The Hammer Commission Read online

  "Why?"

  "I didn't want him to think your healing abilities were anything but God given."

  Mark shrugged and closed his eyes. Technically he felt that all of his abilities were God given. God had created him after all.

  % % % % %

  "Mark."

  "Afternoon Father," Mark said looking up from the table to see Father Gregory enter the room. He wasn't surprised; he'd heard the old priest walking way down the hallway.

  "So what have we learned today?" Father Gregory said sitting down across the table from him.

  "Not to argue with Father Flores," Mark said and sighed. He'd been assigned to window cleaning detail. And Kitchen cleaning duty. And several other menial tasks on top of that. He'd also been ordered to read several Holy Scriptures and meditate on their meanings.

  "Father Flores comes from a long line of distinguished leaders. He can't help it if he's an asshole."

  "I know I need to stop arguing with him Father, I promised you last night that I would stop arguing with him and start minding my manners and showing him respect."

  "Yes Mark, I appreciate that and I know you will keep that promise, but maybe you should start thinking about breaking it?"

  The dream came to a sudden halt as Mark's conscious mind suddenly snapped to attention. This was not what had happened. Father Gregory never ever cursed or swore, and never once said those things about Father Flores.

  "I need to leave Mark, I need to go. I really do." Father Gregory said and got up and left. Mark looked at where he had been sitting at the table, where he had put his hands as he had stood up to leave. There were bloody handprints there.

  % % % % %

  Mark woke up like a shot, changing back before he was even fully awake. Putting on his pants and grabbing a t-shirt he ran out of the room leaving a bewildered Judith groggily asking him what was up.

  He didn't wait for the elevator, but ran down the three flights of stairs, down the long hallway, and right into the ward where Father Gregory was kept, past a startled night nurse and into his room.

  "Are you all right Father?" Mark said panting, looking at his old mentor. Everything looked fine, but something didn't seem quite right. He started searching the room, but couldn't find anything.

  "What are you doing?" The night nurse said coming into the room and looking rather angry.

  "I had a nightmare," Mark said checking Father Gregory over again. Something was wrong. He could feel it, if he had been in animal form his hackles would be up.

  "What happened?" Judith said yawning, coming into the room wearing a bathrobe.

  "Somebody had a nightmare," The night nurse said looking more and more upset.

  "And...." Judith said walking over to stand by Mark with a questioning look.

  "Dreams can receive messages from other worlds." Mark said looking around getting more and more nervous. "They're not always your subconscious; sometimes they're someone in the afterlife or maybe even someone from heaven trying to send you a message."

  "Really?" Judith said still only half awake.

  "Oh please," the nurse said, "Now get out of here, visiting hours are over!"

  Mark wasn't sure exactly what happened next, but the Nurse reached for Judith, who took a step back, which caused her to bump into Mark, making him stumble. At the same time the belt of her bathrobe somehow came off of the robe and dropping free it became tangled in his legs. Suddenly he was falling over, the belt causing him to trip and all he could do was cover his head as he slammed into several of the machines that were attached to Father Gregory's body.

  All of which went dead.

  "Out! Out!" The nurse yelled and hit the red panic button and started checking the machines that Mark hand fallen into.

  Mark crawled out of the way, his head hurt and he could feel something wet on the side of his face.

  Judith's face was ashen, and she quickly backed away, grabbing her robe and holding it closed.

  "Is he, is he going to be alright?" Mark said wincing as he checked his head with a hand and saw that it came away bloody.

  "I don't know, he's not on a respirator, but these other machines are to keep him from having any more seizures."

  Of course at that moment Father Gregory suffered what looked like a rather violent seizure and the Nurse let out a very un-ladylike word, as two Nuns, who Mark knew were the local doctors ran into the room.

  "What happened?" Doctor Susan asked him.

  "I fell," Mark said, "into the machines," and he pointed.

  "Lisa, go get the Felbatol, Mary help me hold him down to the bed. Mark grab those restraints over there!"

  Mark looked around still a bit dizzy, Doctor Susan looked up at him and shook her head, "Mark sit down before you fall down. You there," She pointed to Judith, "Get me those restraints!"

  Judith did as she was told and then taking an extra moment to grab her belt retreated from the room, looking rather embarrassed as it was clear she wasn't wearing anything under the robe which had fallen open while she was getting the restraints.

  "Really now Mark," Doctor Susan said shaking her head as she got Father Gregory strapped down and Lisa gave him a shot.

  "What?" He was confused; his head wasn't healing as quickly as it should.

  "You brought your girlfriend down to the hospital wing?"

  "She's not my girlfriend, she's my new partner. Is Father Gregory going to be okay?"

  "You're sleeping with your partner?" Her voice took on a very unfriendly tone.

  "No, I am not having sex with my partner!" Mark said angrily. "Believe it or not I am not that kind of a guy. Now will Father Gregory be alright?"

  "You better not be!" she grumbled. "And I think he will. The machines you hit are only for dealing with his seizures and monitoring his coma. Oh and the new coma treatment stuff they're trying here."

  Mark sighed. "Good."

  "Why are you here?"

  "I had a nightmare. Father Gregory was in it, he had blood on him."

  "These people and their dreams," the night nurse, Lisa he guessed, said.

  "Mark and Father Gregory are very close Lisa. The good father here is probably the only person who could ever talk sense into the boy. If he had a bad dream, I can not find fault with his running down here."

  "I'm not a boy," Mark grumbled.

  "Well you sure acted like one back then. Give me a minute to bandage that and then your partner can take you back to your room. If your partner hasn't abandoned you that is."

  Mark got to his feet carefully and stumbled out of the room. Judith was still there and did the honors of bandaging his head and then they left while the Doctors were still checking on Father Gregory.

  "Keep an eye on him, if his dizziness doesn't clear up, call me. He might have a concussion." The doctor called after them.

  “I thought you healed quickly from all injuries.” Judith said taking a second look at the wound when they got back to his room.

  “I do,” he said, “Unless it’s from a magical, blessed, or holy weapon.”

  “And silver, right?”

  “Used to be silver. Remember?”

  “Oh yeah, that’s right. So maybe they blessed all of his medical equipment?”

  Mark shook his head, “I wield holy weapons and sigils, I shouldn’t be hurt by one.”

  “Well let’s get you back into your bed. After all of that I need to lay down myself.”

  14

  "How's the head?"

  Mark growled and shook his head a little; he wasn't dizzy anymore at least. Rolling off the bed he landed on his paws and then shifted back. Getting up off the floor and standing he walked over to the mirror above his dresser. The cut had healed, though he had a pretty good sized bruise still. Supposedly he healed faster in his 'monster' or cougar form.

  But something about that equipment must have been magical or blessed or something.

  "Better," he grunted and walked off to the shower.

  Judith was gone when he got out,
so getting dressed he decided to head down to the data processing center and see if he could talk to Brother Stevens about cell phone trackers.

  When he got there Stevens hadn't shown up yet, but there were a couple of other people there.

  "Can I help you?" Asked a young man in a button up shirt, with a pocket protector and glasses who rather completely fit the computer geek stereotype.

  "Looking for Brother Stevens, what time does he show up?"

  "Could be anytime now. Depends on how much they load him down with in the morning standup meeting."

  "Ah," Mark said looking around a bit. "Been working here long?"

  "Only a few years. Can I help you with anything?"

  He shook his head, "Not really. I'll just wait for Stevens to show up. He had a few things he wanted to show me for my investigation."

  "Oh!" The young man brightened up. "Are you a field agent?"

  "Yes, I'm Mark Levin. You are?"

  "Chad. Chad Stevens."

  They shook hands and Mark smiled, "Any relation to Brother Stevens?"

  "Yup, he's my Uncle. So what's it like being a field agent?"

  "It's just like the old saying goes, ninety-nine percent boredom and one percent sheer terror."

  "Is it as rough as they say it is?"

  "Up until a month ago I would have said no. Now I'm not so sure." Mark looked at the displays that Chad was sitting at. "What is all this stuff anyway?"

  "Mostly it's just data storage. We get a lot of stuff sent to us every four hours from different church, government, and Interpol data centers. We process it after that, run a bunch of different search profiles against it, and see what turns up of interest and just warehouse it after that."

  "Who wrote the programs for all of that?"

  "A lot of it started off as simple off the shelf software. We've done a lot of work on those packages however to convert it to our own needs. We have a pretty good team of programmers here working on the code."

  "That include Father Flores?"

  Chad shook his head, "He's a mainframe architecture guy. He works on operating system level stuff exclusively."

  "Different world huh?"

  "Pretty much, yeah. OS guys really focus on interfaces, threading, system calls, and load balancing. Drop them in a regular program and they can get by, but drop them in a database and lookout! That’s way out of their league."

  "Huh, didn't know that."

  "Yeah, a lot of the language skills they use are pretty basic, easier on the code base that way, things run smoother and cleaner."

  "Not sure I follow that," Mark admitted.

  "Well let's say you're logged into the shell," Chad pulled over a keyboard. "At the system level you can run any program you want to run, unless of course it has some sort of higher level security on it. OS guys, they look at a program and figure if you have the rights to run it, you can do anything with it."

  "And that's bad?"

  "It can be, if someone gets into the wrong account. See if I do a simple listing of the files in this account, you can see I have a number of different things I can run. If I run one," Chad typed in a name of one of the files and a 'hello world' printed out on the screen. "Harmless, right?"

  Mark nodded.

  "But if I do this," Mark watched as Chad typed 'for i < 10000; i++; run hello' and then hit the enter key. The screen quickly filled up with 'hello world' written over and over again.

  "It'll do that ten thousand times now, which isn't much really, but someone does that with a more complicated program and it can bring the entire system to its knees. OS guys, they don't really protect you from that kind of disaster."

  "And you guys do?" Mark watched as Chad held down the bottom left hand key and pressed the 'C' key and it all stopped. "What was that?" He asked.

  "Oh, control-C, standard kill command. And yeah, in our programs which access huge amounts of data, and processing power, we have to protect against those kinds of things or someone could easily undo months of work with single key press, or worse yet bring the entire complex to its knees."

  "I bet that doesn't make you very popular if that happens."

  "No, it doesn't." Chad admitted ruefully, "And I'm the guy who usually has to clean it up."

  "Happens that often?"

  "More than we would like, maybe once a year."

  "That doesn't sound too bad," Mark said spying Brother Stevens entering the room.

  "It takes at least a week to fix it, and last time I had to cancel my vacation."

  "Ouch."

  "Mark!" Brother Stevens said coming over. "What happened to your face?"

  "I got tripped accidentally by my new partner and tried to move some heavy equipment with my face," Mark said with half a smile. "So, show me this tracking program?"

  "Yeah sure, come on over here." Brother Stevens brought Mark over to another display. "It's a pretty simple program actually. When I set it up I wasn't trying to do anything fancy. Give me a phone number."

  Mark gave him the number for his cell phone; they'd gotten him a replacement yesterday that worked with his old number.

  Brother Stevens typed in the command name followed by the number. Mark's cell phone rang once, and then a latitude, longitude, and altitude printed out on the screen.

  "Huh," Brother Stevens said, "It's not supposed to actually ping the phone. Let me try that again."

  Mark watched as Brother Stevens repeated the process and the phone gave one single ring again.

  "This is what I get for not testing my work," Brother Stevens said with a sigh. Mark watched as he typed some commands and suddenly there was a whole list of script and commands on the screen. "Ah, there it is! Easy fix."

  "Is there any way to know what numbers have been run through this?"

  "Yeah, there's a log. Here look."

  Mark watched as a list of about forty entries went by.

  "Huh, someone's been playing with this, might be time for a password lock."

  Mark's eyes scanned down the screen. Sure enough, the number for the Mercedes was on there. Twice.

  "Any idea who ran these?"

  "Any one in this room could have done it."

  "Father Flores?"

  "Well yeah, he's got full system access and I did show him how to use it. You think he's been doing all of this?"

  Mark shrugged, "Maybe. I wouldn't go putting a password on it just yet. Could you print that page out for me please?"

  "Yeah sure."

  Mark watched as he entered a print command, and the printer on the desk came on. It was definitely different than his home computer.

  When the printer stopped Brother Stevens handed Mark the print out. "Anything else?"

  "No," Mark said shaking hands with him. "Thanks for your time, I appreciate it."

  Mark left the room and went upstairs and found himself a private spot for a minute and pulling out his cell phone he called the office for religious affairs in Warsaw.

  "Bishop's office." Someone said answering the phone.

  "John, is that you? It's Mark."

  "Oh hi Mark, what's up?"

  "Listen, when I called the other night. Did you give my phone number out to anyone?”

  “No, oh wait, Father Flores called, said he needed to talk to you and couldn't reach you at the cathedral in Paris and that he didn't have your new cell number. It was still on the caller ID, so I gave it to him."

  "And that was it? Nobody else?"

  "No, why?"

  "Just tracking down some loose ends. That's all. Thanks, I'll talk to you later."

  "Bye Mark."

  He hung up the phone and swore. It couldn't be, it just couldn't be. But if so, then the question was how? And why?

  Also this wasn't something he could just accuse Father Flores of. They had too much history and without a lot of proof, no one would ever believe him.

  If it really was him.

  He knew Flores was an ass, always had. But to sell out to the other side? He found that hard to be
lieve. But like it or not he still had to check it out.

  Mark was sitting in the library trying to decide what his next step would be when Judith found him.

  "There you are, I've been looking for you all morning."

  "What's up?" Mark asked.

  "Father Flores wants to see you. He's pretty unhappy about what happened last night."

  "Ugh. I was hoping he wouldn't hear about that." Mark said standing up, "What else?"

  "How'd you know there was something else?"

  "There always is these days."

  "He's a bit upset that I spent the night in your room, I told him it wasn't sexual but he didn't believe me. I figure he thinks you forced me or something."

  "Well time to go upstairs and face the music. I'm sure he'll be all in a self righteous rage about it."

  "Just don't make it worse, with all the crap going on out there right now I know I don't want to have to face any of it alone.

  Father Flores was absolutely furious when Mark showed up in his office.

  "What do you think you were doing?! You almost destroyed a hundred thousand dollars worth of very rare and very expensive equipment last night! Not to mention you could have killed Father Gregory! You had no right, no right at all to go running in there in the middle of the night and start destroying the very expensive and impossible to replace equipment that is vital to... to his continuing survival!

  "If the doctors hadn't assured me that those devices were not harmed, and that Father Gregory's condition is still stable I'd be moving to dismiss you from the Commission as we speak!"

  Mark just stood there and kept his mouth shut as Father Flores continued to rant for at least a good five more minutes. Mark was sure everyone outside of the office was getting a good earful, Father Flores was actually yelling at him. Something he'd never once done before.

  "Well, what do you have to say for yourself?" Father Flores finally demanded.

  "It was an accident Father. I tripped."

  "You TRIPPED! You expect me to believe that excuse?"