Divine Fury by Robert B. Lowe Read Free Book Online Page A

he needed it.     He had two passports in different names, several offshore bank accounts where 90 percent of his wealth was stored and condos in both Belize and Thailand owned by subsidiaries of subsidiaries of his main company, La Vista Security.   And, he kept his records and computer files in a way that he could destroy them all within minutes, confident that no amount of forensic reconstruction would recover anything meaningful.
     
    If anything happened, the Terminator was confident that he could disappear for a year or two and then return with a new identity and stay comfortably below the radar.
     
    But he had no patience for Wilkins complaining that he missed his wife and wanted to leave the Bahamas and return to California.
     
    “No!” he shouted into the phone.   “Stay right where you are!   Go catch a fucking marlin!”           
     

     
    * * *
     
    Brent Daggart stood in front of the window in his corner office at Soldiers of Christ Ministry that overlooked the Pacific Ocean and watched the passenger jets strung out over the ocean in intervals as they prepared for their landings at the Los Angeles International Airport.   Below him, he could see the people walking the beach, hands in pockets studying the sand in front of them and occasionally gazing out to sea.   He couldn’t remember the last time he’d walked idly on the beach.
     
    In the reflection of the window, Daggart could barely see his face and the small lump just below the bridge of his nose, the relic of an old injury.   He rubbed his finger up over it and then back down.
     
    Daggart turned away from the window and settled down in the tall, black leather chair behind a blond, wood desk.   In front of him was a white legal pad with eight names on it.   They were all members of a Congressional subcommittee holding hearings in a few days on a bill requiring mandatory prison terms for all drug offenders.   He steeled himself for the next three hours of persuasion.   At least he knew they would eagerly take his calls.   With the ministry’s millions of viewers, financial clout and the influence the church wielded with other evangelists, Daggart knew the Congressmen would be on their best behavior.
     
    Nine years earlier, Daggart had been on a much different career trajectory.   He was six months away from receiving his doctorate degree in divinity school when he decided the rarified air of academia was not where he wanted to spend his life.   It was another life change that surprised many people who knew him.   The first had occurred when Daggart, midway through college, shifted his studies and life focus away from business and toward religion.  
     
    He’d been the president of his high school and a star athlete.   He could have been valedictorian but made a calculated choice to let someone else have that honor.   Most figured he would zoom through a top college and head on to law school, become a doctor, or wind up a wealthy captain of industry.
     
    Those who knew him well were less surprised by the shift.   He’d had a strict religious upbringing.   Although popular in school, Daggart carefully avoided the vices that his classmates seemed all too eager to embrace.   He avoided alcohol, smoking, drugs and never dated although any girl in the school would have been flattered by an invitation.   When his best friend confessed to having had sex with a girl, Daggart dropped him in an instant.
     
    Daggart still had been immensely popular.   He might not be the guy to show up at a party with a fifth of rum.   But he was the one to win the biggest football game with an inspirational speech and a 40-yard pass in the final seconds.   He even orchestrated the departure of a terrible chemistry teacher, both a bit senile and too fond of the bottle, and did it so deftly that the teacher still gave Daggart glowing college references.      
     
    It was that sense of self, actually, that drove him from the academic