The Mormon Candidate - a Novel (16 page)

How c
ould I say no to God?

Bishop Morgan suggested
that
fasting a
nd prayer would help me embrace
the calling to serve. He
must have seen the pain on my face
, because he took my hands, and we sang
together
the hymn “Sacrifice brings forth the blessings of Heaven.”

Chapter 17

“Unbelievable!” Ben put aside Zachariah’s
iTouch
and turned on the laptop. He went to Joe Morgan’
s campaign website
:

www.JoeMorgan4President.org.

The homepage banner said:
Restore America’s soul!
The rest of the page was taken by a photo of Morgan in jeans and a flannel shirt, standing at a podium on a makeshift stage, surrounded by haystacks and American flags. The left side of the photo captured part of his audience—men, women, and children waving flags and signs that said:
We Believe!

Ben clicked on the button for
Candidate
’s
Bio
.

A
ll major milestones in
Morgan’s
life
were listed
:
Born in Illinois, son of
successful industrialist
, Eagle Scout, two-year mission for the LDS Church, college and MBA at Harvard
,
and, as Zachariah’s journal described, a wealthy businessman in the early
ninetie
s who eventually turned to politics, serving one term as
g
overnor of Ma
ryland and
now
the GOP presidential candidate.
There was no mention of leadership positions in the Mormon Church.

At the bottom
was a photo of Morgan
’s
home in Silver Spring—a redbrick mansion that fit Zachariah’s description
.

A list of links to his major speeches included the one titled: “
My faith is a private matter.
” Ben clicked on
the link and
a small YouTube window opened.

Speaking
at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library,
Joe Morgan
declared
:
“
Article Six of the United States
Constitution
says
, and I’m quoting: ‘
…but no
religious test shall be
required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the Unites States
.
’ Let me say to all those who
wish to
pry into the private spiritual life that my family and I
deeply
cherish:
There’s no curtain to peek behind, no
dark
secrets to uncover, and no unusual customs to
leer at. You would do better to
direct
your
energy at
seeking
your own spiritual joy
.
And to my fellow citizens, my fellow Christians, and my fellow Republicans, I say this: All you need to know is that my faith will continue to inspire me to serve my country to the best of my ability. And when you
elect me as
p
resident of the United States, I will
serve
a
s leader of all Americans without preference or favoritism to any particular race, ethnicity, or
creed
!”

Ben pulled up Wik
ipedia and searched for
Governor
Joseph Morgan
, finding a more detailed
biography.
He clicked on the heading
Mormon Church
Lay-Leadership
Positions
and
there it was, the confirmation to Zachariah Hinckley’s story:

1991
-199
5
:
Lay
B
ishop,
LDS
’s Silver Spring Ward in
Maryland

1995-1997: Lay Stake Presiden
t for
all
LDS
wards in the
State of Maryland

The
se
were
important clergy
positions
,
but
Ben
didn’t remember hearing any discussions of them during
the presidential campaign
or even during
the primaries
last year. Joe Morgan
had
obviously
been
considered by
the Mormon C
hurch
leaders
to be worthy and faith
ful enough to serve in
influ
ential positions in the church
hierarchy
, yet his
record of
ecclesiastical prominence
was
curiously absent from the political discourse
.

Ben went back to Zachariah’s
iTouch
, but the low
battery warning was on. He used the charger from his own iPhone to
juice it up a bit
, which gave him an idea. Using a USB cable and a few minutes of tinkering with the application, he managed to
copy
it
to his own iPhone.
He touched the sailing ship icon, the knightly woman appeared, waving a sword-like pencil at pirates and
cutting off
the sea creature’s tentacles. Ben pressed the pencil’s orange eraser, Zachariah’s face popped up and asked for the motto
, and
Ben
typed
Semper Fidelis
.
T
he
banner appeared:
Welcome to my journal!
Opening the file, he
verified
that all of it w
as successfully copied.

He
disconnected Zachariah’s
iTouch
and put it aside. Now he could r
ead the journal on his own device
.

Chapter 18

Z.H. Journal
Entry # 7
:

My first three years at the US Department of Veterans Affairs
were
spent
transferring paper archive
s
to electronic files. Together with a dozen other employees, I sat in a cubicle
all day, every day (except for
lunch
es
,
cookie
breaks, and frequent leg-stretching
walks up and down the drab hallways)
and keyed in
veterans’
information
from a stack of paper files into
the computerized database
.

L
ike most government
equipment
,
by the time it was install
ed
the
new system
was
a decade behind the private sector.
R
eading
PC Magazine
made me feel l
ike Moses,
looking over at the
digital
promised land but
forbidden to enter it
.
Also,
I was having a hard time sleeping, a condition that required medication
, especially w
ith three little kids and a
pregnant
wife who
constantly
share
d
the frustrations of her days
.

In early 1995, I wa
s promoted
to manager
, which gave me short-
lived hope of making
a
small
difference. I spent three months writing a detailed report
that
list
ed
the shortcomings in the
way the department handled electronic data
and outlin
ed
improvements.
My
boss,
the section supervisor
,
duly sent
my
recommendations
up
the
chain of command, where
they
disappeared into
a
bureaucratic
black hole
.

One day, out of the blue,
Bishop Morgan
invited me for
lunch
at his office
on the top floor of t
he Nibberworth Investment Bank
in Rockville.
Before we bit into our sandwiches, we spent a few minutes studying the scriptures. The bishop spoke about
an important element of our faith
—the salvation of the dead
.
He explained the words of Paul in
I Corinthians:
Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? Why are they then baptized for the dead?
No other church but ours follows Paul’s prescription for the ritual of offering salvation to the dead,
as Joseph Smi
th had taught.

Historically, Brother Morgan explained, it had started with Saints who performed posthumous baptism rituals for their parents and grandparents who had passed on before the restoration of Christ’s True Church by the Prophet Joseph Smith. But like all virtuous customs, it had expanded through additional revelations to include all souls of dead Gentiles, whose identities were continuously collected through extensive investigations globally called
extractions
,
which the Church pursued no matter what the expense was in time and money.

Bishop Morgan described his recent visit to the magnificent genealogical center at the Church headquarters in Utah, where huge underground archives contain hundreds of millions of names and family lines going back centuries, which
had been
extracted from
various
records all over the world
for posthumous baptizing
.

Joe Morgan
was an eloquent man, and
I was grateful for the knowledge and warmth
he shared so generously.
I had no
idea
that this was more than a gesture of religious and emotional support from my bishop, as busy as he was with
both
his
professional and ecclesiastical
responsibilities
.
When
I
was leaving
, he invited me to come with my family to dinner at his house the following week.

Chapter 19

Ben went back to the living room and turned on the TV. His camera was still connected to it. He got the slideshow function going again
and ran it
backward through the photos from the
Camp David
Scenic Overlook
. When it reached the victim lying at the bottom looking up, Ben zoomed in on the face.

Zachariah Hinckley seemed to be looking straig
ht at the camera.
His lips pronounced one word before his body twitched in a final
, fatal
spasm
.

Keera ha
d thought the word was “Palmyra,
”
but now
Ben
suspected it was a different word. A message.

He
zoomed in even further, and the lips filled the screen. The photos changed slowly, and Ben said it out loud with the lips: “Pal…my…rah.”
I
t
was possible, but the lip
movements
didn’t fit
perfectly. He
rewound and tried again, this time saying: “Post…hue…mous.” He did it twice more, and it fit perfectly.

Sitting on the sofa, he shook his head. “That’s what you’re saying,” he told the dead man on the screen. “
Posthumous!
”

The discovery told Ben that
Zachariah Hinckley
’s death
had
something to do with
the
posthumous baptisms
described in
the journal
. But those
events had occurred
sixteen or seventeen
years
earlier inside the cloistered world of the LDS Church, making an investigation very challenging.