Sinner (32 page)

“Jesus!” she snapped, slapping the remote down.

“Slow down, Darcy.” Billy crossed the room. “He did go out of his way to make sure he didn't specifically deride any particular religion. He's only talking about his faith in Je—”

“Which is now legally the same as denigrating Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, the lot of them! He knows very well that Christianity is exclusive.
Jesus
was an exclusivist!”

“Maybe, but he has some pretty direct words for all religions.”

“Which is in itself a flagrant violation of our law.”

“
Our
law?”

“You know what I mean,” she said, standing and dismissing him with a wave of her hand. “The Tolerance Act.”

“This kind of thing's going to happen all over the place for a while. We haven't exactly declared martial law. Let's give it some time to settle in.”

“This isn't just any old place, Billy. This is Paradise. This is Johnny! And he's already got eight thousand hits; if this gets picked up—and knowing Johnny he'll make sure it does—it'll top the Net posts by the end of the day. How many people live in that town now?”

“About three hundred.”

“You can bet they'll lap up whatever Johnny serves them.”

“You're overreacting.”

“And the fact that he called Kinnard makes it clear he's challenging us directly.”

“We don't know that.”

“He's breaking the law already! He's defying us. And he knows what he's doing. Johnny probably doesn't floss his teeth without a backup plan; do you think that this was just a
mistake
?” She was half tempted to take off her glasses and set Billy straight.

“You're right, he's defying the law. The attorney general agrees. I don't see how any court could interpret it differently. We crafted a pretty nasty little law. But we need to be thoughtful about how we proceed.”

“Okay, that's more like it,” she said. “So you agree we can't just leave this up to whatever local police they have up there? Does Paradise even have a sheriff? Do we have to wait for the state patrol to round him up?”

“What do you suggest?”

“Let's shut down the blog. Censure his statements and send in the FBI or whoever Kinnard has access to. We squash this before it has time to breathe!”

“Not that simple.We have jurisdictional considerations. The law would be enforced first by local authorities. The National Tolerance Act is still brand-new. It'll take time to work out the kinks.”

Billy looked at the Rolex.

“I'm sorry.” She walked up to him and they stared at the watch together. “I bought it for you. It's a Rolex. A kind of, you know, gift of appreciation. It was rude of me to get sidetracked.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I've always wanted a Rolex. That was kind of you.”

“You're welcome.”

But neither of them picked up the watch. Johnny had taken the air out of their celebratory mood.

“Kinnard had a suggestion.”

“Let me guess,” she said. “He wants us to go to Paradise.”

“That's right.”

Of course he would. Fly to Paradise, talk Johnny down, nip this whole thing in the bud before it grew out of local proportion.Wasn't that the skill she and Billy had perfected?

“I'm not sure I can go back to Paradise,” Billy said.

She knew what he meant. The very idea of meeting Johnny in Paradise sent shivers down her spine. But the sound of fear in his voice betrayed something deeper than simple anxiety. Billy perhaps had more reason to fear Paradise than she; after all, he'd been the first to fall. The first to push the line between reality and terror. Black was his own evil progeny, and Black had been born in Paradise.

“He would agree to meet us outside of Paradise, don't you think?”

His eyes darted over to her. “Not the canyons.”

“Of course not, no, not where the monastery was.”

“I don't know why it makes me so nervous,” he said. “It's just a place.”

“A place that gave me nightmares for years,” she said. “I understand perfectly well why you'd be terrified of it.”

Darcy realized her mistake immediately. “I didn't mean to suggest that you're to blame any more than I am,” she said, crossing quickly to him. She took his hand and lifted it to her lips. “We all made choices. Just because you were the first to defy the monks . . .”

Darcy stopped there, realizing that she'd already dug a hole of blame. She thought about using her eyes to comfort him, but they'd agreed not to manipulate each other without being invited. And she wasn't eager to have her mind read, though she had no apparent reason to fear it.

She brushed his hair from his forehead and spoke in a soothing tone. “Do you know what the best part of what we've done is, Billy?”

“We've stopped a string of lynchings.”

“We've stopped priests from wandering around this country condemning people to hell.”

Billy didn't share her resentment of the church, but neither did he lose any love on religion.

“Instead we have
Johnny
condemning people to hell,” he said.

“Then let's go to Paradise and change that, once and for all.”

“Talk him out.”

“And if he doesn't talk out?”

Billy answered with fire in his eyes. “Then we burn him out.”

JOSEPH HOUDE, a rail-thin, blond-cropped freelancer whose sudden rise in blog rankings a year earlier had led to significant demand for his stories on several larger Net feeds, was the first reporter to arrive in Paradise. His small yellow Volkswagen hybrid had quietly rolled into town at two on Friday afternoon after a four-hour drive from Denver.

He'd made the decision to cross the mountains after receiving an e-mail from one of his Washington sources, who had it on good faith that one of the many potential infractions of the new hate-crime law might bear a closer look. The e-mail had included a link to Johnny's blog, which in turn led Joseph to twenty-three similar blogs that had originated from the same geographical location.

Without coming right out and denouncing the National Tolerance Act, the blogs had unashamedly broken the law by doing precisely what many feared would test the law. Without naming any religion or group of people, the blogs asserted in a very public forum that when Jesus had repeatedly claimed to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life, who alone provided access to the Father, he meant precisely that.

It was a narrow-minded perception of the prophet's teaching, Joseph thought, but then the same prophet had also claimed that the path to God was indeed narrow, missed by most.

The legal conservatives were sure to wage full-scale war on the new law. The American public had choked it down in a time of crisis, but more than a few would vomit it back into the courts. The notion that people could not stand up and say whatever they pleased about their faith might make sense on paper, but two hundred fifty years of complete religious freedom would not be so easily squashed.

Indeed, similar positions were even now starting to pop up on the Net.

Then again, suppression of free speech in similar categories had been accepted with surprising calm in other countries already.Most European countries had put the brakes on freedom of expression years ago in an attempt to keep the peace between Christians and Muslims.

The Europeans had learned that it was one thing to say, “Starbucks makes the best coffee in the world.” Such opinions, freely stated, had never been contested.

It was quite another thing to say, “White is by far the best color of skin in the world.” Or, “Christianity is a better religion than Buddhism.” Or even, “Islam.” Or even, “Jesus is the only way.”

Fighting words, all of them.

Regardless, as of today, running through Harlem screaming, “Whites rule!” was a crime. And so was holding up a sign in public claiming that Jesus was God. Which was what Johnny had done, albeit a virtual sign.

Hits on blogs were updated hourly, and on Johnny's blog they numbered eight thousand at 9:00 a.m.When the counter rolled over to seventy-six thousand at 10:00, Joseph threw his recorder, his computer, and a few clothes into a bag and scrambled down the stairs for the parking lot.

He'd been in the business long enough to recognize a story when he saw it, and this one had history in the making written all over it. Oddly enough, in dire need of a distraction the night before, he'd downloaded an old classic titled
300
off the Net and filled his mind with an hour and a half of raw heroism or foolishness, depending on how one viewed the movie. Either way it was a enjoyable flick, if a bit violent.

Although he knew it was purely coincidental, it amused Joseph that the current population of Paradise, the epicenter of this blog, was also three hundred.

The three hundred Spartans had taken their stand against impossible odds and been memorialized on film. Now the three hundred Paradisians were gathered in the valley, and if Joseph's nose told him anything, it was that the number would grow to three thousand. He wondered if a memorial would be built to honor them.

The town looked like a typical mountain community abandoned by progress and youth. One church, one grocery store, one bar and grill, one salon, four fruit stands. Nothing about his first drive down Main Street suggested that he was at the epicenter of any ideological struggle destined to be memorialized.

His research told him that the average income of Paradisians was nearly fifty times the average income of other American farmers, but only the expensive cars parked about town provided evidence of this.

There were no mobs standing around with pickets, no signs on the walls of the buildings denouncing the U.S. government, no prophets walking up and down the street with bullhorns, crying for the world to repent. In fact, there were no signs that anyone from this town had done anything to draw attention to themselves at all.

He spent the first hour speaking with residents, pretty much down-to-earth Americans eager to shake his hand, extraordinary only in their apparent simplicity and unapologetic appreciation for the light that had come to destroy darkness. It all sounded a bit kooky to him, although no one met his expectations of a kook.

Then Joseph met Katrina Kivi, the girl who'd hit the wires after her breakup of the Boulder City High School riot a week or so earlier, if he wasn't mistaken.

“You're a journalist?” she asked, eyes bright as the moon.

“I am.”

“Really?” The news seemed to delight her. “What brings you here?”

“I was going to ask you the same question. Aren't you the girl from Boulder City—”

“In the flesh,” she said. “Kat.”

“And what brings you here, Kat?”

“I'm glad you asked. Do you want to meet him?”

“Who?”

“Johnny Drake. You're here because you read his blog, right? Is the word getting out?”

“Umm . . .”Her lack of guile was disarming, to say the least. “I would say yes. Are you sure you want that?”

“Of course.Why write a blog if you don't expect anyone to read it? Do you want to meet him?”

“Yes. I would.”

“Come on.”

She led him to a white house across from the church and informed him along the way that Johnny was staying with his mother for now.

Katrina bounded up the steps, rapped on the front door, and stepped back when a tall, well-built man wearing dark glasses answered the door.

“Hello, Kat.”

She looked at Joseph, smiling coyly so that he couldn't help but to think he'd been set up for something.

“The press is here,” she said.

“They are, huh?”

“His name is Joseph.”

Johnny Drake studied him, then stepped to one side. “Come on in, Joseph.”

Joseph Houde spent thirty minutes with Johnny, but he knew within the first three that he was sitting on top of a time bomb. The man had in mind an epic showdown between good and evil, and he held an utterly compelling conviction that he'd been born to make his stand here, in Paradise, Colorado, today, for all the world to see. There wasn't a breath of backdown in him.

Even worse, Joseph found himself strangely drawn to the man, wanting to believe his soft-spoken rhetoric.

He left the house thinking that if there was such a thing as a devil, Johnny could probably stand toe-to-toe with him and not bat an eye.He returned to his car, fired up his sat link, composed his first story for immediate release, and sent it to his clearing board.

Two minutes later he received a confirmation that Sapphire, the largest of the Net news services, had accepted the story at his regular rate.

When Joseph checked Johnny's blog, he discovered that the hits now numbered 989,498. Even more interesting, a few hundred bloggers out-side of Paradise had picked up the cause and posted their own bold declarations of faith.

He looked out at the sleepy town before him. The Paradisians would indeed be immortalized.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Day Nineteen

IT HAD been a mistake to wait for all the arrangements before leaving Washington, Darcy thought, as they hovered far above the valley of Paradise. It had taken Kinnard four hours to reach Johnny by phone only to be told that he was unavailable before Sunday morning. Johnny was posturing. She had paced the carpet in the suite, telling herself that the bitterness she felt toward him was unreasonable, that this was just a simple misunderstanding, that even he had sat with the council and all but offered his support!

It was almost as if he wanted this showdown of his. But it would all work out. They'd all been through too much to let one little protest from one little man deny them now.

Billy sat beside her, staring out the window, brow beaded with sweat. At first glance, from three thousand feet above the town, Paradise looked deserted and untouched by time, still the same as she remembered.