Free A Darker Justice by Sallie Bissell Page B

tow-headed brat kicked his seat, whining to his apparently deaf mother about wanting a cherry Coke. Though the plane was crammed with cranky passengers, he had not seen a flight attendant since they left San Francisco.
    Disgusted, he turned to the window. From thirty thousand feet, the mountains and ridges of Nevada looked like ironed-in wrinkles in a buff-colored quilt. Somewhere down there Las Vegas glittered like a jewel in the desert; somewhere else the Hoover Dam provided the power to make her slot machines jingle. Wurth could not see either from up here. All he saw was a crackled, sun-baked expanse of brown rock that might as well have been Mars.
    As he stared out the window with a headache stabbing into his left temple, he considered his fourteen-year association with FaithAmerica. Much to his surprise, Dunbar had made good on his promises. Though he’d easily held up his end of the deal—training the boys they sent him and eliminating the soft, unwary incumbents Dunbar wanted out—what had amazed him was the way FaithAmerica had grown as a political player. Never had the FaithAmericans wobbled in their conviction that Gerald LeClaire was the one man who could lead America back into the ways of the righteous. Touchingly loyal, they toiled like ants building a grassroots organization for LeClaire. At last count, FaithAmerica numbered two governors, eleven congressmen, and one senator among its faithful. Not bad for Dunbar, a man who had once made his living selling twenty-second spots on an all-talk radio station.
    Though Dunbar had been tempted to push LeClaire forward in 2000, he held back, sensing, somehow, that the momentum was not yet there. “Our people are all in place, but we need something to really set us off!” Dunbar had railed at him during one of his rare visits to the camp. “Some huge, irrefutable sign from God.”
    Six weeks later, it came. Wurth opened a letter sent to every FaithAmerica patriot from Gerald LeClaire himself. It delineated his hopes and wishes for “his new America” and ended with his false Solomons dream. Though LeClaire had signed the letter, Wurth knew it was Dunbar’s handiwork. This Solomon shit was the huge and irrefutable sign he’d been searching for. Wurth just wondered who the twelve Solomons were.
    The next day he found out. He was called to a secret meeting in St. Louis, where Dunbar told him that federal judges would serve as the false Solomons, and had given him a list of every judge in each of America’s twelve federal districts. His only instructions to Wurth were to make the eliminations look accidental and execute them one per month in no discernible geographic pattern. Beyond that, it was Wurth’s choice. By December 31, the twelve Solomons would need to have all passed away. Then Dunbar could present evidence of the fulfilled prophecy in Miami and the awed believers would sweep Gerald LeClaire into the highest office in the land.
    Now, Wurth thought, everything depends on me. If he didn’t eliminate this last judge in the next week, the twelve false Solomons would become just another entry in the great book of prophecies that had come to naught, and the folks who were now convinced that LeClaire was God’s own chosen might reconsider. He squinted down at a particularly dismal-looking part of Nevada and again thought of David Forrester. Right now he didn’t care if Gerald LeClaire got elected dogcatcher. Right now he just wanted to teach Richard Dunbar that he couldn’t butcher his boys when they made a mistake. Particularly not his boys who’d become Feather Men. They were simply too precious a commodity.
    The kid behind him kicked his seat again, jolting the migraine knife deeper into his temple. He could, he supposed, go back to his camp, pack his gear, and just forget about the twelfth judge. That would leave Dunbar with an unfulfilled prophecy and a fair amount of egg on his face. But that would demean him more than Dunbar. His honor as a soldier