Pierced by a Sword (26 page)

"No!"
He willed with all his bodiless being.
"There is no hell!"

Death laughed at him; the sound of her knife-like
voice echoed off invisible walls.

"No! I'm sorry for using contraceptives! I didn't think it was wrong! I won't go in there! I will
not
go in there!"

Death spun around and around in a strange hopping dance. He was only a few "paces" from her and the fiery cauldron of terror.

"No!"
Lanning screamed again at beckoning Death. He felt the flames begin to lick up off the surface of the lake onto his
legs...

+  +  +

Dr. Paul Elway continued the chest compressions until he felt a rib crack in the corpse's torso. He was just about ready to stop the violent, last ditch procedure. Tears were in the doctor's eyes and on his cheeks. Lanning had been dead for over eighteen minutes.
Eighteen minutes,
Elway thought, exasperated,
four minutes more than anyone who's ever "come back" in my twelve years
in ER. He's gone.

Elway stopped the procedure and hung his head, folding one arm and putting his thumb and index finger on the bridge of his nose with his other hand. He exhaled a long breath as he shook his head slowly back and forth. Three nurses, Emergency Room veterans all, began to sob.

The corpse cried out, startling Dr. Elway.

One nurse gasped.

"No! Don't stop! They're taking me to hell!"
the corpse screamed in a voice that chilled the nurses. "Don't stop you son of a bitch! Hell! The flames!"

"The flames are
eating me alive!"
Lanning shrieked again!

Elway restarted the chest compressions. He heard the first beep on the monitor as Lanning's heart began to beat again.

"Oh! No! I won't go
there!"
Lanning continued to cry out and began to flail his arms at invisible tormentors.

Elway
shouted at a nurse, "What are you standing there for? Epinephrine! Now Nurse Connors!"

With shaking hands, the nurse grabbed the hypodermic needle and a vial as the monitor began to register a climbing heartbeat.

The doctor stopped compressing Lanning's chest. Elway was shaken. Despite his joy at his religious leader's return, his medical experience called forth a question in his mind. LDS leader
or not, Lanning was another case from which to learn. In the Emergency Room there was usually little time before the next gurney came hurtling through the automatic doors. He coldly evaluated what had happened even as he injected Lanning with the needle.

That's odd, Doc,
he told himself.
Twelve years and over thirty patients who've "come back," not to mention countless dozens more who were conscious
during cardiac arrest–and not one has ever told me to restart the chest compressions. They usually scream at me to stop it hurts them so much. Not one in over twelve years.

Not one. Until John Lanning.

"Thank you. Thank you," Lanning gasped in a hoarse voice. His eyes were still closed. "I'm back. I was in hell." Lanning was afraid to open his eyes for fear he might see Death again, even though
he was quite sure he was back in the hospital room. And back in his body.

Lanning bravely opened his eyes.

"Don't speak, Mr. Lanning. We'll take care of you. You're going to be all right." Elway put his hand on the patient's forearm.

Lanning anxiously looked around the room. "Where's the black fellow with the roses?" he asked.

"Which black fellow, Mr. Lanning?" Elway asked, confused. All five
workers in the Emergency Room were white.

"The one with the three roses. I saw him standing next to you as I watched you from the ceiling, before I came back into my body." Lanning tried to move his head to look around the room to find the black man wearing a red checkered shirt and chino pants.

Post traumatic stress-induced hallucinations,
Elway concluded.
Hell? Indeed! Lanning was hallucinating.
Cardiac cases say the strangest things.

Elway was more relieved that Lanning showed signs of hallucinating than he was that Lanning hadn't died. Lanning had screamed about hell in a quite convincing fashion, and it had caused a sudden but palpable doubt in Elway's mind. Elway was a devout Mormon. Every faithful Mormon knows that there is no eternal hell. The "No Hell Doctrine" was one of the seminal
revelations taught by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, the founders of Mormonism.

6

Tuesday Morning
10 October
Downtown Chicago, Illinois

"Where the hell have you been, Payne?" Charlie VanDuren screamed at Nathan as he walked into the VV&B offices in the Standard Oil Building.

After returning to his apartment the night before, Nathan had difficulty falling asleep. It seemed like every time he closed
his eyes and tried to imagine Joanie's face an extremely erotic image of one of Nathan's former bed-mates would be pushed into his mind. It was so disturbing that he considered calling Chet; but he remembered that his friend was still on the road, heading toward New Jersey.

He let one or two of the images linger. Then he felt vaguely guilty, as if he had cheated on Joanie in his mind. Then he
remembered Pascal's Wager and a foggy teaching from the Bible somewhere–something about sleeping with a girl in your head is the same as sleeping with her for real. Maybe he had heard that in grade school as a child.

You mean I've even got to observe the Tom Wheat Rule in my own head? Oh well, a bet's a bet.

Finally, feeling even more guilty for allowing the images to linger in his mind despite
his newfound scruple, Nathan began to pray a Rosary. At four, he dropped off to sleep after the fifth Hail Mary.

Nathan overslept his alarm by three hours. He was always at work an hour early. So why would Charlie be so violently upset about his being late for one stinking day?

The least Charlie can do is let me explain,
Nathan thought.

"Come into my office, Rip Van Winkle," Charlie ordered with
dripping sarcasm.

"So what's the big deal, Charlie? Are you having a bad-hair day? I oversleep one time and you throw a fit!" Nathan was angry.

"It's not that, Payne! Don't you read the papers? Listen to the radio recently?" VanDuren turned and pointed to the monitor on his desk.

The NASDAQ numbers were listed. Nathan looked at the company just above VanDuren's index finger.

"Oh no," Nathan said
weakly.

"The war started last night, our time. The Russians took over your can't-miss oil fields in less than sixteen hours. CNI says that they might be going all the way into Iraq."

CNI was an Atlanta-owned company with communications headquarters in Amsterdam. CNI served over ninety-eight percent of worldwide cable services and over ninety percent of industrialized and Pacific Rim homes. Just
about every television in the world that was hooked up to cable or digital direct satellite service carried CNI.

VanDuren was pointing to a stock called TDC. TDC was a freestanding consortium formed with the resources of five major oil companies (three American, two European) which had agreed to develop the newly discovered, massive oil fields in the Republic of Georgia. The name of the consortium
was the Tbilisi Development Corporation, or TDC. It was named after the capital of Georgia, Tbilisi, where the consortium was headquartered. The former Soviet state didn't have the infrastructure, technology, know-how, or capital to develop the fields. Two months before the consortium was formed, a treaty had been signed by the now-stabilized Russian Republic and its neighboring states. It had
guaranteed peace in the region for years to come.

Georgia had access to the Black Sea. Its rail lines connected it to all of Eurasia. It stood at the crossroads of the Middle East and was not far from the capitals of Iran and Iraq.

With environmental regulations preventing the huge oil fields in Alaska from being developed, and North Sea and Mexican fields drying up, as well as the usual squabbles
among Middle East countries hindering production, Nathan had strongly recommended that VV&B put risk-approved funds into TDC. Nathan personally put over half his wealth into TDC stock. It was a gamble–closer to speculation than investment, but the pay back had enormous potential.

On Monday, a one-day war featuring a small "theater" nuclear weapon began and ended suddenly. The Russians seemed to
have learned a ghastly lesson during the protracted conflict a few years before in Chechnya. The center of Tbilisi was utterly destroyed by a bomb that was roughly one-fifth the size of the one dropped over Hiroshima in World War II. A victorious Russian defense minister had appeared on television and announced to CNI reporters in Moscow that the Russian Empire had just been reborn. It seemed that
no one knew who was in charge of Russia. The minister had pointedly remarked that the former prime minister of the Russian Republic was no longer "in office." He refused to comment on his country's use of the small nuclear weapon.

TDC stock had dropped from 90 3/8 to less than 10 1/4 by the time Nathan walked into the office.

"So?" Nathan asked weakly, his face pale. He was trying to recover from
the news on VanDuren's screen. It told him that he had personally lost over three hundred thousand dollars in less than two hours.

"So? You arrogant bastard! Ready to feel the pain, Mr. Feel the Pain? I put over eighty percent of our biggest individual investors and over half our institutional accounts into that freakin' consortium. And I played them off your stellar reputation!" VanDuren rounded
out his diatribe with a string of expletives.

"You what? I told you it was too risky! TDC was not for low risk capital!" Nathan shouted back.

"Risky?! You put half your life's savings into the damn thing!" VanDuren's neck was red. "It was the chance of a lifetime. Forty-eight hours ago, no political analyst in the world would have predicted the resurrection of Peter the Damned Great and an expansionist,
nationalist Russia!"

Nathan opened his mouth and shut it. He looked out the window and then down at the floor. He felt an odd sensation that the room was tilting, and then the floor righted itself.

"When do I go down, Charlie?"

"Look, Nathan, you had a nice run here. It's the board. The trustees. They'll want a head to roll. Which one of us are they going to believe? You or me? I own half the
friggin' firm. Somebody's got to take the fall. Even after you go down, our reputation's shot on the street for years." A rare note of compassion crept into VanDuren's voice. "You'll land on your feet, Nathan, why I bet–"

Nathan gave Charlie a cold look, stopping his boss in mid-sentence.

"Save the Knute Rockne speech, Charlie. Have somebody box my stuff up and send it to my apartment. Sally can
forge my signature on the resignation."

"What the hell!" VanDuren shouted as Nathan turned and walked out the door.

7

Tuesday Afternoon
10 October
Tule River Indian Reservation, California

Before dropping Lee off at the Tule River Reservation, Randall Knott had stopped at a surplus store.

Randall seemed ready to buy the entire store for Lee. Lee had insisted that Randall restrict his purchase
to two sets of identical chino pants and red checkered shirts, a pair of K-Swiss tennis shoes, underwear, and two pairs of socks. Lee also allowed Randall to buy him some toiletries and a leather "factory reject" gym bag. At Randall's suggestion, Lee stopped in a gas station rest room to shave and wash up as best he could. Lee left his filthy Cleveland Browns t-shirt, socks, beat up Gucci shoes, and
Levi's neatly folded in the rest room. He kept his leather belt.

The two men now stood by the Buick in front of a tiny cottage next to a small and ancient adobe church. It reminded Lee of a Taco Bell restaurant.

"Well, Brother Lee, here it is, Our Lady Help of Christians Mission. I guess a small portion of the tribe was converted by Spanish Franciscans when Indians owned the whole state–before
the white folks took over. Sure was nice talking to you about the Good Book. You opened my eyes on certain passages in the Bible. You've got a gift, boy. I sure hope you use it after you get yourself baptized."

Randall Knott held his hand out to Lee Washington. Lee ignored the hand and embraced the large black Samaritan.

"I promise you, Brother Randall, you'll be rewarded in heaven for being so
generous to this unworthy servant of Jesus." Tears were in Lee's eyes despite his smile.

Randall returned the smile but said nothing.

Lee turned and walked toward Father Juan Rivera's door.

8

Thursday, Midnight
12 October
Chicago's Gold Coast, Illinois

Nathan was more than buzzed. He had been drunk for the past two days. After leaving VV&B, he had headed directly to the nearest drinking station.
It was a small miracle that he hadn't gotten into an accident while driving home.

He left his apartment only to buy liquor and rent videos. He had been unable to keep his mind on the movies, except for
Aliens,
which he watched three times. Bags of half-eaten chips and empty bottles littered his living room.

He had been a heavy drinker since college, but this binge was unusually severe. The booze
helped him blot out the ramifications of his firing. The realization that his drunkenness broke Pascal's Wager inspired him to drink more. Normally, even an event as traumatic as losing half his money and his job wouldn't have shaken his confidence. But Nathan was being goaded by unseen enemies to surrender to despair. Despair–the loss of the virtue of hope–has always been considered the most serious
of sins by theologians.

The unseen enemies were, of course, demons. Philosophers and theologians have always debated the problem of evil. Why had God withdrawn His Divine Protection from Nathan? There is no answer and there is only one answer: for Nathan's greater good. God also allowed evil to run roughshod over Job as a test. God later chastened Job for questioning His motives:
Where wast thou
when I laid the foundations of the earth?

Despite Nathan's gifts for mathematics and leadership, he was not by nature an intellectual. Had he been, the attacks might have come in other areas–an appeal to his intellectual pride, for example. His primary weaknesses were his passions–areas where all human beings have strong natural desires such as food, sex, and drink. The first attack, designed
to incite violent anger through the agency of a desperate Tommy Gervin, had failed. The second attack, the failure of imprudent investments in TDC had succeeded in turning him to the bottle. He was like a poorly conditioned boxer being pounded during the later rounds. It was time for his enemies to deliver the knockout punch. If this next gambit failed, there was still one more deadly tactic available
to them.