Covenant A Novel

ROOM 517, HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING

CONSTITUTION AVENUE, WASHINGTON DC


Kelvin Patterson stared at his appearance in the smoked-glass windows of Senator Isaiah Black’s twin duplex suite in the Senate building. He looked tired, older than his years. Maybe the late nights were wearing him down, but this one was important enough to justify. He straightened his tie and smoothed his hair before retaking his seat.

In years gone by, men like Senator Black would have flocked to his church, eager to be seen to worship with the vigor of times gone by. No more. Now, such men considered themselves more powerful than him, more powerful even than God. From his viewpoint he could see the marble facade of the Hart Senate Office Building that led into a cavernous ninety-foot-high central atrium populated by milling crowds of diplomats, civil servants, and tourists. Walkways bridged the spaces above the atrium on each of the building’s nine stories. Dominating the ground floor was a fifty-foot-high sculpture in black aluminum, Mountains and Clouds, suspended from a ceiling above that allowed natural light to illuminate the building.

A monument to power, and all of it before the eyes of a God they sullied with their arrogance. Patterson had been forced to cancel his press conference in light of the changing polls, and now found himself waiting on Senator Black’s doorstep like any other citizen, begging for a chance to be heard.

As Patterson watched, a long black limousine pulled up outside the building and a tall man in a dark suit got out, surrounded by staff wearing earpieces and sunglasses. Senator Black strode into the Hart Senate Building surrounded by a maelstrom of journalists, broadsides of camera flashes and salvos of questions bombarding the senator’s entourage as they wound their way through the atrium below.

Greater than God, Patterson thought to himself as Senator Black dismissed the wolves of the press with a bright smile, a wave, and a slick one-liner that dispersed the journalists with a trickle of laughter.

Patterson stood, and watched as the elevator nearby signaled the senator’s imminent arrival.

“Pastor,” the senator greeted him as he stepped from the elevator, his staff on either side of him, “I didn’t expect to see you before the rally tomorrow.”

Patterson shook his hand, following Black into the suite and closing the door behind him.

“Something came up.”

They sat down on opposite sides of the senator’s desk.

“What can I do for you?” Black asked.

“I take it that you have seen the news?”

Senator Black smiled at the pastor. “It would appear that the opinion polls have shifted considerably.”

Patterson concealed a sudden ripple of displeasure that twisted deep within his belly.

“In our favor, Senator?”

Isaiah Black leaned back in his chair. “In mine.”

Patterson watched as the senator tossed a newspaper onto the desk to face him. It was folded so that the opinion polls were uppermost. Patterson scanned them with a renewed sense of dismay.

“The polls are unreliable, the people fickle.”

Isaiah Black shook his head. “Yesterday they were reliable, according to you.”

Patterson felt his features twist into something between a smile and a grimace.

“It would be unwise to act with haste on such dismissable statistics.”

The senator shook his head slowly.

“The people are voting with their feet, Pastor. New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and others are placing economic concerns, foreign policy, and climate change far above any theological interests. The mood of the nation is changing.”

“Do you think that Texas, Alabama, and Ohio will do the same?” Patterson challenged.

“No,” the senator responded. “And I don’t give a damn if they do or not, because the conservative vote remains in the minority. The point, Pastor, is that I’m in a dominant position in the primary campaign with or without your support.”

Patterson lost the ability to maintain the grin slapped across his face.

“Do you really think that you can afford to lose the voting block that I control? Can you afford to spout your arrogance when I could block your campaign in a half-dozen swing states? This is the voice of God that you’re turning your back on.”

“It’s the people of America who are turning their backs, Pastor,” Black responded. “On you.”

Patterson struggled to prevent himself from clenching his fists.

“Go down to the Reflecting Pool, stand before the granite wall there, and see the images of our soldiers—Americans who fought for the ideals we preserve, who fought for God and for country and for us to be here in this land fighting for what we know to be true. Read the words imprinted there.”

“‘Freedom is not free,’” Black recited the inscription.

Patterson spoke softly, trying to let the weight of his words carry their importance.

“‘If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you.’ John, fifteen seven.”

Senator Black smiled without passion.

“‘Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.’ Revelation twenty-two seventeen.”

The ripple of despair stirred painfully now within Patterson’s belly. The senator before him may be poised upon the brink of a victory that could see him in just a few short months become the most powerful man on the Earth, an ally that Patterson could not afford to lose. Unfortunately, the senator was clearly aware of that.

“Do not quote so carelessly the words of the Good Book,” Patterson said, “if you are not prepared to follow them.”

“It’s not my choice.” Senator Black smiled with supreme confidence. “My purpose is to serve the people of this country, and if they are supporting policies that you disagree with, then it is up to you to change, not the people you claim to represent.”

So, it was naked power play. Patterson found himself pinned between third and fourth base with a ball in the air, nowhere to run, and not really sure how it had happened.

“A man of true principle stands rigidly by his beliefs,” he muttered.

“As have I,” Senator Black replied evenly, before sighing and offering his trademark ultraviolet smile. “Kelvin, we’re not moving forward here. You need me now, not the other way around. You might be able to swing voters down in places like Oklahoma and Arkansas, but not enough to influence the whole country. And what would you gain if you did? A presidency even more opposed to your moral convictions. Compromise is what you need.”

“Conviction is what we all need,” Patterson said through gritted teeth, his eyes bulging as he strained against his disbelief at the senator’s ignorance. “How can I stand against my own congregation?”

“You’d be standing with them, Kelvin,” Black soothed. “They’re the ones doing the voting, remember? They’re the ones who are setting the polls. Like it or not, they’re speaking for their nation, and if you believe that they’re wrong, then perhaps it is you who knows nothing of God.” Black smiled again. “You’ve said it yourself, many times, that what happens here on Earth is God’s will. Maybe He’s trying to tell you something.”

Patterson squirmed beneath the senator’s patrony. How such a man could dare to speak with any authority on the Almighty was beyond him. How could any mortal man know the mind of God when …

Patterson’s vision blurred. The impact of his thoughts slammed through the field of his awareness like a scimitar through crystal. Suddenly, he sat in a sphere of perfect loneliness as he considered what his mind’s eye had seen. Everything seemed clearer than it ever had. Ignorance. It is I who knows nothing.

I know nothing of God. No man knows anything of God. Blind faith is empty.

“Pastor?”

Patterson blinked at the sound of Black’s voice, looking up and remembering that the senator was still there, watching him now with a concerned gaze. “Are you all right, Pastor?”

“I just need a while, to think.”

“Of course,” Black said, standing.

Patterson stood on weakened legs and shook the senator’s hand, barely hearing his words and trying to ignore the nausea twisting his throat. He turned, leaving the suite and closing the door behind him to stand in the corridor outside.

I know nothing of God. Nothing. He closed his eyes. I must learn of God. I must learn of God. If ever he had been at a crossroads in his life, then this was it. For the first time in history man had the chance to reach out and touch the divine, and he, Kelvin Patterson, had the power to do so in his hands. Now was the time. There would be no other, ever. Lives were being lost in order to achieve a greater good.

Patterson looked at his watch, straightened his tie, and lifted his chin in defiance of himself. There would be no further delays, no further hubris or doubt.

“If you can’t find your way to God, Isaiah, then I’ll make sure God finds His way to you.”

EVANGELICAL COMMUNITY INSTITUTE

IVY CITY, WASHINGTON DC


Officer Leon Gomez sat in an uncomfortable wooden chair at the end of a long corridor, staring at the featureless white wall before him and cursing silently, as he had done for the past three hours.

Assigned to guard a goddamn mental case. He had been given some tough assignments in his time, scouting through the District’s meanest neighborhoods in the dead of night for gang leaders and homicide suspects, but he’d have taken any one of them over sitting on his ass waiting for nothing to happen. Like most all cops, boredom was Gomez’s worst enemy. No doubt he’d been stuck with this shit because he was a Latino. Wouldn’t have seen the lily-whites sending one of their own down here with his thumb shoved up his ass to sit around and—

Gomez broke his reverie to smile at a cute nurse who glided past into an office to his left. To his right, the corridor extended down to a dead end and housed twelve private rooms in which the patients spent their lives painting, drawing, licking windows, or doing whatever the hell it was they did. Jesus, he could have been on patrol. The weather was good and it made the girls get their long legs out, strutting around in shorts and miniskirts or power suits, depending on where you were patrolling.

A movement caught his eye as a tall, loping, blond-haired man appeared, carrying a tray with a dozen foam cups of juice. Gomez glanced him over, recognizing him as an orderly he’d seen earlier leaving for his lunch break. As he strolled past he looked down at Gomez.

“Evening, Officer.”

Gomez nodded and smiled dutifully, watching as the orderly walked down the corridor to pause at each door and knock politely. The patients usually dropped a small latch on their doors for some semblance of privacy, although all of the doors were paneled with a plastic window through which an observer could maintain a watchful eye on the patient within. Most all of them were low risk, which made Gomez wonder why he was being asked to guard them. One by one, the doors would open and a patient’s furtive hand would appear to take the juice from the blond man, and then he would move on.

Gomez, bored already, turned to look back at the nearby office where the cute nurse was chatting with a colleague. Something about a local restaurant. Gomez focused on the conversation, trying to catch the name of the place. Benson’s Grill? Barnie’s? He leaned forward in his chair to hear better.

A crash from the corridor caused him to whirl to see the tray of drinks on the floor, the blond orderly pointing and shouting at him.

“Fetch the nurse! Fetch the nurse!”

Gomez leaped up, shouting for the nurse as he dashed down the corridor toward where the blond man was trying to force open one of the patient’s doors. As Gomez ran, the man leaned back and swung one thickly bunched fist, smashing it through the plastic window of the door. The plastic snapped in half and the orderly reached in and yanked open the latch from the inside. Gomez skidded alongside the orderly as he bolted into the room and then came to an abrupt halt.

Inside, a young man lay flat on his back on the bed, a slick of vomit across his vein-laced face, his jet-black eyes staring wide and empty at the ceiling. A waft of putrefaction choked Gomez’s throat as he stared at the horrific lesions scarring the kid’s body. Across his chest were a scattering of pills, more of them on the floor and an empty pill bottle lying on the tiles. Gomez glanced at the name plate scrawled on the open door: Daniel Neville.

The blond orderly, his features blanched and pale, reached down and picked up the empty bottle, showing it to Gomez. As the nurses flooded into the room, Gomez saw that the bottle of drugs was empty.





JERUSALEM


The Israeli Humvee in which Ethan sat handcuffed to a door handle was hardly a luxury vehicle, but in his exhausted state the rolling of the chassis on the road and the hum of the engine was almost comforting. He wound down a window and let the cool night air blow away some of the weariness aching through his bones.

Along with Rachel he had been safely escorted across the Gazan border at Erez; the Israeli troops there were forewarned of their passing. Now, the glittering panorama of Jerusalem glowed against the horizon while above a thousand stars glistened like jewels adrift on a black sea. Ethan stared at them, hearing Hassim’s words whispering across the empty void above, of gargantuan stars and broiling elements, of supernovas and embryonic solar systems, of the cycle of life replayed endlessly across the tremendous ages that had passed and were yet to come, long after he had been cast back into the dusts from which he had been forged. Life, everywhere.

Somehow, the traumas of his life seemed suddenly trivial against the epic backdrop of the universe. Even Joanna’s shadowy presence, her unknown fate looming over everything that he did, seemed inconsequential. Nothing matters. One day he would be nothing more than a footnote in history, or an image in a photograph, dead and forgotten along with his woes. Maybe he should just quit and get out of Israel before his time came to a premature end.

But then he looked at Rachel, and remembered that science didn’t have an explanation for the human spirit, for courage, fortitude, or love.

She sat beside him, her head nestled against a jacket folded up against the opposite window frame. She had fallen asleep within minutes of crossing the border an hour previously, and despite the hardship and trauma that she had endured over the last few days, her sleeping face was an image of serenity. No regrets. Her inner demons, doubts, fears, and insecurities were temporarily silenced by the solitude of a sleep that still eluded Ethan.

He turned away and looked into the blackness of the Israeli night. Far out to the east, the first faint line of dawn was creeping toward them, broken ribbons of distant cloud black against the deep blue. He looked at his watch: 5:26 a.m.

He looked again at Rachel. Ethan’s past was full of regrets packed, jammed, and shoehorned into every crevice of his existence until some had inevitably spilled out to contaminate his present. He regretted not attending college, regretted resigning his commission in the U.S. Marines and the animosity that had developed between himself and his father as a result, regretted becoming a journalist, regretted the risks he had undertaken and the risks he had exposed others to, and he regretted most of all losing Joanna in this brutal and uncaring corner of the world.

And now he had let Rachel down too.

Rachel yawned, sitting upright and peering out of the window. “Where are we?”

“About ten miles from Jerusalem,” Ethan said.

“You haven’t slept,” she observed.

“Didn’t want to,” Ethan lied, and immediately wondered why.

Rachel’s eyes narrowed slightly, almost playfully, and then it was as though she suddenly recalled where they were and why, and her features sagged. She looked at her makeshift pillow, probably wishing she could return to oblivion.

“Hassim,” Ethan said to her in an effort to distract her. “Before he died he mentioned something called cargo cults. You know what they are?”

Rachel ran her fingers through her long black hair and sighed.

“There’s a few of them, mostly in the Pacific,” she said. “They’re Melanesians who encountered Westerners for the first time during World War II when U.S. Marines were advancing on the Japanese. What’s that got to do with Lucy?”

“Just bear with me for a moment,” Ethan said. “Why do they call them cargo cults?”

“Well, the occupying American forces built runways on the islands, brought in supplies using aircraft loaded with weapons, radios, medicine, and suchlike. They had a good relationship with the islanders. But when the war was over they left, taking their equipment with them and leaving the islanders alone again. What happened was that the islanders built mock runways complete with air control towers, hangars, and aircraft made of straw. They even sat in them wearing wooden radio earpieces, trying to make contact with the great gods and their powerful sky machines. They would have flaming torches at night on the runways to guide down the ‘airships,’ or march up and down with either salvaged or wooden rifles like parading troops, mimicking American dress styles and behavior.”

“And all of it to bring the Americans back?” Ethan asked.

“Pretty much.” Rachel nodded. “The practices eradicated any existing religious observances they previously had. The leaders of the cults promised their people that if they did all of this, then the ‘gods’ would return. It got the leaders power, and it gave the people hope that they were not alone anymore, that they were special.”

Ethan shook his head in wonder.

“Hassim Khan was right. The ancients didn’t have extraterrestrial help in building their megastructures: they built them themselves in an attempt to reestablish contact with their godlike visitors.” He looked at her. “How many cargo cults could there have been?”

“In history? Thousands,” Rachel said. “The Nazca’s lines in Peru, depicting animals on such a scale that they’re only visible from the air, would be among the most likely candidates.”

“Right,” Ethan agreed. “I’ve heard about them, and as icons visible from great heights they’d be perfect.”

“Most of the pyramidal structures built by civilizations around the world could have served a similar purpose,” Rachel agreed, “and they’re everywhere, not just in Egypt. Mesopotamian ziggurats that were once colorfully painted, Nubian pyramids in Sudan, the Sula Temple in Java, the granite temples of the Chola Empire in India, others in Samoa and Greece and those of the Maya and Aztecs at Teotihuacan in South America. The pyramids in Egypt are the most famous, but few people realize that there is not a single hieroglyphic anywhere suggesting that they were burial sites for pharaohs, or that they were once covered with smooth white sandstone: they would have shone like beacons in sunlight, perhaps brightly enough to be visible from space. Virtually every religion on Earth could have started out as a sort of cargo cult and just grown from there.”

“And pyramids would make sense as they’re a stable structure,” Ethan said. “I’ve read that we know they were built by human hands because the graves of the builders were found near the pyramids themselves in Egypt, complete with hieroglyphics recording their achievements.”

“Stability is one reason,” Rachel said. “But we’re used to seeing pyramids from the ground. If you fly directly above one, you see a big X in a box.” She smiled. “Sometimes, X does mark the spot.”

Ethan grinned ruefully.

“What are you going to do when we get back to the city?” Rachel asked him.

“Meet with Ambassador Cutler, Shiloh Rok, or anyone in the Knesset who’ll listen and tell them what’s happened. We need them aware that MACE is involved in this.”

Rachel sighed. “We still don’t know that for sure. They were at Lucy’s dig site and they pursued us, violently, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they abducted Lucy.”

“MACE,” Ethan said carefully, “whoever they are and whatever they’re doing here, have no interest in Lucy’s survival.”

“They were at the site. It doesn’t mean they abducted Lucy, only that they found and were excavating the remains. We can’t lay blame without proof; that’s not how the law works.”

Ethan felt disbelief sluice through his gullet. “You’re living in denial.”

“Tell me what happened to your fiancée.”

Rachel’s unexpectedly direct question stumped Ethan.

“It’s not worth the telling.”

“It is, to me.”

Ethan turned away from her and looked out of the window even though there was nothing to see but the inky blackness. He looked down, and saw his hands trembling in the darkness. Nervous exhaustion, lack of sleep. More hallucinations would come next, probably, like the one in the market square in Jerusalem. He folded his hands tightly together, looking out the window and seeing Rachel’s reflection watching him in the glass as she spoke.

“Since we came here I have trusted you, relied upon you, and taken risks with you because my father told me that if anyone could find Lucy, it was you. I think I have a right to know why that is.”

“I haven’t found your daughter yet and I never said that I could,” Ethan murmured.

“No,” Rachel admitted. “That’s why I want to know the truth. I may have to spend the rest of my life wondering what happened to her. I might end up like you.”

Ethan shot her a sideways glance. “End up like me?”

“Cynical,” Rachel said, “aloof, nihilistic, thinking that nothing is worth anything. I want to know why you’re like you are so I can try to be something else.”

Ethan looked outside again for a long moment before whispering a name as though he were speaking of a ghost.

“Joanna.” He could see Rachel staring at him in the window’s reflection. His own face was illuminated starkly on one side by the glow from the city ahead, the other half lost in deep shadow. “Joanna Defoe was my fiancée. We met while I was serving in the Marines and she was covering the invasion of Iraq, embedded with our platoon. We fell in love, the usual crap. I resigned my commission and worked freelance with her after my unit pulled out of Iraq, traveling together to wherever the news was: New Orleans, Aceh, Afghanistan, Africa, you name it.”

Having started, Ethan let the words fall from his lips, not looking at Rachel but staring out into the shadows sprawled like slumbering demons in the desert darkness.

“While everyone else was covering the war on terror, we decided to change tack and cover the smaller stories, human stories, things that were forgotten in the wake of the obsession with terrorism.”

“Where did you go?” Rachel asked in a whisper.

“Bogotá, Colombia,” Ethan replied. “We’d uncovered a lot of reports there of abductions, criminal syndicates that owned the police forces, a hostage-ransom industry, not to mention the trade in drugs coming from South America. After exposing a number of corrupt officials within the Colombian government, we decided to do the same again, this time in Gaza. During that time we gained a reputation for being able to locate missing people as a result of our investigations.”

Ethan did not feel as though he was speaking, the words drifting through his awareness as though he was picking up a faint distress signal on an archaic radio.

“We wrote several articles about atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza City by both Hamas and Israel that made the international press, but I suppose somehow we dug too deep or pissed off too many people who were making too much money to see their dirty little industries shut down. Joanna Defoe vanished from Gaza City on the afternoon of December 14, 2008, abducted by persons unknown. No ransom, no contact, no information or evidence. Nobody knew a thing about it except that a cleaner said she’d seen someone wearing clothes that matched Joanna’s being dragged from the back door of the hotel we were staying in, with a bag over her head, and that the person was dumped into a car that disappeared. No plates, maybe dark blue in color, she thought. Maybe.”

Ethan’s voice trailed off as though he was miming the words, watching in his mind’s eye as the past replayed itself once again on an endless, miserable loop.

“I spent the next two years searching for her. I used up all of our savings, sold everything we possessed, spent months scouring the alleys and back streets, the refugee camps and villages for her. I printed thousands of pictures of her and put them up all over Gaza City.” He shook his head. “I never heard a word.”

Rachel waited patiently as he went on.

“When the money ran out I thought I’d just curl up and die, that there was no point in going on because there was nothing worth going on for. It was Amy O’Hara, a journalist friend who had covered our stories, who helped me from Chicago to find Joanna. I’d done a piece on missing journalists in the hope of raising awareness. Amy read it, hated what had happened, and decided to help me out. She actually came out to Jerusalem in the end, lent me some money, and told me to get out of the city and find the world again. That Joanna was probably dead and gone, and that even if she wasn’t, there was nothing more that I could do. That if I didn’t leave I’d just destroy myself.”

Rachel remained silent, Ethan speaking without thought or conscious planning.

“So I did. I went back to Chicago, back to work. I did okay until the pointlessness of it all hit me. I resigned my job, gave up on whatever it was I had left. The thing about it was, I didn’t care, didn’t give a shit. I might just as well have been dead already.”

Ethan fell silent, caught in the web of his own memories, of months and years lost in a paralysis of grief. Rachel’s voice spoke softly from nearby.

“What happened next?”

Ethan roused himself.

“Nothing happened next,” he said. “I’ve been fully unemployed ever since. Posttraumatic stress, they call it, makes me medically unable to work. I don’t sleep much, maybe an hour here, an hour there.” Ethan shrugged to himself, felt her penetrating gaze on him but went on talking quietly. “She was a great person, Joanna. You’d have liked her. She loved life. Always full of energy, always quick with a joke. Bright. Cheerful. One of those people that you can’t help but like.”

Ethan’s voice started to become strained as though his vocal chords were being twisted.

“You’ve got some idea, now, of what it’s like when someone you love so much just vanishes, completely and utterly, without explanation or information. What it’s like when you have no idea if they are safe or not, suffering or not, alive or not. I have images of people harming her, and of going and finding those people and skinning them alive, or having them fed to sharks or lowered feetfirst into wood-chipping machines.” He saw Rachel wince and shook his head. “It brings things out in you that you can’t imagine.”

Ethan glanced out of the window, fatigue amplifying his grief.

“I send her parents flowers on her birthday, every year. They always return them unopened. I still don’t feel right alone in bed at night unless I wrap her T-shirt around a pillow next to me. Can you believe that?”

He lowered his head, not willing to let Rachel see what he knew she already must have seen. His voice when he spoke sounded strained in his own ears.

“I wanted to find out what happened to her, and to find Lucy for you. I thought maybe I could put this all right, but I can’t. There’s no such thing as a hero when there’s no way to solve a case. There’s nothing more I can do for you here except tell the authorities about MACE’s involvement.”

Rachel’s reflection was pinched with remorse.

“You’ve done enough,” she said quietly. “It took a lot for you to come out here after all that’s happened. I wouldn’t have come this far alone.”

Ethan was still unable to bring himself to look at her.

Rachel squeezed his arm and rested her head against it, while Ethan continued to stare out of the window at the pale strip of light now slicing across the eastern horizon.