Armageddon Conspiracy (10 page)

A voice in his head countered, No! He was not responsible! The Devil was whispering lies to make him doubt himself. Faith’s choices had made her this dried up monster, reeking of tobacco and booze, her parchment skin stretched over brittle bones. Faith was his reminder of what happened when a person turned away from the Lord.

He pressed forward in his chair. “Do you even know who I am?” he demanded.

For a few seconds, Faith’s glassy eyes seemed to clear, and she barked a hoarse laugh. “I have no idea who you are.”

Biddle thought of his meeting earlier that day with Thomas Swaggert, the Vice President of the United States and the man who would soon accede to the Presidency. Swaggert was seventy-two, a Tennessean and fellow Pentecostal, once also a handler of serpents before his hunger for national office led him to a mainstream church. Swaggert was one of the cornerstones of Biddle’s plan, and he had gone to him seeking assurance that Swaggert’s heart was still capable of Biblical vengeance.

He had found Swaggert cautious, but beneath his politician’s veneer he was as full of hate for non-believers as ever. It had gladdened
him because given the coming outrage at a terrorist attack on the President, the electorate would demand a massive military retaliation against Iran and Syria. The new President would have to be steadfast, making certain that Israel became involved. Then the Final Battle would be underway.

He looked again at Faith, fighting his desire to tell her about the coming glory, to rub her face in her failure to live up to his greatness. As if she was reading his mind, Faith waved one hand, moving it like an eraser on a blackboard. “No,” she slurred. “I
do
know what you are. You’re an asshole!” She let out a drunken laugh, showing her wolfish, discolored teeth.

“The End of Days is coming!” Biddle said, leveling a finger at her. “The Son will soon return, and
your soul
will be judged!”

Faith put her arm on the table, shoving her untouched bowl and saucer and slopping soup over the side. “Go play with your snake.”

“Be careful, woman!”

Faith pushed back her chair and stood unsteadily. “Idiot,” she sneered.

Biddle watched her shuffle from the room and thought again of his great secret. When he became the Messiah Bringer, she would understand the error of her ways. He felt a thrill run up his spine—the End of Days! The Second Coming! One thing was certain—the Messiah Bringer would be rewarded. He shook his head, enraptured by anticipation.

The maid came in and took his soup then wordlessly wiped up the mess at Faith’s end. Afterward, she served Biddle a plate of broiled snapper and green salad, and as he ate, his thoughts changed and drifted to Anneliës. How she transfixed him! Her existence proved
that God did not intend for him to waste his life with Faith.

His mind wandered further, to the night Anneliës had spent with Brent Lucas. He tried to choke off the thought, but not before he felt the claws of jealousy close around his heart. He reminded himself that her sacrifice had been in God’s service and a true Christian did not hate, but what he felt for Lucas had the dark tarry consistence of something very close.

MAGGIE KNEW SHE SHOULD HAVE
been razor sharp on her first day at Project Seahawk, but she wasn’t, not even close. Her new boss, Ann Jenkins, the Deputy Director, seemed to sense it because she’d paused several times during their orientation walk around the ops center to give Maggie a questioning glance.

“Must have been one hell of a send-off party,” Jenkins sniffed at one point, apparently finding Maggie less impressive than her personnel folder and test scores indicated.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Maggie said. She didn’t bother to add that the insomnia had nothing to do with partying but everything to with her old boyfriend.

“Well, then,” Jenkins said, giving her a cool smile. “What do think so far?” Her skin stretched tight across her cheek and jaw in a way that suggested an eating disorder or compulsive exercise. To
Maggie, Jenkins looked uptight even by FBI standards.

“A lot of different agencies and a lot of computers,” Maggie said, her tone noncommittal. “Does it work?”

Jenkins tilted her head as though sifting Maggie’s words, maybe reappraising her a little. “Our capabilities outstrip anything that’s ever been done,” she said. “But it doesn’t work as well as it should. That’s the reason you’re here.”

Maggie nodded, knowing now was the time to say something politically correct, like how excited she was to join the team, but she remained silent because she already had doubts about whether Project Seahawk was the right fit. Jenkins had made it clear that she envisioned Maggie as an inside person, meaning she’d be crunching through reams of paperwork and solving computer incompatibilities. That meant she’d miss the things she loved the most—working cases and human contact.

Jenkins started walking again, her heels clicking on the linoleum in an unspoken demand for Maggie to keep up. They came to a locked door, and Jenkins punched in a code. Inside, through a second locked door, they entered the computer room, cooled to a constant fifty-five degrees. Jenkins talked for several minutes about terabytes and gigaflops and millions of computations per second, describing Operation Seahawk’s vast data crunching power. When she finished, she gave Maggie a skeptical glance, as if questioning how much a small-town cop could have grasped.

Maggie already understood that most FBI agents assumed local law enforcement people to be dumber than rocks, so before she answered she took a long look around, at the gleaming rows of mainframes and servers with their flashing lights. “From what I’ve read,
the problem isn’t the size or speed of your systems,” she said at last. “It’s database incompatibility. For example, accommodating instance heterogeneities in large freestanding systems. I have a paper on it, in case you’re interested.” When Maggie looked at her again, Jenkins seemed to be suppressing a smile.

Finally, Jenkins nodded. “You’re right, and in addition to database problems, our groups have interdepartmental biases and cultures that have never shared information. Our job is to make sure neither the computers nor the people prevent communication.”

“Why are all the groups segregated?” Maggie asked, referring to the way the Coast Guard was housed in one group of offices, the FBI in another, the New York/New Jersey Port Authority Police in a third, the New York City Police in theirs, and so on. “Seems kind of hard to break down barriers that way.”

Jenkins lowered her head and looked at Maggie through upraised eyes. “I’m the
Assistant
Director,” she said. “I happen to have a boss.”

“Gotcha,” Maggie said with a smile, thinking that maybe she was being a little tough on Agent Jenkins.

An hour later Maggie was back in her cubicle starting to get organized. In addition to computer work, she was supposed to act as a liaison officer to the town and city police forces of New Jersey. Jenkins had explained that her counterparts from New York and Connecticut were out checking mailboxes and manhole covers for next Sunday’s POTUS visit. When she’d asked why a port security operation was involved with a Presidential visit, Jenkins had shaken her head and growled, “Don’t ask.”

Maggie was grateful for the quiet and hoped some peace and quiet
would help her sort out the feelings stirred up by Brent’s call. Before last night, they hadn’t spoken in months. The enforced silence had been her choice—five months and twenty-six days if anybody was counting—and during that time she’d been reasonably successful in keeping him out of her thoughts. Nonetheless, last night her fragile wall of self-denial had collapsed, and she had to admit she missed him terribly.

Goddam you, Brent, she said to herself, preferring anger over vulnerability. They’d dated in high school, broken up in college, dated after he graduated from Yale, broken up during his time in business school, and then gone out again when he was in Boston. This last time, after nearly two years, it had seemed, well . . . perfectly natural to take things to the next level. She was thirty, ready to start thinking about the future, but when she’d shared those thoughts with Brent, he’d pulled back.

She knew the reasons. They had a lot to do with Harry’s death, with his parents’ deaths before that, and Brent’s irrational fear that Lucases were poorly made for parenthood or long-term relationships. Still, she hadn’t been able to accept the way he’d become cold and distant. She’d told him she didn’t want to force him into something, but she wasn’t going to waste her life on a partner who showed no hint of changing. It broke her heart, but in the end, she’d been the one who’d called things off.

Over the past months, she’d told herself she was over him, but last night something in his voice had gotten under her skin. He’d sounded lonely and lost, and after all this time, like he was finally reaching out to her. Sadly, she wondered if she could ever be there for him again.

TUESDAY MORNING BEGAN WITH A
special firm meeting. The first thing Brent noticed when he walked into the conference room was the look of barely restrained excitement on Biddle’s face. He turned to Owen Smythe, whose shrug indicated he, too, had no idea what was happening.

“First,” Biddle began once the last person sat, “a reminder that I’m going to be out of touch for the next ten days on a salmon river in Siberia. I’m leaving right after this meeting. I’ll have my sat-phone turned on about an hour each day, so you can reach me in an emergency. Betty will know the hours when I’ll be available.” Biddle smiled and looked around the room. “Call at your peril, gentlemen.”

There was muted laughter, but Biddle raised his hand for silence. “More important,” he said, his voice deepening. “The Holy Spirit spoke last night. The Lord told me that a moment of great darkness
approaches. Because of that we’re going short. I want us net flat by close of trading, and by tomorrow we will be short with ninety percent of maximum leverage. The market is going to crash, gentlemen.”

There was murmur of surprise. Brent looked around at the delight etched on the faces of the other partners. What could be so important that it would change the direction of the market, he wondered? What did Biddle know?

He ran over upcoming earnings releases and government economic data but came up with nothing. Still, there was Biddle at the head of the table with a wild glint in his eyes. Why was Biddle doing this? Were Brent’s clients about to be exposed to massive risk based on some delusion? He caught himself
—his
clients! Reminded of why he was here, he pressed the record button and cleared his throat. “Yesterday, we were unanimous in our assessment that the market would continue moving higher.”

“Yes,” Biddle said.

“We’re going to ignore that now and reposition the entire portfolio?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to know how you justify taking that kind of risk with our clients’ money?”

An angry murmur came from the other partners, but Biddle held up his hands for silence. “Because mine is the way,” he said. He smiled around at the others then clapped his hands, dismissing the meeting. “Have a good day, gentlemen, and God bless.”

Biddle walked out, followed by the other portfolio managers. Brent remained seated. No one, not even Smythe, would meet his eye.

BRENT SAT AT HIS DESK
looking over the cash balances generated from selling out his portfolios a day earlier. His first instinct had been to refuse, but when he’d called Simmons to tell her about the meeting she had instructed him to go along. Still, it was utterly nuts.

He brought up Dr. Faisal’s account on the computer and looked at the performance. The account’s value had grown from seven hundred sixty five million to nearly eight hundred twenty million in the time he’d managed it. This morning the market was roaring ahead yet again; only Biddle said there was “darkness over the world” and they had to go short. He stood and started to pace, telling himself he’d be out of there soon enough.

His phone buzzed, and he reached over and jerked it off its base. It was Joe Steward, the firm’s head trader. “I’ve got everyone else’s list.
Where’s yours?” Steward barked, meaning the lists of stocks Brent would be shorting.

“You’ll have it when it’s ready,” Brent replied.

“Get your ass in gear,” Steward said and hung up.

Brent tossed the phone back into its cradle and resumed pacing. It buzzed again, and he snatched it up. “What?” he barked, expecting Steward again.

Instead, it was Betty Dowager, her voice high-pitched, anxious. “I need to come down and speak with you.”

He assumed it was because Steward had called her to complain. She was probably going to patch Biddle through on the phone and stand there as a witness while he commanded Brent to go short according to God’s holy word.

“Suit yourself,” he said.

A moment later, Betty hurried into his office and shut the door. She stood as far from him as possible, pressing her plump rear end against the doorknob. Her glasses had heavy frames with arched points at the hinges. They usually gave her an aspect of slyness, but now along with the ashen color of her cheeks they simply added to her look of concern.

She put her fist to her mouth and held her other hand over the swell of her tummy as though she had eaten something bad. “Two men are here from the FBI,” she said in a near-whisper. “They asked to see Mr. Biddle, but he’s already out of touch. Mr. Wofford is on vacation as well, and I can’t reach him. They want to talk about one of your accounts.”

Brent frowned. “Which one?”

“Dr. Faisal.”

Brent had no idea what it could be about, but he wanted no part of handling it alone. “Who’s our counsel?”

“Spencer McDonald at Tweed, Barker and Rowe. I’ve already put in a call, but he’s not available.”

“Tell the FBI guys I’ll talk to them when Mr. McDonald can be present.”

Betty shook her head. “They insist on seeing you right away.”