Riven - Jerry B. Jenkins [197]
Chaplain Thomas Carey was slowly coming to think Brady’s idea might have some merit after all. The way things were coming together, maybe God was behind it.
The press credited the almighty dollar.
The news bombshell hit the planet simultaneously, as choreographed by ICN. Moments after dawn in every time zone, everybody everywhere was aware of the facts and began spouting their opinions.
The International Cable Network had, for an undisclosed sum that most estimated in the high eight figures, secured all media rights—including Web, radio, TV, motion picture, book, and any subsidiary right anyone could imagine—to a singular event. They would film, with one stationary camera, the execution of Brady Wayne Darby by crucifixion.
ICN reserved the right to show the footage live on international television, and naturally that announcement alone resulted in unending public debate over the next two years.
Besides its enormous payment to the state, and specifically to the Department of Corrections and its crown-jewel supermax, Adamsville State Penitentiary, ICN committed itself to a laundry list of obligations.
These included guaranteeing the security of the facility and its inmates, covering all related costs, and scheduling a separate extensive documentary that would put ASP in the best light.
Of primary importance to the Department of Corrections was that Darby not have personal access to the media. He could not be interviewed. It was, Warden Frank LeRoy said, a policy for which he could not finagle an exception. Neither was Darby, nor anyone associated with him, to benefit financially from the project.
The only further concession to Brady was that ICN agreed to pay for a simple headstone and a tiny section of the prison grounds where he would be buried four days after his death.
The firestorm of vitriol that resulted included dire predictions from pundits that all manner of public agencies would begin parlaying their capital cases and, in essence, selling condemned inmates to the media to show public executions.
Cooler heads pointed out that this spectacle was Darby’s own idea and that no man or woman without a specific agenda like his was likely to allow the broadcast rights to his or her execution to be sold for the benefit of the state.
Virtually every municipality in the world immediately acted to prevent similar eccentric displays, and the federal government filed suit against the state to preclude what it called “a fiasco with the potential for irreparable harm to the common good.”
While the case dragged on—Governor Allard guaranteeing he would defend states’ rights to the end—a cross was donated from a research facility in Israel that claimed the item was as close to the first-century Roman death contraption as it could be.
Adamsville State Penitentiary
Meanwhile, Brady devoted himself to becoming more than a curiosity. With the exuberant support of his aunt Lois (and, she assured him, her entire church), he was determined to get to know Jesus as well as he could in his time left on earth. He requested books from the chaplain’s library and began memorizing Scripture and reciting it aloud in his cell, despite a constant barrage of abuse from every con within earshot.
The at-long-last meeting with his aunt had been a curious affair, the two of them with both hands pressed against the Plexiglas as they wept and talked and prayed and sang.
“Somehow I always knew God had something in mind for you, Brady,” she said.
He had to smile. “You coulda fooled me. Thanks for never giving up on me.”
Brady spent most of his time pacing, memorizing, and quietly reciting line after line of Jesus’ words from the Bible. He spoke just above a whisper, but no one could have heard him if he had shouted, such was the clamor from within