Chapter 5 #2
And there it was. I'd heard it hundreds of times and it still turned my stomach: the prosperity gospel.
It was the great American heresy, the one where the Almighty runs a hedge fund and your tithe is the buy-in.
I wasn't a religious man—I'd had exactly enough Hebrew school to disappoint my grandmother and quit—but even I knew enough to know this was upside down.
Whatever that bible actually said, I was fairly sure it was something about a rich man, a camel, the eye of the needle.
Oh yeah, and the moneylenders getting their tables flipped, and blessed are the poor.
Not this give me your money and the sky daddy will make you rich, bullshit.
They'd taken a two-thousand-year-old story about the meek inheriting the earth and refitted it as a pyramid scheme with stage fog.
“And so we ask You, Lord,” Finch rolled on, building now, the cadence climbing toward its tent-revival peak, “to bless the generous givers in this room. Open the windows of heaven over THIS house. Pour out a blessing they will not have room enough to receive. In the mighty, the matchless, the moneymaking name of Your son—”
I nearly laughed out loud. I didn't. But I got the frame—Senator Finch in the spotlight, hand to heart, ten thousand faces tipped up toward him in the haze like sunflowers toward the only light in the room—and I knew it was a good one. Set dressing, Hallie would say. But God, what set dressing.
“—amen, and AMEN,” Finch finished, and the room amened it back like a wave breaking.
“Now.” He gripped the podium. “I could stand up here and talk all morning.
But you didn't come to hear me.” Laughter.
“You came to hear from a man who needs no introduction. A man who has built—with his own two hands and the grace of Almighty God—the single most powerful ministry in this nation. A man who has the ear of presidents and the heart of the people. The shepherd of the Citadel of Faith, the conscience of this movement, the future of this whole great fight—”
I was already swinging the lens toward stage left.
“—PASTOR. HARRISON. COLE.”
The arena went supernova.
Through the viewfinder the whole left side of the stage was still a smear of fog and gold haze, and a tall dark shape was walking out. I did what I always do, what my hands know how to do without me: I found the shape, framed it, and I turned the focus ring to bring the man out of the blur.
The blur sharpened.
Jet-black hair, pushed back clean. A charcoal suit cut so close it had to have been built on him.
A jaw I had felt under my own mouth hours ago.
Pale blue eyes—even at this distance, even across the heads of ten thousand strangers, I knew the exact pale blue of those eyes—lifting now to the crowd, calm and certain and luminous, the eyes of a man who owned the room and knew it.
And at his throat, catching the stage lights and throwing back one small hard point of gold: a tiny cross on a thin chain.
My finger came off the shutter.
The roar of the arena went strange and far away, like my head had gone underwater.
The lens was still up and I was still looking through it.
Hell, I couldn’t have lowered it to save my life.
Because the man in my viewfinder—the man with his hand raised now in humble acknowledgment, dipping his head with that practiced, godly modesty while the screens two stories tall threw his beautiful face across the dark in radiant high-definition was my stranger.
The man who'd knelt on a beige floor and wept when I kissed him.
The man who'd said I don't get to stay. The man who'd told me, in the dark, that he was the fakest man I'd ever meet, that he'd been performing a character for so long he'd forgotten where it stopped and he started—and I'd held his hand and thought it was the saddest, sweetest, most honest thing anyone had ever said to me.
Now I knew what the character was.
PASTOR HARRISON COLE, the screens said, in letters ten feet high. And under it, the tagline, the brand, the empire in three words: SHEPHERD. STATESMAN. SERVANT.
He was the story. Harrison Cole was the one Hallie had sent me here to find—the power broker, kingmaker, the man holding the puppet strings of the entire machine I'd flown into this cornfield to dismantle.
“Shit,” I mumbled.
My stranger was the story. He was the national-feed, save-your-career, expose-the-well-documented-lie story.
And he was gift-wrapped and walking out into a spotlight, and he had no idea—none—that the one real face in his grid of cowards last night belonged to the journalist in the press pen who could end him with a single photograph.
And I felt something for him. Something more than lust. It was heavy, and filled my chest with something I didn’t have words for.
That was the thing that closed around my throat like a fist, there at the back of that screaming arena with the fog in my eyes and his face filling my lens.
Not the scoop, though the scoop was the size of a football stadium.
It was that eight hours ago I’d decided, against every rule I'd ever made for myself, that I might be willing to feel something for this man.
Harrison Cole looked out over the crowd, smiling a smile that wasn't his—I knew it wasn't his, I'd seen the real one, and this wasn't it—and he raised both hands to quiet a room that did not want to be quieted. Then he leaned into the microphone with the ease of a man coming home.
“What a morning,” Harrison Cole said, in a voice I had last heard cracking apart against the back of my neck. “What a GLORIOUS morning the Lord has made.”
Ten thousand people thundered their love at him. I stood frozen in the press pen, one eye still pressed to the camera, my hands shaking and my heart slamming somewhere up in my throat.
I had everything I came for. The story of my life was standing forty yards away in a column of manufactured holy light.
So why did it feel like the only honest thing I'd ever touched had just been ripped out of my hands—and what the hell was I supposed to do now?