Storming Heaven

by Kyle Mills

  She shook her head. “As efficient as the Kneissians are at getting you into the church, they’re even better at keeping you there. You have to understand that your entire life is wrapped up with them. I worked as a freelance computer consultant at the time. After a few years, probably eighty percent of my customers were members of the church. I met my boyfriend at a church function. You become too intertwined. And then, of course, there are the psychological factors …”

  “Psychological factors?”

  She looked at him with a strange intensity that was really starting to make him feel uncomfortable. “Are you aware that the Kneissian Bible you buy publicly is only a portion of Albert’s writings? That more books exist?”

  Beamon took off his jacket and pulled a pad and pen from the pocket. “If by more books, you mean other sections to the Bible, no, I’d never heard that. What’s in them?”

  “I don’t know. You see, it’s all a matter of levels. When you enter the church you go in as a Novice or Level One. You’re encouraged to take classes and go to counseling sessions in order to improve your standing—your level. Of course, they’re quite expensive and you rarely pass the first time.”

  “How many levels are there?” Beamon asked.

  “Eleven last time I counted. I was a Three when I left the church.”

  “So you’re learning what’s in these secret books in order to move up?”

  “Not exactly. Actually, getting to Level Two has nothing to do with God or religion. The class you have to pass is on—how would you describe it? Manners? General conduct?”

  Beamon raised his eyebrows. “Come again?”

  “You’ve got to understand the philosophy of the church, Mark. They’re very interested in growth, but they’re also interested in quality membership. I guess you could call their first class ‘communications.’ You learn how to dress, firm handshakes, looking people in the eye when you talk, what fork to eat with at a nice restaurant. That kind of thing. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it works. You’ve probably noticed that Kneissians project a pretty uniform image.”

  Beamon nodded and she continued.

  “So getting to Level Two isn’t very hard. Moving up through the later levels involves more theological training and very strenuous counseling sessions. Those are a lot like the Catholic confession. But, of course, there are other factors.”

  “Other factors?”

  “I started getting a bit disillusioned when I was working on my Four. Level Four, that is. I flunked twice. That’s twelve thousand dollars’ worth of classes for nothing. I should tell you that at the time, I was making about forty-five thousand dollars a year and living in a one-bedroom apartment with two other women because all my money was going to the church. Despite that, though, it wasn’t the money or the time that bothered me, it was the people who were passing. Many of them had done much worse than me in the class.”

  “Politics,” Beamon said knowingly. “It always comes down to politics.”

  “You’re exactly right. I found out later that some of these people were doctors and lawyers and politicians. I was just a lowly programming consultant. In the scheme of things, not that useful to the church.”

  “And for you, moving through the levels was important?”

  “Oh, yes. It is to everyone. I really can’t stress how important. Your level and how long you’ve been a church member are public knowledge, so it’s really embarrassing if you’re not doing well. The flip side of that is, if you are doing well, there are all kinds of bragging rights. There’s a pervasive obsession with levels that the church really encourages.”

  “What about these other books to the Bible?”

  “You don’t start getting to look at those until you’re a Seven. The rumor is that they’re sections from the Bible that will be given to humanity when the Messenger returns.”

  “Two thousand years from now?”

  She nodded. “Obviously, you must be very evolved to understand them. People who are Sevens and higher are treated like royalty. Everyone wants to learn what’s in those books.”

  “The meaning of life,” Beamon said.

  “Perhaps. I’ve met very few people who have reached above Six. The ‘counseling’ sessions become increasingly strenuous and expensive. I’ve even heard rumors of the use of psychoactive drugs in high-level sessions.”

  “I find it hard to believe that anyone would submit to that.”

  “I would have.”

  Beamon leaned back in his chair and chewed the end of his pen for a moment. “I went to one of the recruiting stations a few days ago. The woman they set me up with must have gone through your ‘communications’ training. She was very good. Not very taken with me, though, I’m afraid.”

  Ernie smiled and reached into the small fridge she had parked her chair next to. “Diet Coke?”

  Beamon held a hand out and caught the ice- cold can.

  “I’m sure you’re right on both counts,” she said, popping the top on her can and taking a quick sip. “You can’t work a potential recruit unless you’re at least a Two. And I can almost guarantee that she wasn’t, as you say, very taken with you.”

  Beamon held his hands out innocently. “How can you say that? People love me.”

  The thick folds in Ernie’s face rearranged themselves into a nervous smile. “I’m sure they do, but, again, it’s all about levels. Let me guess: you didn’t want to sign the register—what they call the guest book.”

  “Uh, I think I did pass on that.”

  “You just got a One there. Ask a few tough questions? Tell her you’d heard some negative things about the church?”

  “Yeah, probably. A few.”

  “Well, the first negative question you asked got you a Two. The second, a Three. When you hit Four she’d have asked if you were a reporter.”

  “She did!” Beamon said, impressed. “She did ask me that.”

  “They hate reporters. Afraid the press might shine too bright a light into their organization.”

  “You shined a pretty bright light into it, Ernie. What did you find?”

  “Paranoia. When I started getting upset about the politics in the levels, I started talking with people—both active members and people who had quit for one reason or another. I started to get a picture of an organization trying to control everything. Its members, its image, and more and more, the secular world.” She sighed deeply. “It didn’t take long for me to find out that some of the ex-Kneissians I was talking to were plants. Put there to ferret out anyone who wasn’t toeing the party line. I had to go before a council of elders from my parish and they stripped me of my levels. Later I was thrown out.”

  “Then what?”

  “I continued to dig. I must have gone through ten thousand pages of documents and talked to two hundred people. I figured they’d already excommunicated me, what more could they do?” She laughed bitterly.

  “I take it there was more.”

  “At first it was just threatening phone calls. I kept changing my number, but it never did any good. Then the lawsuits started. I’ve been sued for just about everything you can imagine. I was once sued for sexual harassment by a man I had never met.”

  “But you won the suits.”

  “Oh, sure, I won. Every one of them. But I had to declare bankruptcy from all the legal bills. They also made available, to anyone who wanted them, some of the more personal aspects of my counseling sessions—confessionals—which are taped as a matter of routine.”

  “This is all before the book came out, though, right?”

  She nodded. “When the book came out, things went crazy. A man came to my door and threatened me with a knife; I was being constantly followed. Later, I found out that a woman who had befriended me while I was at a really low point was a member of the church and had been directed to subtly drive me to suicide. It almost worked.”

  She took another sip of her Coke. “I’ve moved twelve times since I wrote that book. I’ve been here eight months.
They’ll find me soon. Then it will all start again—the cars driving by the house too slow, the calls …” She suddenly looked deflated.

  “What happened with the book?”

  “It never went anywhere. The initial print run was twenty-five hundred and they were instantly bought up and destroyed by church members. Then the publisher was purchased by a churchowned corporation set up specifically for that purpose. So then they had the rights to the book and they used those rights to keep it out of the stores.”

  “Do you think that when Albert Kneiss is gone the church will come back in line?”

  Her head jerked as though he had struck her. “Why would you say something like that?”

  “Well, Albert—”

  “Albert doesn’t know about any of this! I wrote the book for him. He knows nothing about what’s happening, what they’re doing.”

  “But he must know,” Beamon said. “It’s his church.”

  “You’re wrong,” Ernie spat out. “She keeps it from him, relies on his goodness to keep him from suspecting what she’s done.”

  “She?”

  “Sara. Sara Renslier. She’s the one who’s twisted the church into what it is now.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “She’s evil.”

  Beamon frowned. “Could you be more specific?”

  “She took over the leadership of the Seven Elders probably twenty-five years ago …”

  “When the church’s membership started to take off?”

  Ernie reluctantly conceded the point with a short nod. “She’s systematically isolated Albert and now hides behind him and uses his name to control everything. Her and a man named Sines.”

  “Sines? You got a first name?”

  She shook her head. “Just Sines. I know he came to the church from the military. He’s the head of security.” She ran a finger from her lip to her right eye. “He has a scar here. Hides part of it with a mustache. Rumor has it that he’s put together a group of ex-policemen and military people fanatically devoted to Albert.”

  “Meaning they answer to Sara,” Beamon said.

  She nodded. “Sara uses the fear of this group to keep the high-level members in line.”

  “Have you ever met one of them?”

  “No. There are probably fewer than ten in total.” She pointed to her wrist. “I was told by someone who once met one of them that they have an iron bracelet welded to their right arm. A sign of their devotion to Albert—who probably doesn’t even know they exist.”

  Beamon started gnawing on his pen again, replaying in his mind his struggle with David Passal. He remembered the man’s fear and how he’d mistaken them for someone else. During the struggle he had grabbed Beamon’s right wrist, and suddenly that fear had disappeared. Passal had immediately stopped fighting and demanded to know who he was.

  “Mark? Are you all right?”

  Beamon looked up. “Sorry, I was just thinking. What was it you were saying?”

  “I was saying that the church has become more sophisticated and efficient now. They pay people not to publish books about them. They don’t have to buy publishers anymore. Through their members they control companies that you would never expect. They influence politicians with contributions. Companies owned by church members control a huge number of government contracts that the Elders find interesting—they just make the lowest bid or put a minority in as the head of the company.”

  Beamon glanced at his watch. He had about a hundred more questions that he’d like to ask, but he was running late. Again. “I’d love to read your book, Ernie. Would you have a copy I could borrow?”

  He followed her unbidden as she wheeled her chair down the hall to a narrow set of stairs. She unwedged herself from the chair and began struggling down the steps to the basement, scraping both walls as she descended.

  Beamon followed, shaking his head in disbelief. She wasn’t crippled at all, just a whale. Couldn’t entirely support her body weight out of the water.

  The basement was stacked with still more documents, books, and old computer equipment. Except for the poor lighting, it didn’t look much different from her office. Beamon flipped through a stack of old computer paper almost three feet high. “This stuff’s all on the church?”

  “Most of it,” Ernie said, struggling to reach a high shelf and pull down a dusty book with a dark green jacket.

  “I may want to borrow some of it, if you don’t mind.”

  She waddled over and handed him the book. “It’s just primary source material. I’ve summarized pretty much all of it in the book.”

  He pointed to the teetering stack of paper at his feet. “What’s this?”

  “It’s a list of the church’s membership from 1981.”

  Beamon kicked at it, trying to make a guess at its weight. “Can I borrow it?”

  She walked over to an old computer resting on a card table and turned it on. Beamon winced when she sat down in the metal folding chair in front of it, but the chair managed to hold her with only a slight creak.

  “I don’t think you really want a hard copy, Mark. There are almost a million names on that printout. Let me put it on disk for you.”

  She punched a few keys as Beamon approached, and he saw the list of names and other personal information come up in alphabetical order.

  “Can you search for specific names?” Beamon asked as she slid a new diskette into the computer.

  “Of course.”

  “Could you do a couple for me? Try Jacob Layman.”

  She typed in the name of his boss and searched the screen. “No match.”

  “Would members’ children be in there?”

  “They should be.”

  “Try Chet Michaels.”

  She typed in the name. “I’ve got a hit on that one.”

  Beamon frowned and looked over her shoulder.

  “Born 1943, joined in 1980,” she said, running a plump finger along the screen. Beamon let out a sigh of relief. That would put Michaels in his mid- fifties.

  It took almost a half-hour to save all of the names to the stack of disks now stuffed in the various pockets of Beamon’s coat.

  “Thanks, Ernie. I’m sorry to take these and run, but I’m real late.”

  “So what is your open mind telling you now, Mark?”

  He stopped with one foot on the staircase. “Excuse me?”

  “You said you had an open mind where God was concerned. What is it telling you?”

  “Nothing. I guess I’m still a devoted skeptic.”

  Her smile held a trace of irony. Beamon was amazed at how subtly expressive her face was, considering the deep folds of fat surrounding it. “What?” he said.

  Ernie struggled out of the chair and across the basement, stopping next to him and supporting herself on the banister. “What are you going to do with what you’ve learned here today, Mark? Do you know?”

  Beamon shrugged. “Same thing I always do, I suppose. Try to use it to find the truth.”

  “The truth about the church?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Have you ever thought you were being directed by God? That your goals are really His goals? Is it a coincidence that you are here talking to me three weeks before Albert is to take his place with the Lord and Sara is to become the unchallenged leader of the church?”

  Beamon suddenly understood the strange looks and the stuff about the dreams. He looked down at her and shook his head slowly. “I’ll tell you, Ernie, if I’m the Chosen One, we’ve got problems. God’s really scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

  31

  “WHAT’RE YOU LOOKING FOR?” CHET Michaels said.

  Beamon pushed the box onto his new carpet in frustration and began digging through the green folders that had been stacked beneath it.

  “I’m trying to find the stuff we got out of Eric and Patricia Davis’s safe.” He pointed down at the haphazardly stacked boxes that were beginning to take over his office. “It’s just not here. I don’t even
know what half this shit is.”

  Michaels leaned over one of the boxes that Beamon had already searched and carefully emptied its contents. “Voilà,” he said, pulling three unmarked manila envelopes from the bottom.

  “You know, those kinds of envelopes do take ink. You could label them,” Beamon said, stalking back to his chair.

  Michaels looked a little hurt when he sat down and began emptying the contents of the envelopes onto Beamon’s desk. “You never try to find stuff yourself, Mark. I figured if you wanted anything, you’d ask me or D.”

  Beamon scowled. Michaels was right, of course, but he was in no mood to have his tendency toward absentmindedness pointed out to him.

  “How’d your meeting with Willard go?” Michaels said, wisely changing the subject.

  “Fine.”

  “Productive?”

  “Yeah, it was,” Beamon said, finding it impossible to stay mad. “We’ve got confirmation that Sara Renslier runs the church. As far as Ernie’s concerned, Kneiss isn’t really aware of what’s going on anymore. That could be a biased view, though.”

  “It’d make sense,” Michaels said, looking at the calendar on his watch. “The guy’s pretty old and he’s said in no uncertain terms that he’s planning to die in about three weeks. I would think he’d have pretty much turned over the church to someone by now.”

  “I suppose so,” Beamon said.

  “What else did he have to say?”

  “Who?”

  “Willard.”

  “It’s she, actually. And it’s Waverly. Willard was a pen name. She painted a pretty vivid picture. Not a very attractive one, though.”

  “How so?”

  “In her mind the church is paranoid and bent on control. Of their members, people they perceive to be their enemies, whoever.”

  “Maybe she’s the one who’s paranoid. She’s the only person who’s ever written an exposé-type book about the church. Maybe she had an ax to grind. How’d she come off? Did she seem grounded?”

  Beamon shrugged. “I don’t know if I’d use the word ‘grounded.’ ‘Wacko’ might be more descriptive. But I’ll tell you, every time I thought what she was saying was getting a little farfetched, she’d come up with something I could corroborate with what we’ve already dug up. I also skimmed the copy of her book she gave me and it seems well researched and, well, pretty credible. My gut feeling is that she gave it to me straight.”