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  Praise for

  Ted Dekker’s novels

  “An inventive plot and fast-paced action put Dekker at the top of his game.”

  —Library Journal

  “With the release of White, and the culmination of the Circle Trilogy, Dekker has placed himself at the fore of Christian fiction. His tale is absolutely riveting, and the redemptive value at the heart of the series only makes it all the more remarkable.”

  —MICHAEL JANKE CM Central

  “One of the highlights of the year in religious fiction has been Ted Dekker’s striking color-coded spiritual trilogy. Exciting, well written, and resonant with meaning, Black, Red, and now White have won over both critics and genre readers . . . An epic journey completed with grace.”

  —Editors, BARNES AND NOBLE

  “Dekker is a master of suspense and even makes room for romance.”

  —Library Journal

  “My advice is to sit back, curl up, and savor White for the triumph it is. It’s so rare that we get stories as well plotted, perfectly paced, and told with real heart like this.”

  —FuseMagazine.net

  “Full of heroic action, deep meaning, and suspense so palpable your fingers will dig grooves into the book’s outer cover, Red magnifies the story of Black times ten, raising the stakes to epic proportions. But Ted Dekker’s biggest ace in the hole is that he understands what so many others never realize: substance and meaning can go hand-in-hand with exciting, cinematic storytelling. Red is a thrilling, daring work of fiction that not only entertains—it inspires. Why aren’t there more stories like this?”

  —ROBIN PARRISH, editor, Fuse Magazine, www.FuseMagazine.net

  “Black has to be the read of the year! A powerful, thought-provoking, edge-of-your-seat thriller of epic proportions that offers great depth and insight into the forces around us.”

  —JOE GOODMAN, film producer, Namesake Entertainment

  “As a producer of movies filled with incredible worlds and heroic characters, I have high standards for the fiction I read. Ted Dekker’s novels deliver big with mind-blowing, plot-twisting page turners. Fair warning—this trilogy will draw you in at a breakneck pace and never let up. Cancel all plans before you start because you won’t be able to stop once you enter Black.”

  —RALPH WINTER Producer—X-Men, X2: X-Men United, Planet of the Apes, Executive Producer—StarTrek V: Final Frontier

  “Put simply: it’s a brilliant, dangerous idea. And we need more dangerous ideas . . . Dekker’s trilogy is a mythical epic, with a vast, predetermined plot and a scope of staggering proportions . . . Black is one of those books that will make you thankful that you know how to read. If you love a good story, and don’t mind suspending a little healthy disbelief, Black will keep you utterly enthralled from beginning to . . . well, cliffhanger. Red can’t get here fast enough.”

  —FuseMagazine.net

  “Just when I think I have Ted Dekker figured out, he hits me with the unexpected. With teasing wit, ever-lurking surprises, and adventurous new concepts, this guy could become a real vanguard in fiction.”

  —FRANK PERETTI

  “[With THR3E] Dekker delivers another page-turner . . . masterfully takes readers on a ride full of plot twists and turns . . . a compelling tale of cat and mouse . . . an almost perfect blend of suspense, mystery, and horror.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Ted Dekker is clearly one of the most gripping storytellers alive today. He creates plots that keep your heart pounding and palms sweating even after you’ve finished his books.”

  —JEREMY REYNALDS, Syndicated Columnist

  obsessed

  Other novels by Ted Dekker:

  Black

  Red

  White

  Three

  Blink

  Heaven’s Wager

  When Heaven Weeps

  Thunder of Heaven

  With Bill Bright:

  Blessed Child

  A Man Called Blessed

  obsessed

  TED DEKKER

  Copyright 2005 Ted Dekker

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee. Thomas Nelson is a trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

  Thomas Nelson, Inc. titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fundraising, or sales promotional use. For information, please email [email protected].

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dekker, Ted, 1962–

  Obsessed / Ted Dekker.

  ISBN 10: 0-8499-4373-6 (hard cover)

  ISBN 13: 978-0-8499-4373-7 (hard cover)

  ISBN 10: 1-59554-031-8 (international)

  ISBN 13: 978-1-59554-031-7 (international)

  ISBN 10: 1-59554-078-4 (trade paper)

  ISBN 13: 978-1-59554-078-2 (trade paper)

  ISBN 10: 1-59554-311-2 (mmpb)

  ISBN 13: 978-1-59554-311-0 (mmpb)

  I. Title.

  PS3554.E43O27 2005

  813'.6—dc22

  2004015647

  Printed in the United States of America

  07 08 09 10 11 RRD 11 10 9 8 7 6

  This one’s for The Circle

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Epilogue

  AN EXCERPT FROM SHOWDOWN

  1

  Hamburg, Germany

  July 17, 1973

  Tuesday Morning

  ROTH BRAUN SLOWLY TWISTED THE DOORKNOB AND GAVE THE door a slight shove. A familiar medicinal odor stung his nostrils. Outside, the sun warmed a midsummer day, but here in the dungeon below the house, the old man lived in perpetual twilight.

  Roth imagined a Jew stepping into a delicing shower and let himself relish the horror he might feel in that moment of realizing that more than lice were meant to die in this chamber.

  Roth was in a very good mood.

  The smothering quiet was broken by the sound of the o
ld prune’s tarred, seventy-eight-year-old lungs rasping for relief. Gerhard’s wheezing annoyed Roth, ruining his otherwise perfect mood.

  The only living soul he despised more than the Jew who’d stolen his power was Gerhard, who had allowed the Jew to steal his power.

  He glanced at Klaus, the gangly male nurse who had tended his father for three years. The white-smocked man hovered over Gerhard in the corner of the room, refusing to meet Roth’s eyes. Gerhard Braun sat in a dark-red leather recliner, blue eyes glaring over the nasal cannula protruding from each nostril.

  “Good morning, Father,” Roth said. He closed the door quietly and stepped into the room, pushing aside a curtain of tinkling glass beads that separated it from the entryway. “You wanted to see me?”

  His father looked at a servant, who busied himself over the table in the adjacent dining room.

  “Leave us.”

  By the trembling in his voice, either Gerhard really was dying, or something was upsetting him, which invariably sowed its own sort of death. How many men alive today had been responsible for as many deaths as his father? They could be counted on two hands.

  Even so, Roth hated him.

  The servant dipped his head and exited through a side door. The steel door closed and the nurse flinched. Glass in a cabinet behind the table rattled despite the room’s solid-concrete walls. The nineteenth-century Russian crystal—one of dozens of similar collections pilfered during the war—had once belonged to the czar. The Nazis’ defeat should have sent Gerhard to the gallows; instead, the war had left his father with obscene wealth. The paintings alone had netted him a significant fortune, and these he owned legally. He’d shipped them to Zurich, where a hotly contested law made them his after remaining unclaimed for five years. Compliments of the Swiss Federation of Art Dealers.

  Until the day I suck the energy from your bones, I will love you for showing me the way.

  Until the day I suck the energy from your bones, I will despise you for what you did.

  Gerhard held up a newspaper. “Have you read this?”

  Roth walked across the circular rope rug that covered the black cement slab and stopped five feet from Gerhard. A hawk nose curved over his father’s thin, trembling lips. Wispy strands of gray hair backlit by a yellow lamp hovered over his scalp. Skeletal, blue-veined fingers clutched what appeared to be a Los Angeles Times. A stack of newspapers—the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, London’s Daily Telegraph, and a dozen others— sat a half-meter thick on the small end table to his left. Gerhard routinely spent six hours each day reading.

  Gerhard flung the paper with a flick of his wrist, never removing his eyes from Roth. It landed on the floor with a smack.

  “Read it.”

  The male nurse pretended to fiddle with the oxygen tank. Roth stood still. This attitude of Gerhard’s was no longer simply ruining his mood, but destroying it altogether.

  “I said, ‘Read it’!”

  Roth calmly bent and picked up the paper. The Los Angeles Times was folded around an article in the Life section, “Fortune Goes to Museum.” Roth scanned the text. A wealthy woman, a Jew named Rachel Spritzer, sixty-two years of age, had died three days ago in Los Angeles. She’d been survived by no one and had donated her entire estate to the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

  “So another Jew’s dead.” Roth lowered the paper. “Your legacy lives on.”

  His father clutched the arms of his chair. “Read the rest.” His chest sounded like a whistle.

  If Roth wasn’t a master of his own impulses, he might have done something stupid, such as kill the man. Instead, he set the paper on the windowsill and turned away. “You’ve read it, Father. Tell me what it says. I have a ten o’clock engagement.”

  “Cancel it.”

  Roth walked to the bar. Control. “Just tell me what has you so concerned.”

  “The Stones of David have me concerned.”

  Roth blinked. He poured a splash of cognac into a snifter.

  “I’m finished chasing your ghosts.” He swirled the brandy slowly before sipping it. “If the Stones still exist, we would have found them long ago.”

  Gerhard managed to stand, trembling from head to foot, red as a rooster around the neck.

  “They have been found. And you know what that means.” He launched into a coughing fit.

  Roth’s pulse quickened a hair and then eased. If the man wasn’t dying, he was losing his mind. Surely the Stones hadn’t been found after all this time.

  Gerhard staggered three steps to the windowsill, pushing his startled nurse out of the way, and grabbed the newspaper. He leaned on the wall with one hand and held the paper up in the other. He threw the paper toward Roth. It fluttered noisily and landed on the black slab.

  “Read it!” Gerhard’s eyes drilled him. So then maybe there was something to this.

  Roth picked up the paper, found the article, and slowly read down the column. What if Gerhard was right? What if the relics did exist after all? They would be priceless. But the Stones’ monetary value didn’t interest Gerhard—he already had enough wealth to waste in his final years.

  Gerhard’s obsession was for the journal that had gone missing with the Stones.

  And Roth’s obsession was for the power that had gone missing with the Jew who’d taken the journal.

  He had spent nearly thirty years tracking down innumerable leads, searching in vain. There was no telling how much wealth had been stripped from the Jews when Hitler had gathered them up and sent them to the camps. Much of the fortune had been confiscated by the gestapo and recovered after the war, but a number of particularly valuable items— priceless relics that belonged in museums or in vaults—had disappeared. Some of those treasures could be found in this very house. But any well-heeled collector knew that the most valuable collection had vanished for good in 1945.

  The Stones of David.

  One stunning item in Spritzer’s collection is an extremely old golden medallion, better known as one of the five Stones of David. According to legend, the medallions are the actual stones selected by David to kill the giant Goliath. The smooth stones were subsequently gilded and stamped with the Star of David. The collection was last verified in 1307, when they were held by the Knights Templars. The collection was rumored to be held by a wealthy Jewish collector before World War II but went missing before the claim could be verified.

  Alone, each medallion may be worth over $10,000,000. But the collection in its entirety is valued at roughly $100,000,000. The relic will be displayed in a museum yet to be disclosed with the following cryptic caption at Rachel Spritzer’s request: “The Stones are like the lost orphans. They will eventually find each other.”

  Sweat cooled Roth’s palms. He set the paper on the bar, set an unsteady finger in its margin, and scanned to the end.

  Rachel Spritzer lived alone in an apartment complex she owned on La Brea Avenue and died a widow. The complex will be sold by the estate, along with much of Spritzer’s noncollectible property.

  Rudy and Rachel Spritzer immigrated to the United States sixteen years ago, five years before Rudy was killed in an automobile accident.(See B4.)

  For a moment Roth’s vision clouded. His mouth went dry.

  “Now I have your attention?” Gerhard demanded.

  Roth read the article again, searching for any phrase that might undermine the possibility that this Jew could be anyone other than whom Gerhard was suggesting.

  “She was sixty-two,” Gerhard said. “The right age.”

  Roth’s mind flashed back to those war years when he was only twelve. Even if the connections were only circumstantial, he could hardly ignore them.

  “I knew the Jew survived,” Gerhard said.

  “She donated only one Stone. There were five.”

  “If one Stone exists, then the journal exists. Someone has that journal!”

  “She’s dead.”

  “You will make her speak from the grave.” Gerhard swayed on his feet, right f
ist trembling. His eyes looked black in the basement’s shadows. “She knew. She knew about the journal.”

  “She’s dead!” Roth snapped. He took a deep breath, irritated with himself for losing control. The fact was, Gerhard’s history with the Stones gave him knowledge that no one else could possibly have.

  “You know well enough that the journal implicates the entire line of elders. It lists each of our names and the names of the women we killed. It must be found!”

  Mention of the women triggered a coppery taste in the back of Roth’s mouth. The last time he’d seen the journal, it contained 243 names. Roth would one day surpass that number, he had vowed it.

  But even a thousand or ten thousand would not compensate for the one that had escaped Gerhard.

  “That woman would toy with me even in her death,” the old man said. “In her house, in her belongings—somewhere, the old bat left a trail. You will go to Los Angeles.” The nurse, Klaus, moved to assist Gerhard back to his seat, but the old man shook him off. Klaus retreated.

  Gerhard was right. The Stones could lead to the journal. The journal could lead to the Jew. The Jew would lead to power, a supernatural power that his father had never attained. But Roth would.

  The prospect of finding the Jew after so many years felt delightfully obscene.

  Roth realized that his fingers were trembling.

  “The United States,” Roth said absently. “We don’t have the same liberties there.”

  “That’s never stopped you before.”

  The notion swarmed Roth like bees from a disturbed hive. Hope. More than hope—a desperate urgency to possess. Pounding heart, dry mouth. He was no fool. He would neither fight the emotion nor show it. After lingering so long on the edges of his mind, the desire to possess this one lost hope swallowed him. This is what Roth lived for, the purest form of power found in the very emotion that at this very moment raged through his body.

  In his mind’s eye he was already flying to America. He would have to move quickly, set the trap immediately. There was no telling how long they would keep the old Jew’s collectibles in Los Angeles.

  Roth stared into his father’s blue eyes for a few long seconds, torn between the man’s mad obsession with the past and his own with the future. What Roth did for tomorrow, Gerhard did because of yesterday. Who was the better man?