A knock sounded from outside the conference room. Mel Ebed popped his head in the door.
“Yes, Mel,” Jehoiakim said. “What do you need?”
“Sir, it’s urgent,” Mel said. “Come with me.”
“What? Why?”
Mel looked at the other people in the room. His instinct told him to leave them in the dark. “Please, sir. Just come. I’ll explain on the way.”
Jehoiakim’s brows furrowed. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”
“Sir. I must insist.”
“Wait outside, agent. I’ll be there when I’m done.”
Mel let out a puff of frustration and headed outside the room. A dropped pen prevented the door from closing all the way.
“What are you going to do about the situation?” President Jehoiakim had a way of yelling in a quiet voice. Even James Shemaiah felt the pressure. “Two years of silence and prosperity. Two years of gains swept away. I thought you had taken care of him.”
Mark Doyle cleared his throat and stuttered, his usual pattern when confronted by authority. “That occurred under my predecessor, Reverend Immerson. He … his responsibility … to ….”
Jehoiakim let out a roar, the quiet yell replaced by frustration. “I know when that occurred. Do I seem like an imbecile to you?”
“Um … no … I never meant to imply ….”
Jehoiakim cut him off. Regret at his decision already had him planning Doyle’s successor.
“We’re working on the situation,” Shemaiah said.
“How did he get the book printed?” Jehoiakim asked.
“He went through an independent publisher,” Shemaiah answered.
“Through your independent publishing company, you mean,” Jehoiakim spat out. “How did he manage that?”
Shemaiah remained silent and let Jehoiakim continue.
“You didn’t you think to check for a book written by a guy named Jeremiah. Did you think it was a different Jeremiah? How many of them do we have running around?”
Now, Shemaiah faltered. “We have thousands … ten of thousands of books come out a month. There’s no way to check every one.”
“I would’ve assumed you had quality controllers, possibly an algorithm to catch and prevent sedition,” Jehoiakim said, fully aware of the answer.
“We … uh … we do. It seems that … that it didn’t catch it in time. Of course, we stopped publishing as soon as we found out. Unfortunately, he pre-ordered five thousand copies and had them shipped to him.”
“Where did he get the money? Did you follow up on the address he shipped them to? Did you attempt to get the copies back?”
“We don’t know who funded him, but we’ll find out. Our guess is it was Pinman-Ferris. As to the address, it was an empty lot. Obviously, they put a lot of thought into it.”
“Why would Pinman-Ferris front him the money?”
“To make us look bad,” Shemaiah answered. “Destroy our reputation. You know how hard they’ve resisted our corporate takeover.”
“That makes sense,” Jehoiakim said. “Of course, it makes equal sense that you’re blaming them for the same reason.”
Shemaiah coughed. “We wouldn’t do that.
“No, you wouldn’t.” Jehoiakim’s words were equal part sarcasm, accusation, and threat. He turned to Ahab. “You’ve been awfully quiet. Any other good news you want to add to the celebration?”
“I think you’re overly worried about the situation,” Ahab said.
“We have a traitor running around, spilling government secrets, riling up the people and turning them against me. But I’m overly worried. I can’t wait to hear your explanation.”
“The network has made a concerted effort to counter his disinformation.”
“Would you care to give me some details?”
“The Register and the Daily have run articles calling Jeremiah the liar that he is. You may have seen the one this morning quoting our friend Mark here. How Jeremiah told him the recession is punishment for not cleansing the nation of the Blacks and Hispanics like God told us to do. Broadcast tv and Public Information Radio have spent all day with panels discussing these latest revelations.”
“Will this be as successful as the ‘Jeremiah is a Russian agent’ campaign or the sexual abuse allegations? I can only hope for the same.”
“They worked well, sir,” Ahab said. “Jeremiah’s support took a hit among suburban women. And the Russian angle alienated all but his most fervent supporters.”
“A two-point hit. It seems no one believed the allegations, probably because the skanks you dredged up had the likability of chlamydia, which, I’m sure, most of them had. With all the money you requisitioned, I figure you could’ve found better witnesses.”
“The Chinese campaign achieved a measure of success,” Ahab insisted, changing the subject from his failure.
“It did until those bastards at Atlantic News dug up the paper trail showing the money sent to Jeremiah’s account came from someone in this administration. Seriously. How incompetent can you be?”
“We took care of the leak and punished the person who put Jeremiah in contact with the Chinese.”
“Darren and Catherine were loyal to me, rising stars.”
“We needed someone to take the fall. It was them or you.”
“And now you’ve made them enemies,” Jehoiakim said, “turned them against me. What are they going to say when they’re released?”
“Darren won’t make it out,” Ahab said. “Guilt will overcome him. Guards will find him hanging in his cell with a note explaining his final act of contrition.”
“When will that happen?”
“The next time we need to change the news cycle.”
“And Catherine?”
“She won’t be a problem.”
“Guilt?”
“We’ll pay her off, let her out early. She’ll keep her mouth shut.”
“You better hope she does.”
Jehoiakim sat back in his chair, brooding, his eyes narrowed and burning a hole in the table in front of him. The soft rasping of Jehoiakim’s nervous fingers failed to rub away his indecision. Doyle opened his mouth to speak but shut it and listened to the hum of the ventilation system instead.
“It won’t work,” Jehoiakim said.
“We have to give it time,” Ahab said.
“I agree with Charles,” Shemaiah interjected. “Give it some time. These allegations will stick. Keep hammering on them. If not, at least we’ve planted the seed in their minds. Little by little, they’ll turn on him.”
“We don’t have time,” Jehoiakim said. “The economy’s on the point of collapse. Even your friends at the Register can’t spin that away. We haven’t had a decent rain in over two years. Most of our food supply is coming from China, who holds this over our heads to demand more and more concessions from us. Atlantic news won’t let up on the corruption story. Their lead on how we’ve been secretly negotiating with the Russians has the Chinese ambassador restless. My assurances that we aren’t have fallen on deaf ears. The ambassador has already suggested raising taxes to keep us from having the desire to revolt, as if that won’t have the opposite effect. The people are getting restless, and all the scapegoats in the world won’t keep them from tearing down the fence around the palace for much longer.” He took a deep breath, which rattled out like a curse. “And then there’s Uriah. He released another video.”
Ahab steeled his face. Aborting babies was one thing. The public still wouldn’t tolerate selling their body parts to the government for profit.
“He won’t release another one,” Ahab said.
“How can you be so sure?”
“We got Justice Kanzla to issue an injunction. And we caught Uriah.”
Jehoiakim raised his eyebrows. “We did? When did this happen?”
“About an hour ago. He’s been turned over to one of our agents as a sign of good faith by the Chinese government. I guess they’re a little more nervous about the rumor than they’ve let on.”
“A silver lining,” Jehoiakim said.
“Isn’t there always one?”
Jehoiakim thought for a moment. “Bring him to me. I want to take care of this one personally.”
“I hate to bring it up,” Doyle said, “but that doesn’t take care of our Jeremiah problem.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Jehoiakim said. “Do you have any suggestions, or did I hire you to state the obvious.”
“I … um … wrote a letter condemning Jeremiah’s actions,” Doyle said. “You can read it if you’d like.”
“A letter. Right. That’ll show him.”
Doyle steadied himself. “And I got over a hundred other leading preachers to sign it. We’ll send it out to various news sites, have the preachers give a sermon about it on Sunday.”
Jehoiakim’s forehead wrinkled. “Do you have it with you?”
“I can pull it up.”
“Do that. And read it to me.”
Doyle opened his tablet and searched for the file. Shemaiah watched impassively as the Religion Secretary dug through his notes.
“Here it is.” Doyle cleared his throat. “An open letter to Jeremiah. As a man of God, it is my duty to correct a brother when he has strayed from the path of truth. To not do so, would dishonor my position and the God I claim to serve. I have followed your progress for over twenty years, seen the passion you have in what you believe, and admired your determination even though the rest of the world turned against you. But the world has turned against you for a reason. There is no room for your archaic brand of Christianity. Judgment, condemnation, hatred, intolerance. That is the God of the Old Testament, not the loving Christ of the new. Do you not know that we are no longer under condemnation, that we are under a new law? The law of love.”
“I have to ask you, what do you see that others don’t? What makes you believe that God has spoken to you but not to us? Is there not wisdom in counsel? Will God show his will to one person only but not to the rest of his chosen ones? When I asked you this before, you responded with a deceitful, ad hominem attack. You spoke lies meant to demean, to cut off polite conversation. I learned long ago, that when you attack another man as you did, it’s because you’re afraid that your own position cannot stand up to scrutiny. Your quick wit and acerbic nature don’t make you right. It just shows your inability to justify what you believe.”
“My former brother, it’s deceitful to state that God is punishing us for our sins when the reality is he loves us very much. Your rhetoric creates fear, distrust. That is not what God has called us to do. Instead, he has called us to obey authority, to honor authority as those who rule in God’s place, not to undermine a nation by inventing and then releasing ‘classified’ information.”
“And as to those horrific things you say about the children of God. I, for one, stand with my homosexual brothers and sisters, with the lost, broken people of this world, and offer them hope. Not attacks. Not slander. Not bigotry. Not hate. I ask you, stop the blasphemy. Show the world who God really is. Put an end to the division and bring us into a fellowship of unity as the good Lord has told us to do. Come back and walk on the path with us, the path that leads to life and blessings and hope and mercy.”
Doyle stopped reading. “It goes on a little longer, but you get the gist of it.”
Jehoiakim nodded to himself for a while and let the ideas rattle around his mind. “That’s not bad,” he said. “That’s actually not bad.” His previous regret at hiring Doyle had almost disappeared. “My concern is that it’ll meet with the same success as our other efforts. That man has no shame. He won’t bow to our pressure. And the more we attack him, the more his support seems to grow.”
Ahab’s face lit up as though a fire glowed inside. He stretched out his arms, his voice, a chant, rising from within. “I got it. I got it.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before.”
“You want to let us in on your breakthrough?” Jehoiakim said.
“The more we attack him,” Ahab said, “the more his support seems to grow.”
Shemaiah smiled. “We’re going after the wrong person,” he said. “Or people.”
Ahab smiled back. “Exactly. Attack his supporters. Not all of them. Not at first, anyway. Make an example of a few of his more prominent ones. Let the world know who they really are: a bunch of narrow-minded idiots. Then, go after their employers. Organize boycotts of their products until they fire those bigoted, homosexual-hating, racist jackasses. Once the big ones are out of the way, let the rest of the people know they’re in our crosshairs. Make sure our friends in the media are informed of each of our operations. And have them add their special flourishes to the stories. If you were to ask where we should start, I’d say focus on Christian businesses. Send our people in to demand they provide services we know they won’t, that their ‘consciences’ won’t allow. Then, haul them to court and sue them for everything they have. When people start losing their jobs and their homes and their businesses and their families, the rest will fall in line. Soon, there’ll be no one to listen to him, and Jeremiah won’t be a problem anymore.”
“That, my friend,” Jehoiakim said, “is a fantastic idea.”
“I agree,” Shemaiah said, “and we should start with Pinman-Ferris.”
“They’re not a Christian business and have no association with Jeremiah,” Jehoiakim said. He added, “But I suppose that doesn’t really matter to you.”
“You get what you need. I get what I need. We both win.”
Ahab lifted his chin. The arrogance dribbled off the end. “I’ll call up our people, get them to mobilize.” He looked at Jehoiakim. “Who should we have them attack first?”
Jehoiakim nodded at Shemaiah. “Let’s go with his idea. I never liked Pinman or Ferris. A couple of conniving, back-stabbing cowards if I’ve ever met a pair.” A grin-like scowl crossed his lips. “And bring me Uriah. I have something special planned for him.”
Mel had heard enough. At that moment, he wondered, almost aloud, why God had chosen him to guard the president. A question he would ask when he talked to him that evening. But more important matters called to him. He stepped inside the conference room.
“Sir,” he said. “This can’t wait any longer. We must go. Now.”
“Apparently, this is really important,” Jehoiakim said to his advisors. He picked up a file and tucked some papers inside. “We’ll finish this discussion later.” As soon as they stepped outside, Jehoiakim raised his eyes and stared at his secret service agent. “So, what’s this urgent matter that just couldn’t wait?”
“The Russians,” Mel said. “They crossed the border into West Virginia.”
Jehoiakim’s face fell. “Is it a feint like last time?” he asked. Worry creased his voice.
“Could be,” Mel said. “They don’t give me that kind of information. All I know is they told me to escort you to the situation room. Immediately.”