Desecration Read online

  Figueroa leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the corner of his desk. Apparently he miscalculated, because as he pulled the huge cigar from his lips, his heel slipped off the desk and his center of gravity shifted. His boots slammed the floor and he nearly flew out of his chair. He dropped the cigar in the process and leaped from his chair to keep from burning himself.

  He picked it up and brushed off the seat, quickly licking a finger that had found a hot ash. It was all Chang could do to keep a straight face when Figueroa smoothed himself, put the wet end of the cigar back in his mouth, and sat again. He leaned back but thought twice about putting his feet up and merely crossed his legs. This shifted his weight back more than he expected, and he had evidently not yet learned how to tighten the chair’s tilt, for he was suddenly leaning back, legs still crossed, but with both feet in the air.

  Figueroa seemed to try to subtly lean forward, but failing that, tried to appear that this was the way he wanted to sit. He pulled the cigar out again and rested an elbow on the arm of the chair, blowing smoke toward the ceiling while trying to maintain eye contact with Chang. “So,” he began, the effort to keep his head erect clearly straining his neck. He let his head fall back as if searching the ceiling for what he wanted to say, and suddenly he was inches from toppling over backward. He quickly reinserted the cigar, gripped both arms of the chair until his knuckles were white, and pulled himself up again. He leaned forward, careful to keep his weight centered.

  “I, uh, spoke too soon when I exempted you from being interrogated,” he said.

  Chang made a teenager’s face at him. “What? I thought you were in charge here.”

  “Oh, I am. Make no mistake. But I would have to answer for it, probably to the potentate himself—we talk, you know—if I made an exception for anyone, especially in my own department.”

  “So you’re going back on your word.”

  “I didn’t exactly give my word.”

  “No, you just said it, and apparently that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Of course it does, but you’re going to have to roll with me on this one. I’ll owe you.”

  “It’s not that big a deal. Forget it.”

  “No, now I want to be known as a man of his word. Tell you what—I’ll conduct the polygraph myself.”

  “Now it’s a polygraph?”

  “Well, not really. The type I told you about is all.”

  “Fine.”

  “You’re a good man, Wong.”

  “Yeah, I’m great.”

  “No, really, you are.”

  Chang pressed his lips together and looked away, shaking his head.

  “I’m trying to be friends here,” Figueroa said.

  Chang looked back at him. “You are? Why would you do that?”

  “You intrigue me, that’s all.”

  “Oh, no. You’re not—”

  “Wong! I’m a married man!”

  “Thank goodness.”

  “No, like most everybody else around here, I’m intrigued with your gifts and skills.”

  “Which I’m not using as long as I’m sitting here.”

  “Don’t be a hard guy, Wong. I’m in a position to do you some good.”

  “You’re not even in a position to keep your word.”

  “Hey, that was uncalled for.”

  “Come on,” Chang said. “What’s this about? That would have been uncalled for only if it weren’t true.”

  “Okay, fair enough. It’s just that you’re bordering on insubordination, and you don’t seem to care that as your boss, I hold your destiny.”

  “What, you’re going to fire me if I don’t make nice?”

  Figueroa took three short puffs and studied him. “No. But I might fire you if you don’t tell me how you knew my name.”

  “I told you, I guessed.”

  “Because to tell you the truth,” Figueroa continued, as if not listening, “I can’t think of a way in the world you would know that.”

  “Me either. You could have denied it and I wouldn’t have known the difference.”

  “Now see? That’s a level of thinking I have to admire. That’s intuitive.”

  “Whatever.”

  “No, because you know what? I started thinking about my personnel file, and I had to wonder if I ever gave them my full name. So, know what I did? Huh? I checked it myself. Not there.”

  “What do you know.”

  “So you really did guess.”

  “Wow. I’m something.”

  “You are.”

  “Can I get back to work now?”

  “One condition.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Promise you won’t say anything about my telling you I’ve got your destiny in my hands or that I could fire you, any of that.”

  “Already forgot it.”

  “Good man. Because I know your dad and you-know-who are tight, and . . .”

  “Already forgot it.”

  “You want to be a project leader, a group head, anything?”

  “Just want to get back to work.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Three and a half years ago there was, like, a church in here,” Enoch said. “Some of us—” he turned to the group—“how many went to the church thing at least once?” About half a dozen raised their hands. “The rest of us had just seen a flyer, a brochure, about the place. We still have those, don’t we?” Someone went to get one.

  “It’s kinda simple, just a regular piece of paper folded in half and then printed on the four pages in black and white.”

  Someone handed Chloe one. On the front it read “The Place.” Inside, it said “Jesus loves pimps, whores, crackheads, drunks, players, hustlers, mothers with no husbands, and children with no fathers.”

  On the next page it told who made up the people of The Place, mostly people who had once been like those listed on the previous page. “We talk about Jesus and what the Bible says about him and you. Come as you are. Address and time on the back.”

  Chloe looked at the back, where, besides the address and times, the brochure also said “Food, clothes, shelter, work, counseling.” She looked up at Enoch and realized she was blushing. Everybody in the room seemed amused.

  Enoch reached for the brochure and faced his people. He read off the list of who Jesus loves, one by one, pausing after each for a show of hands. Everyone raised a hand at least once, and several did many times, always with huge smiles. Enoch carefully set down the brochure, looked meaningfully at Chloe, and rose. With lips trembling and tears streaming, he gestured to the assembled and whispered, “And such were some of you.”

  They nodded and amened.

  “But you were washed . . .”

  “Amen, hallelujah!”

  “But you were sanctified . . .”

  “Praise Jesus!”

  “But you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.”

  And they stood with hands raised, humming and singing,

  “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,

  that saved a wretch like me;

  I once was lost but now am found,

  was blind but now I see.”

  “Rayford, my friend, how are you?” Laslos exulted. “You will not believe who is here with me. Is Cameron there?”

  “Unavailable just now. So who is with you?”

  When Laslos told him, Rayford said, “I’ll have Buck call. He wondered what happened with those kids.”

  “Marcel tells me Georgiana remains on the run too. It is as if God himself told you to call. You must come get these children and get them out of here.”

  “Nowhere is safe, Laslos.”

  “But your safe house! Your man with the disguises and the papers! We are literally one wrong look from death here.”

  Rayford hesitated. “We’re stopping on Crete. If you could somehow get them there . . .”

  “Captain Steele, you have not seen the oceans! There is no water travel. None. Could we
not somehow try to get them to the airport your people flew into last time? It would be risky, but we could—”

  “It would be a death trap for us, Laslos. We will have virtually everyone with us.”

  “There must be some way. Someone.”

  “Let me noodle that,” Rayford said.

  “I don’t understand ‘noodle.’”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Almost every one of us has the same story,” Enoch explained to Chloe. “The streets, these neighborhoods, were our lives. A lot of us had some kind of religious background as kids, but obviously we moved a long way from that. More than half of us served time, and almost all of us should have. The line between legal and illegal didn’t exist for us. We called everything we did a matter of survival.

  “Most of us had seen this place and knew something churchy went on here. What surprised us were the people who came and went. All colors and nationalities and people we’d known. We all saw the brochure and, though we didn’t admit it then, it enticed us, you know? Something that straightforward, that in-your-face, calling things what they are. When you’re at the end of yourself, wondering in the night what’s to become of you in the morning, you start wondering if there’s hope anywhere or if you are too far gone. You remember yourself as a kid and recall that there was something still innocent about you, and you wonder what happened to that person.

  “Any of these people will tell you that they either came here once or twice to try to work the system and get something free, or they even came sincerely and sat through a meeting or two. But all of us, even those who never came once—me, for one—were fixin’ to get around to it. One of these days, we were going to check out The Place.

  “You know the rest. End of the world. People disappearing. We all lost somebody, and this place just about lost everybody. Well, where did we run to first? Right here. Empty clothes all over the place and nobody to tell us what was what. But this poor little church must have had some money from somewhere because they thought to record everything they did. Audio and video. Here we are—two, three dozen no-account street people, some of us women who lost babies—and somebody finds those discs, man, and the players. It didn’t take us long to learn the truth. It was all there.

  “Most of us stayed, sleeping in here, watching, listening, studying, praying to get Jesus, and all of a sudden, World War III. Chicago’s toast. We’ve got one TV and one computer hooked up. First we hear it was not nuclear; then the next wave is, and we expect to die of radiation poisoning. It doesn’t happen, but we don’t dare test the atmosphere outside. We knew if it was full-blown radiation, we were not protected just because we were inside some basement, but we figured we were safer in than out. Till now.”

  Rayford called George and asked if he wanted a mission on his way back to San Diego. “I thought you’d never ask,” he said.

  Rayford gave him the gist of the assignment and said, “I can’t give you papers on short notice, but if I can reach our guy in New Babylon, you can bluff your way around in Greece. If they check on you, you’ll appear to be in the system.”

  “I can come up with some reason why I don’t have papers. And you want these kids delivered to Chicago?”

  “Unless you’re prepared for them in California.”

  Knowing what was coming that evening, Chang felt out of touch with the Trib Force. Not until after his “surprise” visit at about eight o’clock could he key in the stuff Rayford wanted for this George Sebastian, nor could he find out what had happened on the Phoenix 216. He made sure he was watching GCNN and reading a book at the time, but even he was surprised at the nature of the drop-in.

  Chang thought Figueroa’s assignee—a cocky, condescending Scandinavian named Lars—would have at least knocked. But at a few minutes after eight, as Chang watched coverage of Carpathia and his senior cabinet being enthusiastically welcomed back to New Babylon, he heard a key in his door. It was just as well. He quickly turned up the TV and pretended he didn’t hear a thing until they burst in. This was the best cover. He was relaxing, watching TV, reading, not even thinking about his worthless laptop.

  The door swung open and two uniformed Peacekeepers marched in. “Mr. Chang Wong?” one said.

  “That’s me,” he said, rising. “Did I forget to lock my door?”

  “Turn off the television, please, sir, and join us over here, if you would.”

  “What if I wouldn’t?”

  “Now, sir.”

  “Thanks for making me feel welcome in my own place.”

  “This is not your place, Mr. Wong. This is the property of His Excellency, the potentate, and you serve here at his behest.”

  Chang made a show of turning off the TV and dropping his book onto a chair. As he approached, the Peacekeepers moved aside and one of them announced, “This, sir, is Mr. L—”

  “Lars!” Chang said, smiling, though he had barely done anything more than greet the guy. “How are you, man? I know him! We’re in the same department.”

  “We need your cooperation and silence, Mr. Wong,” the Peacekeeper said.

  “Ooh, okay! What’s up?”

  CHAPTER 17

  The peacekeepers asked if they could search Chang’s apartment. “For what?” he said.

  “Routine,” they told him.

  “You won’t find any routine here. I am studying English words new to me and my current favorite is serendipity. That’s what you’ll find here, the opposite of routine.”

  “Funny. We don’t need your permission. We were just being polite.”

  “Of course. My clue was your use of a master key to get me to answer the door.”

  While they searched the apartment, Lars set up a high-powered laptop on Chang’s small kitchen table. “I’ll be asking a few questions,” he said.

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Stop being a smart aleck,” Lars said. “This is my assignment.”

  “Do the questions relate to finding a leak from the palace to the suspected mole?”

  Lars turned ashen. “You’ve already been interrogated?”

  “No, but I have my reservation in with another interlocutor—another new word. You like?”

  “Computer!” the other Peacekeeper called out. “Looks like his personal laptop.”

  “If you had told me what you were looking for, I could have directed you to it.”

  “This your only one?”

  Chang was tempted to pretend there was another, but the fun of watching them try to locate it wouldn’t be worth their leaving the place in more of a shambles. He nodded.

  “Over here with that,” Lars said.

  “I’m so glad you’re here, Lars,” Chang said. “I had everything on that hard drive, and I mean everything. Maybe you won’t feel so bad about losing the interviewing assignment to our boss if you have this project to work on.”

  “Project?”

  “I crashed the hard drive, and I’ve tried everything.”

  “Everything you know.”

  “That’s right! That’s why I’m so glad you’re here. I must be missing something, and even if it’s something complex, I know you can solve it.”

  “You bet your life I can.”

  Chang, of course, was betting his life Lars couldn’t. “I don’t want to be up late, Lars.”

  “Oh, this shouldn’t take long.”

  “I’m just saying maybe you want to call Mr. Figueroa so he can do whatever he has to do with me while you’re retrieving my information.”

  “What’re you, serious?”

  “He promised.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll have to ask him that.”

  “He’ll ask you the same questions I would, and you’ll answer into the same mike.”

  “Only with him, I’ll answer. With you I won’t.”

  “Then you’ll be suspected as the leak, and you don’t want that, guilty or not. You hear what happened to the stewards today?”

  Chang didn’t like it when he
was asked a question to which he didn’t know the answer. “Shock me.”

  “Sentenced to death.”

  That did shock Chang. “For what?”

  “Subversion. Treason. They flunked the lie detector test. They were feeding information to a mole here. Conversations between the potentate and his people were acted upon before they were through talking.” Lars handed him a lapel microphone. “Put this on.”

  “Not for you,” Chang said.

  “For Figueroa then.”

  Chang applied it to his shirt, praying silently. The key, he knew, was how the questions were worded. In his mind, a mole was an animal; he was a human being. If the questions were too specific and unequivocal, he’d be in trouble. “Start with my computer, will you? I’d really love to see all that stuff I had stored.”

  “You don’t back up your stuff?”

  Chang shook his head. “Nah. Do you?”

  “Not as much as I should, but you gotta know you’re going to fry something—hard drive, motherboard, whatever—every few years.”

  “Guess I’ve been lucky.”

  Lars dialed, tucked his phone between his cheek and neck, and started pecking furiously at Chang’s laptop. “Yes, Mr. Figueroa, sir. I’m at Chang Wong’s apartment and he says—oh, you did. Well, yes, right now. I’m helping him with a computer problem, so we’ll be here. Thank you, sir.”

  Slapping his phone shut, eyes still on Chang’s computer, Lars mumbled, “On his way. My, you have fried this thing.”

  “Really, Lars? You can tell already? Wow.”

  “Yeah, it won’t let me in at all. Let me try this.” He appeared to try everything. “Nothing. Believe me, Wong, if anything was here, I could get it for you.”

  “No doubt.”

  “But this acts like it’s been exposed to some super electromagnet.”

  “Haven’t heard that term in a while.”

  “You know the drive is all about electricity and that a magnet can wreak serious havoc.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yeah, it’s quite simple.”

  “For a brain like yours, maybe,” Chang said. “I just know what buttons to push.”