The God Machine (10 page)

“All of these things I have told you,” said Michael, “are
the Word. They will all come to pass. They have all been foretold, for thousands of years. They are written. But you,” he said, pointing down at the eager young faces around him. “You still have a choice. You can continue to live as you have, mindless of consequences, feeling immortal, invincible. Or you can humble yourself before God and prepare for the End-Times. And there is only one way to prepare. And that, brothers and sisters, is to
pray.”

Michael had positioned himself at the front of the audience, barely feet from the stage. There she was. He could see her, in that pink and white dress with the tiny blue ribbons.

“We are meant to rend our hearts, not our garments,” said Michael. “Which means paying the internal and emotional cost of really turning toward Jesus; an outward pretense does not matter. All of you. When you fall into crisis. When you feel poor in spirit. When you know there are no earthly solutions to your problems, no self-help books left to guide you, no human secrets to save you. I tell you, this is the best place on earth, a true gift from God, this valley of the spiritual void. Because no one allows God to rescue him until he realizes that he needs to be rescued.”

He got down on his knees. “Pray with me now,” he continued. He lowered his head. He stared at the floor. “And prepare.” Then he reached out and snatched the young girl in the pink and white dress by the hand. He pulled her down to the floor until she was kneeling beside him. She was glowing with bliss. Her full chest was heaving. The material was wet from the seventh bowl spraying. He could see her breasts outlined beneath. He could feel her small fingers in his. She was squeezing his hand. She was holding on for dear life. Her long hair covered her face. She was praying, he realized, as hard as she could. She was praying as he glanced at her eyes.
They were shut. They were shut tight as almonds. He waited and waited and it finally came. She pulled her hair back from her face, round one ear. She opened her eyes and stole a quick peek at his face. Then, when she saw he was staring at her, she blushed and turned quickly away.

Michael smiled. Judy was taking the kids to their grandma's tonight. He had scheduled some office time to wrap up some business. An hour or two. Perhaps less. But more than enough time to offer some guidance through the valley of the spiritual void.

F
ATHER
P
ATRICK
O'T
OOLE SAT IN THE DARKENED CONFESSIONAL
of St. Joan of Arc on Atlantic and Frankford in North Philadelphia, waiting for his next confessor, thinking about Abby Lindsborg, the assistant director of the Young Adult Ministry. Attendance at the church was way down, and O'Toole was pondering a Youth Gang Music Festival to help attract new members. Abby had loved the idea. “Wow, there's a thought,” she had said, tipping her head to the side, with that beautiful smile she had, the pixie brown hair and those glasses. And he had felt that damned feeling again, that glow, that unwelcome turbidity which—no matter what he did—never seemed to quite dissipate. “Wow, there's a thought,” she had said, and then smiled at him. “There's a thought,” the priest considered.

If he was going to raise enough money, he would have to work fast. Things were tough in the parish. It seemed like every other day another church closed in the diocese.

The screen of the confessional slid open. A tall,
bullet-headed young bald man appeared in the frame, concealed only slightly by the sheer nylon screen. He was wearing a nose ring.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he began. “It's been… three weeks since my last confession.”

“Go ahead,” said O'Toole.

“These are my sins. I've been unfaithful to my new girlfriend, Miranda. I don't know how it happened. I was at a party. I was just standing there, minding my own business, when this old friend of mine came up to me and…”

Everything was a mess since '98, decided O'Toole, when the
National Catholic Reporter
first revealed that the archdiocese's former cardinal, Anthony Bevilacqua, had sunk five million dollars into renovating his mansion, a seaside villa and other personal properties. Parishioners were so outraged that they had taken to the streets with signs depicting Bevilacqua as Darth Vader. O'Toole shuddered, remembering the angry confrontations, the shrill taunts and curses. Then they had brought in a new archbishop, from Los Angeles, of all places, and made him a cardinal, too.

“… and somehow, I guess I forgot to throw out the condom, and she saw it.”

“Anything else?” asked O'Toole, struggling to pay attention.

“I found this thing, the other day, and I feel like I stole it.”

“Go on.”

“This old book, at this job that I'm working on, down on Market Street. I gave it to Wilson, the boss on the gig, and he said he was going to turn it over to Larry Thompson, the curator. From Independence Park. With the National Parks Service. But I saw him this morning, and he told me Wilson never gave him a thing. I think he plans to sell it. It don't feel right, Father.”

“What is this book?” said the priest.

“It's like a diary. We thought it might belong to Ben Franklin. Wilson and me. It's got his signature and everything. It sure looked real. And there was some funny writing inside, like a code …”

In truth, thought O'Toole, Cardinal Justin Rinaldi was probably doing his best. The cardinal's heart seemed to be in the right place. At least he was trying. And what more could he do to counter the seismic forces of the financial and sexual scandals plaguing the Roman Catholic Church in America today?

Just recently, two former prosecutors, who had helped conduct the grand jury investigation into clergy sexual abuse, had sent a letter to Cardinal Rinaldi accusing the Archdiocese of Philadelphia of failing to seriously address the problem. Throughout the city they called it being “Bruggered and Bolested,” after two of the accused priests: Brugger and Bolesta. Meantime, the local parishes languished. And with them, O'Toole's stalled career.

“… the Gospel of Judas.”

“What did you say?”

“The Gospel of Judas.”

“What about it?”

“That's what was written in the diary. The only words I could read that made sense. And there, right beside them, the same words, in both Hebrew and Greek. The rest was in code.”

“In Hebrew? You're sure of this?”

Father O'Toole sat up in the darkened confessional. He leaned a little closer to the screen.

“That's what Wilson said. Why?”

“It could speak to its age. And you're certain it was Ben Franklin's journal?”

“It sure looked like his signature. I checked it out on the Web. Plus, the Gospel of Judas; it's some old heretic text.”

“Why would Franklin be talking about the Gospel of Judas?”

“Dunno.” The young man shrugged.

“Franklin was a Mason. And in Hebrew? That would mean…” Father Patrick O'Toole felt a darkness descend upon him. “What else?” he inquired.

“I lied to my friend Tony. I told him I was going to go out on Thursday, but when Thursday finally rolled around, I didn't feel…”

So old, thought O'Toole. He felt as if the air had been sucked from the tiny confessional. He couldn't stand it. He was drowning in darkness.

The young man droned on about his petty sins. When he was finally done, O'Toole absolved him and sent him on his way with a dozen Hail Marys and two dozen Our Fathers. Heart hammering, the priest closed the panel that covered the screen, and made his way out the side door into the nave, bounding past the choir stalls toward the rear of the church. It was a little after eight
A.M
. If he hurried he might catch the bishop on the phone before his stroll to morning mass.

O'Toole suddenly stopped. No, not the bishop, he thought. This was a matter for the cardinal himself. If he was right, if Franklin had somehow come into possession of a Gnostic text, and if Father Patrick O'Toole was the one who revealed it, it would be impossible for the bishop to shoot down his Youth Gang proposal. Not this year. Not again. A sudden vision of Abby Lindsborg flooded his mind. The assistant director of the Young Adult Ministry sat on the side of his desk in the church office, right in front of him. She was wearing her ivory silk blouse, leaning toward him, with that button undone at the neck…

What was he thinking? O'Toole paused near the altar, by the red votive candles, and stretched out his hand.
The flames started licking his skin. It burned. It burned! He jerked his fingers away.

With the Church reeling as it was from scandal to scandal, with growing divisions between the North and the South, with once-loyal congregations flocking to new Evangelical churches, with the Pope growing sicker, with costs up and tithes down… after two thousand years, this news about the Gospel of Judas couldn't have come at a worse possible time.

A
RCHBISHOP
D
AMIAN
L
ACEY SAT IN HIS OFFICE ON THE VIA
della Posta, off the Piazza San Pietro in Rome, reviewing the final selection of spreadsheets that would go into the annual report of the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (IOR)—commonly known as the Vatican Bank. It was a large chamber, with a twenty-foot ceiling and panels of biblical scenes on the walls. The Ark of the Covenant. The tower of Babel. The flight from the Garden of Eden. The archbishop was trying to keep himself occupied. He'd already scanned these documents several times. As assistant comptroller, Lacey was responsible for vetting the final report. But word of the Pope's failing health had reached him that morning, and the news from the field was not good. There was a powerful movement afoot to elect a third-world Pontiff, reflecting the strength of the growing Catholic population in the South. Lacey's candidate, the stout German cardinal from Stuttgart, was trailing. And the straw polls from Latin America had not even arrived.

Lacey clicked on the Send button and climbed to his
feet. He crossed to the windows facing out on the Via Salita del Giardino. A beam of June sunlight pierced the glass, illuminating his face as he neared, but his features did not grow any clearer. He was a dark man, of Irish descent—black Irish. He was fond of saying at cocktail parties that his elevation from Dublin to Rome had been a kind of Mediterranean homecoming. After all, it was commonly held the black Irish were descendents of the survivors of King Philip's Armada, blown off course during the Spanish invasion of England back in 1588. Thrown up on the hard shores of Ireland, they had intermarried with the local inhabitants, adding their own olive strain to the pool, plus their fervent belief in Catholicism. Short and squat, with emerald eyes and a head that appeared too big for his shoulders, Lacey looked down at the street. There it was—the black Mercedes sedan.
Time to go
, he thought. His night job awaited.

The driver swung the car along the Via di Porta Angelica, past the Piazza San Pietro, swarming with tourists, across the Borgo Santo Spirito toward the river. Traffic was bad on the Via dei Penitenzieri. The black Mercedes cut in and out of congestion, fighting for access, until it tore up the Lungotevere. To his left, the river glowed in the afternoon light like a hot band of copper, and Lacey thought about Dublin, the city he had grown up in, his home. It had been years since he'd been back, but he really didn't miss it. Now, he felt at peace only in Rome. The Eternal City. How many millennia, he thought, had the Tiber been coursing along in this way, through this valley?

The Mercedes crossed the river at the Ponte Palatino, sped round the Parco di Sant'Alessio and the Circo Massimo came into view, a large field off the back of the
Palatine Hill, the chariot racetrack where once two hundred thousand spectators had cheered on the drivers. And beyond that, the Forum, the Temple of Gemini with its stunted white columns.