The Thieves of Faith (27 page)

Michael looked up at Busch, who was watching the same sight.

“No way,” Busch said as he read Michael’s mind.

Michael took off his knapsack, placed it on the stone ground, reached in, and pulled out a dive mask, fifty feet of rope, and another glow stick.

“There is no way you’re going in that water,” Busch said as he walked over to Michael.

“Why, would you rather go?” Michael didn’t bother looking up as he tied the rope around a rock outcropping. He took the other end and tied on the glow stick. He cracked the stick and watched as the chemical mix began to glow an intense yellow. He pulled on his mask and a climbing harness, and clipped onto the rope.

Nikolai watched the exchange between the two friends, smiling broadly. “You are such a cowboy. I wish I had a pair of balls like you.”

“This has nothing to do with balls,” Busch said as he glared at Michael. “It has everything to do with stupidity. You have no idea how strong the suction is, it could rip you under and out of here before you could even think.”

“Relax, I just need to know how wide the mouth is.” Michael pulled out an underwater flashlight and coiled up the rope.

“How wide the mouth is?” Busch exploded. “What if you get sucked—”

But Busch never got to finish the sentence as Michael clutched the coiled rope and leapt into the water. He clung tightly to the line with his left hand while feeding out the coiled end with his right, the glow stick affixed and floating upon the surface. He slowly fed it out, allowing it to be drawn along the top of the water toward the far wall. And like the first yellow light, it, too, disappeared, sucked under by the rip current, but this time Michael held on to the rope so as not to allow the stick’s escape. Michael took a deep breath and, holding tightly to the rope with his left hand, slowly submerged twenty feet from the far wall.

Before him he saw the stick dancing underwater at the end of the rope, desperately trying to break free like a mad dog on the end of a leash. Its ghostly light illuminated the far wall and, five feet below the surface, a five-foot-wide pipe. Michael continued to hold tightly to the rope with his left hand but released the other end, allowing the glow stick to ride the current, watching as it slowly entered the tube, tumbling about in the churning torrents. The mouth of the pipe was aglow as the stick entered then disappeared. Michael flipped on the flashlight and could see that the pipe tilted downward at a forty-five-degree angle. Before long, the yellow of the glow stick began to fade, consumed by the darkness.

Michael surfaced and, hand over hand, pulled himself along the line back to the rock outcropping. As he began to climb the rope out of the water, Busch grabbed him by the collar and yanked him up and out of the pool, tossing him on the ground. “You’re such an ass.”

Michael lay there soaking wet, catching his breath before he rolled over and smiled up at his friend.

Chapter 27

G
od’s Truth was founded in the early seventies
by Yves Trepaunt, a doctor who couldn’t reconcile himself to Church’s rejection of scientific fact. He was a lapsed Catholic seeking to continue his beliefs in God while embarking on a career in medicine, but had found the Church’s unwillingness to stray from pure creationism suffocating.

Trepaunt was the only child of Jacques Trepaunt, a behind-the-scenes player in the Vichy government and the French connection for weapons manufacturing. He left his two-hundred-million-dollar estate to his son, who subsequently rejected a promising career in medicine and poured the fortune into his religious pursuits. Yves purchased the Corsican monastery, formerly the seaside castle of the Genoan ruling family, and its surrounding twenty-five thousand acres. He only left the compound to sail his one-hundred-forty-foot sloop,
God’s Truth,
around the Mediterranean.

Yves had found that there were many like himself who saw a chasm of disparity between scientific fact and Christian doctrine and, as such, he began an unplanned career as a Church father. He built up a following of more than ten thousand and he based the Church out of the abandoned castle monastery on the rocky cliffs of Corsica.

At the age of twenty-one, fresh out of college, Julian Zivera had embraced Yves’s message and had sought an audience. He arrived at God’s Truth with a handful of degrees, a photographic memory of the Bible, and a plan. He and Yves became fast friends and within two years Julian became his confidant, his spokesperson, his right hand, using his oratorical gifts to expound Yves’s interpretation of the Bible and God.

And Julian became something even more to Yves.

Yves’s daughter, Charlotte, was all of nineteen when she fell for Julian. She was at first infatuated with his strong, handsome face, his straw-blond hair, and his crystal-blue eyes. He possessed such a commanding, charismatic presence it intimidated anyone he encountered, all but her. To Charlotte, it was cause for primal attraction. But it was more than a physical infatuation, far more than lust. He was brilliant, with a grasp of Christianity like she had never seen; he knew not only his Scripture but its underlying meaning and possessed a gift for insightful interpretation that inspired her.

It was a relationship that was allowed to grow, to blossom, maturing with baby steps. Julian never pushed, was never the aggressor, their first kiss not coming for three months, but once it did, there was no question that they were destined to spend the rest of their lives together.

Unlike Yves, the couple traveled the modern world, their month-long honeymoon spent traipsing through London, Paris, Hong Kong, Monaco. They rarely saw the light of day, entwined in each other’s arms, lost in a tousle of bedsheets. Julian put Charlotte before everything. She never imagined such a love could exist. She would awaken to find him staring at her, he would leave little gifts planted in her purse, flowers on her pillow at bedtime. He anticipated her every need, her every want. Her favorite wine and cheese on the side table after her massage, the shoes she had merely glimpsed, fallen in love with but passed up, wrapped with a bow in her closet. They would drive off in the evening to a destination unknown only to arrive at her favorite restaurant, a private room lying in wait. They would finish their meal and be whisked off to a private beach where a sea of pillows and blankets were laid upon the sand under the star-filled sky. Charlotte had found love, she had found a best friend, and she had found a husband.

And Yves, Yves found a son. They were not only a triumvirate of religious inspiration to their faithful but an example that love and money, God and science, could work and exist as one.

And the ranks of their followers grew. Through the Harvard MBA playbook, Julian introduced modern business, finance, and marketing to their pious world. They quadrupled their flock within a year and watched it grow steadily for the next two.

But in order for their Church to prosper, they needed continual funding; they couldn’t wait for a collection basket to be passed. And so, unlike other Christian religions, they charged a fee. As distasteful as it sounded, religion was a business that required a balance sheet to exist in the modern world. The Catholic Church’s vast wealth did not arrive through divine intervention. Jewish synagogues charged a membership fee; Baptist and Methodist ministries would use gentle persuasion to coax the funds out of their parishioners, guilting them where necessary.

Of course, Yves and Julian’s approach was subtle, tastefully done, and very successful. The vast majority of their followers were highly educated, and as such some of the wealthiest in the world. The ten thousand dollar per year fee was hardly burdensome to the now one hundred and fifty thousand members. Yves’s two-hundred-million-dollar investment was estimated to have grown to over three billion dollars just a few years after Julian’s arrival.

At Julian’s urging, Yves returned to medicine, setting up research labs in the compound. He and Julian reasoned that each must take advantage of his strengths, that each must use his God-given talents for the reason God gave them. Julian’s was running the Church while Yves’s true calling was medicine. Yves’s desire to cure had reawakened. It was his goal to find treatments, to find remedies for disease and suffering and give them to the world, not seek to leverage the medical misfortunes of others to build wealth. He left the Church’s work to Julian and Charlotte and hired the finest doctors and biomedical experts—many of whom were members of their Church. He lured them with the promise of unlimited resources, unheard-of salaries, and a pressure-free environment that was unbe-holden to stockholders or banks.

God’s Truth had truly become a unique religious conglomerate of the modern world, a faith where scientific discovery was viewed as uncovering the mysteries of God, not as a weapon to counter his existence. They were constantly recognizing the presence of God within nature, within science, within their hearts and everyday lives. As Yves had always said, God’s Truth will always put God first.

On a Sunday evening, Yves and Charlotte went for a sail in Yves’s sloop. It was a ritual, one that father and daughter had shared since she was little. It had bonded them after Charlotte’s mother passed away. They were both expert sailors, alternating at hoisting sails and manning the helm. Yves had passed on his nautical knowledge to his daughter so well that he was convinced she could sail the one-hundred-and-forty-foot yacht by herself. When Julian entered their family, they invited him to become part of their Sunday evening routine, but he deferred, insisting that Yves should continue their tradition as it had remained for twenty years. Julian had already stolen Charlotte away from Yves, the least he could do was share her for a few hours once a week.

Yves and Charlotte set sail at four-thirty; the sky was clear, the September waters calm, with a light breeze coming out of the southwest. They sailed off as the late summer sun began its slow descent. Father and daughter looked at each other, living in the moment, never anticipating the future of this world that they lived in, one filled with happiness, love, and, above all, God. They both looked ahead at the open sea as the broad white sail caught the wind and carried them away.

They never returned.

The next day the sloop was found capsized five miles out, its torn sails floating upon the sea. Investigations were launched, speculations were tossed about, and the search for the bodies continued without result. The weather had been ideal, two experts upon the water, no calls of distress, no signs of struggle on
God’s Truth
once it was righted and towed back to port. The world was left with nothing but questions as to the disappearance of Yves and Charlotte, expert sailors lost at sea. The investigation concluded, their deaths ruled accidental.

Julian gave what was said to be a heart-wrenching eulogy to ten thousand attendees at the outdoor cliffside service. He was beyond distraught, the world seeing the anguish of the twenty-six-year-old as he stood alone upon the outdoor altar that overlooked the Mediterranean.

And Genevieve was there. She knew the pain of losing a spouse and would stay however long he needed, she would be there to comfort him, to provide the steady care that only a mother could render. She had been so proud of him, of his accomplishments, of the fact that he used his degree for God. She had been overjoyed that he had found love and stability, that he had made a life for himself, all of it now torn from him like a cruel trick, an assault on his heart.

But after the sermon, after the memorial for the souls whose bodies were never found, was over, Genevieve left without saying a word. She had recognized a change in her son, a coldness she hadn’t seen since he was a child, when her adopted daughter Arabella’s white kitten went missing after Julian had been beaten up on the playground. She knew what Julian did then…and she knew what he did now. She took one look in her son’s eyes and knew the truth.

No trace of Yves or Charlotte was ever found because everyone had looked in the wrong place. Their broken bodies were buried next to the monks in the crypt deep below the mansion, the former monastery.

As the sun fell toward the sea that Sunday evening, Julian had emerged from the ship’s hold, much to the surprise of Charlotte and Yves, as a speedboat pulled alongside. With a smile on her face, Charlotte ran into her husband’s arms, joyful at another of her husband’s surprises.

But her joy turned to shock and fear as she looked into his eyes and saw something there that she had not seen before. There was a detachment. It was like looking into the eyes of a stranger, a shark, someone without a soul. And her fears were confirmed as she felt the blade slide into her stomach, searing pain radiating outward from her core. Through it all, Julian held her eye, silently watching, hoping to see the moment when her soul left her body.

Yves stood there in shock as Julian laid the body of his daughter on the deck. He was paralyzed with fear as Julian walked straight up to him, never raising a hand in defense as the blade slipped between his ribs and he heard Julian murmur, “Tell God I said hello.”