The Divine Council

By Sandra Lynne Carlton

When Washington Post correspondent Julia Baldwin is assigned to cover a local neo-Nazi group, the chain-smoking, hard-line reporter had no idea it would take her across the globe to witness deadly conflicts between world governments and beyond. As she soon discovers in her investigation, there seems to be a mysterious "entity" involved in her personal history and congenital heart condition, all linked to the stunning chain of events. US State Department agent David Lassiter is her partner in unraveling the mystery that takes them back to Middle Ages Jerusalem and the shattering truth about Julia's very own family. And there is always the blue-eyed stranger watching her… Take a journey through time with Julia as she discovers a deadly plot to bring the entire planet to its knees and create the chaos surrounding the last days in biblical proportion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645845751

Book preview

BEFORE—THE COUNCIL

At that moment, the first heavenly messenger was joined by thousands of other messengers in a vast heavenly choir. They praised God.

—Luke 2:13

They gather in the chamber at the top of the majestic bluff. It overlooks a valley with such splendor it’s difficult to gaze at it for too long. Some enter through the conventional doorway at the foot of the glowing hall, while others simply pass through the wall overlooking the breathtaking valley. There is a massive circular table in the center of the hall. It’s designed to accommodate any number of the council and guests, but conversations can be heard clearly wherever you are positioned at the table. There is no head of this table, only the center, where the Father comes to listen and offer advice and, perhaps, judgments. There is a gallery overlooking the council table, where those that wish to observe can come and pass on decisions to the Legions of the Father.

This area of the Home is truly beautiful. Its spectacular valley is filled with flowers and vegetation of all kinds. Surely Monet caught a glimpse of it in dreams and painted some of his landscapes from it. The building’s architecture is beyond compare. This section of the Home is styled in Greek and early Roman with majestic columns, porticos, and the marble that most in the council favors. They are all slightly amused with the Book’s description of the streets of gold. There are all sorts of avenues and lanes colored in rose quartz, lapis lazuli, garnet, and of course, gold. The grand procession leading up to the throne of the Father is all of these, and more. To try to describe it as quartz or the most brilliant diamond would be to undershadow its mind-blowing brilliance. Overall, this place is perfect, eternal. The Alpha and the Omega, beginning and end of all things, amen.

So they file into the hall, gazing at each other with knowing, acceptance, and the hard reality of what they must do. Most prefer the classic human form of the Father and Son, although occasionally they will assume other forms. For this council, they are all in human form, so splendid and perfect that they resemble all the finest statues on the Sacred Ground rolled into one. As they take their places, they naturally look to the one most splendid, most loved, and most respected.

Tall, with a darker complexion like those of the Mediterranean, he has eyes like the sea. Clear with blue brilliance, they are known to emit the greatest love and compassion but also the fire of righteousness. His muscled arms and legs look at their finest in a draped toga or battle dress but also striking in a tuxedo or business suit. He wears his hair short, in the Roman style, and is completely unaware of his singular beauty. He gazes around this gathering, the witnesses, foretellers, and protectors of all humanity, and says, Let us begin.

JULIA

Who can find a truly excellent woman?

—Proverbs 31:10

Julia Baldwin pulls out of the embassy parking lot, frustrated, for the third time this month. Cigarettes, cigarettes, where are my cigarettes? She hastily maneuvers through typical Washington, DC, traffic and back to her job as a metro correspondent for the Washington Post . With bumper-to-bumper traffic, she lights a Marlboro menthol and cracks the driver’s side window.

She ponders, Who starts smoking at thirty-two years old? Her mom had merely shook her head when she discovered Julia puffing away on their front porch after dinner at their house one evening.

She casually remarked, Smoking, Julia, with your heart? She then turned on her heel and walked back inside the house.

Her dad had quit some twenty years earlier. He walked up next to her and, closing his eyes, said, Let me just stand next to you in the fumes. God, I miss them. He turned and also walked back into their neat colonial, located in the Georgetown district of DC.

It had happened at a party two years ago. She and her illustrious coworkers were sitting at this monster table on the patio of Hello!, one of the toniest restaurants/bars in DC. Jonathan, one of the staff photographers, was puffing away next to her at the end of the table. Hey, Jon, she suddenly said, can I burn one of those?

It was then the entire table took notice with, Not Julia, not straight-arrow Julia. Say it ain’t so! So she took a drag and coughed (of course) but managed to puff about halfway through it. Her coworkers clapped and laughed, thinking that it was the end of that short spectacle. Little did they know that she liked it, a lot. So she moseyed down to the liquor/convenience store close to her apartment and secretly bought a pack.

Ha, let’s see who they think is a straight arrow now…I have an air of mystery, danger about me. Stupid, she thought to herself as she went through the first half pack that week. Jeez, four thousand chemicals in cigs with forty-three known carcinogens. Way to go, Julia. Still, not many, and she was under so much stress at work, and besides, she’d not had an episode in years.

At thirty-four, Julia is tall, willowy, but with generous and slightly rounded hips, breeder’s hips, as they are sometimes called. Jeez, no breeding going on here, not now or perhaps ever, for that matter.

World’s oldest heterosexual virgin, which sort of flowered into her dirty little secret, as she weaved her Mini through this blasted traffic! David is so patient, God love ’em, Julia thought, as she weaved like a bat straight from hell through traffic.

Her hair is shoulder length, a strange, not really red, not really blond shade that her dad thought was beautiful, arresting. Probably because it’s almost the exact same shade as her mother’s. Her eyes are definitely her best feature, clear blue with just a hint of amber flecks. All together, it makes for a combination of straight nose, wide-set eyes, and full, but not pouty, lips. Her editor at the Washington Post likes to call the set of her mouth determined. At any rate, with her height and features, she gets many admiring looks that tend to make Julia feel uncomfortable. It’s creepy, in a way.

Late one night, she tied her hair back and ran to the local Walmart after discovering she’d ran out of tampons. She was surprised to see both lanes at checkout with three or four people waiting in line. Only at Walmart at 11:00 p.m., she mused. Then she noticed this biker-looking dude in the other lane staring at her. Again, creepy, like he could see in her something that only others can see. She stood there and took it for as long as she could. Finally, she turned and, in her sweetest, noncommittal voice, said, Surely, you have something better to look at than me?

Funny that he actually looked around for a few seconds and said, Hell, no.

Enough of this self-reflection, Julia snorts at herself as she pulls into the parking lot of the Washington Post. Ah, the great Post, past home of Woodward and Bernstein, Ben Bradlee, and others who went on to write their versions of the The Great American Novel (insert clique here). It really is an institution though, with so many Pulitzer Prizes that they would seemingly need an entire building just to house them all—eight for international reporting, eight for criticism, seven for commentary, and the list goes on and on. And let’s not forget that it was instrumental in bringing down a US president.

Julia treks up to the third floor using the stairs—gotta work those lung—and resists the urge to stop and have another smoke on the way up. Her cell phone is ringing off the hook, most likely Harry. She and a dozen others have desks scattered throughout the metro/local section of the newspaper. They cover metro/DC events and news, which, of course, could affect the whole world. There are a chosen few who were selected to cover the White House and Congress.

They plan on vacating those spots when they die. The rest of them wait (sometimes impatiently) for that event and are relegated to covering the minor local stuff, ruled over with dictator-like authority by Harold Harry Bernstein.

No relation to that Bernstein, he frequently says when being introduced. Jewish, shortish, and very compact, he carries himself with the stature of someone much taller; and with his tanned skin, he looks much younger than his fifty-seven years. Winding down, he would say about his age. All in metro would roll their eyes. Not slowing down, not this Harry. He talks in short bursts, constantly moving, which any outsider would interpret as somebody high on coke or meth. He is just one of those people jammed full of nervous energy, ready to jump on any story or lead, although he has a dozen or so metro slaves at his beck and call.

Seriously though, he is extremely perceptive and sensitive. When 9/11 happened, he was a reporter covering the White House when all were rushing out to get the president’s statement in the West Wing. The entire metro floor was gripped in shock, watching the monitors as the second tower went down. Harry politely excused himself and emerged from the men’s room a few minutes later, eyes red but back in control. Julia has seen similar instances with Harry to realize that he has a heart as big as the ocean, but few actually see the real Harry.

Anything on the embassy? he asks as he twirls a number 2 pencil while reviewing the third story on the president and first lady’s penchant for English setters. This is crap…what is up with the embassy? he booms from his glass-walled office.

Nothing, boss! Julia yells back. The Chinese ambassador is not seeing anyone—no reporters, no guests. Hell, I doubt the whole of Congress lined up at his door could sway him.

Damn, Harry mutters under his breath, three times we’ve tried to crack their iron wall of silence with this whole North Korea mess with no results.

Julia settles in and opens her desktop to do more research into China-Russia relations. Who da thunk it? Julia thinks as she looks at Russian and China relations throughout the years. Prior to the Russian revolution in the early 1900s, the two countries could basically be classified as frenemies—a tenuous relationship based on mutual hostility and suspicion. It wasn’t until 1727, when the Treaty of Kyakhta was negotiated by the Kangxi emperor and Peter the Great, that relations between the two countries became more normalized and stronger borders were established.

Fast-forward to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when relations between the two countries remained friendly though hardly close. St. Petersburg was the only European capital during this period to host visits by the Chinese emperor’s representatives. As the nineteenth century wore on, they continued to improve relations, undoubtedly for self-interested reasons. No doubt that Russian assistance with the 1900 Boxer Uprising and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 was done purely for economic reasons, which Russia was/is inclined to do with just about anyone.

Of course, there was radical improvement of relations following the October 1917 Bolshevik revolution, whereby the new Communist government renounced the extraterritorial privileges the old government had sought out in China, as a result of one-sided treaties. In 1945, following the defeat of Japan in WWII, the USSR’s military support of China was crucial in the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. However, over the ensuing years, the USSR’s lack of support for China’s efforts to take over Taiwan in the early 1960s, coupled with China’s refusal as the world’s most populous nation to take a subordinate position in the International Communist Movement, did not improve matters much during this period.

As both superpowers moved through the twentieth century, both became aligned with a common goal: suppress the United States in all matters of foreign policy. In 1998, the two acted openly to oppose the US bombing of Iraq (Operation Desert Fox) and the US-led attacks in Yugoslavia in 1999 and again in Iraq in 2003. So presently, when our president and the Russian president (back to Russia, down with the USSR) seem downright chummy, why all this secrecy? One would think with our newly elected president that both Russia and China (yes, Virginia, as the old saying goes, we are friendly with them now, as well) would be jockeying for favor with the leader of the Free World.

Did you tell them that I spoke to Mr. Im at the White House dinner last week? Harry is now tapping the pencil on his peppered crew cut and swigging his fourth cup of coffee.

Yes! Julia shouts back as she peruses around the web for anything out of the ordinary. Supposedly, China and Russia in secret talks and this scary tale, North Korea continuing to shore up its nuclear arsenal, daring the US and its allies to stop them. And hey, let’s throw in the Middle East, stir around all the terror brewing there, and boom, we are seriously effed up, as the gentleman would say.

She knows her gentleman friend at the State Department has been working on the Nazi resurgence in Europe as she comes across an interesting article in a small periodical based in Berlin about the Nazi movement. Not that this was anything new, but apparently this was now bleeding over into Russia. According to this article, the Nazi central leadership hates, well, basically everyone. Again, nothing new, but an eerie picture posted on the web page depicting a closely shaved head of a young guy no more than seventeen or eighteen, with his forearms crossed in an X, was just downright creepy. The tattoos on either side of his arms came together to form a swastika. Jeez, his eyes, gazing into the camera, were dark and totally void of any heart or compassion. In the interview they imagined a world where all the white races would come together and live/reign for a thousand years. Why did that term one thousand years sound so familiar? Granted, the little junior Nazis were just parroting what their long-dead leader, one Adolf Hitler, had imagined for the fatherland, Nazi Germany, so many years ago.

As she finishes reading the article, she wonders what kind of environment these kids were raised in that would cause them to join such a hideous organization.

If Julia were to describe her upbringing, she would term it about as vanilla, apple-pie American as you can get. Her parents, Stan and Helane Baldwin, had met in high school in Blacksburg, Virginia. Her maternal grandmother’s name was Helen, and her mom had joked that hers was the only other name her mom could find with the word hell in it. Her dad loved it. In the tenth grade, he had persuaded Helane to go out with him by folding a note into a football (apparently, the 1970s form of texting) with Helane, Helane, I love your name written on it. It had obviously worked as they dated for the remainder of high school and college, waiting the required three and a half years to get engaged, and married soon after they graduated.

Ah, the swinging ’70s, when all were doin’ a little dance, makin’ a little love, and gettin’ down tonight. Her parents settled down and two years later had her sister Tara, in 1981. Her mom loved two things: her favorite movie, Gone with the Wind, hence Tara, and the late 1960s TV series Julia, starring Diahann Carroll. So Julia was born three years later, in 1984. Her dad was a chemical engineer that had patented several medical processes, eventually landing them in DC. He once said that the periodic table was second only to his fascination with God. She and Tara were raised in a Christian home, although neither one of them was a practicing Christian.

They were Episcopalians, christened at birth, went through catechism at thirteen, and had just somehow drifted away from the church.

When Julia was a baby, Tara couldn’t pronounce Julia, so she became Jule-ja and later just Jule. Tara was the only living person that her mom would permit to mispronounce her name. Likewise, Tara teased Julia so much as the younger sibling that she became the Terror, eventually shortened to Tare. They now have a great relationship as adults with Tara marrying in her late twenties and producing the required 2.1 children. Her niece and nephew are cool kids and know more about tech at six and eight years old than Julia will ever know.

The only remotely strange thing about her upbringing was Julia’s heart condition. From one until around four years old, Julia would suddenly lose consciousness. Sometimes they would be in the back seat of the car with Julia in her car seat and Tara in her little booster seat. Suddenly, Tara would yell, Mama, Jule-ja not wake up! Helane would quickly pull over to see Tara shaking Julia’s shoulder with all her might and Julia out cold. She would frantically unbuckle her out of the car seat as Julia slowly opened her eyes and said, Mama, where da man?

Of course, Julia had no recollection of these events. Three different doctors could only diagnose that Julia’s heart skipped more beats than average. Most normal heart rhythms skip once every nine or ten beats, whereas Julia’s skipped on average of every three to four beats, but nothing more. Julia sometimes dreamed of a man with blue, blue eyes. She awoke with longing, and sometimes her cheeks would be wet, like tears, but she would not recall crying. They were always reassuring, even erotic at times.

Since those early years, the episodes as they had come to call them, became much less frequent and certainly less severe, lasting only a few seconds. The last bad one Julia could recall was when she was a freshman in college.

She and her roommate, Jen, were very excited to be invited to their first frat party on campus, so much so that Jen had come back to the dorm early and left with some others on their floor before Julia was even back from class. One minute she was rushing around trying to find her curling iron, and the next she was sprawled across the bed. It was as though she could feel strong arms caressing her shoulders, whispering to her, Don’t go, little one. Please stay home. You’re not feeling well, stay in the dorm. As she sat up, she realized that she did, indeed, not feel very well. Strange disquiet, sense of something off, convinced Julia, as she reached for her little flip phone to call Jen and beg off.

Crap, no answer. She’s probably already dancing her socks off. Why bother? So she curled up on her bed, made some tea in their small microwave, and settled in for the night.

She was startled awake an hour or two later by the sound of sirens, and she could see the whirling of lights through their large window on the south wall of their dorm room. Oh god! She ran down the hall toward the stair landing, and as she opened the door, the smell of smoke hit her in a choking wave. Julia called down to some other girls standing in the yard downstairs, What happened? Do you know anything? The girls called up that they thought one of the frat houses was on fire. Oh please, sweet Jesus, not Jen, oh no.

There was indeed a fire, a big one. Nobody really knew how it started, only that it was close to the kitchen, that it was suspected electrical, which is what they always say when they don’t really know. Poor Jen, third-degree burns over 40 percent of her body, but she was alive, thank God. She endured sixteen months of painful rehab and, of course, had to leave school. Nine students died in that fire. As the students and faculty attended the memorial in the stadium a few days later, Julia still felt those strong arms on her shoulders, although, she could not, for the life of her, recall why and why she suddenly felt so ill that night.

Julia startles out of her internal history with the thought that she really must call Tara. She still works about three days a week as a researcher for the Library of Congress. Having her 2.1 children has certainly got Julia off the childbearing hook, as their mom is elated to have one each, grandchildren. If she could get in to talk with either ambassador, get a handle on how China is dealing with this whole Korean mess, Israel on alert (yet another situation), she may have a shot at one of those Pulitzers to add to the Post’s collection.

Right…call Tara and see what she can dig up about any or all of the above and mention to her the deal about one thousand years.

THE COUNCIL

He will command His heavenly messengers to guard you and keep you safe in every way.

—Psalm 91:11

Michael looks around the table at the group assembled for their latest task. The role of this council is simple—help the children. The children, of course, is the human race. As they had throughout the millennia, the members of this council have come forth to those needing help and guidance. The instances of a visitation are rare and only authorized by the Father. Their absolute and utter splendor is so dazzling it was decided that appearances must be executed with great care and selectiveness. Although their physical beauty is arresting, it is the eternal light that connects them with the Father that was the inspiration for the stained glass in our Father’s houses, as well as countless paintings and murals. An appearance by one member of the council could cause such awe that the English term strike ’em dead would certainly apply.

This assembly have all been here since the Beginning,