The Stolen Gospels (21 page)

Chapter 25

After being sentenced to death by crucifixion, the Lord Jesus Christ faced Pontius Pilate in his palace without fear and said to him, “I forgive you, for you are not evil but are on a path set for you by others.” Upon hearing such love from a man condemned to die, the Roman governor wept, and then sent Jesus away to be crucified.

—Gospel of Lydia 22:14–15,
Holy Women’s Bible

The women of the council were seated in the half circle of black leather chairs, facing a stony-faced Dixie Lou Jackson as she addressed them from the historic red chair.

Through clear window panes edging a magnificent stained glass centerpiece, Dixie Lou saw the mountains of Macedonia with puffy clouds scudding beyond. She glanced at her watch: 9:22 AM.

“The conspirators include my son Alex,” the Chairwoman announced in a somber tone, “as well as Siana Harui and Liz Torrence—in all a son, a daughter, and a niece of our own select group.” Her gaze moved to the petite Fujiko Harui and to the jowly Bobbi Torrence, each of whom looked at her with anguish in their eyes. “I smell the BOI in our midst.”

“Nonsense,” Katherine Pangalos said, her tone contemptuous. “If the Bureau knew where we were, they’d blow us off the face of the earth. They wouldn’t infiltrate us and try to steal the she-apostles.”

“Wouldn’t they?” Dixie Lou snapped back. “Maybe they want the children for reasons we can’t imagine.”

“I doubt that, but in the list of conspirators don’t forget Lori Vale, the little drug addict you brought from America.” Katherine Pangalos’s tone was as frigid as the mountains across the valley. Casually, she picked at something in her ear. “It seems that
two
of the kidnappers were close to you.”

“I wasn’t
close
to either of them,” Dixie Lou snapped, leveling a fierce gaze at her constant adversary. “From what our informants are revealing, Alex was never actually retarded. He fooled me and every member of this council, too. As for Vale, I don’t think she was ever a hard-core drug addict, just smoked a little weed—but she has street smarts and the two of them got into trouble together. No matter what their relationship is, if you’re trying to connect me with this—”

“Maybe
three
instead of two. Giovanni, Alex, and Lori. You must admit, it’s hardly been an auspicious beginning for your regime.”

“Shall we deal with the matter at hand?” Dixie Lou demanded, fighting to maintain her composure. “Alex and Lori have not been captured, but Siana, Liz and two others have. They’re undergoing testing and interrogation at this very moment,
with BOI involvement suspected
.” She paused, arched a thick, jet-black eyebrow, stared Katherine down and added, “I seek no special treatment for my son, nor will it be granted to others.”

Around the half-circle, some of the councilwomen nodded.

“Alex was seen near the body of the murdered guard,” Katherine said. “No disrespect intended to your family, Madame Chairwoman, but that killing—a bullet in the back of the head—sounds like the vicious act of a man. If your son did that, perhaps the other kidnappers should not be blamed, including the Vale girl, who may have been drawn in.”

“I see no distinctions among them,” Dixie Lou said, in the iciest of tones. “Even if only one of the kidnappers killed the guard, the others are still accomplices. Right now I could charge every one of them with murder and order immediate executions.”

The councilwomen listened silently, for each of them knew from Title 8 of the UWW Charter that the Chairwoman was empowered to act as the sole judge in cases of treason, which this most certainly had to be. In that forum Dixie Lou could evaluate evidence as she saw fit, declare guilt or innocence, and pass sentence. This could include pardoning her own son but not the others, and no one could appeal or reverse her decision.

“What about the injured guards?” the pudgy Bobbi Torrence asked of no one in particular. Are they better?” Bobbi had a history of voting against Dixie Lou on matters before the council. With Bobbi’s niece in trouble, Dixie Lou was looking forward to the first opportunity to change that.

Katherine Pangalos answered. “It looks like they’ll pull through.”

The meeting drew to a close with no decisions made. Before drawing conclusions, the councilwomen said they needed more information from ongoing interrogations of the captured kidnappers, including Alex and Lori, if they could be located.

The last to depart the council chamber, Dixie Lou pressed a button on a hand-held transmitter to deactivate a video camera hidden behind one of the eyes of the She-God statue. Giovanni had set it up for her, using surveillance skills he had acquired in the United States while working with an equipment manufacturer. Later that evening Dixie Lou intended to view the tape of the council members, in private. She would watch it over and over, evaluating words, facial expressions, and body language to determine whom she could and could not trust.

Trust, she had long ago decided, was a constantly changing, highly fragile equation. A person who could be counted upon one moment might not be there the next, for any number of reasons . . . a better offer from an opponent, a new view of the situation, a pique of anger over some seemingly minuscule matter.

No one could really be relied upon entirely, in Dixie Lou’s way of looking at the world, not even those councilwomen who were closest to her, Deborah Marvel, Nancy Winters, Jeanne Cousteau, and Wendy Zepeda, or any of the other five councilwomen who normally voted with her. All relationships were no more than games . . . sleights-of-hand performed by the participants in order to obtain favorable

positions and valuables. Everyone in the political arena harbored ulterior motives.

To survive, one had to excel at the game.

* * *

In a subterranean chamber Dixie Lou huddled with three much taller female guards. Blueprints were spread across the table in front of them, along with photographs of Alex Jackson and Lori Vale.

One guard, a burly woman with a dark mole on her chin and oversized eyeglasses, leaned over the papers, pointing as she talked. She was Lieutenant Sears, third in command on the force. “We searched Sectors One through Thirty-Seven,” she reported, “blocking off each, moving deeper and deeper into the mountain. It’s all been covered, but somehow they got away.”

“This does not please me,” Dixie Lou said. She glared up at each of the guards. Accompanying Sears were guards Ellison and Robson. Ellison was tall and pencil-thin, while Robson was as large as Sears but not as masculine in her features.

“Uh, there is one place we haven’t looked,” Ellison offered, hesitantly. “Umm, we were on our rounds in Sector Five, ummm, two nights ago during the storm. Water was starting to fill the storm drain system, and we were walking by the end of an open pipe. My partner thought she heard a human voice in the pipe. I didn’t hear it myself, and seconds later water was rushing through the system. We didn’t see anything unusual.”

“The storm drains, eh?” Dixie Lou said. With thick fingers she rifled through the blueprints.

“Those schematics aren’t here,” Sears said.

“Why not?” Dixie Lou snapped.

“It didn’t seem possible for anyone to be inside the storm drains. I mean, not the way water rushes through them. No one could survive.”

“Get me the plans,” Dixie Lou snapped. “Fast!”

* * *

Lori came to consciousness with a stench in her nostrils, the odor of festered vomit, or worse. She was lying on her side in shallow water, staring with blurred vision at a furry gray lump only inches from her face. The lump had two dark spots on it. She had been dreaming . . . something about a foul, concealed odor in her house.

With difficulty she shifted position and sat up, all the while trying to breathe through her mouth. Her clothes were soaking wet and torn at the knees and elbows, with red, scraped skin beneath. She had a crashing headache, and winced with pain as she touched her forehead. A swollen, sore area.

Her eyes came into focus, and in horror she scuttled away, then looked back. The dark spots on the lump were the dead, sightless eyes of a large rat, staring at the eternity beyond Lori. A huge bloated rodent, soggy and drowned.

And no sign of Alex.

Carefully, Lori checked her injuries. She moved her arms and legs, flexed fingers and toes. Nothing was broken that she could determine, but her knees, elbows and knuckles were scraped and her muscles ached. On her forehead she probed a bump with her fingertips—carefully, since the spot was sore—and felt crustiness, which came off on her fingertips to reveal dried blood. Her lower back felt bruised and painful. She was thirsty and hungry. From a pocket of her jeans she brought out a waterlogged pack of cigarettes and matches, and tossed them away.

She hoped Alex was OK.

How long had it been since they had tumbled down the storm drain? She glanced at her wristwatch. Through a cracked dial (with moisture droplets on the underside) she noted that the timepiece was still working. On the digital display she noted that more than a day and a half had elapsed.

Beneath her, a wet concrete surface sloped off to a pool of dirty water. Some sort of drainage spillway, she decided. Overhead loomed a rock cavern ceiling, a streaky gray and black vault. Low light filtered in from an unseen source. She was inside a large chamber.

Even though Lori was now some distance from the dead rat, the rotten stench of it lingered in her nostrils. Normally she wasn’t queasy, but she didn’t like the thought of the filthy creature bumping against her in the torrent of water. Maybe its decaying corpse had been against her face as she lay unconscious and dreaming, and she had pushed it away. She wiped her face on her wet blouse.

Walking carefully down the incline, trying to avoid slippery surfaces and remain on rough, grainy concrete, she made her way to the pool of water. Rectangular and perhaps the size of a residential swimming pool, the bottom wasn’t visible. Little pieces of scrap wood and leaves floated in the murky water, along with the mangled, headless body of a gray and red bird.

Lori wished she could drink or wash her face, but the pool was brackish and unclean. It reeked. On the other side, the water swirled in a slow circle, perhaps from a poorly functioning drain.

Turning, she studied water that trickled down the sides of the spillway into the pool. On the left side, at the top of the spillway, she noted a dark opening against the rock that might be the storm drain through which she had traveled on a torrent of water.

Could Alex still be in there? She worried about him.

Climbing up to the opening, afraid of what she might find, she knelt and peered inside the end of a large concrete pipe. Water in there made an echoing gurgle. On top of the pipe she saw something clinging, greenish-black and slimy. Algae? On the bottom the surface was smooth, apparently from the force and flow of water. A trickle coming off the end of the pipe looked clean enough, and she caught some of the liquid in her hands and splashed it on her face, then drank. It tasted bad, but she swallowed anyway.

Leaning into the pipe, Lori listened carefully to the water. Bringing out her remarkably durable flashlight, she shined it inside the murky tube. The limited illumination didn’t reveal much, just a long reach, rising at a gradual slope.

If she crawled into the pipe, she risked being inundated again, and even drowned, but she could think of no other options. She couldn’t remain here. Since her knees were already skinned and the concrete was hard, when she entered the orifice she avoided crawling and instead scampered on all fours, like an animal.

The concrete tunnel rose at a modest incline, into pitch blackness. Periodically she brought the flashlight from her pocket and probed ahead with its beam, then put it away and scrambled in the ebony darkness to the limit of what she had seen. Once, her hands touched something long and slimy that didn’t move, like a dead snake. She shuddered and kept going. After a distance the pipe curved to the left and the ascent grew steeper. Her jogging shoes provided good traction but she worried what she would do if the pipe ever became vertical.

The surface dipped, then rose steeply again. She slipped, bumping her knees and chin, but resumed climbing. Finally she became short of breath and had to stop. In the Stygian tunnel she heard her own labored, jagged breathing.

A portentous, increasing sound intruded. Rushing water? Shining the light ahead, she saw only empty pipe.

Should I turn and run back down?

On impulse, she scrambled to a higher elevation.

The rushing sound grew louder, and the concrete pipe around her trembled, like an earthquake. But she sensed something else.

Desperately, Lori scrambled higher, rounded a curve and reached a flat, muddy area. In the beam of her light she saw a black metal hatch with a handle. She tried to lift the handle, but after moving it only a little, it stuck.

The flashlight fell from her grasp into the mud, but remained on, casting eerie yellow illumination up the tunnel.

The sound of rushing water grew unmistakable, and deafening. Out of the corner of her eye she saw movement. Something
big
and approaching. She gave the handle a mighty tug. It lifted, and she pushed her shoulder against the hatch, as hard as she could. She felt resistance from spring-mounted hinges, but tumbled through an opening and sprawled onto a hard surface.

The door slammed shut behind her automatically, and on the other side she heard the roar of passing water, a deluge.

“Oh there you are,” a woman’s voice said, a familiar Southern drawl that made Lori’s heart sink.

The teenager saw fancy gold boots and a black woman’s legs. With trepidation, she looked up.

Dixie Lou Jackson held a pistol in one hand and a rolled set of blueprints in the other. The gun was pointed down, directly at Lori. The fierce little woman was flanked by two female guards, carrying automatic rifles.

“What are you gonna do,” Lori asked, “kill me like you did the—”

In front of her eyes, a blur of movement, a glittering boot. It slammed into her forehead, against one of the wounds she had suffered earlier.