“Smart boy,” Tertullian said, with a condescending slap on Branson’s smooth face.
* * *
Pacific Coast of Mexico . . .
Through the partially open bedroom door, Gilberto Inez watched the sleeping woman, with her long, dark hair fanned over her forehead and eyes. For the better part of three days, Consuela Santos had worked extremely hard in the house and yard, completing the work of three men. She was taking a well-deserved afternoon siesta now, at the insistence of the Inez brothers. She stirred, turned the other way.
From outside, Gilberto heard hammering, as his younger brother José repaired a window shutter. It was almost 4:00 in the afternoon, and their parents were due at any moment. Earlier in the day, Gilberto had even painted some of the stucco and trim where it had weathered. All was in readiness now for the impending arrival of their parents, except for the matter of the young woman and her tiny daughter, who had been living in the house without permission.
Gilberto held little Marta on his lap, keeping in place a glass baby bottle he’d purchased himself. The child was fussing with the rubber nipple, but sucking occasionally and swallowing formula.
The hammering stopped, and he heard the familiar, smooth pitch of a car engine. He’d know that Alfa Romeo sound anywhere. His parents had driven the mountain roads from Mexico City. He considered rising, but didn’t want to disturb the baby, who was finally settling down. Her eyelids were heavy as she slipped into peaceful slumber. Her lips quivered a little, and white formula ran out of one corner of her mouth. Gently, Gilberto used a hand towel to wipe her chin.
The front door of the house burst open, and a grinning José entered, carrying expensive leather luggage. Their mother and father were right behind. Tall and lean, Arsinio Inez had a silvery mustache, heavy black eyebrows, and a square face with a dimpled chin. He carried himself in the dignified manner of a business owner, the operator of a successful export company in Mexico City. His blonde wife Raffaela, nearly his height, was quite a bit heavier and looked older (though they were the same age), with deep creases around her mouth and eyes. A tenured professor at one of the most prestigious medical schools in the country, she carried a sheathe of medical journals. She was constantly reading, keeping up with the latest developments.
“House looks fabulous, boys,” Arsinio boomed. “How’d you—” Suddenly he stopped in his tracks, mouth agape, as he noticed the baby in Gilberto’s arms.
Marta screamed and wrenched.
“You woke her up,” Gilberto complained, trying to get her to accept the nipple again. Then, realizing what his parents must be thinking, he pointed toward the bedroom door and said, “The mother’s asleep in there. She’s real tired. Uh, it’s a long story, Father. And this is not your surprise granddaughter, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“They were here when we arrived,” José added, as he dropped the luggage onto the floor with a thump. He went on to tell what he and his brother knew about Consuela and her baby.
Raffaela took the unhappy child from Gilberto and cradled her in her arms, speaking soothingly to her.
Marta stopped crying, and with alert brown eyes she looked up at the large woman. And began to babble, making a series of fragmented word-sounds.
“She does that all the time,” Gilberto said. “I think she’s trying to talk.”
Looking to his left, he saw Consuela standing in the bedroom doorway, looking disheveled in a striped blue and white blouse and dark skirt he’d purchased for her. Nervously, she tucked in her blouse and folded her arms across her chest, never taking her eyes off her daughter.
“Unusual child,” Raffaela said. “It’s almost like she’s speaking to me, though I don’t understand a word she’s saying. Of course children this age aren’t able to talk yet.” Seeing Consuela, Raffaela took the baby to her and in a kindly voice asked, “Are you feeling better now?”
The peasant woman nodded. Her expression was grateful as she accepted her daughter, but her eyes were filled with concern. She listened and nodded politely as José made the introductions. Then she said, “I have been staying here without your permission or knowledge, and I am deeply sorry for that, but I was desperate and needed someplace where I could take care of little Marta. I kept detailed records of the food we ate, and all of it will be repaid.”
“She doesn’t actually owe us anything,” Gilberto said. “You should see all the things she fixed and cleaned around here. José and I hardly had to do anything.”
With cautious admiration, Arsinio and his wife looked around, nodding their heads.
“Your child makes such unusual sounds,” Raffaela said. “In my graduate studies I did some research on the communication of babies, but I don’t think I ever heard anything like that.” Studying the worried expression on the uneducated Méxicana’s face, she added quickly, “I am a professor, but a doctor by training.”
Looking alarmed, Consuela said, “I am so sorry to have troubled you. I will pack my things and leave immediately.”
Raffaela approached her, but the young woman, obviously terrified, backed up against the wall, clutching her child tightly to her breast. “Please don’t hurt my baby,” she pleaded.
“We would never do that.” Raffaela placed an arm on Consuela’s shoulder, in an effort to calm her, but the woman was shaking and shivering. “Why are you so afraid?”
“You are a doctor.”
Raffaela laughed, then caught herself. “A lot of people are afraid of doctors, but not terrified of them as you are. Why, child?”
Consuela just looked at her with saucer-eyes. She didn’t answer.
“I think she needs more rest,” Gilberto said. He pointed toward the bedroom. “Do you want Marta with you now?”
Consuela nodded, retreated into the bedroom with sputtering apologies, and closed the door. . . .
An hour later, frantic to find safety for her child—anyplace, she didn’t know where—Consuela climbed out the window into the garden and hurried down the road, with Marta bundled securely in a rebozo. Before leaving she’d listened at the bedroom door, and heard the Inez men in the living room, talking about her and the baby. They were asking questions, wondering why Consuela was so afraid of doctors. They didn’t act as if they knew the frightening secret about her child, but before long word would get out.
When Consuela neared the bottom of the driveway, however, she saw Raffaela striding toward her, carrying a basket of flowers. Apparently she’d been picking them along the road. Consuela tried to walk past her, said, “I’m sorry, Señora, but we are too much trouble for you here.”
The large woman set her basket down, smiled gently. “Nonsense. I was just picking these flowers for you, to cheer you up. We really want to help you—and your beautiful baby.”
Consuela started to cry, and through blurred vision she saw kindness in Raffaela’s face. “You won’t hurt us no matter what I tell you?” Consuela asked.
“Of course not.”
“I don’t know everything,” Consuela began. “But bad doctors are after Marta. You’re not one of them. I trust you.” She explained what little she knew, including the woman in white who attacked her in the church, firing a gun as Consuela fled with her child.
With a troubled but kindly expression, Raffaela put a pink wildflower in the young woman’s hair. “That looks very nice on you,” she said.
“You think so?” Consuela smiled, because she felt better than she had in a long time . . . and safer. These good people would help her and little Marta. She was sure of it.
Chapter 13
These she-apostles are old souls in new flesh. I am haunted by them.
—Dixie Lou Jackson, note in a computer file
Dressed in a camel-colored burnoose given to her by Malia, Dixie Lou stood on the crest of an immense sand dune. It occurred to her that she probably looked like any other Arab traveler from a distance. This was the hottest part of the afternoon, warmer than expected according to the village Arabs, and the No
rth African heat baked into her black skin. The dry heat felt good to her, and she imagined that her ancient grandmothers must have felt this as well, for they had once lived in this part of the world, and on much hotter days than this.
That morning Malia had also given her the hard copy of an encrypted e-mail, along with a microcylinder copy. The message had been sent through her because of the coded e-mails that Dixie Lou had dispatched to various UWW bases from the village. Dixie Lou didn’t like the fact that someone else was receiving her replies, and she would need to straighten that out right away.
The message, decoded by Deborah Marvel, had been bad news, but not a total surprise. The UWW base in Tunisia, which had been Dixie Lou’s destination when she escaped from Monte Konos—and which had not responded to her messages—had been destroyed in another BOI attack.
It meant that she and her companions were stranded in the desert for the time being, but she had just thought of a way to turn the situation to her advantage.
Following the publication of the Holy Women’s Bible over the Internet, she had become incredibly famous . . . literally, overnight. Suddenly the worldwide web was full of stories about her, most of them outright conjecture. No one seemed to know where she was, or much about her. Though public opinion tilted eighty percent against her she was pleased that millions of people at least knew who she was, and she felt certain that the tide would shift in her favor as more people actually read the new holy book.
In the bright sunlight it became clear to her what she needed to do next. When her brain should have been overheated, when she should have been crawling for the cool shelter of shade, she surprised herself by thinking very clearly now, and coming up with a marvelous new plan.
Her time in the desert would become the stuff of legend, she told herself; comparisons would be drawn between her and the forty days Jesus spent in the wilderness.
She just required a little more help from modern technology to get the message out. . . .
* * *
Unseen by his mother, Alex Jackson eluded the guards and followed her out on the hot sands. Concealing himself behind a dune where he could watch her, he tightened his fingers around a combat knife, stolen when one of the young guards had left a weapons cabinet unlocked on the VTOL plane.
It would be so easy to kill her. He imagined what it would be like to do that, and envisioned her bleeding to death on the sand. The thought of matricide disturbed him and gave him great pause, but he could not set it aside. She was as close to pure evil as he could imagine.
Sunlight glinted off the blade. His fingers tightened on the handle. He wanted to leap at her and stab her to death, but could not bring himself to do it.
* * *
That evening . . .
Dixie Lou heard a rush of wind-blasted sand ripple the fabric of the dining tent in which she stood. For the moment, the structure held together. She thought back to another windy night, long ago, when she’d gotten a small amount of vengeance against her drunken, incestuous father and uncle by smashing their expensive watches while they slept through a storm—watches they had stolen in a burglary.
In a blind rage, she’d also splashed acid on the clothing in their closets, ruining them. In all, it was not nearly equivalent to what they’d done to her, and they had no idea how lucky they were that she didn’t murder them in their sleep or disfigure them. The only reason she hadn’t done more was because she would have been the prime suspect; too many people knew how much she loathed them, and why. She had run away from home shortly afterward, taking all the money in her father’s wallet, and had never seen her family again.
While Dixie Lou was engrossed in these memories, Deborah Marvel entered the dining tent and re-secured the door flaps. In the light of the lanterns, her blonde hair was wild from the wind, and she said, “We haven’t had a good talk for awhile, not the way we used to.”
“I’m juggling a lot, too much to discuss. This isn’t a good time.”
“Maybe if you tried to share your troubles. I just thought you might like my advice, or—”
“Go!” Dixie Lou waved her hand dismissively.
“As you wish.” Deborah’s blue eyes were open wide in a combination of emotions. Fear, to be certain, but some anger and resentment as well, barely suppressed. She hurried away, leaving Dixie Lou to her own ruminations. Since the release of the Holy Women’s Bible, the Chairwoman was beginning to feel increasingly confident and untouchable. Already people were speaking of her in the same breath with Amy Angkor-Billings, and soon Amy would be no more than an afterthought, or a footnote. History would credit Dixie Lou Jackson with leading the women of the world out of the wilderness imposed upon them by men.
Half an hour later, Dixie Lou walked out on the moonlit desert. The cool air had grown suddenly still, and the silvery moon was like a cold, low-powered light bulb illuminating the sandscape, imparting a dim, pallid glow. She shivered.
Dixie Lou Jackson had a great deal of optimism about her future, but she still had numerous concerns as well, layers of worry that continued to weigh her down. She harbored secrets that could destroy her if the wrong people learned about them and used them against her.
In her most private thoughts she had worked out details of how to explain the killing of the Monte Konos guard, should Alex or Lori ever tell anyone about it. Dixie Lou would say she’d received a tip that the guard, Linda Cutler, was a BOI agent—and when she confronted her the response had been violent. Dixie Lou had been forced to kill her in self-defense, though she would have preferred to keep her alive to find out what she knew. Yes, she told herself, with a little effort she could make it all sound plausible, asserting that the two young witnesses had arrived too late to see the guard’s aggressive behavior.
Reaching a rock outcropping, Dixie Lou scrambled to a higher level, where she stood and gazed down on the flickering nighttime glow of the Arab village. She heard voices drifting in the still air, and then made out the hulking shapes of camels approaching the settlement, and the shouts of men. The caravan was returning.
From the cimmerian recesses of her mind, a troublesome matter bobbed to the surface: how to control the leakage of information about the fake twelfth she-apostle. She counted the number of people who actually knew the truth about the make-believe Martha of Galilee. All were council members, numbering ten because of the six left on Monte Konos to die. Of the remaining councilwomen, any one of them could have told someone else, despite the oaths of confidentiality taken when they accepted their positions.
The moon illuminated the desert, casting the craggy, lifelike shadows of rock escarpments across the dunes. A night wind picked up, and she shivered.
If too many people know a secret, she thought, it is no longer a secret.
She bent over and scooped up some sand, which she let drain from her hand slowly, like time falling in an hourglass. Seconds ticked by, and presently another perspective became apparent to her. The remaining council members were in on this with her, because they had authorized the creation of the last she-apostle, to complete the holy book before powerful men got wind of it and suppressed it. Dixie Lou had not made the decision alone.
She had been trying to convince herself that the missing helicopter must have crashed, killing everyone aboard including the pesky teenager, four of the she-apostles, and the councilwomen Wendy Zepeda and Fujiko Harui. In addition, it made sense to her that the seven other missing she-apostles must have simply walked off into the desert, where they had died as well.
Taking inventory of the events surrounding her, Dixie Lou placed herself in a historical context. In the early years following the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, devout Christians and Jews had been chased into hiding by Romans, Sadducee priests, and other enemies. In addition, Christians argued with each other—with those claiming to be orthodox accusing others (such as the Gnostics) of being heretics.
In order to protect their precious but forbidden manuscripts, the Gnostics and other beleaguered men and wome
n created copies of their sacred gospels and hid them wherever they could, often sealed in pottery jars. The gospels of Gnostics found near Nag Hammadi and at Alexandria—both in Egypt—were prime examples, and she knew there were others, a vast quantity of material that had been omitted from the Bible. Dixie Lou, like her council members, knew this very well. Amy Angkor-Billings had spoken often of the troubling history, referring to it as “herstory.”
It was like ancient times now. Dixie Lou and her council had taken the necessary steps in order to keep the eleven authentic she-apostle gospels from being stolen and relegated to the forgotten burial grounds of history. In the vast scheme of things a falsified twelfth gospel was inconsequential, and easily justified. She had been considering putting the remaining councilmembers to death for what they knew, but she leaned toward letting them rise or fall with her.
Developing important plans of action provided Dixie Lou with some measure of control over the intertwined problems that pummeled her. But an unresolved—and perhaps irresolvable—matter remained, potentially the biggest and most dangerous of all. This one was explosive.
The trouble was, she didn’t know exactly what it was herself, couldn’t get a handle on it, a clear view of it, other than a terrible sense of fear and foreboding, and a suspicion that it had something to do with Lori Vale and the strange vision the two of them had shared of a bright form hovering over Lori, and a baby crying.
Is Lori truly dead?
Doubts assailed her.
And something lurked in the most inaccessible archives of her mind, something to do with a knife, and stabbing sleeping forms to death. If she could only remember the details, she might formulate a sensible plan.
But the information seemed to be too deep in her consciousness to retrieve. It was bubbling down there in a cauldron, like lava about to erupt and inundate her.
The Lost Apostles Page 10
