The Breath of God

by Jeffrey Small

  “Brian, the outside auditors required by the bank come on Monday.”

  “Yeah, so deal with it.” Brady made notes in the margin of his pad without looking up.

  “We need to prepare for their questions. Our loan is contingent on this audit. We’ve never had an outside audit before, and I’m concerned about how some of our expenses may be perceived.”

  Brady sighed, finally looking up. “William, I’d love to be more involved now in the financial details of the church, but I’ve got to prepare for the most important speech of my career. Just do whatever you need to do to make the auditors happy and send them away.”

  Jennings clenched and unclenched his jaw. This reaction was typical of Brady. The reverend delegated the financial and other day-to-day operations of the church to Jennings, but when the time came to make tough decisions about controlling the expenditures, every line item in the budget was sacred, part of the “necessary operations of the church” or part of God’s “vision for the future.” How was he to make the bankers happy when the New Hope Community’s projected construction costs were now 35 percent over a budget they’d already increased three times—and his hands were tied when it came to cutting costs?

  The empty club chairs around him were a perfect example. The short roundtrip flight to Little Rock was costing the church eight thousand dollars for the three of them. Their one-quarter interest in the fractional jet ownership program provided the flexibility of having a plane at their disposal on a few hours’ notice anywhere in the world, but at an extravagant cost. When Jennings had tried to discuss the economics of flying commercially rather than privately, Brady dismissively replied that he could perform God’s work much more efficiently from the private plane: he saved time by avoiding ticketing, security, and luggage lines. He’d also told Jennings that the bank president didn’t fly commercial, so why should he?

  Jennings knew that trying to budge his boss on the topic of saving money was an exercise in futility. They’d prospered as a church only because of their ability to continually increase revenues. If Brady excelled at one God-given ability above all others, it was raising money. Had the reverend not received the calling to become a preacher, he would’ve made millions in the business world. Brady was the most natural salesman Jennings had ever met. It didn’t matter whether Brady was selling a parable from the Bible, the vision for the new church development, or his book, he had the gift of generating an infectious enthusiasm among those around him. Twenty years ago, Jennings himself had been persuaded by the same charisma. If only he’d been born with such a gift.

  “Look,” Jennings persisted, “the bankers don’t look at the world in the same way we do. If we can’t show at least a trend of increasing our revenues beyond the temporary spike in book sales—either through home sales or growing our congregation—we risk the bank cutting off our funds permanently and possibly even taking over the project.”

  “What!” Brady went red in the face. “New Hope is my vision, not the bank’s! How can they even think they could execute a project like this?”

  “They could never execute the project like you, but that’s never stopped lenders in the past from foreclosing on developers who cannot make their payments.”

  Brady wiped his brow. “The national media will cover my speech tomorrow, just as they’ve been following me since the debate. Won’t that help? I’m the one, after all, who showed the world that those Jesus texts were a fraud.”

  Actually, Jennings thought, he had given Brady the information about Grant Matthews’s past plagiarism. He’d long ago become used to Brady taking credit for his work, but as long as their end goals were reached, he didn’t care.

  “That’s exactly why you have to hit it out of the park tomorrow. Let me see what you’ve got.” The right speech covered by the national media would drive more people into the church, onto their website, and into bookstores to buy

  Brady’s book. The uptick in sales of the book after the debate had been huge, just as Jennings had anticipated, but he knew that that effect could only last so long.

  “Okay,” Brady huffed. He handed Jennings the legal pad with the scribbling that was the beginning of his speech.

  After a glance, Jennings said, “Not bad, Brian. I like how you speak out against all of these so-called self-help gurus who encourage people to find peace within themselves with their watered-down references to Eastern religions.”

  Brady nodded. “True peace only comes through acceptance of Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, not from within. That is the lesson that our country is missing today.”

  “I agree, but what if we also hit people where they are really hurting.”

  Brady templed his fingers under his chin. “Their pocketbooks?”

  “Exactly.” The slow economy had not only hurt home sales in New Hope, it was dragging down contributions to the church as well. Jennings figured they could turn their problems to their advantage. “What are the two countries that are doing well economically today while the U.S. and Europe suffer?”

  “China and India, but those are not Christian countries.”

  “That’s your point. You make the argument in your book that God punished Israel, even though the Jews were the chosen people, by allowing Rome, a pagan empire, to destroy the Temple in seventy AD. Why? Because the Jews had rejected Jesus as the Messiah. Well, take this one step further. China and India are countries controlled by people who believe in heathen religions, yet even as they take our jobs, our businesses form subsidiaries there, moving even more of our production offshore, which is destroying our nation.”

  Brady’s eyes lit up. “Just as Paul wrote in First Corinthians, chapter ten, verses twenty-twenty-one: ‘You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too; you cannot have a part in both the Lord’s table and the table of demons.’”

  Jennings smiled. The reverend hadn’t lost his touch.

  “I can give a hundred sermons like that in my sleep.”

  “Your speech will be great, Brian. After the CNN debate, the media will be anxious to see what you have to say.”

  Jennings glanced at his watch. They would be landing soon. Thinking about the debate, he was reminded of the phone calls he needed to make. In addition to the financial problems at New Hope, the other occurrence that could discredit Brady and upset his bid for the presidency of the NAE would be the sudden appearance of the texts he’d condemned as fraudulent. Jennings believed that the Internet release of the texts had been both a gift and a test sent by God. His strategy of using them to create controversy and drive more people to Brady’s book was exactly the kind of response that God had wanted from them. Only when the texts disappeared for good, just as they had done a hundred years earlier in the case of Nicholas Notovitch, would God’s will be done.

  CHAPTER 45

  VARANASI, INDIA

  KRISTIN STIRRED AND opened her eyes. Her head throbbed. Where was she? She lay on her side on a dusty wood floor, her arms bound to a chair attached uncomfortably to her back.

  Then the horror of her entrapment overcame her.

  She attempted to move her head, but a lightning bolt of pain convinced her to keep it resting on the floor. How long had she been unconscious? The room had no windows to the outside, so she had no idea if it was night or day. She blinked at the bare lightbulb in the ceiling above her. When her eyes refocused on her surroundings, she realized that she no longer lay by the door to the apartment where she’d fallen. Her captor must have dragged her back to the center of the room. She also noticed, with relief, that her pants were still on. Her shirt was open, exposing her sports bra, but it was in place too.

  The pain in her head radiated outward from her jaw. She had a vague memory of the blur of a fist before passing out. She tried to open her mouth, wondering if her jaw was broken, but immediately realized that something was wrong. A stale dry taste pervaded her mouth, and her tongue felt as if it had ballooned to twice its normal size. After a moment, she realized it wasn�
�t her tongue that was swollen but that her mouth was stuffed with some kind of cloth. She tried to spit it out, but it wouldn’t budge.

  She was gagged. Immediately the sensation that she was suffocating overwhelmed her. She forced herself to inhale deeply through her nose. She didn’t want to be the cause of her own death from choking.

  Her sinuses were clear. She could breathe. Just relax and keep breathing, she told herself.

  “I’m in Varanasi.” A muffled voice drifted across the floor to her. “I have the girl.”

  Straining her eyes to look up without moving her pounding head, she saw her assailant sitting on the edge of the bed in the next room. His head inclined away from her, he spoke into a cell phone.

  “Don’t worry about that. You don’t need the details. Just give me what I need and it will be taken care of.”

  Either sensing or hearing her, he swiveled his head in her direction. His nose, while crooked on his face, was no longer bent at the right angle she’d last seen it following her kick. He must have set it himself. Both of his nostrils were packed with tissue, the bloodstained tips of which dangled out. He paused the conversation to smile at her, a cold, predatory smile.

  “I’ll call you back,” the man said and then hung up his phone. He then lifted his feet to the bed and began to unlace and then remove his black boots. Then he unbuckled his belt.

  Kristin watched the monster, knowing she was helpless to prevent him from abusing her. Then she heard a voice. It came not from the room but from deep inside her, like a single candle flame flickering faintly at the far end of a dark cave.

  “It’s only your body. It’s not you.” Her sister’s soft voice spoke to her in the gentle tone Kristin missed desperately.

  Through the throbbing in her jaw and head, Kristin came to the simple understanding that this man could do nothing to her. He might rape her, he might kill her afterward, but he couldn’t take from her something deeper, something that only she could relinquish. She recalled Deepraj’s words and the image of the single candle flame on their dinner table, the tiny flame which she now understood also burned inside her own body. Whatever happened, she would not relinquish that. Kristin’s realization had an unexpected effect on her. Lying on the ground and staring at the man removing his pants, Kristin became aware of a calmness that rested deep within her. Her breathing slowed. The air slowly passed through her nostrils and filled her lungs, the air that fanned the tiny flame inside of her.

  Nephesh, she thought. The breath of God.

  Kristin still felt the physical pain in her body. The fear of what lay in store for her still produced adrenaline coursing through her veins, but now she watched these sensations as an outsider. The sensations were dulled, like someone had turned down the volume of a loud stereo to the point where she was aware that beyond the noise was a silence, a peace that the noise could mask but not reach.

  With the pain in her body now a dull echo of its former strength, she gathered her legs underneath herself and rose to her knees. The pervert on the bed looked startled at her movement. He quickly finished removing his pants, as though he didn’t want to be caught tangled in case she tried a new escape tactic. But Kristin merely stood and then sat back in the chair. For a moment, she wondered whether the old chair would support her weight as it creaked and wobbled under her.

  He stared at her with a new curiosity. She held his gaze, not in angry defiance, and not in fear, but as a gaze.

  He didn’t move immediately toward her. He cocked his head, puzzled. As they continued to stare at each other, the lightbulb above flickered on and off twice in rapid succession. The ever-present Varanasi power fluctuations, she thought.

  Her captor glanced at the ceiling and then rose from the bed. The smirk had returned to his face.

  Blackness engulfed the room.

  “It’s M-I-S-A-K-I!” Grant spelled for the third time to the two police officers standing in the hallway in front of Deepraj’s office.

  “Your wife?” the shorter one, who looked barely old enough to shave, asked.

  “Not my wife, my ... girlfriend.” He paced in the empty hall, his footsteps echoing off the plaster walls. The shock of finding Deepraj murdered and a four-foot long cobra curled under the professor’s desk almost did him in. Grant knew immediately that this was the work of the man from Agra. He was still tracking them. Grant didn’t have time to grieve for the kind professor, though, because his greatest fear had been realized. Kristin was missing. He’d called the police from the phone in the faculty lounge. They had arrived quickly but slammed shut Deepraj’s door as soon as they saw the snake. They called for backup.

  “When did you last see her?” the senior officer in the ill-fitting blue jacket asked.

  “About two hours ago, when I dropped her off here.”

  “Was the professor alive then?” His pen paused above his notepad.

  “I dropped her off outside the building and then returned to the hotel.” He wrung his hands together. They should be sending out search parties to scour the neighborhood, not standing here talking. The older officer continued to stare at him. “Wait. I hope you’re not implying that Kristin may have had something to do with his death!”

  “I’m not implying anything. Just gathering information.” He scribbled something on his pad. “Had they argued recently?”

  Grant threw his hands up in the air. “No! They were very close. We had dinner last night. Deepraj was helping us.”

  “Where do you think she might have gone?”

  Grant put his hands on his hips and let out a breath so that he wouldn’t begin screaming at the officers. “That’s what I need your help with. She’s been kidnapped. By the same man who did that”—he pointed to the closed office door—“and the same man who murdered one of our friends in Agra!” He had already told the story of the events at the Taj Mahal twice to these two.

  “Our office will check into that. But now we have the problem that one of our distinguished professors is dead in his office under suspicious circumstances.”

  “Suspicious circumstances! Have you been listening to what I’ve said?” He took another breath and tried again. “If you want to find the man who did this, we need to find Kristin.”

  The younger officer tapped his superior’s shoulder. “While you wait here for backup, I can take him to his hotel. We’ll be around if the woman shows up.”

  Grant looked back and forth between the officers as if he were watching a bad comedy routine. Standing around, whether in the university building or at the hotel, would not find Kristin. His heart ached for her. He had seen with Razi and now Deepraj what this man was capable of doing. He forced from his mind the possibilities of what Kristin might be enduring. But how could they begin to find her in this crowded, teaming city? He felt bile rise to the back of his throat and swallowed hard. Why did I let her go alone?

  Then the hallway’s fluorescent lights flickered on and off in rapid succession. The three of them glanced around. Another power outage. The overhead lights stayed off, but the emergency floodlights at the end of the hall by the stairwell popped on. The sharp light from the halide bulbs cast daggerlike shadows across the wood floor. A deep unease gripped Grant’s gut.

  This time the power remained off. Kristin could see nothing.

  She moved without thinking. She pushed her legs as forcefully as she could with the chair attached to her back, but she didn’t run in the direction of the door. Instead, she hurled herself toward the opposite wall. Her captor lunged a second slower than she did.

  He must have anticipated she would try another escape attempt, because she heard him yell from the direction of the door, “Come here, you bitch!”

  Kristin hit the opposite wall violently, twisting her body at the moment before the expected impact. She hadn’t been able to see the approaching wall, but she’d felt its presence. A loud splintering sound echoed through the room. The chair shattered and fell from her body in pieces.

  “Huh?” the man call
ed out in confusion.

  Now free from her seated prison, Kristin squatted and groped in the darkness until her hands closed on one of the chair’s legs. Still taped to her forearms were foot-long pieces of wood, but they no longer impeded her movement. Ignoring the stiffness in her back, she stood with her newly acquired weapon in her right hand, ripped her gag out with her left, and began to make her way around the perimeter of the room. She kept her left hand in light contact with the wall, while her right gripped the chair leg above her head.

  The sound of her assailant stumbling over the wreckage of the destroyed chair echoed from behind her. He’d moved quickly. Kristin turned. She strained to see in the darkness, but the absence of light was complete. Instinct told her to raise her left arm protectively in front of her face. She shuffled backward, facing the direction of the expected imminent attack.

  A sharp metallic edge pressed into her spine.

  She froze.

  The image of the blade of the commando knife blazed in her mind. She shifted her body weight to her left, preparing to swing her weapon toward the new menace. The edge rotated with her, now pressed against the length of her back. It wasn’t her attacker but the bathroom door.

  Before she had time to experience any relief from this realization, the actual attack came. She sensed rather than saw the quick movement in front of her. She still held her left arm high in front of her face while her right held the chair leg suspended over her head. Kristin heard the sound of metal striking wood at the same time she felt the ringing vibration run from the armrest taped to her forearm through to her bone. He’d struck with the knife.

  She wasn’t going to give him the chance to adjust his aim. Kristin brought the chair leg she was holding down in a forceful arc in front of her body in a movement that reminded her of serving for match point. Her hand stung when the wooden leg cracked loudly against a hard part of his body. A howl went up in front of her. Kristin knew she needed to press her advantage.