A Creed for the Third Millennium (56 page)

About one o'clock, when all the prominent
heads of state, politicians, movie stars and other dignitaries were gathered in
a specially erected marquee near the Lincoln Memorial to refresh themselves
after the ceremony and before they went to rest up for the night's Millennial
Ball, an aide approached President Tibor Reece, drew him a little away from the
King, and whispered in his ear. Those who were watching him saw him stare at his
aide in obvious shock, part his lips to say something, then think better of it
and just nod his thanks. After which he went back to his conversation with His
Majesty, but as soon as possible he excused himself and quietly slipped out of
the marquee. He went back to the White House, and he waited there for Dr Judith
Carriol.

She arrived not long after two o'clock,
in the fastest of the Presidential helicopters; after he received her message in
the marquee, Tibor Reece had dispatched it to Pocahontas Island to fetch
her.

When she entered the Oval Office the
President's initial reaction was to think that she appeared remarkably calm,
considering the magnitude of this calamitous event; but then, as he had grown to
know her better, he had decided she was the most admirable kind of woman,
incapable of panic, incapable of emotional excess, warm without being effusive,
and above all one who esteemed her intelligence far ahead of her looks. So he
had come to like her enormously, contrasting her with the very different Julia
perhaps more often than he realized.

'Sit down, Judith. I can't believe it! Is
it true? Is he really dead?'

She passed a hand over her eyes; the hand
shook. 'Yes, Mr President, he is dead.'

'But what happened?'

'Due to Mr Magnus's illness, the medical
team was not sent to Pocahontas Island. As far as we can gather, the helicopter
which took Dr Christian down there early this morning dropped him off without
realizing nobody was there. It must have taken off again, because it isn't
anywhere on the island, but it and Billy and the soldier who acted as Dr
Christian's escort have literally vanished off the face of the earth. The Coast
Guard, the Navy and the Air Force have been searching for it now for two hours,
and there isn't a trace. It's as if it had been — spirited away.' She shivered
uncontrollably, the first time he had ever seen her unable to discipline
herself.

'It may have gone down in the sea,' he
said soothingly.

'If it did, there should have been an oil
slick. And its course was entirely over shallow water, where it should be seen
on the bottom. The weather was overcast in the area but basically fine
and clear all along the route. Helicopters navigate by landmarks, so there's no
reason to suppose it was off course the way a high-flying plane might stray.
Billy armed himself with the charts before he left his base to pick me up. You
know Billy, sir! The best.'

'Yes.'

'That helicopter is gone, I tell
you.'

The President decided it might be politic
to alter the trend of Dr Carriol's thinking away from the missing aircraft, and
he had besides a bone of his own to pick. 'So it's thanks to Mr Magnus's — heart
attack — that Dr Christian was left alone to die of neglect.'

Dr Carriol glanced up, stared straight at
him, her strange green eyes glittering not wetly but demonically. 'Dr Joshua
Christian,' she said with a slow relish, 'was crucified.'

'Crucified?'

'Or more accurately, he crucified
himself.'

The President lost colour, his lips
moving soundlessly, his brain formulating so many questions that his speech
mechanisms went into chaotic overload. Finally he grasped hold of a simple query
and managed to articulate it. 'How, for God's sake, could he do a thing like
that?'

She shrugged. 'He was demented, of
course. I knew that this morning when I went back to the March compound to take
him down to Pocahontas Island. And I'd been watching the signs and symptoms grow
ever since — oh, as far back as a month after his book was published. But today
he was supposed to go straight into the hands of doctors and nurses, and I had
no reason to think he hadn't. I'm not saying his madness was the permanent kind.
I think it was more a derangement brought on by his extreme overload of work in
the beginning, and later by physical suffering too. Frostbite, chafing,
abscesses and the like. In the normal course of events he should have
recovered from his dementia along with his bodily ailments. After a summer's
rest, he should have been quite back to his normal self.'

'So what happened, for God's
sake?'

'Apparently he arrived on Pocahontas
Island to find himself totally alone. He made himself a cross out of two old
railroad ties — we found the tools he had used scattered around the courtyard
attached to the house. The courtyard, I should explain, is paved with old
railroad ties similar to the two he used to make his cross. There were chips of
wood all over the place, from his work of joining the beams together. He
couldn't nail himself up, of course, so he tied himself up. He used a stool to
position himself, and kicked it over. And he hung there with a piece of rope
tied around the cross holding his neck, and two more pieces around his wrists.
He died of respiratory arrest, which also appears to have been the chief cause
of death back in the days when a lot of people were crucified.'

The President looked stricken, as indeed
he was. The images Dr Carriol was conjuring up were not anything he could
associate with the man who had spent an evening at the White House, relished his
cognac, quoted Kipling, smoked a cigar, and behaved in the most human
manner.

'It's blasphemy!' he said.

'In all fairness to Dr Christian, no,
sir, it is
not
blasphemy. Blasphemy implies a state of mind sufficiently
organized to want to mock. Dr Christian was quite demented, and the conviction
that one is Jesus Christ is very typical of organically based dementias. His own
name — his extraordinary position — the adulation he received wherever he went —
some people did actually worship him, you know. All these memories and
experiences were cemented in his brain, and when his thought processes
disintegrated, it was quite logical for his particular
loss of contact with reality to take a Jesus Christ form. What I find
unbelievable is the fact that he actually managed to do this thing, crucify
himself. Physically as I've said he was extremely ill — worn out, and on the
verge of permanent crippling. All that walking in subzero cold. He went among
the people, Mr President! Just like Jesus Christ. And he was a truly good man.
Just like Jesus Christ.'

The implications of what Dr Carriol was
telling him were beginning to sink in; Tibor Reece sat up straight, and broke
out in a heavy sweat. 'What happened to his body?'

'We took it down at once.'

'And the cross he made?'

'We put it in a small stone shed within
the courtyard. As I said, the paving is made of these old railroad ties, and the
owners of the house kept five or six extra ties in the shed in case they needed
to replace any paving. Dr Christian found these spare ties, and he used two of
them to make his cross. So we just put his cross back with the
others.'

'Where's his body now?'

'I instructed the medical team to take it
to Walter Reed with them and put it in the mortuary with extreme secrecy. Dr
Mark Ampleforth, who was chief of the team for its duration as a team, is
waiting your personal instructions.'

'How many people — saw him up there?' An
expression of extreme distaste glimmered, was wiped away out of respect and
affection for the dead man, who he was
assured
had genuinely gone mad;
yet not for all the respect and affection in the world could he bring himself to
say, How many people saw him hanging on the cross?'

'Just the medical team and me, Mr
President. Luckily I had sent the helicopter pilot over to start the generator.
After we found Dr Christian, which was immediately, I kept the pilot away from
the area. He knows Dr Christian is dead, but he thinks the cause of death was
simple illness.'

'Where are the medical team now? Who are
they?'

'They're back at Walter Reed. They're all
service officers of high rank and they're all security-cleared. I made sure of
that before we went down to Pocahontas.'

What to do? What to do? Dr Judith Carriol
watched imperturbably as Tibor Reece assembled all the alternatives and assessed
their relative merits. He would not have the medical team eliminated, that she
knew; it was the kind of thing you might have done to obscure people, or
unconnected people, or fewer people; but not even the President of the United
States of America could arrange to have concrete, boots made for eight
high-ranking officers in his own armed forces. No matter how cleverly it was
done, every nosy nose in the District of Columbia and surrounds would start
twitching. Besides which, a long and senior Washington career had made Dr Judith
Carriol very sceptical about the occasional sensationalist allegations of murder
in high places. She did not believe it existed, certainly among politicians.
Politicians were just too careful of their own necks to contemplate running such
an appalling risk. For murder was always a risk.

No, the kind of thinking Tibor Reece was
doing (her interpretation was absolutely right) ran along the lines of whether
the horrific nature of Dr Christian's death could successfully be suppressed,
and if it could not, what was best to do about it?

He decided to aim for suppression, for a
general cover-up; the watching Dr Carriol smiled inwardly. Good! Good! That was
the sensible and prudent course to take. Tibor Reece would invite the medical
team to the White House, ostensibly to talk to them about their vain but heroic
attempt to keep Dr Christian alive, and while he had them there, he
would personally request of each of them that he or she maintain an utter
silence about what they found on Pocahontas Island. Naturally they would all
pledge their silence. But she wondered if the President understood how
implacable an enemy time was going to be; probably not. Though her bald and
frank description of the manner of Dr Christian's death had horrified and
disgusted Tibor Reece, she knew he had actually little comprehension of what a
sight had met the eyes of those who saw the manner of Dr Christian's death. The
horror would fade. The shock would dissipate. But no one who saw him hanging
there could ever forget the sight. The crucifixion death of Dr Joshua Christian
was going to haunt every one of those eight people so long as each of them
lived. By the time Tibor Reece could gather the eight members of the medical
team here in this room, and request their total silence, they would already have
talked. Not in general. Not to superiors, or fellow officers, or professional
colleagues. They would have unburdened themselves to those they loved, because
what they had seen could not be endured without a cathartic sharing of the
experience with a loved one.

The President had managed to file his
personal feelings about Dr Christian's death; now he could really begin to think
about its implications for the country, for the world, for his
government.

'All along we agreed that the one thing
we could not have on our hands was a martyr,' he said grimly.

'Mr President,' said Dr Carriol, 'Dr
Christian's death resulted from a series of cosmic events, events beyond our
control. And he was a law unto himself. Had he not been, he could not have done
what we set him up to do. Why should he be accounted a martyr? Martyrs are made,
they're the victims of persecution. But no one
ever
persecuted Dr
Christian! The government of this country has worked with him in everything,
from providing transport for his travels to
the March of the Millennium! Facts you can point to with pride, facts that
indicate loud and clear how appreciative of Dr Christian this government was and
is. Sir, please approach the problem of Dr Christian's death bearing those facts
in mind! Martyrdom isn't an outcome you need worry about'

He put his chin on his hand, chewed his
lips, then looked across at her wryly. 'Martyrs,' he said, 'come in two types.
The persecuted variety, and the self-made variety. He's the self-made martyr.
You must surely admit, Judith, that there is such a creature — look at half the
world's mothers.'

'Then we must try to ensure the people
don't look at him in that light,' she said, and rose to her feet. 'You don't
need me now, Mr President. If you don't mind, I ought to get across to Walter
Reed and see Mr Magnus.'

He looked startled; clearly he had
forgotten the existence of the Secretary for the Environment. 'Yes, certainly!
Thank you, Judith. Please convey my regards to Harold, and tell him he can
expect a visit from me tomorrow morning.' Tibor Reece's fine dark eyes held a
dangerous gleam.

How he knew it Dr Carriol didn't
understand, but somehow the President did know that Harold Magnus was
shamming.

That night, as a weary but delighted
nation thought about settling back into the weary routines of everyday life, the
President commandeered all television and radio stations for a special
broadcast. The time was eight o'clock, the hour at which the Millennial Ball had
been scheduled to commence; it had of course been cancelled.