“God wants all of you to line up like sitting ducks?”
“We must not get bold with the Lord. We must trust Him and not demand that He save us. His purpose is only that Rona Leigh be saved, and He accomplished this before the law arrived.
“I have learned that no matter how difficult your situation is, there is an answer and it will be revealed. Patience and prayer will always bring the answer.”
He said, “You must sleep. In the morning, you can advise me as to how I should deal with the people out there.”
“You’re seeing to it that she has time to get as far away as possible, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“What did she give me?”
“You can ask Sister Emily in the morning, once you are both rested. But feel assured that it was at the directive of our Blessed Father.”
I couldn’t help myself. I fell asleep again.
* * *
At dawn, the bustle woke me up. I watched the women dress and then they left. Emily was not in the bed. I drank the glass of juice by my bed.
I washed my face and put on my jumpsuit from the feed store. A new guard was outside the door; he helped me maneuver the stairs. The old one was probably feeling the effects of his own piece of fudge.
I was taken to Tiner’s office. The first thing Tiner said to me, in a voice high with joy, was, “We have word of the doings of the Lord.”
I waited.
“Yesterday, I gave Vernon permission to find and protect his wife while she goes about Her Father’s business, the work of saving souls. Vernon’s own work has been started. The bar in Houston that Gary Scott owns burned to the ground in the early morning hours. Vernon has seen to scaring off the man who so wants God’s Child dead.”
“Vernon got himself to Houston and burned down Gary’s bar?”
“Apparently.”
“No, he didn’t. Did Rona Leigh have any money?”
“No. God is all she needs.”
“God? If she didn’t have money, she acquired it. Rona Leigh used the only way she’s ever known to acquire money. Then she got herself to Houston. Where’s Gary Scott?”
He blinked a few times. “The authorities are looking for him.”
“They’ll find him when they sift through the ashes.”
I went to the window. Three cherry pickers were in place, two buckets each. There was a sharpshooter in each of the six buckets. The cherry pickers had the names of the local utility company stenciled on their doors, and the agents were dressed like linesmen. I planted myself at the window long enough to be sure they knew I was definitely in the mission.
I turned to Tiner. “You can’t let all these people die. You made a mistake. You were misguided. You can beg God’s forgiveness. But there is a legal price to pay, and now you have to face that.”
He smiled. He said, “We must see that the Sister of Christ has all the time God chooses to make available to Her through us. We will hold the ramparts as long as we can with the same fortitude Vernon showed when he distracted the enemy.”
I said, “I don’t feel well. I need Sister Emily.”
He became concerned.
“You must return to the women’s quarters and lie down. I will send her to you.”
The guard led me back. I wondered why the ATF hadn’t gone with the helicopters. To avoid attention, obviously. To keep the media at bay as long as they could.
I smelled clean morning air. No gas yet.
Sister Emily sat with several women sitting by a window with bowls in front of them. Oatmeal. I pulled up a chair.
She said to me, “I’m sorry you’re still feeling ill. If you feel you need something to calm your nerves, we’ll get it for you.”
“I think I pretty much need some of your breakfast.”
She smiled. “Yes. You’re hungry. I certainly was.”
She asked another woman to fetch me a bowl of oatmeal.
I said, “Who is the chemist?”
Her voice was full of pride. “Brother George.”
“He’s here?”
“Of course he’s here.”
“How did he do it?”
All the bonnets turned to me and then away.
Emily said, “The Lord inspired our brother to devise what was necessary. He records everything. I help him. If you are interested, he will show you his records.”
There is no fortifier like oatmeal. While I polished it off, I said, “His records are about to be blown to smithereens if we all don’t put our hands in the air and walk out of this building.”
One bonneted head came up. “As long as we hold out, we keep the Christ Child alive. She is out in the world carrying forth Her Father’s will, and She’ll continue to do so if we remain valiant.”
“How are you valiant if you’re burned alive?”
“Elder Raymond says that they will not do that to us, not after the debacles that have come before.”
Another sister leaned toward me. “And Elder Raymond has also informed us that Vernon in his duty as husband has destroyed Gary Scott’s livelihood last night. As a warning. To stay away from the Christ Child when She comes to show Herself.”
I asked Emily why Rona Leigh had drugged us and left against Elder Raymond’s judgment.
She said, “The will of the Lord is to be trusted, not questioned.”
A shock is always a good move. I said, “I’m pretty sure that Rona Leigh set Gary Scott’s bar on fire. She did that right after she killed him. They just haven’t found his remains yet.”
All the bonnets were up.
I kept on chatting. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she goes after a few other people as well. Witnesses at her trial, maybe. The jurors. Her mother. She is not out there saving souls, she is exacting revenge.”
At first, there was nothing from them, no reaction at all. Then one said, “You blaspheme. The tapes made of the Daughter of God are saving a thousand souls a minute. Her presence on earth, once She reveals herself, will save nations.” She stood up. “Come, sisters, it is time for prayer.”
All of them but Emily went downstairs to pray. Just as the strains of the first chants and rantings drifted up to us, the sound of a bullhorn drowned it out. The first rule of engagement was upon them. The warning.
In quiet but stern tones, the Believers were advised to come out unarmed with their hands over their heads. The voice said the federal government had a warrant for the arrest of Rona Leigh Glueck.
The voice announced that they had another federal warrant for the arrest of Raymond Tiner, suspected of aiding and abetting the escape from prison by Rona Leigh Glueck.
Then the state of Texas came on. They had warrants for the arrests of Vernon Lacker and Harley Shank. Everyone else in the mission was advised to surrender, as they were all under suspicion.
Emily’s eyes darted from mine to the window. She got up and looked out.
The Rangers handed the bullhorn back to the feds. The voice said that the agent Penelope Rice was to be released immediately.
Immediately meant they would give the Believers ten minutes at the most. Then they’d do whatever they thought was best to save me. And after that …
I said, “Sister Emily, they’ll throw tear gas very shortly.”
The praying from downstairs became a loud jangling of ecstatic voices.
Emily found that more of a distraction than my words. She said, “I must join in the beseeching for the safety of the Daughter of Christ.” She made her way to the stairs and I followed, both of us holding the walls for support. Downstairs, Emily wobbled into the snaking spiral.
The Believers snuck glances at me from the corners of their eyes. They were faking ecstasy, unable to concentrate. Elder Raymond stopped the service. They were relieved and they were scared, too. He told the men to set up the dining benches. They did and he gathered his followers before him, men on the right, women on the left.
He stood, arms raised. “The Lord has commanded Vernon to turn himself in to the p
olice. He is in custody for the destruction of Gary Scott’s bar. Therefore God alone now commands His Daughter’s duties. He has revealed to me that She is dying. She is in Gethsemane. The Child does not have long. But we are not meant to die here, in a blaze of gunfire. We are not a cult. We are a revival. As disciples of the Daughter of God, the Sister of Jesus, we are soldiers of Christ. I am not afraid to be a leader to Her blessed disciples from the inside of a prison. A prison is where our Divine One served God for seventeen years. I intend to serve Him there for as long as that. Serve Him until I die. Join me and we will begin a life of continuous prayer.
“You are free to leave. All of you. Or you can stay and pray with me until they come and arrest us.”
No one moved.
Tears came to Tiner’s eyes. He said, “Now we must stand up and pray from the depth of our souls. We must make ourselves the embodiment of prayer. The power of prayer has sustained our great effort thus far. It is all we have left now to sustain Christ’s Sister in Her journey into darkness.”
The benches were put back, weapons were leaned against the wall. The spiral formed and in a few seconds took on a life of its own. The Believers became one thing, a growling animal, a hissing snake, Elder Raymond in the center of the undulating coil. And that mass of what was now true ecstasy contained one genius of a chemist.
I walked past them, past the line of guns and out the mission door into the bright yard. My hands were as high as I could reach. I felt the snipers concentrating on me, the hum of the cherry pickers moving into position.
I reached the gate. As deliberately as I could, trying not to tremble, I brought my right hand down and pressed the switch in the wall. The gate opened.
A swarm of bodies descended on me, lifted me off my feet, and carried me down the road to the lead van, about as big as the late Gary Scott’s RV. I was hustled inside. It was filled with tracking devices and radar equipment.
They tossed me into the sectioned-off back of the van with two female Texas Rangers, who scanned me with sonar and then yanked off my clothes just to make sure there were no bombs strapped to my body. They also made sure there were none hidden in any body cavity. I was not surprised.
They gave me green scrubs to put on and then took me out and a technician did a full-body X ray. Then I was cuffed.
During the entire procedure, no one responded to the string of commands I hollered at them. I screamed that I wanted Scraggs, I wanted the chief FBI agent, and I wanted Joe Barnow. I wanted whoever was in charge.
And once the people I was calling for knew I wouldn’t detonate, there they were, three across in front of me. Scraggs was the loudest, shaking a big paper in my face. I didn’t understand him at first. He kept saying something about pinpoints. Finally, I could make it out: “Pinpoint her. Pinpoint her. Tell us exactly where they’ve got her.” The paper was the architect’s plan.
Joe stood over me, but he didn’t know what to do in the face of Scraggs’s incessant shouting. So he just put his face down to mine. “Just answer him, Poppy. Pinpoint her.”
Everything began to spin. I knew I had to shout louder than Scraggs. I did. “She’s not in there. She’s been outside for forty-eight hours.”
Scraggs said, “Bullshit. We’re goin’ in.” His finger pointed into my face. “And somebody arrest her, goddamn it.”
One of the women who searched me told me I was under arrest and while she was reading me Miranda the van came alive. Everyone was suiting up, grabbing canisters, masks. Not Joe. He squatted down. “She couldn’t have gotten out.”
“Night before last. Just before you got here.”
I looked toward Scraggs. “Max.”
He looked down at me.
“I’m telling you the truth. She’s out. She got herself to Houston, where she killed Gary Scott.”
They all gaped at me, including Scraggs. He said, “Who says he’s dead? Every police officer in Texas is looking for Gary Scott.”
“Then I hope they’re using sifters. He’s mixed in with the ashes of his bar.”
Scraggs just shut his eyes. He believed me.
“Max, the people inside the mission are praying, if you’re wondering what that racket is. They pray real funny. They pray till they drop and before they drop they hurl themselves around like a gang of lunatics. Give them fifteen more minutes, get on your bullhorn, and tell them to come out. They won’t be able to come out, though, because they’ll be collapsed on the floor. So you just go in, pick them up, and carry them out.
“Don’t kill the people in there, they’re misfits. That’s all they are. They thought they were saving the life of Christ’s sister. They think that now. They will not fight you. But there’s a man there whose name is George, a chemist, that’s all I know, and he’ll tell us how he saved Rona Leigh from execution. You can’t kill him; we need him.
“I’m sorry, Max. She’s not there. She did it again. She’s gone. She slipped right through my fingers the same way she slipped through yours.”
Scraggs, very softly, said, “Fuck me.”
Then Joe said, “And while you’re at it, Scraggs, unarrest this agent, or you’ll look like the biggest idiot in Texas since”—he thought—“since the Dallas chief of police let his friend Jack Ruby into the station so he could eyeball Lee Harvey Oswald.”
Joe said to me, “You look like hell warmed over. You’d look like hell warmed over even without the black eye. What happened?”
“She hit me. She poisoned me. She’d have killed me except that those people in there saved me.”
16
A week later, my director held a meeting at the crime lab. Scraggs was there representing the interests of the state of Texas. Our chemist held us all rapt.
She said, “The New Shaker chemist, George Billings, came from a stern Pentecostal family and grew up praying. Praying to the exclusion of everything except eating, sleeping, and studying. Then he came to spend more time studying than praying. He was a genius. He won scholarships to great schools here and abroad. He studied, specifically, violently aggressive criminals and produced a Ph.D. thesis that is, to this day, held in the highest esteem.
“Dr. Billings was gay. When he came out of the closet as a young man, his family held a funeral for him. His empty coffin is buried in a cemetery in Oklahoma. Poppy Rice has characterized the New Believers as misfits. Sociologically, misfits are always in search of a family. Raymond Tiner only asked George Billings that he be celibate. The sexual preferences of the New Believers didn’t matter to him. Only their sacrifice to God.
“George Billings worked independently—free agent—for years before he joined the society. He synthesized chemicals for other biochemists. He flourished financially by simplifying other people’s jobs.” She glanced up from her papers. “Now you won’t want to hear this part…”
My director whispered to me, “I haven’t wanted to hear any of it.”
“… but his chief client for many years was the FBI crime lab. Of course, Poppy Rice came aboard, and one of the first things she did was to see that this lab accomplished its work in-house.”
She delved into her papers. “Billings’s premise was that the constitution of the human body contains elements and receptors that can elicit violent behavior. He became a student again. He read, he studied. He learned that violently aggressive people—high-rate offenders, killers—are more likely than nonoffenders to have neuro-biological anomalies. Their behavior centers on uncontrollable impulse; we have all observed that. Billings’s findings showed that violent criminals have slower heart rates and far lower levels than nonoffenders of specific neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, maybe epinephrine, others.… You get the idea.”
Lots of sidelong glances.
“In addition, he came to believe—and this is supported—that violent offenders also have a complexity in their metabolic abilities that is not understood. There are sociopaths who have difficulty or are completely unable to absorb minerals, specifically manganese and possibly
selenium, zinc, cobalt.… Which brings us to potassium. It is the most common mineral of all and can be transfigured into a huge number of compounds and derivatives, including potassium chloride, an extraordinarily deadly substance.
“Mineral absorption requires carrier proteins to move the minerals through the intestinal membranes. Billings was on his way to proving that violent offenders had abnormally low levels of these carrier proteins. Tiner extrapolated and concluded that the violent constitution of Rona Leigh Glueck was created specifically by God for his own purposes. And so it was left to their chemist to enable that purpose.
“Rona Leigh was treated in such a way as to temporarily rid her body of carrier proteins to prevent a fatal absorption of potassium chloride, and at the same her heart was chemically trained with L-dopa to beat very slowly without her suffering any lack of oxygen to her brain. In the death chamber, her heart almost stopped, but it did not stop completely.
“She did not absorb enough potassium chloride to kill her, though it was certainly enough to kill a human being with a normal metabolic constitution. And the process to rid her body of what she did absorb was begun the minute she was put into the bogus ambulance. Actually, Billings made clear to Tiner that the time it would take to get Rona Leigh into the ambulance after she’d been injected might prevent them from saving her. But the risk they would incur in having Harley Shank, the guard, give her something in the death house—that was one of their scenarios—would be greater than the risk in not treating her at all during those minutes. Billings concluded that they would have to rely on prayer during that gap.”
She looked up from her papers again, smiled a little, and shrugged.
“As we know, she was restored to health.” Our chemist paused and then said, “Brilliant.”
But why wouldn’t God’s plan for his daughter be anything but brilliant?
She picked up the papers from the podium and patted them together in a neat pile. Then she said, “Finally, I want to conclude by saying that in the nineteenth century criminology was a branch of medicine. Scholars were on the verge of accepting biological explanations for crime. But that study was abandoned when Hitler showed us that racism alone can lead average people to unequivocal violence.
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