7:00 P.M. GMT, October 9th, 1957 — London, UK

  “Good evening, and welcome to Hot Spot.”

  Reynold Sharpe’s voice was smokey and fluid. He’d said those words more times than he could count. Tonight, they carried more weight than usual.

  “Any list of modern-day Christian conservative warriors would have to include the name Jonah Paul Merrin. Born in 1908. His father owned a hardware store. His mother taught Sunday school. He was admitted to the bar in 1933. After Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and received his commission as a Lieutenant Junior Grade in Naval Intelligence. He was wounded at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and again at Okinawa — for which he received two Purple Hearts, the Bronze Star for valor, and the Navy Commendation Medal. Injuries bravely won, and, I understand, still with him to this day.

  Mr. Merrin’s ptform — patriotism and religious conviction, delivered with powerful oratory — caught fire with the people of Wisconsin. In 1948, they sent him to the United States Senate. His speeches on the Senate floor regurly include quotes from both Testaments of the King James Bible — which, I’m told, he knows by heart, front cover to back.

  Senator, thank you for agreeing to appear on this program.”

  Reynold Sharpe smiled at the man who sat only a few feet away. It was practiced. Reflex. It meant nothing. He’d given the same smile to priests destined for sainthood and nazis destined for hell. Senator Jonah Merrin was somewhere between those two poles. Reynold Sharpe, and everyone watching the live broadcast, was about to find out where.

  Jonah Merrin was himself no novice at presenting a false exterior. He’d learned the skill on Capitol Hill. There were few venues on Earth better at teaching it. The smile he returned was just as practiced.

  “I wish I could say I was happy to be here, Reynold. You know how much I admire your work. But I’m sad to say you’ve wandered far afield on this issue.”

  Jonah had endured many conversations leading up to this moment and without exception they had all tried to talk him out of appearing. Hugh Carver had been blunt.

  “Nothing good will come from it, Jonah. Nothing. Let him talk to an empty chair. Then you can respond in your own time. When you’re ready. And change the narrative.”

  Anne Whitaker took a different approach.

  “The President doesn’t care if you dig your own grave, Senator. Hell, given how determined you are to do it, he’d even lend you a shovel. But he won’t need to. Reynold Sharpe has helped bury bigger men than you. He’ll do just fine on his own.”

  He’d returned from Camp David empty handed to the terrible—unexpected—news that the BBC had broadcast twenty two minutes of footage from the hearing. The same twenty two minutes that he and Ruth had watched in their dining room. He’d slept badly that night—back in his own bed, his wife by his side, but still distant.

  He’d had the dream again. The rainforest. The clearing. The tombstone. But this time it was different. Not the voice. Not the question.

  He was different. Where before there had been certainty as to his answer—his choice—this time he’d hesitated.

  Whose name shall be carved on the stone?

  Why couldn’t he answer that question? Why had it given him pause?

  His only wish since his eighteenth birthday had been to serve the Lord. In that revetory moment twenty one years ago he’d been given his life’s desire. But in the time between the world had changed. And so had his service to God. Where before he’d been a farmer, tilling the soil so that the Almighty’s disciples could flourish, now he was a warrior. Cutting down all those who sought to undo his good works. He'd woken with a start, as he always did after that particur dream. But this time his thoughts weren’t those of submission to the Lord.

  What have I become? he wondered.

  God had shaped him into one thing. But the war, and the resulting world, had shaped him into something else. And he could not recognize what he was.

  His mind had been clearer in the morning, his resolution restored. He was God’s warrior. He could fight this battle with Reynold Sharpe, and win it. The world would be convinced that he, Senator Jonah Merrin, was righteous, and right.

  Ruth had been silent on the matter since she’d seen the film for herself. She’d talked about returning to Wisconsin early—they weren’t that far from their normal Winter recess. But he’d convinced her to stay. But she was like a shadow of herself. Like the ghost of his wife haunting the rge house.

  All efforts to release his own version of what happened—his own version of the film—were halted. There was no point now. Hugh had convinced him of that at least. That, and something else.

  “No. Absolutely not. You can’t unch another investigation into who leaked the film. That could take a year. A year that keeps this story alive. It’s already showing up in Canada and France. A year more of this and it’ll be in Russia and Japan. We need to bury this story, and do it quickly.”

  So everyone who had taken part in distributing the film was safe — for the time being, anyway. What was to be buried now depended on the performance Jonah was giving beneath the hot studio lights. He felt perspiration gathering at the crown of his head and sliding down the back of his neck. His eyes locked on the man across from him, on the striped tie that Sharpe seemed to wear for no other purpose than distraction. But no matter how he tried, Jonah could not push away the other image that pressed against his mind: a solitary stone in a jungle clearing, etched with names he prayed he would never see.

  “You quickly get to the point I’d like to discuss, Senator,” Sharpe replied. His voice remained calm, as did his expression, “that issue being the unjust application of power by a United States Senator. You—”

  Merrin held up his hand as he began to speak over his host. “That is not the issue, sir. The issue is the existence of individuals in America—and the world at rge—threatening our societies with their unchecked powers, and how to protect ourselves from them.”

  “Expin that to me, Senator, because the st time I checked there were no reports of super powered men and women roaming your country terrorizing your citizens. In fact, the only person I know of frightening Americans is you. You’ve had, by st count, eleven men and women appear for your hearings. Eleven tax paying, voting, United States citizens whose lives were ruined by your hearings. And not one shred of hard evidence was ever produced against them.”

  There was an informal pool going within the production staff how long it would take for Jonah Merrin to resort to a biblical quote. Reynold lost to his producer only because Jonah himself had forgone any sort of pleasantries and set fnk speed for the main topic.

  “For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known—”

  Sharpe cut him off. “Senator, I invited you here to have an intellectual discussion, not a theological one. I want to hear your expnation, not Luke’s. Why do you continue with these hearings? You yourself realize they aren’t swaying public opinion.”

  “I am more interested in protecting our country and our way of life than I am in public opinion,” Jonah answered. He was about to recite a quote from Ephesians but Sharpe did not give him the chance.

  “Is that why you have not released the footage from the Larsen hearings, Senator? You don’t think the public would be interested in it? Or are you indeed interested in public opinion?”

  “I—”

  “Is it that you are afraid that American public opinion will turn against you when they see what actually occurred in that hearing room?”

  “They will see Thomas Larsen for what he is: a danger to all Americans,” Jonah answered slowly. The sweat was rolling off the back of his head and down his neck. “He injured spectators and staff members alike when he—”

  “I am sorry to disagree with you, Senator Merrin, but all the injuries that were reported were due to the panicked rush to leave the hearing room. Those people who stayed, the camera crew, as well as yourself, were uninjured. Are you suggesting that there were other injuries not reported?”

  Jonah mopped his head. “I am suggesting nothing. I know what happened. I was there I saw it.”

  “Obviously I was not there. But I saw the film. So please, Senator, describe to me what I did not see on that film.”

  Jonah Merrin and Reynold sparred back and forth in such a fashion for some time. But every time Jonah attempted to gain some space to mentally regroup his attempt at biblical diversion was blocked by the well heeled Brit. Eventually Sharpe’s patience ran out.

  “You have been holding public hearings for a year, Senator, and if anything you are losing the race for public opinion. Have you never considered that your problem is one of communication? That your own constituents are rejecting both the style with which you voice your concerns and the substance of those concerns? Or are you not aware of how regur Americans are interpreting your position?”

  For a moment the heat on Jonah’s head was not from hot studio lights but from stagnant tropical air. The sweat rolling off him bore the scent of burning coconuts and frangipani. The breath in his ears was not his own but Ruth’s. His lips spoke almost as if they had a will of their own.

  “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?”

  “Senator, you wrap your religious certainties around every subject you discuss. You apply them like liniment to healthy muscles as well as injured ones. You seem to me to be a man imprisoned by your faith rather than freed by it.”

  “My faith—” Jonah began before stopping.

  “You are well known to be a man of faith, Senator. But do you put your faith in God, or reserve it for yourself?”

  Put your faith in God.

  He was back in their small home in the Marshall Isnds hearing those words, but it was not Reynold Sharpe’s voice speaking them. Ruth was so sick. And he could do nothing for her. Nothing except put his faith in God that she would recover.

  “I am the Lord’s instrument,” Jonah said out loud, but it was another face he saw when he said it, “I am putty in his hands.”

  “Will that be the epitaph carved into your tombstone, Senator? Here lies the Lords instrument? Or will it be something less complimentary? ”

  My tombstone. Mine, or someone else's?

  He was in the clearing again, kneeling in front of the stone pressed into the soft earth. Slowly his eyes came up from the ground before him.

  “Senator? Do you believe God approves of your treatment of those men and women, who never did harm to anyone?”

  He heard the question, at least the words reached his ears. But what his mind captured something else.

  Whose name shall be carved in the stone?

  When his eyes focused on the gray stone he had his answer.

  Ruth Merrin

  Sarah Merrin

  And beneath them, chiseled by the same invisible hand that had condemned his wife and daughter, was a short passage that announced his own verdict.

  And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.

  Jonah Merrin had no memory of leaving the studio.

  Reynold Sharpe found Jonah Merrin alone in the green room.

  The Senator sat on the slightly threadbare couch, elbows on his knees, hands csped loosely in front of his mouth. His eyes were fixed on the floor a few feet away, as if trying to read something there.

  Sharpe had waited a reasonable amount of time for Jonah to return to his seat. Not because he thought it was likely—he’d seen the man’s face as he walked away. There was something vacant in it. A man in a trance. Or a sleepwalker. Whatever had happened in the studio, Merrin wasn’t just shaken. He was altered.

  After announcing that the program was concluding ahead of schedule, Sharpe had felt a quiet urgency to check on him.

  “Senator?” he asked from the doorway, not yet stepping inside. He left the door open, just in case he needed a quick retreat.

  “Senator Merrin, are you all right?”

  He was about to ask a third time when Merrin spoke—not an answer, exactly. His eyes never moved.

  “Did you know I wanted to enter the ministry? My father wouldn’t allow it. Said you can’t feed a family on a minister’s wage. He convinced me to study w instead. Said after that, I could do anything I wanted.”

  Merrin gave a small shrug. “I spent eight months working estates and conservancies, waiting for my paperwork to come through so I could join the mission.”

  Sharpe stepped further into the room and sat in a chair near the far wall—still within reach of the door, but not as if he’d need it now.

  “Where you met your wife, I believe.”

  Merrin nodded. “Met her there. Married her there. Our daughter was born there.”

  Sharpe knew all that. He’d done his research. But within Jonah, a dam had broken. The words spilled out.

  He spoke of welcoming a tiny, pink, bawling face into the world. Of worrying each day that God would take her away. He described their flight from the Japanese, the long silence after they lost contact with the mission, and the horror of learning what had become of the men and women who stayed behind.

  “During the war,” Jonah said, gncing at Sharpe at st, “I felt like God had a purpose for me. Like I was put on this Earth to defend His flock. Everything that happened—strafings, torpedoes, kamikazes—was easier to endure because of that. But the war had ended when we received the news about Dr. Vogt.”

  He paused, then added, “He saw what was happening in Germany. So in 1933, he took himself as far away as he could. Only to exchange one tyranny for another.”

  Jonah was quiet for a moment.

  “He might’ve been safer if he’d stayed. He wasn’t Jewish. But he was an intellectual. And he hated the Nazis with every fiber of his being. His best friend told him to leave Germany, just like Vogt told us to leave the isnds. Told him to go to America. But Mattias wanted to be somewhere he could do some good.”

  Sharpe nodded gently. “He believed—like Luther did—that every Christian is called to be a priest. To serve.”

  Jonah looked at him steadily. “You’re Lutheran?”

  Sharpe offered his thin smile. “Transcendentalist. But I’ve studied Luther.”

  Jonah nodded again, lost in thought.

  “The year after I got home,” he said, “we heard the terrible news. The Japs had burned the mission to the ground. Everyone was rounded up—put in an internment camp with other civilians. Two of the missionaries survived. Everyone else, including Matthias Vogt, died there.”

  He knew Merrin’s wasn’t a unique story. He had known men and women taken at Singapore—some who came home, and some who never did.

  “There was a woman,” Sharpe began. “Before the war. We were close, for a time. She was captured during the fall of Singapore. When she was liberated in ’45, she weighed barely five stone. She’d given every scrap of food she could find to her children. Her son—he must have been eleven or twelve—used to carry her in his arms.”

  He paused.

  “She survived. But a serving officer I knew from Sandhurst didn’t. I sometimes think everyone on Earth lost someone in that war.”

  Merrin nodded, then continued.

  “But unlike during the war, I had nowhere to pce my anger. No pilots to brief, no bombing runs to pn. Just me—and my grief. And questions for a silent God.”

  He looked down. His voice dropped, raw.

  “How could God let that happen? How could He abandon a man like Matthias Vogt? A man who put his trust in the Almighty, like I did? Everything we built. Everyone we loved. Gone. For what?”

  Sharpe kept his voice even, gentle.

  “That was when your faith began to shift. When you decided that if God wouldn’t protect His flock, you would.”

  Merrin inhaled and sat up straighter. “If you want something done right, my father used to say, do it yourself.”

  Sharpe pressed forward, seeing it now. The flicker in the man’s eyes. He was close.

  “But it’s not right anymore, is it? You’re outside the gate now. Banging on the door. But the watchman won’t let you in.”

  Jonah’s mind pulled backward, to a simpler time. To a pink face giggling in her mother’s arms.

  “It was the stone,” he said softly, though he knew Sharpe wouldn’t understand. “I realized how far I’d strayed from the path God set for me. How much I’d made a mockery of His words.”

  Reynold Sharpe offered an olive branch—uncertain if he wanted Merrin to accept it.

  “There’s still time, Senator. We could go back on the air. Give you a chance to speak to the people. To expin.”

  But Jonah shook his head.

  “No. I’m not looking for absolution. I don’t deserve it. I need to go home. Be with my wife. Then I have to see the President.”

  Sharpe simply nodded. He didn’t need Merrin to expin.

  He already knew what such a meeting would discuss.

  Ed Martell and Lilian Davies sat in front of the rge wooden cabinet with the small screen at the center as David Attenborough’s voice spoke calmly while the camera panned across some veranda that Ed didn’t recognize, and to which he paid no attention whatsoever.

  Ed had expected fireworks. Reynold Sharpe had made corrupt politicians cry, war criminals shout as they shook their fists, and best selling authors ugh uncontrolbly. But this had been the first time any guest had simply stood up and walked out of the studio. The interview had ended with a whimper, not a bang.

  It hadn’t even been that bad, not in Ed’s opinion. By his watch the two men had sparred for twenty-seven minutes, and Senator Merrin—while rarely answering any question directly—had done a professional job of deflecting and denying.

  Until the end.

  Something had clearly happened, though what exactly was less clear. Ed had initially thought Merrin had had a stroke—an idea that was quickly dashed as the man stood up and walked out under his own power.

  Lilian Davies didn’t understand what had happened either, or why it was important. In her defense, she’d spent as much time watching her lodger as she had viewing the broadcast. The younger man’s reactions told her all she needed to know. Something had shifted, and whatever it was it had affected Ed greatly.

  “He’s done,” Ed said finally. “He’s finished. No more hearings. No more hurting people. His fangs have been pulled.”

  By his reaction Lilian knew Ed thought that would be a good thing. Personally she was still undecided on how to feel about people who could do things that others could not. But she was one hundred percent certain about how she felt about men and women being persecuted simply for being who they were.

  “So what happens now?” she asked.

  Ed looked at his nddy. “With him, or with me?”

  She smiled warmly at him as she reached over and patted his arm. “It’s you I’m worried about, love. You’ve been distracted since that first broadcast. I’d hope that after tonight you’d be more yourself.”

  “I’m finally becoming myself. I finally know what I’m meant to do with my life.”

  Her smile broadened. “Well, that’s a start at least.”

  March, 1979 — Schweinfurt, West Germany

  “So now you know,” Ed said in summation of his interest in Aric’s abilities.

  Aric was silent for a moment after Ed had finished speaking.

  “Sounds like—but for the efforts of people like you and Sharp—I might be in a concentration camp right now. Thank you.”

  Ed shook his head. “I didn’t do anything but watch a pair of programs. Reynold Sharpe did the real work—him and whoever sent the BBC the film. But there’s still more work to do. We need to show the world that it’s not magic. That there’s a scientific expnation for what you—and people like you—can do. We figure it out. We share it—our findings, not your identity—with the world. We demystify it. So people can stop being afraid.”

  The look on Aric’s face was not reassuring.

  “What?” Ed asked.

  “You think if you go on TV and give a scientific description on how a hydrogen bomb works people will stop being afraid of it?”

  Ed hadn’t quite thought of it in that way.

  “Fair point.”

  They continued to walk in silence for a few minutes.

  “I’m cold,” Ed said finally. “We should head back.”