Father Gonsalves indicated something on one of the pages. “Note particularly the concatenation in Spain in 1931. Ezquioga, Izurdiaga—”
“Basque country. Just before the civil war. People see things when they’re crazy.”
The priest shot him an impressed look. “Very good. Zumarraga, Ormaiztegui, Albiztur, Barcelona, Iraneta. All in Spain, within the same year.”
“A mental illness of some kind? Mass psychosis, brought on by the proximity of war? If you look at the dates—”
“You’re a data miner, Mr. Harris. You figure it out.”
Interesting choice of words. “Data mining” was not a term in common parlance. Most people had no idea what it meant. Seelye must have put him up to this.
He shook his head. “Too small a sample. No way to create an association algorithm. Probably need to use an API . . .”
“Let me help you.” Father Gonsalves leafed through the pages, found what he was looking for, pointed—
“Are you familiar with California City?”
“North of Lancaster, in the Mojave.” Hell on earth.
“It will take you a couple of hours to get there. Although at that time of day, the traffic will mostly be coming the other way.”
Was he for real? Traffic in L.A. ran in all directions pretty much twenty-four hours a day, six days a week. The myth of a “rush hour” that flowed one way in the morning and the other way in the evening was strictly an East Coast import, one of the things displaced people from the wrong side of the Mississippi clung to, like faith, to help them rationalize the irrational world that was God’s country. He’d seen the Sepulveda Pass clogged at 4 A.M., and once sped west on the Santa Monica Freeway on a fine spring day without braking once between downtown and the beach. Miracles sometimes did happen. Just often enough to keep the suckers in the tent.
“I haven’t agreed to anything yet,” Devlin objected.
“Sure you have,” replied the priest. “You’re here, aren’t you?”
They stood there staring at each other. Jacinta was still nowhere to be seen. Father Gonsalves gestured at the floor as he reached for the stack of papers. “I’m sorry, the rectory’s . . . closed to visitors.”
Devlin sat on the floor; the seat of his trousers would have to like it or lump it. The padre squatted like a Southeast Asian, rocking back on his haunches. That was a position Devlin had never quite mastered, couldn’t have even had he wanted to. It made him feel like the last refugee not to make it out of Saigon, and he had not yet fallen that low. Not quite.
“There’s more pictures. Do you want to see them?”
“Not unless you tell me what this is all about.”
“Listen to this.” Father Gonsalves closed his eyes and recited from memory. “ ‘Dear children! This is a time of great graces, but also a time of great trials for all those who desire to follow the way of peace. Again I call on you to pray, pray, pray—not with words, but with your heart. I desire to give you peace, and that you carry it in your hearts and give it to others, until God’s peace begins to rule the world.’ She said that. Here—”
More pictures. Not the desert: green hills, snowy mountains. A church with twin spires. “That was in 2002. Keep looking—”
A rocky, treeless hillside. Euro-hovels. A million Arabs in mufti, looking up at the sky. Skyscraper windows, sunlight glinting. A saltwater stain on a highway underpass, before which stood a makeshift altar, adorned with candles. And icons.
“You see? We need—”
“We?”
“—to know whether she’s real. Jacinta showed you the pictures from California City.” The pictures in the desert. “Have you ever heard of Juan Diego?”
He thought for a moment; even though he wasn’t originally from California, he remembered something about a baptized Indian, hundreds of years ago, somewhere in Mexico, who had an encounter—probably peyote-fueled—with a beautiful woman.
“She gave him roses and told him to go to the bishop in what is now Mexico City. And when he opened his tilma—her image was imprinted on his cloak. We call her Our Lady of Guadalupe. But it’s not that Juan Diego I’m talking about.”
Instinctively, Devlin looked at the rose petal he was still carrying in his hand as the priest fished a photo out of his stack. A dour bracero, by the look of him, Zapata mustache, floppy hat, holding a rosary. A group of people were kneeling beside him, praying, in the desert. In the background, he could make out a fenced-off area of white rocks with a sign in front of them.
The floor was even less comfortable than it looked. Devlin rose, brushing off his rump. “Sorry, padre, but I don’t believe in fairy tales, Bible stories, global warming, or the Dodgers’ chances this year.”
His answer seemed to please the priest. “That’s why we picked you.” He waved the pages as if fanning himself. “A string of negatives and no decisions—exactly the way the church prefers it. As a person of Mexican descent it embarrasses me to say this, but there is no limit to the imagination of superstitious peasants.” He handed Devlin a couple of folders. “The data’s all in here. Mine it”
Devlin got the picture. “Devil’s Advocate, huh? Debunk and demolish. Scrape the holy mold off the taco, so to speak.”
“More like Serpent’s Advocate.”
“Or the Great Red Dragon’s.”
“You read the Bible.”
“Only in hotel rooms. Scripture’s for Protestants.”
“I thought you said you weren’t Catholic.”
“You don’t have to be Catholic not to read the Bible.”
“Armando can drive you, if you’d like.”
So that was his name. “Armando’s sleeping.”
“Twenty thousand dollars ought to cover it. Half now, half upon receipt of your . . . thoroughly mined . . . report.”
The padre sprang up from his squatting position and extended his hand. It had a stuffed envelope in it.
Footfalls echoing, they walked toward the front doors. “One last question,” said the priest, yanking at the heavy wooden portal.
“Shoot.” The western sunlight hit him right in the eyes.
“Isn’t it rather hot for that suit?”
Not a question he hadn’t heard before. Nobody wore suits in Los Angeles anymore, except lawyers and agents, and even the lawyers took off their ties once they made partner, or on Fridays, whichever came first.
“Since when does hell have a dress code?”
The doors closed behind him. The bums were still homeless. The Escalade was waiting outside, a passenger door open. He stepped over a couple of prone winos, and wondered how long it would be before he joined them.
His secure smartphone buzzed. He looked at the screen. A single word:
DORABELLA
Oh, Jesus.
He switched off voice contact and the browser, but left messaging on. Might as well give eternity and redemption his best shot, and yet still stay in touch with the outside world. It was the least he could do. After all, he was on his way to meet the Blessed Virgin Mary.
There was a map on the front seat, with a location in the desert outside California City circled in red. There was a Polaroid camera, loaded and ready to shoot—extra film, too.
And one other thing. Actually, many other things: rose petals and hyacinths, all over the seats.
A voice from the backseat. He looked in the rearview mirror to make sure he was not seeing a ghost. But it was only Jacinta.
No time for questions. No time for thinking. Only time for believing. He wasn’t sure he had that in him, but he would have to try.
What was the Hollywood motto? Fake it ’til you make it.
Or was it, Fuck you, sucker?
No matter. He hit the gas and the car sped off, toward the desert.
He glanced in the rearview mirror. Nothing was following him, at least nothing corporeal.
Ghosts, he couldn’t do anything about.
CHAPTER EIGHT
California City, California
&
nbsp; The procession was taking forever and the cell phone service was terrible. But what did you expect out here?
Dorabella could mean only one thing. Skorzeny. And Maryam.
It was the last communication the Central Security Service, his agency, had received from her, the unbreakable code that Major Atwater over at NSA had finally cracked by understanding that the series of squiggles, all variations on the Greek letter e, was not a conventional cipher at all, not a substitute for clear text but a substitute for musical notation. The unseen, unheard mystery of a melody that only Elgar could notate.
He looked around for Jacinta, but she had disappeared. How could he have lost her? She must be here somewhere, commingled with the mostly Hispanic crowd.
California City was probably the unlikeliest place to be named after the Golden State. Flat, dry, dusty, a collection of desert cinder-block architecture married to macadam and concrete, it was the kind of place old priests with dark secrets went to die, just like in True Confessions. Out here in the Mojave, there was nothing between you and God except your faith or lack of it, and his lack of it was manifest, even to himself and the God he didn’t believe in.
Make that, no longer believed in. It was hard to believe in a merciful and compassionate and just God when your mother died in your arms, instead of the other way around, like He did.
Why “Juan Diego” had picked this spot over all the others eluded him. The same desolate desert landscape stretched in all directions. The Mojave wasn’t like the Sahara or the Gobi—it was not a limitless expanse of sand and camel dung. On the contrary, the California desert was the same only different in each direction you looked: mountainous here, rolling hills there, flat over there, with cactus and desert flowers and Gila monsters and horned toads and dry dirt and drier gullies that miraculously filled with water a few times each year.
There was a clump of rocks and near it a tent. Vendors hawked sacred bullshit, mostly images of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Euro-tourists, big blond Swedish women hoping for a walk on the wild side with Geronimo, strolled around in short shorts and cameras. Polaroids. Everybody had Polaroids.
Finally, the procession was approaching the tent. Was that Jacinta among them? It certainly looked like her, but then half the women in this crowd looked like her.
Devlin had spent plenty of time in Mexico, and his admiration for the Mexican people knew . . . well, it knew one bound. Drugs had destroyed these good, religious, hardworking, faithful people—demolished their families and turned the entire country into a sewer of hopelessness and despair. They were beheading people in Mexico now. Every day, the pathologies of the Middle East were drawing nearer—the clash of civilizations was no longer at Tours, or Seville or Vienna, but on the Tijuana border.
A dry wind blew across his face, snapping him out of his reverie—and propelling him headlong into another. Not all deserts looked, felt, or smelled alike. The California desert reminded him of another desert altogether, the one surrounding the Iranian city of Tabas, hemmed in by high mountains. The place where Jimmy Carter’s feckless Desert One mission, Operation Eagle Claw, came a cropper in 1980. At that moment, the Iranians lost their fear of the Great Satan.
Was Maryam there?
No time to dwell on that now. They were both in need of redemption, but the only soul he could save at the moment was his own.
He kept respectfully silent as “Juan Diego” passed by, an imitation priest surrounded by imitation acolytes. The voodoo pull of the Whore of Rome still exerted a powerful attraction; had Vatican II never happened, had the reforms instituted by Pope John XXIII never happened, odds were that the world would be a better place. Faith might be crap, but it was better than nothing, and it was obviously a terrible thing to lose.
The crowd of worshippers and tourists fell to its knees as “Juan Diego” began to pray. Devlin’s Mexican Spanish was long since up to snuff and he heard the man’s words directly, in his head and in his heart:
“O brothers and sisters,” began the charismatic preacher. “O beloved of Jesus and of His holy mother, Mary.” Devlin could hear the rosary beads clicking as the old ladies told the prayers, ripping through the Our Fathers and Hail Marys at lightning speed.
“We are gathered here today, as we gather on the thirteenth of each holy month, to honor our Blessed Mother, and to hear her. For she is angry, my brothers and sisters. Angry at the way God’s people have turned their backs on her Son. Angry at the indolence and corruption of the people, who lack only a Golden Calf to make their degradation complete.
“She comes, bringing us the Word. It is not a happy Word, not the Word of joy, but the Word of warning—there are trials and tribulations ahead, O my brothers and sisters. Days of great sorry, of misery and despair. And we are here to witness her warning.
“But do not abandon Hope. For so it must be, for so it is written and so shall it be done. Behold—she comes, roses strewn in her path!”
Somehow, a stray cell signal got through. His phone buzzed. Still kneeling, he glanced down at the display:
LOVE = HATE.
Quickly, he tried to retrace the call, but no luck: the signal had evaporated like moisture in the desert.
“. . . believe, my brothers and sisters. Point your cameras toward the heavens, and witness the miracle of love.”
The “priest” pointed up at the blazing sun. Five hundred Polaroids pointed in its direction.
He looked up, trying at once to avert his gaze and yet stare directly into the sun. Then he remembered the camera he was carrying. The Polaroid Jacinta had left for him.
“Behold—the Door of Heaven!”
He aimed and fired.
The camera whirred, then spit out its picture. It would take a minute or so for it to develop.
He shielded his eyes from the sun and looked back up, but his hand had been just slightly too late and the rays caught him with full force. For a moment, he couldn’t see a thing.
In his blinded state, he suddenly felt something brush against his forehead. He swatted it away as respectfully as he could. The cell phone messages could only have come from one man, and he knew that that one man would only contact him in the midst of a dire emergency.
Slowly his sight was returning. He blinked, the reverse images—like X-rays—still flashing in his brain. There was something there, at the edge of his vision, but he couldn’t quite see it.
He was moving back toward normal polarity now. Gradually, he became aware of a murmuring in the crowd, a swell turning into a shout of hope and radiant glory.
He didn’t want to, but he had to—the thing he sought was still there, at the edge of his vision, but fading quickly. Try as he might, he couldn’t grasp it as it slipped away.
Gone.
He opened his eyes.
Rose petals everywhere. People were picking them up, pressing them into devotionals, putting them into their pockets, even eating them in the hopes of absorbing some of their miraculous patrimony.
His eyes fell upon the Polaroid picture, now fully developed. It was the shot he had taken of the sun. There it was:
A rectangle of light, created by the aperture in reverse. And, at its center, darkness where there should be have been light. Darkness . . . and something else.
A figure? The image of a woman? Once you were blinded, whether by the sun or by superstition, anything could look like anything.
Then he saw the word. Anything could look like anything, but nothing could look like this. It was what it was.
A single word: Repent.
Time to go.
He found the car, just where he had left it. No sign of Jacinta.
Just a single rose on the passenger seat—fresh, glistening as if plucked from a spring shower.
About ten miles south of California City, his phone buzzed again. Devlin hit the scramble button. President Tyler himself didn’t have access to the encoding technology that his smartphone did. As soon as he hit the TALK button, the entire conversation would be encrypted, upl
inked to a secure tech satellite, voice-scrambled, digitally unsequenced, retransmitted, and then unscrambled at the point of reception.
“Who am I talking to?” He waited for the operation code. There was only one right answer; otherwise he would assume the relationship had been compromised and would act accordingly. That would be too bad. He liked Danny, the man had always been there for him. But rules were rules.
“Don Barker.”
“Speak.”
A brief pause. Something was wrong. “What do you know about poisons?”
“Get to the point.” Secure wireless conversations didn’t stay secure forever.
“V- series nerve agent, Novichoks, QNB—I can’t tell yet.”
“Where are you?”
“Coalinga, heading north to San Francisco. Every cow within fifty miles is dead.”
“People?”
“Not yet.”
“Then it’s probably not poison. What’s the news say?”
He could hear “Don Barker” fiddling with the radio. He could hear other voices. Devlin’s keen ears picked them up—three females, one boy.
“Reports just coming in now.”
“Get over to Lemoore and stand by.” Lemoore was a naval air station between Coalinga and Visalia. “Hope and the kids will be safe there.”
“Roger that.”
“Anything else?”
“Do you believe in miracles?”
Until an hour ago, the answer would have been no. “Yes,” he said, and rang off.
CHAPTER NINE
Washington, D.C.
President John Edward Bilodeau Tyler looked at the latest poll numbers on his computer screen, then turned and reached for the fresh whiskey that Manuel Concepcion, his personal steward, always had ready for him. Especially these days.
“This fucking bitch.”
That would be Angela Hassett, the other party’s nominee. She’d been crowned in Kansas City, at their convention, her candidacy covered by the cable news networks as breathlessly as the Second Coming. The First Woman Major Party Candidate! The greatest orator since . . . since, well, the last one. Surprisingly feminine—hot, even—and yet as ruthless as any man. A ball breaker, as a matter of fact, and wasn’t that great? About time the boys got a taste of their own. Served them right for hundreds of years of male chauvinist piggery-pokery, to coin a word.
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