The Breath of God (22 page)

“Well, Reverend,” Dawson asked, “why isn't there room in the silence of the Gospels about Jesus' young adult life to accommodate a spiritual journey to India?”

Brady turned his gaze from his paper to Dawson and then to the camera. “The Gospels simply cannot accommodate Mr. Matthews's New Age fantasy. When the angel Gabriel came to Mary in a dream, the Gospels clearly state that Jesus was born the Son of God. The Only Son didn't discover his spirituality from some Eastern mystics. I may not have the answers to every question that can be posed by twisting around the teachings of the Bible, but where Mr. Matthews looks at those questions and chooses to disbelieve, I simply choose to believe.”

Grant was surprised at how quickly Brady recovered the calm confidence with which he'd begun the evening.

“Mr. Matthews,” Dawson asked, “does this debate about your discovery boil down to faith in one's religious beliefs versus faith in the scientific method?”

“Absolutely not. The reverend misuses faith to hide behind a wall of ignorance. It's one thing to have faith in those fundamental questions to which we can never know the true answers: What is the nature of God? Is there life after death? But refusing to accept archaeological or other scientific evidence because it conflicts with one's belief system is not faith. That's called ignorance. Real truths, as opposed to imagined ones, are able to stand up to rigorous debate and questioning. What I sense in you, Reverend, is a deep and powerful fear.”

“Fear! With faith in Christ, I have nothing to fear!”

Grant resisted a smile. He'd achieved a similar reaction from his father many years earlier with the same statement.

Grant leaned toward the microphone. “If you were truly confident in your faith, you would welcome any evidence that might shed light on the life of Jesus. Instead, you seek to persuade people to reject without any study what we have found, because you fear where it may lead.”

“I have no such fear,” Brady said coldly, “because I already know that you have cooked up this entire spectacle as an elaborate hoax: either these texts do not exist or they were fabricated.”

“How can you say that!” Grant burst out, letting his frustration show for the first time. “We haven't even begun to study them yet.”

“All we have to show from your so-called discovery are
your
own writings of what
you
claim to be a translation.”

“As I said earlier, we are very early in the process of—”

“We know you don't possess the texts themselves; what proof do you have that they even exist?”

Grant hesitated. He thought he'd avoided this line of questioning earlier. Only a handful of people—he, Kristin, Billingsly, the police, and Karma—knew about the missing pictures. “We are still in the process of working through our notes, and—”

“More doublespeak. If you had proof, you would've published it. All we have to go on is your word right now. And we both know you have problems in that department.”

Grant froze. Brady couldn't possibly know. A wave of nausea crept from his stomach into his throat.

Thankfully, Dawson intervened. “That's a bold statement, Reverend Brady.”

“What Mr. Matthews hasn't told you is that over a hundred years ago, a Russian journalist named”—Brady referred to the paper he had taken from his folder—“Nicholas Notovitch made a very similar claim to what Mr. Matthews has made today, but then the book he claimed to have seen mysteriously disappeared.” Brady now appeared as relaxed as if he were giving his Sunday sermon.

“Actually, the Notovitch report just supports our case,” Grant said, relieved that Brady wasn't going where he feared. “But anyway our findings are different. You see—”

“My child, my child.” Brady held up his hand to quiet him, shaking his head. “Isn't it time to give up this ruse? Confess that this ordeal was a mistake that just got out of hand.”

“What are you talking about!” Grant exploded. Refusing to accept the evidence of his findings was one thing, but accusing him of making it up was too much.

“I think you know what I'm talking about.” Brady stared at him with a smug expression. “This may be painful for you, my son, but if I don't rescue my people from your shamefulness, then the blood of your sins will be on my hands too.” Brady pointed a finger at Grant like a criminal prosecutor pointing out the defendant and declared to the audience, “You see, Mr. Matthews here has a history of academic fraud.”

The blood rushed out of Grant's head, causing a powerful vertigo. His mind screamed at him to run before Brady could complete his accusation, but every muscle in his body was paralyzed. A murmur broke out among the audience.

Brady waved the sheet of paper he'd studied moments before. “When Mr. Matthews was in college just a few years ago, he plagiarized an entire paper for a class. Copied someone else's work as his own. Were it not for him pulling some strings, he would've been expelled. What we have here with all this Issa nonsense is just another example of his scholarly dishonesty.”

Grant sensed every head in the audience turn toward him, but he only saw Kristin's horrified expression in the first pew. The weight of the silence in the hall as they anticipated his response squeezed the air out of his lungs like a straitjacket cinched too tight. He tried to swallow, but his tongue stuck in his mouth as if it were a foreign object.

How was he to explain?

His mind searched for the words, but he might as well have been randomly flipping through a dictionary. Nothing came to him. His eyes darted between Brady and Dawson—both wore curious and, he thought, amused expressions.

T
HE COMPUTER'S LED screen cast a blue glow around Tim's cubicle in the otherwise dark office. Tim had left Atlanta at the end of the debate and returned to Birmingham around midnight. After four and a half hours of sleep, he was the first one in the office, as usual. Today was special, however. Today would be his last day working for his imbecilic boss, Duncan Summers, and the other losers of the IT group. He'd been called upon to carry out a mission of supreme importance. He felt almost giddy when he thought about how far he'd come in just two weeks: from having to partner with a lowlife like Johnny to becoming a true soldier in God's army.

He clicked through the airline's website. His travel schedule over the next week would be grueling, but then he'd flown around the world in military transport planes for a decade. The passenger seat of a commercial airliner would be luxurious in comparison. He thought through the checklist of what he'd need for his travels. Some of the more specialty items he already possessed, but he had a new idea he was excited to explore after he finished his tickets. Tomorrow morning he'd fly to DC. Once there, he'd hurry to the Indian embassy for his travel visa. The following day he was scheduled to fly to New Delhi via London.

His online searches had revealed only two paths into Bhutan: fly through either India or Thailand. From the east coast of the United States, the India route was faster. Plus, he admitted to himself, Thailand held certain temptations for him—temptations that he would not expose himself to now that he
was doing God's work. Unfortunately, when he arrived in India, he couldn't just continue straight into Bhutan. The Bhutanese government was stingy in handing out travel visas. The backlog in their New York consulate could take several weeks, he'd learned with a quick call. He didn't have that much time. The firestorm over the heretical Issa texts was heating up. Even after Grant Matthews's humiliation last night, the media would be clamoring to get to the texts. Tim had to find them first. Fortunately, he'd discovered he could obtain a visa from the Bhutanese embassy in New Delhi in only a few days. He would wait there, and once he had the visa, he would be much closer to his destination.

He clicked the onscreen button to finalize his itinerary.

“Damn it, William.” Brady slammed his open palm on the top of his nineteenth-century English desk. “You should've prepared me better. I looked like a fool up there. Look at me sweat.” He hit the pause button on the remote, freezing the image on the forty-two-inch flat-screen mounted to the wall between the cherry bookcases in his church office. The monitor depicted the reverend with a furrowed brow, flushed cheeks, and sweat-soaked temples.

“I warned you he'd be well prepared. But that's irrelevant now. The focus of this story hasn't been on the substance of the debate but on your revelation of his cheating.”

Brady clicked on the play button of the remote, and they watched the concluding scene of the previous night's debate for the fourth time that day since CNN aired it at eleven AM.

“That was masterful, wasn't it?” Brady grinned.

“We've received dozens of calls from news organizations wanting to interview you.”

Finally
, Brady thought,
I'll receive the exposure I deserve
. How else could he spread God's word, if he was limited to one state? God had given him a gift and meant for him to share it. “Make sure you schedule the TV reporters before the newspaper ones.”

“Already done.” A smile spread across Jennings's face, an unusual occurrence. “Our publisher has rushed more copies of your book to print. Sales will skyrocket.”

Brady relaxed into his leather desk chair. His election to the presidency of the NAE was now almost assured.

S
ITTING AT THE ROUND dining table in his apartment, Grant swirled the Absolut and tonic in his glass. He watched the lime spin in the clear liquid, just as the thoughts spun in his mind. After CNN aired the previous night's debate that morning, his apartment phone had rung constantly. He'd answered over a dozen calls from reporters asking the same questions; then he finally unplugged it. He still couldn't shake the image of his pale face frozen on the TV, his mouth moving wordlessly. Dawson had stepped in, giving Grant an opportunity to rebut Brady's charge, but Grant had only managed to mumble something about having gone through a difficult period in college. Then it was all over, except for the replays of his embarrassment that the news network seemed to show continually. Kristin and Billingsly had both tried to comfort him, but he'd just withdrawn into silence. He suspected that Billingsly had given her a quick summary of what had happened his sophomore year, and so far she hadn't pried. Looking across the table as she began to eat, he knew that would change.

Grant took a mouthful of the pasta Kristin had cooked for dinner.
Not bad
, he thought,
but lacking a key ingredient—meat
.

“How can you be a vegetarian?” he asked, hoping to delay the other conversation he knew would follow. From their time together he had noticed that she never touched meat. He always thought that vegetarians missed out on key amino acids in their diets. Anyway, he liked a good steak too much.

“One day my mom bought a basket of blue crabs for dinner. We lived in Baltimore; my dad was an ob-gyn professor at Johns Hopkins. We ate crab
once a month, but on this occasion, watching her drop the squirming creatures into the boiling water nauseated me. When we sat down at the table and my dad cracked the shells with a mallet, I began to cry. I still remember the splintering sound. Some juice squirted me in the face, and I announced that I wasn't going to eat any. He got furious and told me I wasn't leaving until I finished my crab. He said that his, and by that he also meant my, Japanese heritage had always valued seafood.”

“He had a temper?”

“Not when we were younger, but when my sister died, he changed.” She shook her head as if to clear it. “So we sat there for two hours, not speaking. Finally, I looked him in the eyes and took a mouthful of crab.”

“So it was over?”

“I ran into the bathroom and threw up. Haven't touched meat or seafood since.”

As if to emphasize the point, she picked up a piece of mango from the top of her salad, rolled it between her slender fingers, and then placed it in her mouth. Grant couldn't help but notice the way her full lips pulled the fruit from her fingertips. She had a way of touching everything around her, whether it was her food or his arm, like a blind person discerning the appearance of something from the way it felt. She was so different from him in that respect, yet he found her movements sensual. He had the urge to reach out and take her hand. Instead, he clasped his together and rested them on the table.

“Can I ask you about your sister?” Grant asked, hoping he was broaching the subject at a good moment. “What happened?”

For once, she glanced at the table instead of his eyes. Her normally relaxed posture stiffened, but she began to speak. Grant listened in silence to Kristin's story of how Isabelle, her older sister, as a freshman in high school had attended a party and gotten drunk on wine coolers. She was raped by five senior boys in an upstairs bedroom. Isabelle had confided in Kristin but refused to tell their strict, Catholic parents what happened, much less go to the authorities. Her sister said it was her fault for getting drunk. Isabelle was never the same after the assault, withdrawing from her friends and struggling in school. Their father responded by taking away her privileges and making her work
harder. Rumors spread around school that Isabelle was easy. Two years later, when Kristin was a freshman, Isabelle killed herself by swallowing a bottle of their mother's sleeping pills one night. Kristin was the one who tried to wake her the next morning.