by Davis Bunn
“The Mundrose broadcast makes a mockery of God’s eternal promise. They do this for profit. God offers hope for the sake of our souls. A choice has been set before you. I am here today to ask you to act.”
At that moment, John found his fear subsiding. What was more, he sensed people praying for him. He did not hear their voices. He did not need to. But he knew they were gathered with hands clasped, praying for him to do this.
John sat in a mock version of Bobby Barrett’s study. In the pastor’s own suit. Waiting while they tested his voice for level and gain. So he could speak to the world. And do this because in the silent intensity, he knew he was following God’s design for this time. He knew this with utter certainty. And suddenly his fears held no significance whatsoever.
“At the bottom of your screen is a website where you will find a list of sponsors that stand to profit from Mundrose Entertainment and their message of despair. You will also find a list of alternate products. I am asking you to consider switching brands. Send these people a message in the only language they understand, money. The fate of souls, now and those still to come, hangs in the balance.”
17
“The desires of your heart …”
LOS ANGELES
When Trent woke up, he had no idea where he was. Sunlight fell through a window to his left, spilling across a floor of hand-cast Mexican tiles. Gradually the previous day’s events flowed into his brain. The flight on the private jet, the meeting with the world-famous director, the confrontation with the Hollywood publicist, the advertisement, the web-based response. Trent had remained in the broadcast studio for hours, watching the response grow to his concept. His concept. Gayle had finally given in to exhaustion and left sometime after one. Trent could not possibly have slept, not after the publicist announced their ad had become the most watched video on YouTube. The limo had finally driven him back to the hotel under a rose-hued dawn.
The Bel Air Hotel bungalow was not luxurious in any standard sense. The antiques were rough-hewn, the floor tiles cast by hand. The bedroom’s chandelier was simple brass. The four-poster bed would have looked at home on an upscale ranch. Trent emerged from the bathroom and realized that probably had been the designer’s intention, to create the homey feel of an elegant hacienda inside a Hollywood hotel.
Then he heard the knock on the door. Trent slipped into trousers and crossed the parlor. “Yes?”
“It’s Gayle.”
He opened the door to find her holding a silver tray containing a coffee thermos and single cup. Trent greeted her, then hurried back into the bedroom for a shirt. When he emerged, she was holding out a steaming cup. “Thanks.”
“You have a call with Edlyn in—” Gayle checked her watch. “Now, actually.”
His phone rang. He took time for a couple of hasty sips, then answered, “Good morning, Edlyn.”
“Is your computer running?”
Gayle must have known what was coming, because she was already at his desk, booting up. “Five seconds.”
“Go to the website for Barrett Ministries.”
“I know that name.” He passed on the name to Gayle, then remembered, “Isn’t he dead?”
“Yeah, a couple of years ago. Okay, click on the tab labeled Hope Now.”
A face Trent did not recognize popped into view. The man’s name meant nothing. “Who is John Jacobs?”
“No idea.”
The man looked like a plumber, was what Trent thought—big and relatively fit but certainly not made for the camera. He spoke in a flat Midwestern voice, poor inflection, and Trent caught his eyes shift once as he followed the teleprompter. This John Jacobs was criticizing their advertisement. He talked about Jesus. He announced the website, listing all the Mundrose sponsors. Then he stopped cold. No fade out, nothing. The screen flashed the same website. Start to finish, one hundred and twenty-five seconds. A ridiculous length.
Edlyn said, “Click on the web address.”
He did so, and watched an astonishing array of names come into focus. There were two lists, actually. One was headed, Mundrose sponsors, and the other, Alternate suppliers of similar products. Trent rubbed his face, wishing he was more awake. “Should I be worried?”
“Are you kidding? This is fantastic.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Apparently this guy’s little diatribe was shown on the screens of several thousand churches this morning. Pastors all over the nation started their sermons with clips from our advert, gave their little talks, then finished with this John Jacobs here, whoever he is. A pastor in Austin, Craig Davenport, started this rolling. Or so I’ve been told.”
“Sorry, I don’t follow. You say this is good news?”
“Our publicity department is breaking out the champagne. They could not have designed a better response. Remember Pretty Woman? Some church group tried to set up a boycott. The film grossed over half a billion dollars. By some accounts, the boycott added a hundred mil to the total.”
“They’re doing our job for us,” Trent realized.
“There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” Edlyn confirmed. “We want you to stay out there a couple more days, build on this with a second ad.”
“I can do that.” His mind gradually accelerated. He felt fragments of a new idea begin to swirl in his mind.
“Because this is your first top-level assignment, we want Gayle to remain there as your support.”
Trent struggled to fashion a response that would not reveal how delighted he was with this bit of news. All he could come up with was, “Understood.”
But Edlyn must have taken his hesitation as concern, for she said, “We’re not spying, Trent. Well, we are, but in a positive sense. Now give me Gayle.”
He basked in the glow while Gayle spoke briefly into his phone. The clock on the side table said it was three in the afternoon. She hung up and said, “It sounds as though I’ll be around for a bit longer.”
“Have dinner with me.” The words were out before he had a chance to come up with reasons not to speak. “Two colleagues, a free night, nothing more. Please.”
She was dressed in what he supposed was LA casual-chic, pastel shorts and a cotton top shaped like a man’s dress shirt but with short sleeves. But her smile, for the first time ever, seemed genuine. “I know just the place.”
WESTCHESTER TO WASHINGTON DC
The filming had left John so exhausted he barely managed the walk back to the stone cottage, where he undressed and collapsed into bed. He woke up after midnight to find Heather sleeping peacefully beside him. Ravenous, he quietly crossed the starlit courtyard, entered the main kitchen, and ate two bowls of cereal. He sat on the porch for a time, welcoming the night-clad solitude. He remained unsettled by how everyone seemed so comfortable with him being the spokesman. As he stared at the stars draped overhead, he recalled sitting in front of the camera, only this time he felt as though all his faults and all his mistakes were there on public display. Finally he returned to the cottage, slipped into bed beside his wife, and gave in to slumber.
Somewhere around dawn, he had a dream.
In it, John glimpsed his own world, but from a different perspective. For that brief moment, he observed through the eyes of a different John Jacobs.
In the dream, John sat in a diner where he often breakfasted with old friends. Only now he was a whole man. In this dream version of his life, John had never stained his life with rash violence or prison or regret or guilt. Instead, he laughed easily, and he shared thoughts with the confidence of a man who had risen to his full potential.
And then the dream took a remarkable shift.
John left the diner and found himself inside the Barrett Ministries television studio. He was once more dressed in the borrowed suit of a departed evangelist. He spoke the same words that scrolled down the teleprompter. Just as he had done the previous evening. Only in the dream, John belonged. He was made for this role.
When John woke up, he discovered that Heather had slippe
d away, letting him rest. John rose and showered and dressed, then joined the others for prayer and breakfast and a sunrise service in the main chapel. He knew he had every right to be left riddled with fresh grief from the dream. After all, the life he had once thought was his to claim had disappeared the instant he had opened his eyes. And yet John was filled with a distinct whisper of promise. Without saying exactly why, the dream had left him with a marked assurance that by coming here and accepting the challenges that had been placed before him, he was growing. He was being made whole. He was a man whose days held a greater purpose and hope.
After church they went straight to the county municipal airport, where a pair of rented King Air turboprops waited to get them to the Kennedy Center. They needed two planes because the television crew traveled with them. John watched Heather set a suit bag on top of the camera equipment. He was about to go over and ask his wife what was going on, when Yussuf and Aaron walked up. Yussuf said, “Please excuse me, Brother John. I need to have a word with you.”
John found it remarkable how the man’s formality carried such a sense of friendly warmth. “Should we wait until we’re airborne?”
“A perfectly valid question,” Aaron agreed. “Since the pilots are waving at us. Again.”
Yussuf said, “I already said you should get on board.”
“And yet I am here. Asking a question which you have not yet answered.” Aaron gave a massive shrug of his bony shoulders. “What a delightful trip we’re having.”
Yussuf said to John, “I wanted to tell you, in the prayer time this morning, I felt God’s hand upon me.”
Aaron gave him mock indignation. “There is a reason why I am only hearing about this now?”
John liked the spark between the two men, the easy banter, the genuine friendship. “What did God say?”
“That you are to make yourself ready for God to use you,” Yussuf replied. “I was seated and trying to pray, but in truth I was thinking about your time before the cameras. When the lights came on, you became a man of authority. I understood then why God had chosen you.”
Aaron was no longer smiling. “I thought the same thing.”
“Because your authority came not from you. And I admired you for your courage.”
“I didn’t want to do it,” John replied.
Aaron shrugged a second time. “How many of the prophets were people who sought the honor and the burden? God called, you answered. That is the important issue here.”
Yussuf went on, “God spoke to me in that moment. He said you were to make ready to speak for him again.”
John glanced over to where the pilot waited impatiently. “Did he say what I should talk about?”
“Six words,” Yussuf replied. “ ‘Be ready when hope is revealed.’ ”
As John climbed into the plane’s cramped cabin, Alisha waved to him. “Sit across the aisle from me, will you?”
“Sure thing.” He followed the woman’s example and folded up the center armrest so he could use both of the small seats. He pointed Heather into the row in front of him, then waited while the plane revved its twin engines and took off. As they reached cruising altitude, he studied the woman seated across the narrow aisle. Alisha’s features were creased with a very real pain. He leaned in close and asked, “You want to talk about it?”
“I do and I don’t.”
John nodded his understanding. “Well, when you make up your mind, I’m here.”
She reached over and took hold of his hand. Heather saw the gesture and turned so she could smile at him. Another ten minutes passed before Alisha said, “I’m afraid of what I’m gonna find when we land.”
The prop’s noise granted them a remarkable degree of privacy. “I don’t understand.”
“My whole life, I’ve been the one keeping things right. When my grandmother got sick and my momma didn’t come home, I was the one making a home for my little sister. It came natural to me. Like God gave me this gift to organize things. Where somebody else might have seen only the lack, I made do. I found ways to keep it all together.”
John felt tiny tremors run through the hand holding hers, a communication far beyond the words themselves. He said, “Even when your heart was broken.”
Her response was at a much deeper level than her expression. Her entire body was gripped momentarily by the stress of maintaining control. Her hand clenched his painfully tight, then slackened with the rest of her. Her eyes were shiny now, her voice deeper. “I put all I had into shaping my church choir.”
John nodded slowly. He caught the power she put into that word. My choir.
“We been at the Kennedy Center eight times. Tonight makes nine.”
“All because of you,” John said.
“Two hundred choirs try out. Eleven get tapped. Only three have been invited back every year.”
The communion through her grip filled in the unspoken. “And tonight you’re not in charge. You gave that up to be with us.”
“It didn’t start off that way.” She looked at him for the first time, and tried hard to smile. “If God had said that up front, you’d be holding somebody else’s hand right now.”
“I doubt that very much.”
She turned back to the front. “So tonight the pastor’s wife is gonna be leading my choir and fifty kids I didn’t want up there on the stage. And I’m gonna have to smile my way through it. And hope they do good enough so we get invited back another year. ’Cause when this whole thing here is done, the choir is just about all I’ve got left.”
“What about your sister?”
“I don’t want to talk about her.”
The snappish way she responded would normally have been enough for John to drop the subject. But not today. Not when he suddenly felt a rushing sense of divine intent. “You need to invite her, Alisha.”
She turned back to him. “What are you going on about?”
“Tonight. You need to ask her to come.”
“Brother, you don’t have a single solitary idea what you’re saying.”
He nodded, both to the words and to the pleasure he felt in how she had just addressed him. “You’re right. But I know what I know.”
She stared at him. “Tabatha won’t come.”
“That’s not the point.”
“We’re not talking about what I want to talk about.”
“Alisha, you need to do this.”
“Here I thought this day couldn’t get any harder, I’m getting advice on my family from a white man who’s never even met my sister.”
“Will you call her?”
“Will you leave me be if I do?”
He leaned in close. “You’re a good woman, Alisha. It’s an honor to call you my friend.”
18
“Establish the works of our hands …”
LOS ANGELES
Trent’s Sunday was spent in solitary confinement, locked in his room strategizing. When Gayle learned he needed some time to formulate a response to the Barrett Ministries video, she announced that she had not had a day off in three months and could be found at the pool. The detectives had placed him on their list of top clients. Trent learned this little item when he phoned their headquarters on a Sunday morning and started to beg the on-duty officer for a connection to someone with clout, only to be informed that the manager on call had been alerted the instant he phoned in. He ordered a salad for lunch, and ate it seated in a minuscule courtyard reflecting on life at LA speed. However fast he moved, he still had another race to win, another quest to claim as his own. He had never been happier.
The preliminary workup on John Jacobs was delivered at mid afternoon. Trent thanked the manager, slotted the information into his concept, and went in search of Gayle.
There was no response at her door, so he phoned her cell. She answered on the first ring. “I must have dozed off. Am I late?”
“Not at all. I need some advice.”
“I’m still poolside. Should I come up?”
“S
tay where you are. I’ll be right there.”
Even the hotel pool was designed to offer privacy, with shrubs and colorful sunshades to segment the deck. Gayle was stretched out on a divan in a discreet corner. Her one-piece costume was a tawny gold that heightened the luster of her skin. She sat up at his approach and wrapped the towel around her legs.
Trent forced himself to focus on her face as he drew over a chair. “I’m sorry to trouble you.”
“This work is why I was sent to LA. What do you need?”
Trent outlined what he had in mind. As he talked, she resumed her professional mode, slipping the oversized sunglasses onto her hair. “Edlyn needs to hear this.”
“Should it wait until tomorrow?”
“Absolutely not.” She had Edlyn’s private line on speed-dial. When Edlyn Mundrose came on, Gayle pitched her voice so he could hear. “Trent has come up with a concept I found rather remarkable. I told him you would want to hear this without delay.” She passed him the phone and went on, “Tell her just like you did me.”
He could feel his heart squeeze, as though suddenly too big for his chest. He did what he had been taught by the therapist all those years ago, when nerves were enough to render him speechless. Just another throwaway kid whose defect made it all too easy to vanish in the shadows. He spoke slowly, shaping each word carefully, not moving on until the last one had been carved from the air and set precisely in place. “John Jacobs has a prison record.”
“Did you use our in-house people to research him?”
“No, I thought we should be more discreet.”
“Good. Go on.”
“Jacobs had just turned nineteen. He was an underaged drinker using a fake ID, and got into a bar fight. He almost killed his opponent. He served six months for aggravated assault.”
“This just keeps getting better.”
“I thought rather than go at him directly, we might want to play on the church angle. Have some pastor do it for us. Bring up the man’s past, and then talk about who he is now. Jacobs worked a number of dead-end jobs, then went to work for a trucking company. He’s assistant manager of their Midwest depot.”
