Blessed Child Page 12

  Donna returned her attention to the stage, where Crandal was making an adamant statement about some budget proposal he assured them would revolutionize American politics.

  “It’s a plan the American people have deserved for a century but haven’t gathered the stomach to insist upon. Until now, that is. Now they insist, and so must I, ladies and gentlemen.” The man’s jowls shook when he spoke, but not enough to distract from the force of his words. His voice was low and it crackled, drawing Jason in with the first few syllables. A silence had settled over the gathering, and the words engaged their attention like a bullwhip over the heads of sluggard oxen.

  “Mediocrity has taken the teeth out of our lives. Make no mistake about it, I will beg the people to demand their power back, and I will give the people what they demand.”

  He delivered his diatribe with precision, like a laser beam that dispensed with the mind and went straight for the spine. His eyes cut across the crowd, deep-set and knowing. They settled on Jason for a moment, and when they moved on, he felt oddly relieved. An uncanny power possessed this man. Politics had never interested Jason much, but standing eight feet from the stage now, listening to this large man demanding their allegiance, he couldn’t help wanting to give it. It was more than good sense that flowed from him; it was a raw brilliance that insisted on being honored, if not revered.

  A tall man with eyes as black as coal stood in a blue pinstripe suit in front of the stage to Crandal’s left, his legs spread and his arms gripped behind his back. He was the kind you might expect from the Mafia—a hatchet man who was clearly more interested in security than kissing the hands of old ladies.

  The reporters scribbled notes and listened with rapt attention, and when Crandal ended his three-minute speech, they blurted their questions almost as one. Crandal let them ask, ignoring them as if he hadn’t heard them at all. He turned to face the NBC camera and invited Donna with an open palm. “I’ll start with you, Donna.”

  Donna asked her question, but Jason hardly heard it. He watched her staring at Crandal—the way she carried herself, the movement of her jaw— and it occurred to him that she spoke with an authority that nearly matched Crandal’s. He was witness to the making of power. This was how it was done in the greatest of nations. This was how a person rose to command the largest and most powerful army in the world: by engaging a brilliant young reporter with smiling eyes and capturing her heart. Not in a romantic sense, of course, but in a way perhaps far more compelling.

  “Well then, we’ll just have to see if the people can remember what it means to be American, won’t we, Donna?” Crandal said. A few chuckles rippled through the crowd.

  “And if you wouldn’t mind, sir, what exactly does it mean to be American?” Donna redirected.

  Crandal’s smile faded and he spoke as if lecturing. “It means we demand freedom. It means we will die for that freedom if need be. And in the event some of you might have misplaced your memory, freedom is a state of existence unrestrained by slavery, regardless of the master, whether he be armed with a hammer and a sickle or a document called the law.” He let the comment sink in and then removed his eyes from her. A dozen questions filled the air.

  Yes indeed, the making of power.

  Jason remembered the boy and he glanced to his right. The Greek was fixated on the stage, big nose matched by a jutting chin. Leiah stood watching the exchange between Crandal and another reporter. She caught Jason’s eye and smiled. The boy was by her side, his hand in hers. He stood stiff like a board and his eyes were glued to the candidate. Yes, of course, Caleb was why they had come in the first place. He looked like an awe-struck child gazing in at a circus for the first time.

  For ten minutes Crandal handled the media’s questions as if he were in a jousting match and he the repeated victor. The media seemed to sense it too. They knew they were watching a man of destiny, and their eyes were bright with the knowledge.

  “And how would you characterize the current administration’s proposal to trim the fifth fleet?” a question came.

  “I would say that Murdock should spend more time trimming his waistline and less time tinkering with toys he knows nothing about,” the former director of the National Security Agency responded. Now there, only a man who had them on their knees already could get away with a statement like that. Any other political pundit would be beheaded by the press for the comment.

  “How do you respond to critics who say your experience with the NSA casts shadows on your political integrity?”

  “I suggest they go for a long walk and study our beautiful skies. If they happen to see a MiG screaming out of the sky, releasing a string of nuclear weapons, then I would tell them to vote for the opposition. But if by chance they find the skies clear, then I would invite them to vote for the man who granted them this gift.” They chuckled.

  The event felt more like a stage show that topped the best Hollywood could offer than a political rally. According to Donna, the show was scheduled to last thirty minutes today.

  But the boy changed that.

  It came in a moment of unusual silence that Caleb’s soft voice spoke to Jason’s right. “He is the Tempest.”

  Jason raised his brow. The words were barely loud enough for Jason to hear, much less Crandal, but the man’s eyes flickered and blinked three or four times very rapidly. He turned his head and stared at the NBC camera as if lost for the moment. Then his eyes searched each of their faces. Caleb stood wooden, unblinking, placid, except for the trembling in his fingers.

  “This man will bring a new tempest to the earth.”

  Several reporters, oblivious to the small distraction, resumed their questioning, but Jason doubted Crandal even heard them. His eyes were on the boy now, deadlocked and unwavering. Caleb soaked in his stare without flinching.

  Donna looked quickly between the statesman and the boy; she had seen that connection too.

  Crandal broke his gaze and faced the crowd. “Well, ladies and gentlemen . . .” He paused, at a loss for words, Jason thought. But he quickly recovered. “All good things must come to an end. Your understanding of the issues we face in this election has once again been stunning for a mob of journalists. For that I thank you. We’ll meet again, I am sure.”

  With that he turned on his heels and strode from the platform. The tall man Jason had pegged as a Mafia type bolted around the stage, glanced back toward Caleb one last time, and was gone. Immediately the crowd began to disperse.

  “What in God’s name was that?” Donna asked.

  Leiah stared up at the empty stage. “You should ask? That was what you brought him here for.” She pulled the boy to her and turned to leave. “We don’t belong here,” she said and walked for the car with Caleb in hand.

  Blane Roberts slid into the limousine next to Crandal, his mind churning incomprehensibly. The boy had said Tempest, hadn’t he? He had actually identified Crandal as the Tempest, which made no sense. Then again, any comment even associating Crandal with Tempest made perfect sense. If he was not Tempest, he had certainly created Tempest. And now a small half-breed had said so. Which was a problem. Not only because no one in this hemisphere could possibly know about Tempest, but because a small boy who seemed to be able to read minds had done so in public. The NBC reporter had heard, he thought.

  Roberts closed the car door with a thump.

  “I’m not even going to ask for an explanation,” Crandal said without turning. “But unless I’m missing something here, we’ve got a problem.”

  “Yes sir, it seems that way. I’ll take care of it.”

  “I’m sure you will.”

  Encouraged by a red face, a bead of sweat snaked down the candidate’s temple. Crandal rarely yelled, at least not with his mouth. But he did wear his anger, and right now it clothed him like a king. His left hand held a tremor, and his jaw muscles tensed as if they were kneading bread. The rear of the limousine was insulated; the statesman could scream bloody murder without a single syllable being heard by ev
en the driver. But for all practical purposes, he was screaming bloody murder and Roberts diverted his eyes.

  “Give me a day or two—”

  “And you’ll what? Kill the kid? Abduct him? Steal him from his sorry parents and slit his throat? Of course that’s what you’ll do because that’s what you do best, isn’t it, Roberts?”

  Roberts blinked. “He’s a problem. I’ll take care of him.”

  “Do it quickly.”

  The large man put a finger under his collar and stretched his neck. The smell of Old Spice stung Roberts’s nose. Crandal breathed heavily, uncharacteristic for the seasoned veteran of high drama. Roberts knew what he was going to say before he spoke.

  “I thought there were no leaks on Tempest.”

  “There aren’t.”

  “And I suppose you’re going to suggest the boy just happened to look up at me and pull the word out of thin air.”

  “I don’t know, but it doesn’t necessarily mean he knows we orchestrated the invasion of Ethiopia. He couldn’t. He’s a kid, for goodness’ sake!”

  “I don’t care if he’s a dog; he knows more than you think he knows! He stood there and stared me down, and I’m telling you this kid knows something!”

  “And I’ll take care of him.”

  “How could a kid come across this? He didn’t just grab a word like Tempest out of thin air. So who else knows? Find out. I don’t need to tell you what this could do to our mission. We just launched a war over there to keep Tempest quiet. And now a kid waltzes into one of our press conferences and fingers us? He could be Ethiopian for all we know, straight from the war zone!”

  Roberts wanted to tell Crandal that the boy looked about as Ethiopian as Mickey Mouse, but his employer’s bone-rattling tone made him reconsider. And the questions were valid. He ground his teeth and took a deep breath. “I’ll take care of it,” he said.

  Crandal paused, taking the time to breathe through his nostrils. “If it happens again, I may begin to doubt.”

  “I said I’ll take care of it.”

  12

  Day 6

  CALEB SAT IN THE CORNER OF THE BED and ran an open palm over the wool blanket. It felt lumpy, which meant the sheet underneath was probably messed up. He slipped to the floor, reached under the blanket, jerked the sheet straight, and jumped back onto the bed.

  There was a small room attached with a toilet and a shower in it, and he’d used the toilet more than the shower. Besides the bed itself, the only other piece of furniture was the shiny box in the corner, which he’d examined once without any understanding. Being here in the dark for so many hours felt kind of like a long meditation, although one with a twist to be sure.

  In the monastery his daily meditation had lasted two or three hours, or sometimes four hours if he got “lost,” as one of the priests once called it. They all meditated, but he suspected that none of the others enjoyed it as much as he did. Dadda did, of course, but then Dadda was the one who’d shown him in the first place.

  “Be still, Caleb. Just be still and wait. Like it says, Be still, and know that I am God. Wait upon the Lord.”

  “And what if I get tired of being still?”

  “Then it means you haven’t waited long enough.”

  “Did Jesus meditate?”

  “He went away every night. Once for forty days.”

  That was at age four, and forty days sounded like forever. What his father probably didn’t know was that Caleb had been meditating for over a year already, ever since that first time he’d poked his eye and seen the light. He didn’t call it meditation; he just shut his eyes like Dadda did and thought about the kingdom of heaven and about Jesus. Usually nothing happened. Unless you count falling asleep as something, because he’d done plenty of sleeping.

  For all its fancy sounding, meditation was really nothing more than resting your mind and then walking into the light. Into the kingdom. At least that’s how he thought of it. By the time he was five, Caleb had decided that there could be nothing as pleasing as walking in God’s kingdom.

  Now in this dark room he had all the time in the world to fill his mind with God and that was good. The twist was that he was being locked in the room by the witch.

  He closed his eyes and hummed softly to himself.

  This was one thing Dadda had not told him about clearly enough, he’d decided. This strange world with all of these odd people. It felt like a storybook land, full of bigger-than-life characters. Everything they did seemed awkward and backward. For starters, he hadn’t seen any of them sit still for more than a few minutes. Maybe they meditated while he remained locked in the room, but somehow he doubted it. They ran about with frowns and scrunched brows and seemed much too bothered to have come from having waited on anything, much less God.

  Leiah loved him. If Father Nikolous would allow it, she would spend all day with him, he thought. She and Jason only came for about an hour each day so far, but it was a wonderful hour. They made him think of Dadda.

  And Dadda was gone, wasn’t he? Dadda was with God. That made him sad, not because his father was with God but because he missed him.

  “Take care of him,” Caleb whispered. “I miss you, Dadda.”

  I will be your Father, Caleb. Just like I am Dadda’s Father.

  Caleb blinked in the darkness and nodded at the familiar nudge. He smiled and cleared his throat.

  “And I will be your son,” he whispered.

  We will walk through the kingdom together.

  “We will walk through the kingdom together.”

  My kingdom.

  “Your kingdom.”

  Caleb waited for a moment and then lay down on his side, feeling warm now. For a long time he just rested there, lingering in the peace. Gradually his mind drifted through the world outside of his door.

  What was Tempest? He wasn’t sure, but he did know that it was a very bad thing. The kind of evil that had filled Saul when he’d tried to kill David. He knew that and he knew that the big man speaking in the park was Tempest. He wasn’t even sure how his mind had formed the word, but it had, and he thought he should tell someone about it. They’d nearly fainted when he said it; that’s for sure.

  They also seemed surprised when he made things right, as if he were doing something he really shouldn’t be doing. But actually he was doing what anybody would do, wasn’t he?

  That man who’d died in the canyon, for example. How could they just stand by with the poor man dying on the sand? He hadn’t understood all their yelling and their popping sticks in the first place—it really seemed quite silly to him. But then the man had died and Caleb just couldn’t sit by and watch. He’d asked God for the man’s life and God had given it, which was a good thing.

  Samuel, the boy in the church, had been blind, like the blind man that Jesus had healed with mud. He’d never seen a blind person before, and he decided right then that Samuel would want to see the cross. The memory of the boy jumping up and down made him chuckle in the darkness. Caleb had almost started jumping up and down with the boy, right there in front of the priest.

  Now that woman who thought he was a psychic or whatever, that was different. She clearly needed to see better. She hadn’t yet, but she would soon enough, he thought. The breaking glasses had been maybe a little much, but then Jesus had used mud, hadn’t he? And he’d cursed a fig tree. He’d also turned water into wine. The glass wasn’t a mountain, but when he told it to move, it sure did.

  Caleb smiled. The pillow was soft under his cheek and he snuggled into it. Thank you, Father. You are so good to me.

  A click suddenly sounded at the latch and the door swung in. A wedge of light parted the room; Caleb sat up and swung his legs over the bed. The witch walked in. He called her “the witch” in his mind because she reminded him of the time he’d asked Dadda what a witch was after reading about them in the Scripture. Martha was the first person he’d met that didn’t seem out of place with Dadda’s description.

  She stood in the doorway
with her hands on her hips, casting a long shadow into the room. If she owned any clothes besides the dark dresses that made her look fat, she didn’t wear them. He couldn’t see her eyes because of the shadow that swallowed her face, but he imagined them, and a small chill shot down his spine.

  Usually Father Nikolous visited with her once a day, and she was always much kinder when he was with her. Now he was not.

  “How’s our little prince?”

  She always asked questions without waiting for an answer. He wondered if all witches were like that. Not that she was a real witch.

  Martha looked about the room, saw that nothing was out of place, and walked to the bathroom. She looked in, humphed, and pulled her head out. Caleb couldn’t help thinking that if he’d have left a drop of water on the floor, she would be scolding him about it. It wasn’t a pigpen after all.

  Martha walked back to the door and turned around, still surrounded by shadows, so that she looked like a black snowman in the doorframe.

  “Father Nikolous wants you to go with him to a meeting tomorrow. Which means it’s my job to make sure you do just that without causing any trouble.”

  Again she paused as if he should say something.

  “Are you deaf, boy?”

  “No, Auntie.”

  “Then you answer me when I speak to you. You don’t fool me; you’re a troublemaker, boy. And if there’s one thing I detest in this world, it’s troublemakers. Now you may think the world is just one big peachy place filled with people who run at your every beck and call, but believe me, boy, you’re going to learn different.”

  She walked farther in and the light caught her eyes now. He wanted to tell her that he’d never thought of the world as one big peachy place, but the words seemed to stick in his throat.

  “If it were up to me, I’d have given you at least one good whipping by now. If for nothing but your snotty attitude. Now, if you get Nikolous upset, I don’t think he’d mind me giving you a good whipping. So tomorrow you go with him, you understand?”