The Turning (7 page)

She nodded gravely. “That is probably a healthy attitude to take.”

“I need the money.”

“And I have it for you.” She turned to the credenza imbedded in the wall behind her desk. The central door revealed an electronic safe. She applied her thumb to the fingerprint reader, then coded in the access. “How much this time?”

“Twenty thousand.”

She counted out the bills, put them in a blank envelope, then wrote the amount in her pay book. “Sign, please.”

As he did so, he was in close enough to say without being overheard, “Thank you for not making this harder than it already is.”

“Mr. Mundrose has always approved of spending money to make more money. Emphasis on the word
more
.”

“Understood.”

“And you still won’t tell me what you are using this money for.”

“If you insist, I will. But secrecy is vital. So I’ve made a careful accounting of every cent, and as soon as this presentation is done, I’ll give you the full breakdown.”

“Very well, Mr. Cooper. But sooner or later, you will have to learn the lesson of trust. That is, if you survive long enough.”

He breathed the day’s first easy breath. “Thank you. Again.”

But she was not done. “You already have spent four hundred and thirty-seven thousand dollars. That is not the most expensive outlay of anyone who has been granted such an opportunity. But it’s close.”

He finished the thought for her. “Either this works, or there won’t be enough of me left to make a greasy stain.”

She gave him her brightest smile. “So nice to know we understand each other.”

Trent picked up the manila packet and took the elevator to the ground floor. The entrance to Barry Mundrose’s suite of offices was around the corner from the building’s main doors. The security guard standing duty in the small foyer knew him now, and hefted the box Trent had left with him that morning. The guard’s flat gaze said it all. Trent was just another desperate young executive. They came, they went. Very few stayed around long enough for the guard to even learn their names.

Trent’s contact stood in front of the building’s main entrance, doing a tight little two-step in time to music in his head. Overhead the sky was slate grey, so the guy’s sunglasses were out of place. But Trent didn’t need to see the guy’s pupils to know he was in low-altitude orbit.

In another era, the guy would have been called a trendsetter. They came in all shapes and sizes. Most of them were hopeless cynics who had no talent for actual creativity. So they clawed down the artists who threatened their space, and lifted up those who in turn lifted them. They were a disparaging, pessimistic bunch, whose humor dripped with venom. They loved nothing more than the quick line that destroyed a dream, a life. But Trent was not here because he liked the guy.

Beyond them, Times Square was filling up. The people were mostly young, and they chattered with an animated electricity that Trent could feel in his gut. Most of these new arrivals were dressed as vampires, werewolves, ghouls, and a bizarre mix of all three. It said a great deal about Times Square that few people even gave these newcomers a second glance. Trent wanted to gawk and smile and go race over and talk with them. Because their presence meant the first part of his plan was in place. But only the first part. And just then he had to play the hard guy in order to make this trendie understand that his job was not done. Not by a long shot.

The trendie was dressed like a depraved yuppie vampire—skin-tight black jeans and pointy-toed loafers and a starched dress shirt, with a black cloak connected by what appeared to be a solid gold chain, and bloodstains dripping from the corner of his mouth. “Well. You certainly took your time getting here,” the guy said, sounding like he had his nose pinched.

“You took the words right out of my mouth.” Trent passed over the box. “Forty top-of-the-line digital mini-recorders, as promised.”

“There’s no way they will give these back.”

“All I want are the memory chips,” Trent assured him. “And some really solid footage.”

“They understand, and they’ll deliver.”

“They better, for your sake.” He passed over the envelope. “Twenty thousand.”

Disdain fought with greed on the trendie’s wasted young features. He accepted the cash with two bony fingers. “Really, here on the street, how
gauche
.” His tone dripped with cynicism.

“There’s another twenty for you this afternoon.”

The trendie stopped in the process of opening the envelope. “Say again.”

“I know you expected me to argue over the cost. Or at least insist on paying only part until after you delivered. But the cost is not as important as the results. I need you to do what you said, and I need you to
be on time
. You will have three minutes’ notice. No more. Get it right, and your payout is doubled. Tell me you understand.”

Something in Trent’s expression stifled both the disparaging quip and the nasal inflection. “I read you loud and clear.”

“Do this right, and you can count on me for a regular assignment.”

Trent turned and went back around the corner. He meant what he had said. He desperately needed someone who could help set audience trends, and who would be loyal to Trent personally. Barry Mundrose had a personal cadre of his own trendies, but Trent could not afford the risk of one of them running to their boss with word of what he had planned. He had not even used Barry’s in-house headhunter to find his own trendie. Trent had paid an outside agency five thousand dollars to track the guy down. Then he had given him just twelve hours to deliver.

But it was all worth it. If he succeeded.

His entire project depended upon delivering a complete and utter
shock
to the corporate system.

Trent reentered the side doors, nodded to the security guard, punched the button, and stepped into the elevator. He checked his watch, and instantly was flooded with an adrenaline rush. He was not afraid anymore. His heart hammered so fast he heard the blood sing in his ears. There simply wasn’t room for fear.

He checked his watch another time. The hands looked frozen.

Thirty minutes and counting.

NEW YORK CITY

T
he man’s name was Yussuf Alwan, from Damascus. “In Syria, before the civil war, I was a doctor. A surgeon. When the fighting reached my city, I escaped with my family to Beirut. My brother, he runs a business there. My wife and two daughters, they are safe, thanks be to God. I train at the NYU hospital for my certification. When this is done, my family, they will join me.”

Ruth Barrett was smaller in person than John would have expected. But beneath the grandmotherly smile and kindly gaze, he suspected was a core of tungsten steel. She asked Yussuf, “And you are a believer?”

“Since time beyond time, yes, madame. The legend of my family is that we were in Damascus when the apostle Paul himself came and recovered his sight and spoke the words of salvation.” Yussuf was balding and portly, probably in his forties, and he once might have been quite handsome. But the strain of a homeland torn apart by war was evident in his features and his gaze. “For many in Syria, faith is a tradition, you understand? It is heritage.”

“Not a living faith?” Ruth responded.

“Yes, is so. But my family, we were part of the home-church movement. You have heard of this, perhaps? Missionaries come from the west. They speak of renewal. Of fellowship with all people. Sunni, Shia, Alawite, all united under the banner of Jesus.” He stared out the window, at the crowds milling about Times Square. “And now I am here in this place.”

Since he had brought these folks together, now John had resumed the role he felt most comfortable with, which was as a silent observer. A man as big as he was could not easily disappear in plain sight. But he tried.

Or rather, he would have. But his wife had other ideas. Heather kept shooting him looks, and when that didn’t work, she finally said, “John, dear, what are you waiting for?”

Which meant he really had no choice but to clear his throat, and lay it out. The voice in the sanctuary. The trip to the Lake Erie jail, wondering if that was all there was to it. Then the call to come to New York. And the weight he had felt on his mind and heart ever since arriving here.

When he was done, Jenny Linn shifted in her chair and related her own tale. She described the incredible peace she had made with her father, the trip, the conversation with her parents that morning. Then Alisha related her own experience, the voice in church, the visit with her sister. How her work selling radio advertising brought her up here to the company’s home office every other month. But how her morning’s meetings had all been canceled. Which was why she was sitting here.

Then Ruth Barrett described the sense of God having been there in her little study that past Sunday morning, waiting for her to arrive, impatient for her to
listen
. So she had done as she felt called, and come to New York to visit the daughter who had walked away from her faith, and now lived out of wedlock with a young man Ruth refused to even name. And who was not the father of either of her daughter’s children.

Then Yussuf spoke again, relating how the previous Sabbath marked the end of a surgical rotation in trauma care, how the gunshot wounds had brought back all the violence and hardship of his homeland, how he had gone to church seeking only to escape, and instead had found God waiting for him. When he finished, it was Heather who asked, “Did you feel called by God to do something?”

Yussuf’s head jerked in a tight spasm. “No. No call.”

“I don’t mean to pry.” Heather hesitated, then went on, “But the others here felt God telling them to make some unwanted turning.”

“No, is not a turning.” Yussuf refused to meet her gaze.

Heather leaned back, watching her husband.

John asked, “Why are you here in this hotel, Yussuf?”

The Arab did not reply.

“Did you come here because you felt called to do—?”

“Is impossible, this thing, what God wants.” His forehead was beaded with perspiration. “No man can see what I have seen, and now do this.”

John waited, and when no one else spoke, he said, “What if I went with you?”

“You do not know what you are saying.”

“I know God’s power has been upon us all,” John said. “What if the reason we’re all here is to offer you his strength in human form?”

His dark eyes scattered tension around the table. “You do not know me.”

Alisha replied, “We all know Jesus.”

Ruth said, “Tell us how we can help.”

The letter was tattered evidence of war’s calamity. The single sheet, stained and yellowed, shook in Yussuf’s hand like a tragic leaf. The others gathered about him downstairs as he waited by the entrance to the banqueting department. The kitchens were off the small, windowless conference rooms that served as spillovers from the larger chambers upstairs. The padded doors were shut, the corridor empty.

“This is a terrible thing,” Yussuf said.

Ruth Barrett said, “You are right, of course. It is impossible. We can’t be doing this.”

Yussuf glanced over. “You are making joke?”

“No, my brother. I am agreeing with you. Your fears and your anger are not just real, they are justified. But you know you have to do this.”

The placid features drew together in real pain. “But why?”

“Because God is using these acts. I did not understand it until I listened to each of us. We are gathered here with our deeds as living testimony to the power of God. Only he can bring hope to such impossible circumstances.” She spoke with the calm of a woman whose entire life had been centered upon worshiping that same one of whom she now spoke with such assurance. “Now let us join hands and pray one more time.”

The story had been told in the jumbled style of a man who had sought to blind himself from the memory. Yussuf had been working in his clinic, which served as a day surgery for the northern districts of Damascus, Syria’s capital. They were seeing more and more gunshot wounds as the civil war continued to escalate and draw ever closer to their city. Treatment centers like his had become increasingly sectarian. The hospitals in the Sunni districts only treated Sunni, and so forth. Yussuf’s clinic stood upon the main highway dividing the Alawite section from the Christian. He treated everyone.

That day, a gunman had burst into the clinic, hunting an opponent who was also Yussuf’s patient. He had shot the injured man, then turned his gun upon the three members of Yussuf’s staff who tried to stop him. One of them had been Yussuf’s sister.

This letter he now held had traveled to Damascus, then overland to Beirut, where his wife had wept over the words and sent it on to him in New York. How the gunman had escaped to New York, where he worked in the kitchen of the hotel on Times Square. He had found Jesus, and he had written the doctor to ask his forgiveness.

Which Yussuf could not give. “My sister’s children, they grow up without a mother.” He wept openly now. “My daughter, she was named for her. My sister was not even meant to be working that day. She came because I was shorthanded. I murdered her. My own flesh and blood.”

Ruth and John and Heather and Jenny and Alisha, they all stood about him. Their hands rested upon him and upon the shoulders of each other. Bound together in concern for a man who had been a stranger until only minutes ago. John said, “Ask Jesus what you should do.”

“I cannot,” he wept. “I cannot do this thing.”

Then the padded doors leading to the kitchen swung open. Not one man emerged, but three. All were Arabs. Two wore silver crosses about their necks, and supported the man in the middle, who wept harder than Yussuf. When the man in the center saw the surgeon, he collapsed, falling to his knees and gripping the doctor by the legs.

Hard as it was, painful as it felt even to him, John had the distinct impression that it was also one of the most beautiful moments of his entire life. Watching the doctor reach out his hands, lift the man from the carpet, and embrace him.