NEXT BEST HOPE (The Revelation Trilogy) (20 page)

Leon motioned for Ralph to follow him, and the two men walked out of Nussbaum’s one-bedroom flat without another word. Stanley watched until they rounded the corner of the building and then went back inside. He picked up his phone to call Frank, but laid it back down before he hit the send button. He sat down at the kitchen table and read through each executive order. He threw most of them in the trash can and stuffed two in his brief case so he could deliver them to Westmoreland’s staff the next morning.

THE FEDERAL AGENTS
who comprised the Presidential assassination investigation squad, what they called the PAI, wasted no time following up the information that poured out of Tom Mooney and Chirp McVeigh. Soon they had enough to set up surveillance on Numbers eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve. The PAI exchanged intelligence with the other crack unit established to focus strictly on the capture of Ithurial Finis. Agent Brown, afraid of security leaks, received briefings from both groups, but gave them nothing in return. He worked alone.

Numbers eight and nine, a husband and wife team like Numbers three and four, had split up long enough to murder the Attorney General and the Secretary of the Interior. A month later, they reunited in Santa Fe where they summered in a mountain cabin near Taos and did some archaeological work on a grant from a creationist society. When the cool winds of autumn set in, they abandoned that project for the season, migrated to Destin to track sea turtles and transferred their church membership to a small non-denominational congregation near Seagrove Beach.

The PAI caught a break when the young and enthusiastic CM pastor of the church in Seagrove made the mistake of visiting several CM sites that had sprung up on the Internet, sites the PAI monitored day in and day out.

Undercover PAI agents, who made little secret of their sympathy with the CM cause, attended the church services for several weeks, building a bond with the assassins.

After church one Sunday, Numbers eight and nine invited the undercover officers to their condo for Sunday dinner. Somewhere between the elevator lobby on the ground floor and their fifth floor condo, the assassins had second thoughts. When the agents knocked on the couple’s door, no one answered. When they kicked the door in, the sliding glass door to the balcony overlooking the Gulf of Mexico was open and Number eight, the wife, had rappelled half-way to the ground. Number nine turned on the agents with an assault rifle in his hands, but they cut him down before he could pull the trigger. He fell back into the railing and dropped his rifle which fell into the dunes. He hooked his right arm around the top of the railing, but as he lost consciousness his momentum drove him over the top, where he teetered for a second before he plunged to the ground.

From her vantage point on a rope dangling two stories in the air, Number eight saw the fate that befell her husband. When she looked below her, she saw half a dozen federal agents waiting for her. She pulled her Glock 9 mm pistol and pointed it at the crowd of agents.

“Drop the gun,” one of the agents yelled at her.

But she paid no mind to the order. As her finger tightened on the trigger, a federal marksman put a bullet through her head that killed her instantly. When she fell limp, her body snagged on the rope and swung in the ocean breeze, an effigy of her own making.

•  •  •

Number ten fit no one’s profile for a murderer. A Bible professor at a small Church of Christ college in Arkansas, he wore a bow tie and laughed easily. When agents ran their search warrant on his house, they found him and his wife in the middle of a Wii bowling match. The professor looked astonished at the sight of armed men invading his home. He toured them through the house and granted them access to every nook and cranny. When the agents found nothing, he showed them to the door and thanked them for their efforts to find the perpetrators of the heinous acts of 4/11.

Outside, the agents reviewed their notes and prepared to leave empty-handed until they saw the slightest glimmer of light peeping from a window at ground level with cardboard taped around it. They took a battering ram and knocked out the window only to find the professor in a basement stronghold. They stopped him as he tried to delete files from his computer and seized a knapsack that held enough clothes for a couple of days on the road and a flash drive with GPS coordinates for a number of top secret United States military facilities. They also found in the bag detailed instructions for the construction of a clean nuclear device that would wipe out any human life within fifty yards of its point of detonation.

When they hauled the professor out of his house in handcuffs, he yelled to his wife just before they put him in the squad car.

“Remember, we are on the Lord’s side.”

His wife put her hands over her face and wept as the agents drove away.

•  •  •

Numbers eleven and twelve, a gay couple, worked together at an abortion counseling center on the north side of Nashville. They were members of the church where Westmoreland served as pastor emeritus. Although they had never met him, they viewed him as the only person who could rid the nation of the horrors of
Roe v. Wade
. They had made quite a name for themselves as the first people who would volunteer to march outside a clinic that performed abortions. They often gave interviews to local news stations about the moral decline of the United States. On at least three occasions, the authorities arrested them and charged them with disturbing the peace when their protests turned violent and they lobbed incendiary bombs at the entrances to the clinics.

When agents came to their door, the couple, dressed in long white robes, invited them into their house. Around their necks, they wore gold crosses. In their hands, they held large glass jars that contained fetuses preserved in chloroform.

“You are the true murderers,” they yelled at the federal lawmen that bound them and dragged them down the sidewalk as a crowd of reporters recorded their every move.

•  •  •

But Numbers thirteen and fourteen most puzzled the PAI in its investigation. According to Mooney’s information, they were former military operatives in the employ of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Both of them had spotless records, were supporters of the slain commander in chief, and had solid alibis on 4/11. Their cell phone records revealed no suspicious activities before the assassinations or in the months since. They had not missed a day of work and were faithful in carrying out each duty assigned to them. Each had received commendations for valor in quelling an attempted prison break three months earlier.

But they had gone AWOL the day before Finis’ escape.

Members of PAI and the Finis units converged on the last known address for the two guards. The small residence in suburban St. Louis looked no different from any other on the street. A two bedroom asbestosis-shingled house rimmed with dark mulch in the flower beds, and two Ford F150s parked in the driveway it displayed no hint of hostility. Newspapers from the last ten days littered the sidewalk. In the mailbox, agents found wilted letters to both men, including a past due notice from the landlord for the month’s rent.

Agents approached the front door but stopped when they smelled the unmistakable odor of dead, decaying bodies.

When the forensic medical unit arrived, they found the corpses of Numbers thirteen and fourteen. They determined that both men were approximately two weeks dead from strangulation.

Agents could not find their prison uniforms, their Federal Bureau of Prisons ID cards or their SWAT gear.

When Quanah Parker Brown arrived at the scene, he gave it a quick once-over, interviewed the medical team and members of both squads, walked out in front of the house and knelt on the sidewalk while he thought through the information.

The head of the Finis unit approached him when he got tired of waiting on Brown to say anything.

“What do you make of it, Agent Brown?” he asked.

Brown looked up at him, stood up, and said, “Finis used these men until he didn’t need them anymore. At some point, they were on his side. When he got ready to move, he brought in two pros who took these guys out and assumed their identities to gain access to the prison so they could break Finis out,” Brown said. “I reckon you had that much figured out.”

“That’s the way I see it, all right,” the commander said.

“We’ll find the bodies of those pros before long. They won’t have gotten far. Finis wouldn’t leave any lose ends,” Brown said. “The big question is where he went after he killed the men who freed him from the penitentiary.”

“What’s your bet?” the federal agent asked him.

“He’s probably watching us now,” Brown said. He raised the binoculars he held in his right hand to his eyes and pivoted slowly 360 degrees. At 240 degrees, he thought he caught a momentary flash of sunlight off another lens, but he didn’t stop his sweep of the landscape.

He shook hands with the leader of the Finis unit.

“Keep up the good work,” he said. “I’ll let you know if I come up with any leads.”

“You do that,” the commander said as he turned and walked back to the men in his unit.

Brown walked to his car like a man leaving his friends after a weekend at the deer camp, got in, adjusted his seat, looked in the rearview mirror for a second, and pulled away from the curb. He drove through the quiet neighborhood like a man searching for a lost dog. Two blocks from the murdered guards’ house, he turned left out of sight of the agents who swarmed the home and put his accelerator to the floor as he sped through the sleepy streets towards that brief flash of light.

Ithurial Finis was long gone by then.

FLASH GREENWALD POUNDED
the story of Link Jefferson’s assault of Congressman Farragut on every broadcast.

“Bass Whitfield’s failure to fire him immediately shows that all his talk about the rule of law is nothing more than that, pure talk. The American people can’t respect a leader with corrupt values. It’s time for President Whitfield to go back to the cotton patch where he came from,” Greenwald said when a caller asked him about the situation. “If Link Jefferson had any real backbone, he would have tendered his resignation and saved Whitfield a lot of trouble.”

Another scripted call. “What should we do if Whitfield steps down?”

“America will hold true to its values despite this storm. I think the country needs to take a page from the CM book and look for leadership from its moral, religious base. There are plenty of God’s spokesmen who would be willing to serve the country if the country wanted them. For that matter, we may already know who some of them are, but that’s for another show,” he said.

After he signed off and retreated to his office, his staff put a call from Leon Martinez through to him.

“You got off script, Flash,” Leon said. “You were supposed to stop when you said the country should rely on its moral and spiritual base.”

“I thought an extra plug for you wouldn’t hurt anything, Leon.”

“It might end you up in prison, that’s all. If they interpret your last comments to mean that Frank or I should assume leadership of the United States government, you are guilty of treason or something close to it. If you are on my team, Flash, you need to let me call the plays. If you want off the team, let me know that now.”

Flash tried to snap out of the grogginess of his drug and alcohol induced cocktail.

“I’m on the team, Leon,” he said. “I’ll be careful to stay on message. If I get any questions from anyone, I’ll clarify my remarks. I’m not interested in time in the federal pen anymore than you are.”

“Don’t mention any names,” Leon said. “The last thing I need is for some of the brethren who are in states that haven’t seceded thinking they are in a position to take over the federal government. Let’s get Bass out of office first, and then we’ll plan our next move.”

“Ten-four, Leon,” Flash said as he hung up the phone. He buzzed his secretary on the intercom.

“Get me a driver. I want to take a little road trip out of the city for a couple of days,” he said.

“I’m on it, boss,” she said.

In about fifteen minutes, the driver knocked on Flash’s door.

“Mr. Greenwald, I understand you need someone to drive you out of the city for a few days,” he said. “Where would you like to go?”

“I don’t care,” Flash said. “Just make sure it’s isolated and has a view of the mountains.”

“I know just the spot,” Ralph said.

Ralph took Flash by his condo, packed his suitcase for him and threw it in the back of the limo. He helped Flash into the back seat and made him comfortable. Flash stretched out with his head on a pillow and was asleep by the time Ralph got behind the wheel.

Ralph drove through the congested streets of Chicago into the open country southeast of the city. He put a Hank Williams CD in and turned it up loud as he navigated his way across the Illinois countryside.

A couple of times in the night, Flash woke up long enough to get out on the side of the road and urinate. When he got back in the car, he would take a couple of swigs of Black Jack from the bottle Ralph had provided him and then drop back off into his troubled sleep.

Ralph drove hard all night.

By the time the sun came up, Ralph was driving on a winding lane in the middle of the Smokies. Flash was just beginning to come out of his alcoholic haze when Ralph turned off the narrow road onto a spacious drive that led to a gated complex. Ralph entered the security code on the pad at the gate and watched the gate swing open. He drove passed the main house to a cabin hidden back in the woods. He popped the trunk, retrieved Flash’s bag and carried it into the cabin, using a key he had in his pocket to unlock the door.

Flash got out of the limo, stretched his arms and legs and looked around him at the mountains.

“You weren’t kidding were you, podnuh?” Flash said to Ralph.

“I aim to please, Mr. Greenwald,” Ralph said as he handed Flash the keys to the cabin and got back in the limo. “I’ll see you in a couple of days. Everything you need to make yourself comfortable is in the cabin. The hosts are out of town for a while, so you’ll have the run of the place while you’re here. Call your secretary if you need anything, and she will let me know.”