Prophet Of Doom td-111

by Warren Murphy

  Smith frowned like a lemon drying.

  Was this a joke? Esther Clear-Seer had been calling herself Prophetess. But that was just her title. Or was it?

  Smith dismissed the possibility. No one parted with a quarter of a million dollars to hear his fortune.

  Smith returned to the Truth Church Foundation account and traced the next deposit. It was a woman's name that meant nothing to him, but when he cross-referenced the name with those listed in CURE'S massive database, he discovered that she was a Hollywood actress, famous for her roles as a defunct prime-time soap-opera diva and subsequently as mistress to a New Age faith healer.

  Smith felt a tightening in his throat.

  He scanned the computer files rapidly.

  Some of the checks were harder to trace than others, but the pattern formed by those that were more easily identified demonstrated that the Truth Church ranch had recently become a magnet for the crystals-and-cuviur segment of American society.

  At the beginning of the cycle, it seemed as if the church had touched only the fringes of wealthy

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  society. Transaction after transaction showed that numerous celebrities had made the Truth Church the payee on dozens of checks. But the most alarming aspect was the trend appeared to have begun moving into the mainstream. The CURE computers traced checks to various political figures and business leaders whose names Smith recognized.

  That's why Moss Monroe had gone out there. The specific motivation was as yet unclear, but obviously there was something to be had at the Truth Church ranch for which these people were willing to pay dearly.

  Smith withdrew from the Truth Church Foundation account and severed his computer connection with the Thermopolis First State Bank.

  Once he backed into the computer's main drive, he leaned back in his cracked leather chair. The instant his fingertips left the keyboard's capacitor field, the letters winked out. The desktop became a pool of blackish onyx, the computer screen a single, unblinking amber eye staring sullenly up at him from some fearful nether region.

  There was nothing more to go on.

  Smith glanced at his Timex. It was 11:00 p.m.

  Remo had yet to check in. But that wasn't unusual. CURE'S enforcement arm had never been as punctual as Smith would have liked, and it was possible that Moss Monroe was still at the ranch. Engaged in what, Smith did not know.

  There was no doubt that something strange was going on out in Wyoming. Something larger than Smith had originally guessed. Perhaps it had something to do with Zen and Gary's "prophecy," but until he had

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  something more concrete to go on, this part of the investigation was dead in the water.

  Smith was shaken from his reverie by the ringing of a telephone. For an instant he thought it was Remo checking in, then he realized it wasn't the blue contact phone jangling. He pulled open a drawer desk and lifted the receiver of the clumsy red AT&T standard phone that was his direct line to the White House.

  "Yes, Mr. President," Smith said crisply.

  "Smith," the familiar hoarse voice said. "Sorry to call this late."

  "Go ahead, sir," Smith prompted.

  The President seemed to be at a loss for words. He cleared his throat a few times, uncertainly.

  "Is there something I can do for you, Mr. President?" Smith queried. His clipped, lemony tones showed no underlying curiosity.

  The President forced the words out. "It's been brought to my attention that out west there's an establishment of—let's say ill repute. Members of my party have been...frequenting this establishment."

  The uncharacteristic trepidation in the man's voice led Smith to a safe conclusion. Circumstances had often brought the world's two oldest professions into conflict from time immemorial, and it appeared as if the President had a potentially embarrassing political situation on his hands.

  Whatever else Smith was, he was not a pawn of any political party.

  "Mr. President, you are aware that it is not part of our charter to get involved in domestic political situations."

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  "I know that," said the President. "Of course. But—"

  "Then you agree it would be inadvisable for us to investigate a matter of a delicate political nature."

  "Ordinarily, yes," the President agreed. "But there's more to this than that."

  Smith pursed his razor-thin lips. "I am listening."

  ' 'Have you ever heard of a place called Ranch Rag-narok?"

  Harold Smith listened to the President for barely five minutes.

  The Chief Executive explained how he had been approached at a party fund-raising dinner earlier that evening by a congressman who had helped the President win a surprise victory for a piece of important legislation in the House. The man insisted that he had been told at a ranch in Wyoming the identity of those in the opposition who needed to be strong-armed and precisely what personal information would persuade the men to sway their votes. In private life this was considered blackmail, but in Washington it was business as usual.

  The President was willing, at first, to dismiss the man and his claim as mildly eccentric, but twice during the same dinner—once by another congressman, once by a contributing business executive—it had been confided to the leader of the free world that all his questions about the future could be answered at the same small ranch.

  The President cleared his throat noisily. "Do you—do you think there's anything to this?"

  "To fortune-telling?" Smith retorted skeptically.

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  "When you put it that way, no. Of course not. But—"

  "But what?"

  "Well, my wife believes in this stuff. In fact, she spends a lot of time in the Red Room talking to Eleanor Roosevelt."

  "Claiming to talk to Eleanor Roosevelt, you mean," Smith said.

  "Er, sometimes I listen at the door," the President said guardedly. His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. "Sometimes I hear two voices. What do you think of that, Smith?"

  "Not much," Harold Smith said truthfully. "And I would steer your political allies away from Ranch Ragnarok, if I were you," he added.

  Repeating CURE's directive to avoid political entanglement, Smith excused himself and hung up.

  For a long time after he had replaced the receiver, Smith's hand continued to grasp the warm red plastic.

  He had his answer. The cryptic scrawl in the corner of that first check had been no joke. Reputable people with something to lose were willing to risk public ridicule to travel to the Truth Church ranch.

  For a glimpse into the future.

  At long last Smith released the receiver and pushed the desk drawer silently back into place.

  He spun his chair toward the window behind him and stared at the silent, black waters of Long Island Sound.

  For the first time that evening, he noticed that night hud fallen.

  Chapter Ten

  Michael "the Prince" Princippi had been out of politics for a decade, and although most Americans were relieved by this prolonged absence there were some—granted, a very small minority—who longed for the Prince of Massachusetts politics to return to the public spotlight. There was no one who held this view more strongly than Mike Princippi himself.

  His rise to the head of the presidential pack a decade before had been both surprising and meteoric. He was far from flamboyant, but not deliberate enough in his demeanor to be considered reserved. He was, quite frankly, dull.

  No one thought Princippi would get the nomination of his party during the 1988 presidential contest and, therefore, no one in his party campaigned much against him.

  After the dust of the primary battles had settled, the other contenders were shocked to find out that their previous year of squabbling and backstabbing had effectively handed over the presumptive nomination to a man with the charm of a haddock and the charisma of a bucket of chopped ice. A broken space heater projected more warmth, the party chairman had lamented.

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&nbs
p; Princippi had staked his claim to the White House by touting the exploding economy he had presided over as governor of Massachusetts, and he was right in singling out his stellar achievement. What he failed to tell the nation was that the real miracle in his home state was the fact that the makers of red ink were able to produce enough of the stuff to keep up with Prin-cippi's wild spending spree. This was the secret Michael Princippi effectively hid from the voters for so long: although he was an experienced technocrat with a penchant for knowing where all the paper clips in the governor's office were, his administration blew through money like a thresher through a field of autumn wheat.

  For much of the race, it seemed that the voters would overlook Princippi's obvious shortcomings.

  That was until the question.

  It was at the second debate. He was up against the then vice president, and Barney Shea, the cable anchorman, had asked a personal question that the reporter hoped would help the governor dispel the silly notion that he lacked passion.

  "Governor Princippi," the anchorman began, "Kiki Princippi is decapitated and her twitching body violated by four sweating stevedores. What do you do?"

  Kiki. His wife. As the cameras whirred away, as the satellites beamed the small man's image to millions of homes across the country, Michael Princippi paused for dramatic effect, pondering the question.

  At long last the man who would be president spoke.

  "I'd identify the body, obviously, Barney—well, at least the head...."

  The full text of the response, though telecast almost

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  daily up until election day, was irrelevant. The Prince had screwed the pooch.

  Princippi lost the race in a landslide.

  When his party surged ahead four years later, retaking 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the first time in twelve years, Michael Princippi had gone on the few talk shows that would have him and pontificated his opinion that the then president-elect's victory was a ratification of Princippi's own abortive campaign. Four years after his dream had gone down in flames, Michael Princippi was still claiming victory. Something deep about having lost the battle but won the war.

  During the most recent presidential race, his party had treated him like a poor relation. His calls to offer assistance to the national committee headquarters in Washington had gone unreturned. He'd gone full cycle from being courted to becoming a pariah.

  He swore for the absolute last time, as he had so many times in the past, that his career in the fickle world of politics was at a definite end.

  And this time his resolution held, until he heard through his remaining political connections of a place out west where all questions could be answered...and all answers were guaranteed to come true.

  It was after midnight when Michael Princippi arrived in Thermopolis, Wyoming. The battered Volkswagen Beetle he had driven since his days in law school coughed clouds of thick exhaust into the warm spring air.

  The former governor's excessive personal frugality had been fodder for the stand-up comedians during the heady days of the '88 campaign, and the rickety old

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  car had borne the brunt of many an attack. While the worst of the barbs were flying, Michael Princippi's only concern was that the ridicule would force him to go out and buy a new car. After all, this one only had 190,000 miles on it and forty-eight oil changes.

  Ten years later, with the odometer a few miles shy of its fourth restart, Michael Princippi chugged past the sleepy Thermopolis houses with their Re-elect Senator Jackson Cole signs tapped arrow-straight in their neatly tended lawns.

  He remembered with some bitterness that Jackson Cole had been a friend of his opponent during the presidential race and he briefly considered aiming the Volkswagen across a few of the tidier lawns that displayed the senator's owlish visage. But back in Ohio, he had been forced to bind the rusted-out muffler in place with his shoelaces, and he was afraid the jostling would snap them loose.

  Princippi left the images of Cole behind him as he passed through the far side of town. A few miles out he came upon the flashing amber light that was suspended above the twisting paved road, and he turned left onto the well-marked dirt path that led to Ranch Ragnarok.

  He drove several miles into the thickening woods before his washed-out headlights caught sight of armed patrols. At each twist in the path where he saw them, the Ragnarok guards would pause briefly—like deer mesmerized by the flash of light from the oncoming vehicle—before resuming their march through the cluster of trees.

  Princippi passed through the gate without incident. Either no one recognized him after so many years out

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  of the political spotlight, or the Ragnarok soldiers were trained not to be awed by celebrity—something Michael Princippi still considered himself to be. Whatever the reason, no one batted an eye as Mike "the Prince" Princippi pulled up to the ranch house at the end of the main path.

  A full-figured woman in white-and-gold vestments waited for him on the wide hacienda-style porch. When Princippi climbed out of his car, she rose from a small wooden bench beside the door.

  "You're here for Kaspar," she intoned.

  It was a statement, not a question. Her eyes were dull and her voice flat. For a second he thought she was wearing a mask. On closer inspection, he realized both of her eyes had been blackened. Painful dark rings encircled both eyes, making her resemble a raven-haired raccoon. Her nose was bluish and slightly swollen.

  Princippi cleared his throat. "I'm here to see my future."

  The woman sighed. "You want Kaspar," she said, nodding to herself. "Everyone wants Kaspar."

  She beckoned him inside the ranch.

  There was an office in a former bedroom at the rear of the building and, between a pair of four-drawer filing cabinets, a concrete staircase descended into the earth below.

  Princippi followed the woman down.

  The tunnel was cool and musty. Lally support columns held up iron cross beams, and the side walls were stacked with cinder blocks as far into the distance as Michael Princippi could see.

  The dirt floor was boxed in with open frames of

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  wood, which butted up against one another. Princippi had to step over the four-inch-high cross sections of wood every few feet.

  "They start pouring the concrete tomorrow," the woman called over her shoulder by way of explanation.

  At several points along the way the new tunnel met with sections that appeared to be older. Vast storehouses faded into the distant shadows both left and right of the tunnel.

  There were rooms packed to the ceiling with U.S. Army surplus supplies. Boxes of K rations left over from the Korean War were piled neatly on forged metal shelves. One room held nothing but jug upon jug of bottled water. Most of the rooms, however, seemed stuffed to near overflowing with crates bearing sinister-sounding names like White Phosphorus and Thermite in bold black stenciled letters on the sides. There were various cryptic warnings on all of the containers concerning the danger of exposure to fire or extreme heat. Disconcertingly these were packed next to huge galvanized steel drums that reeked of gasoline.

  Other rooms were lined with rack upon rack of guns. More weapons than Princippi had ever seen— even during his famous photo-op tank ride during the 1988 presidential race. Ragnarok soldiers shuffled sleeplessly through the underground chambers in a human parody of a paramilitary ant colony.

  Judging from where they had entered the tunnel, Princippi guessed that the rooms were all near or beneath the large, warehouse-type buildings he had seen in the distance on his drive up, and he was relieved

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  when the woman led him beyond this area and into another long stretch of newly constructed tunnel.

  This section seemed to go on forever, but at last he saw that the thread of insulated wire that was tacked to the cinder-block wall and hung at regular intervals with sickly yellow lights along the whole length of the tunnel finally turned upward.

 
He was escorted up another flight of concrete stairs and soon found himself in the torch-lit interior of the old airplane hangar.

  Without a backward glance, Esther Clear-Seer led him through the building to the Pythia Pit.

  Inside the newly constructed room, Princippi saw an emaciated girl with stringy hair perched atop the rocky hillock in the center of the room. The girl stared, immobile, into space. Thin wisps of yellow smoke spluttered up from somewhere in the riven rock beneath her.

  Resplendent in his priestly garb, Kaspar stood at the base of the small hill, a tethered goat staked to the dirt floor near him. He smiled when he spied Princippi.

  "I was expecting you," he said politely. "I am Kaspar. Present your offering to the priestess of the Ragnarok Oracle."

  Princippi blinked at the name, but said nothing. He nodded and fished in the jacket pocket of his suit, pulling out his checkbook.

  "How much was it again?"

  "The fee is twenty thousand."

  Princippi gulped. "Dollars?" he squeaked.

  "You were aware of the fee before you came," Kaspar said flatly.

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  "I'm a former presidential candidate. Is there a discount?"

  When he saw the stony expression on Kaspar's face, Princippi dragged a Bic pen from his pocket. Reluctantly he filled out the check, double-, then triple-checking the amount he had filled in before turning the scrap of paper over to Esther Clear-Seer.

  "Give the woman two hundred dollars for the goat," Kaspar commanded.

  Princippi balked. "I don't want a goat," he complained.

  "The goat is for sacrifice. This you knew, as well."

  Princippi was ready to put up a stink about the goat clause, but it seemed as if this Kaspar already knew everything Princippi himself knew. Suppressing a shuddery wave of personal anguish, he handed over the cash to Esther.

  Kaspar next presented Princippi with a gem-encrusted knife.

  "Slaughter the animal."

  Princippi stared at the knife dully. He looked down into the wide, fear-filled eyes of the tiny creature before him.

  "What if PETA hears about this?" he asked fearfully.