Righteous02 - Mighty and Strong

by Michael Wallace

  “Okay,” was all he could manage.

  “You’re officially engaged now. Go ahead, Jacob, give your betrothed a kiss.”

  Jacob gave Fernie a desperate look and in return, she widened her eyes, gave him a nod, as if to say, Hurry up, you fool. Don’t make the poor girl suffer.

  Jacob bent down while Devorah formed a huge pucker and leaned forward with her eyes closed. Her hand was trembling in his.

  He kissed her, just long enough that it didn’t looked like he was disgusted.

  Brother Timothy was beaming, Fernie looked content. Devorah, relieved that it was over. And Sister Miriam, at the edge of the courtyard, met his gaze and gave a cryptic shake of the head.

  Not one more day, Jacob told himself. We are leaving. Tonight.

  #

  In spite of everything—9/11, the Kennedy assassinations, his polygamist relatives, even the periodic death threats via email or poorly scribbled notes—Senator Jim McKay found himself surprised when the attack came.

  One minute he was reading tripe from The New Republic that dismissed his candidacy as, “The last, desperate hope of the would-be Jesusocracy.” The next minute, a gun barrel at his forehead. He had a startled moment where he felt like he was dreaming. And then thought this must be a joke. And saw the grim expression on his attacker’s face and he knew it wasn’t.

  Two days earlier a woman had called his campaign headquarters, purporting to be the secretary of a well-known reporter from USA Today. They were doing a comparison piece on the primary contenders, one of those things that lined up candidates on issues like abortion, global warming, and free trade. Could he answer the enclosed questionnaire and write two to three sentences illuminating each viewpoint? But in the same issue they wanted to run a feature on how Senator McKay’s moral values would shape his future presidency.

  USA Today meant pure fluff, with no risk of a hatchet job. Of course someone from his staff checked out the reporter, made sure he was legit. But no return call to USA Today; too much was going on with the upcoming Pioneer Day celebration.

  When the woman arrived, together with the supposed reporter—a respectable-looking man of fifty-five, maybe sixty years old—he’d felt no misgivings. Senior reporter and his attractive young assistant. Probably the woman was the real writer, the man the respected byline.

  Jim shook the reporter’s hand. It was large, callused, like what you’d find on a man who worked with his hands. Maybe that should have given him pause, but he was distracted by the low cut of the woman’s blouse and her coquettish smile. He knew the type, attracted to power. Loose Washington morals.

  He forced himself to look away. No way, no scandals. He would not be derailed by Clintonesque bimbo eruptions.

  “Senator McKay,” the man said, “I’m Todd Brenslow and this is my co-writer Katy Smart. She’s the one who called.”

  “Welcome. Would you like anything? Bagels and donuts in the break room. I can have my staff make some coffee if you’d like. Don’t drink it myself, but I’ve got staff to smuggle it into Utah.” He winked at the woman, who smiled back.

  “Maybe later,” Brenslow said. “Mind if we ask a few questions first?”

  “Sure, come on back.”

  This Brenslow guy had a slow, rural accent, like the type you heard in southern Utah or southeast Idaho. Maybe he was from this part of the world. Come to think of it, hadn’t Jim’s secretary remarked about the woman’s accent when she’d called? Something about these two looked familiar.

  She shut the door behind them and Brenslow pulled a laptop from its case, then fished out a power cord. He had his back turned.

  Jim sat at his desk and waited for the man to get to it. So much going on with a speech and fundraiser in Provo tonight, then all the fun tomorrow. The Pioneer Day speeches, the Temple Square Tour, fireworks and the late-night rally.

  And the following morning he’d make the official announcement. A speech at the State Capitol with his brother, then fly to Washington that evening to make an appearance with the party graybeards. The headline of the press release would read: “Fiscal Conservative Vows to Return America to its Roots.”

  That would be the theme of the campaign: America’s roots. Sound fiscal policy, pay as you go, energy security. No bailouts to banks, no new social programs to ring up on the big national credit card. Manufacturing jobs kept in the U.S. instead of shipped off to China. An end to the farting around in the Middle East. Let the Israelis and the Iranians and the Saudis solve their own troubles. Fight terrorism by keeping crazy Middle Easterners out of the country in the first place. Who could argue with that?

  The culture war crap he could do without, but he’d bring it up just enough to convince the party faithful that he cared. But if he left it alone, he could get some independents and moderate Dems on board as well.

  He was so caught up in his thoughts he barely noticed the woman leaving the room.

  “I’m going to set the tape recorder on the desk, if that’s okay,” Brenslow said.

  Jim waved his hand. “Sure, whatever.”

  Brenslow stepped toward the desk with the recorder held tight in front of him. As he approached, his hand shot out and Jim saw too late that it held a gun. The man shoved the barrel against his forehead.

  “One noise, cry, or scream and your brains end up on the back wall.”

  Jim’s self-confidence, his arrogance dissolved in an instant. His surety of his position in life disappeared, the safety that wealth and power gave him. Terror took its place.

  “Who are you?” he whispered. The barrel of the gun felt warm. How much warmer would it be after it fired?

  “You have wronged me and mine. And that makes you my enemy. I destroy my enemies.”

  “Are you going to kill me?” Jim asked.

  The man just smiled. “I haven’t decided yet.”

  Jim swallowed, felt a sudden, desperate urge to please this man, to make him see he could be reasonable. Whatever he’d done to this man, he could set it right.

  “But I don’t have to kill you, not physically. There are things I could do that would make you suffer just as much. What do you think about that, Senator?”

  Was that it? This jerk showed up just to threaten him? Anger replaced his terror. “Do you have any idea what kind of prison sentence you’ll get for pulling a gun on a presidential contender? Not months or years. Decades. And when the press, the real press, hears the story, it will only help me. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Prison sentence?” the man laughed. “Nobody is going to give me a prison sentence. I’ve outsmarted better men than you, Jim McKay. You, you’re the weak side of the family. The dog with good breeding who can’t hunt. The fat cow that doesn’t give milk.”

  “You’re some kind of fundy, aren’t you? Polygamist nut job. What is it, FLDS? That crazy little cult in Manti?”

  “How about the father of the man whose family you threw into the street?”

  So that was it. He’d wronged Jacob Christianson, and the man’s father—wasn’t he the leader of those Blister Creek polygs? What was his name? He’d forgotten to ask his brother.

  “You know who else I’m related to?” the man asked.

  “Santa Claus?”

  “You’re a funny man. No, I’m related to you.”

  “What?”

  “My name is Abraham Christianson. I’m not just the leader of the Church of the Anointing, and Jacob’s father, I’m your first cousin.”

  Could it be? All he’d known was that his father had left one of these cults as a young man. Father hadn’t discussed it with his sons, except once, when a scruffy, unwashed man had shown up at the house, asking for money. Jim and Parley were old enough to notice at the time—fourteen and twelve years old—but not old enough to piece everything together. To his surprise, Dad had given the man a warm bed, use of the shower, a hot meal, and a wad of bills when he left the next day. His mother, from a good Salt Lake family, had watched with clear disapproval, but said nothing.r />
  Jim and Parley had found their father working in the yard after the man left. Who was that man, and how did he know Father?

  Father leaned against his hoe. “There are those who wander in darkness, boys. They can’t understand why the church left them behind, when the truth is, they left the church. When the prophet commanded them to give up the Principle for a season, they found it too hard to obey.”

  “You’re talking about the polygamists,” Jim said. He’d overheard a few conversations between his parents over the years.

  “I help when I can because I know that could have been me. Should have been me. Only the Lord’s mercy kept me from following that path.”

  It was a strangely formal speech from a man who didn’t take to testimony bearing or care much for formalized religion. He attended church dutifully with Mom whenever he was home from the work site, did what the bishop asked, but no more. Sometimes, he would disappear on some construction project in rural Utah for a few weeks, where he drove a scraper. From Mom’s snide comments, it was clear Dad didn’t go to church when he was out of town.

  But now the polygamist past had intruded in Jim’s life in the form of this man, purporting to be his cousin. And a gun pressed against Jim’s forehead. And he wondered how much more there was to the story, how much he didn’t know, details that could be uncovered by the press or an enemy candidate.

  “Yes, cousins,” Abraham Christianson said. “You know what that means, right?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything. Lot of guys come from polygamist backgrounds. So what? My dad was a true, believing Latter-day Saint.”

  “Hah, that’s what you think, is it?” Christianson had a book held in his left hand, which he now slid across the table. “Ever seen this?”

  Jim took the opportunity to pull back from the barrel to look at the book. To his relief, the man lowered the gun slightly. He thought briefly about screaming for help, or charging the man. But the grim set to Christianson’s eyes dissuaded him.

  “A journal?”

  “Your father’s journal, Senator. A man formerly known as David Christianson before he took the name McKay, which was his mother’s maiden name.”

  Jim didn’t know anything about a name change. “My father? How did you get this?”

  “He was a Lost Boy, didn’t he tell you that?” Abraham Christianson asked. “My father’s rebellious younger brother. When my grandfather selected my father as the future leader over your father, your father refused to accept the verdict. He tried to take wives and privileges that didn’t belong to him and suffered excommunication as a result.”

  “What a load of bullshit. My dad helped people get out of the cult. He gave them money and pointed them in the right direction.”

  “He bribed apostates and dissidents,” Christianson countered. “He spent thirty years trying to bully enough people to help him stage a coup within the Church of the Anointing. It’s all in his journal.”

  “Sure, and you just happened to find this thing…where, exactly?”

  “We stole it, of course. You don’t think your father was the only one maneuvering for control, do you? Your father was wicked enough to try anything—as the journal makes clear—and we had to move against him.”

  “No, I don’t believe you. Even if it is his journal, it doesn’t say what you think it says.”

  “Read it, if you wish, you’ll see soon enough. He even mentioned you by name. He meant for you to have the church some day. It’s all there in his own handwriting.”

  Looking down at the journal, he knew it was true. It tied everything together, from his father’s cryptic remarks over the years, to his disinterest in the mainstream church, to the man who’d taken the large wad of bills that day.

  And what would his enemies say when they saw Jim McKay’s name mentioned as the future leader of a polygamist cult? Never mind it was fantasy, that Jim had never suspected such a thing. He’d gone on a mission, he’d taken a beating by street thugs, and all for his church. And yet one old man’s fantasies would ruin everything if this got out.

  It occurred to him that he could take the journal to read and then destroy it. But his cousin wouldn’t be so stupid. There would be microfilm or some other evidence. The man might be taping the whole conversation, or have his room bugged. Jim could destroy the journal or not, but there would be more than enough to tie him to this mess, if it were true.

  “What then? What do you want?”

  “Call off the dogs, Brother McKay.”

  “The dogs? Oh, you mean your son? I don’t have control over the FBI.”

  “The Attorney General, Brother McKay. Your brother. He’s persecuting my son and it will stop now, or the world will know what’s in this book. You’ll be ruined. Your brother will be ruined. It is that simple.”

  “This isn’t fair, I don’t have anything to do with this.”

  “Surely you don’t believe that. As a man sows, so shall he reap. Or has the Salt Lake church stopped teaching that parable? You sowed your crop when you decided to persecute my son for his beliefs. This is what you reap.”

  The office door opened and the young woman entered. Jim saw her now for what she was: one of Abraham Christianson’s plural wives.

  “Someone is coming,” she said.

  “Good, we were just finishing our interview.” Christianson scooped up the journal and tucked journal and gun alike into his laptop case. “Think about it, Brother McKay. You got a new lease on life. I suggest you use it wisely.”

  And then the intruders were gone. For a long minute he could do nothing but stare at the door. He felt lightheaded. He could still feel the spot on his forehead where the gun had pressed into his skull. A shiver of spent adrenaline trembled through his hands.

  Jim reached for the phone. Time to call Parley. He didn’t know yet if he’d tell his brother about Dad’s nasty little secret. It was too much to digest at once and there was a chance he could still maneuver out of this and continue his candidacy. At the very least, he had to go forward with the Pioneer Day events, for appearances, if nothing else.

  But distressingly, moment by moment, he began to suspect that his entire candidacy had been reduced to appearances.

  #

  Krantz had his perimeter by dusk. Using a BLM map, he’d discovered an abandoned ranch road that swung behind a promontory marked Barton Hill.

  Two men dressed as utility workers had spent half the day clearing brush from the road to allow his black surveillance van to crunch slowly up the hill. He waited until dark before he pulled it around the corner, the last two hundred yards, until it was in view of the compound. Didn’t want to risk someone looking up the hill with a pair of binoculars. Gutierez and Kelty threw camouflaged netting over the van.

  The workers shed their utility company disguises and traded them for camo and sniper rifles. They set up positions on the hill. Two more snipers would watch the road that led away from the compound, and a fifth would infiltrate the gardens after it was fully dark.

  All were armed with FN Special Police Rifles, which fired 7.62X51 mm cartridges, the same round fired by US Military M40s. At positions from 200-800 meters from the compound, the sharpshooters would bring serious backup to the SWAT team.

  That is, if the action moved outside the compound or to the roof, otherwise, they were useless. But the bigger problem was that the two teams would be relying on incomplete information.

  The compound was a black box. Krantz had few tools to penetrate that box. There were no phone lines to tap, they had no bugs on the inside.

  Visually, his luck wasn’t much better. At this angle, they couldn’t see over the walls and into the courtyards. He had a helicopter on standby with infrared detection, but he didn’t dare bring it over until the operation was underway, for fear of tipping off the cult leaders with the sound. Krantz sat in the van, looking at monitors. Some were still on visual, others had flipped to infrared. A tech un-crated a pair of parabolic microphones. They were good to about two hundr
ed meters, but only useful if they could get them inside the buildings or to the roof. Otherwise, the thick adobe walls would block their functionality.

  Agent Chambers opened the door, stepped inside. He squinted against the light inside. “You sure they don’t need you in Salt Lake?”

  “No way I’m leaving until we pull this off.”

  “And things are cool up there?” he asked.

  “No worries, the Senator is in Provo tonight, speaking to a gathering of sheriffs from across the state. A room of armed law enforcement isn’t the best time to try anything, know what I mean? That goes until eleven. He’s then returning to his hotel and our guys will be with him. By the time McKay leaves for Salt Lake tomorrow morning, we should be wrapped up here.”

  “Bad timing,” Chambers said. “Sure we shouldn’t wait until we’ve got this business at Temple Square behind us?”

  “Look at it this way,” Krantz said. “Either the cult is planning something for tomorrow, or not. If they’re not, they’re not as dangerous as we’re guessing. We’ll get into the compound, get our girl, the informant and his family, get out.”

  “And if they are planning something against Senator McKay?”

  “Then no better time to run our operation. We’ll knock them off their game plan.” He tried to sound more confident than he felt. “We’ve got a full SWAT in Salt Lake with sniper and assault contingents. This compound team is an HRT. It can do the job.”

  “Sevare vitas,” Chambers said in an ironic tone.

  It was Latin for “to save lives,” the motto of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. HRT was more advanced than a typical SWAT team, with the ability to fast-rope from helicopters into the center of a hostile environment. Perfect for Zarahemla.

  Chambers had trained with HRT, had performed two missions, although he hadn’t talked much about either one. Reading between the lines, following press and Google, Krantz thought one had been a joint Delta Force operation in Afghanistan, and the second might have been a botched attack in Colombia that left one agent dead and killed two of the three American businessmen being held. Drug-related raids, in both cases.