NEXT BEST HOPE (The Revelation Trilogy) (2 page)

The phone rang and Ert’s secretary, Greenpea, paged him, “This guy says his name is Bass Whitfield, and he has to talk to you right now.”

“Bass Whitfield? You’re kidding, me,” Ert said.

“That’s what the man said.”

When he heard Ert say the name, Leadoff looked away from the TV for the first time since he sat down.

“The Secretary of Agriculture?” he asked Ert.

“We go back a ways.”

Ert punched a button on the phone to pick up the call.

“Bass?”

“Ert, I’m in the middle of something here. I suppose you have begun to hear the reports,” Bass said, his voice tense, his words tightly compressed.

“I’m watching them now,” Ert said.

“I can’t give you a full explanation right now, but I need you to throw some stuff in an overnight bag and get to the airport as soon as you can. I have to get some advice from someone I know I can trust. That’s a short list at this moment. You can bring your protégé that worked the Issacharoff case with you, too,” he said.

“Leadoff Pickens,” Ert said, watching Leadoff shoot him a quizzical look.

“Yeah, Leadoff. I like that name. Tell him he’s been drafted in the first round,” Bass said as he lightened up for a second and then fell back into step. “I’ll have a plane waiting for y’all in about twenty minutes. Just identify yourselves to the guards at the airport as my national security advisors. They will be expecting you.”

“Bass, the TV is reporting that all aircraft across the country are grounded until further notice,” Ert said.

“There are exceptions for national security purposes and for the President’s advisors,” Bass said.

“We hardly qualify for that, Bass. I don’t know jackshit about national security, and I’ve never met the President,” Ert said.

On the phone Ert could hear the sounds of people talking in the back ground and a muffled roar like one hears in the passenger compartment of a commercial jetliner at 35,000 feet. After several seconds, Bass spoke again. “You have now, Ert. I regret to inform you that about five minutes ago, an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court administered the oath of office to me. You’re talking to the President of the United States.”

“My God. I mean, yes sir, Mr. President. We are on our way to the airport right now.”

“Thanks, Ert. I really appreciate it. It will be good to see a friend,” Bascom Whitfield said hanging up the phone.

Ert looked at Leadoff who had stood up and begun pacing back and forth in the kitchen as he overheard snippets of the conversation.

“That means,” Leadoff began.

“I’m afraid so,” Ert said.

“There’s no time to waste. Bass, that is, President Whitfield, wants us at the airport in ten minutes,” Ert said.

“I’ll drive,” Leadoff said as they rushed out the door of the law office, leaving Kilgore, Texas, on a collision course with history.

•  •  •

In the deserted kitchen, the CNN reporter appeared again, sobbing now. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have just learned, and it is an official communication from the President’s staff, at ten-thirty this morning, today April 11th, the medical examiner for the District of Columbia pronounced the President of the United States dead from a gunshot wound to the head.”

IN HIS CORNER
office of one of the city’s tallest skyscrapers, J. Franklin Westmoreland watched over downtown Nashville like Caesar surveying Rome.

Word had reached every home in America that the President and the next eight government officials in the line of succession to the presidency were gone, killed in the most deftly executed plot in U.S. history. In addition to the Vice President, the Speaker of the House and the Secretary of the Treasury, the murderers had assassinated the president pro tempore of the Senate, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General and the Secretary of the Interior. Only the newly minted Secretary of Agriculture, Bascom Whitfield, had managed to escape his executioners. The Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court had also fallen that day, the victim of a sniper’s bullet as he walked his dog.

The chairman of the Federal Reserve ordered the financial markets closed. The FAA shut down all commercial and private flights; the government sputtered to a standstill, waiting for the ship of state to right itself from its greatest storm.

Members of Congress and senators huddled in meetings in Washington and at undisclosed places around the country in makeshift bunkers, charting strategies, looking over their shoulders.

The funerals would start tomorrow. The Department of Homeland Security sought to protect the family members of the survivors and whatever key people in the government it could identify from a threat it did not yet understand.

Westmoreland, with all the major network news channels running on a wall of flat screen TV monitors, was in the final minutes of his ninth phone call of the morning.

“I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic at this terrible moment in our history, but I have never been more certain that the Lord works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform,” he said, his voice stentorian as if he were addressing the general assembly of the Southern Baptist Convention.

“What do you mean, Frank?” the pastor of one of the country’s mega churches asked with genuine curiosity.

“Events have created a vacuum of leadership. We, the Lord’s flock, are perfectly positioned to fill that void, not just politically, but morally and religiously,” Westmoreland said, getting to the point.

“Tell me more,” the pastor said.

After ten minutes of further explanation, Westmoreland signed off and made some notes on his ever-present notebook computer.

He leaned back in his chair and reflected on the national crisis and his personal journey. As a young preacher boy in the 1960s, he worked his way to the top of the emerging market of television youth ministries with a guitar slung across his back, a Bible in his hand and a glib, lowest common denominator gospel on his lips. When he got too old for youth ministry, he shifted to a more mature audience, feeding them the same gruel peppered with pop psychology, Eastern mysticism, yoga, the gospel of wealth and anything else that got a rise from the audience. Donations to his ministry soared, and soon he was senior pastor of the world’s largest Southern Baptist Church. He stayed there until he decided he was ready to take over the entire denomination, creating a political machine the likes of which no one had ever seen in the church world. He put together a seamless coalition that voted to change the traditional rules, installing him as permanent chairman “for that small interim before the Lord comes and takes us home.”

The Lord, apparently in no hurry to de-throne Westmoreland, tarried for more than a decade.

Westmoreland grew restless. Now in his early sixties, he wanted to extend his influence, the Lord’s influence, beyond the confining borders of one group. In a surprise move, he announced he was leaving the denomination and setting up his own national consortium of evangelicals. Anyone could apply. Before he walked out the door, he orchestrated the appointment of his hand-picked successor.

That had been a year ago. His organization, the Christian Militants, mushroomed. The largest non-denominational churches in the country fell over themselves to join, posturing for the top spots of influence. None of them dared buck the trend. Only two weeks before the presidential assassination, the group held its first national congress, electing him its president by acclamation. The committee on the constitution Westmoreland appointed had submitted its first draft to him within the last week. The document owed little to its federal namesake, demanding the members walk in lock step to the Christian Militant Creed, a rigid expression of evangelical fundamentalism. Certainty was the watchword of the movement, dissent a sure fire sign of disbelief.

Westmoreland glanced at the man sitting across the desk from him in a large, overstuffed, leather chair. “The Lord is bringing it all together,” he said.

“I hope the Lord knows what he’s doing,” Ithurial Finis said.

SHERMAN ALOYSIUS, CHAIRMAN
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, rang the doorbell of a small duplex apartment a couple of blocks from the campus of Georgetown University. In a few moments, a slight man in his early eighties, wearing rimless glasses, and an ancient, moth-eaten, wool sweater, opened the door, holding a copy of volume one of Shelby Foote’s
Civil War
in his left hand, his thumb marking his place near the middle of the book.

“Come in, general. It’s good to see you again.”

“It’s good to see you, too, Professor Strube,” General Aloysius said.

“I have started researching the topics you asked me about, general, but I am only in the preliminary stages,” Professor Strube said as soon as they sat down in his study where bookshelves, crammed to over-flowing with classic tomes of American and world history, covered all the windows.

“I’m not trying to rush you, professor. I mainly wanted to visit with you in broad terms about the unique historical circumstance in which we find ourselves.”

“Such turmoil as we now endure will either make us stronger or rip our form of government to pieces,” the old scholar said. “A lot depends on how the military responds,” he added, looking Aloysius straight in the eye.

“That’s why I love talking with you, professor. You don’t cut me any slack or pull your punches. I get tired of everybody sucking up to me.”

The chairman paused for a minute, lost in thought.

“I have no doubt that the military will follow the President’s lead, for the most part. But there are always those in the wings whose ambitions can override their good judgment,” Aloysius said.

“I don’t envy your position, Sherman, but you must keep tight reigns on those under your command. I am certain we will not descend into anarchy. That’s not the question. Rather, I fear a splintering of the union the likes of which we haven’t seen in a hundred and fifty years.”

“Let’s hope and pray that it doesn’t come to that,” the warrior said, slumping slightly in his chair as if a great weight had descended on him.

“Bascom Whitfield may be the next Abraham Lincoln,” Strube said.

“Or the next Jefferson Davis,” Aloysius said.

The two men visited for an hour before the chairman excused himself, donned his overcoat and walked out into the darkness of evening.

He marched deep into the night, ineluctably drawn to the National Mall. As he walked lap after lap, he detoured along the way to the memorials of fallen American soldiers from World War II, Korea and Vietnam, constantly glancing to see if the lights illuminating the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial or the Capitol, were still shining, wondering how long it would be before they gasped their last breaths and flickered out forever.

“WHAT IN THE
hell are we supposed to be able to advise the President of United States about?” Leadoff Pickens asked Ert over breakfast at the Ritz Carlton on their second morning in Washington.

“He wants to know he has someone around him he can trust. That goes a long way,” Ert replied as he leaned his elbow on the table and looked down at his bowl of oatmeal. “Besides, we have spent our lives studying people and making decisions based on our observations. Our instincts have always served us well. Why should we doubt them now?”

Leadoff paused a few beats and began the interrogation again. “You said you and he went back a ways. What’s the story?”

“Bass and I were at A&M together in the 1970s,” Ert said. “We met at new student orientation in an auditorium filled with a thousand new recruits, ninety percent guys. I sat down next to him, shook his hand and asked him if he wanted to ditch orientation and drive up to Austin to look at some college girls. Fifteen minutes later, we were in my ‘65 Ford pickup on the highway to the state capital. We were running buddies for the next four years,” Ert said.

“Sounds like a real intellectual relationship,” Leadoff said.

“Don’t underestimate him. We were good kids. He has a quick mind, studied hard, and distinguished himself. But his ambition was to go home to the cotton patch and take over the family farm from his dad. His professors directed him down a research track, but he broke out of that discipline and began innovating techniques for farming. Before you knew it, he was a national leader in farming practices, in demand by all the big corporations who wanted to utilize his ideas to expand farming operations around the country. Ironically, his efforts greatly advanced the demise of the small farm like the one his dad had. So when he got ready to go home, there was no farm to go home to.”

“I guess that explains his populist stand,” Leadoff said.

“Yeah. He doesn’t want family farmers to disappear, so he is, or was, trying to reverse the trend. Who knows what will happen to the farmers now. The president appointed him Secretary of Agriculture because of his distinguished record as an innovator, because he was a friend of the farmer, and because he was a known quantity in the corporate community. Little did he know that he was anointing his successor,” Ert said.

“How long are we supposed to stay in Washington, you reckon?” Leadoff asked.

“I think we have to see how the first round of discussions goes with Bass’ advisors, and then we can re-assess the situation. Beth isn’t going to want to relocate.”

“Neither do I if I can avoid it,” Leadoff said. “I have some cases I need to be working on.”

“You have some cases in Kilgore, Texas, that are more important than serving as a personal advisor to the president of the United States in the middle of a national crisis?” Ert said.

“Forget I said that,” Leadoff said as he left money, including a generous tip, on the table for the check and stood up to go. “Let’s get to the national security briefing,” he said as he stood up and walked towards the exit. On the sidewalk, he hailed a black government sedan parked on the street corner, which immediately rolled to the curb and opened its doors to them. “This part I could get used to,” Leadoff said, sliding into the back passenger seat.