"I know, I know, There's no reason or excuse for raping a fellow human being," said Ed to Hope. "I ... I wasn't drunk at the time, I wasn't on drugs. I had some serious anger management issues, still do ... and I took it out on you."
"But why?" asked Hope. "We loved each other. You're the first male I was ever vulnerable with. The first. I thought you had 'cured' me of being a lesbian. The sex was great, our friendship was great. We both talked about having a family. About sharing a ministry, even deposing our parents together in a coup. Then ... you did that!"
"What happened?" asked Heather. Ruthie and Peter's daughter, not Matt's ex-fiancée.
Ed was humiliated. He started to cry. But he then composed himself.
"What's there to say, little girl?" he moaned. "I changed the locks on my apartment so it was double barreled - a keyhole on both sides of the dead bolt so Hope couldn't escape. I provoked an argument, I grabbed Hope and slammed her against the wall. While she was catching her second wind, I hit her again, stripped off her clothes and forced my way into her. I made her bleed real hard. I should have apologized right there and then. But I took the coward's way out. I left town and dropped out of seminary."
"Then why did you take money from my parents to rape me?" asked Hope in desperation. 'I can ... no, I do forgive you for hurting me. But how did my parents figure into this?"
"They never accepted that you were going to be a real minister, which they never have been, as you all know," said Ed. "They knew once you took over, which you would have eventually, you would have destroyed the Word of Faith and taken down a hundred televangelists in one fell swoop. They knew you and I were dating. They saw an opening. I initially said, I kept telling them, I loved you and I wasn't for sale for any price. But then they named one. A million dollars. You know I had gambling debts, with organized crime, and I needed to get them out of my life fast. Coward that I was, I took it and ran with the money and away from the thugs.
"And that leads to Lisa here."
"Okay," said Lisa, not looking forward to hearing her part of the story.
"I knew what I did was unconventional, aberrant even, but at the time I didn't really think it was wrong on the balance. I thought a man had a right to have sex whenever he wanted and a woman just had to say yes, no matter what. Having already hacked into Hope's e-mail address book, I found Lucy's name. Through some digging, I found out she worked for Habitat for Humanity burning 'sweat equity' for a couple of candidate families. But I knew that raping Lucy would cause a huge uproar in Glen Oak, especially given how respected Reverend Camden is there. So instead, I staked out her friends on the roofing team. I discovered Lisa was the only one with a single parent. I bought her mother a drink at a bar and in no time at all I moved into the house."
"So you figured I was an easy target, since I was only sixteen at the time?" asked Lisa.
"Sick and perverted as that sounds, yes, Lisa," admitted Ed.
"Do you know how many nightmares I've had, thanks to you?" asked Lisa angrily. She was starting to sweat through her wedding gown . "Do you know you're the reason I'm a lesbian? If it wasn't for you, I wouldn't have gotten PTSD either, and Brian here and I would probably be married now. I had to break up with him because having hallucinations of you while he and I made love got to be too much for me. I'm proud he's the father of our children, but he's wanted you dead as much as Tom has! Same with the children, all four of them including Brigitte's and Tom's. I still know the exact day and time you penetrated me against my will. December seventeenth, 1999, four forty four in the afternoon. You never, ever forget your first time, whether you consented to it or not.
"Speaking of which, you have the ugliest middle leg I have ever seen. Uglier than a certain ex-President's 'distinguishing characteristics'. Before I fell in love with Brigitte, I slept with about twenty guys hoping I could be 'healed', too. And they have better looking tools than you! What was the price for me, by the way?"
"Two fifty. And Lisa, I am not asking for your forgiveness," said Ed. "I don't deserve it anyway. I'm acknowledging what I did was wrong. I know I'm going to jail for a long time. I'm saying that I'm sorry. I never should have taken advantage of you or your mother the way I did. I want that cleared up, because violating your civil rights is small potatoes compared to the rest of what I've done!"
"Like raping Cathy and Rita," said Sarah. "How could you do that to two innocent young girls? Cathy is, what, twelve or thirteen now? And I remind you, she is autistic. And Rita's eight. And Cathy started developing late, in fact she didn't even have her first period until last fall, months after you did what you did. Even worse, you made the girls have sex with each other. Making them grind and lick each other up which they absolutely detested - while you stood there, laughing! And you got paid over a hundred million dollars to do that! Most honorable men would refuse to do that even for one single dollar."
Ed burst into tears.
"If they still had the death penalty for rape, I'd gladly accept it for that," he moaned. "But don't you see? All of what I did was on orders from Harry and Prudence!"
"No!" said little Annie. She was still nursing her wounds as was her mother Deena from their horrors. "You can't pull the Nuremberg defense on us!"
The Nuremberg Defense was called that because it was used at the trials of senior Nazi officials in the aftermath of World War II, and still used by those accused of war crimes and rounded up decades later. Because a order is an order and must be obeyed, the argument was, the criminals were doing their duty and if they committed an offense or omission it was no crime at all.
"You may be able to get a lesser sentence for raping my wife and daughter," said Simon with fury, "but you can't change the fact you chose to take the money, chose to do what you did. To my women, to my friends here. The Rome Statute is clear on this. You're not immune for what you did, even if the Andersons had you at the barrel of a gun. You could have said no at any time and none of this would have happened. If this was during a civil or international war, you'd be guilty of a war crime, according to the Geneva Conventions!"
'You don't think I know that, Simon?" said Ed. "I said I don't want forgiveness. I'm saying I'm sorry and I'll say it again. And there was no money consideration in the case of you and your wife. I did it because ... the bosses told me to go after the Camdens and your family was the closest to where I was at the time. And if it wasn't that ... well, I just felt like it! I didn't care. That was the case with all of you."
The implication of what Ed had just said roiled the group. It could have been Mary. Or Lucy. Or Sarah. Or Ruthie. Or Shelby or Felicity. Or any of the detectives.
"You ... felt like it?" Maighread's tongue was dripping with the saliva of outrage. "You don't just feel like raping someone. You do it for a reason. What have they ... any of us ... ever done to you? And please, spare us the work ethic versus Social Gospel dichotomy. The two are not inconsistent with each other. Only people like you have made it out to be that way."
"It's not an excuse, I agree," said Ed. "I did it because ... deep down, I've hated women my whole life, ever since my big sister groomed me."
"You're kidding!" said Jim.
"No, I'm not. And I would have still felt that way ... except after what I did last weekend, I was horrified at what I did. And I was trying to figure out how to apologize to all of you when I heard the Doomsday Whistle from You Know Who. So let's get the first one out of the way. I'll agree to a life sentence. I'll waive my right to appeal. And I'll pay whatever forfeiture the courts deem appropriate, including compensation to the women I harmed - you four, plus Rita and Catherine."
"In exchange," said Peter, "you're going to have to give up Harry and Prudence. Everything you have. Including the part about the devices. Speaking of which, how did they get their hands on fissionable material?"
"It's a lot easier to get than you may think," said Ed. At this point, his wounds were sutured and stapled but he was still bound to the chair. "Ask Shelby and Rod."
"He's right," conceded Shelby, addressing the group. "Matter of fact, that was one of the main duties Rod and I had in the DIA - securing so-called 'loose nukes'. Under our cover as ministers and chaplains, we'd work every so often as missionaries in countries that have large supplies of uranium but less than secure administrations - in Western Africa, for instance. With our non-official covers - which put our lives on the line as this was something with which we couldn't resort to diplomatic immunity, that's how sensitive it was - we were able to stop some pretty big time arms sales. But we knew there were some who were always one step ahead of us and our allies. Yellow cake is very easy to smuggle, a lot easier than raw uranium ore. Which is why it's been such a huge problem. We've been to war, wrongly, because of it. But the next time won't be a case of crying wolf."
"How much does yellow cake cost?" asked Mary. Her curiosity was piqued.
"Right now, Mary, about thirty bucks per pound," said Rod. "That's legally traded yellow cake, mind you. It's not illegal to buy or sell it as long as it's through proper channels. And that's important to remember, because the melting point of uranium, solid or powdered, is about twenty nine hundred degrees Celsius. That's partly why nuclear power plants are as secure as they are, or supposed to be - it's the steam from such massive temperatures that creates power. A huge steam burst like that and at those temperatures, uncontrolled, would kill anyone within a couple of hundred feet, at least - forget the chain reaction from the atoms splitting and the radiation from that. Black market stuff is much more concentrated and has a lower melting point, and therefore a higher selling price - multiples of a hundred if not more. That's what made Shel and I worry so much and got us so stressed out at times. I can't count the number of close calls we and our allies have had over the years. I knew at some point we'd run out of luck. And it looks like we may have here."
"How much would you need to make a bomb?"
"To make an actual nuke ... you can't, Mary," said Deena flatly. "But a dirty bomb ... to make a place like DC uninhabitable for the next three hundred years, maybe just twenty pounds of really pure cake, and the right explosives. And a spark plug of just the right size. This is terrorism on the cheap, big time."
"But surely, honey, most border detection agencies would flag it. All the radon detectors they have at the perimeter," replied her husband.
"Simon ... you'd think. It's easier to smuggle yellow cake than it is to sneak in a Cuban cigar."
"What about plutonium, like Ed was saying?" asked Tom. "Have there been any break-ins at facilities lately?" He was holding onto Lisa's free hand.
At this, Jennifer ran to her office and retrieved a laptop. She searched for the International Atomic Energy Agency.
"Don't bother, Chief," said Shelby. "A lot of countries with nuclear programs are too embarrassed to report security threats. Developing countries don't because it makes them look like idiots. Developed ones won't acknowledge any breaches because it's a matter of 'national security'. If they are reported, the IAEA reports it to Interpol, and they won't announce in on the publicly accessible pages. There's enough material going around in the world to make over a hundred thousand legal nuclear bombs. All it takes is one not-too-smart person who can be bought of, or is just frustrated with The System, and it goes from there."
Ed shrugged.
"You start with countries with less than secure nuclear programs, but are still deemed 'trustworthy'. Like our allies in Europe," he said. "Romania, for one. It's not that hard to get past security there. And the technicians are way underpaid for the important jobs they have."
"Did you get these materials yourself?" asked Lucy.
"Nah. Harry got a letter from one of his followers there. Said she wanted to help him and Prudence get rid of the gays and countries that are tolerant of them. Offered a deal. Don't know the price, but I understand it's two hundred gallons of liquid plutonium 239 and seven hundred pounds of medium grade yellow 235. Along with a supply of C4 explosives, plastique."
"Aunt Deena, you're the one who knows about chemistry and physics," said Sam. "What kind of damage are we talking now?"
"While the Fat Man bomb over Nagasaki weighed over ten thousand pounds, its core was just fourteen pounds and had, oh, two or three gallons of plutonium," said Deena. "It killed eighty thousand people. You put together twenty of those suitcase bombs and spread them around ... the explosion spreads out slowly and not like a mushroom like you'd think ... you easily kill twenty thousand people and poison about ten times again as many. Each. The beauty is, the radiation makes the target areas become dead zones. You have to rebuild the infrastructure somewhere upwind to resettle for the next three to five hundred years. For a place like DC, you're looking at the hundreds of billions. That's the real payoff. You have previous investments in companies that are guaranteed to get the rebuild contracts - you're stroking!"
"Okay Ed," said David, "you just said you'd be okay with taking out a city block, but not a city. What's the difference to you? Killing one person is too much."
"You define your target zone, you tend to avoid collateral damage," said Ed. "You can't do that with a truck bomb, or a dirty one. Actually, in this case, it will be a dirty bomb inside of a rental truck. All of them. It will make McVeigh and his ton of solid ammonium look like he was an amateur."
"Locations, Ed, locations!" Hope was turning red as a beet.
"I don't know all of them, honest to God!" he pleaded. "They said they'd save the best for themselves. But I can tell you which ones I know of. That might you clue you in to the rest."
"Start talking."
"The stock exchanges in New York - both of them - Toronto, London, Sydney, Frankfurt, Tokyo. Congress. Westminster. The Reichstag. The holy sites. There were five they said they'd never name ... but knowing them as long as I have ..."
Ed thought for a minute.
"Got it. Jack's church, Canterbury Cathedral, Saint Peter's Square, the Sydney Opera House and the Diet."
"Diet? As in the Parliament of Japan?" asked Robbie.
"Yeah. There's just one problem you need to know, though."
"Which is?"
"You can't just defuse them. The only destruct codes are with Harry and Prudence. I don't know where or what they are, honest to God! Where the guys are being held ... or what the codes are."
"We need to find one of the drivers," said James.
"Then what? Waterboard them?" asked Heather.
"At this point, whatever it takes," her twin replied.
"We don't have to do that," admonished Shelby, "but you're right. Finding a runner is our only hope. Ed?"
"Sleeper agents. Manchurian candidates, if you will. I don't even know!"
"Can you hack into their address books and get rid of anyone you know who wouldn't?"
"Yes."
"Do it!"
Jennifer ordered the tribal police captain to untie Ed. Reluctantly, he walked over to the laptop and used his bosses' login. It took five minutes to find the name of the lead driver.
"It couldn't be!" said Ed in horror.
"Who?"
"My girlfriend on the side. Penny Flynn, the faith healer! You damned battle ax!"
"Wait ... she's happily married with four kids," said Felicity in shock.
"I've been seeing her for the last ten years. She's carrying my love children right now, too - triplets! And her husband doesn't know they're not his. But her other children do."
"Now that makes things un-complicated," snarled Sam.
"And she's going to blow Congress, according to this checklist. Let me call her and find out why she's in on this."
Ed picked up his cell phone to call the heretic of heretics.
"She not getting immunity," said Shelby, as the number was dialed.
"She doesn't deserve it, but as long as she gets this called off, that's all that matters, Reverend Connor," said Ed. "Please, let me try."
"Good luck, Ed."