The Trinity Game

by Sean Chercover

  Daniel threw it in gear, mashed the accelerator to the floor.

  Tires squealed on concrete, found purchase, and the beast shot forward.

  Samson unloaded at them from behind—pap-pap-pap-pap-pap-pap—and Daniel heard thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk as bullets hit the SUV, but he kept his eyes forward as they sped up the ramp and shot out into the blazing sun.

  The sidewalk at the end of the driveway was full of Trinity’s Pilgrims. Daniel leaned on the horn, jammed the brakes, saw a clearing, wrenched the wheel, hit the gas, and tore across a patch of grass and onto the road.

  “You hit?”

  “What?”

  “Are you hit?”

  “No,” said Trinity, “fine.” He wriggled up into the passenger seat, buckled his belt, as Daniel hung a hard right, then a left, then another right.

  Daniel didn’t let up on the gas, driving them deeper into the surrounding ghetto, no destination, just putting distance between them and what they’d left behind.

  “Nobody’s following,” he said.

  “Well, that’s something,” said Trinity. “Hang a right, there’s a police station up on Magnolia.”

  “Not going to the cops.”

  “Why not?”

  “Samson was coordinating security with the cops, and that was Samson who just shot at us.”

  “What?”

  “It was Samson just tried to kill us.”

  “Shit. Really?”

  “I saw him clearly.”

  “Damn.” Trinity shook his head. “Still, that doesn’t mean—”

  “Another thing: When we arrived, cops all over the hallway outside your dressing room. Same thing when we went to the stage. But when I came out during your sermon, no cops. All gone.” He hung a left, headed south. “You see any when we ran out?”

  “No.”

  “Right. Maybe they’ve got nothing to do with it, but I say we don’t make that wager.”

  Trinity sat in silence for a few seconds, then nodded. “Where we going?”

  “I don’t know. Away from Atlanta.”

  Chicago, Illinois…

  Special Agent Steve Hillborn straightened his tie as he crossed the high-ceilinged lobby of the FBI Chicago Division Headquarters. He signed in at the counter, clipped his building pass onto his handkerchief pocket, and nodded to the uniformed guard standing at parade rest as he passed through the inner doors.

  Hillborn didn’t usually mind being called in on a Sunday, but he’d promised to meet Fred at five o’clock at the Lakeview Athletic Club’s climbing wall. They’d only been dating a couple months, and Hillborn had been putting a lot of hours in at the Bureau lately, and he didn’t think Fred would enjoy being stood up…again. But that’s the life of a cop’s boyfriend, he thought as he stepped into the elevator, and if Fred couldn’t accept it, the relationship wasn’t gonna last anyway. Better to find out now.

  The text message from his boss, Chicago SAC Winfield Battles, had said simply: Explosion @ Trinity church—Report HQ, 3PM.

  Hillborn worked the Organized Crime desk. A week ago he’d been tasked with opening a file on the Reverend Tim Trinity, and he was glad to be working on something new. Morale had taken a hard hit after their most recent showcase prosecution went tits-up. There’d been a thorough post-mortem on the case, and nobody thought the investigation had been faulty or the evidence lacking. Sometimes you just get a charismatic defense attorney who dances the seven veils and seduces the jury. Sometimes you get a jury of idiots.

  And when you get both, you don’t get convictions.

  So now the federal prosecutor was insisting that more than enough evidence still wasn’t enough, and Hillborn’s open files were growing stale. There were few feelings worse than busting your ass on an investigation, proudly presenting your case to the prosecutor as a slam dunk, and being told to go back in search of yet more evidence.

  The new investigation was just beginning, hadn’t really had time to take shape. Tim Trinity was seen as a successful player in the religion industry, who recently added soothsaying to his act. Nobody knew how he was doing it, but his predictions were bang-on, and his prognostication of professional sports had to be giving the gambling business a bleeding ulcer. Hillborn had not yet found a connection to organized crime, but it seemed a fair bet that he’d find one. So he was searching.

  The terrorism guys—and terrorism was still eating most of the Bureau’s resources—were looking at Tim Trinity from another angle, looking for a connection to the Belle Chasse Refinery disaster. Word around the office was they weren’t finding anything.

  Now, with the explosion at Trinity’s church, Hillborn figured on a trip to Atlanta, a trip he’d have to take anyway to interview that reporter—what was her name?—Julia Rothman. It was Rothman who broke the story, she might provide a way in.

  Hillborn stopped at his cubicle to grab the Trinity file, thin as it was, and headed up to the briefing room. Seated around the long table were Special Agents Robertson and Bock, Toronteli, Bryson, Macfarlane, and a couple of terrorism guys he knew only slightly, who’d flown in from National. They were watching CNN on the large flat-screen monitor mounted on the end wall between the American flag and the whiteboard.

  Hillborn nodded hello to the others, took his seat, and poured himself a coffee as SAC Winfield Battles entered and muted the television. He planted his palms on the table.

  “This is the situation,” said Battles. “As you know by now, an incendiary device detonated in Reverend Tim Trinity’s dressing room at his television studio this morning. We have a forensics team on site, but it’s too early to say if Trinity was among the victims. Lot of meat chunks to sort through. Agent Hillborn has been looking at Trinity for…”

  Hillborn’s Blackberry vibrated on his belt as a new e-mail arrived. He looked at the little screen. The e-mail was from the Nevada office, a response to the query he’d sent two days ago. He read the e-mail.

  “Agent Hillborn?”

  “Sorry, sir, just got some information on the case.”

  “Good. Bring us up to speed.” Battles sat.

  “Yes, sir.” Hillborn stood and opened the file in front of him. “Because of Trinity’s sports predictions, I’ve been looking for an O.C. connection. Hadn’t found one,” he gestured at his Blackberry, “until now. Of all his predictions, his most recent was also the most unlikely—the Gotham Stakes. The winning horse was a fifty-to-one underdog.”

  “Any given Sunday,” said Toronteli.

  “Sure, but Trinity didn’t just pick the winner, he nailed the whole trifecta—win, place, and show. So I contacted our offices in Las Vegas and Atlantic City and just heard back from Vegas. William Lamech’s casino sportsbook stopped taking bets on those exact horses the same day Trinity made the prediction.”

  “What’s the brief on Lamech?” asked Battles.

  “He’s been mostly legit for a long time, but he grew up on Taylor Street…rose through the ranks running the backroom ’books in Chicago. They called him Lucky Lamech back in the day. Anyway, he was the Outfit’s guy when the mob ran Vegas, but he went corporate when Vegas went corporate and hasn’t shown any direct O.C. contact in a while. I worked my contacts on this, and my impression is the old guard still holds him in high esteem, but he’s bigger than they are, and they have no claim on him. I’ve also heard rumors that, aside from his legitimate sportsbook in Vegas, he runs an exclusive network of high-end bookies catering to the white-collar crowd. Just rumors, no evidence.”

  “Wait,” said Robertson, flipping some pages in his notebook. “You said Lamech stopped taking those bets the same day Trinity made the prediction. That’s the same show when he predicted the oil refinery accident. Two days before the news of Trinity’s predictions, and how to decode them, went public.”

  “So maybe the same source who tipped Trinity off about the fixed race also tipped off Lamech,” said Bryson.

  Winfield Battles spoke up from the head of the table. “What’s bugging you, Steve?”
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  Hillborn sat, gestured at the file folder before him. “Trinity’s predictions are all over the place—football, ponies, hockey, car races, golf…If this is happening, we’re looking at the largest sports-fixing racket in history. Exponentially larger…I mean, unbelievably large.”

  “All the more reason to get our asses in gear,” said Battles. “We’ve got a thread connecting Trinity and Lamech, and with Trinity fucking up the betting business, Lamech is drowning in motive for the bombing. The thread has two ends—we pull at both. Agent Hillborn will take lead on the O.C. angle; liaise with the Evidence Response Team in Atlanta. Robertson and Bryson go with him, Toronteli and Bock work it from this end, and K-Mac liaise with Terrorism.” Battles nodded at the television screen. “Publicly this is an investigation of the bombing at Tim Trinity’s television studio. But if there’s a sports-fixing scam attached, we need to find it and take it down, fast.” He stood, glanced at his watch. “Learjet’s being fueled as we speak, gentlemen. Get cracking.”

  Atlanta, Georgia…

  Julia sat alone in Kathy Reynolds’s office, willing the cell phone in her hand to ring, trying not to cry.

  The day had started so well. The morning meeting was a relaxed affair, with plenty of cynical asides and a few good laughs. Television or print, young or old, Southern or Yankee, reporter humor crosses all lines, and Julia felt more at home than she had since she left New Orleans. She realized she could work in television if she had to. She’d stick it out until newspapers were no longer the best place to report the news, or until they could no longer pay a living wage, whichever came first. Hopefully that day wouldn’t come, but if it did, she’d stay in the game, keep fighting.

  They watched the live broadcast of Trinity’s show in a conference room and joked about the unmitigated disaster that was his Faith without Works Is Dead “sermon.” People were actually calling it that, without the ironic quotation marks. Trinity hadn’t given the media much to work with, and just ten minutes after he left the stage, the post-game pundits started repeating themselves. Kathy made a face at Julia and said, “Cue the freak show,” and after a commercial break, the coverage shifted to the tent cities of Trinity’s parking lot and Centennial Park for instant-reaction interviews with hippies high on weed, bikers high on malt liquor, Christians high on the promise of impending rapture (or the promise of impending Armageddon), and the certifiably insane.

  And then the fucking bomb exploded inside Trinity’s dressing room.

  Six people dead in the blast. At least six, maybe more.

  It was not known if Tim Trinity was among the dead, but there was evidence of at least three men among the remains. The Fulton County Medical Examiner said several people were in close proximity to the device when it detonated, and consequently there were many fragments of human remains to sort out and identify. Trinity had not been seen since the explosion. A few survivors were found in the hallway outside his dressing room, but they were now in intensive care. No one knew if any would survive long enough to talk to the police.

  The Atlanta PD had swarmed into Trinity’s church, and an FBI forensics team arrived an hour later. Then they started carrying out the body bags. Some of the bags were mostly empty, carrying only a foot, or a head, or an arm.

  That’s when Julia let out a low moan. She didn’t even know she’d done it—to her, it had been inside her head—but everyone in the conference room turned from the television to face her, and Kathy took her arm and said, “You look unwell,” and led her through the bustling newsroom and into the office.

  And now she sat, staring at her cell phone, thinking: Goddamn you, Danny. Call me…She tried in vain to avoid the memory of their walk together the previous afternoon…their kiss…

  And the last thing she’d said to him before walking away. “Danny, it was over for us a long time ago,” she’d said, “and it’s going to stay over, even if you quit the priesthood.”

  He would have called. If he were alive, he would have called by now…

  Daniel’s cell had gone missing in the chaos, and he’d removed the battery and SIM card from his uncle’s phone so it could not be used to track their location. He stayed on the blue highways, off the interstates, and he stayed well under the speed limit.

  The post-adrenaline hangover left nerves raw for both men, and Trinity didn’t seem to want conversation, which was OK with Daniel. He needed the time to think. He drove without destination for a while, then climbed high into the rural mountains of northwest Georgia, where the roads became dirt. He cruised deep into the woods until he spotted an unoccupied hunting cabin, thirty miles from the nearest town. The cabin was off the grid, electricity supplied by a generator. The generator was cold, the cabin dark, and there was no evidence of a recent visitor.

  Daniel jimmied a window open and climbed through, unlocked the front door and let Trinity in. The hunting cabin was nicer than he’d expected. Probably owned by an executive who liked the idea of roughing it but saw no reason to experience discomfort while doing so.

  Trinity found canned soup and beef jerky in the cupboard, enough to keep them until morning. At sunset Daniel covered the windows with blankets and lit an oil lamp he found under the sink, and they ate soup out of the can and listened to the news on a wind-up radio.

  Twelve dead at Trinity’s church. Six killed by the explosion, another six trampled to death in the stampede from the building. Over two dozen injured.

  “I told you I had a feeling something bad was gonna happen,” said Trinity.

  “This would qualify,” said Daniel.

  The radio told them that Reverend Tim Trinity was missing and was thought to have died in the explosion, but this was as yet unconfirmed. The Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office directed questions to the FBI, and the FBI wasn’t releasing a statement until the forensic investigation was complete and next-of-kin had been notified.

  Trinity put his soup can on the coffee table, reached out his right hand. “Gimme the phone.”

  “What?”

  “I gotta call Liz, let her know I’m OK.”

  “Tim, Liz was still standing in your dressing room when I dragged you out.” Trinity didn’t withdraw his hand. Daniel shook his head. “I said no. The world thinks you’re dead, and you’re gonna stay dead until it benefits us to resurrect you. If they know you’re alive, they’ll come at you again. We need time to figure our next move.”

  Trinity’s arm dropped slowly to his side, and his eyes became wet in the flickering orange light. He blinked rapidly, let out a long breath.

  “You and Liz were close.”

  “Sorta off and on, but…yeah. We were close.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Trinity pulled a steel flask from his pocket, screwed off the cap, and raised it toward the ceiling in a toasting gesture. “Glory and survival, Liz. Hell of a broad.” He took a swig, closed his eyes for a moment, nodded to himself. “OK. We go to New Orleans.”

  “First place they’ll look for you,” Daniel said. “People in trouble usually run home.”

  Trinity pointed at him. “I’m dead, remember? They won’t be looking. Your words.”

  “A couple days at most. And that’s where they’ll start.”

  “Then we haul ass, in-and-out before they find out. See, I know where the answer is…” Trinity held up a hand. “Last night, I had a dream. More powerful than a dream, it felt like a vision. It felt like God talking. In the dream, God came in the form of a beautiful black woman. The woman said I was in danger. She also said she could help me. And when I woke up, I knew where to find her. She’s in New Orleans.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “I don’t know. But she’s in the French Quarter. I know her address—633 Dumaine, just off Royal.”

  “You just woke up with her address in your head.”

  Trinity nodded. “I woke up, and in my head, I could see the building—white, one story, green shutters, slate roof. I could see the numbers by the door, and I knew exactly w
here it was. We go there, we’ll find her. I’m sure of it.” He took another pull from the flask. “If you wanna bail out, I understand. You never signed up for dodging shrapnel. I can drop you off wherever you like…but I’m going to New Orleans.”

  “This dream, it was like the dream where God told you he wanted me by your right hand?”

  Trinity let out a sheepish grin. “Yeah, well, I was lying when I told you that. I just made it up so you’d stay.”

  “What?”

  “That was before I promised not to lie to you. I haven’t lied since, and I’m not lying now.”

  God, he was like a child sometimes. “Speaking of promises,” said Daniel, “what happened to telling the world you’re not the Messiah?”

  “I tried. Honest—you saw me—the words wouldn’t come out. So then I did exactly what I told you I’d do: I opened my mouth and trusted the Lord to feed me my lines.” Trinity took a swig from his flask. “And you know what? I think he did.” He winked. “Just wish he’d given me a little more material. Man, I felt like an ass up there.”

  Daniel smiled despite himself. He kicked off his shoes. “I’ll go with you to New Orleans,” he said.

  “Thanks.” Trinity held the flask out. “Care for a snort?”

  Daniel took the flask, smooth and warm in his hand, and swallowed some bourbon. It went down with a welcome burn. The engraving on the flask caught his eye, and he angled it toward the oil lamp.

  To Pops—Happy 41st Birthday—Love Danny

  He looked up and his uncle nodded.

  “You broke my heart, son.”

  Daniel took another swig, handed the flask back. “Right back at ya, old man.” He lay back on the couch and closed his eyes. “Better get some shut-eye. We hit the road early.”

  Outside, rain started drumming hard para-para-diddles on the cabin’s tin roof, and thunder cracked in the distance. Tim Trinity was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “Thanks for saving my life today.”

  “Go to sleep, Tim.”