THE ALPHA PROJECT
Editor’s note – So how’s the new one coming along? Slow, as always. We’ve had some terrific rows at MCJ Creative lately. Some of us basically want to kill almost everyone off, others don’t. Right now, the Editor is leaning toward the former position [he said, winking vigorously].
I’ve said this before so do with it whatever you want to. I think that I’ve taken this character as far as I can take him so this one, however many episodes it eventually contains, will probably be the last one. So if any of you want in, leave a note to that effect in the comments. I can’t guarantee that you’ll get in but I’ll try.
But in lieu of interesting material, here’s another oldie.
A “Chris Johnson, Anglican Investigator” blast from the past:
Chapter One – Spring Forward, Fall Back
I remember that particular day as one of the best in my life. I hadn’t had a case of any kind in forever. All I’d been doing was sitting around letting my investments make me even more of a fortune while watching my various idiotically lucrative side businesses make me tens of millions more than that.
Nicky was out shopping. I sat out on the deck watching my son Paul play with his friends. They were loud but I didn’t care. As I frequently did whenever I watched my son run and play, I thought back to the way my life used to be. To me, their loudness sounded almost musical.
As I sat there, I wondered, “Why, Lord? You know what I was. What have I ever done for you that you would give me all this? I’ve got a healthy, happy son, a wife who still blows me away every time I look at her and more money than anybody should be allowed to have. I don’t get this, Lord. I don’t get this at all.”
That evening, I dismissed Nicky from the kitchen(an idea that my wife vigorously opposed until I reminded her that I had the spatula and I knew how and where to use it) and cooked dinner myself. Perfectly, of course.
That night, I got Paul into bed and read him his favorite story. Twice. Then I kissed my son goodnight, Nicky and I split a bottle of Brunello and we went to bed.
As my beloved wife dropped off to sleep to the sound of a violent thunderstorm, the greatest sleep inducer in the world, I held her in my arms, still staggered that she had married me at all.
I awoke with a violent headache. And what was in my arms was not my wife but a bottle of Ten High bourbon.
Somehow I had found my way to my old office in Webster Groves, I apparently spent the night and I didn’t have the slightest idea how I got there.
Immediately, I dialed the mansion only to hear that I had dialed a non-working number. Thinking I had misdialed the number, I carefully dialed it again only to get the same message.
I walked out of the office and out on to Lockwood Avenue. Then I saw Nicky walking up the street arm-in-arm with her ex-husband and a little boy who looked an awful lot like Paul. When she saw me, she looked at me with disgust.
“Nicky!” I exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”
“Ah jeez! Hello, Chris,“ she replied with a really irritated tone. “This is my husband. And this is our son Paul. We’re just visiting this dump to see my parents.”
“Is that the loser drunk?” her husband asked.
“The very one. I can’t believe I wasted my time with that piece of garbage.”
He grabbed me by the collar. “Here’s the thing, jackass. You so much as look at my wife again and I will literally kill you.” Then the man violently threw me back against the corner of the wall.
As I struggled to my feet, wiping away some blood from a cut, Nicky leaned down and whispered something into Paul’s ear. He stared at me a moment and burst out laughing hysterically. Then the three of them turned and walked east toward Gore Avenue.
I watched them leave. What the hell was going on?!
At that moment, a white Cadillac limo drove up the street. One of the back windows was down and I could see Dale and Heather Price inside along with Amy Welborn. “Dale!” I shouted, running over to it. “Heather! Amy! It’s me! It’s Chris Johnson!”
Price didn’t even look at me. “Dale Price,” said Welborn who stared straight ahead, “is not in the habit of making friends with drunken losers.”
“Get rid of him,” said Heather.
Without looking in my direction, Dale nodded at someone I assumed was a bodyguard. The man got out of the limo, grabbed me and threw me away from the car and back toward the sidewalk.
Price nodded again and the man walked over and kicked me hard in the genitals. I screamed in agony which greatly amused the Prices, Welborn and the rest of the morning crowd including a couple of police officers. Nicky, her husband and Paul all laughed uproariously.
As the crowd continued to laugh, I slowly crawled to my office door, throwing up twice which further delighted the crowd. On my way, I looked east toward Gore. As she walked away, Nicky turned around, looked back at me and smiled. “Go to hell, bitch,” I said to myself.
When I got up the stairs to my office door, I saw the cardboard “Chris Johnson, Anglican Investigator” sign and was filled with rage. I ripped the sign off the door, tore it into pieces and threw it away. Screw this damn job. Screw my entire life.
I locked the door, went out the back way, went home and began drinking. I had never felt so afraid.
This was reality. And I knew it.
But what about my other life? The one I thought I had. Was I going insane?
The day dragged on. A entire bottle of Ten High later, I staggered down to Bill(not IB)’s. The look on my face told Bill(not IB) that his usual abuse would not be appreciated so he silently poured me a stiff Evan Williams and left me alone as did the other regulars.
I have no idea how long I sat there and nursed my drink but the sun was getting low in the sky when I somehow made it back to my apartment and resumed drinking on and off. At one point, I picked up my Bible and stared at it.
Then I threw it violently against the wall and sat on my bed (my euphemism for the very old mattress and box spring on the floor). “I’ve fought for You as hard as I could,” I said to nothing in particular, the tears coming hard and fast. “And this is how you thank me? With a practical JOKE?!!
“Oh and one more thing. I don’t like being alone. It’s hard to be alone. You Yourself said that it is not good for the man to be alone. So why did you make me think someone loved me?!! Why is it good for me to be ALL ALONE?!!”
To hell with everything, I thought. And everybody, particularly her. I kept drinking. And drinking. And drinking. I intended to drink myself to death.
As I was close to passing out, I heard a loud thunderclap. I don’t know when I woke up and I kept my eyes closed for a long time. Please, God, I thought. I’m sorry for yelling at You before but You and I both know that keeping my life going is just cruel.
Somehow I wasn’t hung over and for some reason, I could hear a woman crying somewhere in the room. Finally, unable to take it any longer, I opened my eyes to tell the bitch to shut the hell up.
Then I saw who it was.
It was Nicole.
I jumped out of bed as if I had been electrocuted and stared at her and at my surroundings, unable to speak.
I was back at the mansion.
When Nicky noticed that I was awake, she ran over, grabbed me and held on hard. “Baby, I had a horrible dream,” she said through her tears, barely able to get the words out. “I was married to my ex and we were visiting Webster.
“He was mean to you and I called you garbage and I made Paul laugh at you and then someone kicked you…down there…and you screamed and I laughed and laughed and I DON‘T KNOW WHY!!” She started convulsively sobbing so I held her, kissed her and stroked her hair until she calmed down.
“Nicky?” I said, more to myself than to my wife. “I need to know something. You were wearing really hot blue jeans and a red leather jacket. Your ex wore an expensive leather New York Jets jacket. He grabbed me and threw me against the right corner of the front wall of the old office.
“Paul wore a black Mets cap, a blue Mets jacket and a blue Mets T-shirt. You were carrying a Prada purse on your right arm. The guy who kicked me got out of a white Caddy limo. I don’t know what you did with the rest of your day but you probably do. Is that how it went down?”
I’ve lost count of the number of times that my abilities have stunned my wife but this was the very first time that I had ever terrified her. She let go and backed away from me, her eyes wide. “How…how…how could you possibly have known that?” Nicole whispered.
“Because I had a piece of the same dream.”
At that moment, the phone rang and Nicky answered. It was Heather Price. “Nick, is Chris there?” she tentatively asked. “Dale and I just had a dream that’s got us pretty shook up and we were wondering if…”
My wife looked at me. “It’s Heather Price.”
“Put the phone on speaker,” I said. “H? You and Dale were in a white Caddy limo in Webster Groves, Missouri. Amy Welborn was with you and a back window was open. Suddenly, I ran up and tried to get the three of you to recognize me only you had no idea who I was.
“You wanted Dale to get rid of me so he nodded at one of his bodyguards who got out, grabbed me and threw away from the Caddy. Then dude walked over and kicked me hard in the junk. I don’t know what you did after that. When both of you went to bed that night, there was a thunderstorm only you didn‘t notice any rain.”
“Oh…oh…oh…oh God,” Heather replied. “DALE!!”
Dale Price came on the line. “What the hell is going on, big man?!!”
“I‘m not sure,” I told him. “Get hold of Welborn right now and find out if she had the same dream. Then round up as many of the first team as you can find. Video conference in thirty minutes.”
“I’ll stay out here,” Nicky told me.
“No you won’t,” I replied. “You’re part of this too.”
Half an hour later, my wife and I sat in front of my big-screen computer. Dale and Heather Price, Amy Welborn, Mark Shea and Captain Yips were on the screen. Amy forced a smile. “Together again, huh?” she said, shakily.
“Wouldn’t miss it. Did you have that dream?”
Welborn downed a triple vodka without so much as blinking. “Yeah. Exactly the way you described it. I was a journalist with Newsweek. And Dale was some kind of rock star I was interviewing. A blues guitarist.”
“Pretty decent chops too,” said Dale, forcing a smile.
“The White House and NSA have been in touch.” Amy continued. “This phenomenon was widespread, people everywhere reported it. Interacting dreams all over the world. Chris, how is this possible? What’s going on?”
“How about you, Mark?” I asked. “Was Amy in your dream last night.”
“Yes,…yes she was,” Shea said, knocking back some vodka of his own. “I was in that crowd that laughed at you. And I saw Amy drive by only she didn‘t recognize me.”
“Had any weird dreams lately, Captain?”
“Yeah,” said Yips. “Last night. I was ordained in TEC and accepted a call to a parish in New Hampshire. Gene Robinson himself performed the ceremony when I was ordained to the priesthood, Persell, Schori and Griswold were co-consecrators and I used Godself in my sermon six times. I woke up screaming.”
“It was real as hell, wasn’t it?” I asked. “All of you can tell me everything you said and did that entire day. And all of you heard a bad thunderstorm when you went to bed before it all happened but you didn’t notice any rain.
Chances are, there was a similar thunderstorm the next time you went to bed.”
All of them looked shaken and silently nodded.
“Captain, you, Amy, Mark, Mrs. Price and Mrs. Johnson are about to be inducted into the Christian private investigator inner circle. Outside of selected elements in ECUSA and liberal Catholicism, there are exactly two people who know about this and Dale and I are both of them. Have any of you ever heard of the Alpha Project?”
With a violently shaking hand, Price drank a long gulp of Glenmorangie straight out of the bottle. “Vaguely,” said Amy. “Nothing in the way of actual details.”
“No,” said Yips.
“Okay.” I poured myself a bourbon-and-soda and began pacing around the room. “Over the years, the Christian left has tried rampaging Spong egos and forces from another dimension. It has tried brainwashing, both individually and collectively. It has tried copper neutrinos and griswoldium. But it has always lost. Why do you suppose that is?”
“Uh…you?” said the Captain.
“I’m going with Chris and Dale,” said Welborn.
“You‘re both wrong.” I held up my Bible. “It was because of this. The Word of the Living God. This is the reason why the left, both Catholic and Protestant, knows deep down that whatever victories it manages to win will only be temporary.
“It can put its people in every pulpit in America, every cathedral, parish or storefront church and it can brainwash everybody in the world and it knows that whatever victories it wins won’t EVER last.”
“Why not?” asked Shea.
“Because people can read,” Dale said. “They can open up a Bible, read it for themselves and understand it. And most intelligent people know that leftist ‘Biblical scholars‘ are the most intellectually dishonest people in the world, tailoring their ‘scholarship’ to back up whatever liberal causes they support.”
“’Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word of God,’” Yips said in a low voice.
“Exactly,” said Price. “And that two-edged sword will quickly find the contradictions between what the Word of God says and what they hear in the pulpit or what ‘Biblical scholarship‘ tells them. Then the questions begin.”
“Questions left-wing priests won’t be able to answer,” said Heather. “Contradictions they can’t explain.”
“Then come the controversies,” said Nicole. “Then the break-ups. Then the new churches which will quickly fill to capacity. Then the left has to do it all over again.”
“But what if they didn’t?” I asked. “What if they didn’t need ‘Biblical scholars’ to explain things away? What if everybody everywhere opened up their Bibles and saw just what the left wanted them to see?”
“That’s not possible,” said Mark. “They’d have to completely rewrite the texts and nobody anywhere in any church would accept that.”
“People would accept it without question,” said Dale, “if the apostles and other Bible writers rewrote the texts for them.”
“But to do that,” exclaimed Amy, “the left would have to know how to…” She suddenly looked terrified, clamped both hands over her mouth, tightly shut her eyes and couldn’t finish the sentence.
I finished it for her. “Manipulate time,” I said. I looked at my wife and squeezed her hand. “And options.“ Nicky, Amy, Mark, Heather and Yips were too frightened to utter a word.
“Enter the Alpha Project,” said Price. “The research was begun by ECUSA not quite two years ago with Jesuit money. Don’t even try to track it. Outside of the research staff, only one Piskie and one LibCat at a time is permitted to know about it.
“Since they can’t take a chance that word will leak out, it’s not backed up anywhere off-site so one of the things we have to find out is where the research is going on.”
Heather looked at Dale. “How did you guys find out about this?” she asked.
“Were you looking for an answer other than the fact that Dale and I are the best in the world?” I asked her.
“So what do we do?” asked Captain Yips.
“I don’t know if it will help or matter at all but dress as inconspicuously as you possibly can. Anybody asks, you’re in from the farm or from someplace exotic.
“If you absolutely can’t avoid it, hide until that thunder-and-lightning-but-no-rain phenomenon comes around again. I assume it marks the beginning and the end of the time shift.”
“It does,” said Dale. “That night, after my bodyguard kicked Chris in the…“ He cringed at the memory of it. “…that second thunderstorm came the night of my St. Louis concert. Then I was back home in Michigan.
“Look for anybody that sticks out. Get whatever you can from them. If you can’t get close, watch everything they do.”
“All of us,“ I said, “are in this whether you’ve ever been a Christian private investigator or not. So keep your eyes open. And here’s the most important thing.
“In the past, we’ve done battle with people we can see and touch. Since ECUSA isn’t anywhere close to perfecting the process, this implies that for all practical purposes, we are going to be fighting people who don’t exist yet.“
I took a gulp of bourbon. “And we’re going to have to throw away the book.”
“Why?” asked Heather Price.
“Because chances are, they’re going to know every move we make.”
Next week – Back to the Future
I’ve said this before so do with it whatever you want to. I think that I’ve taken this character as far as I can take him so this one, however many episodes it eventually contains, will probably be the last one. So if any of you want in, leave a note to that effect in the comments. I can’t guarantee that you’ll get in but I’ll try.
But in lieu of interesting material, here’s another oldie.
A “Chris Johnson, Anglican Investigator” blast from the past:
Chapter One – Spring Forward, Fall Back
I remember that particular day as one of the best in my life. I hadn’t had a case of any kind in forever. All I’d been doing was sitting around letting my investments make me even more of a fortune while watching my various idiotically lucrative side businesses make me tens of millions more than that.
Nicky was out shopping. I sat out on the deck watching my son Paul play with his friends. They were loud but I didn’t care. As I frequently did whenever I watched my son run and play, I thought back to the way my life used to be. To me, their loudness sounded almost musical.
As I sat there, I wondered, “Why, Lord? You know what I was. What have I ever done for you that you would give me all this? I’ve got a healthy, happy son, a wife who still blows me away every time I look at her and more money than anybody should be allowed to have. I don’t get this, Lord. I don’t get this at all.”
That evening, I dismissed Nicky from the kitchen(an idea that my wife vigorously opposed until I reminded her that I had the spatula and I knew how and where to use it) and cooked dinner myself. Perfectly, of course.
That night, I got Paul into bed and read him his favorite story. Twice. Then I kissed my son goodnight, Nicky and I split a bottle of Brunello and we went to bed.
As my beloved wife dropped off to sleep to the sound of a violent thunderstorm, the greatest sleep inducer in the world, I held her in my arms, still staggered that she had married me at all.
I awoke with a violent headache. And what was in my arms was not my wife but a bottle of Ten High bourbon.
Somehow I had found my way to my old office in Webster Groves, I apparently spent the night and I didn’t have the slightest idea how I got there.
Immediately, I dialed the mansion only to hear that I had dialed a non-working number. Thinking I had misdialed the number, I carefully dialed it again only to get the same message.
I walked out of the office and out on to Lockwood Avenue. Then I saw Nicky walking up the street arm-in-arm with her ex-husband and a little boy who looked an awful lot like Paul. When she saw me, she looked at me with disgust.
“Nicky!” I exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”
“Ah jeez! Hello, Chris,“ she replied with a really irritated tone. “This is my husband. And this is our son Paul. We’re just visiting this dump to see my parents.”
“Is that the loser drunk?” her husband asked.
“The very one. I can’t believe I wasted my time with that piece of garbage.”
He grabbed me by the collar. “Here’s the thing, jackass. You so much as look at my wife again and I will literally kill you.” Then the man violently threw me back against the corner of the wall.
As I struggled to my feet, wiping away some blood from a cut, Nicky leaned down and whispered something into Paul’s ear. He stared at me a moment and burst out laughing hysterically. Then the three of them turned and walked east toward Gore Avenue.
I watched them leave. What the hell was going on?!
At that moment, a white Cadillac limo drove up the street. One of the back windows was down and I could see Dale and Heather Price inside along with Amy Welborn. “Dale!” I shouted, running over to it. “Heather! Amy! It’s me! It’s Chris Johnson!”
Price didn’t even look at me. “Dale Price,” said Welborn who stared straight ahead, “is not in the habit of making friends with drunken losers.”
“Get rid of him,” said Heather.
Without looking in my direction, Dale nodded at someone I assumed was a bodyguard. The man got out of the limo, grabbed me and threw me away from the car and back toward the sidewalk.
Price nodded again and the man walked over and kicked me hard in the genitals. I screamed in agony which greatly amused the Prices, Welborn and the rest of the morning crowd including a couple of police officers. Nicky, her husband and Paul all laughed uproariously.
As the crowd continued to laugh, I slowly crawled to my office door, throwing up twice which further delighted the crowd. On my way, I looked east toward Gore. As she walked away, Nicky turned around, looked back at me and smiled. “Go to hell, bitch,” I said to myself.
When I got up the stairs to my office door, I saw the cardboard “Chris Johnson, Anglican Investigator” sign and was filled with rage. I ripped the sign off the door, tore it into pieces and threw it away. Screw this damn job. Screw my entire life.
I locked the door, went out the back way, went home and began drinking. I had never felt so afraid.
This was reality. And I knew it.
But what about my other life? The one I thought I had. Was I going insane?
The day dragged on. A entire bottle of Ten High later, I staggered down to Bill(not IB)’s. The look on my face told Bill(not IB) that his usual abuse would not be appreciated so he silently poured me a stiff Evan Williams and left me alone as did the other regulars.
I have no idea how long I sat there and nursed my drink but the sun was getting low in the sky when I somehow made it back to my apartment and resumed drinking on and off. At one point, I picked up my Bible and stared at it.
Then I threw it violently against the wall and sat on my bed (my euphemism for the very old mattress and box spring on the floor). “I’ve fought for You as hard as I could,” I said to nothing in particular, the tears coming hard and fast. “And this is how you thank me? With a practical JOKE?!!
“Oh and one more thing. I don’t like being alone. It’s hard to be alone. You Yourself said that it is not good for the man to be alone. So why did you make me think someone loved me?!! Why is it good for me to be ALL ALONE?!!”
To hell with everything, I thought. And everybody, particularly her. I kept drinking. And drinking. And drinking. I intended to drink myself to death.
As I was close to passing out, I heard a loud thunderclap. I don’t know when I woke up and I kept my eyes closed for a long time. Please, God, I thought. I’m sorry for yelling at You before but You and I both know that keeping my life going is just cruel.
Somehow I wasn’t hung over and for some reason, I could hear a woman crying somewhere in the room. Finally, unable to take it any longer, I opened my eyes to tell the bitch to shut the hell up.
Then I saw who it was.
It was Nicole.
I jumped out of bed as if I had been electrocuted and stared at her and at my surroundings, unable to speak.
I was back at the mansion.
When Nicky noticed that I was awake, she ran over, grabbed me and held on hard. “Baby, I had a horrible dream,” she said through her tears, barely able to get the words out. “I was married to my ex and we were visiting Webster.
“He was mean to you and I called you garbage and I made Paul laugh at you and then someone kicked you…down there…and you screamed and I laughed and laughed and I DON‘T KNOW WHY!!” She started convulsively sobbing so I held her, kissed her and stroked her hair until she calmed down.
“Nicky?” I said, more to myself than to my wife. “I need to know something. You were wearing really hot blue jeans and a red leather jacket. Your ex wore an expensive leather New York Jets jacket. He grabbed me and threw me against the right corner of the front wall of the old office.
“Paul wore a black Mets cap, a blue Mets jacket and a blue Mets T-shirt. You were carrying a Prada purse on your right arm. The guy who kicked me got out of a white Caddy limo. I don’t know what you did with the rest of your day but you probably do. Is that how it went down?”
I’ve lost count of the number of times that my abilities have stunned my wife but this was the very first time that I had ever terrified her. She let go and backed away from me, her eyes wide. “How…how…how could you possibly have known that?” Nicole whispered.
“Because I had a piece of the same dream.”
At that moment, the phone rang and Nicky answered. It was Heather Price. “Nick, is Chris there?” she tentatively asked. “Dale and I just had a dream that’s got us pretty shook up and we were wondering if…”
My wife looked at me. “It’s Heather Price.”
“Put the phone on speaker,” I said. “H? You and Dale were in a white Caddy limo in Webster Groves, Missouri. Amy Welborn was with you and a back window was open. Suddenly, I ran up and tried to get the three of you to recognize me only you had no idea who I was.
“You wanted Dale to get rid of me so he nodded at one of his bodyguards who got out, grabbed me and threw away from the Caddy. Then dude walked over and kicked me hard in the junk. I don’t know what you did after that. When both of you went to bed that night, there was a thunderstorm only you didn‘t notice any rain.”
“Oh…oh…oh…oh God,” Heather replied. “DALE!!”
Dale Price came on the line. “What the hell is going on, big man?!!”
“I‘m not sure,” I told him. “Get hold of Welborn right now and find out if she had the same dream. Then round up as many of the first team as you can find. Video conference in thirty minutes.”
“I’ll stay out here,” Nicky told me.
“No you won’t,” I replied. “You’re part of this too.”
Half an hour later, my wife and I sat in front of my big-screen computer. Dale and Heather Price, Amy Welborn, Mark Shea and Captain Yips were on the screen. Amy forced a smile. “Together again, huh?” she said, shakily.
“Wouldn’t miss it. Did you have that dream?”
Welborn downed a triple vodka without so much as blinking. “Yeah. Exactly the way you described it. I was a journalist with Newsweek. And Dale was some kind of rock star I was interviewing. A blues guitarist.”
“Pretty decent chops too,” said Dale, forcing a smile.
“The White House and NSA have been in touch.” Amy continued. “This phenomenon was widespread, people everywhere reported it. Interacting dreams all over the world. Chris, how is this possible? What’s going on?”
“How about you, Mark?” I asked. “Was Amy in your dream last night.”
“Yes,…yes she was,” Shea said, knocking back some vodka of his own. “I was in that crowd that laughed at you. And I saw Amy drive by only she didn‘t recognize me.”
“Had any weird dreams lately, Captain?”
“Yeah,” said Yips. “Last night. I was ordained in TEC and accepted a call to a parish in New Hampshire. Gene Robinson himself performed the ceremony when I was ordained to the priesthood, Persell, Schori and Griswold were co-consecrators and I used Godself in my sermon six times. I woke up screaming.”
“It was real as hell, wasn’t it?” I asked. “All of you can tell me everything you said and did that entire day. And all of you heard a bad thunderstorm when you went to bed before it all happened but you didn’t notice any rain.
Chances are, there was a similar thunderstorm the next time you went to bed.”
All of them looked shaken and silently nodded.
“Captain, you, Amy, Mark, Mrs. Price and Mrs. Johnson are about to be inducted into the Christian private investigator inner circle. Outside of selected elements in ECUSA and liberal Catholicism, there are exactly two people who know about this and Dale and I are both of them. Have any of you ever heard of the Alpha Project?”
With a violently shaking hand, Price drank a long gulp of Glenmorangie straight out of the bottle. “Vaguely,” said Amy. “Nothing in the way of actual details.”
“No,” said Yips.
“Okay.” I poured myself a bourbon-and-soda and began pacing around the room. “Over the years, the Christian left has tried rampaging Spong egos and forces from another dimension. It has tried brainwashing, both individually and collectively. It has tried copper neutrinos and griswoldium. But it has always lost. Why do you suppose that is?”
“Uh…you?” said the Captain.
“I’m going with Chris and Dale,” said Welborn.
“You‘re both wrong.” I held up my Bible. “It was because of this. The Word of the Living God. This is the reason why the left, both Catholic and Protestant, knows deep down that whatever victories it manages to win will only be temporary.
“It can put its people in every pulpit in America, every cathedral, parish or storefront church and it can brainwash everybody in the world and it knows that whatever victories it wins won’t EVER last.”
“Why not?” asked Shea.
“Because people can read,” Dale said. “They can open up a Bible, read it for themselves and understand it. And most intelligent people know that leftist ‘Biblical scholars‘ are the most intellectually dishonest people in the world, tailoring their ‘scholarship’ to back up whatever liberal causes they support.”
“’Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word of God,’” Yips said in a low voice.
“Exactly,” said Price. “And that two-edged sword will quickly find the contradictions between what the Word of God says and what they hear in the pulpit or what ‘Biblical scholarship‘ tells them. Then the questions begin.”
“Questions left-wing priests won’t be able to answer,” said Heather. “Contradictions they can’t explain.”
“Then come the controversies,” said Nicole. “Then the break-ups. Then the new churches which will quickly fill to capacity. Then the left has to do it all over again.”
“But what if they didn’t?” I asked. “What if they didn’t need ‘Biblical scholars’ to explain things away? What if everybody everywhere opened up their Bibles and saw just what the left wanted them to see?”
“That’s not possible,” said Mark. “They’d have to completely rewrite the texts and nobody anywhere in any church would accept that.”
“People would accept it without question,” said Dale, “if the apostles and other Bible writers rewrote the texts for them.”
“But to do that,” exclaimed Amy, “the left would have to know how to…” She suddenly looked terrified, clamped both hands over her mouth, tightly shut her eyes and couldn’t finish the sentence.
I finished it for her. “Manipulate time,” I said. I looked at my wife and squeezed her hand. “And options.“ Nicky, Amy, Mark, Heather and Yips were too frightened to utter a word.
“Enter the Alpha Project,” said Price. “The research was begun by ECUSA not quite two years ago with Jesuit money. Don’t even try to track it. Outside of the research staff, only one Piskie and one LibCat at a time is permitted to know about it.
“Since they can’t take a chance that word will leak out, it’s not backed up anywhere off-site so one of the things we have to find out is where the research is going on.”
Heather looked at Dale. “How did you guys find out about this?” she asked.
“Were you looking for an answer other than the fact that Dale and I are the best in the world?” I asked her.
“So what do we do?” asked Captain Yips.
“I don’t know if it will help or matter at all but dress as inconspicuously as you possibly can. Anybody asks, you’re in from the farm or from someplace exotic.
“If you absolutely can’t avoid it, hide until that thunder-and-lightning-but-no-rain phenomenon comes around again. I assume it marks the beginning and the end of the time shift.”
“It does,” said Dale. “That night, after my bodyguard kicked Chris in the…“ He cringed at the memory of it. “…that second thunderstorm came the night of my St. Louis concert. Then I was back home in Michigan.
“Look for anybody that sticks out. Get whatever you can from them. If you can’t get close, watch everything they do.”
“All of us,“ I said, “are in this whether you’ve ever been a Christian private investigator or not. So keep your eyes open. And here’s the most important thing.
“In the past, we’ve done battle with people we can see and touch. Since ECUSA isn’t anywhere close to perfecting the process, this implies that for all practical purposes, we are going to be fighting people who don’t exist yet.“
I took a gulp of bourbon. “And we’re going to have to throw away the book.”
“Why?” asked Heather Price.
“Because chances are, they’re going to know every move we make.”
Next week – Back to the Future
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