“Thank you, Francois,” Leo said. “We’ll stay in touch.”
Francois shoved a satellite phone into the cardinal’s hand. “Remember, we can get to you wherever you are … we’re only a phone call away.”
As everyone clamored onboard the speedboat, John took his place on a raised seat behind the wheel and turned the key. Immediately, the engine came to life with a muted rumble that grew into a throaty roar as they moved out into the harbor. Inching the throttles forward, the bow rose steadily through the water as John steered the boat out into open water toward the Carmela. Standing behind him on tiptoes, Ariella wrapped her arms around his shoulders and laid her head against his tanned back, her long hair whipping in the slipstream as she closed her eyes against the saltwater spray.
Sitting next to Lev on the padded seat in the back of the boat, Leo watched the young couple with a mixture of joy and sadness. He felt a great sense of satisfaction that these two had found happiness with each other, but his joy was tinged with sadness at the fact that he would forever have a void in his life. He would never experience the same closeness with a woman. No one would ever hold him the way Ariella held on to John. His only embrace came from his faith, for that was the path he had chosen.
Only a few of the cardinal’s closest friends knew that he fought a constant internal battle with the issue of celibacy and marriage. His rough-chiseled features and intelligent green eyes had attracted more than one woman throughout his life, and for some odd reason, his Roman collar had actually acted as a magnet to some. But despite his yearning to share his life with another, Leo had come to terms with the fact that life wasn’t always fair to those who served. He had always managed to remain faithful to his vows, but in his view, the Church’s demand for priests to remain celibate had condemned thousands of men to a life of unnatural solitude. More and more he was coming to believe that this demand for a life filled with reflective isolation was a throwback to the Middle-Ages, to an unenlightened era in history, when enforcing deprivation on others was power.
Now, in the twenty-first century, as information circled the globe at the speed of light, a new generation of priests had become filled with a fierce resolve-a resolve for change. They had become convinced that the Church’s failure to acknowledge a man’s God-given right to marry and have a family was the one thing most responsible for the scandals that had befallen the modern priesthood.
The year before, when Leo had first met John as a young man considering the priesthood, he had counseled him to choose his vocation wisely due to this very issue. John had agonized between his ambition to serve God as a priest and his desire to marry and raise a family. The matter had finally been settled in Israel when John and Ariella looked into each other’s eyes for the first time. Game over. The Church had lost another promising candidate.
A shadow looming over the speedboat caused Leo to look up as the gleaming white superstructure of the Carmela towered above them. Pulling up alongside the yacht’s dark blue hull, John expertly reversed the speedboat’s engines to keep from slamming into the wooden stairway that descended down the side of the yacht from the deck above. Rising and falling with the swell of the ocean, John tried to steady the small boat while Lev scrambled onto the bow and threw a line to a deckhand standing at the bottom of the stairs.
Up on the bridge, Alex Pappas, the Carmela’s captain, stood against the railing, smoking a cigarette. He looked down on the scene below with eyes that matched the color of the sea he had lived on for most of his adult life. His short black hair contrasted with the stark white uniform he wore with pride, and like his father and grandfather before him, he had followed in the footsteps of generations of Greek sea captains who had guided ships across the Mediterranean Sea for thousands of years.
“Secure that speedboat,” Pappas bellowed to the deckhands below. “We’re starting the engines in fifteen minutes.”
The yacht’s mixed crew of men and women looked up and watched as he flicked the remainder of his lit cigarette overboard and walked back into the bridge. The young crewmembers sprang into action, for they knew that their beloved Greek captain always meant what he said, and that in exactly fifteen minutes, the twin turbines of the two-hundred-and-thirty-foot yacht would begin propelling the huge boat away from the coastline and out to sea.
As the crew took charge of stowing the speedboat below decks, Leo and Lev followed John and Ariella up the polished wooden stairs to the main deck.
“We’re going up to the bridge to watch the departure,” John said. “Aren’t you two coming? The view is spectacular from up there.”
“It’s pretty spectacular from here too,” Lev said, settling back into a cushy lounge chair next to a table under a blue canvas awning. “Tell Alex we’ll be up in a minute.”
Shrugging his shoulders, John grabbed Ariella’s hand and the two headed up some outside stairs to the bridge. Seconds later, a female crewmember exited the aft salon with a tray in her hand. She was wearing the crew’s standard uniform of dark blue shorts and a blue-and-white-striped polo shirt with the name of the yacht, Carmela, emblazoned in gold script over the left chest. Bending from the waist, she set two glasses of sparkling white wine at their table before disappearing back inside.
“I had forgotten how much I loved being on this boat,” Leo said, lying back in a recumbent deck chair next to Lev and gazing out at the harbor.
“I know. I love it too. Sometimes I feel more at home on this boat than I do on land. Still, I can’t help but feel a little guilty sitting here amidst all of this luxury, especially in view of what just happened to all of those poor souls back on the highway.”
Leo took a long sip from his glass and stared out at the water. “Life is for the living, Lev, and we have to press on if we are to have any chance at all of stopping this thing. Now that I think of it, this boat is probably one of the best places in the world to be right now. It’s mobile and easily isolated … a perfect home base for what we need to do. Everything happens for a reason, so we should count our blessings that we have our own little island of safety right now.”
“What you just said reminds me of something I’ve been thinking about since we came onboard. Now that the world is at the mercy of a virus that’s capable of killing millions, we’ve arrived at a kind of crossroads in human history. No one knows where this thing will strike next. Panic will soon rule the cities, and others will be looking for similar places of safety. Untold thousands will be seeking to escape the virus until the threat has passed. I’ve sent word to our people guarding the compound back in Israel to block all access. For now, no one comes in and no one goes out. The same thing goes for this boat except for designated team members who will have to make shore excursions from time to time.”
“I suppose you’re right. We’re going to have to start looking at the world in a whole new way. For all practical purposes, the planet we live on is rapidly becoming a dangerous alien environment.”
“That’s exactly the way we need to start looking at our surroundings when we leave the boat. We have no idea when or where the pathogen will pop up next and what effect it will have on any given population. Of course, in Israel, we’ve always been faced with hostile threats, but according to the Bible, our greatest threat still lies ahead. My wife and I always kept the biblical warnings of Revelation at the forefront of our thinking, especially when we built the villa and the compound surrounding it. I don’t think I ever mentioned this to you before, but throughout the years, I’ve been in contact with other like-minded communities similar to ours in Israel.”
“You mean people have built other compounds like the one surrounding your villa?”
“Most of them were built by friends I’ve known throughout the years … friends who believe as I do. We wanted to create places of safety for our families and friends to go to if something catastrophic occurred in the world. A lot of people scoffed at our
“Are they all in Israel?”
“Two of them are. They are both kibbutz-like compounds like the one at the villa. There’s another located near the Aude River in southern France, and two more in America. All of them were started by some very interesting people.”
“I sincerely hope you’re not describing something along the lines of those end-of-world religious cults that seem to pop up in the headlines from time to time … the kind that give the rest of us in the religious community a black eye.”
“Oh, no, they’re nothing like that. They were conceived with Christian belief systems in mind, but there’s nothing cult-like about them. One of the communities in America is quite large. Apparently, one group bought up hundreds of acres of farmland in an area of the country where the local farmers had fallen on hard times. Some of the farmers actually returned to live for free in homes they had lost to the bank. They now run the farming
