Storming Heaven (47 page)

Then another dose of the sedative just before midnight, combining with what she already had coursing through her veins, and the life would fade out of her. Sara’s control of the church would be nearly unshakable then, and she would use that power to continue her work. To increase the church’s wealth and influence, and with it her own.

Sara looked away from the girl and considered the problem of Mark Beamon, the only thing standing in the way of the future that she envisioned for herself and the church.

He was broken. She’d seen the pain and guilt in his eyes when she had taken Jennifer and reduced to nothing his desperate struggle and his sacrifice of everything meaningful in his life.

She recognized his subsequent escape as a fluke, but was becoming concerned that despite her resources,
he was still missing. If he hadn’t been located by tomorrow morning, she would call him and make a meager offer for the Vericomm tapes. With nothing else left, he’d jump at whatever bone she saw fit to throw.

And then, when he was at his weakest, she’d have him brought to her and end it once and for all.

The men who had let him escape—both in Phoenix and in Washington—had been severely censured, but had kept their positions. She needed the Guardians to complete the consolidation of her power and to keep the rest of the Elders docile. A replacement for Sines would have to be chosen. And soon.

Sara walked to the frost-covered window and looked out at the empty expanse that surrounded the Retreat. She didn’t turn when she heard the door open. “I said I didn’t want to be disturbed.”

There was no answer.

She turned to face a man wearing a thick black jacket standing just inside the doorway. His name was Thomas. Thomas Nolan. He was only thirty- two, but intelligent and strong beyond his years. His parents had been members of the church since almost the beginning. She’d recognized him for his fanatical devotion to Albert when he was still very young and had personally attended the ceremony marking his entrance to the Guardians.

Now the devotion he had shown Albert would be hers. When this was over, he would be the one to step into Sines’s position.

“What is it, Thomas?” she said as the other two Guardians staying at the Retreat walked in behind him and took positions at the edges of the room.

“Get out of here,” Sara said, letting the anger
creep into her voice. “I told you that no one but Thomas and myself are to enter this room without my permission.”

“No. Stay,” Nolan said.

The two men held their ground, their expressions undecipherable.

“What did you say?” Sara said, stepping closer to Nolan and looking directly into his eyes. The reverence that she had always seen there had disappeared. Instead of averting his gaze, he glared back at her. “Tell them to leave, Thomas.”

“No.”

“What’s wrong with you?” She took a step back, confused.

She looked around her at the men standing silently along the wall, concentrating on maintaining her outward calm. None of the Guardians had ever disobeyed her before. She was suddenly very aware of the young girl lying on the bed behind her and the precarious position that Jennifer put her in. Had something happened that she wasn’t aware of? No, that was impossible.

“I thought that you would be the one to take Gregory’s place, Thomas. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps you don’t have the devotion to Albert that he thinks you do.”

She jerked back when his hand shot out, but not fast enough. He caught her by the back of the neck and pulled her toward him.

“What … what are you doing?” she yelled, struggling to break free. “Let me go!”

The two other men followed along slowly as he dragged her through the door and out into the hall.

“Stop him. He’s gone insane!” she shouted at them.

They didn’t seem to hear, so she turned back to Nolan. “Albert will—”

At the mention of Kneiss’s name, Nolan threw his weight back and pulled her head into the wall.

She slid to the floor dazed, blood from a gash in her forehead flowing into her eyes. She wiped at it with her sleeve, still trying to understand what was happening. Thomas Nolan was the most devoted of all the Guardians.

She didn’t stand, but held her hand out, trying to calm down and to give herself time to think. Something had happened. What?

The cold rage was clearly visible on Nolan’s face as he moved toward her.

“Wait,” she said, holding her hands out in front of her.

He hesitated.

“Just wait. There is some misunderstanding here and there’s no need for Albert to ever hear about it. It’s okay. It’s okay. Just tell me why you’re doing this. We’ll straighten it out.”

Nolan didn’t answer, but instead grabbed her by the hair again and dragged her through the grand entry hall of the old building and out into the snow. Sara felt the sharpness of the cold in her lungs as she tried to regain her footing on the icy ground beneath her.

“Stop!” she screamed, digging her nails into the arm pulling her along.

The cold was beginning to penetrate her skin as Nolan released her and she dropped to her knees in the snow. She looked up through the blood that was beginning to freeze to her face and focused on the two silent men standing a few feet behind Nolan. “Whichever one of you stops this will take
Gregory’s place and will have whatever he wants. Do you understand? Tomorrow I will be the final authority of the church. I will.”

One of them stepped toward her. She pulled away from Nolan and crawled to the man. She held a hand out to him, but he stopped a few feet away and threw a single piece of computer paper onto the snow in front of her.

Sara struggled to keep her breathing normal as the shadow of a pistol crossed in front of her on the snow.

“This is wrong,” she said, turning toward Nolan and the barrel of the gun. “It’s not from Albert. I’m telling you it’s not from Albert. Mark Beamon has broken the codes we use. He sent this.”

Nolan shook his head sadly, but kept the gun steady. “Those codes have never been broken. We checked the encryption signature you gave us. It is from Albert.”

“No! Don’t you see? That’s how Beamon found her at the airport. He wasn’t watching the plane like we thought. He read the e-mail!”

“No,” Nolan, said, reaching out and pulling the slide back on the pistol. “Albert told him. He was giving you a chance to repent.”

This couldn’t be happening. She would not allow her life to be ended by Mark Beamon, a drunken nobody whose pathetic life she’d had the power to destroy with a few words.

“None of this would be here if it weren’t for

me, and none of it will survive without me! I
am
Albert Kneiss!” ‘

Nolan pressed the gun against her temple, grabbing her by the collar as she tried to back away. “That’s for God to decide.”

B
EAMON PULLED HIS FEET UP ON THE BUMPER
of the car and struggled to light another cigarette in the wind. The hood was quickly losing its warmth as the engine cooled, but it was still better than the alternative. The interior of the car had been closing in on him.

The fate of the two e-mails he’d sent was a complete mystery to him. What the hell did he know about computers? It was entirely possible that the little zeros and ones that the e-mails were constructed from had just been dispersed to the digital void of the Internet. If that was the case, Jennifer was dead and he was waiting for no one.

More likely, the e-mails had been received and immediately reported to Sara, who wouldn’t have had much trouble figuring out who wrote them. In that case, he was waiting for a church hit squad.

He’d FedExed the Vericomm audio disks to an attorney who had kicked his ass in court about five years ago. Meanest, most ruthless sonofabitch he’d ever met—a man who clearly could be trusted to carry out his instructions. Upon hearing reports of Beamon’s death, he was to distribute copies of the disks—and the handwritten explanation of how Beamon had come to possess them—to twenty-five
major newspapers. And with that final act, Beamon’s hat was officially out of rabbits.

He took a deep drag on the cigarette and moved to a warmer part of the hood, thinking about the contents of the e-mails he’d sent. The ironic thing was, what he’d written in them was true. Or at least as close to the truth as he could get. After spending the last month studying Albert Kneiss through reading just about everything ever written by or about him, it had been surprisingly easy to get into the old man’s head and create a message in an electronic hand that would be indistinguishable from his. A message that Albert might have composed himself if he’d been able to.

Except for the last part, perhaps—the purposefully ambiguous sentence that Beamon knew the Guardians would interpret as a death sentence for Sara.

And that was the drawback to his plan. In the unlikely event that it worked, he was a murderer. But what choice had he been left with? A breathing Sara Renslier couldn’t be trusted to stay away from the girl. And she sure as hell wasn’t going to let him stroke out playing bridge in an old folks’ home. Or was that just a rationalization that freed him to take his revenge?

Beamon spotted the gray panel van slowly approaching from the other side of the parking lot and slid his hand around the butt of the shotgun lying under a towel on the hood next to him. Those assholes who had shoved him in that trunk in D.C. still had his pistol. If he was still alive five minutes from now, he’d have to see if he could get that back. It had been a good friend.

“Mr. Beamon!”

The van hadn’t yet come to a complete stop when Jennifer burst from the passenger door and ran to him. She almost knocked him off the slick hood when she grabbed hold of him.

“I knew you wouldn’t let them kill me.”

“A promise is a promise,” he said, stroking her hair with one hand but keeping the other under the towel.

“She’s gone,” Jennifer said, beginning to sob. “She was in the snow! There was—” her voice caught for a moment. “There was so much blood. It was just like Mom.”

Beamon was only about half-listening, concentrating on the van as a young man he hadn’t seen before stepped from it and walked around to face him. He patted her on the rear and peeled her arms from around him. “Go sit in the car, okay? I’ll be there in a second.”

She pulled away from him, and a moment later Beamon heard the door slam shut behind him.

“Mr. Beamon. I wanted to tell you—” the man in front of him started.

Beamon cut him off, speaking authoritatively. “It’s okay. We understand. You were only doing what you thought Albert wanted. He holds Sara solely responsible.”

“I only wanted to do what was right,” he said looking at his feet. “I contacted the others and told them what happened.”

Beamon nodded sagely. “Albert wanted me to tell you he was sorry to put you through what he did—to ask of you what he did. But that he knew you were strong enough to handle it.” Beamon slid from the hood. “He loved Sara so much. I think he
believed that she would come back to him until the very end.”

The man turned and began walking slowly back to the van. Beamon thought he said, “He always saw the good in people,” but couldn’t be sure. The wind had picked up and carried the man’s words away.

Beamon adjusted himself in the sofa and looked down at Jennifer, who was lying on the floor in front of the television. “I find it kind of disturbing the way you stare at things but don’t really see them, Jennifer.”

“Sorry … I was thinking.”

“Too much reflection can be bad for you. Why don’t you come sit up here and have some ice cream?”

She slowly peeled herself off the linoleum and fell onto the couch next to him.

“Oh, by the way, the place looks great.”

She’d spent the last four hours scrubbing and straightening the worn-out little apartment they were holed up in, glancing at the clock on the desk every five minutes or so.

He’d tried to convince her that she was no longer in danger, but the fact that his record was a little spotty on that subject, and the loaded shotgun resting on the sofa next to him, made his argument less than convincing.

They both watched as the numbers on the clock flipped over to twelve o’clock. Jennifer sat completely still, ignoring the dented spoon Beamon was holding out to her. It looked as if she was waiting for something. The sound of the church’s enforcers rushing the apartment? A lightning bolt from heaven?