Covenant

by Brandon Massey

  A stern command broke through the haze: “Back off, Thorne. Hands in the air.”

  Anthony blinked through his tears, sucked in a hitching breath. His vision swam into focus.

  Valdez was at the threshold of the suite. She was backed by several armed FBI agents. All of them aimed guns at him.

  “Back off,” Valdez said in a softer, yet authoritative tone. “It’s over, Thorne.”

  Mike edged around the agents. “We did it, AT. Right?”

  Anthony let go of the gun, the pistol still lodged in the bishop’s throat, and raised his hands.

  Face bluish, Bishop Prince snatched the gun out of his mouth. He clawed at his neck, choking and gagging, his suit jacket soggy with blood.

  Anthony rose and backed away a few steps. He was aware of the balcony doors behind him.

  “Arrest . . . this . . . trespasser,” Bishop Prince said, spluttering. “Assaulted . . . me . . .”

  Valdez glanced at the bishop as if he were pure slime. “We’re arresting you. We’ve got paramedics outside who’ll attend to your injuries.”

  “It’s only a flesh wound,” Anthony said. “He deserved a lot worse.”

  Valdez barked out a command to her team, and two square-jawed agents came forward, grabbed the bishop under the arms, and hauled him to his feet. They began to recite his Miranda rights.

  “What? You can’t . . . arrest me,” Bishop Prince said. “You have no . . . evidence of anything.”

  “There’s a white room down the hall,” Anthony said. “That’s where he kept ‘his angels.’ You guys can start searching in there—one of the victims ran out of here a few minutes ago.”

  “We found her downstairs,” Valdez said. “We’ll take good care of her and sweep every inch of this hellhole, see what else we can find.”

  “God will protect me from the snares of the wicked,” Bishop Prince said, on the verge of babbling as agents escorted him out of the room. “He will deliver me from the hand of my oppressor. I am his anointed prophet!”

  “Shut your snot-catcher,” Valdez said.

  “When I speak to God, I’ll ask him to go easy on you unrepentant sinners,” Bishop Prince said with a leer, before they led him out.

  “What a freak,” Mike said.

  “All right, Thorne.” Valdez scrutinized Anthony. “You get the goods?”

  He nodded. “It was taped underneath the bed frame. A flash drive.”

  “Of all the freakin’ places.” Valdez rolled her eyes. “Well, great work. Hand it over. We’ll take care of things from here.”

  Anthony looked from her, to Mike. Mike glanced at the balcony doors, and inclined his head almost imperceptibly.

  Anthony took off running. The other agents raised their guns.

  “Hold your fire!” Valdez yelled at her team. “We’ll nab him at home.”

  Anthony kicked open the doors and raced to the edge of the covered balcony.

  Outside, the clouds were breaking up, and the sun was coming out again.

  85

  Anthony climbed over the balcony and dropped to the ground below.

  Ahead, FBI agents and an ambulance crowded the mansion’s driveway. Although the agents looked at Anthony curiously as he approached, none attempted to stop him.

  Valdez had granted him leave, but it would not be long before she would come calling.

  Beyond the driveway, around the stone pillar, Lisa waited in the Explorer. He got inside and kissed her lustily.

  “Nice to see you, too,” she said. “All in one piece.”

  “Let’s get out of here, sweetheart.”

  She started to twist the key in the ignition, paused. “Did you get it?”

  “We’ll see in a minute.”

  “What about Mike?”

  “I’m sure he’ll be hitching a ride with Valdez.”

  As she made a U-turn and sped away from the estate, he grabbed his notebook computer out of the duffel and powered it on. He plugged the flash drive into the USB port.

  The drive contained over thirty PDF files, each titled by year; another group of files was named, “Revelation Phase 1,” Revelation Phase 2” and so forth, seven phases in total.

  He selected a file at random. The document was over a hundred pages long. He read the first page.

  Missions Executed by the Armor of God in the Year of Our Lord, 2009

  Summary: 2009 saw a broad range of threats to the Kingdom, most related to our interests in new Kingdom territories across the United States. In total, 47 threats were identified, and eliminated . . .

  “Well?” Lisa asked.

  He skimmed a bit more. A pleasant chill skipped down his spine.

  “We’ve got it,” he said. “My God, we’ve got it all.”

  86

  Back at the family home, they found Danielle on the sofa in the living room, smoking a Newport and watching television. A box of Kleenex sat on the coffee table, wads of tissue scattered around.

  At their arrival, she mashed out her cigarette and stood. “What happened? You end it?”

  “Lisa will tell you everything,” Anthony said. He looked to the staircase. “Reuben upstairs?”

  “In his room.”

  “Did you tell him, Danny?”

  “I said I would.” Sighing, she eased onto the sofa again, and lit another cigarette.

  Anthony went upstairs and knocked on Reuben’s door. Unlike every other time that Anthony had visited his nephew, no music pounded from inside.

  “It’s open,” Reuben said.

  Reuben lay on his back on the bed, gazing at the shadowed ceiling, hands crossed behind his head. The only light in the room issued from the computer monitor. The web browser displayed the New Kingdom Church Web site; Bishop Prince’s bio filled the screen.

  Anthony felt so sorry for the kid that he didn’t know what to say. He pulled the desk chair over near the bed, and sat.

  For a couple of minutes, neither of them spoke.

  “Your mother told you about your father,” Anthony finally said.

  Reuben didn’t look at him. “He ain’t my father, man. He’s just some dude who got her pregnant.”

  Count on a youth to get straight to the point, no chaser.

  “How do you feel about it?” Anthony asked.

  “The guy’s a twisted motherfucker. Getting with girls younger than me? That’s sick, man.”

  “Your mom loves you, Reuben, in spite of what happened. I love you, too. I love you like a son.”

  Reuben shifted to face him. He looked so much like his father that it was disconcerting, their eyes the same shade of gray. But the souls reflected within those eyes were vastly different—Reuben was a kid, and he had a good heart.

  “It’s kinda weird that you called that dude my father,” Reuben said. “ ‘Cause you know, I’ve always sorta looked at you like you were my father, know what I mean?”

  “You have?”

  “Yeah, man,” he said, as if the truth were obvious. “Who else I got? You’ve always been there for me and Mom.”

  “Thanks, Reuben. I needed to hear that.” Anthony clapped his nephew’s shoulder.

  “Yo, you wanna sleep here?” Reuben sat up, examining Anthony’s face. “You look like you need to crash, for real.”

  “In a while. I’ve still got some work to do. Did you finish that press release blaster?”

  “Man, I was putting the finishing touches on it when that crazy dude jacked me this morning. But we could use it now, for sure. You got something you need to send out?”

  Anthony held up the flash drive.

  “There’re some files on here that I’m going to upload to my author web site,” he said. “I drafted a press release on my way here. I want to direct the media to a page on my site where they can find all the files.”

  “Aw, that’s easy.” Reuben grabbed another chair from the corner of the room and dragged it in front of the computer. “Let’s do this.”

  87

  Using the program Reuben cre
ated, Anthony sent a one-page press release to over ten thousand news and media outlets across the Internet, from CNN.com to MSNBC.com, from Reuters to The Associated Press, from The New York Times and The Huffington Post to The Times in London.

  Although New Kingdom dispatched web crawlers that canvassed the Internet and identified damaging content, the breadth and sheer number of media sources that Anthony contacted ensured maximum damage, in minimal time. By the time the church shut down his server—if the crush of media-generated traffic didn’t manage to do so—it would be too late.

  “Now we need to get out of town.” Anthony pushed away from the computer. “I don’t think we want to be around when the reporters come. It’ll be a zoo.”

  “Where we gonna go?” Reuben asked.

  “I’m not sure. Let’s go talk to the ladies of the family.”

  Reuben followed him downstairs. Lisa and Danielle were in the living room, Lisa relating what had happened.

  Anthony started to tell them, It’s done, when he glanced down the hallway and noticed that the door to his father’s study was open.

  No one ever left that door open.

  Dread gathering in him, he moved down the hallway. A cool draft drifted from inside the room.

  Lisa called after him, but he ignored her. He pushed open the door all the way. When he and Lisa had spoken privately in there earlier that day, he’d opened the window on the other side of the study, to let air circulate.

  But he hadn’t removed the screen, too. He stepped into the room.

  Someone pressed a cold muzzle to the side of his head.

  “Guess who?” Cutty said from the shadows behind the door.

  Anthony held his breath. He didn’t have any of his guns, and had taken off his body armor, too.

  In his peripheral vision, it looked as if Cutty bore a silencer-equipped nine millimeter.

  “Did you think I’d abandoned my mission, Thorne?” Cutty said. “I am a loyal servant of the Kingdom until the day God calls me home to glory.”

  “You should have run away,” Anthony said quietly. “It’s all over now. You’ll go to prison.”

  “Wrong,” Cutty said, and pulled the trigger.

  The bullet ripped across Anthony’s left shoulder, spinning him around. He crashed against his father’s desk. Pens and pencils clattered onto the desktop, fell to the floor.

  Never should have let my guard down, Anthony thought. I knew this nut was still on the loose . . .

  Pain swelled across his shoulder, the bloodstain on his shirt steadily growing. He had been shot before, but those prior injuries had been only flesh wounds, and he’d recovered quickly.

  This time, he wasn’t sure if he’d been so lucky.

  None of his family came running. The silencer had done exactly what it was designed to do.

  “Heaven,” Cutty said was saying. “I am going to heaven. You and your family are going to hell—now get up and move.”

  Keeping the gun trained on him, Cutty grabbed his arm. His short, strong fingers dug like meat hooks into Anthony’s flesh. Anthony struggled to his feet, dizziness tipping through him.

  After all he had been through, fifteen agonizing years of hoping for justice, it couldn’t possibly end like this, with him slaughtered in his family’s home on the very day of his redemption.

  Cutty pushed him through the doorway, and into the hall.

  “Go to the living room,” Cutty said. “I’m going to shoot your family members one at a time, and you’re going to watch, and you’re going to pray to God to forgive you for all the wicked acts you’ve done, and when I’m done with them, I’m going to finish you off.”

  He poked the gun against the back of Anthony’s head, and Anthony began to shuffle down the carpeted hallway. Blood trickled from his fingers and dripped onto the floor as he walked past the photos of his family and the time-faded pictures of his beloved father.

  No. It couldn’t end like this. Not after they had suffered so much.

  But he was out of options.

  Reuben and Danielle were sitting together on the sofa, talking. They stopped in mid-sentence and gasped.

  “Not one word or move from any of you,” Cutty said. “You disobey, Thorne dies.”

  Both of them froze.

  Where is Lisa? Anthony wondered, wildly. Where the hell is she?

  Her purse, which had been sitting on the coffee table, was missing.

  “Go sit across from your family, Thorne,” Cutty said. “You’ll have the front row seat as I bring God’s vengeance to you heathens.”

  Anthony crossed the room, lowered himself slowly into the chair. Searching in the corners of his eyes for weapons, but finding nothing, dammit.

  “Where is your harlot, Thorne?” Cutty asked. “I was certain that she was present.”

  “I am,” Lisa said, from somewhere behind Cutty. “And I’m no harlot, you crazy sonofabitch.”

  As Cutty whirled to face her, gunfire boomed. Cutty’s head snapped backward. He bounced against a wall and collapsed to the carpet in a dead heap, a bloody hole drilled through the center of his forehead.

  Danielle screamed, clutched Reuben to her.

  Still aiming the pistol at the fallen zealot, Lisa emerged from the shadows of the hallway. She slowly lowered the gun, staring at the man she had killed.

  Anthony realized that when he had entered the study, she must have followed, suspicious, and waited in the powder room off the hall when she knew he was in trouble, waited for her shot.

  He went to her. She was shaking. He carefully removed the gun from her clammy fingers.

  “It’s okay, baby,” he said. “Everything’s fine, it’s over.”

  “He shot you,” she said softly, gaping at the blood on his shirt. “Oh, my God . . .”

  “I’ll be okay, I think,” he said. “Can someone get me a towel?”

  As Reuben raced to find one, the doorbell rang.

  “That’ll be the FBI,” Anthony said.

  88

  Valdez hustled inside, two agents flanking her. Mike was behind the three of them, beaming like a kid on Christmas morning, but his eyes widened when he saw Anthony pressing a blood-stained towel against his shoulder.

  “Hand it over, Thorne,” Valdez said, ignoring his injury. “Or else you’re facing charges on all the carnage you guys left behind on the church’s property.”

  “No need to make threats.” He gave her the flash drive. He’d let her find out later that every piece of damning evidence it held had already been leaked to the media. He doubted it would hurt her case, and might even speed the process along.

  She gave the device to one of her agents. He plugged it into a PDA, watched the handheld’s screen for a few seconds, nodded at Valdez. “We’re good.”

  “You guys are clear,” Valdez said. “We’ll clean up the collateral damage.”

  “Got one more piece of collateral damage waiting for you in the living room,” he said. “Your old partner.”

  “You’re shittin’ me.” Her eyes sharpened. “Cutty came here?”

  “Who the hell do you think shot me?” Anthony said.

  “Hey, sorry. We’ll call our crew, get this squared away ASAP.”

  Anthony stepped aside, and Valdez and her agents entered the house. Reuben directed them to Cutty’s corpse, which Danielle had covered with a blanket.

  Mike came inside, too. He checked out Anthony’s wound. “How serious is this one?”

  “I think my luck’s still good,” he said. “It’s feeling like another flesh wound.”

  “You better get it checked out.”

  Anthony nodded. “We’re planning to make ourselves scarce shortly, get away for a while. You wanna come with?”

  “You kiddin’?” Mike winked. “I’m hanging around—I got a date tomorrow with the senorita. We’re going to the firing range.”

  “Lucky you,” Anthony said. “Make sure I get an invite to the wedding.”

  “You’ll get more than an invite, AT. Y
ou’re gonna be the best man.”

  89

  That evening, the media frenzy began. The expose on Bishop Prince and New Kingdom Church was leading news on all the major television and cable networks.

  By then, Anthony and his family had left town. On the way, he sought medical attention at an urgent care clinic and had his gunshot wound attended to, and it was a minor injury, as he’d hoped.

  Later, using an alias, they checked into a beachfront hotel in Panama City, Florida.

  The staggering influx of Internet traffic shut down the server that hosted his Web site, but hundreds of news sites and blogs already had downloaded the documents and posted them on their own servers. The evidence would circulate through cyberspace indefinitely, outpacing the church’s capacity—and soon, ability—to squash it.

  Over the next two weeks, Bishop Emmanuel Prince was charged with several hundred counts of various federal crimes, including but not limited to extortion, blackmail, solicitation to murder, conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to commit terrorist acts, embezzlement, mail fraud, racketeering, child pornography, and child sexual abuse.

  Several members of the bishop’s inner circle stepped forward to negotiate plea deals, including the Director of the Armor of God.

  Even a high-ranking Senator, a favorite for the White House in the next Presidential election, went down in flames, damned by his close association with the bishop. Numerous federal and state judges and law-enforcement officials either resigned, or tried to disavow their church ties.

  The Kingdom Campus was shut down, and residents were given time to secure alternate housing, and schooling for their children. To Anthony, the sight on television of families leaving the church grounds after having invested so much of their lives in the organization was perhaps the saddest spectacle of the whole affair.

  Through it all, Bishop Prince confessed to nothing and refused to cooperate. “God will deliver me from the snares of the wicked,” was his consistent response to the charges. Legal pundits predicted that he would serve a life sentence at a federal prison, with no possibility of parole.