NEXT BEST HOPE (The Revelation Trilogy) (5 page)

Only the Texas governor accepted his invitation.

On May 25th, a black stretch limo pulled up in front of the Estes Kefauver Federal Courthouse in Nashville. The driver put on his emergency flashers, got out, walked around the rear of the vehicle to the back passenger door, and opened it. Leon Martinez stepped out on the curb.

“Pick me up here in thirty minutes,” he said, not looking at the chauffeur as he hustled into the building.

Inside, the guards greeted him like an old friend and waved him through the metal detectors.

“Is Mr. Westmoreland in this afternoon?” he joked with them.

“He’s taken the afternoon off to play golf, I think,” one of the guards cracked back at him.

Leon took the elevator to the top floor of the building which had served as Westmoreland’s home away from home since May Day. When the jailer at the control panel saw it was Martinez, he buzzed him through the heavy steel doors, and another jailer escorted him to a private room, larger than those where the attorneys met with their clients. Leon paced back and forth like a fox chained to a clothesline pole as he waited for Westmoreland. In about a minute, the door to the room opened, and Westmoreland, dressed in an orange jump suit, walked in. They shook hands, and Westmoreland motioned for Leon to take a seat on one of two metal stools next to a dilapidated table pushed up against the wall on the side of the room.

“The Lord has told me that you would come bearing good news today,” J. Franklin said.

“I have indeed,” Leon said. “We have four state conventions slated for this weekend. The politicians in each state are quaking in their boots before the power of God.”

“As they should. Do we have firm commitments from our delegates that they will be willing to take courageous stands against the government that has brought us to this crisis?”

“They are awaiting the nod from you, Frank. If you give me the words to say, I will serve as your spokesman. Even the Texas governor is prepared to join the movement at your urging,” Martinez said.

Westmoreland reached into his pocket and pulled out a stack of letter-size, hand-written documents, folded in half long ways.

“Study these, my friend, and find your own voice,” Westmoreland said.

Then he reached into a pocket sewed into the inside of his jumpsuit. This time he brought out an even larger sheaf of papers, also hand-written. “In the twenty-five days I have sat in this prison, the Lord has moved on my heart daily. I am convinced that my presence here is for a purpose, and I am dedicated to fulfilling it. These are the initial pages of a work he has led me to entitle ‘God’s Struggle.’ Please guard them with your life until you deliver them to Stanley Nussbaum, a friend who runs a small press in Charlotte, North Carolina. His address is on the back page. He will handle the rest.”

Martinez accepted the papers like a person handling the Hope Diamond. “I will not sleep until I have placed them in his hands,” he said.

“I look forward to your next report, my son. The Lord is using you in a mighty way to build his kingdom,” Westmoreland said.

The two men rose and embraced. Westmoreland beat on the locked door to their conference room a couple of times to call for the jailer who responded immediately and took him back to his cell. In a few moments, the jailer returned and escorted Martinez through the steel door that led to the free world. Leon Martinez took the elevator to the ground floor and walked out of a meeting with one of the most high security prisoners in federal custody without ever suffering the indignity of a search.

When he walked out on the sidewalk, his chauffeur stood at attention near the opened rear door of the limo. The driver waited until Martinez was in the back seat, closed the door for him, walked around the rear of the car and took the driver’s seat.

“Ralph, take me to the Hermitage Hotel. I need to get some shut eye,” Leon said as he grabbed a bottle of Glenlivet from the limo bar and poured himself three fingers neat.

FRIDAY BEFORE MEMORIAL
Day, Ert and Beth Roberts sat next to each other in a Southwest Airlines jet on final approach to Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix. Since 4/11, they had spent their time shuttling back and forth between Kilgore and Washington. They had decided it was time to conduct a mission of their own.

“Do you realize it has been less than a year since Josh was arrested at Minerva Johnson’s house in Kilgore?” Beth asked Ert as the plane taxied to terminal four.

“Seems like a lifetime, doesn’t it?” Ert replied. “Who could ever have predicted the events to follow? I don’t feel like I was finished grieving for him when Bass drafted me into this duty.”

Beth thought about the espionage trial of Joshua Issacharoff that ended when Josh was found hanged on the eve of his release from prison. The case had taken a great toll on Ert, Leadoff, many of Josh’s friends and her. She knew a good and innocent man had faced death head-on for values he could never forsake, the founding principles of American democracy and a love for all people of the world.

“President Whitfield knew the right man for the job,” Beth said.

•  •  •

They picked up their bags at the luggage claim and rented a medium size car at the Enterprise counter. They got an area map from the rental car clerk, threw their bags in the car and drove out of the airport with no immediate destination, tourists for the brief respite between their arrival and Saturday morning, when they would gain access to the bank vault.

The next morning, at eight o’clock sharp, the guard unlocked the thick glass doors to the bank and escorted them across the expansive, marble covered floor of the lobby to the large walk-in safe where the safe deposit boxes were. Beth carried an empty canvass book bag in her right hand. The guard checked their IDs and showed them inside the vault, locking a heavy steel door behind them so they could conduct their business in private. Ert fumbled in his pocket for a key and slipped it into the lock of a drawer on the next to the bottom row.

He pulled the drawer all the way out of its wall socket, placed it on a table in the middle of the room and peered inside. On top of a stack of ledger books or journals was a sealed envelope with his name written on it in a clean, cursive script. Ert removed the envelope without opening it and gently placed it on the table top.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” Beth asked him.

“I don’t think I’m ready yet,” Ert said.

Then he reached in and took out six hand-written journals, looked at the volume numbers on the spines and placed all but one in Beth’s book bag. He put the envelope with his name on it back on top of the one journal left in the drawer, returned the drawer into its wall socket and locked it with the key.

Beth pushed the button, calling for the guard, who appeared in a matter of seconds and let them out of the vault. They nodded to him as they walked to the front door and hurried down the steps to their rental car where Beth carefully placed the book bag in the back seat within her reach.

“Are you ready for a road trip?” Ert asked.

“I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon,” Beth said.

“Neither have I. If you’ll be my date, I’ll spring for supper,” Ert said.

“You’re on, big boy,” Beth said as they entered the I-17 north ramp, leaving the desert basin of Phoenix behind in favor of the high country of northern Arizona.

Four and half hours later, they passed through the entrance of Grand Canyon National Park and found a parking space near the south rim. When they got out of the car, a strong north wind bit into them with a cold sharpness they had not anticipated.

“I guess six thousand feet elevation is not quite the same as sea level,” Ert joked. “I should have brought a jacket.”

Before they began the short walk to the rim, Beth grabbed her book bag and clutched it to her.

“I’d hate to see anything happen to these,” she said.

“You and me both,” Ert said.

After only a few minutes, the wind drove them to shelter at the visitor center where they spent a couple of hours listening to guides explain the history of the park and points of interest.

“Ready for that lunch?” Ert asked when he saw the look on Beth’s face that said she had experienced enough historical education for the day.

At the El Tovar Hotel restaurant, they ordered rib eyes and wild greens salad. While they savored the smell of their steaks and the house vinaigrette dressing, that had a mild hint of garlic, they lurched in their seats to see over the precipice into the Grand Canyon, its bottom obscured in the early evening mist that made the whole enormous pit look like a cauldron of ghosts preparing for a night raid.

“Do you have any idea what we think we will learn?” Beth asked half way through their meal.

“Not a clue,” Ert said. “I think we will know it when we see it, though. Josh said he would never leave us, and, Lord knows, I am in way over my head right now.”

“So far, the answers have come when the time was right,” Beth said.

•  •  •

After their late lunch, they settled in for the night in their hotel room. Ert picked up the book bag and drew out one of the journals. He handed Beth another. He sat at the desk with a legal pad in front of him as she positioned herself in a large leather chair next to a floor lamp, which illuminated the room. As was his custom, when Ert read anything, he took occasional notes. Neither of them spoke for a long time.

“Oh my,” Beth said as she closed her volume a third of the way through. Tears filled her eyes as she held the book against her as if it were one of her children who had just breathed her last breath before dying.

“That’s the same way I feel,” Ert said as he put down his pen and rested his face in his hands, staring down at the journal which lay open before him.

The next morning, they rose early and re-traced their steps, returning the journals to the vault on their way to the Phoenix airport. While they were waiting for their boarding call, Ert went to a news stand for a paper. He quickly scanned the headlines of the
New York Times
, and the
Wall Street Journal
, but it was the
Dallas Morning News
that caught his eye. On the front page, above the fold, he saw a picture of Leon Martinez addressing an overflow crowd at the Houston convention center with the governor of Texas in the background egging him on. The caption said: “Martinez calls on Christian Militants to separate themselves from a heathen nation.”

“Can you believe this?” Ert asked her.

“The last year has taught me that people are capable of almost anything,” Beth said.

As the clerk at the counter called their group number, they lined up with others to board. Just before they handed their tickets to the clerk, a news bulletin came on Fox News.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, we have just learned that at the Christian Militant convention in Houston, the Militants voted to call a secession convention two weeks from today. The governor of Texas has issued a statement in support of secession, pledging his support in the Christian’s effort to break Texas away from the United States. We have no word, yet, about any results from the other Christian Militant conventions around the country.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ert said.

A man behind him in line turned to him and said, “Praise the Lord. President Whitfield better watch his ass.”

Ert caught him with a strong right hand and laid him flat. When security arrived, he told them, “This man has just threatened the life of the President of the United States. I’ll stand witness to it.”

“NICE RIDE, BB,”
Bass Whitfield said to Beauregard Butler, Jr. as they careened around a corner, the jacked up Ford F250 teetering for a second like it wanted to roll over.

“Ain’t she a beaut’, Mr. President?” BB said, grinning from ear to ear.

With Nate riding shotgun in the front seat and Leadoff Pickens in the rear passenger seat, the President of the United States made his way from the center of his government to a monument of death and destruction, where the fate of his country hung in the balance for three days in the summer of 1863.

The four men looked like every other car full of tourists as they entered the battlefield at Gettysburg and began the tour. At the site where Lincoln, four months after the end of a fight that produced 51,000 casualties, delivered his famous speech at the cemetery, they stood quietly and listened as a park ranger provided details about the address, then recited it with the inflections President Lincoln had used.

When the crowd began to break up at the conclusion of the speech, President Whitfield moved next to an old man wearing a turned-down fishing hat and wire-rimmed glasses with clipped on sunglass lenses. When Bass placed his hand on his shoulder, the old man turned and softly said, “It’s good to see you, Mr. President.”

“Thanks for agreeing to meet me here, Professor Strube,” Whitfield said. “I was starting to get cabin fever.”

“The symbolism of the location isn’t lost on me,” Strube said as he surveyed the cemetery.

“I thought not.”

President Whitfield nodded at BB as he and the old professor wandered off through the graves, lost in their conversation. BB and Nate flanked them as inconspicuously as possible and scanned the thinning crowds, searching for any signs of trouble.

Leadoff walked next to BB, trying to act nonchalant, scared out of his wits.

“I don’t suppose he mentioned the part about walking in an exposed public place in the middle of a crowd for a few hours, did he?” Leadoff asked BB.

“He just told me to fill up my truck with gas, latch on to you and drive north ’til he told me to stop,” BB said. “But he has a point. No one seems to have even looked his way. It’s like he’s invisible.”

“Let’s hope things stay that way. Otherwise, we may begin to feel like Grant on the first day at Shiloh,” Leadoff said.

As they walked near a large oak, a little girl, her blonde curls flapping, her blue eyes full of mischief, approached them. In each hand, she held small flags wrapped on wooden sticks, the U.S. flag in her right, the Stars and Bars in her left. “My momma told me I should ask you to pick a flag,” she said to BB while she glanced over her shoulder at a beautiful twenty-something woman sitting in the shade on a blanket thumbing through a fashion magazine. When BB looked at her, she gave him a quick wink before glancing back down at the page.