The Stolen Gospels Read Online Free PDF Page B

windows, which she guessed must provide a fine view of Lake Washington and the tall buildings of the Seattle skyline. Two late model imported cars were parked beside the driveway, along with a new off-road hovercraft. The garage doors were open, revealing a Cadillac and a Mercedes.
    While walking to the house, Lori noticed that the sky was a wash of gray-black with a sprinkling of visible stars. A cold wind whipped across the moonlit waters of the lake. A chill ran down the girl’s spine, but she didn’t know why. She stared up at the house, and women who were visible inside at a second floor window, milling around, talking.
    Something rustled in the bushes.
    Camilla let out a cry.
    “Just a cat,” Lori said, watching a gray-and-white feline, illuminated in yard lights, as it scurried across the lawn and disappeared into the backyard.
    The pair climbed brick steps to the creaky, wooden front porch, where Camilla rapped a brass lion’s head clapper mounted on the door. The soft tones of women’s voices could be heard inside.
    But no one answered.
    A peculiar feeling came over Lori, an odd mixture of fear and excitement.
    Camilla rapped again, but still no one came to the door.
    With a splash of headlights across the porch, a green sports car pulled into the driveway and squeaked to a stop behind one of the open garage doors. An exotically beautiful dark-skinned woman emerged and climbed the steps to the porch. Without a word she opened the door and stepped inside.
    The woman hesitated, looked back. “Are you going to join us?” she asked.
    “We rang the bell and knocked,” Camilla said, “but no one answered.”
    “I’m sure it’s all right to go in,” the woman said. She glanced at her watch. “They’re about to begin.”
    Trying to sort out her feelings, Lori went inside with the others.
    * * *
    In the front passenger seat, Styx felt the throbbing heartbeat of the V-Warrior attack helicopter as it bore him westward. The Cascade Mountains of Washington State lay in moonlight below, with their craggy tops casting fantastic shadows across the nightscape, as if the mountains were living creatures that had been frozen in time by the ice and snow.
    The aircraft looked like an ordinary transport chopper, but it had concealed gun ports and missile launchers. It was not one of the stealth aircraft that the Bureau had, because none of them were available on short notice for this mission. It didn’t matter to Styx; this disguised attack craft was all they needed.
    Glancing back into the rear compartment, he saw the eight members of his squad sitting motionless, with the portholes beside them letting in moonlight that glinted off the silver portions of their uniforms. They wore black helmets fitted tightly to their heads like second skins, with their eyes concealed behind narrow slits.
    Styx’s heart matched the iciness of the night as he thought of the Satanic women who would feel his wrath tonight, especially Dixie Lou Jackson, second in command in the UWW, just as he was in the BOI.
    “Bring her in alive if you can,” Culpepper had ordered.
    But that wasn’t Styx’s intention, and the men in his squad were fiercely loyal to him. He would do whatever he pleased.

Chapter 4

    They want a reversion to the mythical days of when we didn’t talk back as much, when women were little more than slaves to the interests of men.
    —Amy Angkor-Billings, United Women of the World

    In central México, Consuela Santos was filled with fear. A young peasant woman whose father tilled the land and whose mother cooked and cleaned for the local parish priest, Consuela had shamed her parents by bearing a child out of wedlock. She and her baby—now five months old—still lived with them in their small adobe house, but so religious were they that they had not spoken to her in weeks.
    It had been an unseasonably warm day, but now Consuela pulled her thin rebozo around her shoulders to ward off the night wind, and held her baby