They’d land in Pueblo in fifteen minutes, the pilot said. The weather there was sunny and breezy, the temperature 53 degrees, and a crowd was waiting to greet them. The Pueblo County sheriff’s department estimated it at six to eight hundred. Deputies were on hand to escort Mr. Aran and his party to their helicopter. Their luggage would follow.
How many deputies? Cochran wondered, Six? Ten? A dozen at most, and in a crowd of several hundred, there were bound to be nut cases. He took several deep breaths to activate his groggy system, but succeeded mainly in hyperventilating.
* * *
Margaret Colletti waited in her wheelchair, unaware that her hands were twisting the rosary beneath the blanket on her lap. Or that her guts were churning. Her attention was on the chartered turboprop settling in toward the end of an east-west runway. Screened by the crowd in front of her, she lost sight of it before it touched down.
She’d planned to be on the tarmac earlier, up front, among the first, but her guts had been so nervous, she’d needed to use the restroom. The process had taken considerable time. Her sister-in-law, Elyse, at only 115 pounds, had needed to support her out of her wheelchair, and afterward back onto it. When finally they got outside, the crowd was already packed against the rope set out to help control them.
Almost without volition, Margaret began her prayer. She was a modern Catholic—one more traditional wouldn’t be there—and ordinarily she’d have prayed directly to God. But somehow this time she prayed to the Virgin, the words audible to her brother holding the handles of her wheelchair.
Initially the plan had been for Fred to run interference if necessary, but Elyse had insisted on doing it. People would, she told him, get out of the way more willingly for a determined 115-pound woman than for a 180-pound man.
Margaret wished she could see more than jacketed backs. It seemed to be taking an impossibly long time. “Hail Mary, full of grace . . .” she prayed.
Her brother watched the aircraft taxi toward them from the runway. It came to a stop some two hundred feet from the crowd. A wheeled ramp was waiting, and men positioned it. A door opened in the plane’s side. After a minute, people began to disembark, led by a husky white man followed closely by a tall black: Ngunda Aran.
Fred Colletti wondered sourly what had given his sister the crazy idea that this goddamned guru could do anything for her. Anything at all, let alone heal advanced, cancerous degeneration of her knees and hips. All he could see growing out of this was disappointment. He hadn’t voiced his skepticism—Elyse would kill him—but he wished to hell they weren’t there. Maybe disappointment was what they needed, he told himself, but he didn’t like it. Maggie’d had more than enough grief.
He watched Ngunda say something to the husky man, then both turned and began walking toward the crowd and the police. The rest of the Millennium people started toward a nearby helicopter.
Fred Colletti watched the guru coming, a pink-palmed black hand raised in greeting. Well hell, he told himself, here goes nothing, and opened his mouth. “Make way!” he bellowed. “Make way for the wheelchair!” Elyse took it up at once, forging ahead. “Make way for the wheelchair!” she yelled. “There’s someone to be healed!”
Like the Red Sea supposedly had for Moses, the crowd began to part, pressing to the sides, and Fred pushed the wheelchair through the gap. Startled deputies moved to close it off, as if a bomb or gun might lurk beneath Margaret’s blanket and coat, despite the electronic screening and search she’d passed through. But Ngunda called something, and the deputies stopped.
* * *
Waiting, Margaret Colletti had been sick with an anxiety that had nearly suffocated her hope. But with Fred propelling the wheelchair at a near trot through the opening aisle, hope flared suddenly bright. Reaching the front of the crowd, she saw Ngunda not a hundred feet away, and joy surged. She heard her own voice crying out: “Heal me, Master! Heal me!” Almost shrieking it, she missed entirely Fred’s muttered, “Jesus Christ!” Her brother and her wheelchair were stopped by a deputy, just short of the rope barricade.