by Kyle Mills
“Please sit down, Mark.” Ernie said. “I already am involved in this. I have been for years. I thought that God had directed me to write my book—to warn Albert about what was happening to his church—and for all these years I thought I’d failed Him. Now I know that my real purpose was to be here for you.”
Beamon hesitated and finally sat back down. He was feeling increasingly uncomfortable and dishonest—like he was a fraud playing to this woman’s faith.
“Okay, Ernie,” he said slowly. “You’re in, but I feel like I should tell you again that I don’t for one minute believe that I’m being directed by God. I just want to find this girl so I can look like a hero and twist the knife in my boss. If, as a by-product, Sara Renslier takes a beating and your church gets the overhaul you think it needs, then fine—but in the end, I don’t really care. It’s not my job to save people from themselves.”
She smiled. “It doesn’t really matter what you believe. What either one of us believes. God will do what He will do.”
Beamon took off his parka and threw it on the floor after extracting his copy of the Kneissian bible. He pulled a couple of legal-sized sheets of yellow paper from the book and smoothed them out on his lap. On the sheets, he’d sketched out the theory that had woken him up at 2:00 A.M. that morning. What he needed from Ernie was for her to tell him he was wrong.
“What’s that?” Ernie asked, wheeling her chair around and handing Beamon a slice of pizza. He accepted it gratefully.
“It’s something I want you to help me think about.”
She craned her thick neck and looked at the unintelligible writing connected by undecipherable arrows and grids.
“I think better in pictures,” Beamon explained. “Let me translate.” He took a bite of pizza and slurred through a mouth full of cheese and dough. “Fact number one: Jennifer is Albert Kneiss’s granddaughter.”
Ernie shook her head. “Carol Kneiss died childless.”
“Actually, your research wasn’t entirely accurate with regard to her death. Carol Kneiss died Carol Passal in a fire in the early eighties after changing her name and moving a number of times. I’m guessing that she knew she was being watched by the church and that she was afraid for her daughter.”
“I didn’t know …” Ernie said sadly.
“Fact two. Well, actually, this is more of a strongly supported hypothesis, but let’s raise it to the exalted status of fact. Eric Davis killed his wife and committed suicide. Both had been members of the Church of the Evolution since the late sixties.”
“What? Why?” Ernie stuttered.
“They adopted Jennifer shortly after her biological parents’ death—I’m guessing at the direction of the church.”
“But why would they …”
Beamon held his hand up and silenced her. “I thought it was to cut Jennifer off from her support system. The church couldn’t kill them without alienating Jennifer and they couldn’t leave them alive because she’d have a home and family to get back to. And what better way to show Jennifer their strong belief and dedication to the church?”
“So you think they’re trying to brainwash her to replace Albert?”
“I did. Until last night, I was convinced that when Kneiss died, the church would tell the world they had her. They’d have her say that she knew Albert was her grandfather all along. That her father went nuts, killed her mother and himself, and she ran to granddad—her only living relative. The church elders would swear they didn’t know anything about it till Albert told them on his deathbed.” Beamon took another bite of the quickly cooling pizza. “Then Jennifer is inserted as head of the church. Easy as pie.”
Ernie shook her head. “Except one thing. Sara Renslier will never give up her power over the church. She gives God and Albert almost no credit in building it—she believes that it’s hers.” The hatred in her voice cut through the air.
“I met Sara,” Beamon said. “And I got the same feeling. That, combined with the fact that Albert’s already dead, is what woke me up last night.”
Ernie jerked back in her wheelchair so hard that it drifted back a foot. “Albert isn’t dead. He can’t be. Not until Good Friday.”
“I know this is hard for you, Ernie, but let me finish. I tried to get in to see Albert the day before yesterday. Sara told me he was in Turkey meditating.”
Ernie looked like she was about to say something, but Beamon ignored her and continued. “There’s no record of him entering Turkey, nor is there a record of him taking a commercial or private flight to Turkey. Why would Sara keep me from talking to him? The best reason I can come up with is that he’s dead. He must have ordered Jennifer’s retrieval before he died. Sara wouldn’t have wanted to, but she would have had to obey. So we can hypothesize he was still alive as of the day Jennifer was kidnapped—give or take. Then, at some point since then, he’s died. I mean, the guy was pushing ninety and hadn’t been seen in public for years. He had to have been on his last legs.”
“But he can’t die until Good Friday. That’s God’s will!” Ernie repeated in a voice tinged with desperation. “What if Sara has isolated him completely? Taken over …”
Beamon shrugged. “Maybe, but we know he wasn’t isolated before Jennifer was kidnapped—he must have given Sara the order in front of a group of people, probably the Elders, or else she could have just ignored it. And I think it would have been difficult for Sara to suddenly isolate him in his final days when everyone is wondering what exactly to do with their new leader, don’t you? No, the simplest answer is the best in most cases. He’s dead.”
Beamon doubted he was ever going to win Ernie over with the dazzling logic of his argument. Logic was oil to religion’s water—always had been. She’d need more.
He opened his copy of the Kneissian Bible to a page marked with a Post-it note. “There is a way that he could be dead, Ernie.”
She looked at him blankly, obviously still Struggling with what he’d told her and the credibility she thought God had bestowed on him.
“It says here that Kneiss hasn’t always been the Messenger, right?” Beamon said, trying to coax her out of her stupor. She didn’t respond.
“Right?” he prompted.
“Yes. Yes, that’s right. Our Bible specifically names three of his incarnations. Kneiss, Jesus, and before that Persiah. Eventually God will take him to his reward and he’ll be replaced by another, like he replaced the one before him.”
Beamon flipped to another marked page and began reading. “I was once flesh like you … “
Ernie finished the passage in a voice so quiet that Beamon had to lean closer to hear. “… full of fear, doubt, and hatred …” She looked up at him. “It’s central to our belief. That the Messenger was once human and became more. An example to all of us.”
Beamon closed the book slowly, feeling the tightness at the bottom of his stomach cinch down a bit more. He was right. Somehow he’d known he would be. “Follow me now, Ernie. Kneiss is dead, but he didn’t ascend on Good Friday. That can only mean one thing, right? That he’s served God long enough. That he has been accepted into heaven.”
She still didn’t seem to be fully tracking on what he was saying, but she nodded with enough authority for him to continue. “To replace Albert, God will choose a worthy human being, right?”
Ernie nodded again.
“We know that Sara isn’t going to be happy about turning over the church she spent a quarter of a century building to an adolescent girl with a ring in her nose, so she needs to get rid of her,” Beamon paused. “The question is, how far would Sara go?”
He could see from Ernie’s expression that his words were beginning to sink in. She reached out and grabbed his arm in her soft hand. “Of course, it’s the only way she can protect her position. If Albert is dead, she could tell the other elders anything. And if she told them that Jennifer had been chosen …”
Her voice faded away and Beamon finished her thought. “Then Jennifer has to ascend on Good Friday.”
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Ernie’s hand tightened around his arm. “And then there will be no one. No one but her!”
Beamon chewed on his lip, wishing for once that his instincts had failed him. He’d come hoping that he’d missed something. Hoping that Ernie’s intimate knowledge of the church would point him in another direction. He looked at the calendar on his watch. Fifteen days until Good Friday. If he was right, and his gut told him he was, he had to find Jennifer in the next two weeks or he never would.
Beamon stood and patted Ernie on the back, trying to comfort her as her sniffling turned into sobbing. He wondered if it was for Jennifer or if it was the final realization that the church she loved had turned so far from God.
“Ernie. Ernie? Come back to me now. We can still turn this thing around if we work together.” She sobbed louder. “Come on, Ernie. The Bureau’s left me hanging on this one. You and I are all Jennifer’s got. We’re all the church has.”
She wiped at her eyes with her sleeve and her sobbing faded back into sniffles.
“I want you to do something for me, Ernie. I want you to run your old Kneissian membership list against lists of influential people. Give me an idea of who we might be coming up against.”
She looked up at him. “What … what kind of lists?”
“I don’t know exactly. Politicians. Who’s Who. World’s richest people. That kind of thing. Whatever you can think of. Are you up to it?”
She nodded. “But I want you to do something for me in return.”
“Sure.”
“Pray with me.”
She pulled at his sleeve and he sank to his knees next to her wheelchair. She squeezed her eyes shut and began moving her lips soundlessly. Not really knowing what to do, he bowed his head and waited for her to snap out of it.
36
BEAMON ADJUSTED HIS READING GLASSES TO a more comfortable position on his nose and slid a withdrawal slip and his driver’s license through the teller window. “I’d like to get five thousand dollars from my savings account, please.”
The teller looked the two documents over briefly and then punched a few keys on the terminal next to her. “Just a moment, please, sir.”
Beamon felt a nervous twinge as the young woman hurried off and disappeared through a door at the back of the teller line. His fears were dispelled, though, when she reappeared a few moments later and started counting hundreds onto the counter. When she was finished she slid an envelope to him and he stuffed the cash into it.
“Come and see us again, sir.”
Beamon smiled and walked back out onto the sidewalk, pausing to watch the flare of orange on the horizon slowly deepen and cast a red glow over the mountains. He stood there for a few minutes, filling his lungs with the cold dry air and trying to focus his mind on the most urgent problems facing him. There were so many to choose from—the fight he’d purposefully started with the eleven million members of the Church of the Evolution, the tenuous grip he had on his job, the fact that there was a good chance that Jennifer Davis had only two weeks before Sara sacrificed her on the altar of power and influence.
Beamon sunk his hands into the deep pockets of his parka and jogged down the sidewalk toward a dully flickering PACKAGE LIQUOR sign a block and a half away.
In his two months in Flagstaff, he’d been into that particular liquor store more times than he’d like to admit, but this was the first time he’d set foot in the attached bar. It was about what he imagined. Dark and worn, with the strangely comforting smell of age and countless spilled drinks.
It was almost completely empty, he saw as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. There was a woman in a dark coat to his right, speaking to the bartender as though she knew him well. Across the room, in the booth next to a dead jukebox, he could see the thick brown hair of his favorite computer nerd, Craig Skinner.
Skinner had become a little paranoid after the unfortunate incident with the Kneissian membership list and Jake layman. He’d taken Beamon’s lecture on keeping things quiet a little too seriously, insisting that they meet away from the office in order to give him what would undoubtedly be a rather mundane report on TarroSoft.
Beamon had picked the place. Figured he might as well kill two birds with one stone—his beer inventory was getting dangerously low.
Beamon sneaked up behind the young man and leaned in close to his ear. “The blue moose howls at the moon,” he whispered.
Skinner jumped and almost spilled his drink. He was still clutching at his chest as Beamon slid onto the bench across from him.
“Jesus, Mark! You almost gave me a heart attack!”
“If you don’t give the countersign, I’m going to have to kill you.”
“You said be subtle!”
Beamon nodded and lit a pre-rolled cigarette. He had said subtle.
“So what have you got for me, Craig?”
“I talked to some friends … “
Beamon stopped in mid-drag and raised his eyebrows.
The young man held his hands out. “Subtly. I talked to them subtly. TarroSoft is a holding company—they don’t actually produce software themselves. They own BiblioNet and apparently do software design work for the telecommunications industry. Mostly for a company called Vericomm.”
“Vericomm I’ve heard of, but what’s BiblioNet?”
“You know, the company that created the software for the national interlibrary loan system?”
Beamon looked at him blankly.
“You know. Have you ever tried to check out a library book and they didn’t have it, so they ordered it from another library?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“That’s the interlibrary loan system. It used to be state by state, but now it’s nationwide. BiblioNet created the software for the system and now they manage it under a government contract.”
Beamon took another deep drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke out through a thin smile, appreciating the irony of Skinner’s report. The FBI had tried for years to get the right to track what books people were buying and checking out. There was a pretty strong argument that keeping tabs on books relating to poisoning, bombs, murder, and so on could be a powerful tool in the right hands.
Unfortunately, there was just no way that kind of a Big Brother tactic was going to fly in the U.S. of A. Not for a government agency, anyway. But what about a private organization? Chet Michaels had received his NickeLine solicitation about a week after Beamon had sent him crawling through the local libraries looking for information on the church. He’d assumed that Michaels had simply run into an astute Kneissian librarian. He took another drag on his cigarette. It was that kind of small thinking that was going to make Jennifer Davis dead.
“I can probably get more, if you need it,” Skinner continued. “But I won’t be able to be as quiet about it … I don’t need any more trouble from Layman, Mark. I don’t know if you noticed, but I don’t really fit in at the Bureau. You’re, like, my only ally.”
“No, that’s what I needed, Craig. Thanks.” Beamon tossed a few bills on the table for Skinner’s drink and slid out of the booth.
“What about the names I asked you to run against that database?”
“All positive but one.”
“Okay, thanks. I’ll see you at the office tomorrow.”
Beamon walked through a door next to the bar and into the attached liquor store. He grabbed a twelve-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon out of the cooler, then walked along the rack of red wine against the wall. He examined a few labels, but they meant nothing to him. Finally, he decided to follow the theory of “you get what you pay for.” He pulled the most expensive bottle out of the rack and took a place in line behind a man in a tall cowboy hat who was making a less than persuasive argument about the Communists’ and Democrats’ involvement in raising the price of chewing tobacco. Losing interest in the debate, Beamon let his mind wander back to Sara Renslier and her church.
He’d underestimated her, he knew now. He’d read Ernie’s book and talked to Volker at the G
erman Embassy, but in the back of his mind he’d considered both of their reports a bit suspect. Some people just had conspiracy on the brain—anyone who’d been with the Bureau for as long as him knew that. How many times had he been surrounded at a party by people wanting the inside scoop on the space aliens that had really killed Kennedy or the CIA/KGB team that had developed the AIDS virus?
But now here he was, tilting at an organization with millions of followers and a yearly income that would give it a respectable position on the Fortune 500 if it were a corporation. They were watching what people read and—though he hadn’t gotten Goldman’s confirmation yet—they were probably listening in on the long-distance phone conversations of some of the country’s most influential people. And then there was the small matter of that group of ex-military nutcases fanatical enough to weld bracelets to their wrists.
Beamon pulled his credit card from his wallet and laid the beer and wine on the counter as the cowboy walked away, still grumbling.
“How are you today, Mr. Beamon?” the man at the register said.
“I’ve been better, Barry. You?” He was in this store regularly enough to have become a favored customer. He would probably put braces on Barry’s kids’ teeth before he got transferred out or canned.
“I’m good, Mr. Beamon. Thanks for asking.”
“The kids?”
Barry frowned and ran Beamon’s credit card through the machine again. “They’re good, too. Taking them to their mother’s house for the weekend.”
The skin above Barry’s nose creased as he looked down at the little black keypad next to the cash register.
“Problem?” Beamon said.
“It doesn’t seem to want to accept your card. Could you be maxed out?”
Beamon shook his head and handed the man his other card, though he didn’t have much hope for it.
“How you doing on that little Jennifer Davis girl?” Barry asked as the machine decided how it felt about Beamon’s second credit card.
“Working on it. See what happens.”
The man nodded knowingly and looked down at the keypad again, obviously a little embarrassed. “It doesn’t like this one either, Mr. Beamon. There must be something wrong with the machine. Let me put it on your account.”
