First Daughter by Eric Van Lustbader Read Free Book Online Page B

like a wound. "As the head of this task force, my opinion is the one that counts."
    "So, what?" Jack spread his hands. "Have you brought me here to fire me?"
    "Have you ever heard of 'missionary secularism'?" Garner continued as if Jack hadn't spoken.
    "No. I haven't."
    "I rest my case." Garner flipped the file onto the carpet. "That's about all those reports are good for—floor covering. Because they're built on old-school assumptions, we have to give those assumptions the boot or we'll never get anywhere on this case." He perched on the edge of the sofa again, linked his fingers, pressed the pads of his thumbs together as if they were sparring partners about to go at it. "It can be no surprise even to you that for the past eight years the Administration has been guiding the country along a new path of faith-based initiatives. Religion—the belief in God, in America's God-given place in the world—is what makes this country strong, what can unite it. Move it into a new golden age of global influence and power.
    "But then there are the naysayers: the far-left liberals, the gays, thefringe elements of society, the disenfranchised, the deviants, the weak-willed, the criminal."
    "The criminal—?"
    "The abortionists, McClure. The baby killers, the family destroyers, the sodomites."
    Again, Jack glanced at Nina, who was flicking what appeared to be a non ex is tent piece of lint off her skirt. Jack said nothing because this argument—if you could call it that—was nonrational, and therefore not open to debate.
    "There's a Frog by the name of Michel Infra. This bastard is the self-proclaimed leader of a movement of militant atheists. He's on record as claiming that atheism is in a final battle with what he terms 'theological hocus-pocus.' He's far from the only one. In Germany, a so-called think tank of Enlightenment, made up of Godless scientists and the like—the same dangerous alarmists proclaiming that global warming is the end of the world—are promulgating the devilish notion that the world would be better off without religion. The president is beside himself. And then there's the British, who haven't had a God-driven thought in their heads in centuries.
The God Delusion
is a book written by one of them." He snapped his fingers. "What's his name, Nina?"
    "Richard Dawkins," Nina said, emerging from her near-coma. "An Oxford professor."
    Garner waved away her words. "Who cares where he's from? The point is, we're under attack."
    "What's further aggravated the Administration," Nina continued blandly, "is a recent European Union survey asking its citizens to rank their life values. Religion came in last, far behind human rights, peace, democracy, individual freedom, and the like."
    Garner shook his head. "Don't they know we're in a religious war for our very way of life? Faith-based policy is the only way to fight it."
    "Which is why this Administration is hostile to the incomingone." Having awoken, Nina now seemed on a roll. "Moderate Republicanism as represented by Edward Carson and his people is a step backward, as far as the president is concerned."
    "Okay, this is all very enlightening," Jack said, "but what the hell does it have to do with the kidnapping of Alli Carson?"
    "Everything," Garner said, scowling. "We have reason to believe that the people who planned and carried out the kidnapping are missionary secularists, a group calling itself E-Two, the Second Enlightenment."
    "That refers to the ongoing—often violent—conflict originating in Europe's eighteenth-century Enlightenment," Nina said.
    "A so-called
intellectual
movement," Garner sneered, making the word synonymous with
criminal
.
    "Reason over superstition, that was the Enlightenment's battle cry, led by George Berkeley, Thomas Paine, who returned to the pioneering work of Pascal, Leibniz, Galileo, and Isaac Newton," Nina said. "And it's E-Two's credo as well."
    "I never heard of them," Jack said before he could stop himself.
    "No?" Garner cocked his