“Go now,” the Prophet said. “Be the warrior for the Lord that you were born to be. God and I will be with you.”
“I will not fail you.”
Cutty almost ran out of the conference room.
59
“Kelley Marrow committed suicide,” Lisa said.
Pulling away from Susie Marrow’s home, Anthony came out of his near-trance, and glanced at her. “Yeah. That’s what I was thinking, too. I didn’t dare say it to her mom, but that was what my gut told me.”
“Along with Susie’s reluctance to share any details about the girl’s death, her remark that some people would dispute that her daughter is in a better place because of how she died—what she really meant that some Christians believe that by committing suicide, you earn a first-class ticket to Hell.”
“As if they would know,” he said under his breath. “What could Bishop Prince have done to the girl that would make her commit suicide?”
“I don’t know.” She was shaking her head. “Something so terrible her mother didn’t want to discuss it.”
“Neither did Bob, because he sure didn’t bring it up with me.”
Lisa opened the Bible to the front page. She traced the letters of the girl’s name as if reading Braille.
“You’re thinking about the code Bob might have used,” he said. “I almost forgot—you’re into brain teasers and word games, too.”
“As often as I’ve spanked you at Scrabble, I don’t know how you could forget that.”
“Okay, whatever, I’ll give you your props.”
“Can we find a coffee shop around here?” She closed the book. “I’ve got to be somewhere I can think, and besides that, I’m famished.”
Fifteen minutes later, they found a Starbucks on Barrett Parkway, Kennesaw’s main commercial drag, a riot of restaurants, shopping malls, bowling alleys, and movie theaters. Lisa found a table in a quiet corner of the café, and Anthony went to the counter and purchased bagels, cream cheese, espresso, and a pass to use the shop’s Wi-Fi network.
Back at the table, as he took a sip of espresso and felt the caffeine blast through his nervous system, Lisa slathered cream cheese on a bagel, bit into it, and chewed hungrily.
“This stuff is way outside my diet, but I don’t care,” she said. “I need major brain fuel before I can crack Bob’s puzzle.”
“Since you’re the puzzle queen, you can work on that, while I do research on the church,” he said.
Swallowing a mouthful, Lisa nodded.
He booted up his laptop and used his pass to access the network. He began his research by visiting the most logical of places.
The New Kingdom Church International Web site.
60
The site’s Introduction page looked as if it might have been designed to herald a major Hollywood film. A flock of white doves swooped across the screen, and dramatic orchestral music burst from the computer’s speakers, prompting Anthony to lower the volume. Meanwhile, shots of Bishop Prince in action behind the pulpit cascaded across the display, his voice rising above the music like thunder: “The kingdom is not in heaven! The kingdom is here on earth! Will you be worthy? God wants you there right now!”
The intro passed, and took him to the home page. The site appeared incredibly well designed, with striking, fast-loading graphics, easy to read text, and intuitive navigation. The Web sites of many major corporations paled by comparison.
A “Sow a Seed” button shimmered prominently in the navigation bar. Clicking on it carried him to a page where a video clip of a smiling Bishop Prince immediately began to play. He was dressed in a tan suit and sat in a gold-trimmed chair that resembled a throne.
“God loves a cheerful giver,” the Bishop said in a genial voice that nonetheless carried authority. “We are exhorted to sow seeds for his kingdom, for which we will surely reap a bountiful harvest. Sow your seed for the kingdom and get ready for the blessings in store for you, my friend.”
The video ended, and the site automatically transported Anthony to an encrypted payment page. The church accepted donations online via credit or debit card, and electronic check. You also could set up an automatic bank draft to pay your tithes, and there was a link to the Kingdom Credit Union site, though only church members could join.
“They have their own credit union,” Anthony said.
Lisa looked up from a notepad, where she was scribbling with a pen.
“That’s becoming common these days, Tony,” she said. “Even our church has joined up with other smaller churches to form a credit union. It can be a good thing, if the organization is on the up and up.”
“Maybe. But the thought of these people having access to my money creeps me out.”
He visited a page that enabled you to submit a prayer request. For a small donation, the church’s team of “prayer warriors” would petition God on your behalf, and rest assured that it would be effective, as “God hears the prayers of the righteous.”
Not even prayer was free at New Kingdom.
A link offered a guided visual tour of the New Kingdom Church Campus. He selected it. It was like taking a virtual journey of Disney World. Covering over two thousand acres, worthy of its own zip code, the campus was meticulously planned, populated with aesthetically pleasing buildings, lush landscaping, walking trails, lakes, and environmentally-friendly shuttle buses that transported residents throughout the complex, from the sanctuary to the Kingdom Market.
“This is unreal,” he said. “They have their own warehouse store, Lisa. It looks bigger than a Navy Exchange.”
“Their own store, their own schools, even their own medical clinics and housing. When I went there for my friend’s wedding, I was totally blown away. You’d never have to leave the campus for anything.”
“Incredible.” He stared at the screen. “They have an entertainment complex with bowling alleys, miniature golfing, movie theaters, restaurants.”
“The sanctuary seats around twenty-five thousand, I’ve heard,” she said.
The camera swept over the sanctuary, a massive structure capped with a gold, geodesic dome. A view of the building’s interior showed seemingly endless rows of pews, plush seats designed to keep the faithful comfortable during their worship experience. The main stage, book-ended by giant video screens, was large enough to accommodate a rock concert.
The tour then visited the businesses that the church operated. The enterprises included a publishing company, a food service vendor, real estate management, a television studio, a radio station, and many, many others. They employed a workforce of “over two thousand loyal servants.”
Next was a sweeping front view of the bishop’s home, a palatial structure built of white stucco and stone in the style of a French Country chateau. The sprawling residence sat atop a steep hill overlooking the campus.
The bishop lived in a house fit for a king. Literally.
The tour ended. He chose a page that contained the bishop’s bio.
Bishop Emmanuel Prince was the seventh child of his family, the offspring of an interracial marriage—black mother, white father. His father, deceased, had founded the church forty years ago in the basement of an Atlanta elementary school. Prince had assumed the senior pastor duties about twenty-one years ago, and had led an explosive growth in membership, from eight thousand members to the two hundred and eighty thousand members worldwide the church currently boasted.
He was married to a gorgeous, fair-skinned black woman at least fifteen years younger than him, and had four, school-age children. A video titled, “The Bishop and The First Lady at Home” showed the family interacting at the dinner table, in their mansion, everyone smiling, as if every day of their lives defined harmony and perfection. Prince spoke of “sowing kingdom seeds” daily, and how he and his family had reaped the blessings that came with obedience to kingdom mandates.
Anthony finally clicked away. The site was nothing more than a PR tool designed to fill the church’s coffers.
On Goo
gle, he entered “Bishop Emmanuel Prince” in the search field. The engine returned over five million pages of results, the number of hits one might have found for an A-list movie star.
He visited the first few sites. They amounted to blatant, excessively flattering portrayals of Prince and his ministry. “The Prophet saved my life,” one person wrote, and recounted a story of how he had begun to “sow kingdom seeds,” even though he was unemployed and living on meager savings, and how he’d eventually found a new, better-paying job, thanks to the Prophet’s teachings.
Oddly, he found similar testimonials on many of the other sites. The names of the devotees were changed, but the stories were basically identical—someone’s life had been in shambles, but when they began to “sow seeds,” their fortunes magically turned around.
Each personal testimony concluded with a link that went directly to the “Sow a Seed” page on the New Kingdom Web site.
He changed the search to include the bishop’s name, and the phrase, “sow a seed.” He received over one million hits. Although all of the pages might not have been enticements to donate to the church, it seemed likely that a large number of them were.
How much income did the church generate annually from online donations? The sum was probably staggering.
He modified his search to include the bishop’s name, and the word, “controversy.”
The search returned only a couple dozen pages. The first search result bore the title, “Bishop Emmanuel Prince Exposed!” He chose the link.
The site was down.
He clicked back to Google, and looked for the “Cached” page link—a snapshot of the page the last time Google had crawled it. But there was none.
He visited the next site in the results list. The page was up. The text read: “Bishop Emmanuel Prince knows he risks controversy when he declares that sowing a seed for the kingdom will reap blessings, but he is an anointed leader who is moved by God to speak truth to power.”
Other sites in the list either were unavailable, or contained more content praising Prince. None of the inaccessible sites had cached pages.
He altered his searches to include the name of the church, and other words such as “corrupt,” “immoral,” “fraudulent,” “crime,” “felony,” and “murder.” Although many sites appeared for the various searches, the ones he could access did not include any negative statements, and all of the others were down.
They monitor the web, Bob had told him.
It was unbelievable . . . but New Kingdom had apparently scrubbed the Internet of all damaging material. The resources that would have been necessary to ensure that a sanitized image of the church and its leader was presented at all times were surely formidable—about as formidable as the assets that had enabled the fanatics to track them across the city as easily as if they were mice in a maze.
If he launched a blog and posted negative remarks about the bishop, he wondered how long it would take for the church to shut it down. Days? Hours? Did they utilize software that constantly scanned the Web in search of slander? Did they dispatch viruses to infect the servers and disable the sites?
It was an egregious violation of freedom of speech. But he suspected that they cared little for the Bill of Rights.
His imagination, stimulated by the discoveries, kicked into higher gear. What if they had the capability to even learn who was seeking proof of corruption—and could trace the user to the physical address where the user’s computer resided?
There’s no way they can do that, he thought. You’re letting your imagination get the better of you.
But a shudder passed through him. He looked around the café, gazed through the windows to the parking lot. He noticed nothing out of the ordinary, but . . .
Just to be safe, he closed the browser windows, and logged off the network.
Across the table, Lisa was busy at work. Several small squares of paper, torn from a notepad, lay scattered before her. A letter was written on each square in black ink. It looked like a homemade Scrabble set.
“What’re you working on?” he asked.
She glanced up at him, blinked as if surfacing from a trance.
“Following a hunch,” she said. “I think Bob created an anagram using Kelley’s name, and I’m going to solve it.”
61
A snow-white, chauffeur-driven Mercedes Maybach transported Bishop Prince and the Director across the Kingdom Campus. They were escorted front and rear by black SUVs bearing Armor of God agents, forming a three-vehicle motorcade.
The Maybach was an exemplary machine, ultra luxurious. It featured double-quilted, diamond-stitched leather seats. Hand crafted wood trim fringed with twenty-four carat gold. Utterly unique, custom details such as the Kingdom’s emblem embroidered in the headrests—and bullet-proof windows and reinforced steel panels that could have repelled a machine-gun ambush.
He owned another similarly equipped Maybach, that one as black as night. He also counted among his personal fleet a Rolls-Royce Phantom, an Aston Martin, a Ferrari, two Bentleys, and more Mercedes and BMWs than he cared to enumerate.
He had long reveled in the accouterments of wealth. Wealth was a sign of God’s favor. God had smiled on King Solomon, the legendary monarch of Biblical times, blessing him with great wealth, wisdom, and a reign of peace.
He often envisioned himself as a King Solomon for a new age. But the Kingdom he was building was still new, still expanding.
Still warding off threats.
He reclined in the seat, customized to accommodate his elongated frame, and gazed out the one-way window. It was a sunny morning, and Kingdom servants were out in multitudes, walking, jogging, playing sports, and conducting daily business.
Many of them waved at the passing convoy. Ordinarily, he would have lowered the glass and returned the greetings of his loyal flock, but he kept the window sealed, quietly ruminating on how blissfully ignorant they were of the tenuous position in which their Kingdom found itself.
He turned to the Director. The military man was seated next to him, brow furrowed in thought.
“Noah Cutty was indeed zealous, as you promised he was,” Bishop Prince said. “I pray that he’s competent as well.”
“Cutty should have no major issues collecting Thorne, sir. I expect we’ll have Thorne in our custody before nightfall.”
The Director’s original plan had been to simply eliminate Thorne, but that morning, the chief technology servant had contacted them with the disturbing news that the Judas’ treachery ran deeper than they had thought. According to recent investigative traces of their database, the Judas had plundered their most confidential data sources and copied volumes of highly combustible data onto a storage device of some kind—including explicit details about their most classified project, Revelation.
Revelation. The intricately layered, holy vision that had come to Bishop Prince in a dream several years ago, the execution of which he and the Director had been toiling and scheming ever since. If the plans leaked into the wrong hands, there was no telling the havoc Satan could wreak on the Kingdom.
Common sense suggested that the Judas had given the storage device to Thorne. Eliminating Thorne would prove of no consequence if he had passed his information to others. A thorough interrogation was in order—and though Bishop Prince had never participated in such affairs in the past, the threat they faced was so acute that he might question Thorne himself.
“You understand my concerns, yes?” Bishop Prince said. “The Judas could expose our work.”
“He wouldn’t have transferred the data to Thorne at their meeting,” the Director said. “That would’ve been too risky, for both of them. He’ll be leading Thorne to it. That’s how he operates—that’s how he was trained.”
“By you,” Bishop Prince said.
The Director accepted the rebuke with a shrug. He was the only man on earth who could have gotten away with a response like that in the bishop’s presence, and he knew it.
“We should ass
ign more men to this mission,” Bishop Prince said. “We have a force of hundreds. Why are we entrusting a task of this magnitude to one agent and his female partner when we could dispatch an entire team to capture Thorne right now?”
The Director’s eyes hardened. “As you should be aware, sir, we’ve always used two-agent teams for domestic missions. It gives us a measure of anonymity. A squad of say, five of our vehicles boxing in Thorne somewhere and attempting to apprehend him could be a public relations disaster. Thorne isn’t an average civilian—the man’s a Marine, not long out of service, heavily armed, and you hit him with lots of firepower, he’s going to hit back.” The Director smacked his fist against the palm of his hand, causing Bishop Prince to flinch slightly. “You want some snot-nosed brat with a camera phone recording video of a major shootout between him and our agents, and posting it online for the whole world to see? Or perhaps you’d like to see those vultures in the TV news crews coptering over the scene and talking up every eyewitness within five miles? Best of all, how about we mistakenly kill a few innocent civilians in the process, create some nice collateral damage? Too many variables can go haywire with deploying a large unit—and that’s why I don’t allow it.”
“We have monitoring capabilities online, and contacts in the media. We could shut down any story before it spread, clean up any fallout.”
“I will handle this my way.” The Director’s mouth was a sharp line. “You preach your sermons—I keep your ass safe. That affirmative with you? Sir?”
Bishop Prince paused. “I don’t appreciate your tone, Director. Remember your place.”
The Director’s fists had been clenched, his jaw tight. He blew out a hiss of air.
“I’m sorry, your grace,” the Director said. “This is a tough spot for all of us. I ask only that you trust me as you have in the past, and relax. We’ve dealt with breaches like this before. We must remember, God is on our side, and no weapon used against us will hurt us.”
Covenant Page 24