The Twelfth Insight - James Redfield [88]
“We’ll focus on helping you,” Tommy said, “like the Angels.”
I gave him a pat on the shoulder and eased down over the ledge as the sun broke above the horizon for the first time. Focusing on the beauty, I managed to hold my energy as I crept down the rocky slope. I thought about my father’s advice on how to keep one’s wits while in situations of extreme danger. And smiled. I knew he was around.
At last, I arrived at a spire of rock that rose up about twenty-five feet in front of me. Very carefully, I crawled forward and gazed over. Within fifty feet of me, about a dozen men were covering something in a twelve-foot crevice with rocks. Anish was nowhere to be seen.
Then I spotted someone sitting alone, his hands tied behind his back. He turned his head, and my stomach seized. It was Wil!
I stared at him until he felt me looking and jerked around and saw me. He immediately began to point with his eyes toward the ground to his left, where a handheld two-way radio was sitting on an old leather briefcase on the ground. I was bewildered. What did he want me to do? Grab the radio? I couldn’t understand how that would help us.
Suddenly, I heard a noise in the rocks directly below me. I rolled backward quietly and dropped into a mild depression in the rock, hoping to hide. The noise continued, and to my horror I realized someone was climbing the same spire I was lying on, coming my way. I tried to duck down but it was too late. The individual, holding a pair of binoculars, had climbed to a point just ten feet below me. Anish.
He turned and looked, recognizing me immediately.
“I thought you were around here somewhere,” he said. “I could feel you. You’re like me. You never give up.”
His tone and demeanor were casual, even serene, again like someone feeling invulnerable. Rachel had tried to reach him, and now it was my turn. As best I could, I tried to center myself and move into Oneness, hoping he might sense his own Divine Connection.
“I have to talk to you,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but you have to rethink it. There’s another way.”
“Will you stop exporting your corruption to my world? Will you stop trying to reform my religion?”
I sat up so he could see me better. “We all have souls. We’re all the same, spiritually. It’s true, there’s too much corruption everywhere. But we can fix that, all of us together, if we find the one experience.”
He laughed and gave me a look of pity. “The prophets don’t lie! The end must come now.”
For a moment there was only silence. I didn’t know what to say. Then I thought of Rachel and remembered my last conversation with her.
“The Prophecies all point to an Armageddon,” I stressed. “And a Rapture where the true believers are protected, so they can avoid this war. What if the message of the prophets is really for all of us? And the message is that we can all find a higher God Connection together that will allow us to avoid Armageddon? Do you see what I’m saying? Armageddon doesn’t have to happen!”
I could feel Rachel wanting me to say something else about the Calendar and about the point of Connection I had felt on Secret Mountain, but I couldn’t put it together in my mind.
Anish looked at me, first in confusion and then in anger. When he reached inside his belt for a weapon, I was ready. I rolled over and slipped off the crest of the huge rock on the side away from him. As I did, I glimpsed from the corner of my eye the item the extremists were covering up. It was about the size of a suitcase and had several blinking lights on one side.
For a minute or two, I ran up the hill frantically, thinking he was chasing me. Then I heard him yell from back at the mound.
“If I see you again,” he called out, “your friend will be the first to die.”
When I got back to the others, I was so out of breath and exhausted from the climb that I couldn’t tell them anything for a full minute.
“They have Wil!” I finally blurted out. “I tried to convince Anish to stop what he was doing, but it didn’t work. There wasn’t enough energy. They have some kind of device.