Covenant (46 page)

            “Where we gonna go?” Reuben asked.

            “I’m not sure.  Let’s go talk to the ladies of the family.”

            Reuben followed him downstairs.  Lisa and Danielle were in the living room, Lisa relating what had happened. 

            Anthony started to tell them,
It’s done,
when he glanced down the hallway and noticed that the door to his father’s study was open.

            No one ever left that door open.

            Dread gathering in him, he moved down the hallway.  A cool draft drifted from inside the room.

            Lisa called after him, but he ignored her.  He pushed open the door all the way.  When he and Lisa had spoken privately in there earlier that day, he’d opened the window on the other side of the study, to let air circulate. 

            But he hadn’t removed the screen, too.  He stepped into the room.

            Someone pressed a cold muzzle to the side of his head.

            “Guess who?” Cutty said from the shadows behind the door. 

            Anthony held his breath.  He didn’t have any of his guns, and had taken off his body armor, too.

            In his peripheral vision, it looked as if Cutty bore a silencer-equipped nine millimeter.

            “Did you think I’d abandoned my mission, Thorne?” Cutty said.  “I am a loyal servant of the Kingdom until the day God calls me home to glory.”

            “You should have run away,” Anthony said quietly.  “It’s all over now.  You’ll go to prison.”

            “Wrong,” Cutty said, and pulled the trigger.

            The bullet ripped across Anthony’s left shoulder, spinning him around.  He crashed against his father’s desk.  Pens and pencils clattered onto the desktop, fell to the floor.

Never should have let my guard down,
Anthony thought. 
I knew this nut was still on the loose . . .

            Pain swelled across his shoulder, the bloodstain on his shirt steadily growing.  He had been shot before, but those prior injuries had been only flesh wounds, and he’d recovered quickly. 

            This time, he wasn’t sure if he’d been so lucky.

            None of his family came running.  The silencer had done exactly what it was designed to do.

            “Heaven,” Cutty said was saying.  “I am going to
heaven
.  You and your family are going to hell—now get up and
move
.”

            Keeping the gun trained on him, Cutty grabbed his arm.  His short, strong fingers dug like meat hooks into Anthony’s flesh.  Anthony struggled to his feet, dizziness tipping through him.

            After all he had been through, fifteen agonizing years of hoping for justice, it couldn’t possibly end like this, with him slaughtered in his family’s home on the very day of his redemption.

            Cutty pushed him through the doorway, and into the hall.

            “Go to the living room,” Cutty said.  “I’m going to shoot your family members one at a time, and you’re going to watch, and you’re going to pray to God to forgive you for all the wicked acts you’ve done, and when I’m done with them, I’m going to finish you off.”

            He poked the gun against the back of Anthony’s head, and Anthony began to shuffle down the carpeted hallway.  Blood trickled from his fingers and dripped onto the floor as he walked past the photos of his family and the time-faded pictures of his beloved father. 

            No.  It couldn’t end like this.  Not after they had suffered so much.

            But he was out of options.

            Reuben and Danielle were sitting together on the sofa, talking.  They stopped in mid-sentence and gasped.   

            “Not one word or move from any of you,” Cutty said.  “You disobey, Thorne dies.”

            Both of them froze.

Where is Lisa?
Anthony wondered, wildly. 
Where the hell is she?

            Her purse, which had been sitting on the coffee table, was missing. 

            “Go sit across from your family, Thorne,” Cutty said.  “You’ll have the front row seat as I bring God’s vengeance to you heathens.”

            Anthony crossed the room, lowered himself slowly into the chair.  Searching in the corners of his eyes for weapons, but finding nothing, dammit. 

            “Where is your harlot, Thorne?” Cutty asked.  “I was certain that she was present.” 

            “I am,” Lisa said, from somewhere behind Cutty.  “And I’m no harlot, you crazy sonofabitch.”          

            As Cutty whirled to face her, gunfire boomed.  Cutty’s head snapped backward.  He bounced against a wall and collapsed to the carpet in a dead heap, a bloody hole drilled through the center of his forehead.

            Danielle screamed, clutched Reuben to her. 

            Still aiming the pistol at the fallen zealot, Lisa emerged from the shadows of the hallway.  She slowly lowered the gun, staring at the man she had killed. 

            Anthony realized that when he had entered the study, she must have followed, suspicious, and waited in the powder room off the hall when she knew he was in trouble, waited for her shot. 

            He went to her.  She was shaking.  He carefully removed the gun from her clammy fingers.

            “It’s okay, baby,” he said.  “Everything’s fine, it’s over.”   

            “He shot you,” she said softly, gaping at the blood on his shirt.  “Oh, my God . . .”

            “I’ll be okay, I think,” he said.  “Can someone get me a towel?”

            As Reuben raced to find one, the doorbell rang. 

            “That’ll be the FBI,” Anthony said.

88

            Valdez hustled inside, two agents flanking her.  Mike was behind the three of them, beaming like a kid on Christmas morning, but his eyes widened when he saw Anthony pressing a blood-stained towel against his shoulder.

            “Hand it over, Thorne,” Valdez said, ignoring his injury.  “Or else you’re facing charges on all the carnage you guys left behind on the church’s property.”

            “No need to make threats.”  He gave her the flash drive.  He’d let her find out later that every piece of damning evidence it held had already been leaked to the media.  He doubted it would hurt her case, and might even speed the process along.

            She gave the device to one of her agents.  He plugged it into a PDA, watched the handheld’s screen for a few seconds, nodded at Valdez.  “We’re good.”

            “You guys are clear,” Valdez said.  “We’ll clean up the collateral damage.”

            “Got one more piece of collateral damage waiting for you in the living room,” he said.  “Your old partner.” 

            “You’re shittin’ me.”  Her eyes sharpened.  “Cutty came here?”

            “Who the hell do you think shot me?” Anthony said. 

            “Hey, sorry.  We’ll call our crew, get this squared away ASAP.”

            Anthony stepped aside, and Valdez and her agents entered the house.  Reuben directed them to Cutty’s corpse, which Danielle had covered with a blanket.  

            Mike came inside, too.  He checked out Anthony’s wound.  “How serious is this one?”

            “I think my luck’s still good,” he said.  “It’s feeling like another flesh wound.”

            “You better get it checked out.”

            Anthony nodded.  “We’re planning to make ourselves scarce shortly, get away for a while.  You wanna come with?”

            “You kiddin’?” Mike winked.  “I’m hanging around—I got a date tomorrow with the senorita.  We’re going to the firing range.”

            “Lucky you,” Anthony said.  “Make sure I get an invite to the wedding.”

            “You’ll get more than an invite, AT.  You’re gonna be the best man.”

89

            That evening, the media frenzy began.  The expose on Bishop Prince and New Kingdom Church was leading news on all the major television and cable networks.

            By then, Anthony and his family had left town.  On the way, he sought medical attention at an urgent care clinic and had his gunshot wound attended to, and it was a minor injury, as he’d hoped. 

            Later, using an alias, they checked into a beachfront hotel in Panama City, Florida.     

            The staggering influx of Internet traffic shut down the server that hosted his Web site, but hundreds of news sites and blogs already had downloaded the documents and posted them on their own servers.  The evidence would circulate through cyberspace indefinitely, outpacing the church’s capacity—and soon, ability—to squash it.

            Over the next two weeks, Bishop Emmanuel Prince was charged with several hundred counts of various federal crimes, including but not limited to extortion, blackmail, solicitation to murder, conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to commit terrorist acts, embezzlement, mail fraud, racketeering, child pornography, and child sexual abuse. 

            Several members of the bishop’s inner circle stepped forward to negotiate plea deals, including the Director of the Armor of God.

            Even a high-ranking Senator, a favorite for the White House in the next Presidential election, went down in flames, damned by his close association with the bishop.  Numerous federal and state judges and law-enforcement officials either resigned, or tried to disavow their church ties.          

            The Kingdom Campus was shut down, and residents were given time to secure alternate housing, and schooling for their children.  To Anthony, the sight on television of families leaving the church grounds after having invested so much of their lives in the organization was perhaps the saddest spectacle of the whole affair.

            Through it all, Bishop Prince confessed to nothing and refused to cooperate.  “God will deliver me from the snares of the wicked,” was his consistent response to the charges.  Legal pundits predicted that he would serve a life sentence at a federal prison, with no possibility of parole. 

            Late one night, lying in bed in their hotel room with an ocean view, Anthony said to Lisa, “You awake?”

            She murmured, turned over, her face a dark oval in the blackness.

            He stroked her cheek with the back of his finger.  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.”

            “About?”

            “You know.  What we did.”

            “And?”

             “I’ve changed my mind about something.”

            She traced a gentle circle across his chest.  “Go on.”

            “I’m ready to be a father, if you’re ready to be a mother,” he said.

            “Really?” 

            “I’m sorry it took me so long to come to this decision.  I guess I . . . I had to go through some things first.”

            “What about what you’d said before, about not being able to protect a child from the world?”

            “Well . . . we can’t spend our lives worrying about what the world might do to us.  We’ll take life one day at a time—and when we have to, we’ll fight.”  He kissed the tip of her nose.  “You ready to be a mother?”

            She took his hand in hers and slid it down her stomach, and lower still, to her warm center.            

            “I’ll take that as a ‘yes,’ ” he said, and kissed her again.

90

            One weekday morning a month later, Anthony was at home, writing in his office, when a text message arrived on his new cell phone.  It came from an unknown phone number—but when Anthony read the message, he immediately knew the sender’s identity.

Want to chat? Come to front porch

            He went upstairs and removed two ice-cold cans of Coke from the refrigerator.  He took them to the veranda.

            He also brought his Beretta, wearing it in a hip holster for all to see.

            Bob sat in a rocking chair on the porch, legs crossed, a smart phone resting in his lap.  He wore aviator sunglasses, a University of Georgia baseball cap, cargo shorts, blue flip flops, and a rumpled Hawaiian shirt.  Like a professor on summer vacation.

            There was no car parked in front of the house.  Anthony suspected that Bob had taken care to conceal his vehicle.

            Anthony settled into the chair next to him and offered him the cola.  Bob took it, popped the tab, and enjoyed a long sip.    

            Anthony tilted his soda toward Bob’s pale legs.  “You need to work on your tan.”

            “Where I’m going, I’ll have plenty of opportunity to do that.” Bob grinned. 

            “I don’t expect you’ll tell me where you’re going.”

            “Somewhere with lots of sun.”

            Anthony took a sip of the Coke, gazed out at the sun-splashed day.

            “I’m sorry about your granddaughter, Kelley,” Anthony said.

            “I never expected it to happen.”  Bob’s voice was bitter.  “I was a fool.  I thought the man understood boundaries, would never violate the blood relative of his closest associates.”

            “He’s evil,” Anthony said. 

            “Many of his victims went with him willingly.  With others, he applied force.  Kelley was one of those latter ones.”

            “Again, I’m sorry.”

            Bob stared at the soda can in his hand as if wondering how it had gotten there.  “Afterward, Anthony, she couldn’t handle the shame.  She got her mother’s prescription sleeping pills and painkillers . . .” He pushed out a ragged breath.  “The church kept it out of the media, as we were expert in doing.  But I wasn’t the same after that.”

            “It finally became personal for you,” Anthony said. 

            “After twenty years,” Bob said.  “I finally found myself with a conscience.”

            “Clever tactic, to build the coded message around her name with the anagram.”