The retrieval of named persons began directly afterwards, Section 9 agents breaking down doors, chasing expected participants, the man-hunt was on… first and foremost, Section 9 was after Arthur Dodger, a.k.a. Father Nicholas, and intelligence reported sightings of the wanted man as he moved away from the city. Other persons were also on the ‘most-wanted’ list, including Carl Reagan, Noah Petrov, Oxford Carlyle, Michael Rand, Gregor Heely, and Joseph Moore. Agents fanned out to search for the key players, and the resistance was decimated, making the operation seemingly a success. However, indications from retrieved intelligence showed several independent cells still fully functional, along with particular members on individual missions that no longer had sustained contact with the leaders. One of which suggested that the newly appointed director, Graham Greene, was in danger, that the resistance had assigned an agent to kidnap him and his new wife. The department immediately sent out a team to protect him, who found him in the city, and convinced him to move out to the country estate until the man could be captured. The Greene’s cooperated completely and Captain Vincent’s team went out to protect the new couple.
* * *
Meanwhile on the first convex of the lesser spheres of eternity, Joseph ambled along atop the debris of chaos on his way through the dark, waste, and wild of the starless desert, whose sky threatened to erupt in inclement out-pourings and fateful screams of a conduction zone between the tempest and the heavens. The boulders of nothingness soon gave way to the open plains with Himalayan vultures perched on titan carcasses, feasting on the divine spleen, only to grow tired of holy organs and seek out Tartan yeanlings and bah-bah lambs amongst the deltas and the great isthmus of the Ganges or Hydaspes which bled into the great Gobi desert of Sericana, where he found a ferry across the windy seas of land, alone, without company or life for he was treading on the border of creation. Where the convicts of vanity, sloth, greed and violence search for their rewards like lunar colonists terra forming a new world.
Those silver fields caught the words of superstition, narrowly translating the saints of Hebrew laws, Babylonian captivities, Babel suicides, Egyptian snake charmers with twisted staffs, and more cannibals than a table has room for, along with celestial wind-riders who made passionate, exotic love orgies with proto-mammal females and spewed forth a breed of towering pagans who were the key-masters of lexicon antennae that stabbed the virgin navel of god on the Sennaar plain. Others wandered lonely, leaping eternally into Aetna flames or constantly re-reading the holocaust of philosophers and chasing lemmings off cliffs into the unforgiving sea, or heretics of long forgotten papal councils whose hermitage extends into infinity, St. Francis of Assisi, with his long line of consumer terrorists, Carmilites, Dominicans, friars, and pilgrims seeking the chance to rub the enormous skull of Christ on Golgotha. All of Martin Luther’s enemies, and a few of his coconspirators, perpetually climbing the ladder, only to thrust like match sticks, back to the start, searching for their rosaries, their crosses, their hoods, and their habits.
Passing through what arguably had to be the paradise of fools, now peopled and trodden by a few millennia of ghosts, Joseph came upon the shore of the Chardonnay Sea, where dawn laps lazily upon the plains and the tide baths everyone in its gleam. Dangling like kite strings of the clouds, the fragments of the sun pierced the earth and created pools of light for any to lie in wait. Our hero, who had seen the engineer Jacob construct the highways of angels and knew the dreams of Luz, their pearly lakes and invisible visitors, waited like a patient for the chariot to draw near.
The carriage held
* * *
But just ourselves
And immortality
And once it came, it was an easy ascent through the tunnel of the mind’s eye, through the holy rocks of Mount Zion and into fabled Tel Meggio, dodging the goody-goody-winged shoes of the order, who in all of their labor, and due to our hero’s careful attention, noticed not the fiend glaring at the city of Dan, where the great Jordan begins on its way to Beersheba and the Arabian shore. Joseph, like a child on his first slide, bounded down the stairs in great kingly leaps and swoops (his arms remaining out for control) to be the first to conquer (a flag in his left back pocket intended for the highest point and a short poem written for his dear Flower, since he had, for all intensive purposes, planned to call it Flowersburgh in a fit of romantic idolatry) the new earth. Removing his careful instruments, arch-angel Joseph begins first with a topographical grid, squared off in one-foot increments and with a two-foot handicap, which he follows with a comprehensive geomorphology study (intending for a watershed mitigation ruling) that he rounds out with a Class 4 environmental assessment and hydrology model for use by the agency, until he feels quite sure that he has completed the necessary measurements and followed all the proper procedures for an immediate land use action to be proposed. That the canopy of night has befallen him, goes unnoticed by our hero, as he slips over the wall, and is embraced by a plastic atmosphere of such suffocating consistency that he flails with mighty swings and actually, quite by accident, clocks a few other worlds, ah those happy isles like Hesperian gardens of golden deciduous trees, sending them like marbles, recall dear Joseph your lonely games with string and invented opponents, on your hands and knees, that tongue locked in ready, your thumb tucked below your finger, and the pluck, the great Jupiter rolling into moons and planets, outside the holy solar system, how many aliens died that day? And what of poor Galileo, who’s reason was so concentric that he upset the firmament and made the ever-lasting sun blush with big, black acne, did he have his marbles?
No matter, never mind. Staring into the sun can make visions of Protean prophets who capture sunrays and sell them to armories appear without warning. Is that a vision or an angel there? His back is turned, a faint crown of golden laurels circles his head as he folds his wings and fixes his hair. In need of directions, the spirit impure adjusts his shape and feigns innocence.
* * *
Now to the ascent of the final, steep knoll that separated the house from the gardens surrounding its brick façade, like a wolf starving in winter and howling over the body of a child, or a burglar invading the home of a burgher and removing from him not only his jewelry and his art, but also his wife, or a mercenary on a holy mission who not only destroys his adopted enemy, but captures them alive and ravishes their women before their eyes, then impaling them in the midst of their rage and sorrow, Joseph invaded the hearth by climbing the middle tree, the highest and the one with the most fruit, and gazed through an open window, cradled by a strong branch. From his position, Joseph could see the entire estate, a heaven on earth, stretching eastward towards two large towers modeled after those built by Grecian knights in the land of Seleucia and with noble trees of every variety, blooming ambrosial fruit, along with a large, well kept brook that ran its course over undulating hills, beneath mini-mountain tops of craggy rock and split into four tributaries that seemed to guide the flora and the fauna of each segregated zone and naturally fed all the plants. The areas divided by the brooks were as diverse as the foliage they contained, some basked in the morning sun and were left open, with a profundity of hills and dales and plains that stretched into the horizon, whilst others held groves of stringy trees that blocked the midday sun and offered lounging seats for wayward strollers to enjoy the shade and feast on fruit that dripped from the vine. Still others were wooded thickets of hemlock, birch, and oak, hiding caves and burrows, ferns and wild berries; or fields that drooped into dedicated valleys with colonies of trees where Pan would play his magic lute for all the graces and the hours, where spring seemed to never leave (like Prosperina remaining at the dear side of Pluto) and the rainbow wept into the flowers (as if all of the prey of Apollo chose it for a place to rest).