The Christ Clone Trilogy - Book Three: ACTS OF GOD (Revised & Expanded)

by James Beauseigneur

  He was probably right, but Decker had no time to consider it. As he studied the man’s face, suddenly something seemed vaguely familiar. Decker squinted and cocked his head, looking closely, trying to remember. “Do I know you?” he demanded, finally. “I do know you!” he declared, not giving the man a chance to answer. In part at least, Decker was bluffing: He wasn’t really sure, but there was something undeniably familiar about the man and he hoped to elicit an admission.

  “Yes, Mr. Hawthorne,” he said. “My name is Scott Rosen.”

  The name meant nothing. It had been decades since he had last heard it.

  “My parents were Joshua and Ilana Rosen.”

  The family resemblance was obvious, and Decker realized it was only this that had made him think he recognized the man. “Oh, yeah! I remember! You betrayed your parents to keep them from getting their Israeli citizenship.” The reference appeared to sting a little, and Decker looked for a way to exploit it. “So I see you’re still an obnoxious bully,” he jabbed, shaking his head in ridicule. He wanted to do everything he could to belittle his captor. It wasn’t just to strike back at him for the kidnapping, however. Decker knew from intelligence summaries and news reports that the fundamentalists didn’t kill their hostages before getting them to “convert.” He assumed the KDP probably did the same. It was a long shot, but Decker hoped that if he could quickly convince his captor that it was hopeless to try to convert him, perhaps he might still get out of this alive.

  It wasn’t that easy.

  “Mr. Hawthorne,” Scott Rosen answered, “I have come to realize that I was wrong, but not only for the way I treated my parents. I was also wrong about their beliefs. I know now they were right. Yeshua — Jesus — is the Jewish Messiah.”

  “If you have any respect at all for the memory of your parents, you’ll release me immediately!”

  “Mr. Hawthorne,” Scott Rosen said again, “all I want is to talk to you.”

  “Call my secretary!”

  Rosen ran his hand over his long thick beard in frustration, then got up to leave.

  Decker felt a rush of power: He had gotten a reaction. He was still a prisoner, but he was in control, even if it was only control of the conversation. “So are you going to release me?” he insisted.

  “In time,” Rosen answered continuing toward the door. Then, turning in apparent afterthought, he asked, “Mr. Hawthorne, why have you never taken the communion?”

  “I was on my way to get it when your pals kidnapped me,” Decker answered quickly, hoping to negate any significance that Rosen might attach to the fact.

  “My friends — the ones who brought you here,” Rosen said, “had specific orders not to take you if you had the mark.”

  Decker glared.

  “It’s not an accident that you haven’t taken the communion,” Rosen continued. “Or that we got to you before you did. It’s the grace of God.”

  Decker laughed mockingly. “You people interpret whatever suits you as a sign from God. Well, you’re wrong, Rosen. The whole idea of the mark was mine! I’m the one who originally suggested requiring the mark, and I would have taken the communion myself and had the mark by now if your thugs hadn’t grabbed me!”

  “Going to get the mark and having the mark are not the same thing, Mr. Hawthorne. God — I have learned — is never too early and never too late, but always right on time.”

  Decker’s supper was much the same as lunch with the exception that it included a small mutton chop, and the sweet meal used earlier to make the porridge had been used as flour to make a fritter, which was fried in olive oil. After eating, Decker lay down to sleep. It was only 8:30 p.m., but he was certainly tired enough. Besides, he knew if he was to survive whatever Rosen and the KDP had in mind for him, he would need all the rest he could get. The mountains that formed the walls of Petra did their part by shutting out the sun well before it grew dark outside this city hidden in the hollow.

  Thursday, June 3, 4 N.A.

  Rising before dawn, Decker crept silently toward the window and looked out, hoping his guards might be gone or asleep. They weren’t. That, however, wasn’t what caught Decker’s attention. Shaking his head quickly to clear his mind and his vision, he looked again at what seemed an impossible sight, for as far as he could see, everything lay blanketed with a covering of what looked for all the world like snow, though perhaps not quite as white. It wasn’t snow — it couldn’t be — it was a hot arid morning in June. But despite all his attempts and the growing light of morning, he could arrive at no other explanation. A hundred yards away, a woman and a young boy came out of one of the thousands of tents that speckled the ancient tableau and began scooping up the white material and putting it into a tub. Others came out of their shelters, carrying in their arms pots and pans and baskets, and did the same.

  Soon, there was a tap at the door and Decker looked to see the jailer bringing in breakfast. “What is that?” he asked, pointing out the window.

  “Exactly,” the jailer answered.

  “No,” Decker said, trying again. “Is that snow?”

  The jailer laughed.

  “Well, then, what is it?”

  “Exactly,” he repeated.

  This was getting nowhere, and Decker wasn’t going to ask again.

  “I’m sorry,” the jailer said when he saw he could press it no further. “I just always hoped somebody would ask me that.”

  Decker wasn’t amused.

  “That’s what it is: what is it,” the jailer said, as if that was supposed to be the answer. “The white stuff outside is called ‘what is it.’ At least that’s the English translation. In Hebrew, it’s called manna. Here, look,” he said, motioning toward the tray he had brought in. On it was a bowl filled with the white substance. “Try it.”

  Decker took a pinch from the bowl and tasted it. It was crunchy and white like coriander seed and it tasted something like wafers made with honey. He recognized it as the grain or meal from which the porridge and fritters had been made the day before.

  We use it for everything,” the jailer explained. “There must be a thousand different recipes. We’ve got manna bread, manna donuts, manna cookies, manna pasta, manna spaghetti, manna waffles; we’ve got fried manna, boiled manna, broiled manna, toasted manna, and even raw manna; we’ve even got manna-cotti,” he quipped, chuckling to himself. “And this morning we’ve got manna muffins and manna cereal.”

  “But what is it?”

  “Exactly,” the jailer said again, pushing his luck. Decker wondered if he was ever going to get a straight answer.

  “When Moses led the people out of Egypt,” the jailer explained, “God provided manna for them to eat.[59] He’s done the same here in Petra. Each morning, except on the Sabbath, a dew sets in and when it lifts, it leaves behind the manna. Later, as the sun gets hot, the manna melts away, leaving no trace that it was ever there. It’s not even sticky.”

  It was a preposterous story, but there it was, outside the window and in his bowl.

  After breakfast the jailer returned for the tray and brought two cups and a plastic pitcher filled with cold water. Shortly after, Scott Rosen returned.

  “When are you going to release me?” Decker asked as soon as he walked through the door.

  Rosen ignored Decker’s question and sat down at the table. “I prayed about our conversation last night.”

  Decker laid back on his bed and laughed out loud. His laughter mocked Rosen, but it was the most sincere form of mockery: He truly found Rosen’s pitiful piety funny.

  Rosen was forced to wait until Decker stopped before he continued. “I realized I didn’t entirely answer your question about why I brought you here.”

  Decker stood up and went to the table. Sitting down across from Rosen, he leaned over as close as he could, then belched loudly in his face.

  Rosen flinched and looked away but soon went on, undeterred. “This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to talk with you. Six years ago, you and Christopher came
to Israel.” Decker remembered the trip well: It was just before Christopher went into the wilderness for forty days.

  “I don’t remember seeing you,” Decker said, not to inform but to challenge Rosen’s assertion.

  “You didn’t,” he acknowledged. “I backed down.”

  Decker made a quick mental note. Something had scared Rosen — made him “back down.” It showed weakness.

  Rosen continued, “I felt that God had directed me to talk with you, but you were so close to Christopher, it seemed impossible that you’d listen.” Even though it was common for people to refer to Christopher by his first name, Decker bristled at Scott Rosen’s repeated familiar use.

  “You mean,” Decker answered, “it seemed impossible that I would betray him.” Hearing his own words, it suddenly occurred to Decker what this was really all about, and he was momentarily struck dumb. On the plane to Israel after his resurrection, Christopher said that in a past life Decker had been Judas Iscariot and that he had been convinced by the Apostle John to betray Jesus. Now Scott Rosen was attempting to play John’s role. Yahweh had indeed directed Rosen to talk to him, he realized. Well, Decker promised himself, it’s not going to work this time. He had never been able to recall any part of his life as Judas, so he had no remembered experience to draw upon for guidance, but he was determined that one way or another he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. He would rather die than betray Christopher.

  “There’s no reason for you to die, Mr. Hawthorne,” Rosen said, unexpectedly.

  “I guess it was crazy,” Decker said, “but somehow I had this ridiculous notion that even though you’re a kidnapper and who knows what else, there might be some small shred of decency in you, some little something that would compel you to play fair. You pathetic hypocrite, you’ve been reading my mind!”

  “Not entirely, Mr. Hawthorne,” Rosen responded, unaffected by Decker’s tone. “I only know what I’m able to perceive from your behavior and by a few glimpses that God gives me of your thoughts.” Decker shook his head in disgust. “And, while I’m sure you won’t believe this, those things that Christopher told you about John and Judas were lies . . . all of them. Nor did I bring you here to get you to betray Christopher.”

  “I wasn’t just brought here!” Decker screamed. “You kidnapped me! Can’t you even be honest enough to admit that?”

  “When we’re done, you can judge whether I’m guilty of kidnapping you or of rescuing you.”

  “You’re a pathetic ass,” Decker growled.

  “As I was saying,” Rosen continued, getting back on topic, “after I backed down from talking to you in Tel Aviv . . .”

  For a second time, Rosen had admitted backing down. Didn’t he care that he was exposing a weakness? Did he think that because Decker had caught the point the first time there was no harm in saying it again? . . . Or was it that he really did have only a limited ability to read Decker’s mind, so that he didn’t understand the importance Decker assigned to the admission?

  Decker decided to test the theory. I’m going to slug this guy, he thought as Rosen continued talking. I’m going to slug you, he thought again, almost trying to project his thought to his captor. I’m going to slug you . . . now! And then, lunging across the small table and knocking over the pitcher of water, Decker planted his right fist on the left side of Rosen’s face.

  Unprepared, Scott Rosen twisted and fell from his chair with the force of Decker’s punch.

  Sprawled across the table and struggling to keep from toppling over, Decker watched with tremendous satisfaction as the big man tumbled to the floor.

  Now the question was: Had Rosen really been unable to read his thoughts or had he taken the blow just to make Decker believe that? He had watched Rosen’s eyes as he hit him, and there was no sign of an early flinch. Righting himself from off the table and returning to his chair, Decker realized the test wasn’t really conclusive. Either way, it had felt good to hit him.

  Rosen winced in pain on the floor, his clothing wet as he lay in the puddle of water from the pitcher, his head spinning. Then looking back at Decker, he got up, recovered his upturned chair from where it had slid across the floor, and relocated himself at the table. “I suppose now you expect me to turn the other cheek,” he said.

  “If you’d like,” Decker said with triumph in his voice that masked the throbbing in his hand.

  Rosen refused to be distracted and amazingly went back to his story as though nothing had happened. His persistence was getting a little unnerving. “I brought you here,” Rosen continued, “because I believe that in some part I am responsible for the fact that you didn’t accept Yeshua as your savior long ago.”

  “Oh, brother,” Decker sighed.

  “You see,” Rosen said, “I once interrupted a conversation between you and your wife, that might have dramatically changed your life.”

  This was a completely unexpected turn. Decker hid his rage. He wanted to shout, “You leave my wife out of this!” but he knew if he did, Rosen would realize he had hit a nerve. As long as there was any chance that he didn’t know what Decker was thinking, it was better not to react. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Decker muttered.

  “It was in the hospital in Tel Aviv,” Rosen said. “You and Tom Donafin had just returned to Israel after your escape from Lebanon. When I heard that you had actually been abducted on Israeli soil, I was outraged. I insisted that you and Tom report the details to the authorities immediately, but everyone else said it could wait until later, so I stormed off. When I returned with the police, you and your family and my parents were talking.”

  Decker remembered the event but not the specifics of what they had been discussing.

  “You’re aware, I believe, that while you were a hostage, your family spent a lot of time with my parents.”

  Decker did remember that Elizabeth and the girls had talked about Joshua and Ilana a lot before the Disaster. Apparently they had gotten pretty close.

  “That night, I heard my parents talking,” Rosen said. “Apparently, I had interrupted your wife just as she was about to tell you that she and your daughters had accepted Yeshua and become Christians while you were in Lebanon. If I hadn’t interrupted, they were going to explain the Gospel to you.”

  “You needn’t have troubled yourself,” Decker said derisively. “If my wife—” Decker chose not to defile Elizabeth’s name by saying it in Scott Rosen’s presence, “—had wanted to explain the Gospel to me, she had ample opportunity.”

  “True enough,” Rosen agreed, “no doubt, she did. And for that I bear no responsibility. However, your wife was certainly not the first Christian to make the mistake of thinking she had plenty of time to get around to sharing her faith with those she cared about. But then the Rapture came, and there was no more time.”

  Decker’s puzzled look required an explanation.

  “Your wife and daughters didn’t die,” Rosen asserted. “Nor did my parents.”

  Was Rosen insane?

  “There was no Disaster,” he continued, unabated. “Your family, my parents, and all the others — except of course, some who died in resulting accidents — didn’t die. They were ‘raptured,’ caught away by Yeshua to remove their influence from the world and to spare them the horrors of the times in which we now live.[60] What the world knows as the Disaster, Mr. Hawthorne, was really the Rapture, just as was described prophetically by the Apostle Paul when he wrote:

  . . . the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.”[61]

  “What about the bodies?” Decker scoffed. “I know all about the Rapture. Jesus comes back and all the Christians fly away or disappear or something. My wife and children didn’t go up in the clouds to be with Jesus. They died, just like your parents! Accept it!”

  “The bodies of the people who were raptured were corruptible — the
decaying remains of the family of our fallen ancestor, Adam,” Rosen propounded. “Those bodies never would have been permitted into heaven and so were simply sloughed off, or shed like old clothes. When they were raptured, they were given new bodies: perfect, incorruptible, and without flaw. Again, I refer you to the Apostle Paul:

  . . . flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed — in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye . . . the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.[62]

  Decker rolled his eyes, but Rosen continued. “The Greek word[63] in the passage that’s translated changed, is elsewhere[64] translated as exchanged, which is really much more accurate because it’s the word used when discussing changing clothes,[65] which in reality, of course, is exchanging one garment for another. In another Scripture, the change that took place at the Rapture is described as exchanging a tent for a house.[66] The tent doesn’t become the house. Its materials aren’t used to build the house. The tent is entirely discarded in exchange for the house. And Paul even said that the resurrected bodies of Christians who died before the Rapture wouldn’t be the same as the bodies that had been buried.[67] The bodies of those who appeared to have died in the Disaster were actually exchanged for new ones, and the old ones were left behind.”

  “Then how do you explain all the Christians who weren’t ‘raptured’? I don’t recall hearing that all the churches were emptied,” Decker countered. “And what about the churches today? What about the fundamentalists?”

  “Not everyone who claims to be a Christian is one, Mr. Hawthorne. Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than going to a football game makes you an athlete. As for those you call fundamentalists, they accepted Jesus after the Rapture.”

  “So you’re saying that you and your fundamentalist buddies are the only real Christians.”