by Gary Parker
Lifting the sword, Augustine turned and faced the Council again. “We have made much progress,” he said to the gathered group. “The Judeo-Christian consensus of the past millennium now rests on the dust heap of history, replaced by a post-Christian culture in most of the Western world.”
The Council nodded in assent as Augustine continued. “We have two times as many atheists in America as we have Episcopalians.”
A couple of the Council actually smiled, their lips barely visible as their hoods crowded in around their chins.
“Sixty-eight percent of Americans say that religion has less influence in their lives this year than last. An equal number say that tolerance of all others is more important than publicly proclaiming one’s own beliefs. I could go on and on with the changes that have happened—we all know and celebrate events such as these.”
Augustine paused for effect, his pleasure rising, and then continued. “We are like a stone mason pounding on a large rock. For a while, the mason sees no effect from his efforts. But then, with one last mighty blow, the mason slams his hammer onto the rock and the rock splits into a thousand pieces. Today, my friends, I am here to announce to you that we are poised for the final mighty blow!”
The Council murmured their approval.
“Then,” shouted Augustine. “Then I will pass from this earth and another man will take the oath and speak the words and protect the sword that guards us all!”
“As you wish!” called the Council. “The time for Succession is at hand!”
30
Monday
Charbeau spent the rest of Sunday and all day Monday managing two jobs. First, he put into motion a scheme to settle the matter of Shannon Bridge; second, he went into overdrive with the arrangements for Domino. He brought in a husband-and-wife team skilled in technology and explosives to finish up the Bridge job and ten others, all men, to complete preparations for Domino. As always with tasks as sensitive as these, he enlisted only true believers to carry them out, people with all manner of personal axes to grind against the church. Although he didn’t tell his crew the ultimate goal of either of the two actions, he said enough to assure their full loyalty and most dedicated efforts.
His timetable called for the set-up of the two events to run simultaneously in two different cities but the actual fulfillment to occur separately, with Bridge dying late on Monday and Domino unfolding three days later on Thursday afternoon.
The couple assigned to Bridge’s demise went to her hotel on Sunday night and detected, then disconnected, the three cameras that kept watch over the place. Next, after the sun rose on Monday, they disrupted telephone service so the hotel phones shut down. Finally, they responded within thirty minutes to the service call the hotel manager placed on his cell, showing up in crisp uniforms and driving a fully equipped van from the FoneAir Corporation. Since they were the ones who had fouled up the reception in the first place, it didn’t take them long to isolate the problem and communicate the resolution to the manager. Pleased with their quick service, the manager handed them a master key and told them to do whatever was necessary to make repairs.
The woman, a boxy redhead with a crooked grin and a mole in the center of her chin, said they’d get right on it, should finish the sixty-four rooms within an hour or so since they’d called in an extra technician.
Charbeau drove up within minutes in a van identical to theirs, and the three of them split up and went to work, moving room to room in the enclosed hallways, pretending to reset the landline of each phone inside. Within the hour Charbeau reached the third floor and knocked on Bridge’s door. Nobody answered, so he slid the master key into the lock, opened the door, and stepped inside.
“Nobody home,” he whispered to himself. “Easy as a drunken coed on spring break.”
It took less than three minutes to set the C-4, a malleable plastic explosive, hidden with gloved fingers in the cavity of the telephone receiver with a minuscule detonation device rigged to explode twenty seconds after someone picked up the ringing telephone. An old favorite in Charbeau’s line of work but still extremely effective—enough C-4 to take out Bridge’s room plus a couple of extras, collateral damage that was regrettable but necessary.
Pleased, Charbeau set the phone back in its cradle and conducted a quick search of the room but found nothing worthwhile, so he slid out the door and down the steps to the bottom floor. A couple of minutes later, he and his coworkers hopped into their trucks and drove off the premises. One job down, Charbeau grinned, an even bigger one left to complete.
Alone with his thoughts, Charbeau examined Domino from all angles, looking for risks, probabilities, potential pitfalls. If all went well, he and his team would accomplish something unparalleled—a deed disruptive enough to alter the future in unimaginable ways.
He pulled out his cell and punched in a number. His on-site manager of Domino picked up the encrypted line.
“What’s your status?” Charbeau asked.
“Since the pre-work still looks good, we’re way ahead of schedule. Less than a quarter of a mile to reach the target, and at the rate we’re progressing, we should finish with time to spare.”
“Obstacles?”
“None worth mentioning so far. Security will tighten tonight, more as we get closer to zero hour. But they’ll focus on the usual angles—the outer perimeter, the air space, rooftops, personal belongings carried in. We’re way ahead of them, something never attempted. They’ll never get a sniff.”
“Don’t you just love surprises?”
The man chuckled and Nolan shut off his phone as he pulled to the curb and shut down his vehicle. If his plans succeeded, the Council owed him the Succession. He knew it, Augustine knew it, and soon enough everyone else would know it too.
Word of Gerald Grimes’s death reached Shannon as she stood with a tube of toothpaste in her hand in a grocery store aisle about a mile from her hotel. Gerald’s mother called with the tragic news, her sobs making it tough to get much information other than the fact that Gerald was shot on Thursday at lunch and died in his sleep on Saturday after sending her out for something to eat.
“I tried to call him Thursday, yesterday too,” Shannon said, guilt cutting away at her. “He sent me a text, some information he found.”
“That’s how I . . . how I got your number, out of . . . his phone. I’m trying to reach all his friends. He sure liked you,” Mrs. Grimes sobbed.
Shannon’s guilt shifted to suspicion. “The medical examiner needs to do an autopsy,” she said. “Make sure, okay?”
Mrs. Grimes cried even harder and Shannon’s guilt boiled back up. She’d caused Gerald’s death, her request for help. She thought of Rick but pushed away her worries. Had to put him on the back burner for now, she decided.
“I’m coming to Montana,” Shannon told Mrs. Grimes. “Gerald meant a lot to me.”
“That’s so nice. I know Gerald would have appreciated that.”
“Give me your address.”
Mrs. Grimes sobbed it out and Shannon assured her of her prayers, then said goodbye and hung up.
Putting aside the toothpaste, she exited the store and stepped into a light but steady rain, her phone already to her ear making flight reservations for a take-off barely three hours away. She reached her hotel in less than five minutes and thought of Rick again as she threw a rain jacket over her shoulders and ran through the rain to her room. She almost called him but resisted the temptation. She’d told him the truth; now he had to figure out what to do with it.
After reaching her room, she wiped water off her face, gathered her belongings, threw her bag over her shoulder, and headed for the door. Just before she turned the knob, her room phone rang. She pivoted back, unsure whether to answer. So far as she could remember, no one knew her location, much less the number to the room. The phone rang again and Shannon took a step toward it. Maybe the hotel manager needed her for something. She took another step and lifted the phone from its cradle.
Sitting
in his SUV down the street from Bridge’s hotel, Charbeau held his cell to his ear and listened as her phone rang for the second time. Raindrops pattered onto the SUV’s roof and a note of sadness chilled him as he pictured Bridge, an attractive woman with an admirable set of skills, about to breathe her last. He didn’t like the notion of hurting her, but what choice did he have? She had stuck her neck into the line of fire so she had to pay the price. Even his momma, rest her soul, would have recognized that.
Bridge said hello.
“Ms. Shannon Bridge?”
“This is she.”
“Too bad about your friend Gerald Grimes.”
“Who is this?”
“You love Jesus, don’t you, Ms. Bridge?”
“Of course I do.”
“Then get ready to meet him.”
Shannon gripped the phone so hard her knuckles turned white. “You drove the motorcycle.”
“You’re one sharp lady.”
Shannon’s cell phone buzzed, breaking her concentration. She grabbed it from her purse and checked the number. Rick!
“Tell me your name!” she demanded of the caller on the room phone.
The man said nothing and Shannon’s cell buzzed again. “I’ll find you,” she growled. “Count on that.”
She slammed the phone into its cradle and rushed toward the door as she hit her cell phone answer button. The explosion detonated as she opened the door, the blast pushing out from the phone toward the windows on one side and the hallway to the stairs on the other. Shannon’s body ricocheted outward, banged against the wall on the other side of the hall, and crumpled to the floor as shattered tile, wood, carpet and cloth from her room sprayed down over her. She felt heat and tried to rise off the floor as the fire burned around her but couldn’t lift the rubble off her chest and legs. She felt her phone still in her fingers, so she lifted it to her face.
“Rick.”
“Shannon? You okay?”
“The Marriott, Fountain Street . . .” Her voice faded, her eyes closed, and her cell phone fell from her hand as she tried to breathe under the smoking rubble that covered her from head to toe.
31
Rick heard sirens as he swerved around the last corner leading to Atlanta Memorial Hospital, and he jammed his foot into the accelerator of the BMW he drove. An ambulance rushed toward the emergency room from the opposite direction and a police car slammed to a stop just as he did in the parking lot outside the emergency entrance. An SUV filled with four bodyguards trailed him, an arrangement insisted upon by Pops before he left for New York. Multiple cars and SUVs followed the bodyguards, the media on the chase as Rick left his house.
Out of his car, Rick bounded toward the ambulance, but an EMT pushed him away, so he turned and followed the police inside, three bodyguards behind him to stop the media while one parked the car. Scores of medical personnel rushed at the body on the gurney hauled out of the ambulance, none of them noticing Rick as he watched. A sheet covered the body and Rick saw blood on the face of the person lying there. A police officer joined his bodyguards blocking the media, and the throng halted before they reached the hospital door but continued to shout their questions and snap their photos.
“Shannon!” Rick called, rushing toward her.
A nurse faced him, a hand up, while other personnel rolled Shannon up a ramp and through thick double doors into the hospital. “Who are you?” asked the nurse, a middle-aged black woman.
Rick fumbled for a second, then regained his composure. “I called her just before the explosion, we were talking on the phone.”
“You a boyfriend?”
Rick nodded without thinking, anything to stay close to Shannon.
“Follow me,” the nurse said.
They moved through the double doors and the nurse stopped. “Waiting room is over there,” she pointed to a door ten feet away. “Go get a seat. I’ll bring you up to date soon as things settle some.”
“Is she okay?”
The nurse indicated the waiting room again, then noted the bodyguards, now four in number, who had trailed them inside. Her eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute, you’re Rick Carson, right?”
Rick shrugged and the nurse shook her head. “What are you mixed up in now?” she asked.
“It’s a long story. Just give me a status on the lady on the gurney soon as you know something. Can you please do that for me?”
The nurse stepped closer. “I’m Beth Cotter, honey,” she said, holding up a nametag wrapped around her neck by a blue rope. “You feeling okay?” she indicated the wrap on his shoulder, the sling holding his arm.
“I’m good, fine.”
“Okay, then. Go on to the waiting room and sit a few minutes, I’ll come out when I can to talk to you and her father.”
“Her father?”
“Yeah, he’s already in the waiting room.”
“Okay.” Rick ordered his guards to wait outside, then headed to the waiting room, his heart thumping. Maybe he’d finally learn something about Shannon—where she’d grown up, how she’d ended up in the Order, what made her tick. Another question crossed his mind. How did Shannon’s father beat him to the hospital? Did he live in Atlanta? If not, what was he doing here?
More confused by the minute, Rick suspected that the answers to his questions would surprise him almost as much as Shannon’s fantasies about the Conspiracy had.
Short-cropped, steel gray hair covered the head of the man who greeted Rick in the waiting room. He stood as Rick entered and extended a hand that Rick quickly took and shook.
“Doug Bridge,” the man said, “Shannon’s dad.”
“Rick Carson,” he said. “Shannon’s friend. You married to Mabel?”
“Shannon tell you that?”
“No, I just assumed.”
“Shannon will let you do that—say nothing and let you assume a lot of things.”
“She is a mystery. So Mabel isn’t her mom?”
“Shannon’s mom . . . she died a few years back.”
Rick started to ask how but decided to hold it for the time being. Mr. Bridge stepped back and Rick studied him— late fifties, lean and angular, like a long-distance runner, a natural tan, sharp blue eyes—similar in a lot of ways to Shannon.
“How’d you get here so fast?” Mr. Bridge asked, his eyes searching Rick’s.
“I was about to ask you the same thing.”
“You go first.”
“I was on the phone with her when the explosion went off. She managed to tell me the name of her hotel, last thing she said. I knew this was the closest hospital, got dressed, and rushed here.”
“How bad you hurt?” He pointed to Rick’s shoulder.
“I’m fine. Some pain, but they’ve got good drugs for that, right? No permanent damage.”
Mr. Bridge pointed Rick to a chair and took the one opposite his. He leaned over, his forearms on his knees. “I flew into Atlanta yesterday, business to attend with Shannon.”
“Mind if I ask what kind of business?”
Mr. Bridge rubbed a hand across his mouth, then settled it on his knee again. “How much did Shannon tell you about what she does? Why she followed you to Atlanta?”
Rick glanced over his shoulder, then around the room, but saw no one nearby except two of his guards placed near the door. “I hesitate to say,” he began softly. “Not sure . . . you know . . . do you have some identification? I’m a touch paranoid these days, you understand.”
“Sure, no problem.” Bridge pulled out his wallet, flipped out a driver’s license, and handed it to Rick who studied it a few seconds, then handed it back, his fears satisfied.
“Shannon told me about something, a conspiracy she called it,” Rick started. “She said she worked for the Order, a religious group pledged to stop the Conspiracy. I didn’t know whether to believe her or not, but now, this explosion, somebody obviously wants her dead. It makes her story, at least part of it, a lot more believable.”
Mr. Bridge stayed quiet for a coup
le of minutes after Rick stopped talking but then finally spoke—his tone conspiratorial. “She told me to find you if anything happened to her. Said you were the key to something about to happen, something game-changing.”
“She didn’t tell you what that was?”
“No, I don’t think she, the Order, knows any details yet. I hoped you’d have some answers for me.”
Rick stood and walked to the window overlooking the parking lot, gazed out for a minute, then faced Mr. Bridge again. “Tell me about Shannon,” he said. “And I mean everything, how she ended up here, why anybody would want her dead.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Uncomplicate it for me.”
Mr. Bridge stared at the floor, then back up at Rick. “She grew up in Colorado with me and her mom. Loved sports, basketball mostly. Sang in the school choir. A real leader, president of her student body, not a big class, a couple of hundred, but still.”
“Fast forward,” Rick said, taking his seat again. “How’d she end up with the Order? Not a normal career path.”
Mr. Bridge threw a leg over a knee. “Well, here’s the tough part. Her mother died the summer before her senior year of college.”
“What happened?”
Mr. Bridge waved off the question. “We’ll come back to that,” he said. “But suffice it to say that it tore Shannon up—never saw a child change so much so fast. She started hanging out with a rough group of people. She . . . well, she started doing some drugs, nothing hard but still scary; it caused her to lose focus, motivation. Next thing I knew, she’d practically dropped out of college, took a job as a personal trainer in a gym, not my idea of a future but I had lost my influence with her. You’ll find that someday when you have kids, they go off on their own, make their own decisions. I had my own demons to fight off, my wife dead and all. I didn’t stay as connected to Shannon as I needed, didn’t know how to deal with the emotions I was feeling. So, anyway, every time I tried to intervene with Shannon it backfired. She withdrew, cut herself off from me, went most of the year when I didn’t hear from her at all.” He paused as his eyes glistened.