Blasphemy wf-2 Read online

  “Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.”

  This is how the Bible tells us we will recognize the Antichrist—by the number 666. The first language of the Apostle John was Hebrew. He knew that every Hebrew letter has a numeric equivalent. Gematria is the process of looking for hidden numbers in a Hebrew name or text. So let’s see what happens when we apply gematria to Isabella and its location, Arizona. If we turn the Roman letters into their Hebrew equivalents and assign each Hebrew letter its proper number, we get:

  Still don’t believe me? Consider this:

  My friends, is this not the proof we have been waiting for?

  Now, consider this passage from Revelation:

  “And he gathered them together in a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.”

  Armageddon is where Satan makes his last stand against God’s appointed King, Jesus. The word Armageddon is derived from the Hebrew words Har Megido, meaning “Mountain of Megido.” But this “Mountain” has never been found in the Holy Land and the word “Megido” is really only an ancient form of the Hebrew word for reddish-colored earth. So you see that the word “Armageddon” in Revelation actually refers to a place called “Red Mountain.” My friends, the Isabella project is situated on a place called Red Mesa in Arizona. The Navajo Indians call it Dzilth Chíí, which in the Navajo language literally means “Red Mountain”—Armageddon.

  These are the proofs, my friends. And now the ball is in your court. What will you do with this information? The ultimate moment in your life as a Christian has just happened, RIGHT NOW, as you read this e-mail.

  WHAT WILL YOU DO?

  Will you stay at home? Will you hesitate, wondering if I am just another nutcase? Will you remain seated at your computer, not knowing where Red Mesa is or how to get there in the middle of the night? Will you decide to put it off until tomorrow? Will you wait for proof, for a sign?

  Or will you answer the call right now and become a foot soldier in the Army of God? Will you drop everything right now, will you rise from your computer right now, leave your home, and come to Red Mesa to join me in “ the battle of that great day of God Almighty”? Will you fight alongside me right now, shoulder to shoulder, brothers in Christ, in the final battle against Satan and his Antichrist? THE CHOICE IS YOURS. In Christ,Pastor Russ EddyGathered in Thy Name MissionBlue Gap, ArizonaThis original e-mail was sent Sept. 14, at 9:37 p.m. MDT.POST AND FORWARD THIS E-MAIL TO ALL YOUR CHRISTIAN FRIENDS — THEN COME TO RED MESA AND JOIN ME!

  When Eddy finished, he sat back in a sweat, his hands trembling. He didn’t even read it over. God had been guiding his hand, and that meant it was perfect.

  He went to the subject line and typed in:Red Mesa = Armageddon

  He checked the list of e-mail addresses he’d been developing in hopes of raising money for the mission. He’d culled some from churches and Christian mailing lists; others were contacts from Christian bulletin boards, newsgroups, chat rooms, and Usenet discussion sites.

  Two thousand one hundred and sixteen names. Of course, most wouldn’t respond. That’s what the Bible said would happen— “Many are called, but few are chosen.” But two thousand was a start. Of those, a few dozen might forward the e-mail and make the journey to Red Mesa. A few hundred might respond to the next round, and a few thousand to the next. The letter would be posted at hundreds of Christian Web sites. Christian bloggers would pick it up; and in that way the message would grow. Eddy had spent enough time on the Internet to know that the mathematics were in his favor.

  He pasted his entire address book into the To: field and moved the cursor to the little paper airplane button. He took a deep breath, then clicked the mouse. With a whoosh! the e-mail blasted into the electronic ether at the speed of light.

  It is done.

  He sat back, trembling. All was silent. But the world was changed.

  He remained seated for five minutes. And then, his breathing under control, he rose, steadying himself. After a long hesitation he fished the keys out of his pocket and unlocked the filing cabinet next to his desk and took out the Ruger .44 Magnum Blackhawk revolver his father had given him for his eighteenth birthday. It was a limited edition, Old West replica gun, but updated and reliable. He had spent a few days at the firing range with it many years ago, and he had always kept it well oiled and in good working order.

  Eddy had no illusions. This was going to be war— real war.

  He loaded the revolver with Remington 240-grain jacketed soft points. He put the gun and two boxes of extra rounds into a knapsack, added a water bottle, a flashlight, extra batteries, binoculars, his Bible, a notebook and pencil. He hunted down the spare fuel bottle he kept filled with kerosene in case of blackouts. That went in, too.

  He slung the knapsack over his shoulder, stepped out into the night air, and looked up at Red Mesa, a dark mass silhouetted against the night sky. A single, faint light marked the Isabella project, perched at the edge of the dark island of stone.

  He tossed his knapsack into the cab of the pickup and got in beside it. He had barely enough gas to reach the top of the mesa. But why would that matter? God, who had led him this far, would bring him home and reunify him with his children, if not in this earthly life, then in the one to come.

  47

  “EVERYONE, BACK TO YOUR PLACES,” HAZELIUS ordered, his voice gaining strength. He turned toward the Visualizer and spoke to it. “All right, let’s start again from the top. What the hell are you—really?”

  Ford stared at the screen, transfixed, waiting for the answer to appear. He felt himself being drawn in almost against his will.

  For reasons I have already explained, you cannot know what I am. The word “God” comes close, but it remains a highly impoverished description.

  “Are you part of the universe, or separate from it?” Hazelius asked.

  There is no separateness. We are all one.

  “Why does the universe exist?”

  The universe exists because it is simpler than nothing. That is also why I exist. The universe cannot be simpler than it is. This is the physical law from which all others flow.

  “What could be simpler than nothing?” Ford asked.

  “Nothing” cannot exist. It is an immediate paradox. The universe is the state closest to nothing.

  “If everything is so simple,” Edelstein asked, “why is the universe so complex?”

  The intricate universe you see is an emergent property of its simplicity.

  “So what is this profound simplicity at the heart of everything?” Edelstein asked.

  That is the reality that would break your mind.

  “This is getting tiresome!” Edelstein cried. “If you’re so smart, you should be able to explain it to us poor, benighted human beings! Do you mean to say that we’re so ignorant of reality that our physical laws are a sham?”

  You constructed your physical laws on the assumption of the existence of time and space. All your laws are based on frames of reference. This is invalid. Soon your cherished assumptions about the real world will crash and burn. From the ashes you will build a new kind of science.

  “If our physical laws are false, how is it that our science is so spectacularly successful?”

  Newton’s laws of motion, while false, were adequate to send people to the moon. Just so with your laws: they are workable approximations that are fundamentally incorrect.

  “So how do you construct the laws of physics without time and space?”

  We are wasting time bandying about metaphysical concepts.

  “So what should we be discussing?” Hazelius asked, cutting off Edelstein.

  The reason I have come to you.

  “What is that?”

  I have a task for you.

  The singing sound of Isabella yawed suddenly, like a Doppler-shifted train going by. There was a rumble somewhere in the mountain, a vibration of the very backbone of the mesa.
The screen flickered and a hiss of snow whipped across it, obliterating the words.

  “Shit,” breathed Dolby. “Shit.” He struggled to adjust the software controls, his fingers pounding the keyboard.

  “What the hell’s happening?” Hazelius cried.

  “Decollimation of the beam,” Dolby said. “Harlan, damn it, you have power-flow alarms going off! Alan! Get back on your servers! What the hell are all of you doing standing around, for chrissakes!”

  “Back to your stations!” Hazelius said.

  Another rumble shook the Bunker. Everyone rushed back to their workstations. A new message hung on the screen, unread.

  “Stabilizing,” St. Vincent said.

  “Collimated again,” said Dolby. A sweat stain was spreading across the back of his T-shirt.

  “Alan, the servers?”

  “Under control.”

  “What about the magnet?” asked Hazelius.

  “Surviving” said Dolby, “but we don’t have much longer. That was damn close.”

  “Well, then.” Hazelilus turned back to the Visualizer. “Why don’t you tell us what this task is?”

  48

  THE PICKUP RAN OUT OF GAS just beyond the top of the Dugway. Eddy used the last bit of momentum to coast off the road into the sagebrush, where the truck came to a bumpy halt. Above the skeletons of the piñons, a faint glow of light in the night sky marked the Isabella project, three miles to the east.

  He climbed out of the truck, pulled out his knapsack, shrugged into it, and began walking down the road. The moon had not yet risen. While he could see the stars from his trailer, tonight, on top of the mesa, they seemed unnaturally bright, pools and swirls of phosphorescence that filled the dome of the sky. In the distance, faintly silhouetted against the firmament, a line of high-tension towers headed for Isabella.

  He could feel every thump of his heart. He could hear the blood singing in his ears. He had never felt so alive. He hiked at a rapid pace, and in twenty minutes he had reached the turnoff to the old Nakai Rock Trading Post. Here he paused, and then decided to scout out the valley. In a few minutes he had reached the edges of the bluffs where the road dropped down into the valley. He focused his binoculars on the settlement.

  A large tipi sat in the middle of the field, aglow from the flickering light of a fire inside. Nearby stood a helter-skelter structure, a dome of branches leaning together, covered with canvas tarps held down with rocks. Beyond it, a bonfire was burning down to coals, exposing inside a pile of cherry-red rocks.

  He had seen this before: a Navajo sweat lodge.

  The faint sounds of chanting and a rapidly beating drum drifted up on the dry, quiet air. How odd. The Navajos were having a ceremony. Had they sensed it, too—this great and powerful thing that was about to happen? Had they felt the coming wrath of God? But they were idolaters, worshipping false gods. He shook his head in sadness: “Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”

  The sweat lodge and the tipi were one more sign that the End Days were fully come, that the devil walked among them.

  Aside from the Navajos, the valley looked deserted, the scattered houses dark. Eddy looped around and bypassed the settlement, and in another ten minutes he came to the airstrip. Deserted, too, were the hangars against the night sky. The Antichrist and his disciples had gathered at Isabella, deep down in the mountain—he was sure of that.

  He approached the chain-link fence around the security area, taking care not to get close enough to set off the alarms he assumed were there. It gleamed in the harsh sodium lights that illuminated the area. The elevator down to Isabella stood a few hundred yards away, a tall, ugly, windowless building topped with clusters of antennae and satellite dishes. He could feel the ground vibrate from deep within; he could hear the hum of Isabella. “And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon.”

  His mind and spirit burned, as if in a fever. He looked up at the hulking steel towers that brought in the electricity to run the machine, and his flesh crawled. They could have been the devil’s very own army, striding through the night. The high-tension wires crackled and hummed like hair charged with static. He reached into his bag and grasped the warm leather of his Bible, feeling its reassuring solidity. Bracing himself with a short prayer, he walked toward the nearest tower, a few hundred yards away.

  He stopped beneath the tower. The gigantic struts disappeared upward into the night, visible only by the lines of blackness they painted across the stars. The power lines spit and hissed like serpents, the sound mingling with the moaning of the wind through the struts, a symphony of the damned. Eddy shivered to the roots of his soul.

  The phrase from Revelation came into his mind again: “ . . . to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty.” They would be coming—he was sure of that. They would answer his appeal. He needed to be ready. He needed a plan.

  He began scouting the area, making notes of the topography and terrain, the roads, access points, fences, towers, other structures.

  Above him, the high-tension lines hissed and spit. The stars winked. The earth turned. Russell Eddy moved through the dark, for the first time in his life supremely sure of himself.

  49

  LOCKWOOD WAS SURPRISED AT HOW SHABBY and bare-bones-functional the White House Situation Room was. It smelled like a basement rec room that needed airing out. The walls were painted ochre. A mahogany table dominated the center, with microphones strung down the middle. Flat-panel screens lined the walls. Chairs lined the two long walls, shoulder to shoulder.

  The ugly, institutional clock at the end of the table read midnight, exactly.

  The president strode in, looking crisp in his gray suit and mauve tie, white hair swept back. He turned to the Navy rating who evidently ran the electronics. “I want you to patch in the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, my National Security Advisor, DDHS, DFBI, and DCI.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “Oh, and don’t forget the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee so he won’t bitch later about being out of the loop.”

  He took a seat at the head of the table. Roger Morton, the chief of staff, patrician and cautious, took the seat to his right. Gordon Galdone, the campaign manager, as large and disheveled as an unmade bed, wearing a brown Wal-Mart suit, took the seat on the other side of the president. Jean occupied a chair against the wall in the corner, behind the president, primly perched with her steno pad at the ready.

  “Let’s just go ahead—the others will join us when they join us.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Some of the flat panels were already lighting up with attendees. Jack Strand, the FBI director, was the first. He sat in his office over in Quantico, a giant FBI seal behind him, his square-jawed cop’s face touched with old acne scars staring relentlessly into the screen—a man to inspire confidence, or at least trying to.

  The Secretary of DOE, a man named Hall, popped up next from his office on Independence Avenue, the man ostensibly in charge of Isabella. But he had never taken control—he was a genial delegator—and now he was a mess, his plump face covered with a sheen of sweat, his light blue tie knotted so tight it looked like he’d just tried to hang himself with it.

  “All right,” said the President, clasping his hands on the table in front. “Secretary Hall, you’re the man in charge, what the hell’s going on out there?”

  “I’m sorry,” Hall stammered, “Mr. President, I have no idea. This is unprecedented. I don’t know what to say—”

  The president cut him off, turning to Lockwood. “Who was the last to be in contact with the Isabella team? Stan, do you know?”

  “It was probably me. I spoke to my inside man at seven MDT, and he said everything was fine. He said a run was planned and that he’d go down and join them at eight. He gave no indication that anything was out of the ordinary.”

  “Got any theories about what’
s going on?”

  Lockwood’s mind had been racing through the possibilities, none of which made sense. He controlled the panic welling inside, keeping his voice steady and calm. “I’m not sure I’ve got a clear handle on it.”

  “Could we be dealing with some kind of internal mutiny? Sabotage?”

  “It’s possible.”

  The President turned to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, sitting in his office in the Pentagon, wearing his rumpled field uniform. “General, you’re in charge of the rapid response units, where’s the closest one?”

  “Nellis AFB, in Nevada.”

  “National Guard Unit?”

  “Flagstaff.”

  “FBI? Where’s the closest field office?”

  Jack Strand, the FBI Director, answered from his screen. “Also Flagstaff.”

  The president thought, his brow furrowed, tapping his finger on the table. “General, have them send out the closest chopper to investigate.”

  At this, Gordon Galdone, the campaign chief, shifted his bulk, sighed, and pressed a finger to his soft lips.

  The oracle speaks, thought Lockwood sourly.

  “Mr. President?” The man had an orotund voice, not unlike Orson Welles in his obese years.

  “Yes, Gordon?”

  “May I point out that this is not just a scientific or even military problem? It’s a political problem. For weeks the press and others have been asking why Isabella isn’t online. The Times ran an editorial last week. Four days ago a scientist committed suicide. We’ve got a firestorm among the Christian fundamentalists. Now the scientists won’t answer their telephones. On top of that, we have a science adviser who is freelancing as a spy.”

  “Gordon, I approved it,” said the president.

  Galdone continued unperturbed. “Mr. President, we are heading into a public relations disaster. You supported the Isabella project. You’re identified with it. You’re going to take a big hit—unless we solve this problem right away. Sending out a chopper to investigate is too little, too late. It’ll take all night and things will still be a mess in the morning. God help us when the media gets hold of this.”