The Click

There was much to do. It had been a while since Meta visited DanSheba. She

wasn’t sure how long it would be before she returned to Greve. Her essentials were out and ready to go. Everything else was packed away. Now she had to sit down and contemplate the future.

DanSheba! She thought about the tiny village with deep satisfaction. Its history, over thousands of years rich with tradition and mythological hyperbole. From the beginning it was first and foremost the place that would receive the legitimate Coming, the Messiah, with all his humanity intact. No one who understood the Old Testament believed the Messiah would be any more than a mortal being blessed with the gift of spiritual and battle-ready leadership … and the ear of the Almighty. That was in 2010 when the village supposedly received him, or so that story was told by the villagers around the tall pole in the square. Whether the Messiah really did come, Meta could not say.

What she could say with a smile wider than the Arno River was that her Messiah was coming. Elana Wu would be bringing sufficient expertise to destroy the Click as surely as the earlier Messiah would have addressed, or did address, the myth of a divine Jesus described in the New Testament and the hope for life eternal in some celestial Garden of Eden.

She tried to think back to the first time she visited DanSheba. She couldn’t have been more than twelve. In early afternoon on a gloriously sunny day, she sat with her mother in a small corporate jet secretly owned by a DanSheban corporation, flying south from Delhi towards Bangalore, the high-tech capital of India. Because the small jet could fly at a relatively low altitude, she had exceptional aerial views of the country’s jungled midsection. Somewhere between Nagpur and Hyderabad, Meta recalled being glued to her window and the terrain below. The sun appeared to fall to the earth and bounce back

into her vision, a powerful glare that disappeared before she could look away, as if it had been swallowed up by the jungle floor.

“Did you see that?” her mother asked.

She remembered nodding but didn’t know what it was she saw.

Her mother kissed her on the head. “That my darling is DanSheba. That is where you will be spending a good deal of your life and that is where you will learn both Hebrew and Amharic.”

The homes were modest, mostly stone and wood, and yet the technology that connected that tiny hidden village was the most sophisticated in the world. And still there were no motorized vehicles. If the people wanted to get from one end of the village to the other, they either walked or rode a bicycle or hailed a bicycle-powered taxi. Both extremes amazed Meta as she acclimated to her new surroundings that summer when she was twelve.

In addition to computation shells of all sizes and varieties and other digital gadgetry, there were books of every type, fiction and non-fiction, not necessarily the most current editions, but eventually they came. DanSheba could be described best as an intellectual community hidden within the long forgotten and mostly irrelevant underbelly of India, she thought years later. After all, its people had nothing else to do but read, argue—and spend money the village made on the Ethiopian diamond mines it owned. And much of that money was spent on travel the world over, education, and more recently a state of the art hospital and medical research facility, right there, within a tin can kicking distance from the main square and the tall pole that stood watch, the very same pole that the Messiah supposedly climbed up to reach the ear of God. DanShebans thrived everywhere in the world and it was from those places they would bring the most recent technology, books, and even mere ideas back home.

Because DanSheba occupied a small amount of land, its young people were encouraged to live in other parts of the world. The village sat within a grand meadow pressed up against steep, barren sides of a mountain that encircled all the meadow except for a small opening around a hundred yards wide. A river providing the only way in and

out flowed alongside the opening and served as DanSheba’s umbilical cord to the outside world, its means of obtaining reading material, medicine and other necessities from those outside as well as a source of much of its food. Looking up from the wharf at the river, the mountainside appeared to be formed of polished granite that glistened in the sun. That glare and the mountain shadows were enough to hide the meadow and its inhabitants from the daylight sky.

Meta shook herself back to the present. Time was running out. She jumped from her chair and gathered her belongings. After making several trips down to the Speedster, she started back up the stone stairs to lock up. Pounding footsteps echoed behind her. Before she had a chance to turn around two masked thugs grabbed her and dragged her back into the house. She fell to the floor and hit her head. Blood oozed from above one eye. When she finally looked up to see what was happening, the barrel of a laser gun pressed against her temple. One of the thugs, short and thin, holding the gun in one hand reached down with a handkerchief in the other hand. Before she could take it, the second thug, much taller and heavy around the middle, pushed him aside and got into her face.

All of a sudden she felt a knife against her throat. The panic seemed to cause her eyeballs to jump from their sockets. Her scud RANG. She tried to reach for it. The thug grabbed her wrist.

Yennie was on his cell leaning against the outer gate of the White House, listening to continuous RINGS.

“Darn it, Meta. Pick up.”

Where was she? They had talked earlier. She should have been on her way to the airport in Florence. There was no reason for her not to pick up.

Meta was now in the basement standing before a large safe hidden within what looked to be a second furnace. Blood was still dripping from the gash above one eye. Her scud RANG again.

The overweight thug flashed his knife in front of her eyes. “Leave it.”

The smaller thug came down the steps with a wet cloth. He placed it above her eye. She took it from him, held it firm, and nodded a thank you.

“What the hell are you doing?” the other thug growled out.

“Shut up,” the smaller thug barked back. He then leaned closer to Meta and whispered, “Open it before he cuts your throat … and he will.”

Meta jerked back, trying to appear defiant. “No.”

“Lady, I can put this safe in your lap and blow it up,” the fat thug said then began poking the tip of his knife into her chest. Her scud RANG again. “But I won’t. I’ll cut your throat instead, then I’ll blow up the safe right where it is. Now, I’ll count to five. One, two …”

Meta nodded and bent down to reach the safe. She worked the combination until it popped open. She reached in and pulled out a brown leather valise, the only thing in the safe. The thug with the knife grabbed the valise and looked in the safe to make sure nothing else was there, then opened the valise and pulled out the Smotecal Decretum. The smaller thug took it in his hands. He ran over its entire surface with his fingertips. He bent the edges, and bit into the gold colored trim. He stared at the signature.

“Is it the original?” the fat thug asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“I know real gold when I see it. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

He and the other thug raced upstairs and were gone by the time Meta reached the top of the stairs. Once she heard the roar of their high-powered pickup truck speed away, she plopped on the couch in the den and called Yennie.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yes, of course. I had visitors. It seems they knew I had the Decretum, and think they have the original.”

“Not surprising. My sources tell me there’s a VAMA spy close to Hitchcock.” “What! Any ideas?”

“I’d look for anyone with a connection to Opus Dei or quite possibly the Tarsusians.”

Meta looked at her watch. “I have to go. I will be meeting Oliver at the Mumbai airport and want to make sure I’m there before he arrives.”

“And the others?”

Meta thought about that. “Barnaby Bloom will be bringing Oliver’s daughter and grandson directly to the school. I’ve arranged for that with the transportation people in DanSheba.”

“And Elana Wu?”

That was a more difficult question to answer. Meta shrugged. “Oliver said she will be there but wouldn’t tell me how or by whom. Let’s hope he’s right.”