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  Was she afraid that at twelve Paul would be too susceptible to his father’s words? Did she want to preserve Paul’s illusions—and her own—rather than acknowledge that his father was so gullible and cowardly? Was she shocked—as Paul was—that instead of wisdom or inspiration, all her husband had offered his son was a myth about a man who died on a cross and was coming to punish those who didn’t buy it?

  I needed more from you at twelve, Dad. I deserved better. Thanks, Mom, for sparing me this till now.

  And the idea that the Bible’s prophecies were being fulfilled, that God’s Son was coming soon—well, urgency was part of the comeon in virtually every fraud. “A onetime offer,” “Get in on the ground floor,” “Fire sale—prices will never go lower,” “Something for nothing”—how could his father fall for that? Paul knew of the book of Revelation from his studies but had never read it, though he’d heard it was powerful and richly symbolic. The florid what-if pitch was another typical huckster tactic—fire-and-brimstone razzle-dazzle to throw in a scare and close the deal. Didn’t all religions threaten colorful punishments to keep the faithful in line? Was his father really that naive? After a lifetime of admiration, Paul was flooded with contempt for the pathetic dupe his father had turned out to be.

  What kind of man fell prey to such lunacy—calling it “the most important and fulfilling decision of my own life”—and even tried to inflict it on a child? Maybe his mother, with all her rationality and abhorrence of religion, couldn’t justify ever showing it to him—or was too ashamed to. He could only imagine what Ranold would say. He couldn’t have had this planted, could he? Some coincidence, this and finding out about Andy Pass the same week.

  The envelope looked rather pristine, considering it had been in a box for thirty-odd years. The sealing wax seemed darkened and brittle, but it would take an expert to tell for sure whether it was new or old. The same was true of the ink, which looked like the kind that had to be drawn out of a bottle into an old-fashioned pen. He could compare the handwriting by eye but computer analysis would be necessary to test it definitively against other letters from his father that his mother had saved.

  We were in Washington long enough for someone to plant a letter, of course—but did I tell anyone I’d be clearing out my mother’s basement this weekend?

  Paul examined the box of mementos, which looked no less dusty than the others. It had been in the middle of a stack of boxes, so its lid was clean and offered no clue. But maybe the timing wasn’t the issue. Surely Andy had been under investigation for months. During that time, people in his life would have come under scrutiny—including Paul, if Ranold, who knew he once viewed Andy as a father, was in charge.

  Ranold would know better than to suspect Paul was a Christian, but the letter could be some kind of loyalty test—to see if Paul knew the truth about Andy and looked the other way. If Paul suddenly discovered that his own father had been a Christian, it would be natural for him to turn to the one religious person he knew and trusted. So anytime during the three months Paul’s mother’s house had been standing empty, the letter could have been planted to flush him out.

  Spinning the plot, Paul had to acknowledge it seemed like a stretch. Maybe he was grasping at straws to escape the reality that his father had been a crackpot, not the shining example of a man he had idolized for thirty years. But “a stretch” didn’t mean impossible or even far-fetched. Paul knew well that fabricating and planting a letter was child’s play for the NPO; and if the operation was one of Ranold’s first special projects, his father-in-law would have pulled out all the stops.

  The letter itself was probably the only key to the truth. Paul tore off part of the envelope flap, then folded the letter back into it and replaced the envelope in the box, beneath the stack of congratulatory cards.

  He had hit the trifecta, Paul thought bitterly. Andy and his father and now even Ranold were tainted by the Christian threat. Tomorrow he would sound out his boss about the extent of the Christian problem—whether the activity was nationwide or localized in Washington—and try to detect any hint that he was under suspicion himself.

  And if this infestation is swarming beyond Ranold’s backyard, I want to be an exterminator. And not just for national security.

  4

  MIDMORNING MONDAY, Paul dropped by to see his boss, Robert Koontz, the National Peace Organization’s Chicago bureau chief. Standing in the doorway, Paul recognized that, frankly, it was Koontz’s office he aspired to more than his job. Large and handsomely appointed with a nautical theme, the office had banks of windows on two walls, offering sweeping views of both the Chicago River and Lake Michigan.

  Koontz at sixty was a big man with a shiny pate and a rim of salt-and-pepper hair. He was fiddling with his computer but gestured for Paul to take a seat. “So how were the holidays?” he asked, eyes still on the screen.

  “The usual. Except for Andrew Pass.”

  Koontz stiffened but didn’t turn. “You knew him?”

  “Bob, you know I did. I saw the NPO guys at his funeral. They had to tell you I was there.”

  Koontz spun in his chair and held up both hands. “You’re right, Paul. Yeah, I know. You spoke. You served under him. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Thanks. But why the agency presence?”

  Koontz sighed. “Pass was a Christian fanatic.”

  So the word is out.

  “That’s incredible. What about his family?”

  “We think his brother, John—goes by Jack—is in deep too, but he’s not shown himself enough to be vulnerable.”

  “Anyone else? Wife, kids?”

  “Apparently his wife divorced him over it. So we don’t think so, but we don’t know.”

  “Bob, did we take him out?”

  “What did your father-in-law tell you?”

  “Nobody stonewalls like an old spymaster. So that’s a yes?”

  “Well—”

  “Why—he resisted?”

  “You bet he did. I hear we confiscated an arsenal out of his car, and he tried to take a few of our guys down with him. One tough hombre—but you knew that.”

  “So the story about the warehouse fire—?”

  “Strictly press fodder. His confederates got the message loud and clear, but we kept the public’s nose out of our business. It starts getting out that this cult exists, it will only grow. And with martyrs? Don’t get me started. Listen to this.” He turned back to his computer and scrolled. “Over a hundred years ago Russia closed almost all its churches and disposed of more than forty thousand clergy. They turned city churches into museums and country churches into barns or apartments.”

  “Like we did.”

  “But get this. By the turn of the century—of course this is after the fall of communism—two-thirds of all Russians identified themselves as Christians.”

  “So insurrection was brewing underground.”

  “Bingo. Can’t let that happen here. What happened in Russia and China and Romania decades ago could reemerge here, right under our noses. We haven’t really eradicated religion unless we can contain the fanatics. If we let them get a foothold, we could see a full-blown religious uprising.”

  “Is there really an armed Christian cult?”

  “There’s a lot we’re just learning now, Paul. We’re putting together a task force to determine the extent of the problem—whether we have just a few isolated cells, or worse.”

  “It’s a disease,” Paul said. “An addiction. Religion gets hold of people, and they can’t seem to keep it to themselves—they spread it and get other people hooked. Makes me sick—the waste of a guy like Andy Pass.”

  “Exactly,” Koontz said. “And that’s why we have to treat this like the war on drugs—expose the threat, flush it out, eliminate it.” He shook his head. “This has the potential to destroy everything this country has worked for since the war. I’m old enough to remember how things were. It was religious extremists who persecuted homosexuals, assassinated abortion doctors
—before we had childbirth grants to promote repopulation—and bombed stem-cell research labs that yielded most of our cures for disease. And after the terrorist attacks of ’05, it was the extremists who defied the tolerance laws and rioted, killing Muslims.”

  Paul nodded. He’d studied all this in grad school. Naturally, people wanted revenge for the Super Bowl and Disneyland bombings and the gas attacks on the underground trains in Washington, Boston, and New York. The same thing had happened in Europe, when the Eiffel Tower, the London Bridge, and the Vatican were destroyed. And then the war came—life on earth nearly snuffed out because of religious fanaticism.

  “We’re lucky the war ended the way it did and woke us up,” Paul said. “The abolition of religion has proved the best outcome of tragedy ever.”

  “Tell me about it,” Koontz said. “Peace for more than a generation. Not a single nation at war for the first time in history. But we can’t take it for granted. Not now—and not ever again.”

  “What’s this new task force?”

  “We’re calling it Zealot Underground.”

  “Bob, get me on that. You know I’ve got the background. The corruption of Andy Pass—and so many others—demands vengeance.”

  The following week, Paul was dispatched to Mexico on a consulting job, returning the Tuesday following the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend. The big news in Chicago was that a speaker at a King celebration had twice used the archaic and outlawed term Reverend in connection with the martyr’s name. One TV pundit suggested the city declare a moratorium on King Day observances “until organizers learn to control themselves.”

  Paul’s secretary, Felicia, a tall black woman in her late forties, couldn’t hide her emotion. “Dr. King died long before I was born, but no matter what you say, the man was a reverend. They go stopping King Day for something minor as that, they’re going to have trouble. Tell me the truth, Dr. Stepola. You see any harm in using a man’s title, one he earned and used himself?”

  “Yes, I do, Felicia. And the organizers know better too. It’s playing with fire to link religion with a hero like Dr. King.”

  “Link? Isn’t that where Dr. King got his nonviolence philosophy?”

  “If you’re talking about his tactics, I believe he got them from Mohandas Gandhi. Think about it—what that title links him to is occultism and ignorance.”

  “I just meant—”

  “Dr. King was a product of his time. Do you think highlighting that era’s blindness serves his memory? When we want to honor Thomas Jefferson, do we focus on his slaveholding?”

  Felicia looked stricken. Paul smiled. “Am I going to have to arrest you for practicing religion, Felicia?”

  “Cuff me. You’ll need backup.”

  “Oh yeah?” he said, chuckling. “We’ll see about that. But seriously, I spent four years studying the major religions. And ‘I ain’t gonna study war no more.’ That’s what the history is like. Believe me, religion is the opposite of nonviolence.”

  Though he let it go, Paul was amazed that an NPO secretary would defend religion in front of her boss. But before Wintermas, he himself had given little thought to the likelihood of a Christian threat right here in the USSA. We’ve forgotten that the price of freedom is constant vigilance. We take peace for granted. But not anymore.

  The river appeared in danger of icing over, a rarity. He stared at it past the picture of Jae on his desk and acknowledged that he had thought more about Angela Pass than his wife while he was away. He’d felt so relieved when Koontz said she wasn’t a suspect. Angela had said she’d always wanted to meet him and that she’d love to get together to talk about her father.

  Felicia buzzed. “Koontz wants to see you.”

  Paul pulled on his suit coat, tightened his tie, and grabbed a notepad. He paused for iris scans at two checkpoints, then was waved in by Koontz’s secretary. “He’s on the videophone, but he wants you to come in anyway.”

  Paul entered and shut the door, just as Koontz was saying, “He’s here now. I’ll call you back.”

  He clicked off but didn’t offer Paul a chair. “That was the brass. Talking about you, Step.”

  Paul nodded, unsure what to say.

  Koontz rose. “Let’s go.” He pointed down with his thumb.

  The secure room?

  Koontz smiled. “I have news.”

  “Okay,” Paul said, more as a question.

  Koontz opened his credenza and the DNA-coded lock on his safe, pulling from it a sealed document box.

  Paul followed him to the elevator, and they rode sixteen floors to the basement. At every checkpoint Koontz’s ID was enough for both of them. In the wing that led to the secure room, however, Koontz and Paul were treated like anyone else. Though they had known the uniformed guards by name for years, there was no small talk and no shortcuts. Their holographic-image IDs were scanned by computer and compared to their faces. Besides the iris scans, both put their palms against a screen for fingerprint and DNA checks.

  They passed through a metal detector and were finally given two metal keys for the secure room, a touch that always struck Paul as quaint. The keys were supposedly a precaution against bugs that might be somehow encoded in the modern electronic locking devices. Koontz unlocked a three-inch-thick steel door that revealed, six inches away, a three-inch-thick wood door, also locked. Once they were inside and Koontz had secured both doors, a guard outside ran a final scan on the room. The results appeared on a small monitor on the wall. No evidence of bugs or microwaves or any other invasive device. Koontz hit a button next to the monitor, which triggered white noise, a barely audible hum that would interfere with any recording equipment and make their conversation unintelligible.

  Six luxurious, deep burgundy leather chairs surrounded a round mahogany table. Otherwise the room was bare, save for a pewter ice-water pitcher and several glasses. Koontz tossed the document box on the table and poured two glasses of water, mostly ice. He set a tiny napkin beneath each glass. “Missed my calling,” he said as he sat and pointed to a chair for Paul. “I’d have been a dynamite waiter.”

  Paul smiled and tried to act calm. Koontz, usually all business, seemed to be stalling. Paul wondered if his father-in-law had been right. Had he aroused suspicion by going to Pass’s funeral? His plan was to claim he had no knowledge of Pass’s activities since he’d known him in Delta Force—which was true. Or was this somehow connected to his father’s letter? Alleged letter. He still had the scrap he’d torn from the envelope tucked in his wallet. What if he was searched? Whether or not the letter is a plant, wondering about it is no crime. It would be weird if I didn’t wonder.

  Koontz stood and removed his jacket, draping it over the back of his chair. He loosened his tie. “Get comfortable,” he said. “We got us some work to do.”

  “I’m comfortable for now,” Paul said. He had been in the secure room twice before and knew it was kept at a constant temperature.

  “You kept up on your firearms, Paul?”

  Paul nodded. “I can handle anything from a derringer to a howitzer. I’m at the range every two weeks, minimum.”

  “You own a double-action semiautomatic?”

  “I’ve got an eleven-point-five-millimeter Beretta and a Walther Stealth.”

  “Got a preference?”

  “Depends. What am I going to do with it?”

  “Kill someone from close range.”

  Paul hesitated. “Beretta’s hard to beat, Bob. Who am I going to kill?”

  “Hopefully no one. But this job requires a side arm.”

  “This job?”

  “The new task force. You asked for it, and you got it.”

  “That’s great. But tell me—is Ranold involved?”

  “The Special Projects Unit in D.C. is developing some kind of operation. It’s classified—need-to-know only—and down the road we’ll probably intersect. Here, at this point, we’ll be more of an intelligence clearinghouse.”

  “What will my role be?”


  “Actually twofold. I want you to be a wild card. Officially, you go along on strategic raids. You’ll counsel us on what these Christians believe, and you’ll help interpret what they’re really saying when interrogated. You’ll do some of the questioning yourself. Unofficially, you’ll keep me personally informed as to the size and strength of the cult. We don’t know yet whether these various factions are connected. How sophisticated are they? Is this thing nationwide, or are these independent groups that just look and act alike?”

  “I’ll need to brush up on their theology and beliefs and practices.”

  “We think some of them are into sabotage. Remember that incident with the Reflecting Pool in Washington?”

  “It turned red, right? Wasn’t that some kind of prank?”

  “Not exactly. In front of a hundred tourists, the water turned to blood. Real human blood—we tested it. All it takes is one person in a crowd like that to claim it’s a miracle—which is what happened, though we kept it out of the press—and you have a religious crisis in the making. Christians are staging these supposed miracles and using them to win converts, claiming they are signs the world is coming to an end.”

  Koontz leaned forward. “I hate to tell you this, but we think Pass was behind the Reflecting Pool thing. When we tried to interrogate him—well, the way he fought, it turned into ‘suicide by cop.’”

  Paul nodded. “Extremists will die for their causes.”

  “I have to be honest with you, Paul. It’s going to be tough. More people are going to die. It can’t be avoided.”

  “Whatever it takes,” Paul said.

  Koontz unsealed the document box and spent two hours showing Paul what they believed was evidence of some kind of Christian presence in all seven states.

  “See what we’re up against?”

  “Shocking how fast this thing has snowballed,” Paul said.

  “I’m glad you’re on board. In case you’re wondering, it’s a significant jump in level and pay.” Koontz stood and began gathering his materials. “You’ll stay in the same office, and you can inform Felicia, but first we’ll have to upgrade her security clearance. That should be done by the time you get back.”