Shadowed

by Jerry B. Jenkins

  “I’m going to need your weapon, sir.”

  “Certainly.”

  “And I’m going to need you to remain in Bern a few days while we finish our investigation.”

  “Of course.”

  As they returned to the door of Dengler’s office, an investigator emerged with three clear plastic bags. One contained Aikman’s wallet and ID. One contained his nine millimeter. And the other contained the smooth, white stone.

  “Oh no!” Ranold said. “Where did you get that?”

  “Off the shooter’s body, sir. Do you recognize it?”

  “I sure do. It identifies him as a member of the Columbia Region zealot underground.”

  The investigator seemed to study Ranold. “Why would he be so stupid as to carry that if this shooting was premeditated? Did he know he’d never get out of here alive?”

  Ranold shrugged. “How could we ever know?”

  * * *

  Felicia wasn’t reaching Cletus. Nothing she did or said seemed to make a difference. “What do you want?” she said. “Besides having Danny back.”

  “That’s all I want,” Cletus said. “Short of that, I don’t know if I can go on.”

  “You’re scaring me.”

  “I’m being honest, Felicia. If I can’t be honest with you . . .”

  “You can, but how do you think that makes me feel? I’m still here, you know, and I need you.”

  Cletus dropped into a kitchen chair and refused her offer of something to eat or drink. “I have nothing to give you, Fel. There’s nothing left in me. I want what you’ve found. Of course I do. But even if I believe in God because I have no choice, I can’t become friends with Him. Not while I’m hating Him.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, while Paul was praying for Bia and hoping to get more sleep, she called him back. He hurried into the hallway.

  “Paul,” she said, “you’re not going to believe this.”

  31

  THE ASSASSINATION of International Government Chancellor Baldwin Dengler threw the world into yet more chaos. Paul didn’t think it possible, the death of one man after the deaths of a billion seeming to knock the fragile door of society off its hinges.

  The vice chancellor, the previously anonymous, almost invisible Asian woman few had ever heard of before, moved into the leadership role. But everyone knew that was temporary. She seemed powerless to stem the tide of unrest and protest around the world. The populace, even the hundreds of millions who still called themselves nonreligious, demanded that the government lift the ban on the practice of religion.

  The tide was turning. Paul foresaw—for the first time in his life—the possibility that the oppressed, the distressed, the disenfranchised might actually emerge, squinting, from belowground and take their rightful place in society.

  Three days later, Monday, February 4, Paul, Jack Pass, and Greenie Macintosh spent hours in a TV room, watching coverage of the investigation of the murder while planning the exodus from Washington to the Heartland salt mines. “With all the unrest,” Greenie said, “maybe we won’t be attacked after all.”

  Paul and Jack looked at each other, then at Greenie. “Dream on,” Paul said. “How do you figure?”

  “Your father-in-law is coming home a hero for killing the assassin. Is he going to want to spoil his image by massacring a thousand secret believers? The world is finally on our side, Paul.”

  Paul heard a tone in his mouth and turned away. “Stepola,” he said.

  “Bia. I need asylum.” She sounded as he had never heard her. Terrified.

  “Why? What?”

  “Are you watching the news?”

  Paul looked up to see a close-up of the talisman. “I’ll call you back,” he said.

  “Don’t wait. Decenti gets back this afternoon, and I have to have vanished by then.”

  “Why?”

  “I gave him that talisman, Paul. I’m the only one who links Decenti to it. Aikman was not a turncoat. In fact he was anything but.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I gave that talisman to Decenti and it winds up on the body of the suspected assassin? This isn’t brain surgery, Paul. The general wants me to pick him up at the airport. You think I’ll ever see the light of day again? I’m coming your way. Can you leave my name at the entrance or something?”

  “What good will it do you to come here? We’re planning a mass exit.”

  “I don’t know where else to go, Paul. Decenti’s all but wearing a medal, and I’m nothing but a big target.”

  * * *

  “Sorry to bother you at work, Mrs. Thompson,” the principal at Lake-Cook Middle School said, “but we’re worried about Cletus.”

  “Why? What do you mean?”

  “Usually he or you call in if he’s not going to be at work.”

  “He was getting ready when I left.”

  “He’s not here, ma’am.”

  * * *

  The men the Columbia undergrounders had taken to calling The Three Zealoteers stood watching the TV screen. “Aikman’s not one of us,” Greenie was saying. “I don’t recognize him or even his name.”

  Paul filled in Greenie and Jack on what had to have gone down, also explaining his relationship with Bia Balaam.

  Jack said, “Well, she’s certainly welcome here if that’s of any help and you’re certain she’s—”

  “Whoa!” Greenie said. “Hey! Slow down. Is this not the very woman behind the attack on the Sunterra believers? You realize she and Decenti are pretty much solely responsible for bringing the drought upon Los Angeles?”

  Paul held up a hand as the news showed the smooth white stone from all angles, and the scratch on the back was magnified. “There’s the smoking gun,” he said. “That positively links Decenti to the assassination.”

  “How did he pull this off?” Jack said. “Aikman’s fingerprints are on his own gun. The only powder burns on Decenti’s hand are from his own weapon. The talisman makes Aikman look like one of us. If this guy did it, he’s awfully good.”

  “You have no idea.”

  The news channel ran a day-old tape of Ranold casting more aspersions on Aikman. “I’m ashamed of myself for not noticing signs earlier. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, of course, but only after the murder did it strike me that something might have been amiss. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but Commander Aikman did seem distracted of late. I should have been able to read something in his demeanor, but I didn’t.”

  The news also showed Mrs. Aikman with her two teenage daughters, all of them red-faced and puffy-eyed, glaring at the camera as they were being hustled away by NPO personnel. “There is no way my husband was zealot underground. He hated those people and spent his life trying to expose them.”

  “Of course,” the anchorwoman said, “the rest of the family is under suspicion and will be detained and interrogated until USSA operatives are satisfied they were unaware of their husband’s and father’s clandestine activities.”

  An expert intoned that the only mystery remaining from the murder investigation was why Aikman suffered no powder burns. “On the other hand, with those types of weapons, that’s possible and it happens, as apparently it did in this case.”

  * * *

  “We are severely short staffed, as you know,” Harriet Johns told an abjectly distressed Felicia Thompson. “We can’t all be running home in the middle of the day because of marital problems.”

  “This is more than a marital problem, Chief Johns. Now I must go, and if it costs me my job, so be it.”

  “It’s not going to cost you your job, Mrs. Thompson,” Harriet said as Felicia rushed from her office. “But it will have to go on your record!”

  As she sped up the Edens Expressway, Felicia called Cletus’s friend and assistant coach. “Buddy, would you mind running to the house during your break and seeing if Cletus overslept? He hasn’t been sleeping well and—”

  “Way ahead of you, Felicia. I’m on my way there now.”


  “Thank you. Please call me.”

  But Buddy didn’t call. And when she tried him again ten minutes later, he wasn’t answering. She called the principal. “Have you heard from Buddy? He was running to my house to—”

  “He’ll see you there,” the principal said.

  * * *

  “I’m not a big international espionage guy,” Greenie said, “but I’ve sure got to argue on the side of caution. This woman is as highly placed at NPO as anybody but Decenti, and she knows where we are? You don’t think allowing her in here is like letting the camel get his nose under the tent? For one thing, let’s say she’s legit, she’s flipped, she can finger Decenti in the assassination. He figures she’s hiding here, he’s going to pull the trigger on us even faster.”

  * * *

  Felicia pulled onto her street only to find her driveway and the front of her house crammed with two squad cars, an ambulance, what looked like an unmarked police car, and Buddy’s station wagon. It was all she could do to steer to the curb and get her own car into park. She laid her forehead on the steering wheel and pounded her thighs with her fists. She looked up to a tap on her window.

  Buddy opened the door and helped her out.

  “Is he gone?” she said.

  Buddy nodded, grim.

  “How?”

  “Car. Garage.”

  “Did he leave a note?”

  He handed it to her.

  Fel, forgive me, please. I know you’ll see this as my abandoning you, but you’re strong. You’ll make it. I tried everything, even praying. I’m sorry. I love you. Good-bye.

  Clete

  32

  PAUL NEEDED A MINUTE. In fact, he needed more than a minute. He needed Jae. He found her with Angela Pass Barger and the kids and stole her away. She followed him to their quarters, where he sat wearily and fought for composure. He knew she was seeing a new side of him, and while he didn’t want to worry her, Paul felt at the end of himself.

  “You know, I have to admit,” he said, “I was thrilled with what God did in Los Angeles. He proved Himself, made me feel proud to be on the winning side, left me in awe of what He could do. I can’t say I felt the same about the slaying of all the firstborns. I reacted the way most of the surviving victims did. Rocked. Devastated. That people are calling for an end to this religion-ban idiocy doesn’t surprise me in light of all this. But look what’s happening now.”

  He told Jae about the call from Felicia that had prompted him to come and find her. “Look what’s happening to my friends, my colleagues, even to new believers. Can I in good conscience point them to God when this is the kind of result they can expect?”

  Jae reached to massage his shoulders. “Paul, think. We’ve all suffered. I’m a new believer too, remember. And look what happened to me. My brother. My mother. Our family living underground, afraid for our lives. Fugitives. My dad likely an assassin.”

  Paul nodded. “Felicia loses a son and now a husband, and she doesn’t even have the comfort that he was a believer. And look at Bia. I wouldn’t have given her a toddler’s chance in the NBA to ever even consider God, and now she’s trying to figure out how to talk with Him, to tell Him she’s sorry, to come to Him. She’s lost a son. And now she’s running for her life. Where is this all going? Where will it end?”

  Jae stood and moved to the window that looked out on the corridor. “I’m getting cabin fever,” she said. “I know that sounds minor, compared with everything else, but—”

  “Yeah, it does.”

  “But what do you always tell me, Paul? When I feel overwhelmed?”

  “Something sage, I’m sure, babe. What? What do I tell you?”

  “To refocus. To concentrate on some small thing I can handle. Isn’t there something you can accomplish right now that will propel you, even a little? You can’t save the world. You may not be able to save even this underground. You can’t bring Cletus back. You can’t change my dad. But maybe we can take in Bia Balaam. And maybe you can somehow come alongside Felicia.”

  Paul rubbed his eyes. “Bia is on her way. Let’s hope she doesn’t lead anyone else to us. As for Felicia, I’m at a loss. She’s so brand-new, so fragile. What’s going to keep her going?”

  “Can she come here too?”

  “Maybe, but that wouldn’t be the best for us or for her.”

  “What are you saying, Paul?”

  “Here she’s even more vulnerable. Your dad gets back, finds that Bia has bolted, retaliates with an early strike, and here’s where Felicia meets her end.”

  Paul realized what he had done even before Jae had flashed him a double take.

  “An early strike? What are you saying?”

  Had he deteriorated this quickly? That made twice that he had leaked something to Jae that he never would have before. He wished it said something about them, about their new relationship, their shared faith. But he had not planned to reveal first that he knew more about her father than she did—that he was only interim NPO chief and that he had been headed to Bern, and second, especially that he was planning a strike on the Columbia underground.

  He set his teeth and shook his head.

  “Paul. What? Are my children in danger even here?”

  Stupid, stupid, stupid! It was all Paul could do to keep from smacking himself in the head. “We’re all in danger,” he said. “Yes, even here.”

  He saw Jae’s eyes wander as he told her what was going on. He knew she had to be plotting how to get out of there, how to get the kids to safety. “Where can we go?” she said. “The salt mines?”

  “Probably.” He told her of the overwhelming logistics of a mass exodus of a thousand people. And then, for the first time in his life, Paul let his guard down and allowed himself to be vulnerable in front of his wife. He told Jae how worried he was that he—always lauded for his ability to maintain high-level confidentiality—had now told her two things he shouldn’t have.

  “I’m weak; I’m tired. All these people counting on me, and I don’t feel half the man I was just weeks ago. I should be an asset here with my contacts and background and training. But I feel like a bumbler, like I’m going to mess it up for everyone. Rather than helping, I could be the cause of a disaster, a massacre.”

  Jae seemed to study him. She reached as if to touch him, then held back. “Focus, Paul. Get your mind off yourself and onto these women. Think of it. First me, then my mother, then Felicia, then Bia. They’ve all come to faith or are getting there. That’s something. I mean, God did it, but you were involved.”

  “That’s why I feel I owe something to both Felicia and Bia.”

  “You say Bia’s on her way. We’ll deal with her when she gets here. What can we do for Felicia?”

  Paul shook his head. “She needs someone to talk to, and not by phone.”

  “What are we? Blind? Short of being there ourselves, we have the next best thing. Maybe better.”

  “What?” Paul said. “Who?”

  “Straight.”

  * * *

  Ranold B. Decenti’s triumphal return to Washington was all over the news. Governor Haywood Hale of Columbia met him at the airport and presented him with a medal of honor for bravery in the midst of a deadly crisis.

  Decenti took to the microphones and, with eyes cast down and his most humble look effected, expressed his deep sorrow over the loss of “our beloved world leader. Baldwin Dengler was a man of great vision, courage, and insight, and we are unlikely to see his ilk again in our lifetime.”

  * * *

  Paul himself met Bia Balaam at one of the secret entrances to the underground but didn’t even let her put her bag down. “We have no one else inside NPO USSA,” he said.

  “Good grief, Stepola, what are you saying? You want me to go back?”

  “How good are you?”

  “One of the best, but I’m not volunteering for martyrdom.”

  “We need to concoct a reason you stood up Ranold at the airport, and you need to convince him you’re stil
l a loyal soldier. We have to know his plans for the attack. It’s four days from now, and we’re out of options.”

  Bia closed her eyes and ran a hand through her silver hair. Paul could sense the wheels turning. “I knew the governor was meeting him,” she said, “so I did some reconnaissance work with my underground contacts, taking over Aikman’s role in planning the attack.”

  “Good, good.”

  “But, Paul, how do I get around Decenti’s knowledge that I’m the only one who can tie him to the talisman?”

  “Go right at him. Tell him you know what he did and that you consider it a stroke of genius. He knew something about Aikman that you had missed, so assassinating a weakling like Dengler and pinning it on Aikman—even implicating him as an underground zealot—merely solidifies him as your hero.”

  “Gag me.”

  “You can pull this off, Bia.”

  “I know.”

  * * *

  Watching her husband’s sheeted body loaded into an ambulance- cum-hearse was the hardest thing Felicia Thompson had ever endured. Hearing that her own son had died in The Incident had nearly destroyed her, yet to her knowledge he had not suffered. But Cletus. Cletus.

  She considered riding with him to the overtaxed morgue, but there would be nothing more to do there. She had already identified him, and he would be slabbed in a human-sized refrigerated file cabinet for who knew how long.

  When the authorities finally pulled away, she thanked Buddy and assured him she would be all right, then took a condolence call from the principal. Still outside in the cold, dreading going inside the empty, echoing house, Felicia called Harriet Johns.

  “I’m very sorry to hear that, Felicia,” Chief Johns said, sounding more matter-of-fact than sympathetic. “Take a few days, if you must, and keep me posted about your return.”

  Felicia finally trudged inside and sat at the dining-room table, still bundled in her coat. She lowered her head and sobbed. She tried to pray, intending to blame this on God, to challenge Him, to question Him, but she didn’t have the wherewithal. And besides, it didn’t ring true. This wasn’t God’s fault. Cletus had made this decision. What worried Felicia most was that she could barely fault him for it. Oh, she was angry with Cletus. In fact, that wasn’t a strong enough word for what she felt about what he had done. How dare he leave her alone now?