Washington, DC
Several Months Later
A MASTER HAD RECRUITED the man whose first report lay before the President.
“The boy is intelligent, highly motivated, and well positioned to be useful,” Mills told the President when he first announced the recruitment of a backup to Melchisedec.
“And what will be his nom de guerre?” The President smiled as he remembered Mills’s reply.
“I’m calling him “What If,” he said, and then described how the man had come to the agency’s attention.
At the height of the cold war, President Eisenhower inaugurated an annual intelligence briefing for senior or master’s level college students showing an interest in public service. Because attendance was by invitation only, academics and various law enforcement agencies were encouraged to nominate students they believed to be promising candidates for government service.
Each student nominated submitted a paper dealing with some real or imagined threat to national security. Mills told the President of the several thousand nominated, fewer than twenty percent made the cut and received invitations to attend a special security briefing at the Capital.
Of course, the meeting was merely a cover for identifying and recruiting bright young men and women for the Agency. Other than a vigorous security check, insightfulness reflected in the student’s paper was the deciding factor in their selection.
It’s like this kid’s been reading our mail, Mills said to himself, recalling the astounding insight the young man had displayed. The similarities between the imaginary situations described in his paper and the facts contained in Melchisedec’s reports were remarkable.
“What if,” the student had asked, “there exists a secret organization composed of powerful men from the highest strata of the world’s economic, political, academic, and religious life? What if their loyalty is only to the group and their purpose is world domination? What if their motivation is not power for power’s sake but driven by a conviction they alone possess the wisdom to save the world from a coming catastrophe?”
“Insightful,” the President responded after Mills had shown him the paper. “Where did the kid get such an idea?”
“You can bet that will be the first question I ask when I meet him,” he replied.
The student turned out to be the graduate assistant for a Dr. Frederick Neisen, professor of cultural anthropology at Evangel University in Texas. The young man told Mills the idea for his paper had come following a conversation he had with his professor, Dr. Neisen.
That revelation, and the fact Melchisedec mentioned this professor in a number of his reports, was enough to spark Mills’ interest in the boy and ultimately win him an appointment. At this morning’s intelligence briefing, Mills had given the President What If’s first report.
The President opened the file and began perusing its contents.
Not bad for a first effort, he thought as he read the captions beneath the pictures on the first page. Mills said the agent had retrieved the pictures from a CD he found in Neisen’s office. To the uninformed, they might have appeared to be nothing but paparazzi shots, taken in informal settings and obviously from a distance.
“Our photographic specialists tell us the grainiest of the pictures suggest whoever took them was using a telephoto lens in the two hundred millimeter range,” Mills said.
“Which means the photographer didn’t want to be seen,” the President speculated.
“That’s our best guess, but that opens a whole new can of worms,” Mills replied.
“How’s that?”
“Well, for one thing Melchisedec has a unique relationship with the organization. He’d never have to be secretive about taking pictures.”
“Then who’s taking them, and why?” The President tried unsuccessfully to mask his frustration.
“It’s obvious someone else is as interested in getting a fix on this group as we are. Interpol, remnants of the KGB, Mosssad. Take your pick.”
“What’s your best guess?”
The President knew his CIA director did not like to deal in guesses and sensed Mills’ discomfort at being put on the spot. Mills had a well-earned reputation for controlling the agenda, for anticipating questions and having his answers prepared ahead of time.
“The more important question is how the pictures got into Neisen’s hands in the first place,” he replied, betraying a hint of defensiveness in his voice.
“Why?”
“It may indicate that Melchisedec’s cover has been compromised.”
“What do you mean?”
The President’s voice must have registered his impatience because Mills dropped his head and scanned the carpet, as if searching for an answer.
“I mean, Mr. President, that these pictures are the same as those Melchisedec furnished us nearly two years ago as proof of The Brotherhood’s existence.”
President Stewart let his gaze drop again to the young man’s report. The photos, arranged in a series of four montages and labeled as to place and date, also included the names of those pictured. Taken nearly a decade earlier, the oldest bore the caption Thailand. Others were labeled Hilton Head Island, Canary Islands, and the most recent, Luxor, Egypt. They included photos of men dining on hotel verandas, walking down ships’ gangways, and deplaning from private jets.
“When we got the pictures from Melchisedec,” Mills said, “we spent the better part of a month putting names to faces. This attachment to What If’s report contains the background information we collected on these men.”
The President’s attention fastened on one particular picture of four men snapped in conversation beside a hotel swimming pool. Three were identified as a Father Henri Bodien, Dr. Francis Abelard of Oxford, and Dr. Frederick Neisen, whose name kept cropping up with such interesting frequency. For a moment, the President studied Neisen’s finely chiseled features.
There was no need for a caption identifying the fourth man. The President recognized him instantly as his dinner host while attending an economic summit in Germany less than a year ago: His name was Erik Stiediger, Board Chairman of CGA, a German conglomerate invested heavily in steel, banking, and petrochemicals. A recent issue of Fortune Magazine had described him as one of the five richest men in the world.
The Stiediger family had played a prominent role both politically and economically in Europe since the turn of the twentieth century. Curiously, though they were free marketers to the core, it was widely believed the Stiediger wealth had supplied Lenin with much of the capital he needed to finance Russia’s Bolshevik revolution.
After the Second World War, Stiediger’s great-uncle Hans was tried at Nuremberg on charges CGA used slave labor in several of its plants that supplied needed materials for the Nazi war machine. Although sentenced to five years in prison, powerful friends in America and Great Britain arranged for the commuting of his sentence after he had served only six months. Numerous magazine articles speculated on the source of the funding that fueled CGA’s meteoric rise from the ashes of Germany’s defeat, but that source remained a mystery.
The President’s eyes swept the photomontage and list again. What was Stiediger doing with a Priest and two college professors? Moreover, what about the others? He marveled at the intellectual, political and economic power they represented: a retired chair of the International Monetary Fund, Russia’s leading theoretician in the field of hydrogen fusion, an American televangelist. There was a Saudi prince, CEOs of a dozen Fortune 500 companies and chairs of some of the world’s largest philanthropic organizations. Rounding out the list was a British cosmologist, an authority on dead Middle Eastern languages he had never heard of, a rabbinic scholar specializing in the Kabala, a Buddhist mystic, and a defeated thirdparty candidate the President knew only too well.
What common thread bound such a disparate group together?
A cloud passed over the sun and dulled the light spilling through the Oval Office windows. From somewhere beyond the White House grounds, an ambulance siren wailed. He turned his attention again to the CIA addendum to the young agent’s report.
“A trans-national organization of gifted and influential men,” it read.
Gifted? Without a doubt, the President reflected. And obviously organized. Meeting in out-of-the-way places all over the world demanded both good communications and the ability to travel under the radar. But for what purpose?
Did the photos provide sufficient evidence these gatherings were not only unusual but also conspiratorial? Did they bolster the new agent’s hypothesis, the one he had first suggested in his application paper? No matter, the bottom line was clear. He needed incontrovertible proof, solid enough to satisfy his critics before he even contemplated labeling this group a threat to national security.
The President retrieved his Bible from his desk drawer. A personal treasure, it had been his father’s and the one on which he had taken his oath of office. He opened it to his dad’s inscription on the flyleaf: “Son, read this book every day. Let it be a lamp for your feet and a light for your path.”
And I have opened it so seldom, Stewart thought, remembering how his father would read it aloud to the family each evening after dinner when he was a boy. He felt his eyes well with tears. Oh God, I need your wisdom now, he prayed silently as his fingers felt along the Bible’s edge until they randomly selected a page deep in the book. His gaze was immediately drawn to Revelation 20:1.
“And I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies assemble to make war against Him who sat upon the horse and against His army.”
Memories of chilling intelligence briefings came back to him, each more alarming that the last. He thought of his many meetings in the Situation Room buried beneath this very floor. He could see Mills, the Joint Chiefs, members of his National Security Council—each reciting a litany of threats to the nation.
“Mr. President,” one said, “our sources have confirmed at least two dozen suitcase-sized atomic devices are missing from the Russian arsenal, and may be in the hands of terrorist organizations. Already we’ve heard rumors of plots being formulated against major cities and industries in the West.”
And another, “Hackers have been intercepted on the verge of accessing both ours and Russia’s ballistic missile codes. The hackers’ intent is unclear, but we must assume they are trying to deactivate the missiles. Or, even worse, trying to trigger a launch.”
Another threat concerned the seas. Not only were they being polluted and depleted of fish, but also rising at an alarming rate. Changing weather patterns were producing spring-like conditions at the North and South Poles for several months each year. As a result, the ice packs were melting. He had read one ominous report from the Academy of Science so many times he had practically memorized it. “If the current rate of meltdown continues,” it said, “we can expect a number of cities along the eastern seaboard and Gulf of Mexico to become uninhabitable within less than a hundred years.”
The Horsemen of the Apocalypse are riding over the world, he thought, closing the Bible and dragging his attention back to the young agent’s report. And now this! He glanced at the pictures again and shook his head sadly.
“Oh, dear God, I need you now. Please show me what to do,” he prayed aloud, resting his face in his hands before turning to stare through the office windows. Since he began studying the reports the sky had completely overcast. Branches, neatly stacked earlier by the grounds crew for pickup, were blowing about as a line of rainsqualls moved through the city.
Again, in the distance he heard the wail of a siren. Like the scream of an enraged beast, he thought and chided himself for giving way to his overworked imagination as he let his head drop once more into his hands.