After a moment of reflection, she cast a sidelong glance to a framed photograph of her family that was situated at the corner of her desk. With Gary smiling his boyish charm and the girls smiling with teeth either missing or sitting irregular along the gum line, she picked up the photo and gave it her full attention. She had fallen in love with Gary only after he had fought for her affection and suffered her countless refusals. Perhaps it was his determination, or perhaps his perseverance, that finally won her over. Either way, their love had grown together and created two beautiful daughters.
Then comes Kimball Hayden, larger than life, seemingly a poster child for the bad-boy image who had somehow worked his way into her emotions, but without the tenacity Gary had shown.
She traced her fingers over her husband’s image and quietly asked his forgiveness for feelings she could not control. Her answer, of course, came in the form of total silence.
Slowly, she placed the photo back on the desk unable to stop the image of Kimball Hayden’s face from entering her mind. For the second time that day she felt dirty.
The Coroner’s lab was an infusion of alcohols and chemicals, which was far better than the stench of the corpses lying in gathered pieces on stainless steel tables.
Clothing from the bodies were removed and bagged as evidence. Body parts were matched to torsos by sorting through the corresponding sizes and densities of the pieces. Rib cages lay open revealing the lack of internal organs, the lumbar column fully visible. Femurs and fibulas were separated, but matched to individual corpses. Nevertheless, there was enough left to cobble together IDs which garnered immediate strikes from Interpol, the Department of Homeland Security, and other top-worldwide agencies.
After piecing together their identities, the coroner’s office immediately prioritized their work to establish a ninety-nine-point-ninety-seven percent probability of the identities on the corpses and sent the results to Special Agent Cohen of the FBI, according to the red-flag status in their network, which was protocol.
The identities of the bullet riddled bodies found in the Mojave Desert were about to provide major pieces to Shari Cohen’s puzzle.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
When Kimball received the call from Shari, he could tell she was elated. “You’re not going to believe this. Six bodies were discovered in Mesquite, Nevada, this morning, about four hundred miles south of Ogden, Utah.”
Kimball recognized the name Ogden, the station point for the Soldiers of Islam, nothing more. “Okay.”
“I just received a preliminary report from the Clark County Coroner’s Office identifying the bodies as the six remaining members of the Soldiers of Islam.”
Kimball pressed the phone closer to his ear. “They know this for certain?”
“Over ninety-nine percent certain, which means I’m definitely on the right track. The bodies, according to the findings, have been in the desert for at least three weeks, or for as long as five. This means they were dead before the pope was kidnapped.”
“Execution style?”
“They were able to find two bullets from an MP5, so it looks that way.”
“Military issue,” he said. “Not the kind of weapon you’d see Joe Blow carry around.”
“No, not at all,” she returned.
“So they were executed, dumped, their residences sanitized—”
“—and the Governor’s mansion was seized with the military precision incapable of the Soldiers of Islam,” she interjected. “But better managed by—”
“—the Force Elite.”
“Yes! They still exist.” There was a period of stunning silence before Shari spoke again. And then, “We have him, Kimball… Our own government took the pope.”
“But why?”
“To start a war,” she said. It was all too clear. “Who is the one man on this planet, the one man, who by the power of his presence can incite a world?”
“To start a war though? Again I have to ask, why?”
“For oil,” she said without hesitation. “It’s all about oil.”
After receiving the videotape through his connections, Yahweh viewed it several times in the darkness of his study. The only pool of light in the room came from the TV screen.
Sometimes he played the tape in slow motion and watched the bishop’s skull erupt in a fountain of blood frame-by-frame, trying to understand why the cleric was so terrified of dying, when an Islamic terrorist readily gives up his life as if it was meaningless.
In the first few clips it was obvious that the bishop was alarmed, his sense of self-preservation so animalistic in display by the way he thrashed in the chair or the way his eyes widened with absolute terror. It was as if the man held no faith. But when the pope reached out to him and whispered a few words of contentment, words not heard over the video, the bishop seemed somewhat pacified.
Although he considered it gruesome, he replayed the tape over and over, trying to differentiate why a man of cloth was afraid of making the graduation to a greater level of being, when a man from another culture was not. No matter how many times he played it, the answer or understanding never came.
Finally shutting off the tape, he sat in utter darkness and mused over the brilliance of the video.
Bringing the pope on stage was a brilliant stroke on the part of Team Leader — an obvious ploy to provoke the masses and encourage anger. Watching the pope in his disheveled state would no doubt work wonders on the emotions of Christians worldwide and wreak havoc long before Shari could do anything to quell the matter.
“Brilliant,” he whispered, then once again, but in a softer tone and with far less emotion, uttered, “Brilliant.”
Within four hours the tape was displayed on the Internet by Aljazeera. Within five hours the world community was in an uproar. The international news media played the edited version of the execution over… and over… and over again.
Yahweh was pleased.
“Oil?”
“Think about it,” she said. “Those photos of the Soldiers of Islam weren’t on the dossiers as mere surveillance shots; they were being targeted. And now they’re dead — all of them. So now we know who doesn’t have the pope, but can surmise who does, which leads us to question number two.”
Her voice picked up momentum as she spoke. Kimball was sure he would have to tell her to slow down. “Members from the president’s own assassination squad tried to take me out for having that CD given to me by the attaché of the Israeli government.”
“Which ties them together — we know that.”
“True, but now we know why there were photos of the oil tracts, and business and political principals from the oil producing countries,” she said.
Kimball didn’t see the connection. “I’m not getting you.”
“Not only is that CD a schematic, Kimball, it’s also a political agenda.” Shari pressed the phone closer to her mouth. “Israel, Russia, Venezuela and the United States are countries with implausible political ties with Venezuela harboring anti-American sentiment. But according to the agenda, and from what we have seen, forced changes may be ahead to better serve the economies of the nations bound by foreign accords by changing the geopolitical landscape and to form new alliances with nations who are starting to tap more of their fossil reserve, like Russia, or in the case of Israel, sitting on top of an oil bonanza that happens to be under Palestinian territory.”