In the rearview mirror, D'Agosta could make out a long black Mercedes, absurdly out of place, cruising slowly up the park drive behind them. It pulled onto the grass across the tennis courts from the van. Two big men with shaved heads and dark glasses got out, looking around carefully. Then a third, smaller man exited and began walking across the grass toward the van.
"What dreadful lack of subtlety," said Pendergast. "It appears these gentlemen have been watching too much television."
D'Agosta eased the car forward, coming to a stop near the exit back onto Broadway. The hill fell away here and the trees were more numerous, blocking their car from view.
"Too bad I'm in uniform," he said.
"On the contrary: being in uniform, you will be the last one they suspect. I'm going to get as close as I can, see if I can learn more particulars about the meeting. You buy a donut and coffee over there"—he nodded to a dingy coffee shop across Broadway—"then wander into the park. Take a seat on one of the benches by the baseball diamond, where you'll have a clear line of fire should anything untoward occur. Let us hope, with these children around, that nothing of the sort occurs—but be ready for action regardless."
D'Agosta nodded.
Pendergast gave his eyes a vigorous rubbing. When his grubby hands fell away again, his eyes had lost their clear, silvery hue. Now they belonged to a tippler: uncertain, watery, red-rimmed.
D'Agosta watched Pendergast get out of the car and amble back up the rise. The agent was wearing a brown sport coat of dubious material, a faded stain between the shoulders; double-knit slacks a size too large; a pair of shabby Hush Puppies. His hair was several shades darker than usual—just how the hell had he managed that?—and his face was in need of a wash. He looked exactly like a man who was down but not quite out, clinging to a few shreds of respectability. And it wasn't just the clothes: his very gait had changed to a vague shuffle, his body language tentative, his eyes darting this way and that, as if prepared to ward off an unexpected blow.
D'Agosta stared another moment, marveling. Then he exited the car, bought a coffee and a glazed donut in the coffee shop across the street, and headed back into the park. As he crested the little rise and approached the diamond, he could see the shorter Chinese man getting into the back of the television van. His large companions were hanging back about forty paces, arms crossed.
There was a whooosh as a model rocket went off to scattered cheers and clapping. All eyes turned skyward; there was a pop and the rocket came drifting back, floating beneath a red-and-white-striped miniature parachute.
D'Agosta eased himself onto a bench across the diamond from the van. He slipped the lid off his coffee, pretending to watch the rockets go off. This was strange: the would-be cameraman was now calling the kids together, apparently to film them. D'Agosta wondered if the cameraman was Chait, Bullard's main man in New York. He decided otherwise: Chait was no doubt inside the van with the Chinese honcho.
He turned his attention back to Pendergast. The agent was strolling along the walkway near the van. He paused, fished a racing form out of the trash, shook it clear of debris, then stopped to chat with the cameraman. It looked like he might be asking him for money. The man scowled and shook his head, motioning Pendergast to move on. Then the man turned back toward the children, gesturing for them to line up with their rockets.
D'Agosta felt a knot tighten in his stomach. Why the hell was the man organizing the kids like that, anyway? Something did not feel right at all.
Meanwhile, Pendergast had seated himself on the bench next to the van, so close he could almost touch it, and was going through the racing form with a pencil stub, circling various horses and making notes.
Then—inexplicably—Pendergast stood up, went to the back door of the van, and knocked.
The cameraman came striding over immediately, gesticulating furiously, shoving Pendergast aside. D'Agosta resisted the impulse to reach for his gun. The back doors of the van opened; there was some loud talk; the doors slammed shut. The cameraman gestured angrily for Pendergast to move off, but instead, the agent shrugged and seated himself back down on the bench, returning to his study of the racing form, perusing it with languid ease, just as if he had all the money in the world to blow on the horses.
D'Agosta looked around. The two plainclothes FBI agents were strolling along the far side of the baseball diamond, talking. The Chinese goons didn't seem to have noticed them. Their attention was riveted on the van and what was going on inside. They seemed ready for something. Too ready. And there was the cameraman, still lining up the kids, as if he, too, was expecting something to happen at any moment.
D'Agosta felt an almost unbearable sense of apprehension. He asked himself why Bullard's men had gone to such trouble to place themselves in the midst of these kids. They had no inkling they were under surveillance. The tension was between them and their customers, the Chinese. He'd gathered as much from the wiretap, and now it was playing out here.
He started to calculate what would happen if the Chinese thugs pulled out weapons and opened fire on the van. The kids would be caught in cross fire. That's what it was all about: the kids were protection. Bullard's men were expecting a firefight: the cameraman was lining up the kids as a human shield.
D'Agosta dropped his coffee and donut and rose from the bench, hand on his piece. At the same moment, the back doors of the van flew open, and the little Chinese man got out as quickly and lightly as a bird. He began striding across the baseball diamond. He flicked his hand toward the two thugs—just the barest gesture—and broke into a run.
D'Agosta saw the two reach for their weapons.
Immediately, he dropped to one knee, steadied his grip on his handgun, and aimed. As soon as a weapon appeared—an Uzi, by the look of it—he squeezed off a round, and just missed.
Abruptly, all hell broke loose. There was the pop! pop! pop! pop! of semiautomatic-weapons fire. Kids scattering, grown-ups yelling, grabbing their kids and running in terror or throwing themselves to the ground. An Uzi appeared in the cameraman's hand, too, but before he could fire, he was struck in the chest by a hail of gunfire and flew backward, slamming against the side of the van.
D'Agosta fired a second time at the goon he'd missed, stopping him with a well-placed round to the knee. The other turned toward the unexpected fire, swinging his Uzi and spraying automatic fire across the outfield; Pendergast, shielding two children with his own body, coolly dropped the man with a shot to the head. As the man went down, his Uzi swung wildly, still firing; small clouds of dirt erupted in the grass before Pendergast; then the agent fell sharply back, pushing the children out of harm's way as a spray of blood suddenly darkened his arm.
"Pendergast!" D'Agosta screamed.
The goon D'Agosta hit refused to stay down. Now the man had rolled over and was firing on the van, the rounds whanging its side and sending chips of paint flying. A burst of fire came from its front seat; the Chinese goon went down again; and the van pulled away with a squeal of tires.
"Stop them!" D'Agosta yelled at the two agents. They were already up and running, firing futilely, their shots ringing off the van's armored sides.
Now the head Chinese had reached the black Mercedes. As it roared to life, the two agents turned their fire toward it, blowing out the back tires as the car swerved into the lane. A round hit the gas tank, and the vehicle went up with a muffled thump, a ball of fire roiling skyward as the car left the lane and rolled gently into a grove of trees. The door flew open and a burning man got out, took a few halting steps, paused, and slowly toppled forward. In the distance, the television van was careening out of the park, vanishing into the warren of streets to the west.
The park was bedlam: kids and adults scattered across the ground, cowering and screaming. D'Agosta rushed to where Pendergast had fallen, relieved beyond measure when he saw the FBI agent was sitting up. The two Chinese were dead, and the cameraman, who'd practically been torn in half, was obviously on his way out, too. But no civilian
s had been so much as scratched. It seemed a miracle.
D'Agosta knelt in the grass. "Pendergast, you all right?"
Pendergast waved, face ashen, temporarily unable to speak.
One of the other FBI agents came running up. "Wounded? We got wounded?"
"Agent Pendergast. The cameraman's beyond help."
"Backup and medical are on the way." And, in fact, D'Agosta could now hear sirens converging on the park.
Pendergast helped one of the children he'd protected—a boy of about eight—to a standing position. His father rushed over and clasped the child in his arms. "You saved his life," he said. "You saved his life."
D'Agosta helped Pendergast up. Blood was soaking through one side of his dirty shirt.
"That fellow winged me," Pendergast said. "It's nothing, a flesh wound. I lost my wind, that's all."
Slowly, hesitantly, people began converging on the park from the surrounding houses, crowding around the burning hulk of the Mercedes and the nearby corpse. Newly arrived cops were shouting, covering the corners, setting up a cordon, yelling at the gathering crowd to keep back.
"Damn," said D'Agosta. "Those fuckers from BAI were expecting a firefight."
"Indeed they were. And no wonder."
"What do you mean?"
"I overheard just enough to learn Bullard's men were calling the deal off."
"Calling the deal off?"
"On the very eve of success, apparently. Now you can see the reason for the elaborate setup—the park, the children. They knew the Chinese would not be pleased. This was their attempt to avoid being shot to pieces."
D'Agosta glanced around at the carnage. "Hayward's gonna love this."
"She should. If we hadn't run that wiretap and been here to take down those shooters, I hate to think what might have happened."
D'Agosta shook his head and looked at the burning Mercedes, now being hosed down by a fire truck. "You know what? This case just keeps getting weirder and weirder."
{ 36 }
The Reverend Wayne P. Buck Jr. sat at the counter of the Last Gasp truck stop in Yuma, Arizona, stirring skim milk into his coffee. Before him lay the remains of his usual breakfast: white toast with a little marmalade, oatmeal without milk or sugar. Outside, beyond the flyspecked window, there was a grinding of gears: a large semi pulled off the apron, its steel tank flashing in the brilliant sun, heading west toward Barstow.
Reverend Buck—the title was honorary—took a sip of the coffee. Then, methodical in everything he did, he finished his breakfast, carefully cleaning the bowl with the edge of his spoon before setting it aside. He took another sip of coffee, replaced the cup gently in its saucer. And then at last he turned to his morning reading: the ten-inch stack of periodicals that lay tied in heavy twine on the far end of the counter.
As Buck cut the twine with a pocketknife, he was aware of a sense of anticipation. His morning reading was always a high point of the day: a trucker, whom he'd cured of fits at a camp revival several months before, always left a bundle of outdated newspapers for him outside the truck stop every morning. The papers varied from day to day, and Buck never knew what he'd find. Yesterday there'd been a copy of the New Orleans Times-Picayune in among the more common Phoenix Sun and Los Angeles Times. But his tingle of anticipation, he knew, extended beyond the selection of reading material.
Reverend Buck had been in the vicinity of Yuma almost a year now, ministering to the truckers, the waitresses and busboys, the migrant workers, the broken and wandering and uncertain souls that passed through on their way to some place and rarely lingering long. The work was its own reward, and he never complained. The reason there were so many sinners in the world, he knew, was that nobody had ever bothered to sit down and talk to them. Buck did just that: he talked. Read to people from the Good Book, let them know how to prepare for what was coming, and coming soon. He'd talk to the drivers, one at a time here at the counter; long-haul truckers just stopping in for a leak and a sandwich. He'd talk to groups of two or three regulars in the evenings, out back by the picnic tables. On Sunday mornings, fifteen, maybe twenty, at the old Elks lodge. When he could get a ride to the reservation, he'd preach there. Most people were receptive. Nobody had explained the nature of sin to them, the terrifying implacable promise of the End Days. When people were sick, he'd pray over them; when people were grieving, he'd listen to their problems, recite a parable or some words of Jesus. They paid him in pocket change; a few hot meals; a bed for the night. It was enough.
But he'd been here in Yuma a long spell now. There were other places, so many others, that needed to hear. Every day that went by meant there would be less time. For truly I tell you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.
Buck was a firm believer in signs. Nothing that happened on this earth happened by accident. It was a sign that carried him from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, to Borrego Springs, California, last year; another sign that had brought him from Borrego Springs here to Yuma a few months later. One of these days—maybe next week, maybe next month—there would be another sign. He might find it here in these stacks of newspapers. Or he might find it in the story of a passing trucker. But the sign would come, and he'd be gone, gone to some other remote spot with its full share of those in need of the balm of salvation.
Reverend Buck plucked the first newspaper from the pile: the previous Sunday’s Sacramento Bee. He leafed rather quickly through the national and local pages—big cities like Sacramento could always be counted on for stories of murder, rape, corruption, vice, corporate greed. Buck had read enough such stories for a thousand cautionary sermons. He was more interested in the squibs and sidebars, the news bites taken off the wire feeds and recounted in odd corners of the paper for reader amusement. The tiny town where two brothers hadn't spoken to each other in forty years. The trailer park where every single child had left, a runaway. These were the stories that spoke to him; these were the signs that impelled him and his message.
The Bee completed, Buck turned to the next: USA Today. Laverne, the waitress, came over with coffeepot in hand. "Another cup, Reverend?"
"Just one more, thank you kindly." Buck practiced moderation in all things. One cup of coffee was a blessing; two cups was an indulgence; three cups, a sin. He perused the paper, put it aside, and picked up a third: a day-old copy of the New York Post. Buck came across this tabloid only rarely, and he had nothing but scorn for it: the brazen mouthpiece of the world's most dissipated, sin-ridden city held no interest for him. He was about to put it aside when the headline caught his attention:
DESTRUCTION
Renowned Scientist Claims Recent Deaths Signal End of Days
by Bryce Harriman
More slowly, Buck turned the page and began to read.
October 25, 2004—A respected scientist yesterday predicted imminent destruction for New York City and possibly much of the world.
Dr. Friedrich Von Menck, Harvard scientist and Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, says the recent deaths of Jeremy Grove and Nigel Cutforth are merely the "harbingers" of the coming catastrophe.
For fifteen years Dr. Von Menck has been studying mathematical patterns in the famous disasters of the past. And no matter how he cuts the data, one number shows up: the year 2004.
Von Menck's theory is based on a fundamental ratio known as the golden ratio-a ratio that is found throughout nature, as well as in such classical architecture as the Parthenon and the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci. Von Menck is the first to apply it to history—with sinister implications.
Von Menck's research has revealed that many of the worst disasters that have befallen mankind fit the same ratio:
79 A.D.: Pompeii
426 A.D.: The sack of Rome
877 A.D.: Destruction of Beijing by the Mongols
1348 A.D.: The Black Death
1666 A.D.: The Great Fire of London
1906 A.D.: The San Francisco Earthquake
These and many more date
s line up in ratios of uncanny precision.
And what do these natural disasters have in common? They have always struck an important world city, a city notable for its wealth, power, technology—and, Dr. Von Menck adds, neglect of the spiritual. Each of these disasters was preceded by small but specific signs. Von Menck sees the mysterious deaths of Grove and Cutforth as precisely the signs one would expect preceding the destruction of New York City by fire.
What kind of fire?
"Not any kind of normal fire," says Von Menck. "It will be something sudden and destructive. A fire from within."
As further evidence he cites passages from Revelation, the prophet Nostradamus, and more recent clairvoyants such as Edgar Cayce and Madame Blavatsky.
Dr. Von Menck left today for the Galápagos Islands, taking with him, he said, only his manuscripts and a few books.
Buck lowered the paper. The rest of the pile sat at his elbow, forgotten. He felt a strange sensation rise up his spine, spread down his arms and legs. If Von Menck was right, the man was a fool to believe he could take refuge on some faraway island. It put in mind some lines from Revelation, his favorite book of the Bible, which Buck frequently quoted to his flock: And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men… hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains… For the great day of His wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?
He raised his cup of coffee, but it no longer seemed to have any flavor, and he replaced it in its saucer. Buck had long believed he would see the End Days in his lifetime. And he had always believed in signs. Perhaps this sign was just larger than the others.
Perhaps it was very large, indeed.
Revelation, chapter 22: Behold, I come quickly…
Could this be what he'd been waiting for all these years? Did it not also say in Revelation that the wicked, the men with the mark of the beast on their foreheads, were taken first, in successive waves of slaughter? Just a few, here and there, would be taken. That's how it would start.
Brimstone Page 22