Blasphemy

“I devoted an entire hour of my sermon to your problem. I hope to take it up again on Roundtable America this Friday. You watch it?”

“Never miss it.” Crawley knew the Christian Cable Service aired Spates’s weekly talk show, but he’d never seen it.

“I plan to keep on top of this until I’ve aroused the righteous anger of Christians across this land.”

“I’m very grateful, Reverend.”

“For this, ten thousand dollars is hardly a drop in the bucket.”

Goddamned Holy Joe, thought Crawley. How he hated to deal with people like this. “Reverend, forgive me, but I was under the impression that you would take up the issue in return for a one-time donation.”

“And I did: one-time donation, one-time sermon. Now I’m talking about a relationship.” Spates tipped the glass up to his wet lips, drained the last of the drink through the column of ice cubes, replaced the glass on the table, and wiped his mouth.

“I handed you an excellent issue. Judging from the reaction, it seems worth pushing, regardless of the, ah, pecuniary aspects.”

“My friend, there’s a war on faith going on out there. We’re fighting the secular humanists on multiple fronts. I could shift my battle lines at any moment. If you want me to keep fighting at your salient, well, then—you’ve got to contribute.”

The waiter brought their filets mignons. Spates had ordered his well done, and the thirty-nine-dollar cut of meat was now the size, shape, and color of a hockey puck. Spates clasped his hands and bowed over the plate. It took Crawley a moment to realize he was blessing his food, not smelling it.

“Can I get you gentlemen anything else?” the waiter asked.

The reverend raised his head and lifted his glass. “Another.” He narrowed his eyes at the waiter’s departing form. “I believe that man’s a homosexual.”

Crawley took a long level breath. “So what kind of a relationship are you suggesting, Reverend?”

“A quid pro quo. You scratch my back; I scratch yours.”

Crawley waited.

“Say, five thousand a week, with a guarantee I’ll mention the Isabella project in each sermon and take it up on at least one cable show.”

So that’s how it was going to be. “Ten thousand a month,” said Crawley coolly, “with a guaranteed minimum of ten minutes devoted to the topic in each sermon. As for the cable show, I’ll expect the first show to be devoted entirely to Isabella, with later shows pushing the subject. My donation will be made at the end of the month after the airing. Each payment will be duly recorded as a charitable contribution, with a letter to that effect. That is my first, last, and only offer.”

The Reverend DonT. Spates gazed pensively at Crawley. Then his face turned into an enormous smile, and a freckled hand extended across the table, once more exposing the orange hairs.

“The Lord will give you value for your money, my friend.”

13

EARLY TUESDAY, BEFORE BREAKFAST, FORD SAT at the kitchen table in his casita staring at the stack of dossiers. There was no reason why having a high IQ would somehow protect you from the vicissitudes of life, but this group seemed to have more than their share of problems: difficult childhoods, dysfunctional parents, sexual identity problems, personal crises, even a few bankruptcies. Thibodeaux had been in therapy since she was twenty, diagnosed with the borderline personality disorder he’d read about before. Cecchini had gotten tangled up with a religious cult as a teenager. Edelstein had suffered bouts of depression. St. Vincent had been an alcoholic. Wardlaw had suffered from PTSD after witnessing his squad leader’s head blown off in a cave in the Tora Bora mountains. At thirty-four, Corcoran had been married and divorced—twice. Innes had been reprimanded for sleeping with patients.

Only Rae Chen didn’t seem to have anything untoward in her own background—just a first-generation Chinese-American whose family owned a restaurant. Dolby, also, seemed relatively normal, except that he’d grown up in one of the worst neighborhoods in Watts, and his brother had been paralyzed by a stray bullet in a gang shootout.

Kate’s dossier had been the most revealing of all. He read through it with a kind of sick, guilty fascination. Her father had committed suicide not long after they’d broken up—shot himself after failing in business. Her mother had then gone into a long physical decline, ending up in a nursing home at seventy, unable to recognize her own daughter. After her mother died, there was a two-year gap in the record. Kate had paid two years’ rent on her apartment in Texas and disappeared, returning two years later. It impressed the hell out of Ford that neither the FBI nor CIA could find out where she had gone or what she did. She refused to answer their questions—even at the risk of not gaining the security clearance she needed to be assistant director of the Isabella project. But Hazelius had stepped in, and the reason wasn’t hard to see—they had been having a relationship. It seemed to have been more a friendship than a passion, and it had ended amicably.

He packed away the files, disgusted at the violation of privacy, the gross intrusion of government into a person’s life, represented by the dossiers. He wondered how he could have stomached it all those years in the CIA. The monastery had changed him more than he’d realized.

He pulled out the dossier on Hazelius and opened it up. He had read it over quickly, and now he began going through it with more care. It was arranged chronologically, and Ford read it in order, visualizing the arc of the man’s life. Hazelius came from a surprisingly mundane background, an only child in a solid middle-class family of Scandinavian roots from Minnesota, father a storekeeper, mother a homemaker. They were sober, dull, churchgoing people. An unlikely environment to produce a transcendental genius. Hazelius had quickly shown himself to be a true prodigy: summa cum laude from Johns Hopkins at seventeen, doctorate from Caltech at twenty, full professor at Columbia at twenty-six, Nobel Prize at thirty.

Beyond his brilliance, the man was hard to pin down. He was not your typical narrow academic. At Columbia his students had adored him for his dry wit, playful temperament, and surprising mystical streak. He played boogiewoogie and stride piano in a band called the Quarksters at a dive on 110th Street, filling the place with worshipful undergrads. He took students to strip joints. He developed a “strange attractor” theory of the stock market and made millions before selling the system to a hedge fund.

After winning the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum entanglement, Hazelius moved easily into his role as the heir to physics superstar Richard Feynman. He published no fewer than thirty theoretical papers on the incompleteness of quantum theory, shaking the very foundations of the discipline. He won the Fields Medal in mathematics for proving Laplace’s third conjecture, the only person to have won both a Nobel and a Fields. He added a Pulitzer to his list of prizes for a book of poetry—strangely beautiful poems that mixed expressive language with mathematical equations and scientific theorems. He had set up a rescue program in India to provide medical help to girls in regions where it was customary to allow sick girls to die; the program also included subtle but intensive educational programs aimed at changing societal values about girls. He had contributed millions to a campaign to eradicate female genital mutilation in Africa. He had patented—and this Ford found comical—a better mousetrap, humane but effective.

He often appeared on Page Six of the Post, hobnobbing with the rich and famous, dressed in his trademark suits from the seventies with fat lapels and massive ties. He bragged he bought them at the Salvation Army, never paying more than five dollars. He was a regular guest on Letterman, where he could always be counted on to make outrageous un-PC pronouncements—he called them “unpleasant truths”—and wax eloquent about his utopian schemes.

At the age of thirty-two, he astonished everyone by marrying the supermodel and former Playboy bunny Astrid Gund, ten years his junior and legendary for her cheerful vacuity. She went everywhere with him, even on the television talk circuit, where he gazed at her adoringly while she chattered happily about her warm and fuzzy political opinions, once declaring famously, in a discussion of 9/11, “Gee, why can’t people just get along?”

That was bad enough. But during this period, Hazelius had said something that so outraged the zeitgeist that it became immortal, in the manner of the Beatles’ claim that they were more popular than Jesus. A reporter asked the physicist why he had married a woman “so far beneath you intellectually.” Hazelius had taken great offense. “Who would you have me marry?” he roared at the journalist. “Everyone’s beneath me intellectually! At least Astrid