Pressure (Book 1): Fall

by Thomson, Jeff

  His son, now a millionaire (in reality, if not with legal and taxable documentation), would love to rub some of that money into the Old Man’s face, but he wouldn’t. In fact, he had no intention of seeing that stingy fuck ever again.

  “See you tonight, Mrs. Delaney,” he said, closing her car door. He stood there as she drove off and exited the parking lot, then he turned and headed to his office. There was work to do. He had a Beacon of God to create.

  3

  Boise, Idaho

  Jericho Ministries sat within the Church of the Eternal Savior, in a building Thomas thought looked a bit like a Quonset hut from outer space. But it gave the right impression to the rubes who came in for the daily services, and it proved to be distinctive enough for the weekly television audience to recognize at a glance.

  Of course, he’d rather it wasn’t in Boise, Idaho, but beggars can’t be choosers, and he certainly had been begging when he set it up, six years ago. Money hadn’t been the issue, because the business of God was booming, thanks to the groundwork laid by the Christian Coalition and then nurtured by the rest of the religious right. And the War on Christmas had been a delightful cash cow, every time the fools from the propaganda arm of the Republican Party mentioned it. God Bless the twenty-four-hour news cycle. But the competition had most of the good locations already - or at least those with the proper zoning, combined with the necessary piety (and pliability) of both the state legislature and the local City Council. And so Boise it had been.

  Still, it could be worse, he thought, as he sat behind the gigantic oak desk in his office. He could be back in Indiana, with the Indianapolis warrant for the arrest of the man he used to be. David Sinfreidey (the actual name on his real Birth Certificate) had been another man, in another place, in another universe. He didn’t exist anymore. And thanks to the miracle of plastic surgery, neither did anyone who looked like him. But he hadn’t been able to change his fingerprints, so Indiana was out. Just as well; he’d never liked it there.

  He’d been a con man, once upon a time, running real estate and stock scams throughout the eastern half of the country, and business had been very good. But once any scam reached its end and he had the money safely deposited in his offshore account in the Caymans, there had always been the need to disappear and assume a new identity, find a new rube, and set up a new operation. And there had always been the possibility – however remote – that he might get caught.

  Televangelism, on the other hand, was proving to be the greatest con of all. And what’s more, he was good at it. The rubes willingly handed over fistfuls of money, they thanked him for it after he was done feeding them his latest line of bullshit, and the law left him alone. Hell, it was even tax-exempt. God Bless America.

  And so he walked away from Indiana. Okay, he’d slinked away in the middle of the night and gone straight to a plastic surgeon. Point is, he left that life behind him in the Hoosier State and made for himself an even better one there, in the Great Spud State of Idaho.

  And as for those three women in Indianapolis . . . ? Best not to think about them. They had all been too easy, too eager. In short, they had been sluts (Jezebels), while he had always been a man on a mission: to make an ungodly sum of money. And if he’d had to use certain chemical enhancements to get what he wanted, well, who were they compared to him? Of course, the trial of Bill Cosby tended to put a darker, more terrifying light on such activities, but in any case, it was all in the past. Chemical inducements were no longer necessary. Now he had the greatest drug of all: religious fervor.

  His mission, however... He’d always believed he had a purpose beyond the next con. Just what that purpose might be took him a while to figure out, but it hadn’t changed his feeling - his certainty - of destiny. And in the end, all it had taken was a bored Sunday morning during his post-facial reconstruction recovery.

  He’d been flipping through the channels, peering at the TV through the eye-holes of his bandaged face, when he happened upon the Right Reverend Theodore Upton, and his Good News Christian Ministry. The rotund reverend, his corpulent body resplendent in a white suit, had been so clearly full of shit, and yet so obviously successful in his ministrations, that the then David Sinfreidey - ever the opportunist - had gotten the idea for his next con like a bolt out of the blue (or, perhaps, a sign from God).

  The phone rang, and he picked it up. “Yes?” He said.

  “Reverend, this is Davis from Security.”

  “Yes?” He tried to picture the man’s face, but couldn’t. David Bourassa was his Head of Security, and so knew all the ins and outs of this latest (and greatest) scam, and as such, should have been the only one with enough juice to call him directly. This Davis character was an unknown, and unknowns bothered him. But, he supposed, even Bourassa couldn’t be everywhere at once.

  “There are two men here to see you.”

  “Yes?” He tried to mask his annoyance at the interruption, but couldn’t.

  “They’re from the FBI.”

  4

  Boise, Idaho

  The two agents ushered into his office looked nothing like either Mulder or Scully. For one thing, neither was a hot woman. In fact, they could have been twins, or at the very least, siblings. Both stood about six feet, with medium builds. Both sported regulation short and unflattering haircuts. Their faces were, for all intents and purposes, nondescript. Thomas had always heard that adjective, but had never seen it in action, until now. There wasn’t a single damned thing remarkable about their faces, at all. This lack of a look was further enhanced by their nearly-identical suits. The one on the right (Carter) wore grey with a maroon tie; the one on the left (Benson) wore charcoal with a black tie.

  They were ushered in by Davis, a slab of beef the size of both agents put together. Jericho still didn’t recognize him, but that hardly mattered. As soon as he talked to Bourassa, the idiot would be seeking employment elsewhere. Where was he? How could he let this happen? He looked at the agents, who were looking at him.

  Best to deal with that later.

  “How may I help the FBI?” he asked, as they sat in the chairs opposite him. Davis departed without a word.

  Carter spoke. He seemed to be the one in charge. “Recently, our Indianapolis field office arrested one Mr. Felix Kinkaid, on charges of forgery and blackmail.”

  The name drew instant recognition from Thomas’ brain (or, more to the point, David Sinfreidey’s brain). If they’ve got him, they could have everything. “What does that mean to me?” he asked aloud, his expression blank, his tone neutral, but his mind and pulse racing.

  Where the Hell was Bourassa?

  5

  Eat More Café

  Boise, Idaho

  David Bourassa, age 42, wearing black slacks, a button-down white shirt, opened at the collar with no tie, and a black sport coat, sat in a booth in a greasy spoon on the bad side of Boise. Not that any part of Boise was all that bad, compared to New York, or Los Angeles, or Chicago, but this was considered the wrong side of the tracks, and he needed the anonymity this place provided. It was daylight, and he didn’t like to do what needed doing in the daylight, but the greedy slimeball sitting across from him hadn’t given him much choice.

  Christian Kinkaid, son of the recently incarcerated Felix (Bourassa had known of the arrest, even if Jericho had not), looked every bit as shiftless and unkempt as his father had the last time they’d used him to forge their current identities. His hair was greasy. He wore jeans and a tee-shirt, with holes and obvious stains, under an actual by-God letterman’s jacket. Bourassa knew for a fact this guy was at least in his late-twenties. What does he think? That he’s still in high school?

  The punk fidgeted over his pancakes, turning them into a goo of dough and syrup. Bourassa had only coffee.

  “A hundred thousand,” the weasel said in a low voice. “That’s what I want. That will buy my silence.”

  “You said that over the phone,” Bourassa hissed. “Very careless. Far more foolish than your father
would have been.”

  “Yeah, well, he just got arrested, and I’m still walking free,” the punk replied. “So who’s the fool?”

  The fruit didn’t fall far from the tree, Bourassa thought. Felix was a jackass. Always had been. But he’d been a cunning jackass, which - in retrospect - made him dangerous, and this half-assed attempt at extortion, inevitable. His idiot son, however, didn’t even qualify as high up the evolutionary food chain as the pancakes he was mauling. Removing him as a problem would almost be a pleasure. Might even be a public service.

  “I’ll give you what you want, but not here and not now,” Bourassa said.

  “When?”

  “Tonight. I’m not doing it in public, or anywhere even loosely connected to the Church.”

  “Not sure I trust you,” the younger Kinkaid said.

  “You don’t have a choice,” Bourassa replied. “Not if you want the money.”

  Kinkaid pondered this a moment, then said: “My father warned me about you.”

  I’ll just bet he did, Bourassa thought, remembering the last encounter with the forger. Felix Kinkaid had agreed on a price for their new identities. It had been expensive, but the IDs were damned-near impossible to distinguish from the real thing, so it was worth it. But when they’d come to pick up the new creds, the price had suddenly doubled.

  Bourassa’s threat of broken bones soon returned it to the original quote. He had that effect on people.

  “Your father shouldn’t have changed the price on us,” Bourassa, whose original name had been Bernard Baker, before the latest change, said. Then he leaned in close. “Take that as an object lesson. We have agreed on a price. I will pay that price, and not one penny more. You will deliver the evidence - all the evidence. And then you will go away. Forever. This ends here.”

  “Of course. Of course,” Kinkaid replied, leaning back. “My father got caught. I didn’t. I just want enough to get away.”

  Bourassa nodded, sipped the last of his coffee, then stood up. He knew the punk was lying. He also knew it didn’t matter.

  He reached into his left front pocket, withdrew a few bucks, then dropped them on the table as a tip. “You can pay for breakfast,” he said. “I’ll call later with the location.” Then he bent down next to the weasel’s ear. “Hold out on me, fail to bring all the evidence, or ever contact me again, and I’ll gut you like a fish.” And then he left.

  The moron would call, and Bourassa would give the punk a time and place. It would be somewhere dark and quiet. He would bring a valise, to make everything look as it should be.

  He would also bring his knives. And a shovel.

  6

  Boise, Idaho

  “Do you know the man?” Agent Carter asked.

  “Never heard of him,” Jericho replied, keeping his voice even. “Should I have?”

  “Apparently, he knew you,” Carter answered, clearly watching and hoping for a reaction.

  Thomas wanted to scream, to jump up from his chair and run like Hell, but he restrained the temptation and forced the bland facade to remain. If they had everything, they’d have come in here with a team and a warrant, so this is just a fishing expedition. “Oh?” was all he said.

  “We found your name in some documents,” the agent said, still giving nothing away, still stupidly waiting for Thomas to react. Hell would freeze over first.

  “Are you certain it was me? There must be dozens of Thomas Jerichos in the country. Hundreds, maybe thousands. What brings you to my door?”

  “Has he contacted you recently?” Agent Carter asked, without answering the question. “He or his son?”

  His son? That fucking whelp was a poster child for abortion. If he was still wandering loose . . . Enough! “Look, Agent - what was your name?” He knew perfectly well what the guy’s name was, but the pencil-necked bureaucrat had been playing this silly game long enough.

  “Carter.”

  “Fine, Agent Carter,” he began. “You are wasting my time, and yours. And I’ve got a rather full schedule this afternoon.” A lie. He didn’t actually have much of anything to do until about an hour before the eight o’clock radio broadcast. “So let’s cut to the chase, shall we? I’ve already told you I don’t know the man. Or his...son, did you say?”

  Both agents shifted in their seats, the disappointment evident on their faces. He wasn’t going to spontaneously confess, and without that, they had nothing.

  “As I said, sir,” Agent Carter finally began, “we arrested the man for forgery and blackmail. The documents we found were among others concerning people whom we know he blackmailed. Can you explain that?”

  That fucking Kinkaid. That fucking worm. I’ll have Bourassa tear his fucking lungs out through his ass. “No,” he replied aloud. “I cannot.” He was about to suggest they get the Hell out of his office and quit wasting his time, when the floor started to buck and lurch.

  7

  The Planet Earth

  Americans have always liked to compare things to other things, and they liked it best when their things were the biggest in the world. They wanted the bragging rights.

  Prior to Yellowstone, the biggest American volcanic thing had been Mount St. Helens. The 1980 eruption killed fifty-seven people and thousands of animals, caused almost three billion dollars in damage, dumped somewhere around two-thirds of a cubic mile of ash and rock and pumice into the air and onto the ground, and made for some really cool video tape that was shown time and time again, pretty much whenever an American TV special discussed any kind of natural disaster. But as for bragging rights, they were barely even playing the same sport, let alone being in the same ball park.

  Mount Pinatubo (1991), in the Philippines, had been ten times bigger, with a whopping five cubic miles of material ejected, which circled the globe and caused worldwide temperatures to drop a full degree for five years. One degree doesn’t sound like much, but it was believed to have contributed to the damage caused by hurricanes Andrew (Florida) and Iniki (the Hawaiian island of Kauai).

  In 1815, the Indonesian volcano, Mount Tambora, reduced the size of the mountain by 4000 feet, dumped 150 million tons of volcanic debris into the air and caused 1816, the so-called year without a summer, where New York State experienced blizzards in the middle of June. It effectively eliminated the entire 1816 growing season, and was the last time Western Europe ever experienced widespread famine that hadn’t been caused by war.

  And then there was Krakatau. This contest entry from Indonesia (the Asians absolutely kicked America’s butt when it came to volcanoes) blew its stack in 1883, was seventeen times the size of Mount St. Helens, and erupted somewhere around ten cubic miles of ash and debris into the atmosphere. It generated the loudest sound in recorded history, and was heard all the way in Perth, Australia, a thousand miles distant. Over thirty-six thousand people were killed, including every single one of the three thousand inhabitants of Sebesi, an island a little over three miles away. Worldwide, it affected the weather for five years. The famous 1893 Edvard Munch painting, “The Scream,” with the weird shaped guy screaming on the bridge in front of a multicolored sky, painted ten years later, was supposed to be an accurate depiction of the way the sky looked over Norway - on the other side of the planet - as a result of Krakatau.

  And the last so-called Super Eruption, a term coined by the BBC when they created the made-for-TV movie called Supervolcano, a fictional account of what Yellowstone might be like, was also an Indonesian competitor. Toba erupted seventy-four thousand years ago, give or take, and was believed by some to have caused an evolutionary bottleneck. Something drastic happened in human history, reducing the amount of genetic variation in the human species, somewhere around seventy-four thousand years ago. It is possible, they said, that all of modern humanity were the direct decedents of the Toba survivors.

  Then there was Yellowstone . . .

  8

  Volcano Observatory

  Yellowstone National Park

  Maggie stood in the shelter of
the cafeteria building with Suzie, whose last name, she finally discovered, was Babbett. They were technically out of the thirty-five mile an hour winds that raced off the snow-capped mountain tops to the west, but it was only a technicality - just as the park was technically open, but the only way to get around was by snowmobile, so there were hardly any visitors. This was a very good thing.

  Dr. Morgenstern had upped the alert level to yellow, as a result of the latest, profoundly disturbing data coming out of Salt Lake. This meant the park was to be closed this afternoon. It was being called a “precautionary measure,” in the media, but people were worried. The Public Affairs Office had been inundated by a blitzkrieg of media requests for “further information.” Maggie knew (as did anyone with eyes, ears, and a brain in the early part of the Twenty-First Century) that what they really wanted was juicy details, like, say, that the world was about to end.

  “So what do you think, Maggie?” Suzie asked, cocooning herself as deep as she could into her pale blue parka and doing a shuffling dance to keep her boot-clad feet warm.

  They were standing outside in this absurd weather, because there was hardly anyplace inside where they weren’t in somebody else’s way. The cafeteria itself was closed, or they’d be in there, and they’d both been stuck inside their cramped quarters until neither of them could take it anymore, and so outside they’d come, and were now trying to stay warm in the freezing, sulphur-smelling air of Yellowstone National Park.

  “I don’t know what to think,” Maggie confessed. “But I know Professor Galotta is spooked. Or at least he was. Haven’t seen him since the meeting.”

  “I know!” Suzie agreed. “You know Dr. Higgenblat, the woman who looks like she’s part of the German swim team?” Maggie nodded. “I overheard her telling Shintake that the acid level in Yellowstone Lake is higher than she’s ever seen it. And she’s been here since Bill Clinton was staining Monica’s dress.”