Deadly Cult

by Joel Gomez-Dossi

The loudspeakers crackled and Mordecai called everyone into chapel. Zacchaeus looked out the window. It wasn’t even dawn yet, hours before the service was scheduled to begin. Yet Mordecai decided their day was to begin early on Good Friday, when the Faithfuls should be meditating about the Lord’s ultimate sacrifice.

  Zacchaeus got dressed to join the others in worship.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Mordecai stood next to the altar, looking officious. He liked that pose. It got attention, although he feared it made him look a little pompous, but his followers didn’t seem to care.

  He cleared his throat and began. “Faggots tell us that ‘it gets better.’ But I’m here to tell you that they’re lying. Life may get easier for those faggots as the world kowtows to their propaganda. Their so-called fight for equality. And while life is getting easier for the sinners, it’s becoming harder for the righteous, people like you and me.”

  He leaned in with a conspiratorial stance. “I have it on good authority that the two queers in our cellar even got married.”

  “No!” someone from the congregation cried.

  “Oh, yes! The state of New York, in the ultimate concession to evil, allowed them the rites of holy matrimony. The state said their relationship was legitimate. But where does that put the relationships God sanctioned? The relationship you have with your wife or husband? With your children and grandchildren?”

  Grandpa Swanson rose from his pew. “But I loved my wife, Edna. May she rest in peace.”

  “I know you loved Edna.” Mordecai bowed his head for a moment, then jerked it back up. “But the gays are making fun of that relationship. Of your love, Grandpa. They’re making fun of all of our loves. As if the years we’ve spent with our wives and husbands don’t matter.”

  “But my love for Edna did matter.”

  “Of course it did. That’s why we’re going to turn the tables on sin, at least for those two homosexuals in the cellar. They’re going to pay for their blaspheming. For them, it’s going to get worse. I promise you, a lot worse.”

  The Faithfuls murmured thanks in their pews and Mordecai felt triumphant. He played the right chords in his sermon. Nothing got people riled up more than threatening their place in society.

  Mordecai made sure to look at each individual with sympathetic eyes. It would draw them into his plans. “We tried to pray those two gays away, but it didn’t work. Then we politely asked them to leave. The two sodomites still refused to go. It is now time to act. To raise the Brethren’s staff and to strike down the abominations who inflict our lives with sin. Who erode our morals and threaten our way of life.”

  The congregation rose, their eyes filled with fear and contempt. “Faggots prey on our children,” a mother cried.

  “They spread AIDS,” screamed another.

  “They’re sick and vile!”

  Mordecai raised his hands. “You’re right, dear Faithfuls. We can’t let the world be subverted by immoral homosexuals any longer.”

  “I want to crack open faggot skulls,” Grandpa screamed.

  “And that’s what we’re going to do. In time.”

  “I want to kill the two faggots now.”

  “Grandpa, if we kill them now, others will only take their place. We must stop this scourge at its source and let the sinful world know that the Brethren stands for righteousness.”

  The congregation stood up and cheered. Mordecai’s face almost revealed a grin.

  “We have a new, important mission. Are you ready to take up that challenge?”

  The congregation’s cheers became ecstatic.

  “Good. Saul has made a list of duties. As you leave chapel, be sure to check in with him. He’ll let you know if you are to fight sin at one of its sources or take on the equally important task of staying here and protecting the home front from evil.”

  The Faithfuls scrambled toward Saul.

  “We’re finally working toward something worthwhile!” one person yelled.

  Another answered, “Yes! We’re protecting our way of life!”

  They all raised their arms to heaven. “Mordecai is great. Mordecai is good. Mordecai will redeem me of my sins.”

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Ellen opened her eyes. The sun spread beams of light throughout Chris’s large bedroom, making it bright and airy. She was tempted to stay in bed a while longer, breathing Chris’s scent. He had already left for work. It was Friday, after all. But he’d left a note on the bedside table, and when she read it, she felt complete.

  Ellen, meeting with your father’s new security team tonight, so I’m not sure when I’ll be home. Please feel free to kick back and relax. Affectionately, Chris

  The note was clearly an invitation for her to stay in his life, at least for one more day. Her hopes for a relationship were coming true, yet a twinge of regret still ran through her. Chris didn’t sign the note with love or any other expression of intense feeling. Affectionately was how he might sign a letter to his grandmother. She knew it was silly. It was too early for a man to declare his love to another person, yet she wanted him to.

  She decided to take Chris up on his offer and went into the kitchen to make coffee. A thermal carafe filled with Colombian dark roast waited for her, and she grinned at Chris’s thoughtfulness. She poured a cup and went to the window to watch the workmen’s progress with the Pavilion.

  Only three more days until Easter morning, and Jamie’s adventure was over before it started. She felt sorry for him. He wanted to be a hero again. To have a hero, there has to be a villain and victims. She decided not to think about Jamie’s misfortunes and instead got out Chris’s laptop to surf the web. She couldn’t get online, though. She kept getting an error message asking her to provide a valid security authorization. She didn’t have that thingamajig, the dongle. She thought of searching for an unsecured Wi-Fi hotspot, but it wasn’t worth the hassle. She decided to take a shower instead.

  Once she was clean, Ellen went into the bedroom to change. But the only clothes she had were the ones she’d worn last night, and the thought of greeting Chris in dirty clothes disgusted her. She opted to search his closet.

  On the closet floor were a suitcase and several cardboard boxes filled with books. Even though it was snooping, she couldn’t resist sneaking a peak at Chris’s makeshift library. There were only a couple of classics, The Great Gatsby and Elmer Gantry. The rest were nonfiction. There were self-help books about clawing your way to the top of business world, investment strategies, and even some travel books for the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, and Belize. One book stood out as different, however—a textbook titled Theologies of America’s Religious Fringe.

  She picked up the heavy volume and papers fell from the inside cover. The first piece of paper was a weird listing of numbers—ten digits each, with spaces throughout each number. She had no idea what the numbers meant. But there were other interesting documents, deposit receipts from banks around the world. Most were for small amounts—a couple hundred bucks here, five hundred there. But there were some for higher amounts. She added up the receipts and they totaled almost $400,000.

  She looked at the receipts again. They didn’t have the account owner’s name on them, only an account number. But why would he have them if they weren’t his? And who would be giving him so much money? Is he selling something? What could he sell, and who would be the buyers?

  She hoped the payments weren’t for something illegal. With her smartphone she took pictures of each receipt before carefully returning them to the closet. Then she dialed her father’s number. Marianne answered. “Can you have my father call me? I need to know about the employment research he did for Chris.”

  “Christian Donahue?” Marianne asked. She sounded surprised.

  “Yeah. And I need to know the answer as quickly as possible.”

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Zacchaeus watched Saul divide the congregants into two groups. The strong and good-looking would travel with Mordecai to fight evil’s onslaugh
t. The sickly and the weak were to stay at the home front to defend the Brethren.

  He wasn’t sure if he should get a job assignment from Saul or not. Before last night, he was with the Disciples. Now he wasn’t so sure he belonged with them. Sharar approached and put an arm around his shoulder in a manly embrace. “Are you excited, my little soldier?”

  Zacchaeus didn’t know how to respond. Did Sharar change his feelings? Was he no longer a pissant faggot? Or was he Sharar’s soldier once again? Either way, he felt good having Sharar pay attention to him.

  “Yes, Disciple. I’m very excited.”

  “Good, because we need to get started.” Sharar left the chapel, and Zacchaeus quickly followed.

  Chapter Forty

  Ellen sat in Chris’s living room, biting her nails down to the quick. Her father hadn’t called back and she considered contacting his private investigator to track down the information, but he wouldn’t do anything without her father’s permission. No, she thought. I have to wait and talk with Daddy. If Chris stole money or corporate information from Rhodes Petroleum, he’d want to be the first to know about it.

  Her cell phone rang just as her cuticles started bleeding. Her father was on the other end. “What’s so damned important?” he blurted out.

  “I have questions about Christian.”

  There was a heavy sigh. “Will this take long? I have to get back to my meeting.”

  “I don’t know, Daddy, but this is important. When you did your employment investigation on Chris, what did you find out?”

  “We don’t investigate our recruits. We vet them, there’s a difference.” He sounded indignant.

  “Stop bullshitting and tell me what you found out.”

  He gave a guttural cough. “He came up clean as a whistle.”

  “Thank you.” The answer gave her a calming sense of relief. But there was a tense pause at her father’s end. “Daddy, is there anything more you should tell me?”

  “In fact, his record came up unusually clean. Not even a parking ticket.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, unusually stellar background checks could indicate several possibilities. But the most probable explanation is that the person’s real background isn’t as faultless as they’d like people to believe.”

  “And you still hired him?”

  He laughed. “Oftentimes, a shady background can be invaluable.”

  “And the possibility that he might be dishonest didn’t concern you?”

  “I’m neither his mother nor his minister, Ellen. As long as he gets his job done and doesn’t steal from me in the process, I don’t care.”

  His statement surprised her. “Daddy, what is Chris’s job, anyway?”

  “It’s to do whatever I tell him to do.”

  “Including illegal things?”

  “I would never tell an employee to do anything illegal. But many of my employees operate under a certain amount of autonomy. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  She did, and it disturbed her. “Daddy, I found some interesting paperwork in Chris’s apartment today.” She pressed on, telling him about the receipts and her fear Chris might be embezzling, or worse. “Daddy, wouldn’t it be prudent to check these receipts out?”

  “Probably,” he answered. “But it would be a lost cause. No offshore bank will reveal the identities of their clients. I suppose we could pay someone to dig the information up, but it wouldn’t be worth the expense.”

  “How can you be sure Chris isn’t embezzling or trading proprietary information?”

  “Chris may be doing that sort of thing,” he said. “But I’m confident I’m not the victim. He doesn’t have access to any of my financial accounts or any real proprietary information. His title is Corporate Liaison, but he’s really just a contract spy.”

  “A contract spy? What is that?”

  “You’ve heard of good cop / bad cop, haven’t you? Same principle, only regarding contract negotiations.”

  Now she was completely confused.

  “Look, during a negotiation with another company, Christian’s job is to befriend the other side and gain their confidence. The information he gathers gives us an upper hand because we’ll know the other side is thinking. But he’s only worked one contract so far. And we weren’t expecting much benefit out of that deal.”

  “What was it for?”

  “It was for underwriting events for a large religious organization. We gave them a small gift, about fifty thousand dollars. In return, they’ll mention Rhodes Petroleum positively in their sermons, and I’ll even show up at a couple of their services.”

  “Thank you, Daddy.”

  “Then have I answered all of your questions? Because I have to get going.”

  “No, I have one more…” But Ellen was too late. There was a click on the other end, so Ellen swiped her phone off, too. She’d have to investigate Chris by herself. She got out her tablet and went to the window to prepare a to-do list. She couldn’t think clearly, though. The workmen at the Pavilion kept diverting her thoughts. They were going full-tilt, setting up thousands of chairs and tripping over the television cables that were set up earlier.

  At the tent’s entrance, a larger sign replaced the first one. Welcome to the National Easter Sunrise Service, presented by the American Council of Conservative Christians with generous support from the Rhodes Petroleum Foundation.

  She laughed. Daddy’s charity was in front of me the entire time. But why didn’t Chris tell me anything about the service or Daddy’s connection with it? What could be so important about an Easter service, even with live television coverage? She wondered if an answer could be found in his laptop, but she’d need his computer dongle to access the network.

  Or maybe not.

  She ran to Chris’s closet and dug out the paper with the strange numbers. Using an unsecured Wi-Fi hotspot, she got online. The first thing she noticed was his browser was set to anonymous mode, meaning his browsing history and cookies would be deleted at the end of each session so there would be no record of the sites he visited.

  She typed in the first set of numbers, the series of ten digits, separated with spaces. She replaced the spaces with periods and, sure enough, the numbers were IP addresses for web pages. The first page was a web anonymizer, a service that allowed the computer to surf the Internet anonymously. She typed in the next series of numbers. It opened a file hosting service on the Internet. She looked down the paper’s row of numbers and typed the next one in. Sure enough, it was a password. Once inside the service, she saw a list of files that Chris had saved. They were a series of video clips from television news stations: Seattle, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. She opened the first clip.

  The anchor read from the teleprompter, “This morning, a gunman burst into the worship services of the Independent Fundamentalist Church of Minneapolis and started a shooting rampage.” The broadcast cut to footage taken by a parishioner with his cell phone. The anchor continued, “The gunman’s only victim was Reverend William Ashley, the church’s associate pastor. No other casualties have been reported. But at this time, the police have no leads about the gunman or a possible motive.”

  The other clips were similar to the first. All shootings at a conservative church, and each time the gunman killed only one minister. No one else was hurt. As the congregants ran outside in terror, the gunman disappeared without leaving any clues.

  She looked at the paper for more addresses. She recognized the next one and her heart missed a beat. It was the address that brought up the document that had wreaked havoc with her laptop.

  The link between the Brethren and Boston is the National Easter Sunrise Service. The Brethren are planning to kill another pastor at the service!

  She typed in the last address on the paper and found a dozen scanned receipts for rooms and banquet halls in this very hotel for Easter. It confirmed her fears. I have to call the police. But what I’m about to tell them won’t make sense. Why would the B
rethren want to hurt a consortium of conservative churches? Weren’t they allies in the fight against the liberals?

  She dialed 911. She realized she probably sounded like a ranting lunatic to them, and they were being polite. They took down her telephone statement and asked her to come by the station to be interviewed. She swiped the phone off, wondering if going down there would do any good. Deciding it was worth a chance, she turned around to get dressed. Chris was behind her.

  He drew back his arm and delivered a wicked right hook.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Sharar stood before the Disciples and meticulously outlined the strategies for Ground Zero. He finished with “It’s late. We have very little time left, and a six-hour ride ahead of us. Since there’s much to do when we arrive, we can’t hesitate.”

  The Disciples took the hint, and so did Zacchaeus. He was part of the Disciples again, and he dove into his duties. His first chore was to prepare food for the trip. Easy-to-eat meals, high in protein and carbohydrates, for lasting energy. He also had to make sure the costumes were cleaned, pressed, and neatly packed.

  When Zacchaeus finished, Sharar instructed him to do the real work. The important work. He was to pack the artillery and ammunition into five SUVs for their trip. The Disciples would be split up between four of the vehicles. The fifth was exclusively for the use of Sharar and his manservant—him, though he was almost a Disciple. One of the chosen.

  Sharar gave him a knowing nod, then left to oversee the other Disciples.

  Zacchaeus watched Sharar from afar. He couldn’t help it. He loved the way Sharar looked—manly and strong, yet kind and compassionate. Sharar walked with confidence past the Disciples and divvied out words of encouragement and warning. “Step lively,” he said. “Faster, Raamiah. Don’t let that belly fat get in the way of destiny!”

  Sharar looked over and saw Zacchaeus staring. In a loud voice he said, “You’re doing good, my little soldier. I’m proud of you.”