The Sign (47 page)

T
hey met in the five-star downtown hotel, as per Rydell’s instructions. Located just off the lobby, the Grove Café seemed like a good spot. It was an open, public area with other people around. Rydell felt he’d be safe there.

Drucker was already there when he arrived. He was seated at a low table by a wall of glass that looked out onto the street. It was late afternoon under clear skies, and a few pedestrians were promenading by on the wide pavement outside. Drucker motioned for Rydell to join him.

As Rydell sat, Drucker reached down and pulled out a small box from his briefcase. He placed it squarely on the table, to one side. It was black and heavy and the size of a paperback novel, and had a couple of small
LED
lights on its side.

“You don’t mind, do you?” he asked Rydell, “just in case you were planning on taping any of this.” He didn’t really wait for an answer and discreetly nudged a small button on the box. The LEDs lit up. Rydell shrugged and glanced around to see its effect. A couple of people in the room who’d been talking on their cell phones were now examining them curiously and pressing random buttons to try and get a signal back. Rydell knew they wouldn’t be able to. Not until Drucker was done and had switched off his jammer.

Drucker gave Rydell a knowing smile and covered the jammer with his napkin. A waitress came over to ask what they wanted, but Rydell sent her away with a stern shake of his head. They weren’t here for an afternoon tea.

“I’m surprised you’re down here,” Drucker said. “Couldn’t resist seeing its effect with your own eyes?” He cracked a slight smile, but it didn’t hide the fact that he seemed to be fishing for something.

Rydell ignored the question. “What are you up to, Keenan?” he asked evenly.

Drucker sat back and exhaled slowly. He studied Rydell like a principal wondering what to do about a wayward student. After a moment, he said, “Do you love this country?”

Rydell didn’t get the question’s relevance. “Excuse me?”

“Do you love this country?” Drucker repeated firmly.

“What kind of a question is that?”

Drucker opened his palms. “Indulge me.”

Rydell frowned. “Of course, I love my country. What does that have to do with anything?”

Drucker nodded, as if that was the right answer. “I love it too, Larry. I’ve devoted my whole life to serving it. And this used to be a great country. A world leader. The Japanese, the Chinese . . . they weren’t even a speck in our rearview mirror. We put a man on the moon fifty years ago. Fifty years ago. We used to be the standard bearers of modernity. We were the ones showing the rest of the world how it’s done, how science and technology and new ideas can help us live better lives. We were the ones exploring new visions of what a twenty-first-century society should look like. And where are we now? What have we become?”

“A lot poorer,” Rydell lamented.

“Poorer, meaner, fatter . . . and dumber. We’re moving backward. Everyone else is charging ahead and we’re backpedaling to the point where we’ve become a joke. We’ve lost our standing in the world. And you know why? Leadership,” he said, jabbing an angry finger at Rydell. “It’s all about leadership. We used to elect presidents who blew us away with their intelligence. With their knowledge of the world and their sharp wit and their dignity. Guys who used to inspire us, guys the rest of the world respected, guys who made us proud. Guys who had vision.”

“We have one of those now,” Rydell interjected.

“And you think we’re out of the woods?” Drucker shot back. “You think, hey presto, the country’s safe now? Think again. We just had eight years of an oil wildcatter I wouldn’t even hire to run a car wash, eight years of a guy who thought his instincts were manifestations of God’s will, eight years of criminal incompetence and unbridled arrogance that brought our country to its knees, and did we learn anything? Clearly not. Hell, it took the economic meltdown of the century to just barely manage to scrape through this victory. This was no landslide, Larry. Damn near half the country voted for more of the same—or worse. We actually came this close to putting someone who thinks
The Flintstones
is based on fact, someone who only got a passport a year before the election and who wouldn’t take an interview for a month while she was whisked away to be quietly educated about what’s happening in the real world, someone who actually thinks she’s going to see Jesus Christ again on this earth during her lifetime and who thinks our boys in Iraq are out there doing God’s work,” he raged, slamming his palm against the table. “We actually came this close to putting someone as risibly, absurdly unqualified as that within a seventy-two-year-old cancer-weakened heartbeat of the presidency. As ridiculous and insane as that sounds, it actually almost happened, Larry, and it could still happen. That’s how blinded we’ve become when it comes to choosing our leaders. And do you know why it almost happened? You know why they almost got away with it?”

Rydell thought about Father Jerome and started to see what Drucker was getting at. “Because God is on their side,” he said.

“Because God is on their side,” Drucker repeated solemnly.

“Or so they claim,” Rydell added with a slight, mocking shrug.

“That’s all it takes. We’ll elect any bumbling fool, any champion of mediocrity to the highest office in the land as long as they have God as their running mate. We’ll hand them responsibility for everything—the food we eat, the homes we live in, the air we breathe—we’ll give them the power to nuke other countries and destroy the planet, even when they can’t pronounce the world ‘nuclear’ properly. And we’ll do that proudly and with no hesitation at all just as long as they say the magic words: that they believe. That they have Jesus in their heart. That they seek the guidance of a higher father. That they can look into the heart of a Russian president instead of talking to the experts. We’ve got presidents making policy decisions based on faith, not reason. And I’m not talking about Iran here. I’m not talking about Saudi Arabia or the Taliban. I’m talking about us. I’m talking about America and this evangelical revival that’s sweeping the country. We’ve got presidents making political decisions based on the Book of Revelations, Larry. The Book of Revelations.”

He settled back to catch his breath and watched Rydell for a reaction before pressing on. “We were a great country once. A rich country the rest of the world envied. Then they put a guy in there who thought Russia was an evil empire and thought we were living through the prophecies of Armageddon. They got us a guy who found Jesus but can’t read a balance sheet, and they’re out there running the country down to the ground and waging wars in the name of God and getting our boys blown to bits, and half the country’s still marching into church every Sunday and coming out with a big smile and waving the flag of their redeemer nation—”

“I know you’re angry about Jackson,” Rydell interrupted, the face of Drucker’s deceased son suddenly flashing up in his mind and making him aware of what was really fueling this, “but—”

“Angry?” Drucker growled. “Oh, I’m not just angry, Larry. I’m fucking furious. And don’t get me wrong. I’m not one to mollycoddle our troops. A soldier’s job is to put his life on the line for his country. Jackson knew that when he signed up. But our country was not at risk here. This is a war that never should have happened. Never,” he bellowed. “And the only reason it did was that we had an incompetent fool with daddy issues and a messiah complex running the show. And that can’t be allowed to happen again.”

Rydell leaned in closer. He knew how much Drucker had loved his son, knew of all the grand plans he’d had for him. He had to tread carefully. “I’m with you on this, Keenan. We’re on the same page here. But what you’re doing is—”

Drucker headed him off with a quieting hand and nodded like he knew what Rydell was about to say. “We can’t allow this to go on, Larry. They’ve got it so politicians can’t get elected these days if they say they believe in Darwin. They’ve turned a college degree into a stigma and ‘elitist’ into a dirty word.” His eyes narrowed. “In the America of the twenty-first century, faith trumps competence. Faith trumps reason. Faith trumps knowledge and research and open debate and careful consideration. Faith trumps everything. And we need to turn that whole mind-set on its head. We need to bring back a respect for fact. For knowledge. For science and education and intelligence and reason. But you can’t reason with these people. We both know that. You can’t have a political debate with someone who thinks you’re an agent of Satan. They won’t compromise, because to them, compromising means compromising with the devil, and no God-fearing Christian would want to do that. No, the only way to put an end to this is to make it embarrassing for people and for politicians to flout their faith. We’ve got to take that tool away from the guys who’re using it to win elections and advance whatever agendas they have. We need to make it as embarrassing to say you’re a creationist as it would be if you said you still support slavery in this day and age. We need to sweep religion into the dustbin of political discourse, just like we did for slavery. And we have to do it now. The country’s caught in a voodoo trance, Larry. You’ve seen the numbers. Sixty percent of the country believes the story of Noah’s Ark is literally true. Sixty percent. There are seventy million Evangelicals out there—a quarter of the population, attending a couple of hundred thousand evangelical churches, most of which are run by pastors who belong to conservative political organizations, and these guys are telling them which way to vote. And the people are listening, and they’re not voting for the guy whose policies make sense. They’re not voting for the guy with the brains or the vision. They’re voting for whoever will help them improve their standing when they get to the pearly gates. And it’s getting worse. This delusion is spreading. There’s a new megachurch opening every other day. Literally every other day.”

Drucker fixed Rydell with blazing intent. “You think global warming is around the corner? This threat’s already here. We may have dodged the bullet with this election, but they’re still out there, they’ll be back, and they’ll fight twice as dirty. They look at it as a war. A war against secularism. A crusade to reclaim the kingdom of God from the nonbelievers and save us all from gay marriage and abortion and stem cell research. And the way things are going, they’re going to make it. At some point, these prayer warriors are going to put a televangelist in the oval office. And then we’ll have a bunch of whack jobs running Capitol Hill and another bunch of nutcases facing off against them in the Middle East, each of them thinking God wants them to show the other the error of their ways, and guess what? It’s going to get ugly. They’ll be lobbing nukes at each other before it’s over. And I’m not going to let that happen.”

Rydell wasn’t following. “And you’re going to do that by giving them a prophet to fire them up even more?”

Drucker just stared at him enigmatically. “Yes.”

“I don’t get it.” Rydell pressed on. “You’re giving them something real, a real miracle man to worship and rally around. A Second Coming to unite them all.”

“Yes,” Drucker repeated, leading him.

Rydell tried to follow his train of thought. “You’re getting all the church leaders to embrace him and hitch their wagons to his train.”

“Yes.” This time, a hint of satisfaction cracked across Drucker’s face.

Rydell’s brow furrowed. “And then you’ll get him to change his message?”

Drucker shook his head. “No,” he stated. “I’ll just pull the rug out from under him.”

Rydell stared at him questioningly—then his eyes shot wide. “You’re going to expose him as a fake?”

“Exactly.” Drucker’s hard stare burned into him. “We’ll let it run for a while. Weeks. Months. Just let it build. Let every pastor in the country accept him and endorse him as God’s messenger. Let them spread the word to their flocks,” he added, spitting out the word mockingly. “And when it’s all sunk in and settled, when it’s deeply embedded and they’re all on the hook—we’ll show him for what he really is. We’ll show them what the sign really is.”

“And you’ll show them how gullible they are.” Rydell had a faraway look on his face as he imagined the outcome in his mind’s eye.

“The preachers will have so much egg on their faces they’ll have a hard time stepping behind those pulpits and facing their people. The churchgoers will feel like they’ve been had—and maybe they’ll start questioning the rest of the crap they hear in those halls. It’ll open up a whole new discussion, a whole new questioning frame of mind. ‘If it was so easy to fool us today, with everything we know . . . how easy was it to fool people two thousand years ago? What do we really know about that?’ It’ll put everything about religion on the table. And it’ll make people think twice about who they’re willing to follow blindly.”

Rydell felt heady. He himself had been ready to try and convert the world to his cause, but this . . . this went much further. He let out a weary hiss and shook his head. “You’ll make a lot of them even more fanatical than they already are,” he warned.

“Probably,” Drucker agreed casually.

“And you could also start a civil war,” Rydell added, “if not a world war.”

Drucker scoffed. “Oh, I very much doubt that.”

“Are you kidding me?” Rydell flared. “You’re going to have a whole bunch of really angry people out there. And they’ll be looking to take it out on someone. Who’s going to shoulder the blame? You can’t exactly stand up and tell them, ‘Hey, we did it for your own good.’ The country’s already split right down the middle on this. You’ll polarize them even more. The blowback will be horrendous. There’ll be blood in the streets. And that’s before you get the blowback from the rest of the world. You’ve seen what’s starting to happen in Pakistan, in Egypt, in Israel and Indonesia. It’s not just Christians who are buying into your little scam. Muslims, Jews, Hindus . . . they’re fighting among each other over whether or not he’s the real deal. And they’re going to be seriously pissed off when they discover it’s got Uncle Sam’s fingerprints all over it. People don’t take kindly to having others mess around with their beliefs, Keenan. They get real angry about that. And it’s Americans who are going to pay for it with their blood. You’re gonna end up triggering a war you’re trying to stop.”