Blasphemy

“We have to get this out. Tell our story. The world has to know. Wyman, when we get to Flagstaff, we’ll organize a press conference. An announcement. The radio says that everyone thinks we’re dead. Right now, the entire world’s attention is riveted on what happened at Red Mesa. Think of the impact we could have.” Her beautiful face, so battered, so tired, had never looked so alive.

“An announcement . . . about what?”

She stared at him as if he were crazy. “About what happened. About the scientific discovery of . . .” She hesitated only a moment before saying the word, and then spoke it with great conviction: “God.”

Ford swallowed. “Kate?”

“What?”

“There’s something you should know first. Before you . . . take that step.”

“Which is?”

“It was . . .” He paused. How was he going to do this?

“It was what?”

He hesitated.

“You’re with us, aren’t you?” Kate asked.

He wondered if he could even bring himself to tell her the truth. But he had to try. He couldn’t live with himself otherwise. Or could he? He looked at her face, glowing with conviction and belief. She had been lost, and now she was found. He still couldn’t walk away without telling her what he knew.

“It was a fraud,” he said quickly.

Her eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?”

“Hazelius concocted this whole thing. It was a scheme to start a new religion—sort of like Scientology.”

She shook her head. “Wyman . . . You never change, do you?”

He tried to take her hand, but she withdrew it sharply.

“I can’t believe you’re trying to pull this,” she said, suddenly angry “I really can’t.”

“Kate, Hazelius told me. He admitted it to me. Back in the mines. It’s all a con.”

She shook her head. “You’ve tried everything to stop this, to discredit what’s going on here. But I never thought you’d stoop this low—to out-and-out lie.”

“Kate—”

She rose. “Wyman, it isn’t going to work. I know you can’t accept what happened here. You can’t abandon your Christian faith. You’re making no sense, though. If Gregory dreamed up this whole thing, would he have admitted it to anyone? Especially to you?”

“He thought we both were going to die.”

“No, Wyman, what you’re saying makes no sense.”

Ford looked at her. Her eyes blazed with fervid belief. He would never change her mind.

She continued. “Did you see the way he died? Do you remember what he said, his very last words? They’re burned into my memory. The universe never forgets . You think that was part of the fraud? No, Wyman: he died a believer. You can’t fake something like that. He stood in the fire. Even while he was burning, with one leg shattered, he stood. He never buckled, never faltered, never stopped smiling, never even closed his eyes. That’s how powerful his belief was. You’re telling me that was a fraud?”

He said nothing. He wasn’t going to change her mind, and he wasn’t sure he even wanted to. Her life had been so hard, so full of loss. To convince her Hazelius was a fraud would be to destroy her. And maybe most religions needed a certain measure of fraud to succeed. After all, religion was based not on fact, but on faith. It was a spiritual confidence game.

He gazed at her with an almost inconsolable sorrow. Hazelius had been right: There was nothing Ford, Volkonsky, or anyone could do to stop this. Nothing. Les jeux sont faites . The die is cast. And now he understood why Hazelius had so freely admitted it to him—he knew that, even if Ford survived, he would be powerless to stop it. And that was why he went to his death with such astonishing dignity and resolve. It was the final act in his drama, and he was determined to play it well.

He had died a true believer.

“Wyman,” Kate said, “if you’ve ever loved me, believe and join us. Christianity’s done.” She held out the packet of computer paper. “How can you not believe this, after what we lived through?”

He shook his head, unable to answer. Her passion filled him with envy. How wonderful it would be to be so sure of the truth.

She tossed the paper down and seized his hands. “We can do it together. Break with your past. Choose a new life with me.”

Ford lowered his head. “No,” he said softly.

“You can still try to believe. Over time, you’ll see the light. Don’t walk out on this. Don’t walk out on me.”

“It would be wonderful for a while. Just to be with you. But it wouldn’t last.”

“What we witnessed in the mountain was the hand of God. I know it was.”

“I can’t do it . . . I can’t live what I don’t believe.”

“Believe in me, then. You said you loved me and you’d stay with me. You promised.”

“Sometimes love isn’t enough. Not for what you plan to do. I’m going now. Give my regards to the others.”

“Don’t go.” The tears ran down her face.

He bent down and kissed her on the forehead, very lightly. “Good-bye, Kate,” he said. “And . . . God bless.”

ONE MONTH LATER

WYMAN FORD SAT IN MANNY’S BUCKHORN Bar and Grill in San Antonio, New Mexico, eating a green chile cheeseburger and watching the television behind the bar. A month had passed since the press conference at Flagstaff that had electrified the world.

After a debriefing in Washington by Lockwood, in which he had shamelessly shaped his story to support the new mythology, he had taken off in his Jeep and drove to New Mexico. There he had spent a few weeks hiking the canyons north of Abiquiu, by himself, thinking about what had happened.

Isabella had been destroyed, Red Mesa left a blasted, smoldering moonscape. Hundreds had died or disappeared in the conflagration. The FBI had eventually identified Russell Eddy’s body, from DNA and dental records, and declared the millennialist minister the perpetrator.

Already a media spectacle, after Flagstaff the Red Mesa story grew into an epic of gargantuan dimensions. It was the biggest story in the last two thousand years, some pundits proclaimed.

Christianity had taken four centuries to conquer the old Roman Empire. The new religion—which its votaries called the Search—took four days to burn through the United States. The World Wide Web turned out to be the perfect disseminator for the new faith—as if the Internet had been created for its propagation.

Ford glanced at his watch. It was eleven forty-five, and in fifteen minutes half the world, including the patrons of Manny’s Buckhorn, would be watching the Event, broadcast live from a Colorado ranch owned by a dot- com billionaire.

The television’s volume was turned down, and Ford strained to listen. Behind the anchorman on the background screen, a high-angle aerial camera panned a crowd of prodigious size, which the news channel estimated to be three million people. The teeming throng filled the prairie farmlands as far as the eye could see, the snowcapped San Juan Mountains providing a picturesque backdrop.

Over the past month, Ford had done a lot of thinking. He had come to recognize Hazelius’s brilliance. The Red Mesa debacle had established the religion and made himself the movement’s preeminent prophet and martyr. Red Mesa, Hazelius’s blazing immolation, and his tragic transcendence had become the stuff of myth and legend—a story like that of the Buddha, Lord Krishna, Medina and Mohammed, the Nativity, the Last Supper, Crucifixion and Resurrection. Hazelius and the story of Isabella was no different from those other stories, a narrative that believers could share, a founding history that animated their faith and told them who they were and why they were