Shadowed Read online

  “Oh, honey,” Margaret said, “you can’t. You must—”

  “I said I could not and will not be dissuaded. Paul, I know you have some plan, so take the kids and put it into action. Send for me or I will come to you, whatever you concoct.”

  “That won’t be easy, Jae. Your dad will have this place under surveillance, and—”

  “Just go, Paul. This is your life. You’ll make it work. We’re out of time. The only reason Daddy isn’t back yet has to be the traffic. Go.”

  * * *

  Alone with her mother at last, Jae found herself a wreck emotionally. She wanted to be alone to deal with God about her own faith and about the loss of her brother. And she desperately needed to be with Paul, because now it was clear she could lose him in an instant. The NPO would be under orders to shoot and kill traitors on sight. On top of that, she had just reunited with her children and had been with them only a few hours.

  But right now her mother was top priority. Margaret could work herself into such a state that she might faint again, or worse. And what if she hit her head? Could she be suicidal? Jae didn’t think so, but the loss of a child, even a grown one, had to put any mother on the brink. Then there was the trauma of waiting for her volatile husband to find the target of his vengeance gone in his car. . . .

  * * *

  Connor had done what Paul wished he himself could do. Retreat. The boy had simply shut down. He buried his face in his sister’s shoulder and appeared to be sleeping. No crying. No moaning. No talking. He was just still.

  Brie was stony too, but she hauntingly reminded Paul of his mother-in-law as she sat rocking in the backseat. As he fired up the car, he swiveled to face her. “You trust Daddy, don’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “Once we get where we’re going, I’ll make sure you understand what’s going on. Okay?”

  She nodded again. “Where’re we going?”

  “No place you’ve ever been before, but I think you’ll like it.”

  “Are there kids there?”

  Paul hadn’t even thought of that. “Yes. Yes, I believe there are.”

  He used the remote to open the garage door and shut it again as he pulled slowly onto the street. The sky was pitch-black and the night frigid, but the neighborhood of stylish brownstones was alive. Three cars were disabled, two in a ditch and the other lodged against a power pole. People milled about outside, moving between houses, talking, arms around each other, some apparently near collapse from grief and fear.

  As Paul picked his way through the neighborhood and onto the main streets, he saw more damaged cars, some off the road, some on. Every intersection was a muddle of fender benders, people crying, civilians trying to direct traffic, the occasional emergency vehicle creeping through the snarl. People poured in and out of stores and auto-recharging stations, carrying supplies, blankets, first-aid kits.

  “What happened, Daddy?” Brie called out.

  “Lots of accidents, huh?” he said.

  “Yeah, but why?”

  “Remember, you’re going to find out later. Daddy has to be on the phone for a while, so you be patient, okay?”

  Paul was trying to connect with Straight, his faith mentor and underground contact in Chicago, but he was getting no answer. Straight was either trying to reach Paul or was inundated with calls from other zealot underground cells throughout the world.

  Between Paul’s attempts, a call got through to him, the caller ID showing a Chicago number. “Paul?” It was the voice of his secretary from NPO bureau headquarters.

  “Felicia? Where are you calling from?”

  “A pay phone.” Her voice was shaky. “Did you know Bob Koontz was a firstborn?”

  4

  JAE SWITCHED OFF THE TELEVISION and sat knee to knee with her mother, holding her hands. Both women wept, commiserating over the loss of brother and son.

  Jae had never felt the presence of God so clearly, and it terrified her. She had loved getting to know Him through the New Testament discs, realizing that along the way she had come to understand what had happened to Paul and what must happen to her. She believed, she knew, and yet she didn’t understand how or why things had come to such a state that God had to act in this manner.

  Strangely, though, while she had predicted that she wouldn’t understand Him or like Him much if the curse was enacted, she found only the former true. The latter somehow was not part of the equation. It wasn’t that she was happy about what had occurred. Who could be? But that it was so specific, so definite, so crystal clear, made her fear God with such profound respect and awe that any doubt escaped her.

  It was almost like cheating now, she decided, to place her faith in a God who had revealed Himself in such a dynamic, obvious way. When she had been pondering all this, trying to piece together the puzzle Paul had become while gaining glimpses of God through the recordings of His Word, everything she had been taught and come to believe had been challenged. When she allowed for the possibility that this might be true, her little-known muscle of faith was stretched and tested and strained beyond capacity. When she had found herself wanting to believe, Jae fought against a lifetime of programmed-in resistance and knew it would take some real heart-to-hearts with Paul and maybe with Straight and who knew who else—God Himself?—before she could surrender her disbelief.

  Well, that had certainly been taken care of in one fell swoop. The international tragedy had blown her back on her heels, and she sensed that the full intensity of it would not scratch the surface of her consciousness for days. But it had had the opposite effect on her soul than she had envisioned.

  At first she had thought those praying for such an act from the Almighty were capricious and mean-spirited. And she assumed that if God was who she was slowly coming to believe He was, He would not allow Himself to be talked into such a horrific deed.

  Somehow He had agreed it was necessary. No one who could do this would be weak enough in character to be able to be talked into it against His will. What He had wrought in Los Angeles the year before should have convinced the world that He existed and was not to be trifled with. Yet Jae herself had not known what to make of it and, in spite of all reason, found herself trying to explain it away as some sort of natural aberration.

  Well, there would be no explaining this away. Every firstborn male in the world who was not a believer in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and in God’s Son, Jesus the Christ, lay dead. People could rail against heaven; they could shake their fists in the face of the Eternal One, but no one could deny for another second that their enemy existed and that He was powerful beyond comprehension.

  If they chose to hate Him for it, after ignoring Him for decades while indeed considering Him imaginary, that was their choice. But Jae doubted a true atheist still existed on the planet.

  All this she hurriedly breathed to her mother as the women sat trying to console one another. And Margaret Decenti, to her credit, seemed to agree, despite that she had not had the benefit of all the recorded Scripture Jae had listened to.

  That would change soon enough. Jae would get her mother whatever she needed to make it all make sense. As for Jae herself, she prayed silently. Lord, she said, realizing it was the first time she had acknowledged God as her Lord, I have had my mind and heart thoroughly changed. I believe in You with all that is in me. Thank You for Jesus. Forgive me for rejecting You for so long.

  Jae had to admit to herself that, yes, she had benefited—a strange word under the circumstances—from the most dramatic act of God in all of history, and thus her decision seemed to have been made almost too easily. But it was no less real.

  * * *

  “Bob is gone?” Paul said. Koontz had been his boss and friend for years.

  “It happened at closing time, Paul,” Felicia said.

  Paul could picture the tall black woman on the other end of the phone.

  “A bunch of us were getting a head start, streaming toward the elevators, when the screaming started. We all
ran back to our offices. Men were dead everywhere. Bob had been standing in the doorway between his and his secretary’s offices. You remember how he liked to do that, just to see if she’d try to leave right at five? She said he just gave her a puzzled look and dropped like a sack of potatoes. Calls came in from bureaus all over the country. ’Member Lester Harrelson from Gulfland?”

  “Tick? Sure.”

  “Dead. Lots of other men you know are gone, Paul. Why didn’t you tell me?” Her voice had a bite to it.

  “Tell you?”

  “Why do you think it’s taken me so long to call you, Paul? I’ve been on the phone too. I lost my son. My husband lost his brother and his father. I lost another brother-in-law. You think I don’t know you’re an only child? That makes you a firstborn. And I’ll bet that sweet child Connor is just fine too, isn’t he?”

  Paul felt for Felicia. What could he say?

  “I know,” she said finally. “Who could you trust? I know you were suspected ’round here, so you had to know it too. You didn’t know who you could trust, and maybe you couldn’t have trusted me. But when this crazy prophecy came out, this challenge to the international government, you had to know it was really going to happen. Even though I was on to you, or was pretty sure, I didn’t really think it would happen. But you did. You had to. You knew, didn’t you, Paul?”

  “I was hoping it wouldn’t have to happen.”

  “And you didn’t care enough about me to tell me, to spare me some of this.”

  “I care about you, Felicia. What could I do?”

  “You know what you could have done, Paul. You could have warned me. Maybe I’d have laughed. Maybe I’d have ignored you. Maybe I’d have turned you in. But just maybe I’d have believed, and God’s hand of death would have passed by my family.”

  “I’m so sorry, Felicia. I really am.”

  “Yeah? Are you? Well, so am I. What am I supposed to do now?”

  A tone sounded from one of Paul’s molars. “I’ve got another call, Felicia.”

  “How convenient.”

  “I’ll get back to it later if there’s anything I can do for you now.”

  “No, I guess not. I don’t guess I’ll be seeing you again.”

  “Not around there, no.”

  “I wouldn’t turn you in, Paul. And I’d still like to talk about this.”

  “I believe you, Felicia. We’ll make that happen somehow. I can’t say when or where, but—”

  “Take your call, boss.”

  It was Straight. “I’ve been at the hospital,” he said. “You can only imagine.”

  “Are you suspected?”

  “Nah. Nobody knows I was a firstborn, and my family’s already gone.”

  “I can’t wait to see you, Straight, but I need info. I’ve got to get to the Columbia Region underground. Jack Pass still running it?”

  “Yep. You got a talisman?”

  “No.”

  “I can get you clearance, but you’re hot so they’re gonna be skittish about you leading anyone there.”

  Paul filled him in on what he was driving and why, who was with him, and where Jae was.

  “Wow,” Straight said. “If I were Jack, I’d plead with you to lie low somewhere else.”

  “Where’m I going to go, Straight?”

  “I can’t imagine. I’ll talk to Jack. Best-case scenario is that they’ll come to you somewhere. No way they’re going to let you get close, just in case you’re already being tailed.”

  “I don’t appear to be yet.”

  “Paul, do the people you’re tailing ever know you’re there? You’re NPO. You know how to do it. And so do they. I’d recommend staying on the move until I get back to you.”

  5

  IT WASN’T DIFFICULT FOR JAE to read her father. It never had been. He was a beefy, jowly, red-faced man who should have been long retired. Having been brought back to head the Zealot Underground task force had reinvigorated him, made him a new man.

  As always, he wore his feelings not so much on his sleeve as on his face. He had the squint of the suspicious, the pain of the bereaved, and the flush of anger as he slowly entered from the attached garage to the kitchen. “How’s your mother?” he said, his voice a low growl.

  “Resting. Hurting, as you can imagine. We all are.”

  “And where’s my car?”

  “Paul took the kids out. They were getting squirrelly. We just thought—”

  “You thought taking children out into this chaos made sense? You weren’t thinking at all. You should see it out there. Reminds me of the war.”

  He sat heavily and rested his face in his hands. “When will they be back?”

  “That’s hard to say, Daddy. We didn’t set a time.”

  “He’s not running on me, is he?”

  “Running?”

  “Don’t play dumb! Surely his predicament is not lost on you. Is he making a break for it?”

  “In an NPO car? What kind of sense would that make?”

  “Might be sly. I’ve faced few adversaries as slick as Paul. I—”

  “Now he’s your adversary?”

  Ranold narrowed his eyes and stared at her. “He’d better be your adversary too, girlie, or we’ve got big trouble.”

  She held his gaze and planted herself in a chair across the table from him. “Then we’ve got trouble, Dad. He’s my husband, my first loyalty. Anyway, he said you had changed your mind on all this, wanted to talk, to pray.”

  “You should have seen through that even if he didn’t. I don’t suppose he fell for it either, but it was a shot. I had to keep him here. So, what, does he think he’s going to find an ice-cream parlor open at a time like this?”

  “I don’t know where they went.”

  “But you swear he’s not on the run?”

  “I’m not swearing anything, Dad. But he’s not going far without me.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I told you. Whatever happens, we’re in this together.”

  Ranold stood, trembling. “So you’re on the other side now? Is that it?”

  “There is only one side anymore, Dad. Can’t you see that? You want to take arms against a Force that could wipe out over a billion men? Now who’s not thinking?”

  He sat down again and slammed his palm on the table, making the whole kitchen rattle, and Jae jumped. “You lose a battle and you’re ready to surrender? Well, not me, sister.”

  “You’re still an atheist?”

  “Don’t get smart with me.”

  “I’m not being smart. Are you going to tell me that the Person you’ve never believed in wins a battle, as you call it, of this magnitude, and you’re not ready to concede He exists?”

  “I concede nothing. I never give in, never give up.”

  “What’s it going to take, Daddy? Do you have to lose everything and everybody?”

  Before he could answer, Margaret padded in, looking as shaky and pale as before she had fainted. Jae quickly rose and guided her to a chair directly across the table from Ranold. Jae was stunned at how frail and bony her mother felt, shuddering beneath a baggy sweater.

  “What’s all the racket?” Margaret said.

  “Guess,” Jae said.

  “Your daughter is crazy talking,” the old man said.

  Jae shook her head. “I’m not going to continue fighting you on this, Dad. Your enemies pray God will rain down a curse, an unspeakable, unimaginable horror that not even I believed would happen, and it happens. How could anyone be in such colossal denial as to doubt that God acted?”

  “You’re a believer now?”

  “Who couldn’t be, Dad? You may be the only stubborn fool left, shaking your puny hand in the face of the Almighty. Do you need Him to squash you like a bug?”

  “Who do you think you’re talking to, Jae?”

  “I know who I’m talking to, and if ever there was a time to be in your face, it’s now, don’t you think? If I didn’t love you, Dad, why would I risk offending you? I’m w
ay past worrying about that now.”

  “You’re about to make me do something I don’t want to do.”

  “What? Turn me in? Bring me up on charges? Have me put to death? You’d do that to your own daughter and your grandchildren—leave them without parents?”

  “We’ll take care of the kids, bring ’em up right, sane, not believing in some—”

  “Yeah, Dad, whatever you do, don’t let them believe in a God who has proven Himself.”

  Margaret’s voice was quavery. “You’re not going to turn in your own daughter.”

  Jae was as surprised as her father had to be. She had never—ever—heard her mother take him on.

  “Watch me,” he said.

  “Maybe you don’t care, Ranold,” Margaret said. “Maybe you never have. But the minute you do that, you’ll never see me again as long as you live.”

  Jae’s father pressed his lips tight and filled his cheeks with air. He stood, thrust his quivering hands into his pockets, as if to keep himself from doing something he regretted, and marched about the kitchen. “Do you not understand the law, Margaret? Do you not respect authority? Do you know the definition of treason?”

  “Do I need to pack my bags, Ranold?” she said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Have I not been clear? You bring harm to my daughter or my grandchildren and you’ll regret it.”

  “You’re threatening me?”

  “Now you’re getting it.”

  “But what about Paul? A double agent. A turncoat! A Benedict Arnold! He’s the epitome of a national security risk. You can’t expect me to stand by and let him—”

  Margaret placed her hands on the table and tried to stand.

  “Mother, please, don’t,” Jae said.

  “I want to stand.”

  “Let me help you.”

  Once she was on her feet, the old woman pointed a shaky finger at her husband. “Here’s what I expect from you if you care a whit about me and your family: You will leave this alone. The NPO doesn’t have time to worry about who’s on what side now. This mess of death all over the world is going to take every man and woman left to sort out and clean up. If after all that Paul and his family are determined to be enemies of the state, you don’t have to get involved.”