Rise of the Beast: A Novel (The Patmos Conspiracy Book 1) Read online

  Burke looked at the phone again. He slid the back panel off and tossed the battery in the waist basket. Something was in the air. He packed his few belongings quickly, forcing his breathing to remain even. He then worked through the room quickly to wipe away prints and any traces he had been there. Anything in the trash went with him to be deposited in random dumpsters outside a radius of at least one mile. Time to change to a new untraceable phone and location.

  The problem was, as he well knew, nothing and nobody was untraceable.

  7

  Turin, Italy

  WHEN AC MILAN VISITED TURIN to square off against Juventus in a Lega Serie A football showdown, all 41,475 seats were sure to be filled, sometimes with more than one person to a seat. The two teams were in a tight battle to be crowned Campione d’Italia and for a spot in the UEFA Euro Cup Championship.

  With a 1-1 tie at the 85th minute mark, and the black and white striped “jailhouse” uniforms of Juventus setting up to take a corner kick, the stadium vibrated from the sound of thousands of raucous voices screaming encouragement to Filippo Esposito, a homegrown hero, as he bent over to place and replace the position of the ball in order for him execute a perfect crossing strike.

  No one noticed two men standing on the causeway above the top row, 49 meters from the pitch. Their heads were drawn close as they would point to various entrance and egress points for fans and then heatedly discuss a point of contention.

  Esposito struck the ball on the right inseam of his boot, hooking a screamer around the mouth of the goal, where the ball met the forehead of his teammate perfectly, caroming back across the goal set where it cleared the side and cross bars, mere centimeters to spare, nestling into the back corner of the net.

  More than 41,000 sets of eyes followed as Esposito sprinted across the field, shedding his jersey en route, to join his teammates in a corner celebratory scrum.

  The two men were still talking closely as they descended the exit ramps, ignoring the roar of the crowd shouting, “Fileeepo!”

  A member of the Carabinieri, straddling a BMW motorcycle, noticed the two men exiting the stadium early. He smiled. Must be AC Milan fans, he thought. Bad losers, but at least they are not causing trouble.

  “I’m not arguing your point,” the taller man hissed at his companion. “Yes. Of course. The stadium is best.”

  “And the discothèques have been hit so many times, they get no reaction,” the shorter man interrupted.

  “Yes! Agreed! But this is only phase one. We aren’t ready to hit the stadium. That can come next. What we must do is succeed. Better a thousand at a disco than failing to set up correctly at a football stadium and killing no one. Do you think we will be entrusted with a second chance?”

  The shorter man scowled and said, “small vision, small courage, and small faith produce small outcomes.”

  “True,” the taller man responded conciliatorily, knowing he had won the argument. “But when we are faithful in small tasks, we will be entrusted with larger tasks in the days ahead. You shall have your football stadium in the near future.”

  The two men exchanged kisses on each cheek before parting at the entrance of the Torino Porta Nuova railway station. The taller man was taking a train to Milan and the shorter man a train to Rome.

  The taller man shook his head slowly from side-to-side as he walked down the open air concourse. His compatriot, like so many other young men, was too impatient. He was willing to screw up an important attack—probably blowing his foot off during the setup— rather than go for a sure victory and learn. We’ve not handled the explosive required to implode the Stadium. Better to wait until we are ready.

  I would actually like to see if AC Milan can still win it all this year, the taller man, a die-hard Devil fan, thought with a smile, approaching his platform at a brisk pace.

  8

  Bentonville, Arkansas

  AS JONATHAN ALEXANDER DROVE OFF in the first Range Rover, Pauline looked out the side window one more time to make sure Jonathan and Jules were gone. Her heart was hammering a staccato pattern that made her feel faint. It was time to finish what she was hired to do.

  I have to get out of here.

  PRETTY COUNTRYSIDE, JONATHAN ALEXANDERTHOUGHT as he peered out the window on the country drive. Not like the countryside surrounding his residence in Switzerland, but charming in its own way.

  Twenty-five minutes later the car pulled into the parking lot of a low-slung, rectangular brick structure. A concrete-floored, open pavilion with a painted metal roof covering long rows of picnic tables was off to one side. The parking lot was pitted and broken asphalt with splashes of green where weeds had fought their way to the surface to breach their prison ceiling. The building’s only defining feature was a cross. It looked to be fashioned from construction I-beams, anchored in small plot of grass surrounded by a foot-high stone fringe.

  Pretty countryside but the architecture leaves something to be desired.

  A youngish man—Alexander didn’t know his exact age, but assumed late thirties or early forties—wearing a cheap suit and scuffed shoes was waiting for him at the front door, per his instructions. This would be their first and only meeting at the man’s workplace.

  He really should bulldoze this ugly little building and erect something more edifying to the spirit. But after today, regretfully, that will no longer be within his purview.

  Alexander frowned. This is the man I’ve flown thousands of miles to meet with on numerous occasions—always the same stateroom at the Hyatt Regency in Fayetteville, both of us ascending via the service elevator, of course. This is my spiritual mentor, the man whose blessing I seek yet again. This puzzled Alexander. What was the pull? History is filled with stranger convergences and meetings, he thought. He almost smiled.

  Alexander gently rubbed two fingertips above his right ear, feeling the familiar groove from an old battle scar earned when his last name was Alexopolous. That was a long time ago and a different life. He ran his palm over the spot again carefully, slowly, and almost lovingly. He liked to tell himself he did it to make sure the jagged disfigurement was properly hidden by the feathering of his elegantly coiffed, slightly longish hair. But the truth was that touching it brought him a sense of comfort. He was a survivor. It reminded him of who he was and where he came from. What it had taken to get where he was.

  Maybe there is a God and he brought me here, Alexander thought, his hand outstretched in greeting. Or more likely, the thorn in God’s flesh brought me here. Or maybe it was just Google.

  Blame it on a bout of insomnia a few years back. Sleep had been so hard to come by that he broke his strict protocol of no more than a few hours of television a week and started late night channel surfing. He stopped to listen to an American minister with a hard-to-understand southern twang preach on Armageddon, the End Times, the Last Days, and other things Alexander wasn’t sure he ever heard about in the occasional Greek Orthodox training he received in his childhood. When the preacher spoke of the Apostle John writing the Book of Revelation from the Island of Patmos, Alexander felt a tingling. His father was from Patmos. They had fished the waters around the island and hiked the rocky, desolate hills when he was a little boy.

  Several times Alexander tried to click the button on the remote but something arrested him. It was one of the rare moments when he felt such a mysterious tug at his heart from a religious source. He felt Marx got one thing almost right: religion is the opiate of the masses. That was a good thing so he kept a healthy respect for most religious traditions for those times when he needed to use them as a tool to further his business interests. He contributed to the full range of faiths, whether he liked them or not. The only checks that he didn’t like to write were to Islamic causes. Islam is not really an opiate, he thought; it is definitely a stimulant. But business needed oil so he did what was expected to court the princes and mullahs.

  That will change soon.

  Alexander listened raptly to the enthusiastic and animated descrip
tions of the one world government, the Battle of Armageddon, the mark, the Beast … it was … it was magnificent. Better by far than the vision presented by men in secret meetings who thought they still controlled the puppet strings of human history.

  History is no longer under the command of a few enlightened men.

  The biblical version of the Apocalypse. Did he believe it? Not at the time. Not now; at least not literally. But he knew others believed every word and sentence wholeheartedly. A seed of thought began to emerge on how such knowledge could empower plans that were already under way.

  After hearing the sermon, he invited a professor from Princeton Theological Seminary to dinner at his Manhattan townhome to learn more. The man gave him a two-hour lecture on the sociology of religion to explain why some people got such fanciful and outrageous notions of the End Times. The man bored him. He was no help. Alexander decided to forget Patmos and St. John’s Revelation and the Beast, but his mind kept circling back, pulled by an invisible, mystical tether.

  He next visited a Methodist minister, a well-known religious author and close confidant of New York City’s devout Conservative Jewish mayor—maybe this man could cover more theological bases based on his range of contacts—who explained that the Book of Revelation wasn’t prophecy but a look back at conditions under the Emperor Nero. He was very knowledgeable about Early Church history. A little more interesting than the professor’s lecture, but the talk did not stir his blood. It had no power, no pull. It was not what he wanted to hear nor needed. Alexander determined to let the sleeping dog of End Times rhetoric sleep. But the invisible fetter and his imagination betrayed him yet again.

  He met with a Catholic Bishop in Vatican City who explained the use of imagery in the Bible and how it was better to have a more optimistic view of life and the world—“Remember the doxology, ‘world without end, Amen, Amen’”—and that Alexander shouldn’t be preoccupied with the End Times. When he asked if Alexander wanted to make a confession Alexander almost laughed. He would go to the grave with his secrets and he wasn’t a fan of Catholicism anyway. He felt the Catholic Church gave too much support to his Sicilian competitors when he was fighting his way up in the world.

  He next spoke with a Baptist evangelist in Houston, Texas, and listened to how people he had never heard of were misinterpreting Scripture on when the rapture would happen and who would face the Tribulation. The man was enthused. But he couldn’t stay in a straight line to save his life. He had identified too many false notions that needed to be corrected—none of which Alexander was aware of— which made the discourse rambling and confusing in his ears. It felt like trying to get a sip of water from a fire hose.

  Not sure what to do next, Alexander returned to Greece and visited Mount Athos, a small peninsula jutting into the Aegean Sea and home to twenty Eastern Orthodox monasteries under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. Only men were allowed on the holy ground. Visitors had two ways to prove their gender; either grow a beard or drop their pants before boarding a ferry. Alexander grew a beard. He met with a scholarly priest who taught at the University of Thessaloniki and who was on a sabbatical to study some rare extant Byzantine manuscripts. When Alexander asked the professor about the Beast of Revelation, the man lit up as he explained:

  “Though John’s Revelation of Jesus Christ is not read in the liturgy, the book is most important to our understanding of being the one true church. It is the Beast who will seek to corrupt the one true faith through unity with heretics. I worry even now when I hear reports of the amount of time our Patriarch spends in Rome.”

  Alexander listened attentively but lost real interest as he realized that it was an ecclesiastical war the priest described. Ministers are as bad as economists on interpreting what they are looking at, Alexander mused as his barber shaved the last stubble of his beard with a straightedge the next day.

  Forget this, Alexander thought. You don’t need God’s help or blessing. If there truly is a Creator God, the one closest to him, the true son, Lucifer, has already taught us that God’s judgment is not always correct nor fair. The Morning Star has also taught us that God can be tricked and even exploited.

  Exploiting God. Using God. Was that not the story and pathos of all religions? The thought of manipulating the divine would not let him forget the message he heard on late night TV. It kept him uncharacteristically restless. He still wanted to talk to someone who could explain what was believed—really believed—about the Last Days and especially the Beast.

  Alexander didn’t know if he was an agnostic or an atheist, so that probably made him the former. But perhaps knowing he was realistically entering the final decade or possibly two of his mortal life—his only life, he assumed—he had developed a … a what? A Freudian need to create a god, bubbling up from the superego based on having lousy parents and a life filled with unacknowledged guilt? Seemed too dramatic. He had set in motion the planning and research stages of his legacy to the world, but had stopped short of pulling the trigger. Literally pulling the trigger. He felt the need for a touch of the divine—a sign—to serve as a shiny talisman of protection and guidance over the most important and difficult task of his life.

  Killing more than five billion people and resetting the clock on the tipping point of whether the earth could continue to house its human inhabitants—the Malthusian Equation—was no small undertaking.

  Alexander rationalized that Napoleon Bonaparte consulted with a clairvoyant, Madam Normand, before his great victories. Alexander the Great sought out the Oracle of Delphi before conquering the Persian Empire with the belief he was a god. When she refused to give him audience, he dragged her by the hair from the temple to the town square and beat her until she spoke the words he traveled to hear.

  Was that what he was doing to this man?

  Hitler had so many superstitions, from the number seven to the magic of the swastika he found in Egyptian symbolism, he had obviously outdone himself and taken the need for a touch of the divine far too far.

  But still … why shouldn’t he consult with—and be blessed by— the divine before his conquest? Was that so unreasonable? Achilles’ mother, Thetis, had made her warrior son invincible—had it not been for holding him by his heel. Could the Revelation of John help him bathe in River Styx fully?

  The ancient Greeks believed that as long as people repeated your name you were immortal. My conquest of the world’s worthless is my path to immortality, Alexander thought again. I must do it right. And I must continue to write down the words of my truth so people will know it was me who bestowed the gift. Forever.

  There was another practicality to truly understanding the words of Revelation. If God was real, he might awake from his slumber and choose to oppose Alexander, making him an enemy to Alexander’s plan to save the world. That made it even more of an imperative to understand this strange, esoteric book. He needed to know how best to defeat anything God sent against him. Alexander suspected that the outcome of a battle that pitted the forces of heaven against Lucifer’s earthly incarnation was not the foregone conclusion the Apostle John made it out to be. But still better to understand as much as possible.

  In frustration over not hearing the words, the conviction, the blessing—or cursing—he wanted to hear, Alexander typed into the Google search line on a computer at an internet café in Paris, Armageddon, the Apocalypse, the Beast, the False Prophet, the Last Days, Revelation, the Island of Patmos, the end of the world. He thought that might cover everything.

  To his amazement, one country preacher, Reverend Dwight Garrison, located outside of Bentonville, Arkansas, right in the heart of Middle America and Walmart country, was preaching on those very topics the coming Sunday. He had been considerate enough to tag all those phrases on his church’s online announcement and the Google spiders popped the preacher to the second page of Alexander’s search. Alexander was going to have Klaus call the reverend to set up the appointment, but some things were better handled personally. H
e decided he himself would call to let the man know he needed to meet with him and that he would reward him generously for his time. He told the man he needed some spiritual guidance.

  “You don’t need to bring any money, but I’m happy to talk to you.”

  After each meeting, whether by phone or in person at the Hyatt—a foolish risk, truth be told—Alexander gave Garrison the user name and password for a blind account in the Cayman Islands, which grew by one million dollars each time they interacted. It was funded through a shell company that was untraceable to Alexander, but still a potential entanglement that needed to be severed. Garrison still hadn’t withdrawn a single dollar. Alexander made sure Garrison knew the account balance. The man now had more than seven million dollars to build a glorious temple to the God he believed in so ardently. Alexander was both impressed and unimpressed by the man’s stubborn refusal to use the funds. A couple hundred thousand dollars, just one little withdrawal, would pave the parking lot and build a suitable steeple to draw attention heavenward and away from the ugly low-slung structure that was better suited to serve as a machine shop. Reverend Garrison was a good man but appeared to have a shortage of vision, Alexander mused. Yet here he, the world-famous Jonathan Alexander, was back to meet with his spiritual mentor. He gave Garrison a curt nod as they shook hands.

  Once Garrison bestowed the blessing of his understanding—a deadly blessing that both killed and gave life to the world—he, Garrison, would be dead. Even if the funds were untraceable to him, it was actually better Garrison hadn’t withdrawn any of the money. There would be no walking the cat back to Alexander once the account was closed. Garrison’s death would be unfortunate but necessary.