blazing sphere of light, then Father Jerome brought his head back down, and as he did, she caught his eye. She could tell that he was shivering, and saw a tear trickle down his cheek. He looked scared and confused, his stricken expression telegraphing an am-I-really-doing-this anguish to her and quietly pleading for some kind of confirmation, as if he didn’t believe what was happening. She mustered up a confirming nod and a supportive smile—then his expression shifted, as if something had suddenly startled him from within. He closed his eyes, as if locked in concentration, then, a few seconds later, he turned to face the crowd. He looked down on them for a moment, then he spread his arms expansively and tilted his head upward to face the sign. He shut his eyes again and breathed in deeply, basking in the sign’s radiance, drinking in its energy. The masses below were still paralyzed, staring up in shocked silence, their arms stretched upward toward him, reaching out, as if trying to touch the hollow globe of light.
Father Jerome maintained his outstretched stance for the better part of a minute, then he opened his eyes to face the crowd.
“Pray with me,” he bellowed out to them, his voice thick with emotion, his arms raised to the heavens. “Let us all pray together.”
And they did.
In a stadium wave-like reaction that spread slowly and silently from the front to the back of the crowd, every single person outside the monastery—Christian and Muslim, believer and protester alike—fell to their knees and bent forward, all of them dropping their foreheads to the ground and prostrating themselves in fearful adulation.
Chapter 41
Washington, D.C .
“What the hell are you doing? I thought we had an agreement.” Rydell was seething. He’d been up through the night, monitoring the news. The images from Egypt had exploded across his TV screen a little after midnight, and right now, pacing around the cabin of his private jet by a quiet hangar at Reagan National Airport, his senses still throbbed with the burns of their visual sharpnel.
“We never agreed on it, Larry,” Drucker replied smoothly from his lush, padded seat. “You just wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“So you just went out and did it anyway?”
“We both have a lot invested in this. I wasn’t about to jeopardize it all because of your stubbornness.”
“Stubbornness?” Rydell flared up. “You don’t know what you’re doing, Keenan. Have you even thought about where this goes from here?”
“It’s working, isn’t it?”
“It’s too early to tell.”
Drucker tilted his head slightly. “Don’t be disingenuous. It demeans you.”
“I don’t know if it’s working, but—”
“It’s working, Larry,” Drucker interrupted emphatically. “It’s working because that’s what people are used to. It’s what they’ve been used to for thousands of years.”
“We didn’t need it.”
“Of course we did. What did you expect? Did you think people would see the sign and just ‘get’ it?”
“Yes. If we gave them a chance.”
“That’s just naive. What people don’t understand they just push away to the far corners of their minds and eventually it fades away and gets forgotten. ’Cause it’s safer that way. No, people need someone to tell them what to believe in. It’s worked before, many times. And it’ll work again.”
“And then what?” Rydell fumed. “Where do you go from here?”
Drucker smiled. “We just let him grow his following. Get the message across.”
“That’s untenable and you know it,” Rydell flared up. “You’re building up something that’s going to be impossible to maintain.”
“Not if you graft it onto an existing structure. One that has staying power. One that can last.”
Rydell shook his head. “I can’t believe you’re saying this. You, of all people.”
Drucker chuckled. “You should be enjoying the irony of it. You should be sitting back and laughing instead of getting all worked up about it.”
“I can’t even begin to . . .” Rydell’s mind was overwhelmed with indignation. “You don’t get it, do you? You don’t see how wrong you are.”
“Come on, Larry. You know how the world works. There are only two surefire ways to get people to do what you want them to do. You either put on an iron glove and make them do it. Or you tell them God wants them to do it. If God wills it,” he scoffed, “it shall be done. That’s when they listen. And given that we don’t live under an Uncle Joe or a Chairman Mao—”
“That was the whole point,” Rydell protested. “God was supposed to be willing it. God. Not his self- appointed, holier-than-thou representatives.”
“That wouldn’t work, Larry. It’s too vague. Too open to interpretation. You’re asking people to decipher the message on their own, and that would be giving them far too much credit. That’s never worked. They’re not used to figuring things out for themselves. They like to follow, to be led. They need a guide. A messenger. A prophet. Always have. Always will.”
“So you create, what, a Second Coming?”
“Not exactly, but close. And why not? A major chunk of the planet’s expecting something like this. All this talk of End of Times and Armageddon. It’s a golden opportunity.”
“What about the other religions? ’Cause you do know there are others on the planet, right? How do you think they’re going to react to your manufactured messiah?”
“He won’t be exclusive. It’s been factored in. His message will embrace all.”
“Embrace all and encourage them to follow Jesus?” Rydell said acidly.
“Well,” Drucker mused with a mischievous twist to his mouth, “That’s not the main message he’ll be bringing, but I suspect it may well be a secondary effect of his preaching.”
“Great,” Rydell retorted fiercely. “And in doing that, you’ll be propping up this mass delusion we haven’t been able to shake for thousands of years. Can you imagine the field day these preachers are gonna have with this? Can you imagine how much power you’d be handing to all those blow-dried, self-serving egomaniacs out there? You’ll turn every born-again politician and every televangelist into a saint who can do no wrong. And before you know it, they’ll reclassify the pill as a form of abortion and ban it, the
“It doesn’t have to be that way. See, you’re forgetting one thing,” Drucker pointed out as he leaned forward, his face animated with expectation. “We control the messenger. Think about it, Larry. We’ve got a chance to create our own prophet. A messiah that we own. Just imagine the possibilities. Think of what we can make people do.”
Drucker studied Rydell through cold, calculating eyes.
“You know we’re right,” he continued. “You know this was the only way to go. These people don’t read newspapers. They don’t research things on the Internet. They listen to what their preachers tell them—and they believe them. Fanatically. They don’t question what the preachers say. They don’t bother to fact-check the bullshit they hear in their megachurches. They’re happy to swallow it whole, no matter how ridiculous it is, and not even an army of Pulitzer Prize-winning thinkers or Nobel Prize-winning scientists with all the common sense or scientific evidence in the world could convince them otherwise. They’d just dismiss them as agents of the devil. Satan, trying to cloud their minds. We need these windbags. We need them to sell our message. And what better way to get them on board than to give them a new prophet of their own to sell on to their flocks?”
