W: The Planner, The Chosen (32 page)

Chapter 10

N
either Michael nor Jeff knew much about computers. They were able to use a PC in all of the ordinary ways—to pay bills, to find information, to send messages to friends and family. Beyond that, however, they were pretty much at a loss. They had depended on Jessie and Kyle to give them the information that they extracted from W.net and other government websites to move to safety those who had been targeted for extermination or arrest. Keith was their intermediary and their sole contact for their operations.

The morning after Nathan O’Brien was taken away Michael and Jeff drove to Queen of Peace Church to talk to Sid Portman. Sid was the lay worker who had called Michael when Nathan was taken away, and they wanted to find out as many details about his arrest as possible without leaving an electronic trail.

Sid had known that they would come. Michael had visited Father O’Brien frequently, and for the past year Jeff had accompanied him on those visits. Sid knew that they would do whatever they could to help the priest. When Michael and Jeff entered the sanctuary, Sid was waiting for them. Without saying a word, he put his finger to his lips and motioned for them to follow him.

The men passed through the sanctuary and turned left into a hall that led outside. When Sid opened the door, the bright sunlight that flooded the doorway seemed almost blinding after being in the dimly lighted church. The three men squinted while they waited for their eyes to adjust.

Sid led Michael and Jeff through a maze of rose bushes, religious statues, and fountains to the back of the garden where the three of them could talk without fear of being overheard. Michael had to be very careful. He trusted Sid, but he could not divulge any information that might endanger Keith and the others. He had already made up his mind that he would not tell Sid that he knew anything other than what Sid had told him in their brief phone conversation the previous evening.

“Tell me everything you know,” Michael said as soon as they were seated on the long wooden bench under a group of trees.

“I was helping the father prepare for Sunday mass when they came in,” Sid replied.

“Who were they?” Michael inquired.

“Four men who said that they were special agents from the Religious Unity Agency. They asked to speak to Nathan O’Brien. When the father told them that he was Nathan O’Brien, they showed him their badges and said that he was under arrest. When he asked what the charges were, they wouldn’t tell him anything else. They grabbed him very roughly and handcuffed his hands behind his back.”

“Did they say where they were taking him?”

“No. They just said that they were taking him for an arraignment hearing before a federal judge.”

Sid put his face in his hands to hide his tears. He was an old man—probably late seventies. He was of medium height but very frail with a thick head full of silver white hair. As Michael watched him sitting on that bench fighting back the tears he was reminded of the martyred saints in the Bible. “It’s a sin to harm a priest,” Sid whispered. “God sees everything, and He will give Father O’Brien justice. Those men will pay for what they did.”

Sid’s hands still hid his face. Michael rose from the bench and stood beside him. Putting his arm around the old man’s shoulder, he said, “Father O’Brien has been my close friend for more than twenty years. He is like a brother to me. I will do everything I can to help him. But I want you to know that Father O’Brien is ready to meet his Lord if that becomes necessary. I want you to go home now and stay there. Don’t talk to anyone, and in a few days this danger will pass.”

The old man nodded in agreement. “God bless you.”

While the three men had been talking in the garden, Arthur Danville had been watching them from the window of the rectory. Before Michael and Jeff had left through the garden gate at the rear of the property, Arthur had already called the RUA. “May I speak to Agent Carter? Tell him it’s about Father Nathan O’Brien.” In less than fifteen seconds Agent Carter was on the line. “You told me to call you if anyone came asking about the priest,” Danville spoke the words with a lilt in his voice and a smile on his lips.

At 11:23 P.M. Agent Carter and his partner knocked on the door of Sid Portman’s small apartment. A neighbor heard the knock through the thin wall that connected her apartment to his. She had never known Sid to have visitors so late at night. She peeked through a slit in the blinds just in time to see Sid being shoved into a black van with government license plates.

Fifteen hours later the battered and bloodied body of Sid Portman was transported from the RUA interrogation room to the special government morgue for transport to a mass grave.

Chapter 11

A
t 6:00 A.M. Michael, Jeff, and Keith sat on the floor of the watch tower as Keith logged onto his laptop and contacted Kyle. He filled Kyle in on everything that Michael had managed to learn about Nate’s disappearance and waited for a reply.

As they sat watching the first rays of sunlight appear over the horizon, Keith commented, “I’m almost certain that they took him to the Federal Courthouse. I mean, if he were going to appear before a federal judge, I can’t really see them taking him anywhere else.”

“Probably,” Michael responded, “but everything is so messed up now that it’s hard to know where they took him. I just hope that we can find him and stir up some public support for him.”

“Here’s a message from Kyle,” Keith remarked as he looked at his computer screen. “He says that he’ll get right on it and try to find out exactly where Nate is. In the meantime, he wants to know if there’s anything else you want him to do.”

“Yes!” Jeff spoke for the first time since he had entered the room. “I want him to set up the Father Nathan O’Brien website. We’ll use it to get his story out to the public. We’ll put his picture on it and tell about him as a person as well as about his work as a priest. We’ll let people get to know him and get to care about him.

“Mike, you can write up some personal stuff about him. About his college days, his community work, his homeless shelters, his job training programs—all the stuff that makes him human. If we tell our story right, people will begin to think of him as a friend, and we’ll have public sentiment on our side.”

Keith spoke, “I didn’t spend all those years as a journalist for nothing. I was a photographer, but I also wrote a lot of news stories. When you’re working under primitive conditions to get the stories back to the network, you do some of everything. I know how to use media. Mike, you write up the basic info, and I’ll do the rewrites. Kyle knows how to design a website that’ll have the whole country logging on. I think we have exactly the right team to get this job done.”

∞

Kyle thought that they should call the website
Where in the World is Father O’Brien?
and set it up as a sort of scavenger hunt. Michael and Jeff were not on-board when he first floated the idea, but he convinced them that the more attention they could get for the website, the better. “I mean, it doesn’t matter how sad it is, man,” he had told them, “if it doesn’t get nobody’s attention, it’s not gonna do any good. One thing I learned when I was workin’ for G is that people are exposed to thousands of internet images every day. If your image doesn’t grab their attention in three seconds, they’re gone, man.”

Michael had told Keith that they would “think about it” and get back to him. After both Michael and Jeff had prayed about it and slept on it, however, they believed that this was the right course to take, and they gave Keith and Kyle the green light.

Michael fed Keith great stories from college and the intervening twenty years that gave the reader an in-depth look into the man and his faith. Michael also had old photos of Nate playing basketball, working in a soup kitchen during his college spring break, and conducting a wedding service. Kyle posted these to the website along with information about Father O’Brien’s last sighting. The website simply stated that Father O’Brien was last seen leaving Queen of Peace Catholic Church with four unidentified men. Everyone was asked to help solve the mystery of his disappearance. The website stated that clues and opinions provided by readers would be posted, and anyone providing information that led to finding Father O’Brien would be given the title of “Superhero of the Year.”

The website accomplished exactly what Michael and Keith had hoped it would. Soon Father Nathan O’Brien’s name was trending on Twitter. Thousands of people were posting information about him on their Facebook pages—a post about Father O’Brien was certain to be shared. Within two weeks Father Nathan O’Brien had become a household name; everyone, from teens to seniors, knew his story, and everyone had an opinion about his disappearance. Some hated him solely because he was a priest, and others considered him to be a great hero for precisely the same reason, but everyone knew his story.

Jessie had been able to determine within hours of his disappearance that the priest was being held in the Federal Courthouse in a detention cell reserved for terrorists. Michael and Jeff were well aware of this, but they were convinced that if they could get enough public support for Nathan O’Brien the RUA would be forced to release him. They were wrong.

Twenty-eight days after his disappearance, the Department of Justice released a statement that Father Nathan O’Brien had been found guilty of terrorism and, in accordance with recently enacted statutes concerning threats to national security, had been executed that morning.

When Michael received the news, he was eating breakfast with Kris and Mitch. Without saying a word, he stood and walked out the kitchen door. Kris watched from the window as he headed straight out into the desert, looking neither to the right nor the left. She continued to watch until some sand hills blocked her view.

Jeff entered the kitchen and asked, “Where’s Mike?”

“I don’t know. He got a text and then left without saying anything.”

“Where’d he go?”

Kris pointed out the window.

Jeff walked for fifteen minutes before he found Michael sitting by a clump of mesquite, his eyes were red and his face was wet with tears.

Jeff waited for Michael to speak. “I am such an idiot!” Michael shouted. “I thought that I was so smart! I was going to create all this buzz, and the Feds would have to release Nate. The only thing I’ve managed to do is kill the nicest guy I’ve ever known!”

“Mike,” Jeff said, “knock it off. They were going to kill Nate no matter what anyone did. The moment they issued his arrest warrant he was a dead man. They probably only kept him alive as long as they did because of all the public support. You did exactly what you were supposed to do—it just didn’t turn out the way you had expected.”

Jeff continued, “I’ve known all along that this was how it was going to end for Nate. He was one man, and when one man becomes too much of a liability, the government always gets rid of him. However, when thousands of men get that much attention, they can get rid of the government. I know that you were supposed to do exactly what you did, and I also know that we’re supposed to continue doing exactly what we’re doing. I’ve been talking to Keith about having Jessie find out how many people are being held without charges. Thousands have been arrested as domestic terrorists, but no specific charges have been brought.”

Michael looked at Jeff with interest. “So is this going to be the
Where in the World is Everybody?
website?” Michael asked without humor.

“No, this website is going to be
The Wall
. I’ve given it a lot of thought during the past few weeks. We will build it like the Vietnam Memorial Wall in D.C. It will have a brief explanation at the top saying that these are the names of American citizens who were arrested as domestic terrorists and then vanished. We will list them in order of our receiving their names. As we get the name of each missing person, he or she will be added to the top of the list.”

“What’s that supposed to accomplish?” Michael asked.

“Have you ever seen the Vietnam Memorial in person?” Jeff responded.

“I’ve seen pictures. I’ve never been there.”

“Well, then you have no idea of its impact. My Dad took the family to D.C. for a vacation when I was fifteen. One day we went to see all of the monuments. My dad saved the Vietnam Memorial for last, and by the time we got there, I was bored and hungry. When I saw that it was just a big black wall with a bunch of names on it, I thought, ‘This won’t take long.’ I was prepared to walk past the wall as fast as I could without getting a reprimand from my dad, but when I saw on the inscription that the names were listed in the order of the men’s deaths, I thought that it would be interesting to see the names of the first and last casualties of the war. When I read that first name, I was hooked: Air Force Sergeant Richard Fitzgibbon. I stood staring at that name for a little while, and then I began my walk past the wall, stopping from time to time to read a few of the names. I can’t explain exactly what happened, but as I made my way past those 493 feet of black granite inscribed with fifty-eight thousand two hundred seventy-two names, those men became real to me. One of the guys was in his sixties, and I saw the names of some who were only sixteen years old when they died. Long before I reached the end and read the final name—an eighteen-year-old Marine named Kelton Turner—I was shaking like a leaf.

“My dad came up beside me and said, ‘Each of these men died to protect freedom, and that’s about the greatest thing a man can do. But sometimes it’s harder to live to protect freedom than it is to die for it. You may never have to go to war—I certainly pray that you won’t—but every generation is called on to defend freedom. When Freedom calls you, don’t hesitate to answer that call.’

“Freedom is calling, Mike, and I’m going to do everything I can to defend it. Are you with me?”

Michael nodded, “Yes, I’m with you.”