‘You’re the stubborn one, aren’t you?’ said Dennis Evelyn Branch. ‘Stubborn like all of your faith. You wait until my great crusade. You wait until the cloak of death sweeps over you all! Then we’ll see how stubborn you are.’
His pink eyes wide with evangelical glee, he shook the jar a second time, much harder, so that dozens of cockroaches dropped into the funnel. They thrashed and struggled and clung together, but Dennis Evelyn Branch flicked the side of the funnel with his finger to dislodge them. They dropped into Conor’s throat in a wriggling mass. He didn’t want to swallow. His neck muscles ached from the effort of not swallowing – but then Pork Knuckle suddenly released his grip, and his first reaction was to take the whole throatful down into his stomach.
His eyes bulged and he arched his back. Dennis Evelyn Branch stepped away, circling the jar. ‘You still refuse?’ he crowed, at the top of his voice. ‘Look at him here, everybody! Did you ever see such stubbornness? Are you still going to refuse me, Mr O’Neil? Or are you going to help me to fulfil the Lord’s great plan?’
Conor shook his head wildly from side to side.
‘What does that mean?’ insisted Dennis Evelyn Branch. ‘Is that a no, you’re not going to refuse me? Or is that a no, you’re not going to help me?’
Conor’s head was bursting and he couldn’t even think. He was whining for breath and his stomach muscles were churning so fiercely that he felt as if a truck were rolling over him, backward and forward. He shook his head again, and the tall, ascetic man took the funnel out of his mouth.
‘You give in?’ asked Dennis Evelyn Branch. ‘Is that what you’re telling me? You’re going to help us out?’
Conor tried to speak but then he spewed a fountain of coffee and bile and cockroaches all over himself. Most of the cockroaches were still alive and they scuttled across his knees and dropped onto the wooden floor. He coughed and coughed, and spat, and coughed again, and at last he managed to dislodge the last cockroach out of his windpipe. He sat with his head lowered, sweating, shivering, and still trying to spit out the taste of cockroach.
Dennis Evelyn Branch replaced his blue sunglasses with the same slow-motion flourish with which he had taken them off.
‘You want seconds, Mr O’Neil? There’s a few left here in the jar. It seems a shame to let them go to waste.’
Conor shook his head. He wasn’t going to be able to stand any more of this. He had to think of another way to deal with Dennis Evelyn Branch. Like so many sociopaths, he thrived on outright defiance: it excited him, it empowered him, and God alone knew what he was going to make Conor swallow next.
‘Well, well. Praise the Lord. You don’t know how glad I am that you’ve seen reason.’ Dennis Evelyn Branch shook the rest of the cockroaches onto the floor and stepped on them, a little crunching tap-dance. ‘As I said before, it isn’t much I’m asking you to do. Just meet a few people, do a little business, and keep yourself alive and out of the clutches of the law until we’re all done here in New York, and the money’s all been transferred.’
Conor nodded.
‘You give me your solemnest word on that, so help you God?’
Conor nodded again.
‘Well, you don’t really have to give me your word because I’ve arranged for a little security.’
‘I’ll give you my word, OK? Isn’t that enough?’
‘Al-most, but not quite. You’re a fugitive from the law, after all. Your word, quite frankly, doesn’t count for too much.’
‘So what do you want? I don’t have anything else to give you.’
‘Don’t you go worrying yourself… I’ve already made the arrangements.’
‘What arrangements? What are you talking about?’
‘Your girlfriend has decided to change her address for a while. She’s staying across town with some friends of mine.’
‘Lacey? You mean Lacey?’
Dennis Evelyn Branch nodded and smiled.
‘You bastard! If you hurt her – if you so much as—’
‘I know, I know. I’ve read the script. “If I so much as touch one hair on her head, etcetera, etcetera.” But you see my problem, don’t you? I need to let you out while I finish fixing this deal up; but I can’t have you misbehaving yourself. It’s an incentive, too, to get it all concluded as soon as possible. Trust me. So long as you keep your part of the bargain, she’s safe.’
Pork Knuckle unlocked the handcuffs and cut off the tape with a craft knife. Dennis Evelyn Branch said, ‘You can go now. You’ll be hearing from a man called Victor Labrea later today. Don’t try to come back here … we’ll be gone.’
Conor shakily stood up. He didn’t know what to say so he didn’t say anything at all. He left the apartment and slowly made his way down the bare-boarded stairs to the street. As soon as he opened the front door and the heat hit him, his stomach clenched and he was sick. A man in a filthy undervest watched him with pity.
‘The end of the world is next Wednesday,’ he kept repeating. ‘The end of the world is next Wednesday. Three-fifteen.’
Conor returned to Sebastian’s apartment by a devious route, taxi-hopping and changing buses and doubling back on himself five or six times, so that a six-block journey took him almost thirty-five minutes. By the time he reached Sebastian’s door the perspiration was stinging his eyes and his shirt was glued to his back.
Sebastian quickly opened the front door, wearing turquoise silk pajamas and looking tense.
‘Conor! My dear! We thought we’d lost you for ever!’
‘I don’t know what happened – one minute we were fighting with Hypnos and Hetti in the theater, the next thing I knew I was sitting in some strange apartment with all of these strange people standing around me.’
He walked through to the living room. Sidney and Eleanor were sitting on the couch. Sidney was pale and obviously shaken and Eleanor had her arm around his shoulders.
‘Ric isn’t feeling too good … he’s gone to bed for a sleep.’
‘I think Sidney should see a doctor,’ said Eleanor.
‘No, no, please, I’ll be all right,’ said Sidney. ‘This isn’t any worse than your regular three-martini hangover.’
‘What happened to you, Conor?’ asked Eleanor. ‘You look positively gray.’
Conor sat down and Sebastian broughthim a glass of water. He told them all about the Reverend Dennis Evelyn Branch and the cockroaches and Eleanor wrinkled up her nose in disgust. ‘The upshot is, the Reverend Dennis Evelyn Branch wants me to help him extort a few more millions, and just to make sure I do what I’m told, he’s holding Lacey as security.’
Sebastian jumped up like a jack-in-the-box. ‘He’s got Lacey? The bastard! I’ll kill him! If he so much as—’
‘I know,’ said Conor. ‘If he so much as touches one hair on her head.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘What can I do? The guy’s a complete fruitcake and I have no idea where to find him.’
‘There must be some way.’
Conor licked his lips and he was sure he could still taste cockroach. He went over and sat down next to Sidney. ‘You feeling OK?’
‘Sure, sure, I’m feeling OK. A little woozy, that’s all’
‘What happened to us, Sidney? I thought that even Ramon Perez couldn’t hypnotize four people simultaneously. I mean, you trained me to be resistant, but it was like whoofff! and there I was, somewhere on East 29th Street without the faintest idea of how the hell I got there.’
‘Ramon blew some powder at us, remember that?’
‘Sure. But he didn’t touch me, or shake my hand, or say anything. Not so far as I can remember.’
‘We’re not just dealing with ordinary trance induction here. That powder was almost certainly burundanga.’
‘Burundanga? What the hell’s that?’
‘Zombie dust, that’s what they call it in Haiti. It’s a powder made from very powerful tranquilizers. Ativan, usually, which is a strong barbiturate, and scopolamine, which is s
ometimes called hyoscine. They use scopolamine in hospitals as a sedative and as a pre-medication before anesthesia. I’ve occasionally used a mild dose to make it easier for me to induce a hypnotic state in very resistant patients.’
‘But a strong dose?’
‘A strong dose can cause hallucinations, loss of memory, disorientation and great suggestibility. Robbers in Colombia have been using burundanga for the past forty years. They induce a state of suggestibility in their victims by spiking their drinks with it or blowing it into their faces, the same way that Ramon Perez did to us.’
‘Sidney and Sebastian and Ric found themselves sitting on a bench at the Rockefeller Center,’ Eleanor put in. ‘They couldn’t remember how they got there, not for the life of them.’
Conor said, ‘This is all to do with some great religious crusade. Dennis Evelyn Branch kept on and on about it. But God alone knows why he needs so much money.’
‘The first thing we have to do is find Lacey,’ said Sidney.
‘Oh, yes?’ said Sebastian. ‘And how do you propose we do that? Hypnos and Hetti have gone. I called Sammy at the Rialto. He was in a trance for over an hour, too. When he woke up, Hypnos and Hetti had skedaddled, with all their belongings, too.’
‘So we’ve lost them again,’ said Conor. ‘It’s back to square one.’
‘How about some tea?’ asked Sebastian. ‘I have these wonderful little madeleines. I’m sure they’ll make us all feel better.’
Chapter 18
A corner of Sebastian’s living room had been made into a tiny office, with an antique mahogany desk and a fax machine and a Hewlett-Packard PC connected to the Net.
Conor pulled out the chair and said, ‘Let’s do a little surfing, shall we, and see what we can find out about our friend Dennis Evelyn Branch.’ He set down a tumbler of Irish whiskey next to the computer. Sebastian instantly picked it up and slipped a silver coaster under it.
It didn’t take Conor long to find a website devoted to Branch, Dennis Evelyn/ Global Message Movement. The Global Message Movement was an evangelical church based in Lubbock, Texas, and Dennis Evelyn Branch was its ‘Leader and Divine Inspiration’. The Movement’s declared mission was to ‘bring the true message of God’s holy will into the hearts and minds of all people of all cultures throughout the world’. It organized mass prayer meetings, hymn festivals, charity telethons and ‘outdoor training activities’. Founded in 1987, it was now said to have a membership of more than two and a half million devotees and subscribers. The website showed a list of Global Message Movement churches in eleven major US cities, most of them Southern, such as Atlanta and Birmingham, but including Minneapolis/St Paul, Philadelphia and New York – 1441 West 19th Street.
There were dozens of news cuttings, as well as features from Time and Newsweek and even media releases from the Global Message Movement themselves.
Dennis Evelyn Branch was the seventh son of Wayne Branch, a Baptist minister from Wichita Falls, Texas, and his wife Noreen (née Tuttle). He was born in 1956 or 1957 – ‘no birth registration appears to exist’. Wayne Branch had been one of the most influential of early TV evangelists, and his fifteen-minute show The Message had been a fixture of Sunday morning television in the Wichita Falls area for over seventeen years. It was devoted to ‘the defeat of Satan in whatever guise he might contrive to appear, and the cleansing of all earthly sin – nothing more, nothing less’.
Dennis Evelyn Branch had appeared on his father’s show at the age of nine, and a black-and-white picture showed a thin, serious-looking young boy with shining white hair. He had been credited with ‘a gift of healing, by finding the demons that live within us, and exorcizing them’. He had shown signs of a precocious intelligence, and he graduated from high school in Wichita Falls a year early, with exceptional grades in science and Bible studies. He went on to the University of Texas Health Science Center and took a doctorate in microbiology, while at the same time studying at Dallas Bible College.
In 1979 he found a well-paid research post with Texas Bio-Systems in Houston, where he was responsible for ‘an original and highly creative’ method of dealing with potential outbreaks of smallpox – a hugely significant medical advance since the United States possesses only seven million shots of smallpox vaccine for a population of nearly two hundred and sixty million.
Dennis Evelyn Branch’s achievements might have been fêted in the specialist press, but it was plain that he wasn’t widely liked by his colleagues at Texas Bio-Systems. His company personnel report described him as ‘sociopathic, devious, deeply involved with fundamentalist religion and white supremacy’. On the other hand, he was ‘highly motivated in his work to the point of obsession, and unquestionably a considerable asset to our research department’.
A research assistant described him to Time’s reporter as ‘a ghost, with attitude’.
He seemed to have no close friends, and his albinism and eczema had evidently made it difficult for him to form relationships with women, so he spent most of his spare time organizing evangelical meetings for his father’s ministry.
Three years in Houston came to an end when Dennis Evelyn Branch was arrested after a minor explosion in the PX at Fort Sam Houston, headquarters of the US Fifth Army, in which two servicewomen were slightly injured. Military police were unable to work out how a white-haired pink-eyed evangelist had managed to penetrate base security, and Dennis Evelyn Branch refused to enlighten them. He told the court that it was a protest against America’s close diplomatic ties with Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, and that he was sorry.
Prosecuting attorney: You’re sorry? You could have killed someone.
Dennis Evelyn Branch: Of course. But I failed to kill someone. That is why I am sorry.
Dennis Evelyn Branch was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, but was released without any official explanation after only eleven months. No official explanation was really needed: his name next appeared on a roster of scientists employed at the US Army medical facility at Moab, Utah.
According to a press release from the Pentagon, the scientists were working on ways to counteract the threat posed by Biopreparat, the Soviet Union’s germ warfare program. But in 1986 there was an emergency at the medical plant which was officially described as ‘a minor compromise of sterile containment’ but which led to half of Moab being evacuated for over a week. The Washington Post was prompted to ask: ‘Are we finding ways of defending ourselves against germ warfare or are we secretly and illegally developing our own biological weapons?’
In November 1989, Dennis Evelyn Branch failed to report for work. An immediate search of his house gave no clues to where he might have gone. The FBI investigated the possibility that he might have been kidnaped by Soviet agents in retaliation for the recent defection to the west of the Soviet microbiologist Vladimir Pesechnik – whose claim to fame was that he had found a way of turning the Black Death into a practicable biological weapon.
Some reports said that Dennis Evelyn Branch had been murdered by rival white supremacists. Others suggested that he had accidentally contracted a virulent disease and had gone to the woods to die so that he wouldn’t infect his fellow workers. (‘Unlikely, given his character,’ noted the FBI agent in charge, dryly.)
During the investigation that followed the bombing of New York’s World Trade Center in 1993, Dennis Evelyn Branch was named as a possible suspect, along with several other religious extremists, although it was later established that an Islamic terror group had been responsible. His name was also connected with plots to bomb the Midtown and Holland Tunnels.
From time to time, there were unsubstantiated sightings of Dennis Evelyn Branch in Canada, South Africa and the Irish Republic. A CIA agent claimed to have seen him in Chile. But it was not until 1995 that he dramatically reappeared, with a full-page advertisement in the International Herald-Tribune and several Arab-language newspapers, declaring the formation of his Global Message Movement, ‘the object of which is to convince all unb
elievers throughout the world that there is only one true way to God’.
In August 1996 Dennis Evelyn Branch sent a rambling letter to NBC News, claiming responsibility for the bombing of the Municipal Center in Omaha, Nebraska, in which one secretary was killed and three other office workers seriously hurt. He said that he was dedicated to the cause of ‘wresting the human race from the grip of atheists and blasphemers and backsliders, to re-establish God’s holy law throughout the world, and to convert all those who follow false and deluded religions to true Christianity’.
He said, ‘Our churches must be filled again. We must learn to sing our sacred hymns again. The light of the Lord must shine everywhere, from the greatest cathedrals to the humblest dwellings in the slums. I swear that I will root out every single Muslim, Mormon, Catholic, Jew and all other devotees of false religions. If they cannot be converted by persuasion, then they will have to be converted by the fear of God.’
He was prepared to sacrifice the lives of ‘every man, woman and child on the face of the Earth’ if that was what it took for his mission to succeed. His message was: be saved or die, for not to be saved is a hundred times worse than death.
After that, the Global Message Movement was officially repudiated by the Southern Baptist Conference, who said that Dennis Evelyn Branch was ‘an agent of Satan’.
A blurry black-and-white photograph of a man reputed to be Dennis Evelyn Branch was displayed on the screen. It showed a thin, white-faced man with very short hair and sunglasses. The camera had caught him just as he was climbing into a Toyota Landcruiser. He was staring in the direction of the camera with a look of hair-raising menace, quite unlike the small boy standing next to his father in church.
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