It took only two days for Ruthie and Peter, their children, and Felicity to get settled into Trois-Pistoles, a quintessentially French Canadian town three hundred miles northeast of Montréal. All knew how to speak French - including James and Heather, who at their parents' insistence were exposed to a series of interactive learning CD-ROMs. On a couple of occasions Felicity thought she had received a knowing glance from one of the town's residents, but for the most part their cover appeared to be working.
On day four of their hiding in plain view, Ruthie finally felt she had to ask Felicity some obvious questions, that followed from Annie's harsh interrogation of the new lady on the block.
"Felicity," Ruthie asked in French when they gathered for supper at a local café, "even before you met Peter, I thought of you as having incredible integrity, having earned everything you have. But this past Sunday, Mom got you to admit you were very sneaky in how you got to the top. Including sleeping with the boss. Which not only raises questions of sexual harassment - "
"No. The relationship was entirely consentual," replied Felicity. Her French was more Parisian than the Montréal dialect Ruthie was using.
" - but how Machiavellian you were, and from my read, just as much now. I submit to you, sister, that as soon as Peter made his contact with you, through Jimmy Moon, you were determined to seduce him as soon as you could."
"Not on day one," restated Felicity. "But after he finally convinced me that he was on my side ... yeah, I made up my mind to get him inside of me. Say, day four of our tête-à-tête."
"Peter's a younger man than you. You're Generation X. He and I are very much 'Y'."
"Oh come on Ruthie. I don't know how or why Doug Coupland came up with those terms. ButI know what you're suggesting. Is it sexist I would go after someone several years my junior? Probably. Nowhere as bad as if I was going after someone who could be a baby brother or even a son. But if you follow the 'half plus seven' age rule for finding a mate, I could have gone after someone as young as 25. Peter is just above that age, and you know that he has the maturity of someone at least 30 plus."
"He does," agreed Ruthie. "Still ... you said you had a cousin at the parachurch who was a plant. What's with that?"
"He - and he's on my mother's side, may she rest in peace - was there for about a year before my getting hired there. I knew of his employment there, and the fact a co-worker at the astronomy outfit brought books from their publisher was just a coincidence. It was so much fun sharing the good times of when I was happy as a kid, before my maturing. He also had the inside track that the boss had just divorced and was looking for fun.
"One day, after work, I did a quick change in the locker room to a cocktail dress I kept in the locker. With no bra, my cleavage showing big time and the cut line just above the nipples. I 'ran into' the boss in the garage, and ... well, we had sex on the roof of his car right there and then. It went from there until he decided to take his 'vacation' so we could have sex three times a day - morning at my home, lunch at a secret room at the think-tank, evening at his place.
"The first day I began substituting on air, my cousin, knowing my frustration that so many record companies rejected my published sheet music for other singers, decided to tell me that I should try something new. He told me the phone lines for the daily talk show actually open about seven minutes before the live show started. So he called in about thirty seconds after the lines opened and was fifth in line. He routed the call, using a calling card, to a switch station in the Midwest, so as not to give it away to the rest of the team.
"I made a point of being soft-spoken deliberately as a way of luring the audience as well as to make them pay attention to the Gospel truths I was imparting. And of course, I was being more than just sarcastic in reading off the one-liners from televangelists the previous day. So when my cousin - I call him 'Sonny' - got through, he deliberately pounced. And that's when I just gave it my all singing. It was a once in a lifetime shot, but it worked. Three months later, I had my first platinum album. Six months after that my first book - that one about the Synoptic Gospels made simple - sold a million copies.
"So was it a rather underhanded way of getting to the top, all of it? Of course. Would I do it again? Yes!"
"Still, Felicity," said Heather, her American accent quite obvious through her French, "there's got to be more than that Dad had really good 'fresh meat', if you'll pardon the expression."
The rest of her family rolled their eyes, but since they were used to using rather explicit and suggestive talk with each other even if they were ministers and PKs, they decided to let it slide as they usually did.
"Heather," said Felicity, "it's way more than his middle leg, although I love that too. Believe me! Seriously, I have never met a man like your father. Never. He's a wonderful father to you and Jim, he treats all the parishioners at your church with so much respect, and he knows mostly what's right and what's wrong. And he still loves your Mom. Not only that, but he mourns for Paris and Vic every single day - and prays that they are at peace with each other in Heaven if they weren't able to find it on Earth. You thought I was crying - well, I was crying - for three straight weeks after Harrison threatened me. I kept crying even after Peter started to have cybersex with me. My crying stopped shortly after we finally met face to face. Once I knew he was not a figment of my imagination, that there really was someone on the other end of the line, that's when I knew I had to have him."
"Well obviously the reason you guys had a shotgun marriage, is because you're pregnant with our brother and sister. Well, let me put it this way - and James and I asked each other this last night before we went to bed - if you guys weren't preggers, would you still have gotten married at some point, or would you just have ended it as a four-week stand? Well, three months with the online sex."
"Truth be told, and your Mom will attest to this ... Peter and I were looking at about next fall, a year from now. It would have given us a lot more time to bond and to prepare a real wedding with all the gowns and lace and what not. But with a gun to all of our heads, this is going to be a crash course. I'm sure neither you nor James were looking forward at having two Moms even a week ago. But ... yes, I was more than just sneaky at getting your father, and since I've said sorry to your mother, I'm going to say I am sorry to both of you too. I certainly wasn't counting on getting pregnant. And I never meant to be the second to last nail in the coffin of your parents' marriage - the last, of course, was Lisa Lumby, and I'm sure she'll tell you both and your Dad she's sorry too, real soon. But I want to do everything I can to stand by you guys."
"Sooner or later, Felicity, the truth will come out," said James, "and no one will care if you are remorseful or not for what you've done or if you are a completely changed woman as we both believe you are now. No explanation might save you from your critics, and a lot of your followers will feel let down. They probably are already now that you've admitted you slept around as much as you did - and not just with Dad."
"I'll cross that bridge when I get there, Jim," said Felicity. "What's important now, is that we truly do mesh together. Because now it truly is all of us or none of us."
"All right then," said Peter. "Let's get down to supper - ready guys? Serveuse - " summoning the waitress " - For me, how about, um, salade césar, profiterole, rôtissoire bifteck sur riz, tourte cerise, et gingembre, s'il vous plaît?" - Caesar salad, cream puffs, steak skewers on rice, cherry pie and ginger ale. James and the women in turn made their selections, trying to enunciate in French without giving away they were still rough with it.
"Speaking of which," Ruthie said once the orders was taken, "I heard that Ed Sanderson was at Casa Anaheim and made a run for it just one hour before the raid. Unbelievable - we were so close to getting the bastard who raped Lisa, Hope, Cathy and Rita - and he got away again!"
"That's not good news," said Felicity, "because he may be behind the threat. We need to warn the junior pastors to be on the lookout! Their children are targets too - and all the women pastors to boot."
"We all agreed, strict radio silence," said James.
"No, I can't keep silent on this! I'm going to the nearest station of the provincial police, the SQ - Sûreté du Québec - and let them know Sanderson is on the run. At least they can get in touch with our friend Jeanne-Marie with the Mounties." Inspector Charbonneau, who was supposed to be now posted at Interpol, was granted a deferment of that tour until the present investigation wrapped up, and was instead at a station in an unnamed city in New Brunswick. "She can then put an APB on Ed just in case he tries to cross the border - which I suspect he might to evade American law enforcement. I'm going there right after supper!"
Half a continent away, Cyril Jackson Whirry, the self-styled "Pastor General" of his church, was about to begin his weekly broadcast to the "wild feed" that television stations on which he bought ad time would download for air at a later date during the week. He was still grilling over the news that the Anderson parents had been arrested.
He was inside the underground bunker he built for the television studio where he taped his program. He had reason for this - back in the 1990s a truly bizarre and heretical white supremacist preacher from Arkansas was doing a show live across the continent when someone at the front table of the "chapel" starting calling him a blasphemer. Of course he was, but the preacher would broach no criticism. He quickly grabbed his briefcase from under his desk. The feed went to a photo of the church and a satellite dish, but the audio was still audible: "Here, pump this 9 mm into that boy!" When a comedy show picked it up a few days later, the preacher inadvertently got more publicity than he wanted - not just the ridicule from millions of unwanted viewers but also in particular from a civil rights group that had long criticized him for hating Jews but now used the video as proof he wasn't so much insane as he was motivated to carry the torch for the so-called "Christian Identity" cause. But any publicity was good because he managed to get about 10,000 more like-minded donors when he was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Flurry didn't want any interruptions from anyone, even his "students" - he had armed guards patrolling the campus day and night.
Earlier, he had typed up a lengthy statement that he posted on his website about the arrests. He said people should not rush to judgment until a trial was held. But he also indicated he supported his rivals / friends pointing out that Felicity Foster Hunter admitted to promiscuity and Hope Anderson to fraud on a huge scale. He asked why two women like that should even be trusted. Not that it really mattered anyway - his church and its antecedent were long opposed to women in the workplace anyway.
He was scheduled to do his sermon on an old subject - the so-called '7 revivals of the Roman Empire', something he believed in even though it was dismissed for decades by scholars on world history. Instead, he decided to make a frontal attack on Felicity and Hope - the first time he ever directly targeted anyone on television. He had once called a former federal legislator a traitor for presenting a different viewpoint on American policy to foreign leaders other than the official one of the incumbent executive, and a former President naïve about the Middle East. But both of these "editorials" were in his magazine. This time he was ready on the offensive in real time.
What he did not know was that an insider who did not like how much worse the church had gotten in the last six months with Whirry getting even more radical and maniacal - banning access to social media was the last straw for him - put the studio on a live web feed on the church's website. It was a secret hidden page, set to deploy just ten minutes prior to air - ten to send out a mass e-mail to dissidents to contact their evangelical friends and quickly spread the word to tune in, and two minutes for the test pattern, just like Peter had done for Felicity.
Ruthie and the gang got tipped off about this feed prior to their going into hiding, so they pulled up her laptop, logged into the rental house's wi-fi and recorded the entire streaming session. They were shocked to see a man, as he was setting up and who previously said that Jesus drank in moderation, on a bender.
It was a matter of public record, despite the attempts of Whirry to make it go away, that he had been busted for several DWI offenses across the United States - in seven states in fact. How he managed to get back on the road relatively quickly was explained by the fact that none of the states had reciprocity with each other for moving violations or insurance carriage. If they had, Whirry would have gotten second or third offenses until finally his license would have revoked for a year or longer. When the reports were leaked, Whirry and his son said that they had come "from Satan" even though both their signatures - the father acknowledging the authenticity of the reports and that he had read them even if he disagreed with their content, the son who bailed him out every time to his ever increasing annoyance - matched the signatures they used for their propaganda magazine.
"Boy, our church will just love this when I post this on our website - and then when we post it on YouTube it will really carry over," said Felicity, daring to speak in English for the first time in nearly a week.
"I thought that stupid faith healer Penny Flynn was over the top on her benders during her so-called 'layovers,' but this is ridiculous," said Heather. "I don't think pathetic covers it."
"Not to mention all the spam Whirry sends," added Peter.
"What? Whirry spams?" Ruthie was shocked.
"You didn't know that, Mom?" said James. "It'll be a 'message from Jesus' but it links directly to 'The Ram's Horn', the church mag's website. "More accurately, a page with everything you want to know (and a lot you don't) about Whirry."
"Isn't that illegal? Sending spam?"
"The cops don't want to get involved, Mom. That convenient thing called the First Amendment."
"You can't yell fire in a crowded theatre!"
"Apply that to every church, and everyone would have to shut down."
"True enough," admitted Ruthie, "but if they are committing fraud like Prudence and Harrison?"
"It's been way harder to make a case against Whirry, sister," said Felicity. "Of course he's using fraud but they hide their financials even better than the Andersons. They use a five twenty-seven structure which means absolutely no public scrutiny. It's what you'd use for something like, say, a tax shelter. It's way worse than a five-oh-one whose returns are public information. Most televangelists use the latter and belong to industry accountability organizations. Whirry and Flynn, among others, use the former and say such returns are only God's business. Whatever. So far, Whirry's been a tough nut to crack.
"You and I both know he's a heretic. But money wise? I'd pay in the tens of thousands to get my hands on just two or three of the tax returns. No matter how hard you try to hide money, I could pick out the deceit quite easily. I have with most of the other 527 televangelists that will get arrested in mass raids - tonight - all with returns that were leaked to me, all of which I turned over to the grand jury a few weeks back."
Ruthie and her family were shocked. They had no idea that this was going to happen.
"Billie tipped me off prior to our getting onto the paddy wagon. I couldn't tell you because the FBI and the Secret Service needed to do a final verification of my numbers before they make their move later. It won't be the death blow for televangelism but it will make a lot of followers wake up from their complacency."
But none of them, including Felicity, could be prepared for what happened during the broadcast. True, what Whirry was saying about Hope and Felicity was beyond libel and he was going to face a huge lawsuit after this night. But it was what was on screen during the wild feed that was the shocker. For the hacker carefully included captions timed to appear at various points of the show, that made even the usually suppressed filming crew laugh in stitches behind the soundproof one way window, hopeful their liberation was at last at hand. These messages included:
"Whirry has been busted for DUI in 22 states, not 7."
"He claims our religion prohibits voting, but he has been a registered Republican his whole life, in fact he ran ten years ago for city council under a fake name."
"He can often be found in the arms of call girls - in nearly every major city in the country - at a thousand bucks per hour or more."
''While our church claims a strict prohibition on gambling, he goes to Vegas every other weekend. His favorite game is baccarat, with minimum bets at $1000. After all, it's the only legal numbers racket there is. Oh ... did we mention he uses parishioners' money too?"
"More than half of the female staffers have given him blow jobs - and he has gone down on most of them. Slept with most of them too. Reason: so they can get their student loan applications 'approved.' Strange because as an unaccredited university, we're not even supposed to have access to federal loan guarantees. He has a female friend inside the IRS' office in OKC, who he screws regularly to make sure the feds look the other way."
"We took in $520 million last year - $480 million came from double tithes from our 60,000 members who earn an average of $40,000 per year each. Only $40 million were 'free will' (yeah right!) donations from viewers and listeners. $375 million of the pot went to loan servicing payments on the university campus, the concert hall, seven cattle ranches we own across the Midwest, and margin calls from the stock market crash in 2008 we're still paying off."
"Is this serious?" asked Heather in shock.
"Oh, it gets better, sweetheart -" said Felicity. " - I know some of this already but this guy must know something I don't."
"He keeps two sets of books. Has for years. He was supposed to pay the government $5 million in income taxes over the last five years. He only paid $34,000, total."
"He attends Klan rallies twice a month - and we have proof of this on videotape."
"He and his wife haven't had sex in fifteen years ... well, consentual sex, we'll get back to that one shortly ..."
The gang leaned forward in anticipation, as there was a longer pause than between the previous captions and Whirry continuing his misogynist diatribe.
"Why isn't the film crew stopping tape?" asked Ruthie during the pause. "I would have ordered take two a long time ago."
"A wild feed live to tape is just that, live to tape," said Felicity. "That's how I do my radio shows and webcasts on the rare occasions when I do have to tape - I'm usually live as you know. Whirry never does editing because he's so polished he only needs one take. But I'll bet you, the film crew knows they've been hacked and they don't care. They've wanted to be Daniel throwing the king into the lion's den for so long that they won't let this opportunity slip by.
"The best part is this: The vast majority of TV stations who've sold air time to Whirry don't review it either - almost never, ever preview it. They don't even use videotape anymore - it's just a compressed digital file much like when you use a digital video camera although with much higher resolution. It's not even sent by satellite to most stations but distributed from behind a pay wall. The only clue is when they hit the play button, and unless they're waving a Nazi flag or burning crosses they'll just let it play unedited. After all, they're just living up to their end of the bargain after starting the show with the phrases 'The opinions expressed in the program are those of the participants and not necessarily those of this station' and, for faith healing shows, 'Events shown in this broadcast are not typical of the average participant - your results may vary.' So the station is absolved of any legal responsibility."
"So what is mystery man or woman going to say next?" inquired Heather.
"Whatever it is, daughter," said Peter, "it may cause an earthquake."
He was right. The next message came in a series of flashes.
"However, we can report that about twenty-five years ago he began sexually abusing his daughter from the time she was fourteen. This lasted three years under threats of serious physical harm if she reported it. At university, she had a 'minder' from this church who constantly raped her, also under threat of reprisals. After she came back from university, the relationship with her father resumed and after a few months became a truly consenting one, one that lasts to this day, with the woman now in her late thirties. Yes, they practice incest with impunity.
"And it gets better. Despite our strict ban on abortion, she has had three, once because of Down's Syndrome, and twice because she didn't know who the father was - her husband or her father. Best part is, her husband doesn't even know nor does her mother - well, after watching this episode, they will. The daughter does have two children, both of which are her husband's - but only after she used trickery to get him to give a DNA sample to confirm paternity. Otherwise she would have aborted them, too.
"One last thing - thanks to that often misinterpreted verse about women who are supposed to be subject to their husbands, Pastor Whirry has raped his wife for years; and she is so out of the loop, and literally imprisoned in her house, she doesn't even know that spousal assault is a crime. For her forced submission, she gets an 'allowance' of a million dollars per year even though she has no official duties. What does she do with the money? Well, all news sites are banned from her internet connection, as well as any sites that would tell her that what's happening to her is a crime, and any sites that would demonstrate that our church defies the Bible's plainest teachings. So she engages in that wonderful thing called retail therapy, online. The real premium ones. She has more wardrobes than she could wear every day for the rest of her life. The finest perfumes. And ten thousand pairs of shoes. Yes, ten thousand."
The Petrowskys were not ready for this. Felicity had been investigating Whirry's financials for years, but she had no idea about any of this either.
"Oh ... my ... God," she gasped. "Whoever is writing this, he or she is literally risking his or her life. When this goes on air this weekend, the shit will hit the fan, and that's putting it mildly."
"We should see the first wave in as little as one hour," said Ruthie. "His show broadcasts in New Zealand late Saturday morning their time. This will go viral in no time once people realize the website feed wasn't a punk. That it will look like this came from the ministry itself."
"The man who praises the purity of young women, exploits them. Even blood," seethed Heather. Although she was only seven, she was analyzing this like a grown up cop. "Using church money for personal fun - who knows what his gambling debts are at this point. If he's been caught in twenty-two states DUI, how many times has he been drunk and not gotten caught? And to top it off, he makes the Tea Party look like communists - and he votes to make sure his party goes even further right. I'll say it right now - I actually lean Republican, but I think that means personal freedom. The kind he's against openly. But he sure feels free to do what he damn well pleases."
"Well, forget child abuse - the source says he has proof Whirry has evaded taxes," said Felicity. "I don't think you can get away with writing off only gambling losses because you can only do that if you have gambling winnings. And even if he is luckier than most ... if he owes a million a year that means his salary is between two million five, and three million bucks. Either his church is overly grateful in paying his stipend ... or he's been stealing money from the church which is much more likely. And that's over his borrowing money for gambling and buying his daughter's silence about their relationship."
"If they're paying that much interest and penalties, that leaves the church with just over a hundred million per year," said Ruthie. "Their administration costs to run the church day to day must be enormous. I'll reckon, on top of a three mill stipend, he has an almost unlimited spending allowance. Who knows what the other family members are getting - including the daughter's payoff to keep the incest quiet; or if she has money of her own, how much she's paying her father. Ashley was right - The Work means personal enrichment, and nothing with spreading the Word. Which is heretical in so many respects. If ever we've needed discernment it is now. Which leaves us only one choice."
"I know what you're thinking sister, and you're right. Hope and I need to break our silence - our collective silence - and do a joint emergency podcast. It only has to be fifteen to twenty minutes. But, hard as it is, we need to tell the world now about our living arrangement, that I'm married to Peter and Hope is living as a permanent guest of the Parkers. Once the blood work comes back after my missed period, we'll announce Peter and I are expecting too."
"Honey, why now? This could be our downfall!" gasped Peter.
"No it won't. As conniving as I was in getting to where I am, I didn't break any rules," said Felicity, standing up. "Whirry is a criminal writ large. I've always known it, but this episode is the smoking gun. As long as we continue to stress we're not perfect but are still servants of Christ - all of us, including the kids here - we should do fine. Don't forget Peter, we compromised our principles briefly but we created two human beings and we are not having an abortion. If you say something you have to mean it and do it. That makes our family different from the Whirrys. Different from the Andersons, and different from all the false prophets out there. We have to keep the upper hand. Once the medical evidence proves what God told me, we'll go public - period. And no matter what Billie said, we are all going back to Saint Louis tomorrow. Hope and I will do the podcast at two in the morning saying we'll have more to say on Sunday. We then drive back to Montréal early in the morning and take the first flight back, no matter how much it is. Actually, I do have a ton of frequent flier points so we can all fly first class for free, with plenty of points left over. I'll get first class passes for the Parkers and Hope too."
"What if one or more of us dies?" asked Heather. She understood now their lives were truly in danger for being willing to be honest about who they were, and to face the music. There was a pause as the last captions were shown:
"Let's face it folks ... this church and our competitors is a breakaway branch of the SDA's, with a mix of conspiracy theories, White Nativism (you know that already) and the so-called 'Messianic Judaism'. A Jew can never be a Christian, and vice versa. You can be one, the other, or a practitioner of another belief system. You can't be some or all of these, just one.
"So do yourself a favor. Don't donate to us, another BI church or any televangelist, even the legitimate ones. Donate your money to a faith based organization that helps people without regard to faith and doesn't shove their faith in people's faces. The Salvation Army, Catholic Relief Services, Saint Jude's Hospital ... there are too many but there are a lot of good ones. It can be national, it can be local.
"But please, put this church out of its misery. Because we can't bear it anymore. Pastor Whirry is a charlatan, not an 'Ambassador for Peace'. He needs to be stopped. He wants to trigger Armageddon. Unlike most on air personalities he has the ability to do it. Don't let him!"
"Like Dad said, quoting a famous actor from Canada, 'Death is a side effect of living,'" said her mother, once the captions ceased. "If we do get killed, I don't think that'll make us martyrs; but just as Sarah said she's willing to die if she is the last member of the Remnant, we just might - dead or alive - inspire others to rise up and investigative reporters to put their gumshoes back on and finally give the Word of Faith and British Israelism the death coffins they so truly deserve."
She put out her hand, palm down. The other four places theirs on top of hers in a stack.
"All for God ..." said Ruthie.
"... and God for all!" chorused the others.
Meanwhile, Whirry finished up, still oblivious to the fact he had been hacked. He ended with the closing line of his predecessor, "Good bye friends."
"Adieu, monsieur, et bon débarras!" snorted Heather at the feed on the laptop. Farewell, sir, and good riddance.
Late the next day, both posses were back in Saint Louis. To their relief, Hope's and Felicity's message got hugely positive comments on the church's website - fifteen to one in favor and with thousands offering their congratulations to the newlyweds as well as best wishes for Ruthie.
As soon as the baggage was claimed, they all headed out to the taxi stand.
Billie and Kevin were waiting outside, along with a local cop. They had bad news for Hope: Her brother, Patrick, had been shot. While he was expected to survive, he took a bullet to the thigh, had lost four pints of blood, and was in intensive care although fully conscious.
Hope screamed, and fell. Her head hit the ground. After blacking out for two minutes, she finally came to and slowly got up.
When she was back on her feet, a bottle of water was handed to her. After she downed it, and sat in a wheelchair that paramedics had rushed in so she could go to the hospital for observations and could check on Patrick, she asked Ruthie, "Sister - do you have your rifle?"
"Yeah," said Ruthie, "I have a dozen - but they're in lockup in my basement. Trigger locked. Peter and I don't take chances."
"May I borrow one of them, please?"
"Why?"
"I'm putting an end to this, once and for all. I have to. Ed did this - no question. I have an idea where he is, and I'm going to confront him. If he pulls his rifle, I'll blow him away and claim self-defense. I can't wait for Tom. I have to do this myself. For all of us!" The paramedics rushed her to the hospital, and she was put into protective custody at the children's intensive care unit so she would not be harassed.
Meanwhile back in Oklahoma, Whirry found out he had been punk'd. He threatened to disfellow everyone who worked at or attended school on campus, but decided to hold off. After all, most of the money was offshore, in countries and colonies that never cooperated with any other country investigating tax evasion. The allegations were unproven. He was safe for now. And as long as he had his lifeline with Ed Sanderson, he could still have the Doomsday Summit he had been preparing for years for, no matter who it was with. The beginning of Christ's dictatorship had to begin as soon as possible, and the sooner the better.