Caligula snatched the rat and flung it down to the floor. Then he stood on the creature’s head with one foot, and tore messily at its stomach with his beak.

Jamal grimaced down at it. “Oh God. Oh, gross. Rat innards all over the carpet again.”

The teleconference room was a good sixty years old and timelessly bland, though the equipment itself was contemporary. Molly double-checked that the camera was off-line, and then turned on the video wall.

The defector was sitting bitterly in a chair behind a conference table, staring straight ahead of himself at nothing. He rarely blinked.

“When will Griffin be here?” he asked peevishly. He was dressed entirely in black, and had cultivated a small, devilish goatee. All in all, he was the single most Satanic-looking individual Molly Gerhard had ever seen. She was surprised he wasn’t wearing an inverted crucifix on a chain around his neck.

Tom Navarro, sitting to the man’s left, put down some papers and pushed his glasses up on his forehead. “Just be patient.”

On the defector’s right, Amy Cho sat smiling down at the top of her cane, tightly clutched by those pale, blue-veined hands. Without looking up, she made a comforting, clucking noise.

The defector scowled.

Okay, kiddies, Molly thought. It’s show time!

She dimmed the lights to give her an indistinct background, put her administrative assistant on the table before her, and switched it to steno mode. Then she snapped on the camera. “All right,” she said. “What do you have for me?”

“Who’s this?” the defector demanded. “I was supposed to talk to Griffin. Why isn’t he here?”

She’d wondered that herself. “I am Mr. Griffin’s associate,” she said emotionlessly. “Unfortunately, he can’t be here at this time. But anything you can tell him, you can tell me.”

“This is bullshit! I came here in good faith and you—”

“We have yet to establish that you have anything worth hearing,” Tom Navarro said. “The burden of proof is on you.”

“That’s bullshit too! How could I even know about your operation if it weren’t riddled with double agents? Your press conference announcing time travel is going on right now! I didn’t come here to be treated like a child!”

“You’re absolutely right, dear,” Amy Cho said. “But you’re here now, and you have a message that needs to be heard. So why don’t you just tell us it? We’d all be delighted to listen.”

“All right,” he said. “All right! But no more of this good-cop bad-cop routine, okay? I expect you to keep this guy muzzled.” This last was directed at Molly.

Bingo! she thought. He’d accepted her authority. Their little psychodrama was now firmly on course. But she was careful not to let her elation show. Outwardly, she allowed herself only the smallest of nods. “Go on.”

“Okay, I stared work at the Ranch four years ago—”

“From the beginning, please,” Molly Gerhard said. “So we have a more complete picture.”

The defector grimaced and began again.

He was a film maker. After graduating from London University in 2023, he’d returned to the States and the usual round of rejection and menial industry jobs an aspirant director could expect, before drifting into Christian video. He’d had some success with Sunday school tapes and inspirational packages for aspirant missionaries. He specialized in morality tales of people rescued from drugs, alcohol, and situation ethics by a strict literal reading of the Bible. He was always careful to have those transforming passages read aloud by a stern father-figure, who could then explain what they meant. He was particularly proud of that touch.

He’d had success, but no money. Religious producers were notoriously miserly, slow to pay off a contract and quick to point out the spiritual benefits of poverty and hard work.

Nor was there recognition to be had. The Jew-dominated secular film industry, of course, paid no attention to fundamentalist films. None of his work was reviewed, listed, or even noted in their cinematography journals. Awards? Forget it.

So when he was approached by one of the Ranch’s recruiters, he listened. The money wasn’t great, they told him, but it was reliable. He’d be doing important work. He’d have his own studio.

The Ranch started him out with a documentary of an expedition to Mount Ararat in search of Noah’s Ark. Six weeks in Armenia, sleeping in tents and coddling the inflated egos of self-styled archaeologists who didn’t even know that the mountain’s name dated back not to the Flood but to a prestige-seeking Christian monarch in the fourth century A.D. After that, he made a series of training films showing how to forge fossils. Then revisionist biographies of Darwin and Huxley identifying them as Freemasons and hinting at incest and murder. He admitted that these were speculations.

“Didn’t that bother you?” Tom Navarro asked abruptly.

“Didn’t what bother me?”

“Slandering Darwin and Huxley. They, neither of them, did any of the terrible things you claim.”

“They could have. Without God, all things are possible. They were both atheists. Why shouldn’t they do whatever evil things entered into their heads?”

“But they didn’t.”

“But they could have.”

“If we can keep to the topic—” Molly said crisply. Amy Cho, sputtering with indignation, looked like she was about to take her cane to Tom. To the defector, Molly said, “Please continue.”

“Yes.” The defector placed his hands together, as if in prayer, bowed his head over them, and then looked up through his dark eyebrows at her. He looked like a second-rate stage magician building up suspense for his next illusion. “As you say.”

Finally, they trusted him enough to let him film a demolitions expert assembling a bomb.

“Who was he?” Tom wanted to know.

“I have no idea. They brought him in. I filmed him. End of story.”

The video had been made under almost comically excessive secrecy. He was taken blindfolded at night to a cabin in the mountains to film a man wearing thin gloves and a ski mask while he slowly and lovingly assembled a bomb to the accompaniment of a synthetic-voice narrative. He hired actors to play the parts of Ranch strategists in what they thought were scripted fictions, then muffled their voices and electronically altered their faces, to protect those strategists even further.

“How many videos did you make?” Tom Navarro asked. “When did you start?”

“We made a lot. How to build a bomb. How to plant it. How to infiltrate a hostile organization. Hiding your faith. Passing yourself off as a godless humanist. I lost count. Maybe one a month for the past year?”

“That’s a lot of work for so little time,” Amy Cho observed.

“No third takes, no re-shoots, no catering,” the defector said with a touch of pride. “It may not be pretty, but it’s efficient. I gave them good value, and I brought their films in under budget.”

“And they dumped you.”

“We had a falling-out, yes.”

Molly checked the transcript on her administrative assistant. “We seem to have skipped over the cause of your dismissal.”

“He was running a porn site,” Tom said. “Anonymously, it goes without saying. The Ranch probably would’ve never found out if he hadn’t gotten the fifteen-year-old daughter of one of their administrators involved.”

The defector glanced at him scornfully. “It was her own idea, made freely and without coercion. It wasn’t exploitative at all.”

“It was a so-called ‘Christian porn site,’ ” Tom explained. “That had to be what made them angriest. They hate those things. They think the very name is rank hypocrisy. Know what? I think they have a point.”

“I’m having trouble picturing such a thing,” Molly said.

“Biblical scenes. Girls in short skirts kneeling in church. The joys of wedded bliss. Saints being flogged and tortured.”