Blessed Child (16 page)

“Give me a day or two—”

“And you'll what? Kill the kid? Abduct him? Steal him from his sorry parents and slit his throat? Of course that's what you'll do because that's what you do best, isn't it, Roberts?”

Roberts blinked. “He's a problem. I'll take care of him.”

“Do it quickly.”

The large man put a finger under his collar and stretched his neck. The smell of Old Spice stung Roberts's nose. Crandal breathed heavily, uncharacteristic for the seasoned veteran of high drama. Roberts knew what he was going to say before he spoke.

“I thought there were no leaks on Tempest.”

“There aren't.”

“And I suppose you're going to suggest the boy just happened to look up at me and pull the word out of thin air.”

“I don't know, but it doesn't necessarily mean he knows we orchestrated the invasion of Ethiopia. He couldn't. He's a kid, for goodness' sake!”

“I don't care if he's a dog; he knows more than you think he knows! He stood there and stared me down, and I'm telling you this kid knows something!”

“And I'll take care of him.”

“How could a kid come across this? He didn't just grab a word like
Tempest
out of thin air. So who else knows? Find out. I don't need to tell you what this could do to our mission. We just launched a war over there to keep Tempest quiet. And now a kid waltzes into one of our press conferences and fingers us? He could be Ethiopian for all we know, straight from the war zone!”

Roberts wanted to tell Crandal that the boy looked about as Ethiopian as Mickey Mouse, but his employer's bone-rattling tone made him reconsider. And the questions were valid. He ground his teeth and took a deep breath. “I'll take care of it,” he said.

Crandal paused, taking the time to breathe through his nostrils. “If it happens again, I may begin to doubt.”

“I said I'll take care of it.”

12

Day 6

C
ALEB SAT IN THE CORNER OF THE BED
and ran an open palm over the wool blanket. It felt lumpy, which meant the sheet underneath was probably messed up. He slipped to the floor, reached under the blanket, jerked the sheet straight, and jumped back onto the bed.

There was a small room attached with a toilet and a shower in it, and he'd used the toilet more than the shower. Besides the bed itself, the only other piece of furniture was the shiny box in the corner, which he'd examined once without any understanding. Being here in the dark for so many hours felt kind of like a long meditation, although one with a twist to be sure.

In the monastery his daily meditation had lasted two or three hours, or sometimes four hours if he got “lost,” as one of the priests once called it. They all meditated, but he suspected that none of the others enjoyed it as much as he did. Dadda did, of course, but then Dadda was the one who'd shown him in the first place.

“Be still, Caleb. Just be still and wait. Like it says,
Be still, and know that I am God. Wait upon the Lord
.”

“And what if I get tired of being still?”

“Then it means you haven't waited long enough.”

“Did Jesus meditate?”

“He went away every night. Once for forty days.”

That was at age four, and forty days sounded like forever. What his father probably didn't know was that Caleb had been meditating for over a year already, ever since that first time he'd poked his eye and seen the light. He didn't call it meditation; he just shut his eyes like Dadda did and thought about the kingdom of heaven and about Jesus. Usually nothing happened. Unless you count falling asleep as something, because he'd done plenty of sleeping.

For all its fancy sounding, meditation was really nothing more than resting your mind and then walking into the light. Into the kingdom. At least that's how he thought of it. By the time he was five, Caleb had decided that there could be nothing as pleasing as walking in God's kingdom.

Now in this dark room he had all the time in the world to fill his mind with God and that was good. The twist was that he was being locked in the room by the witch.

He closed his eyes and hummed softly to himself.

This was one thing Dadda had not told him about clearly enough, he'd decided. This strange world with all of these odd people. It felt like a storybook land, full of bigger-than-life characters. Everything they did seemed awkward and backward. For starters, he hadn't seen any of them sit still for more than a few minutes. Maybe they meditated while he remained locked in the room, but somehow he doubted it. They ran about with frowns and scrunched brows and seemed much too bothered to have come from having waited on anything, much less God.

Leiah loved him. If Father Nikolous would allow it, she would spend all day with him, he thought. She and Jason only came for about an hour each day so far, but it was a wonderful hour. They made him think of Dadda.

And Dadda was gone, wasn't he? Dadda was with God. That made him sad, not because his father was with God but because he missed him.

“Take care of him,” Caleb whispered. “I miss you, Dadda.”

I will be your Father, Caleb. Just like I am Dadda's Father.

Caleb blinked in the darkness and nodded at the familiar nudge. He smiled and cleared his throat.

“And I will be your son,” he whispered.

We will walk through the kingdom together.

“We will walk through the kingdom together.”

My kingdom.

“Your kingdom.”

Caleb waited for a moment and then lay down on his side, feeling warm now. For a long time he just rested there, lingering in the peace. Gradually his mind drifted through the world outside of his door.

What was
Tempest?
He wasn't sure, but he did know that it was a very bad thing. The kind of evil that had filled Saul when he'd tried to kill David. He knew that and he knew that the big man speaking in the park was Tempest. He wasn't even sure how his mind had formed the word, but it had, and he thought he should tell someone about it. They'd nearly fainted when he said it; that's for sure.

They also seemed surprised when he made things right, as if he were doing something he really shouldn't be doing. But actually he was doing what anybody would do, wasn't he?

That man who'd died in the canyon, for example. How could they just stand by with the poor man dying on the sand? He hadn't understood all their yelling and their popping sticks in the first place—it really seemed quite silly to him. But then the man had died and Caleb just couldn't sit by and watch. He'd asked God for the man's life and God had given it, which was a good thing.

Samuel, the boy in the church, had been blind, like the blind man that Jesus had healed with mud. He'd never seen a blind person before, and he decided right then that Samuel would want to see the cross. The memory of the boy jumping up and down made him chuckle in the darkness. Caleb had almost started jumping up and down with the boy, right there in front of the priest.

Now that woman who thought he was a psychic or whatever, that was different. She clearly needed to see better. She hadn't yet, but she would soon enough, he thought. The breaking glasses had been maybe a little much, but then Jesus had used mud, hadn't he? And he'd cursed a fig tree. He'd also turned water into wine. The glass wasn't a mountain, but when he told it to move, it sure did.

Caleb smiled. The pillow was soft under his cheek and he snuggled into it.
Thank you, Father. You are so good to me
.

A click suddenly sounded at the latch and the door swung in. A wedge of light parted the room; Caleb sat up and swung his legs over the bed. The witch walked in. He called her “the witch” in his mind because she reminded him of the time he'd asked Dadda what a witch was after reading about them in the Scripture. Martha was the first person he'd met that didn't seem out of place with Dadda's description.

She stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips, casting a long shadow into the room. If she owned any clothes besides the dark dresses that made her look fat, she didn't wear them. He couldn't see her eyes because of the shadow that swallowed her face, but he imagined them, and a small chill shot down his spine.

Usually Father Nikolous visited with her once a day, and she was always much kinder when he was with her. Now he was not.

“How's our little prince?”

She always asked questions without waiting for an answer. He wondered if all witches were like that. Not that she was a real witch.

Martha looked about the room, saw that nothing was out of place, and walked to the bathroom. She looked in, humphed, and pulled her head out. Caleb couldn't help thinking that if he'd have left a drop of water on the floor, she would be scolding him about it. It wasn't a pigpen after all.

Martha walked back to the door and turned around, still surrounded by shadows, so that she looked like a black snowman in the doorframe.

“Father Nikolous wants you to go with him to a meeting tomorrow. Which means it's my job to make sure you do just that without causing any trouble.”

Again she paused as if he should say something.

“Are you deaf, boy?”

“No, Auntie.”

“Then you answer me when I speak to you. You don't fool me; you're a troublemaker, boy. And if there's one thing I detest in this world, it's troublemakers. Now you may think the world is just one big peachy place filled with people who run at your every beck and call, but believe me, boy, you're going to learn different.”

She walked farther in and the light caught her eyes now. He wanted to tell her that he'd never thought of the world as one big peachy place, but the words seemed to stick in his throat.

“If it were up to me, I'd have given you at least one good whipping by now. If for nothing but your snotty attitude. Now, if you get Nikolous upset, I don't think he'd mind me giving you a good whipping. So tomorrow you go with him, you understand?”

“I will go with Leiah and Jason.”

She wagged her head and repeated in a mocking tone, “I will go with Leiah and Jason.” She took a deep, disgusted breath. “You'll go because I said so, and Leiah and Jason can crawl up and die for all I care.” But she didn't push the issue, and he wasn't about to either. Not now.

Martha looked at him for some time, and then scanned the room, as if searching for a violation of some kind. “You like this quiet, don't you, boy? Of course you do. It reminds you of your precious monastery.”

She dropped her arms to her sides and turned back to him. “You're actually a happy little fool in this dungeon, aren't you? You are one sick child!”

Martha suddenly walked to the glassy box in the corner, did something to it, and stepped back. The box lit up. It was a light of some kind.

The witch turned, faced him for a few long seconds, and then marched out of the room with a humph. She left the box light on.

Only it was more than a light. Caleb stiffened and caught his breath at the image before him. The glassy part of the box had become a painting. A moving painting full of rich colors and sound.

He scrambled back into the corner of his bed, suddenly panicked. But his alarm passed almost immediately, replaced by fascination at the wonder before his eyes. He'd seen something similar at the airport in England with Jason and Leiah, but it had been far away and his mind had been in a fog. He stared with wide eyes as a painting of a boy with spiked yellow hair and eyes as thin as slits walked across the picture. The boy was not real, but a drawing of a boy. In fact, the whole screen was filled with a drawing, as if someone inside the box were quickly painting this picture and making it move.

Caleb stared at the picture, mouth agape. The pretend boy held a red stick in his hands and he walked over to a sleeping dog. He dropped to his knees, shoved the stick under the dog, and then ran away on his tiptoes, snickering. The scene made the hair on Caleb's neck stand.

A loud boom and a flash of light suddenly filled the room and Caleb started. In the next moment he saw what had happened. The red stick was a weapon and it had exploded. The dog now lay burning on his back with his four legs sticking straight up in the air.

Caleb had never felt the kind of horror that flooded his veins at the sight. He yelped with terror and threw his arms over his head. He curled up tight in the corner of his bed and clenched his eyes. Oh, dear God, what is this? What is this?

He wanted to run to the picture and beg for the dog's life, but he knew he couldn't. It was just a picture. He wanted to run from the room and never see the glass box again. Instead he covered his ears and curled up and began to sing.

It had taken Roberts two days to learn the truth about the boy, Caleb. He would've pieced the information together in a few hours if Colonel Ambozia had shot straight from the start. Instead the Eritrean commander had pretended as though he had no knowledge whatsoever of any living soul escaping the monastery. They had accomplished the mission as agreed and the price had not been cheap. Forty-eight of his soldiers had lost their lives in the invasion, and he personally had suffered more than enough political fallout to threaten his future.

“Then let me be a little more blunt, Commander. The arms are still in my control,” Roberts had returned. “You really don't have to pretend that you're in mourning over there. We both know you'd quickly give up a thousand men for this shipment, and for all practical purposes it will
guarantee
your political future. Our agreement was for total silence, and I promise you that as long as there remains any question of that silence, we'll hold the shipment. Now whether you like it or not, we have a boy here who just happens to be walking through our streets talking about Tempest. For your own sake, you'd better find somebody over there who knows who he is.”

Colonel Ambozia's right-hand man, a sleazeball who called himself Tony, phoned sixteen hours later, and his news was not what Roberts had been hoping for. He had just delivered that news to his boss.