She nodded and walked away with Mary.
Mary.
The mother of God.
I’d been dying to blurt out to her, “So, did you really think you were a virgin when you got preggers? Come on, you can tell me…” Somehow, I managed to hold in that question. As she walked away, though, I saw her grace, calm demeanor, and confidence. There weren’t many other women visible in the village, but the few I had seen had been meek and almost invisible. I saw why Jesus said she was quite forward.
When I looked back at Jesus, I felt ashamed for my thoughts questioning Mary’s purity. His eyes were like bold sapphires that managed to drill into my mind. In return, I could only feel he was full of gentleness, a person to be trusted, somebody to listen to.
Yes, he was a natural, all right.
“You’ve walked a long way from Jericho.”
“It’s the life I lead.”
He nodded and smiled. We walked from the village center between two stone buildings toward a copse of shrubbery. A path was worn between the bushes. This was a commonly used trail.
After walking a couple hundred yards, the path opened into a clearing. There, I could see a half dozen long narrow pieces of wood.
“The wood is brought here by lumbermen. I create the boats here. They are then transported by others to the Sea.”
He showed me a set of tools he had sitting on a block of stone. He had an axe, a chisel, a small handsaw, and a larger saw. Some other tools were not known to either myself or Adlai, so we had to wait for Jesus to show them to us. I was surprised I recognized any of the tools.
I could see a pile of wooden boards shaped like the bow of a boat. They were lain out on the ground near several piles of rocks. The rocks were each about the size of a softball.
A second pile of rocks was used to weigh down another set of wooden slats. Jesus had taken some slats and twisted them a little. The rocks were used to anchor both ends, so they remained twisted.
He could see me staring at that.
“I wet the wood while it is twisted, so that it weakens temporarily. The rocks hold the wood into its new shape. After seven days of watering and being bent, the shape will hold. These make it easier to create the frame of the boat.
I nodded.
“Would you like some water?”
“Thank you,” I said as he handed me a skin of water. It was fresh by his standards but felt a little oily by ours. I didn’t care. I was thirsty and drank a lot of it.
When I gave back the skin, though, I noticed it was still full.
Jesus grabbed the skin before I could examine it more closely. I decided I had to have been mistaken.
We spent the next couple hours talking and with Jesus showing me how he did his work. By now, it didn’t seem at all strange to be talking to him in a language I had barely heard of before. Sometimes whatever you’re doing becomes normal.
That didn’t change my thinking about why I was in the past.
My own focus was the Holocaust, but I also knew that millions more people had been killed from religious wars. These included the Crusades, the Great Turkish War, the French Wars of Religion, and the Thirty Years War.
Would these people have all died if Christianity hadn’t existed? Maybe. Sometimes religion is a crutch for a land grab or a power-hungry dictator. All I cared about was stopping Hitler from murdering so many people.
That meant I had to kill the kind-hearted teenager who was happily showing me his trade.
I felt sick.
Chapter 17
Colonel Peter Lassiter kept a map of the United States on his desk. It was laminated and on the surface he kept fifteen small green houses and red hotels he’d picked up from a second-hand Monopoly game.
The houses represented the fifteen states where he had ongoing operations.
He was forty-five years old, kept his head shaved bald, and wore a traditional army uniform typical of a colonel. On his chest were several colorful rows of service ribbons and badges. Hanging below those were three medals of honor.
Lassiter absently rubbed his ribbons as he stared at the map on the desk.
Everyone who knew him knew that Lassiter was a complete son of a bitch, and nobody ever gave him grief. Anyone who did wouldn’t be around to do it a second time.
The uniform was not earned. Peter Lassiter had never served in the army or any other branch of the armed forces. Nobody who worked with him knew that, though. He believed in his own power and used the uniform to symbolize it.
Fuck anybody who crossed him.
“Time to close the San Diego operation,” he said. “Pity, I thought it would work out.”
The San Diego operation referred to a teenaged girl he’d kidnapped from Ocean Beach, a handful of miles from his base in California. The girl had been wandering at midnight a week earlier. Jesse Helman, his lead man in the area had texted him:
F teen alone on beach, easy target
Female teens were the ones that had the highest payback, especially ones who seemed to be from a middle class or higher background.
When Helman had taken the girl to the local vault, Lassiter checked her out on the net-cam.
“Nice work, Helman,” he said.
“Thank you, sir.”
The girl was drugged and unconscious. She’d be that way from the kidnapping until she was either freed or killed. Even so, her arms and legs were tightly bound to a bed. She wore only a skimpy purple bikini. She had long blonde hair that was tangled from when she fought her kidnapper.
Before putting her under, Helman had obtained her name and address as well as the email address of her father.
Lindsay Smyth was sixteen years old and would be dead very shortly.
Like many businesses, Lassiter’s profit was in volume. There was no advantage to drawing out any operation. The ransom was either paid or it wasn’t.
The first email was sent within two hours of the kidnapping. The father replied, pleading for his daughter and saying he had no way to raise a million dollars. He didn’t have the resources.
Lassiter didn’t give a shit. Not a single solitary shit. That was his rate, and the email was very clear that good old Dad had seventy-two hours to get the money or the girl would be killed. Time was wasting.
A second reply came six hours later.
I will get the money for you. Please let me see Lindsay so I know she’s still alive. I’ll have to bring the cash to you. Let me know where. Please, don’t hurt my daughter.
When that email had arrived, Lassiter knew the girl would end up dead. The father had called the cops, and they were telling him to arrange a meeting.
That’s not how Lassiter worked. Payment could only be made via bitcoin, a digital currency that could be used without any possibility of tracing the origin of the money. It was easy to use, especially for the father, who worked at Apple as a software engineer.
He sent one last email, re-enforcing the time limit and that payment could only be via bitcoin. He knew it was a waste of time.
His emails went through several anonymous proxy servers. When the FBI tried to trace him, they’d get lost in a spaghetti of locations, mostly in the Middle and Far East. Lassiter enjoyed thinking of them trying to find him.
For the three years he’d been in full operation, they’d never come remotely close.
In that time, his team had abducted forty-six people. Twenty-four of those had the million-dollar ransom paid. The other twenty-two had been killed and discarded.
There were three little plastic hotels on the map right now. San Diego, Cleveland, and Boston. He knew his people in the other twelve cities were scouting for fresh targets.
Clearly, the FBI knew the kidnappings were all related. The initial email he sent was a standard letter with only minor tweaks.