The God Patent (31 page)

Ryan watched Emmy fume when Foster referred to her without addressing her. Dodge’s eyes kept going back to her too. She was dangerous, and Ryan realized for the first but certainly not the last time that he was firmly entrenched in the crossfire. He felt his tongue run along his teeth. He wanted to disarm the situation and started to interrupt, but Emmy beat him to it with one word spoken very quietly.

In a southern gentleman’s drawl, Blair said, “What was that, ma’am?”

Emmy looked at him. “I said
please
.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, Mr. Reed—”

“
Doctor
Reed.”

“Yes, well.” Emmy cleared her throat. “He said he would like to expose the scientific establishment. My response is, please. Let’s discuss this in public. Let’s compare experimental results. The problem,
Mister
Reed—your work is so weak, so divorced from the scientific method, that I couldn’t imagine”—she looked at Jeb—“an accredited university awarding you a doctorate.”

Blair began assembling documents into his briefcase. Jeb followed his example. Dodge watched the two of them, his eyes squinted, but a trace of a smile lingered on his lips.

Blair shut his briefcase with a snap and looked across at Dodge. “What sort of number are you considering?”

“We believe that, at this point, ten million should appropriately compensate Mr. McNear for his contribution. Right now, that’s a small fraction of the contracts you must anticipate from National Engineering. You could wait, but in a few years, maybe a hundred million will be more appropriate.”

Jeb’s false laughter drowned out Dodge. “Millions? You got quite an imagination there, Nutter. Tell you what, I’ll pretend to use it as a starting point. See, I was thinking a few thousand.” He looked at Blair, as if for support, but Blair looked away. Jeb said, “I reckon extortion is what you get in this town for trying to do the Lord’s work.”

Dodge closed his briefcase and dropped the kind demeanor he’d been masquerading. He released an extra-long version of his raspy chuckle. “I prefer the term
blackmail
myself, but as long as the check doesn’t bounce, we can call it whatever you like.”

“You lied to me,” Emmy said.

Ryan stammered.

Dodge had just led Foster and the others to the elevator. Emmy had stayed in the conference room and was looking out the window. Ryan stood in the hallway, caught between them.

“Dodge is a liar. I expect him to lie to me, but I trusted you.”

“It wasn’t a lie,” Ryan said, though he didn’t believe it. “You were here to set them straight, and you did.”

“I told him that everything I said had to be in the open, and here I am in a smoke-filled room.”

“There’s no smoke in this room.”

She turned and glared at him.

His heart sunk. “I’m sorry. Emmy. I needed your help and—”

“And you got it!” She marched out of the room, past Ryan. “You used me.”

“Wait a second,” Ryan said. “I appreciate your help—you know how much I appreciate your help. I didn’t know what Dodge planned. No one knows what Dodge plans. Come on, Emmy, I—”

“Ryan, just leave me alone, okay?” She stopped several feet away from him. “I’m angry, so just let me figure this out, okay? I’ll call you.”

She walked away.

A
t the airport, Foster quietly changed his seat assignment for the flight home. On the way out he’d sat between his father-in-law and his boss. But right now, he was fighting the impulse to get in their faces. They were politicians, not warriors. If Foster questioned them, Blair would list their losses again, from the Scopes trial to
Roe v. Wade
to the defeat of intelligent design in
Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District
, right up to the most recent,
Lawrence v. Texas
. To Foster, the last was the worst—the courts openly embraced sodomy.

Yes, the Christian soldiers were racking up defeats, but this was a battle they could win. He took a breath and leaned against the window. He could see their wisdom; they needed time to develop the Creation Energy Generator. Settling with Ryan would give them that time. Soon enough, Foster would open Heisenberg’s window, and the power of God would be unleashed. That’s when the battle should begin, but not yet.

He was a paladin fighting for God, and always, hovering over him, was the angel Rachel. The accusation made by the shark, that Rachel had been engaged to the patent officer and had been deceiving him all these years, opened a wound. When Blair failed to deny it, a demon of self-doubt had flown into that wound, into his heart. He knew how to fight the self-doubt in his head—why had God chosen him, and what if he couldn’t do it?

He fought those demons every day, but he had never had a doubt in his heart.

The plane weaved through clouds over the Rockies, each a distinct thunderhead towering into the heavens. Foster could see flashes of lightning inside them, and shining between each great column were individual beams of sunlight. The possibility that Creation Energy could unleash enough power to initiate the Rapture seemed desirable right now. Purge the world of evil in one righteous slap.

Would paying off Ryan be his sin or Jeb’s? He sighed. The man sitting next to him shifted his laptop away. Ryan’s collapse had started at the celebration of the end of Foster’s bachelorhood—his wound oozed doubt. Ryan had suffered for that night all these years. Maybe it was time that Foster suffered too.

And, like so many other times, it came to him—how to exorcise the doubt from his heart.

Ryan was the best friend he’d ever had, and the deeper Foster looked inside, the more obvious it was. He felt a pang of disgust that it had taken guilt and doubt to motivate him to do the right thing, but if that’s what it took…

W
hen Dodge unpacked his briefcase after the meeting, he discovered a legal-sized manila envelope. He opened it and let the contents slide onto the desk. There was a short note on Evangelical Word University stationery, several photographs, and two newspaper clippings. The note was an ancient threat: “Then Judas, which had betrayed Him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders. Saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. And they said, What is that to us? see thou to that. And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself. And the chief priests took the silver pieces, and said, It is not lawful for to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood.—Matthew 27:3–5”

He leaned back in his chair and flipped through the photos. Some were pictures of Dodge visiting with his clientele at Skate-n-Shred. He examined them with a magnifying glass. They must have been taken from across the street, probably from a second-story window with a telephoto lens. Two were much older. The first was a file photo from the
Los Angeles Times
with a teenage Dodge in shackles. Dodge chuckled and then wiped a line of spittle from the photo. A paperclip attached a newspaper clipping. He remembered what it said word for word. Tried as an adult, he’d been acquitted.

The other picture came with newsprint too. It had been taken the day he’d gotten his nickname from the University of Michigan campus police: a college-aged Dodge standing in front of a cemetery. The clipping, from the
Ann Arbor News
, said that Dodge had been acquitted of manslaughter and grave robbing in the Zeta Sigma Chi “hazing suicides” trial. It also quoted the officer who had dubbed Wayne Nutter “Dodge,” saying that the police had closed the case for lack of evidence.

The last piece was a short paragraph from the Los Angeles County Bar Association’s newsletter. Dated 1987, it described a case where Wayne Nutter, JD, had been held in contempt of court while representing a man who, during a bank robbery, had executed five tellers with single shots to the backs of their heads. Dodge had argued that the defendant was merely guilty of “assisted suicide.” The judge had not been amused when Dodge attempted to demonstrate that none of the tellers had had a life that was worth living.

Dodge set the pictures on his desk in a straight line and stared at them. He leaned forward and picked up the revolver, spun the chamber, and held the gun to his head. He looked at the pictures and said out loud, “No. Not today,” and set the revolver back on the gavel pad.

He took a sheet of monogrammed paper from his desk and wrote, “The Lord hath made all things for Himself: yea, even the wicked for the day of evil. Every one that is proud in heart is an abomination to the Lord: though hand join in hand, he shall not be unpunished.—Proverbs 16:4–5.” He sealed it in an envelope with a twenty-dollar bill and a short note that read, “Deliver to Jeb Schonders, EWU, by hand and with emphasis.” Dodge mailed it to the ranch outside of San Antonio, addressed to Dale Watson, the son of Foster’s secretary.

R
yan’s faith in make-up sex was restored.

He knew that Emmy had come to Petaluma that night to end their relationship. She’d been ignoring his e-mails and hadn’t answered his calls in almost a month, and then, finally, she invited herself over. She lit into him pretty good too, accusing him of misleading her, abusing her support, and perpetuating nonsense nonscience in the face of the truth. He admitted that he had known Dodge was manipulating her. She had glared at him, those warm blue eyes turned hot indigo, and he admitted what he thought would be the killing blow: “Yes, I misled you. It was selfish. Without your help, I could never fix my life, never see my son and”—he placed both hands on her shoulders—“if I couldn’t fix my life, well, I didn’t want you to fall in love with a failed man.” Emmy glowered for a few seconds. Ryan felt her shoulders tense up, and when she looked away from him, he thought it was over.

She turned back, though, and put her hands over his heart. “Ryan, I would have helped you anyway.” Then she relaxed and started to laugh. “For some reason, my grody brother cannot do anything in the open. He’s been lying to me all my life, and every time I get mixed up with him, I think it will be different.” Then she lightly punched his chest, and her eyes simmered to a warm glow. “Ryan, I’m falling in love…please be the man I think you are.”