I don’t know why, because I hardly knew him, but I stopped next to Simon and put my hand on his shoulder. He winced. Then he tilted his head and looked into my eyes. “Thank you,” he said. I wanted to cry.
He put his hand on mine. I knew he wanted to touch Kacey, not me, but I was there and she was not, and at that moment the touch of a stranger must have been better than no touch at all. I let him hold my hand—and I did cry. But I cried as quietly as I could, because it was his moment to hurt, not mine. Eventually he nodded, and I understood it was time for me to leave.
As I walked toward the kitchen, wiping my eyes with my fingers, I heard him open one of the bags. I looked over my shoulder. He’d removed Kacey’s finger from the plastic bag. It had been cut cleanly, just above the second knuckle. The skin was already darkening. He turned it over and over, studying it from every angle. He nudged it into his palm and touched it lightly, then stroked it with his fingertips, as if it were still attached to her hand and she were sitting right beside him.
I felt guilty for watching, and I started to turn away. Before I did, Simon lifted Kacey’s finger and pressed it to his cheek. He held it there for a long time. Then he began to sob.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
BY 10 P.M. ELISE had been sitting on the couch for a couple of hours and had barely taken her eyes off the laptop resting on the coffee table in front of her. Simon had been in the bedroom alone since he returned the evidence to Harrison. I sat in an upholstered wing chair, flipping through the pages of one of the hotel’s promotional magazines about Chicago. The room smelled like burnt coffee. I wanted a drink of something far stronger.
At the desk in the corner, Harrison hunched over a report that had been delivered to him a few minutes earlier. From time to time he scratched something onto the paper with the hotel’s ballpoint desk pen.
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Elise lean forward and peer at the computer screen. “This may be it!”
Harrison and I hurried over to the couch. Simon rounded the corner from the bedroom. In three long strides he was at the coffee table. Elise stood and moved out of his way. He leaned over the laptop, clicked open the message, and scanned the screen. After a moment he shook his head and toggled the message to the beginning. He read it again, then sat on the couch.
“What is it?” Harrison said. “Is she all right?”
“They have a demand. If I meet it, they say they’ll let Kacey go.”
Harrison walked around the coffee table and squinted at the laptop. “What do they want?”
Simon rubbed his hand over the bald crown of his head. “They want me to make a statement on international television this Saturday at the Celebration of Hope in Dallas.”
“What statement?” Harrison said.
Simon leaned back on the couch. “They want me to deny that Jesus is the Son of God.”
FIFTEEN MINUTES AFTER READING the e-mail, Simon paced near the windows of the suite. “If I don’t say what they want me to say, they will kill Kacey. If we try to find her and rescue her, they’ll kill her.” He stopped, and the muscles in his neck strained until they practically throbbed above the neck band of his T-shirt. “What she must be going through . . .” He clenched his fists. “If we find them I swear I will kill them with my bare hands. I will pummel each one of them until they’re dead.”
Harrison frowned and took a step toward Simon. “I feel the same way, believe me. We’re going to do everything we can to—”
Simon spun around and kicked one of the dining table chairs. It smacked against the table and fell backward onto the carpet. “These people talk about religion. This has nothing to do with religion. That’s a charade! They’re thugs—nothing more than a street gang with a pious-sounding name.”
“You’re exactly right,” Harrison said. “Religion is a tool for them. It’s an excuse to do whatever it takes to achieve their political goals.”
“But what sort of a tool?” Elise said. “If you go on television and say what they want you to say, it will all come out afterward. Everyone will know. They will be vilified the world over for this, even by Muslims.” We all turned and stared at her. She’d hardly spoken all day. She blushed, and her voice lowered. “What can they possibly gain?”
Harrison’s eyes narrowed. “You’re looking at it from the wrong perspective. These people are fanatics. They don’t care how 99 percent of the world reacts.”
“But that doesn’t answer my question. What do they gain? Any statement by Simon would be meaningless under these circumstances.”
“Meaningless to the West, maybe. But with respect to their target audience—the others who think as they do—it would be a public relations bonanza. It would be viewed as a demonstration of our weakness and their superiority.” Harrison turned his palms up. “To borrow a political phrase, they’re playing to their base.”
Elise’s voice gained strength. “How can that be? Whose weakness would it demonstrate? Simon’s? Why would they care about that?”
He wagged his finger. “Not just Simon—the West, Christianity. To them, we’re the enemy. All of us.”
What Elise said made sense. I was about to interject that I agreed when Simon threw up his hands. “Would you two stop it?”
Elise’s face flushed. She leaned back on the couch, and Simon walked toward her. “This is philosophical drivel. What difference does it make? If I don’t do as they say, they’re going to kill Kacey. That’s the only thing that matters.” He turned his back on her and looked at Harrison. “Can we negotiate with them?”
Elise’s shoulders drooped. She sank lower into the couch. I wondered whether it was possible for any human being to appear more drained of self-confidence. For an instant I was angry at Simon for treating her so dismissively, but I caught myself. Who was I to judge him under these circumstances?
“We can try to negotiate,” Harrison said. “We will try. Maybe we’ll even find them before next week—find Kacey and get her back. That’s the result we want, but there are no guarantees.”
“If you go after her, they’ll kill her.”
“We wouldn’t move unless we felt there was a high probability of getting her out alive.”
“High probability? What does that mean?”
Harrison shoved his hands in his pockets. “Why don’t we wait and see if we can locate her before we get into a guessing game about whether we can get her out safely? A lot of it would depend on the circumstances. We have no way of knowing what those would be.”
Harrison’s cell phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket and held it to his ear. After a moment he nodded. “Yes . . . read it.” His eyes narrowed. “Read it again . . . thanks.” He flipped the phone shut.
Simon cocked his head. “What was that?”
“We don’t have to wait for word of this to get out. They’ve posted it on their Web site in Arabic. I just got the translation. They want everyone to know exactly what’s going on, exactly what their demands are.”
“They’re lunatics,” Simon said.
“You give them way too much credit. They’re not crazy. They’re no different than any criminal organization. They get their way through murder and intimidation. They’re corrupt and ruthless, nothing more and nothing less.”
“If Simon does what they say, do you think they will keep their word? Will they really release her?” Elise watched Simon out of the corner of her eye as she spoke.
“Yes, will they make good on this if I do it?” Simon said. Elise appeared relieved that he hadn’t snapped at her again.
Harrison ran his hand through his hair. “There’s no way of knowing for sure. My strong hunch, though, is that they will. Now that they’ve gone public with this, they won’t have much choice. In their warped world, it would be a matter of honor. They told you they would do it, and I think they will. After we’ve gotten more research on them, we’ll be in a better position to evaluate it, though.”
Elise leaned forward, seeming to have regaine
d her confidence. “Then it’s great news. You’re going to get Kacey back.”
Simon stared at her. “Great news? Are you sick?”
Her shoulders sagged again. “That’s not what I meant.” She squinted up at him, as if searching for a clue to what he wanted her to say. It was painful to watch.
“Don’t you understand the significance of what they want me to do?” His jaw muscles clenched with each word.
“Yes, of course. But you will do it, won’t you? You just say it one day, get her back, and then go on television the next day and retract the whole thing. Everyone will understand.”
Simon scowled at her. She shrank back on the couch. In a voice barely above a whisper she said, “You can’t let her die.”
Without another word, Simon turned, walked into the bedroom, and shut the door.
Elise’s eyes remained fixed on the door. She reached up and straightened her hair, then put her hands back in her lap. A cab horn honked on the street below, and somewhere in the distance a siren blared. I looked at Harrison. He was staring at his shoes. Elise continued to watch the door, but it didn’t open. After a few more moments, she straightened her back and stood. Then she picked up her purse from the couch and, without a word, walked out the door of the suite.
Harrison motioned with his thumb toward the door. “Do those two have something going on?”
I shrugged. “I’ve only known them for twenty-four hours. My read is that she wants to.”
He smiled. “Maybe so, but I sure don’t think he does.”
“Right now it’s the farthest thing from his mind, don’t you think?”
He shook his head. “Of course. I should never have brought it up.”
“I didn’t mean to sound self-righteous. I’ve been wondering the same thing.”
Harrison walked back over to the desk where he’d been working.
“Do you think you can find Kacey?”
He leaned on the desk and lowered his voice. “Honestly? She could be anywhere. We’ll need a lucky break.”
I looked at the bedroom door. Simon was almost certainly praying for Kacey. In fact, millions of people all over the world must be praying for her. On the other hand, millions had undoubtedly prayed for Simon for years and this is where it got him. When I thought of Kacey—how alone she was and how terrified she must be—I felt sick to my stomach. I resolved at that moment that I would pray for her too. My prayers probably wouldn’t count for much, but they weren’t likely to hurt. And Kacey needed all the help she could get.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
BY MIDNIGHT SIMON STILL hadn’t come out of his bedroom. With no pressing reason to disturb him, Harrison decided to go back to his room and get a few hours of sleep. As he walked out the door, I hit the mute button on the TV and turned it on one more time to see if the news had picked up the story of the kidnappers’ demands.
Just as I was about to click to a news station, Simon walked out of the bedroom carrying a beat-up, green shoe box under his arm. The small amount of hair that he had left on the sides of his head was matted flat. His jeans and T-shirt looked as if someone had wadded them up wet and thrown them in a corner.
When he saw me standing in front of the television, he stopped and rubbed his hand over his head. “I heard the door close. I thought everyone had gone.”
“I’m sorry. I’m on my way out.” I placed the remote on top of the television. “I wanted to check the news one more time.”
“What are they saying?”
“I don’t know. I just turned it on.”
He stood barefoot in the middle of the floor and looked around the room. He was lean and athletic; his chest and arms stretched against the cotton of his T-shirt. I thought of my father and the way he looked that last night at the campsite. Then I pictured Simon the evening before, how calm he’d remained after the bomb went off.
Dad would have liked this man.
Simon continued to scan the room. His eyes were dark and bloodshot, and he seemed incapable of moving, as if he’d forgotten why he came into the room in the first place.
I stepped toward him. “Are you all right? Can I get you anything before I go?”
He blinked and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “No, I’m fine. Thanks.”
I walked toward the table, where my purse hung from the back of one of the arm chairs. “I’ll just get out of your way then. I’m sure you want to get some sleep.” I picked up my purse and slung it over my shoulder.
He nodded toward the kitchen. “Is there any coffee left?”
“I imagine so. We didn’t drink much out of that last pot.”
“Would you mind staying for a bit?”
Surprised, I didn’t respond immediately.
He shifted the shoe box to his other arm. “You’re probably exhausted. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“No, a cup of coffee would be good. I’m not sleepy anyway.” I dropped my purse onto the floor next to the wall and headed for the kitchen. I looked at him over my shoulder. “You like it black, right?”
He held up a hand. “You sit down. I’ll get it.” He walked past me, sliding the shoe box onto the table as he went by. “I’m sorry, I didn’t notice how you like it.”
“I like mine black, also.”
I sat down and rested an elbow on the table. The shoe box was inches from my hand. Part of the lid was torn. One of the bottom corners had a hole the size of a dime, where the cardboard had worn through. I resisted the urge to lift the lid and see what was inside.
A few moments later Simon came back from the kitchen and placed a coffee mug in front of me. I picked it up and blew over the top. It smelled strong, burnt. He sat down across from me. Neither of us said anything.
I wondered whether he wanted to talk or just sit for a while. The fear that I’d seen earlier that evening was back in his eyes. He had no one left, and I knew how that felt. I would sit with him all night, and all day, and the next night too if it would help him.
He took a drink of coffee and set his mug on the table. “Do you know how I got to be a preacher?”
“No, how?”
“When I was growing up, my family was not what you would call religious. We went to church once in a while, mostly on Easter, Christmas, Mother’s Day. When Marie and I got married, she was more serious about faith than I was. She went to church most Sundays. I stayed home.
“When Kacey was born, I had so much to be thankful for. I still never thought about God, though, or about much of anything except just living my life. We were happy. Our lives revolved around Kacey, and we thought we had everything we needed. At least, I thought we did.” He picked up his mug and sipped.
“Then Marie got sick. And then she died. After that, I wanted to die too. But I couldn’t. Kacey needed me. She was only three years old. So I kept on living. I tried, really tried, to get back to life, but it was so hard because I missed Marie so much. I kept on living on the outside, but on the inside I was dying more every day.
“About six months after Marie died, I lost my job at the auto factory. We basically had nothing in savings. We’d been a young couple with a kid. We’d poured every penny we had into our house. I’ll never forget when I got the notice in the mail saying that we had to move out within thirty days because I wasn’t able to pay the mortgage. I wondered how people lived when they didn’t have a house or an apartment. I remember lying in bed one night when Kacey was asleep. I put a pillow over my face and screamed into it so Kacey couldn’t hear. I was screaming at God. ‘Why are you doing this to me? Don’t you have someone else to knock around for a while?’”
I wanted to reach out and touch him, hold his hand. But how could I? I hardly knew him.
He turned his palm up. “I don’t know why I decided to yell at God that night. It’s not as if I’d paid much attention to him in the past thirty years. For some reason, though, as soon as I finished yelling into that pillow, the strangest sense of peace came over me. It was as if he’d
just been waiting for me to ask him to help. God moved into my life that night. He moved in because I asked him in. He came in quietly, and he sat with me. I began to talk to him that night, there in my bedroom. And that’s how God saved me. He did it very quietly. That’s how we talk even today—very quietly.”
He shrugged. “I’m sorry, I’m sure you don’t want to hear about this. I guess I just wanted to talk to someone.”
I leaned forward. “Please, I do want to hear. So how did you end up preaching?”
“That’s a little bit tougher to explain.” He took another sip of his coffee. “I got some odd jobs around town, things like painting, fix-it stuff. It was enough to get the mortgage caught up and keep us in our house. I wasn’t working full time, just a job here and there. I had time to think about things.
“At first the idea of preaching was something that flitted through my mind and was gone. Over time, when the thought came, it stayed longer. At some point I began to consider the details. How would it actually work if I did it? How does a person begin something like that? I finally concluded that God was putting the idea in my head.
“So I raised my objections to him; and I had plenty of them. I’m not an educated man. I’m nobody. Who would listen to me? I would have to go to seminary, and that would take years. How would I pay for it? I had Kacey to think of. How would I earn money for the things she needed?”
I nodded. “Particularly important with a girl.”
He smiled. “Yes, you’ve got that right. Anyway, I sat down and wrote out a list of my strengths and weaknesses. I still have it. On the strength side of the ledger, I figured I was a hard worker, I was sincere, and by that time I felt I really loved God. I had some skills most preachers don’t have, but they didn’t seem to have much applicability. For example, I was a good athlete. I could dunk a basketball. In high school I’d been a quarterback and pitcher too. I figured that might help me work with youth somehow. I had a good sense of humor, and that could help with kids, also. You get the point. I had very few things going for me. None of them seemed to fit particularly well with being a preacher.
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