Upstairs were two bedrooms, the one much larger where Moriarty obviously slept. It was neat and clean. There were no personal pictures on the wall, which Jason thought strange. As that thought came, he realized Moriarty had left no stamp of himself in the room. A blank slate.
He carefully went through various dresser drawers, careful to make sure he disturbed nothing. Not sure what he’d find in the house, Jason was getting frustrated. He searched the second bedroom and came away with nothing.
Mumbling to himself, he went down to find how Lizzy was doing. Not seeing her at first, he found her in the furnace room, staring at a padlocked steel door.
He made sure she heard him come up from behind and wrapped his arms around her. “You okay?” he whispered.
She cradled his arms in front at her waist, and he felt a tremor run through her.
“No.”
He waited.
Finally, she said, “It’s coming from in here. That feeling I have. The oppression.”
“You never noticed it before?”
“Uh-uh. I had no idea about this door and whatever’s behind it. I had no reason to come into the furnace room.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Run…screaming…out of here.”
“That bad, eh?”
“Yes, but I can’t. We need to know what’s in there.”
“They do teach us some useful skills in the IRS. Let’s see if we can locate the key.”
With that, he began a systematic search that soon revealed a lone key in a small, multi-drawer cabinet.
His perseverance was rewarded as the key unlocked the shackle.
They exchanged glances, and he pushed open the door. Immediately, he experienced what Lizzy must have sensed.
Chapter 60
An almost physical wave swept over him and pushed him back several steps into Lizzy.
“What is that?” he said.
Lizzy bent over, panting. “It’s hard to breathe.”
As soon as she said it, the same sensation attacked him.
He fumbled around the edges of the doorframe for a switch, his lungs having difficulty drawing in air. His fingers found the control and he flipped it up. Light flooded the room.
The space in the center was empty except for the symbol drawn in black on the floor.
A five-sided star encompassed with a circle.
“Another pentagram,” Lizzy said. “Is that the source of this…whatever it is?”
Numerous candles, three-quarters burnt, placed in sconces hung on all four walls.
“Am I imagining it, or has this room gotten colder in just the minute we’ve been in here?”
Lizzy hugged herself. Jason saw goosebumps rise on her bare arms. “Definitely colder. I can breathe better now, though.”
“Me, too. But why do I think we’re not alone?”
Before Lizzy could answer, the door slammed behind them. Jason swung around and tried forcing it open. It wouldn’t budge.
Wild-eyed, Lizzy grabbed Jason’s arm and pointed toward the pentagram. “Over there!”
Jason had never held much of a supernatural view of the world. Until recently, his thoughts of God had been distant and jumbled. A supreme being superintending the affairs of the world hadn’t been uppermost in his mind most of his life. With exposure to Nancy Evans and the God-thoughts that had filtered through his writings, he’d come to accept the idea of a higher power, even that Jesus Christ might have actually lived and performed the miracles attributed to him.
As he’d delved into the human trafficking ring and the Gaiatic Charities case, none of that had influenced him any further in this regard, until he’d learned of the Georgia Guidestones and the religion-oriented UN organizations that embraced the Guidestones’ radical population-decreasing philosophy. That hadn’t meant much to him in his thoughts about God. Only in seeing the pagan altar at Rick’s house had some of these ideas begun to coalesce—but still not clearly.
Now, what confronted the two of them shook Jason to his very core. It was so outside his realm of understanding that he couldn’t process what they both saw.
A figure materialized right before them in a boiling cauldron of flame at the center of the pentagram. Its form took substance, and the image of a man emerged. The specter that came into existence twenty feet away caused Jason’s heart to pound in fear.
He wore black on his lower body. His naked upper torso was heavily muscled. He stood with bulging biceps crossed over his chest. His black hair swept back and framed a frightening scowl that spanned his face. Black depthless eyes, filled with hate, glared at Jason and Lizzy, who were frozen in place.
The man spoke. His voice, deep and guttural, echoed throughout the room and bounced off the cement block walls.
“You have one chance. Back off from my people.”
The words reverberated in Jason’s skull. The cold increased, and he realized his teeth were chattering. From the corner of his eye, he saw Lizzy hug herself tighter.
Jason wasn’t sure why he said what he did next. Defiant bravery in the face of this entity was the last thing on his mind.
“What if we don’t?”
The apparition seemed almost taken aback. His eyes blazed and narrowed.
“You don’t want to think about the consequences.”
He rose into the air, hovering two feet off the ground, and waved a hand. What next appeared could only have been summoned from the lowest pits of the earth.
From the very spot he’d stood at the center of the pentagram, an opening appeared. Grotesque winged creatures swarmed upward and circled, completely surrounding Jason and Lizzy. Their leathery, black wings grazed Jason’s cheek and the back of Lizzy’s neck.
She let out a desperate sound that barely escaped her lips. “Ah.”
With every ounce of his strength, Jason folded his arms around Lizzy and held her tightly. She’d closed her eyes. His remained open as the creatures swooped and swirled, beating the air and making the room fetid with their presence.
“They will usher you into the depths. That is what will happen.” The being smirked at Jason. “You will submit.”
In the next blink of Jason’s eye, nothing remained in that basement room. The opening in the middle of the pentagram disappeared. Whatever they were, all the entities, including the man-figure, had left the place emptier than when Jason and Lizzy entered. The temperature rose. Behind them, Jason sensed the door opening. He released Lizzy.
“Let’s get out of here.”
They locked the place and left it as they’d found it. As soon as they reached the outdoors, each of them violently vomited into the bushes.
In leaving that place, they took with them the imprint of Moriarty’s hellish connection.
Chapter 61
They were silent on the drive to Lizzy’s. So agitated did Jason become in the car, that as soon as they got to the house, he phoned Nancy Evans.
“Nancy, you’re the only one I can ask about this.” He described what they’d seen and experienced. “What was that?”
Her silence extended for over a minute.
“Nancy, are you still there?”
“Yes, Jason. Let me try to formulate this for you best I can.” She paused again. “Okay, we know that Moriarty is up to his eyeballs in much of what we’ve looked into. From this encounter you and Lizzy had, apparently, he’s into more than we realized. And the potential connections are frightening. If what you describe is accurate—”
“Oh, it’s accurate all right. We felt the wings of those things on our faces. You can’t imagine how real and terrifying it was.”
“Actually, I can. I didn’t have an encounter like this one, but I have seen this kind of being before. My life before Christ as a lesbian led me down a very dark road with manifestations of this nature.
“You know what’s interesting to me? That this entity warned you off. He could have done some awful things to you and Lizzy right then and there, but he didn’t. You know, I�
�ve been praying for you. That may have given you enough cover to keep this guy from acting.”
“You’ve been praying for me? Really?”
“Lizzy, too.”
Once again, Jason’s true understanding of Christianity limited him. All he could say was, “That’s nice. We appreciate that.”
Evans laughed. To Jason it was as if she was laughing at an inside joke.
“Look,” Evans went on, “the stakes are much higher than we knew. The powers working behind the scenes are demonic. What you ran into at Moriarty’s; the altar you saw at Rick’s…listen…these are not random events. They’re connected at a very deep level. I think what you uncovered in your talk with that guy at the UN who was killed and the subsequent discoveries all tie together. The UN with its pagan religious affiliations, the belief that climate change is the greatest threat to mankind, the Georgia Guidestones with their limitation on human population, even with the children that are victims in all this and are somehow being used. Jason, I can’t put it together. I don’t know where this exactly leads. All I can say is that from my perspective, I see a massive conspiracy rooted in satanic origins.”
Jason had the speakerphone on so that Lizzy heard all that Evans said. They locked eyes in the same wondering confusion.
“Nancy,” Lizzy asked, “if this is from Satan, what does he want?”
Jason’s concern was more practical. “What do you mean conspiracy? You know how fragile those kinds of things are. One person talks and the whole house of cards tumbles down.”
“Not necessarily, especially if the master conspirator isn’t human.”
Throughout the conversation, Jason had been pacing. That stopped him, and he plopped next to Lizzy on the couch.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Jason, I don’t think you’re getting the implications of all this. We’re in a battle of a very long war. I know you two can’t comprehend some of what I’m saying because you’re not Christians. You haven’t yet accepted the blood-bought sacrifice of Jesus Christ, which makes this comprehensible. Listen to this Bible verse:
The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.
“Here’s another. The passage applied originally to the Jews who didn’t believe in Jesus, but it’s applicable to today and your situation:
But their minds were hardened. For to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away. Yes, to this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their hearts. But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed.
“There’s a spiritual barrier that keeps you from understanding aspects of this. It is what it is.”
He couldn’t argue with what she said. Much of it was beyond him.
“Where do we go from here?”
“I think you know. You have to determine Moriarty’s real objective as to how he intends it to play out with all these different elements. I have the sense however, Jason, that you don’t have much time. And remember, powers from the very pit of hell are arrayed against you and are very powerful.”
Chapter 62
When Jason had last spoken with Clarence Short, the man had warned him—actually pleaded in a sense—not to contact him. He’d given all the information he intended and wanted nothing more to do with Jason and his investigation. But Short’s lead had been immensely useful directing him to the Georgia Guidestones. Perhaps he had additional tidbits that could assist in Jason’s inquiries.
He called Evans back and she found Short’s home address.
“I’m going to surprise him,” Jason said.
He and Lizzy kissed goodbye, and he began the five-hour drive to the nation’s capital. By 9:00 PM he had found a parking space down the street from Short’s apartment building. Jason saw lights switch on inside the unit and made his move.
The old trick of waiting for someone else to enter through the security door worked, and Jason slipped into the foyer. He confirmed the unit number and took the elevator to the third floor, where he knocked on Short’s door, while standing to the side so he couldn’t be seen through the peephole.
When Short cracked open the door, Jason stuck his foot into it. Short reluctantly unfastened the security chain.
Once Jason had entered, Short said, “I told you I didn’t want any more involvement in this. I gave you what I could.”
The place was immaculate. Everything was in proper order and clean. Jason glanced around in approval.
“Very nice. Clarence, I need more. Listen, I’m not threatening you. Please believe me. But the people you’re involved with are dangerous. You know that. One of these days they’re going down. I don’t want to see you caught up in their problems. You can help. You can build a protective layer around yourself by giving me more info. What you’ve already told me has been fantastic, but we must have more on Stephen Moriarty. I know you can help me.”
At the mention of Moriarty’s name, Short tensed. He licked his lips and shook his head. “No, no, I can’t say anything more about him.” His fear was palpable.
“You brought him up in our previous conversation.”
“Only in passing.”
Jason closed the space between them. He whispered, “I know Moriarty is a scary guy. That’s the reason we have to bust him. The more information we have about him, Green Liberation, Gaiatic Charities, even any connections with the United Nations, it won’t go to waste.”
Short grabbed his head and bent over. “Ooh, I’m absolute toast. Anyone in any of those places finds out about my talking to you, and I’m a goner. Why did I ever open this can of worms?”
“It was already open by your working for a dodgy outfit like Gaiatic. Besides, you wanted to protect Senator Toomey, remember?”
“But if I tell you more, it might actually implicate him.”
“Clarence, I think you’re a decent guy involved with people that have dragged you into places you don’t want to be. The only way to extricate yourself is to come clean with me.”
Short argued for another ten minutes, with Jason calmly rebutting the issues he mentioned. By this time Short was sitting at his kitchen table wringing his hands. “If I give you more, you can’t even protect me. That’s how bad this is.”
“Why do you think that? Don’t you believe me when I tell you we’ll do everything we can to keep you safe?”
“Words. That’s all they are. These people are experts at killing. I’ve seen our books. Gaiatic has offed more people than you can imagine; rather, their partners have. Same difference. You think if I give you all the details they won’t find out?” Short snorted in disgust. “Trust me, they’re professionals. You want a drink?”
He got up and retrieved a bottle of sherry from the cupboard.
Jason eyed it, and said, “No, thanks.”
After Short had downed two quick glasses, he said, “All I wanted was to support the environmental movement. I believe in it. I grew up immersed in how critical it is to protect the earth in its pristine beauty. Man was ruining every habitat he touched. Big Oil wanted to drill in the tundra of Alaska’s North Slope. Think of the polar bears and how we’d destroy them through our plunder. Senator Toomey spoke about his love for the earth and how we could reclaim it from the predations of man. I loved what he said.
“The opportunity to work for Gaiatic was a dream come true. We worked hand-in-glove with Toomey, and everything was great until I learned about Stephen Moriarty’s connection with us and the senator. The more I saw him in action, the more concerned I grew. He’s a bad man.”
Short sat silently, rubbing the stubble on his chin.
“We have to take him down, Clarence,” Jason said quietly.
Sadness seemed to consume Clarence Short. “I know; it’s just that I’m not yet ready to die.”
Chapter 63
Stephen Moriarty’s eyes narrowed as Jason
Ruger finally emerged from the apartment building where Clarence Short lived. He cussed under his breath. Now with two extra tasks in his busy schedule that he hadn’t planned on, his available time was compressing.
He had followed Jason Ruger on his drive here and listened to their conversation on the bugs he had planted. Now he sat in his car thinking through his options for killing these two men. As one of the innovators behind the Gaiatic Charities CHOLI scheme, Moriarty had originated many of the different means by which various people insured by Gaiatic had accidentally died. It was one of his creative gifts.
Through the extensive network of surveillance cameras he deployed around his property and secretly within his house, he’d seen everything that Lizzy and Ruger had discovered when they’d invaded his privacy. He even witnessed the appearance of one of the entities who worked on his behalf. When they froze in the fear that Gadreel provoked in them, Moriarty couldn’t help but chuckle.
He and Gadreel had a pact. This entity from the spiritual realm specialized in death. Gadreel had taught him much. Moriarty’s allegiance to him meant that someday he might have an accounting with him. Might. That was the operative word that Moriarty used. Gadreel hadn’t been so imprecise when they’d made their covenant, but Moriarty figured he’d probably find a loophole and slip out from under the decree the demon had said he’d exact: Moriarty’s soul for wealth and power in this life.
As far as Moriarty was concerned, he doubted the reality of an afterlife anyway. Gadreel had laughed at Moriarty’s declaration that no life existed following death. He’d said, “Know what you face, human.”
Moriarty had retorted, “You may know some tricks to help me gain what I want, but I’m smarter than you think.”
The demon had only smirked.
It didn’t worry Moriarty. He would live a long, successful, and prosperous life and worry about the consequences later. For now, he had work to do and needed a little advice.
In the car outside Short’s apartment, Moriarty voiced the situation as he saw it and the options he’d considered. Within moments of his request for counsel, a disembodied response came from the radio of his vehicle.
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