“Who else? For the great L. Ron Hubbard... Clever man... Only they didn’t call him the Antichrist.... He was luckier than me, the schmuck.”
Ford was thunderstruck. Joe Blitz? A penname for L. Ron Hubbard? Hubbard was the science fiction writer who had started his own religion, Scientology, and set himself up as its prophet. Before launching Scientology, Ford recalled, Hubbard had famously told a group of fellow writers that the greatest feat a human being could achieve in this world was to found a world-class religion. And then he went out and did it, combining pseudoscience and half-baked mysticism into a potent and appealing package.
A world-class religion... Was it possible? Was that the question Hazelius alluded to? Was that the point of his hand-picked team? Their tragic backgrounds? Isabella, the greatest scientific experiment in history? The isolation? The Mesa? The messages? The secrecy? The voice of God?
Ford took a deep breath and leaned over. He whispered, “Volkonsky wrote a note just before his... death. I found it. It said, in part: I saw through the madness. To prove it, I give you a name only: Joe Blitz .”
“Yes... Yes... ,” Hazelius answered. “Peter was smart.... Too smart for his own good... I made a mistake there, should have picked someone else....” A silence, and then a long sigh. “My mind is wandering.” His voice quavered at the edge of sanity. “What was I saying?”
Hazelius was swimming back into reality—but only a little.
“Joe Blitz was L. Ron Hubbard. The man who invented his own religion. Was that what this was all about?”
“I was babbling.”
“But that was your plan,” said Ford. “Wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Hazelius’s voice sounded sharper.
“Of course you do. You choreographed the whole thing—the building of Isabella, the problems with the machine, the voice of God. It was you all along. You’re the hacker.”
“You’re not making sense, Wyman.” Now Hazelius sounded like he had returned to reality—hard.
Ford shook his head. The answer had been staring him in the face for almost a week—right there in his file.
“Most of your life,” said Ford, “you’ve been concerned with utopian political schemes.”
“Aren’t many of us?”
“Not to the power of obsession. But you were obsessed, and, even worse, no one listened to you—not even after you won the Nobel Prize. It must have driven you crazy—the smartest man on earth, and no one would listen. Then your wife died and you went into seclusion. You emerged two years later with the idea for Isabella. You had something to say. You wanted people to listen. You wanted to change the world more than ever. How better to do it than become a prophet? To start your own religion?”
Ford could hear Hazelius breathing heavily in the darkness.
“Your theory is... demented,” Hazelius said, with a groan.
“You came up with the idea for the Isabella project—a machine to probe the Big Bang, the moment of creation. You got it built. You picked the team—making sure they were psychologically receptive. You staged this whole thing. You planned to make the greatest scientific discovery ever made. And what might that be? What else, but to discover God! That discovery would make you his prophet. That’s it, isn’t it? You planned to pull an L. Ron Hubbard on the world.”
“You’re really quite mad.”
“Your wife wasn’t pregnant when she died. You made that up. Whatever names the machine came up with, you’d have reacted the same way. You guessed the numbers Kate would be thinking of—because you knew Kate so well. There was nothing supernatural about this at all.”
Hazelius’s even breathing was his only response.
“You gathered around you twelve scientists—handpicked by you. When I read their dossiers, I was struck that every one of them had been hurt by life, every one seeking meaning in their lives. I wondered why that was. And now I know. You handpicked them because you knew they were susceptible—ripe for conversion.”
“But I couldn’t convert you, huh?”
“You came close.”
They paused. The faint sound of voices reverberated down the tunnels. The mob was returning.
Hazelius let out a long sigh. “We’re both going to die—I hope you realize that, Wyman. We’re both to be... martyred .”
“That remains to be seen.”
“Yes, my intention was to start a religion. But I don’t know what the hell happened back there. It got away from me. I had this plan... it just got away from me.” He sighed again, moaned. “Eddy. That was the wild card that blew my hand. A foolish oversight on my part: martyrdom is the way of all prophets.”
“How did you do it? I mean, hack the computer?”
Hazelius slipped the old rabbit’s foot out of his pocket. “I hollowed out the cork stuffing, replaced it with a sixty-four-gig flash drive, processor, microphone, and wireless transmitter—voice recognition and data. I could connect it to any one of a thousand high-speed wireless processors scattered about Isabella, all slaved to the supercomputer. It’s got a lovely little AI program I wrote in LISP, or rather helped write, since much of it’s self-generated. It’s the most beautiful computer program ever written. It was simple to operate, just sitting in my pocket. Although the program itself was anything but simple—I’m not sure even I understand it. Strange, though, it said a lot of things I never intended—things that I never dreamed of. You might say it performed beyond specs.”
“You manipulative bastard.”
Hazelius slipped the rabbit’s foot back into his pocket. “You’re wrong about that, Wyman. I’m not a bad man at all. I did what I did for the highest, most altruistic reasons.”
“Sure. Look at the violence, all the death. You’re responsible for it.”
“Eddy and his people chose the violence, not me.” He winced with momentary pain.
“And you either murdered Volkonsky or had Wardlaw do it.”
“No. Volkonsky was a smart man. He guessed what I was up to. When he really thought it through, he realized he couldn’t stop me. He couldn’t bear to see himself made a fool of, his life’s work manipulated and disgraced like that. So he killed himself, making it look like a suicide, but with a few anomalous details so they’d end up thinking it was murder. Double-reverse psychology, typical Volkonsky. He had a uniquely devious mind.”
“Why make it look like murder?”
“He hoped the investigation would eventually engulf the Isabella project, shut us down before I could pull my coup. Didn’t work, though. Events moved too fast. I accept responsibility for his death. But I didn’t kill him.”
“What a futile damn waste.”
“You’re not thinking it through, Wyman....” He breathed heavily for a moment, and resumed. “This story is just beginning. You can’t stop it. Les jeux sont faites, as Sartre once said. The great irony is that they are going to make it happen.”
“They?”
“That fundamentalist mob. They’re going to supply a far more powerful end to this story than the one I had devised.”
“Your story will end in futility,” said Ford.
“Wyman, I can see you don’t understand the full dimensions of what is happening. Eddy’s unwashed masses...” He paused and Ford, to his dismay, could hear the faint sounds of the mob getting closer. “... They will kill me, martyr me. And you. In so doing, they’ll anoint my name... forever.”
“I’ll anoint you a madman, forever.”
“I grant you that is how most normal people would perceive me.”
The voices became more distinct.
“We have to hide,” said Ford.
“Where? There’s no place to go and I can’t move.” Hazelius shook his head and, in a low, hoarse voice, quoted the Bible. “‘They will call to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us...’ Just as Revelation says, we’re trapped.”
The voices were getting closer. Ford removed his pistol, but Hazelius placed a clammy, trembling han
d on his arm. “Acquiesce with dignity.”
Bobbing lights flashed from the darkness. The voices swelled as a dozen filthy, heavily armed men surged around a curve in the tunnel.
“There they are! Two of them!”
The crowd emerged from the murk, black and ghoulish as coal miners, with guns drawn, white streaks of sweat like bars down their grimacing faces.
“Hazelius! The Antichrist!”
“The Antichrist!”
“We’ve got him!”
Another distant explosion shook the room. The hanging rock of the ceiling loosened and let loose a storm of pebbles, which clattered to the floor, hailstones from hell. Coal smoke drifted in tendrils through the dead air. The mountain quaked again and another cave-in down the line growled and rumbled, coughing smoke through the shafts.
The crowd parted and Pastor Eddy walked up to Hazelius. Standing over the stricken scientist, his hollow, bony face grinned in triumph. “We meet again.”
Hazelius shrugged and averted his eyes.
“Only now, Antichrist,” Eddy said, “I’m in control. God’s at my right, Jesus on my left, and the Holy Spirit has my back. And you—where’s your protector? He’s fled—Satan, the coward—fled to the rocks! ‘Hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb!’ ”
Eddy bent over Hazelius until his face was inches from the scientist’s. And then he laughed.
“Go to hell, germ,” Hazelius said softly.
Eddy exploded with rage. “Search them for weapons!”
A group of men approached Ford. He let them come, decked the first one, kicked the second in the stomach, and slammed the third into a rock wall. The others converged with a roar of fury, and a small army of fists and feet finally drove him to the wall and then to the ground. Eddy pulled the SIG-Sauer out of Ford’s waist band.
During the melee one enthusiastic worshipper kicked Hazelius in his broken leg. With a sobbing gasp, the scientist passed out.
“Good work, Eddy,” said Ford, pinned to the ground. “Your Savior would be proud.”
Eddy glared at Ford, his face red with fury, as if he might strike the man, but then he seemed to have second thoughts. “Enough!” Eddy shouted at the crowd. “ Enough! Give us room! We’ll take care of them in our own way, the right way. Get them on their feet!”
Ford was dragged to his feet and pushed forward, and the group began to move. Two burly men hauled the comatose Hazelius along by his armpits, his nose streaming blood, one eye swollen shut, his crooked leg with the broken bone dragging.
They reached another large, cavernous stope. Lights arrived from a side tunnel, bobbing in the murk. There was a burst of excited talk.
“Frost? Is that you?” Eddy called.
A beefy man dressed in camo with a tight blond crew cut, massive neck, and closely set eyes pushed through. “Pastor Eddy? We found more of them, hiding downshaft.”
Ford watched a dozen armed men herd Kate and the others at gunpoint. “Kate... Kate!” He wrenched himself free and struggled toward her.
“Stop him!”
Ford felt a massive blow to his back, which sent him to his knees. A second blow knocked him on his side, and punches and kicks laid him flat. He was hauled back to his feet so roughly it almost dislocated his shoulders. A sweaty man, his face streaked with coal dust, his eyes white and rolling like a horse’s, struck him across the face. “Stay in line!”
Another distant rumble and the ground convulsed. Dust jumped up from the floor, billowing through the tunnels. Layers of smoke collected in layers along the ceilings.
“Listen to me!” Eddy cried. “We can’t stay down here! The whole mountain’s on fire! We’ve got to get out!”
“I saw a way up top back there,” said the man called Frost. “A drift-shaft was opened up in the explosion. I could see the moon at the tunnel’s end.”
“Lead the way,” said Eddy.
Armed men shoved and prodded them with guns through dark, dust-choked tunnels. Two of Eddy’s followers hauled the unconscious Hazelius by the armpits. Moving through the murk, they crossed another massive stope. The lights played through the gray dust, revealing a huge cave-in, with a mountain of rubble leading up into a long, dark hole in the ceiling. Ford gulped down the fresh, cool air streaming from above.
“This way!”
They started up the pile, staggering up the loose, sliding scree, rocks rattling down around them.
“Up from the Bottomless Pit of Abaddon!” Eddy cried triumphantly. “The Beast is yoked!”
At the head of the mob the two followers dragged Hazelius up, through the jagged hole in the ceiling rock, the rest being pushed along by men with guns. The hole led to a higher stope and, from there into another shaft, at the end of which Ford saw a momentary light—the gleam, quickly extinguished, of a single star shining in the night sky. They emerged into the night of the mesa through a long diagonal crevasse. The air stank of burning gasoline and smoke. The entire eastward horizon was ablaze. Reddish-black clouds of smoke rolled across the sky, obscuring the moon. The ground rumbled continuously, and now and then a flame leapt up a hundred or more feet like a blood-orange banner fluttering into the night sky.
“Over there!” Eddy shouted. “Into that open area!”
Crossing a dry wash, they stopped in a broad, sandy depression, dominated by a giant, dead piñon tree. Ford at least got close enough to Kate to ask: “Are you all right?”
“Yes, but Julie and Alan are dead — caught in the cave-in.”
“Silence!” Eddy shouted. He stepped into the open area. Ford was amazed at his transformation from the high-strung preacher he had first met. Calm and self-assured, his movements were now deliberate. A .44 Super Blackhawk revolver was shoved into his belt. He paced and turned before the crowd, raised a hand. “The Lord delivered us from bondage out of Egypt. Blessed be the Lord!.”
His flock, a few dozen worshippers, thundered back: “Blessed be the Lord”
Eddy bent over the supine scientist, who opened his eyes, coming to.
“Stand him up,” Eddy said quietly. He pointed to Ford, Innes, and Cecchini. “Hold him tight.”
They reached down and, as gently as possible, raised Hazelius to his one good leg. Ford was astounded the man was still alive, let alone conscious.
Eddy turned to the crowd. “Look into his face—the face of the Antichrist.” He walked in a circle and his voice throbbed out, “‘And the Beast was taken, and with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before him. These both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone.’ ”
A muffled boom threw a distant ball of fire into the air, casting a lurid glow over the proceedings. Eddy’s gaunt face was briefly silhouetted by the orange light, which highlighted his blackened, hollowed cheeks and sunken eyes. “‘Rejoice, for God hath avenged you!’ ”
The crowd cheered but Eddy raised his hands. “Soldiers in Christ, this is a solemn moment. We have taken the Antichrist and his disciples, and now the judgment of God awaits all of us.”
Hazelius raised his head. To Ford’s surprise, the scientist fixed Eddy with a supercilious sneer—half grin, half grimace—and said, “Pardon my interruption, Preacher, but the Antichrist has a few anticlimactic words for your illustrious flock.”
Eddy held up his hands. “The Antichrist speaks.” He took a bold step closer. “What blasphemy comes from thy lips now, Antichrist?”
Hazelius raised his head, his voice strengthening. “Brace me,” he said to Ford. “Don’t let me slip.”
“I’m not sure this is wise,” Ford murmured in Hazelius’s ear.
“Why not?” Hazelius whispered grimly. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”
“Listen, soldiers in Christ, to the words of the false prophet,” Eddy said, his voice tinged with irony.
74
FROM A PILE OF SANDSTONE BOULDERS, Begay scanned the darkened horizon with his binoculars. It was 2:30 A.M.
“There they are
. Huddled up in that grassy flat, scared shitless.” The horses milled about, dark silhouettes against a red sky.
“Let’s go get ‘em,” said Becenti.
But Begay didn’t move. He had trained the glasses eastward. The eastern point of the mesa was gone—blown away. Below the blasted notch lay a huge scree slope of rubble, burning coal, tangled metal, and rivers of burning fluid that spread out and ran down the gullies like lava from a volcano. The entire eastern side of the mesa was on fire, smoke and flame pouring out of holes in the ground and leaping into the air. Once in a while a piñon tree or juniper would flare on top of the mesa, lighting up like a lone Christmas tree. Despite a wind blowing the smoke away from them, the fires were spreading rapidly in their direction. There were occasional explosions, with dust and flames shooting up, the ground sagging, then collapsing with an upwash of black dust and smoke. Nakai Valley itself had caught fire, the trading post and houses in flames, along with the beautiful grove of cottonwoods.
Before the explosion, at least a thousand people had gathered in that place. Now Begay, scanning the hellish mesa with his binoculars, could see only a few scattered people wandering shell-shocked among the smoke and flames, crying out, or simply stumbling about silently, like zombies. The flow of cars up the Dugway had ceased and some of the parked cars had caught on fire, the gas tanks exploding.
Willy shook his head. “Man, they did it. Old Bilagaana finally did it.”
They descended the rockpile, and Begay approached the horses, whistling for Winter. The horse pricked his ears and a moment later trotted over, the others following.
“Good boy, Winter.” Stroking his neck, Begay clipped a lead rope to his halter. Several of the horses had been saddled in preparation for departure, and Begay was glad to see they hadn’t shucked them. Switching his own saddle from the horse he was riding to Winter, he cinched it tight and swung up. Willy mounted his horse bareback, and they began hazing the nervous horses toward the Midnight Trail, which lay opposite the conflagration. They moved slowly, keeping them calm and on high ground where the footing was sure. As they topped a rise, Becenti, who was in the lead, paused.
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