“Let’s not overstate the case,” Lord Winston cautioned. “But I agree, I believe each of us agree, he is dangerous.”
“I’ll give him this,” Middleton added, “the guy has balls.”
“Yes, I agree,” broke in Marcia LaMont, the representative of the International Bankers Consortium, as she turned to Margolis and added, “It would appear, Director, that he was able to do what the Network couldn’t. Stop the Islamists in their tracks.”
Margolis shrugged and scoffed, “I don’t have a messiah on my staff.”
“All this still begs the question,” Kruger said. “What are we going to do about him?”
Turning to Margolis, Lord Winston said, “I understand, Director, you have a plan.”
“Yes,” Margolis said. “An old plan that has worked in both the distant and recent past to neutralize self-proclaimed messiahs.”
“Crucifixion?” asked Assad Bin Laden, head of the Arabian interests, then he sniggered.
Margolis turned to the Arab and said, “Well, yes. A modern version, of course.”
“As I recall,” interrupted the European representative, Herman Bohn, “that plan failed miserably when it came to this Pantera’s ancestor, the most famous messiah of them all, Jesus.”
“That he survived is still unproven,” Margolis said. “And even if he did, the plan failed only due to the unforeseeable, the treason of our operative, Judas Iscariot, who may have helped Jesus escape the ruling powers of the day. But we’ve succeeded numerous times since then in crucifying false prophets. And here, we shall again succeed.”
“How can you be so sure?” Kruger asked.
“Let us say,” Margolis said with the hint of a mischievous smile, “we have an ace up our sleeve.”
“Well, we certainly hope so, Director Margolis,” Lord Winston said. “The fate of the Supremacy may depend upon it.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy
After the meeting, Director Margolis went up to his assigned chamber in a dark corner on the second floor of Steinvikholm Castle. It was a large, drafty room with a monstrous fireplace against the far wall, furnished with dark, antique wooden tables and chairs and a king-sized canopy bed whose silk sheets were covered by a thick wool blanket. The Gothic atmosphere of the room reminded Margolis of something out of a 1930s American vampire movie set in the creepy land of Transylvania.
Upon entering the room, Margolis carried his stainless-steel briefcase to the large, squat desk adjacent to the bed. He used the retinal scan to unlock it and opened the case, then carefully lifted out his Network-issue tablet computer and placed it on the desk. With a yawn as he sat before it, he pressed the power button and used his thumbprint to boot up the operating system, then touched the icon for the intra-Network communication app, called “Wintalk.”
Once the app loaded, he stated the name “Lester Bradley,” which would generate the appropriate call. Within moments, he was looking at Chief Bradley, who was sitting behind his desk in an office halfway around the globe in a squat glass building under the name Johnson Industries on a desolate piece of land in southern Maine. It was close to 11:00 p.m. at Steinvikholm Castle, but only 5:00 p.m. in Maine.
Without offering a greeting, Margolis said, “Implement the Pantera contingency.”
“Yes, sir,” Bradley responded, nodding as though not the least bit surprised. Pantera had become dangerous. “I’ll notify Agent Constantine. We should be able to finalize details tonight. According to his report last night, they leave for Washington in a week or so, at the beginning of October.”
Margolis drew in a breath, but said nothing.
“What about Rex?” Bradley asked.
“What about him?”
“He’s working for…”
“I know,” Margolis said. “But with Pantera gone, that won’t matter—they won’t matter.” The director thought for a time. “And we may have a future use for him. No, let’s keep him out of this.” After a sigh, he asked, “Is the other asset in place? Ready to act, in case…”
“Yes, sir,” Bradley confirmed.
“When did you two last communicate?”
“Yesterday.”
“And is the secondary plan ready?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good,” Margolis said. “We are not going to be tricked this time. No fake crucifixion, no fake resurrection. Not this time.”
“Yes, sir,” Bradley agreed. There was no doubt of it in his mind. Pantera would be eliminated one way or another. Then he heard Margolis laugh to himself.
After a moment, the director said, “It’s like spy versus spy versus spy.”
“Sir?”
“I don’t know why I just thought of that,” Margolis said. “It’s a cartoon from a magazine I used to read as a kid. Mad. Mad Magazine.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ever read it?”
“Can’t say I have,” Bradley said.
“Well, there was this cartoon in it,” Margolis told him. “Spy versus Spy versus Spy. About backstabbing secret agents…one white, one black, one gray. That’s what we have here, in a way.”
“Yes, sir,” Bradley said, not really getting it.
Margolis let go of another short burst of laughter. “Funny-looking kid on the cover,” he said.
Bradley thought a moment and, though he had never read the magazine, remembered a name. “Alfred E. Neumann.”
“Yeah, that’s him. Alfred E. Neumann.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The Order
Six hours later, just after eleven, Bradley finally received the nightly call from Constantine.
“Why so late?” Bradley asked.
“He called a meeting after dinner,” Constantine told him. “Final plans for the DC rally.” He sighed. “He mentioned the autumnal equinox, then told us, ‘They’ll be talking about me today,’ as if he knew when the Council would meet.”
“Renata Singh wouldn’t have known that,” Bradley said.
“I didn’t think so,” Constantine agreed.
The existence of the Supremacy Council, or certainly when it met, and where, was on a need-to-know basis. After ten years in the Network, Constantine’s secrecy clearance had risen to the level that he knew the Council met biannually, in conjunction with the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, but he still didn’t know where those meetings took place. Some secret, hidden, dark location, no doubt—invisible to the billions of puppets the Supremacy controlled.
“How could he know, then?” Constantine asked. With each passing day, the guy seemed well beyond the ordinary.
“You give him too much credit,” Bradley snapped. “We all do. We twist a word or gesture into something grander than it is. In truth, he’s just a very smart man with a flair for public speaking who dresses and looks like Jesus, who spouts a message of hope and change vaguely linked to God that appeals to people whose lives are dull or aimless or rotten or lost. That’s most people, unfortunately, the masses. And then, he was lucky enough to latch onto the best damned promoter on the planet. On top of all that, he found himself genetically linked to the most famous false prophet in the history of mankind—Jesus. And so he’s where he is today. On top of the world, getting close to the Sun. But like Prometheus, soon his wings will melt and he will fall to Earth.”
Bradley’s tirade irked Constantine. The chief didn’t live with Pantera and witness what Constantine saw day after day. There was obviously something special about Cristos Pantera, a connection to something beyond the ordinary. Pantera was way more than lucky. He was a special being who had somehow opened the magical door into the Kingdom of God on Earth.
Or perhaps the chief was simply rationalizing away that he saw it too—that Pantera may indeed be the messiah.
“No matter,” Bradley went on. “His days are numbered. An order has come down. He’s to be crucified. In DC. At his Kingdom Rally.”
Constantine swallowed. His heart started beating faster.
He had been ordered to kill men before, and each time, he had gone through with it. Nine times, no questions asked. A Network field operative was trained and expected to do that from time to time. Not for the sake of murder, of course, but to advance the interests of the Supremacy. And Constantine had always believed—at least, until now—that those interests coincided with those of his fellow man. But in this case, when it came to killing someone as brilliant and gifted as Cristos Pantera, with his connection to truth and God and the seeming power to change the world for what seemed the better, it was quite another matter.
Deep down, Constantine had known that this day would come—that the order to assassinate Pantera would come to him. But now that it had, his mind was rebelling against it. He wanted no part of it. He thought of Judas Iscariot and wondered if the same doubts had plagued Judas’ mind when, after months in Jesus’ company, as perhaps his closest confidant, he was given the order by some superior like Bradley in the Roman secret police—that era’s version of the Network—to put in motion the sequence of events that would ultimately lead to Jesus’s crucifixion. Instead of following those orders, however, Judas had double-crossed the Roman-led Supremacy of the time to help Jesus escape their punishment.
“We’ve already identified the patsy,” Bradley went on. “The lone nut. He’s been under our control for several years, a pathetic fellow who lives with his elderly parents on Long Island. All we have to do is flick the switch and he’ll be in DC to take credit for your handiwork.”
“Flick the switch” was a term-of-art used by Network ops to put a plan or an asset, conscious or not, into action—in this case a lone nut, some hapless loser selected by the Network years earlier to unwittingly be tapped one day to do a service for the Supremacy. The more notable Network lone nuts placed into service over the years included Leon Czolgosz, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, David Chapman, Richard Hinckley, and of course, Lee Harvey Oswald.
“Why not just have him arrested and discredited?” Constantine asked. “Find some obscure section in the criminal law, and call what he’s preaching sedition or homeland terror. After all, he is calling for a kind of revolution—the overthrow of authority.”
“And then what?” Bradley asked. “We try, and he gets to spout off his message about the Kingdom of God with the whole world watching. Trial of the millennium, or something. I mean, can you imagine if they had CNN and Fox News back in Jesus’ day, covering that trial? It would be quite a different world today, I think.” He sighed. “Maybe we’d all be citizens of the Kingdom of God, whatever that means. No, we need something cleaner, quicker. We need to nip this in the bud. Cut off the head. A month after his crucifixion, Cristos Pantera and his movement will be forgotten. Not even a footnote. Case closed.”
“Unless a new religion rises up out of the ashes,” Constantine said, “as it did with Jesus.”
“That’s not a real worry,” Bradley said. “None of his disciples have his talent. And even if one does, we know how to deal with it and eventually bend it to our interests. As with Christianity, for instance.”
Constantine thought better of continuing the discussion. It was pointless trying to talk the Supremacy, through Bradley, out of killing Pantera. The decision had been made at the highest levels and was final. He knew the contingencies had been considered, run through the algorithms of the Network’s statistical and intelligence analysts, and they saw assassination as the best outcome.
“So when’s this Kingdom Rally?” Bradley asked. “Still early October?”
“Yes,” Constantine confirmed. “First week in October. Rex and his people are getting the necessary permits, and I believe the ad campaign will launch tomorrow. Rex thinks it’ll draw a million people.”
“His coronation.”
“Sir?”
“At some point during that rally,” Bradley said, “before a million dedicated fools in attendance and countless more watching at home, he’ll anoint himself King of the Kingdom of God. King of the World. And then all hell will break loose.”
“Yes,” Constantine agreed. “All hell.”
“He must be stopped,” Bradley reminded his agent. “This man has become far too dangerous.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Pinto
It was close to midnight by the time Constantine started back toward the farmhouse. With the dreaded order to kill Pantera now a reality, he was having trouble thinking straight. The fact that he was rebelling against it troubled him. He was a hardened Network agent, dammit. One part of him said, just do your duty and honor your oath. But the other part said, damn duty and honor.
It was as if he had become the real-life version of his fictitious alter ego, Donald Summers, awakened from a dead life dedicated to the false god of the Supremacy to the reality that Pantera proposed of entering some magical Kingdom of God. Before this assignment, he’d been troubled from time to time by his one-dimensional life. But the work was all-consuming, and he’d had little time to fully contemplate what he was doing with his life. He was thirty-four years old and had no partner, no family—no goals or dreams other than to serve the Network as best he could and obey orders, even if it meant killing other human beings. But Pantera had awakened him to the reality of other beliefs, other dreams, and to the sour truth that the Supremacy’s goal was solely to maintain control over wealth and power and not to advance mankind to its highest potential.
Or perhaps that was all nonsense. Perhaps the effect Pantera was having on him over the past months was akin to Stockholm syndrome, the hostage effect where a captive begins to identify with his captors. But, no, Constantine knew it was more than that—something different, something authentic and real and lasting had ignited in him after being around Pantera. Something had profoundly changed him as it had changed Renata Singh and so many others.
Constantine stopped for a time and looked up at the cloudless, moonless star-lit sky. After a long breath, he trudged forward, pulled in two countervailing directions. Could he really kill Pantera? Could he really betray the Supremacy?
As Constantine entered the house that night, he noticed that the kitchen light was on again. Someone was up. And as he walked gingerly past the archway leading into the kitchen, a mere shadow to whomever occupied it, Pantera called out to him.
“Donald?”
Constantine stopped and sighed. This was the last thing he needed. Pantera was a light sleeper. He’d often occupy the kitchen late into the night and early morning, engaging one or more disciples in deep discussions about the Word, the general meaning of things—and, of course, the essence of the Kingdom of God. Either that, or something was up. After a moment, he drew in a breath, turned, and walked through the archway.
As he entered the kitchen, Constantine saw that Pantera was not alone. Sitting at the kitchen table with him were Renata Singh, Nick Amato, Stu Goldstein, and Richard Avery. Mother Jane was leaning against the kitchen counter.
“Ah, it is you,” Pantera said with a smile, his arms upraised in a welcoming gesture. “Back from your walk. Come, join us. We’re having an interesting discussion.”
Pantera pulled the only empty chair away from the table and slapped its seat. As Constantine went to sit down, he noticed that the others had serious expressions and, unlike Pantera, did not seem pleased to see him. As he was adjusting his chair forward, Goldstein’s cell phone rang. The accountant snatched it from the table and answered, listening for a time while the others watched and waited.
“That’s great,” he said to the caller. “Yeah, perfect. We’ll pick it up,” he stopped, raised his right wrist and checked his watch, then continued, “this morning. What time is good for you?” The caller said something, and Goldstein said, “Yeah, that’ll work.”
After listening to the caller at the other end for a few more moments, he laughed. “Is that right? Geez. Okay. See you at ten.”
Goldstein clicked off the call and turned to Pantera.
“We got it,” he said as he set the phone back on the table.
“That’s super,” Pantera said with a nod. “Good work, Stu.”
“Got what?” Constantine asked.
“A Pinto,” Pantera said, his lips curling into one of his kindly, mischievous smiles.
“Pinto?”
“Yeah,” Goldstein said. “The car. A Ford Pinto. They don’t make them anymore. And when they did, it was a joke. Came out in 1971, Ford’s entry into the subcompact market because of the gas shortages of the time. Only thing was, the Pinto was a crappy car. Ugly, for one thing. Unsafe, for another. Something to do with its fuel tank design. Anyway, Ford stopped making them in 1980, so they’re not too easy to find. They’ve become sort of a collector’s item.” He nodded toward his phone on the kitchen table. “But we just got one.”
“But what for?” Constantine asked with a short laugh. “Why a Pinto?”
“It’s what I want to drive into DC,” Pantera said. “Leading our caravan straight down Interstate 66 into the city and then down Constitution Avenue to the stage Rex is building on the National Mall. A Pinto.” He smiled again. “A real donkey of a car.”
The others laughed a moment, but Constantine didn’t get the reference. He shrugged and looked puzzled.
Seeing this, Pantera added, “It’s straight out of the Bible, Donald. Book of Isiah.” Then, he looked up, thought a moment, and recited, “‘Tell the daughter of Zion, behold, your King is coming to you. Lowly, and sitting on a donkey, a colt, the foal of a donkey.’ It’s exactly what Jesus did when he entered Jerusalem. Rode in on a donkey, to fulfill the ancient prophecy that he was the Messiah.” He nodded, smiling again. “For my purposes, it’ll be a Ford Pinto. It’s closest thing to a real donkey, I guess, in the twenty-first century. Can’t exactly ride into DC on an ass these days.”
“I get it,” Constantine said with a nod. He knew that it was yet another cog in Pantera’s ultimate plan for the Kingdom Rally. As Chief Bradley had guessed, Pantera would proclaim himself the Messiah, King of the World. Ignite the revolution.
The Messiah Page 15
