The Brad West Files

by Fritz Galt

  Jade started up the engine.

  “Hey, how about paying for the gas,” the attendant said. “Moolah. Francs. Yen. Whatever you use over there.”

  They pulled away in a cloud of dust.

  Once they were back on the road, May confronted her friend. “Why did you steal the gas?”

  “I don’t have money,” she said. “Liang took it all.”

  May shifted slightly and pulled a wallet from her back pocket. “I still have mine.”

  “Oh.”

  Jade was silent for several minutes. She steered around slow-moving cars and glanced anxiously into the rearview mirror. Remarkably, there was no police car on their tail. Nor could they see Liang ahead of them.

  So May turned her attention back to the map. The next town was Fairplay. There Liang could take one of several routes. One road turned back northeast to Denver and the other shot due south to essentially nowhere. From the angle of the roads, it made no sense for Liang to be heading south of Breckenridge to head back north toward Denver. When they reached Fairplay, she told her friend to continue driving south.

  They had ventured onto an expansive plain rimmed by spectacular, snowy peaks. She read off the names of mountains they would pass: Mount Harvard, Mount Yale and Mount Princeton. The rugged 14,000-foot peaks seemed so far removed from the Ivy League schools half a continent away that they were named after.

  She traced the road further along on the map. Her finger encountered towns that seemed only to exist because they were at the intersection of minor roads. The main route continued nearly as far as the state border. Why would Liang be heading to New Mexico, where there were virtually no major cities?

  She unfolded the map completely to see what states bordered Colorado. Some had names she’d never heard before. There was Kansas to the east, New Mexico directly south, Arizona southwest and Utah due west. Why was Liang heading out into the middle of nowhere? The only city whose name she recognized was Tucson in southeastern Arizona. The previous year, she and Liang had gone there for training in Blackhawk helicopters. There, Liang had killed a colonel and she had met Brad West, the love of her life.

  She doubted Liang intended to relive that awful scene.

  Further away were Texas to the southeast and Nevada and California to the far west. Assuming that Liang had done no business in Denver or Breckenridge, given his quick pass through the two towns, he seemed to have come to the American West simply for the adventure.

  She shielded her eyes and scanned the empty landscape. She had never been anywhere so desolate before. The lack of people was unsettling.

  Chapter 23

  The Reverend Terry Smith sat backstage in the television studio wearing the robes of a preacher. But that Sunday morning, he wasn’t meditating. Nor was he reading the scriptures for inspiration.

  Instead, his right thumb was poised over a remote control. The original Reverend Smith appeared on the television screen. Terry fast-forwarded from sermon to sermon to pick out the most memorable performances.

  He mumbled phrases that struck a chord. Then he said them aloud and emulated the gestures. He was a stickler for details and wanted to get the other Terry Smith’s nuances just right. Several times, he paused the tape, rose to his feet, shook a fist, and uttered a powerful phrase in an even more tremulous way than his predecessor.

  He was determined to do more than get the accent and terminology right. He was going to elevate his legions to the next level. Just as certain imams were able to radicalize fundamentalists, he was going to take his devoted followers and turn them into his foot soldiers. Following that, just like the terrorists were able to turn the radicals into jihadists, within a few weeks he would put those who marched with him into action. And together they would fight their way to the White House.

  An acolyte held the curtain aside for him to walk on stage. “You’re on, Reverend,” a voice said in his earpiece.

  He could hear the gospel choir chanting and the congregation clapping in unison. They were prepped. He rubbed his hands together. Now for the coup de grâce.

  He stepped into the glare of studio lights with a broad smile on his face. He wasn’t a rock star, he had to remind himself. He didn’t have to drive the excitement. He was above the fray.

  But he had to be in synch. He lifted his voice to match the pitch of the music and shouted in cadence with the beat. He dredged up all the trite expressions that people longed to hear on Sunday mornings. His words punctuated each climax in the music. He comforted, he exhorted, he blessed, he forgave. This was some happy flock. For a moment, he could appreciate why his brother had chosen the profession.

  Then he waved a hand to silence the choir behind him. They took their seats and the organist moved into the lower registers of the keyboard. Row by row, the faithful took their seats in the vast hall. Through thick eyeglasses and from their wheelchairs, their attention was riveted on him.

  “This past week,” he began his sermon. “Our nation saw the beginning of a sea change in our spiritual lives.”

  Out in the halo of camera lights came a hearty, self-righteous “Amen.” Did they even know what he was talking about?

  “We have seen courageous acts of patriotism in Colorado and California.” He raised his voice a pitch. “Proud and responsible American leaders have…” He remembered Herman Stokes handing him the baseball bat. “They have stepped up to the plate to protect their people. They have…” and Randy Walsh came to mind, “tackled the nation’s problems with both hands.”

  Several in the congregation turned to each other in bewilderment. “Cue the choir,” the voice said in his earpiece.

  He spun toward the choir, his robes flowing out behind him, and was met by a soothing, sustained chorus of “Ooh.”

  He hiked his voice up another notch. “Today, we stand in the protective shadow of these courageous Americans.” Then he dropped his arm to cut off the choir. “But we’re not here today to talk about the mundane sphere of politics, or terrorism, or bio-terrorists infiltrating this nation. No!”

  The congregation responded with a hearty “No!”

  “We’re not here to discus nuclear weapons in our midst, or to talk of drug lords poisoning our nation’s youth.”

  “No!”

  “Here we stand plainly before our Lord, and we have but one thing to offer. Not our fear!”

  “No!”

  “Not our money!”

  “No!”

  “Not our cherished freedom!”

  “No!”

  “We’re here to offer our pure and simple faith.”

  The choir rose to their feet as one. They sang “Amen!” in perfect harmony.

  He lowered his voice. “Our faith lies in one God, our Lord the Almighty.”

  “Praise to the Lord,” the congregation echoed. No one was willing to be drowned out by his neighbor.

  “My fellow believers.” His voice cracked with emotion. “We are surrounded by those who don’t believe.”

  “No! No!” they shouted in alarm.

  “Yes! They are among us. They could be the man or woman seated right beside you. I tell you, we are being besieged by pagans!”

  “Oh, Lordy, take my soul,” the choir sang.

  “That’s right. Pagans! Our nation’s moral fiber is being shaken by pagans. Pagans from the Middle East. Pagans from Africa. Pagans from China. Pagans from India. Pagans from all corners of our great and wonderful earth! We stand alone, the last bastion of faith, in a world—” Here he crouched low. His voice whispered harshly into the microphone. “—where people believe in spirits!”

  “Oh, Lordy, save my soul.”

  “Can you imagine? Can you picture that?” His face took on an incredulous look. “Some believe in trees having souls, and train engines having hearts, and straw dolls performing miracles!”

  The crowd was on its feet in fiery indignation.

  “Yes. Our fellow man is desecrating the Lord, day in and day out. Praying to shrines of the dead. Channeling sp
irits out of thin air. Why do these people do this to us?”

  The congregation shouted back that they didn’t know.

  “Because they’re testing us. They’re testing our faith. The devil is working within them, trying to turn us against our wonderful, all-loving God.” Then he struck a far more ominous tone. “And I stand before you today to witness that we are a people under siege. Under attack by the foreign man, by the New Age man, and by the very academics who haunt the hallowed institutions of our children’s schools.”

  The crowd booed, which the chorus adroitly turned into another “Ooh.”

  With the reverend’s head bowed, the audience fell silent and took their seats. He raised his head slowly to reveal the truth about the Satan in their midst. He was holding a magazine article that had materialized from within his robes.

  “I hold a journal in my hands,” he began. “It is called Science, the most widely read scientific journal in the world. And, my brethren, it is published right here in these United States.”

  The crowd shrank back in horror.

  “And I draw your attention to the January issue, page 53. And the title of the article reads as such: ‘Modern Religions are Based on the Primitive Worship of Spirits.’”

  One could hear a pin drop as the congregation waited for the explanation.

  “Modern religions?” He strutted across the stage. “We are a modern religion. And this article states that we are based on the primitive worship of spirits!”

  A woman fainted in the front row, and ushers scrambled to catch her and revive her in full view of the television cameras.

  When the cameras finally swiveled back to Terry, he continued, “And the article goes on to say that our sacred music and dance are our means of exorcizing demons!”

  The crowd fell back in horror.

  “And who is the author of such an offensive article?”

  “Who?” the crowd shouted, smelling blood.

  “Dr. Yo Chow Go,” he said, sarcasm dripping from each mispronounced syllable. “From China!”

  There was a giant intake of air as the congregation sucked in its collective breath with indignation.

  “China, a country that has absolutely no religion, is telling our great nation in our very own science journals that our Bible, the bedrock of our faith, the inspired wisdom of the earliest Christians, owes its existence to voodoo worship, to paganism, to magic spells, to witchcraft! And they call this science?”

  He cued the choir for a dramatic chord. And he got one, a magnificent D major that could have come right out of Beethoven’s Fifth.

  “I tell you, these people are devil worshipers, and they are among us. If you talk to a tree, if you gaze into a crystal ball, if you stick pins in dolls, then you are one of them! We are different from them,” he asserted. “We are not scientists from China. We stand proud and we stand tall. And this—” he held the article high above his head, “is the work of the devil!”

  He began to tear the article into shreds and threw it into the air. Pieces littered down upon his head and shoulders.

  He stood there in glorious profile, arms upraised, triumphant, having just been shat upon by the words of the devil. With the paper still clinging to his silvery hair and dark robes, he walked out of the spotlight and beyond the camera marks and toward the front row of the congregation. In that impromptu act, the cameras had to move quickly to keep up with him.

  “Bring me the poor, the maimed, the halt and the blind!” he cried.

  The congregation, anticipating the familiar call, broke into, “We are one in the spirit, we are one in the Lord…”

  Terry scanned all the faces turned up at him and waited.

  “Second wheelchair up the aisle,” a voice whispered in his earpiece.

  Terry’s stern face turned kind as his heart flowed out to one particular lamb in his flock. “Young woman, what is thy ailment?”

  The cameras closed in on the wheelchair-bound invalid, who shook from the infirmities of old age and some unknown, but clearly debilitating malady. She looked about in amazement to have been singled out. She pointed to herself uncertainly.

  “Yes you, young creation of the Lord.”

  She collapsed in a swoon, but a pair of ushers quickly revived her. With the crowd’s encouragement, they wheeled her down the aisle and onto the burnished wooden stage.

  Terry placed the palm of his right hand on her wrinkled forehead and recited the words that his followers had come to expect. “If you are healthy in spirit…”

  “I am!” she cried, and clenched her violently shaking fists against her chest. She squeezed her eyes shut. Her skin was lined and blotchy under the camera lights.

  “….then you are healthy in the eyes of the Lord!” he proclaimed. “Rise, and ye shall walk.”

  The woman looked up hopefully into his face. The crowd tingled with anticipation.

  He reached out a hand, and she took it. Then, with one jerky movement after another, she locked her knees, leaned forward, and straightened up. With a sudden lurch forward, she shot out of the chair and sent it rolling backward and off the stage.

  For one dramatic moment, she stood teetering on the brink of collapse. But the good preacher would no longer assist her. Only her Maker could help her walk. Before the spellbound congregation and millions of television viewers, she summoned up her inner strength and began to stagger in an irregular path around the stage. Her arms no longer trembled and she spread them outward in the shape of a cross.

  The organ picked up the opening strains of a spiritual, and the choir started the believers clapping and singing praises to the Lord.

  The ushers pushed a young woman up.

  Terry’s earpiece came to life. “She wants to convert.”

  “Beautiful young creature.” He was deep in seduction mode. “Do you witness that there is one God?”

  She cried, “I do!”

  He placed an arm out straight and touched her forehead. “Then be filled with the spirit.”

  Stiff as a board, she fell backward into the awaiting arms of the ushers. The crowd wailed with awe.

  “Next, please,” Terry said.

  “Blind man,” the voice in his ear said, then added, “The show’s ratings are skyrocketing.”

  Terry paused a moment to take in the circus atmosphere around him. Everything from the television angles to the lighting, the music, the woman wandering about the stage, and the message he was delivering was perfect. He didn’t need to drug people and whack them over the head.

  The voting public was getting its first glimpse of their next president. He was making new converts live and on television, the most powerful and convincing medium of all.

  Chapter 24

  Brad West arrived in San Francisco jet-lagged, but full of purpose. He was going to show the CIA’s facts and figures to a friend at the University of California at Berkeley. Together, they would seek out the top scientific minds at the computer lab.

  As the airplane banked for its final approach, Brad beheld a most unusual sight. Container ships were backed up from bow to stern, forming a line that reached clear over the horizon. No wakes visible, they were sitting still in the water. The extent of the trade embargo could not have been clearer.

  At the airport, a cabbie was surprised when Brad asked to go all the way to Berkeley. “You could try BART,” he said. “I could take you to a train station.”

  “No, thanks.” Brad wanted to gauge the effects of the crisis on the city and to do that, he needed to be above ground.

  And what he saw unnerved him. They made great time skirting the steep hills that ran up the center of the peninsula. But in a city where traffic jams were legendary, theirs was the only car.

  “How’s the embargo going?”

  “Great!” the cabbie said. “If you want federal troops invading the docks. So Governor Walsh laid off all the longshoremen.”

  Laid off? What news had he missed during the flight? Brad looked around for evidence to confi
rm the cabby’s claim. Just before the Oakland Bay Bridge, he spotted people stepping over broken glass and carrying television sets and furniture out of a store. The same thing had happened at the department store in Beijing.

  They passed a line of cars that stretched nearly a mile and ended at a gas station. Many drivers had resorted to pushing their cars, presumably to save on gasoline.

  “I waited twelve hours to reach the pump,” the cabbie said.

  “What’s the hold up?”

  “We’re gonna run out of gas in a few days. Everyone’s hoarding.”

  Brad thought about it. He was lucky to have found a cab at all. Luckier still that airplanes continued to fly. Traveling around the country might not be so easy.

  The sunny noonday view from the bridge was spectacular, and he could almost forget the material world for a moment. The radio was tuned to an all ’70s station, and Diana Ross was singing the theme song from “Mahogany.”

  Do you know where you’re going to?

  Or was that the spirit in his head?

  Do you like the things that life is showing you?

  Quite frankly, yes, he knew where he was going. He had an important mission, not only that day but in life. The view was superb. He had a wonderful girlfriend. He was becoming known in his field. Still the nagging question:

  Where are you going to? Do you know?

  San Francisco was in the grips of a catastrophe. But surely the governor’s decision to shut his state’s ports down didn’t affect the rest of the country half as much.

  He let his emotions swell with the music. Wind whipped through his hair and the struts of the bridge cast rhythmic shadows across his face. He was going to save the world.

  Brad went straight to the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology to meet his colleague. He found Chuck Harris in his office waiting to see him.

  Chuck was a red-haired hippie and an eternal graduate student much like Brad. He welcomed Brad warmly. The big guy’s grip was firm, but his eyes glanced furtively out the dusty window toward the tree-shaded lawn.