Storm Front

money, and Jones knew that. So the bidders were the Turks, if they were still involved—after the park shooting, they might be less interested—and the Hezbollah agent. Who was the third bidder?
    He had no answer to that.
    Then he thought about God for a while, and wondered why He would allow one of His preachers to drift so far from the paths of righteousness, especially on his, Virgil’s, time. The only answer, he decided, had to lie within Jones’s personal psychology. Some twist, some juke, some repository of wrong chemicals. You saw it often enough in preachers who taught hate, bigotry, intolerance, or who preyed on their own flocks.
    Which led him to another thought. Did the Jesuits really have commando teams? The concept was oddly attractive.
    And he thought for a few moments about Ellen. When he met attractive single women, he tended to assess their potential personal compatibility; he didn’t think he was unique in this—in fact, he thought everybody did it, automatically. There was never any mystery when somebody found somebody else attractive, or unattractive; the mystery came when somebody was obviously attractive, obviously right down the centerline of his taste in females . . . and there wasn’t even a flicker of response in his own self. Ellen was like that: she was very good-looking, had eyes like emeralds, was most of what he looked at in women. And yet he felt almost nothing. It was almost like a sisterly response. He could like her very much, but there’d never be a sexual urge involved. He sensed that she reacted to him in the same way. Strange.
    Then he went to sleep . . . for a short time.
    —
    M A N OBLES had eavesdropped on the conversation between Ellen Case and Virgil Flowers, and had been deeply impressed by two things: first, the money they were talking about, which apparently could involve millions of dollars; and second, that they were talking about Case’s father, the Reverend Elijah Jones.
    When she mentioned to Virgil that she’d known Jones, she’d choked back an impulse to be effusive about it, and had let it go with the comment that she’d known him long ago, when she was a child.
    That wasn’t the whole story; that wasn’t even much of it.
    —
    J ONES HAD long ago been called to preach at a dying Lutheran church out in the countryside. He’d agreed to do it out of charity—he was already a full professor at Gustavus Adolphus, and didn’t need the small amount that he’d be paid at the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church of Bizby, Minnesota, pop. 321.
    In fact, his church salary barely covered gas and an afternoon cheeseburger at Carl’s Diner & Fuel, Bizby’s only business. Jones had done it not because he’d been called by the Good Shepherd Church, but because he’d been called by God.
    In any case, it was at Bizby where he’d encountered Florence McClane before she became Ma Nobles. She’d been nine years old at the time, the youngest of three children of Helen McClane, part-time and later no-time wife of Hank McClane, who left for anywhere else when Florence was seven.
    After Sunday services, Jones had a children’s class, and had noticed that Florence and her brothers never brought lunch. They were supposed to tell Jones that they always ate lunch at the table with their mom, but Florence confided to him privately that, on most days, there was no lunch—perhaps an early sign of her ability to manipulate the world around her.
    So Jones, true minister that he was, went back to a youth group at Gustavus and got them to pledge a hundred dollars a week to help out the McClane family until Helen McClane could find something permanent. The hundred dollars a week got the family through the bitterest summer of the young girl’s life. She would never again eat lemon Jell-O with little marshmallows and sliced onions. . . .
    In the fall, Jones found Helen McClane a meat-cutting job at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota, and the family said good-bye to the trailer in Bizby.
    Life in Austin hadn’t exactly been a bowl of cherries, with a single mother on the night shift, and three growing children, but it was approximately fourteen thousand light-years better than Bizby. Austin had libraries and movies and local TV stations, and kids her own age. Right up to the time when Florence got knocked up in ninth grade, she’d been a happy girl; even after that first kid arrived, things had been okay. She’d managed to graduate from high school, and get a couple