The Messiah Read online

  “Good afternoon,” Bradley began. “Sorry for the quick turnaround. Couldn’t be helped.

  “Tomorrow morning, you’ll take Southwest flight 8209 departing Orlando at 8:30 a.m. to Charleston, South Carolina. You’re scheduled to arrive in Charleston at 11:15 a.m. A late-model sedan is waiting for you on the third floor in terminal parking, about halfway down Section E. You have the key.

  “Your assignment is this,” Chief Bradley went on. “Monitor and possibly infiltrate the cult movement of a certain preacher, one Cristos Pantera. He’s a rather obscure figure right now, but we have our concerns. He and his one hundred fifty followers are traveling up Interstate 95 in a caravan of two RVs and two buses. This Pantera is supposedly a most effective orator, quite charismatic. Right now, his group is parked at a RV campsite near an I-95 interchange just north of Charleston.

  “Please note that about three months ago, one of our agents sent to monitor Pantera defected to his movement. Her name is Renata Singh. More information about Pantera and former Agent Singh are set forth in the remainder of this situation briefing.”

  After a sigh, Chief Bradley leaned back and said, “Well, that’s it for now. A handler has been assigned to provide communications and assistance. You’ll hear from him once you’re onsite.” After a nod, the chief said, “Good luck.”

  And that was it—the screen went blank, and the briefing icons were back.

  Constantine seethed a moment before continuing. He wondered at the wisdom of sending him halfway around the world to monitor what seemed like an insignificant cult led by a hapless preacher. But, his was not to reason why, as they say, just do or die—and get the mission accomplished. So, after a sigh, he clicked the next icon.

  Chapter Two

  Bloodline

  The next icon opened a PDF file of a report titled “Genealogy of Jesus Pantera.” Despite his fatigue, Constantine could not put down the iPad in light of such a provocative title. Who the hell was “Jesus Pantera,” for one thing, and what did this have to do with his assignment? He read on.

  As he’d been taught, as everyone had been taught, the report confirmed that a Galilean woman named Mary was the mother of Jesus Christ. However, the report went on to repudiate his virgin birth, and it also rejected that a carpenter named Joseph was Jesus’ natural father. It declared that Jesus’ real father was a Roman soldier, born in the Judean city of Sidon, by the name of Tiberius Julies Abdes Pantera.

  The report referred to the discovery in 1859, quite by accident during the construction of a railway station in the German town of Bingerbruck, of an ancient cemetery containing the graves of Roman soldiers who had died while serving in the German province around 40 AD. Among these graves was the tomb of Abdes Pantera.

  The file even included a photograph of Pantera’s gravestone. Although the top of the stone had been cracked off ages ago, sculpted on the lower two-thirds was a solidly built Roman centurion with a scabbard at his side. The Latin inscription on the back of the gravestone read:

  Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera

  of Sidon, aged 62,

  a soldier of 40 years service

  of the 1st cohort of archers, lies here.

  One hundred and forty years later, in 1999, a work crew discovered a burial cave during the construction of a condominium in Jerusalem’s Old City. Inside the cave were ossuaries, small stone boxes in which, as was ancient custom, the bones of the dead were placed. Although not reported by the press at the time due to the Supremacy’s intervention, several scholars of antiquity reached the same provocative conclusion that the bones found in one of these ossuaries belonged to the family of Jesus. Three of these scholars made the additional bold claim that the bones of Jesus himself were in one of the ossuaries, along with those of his wife, Mariamene, more popularly known as Mary Magdalene, and a son, Joshua.

  Because it had long been controversially speculated by certain scholars that Abdes Pantera was Jesus’ father, the Network dispatched an agent to a museum called Romerhalle in the little town of Bad Krueznach, not far from Bingerbruck, only weeks after the discovery of the supposed Jesus ossuary in 1999. At Romerhalle, what was left of the Pantera gravestone, and more importantly, the pile of bones found in the grave under it, had been taken, stored, and occasionally put on display.

  After a generous bribe to the museum’s curator, the Network agent was permitted to scrape tissue from these bones. A subsequent analysis of the DNA extracted from them, and the DNA from the equally ancient bones allegedly of Jesus found in the Jerusalem ossuary, concluded with the highest degree of scientific certainty that Jesus was indeed the son of Abdes Pantera.

  Even more interesting and disturbing, as far as the Supremacy was concerned, was that the DNA extracted from the Abdes Pantera and Jesus bones also matched the DNA of a specimen of saliva that the now-former Agent Renata Singh had secretly extracted, before her betrayal, from a plastic fork used by Cristos Pantera. In short, it was statistically certain that the itinerant preacher Cristos Pantera was a descendant of both Abdes Pantera and Jesus Christ—that he was in the bloodline of Jesus.

  The report also confirmed that Cristos Pantera’s father, Julian Pantera, was himself a descendant of Abdes Pantera. Giving the matter an uncanny parallel, Julian Pantera was a career army man, like his distant ancestor. Making it even more uncanny, like Julian’s bastard ancestor Jesus, who was conceived after illicit sexual relations between Abdes Pantera and Mary while Abdes was stationed in Judea after his enlistment around 4 BC, Cristos was likewise Julian Pantera’s illegitimate son.

  Julian had met Cristos’ mother, Jane Smith (at least her name wasn’t Mary, Constantine thought as he read this portion of the report), while stationed at Fort Drum at the foot of the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York, near Watertown. They had met at a singles dive on a cold, snowy January night in 1984 and made love that very night in a cheap motel. That was the first and last time Jane Smith would ever see Julian Pantera.

  A week later, Julian received orders to Germany (when Constantine read that, he laughed to himself and shook his head). He left Fort Drum with his unit, not knowing that Jane was pregnant with his child—a son. For reasons of her own, Jane did not contact Julian Pantera and tell him about the pregnancy even though she recorded the man’s name as the boy’s father on the birth certificate. And for reasons presently unknown, Jane Smith decided to name the boy Cristos.

  Chapter Three

  Mary Magdalene

  Constantine leaned back against the headboard to consider all that he had read over the past half hour and quickly fell asleep sitting up, the iPad resting on his lap. He woke with a start an hour later. After stretching his arms, yawning and shaking his head, he lifted the iPad and clicked on the next icon. A moment later, a new PDF file containing a report titled “Renata Singh” flashed onto the screen.

  The Network had thousands of employees and independent contractors—field agents, intelligence analysts, IT experts, typists, security guards, clerks, drivers, and assassins, to name a few, who were paid quite well for the honor and privilege of serving the Supremacy. Of course, each was carefully recruited and sworn to secrecy. Renata Singh was among the rare few Network employees who had breached that vow.

  She was the daughter of computer scientists, Jaspal Singh and Indira Jain, children of émigrés who had come to the United States during a wave of Asian-Indian immigration in the mid-1960s. In 1981, Indira gave birth to a girl who she named “Renata,” meaning “rebirth.” Renata was a beautiful child who became a beautiful woman. With her stark-black hair, square, bronze face, and dark brown eyes, she was soon being ogled by boys and men alike.

  In addition to her beauty, Renata was also extremely intelligent. Like her parents, she excelled in mathematics. Following in their footsteps, she attended Princeton and pursued a double major in statistical analysis and drama.

  Since childhood, Renata had voraciously read conspiracy theories involving a secret ruling elite directing the affairs of mankind,
including Behold a Pale Horse by William Cooper and None Dare Call It Conspiracy by Gary Allen, along with other books of that ilk that made wild, paranoid claims. At Princeton, Renata continued to pursue this offbeat interest and, as she became better versed in statistical analysis and probability theory during her studies, she began devising complex algorithms in an attempt to confirm the claims of these authors. Toward the end of her junior year, she’d produced an algorithm that did just that.

  With the help of a professor, Renata published a paper, “A Statistical Model Demonstrating the Existence of a Political Force Controlling Human Motivation and Behavior” in the Journal of Applied Statistics. Within a week of the paper’s publication, Renata was contacted by a Network recruiter. Less than a week later, she was on the Network payroll as a statistical analyst. In that position, she’d been tasked from time to time with assessing the probability of an occurrence based on a set of real-life variables. The more variables that were known, of course, the more accurate the prediction.

  Constantine put down the iPad for a time and thought about his own recruitment by the Network, now ten years ago. He’d been a field agent for the CIA at the time, working for a joint British and American terror interdiction team headquartered in London. After three months overseas, a Network operative, himself a Brit, approached Constantine while he was strolling through shadowy London backstreets conducting routine surveillance of three Arab men who were part of a suspected terror cell.

  The pitch by Constantine’s Brit recruiter was likely similar to the one made to Renata Singh. Essentially, the Supremacy was a beneficial association of leading world interests that would eventually lead mankind to Utopia. However, achieving that end would be a long and sometimes arduous struggle, a battle of countervailing forces and creeds for the very souls of men. Like Renata Singh, Constantine was won over by the pitch and joined the Network, sincerely believing that he was siding with the forces of good.

  So why had young Agent Singh defected so easily? Why had this intelligent beauty joined the Cristos Pantera movement? Constantine read on.

  At first, Agent Singh was given few assignments because she was still in school. In Network parlance, she was in “sleep mode.”

  In late October of her senior year, while attending a conference at Cornell with a student group she had joined, Renata crossed paths with Cristos Pantera. After a long day of seminars, Renata was strolling across the Cornell campus on her way to her room when she saw a small group of students gathered around a speaker. Curious, she joined the group and edged her way through to the front row. Within moments, the speaker turned and looked into Renata’s eyes. As they locked gazes, Renata was struck with equal feelings of longing and inner peace. The speaker, of course, was Cristos Pantera.

  Renata knew immediately that he was something special; “magical,” as she later described him. His kindly expression, cadence of speech, searing gaze, and message all combined to intrigue and excite her to the core. There was his white robe and long, glistening brown hair that flowed behind him, framing his sharp, dark handsome features and nicely clipped goatee. She was, in short, reminded of Jesus Christ.

  It was not strictly a love-at-first-sight kind of thing, although Renata did not deny that she felt instantly attracted to Pantera. He was certainly good-looking and strong and sure of himself. There was an unmistakable affinity between them, as if she had known him her entire life, and perhaps longer than that, in some supernatural existence long before their lives had intertwined in that moment.

  That moment between them was broken, however, as Cristos looked away and continued preaching. He made a wide circle with his right arm as he pointed to each of the students who had gathered around him, including Renata, as if calling them out.

  “In order to attain salvation,” he told them, “you must discard your present beliefs and adopt new ones based upon the sanctity of the human spirit!” Everyone seemed mesmerized for the moment by his presence and cadence of speech as much as his words, as if he was a magician performing a surprising trick from which they could not look away.

  At some point as she listened, her duty as a newly recruited Network operative bubbled up from somewhere within her and an algorithm started formulating in her mind. What was the statistical probability, she wondered, of this fledgling preacher, with his compelling message and charismatic style of proclaiming it, becoming a threat to the powerful and all-encompassing secret hegemony that influenced, like puppeteers, the affairs of men?

  The next day, unable to keep her mind off Pantera, Renata skipped the mathematics seminar, faking a cold, and worked on the algorithm. After several hours of plugging in variables, she came up with an equation demonstrating—vaguely, of course—that there was a statistically significant possibility that this itinerant preacher posed a threat, however small at present, to the ruling elite. Renata emailed the algorithm in the code she’d been instructed to use, to an innocuous no-reply address. If her Network superiors deemed that the report merited further clarification or action, someone from the Network would contact her.

  Back at Princeton a month later, Renata received an email on her secure Network smartphone. Her orders were to go to Key West during her winter break. Cristos Pantera and a small band of followers had settled there for the winter and she was to observe him on the hope of adding new variables to enhance the reliability of her algorithm.

  The assignment had seemed innocuous enough, more a vacation than a true field mission. The regional chief, now former regional chief, had approved it despite Renata’s inexperience and lack of field training. What could possibly go wrong?

  So Renata went to Key West on December twenty-first and watched Cristos Pantera preach each morning at Smathers Beach, Mallory Square, and other public areas on the tiny island. By early January, Renata had stopped communicating with her handler and he had to go down to Key West to find out why. Within a day, he’d determined that Renata had converted to Pantera’s cause and thus betrayed her oath and the mission.

  “They have become lovers,” the handler wrote to her section chief, who in turn passed the information to the former regional chief. From that day forward, the Network’s code name for Renata Singh was “Mary Magdalene,” or as some (including Director Margolis) called her, “Pantera’s Slut.”

  Constantine closed his eyes and wondered whether he had underestimated the importance of this assignment. Something that Agent Singh, Pantera’s “Mary Magdalene,” had reported near the time she had defected now aroused his curiosity and concern. According to Singh, during a sermon on Smathers Beach, a young woman in a long, flowery dress had asked Pantera, “Are you the One, the Messiah come to save us?”

  Pantera had turned to her with a stern expression and said, “Yes, I have come to fulfill the prophecies. I am the one you mean. I am he.”

  “The Messiah,” Constantine whispered to himself and frowned. He thought about that for a time and wondered whether Cristos Pantera’s quest for messiah-dom, self-proclaimed or otherwise, would end up like all the others—on the cross.

  Part Two

  Disciples

  All your followers are blind, too much Heaven on their minds…

  - Jesus Christ Superstar

  And he saith unto them, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.

  - Matthew 4:19

  For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.

  - Matthew 10:34

  We have left everything to become your followers.

  - Mark 10:28

  There came a time when some abandoned their lives, left behind their jobs, wives, parents, children, and were drawn to see him, hear him, touch him, and be touched by him, and join his mission.

  - Book of Jude 3:11, Testament of the Church of Cristos

  Chapter Four

  First Impression

  Although Constantine’s room at the Hyatt had been booked under his longtime
Network alias, Lawrence Jarrett, he was to become “Donald L. Summers” for this mission. The car waiting for him at Charleston Airport’s long-term terminal parking lot the next afternoon had been registered under that name. In the glove compartment, he found several credit cards and a debit card with a $5,000 balance from a bank near Donald Summers’ purported home town of Gurnee, Illinois, as well as a passport, an Illinois driver’s license, and a library card all in that name.

  The backstory for the assignment was that the fictitious Donald Summers had heard Pantera preach in Key West while he’d been vacationing down there during the Christmas holidays. Those sermons had stayed with him upon returning home, causing a grave reassessment of his life and beliefs.

  Like so many others, Summers was purportedly dissatisfied with life. He found no fulfillment in his job as a financial analyst (employment as such was easily supported by a local investment firm on the Network payroll) and was depressed over his inability to find a soul mate. Thus, he was exactly the type drawn to Pantera’s message: the disillusioned.

  At around four, Constantine arrived at the New Green Acres RV campground, where Pantera’s one hundred and fifty or so converts had settled in the last three days. Their caravan consisted of the RV transporting Pantera and three members of his inner circle, another RV for the remaining inner circle disciples, and two busloads crammed with his remaining followers.

  After parking in a small lot at the front of the campground, Constantine observed the group from a safe-enough distance. Not much was happening. Many of the followers remained on the buses—sleeping, talking, doing whatever—while others wandered around outside. Some were sitting on several long picnic tables between the RVs and buses, playing cards or just talking.