Sinner

by Ted Dekker

  “We can get all that,” Kinnard said softly.

  “Billy and I can,” Darcy said, “make this happen.”

  “You’re actually suggesting we place part of our national armed forces in your hands?” Lyndsay asked with a hint of incredulity.

  None of this had been planned, but Darcy saw no reason to mince words. “Why not? We all know that using force on Paradise is the right thing to do given the laws of the nation. Would you prefer that I speak to you more directly, Lyndsay?”

  The attorney general was quiet for a moment. “Be careful, Darcy. You’re on very thin ice here.”

  “Get over yourself,” Billy said. “Everything Darcy’s suggesting is going to happen anyway. Tell me where we’re wrong.”

  “You’re not,” Annie said, “unless you’re actually hoping to spill blood in that valley.”

  Billy tipped his head back with exasperation. “I’m not suggesting you drop a bomb on Paradise. But Johnny has to believe that I could. I could. Not some commander who has no personal stake in the operation. Only then do we stand a frog’s chance in the boiling pot of getting him to roll over.”

  “You’re suggesting a bluff,” Lawhead said.“Knowing that these people won’t actually die for their position. And I tend to agree, Lyndsay. For all their talk, I can’t imagine too many Americans willing to give their lives for the right to follow a guy who’s been dead for two thousand years.”

  “They don’t believe he’s dead,” Annie said.

  “Yes, well, follow a ghost, then. Point is, they will capitulate if led to believe that the alternative is a prison sentence or a bomb.”

  “It only works if the bluff has teeth,” Billy said.

  “You’d do nothing without my personal approval,” the attorney general said.

  “Naturally.”

  We don’t need you, you old prune, Darcy thought. You don’t think we could rip off those eyeglasses and make you do this anyway? I could probably make you commit suicide. Who doesn’t believe, deep down inside, that they deserve to be dead?

  She’d never considered the possibility before.Maybe she should try it out on Johnny. Looking at Billy’s set jaw, the dark circles under his eyes, the pale green eyes, she thought Billy just might approve. She was being influenced by his hatred. And honestly, it was all a bit exciting.

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  * * *

  Day Twenty

  “NOW, YOU get your pretty little head down when I say,” old Ben said, eying Kat with a twinkle in his eyes.

  “Got it.”

  He winked at her in the dawn light. “Time to go boom.”

  She winked back. “Boom, boom.”

  Steve placed his hand on her arm and pulled. “Down.”

  Kat gazed up the road one last time. It hadn’t taken much to twist Steve into letting her tag along. She was from the city, she’d argued—used to much worse than any of this.

  They’d laid out the plan with Johnny last night. There were only two roads leading into Paradise, this one heading west toward Delta, and the same one heading north out of Paradise. They would welcome visitors through the night, explain their plan, turn all weapons over as a symbolic gesture caught on film by Joseph and three other news crews, then blow both roads at daybreak. If anybody wanted out or in, a helicopter would be available.

  Johnny was locking Paradise down and locking its artillery out.

  As instructed, Steve and company had gone house to house, collecting two pickup loads of weapons, which now sat a hundred yards outside the blast zone with a large sign in the window that read: Please don’t lose. We’d like these back.

  Claude Bowers and Chris Ingles were blowing the northern road. Steve and Ben had selected this particular spot on the western road because of the cliffs on either side. Bring down all that rock and it would take heavy equipment at least a few days to clear the rubble, then another couple to rebuild the road.

  It had taken them a couple of hours to rig the dynamite along the cliff walls and rig the detonator lines.

  “You ready, Ben?”

  He glanced at Jeremiah and Brodie, who’d been scurrying around like mountain goats for the last hour, setting charges.

  “We’re good. Let her rip.”

  “Cover your ears,” Steve instructed.

  Kat ducked low on her knees and pushed her palms against her ears. Beside her, Ben, who’d said plenty about how he preferred the old ways over all the fancy electronic wireless gizmos, gripped an ancient plunger with his wrinkled hand. “Fire in the hole.”

  He shoved the handle down.

  Ka-boom!

  The earth shook and the booms kept coming as huge slabs of rock tumbled from the cliff and slammed onto the road. Small pieces of gravel rained on them.

  “Stay down!” Steve covered her back with his big arm.“Just stay down!”

  But there was no need. The debris stopped falling and the show was over. Kat was the first on her feet, staring at the road.

  Where the road had been, to be more precise. Now a mountain of rock at least fifty feet high filled the gap between the cliffs.

  “Well now, that oughta discourage any pranksters,” Ben cackled.

  “You think the trucks got it?” Jeremiah asked.

  “I guess we’ll find out in a week.”

  They piled into Ben’s new Lexus SUV and sped back into Paradise, a mile down the road.

  As it turned out, 2,713 supporters had responded to the call to join Johnny in Paradise, mostly driving in from the Four Corners states but also as far as Los Angeles, California, to the west and Springfield,Missouri, to the east. (Jamie Peterson, the college kid who’d driven from Springfield, admitted to breaking every possible speed limit law on the way, just managing to fly past the checkpoint in his cobalt blue Corvette at dawn.)

  Four people had elected to leave the valley, one of them pregnant, two more who’d just wandered in the day before to see what all the fuss was about, and one hitchhiker who was trying to get to Denver.

  The gathering in Paradise stood at just over 3000, up from a population of just under three hundred twenty-four hours earlier. And despite all of her worrying, once Paula Smither settled for making do, she’d got-ten them all situated just fine. The regulars opened their homes to as many as could sleep comfortably, seven or eight, which took care of two-thirds of the visitors. The rest preferred the church, the rec center, or the barns anyway. They were here because they’d been born into the kingdom of light, not because they wanted a five-star vacation getaway.

  Ben and Charlie’s food stash consisted mostly of dried soup packages. Pea soup, corn soup, tortilla soup without the tortillas, chicken noodle soup, turkey soup. And those were just the ones Kat could remember.

  Looked like they would be eating soup and fruit for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Which, again, was fine, Paula had decided. Wasn’t no five-star resort, wasn’t no five-star food.

  Kat rode into Paradise at six thirty with Steve and Ben. The street was still quiet this early, but she immediately noticed two changes.

  First change, the sheer number of cars. They were parked everywhere except for the town center, which they were keeping clear. Had to be a thousand cars strewn throughout all the alleys and surrounding fields.

  Second change was the plywood platform Father Yordon and a team of a dozen men had built along the side of the old theater, looking out over the center of town and the church lawn. They’d built it tall, at least five feet, so that the whole town could see whoever was talking up there. They’d even set up a sound system with two black speakers balanced on top of crates.

  Word had gone out: they would gather at eight.

  Short on sleep, Kat slipped into the Smithers’ house on Main Street, rolled onto her bed in the back bedroom, and was asleep before the first sounds of waking could mess with her mind.

  She woke to a “Check, check, check,” over an amplifier at 7:59 by the wall clock, and sat up with a start.


  They’d started?

  “Could I have your attention?”Yordon’s voice rang out over the town. “Ladies and gentlemen, your attention up here please.”

  Kat splashed water on her face, dabbed it dry, ran out the front door, and pulled up sharply.

  She gasped. The crowd started at the bottom of the Smithers’ porch and stretched across the whole center of town to the field on the other side of the church lawn. No street that she could see, no lawn, nothing but people standing and looking up at Father Yordon on the platform.

  Ordinary people dressed in everything from jeans to skirts, even a few business suits. A black boy of about ten stood beside the planter at the bottom of the porch steps, staring up at Kat.His closely shaven head was almost perfectly round.

  Kat smiled and nodded. The boy grinned back, all gum except for one buck tooth.

  Father Yordon was welcoming the people, giving them some basic instructions about keeping order. Sanitation. Food.

  A helicopter chopped overhead, and Kat saw with a glance that there were two, actually, in army olive-drab green.

  She returned her gaze to the crowd. It struck her that so many people had traveled so far at the drop of a hat to stand up for what was to them the essence of life. She remembered stumbling across a quote by George Washington saying that it was “. . . impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible,” and she’d wondered what that meant about governing a school. And what about a town?

  Johnny had made it clear in his blog that he wasn’t as interested in politics as he was interested in matters of the heart. Faith in God. Following Jesus.

  So all of these people had read that blog and come to follow Jesus with Johnny. To Kat, who’d only just stepped into the kingdom two weeks ago, the sight was an incredible thing.

  The kingdom of truth wasn’t just her alone in the high school.

  It wasn’t just her and Johnny.

  It wasn’t just a church full of old people in the Colorado mountains.

  It was these 3,000 pilgrims who’d traveled hours to stand and be heard for Jesus. He’d been slain two thousand years ago, but he’d left the world with this.

  Kat felt such a surge of gratitude that she didn’t think she could contain it. Why the whole world didn’t rush here and stand as one was beyond her.

  Father Yordon was still going on about organization, which she knew was important. But she just couldn’t bring herself to care. The helicopters were flying overhead, pilots’ jaws probably dropped at the scene below. The Net was flooded, yes indeed, truly flooded with blogs and news from this very small town. The whole world had its eye on Paradise, and she was here because one blind man had shown her the light.

  “Go, Johnny!” she screamed.

  Her cry rang out over the crowd, which turned as one and stared at the dark-skinned girl standing on the porch next to Smither’s Barbeque.

  She’d actually screamed that?

  “Go, Johnny!” The toothless black boy had seen fit to match her cry.

  And then they all did, a dozen at first and swelling to three thousand voices calling for their leader.

  “Johnny! Johnny! Johnny!”

  But Johnny was nowhere to be seen.

  Not yet.

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  * * *

  “HOW LONG?” Billy demanded.

  “Three days, four tops.”Kinnard stood on a plateau high above Paradise, eyeing the wrecked roads through his glasses. “Assuming the Army Corps of Engineers can get their gear here before nightfall. You gotta hand it to Johnny—he knows what he’s doing.”

  Darcy stood to one side watching Billy pace, white-faced.

  “I don’t care when they arrive, they can work by lights if they have to. We need those roads clear.”

  “And they will be. Three days,” Kinnard said. “We’ll have plans for an extraction long before that.We can’t wait three days to deal with Johnny.”

  Darcy lifted her binoculars and stared at the valley again. They’d gotten the thumbs-up to bring in the National Guard late last night—no martyrs, not even one, Lyndsay warned—and immediately issued the orders to close the valley. But Johnny had beaten them to it. The first unit of the National Guard of the 947th Engineer Company arrived from Grand Junction to find both ends of the highway into the valley completely blown.

  Apart from the single gathering earlier in the day, there had been no organized activity. Darcy wondered what they were eating. No sign of Johnny, not even at the meeting. He was wisely staying out of the line of the snipers brought in by the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team and the Colorado National Guard, 5/19th Airborne Special Forces. They had the area mapped and scouted, but . . .

  “Somehow I doubt extracting Johnny will be that easy,” she said, lowering her binoculars.

  Kinnard nodded. “Saint.”

  “You know about his days as an assassin?” Billy demanded.

  “He was known as Saint. From what I can gather, Johnny was one for-midable opponent, especially with a rifle.”

  “Johnny was an assassin?” Darcy asked. “So then what makes you think we can waltz in there and take him out?”

  “No martyrs, remember?”

  “Not take him out as in kill him,” Billy snapped. “She means extract him. And that’s not the point, Darcy. The point is to show him what he’s up against, make him second-guess himself.”

  A large double-bladed helicopter thumped in from the north, settled to the ground behind them, and emptied its cargo onto the high mesa. Several large tents had already been erected in the guard’s staging base, and this load brought another dozen with three times that many soldiers armed to the teeth.

  A perimeter had already been established around the valley with seventeen carefully placed teams dug in and armed. Only two of these teams were responsible for the roads. The rest had taken up positions that protected any traffic in or out, on foot or by horse. They had enough rifles trained on Paradise to make the president pucker right up, no doubt about that.

  “Yes, of course, give time for negotiations, we’ve all heard that,” she said. “But we all also know that Johnny’s not going to negotiate. Not without some juice.”

  “We’ll force him to negotiate!”

  The National Guard were being led on the ground by a Ranger battalion flown in from Fort Carson and commanded by a Colonel Eric Abernathy.

  Kinnard took a call from the colonel, something about rules of engagement, civil response, and logistical support. Darcy eased over to Billy and took his arm, guiding him away from Kinnard.

  “Is it really necessary to go through all these motions?” she whispered quickly. “I can change them all!”

  “You don’t know that.We can’t change Johnny!”

  “No? Maybe not, but his bringing all these people will work with him, I’m convinced of it.”

  “If you think you can change their minds—”

  “I can! Drop me in the middle of that crowd down there and I’ll show you.”

  “And if you can’t? You expect them to revolt against their beloved Johnny?”

  She was appalled by his lack of confidence in her.

  “Did I or did I not convince the whole of Congress to revolt against their beloved Constitution?”

  “Half of them already wanted to change it. I’m just saying”—he faced the town far below, scowling with bitterness—“Johnny wants a fight, and I swear, I’m going to give him his fight. And this time it won’t just be with words.”

  “So you’re just going to give up on me?” she demanded.

  “I’m going to save you!” he cried. And she knew then that he was starting to lose it. His whole past had caught up to him in the last week, and he was starting to set reason aside to protect himself from it.

  As are you, Darcy.

  She ripped off her glasses. “Take off your glasses.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now!” she screamed.

  Kinnard spun arou
nd, ear still plastered to the phone, but he meant nothing to her now. She stepped forward and plucked Billy’s glasses from his face.

  Bore into his eyes with her own.

  “You love me, Billy, but if you think you can save me you’re not thinking straight. I’m here to save you.What have you ever done to save me? It’s not in your blood—accept it. You’ve always been an impetuous gambler, willing to throw yourself to the wolves for the chance to be crowned the wolf slayer. This time we will do things my way, you hear me? You’re not taking me down with you again!”

  Billy’s face wrinkled with pain. She knew she’d been far too harsh, pushing him to the point where he might resent her words and obey her out of pure obligation.

  But she was honestly afraid for him.He was beginning to lose himself in this whole affair.

  “I want you to make them take me down there now, set me in the middle of the town down there”—she shoved a finger down toward the valley—“and let me deliver this ultimatum of yours in person.”

  Kinnard took a step toward them. “Are you two—”

  “Shut up, Kinnard!” she snapped.

  Billy’s eyes leaked trails of tears. He looked both terrified and bitter at once, and Darcy felt a tinge of regret.

  “Sorry to put it like that, Billy.” She shoved her glasses back on. “I’m just a bit out of whack myself.”

  Billy spun to Kinnard. “Tell them we’re going down.”

  “I’m not sure that’s really a good idea.”

  Darcy drilled him with a glare. “Do you want an earful as well?”

  “Just thinking of your safety.”

  “Johnny isn’t going to guillotine us, you idiot. We’re going to guillo-tine him!” she said. “It’s time he learned what the stakes are.”

  THERE WERE only a couple hundred people milling about the center of town when the old Apache settled onto the church lawn and barely waited for Darcy and Billy to tumble out before screwing back into the sky.