Rayford and Chaim had been quietly calculating for three years now, the exact day when Xu Dangchao would turn from being a great leader, to becoming the most evil man in all history.
During that time, Chaim had been working to merge what he referred to as two sides of the brain. He had taken a movement which started as spontaneous religious anarchy, with no human leader, and turned it into a tightly knit team of people who were full y submitted to the authority of God.
There were now more than 70,000 people involved in the six tribes that he led, and they were all geared for a huge spiritual battle.
This concept of God's authority encapsulated what Chaim now had the confidence to say was wrong with Friends, the churches, and the world in general. People were quick, he said, to push the authority of their various organisations, but slow to humble themselves before God. Friends called themselves mystics... open to the leadings of the Spirit, but only if the "spirit" was stripped of all authority first. They had become trapped in a whirlpool of self-made gods who became ever more comfortable and ever less real.
Chaim had grown to appreciate the significance of the death of Jesus… something that he had, in his more liberal past, rejected as inconsistent with a loving God.
"He's only human, after all !" Chaim would now say jokingly, to get people to let go of their ridiculously binding rules about what a perfect God can or cannot do. "If he wants to get angry, who are we to stop him?"
He taught that the cross was a symbol of God's anger against sin and rebellion... the kind of sin and rebel ion that was being practiced and defended both in and out of the churches. By letting his own Son suffer for the world's rebellion, God had illustrated, in a single act, both his great anger at sin and his great love for the sinner.
Some churches still talked about the cross, but only in terms of what Jesus had done for them. The smarter theologians believed that if they yielded on that point, they would soon have to accept that Jesus also had the right to call on others to do the same thing. No one wanted to do that, and so, in one way or the other, the message of the cross was snipped out of the New Testament, as theologians conducted their own castration of God.
Meanwhile, thousands of people from outside the churches saw perfect sense in serving a God who makes rules and sets standards; and these were the ones who joined the Twelve Tribes. While the churches moved toward more and more open rebellion against God, Chaim was steeling his followers to face their greatest fears, and to pray for the strength to confront them. There would be suffering, he promised. There would be deaths. There would be rejection by loved ones, as Ming had experienced already. And there would be scandal, which, for Chaim, had been his biggest fear.
"God gives, and God takes away," he had said. "God forgives; but he also punishes. And we are about to enter the furnace of his judgment."
He was talking about the next three and a half years, a period during which true believers would be subjected to the greatest persecution that they had ever experienced before.
Sheree also knew of Chaim's predictions, and she hated the logic behind them. She had marked the day on her calendar, and was going to use it to make one final bid to steer him away from his goal... a goal which she had come to see as anathema to her voices.
It was a Tuesday night in August -- winter in Sydney. It had been raining off and on all evening, and Chaim had not taken an umbrella with him when he left that morning. During a cloudburst on the way home, he ducked under cover of a picnic shelter in a park, to wait it out. While standing there, trying to stamp some of the water off his feet and clothes, he spotted someone coming toward him in the darkness. Although the rain was pouring down now, the image in front of him did not hurry, but moved steadily closer. She was only ten metres away when Chaim recognised her. It was Sheree, and she had a strange smile on her face. Under her coat, she was clasping a notebook to her breast, but otherwise she seemed indifferent to her drenched condition.
The rain was so heavy on the corrugated iron roof of the shelter at that exact moment that it was difficult to hear anything. But Sheree was not saying anything anyway. She simply handed Chaim the notebook and indicated that she wanted him to open it.
Inside were lists of names, email addresses, phone numbers, even some house addresses. Chaim recognised them as all being members of the Twelve Tribes, most of them senior leaders.
Then, quite suddenly, the rain eased, and the two were able to talk.
"Where'd you get this?" Chaim asked.
"Here and there," Sheree answered proudly. "You didn't always take your computer with you, you know."
"So what're you planning to do with it?" Chaim had a good idea but he wanted to hear it in her own words.
"It all depends on you," she said. "There's still time to dump Rayford and start our own movement."
"You know that isn't going to happen," Chaim responded.
"So, I take this to the authorities! If your predictions are correct, from tomorrow onwards, they'll be looking for you and the others. Isn't that right?"
"Sheree, what's happened to you?" Chaim asked sadly. "First, you stopped listening to God, and now you're actually wanting to work for the devil?"
"There is no devil," she hissed angrily. "Only the voices."
"God is not going to let you get away with this," Chaim said calmly. "He'll stop you."
"I've memorised the entire list," Sheree boasted. "Even if you destroyed that book, it wouldn't stop me."
"Sheree! Look at yourself! Can't you see that we're talking about a lot more than destroying a book?" Chaim pleaded. "You're the one who'll end up being destroyed if you carry on like this."
"What? You're going to destroy me?" she asked, and then laughed. A long, evil laugh.
"I won't need to do it," Chaim answered. "God can take care of that himself. He let you come here... maybe to test me, maybe to give you another chance. But when he decides you've had enough opportunity to change, he'll deal with you in other ways."
"Is that how your God of hate works?" she asked sarcastically.
"If you want to think of it that way, Sheree, that's fine. But it won't change the truth. He'll do what he's going to do, and you won't be able to stop him. And he's asked me not to resist him either; so I won't. One way or another, he'll deal with you, and he'll do it without my help."
Sheree reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a small gun. "I don't want to hear any more of that," she shouted, as the intensity of the rain picked up again. "If you won't help me, you won't help anyone!"
Chaim left the notebook on the picnic table and strode quickly over to Sheree, hoping to take the gun out of her hand. "Put that down, Sheree," he said fearlessly, and perhaps foolishly. "You'll hurt somebody."
Just as he was reaching out for the gun, she pulled her arm back and then swung it with all her strength at his head, hitting him in the temple with the side of the gun. As she did so, the gun went off. Chaim fell to the ground. After a moment or two of shock, he realised that the bullet had missed his head.
Nevertheless, he was in pain, and more than a little dizzy.
Neither one said a word as Chaim stared up at her. There was a soft moan from him as he said something that Sheree did not catch. She was standing over him, with the gun pointed straight at his head. More out of curiosity than anything else, she shouted for him to repeat what he had said.
"I was talking to God!" he said, using all of his strength to be heard above the rain. From somewhere nearby was a flash of lightning, followed almost immediately by the loud explosive crack of thunder.
"And what did you say?" she asked, as she cocked the trigger. She was watching closely to be sure that he could not lunge at her and disturb her aim.
"I asked him to DO IT!" he shouted, just as a blinding flash of light filled the shelter, accompanied by the loudest explosion Chaim had ever heard.
Sheree did not hear it, however, because she was dead. The lightning had cut right through the metal roof and struck her in the head, lighting up her whole body just before she tumbled down on top of Chaim.
He rolled out from under the lifeless form, rubbed the side of his head where she had hit him with the gun barrel, moved over to the table to retrieve the notebook, and then stumbled back to his room.
There was no longer any need for an umbrella, because the rain had stopped.