The Painted Messiah

by Craig Smith

  'In Caesarea,' he told her, 'where we have a great many Jews, they graciously allow us to hang the imperial standards as well as the golden eagle, the standards of the Fretensis Legion and all her cohorts and centuries. Perhaps you can explain to me the difference between Caesarea and Jerusalem.'

  'I would not presume to explain politics to you, sir.' Claudia Procula had the black hair and exceedingly large, luminous, brown eyes that distinguished all of the Claudii women, whom Rome inevitably celebrated as the most beautiful women in the empire. The matriarch of the clan, after all, was none other than Livia, the legendary wife of Caesar Augustus and mother of Tiberius. Unlike her great aunt, Procula did not seem especially attracted to power. By the age of twenty-one Livia had already divorced one husband, the father of Tiberius, in order to marry Augustus who, with her help, seized the imperial throne and held it for the next fifty years. As men liked to observe, when they were quite sure it was safe to say such a thing, Augustus had ruled the world, and Livia had ruled Augustus.

  'I don't want you to explain politics to me. I only want your opinion. An objective consideration,' he answered. 'What do you think of it?'

  'Sir, please. I don't know about such things.'

  'Why does Jerusalem fail to honour - at the very least - an image of Tiberius? I will give the Jew his Temple, but don't you think he should grant honour to his earthly ruler?'

  'It would seem so to me, sir.'

  'To me as well.'

  Following his dinner, Pilate sent a slave to find Cornelius. Cornelius was not to be found, however. The following morning as Pilate's barber shaved him and he dictated a letter to Sejanus, informing him of his decision 'to engage the sensibilities' of the Judaeans, Cornelius showed up.

  'We are twelve hours behind schedule, Centurion, because I could not find you in your quarters last night.'

  'If the prefect had only told me I would be needed—'

  Pilate waved the matter away with a friendly smile, or as friendly as he got in the morning. 'Were you practicing your Greek, Centurion?'

  Cornelius nearly smiled in return. 'The Syrian women, Prefect, are beyond comparison, if I may speak freely.'

  The centurion had told Pilate once that one woman was too many and two were not enough. So he took them by threes and was the happier for it. 'All of them, or have you a favorite trio?' Pilate's barber's razor hesitated as his eyes took in the huge centurion appreciatively.

  'I have a favorite house, Prefect. The wine passes and the women are beyond—'

  '—comparison. Yes. In the future you will please leave a forwarding address when you visit your wives, Centurion, so that the emperor does not grow impatient with his prefect. I want you to take three centuries to Jerusalem and raise the imago standard over the great door to Herod's palace. If I recall the plans correctly, it faces the Temple, so that everyone who goes to see the desert god may know the living god watches over them as well.'

  'Yes, Prefect.'

  'You will inform Caiaphas with a letter written under my seal that should any disturbances transpire inside the city as a result of this display, your orders are to crucify Annas and all of his sons. You will then proceed to the population at large, taking every hundredth soul regardless of responsibility, age or sex.'

  'Yes, Prefect.'

  'And tell Caiaphas that, in my religion, we honour the images of all living things. Should he wish to discuss the matter with me, he had better bring his own interpreter. I find I am running short of them.'

  'It will be done, Prefect.'

  Over the North Atlantic October 6-7, 2006,

  Malloy downloaded everything Gil Fine had sent him, hoping to browse through the material during his flight to Zürich. Gleaned from various sources, some print and some electronic, it was the kind of material you would have gotten from a good library a couple of decades ago if you were ready to spend weeks tracking through the Reader's Guide and photocopying a few thousand pages. From the organization of the material it was clear that Homeland Security had already done the basic work on Nicole North, Jonas Starr, and J. W. Richland. About half the articles on Richland involved the televangelist taking a resolute stand against sin. A great deal more was self-promotion, articles about Richland disguised as news. Finally, there was a small but persistent strain of real information, Richland's life as told by his enemies. The good stuff.

  Despite a high profile and long tenure at the top, Richland's scandals had come and gone when he was still a very young man. There had been much made of it some years ago when Richland was a young preacher on the rise, but even then it was ancient history, nothing people could not forgive or at least overlook. Who hasn't been young?

  The scandals were juicy, all the same. It seemed Richland had begun his professional life working tent revivals at the age of sixteen. He preached hellfire and damnation, cured cancer, caused the lame to walk, the blind to see. By age nineteen, young J. W. Richland sold his tent and rented a church in downtown Ft. Worth. Things hopped for a while. People rolled in the aisles, talked in tongues, and sang the night away. Then, according to people who knew him in those days, a delegation of the younger husbands and middle-aged fathers appeared at Richland's office one evening after services and suggested the preacher consider a career in the military. The idea apparently made good sense, because the next day Richland enlisted. Ninety days after that he was in Vietnam.

  According to Richland's own account of that time, the next several years were given over to worldliness. His enemies named names. There was marijuana and liquor without question. A number of sources talked about cocaine, amphetamines, and always a steady stream of sexual partners, with a notable penchant for the married ones. In the army Richland liked to brag about his tent revival days, the pretty girls and young wives who needed 'special counseling.' All of it a great joke.

  After his tour of duty and an honorable discharge, he enrolled at one of the junior colleges in Fort Worth. Grades were shaky but passing. The lifestyle was more of the same. In Richland's account of his conversion, he had hit rock bottom and was half-drunk when he stumbled into an old-fashioned tent revival. It was the kind of event he had run so well when he was too young to know what gifts he possessed. Even knowing the game, and it was nothing but a game to him at that point, he wasn't immune to its power. While the preacher spoke that evening, J. W. Richland sat in the back row and wept.

  That was the genesis of Richland's long journey back to faith. He met the woman he would eventually marry a year later in Bible class and soon after that transferred to a Christian college. At seminary he honed his oratory skills and fashioned a less radical dogma. When he returned to the ministry there were no outraged husbands, not even the hint of indiscretion. In fact Richland's return to the pulpit appeared to be a genuine conversion.

  His ministry was even marked by a relative degree of sophistication, according to people who knew about such things. He was no longer healing the lame, curing cancer, and giving sight to the blind on a nightly basis. He built a broad base of support among the middle class and formed critical alliances with people who provided a sound financial underpinning to the ministry.

  The most important early friendship turned out to be Nicole North's father. Nicholas North helped Richland exploit cable TV in the 1970s, letting him compete with the likes of Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell.

  Richland was not the biggest name in televangelism in the early days, but after Swaggart stumbled badly with a New Orleans prostitute and Jimmy Bakker went to prison, Richland took market share. While a number of preachers including Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell began to politicize the evangelical movement, J. W. Richland steadfastly refused to drift from his message. His strategy began to pay off by the early 1990s, the decade his face first made the cover of Time. Richland had become a household name. His refusal to deal in politics ended with the new millennium. Some thought because he had previously been reluctant to join the fray his support made the difference. He was a
man, certainly, with a favour owed him.

  Recent news articles on Richland dealt with his illness and dramatic refusal to be treated. According to some of the more reputable reviewers of his new book, Richland had returned to the message of his earliest ministry, proclaiming in effect that doctors weren't needed if one had faith. There was concern about the effects of such simplistic dogma, but on the whole the media treated Richland with surprising kindness, the result no doubt of the preacher's imminent demise.

  When he turned to Jonas Starr, Nicole North's uncle, Malloy found a different kind of man. The founder of the NorthStarr Institute had spent his life promoting archaeological digs that, according to the institute's mission statement, 'verified Biblical history'. Interestingly enough, a long time member of the board of directors for the NorthStarr Institute was none other than J. W. Richland. Jonas Starr had been involved in Richland's comeback.

  In fact it was Starr's influence with Nick North that got Richland's ministry on cable TV in the first place. Until his death Nicholas North had been an enthusiastic supporter of both men and the causes they represented. And Nicole North's father had the money to pursue any enthusiasm he fancied. Nick North came from old Texas money, meaning cattle and oil. By the mid-1980s, he had diversified into several industries and was rubbing shoulders with the likes of the Hunt brothers and Ross Perot. Jonas Starr, on the other hand, had been born poor. Possessing an amazing if undisciplined intellect and a faith in God that was so intense he even impressed his fellow Texans, Starr realized early in his life that he wanted to serve God. Having neither the voice nor looks for the pulpit, Starr discovered his true calling at the University of Texas: archaeology.

  From the age of twenty onwards, Jonas Starr travelled the Middle East in search of proof that everything in the Bible was literally true. Nick North's sister, then a graduate student in archaeology at the University of Texas in Austin, was on one of Starr's earliest expeditions. Jonas Starr was clever enough to court her.

  The marriage produced a great deal of success, with every significant discovery wildly publicized. Jonas Starr's greatest moment came in the mid-1980s, when he uncovered a six-thousand-year-old fishing boat in the mountains of eastern Turkey. Calling it Noah's Ark, Starr and his wife built a museum in Fort Worth to house their treasure.

  Those members of the media sympathetic to the cause stressed the fact that Starr's boat was found where no body of water was known to exist, proof, it seemed, that a flood had carried it there. Radiocarbon dating supported the thesis as well, placing it almost exactly in the time of the biblical Noah. J. W. Richland, who apparently spent a great deal of television time reporting on the 'amazing discovery of Dr Jonas Starr', announced to his viewers that science had finally confirmed what the faithful had always known: the Bible was true not only in matters of the spirit but in matters of history and evolution as well!

  Naturally the secular world struck back. Jonas Starr had found the hull of a boat in a region that had once been part of the sea. Moreover, the discovery of a boat in no way made it Noah's mythical craft. As one humanist put it, the only thing less trustworthy than the Bible's version of history was Jonas Starr's. Undaunted by his critics, Starr continued his life work, careful to stay close to the money of his brother-in-law and the publicity it could engender.

  Following the death of his wife Jonas Starr's career seemed to stall. In the mid-1990s, at an exploratory dig not far from the ancient site of Antioch, Starr unearthed a Roman era drinking cup that he claimed was the legendary Holy Chalice, the cup Jesus had passed among his disciples on the night of his arrest. The media's initial response to the discovery was both credulous and excited. All that changed after one of Starr's own team accused him of buying the cup from Bedouin looters.

  For a time Starr's friends stood by him, J. W. Richland in the forefront. Richland stressed the importance of the cumulative work of Jonas Starr. He said the people who attacked Jonas Starr were motivated by the fear that the Bible was ultimately right. Richland and others pilloried the graduate student who reported Starr's fraud, but the accusation did not go away. In fact other stories began leaking out. These suggested that in his desperate attempt to match the glorious finds of his youth Starr was always on the lookout for black-market treasures he would claim to have found himself.

  After the Holy Chalice debacle, which even his friends later admitted harmed Starr's reputation, there were increasing accusations of fraud and a few notorious failures, the most prominent being a search in eastern Ethiopia for the lost treasure of Solomon. Heartily promoted before the expedition, the failure to find anything besides starving Ethiopians was advertised widely by a media that no longer took Jonas Starr seriously. In the late 1990s, after a series of disputes with the Israeli government, the Antiquities Authority of Israel refused to allow Starr permits to dig. There was even talk of keeping him out of the country altogether.

  Whether by coincidence or as a result of the ban, the following year Jonas Starr resigned the directorship of his institute in favour of his niece, Nick North's daughter, Nicole. When Dr Nicole North, then twenty- seven, took control of the institute, people who bothered to comment suggested that the institute would inevitably fold. What they failed to appreciate was the unlimited funding North could make available to her institute.

  Just how important that was became clear the following year when Nick North passed away. His will provided the institute with a seventy-five million dollar endowment. Moreover, as sole heir to her father's vast fortune, Nicole got the rest, a tidy seven hundred million in cash and liquid assets, as well as control of her father's business interests, worth roughly three billion dollars. Real estate and inventory valued at close to a billion dollars more put the inheritance at around five billion dollars: real money, as they say in Texas. That is assuming one could trust the accountants.

  The last anyone had heard of Jonas Starr was the publication of his autobiography. He wrote only briefly about the Holy Chalice of Antioch, denying the charge of fraud, yet offering nothing beyond his good name as evidence of its legitimacy. Probably the only matters of interest came from Starr's recounting his earliest adventures. While these occasionally diminished the importance of his wife's participation, at least one sympathetic reviewer had referred to the couple as Mr and Mrs Indiana Jones.

  Archaeological scholars who bothered to comment on the book asserted that there was nothing of value in the lifework of Jonas Starr. One academic journal called his autobiography a vanity publication. Another quoted a renowned French antiquarian who was even less kind. He called Jonas Starr 'a fraud, a liar, and a thief.'

  At that point in his research Malloy was forced to shut down his computer. His plane would be landing in Zürich shortly.

  Zürich, Switzerland

  October 7, 2006.

  Malloy held up a Swiss passport as he walked past the immigrations officer. He collected a single bag at the luggage carousel, passed through customs without incident, and ten minutes later boarded a train for Zürich's main station.

  At the Gottard Hotel on the Bahnhofstrasse he spoke Swiss German and registered under one of the four names he had used regularly over the years, part of the agency-issued identities that stayed with an operative even after retirement, the assumption being old warhorses still had their uses. It was not usual procedure for an operative to try to pass as a native. Accents being what they are, it was probably the easiest method of drawing attention to one's cover, but Malloy felt comfortable with his Swiss German.

  As opposed to High German, Swiss German is a language few foreigners bother to learn and almost none master. Having no written form, it can really only be acquired if one has an extraordinary talent for language or has grown up in Switzerland. Malloy boasted both talent and experience, having learned it in the streets of Zürich during the seven years his father worked at the American Consulate, then stationed in Zürich. Both a diplomat with the Consulate and intelligence officer for Langley, his father had spoken fluent High
German, the literary language of the Swiss. His mother's second language was French, which she loved as some people love chocolate. Swiss German, sometimes called Farmer German, was his alone. Malloy's friendships had required it, and at seven one adjusts to necessity no matter its face.

  It was this peculiar skill, the ability to speak as a native, that Malloy firmly believed had inspired Jane Harrison to offer him an assignment in Zürich at the beginning of his career. For the Swiss, the ability to speak Swiss German is tantamount to uttering a password or offering a secret handshake. Getting access to the private accounts of a Swiss bank had required all of that.

  Once in his room Malloy made a cursory examination for cameras and listening devices. Satisfied the room was clean he settled down for a long nap. He woke up just as the sun was setting. Still suffering from a night without sleep, he ordered a pot of coffee sent up and took a couple of hours to run through the remainder of the material Gil Fine had sent him. This mostly dealt with Nicole North and North Industries and turned out to be the least useful of the three folders. Even though Dr North was neither a public figure like J. W. Richland nor a publicity hound like her uncle Jonas Starr, Homeland had culled material from several hundred articles about her.

  Of course as a major shareholder in most of the media conglomerates producing the information, Nicole North came off unscathed. In fact Malloy could find almost nothing negative about the woman. She was the belle of Dallas society, a major source of charitable donations, a respected scholar, the dynamic director of NorthStarr Biblical Institute, the driving force for any number of church related issues, and of course the chairperson of the board of a Fortune 500 company. If her managerial skills were a matter of unrivalled excellence, the intimate looks into her life were even more celebratory and shallow. Her house was one of the treasures of Dallas. Her munificence was sometimes for the public good, sometimes just to help a stranger in need. All of it carefully nurtured PR. And not a breath of scandal.