The Antiquities Dealer by Ed Protzel

Author:Ed Protzel [Press, TouchPoint]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TouchPoint Press
Published: 2018-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Cain and Abel

The first thing I Googled was Reverend Nation. He had been the first to break from Israel to return to St. Louis. Regardless of my gut feelings—that the guy couldn’t be behind the Moise Shankman or Levi Asher murders—his own actions had made him the Number One suspect. One strike against him: he could have shot his TV sermons in Israel; his backdrop sets were canned. His writers and producers had followed us to Israel on commercial aircraft, so he had everything he needed when he arrived in Jerusalem. To paraphrase what he himself had pronounced, “the Beast will achieve power by convincing the world he is the ‘good guy.’” And nobody’s much more of a good guy than the reverend, except for his having kidnapped me, blackmailed me, and stuck me with a bodyguard to track my every move.

Bear? Another seemingly “good guy.” Oy.

The good reverend was suddenly trending big on the net and subsequently on the news. A photo of him shot from a distance, sans hairpiece, was appearing on web sites throughout known civilization. His people had denied that the fuzzy, distant photo was the reverend, but they later retracted their denial. Having seen him up close in his baldpate state, I could certainly confirm that the images on the screen were, indeed, Reverend Nation. I felt a bit bad for old Hubris. Here he’d dedicated his sober life to bringing Jesus into the hearts of the masses and preparing America for the End of Days, and all anyone wanted to do was sneer at his hair loss.

Ain’t America a great country?

Taking advantage of the reverend’s current notoriety, an industrious journalist had recently blogged about an investigation into his purported Blood Diamond connections—guns for diamonds—to the Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa, a terrorist organization responsible for crimes against humanity. In response, or cashing in, the blogosphere was going wild with speculation and commentary on this purported offense. I speed-read the original story and found myself more than half-convinced, but there were some highly tenuous major points that definitely required more proof. Besides, allowing for some latitude, would Reverend Nation be party to all the details of his far-reaching empire? Even if the stories are true, unbeknownst to the reverend, a subordinate could be behind the illicit trade.

Dismissing the bloggers’ guesswork, I searched further until I found the link for the reverend’s latest telecast. But within seconds, it was obvious the episode had been in the can before his meeting with Ari. Not only was his wig in place, but he was wearing the Rolex and Super Bowl-like ruby ring that he’d used to tip the hotel’s servers. The sermon was based on the Amos quote from the Bible, “The Lord roars from Zion,” and the Lord was certainly roaring these days, with political turmoil, revenge plots, demonstrations, Knesset speeches, PM Cabinet shuffles, any number of denunciations of Israel from Iran, and the spectrum of jihadi terrorists, even from the normally restrained monarchs of so-called moderate U.

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