A Secret Consilium, or Ten Percent for Lucifer

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Lake Como slumbered in the crisp, almost tangible stillness of late Alpine autumn. The chalet’s panoramic terrace offered a picture-postcard view of ineffable beauty: the mirrored azure expanse of the lake reflecting the steep slopes of the Lombard Alps, their peaks dusted with the season’s first silvery frost. Below, along the drowsy shores, nestled pastel-colored villas of the wealthy, draped in crimson wild ivy, while the faint, invisible bells of grazing goats echoed across distant terraced slopes.

The air was rich with the scent of damp mountain woods, decaying chestnuts, and the absolute, centuries-old serenity of old European wealth.

The chalet itself—a monumental, three-story château fashioned from dark larch beams and grey Alpine slate—was officially registered to an unassuming financial foundation based in Lugano with a convoluted corporate holding name. To hundreds of thousands of European Jehovah’s Witnesses pinching every single euro for gas just to drive to the Kingdom Hall, this trust was known merely as a “non-profit entity supporting missionary activity in Europe”. In reality, the estate served as a strictly confidential sanatorium and a covert retreat for the highest tier of the supervisory elite, the so-called Governing Body. Here, far from prying eyes, they could escape the demands of the flock, secular tax authorities, and the tedious, monastic austerity of Bethel—the Watchtower Society’s World Headquarters in Warwick, New York.

Inside the grand fireside hall, exquisite comfort reigned. Heavy oak wall paneling, supple leather Chesterfield armchairs, a roaring fire in a natural granite hearth, and a massive oval dining table set with fine bone china, bottles of twenty-five-year-old Scotch, and freshly brewed espresso.

Yet the atmosphere inside was anything but pastoral bliss.

Seated around the table was a delegation from the Governing Body—key functionaries of the Coordinators’ and Writing Committees. Stephen Lett nervously rubbed the bridge of his nose, repeatedly adjusting his silk necktie; David Splane, with obsessive pedantry, shuffled through color-coded charts and audience retention graphs inside his leather portfolio; Geoffrey Jackson sipped his whisky in measured swallows, his plump fingers never letting go of a corporate iPad displaying financial summaries. Nearby, two pale assistants from the Coordinators’ apparatus stood motionless, resembling private investment bank security guards far more than clergy.

Here, on neutral Swiss-Italian soil, not a shred remained of their public aura as “God’s earthly representatives”. The elders were waiting for their true Partner and General Contractor.

Precisely at noon, the room’s physics suffered a subtle, eerie glitch.

The fire in the granite hearth did not die—it froze, suspended like a freeze-frame, its vivid amber hue instantly dulling to an ashen, lifeless grey. Across the screens of all tablets and smartphones ran a faint lattice of static, and in a single second, an icy draft flooded the chamber as though a glacial gale had blown straight through. The aroma of woodsmoke and coffee was displaced by the smell of ozone, mingled with the scent of an expensive, niche Tom Ford fragrance and a faint, metallic tang of heated iron.

The heavy oak doors parted without a sound.

Into the hall stepped a tall, impeccably built, middle-aged gentleman with distinguished silver hair at his temples. He wore a tailored, charcoal-slate Brioni suit, stitched with such geometric precision as no mortal tailor could ever manage. Gliding silently behind him came two athletic auditors in crisp suits, carrying titanium briefcases; their shadows fell across the oak parquet at a strange, slightly skewed angle, subtly misaligned with the ambient light.

The men at the table looked toward the newcomers with a rising wave of anxiety and dread. It was their longtime associate and Chairman of the Board since the late nineteenth century—the fallen angel, Lucifer himself.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” the Prince of Darkness began in a smooth, velvety baritone that carried the polite detachment of a seasoned Swiss banker. “The Alps are exceptionally splendid today. Please, remain seated—don’t get up. Let us begin our meeting. As you well understand, I did not summon this particular gathering on a whim. The matter is pressing. But first, I believe I shall sit and take a sip of whisky; one must unwind after travel, you know”.

Satan gracefully took the head seat at the table, crossed his legs, and casually signaled his assistants, who stepped up and froze behind him like living statues. Reaching for a clean crystal tumbler, he poured himself two fingers of amber whisky and swept his gaze over the assembled elders with a faint, patronizing smirk.

“It is a pleasure to see you all assembled and in good health. After all, our joint venture has outlasted most secular empires. And yet, remember how it all began?”

Lucifer narrowed his eyes slightly, fixing his gaze on Splane:

“Good old Charles Taze Russell with his naive pyramidology… Measuring the interior corridors of the Great Pyramid of Giza with an inch-tape to calculate the date of the end of the world! We down in the netherworld had a hearty laugh over that charming little startup, though we certainly appreciated the zeal. And then came Joseph Rutherford. Now there was a man with real business acumen! Erecting the lavish Beth-Sarim mansion in sunny California right in the dead of the Great Depression, announcing to millions of starving publishers that it was a ‘residence for the resurrected King David and Abraham,’ all while hoarding bootleg liquor inside and cruising around San Diego in a sixteen-cylinder Cadillac… A cynical genius. Your current construction budgets in Ramapo pale before the Judge’s sheer audacity”.

The members of the Governing Body nodded in obsequious agreement, though an old, dormant dread flashed behind Jackson’s eyes.

“The founding fathers, however, were merely the opening act,” Satan said, raising his glass in a mock toast toward Lett. “The true masterclass began in the second half of the twentieth century. Gentlemen, your doctrine regarding the refusal of blood transfusions… That was an absolute masterpiece! For millennia, I expended vast energy inciting world wars just to make human blood flow in rivers. Yet you managed to have fathers and mothers voluntarily bury their own children right on operating tables, refusing even simple plasma—and all of it done to the applause of the elders, with serene smiles of loyalty on their faces! To rebrand crude ritual sacrifice as ‘Christian endurance’… My administrative bureau gave you a standing ovation”.

The corner of Lett’s mouth twitched as he forced on his customary, strained half-smile:

“We… we strictly maintained the boundaries keeping the flock separate from the world, Your Dark Eminence. Blood and the fear of death bind a congregation far tighter than any bylaws ever could”.

“Undoubtedly,” the Devil purred. “And your little circus surrounding 1975? What exquisite drama! People sold their farms, blew through their life savings, quit their careers, went into debt—all to purchase a front-row ticket to Armageddon. You certainly engineered a clever spin on the completion of six thousand years of human history in seventy-five! Down in Hell, we even ran a betting pool: would your little shop fold after January first, nineteen seventy-six, or hold the line? And yet, you slithered right out of it! Blamed everything on ‘the overzealous expectations and running ahead of the chariot by the brothers themselves’. A supreme triumph of corporate gaslighting. The flock swallowed it whole and came back asking for seconds”.

Satan’s gaze shifted abruptly toward David Splane, and the temperature in the room plummeted another few degrees. The visitor’s smile sharpened like a scalpel.

“Though with that ‘overlapping generation,’ David, you were skating on remarkably thin ice, to put it mildly. Admit it candidly: didn't you all nearly soil yourselves right in front of the entire planet?”

Splane swallowed hard, his face blanching as his fingers tightened around the edge of his portfolio.

“The generation of 1914—the one that supposedly witnessed Christ’s invisible presence—had died off completely,” Satan continued without raising his voice, his icy pupils pinning the old man in place. “The ground was vanishing beneath your feet, the dogma was ripping apart at the seams, and sheer panic had broken out in every branch office. After all, that was one of the foundational pillars of your theology. And then, at the convention, you roll out this absurd little idea of generational succession: ‘contemporaries of those who saw the contemporaries’! The absolute pinnacle of nonsense! Even the demons down in accounting choked on such unblushing insolence. Granted, your sheep didn't choke on that bone either, but the brand took a severe beating. It was a cheap, hazardous stunt. One more reach like that, and your entire multi-billion-dollar enterprise will crumble into dust”.

A dense, ringing silence settled over the room. Outside, behind the thick glass, only the faint swaying of cypress boughs along the shores of sleepy Lake Como could be seen.

Satan set his glass back onto the oak surface. In an instant, his relaxed demeanor vanished. His face hardened into the cold, predatory mask of an ancient tyrant.

One of the accompanying demons stepped forward, flipped the latches of the titanium case with a dry snap, and dropped a heavy black folder embossed with a coat of arms onto the table before the Council.

“The past is the past, however,” the Prince of Darkness stated in an icy voice that sent an ache through the elders’ jaws. “I did not travel all this way to reminisce about your past laurels. Let us discuss, gentlemen, why over the recent fiscal cycles your branch has been deteriorating at breakneck speed, why the flock has lost its fear, and why the metrics of our joint revenue are going straight to hell… Open the reports. The audit has begun”.

The demon who had brought the case leaned over and opened the folder. With a flick of his fingers, crisp holographic infographics hovered directly above the oak tabletop, slicing through the cool air.

The trajectories on the charts were anything but encouraging. They crawled stubbornly, calamitously downward.

“Take a look, gentlemen,” Satan drawled without raising his voice, yet every syllable was laced with the savage chill of a top executive catching branch directors red-handed in a reckless asset dump. “The neuroticism index of the flock over the past three fiscal cycles has plummeted by forty-two percent. The average level of subconscious guilt in a rank-and-file publisher is at an all-time historic low. The attrition of revenue-generating youth is breaking records. Why is everything going straight to the dogs?”

The Prince of Darkness slowly swept his gaze over the pale elders. David Splane froze, barely breathing; Geoffrey Jackson desperately clenched the corner of his silk tie in his fist; Stephen Lett blinked rapidly and erratically, trying to master his involuntarily twitching cheek.

“I supply you with geopolitical chaos like clockwork,” Lucifer continued, tapping his fingernail against the rim of his glass. “I keep inflation afloat, fan the flames of conflict in the Middle East, toss in climate anomalies and hysterical headlines in the press. I create the ideal target market for your apocalypse! And what do you do? You are losing your grip. Your sheep have stopped fearing Armageddon!”

Satan turned an arched, venomous glance toward the vacant leather armchair next to Jackson.

“By the way, gentlemen… Where is your good old Tony Morris? Did he decide to stay home, polishing off that famous Sunday case of twelve-year-old Scottish Macallan from New Jersey?”

The elders hunched their shoulders in unison.

“What a character he was!” the Devil clicked his tongue in sarcastic admiration. “A genuine, thoroughbred butcher of the old school. How deliciously he struck that match right in front of the lens on your JW Broadcasting, relishing how the innards of sinners would burn and vanish like smoke on an altar! How brilliantly he terrified the sheep with those ‘tight pants,’ supposedly concocted by fashion designers to promote homosexuality! And what did you do? The old man was caught off-guard by worldly onlookers at a liquor store with a shopping cart full of premium booze during working hours. You panicked over a couple of YouTube videos, quietly exiled the fellow to the backwoods of North Carolina, and frantically began scrubbing his face from all video archives like an enemy of the people in Stalin’s Politburo! You couldn’t even gracefully dispose of your own drunken anointed member—leaving behind a trail of cheap panic and amateurish redactions in your media library!”

“Your Dark Eminence…” Jackson croaked, dabbing his dripping forehead with a handkerchief. “Anthony… Brother Morris became a toxic asset. He was damaging the brand’s reputation…”

“The brand’s reputation?!” Satan’s eyebrows shot up, and the fire in the hearth flared with a sharp, ghastly blue flash. “I couldn’t care less about your brand if you’re dismantling the very bedrock of discipline! What have you unleashed in the congregations over this past year? You’ve allowed men to grow beards, and women to strut into Kingdom Halls in slacks! What was our entire system built upon? Total conditioning through everyday shame! Upon the fact that an ordinary elder could crush any publisher’s life over a three-day stubble! You voluntarily tossed the leash of micromanagement into the trash!”

Lucifer turned a page of the report, jabbing his finger at a red metric.

“And abolishing the submission of monthly field service hours? You swapped thirty days of relentless self-flagellation, insomnia, and nervous tics for one lazy checkmark at the end of the month! Now the sheep sleep peacefully on Saturdays instead of freezing in drafty apartment vestibules and braving dirty looks from the neighbors. Where is my background neuroticism among the flock?! Why on earth do I need a religious corporation where the rank-and-file have stopped feeling like perpetual, guilt-ridden nobodies?!”

“Mr. Chairman, you have to understand our legal context!” Splane pleaded in desperation, shoving folders of litigation summaries toward the Devil with trembling hands. “We’ve been stripped of registration and state subsidies in Norway! Prosecutors in Pennsylvania and Australia are unsealing archives of blue envelopes detailing child sexual abuse! We are facing the revocation of our 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status in the States! We were forced to allow publishers to at least say a simple greeting to disfellowshipped individuals just so we wouldn't look like a medieval cult in the Oslo courtrooms!”

“You caved to secular courts for a measly few million Norwegian kroner?!” Satan scoffed in disgust. “Trading the sacred, blood-curdling terror of familial ostracism for Scandinavian handouts? What an utter disgrace!”

At that moment, Stephen Lett sprang slightly from his seat. His face warped into his trademark exaggerated grimace—his eyebrows climbed his forehead, his mouth rounding as though he were lecturing a room of toddlers:

“But Your Dark Eminence! We are migrating flock retention into a digital ecosystem! We are constructing a monumental studio complex in Ramapo! We’re launching production on a multi-part blockbuster on Jesus in 4K resolution with cutting-edge visual effects! No youth attrition can touch us—they’ll be glued to their screens with their jaws dropped!”

Satan fixed Lett with a prolonged, unbearably heavy stare, and Lett’s jaw snapped shut instantly as he shrank back into the cushions of his armchair.

“Do you honestly believe you can outcompete TikTok and Reddit with your pathetic stage plays featuring bearded extras in bathrobes?” the Prince of Darkness threw out in an icy voice. “Young people read exposés of your financial schemes online and openly mock your productions. You are attempting to patch gangrene with Band-Aids made of moronic Caleb and Sophia cartoons!”

Satan slammed the black folder shut with a dry, hollow thud. The holograms dissolved in an instant.

“Enough whining and excuses. My verdict is simple: I need fanatics ready to bleed out on operating tables and throw their own flesh and blood out onto the street over a cup of coffee with an apostate. I need an army of intimidated, obedient slaves, not a congregation of leisurely, bearded hipsters ticking checkmarks in an app.

The Prince of Darkness leaned forward, fixing his heavy, unblinking gaze on the terrified elders:

“Tighten the screws back down. Bring fear and terror back into the congregations. Otherwise, at our next consilium in a few years, we will carry out an emergency optimization of personnel. Down in Hell, there is a very long line of cynical, ruthless scoundrels eager to step into your leather seats in Warwick tomorrow. Have I made myself clear, brothers?”

A hollow, sepulchral silence filled the fireside room. Not daring to raise their eyes, the members of the Governing Body nodded in meek, unified submission.

“Splendid,” Lucifer remarked, leaning back into his armchair and reaching for his tumbler of whisky once more. “Now that you appreciate the sheer depth of your decline, let us get down to constructive business. Pull out your budget proposals. We have the renewal terms of our exclusive contract to discuss…”

A dry, businesslike chill descended upon the fireside hall of the Swiss château. The raw emotion subsided. After the blistering reprimand, the members of the Governing Body sat meekly, tucking in the tails of their jackets and scarcely daring to breathe, while the demon-secretary methodically rearranged embossed letterheads across the table.

“Now then, gentleman managers, let us proceed to drafting our mutual obligations for the forthcoming five-year cycle,” Lucifer began, producing a gold pen from his vest pocket and twirling it smoothly between his fingers. “I am prepared to renew your exclusive franchise for the distribution of religious opium. But free cheese is found only in the mousetraps of my competitors. What is on your requisition sheet? How do you intend to prime your dwindling flock?”

David Splane shot a cornered glance at Jackson, who gave an almost imperceptible nod. Clearing his throat into a clenched fist, Splane drew toward himself a leather portfolio stamped with the seal of the Coordinators’ Committee.

“Your Dark Eminence…” Splane began, striving to adopt the measured cadence of a circuit overseer. “Our most critical deficit today is fresh, high-grade heroism. We desperately require public, ruthless crackdowns. Without tearjerker dramas about persecuted righteous ones, the emotional engine of the organization simply stalls. The Western flock has grown fat in its suburban prosperity, stopped donating, and increasingly pesters our legal counsel with awkward questions. We need blood and prison bars on our screens!”

“Is that so?” Satan arched an eyebrow in mock surprise. “Did you not squeeze the Malawi situation dry? You milked that cow for a solid forty years!”

“Oh, Malawi was our absolute goldmine!” Geoffrey Jackson chimed in with reverent breath, dabbing his neck with a handkerchief. “When Hastings Banda’s regime began butchering our brothers in the late sixties over their refusal to buy a nominal party card, Brooklyn was ecstatic! Forbidding the sheep from purchasing a party membership card, branding it ‘Christian neutrality,’ while simultaneously whispering to the brothers in Mexico that bribing corrupt generals for military exemption booklets was merely ‘local custom’… What a masterstroke! What exquisite drama! Ransacked villages, refugees in Mozambique, torture by fire, raped sisters—we monetized that horror for decades in the *Yearbooks* and drew standing ovations at regional conventions! But… alas, Your Dark Eminence. Malawi is dated. The youth only yawn at black-and-white photographs from half a century ago”.

“And that was precisely why I handed you Russia,” the Devil countered coldly, tapping his pen against the tabletop. “I personally choreographed the 2017 extremist ruling for you. I provided everything: FSB tactical squads at dawn, doors splintered by battering rams, elderly women enclosed in defendant cages, and real six-to-eight-year prison sentences for reading the Bible over Zoom! Do you have any idea the exertion it took me to convince Moscow’s security services to chase your harmless colporteurs instead of genuine terrorists?! It was a princely gift to your media library!”

“And we remain boundlessly grateful for it!” Stephen Lett interjected, his hands gesticulating wildly, his eyes bulging wide. “The Russian branch performed at two hundred percent capacity! Whenever a JW Broadcasting broadcast rolls ominous orchestral strings over footage of another sister weeping at the gates of a penal colony in Mordovia, contribution conversions from Germany and Texas go through the roof! But… we are facing the effect of ‘normalized repression’. The flock grows accustomed to the outrage. When the hundredth brother is incarcerated, it is a tragedy; when it is the three-hundredth, it is merely another news ticker update. We need a new scale!”

Splane hurriedly unrolled an annotated world map:

“We need fresh autocracies, Your Dark Eminence! Toss us a couple of exemplary state bans across Central Asia, or a pair of bloodthirsty regimes in Africa. Let them raid a few printing facilities, conduct show trials, and demonstratively pack a dozen or two loyal publishers onto prison bunks. We need raw emotional fuel! If we link the crackdown in Russia with a new wave of persecution across the Black Continent, we can officially proclaim that the ‘King of the North’ has entered into a final conspiracy, and that Gog of the land of Magog is standing at the very threshold!”

Lucifer listened to this pitch with undisguised, epicurean delight.

“Astonishing,” the Prince of Darkness chuckled, shaking his head. “A handful of well-fed American retirees sitting in a villa on Lake Como, sipping thousand-dollar-a-bottle Scotch, shamelessly commissioning torture and penal servitude for provincial blue-collar laborers just to pump click-through rates on their streaming channel… Even in the ninth circle of Hell, they would salute this tier of corporate cannibalism!”

Satan straightened up, his voice snapping back to a hard, arctic delivery.

“Very well. I shall sign the order. You shall have your fresh persecutions. I will set a couple of Eastern despots upon your congregations; they will guarantee tactical raids, property confiscations, and prison sentences. But now, hear my terms. Memorize every single word, for I will not tolerate the slightest deviation”.

The elders drew themselves up in unison, hands gripping their armrests tightly.

“Item one: total war on intellect. No higher education! No colleges, no universities! My world runs on fools, and your flock must remain an ideal biomass. If an adherent learns to cross-reference sources and parse historical documentation, they will toss your publications into the incinerator within three days. Stomp out any spark of ambition right from the convention stage! Keep them washing windows, turning wrenches, and sweeping streets, drilling into them that a college diploma is a one-way ticket to Gehenna!”

“We are already drafting a series of *Watchtower* study articles on the spiritual perils of the academic environment,” Splane offered obsequiously. “We shall brand secular education as an ego-trap! Just like the good old days—when elders were stripped of their privileges if their children enrolled in university”.

“Item two: eschatological psychosis. Enough muttering! You are obligated to hold the flock in a continuous, exhausting time crunch. ‘Armageddon may strike on any given day’—that must remain your solitary narrative! No long-term life plans, no retirement savings! Let them deed over their homes and apartments to the Worldwide Work right now! Let them mix mud and haul cinder blocks at the Ramapo construction site for free, believing that in the New World, every cubic meter of concrete will be credited to their salvation!”

“Consider it done, Your Dark Eminence,” Jackson nodded. “We shall immediately direct the Financial and Legal Committees to redraft our estate-planning guidelines and bequest brochures”.

“And item three: the total digital tether. You scrapped monthly hour requirements—so replace them with surveillance inside the mobile app! The flock must live under glass twenty-four hours a day. Every congregation must become an ecosystem of mutual informants. No worldly associations, no lingering doubts. Background anxiety must ring in their ears from daybreak until dusk”.

Satan tossed the pen onto the desk. The metal clicked sharply against a granite ashtray. The auditor-demon immediately laid before the elders two counterparts of the agreement, run off on heavy stock with char-blackened edges.

“Sign the mutual delivery protocol, brothers. You receive fresh martyrs for your video streams; I secure millions of terrified, voiceless drones. The contract term is five years”.

With a trembling hand, Splane took up the pen. Jackson and Lett bowed their heads in docile compliance. The moment the final stroke touched the parchment, lightning flashed soundlessly beyond the château’s panoramic glass, cleaving the pristine white mantle of the Alpine peaks.

The deal was sealed with signatures. The auditor-demon neatly gathered the signed copies, stowed them away into the depths of the titanium briefcase, and snapped the locks shut with a crisp click. The stifling, leaden oppression bearing down on the Governing Body members' temples vanished instantly. The elders exhaled, stretching their stiffened shoulders and discreetly dabbing their sweaty foreheads.

Lucifer narrowed his eyes with satisfaction, leaned back into the depths of his armchair, and slowly extended his right hand forward, palm turned upward.

Directly above the table's polished grain, the air trembled for an instant, congealing into a frosty vortex of grey ash. Space shuddered with a faint, muted rustle, and out of thin air, a dark glass bottle materialized in the fingers of the Prince of Darkness. It was sealed with faded wax bearing an embossed crest and draped in a web of centuried dust.

The elders' gazes instantly locked onto the faded, vintage label. Connoisseurs from Brooklyn needed no magnifying glass to decipher the calligraphic script: *The Macallan 1926. Cask #263*.

“To the successful closure of our negotiating round, gentlemen,” Satan chuckled, chipping off the sealing wax with a languid snap of his fingers as if it were dry clay. “Your retired brother Anthony Morris almost traded his soul for a case of pedestrian twelve-year-old swill in a dingy New Jersey supermarket, squandering the donations of destitute widows. But today, you drink what good old Tony dared not dream of, even in his sweetest, booze-soaked stupors. Distilled in nineteen twenty-six. Aged sixty years in a sherry oak cask. The sole untouched bottle from my private collection. At auctions, mortals fork over fortunes for it, but for dependable business partners, no expense is spared.”

The Council members held their breath in reverent awe. Across Splane’s and Jackson’s faces flashed the genuine, professional delight of seasoned top-shelf connoisseurs. With a thick, syrupy gurgle, the amber liquid cascaded into heavy crystal tumblers, saturating the fireside hall with rich notes of aged oak, dark honey, bitter chocolate, and a faint ribbon of peat smoke.

Lucifer raised his glass:

“My toast is straightforward: to the stability of our syndicate. You unfailingly supply me with millions of intimidated, voiceless zombies, stripped entirely of critical thought, and in return, I ensure the global nightmare that keeps your multi-billion-dollar enterprise afloat. To partnership, brothers!”

“To… to our cooperation, Your Dark Eminence,” the elders murmured in near unison, eagerly pressing their lips to the crystal. The scorching warmth of the elite spirit instantly washed away any lingering dread.

Satan finished his drink, rose from the table, and adjusted the cuffs of his bespoke jacket:

“And now—back to work. I expect fresh broadcasts on JW Broadcasting: make the persecution stories more heart-wrenching, lay on the dramatic orchestral strings, and don't skimp on the tears. The crowd needs to swallow it whole and stay terrified.”

Before the elders could blink, the visitors' silhouettes began to dissolve like smoke from an extinguished cigar. A second later, the head of the table was completely deserted—only drifting tendrils of frosty Alpine fog outside brushed softly against the panoramic glass of the terrace.

The room's physics snapped back to normal. The hearth fire rekindled, blazing with welcoming golden-orange hues, and on the screens of all tablets, chiming with notifications, Bethel’s private corporate intranet sprang back to life. The men drained their whisky to the final drop, smoothed their jackets, straightened their neckties, and checked their grooming in the mirror. Their customary masks returned: once again, they were the venerable, infallible earthly shepherds.

Ten hours later, cruising at thirty-six thousand feet, a private business jet with tinted cabin windows cut through the Atlantic sky, bound for New York.

Inside the spacious, leather-appointed cabin, production was in full swing. David Splane, hunched over his laptop screen, was rapidly typing out talking points for the Writing Department:

“I’m drafting: ‘In view of mounting worldly pressures…’ No, better yet: ‘Jehovah’s timely love and tender care move us to forsake futile worldly ambitions…’ Geoffrey, how do we spin these new criminal indictments in the news updates?”

Jackson, reclined leisurely in his leather seat with a cup of coffee, gave a patronizing chuckle:

“Frame it as the fulfillment of Bible prophecy down to the smallest detail. We’ll tell them: ‘Brothers, as the juggernaut of state persecution bears down, know that the organization has already prepared spiritual food! Rally around the Governing Body, liquidate surplus property, and remit the funds directly to the Worldwide Work before the banking system completely collapses!’”

“Brilliant,” Splane smirked. “Throw in an infographic with locusts and horsemen, and European and American congregations will bury us in donations.”

A few days later at the Warwick World Headquarters, inside the primary production soundstage of JW Broadcasting, preparations were smoothly underway to record “new light” delivered directly by the Governing Body.

A reverent hush hung beneath the towering rafters. Powerful studio floodlights bathed the set in soft illumination; behind the desk loomed a massive framed green screen, destined to be keyed with an idyllic pastoral backdrop: lush paradisiacal lawns dotted with fluffy pandas, frolicking lion cubs, and azure waterfalls.

Stephen Lett sat in his studio chair, waiting patiently while two makeup sisters applied a final dusting of powder across his forehead and straightened his silk necktie. Lett’s face remained completely motionless, cold, and hollow with exhaustion.

“Ten seconds to air, Brother Stephen!” the director’s reverent voice chimed from the dim control booth speaker. “Audio is hot, teleprompter engaged. Three, two, one… Rolling!”

Above the main camera lens, the ruby tally light clicked on.

In that very fraction of a second, an uncanny metamorphosis seized Stephen Lett’s face: the creases of weariness vanished, his eyebrows shot upward, and his lips stretched into that trademark, inhumanly wide rubber grin, dripping with saccharine condescension. His eyes widened into an unblinking gaze, and accompanied by soft, hypnotic sweeps of his hands, he began to speak in a velvety, honeyed purr:

“A warm welcome to all of you, our dear, precious brothers and sisters! How our hearts overflow with boundless joy and gratitude as we see, day after day, that Jehovah’s visible organization remains the solitary, serene oasis of purity, peace, and true holiness in the midst of this wicked, dying, and decaying world of Satan!..”