Chapter 10

Donafin

Decker sat quietly for a few minutes, unsure of what might come next. When nothing happened, he got up to look out the window. The guards that had been posted outside were gone. For a while, he just watched and waited. There was no place to go except out into Petra, so what was the point? After all, though it was larger than the cage he had been in for the previous three days, Petra was still a cage. Whether he stayed in the cabin or not, the risk was the same. Whatever the KDP had in mind for him, they were going to do whether he stayed or left. He decided to leave. Better to die in the sunshine, he thought, though he couldn’t have given a reason why.

Stepping carefully from the room and taking only what he was wearing and the leather satchel that held Elizabeth’s Bible, Decker was surprised to see that not even the jailer was anywhere to be found. His mind flashed back to his escape from captivity in Lebanon when his guards had all mysteriously disappeared. This wasn’t quite so mysterious; Rosen had said he was free to leave. Still, the feeling of déjà vu was strong.

At first, Decker stayed near the cabin, but the inclination to do so quickly faded and he decided the safest thing was to get lost in the people and the surroundings. He knew that trying to avoid Rosen and the KDP would ultimately be hopeless. There was no escape from this island in the desert. And what if Rosen had been telling the truth and he really did intend to have someone take Decker to Israel on Sunday? If so, then he needed to stay where Rosen could find him. Still, he found it hard to convince his feet of any of that. For nearly forty-five minutes he bobbed and weaved his way erratically through the rows of tents and their crowded inhabitants. Everyone he passed greeted him with a traditional Shabbat shalom, meaning “Sabbath peace.” But for Decker there was no peace: He just wanted to lose anyone who might be following him.

[Photo Caption: Stone facades in Petra]

Finally, he slowed down. He had to — he was too tired to continue. Only now did he begin to allow his mind to focus on the beauty of the natural and man made wonders around him. Stopping to rest, he sat down on the excavated stones of a two-millennia-old structure and surveyed his surroundings. From his location at what archaeologists called the Roman House, he could see much of Petra. In the west the sun hung just above the jagged red faced mountain that surrounded the city. Under other circumstances, he might have lost himself in the study of the archaeology and architecture of this ancient but now thriving metropolis. Then he noticed something else: a young boy, perhaps ten or eleven years old. He had seen him before. The first time had been right after leaving the cabin. Thinking back, it seemed that he may have seen him again some time later. Both times it appeared the boy had just been out walking, but here he was again. Decker had made too many turns along the way for this to be a coincidence. The boy must be following him. A wave of disgust rushed over him at the thought that Rosen would recruit one so young as a spy.

He looked around for the best avenue of escape from his unwanted attendant. It would be impossible to simply outrun the boy; Decker would never win such a race. But now that he knew who his pursuer was, he thought he could probably lose him amongst the people and tents and scattered structures. He was about to leave his perch when he heard a woman’s voice. He wasn’t sure, but it sounded like she was calling his name. There were scores of people within earshot, all crowded into this self imposed exile, and many voices competed for the ear’s attention. Still, it truly had sounded as though a woman had called his name.

“Decker!” he now heard distinctly. He didn’t recognize the voice.

“Decker!” the woman called again. Finally she came around a row of tents and into view. He was certain he didn’t recognize her. Stranger still, she headed not toward him, but for the boy who had been following him.

The woman and the boy obviously knew each other and they talked for a moment, and then both looked at Decker, who was very conspicuously watching them. Eye contact was unavoidable and the woman, apparently believing some explanation was required, came over with the boy in tow to where Decker sat.

“Are you Decker Hawthorne?” the woman asked.

He could find no good reason to deny it. “Yes,” he answered.

“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Hawthorne,” the woman said. “I’m afraid my son has been following you. He didn’t mean any harm.”

Decker wanted to ask her why her son had been following him, but there was something even more perplexing. “Did I hear you call the boy Decker?”

“Yes,” the woman answered. “I guess I should introduce myself. I’m Rhoda Donafin. Tom Donafin was my husband.” Decker was stunned, unable to respond. But there was more. “This is my youngest son, Decker. Tom named him after you.”

Decker felt as though he had been thrust into an unexplored reality. Here was evidence of a past of which he had obviously been a part — hence a child named in his honor — and yet it was totally unknown to him beyond the fact that Tom had said that he was married and had children.

“Decker has been asking about you since we found out that you were in Petra,” Rhoda said of her son. “He really wanted to meet you.”

“How did you know I was here?” Decker managed to ask.

“My brother, Joel Felsberg, and Scott Rosen are good friends,” she answered. “Besides,” she added, “I’m a doctor: Scott came to see me the other day. Seems he walked into a door or something with his face.”

Decker wasn’t sure if she was making a joke or, if because of the boy, she was avoiding mentioning that Scott Rosen’s injury had come as the result of a meeting with Decker’s fist.

Rhoda looked toward the western rim of the city at the sun that would soon be setting. “It’s almost Shabbat,” she said. “My children and I would be honored if you would join us for dinner.”

“I . . . uh,” Decker stammered. This was all happening so fast. He felt a little uncomfortable about imposing on the hospitality of someone he had just met, and yet he had so much he wanted to ask this woman. “Thank you,” he said finally. “I’d like that.”

The Donafins’ tent was not far from where they met so there was little time to talk, but once the initial surprise of meeting Tom Donafin’s widow and son had settled in, Decker noticed how young Rhoda looked. “You’re uh—” Decker hesitated, for despite all the social mores that had changed in his lifetime, one taboo that still remained was talking about a woman’s age, “—quite a bit younger than Tom,” he said, finally.

“I’m fifty-five,” she answered, showing no timidity. “Tom was seventeen years older than me. He was sixty-one and I was forty-four when Decker was born. He was a surprise to both of us.” Rhoda affectionately ran her hand through her son’s hair.

Decker sorted through the many questions in his mind. It seemed that the things he most wanted to ask would require too long a response to be given fair treatment before they reached the tent — which Rhoda assured him was just a little farther on — and everything else he might ask would seem like small talk and terribly inappropriate to the circumstances. With little choice then, Decker maintained an uneasy silence, hoping somehow that Rhoda might volunteer answers for his unspoken questions. Rhoda, however, did not oblige.

The Donafins’ tent looked like so many others — plain canvas, something less than fifteen feet square, with a canopy extending from the front, under which the family did its cooking and had its meals. Busily working there to prepare the Sabbath dinner was a young woman who smiled as they approached.

“Mr. Hawthorne, this is Rachael,” Rhoda said, giving her daughter a little hug. Rachael was a handsome girl, not what anyone would have considered a great beauty, but with strong features that were a blend of the best from both her parents.

“Rachael, this is an old friend of your father’s, Mr. Decker Hawthorne.” The girl was very polite and greeted Decker with great interest, though some of that could have simply been eagerness to find some distraction from her chores and the pot of boiling manna on the gas camp stove, which seemed to be standard issue for the city’s residents.

“Rachael is our middle child,” Rhoda continued. “She’s sixteen.”

“And this is Tom Jr.,” Rhoda said, as her eldest came out of the tent carrying a pair of silver candlesticks. Tom Donafin Jr. looked very much like his father had when Decker first met him, with the notable exception of the injuries Tom Sr. bore from his childhood accident.

“Tom, this is Mr. Decker Hawthorne.”

Tom nodded recognition of the name as he reached to shake Decker’s hand. “So, Scott Rosen finally let you go,” he said.

“Well, that remains to be seen,” Decker answered. “I’m still here.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that. If you’re out, I’d say you were out for good.”

The comment sounded as though Tom might have some experience in the subject. Decker wanted to find out. “So does Rosen do this often?” he asked.

“No, you’re the only one,” Tom answered with a strange tone that seemed to imply that Decker should consider the exception as some kind of honor.

“Tom is eighteen,” Rhoda said, rounding off the introductions.

Dinner was soon ready and they shared a traditional Sabbath meal, with Tom filling the role of his father at the table. Finally, Decker felt he had the proper setting to ask his questions. He wanted to know what had happened during the missing twenty-one years between the time Tom was presumed dead and the day he reemerged. In the presence of Tom’s children, Decker was careful to omit any mention of Tom’s death or questions that might necessitate such a reference. Those would be saved for Rhoda alone. His interest was in uncovering all that he could about who Tom Donafin had become during those years.

As it turned out, however, it wasn’t Decker Hawthorne who asked most of the questions, but Decker Donafin, so that without realizing it, the elder Decker spent most of the meal telling stories. Whether the events he recounted had, in truth, been as interesting and amusing as they now seemed, or whether it was simply the old reporter’s ability to weave a tale, even Decker didn’t know. What he did know was that it was delightful fun to remember and even more so to see the interest in the faces of Tom’s wife and children as he told the tales.

After dinner they were joined by neighbors who had overheard Decker’s stories and the Donafins’ laughter and wanted to hear more. It started with just a few children but continued to grow as the children’s parents dropped by to meet the unusual guest. As he spoke to what had become a group of more than twenty people, Decker was struck by the extreme irony that he, the closest friend of Christopher Goodman — the man these people considered their worst enemy — would be telling them funny stories about his experiences with the man who had been Christopher’s assassin.

As the evening wore on and it got to be past Decker Donafin’s bedtime, the elder Decker and the Donafins went in the tent, but the conversation continued for another hour and a half. Tom and Rachael Donafin drifted off to sleep a little before ten. Young Decker held on for another half hour, though it was doubtful he was really catching much of the conversation. Finally, with all but Rhoda sound asleep and she looking droopy eyed, Decker suggested they go back outside. There were a few things he still wanted to talk about, and he felt it best that their conversation be away from the children.

“I don’t know if you can answer this,” he began once they were outside. He kept his voice down so as not to be overheard by those in the neighboring tents. “I’ve always wondered,” he asked, “why, during all those years that I thought he was dead, Tom never tried to contact me.”

Rhoda nodded, understanding why Decker would ask that question. “I can’t really give you a full explanation,” she said. “I wish I could. I know that he tried during and just after the war, but he was never able to reach you. After that, he never tried again. I asked him about it because he frequently talked about you and he always watched when you had a news conference, but he said that he and Rabbi Cohen had discussed it and agreed it would be best to wait. I do know that he wanted to let you know he was all right, but he said he just couldn’t.”

It was more of an answer than Rhoda realized, for it confirmed Decker’s assessment that Tom had somehow become a puppet of Cohen and the KDP.

“There’s something . . .” Rhoda hesitated. “There’s something I’d like to ask you.”

“Yes?” Decker prodded. He could sense her discomfort.

“You were with Tom when he died,” she said finally. “Did he suffer?”

Decker shook his head reassuringly. “No. I don’t think so.”

She bit her lip and wiped away a tear as she nodded both understanding and appreciation.

“I only spent a brief time with him, but I know that he loved you very much,” Decker added. In reality, Tom had said very little about Rhoda or his children, but this wasn’t the time for strict adherence to the facts; for Rhoda’s sake a little supposition seemed in order. “I have some wonderful news for you, though,” he added. “Just before Scott Rosen had me kidnapped, Christopher told me that Tom has been born again — reincarnated — to a family in Paraguay. If you’d like, you and the children can come with me when I leave — assuming, of course, that Scott Rosen really does intend to let me go. I’ll talk to Christopher for you; I’m sure I can convince him to tell you where Tom is. He may not tell you all the specifics until Tom is older, but with patience, and if you’re willing to take the communion, you and Tom could be reunited.”

Rhoda shook her head politely. “I appreciate your concern, Mr. Hawthorne, but the Bible clearly teaches against reincarnation. It says, ‘. . . man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment.’[112] When Yeshua talked about being ‘born again,’ he wasn’t talking about reincarnation. He was talking about a spiritual change that is so complete it’s as though we’ve been reborn as new people.”

“But what about all the people who remember their past lives? Some of them remember things that they couldn’t possibly know without having lived before,” Decker replied.

“I think that in most cases what they think they remember is really just something from a dream or their imagination or perhaps something similar that happened in their own life. Or maybe it was something that they heard or read about or saw in a movie. There are all sorts of possibilities. But in those cases where they really do know something that no one could know without having been there, I think that someone was there in that other life. But it’s not the people themselves. To use the vernacular of the New Age, I would say that an ‘ascended master’ or ‘spirit guide’ was the one who really remembered the event and that the guide shared the memory with the person. Of course, the Bible would call that ascended master or spirit guide a demon.”

“You don’t really believe in demons, do you?” Decker gently chided.

“You don’t really believe in ascended masters and spirit guides, do you?” Rhoda responded.

Decker smiled. He had left himself wide open for that. “Okay,” he said, “so you don’t believe in reincarnation. Are you so sure you’re right that you’re unwilling even to ask Christopher?”

“I wouldn’t ask Christopher even if he was standing here with us,” Rhoda answered in an even tone. “I know where Tom is and I’m quite certain it’s not Paraguay.”

Decker sighed in defeat. He could see there was no use arguing.

“Mr. Hawthorne,” Rhoda said, “I knew when Tom left that I wouldn’t see him again in this world.”

“You knew where Tom was going? He told you?”

“I knew he would be killed.”

“And you let him go? You didn’t try to stop him?”

“I know you won’t understand this, but I had no choice. I knew from the day I first saw Tom that he would die a violent death.”

“How?”

“Right after the Rapture, God gave Rabbi Cohen a prophecy about the Avenger of Blood, a man who the prophecy said ‘must bring death and die that the end and the beginning may come.’ When Rabbi Cohen brought Tom to me on the night the war started, he appeared so badly injured that I didn’t think I could help him. But Rabbi Cohen insisted. He said that Tom would recover — he had to — he was the Avenger of Blood.”

Decker shuddered. That was what Tom had written on the note he slipped into Decker’s pocket just before he died.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “What does that mean?”

“There’s an ancient law, older even than the Ten Commandments. Its validity was recognized by Moses[113] and by Joshua[114] and by King David.[115] It allowed — within certain limitations — for a relative of a murdered person to avenge the murder by killing the murderer. It sounds rather barbaric, I suppose, by some standards, but it did keep down the number of murders and it prevented full fledged blood feuds between families.”

“But what does that have to do with Tom?”

“Before the children were born, Tom was the last of his line, Mr. Hawthorne. He didn’t even know it for most of his life, but Tom was the direct descendant of James, the brother of Jesus.”

Decker was shocked at the assertion, and his first inclination was to ask how Tom could possibly have “discovered” such a heritage, but there was something else that needed to be cleared up first. “I didn’t think Jesus had any brothers.”

“The Bible specifically mentions that Jesus had at least four brothers — James, Joseph, Simon, and Jude — and at least two sisters.[116] I should say half brothers and half sisters, of course, because while they had the same mother, Jesus had no earthly father.”

Decker found the information interesting but went back to the other question. “And how was it that Tom discovered he was related to Jesus?” he asked skeptically. “I suppose that was Saul Cohen’s idea.”

“I don’t know how he found out,” replied Rhoda. “He never told me. I think he probably realized it over a period of years.”

“Okay, so even if we assume Tom was related to Jesus, what does that have to do with him deciding to assassinate Christopher?” Decker asked. To his surprise, the emotion evoked by his memory of the assassination charged his voice with anger. He hoped Rhoda wouldn’t assume it was directed at her.

Rhoda apparently didn’t take offense. “The very first prophecy about the Messiah, in the third chapter of Genesis,[117] says that Satan would strike the heel of the offspring of God, and the offspring of God would crush the head of Satan. The offspring of God is Jesus. The striking of Jesus’ heel took place at the crucifixion when nails were driven into his wrists and feet. And then, adding insult to the injury, it was the cells from the wound to his heel that were used to create Christopher.”

The expression on Decker’s face asked how she could have known that last bit of information.

“You mentioned in an interview after Christopher’s resurrection that Professor Goodman had found the cells on a slide from the heel,” Rhoda answered in response to his unspoken question.

“And why do you say that added insult to injury?” he asked.

“Well, think about it. Satan used cells from the wounds that paid the price for the sins of the world to give life to the Antichrist.”

Decker filed that under ‘religious mumbo jumbo’ and got back to the point. “But how does this explain why Tom believed he had to kill Christopher?”

“As his closest living relative, Tom was acting as Jesus’ Avenger of Blood, striking the head of Satan in accordance with the prophecy in Genesis.”

Decker took a deep breath and tried another tack. “If you believe Jesus is God and that God is good, then how could anything evil be made from the cells of Jesus?”

“Nothing in the universe was evil when God made it,” Rhoda asserted. “But Satan takes what God meant for good and uses it for evil. Even Lucifer was perfect when God created him. But by his free will he chose to rebel. In the same way, Satan used the cells of Jesus’ own body for evil. It’s the ultimate evil irony. But it’s entirely in keeping with Satan’s standard operating procedure.”

Decker shook his head and sighed.

“But can’t you see that Christopher and Jesus are the same person?” he reasoned. “Christopher is Jesus, an exact duplicate with all his memories, all his powers, and all his love for Humankind!”

Rhoda laughed. It wasn’t an unfriendly laugh, but it was clear she disagreed. “Hearing you say that, I can’t help but be amazed at just how detailed and exact the prophecies about the Antichrist really were. In the book of Revelation,” she explained, “an angel told John that one of the reasons the world would follow the Antichrist is ‘because he once was, now is not, and yet will come.’”[118]

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning just what you were saying. You say Christopher is Jesus — that he came to Earth; he was gone for two thousand years; and now he’s back in the form of Christopher. Or from the perspective of John when he wrote the book in about A.D. 90, he once was, but at the time they were talking he was not, and yet he was to come in the future. And because of this, the world trusts Christopher and follows him, even while rejecting everything the real Jesus said and did.

“In short,” Rhoda concluded, “Jesus was God, made in the image of man, sent to reconcile man to God. Christopher, on the other hand, is a man made god created to separate man from the God.”

This was getting nowhere. “I just wish you could meet Christopher and get to know him. If you did, you’d realize what you’re saying about him couldn’t possibly be true.”

“I just wish you could meet Jesus,” Rhoda responded.

Rhoda looked at Decker and Decker at Rhoda. Both could see that neither was going to convince the other. Even though they disagreed, however, Decker found Rhoda not at all disagreeable. She was, in fact, quite pleasant to be with. He could easily see how Tom could love her. Ultimately, each resolved to let the matter pass. As for Decker, at least he had gotten an answer to what Tom’s note had meant. There was one other thing he hoped Rhoda might be able to explain.

“Just before he died,” Decker said, “Tom’s last words to me were, ‘He was going to leave me.’ Does that mean anything to you?”

Rhoda shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know.”

When Decker arrived back at the cabin he was greeted at the door.

“Welcome back, Mr. Hawthorne.”

“Jailer, I thought you were gone,” Decker responded.

The jailer shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “I can’t leave. I run this place. Besides, I still haven’t perfected my manna-cotti recipe, but I’m working on it.”

Decker was still far from certain that Rosen was going to let him go, but it was beginning to seem as if everyone else believed it.

“There’s just one thing, Mr. Hawthorne,” the jailer said. “Now that you’re free to come and go as you like, would it be all right if you didn’t call me ‘jailer’? My name’s Charlie.”

“Sure, Charlie,” Decker said.