Authors: Bryan Smith
Nathan didn’t believe they would spare his kids. Mercy on any level didn’t fit with the brutality these deranged people—who were barely more than kids themselves—clearly loved dispensing. He was being lied to and used. There was nothing in him that believed anything other than this.
And yet…
“Yes. I’m ready.”
Though he believed doom for them all was certain, he had no choice but to play along. So long as there was the tiniest, most infinitesimal chance Sally was telling the truth, he would obey her every command.
“Are you a filthy, greedy pig who values material possessions and the accumulation of an obscene amount of wealth above all other things?”
Nathan swallowed hard and heaved a breath. “Yes.”
Sally smiled. “Tell me what you are.”
“I’m a filthy, greedy pig.”
“Oink for me.”
His instinct was to rebel against this indignity, but he suppressed it and made the requested sound. Sally’s male cohorts giggled.
Sally put a hand on Courtney’s head. His little girl flinched as the woman who’d murdered her mother began to stroke her hair in an obscene mockery of maternal tenderness. “Isn’t your father funny, Courtney?”
Courtney’s only response was another sob.
Sally grinned. “Next question. Do you believe John Wayne de Rais was sent to this filthy world to save us all?”
Nathan sighed. “Yes.”
“Do you accept John Wayne’s gift of love?”
“Yes.”
“Should everyone else do the same?”
“Yes.”
“Do you accept your death as the just judgment of God?”
“Yes.”
Sally glanced at Thomas. “Stop the recording.”
Thomas pressed a button on the phone’s screen and tucked it away in a rear pocket.
Sally raised her gun again. “Are you a music fan, Nathan?”
He frowned. “What’s this got to do with anything?”
“Just answer the question.”
He lifted his shoulders in an exasperated little shrug. “Sure. I guess. Isn’t everyone?”
Sally smiled. “I sure am. I’m a big fan of the Doors. You ever listen to them? I figure an old guy like you must. Anyway, there’s this book about them called
No One Here Gets Out Alive
. It’s one of my most favorite books ever. I’ve read it over and over.” And now her smile turned overtly menacing. “Appropriate, don’t you think?”
Nathan’s eyes opened wide as her meaning hit home.
He opened his mouth to scream.
Sally fired her gun until it was empty.
At several locations across the city in those early evening hours, many more similar incidents unfolded. All of them occurred in places where the wealthy and privileged lived, dined and did business. Soon the populace was in a froth of panic. The multitude of crime scenes made for a tremendous amount of confusion and chaos for those charged with investigating the incidents and attempting to restore some measure of calm. By the time the city’s leaders could put their heads together and come to the conclusion that it was time to move against John Wayne de Rais and his cult with significantly more force than before, it was too late to matter…
Chapter Twenty-Five
Coming Down Fast
The thing that mattered most to John Wayne de Rais as the last day of his life began to unfold was that all his years of scheming and manipulating others had to mean something bigger in the end than just the pursuit of money. This was why he had devoted so much time to defining his central message as a rejection of the modern world’s obsession with money and material things. In his sermons to the faithful, he railed with tremendous fervor against greed and the tyranny of big business. Once upon a time he’d had to fake that depth of feeling, but no more.
Because now he had at last become the man he was always meant to be. All the superficially “bad” things he’d ever done had served a greater purpose in leading him to this transcendent moment in time. All his former cynicism vanished as the larger purpose behind all the years of madness and deception was finally revealed.
The time had come to send his message out to the world in the most dramatic way possible. The events he had set in motion today would rock the foundations of corrupt western civilization. Even now, as he prepared to take the final steps of his own journey, his emissaries were out there communicating the message and sowing seeds of fear and chaos. Video recordings of the many acts of painful love would soon be appearing in many places online. His own pre-recorded farewell and statement of intent would be uploaded by Jade in the moments following his death.
The world will hear us
, he thought as he stared at the closed curtain in the backstage area of the compound’s meeting hall.
The time for revolution is ripe. The poor of the world are more desperate than ever. We are the spark that ignites the conflagration that burns the world clean again.
Before today, there had been moments when he wondered whether his increasingly frequent cloudy moments meant he was deluding himself about the rightness of steering the Order down this revolutionary path. Maybe his quest for some kind of larger meaning was nothing more than megalomaniacal selfishness.
Today had put an end to that for good.
For the first time in weeks, he woke up without a crushing headache and free of even the faintest wisp of confusion. He didn’t trust the apparent relief of symptoms, thinking they would reappear soon, but that never happened and he spent the day feeling clear-headed and more mentally fit than he had in ages. John was no fool. He knew well the medical reality facing him. This was nothing more than a blessed respite from suffering. But the temporary lifting of the clouds convinced him he was doing what was righteous and just. The respite was a sign from God, a gift for rallying the faithful to make this great sacrifice.
John smiled.
Time to make history.
He parted the curtain and stepped out onto the stage to applause that was nothing short of ecstatic. The faithful were on their feet, the mass of humanity so dense it all but made the rows of chairs invisible. Some rolled on the floor as if possessed by manic spirits, while many others danced and sang. Their hands were in the air, their feet were stomping and their voices were thunderous enough to raise the rafters.
John walked to the podium at the edge of the stage and stood there beaming out at the rapturous crowd. He didn’t bend his head to the microphone to ask for quiet, choosing to allow them this moment of perfect joy a while longer. The revelry of his faithful further reinforced the rightness of what he was doing. Soon enough, though, the crowd noise leveled out, dimming amidst loud shushing sounds from many in the audience.
When the noise had dropped to an acceptable level, John smiled and put his mouth close to the microphone. “Are you ready to go to heaven tonight?”
The crowd erupted again.
Hundreds of feet stomped the wooden floor.
The building shook.
When the frenzy again began to abate, John looked to a black-clad man at the rear of the building and gave the prearranged signal. The man opened the door to the meeting hall and stepped back as several more men in black entered the building.
The mood in John’s private quarters was tense as the remaining members of his inner circle awaited his return from his final speech to the faithful. Keely’s understanding was that the group once numbered more than a dozen people. Desertions and death had reduced inner circle membership to half that number. If John’s plan played out the way it had been outlined to her, all the remaining inner circle members would be dead within the next hour.
Keely wanted no part of this madness and had said so—loudly—many times. It struck her as grotesquely humorous that her official position in the Order remained “inner circle” despite her attempted escape and the fact that she had never felt like anything other than a prisoner during her brief time in the big house. But it was the way John wanted things, which she took as more proof of his raving insanity.
No one in the room was talking. The couple she had glimpsed in the hallway outside her bedroom prior to her foiled escape attempt—the heavyset man and his female friend—sat on the edge of the large bed, their hands intertwined as they stared at the floor. A security guy in the usual black stood with his back against the door, a semi-automatic rifle clutched in his hands. He steadfastly refused to meet anyone’s gaze. A female couple sat cross-legged opposite each other on the floor, holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes. One was weeping quietly, but both were smiling. That was the crazy thing to Keely. They were all about to die, but no one was outwardly panicking. They should all be scared witless.
Jade was standing by a window that overlooked the area behind the big house, watching and waiting for John’s inevitable departure from the meeting house.
Keely approached her. “He still in there?”
Jade didn’t look at her. “Yes.”
The terse one-word reply made it clear she wasn’t interested in further conversation. The implicit warning of physical retribution if she dared pursue it was impossible to miss. In normal circumstances, that threat would be enough to still her tongue. But she was facing imminent death anyway, so what did it matter?
“This is ridiculous. You can’t want to die.”
Jade said nothing and kept staring out at the window.
“I don’t get it. You’re young. You’re attractive. You have a fuck of a lot to live for. Throwing all that away over this bullshit is insane.”
Jade looked at her. Her jaw tightened and her nostrils flared, but still she said nothing. She flexed her fingers around the handle of the gun in her right hand, tightening her grip on it. Her rapidly fading patience was as palpable as her anger. It wasn’t out of the question that she would fabricate some excuse to shoot her now rather than waiting for John’s arrival. Already tonight the woman had gunned down two other inner circle members who’d attempted to flee.
But Keely again put her fear aside and pushed ahead. “This is stupid. You’re not going to some celestial paradise when this is over because there’s no such thing. You’re just gonna be fucking
dead
. For no good reason. For
nothing
.”
Jade’s face twisted in a snarl as she whipped the back of a hand across Keely’s face. The loud
crack
made everyone else in the room flinch. The pain made her cry out and stagger away from Jade, who followed her into the middle of the room. She said nothing as she delivered another, even more devastating blow, this one a closed-fist punch to the face that made Keely’s knees buckle. The next punch drove her to the floor.
Keely rolled onto her back and looked up in time to see Jade looming over her. Before she could attempt to scoot away, Jade planted the heavy sole of one of her designer boots against the side of her head, pushing down until her face was pressed against the carpeted floor. “That’s enough out of you.”
Keely whimpered, tried to say something.
Jade’s boot pressed down harder, silencing her. “Enough.” She took her boot off Keely’s face and knelt next to her, pointing the gun at her face. “You know what? I enjoyed playing with you out in the barn. Let’s play some more.” She smiled and put the barrel of the gun under Keely’s chin. “Beg for your life.”
Keely’s heart hammered as she stared into Jade’s pitiless eyes. “What’s the point? You’re just gonna kill me anyway.”
“Probably. But as long as your heart is beating, you’ve got a chance, right? Maybe you’ll even be rescued. It won’t be much longer before the police are all over this place. But you’ll never know because for some reason you decided now was the time to save a little bit of pride.” She nudged Keely’s chin with the barrel. “Beg.”
It infuriated her to think so, but the bitch was right. The chances of salvation were close to zero, but…
As long as my heart’s still beating…
She begged for her life.
Before they departed the Renaissance, Ted Wilkinson arranged for his sister to have a private chat with Casey Miller. This occurred in a bar inside the hotel called the Bridge. Rarely in his life had Casey felt so out of his element than when he walked into the lounge there. Everyone looked as if they had just walked off the set of
Mad Men
. The atmosphere was elegance and class. There was a lot of muted, civilized-sounding conversation that was entirely bereft of all but the most benign profanity, a disconcerting thing for a guy not accustomed to putting together more than a couple sentences without saying “fuck”.
The men all betrayed the easy confidence that comes with a high level of financial success. They drank martinis and scotch. There wasn’t a single beer bottle in sight. The women were the sleekest and most chicly dressed Casey had ever seen. He didn’t have the first clue how to behave around any of these people.
Fuck this noise, let’s get this over with.
He made his way to the bar and scanned the area for Ted Wilkinson. Ted had invited Casey to the bar because, supposedly, he had a business proposition for him. Also he liked the cut of Casey’s jib (whatever the hell that meant) and wanted to get to know him better. They had a couple hours to kill before heading out, so Casey figured why not?