NEXT BEST HOPE (The Revelation Trilogy) (11 page)

“When my wife and I started having trouble, I almost succumbed to the evils of drink at a Motel Six one night,” Billy said as they parked in front of the office. “I guess I should have gone ahead and got drunk for all the good staying sober did me.”

“If you’d been a queer, you could have avoided all that,” DeShaun said, laughing.

“I never looked at it that way,” Billy said as he squirmed in his seat.

They took separate rooms.

“I’ll meet you in the parking lot at five in the morning,” Billy said. “I want to make Shiloh tomorrow before it gets too late.”

They had been on the road an hour when the sun came up the next morning. In the morning light, they found themselves in some of the richest agricultural country in the world, the Mississippi Delta, where top soil reaches depths of two hundred feet.

“You ever been to Greenville, Mississippi, Brother Billy?” DeShaun asked.

“Can’t say that I have,” he said.

“There’s a reason the blues grew up around there,” DeShaun said.

As they drove farther north, they began to see thousands of acres of farmland stretching flat on either side of the road, filled with cotton as high as your head.

“They make four and five bale cotton around here,” DeShaun said.

“Educate me,” Billy said.

“A bale of cotton is five hundred pounds. Around here they make up to twenty-five hundred pounds per acre. That’s unheard of most places in the world,” DeShaun said.

“How did you come to know so much about cotton, Reverend Moore?” Billy asked knowing there was a story waiting to be told.

“I grew up in Leland, a few miles east of Greenville,” DeShaun began. “As far back as anyone can tell, my kin folks were sharecroppers or slaves in that God-forbidden country. When we get there, you can see for yourself how far we have come since the Emancipation Proclamation. The only thing the end of the Civil War did for my progenitors was to kick us off the plantation into shanties across the road from the big house.”

Brother Billy heard the bitterness in his voice, something he was not accustomed to from DeShaun. While he listened to DeShaun chronicle the annals of a population subjugated by church-going people who prayed to the same God he purported to worship, he remembered all the times he had seen some redneck driving a truck with a Confederate flag emblazoned on the back window and not cared enough to engage the sumbitch in conversation. He ceased to wonder why God had cast him out of the ministry. He deserved it.

“So, how did you break the cycle?” Brother Billy asked.

“I graduated number one in my class at a high school that had only become fully integrated my junior year. It created an uproar in the community. Parents pressured my teachers to change my grades, administrators averaged scores every way they could think of to give someone else an advantage, but try as they may, I was too far ahead of the next guy. They just couldn’t cheat him past me.”

“So?” Billy said.

“On graduation day, when I stepped to the mike to give the valedictory address, half the adults in the auditorium marched out. Their kids, who were sitting together in the section of seats right in front of me, looked back in shame, then stood and applauded me.”

Billy could see the emotion in DeShaun’s eyes.

“I gave my speech, accepted my diploma, and the next morning packed my bags, and caught a bus to Greenwich Village, where I had been accepted in the New School. I never looked back. Today will be the first time I have passed through there in thirty years,” DeShaun said.

As they approached Greenville, Billy saw a structure rising out of the northern horizon.

“What the heck is that?” he said.

“Beats me,” DeShaun said.

As they drew closer, they saw a suspension bridge unlike anything they had ever imagined. Its two towers supported a lattice-work of cables that suspended a four lane highway above the Mississippi River for more than a quarter of a mile. Its cutting edge design and modernistic styling stood in stark contrast with the delta farmland surrounding it, creating the feeling as if a spaceship had landed there, and its alien occupants, trapped at this time and place until they finished their mission, had built the greatest monument they could imagine in hopes their superiors would free them from their assignment on the strange planet its primitive inhabitants called Earth.

“I guess tourism must be picking up,” DeShaun said. “Think how many poor Black kids could have gone to college on the money it took to build this bridge,” he said as they looked over the sides of the structure at the swirling waters of the Mississippi.

As they came off the bridge on the east side of the river, Brother Billy checked his side mirror several times. DeShaun saw him and did the same.

“Company?” DeShaun asked.

“I think they have been trailing us ever since I picked you up. They are hanging well back as if they just want to be sure of our location,” Billy said.

“You think we need to have a little sit-down with them?” DeShaun asked.

“They don’t seem to pose an imminent threat. Let’s take care of our main business and deal with them later,” Billy replied.

“I’m with you,” DeShaun said glancing in the mirror again.

For the next hour, they rode through the alluvial plain of that great river. They saw the shacks and the big houses.

“There’s where my Uncle Alf spent his ninety years,” DeShaun said, pointing at a falling down, shotgun house grown up with weeds. “My Auntie Mae passed away last year. There’s no one left who cares about the place anymore.”

About fifty miles east of Greenville, they began to climb out of the flatlands into terrain with some relief, peppered with hardwoods.

“The Mississippi played its role in the Civil War,” Billy said. “But we are going to a place where the Tennessee River turned the tide.”

“Maybe you can do the same thing today,” DeShaun said.

“I’m going to give it my best shot,” Brother Billy said.

About one o’clock, they pulled up to a road block on the two-lane leading to the National Military Park at Shiloh. When a young soldier approached them and told them no one could pass beyond the check point, Billy handed him an ID that looked like a passport but had some supporting documents attached.

“Sorry, Brother Bright,” the soldier said. “I didn’t realize who you were. We have been expecting you and Reverend Moore. Drive ahead until you reach the next checkpoint. They will show you where to park,” he said.

As Brother Billy drove past him, he heard the young man say, “May God be with you, Brother Billy.” In his rearview mirror, Billy saw the young man bow his head for a second and cross himself.

“Nothing like a little pressure,” Brother Billy said to Deshaun as the soldiers at the next checkpoint directed them to their parking spot.

“That’s why they pay us the big bucks,” DeShaun said as he stepped out of the car and reached into his bag for his Colt .45-caliber pistol.

From the center console of the Men-in-Black car, Brother Billy drew out a cross on a gold chain he used as a bookmark in his pulpit Bible and draped it around his neck. He scooted out of the front seat, donned his First Baptist Church, Kilgore, Texas baseball cap, hitched his pants, and started walking down the lane towards the visitor center, which the dark branches and green leaves of the mature oak trees blocked from his view.

LINK JEFFERSON ASSIGNED
twenty agents to the task of finding the surviving people named on the list of fourteen from the Minion headquarters in Houston. After three days, they had nothing to show for their efforts, nothing, that is, but more dead bodies.

In Cleveland, agents broke a door down in a high-end condo building, only to find a husband and wife curled up in each other’s arms, naked, four days deceased from gunshot wounds, perhaps self-inflicted.

In San Francisco, Homeland Security stood by helplessly while Number Five on the list ranted to the gaping on-lookers about the Second Coming of Jesus before hurling himself from the Golden Gate Bridge. The Coast Guard fished his body out of the bay three hours later. When they stripped off the outer layer of his clothes, they found a CM flag wrapped tightly around his torso.

Near Waco, Texas, the agents almost caught a break. Less than two miles from David Koresh’s compound, they set up a perimeter just out of sight of an old farm house and watched it for two days. They intercepted a man on his way in and began questioning him, but before they could break him, a fire erupted at the farm house. When they stormed in, they found Number Six on the floor in a part of the shack not yet consumed by flames, dead for only a few minutes. They tracked foot prints from the structure to an abandoned mineshaft a few hundred yards from the house. Inside the mine, they found signs that someone had been holed up there. They began a search, but soon realized the mine’s serpentine maze of tunnels would take weeks to plumb.

From the fourteen names on the list, they had confirmed a total of seven dead: the two men at the cotton patch, the man and wife in bed, the driver of the armored car that killed the Vice President and Secretary of Treasury, the jumper in San Francisco and the man found dead in the burning farm house.

“Are these people taking themselves out, or is someone beating us to them?” Link asked his advisors when he received the word from Waco.

“It’s obviously some of both,” the head man from Homeland Security said.

“I don’t understand why Ithurial Finis’ name isn’t on the list if he was the man who planned the conspiracy,” Link said.

“Maybe it’s his list,” the Secret Service chief said. “That might explain why his name is not on it and also how he knows which people to eliminate before they talk.”

“He doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who would leave a list like this as evidence of a conspiracy to kill the President. He would know it could sign death warrants for all of them. He probably knew who was on the list, but I’ll bet someone else wrote this down without his knowledge. It was probably the amateur in the deal, maybe even the big cheese who bankrolled it. What about this guy they nabbed on his way to the farmhouse in Waco? Is he on the list?” Link asked.

“Not unless he is using an alias unknown to us so far,” Link’s lead agent from Justice said. “We’re not letting go of him anytime soon. We’ll see what connections he can offer us. We’re trying to turn up the heat on him every way we can.”

“Make it hot enough that he begins to feel uncomfortable,” Link said. “Agent Brown reported that he saw Leon Martinez meeting with a bunch of paramilitary types not far from Shiloh a few days before the raid on the park. Have we been able to ID any of the guys who are leading the standoff there to determine any connection they may have to Finis or Westmoreland?” Link asked.

“They are like ghosts,” the Secret Service man replied. “We can’t get close enough to take good pictures of them, and they wear ski masks any time they come out in the open. We’re hoping William Bright can help us with the identification after his meeting with them.”

“William Bright?” Link said lost for a minute. “Oh. Sure. Brother Billy. When is he going in?”

“It should be just about now,” the Homeland Security agent said.

THE U.S. COAST
Guard shut down the Tennessee River for ten miles in both directions from Pittsburg Landing, the spot where the Yankees landed their reinforcements to stem the defeat looming after the first day of battle at Shiloh in April 1862. The Coast Guard gun boats patrolled up and down the river, presenting an ever-present show of force to the handful of CM operatives holding the bluffs overlooking the waterway.

The night that Brother Billy and DeShaun slept in separate rooms at the Motel Six, an aluminum-chambered Coast Guard vessel drifted across the river a few hundred yards east of the landing with its lights out, ferrying its precious cargo to a date with destiny. An agent in night gear, with a duffel bag slung across his back, hopped off the boat and slogged the few feet to shore. On dry ground, he motioned for the boat to leave him. He soon blended into the landscape, seeking refuge next to one of the ancient Indian burial mounds on the grounds of Shiloh National Military Park. When he realized no CM forces were coming for him, he made his way through the dense forest near the river to a vantage point where he could possibly get an angle on the visitor center when the sun came up. Then he covered himself with leaves and a parka, and hoped the shade would keep him reasonably cool in the June heat. He also hoped Brother Billy would be there early in the morning. He took his cell phone from a buttoned fatigue pocket and called in to a secure number.

“This is Brown. I am in position,” he said before he hung up.

•  •  •

At the same time, a man worked his way up the southwest bank of the river towards Shiloh without the benefit of U.S. Coast Guard support. Near a catfish place that bordered the west side of the park, he changed from his fatigues into a Special Forces uniform, stashed his duffel bag in the bushes and sauntered in the front door to get something to eat.

Because the highway was shut down, Army personnel were the only customers in the place. He took a seat at the bar and ordered all you can eat catfish fillets and iced tea. He looked out the picture window at the Tennessee River and marveled at the calm waters where small mouth bass hit the surface as if they had no idea a national crisis was underway a few hundred yards from them.

A young soldier a couple of seats down from him studied his Special Forces insignia. “You think tomorrow will be the day?” he asked him.

“The day for what?” the man asked.

“You know. The day this thing ends,” the soldier said.

“I think there is a good chance it will be,” the Special Forces man said. “Between you and me, I hope we can get out of this deal without having to kill anybody.”

“Me, too,” the young soldier said.

When the Special Forces soldier finished eating, he got up to leave.

“Let me get your check tonight,” the young soldier said. “You can call it a good luck omen for tomorrow.”