With their preferred policy in place, Rex Deus started investing heavily in war industries like small arms, rubber, steel and aluminum, well aware that the United States was being drawn inexorably to war. When Pearl Harbor came they were ready, all in the name of God, and particularly in the big-dollar, American God of Rex Deus.
After the war some members of Rex Deus, the Sinclairs in particular, began buying up utilities, both in the United States and abroad. Others continued investing in oil and others in real estate and banking. As America grew richer and stronger so too did Rex Deus.
The members of Rex Deus were not cracker evangelists who preached that prayer could bring you wealth and fame and took every credit card under the sun, even the Discover Card, just so long as you called their toll-free number right now with your faith offerings. The members of Rex Deus were True Believers, as devout and fanatical as the most ardent jihadist.
By the beginning of the new millennium, the senior members of the Rex Deus order were collectively the greatest single economic force in the United States as well as being the largest religious organization, and still, after more than two hundred years of remaining completely secret and off the radar, the existence of Rex Deus was barely rumored, and when those rumors did circulate they were invariably dismissed out of hand as nothing more than the paranoid delusions of the left liberal media and addle-brained, pot-smoking conspiracy theorists.
By 2008 the only thing Rex Deus hadn't done was to elect a president, and by the end of that year, with the abomination of a black man installed in the White House, it was clear to the Rex Deus elite that something had to be done before the country was irrevocably wounded, the very core of the nation's soul riddled with the cancerous tentacles of godlessness and unholy corruption. To fight this terrible scourge, Rex Deus would need a new leader and a new plan for the country if it was to survive. Drastic measures had to be taken and taken soon. A secret conclave of the Desposyni was called.
The Skybus Air Express turboprop resumed the normal flight path corresponding to the flight plan they'd filed earlier in the day and arrived in Bangor, Maine, an hour and a half after leaving Sable Island and well ahead of the newly christened Hurricane Otto that was now sweeping over the little outpost island in the Atlantic.
By the time they arrived at Bangor International Airport the ark had been transferred to a wooden crate already Customs-sealed and listed on the cargo manifest as medical isotopes. Holliday was provided with what appeared to be a genuine United States passport with his name on it and his occupation listed as copilot.
They were waved through the Customs and Immigration checkpoint as crew, and Holliday was immediately led to a private lounge. The two watchdogs who had been on the Skybus flight accompanied them, then turned them over to a new set of caretakers in the lounge. From their attitude and their demeanor Holliday assumed they were ex-military, and he also assumed they were armed.
Half an hour later they transferred to a Gulfstream G550 business jet in the black and red livery of American Fluid Dynamics Corporation. Slightly less than two hours later they arrived in Lexington, Kentucky. They were met on the tarmac by three hard- faced black men in white shirts and dark suits and three black Cadillac Escalade vans with darkly tinted windows.
Even in the brief moment that he saw their faces Holliday knew they'd seen war in one place or another, either Iraq or Afghanistan. They had the look in their eyes of soldiers who still saw things that haunted them in their dreams. Everyone climbed into the three vehicles and then, like a downsized version of a presidential motorcade, they swept out of the airport and onto Interstate 64.
From the interstate they made the brief thirty- minute commute to the state capital of Frankfort and finally, bypassing the small town of barely twenty-seven thousand, they arrived at Poplar Hill, home of the Sinclair family for almost two hundred years.
Originally Poplar Hill had been called Stoneacre Farm, named for the boulders that had been pulled from the soil by the earliest Sinclairs, and the farmhouse had been more like the impoverished cabin mentioned in the state song, "My Old Kentucky Home."
As the Sinclairs had prospered in the company of Rex Deus the old cabin on the hill overlooking the Kentucky River and the growing town of Frankfort had been replaced by larger and larger farmhouses, eventually becoming the gigantic combination neo-Norman, Gothic and Scots-Baronial style castle-mansion that sprawled over the summit of the hill today, a stone extravaganza that came complete with a granite porte cochere at the main entrance, several Disneyland turrets, a conservatory as big as a bowling alley, two secret passages-one on either side of the massive fireplace in the study-the Sinclair coat of arms inlaid in marble on the floor of the Main Hall and a tunnel leading from the basement kitchens to the stone stables and the coach house behind the main building. Half of the original stables were still used for their original purpose and held the Sinclair thoroughbreds, and the other half was used as a garage.
The building had been erected at obscene cost by Richard Oswald Sinclair, the present Richard Sinclair's great-great-grandfather. The chateauesque mansion had been built between 1888 and 1895 in direct competition with his art-collecting colleague, George Washington Vanderbilt, who built the famous Biltmore Mansion during the same period. The two men had wagered on who would build the largest mansion in the country. Vanderbilt won, with Biltmore coming in at 175,000 square feet to Poplar Hill's 165,000 square feet. Sinclair argued that if you included the stables, directly connected by the tunnel to the main house, he should have won. The two men never spoke again.
Holliday stayed in his seat for what seemed a long time and then one of the babysitters who had accompanied them on the jet escorted Holliday into the building and across the Main Hall. The elaborate entranceway with its marble floor and soaring ceiling with the inlaid coat of arms made Holliday acutely aware that he was still dressed in the jeans, rough shirt and work boots he'd been wearing on Sable Island. Looking at his watch, he realized that it had barely been four hours since he'd been staring down the throat of a hurricane.
He wondered if Gallant had made it through the storm and silently vowed to find out about the lobsterman's fate if he got out of his present situation alive, something he was beginning to doubt. If he authenticated the bogus ark for the Sinclairs his continued existence would only be a liability. While driving into the estate he'd seen hundreds of acres of field and forest, all far from any public road; plenty of places to discreetly dispose of a body.
They turned left off the entrance hall and went down a passage that looked like something out of Bucking-ham Palace, complete with dusty Persian carpets on the teak wood floor and heavily framed and individually lit oil paintings on the green, moire silk walls. The paintings were all European, mostly of horses in battle, their nostrils flared with the scent of fresh blood, their eyes crazed as their riders sliced each other to ribbons with their curved sabers.
They passed what appeared to be the doors of an elevator and a little farther on turned into a relatively small and comfortable-looking sitting room fitted out with couches and easy chairs centered around a reasonably scaled fireplace. Above the mantel was a simply framed painting of a small terrier-like dog in full flight.
"It's a Galla Creek Feist," said an elderly, elegant woman seated in one of the armchairs and noticing Holliday's interest. She had the rasping voice of a heavy smoker. "It's the kind of dog that Daniel Boone used when he was hunting squirrel. His name was Langford's Rowdy. He was my favorite."