I leaned even more forward in my chair. I needed, wanted, to catch every syllable, as I wrote furiously in my notebook.
“But what about the president of the United States? What was his position?”
“It was not within my purview to ask such a question, nor would I have asked even if it were. Suffice to say he was a member of the nonradical arm of the Fellowship. Or at least he attended their prayer breakfasts.”
“The Fellowship?”
“The White House Prayer Breakfasts are probably what you’ve heard about.”
“With all due respect, ma’am,” I continued, “how could a prayer group who prays for breakfast even have a radical arm?”
“Arm is probably the wrong term. Fringe element is more like it. They call themselves Face of God Fellowship. Their detractors just call them the ‘Black Robes.’”
I looked at her inquisitively.
“There were a lot of judges allegedly involved.”
My mind immediately shot to the judicial panel as they walked in yesterday, resplendent in their black robes, and to my odd, out-of-nowhere comments to Dona about how they looked like Inquisitionists.
I refocused. I was there to do an interview, not to muse on life.
“All right, then. I can understand, if such an event did really happen, how there would be some, ah, sign that religious crazies around the world would interpret as evil or something but … but why would the United States get involved?”
“For one thing,” she answered rapidly, “the Girl whom they’d impregnated was American.”
You people killed an American’s baby? I couldn’t control the look of disgust on my face.
She ignored me. “And let us not forget what happened to you yesterday, Ms. Russo—and you are as typically American as they come. Third generation?”
“Fourth.”
“Sorry. I digressed. Anyway, somehow ‘it’ had been born, and the cardinal told us that their intent had been to eliminate it in utero—but they failed. He said that the pope himself believed that such a creature would have been a being without a soul, someone who could grow up, the pope feared, to destroy the world!”
“So abortion was condoned by the Vatican? That’s almost more incomprehensible than the cloning of Jesus,” I said, unable to control the snarkiness in my voice.
“Don’t be condescending, Ms. Russo,” she shot back, staring me in the eye.
“Anyway, once our sources confirmed the pregnancy—we didn’t know where exactly yet—so many of the world’s security agencies were ordered to combine forces and find this thing. That’s how significant we all believed this event to be. And, yes, for a few brief hours all the conflicts were put aside; this was just a few months before Israel invaded Lebanon, remember. The representatives of several enemy nations were able this one time to make a pact together. It was unanimously agreed that the baby and its mother had to be eliminated before this thing could wreak havoc.”
OK, that’s two Americans so far.
“My immediate boss, whose name is not relevant, was quite confident that he had a personal relationship with Jesus—and not the new one, either,” she actually joked.
“He, my boss that is, was born-again. The Reverend Bill Teddy Smythe, of the Light of God Tabernacle in Plano, Texas, became his pastor.”
“Excuse me for interrupting, Ms. Wright-Lewis, but where did this blood come from for the cloning?” Wright-Lewis got up and walked to the window. She peered out, took a brief check, and came back and turned on a table lamp, then stared at me so hard and so long that I started squirming.
“Anything wrong?” I asked her. “Is my Freudian slip showing?” She didn’t think it—or I—was funny.
“Just trying to figure out what he saw in you, that’s all.”
“Hey, you’re not the first person who’s said that to me, either!”
That softened her up a bit. “As I started to say, they were all advised about what we believed had transpired. As far as my intelligence had reported before the blackout, the birth occurred near Ephesus sometime after three A.M. Eastern European time.
“The cardinal simply said without hesitation to the assembled group, ‘This threat must be eliminated before “it,” or we, see another day.’”
Wright-Lewis got up and poured herself another generous shot of Scotch—I saw it was Johnnie Walker Blue, no less—while I tried to calm down. Was I in the home of a crazy woman, or was I hearing something so extraordinary it defied belief?
“The Mossad representative informed us that they’d had a bead on the whereabouts of this thing, this child,” she said, sipping her Blue, “to within a hundred-mile radius.