Kingdom of the Seven

by Jon Land

  “What you’re telling me, Mr. McCracken,” came his response when Blaine had finished, “is that one of our present inmates was murdered in New York City yesterday.”

  “That’s right, Warden.”

  “Could you spell his name, please?”

  Widmer turned his chair to face his computer terminal, entered the name as Blaine recited it, and typed in the proper instructions. He studied the results briefly and looked back at McCracken.

  “It seems you’re correct. Benjamin Ratansky does indeed reside here in cell twenty-seven of cellblock D.”

  “Resides there now?”

  “Apparently not, I’m afraid. You see, cellblock D only has twenty-six cells.”

  The strain in the priest’s voice was plain to the twins as he repeated his question to them over the speaker phone:

  “Are you sure the descriptions you forwarded me are accurate?”

  Jacob and Rachel looked at each other.

  “Yes,” said Jacob.

  “Straight off the police report,” added Rachel.

  “I’ve managed to identify them,” their father explained after a long pause. “It wasn’t terribly hard. They’re rather well known in certain circles.”

  “Who are they?”

  As their father explained to them exactly who the bearded man and the Indian were and what could be expected of them, the twins grew more and more agitated.

  “How could such men be involved in this?” Rachel wondered.

  “They may well have stumbled into it. My information indicates this man McCracken had a prior experience with the Arab terrorist who was shot. Equally unpleasant.”

  “That doesn’t explain the presence of the soldiers,” Jacob reminded. “They should have fled the scene after dispatching Ratansky.”

  “We must assume they had their reasons for doing otherwise.”

  “McCracken’s unwitting involvement? Something he did or … or even learned!” Rachel said, getting excited.

  “Possibly. But only McCracken himself would be able tc tell us.”

  “So we must find him!”

  “But where to start?” Jacob raised despondently.

  “Where would you start?” the priest challenged. “Think as outsiders. Detach yourselves.”

  “Ratansky,” Rachel muttered.

  “By now, McCracken will have identified him,” Jacob added.

  “And gone where with the information?”

  The twins looked at each other. Rachel said exactly what Jacob was thinking:

  “Where we must go next.”

  “Was the transfer unusual?” McCracken asked.

  “In and of itself, not at all,” Widmer replied with a hard copy of Ratansky’s records before him. “Ratansky was a model prisoner, but wouldn’t have been eligible for parole for another two years under the terms of his sentence. Transferring him here to a minimum security facility was the next best thing.”

  “Only he never made it to Taylorville.”

  Widmer leafed through the rest of the pages he was handling and then reached for another file that had just arrived via computer modem from Sheridan. “By all indications, his presence here was a sham perpetrated on the system and the state by someone who had tapped into and tampered with both prisons’ computer systems. Sheridan’s records, as well as ours, have been altered so everything appears as it should be.”

  “Ratansky was convicted of computer fraud,” Blaine recalled.

  “I see the connection didn’t escape you, either.”

  “Along with the fact that he could never have accomplished all the logistics alone.”

  “Agreed. In fact, regular updates on his status have been entered into our system here in Taylorville, just in case anyone bothered to check.”

  “Any way of tracing them to a source?”

  “Not with any high degree of confidence, under the circumstances. There’s no paper trail to follow, remember. Everything was done with computers talking to other computers.”

  Blaine thought briefly. “Do you have a list there of his visitors while he was in Sheridan?”

  “I should.”

  Again Widmer ruffled through the pages of the top manila folder. The diary-form visitors list for Ratansky’s three-year stay was four stapled sheets long.

  “Family members, mostly,” the warden recited. “His lawyer, too.”

  “What about in the last few months he was in there? Any new names?”

  Widmer looked up slowly. “Several of them. No two repeat.”

  “My guess is it was the same person using different identifications,” Blaine concluded.

  “Four visits over the course of Ratansky’s final three months,” the warden intoned skeptically. “Not much on which to base a conclusion.”

  “Unless there was a setup inside Sheridan passing him information as well. See if Ratansky was part of any group during his stay. See if he happened to join one during his last few months.”

  It took a few minutes of scanning through a second manila folder faxed from the Sheridan Correctional Center for Warden Widmer to find the answer. “Yes and no. He never joined a group, but there are several notations linking him to one, starting with those months in question. Something called the Fifth Generation. My Lord,” the warden realized, “there was a group by the same name up at Menard when I was deputy warden there. It’s a religious group, fanatical evangelists, I believe. I hadn’t realized they were anything but local.”

  “No chapter here at Taylorville.”

  “Fortunately they’re not the minimum security type, not even the medium really. But Sheridan maintains a small maximum security wing to help handle the overflow.”

  McCracken leaned forward, the hairs on his neck stiffening. “These Fifth Generation members, would you classify them as troublemakers?”

  “No. Keep to themselves mostly, except when one of them is crossed. They take care of each other. Not unusual for prison. In fact, there’s very little about them that is unusual, except maybe their claim to be religious zealots.”

  “You called them fanatics before, Warden.”

  “An unfortunate stereotype, I suppose, because they do have one strange tradition the penal system’s been unable to stifle despite making a rather concerted effort.”

  “Why bother making it?”

  “Health reasons. See, the members slice off their left earlobes, Mr. McCracken. Each and every one of them.”

  A connection established with the missing corpses of the gunmen in New York, Blaine called Sal Belamo from Warden Widmer’s office to ask him to find out all he could about the group that called themselves the Fifth Generation. McCracken was an hour into his drive north toward Sheridan, and the prison Benjamin Ratansky had managed a brilliant escape from, when the cellular phone in his rental car rang.

  “What’d you come up with, Sal?” McCracken asked by way of greeting.

  “It’s like this, boss. Fifth Generation got off the ground between prison walls, all right, but it’s not limited to them anymore. Made up of extreme Christian fundamentalists, and I do mean extreme, who are big into the area of rebirth and redemption. Was started up fifteen years ago in San Quentin by a priest named Preston Turgewell. Thing is, Turgewell wasn’t just visiting at the time; he was imprisoned there.”

  “For what?”

  “Turned out this holy father was leading a double life, which he financed by stealing from the parishoners’ donation baskets every Sunday. Made the best of his token two-year stay in the slammer, by all accounts. Became a new man and took plenty of other convicts with him.”

  “The Fifth Generation …”

  “Damn straight, boss. Soon as he got out, he took his show on the road. Became quite the soul saver with branches in every big lockup across the nation. His people get out, they open or join Fifth Generation branches back in their hometowns, and the fucked-up former Father Turgewell used to hold the paper on each and every one. We’re talking lots of ex-cons here, drawn from just about
the most violent available. Leastways we were.”

  “Past tense.”

  “’Cause the fucked-up former father has done gone to his Maker. About a year ago in a private plane crash. Suspicious circumstances, ’specially considering his kids disappeared round the same time.”

  “Kids?”

  “I forget to mention that? Yeah, in addition to everything else, before he found the Lord for real, Turgewell found some pussy through which he ended up with two kids.” Sal paused long enough to consult his notes. “Twins, a boy and a girl. They’d be almost eighteen now.”

  CHAPTER 11

  The rain pounded the huge tent. The wind slammed vast torrents of water against the flapping canvas, threatening to tear it loose from its ropes and poles. For twenty-four hours now the water had poured down its sides into ever-deepening pools atop the grass. Where the grass choked off and died, oozing puddles of mud formed, determined to force their way beneath the bottom flaps that thus far had held the onslaught back.

  Inside and outside the tent, dozens of sodden workers toiled feverishly to keep the canvas tied down. Fresh stakes were driven where the ground would take them. And when no ground could be found, the workers did their best to shore up the supports already in place.

  Inside, though, the capacity crowd was spared the storm. They sat upon folding row chairs atop ground that had remained dry. The rain bursts thwacking at the tent top sounded like monotonous drumbeats that simply became part of the atmosphere. They noticed them not in the slightest, although the sudden flashes of lightning visible through the olive-khaki canvas did draw an occasional stir and sent a muttering through the makeshift pews.

  “Are we to fear nature, my brothers and sisters?” challenged the woman from the lowest tier of a three-level stage set near the front of the tent. “Are we to fear our collective ends in this place tonight, victims of a terrible tragedy? Are we to fear our helplessness before the might of the Lord?”

  The murmuring through the crowd intensified. Eyes swept the recently erected tent, as if to check whether the tower-high supports were strong enough to withstand the storm’s power.

  “I say, no! I say we are not to fear it!”

  Sister Barbara was awash in the spill of bright white and blue spotlights that shone down from a trio of scaffolding towers. Her pearly white sequined dress seemed to both absorb and reflect the light, casting her as one with it. She cut a tall, graceful, and elegant figure striding across the stage, high heels clacking between the bolts of thunder. Behind her, seated in a semicircular erection of bleachers, a blue-clad choir a hundred strong followed her every move. She was wearing a wireless microphone that hung down unseen from her left ear. She came to the very edge of the stage and lowered her voice into it.

  “There are those who stand on pedestals like this who say there is no hope. They tell you to forget hope. They say you must change your ways and accept their word, or risk not being saved when Judgment Day approaches.”

  As if on cue, a bristling thunderclap erupted, just before another flashbulb-bright flash of lightning. A collective gasp moved through the increasingly jittery audience.

  “Well,” Sister Barbara continued, “I am here tonight to tell you not to put your faith in them, these doomsayers who have given up on the world and on you. Have faith in yourselves to endure, to survive in spite of what is thrown in your path. Those who have been here before me have passed around their baskets and asked you to give in order that you might be saved. But it is faith in yourself and in God Himself that saves you, not faith in the interpreters of His word. No baskets will be passed around tonight. No money will be collected, nor will it be accepted. God does not charge for the benefit of His word.”

  Sister Barbara held both hands out to the crowd, reaching as if to touch them all. This time, when a thunderclap and burst of lightning filled her pause, the crowd remained silent and still.

  “Are there those who have come to be healed tonight?”

  “Yes!” a segment of the crowd shouted back at the stage.

  “Are there those who are sick in the body?”

  “Yes!

  “Are there those who are sick in the mind?”

  “Yes!” Considerably less resounding.

  “Are there those who have lost hope …”

  “Yes!”

  “Forgotten how to love …”

  “Yes!”

  “Down on their luck, lost in their faith, faced with demons in the form of the bottle or the pill …”

  “Yes! … Yes! … Yes!”

  Sister Barbara brought her hands together before her in a mock position of prayer. “What are we to do about these cancers that eat away at our bodies and our souls? We come here seeking salvation from the only force we have left to turn to. And if we leave here as we came, what happens then? What happens tomorrow when the alarm goes off and the pain of another day sets in?” Her eyes swept the crowd, hundreds believing they had met her stare and each of these feeling a strange shudder pass through them. “We lose hope, and when we lose hope the hole we dig grows deeper. When we lose hope our lives become a quagmire in which our emotions have been lost. So all of you who have come here for salvation must look into your own souls before you can expect God to notice you.”

  “Amen,” chanted the choir with upraised palms shaking.

  “Amen,” followed the crowd.

  “But it isn’t to find God that you’ve come here tonight,” Sister Barbara continued, “it’s to find yourselves. To find meaning, to find, yes, hope. And I will show you how to find it. I will be your guide because I’ve been there myself. I’ve sunk to the very depths. I’ve known what it’s like to give up on the world, and when you give up on yourself, that’s what you’re doing.”

  Sister Barbara squeezed her eyes closed. Her whole face squinted up into a pained scowl. She bowed her head slightly and touched her hands to her temples.

  “There’s a woman out there who hasn’t seen her son in five years. He ran away when he was thirteen—”

  “Ohhhh-ahhhhhhh,” came a sobbing scream from somewhere in the middle of the rows.

  “—because his father beat him.” Sister Barbara’s eyes opened. “And the woman threw the father out of the house when she learned what he had done. Too late to save her son, but not too late to save herself and her soul. She blames herself, because she was afraid to stop the father, tortures herself because her son is gone.”

  “Please,” the same voice from the middle pleaded, its echo swallowed by a thunderclap.

  “Come forward,” Sister Barbara instructed.

  And the huge crowd turned en masse toward the center of the tent. Some rose slightly, stiff from the sitting. Others squinted. The murmur was deafening as a slovenly woman in a nondescript blue print dress made her way slowly down the center aisle toward the stage. Her hair hung uneven and limp. Rolls of fat pushed the dress outward at the sides and threatened to split the seams. She was sobbing quietly, eyes glazed in shock.

  Sister Barbara knelt at the edge of the stage and reached down to take the woman’s hand in one of her own. “You fear you will never see your son again. You want me to tell you if he will ever come back, tell you where you might find him.”

  “Yes! Please …”

  “What reason have you given him to return?”

  The woman looked up questioningly. Her grip on Sister Barbara’s hand slackened.

  “What have you made of yourself since he left, since your husband left? What has the boy to return to?”

  “I, I, I—”

  “Fear drove him away. If there is no hope, no faith, he will never return. You must make a life for yourself before you can make one for anyone else.”

  Sobbing horribly, the slovenly woman began to sink. Sister Barbara latched her second hand over her first and wouldn’t let her drop.

  “You want to quit. So many of us have wanted to quit, and at times we do. We fall into a grave we make for ourselves, hoping someone will pull us out. Ult
imately, though, that task is left to us, and if we fail to perform it, we sink deeper until one day we can no longer see the surface. Can you see the surface now, sister?”

  The woman’s lips trembled.

  “Can you see the surface?”

  “No. God forgive me, no.”

  “Close your eyes, sister. Close your eyes and let your mind take you back to when the surface was there. See those years when you thought you had a chance to be happy. If you hadn’t fooled yourself, you wouldn’t have fallen. Can you see your wedding day, your child being born? …”

  The woman’s tears had turned joyous. A smile so long in coming that fresh dimples were carved in her cheeks stretched wide and mighty. “Yes! Yes! Praise the Lord, yes!”

  “Don’t praise the Lord, sister. Praise yourself. See yourself back then and make yourself into that person once more. Climb back to the surface.”

  The woman’s smile vanished, pain replacing it across her features. “I—I—I … can’t!”

  “You can!”

  “I can’t reach it!”

  “Then I’ll pull you up. Bring your other hand to mine and I’ll pull you up!”

  “Yes—yes—”

  “Give me your other hand, sister. Take mine with it!”

  The woman’s fingers flailed blindly until they brushed against the right hand Sister Barbara had locked over her left. Instantly Sister Barbara released it, feeling the clammy grasp close into her own as she interlocked all ten of her fingers into the woman’s.

  “Now use me to help pull yourself upward,” she instructed.

  “I’m too weak!”

  “You’re not!”

  “Pull!” the crowd chanted, on their feet now. “Pull!”

  The woman seemed to hear them and stretched upward, trying to lift herself.

  “That’s it!” Sister Barbara coaxed. “Try a little harder now. Just a little bit harder.”

  And when the woman obliged, Sister Barbara hoisted her atop the stage in one incredibly swift and strong motion, showing no sign of exertion whatsoever. A gasp of wonder for the apparently effortless feat passed through the crowd. The slovenly woman, meanwhile, stood next to her shaking. Her wrinkled dress clung to her, its bottom hanging stiff and uneven.