THE MCJ

POSSIBILITIES

A new “Chris Johnson, Anglican Investigator” adventure

Chapter One - Contest

I guess you could call it the passing of the torch.

One by one, my professional contemporaries were leaving the Christian investigation stage. Dale Price had finally gotten completely free and had gone into politics.

One of his first acts as Senator from Michigan was to push through the establishment of the Cabinet-level Department of Religious Investigation whose first Secretary was Greg Griffith. Dale’s since moved onward and upward about which more in a few moments.

The DRI took over CETU and put Amy Welborn in charge. After that, the DRI founded the premier religious investigation research facility in the world(and Washington DC’s most familiar landmark), the Welbornian Institution.

Amy’s few forays into anything connected with Christian investigation are her professional seminars at the Institution that bears her name(since I wouldn’t permit them to name it after me ). Aside from that, she knocks off best-selling Christian investigation mysteries once or twice a year, several of which have become lucrative movies.

The Canadian government did something similar. These days, both Binky and Kathy Shaidle restrict their public Christian investigation activity to periodic lectures at the recently-established Captain J. M. Heinrichs Religious Investigation College in Regina, Saskatchewan.

Mark Shea gave up Christian private investigation entirely which is understandable when you win both Best Actor and Best Director Oscars three years in a row(a feat that had never been done even once) for your own version of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

To take on his role of Aragorn, now considered the standard for that part, Mark got himself an incredible personal trainer; dude is ripped these days. Mark’s putting his kids through college on the sales of his action figure alone.

Captain Yips, Wannabe, Brad Drell, Dawn Eden, David Fischler(the Presbyterian CPI not the hot dog billionaire although the latter recently told me that he was looking into the idea) and my other friends and associates still get a ticker-tape parade now and then but are most insanely wealthy consultants these days.

Bill(not IB) sold most of his holdings(he kept the Webster Groves bar and a few other things) and got into Christian investigation part-time.  "If a bum like you can make a living at this, anyone can,” Bill told me at the bar one evening but he was the only active CPI I still personally knew.

A new generation of Christian private investigators had taken over, most of whom I had never met, with new ways of doing things and new technology with which to do them.  The profession that I invented forgot me.

And I couldn’t have been happier.

My wife’s life had radically changed as well. Yielding to intense pressure, Nicole overcame her distaste for Washington, DC, ran for president and defeated Democratic candidate J. Jon Bruno by the largest margin of victory in the history of the Republic, carrying every state and winning every electoral vote.

Her administration has been so incredibly successful and so wildly popular that some historians have begun comparing her to George Washington and Andrew Jackson. Nicole’s economic policy resulted in a boom that the country had never before known while the solid Senate majority of conservative Republicans she brought along with her enabled my wife to completely reshape the Supreme Court for generations.

In foreign policy, Nicole’s adroit handling of the second Iranian revolution effortlessly turned a one-time enemy of this country into a strong and fiercely pro-Western secular democratic ally of America and won my wife the Nobel Peace Prize. The country and the world are in such solid shape that Nicky’s recent announcement that she wouldn’t run for a second term barely caused a ripple anywhere.

Nicky gets back to the mansion as often as she can, we talk on the phone every day(and most days more than that) and I‘m usually at the White House at least two or three days a week. But she and Paul live in Washington while I oversee my now psychotically-lucrative side businesses from Missouri.

And I think my wife prefers it that way.

I got the impression, and impression is all that it was since Nicky has never said anything about it, never will and I’ll never ask her, that one of the reasons she ran for President was to get out from under my shadow. And I didn’t blame her in the slightest.

I guess it’s got to be hard to see all those Congressional gold medals with my face on them so I encouraged her every step of the way. But it means that when I feel particularly lonely, my bourbon consumption begins to have the old pre-Nicky edge to it.

And that happens a lot more often than I like to admit.

All things considered, though, I was happier than I had ever been. I even allowed myself to entertain the idea that my most treasured dream had finally come true. That I was truly, finally and forever done with it.

On that particular day, I was home alone, having just returned from Washington. I’d just started in on a feeling-sorry-for-myself bourbon-and-soda when Bill(not IB) stopped by for some help with a case he was working on.

Wasn’t much of a case, a one-bourboner. That’s how I judge what few consultations(I can’t honestly call them cases anymore) I still get. How many bourbon-and-sodas I make before they’re solved. I didn’t even finish the one I‘d started prior to Bill’s arrival before his case was history.

Bill’s business done, he decided to hang around for a while. I killed him at shogi, Japanese chess, and he returned the favor by obliterating me at go, a game I have never been able to master, at least anywhere near Bill‘s level.

Then my phone rang.

I took the phone out of my pocket, looked at the number and got a palpable jolt. It was a number Nicky had set up in case of an absolute emergency. If I ever saw that number, I had to contact my wife at once.

“Something big seems to have come up,” I told Bill. “Want to stick around for it?”

Bill shrugged and said, “Sure, why not? Might be fun.”

He and I went into my office, Bill made himself another drink and we sat down. I fired up the big-screen computer monitor, entered a few commands and was extremely unsettled to see Nicky, her cabinet, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, prominent senators and congressmen and many of my friends and their families all staring back at me with definite fear in their eyes.

“Honey, you remember Bill(not IB),” I said.

“Hello, Bill, it’s good to see you again” she quickly replied in a low, strained voice.

“Madam President,” Bill quietly responded, shooting a quick glance in my direction. He also noticed the fear but said nothing.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Chris,” said Greg Griffith, “a serious threat has developed over the past two weeks. The single most serious threat we‘ve ever encountered.”

“Involving?”

“The Episcopal Church, the Jesuits and other liberal Christian elements.”

“Intel?”

“Best possible,” Nicky told me. “That’s the judgment of everyone here.”

“What’s the nature of the threat?”

“The person who alerted us to it is probably the person who can best explain it.” My wife signaled to her left. “You’ll be working with her. She’s…um…someone that you’ve…we’ve…met before.”

A frighteningly beautiful woman came on the screen and my mouth dropped to the floor. It was my hot young friend who I had met at the St. Louis airport during the Alpha Project investigation. The one whose existence I thought I had rendered impossible.

For the longest time, I couldn’t say a word. Baffled, Bill(not IB) kept looking at the screen and then at me. Finally, the woman said in a sultry voice, “It’s a great pleasure to meet you, Mr. Johnson. Although I understand that this isn‘t our first time.”

“Yeah. Pretty impressive the way you seem to have completely destroyed logic.”

The woman smiled. “So I’ve been told.”

“Your name is…”

“Unimportant.”

“Then what do I call you?”

The woman thought for a second and then said softly, “Diane will suffice.”

“Okay, Diane. What are we dealing with?”

“What do you know about quantum theory, Mr. Johnson? Specifically about the concept of parallel universes?”

“A little. Enough to know that I’m not sure if I buy it.”

“Buy it, babe,” said Nicky. “Can you not see Diane or something?”

“Good point.”

“The fact that she materialized in the Oval Office cinches it for me, anyway.”

“Chris,” said Amy Welborn. “About a month ago, our operatives alerted us that the TEC/Jesuit/liberal group has been researching the idea for some time. Our people brought us some schematics but the work isn’t complete.

“Two weeks ago, Diane here, uh…showed up…in the President’s office and confirmed it by drawing the schematics from memory. They were exact in every detail.”

“What are they?” Bill asked.

“Doors,” Diane said. “Portals, windows…between universes. Between realities, if you like. I come from a reality in which the technology has been perfected. In this one, it hasn’t and my team and I have been sent here to see that it never is.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Mr. Johnson, in my reality, the Roman Catholic Church is your Episcopal Church writ large.”

“Liberal, ordaining women, big on ‘inclusion,’ that kind of thing?”

“That’s correct. Our German Pope thinks the Resurrection was nothing but a metaphor.”

“So they want to bring it over here.”

“Exactly. In my reality, orthodox opinion occupies the same place as orthodox opinion in the Episcopal Church does here. Weak, splintered and irrelevant. Eastern Orthodoxy is rapidly dying out and our Southern Baptists might as well be UCC.

“The current Presiding Bishop of our Episcopal Church, the third most powerful church in my world, is a lesbian, female and homosexual bishops are the rule rather than the exception and the new edition of their prayer book features a liturgy which includes public sexual intercourse during the service. Take your pick which kind and with who.

“Those of us who hold orthodox opinions are a small minority, Mr. Johnson, wherever we find ourselves. We do what we can but the weight of our entire society is against us.”

I made myself a bourbon-and-soda and began pacing around the office. “Am I correct in assuming,“ I said, “that elements in your reality want my reality to complete this project?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Mr. Johnson, the reality of parallel universes was not considered good news by elements of the dominant Christian religion of my universe,” said Diane.

“Why not?”

“To the radicals, the notion that there was a reality anywhere where their ideas might not predominate was intolerable to them. That was the reason why the development of this technology was as important to them as it was.

“They want to come here and eradicate orthodoxy and the fact that they have allies in this universe is a bonus. And then they’ll move on to anywhere else they find it.”

“What do they want to do? Send people over here and take over churches?”

“That’s far too slow and far too iffy for them. For one thing, they know you too well. What they want is to open portals in both universes and flood their reality into this one.”

Diane shut her eyes for a few moments. “But that’s not what will happen. Portals only go one way, Mr. Johnson. I can come here but you can’t go to my universe. And they only go one way for a reason.”

“Which is?”

“What happens when you open a window? The air from outside comes in. The atmosphere of the world and your home are one.

“The principle is the same. When I move from my universe to this one, our two realities stay separate. But if my universe and your universe open our windows at the same time, our realities are joined.

“Think of it. If you join two universes, you will have two realities coexisting in the same time and place. And that’s not logically possible."

“Meaning?!”

“It is the view of most scientists in my universe, and some claim to have demonstrated this effect in experiments, that both universes will cancel each other out.”

“Nonexistence,” murmured Nicky who suddenly looked very much like she wanted to be with me more than anything in the world.

“Although the damage,” said Diane, “may be infinitely greater than that. It’s been theorized, and most serious scientists in my universe agree with this, that the void created when our two universes cease to exist could cause three, four, five, six, ten or more universes to implode. Maybe even creation itself.”

“And the church in your reality is…okay with this?!” whispered an astonished Bill(not IB).

“Please don’t get me wrong. Lots of my reality’s liberals, some really high up, are working with us to stop it. But others aren’t and the radicals don’t care. To them, nonexistence is infinitely preferable to allowing orthodox ideas to exist anywhere.”

“Do you want me to come out, big man?” Dale Price quietly asked me.

“Probably wouldn’t be a good idea, Mr. Vice-President. You’re a little too high-profile these days,” I said. Since my wife wasn’t running again, Dale was considered a lock to become the next President of the United States.

“And if anything…“ I took a deep breath and let it out, “happens…to…Nicky…we’re going to need a strong hand at the helm.”

I refreshed my drink. “But I don’t get something. What do you guys need me for? Why can’t the Welbornian, the DRI and/or CETU take care of this? There’s more than enough talent out there. You guys don‘t need me anymore, you know that.”

“NO THERE‘S NOT ENOUGH TALENT TO DEFEAT WHO WE HAVE TO DEFEAT, CHRIS!!” Nicole suddenly screamed at me.  She was visibly trembling so Heather Price came over and hugged her.  I had never seen my wife so terrified. “We need you more than we’ve ever needed you before,” Nicky said, her voice breaking.

“But why?!!”

“My team is working with every government in this universe as well as the United Nations, Mr. Johnson, and we all agree that you‘re the only person who can stop this,” said Diane. “Your antagonist is from my universe and he is far and away is the best in my reality at what he does. No one else comes even remotely close to him.”

“He is also,” said Greg Griffith in a very low voice, “someone that no other Christian investigator in this universe alive today, active or retired, including Dale and every other CPI working together, could ever hope to slow down, never mind stop. Only you can do this job. Only you can save two universes. Or existence itself.”

“You‘re the only chance we have,” Diane added, whispering, “Please help us.”

“Who is it?!!” I demanded. “Who am I up against?!!”

People in that room in Washington looked fearfully at each other but no one said anything. Why wouldn’t anyone talk to me?!

Finally, Amy Welborn spoke up. “Diane’s information helped us track him down,“ she said in a business-like but scared tone, staring intently at her computer screen.

“This video file,” Amy continued, “was taken by a CETU operative at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine approximately an hour and a half ago.

“Our tests indicate that it hasn’t been faked and that it’s exactly who it looks like it is.” She typed some keys and the video file began running on my monitor.

As I watched, I was hit with a panic attack of indescribable intensity. My heart began racing, my chest felt like I was being squeezed in a vice and I couldn’t breathe.

Because I instantly recognized my opponent on the CETU video.

It was me.

Next week: Shadow

Posted on 3/19/2008 11:24:28 PM , 14 comments