Chapter 8

Thursday's fun was just as good as Wednesday's, except it was of a different sort entirely. It was a field trip day and I was taking a little journey to the wilds of Western Utah to pay a visit to our nutjob LDS castoffs at the New Celestial Covenant Church.

I'd directed my private investigation firm do some advance scouting on them and they already had a nice little packet of information that we reviewed together at a an early morning breakfast meeting at a diner before we all hit the road. The early indications were very promising that we could poke at these wackos with some long pointed sticks and maybe get them to react just the way we wanted them to. These guys were certainly not on anyone's favorite list of LDS offshoots and they probably didn't have any political IOU's that could be cashed in to save their bacons in an emergency. These guys were far fringe nutjobs and frankly if we nuked them off of the map the Bishops and whatnot in the big temple in Salt Lake City would probably all breathe a huge sigh of relief.

The New Celestial Covenant Church, of New Covenant, Utah was just your garden variety Latter-Day Saints extreme fringe offshoot that still had its head firmly stuck back in the nineteenth century. Undoubtedly they thought fire and horse-less carriages were still a risky and experimental things as well, but that didn't stop them from sending off their young Brothers and Elders on 'missions from God', often involving guns and high explosives.

Being a typical polygamous cult, the old guys were banging all of the hot young thirteen and fourteen year olds, the minute they were ripe enough to 'marry', leaving the young men with not much to do with their time except spend a lot of time on their knees in the desert praying. Like most folks who spend too much time in the burning sands of some desolate wilderness thinking about God, they had a rather cavalier attitude towards the rest of us mere mortals. In their eyes we were all damned at best, and our blood was probably best suited for greasing the wheels of the 'Lord's Work', whatever that was.

Like an Islamic terrorist, these guys were more than happy to die in the name of their religion. They apparently believed that God came from outer space and would return for them once all of the evil had been purged from the earth with fire and the sword. Yeah ... good luck with accomplishing that!

One very useful report from one of our paid investigators in Salt Lake City alleged that this cult was descended from the original LDS colony that had captured and occupied Carcosa from 1864 to 1871 until it was ordered to return to Utah by Brigham Young. This sort of explained their interest in Carcosa once again. I suppose they had decided that the 'stars were right' for purging Carcosa off the face of the earth once and for all, and destroying the lair of Satan who lived there deep under the earth.

This was looniness that we could use and exploit.

Our plan was extremely simple. We wanted to take a good look around at the lay of the land and most of all 'be seen'. One of our PI operatives, Rich Waters, was a good physical match for Carl Greenwood, the Deputy Director of Casino Security and chief of Special Projects, John Samuel's right hand hatchet man and we were going to exploit this. I was going to play driver and stupid muscle, and we'd bring along another PI to act like his bodyguard, all of us complete with dark suits and dark glasses.

We were going to ask a lot of pointed questions and try to draw as much attention to ourselves as possible ... without hopefully getting shot at. It was going to be a neat balancing act, to push poke and prod as much as possible before they poked back, even harder. We were definitely going to need a little backup and a contingency plan or two in the event of trouble.

New Covenant lived up to its name; a place where God definitely came first before any other creature comforts. No restaurants, a vintage rusty gas station that didn't sell soda or junk food, and down the one unpaved street was a long row of sand and wind scoured wood and stone houses that were only marginally an improvement over sleeping in a tent.

The creepiest part to me was noting that not a single of the forty or so houses in town had a TV antenna, let alone a satellite dish. No electrical power lines, no telephone cables, nothing. As the song goes, 'No phone, no lights no motor cars,
Not a single luxury, Like Robinson Crusoe, As primitive as can be.'

Horses outnumbered cars at least three to one and the mere act of driving into town classified itself right off the bat as an extremely unfriendly act. These folks were still living in the nineteenth century and were mightily unhappy about having anything to do with the twenty-first.

Nice. All the better to make some friends and influence some people, and if we could put a few zealots noses out of whack in the process, so much the better!

On the far end of the town the dirt road continued up a small hill, at the top of which was the New Celestial Covenant Church compound. It was secure ... very secure. At first sight it looked just like a prison camp complete with barbed wire fences and guard towers at the corner. The guards, young men with rifles and a crazed look from staring into the sun too much while thinking about God, were a decidedly unfriendly sort and weren't about to let us inside for any reason. They gave us a couple of warning shots that were a bit too close for comfort when we didn't turn around and drive away quite fast enough to suit them.

Well, that was half of the job done anyway. We drove back through New Covenant and parked on the outskirts of town to stretch our legs for awhile and to meet and greet the happy citizens who seemed delighted to meet a trio of modern gentlemen. Well, not quite.

We let Rich get into his acting job and we started to knock on doors ... and mostly got greeted with loaded shotgun barrels for the most part. Rich tried to do his spiel, but not many folks were willing to listen.

"Hi, my name is Carl! We're working on a mining project in Carcosa, Nevada and we've been encountering some of your nice young men from the church ... probably on mission converting the pagans, or the hidden deep underground evil ones. We were just in the area and wanting to drop in and visit, maybe make new friends or business partners, eh? We both seem to love those mountains, so full of old mysteries and forgotten things. It would be nice to bring those old times back again, eh? Ah, there's so much truth to be found there in the hidden dark places of the world, eh? Don't you agree?"

Ok, it wasn't very subtle, I admit, but these zealots were so dense that it just about took an axe to get any sort of new idea into their head. Eventually they started to get the hint — some Vegas tough boys wanted to bring back public worship of the evil 'dark ones'. Two shows with live human sacrifices daily, four shows on weekends complete with a cannibal buffet. Fun for the whole family! Worse, we were going to obstruct their 'Holy Work' ... whatever that was.

After about half of an hour and twenty slammed doors later, what passed for the town Sheriff came along to officially run us out of town. He brought along a pair of young gunsels toting hunting rifles and they all tried to look menacing, but not at all terribly convincingly.

We showed off our own gun collection and it was much nicer and shinier than theirs, and they backed off a bit and let us retreat to our car.

As expected, the Casino owned car had developed four flat tires and someone had taken an axe or a pick to the radiator. No surprise at all ... in fact we had almost counted on this to occur. We called for our backup and five minutes later our relief party arrived to pick us up. We picked up a few bullet holes along the way as our rivals had managed to ride a few lads with hunting rifles out around the town to stop our getaway, but this wasn't unexpected either. The Casino owned several specially reinforced SUV's that were relatively bullet resistant and I'd grabbed one yesterday for use as our backup escape vehicle. I still had friends in the garage and the FoW in charge there was too perpetually drunk and clueless to ever figure out that a few vehicles were missing.

The car we left behind in New Covenant also belonged to the Casino, but it was just a normal sedan, albeit nicely stocked with information and misinformation that we wanted to get into the hands of the cult. All of it pointing towards the senior management of the Casino being direct rivals for the control of Carcosa. Specifically, the cult should have no difficulty whatsoever identifying 'Carl' as Carl Greenwood, head of Special Projects, particularly since I left a few of his real business cards in the glove box, along with the cards of John Samuels, Marlon Simms and of course, Wesley.

I thought about stocking it with a small arsenal to give them a helping hand to even the odds a tiny bit, but I was fairly sure these cultists probably were armed up to their teeth well enough already. I had a few sources for obtaining a large stock of 'family' guns, but most of them were under watchful eyes of FoW faithful and I decided that this token measure wasn't at all worth the risk.

We hightailed it out of town and drove a couple of counties away to coordinate and compare notes over a very lengthy late lunch. From here on things were going to get a bit more subtle and I was now introduced to the two fellows that were going to handle the second phase of the operation on-site for me.

Mitch and Oscar were both ex-military and worked with a covert group that specialized in extracting some parents' precious little misguided snowflakes from the clutches of evil cults. These guys were going to work the covert surveillance side of things for the next week and I had hired them to give us a 24/7 bird's-eye watch over these nutjobs so we could have a little warning when and if they all went jihad on us and left their reservation in search of pagan blood. They knew exactly the type of crazed zealots we were dealing with and had no problems or moral qualms with some of the more extreme steps we wanted to take later. They were 110% on our side, and not just because they were getting extremely well paid. Neither was a stranger to doing 'wet work', especially in the name of a good cause. They were both hard men and willing to do anything it would take to remove one more kook cult from the world, including digging quite a few shallow graves, if necessary.

We drove back towards New Covenant but held off moving in too close until after full darkness. Then we unleashed our cult hounds, complete with night suits and night vision goggles to invisibly scout out the hills ahead. I told them to take their time and be careful, that the rest of us could wait all night if necessary.

The guys were good and came back to the SUV about two hours later complete with a pair of prizes. They'd easily found the two roadside guards and had shot them with tranquilizer darts, knocking them both unconscious and then they carried them back here to us. We gave them shots to make them sleep a whole lot longer and we drove in darkness a few miles closer down the road towards town.

Our scouts let us know what their primary, backup and escape and evasion positions would be for the next week and we dropped them off complete with supplies and a satellite phone. These guys were indeed good. With desert ghillie suits on, any daytime cult patrols would only see sand, rocks and brush, passing within feet of our hidden and well-prepared scouts.

I left them to their work, feeling confident for the first time that my plan really might work.

Our resting young culties were going to stay drugged awhile longer until they were safely stashed away on a ranch on the outskirts of Vegas. For the next two days, our PI friends were going to scare them a bit but not actually hurt them (much) while they pretended to be tough mobsters working for my security bosses at the Casino. In return for this temporary ill-use, our captives were going to be allowed to overhear a lot of juicy planted information about what Wes and his friends were allegedly planning for Carcosa, and how they planned to soon attack the New Covenant compound to eliminate their rivals, so that their evil work could continue undisturbed. Sunday morning they would be drugged again and dumped off near the cult compound 'as a warning' to the rest, which would certainly be unheeded. This should kick their butts into high gear to prepare the compound for an assault in the next week or two.

With any luck, they wouldn't be disappointed.

I would have loved to have spent Friday and Saturday in a replay of Wednesday, just playing voyeur and watching my slut wife and sister-in-law at play under the watchful eyes of the hidden cameras, but unfortunately I actually had a lot of work to do. Tanya came in a few times to provide me with some pleasant distraction, but we really didn't have time to make a long production out of it. I gave her a 'To Do' list of things that was nearly a mile long and I was absolutely amazed that she was able to even get half of it accomplished on the first day.

The idea of preparing a 'Run Kit' would have been laughable under Mr. DeLuca. If things had ever gone that far south I would have stood with him at the very end against his foes, Feds or rival mobsters, defiant until the end. Needless to say, his nephew Wes didn't attract anything close to that level of loyalty. To him, everyone was just a pawn to be used and to be discarded when no longer necessary or useful. That bad habit of his was going to hurt him ... soon.

Already, I was starting to use the money from the first small secret account to cover the expenses of the private investigators and cult surveillance team. The PI firm had offered to work at an extreme discount out of old loyalty for the business Mr. DeLuca had given them, but I was adamant that I'd pay the same rates that they had charged him. I wanted to make sure I kept their full loyalty; a great deal of my plan was going to depend upon them following my orders to the letter. My anti-cult mercenaries weren't cheap either but I didn't care. Like when Mr. DeLuca paid top dollar for his entertainment personalities, I was making an investment for the future.

When one plans to run from the mob, you really have rather limited options. Planes are fast, but the airport is the first place that they'll go looking for you. There are lots of security cameras nearly everywhere and then there are those pesky folks at homeland security. The minute the word broke loose that I was a wanted man by the mob, the Fed boys would want me just as badly, maybe worse. They'd want confessions and demand to know about all sorts of things that frankly weren't a bit of their business. I had no interest in spending the rest of my life in the Witness Protection program, let alone locked up in a Club Fed. It would be better for everyone if my plan more or less worked, freeing Mr. DeLuca to either return to power, pick a more worthy successor, or else watch the place and over fifty years of history just burn to the ground, like a Viking funeral.