1
"We've got a problem."
Luther Brady had already guessed that. A call from Jensen on his private line at this hour of the morning could mean only trouble. Serious trouble.
"Go ahead."
Luther listened with growing dismay as Jensen described the night's events. His stomach was burning by the time the man had finished.
"You've got to find them."
"I'm full into that right now. But I have to ask you something: After all the face time you spent with this guy, why didn't your xelton pick up that he was a phony?"
The question stunned Luther. The audacity! How dare he?
And yet… it was a question he had to answer.
"I don't know," Luther said as his mind raced around for a plausible explanation. He tried to buy some time by acknowledging the problem. "My xelton has no answer, and I'm baffled as well. A Fully Fused xelton such as mine should have been able to pierce his masks in a moment, but it didn't. That's virtually impossible… unless…"
"Unless what?"
Brady smiled. He'd just come up with an explanation. A doozy.
"Unless this man has achieved FF."
"That's impossible!"
"No, it's not. How many temples do we have? Do you know every man worldwide who's reached FF? Of course you don't. He's a rogue FF. It's the only explanation."
"But why would an FF try to harm the Church?"
"Obviously his xelton became corrupted. If it can happen to our PD, of all people, it can happen to a lesser man."
He let that sink in. That was the same line he'd fed Jensen and the HC when Cooper Blascoe became a risk: The PD's xelton had gone mad and, as a result, Blascoe had gone even madder. The corrupted xelton had allowed him to get sick and was refusing to heal him. Just as a human could become a WA, so could a xelton.
Far out, far out, but they'd all believed. Because they wanted to believe. To doubt would destroy the foundation on which they'd all built their lives. They had to believe.
"You mean—?"
Luther had had enough of this.
"Forget him for now. He and his corrupted PX don't worry me half as much as Grant. She's had it in for the Church and now you can bet she knows everything. Well, almost everything. She can't know about Omega because Blascoe didn't. Noomri, what a mess! We've got body parts up at the cabin and a muckraking reporter with a tape of Blascoe saying who knows what. You've got to stop her before she talks."
"I'm on it. I have a clean-up detail heading for the cabin. They'll remove what needs to be removed and burn the rest. As for the tape, can't we say it's a fake?"
"A voiceprint analysis comparing her tape to Blascoe's voice on one of our own instructional tapes will make us liars. She's got to be stopped, Jensen."
"I know. I'm—"
"I mean stopped—as in, I do not want to hear from this woman again. Do you hear me?"
"Loud and clear."
"Find her."
Luther hung up and rose from his bed. Sleep now was out of the question. He strode into the office area, sat at his desk, and pressed the button for the globe.
He stared at its glowing lights, twinkling in the darkness of the office, and wanted to cry.
So close. He was so close to completing Opus Omega, to fulfilling all the required tasks. The end was in sight. A year… he needed just another year or so and all would be in place. Everything had been going so smoothly…
Until now.
Damn that woman. Ruination. Disaster. Cooper Blascoe, the beloved PD, not in suspended animation but held prisoner and fitted with a bomb, and then… blown to pieces.
The Church would deny everything, of course, but the tape would damn them.
Luther groaned and closed his eyes as he envisioned the fallout: Members fleeing in droves, recruitment coming to a standstill, revenues constricting to a trickle.
Revenues… he needed money, lots of it, to acquire the final sites. Final because they either were prime real estate or the owners refused to sell. They couldn't all be pushed in front of subway trains.
As a matter of fact, the new column was scheduled to be planted on the Masterson property tomorrow night.
But if that woman exposed the Blascoe debacle, it might be the last.
Luther slammed his fist on the desktop. He could not allow one lousy woman to threaten the greatest project in the history of mankind.
Yes! The history of mankind.
For Opus Omega had not begun with Luther Brady. Oh, at first he'd thought it did, but he had soon learned otherwise. He remembered the day in England when he'd begun to excavate a patch of moor he'd purchased in York. He'd found a bare spot in a field of wild rape and decided that would be as good a place as any to bury a pillar. But after digging only a few feet into the soft earth his crew discovered the top of a stone column. As they excavated around it Luther was stunned to see the symbols carved into its granite flanks—identical to the ones on the concrete column he'd prepared for this site.
Someone had been there ahead of him—hundreds, maybe thousands of years before. The conclusion was inescapable: Opus Omega had begun long, long ago. It was not Luther Brady's exclusive task, as he had thought. He was merely another man chosen to continue an ancient undertaking.
No, more than continue. He, Luther Brady, was determined to finish Opus Omega. The ancients had been at a disadvantage, lacking the means to travel to the necessary sites, let alone transport huge stone pillars. He was positioned to use all the modern world's learning and technology to bring Opus Omega to its fulfillment.
But one woman could bring his life's work to a grinding halt.
One woman.
Jamie Grant had to be stopped.