by Grady Ward
One thing that suddenly occurred to Joex, considering the web site and number and differences among the businesses under the Crux umbrella: it may less for laundering tax-free money than it might be for laundering people.
Chapter 17
The next morning Joex considered what to do next. As long as a street person or a police officer did not mug him, Mr. Brillo’s money could last quite a while. On the other hand, he had no idea if his life were still in danger and, if so, was he now living in the epicenter of the danger? Certainly stealing the urban assault vehicle and a stack of hundreds would not endear him to whoever was targeting him. But opening up a bank account would be like turning on a strobe light among a conclave of bats. Identified from a photo sometime in the future, his deletion might be more successful. On the other hand, maybe he was just fucking paranoid.
Once again, he considered the possibilities and cobbled together something that might pass as a plan. He searched the news for Mad Landing and discovered a minor news article about a man matching Mr. Brillo’s description swept into the Pacific, his body recovered the following morning. Joex had no specific reason, but had no doubt this was Mr. Brillo. A cluster of weird things often had a familial cause: he remembered compiling a program missing a single cross-hatch comment marker, thousands of different errors resulted.
Joex emailed the Mad Landing police using a toss away account and asked what the disposition of the body was. The police referred him to the county coroner who in turn cited privacy boilerplate for not answering in email. He looked up pay phones in Portland, headed over to the Quickie Market and called the coroner. The answering attendant was chatty and revealed that the body of Mr. Brillo, or Mr. Rahul Kavith, a foreign national studying religion in the United States, was already picked up for return to his family overseas. The attendant was chattier than Joex had counted on.
Joex finally thanked the attendant and hung up. His head ached from thinking about the same thing for a longer time than he had in years. Though only mid-morning under the gray smothering comforter of the sky he went outside, returned to the Mart, bought a six-pack, then returned to his lodging and then gently knocked on the door that the knit-capped woman had vanished. No answer. He went back into his own room and firmly closed the door. The Coroner’s attendant had mentioned that the people who had picked up Mr. Brillo were representatives from the International Church of the Crux, Portland, Oregon.
Despite the overt connection between Rahul and the Church of the Crux, that evening Joex was no better at narrowing the reasons for his targeting. Then dealing with his economic situation, he looked at the darker side of the Internet and chatted up an IRC warez channel to ask about setting up a Redbud bank account with false identification. A couple of self-proclaimed crackers responded in voice chat using Ventrilo, and one sent Joex a password for a shared Gmail Brutha account. Joex actually sent cash in physical overnight mail to several resulting prospects who promised to set up accounts using false but unimpeachable identification. After several days of web searching investigation of the Crux and reflection upon his own past to pass the time, Joex concluded that two disappeared with his money while the third came through.
Along with the new account, Joex purchased an entire new identity that looked like a dump of a credit reporting bureau database entry with all the details. Joex now had a way of depositing money and spending it without tracking physically back to him. He requested a Redbud debit card. Sent to General Delivery in care of the name on the card, “Jim Rogers,” he had it within a week.
Online, the social security number to the Death Index came back for a Jim Rogers who had drowned the previous month in a fishing accident near Alki Point in Washington State. That fact will take a while to percolate through the credit agencies, Joex thought.
By this time, Joex had been staying the hostel for more than two weeks without being any closer to unraveling the mystery of his attack. In an about-face from his passive approach to life of late, Joex wanted to take the initiative again somehow.
It almost certainly had to with the Crux. More pressing, Joex needed some relatively permanent employment if he were to live in Portland for any length of time. Of course, with the new anti-alien laws, it was difficult to find permanent employment without a social security card or even any kind of official government identification. The debit card was something, but was too slender of a reed to count on.
But in a flash of spectacular realization analogous to his questionable decision to take the initiative in counter-stalking Mr. Brillo, Joex realized that there was one place who would gladly take a person looking for minimal employment and both disregard government regulations on employment with the infrastructure established to do so. “I am so fucking crazy,” Joex thought. Suicidal or brilliant, either way he would draw this puzzle to its conclusion.
So late in the third week after the attack on him by Rahul Kavith, late of Sri Lanka and holy orders in Portland, Joex Baroco, gave his netbook to the rainbow hair woman, who, despite convinced this was an old creeper hitting on her, was happy to get a cute portable computer to Facebook. He left the hostel, buried his most of Mr. Brillo’s remaining cash rolled in a short piece of PVC pipe, stamped vertically into the soft muddy soil in the off-leash section of the Mt. Tabor Park, and walked uptown to the headquarters of the International Church of the Crux, in Portland, Oregon.
Chapter 18
According to the information Joex cobbled together from accounts on the Internet, the official account of the origin of the International Church of the Crux assured the public that the Church was the fully-formed conception of a renegade group of cognitive psychologists of the 1960’s. Who supposedly had imagined an intellectual school name “the crux,” after their studies showed that cognitive ability discontinuously jumped by several standard deviations when engaged in puzzles. Puzzles that systematically engaged the different centers of thinking. According to the official account, this exercising the structure of intellect brought the adherent closer to a realization of God.
This story was nonsense of course given that the Crux began as a secular mission in the 70’s, by the heretofore-described tech millionaires, but the truth was not only deprecated, it was extinguished. So, continuing with the official scriptural account, these 60’s psychologists, the first seven Supernals, understood that their new regimen was so supremely effective that simple qualitative accounts of the awakened ability were in a sense derogatory to the entire process, and that the system of the Crux should be referred as analogous to the transcendence of a devoutly-held religious belief. Similarly, the Church did not use terms as “Intelligence” and “IQ” because they thought those concepts limited the descriptive scope of these new alleged bounds-jumping abilities.
According to the official account, the organization of the Church into four Choirs of three Angelic Orders each. The precise distinctions among the Orders and between the Orders and the body of lay members who made up the Parich, or parichoners was well established before the end of the 1960’s summers of lust had exhausted themselves in intellectual and moral debauchery. The Supernal Order was reserved for prime movers of the Crux who had moved, or perhaps were moved, past their corporeal existence. The next lower order, the Celestials, had only one living member, Michael Voide, the First Celestial of the First Choir.
Joyously—non-members might say suspiciously—every recorded founding member of the Church of the Crux was now dead. The Church purchased, copyrighted, patented, trademarked, and exclusively licensed their entire bodies of research relating to aims of the Church. That research supposedly was now actively undergoing analysis and restoration—a cynic might say fabrication—in holy conservatories reporting directly to the Celestial, who reported all new discoveries and principles, along with their price list.
And the single entity holding the principal copyrights, trademarks, and patents after purchasing those rights from founders’ families was not the Church in total, but the singular office of the First Celestial
Michael Voide.
Unofficially, the cynics whispered that the Church of the Crux was a totalitarian extortion racket run and protected by intelligent, sociopathic thugs. Whispering was necessary because unfortunate grotesque accidents would predictably happen to the extended family members of an effective identified detractor. A near drowning resulting in profound brain damage, a blinding and castration by unknown attackers, irreparable comminution of the pelvic girdle in an unfortunate hit-and-run, and horrifying attacks of splattered Fluoroantimonic acid instantly carbonizing flesh and bone into a distinctive speckled and excruciating disfigurement and permanent disability.
The detractor himself was never touched; they were sued in every jurisdiction listing every claim that was colorable. Teams of in-house Angel attorneys and prestigious outsiders lawyers promoted arguably non-frivolous theories of every kind of damage and criminal allegation if it were important to set legal precedent or enlist the power of the state to punish critics.
Dockets ran into the tens of thousands of pages of complaints, amendments, motions, hearings, orders, emergency ex-parte applications, appeals, oppositions, sanctions, rebuttals, special master investigations, expert testimony, multiple and lengthy depositions, and private surveillance And using pretext, bribery or theft, the Church obtained every fragment of personal information the detractor possessed in order to frame every argument and exploit every potential weakness. The ability of the defendant to pay damages was irrelevant. If the litigation itself did not crush their material resources and spirit, it estranged them from everyone around them who hated them for exposing themselves to the Church’s fury. Following defeat and judgment, the Church would depose tecum duces the defendant periodically, forever. Any discrepancies or unease in forthcoming any information demanded by the Church attorneys resulted in another round of criminal complaints of perjury, emergency ex-parte motions to compel, to sanction, to hold in contempt of court and potentially lead to indefinite imprisonment.
Beyond an aspect of the punishing arm, attorneys had another purpose as well. The Church invariably used its attorneys to mediate its manipulation of the world outside its velvet-draped clerestories; the attorney-client privilege, used and misused, insulated the individual actors within from the lawsuits without, giving plausible deniability between the whispered atrocities of the Church enforcers and the Angels of the Choir. It was quite a game with real people as disposable pieces.
The Church was not a pure fraud. As in most belief and ideology in the world, the creed of the Church was both psychopathic nonsense and effective praxis. The members of the Parich contracted to undertake successive series of tests and puzzles under the private and secure supervision of the Angelic orders. These tests and puzzles had the purpose and effect of introducing novel concepts in problem representation and solution, evoking every more precise distinction and apt metaphor. Beyond primitive notions of numerical and verbal fluency, the puzzles and tests touched systematically on every aspect of rhetoric and mathematics, logic and poetics, and at the rumored higher levels, love and emotion.
But according to the Crux script, the darker levels below the Angelic ascension asserted by the puzzle training: the Fallen and even darker daemons must be exorcised as well.
Personal confessional interviews augmented with physiological instrumentation were required. The Angelic master of training recorded every particle of embarrassing detail in the supplicant’s life. Every infidelity, every law broken—accidentally or not—in fact every error and failure and personal embarrassment must be revealed and reviewed until every facet of the parichoner’s impropriety was recorded in high-definition video correlated with a concurrent physiological measure, and became the irrevocable and exclusive property of the Church of the Crux.
Failure to follow any aspect of the Church’s ecclesiastical authority resulted in graduated measures of punishment—penance—and rehabilitation. Catching a parichoner in a lie while in training meant that the cost of further training trebled and interviews doubled, as special investigative Angels sought to reboot the salvation of perfection, as the Church termed the process. Repeated offenses trebled the costs again; if the parichoner would not or could not pay he or she was expelled and banned. They understood that the provision that any slander, libel, or complaint would result in immediate application of extraordinary and overwhelming force. What that application might be was unspecified, but of course, the Church itself in the exit interview referred to the more lurid disgusting rumors of the Church’s critics.
As an alternative, if a parichoner could not afford the services of test exaltation, he or she could become a member of the lowest order of Angels and pay for training with service. Pay was something nebulous in the Church, however, and rumors that work was a unbroken string of sixteen-hour days with scant time for any training whatsoever. Of course, the Church had a religious exception and did not provide for any retirement, disability, or medical insurance, and it was assured that the moment you were no longer useful to the Church that you would be dumped on the streets of the nearest urban center with orders never to appear on Church property again.
Usually the reality was worse.
Once a member of the Order, tasks and schedules were devised and enforced in a strictly hierarchical manner; the Archangels directed the Angels, the Thrones were the absolute directors of the Principalities, and the bulk of the professional work of the Church was done by the Third Choir of Dominations, Virtues, and Powers. Within the Third Choir were most of the church attorneys, test and puzzle researchers and developers, persons handling the real estate and general intelligence monitoring of the press, the grounds maintenance and estate keepers, and those devising price lists and celebrity stunts and endorsements for benefit of the Church. While in principal rising in the Orders was a matter strictly left to merit, fidelity and faith, what was not well known in the Church (below the members of the Second Choir) was that no one had ever risen above the Third Choir except by personal designation by the First Celestial, Michael Voide.
Becoming a member of the Order was a life-changing event. At the promise of perfection through free training and puzzle solving, the Angel must obey every order without question or reservation. Even insufficient enthusiasm was cause for immediate sanction.
Beyond the array of punishment and litigation that a Fallen or daemon and his extended family might undergo, a questioned member of the Order exposed himself to specific internal punishments. Following additional intensive interviews replacing sleep periods was the first level of inquisition that heralded the physical beatings—called penitential purification—by the four elementals of water, electricity, sand, and air. Then the segregation in the Church rehabilitation camps held in guarded isolated compounds. The principal selection criteria for siting these camps seemed to be places where—no matter how desperately or agonizingly or terminally—no one other than Church Angels could hear you scream.
Despite the distillate of horror rumored and actually used on members by the Church, related by the most embittered apostates, once again the truth was even worse.
Chapter 19
“Wala nya ye! Bē gu na ma?” Sam’s cousin shouted as he slapped Sam down to the stamped dirt floor, imperfectly covered with irregular sheets of vinyl flooring. Sam’s cousin, the master of the compound Sam was living at in southeast Freetown within easy view of the new U.S. Embassy. Cousin Robert Siloi was a self-made gangster of the nascent building industry in Freetown. In his early forties, short, round, and out-of-breath from his effort, his face a cordillera of tribal scars, he specialized in obtaining properties and organizing building trades for the NGO’s that swarmed into Freetown to ply their good works at whatever cost in local corruption. However, it seemed to Sam that his cousin’s principal business was to move building materials around depending on a personal gauge of the minimum show he need to silence his client’s frequent complaints.
Given that there was no reliable infrastructure of any kind after the last ten-year civi
l war, it was a cash-and-carry business. More than once Sam had to ride along with Cousin Siloi wearing an ancient rifle slung with twine as his cousin collected and disbursed thick wads of cash from a tattered plastic bag as big as his own ass.
“The money, all of it! I will tell you what you will need of money! Nothing!” Cousin Siloi kicked Sam between the legs and dramatically wiped the toe of his roper-style cowboy boot on Sam’s pants. Sam’s cousin Siloi had no idea that the hammered studs and iridescent beads on the boots had been perfectly in style for the pre-teen daughters of the suburban ranches surrounding Raton, New Mexico twenty years ago. Cousin Siloi looked down at his cousin, his burden, sighed, and forgetting about Sam after completing his weekly extortion, dropped himself onto a brand-new leather sofa. Put in front of the television by two of the go-boys of a client, George Kemara, George hoped that it would encourage Siloi to begin his building project before the next big rainy season would turn the barely-passable cratered roads into the impossible sloughs of sticky red mud.
Lying on the cool floor of the cinder-block television room, Sam heard the clack-clack of the whirligig beetles hurling themselves into the metal grate of the window. He dreamed of taking the hovercraft to Lungi airport and then to London. Forever.
Chapter 20
The main entrance to the Church of the Crux in Portland, was cool, dark, and cavernous. The high-vaulted narthex consisted solely of hard surfaces as is if to amplify the echo from every fugitive sound. In the far center of the marble and mahogany arcade was a monumental desk within a miniature apse. Off to each side of the arcade, enfilade, were adjoining rooms in which Joex glimpsed racks of Church literature, worktables with built-in monitors and exhibits of one kind or another pertaining to the Church. The only person other than himself in the entrance was sitting at the desk across the hall facing him. She was a young woman with extraordinarily short hair wearing a nondescript fitted baize singlet. She stared at him, undemonstrative but not unfriendly. Sam did not yet notice the HD/ip surveillance cameras or microphones camouflaged in tiny tinted hemispheres ensconced every few yards on the shadowed arched of the ceiling.