The Sacred Cipher (54 page)

Bohannon dug into one of the backpacks, hoping to find one more pair of dry wool socks.
God was certainly watching over us. Who would have expected this much cold and this
much water, under the Mount?
Bohannon had enough camping and hiking experience to know that the woolen clothes
they carried in—sweaters, pants, socks—protected them from hypothermia. Unlike cotton,
which wicked away body heat, wool retained the body’s heat even when wet. They might
get uncomfortable in wet wool, but at least they wouldn’t be dead.

“Thank you, God!” Bohannon exclaimed aloud as he pulled out an unused pair of socks.
He closed his eyes. “God, you have been so good to us, throughout this entire journey.
You have blessed us with so much favor. Thank you, Lord.”

Johnson was standing in front of Bohannon as he opened his eyes.

“How can you be so sure?”

“So sure of what, Doc?”

Johnson lowered himself and rested on his haunches. “So sure that this God of yours
is listening, so sure that he will answer your prayers, or even cares about your prayers?”

The question was simple. Doc’s tone of voice was calm, not accusing. His eyes asked
questions of interest. Bohannon looked hard at Doc for a moment and nodded.

Standing up, Bohannon took Johnson by the arm, grabbed his sleeping bag, and led him
to the other side of the room. “Let’s not disrupt Joe’s sleep,” he said. “He needs
it.”

“We all need it,” said Johnson. “I know I’m wearing out, may have already. I don’t
think I can recall a time when I was this tired. Everything hurts. My bones hurt;
my brain hurts. I just want to stop and sleep for a month.”

Bohannon spread his sleeping bag against the room’s far wall, and turned to Johnson.
“Doc, we don’t have to do this now. It can be another—”

“No,” Johnson interrupted. “No, I don’t think there will be another time. That’s why
I asked you the question. I just feel . . . I feel that I need to ask that question
now. That it was important to seek an answer, now. This is the right time.”

Resting their backs against the limestone wall, Bohannon turned his head slightly
to look at Johnson. “What is it, specifically, that you want to know?”

Johnson hesitated for a fraction. “Tom, how you can be so sure of something that is
so unknowable? How do you know that God exists? And if God does exist, why would he
be concerned about you, individually?”

Bohannon sighed, knowing his answer might not make sense. Might not be enough.

“Richard,” he said quietly, “you can’t.
You
can’t. It’s not possible for a man like you or me to know anything for certain about
God. It doesn’t make any logical sense. Us, the finite, there is no way for us to
understand the infinite. It just can’t happen. Not on our terms.”

Bohannon turned to his right and folded his legs, so he could look directly at Doc.

“All of the religions of the world are about the same thing, man reaching up and trying
to understand God. Christianity is different. Christianity is God reaching down and
making himself understandable to man. And inviting man into fellowship with him.

“That’s it, that’s the whole program. It’s about relationship. That’s what the Bible
is about, front to back, it’s a story about relationship. God created man because
he desired to have a relationship with man. And the story plays out from there. It’s
a very simple theme. Man can know God, because God wants to be known.”

A scowl was forming on Johnson’s face, deepening its furrows with every passing word,
an image of disappointment and bitterness. “That’s just like you Christians,” Johnson
said, rancor dripping from his lips. “Nothing concrete, no real knowledge or understanding,
no empirical truth upon which to hang your faith. Just God’s love. Believe in God’s
love. Well, to me it’s just a shell game: ‘here it is, there it goes, where it stops,
nobody knows.’ What good is that?” The last words he spat out, purging his tongue
of the bile as he began to get to his feet.

Bohannon reached out, put a hand on his arm.

“Hey, give me a minute.”

Johnson’s features softened somewhat. Holding Bohannon’s gaze, he sat back down on
the floor.

“When our daughter, Caitlin, was five years old, she needed to have open-heart surgery.
When she was a year old, a heart specialist told us she had a hole in her heart, a
big one, too big to fix at her age. By the time she was five, we had been making regular
trips to the hospital emergency room for one ailment after another. Her little brother,
Connor, got used to celebrating birthdays in hospital rooms. Caitlin got double pneumonia
when she was five, and we could see her failing. It was time to get her heart fixed.
In preparation, she had a cardiac catheterization. They found no hole in her heart.
We had been praying so long for the hole in her heart to be healed, we were overjoyed.
But the surgeon showed us that her heart was still damaged, one side was really enlarged.
One of the heart valves was leaking badly. She needed surgery. Or . . . well . . .
“We prayed with her surgeon that morning, and he told us to be patient, it would be
a long surgery, eight to ten hours. A few hours later, he walked out of the operating
room, shaking his head. ‘It was too easy,’ he told us. Caitlin had a bad valve, like
swinging doors that were out of alignment and never closed flush. But she also had
a very small hole in the wall between the chambers of her heart. The surgeon used
the small hole to get access to the valve, fixed the valve, then closed the hole on
his way out. A couple of hours.”

Bohannon could see he had Johnson’s full attention. “The next morning, Caitlin was
up on her feet, wires and tubes and monitors hanging all over her, wandering around,
asking about her breakfast. Doc, one day after major heart surgery, she’s walking
around asking where her pancakes were. To me, that’s a miracle. That is God reaching
down.

“Doc, God made himself known to me that day. God made himself known to Annie, and
Caitlin, and to all our friends and relatives who were praying with us outside those
operating room doors. And God made himself known to that surgeon, too. God made himself
known to me day after day after day, long before the surgery. Every time I cried,
every time I asked him why, every time Annie and I put our daughter into his hands.”

Bohannon felt that catch in his throat, that slight quiver in his chin, that moistness
in his eyes that often came when he remembered God’s faithfulness to him and his family.
He had lowered his head, was looking at the sleeping bag.

“I could take up hours of your time, telling you one story after another. About how
God picked me up out of the newspaper business and clearly planted us at the Bowery
Mission in New York City and how it saved our marriage. I could tell you about times
when Annie and I stepped out in obedience, did what we both confidently believed God
was asking us to do and saw miracles, things that only God could orchestrate, work
out before us. Our lives are one story after another of God’s faithfulness to us.
Of God manifesting his love for us, each of us individually, over and over and over
again.

“You know, other people might sit here and talk to you about theology and try to convince
you that God exists; somebody else might use creation, or archaeology, or the history
of Jesus, or who knows what to try and convince you that God exists. I guess that
would be okay.

“But, Doc, you asked me how I know. This is how I know.” Bohannon picked up his chin,
ignoring the tears in his eyes and his quivering lip, and laid his heart out in front
of his friend. “I know because in the darkest places of me, where I hid all my secrets,
he brought me light and rescued the scared little kid who lived there. In the worst
moments of my life, when fear was stampeding through my brain, he brought me a peace
that was impossible to comprehend. In those times when I was ready to quit, when life
was just too hard and I was desperate to escape, to run away, he came, put his arm
around me, and walked alongside me.

“God is real, Doc, because he walks with me every day. Without him, I can’t breathe.
I don’t know how else to explain it to you. I don’t know how to tell you, where to
tell you to go, to find God. You can’t. But I can tell you one thing I know is true.”

Bohannon looked at his friend and prayed for him to understand.

“I know that if you truly, in your heart, ask God to come to you so that you can know
him, personally, intimately, he will always answer that prayer. And he will answer
it when you are most in need. That is his character. That is who he is, and he wants
you to know him, too.”

Bohannon was done. He looked across at Johnson, who shook himself, then threw back
his shoulders and sat more upright.

“Thanks, Tom, thanks for taking the time to share all that with me.”

Bohannon nodded, now a bit sheepish because of his vulnerability. “You’re welcome.”

“To be honest,” said Johnson, staring at his fingertips, “at this moment, I’m not
sure what I think, or believe, about what you’ve told me. But you have certainly given
me a new perspective, a different perspective. I promise you I will give close consideration
to what you have shared with me. Thank you. I mean it, thank you.”

Johnson extended his arm and the two men shook hands, the firmness of their grip communicating
the seriousness of their resolve.
Now
, Bohannon thought,
it’s all in God’s hands
.

“We better get some sleep,” said Johnson, rising. “Whatever time we’ve got left, we’ve
got to make it count.”

Bohannon found himself on the floor, still in his sleeping bag. It was a strange dream.
Everything was bouncing. A deafening roar filled his ears and filled him with a fear
of being buried alive. He was somewhere in the dark, trying to find light. Then it
stopped.

He looked around. In the half-light of the room, which was now filled with dust from
floor to ceiling, he could see that Joe and Doc were also on the floor, also still
in their sleeping bags.

“Was that an earthquake?” Johnson squeezed out of his throat, his body and mind rebelling
against being awake.

“I went to grad school in California,” answered Rodriguez, “and that was no earthquake.
Earthquakes, everything moves in every direction. This, something crashed, or something
exploded. Either something very big and heavy just fell, or somebody just set off
one heck of an explosion and shook this entire mountain.”

Bohannon pulled away his zippers, stirring up more dust storms, and slowly crawled
out of his bag. “Ooww, oh, man, everything hurts.” He tried to stretch out the kinks,
but each move brought more pain, to different spots. He sat down on the stone bench.
His watch said 3:06, but he didn’t know if that was
AM
or
PM.
He reached over to his pack and pulled the handheld computer/GPS unit from its padded
pocket.

“Hmm, it’s three in the morning,” Bohannon said, almost to himself, as Rodriguez and
Johnson scrambled off the dust-laden floor. “Well, something moved this mountain,
and we should be able to find out what it was.” Bohannon fired up the unit. His first
stop was Google Earth, where he quickly zeroed in on Jerusalem, then the Old City,
then the Temple Mount. Dependent on satellite imaging, Google Earth is about as real-time
a look at the earth as any average person is going to get. Still, the images are not
instantaneous, they don’t change until the next satellite pass. Bohannon didn’t expect
to find any great revelation, but he checked the Temple Mount area nonetheless. With
nothing visible on Google Earth, Bohannon logged into Yahoo’s home page for news bulletins.
Probably still premature for . . .

There it was, popped right up to the top of the list. “The southern wall holding up
the Temple Mount just collapsed,” Bohannon said out loud, speaking as he read along,
“at least a large section of the southern wall. Nobody is sure yet how much damage,
or if it was a natural disaster or terrorist-related. Seems it’s been raining up there
for the last three days, raining heavily. The last time a portion of a wall came down,
the eastern wall, it had also been raining for days. That’s all they—”

At the sound, Bohannon jumped to his feet, ready to run, internal alarms sounding.
Rodriguez was also on his feet, crouched, apparently ready to ward off attack. Only
Johnson appeared normal, walking briskly over to his pack. Again and again the noise
demanded their attention, but Bohannon couldn’t place it, until Johnson pulled out
the metal-clad, heavily padded Pelican case. The satellite phone was ringing, and
vibrating, with a Richter rating of its own. With a deft smoothness that belied the
concern on his face, Johnson engaged the receiver.

“Dr. Johnson here. How may I assist you?”

In spite of his overall ache, Bohannon just started to chuckle.
Underground for three days, people trying to kill us, the mountain’s falling down,
and he sounds like the butler
.

“Yes, one moment.” Johnson turned to his left with a quizzical look. “Mr. Bohannon,
sir, this call is for you.”

At first, he didn’t want to put his hand on it. Who could be on the other end? Who
would be calling them, here? This was getting too weird.

Johnson, holding out the phone, wordlessly urged it in Bohannon’s direction, then
firmly placed it in his hand.