Chapter 3: The Anti-Theist Delusion
I said nothing to Lermon for a moment as I looked at my father, Ranger Chief Aaron Nolan, speaking to Alex at the front desk.
I quietly answered Lermon, almost under my breath, “My father wasn’t a Ranger last time I saw him. He wasn’t even in Texas. It was Chicago.”
Lermon nodded slowly. He said, just as quietly, “Yeah. I didn’t see much of a family resemblance.”
Ranger Aaron Nolan didn’t even look at Alex but stared up at me. “Thomas.”
I said nothing to him but looked over to the desks. My kids had arrived since Lermon had come in. “Lena, Jeremy. You both remember Ranger Lermon. Ranger Lloyd Lermon, I would like you to meet my old partner, retired NYPD Detective Alex Packard.”
Lermon nodded. “Howdy.”
Alex gave a quick wave that was more like swatting the air. “Yo.”
“Everyone,” I continued flatly, “meet Ranger Aaron Nolan. My father.”
Jeremy and Lena stopped looking at their computers, then glanced towards Aaron, curious about the newcomer, the grandfather Jeremy had never met and had rarely heard of.
Aaron straightened even harder. He sneered at me, “Chief Aaron Nolan,” he corrected. “I’m from Austin.”
I refrained from rolling my eyes. He had always been proud of his rank. According to my recollection, it had been more important to him than anything else.
With that one complaint, Jeremy and Lena sighed and rolled their eyes at the same time. I didn’t know if it was because Lena and Jeremy were linked through some telepathic ability of hers I was unaware of, or if they just thought that much alike.
Alex, however, had to whip out a comeback. Ignoring Aaron entirely, he turned to me and said, “Tommy, I didn’t know you had a father. I thought you were just hatched, fully grown, when your space ship crashed.”
I smiled. Alex was always reliable for well-placed sarcasm.
I gestured for my son. “This is Jeremy. My eldest.”
Jeremy stood. He was as tall as I was, but not as wide. He also had my coloring. He had specialized in martial arts since before puberty. He looked lanky, but he weighed as much as I did, and he knew how to hit. His idea of a good time involved superheros, Legos, and taking a five-mile parkour run to the gun range to see if he can hit the target after he was exhausted.
Jeremy offered Aaron his hand as the older man stepped up a level. Aaron ignored it, but simply studied Jeremy’s outfit for the day—dark green polo shirt, matching blue jeans, and Original SWAT boots.
“No uniform?” Aaron asked.
Jeremy dropped his hand and studied the newcomer. My son’s posture had gone from relaxed to stiff and formal, which also doubled as his posture for hostile. Jeremy had little tolerance for rudeness, disrespect, and idiots, so I tensed a little.
Jeremy didn’t respond like I feared he would. His voice was calm, almost too lackadaisical. “They frown on them at the Agency, unless it’s Campus security. When you’re a spy, it’s best not to have them see you coming.”
It was rare that I heard Jeremy speak down to someone. But Aaron had managed to piss him off that badly that fast. Aaron was great at managing up, and making those above him love the image he presented to him. Anyone under Aaron usually hated his guts. It was good to see that he was consistent.
Jeremy turned, revealing Lena behind him. Lena was tall, with bright green eyes, high cheekbones, and blonde hair that came down a little longer than I’d like for law enforcement. In fact, her bright pink dress and black combat boots felt out of place for this job. But she didn’t engage in melee combat. That’s what her telekinesis was for.
Aaron sneered at her. “What are you? The distraction?”
Jeremy gave a low, soft growl. “My wife. And my Agency partner.”
Lena gave Aaron a look I knew well. She was deciding what part of his body to use her telekinesis on. I kept my hands at my waist but raised my right hand parallel to the floor and made a quick left-to-right cutting motion to keep her from doing something nasty to him. She frowned, rolled her eyes, and went back to her desk. Jeremy followed.
Aaron looked from Jeremy to Lena,, as though deciding just how much of his luck he could push. He scowled at them, then looked at me. “You don’t call. You don’t write.”
I blinked, trying to process his comment. “Yes? And?”
Aaron squared his shoulders. “I’m your father.”
I furrowed my brow and bit down on the inside of my cheek as I studied him a long moment. I tried to read his thoughts, and interpret what he wanted out of the situation. From my experience of the man, he did very little in public that wasn’t calculated for personal gain. What he could have wanted from me was a mystery.
“What does that have to do with it?” I asked, genuinely curious. “The last thing you told me was to never talk to you until I gave up my ‘God delusion.’” I gestured to the crucifixes on the walls of the office—over my office door, the arsenal entrance, and the observation room. “Obviously, I didn’t. Was there something I missed in your ultimatum? Did the conditions change when I had children? Did it expire when I hit thirty? Forty? Fifty?”
Aaron grimaced, then switched tacks. “Look, your mother became a Catholic, then decided to indoctrinate you into her crazy cult. What else was I supposed to do?”
I cocked my head, trying to wrap my brain around his logic. “You could have tried to understand? Or listen? Use all of the rationality and empathy that is supposed to be your superior trait? Or did you decide they aren’t all that superior?”
Aaron scoffed, glaring around the room for support from people he had already alienated. Finding none, he kept up with the belligerence. “I don’t need to empathize with you idiots. There’s no reasoning with you people.”
Alex groaned softly behind his desk, facepalming himself. He had been an atheist when we met—until our first possessed serial killer changed his mind about the supernatural.
My eyes narrowed to slits. My smile was slight, tight-lipped, and cruel. “That’s the ideology that led to our ultimate conversation when I was twelve.”
As a reminder, my eyes went to the hearing aid in his right ear. That was the one I had deafened with the Buntline Special. Just a reminder—guns are loud.
He rolled his shoulders, uncomfortable. “Can we go into your office? We shouldn’t be talking about this in public. It’s a family matter.”
I gave a surprised laugh, taken aback by the ludicrous suggestion. I waved at Jeremy, Lena, and Alex. “This is literally my family. But if you want to start talking about what brings you to New York...” I said, sitting down on top of one desk meant for an FBI agent we might one day be assigned. “We’re all ears.”
Aaron looked at the scars on my hands. They were holes the size of a silver dollar on the backs and palms of my hands. “What happen? Someone nail you to a wall?”
I nearly laughed, remembering how many times that had happened to me when I had bilocated. More scars were on my chest, currently covered by my button-down Oxford shirt. Instead of answering, I told him, “We’re all here. Tell us what’s up.”
Aaron looked around at us, consternation clear in his scrunched-up expression. From what I remembered, there had never been a room he couldn’t charm when he needed to. He rarely thought he needed to, but the ability was there. It was how he could be as militantly anti-faith as he was, yet was still promoted through the ranks without other cops throwing him a blanket party—a festive event where one was ambushed with a blanket thrown over one’s head, and proceeded to be used like a punching bag.
Since Aaron was busy trying to think of a way to turn the conversation back to his advantage, I looked to Ranger Lermon. “You want to walk us through what all this is about?”
Lermon nodded. He strolled over to in front of my office. Jeremy and Lena parked themselves back in their chairs and faced him.
Alex leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk, watching the show. He said, “Yo, Chief, you’re blocking my view.”
Aaron curled his lip at Alex and stepped to the side, behind Lermon, content to let his subordinate discuss their task.
As Lermon spoke, I took out a vial of holy oil, then tapped some under each nostril. It worked to filter out the smell of sin and evil that came from Aaron Nolan. It would make out time together much more tolerable.
“Now,” Lermon began, “anyone around here know a Fulton Zmirak?”
I shrugged. Alex said, “Who?” But Lena and Jeremy both nodded along.
Lermon cocked a brow and looked to me. “Never? I’m surprised. He’s apparently a big Catholic star. Does a lot of preaching on YouTube.”
I rolled my eyes. “I generally don’t have time for Internet videos,” I explained. I looked over to kids, since they seemed to know of him. “How big is he?”
Lena was happy to answer. “Zmirak has over a hundred million followers on social media. It’s one of the reasons he hasn’t been kicked off platforms. YouTube doesn’t dare remove him. They need the clicks. And the ad revenue.” She smiled evilly. “Zmirak doesn’t pull punches. He’s fun.” She reached over and touched Jeremy’s hand. “Imagine if we discussed apologetics in public.”
I flinched internally. I couldn’t imagine my kids explaining Catholicism in public without a brawl as a result.
Alex raised a hand to get everyone’s attention. “Pardon, but why would he need the followers to stay online? If he’s anything like Tommy, who’s he going to offend?”
Lena laughed. It was light and musical, still lightly accented with her native Polish. “He’s not Hussar.”
Jeremy nodded. “Concur.”
Lermon sighed. “He was born in Hong Kong. Don’t ask me how he has a name like Zmirak. Or Fulton, for that matter. But he’s not happy with the Chinese government, and how they run the country. He calls out any human rights abuses he sees. He does at least one episode a week on how the People’s Republic of China keep concentration camps, rape their ethnic minorities to ‘breed them out of existence,’ and use the rest for involuntary organ donors. And yes, I mean Uighurs, Catholics, any Christian who maintains an underground religion and doesn’t bend a knee to the state, or the state church.”
Lena’s pretty face curled up into a snarl. “Tak. The Chinese aren’t picky.”
Alex nodded slowly. “Okay. I get that. So why would social media care about him pissing off the Chinese?”
Lena glanced over the rail at Alex. “Because most major tech platforms take money from the Chinese,” she explained. “Supposedly, it’s to ‘manage’ content that comes into China, but it’s understood that they quietly smother criticism about China. They all contribute to the Great Firewall of China. Normally they would smother Zmirak. But they can’t. His fan base is too large.”
Jeremy nodded in agreement, then stared hard at Lermon. “You think China grabbed him?”
Lermon shrugged. “Maybe. It’s not like they care what anyone else thinks about them.”
I glanced at Aaron for a split second and refocused on Lermon. Suddenly, all of this made a lot more sense. Zmirak was a high-profile victim with a massive following around the world. Given that the perps may have been Chinese, it had international ramifications. It was the sort of case with potential for high media exposure. So of course Aaron was going to jump all over this one.
I smirked to myself and tried not to laugh. Aaron was ready and waiting to leap in front of the reporters on this one and take all of the credit. Funny thing, I’d be happy to let him do exactly that. We usually let the FBI do it for us, but I didn’t care as long as I stayed away from the press corps.
Though the real question would be if he’d do anything helpful during the course of our investigation.
I had another suspicion—was Aaron here because it would become a high-profile case, or because he was taking money from China? It wouldn’t have been the first time he had taken a payoff. After all, he had all the instincts of a Chicago politician.
I filed that idea away for a later date, just in case.
You might be wondering: Tommy, why are you so casual about Aaron? Isn’t he my father? He abused my mother, didn’t he?
While I would not say that time heals all wounds, my mother was already dead, and had been for decades. She had been killed by a hit-and-run driver before Jeremy was born. Aaron had been fine with homeschooling when he saw my grades, but decided to use my mother for a punching bag when he realized that I was becoming “indoctrinated” in the Catholic faith.
To say that Alex was more family to me than Aaron was true—Alex and I had spent more time together on stakeouts than I’d ever had “father-son time” with Aaron.
So, Aaron was less my father and more of a sperm donor I hadn’t seen in over forty years. One doesn’t hate a person like that. Apathy is more accurate. Holding a gun on him when I was twelve was less about hate and more about stopping him from hurting my mother. That was a close as circumstances allowed me to honor my father, aside from my prayers for his eventual conversion to being a human being.
Ranger Lermon continued with his conversation about the missing priest, Fulton Zmirak. “Now, why we’re here and talking with you is easy. We found some of the locals who were in on the kidnapping.” He glanced my way and smirked. “Surprise, they were members of MS-13.”
Alex winced at the memory. I cringed. “Yeah. Great.”
Lermon nodded. “We had a conversation with them. The one who survived explained that they had been contacted by someone on the Dark Web to capture Zmirak, load him up on a truck, and ship him to New York.”
I held back a groan. I didn’t want to know what the Dark Web held. Everything I’d heard about it sounded like the bad part of every neighborhood. And this is the Internet, where porn was only the tip of the iceberg of vice. The Dark Web was where the slippery slope just gave way to the bottomless fiery pit. Human trafficking and sexual slavery were daily occurrences, and it only got worse from there. I think I preferred it back when the most high profile crime on the Dark Web was drug-dealing and gun-running.
“Now, this particular dark web vendor is special,” Lloyd Lermon continued in his drawl. “It wants to be known as Shadow Mart. In fact, the things it advertises online involves a whole bunch of horrific things. Mind you, none of which anyone’ll tell us about. The entire thing is the stuff of rumor and legend and criminal underworld boogeymen. However, anything that’s going to be scaring an MS-13 cell has got to be something more horrible than even they normally pull.”
We four New Yorkers exchanged a glance. MS-13 ran a massive sexual trafficking ring. Their motto was Rape, control, kill. Anything “more horrible” sounded like it was right up our alley of expertise.
Lermon added, “One of the things we were hoping for was that you folks would know something about what’s going on with this here Shadow Mart.”
This was where Jeremy stood, straightened his polo shirt, and smiled. “Why, yes,” he said. “This is where I can help you.”