He stopped, surprised. “It worked?”
He didn't know? “Yes, I think so.”
“And how would you know this?”
“I saw it,” she said simply. “In a dream.”
He cocked his head slightly and examined her face carefully. “You saw it, did you? And what else did you see?” His lips twisted. “Do you see what will happen now?”
She hesitated. She only knew that it would be good for Shannon to come through the trees now. And she didn't necessarily want him to save her, although that seemed reasonable enough, but she wanted him to be here. Shannon.
“I'm sure you want to kill,” she said.
He blinked. “And will I succeed?”
“I don't know.”
“Then you don't know anything.”
“I know that you're death.”
“Shut up!” he screamed. His voice echoed about the trees.
She looked past him to the tree line.
Shannon, do you hear that, my love?
Come quickly. Please, there isn't much time.
My love?
“If you speak again, I'll kill him,” Abdullah said, pointing the gun at Petrus.
She looked back at him. “You can't kill him.”
Abdullah's face quivered with anger.
“He would hear the gunshot. My Shannon would hear it,” Tanya said.
The Arab's black eyes seemed to hollow with hate. Like two holes drilled through that skull of his.
“Lie down on your stomach.”
Petrus protested. “Please, I mustâ”
“Shut up!”
Tanya hesitated and then did as he asked. His knee dropped into her back and she waited for something to happen. The fear returned then, as she lay on her stomach. A panicking terror that ripped through her bones like white-hot lead. Nausea swept through her and she imagined his blade reaching forward and slicing through her neck.
Oh, God, please! Please save me!
Her heart crashed in her chest and her muscles strung tight. Behind her Abdullah's breathing thickened.
And then Abdullah simply stood and walked away.
TANYA LAY on her stomach for a long minute before moving. Petrus was still seated beside her, staring at the river. She followed his eyes. Abdullah squatted on the muddy bank, twenty meters off. He stared at them, rocking, gun limp in his right hand.
Tanya pushed herself up to her seat and faced Abdullah.
“Father Petrus?”
He answered without turning. “Yes, Tanya?”
“I'm . . . I'm very sorry, Father.”
He turned his head and raised a brow. “Sorry? Don't be sorry for me, my dear. We are winning. Can't you see that?”
“Winning? We're sitting on a river a thousand miles from anywhere with a madman staring us down. I'm not sure I'm following.”
“And to be honest, I'm not necessarily following either. But I do know a few things. I know that your parents were drawn to this jungle twenty years ago so that you could be here today. I know that a young girl named Nadia died in my homeland of Bosnia forty years ago so that I could be here today.” He offered a smile. “This is far beyond us, my dear.”
“My parents were
killed,
Father.”
Father Petrus looked up to the canopy to his left and sighed. “So were mine. And I think we may be as well. As were all the disciples and Christ himself.”
Tanya's mind spun. Something in her belly told her that his words were spun of gold. Her vision swam.
“God's chess match,” she said.
She expected him to comfort her. To reason with her or something. But he didn't.
“Yes.”
For a full minute they just stared out to the trees, hearing a sea of cicadas, watching Abdullah's glazed-over stare from across the way. He was squatting and waiting for something. He was insane.
“You're saying that my parents died so that I would end up in a box and pledge my life to God to come back here and lay on a riverbank and die myself.”
“Perhaps. Or so that you could do something only you can do.” He looked at her. “Do you know what that might be?”
She considered the question. “It sounds crazy, but maybe to love . . . Shannon.”
“The boy.”
“Yes, the boy. You know him better as Casius. The assassin.”
The father's eyes widened with the realization. “Casius.” A smile tugged at his lips. “Of course.”
A tear pooled in her eye. “It may not make any sense to you, but my heart is crying for him.”
“So then he is a part of this too.”
“He was the man I loved.”
“Yes, but more.”
“What?”
“I don't know. But nothing is without a purpose. For all we know
his
parents were somehow drawn to the jungle so that he could become who he has become.”
“An assassin? Doesn't sound like God to me.”
“And the man who killed Hitler, was he raised up by God?”
“You're saying that one of the reasons God brought our parents to the jungle was so that Shannon and I could fall in love and become who we are today for some reason somehow connected with this . . . this attack on America by these terrorists.”
“The chess match. I'm saying that the black side has had something up its sleeve and God has known for a long time. Yes. It happens a thousand times a day.”
“We are hardly pawns. What if my parents had not responded to God's call?”
“Then you wouldn't have fallen in love with Shannon, would you?”
“And what if Helen hadn't persuaded me to come back?”
“Then . . . then you wouldn't be able to love Shannon again.”
“And?”
He paused. “And I don't know.”
A knot rose in her throat and she swallowed against it. “Part of me does still love him. But he's changed. I'm not sure I know how to love him.”
“Love him the same way you are loved,” he said.
She looked at Petrus and he held her gaze for a long time. His brow lifted mischievously. “I knew a priest who died for a village once. He was crucified. Would you like to feel the love he felt, Tanya?”
Feel love? The silky voice of B. J. Thomas crooned through her ear,
Hooked
on a feeling.
“Yes,” she said.
Petrus smiled and closed his eyes.
Tanya looked away. Abdullah still sat across the way, staring at them. The birds still called in the afternoon heat. A warm breeze swept over herâa breeze laced heavily with the odor of sweet gardenia flowers. Like the gardenias around Helen's house. The ones from Bosnia.
Tanya's heart hammered. She felt the scent caress her nostrils and then sink into her lungs. Heat surged through her bones, like an electric shock.
She gasped and fell back to the grass.
The euphoria followed almost immediately, swallowing her whole. An ecstasy unlike any she had ever felt. As if her nerves had been injected with this drugâGod's love flowing through her.
But it wasn't simply her nerves or her bones or her flesh. It was her heart. No, not her heart, because her heart was just flesh and it was more than a drug that wrapped itself around flesh.
It was her soul. That thing in her chest that had long ago taken to hiding in her bowels. Her soul was doing backflips. It was leaping and twirling and screaming with pleasure.
She threw her arms wide on the grass and laughed out loud, thoroughly intoxicated by the love. She felt hot tears run down her cheek as if a tap had been turned on. But they were tears of ecstasy. She would give her life to swim in a lake of these tears.
In that moment she wanted to explode. She wanted to find a lost orphan and hug him tight for a whole day. She wanted to take her tears and sprinkle them on the world. She wanted to give. Give everything so that someone else might have this feeling. It was that kind of love.
Then an image of a cross stuttered through her skull and she caught her breath. Her arms were still spread wide in laughter, but her chest had frozen. A man bled on the towering wooden beams. It was a priest. No, it was Christ! It was God. He was loving. All of this came from him. These tears of joy, this euphoria that had raged through her bones, her soul doing backflipsâall because of his death on those beams.
The image burned into her mind like a red-hot branding iron.
And then it was gone.
Tanya lay prostrate, shaking in sobs. She wept because for the first time in memory everything was starting to clear. The purpose of life lay before her, crystal and breathtakingly beautiful. It all made sense. It not only made sense; it made lovely sense. And she was reduced to this . . . this blubbering lump in the face of it all.
Yes, something terrible had happened. But God was taking care of that. It wasn't her concern now. What mattered now was that she had been loved. That she was loved.
That she had been called to love.
Shannon, oh Shannon!
How her heart ached for him. It was as though this breath flowing through her body had given her a transfusion of love. Love for Shannon.
Tanya lay on her back and stared past tears at the sun. She was barely aware that Father Petrus was crying softly beside her. The jungle slept in the noon heat. To think that history lay cradled in the bosom of a young woman lost here in the deepest of jungles while the rest of the world went mad seemed absurd. High above, a macaw flapped lazily through the blue sky. It showed no concern for the humans by the river. Maybe it didn't even see them.
Tanya closed her eyes, once again consumed with an image of the tall, muscular man who had dragged her here. Shannon Richterson.
Father, I will do as you will. I will do anything. I will love him. Please bring
him back to me.
Will you die for him, Tanya?
Tanya heard a rustle and opened her eyes just in time to see Abdullah grinning, swinging his gun down. Its butt struck her head and her world exploded with stars and then went black.
BY THE time David Lunow followed his superiors into the final transport out of Miami International, less than three hours remained until the Brotherhood's twenty-four hours expired. And Bird's men had found nothing.
The Bell helicopter rose slowly and then skimmed north over deserted streets. Stragglers could be seen wandering the main streets of the downtown districts and farther north the highways were clogged, effectively shutting down any retreat for the millions of stranded motorists. One thing became crystal clear as the helicopter wound its way out of danger's way: If another bomb did detonate inland, a lot of U.S. citizens would die despite the evacuation. A million. Maybe more. And if the bomb went off in another city, then many more.
David turned to Ingersol and noted that the man had been watching him with a hazed stare. “If this thing goes, you're toast; you know that, don't you?”
For the first time in many days, Ingersol did not respond.
“In fact, regardless of what happens, you're toast.”
Still no response.
“If you would have listened to me a week ago, we might not have had the first blast and we probably wouldn't be running for cover now. Someone's gonna take the fall.”
When he received no response to his third charge, David turned back to the window.
“God help us,” he mumbled. “God help us all.”
OF THE nearly three hundred million people living in the United States of America, the only ones
not
awake and watching the real-time satellite picture of southern Florida were those fleeing southern Florida.
It was an event that shut down the world. The cities near Miami had been deserted, the hospitals had been evacuated, and the air space had been cleared. It was a looter's paradise down there and nobody cared. Not even the looters. They were too busy trucking north.
The talking heads hosted an endless lineup of experts who stammered their way through hours of speculation. In the end, nobody looked good; nobody looked bad. They all pretty much looked desperate.
Someone in the White House had leaked the twenty-four-hour detail and every station now had a clock on-screen, ticking down the time from the last blast. Give or take a few seconds, the clocks now read one hour, thirty-eight minutes.
John Boy sat eating a sandwich in his home in Shady Side, watching NBC's coverage of the nation's meltdown, shaking his head. All seaports had been closed, but not before he'd lowered anchor in the bay. The terrorists had finally done it.
John Boy's boat
, Angel of the Sea,
sat in silent waters, and if anybody had been listening with a highly specialized listening device, they might have heard the faint electronic ticking in the bowels of her hull. But nobody was listening to
Angel of the Sea
. Nobody was even thinking of her.
Except Abdullah, of course.
And Jamal.
LOST IN the madness, barely aware of himself, Shannon came upon the bank where he'd left the woman.
The sun was dipping in the west. Ahead lay an endless sea of foliage, rolling and climbing and falling and plunging. And under it somewhere crept a single man running from him. The Arab Abdullah. It was madness. They both were mad.
But deep in his mind, beyond the madness, an image replayed itself in an endless loop, drawing Shannon forward despite it all. An image of a thick green lawn, and on the lawn his father. And beside his father, his mother. Father was cut in two; Mother's head was missing. And in the machine hovering over them, Abdullah was grinning. And beside the Arab, a thousand men in brown suits, with plastic grins.
The miles passed underfoot steadily, with pounding monotony. But the thoughts were anything but monotonousâthey were hell.
As his feet ate up the miles, a few new frames joined that clip running through his brain. They showed a young woman trapped screaming in a box while her own father soaked up the bullets above her.
Tanya.
She had latched her claws into him. He couldn't shake the images. In fact, they seemed to work their way deeper into him with each footfall, like barbed spurs.