Judas Church

Episode 10

"Something like what?"

"We've been going through Leon's contacts to see if anybody else has heard something. Nothing on that so far. So, we're thinking that if we don't get an update in the next twenty-four hours, we're flying over there."

"You fly planes?" I asked.

"No, but I have connections," Manley said. "I'm working on some now."

"Okay. I want in," I said.

"Sure," Manley said.

Late evening the next day, Manley, Abigail, and I boarded a small jet at an airfield about thirty miles south of Baltimore.

"It used to be a military facility, until it was abandoned and converted for civilian use about ten years ago," Manley said.

The pilot was an older Californian man who worked for American Airlines before he decided to go into business for himself. Now, he piloted private flights like ours and taught aviation at an Air Force Academy. His name was Marco. "Does your friend know you're coming?" he asked once we boarded his plane.

"We're not for sure," Manley said. "He gave us just enough information to find him if we look hard enough."

"So, a rescue mission then?"

"We're hoping that everything works out so it won't come to that, but it will be if it has to."

After a sixteen hour flight across the Atlantic, we stopped to refuel in Morocco. The sun was hot and the air was dusty in Casablanca, and Marco told us that a dust storm had just blown across the city. I had only traveled out of the country once before — with my parents when we vacationed in Mexico about eight years ago. The long flight hours had made us all a bit cramped and tired, so we got out and walked around while Marco refueled the plane and talked to the control tower.

Marco insisted on getting something to eat so we ordered pizza inside the terminal and ate in the airport's waiting area. We tried to reach Leon on the satellite phone again, but we got no answer. While Abigail informed our friends back in the states about our progress, I checked Leon's blog to see if he had posted another update, but he hadn't. We did, however, receive an update from the mission agency that was sponsoring Leon's trip. They said they were working to re-establish contact with the team on the ground.

Before we got back on the plane, we prayed again for our own safety while traveling and for the protection of Leon and the church members in Indonesia. If this did turn out to be a rescue mission, we were seriously going in blind.

Chapter 30

"How can one man be doing all of this?" one of the elders asked after the recording of Pastor Taylor's conversation with Arnold Wexson had finished playing. "I mean, I really want to just chalk it all up to Arnold going crazy, but he sounds serious."

"He is serious," Taylor said. "He's already proven that. Now, we just need to figure out what to do about it. We obviously can't continue on the path we're on. He obviously still has connections to people in this church that we didn't know about."

"Sleeper agents, working from within," Stan said.

Taylor nodded. "We need to find out who they are."

"And you never told us about this deal you had with the music director," another of the elders said wrinkling up his face.

"I didn't know what else to do," Taylor said. "It would look really bad if we fired a new music director just two weeks after hiring him. And he agreed not to make it an issue, so I decided to keep quiet about it."

"You should have told us at least."

"What's done is done," Taylor said. "We have to focus on moving forward. What are we going to do now?"

"I say we expose Arnold Wexson," said one elder leaning back in his seat and crossing his arms. "Tell everyone what he's up to. There's still a lot of people in this church who remember him."

"But you risk two things: there's a lot more people who don't know him and won't care," another elder said. "On top of that, some of the people who do know him will remember him as the person he was, not the person he is now -- "

"We'll give them the facts," the first elder said.

"Let me finish," the second elder went on. "Those people will not want to believe what we're telling them about him. They are going to want to hear his side of the story, which raises a third problem. By exposing Wexson, we expose ourselves. People will begin to question us just as much -- if not more -- than they question him."

A moment of silence followed the elder's speech.

"There's not much we can do except carry on," one elder said. "We won't let Wexson put us into a position where we compromise what we believe on the issue of homosexuality and other issues from the Word of God, the Bible."

"He already has," another elder said.

"So we're trapped," Taylor said.

"I have a feeling this is exactly where our good friend, Arnold, knew we would be right now," Stan said.

"He did," the silver-haired elder Sean Petri said. He had been silent the whole time.

Pastor Taylor looked at him. "Wait," he said leaning forward in his seat. "You knew. You knew the whole time that Wexson was behind Johnny Dunmoore leaving and behind the recommendation to hire the openly homosexual Ferrian Flay. That's why you said it was an enemy I had made before, isn't it?"

"Yes, I did know," Sean said.

Everyone was silent again.