By the time Lt. Harry Carlisle had reached the corner, uniforms had already closed off the streets for three blocks in every direction. Union Square was probably already gridlocked, the traffic beginning to back up all the way to midtown. Carlisle took a deep breath of the crisp autumn air. It was a tense situation, but at least it was real. He was out of the Astor Place complex and temporarily beyond the reach of its internal politics, its paranoia, and its induced religious mania. He had joined the police department to chase criminals, not to absorb a lot of crap about the wrath of God and the punishment to come. Of course, back in the days when he had been a rookie patrolman, life in general had seemed a whole lot simpler. Religion had been a thing that was there on a Sunday morning for those who wanted it. It had not been a vims that infected the whole damned country.
A heavily armored blue-and-white bomb-squad truck with black-and-yellow warning bars on its rear doors was pulling up beside the prayer parlor in a flurry of lights and sirens. Reeves and Donahue, also from T7, were already there. They were standing well back, keeping a healthy distance between themselves and any possible explosion. It was the members of the bomb squad who were paid to risk their lives. T7 sifted for clues once the danger was over.
The bomb squad, in full blast armor, was off-loading its ATCO J40 search robot. The prayer parlor was one of the Good Shepherd chain, the biggest franchise east of the Mississippi. In Harry Carlisle's estimation, the prayer parlor was one of the rinkiest of dinky ideas in an ultimately rinky dink epoch. If a person wanted to talk to God, all he had to do was to plastic in, duck into a pod, and wait while his credit was checked out. If his plastic was good, the opaque cover closed and he was free, in seeming privacy, to mutter his specific needs, hidden fears, or darkest confessions into the nativity-blue microphone that was supposed to lead directly to the ear of the Almighty. The sense of privacy was illusory. The microphone also led to the deacons' central records complex in Virginia Beach. Each individual's desires, fantasies, and shameful little sins were collated, analyzed, and data-shaped. If no other action was taken, they would finally be downloaded into the memory banks by which the Good Lord, with the help of his ever-present secret police force, kept his flock on the straight and narrow. According to the deacons, God could never get enough data.
Of course, the deacons paid through the nose for their tap into the heavenly hotline. It was supposed to be a closely guarded secret, but anyone in the know was well aware that annual user fees garnered by Good Shepherd Inc. alone ran into the hundreds of millions. The deacon hierarchy would have been overjoyed to cut out the middleman and run the prayer parlors itself, but not even the deacons could walk over the fundamental principles of Christian free enterprise. Government and even religion were supposed to stay off the back of business. Thus the deacons had to lease their access to the data matrix from the franchise owners.
The robot swayed down the ramp that led out of the back of the bomb-squad truck. There were wisps of blue smoke coming from the small rotary engine set between its two sets of treads. That did not bode well. Harry Carlisle scowled. The deacons got everything they wanted while the regular cops, who in his estimation did the dirty, day-to-day work of law enforcement, had to operate with hardware that was little more than obsolete garbage. There was hardly anything in the department that was not held together with epoxy and duct tape.
The deacons themselves had arrived on the scene. Two of their big black Lincoln Continentals were nosing through the police barriers to stop on the corner of Tenth Street. They, too, were keeping their distance. The doors opened, and eight deacons climbed out of the two cars. They were the standard issue: cold-faced young men in dark suits so alike that they were virtually a uniform. Although he could
not see from where he was standing, Carlisle knew that they were wearing the tiny gold crucifix insignia in their lapels. He reached the spot where Reeves and Donahue were standing and nodded to the two detectives.
Reeves grimaced. "That J40 looks about to burn out."
"So what else is new? "
Carlisle checked his tracy. When it finally came on line, the small wrist screen showed a robot-eye view of the entrance to the Good Shepherd. The robot lumbered forward. Carlisle flicked the channel changer with the nail of his index finger. The image changed to a close-up of the bomb-squad officer who was monitoring the operation from inside the truck.
The man glanced impatiently into the screen. "What do you want, Lieutenant? I kind of got my hands full here."
The man's name was Vargas. One of the last holdout Catholics on the force, he would probably never make it past sergeant. The two men were not friends, but they knew each other by sight, and there was a certain mutual respect.