Sinner

by Ted Dekker

  Then again, Steve and Claude and Paula, all of them had a way of making even total strangers feel like insiders within minutes of arriving. Her understanding of friendship had been formed through cliques and alliances forged by kids of similar race and beliefs, and then only after a formal invitation to join the group.

  Someone had forgotten to tell Paradise that the customs of society had become more complicated than theirs, which was simply: Hello there, friend, how you doing this afternoon? Have a seat. Have a bite of my pie?

  The informal meeting had come about for two reasons: One, Johnny had headed out of town with Kelly for a meeting at ten o’clock this morning, and no one had heard a word from him since.

  Two, people were coming.

  Ben Ringwald, who had to be ninety if he was a day, chuckled. “Well, if we’d a’known this day was coming, we might have built us a few hotels with all that loot everyone’s holdin’ on to.”

  “I don’t see it being a problem,” Claude said. “We have over two hundred homes in this valley. And another hundred barns.”

  They hung around the bar and two round tables, half of them nursing drinks or popping the peanuts Steve had put out. The restaurant was once a proper bar before they’d converted it, and the old lights behind the counter still advertised Bud Light.

  “We aren’t putting visitors in barns,”Paula said.“Not if I have anything to say about it.We can use the church if we have to, but we have plenty of room to house a hundred guests.”

  “A hundred? And what if no one turns this tap off? I’d say we already have fifty. Give it a couple of more days and we could have five hundred. You ready for that?”

  “Well, it’s not the housing I’d worry about.We can put ten to a house if we have to. It’s food.”

  “Got ya covered there,” Ben rattled with a twinkle in his eye.“Me and Charlie got us a few extras.”

  They looked at the old geezer. Richest in the valley on account he owned seven fields, Paula had told Kat. He glanced at their questioning gazes.

  He shrugged. “You know Charlie. He’s a bit of a survivalist. Trust me, food won’t be a problem. Could prob’ly feed five thousand for a week out of that basement.”

  Kat spoke up. “Umm, excuse me?” They glanced at her. “I’m not sure you guys are getting the whole picture here.” She thought Joseph Houde did, judging by his smile. “Any of you been on the Net in the last couple of hours?”

  “Sure,” Claude said.

  “This thing’s blowing up out there. I mean really, actually blowing up.”

  “That’s just the Net, honey,” Paula said.

  “Just the Net? The Net is America. People live on the Net. And it’s not just Johnny’s blog, it’s thousands of blogs. It’s news stories. It’s dialogue centers, chat rooms . . . Half the country is talking about Paradise.”

  They just looked at her, still not comprehending. To them, life was about getting a kick out of what junior did last night during supper. To the rest of the country, life was quick exchange over the Net about what Johnny did last night.

  “Tell them, Joseph.”

  The reporter chuckled. “She’s right. As of a half hour ago, Johnny’s blog had over two hundred million hits worldwide and has been referenced over fifty thousand times on the news feeds. Today alone, his name has been viewed over a billion times if you include public chat rooms, unrestricted e-mail, and the rest of it.”

  “A billion?” Katie Bowers asked, as if she hadn’t heard right. “How is that possible?”

  “Think about it. One post on a bulletin board might use his name a half dozen times. Turn that into a hundred-page thread.Multiply it by a thousand threads. And that’s just bulletin boards.”

  “Okay, so Johnny’s gone and gotten famous on us.”

  “But it’s not just Johnny,” Joseph said. “There are threads cropping up suggesting that believers who support Johnny should join him in Paradise.”

  Kat watched realization settle over them.

  “I’d say fifty people have rolled into town this afternoon, some of them press. It could be five hundred tomorrow. And it could be three thousand in three days.”

  “No, that’s too much,” Paula protested. “What in the world are we supposed to do with three thousand people?”

  “Like I said,” Claude replied, “We have plenty of barns.”

  “What do you expect them to sleep on, dirt?”

  “The church won’t hold that many either,” someone said.

  “We could set Johnny up on the old theater’s roof and let him speak from there,” Claude said.

  The suggestion came from left field and had little to do with the point.

  “I hate to point out the obvious,” Joseph said, eyeing Kat as if only he and she were really in the know. She liked the man.“But accommodations are the least of your problems.”

  “Well, you can’t just throw people into a barn and then expect them to live like human beings,” Paula said. “What are we going to feed three thousand hungry mouths? Grain?”

  “I think he means to say that these people will never arrive,” Kat said.

  “I thought you said three thousand people would arrive in a couple of days.”

  “Could,” Steve said from behind the bar. “If they aren’t stopped.”

  “Who would stop them?”

  No one seemed to want to speak out the obvious, Kat thought. Were they really that naive?

  “The law,” she said. “The law’s gonna come to Paradise.”

  “Claude’s the law,” Paula said. Paradise had no real law—they’d elected him as their “sheriff” two months earlier when the spot became vacant. But really, he was just the grocery store owner.

  “She means the real law,” Steve said.

  Joseph stood and walked around the table, cracking his knuckles. “I still don’t think you’re getting the whole picture here. You do realize that you’ve broken the law. Not just a little law. Not like running a red light or being drunk in public. The law Congress just passed makes everything you’re doing here illegal. A federal offense. They’re not just going to sit by and let you keep doing it.”

  “Well, that’s fine, Joseph,” Paula said. “We know that. They’ll try to keep us from saying what we know to be the truth, and we’ll keep saying it, and then who knows what happens? Johnny will help us figure all that out. But in the meantime we have to figure what to do with all these people.”

  “And if they come in here tomorrow to arrest all of you? What will you do?” Joseph asked.

  “Are you asking on the record?” Kat asked. “To publish, I mean?”

  He shrugged. “Unless you don’t want me to publish it.”

  Steve set his glass on the bar. “Publish what you want. Johnny will make the call, but I think if they come to arrest us, we’ll lock ourselves in the church.”

  “You’d resist arrest?”

  “Not with force, no. Call the church our prison.”

  “And if they demand that you surrender yourselves?”

  “Then we’d have to go,” Katie said.

  Her husband shook his head. “Well, I ain’t walking. If they want to throw me in prison, they’s going to have to pick me off the floor.”

  “What good would that do? You’re going. You’re going one way or the other.”

  “Do you really think they would come in here and arrest the whole town?” Paula asked. “Three thousand people?”

  “That’s the whole point: they won’t let it get to three thousand people because they know they can’t deal with that many,” Kat said. “Which is why they’ll probably come in tomorrow and deal with five hundred.”

  “Even five hundred. They’re going to arrest five hundred people?”

  “They won’t have to arrest five hundred.” They all turned and stared at Sally, who sat quietly at the back with her cell phone on the table before her, waiting for a call from her son.

  “They’ll come for Johnny,” she said.

  �
�If they take Johnny, they take us all!” Claude said.

  The screen door slammed behind Kat and she twisted around. Johnny faced them from the entry. Kelly followed to his right and slightly behind him.

  Sally rushed past Kat and embraced her son. “You’re back,” she whispered.

  “I’m fine, Mother,” Johnny said, kissing on her cheek. And then he walked in, like a prophet, come to set his people straight.

  “Hello, Johnny,” Kat said.

  “Hello, Kat. Claude.” He scanned the rest. “Looks like the town’s growing.”

  “The newsman thinks we’ll have five hundred by tomorrow,” Paula said. “We were just talking—”

  “Five hundred isn’t enough,” Johnny said.“We need a gathering of three thousand by morning. Can you do that, Joseph? Tell them that Johnny Drake is calling for three thousand followers to drive through the night and join him in Paradise valley by sunrise.”

  “You might get more than three thousand.”

  He acknowledged Joseph with a single nod and faced the old geezer, Ben. “That food you told me about will feed them for a week?”

  “Should.”

  Johnny looked at Steve. “There are still only two roads into this valley?”

  “Only two.”

  “I want you and Claude to get a few men together and go house to house. Collect every weapon in this valley. Every gun, every hunting knife, all of it. Take them all up the road three miles and leave them in a pile, right in the middle of the road. You think you can do that?”

  A thin smile crossed Steve’s face. “Sure.”

  “We’re going to have us a showdown,” Johnny said.

  “CRUSH IT!”

  Darcy leaned forward in an overstuffed chair and faced Attorney General Lyndsay Nadeau across her dark wood desk. Darcy glanced at Billy, who sat beside her. He hadn’t smiled once today that she could remember.

  “She’s right,” Kinnard said, speaking from the couch next to FBI Deputy Director Lawhead.“Crush it. Question is, how? You’re not suggesting we roll the National Guard in there.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. How else do you enforce the law, with threats? He’s blatantly defying the laws of this country. If we don’t respond now, send a clear message, we could face much worse than the Kansas City riots. Surely you see that.”

  Lyndsay watched them, perpetual smile fixed in place. The defiance on the Net was growing exponentially by the hour, but so far it had been contained to the Net. Except for Paradise.

  “The president wants this shut down,” the White House chief of staff said, turning from the window.

  “Of course he does, Annie,” Lyndsay said. “We expected something like this, maybe not in quite the same form, but we always knew the first challenges would come over the Net.”

  “And Johnny Drake’s activities clearly break the new law, correct?”

  “I’ve had a team of ten of the country’s best attorneys on the case since this broke. There’s a lot of noise out there, but the law the president signed isn’t the most difficult to interpret. Trust me, what is happening in Colorado right now clearly defies the law in a most egregious manner.

  It’s blatant and purposeful, done to make a very specific point.”

  “Johnny threatens to test our system in a way it’s never been tested,” Billy snapped. “This is spreading like fire out there. What are the stats?” He stood and waved off Kinnard.“Forget the stats, we know the problem. And it’s going be almost impossible to shut down. You mess with people’s faith and they tend to get just a bit lopsided on you. I’ve been there.”

  “Precisely why we wrote the laws,” Annie said.

  “If we don’t shut Johnny down in the next twenty-four hours, it’s going to be too late.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t see the urgency,” Lyndsay said.

  “Think!” he snapped. Billy had indeed changed since his visit to Paradise, and Darcy liked him this way. “Today he was joined by roughly fifty people, so as of this moment the three hundred heroes standing in the gap number three hundred and fifty. I guarantee you that will swell to ten, even twenty times that number. Johnny isn’t going to be talked down—he’d die first. That’s what Darcy and I learned in Paradise today.We have two choices: either accommodate Johnny or silence him with force.”

  He took a breath.

  “I know you won’t accommodate him, so the question is whether you want to go in there with force tomorrow, when you only have to deal with a few hundred, or go in later and deal with thousands.”

  She nodded. “Point made.”

  Yes, point made, Darcy thought. But that wasn’t Billy’s true motivation. He’d always supported the new law, but not with the passion he wore on his sleeve now.

  She’d tried to engage him on the flight home, but he stared out of the window most of the way, lost in thought. He said that Kelly had made a plea for Johnny, and at first she wondered if he was considering it. But Billy said that Johnny would get exactly what he had coming to him.

  “The law will prevail,” Darcy said. “We all know that getting the act passed was bound to happen anyway, just like similar laws have been passed in Canada and Europe. Billy and I just greased the wheels. The world can’t afford certain freedoms any longer, and it just might take as much blood to purge them as it did to win them.”

  “And now Johnny is trying to put the brakes on it all,” Annie said.

  Billy waved his hand.“Keep this isolated to Paradise and Johnny won’t be able to do a thing. Let Darcy and me handle this our way.”

  “Which is?”

  “To roll in tomorrow and seal off the valley before we issue our ultimatum. Ignore the hundreds of thousands of voices joining Johnny on the Net and go after him now, before they actually join him on the ground.”

  “And then?”

  “And then enforce the law using whatever force is necessary.”

  “And just how far do you suggest we take that force, Billy?”

  Darcy answered for him, making her support clear.

  “As far as it takes to silence Paradise. We want carte blanche from the governor of Colorado, the president, the Justice Department, and whoever orders the National Guard around in situations like this.”

  “Stop,” Lawhead said. “Giving you that kind of authority could undo everything we’ve accomplished. First of all, activating the National Guard to do anything but assist the Justice Department will demonstrate to the American people that we are enforcing domestic laws with military force. We simply can’t afford that for two reasons: One, engaging an American populace with military force is like trying to squash a bee with a sledge-hammer, which will take weeks of preparation and will effectively drive Americans toward insurrection at the national level. Enforcing change with troops will only convince people that they are no longer free at all. Secondly, because the National Tolerance Act is a federal statute, it needs to be handled by federal law enforcement.”

  “Which puts a quick response out of the picture?” Darcy snapped. “We can’t afford to let this situation grow. We don’t even have time to deliberate. We have to move now. Time is on Johnny’s side, not ours.”

  “That’s why we sent you two in first,”Annie said.“And Johnny sent you both home.”

  “I’m not saying there isn’t a solution,” Lawhead said, glancing between them. He stood, clicked a remote, and began to highlight points on a digital map. “Paradise is in a valley, which is to our tactical advantage. Containment by the Colorado National Guard should be simple enough and shouldn’t cause a PR disaster. Assuming that the governor will provide us with support from the state patrol as well, we can cordon off the town within hours.”

  “He will,” Darcy said.

  Lawhead nodded, understanding her. “Fine.” He clicked his remote and brought up another aerial image of Paradise Valley. “With medical and support troops in play, the FBI can begin a systematic sweep from both ends of the valley in coordinated tactical groups.We c
an fly them out from Quantico if necessary. A component of the Air National Guard can provide overwatch and strategic direction. The state patrol will put out descriptions, the guard will hold the line, and the FBI will prosecute the arrests while air support provides intel. It could work.”

  “It has to,” Billy said. “What are the challenges?”

  “Warrants and timing.” Lawhead dropped his pencil on the table. “Justice won’t arrest on suspicion alone. We need federal papers authorizing these arrests. And getting interagency cooperation will take twenty-four to seventy-two hours. In the meantime, the Net will be counting their score while we’re still putting our pieces on the board.”

  Pause. “I didn’t say it would be quick. But this is legal, and it could work: the FBI serves the warrants, the guard provides medical support and over-watch, and the DOJ and state get to preserve credibility.”

  Darcy removed her sunglasses, set them on the table for all to see. “Seventy-two hours is two days too long.”

  Lawhead planted his palms on the table and eyed her through his own spectacles. “I can’t make miracles any more than you can talk Johnny Drake into a truce. You asked me for a legal solution that involved timing, force, and terrain. This is what I’ve got.”

  “Enough.” Kinnard stared at them. “You have several points that I think could be refined for our purposes. One, the attorney general can supply—or demand—the warrants to make this legal. Two, the sedition currently growing in Paradise is still small enough to contain without diverting traffic. Three, because Paradise is in a valley, we can divert or block over 80 percent of the satellite-based communications, and simultaneously shield outgoing calls and uplinks.”

  Darcy bit into the idea.“No coverage means no media. No media means we can act without hesitation.”

  That settled them all.

  “How far do we take this?” Billy asked.

  Darcy frowned. “As far as we have to.”

  “Legally . . .” Lawhead dipped his head and thought a moment. “With the warrants and the timing . . . It could work. But we need the governor, the Justice Department, and a good window of timing. The public spin we can handle later.”