“Weren’t we just freezing our nuts off in the South Pole like yesterday?” Dalton asked in a weary, incredulous tone. “What just happened?”
“The story of our lives, that’s what happened,” Gracie replied.
“That’s for sure.” Dalton shook his head, a wry smile curling up one corner of his mouth.
She caught it. “What?”
“Weird how these things happen, isn’t it? I mean, I don’t know what you want to call it. Luck. Fate.”
“What do you mean?”
“We could have missed all this so easily. Imagine . . . If you hadn’t taken that call from Brother Ameen, back on the ship. Or if he hadn’t been able to convince us to come. If the documentary guys hadn’t been here before us and shot Father Jerome’s wall paintings. We might have passed, right?” His eyes swung from Gracie to Finch and back. “We wouldn’t be here right now, and maybe none of this would have happened.”
Gracie thought about it for a beat, then shrugged. “Someone else would be here. It’d just be someone else’s story.”
“But would it? What if the documentary guys hadn’t shot that footage. What if no one had showed up here to talk to him. The mob wouldn’t be out there. Father Jerome wouldn’t have been up here on the roof. There’d be no sign up there.” He raised his eyebrows in a think-about-it manner. “Makes you wonder if he’s the first, or if there were others before him.”
“Others?” Gracie asked.
“You know, kooks. Nuts with voices in their heads, painting weird signs all over their walls or filling journals with their ramblings. What if there were others, before him? Others who were also the real deal. But no one knew.” He nodded, to himself, his mind mining that vein further. “And what about the timing of it?” he added. “Why now? There were other times when we could have used a sign, a message. Why not just before Hiroshima? Or during the Cuban missile crisis?”
“You always get this lucid with lemonade?” she asked.
“Depends on what the good monks put in it.” He grinned with a raised eyebrow.
Just then, Brother Ameen popped his head through the roof hatch, his expression knotted with concern. “Come with me, please. You need to hear this.”
“Where?” Gracie asked as she got up.
“Down. To the car. Come now.”
They climbed down and followed him to the Previa, which was still parked by the gates. The abbot arrived as they did. The car’s doors were open, and Yusuf and a couple of monks were huddled around it, heads hung in concentration as they listened to an Arabic broadcast coming through on its radio. They looked thoroughly spooked.
Another religious leader was making a pronouncement, only this one wasn’t as inspirational as the earlier one. Gracie couldn’t understand what was being said, but the tone of the speaker wasn’t hard to read. It sounded just like the other furious, inflamed rants she’d heard countless times across the Arab world. And even before Brother Ameen explained it, she understood what was happening.
“It’s an imam, in Cairo,” he told them, his voice quaking slightly. “One of the more hotheaded clerics in the country.”
“He doesn’t sound happy,” Dalton remarked.
“He’s not,” Brother Ameen replied. “He’s telling his followers not to be deceived by what they see. He’s saying Father Jerome is either a
“Which is?” Finch asked.
“He’s asking for Father Jerome’s head,” Brother Ameen replied. “Literally.”
Chapter 45
River Oaks, Houston, Texas
“I’ve got to tell ya, I’m really confused,” the pastor grumbled as he I set down his tumbler of bourbon. “I mean, what the hell’s going on out there? This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen.”
“How what’s supposed to happen?”
“The Second Coming, Roy,” he answered. “The End of Times. The Rapture.”
They were seated across from each other in the large conservatory, a huge glass house that dwarfed most single-family homes but looked like an outhouse next to the rest of the pastor’s massive mansion. An oval-shaped pool lay beyond the chamfered windows, huddled under a glistening tarp cover and waiting for warmer days. The fence around Darby’s tennis court winked out from behind a row of poplars that skirted the left edge of the property.
Although they’d met countless times over the last year, Roy Buscema still studied the man before him with the fascination of an anthropologist discovering a new species. The Reverend Nelson Darby was an intriguing specimen. Modern in all things technological and where business practices were concerned, but immovably medieval when it came to anything relating to scripture. Genteel and measured, and yet a fierce right-wing culture warrior and unrepentant agent of intolerance. In all the times they’d met, Darby was never less than a charming, relaxed, and earnest host, nothing like the bombastic, fire-and-brimstone preacher he morphed into on stage. He was also always impeccably groomed, an elegant man who appreciated the finer things in life. Fortunately for Darby, God—according to the inerrant scripture he bequeathed us, in any case—took pleasure in the prosperity of his servants, and the pastor was nothing if not a loyal servant.
His refined style extended to his home. Nestling at the end of a leafy road in River Oaks, it occupied a privileged site, directly overlooking the fairways of the country club. It was a stately, white-columned mansion that dated back to the 1920s—stately, but tasteful and restrained, not a vulgar temple to Prosperity Theology. Darby was particularly proud of his conservatory. He’d had it custom-designed by one of London’s leading purveyors of garden houses, who’d then flown over a team of four carpenters to install it. He liked to take meetings there. It was away from the eyes and ears of the small army of staffers who toiled in the sprawling offices on his megachurch’s campus. It was a chance to show off and impress his visitors. And, of course, it inspired him. The glass house seemed, to Darby, a prism for the sun’s rays, a white hole that sucked in the faintest glimmer of light on even the bleakest of days. It normally helped instill a further sense of wonder in him than he already possessed. It was here that he prepared his most fiery sermons, the ones in which he took on homosexuals, abortion—even in the case of victims of rape and incest—condoms, evolution, stem cell research, and elitist-quasi-Muslim presidential hopefuls, even directing his bombastic, venomous rants at the Girl Scouts, whom he’d branded as agents of feminism, the Dungeons & Dragons game, and, still more bizarrely, SpongeBob SquarePants. It was here that he drafted the sermons he reserved for special occasions, like Christmas, which was now only days away.
Today, though, any inspiration was hobbled by the confused thoughts swarming inside him.
“Maybe this isn’t the End of Times,” Buscema suggested.
“It sure as hell isn’t,” the pastor agreed huffily. “Can’t be. Not yet. Not when none of the prophecies of the Good Book have happened.” He leaned forward, a studious stare in his eyes, and did the parallel-vertical-karate- chops thing with his hands for emphasis, as he did at his pulpit. “The Bible tells us the messiah will only return
“God’s giving us a message, Nelson,” Buscema put in thoughtfully. “He’s given us a sign—two signs—over the ice caps. And he’s sent us a messenger.”
Darby scoffed. “An Arab. And a Catholic at that, if you can get your head around that one.”
