THE MCJ

24

A new “Chris Johnson, Anglican Investigator” adventure

The following takes place between 9:00 PM and 1:00 AM

9:00 PM - Had the profession that I invented passed me by? Since my last big one, my few cases, if you could call them that, had barely taken any time at all, an hour or two at most. Other people were getting the run these days; the New York Times called Wannabe the best Christian private investigator in the field and didn’t once mention my name.

Not that I was upset, mind you. Far from it. Because every unsolvable case that Wannabe or Dawn Eden or Mark Sullivan or Brad Drell cracked and every ticker-tape parade in their honor brought me that much closer to my most treasured but most elusive goal. The chance to finally and completely retire, enjoy my wife, watch my son grow up, look after my insanely lucrative side businesses and raise chrysanthemums.

That particular day, Nicky and Paul were gone, off to New York for Nicky's sister Anne’s wedding; I was to join them the next morning. I wasn’t alone, though. Dale Price and his family were on their way to Italy except that business had delayed him in Michigan while his family had flown on to New York.

When I told Nicky that, she insisted that Heather Price and her kids stay at Nicky’s family’s Hamptons estate and have a day or two at the beach before crossing the Atlantic(since the St. Louis incident, Dale's wife has become one of my wife’s closest friends).  Heather and the kids were delighted by the idea so Dale flew into St. Louis and he and I planned on flying to New York together the next morning.

Dale and I spent most of that day drinking this and that, playing shogi, the Japanese version of chess that we much prefer to the European version, trying to figure out where the Byzantine Empire went wrong, debating the artistic merits of American coinage and many other vitally important matters when Amy Welborn stopped by.

Amy had been in town for a speaking engagement and was disappointed that she'd missed Nicky and Paul.  She was due to fly to New York the next day to catch up with her family so, at my invitation, she decided to hang around. The three of us spent the rest of that day talking about this and that, MST3K-ing bad movies and eating and drinking whatever struck our fancy. We were just about to make an early evening of it...

When the phone rang.

I answered it, listened silently and said, “I understand. I’ll get back to you on the PC in a little bit.” I hung up the phone, looked at Dale and said gravely, “Greg Griffith says hello.”

Dale stared at me with his mouth open. I said to the two of them, “If you don’t want any part of this, leave now.”

Price, who wanted out of Christian private investigation even more than I did, rubbed his hand over his mouth, tightly shut his eyes for several seconds, looked at me and said quietly, “No. I’m in.”

“Now’s your chance,” I said to Amy.

“What are you talking about?” she asked warily.

“If we’re lucky, it’ll only delay you a day. If.  We're.  Lucky.” Dale said.

Welborn understood immediately. She stared at me fearfully for a long time before finally declaring quietly, “I’m in too.”

The three of us made drinks and went into my office where I fired up one of the big-screen office computers and dialed a number. After about a minute, Greg Griffith’s face came on the screen. “Great to see you guys again,” he said “How are your families these days?”

“Couldn’t be better, G-Man,” said Dale. “We’re on our way to Italy. Thought I’d show ’em Rome. Introduce ’em to the Pope, that kind of thing.”

“We’re outstanding, Double G,” I said. “I’m heading up to New York tomorrow. Nicky’s sister’s getting married and Paul finally gets to meet some of his cousins so I guess they’ll have him the whole time. He’s couldn’t stop talking about the great big jet he was going to get to fly in. How’s your crowd doing?”

“FANtastic,” said Griffith.

The ludicrously inept small talk out of the way, I said, “Greg, you remember Amy Welborn.”

“It’s great to see you again, Ms. Welborn,” said Greg. “Your reputation proceeds you.”

“As does yours, Mr. Griffith,” she replied. “Thanks again for the last one. And it’s Amy, by the way.”

“You’re welcome.” Griffith grinned. “And it’s Greg, by the way.”

Amy smiled back at him. “Got it, Greg.”

“What’s up?” I asked.

Griffith looked down, took a deep breath, gulped down most of whatever he was drinking and looked up at us. “One hundred 55-gallon drums of griswoldium have been stolen. According to the threat we received, the thieves intend to turn all of it into gas and release it into the atmosphere some time in the next 24 hours.”

10:00 PM - Dale and I were staggered and couldn’t say anything for a long time. “One hundred...55 gallon...” Price whispered. “Oh my God!!”

“How’s the intel?” I managed to ask.

“Perfect,” said Greg.

“Who made the threat?”

“Two groups. We think. The first are some old friends of ours.”

“The Episcopal Peace Fellowship,” said Dale.

“Yeah. And here’s where it gets tricky. The other group seems to be hiding. There are only hints in the intel here and there about who they are. It’s almost like they want EPF to take all the credit.”

Dale looked at me and said, “Sounds like the Jesuits.” I nodded in agreement.

“That’s our thinking,” said Griffith.

“If they pull this off, do you have any idea as to a potential coverage area?” I asked.

“We’re still working on the analysis,” Greg replied. “But our preliminary estimates indicate that these things can be strategically placed in the United States so that the stuff will spread worldwide. There won’t be any place anywhere that anyone can hide from it.”

By now, Amy was terrified. “Guys?” she shakily asked. “Pardon my ignorance but what is griswoldium?”

“In the late 70’s,” I told her, “some Episcopal scientists, with what may have been a grant from the Jesuits, were working on a way to bypass the fact that people were abandoning liberal Christianity in batallions. They wanted a way to override what people were hearing from orthodox pulpits and reading in the Bible for themselves.”

“After about five years, give or take, they developed a liquid,” said Dale, “that can be turned into a gas if necessary. They didn’t give it a name right away. They tested it first in...where was it?”

“General Theological Seminary and the Episcopal Diocese of Newark,” I said.

“Right. Then St. John the Divine, orders like the Maryknoll, Jesuit houses from one end of this country to the other, Georgetown University, the Episcopal Divinity School and many other places, both Catholic and Episcopalian.  There are indications that they tested it at Trinity-Wall Street not all that long ago.”

“That clown eucharist,” said Amy.

“Yeah,” said Price.

“Just what does this stuff do anyway?” Welborn asked.

“It clears your head of whatever’s there,” I replied. “It confuses you. Basically, it makes you believe whatever anyone tells you and believe it like you came up with the idea yourself. And it’s permanent. The last Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church is supposed to have been an enthusiastic volunteer test subject and you see what resulted.”

“Hence the name they finally gave it about 2001 or so,” said Price. “It’s incredibly potent in liquid form. They only used an eyedropper-full at Johnny the D and it’s still affecting people there.”

“Why?!” exclaimed Amy.

I downed the rest of my drink. “It’s supposed to have a half-life of 975,000,000,000,000,000 years. But here’s the scary part. In its gaseous state, it’s ten thousand times more powerful.”

“My God.”

“Goodbye evangelism. Goodbye coherent Christian teaching,” said Dale, “And goodbye any kind of Christian orthodoxy for everybody in the world and all their descendents for the next 975,000,000,000,000,000 years. And once they get the stuff spread...”

“They’ll make more. And keep on spreading it. Forever,” whispered Welborn.

“Considering how lethal this stuff is,” said Price, “NSA confiscated all the stocks and destroyed them. Supposedly.”

“Speaking of NSA,” said Griffith. “I’d like to introduce you to the person who’s going to be in charge of this investigation. This is Kay Lewis, senior NSA ecclesiastical terrorism analyst. As far as possible, she’ll answer any questions you have.”

11:00 PM - Greg nodded to his right and a stunningly beautiful woman appeared on half the screen. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” she said pleasantly.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Lewis,” I said. “I guess you know Mr. Price and Ms. Welborn.” I looked at Dale.  “I think my Michigan colleague would like to start things off.”

“Yeah, one thing,” said Price. “NSA was supposed to have destroyed all the griswoldium stocks in the country. How in the world could you have screwed up this badly?”

“We’re working on that, Mr. Price,” Lewis replied, now distinctly less friendly.

“Where was this stuff stored?” asked Amy.

“At various facilities around the country. The theft occurred at a warehouse there in St. Louis. Mr. Griffith will send you the address.”

“How much griswoldium was stored at the St. Louis facility?”

“Just the one hundred drums.”

“So let me get this straight,” said Welborn. “You not only lose enough griwoldium to cover the entire world, you, for all practical purposes, lose the building it was stored in. How is that even remotely possible?!”

Lewis was about to try to answer when I cut in. “Ms. Lewis? When did NSA decide to seize and destroy the griswoldium stocks?”

“1998. But it wasn’t actually done until 2002.”

“Legal challenges?”

“That’s correct.”

I stood up, poured myself a bourbon-and-soda and began to silently pace around the room for a while, sipping my drink every so often. Then I looked straight at the webcam and asked, “Your section just had some kind of financial audit, didn’t it?” Ms. Lewis, who evidently had no idea just how good I was, looked stunned and silently nodded. “There’s your answer, Dale.

“TEC gets word in 1998 that NSA is coming for the griswoldium. They delay things in the courts long enough to get a mole inside NSA to try to save some of it.

“When the order finally comes down, the mole’s got his own people in place. He fakes expense reports, invoices, job orders, that kind of thing, and records the St. Louis job as done. Then some jobs that are here are reassigned over there and a budget item is moved from this column over to that one.

“TEC gets a free building, enough griswoldium to affect the entire world and people in place to steal it. And nobody’s the wiser until an auditor untangles all this and NSA discovers that there’s still a whole lot of griswoldium out there that it doesn’t control.” I sipped my bourbon. “Is that about how it went down, Ms. Lewis?”

Kay Lewis looked scared; my abilities can do that to people. “Yes,” she whispered. “By the time we got there, the stuff was gone. According to our only witness, we missed them less than half an hour.”

Dale poured himself another bourbon and asked, “Were there security tapes?”

“No,” said Lewis. “They took them. Tapes from nearby buildings didn’t show anything useful.”

“What did this witness see?”

“A security guard at a nearby company noticed two semis pull up and saw people loading lots of drums. But he was too far away to get any kind of an ID on anybody or anything.

“We immediately put multiple roadblocks up on every road out of St. Louis at least 300 miles away in every direction. Every police force in the country was alerted.

“We searched every truck from Ohio to Colorado and from Michigan to Lousiana and every truck we searched came up empty. We have no idea how they slipped by us.”

“How many people worked at that warehouse?” asked Amy.

“Three. I’ll have Mr. Griffith send their files down.”

“Who was your section chief between 1998 and 2002?” I asked.

“William Stilton. He arrived in 1998 and resigned in 2002. I’ll send his file too.”

I took a contemplative sip of bourbon as Price and Welborn looked at each other. “William Stilton,” said Welborn. “Where have I heard that name?”

“He’s the author of Confessional: Inside the NSA, that best-selling NSA expose,” I replied. “Odd duck, Bill Stilton. Spy and member of the Society of Jesus. I believe you’ll find that the Rev. William Stilton is currently a very liberal adjunct professor of European literature down at St. Louis University.”

“Well, that’s one stop today,” said Dale.

12:00 AM - “One more thing, Ms. Lewis. Does anybody in NSA or anywhere else know that you’ve having this conversation,” I asked.

“No one except my aide and I trust him implicitly. Mr Griffith impressed upon me the value of silence in situations like these,” said Kay Lewis. “And listen...thanks for helping us out.”

“We haven’t helped anybody yet,” I replied. “Let us know the moment you find out anything you think we ought to know. Do it through Greg.”

“You’ve got it,” said Ms. Lewis. “Good luck.” Her face left the screen.

“Do you guys want me to come out?” Griffith asked.

“Not yet. I assume they’re watching. Amy, Dale and I might be working on anything,” I told him. “If you, me and Dale are seen together, they’re going to know. But stay ready. We’ll be in touch.”

“Will do. Good luck, you guys.”

“Thanks. You too.”

The screen went blank. Dale and I refreshed our drinks and then the three of us sat there silently, sipping our drinks every so often. Finally Amy said, “They missed by less than half an hour? How in the world could they have gotten those trucks past the roadblocks?”

“I don’t think they did,” I told her.

“Kirkwood?” asked Price.

“That’s what I intend to find out.” I looked at Welborn. “Is your gun loaded? Because you may have to use it”

“Of course,” she replied.

As I printed copies of the files CETU had sent, Dale asked, “Do you think we should contact our families?”

I stared out the window into the night. “No,” I finally said. “After what happened last time, I want to keep them out of the loop as long as I possibly can. I don’t want to risk putting them through that ordeal again. We can easily finesse showing up a day late so I’m not going to call Nicky unless I absolutely have to. Let’s get out of here.”

The three of us gathered our equipment and started for the door when Amy suddenly asked, “Guys? What am I in for?”

“Hell,” Dale and I told her at exactly the same time.

Next week: Part Two

Posted on 12/15/2007 3:40:30 AM , 18 comments