The House of War: Book One Of : THE OMEGA CRUSADE (7 page)

“Be of good cheer then, my brothers & sisters in Christ. Ours is The One & The Only True God. We cannot fail. We cannot fall.”

“You tell them, Pops,” Ralph Golden says.

With the sermon completed the Pope shuffles back to the altar.

Ralph picks up his scapular from the bed post over which it is draped. The scapular is a sacramental, an outward sign of an internal reality. It is made of two, small squares of brown, woven wool connected by two woolen strands. The scapular is a badge of the confraternity of Holy Mother Mary, a sign of Grace &
a defense against danger & everlasting fire for those who wear it devoutly. It is a gift from the Queen of Heaven to Her beloved faithful. The Carmelite Saint, Simon Stock who received his from the holy hand of the Queen of all Saints, called the scapular the
Jugum Christi
, the yoke of Christ.

Ralph Golden gathers the sacramental up in the palm of his right hand & crosses himself. He then kisses the scapular & puts it on over his shoulders. The
Jugum Christi
, as advertised, is easy & light indeed!

“Credo in Unum Deum…”
The Holy Father leads his faithful through the Nicene Creed. “I believe in One God…”

“Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with thee,”
Ralph hears the angelic salutation as the view on the holographic projection pans out past pews of the faithful in the basilica. The footer on the screen informs him that Hawaii is leading the congregation through the second Joyous Mystery,
The Visitation.

“Blessed are thou amongst women & blessed is the fruit of thy womb...”
They chant the words of Saint Elizabeth to her cousin, Mary. Elizabeth exclaimed them when Mary’s greeting from the door caused the baby within her womb to leap with joy. Elizabeth the mother was filled, in that instant, with the Holy Spirit & her child who would grow to be John the Baptist was, through the divine virtue of Charity associated with the mystery, immediately cleansed of the stain of Original Sin.

“Jesum Christum, Filium Dei...”
The worshippers in Saint Peter’s continue through the Credo.

Ralph gives each of his armpits a few dabs of an antiperspirant stick.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,”
the congregation responds as one to the Hawaiian delegation.
“Pray for us sinners, now & at the hour of our death. Amen.”

“Hail Mary, full of Grace,”
Idaho begins the second bead.

Ralph pulls his camel’s hair shirt off the bed.

“The Lord is with thee.”

“Deum verum de Deo vero...”

The shirt is his creation as founder of the Hair Shirt Club for Men. It is close fitting with sleeves that reach to the wrists. The outside is soft, calf leather & the inside is made of large, coarse tufts of camel hair that provides the wearer with maximum irritation. From Saint John the Baptist to Saint Thomas Moore, all of Ralph Golden’s heroes wore hair shirts. It is mortification he enjoys offering up to God in their honor during the penitential seasons of Lent & Advent.

The PalmPal gives him a quick tour of the Church’s crypt where young priests & nuns recite the Rosary, knelt in adoration before the Eucharist.

“Blessed are thou among women & blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”

Over the hair-shirt, Ralph hangs his gold Miraculous Medal. The little, gold oval bears the image of the Blessed Virgin Mother on one side, arms outstretched with the words
‘O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to you.’
On the other side, the sacred hearts of Jesus and Mary are crowned with an arc of twelve stars before the cross & the letter
M
. Miracles beyond reckoning have been attributed to the medal since the design for it was revealed to Saint Catherine Laboure in 1830.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now & at the hour of our death. Amen.”

Leaving the crypt, the PalmPal proceeds to give Golden a 360 degree viewing of the church grounds. The National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception is the largest Catholic Church in the country, the tenth largest in the world. It was built in honor of the Patroness of the United States, Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. The church is also Ralph Golden’s forward operating base against the forces of darkness.

He has been living at the rectory since the first week of September. He came to play the church’s wonderful Moller organ for the feast Mass of Saint Peter Claver. That was on the ninth of September. Two days later, the courts ordered the covering up of the nation’s religious heritage. Two days after that the call was put out to Christendom to gather in Washington. Ralph Golden cleared his schedule for the rest of the year & volunteered to stay and help handle the logistics of the protest. Less than a month later, across the Atlantic, the Italian military lay siege to the Vatican.

Satan upped the ante on Ralph.

Golden was unfazed. The showdown has been a long time a-coming & Ralph was ready, eager even.

The PalmPal shows him the fleet of twelve mini-buses filing into the parking lot on time. The buses are filled with worshippers, the elderly & the handicapped, for the second of today’s Christmas Eve Masses.

Ralph pulls his tuxedo out of its garment bag & smiles in admiration of it. It is an eye-popping, startling, one-of-a-kind, thing of beauty! The Cutaway tux is white & overlaid with fist-sized hound’s tooth in Christmas green & red
from collar to cuffs. He slips on its pants as the holographic projection flickers, changing from church to city cameras. It displays the scene outside the Supreme Court building. Twenty thousand fellow Catholics fill the grounds behind the Capitol building, sitting in neat, tight rows, reciting the Rosary, state by state, in unison with their fellow faithful in churches throughout DC, the country & the world.

“Hail Mary, full of Grace,”

Ralph sits on the edge of the narrow bed to put on his socks. One is red and the other is green.

“The Lord is with thee…”

He watches the images from the National Mall roll across the ghostly screen as he rolls his socks up past his calves. The park is packed with their fellow Christians, concentrated at the moment in & around The Ellipse across from the White House.

Ralph rises & puts on a silk, dress shirt. It has golden buttons & is green on the left & red on the right. He buttons the shirt and tucks it into his pants. His suspenders, cummerbund & bow tie are also green & red but they invert the colors against the silk shirt.

As he dons them, the computer shows him footage from the cameras in & around Lafayette & Mount Vernon Square as well as Franklin, Stanton & Lincoln Parks. Ralph Golden’s enemies, atheists, anti-Christians & nihilist agitators have occupied those sites. The news estimates their numbers at twenty-to-forty thousand & most of them seem to be back at their litter-strewn camps, resting up for tonight.

“All quiet on the Western front,” Ralph declares to his computer. The holographic screen disappears.

Golden puts on the tuxedo’s long-tailed jacket. He then snatches the matching cane & top hat off his dresser. He does a little dance with hat & cane, admiring his outfit & the toughest & tallest five foot nothing of a man wearing it. He puts the hat & cane back on his dresser top. There will be time enough for them later, he tells himself; it’s not Christmas yet. From the closet, Ralph pulls out an Inverness caped coat. Its wool is Advent violet. He puts it on, covering the riotous Christmas tux. He then slips his feet into a pair of matching violet loafers. Standing before the mirror, he gives his dark & waxed handlebar mustache a quick curling & himself a wink of a steely, gray eye.

“T.V. off,” Golden says & the flat screen goes dark.

Ralph then pulls his Rosary off the Crucifix over his bed. It is made up of American Revolutionary era musket balls strung through with a slender, iron, link chain. The Crucifix at its end is made up of three Civil War era railway spikes arranged in a cross, the bottom end sharpened to a pencil point. A solid 24 karat gold
Corpus Christi
, body of Christ, is mounted to it. The Rosary is Ralph’s favorite sacramental & the source of much of his power. He kisses the feet of his Savior & places the Rosary into his coat’s right pocket.

On his way out of the room, Ralph snaps up his PalmPal.

“Say good night, Gracie,” he tells his computer.

“Good night, Gracie,” the machine responds in Gracie Allen’s voice. The PalmPal shuts itself down before it reaches the bottom of his coat’s left pocket.

Ralph Golden is just beginning his day. & his days, the best of them at any rate, begin with Mass.

23:22:20

A half hour ago Lamar Reed took the time to greet everyone as he made his way to his booth at the back of the bar. After the initial greetings no one approaches him. They know that seated where he is, the congressman is awaiting the latest update from his two top analysts. Lamar takes a sip of a fresh drink and scans the room. He loves the people gathered about him. They are his people and he considers himself more than their boss. He is their servant as well. It is another lesson learned at his grandmother’s knee.

“Leaders rule justly when they serve,” she reminded him of it the night he won his congressional seat. “That’s what leading by example is all about. All else is pomp and ceremony.”

Lamar sees his job a simple one; he is to make their jobs as easy as possible. Money, machines, software, intelligence from every corner of the world, whatever they asked of him, Lamar bent heaven and earth to get it to them. Fueled seemingly by little else than caffeine, these, his people, had saved tens, if not hundreds of thousands of lives. They peered into the endless streams of numbers, bits and bytes of information that deluged government computers daily, they scrutinized volumes of intelligence reports, analysis and scoured through the babble of communications in every known language and medium to unearth plots against the nation. In the two years he has worked with them,
their efforts have foiled schemes against the Mall of America, LAX, JFK, the Super Bowl, two attacks on the capital and, the most audacious of all, the recent plot to take down the Liberty Tower, freshly risen from the site of the old World Trade Center in New York. Their dedication to the nation and their jobs made them true professionals in a town sorely lacking in them. Their results made them the quiet, unsung heroes of the President’s War for Law and Order. Congressman Reed often and sadly wondered why their work ethic was so often lacking in the men and women elected to be their superiors; senators and fellow congressmen with far more vital responsibilities did not work half as hard as the least of those gathered around him tonight.

The television over the bar draws his attention to it once more. Lamar shakes his head at the slow, panning aerial shot of the crowds gathered at the National Mall. He does not want to think about them but can’t help it. Everyone in the bar will be keeping an eye on them through the night’s festivities. The whole world, in fact, will be watching, keeping a wary eye on the two hundred and fifty thousand anti-government protestors prepared to take on DC’s mayor and the Federal government at midnight. Sizable throngs of angry citizens are gathered in a score of other cities in solidarity with them. The blinking footer sums up the issue and the fear in a few words:

CHURCH vs. STATE

Congressman Reed’s thoughts turn to his grandmother once again. She was both the voice of reason and the inspiration for much of his life. She died last February at the age of ninety-nine. He misses her dearly. She was the last of his immediate family to pass. His mother succumbed to cancer ten years before. His dad was senselessly gunned down in the street when Lamar was only fourteen years old. Reed has other family; there are a handful of cousins in Fort Wayne, a pair of aunts in New Orleans and an uncle in Los Angeles. None of them, however, have the influence of the three who raised him. This was his first Christmas without them. It is as much a reason for his staying in DC over the holiday as is his workload.

Lamar takes another swallow of his drink as memories of them rise like ghosts in his mind. And as ghosts often do, they rise in accusation.

Congressman Reed knows that he would have been at odds with his family over the affair that brought the demonstrating masses to DC. They would have
been unapologetic in their support of the crowds. Were they still alive, they might even be counted among their number. His grandmother, in particular, would have found the whole thing shameful. He remembers her indignation at the news coverage from San Diego three years ago, the sad shaking of her gray-haired head while she watched the cross atop Mount Soledad being pulled down by chains and tractors. The decision of the Supreme Court would not have sat well with her. She did not understand the world his generation was trying to build. She did not believe it was the kind of world the grandson of a Baptist minister should be helping to create.

“Our government is becoming godless, son,” she complained to him the night the cross came down in California. “Why must this government be so set against religion?”

“We’re not against religion,” Lamar argued. He had just won his election and was spending time with her before moving to DC to start his political career. “Religion has its place in the home, the church, the temple and the mosque. It’s just too divisive in the public sphere.”

“You really believe that?”

“Why sure,” he answered. “Religion has been the source of a lot of bloodshed over the centuries.”

“It has?”

“You don’t think so?”

“No,” his grandmother answered with a resolute shake of her head. “People are the source of bloodshed, son. Religion is just one among countless things people will fight and kill over.”

“Well then,” Lamar said. “We’ll give the people one less thing to fight over in the public sphere.”

“So you’re going to take the most important thing out?”

“Not everyone feels that way about it, grandma.”

“That doesn’t make religion any less important, Lamar,” she said. “How do you feel about it? Reverend Randolph tells me he hasn’t seen you at services in a long while.”