Sean Chercover - The Trinity Game

Back in the quiet of his hotel room, Daniel sipped cognac and reviewed the day’s developments, sorting his responses into two categories: personal and professional.

Start with the professional, he told himself. Put aside predictions of thunderstorms and football games, and focus on the oil refinery. Maybe the small stuff was just a way to get our attention, a way to ensure that we act on the major predictions when they arrive.

One hundred lives could have been saved had the Church taken action. Had those lives been saved, this assessment wouldn’t even be necessary. They weren’t saved, but that didn’t fundamentally change anything; the public now knew, and the next important prediction would be acted upon.

Professionally, the case was clear, and the billboard accident—which Trinity could neither have known about in advance, nor caused to happen—had sealed the deal. Professionally, Daniel concluded, the Trinity Anomaly was a miracle.

Personally, things were more complicated.

Twenty years earlier, the great and powerful Oz became a huckster jerking levers behind the curtain, Daniel’s life became a lie, and he ran away in search of a real miracle.

Now he had one.

Yes, it was happening to the huckster—and yes, that was a problem—but the larger point was it was happening. And that changed everything. Because if the priesthood is a call to faith, Daniel’s shameful secret was that he had never sincerely answered the call. There can be no religion without faith. And there can be no faith if we demand that God prove His existence.

No, that’s not right. Not existence . Daniel had no trouble believing in God, creator of the universe. That God existed for Daniel. The proof he sought was not of God-the-creator but God-the-father.

God who loves us, who cares what we do with the world, cares how we treat one another.

Daniel had always known his ersatz faith made him less of a priest. And while he prayed daily for stronger faith, the truth was he just wanted a damn miracle. Just one miracle to prove God was taking an active interest in human affairs.

And now he had one.

Daniel picked up the phone and dialed a number that was known to fewer than 120 people on the planet. The phone was answered on the first ring.

“Facilitations. Please identify.”

“Father Daniel Byrne. Devil’s Advocate, clearance code: UG-8806.”

“Go ahead.”

“I need a plane, in Atlanta. Destination is Rome, and I need to leave in”—a glance at his watch—“two hours.”

“Um, that’s pretty tight, I’m not sure—”

“Just make it happen,” said Daniel. “Priority One.”

“Yes, sir. Anything else?”

“Yeah, get a message to the DA. Tell him I’m coming in. And tell him we’ve got a positive.”

He hung up, shaved, showered, and dressed. He hadn’t worn the uniform since his last visit to the Vatican, and as he adjusted his clerical collar in the mirror, he saw a priest looking back. In recent years, he’d felt increasingly like an imposter, the uniform increasingly like a costume.

But not anymore.

The sky was still dark as Daniel walked across the tarmac to the white private jet with a gold holy cross painted on its tail. He climbed the aluminum steps and entered the lush cabin, was greeted by the smell of fresh leather. The seats were wide and soft, and could swivel, and each had a gold cross embroidered into the headrest. Side tables of polished burl wood and silk curtains on the windows. At the back of the cabin, a well-stocked bar and flat-panel television on the wall.

As they reached altitude, Daniel reclined his seat and closed his eyes.

Julia wrapped her wet hair in a towel and picked up her cell phone. The display said it was her editor at the Times-Picayune calling from New Orleans.

“Haven’t found him yet,” she said.

“Shit.”

“Left messages with his office, got his unlisted number and left messages at the house too. Nothing else I can do right now on that angle.”

“There is no other angle, Julia. Trinity is the story.”

“I get it, Herb, you don’t have to yell at me. Nobody knows where he is, what the hell do you want me to do? Anyway, you have no idea what it’s like here. Atlanta’s gone insane.”

“Seen it on the news. What are you following?”

“Got a call in to Sheriff Alatorre. Figure I’ll talk to a couple survivors, work some human interest to carry us through the next cycle until Trinity reappears.”

“OK, I want you to get with Kathryn Reynolds, she’s a producer at CNN. You’ll be working with her for the duration.”

“Oh God, gimme a break.”

“I don’t want to hear it, Julia. You know the drill—we’re broke, and they offered to pay your expenses. And we need the profile. So it’s either that or we call you home and send Sammy to work with them. Your story, your choice.”

Julia blew out a long breath. “Fine, but I answer to you. Can’t serve two masters.” She wrote down the number Herb read over the phone, said, “I gotta run.”

“Hey, one more thing.”

“Yeah?”

“Nice job on GMA this morning.”

“Thanks. On two hours sleep, but yeah, I think I did OK.”

“Better than OK, you did great. The camera really likes you.”

“Well, thank you.”

“Look, I know we don’t pay television money—hell, we barely pay newspaper money—but…I hope you’ll stay with us when this is all over. I mean, you’ll be able to write your ticket now—”

“Don’t sweat it, Herb. New Orleans is home. And I’m a newspaper gal, I bleed ink.”

She hung up, towel-dried her hair and tied it back in a ponytail, and switched on the television.

The city had indeed gone insane. Lunatics were flooding in from all over the country, clogging the streets, pitching tents in the parking lot of Trinity’s church. And it would only get worse. The television outlets were having some kind of tantric orgasm over the story, decoding Trinity’s past predictions, confirming their accuracy, and reporting each as Breaking News , around the clock, reporting each with the same breathless intensity as the refinery explosion.

This just in: Reverend Tim Trinity accurately predicted a traffic jam three weeks ago!

This just in: Reverend Tim Trinity declared that jambalaya is good!

Asinine.

Julia really was a newspaper gal, and she did bleed ink. Television is a possum with a tapeworm, she thought; always hungry and it’ll feed on any garbage. But the newspaper industry was in trouble—many would say mortal danger—and nobody knew what the hell to do about it.

Julia watched the muted television for a minute—a helicopter shot of the congested highways leading into Atlanta. How to make sense of all these people? It wasn’t really fair to label them all as lunatics—after all, there were hundreds of thousands of them and growing by the minute. But really, what was going through their heads? Why were people so eager to embrace religious explanations for the things they didn’t understand?

Julia was an atheist, sure. But unlike many of the other skeptics she’d known, she didn’t consider herself intellectually superior to the vast majority of humans who did believe. She felt, rather, like a bit of a mutant. Like maybe 10 percent of the world’s population had somehow been genetically deprived of whatever neurological wiring caused the other 90 percent to perceive this thing called God.