The God Machine (19 page)

K
OSTER COULD DO NOTHING BUT WATCH AS THE LARGE MAN
approached Mariane, as he wrestled the gun from her hand. “Silly girl,” said the man, as he struck her. On the side of the face. With the butt of his pistol. She fell to the floor. “This is how it's done,” the man added. He lifted her up by the hair. He brought her head close, in a sickening kind of embrace, pressed the gun to her temple and the gunshot resounded like thunder.

For a moment, Mariane seemed to climb to her feet. Then the strings in her legs came undone. She toppled, she fell like a puppet, revealing that blossoming hole in her head, rimmed by tender pink petals of freshly hewn brain. As she rolled away, her face swung into view, but her features were blurred, indistinct.

Koster slid to the floor on his knees. He lifted her head, brushed the hair frantically from her face, and as he did so, for the first time, he realized—it was not Mariane. He wiped the blood from her skin with his fingers, revealing the features beneath. The delicate nose. The curve of the lips. The cloudy blank stare in the
almond-shaped eyes. The woman with the hole in her head was Savita Sajan.

Koster awoke.

For a long time, though he attempted to move, he felt frozen in place. The night terrors had seized him again. Koster tried not to struggle against them. Indeed, he clung to his fear, like a shipwrecked man to the side of a lifeboat. In the end, it was all he had left. His guilt was the only road back to his memories. But, this time, his dream had been different. It had been Savita Sajan in his arms, not Mariane.

Koster breathed hard and steady, trembling. That's when he felt the presence of somebody else in the room. He looked up. A figure was standing alone in the doorway.

“Are you all right?” asked Sajan. She wore a white satin nightgown under a light golden robe. Her hair was twisted up in a bun. She leaned against the doorframe, pulling absently at the belt round her waist.

Koster lifted himself up in the bed, bewildered. For a moment, he had completely forgotten where he was. “I'm fine,” he replied. But he wasn't. As soon as the words left his lips, he felt the memory of his dream start to fall out of sight, to descend into nothingness, like a coin down a wishing well.

“I heard screaming,” she said. “Were you having a nightmare?”

“I guess so,” was all he could say.

Sajan finished tying her belt. Her eyes had faint circles beneath them. She looked small and somehow defenseless in her pale saffron robe. “Time to get up, anyway,” she said with a shrug. “Our flight out of SFO is at ten. You have an hour or so to get ready before Sam drives us up to San Francisco.” She started to leave. Then she turned and said, “Flora's making breakfast, so I suggest you at least pretend to be hungry.”

Koster showered and shaved, and slipped on a pair of black Levis, a white button-down shirt and his blazer. He packed quickly, finishing with Franklin's journal, which he bundled in bubble wrap and stuffed back into his computer bag.

He rendezvoused with Sajan in the dining nook just off the kitchen for breakfast. The irrepressible Flora fed them fried eggs and chorizo, with homemade tortillas, black beans and white rice, assuring them that it was absolutely required to have such a large meal before traveling. Especially by plane.
“Ay, Dios mio,”
she said, rolling her eyes. It was clear she found the idea of flying distasteful.

Samuel, the driver, a tall lanky black man from Haiti, put their bags in the limousine and they were off, in a cloud of white dust, down the long tree-lined driveway. At first, Koster found it hard to relax. Sajan told him the history of the valley and he struggled to pay attention, but his thoughts kept being pulled back to his nightmare. He had had similar dreams for at least fifteen years now, but it had been weeks, perhaps months since the last one. Koster stared out at the vineyards and orchards, trying to suppress the feeling of foreboding that seemed to spring up from somewhere inside him. He counted the vines as they passed, attempting to estimate the number of grapes per square hectare, trying to settle himself.

As they headed northward, Sajan began to inquire about the journal again. Why had Franklin first searched for the Gospel of Judas? Why was it so important to him? Sajan had always thought Franklin didn't care about organized religion. He was a deist, but not much of a churchgoing man. Why, then, she inquired, had he gone to all this trouble of hiding it and making his map?

Koster tried his best to respond. “I don't know,” he said truthfully. “The journal's not clear. And I haven't
finished translating it all.” He noticed a minibar in the back of the limousine and plucked out a soda. “You want one?” he asked her.

“No, thanks. Help yourself, though,” she answered.

Koster poured out his ginger ale into a fat crystal tumbler. “He talks about his son Franky a lot,” he said, adding some ice. “He died of the smallpox when he was a child. It's almost as if Franklin thinks finding the gospel will bring his son back to him. He seems to feel guilty for the boy's death for some reason. As if he's somehow responsible.”

“Perhaps he was using the Gospel of Judas as a lever to ward off his religious and political enemies. You said he mentions Church Elder Andrews.”

“And Tom Penn. Yes, that's true. His antipathy toward the Proprietors is well documented. He traveled to England on a number of occasions where he actively worked to transform Pennsylvania into a Royal Colony. And the Penns used their considerable influence to have Franklin politically isolated. The Privy Council never did move to alter the Charter, or to divest the Proprietors of their holdings. Later, when the British enforced the Stamp Act, it was Franklin who was chosen by the colonists to make the case before Parliament to repeal it. In one afternoon, he became the most powerful spokes man for the American cause. As a result of his testimony, the Act was rescinded, but by then it was already too late. The colonists remembered what had happened to General Braddock when the British sent him out to defend them against the Indians and French. He had been unceremoniously trounced, and a young Colonel George Washington had suffered the loss of two horses, shot out from directly beneath him in a last-minute getaway, with four bullets passing right through his clothes.” Koster leaned back in the plush leather seat. “It would be a very different world today if he had shifted right instead
of left on his saddle.” He took another sip of his soda.

“You certainly know your American history,” Sajan said.

Koster shrugged. “I've been boning up on Franklin since Nick showed me the journal. And Franklin was a kind of childhood hero to me. His scientific experiments. His insatiably curious mind. If we're going to unravel Franklin's journal, we're going to need to understand what was happening in his life when he wrote it.”

Sajan smiled. She started to say something, and instead, laughed.

“What is it?” asked Koster. “What's so funny?”

“It's just that… I don't know. Usually I'm the one babbling on.” She reached out and touched the back of his hand. “It's refreshing, that's all. Generally, everyone thinks I'm the nerd.”

“You're saying I'm a nerd? And this from an electrical engineer, with degrees from Columbia and Princeton?”

“I'm just a tinkerer.”

“Well, you tinkered your way into one of the most successful chip-manufacturing businesses in the world.”

“I have a number of very smart partners. Anyway, you were saying. After Braddock's defeat…”

“The point is,” Koster said, trying to pick up the thread, “after Braddock's defeat, the colonists realized they couldn't count on the Crown to protect them. But Franklin still believed in a possible compromise with Great Britain, if only he could wrestle the colony away from the Penns. Many were not so forgiving. The Stamp Act sparked a dramatic change in the colonial landscape as a new crop of leaders came to the fore. Young Patrick Henry stood up in the House of Burgesses in Virginia, decrying taxation without representation. He soon found an ally in Jefferson. In Boston, the Sons of Liberty attacked the home of the Massachusetts tax
commissioner—men like John Hancock and Sam Adams, who soon after became embroiled in the Tea Party. It was they whom the redcoats came to arrest on the night of April eighteenth, 1775, which sent Paul Revere on his famous ride through the streets. By the time the redcoats reached Lexington, seventy American minutemen had gathered to meet them. Within minutes, eight lay dead. Of course, more than two hundred and fifty redcoats were cut down or wounded on their day-long retreat back to Boston.”

“You're rattling on again, Joseph. Where was Franklin in all of this?”

“With blood in the streets, revolution became almost inevitable,” said Koster. “Franklin returned home from Europe. He became a member of Congress. He moved to his new house on Market Street, where Deborah had been living for the past decade without him. His daughter, Sally, took care of his housekeeping needs. He was named America's new Postmaster General, and president of Pennsylvania's defense committee. Indeed, when Congress ordered the removal of all royal governments in the colonies, Franklin supported the motion—even though his bastard son, William, was the governor of New Jersey, and the ruling resulted in William's arrest. He was even appointed to the committee responsible for drafting some sort of document explaining the colonists' decision to seek independence from Britain.”

“The Declaration?” Sajan said.

Koster nodded. “Thomas Jefferson was chair of the committee. He composed the first draft by himself in a second-story room of a small house on Market Street, just a block from Franklin's own home. But Franklin suggested some pretty telling amendments.”

“Like what?” asked Sajan.

“In the famous preamble, Jefferson wrote,
‘We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.’
Franklin changed
it to,
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident.’
While Jefferson favored such thinkers as John Locke, it was Franklin's mathematical mind that led him to the scientific determinism of Newtown and his friend David Hume. To Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, there was a difference between so-called synthetic truths, describing matters of fact, such as you're younger than me and this is the road to San Jose, versus analytic truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason, such as the angles of a triangle add up to one hundred and eighty degrees. Jefferson's use of the word ‘sacred’ implied that the equality of men was a religious assertion, ascribed by some deity—”

“While Franklin's phrase turned it into a matter of rational thought,” Sajan cut in.

“Exactly. Franklin bore the stamp of the Enlightenment, the notion that Man was not doomed to live a life predefined by his class or lineage. He bridled at the European feudal system. Given his own humble beginnings, it was not surprising he embraced the values of the so-called middling classes. The confines of original sin… subjugation by hereditary rank… all the representatives of traditional power, from Church leaders to the Proprietors—these were anathema to him. No wonder he became a Freemason.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Freemasonry is a meritocracy. Once you join, anyone who applies himself can rise through the ranks. Members come from all over the world, from all faiths, in all colors. According to the Countess de Rochambaud, the one thing all Masons share is their fundamental belief in one God; they're deists, as Franklin was, but to them it doesn't matter particularly what you call Him. Buddhists can be Masons. So can Muslims. In some Lodges, the Koran is used just as much as the Bible. Yet a lot of Masons harbor special feelings for the Gnostics
not only because they share a common heritage, but because they hold a sympathetic point of view. The Gnostics didn't believe in hierarchical systems. No deacon or priest, no cardinal or pope, was required to validate their religious experience. The search was within, just as the values of the Enlightenment were predicated on the merits of each individual—his luck, pluck and virtue, his own native skills and intelligence—and not just his family lineage.”

The search was within
, Koster said to himself.
Nothing was predefined or determined
. He took another sip of his soda. Then he added, “Ironically, Franklin's journal barely speaks to the historic events he helped shape. In the passages I've translated so far, he focuses more on his scientific experiments, and keeps referring—again and again—to the mysterious schematic of El Minya, presumably from the Gospel of Judas, and the one drawn by da Vinci. He even talks about the one he created himself. But exactly what he created, and why, is—”

It was then, as he was finishing his sentence, that Koster first noticed the black van approach, then swing toward them. He barely had time to react when he realized it was not going to stop. They slammed into each other and the limousine shook. Koster's drink spilled all over his chest. He started to say something when the van struck them again.