59

On Friday morning the contestants gathered for their day of reckoning in Paradise Court. Kareem Hasaan took his seat next to Finney, looking tense and formal in one of his custom-designed Italian suits, which seemed to hang a little looser on the man after five days of fasting. He had pulled out of the Chinese water torture after four hours, calling it “a ridiculous exercise in masochism.” He told the cameras that Allah didn’t subject his servants to torture in order to prove that he was god.

Dr. Ando came dressed in his traditional Buddhist robes. The man was fast becoming a legend on Paradise Island. He lasted all twenty-four hours on the Chinese water torture and probably could have gone days longer. Though he looked tired and frail, Finney knew better. It was rumored that Ando’s heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing actually slowed down during the last few hours of the ordeal.

“He probably went back to his room and took a nap on a bed of nails,” Gus quipped.

The Swami lasted more than seventeen hours, just as he and Finney had planned, though the Swami later confessed that his meditation techniques had failed him during the last few painful hours.

Next to the Swami sat Dr. Kline, looking stunning and rested for this final courtroom session. She was wearing a classic black sleeveless dress, with a modest silver necklace and matching bracelet. She had pressed the panic button as soon as the first drop fell on her forehead. “Rational people do not voluntarily subject themselves to torture,” she said.

She has a point, Finney had to admit.

Javitts took the bench, wearing his normal dour expression. He gaveled the session to order and began by congratulating Dr. Ando for his victory in the Chinese water torture. The stoic contestant nodded humbly, and Javitts moved on to the next item.

“Today we will be selecting two finalists in a procedure that has remained a secret until this moment.” Javitts surveyed the contestants and then gazed into a camera at the back of the room. “Throughout your time on Paradise Island, we have emphasized that the important thing is not whether you can defend your faith in a courtroom setting but how well you live your faith day to day. The real crucible of your cross-examination does not take place on this witness stand or even in the cross-examination room. It occurs in your interactions with others, in the challenges you face, in the unexpected tragedies nobody can explain. The question becomes: do you have something special in those times that can only be explained by faith?

“And who knows the answer to that question better than your fellow contestants?”

Finney could see where this was headed—a Survivor-type voting process. But as usual, the producers of the show had a twist.

“We’ve looked at the voting procedures for all past reality shows,” Javitts continued, his tone solemn for the occasion. “And we’ve decided to combine the best of those procedures for this, the ultimate reality game show. Accordingly, here’s the way we will proceed.

“In a few minutes, you will be given a ballot with your name on it. Later today you will cast either one or two votes. You may vote for yourself and one other person. If you don’t vote for yourself, then you cast only one vote.” Javitts waited a few seconds for this to sink in. The cameras scanned the faces of the contestants.

“The contestant who receives the most votes will be one finalist. As the judge, it will be my sole prerogative to select the other. Those two finalists will stay on the island for one additional day. The rest of you will pack this afternoon and leave after lunch and one final session in the cross-examination room.”

Had Finney heard right? Lunch?

“The finalists will each give a closing argument tomorrow. After the final show airs, the viewing audience will select the winner between the two finalists, based on the same voting procedures we’ve established for earlier shows.”

Finney was surprised at how much tension crackled in the air. His own palms turned sweaty, and he felt a coughing fit coming on. No matter how often he told himself that this was just a reality show, that his entire job was to glorify God in the way he played the show, he still wanted to win. Badly. And it wasn’t just his competitive instincts. He saw this as a vindication of his faith—one bold and final stroke to reach the next generation before he passed into eternity.

Yet he doubted that his dream would ever come to pass. He had sent an encoded message to Nikki, instructing her to get the Feds involved and stop this madness. Unless Wellington failed to decode that message, which Finney doubted, there would be no final session to win.

Still, Finney wanted to at least make the finals. Yes, pride was involved. And yes, vindication was involved. But if for some reason the Feds never showed up, danger was also involved.

Making the finals, from all appearances, was a game of Russian roulette. Both Victoria Kline and Kareem Hasaan had allegedly discovered the same thing—a plot existed to kill one of the finalists. Even the Swami, who didn’t trust anything Kareem said, agreed with Finney’s analysis—a conspiracy was afoot. And the conspirators were already setting up their scapegoats.

For Finney, this danger was one more reason he wanted to make the finals. The other contestants, except for Dr. Ando, were relatively young. Kareem and Hadji both had at least a possibility of surviving their illnesses, and Kline wasn’t even sick. If anybody had to be at risk, Finney reasoned, it might as well be him.

“At eleven o’clock you will return to this courtroom one at a time, in alphabetical order, to cast your ballots,” Javitts continued. “At noon I will announce your verdict and select the other finalist. But before you retire to deliberate, I have one final announcement that I have been asked to make.” He paused and cleared his throat. “We have the results of the medical tests performed earlier this week.”

With everything else going on, Finney had forgotten all about the medical tests. But Javitts gave him no time to mull it over. “Unfortunately,” Javitts continued, “there have been no changes in your various medical conditions. The God who heals apparently decided not to intervene in this show.”

In his peripheral vision, Finney caught Kareem’s reaction. His Muslim friend stared straight ahead without flinching, as if he had expected this news all along.

By 9:00 a.m. Nikki and Wellington had shifted their base of operations to the dining room table. Nikki still had on her outfit from the night before—her favorite pair of faded and ripped jeans, together with a sheer V-neck sleeveless silk top and matching silk camisole. She had kicked off her sandals at the door last night, and her hair was so frizzed out this morning that she tucked it all up inside one of Wellington’s caps—a new ODU hat with a bill that stuck straight out. Her mouth tasted like dog’s breath until she squeezed some toothpaste out of the tube in the Farnsworths’ bathroom and rubbed it on her teeth with her finger.

Corky was hanging around her feet in spite of her best efforts to give him occasional kicks in the chops. Wellington was hunkered over his charts and graphs, his head nearly dropping on the table out of pure exhaustion. Nikki felt wide awake, spurred on by two cups of coffee and the thought of twenty million dollars.

She didn’t bother trying to solve the famous Beale cipher on her own. If Wellington and a hundred and fifty years of the brightest minds available couldn’t crack it, what chance did she have? Instead, she took an entirely different approach. She assumed that Finney had somehow solved the cipher and, as with every other chapter, had given hints about the key in the chapter itself.

She carefully read every word of chapter 7, a chapter titled “Jesus Takes the Fifth.” In it, Finney wrote about the one time when Jesus refused to answer a question from the Pharisees. When they asked Jesus where His authority came from, He answered their question with one of His own: “Where did John’s baptism come from? From heaven or from men?” Since the Pharisees didn’t dare answer that question, Christ refused to answer the one they had asked Him.

Finney’s point: we can’t expect God to answer every one of our why questions. Sometimes we have to operate on faith.

When Nikki finished chapter 7, she read straight through chapter 8, another chapter that used numbers instead of letters for its code.

Chapter 8 dealt with Christ’s response when the Pharisees asked Him about paying taxes. One phrase in particular almost jumped off the page at Nikki. In discussing the separation of church and state, Finney wrote something that couldn’t possibly be a coincidence. “You can mark Jefferson’s words in the Declaration—an exercise that will generate no fewer than four independent references to God.”

Mark Jefferson’s words, Finney had written. The key to the second Beale cipher! Nikki—on her own—had just discovered the key to chapter 8.

“Have you got a copy of the Declaration of Independence?” Nikki asked.

A tired Wellington looked at her like he couldn’t be bothered. “Not on me,” he said, and Nikki couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic.

“Can you look it up on the computer?”

A few minutes later, Nikki was reading the Declaration and counting words. She felt a surge of excitement but kept her cool. It would be more fun to do it this way.

“Did you read chapter 7?” Nikki asked.

“Sure,” Wellington said without looking up.

“What about chapter 8?”

Wellington put down his pencil, sighed, and gave Nikki a perturbed look. “I skimmed it,” he said.

“Okay, so chapter 7 is all about trusting God even when we don’t understand what He’s doing. Right?”

A small glint of curiosity sliced through the redness in Wellington’s eyes. “Yes?” he said tentatively, like a question.

“And chapter 8 is about the separation of church and state. It even references the Declaration of Independence, you know.”

“I guess I hadn’t caught that,” Wellington admitted. Nikki thought she might burst with pride. Maybe wearing the guy’s ODU hat did something magical.

“So think about it, Wellington. God doesn’t always answer our questions. There are some things we will never understand. Just like there are some ciphers we will never figure out. Get it?”

Wellington knit his eyebrows as Nikki continued. How can he not see this? “So the judge uses a cipher for chapter 7 that he knows nobody can figure out—at least nobody has for one hundred and fifty years. The first Beale cipher. Finney didn’t figure it out, either, but he used it to illustrate the point of the chapter. And then, for chapter 8 he uses the second Beale cipher, the one that depends on the Declaration.”

“And the numbers from the water torture correspond to the second Beale cipher,” Wellington said, finally picking up on Nikki’s thought. “It’s the only chapter that uses just numbers where we actually have a key.”

Nikki nodded. It was fun being the teacher for a change. It would have been even more fun if solving the puzzle didn’t require admitting that the first Beale cipher remained unsolved. As soon as we get Finney off that island, Nikki promised herself, I’m going to make Wellington work on the first Beale cipher nonstop until he solves it.

“Unbelievable.” Wellington shook his head. “I fell right into the classic code breaker’s trap.” Instead of the look of triumph that Nikki expected—after all, they were partners—Wellington’s look was closer to shame. “I made an assumption and treated it as fact. Just like the code breakers who, for hundreds of years, thought the substitution cipher could not be cracked. They were using linguistic skills when they should have been focused on the mathematics, the frequency analysis. I was looking at chapter 7 when I should have been focused on chapter 8.”

Nikki wanted to interrupt him, but his rambling analysis sounded too much like a confession to cut him off. She let the silence hang there for a moment as Wellington’s tired cranium processed his failure. “I don’t think I would have ever thought of looking at chapter 8,” Wellington admitted.

“That’s why we’re partners,” Nikki said. “Even Einstein needed help once in a while.” She had no idea if it was true, but it seemed like the right thing to say.

Wellington appeared to ponder this for a moment and then make peace with it. “So what’s it say?” he asked. “Have you applied the Declaration as the key to Finney’s water torture message?”

“Here’s what you get,” Nikki announced. “It’s PER.”

“PER?” Wellington repeated. “What’s PER?”

Nikki paused, extending her moment in the sun for a few more seconds. She couldn’t wait to see the look on Finney’s face someday soon when she got a chance to tell him she outsmarted his golden boy.

“PER is Preston Edgar Randolph,” Nikki announced. “He’s apparently the one behind this murder conspiracy.”

Wellington’s mouth dropped open—the same reaction Nikki had when she first figured it out. “How could Finney know that?” he asked.

“You got me. But we’ve been playing right into Randolph’s hands.”