NEXT BEST HOPE (The Revelation Trilogy) (9 page)

“It’s not the same thing at all,” Leadoff said at one of their many briefings. “Koresh retreated into his compound and agents attacked him there. The CM forces mounted an invasion against a battleground revered by both sides that fought in the Civil War. We’re not bringing the fight to them. They started it. If we give them an inch, they’ll take a mile.”

“That’s my impression, too,” Bass said.

Sherman Aloysius spoke up. “The forces in control of the park have no resources to speak of, no artillery, few supplies. They can’t last more than a few days before we starve them out. They have released the three park employees they captured on the grounds the first day, so realistically all we could charge them with is some misdemeanor or low grade felony. We can do that to make our point when they give up,” he said.

“General, I thought you would be the ‘let’s go kick their asses’ guy in this discussion,” Whitfield said.

“I try not to be totally predictable, Mr. President. True military leadership always considers the peaceful, diplomatic option first. No one wants to see anybody get killed in this deal,” Sherman said. “We’ll only whip their asses if we have to. If they turn up the heat with a local militia or something along those lines, they’re toast. Until then, I say we freeze them out.”

“Ert?” Bass said.

“I’m with the general with one additional thing,” he said. “I think we need to send someone in to find out what their demands are, if any.”

“I’m categorically opposed to any negotiations with these people,” Aloysius said.

“I’m not talking about negotiating, general. I just want them to state their position. If they say something like, ‘We expect you to give control of the country to us and leave town,’ then we use that against them as a sign of their absurd demands. If they defer to Westmoreland or one of his cronies, then we loop him into the deal and see where that leads us.”

“Okay. I’m all right with that, Mr. President. We have some highly skilled hostage negotiators who would be perfect to execute that mission,” Aloysius said.

“Hold on, general. I have the perfect guy in mind. He’s someone who straddles both camps and knows how to talk to the guys at the park and J. Franklin Westmoreland,” Ert said.

The light came on for Leadoff.

“Brother Billy?” he asked.

“Precisely,” Ert said.

“Would someone mind clueing me in on the secret handshake?” President Whitfield said.

“Me, too,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said scratching his head.

BROTHER BILLY DIALED
the Dallas police as he stood in the parking lot of the convention center, looking at the broken-out passenger window on his “Josh’s Heating and Air Conditioning” van. When he finally got a clerk on the phone, she said it would be up to four hours before they could get a patrol unit to him to take a report and process the scene.

“Tell ’em I’ll wait,” he said.

He poked around in the van to see what was missing. He decided he must have spooked the burglars because most of his work equipment was still intact. But his XM radio and speakers were gone along with his MP3 player, a cheap one from Wal-Mart.

He put on his work gloves, took a broom and dust pan from the back of the van, and began sweeping up shards of scattered glass and picking them out of the seat covers and floorboard. When he finished the clean up, he took a cold drink from his ever-present ice chest and positioned himself in the shade of the van on a three-legged stool he carried with him.

While he waited, he studied the notebook containing the materials from the air conditioning course he had just completed at the convention center.

“I’m the certified real thing now,” he said as he flipped through the two hundred—page manual.

He leaned the stool on two legs, propping his back against the van. The slightest breeze cooled him as he closed his eyes and focused on the sounds of the city. A bus accelerated at the corner and screeched to a stop fifty yards down the curb; horns honked out of the frustration of lives lived in too big a hurry; a grackle strangled a warning out of its tight-lipped beak; a jet climbing out of Love Field split the sky with a roar; two men yelled at each other pushing one another on the sidewalk, cursing something about a woman; a distant electronically simulated church bell rang out “Amazing Grace.”

Brother Billy took out his cell phone and looked at it a few seconds before he decided he really didn’t have anybody he wanted to call or anyone wondering why he was running late getting back to Kilgore. He rummaged through the console and found his old pulpit Bible, wrapped in a plastic freezer bag. He unzipped it from its package and returned to his stool in the shade and began reading the Gospel of John.

As he read, “He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not,” he heard a man’s voice addressing him.

“You’re a hard man to track down,” he said.

Brother Billy stood up and grabbed the man’s shoulders giving him a good shaking.

“Leadoff Pickens. One of my all time favorite people,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

As soon as the words came out of his mouth, Brother Billy knew something was up.

“I’m looking for you, Brother Billy,” Leadoff said. “Have you ever heard of Shiloh?”

“Shiloh is the biblical word for ‘the house of peace’,” Brother Billy said. “But something tells me you have something else in mind.”

“What would you think if I told you the President of the United States would like to send you to Shiloh National Military Park to act as his special emissary to the Christian Militants holed up there?” Leadoff asked him.

“I would say Bass Whitfield must be getting some bad advice from somebody,” Brother Billy laughed.

“He is. He’s getting it from Ert and me. I’m here to ask you to accept the assignment. I’ll explain while we ride,” Leadoff said.

“I’m waiting on the police so I can report my van break in,” Brother Billy said pointing at his shattered window.

“Not anymore,” Leadoff said.

A tow truck flanked by police cars pulled next to Brother Billy’s van, hooked on to it and left with the flashers on.

“They’ll have it repaired and waiting for you when you get back to Kilgore,” Leadoff said.

A black limo stopped a few feet from them. Leadoff opened the door closest to them. “Hop in. There are a number of things I need to brief you about.”

“This beats all I ever saw,” Brother Billy said in his best North Carolina twang as he climbed in the long black car cradling his pulpit Bible in the hook of his left arm.

The two men who had been fighting and shoving each other on the street corner stopped and watched as a heating and air conditioning man from Kilgore, Texas, got in a stretch limo and raced out of the convention center parking lot. When the limo was out of sight, one of them took a cell phone out of his pocket.

“He just got in the car with Leadoff Pickens. The bug is in place.”

“Good. Keep me posted,” Leon Martinez said on the other end of the line.

FLANKED BETWEEN A
topless bar and a liquor store in a half-burned out strip mall in Houston’s South Ward, the Minions of God International Headquarters had visitors from Homeland Security. With guns drawn, in full tactical gear, agents stormed the building, warrant in hand, to run to ground their lead on the cotton patch would-be assassins.

Inside they surprised a dozen former and practicing dope addicts sitting at desks, cold-calling blue-haired old ladies from a list supplied by their friends in many of the country’s largest churches. They had a fee-splitting agreement in place that allowed the Minions to keep twenty percent of the take, subject to weekly audits by the churches’ bookkeepers. It had proved a lucrative arrangement for both sides.

In a back room, they found another group of Minions, dressed in khaki pants and starched white shirts, preparing to leave in their church van for a day of direct solicitations and pamphlet distribution at George Bush International Airport. Two white male ex-cons in their twenties and a runaway seventeen—year-old Hispanic girl had their musical instruments, two guitars for the guys and a tambourine for her, packed in preparation for a street corner serenade, a latter day Peter, Paul and Mary sans talent or inspiration. When the agents walked in the room, the trio was taking a final toke to get in tune with God.

Within minutes, the agents arrested everyone in the headquarters for possession of controlled substances, herded them into paddy wagons and shipped all of them off to jail, except for the apparent woman in charge, one Chirp McVeigh.

The interrogation unit began working on Chirp while the others got down to the business of tearing the place apart. They seized all the computers for study at their forensic labs and began rifling through scores of filing cabinets. Their initial sweep turned up little more than business records, phone numbers and names, financial information about daily revenues and deposits, lists labeled “call back” that demonstrated that anyone who requested prayer in connection with a donation would be targeted for a subsequent request for funds.

On the second sweep, the agents discovered a floor safe under the refrigerator in the break room. When they cracked it open, they found an envelope with another list of fourteen names, contact information and no additional identifiers.

They brought the list to Chirp’s interrogator, Agent McDonald, who scanned it and immediately recognized two names on the list as aliases for the men killed in the shootout with BB and Nate.

Armed with that information, he turned up the heat on Chirp McVeigh. “Any way you look at it, Chirp, it’s capital. So, you want to take the needle for the guys behind this deal?”

“What are you talking about?” Chirp said. “I’m running a legal fund-raising operation here. Some of the best known churches in the United States are my clients. You can check out my records. It’s all done by the book.”

“How about that safe under the refrigerator? It’s all by the book, too, I suppose?” he pressed her.

“I don’t know nothing about no safe under the ’fridge. What you talking about?”

McDonald grabbed her by her cuffed hands and yanked her down the hall to the break room where she saw the safe lying open on the floor, its contents neatly stacked next to note cards bearing ID numbers for purposes of the police photos. He shook the list of names in her face.

“I’m not a patient man, Chirp. If you want to do yourself any good, you had better start talking in a hurry. The train is about to leave the station,” her inquisitor said.

Chirp knew the jig was up.

“That’s not a list I had anything to do with,” she said. “I’m a thief, not a killer.”

“Who did have something to do with it?” he said.

“You got a pen and paper?” she asked. “I’ll write them down for you, but I need to know what is in it for me before I do.”

“The death penalty will be off the table,” he said. “The rest of your deal will depend on how your information pans out.”

He sat her down at the table in the break room, put a clean sheet of paper in front her and handed her a pen.

“Get busy,” he said.

Before she could write the first name, a man burst into the room.

“This interrogation is over. I represent Chirp McVeigh. She doesn’t have anything else to say,” Blackie DeLay said. “We’ll see you in court.”

“Your lawyer may have just signed your death warrant, Chirp. If I were you, I’d give that some thought tonight in your cell,” McDonald said.

“Screw you,” Delay said as agents escorted him and his client out of the building.

When they were gone, Agent McDonald turned to the other agents. “You could ask how a loser like Chirp McVeigh could afford the highest-priced criminal defense lawyer in Houston. I think we are getting close to the nerve center of the operation. Let’s process the fire out of this building.”

As the agents continued their demolition of the Minions’ International Headquarters, a man sat in his car a half-block down the street watching the commotion through his binoculars.

“Man, am I glad I was running a little late this morning,” Ralph said, thanking his lucky stars. He backed into a driveway, turned around and drove away from the crime scene trying not to draw any attention to himself. When he was out of sight of any law enforcement personnel, he grabbed his cell phone and placed a call to Stanley Nussbaum’s private number and left a voice mail. Then he reported what he knew to his boss, Leon Martinez.

THE SUN WAS
almost down when Brother Billy pulled into the parking lot of the Issacharoff Foundation on the main highway a few miles outside Kilgore. He could see the lights on in the corner office on the second floor that overlooked a pasture lined with pine trees.

He went to the front door and pushed it open, knowing Joshua Issacharoff would never have wanted a building named in his honor locked to the public. He climbed the stairs to the second floor and peeked through an open door at the foundation director who was watching CNN out of one eye while talking on the phone to someone he was trying to interest in partnering with the foundation’s goals. He rapped the door lightly with his knuckles to alert the director who looked up long enough to beam a greeting to him and motion for him to sit down.

While he waited for the director to finish his call, Brother Billy watched a news report about the Shiloh Siege. In its fifth day, tensions were beginning to mount. A number of people had tried to break through the road blocks, and the military had repelled them with tear gas without having to fire a shot. More demonstrators arrived daily with signs proclaiming the righteousness of the CM cause. Supporters of the Union were slim to none. The de facto head of the CM contingent occupying the park had refused to talk to anyone but President Whitfield, who had expressed no interest in speaking with him.

The reporter stuck a microphone in the face of the commander of the U.S. soldiers on the ground.

“They are our brothers and sisters. We don’t want to fire on them unless we absolutely have to,” he said.