The Lucifer Gospel by Paul Christopher

fundamentalist, Judd was generally thought to be a complete outer-limits nutcase who had been twice warned in the Senate for his racist, inflammatory remarks. The fact that Adamson had anything to do with a lunatic like Senator Jimmy “Sword of the Lord” Judd came as a complete surprise to Finn.
    Simpson wasn’t entirely sure what Adamson’s involvement with Judd had to do with the dig, but according to Simpson it was Judd’s influence in the corridors of power that had gotten Adamson’s expedition access to the Libyan site. That Judd would be rubbing shoulders with people who were the sworn enemies of groups like the Tenth Crusade didn’t make the slightest bit of sense, but according to Simpson’s sources it was unqualified fact, and that made the information all the more intriguing.
    After Simpson finally left her room, Finn had spent a confusing hour in the darkness trying to make sense of it all, and trying to make the fat little Englishman’s tale fit in with what had happened to her in the City of the Dead. What had started off as an exotic summer job after graduation was turning into something sinister, dark, and very dangerous. On top of everything else she still hadn’t figured out what Simpson’s angle was; except for the tenuous connection to her late father, there was no reason for the strange man to have sought her out for his late-night warning.
    “Holy… !”
    The Cessna suddenly yawed, turning in the sky like a windblown leaf. They dropped like a stone, surrounded by a screaming howl of jet engines on both sides that came and went in an instant.
    “Son of a bitch!” Hilts yelled, struggling with the wheel, hauling back, desperately pulling out of the sudden dive. The horizon tumbled, spun, then finally settled down. “What the hell was that?!”
    Finn tried to get her stomach back where it belonged. Achmed, wide awake, sat behind her looking terrified.
    Laval, book in his lap, looked out the port-side window, staring through the lightly tinted glass. “I believe they were Sukhoi Su-22s,” he said. “A pair of them. Probably flying out of Al-Jufra/Hun. Presumably we are now in Libyan air space. They were most likely trying to read your tail registration number.”
    “You seem to know a lot about Russian all-purpose fighter jets for a monk,” said Hilts. “Not to mention Libyan air bases.”
    “You forget, Mr. Hilts, I am French, and France had no argument with the colonel, as you Americans had. I have been to this country many times in the past twenty years; I am no stranger to their security measures.”
    “That must be nice for you,” said Hilts with a sour note in his voice.
    “It must be disturbing for a man such as yourself to realize that some of us would rather be citizens of the world than citizens of the United States.”
    Hilts muttered something under his breath.
    “I beg your pardon, Mr. Hilts?”
    “How soon before we land?” Finn broke in. The thought of these two in a fistfight at twenty thousand feet wasn’t doing much for her peace of mind.
    “Can’t be soon enough for me,” Hilts grunted.
     
     
     

10
     
     
    An hour later they landed at Al-Kufrah. From the air it looked like an arid west Texas ghost town: a crossroads with a main street and a few dozen low, adobe-style buildings in the middle of nowhere. The original oasis had become one of Qaddafi’s first “modernization projects” after the revolution, and as they came in for their approach Finn saw dozens of the huge green circles in the desert that marked the deeply irrigated zones of oasis agriculture the colonel-dictator had instituted. The fact that the desert climate was totally unsuited to the crops he tried to grow and that the oasis economy had been totally upset by his efforts was immaterial. He would make the desert bloom even if what he grew cost three times as much to produce as it could be sold for. What Colonel Qaddafi wanted, Colonel Qaddafi got, no questions asked.
    Hilts put the