Mark of Evil (20 page)

He then finished the verse: “ ‘And the merchants of the earth have become rich by the wealth of her sensuality.’ Will you keep yourself clean of the spiritual filth of the religious Babylon?”

Then he shouted to the stone-silent crowd from Revelation
chapter 17
:

And he carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness; and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast, full of blasphemous names, having seven heads and ten horns. The woman was clothed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls, having in her hand a gold cup full of abominations and of the unclean things of her immorality, and on her forehead a name was written, a mystery, “BABLYON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.”

Then Rabbi ZG cried out, “God, the Almighty and Supreme Judge, has declared that this monstrous Babylon shall be destroyed. Babylon shall fall by the hand of the Lord.” And he shouted out the text from Revelation 18:9–11:

And the kings of the earth, who committed acts of immorality and lived sensuously with her, will weep and lament over her when they see the smoke of her burning, standing at a distance because of the fear of her torment, saying, “Woe, woe, the great city, Babylon, the
strong city! For in one hour your judgment has come.” And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn over her, because no one buys their cargoes any more.

When the message was finished, tens of thousands in the audience flooded down to the front of the stadium to acknowledge their faith in Jesus the Christ.

Outside the stadium, the detective was waiting for an answer from the other end of his satphone. “Commander . . . Are you still there?”

The voice growled from the other end. “Yes. I’m still here.”

“The crowds will disperse soon. Shall I give the order—”

“You mean two hundred and twenty soldiers to confront a crowd of forty—perhaps fifty—thousand?”

The detective started to reply, but the commander cut him off. “No, we will not attack. You miscalculated, Detective. Miserably.”

TWENTY-SIX

U.S. SENATE

Washington, D.C.

There was silence in the Senate chambers, broken only by a single polite cough by someone up in the gallery. It was a seminal moment in the proceedings as Chief Justice Straworth considered the issue that was now pending before him. He rocked back and forth in his special, high-backed judicial chair. Before the trial, he’d had the Senate maintenance crew fetch it from the Supreme Court chambers and carry it over to the Senate. By all indications, the trial against President Hewbright under Article II Section 4 of the Constitution—the provision allowing for impeachment and removal of a president for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors”—was not destined to be a long one. But Straworth had a penchant for
comfort, so he’d demanded his own personal executive chair—the one usually positioned dead center in the line of Supreme Court justices during oral arguments.

Or at least that used to be the lineup before that bizarre day when several justices vanished right before Straworth’s eyes in the middle of the Court’s Friday conference discussion about pending cases. Some people called it the biblical Rapture. But Straworth refused to let that word pass his lips. He’d even called the FBI into the Court building to do a toxicology sweep in the conference room to see if some terror group had managed to gas everyone with a hallucinogen. The Bureau came up with zero. And when the missing justices never showed up again, a few of the law clerks privately joked about Straworth’s suspicions about mind-altering drugs, calling him Chief Justice LSD.

But that hadn’t been the only freakish occurrence leading up to this Senate proceeding. Unlike the only other presidential removal trial in recent American history, against William Jefferson Clinton, this trial lacked the polite diplomacy that usually characterized the Senate. A global confederation of nations rising up against America, a crushing economic depression and riots in the streets—those events had helped set the political stage in Washington. The trial in the Senate was bare-knuckle boxing from the very start.

Straworth stopped rocking in his big black chair. He leaned forward, preparing to address Corbit Hibbings, the prosecuting attorney for the House of Representative managers. Hibbings was a Washington trial lawyer and the former solicitor general under former president Jessica Tulrude.

“Mr. Hibbings,” he asked, “I need one clarification. It’s about the procedural posture of this case. The prosecution has rested its case. The attorney for the president has moved to dismiss these proceedings on the grounds that the evidence has failed to support any Article II Section 4 charges against him. On the other hand, you argue that in these kinds of proceedings the Senate need not prove actual treason
or even any specific crime against the president at all, for that matter, in order to vote for conviction and to remove him. But if that is true, then I wouldn’t even have to follow the usual procedures that a criminal trial would require. Am I correct?”

Hibbings nodded and came to his feet at counsel’s table. “Exactly, Chief Justice Straworth. This is not a criminal trial. Or a civil action either, for that matter. This is a constitutional trial, set out by Article II of the Constitution. As such, we don’t have to shoulder the ordinary burden of proof. The motion to dismiss by the defense is sadly misplaced.”

Justice Straworth directed his attention to the opposing counsel’s table with a scowl and cocked an eyebrow in that direction. “Counsel?”

Harry Smythe, the privately retained defense counsel for President Hewbright, rose to address that last point. Now seventy-two, the Washington trial lawyer with his familiar shock of white hair had long enjoyed a reputation as a landmark in the D.C. legal establishment. But lately the consensus was that he was too far past his prime to handle a case of this magnitude. And then there was that other matter: the issue of his more recent clientele. There’d been a time when his gold-plated clients were culled from the U.S. Senate or from governors’ mansions or even the chambers of a few federal judges accused of malfeasance.

But then he’d taken on the mean-spirited and trumped-up, though politically sensitive, criminal cases that had been brought against Joshua and Abigail Jordan. And even though the ultra-affluent Jordans were multimillionaires, he didn’t defend them because they had deep pockets. He agreed to get involved because he knew that the Jessica Tulrude administration had targeted them with a red laser dot
on their backs. Harry tried to keep himself at a distance from their powerful Christian zeal, focusing instead on the fact that their activities as real-life heroes and influential private patriots had put them on a collision course with then president Tulrude and her lapdog attorney general. The case against the Jordans was a partisan-tainted sham, and Harry Smythe was jubilant when it finally collapsed under its own weight.

But in Washington, taking sides and drawing lines can come with a heavy price. Harry’s vocal criticisms of the Tulrude administration and his championing of the Jordan family created rabid chatter among the local lawyers as they flocked for drinks at the local watering holes just off of Constitution Avenue.

As Harry now stood at the defense counsel’s table, he returned Chief Justice Straworth’s frigid stare. There was bitter irony in those two men facing each other now. Straworth, a former senator, had been appointed to the Supreme Court by his political crony Jessica Tulrude, the primary persecutor of the Jordans. Now Straworth was judging the legal arguments of Harry, who represented Hank Hewbright—who had defeated Straworth’s patron saint, Jessica Tulrude, in her bid for another term as president. The lines could not have been more clearly drawn.

As Harry readied himself to respond to the chief justice, a smile broke over his face.
What is
it
about Washington, I wonder, where picking the right friends also means you make the wrong enemies?

Chief Justice Straworth intoned a stern reminder. “Your silence is not a proper reply, Mr. Smythe. Do you intend to respond?”

“I do,” Harry replied in a casual tone. “First, I am, Mr. Chief Justice, rather alarmed at the willingness of this august body to forsake any semblance of normal legal process when it comes to this trial. Burden of proof. Standards of evidence. They have seemingly been tossed to the four winds.”

Straworth’s face flashed with a momentary look of internal combustion, as if he had just bitten into a jalapeño pepper. The chief justice
gave every indication that he knew where Harry was aiming his darts. But he held his peace as Harry continued.

“The Senate rules for this proceeding have specifically given you, as presiding chief justice, nearly absolute autonomy in guiding this constitutional process in any direction you chose. Now that, in itself, is a curious thing—a
very
curious thing—considering the way the Senate usually guards its power to govern its own internal procedures.
Jealously
guards its own Senate rules, I might add. Practically clinging to them like an out-of-work lottery winner grasping his winning ticket.”

A few stray chuckles echoed across the Senate, but Straworth continued to scowl.

“Now, why, I wonder, would the Senate do such a thing?”

Harry’s question hung in the air like a toxin. His point was apparent to every astute Senate watcher in those chambers that day. Straworth was a former senator and a political opponent to Hank Hewbright. The two men sat on opposite aisles in the Senate. Apparently there was only one explanation why Senate Majority Leader Atchison and his bunch would be willing to cede absolute procedural discretion to Straworth, their former Senate colleague and a member of their political party, as presiding chief justice over this impeachment trial. They figured that they could count on him to help scuttle President Hewbright’s ship.

“But just as the Senate holds dearly on to its own rules,” Harry continued, “I hold on to something too, Mr. Chief Justice. And I hold on to it like, well, a Kansas father might cling to his child when he sees a tornado winding its way toward his farm. What I hold on to is the rule of law and the idea of justice. And the concept that if a president of the United States is going to be kicked out of office under Article II of the Constitution, then his misdeeds had better go to the very core of his fitness for office—rather than some spineless fear on the part of certain partisans that the political judgments of our chief
executive won’t sufficiently mimic the current climate of opinion in the so-called international community. When our founders forged this Constitution—under a wisdom aided by the divine sovereignty of God, I might add—they feared that external international influences could undermine the integrity of this Republic. Now it appears, in light of these articles of impeachment, that the House of Representatives and perhaps even some members of this Senate body have completely turned that notion clear around—they now fear that the integrity of this Republic may interfere with the international community and that that alone is grounds for removing a sitting president.”

“Mr. Smythe,” Straworth barked. “This may be the Senate chambers that we’re in right now, but I will not tolerate speechmaking. Address the point.”

“The point?” Harry called out, his voice ringing through the hall. “It is simply this: the Senate, in an attempt to weld the beams of our noble Republic into the hull of that ill-fated
Titanic
called the Global Alliance, has ratified a document they call a ‘treaty,’ and they complain that the president has refused to honor it. But that document was no such thing. That so-called treaty was in essence a declaration that would totally dissolve this Union that we call America. And for what? For forty pieces of silver from the Global Alliance treasury, with the Senate acting like some traitorous Judas? Trading our nation’s sovereignty for a bowl of stew like Esau of old? Contrary to all of that, President Hewbright simply believes that this devastatingly harmful Global Alliance document
cannot
be magically turned into a true treaty by merely calling it that, much the same way that a man who has been beheaded at the guillotine can’t have the damage reversed by someone renaming it ‘head and neck surgery.’ ”

A few explosions of laughter rolled through the chambers. The chief justice reached for his huge gavel and the laughter quickly disappeared.

“Now,” Harry continued, “the Senate disagrees with the president.
And that is the Senate’s right. So the White House attempted to avert a constitutional crisis over all of this. And the president attempted to appeal that matter to your Court, sir—your Supreme Court—for a decision. But your Court, sir, your Court refuses to hear it. Why? Perhaps because several of its justices—men and women who had placed their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ—happened to disappear that day—”

“Enough!” Straworth bellowed. A second later he added, with a banging of his big gavel, “Your motion to dismiss this case is denied.”