Lori, an interesting person arrived on my doorstep, speaking in the words of the ancients, going by a name familiar to both of us. That individual has undergone extensive tests for the purpose of identity confirmation. As you can imagine, this has immense potential repercussions.
Does she have the real Martha of Galilee? Lori wondered. This is written so that it doesn’t incriminate her for the fake twelfth she-apostle.
Lori continued reading:
You and I need to work together, for the benefit of womankind. Let bygones be bygones. Bring back our little friends, and come with them. I will make you my High Priestess.
Sincerely,
The Grand Messenger of the Holy She
Our friends. The eleven authentic she-apostles.
“She’s inviting me to be her High Priestess,” Lori said, angrily. “She wants me to join a pack of murderers and kidnappers who shot their way into the Vatican and took the Pope hostage! What future is there in that? She’s insane. Let bygones be bygones? She allowed my mother to die! I’ll never forgive her for that!”
“May I?” her father asked, reaching for the letter.
Seething, she handed it to him, then noted the messenger staring at her with a pained expression on his face.
It occurred to Lori that she should delay answering, to avoid provoking the insane woman into harming Martha of Galilee, or Pope Rodrigo The teenager knew that the twelve children should be together, but it made no sense at all to allow Dixie Lou to control all of them. That would only risk the other eleven. But Fujiko Harui and the she-apostle Abigail had told her that Martha was essential, a key to the puzzle of these remarkable children.
And Dixie Lou had the key.
Now Lori turned to the message from Deborah Marvel. “It’s in the same handwriting,” she said, “but the two letters are signed by different people.”
“Dixie Lou ordered Deborah to handwrite the first one for her signature.”
“Oh.” As she read the second letter, the comments surprised and astounded her. Deborah referred to Dixie Lou Jackson as a “madwoman,” and offered to help Lori “in any way possible.” Lori had not expected anything like this. Deborah had never shown her any indication that she opposed Dixie Lou in any way.
Do I have a new ally? Or is this only Dixie Lou’s trick, an attempt to lull me?
She passed the Marvel letter on to her father, too, and noted the perplexed expression on his face as he read it.
“Do you have responses?” Giancarlo Veron asked, of Lori.
“None that a young lady should utter,” she said, with a tight smile. She glanced at Zack. “At least, not in the presence of my father.”
He smiled in return, but his eyes were narrow and intense.
“My first inclination is to address her as the Grand Murderess,” Lori said. “And tell her I won’t discuss anything with the ‘Holy She’ until she is completely out of the picture.”
“I think my daughter needs time to think about this,” Zack said.
“Will twenty-four hours be long enough?” Veron asked. “Shall I return tomorrow?”
“All right,” Lori said, as her father nodded. “Come back tomorrow at this time.”
“You will respond to both Marvel and Jackson at that time?”
“We will discuss it more tomorrow,” Lori said.
“If I may caution you, Miss Vale, do not respond to Ms. Marvel in writing. Tell me what to say and I will repeat it faithfully. Only write to the Grand Messenger.”
“That sounds wise.”
* * *
For the rest of the afternoon, Lori, her father, and Alex discussed the letters. Previously, Lori had filled Zack in on her life since the goddess circle, and told him how much Alex had helped her, and how he despised his own mother. “I trust him completely,” Lori had said. She had also told him in a firm voice that she intended to include Alex in the important decisions she had to make, as one of her key advisers. Her father had argued.
Now, after reexamining the letters, Lori said, “I’m not sure how to respond.”
“Do you think Dixie Lou really has the missing twelfth she-apostle?” Zack asked, “the one that supposedly knows things the others do not?”
“I don’t know,” Lori said, “but if Martha is there I want to rescue her. Maybe that tunnel route is the way to do it.”
“It’s sure to be heavily guarded,” Alex said. Wearily, he passed a hand through his crop of unkempt, curly black hair. He had dark circles under his eyes, looked as if he needed to catch up on his rest. Earlier, he had said he’d been sleeping poorly because of all the commotion, and that he had decided to take sleeping pills until things settled down.
Lori gazed at the ceiling for several moments, trying to sense whether Dixie Lou really had the last she-apostle. She held the first letter on her lap, and passed her fingers repeatedly over Dixie Lou’s signature, without picking up any strong sensation, one way or the other. Likewise, she couldn’t get any particular sensation from the other letter, which was signed by Deborah.
Finally, she said, “I want to go in. We have to assume Martha’s there.”
“You don’t mean you want to go into the Vatican?” Zack asked.
“I told you about the small telekinetic tricks the she-apostles do when I’m around, things they can’t seem to do when I’m not there. Why do you suppose that is?” Lori asked.
Zack shrugged.
“It’s because we have a connection,” Lori said. “I feel it in my soul, that my life isn’t worth anything without those children—without all twelve of them. I need to get to Martha and protect her.”
“If you go, I’m going too,” Alex said, rising to his feet for emphasis.
Zack glared at both of them. “Both of you are out of your minds. NATO can take care of this without either of you. They’ll nab the kid and bring her out.”
Shaking her head, Lori said, “They won’t find her so easily, if Dixie Lou hides her, or keeps moving her around. But I can find Martha, wherever she is, the same way I figured out where Dixie Lou was going when she was flying away from Libya, heading across the Mediterranean. It came to me when I was holding hands with the she-apostles, and afterward when I seemed to be following the Chairwoman’s spoor, and I knew she was going to Rome. I just knew it without anyone saying so, and I turned out to be right.”
She paused. “I have an extrasensory link with the children, you see, and perhaps a link with something even deeper. Look—Dad—I need to be involved in rescuing Martha. You know the miraculous story of the she-apostles, and if you believe that, it’s not a stretch to believe more, that I’m somehow part of their destiny.”
“I don’t know what I believe,” he said. “I’m just worried about you.”
“We should both go with her,” Alex said.
“And you should get some sleep,” Zack said, looking at him. “You look as if you’re going to fall down.”
He stood there, as if too tired to even walk into his apartment.
Taking a long, deep breath, Lori said, “Dad, you apologized to me for all the years we lost together; you said you hoped it was not too late for us to start over. This is incredibly important to me, more than I can ever express to you. I hate to say this, I hate to put it this way, and I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to, but if you don’t help me now, if you don’t get us into the Vatican with the NATO assault force, you and I will never have a relationship.”
The tall officer looked miserable. He shook his head sadly. “I don’t want you harmed, Lori. I’d rather save your life, even if you never speak to me again.”
“If you let me down on this, you can count on that.”
“And why do you want him to go with you?” Zack shot a laser glance at Alex. “He’s one of your key advisers, you said; he’s not a military operative.”
“I believe in him completely,” she said. “Assuming he gets some sleep. I told you about him, all the ways he helped me when his mother was so awful to me.”
“Anyone else you want to bring along?” Zack asked. “Your friends from high school, maybe? Some street people from Seattle?”
She glared at him.
“All right,” he said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
He grabbed his officer’s hat and coat, and stalked out.
“I need to be alone,” Lori said to Alex. She gave him a peck on the cheek, and he shuffled off to his own quarters.
* * *
By herself in the sitting room, Lori brooded over the situation.
Closing her eyes, she envisioned the faces of seven she-apostle toddlers: Veronica, Mary Magdalene, Priscilla, Sarah, Kezia, Candace, and Lydia . . . As each face came to her, she paused to examine it, in all of its details. Four she-apostle babies came into view: Esther, Hannah, Abigail, and Rhoda. Eleven she-apostles were familiar to her, in all.
Now she remembered the frightening vision she and Dixie Lou seemed to have shared involving Lori’s own future baby, a child with auburn hair like her own. Previously, Lori had wondered if this might be the real twelfth she-apostle, Martha of Galilee, but now Dixie Lou said she had her at the Vatican.
Suddenly, the visage of a brown-skinned, black-haired baby came into focus, but faded quickly. She struggled to bring the image back, but unsuccessfully. It had been so ephemeral that she couldn’t recall the facial details, only the skin and hair color.
Martha of Galilee?
Lori opened her eyes wide, but they wouldn’t focus. It was as if she was looking through a tinted window that increasingly darkened, moment by moment.
Her fingers transmitted a texture to her, something they were touching. The letter from Deborah Marvel. She focused on the ending words: This is a critical moment in history. Deborah was right.
The self-proclaimed Grand Messenger was moving ahead with a curious sort of determination, cranking the engine of her organization to full speed ahead. Her surprise takeover of the Vatican had been shocking, and would certainly earn her a place in the history books, albeit an ignominious one. This was big and getting bigger. The attention of the world was riveted on Rome.
Lori wondered about her own place in the history unfolding around her, how much she would be able to influence it. She didn’t care about credit for herself. She only hoped everything would turn out all right, and vowed to do whatever she could to make certain it did.
As her eyes focused, or seemed to, she saw the eleven she-apostles standing in front of her chair, looking up at her. She tried to determine if this was in her mind’s eye, or if the children really stood there. Somehow, it didn’t matter to her. The important thing was, she had a connection with them.
Lori stared at the eleven children, reached out her hands and touched some of them—or seemed to—and asked them what she should do about Martha of Galilee. They only looked at her with their expressive eyes, without saying anything, and without seeming to communicate with her in any other manner. This time it was as if they had the answer but would not share it, as if Lori needed to figure out what to do on her own. Frustrated that the children were not sharing information with her, Lori felt irritated, but only for a moment before she had second thoughts, before she realized it was another example of wordless interaction.
It was a test, pushing Lori to her limits, making her use her own abilities to figure things out for herself. If she didn’t succeed at this, she realized, then she could not possibly advance, could not possibly understand the secret realm in which the children lived.
Odd, she thought. Children teaching an older person. But they are “old souls,” the term Dixie Lou likes to use.
To Lori, it was also odd the way they were communicating with her, in their ancient, secret language that involved spoken and unspoken words. Perhaps when she no longer considered such methods strange, then she would understand.
“What will happen when all of you are with Martha of Galilee?” Lori asked, looking at each of the children, her gaze drifting from face to face.
In unison they smiled, in a way that gave her tremendous hope.
Chapter 35
I don’t need to negotiate with my enemies; they are rotting away.
—Dixie Lou Jackson, Grand Messenger of the Holy She
It seemed the worst sacrilege in the history of the world to have Dixie Lou Jackson—surely a pawn of Satan—in charge of the holy Vatican City. This woman had, after all, been raised in the poverty of the inner city and supported herself for years through prostitution. How could she be dislodged? To President Markwether, the problem seemed almost insurmountable, but he and his advisers were determined not to rest until it was solved.
NATO had decided upon a multi-pronged approach, one that had been instituted with the cooperation of its member nations. Thus far, Dixie Lou had refused all offers from the allies to negotiate. In London, Paris, Rome, and other major cities around the world, potential emissaries were being interviewed by diplomats and psychologists, with an emphasis on finding just the right women and men who did not sympathize with the criminal Holy She, but who understood their deviant thought patterns and motivations. That focus formed the first NATO prong, under the direction of the N-1 team.
The second prong—a propaganda campaign involving the Internet, television, radio, and print media—was already spreading negative information on the Holy She and its leadership. This effort—designated N-2—was under the supervision of the flamboyant and outspoken Rickson Prentiss, an egotistical Australian media mogul.
The United States, by agreement with the others, was responsible for N-3, the violence option, involving military force and/or assassination. That put President Markwether in charge of N-3.
In the fitness room of the White House, the President sat inside a fat-melting electronic field that shimmered all around him. Standing nearby were Harold Gravidovitch and Argan Smits, the Secretaries of State and Defense respectively, who were delivering their reports one at a time.
The President had gained fifteen pounds in a matter of weeks, and now he was embarking on a crash diet and “exertion program” to knock the weight off. He never actually worked out, preferring the comfort and ease of automatic devices. Markwether’s skin tingled from the pulsing, penetrating field; he was red-faced and breathing hard, with perspiration pouring down his brow. He wore a khaki shirt with “US ARMY” emblazoned across the chest, and had a small towel bearing the presidential seal draped over one shoulder.
While he had never served in any branch of the armed forces himself, he had run for office on a policy of strong support for the military. His brother, an Army colonel, had advised him closely on this. He wished Zack could be here now, to guide him through the difficult decisions he had to make. He wasn’t accustomed to relying on these two cabinet ministers—Gravidovitch and Smits—and they knew it. An awkward tension hung in the air.
The President hadn’t told them his brother was in Rome, and could be in danger if NATO decided to attack the Vatican. It seemed best to keep that information to himself, and to avoid worrying about it, if he could. Affairs of state always took precedence over individual or familial concerns.
“You asked me to report on the possibility of getting an assassin close to Dixie Lou Jackson,” Gravidovitch said. The small man wore a wrinkled suit, reflecting long hours of work without going home. He had removed his tie.
“Close to her?” Markwether snapped. “We need to get closer than close, you bumblehead! I want her stabbed, shot, poisoned!”
“Yes sir, but we must determine her patterns first. We have all the Vatican entrances under video surveillance, watching who they allow in and who they don’t. We’re also trailing people who emerge from the complex, and we have parabolic microphones trained on all possible windows, picking up whatever we can of the words that are being spoken in the rooms.”
“So you don’t have an answer for me yet?” Markwether said, an edge to his voice. He studied the digital readout of the calories he was burning, and increased the intensity of the electronic field.<
br />
Gravidovitch shook his head. “This is not a normal situation. We’re breaking new ground here. While we have FBI and CIA files on United Women of the World, the information on Dixie Lou Jackson is somewhat limited, just the poverty and prostitution facts being used for propaganda by Prentiss in N-2. We actually developed the information first and gave it to him. In turn he shared it with the N-1 people.”
“You did what?”
“Uh, we told Prentiss about Jackson’s unsavory background.”
The President’s face became stony. “I’ve never liked that guy, and I’d rather he found it out for himself, but all right, you didn’t do anything wrong. We’re on the same team with him, trying to defeat the Holy She.””
““We’re working on getting more details about Jackson and her people, trying to find a weakness to exploit.”
Markwether wiped perspiration from his forehead. He didn’t think much of these two members of his cabinet. Consulting with them was not like working with his own brother, and he wished he hadn’t allowed Zack to go to Rome. As President of the United States he could have taken steps to prevent it. The trip couldn’t have come at a worse possible time.
“Sorry, sir,” Gravidovitch said.
President Markwether increased the setting of the electronic field again. He imagined the fat rolling off his body.
“OK, what about N-1?”
For a moment, Gravidovitch looked confused. “The psychological analysis on Jackson and her top advisers, sir? We only have preliminary information so far. A few more days, and they should have a better report.”
Secretary of Defense Smits folded his arms across his chest. “I wish we could just bomb Vatican City and get it over with.” A bulky man with effeminate mannerisms, Smits had tiny, pale green eyes and a mole on his chin.
President Markwether stopped pedaling. A scowl creased his face.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Secretary of State Gravidovitch said. “Even conventional bombs would destroy Michelangelo’s masterpieces, the Sistine Chapel, the sacred Basilica—” He shook his head sadly. “—and kill everyone.”
The Lost Apostles Page 27
