Armageddon Conspiracy

by John Thompson

  A pickup truck was parked directly in front of the church door, and he climbed quietly into its bed and moved to where he could kneel on a hay bale and steady the binoculars on the cab roof. Maggie went up the steps to the front door then turned and looked at him and held up one thumb, her gesture indicating he was out of sight. After another second, she opened the door. She waited like that, seeming bewildered, holding the door wide. Brent could see a number of people in the pews on either side. One by one heads began to turn as parishioners looked back.

  “Excuse me!” Maggie said to no one in particular, her voice carrying faintly to where Brent knelt. “Is this St. John the Evangelist?”

  Brent saw one man shake his head.

  “I didn’t think so!” Maggie grabbed a handful of hair, as though she was some kind of ditz. “I’m so sorry to bother you, but somebody told me St. John the Evangelist was out of town. Is it in town?” Several parishioners nodded.

  “Come on, come on,” Brent muttered, a cold sweat breaking out from his armpits as he scanned the strange faces with growing desperation.

  “I’m so sorry,” Maggie persisted, even as the heads started to swing back to the front of the church. “But I’m kind of lost.” Someone seemed to be trying to wave her forward, but she seemed too embarrassed to go any further, too confused to leave.

  A second later Brent felt his breath catch as Spencer McDonald—at least the man he knew as Spencer McDonald—walked down the aisle wearing a black clergyman’s shirt and white collar. He led Maggie out onto the porch and let the door swing shut behind them. His voice was a low rumble as he gave her directions back to town.

  Just before she turned to leave, Maggie asked, “May I ask your name, sir. I want to tell my friends about the nice man who helped me.”

  “Reverend Turner.”

  Brent stayed out of sight in the back of the truck. After a few seconds, the church doors opened and closed again. Finally, he heard Maggie’s footsteps coming toward him.

  “Well?” Maggie asked when she came abreast of the pickup.

  He nodded. “It’s him!” he whispered.

  THIRTY-NINE

  LONG ISLAND, JUNE 30

  ABU SAYEED GLANCED AT HIS watch, spoke a silent prayer to Allah, and then nodded to Mohammed. It was time. They had gone over his instructions yet again. Mohammed’s job was to erase their tracks, but if he was stopped and could not escape, he was to kill himself and the woman. It would be a necessary loss so the plan could still go forward. The American President’s visit was two days away, but Abu Sayeed had no interest. His attack was scheduled for tomorrow.

  They stood in the open door of the cottage. The night was moonless. Mohammed licked his lips, and Abu Sayeed noted a trickle of sweat at his hairline. Not good, he thought. Mohammed checked the silenced Marakov 9mm pistol he wore strapped across his chest, gave it a tug to make sure it was secure, and then Abu Sayeed handed him the Heckler & Koch submachine gun. Mohammed nodded once then set off through the trees.

  Abu Sayeed watched him disappear into the shadows. He would scale the wall at the front of Biddle’s property, where Anneliës would pick him up. With Allah’s blessing, he would return within three or four hours.

  FORTY

  GREENWICH, CT, JUNE 30

  FRED WOFFORD PUT THE LAST of his clothes in the suitcase then held it closed while he zipped it shut. The act felt like a milestone, and he let out a sigh of relief. His wife’s clothes were still strewed over the bed as she hurried to pack and at the same time understand what had possessed her husband, who by his own admission had never done anything spontaneous in his life, to book the Queen Mary Suite on the new QM2.

  She was still selecting jewelry and formal dresses when the doorbell rang. Wofford glanced at his watch, thinking it must be the limo driver. The man was at least an hour early, but then better that way than late. It was probably the driver’s intention to bill him for waiting time, but he didn’t care. He just wanted to leave. The sooner he was on the ship, the better. He wanted to be protected by distance, insulated by deniability.

  At some level he felt a terrible sense of disloyalty, but his visit to the terrorists had tipped some invisible scales. He’d finally admitted to himself that he couldn’t go along with Biddle. In the final analysis, the wild hope for Armageddon, the belief that an unforgivable act might result in a miracle—none of it made sense. They led Christian lives, and they had every single thing a person could want, including great wealth. Why should they throw it away on a fantasy?

  He pulled on a shirt, buttoned it on the way down the stairs, and flipped on the porch light. He opened the door intending to tell the driver to wait in the car, but then he froze. A different man, his face terribly familiar, stood on the porch smiling up at him.

  • • •

  Ten minutes later, wanting her husband’s help in deciding between several dresses, Wofford’s wife called his name. When she heard no answer, went to the bedroom door and shouted again. Again, there was no response. She went to the top of the staircase and called his name again. Typical Fred, she thought.

  “Fred!” she shouted, starting to become angry.

  She went down and looked in the kitchen, then in his library. Finally, she went out onto the front porch and looked at the empty driveway. Her husband was gone.

  FORTY-ONE

  OVER THE PACIFIC OCEAN, JUNE 30

  PRESCOTT BIDDLE PEERED OUT THROUGH his jet’s thick window at the night. He’d been flying for twelve hours, having left Murmansk at ten p.m., and throughout the entire flight darkness had gripped the world. This constant blackness reminded him that he was the avenging Angel of God, racing through the heavens toward his ultimate meeting with the agents of Satan.

  His return would surprise no one. He was cutting short his fishing trip because of Dr. Faisal’s murder and the theft of his assets. It was tragic Biddle would tell the press. After their exhaustive background checks and psychological profiles, they had trusted that young man, but obviously they’d failed to find the hidden character flaw. It was heartbreaking, doubly so since Lucas also killed Owen Smythe and his young family.

  The one flaw, of course, was that Reverend Turner and the Arab had failed to kill Lucas. Right now, he could be dead or dying of his wounds, but they couldn’t be sure. They had to assume he was alive, and therefore dangerous and unpredictable. There remained the possibility that Lucas would go to the police, but with what? A preposterous story about fake FBI Agents and a fake lawyer who had all . . . disappeared? No, with Smythe gone, there was no way for Lucas to garner any proof, which also meant that instead of running he was more likely to attack.

  Biddle shook his head as he sipped a Diet Coke. He wouldn’t let that happen. He’d found out where Lucas was, and this time his own people were going to kill Lucas and dispose of the body. Even if they had a problem, who would question two sheriff’s deputies who killed a murder suspect? No, he thought, in a country that cared more about abortion rights and gay marriage than the truth of the Holy Bible, it wouldn’t surprise anyone. Brent Lucas would be one more American tragedy, like O.J and Columbine. Yes, Biddle thought, God was looking down into the muck of modern America and watching His Angels of Prophesy. God knew they were taking great risks in His name, and He would ensure their success.

  He tried to retain the purity of his focus, but he felt it slip. Try as he did, he was helpless to prevent the next image that took shape in his mind. It was Anneliës again, dancing before him in a smoky light. Shadows ran across her stomach and breasts as she moved, caressing the parts of her that his tongue and fingers had explored so often.

  He believed that the holiness of his mission should have lessened his need, but the opposite had occurred. His hunger had grown and raged inside him now, as if his every molecule of sinfulness had been compressed into desire for this woman’s flesh. He’d spent many hours on his knees, praying for strength, but it did no good. Now, he glanced at his left hand where the snake venom had rotted the skin between h
is thumb and forefinger, leaving a permanent disfigurement as though bitten by the Devil himself.

  The plane hit some turbulence, and Biddle turned again to the outer dark and tried to shake off these feelings. He bent his thoughts back to his mission, to Beddington and McTighe and the job they were doing in God’s name. He closed his eyes and said another prayer, asking God to speed their progress, give them steady hands for aiming and strong hearts for killing.

  The turbulence ended. Suddenly, the clouds beneath the aircraft gave way, and the full moon reflected off the black void of ocean fifty thousand feet below. As he watched, the reflection appeared to change shape, narrowing into a flame, as if the first fire of Armageddon was already igniting the world. The jet streaked across the sky, and he kept the flame in view as long as he could, counting it as one more sign from God that he would be victorious.

  FORTY-TWO

  CENTRAL NEW JERSEY, JUNE 30

  DARIUS MCTIGHE HAD WORKED HARD to keep the pickup tucked out of sight, but the traffic had thinned and now the only car ahead of him was a VW bug, one of the old ones tricked out with wide tires and mag wheels. The driver was right on the woman’s tail, and if he hung a quick pass and got around her, it would leave McTighe’s pickup sticking right out there naked. They were on 202 North, heading into the 287 merge. He prayed the woman’s eyes were too taken up with road signs to notice they’d been on her tail ever since she left Morristown.

  Originally, they’d been parked down at the end of her street waiting for her and Lucas to go to sleep, intending then to slip in and do their job. They’d planned to leave the woman’s body there, making it look like Lucas had continued his murder spree, and then they would dump Lucas where the Arab should have in the first place, about fifty miles straight out from the Barnegat Light where they’d wrap him in chains and sink him in about five hundred feet of water.

  Only instead of staying home and going to bed, Lucas and the woman had left the house, and to McTighe’s growing horror, they had driven all the way down to Lambertville, right to his own neighborhood church. It had to mean that Lucas and the woman were close to the truth. Just in case they’d already figured it out and were heading to the cops, Beddington and McTighe had decided to nail them before they got back to Morristown, whenever they came to a deserted stretch of road. Their story would be that Lucas had taken the woman hostage and killed her when she’d tried to escape. There’d be no questions. After all, they were sheriff’s deputies.

  Tom Beddington seemed to be thinking the same thing because he said, “This is going to be easy.”

  McTighe glanced over. Somehow hearing Beddington say it only made the reality worse. He’d been a police officer for nearly twenty years, but he’d never fired his gun in the line of duty, much less killed people in cold blood. Right now his nerves were firing off like popcorn. “Oh yeah?”

  Beddington swung his head on his thick neck and gave him a disgusted look. “Where’s your faith?”

  “I got plenty.” McTighe could feel Beddington’s small eyes cutting holes in him, but he didn’t care.

  “Mr. Biddle set this up. He’s got grace.”

  “He’s a human being. People make mistakes.”

  “You gotta believe.”

  McTighe said nothing, but he started to worry maybe Beddington had a point. Maybe he did lack faith.

  “It’s your attitude, man. You need to pray more.”

  “Killing a cop’s got nothing to do with faith,” McTighe shot back, finally putting words to it.

  “Man, it’s got everything to do with faith.”

  McTighe hit the steering wheel with his hand.

  “You got faith, you don’t worry, you just do it,” Beddington insisted. “You gonna do it, or not?”

  McTighe gritted his teeth until his fillings hurt. “Yeah, I’m gonna do it, but I don’t like doing it. I hate doing it.”

  Beddington shook his head and smiled. “It’s God’s will,” he said.

  “And what if it goes down wrong?”

  Beddington shrugged. “Then maybe we die and go to Heaven right now, tonight. That’s okay with me, man. God understands I’m laying my life on the line for Him.”

  “Personally, I’d like to be around for a few more years,” McTighe said, feeling a combination of resentment and shame that he couldn’t muster Beddington’s apparent selflessness.

  “You will be,” Beddington assured him. “I mean, look what God’s given us to help us do our job. Amazing stuff on this guy!” Beddington picked up the file that sat on the seat between them then reached up and flipped on the overhead light.

  Right away McTighe reached up and turned it off. “No light!” he snapped, thinking that with Beddington he could never be sure where faith ended and stupidity began. “We already know what it says.”

  The file held almost everything a person could want to know about Brent Lucas, including his schools; his test scores; the sports he’d played; names of his friends; pictures of him taken from different angles. It also had the name and address of Lucas’s old girlfriend and listed her occupation as cop. That one detail in particular, McTighe was thinking, was way more than he wanted to know.

  That information, plus the bug in Lucas’s cell phone, had led them to him after the Arab screwed up. Lucas had only turned the phone on for a few minutes, but it had been enough to confirm his location. Tonight, with the cell phone turned off, they were having to tail him the old fashioned way.

  After they’d followed him all the way down to the Reverend’s church, they’d parked the truck behind an old barn down the road. McTighe knew if they stayed in plain sight, some meathead friend might recognize the pickup and come over to shoot the breeze. What excuse do you use when you’re waiting around to kill a couple people?

  What McTighe couldn’t understand was how fast Lucas had managed to track the Reverend. It had even freaked Beddington out, and he had wanted to pop the both of them right there, on the road between the church and town. It would be easy, he’d insisted, and they could dump the bodies down near Camden. No way, McTighe had said. He wasn’t killing anybody that close to his wife and kids.

  It kept eating at him that the woman was a cop. He tried to think on what Reverend Turner said, how true Christians had a duty to the prophecy. It was a grave responsibility, the Reverend said, and if they didn’t do it, they could be pushing back Jesus’s return by five hundred or even a thousand years. Would that be right? Would God want that? It was tough to argue with the Reverend.

  His thoughts were interrupted when the VW ahead of them put on its blinker. “Shit,” he mumbled. One of his front parking lights was broken, and he hadn’t gotten around to fixing it. If Lucas’s girlfriend had been checking for tails, that broken light would be easy to pick out. He took his foot off the gas and let the space between the Toyota and the truck widen to the point where he could barely see her taillights.

  “Don’t lose her!” Beddington snapped.

  “I don’t want her to spot us.”

  “She ain’t going to,” Beddington said.

  “I’m glad you’re so sure.”

  Beddington nodded. “We’re invisible to the sinner. We are enclosed in the blinding cloak of God’s grace. No way they can see us.”

  McTighe shot him a sideways glance, hating the smug expression Beddington always wore when he talked about God. McTighe knew that God helped those who helped themselves, so it seemed just plain foolish not to be careful.

  After another mile, Route 202 merged into Route 287, and the traffic became heavier. McTighe sped up again but managed to get a delivery van between him and the Toyota. They were eating up the distance to Morristown.

  “We gotta find our chance,” Beddington said.

  McTighe winced and rubbed his hands on his trouser legs to dry the sweat. “Maybe we just ought to wait.”

  As if in response, Beddington took out his automatic, slid a shell into the chamber, and clicked on the safety. “We already talked about this. What if
they’re not goin’ back to her house? What if they’re goin’ to the cops to report the Reverend?” Beddington glanced at him.

  McTighe felt none of Beddington’s confidence, only fear. He thought about their alibi. They’d sure as hell need God to make it hold up because the whole thing sounded like bullshit—especially the part about how they’d driven fifty miles to meet a friend at a bar for a couple Cokes. Maybe other people did stuff like that, but not him. Other than his jobs for Mr. Biddle, he generally hung out close to home.

  He went over everything in his head again, looking for comfort in the details. He had to admit Reverend Turner had thought it out pretty good—even had a waitress at a Morristown restaurant who’d claim she’d waited on them if anybody asked. But nobody would. He and Beddington were cops. They’d be heroes for nailing a murderer.

  “Hey!” Beddington said suddenly.

  The Toyota’s turn signal was on. There was an exit just ahead, and McTighe tried to recall what the last sign had said. Basking Ridge, that was it. “Shit,” he muttered as he slowed down.

  FORTY-THREE

  BASKING RIDGE, NJ, JUNE 30

  “TELL ME AGAIN WHY WE didn’t drag that sonofabitch out of his church and beat the truth out of him right on the spot?” Brent demanded.

  “Other than to feel good,” Maggie said, “what would be the point?”

  “To make him admit he’s working with Biddle!”

  “What if he denies it? What do you do then?”

  Brent threw his hands in the air. “I’ll break his arms!”

  “That would be persuasive to a jury. An accused murderer and embezzler beats up a minister!” Maggie nodded. “Good thinking.”