SOIKOS: In Purgatory

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Farouk and Kane find themselves sharing a cell together.



"Nobody knows the trouble I've seen." Kane muttered softly, staring at the dark concrete wall from his sleeping bag perch. It wasn't so much of a cell that he was in but an oubliette, with a single barred hole in the ceiling for light, and a walls of bars on one side with a locked door. He had tried to break it down, but something was effecting his strength. The side of his face was a single mottled bruise, and while he'd been given medical attention, his healing factor was sluggish in dealing with the injuries. Obviously whatever was effecting his strength applied to the rest of his mutant abilities.

The door of the cell creaked open slowly, their weight (and the liberal amounts of rust) giving the sound an almost comic undercurrent of drama. Kane gathered himself, mentally preparing for an interrogation, beating or whatever unpleasantness might come his way. Instead the door opened only wide enough for a dishevelled and bruised man to be physically thrown though and then slammed closed again.

Amahl Farouk stared at Garrison Kane for a long second and then sat heavily on the damp stone floor. "Oh, hell."

"Nobody knows but Jesus." Kane finished dryly. "Good afternoon, Professor Farouk. The bruises on your face make a lovely pattern. Really brings out your eyes."

"Well," Farouk remarked thoughtfully, "They did say they would torture me." Suddenly a hopeful look entered his eyes and he grabbed a pebble off the floor next to him. A minute later Kane grunted in indignant pain as the small stone bounced off his head.

Farouk's face resumed its sad mien. "No, not a hallucination. Figures."

"So," Kane rubbed the spot where the stone had been bounced off his head. "How did the Lashker get you? Or is it Opus Dei? They've been particularly non-responsive to questions, so I don't have a clue who our captors actually are, eh?"

The simple questions struck Farouk with a disproportionate force bringing home the magnitude of the disaster that was still unfolding around him.

Alamut was dead.

Undoubtedly some men and cells survived - even with Jacob's access and guidance no strike could be perfectly successful - but for all intents and purposes the Society had ceased the exist. when Opus Dei teams were let into the Imam's inner sanctum. If they were able to breach that very last ring of defences...

Farouk had always remained an outsider in the Mountain. Partly by his own volition, partly not. Of the Society but not part of it, respected but disliked - and yet it was a significant part of his life for decades, the finishing school of his maturation as the walker of the shadow world.

And now it was gone. And this was neither the time nor place to mourn or dwell.

"Opus Dei," Amahl finally replied, his voice scratchy and uneven. He cleared his throat and repeated himself more firmly. "I was taken by the Opus Dei."

"Catholic fundamentalist terrorists. That I didn't see coming." Kane said, leaning his head back against the wall. The problem was that it still didn't make sense. What was the purpose of kidnapping Calysee Neramani, and doing so in a way that put the blame on another group? He supposed it might be to piss off India, but what was the motivation for the Opus Dei? Zerach had mentioned some kind of biblical motivation, like jumpstarting Revelations, but how did India factor into it?

"It doesn't make sense." He muttered to himself.

"From the mouth of babes..." Farouk raised an apologetic hand as Garrison's eyes narrowed dangerously. "Sorry. Force of habit. In fact you took the words right out of my mouth, it does not indeed make much sense."

He hesitated, aware that the room was in all likelihood being monitored. But at this juncture they had fairly little to lose. Certainly they must have some value to the opposition since they were both still alive and relatively undamaged. Yet he could not fathom what it might be at the moment.

Right now information was of more use to them then to whomever may be listening.

"I think we need to pool our data, Inspector."

Kane's summation of his travails and discoveries was cogent and precise, the experience of a myriad of briefings and reports delivered for the bosses perpetually out of time and patience showing itself. It also left Amahl even more bemused than before and even as he outlined the results and conclusions of his own investigation he looked nonplussed.

"Nonsensical..."

"What?" Kane bristled.

Farouk shrugged, wincing. Momentarily he was mostly furious with his bruises for making it to difficult to pace as he tried to work through the situation.

"Easy, Garrison, easy. It simply make no sense." He raised his right hand palm up. "I am, in fact rather fond of the Opus Dei - even though my direct contact with them has been rather limited. Their central philosophy is the search for the miraculous in every day, a quest to find the divine in the daily grind of the honest work done well. When they arose in Spain, on the eve of the Civil War they ended up being practically the only sane group on the either side of the slaughter. They stood against Franco at first, before infiltrating his government, forcing out the Phalangist fascistic ideologues and hollowing the entire thing out. They were more or less single-handedly for the Spanish economic miracle, liberalization and played no small part in the transition of the regime to democracy."

"That's not the information I have," Kane interjected levelly.

"I understand that," Amahl said. "And I am trying to explain it. Opus Dei is simply not this apocalyptic sect you have been described. They are not a Christian version of the Twelver Shia!"

He sighed, his frustration visible. "Could this Israeli cop have been a plant? I understand that he died during the mission, but there could be any number of explanation for that. he could have been a fanatic, he could have been misled by his handlers..."

Kane shook his head firmly. "Yaakov was clean."

"Are you su-"

"Yes."

"All right. Let's try this from another angle." Amahl frowned in thought, his fingers drumming the beat to the pop song of the moment in the floor. "Yamam is not an intelligence-gathering outfit. They are muscle, a souped up SWAT. They do some undercover stuff, but primarily they are shooters not spooks. And they operate purely in country. Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Aqsa, Islamic Jihad - that's their usual opponents. For your man to have been so 'knowledgeable' on Lashkar and Opus Dei he must have had the information procured for him by someone else."

Kane's face darkened suddenly. "Right at the time when, by an amazing coincidence, there is a Hellfire Club Red Rook in town..."

"Hampshire? Don't tell me if you slept with her." Farouk said, kneading his moustache with his fingers.

"Okay, here's where it gets weirder." Kane said, ignoring the comment. "She was asking what I knew about the Grail. Like, the Holy Grail. The cup of Christ or whatever. Now, I can understand political dimensions, even if these Opus Dei guys aren't hellbent on kicking starting the Last Days like you said. What I can't figure out is how some British version of a kink club fits in, especially looking after some Christian relic."

Farouk's eyebrows climbed. "Christian never took you to their parties? No wonder you gentlemen don't get along." The older man grew serious, his tune being tapped out speeding up noticeably. "Hellfire Club is a bit more than a chance for the rich and stupid to let free. It's a genuine nexus of power and money with all that this implies. A consortium with its own agenda which it has pursued for generations, full ramifications of which I have still not completely worked out."

The tapping stopped abruptly. "But they would certainly stand to benefit from a certain degree of chaos in the region. And if they managed to set most of their rivals in the cloak-and-dagger world at each other throats while staying aloof themselves...."

"But what about the Grail?"

Amahl rubbed his forehead tiredly. "I don't know, Mr. Kane. My exposure to the magical underworld is still relatively facile. I am only scratching the surface in my studies of it. London chapter of the Club is infamous for relying on sorcery as the source for its power structure. And, apparently the Grail is a necessary step in the creation of the Babylon Woman."

"Baba-what?" “Babylon Woman, Mr. Kane. The Vessel of the Rage Divine.” A handsome, darkly urbane man whose somehow managed to enter the room without the rusty hinges heralding his presence smiled genially at hs prisoners. “I must admit, Dr. Farouk – you are as advertised.”
“A gigantic pain in the ass?” Garrison inquired helpfully.
"That as well. I must admit, even after a decade of Jacob's industry, and that of our unwittingly allies, Alamut still twists and writhes like a snake, evading just enough to keep us from crushing the head of the serpent. Under torture, I have been told you have much to do with this fact." He said, with a slight smile. With the lines of white shooting through his hair, and the slightest educated French accent hinting his voice, the man looked like an avuncular French noble in a particular genre of American romantic film. Garrison could almost see an aging female star matched up against him in a seaside bistro or something.
"Right, so assuming he's the one you want, I'm just going to get my things and go. It was fun, though."

"The son of Christian Kane in the middle of our operations? I'm afraid, dear boy, that I don't believe in coincidences, especially not with that blasted Hellfire Club dipping its fingers into my plans. No, I think torture will provide some answers as well." He shook his head. "But where are my manners? I am Jonathan Tremont, Grand Master of The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon."

Farouk could feel laughter that he strongly suspected resembling hysterics bubbling on the edge of his lips. He spent most of his adult life as an intelligence operative, collector and collator of data. The problem is that sphere of work was not, as was commonly assumed, the paucity of information. Quite the opposite in fact. Success - and that usually meant life - depended on one's ability to sift through the mounds of hints and gossip and lies, to separate the kernel of truth and to follow it through the maze.

The revelations of the sorcerous world existing underneath the one he had always known rocked Farouk's universe at its very foundations. Not because of the people engaged in it or their capacity for destruction - considerable though it may be. Rather it was the implications and repercussions of the new data that shocked him.

A wealth of myths and legends, of secret societies and forgotten Gods, of rumored mysteries and heralded prophesies. Nothing could be dismissed any more or analyzed from purely anthropological perspective. Overnight he had to reassess everything he took for granted, every axiom of his profession and analysis was now up for question.

It was that desperation to rechart some sort of terra firma once again that drove him to the desperate risks of autonomous study, of humiliation at coming to Sefton for lessons. Anything and everything, to find his footing again.

And he had done well, he thought. In a very short time he could orient himself, the new information now factored in.

He thought.

The hubris, as the ancient Greeks would know, was a sure marker of the man condemned by Gods.

It finally caught up to him.

Templars. The part of the legend he dismissed without a second thought. The part he was absolutely sure could not be true,

"The fucking Templars."

"Not our preferred choice of sobriquet, but it will do if you must." Tremont crossed his arms over his wide chest. "And you, Dr. Farouk, we have been watching for a long time. Jacob believed that you might have some kind of connection with the Judas Codex. Considering your own apocryphal research, it made sense to make sure you were... well monitored. It is a shame that you never showed the kind of openness to our faith, as you could have found many answers in our service."

Amahl smiled genially. "I like atheism. It's comforting. Prevents me from believing into nonsense like the Judas Codex and assures me that one day you shall return into nothingness and oblivion you so richly deserve."

"But, Professor." Tremont laughed, a rich and warm sound of a perverted uncle. "You hardly know me."

"Alright, Crazy guy, if you want to do your whole thing with the Holy Grail or whatever, that's cool with me. But speaking just for myself alone, you're borrowing an awful lot of trouble if you want to keep a hold on me. The FBI, RCMP and British Intelligence for a start. So why don't you just let us go, and we'll let you go do whatever ritual thing it is that you have in mind, eh?"

"The trouble with faith, Mister Kane, is that those who don't possess it use that as the reason to dismiss what they have seen with their own eyes." Tremont said evenly, but his eyes were not on the Canadian. "To construct elaborate 'reasonable' explanations because the simple answer leads to a much more frightening world to understand. Like everything your life has been based on is nothing but quicksand beneath your feet, and it is slowly swallowing you up. Isn't that right, Professor?"

The silence stretched until Farouk started, as if abruptly awakened. "Oh, I am sorry. How rude of me - please continue with your vapid psychoanalysis. I am all ears. Did you get it from Jacob's dossier on me, or are you improvising?" He snapped his fingers suddenly. "Where is my good friend Jake, by the way? No chance he slipped on the stairs and broke his neck recently, is there?"


"Jacob has a meeting with Prime Minister Neramani. Once he is collected in Islamabad. The finalization of our agreement. He'll gobble up the oil and gas fields of South Pakistan, citing 'security' reasons. It will plunge Afghanistan into a war and likely have all of Iran with their armies pointed the other way when the Babylon Woman arises. Within a month, there won't be anything resembling a stable government from Jerusalem to Islamabad. That is, of course, until the Final Crusade begins. Just in time for the second coming of the Babylon Woman, as she sheds her terrible and bloody visage for a pure and Angelic form." Tremont said casually. "After all, they flocked to revere a Prophet. How will they reject an actual angel? Her message, and a powerful array of magical and psionic abilities, will quell the fighting and convert the region to the True Faith. Just as we swore to guard the temple for in preparation of. Let Neramani have his oil interests and expanded borders. He won't have long to enjoy them."

The art of interrogation consisted, more often than not, to simply get out of your own way. The basic truth of the human condition was that all people were egotists. They *wanted* to talk, and mostly they wanted to talk about themselves. To suppress that desire in operators took a lot of training and self-control. No doubt Tremont was a formidable man, a survivor of countless intrigues and shadow battles.

But it was just so easy to dismiss the two imprisoned captives as possible threats and to give in to the Bondesque villain's desire to brag. Just a little.

Farouk kept his mouth straight and pursed, letting the quite genuine emotions that Jacob's name prompted, leak though.

Tremont smiled, a slow and vicious expression. "Well. It has been nice meeting you gentlemen. I shall take my leave now. We will meet again, in the New World."

Kane squinted. "In your voodoo-speak does that mean you are going to scrag us now?"

Tremont laughed out. "Oh, no Mr. Kane. Waste not, want not. The New World I am referring to is the one my Babylon Woman will create, very quite shortly. I am going to join her now - duty calls. You understand. But I'll be hanging on to you and leaving you in the hands of my colleagues, for now. One never knows when I may be able to trade you for something useful. And there's bound to be a mounds of all kinds of interesting information buried in both of your heads. It will be rather fun getting it all out of you."

He paused. "Well. Fun for *me*."

He stepped through the door, already barking the commands to prep the vehicle for the prisoner transport.