Armageddon Crazy

ONE

Mansard

"No economy can support an institutionalized religion of this size. It's a matter of simple arithmetic."

Mansard was drunk and he didn't give a damn. Over the last few months, his downtime drinking had been getting worse and worse, but when anyone summoned the courage to say something to him, he simply shrugged and asked them what they expected. In a world that had patently gone crazy, the sane man surely had a moral obligation to shut out as much of the lunacy as possible. He looked slowly around the bar. O'Ryan's was a cheesy joint, but that went for every bar in the city, and probably for every bar in the whole sorry country. He ought to be thankful that there was any kind of bar at all for him in which to lose himself. The return of prohibition had been a major plank in the Faithful/Wrench platform. When they had ridden the landslide into power, however, the idea had been quietly dropped. Someone had whispered in Faithful's ear that, judging from the last time around, the net result of a new Volstead act would be to give an astronomical amount of money to organized crime. Larry Faithful might claim a direct line to God, but in day-to-day practice he was nothing if not the pragmatist. The last thing that he and any of the people around him wanted was to give astronomical amounts of money to anyone outside their circle.

Still, Faithful and his gang had done what they could to discourage the social drinker. The friendly tavern had been reduced to a place of shame. Gone was the warmth and comfort that Mansard remembered from his youth. All that remained was a flyblown red-and-blue Budweiser sign with a third of its tubes burned out, a rack of bad generic booze on electronic measure, and a line of barstools so patched with gaffer tape that scarcely any of their original fabric remained. The walls were dominated by the legally mandated display signs that reminded patrons of the manifold evils of demon drink. The sound system oozed one after another of the mawkish saccharine neobilly ballads that dominated the top forty. The deacons and even the miserable, vindictive children of the Young Crusaders came through at least twice a night, checking IDs and generally intimidating the customers.

Mansard signaled for another shot.

"It's like the poor goddamned Tibetans," he said to no one in particular. "The whole sad-ass country, which was an uphill struggle at the best of times, fell apart in the mid-twentieth century under the strain of supporting a system in which 60 percent of able-bodied men were engaged in full-time religion. The country starved because its main industry was Buddhism. This country is going the self-same route because our major industry has become Jes-us."

The sneering singsong stress on the final word was a clear parody of the Faithful whine. Most of the other people in the bar were avoiding looking at him, trying to pretend that he did not exist. Eddy the bartender was beginning to give him the hard eyeball. Eddy generally tolerated his mouthing off. Mansard did, after all, piss away the bulk of his salary in O'Ryan's and places like it. Only when people got nervous enough to start leaving would Eddy move firmly to shut him down.

That moment was getting very close. A shabby middle-aged couple with furtive faces who, from the look of them, subsisted on the dingy fringe of the black market, were already gathering up their change.

Mansard snarled at them. "What's the matter with you? Am I driving you out?"

The man took the woman's arm protectively as they stood up. They refused even to glance in Mansard's direction. Mansard swayed ominously, half off his stool.

"I'm talking to you."

The man raised a frightened, defensive hand. "Listen, mister, we don't want no trouble. We've got troubles of our own."

" 'Fraid of the thought police? Is that it?"

The couple were edging toward the door. Mansard finished his shot. He doubted that Eddy would give him another.

"You don't have to worry about me. They can't touch me. Charlie Mansard can blaspheme all he wants and there ain't a damn thing the deacons can do about it. You want to know why?"

He received no response, but he went on anyway.

"They can't touch me because they need me too bad. I'm an artist, goddamn it, and they can't do without my art. I make their stinking miracles for them."

Eddy was moving down the bar. The boom was about to be lowered on Charlie Mansard's evening.

Carlisle

The call had come just twenty minutes earlier: There was a bomb in the prayer parlor at the corner of Broadway and Eighth. The caller had identified herself as a Lefthand Path. She had used the antihoax code that was the terrorsect's only compromise with the authorities, so it was close to certain that the call was the real thing. The LPs inevitably meant business and rarely screwed around with false alarms. The data had flashed on the 17 screens as an emergency interrupt; it would have simultaneously been routed to the deacons and the bomb squad. 17, the NYPD's lower Manhattan anti-terror task force, worked out of the brand-new Combined Crime Control complex on Astor Place, and there was no excuse for them not being among the first on the scene.

By the time Lt. Harry Carlisle had reached the corner, uniforms had already closed off the streets for three blocks in every direction. Union Square was probably already gridlocked, the traffic beginning to back up all the way to midtown. Carlisle took a deep breath of the crisp autumn air. It was a tense situation, but at least it was real. He was out of the Astor Place complex and temporarily beyond the reach of its internal politics, its paranoia, and its induced religious mania. He had joined the police department to chase criminals, not to absorb a lot of crap about the wrath of God and the punishment to come. Of course, back in the days when he had been a rookie patrolman, life in general had seemed a whole lot simpler. Religion had been a thing that was there on a Sunday morning for those who wanted it. It had not been a vims that infected the whole damned country.

A heavily armored blue-and-white bomb-squad truck with black-and-yellow warning bars on its rear doors was pulling up beside the prayer parlor in a flurry of lights and sirens. Reeves and Donahue, also from T7, were already there. They were standing well back, keeping a healthy distance between themselves and any possible explosion. It was the members of the bomb squad who were paid to risk their lives. T7 sifted for clues once the danger was over.

The bomb squad, in full blast armor, was off-loading its ATCO J40 search robot. The prayer parlor was one of the Good Shepherd chain, the biggest franchise east of the Mississippi. In Harry Carlisle's estimation, the prayer parlor was one of the rinkiest of dinky ideas in an ultimately rinky dink epoch. If a person wanted to talk to God, all he had to do was to plastic in, duck into a pod, and wait while his credit was checked out. If his plastic was good, the opaque cover closed and he was free, in seeming privacy, to mutter his specific needs, hidden fears, or darkest confessions into the nativity-blue microphone that was supposed to lead directly to the ear of the Almighty. The sense of privacy was illusory. The microphone also led to the deacons' central records complex in Virginia Beach. Each individual's desires, fantasies, and shameful little sins were collated, analyzed, and data-shaped. If no other action was taken, they would finally be downloaded into the memory banks by which the Good Lord, with the help of his ever-present secret police force, kept his flock on the straight and narrow. According to the deacons, God could never get enough data.

Of course, the deacons paid through the nose for their tap into the heavenly hotline. It was supposed to be a closely guarded secret, but anyone in the know was well aware that annual user fees garnered by Good Shepherd Inc. alone ran into the hundreds of millions. The deacon hierarchy would have been overjoyed to cut out the middleman and run the prayer parlors itself, but not even the deacons could walk over the fundamental principles of Christian free enterprise. Government and even religion were supposed to stay off the back of business. Thus the deacons had to lease their access to the data matrix from the franchise owners.

The robot swayed down the ramp that led out of the back of the bomb-squad truck. There were wisps of blue smoke coming from the small rotary engine set between its two sets of treads. That did not bode well. Harry Carlisle scowled. The deacons got everything they wanted while the regular cops, who in his estimation did the dirty, day-to-day work of law enforcement, had to operate with hardware that was little more than obsolete garbage. There was hardly anything in the department that was not held together with epoxy and duct tape.

The deacons themselves had arrived on the scene. Two of their big black Lincoln Continentals were nosing through the police barriers to stop on the corner of Tenth Street. They, too, were keeping their distance. The doors opened, and eight deacons climbed out of the two cars. They were the standard issue: cold-faced young men in dark suits so alike that they were virtually a uniform. Although he could not see from where he was standing, Carlisle knew that they were wearing the tiny gold crucifix insignia in their lapels. He reached the spot where Reeves and Donahue were standing and nodded to the two detectives.

Reeves grimaced. "That J40 looks about to burn out."

"So what else is new? "

Carlisle checked his tracy. When it finally came on line, the small wrist screen showed a robot-eye view of the entrance to the Good Shepherd. The robot lumbered forward. Carlisle flicked the channel changer with the nail of his index finger. The image changed to a close-up of the bomb-squad officer who was monitoring the operation from inside the truck.

The man glanced impatiently into the screen. "What do you want, Lieutenant? I kind of got my hands full here."

The man's name was Vargas. One of the last holdout Catholics on the force, he would probably never make it past sergeant. The two men were not friends, but they knew each other by sight, and there was a certain mutual respect.

"Is that robot of yours going to hold up?" Carlisle asked.

"How the hell should I know?"

"Shouldn't talk like that with deacons around."

"Believe me. I've got more shit to worry about than petty blasphemy."

"We could really use a bomb that was defused and intact – anything that could give us a lead."

"I'm doing the best I can."

Vargas cut the connection, and Carlisle's screen once again showed the view from the robot. It was inside the prayer parlor, running on its redscope and moving slowly along the row of pods. The Good Shepherd was a big joint as prayer parlors went – a full two dozen pods. There was the heat image of a human figure inside the pod at the very end of the line.

"What the hell is that? I thought the place had been cleared." Vargas' voice boomed and crackled from the robot's speakers. "Come out of there right now with your hands in plain sight!"

The reply was picked up by the robot. It was a man's voice, weakly amplified.

"Jesus won't let me be harmed."

"Christ, we got a nut in there. How did you morons manage to miss him?" Vargas was back on the wrist screen again. "We'll have to get some uniforms in there to drag him out. Goddamn lunatic."

A uniformed officer whom Carlisle did not know was on the screen. "My men can't go in there. They don't have any armor."

Vargas was cursing in Spanish as he sent in his own men. The deacons remained aloof and silent throughout the entire exchange. There was a confusion of heat images on the tracy. The nut was screaming about sacrilege and damnation, and then abruptly he stopped. One of the bomb squad must have chopped him out with armored gloves that could quiet just about anyone. The robot was on the move again, sniffers going. Within seconds, the bomb location symbol was flashing. Then the screen snowed. The J40 had malfunctioned.

"Now we're screwed," Vargas said.

"How long to detonation?" Carlisle asked.

"Six minutes, if the warning call was on the money." Vargas was shaking his head. "I can't send in any of my men."

One of the bomb squad cut in. "It's Massey, chief. I'm still inside, and I 'm on the device."

"Get out of there."

"I think I can drop the sucker."

"Don't try it. There's no time."

"It looks like a couple of keys of juiced plastique with a simple d-style timer. It's in a supermarket bag. A&P."

"Timer got a readout?"

"Yeah."

"How long to go?"

"Four forty-two and counting."

"So get out of there."

"I tell you I can down it."

"Forget it!"

"I can do it, Sarge."

"Give me the bomb location."

"It's under the seat in one of the booths."

"Which one?"

"Hang on, I can't read the numbers… It's seven. Booth number seven."

"Just look in the bag. Don't touch a thing."

"I'm looking."

"And?"

"There's no sign of a trembler. I'm going to try to get it out of the bag."

The explosion left Carlisle deaf for thirty seconds. Flying glass had cut his cheek. Reeves had been hurled to the ground. The glass was like a carpet of fresh, glittering hail that stretched for a block and a half in every direction. Windows were gone from buildings all around the intersection. The deacons were sheltering behind their Lincolns. Flames were licking inside the ruined shell of the prayer parlor. Debris showered down. There was no longer a link with Vargas in the truck. Carlisle started running. The back doors of the truck burst open, and Vargas staggered out, pulling off his protective helmet and shaking his head. It would turn out that his hearing was permanently impaired.

Speedboat

Speedboat waited until well after dark before he decided to leave the apartment on Avenue C. The girl was out cold on the bare mattress. She had been packing away bootleg doomers all the previous night and was in a world of her own. A tiny trail of spittle ran from the corner of her mouth. He could hardly believe that just eighteen hours earlier he had figured her to be the hottest thing on spikes. For an hour he had sat on the rusting fire escape and watched the bloodred sun going down over the buildings. There had been an explosion earlier that had sounded like a bomb. Probably some cult bombing – if there really were cults. Sometimes he wondered if the deacons didn't plant the bombs themselves to give them the excuse for more purges.

He found the apartment altogether too oppressive. It was just too witchy. The broad was full doombeam, and had all the spooky crap that those people felt they had to surround themselves with. The broken dolls; the ropes of beads hanging from rusty nails; the fans and feathers; the tattered, one-eyed stuffed owl; the crumbling building itself – all added up to a particularly defeated strain of spiritual decay that Speedboat was willing to skirt in the course of business but in which he never wanted to become completely immersed. Her violently disturbing collages, made of plates ripped from medical textbooks juxtaposed against mutilated images from twentieth-century girlie books, were more than enough to convince him. If the dekes ever kicked their way in there, they would have a field day with her artwork. She would probably wind up in Joshua.

Winding up in Joshua was something he, above all, wanted to avoid. One could the in the camps. That was why he waited for the cover of big-city darkness. It was not just simple paranoia either. When he left the place, he would be carrying more than enough contraband to make him dead meat if he was picked up by a prowler. Behind the strip of false baseboard, he had stashed a small fortune in pornosoft and a dozen proscribed audio discs from the '80s and '90s. The latter included a couple of Billy Idols and a mint Motorhead. The old packrat Metal Monster on Third Street would pay premium for those, while Manny on St. Marks would give him a good price for the hardsoft in-out. All in all, he should realize some seven hundred on the evening's running. That, in turn, would be enough to get him a hundred Haitian spansules from Jook Aroun, which he could straightaway peddle in the rat traps for twenty a pop. Escape to Canada was nearing reality, but as it did, anxiety made quantum leaps. Nothing must go wrong.

The sun had gone, and the block beyond the airshaft was a black silhouette against a deep red sky. Speedboat did not turn on the light but just sat in the gathering gloom, staring at the shape of the girl on the mattress. She had told him that she had been a phone whore for nine months. That was probably enough to have flipped her over all on its own, sitting there and listening night after night while the holy bastards with the jobs and the plastic spewed out the sump poison of their God-fearing psyches. He could imagine them crouching in dark rooms, muttering their equally dark fantasies to a girl at the end of an anonymous phone. It was a world where everything had to be hidden from the light. Speedboat had stopped getting angry about it a long time ago. He was getting out.

He realized that he himself was crouching in a dark room. It was time to go to work. He carefully closed the drapes before he turned on the light. The single unshaded bulb made him blink. The girl muttered something and turned over, but she did not wake. Speedboat watched her for a moment, then stooped down and removed his contraband from its hiding place. He had to distribute it around his body – carrying any kind of a bag was asking for trouble. The diskettes of pornosoft were no problem. They would fit into any of the dozen or so secret pockets of his old, stained military parka. The audio discs were a bit more of a problem. The only place where they would fit was in the large pocket just below his shoulder blades. Even then, they were. sufficiently bulky that there was a risk they might produce a telltale outline, even in the deliberately voluminous olive drab. He would have to chance it and try to walk with his shoulders back instead of up around his ears as he normally did.

He started down the stairs on silent Reeboks that had cost him an entire bag of yellow octagonals down on Delancey Street. He paused for a moment in front of the street door. He opened it a crack. Nothing on the street looked out of place. The box people were setting up their homes, and a couple of fires had been lit. That was usually a good sign that there was no law about. A couple of the streetlights were out. He ran a hand through his close-cropped suedecut and slipped out into the dark.

Winters

Deacon Winters put down the phone with a sigh. The sweep of the crime scene had given the lab boys exactly nothing. It was the third LP bomb in a month and it had gone off right on the corner of Broadway and Eighth, within walking distance of the Astor Place CCC complex where he was based. Three of the bomb squad were dead, and no one was even a fraction closer to identifying the terrorcult. There was bound to be another internal inquiry, and as one of the investigative team assigned to the case he would find himself being asked a lot of questions to which he had no answers.

He wanted to slam his fist into the desk, and it was only with the greatest of effort that he restrained himself. Any such display of temper would be picked up by the surveillance cameras and go down on his record. It would indicate that the Peace of the Lord was definitely not upon him. Being suspected of having a potential low-stress quotient was a black mark that he could do without. He had enough problems already. The very last thing he needed was to slip any farther down the ladder of departmental grace. Not even the long hours of visible public prayer at the Deacon Tabernacle on Seventy-third Street seemed to help. After all the kneetime for the cameras, it still had been a nightmare of a week, and it was only Wednesday. The efficiency ratings and devotion assessments had been released on Monday morning, and he had showed up well down in the pack.

When he had transferred from Cleveland to New York City, he had had the reputation of being a bright and promising young man with an equally bright future. The New York deacons had a policy of recruiting their young officers from the heartland, where youths supposedly were untainted by the Babylonian evils of the metropolis. Once they were in the city, though, they were expected to shine. Winters was not shining. In fact, he was floundering. The inquiry after this latest bombing might actually turn that floundering into a state of mil-scale drowning. He could not even see a way that he could pass some of the buck onto the NYPD task force. He had played that card twice already.

Back in Ohio, he had woven small-town, TV dreams about high-city law enforcement. While he had chased minor-league pornographers and teenagers fooling around with petty Satanism, he had played with romantic images. He pictured himself kicking down doors with a machine pistol clutched in his fist, smiting the ungodly, bringing the terrorists and heretics to justice, and generally making the world a safe place for decent, God-fearing people. Those comic-book scenarios had been destroyed in the first flaming crash of his innocence. In the eleven months that Winters had been in New York, he had not kicked down a single door. He had not even so much as drawn an automatic weapon from the armory. He had been buried in an avalanche of cross-referential data. He tracked and matched minor details and ran patterns looking for possible anomalies. The most drama that ever came his way was provided by the spying and backbiting of internal politics. It was a long way from the heady excitement of swashbuckling, more akin to the constant numbing fear of walking the edge of a razor or swimming in a tank of man-eating sharks.

The phone rang. It was Carlisle from the NYPD team. The debris from the explosion had gone to the deacons' lab, and he wanted to access the results. No doubt he was also looking for a clue to what, if anything, Winters or the other deacons might be planning to pull when the reports went in. Winters did not trust Carlisle. The way the man played the world-weary street cop only barely concealed a deep-seated contempt for the established religion. Winters inwardly toyed with an image of Carlisle in the pit. On the phone, he adopted a closed and neutral tone.

"They've come up with nothing so far," he told the cop.

On the other end of the phone, Carlisle sounded as if he did not believe him. Winters gave just a fraction. Carlisle was probably a closet heretic, but Winters had to do business with him.

"Of course, I'll let you know immediately if they do find anything."

Carlisle grunted and hung up. Winters silently vowed that one day he would get the NYPD officer. Making empty, unheard threats, though, did not help too much. He was still in a vise and he had no way that he could see to stop it from closing on him. He stared across the large open-plan squad room with its beige walls and bright panel lights that made it look like an aquarium. Orderly lines of dark-suited figures hunched over blue-gray computer terminals. Overhead, the small, black watch cameras with their glowing red LEDs swivelled from side to side, scanning the people below like inquisitive birds. The watch cameras were the electronic eyes of the Lord. All was seen and all was noted. Winters picked up a pencil, trying to give the appearance of doing something. Unfortunately, there was nothing that he could do except wait and pray for a break in the case. If that break failed to materialize, the case would undoubtedly break him.

Cynthia Kline walked by his desk carrying a sheaf of printouts. In her mid to late twenties, she kept her chestnut hair swept back into a tight bun and wore little or no makeup; her only jewelry was a pair of discreet gold earrings. Yet even in the severe and unflattering tailoring of her clerical auxiliary uniform, there was something about the way she moved, the way she carried her slim, athletic figure, that caused Winters to observe her covertly whenever she was in the junior deacons' squad room. She had never smiled at him or even given him any indication that she was aware of his existence. There was no way he could think that she was somehow encouraging him in the lusts of the flesh. The problem was that his interest was not limited to simple observation. Despite all his efforts, he could not stop his imagination, could not stop the dark thoughts and images that crept into his inner mind. The most vivid picture was straight out of a proscribed magazine: Cynthia Kline stripped down to scanty silk lingerie, standing on tiptoe, arms stretched above her head, wrists secured by leather thongs. He shook his head as if trying physically to dislodge the vision. He found that his palms were sweating. Get behind me, Satan. He realized that if anyone could read his thoughts, his career would be over.

After the first couple of times he had seen Cynthia Kline, he had accessed her departmental records. All he had gotten were prints and a picture and a few short paragraphs of background. He had attempted to go further, to get through to her personal file, home address, and recruitment investigation report, but he had run into a privacy block. The computer had demanded an AC-19 clearance and details of how the required data applied to an ongoing investigation. Not wanting to draw attention to himself, Winters had garbaged the request. Unfortunately the images of Cynthia Kline had not gone away. If anything, they had become more intense. If they did not go away soon, he would be forced to go to see one of those women on Fifteenth Street again.

Kline

Cynthia Kline walked quickly out of the junior deacons' squad room and headed for the elevators. She needed a cup of coffee and maybe an illicit cigarette in the women's rest room. She was certain that little bastard Bernie Winters had been staring at her again. There was something creepy about those large pale-blue eyes under the blond brushcut. He was so typical of the repressed, small-town kid who enlisted in the deacons. On one level, they believed that they were the wrath of God, but deeper down they were constantly at war with themselves, so constantly on the run from their perfectly normal impulses that they ended up being twisted out of shape by the conflict and the shame. There was probably nothing more sinister to Winters' stares than the usual banked-up horniness, but he still made her nervous. She kept reminding herself that she had encountered more than enough of it in the four months since the organization had planted her as a sleeper in the clerical auxiliary of the deacons. Her nervousness could probably be chalked up to the feet that Winters was part of the team that was actually hunting the Left-hand Path. The team appeared to be getting nowhere, but if it ever did get lucky and blow the organization apart, she would be one of the first to be arrested. If they did not hang her outright, she would certainly die slowly in Joshua or one of the other camps.

In the third-floor women's rest room, a burly, masculine directoress was inspecting her eyebrows in the mirror over the line of sinks. As Cynthia entered, the woman turned and gave her an unmistakably appraising look. She treated Cynthia to a half smile. "Praise the Lord, my dear."

Cynthia nodded absently and avoided the woman's eyes. "Yes… praise the Lord."

It was damn lucky that paranoia and prudery looked so much alike. The women in the female branch of the deacons seemed a good deal less repressed than their male counterparts.

The door closed behind the directoress, and Cynthia Kline allowed herself a silent sigh of relief. She let herself into a stall, dumped the pile of printouts that she was taking up to the twenty-third floor on the cistern, and rummaged for her pack of cigarettes. The twenty-third floor could wait. Policy frowned on the idea of deacons, directoresses, or even the clerical auxiliary smoking or drinking, but an official blind eye was turned to the odd smoke in the bathroom. No one could be perfect all the time.

When she was through, she dropped the butt in the toilet bowl and flushed, then emerged from the stall to find a senior clerical assistant sniffing the air with a disapproving expression.

"Your body is a temple of the Lord, my dear. It's a shame to pollute it with nicotine. "

Cynthia nodded. "I know, but it's been a rough day."

"Some days are like that. I'd pray about it if I was you." The woman started to vigorously wash her hands.

Cynthia wondered how much more she could take. It was very tempting to just give it all up and run for Canada. In the beginning, what she was doing had seemed like a noble mission – to actually go undercover, right into the very heart of the enemy, even maybe to turn key deacons. She had felt like a modern Mata Hari fighting for the return to sanity. The reality had turned out be something very different. She was on assignment at the heart of the disease. She was starting to believe that if she stayed around those people much longer she would finish up as crazy as they were.

There was commotion outside in the corridor. Uniformed NYPD in full riot gear were milling in front of the elevators waiting for a descending car. Another clerical auxiliary was standing back against the wall letting them go by. Cynthia did the same thing.

"What's the panic?" she asked.

"Bread riot at a supermarket."

"Where?"

"A&P at Twentieth and Eighth."

"Deliveries didn't happen?"

"Something like that."

Cynthia Kline cursed under her breath. It was uncomfortably close to where she lived on Ninth Avenue. She might well have problems getting home. Suddenly she caught herself. Something was happening to her attitude. There had been a time when she would have been overjoyed at a bombing and a riot in the same day. It would have been proof that the regime was really coming unglued. But events like this had become mere nuisances. She needed to watch herself.

1346408 Stone

1346408 Stone lay motionless on the hard plastic mattress and stared at the underside of the bunk above. Every fifteen seconds it was illuminated by the glare of the searchlight on the south gun tower. His body ached all over, and his stomach was cramping again. After the bosses had found the radio, the rations had been cut for everyone in D block. The evening meal was down to half a cup of the pink goop and three slices of Wonder Bread. 4321921 Gotti, who had actually had the radio hidden in his mattress, had been dragged off to the bunker for three weeks' intensified. There was a great deal of speculation as to whether he would make it back. Since the radio had gone, a deep gloom had settled over the block. The radio, on which Gotti had picked up the news out of Canada, had been more than just a lifeline to the world beyond the wire of the Joshua Redemption Center. It was also more than just an antidote to the pap of game shows and preachers and the constant claptrap about Jesus, punishment, and repentance that blared from the TV from the moment the working parties returned to the barrack block clear through until lights-out sounded. It was a small but defiant symbol of the fact that the system had not totally broken them. It was hard to accept that their symbol was gone.

Stone's mind felt numb. He was convinced that they were putting hexapan in the food again. He wriggled in a vain attempt to get comfortable on the mattress and immediately let out a groan. His ribs were bruised on the left side where Boss Carter had lashed out with his billy club. Stone had not even been doing anything wrong. Everyone knew that Carter was a psycho who got his jollies inflicting pain. There was a scream from over in the women's section. Someone else was getting their kicks. The women suffered more at the hands of the guards than the men did. For a penal system that put such emphasis on morality, it harbored an extraordinary number of deviants.

Despite the fact that he was exhausted, sleep would not come. A few bunks away, someone was muttering in the throes of a bad dream. Someone else was coughing. That was probably 8368728 Katz. The general opinion was that Katz did not have much longer to go. After fourteen days in the bunker, he had come back with damaged lungs that had been getting progressively worse.

Stone closed his eyes. He could feel the anger building inside of him. It was the anger that had sustained him through the nineteen months that he had been in Joshua. During that time, he had learned that anger was something that could not just be squandered. If a person let it run loose as an unchecked rage, it either slowly consumed him or built up until he exploded in some suicidal outburst, until he attacked a guard or walked into the electrified wire. Anger was a thing that had to be conserved. It could not be allowed to blaze bright; but, on the other hand, if the spark went out, then one was nothing but an obedient zombie. Above all anger had to be focused and directed. It was fatally easy just to hate the immediate instruments of oppression, to center a bitter loathing on the guards or the deacons, or to silently rail against big generalities. It was too simple to hate the Fundamentalists or a figurehead like Faithful, or to damn all Christians and their bloody religion.

Hating Christianity was an easy trap to fall into. It even defied logic. The number of Christians shut up in Joshua, the stubborn, passive resisters who had been among the first to challenge Faithful and his tyranny, were more than ample proof that the whole philosophy could not be held responsible for the few that used its trappings to cloak their evil. It made no more sense than cursing all Moslems for the acts of the few fanatics who had touched off the Gulf War. The second trap to avoid was the urge to hate oneself. In this one did not have much help from logic. It was easy for Stone to demonstrate to himself that, without his own unbelieving complacency and that of those like him, Faithful and his gang would never have been able to do what they did. He was one of the ones who had been too busy congratulating themselves for their sanity and liberalism to notice what was going on, the ones who had made the mistake of assuming that, whatever happened, things would remain within the limits of civilized behavior. By the time they had discovered their error, it was far too late.

It had all started with the collapse of '98. The banks had run the economy to the edge in the hope that a threat of global currency panic would finally unseat the Democrats and kill off the Second Chance once and for all. Unfortunately, Rilker and his cronies, backed up by a generation of ex-Reagan yuppies panicked by early middle age, overestimated both their own strength and the monstrous inertia of the world's money system. They had managed to push the economy to the edge because that was easy – it had been drifting in that direction for half a century. When it got there, no power on Earth was capable of stopping it, and it plunged over. The crash of '98 was followed by the wide-eyed panic of '99, and the economic chaos became coupled with the superstitious upheavals that tended to erupt at the turn of any century. The country was paralyzed by fears, both real and imagined, and ready to follow anyone who offered a way out. Faithful did not even have to claim a vision with which he would lead them to the promised land. All he had to promise was to get Jesus to intervene and stop the rot. The election of the year 2000 was a landslide.

At first it had looked like business as usual. The quality of television had dropped markedly, but most of the smart set had put that down to the movement of the public into one of its infantile phases. Van Der Kamp had just had the big, summer, non-fiction bestseller with Cycle/Social The TV evangelists had been shucking and jiving all over the place, but that was also easy to dismiss. Everyone assumed that if they were allowed to run, they would eventually make themselves ridiculous just as they had before. The censorship battles that flared up on a number of fronts were so scattered and protracted that nobody was really able to focus on them as a single campaign. It was hard to equate Wet Bimbo Magazine with The Catcher in the Rye. When the anti-abortion amendment was pushed through a totally intimidated Congress, protesters took to the streets, but their efforts were largely negated by a total media blank. When the more militant pressed their point, the marches and sitdowns were broken up by police with clubs, tear gas, and water cannons. Many of them became a part of the first mass jailings.

It was over a year before the situation touched Stone personally. Reality, the magazine for which he wrote, was closed down, and the editors were charged with sedition. After that, no other publication seemed willing to hire a left-of-centre columnist with his kind of track record. He went to work as a copywriter for Mandell, Jenkins, and Howard, the advertising agency. The money was okay, better in fact than he had been making at Reality. He kept his head down and tried to pretend that everyone would eventually come to their senses. Things were going okay, if one did not count his inability to sleep well, until they landed the TLC account. As the biggest of the booming evangelical conglomerates, TLC was able to swing a lot of muscle. All employees of the agency were expected to sign something called the 'Six Minimal Articles of Faith'. When Stone started muttering about McCarthyism, he was immediately fired. He wound up flipping burgers and working with a small group that put out a Xeroxed samzat. Then the Young Crusaders had come around and smashed their copying equipment.

The mask had come off during the summer of 2004, "The Summer of the Three Crises." In those three months of manufactured panic, Faithful and his gang had made their moves. A terrified Congress had suspended the Constitution and then dissolved itself. With nothing to stop them, the administration had started rewriting the rules. The Heresy and Blasphemy Laws were enacted, and the deacons were formed. The redemption centers, concentration camps by any other name, were under construction. By the fall, the country was as fully fledged a religious police state as Iran had been under the Ayatollahs. It had taken Hitler some five years to change the face of Germany. Faithful had done it to America in just three. Of course, he had had some heavy hitters helping him. The Orange County Ring had been behind him from the start and the multinationals had at least used him as natural cover while they transferred their U.S. operations to Brazil or Australia. Stone often wondered if those passive, corporate collaborators should not have been the real targets for his hate and anger.

After the start of 2005, there was no pretending. All over, people were leaving for Canada and Europe. Stone had applied for a passport, but he had been turned down. His record at Mandell, Jenkins, and Howard was given as the reason. Even then, he thought that he could make it through the system. Instead of going on the run, he filed an appeal. The major waves of mass arrests did not start until the spring of that year. Whole neighborhoods were sealed as accused heretics were dragged to the black windowless deacon buses. When Shea Stadium was full they had started taking the detainees across the river to the Meadowlands. There were horror stories on the streets about beatings and summary executions. Finally Stone did run, heading for Canada. He did quite well for an amateur. He made it to Buffalo before they caught him. After two and a half months on Rikers Island, he was shipped to Joshua. He had never had a trial, and his sentence was indeterminate. He wore the green patch of a second-degree heretic on his striped uniform.

The light from the south gun tower was starting to hypnotize him. It was getting difficult to think. They had to have started putting hexapan in the food again. A dull and far from comforting insulation was wrapping itself around the hunger, the aches, and the anger. He felt himself slipping. He only hoped that the drug would suppress the nightmares.

Carlisle

Harry Carlisle came out of the elevator on the rear ground floor and ran straight into the riot squad. They were moving out in force, loading onto the armored trucks. The Pharaohs were already lumbering up from the underground motorpool, belching diesel smoke. The uniforms were loaded for bear with body armor, full helmets, gas masks, and squat black riot guns, over and under, Remington Controllers, with the new forearm clamp that made it possible to use the weapon with one hand. One in every five had been issued with a pepper fog generator. A water cannon came up the ramp between the Pharaohs.

Carlisle grabbed the nearest patrolman. "What the hell is all this? World War III?"

The armored patrolman, anonymous behind his visor, glanced briefly at the lieutenant. "Big 9-79 up on Twentieth."

"It don't rain but it pours."

"Don't it just."

The patrolman was gone, scrambling into the dark interior of a Pharaoh. Harry Carlisle was on the rear ground floor only because that was where one had to change elevators to get to sub-basement four, the restricted-access area where the deacons conducted their depth interrogations. Normally, Carlisle would not have gone anywhere near sub-basement four. The deacons' idea of depth was more than enough to turn his stomach. Nevertheless, despite his stomach, he had hurried on down after hearing that the headcase – the one who had been dragged from the prayer parlor shouting for Jesus just before the bomb exploded-had been taken down there. Carlisle wanted to talk to him before they beat him stupid. There was always a chance that he had seen the bomber.

Carlisle eased his way through the milling riot squad, making for the single elevator door that would take him down to Sb4. Their excitement was infectious. He could feel their adrenaline rising. They were working themselves up to bust heads. A food riot inevitably turned ugly.

The elevator was guarded by a junior deacon in black combat fatigues. He carried an Uzi slung under his right arm, and his face wore an expression of blank, all-encompassing hostility. "There's no admission."

Carlisle was not going to stand for that attitude. "There is for me, sonny boy."

"You think so?"

Harry took out his ID plate. "Run by this."

The deacon took the card, making clear his obvious contempt for the ordinary police department ID. He stuck it into the slot. The green light immediately came on. The deacon shrugged. "It looks like you can go on in."

Harry Carlisle gave the young man a hard look. "You should watch those manners of yours, kid. I seriously outrank you."

The deacon came to approximation of attention. "I'm sorry, sir. It's hard to tell."

Carlisle shot him a bleak look as the elevator door opened. At the bottom of the shaft there was another guard.

"Can I help you?"

"The man they brought in after the Eighth Street bombing, where have they got him?"

"ID?"

Carlisle handed over his card for a second ID check. The deacons were very particular about whom they let into their torture chamber. Again the light flashed green. The card was handed back.

"Interrogation room five. Along to your right. You can't miss it."

The headcase was doubled over with his arms pulled up hard behind him. His manacled wrists were secured to an overhead pipe by a short length of chain. Blood was dripping from the tip of his nose, creating a spattered puddle on the floor. The walls, floor, and ceiling of the interrogation room were covered with hard, washable plastic, so the place could be hosed down after use. The prisoner was surrounded by three deacons in gray sweatsuits that were also spattered with blood. The word 'Zealots', along with a clenched-fist symbol, was silkscreened across the back of each sweat top. The Zealots were the New York deacons football team. They had won the interdepartmental championship for four years running. They also turned football into a bloodsport.

One of the interrogators lifted the prisoner's head by the hair so he could look into his face. "Shall we try that again?"

The headcase spluttered. Blood ran down his chin. "The Devil was in me. The Devil was in this body."

"And how did you recognize the Devil?"

A second interrogator joined in. "Confess it all and save your soul."

Carlisle looked on in disgust. "What exactly do you three expect to achieve by torturing a loony?" he asked.

"This is none of your concern, Carlisle. This is a devotional matter. It's moved from the temporal to the spiritual."

"Yeah, sure. That old-time religion."

The loony's head was allowed to drop. The three interrogators turned to face Carlisle. He knew all three of them. Baum, Bickerton, and Kinney. The trio had a reputation throughout the CCC for extreme brutality. Although they all held the same rating, Bickerton was the apparent leader of the holy trio. He was also the Zealots' quarterback.

"You just stepped out onto very thin ice, Carlisle."

Baum joined in. The linebacker, he tended to be the blunt one. "Your own state of grace could be investigated."

Kinney brought up the rear. He played tight end. "What do you want here, Carlisle?"

"I was hoping that I could question this witness about the bombing. There was just a chance he might have seen something." Carlisle looked around coldly. "I can see that I'm wasting my time. You've made him altogether too spiritual."

"I'm glad you recognize you're wasting your time."

Baum was holding a short, leather-covered billy. He prodded the prisoner with it and grinned. "A soul that has become so complex in its sin requires a great deal of saving."

Carlisle shook his head. "I hope you manage it."

"All it takes is a comprehensive confession and an acceptance of Jesus."

The loony's bloody mouth was moving slackly. "Jesus… Jesus…"

Harry Carlisle turned on his heel and left. The guard at the bottom of the elevator shaft called after him as he passed.

"See enough, did you, Lieutenant?"

Carlisle had to contain his fury until he was in the privacy of his own office. The bastards thought what they were doing was amusing. They tortured a harmless mental case and thought that they were funny. When he reached his cubicle on the tenth floor, he roared in like an express train, slamming the door as hard as he could. There was a pint of Wild Turkey with an inch left in it in the bottom drawer of his desk. He swallowed the bourbon in three angry gulps and then hurled the bottle into the waste-basket with enough force to shatter it. Then he stood and glared up into the watching lens of the surveillance camera.

It was only when his anger had subsided a little that he realized what he had missed. And then he was mad at himself.

He opened the door and yelled. "McNeil, I want the bomb-squad audio from this afternoon. The last dialogue between Vargas and Massey, immediately before the bomb went off."

Winters

Winters' phone startled him. He grabbed for it as if it were dangerous. "Winters," he said abruptly.

"This is Lieutenant Carlisle. Will you come up to ten, please, Winters? I think I may have found something."

"Perhaps you could tell me over the phone."

"Just get your ass up here."

Winters swallowed. He wanted to tell the flatfoot to take a jump, but once again he reminded himself that, in his position, he could not afford a conflict with the PD. Carlisle could easily make him look bad at a progress inquiry. He hung up the phone and logged himself out to the tenth floor. When he arrived at Carlisle's office, the lieutenant had a small audioplayer on the desk in front of him.

Carlisle hit the play button. "I want you to listen to this."

His voice was soft, but there was a certain built-in menace. Winters noted that the PD had not invited him to sit down. The tape was from earlier in the afternoon. Vargas, the bomb-squad coordinator, was talking on the radio with one of his men, Massey, the one who had blown himself up trying to down the bomb.

"Give me the bomb location."

"It's under the seat in one of the booths."

"Which one?"

"Hang on, I can't read the number… it's seven. Booth number seven."

"Just look in the bag. Don't touch a thing."

"I'm looking."

Carlisle cut it off. "Notice anything?"

"What am I supposed to be looking for?"

"The bomb was in booth number seven."

"Right."

"So what does that tell us?"

Winters was aware that he was being tested, but he could not imagine what Carlisle was driving at. The detective had hard, tired blue eyes with lines fanning out from the corners as if he had spent too much of his time squinting at things that did not please him. They were eyes that could produce the illusion that they were looking directly into his soul. Winters had heard that there was some kind of scandal in Carlisle's past, but he had never been able to access the details. Sweet Jesus, if only he could prove that the man was an agent of Satan.

"I don't know. What does it tell us?"

"That the bomber must have activated the booth in order to get into it and plant the bomb. He would have had to act like any other confessee."

Carlisle's tone indicated that he believed he was talking to a simpleton. Winters again reminded himself that one day he would get the man. "So?"

"So the bomber must have used either cash or plastic to get into the booth, and there's an outside chance that he may have said something while he was in there. Every prayer booth in the country is wired into deacon central. There must be a record of it somewhere in the Virginia Beach facility, and I want you to access it."

"I don't know."

Carlisle looked at him coldly. "What don't you know?"

"I'd need an AC-19."

"So get one. There's the terminal."

Access to the Virginia Beach data banks was one of the deacons' most jealously guarded secrets. The Virginia Beach computers contained the files of God. With great reluctance, he sat down in front of the lieutenant's terminal. He did not have to be told that this tenuous lead was all they had, but it still went against the grain to have to access into Virginia Beach for a mere PD. He menued up an AC-19 application and started to respond to the lengthy questionnaire. When it was complete, the computer considered it for about fifteen seconds and then let him in. While Carlisle watched him, Winters went after the data. Finally he had it. It was less than enlightening.

He slowly shook his head. "Booth seven could be cash activated."

"Go further. He or she must have been the last person to use the booth before the explosion."

"You think it might be a woman?"

"It's a fifty-fifty chance. There's plenty of broads with no cause to love the regime."

"How do you know the bomber was the last one to use the booth?"

"He would have had to have been. He couldn't risk anyone finding the bomb. The placing of it must have been coordinated with the phone call and an intelligent guess at our response time."

"Or he just listened for the sirens."

"Maybe. It's still a pretty slick setup."

"You think so?"

"This ain't no bunch of pinhead Satanists. These people are classic terrorists. If they weren't pretty slick, we'd know something about them by now."

"They do keep themselves well hidden."

"What we want to do now is to get the tape of the last session in the booth. If it was a cash payment our bomber would still have at least to enter some kind of name. Can you do that?"

"Sure."

Winters went further in.

"I've got it," he said a short time later. "I'll run it on audio."

There was the sound of the booth cover closing. Then there was a voice. It was that of a robot.

Carlisle and Winters looked at each other.

"He's talking through one of those kid's toys," Winters said. "They completely distort the voice print."

"Shut up and listen."

"… and by the time you hear this, you'll know all about why we were here. We are the Lefthand Path and we will not cease our actions until the Faithful tyranny is overthrown. You're probably wondering where we will strike next. I can't exactly tell you that but keep watching the skies."

Carlisle was half smiling. "Definitely slick."

Winters looked carefully at the lieutenant. It was almost as if Carlisle admired those sinners.