Parishioner (22 page)

From IHOP Ecks got in his car and headed for the beach.

Charlie Mothers’s yacht was in the wealthiest part of the marina. It stood as high as a three-story building in the water and had tiers and windows like a house. A powerfully built, bald Asian man with an orange-and-yellow tattoo like a sun around his left eye guarded the gangplank. He looked dangerous but Xavier wasn’t worried. Death, he knew, would come up on him like an unwanted surprise party. He’d probably be smiling just before the knife went in.

“Yes, sir?” the guardian said softly.

“Egbert Noland for the man who lives here.”

The security man made eye contact with the Parishioner. He was trying to see whether he could stare Ecks down. When this failed his eyes searched Ecks’s hands and clothes, looking for weapons. He accepted that the visitor was dangerous and didn’t want to use the walkie-talkie if that meant he would be vulnerable to attack.

Xavier saw all this and shouted, “Hey, Mothers, I’m down here!”

The exhortation bothered the protector, but before he could express this dissatisfaction a man said, “Hey, Soon, send Brother Ecks up!”

There were two skinny women with huge breasts and in impossibly small bikinis sunning themselves in beach chairs on the upper deck of Charlie Mothers’s yacht; white girls with blond hair, red lips, and skinny legs that looked like they could crush walnuts the size of pillows.

“Ecks!” a man shouted.

He was at least a demigod. Six-six with bronze skin and yellow hair. His eyes were the color of the ocean, and the muscles beneath the skin of his bare chest and arms undulated like huge snakes under a satin sheet. This deified man strode easily from the pilot’s dais onto the upper deck.

He wore dark blue sweatpants cinched tight to his thirty-inch waist, and his smile belonged to a presidential hopeful: white and contagious.

They shook hands and Ecks allowed himself a mild smirk.

The women sat up, aware that their host-provider wasn’t always so friendly and inviting.

“Nerd boy,” Ecks said in greeting.

Charlie Mothers laughed loudly.

“Can’t fool you,” the blond titan said.

“You got what I need, man?”

“I have things that you don’t know you need yet,” Mothers said. “I have things you couldn’t even imagine.”

“I can imagine a razor across the naked eye.”

“Come on downstairs, Ecks. Let us see what we shall see before we’re blinded by an Andalusian dog.”

Two floors down in the floating mansion Mothers brought Ecks to a large, nearly refrigerated room filled with computers, screens, and keyboards. Charlie took a zippered sweatshirt from a wall hook and wrapped it around his naked torso.

“There’s a coat hanging on the door behind you,” the taller man offered.

“No, thanks,” Ecks said. He was never really bothered by intense cold or heat. For that matter he was generally unfazed by any kind of pain. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel these sensations: it was that they intruded only as nuisances in his mind.

Charlie pulled two rolling chairs up to an eighty-inch LCD screen, pressed a few buttons on a red keyboard that had no wires. This keyboard he placed on his lap.

Ecks sat down and the screen came to life. There appeared the photograph of a man, woman, and teenage boy. They were standing together in front of a big Victorian, under an ancient, dark green pine. It was a driveway built for many cars. The man and woman were both short and dumpy, clad in leisure wear. His gray hair was receding and her black tresses came out of a bottle applied in an upscale salon.

The boy was blue eyed, blond, and taciturn. He didn’t want to be in that photograph, under that tree, next to his parents, or on the same planet where any of those things existed. He was carrying a multicolored skateboard, wearing artfully torn jeans, and had on a pale blue dress shirt that was soiled with all the buttons undone.

The woman was sneering at her son’s appearance.

The man was smiling forcefully at the camera.

“Balford and Jeannine Marcus with their son, Henry,” Mothers said. “This picture was taken nine years ago. Since then Hank went to college, dropped out, opened a surf shop, and developed a taste for various white powders. Jeannine died of a congenital heart problem, and Balford moved to Maui with a girl who graduated from high school the year after his son.

“The boy is in AA and falls off the wagon each year in July. Smokes too much and according to his Facebook account finds a new girlfriend every August.”

Mothers hit a pink key and two new photographs took the place of the one. On the left side of the screen stood a tall and slender man next to a buxom woman who looked like she should be grinning but instead forced a frown. Both in their forties, they had the old-fashioned
aesthetic to look dour for portraits. It was an older photograph, fifteen years or so, Xavier thought. On the other side was a newer picture of a young blue-eyed, crew-cut blond man in an orange jumpsuit. He was sitting on the other side of a bulletproof glass window. A California prison. San Quentin, if Xavier wasn’t mistaken.

“Lester Lehman murdered his parents for no apparent reason on an April afternoon at their home in Oxnard,” Charlie Mothers said. “He used a shotgun. Killed his sister and the housekeeper too. He’s about to get a second trial because certain facts brought up in the original hearing were illegally obtained. Cylla Pride’s firm is representing him.”

“No shit.”

“The law is the law,” Mothers intoned.

“You think these two are my boys?”

“They were both adopted in April ’eighty-eight. The same witness signed both papers—Sedra Landcombe.”

Ecks frowned and sat back in the office chair.

Mothers went on. “But that’s not the kicker.”

“No?”

“Not nearly,” the bronze man said with an unconscious goofy grin plastered across his face. “This Verify thing was a real poser. I finally found a data trail of false identity papers for underage children that led to a legal adoption agency named Libertas, Unitum, Veritas Incorporated, called LUV. This nonprofit corporation is one of many subgroups belonging to Wicker Enterprises. The legal major revenue stream for Wicker is a company that makes commercials for third-world television companies. But if you look closely you can see that there’s another business buried beneath the commercial company.”

Mothers hit a key and a group of photographs organized themselves into the general form of Picasso’s
Guérnica
. The images in this collage were even more disturbing than the antiwar original: young boys being buggered by fat tattooed men, girl children suffering triple penetration by men wearing dresses, a naked child praying while a man ejaculated over his face and hands. There were two dozen images, each more unsettling than the last.

“Verify’s films cost at least a thousand dollars per copy,” Mothers said. “They’re sold all around the world. Even I can’t locate the IP where the offers originate and the money is collected. It’s probably in some country that has an absolute monarch or dictator. They make
double-digit millions.”

“What does this have to do with the third boy?” Ecks asked.

Mothers switched off the image and turned to his fellow congregant.

“On May third, 1988, LUV gave Leonard Oscar Phillips to Loretta and Manly Hopkins for adoption. Again, Sedra Landcombe signed the adoption papers. Over the years the Hopkinses have adopted nine children—every one of them a moneymaker for Wicker Enterprises.”

“That, um, that poster,” Ecks said. “Was it Wicker’s?”

“No.… What I mean to say is that I got the images from a secret Wicker website but I used an image system that uses various surrealist paintings for templates to present collections of images. Like it?”

“Where do the Hopkinses live?”

“In the hills of Santa Monica. They’ve made a lot of money over the years.”

Xavier considered the information presented by the computer geek in the demigod’s body.

“How many hours?” Ecks asked Charlie.

“How many hours what?”

“Do you work with your trainer?”

“I’m down to five a day, three days a week.”

“Does it help?”

“I haven’t used a computer to blow up a Chinese robot factory or kill some guy in an ICU for a long time.” Mothers’s smile was sickly hopeful.

“What do they call that?” Xavier asked. “What you do.”

“Techno-anarcho-terrorism.
Tat-a-tat, tat-tat-tat
, the ultimate virtual machine gun of the modern world. The battle cry of the downtrodden and disenfranchised. Man-machine against machine-men.”

“But now you funnel these desires into bodybuilding?”

Charlie nodded, looking much less like a deity.

“Pretty much,” the pumped-up hacker agreed.

“Not completely?”

“I want to get into the guts of systems and strip them bare. A hunger like that doesn’t go away. Sometimes I want it so bad that I start sweating.”

“But the exercise stops you,” Ecks said, “that and the bikini girls upstairs.”

“That and the fact that I know Frank would have me killed if I crossed the line.”

“Killed?”

“After the baptism your soul belongs to the church.”

“My soul?”

“Didn’t Frank ever tell you his theory that Earth is Eden for animals but hell for humanity?”

“Just the other day.”

“Didn’t he add that it’s a proving ground and we are here to prove it wrong?”

“He didn’t say that exactly.”

“Frank, as far as I can tell, is the devil,” Mothers said. “Not some evil being but the last chance for evil souls like you and me. He’s there either to usher you into redemption or to bury you underfoot.”

“Nobody ever told me about a baptism,” Ecks said.

“It’s a secret ceremony. We’re not supposed to talk about it.”

“Then why are you?”

“Because, Ecks,” Mothers said, “because you’re special. All the anointed know it. Frank is … Frank is grooming you for something. He brings people into the fold now and then, but rarely does he go out recruiting, not for years now. When he brought you in we all knew to expect greatness.”

“Has Frank ever told you that he’d have you killed if you turned back to your old ways?”

“No. He didn’t have to.”

“You’re crazy. You know that, don’t you, nerd boy?”

“Maybe I am. Maybe it’s crazy to have faith in a higher power. I don’t know. All I can tell you is this—I was planning to put out a virus that would jam the controls of a hundred jumbo jets all at once, all over the world. Every one of them would have crashed in an urban setting. I had it planned down to the microsecond.

“I was nearing the end of the data distribution design when one Sunday morning I was grabbed in my own home and taken to Seabreeze City. I was brought to a sermon and I listened. I was made an initiate, as you are now, and then after three years I was given my first mission. After that I was baptized and now my life belongs to the church.”

Ecks wondered whether the new man in his heart had anything to do with the church of Father Frank. Did he feel the faith that Mothers did, or Iridia, or Captain Soto?

“Do you have all this information printed out for me?” Ecks asked Charlie.