Tartarus: Kingdom Wars II (10 page)

B
efore climbing into bed I set out my notes, the journal of my White House experience, and my laptop, and set the clock alarm for 5:00
A.M.
I figured if I hit the ground running I could have a couple of chapters written by my publisher’s New York deadline.

Sleep was fitful, fueled by the day’s events. Seeing the assemblage of angels sparked flashbacks of my showdown with Semyaza on top of the Emerald Plaza tower. The nightmares of that night always left me writhing, with entangling bedsheets playing the role of demons. When the alarm went off I was exhausted. But getting up and working was more attractive than staying in bed and dreaming.

With a pot of room-service coffee fueling me, I fashioned a rough outline of chapter one and by 6:00
A.M
. I had a suitable first paragraph. By 6:30
A.M.
I was hitting my stride. At this pace I would meet my deadline with ease.

A soft tapping at the door interrupted me.

“Grant?”

My fingers froze over the keyboard. With writing, momentum is everything, difficult to generate and difficult to regain once it’s lost. It’s not something a writer surrenders willingly.

“Grant? Are you awake?”

The voice was feminine.

If I remained silent, would she conclude I was sleeping and go away?

But then paranoia kicked into gear. What if she was ill? A change of time zones, diet, the excitement of yesterday. It was enough to throw anyone’s system off. What if something was wrong with the professor? What time was it in San Diego?

“Grant?”

“Coming,” I said.

Abandoning chapter one, I crossed the room and opened the door.

“Jana!” I said, surprised.

“I need to talk to you.” She stared past me into the room. “Is this a good time?”

I looked at my watch.

“I know it’s early,” she said. “I wanted to catch you before you got away. Good, you’re dressed. Do you want to talk here or go down to the coffee shop?”

Glancing over my shoulder at my open laptop, I felt my writing momentum slipping away.

“I have a pot of coffee,” I said. “I know you prefer tea.”

She stepped past me and crossed to the curtains I hadn’t yet opened. I’d kept them closed to shut out the distraction of Jerusalem. I half-feared I’d see angels. If that were the case, I’d never get any chapters written.

“Do you mind?” Jana said, pulling the curtains back, letting the sun in.

A glance out the window revealed a sky clear of angels.

With an inward sigh over lost momentum I tidied up the table, shuffling my notes to one side and closing the laptop. To hope that this would be a short conversation was a fool’s wish. This was Jana.

I righted the second cup on the serving tray and poured Jana some coffee, setting it in front of the chair opposite mine along with the sugar packets and miniature crème pitcher. Jana had always doctored her coffee heavily.

She pulled out the chair and pushed the crème and sugar aside, sipping her coffee black. “I want to know where I stand with you.” Holding her cup in both hands, she peered at me with serious brown eyes.

I sat and topped off my own cup. “I saw your video clip on the news. Your producer must be ecstatic.”

“You tried to ditch me yesterday. Why?”

I didn’t have a good answer for her, so I offered the only answer I had. A lame one.

“You caught us by surprise. We had no idea you were in Jerusalem.”

Her eyes narrowed. “We—is this about Sue Ling?”

I set my coffee cup down with a purposeful clink. “Why don’t you tell me, Jana? If you and Sue Ling have something to work out, do it on your own. I don’t appreciate the two of you putting me in the middle.” I matched her gaze with my own.

“You saw the angels before anyone else yesterday, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You were going to the Mount of Olives when you ran out of the hotel.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? After all we’ve been through, certainly you must have known I’d want to know.”

“Like I said, we were in a hurry, you caught me by surprise. I wish I had a better explanation than that, but I don’t.”

“You tried to ditch us.”

“That wasn’t my call. I admit I do a lot of dumb things, but this wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t driving, and it wasn’t my call. If I had something to apologize for, I would.”

She thought about that a moment. Sipped her coffee. Then said, “True, you have been known to do a lot of dumb things.”

She offered a half-smile. A good sign.

“So where does that leave us?” she asked again.

“You tell me. If I continue working with the professor and Sue Ling, can we still be friends?”

Her smile faded. She became Jana the reporter. “I have to ask the hard questions. It’s my job.”

“I would expect nothing less.”

“But can you live with it? I won’t be anyone’s press secretary. Not yours, not the professor’s.”

“The professor was wrong to try to use you like that,” I said.

My answer surprised her. “Sue Ling wouldn’t agree with you.”

“At times Sue Ling’s feelings for the professor cloud her judgment.” I paused. “You want to know where you stand. I’ll tell you. I am your flawed but devoted friend. Nothing between us has changed.”

Her smile was full. The reporter was gone. My friend Jana was back.

She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “Thank you.”

She sat back.

“Now,” she said, pulling a pad from her purse, “where did you go after you left Mt. Olivet yesterday?”

The reporter didn’t stay away for long.

I told her of our trip to Hebrew University and how, based on the text, Professor Serrafe had dubbed the Jesus of the manuscript Joker Jesus. Jana chuckled and nodded. She wrote that down.

“And what were your impressions of the Jesus on the mountain?” she asked.

“Same as everyone else, I guess. Dumbfounded.”

“Did you recognize any of them?”

I sat back in my chair. “I hadn’t thought about that.”

So now I did. I replayed what I saw in my mind, scanning the faces of the angels. “No.” I shook my head. “I didn’t recognize any of them, which is really odd.”

“So how did you know to be here?”

I told her that both Sue and I were here as the professor’s eyes and ears, and how I felt the clouds calling to me, and how I tested my abilities.

“So nobody forewarned you,” she asked, “no angel, that is?”

I shook my head.

“What’s next?”

“I’m writing another book.” I motioned to the laptop. “It will be about the deception at the White House while I was—”

“I mean, what’s next on the angel’s agenda?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. I’m not exactly on their newsletter mailing list.”

There was a knock at the door.

“Grant? Are you awake?”

I looked at Jana but saw only the top of her head. Both hands were in her purse. She was packing up.

I opened the door.

“Good, you’re dressed,” Sue Ling said. “I just got a call—”

She saw Jana standing at the foot of my unmade bed.

“Oh—” Sue said.

Jana caressed my arm in passing. “Call me if you get wind of anything,” she said, exiting the room without a word to Sue.

“Jana was just—”

Sue cut me off. “I’m establishing a video link to the professor,” she said without looking at me. “He wants to talk to you.”

She turned to go.

“Sue—Jana just stopped by to—”

“Five minutes,” she said over her shoulder.

The laptop sat idle on the desk. I hoped the call to the professor wouldn’t take long. Meanwhile, I had five minutes to knock out a paragraph.

My cell phone rang. It was Christina. She said she would be briefing Senator Vogler in ten minutes on the situation in Israel and wanted to know if I’d seen the Mt. Olivet video.

“Doesn’t anybody sleep in the States?” I grumbled. After finishing my call to Christina, I had just enough time to get to Sue’s room for the video call to the professor. “What time is it in San Diego?”

“Ten-thirty
P.M
.,” Sue said, adjusting the camera on her laptop computer. “We’re a day ahead of them.”

She had propped the door open so I wouldn’t have to knock. Her room was a mirror image of mine. She’d set her computer on my working table’s twin and was busy opening the communications software program. She avoided eye contact with me. All we needed now was the professor. He had yet to log in.

Sue drummed her fingers impatiently on the table. She waited a minute longer, then picked up her cell phone and talked the professor through the procedure to get online. Soon afterward we had picture and sound.

“Pull up that chair,” she told me, scooting over so that both of us would fit into the camera’s field of vision.

“Quite a display on Mt. Olivet,” the professor began.

His backdrop was a living room in disarray, a testimony to Sue Ling’s absence. She always kept it clean and orderly for him.

Turning his head, the professor spoke to someone off camera. “Good, you’re here.”

Though we couldn’t see him, we recognized Abdiel’s voice.

The professor faced the camera again. “Grant, Sue tells me you saw the angels massing even before they revealed themselves. How did you do that?”

I explained how the cloud called to me and described my attempts to see them. I don’t know what pleased the professor more—my initiative or my newfound ability.

“Now that you’ve done it once,” he said, “it should be easier to do again. Have you seen any more angels?”

I told him I hadn’t.

He inquired about our meeting with Professor Serrafe. Sue gave him a concise report.

“The translations. When do they expect to release them?”

“Within the week.”

“That soon?”

“Since the appearance on Mt. Olivet, the Egyptians have been pressing to release the original text immediately.”

“That’s exactly what they want,” the professor said. “They want to keep us off balance.”

“The Egyptians?” I asked.

“The rebel angels,” the professor replied. “Olivet tipped their hand. Until then we only suspected they were behind the manuscript. Now it’s obvious they planted it.”

“So the Jesus we saw yesterday—”

“An angel,” the professor said. “You have to hand it to them. The detail was incredible. They staged everything according to Bible prophecy.”

“If everything was according to prophecy,” I said, “how can we know that it was an impostor?”

Sue looked at me as if I were crazy for asking the question.

A voice came from off camera. “Had it been the Divine Warrior himself, I would have been there with him,” Abdiel said.

“The Divine Warrior is the Christ,” the professor explained, in case I missed it.

It made sense that had the event been genuine Abdiel would have known about it.

“Abdiel recognized some of the host,” the professor added. “They’re all on the rebel side.”

“Did he recognize the impostor angel?” Sue asked.

“Abdiel’s inquiring into the angel’s identity,” the professor replied. “You know, there’s another way to verify that it wasn’t Jesus who appeared on Mt. Olivet.”

“He never touched down.”

The voice came from behind us. Nearly jumping out of our seats, both Sue and I turned to see Abdiel standing in the hotel room.

Did I say standing? I meant floating. His feet weren’t touching the carpet. It was the first time I’d seen him barefoot.

A revelation hit me like a thunderbolt. “Doc!” I exclaimed. “Doc Palmer! When I went to see him in Montana, he held a shotgun on me and made me take off my shoes and wiggle my toes in the dirt. He wanted to make sure I wasn’t a rebel angel!”

“That makes no sense,” Abdiel said. “Projectile weapons cannot harm us.”

I pointed at his feet. “This thing about not touching the ground. Is it true of all angels?”

“It is true,” Abdiel said.

“The incarnate Christ touched the ground,” Sue said.

“When he walked, he left footprints,” Abdiel said, with a surprising touch of emotion.

The professor’s voice came over the computer speakers.

“Philippians, second chapter,” Sue said, stamping the quotation with its biblical reference.

The hotel room door flew open and banged against the wall.