Blasphemy wf-2

by Douglas Preston

  12

  THAT EVENING, BOOKER CRAWLEY FOLLOWED THE maître d‘ to the back of the dim steak house in McLean, Virginia, and found the Reverend D. T. Spates already parked at a table, perusing the five-pound leather-bound menu.

  “Reverend Spates, how good to see you again.” He took the man’s hand.

  “A pleasure, Mr. Crawley.”

  Crawley took his seat, shook out the elegant twist of linen that was his napkin, and strung it across his lap.

  A cocktail waiter glided over. “May I get you gentlemen anything to drink?”

  “Seven and seven,” said the reverend.

  Crawley cringed, glad he had picked a restaurant where no one would recognize him. The reverend smelled of Old Spice, and his sideburns were a centimeter too long. In person he looked twenty years older than on-screen, his face liver-spotted and mottled with that reddish sandpaper texture that marked the drinking man. His orange hair glistened in the indirect light. How could a man with so much media savvy tolerate such a cheap hair job?

  “And you, sir?”

  “Bombay Sapphire martini, very dry, straight up with a twist.”

  “Right away, gentlemen.”

  Crawley mustered a broad smile. “Well, Reverend, I saw your show last night. It was . . . terrific.”

  Spates nodded, a plump, manicured hand tapping the tablecloth. “The Lord was with me.”

  “I was wondering if you’ve received any feedback.”

  “Sure did. My office has logged over eighty thousand e-mails in the last twenty-four hours.”

  A silence. “Eighteen thousand?”

  “No, sir. Eighty thousand.”

  Crawley was speechless. “From whom?” he asked finally.

  “Viewers, of course.”

  “Am I right in assuming this is an unusual response?”

  “That you are. The sermon really touched a nerve. When the government spends taxpayer money to put the lie to the Word of God—well, Christians everywhere rise up.”

  “Yes, of course.” Crawley managed a smile of agreement. Eighty thousand. That would scare the piss out of any congressman. He paused as the waiter brought their drinks.

  Spates wrapped a plump hand around his frosty glass, took a long drink, set it down.

  “Now there’s this matter of the pledge you made to God’s Prime Time Ministry.”

  “Naturally.” Crawley touched his jacket above the inner pocket. “All in good time.”

  Spates took another sip. “What’s the reaction in Washington?”

  Crawley’s contacts had learned that a significant number of e-mails had also arrived for various congressmen, along with heavy telephone traffic. But it wouldn’t do to inflate Spates’s expectations. “An issue like this needs to be pushed awhile before it penetrates the hard shell of Washington.”

  “That isn’t what I heard from my viewers. Lots of those e-mails were copied to Washington.”

  “No doubt, no doubt,” said Crawley hastily.

  The waiter came by and took their order.

  “Now, if you don’t mind,” said Spates, “I’d like to collect that donation before the food comes. I wouldn’t want to get grease on it.”

  “No, no, of course not.” Crawley slipped the envelope out of his pocket and laid it unobtrusively on the table, then cringed as Spates reached over and held it up ostentatiously. Spates’s jacket sleeve slipped back, exposing a meaty wrist well furred in orange hair. So the orange was real. How could the thing that seemed most fake about Spates turn out to be the one real thing? Was there something else, more urgent, that he was missing about this man? Crawley pushed down his irritation.

  Spates turned the envelope over and tore it open with a lacquered fingernail. He slid out the check, held it to the light, and examined it closely.

  “Ten thousand dollars,” he read slowly.

  Crawley glanced around, relieved they were alone in the back of the restaurant. The man had no class at all.

  Spates continued to study the check. “Ten thousand dollars,” he repeated.

  “I trust it’s in good order?”

  The reverend slid the check back into the envelope and stuffed it inside his jacket. “You know how much it costs to run my ministry? Five thousand a day. Thirty-five thousand a week, almost two million a year.”

  “That’s quite an operation,” said Crawley evenly.

  “I devoted an entire hour of my sermon to your problem. I hope to take it up again on Roundtable America this Friday. You watch it?”

  “Never miss it.” Crawley knew the Christian Cable Service aired Spates’s weekly talk show, but he’d never seen it.

  “I plan to keep on top of this until I’ve aroused the righteous anger of Christians across this land.”

  “I’m very grateful, Reverend.”

  “For this, ten thousand dollars is hardly a drop in the bucket.”

  Goddamned Holy Joe, thought Crawley. How he hated to deal with people like this. “Reverend, forgive me, but I was under the impression that you would take up the issue in return for a one-time donation.”

  “And I did: one-time donation, one-time sermon. Now I’m talking about a relationship.” Spates tipped the glass up to his wet lips, drained the last of the drink through the column of ice cubes, replaced the glass on the table, and wiped his mouth.

  “I handed you an excellent issue. Judging from the reaction, it seems worth pushing, regardless of the, ah, pecuniary aspects.”

  “My friend, there’s a war on faith going on out there. We’re fighting the secular humanists on multiple fronts. I could shift my battle lines at any moment. If you want me to keep fighting at your salient, well, then—you’ve got to contribute.”

  The waiter brought their filets mignons. Spates had ordered his well done, and the thirty-nine-dollar cut of meat was now the size, shape, and color of a hockey puck. Spates clasped his hands and bowed over the plate. It took Crawley a moment to realize he was blessing his food, not smelling it.

  “Can I get you gentlemen anything else?” the waiter asked.

  The reverend raised his head and lifted his glass. “Another.” He narrowed his eyes at the waiter’s departing form. “I believe that man’s a homosexual.”

  Crawley took a long level breath. “So what kind of a relationship are you suggesting, Reverend?”

  “A quid pro quo. You scratch my back; I scratch yours.”

  Crawley waited.

  “Say, five thousand a week, with a guarantee I’ll mention the Isabella project in each sermon and take it up on at least one cable show.”

  So that’s how it was going to be. “Ten thousand a month,” said Crawley coolly, “with a guaranteed minimum of ten minutes devoted to the topic in each sermon. As for the cable show, I’ll expect the first show to be devoted entirely to Isabella, with later shows pushing the subject. My donation will be made at the end of the month after the airing. Each payment will be duly recorded as a charitable contribution, with a letter to that effect. That is my first, last, and only offer.”

  The Reverend DonT. Spates gazed pensively at Crawley. Then his face turned into an enormous smile, and a freckled hand extended across the table, once more exposing the orange hairs.

  “The Lord will give you value for your money, my friend.”

  13

  EARLY TUESDAY, BEFORE BREAKFAST, FORD SAT at the kitchen table in his casita staring at the stack of dossiers. There was no reason why having a high IQ would somehow protect you from the vicissitudes of life, but this group seemed to have more than their share of problems: difficult childhoods, dysfunctional parents, sexual identity problems, personal crises, even a few bankruptcies. Thibodeaux had been in therapy since she was twenty, diagnosed with the borderline personality disorder he’d read about before. Cecchini had gotten tangled up with a religious cult as a teenager. Edelstein had suffered bouts of depression. St. Vincent had been an alcoholic. Wardlaw had suffered from PTSD after witnessing his squad leader’s head blown off in a cave in t
he Tora Bora mountains. At thirty-four, Corcoran had been married and divorced—twice. Innes had been reprimanded for sleeping with patients.

  Only Rae Chen didn’t seem to have anything untoward in her own background—just a first-generation Chinese-American whose family owned a restaurant. Dolby, also, seemed relatively normal, except that he’d grown up in one of the worst neighborhoods in Watts, and his brother had been paralyzed by a stray bullet in a gang shootout.

  Kate’s dossier had been the most revealing of all. He read through it with a kind of sick, guilty fascination. Her father had committed suicide not long after they’d broken up—shot himself after failing in business. Her mother had then gone into a long physical decline, ending up in a nursing home at seventy, unable to recognize her own daughter. After her mother died, there was a two-year gap in the record. Kate had paid two years’ rent on her apartment in Texas and disappeared, returning two years later. It impressed the hell out of Ford that neither the FBI nor CIA could find out where she had gone or what she did. She refused to answer their questions—even at the risk of not gaining the security clearance she needed to be assistant director of the Isabella project. But Hazelius had stepped in, and the reason wasn’t hard to see—they had been having a relationship. It seemed to have been more a friendship than a passion, and it had ended amicably.

  He packed away the files, disgusted at the violation of privacy, the gross intrusion of government into a person’s life, represented by the dossiers. He wondered how he could have stomached it all those years in the CIA. The monastery had changed him more than he’d realized.

  He pulled out the dossier on Hazelius and opened it up. He had read it over quickly, and now he began going through it with more care. It was arranged chronologically, and Ford read it in order, visualizing the arc of the man’s life. Hazelius came from a surprisingly mundane background, an only child in a solid middle-class family of Scandinavian roots from Minnesota, father a storekeeper, mother a homemaker. They were sober, dull, churchgoing people. An unlikely environment to produce a transcendental genius. Hazelius had quickly shown himself to be a true prodigy: summa cum laude from Johns Hopkins at seventeen, doctorate from Caltech at twenty, full professor at Columbia at twenty-six, Nobel Prize at thirty.

  Beyond his brilliance, the man was hard to pin down. He was not your typical narrow academic. At Columbia his students had adored him for his dry wit, playful temperament, and surprising mystical streak. He played boogiewoogie and stride piano in a band called the Quarksters at a dive on 110th Street, filling the place with worshipful undergrads. He took students to strip joints. He developed a “strange attractor” theory of the stock market and made millions before selling the system to a hedge fund.

  After winning the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum entanglement, Hazelius moved easily into his role as the heir to physics superstar Richard Feynman. He published no fewer than thirty theoretical papers on the incompleteness of quantum theory, shaking the very foundations of the discipline. He won the Fields Medal in mathematics for proving Laplace’s third conjecture, the only person to have won both a Nobel and a Fields. He added a Pulitzer to his list of prizes for a book of poetry—strangely beautiful poems that mixed expressive language with mathematical equations and scientific theorems. He had set up a rescue program in India to provide medical help to girls in regions where it was customary to allow sick girls to die; the program also included subtle but intensive educational programs aimed at changing societal values about girls. He had contributed millions to a campaign to eradicate female genital mutilation in Africa. He had patented—and this Ford found comical—a better mousetrap, humane but effective.

  He often appeared on Page Six of the Post, hobnobbing with the rich and famous, dressed in his trademark suits from the seventies with fat lapels and massive ties. He bragged he bought them at the Salvation Army, never paying more than five dollars. He was a regular guest on Letterman, where he could always be counted on to make outrageous un-PC pronouncements—he called them “unpleasant truths”—and wax eloquent about his utopian schemes.

  At the age of thirty-two, he astonished everyone by marrying the supermodel and former Playboy bunny Astrid Gund, ten years his junior and legendary for her cheerful vacuity. She went everywhere with him, even on the television talk circuit, where he gazed at her adoringly while she chattered happily about her warm and fuzzy political opinions, once declaring famously, in a discussion of 9/11, “Gee, why can’t people just get along?”

  That was bad enough. But during this period, Hazelius had said something that so outraged the zeitgeist that it became immortal, in the manner of the Beatles’ claim that they were more popular than Jesus. A reporter asked the physicist why he had married a woman “so far beneath you intellectually.” Hazelius had taken great offense. “Who would you have me marry?” he roared at the journalist. “Everyone’s beneath me intellectually! At least Astrid knows how to love, which is more than I can say for the rest of you moronic human beings.”

  The smartest man in the world had dissed everyone else as morons. The uproar was enormous. The Post ran a classic headline:

  HAZELIUS TO WORLD:

  YOU’RE ALL MORONS

  The talk-radio mobocrats and their fellow travelers worked themselves into a self-righteous fury. Hazelius was condemned from every pulpit and soapbox in America, pilloried as anti-American, antireligious, unpatriotic, a misanthrope, and a member of that most despicable of species—a sherry-sipping, ivory-tower Eastern establishment elitist.

  Ford laid the papers aside and poured another cup of coffee. So far the dossier didn’t fit the Hazelius he was getting to know, who weighed his every word and acted as peacemaker, diplomat, and team leader. He had yet to hear a single political opinion from the man.

  Some years ago, Hazelius had experienced a tragedy. Perhaps that had changed him. Ford skipped ahead in the file until he found it.

  Ten years ago, when Hazelius was thirty-six, Astrid had dropped dead of a cerebral hemorrhage. The death devastated him. For several years he had retreated from the world into a Howard Hughes–like seclusion. Then, quite suddenly, he emerged with the plan for Isabella. He was indeed a changed man: no more talk shows, offensive statements, utopian schemes, or lost causes. He shed his society connections and dropped the ugly suits. Gregory North Hazelius had grown up.

  With extraordinary skill, patience, and tact, Hazelius had pushed the Isabella project forward, enlisting allies in the science community, wooing big foundations, and courting those in power. He never missed an opportunity to remind Americans that the United States had fallen seriously behind the Europeans in nuclear physics research. He maintained that Isabella might lead to cheap solutions to the world’s energy needs—with all the patents and the know-how in American hands. With that, he had accomplished the impossible: cajoling forty billion dollars out of Congress during a time of budget deficits.

  He was a consummate master at persuasion, it seemed, working quietly behind the scenes, a cautious visionary, yet willing to take a bold, calculated risk. This was the Hazelius that Ford was getting to know.

  Isabella was Hazelius’s brainchild, his baby. He had traveled the country and handpicked a team from the elite ranks of physicists, engineers, and programmers. Everything had proceeded smoothly. Until now.

  Ford closed the file and ruminated. He still felt he had not yet peeled back the inner layers to reveal the core human being. Genius, showman, musician, utopian dreamer, devoted husband, arrogant elitist, brilliant physicist, patient lobbyist. Which was the real man? Or was there a shadowy figure behind them all, manipulating the masks?

  Parts of Hazelius’s life weren’t so different from his own. They had both lost their wives in horrifying ways. When Ford’s wife had died, the world as he knew it had blown up with her, leaving him wandering in the ruins. But Hazelius had reacted in the opposite way: his wife’s death seemed to have focused him. Ford had lost the meaning in his life; Hazelius found his.

&nbs
p; He wondered how his own dossier would read. He had no doubt it existed—and that Lockwood had read it, just as he was reading theirs. How would it look? Child of privilege, Choate, Harvard, MIT, CIA, marriage. And then: Bomb.

  After Bomb, what then? Monastery. And finally, Advanced Security and Intelligence, Inc., the name of his new investigation company. It suddenly seemed pretentious. Who was he kidding? He’d hung out his shingle four months ago and he’d gotten one assignment. Admittedly, it was a plum job, but then there were special reasons why he’d been chosen. And he couldn’t put it on his résumé.

  He glanced at the clock: he was late for breakfast, and he was wasting time with self-pitying musings.

  Shoving the dossier in the briefcase, he locked it and headed out toward the dining hall. The sun had just risen over the red bluffs, and the light was shooting through the leaves of the cottonwoods, setting them aglow like shards of green and yellow glass.

  The dining hall was rich with the smell of cinnamon buns and bacon. Hazelius was seated in his accustomed place at the head of the table, deep in conversation with Innes. Kate sat at the other end, near Wardlaw, pouring herself coffee.

  At the sight of her, Ford felt a twist in his gut.

  He took the last empty seat next to Hazelius and helped himself to scrambled eggs and bacon off the platter.

  “Morning,” said Hazelius. “Sleep well?”

  “Never better.”

  Everyone was there except Volkonsky.

  “Say, where’s Peter?” Ford ventured. “I didn’t see his car in the driveway.”

  Conversation trickled into silence.

  “Dr. Volkonsky seems to have left us,” said Wardlaw.

  “Left? Why?”

  At first, no one spoke. Then, in an unnaturally loud voice, Innes said, “As the team psychologist, I can perhaps shed light on that question. Without violating any professional confidences, I think I can say without contradiction that Peter was never happy here. He had a hard time adjusting to the isolation and stressful schedule. He missed his wife and child back at Brookhaven. It’s no surprise he decided to go.”