Antler Plan (A Konrad Loki Thriller Book 1) Read online

  “Intriguing,” Kaspar said. “What about the year 1631. Does it mean something to you?”

  “The Age of Reason—many supernatural matters became natural. How come?”

  “Are you familiar with a book called The Wicked Bible?”

  “Now I get it. Oona speaks about reversed scriptural meaning: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ Surprise. God doesn’t write perfect books, after all. After the printing error, the Church wanted to destroy every book to prevent moral and mass panic from spreading. We’re talking about a collector’s item.”

  “You have done your homework.” Kaspar’s eyebrows hunched low. “Speaking of which, now it’s your task to figure out why Oona Louhi bequeathed The Wicked Bible to you, an anti-Christ.”

  Konrad arched his eyebrows. “She left me the Unholy Scripture? Why? How did she own such a precious book?”

  “Don’t ask me,” Kaspar said. “You killed the priest.”

  “S-she was a priest?”

  “Recently graduated.”

  Konrad huddled in his hospital gown. The cold air flowing in from the window gave him the feeling he was back in full control of his body. “But… Where is the Bible?”

  “Heaven alone knows.” Kaspar threw the cigarette out of the window, looked at his watch, and offered Konrad a handshake. “Time is of the essence. It’s Independence Day tomorrow. I’m going to Helsinki to the castle to meet the president. If I’m lucky, I’ll get to dance with his lady.”

  Konrad gave a quick grip and release.

  Kaspar exited the room and gave instructions to a guard behind the door.

  Konrad kept his hand in a tight fist until Kaspar was gone. Then he opened his hand and looked down at Kaspar’s watch he had stolen. On the back was an engraving:

  TRUE LOVE WAITS. —JULIA

  The message made Konrad wonder where his wife was. By coincidence, Kaspar was married to a woman with the same name.

  The watch face also displayed the date.

  The fifth of December? It’s our wedding anniversary already? Have I been unconscious for two weeks?

  The length of Konrad’s body trembled. He weighed the watch flat on his palm. In the new light, a carving of another familiar word hit his eyes.

  Abracadabra?

  Konrad considered the most universally adopted phrase, pronounced in all languages without translation. The ultimate meaning was a conundrum. Stage magicians and conjurers and fantasy characters used it to summon mysterious powers to perform their magic, but the ancients ward off sickness and keep away evil spirits. A combination of the Hebrew words ab—father—ben—son—and ruach acadosch—Holy Spirit—as in Trinity. A Gnostic word for God, Abraxas, meaning His dead body. Attributed to God’s might, it meant What I speak is what I create. The meanings varied between creation and destruction, between love and hate, upsetting virtually all linguists around the globe.

  Konrad sneered. He knew another nonsense magical incantation as well.

  “Hocus pocus.”

  He threw the watch out the window, which Kaspar had deliberately left open, and went on reading the garbage news. The interrogation was weird. But whatever Kaspar truly had in mind for him, one thing was sure.

  Gone was all love.

  Abra-goddamn-cadabra…

  3

  RUUT STORMED TO her workroom, and slammed the door behind her. She had once again vented her frustrations at her husband and daughter and already regretted it.

  Netta had only spilled milk on the floor. And before that, the TV remote control was not even where it used to be, where she preferred, between the sofa pillows.

  Ruut stood still under a lamp with her thumbnail jammed against her teeth, stopping her hand from slipping to her throat, which was on fire.

  Jake and Netta were preparing themselves for a sauna, and she felt left alone.

  There was a formless twist in his head that cracked her strength. Her marriage with Jake was good. Not that everything was all roses on the home front, he was an open and a loving husband, scatterbrained as they come, but he mostly understood her neurotic tendencies and childish outbursts. The reality behind today’s temper tantrum was still the fact she wasn’t allowed to help Konrad. The orders were unbelievable and unforgivable: General Eric Pantzar—an ill-tempered, barking walrus—had strictly prohibited her from intervening in the case, without explanation, or further apology.

  Why?

  Ruut occupied her mind in her private chamber and slumped in front of her MacBook Pro. In the screen’s reflection, her eyes looked like holes poked in clay. Her cheeks pinked, like a serial worker about to kill herself.

  She began her aimless drifting by reading the headlines of the day, speculating what women were going to wear in the castle for Finland’s Independence Day. Utterly uninterested in the fashion, she shifted to Lapland University’s site, pondering where best to invest her time. Probably finding an occupation where pulling back her shoulders was not a requirement.

  A teacher? PTSD day and night?

  She switched to Facebook. Konrad popped up in a shared link, the picture taken in the hospital bed. A woman commented why Konrad was famous for disfiguring the face of the Church and fostering equality between genders: “His hard crotch-kick of truth castrates all converters’ and priests’ weapons of dominance—AKA dicks—and sends them back to Genesis to wonder who created a woman out of man’s rib.”

  “Preach it, sister!” another woman commented. “Men have portrayed us crooked and sly as the rib bone, curving away from virtues. Two-millennia-long second-class citizenship because of total BS! No wonder why no women have written a book in the New Testament, as Konrad pointed out.”

  Many saw Konrad as a spiritual teacher, but conspiracy theorists warned of him being a closet racist and misogynist in disguise.

  Ruut found her hand on her throat once more, and a memory of a bar incident crept in. While having fun with her friends for the first time in five years, some jerk had hit her in her throat and tore her left vocal cord. Apparently, an offered drink was supposed to be accepted.

  Giving up on the shameful headlines, she found herself quickly moving back to explore the snowflake logo of the university. She bit her lower lip as she read the motto beneath the logo: Learn to live, live to learn. She scrolled down the page of the staff of the faculty of education. Academic minds always seemed satisfied. Why didn’t she try to be a researcher? She could have stayed in her office, just reading and contemplating the world from the lofty places of intelligence.

  Unlimited privacy.

  What a privilege.

  She went to Google and entered Konrad Loki. She clicked the first YouTube link, a video from 2012, entitled “Are We Better Off Without Religion?”

  A handsome and hawk-like host, yet as boring as a shop-window dummy, welcomed the audience in the University of Notre Dame and listed Konrad’s contributions to science.

  Through the wall, Ruut heard Netta coughing hard. She froze, finding herself at the edge of screaming and asking what was going on. Burdening herself with the thought that he didn’t care about her enough made heat flush through her body. She buried her head into her hands. She would soon suspect Jake of doing things he’d never do if she continued being paranoid.

  Netta coughed again. Ruut contemplated the poor little girl and her current status: a mold refugee. She was being bullied in school, and all because she just couldn’t breathe and reddened easily because of it, despite coloring being partly genetic. The day had been unbearable for Netta. Two idiot boys had captured her. They had drawn her away from the school path and spread her books and notebooks into a ditch. Instead of going ice-fishing, they had organized fly larva’s Paralympic games in her mouth.

  Ruut sighed. Finland’s suicide rates were one of the highest in the world, and she had long seen the problem. Boys and men didn’t talk; they dressed their nonverbal communication skills as fists in schoolyard, streets, and bars. In school, kids learned to humiliate and degrade the weak, and later, th
ey refined this skill into leadership. Generations of leaders stared at the lines of zeroes in profit, and in case sales dropped, all it took was to kick out the weakest and grow the breadline to keep the Big Caravan on the road.

  Bullies were terrific at getting rich on the backs of the broken.

  In all her doom-and-gloom, a limping man with wooden crutches walked across the stage toward a podium. The clothes Konrad wore were gray and dull as dishwater, but he owned the stage with his latent intensity and retro-design glasses; the spherical lenses gave way into his mischievous spark in his mismatched eyes, making gooseflesh whisper across her arms.

  “Good news—I’ve gained new followers,” Konrad announced, emphasizing the word so that it meant stalkers. “I fell down the stairs in my home a few days ago and broke my leg. I’m crippled and slow, which makes believers ferociously think that I’m now an easier target for converting. Everybody wants a piece of me. I’m like a big feather in the cap of sky-point bonuses.”

  Konrad grinned like he knew something no one else could.

  “As you probably know, I’m here to debunk the most romanticized story ever told. My opponent will defend that story, the miraculous work of an imaginary friend, who gives useless advice like ‘open your inner eyes and keep your spiritual ears attuned.’ I like more practical advice that comes from my fans: ‘Remember to calibrate your bullshit detector,’ and, ‘Don’t forget to crowd surf!’ Of course, the hate mail from the guardians of faith can be useful sometimes: ‘You don’t own enough fire insurance to avoid the flames of perdition!’ I guess I should consider changing my insurance company.”

  The audience laughed.

  “A threat to Faith. An enemy of God. A Bastard Son of Satan. An Evil man. If you only knew how busy these titles keep me, updating my CV and dating profiles...” Konrad placed the crutches against the stand. His face hardened. “Now, let me ruin the story of your life. First, what do we mean by the word ‘evil’? Frankly, there is fundamentally only one good reason to denounce someone as evil. If you plan to hurt or injure someone, naming or thinking one is evil makes it psychologically easier to do so. Evil is the strongest word we have to prepare ourselves for personal relationships, conflicts, tragedies, and war zones, especially when we prepare to kill each other with ease. And why is it so effective?”

  Konrad gave the audience a few seconds to think.

  “Because it is the word that prevents us from thinking.” Konrad straightened himself. “But when we mix our animal attributes with scriptures, we push human capacity to hate beyond healing…”

  Ruut skipped forward.

  “In my latest book, ‘His War, Her Pain,’ I discuss an interesting taboo against women. Women are considered softer, dove-like, and slower to resort to physical violence. Men have socialized and brainwashed women into this gender role, especially with the aid of The Bible. Women have always been the symbol of why wars are fought—the ultimate justification. In the battlefield men dream about women, because it reminds them of home, family, warmth, balance and love—things the both sides of the ideological fence are trying to preserve. There’s a saying in Hindi that all causes of war are due to ‘jar, joru aur jameen,’ which translates as ‘land, gold, women.’ The bodies of women will continue to be the biggest battlefield as long as testosterone continues to fight with gunpowder…”

  Men—so easily seduced by power, explosions, and dreams of whore houses made out of solid gold bars. She clicked ten minutes forward.

  “…Men’s conception of sacrificial heroism is deeply flawed. Call of duty, honor and glory, faith that the cause is just—all cherished to ensure seeing evil around us. When we think of war heroes and idols we salute Alexander the Great who did conquer the world, or we might pick up Napoleon, or Caesar who was the example of boldness and braveness, a real tactical genius. Then we cherish the names of mythical legends and demigods like Achilles, Hercules, Beowulf, and even Xena, who is a fictional character with male attributes derived from the Demigods of Greek mythology. Our role models in history—his story—are all bloodthirsty killing machines.”

  “True,” Ruut said to herself. “Where are all the unsung heroes, thanks to whom no battle had to be fought?”

  A click. Konrad was again effortlessly eloquent in unleashing his venom.

  “…‘He’s almighty and above evil’—that’s my opponent’s argument about Creator. But when a catastrophe happens, why isn’t your All-knowing, All-loving, All-powerful and the most active force in the Universe motivated enough to overcome misery and death by preventing disasters and diseases?”

  What was feeding the rebellion in him? She clicked forward again.

  A bearded man in the audience stood up, yelling, “Blasphemy!” He lobbed an egg toward at Konrad and seemed to hit him right in the chest, but Konrad spun around while receiving the oncoming force, and pitched the egg back with full force. The standing man received a slimy blast to his forehead. A few other activists hid their eggs in their clothes as guards came to escort the humiliated man away.

  Konrad adjusted his suit. “Some call my words blasphemy—I call it honesty.”

  Ruut got bored. The show went on so smoothly that she suspected that the whole egg-episode was planned. She skipped to near the end for final statements. Konrad was at the top of the game. Suddenly, he smashed the crutch over his knee and finished it by hitting it against the floor, like a guitar hero destroying his instrument at the end of the gig. He showed one piece of wood to the stunned audience, and it looked like a snake.

  “Let’s step back a few millenniums to the dawn of primitive superstitions. Which one do you think is a safer bet from the stand of human evolution, that our ability to believe the stick is a snake and fear it, or believe that the snake is a stick?”

  Konrad’s eyes scanned his captivated throng.

  “You want to know what religion is all about? Just like us, snakes constantly grow new skin cells and shed the old ones. We shed ours continuously in small quantities, but snakes shed their skin in a continuous sheet. Religion is the snake reversed: the snake sheds its skin and becomes smaller, smaller, and smaller until a handful of scale is all that’s left. There was no snake in the first place, no original sin. Nothing. Only an empty shell filled with fear and false hope in disavowed, deep existential dread.”

  The hall remained still long after he had stopped talking.

  “By the way,” Konrad said. “You don’t need a crutch to get through life. I ceased to feign—now it’s your turn.”

  Ruut heard a knock. Jake was naked by the door, wreathed in ghosts of steam. He was smiling, and Ruut answered it with a soft laughter. “I’ll join you in a minute.”

  A knot of counter-arguments racing in her mind, Ruut went back to the site of the University of Lapland and located Konrad’s phone number. There was nothing ground-shaking in Konrad’s militant atheistic views. His arguments drew on popular psychology and were convincingly disapproving many established beliefs with inviting logic. But being brain-centric and biologizing all human problems was not a solution, but part of the symptom.

  An odd connection between Oona and Konrad rose from the rubble like a smoke sign. Once during mass, Oona had said that the world needed the era of atheists’ rise because they were the only one able to purify religion from its idiocy and lunatic aspects. She had described this period as a spiritual adultery. Man was getting closer to an animal. Carnal desires dominated, and primitive pleasures were wellbeing. The world had exchanged love for lust.

  ‘It is better to marry than to burn with passion,’ Ruut recapped the last quote from the Bible Oona had made.

  But why did Oona will The Wicked Bible to Konrad? Something unsettling urged her to speak to Konrad as soon as he was out of the hospital.

  Even though injured, his eyes had been bizarrely lewd.

  A HUNDRED METERS away from the house where Ruut closed the screen of her computer, a black Mercedes van sat buried in snow in the shadows between two street lamps. Inside,
over the shoulder of one of his comrades, Colonel Patrick Praytor evaluated what he had seen on screen. He had hoped the woman would forget the incident.

  The tech agent cast his eyes away from the screen. “We have a problem.”

  Patrick clenched his teeth.

  A phone rang in his hand.

  “Is it the Veteran?” another agent asked, maintaining a sniper rifle. “The boss won’t be delighted.”

  Patrick answered the phone.

  “Status?” a toneless voice said.

  “A minor nuisance, sir,” Patrick said. “She’s gathering Intel.”

  Silence fell.

  Patrick waited.

  The voice spoke again. “The level of threat?”

  “Zero, sir. She’s on our leash.”

  “Keep it short. And our man?”

  “Recovering.” Patrick shared a glance with the agent, now attaching a suppressor to the muzzle of the rifle. “His employer has urged him to come to the university ASAP. Everything is going as expected.”

  “I expect better. Contact me should the book appear.”

  The call ended.

  Patrick grabbed the rifle and aimed through the scope at the house. A girl was in the window, trying to catch a snowflake on her tongue. Her innocence gave him a glimpse of his son. His heart filled with instant love. It took only the experience of carrying one’s child against one’s chest to know one carried the innocence of all children of the world. Every good parent knew the truth.

  Fortunately, the new frontier offered the promise of a new beginning. Soon he would cease to hear the cries of the children with his son’s face in his mind. Children would grow up without the torment of the inevitable and consuming paradox that comes with the truth about Santa Claus.

  Man’s inhumanity to man.