Armageddon Conspiracy bl-1 Page 4

  As the voice faded, an angel appeared bearing a golden crown. The angel placed the crown on his head and named him—Messiah Bringer. He snapped awake, blinking in surprise at his French Regency desk, the familiar walls of his office, and realized he’d dozed off. He wasn’t the Messiah Bringer yet, but that would come soon enough. He rose from his chair and strode around his office, forcing blood through his jet-lagged veins.

  When he opened his office door, Betty Dowager turned from her computer screen with an anxious glance. “Go with God,” she mumbled.

  He nodded. He was utterly exhausted, but he had one more task before everything was in place. Afterward he would rest several days before heading back to Europe for the final meeting that would set the plan in motion. Messiah Bringer! The memory of his dream brought a jolt of elation, as he once again imagined the roar of a million Christian voices singing his praise.

  He climbed to the third floor, praying as he went for one more sign, one more assurance. Show me, Lord, he beseeched. Forgive my doubts.

  Brent Lucas was hunched over his keyboard, his back to the door. His head jerked slightly at the sound of Biddle’s knock. “Yes?” he said, not looking around.

  Biddle cleared his throat. “I hate to interrupt such intense concentration.”

  Lucas turned, and his expression changed from annoyance to surprise. He jumped to his feet and came around the desk to shake hands. “Mr. Biddle!” he exclaimed.

  “I wanted to personally welcome you on board,” Biddle said, thinking as he had the other times they’d met how physically imposing Lucas was and how brimming with energy. Lucas’s shirt outlined his muscular chest and torso, giving him an aura of unstoppability. His aggressiveness was right there on the surface; he wasn’t the kind to let anything stand in his way.

  Biddle realized that his odd sense of familiarity with Lucas came from the inch-thick binder assembled by his team of private investigators. It detailed Lucas’s grades and athletic endeavors, how Lucas’s father and brother died, about the suicidal house fire when his mother died and almost killed her two sons. He knew everything, down to Lucas’s last girlfriend and the kind of car he drove. Under different circumstances, Lucas might have been a wonderful addition to the firm.

  • • •

  Brent released Biddle’s hand and went back to his desk, thinking his boss seemed more than a little keyed up.

  “Any questions so far?” Biddle asked as he took a seat across from Brent.

  Brent thought for a second. “Only one,” he said, reaching for his jacket where it hung on the back of his chair and pressing start button on the recorder that sat in the side pocket. “In the research meeting… the unemployment report. I have to admit I’ve been curious.”

  “About what?”

  “All of it.”

  Biddle leaned forward. “We invest according to the Word of God.”

  “What about earnings per share and cash flow?”

  “We use balance sheets and income statements like everyone else, but when I receive signs, we act on them.” Biddle smiled. “There’s a higher truth than analysis, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Pardon my cynicism, but you’re saying that God revealed a government employment report?”

  “If God puts it in one Christian’s heart to help another Christian, what would you call that? Is information given in that way something to be refused? Don’t God’s commands transcend man’s statutes? Non-believers don’t understand that, but you should.”

  Brent remembered that he was a guy who’d supposedly sent twenty-five thousand dollars to the New Jerusalem Fellowship. He nodded. “Absolutely… but do you disclose that to our clients?”

  Biddle’s eyes narrowed. “Some of them,” he said quietly.

  “The reborn ones?” Brent persisted.

  Biddle nodded. “Why would I share that information with unbelievers?”

  • • •

  An hour later, Biddle looked across his desk at Wofford. “I have no doubt. He’s the one.”

  Wofford sat in an overstuffed chair chewing a thumbnail. “Smythe found out what happened at Lucas’s old firm. He asked me why we hired him.”

  Biddle looked up sharply. “Tell Smythe to mind his own business.”

  “I did, but I’m not sure his curiosity is satisfied.” Wofford looked down. A flicker of worry passed across his face. “He suspects something.”

  Biddle felt a spasm of anger at Wofford’s caution. “Forget Smythe. Think of the opportunity. If we do our job, we fulfill the prophecy.”

  Wofford looked up, and his expression hardened. “What if you’re wrong? We’re risking everything!”

  “Everything? What is everything? Are you risking your soul?”

  “No, but—”

  “We don’t have Jesus here! We can’t touch him! We can’t watch Him move through crowds, see Him heal the sick, feed the hungry! If we lack courage, how’s that going to happen?”

  Biddle tried to control his annoyance. After all, how could he explain his visions to someone who never saw them? How could he explain that God’s will moved inside him like an unborn child. It was part of him, indistinct, yet full of unspeakable promise. The Second Coming was a miracle, something to be trusted, an event that would unfold like a flower from the small bud of faith and possibility. And a nuclear attack on the President of the United States would be the spark. The massive reprisals would be enough to begin the conflagration.

  “Armageddon,” Wofford whispered, as if reading Biddle’s mind. He rubbed an invisible spot on his trouser leg. “God guide us,” he said.

  “His will is being done!” Biddle snapped. He held up a finger and quoted from Hebrews, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

  The burden of his own certainty became so much heavier when those around him were weak. Yet even as he cursed Wofford’s fear, a different thought intruded—Anneliës, her name a sultry whisper in his mind. He felt his cheeks redden. His weakness, he thought, as he turned reflexively toward the window.

  Anneliës was inextricably part of the plan. He hated that, just as he sometimes hated her. Nothing about her was the way he’d planned. She was different from any other creature he’d encountered—unbelievably tempting and seductive, a devil in his heart and an angel in human form. He had chosen her because her extraordinary allurements would enable them to complete the preparations with Lucas, but they had snared him as well. His gaze wandered to the corner of his credenza, to the picture of Faith, his wife. God help me, he prayed.

  NINE

  NEW YORK, JUNE 20

  THEY SAT AT A CORNER table illuminated by wavering candlelight. Brent could hear the background murmur of other voices, but his attention was rooted on the woman across the table. His heart caught in his throat as he gazed at her, with her flashing eyes and high cheekbones, her simple black dress held up by thin spaghetti straps.

  Maggie could have been a model, a fact made obvious by the way other men turned to stare, but she set little stock in her beauty, just as she did the accumulation of wealth, or worldly power. Like Brent’s father and brother, she valued the qualities that made her community thrive—the welfare of her fellow citizens, fairness, equality, and justice.

  Tonight, in spite of the romantic setting, her lovely features were creased in anger. “You’re twenty-nine years old,” she was telling Brent. “And you still have no idea what you want.”

  Brent sighed. This whole topic was something he wanted to avoid.

  “You want a good marriage and a life that stands for something, but you also want to be rich and powerful,” Maggie went on.

  “I want you.”

  “Okay… when?”

  He shrugged. “You know… when I get some things settled.”

  She shook her head, and her anger seemed to dissipate, only to be replaced by sadness. A tear broke free and ran down her cheek. “You never make the hard choices. I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can wait.”

&n
bsp; Brent reached across the table for her hand, but he never touched it. From somewhere nearby he heard a crashing sound as if a waiter had dropped a tray of silverware.

  He opened his eyes. His bedroom was dark. From down in the street he heard the noise again, only he recognized it this time—a garbage truck compressing a load of trash. He was alone, as he had been since that last night with Maggie. His heart beat a lonely tattoo against the walls of his chest.

  TEN

  NEW YORK, JUNE 20

  EARLY MONDAY, WOFFORD TOOK A cell phone from his pocket and placed it on his desk. He leaned back in his chair and waited. When it rang, he picked it up, pushed the send button, and listened. The voice on the other end whispered that Google’s earnings would be five cents ahead of forecast. “Go with God,” Wofford said, and clicked off.

  ELEVEN

  NEW YORK, JUNE 20

  BRENT SLUMPED IN HIS CHAIR and only half-listened to the morning meeting. He was recalling Saturday afternoon when he’d given Simmons the tape of his conversation with Biddle. Simmons had been unimpressed. She’d called it “smoke,” not hard evidence, and said she needed more.

  Brent’s other problem was his growing unease about his decision to join Genesis Advisors. In spite of the money, he now realized it had been a mistake. Increasingly he simply wanted to get on with his life, and while much of that stemmed from regrets about Maggie, she wasn’t the whole reason. The idea of being a spy troubled him more each day. He shot a guilty glance at Owen Smythe. It had been one thing to bust a few greedy bastards in Boston. That had been unplanned, an instinctive response to the situation, but this felt very different, coldly planning to take down an entire firm and ruin so many careers.

  A sudden silence descended over the room and interrupted his thoughts. At the head of the table, Fred Wofford, once again running the meeting in Biddle’s absence, bowed his head and started to pray. Anticipating what might follow, Brent suppressed a shudder of distaste but pressed the record button.

  After his “Amen” Wofford looked at the expectant faces. “The Lord spoke last night,” he began and went on to announce that God had told Biddle about Google’s earnings.

  Brent struggled to mask his incredulity—the idea that God would front-run a company’s earnings report! He glanced around the room, angered now by the preposterousness of the lie and the transparent greed of the partners. No longer concerned about being unfair, he felt a thrill at having some concrete proof.

  TWELVE

  SOMEWHERE OUTSIDE PARIS, FRANCE, JUNE 20

  ABU SAYEED HEARD THE STACCATO of a siren and felt the van slow as Naif’s foot came off the gas. He was tucked out of sight, on a folded tarp in the cargo area. It was two a.m., the roads were quiet, and they had not been speeding. “Just one?” he asked, unable to see out the van’s windowless rear doors.

  “Yes,” Naif said, his voice calm.

  “Pull off here.”

  Naif stopped the van on the gravel shoulder, and they waited. A second later, a motorcycle pulled to a stop behind them and then the policeman’s boots crunched over gravel as he walked toward the driver’s door. Abu Sayeed’s pulse pounded behind his eyes as he recognized the snap of a holster flap. The policeman shined a light in Naif’s face and ordered him to keep his hands on the wheel. He sounded young, nervous. Abu Sayeed knew he’d seen what he took to be an Arab face heading north. It had to mean an alarm was out.

  The policeman’s light picked its way around the front seats then worked gradually toward the rear of the van, finally picking out Abu Sayeed’s legs and knees and the crate on which he sat. The policeman started to reach for his holster, but Naif’s hand was much quicker. It moved in a blur as he plunged his knife into the policeman’s throat.

  Abu Sayeed opened the rear doors and leaped out. He checked for traffic in both directions and thanked Allah for the empty road. He took the dying policeman beneath the arms, dragged him to the back of the van, and threw him inside. Naif took the policeman’s motorcycle and rolled it down the steep embankment into an irrigation ditch. It would be invisible unless someone stood at the edge and looked down.

  They drove onward, Abu Sayeed now sitting in the passenger seat. They drove slowly, appeared not to hurry, but both of them knew the policeman had almost certainly called in their vehicle’s license plate. Their eyes scoured homes and businesses, but at this hour almost everything was dark. In the next small town, Abu Sayeed spotted an ambulance, its lights flashing but no siren, waiting to turn onto the main road. Abu Sayeed could see a driver at the wheel and an attendant visible in the back. “There,” he said, and Naif checked the mirror for other cars then pulled across the road to block the ambulance.

  Abu Sayeed climbed out of the van and began gesticulating excitedly. When the ambulance driver lowered his window to ask what the problem was, Abu Sayeed shot him through the forehead. He ran around, jerked open the rear doors then shot the nurse and an old woman who lay on the stretcher. He dragged the driver’s body around to the back, turned off the rear inside lights and flashers, and then followed Naif to a pull-off. There, leaving the dead policeman in the van, they loaded their precious cargo into the ambulance, positioning the driver and attendant’s bodies to make it appear that the crates were a second stretcher. They covered the bodies with sheets and resumed their drive toward Le Havre.

  Two hours later, on a dead-end road near the port, they pulled up before a crumbling stucco warehouse fronted by a pair of scarred wooden doors. Naif killed the headlights as the warehouse doors swung outward. They drove into the dark interior and heard the squeal of hinges as the doors closed behind them then the heavy thud of a bar being dropped into place. A second later someone flipped on overhead lights to reveal a vast space with a stained concrete floor.

  Abu Sayeed shielded his eyes from the glare then climbed out. He came around the ambulance, clasped Naif by the arms, and kissed him on both cheeks. “Well done, my brother,” he said, feeling the reassuring strength in the young man’s biceps.

  Naif smiled, his teeth flashing in his dark face. There was youth in his smile but also pain from the recent killing in his eyes, Abu Sayeed thought. Naif was an eager warrior, but his hardness was marred by the poetry in his soul.

  “Praise be to Allah that we made it safely,” Naif said, his voice soft with relief. Abu Sayeed nodded, as he too felt an easing of the tension that had eaten his stomach.

  Across the empty warehouse floor, the two Americans stood behind their bodyguards. They had trusted the protection of their God enough to risk coming here, and that in turn had triggered Abu Sayeed’s own demonstration of faith: accompanying their lethal cargo for the nearly twelve-hour trip from Marseilles.

  The man who had locked the warehouse doors opened the rear doors of the ambulance then dragged the two corpses crudely onto the warehouse floor. When he finished he came over to stand beside Abu Sayeed. Mohammed Al-Wahani, a stocky Egyptian with moody eyes and a bad temper, crossed his thick arms and glared across the room at the Americans and beyond them at the shipping container that waited on its pallet in the far corner.

  “Patience and respect,” Abu Sayeed whispered, as he noted the hatred in Mohammed’s eyes. “Today our enemies are our friends.”

  Mohammed took a deep breath, but he finally nodded. “If that is your wish,” he muttered.

  Abu Sayeed walked toward the Americans. The bodyguards were staring at the corpses, and they edged reluctantly aside as he drew close. “Mr. Biddle,” he said.

  “What happened?” Prescott Biddle asked as he eyed the bodies.

  Abu Sayeed shrugged. “Unavoidable, I’m afraid.”

  Biddle stared for one more second then indicated his associate, “This is Mr. Wofford.”

  Wofford tore his horrified eyes away from the bodies long enough to offer a sweaty hand. Abu Sayeed glanced at his swelling bag of a stomach and suppressed a scowl. He shook the hand briefly then quickly turned to examine what from the outside appeared to be a normal half-size container. It
was metal, a weathered dark blue, similar to the thousands of others that were loaded onto ships and carried across the ocean every day. When he looked through the container’s open hatch, he suppressed a shudder.

  A Bedouin with a two thousand year heritage of open space and arid sands, he could not imagine being locked in a tiny box and thrown into the sea, and he prayed Mohammed could survive the ordeal. Perhaps he would emerge babbling on the other end, but it had to be risked. Mohammed’s face was too well known to the western authorities to get him into the United State any other way.

  “Reinforced, absolutely guaranteed to float” Biddle said, running his hands over the seals around the container’s hatch. “Everything inside will be perfectly safe and dry.” He stepped in, stooping to avoid the low ceiling, and pointed to five large tanks strapped to the back wall. “Ten days’ worth of oxygen. Far more than your man will need.”

  He clicked on a light above the built-in cot, indicated the row of batteries that provided power, pointed to several crates of health bars, dried fruit, nuts, and bottled water, even a small portable toilet. “All the comforts of home,” he said.

  Abu Sayeed turned back to Naif and Mohammed and nodded. They went into the ambulance and emerged with the first crate, carrying it with care as if they feared waking whatever lay inside. They lowered it onto a hand truck and wheeled it toward the container. Then, neck veins bulging from the strain, they hoisted the crate inside, laying it crosswise in front of the oxygen tanks where they fastened it in place with metal brackets. A minute later, they returned with the second crate.

  “Aren’t you going to give us a look?” Biddle asked.