Hunting an Angel

After completing his internship, Bob Moraine enlisted in the Operative Division of the Special Intelligence Department. After six years of fighting for his country, he was shot in the hip and was honorably discharged. The veteran pension for his disability was a very small one, he thought angrily, looking at the bottle in front of him.

“20,000 dollars?!” Klaus Werner repeated. He ran his fingers through his gray hair. For a bullet?

“For one or for a hundred. Who counts how many shots? They're interested in taking it down.”

“You're a professional. I guess you didn't need more than one.”

Moraine nodded, sipped his glass, and kept talking.

The person who contracted him wanted to remain unknown. He had stumbled upon the ad in the Daily Telegraph's Internet Advertising column. Bob applied by sending an e-mail and he received the information about the mission the very same evening. The e-mail ended with a request for a mailing address, for him to receive a package. Inside the box was the bait that would attract the prey. The location was of his choice, but there was a condition: for the prey to feel it, it needed a flat lot of land, near a religious settlement, even if it was no longer used as such.

“It's hard to believe that you managed to find something like this here.”

“I've been looking for a while”, the other one admitted. “For the most part, the area is full of hills and forests. However, I discovered an old map at the public library. There was and old airport decommissioned almost 40 years ago, not far from the border between Maine and Canada. Less than a mile from it, there are the ruins of a mosque.”

He waved his hand and said that he had been lurking for three weeks. Patience, yes, for any game you need a lot of patience. And, finally, the luck brings it to you. He had pitched his tent in an old sycamore grove. He had installed the gun, camouflaged it, and then placed the bait in the middle of the cracked aircraft runway.

“What bait?” the occasional friend inquired, pushing the bottle in front of him.

“I thought I told you!” Moraine protested with his harsh alcoholic voice. “The package I got, you know? There was a small wooden box with bronze side handles, like for some dwarfs. And inside…”

“Inside…” Klaus Werner repeated impatiently.

“This thing!”

He placed on the table a kind of book, no thicker that his palm.

“A notebook!” The gray-haired man leaned toward him. “May I…”

“Sure.” Bob Moraine yawned and rested his face on his hands. “I didn't understand too much. In fact, it didn't even take that for the trap to work.”

Werner pulled him forward and flipped through it. It was a notebook, with black leather covers and tabs covered with lots of tiny, handwritten signs. He put on a pair of glasses and examined them carefully.

“It looks like it’s written in Arabic. Very old, though. I don’t know where you could find a specialist in Maine to translate it, really. Maybe in Boston. If you get there.”

“Oh, I'm not interested. The contract requires for me to deliver the prey to a location near Portland. I’ll finish this drink, sleep for an hour in my truck’s cab, then get behind the wheel, drive the 120 miles, hand over the goods, collect the money and I’ll get the hell out of there as soon as possible. With that much money, I can live decently for the next two or three years.

“How did you manage to knock him to the ground?”

Bob Moraine took another sip from his glass, lifted it a little to and looked through the liquid at the lamp in the ceiling. The barmaid looked at them from behind the counter, her eyes narrowed. They were the last customers and she was waiting for them to leave so she could go home.

“With a suitable weapon…”

He looked through the window for a while, then he began to talk.

“One day, at dawn, two large, golden eyes appeared above my head, looking at the earth through the thick ceiling of the clouds.”

“I called them cat's eyes, even though I knew no cat was lurking from up there.”

“I had armed my shotgun and waited. To the East, the sun was shedding a red light on the lower edge of the clouds. The eyes blinked and stared in my direction, as if he knew in advance where I was. Later, I realized that he was not looking at me, but at the ‘bait’. I wondered if it wasn't a mistake shooting that unseen creature.”

“And?”

“And nothing. I had my right eye pressing the scope, turned on the electronic viewfinder targeting, and waited. After a few minutes, the cloud ceiling broke.” Bob Moraine shook the glass, making the ice jingle.

“And the angel appeared, in all his heavenly majesty.” He grinned.

“A giant creature. Forty feet high. The wingspan was almost sixty feet. A single hair was longer than me and thicker than a human finger. The nail on his thumb was the size of my fist. A giant right from the ancient stories. But one with wings, which had nothing to do with me, but only with that wooden box.”

He lit a cigarette and inhaled slowly the smoke before continuing.

“I have closed my eyes and counted to twenty. When the wings fluttered in the air, they whistled louder than the morning wind, I have targeted the creature's neck, where the Adam's apple should be.”

“Strange irony of fate, right? To kill an angel by smashing his Adam's apple.”

“Forget that!” the other shook his head, almost overturning the bottle. “Did you hit him right away? Did he fell?”

“That very moment”. Bob Moraine muttered and took another smoke. “Like a brick. I used .308 Winchester rounds. Breaking bullets that can penetrate even through the cockpit of an airplane. It collapsed almost 300 feet from where I was lurking. There were splinters of concrete from the runway all over the place. The giant body made a crater 3 feet deep. When I reached him, he was still fluttering a wing. The other wing was caught under him and broke. The liquid gushing from his wound was not blood, but an oily, greenish substance that made the concrete sizzle. I took a few steps away and shot him in the chest and once more in the hip.”

“Wasn’t it safer to shoot him in the head?” Klaus Werner asked.

“I didn't want to damage his face”. Moraine shook the bottle, but put it back. “He had an unforgettable face and I think I could get at least ten thousand dollars for the pictures I took, from a magazine like Nature or National Geographic.”

“Do you have it with you?”

The man nodded and produced a small Sony camera with a metal lens shutter out of his coat pocket. He turned it on, searched for the image, and hand it across the table.

“God, I had no idea that angels have horns!” Werner shouted and swept the table with his free hand.

“Horns and tail. However, the most beautiful cat eyes in the world”, the other one reinforced his words, yawning. “Those eyes? I can't forget them even in my sleep. I could swear that God himself looked at me through them.”

“What happened after that?”

“I waited until the last movements of his body have stopped, then I called the crew. You know, right after I’ve located the airport, I paid a building company two thousand dollars for a crew of six people, a huge crane and two bulldozers. They arrived before noon together with their equipment. They’ve laid a tarpaulin on the ground, pushed the body over it with bulldozer blades, then wrapped it and tied it with some ropes. After that they hung the body on the crane hook, lifted it, and laid it in the truck. The whole operation was a piece of cake for them. I left before 3:00 p.m. and I am having this coffee break after five hours of driving.

“And those bastards didn't ask you anything? You don't see an angel falling from heavens every day.”

“Oh, they did”, Bob Moraine answered yawning. “I told them that this was a secret US military experiment. And, if they didn't want to get in trouble with the Counterintelligence Section, they'd better keep their mouths shut.”

“Cool. And now, what’s next?”

“It's time to hit the road. If I arrive in Portland before midnight, I could make the delivery from there as well. I’ll send an email and tell them I have an engine problem. If they still want him, they should come and get him out of the parking lot. And if not, I'm selling it to a circus or a private zoo. Something like that.”

“May I take a look at it?” Klaus Werner gave him a pleading look. “I haven՚t seen an angel in my life. Even one that looks like a devil. But devils don't have wings and they don't fly. I'll buy you a bottle of whiskey.”

Moraine rose heavily from the table, reflecting. What did he have to lose, after all? If he had been entangled from the beginning with this jumper, who seemed to be clinging to the tavern, an extra gesture of benevolence meant nothing. He pointed to the door.

“You don't have to buy me a drink. I'm honoring you with an angel.”

He went to the counter to pay for his drink and the occasional partner's coffee. He felt generous, like a king. And why not? In two hours, if there weren’t any problems, he would hand over the angel and the notebook with black leather covers. And he would have received his handsome pay. In cash.

The barmaid opened the cash register and put the bill in the tray, but her gaze remained as cold as before. Some women were made by God this way, Bob Moraine decided as he made his way out — angry and dry, like dead crocodiles under the scorching sun of the Everglades.

Klaus Werner was waiting for him next to the truck, hands in his pockets. It helped him regain his balance when he stumbled over the ladder of the truck, then climbed after him. Moraine fumbled for the switch and turned on the lamp in the back of the cab.

The angel was a giant, indeed. They took a walk around him on the left side, and just as he grabbed the rope that bound his head and shoulders, he felt a burning blow between his shoulder blades.

“What the hell…”

He slid to his knees, trying to grab the tarpaulin to get up. He couldn't do it. The second blow of the knife cut his forearm and he collapsed face down in a pool of blood. The other's cunning hands rummaged in his pockets as he was still moving, pulled out the notebook, and transferred it into his own pocket. Then he took the keys and the pistol, and moved his body closer to the angel's.

He ran to the driver's cab, holding the hard covers of the only Holy Scripture that God had never been able to retrieve from the Earth. The Bible of the Antichrist. If he was lucky, those guys in Ontario would pay him a fortune. As for the angel, he would think later what to would do with the body.