The Unreconciled

By Eric Young

A Caliph rules America after the Christian Holocaust. Denisa Graceon, archeologist, is employed by an enigmatic Cardinal to locate Christian relics there. Beginning her search at the University of Virginia, where Jefferson’s dream has become an oppressive nightmare, Denisa meets the Imam’s debonair son, who, abhorring the radical Islamic vision, leads a clandestine rebellion and, hypnotized by her intellectual exuberance, aids her quest. Searching deep in Appalachia’s wilderness she discovers the Unreconciled, the last American Christians. Immersed in Christianity, she is born again and becomes enamored by “Hawkeye”, the swarthy, Adonis, who guards the very relic she had come to steal. When she learns the Caliph plans to annihilate them, she realizes only she can save them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ambassador International
• Release date: Dec 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781620201077

Book preview

THE UNRECONCILED

This is a fictional work. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locations is entirely coincidental.

© 2012 by Eric Young

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a data base or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-62020-105-3

eISBN: 978-1-62020-107-7

Cover design: Matthew Mulder

Typesetting: Matthew Mulder

E-book conversion: Anna Riebe

AMBASSADOR INTERNATIONAL

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For my girls

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter I

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

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Chapter 92

Chapter 93

More Information

CHAPTER I

DARKNESS BLANKETED THE EARTH. But soon dawn would peel away the dark, and the light at last would return to us. For the moment, though, I could not see my hands as they gripped the horse’s reins. When we had started the evening before, it had not been as dark. A waning moon had given a soft blue glow to the reels and valleys before us. The moon now had set in the west ahead of us. Or at least it had slipped behind the ridge that had risen before our approach.

Somehow, when the moon went down, everything had become quieter. We had not dared to speak so much as a whisper for some time. For many hours the only sounds to be heard in the early April night were three horses’ hooves falling softly on unbroken earth, their heavy breathing, and my companions’ and my labored panting of heavy, cold air. It seemed that night had been eternal; yet we had only spent about eight hours traveling beneath the cover of darkness through a long, shallow valley, toward a steep ridge standing across its end. The moon had set ominously behind it nearly an hour earlier, and now we at last were at its base.

Slowly, our mounts weaved their way along a well worn cow path up the slope. It was barely spring there. The frosted grasses crunched and crackled beneath their hooves. Obscured by the ridge from the setting moon’s light, the horses struggled up the hill in pitch darkness.

My heart pounded. My breathing labored as I struggled to keep my balance. I leaned forward more and more. My chest pressed firmly against the mighty muscles in the horse’s shoulders. I felt them work beneath my weight. The coarse hair of his sweaty mane filled my white-knuckled grip. Nearly cheek to cheek, we both huffed and strained. Visions of a fatal, endless tumble through the darkness pressed as tightly on my mind as I pressed upon the beast. Each misstep, and there were many, brought a clenching of my knees against his ribs.

I was too old for it. My hair was white. The corners of my eyes had begun to look like roadmaps. By then I was fifty; my long, thick frame could not survive such a fall. Yes, I was a veteran of many such treks into the unknown corners of the Earth; yet with each such trip, my concern that I had agreed to one trek too many grew. This was the last leg of a week-long journey into a place ignored by time and forgotten to God.

The three of us had begun the journey with an unsettling plane ride. Then five days earlier, we had the pleasure of river rafting through an even cooler night. Two nights we had ridden the river north, sleeping by day so as to remain unseen. The moon truly had been full then; we also had had the good sense to stop when it went down. Yet, we still had been fools enough to battle frothing waters in the darkness; that alone had rattled my bones and frozen my joints near to the point of surrender.

For another two nights, we had hacked our way through a dense forest, punctuating our suffering by repelling down a 200-foot rock face. All of which brought us to a tiny village of aboriginals. There our leader haggled with them for crude directions I did not understand. Moreover, I was not sure whether we had bought or rented the poor, unfortunate horses that trod with us, in the darkness, for two more nights to reach the ominous ridge. Trusting them then with our very lives, we spurred them ever up the slope.

Of course, the danger on the trip likely was far less than I had perceived. Or at least I tried to convince myself, thinking, After all, the river was only cold water and rocks; and what is a forest but trees? The horses certainly were strong, sure footed, and had a better view of the ground than I. Or at least I hoped, because I could see almost nothing.

The last steep step in our journey demanded our rapt attention. But I could not help entertaining a little resentment of our leader, who had failed to mention to us that this last measure of courage would be required at the end. Though it should have come as no surprise to me that the ridge stood before us: the most arduous moment of our journey was at the very end. Our leader inevitably saved the worst for last. I only wished she had chosen to advance to the top of the ridge beneath the moonlight. I knew we had to go in the dark or risk being killed by natives. But the moonlight had been a help. She, however, was young and spry, with her eyes ever on the prize before her.

She led the three of us. Of course, she would have come alone. We had come more to protect her than for the prize. She was my daughter, Denisa. She had mastered repelling and white water rafting, and was an accomplished equestrian. It seemed dangers that loomed large in my mind never gave her pause.

Behind me was Rasheed, whom I had called Sheed since he was a gangly teenager. He had been my companion for the many years, after I found him in an orphanage in Qua-la-lam-pac. Denisa called him Gunga Din on those journeys to tease him. Erstwhile, she called him Uncle Sheed.

Denisa had brought us to that wilderness at the end of the Earth. At thirty-two years of age and single, her life’s passion was searching for pieces of the past, relics of a lost time. In that pursuit she had studied at the greatest universities of the world. She had studied three dead languages; she spoke seven modern ones. She could quote the Koran, most sayings of the Buddha, and the remnants of holy books of many lost cults and sects.

Despite all her god-given talents and acquired skills, she could not, it seemed, move out of my cellar. I complained of it to Sheed constantly. Secretly, however, I did not mind at all. Her mother was dead. The day Denisa moved out would be the day I would be alone. Though I found Sheed’s nine children and their exploits entertaining, the stark prospect of living alone disturbed me.

Denisa’s life to me seemed interrupted. Each year since her mother’s death ten years earlier, she had become more withdrawn. I had hoped moving to Charlottesville would inspire her to engage the world again. Unfortunately, there she had lost interest in dating entirely and recoiled into the basement of our modest home. There she divined copies of ancient texts and plotted our next adventures. Unsure of how to change her attitude, I humored her and had not retired from the secretive hobby of mine and Sheed’s. In fact, after her mother’s death, I began to bring her with us to keep her engaged in some productive endeavor. Over the years, our rolls changed. By then, she was bringing me along—at least in her mind.

Sheed and I had discussed Denisa’s need for a mate quite a bit on that trip without being able to devise a plan to save her youth. Though he vowed that very day to find a good, sophisticated man for her, when we returned to civilization nothing changed. All the while, we admired her for who she had become. She loved life in the bush. There she could live life unfettered by the bonds of womanhood that she found so oppressive. There she could lead, and I was willing to be the follower for her sake. On those trips she could speak loud and wear men’s plaid shirts and raggedy jeans. Oh, she polished up when she wanted. She had her mother’s curly red hair down to her shoulders, which in the bush she fancied to draw into a long pony tail beneath a wide brimmed hat. Despite how she dressed herself, she had an undeniably feminine figure, pearl white teeth, and crystal blue eyes. And her demure smile surely was as beguiling to her would-be suitors then as it had been disarming to me since her birth. Of course the world would never see that— unless it could be seen from my basement. That night she was in her full glory, in the wilderness.

Suddenly, she whipped her Appaloosa vigorously. It kicked up dirt. It lurched to the crest of the ridge in wide-eyed desperation. At the sight of it, my horse picked up his pace. He sprinted to the top as well. There I pulled the reins, turning my mount to watch for Sheed. His horse too had jerked to the finish right behind mine without expecting me to turn. Abruptly eyeball to eyeball and shoulder to shoulder, our horses were startled, jostling back and forth. There was a clamoring of hooves and gear, but fortunately there were no frightened whinnies. Satisfied we had reached the top, I dismounted. Sheed, dismounting, fell backward into me, and we both dropped to the ground. Denisa glared down at us with contempt. So did our horses.

Both Sheed and I were tired and old. Sheed loved stories about adventure much more than adventure itself. Truthfully, neither of us was very good at it. We smiled at each other and climbed to our feet like boxers in late rounds. She ignored us.

Denisa had come in search of a relic from an extinct religion. That morning would be the culmination of not only that torturous trip but years of study and research for her. What at first I had encouraged as a welcomed distraction from her grief over her mother had grown to an obsession. Though I had spent many years of my life searching for relics, even before she was born, I had sought them because they were valued by someone willing to compensate me for them. For her it was different: She found that they allowed her to somehow commune with a past she never experienced. I lacked that emotional attachment to them.

At that moment she was driven by a singular focus. For some danger, stress, and anticipation make them nervous or giddy. But for others who possess an unquestioned sense of purpose, those emotions yield to an almost supernatural confidence—born of an undiluted sense of destiny. She was of the later sort. Like a great athlete in the final seconds of a close game or a soldier at the pivotal point in battle, she moved with a daunting aura.

I kept thinking how much my hind quarters hurt. I rubbed my buttocks and held up my left foot and shook it to loosen my aching thighs. Sheed likewise was twisting at the waist and accounting his pains. Denisa removed her hat with her right hand and wiped her brow with her right forearm in a single, smooth motion. All in the same smooth motion, she returned the hat to her head. This she did while keeping her eyes fixed on the western horizon. There lay a more gentle slope opposite the side we had just ascended. A quick exhale and she was leading her horse down the western side of the ridge, toward a little grove of trees. I groped in the darkness for my horse’s bridle. Once I had charge of the animal, I turned to see Sheed coming up behind us.

In the grove we tied our horses beside Denisa’s and wandered downhill. There, the moon had yet to set. At the same time, a faint glimmer of dawn breached the darkness in the east behind us. Only then could we at last see enough to function.

We came to a clearing about a hundred by fifty feet wide. She already was at the far end of it, by the time I could see her, crouched with her right hand’s finger tips planted on the ground by her right side to support her. Her left hand held binoculars to her face. Eagerly, she leaned forward. Sheed and I knelt on opposite sides of her, straining to see what she saw.

How can you see? Sheed asked, squinting.

Shh! She growled.

Sheed pressed, Are those night vision? Whipping his head around to her face, he concluded, They are night vision. Where did you—

Hush! She interrupted without removing her eyes from the binoculars.

Sheed would not be silenced and persisted in a hostile tone, How can you do this? I have rafted, hiked, and ridden these animals. he pointed back toward the horses, for a week in the dark, while you, you had night vision goggles in your little pack.

Sheed loved the feeling of being prepared and hated being without some piece of technology that could lessen the work. Denisa was lucky to remember her coat in winter when preoccupied with some mystery. She ignored his rant, stood, and dropped the goggles to the ground between where Sheed and I knelt. Without a word, she strode back up the hill toward the horses.

Sheed picked up the goggles. I watched her silhouette, cast against the brightening eastern sky, disappearing into the woods, on the uphill side of the clearing. I did not know how to take her stomping off. Had she not seen what she had hoped to see there? Was she angry and distraught? I thought that perhaps in frustration she would return home, trash all her books and maps, marry the first rascal who came along, and move out of my basement. I thought for a moment more and concluded that the more likely scenario would be that she would go to her saddlebag, rustle her maps a bit, curse, look at the sky, and declare that we were one hundred miles off course.

That would be most unfortunate for our mission. We had come to observe something that was to occur at daybreak only on the spring equinox. If we were in the wrong place, there would not be any time for us to find it. Of course, by my calculations, the spring equinox already had passed. Denisa, however, had decided that the event happened annually—actually several days after the equinox. It was in her mind to happen on that spot on that day, at that very hour. If the spot was wrong, we had missed it. That would make for a very unpleasant ride home.

Look! Sheed patted me on my knee as he stretched out prone. I turned back to face the direction he was looking and stretched out flat. We looked at another broad, flat valley below.

A primal stream meandered westward like a silver ribbon, disappearing at length into the distant fog. No doubt over the eons it had worn smooth the surrounding flood plain that lay gently frosted on both sides of it. I could only imagine the tender green grass carpet over it that daylight soon would reveal.

Still looking through the goggles, Sheed stood and walked ahead, trying to see something on the horizon. I followed him, watching his feet while he peered into the goggles. Placing a hand on his shoulder, I stopped him. We both looked about our feet. The grove had grown on a giant monolith, an enormous rock extending from the ridge top. In front of us the soil had run out, and we were standing on bare rock. Just a few feet ahead of us the rock ran out, and the face of a cliff dropped sheer below us to the valley floor. The fall would easily be a hundred feet or more. We dropped and crawled on our bellies to the ledge.

Below us was a nearly bare canopy of trees bearing only the tiny buds of spring. So dense they were, however, that they gave the illusion of solid ground below. I figured the trees themselves at fifty feet and thereby estimated the drop to solid earth to be more than a hundred.

After peering silently through the goggles for a minute or two, leaning forward on his elbows, Sheed handed them to me. He smiled a broad smile such that his teeth glimmered in the blue light. She is right. She is right. They have come.

By then, though, I did not need the goggles. I saw a tiny speck of golden light flickering on the western horizon on the north side of the stream. He had seen in the goggles what would not be clear to the naked eye for some time. The golden speck was actually a procession of torch-bearing savages following the stream in the darkness. They too were headed toward the ridge.

How will we get down there in time? I whispered to Sheed.

At that moment we both turned quickly, startled by a thud on the rock behind us. There Denisa had dropped a large nylon rope. She was standing over top of us, looping the rope around her waist. We repel, she answered. She already had tied one end of it to an automobile-sized piece of rock jutting out behind us.

Sheed stood in defiance. I am not climbing down there into the dark! They may sacrifice humans. Who knows? And there will be no way back up.

Denisa continued arranging her gear.

Walking to the precipice, she flatly responded, as she passed between us, You’re right, Sheed, you won’t. You’ll pull us up. She turned a few feet ahead of us to face us with the other end of the rope wrapped around her hips. She had it clipped together in her hands.

Us? I queried.

She smiled and dropped out of sight. I panicked. I rushed to the ledge. From where she had stood an instant before, I saw her repelling gracefully into the naked canopy below. I turned to Sheed, who stood shaking his head in disapproval.

When Denisa and I were safely on a lower ledge, half way to the bottom, she gave a jerk on the rope and, unseen above us, Sheed began to pull it up. My descent had not been so graceful. I was looking over my torn shirt and skinned elbow when I noticed the rope slithering away.

Whoa! Where’s the rope going? I asked.

She put a gloved finger to my lips and whispered, They will see it when the sun comes up. Sheed can drop it later. I stared longingly back at the rock face above us. She crept off among the trees.

I then tasted the leather glove on my lips. I hurried to catch up with her. I stammered breathless in her ear as I crouched beside her, You had gloves? My hands are on fire, and you had gloves. I have rowed a raft, ridden a horse, and held a rope, while you had gloves.

She calmly pulled off her gloves and handed them to me. She then sat on her behind and began fishing a note pad and a digital video recorder from her backpack. I stared at the gloves for a while. Then I began to look around. We were on another rock, hanging over a large pond from which the stream flowed. The pond, I deduced, extended from beneath the massive rock. I suspected the entire ridge likely was a singular rock, beneath which there was a great cave, hewn by the water pooling and flowing from its mouth at the surface.

As we crawled flat on our bellies towards the utmost edge of the rock, a bevy of bats returned from their nighttime frolic. Rattling through the trees behind us, over our heads, they turned and dived into the open cave mouth below us.

I leaned on her, subconsciously hoping somehow to protect her in the event we were assailed by bats. I soon concluded we were masked by brush, limbs, and a scattering of loose rocks, such that we would be invisible to the torch-bearing procession. Meanwhile, they were becoming completely visible to us.

I was stunned by their numbers. More shocking still, they were white. White people were rare in that part of the world. Never had I seen so many in one place at one time in that country. I wondered, How did they get here? How could they be here for so long, cut off from the fate of other whites? How were they unknown to us? It simply was not possible. Their presence there defied all we knew of history. Yet, there before us were hundreds of them. Each carried a torch.

There they were—whites practicing an extinct religion that was older than time itself, in a place where whites ought not to be at all. I grinned, swelling with pride, thinking, Denisa has done it, the find of finds!

I watched in awe as the ceremony began. This was perhaps the last cult of a faith that long ago had perished from the Earth, leaving only those expensive relics Sheed and I had spent a lifetime collecting. No one would believe their faith still was practiced. More shocking still would be the notion that they were white.

Denisa carefully placed her recorder on a rock in front of her to capture the moment. Yet, in the tradition of her art, she dutifully scribbled notes in the little book she held in her hands. I watched her for a moment, wondering how she could so calmly rely on the machine to capture images she had so longed to see and not choose to see them instead with her own eyes. Then it dawned on me: she understood their language. She was listening carefully in hopes of translating. It was a language lost to the spoken word long ago. She and only a few professors around the world dared try to decipher it. I suspected she alone could speak it.

They gathered closer to the pond. One by one, they deposited their torches there very solemnly. The man I took to be the Shaman or priest stood on a rock sticking up from the middle of the pond. He waited patiently until all the torches were doused and the procession had assembled around the pond. All this was done in silence. Denisa continued to scribble.

They sang. A dull melody resonated from the walls of the cave below, filling the valley with a slow, sad tune I did not understand. Yet the sincerity of their harmony gave me goose bumps. It was slow, unthreatening, and, while a little sad, seemed not to sadden them. Of course, I did not understand a word. Denisa wrote with fury, hazarding a glance for herself on occasion.

After the song, their Shaman spoke. They all knelt in unison around the edge of the pond. A hundred hues of blue dawn twilight had brightened the valley. As if lifted up by their singing, the sun rose above the ridge behind us. In front of them, the pond suddenly shimmered of silver. While behind them, the first rays of sunlight illuminated the mist hanging over them to a spectacular gold. Their combined reverence pervaded the air. It indeed was an intoxicating sight to behold.

After some time, their Shaman began to speak again. He was accompanied by the multitude. I peeped over Denisa’s shoulder to read her translation,

Our father who art in heaven…

CHAPTER 2

ONCE THE CULT MEMBERS had disbursed, we spent the remainder of the day at the bottom of the ridge, digging around the entrance of the cave. We found some interesting pieces: a ceremonial goblet, some tiny drinking glasses, and a silk stole with the Greek letter Alpha on it.

But the real gem was the audio and video recording of the ritual. No one would believe the religion was still practiced, especially there. More stunningly, those practicing it were white, speaking a dead language. I pondered silently, Why here? How had they come to be so far from their ancestral home, worshipping a long abandoned god in a forgotten tongue? The video recording proved what no one else would believe. Our benefactor would be well pleased.

Yet, Denisa wanted more. She wanted the one true relic that had eluded her on that and several other trips. Again, though, it appeared to be just out of reach. She was convinced the true find was in the cave. Standing at the bottom of the west side of the ridge, where their priest had stood, was a great pool of water. It seemed somewhat less magical in the light of full day without the reflection of a thousand torches to adorn it.

In the middle was a large rock where the priest had stood. Denisa waded out to that point and looked back at the hillside. As the water, rock, and bats had indicated, the entire ridge was a giant cave. The western face was a massive, concave rock face that formed a large, vertical bowl. Its face had been worn smooth as glass by vast amounts of wind and rain over obviously enormous geological time.

Just above the water’s surface, an opening about six feet high and twelve feet wide gaped open, a mouth to an abyss. Cool air pushed out of it in the mid-morning sun. I felt the Earth itself breathed on us.

Sheed and I did not like it. Denisa was hypnotized by it. She was convinced the relic she so desperately sought was deep within the cave. But that was not our mission. Ours was a scouting trip to determine whether the rumors of the cult were true and whether the ceremony was still practiced. For more than a year, the plan had been to verify the location of the relic and to return later, with equipment, specialists, and, most importantly, security. Denisa wanted to seize the moment and splash headlong into the cave.

I let Sheed take the lead in convincing her doing so would be madness. We did not have the equipment to explore the cave. Even if we did not get lost, we would likely emerge from the cave into a host of very inhospitable natives. We absolutely had to leave and come back. She stood there on the rock, her pant legs rolled up past her knees, her face shadowed by her wide brimmed hat, pointing at the cave and pacing back and forth on the rock for nearly an hour. Sheed stood on the shore gesturing just as wildly, pointing to the hillsides where he was convinced thousands of blood-thirsty natives were poised to swoop down on us.

It proved later to be a pivotal moment in all our lives. She relented. Denisa finally agreed to stick with the plan. We made our way back to the top of the ridge on foot and slept in the grove of trees beside the horses until dark. Homeward we went toward the rising moon.

Not surprising, the river we had rafted down had not changed course for our convenience. So, the horses carried us for ten days through a wilderness. We finally popped out of the forest only a few miles from the village we had flown into two weeks earlier. Apparently, we had either bought or stolen the horses, because we sold them there. They fetched enough to pay to sleep in the airport, eat our fill of beans and rice, and have hot baths all around. The next morning we left by air for the capital, cleaner and far more fragrant.

When the plane leveled off, I looked a few rows back at Denisa. I could not see her face, but her slumped shoulders assured me she already was asleep. I was glad to see her sleeping. I had dragged her to her feet that morning in the airport and virtually pushed her onto the plane. Oh, how she hated city life and dreaded returning.

I had hoped to talk with her more on that trip than I had. You might imagine that with only three people and fourteen days of horseback riding, there would be plenty of conversation. There was—about our mission, the relics we found, our home in Charlottesville, chores and errands to be done when we returned. But I had hoped, as I always did on those trips, to talk to her about her life, her dreams, her need to marry someone. There was an undeniable space between us because we never discussed our past together, particularly her mother’s death. Watching her silently riding a few paces ahead of us for hours, I felt deserted by her, even though she still lived with me. I had hoped on that trip we could somehow discuss her mother’s death and come to grips with it. I knew the problem was and always had been that she blamed me for it.

And she would always blame me for it, so long as I continued to lie to her about how it happened. But I preferred her to hate the parent she had, rather than the one she had lost; because I could eventually atone for it, while her mother never could.

Sheed was somewhere in front of me, certainly asleep as well. I could not see him. He blended among the dark-skinned faces. I, on the other hand, stuck out—literally. At six foot five and two hundred twenty pounds, I towered over the rest of the world, it seemed. A gray-haired, white man, a full foot taller than everyone else, I was sure I was a bit intimidating to everyone around me.

It had not always been that way. I say I found Sheed in an orphanage. And that is true. But I also was an orphan there. I was only about five years old—routinely on the run from the older, bigger boys, who chose beating me as their pastime. Fleeing from them one hot, sunny day in the dusty compound of the orphanage, I found Sheed. He was six years my senior. More importantly, he had a soft spot in his heart for the only white kid in Qua-la-lam-pac. He became my protector. Over the years I grew to be much larger than he. When it came time to leave for college, he took me with him to be his heavy. I had followed him ever since. He was the brains behind our little projects, not me.

Finally, I leaned up, straining against my seatbelt and craning my neck. I spotted him. He was fast asleep also. His head bobbed down on his chest tilted toward the aisle. I had noticed on the trip that his once-tar-black hair had veins of white rippling through it; his beard was more salt than pepper by now; and he was a little rounder in the middle.

Of course, I had no room to talk. As I eased back into my seat, I felt my hips pop and my back spasm. My hands were raw and my feet blistered to no end. My face peeled from either wind or sunburn. I was not sure. There were those few dings and scratches. But my daughter and best friend were both alive. Sure, it would take Sheed and me months to recover from that odyssey. But at that moment, I was happy my daughter was unscathed. I tilted my cap over my eyes and slumped into my seat for a short nap. The gentle hum of the engine quickly lulled me to sleep.

CHAPTER 3

IT SEEMED LIKE DAYS, but it was only about two hours before the intercom rudely interrupted my sleep. The pilot announced we were approaching the capital. I did not mind because I loved seeing it from the air. So did Denisa. I glanced back quickly to see if she was awake. I could only see her shoulder as she leaned over the still-sleeping passenger beside her to see out the window.

On the way back, she had wondered how her discovery would affect the cult. Our benefactor would certainly keep their location a secret. There was, however, no doubt that publication of the tapes would incite a witch hunt by the national authorities. Just before we had left, the local authorities had stoned several men to death for missing prayer. One had been quite elderly and ill. The others were younger men, whom I supposed should have known better. After all, it was a single sanction society.

I had seen many stonings in my journeys. Each was terrible in its own way. In that country, though, they seemed all the more zealous and frequent. We were certain the authorities would hunt down the cult members like rodents and execute them in a very public way. Of more concern to me was whether they would discover the source of the tapes. I had, however, the utmost confidence in our benefactor to keep our identities and most likely the recordings secret, even unto death.

Leaning towards the window as the plane dipped to circle for its approach, I saw what I had wanted to see—the plaza. Towering beneath us at more than seven hundred feet tall was the great national mosque. The call to prayer echoed forth in the capital five times a day from the solitary, alabaster pillar. It was a world-renowned masonry structure more than four hundred years old. It stood alone in the middle of a long, broad plaza where hundreds of thousands gathered to pray. The plaza had been a beautiful lawn, but much foot traffic in the winter had worn away the green grass, leaving only bare earth with speckles of green here and there. At one end of the plaza stood several monuments to martyrs, and at the other end, two miles away, stood the capital building housing the counsel of Imams. From them all law there emanated—both Allah’s and man’s. That was the official version, of course. In the real world, everyone knew the Imams were the anointed puppets of the dictator, who resided in the palace north of the great mosque. There dwelt the absolute ruler of each and every citizen, body and soul: the Caliph.

Unfortunately, it was not time for prayer, so we did not get to see the masses crowded onto the lawn in great human waves, rendering supplications to Allah. It was too early in the day. We would see this marvel of the world soon enough, just not from the air.

The plane accomplished its turn and rapidly descended to the runway at the national airport. The landings there always were an adventure, and that time was no different. Nevertheless, we came to a safe stop. I stood up and stretched. I looked back. Denisa already had her back to me, wrestling her bag from the overhead compartment. The recordings were inside the bag she yanked on vigorously. What would Sheed say? I thought. He likely already was off. I knew Denisa’s baggage tantrum was more frustration with being back in the city than with the overhead compartment. I decided to meet her in baggage claims.

At the end of the ramp, I found Sheed. He managed a discreet smile, and I fell in behind him walking down the concourse. When we arrived in baggage, there were hoards of women dressed in uniformly black burkas, jostling for position to retrieve bags appearing on the turn stall. Dressed in her black burka and hijab also, Denisa’s face was invisible; yet I immediately recognized her. Like me, she was taller. She towered over the other women. Otherwise, she appeared to be one and the same as the masses of women whirling about her, clad in heavy wool, black burkas with their faces forever shielded from the sight of men.

Trudging towards us, saddled with our half dozen bags on both shoulders and in her hands, she dutifully fell in behind us a good ten paces. Once she was the appropriate distance behind us, we headed for the exit. We exited and found the rental car waiting for us. She battled her way out of the doors behind us with the heavy bags whipping around her.

Sheed took a luxuriously deep breath and stretched his arms. I watched her load the bags into the trunk. She opened the back door for us. We crawled into the back seat. She slammed the door just hard enough to express her frustration. Once she had buckled herself into the driver’s seat, she pulled out into the heavy traffic. The traffic was always difficult there. Everyone knew the streets were always packed in the District of Columbia.

CHAPTER 4

DENISA IN FACT HAD studied her whole life at the world’s great universities. However, she had done so in secrecy and seclusion. Sheed was a world-renowned scholar. I was his associate professor of engineering. Together we had spent a lifetime living around the world, teaching and learning. Denisa’s mother had introduced Sheed to his wife, and we were all dear friends. Sheed knew Denisa’s mother could read and ignored it. He knew she taught Denisa to read and knew of her studies. This made him nervous for he knew, as we all did, what the penalty was for a woman reading.

What made him tolerate it was her fascination with his favorite subjects, history and archeology. Sheed loved engineering but lusted after archeology. Denisa did too—and even more so after her mother died.

For years I had brought Denisa copies of books from libraries at Oxford, Beijing, Barcelona, Baghdad, Alexandria, all the great repositories of learning. She spent endless hours listening to recordings of lectures I ferried home to her. It was our bond.

But her bond with her mother reached far beyond letters. She taught Denisa gymnastics, karaté, music, and art. By day they labored together at the most menial tasks for pennies beneath their uniform burkas; by evening they reveled in being secret scholars. It was all fun and games with them until Denisa was about twenty-two and her mother was forty-two. Then it became much more serious. Her mother, Marie, kept impressing upon Denisa the duty she had to carry on with her own daughters what Marie had handed to her. But it was crystal clear Denisa would never find a mate who would tolerate it.

Nor could I accept the risk that any suitor would discover it. The moment any would-be beau discovered her secret, he would hold the power of life and death over her. It was far better in those days to be unchaste than to be discovered literate: Because for him to claim she was unchaste , he would have to admit to sleeping with her and thereby condemn himself, while an angry lover could have her arrested for reading—an accusation difficult to disprove when the word of a woman carried no weight. And it was a single sanction society.

After her mother died, reading became far less of an issue because Denisa retreated into a shell. Most of her time was spent at home, alone with her books. As years went by, she asked for books that were increasingly harder to find. Nearly all of the religious books could only be found in the black market. It was a risk I took for her out of pity for her losing her mother: late night rendezvous on dark street corners, trading precious cash for crumpled parchment became a staple of my existence.

Denisa’s mother’s death also deeply disturbed Sheed and his family who, since then, had taken us in as their own. After several months, when Denisa’s spirit did not rebound, Sheed decided moving to America would be the best thing for all of us. Moving to the wilderness, on the frontier of civilization, would give him and Denisa a chance to pursue their hobby in places where the rules were not as strict.

So we moved to Charlottesville to teach at the public university there. It was a step down for Sheed compared to Oxford. Sheed, though, already was renowned as a scholar and optimistically expected that his presence at the university would lift up the image of the frontier more than it would demean his reputation. There, too, he could do more engineering work in the field, where many improvements begged to be made to streets, bridges, buildings, and the like. That was how they found the texts that had led us into the Appalachian Wilderness in search of the cult. Which in time brought us to Denisa navigating D.C. traffic.

We reached the plaza, unbelievably without being run over by any one of hundreds of other burka covered women driving their men about the bustling city. Not more than two hundred yards from the base of the great National Mosque, we looked up as we walked towards our benefactor’s office. Embedded on the stone wall before us were the large bronze letters CRC. We entered ahead of Denisa, who carried the only two bags of our luggage that really mattered.

Sheed spoke briefly with the guards. I had not learned to speak much Spanish, despite having been in America for nearly ten years. I blamed it on almost never leaving university grounds, where Farsi was the official language. Denisa’s fluency in Spanish did us no good, because she was not permitted by law to speak. Sheed apparently spoke enough to explain who we were and whom we were there to see.

The guard turned on his heels, and we followed him through a labyrinth of hallways. The city’s electricity was failing that day, so we were subjected to several flights of stairs. I did not know how sore I was until we climbed those stairs. I thought, How ironic it would be to fail now! I was certain Denisa still pulled up the rear, toting the heavy bags in the stuffy, hot stairwell.

After about eight flights, we reached another maze of angular hallways, which we traversed until we came to a door flanked by armed guards on either side. Spanish again, this time—mercifully—it was spoken between the guards. Suddenly, the guards came to attention with a start. The large, windowless mahogany door behind them opened.

It was Cardinal McCafferee, the man we had come to see. At last—someone who speaks Farsi! I thought. McCafferee had begun his career as a lowly monk at the orphanage where Sheed and I met. He had been a father to us since, as he was to thousands of orphans now scattered throughout the world. His life had been a marvelous story of ascent from the filthy orphanages of Indonesia to Rome itself. Everyone was certain that when the ailing pope died, McCafferee would take his place.

Even he was not immune to the passage of time. He seemed much shorter. He was about Denisa’s height. Far more round in the middle than he had been just a few years earlier, he more than filled out his red tunic and black, hooded robe. Despite the wrinkles and age spots, his smile demonstrated a heart still beat within him.

Of course, his smile was all I could see of his face. In his later years, he developed a curious allergy to vitamins contained in sunlight. Consequently, he often wore his oversized hood over his head when indoors and always covered his face with it outside. So large was the hood that only his mouth and chin remained visible below it.

Nicolas. Rasheed. He exclaimed jubilantly. A broad smile raised the rosy red cheeks of the only man on earth who called me by my full name.

Indeed, he had aged since I had last seen him, only a year before in London. His gums had receded to the point that his teeth seemed to dangle. His hands felt frail and cold in mine. While his eyes yet twinkled in their orbits, they were yellowed and bloodshot. I thought he must be nearly eighty by now. Traveling, I was sure, was difficult for him. He had come to America—all the way from Rome—to see if what Denisa had discovered was true. Of course, we had imbued him with the false belief that Sheed had in fact made the discovery: Had McCafferee known Denisa was ever put in harm’s way, he would have been furious. Yet, I suspected he sensed she was more than a mere spectator.

He welcomed us into his office with an outstretched arm around each of our waists, turning his back on Denisa, who trailed behind. We settled around an enormous mahogany table. Its top was polished to a high sheen and covered with glass. The walls too were paneled with mahogany. The thick red carpet made rolling our rich leather chairs closer to the table awkward. McCafferee sat at the head of the table. He asked Sheed about each of his nine children and listened intently. I panned my gaze around the room. Denisa sat behind me against the wall in a straight backed wooden chair, beneath a beautiful tapestry depicting the Garden of Eden. In front of me was a wall of solid glass from floor to ceiling. Though it was heavily tinted to prevent sunlight from breaching his office, it afforded a breathtaking view of the Mosque, the monuments, and, in the distance, the Caliph’s white palace.

McCafferee then turned his attention to Sheed and me. Two women entered the room from behind, baring trays of tea and tortillas with hummus. They placed the trays on the table between us without breaking our eye contact. I answered most deferentially and politely about my health, my work, my studies. Not a word was spoken of Denisa nor spoken to her. McCafferee poured three cups of tea and slid one each to Sheed and me. Not a drop was offered to Denisa.

Stirring slowly, he lamented the fact that there was no sugar in America. Then, taking a long sip and leaning back into his oversized arm chair, he looked at Sheed. Tell me, Rasheed, about your journey.

Sheed then narrated our trip, carefully interposing himself in the role of Denisa and referring to her only tangentially when the story made obvious that a third person must have been present. McCafferee laughed and gasped at all the appropriate times.

Sheed completely believed the old man was captivated by his storytelling. I suspected McCafferee’s interest was feigned to be polite to an old friend. At one point, Sheed became excited recounting the rafting and, flailing his arms about, looked at the ceiling. Just then, McCafferee looked at me and winked, acknowledging our mutual recognition of an old friend’s charm. McCafferee responded, Oh, my, then what did you do? and winked again at me.

McCafferee finished his second cup of tea about the time Sheed was explaining the climb up the ridge, and he leaned slowly forward to spread hummus on his tortilla.

The rest, Sheed offered, is on this recorder.

McCafferee responded while slowly and very deliberately spreading just the right amount of hummus on his tortilla and returning it to his saucer. He was a man of great patience and immaculate manners. Together with his soft spoken charm, he carried the air of a great man, a man far different from the one who had raised us those decades ago.

Very good, then, McCafferee responded, leaning back into his chair. Let us see.

Sheed nodded to Denisa. She stood and opened one of the bags she carried, pulled a DVD player from it, and sat it in the middle of the table. She dimmed the lights. Then she slapped the remote into my palm with a zest that revealed her frustration. I was sure listening to Sheed describe how he repelled down the rock face, how he steered the rafts through white water at night, and how he gouged his way through undergrowth, all while she fed and watered the horses, was not easy for her to stomach. Nor I suspected was it easy for her to watch us drink tea and eat tortillas when she had not eaten since breakfast. But it was a woman’s lot, and neither McCafferee nor Sheed felt the least bit discomforted by it.

McCafferee had felt around the table top and in his pockets while Denisa set up the monitor. Finally, he discovered his glasses were dangling from around his neck the whole time. He chuckled at himself