The Sixth Station (13 page)

“Sorry. I digressed. Anyway, somehow ‘it’ had been born, and the cardinal told us that their intent had been to eliminate it in utero—but they failed. He said that the pope himself believed that such a creature would have been a being without a
soul,
someone who could grow up, the pope feared, to destroy the world!”

“So abortion was condoned by the Vatican? That’s almost more incomprehensible than the cloning of Jesus,” I said, unable to control the snarkiness in my voice.

“Don’t be condescending, Ms. Russo,” she shot back, staring me in the eye.

“Anyway, once our sources confirmed the pregnancy—we didn’t know where exactly yet—so many of the world’s security agencies were ordered to combine forces and find this thing. That’s how significant we all believed this event to be. And, yes, for a few brief hours all the conflicts were put aside; this was just a few months before Israel invaded Lebanon, remember. The representatives of several enemy nations were able this one time to make a pact together. It was unanimously agreed that the baby and its mother had to be eliminated before this thing could wreak havoc.”

OK, that’s two Americans so far.

“My immediate boss, whose name is not relevant, was quite confident that he had a personal relationship with Jesus—and not the new one, either,” she actually joked.

“He, my boss that is,
was
born-again. The Reverend Bill Teddy Smythe, of the Light of God Tabernacle in Plano, Texas, became his pastor.”

“Excuse me for interrupting, Ms. Wright-Lewis, but where did this blood come from for the cloning?” Wright-Lewis got up and walked to the window. She peered out, took a brief check, and came back and turned on a table lamp, then stared at me so hard and so long that I started squirming.

“Anything wrong?” I asked her. “Is my Freudian slip showing?” She didn’t think it—or I—was funny.

“Just trying to figure out what he saw in you, that’s all.”

“Hey, you’re not the first person who’s said that to me, either!”

That softened her up a bit. “As I started to say, they were all advised about what we believed had transpired. As far as my intelligence had reported before the blackout, the birth occurred near Ephesus sometime after three
A.M.
Eastern European time.

“The cardinal simply said without hesitation to the assembled group, ‘This threat must be eliminated before “it,” or we, see another day.’”

Wright-Lewis got up and poured herself another generous shot of Scotch—I saw it was Johnnie Walker Blue, no less—while I tried to calm down. Was I in the home of a crazy woman, or was I hearing something so extraordinary it defied belief?

“The Mossad representative informed us that they’d had a bead on the whereabouts of this thing, this child,” she said, sipping her Blue, “to within a hundred-mile radius.

“My boss, who was on a satellite conference call, yelled ‘What the bloody hell good is a radius of one hundred damned miles in a country that no longer has electricity?’

“The cardinal actually raised his arms to God. ‘We need to find them and do the right thing. That devil spawn and its Satan-fornicating mother and the whole damned band of Satanists she’s with must be eliminated, before the next sunrise.’ He said he believed that the lights would not come back on until the thing was disappeared. He declared that it was ‘sucking the energy right out of the world!’ And he was right. I said, ‘Cardinal Renzi, I assure you we’ll find this child.…’

“That put him into orbit. ‘It is not a child,” he roared. ‘Because it is not a human!’

“I’ve thought about that these thirty-three years—after what we did. Anyway, I said to him, ‘Excuse me, Your Eminence, but really we don’t know what it is until they examine it.’

“That drove him crazier. ‘Examined? You mean autopsied!’

“Our orders were clear. It was to be destroyed, and so were the people behind the cloning, because this must never happen again.”

“Do you mean cloning a human, or do you mean cloning Jesus?” I asked.

She pierced me with her gaze. “Frankly, both. The Vatican as well as top Jewish leaders, four Shia Grand Ayatollahs, and several Sunni leaders had, we were told, condoned the decision of the president and other world leaders on this issue. They wanted whoever was responsible to know that cloning was not going to be allowed and that killing cloned babies was not infanticide; it was the right thing to do. They all agreed that it was not just bad science, it would create a race of godless monsters.”

“Well, maybe the baby was the Prince of Peace, after all,” I injected sardonically—I hoped. “Who else could get all those enemies to agree on anything?”

Instead, a sadness passed over her face, which was totally unexpected. “You have no idea how much that has weighed on—” And then she changed the point abruptly, bringing herself back upright and stone-faced.

“At any rate, using the blood, the actual DNA, or whatever to reproduce Jesus? Do you think that the pope or any leader of any Christian country in the world could allow scientists to decide when the Second Coming would take place? And it wasn’t just the Christians. Every religion’s power base would be vulnerable to a new Messiah.

“I tried to tell them that even if we killed ‘the thing,’ it was just as important to find out where the blood had come from. Or it could happen again. I never doubted that whatever the source, it still existed and still held the DNA.”

Bursting with curiosity, I asked, “What kind of vessel held the DNA or blood that this mysterious laboratory supposedly possessed?”

“Don’t know. It may have been something that a few godless knights—
perfecti
is the proper term—of the heretic Cathar cult carried down Montségur Mountain in France in the thirteenth century; supposedly some kind of treasure. But logic tells us that one can’t rappel down the backside of a mountain in the middle of the night carrying a treasure chest. Legend has it that one or perhaps two of them were women.”

Not that again. Another true cross meets the Holy Grail.

But then I remembered, even in my exhausted state, that Sadowski had said something about that same cult earlier.

He called them Gnostic Christians, though, not godless heretics. Hmmm.

“Can you spell that for me—
catheters,
” I joked.

She laughed—finally. “Well, I suppose DNA would have been left on a catheter if they had such a thing in the thirteenth century. But it’s C-A-T-H-A-R, a Gnostic heretic Christian sect.”

“Oh, I see,” I said, not seeing at all.

Then she made a joke. Another actual joke. “Speaking of catheters, you probably need a bathroom break.”

“Thank you, Jesus. No pun intended,” I said.

13

She showed me to the bathroom, where I reached into my pocket, retrieved Sadowski’s phone, and tried him again. Again I got the recording.

“Where the hell are you? I’m up here with that woman, and I’ve got your car. Call me back or I’m sending your Caddy and the witch over the cliff. Got it? Good.”

I peed and walked back in.

“The real problem,” she continued, as though we hadn’t been interrupted, “was that the people who were in possession of the baby might actually escape, what with all the tracking devices in that area of the world down while we were sitting around a damned campfire!

“And it then got worse. There we were in this super-secret setting at the edge of Asia and Europe, and suddenly the door swings open and in walks the Reverend Dr. Bill Teddy Smythe, dusting off his Stetson on his jeans like it was just an ordinary day. How he got there, I will never know. How he knew where to find us, I would never say, but it was pretty clear.”

“Right. Your boss. Yesterday I couldn’t believe it when Smythe made that fake-spontaneous speech at ben Yusef’s tribunal.”

“Yes, that would be one and the same.”

I had to smile at her candor.

“He walked over to Cardinal Renzi, kissed his ring, stood up, and said, ‘Cardinal Renzi, my friend. It’s a great day for a hanging—eh?’ Then he knelt down and declared, ‘The devil has come to feed among us in the form of our Lord Jesus!’ Yes. He knew everything.”

The reporter in me couldn’t take it one more second, and I jumped up. “Wait a minute! If it was the clone of Jesus, how in hell could they also say it was Satan?”

“According to Smythe and Renzi—and they made a good argument—humans are created with one soul each,” she answered. “And that would apply even to God’s own son. That meant they—whoever ‘they’ were, and we didn’t know at that point—had created a soulless being. Got it?”

“No, not really,” I said, getting up and walking to the window to see if it was dark out yet. That road and grassy thing next to it didn’t look safe during the daylight, let alone the dark.

“I mean, wouldn’t God make an exception in the case of His Son, Ms. Wright-Lewis?” I asked simply as a throwaway question. Her answer floored me.

“That, Ms. Russo,” she said without hesitation, “is a question people have been asking since the First Coming.”

“The First? You mean you think there was more than one?” I responded, spinning around to face her.

Ignoring my question, she simply said, “Anyway, they all wanted it eliminated. And we believed that we had destroyed it, and the rest of them, too,” she said, tears of triumph or maybe regret forming in the corners of her eyes. “Yes, dead before the boy was twenty-four hours on this earth! Or so we thought for sure—until this ben Yusef showed up.”

I walked back to the couch and sat down, my legs feeling rubbery. “Well, whoever ben Yusef is, we know he
is
a killer and he is without a soul,” I said.

“Is that how you felt when he kissed you?” she said, to my surprise. “That you were kissing a man without a soul? One who may be a sociopathic killer?”

The last thing I wanted to do was share the crazy feelings that that kiss had stirred up in me. My words about that kiss had already cost me my job and, I was beginning to fear, my sanity.

“
Maybe
he’s a killer? I mean, is there any doubt?” I asked instead.

“There’s always doubt about everything, except what you know about power. When joined, world powers and organized religion can move mountains when they set their collective minds to it. That has only happened once before in history—and now once again. Both times over this man.”

I felt very claustrophobic in that dark house suddenly—and dirty. This was an ugly world she’d inhabited, or still did in her mind, anyway.

“So, you’re saying that the people in power killed innocent folks and caused worldwide panic to defeat an enemy they’re afraid could grow more powerful than all of them?”

She leaned forward. “What do you think?”

My mind was reeling, so I went back to the easier question: “Okay, so even if that were true, how did you manage to find it—that baby—that day?”

She answered coolly, “Our operatives had found that the birth had taken place at the House of the Virgin Mary—supposedly where the Blessed Mother had lived out Her last days on earth—Selçuk, near Ephesus, Turkey. Clever, don’t you think?” she added rhetorically.

“And why exactly would Jesus’ Mother be in Turkey, of all places? Long way for Her to travel, no?”

Wright-Lewis ignored my sarcasm. “She’d been taken there by John the Apostle.”

“So you’re saying the Blessed Mother took up with a disciple of Her Son’s?”

“You really don’t know your Bible at all, do you?” And so she quoted it for me: “‘Jesus said to his mother: “Woman, behold your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold your mother.”’ Gospel of John nineteen, verses twenty-six to twenty-seven.”

“So the disciple John was another son?”

“No.
Like
a son. Not her son.”

I sat back confused. “I’m not getting it.…”

“The argument that some fundamentalist Christians use to show that Mary did
not
have other children is that Jesus said this to John as He was dying on the cross.”

“But why Turkey? Isn’t that a Muslim country?”

She looked exasperated at my ignorance. “Organized Christianity as we know it was practically born in Turkey, Ms. Russo! In fact, John established seven churches there. Have you never read Revelation?”

Embarrassed by my lack of biblical knowledge, I answered her with a question instead: “So you believe John took that old woman all that way? How would She have survived the trip?”

“The Blessed Mother? She was only forty-six or so when Her Son was crucified.”

“What? I don’t know all that much about the New Testament,” I admitted, “but I do know that Jesus died when He was thirty-three. Right?”

“Right. The same age as Demiel ben Yusef is now.”

Holy good God! How had I not thought of that before? This is getting even weirder.

Maureen leaned back, pleased with my reaction. “The Blessed Mother was probably twelve or thirteen years old when She became impregnated. She had already been betrothed to Joseph, an older man, before that. Remember, in those days a girl was promised in marriage between the ages of eleven and fourteen at the latest.”

“Thirteen! So the Mother of Infant Jesus wasn’t a thirty-year-old blue-eyed white woman in a light blue burqa?”

“Hardly. And after Her Son, the seditionist—what we might call a terrorist today—was crucified, Her life was no longer safe in Jerusalem. Thus Mary’s house in Selçuk. It stands to this day.”

I must have looked surprised, so she said, “Why, Ms. Russo, with that good Italian Catholic last name, I’m frankly surprised that you don’t know your Catholic history.”

I countered: “Do you always judge a book by its writer? The Russos are proud agnostics, well, deists more specifically. I was brought up to never trust a religion that requires big gold hats and massive golden cathedrals in order to worship God.”

She looked disgusted.

“My parents were hippies back in the day.”

She dropped her point.

“As I was saying, we found that a group was escaping with the infant boy and its thirteen-year-old mother—yes, she was the same age as the Virgin Mary. A girl named Theotokos Bienheureux, who had been hemorrhaging very badly. We were told she probably would have died anyway—”