There was a long lag. “It involves more disorder and destruction than I care for. Tell me: Do you think some advance planning and organization might minimize them?”
They talked awhile longer. Gorman wasn’t interested in organization. He’d had a bellyful of it for thirty years. But he agreed to give advice from time to time, when Forsberg asked, and if he had something worthwhile to say.
49
On the morning after Lee left Seattle, Duke Cochran got a call from his editor. His Millennium articles, Nidringham told him, had gone stale. “We’re starting to get complaints from subscribers and shareholders. Have you found significant evidence of anything discreditable about the cult? Something you can run with? . . . No? Then I want you back in Chicago, prepared to do other assignments. Mainly on government. You can submit occasional Millennium pieces, but they’ll need stronger elements of contention.”
This might, Cochran told himself, be a break in disguise. It would give him resources, and more reason to investigate the relationship between the president and the ex-general. Something might turn up there yet. And he could see Adrielle again.
Cochran returned to the Cote that same day, and on the next, left for Chicago.
* * *
A few days later, a new “writer” arrived at the Cote, and was given a three-week permit to stay in the visitors’ lodge. He carried papers, including a passport, identifying him as Father Thomas Edward Glynn, S.J., of Tralee, Ireland. He was currently a doctoral candidate in comparative religion at Xavier University in Cincinnati, supposedly working on his dissertation. Millennium’s church liaison office—one person, having other duties—had not checked Father Glynn’s background or status, either with his order or with the university. His embossed clerical and student credentials seemed entirely in order.
Actually they were fictitious. And while there was in fact a Jesuit Father Thomas Edward Glynn from Tralee, he was still in Ireland. It was Thomas Corkery who’d landed at Pueblo, taken a bus to Walsenburg, and arrived at the Cote in the Mescalero. He was a cheerful, chatty man, wearing a clerical collar, an attractive brogue, and neatly trimmed red beard, recently grown.
He’d brought no weapon with him. To do so, it seemed to him, would be more dangerous to himself than to Ngunda Aran. Corkery had taken risks from time to time; even extreme risks. If asked, he’d have said it was surprising he was still alive. But his risk-taking required a reasonable prospect of success; either that or the need to counter a compelling threat to his own life.
Corkery’s approach to life and to challenges was different than most. Though he could be remarkably patient, he was basically impatient, inclined to audacity and shortcuts. But he could also be very indirect, seeming to address a situation aimlessly. In fact he never acted aimlessly. But the course he plotted could be a series of steps, each contingent upon the steps before, with its own purpose and goal. And always with an end result in mind: in this case the death of Ngunda Aran.
Twice in his past, Corkery had risked his own life gravely, in missions where the odds of success seemed poor. Risked it without anxiety. God would provide or not, as He saw fit. Thomas Corkery had no doubt at all in the reality of God, but his God was not vengeful. It was somewhat of an actuarial God, whose inscrutable ways were beyond any theological calculus.
At the Cote, Corkery was given access to Millennium’s open archives on the ministry of Ngunda Elija Aran. This allowed easy review of videocubes, audiocubes, transcripts, etc. He was not the first to be allowed that access since the destruction of the International Computerized Library. And no one would pay much attention to him while he used them.
Actually he found the archives interesting, though he saw no connection between their content and himself.
During his three weeks at the Cote, he comported himself as a student and a Jesuit. (He’d been both, before being defrocked for terrorist connections.) And when the three weeks were over, he left with notebooks of actual notes, along with a list of sources. Carelessly compiled, it’s true, but they’d do. His purpose, after all, was not a doctoral dissertation.