The banner headline across the cover of Time Magazine proclaimed:
THE MESSIAH!
Other magazines followed suit, and the major tabloids got into the act on a regular basis with bizarre stories claiming that Pantera was truly the Son of God or of extraterrestrial origin. Of course, scandalous stories ran that were immediately debunked through Twitter statements or threats by Rex to sue. Most were eventually withdrawn.
It didn’t take long for a regiment of paparazzi to gather among Pantera’s followers during the Enlightenment Tour, snapping thousands of photographs and videos. As Pantera walked among the crowds or from a hotel to the venue of his latest sermon, or back again, always surrounded by Amato and a growing number of biker bodyguards, the click and whirl of cameras accompanied the stroll like angry insects. One photograph that made the rounds, published over and over again, was Pantera locked in an obviously loving embrace with Renata Singh. The caption under this photograph read: “The Preacher and his Mary Magdalene?”
The talking heads and analysts who chimed in during the tour on local and national news shows all agreed that Pantera’s rise to stardom was attributable to his striking a chord into a gaping, modern spiritual void. The old religions were no longer able to ease the pain of existence and the fear of death. His critics lashed back, saying it was all so much New Age mumble-jumble. Among these critics, not surprisingly, were the priests, reverends, imams, and shamans of the major and minor organized religions, who all gave unified voice to the claim that Cristos Pantera was a fraud, a false prophet, and not the authentic, enlightened man that he and his handlers made him out to be.
Despite the frenzy, Pantera seemed to have little practical effect in effecting real change. Constantine pointed this out repeatedly to Bradley when the specter of “taking action” against Pantera was raised during the tour. Pantera’s sermons seemed to quickly wear off most members of his audience. After all the sermons and parables, and the attendance of millions at his events and even more millions watching at home, life had gone on pretty much as before. Those who had listened to his words were perhaps superficially enlightened, for the moment, and possibly for a few hours or days thereafter. They had briefly awakened, but then gone back to sleep in the comforting illusions of meaning that the ruling elite’s belief system had always provided.
Only a miniscule portion of Pantera’s “multitude” who attended his Enlightenment Tour sermons renounced their old beliefs and embraced those he urged upon them. Only these few left their old lives behind and joined the movement, becoming so-called Sons or Daughters of Man, and thus Citizens of the Kingdom of God.
Chief Bradley agreed with Constantine that Pantera’s effect was minimal. Society had not changed much despite the seeming success of Pantera’s Enlightenment Tour. The Supremacy remained securely in control. The tipping point for Pantera’s revolution seemed far from reach.
“But the night is young,” Bradley added dourly.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Lazarus
Healing the sick became a regular part of Pantera’s routine at the end of the Enlightenment Tour gigs, from the first one at the Ralph to the last at Gruden’s Farm. Once Pantera stopped speaking, a small but ever-growing portion of the audience squeezed toward the stage, and then followed him and his entourage of security guards and disciples toward various dressing or staging rooms.
“Help us!” shouted the afflicted, or family or friends pushing the wheelchairs of the afflicted. “Touch us!” others said. “Make us whole!” still others beseeched.
Hearing them, Pantera could not resist the call. He came out and said a few words of hushed encouragement to each one of the afflicted and, for some, the power of suggestion did the rest. Reporters tried unsuccessfully to verify claims of healings. His ability to heal some or to cast psychological demons from the minds of others, like everything else concerning Cristos Pantera, became shrouded in mystery.
And then in late August, after a sermon at Mile High Stadium in Denver, the inevitable happened. It was reported that Pantera had raised a man from the dead.
The night after the “miracle,” the inner circle gathered in the penthouse suite at an upscale hotel in downtown Denver that Rex’s team had booked for them. They lounged on various couches and chairs in the spacious living room, waiting for Pantera to emerge from his bedroom. Finally, he walked out with Renata. As she found a spot on the floor and sat down, Pantera moved to the center of the living room.
“You’ve all heard what happened this afternoon,” he began.
“Is it true, you raised some guy from the dead?” Richard Avery asked, laughing sarcastically. “Did we hear that right?”
Avery seemed agitated over everything lately, and he had been making derogatory comments. He had confided to Constantine that he hated how Pantera’s ministry was becoming a circus act controlled by Spartacus Rex. Constantine had said nothing in response, but wondered if Avery’s father might soon get his way and see the return of his prodigal son.
Pantera turned to him and softly said, “Yes, Richard, you heard it right.”
Stu Goldstein burst into the room, cutting off anything further that Pantera might have said. “It’s gone viral,” he told them. “The Pope is having a coronary. The Holy See has officially condemned the claim. Calls it not only false, but blasphemous, profane.”
“Who cares what the Pope thinks?” Amato snapped.
“The Master is lucky the Grand Mufti doesn’t condemn him,” Mohammed Atti said, “because that would be a true condemnation. A death sentence. The Master would have to go into hiding, like Rushdie.”
“Be careful with this, Cristos,” Mother Jane warned from her chair in the back corner of the room. Over the past weeks, she had cultivated a backseat approach regarding her son’s doings and would normally speak up only when Pantera asked her to. But this time, she clearly felt the need to speak. “The Pope’s furor could alienate a lot of people.”
“I threaten him,” Pantera told her. “I threaten them all. As I should.”
“But this is more than a war of words,” she pressed. “Something like this is what they fear most—that you’ll be considered a god.”
Pantera sighed and sat on the couch, suddenly looking distracted. After a time, Luke Morgan asked, “So what happened? Tell us, Master. How did you raise someone from the dead?”
Pantera turned to Renata and said, “You tell them.” He leaned back and closed his eyes while Renata stood and told the story.
Earlier that night, a forty-two-year-old man standing on the football field with his wife not far from the stage at Mile High Stadium had suffered an apparent heart attack toward the end of Pantera’s sermon. Upon his collapse, the woman screamed, and a couple paramedics rushed over. Pantera had stopped in mid-sentence and watched the drama unfold, but few in the audience were close enough to the fallen man to realize why the preacher had stopped speaking.
Today, they knew.
Pantera finally resumed speaking as the paramedics lifted the stricken man onto a stretcher. His skin was gray, ashen. He appeared lifeless. As the paramedics rushed him to a nearby hospital, Pantera cut short his sermon and had one of Rex’s limos take him there. Upon his arrival in the ER waiting area, he found the wife frantic, sobbing. But seeing the white-robed figure, she ran over and hugged Pantera, thanking him for coming. Then, suddenly, she backed away and looked up into his eyes.
“It’s too late,” she told him through her sobs. “Robert’s dead.” And then she broke down again in Pantera’s arms.
“May I see him?” he asked. She looked up at him and nodded, then led him into the ER and approached the bed where her husband’s lifeless body lay. By then, the nurses were milling about in the hallway by the man’s curtained-off bed. The instruments monitoring his condition had flat-lined and a crisp white sheet had been pulled up over the length of his body. At any minute, orderlies would come and take it to the morgue. Tomorrow morning, there’d be an autopsy confirming that he�
��d died of a massive coronary. His funeral would be held later in the week.
Pantera approached the man’s bed and pulled back the sheet. The face that greeted him was in a contorted death-grip. The man’s mouth was open, as if he’d needed to say something—perhaps a final goodbye. His wife approached the bed and broke down into a guttural wail.
Pantera reached out a hand and touched her forehead to quiet her as he stared down at her husband in his death agony. After a time, he closed his eyes and mumbled a prayer or chant. Finally, he opened them and waved his right hand over the man’s forehead, whispering something that the woman later reported as, “Whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.”
Moments later, the man’s mouth closed and his face went slack. His chest to have started rising and falling. He was breathing again, and the instruments began to confirm the impossible. They registered life. And then the man opened his eyes. With this, the woman screamed—not out of terror, but out of utter joy.
Hearing the commotion, two nurses and the young resident who had valiantly tried to save the man hurried into his room. What they saw caused them to stop in their tracks and gawk. The dead man was sitting up, his eyes open. Somehow, he’d come back from death. In the next moment, they all looked over in awe at the long-haired, white-robed man with a benevolent smile standing at the man’s bedside. They knew him as the famous preacher, Cristos Pantera, who they also now believed was responsible for raising a man from the dead.
There was, of course, no way for anyone to verify that Pantera’s spiritual intervention had brought the man back from death. His wife certainly told that story—the “Master” had saved her husband. The doctors couldn’t explain it, except to say, sometimes things like that happen. Had Pantera’s prayers or chants over the man been the cause? The press conjectured, and many came to believe it.
“The Christ parallel again,” Chief Bradly later told Constantine. “The Lazarus story.”
Constantine had left the hotel and was walking on a narrow path in a small park across from it. It was a dark, clear night and a half moon blazed above him. After a time, as if it had just occurred to him, Constantine said, “Lazarus…wasn’t he a friend of Jesus?”
“I don’t know,” Bradley said. “Was he?”
Constantine said he thought he was and added, “And, though I don’t know the source just yet, there is a rumor circulating around that the man who supposedly died, Robert Jeffries, is somehow associated with none other than Spartacus Rex.”
“I’ll put someone on that,” Bradley said, then sighed and added, “So that’s the plan—same as Jesus.” Then, he laughed. “What’s next, he turns water into wine?”
“No matter what it is, it’s already gone viral,” Constantine said. “A modern-day miracle, straight out of the Bible.”
“The ultimate miracle, I’d say,” Bradley said. “Something only a god could do.” He laughed again. “Or the son of God. It’s like the bastard’s poking a finger in our eyes,” he continued. “He knows we’re out there, watching him. So, he orchestrates this?”
“If it was faked,” Constantine said.
“What, you think he can bring people back from the dead?” Bradley asked with another laugh. “And I bet there’re be more of them, miracles probably orchestrated through Rex. Like the kid whose eyesight was restored in Chicago.”
Bradley sighed and they stopped talking for a time.
“He wants to be the king of the world,” Bradley finally said. “There’s no mystery about it anymore. Just like Jesus.”
“So he’s a megalomaniac? That’s what you’re saying?”
“What messiah isn’t?”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Invitation
With the Enlightenment Tour over, Pantera returned to his farmhouse retreat in Grassy Creek for a period of rest. Construction crews were still working on the permanent dormitories, a dining hall, and a small amphitheater with one thousand seats arranged in semi-circular rows before a small stage where Pantera could give his sermons from a raised pulpit to resident converts and visitors.
While they waited for the dorms, Pantera’s followers had arranged themselves in Quonset huts set along the periphery of the construction zone, which were in turn surrounded by a dozen or more porta-potties. Another larger Quonset hut in the middle of the others housed a temporary dining hall. Beyond the structures, in a wide clearing, were parked the three RVs and now ten buses that had been used to crisscross the country during the Enlightenment Tour.
A security gate had been installed along the temporary main gravel road leading up to the farmhouse, only a short drive from the narrow county road it intersected. There were always four guards manning the gate, more bikers from Amato’s old club, but also including other volunteers who knew how to handle themselves and who had passed a basic psychological test that Amato and Pantera had devised.
After some debate among the inner circle, Amato had been permitted to amass a small arsenal, including semi-automatic rifles and small arms, to defend against whatever official, unofficial, government, or other threat might seek to put them out of commission.
“It’s useless,” Renata Singh had argued. “If they want to take us down, they will.”
“Maybe,” Amato replied. “But why go down without a fight?”
“Our defense against Satan is our message,” Pantera had snapped.
But the inner circle voted to appease Amato and permit the arsenal.
On the day following Pantera’s return to the Grassy Creek compound, a contingent of national and local news hounds and at least a dozen paparazzi had camped out in cars or smaller RVs along the county road just outside it. The next afternoon, a county sheriff’s patrol came by and chased them off, only to see them return the following morning.
When Pantera saw that they had returned, he and Amato strolled out and called them over. The two men then marched the group past the security gate and inside the compound. When Constantine saw this from inside the farmhouse, he went outside to see what was going on.
Standing in the middle of the crowd of curious reporters and paparazzi, Pantera raised up his arms and said, “We welcome you. There is nothing to hide here. Breaking free of the illusion provides ultimate freedom in the Kingdom of God. And we want you all to see that.”
Brilliant, Constantine thought. Pantera was always brilliant.
That same morning, a black stretch limousine pulled into the gravel driveway to the compound. Moments later, Nick Amato had come out with a detail of three bikers to greet the limo as it slowly drove up the driveway. He stopped it some distance from the farmhouse and stood waiting for its occupant to exit and show himself. It wasn’t Spartacus Rex this time.
A moment after the limo came to a stop, the rear door opened and out stepped a tall young priest in a full-length black cassock. Amato stepped forward, within a few feet of the priest, and asked, “Help you?”
The priest looked surprised, first by Amato’s question, then by the three scowling bikers lined up behind him. He stiffened, smiled, and bowed briefly, then pulled an envelope from his pocket and offered it to Amato.
“It is from the Vatican,” the priest said. “An invitation. Direct from the Holy Father himself. I am Father Antonio Parlato, an aide to the Vatican Secretariat.”
Amato’s frown deepened. He reached out and took the letter, and examined it for a moment. The envelope was made of thick, expensive paper edged with gold embossing. It bore no address—no writing at all. Inside it was a single card of some kind.
At last, Amato looked up at Father Parlato and asked, “An invitation? An invitation to what?”
“Why, an audience with the Holy Father,” the priest said with a smile.
Amato thought a moment, then said, “Wait here.”
He went into the farmhouse with the invitation, leaving Father Parlato standing there facing the scowling bikers. Five minutes later, he returned and told the priest, “He’ll be there.”
The p
riest smiled, then stood looking at Amato and the bikers for a time as if expecting Pantera to come outside and introduce himself, a show of respect.
“Is there anything else?” Amato asked.
Father Parlato finally shook his head and said, “No.”
The priest stepped back, turned, and walked to the limo. A moment later, it drove off. Inside the farmhouse, Pantera had already placed a call to Spartacus Rex.
“Holy See, holy shit!” Rex exclaimed after Pantera told him the news. He seemed to be laughing, or possibly hyperventilating, at the other end. “But what the fuck you think he wants?”
Pantera thought a moment, then said, “To do Satan’s bidding and bribe me.”
Rex burst out laughing, then said, “Yeah, that’s it. Pope’s gonna bribe your ass. Buy your fucking soul. But not for Jesus’ sake. He wants to preserve his fucking church. When is it? This audience with the Pope?”
“Day after tomorrow. The Vatican has made the travel arrangements, it seems. All I need to do is catch a plane.”
“Tomorrow?”
“I guess what the Pope wants to see me about can’t wait,” Pantera said.
“I guess not. Like the Godfather, I bet he makes you an offer you can’t refuse.”
Chapter Thirty
The Vatican
At just before nine the following morning, two black stretch limousines rented by the Vatican took Pantera, his twelve disciples, and Mother Jane from the Grassy Creek compound for the two and a half-hour drive to the Charlotte Douglas International Airport. The Vatican had booked fourteen round-trip tickets on an Alitalia Airbus A330 scheduled to depart Charlotte Douglas at 2:25 p.m. for the long trip across the Atlantic to Rome.
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