The Bishop

by Steven James

  He found a parking spot surprisingly near the car he was looking for. He left his vehicle, walked toward it.

  After this week, the world would know who was behind these crimes.

  And Bowers would come after him.

  He had no doubt about that.

  But the secret to defeating your enemy isn’t by letting him focus all of his energies on you, it’s by making sure that he can’t.

  Take the life of your subject’s loved one, and you will indeed suffer the consequences; destroy her psychologically, and you make him spend time and energy taking care of her rather than searching for you.

  Split his loyalties, his priorities, use his love to divert him.

  Don’t let him concentrate wholeheartedly on the hunt.

  Brad picked the car’s lock and left the surprise behind.

  Ever since arriving at the Library of Congress three hours ago, Tessa had been trying to figure out what it means to be human.

  And it was not as easy as it might seem to find the answer.

  And that was really starting to annoy her.

  She glanced at the pile of reference books around her and the notes she’d typed into her computer.

  Okay, so first you had the religious party-line answer: created in the image of God.

  But there was no real consensus, even among religious people, on what that meant—creativity, imagination, love, curiosity, dignity, freedom, responsibility . . . The list went on and on depending on which author you chose and on what he or she, a priori, seemed to feel was distinctive about Homo sapiens. So, circular reasoning.

  Besides, it hadn’t taken her long to find out that the Bible never says humans are the only animals with consciousness or intelligence or emotions or politics or self-awareness or even the only creatures with a spirit.

  That last one had surprised her.

  She pulled up the verse she’d stumbled across while reading a church treatise from the nineteenth century—Ecclesiastes 3:20–21: “All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?”

  The spirit of man.

  The spirit of the beast.

  She’d wondered if “the beast” was like Satan or something, so she’d checked a couple other translations; most rendered the phrases “the spirits of man” and “the spirits of animals” or something very close.

  People could interpret those verses however they wanted, but she figured that for now she would just take them at face value.

  Animals have spirits.

  People have spirits.

  So, putting the whole “who has a spirit/soul” question aside, from a naturalistic point of view, humans are simply highly evolved apes who, at some point, acquired abstract thinking that facilitated language use and the eventual development of the societal expectations and behaviors we have today. So humans would not be essentially different from animals at all.

  Different only by degree.

  Not kind.

  In fact, over the last hour she’d discovered that a growing number of bioethicists were abandoning the whole idea of “human,” arguing that it’s an artifice based on anthropocentrism and our vanity as a species. But anyone could see that as soon as you erase the uniqueness of humanity, you take away the basis for moral responsibility.

  After all, chimpanzees aren’t held accountable for murdering their weak. Why should we be? Especially since, in the long run, it would only serve to help natural selection create a more vibrant and successful species?

  But most of the atheists she was reading weren’t advocating murdering the weak.

  Most.

  She looked at the notes she’d scribbled.

  Through the years, evolutionist thinkers like Hobbes, Huxley, Freud, who all held unflinchingly to natural selection, had inexplicably encouraged people to rise above their natural instincts, a view shared by atheist proselytizer Richard Dawkins: “In our political and social life we are entitled to throw out Darwinism, to say we don’t want to live in a Darwinian world.”

  Okay, but how, if we’re the result of our genes, can we “throw out” being the result of our genes?

  Talk about being illogical.

  You can’t have it both ways—either we’re determined to be as we are by natural selection, or we’re not. And only if we’re not can we act in ways that are contrary to instinct. An animal constrained by instinct can’t suddenly decide to become something that instinct doesn’t allow it to be.

  So, if natural selection really was natural and not somehow guided by God, the entire spectrum of human behavior would be natural. Instinctual. The good stuff and the bad stuff. All just part of being a highly evolved primate.

  A species being true to itself.

  People being true to their hearts.

  To the fractures.

  And the whole idea of “man’s inhumanity to man” would be a logical contradiction, because it would be impossible for a human to act in a nonhuman, or inhuman, way.

  Chilling.

  Bestiality, infanticide—just part of human nature.

  Greed, cowardice, slavery—well, they must have had a beneficial role in survival or reproduction, or else natural selection would have weeded them out.

  And from there things just got worse.

  The entire field of medicine—the practice of keeping the sick and genetically deficient (whatever that might mean) alive as long as possible, is actually counterproductive to natural selection and the advancement of the species—especially considering the earth’s diminishing natural resources.

  So why do it?

  After all, natural selection requires the death of the weak for the good of the species, so why fight it?

  What is good for the species is good.

  What is bad for the species is bad.

  Letting AIDS victims or starving children in Africa die would be moral. So would euthanizing the mentally or terminally ill. And since teenage girls are the most likely to reproduce, selective breeding and forced copulation with adolescent girls exhibiting genetically desirable traits would be acceptable, even desirable for the species.

  Rape the gifted girls so the species might flourish.

  It didn’t take much of a leap at all to conclude with Nietzsche: “Whoever must be a creator in good and evil, verily, he must first be an annihilator and break values. Thus the highest evil belongs to the highest goodness: but this is creative.”

  Compulsory sterilization for mental patients, à la Woodrow Wilson’s polices in 1907. Genocide. Aborting kids with Down syndrome or cystic fibrosis. Physician-assisted suicide. Eugenics.

  Why not?

  Given the assertions of naturalism, all of this was logical, of course, but even most of the ardent naturalistic evolutionists she came across were reticent to go all the way down the eugenics road.

  In fact, most of them were, ironically, strong advocates for social justice and medical advances, which, considering their assumptions about human origins, didn’t really make any sense.

  But she actually gave those authors a lot of credit though, because even if they weren’t intellectually honest to their premises about human nature, they were honest to their hearts.

  To the shell of good.

  Because they knew what all people know—what even Hobbes, Huxley, Freud, and Dawkins knew—that some things are right and some are wrong, regardless of how beneficial or detrimental those things might be to our evolution as a species. Compassion trumps torture because compassion is good and torture is bad. Period.

  But not everyone would be courageous enough to be that honest.

  Nietzsche for example.

  Or Hitler.

  And that was the thing.

  All it would take was the right person wielding the argument to the right people—She noticed the time.

  1:56.

  Dang.

  Patrick was picking her up, like, any minute. />
  As much as she wanted to read more, she totally needed to get going.

  She returned the books to the research librarian’s desk and hurried outside.

  89

  Tessa was waiting for me when I pulled up to the steps of the Library of Congress.

  “How was your day?” I asked as she climbed into the car.

  “I didn’t find what I was looking for. You?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “How about that? We actually have something in common.”

  Changing the subject, she told me she was starved, and since we still had a few minutes before we needed to be at Missy Schuel’s office, I drove toward food.

  Up until then I hadn’t told Tessa about the meeting at 3:30, but now I explained that after we grabbed something to eat we were going to meet with the lawyer and then head over to a custody meeting with Paul Lansing’s lawyers.

  She listened with uncharacteristic silence. When I was done and she finally spoke, her voice was edged with anger. “Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”

  I’d anticipated her question. “I knew that if I told you, you’d worry about it all morning. I couldn’t come up with any good reason to ruin your day, so I waited. Trust me, I wasn’t playing games with you, I was just trying to keep you from being upset.”

  She was quiet. “But you actually want me to come along?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “You deserve to be present. It’s your future we’re talking about.”

  A pause. “It’s yours too.”

  I wasn’t sure how to reply to that. “Yes. It is.”

  It was a long time before she responded. “Thanks.” After a The Bishop moment she sighed. “This whole thing with Paul, I gotta say, I’m kind of annoyed at you.”

  “Because I didn’t tell you?”

  “No, because you took me to see him in Wyoming in the first place.”

  “Hang on, you’re the one who wanted to meet him. I just agreed that you had a right to know who—”

  “I know. I changed my mind. That’s why it’s your fault.”

  “You changed your mind and that’s why it’s my fault.”

  “Yes. It’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind and then blame someone else if things don’t work out.” She’d lent a lightness to her tone that told me she wasn’t really angry after all.

  “I don’t think that’s exactly how the saying goes.”

  “It’s the twenty-first-century version.”

  “You just made that up.”

  “Maybe.”

  A moment passed, and her tone turned serious again. “You’re a good dad, Patrick. Seriously. I mean that.”

  “Don’t worry. Things will work out.”

  “No, I mean, whatever happens—” she began, but I didn’t want to hear her say anything more.

  “Don’t worry,” I repeated.

  She didn’t reply.

  We grabbed a quick, very late lunch, and headed to Missy Schuel’s office.

  90

  7 hours left . . .

  2:29 p.m.

  She had no idea how long she’d been straining against her bonds, yanking, yanking, trying to get free, but slowly, over time, more and more dirt had tipped from her back and loosened around her limbs.

  And now, as she wrenched her arm to the side as hard as she could, Riah’s arm nudged a little bit to the left.

  She yanked again.

  It moved more.

  Then she jerked her whole body as hard as she could, back and forth, again and again, and all at once, with a thick, solid squish, Riah Everson’s rotting left arm broke free from her body.

  For a moment she lay in stunned disbelief. Maybe God had given her an answer after all. Maybe.

  Maybe.

  Awkwardly, frantically, she smacked the corpse’s limb against the ground until the horrible thing cracked at the wrist and fell from the leather strap.

  And her right arm was free.

  Though the angle was working against her, she grabbed the arm and tried to fling it to the side. It took three tries, but at last she got it out of the shallow grave, giving her own arm more room to move.

  Then she got rid of the corpse’s hand.

  From the position her betrayer had left her in, it wasn’t easy to undo the gag, but at last she managed.

  Immediately, she gulped in a mouthful of sour air. The Dotracaine had worn off, and she vomited as she gasped for breath, but still, with the gag gone, she felt a rush of hope.

  She twisted her arm toward her head, reaching for the strap around her neck.

  We arrived at Missy’s office.

  Considering her hesitancy to have me attend the custody meeting, I’d expected her to be reluctant to have Tessa there as well, but if she didn’t like the idea, she hid it well. As soon as I introduced Tessa to her, Missy returned the diary. “I can only imagine how special this must be to you.”

  “Yes, it is,” Tessa replied.

  Missy took some time explaining that reading the diary had helped her better formulate the things she wanted to emphasize in the meeting today.

  “I’ll draw attention to the brief nature of Paul Lansing’s relationship with Christie,” she said. “It was a short-lived love affair that lasted less than a month.” She nodded toward me. “During the last few months of your wife’s life, and ever since then, you’ve been Tessa’s caregiver—that’s more than twenty times longer than Paul even knew her mother.”

  “That’s a good point.” Tessa let her eyes bounce from me to Missy as if she were looking for support. “That’ll help.”

  “Yes, I think it will,” Missy said. “Also, Paul corresponded with your mother long after their relationship ended, yet never mentioned you or tried to find out if you were alive, so I believe we can show that he—”

  Tessa shook her head, the reassurance gone. “I already went through all this with him. He’ll just say he thought Mom went ahead with the abortion.”

  “Perhaps, but we’ll show that if he could find her, he could certainly have found you, or at least found out that Christie had delivered her baby. She never took any steps to keep it a secret from people, did she? That you were her daughter?”

  “No. Never.”

  I felt a shot of optimism.

  Missy was the real deal.

  “All right.” She looked at her watch, then promptly rose. “Their office is across town. Let’s go. I don’t want to be late.”

  Seated at her desk at the command post, Margaret Wellington clicked to Congressman Fischer’s website to read his issue statements.

  Last night she’d reviewed his voting record, but today, in light of what Agent Bowers had told her—or at least insinuated by his lack of an answer—about the congressman influencing Rodale, she’d decided to study the man’s votes and platform more carefully.

  From living in his district, she knew that he was for shrinking the military and FBI, decreasing the national debt, strengthening abortion rights, creating more green jobs, and expanding health care benefits to seniors, but she hadn’t been aware of how strongly he felt about justice reform until she saw his record of cast votes.

  Among other things, Fischer was adamantly against the death penalty.

  That one brought her pause.

  The man who’d tried to kill his brother had been a pro-death penalty advocate. After the assassination attempt, public opinion had pendulumed the other direction toward the congressman’s position, and Director Rodale had been one of those swayed to change his mind.

  During Richard Basque’s retrial, Margaret had gotten into a discussion with Rodale about the justice (or lack of justice) of the death penalty—something he’d grown to oppose but she supported. And, knowing she was for reducing the number of abortions, he’d challenged her: “How can you claim to be pro-life when you’re for the death penalty?”

  “Greg, we’re talking about the death penalty, not about—”

  “I’m only say
ing, Margaret, that your view is inconsistent.”

  “Frankly, I’m not sure it’s appropriate to compare—”

  “See?” He looked satisfied. “Your position is untenable.”

  “I am for life,” she said, “as well as for justice. With all due respect, Greg, how can you claim to be for either when you support letting the guilty live and putting the innocent to death?”

  Rodale had looked at her coldly. Had not replied.

  Even at the time, the fact that he’d confronted her in such a way had seemed inexplicable to her. Why was he so emotionally invested in the issue as it pertained specifically to Basque’s case?

  The computer screen stared at her and her thoughts switched from Rodale to Fischer.

  She turned back to his policy statements.

  He supported ways to “enhance human potential and reduce unnecessary suffering,” which included his endorsement, along with that of the National Science Foundation, of nanotechnology and transhumanism—the emerging field of genetically altering DNA to treat blindness, epilepsy, paralysis, cancer, and so on.

  Margaret wasn’t familiar with transhumanism, but it didn’t take her long online to discover that it was controversial since much of it involved not just augmentation but species advancement—through neuro-implants and gene therapy—creating humans with better eyesight, strength, or mental capabilities than the human race had ever developed on its own.

  Through genetic manipulation, scientists would soon be able to give people the reflexes of a panther or the strength of a gorilla or the eyesight of a falcon. And by implanting chips into their brains, provide them the ability to remember nearly everything they learned or experienced. Because of transhumanism’s ultimate goal of improving the human race, transforming it even, into a superior species altogether, some people were calling it twenty-first-century eugenics.

  Neuroscience. Nanotechnology.