Forsaken (15 page)

“Yes, Allah is merciful,” the imam said. “And we need to remember that there is still hope that Kacey will be found before Reverend Mason must make his decision.”

Summer turned to the rabbi. “I’ll put the same question to you that I put to Pastor Hale. If you were in Reverend Mason’s position, what would you do?”

“I don’t know. Who could possibly know? Our God is a God of life, not death. I pray that he will have mercy on Kacey and on our brother, Reverend Mason.”

She looked at the imam. “Imam?”

“I do not know what Reverend Mason will do, and I sympathize with him as he faces a terrible decision. I know, however, that no matter the circumstances, no matter the sacrifice, I would never deny Allah. Never.”

“Then you believe that Reverend Mason should allow Kacey to die?”

“Only Reverend Mason can make that decision. I will not presume to think for him or speak for him.”

“But in the same situation, you would let your own child die?”

“Allah allows me no choice.”

Summer brushed back her blonde hair. “This is, indeed, intense.” She placed her hand to her ear. “All right, we’ve got a caller who has an interesting point. Let’s go to Peggy, from Alton, Illinois. Hello, Peggy. What do you think Reverend Mason should do?”

A woman’s voice crackled over the speaker phone. “No father could allow his child to die like this, and the God that I know would not expect it. No one will believe that Reverend Mason is really denying Jesus, and he will not believe it in his own heart. That’s what matters, what’s in his heart.”

Summer nodded. “What’s in his heart . . . that’s an excellent point, Peggy.” She looked at the pastor. “And what about that, Pastor Hale? If Reverend Mason says the words the terrorists demand but doesn’t believe them in his heart, do the words really matter? Is he really denying his faith?”

“The thing that makes this so difficult, Summer, is that words
do
matter. I wish it were as easy as the caller suggests, but when a leader of the stature of Simon Mason speaks, people all over the world listen. This is not the average guy walking down the street.”

“How ironic,” she said, “because much of Reverend Mason’s appeal throughout his career has been that he seems to be just an average guy, someone to whom ordinary people can relate. Now I’m sure he would give anything to be able to disappear into the crowd, as the rest of us can do. Then his words would not have the effect that they may have next weekend, whatever he decides to do. Let’s face it, though, he’s become too well known for that to be a possibility.”

The camera cut back to the rabbi just as he was taking a sip from a blue Instant News Channel coffee mug. He lifted his hand in a stop sign and smiled.

“Sorry, we caught you in midsip, Rabbi,” Summer
said. “It’s happened to me many times. We’ll come back to you in a moment.”

The camera panned back to Reverend Hale, who leaned forward and clasped his hands. “I want to remind people that the Apostle Peter denied Christ publicly— not once, but three times. And, of course, Christ forgave him. Peter became an indispensable leader of the early church. He eventually suffered greatly for his faith and was martyred. As legend has it, he asked to be crucified upside down because he did not feel worthy to die the way Jesus died. In any event, there is clear precedent that even a person who publicly denies Christ can be forgiven.”

“So, as is often the case, there is instruction in church tradition.” Summer touched her earpiece. “Well, they’re telling me we’re out of time. I want to thank you, gentlemen . . .”

The imam held up his hand. “One moment, Ms. Harcomb. I would like to ask—and I’m sure that Reverend Hale and Rabbi Stone will join me in this wish—I would like to ask all people of faith the world over to offer prayers for Kacey and Simon Mason during this terrible ordeal.”

The other men nodded.

I turned off the television and leaned over my laptop to check the Internet, clicking from one news site to the next. Virtually every major newspaper in the world had an editorial piece about Simon’s dilemma. Most took no position on the decision that he should make but instead condemned the terrorists and sympathized with him
and his agonizing situation. A number of papers did, however, offer advice. The
Post
, the
Times
, and several leading European papers urged Simon to say whatever words would save his daughter. Each assured him that no one would believe he was truly renouncing his faith. The
Times
even instructed him that no loving God could hold him to account for his decision.

I worried that Simon was not going to do what the terrorists demanded. That, in fact, he couldn’t do it. As horrible as the consequences would be, I was beginning to understand how he could make such a decision. I had been around two presidents and had seen firsthand the burden borne by men under great responsibility. They were among the few people on earth whose decisions regularly resulted in one person dying and another living—the men and women who sometimes had to sacrifice individual lives for the benefit of a larger group, or a larger principle.

Simon’s situation was not that different. His actions influenced millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people, and that influence could alter the fate of souls. Who would want such responsibility?

I got up and walked into the bathroom. Maybe the authorities would find Kacey and free her. Maybe he would never have to decide. I leaned over the sink and splashed water on my face. When I peered into the mirror, the eyes that looked back at me were dark and swollen. My head hurt, and I wished I hadn’t emptied my room’s mini-bar of bourbon after I left Simon the night
before. But I’d needed something to calm me down. Who wouldn’t under these circumstances?

No matter how bad I felt, though, I knew that Simon felt worse. I pictured him standing in his wrinkled jeans in the living room of his suite. How alone and lost he’d looked. I wished I could see him again right that moment, that I could talk to him and hold his hand. I wished that I could do more to comfort him.

More than anything, though, I wished that some miracle could make a man like Simon want to be comforted by a woman like me.

BY SATURDAY MORNING WE were back in Dallas. Simon’s internationally televised celebration was to take place that evening at the Challenger Airlines Center.

From a string of abandoned cars, the FBI had concluded that Kacey’s kidnapping was a well-planned operation. The kidnappers changed cars, and probably personnel, at prearranged locations. Although there were a few early leads, hope of finding her faded as the days passed. There simply wasn’t enough time before the deadline. Kacey and her kidnappers had vanished.

In anticipation of the event at the Challenger Airlines Center, Michael Harrison temporarily moved his control center for the investigation from Chicago back to
his Dallas office. He hoped that the event would somehow trigger a significant lead. We all knew, though, that there was virtually no chance of rescuing Kacey.

Simon was going to have to decide whether to meet the kidnappers’ demand.

My first night back in my apartment, I slept restlessly and woke to the unsettling feeling that my bed was bouncing across the floor. I punched my pillow and tried to burrow to a more peaceful place. Within a few moments the window above my bed rattled so violently that I pulled the pillow over my head in case it shattered. Then the rattling stopped.

I sat upright and ran my tongue across my lips—stale bourbon—and as I recalled, lots of it. My head throbbed. I resolved not to have a drink for at least two weeks. The rattling started again. I leaned over and peered through the slats of my plantation shutters. Several stories below, three men in orange hard hats and fluorescent vests were bending over, looking into a hole in the sidewalk. Another worker rode a jackhammer that bucked him like a mechanical bull. The sunlight streaming through the shutters made my head feel even worse. I pulled the slats closed.

I turned toward the ostrich egg alarm clock next to my bed. The red numbers blinked 4:00. The power must have gone off during the night. I grabbed my watch off the nightstand. It was ten o’clock.

I swung my feet off the bed, hopped down, and threw on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt that lay in a wad on the floor. Simon had talked about visiting
a chapel at a neighborhood Methodist church that morning. With the press stalking him, visiting his own church was out of the question. He hoped to slip out of his house somehow.

The pastor of the Methodist church offered instructions on how to find an out-of-the-way entrance that would lead Simon to the chapel. If I hurried I could be there in ten minutes. I didn’t know if Simon had made it, or whether he would still be there if he had. The least I could do, though, was try to support him on what was going to be the most difficult day of his life. I grabbed a bottle of Tylenol out of the bathroom and downed three of them dry on my way out the door. As I jogged through the parking garage to my car, I shoved a stick of gum in my mouth.

When I pulled my Camaro into the massive parking lot of the Methodist church complex, there was not a single car in sight. The grounds stretched for acres. The campus consisted of a number of gray stone buildings that, judging by the slightly different shadings of the stone, had been added one at a time over the years. According to Simon’s description, the side entrance I was looking for would have a small, blue awning over a single door. I walked a considerable distance and peeked around a number of corners before I finally spotted it.

The morning was already developing into the type of shining March day that forces Yankees to admit there is something for which they envy Texans. Unfortunately, my hangover was brutal, and the bright sky was not helping. By the time I ducked under the awning and
walked down three narrow steps to the door, my head was pounding and my forehead damp with sweat.

The building seemed to be the original sanctuary, although it was now dwarfed by a newer, more elaborate structure a few hundred yards to the west. The door and doorknob appeared to be original equipment. I grabbed the knob and turned it. It wobbled so dramatically that I wondered if it would fall off in my hand. The door swung open.

Inside the dim building my eyes took a few moments to adjust. I was in a hallway so narrow that two adults could not have walked side by side. The cinder-block walls were glossy gray, and a strong scent of fresh paint suggested a recently applied coat. The air was cool and damp. The ceiling was so low that a tall man would have to duck to avoid the teardrop light fixtures hanging, like stalactites, from the ceiling every fifteen feet or so. As I made my way down the hall, my sandals tapped on the slate floor. The sound echoed off the close walls, reinforcing the unsettling sensation that I was moving deeper and deeper into a cave.

I rounded a corner and arrived at a medieval-looking oak door with a darkened brass plate above it, engraved with the words
Martinson Prayer Chapel.
I turned the knob and eased it open. It creaked as it swung. I half expected Vincent Price to greet me on the other side.

The lights in the chapel were off, but the small room was illuminated in an ethereal way by sunlight that streamed through red and yellow and blue stained-glass windows. The chapel consisted of two short rows
of straight-backed pews, separated by a narrow aisle. In the front, a plain wooden altar looked out over the room from the middle of a raised chancel. The altar was quite old, judging by the number of nicks and gashes that were apparent even from where I stood.

Near the front, in a hooded blue sweatshirt, Simon sat hunched over in the middle of a pew. I watched him for a few moments. He couldn’t have made himself look any smaller, sitting alone in that tiny chapel. He didn’t move. I assumed he was praying and hadn’t heard the door creak. As I watched him sitting there, I wondered whether he’d fallen asleep. I decided that my coming had been a bad idea. Just as I turned to leave, I heard him say my name.

By the time I turned back, he was standing in the aisle. He pushed the hood back and motioned toward the pew. “Will you sit with me?” The filtered light from the windows glinted off the bald crown of his head, and for an instant his face seemed to glow.

“Of course.” As I approached him, he stepped to the side and let me slide into the pew. He sat next to me.

He smiled. “Like my outfit? The security guards created a diversion in the driveway, as if we were going somewhere in the car. All of the cameras scrambled to get in position. I took off out the back door and jogged over here.”

“You should be a politician.”

He nodded toward the beat-up altar. “This place doesn’t seem to get much use, but it must have at one time.”

“If not for the stained glass, it would have all the ambience of a dungeon.”

He chuckled. “You hit it on the head. It’s the stained glass. You could put stained glass in a parking garage, and it would still create the sense that God was nearby. These sorts of prayer chapels aren’t built much anymore. They’re viewed as an unnecessary expense. It’s a shame. Sometimes people need a small, quiet place.”

I wasn’t qualified to respond, so I simply sat there looking at the altar.

He rubbed the top of his head. “You know, I just kept praying that it would never come to this—that something would happen—that God would never actually make me choose. After all, how can it be that a man could end up in this situation? Now it’s here, though, and I’ve got to choose: God or Kacey. Today is my last day with one of them.”