Day 50 (The DMT Series Book 2) (8 page)

Alejandro put the lid back on the DMT-container. Not long now. He just needed to reach a critical mass of followers before announcing that he was the new prophet. Codyism would never succeed as a world religion with a white prophet anyway. There was too much stigma around white people. Most people in developing countries automatically assumed, and rightly so, that most white people were rich brats. A Mexican prophet though, a Spanish-speaking prophet, that was something the world craved. The whites had their Jesus, and the Arabs their Mohammed. Now the Spanish-speaking population would at last get their own prophet. There was a pool of more than 330 million people with Spanish as their native language.

More than enough to catapult Codyism into a mainstream religion.

20

Agent Fowler studied the body of the dead farmer on the floor of the barn. It was a shame that it had come to this. The farmer had been a patriot. He had paid his taxes and even served his country in the Korean War. Agent Fowler had done his research. There was no way around it though. No war was won without collateral damage. And that was what the farmer had been; collateral damage.

The Director had been crystal clear. Agent Fowler couldn’t use C4 or any other high-tech explosives. The attacks had to appear as if they had been executed by amateurs. If it had been up to Agent Fowler he would have used a drone as the delivery mechanism and chemicals as the weapon. Nothing scared people more than chemical bombs. He understood the Director though, and it also provided him with an opportunity. He had always wondered why terrorists were so ineffective. Despite there being thousands of willing martyrs around the world, most of them never got off the ground. And the few who did launched amateurish attacks that could have been better planned by three-year-olds. The vast majority of wannabe-terrorists got caught planning their silly and naïve operations a long time before they were ready to execute them. The truth was that most terrorists were the losers of society. Stupid morons who could hardly hold down a job at the supermarket. And then the even more stupid media elevated them into rock stars by labelling them terrorist masterminds. Agent Fowler shook his head.
Masterminds
. If buying a gun and walking into a coffee shop spraying bullets into innocent bystanders warranted the label of a terrorist mastermind, then the media had truly set the bar low. Talk about enabling idiots. If there had been a terrorist with even half a brain then Agent Fowler would have been worried. Luckily they were all morons, petty criminals who, encouraged by social media and left-wing newspapers, saw blowing themselves up as a way to get their fifteen minutes of fame. They were probably too stupid to even blog about their opinions. It was easier to blow themselves up and let the media do the job for them. Because none of the moron-martyrs whom Agent Fowler had read about seemed to be true believers. If they had truly believed in their God, Allah or whatever other gods there were, they would have spent every waking second of their life living exactly as their God wanted. And they wouldn’t have feared anything, because God would of course protect them until it was their time to die anyway. They could have walked out in front of a bus, and nothing would have happened unless their God wanted it to. Agent Fowler couldn’t exactly remember having read that any of the reported martyrs had lived their life like that. They just seemed to have blown themselves up in the hope that such an action would let them into paradise early, let them have their fun with their seventy-two virgins.

Damn losers.

And poor virgins.

Well, today Agent Fowler would be able to test out how much damage an intelligent terrorist could cause; a terrorist who wouldn’t blow his cover by chatting in confidence with friends and family, or revealing his frustration with society on the net before he got ready to execute his plan. He would simply get the job done.

No fuss.

Just blow up the building and get on with it.

His first target was the Washington Memorial Hospital. A lot of the politicians in Washington had relatives and old colleagues there, and it always hurt more when you could relate to the damage. The Director hadn’t expressed it in clear words, he had offered Agent Fowler a way out, told him he could call in a bomb threat if he felt the loss of civilian lives would weigh too hard on him. But Agent Fowler had seen it in the Director’s eyes - he would prefer casualties. One needed casualties if one’s goal was to strike fear in the population.

Agent Fowler dragged the dead farmer closer to the septic tank where two of his adult sons already lay dead on the bottom. The local police would probably assume an accident had occurred when the oldest of the sons had cleaned out the tank. And then his brother and father had died trying to help. Farming was a dangerous occupation. Accidents happened all the time.

Agent Fowler smiled. Two tons of ammonium nitrate, and another two tons of calcium ammonium nitrate, was sufficient to provide him with a bomb close to a thousand kilos. Enough to pulverize most of the Washington Memorial Hospital.

That much was for sure.

21

Alejandro approached the bed where Cody lay, almost feeling sorry for him. Cody looked like a tiny child in the king size bed. Cody barely seemed to notice Alejandro’s presence. As usual he was listening to the radio, or resting with the radio in the background was probably a more appropriate description. Cody claimed he needed constant background noise to be able to relax. If it was too quiet, his mind would race through a million thoughts a minute. He claimed it was threatening to drive him insane. Alejandro knew it was all bullshit of course. Cody just didn’t possess any will power. He couldn’t force himself to relax like Alejandro did. It was actually quite ironic that the head of a religion that encouraged the use of psychedelics and meditation techniques for relaxation, wasn’t able to shut out the world himself. It was yet another reason the change of prophet had to occur soon. Cody couldn’t conduct any public appearances the way he looked these days. The religion survived on his reputation, on all the miracles people had witnessed him perform in the past.

If his followers had seen him now they would have wondered what the hell they were worshipping. Cody’s appearance reminded Alejandro more of Stephen Hawking than of the powerful prophets throughout time.

Gently Alejandro lifted one of Cody’s arms, perusing the skin under his elbow. Alejandro concluded they needed to move Cody’s body more often. He was beginning to develop bed sores.

“Master Cody. Unfortunately I will have to go away for business for a few days. I will however be back before the weekend.”

Cody tilted his head slightly to the side. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“On a business trip. I need to attend to some formalities.”

“Have you located Cameron?”

Alejandro shook his head. “Not yet. It is only a matter of time before we do though. I have dispatched a new team, this time with orders to be more cautious.”

“Good,” Cody replied.

Alejandro couldn’t help smiling. The stupid pile of skin and bones believed so much in the story Alejandro had sold him and his followers, that he still believed he was calling the shots. He believed he was the chosen one, a holy prophet. Once Alejandro was one hundred percent certain that the DMT had worked its magic, he would take personal pleasure in strangling the last ounce of life out of the useless person in front of him.

“Very well, Master Cody. I will see you in a few days then. Do you want me to change the station before I leave? Perhaps one of the music stations, for variation?”

Cody barely moved his head, but it was enough for Alejandro to understand the gesture. Cody didn’t want to listen to any music. “I’ll leave the news on then.”

As Alejandro left the room he could barely hide his contempt for the man in the bed. Cody was not even thirty years old, but he had already acquired that old-man smell that consumed aged care facilities. Alejandro had to cover Cody’s room in flowers and incense just to be able to make his daily visits. He hated that sweet smell of death and medicines. Several weeks ago a couple of doctors had checked Cody out from top to toe without finding out the reasons for the smell. Alejandro knew what it was though. Cody was rotting from the inside out. He might well possess the ability to heal others, but he was falling apart.

Alejandro closed the door behind him and proceeded across the field to the bunker. He needed to make a trip to Uruguay. He would have avoided it if he could; there were always risks involved crossing borders, and he assumed he was reasonably high up on the list of unofficial targets for the US government. Some tasks were too important to delegate away, however.

Alejandro had finally acquired a valuable contact inside the highly secular country of Uruguay. In record time Codyism had achieved remarkable growth rates in most South American countries. Poor countries tended to be quite religious, but Uruguay had always been a problem. Alejandro’s advisers had told him to abandon the country altogether. The population’s reluctance to embrace a new religion had nothing to do with Codyism. It was anchored in history. The country had simply not had a large enough population of indigenous people when the Spaniards had arrived with their legions of priests on conversion-missions. There hadn’t been enough people to convert in the first place, and thus the country had never really had any chance to learn about religions. Alejandro knew he needed to educate them. Codyism wasn’t a regular religion. It appealed just as much to agnostics and atheists as to Christians and Muslims. People were sick and tired of not having something to believe in, or they were sick and tired of believing in a prophet who was supposed to have lived more than a thousand years ago. People wanted evidence, something they could see with their own eyes. And Codyism provided just that. Cody, the almighty prophet who spoke to the universe, was still alive and kicking. Well, not really kicking, but he did the occasional healing, and he had been to heaven and back.

He was a living miracle.

The only one.

The best thing, however, was that one didn’t have to kill an infidel or blow oneself up to gain entry into Cody’s heaven.

One could even visit it while still alive. That was the remarkable thing about Codyism; it felt real. One could ingest some Mescalin or drink some Yage, and one could immediately experience how the entire universe and everything within it was connected. The Americans’ ridiculous attempt to stall the growth of spiritualism, by imposing life in prison sentences for being caught with psychedelics, had had the exact opposite effect of the intended one. It was business 101; when something became limited in supply, it became coveted. The Americans had made Codyism a coveted religion. The few who were able to get hold of psychedelics shared their life altering experiences on the internet. Most of it was lies of course; people making up stories to make themselves more interesting. But it helped Alejandro’s case. The liars and exaggerators sold his religion to the world. The religion that the traditional faiths like Christianity and Islam were attempting to quash with their harsh stance on psychedelics.

The public wasn’t stupid though. They understood their governments had their own agendas. And as more and more stories were shared on the internet, Codyism was growing into a real powerhouse religion.

Soon it would be the most powerful of all.

22

Agent Fowler’s white van swirled into the oncoming lane. A black Mercedes flashed his lights, but Agent Fowler was already back in his lane. A grey cat had just crossed the road in front of his van. It had appeared out of nowhere. Agent Fowler quickly checked the rear mirror. The cat was nowhere to be seen though. He concluded it had avoided being hit.

Instead he glanced down at the passenger seat. A gun and a mobile phone were neatly placed next to a red paperback in the seat. The book’s title was
Codyism
, and it was currently one of the top sellers on Amazon’s stores around the world. Agent Fowler had picked up a used copy from one of the few remaining physical bookstores in Washington. He had paid cash, and hadn’t bothered opening it. He knew it would all be bullshit anyway.

He glanced at his watch. He would be arriving at the Washington Memorial Hospital in just under one hour. He would park his van outside the main entrance of the hospital, in a parking spot he had already cornered off the day before. The van looked like any other delivery van. It had no distinctive markings, and Agent Fowler felt certain it wouldn’t arouse any suspicion. Security personnel were like most employees, they were trained to do a specific job, and most of them weren’t even very good at it. It always surprised Agent Fowler how stupid drug smugglers and criminals were. They boarded airplanes with their luggage full of drugs, and paid little or no attention to what the customs officers had been taught to look out for. If you had a pony tail, you shouldn’t be smuggling drugs – it was as simple as that. Agent Fowler had accessed the Washington Memorial Hospital’s security manuals, and he had rigorously studied the training the security personnel had been through. If he stuck to the plan, and parked the van in its ordained spot, it would at least take four hours before anyone decided to check it out. By that time the bomb would have gone off, and there would be nothing left to check.

He checked the rear mirror again. He really hoped he hadn’t hit that cat. Unfortunately he hadn’t had time to react any faster, it had just appeared in front of the van.

It had just appeared out of nowhere.

23

Adam turned up the volume on the TV. He was slouching in the chair in a cheap motel room in Mexico City. Cameron was sound asleep on the couch, totally exhausted from the adventures of the last few days, and Adam was having a beer to calm his nerves.

“Police in Washington DC have just confirmed they received a bomb threat only two minutes prior to a massive car bomb being detonated outside the Washington Memorial Hospital earlier this morning. Authorities have yet to confirm the number of casualties, but it is expected to run high, possibly as high as a hundred people. Although police have not yet publicly confirmed that the bomb threat was made by extremists from the relatively new religion, Codyism, there are strong indications that people associated with the religion, or ideology, have been involved, and that today’s bombing was a retribution for the increased crackdown on psychedelic drugs in the United States. The President has issued a public statement, where he expressed sadness for the loss of innocent lives. He also made it abundantly clear, however, that America would not change its stance on psychedelics or let any extremist ideologies influence our domestic or foreign policies.”