residents mostly made their money from farming and tourism and the staples of small-town economics: insurance, real estate and building trades.
Travel books about the area generally didn't mention Kent. The MobilGuide gave the restaurant in the Travel- lodge near the Interstate a couple of stars. The Farming Museum got mentioned. So did a spring flower festival. It was a quiet place.
Outside of the small downtown, about a mile from the last of the seven Protestant churches in Kent, was an old rock quarry. The huge pit did double duty: a Saturday night hangout for teenage boys who had either dates or six- packs of Bud, and an informal shooting range during the day. This afternoon, three men stood at a disintegrating wooden board that served as a table for bench-resting rifles and for holding ammo and targets and extra magazines.
All three were in the NRA-accepted standing firing position-right foot back, parallel to the target, left forward and pointed downrange. They were tall men with shortcut hair sprayed into place. Two of the men had graying hair and were thin. The other, a younger man with black hair, had a beer belly, though his legs were thin and his shoulders broad. They all wore light-colored shoes, light slacks (two pink and one gray) and short-sleeved dress shirts with ties kept in place with a tack or bar. In the shirt pocket of the fatter man was a plastic pen-and-pencil caddy.
They all wore teardrop-shaped shooting sunglasses tinted yellow and made out of impact-resistant glass. In their ears were flesh-colored earplugs.
One thin man and the fat man held Kalashnikov assault rifles, whose clips they had just finished emptying at paper targets 150 feet away. They rested the guns on the ground, muzzles up, and began picking up the empty brass cartridges, which they would reload themselves on the weekend.
The third man held a square, ungainly Israeli Uzi, which he fired in two-second bursts. The muzzle ended in a ten-inch sound suppressor, and the gun made a sound like a hushed chain saw.
All three guns were fully automatic and therefore in violation of federal and state law. The suppressor was a separate offense. None of the men, however, had ever even seen an agent from the FBI or BATF in this part of the county and they weren't any more secretive with these guns than they were with their favorite. 30-06 deer rifle or Remington side-by-side.
The man with the Uzi aimed carefully and emptied the clip.
He took his earplug out and said, 'Cease fire,' although the others had already laid the guns on the bench, muzzles downrange. There were just the three of them present but they'd been raised in the protocol of firearms and adhered to formalities like this-the same as when they'd arrived, an hour before, and this man had glanced at the others and said, 'Ready on the left, ready on the right, ready on the firing line… commence fire.'
These were rituals they respected and enjoyed.
He set down the Uzi and went downrange to pick up targets. When he walked back to the shooting stations they picked up their guns, pulled out the clips, opened the bolts, put the safeties on and started toward the parking lot. The guns disappeared into the trunk of a Cadillac
El Dorado.
The ride took only ten minutes. The car pulled into the black gravel driveway of a white colonial, which had been built with money from the man's insurance business. The three men walked around a fieldstone path to the entrance of a den. Inside the large room, decorated with dark green carpeting and wormwood walls, they rolled a gray tarpaulin out on the floor and laid the guns on the thick canvas. Battered metal cleaning kits appeared and the sweet smell of solvent filled the room.
In thirty seconds the guns were stripped down into their component parts and the three men were swabbing the bores with patches threaded through eyelets in the tips of aluminum rods. They lovingly cleaned their weapons.
One of the thin men, John, looked at his watch and walked to the desk-this was his house-and sat down. In seven seconds the phone rang and he answered. He hung up and returned to the blanket. He began to rub oil on the sling of his Kalashnikov.
'Gabriel?' asked Harris, the dark-haired man, the fatter one.
John nodded.
'Has he figured out what happened?'
'Yes, he has,' John said.
The third man, William, said, 'Who climbed on our bandwagon?'
'It seems there was a man who wanted that girl killed, the one in those filthy movies. He planted the second bomb. He was killed by the police.'
'The press thinks he was behind all the bombings?' William asked.
'It seems so. To cover up what he did.'
'Media,' said Harris. 'Blessing and a curse.'
John finished assembling the Kalashnikov, closed the bolt, put the safety on and stacked the gun on a rosewood rack next to a Thompson submachine gun, a Remington pump shotgun, an Enfield. 303, an M1 carbine and a. 30-06 bolt-action. 'What do you two think?'
Harris said, 'All Gabriel's work is wasted if they think someone else did the bombings… You know, though, itis a good smoke screen. There's no pressure on him now. It's a good thing we picked up the count with the passage about the third angel, after the second bomb.'
William used a tiny periscope to study the bore of his gun, looking for any bits of gunpowder he'd missed. 'We can't just stop. Brother Harris is right.'
'No. We can't just stop,' John said slowly. He poured water into a Mr. Coffee and began to brew a pot of decaf. Like the others here he felt caffeine was a sinful stimulant. 'But I'm not sure I agree about Gabe. The police aren't going to ignore the other bombings. The experts will finish their reports, and they'll find out that someone else was behind them.'
Harris said, 'Gabriel will stay to see things through. He won't hesitate to sacrifice himself.'
John said, 'But he shouldn't. He's too valuable.'
'Then let's give up on New York,' William said. 'Send him to Los Angeles. Hollywood. I've said all along we should have begun there. Nobody knows Gabriel in California. All his connections are in Manhattan.'
'With all respect,' John said, 'I think we've got to finish what we started.' He spoke softly, as if it pained him to disagree.
John's aura of gentleness was misleading. Harris and William hunted for deer and geese with that excited, hungry love of the hunt. John did not. John had been a marine in Nam and had never once spoken about his tours of duty. Harris and William knew that the ones who didn't talk about killing were the ones who had the most personal relations with it.
John said, 'We can't leave New York yet.' He shrugged. 'That's how I feel.'
William hawked and spit into a linen handkerchief. 'All right. How does Gabriel feel?'
Harris snapped home the bolt of his machine gun. 'He'll do whatever we want him to.'
'But he should act fast.'
John poured coffee into mugs and handed them to William and Harris. 'Oh, he will.'
William nodded, then said, 'What's the target going to be?'
John's eyes flickered to an illuminated crucifix above his desk, then he looked at the other men.
'I sometimes feel great temerity at times like this,' Harris said. 'Deciding who should live, who should die.'
'He told me about someone, Gabriel did. I think it's an interesting idea.'
'Let's go with his thoughts then,' Harris said, nodding.
'Agreed.'
'Let's pray for his successful mission.'
Their eyes closed tightly as they dropped to their knees and the three men that made up the council of elders of the New Putnam Pentecostal Church of Christ Revealed, known-though only to themselves-as the Sword of Jesus, prayed. And they prayed so fervently, their grim lips moved with silent words and tears came into their eyes.
Ten minutes later they rose from the floor, feeling refreshed and cleansed, and John placed a call to Gabriel, waiting for their message in the terrible city of Sodom.
