his colleagues touched his sleeve, and he shook it off impatiently. The poor bastard really had it bad.
I don’t know why. You’ll have to ask the physicists. I’m just a dino girl.
Applause and whoops of laughter.
Something beeped. Her administrative assistant, in phone mode. She stepped out into the hallway to take the call. It was Tom Navarro.
“I’m in California with Amy Cho,” he said. “Grab a conference room—we’ve hit the jackpot. We’ve been approached by a defector from Holy Redeemer Ranch.”
“Holy shit. But wait. I can’t get away from this until it’s over—it would draw too much attention to me. Can you stall him for half an hour or so?”
“No problem, we’ll just let him stew. The flesh comes off the bone so much easier that way.”
She slipped back into the lounge to find that the press conference was over. The students were Monday- morning quarterbacking Salley’s performance.
“Very shrewd indeed,” the weedy one said. Nils, loosely aligned with Manuel and Katie, though there seemed to be something going on between him and Caligula’s Tamara.
“If she’s so shrewd, why doesn’t she copyright the hatchling? All those plush allosaurs with felt teeth and fake feathers. It makes my teeth ache to think how much she’s missing out on.” Jamal, self-centered and opportunistic, though everybody seemed to like him—Gillian in particular. “I had a doll like that when I was little.”
“She’s not a natural blond, is she?”
“According to Kavanaugh’s book, she is.” Tamara dangled another rat over her archaeopteryx.
Caligula snatched the rat and flung it down to the floor. Then he stood on the creature’s head with one foot, and tore messily at its stomach with his beak.
Jamal grimaced down at it. “Oh God. Oh, gross. Rat innards all over the carpet again.”
The teleconference room was a good sixty years old and timelessly bland, though the equipment itself was contemporary. Molly double-checked that the camera was off-line, and then turned on the video wall.
The defector was sitting bitterly in a chair behind a conference table, staring straight ahead of himself at nothing. He rarely blinked.
“When will Griffin be here?” he asked peevishly. He was dressed entirely in black, and had cultivated a small, devilish goatee. All in all, he was the single most Satanic-looking individual Molly Gerhard had ever seen. She was surprised he wasn’t wearing an inverted crucifix on a chain around his neck.
Tom Navarro, sitting to the man’s left, put down some papers and pushed his glasses up on his forehead. “Just be patient.”
On the defector’s right, Amy Cho sat smiling down at the top of her cane, tightly clutched by those pale, blue-veined hands. Without looking up, she made a comforting, clucking noise.
The defector scowled.
Okay, kiddies, Molly thought. It’s show time!
She dimmed the lights to give her an indistinct background, put her administrative assistant on the table before her, and switched it to steno mode. Then she snapped on the camera. “All right,” she said. “What do you have for me?”
“Who’s this?” the defector demanded. “I was supposed to talk to Griffin. Why isn’t he here?”
She’d wondered that herself. “I am Mr. Griffin’s associate,” she said emotionlessly. “Unfortunately, he can’t be here at this time. But anything you can tell him, you can tell me.”
“This is bullshit! I came here in good faith and you—”
“We have yet to establish that you have anything worth hearing,” Tom Navarro said. “The burden of proof is on you.”
“That’s bullshit too! How could I even know about your operation if it weren’t riddled with double agents? Your press conference announcing time travel is going on right now! I didn’t come here to be treated like a child!”
“You’re absolutely right, dear,” Amy Cho said. “But you’re here now, and you have a message that needs to be heard. So why don’t you just tell us it? We’d all be delighted to listen.”
“All right,” he said. “All right! But no more of this good-cop bad-cop routine, okay? I expect you to keep this guy muzzled.” This last was directed at Molly.
Bingo! she thought. He’d accepted her authority. Their little psychodrama was now firmly on course. But she was careful not to let her elation show. Outwardly, she allowed herself only the smallest of nods. “Go on.”
“Okay, I stared work at the Ranch four years ago—”
“From the beginning, please,” Molly Gerhard said. “So we have a more complete picture.”
The defector grimaced and began again.
He was a film maker. After graduating from London University in 2023, he’d returned to the States and the usual round of rejection and menial industry jobs an aspirant director could expect, before drifting into Christian video. He’d had some success with Sunday school tapes and inspirational packages for aspirant missionaries. He specialized in morality tales of people rescued from drugs, alcohol, and situation ethics by a strict literal reading of the Bible. He was always careful to have those transforming passages read aloud by a stern father-figure, who could then explain what they meant. He was particularly proud of that touch.
He’d had success, but no money. Religious producers were notoriously miserly, slow to pay off a contract and quick to point out the spiritual benefits of poverty and hard work.
Nor was there recognition to be had. The Jew-dominated secular film industry, of course, paid no attention to fundamentalist films. None of his work was reviewed, listed, or even noted in their cinematography journals. Awards? Forget it.
So when he was approached by one of the Ranch’s recruiters, he listened. The money wasn’t great, they told him, but it was reliable. He’d be doing important work. He’d have his own studio.
The Ranch started him out with a documentary of an expedition to Mount Ararat in search of Noah’s Ark. Six weeks in Armenia, sleeping in tents and coddling the inflated egos of self-styled archaeologists who didn’t even know that the mountain’s name dated back not to the Flood but to a prestige-seeking Christian monarch in the fourth century A.D. After that, he made a series of training films showing how to forge fossils. Then revisionist biographies of Darwin and Huxley identifying them as Freemasons and hinting at incest and murder. He admitted that these were speculations.
“Didn’t that bother you?” Tom Navarro asked abruptly.
“Didn’t what bother me?”
“Slandering Darwin and Huxley. They, neither of them, did any of the terrible things you claim.”
“They could have. Without God, all things are possible. They were both atheists. Why shouldn’t they do whatever evil things entered into their heads?”
“But they didn’t.”
“But they could have.”
“
“Yes.” The defector placed his hands together, as if in prayer, bowed his head over them, and then looked up through his dark eyebrows at her. He looked like a second-rate stage magician building up suspense for his next illusion. “As you say.”
Finally, they trusted him enough to let him film a demolitions expert assembling a bomb.
“Who was he?” Tom wanted to know.
“I have no idea. They brought him in. I filmed him. End of story.”
The video had been made under almost comically excessive secrecy. He was taken blindfolded at night to a cabin in the mountains to film a man wearing thin gloves and a ski mask while he slowly and lovingly assembled a
