by Ted Dekker
If Stephen didn’t move now, they could both be dead in a matter of seconds.
“Wait.” He could hardly stomach the thought of leaving her here with Braun, but he had no choice. “She’s right.”
Stephen took a step back. “Okay, I’ll leave. I’ll leave.”
THE GAME had been played out like chess match: for every move a countermove, for every victory a defeat, for every hope a helping of despair. Roth could not have hoped for more.
He was quite sure that he could be completely satisfied standing here for hours listening to their desperate ploys. But little did they know. It was just getting good. Really good.
He could toy with them both as if they were made of clay. And compared to him, they were. Next to him, most humans were merely dirt that had been fashioned into walking objects.
Stephen backed toward the door. “I’m leaving. And since I’m an American citizen and people know I’m here, shooting me would be a mistake. I’ll go.”
Braun swung his gun in line with Stephen and waved at Esther. “I want you here, beside me, before he leaves.”
She walked toward him slowly. “I’m coming. Now let him go.”
Stephen took another step back, hands up. “Easy. I’m going. I’ll be going.” His back hit the door, and he felt for the knob.
Braun turned the pistol back on Esther. Stephen pulled the door open, stepped quickly through, and slammed it shut.
45
STEPHEN HEARD A SLAP THAT SOUNDED LIKE ONE OF THOSE TINY firecrackers, followed immediately by Esther’s muted cry. The world tipped crazily. He had to go back in. He gripped the doorknob but stopped short. Braun was yelling at her in German.
Time was running out. Stephen turned, bounded for the outer door, and threw it open. A back alley; empty. He had to find his way back to the bell tower.
Hold on, Esther!
Stephen gritted his teeth and tore down the alley toward the door below the bell tower. Tugged on it.
Locked! Dear God, it was locked!
He sprinted around the corner, but he was running farther from her, not to her rescue. What if he couldn’t find another way in? Inside, Braun was brutalizing Esther, and her only hope for survival was running in the wrong direction.
The species of panic that swallowed him in that moment was a rare kind, debilitating in dreams and deadly in waking life. His legs felt numb, and he wasn’t running nearly as quickly as his heart suggested he was.
He ran straight for the street, barely aware of three women who gawked at him from across the lane. Rough brick tore at his fingers when he grabbed the building’s corner for the turn.
The steps leading to the front entrance loomed, gray and empty. No other doors. The steps, the foyer, and then the sanctuary. And in the sanctuary, Esther.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Lars, limping, pulling something from the back of the car.
Stephen took the steps at a full run. A faint cry of pain drifted from the church. He was out of time.
He slammed through the heavy church doors. He crossed the foyer in three long strides and headed up the center aisle at a full sprint.
Braun knelt on the floor, directly ahead, bent over Esther.
A terrifying, throaty scream echoed off the arching walls, and Stephen realized it was his own. He rushed forward, blindly, pushed by the power of his own rage. Braun stared at him, frozen by the sudden intrusion.
Still Stephen ran. Still he screamed.
He was halfway up the line of pews before a thought redirected him, an image of that rifle he’d dropped at the base of the tower stairs.
He veered to his right, vaulted a pew, landed his foot on the seat of a second, and hurdled the pew tops toward the bell tower.
A gunshot boomed, but he didn’t duck or stop. His momentum permitted neither.
Another gunshot. Stained glass shattered high above and rained down.
Stephen skipped over the entire bank of pews before his left foot finally betrayed him and came up short on the last bench. He threw himself forward in a dive, banged his shin hard, toppled over the pew, and landed on his side with a tremendous grunt.
Wood splintered above his head—Braun’s shots tore at pews that momentarily shielded Stephen. He couldn’t breathe. The bell-tower door was open, two yards away.
He clambered for it on his hands and knees.
Click! Click!
The gun-hammer fell on an empty chamber. Braun was out of bullets?
Stephen was still out of breath. He shoved himself to his feet and lunged through the door. The old rifle lay where it had fallen.
He snatched it up.
Chambered a round, desperate for breath.
Whirled back.
Lurched for the doorway, feeling faint.
His reason was making a comeback, and for once it sang in harmony with his passion. Kill Braun. He had to kill Braun.
Still no breath.
Stephen staggered into the doorway, gun extended, trigger halfway through its pull, sights lined for Braun.
But Braun didn’t fill the sights. Esther did.
Stephen blinked. Braun had pulled Esther to her feet and stood behind her. A large, shiny blade pressed against her throat.
“Drop it,” the German said. “Drop it, or I cut her and drink her blood here before it’s time.”
Stephen’s lungs finally inhaled a pocket of usable air.
“Lower the weapon.”
Stephen held the gun as steadily as he could, which amounted to wavering in favor of jerking. He had no chance of picking off Braun’s head like they did in the movies. Esther’s shoulder was exposed, baring the scar. Her eyes stared at him, glazed with indifference. She’d resigned herself to die.
“Let her go,” Stephen said, still gasping.
“Drop the gun, and I’ll release her.”
Stephen groped for a way out, but came up empty-handed.
“I can’t put the gun down, and you know it,” Stephen said. “But I can promise you that if you draw blood, I’ll take my chances and shoot.”
“Then you’ll kill her,” Braun said.
“You’ll kill her anyway.”
The front doors crashed open. A woman’s muffled cry.
Stephen froze.
A sick grin distorted Braun’s mouth.
Lars staggered into the back of the sanctuary. Shoved a woman down the aisle. Her hands were bound. Lars held a gun to her back.
It took Stephen a few seconds to realize who he was looking at, not because she looked any differently than he might have guessed, not because the gray tape over her mouth hid her facial features, but because he simply couldn’t understand what he was seeing.
Esther. Only older.
Ruth.
But this couldn’t be Ruth.
Ruth was dead.
“Hello, Ruth,” Braun said.
46
Torun
May 8, 1945
MARTHA STEPPED INTO THE YARD BEHIND THE COMMANDANT’S red house and let her eyes adjust to the darkness. Ordinarily, the lights would be blazing from tall posts throughout the camp, but not since the Russians had begun their air raids. Not even the front gate was lighted. It was so dark tonight that Martha had to choose her way carefully. If the perimeter fence wasn’t flowing with high-voltage electricity, she might have been able to find a way out with the children under the cover of this darkness.
She made it as far as the tool shed at the edge of the yard before a sound stopped her dead in her tracks.
A cough.
From the shed? Did Braun keep prisoners in the shed? She wouldn’t put anything past Braun, but why? Most of the barracks below were empty.
There it was again. The cough.
It didn’t matter; she had to keep her mind focused. She had to hurry, or she could endanger the children’s lives. The fate of one or two prisoners locked in a concrete cell was no longer her concern. Maybe on the way back she would— “God forgive me. God forgive me.” The voice came now, a soft, mumbling v
oice that stopped Martha in her tracks. Didn’t she know that voice?
She heard it again, coming from a small, barred window to her left. “God forgive me.”
Martha held her breath and stepped up to the bars. “Hello?”
Nothing.
“Is anyone in there?” she whispered.
“Martha?”
“Ruth?” A knot tried to choke her off. “Is that you, Ruth?”
Hands grasped the bars. A face pushed up between them. Ruth’s face.
“Ruth! Is it you? How . . . ? I thought he—”
“Martha! Thank God, Martha. You’re alive!” Ruth frantically searched her face. “The children! Are the children—”
“Yes! Yes—oh, yes. I can’t believe it’s you! I was so certain that . . . I saw your body!”
“It wasn’t me. I don’t know who.”
“But you’re alive!” Martha kissed her fingers, then her forehead. “Oh, I have so much to tell you. So much! Esther is the most beautiful child. He won’t let me see David.”
“They’re here? Can I see them?”
Martha glanced back toward the house. “They’re here, but the commandant . . . I can’t bring her out. She’ll wake up. We are being liberated tomorrow, Ruth!”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes! Yes, I’m sure of it.” She had to leave; she knew she did. If Gerhard found them . . .
“Listen to me, Ruth. There is so much I will tell you. Tomorrow. If we get separated, then you should know that I’ve marked Esther, and I am going to mark David. Each with half a circle with a star of David in it. The Stone of David. You know it?”
“Yes.”
She stepped back and lifted up the boxes. “I have them. And I am going to hide them. If for some reason we get separated from each other, or from the children, remember this.”
Martha told her how she planned to hide the treasure.
“What good will that do? His gold is filthy!”
“Do I care? It’s for the children, Ruth.”
“They will have each other.”
“He’s . . .” Should she tell Ruth? She had to. “He’s taking the children with him, Ruth.”
“No!”
“Yes. I’m so sorry. Don’t worry, God will protect them. You said so yourself. As long as he thinks I have stolen his treasure, he won’t hurt them. Do you see? He’ll keep them alive until he finds it. It’s the only solution I have. We must have leverage. I have to go.” She kissed Ruth on the forehead and nose.
“Thank you, Ruth. You saved my life. I love you more than I would my own sister. Tomorrow we will talk, okay?”
“Pray that God will draw the children with his hope. Like desperate children seeking the pearl of great price.”
“I will, Ruth. I will pray it every day.”
“God be with you.”
“God be with you.”
She hated leaving, but she walked with a new urgency. Ruth had survived! Think of it. A great weight was gone from her shoulders.
It took her half an hour to pick her way through the camp toward the barracks she thought would be David’s. The door was unlocked. She slipped in and shut the door quietly. “Rachel?”
Silence.
Louder now. “Rachel?”
“Yes?”
Martha ran past empty bunks toward the sound. “Rachel. It’s Martha.”
“Martha?”
The woman lay on a lower bunk, one of only a few people in the beds as far as Martha could see. She set her bundle on the bed and threw her arms around the woman, noting Rachel’s frailty through the cloth immediately. She was nothing but bones!
“Thank God you’re alive.”
“Martha?”
“Yes, it’s Martha, dear. You have my baby? David. Where is David?”
Rachel shifted to reveal a small lump in the blankets behind her. “This is David,” she said very quietly, almost as if it were a question. The woman’s mind was slipping.
Martha stared at the form, afraid to ask anything more. She leaned in and eased back the blanket. There lay a small boy, white chest rising and falling slowly. Dark hair covered his head. Her David.
She lifted her fingers to her mouth to hold back an urge to cry. But this scene was too much for her. She sank to her knees, folded her hands in gratitude to God, and began to shake with soft sobs.
Her son was more beautiful than she had ever imagined in thousands of hours of imagining. He lay with all of his arms and legs and a nose and such tender lips and eyes with long lashes. And he was breathing.
Martha knew she had to hurry, but she hadn’t counted on such brutal emotion. The thought that she was about to lose her precious child again, this very night, consumed her.
She couldn’t wake him.
Did she dare hold him? If he awoke, she would never have the strength to mark him. If she didn’t mark him, she might never see him again. She might never see him again anyway. Shouldn’t she just hold him now—her baby in her arms, his soft cheek against hers, his breathing in her ear?
She reached a trembling hand for his body. Touched him lightly on his head, pushed his hair back. He took a deep breath and turned his head toward her, still deep in sleep.
“This is David,” Rachel said quietly.
Martha nodded but couldn’t speak. There was no possible way for her to take him away from the commandant. Marking her beautiful baby boy might be the only way to find him again.
Martha closed her eyes and gripped her hands to fists. Strong, Martha. You have to be strong.
With Rachel and two other gaunt women in nearby bunks now staring on, Martha heated the brand until it glowed. She’d reversed it on the ladle to make it a companion to Esther’s mark.
She could barely see to press the hot brand into David’s flesh for all her tears. To make matters worse, Rachel began to hit her feebly as soon as the metal made contact. As with Esther, it took a moment for David to wake, but when he did, a scream was already in his throat.
For the first time in nine months, Martha pulled her baby boy to her neck and held him tight. His cries tore at her heart like knives, and she did her best to comfort him. He didn’t know who she was, didn’t recognize the scent of skin or the tone of her voice. Slowly, he calmed.
“It’s my mark, Rachel,” she said as she put the salve on David’s burn. “Do you understand? My mark. So that later I will be able to find him.”
Rachel stared at her with hollow eyes, but Martha thought she might understand, might remember what she had done once for her own son. One of the women looked out the dark window to their left. Martha followed her gaze and froze. A light! A guard was coming!
Now, so late? It couldn’t be possible!
She spun to Rachel. “Where’s his shirt?”
Rachel blinked.
“His shirt—we must cover this! Hurry!”
The woman picked up a small cotton shirt from the end of the bed, and Martha snatched it from her hands. If the guards caught her in here, all would be lost.
The light approached steadily, swinging at the end of the guard’s arm. Had Braun discovered her missing? She began to panic. There was no time. No time!
She handed her child to Rachel. “Lie down! Pretend you’re sleeping. Don’t let them see!”
She scooped up the ammo boxes, ran to the back around the last bunk, and climbed through a window just as the front door opened. If they would have turned on a light, they might have caught her with one leg still hooked in the window, but with the raids, they couldn’t chance the brilliance.
Then Martha fled as fast as she dared in the darkness, pulse hammering in her skull, certain that all was lost.
47
Germany
July 27, 1973
Friday
“MOTHER?” ESTHER’S EYES WIDENED.
“Esther?”
Esther stepped forward, but Braun grabbed her collar and yanked her back.
“Drop the gun,” Lars said, shoving his pistol into Ruth’s
back.
Ruth’s face wrinkled in empathy. She looked at Stephen. Then at Esther. Her eyes flooded with tears. Ruth began to cry.
“I thought . . .” Stephen didn’t know what to say.
“Yes, you thought she was dead,” Braun said. “She is. She’s been dead for thirty years.”
“Mama?” Esther gazed at her mother. There was something between them, Stephen thought. Something they knew that he did not.
The rifle wavered in his hands. “She . . . she’s been alive all these years?”
“Naturally,” Braun said. “My father’s foolishness in allowing any of you to live has created several problems, but it would take too long to explain how the powers of the air work.”
He ran a fat tongue over his upper lip. “When he found the journal and the Stones missing, Gerhard was . . . let us say, disturbed. Martha had outwitted him, and Gerhard was forced to keep Ruth alive. In the event we found Martha, she would reveal the location of the Stones if we hung Ruth’s life over her head. So we kept Ruth alive, in my father’s house.”
He paused as if to let comprehension of Ruth’s plight sink in.
“And, of course, what better way to keep Ruth in humble service than to let her know that her daughter was also alive, and would remain so only if Ruth stayed faithful? We told Esther the same about her mother. They’ve never met, as you can see, but they’ve lived in respect of each other’s life.”
Braun’s smile faded. “You see what happens when you don’t follow the rules? My father should have killed Martha when he selected her with the scarf. Instead she stole his power and handed him thirty years of misery. Today I intend to take that power back.” He shivered.
“I’m sorry, Mother,” Esther said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. God has answered our prayers.”
An awkward moment of silence passed.
“Please lower the gun,” Braun said.
Stephen’s head buzzed. Slowly his rifle came down, as if it had a will of its own.
“Rifle on the floor,” Braun said.
“Forgive me, Mama,” Esther said.
“Rifle on the floor!”
Stephen set down the rifle and stepped back.
“Don’t be sorry,” Ruth said. “Never. Every minute of my life has been worth this one.”