"Call me anything but Randy, and we won't cause each other trouble." He shuffled unsteadily to the white cube and leaned his bulk against it. It skidded a bit, dragging part of the rug with it. He shifted about to gaze up at me. I must have scored a hit on the button the way his round chin was getting rounder.

I felt bad about doing that. His face didn't need any more workouts.

"The Ecclesia," he continued, as though he'd just stopped for a breath, "is a loose association of high-level bishops, rabbis, imams, roshis, and various other shamans who have a vested interest in maintaining the power of religion. Organized religion. The kind that accumulates revenue. They consider any threat to the philosophical foundations of any faith to be a threat to all. They leave the lip service concerning holy wars to the lower echelons. In the same manner as the U.S. and the Soviet governments, they recognize that the pretense of being enemies is necessary to justify their mutual existences. Fear and hatred of the rival religion keeps the peons in line. The Ecclesia is securely entrenched. They've got the wealth of a dozen faiths to play with, and they're not interested in people who rock the boat."

He leaned toward me. "And you've got them worried, Ammo. Why?"

I smiled. Easing back in the chair, I pulled out another coffin nail and tapped it against the pack. Silently.

"They're sure as hell not concerned about me," Corbin said. "And look what I'm preaching." His arm swept about to encompass the room. "The Word of the Beast. The heretical absurdity that a true Christian should labor to bring the Antichrist to power so that God's prophecies can-finally-come to pass."

He frowned. "No one's ever so much as dropped me a nasty note. A couple of decades ago, when some researchers proved that Jesus had been rescued from the cross and lived to sire a child with Mary Magdalene, did the religious establishment even sniff? The book was a best-seller. Did the faith of millions come crashing?"

"Let me guess," I said. "No?"

"No. Even the revelation that the Death and Resurrection never happened bothered no one. Yet you-you they kill for." His fist pounded against the altar. "What's your angle, mister?"

I smiled. "Jovial old Jehovah is at the top of a hit list and I'm the torpedo."

Tom burst out laughing. Corbin stared at me. His chin was growing purplish. He didn't laugh.

"Don't get funny, Ammo."

"You seem to think I'm having a less than humorous effect."

"God's just one of a lot of ideas, Ammo. It's a metaphor for conscience-for the all-seeing eye that watches your actions and won't let you escape their consequences. God doesn't exist where you can track Him down and kill Him. You'd have to kill an idea."

"I'm hearing echoes," I said. "Deja vu. I've heard all this before. Yet someone must think it's possible or I wouldn't be drawing a paycheck."

Corbin shook his head. Tom smiled again, saying, "Ghostbusters make a lot of money ridding homes of entities that don't exist. Someone wants you to exorcise the Holy Spirit. Better check your client's psychiatric record."

I didn't have to. I already knew it was pretty wobbly.

"Look, Ammo." Corbin spoke softly. "God is a concept deep within most all of us that exists for a lot of reasons-fear, guilt, hatred. Sometimes even genuine worship and joy. It's other-directed, it's aimed outward from the self. When one is compelled to appease an all-powerful thing whose purpose is beyond human understanding, the stress causes severe psychological damage. In fact, the degree to which one achieves the good is the degree to which he or she defies the dictates of God. Or, I should say, what some people say are the dictates of God." He waved a hand about. "It's all just a way to keep people enslaved. To keep them from thinking, daring, or rebelling."

"Bravo," I muttered around my cigarette. "A brilliant new hypothesis."

"Not much of what I say is new," Corbin admitted, his face as pleasant as flat beer. "It just isn't repeated enough." The idea that one can live without God, or that He's a cruel hoax, or an age-old political tool is so alien to most people that they consider it a sin even to think about it."

"Perhaps," Tom cut in, "if you started grabbing people on the street, dragging them into alleys and hypnotizing them, you could get into their subconscious minds to pluck out the concept."

"Deprogramming?" It sounded like hard work.

Tom shrugged his suitably well-formed shoulders. "Well, not the sort that some church kidnappers practice. They simply reprogram in a traditional God to replace a socially unacceptable God. You'd have to leave them without any deep-seated theistic concepts."

"And there are as many concepts of God," Corbin added, "as there are human beings."

"And," Tom chirped, "you'd have to destroy the concept in everyone at once. Otherwise it might re-emerge and God would live again."

"Not only that"-Corbin strode around the room like a hyped-up fight promoter-"you'd have to provide enough intellectual ammunition to prevent people from backsliding. Something to battle their doubts with. Thought, after all, is the enemy of faith."

"You could use television. It's been used to hypnotize the masses for half a century." Tom was enjoying this as much as Corbin.

The stocky man ran his fingers along his chin. Touching the sore spot made him wince. He glowered at me. "TV's no good. Doesn't reach all the people. You've got to lower everyone's brain waves into a theta dream state all at once. As if they were dozing off. Yet leave in enough alpha wave state to enable them to alter their gestalts."

"Same as the ancient initiation rituals."

He smiled at Tom. "Hmm. Isn't that so…" He nodded in my direction. "Know what we're talking about?"

"Alpha, theta-it's all Greek to me."

"Haw. Haw. Funny man. We're talking about brain wave frequencies." He looked at me with his small, buried eyes and shook his head. "A tough guy like you wouldn't care, would you?"

"I'm not tough. You said so yourself. I'm just a soft, sensitive guy who can't take rejection."

"Take a walk and never come back."

"I presume this concludes our audience?"

Corbin glared at me. "I've given you a warning and offered you my help-"

"Is that what it was? Sounded like a lecture to me." I headed toward the door.

"And you refused to come clean. Whatever you're trying, Ammo, you're up against stiff opposition. You can't do it alone."

"We all die alone," I said. "To kill, the only partner I need is my target."

"You're looking in all the wrong places."

I kept walking.

Tom stopped me with one lovely hand on my arm. "You can't leave without asking why he calls this the St. Judas Church."

"Watch me."

Tom was insistent. His fingers tightened with surprising strength around my arm. The friendly smile never left his lips. "Because all the apostles betrayed their Lord, but only Judas felt bad enough about it to kill himself."

"Gee," I said, grasping Tom's wrist and squeezing until I felt cartilage grind, "and all these years I thought Judas should be a saint because he was instrumental in granting God's greatest wish."

"Wish?" Corbin said.

"To feel what it's like to be human. To feel what it's like to die."

Corbin's jaw dropped as far as it could in its condition. Score one for me. Tom laughed.

I took one last look at that beautiful face and turned to go. His voice carried down the steps as I departed.

"How's that for meeting your theological match?"

"Forget him. We've got work to do."

The sound of Tom's laughter followed me onto the hot L.A. streets.