Covenant A Novel

AMERICAN EVANGELICAL ASSOCIATION

NEW COVENANT CHURCH, WASHINGTON DC


What is the meaning of life? Where did we come from? What happens to us when we die?”

Pastor Kelvin Patterson’s words echoed as successive ranks of speakers amplified his voice around the church gardens, where two thousand pairs of eyes were fixed upon him. For a brief moment he caught himself waiting to hear the voice of the Almighty thunder down in reply and break the live current of anticipation flickering through the congregation. He was a small man dwarfed by the broad stage upon which he stood, yet although the ranks of speakers gave amplification to his voice it was his passion that truly powered it.

“What would life be if it had no meaning?” Patterson demanded of his flock. “What would be the point of a universe without purpose? Nature never does anything without purpose, for to do so is a waste of resources.”

Television cameras focused on him from nearby, broadcasting his image onto massive television screens and to millions of Americans across the United States. He could see his own image, his big, round gray eyes glowing beneath his short gray hair and a light sweat glistening on his brow from the stage lights. The man of the moment. Pastor to the nation. Patterson momentarily recalled his unhappy childhood as he looked at himself on the huge screens, a lonely and ostracized youth where his bulbous eyes and earnest desire to be accepted by other children had earned him the hated moniker Bug. If only they could see me now, he thought, before realizing once again that they were probably watching him on television.

Across the rear of the gardens, a huge banner spread between two towering trees was emblazoned with flowing red text: give blood for jesus!

Patterson glared at his congregation, his bulging eyes ablaze with the utter conviction of faith as he clenched his fist beside his head.

“The Darwinists, the atheists, and the secularists claim that the scientific method, pure logic, is the only way to find the answers to such questions. I say unto you now: if the universe is here and it is governed by the laws of nature, then it must have a purpose, and to have a purpose it must by that same pure logic have had a cause!”

A surging wave of cheers thundered down as though from the heavens to swamp him as he spoke.

“And all of you know that there is only one cause that fits every criteria, supports every fiber of our human instinct, and provides us with the answers we need, and that cause is God, and His word brought to us by our Lord Jesus Christ! This is not a movement for God, this is a movement because of God!”

The congregation roared their approval, applauding and swaying as Patterson gathered his breath and waved them down to silence. From the corner of his eye he saw a tall figure watching him from the wings of the stage. Patterson’s voice trembled with emotion as he spoke.

“Yet every day we see our Lord’s mission corrupted by the secularists! They infect our country with their filth and despair, their disregard for the sanctity of human life, their disrespect for God. There can be no peace on Earth, there can be no Second Coming, and there can be no Rapture until the prophecy is fulfilled!”

The pastor’s face twisted upon itself in righteous indignation, teeth gritted and spittle flying in the bright glare of the stage lights.

“Until the Holy Lands are returned to whom they rightly belong there will be no peace and there should be no peace! Peace before the glory of our Lord’s coming is a heresy, and I for one shall not rest until God’s will has come to pass!”

A tsunami of approval surged up into the vault of the sky before crashing down around Patterson. The ranks of the faithful bolted to their feet and punched the air, faces shining with the fervor and the fury of the chosen. Cameras flashed, flags and banners waved, faces beamed with conviction.

Patterson turned to the figure lurking in the wings of the stage.

“Thank God that we have in our government today the kind of men who would have made Moses himself proud. I’d like you all to give a warm welcome to a man with whom I’m sure you’re all very familiar, United States senator Isaiah James Black!”

A rush of surprise swept through the congregation as two thousand heads turned to look at the stage wings. Senator Black walked out into the brilliant sunlight, waving and smiling at the crowd, perfect white teeth and wavy salt-and-pepper hair. The pastor extended his hand to the senator. Black took it and leaned in close to be heard above the tumult of the crowd.

“No peace? What the hell are you talking about?”

Patterson kept a smile fixed as he vigorously shook the senator’s hand.

“Keeping up appearances, Isaiah, as should you.”

The senator managed to keep a smile slapped awkwardly on his face and turned to face the expectant flock of the American Evangelical Alliance, some two thousand souls from a total of thirty million faithful Americans.

Tread carefully, Isaiah, Patterson thought as he watched the senator speak.

“I can scarcely begin to say how proud I am to be a part of this initiative by the New Covenant Church to refill the empty transfusion reserves of this great city, our capital. There can surely be no greater, yet simpler, sacrifice than the offering of our blood for the hospitals that save American lives every day. It takes only a little time, only a little effort, but a really big heart, and that makes us special in our own way, knowing that this one act of selflessness could tomorrow save the life of our fellow Americans, perhaps even one of us here today.”

The senator cultivated a smile for the crowd, who applauded him vigorously as he spoke through a carefully choreographed flash of brilliant white teeth for the cameras. “I know without a doubt that I’ll be seeing each and every one of you down at the donor stations, and if it’s okay with all of you, I’d like to take a moment out of my campaign here to donate blood myself right now.”

A further burst of applause thundered across the gardens, followed by a chorus of “Amen, Amen,” chanted as though God Himself were listening. The senator strode off the stage, waving as he went, followed by Patterson. As Black reached the shelter of the wings he turned to glare at the pastor.

“What the hell was that?”

The pastor smiled calmly.

“It was on a whim, Isaiah. You were here, the people were excited. You’re a member of this congregation, after all, and so rarely do we get to hear the great and good of our leadership say a few words to the humble masses.”

Erratic spasms twitched across Black’s eyelid.

“I’m also a member of the Senate of the United States of America,” he snapped, and then appeared to quell his rage. “We need to talk.”

The pastor led him into the modern megachurch, a maze of carpeted corridors and offices far removed from the archaic European monuments of austerity hewn from ancient stone. A suitably imperious oak door bore Patterson’s name on a polished brass plate. The pastor led Senator Black through, closing the door after them and noticing the senator’s visible relief at a brief sanctuary from the endless cameras and questions of the press.

The office was vast, dominated by a heavy desk and broad bay windows that looked out across Memorial Park and the distant silvery strip of the Potomac. A fifteen-foot-high chrome crucifix dominated one wall, a small altar and candles arranged before it.

“So Isaiah, what can I do for you? Your call sounded urgent.”

Black turned from examining the glorious vista outside.

“Do you have any idea how long the Senate and the president have been working on a peace initiative for the Middle East?”

“As long as Israel has existed as a state,” Patterson replied. “I’m not unaware of the efforts made to secure a deal with the Palestinians.”

“This is the first time in over a decade we’ve had any real chance of a deal and you’re here preaching fire and brimstone. Peace in the Middle East a heresy? How the hell do you think that will look on tonight’s news?”

Patterson sighed heavily.

“That is what we stand for, Isaiah, the kingdom of our Lord as the destination for the Second Coming. The administration must return the faith of its people toward God, put God back into the public sphere, and save this soulless, secular, decaying society of ours. You, my friend, will be the next man in the White House to support the cause.”

Black stared at the ceiling as though searching for a safe escape. “It’s not as simple as that.”

“Why?” Patterson snapped. “Isaiah, on the day of the Rapture the Christian faithful of this world will ascend to Heaven while the remaining few billion people on Earth are cast unto everlasting fire. That will be deeply unpleasant but not one of them can say that we haven’t tried to warn them. You’ve been a member of my congregation for forty or more years, you know this.”

The senator rubbed his temples wearily.

“Being a member of a church is not the same thing as being a member of an administration. I can’t be seen endorsing a man who favors war. If I go into the primaries on that ticket, I won’t last five minutes.”

Patterson’s eyes transformed into tiny, probing points of ice that pierced Black’s soul.

“I had no idea your faith was built on such weak foundations.”

Senator Black raised his chin as he spoke.

“The American people will watch the news tonight and see me as a member of a church that preaches hate. Despite what you seem to think, not every American wants a theocracy.”

“Are you sure? Fifty percent of all Americans believe the Bible to be the literal truth. They know that the Earth is less than ten thousand years old, that it was created by God, and that His judgment upon us is soon to be realized. All of the prophecies support it, Isaiah.”

“Prophecies don’t win elections,” Black muttered, crossing the room and sitting on a brown leather chair. “The people are not going to support a president who is so openly associated with …” He struggled for a suitable word.

“Fundamentalists?” Patterson suggested with a mocking smile.

“Conservatives. We’ve been down that path before.”

Patterson adopted a soothing tone, sitting on the edge of his desk.

“Don’t be so dismissive of the Word, Isaiah. The Second Coming, the End Times and the Rapture are all preceded by what we see in the world around us today. The revival of Israel as a nation, witnessed by the last generation before Christ in the parable of the fig tree—Matthew Twenty-four. A strong and united European state, or a United States of Europe similar to a revived Roman Empire—Daniel Two. The role of the European Union in the Middle East, the Antichrist, and the peace treaty—Revelation Thirteen. The mark of the beast, in commerce, so that none can buy or sell without the mark, which is the UPC bar-code system whose bars are encoded as three groups of six: the number of the beast—Revelation Thirteen.”

Black shook his head. “I think that you place far too much faith in ancient texts.”

The pastor smiled again. “Peter Three—the Apostle says that in the End Times even religious people would dismiss the idea of Christ’s return.”

Black looked the pastor straight in the eye.

“My allegiance is to this country and its Constitution. I cannot be seen to openly favor one faith above another.”

Patterson kept his expression neutral.

“Yet this country is one nation under God, Isaiah. Look around us, at what is happening to our world. America is crumbling beneath the weight of crime, corruption, and societal decline caused by atheists and secularists. America is rotting from within and God is the only one who can save us.”

“One nation under God indeed,” Black echoed. “Yet our crumbling America is the most religious of all the world’s democracies, which kind of lets the atheists off the hook.”

A stab of indignation punctured Patterson’s studied calm. “God is the light, not the darkness. Only a lack of faith can see His light deflected from a true path.”

“I can’t support your church any further if you continue with these inflammatory speeches,” Black said firmly, standing.

Patterson regarded Black for a long moment, masking his fury at the senator’s resilience. A man who had survived the political machine due to his popularity with ordinary folk, hockey moms, and liberals, Isaiah Black had always been a more pliable man in time of need. He decided to turn the screws up a notch.

“The voters may not forgive you lightly, Isaiah.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you turn your back on us, then you turn your back on God and abandon any chance of redemption. I command the allegiance of thirty million faithful Americans, Isaiah. They do not vote for a president or a party, they vote for God, and if you abandon us, then I’ll make damn sure that ten percent of this country’s voters abandon you.”

Senator Black’s jaw dropped open. “You can’t control voters like that.”

The pastor shook his head slowly, a smile creasing his thin lips.

“Can you afford to take the risk? I would suggest that you ask yourself something, Isaiah. What matters more to you: misguided government policy or your place as the president of the United States of America?”

Senator Black ground his teeth.

“I have blood to give,” he said, and turned for the door.

“We too are prepared to shed blood, to seal the covenant between man and God,” Patterson said after him, “no matter what the consequences.”





AUGUST 25


The woman stared at him from across the street, her hair in disarray, her wrists bound, guns wedged into her side as she was wrestled into a battered sedan by masked men. Ethan shouted at her, but his voice was muted. He ran toward her, but his legs refused to move, dragging like lead weights beneath him. He saw her scream in desperation, and he heard a strange whining noise assault his ears as the world shuddered beneath his feet.

Ethan’s eyes blinked open, the turbulence shuddering through the aircraft jolting him awake.

He stared out of his window as the Boeing 737 turned steeply over the sparkling azure Mediterranean. The coast of Israel drifted past five thousand feet below beneath a scattering of cloud, and to the north he could see the metallic sprawl of Tel Aviv glinting through the early-morning haze. His eyes ached, and he realized that he had drifted into sleep, the first time since taking off some seven hours previously.

Beside him Rachel Morgan sat in catatonic silence, as she had done for the past four hours. Ethan had spent half of his life crammed into aircraft flying from one godforsaken war zone to another, and had hated the narcissistic chatter of journalists from a dozen countries sharing their unwanted opinions on whatever crisis they were heading to document. Rachel’s silence had been initially a great relief. Now, he suspected that there was something more to it, emphasized by the empty seat between them.

“We’re descending,” he said in a vague attempt to provoke conversation.

“So it would seem.”

He tried again.

“You ever been to the Middle East before?”

“Only when family members go missing.”

“Is that some kind of joke?” Ethan snapped.

Rachel’s eyes swiveled to peer sideways at him. “No, I’m sorry. I’m just not in the mood for talking right now.”

“Is there some kind of problem here, with me?”

“Should there be?”

“You’ve barely spoken since we met, and if this trip is going to achieve anything at all, I need your help.” Ethan leaned across the empty seat between them. “If we can’t work together and start uncovering what happened to Lucy, you know what will happen?”

“What will happen?”

“Nothing at all.”

Rachel stared ahead for a few moments before replying. “I’m not comfortable with the idea of running around a foreign country with someone I don’t know anything about and who clearly has problems of his own.”

“You think I want to be cooped up on an airliner bound for the Middle East?” Ethan challenged. “I was perfectly happy where I was.”

“Is that so?” Rachel said. “You see, that’s my point. Even Doug admitted to me that you’re troubled, and whether that’s because of whatever happened to you out here or not is irrelevant. If you’re unable to help yourself, then what use are you to me or to Lucy?”

Ethan struggled to erect a harbor of dignity around his shame.

“Do you think Doug would have asked me here if he thought that?”

“By his own admission, there was nobody else he could ask.”

Ethan gave up and stared out of the window. “Glad I could help.”

For a long time Rachel sat staring into space, but eventually she glanced across at him.

“Look, I appreciate you being here.”

“Thanks,” Ethan said quietly. “As you’ve pointed out neither of us has much of a choice, so why don’t we just get on with it?”

Rachel stared at him for a long moment with an unconvinced expression. “Fine.”

“I need you to tell me everything you can about your daughter and what she was up to out here.”

“Lucy was born in 1981, but her father Robert died when she was fourteen.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“So were we,” Rachel said, her voice softening. “He died before his time. I’ve questioned a thousand times what would make God take someone from us, but I’ve never found an answer.”

“You’re Catholic,” Ethan guessed.

“I’m a theologian. You?”

Ethan held up his hands. “I’m on the fence, doesn’t interest me much.”

Rachel looked away, but he saw a ghost of a smile touch her lips. “You’d have liked Robert then. He was a humanist.”

Ethan blinked.

“A humanist, a theologian, and a scientist? Family dinners must have literally been a riot.”

Rachel smiled again and Ethan watched as her green eyes blossomed briefly with light, but the moment vanished as quickly as it had come and the smile melted away.

“How on earth did you and Robert meet?”

“He was a friend of a friend. We met at a barbeque, and he bet me ten bucks that I couldn’t convert him from his humanism over a dinner date.”

“Nice move,” Ethan said.

“It was.”

Rachel’s features were no longer strained, and though she continued to stare straight ahead Ethan could see that her mind was wandering among the phantasms of the past. She barely noticed the mechanical grind of the aircraft’s undercarriage coming down somewhere beneath them. Ethan glanced briefly out of the window at the fields and palm groves sweeping past beneath the Boeing’s flexing wing tips.

“How did Lucy end up in Israel?”

“She had been doing field research in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley near Nairobi, before moving to the Hebrew University under a new posting. She’d been awarded a grant for new research into early human evolution and was being mentored by someone called Hans Karowitz, a Belgian scientist, and a cosmologist called Hassim Khan.”

Ethan made a mental note of the names.

“Okay, so why don’t you tell me what was so important about what she found out there?”

“It was an unknown species of human,” Rachel began, “that hasn’t yet been classified by science and—”

“That the Defense Intelligence Agency for some reason wants to recover?” Ethan challenged. “I need to know everything, or this is all for nothing.”

Rachel sighed.

“They asked me not to reveal it to you unless it was absolutely necessary.”

“Is finding your daughter alive absolutely necessary?” Ethan asked.

Rachel closed her eyes and nodded before speaking softly.

“The remains that Lucy found were in a tomb estimated to have been about seven thousand years old,” she said. “But the remains were not human.”

“Not human?” Ethan echoed. “They said that the bones were humanoid.”

“Yes, they were.”

The aircraft around Ethan seemed to recede as he tried to grasp what Rachel was saying.

“So it was some kind of ape?”

“It was a species that did not originate or evolve on this planet,” Rachel said.

Ethan dragged a hand down his face, trying to conceal his disbelief.

“An alien,” he said finally. “That’s why they’re sending the DIA after Lucy, because they think she found E.T. camping in Israel and they want possession of the remains.”

“It’s the only reason they’re willing to take an interest in this case at all,” she said sadly. “If it weren’t for what Lucy found, do you think the DIA would invest in a search for her? They wouldn’t give a damn. This is about the remains, not Lucy.”

Ethan leaned his head back against his seat and chuckled in disbelief.

“I’m being sent halfway across the world to dig up some bones for the DIA,” he murmured, “that’ll probably turn out to have belonged to a frickin’ rhinocerous or something.”

Rachel shot him a toxic look.

“My daughter is still missing out there, whatever you think about this, and she’s smart enough to be able to tell a rhino from a human.”

Ethan shook himself from his torpor of disbelief.

“Okay, indulge me. Why would she have found something like that out there?”

“There’s a big problem in human history that nobody has been able to explain,” Rachel said. “The ancestors of modern humans, people essentially identical to us in every way, had existed in a hunter-gatherer state for at least sixty thousand years. But suddenly, out of nowhere, mankind began building cities, forming agriculture and producing advanced technologies. And that growth blossomed simultaneously in vastly separated geographical areas, from the Indus Valley to the Levant to the Americas.”

Ethan leaned back in his seat.

“Surely that’s just natural growth after the end of the Ice Ages?”

Rachel shook her head.

“There had been some developments, of course: simple dwellings, domestication of animals, and rudimentary agriculture. But then the people of the Indus Valley in today’s Pakistan began the construction of major cities around five thousand years ago. At the same time the Sumerians began to build cities in Mesopotamia, between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. The point is that there is no record of gradual development or progression—the cities sprang up almost instantaneously. Both civilizations supposedly independently invented the wheel and a script called cuneiform. The Indus Valley script, known as Dravidian, hasn’t been fully deciphered even today.”

“How big were these cities?” Ethan asked.

He was surprised by her answer, never having known that such ancient cities could harbor populations of up to forty thousand people. Nor had he known of the complexity of their technologies: that the Indus civilization had built domestic bathrooms, flushing toilets, and drains using burned and glazed bricks; or that it built public basins with two layers of bricks with gypsum mortar and sealed by a layer of bitumen, a remarkably astute method. The Mesopotamians had built docks and seaworthy vessels for trade, and had developed extensive irrigation comparable to modern agriculture.

“Okay,” Ethan said, “but so did the Egyptians, right, and they came later?”

“The Egyptians rose at about the same time,” Rachel said. “Egypt’s first king, Menes, ruled some five thousand years ago in its capital Memphis, but the kingdom was ancient even then and had already developed its hieroglyphic script, again apparently out of nowhere.”

Ethan frowned.

“And you don’t think that this could have happened naturally?”

“It’s possible,” Rachel conceded, “but it should have taken longer than it did, and it seems that the ancients suddenly acquired knowledge sufficiently advanced to still be used today.”

The Babylonians, Rachel explained, were descended from the Sumerians, and their mathematics was written using a sexagesimal numeral system: one which has as its base the number sixty. From this derived the modern-day usage of sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, and three hundred and sixty degrees in a circle.

“Which remains after almost eight thousand years,” Ethan said.

“Along with various customs and traditions,” Rachel agreed, “which are continued today in recognizable forms.”

“And Lucy thinks that another species,” Ethan guessed, “perhaps an extraterrestrial species, gave them knowledge, which they then passed down through time ever after?”

“If it seemed crazy before, it doesn’t now after what Lucy found,” Rachel said. “I’ve spent some time researching all of this since Lucy first mentioned it months ago, long before she disappeared. There have been many books written in the past that have attributed all manner of activities to alien visitors from distant planets, from the founding of Atlantis to building the pyramids. All of it was rubbish, of course.”

“So what’s the difference here?” Ethan asked.

“Real historical events that match the supposed myths of a thousand religions,” Rachel said. “We are familiar only with the religious histories that survive to this day, but they have existed in many differing forms for millennia. Oral tradition was the only way for ancient civilizations to record their past until scripts suddenly appeared simultaneously around the world: the Neolithic script, Indus script, Sumerian and Bronze Age phonetics all appeared around six thousand years ago. In all of their creation myths, these early civilizations almost identically describe Gods who came down from the skies and passed to them great knowledge.”

Ethan himself had read of the legends of the Sumerians, Egyptians, Amerindians, and Japanese, describing such visitors as traveling in fiery chariots, flaming dragons, or giant glowing birds that descended noisily from the sky.

A loud thump reverberated through the fuselage.

Ethan looked at the sun-baked runway flashing past outside. “So we don’t know who hired Lucy to go digging in the Negev for alien remains, but whoever it was must have known what they were looking for.”

“I doubt that she would have abandoned her original research on a whim.”

Ethan unbuckled his seat belt and turned to face her.

“I need to know everything you know about this,” he said. “When someone vanishes, the first forty-eight hours are the most critical and they’ve already passed. Knowledge is our only resource now because X never marks the spot.”

Although Ethan could still see doubt shadowing her expression, Rachel unbuckled her seat belt and looked at him expectantly.

“What do you want to know?”