JCA (Opening chapters for a new novel)
December 30th 2006 03:03
1.
Let’s start with a bang.
The human mind is an amazing thing. It processes a truly staggering amount of information and makes the kind of intuitive leaps no computer has yet succeeded in matching. A case in point would be the mental processes of one Jack Blessed, a particularly mild mannered accountant from Surrey in England. There are those who have gone so far as to refer to Jack’s regime of intense organisation as being anally retentive. The truth is far worse than that. This was a man who kept a spirit level in the bathroom to ensure he hung his towels straight. Let’s take a look into his brain and see.
Jack has just stood up to go to the bathroom. His fear of the unsanitary nature of public facilities has increased his level of anxiety to the point where his need to visit the bathroom has become quite pressing. He planned to hold on until he reached Florida but that was not to be. Arising from his seat, he is immediately disturbed by what he sees in the row of seats behind him.
“What is that man doing? He’s got a cigarette lighter! You can’t smoke on planes. It’s not allowed. Besides, passive smoking has proven links with lung cancer. Lung cancer is the second biggest killer of males in the Western World though the numbers of fatalities are dropping thanks to improved treatments and vigorous anti smoking campaigns. There is also a marked rise in obesity that is giving rise to an increase in fatalities from other sources. Why is he trying to set fire to his shoe?”
“Shit,” he said out loud. Jack did not swear often but he felt the situation warranted such language.
“Explosive decompression is a myth. The differential pressure between the inside and outside of a plane at altitude is not sufficient to cause people to be sucked out through tiny holes like spaghetti. The truth is, commercial airliners have suffered massive hull breaches and continued on to their destination with only minimal loss of life. It is important to wear your seat belt at all times.”
Jack had just enough time to wish he was wearing his seat belt before he left the plane prematurely and at speed.
“Planes cruise at a height of at least five miles above the earth. It is cold at this altitude and you wouldn’t want to live there. I am wearing a vest and cardigan because I find air conditioned environments unpleasantly chilly. The sudden drop in temperature I am feeling is merely bracing rather than life threatening.”
“The air is thin at this altitude and prolonged exposure would probably cause you to pass out. This is not the case as you fall from a plane. You find yourself moving into a more oxygen rich environment at speed. The falling human body quickly reaches a speed of around one hundred and twenty five miles per hour and wind resistance keeps it there. At that speed, it will take me about two and a half minutes to hit the ocean. It is unlikely I will pass out. Parachutists do this all the time and they don’t pass out.”
Jack wished he was not a virgin. He would have wished for many other things but the silence was rather awe inspiring. If not for the wind tearing at his clothes, he would swear that he was floating.
“You’re deaf from the blast.”
Jack heard the voice very clearly and wondered if there was such a thing as sudden onset schizophrenia that could be bought on - say - at times of traumatic stress. If there was ever a moment he wished he could lose his not so perilous grip on sanity, it was probably about now.
“It’s all right. You’re hearing will come back in a day or two but you may suffer some tinnitus in later life.”
Jack turned to where the voice seemed to be coming from. This was no mean feat when you’re falling through the air at two hundred kilometres an hour and have nothing to grip onto to assist your turn.
The figure beside him looked like he had just fallen off of a renaissance painting of cherubs. He had the blond curly hair and the beatific smile. The whole works.
“Hi, I’m Michael,” the figure said with a rather annoying level of cheerfulness. “Look, we don’t have a lot of time so I’m just going to have to plunge right in.”
Michael looked at the ocean below and shrugged his shoulders.
“No pun intended.”
“If I’m deaf, why can I hear you?”
“Look, you’re just going to have to trust me on that. We have far more pressing concerns.”
They both looked down at the oncoming waters below. At this height, it didn’t appear to be all that oncoming but Jack knew that would change fairly quickly.
“Are you familiar with Matthew Chapter Four?”
Jack suspended his disbelief just long enough to feel his heart sink. Two minutes to live and he was stuck with the God squad.
“I know, I know. Religion really isn’t your bag but who can blame you with the mess they’ve made. Anyway, chapter Four concerns the temptation of Christ by the Devil. Verse five in particular states that if God’s son was falling, he would give orders to his angels to hold you up with their hands so that not even the soles of your feet would be hurt by the stones.”
Jack had been subjected to enough Sunday school to have heard this tale. He was, however, somewhat confused by the use of the words “you” and “your”.
“I seem to remember that Jesus didn’t go for the deal.”
“Well, you’re right. And, of course, you would be. But the reason Christ didn’t jump was only because you are not supposed to test God. The theory of the angels coming to the rescue is fundamentally sound. The fact is, God had to hold the angels back at the crucifixion because we weren’t a happy bunch of campers.”
“Well,” Jack said in a gallant bid to just go with the flow. “That isn’t going to help me any. Is it?”
“Well it could. Hear me out”
“I don’t seem to have much of a choice.”
“True. The thing is we have about a minute before we hit the ground and that isn’t very long to convince you that you are the Son of God.”
Jack would have normally dismissed such an idea with an attempt at ridicule. He was never good at ridicule but he was British and felt the need to attempt sarcasm at least twice a day. It was buried deep within his genetic coding. However, as the icy waters of the Atlantic were fairly clearly oncoming at that point, Jack was ready to cut to the chase.
“You mean to say that, if I believe I am the Son of God, a bunch of angels are going to come and rescue me?”
“Essentially. But it’s more like you are the great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grand son of God.”
Jack knew a straw to clutch at when he saw it.
“I can live with that,” he said. And he did.
2.
It is said that patience is a virtue and Father Gregory considered himself a virtuous man. As the third pencil of the afternoon snapped between his fingers, his patience was coming into question. As to his virtues, I’ll leave that to your own conclusion.
He was a short fat man who bore more than a passing resemblance to a bleached bean bag. Every day and long into the night, he sat in his basement office and did what had to be done. The church has always faced constant threat and Father Gregory has the job of taking care of these threats.
With extreme prejudice.
Some would laugh at the idea of a Catholic Black Ops unit working from within the bowels of the Vatican. There are, however, seventeen such groups. Well, as far as I know, there are seventeen such groups but, after the first dozen, who keeps count?
There have been recent reports that Opus Dei is responsible for carrying out most of the Church’s dirty work but that is simply not true. One thing history confirms is that, if you wear horse hair underwear and regularly scourge yourself, you are generally in too much discomfort to do all that much evil. The truth is that Father O’Connell down the hall is responsible for placing clues that lay the blame for any misdeeds committed by any of these covert groups squarely at the feet of Opus Dei. This little ruse allows a kind of plausible deniability to any mad scheme the good Fathers come up with.
For example, booked onto a transatlantic flight today is one Mario Fulci, a long standing member of Opus Dei. By bizarre lack of coincidence, he was sat beside one Jack Blessed at the time of a terrible mid air explosion. The fact that Mario knew nothing in advance of the event would mean little to Internet conspiracy theorists if the church’s links to the explosion were ever detected. The church has always made the best of its sacrificial lambs.
Father Gregory stared at his phone and tried to will it to ring. Once again he felt a pencil snap between his fingers.
He threw the broken pencil at the bin on the other side of the room. He missed spectacularly, hitting only a completely different wall. Some would say he threw like a girl but any man who has been in a long term relationship knows that there is little weakness or inaccuracy when a woman throws something. There were times Father Gregory wondered if he had only joined the priesthood because of his incredible lack of sporting prowess. It certainly wasn’t for the money or the sex.
He switched on CNN. Their news coverage was often faster than his own intelligence network even when his guys knew what was coming. He was tempted to say that you just can’t get the staff these days but, clearly, CNN had.
As the screen faded up into life, the image Father Gregory saw did not please him in the slightest. An image captured on a mobile phone was already flashing its way around the world. It was an image that was so spectacular that they seemed to be showing it looped. The other news of the day had been quickly relegated to a text strip running across the bottom of the screen.
As if carried by the invisible arms of angels, Jack Blessed gently floated down onto the deck of the “Queen of Sheba”, the second largest luxury liner in operation today. Jack was greeted by a throng of unmarried Baptists out on a “Christian Cruise of Love to the Holy Lands”. There were ministers on call twenty four hours a day in case any of the passengers got the urge to get hitched. Three days out and already forty seven couples had taken the plunge and been united in Christ. Hallelujah!
That miracle had just been somewhat overshadowed.
3.
The American Secular Society for the Witnessing and Investigation of Paranormal Experiences has had its work cut out for itself since day one. Amazingly, despite the fact that the organisation was comprised of highly respected leaders in a variety of fields of science, none of its founding mothers or fathers spotted the glorious acronym “ASSWIPES” by which they would become less than affectionately known. All their press handouts, badges and tee-shirts may have read “SWIPE” but we all know what happens when a name fits.
For the last hour, the society had been under siege by the media for some comment concerning today’s miracle. They could usually be relied upon to provide some tiresomely banal explanation to even the most seemingly inexplicable event. A flying saucer over New York? No, just a weather balloon at a high enough altitude that it still caught the rays of the sun even though the sun had set at ground level. A poltergeist in California? Merely long term settling of Earth over a fault line causing the movement of inanimate objects. A lactating statue of Ganesha in North West London? Humidity.
You get the picture. When there is something strange in your neighbourhood, who are you going to call? Well, whenever the image of the Virgin Mary appears on a hamburger bun near you, Swipe is on call with a suitable rational explanation. Today, they were just having problems finding that explanation.
“For the last time,” Martha Wayne sighed. She was frequently amazed at how stupid brainy people actually were.
“It isn’t digital alteration to the video image. There wouldn’t be enough time to pull that off. This guy gets blown out of the plane and three minutes later he’s on the deck of the ship. The video is transmitted to the news networks almost immediately.”
“There’s that word,” Charles Kent snapped. “Almost. Almost gives these God loving freaks enough time to pull any scam off.”
Charles was merely pissed off because his rational explanation was full of holes but he didn’t like to be proved wrong by anyone. He fought tenaciously to keep his theory and reputation alive. Martha was having none of it.
“I’m sorry, we can’t run with that. Anyone who has ever tried to render an image will tell you how long it takes for one of those little blue bars to fill the box.”
Robert Parker got to his feet and the room knew it was in trouble. When the physicists start wading in with their alternate universes and string and chaos theories, you might as well have a witch doctor step up to the rostrum to lecture on voodoo curses.
“This is not an inexplicable event. It is merely an unlikely event. Just because gravity works one way almost all of the time, it is foolish to assume it will always work the same way. If there is a possibility, no matter how statistically improbable, given an infinite amount of time, that eventuality must occur. Besides, I think we can be fairly certain that in all the other alternate universes this guy hit the poop deck like a blob of strawberry jam.”
Martha raised her eyes to the ceiling before she spoke in reply.
“This is exactly the reason why you never take your car to a Quantum Mechanic when it breaks down. He’ll just stare at it because he thinks he’s influencing the problem just by looking at it and therefore there is always the possibility that the car will fix itself.”
4.
Jack took great comfort in the hum of the ship’s engines. His hearing had returned, he was safely tucked into a warm bed and the gentle rocking motion of the boat allowed him to drift in and out of half sleep. It had, after all, been a very big day.
At first, he mistook the glow for the rising sun. He closed his eyes against it but it still registered at the back of his head. Try as he might, he could not fight the inevitable.
“Hello, Michael,” he whispered.
“Hello, Jack,” the angel replied. “And how are you?”
“I’m pretty damn good for a man who has just fallen out of an aeroplane. Still, I think I’d like an explanation at some point. You can’t just tell someone that they are descended from God and just leave it go at that.”
“Well, that’s a big story and I’ll be able to tell it to you when we get to Israel. I can show you where it happened and the like. It’ll be like watching a documentary except better.”
“Israel?” This was news to Jack. He’d been looking forward to his vacation at Disney World.
“Well, yeah,” said Michael. “That’s where the boat is going. Pretty fortuitous if you ask me. Some might say the Lord works in mysterious ways.”
“If God had wanted me to go to Israel, he could have just bought me a plane ticket.”
“Well, it’s not quite that simple. God is sort of everywhere but he can’t interfere with everything because he gave you lot free will. If someone wants to blow up a plane, it’s their decision not his.”
“Whoa. God knows everything?”
“Pretty much. He still can’t work out what people ever saw in the Spice Girls but, other than that…”
“And he knows the future?”
“Yes. That’s one of his jobs.”
“And when he created man, he created them in such a way that he knew some of them would try to blow up aeroplanes.”
Michael smiled and nodded.
“And,” Jack took a deep breath as he prepared to take a blinding leap in logic. “This is what he calls ‘free will’?”
Jack looked vaguely triumphant, as if he had just explained all the impossibilities away in a few glib sentences. He almost expected Michael to wink out of existence but failed to realise how close to the truth he actually was.
“Jack, Jack, Jack,” the angel sighed. “You’re labouring under a misconception. God did not create Man. Man created God so that he could create Man. You’ve got to stop thinking so linearly. Step outside the box.”
If you’d actually been there, you’d have seen that concept fly way over Jack’s head leaving little more than a jet stream whoosh in its wake.
“Don’t worry if you don’t get it now,” the angel continued. “If it still doesn’t make any sense after the next few days of explanation, I’ll take you to Amsterdam and we’ll pick up some really shit hot acid. You’ll be able to see in five dimensions when you take that stuff.”
Jack’s jaw dropped. In the books he had read, angels didn’t tend to advocate the consumption of illicit substances. Besides, he was sure the angel was looking less and less like a Botticelli painting and more and more like a Stonehenge visiting hippy with every passing minute.
“Don’t worry,” Michael beamed because he could read Jack’s mind. “There’s precedent. Book of Revelations? That John guy was bombed out of his head on mushrooms, man.”
5.
“Listen,” Father Gregory screamed down the phone. “I want both the A and B teams in Jerusalem, stat. This isn’t a time to act like pussies. What we need here is good old fashioned overkill.”
For a man who ran a small private army, he didn’t find much opportunity to get over excited and throw his considerable weight around. Now that he had the chance, he seized upon it with his stubby little fingers and proceeded to choke the life out of it.
“Don’t start talking to me about fucking hardware unless you are on a secure line, Monroe. Are you on a secure line? That’s what I thought. Let me worry about the fucking hardware, then.”
It felt good to swear. Father Gregory hadn’t sworn since he stubbed his toe seven years earlier. He hadn’t actually sworn at another human being since he was at high school. Fuck, it felt good. Especially seeing as he was doing the Lord’s work and had a guaranteed pardon from the Pope for all sins committed in the Church’s service. He decided to not only go with the flow, he decided to get inventive.
“Listen, Monroe. I want that tit chomping motherfucker dead and buried. In fact, I want that shit bag chopped up into tiny fucking pieces and I want those tiny pieces buried in separate graves that are preferably on different and non adjacent fucking continents. There’s no fucking way we can have this cock sucking sanitary pad sniffing bastard resurrecting himself. Scorch the Earth and then salt the ground. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
Monroe ran what amounted to the Catholic SWAT team. He thought he’d seen it all during his time of service. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts and demons; he’d sent more than his fair share of those bastards screaming back to Hell. Priests who swore like drunken stevedores? Easy.
“Who is this guy?” Monroe snarled as he sucked hard on his cigarette. “Fucking Dracula?”
“That,” Father Gregory replied. “Is on a need to know basis. All you need to know is that this pussy licker represents a clear and fucking present danger to Mother Church and civilisation as we know it. Plant this scrawny assed dog fucker in the ground, Monroe. Plant him deep.”
“You got it, Boss.”
6.
When Martha Wayne adjusted her glasses with her index finger, it was perhaps one of the cutest actions ever perpetrated by a human being. I use the word perpetrated with a scalpel like accuracy because I mean just that. Martha had seen from an early age just what an effect that simple gesture had on human males and had strived to perfect its many intricacies. Other girls had bigger tits and eyelashes that they flashed and fluttered respectively. Martha took what appeared to be a consolation prize and she had and run with it. Now grown men swooned and women tried to imitate. Actually some women swooned and some men tried to imitate as well but that’s another story and that story really starts here.
Besides showing someone she was sexually interested in them, Martha also found her gift particularly useful in a variety of circumstances. She estimated that she increased her grade average by three points with just one casual use of this gesture. It helped her with employment and placed her into a position where she had become SWIPE’s media spokesperson.
When an interviewer asked her a difficult question, with one simple variation on the spectacular spectacle adjustment theme, she could bring the viewing public around to her side. The offending interviewer was immediately painted as a vicious brute or jealous harridan depending upon the unfortunate’s gender.
In a less enlightened era, some may have called it witchcraft. She had previously only had the opportunity to display her skills on cable and regional programs of minimal interest to the wider public. She was moving into the big league now as today’s program ran nationally.
“Well, Simon,” Martha said whilst working her little magic trick direct to camera. “You’re asking me for a lot. If you want a scientific explanation, I can’t make one up for you just like that. It would be fairly unscientific if I just threw you any old nonsense I could off of the top of my head.”
Curiously, this was exactly what she intended to do. The best lies always come wrapped in a bundle of truth.
“Besides, watching a low resolution image caught on a mobile phone is not exactly laboratory conditions. However, I think I can offer you quite a few plausible explanations to these events.”
A better presenter would have gone with the flirt and the flow but Simon Black had too much ego for his own good. She had deliberately left a large enough hole in her words to trap the biggest fool and this arrogant presenter was stupid enough to just step right in there. Obviously, he was not helped by the misinformed notion that his bushy eye brows did not need trimming because they made him look wise. As he grumpily filled the gap, audience sympathies switched stream. Usually, the audience enjoyed nothing more than seeing the science nerd crucified. Instead, America fell in love.
“Well,” he sniffed. “Maybe you could just give us an example or two.”
The words seem harmless enough on paper but it was something in his tone. The nation suddenly realised this trusted journalist was really just a bitter and twisted old queen. Martha skipped over the wicked witch’s corpse and proceeded down the Yellow Brick Road to glory.
“The atmosphere itself is probably the obvious place to go for an explanation. We are only just beginning to glimpse the intricacies of that system. We look at the sky and we’re often fooled by its quiet majesty. Until we see a roof blown off in a storm, that is. The sky is a bit like a big pan of water placed on a stove. As the sun beams down, it starts to churn and bubble. Atmospheric vortices, up drafts, wind sheers and micro storms are all recognised phenomena that have all bought down aircraft.”
“So these sudden gusts of winds could pick up a man?”
“It has happened but the up draft wouldn’t actually have had to pick this man up. It merely had to slow him down . But, you know, let’s face it, at the end of the day I think Mr Blessed was just fortunate enough to live up to his name.”
“You’re saying he just got lucky?”
It was just too tempting. Martha smiled cheekily and beamed at her two hundred million viewers.
“Well, yes, Simon. You may have forgotten this but people occasionally do get lucky. In Jack Blessed’s case, I think he used up a whole lifetimes worth of luck. If I were him, I definitely wouldn’t buy a lottery ticket.”
Simon Black’s face was a picture but not a particularly pretty picture. Being stung by a zinger from the science geek? That certainly hadn’t been part of his script. Flushed with rage, he staggered to keep control of his emotions. He smiled and turned to camera.
“We’ll be right back after this short commercial break.”
The demand for a fade to advertisements had come a minute and a half prematurely. Some affiliates were taken unaware and accidentally broadcast an additional partial sentence.
“Who the fuck do you think you are you smug…”
Black was widely censured for his outburst. As for Martha Wayne, she had gone to air with nothing up her sleaves except her arms and what can you say? A star is born.
7.
“You know, man,” Michael tried to seriously focus on his escaping reality. “I think it’s just modern times. The Zeitgeist is just getting to me. I’m an angel. People think angel and they think peace and love. People think peace and love and they think hippies. God damn Socratic logic is turning me into a hippy, man. I’m not supposed to be a flaming hippy, man. I’m supposed to be one of God’s warriors. Back home, I’ve got this dirty great flaming sword in my closet which I keep handy for the last days. You see me wielding that thing above my head and you won’t be thinking about the flowers in my hair.”
The cabin was beginning to take on the smell of a University Bar. Whilst this was the kind of smell Jack had hoped never to experience again, he said nothing. The weirdness was getting too much for him and he had decided to feign catalepsy.
“Look at this, man,” Michael groaned as he exposed his chest. “Reality has just pierced my nipple and - look – it’s given me a tattoo around my navel. If only you people could just find a truth and stick to it. It would make my existence as the personification of a mythological ideal a whole lot easier and that’s the truth. You can take that as gospel, man.”
Michael took an enormous toke on the joint that had just appeared in his hand. He held the smoke inside whatever it is angel’s have instead of lungs and then pumped a choking cloud out that resembled a good old fashioned London fog.
“You want some of this, man? Sorry dude. I forgot. You’re not allowed to sin, are you? Me. I’ve got no free will. I just go where the current of public imagination carries me. Do you know what I’m saying?”
Jack continued to feign catalepsy. He considered the possibility that he had died and gone to hell. There was still the chance he was dreaming but he felt that this illusion had been going on for quite a while now and the dream option was growing increasingly unlikely.
“It’s okay, man. I know your mind is blown but I’ll try to explain it to you. You know what I said earlier about taking things as gospel? Well that’s a saying that has built up over the years because people believe the Gospels to be true. In fact, they represented a truth decided upon some four hundred years after the event. Before they narrowed it down to four, there were a whole stack of Gospels. I could go on about how different the stories were in those documents but they represent a dismissed truth. To an entity like me, they are irrelevant until someone digs up a copy and then my entire universe gets dicked around with.”
“The first of the four official Gospels was the book of Mark.”
“I thought Matthew was the first Gospel,” said Jack. He had given up on the whole silence thing.
“You know,” he continued. “Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.”
“No, man. That’s just the way they ordered them in the big book. The Book of Mark was written thirty years after the death of Christ. Mark hadn’t been an Apostle but he had been working with Peter and Paul. That doesn’t mean he actually wrote the book either but it bears his name and was probably written in Rome in around 65AD. Both Peter and Paul had been martyred by then so, as the book began to circulate, Mark was a fairly authoritative name to use. It’s kind of like getting celebrity endorsement for your product.”
“Up until that time, the message of Christ’s life and teachings had only been passed along orally. This had led to a fair amount of inconsistencies creeping into the tale. A variety of different approaches to Christianity were springing up in different outposts around the Mediterranean. As these beliefs diverged to the point where travellers were confused as to whether or not they worshipping the same God at all, a great demand arose for someone to write the story down and bring to bear some consistency.”
Jack stifled a yawn. He found the history of the early Christian church to be even more effective than any of the commercial sleeping tablets. The “wow factor” was wearing off. Humans move quickly from disbelief to excitement and then to acceptance and ultimately boredom. It had taken Jack less than six hours to go from “Are you really an angel?” to “Can you just shut the fuck up?”
Michael was on a roll. There wasn’t much that could have shut him up.
“What is weird is that the author makes no mention of the Immaculate Conception and only partial reference to the Resurrection. The Book of Mark originally ended with the tomb being found empty. There were a couple of different additional endings tagged on by different authors later but, in the original book, it ended as a mystery.”
“So?” Jack groaned. He felt obliged to say something.
“This is about as close as we get to a primary document and it leaves out the two events that allegedly separate Christ from humanity and proves him to be the Son of God. You’d think these would be the main things that people would want to hear about, wouldn’t you?”
“Matthew and Luke quickly followed up with Gospels of their own and they were more than pleased to fill in the missing gaps. A cynic could argue that Mark’s audience was a little upset that he didn’t include enough of the fairy tale mythology that had sprung up in the telling of the tale. The later authors had no such qualms and just gave into public demand.”
Michael continued to talk into the night but Jack had already fallen asleep. The casual observer may have been mystified by the fact that the angel now looked like an English History professor.
8.
There was a sense of pandemonium at Tel Aviv airport. The private jet had touched down carrying Vatican diplomatic clearance. The men who strode out of the plane were monstrous in a kind of rock star way. As tall and physically stunning as a team of elite sports stars, they marched through customs in priests robes and wrap around sun glasses. If you ever wanted an opening scene for that Hollywood blockbuster you’ve been trying to sell, here it was in the flesh. This was a bunch of some seriously impressive motherfuckers. Even battle hardened Israeli soldiers took an unconscious step backwards.
Cardinal Wosley was there for the old meet and greet. Monroe and his crew did not break step as he approached them. These were men on a mission. Wosley was left with little option but to waddle beside them in a sweaty attempt to keep up.
“You’re Monroe?” Wosley gasped as his little legs moved double speed against the squad’s gallant stride.
“And you’re Wosley, our liaison in Israel,” Monroe grunted the obvious. “Do you have anything for me or is this just a courtesy call? I believe the ship is docking in three hours so I hope the transport and equipment are arranged.”
“Yes, no, yes and yes,” Wosley panted efficiently. “I have hotel and vehicle keys as requested. We have a tour bus parked right outside and it is fully equipped as per your instructions.”
“Outstanding. Did we settle on Uzis?”
“Local product, sir. The best we could do in the allotted time.”
“Understandable under the circumstances. Well, we’ll just have to live with that.”
“Can I also confirm that you received the dossier that was e-mailed to you in flight?”
“That’s an affirmative.”
Awe struck crowds parted as they marched across the concourse. Even the automatic doors hurried to part as this small army approached them. The morning sun lit them up like Greek Gods. Stewardesses drooled and taxi drivers gasped. These were men who certainly knew how to make an entrance.
9.
“Well, Ms Wayne. Here it is in a nutshell. We’d like you to go to Israel and interview Mr Blessed. We think you are the woman for the job.”
Let’s start with a bang.
The human mind is an amazing thing. It processes a truly staggering amount of information and makes the kind of intuitive leaps no computer has yet succeeded in matching. A case in point would be the mental processes of one Jack Blessed, a particularly mild mannered accountant from Surrey in England. There are those who have gone so far as to refer to Jack’s regime of intense organisation as being anally retentive. The truth is far worse than that. This was a man who kept a spirit level in the bathroom to ensure he hung his towels straight. Let’s take a look into his brain and see.
Jack has just stood up to go to the bathroom. His fear of the unsanitary nature of public facilities has increased his level of anxiety to the point where his need to visit the bathroom has become quite pressing. He planned to hold on until he reached Florida but that was not to be. Arising from his seat, he is immediately disturbed by what he sees in the row of seats behind him.
“What is that man doing? He’s got a cigarette lighter! You can’t smoke on planes. It’s not allowed. Besides, passive smoking has proven links with lung cancer. Lung cancer is the second biggest killer of males in the Western World though the numbers of fatalities are dropping thanks to improved treatments and vigorous anti smoking campaigns. There is also a marked rise in obesity that is giving rise to an increase in fatalities from other sources. Why is he trying to set fire to his shoe?”
“Shit,” he said out loud. Jack did not swear often but he felt the situation warranted such language.
“Explosive decompression is a myth. The differential pressure between the inside and outside of a plane at altitude is not sufficient to cause people to be sucked out through tiny holes like spaghetti. The truth is, commercial airliners have suffered massive hull breaches and continued on to their destination with only minimal loss of life. It is important to wear your seat belt at all times.”
Jack had just enough time to wish he was wearing his seat belt before he left the plane prematurely and at speed.
“Planes cruise at a height of at least five miles above the earth. It is cold at this altitude and you wouldn’t want to live there. I am wearing a vest and cardigan because I find air conditioned environments unpleasantly chilly. The sudden drop in temperature I am feeling is merely bracing rather than life threatening.”
“The air is thin at this altitude and prolonged exposure would probably cause you to pass out. This is not the case as you fall from a plane. You find yourself moving into a more oxygen rich environment at speed. The falling human body quickly reaches a speed of around one hundred and twenty five miles per hour and wind resistance keeps it there. At that speed, it will take me about two and a half minutes to hit the ocean. It is unlikely I will pass out. Parachutists do this all the time and they don’t pass out.”
Jack wished he was not a virgin. He would have wished for many other things but the silence was rather awe inspiring. If not for the wind tearing at his clothes, he would swear that he was floating.
“You’re deaf from the blast.”
Jack heard the voice very clearly and wondered if there was such a thing as sudden onset schizophrenia that could be bought on - say - at times of traumatic stress. If there was ever a moment he wished he could lose his not so perilous grip on sanity, it was probably about now.
“It’s all right. You’re hearing will come back in a day or two but you may suffer some tinnitus in later life.”
Jack turned to where the voice seemed to be coming from. This was no mean feat when you’re falling through the air at two hundred kilometres an hour and have nothing to grip onto to assist your turn.
The figure beside him looked like he had just fallen off of a renaissance painting of cherubs. He had the blond curly hair and the beatific smile. The whole works.
“Hi, I’m Michael,” the figure said with a rather annoying level of cheerfulness. “Look, we don’t have a lot of time so I’m just going to have to plunge right in.”
Michael looked at the ocean below and shrugged his shoulders.
“No pun intended.”
“If I’m deaf, why can I hear you?”
“Look, you’re just going to have to trust me on that. We have far more pressing concerns.”
They both looked down at the oncoming waters below. At this height, it didn’t appear to be all that oncoming but Jack knew that would change fairly quickly.
“Are you familiar with Matthew Chapter Four?”
Jack suspended his disbelief just long enough to feel his heart sink. Two minutes to live and he was stuck with the God squad.
“I know, I know. Religion really isn’t your bag but who can blame you with the mess they’ve made. Anyway, chapter Four concerns the temptation of Christ by the Devil. Verse five in particular states that if God’s son was falling, he would give orders to his angels to hold you up with their hands so that not even the soles of your feet would be hurt by the stones.”
Jack had been subjected to enough Sunday school to have heard this tale. He was, however, somewhat confused by the use of the words “you” and “your”.
“I seem to remember that Jesus didn’t go for the deal.”
“Well, you’re right. And, of course, you would be. But the reason Christ didn’t jump was only because you are not supposed to test God. The theory of the angels coming to the rescue is fundamentally sound. The fact is, God had to hold the angels back at the crucifixion because we weren’t a happy bunch of campers.”
“Well,” Jack said in a gallant bid to just go with the flow. “That isn’t going to help me any. Is it?”
“Well it could. Hear me out”
“I don’t seem to have much of a choice.”
“True. The thing is we have about a minute before we hit the ground and that isn’t very long to convince you that you are the Son of God.”
Jack would have normally dismissed such an idea with an attempt at ridicule. He was never good at ridicule but he was British and felt the need to attempt sarcasm at least twice a day. It was buried deep within his genetic coding. However, as the icy waters of the Atlantic were fairly clearly oncoming at that point, Jack was ready to cut to the chase.
“You mean to say that, if I believe I am the Son of God, a bunch of angels are going to come and rescue me?”
“Essentially. But it’s more like you are the great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grand son of God.”
Jack knew a straw to clutch at when he saw it.
“I can live with that,” he said. And he did.
2.
It is said that patience is a virtue and Father Gregory considered himself a virtuous man. As the third pencil of the afternoon snapped between his fingers, his patience was coming into question. As to his virtues, I’ll leave that to your own conclusion.
He was a short fat man who bore more than a passing resemblance to a bleached bean bag. Every day and long into the night, he sat in his basement office and did what had to be done. The church has always faced constant threat and Father Gregory has the job of taking care of these threats.
With extreme prejudice.
Some would laugh at the idea of a Catholic Black Ops unit working from within the bowels of the Vatican. There are, however, seventeen such groups. Well, as far as I know, there are seventeen such groups but, after the first dozen, who keeps count?
There have been recent reports that Opus Dei is responsible for carrying out most of the Church’s dirty work but that is simply not true. One thing history confirms is that, if you wear horse hair underwear and regularly scourge yourself, you are generally in too much discomfort to do all that much evil. The truth is that Father O’Connell down the hall is responsible for placing clues that lay the blame for any misdeeds committed by any of these covert groups squarely at the feet of Opus Dei. This little ruse allows a kind of plausible deniability to any mad scheme the good Fathers come up with.
For example, booked onto a transatlantic flight today is one Mario Fulci, a long standing member of Opus Dei. By bizarre lack of coincidence, he was sat beside one Jack Blessed at the time of a terrible mid air explosion. The fact that Mario knew nothing in advance of the event would mean little to Internet conspiracy theorists if the church’s links to the explosion were ever detected. The church has always made the best of its sacrificial lambs.
Father Gregory stared at his phone and tried to will it to ring. Once again he felt a pencil snap between his fingers.
He threw the broken pencil at the bin on the other side of the room. He missed spectacularly, hitting only a completely different wall. Some would say he threw like a girl but any man who has been in a long term relationship knows that there is little weakness or inaccuracy when a woman throws something. There were times Father Gregory wondered if he had only joined the priesthood because of his incredible lack of sporting prowess. It certainly wasn’t for the money or the sex.
He switched on CNN. Their news coverage was often faster than his own intelligence network even when his guys knew what was coming. He was tempted to say that you just can’t get the staff these days but, clearly, CNN had.
As the screen faded up into life, the image Father Gregory saw did not please him in the slightest. An image captured on a mobile phone was already flashing its way around the world. It was an image that was so spectacular that they seemed to be showing it looped. The other news of the day had been quickly relegated to a text strip running across the bottom of the screen.
As if carried by the invisible arms of angels, Jack Blessed gently floated down onto the deck of the “Queen of Sheba”, the second largest luxury liner in operation today. Jack was greeted by a throng of unmarried Baptists out on a “Christian Cruise of Love to the Holy Lands”. There were ministers on call twenty four hours a day in case any of the passengers got the urge to get hitched. Three days out and already forty seven couples had taken the plunge and been united in Christ. Hallelujah!
That miracle had just been somewhat overshadowed.
3.
The American Secular Society for the Witnessing and Investigation of Paranormal Experiences has had its work cut out for itself since day one. Amazingly, despite the fact that the organisation was comprised of highly respected leaders in a variety of fields of science, none of its founding mothers or fathers spotted the glorious acronym “ASSWIPES” by which they would become less than affectionately known. All their press handouts, badges and tee-shirts may have read “SWIPE” but we all know what happens when a name fits.
For the last hour, the society had been under siege by the media for some comment concerning today’s miracle. They could usually be relied upon to provide some tiresomely banal explanation to even the most seemingly inexplicable event. A flying saucer over New York? No, just a weather balloon at a high enough altitude that it still caught the rays of the sun even though the sun had set at ground level. A poltergeist in California? Merely long term settling of Earth over a fault line causing the movement of inanimate objects. A lactating statue of Ganesha in North West London? Humidity.
You get the picture. When there is something strange in your neighbourhood, who are you going to call? Well, whenever the image of the Virgin Mary appears on a hamburger bun near you, Swipe is on call with a suitable rational explanation. Today, they were just having problems finding that explanation.
“For the last time,” Martha Wayne sighed. She was frequently amazed at how stupid brainy people actually were.
“It isn’t digital alteration to the video image. There wouldn’t be enough time to pull that off. This guy gets blown out of the plane and three minutes later he’s on the deck of the ship. The video is transmitted to the news networks almost immediately.”
“There’s that word,” Charles Kent snapped. “Almost. Almost gives these God loving freaks enough time to pull any scam off.”
Charles was merely pissed off because his rational explanation was full of holes but he didn’t like to be proved wrong by anyone. He fought tenaciously to keep his theory and reputation alive. Martha was having none of it.
“I’m sorry, we can’t run with that. Anyone who has ever tried to render an image will tell you how long it takes for one of those little blue bars to fill the box.”
Robert Parker got to his feet and the room knew it was in trouble. When the physicists start wading in with their alternate universes and string and chaos theories, you might as well have a witch doctor step up to the rostrum to lecture on voodoo curses.
“This is not an inexplicable event. It is merely an unlikely event. Just because gravity works one way almost all of the time, it is foolish to assume it will always work the same way. If there is a possibility, no matter how statistically improbable, given an infinite amount of time, that eventuality must occur. Besides, I think we can be fairly certain that in all the other alternate universes this guy hit the poop deck like a blob of strawberry jam.”
Martha raised her eyes to the ceiling before she spoke in reply.
“This is exactly the reason why you never take your car to a Quantum Mechanic when it breaks down. He’ll just stare at it because he thinks he’s influencing the problem just by looking at it and therefore there is always the possibility that the car will fix itself.”
4.
Jack took great comfort in the hum of the ship’s engines. His hearing had returned, he was safely tucked into a warm bed and the gentle rocking motion of the boat allowed him to drift in and out of half sleep. It had, after all, been a very big day.
At first, he mistook the glow for the rising sun. He closed his eyes against it but it still registered at the back of his head. Try as he might, he could not fight the inevitable.
“Hello, Michael,” he whispered.
“Hello, Jack,” the angel replied. “And how are you?”
“I’m pretty damn good for a man who has just fallen out of an aeroplane. Still, I think I’d like an explanation at some point. You can’t just tell someone that they are descended from God and just leave it go at that.”
“Well, that’s a big story and I’ll be able to tell it to you when we get to Israel. I can show you where it happened and the like. It’ll be like watching a documentary except better.”
“Israel?” This was news to Jack. He’d been looking forward to his vacation at Disney World.
“Well, yeah,” said Michael. “That’s where the boat is going. Pretty fortuitous if you ask me. Some might say the Lord works in mysterious ways.”
“If God had wanted me to go to Israel, he could have just bought me a plane ticket.”
“Well, it’s not quite that simple. God is sort of everywhere but he can’t interfere with everything because he gave you lot free will. If someone wants to blow up a plane, it’s their decision not his.”
“Whoa. God knows everything?”
“Pretty much. He still can’t work out what people ever saw in the Spice Girls but, other than that…”
“And he knows the future?”
“Yes. That’s one of his jobs.”
“And when he created man, he created them in such a way that he knew some of them would try to blow up aeroplanes.”
Michael smiled and nodded.
“And,” Jack took a deep breath as he prepared to take a blinding leap in logic. “This is what he calls ‘free will’?”
Jack looked vaguely triumphant, as if he had just explained all the impossibilities away in a few glib sentences. He almost expected Michael to wink out of existence but failed to realise how close to the truth he actually was.
“Jack, Jack, Jack,” the angel sighed. “You’re labouring under a misconception. God did not create Man. Man created God so that he could create Man. You’ve got to stop thinking so linearly. Step outside the box.”
If you’d actually been there, you’d have seen that concept fly way over Jack’s head leaving little more than a jet stream whoosh in its wake.
“Don’t worry if you don’t get it now,” the angel continued. “If it still doesn’t make any sense after the next few days of explanation, I’ll take you to Amsterdam and we’ll pick up some really shit hot acid. You’ll be able to see in five dimensions when you take that stuff.”
Jack’s jaw dropped. In the books he had read, angels didn’t tend to advocate the consumption of illicit substances. Besides, he was sure the angel was looking less and less like a Botticelli painting and more and more like a Stonehenge visiting hippy with every passing minute.
“Don’t worry,” Michael beamed because he could read Jack’s mind. “There’s precedent. Book of Revelations? That John guy was bombed out of his head on mushrooms, man.”
5.
“Listen,” Father Gregory screamed down the phone. “I want both the A and B teams in Jerusalem, stat. This isn’t a time to act like pussies. What we need here is good old fashioned overkill.”
For a man who ran a small private army, he didn’t find much opportunity to get over excited and throw his considerable weight around. Now that he had the chance, he seized upon it with his stubby little fingers and proceeded to choke the life out of it.
“Don’t start talking to me about fucking hardware unless you are on a secure line, Monroe. Are you on a secure line? That’s what I thought. Let me worry about the fucking hardware, then.”
It felt good to swear. Father Gregory hadn’t sworn since he stubbed his toe seven years earlier. He hadn’t actually sworn at another human being since he was at high school. Fuck, it felt good. Especially seeing as he was doing the Lord’s work and had a guaranteed pardon from the Pope for all sins committed in the Church’s service. He decided to not only go with the flow, he decided to get inventive.
“Listen, Monroe. I want that tit chomping motherfucker dead and buried. In fact, I want that shit bag chopped up into tiny fucking pieces and I want those tiny pieces buried in separate graves that are preferably on different and non adjacent fucking continents. There’s no fucking way we can have this cock sucking sanitary pad sniffing bastard resurrecting himself. Scorch the Earth and then salt the ground. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
Monroe ran what amounted to the Catholic SWAT team. He thought he’d seen it all during his time of service. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts and demons; he’d sent more than his fair share of those bastards screaming back to Hell. Priests who swore like drunken stevedores? Easy.
“Who is this guy?” Monroe snarled as he sucked hard on his cigarette. “Fucking Dracula?”
“That,” Father Gregory replied. “Is on a need to know basis. All you need to know is that this pussy licker represents a clear and fucking present danger to Mother Church and civilisation as we know it. Plant this scrawny assed dog fucker in the ground, Monroe. Plant him deep.”
“You got it, Boss.”
6.
When Martha Wayne adjusted her glasses with her index finger, it was perhaps one of the cutest actions ever perpetrated by a human being. I use the word perpetrated with a scalpel like accuracy because I mean just that. Martha had seen from an early age just what an effect that simple gesture had on human males and had strived to perfect its many intricacies. Other girls had bigger tits and eyelashes that they flashed and fluttered respectively. Martha took what appeared to be a consolation prize and she had and run with it. Now grown men swooned and women tried to imitate. Actually some women swooned and some men tried to imitate as well but that’s another story and that story really starts here.
Besides showing someone she was sexually interested in them, Martha also found her gift particularly useful in a variety of circumstances. She estimated that she increased her grade average by three points with just one casual use of this gesture. It helped her with employment and placed her into a position where she had become SWIPE’s media spokesperson.
When an interviewer asked her a difficult question, with one simple variation on the spectacular spectacle adjustment theme, she could bring the viewing public around to her side. The offending interviewer was immediately painted as a vicious brute or jealous harridan depending upon the unfortunate’s gender.
In a less enlightened era, some may have called it witchcraft. She had previously only had the opportunity to display her skills on cable and regional programs of minimal interest to the wider public. She was moving into the big league now as today’s program ran nationally.
“Well, Simon,” Martha said whilst working her little magic trick direct to camera. “You’re asking me for a lot. If you want a scientific explanation, I can’t make one up for you just like that. It would be fairly unscientific if I just threw you any old nonsense I could off of the top of my head.”
Curiously, this was exactly what she intended to do. The best lies always come wrapped in a bundle of truth.
“Besides, watching a low resolution image caught on a mobile phone is not exactly laboratory conditions. However, I think I can offer you quite a few plausible explanations to these events.”
A better presenter would have gone with the flirt and the flow but Simon Black had too much ego for his own good. She had deliberately left a large enough hole in her words to trap the biggest fool and this arrogant presenter was stupid enough to just step right in there. Obviously, he was not helped by the misinformed notion that his bushy eye brows did not need trimming because they made him look wise. As he grumpily filled the gap, audience sympathies switched stream. Usually, the audience enjoyed nothing more than seeing the science nerd crucified. Instead, America fell in love.
“Well,” he sniffed. “Maybe you could just give us an example or two.”
The words seem harmless enough on paper but it was something in his tone. The nation suddenly realised this trusted journalist was really just a bitter and twisted old queen. Martha skipped over the wicked witch’s corpse and proceeded down the Yellow Brick Road to glory.
“The atmosphere itself is probably the obvious place to go for an explanation. We are only just beginning to glimpse the intricacies of that system. We look at the sky and we’re often fooled by its quiet majesty. Until we see a roof blown off in a storm, that is. The sky is a bit like a big pan of water placed on a stove. As the sun beams down, it starts to churn and bubble. Atmospheric vortices, up drafts, wind sheers and micro storms are all recognised phenomena that have all bought down aircraft.”
“So these sudden gusts of winds could pick up a man?”
“It has happened but the up draft wouldn’t actually have had to pick this man up. It merely had to slow him down . But, you know, let’s face it, at the end of the day I think Mr Blessed was just fortunate enough to live up to his name.”
“You’re saying he just got lucky?”
It was just too tempting. Martha smiled cheekily and beamed at her two hundred million viewers.
“Well, yes, Simon. You may have forgotten this but people occasionally do get lucky. In Jack Blessed’s case, I think he used up a whole lifetimes worth of luck. If I were him, I definitely wouldn’t buy a lottery ticket.”
Simon Black’s face was a picture but not a particularly pretty picture. Being stung by a zinger from the science geek? That certainly hadn’t been part of his script. Flushed with rage, he staggered to keep control of his emotions. He smiled and turned to camera.
“We’ll be right back after this short commercial break.”
The demand for a fade to advertisements had come a minute and a half prematurely. Some affiliates were taken unaware and accidentally broadcast an additional partial sentence.
“Who the fuck do you think you are you smug…”
Black was widely censured for his outburst. As for Martha Wayne, she had gone to air with nothing up her sleaves except her arms and what can you say? A star is born.
7.
“You know, man,” Michael tried to seriously focus on his escaping reality. “I think it’s just modern times. The Zeitgeist is just getting to me. I’m an angel. People think angel and they think peace and love. People think peace and love and they think hippies. God damn Socratic logic is turning me into a hippy, man. I’m not supposed to be a flaming hippy, man. I’m supposed to be one of God’s warriors. Back home, I’ve got this dirty great flaming sword in my closet which I keep handy for the last days. You see me wielding that thing above my head and you won’t be thinking about the flowers in my hair.”
The cabin was beginning to take on the smell of a University Bar. Whilst this was the kind of smell Jack had hoped never to experience again, he said nothing. The weirdness was getting too much for him and he had decided to feign catalepsy.
“Look at this, man,” Michael groaned as he exposed his chest. “Reality has just pierced my nipple and - look – it’s given me a tattoo around my navel. If only you people could just find a truth and stick to it. It would make my existence as the personification of a mythological ideal a whole lot easier and that’s the truth. You can take that as gospel, man.”
Michael took an enormous toke on the joint that had just appeared in his hand. He held the smoke inside whatever it is angel’s have instead of lungs and then pumped a choking cloud out that resembled a good old fashioned London fog.
“You want some of this, man? Sorry dude. I forgot. You’re not allowed to sin, are you? Me. I’ve got no free will. I just go where the current of public imagination carries me. Do you know what I’m saying?”
Jack continued to feign catalepsy. He considered the possibility that he had died and gone to hell. There was still the chance he was dreaming but he felt that this illusion had been going on for quite a while now and the dream option was growing increasingly unlikely.
“It’s okay, man. I know your mind is blown but I’ll try to explain it to you. You know what I said earlier about taking things as gospel? Well that’s a saying that has built up over the years because people believe the Gospels to be true. In fact, they represented a truth decided upon some four hundred years after the event. Before they narrowed it down to four, there were a whole stack of Gospels. I could go on about how different the stories were in those documents but they represent a dismissed truth. To an entity like me, they are irrelevant until someone digs up a copy and then my entire universe gets dicked around with.”
“The first of the four official Gospels was the book of Mark.”
“I thought Matthew was the first Gospel,” said Jack. He had given up on the whole silence thing.
“You know,” he continued. “Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.”
“No, man. That’s just the way they ordered them in the big book. The Book of Mark was written thirty years after the death of Christ. Mark hadn’t been an Apostle but he had been working with Peter and Paul. That doesn’t mean he actually wrote the book either but it bears his name and was probably written in Rome in around 65AD. Both Peter and Paul had been martyred by then so, as the book began to circulate, Mark was a fairly authoritative name to use. It’s kind of like getting celebrity endorsement for your product.”
“Up until that time, the message of Christ’s life and teachings had only been passed along orally. This had led to a fair amount of inconsistencies creeping into the tale. A variety of different approaches to Christianity were springing up in different outposts around the Mediterranean. As these beliefs diverged to the point where travellers were confused as to whether or not they worshipping the same God at all, a great demand arose for someone to write the story down and bring to bear some consistency.”
Jack stifled a yawn. He found the history of the early Christian church to be even more effective than any of the commercial sleeping tablets. The “wow factor” was wearing off. Humans move quickly from disbelief to excitement and then to acceptance and ultimately boredom. It had taken Jack less than six hours to go from “Are you really an angel?” to “Can you just shut the fuck up?”
Michael was on a roll. There wasn’t much that could have shut him up.
“What is weird is that the author makes no mention of the Immaculate Conception and only partial reference to the Resurrection. The Book of Mark originally ended with the tomb being found empty. There were a couple of different additional endings tagged on by different authors later but, in the original book, it ended as a mystery.”
“So?” Jack groaned. He felt obliged to say something.
“This is about as close as we get to a primary document and it leaves out the two events that allegedly separate Christ from humanity and proves him to be the Son of God. You’d think these would be the main things that people would want to hear about, wouldn’t you?”
“Matthew and Luke quickly followed up with Gospels of their own and they were more than pleased to fill in the missing gaps. A cynic could argue that Mark’s audience was a little upset that he didn’t include enough of the fairy tale mythology that had sprung up in the telling of the tale. The later authors had no such qualms and just gave into public demand.”
Michael continued to talk into the night but Jack had already fallen asleep. The casual observer may have been mystified by the fact that the angel now looked like an English History professor.
8.
There was a sense of pandemonium at Tel Aviv airport. The private jet had touched down carrying Vatican diplomatic clearance. The men who strode out of the plane were monstrous in a kind of rock star way. As tall and physically stunning as a team of elite sports stars, they marched through customs in priests robes and wrap around sun glasses. If you ever wanted an opening scene for that Hollywood blockbuster you’ve been trying to sell, here it was in the flesh. This was a bunch of some seriously impressive motherfuckers. Even battle hardened Israeli soldiers took an unconscious step backwards.
Cardinal Wosley was there for the old meet and greet. Monroe and his crew did not break step as he approached them. These were men on a mission. Wosley was left with little option but to waddle beside them in a sweaty attempt to keep up.
“You’re Monroe?” Wosley gasped as his little legs moved double speed against the squad’s gallant stride.
“And you’re Wosley, our liaison in Israel,” Monroe grunted the obvious. “Do you have anything for me or is this just a courtesy call? I believe the ship is docking in three hours so I hope the transport and equipment are arranged.”
“Yes, no, yes and yes,” Wosley panted efficiently. “I have hotel and vehicle keys as requested. We have a tour bus parked right outside and it is fully equipped as per your instructions.”
“Outstanding. Did we settle on Uzis?”
“Local product, sir. The best we could do in the allotted time.”
“Understandable under the circumstances. Well, we’ll just have to live with that.”
“Can I also confirm that you received the dossier that was e-mailed to you in flight?”
“That’s an affirmative.”
Awe struck crowds parted as they marched across the concourse. Even the automatic doors hurried to part as this small army approached them. The morning sun lit them up like Greek Gods. Stewardesses drooled and taxi drivers gasped. These were men who certainly knew how to make an entrance.
9.
“Well, Ms Wayne. Here it is in a nutshell. We’d like you to go to Israel and interview Mr Blessed. We think you are the woman for the job.”
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