by J L Bryan
“The same a lot of us have. You don’t adjust. You remember all kinds of inconvenient things that don’t fit with today’s version of the truth. You almost want to scream it out at times. In front of a huge crowd, maybe.”
“Sully’s right. I do have that disease.”
“He had a good sense about people.” The young man wiped at his eyes. “He was ready to give up everything. Then it was just going to be me and him, going up to Canada…” He shook his head, looked Ruppert in the eyes. “Sully picked you to take his place. What if you had your chance to speak the truth, an important piece of the truth, out to the world?”
“I don’t control content. The shows are prerecorded, they’re edited-we even have a Terror agent on site.”
“Forget the newscast. We have our own distribution. What we need is your face.”
“I don’t understand.”
The young man took Ruppert’s jaw in one hand. “Your face, man. The trusted face of the news from San Diego up to Fresno, right? Millions of people. They’ll believe it when you tell them.”
“What am I telling them?”
“Not yet. But I promise you, if you care about the truth, if you hate what’s happening out here, it will be worth sacrificing everything to let the people know what we’ve discovered.”
The man let go of him, but his eyes were locked onto Ruppert’s.
“What do you want me to do?” Ruppert asked.
“Go home.”
Ruppert shook his head. “I want to know more.”
“You’ll know more, man, but not today. Do you trust Sully?”
Ruppert thought the question over. As the choir sang the final verse, the last row of prisoners dropped two at a time.
He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is wisdom to the mighty, He is honor to the brave;
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of wrong His slave,
Our God is marching on.
“I trust Sully as much as I could trust anyone.”
“Are you in or not? This is your only chance to say no. You can go home and forget you met me. If we go any further, then change your mind-I hate it, but we have to be as ruthless as Terror sometimes. Too much at risk.”
“I understand.”
“Think it over. Your own life against the truth. Sully thought it was worth dying for.”
Ruppert remembered his old journalism teacher, Professor Gorski, one of Terror’s early victims. What had he said? Power fears truth above all things-more than bullets, more than bombs, more than death itself, because truth can destroy powerful men even as they lie in their graves.
A battery of cannons fired at the final note of the hymn, and the crowd screamed and howled and cheered, their bulging, hungering eyes transfixed by the grisly ornaments jerking and twitching on the Tree of Justice. All over the stadium they waved pointing foam fingers, giant New America flags, and small golden flags stamped with the Archangel team logo.
“I’m with you,” Ruppert said. “Somebody has show the world what it’s become.”
FIFTEEN
The room was gleaming white and extremely long, like a corridor stretching away into eternity. Ruppert sat alone in a chair. He had the impression that the room extended a long way behind him, but he did not turn to look.
Far in front of him, though it was difficult to judge distance in any meaningful sense, George Baldwin sat behind his black slab of a desk, which had somehow been transported into this strange, elongated room.
Ruppert felt comfortable and relaxed. He felt good. There were no secrets here, nothing to hide. He could get up and leave anytime he wanted. He was so sure of this that he had no need to prove it.
“You met him at Nixon Stadium?” Baldwin asked. His tone was pleasant and friendly.
“Yes.”
“What was his name?”
“He never said.”
“Describe him.”
Ruppert painted a verbal portrait of the young man in the green Packers jersey, noting the hazel color of his eyes, the slightly snubby nose, the ragged tennis shoes the man had worn. He mind functioned with extreme clarity, offering pristine, photographic memories.
As he spoke, Ruppert noticed dark, smoky curls wavering in and out of the space next to Baldwin, forming a suggestion of a shape, something like another man in an all-black suit like Baldwin’s.
“Who’s there with you, George?” Ruppert asked.
“Nobody’s here, Daniel. It’s just you and me.” At Baldwin’s words, the dark traces hovering beside him vanished. “What did the man in the Packers jersey say to you?”
“He had a secret to share.” Ruppert’s voice dropped to a childish whisper.
“What kind of secret?” Baldwin leaned forward, smiling, eager to play along. They were just boys playing war games.
“No, no,” Ruppert wagged his finger. “Not for me, not yet.”
“For who, then?”
“For the world. The whole, wide world.” Ruppert cocked his head, half-remembering something important about his pal Georgie. “You’ve been playing a bad, bad game.”
“I have? Not me, Daniel. You know you can trust me.”
“You broke the rules. He wants me to call no fair how you broke the rules. Naughty, naughty.”
“What precisely did he want you to tell the world, Daniel?”
Ruppert dropped into his childish whisper again. “It’s a big huge secret. It’s too big for me to know yet.”
“That’s interesting, Daniel.” Baldwin reclined back in his ergonomic chair. “So what are you supposed to do now?”
“I wait for him to call me. Then we go and play.” Ruppert held out empty hands, palms up. “That’s all I know, Georgie.”
Baldwin turned and spoke in a low voice to the empty space where the other Terror man wasn’t standing, wasn’t there at all because it was just Ruppert and Georgie in the room. Ruppert could hear Baldwin’s words but not understand them, as if they entered his ears tilted at the wrong angle. Baldwin nodded, then turned back to Ruppert.
“That’s fine, Daniel. What you’re going to do is play along with him for now. It’s going to be a fun game, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Georgie.”
“Play along until it’s time to do what I told you. You remember what I told you to do, right, Daniel? What we talked about before?”
“I remember.”
“Good boy! You’ll be a good secret agent, won’t you, Daniel?”
“I am!”
“Now you have to forget this whole conversation. You’ll do what I said, but you won’t remember we ever talked about it. Right?”
“Yes, George.”
“Now, we’re counting up. Listen to my voice. One…two…three…”
“Are you still here, Daniel?”
Ruppert started at his desk. He’d been…what? Sleeping? Daydreaming? He glanced down to see a half-played game of solitaire floating on the digital surface of his desk. Amanda Greene stood at the door to his office, a puzzled look on her face.
“Amanda Greene,” he said. “With the weather.”
“Yeah…Are you feeling okay? It’s almost seven o’ clock. I’ve never seen you work this late.”
“Oh. Do you work this late?”
“Sometimes.” Amanda stepped closer to his desk. “You don’t look right, Daniel. Should I call your wife for you?”
“Yeah. No! There’s no reason. I’m just here.” Ruppert glanced at his desk calendar, which minimized to the size of a postage stamp when he wasn’t looking at it. The desk sensed his interest, and the calendar expanded until he could see the highlighted box representing today. It was Monday. “Just working.”
Amanda glanced out towards the hall, then whispered, “I saw you go into Baldwin’s office after the show. Is something going on around here?”
“Baldwin?”
Amanda raised her eyebrows and nodded in the general direction of Baldwin’s office.
�
��Oh,” Ruppert said. “Oh. George Baldwin. Nope, I haven’t seen him today. Was he here?”
Amanda’s brow crinkled, and she frowned at him. “Sure. All right. Good night, Daniel.”
“Night.”
Ruppert’s chair creaked as he leaned back. He remembered doing the newscast, even remembered that the main story centered on the pursuit of Sheik Muhammad al Taba, whose terrorist militia might have fled from Egypt, possibly as far as Addis Abbaba. The Hartwell Services contractor army might just have to follow. News reports had downgraded al Taba’s vast army to a small but intensely radical militia, though this downgrade had not been acknowledged or explained in any way to the public.
So he’d finished doing the report, and then…he must have come into his office. He must have been reading, or…playing solitaire, and dozed off. Something about this didn’t fit right, but he couldn’t identify exactly what it was.
Ruppert left his office, the lights dimming automatically behind him, and headed for the elevator. There was nobody left on his floor, as far as he could tell. He was accustomed to assistants whirling through the hallways bearing urgent messages, technicians with carts of equipment, visiting executives. The silence and emptiness unnerved him.
“Down,” he said to the elevator. He looked along the intersecting corridor toward the black glass of Baldwin’s office. If he walked down there, would he find Baldwin still inside? The idea that he might be alone with the Terror man bothered him even more than the after-hours silence.
When his elevator arrived, he jabbed the LOBBY button with his thumb, and kept jabbing it until the elevator doors had closed.
?
Ruppert arrived home to find Madeline on her hands and knees in the kitchen, furiously scrubbing bleach into the white tiles with a hard-bristled brush. Her hair hung in sweaty tails around her eyes, and her skin had an unusual, feverish glow. Rags, sponges, and more cleaning fluids and sponges were scattered across the granite kitchen counter, as if a maintenance crew had exploded inside their house.
“Madeline?” he said.
She looked up at him, her teeth bared, her lips locked into a smile under unnaturally wide and bright eyes.
“I quit my job,” she announced.
“You put in your notice?”
“I walked.” She turned her brush on its end to scrape the grout between two tiles. “I couldn’t take those dirty brats any more. I’ve done my part for other people’s kids. I want to focus on mine from now on. You make enough money.”
“Sure, if that’s what you want. But why…” He indicated the mess of cleaning fluids on the counter. “Didn’t Tiffany come today?” Tiffany was their regular housekeeper, a great slab of a woman in her late fifties.
“It’s not clean enough. We need it clean for the baby.”
Ruppert nodded and decided it might be best not to pursue the question. The church doctor had been injecting her with fertility hormones, a common necessity for couples who wanted to conceive. When he was younger, Ruppert had read about toxic pollution in the air and water, possibly interfering with fertility, but that kind of news had vanished.
“We have to be very clean from now on,” Madeline continued. “If we’re going to do these dirty things in the bedroom, the rest of the house should be extra clean.”
Ruppert mumbled an agreement with this logic and stepped around to take a bottle of Canadian water from the refrigerator, which also reeked of bleach. He watched her a moment longer as she scrubbed a floor that had remained spotless as long as they’d inhabited this house. He could not imagine conceiving a child at this point in their lives, when his own future remained in question. If he went along with Sully’s friends, he’d have to spend the rest of his life in hiding. Cooperating with Terror was no guarantee of security, either-once they had what they wanted, he would become an inconvenient detail to eliminate. They’d already targeted him for dissidence. Why keep him alive once he’d served his purpose?
He continued up to the bedroom, where he did as the Packers fan had instructed him. He packed his suitcase with several changes of clothes, a toiletry kit, an envelope of cash he’d drawn from the ATM. The Packers fan had told him to make a small withdrawal each day, no more than a couple thousand dollars at a time, because taking a big piece out of his spending account would trigger an alert at the bank.
He finished packing the suitcase, then wondered where to hide it. He decided plain sight was best, especially with Madeline’s new obsession with cleanliness and order. He returned it to the closet from which he’d taken it, taking pains to line it up perfectly with Madeline’s empty suitcase. In her bizarre psychological state, she might notice if the suitcases were even an inch out of line with each other.
Madeline cleaned for the rest of the day, washing the walls, vacuuming, scrubbing out faucets with a toothbrush, vacuuming the same carpets a second time, dusting-he felt exhausted each time he saw her. He sat in the living room and tried to watch something soothing on the wall, an old documentary about the Serengeti, but she insisted on vacuuming out the sofa and then rubbing some kind of foaming cleaner into the upholstery.
He retreated to his upstairs office. She was still cleaning when he went to sleep.
SIXTEEN
Ruppert considered skipping the Wednesday Men’s Meeting altogether, since it was futile at this point to continue trying to prove himself a citizen of impeccable character. Unfortunately, Madeline insisted on attending her Wednesday groups, though she’d slept little and cleaned constantly for two days now, leaving her hands fidgeting and her eyes scurrying back and forth like nervous creatures. He did not feel comfortable letting her drive all the way to the Palisades.
After the stomping rally of the Men’s Meeting, Ruppert made it almost all the way to the outer narthex door when Liam O’Shea tracked him down and took his arm.
“I’ve been praying about you a lot,” O’Shea said. “Almost every night.”
“That’s great, Liam.” Ruppert tried to edge forward, but O’Shea clung to his sleeve.
“I’m only starting out as a lay pastor. I think your problems are bigger than I can solve by myself.”
“That’s right, Liam. You wouldn’t understand my problems.”
Liam stuttered for a moment, his lips flapping but making no sound. He appeared off-balanced by Ruppert’s honesty. He finally recovered and said, “After much prayer and reflection, I came to believe that Our King intended for me to submit your name to the lay pastor council, with the recommendation that they forward my concerns to Pastor John’s office.”
“Liam, I guess I should say I appreciate your concern, but I don’t,” Ruppert said. “And I don’t think Pastor John is going to find your obsession with me that interesting.”
“Daniel Ruppert?” A man’s voice spoke behind him.
Ruppert turned to see a meticulously groomed young man in his late twenties, wearing a dark suit with a laminated badge clipped to one of the breast pockets, a golden cross with an eye at the center-one of Pastor John’s legion of assistant pastors.
“Can I help you?” Ruppert asked. He felt his heart pounding. He was only a dozen steps from the exit. He’d almost escaped.
“Pastor John wishes to speak with you in his office.”
A mealy grin curled across O’Shea’s wide face. It was a personal victory for him, confirmation that his incessant pushiness was valued by the church, and that Pastor John might now have heard that Liam O’Shea was an astute monitor of the flock, able to sniff out the wayward.
“Are you sure it’s me he wants?” Ruppert asked.
“Certainly. Please come with me.”
Ruppert followed, making sure not to look back at O’Shea, who looked as proud of himself as a three-year-old who’d punched a smaller child and stolen his toy.
The pastor led him down a flight of steps into the warren under the Sanctuary, past the rooms where choirs dressed and undressed, the vast closets full of musical equipment and stage dressing. Ruppert’s annoyance at
O’Shea gave way to real fear about having a face-to-face with Pastor John.
Pastor John Perrish’s weekly audience extended far beyond the thirty thousand or so congregants who physically appeared on Sundays. His sermons were piped into the hospitals, nursing homes, and veterans’ organizations that Golden Tabernacle administered under their federal contracts and grants. They also remained available to the global web audience for seven days after he delivered them. Pastor John reached hundreds of thousands of viewers each week, and no politician could advance far in southern California without his support.
Ruppert could not imagine why such a powerful man would bother speaking to Ruppert. Ruppert might have some minor value as a television personality, but he could easily be replaced. Could O’Shea really be causing this much trouble just by reporting Ruppert? He wanted to go back, find O’Shea, and punch him in his flabby mouth.
The assistant pastor took him through an ordinary-looking pair of double doors into an elevator large enough to transport cargo, but lined with soft red carpet and oak paneling. They descended several floors-Ruppert guessed four or five-then emerged into a high, domed lobby that was a miniature of the Sanctuary overhead.
“Wait here,” the assistant pastor said, and Ruppert sat on a cushioned bench near a small flower garden. He watched a kind of modernist-style fountain at the center of the room, where water gurgled over smooth black and white rectangles. Nobody had fountains anymore, not even the big commercial or state buildings. It was illegal to squander water that way.
The assistant pastor marched across the marble floor without making a sound, then leaned down to whisper to a powerfully attractive young woman at a glass desk at the front of the room. She nodded, and the assistant pastor turned and left the room, passing Ruppert as if he’d become an uninteresting piece of furniture.
Ruppert waited for several long minutes, taking in the large room. There were some religious magazines on the end table next to him, but he was too nervous to read and, for that matter, wasn’t feeling particularly religious. He’d been raised a Presbyterian, in a loose, on-and-off kind of way, but now anybody of any importance belonged to the Dominionist church. After more than a decade, he still had only a vague idea of what the denomination was about. Sermons and studies focused heavily on Revelation, the holiness of war, the importance of morality and obedience to authority. He remembered the Gospels had figured pretty heavily in his childhood church, but Pastor John rarely referred to them. Not enough death and war in the Beatitudes, Ruppert guessed.