CHAPTER 1

Knock.

Knock, knock, knock,

Knock, tap.

"Jesus!"

Startled almost out of my sleep, I hear footsteps creak on the boards of the porch. A bear? The knocking again.

Who's wrapping the code?

Pulling aside the ringed curtains, patterned with those black bears that seem to be found only on mountain cabin windows, I peer through the moist glass toward the porch and, in the powdery light of a lonely yellow bulb, I see the form of a girl holding a leather pizza warmer. Can't believe they have home delivery in these parts. I open the door to see the thin face of the girl framed by her jacket hood. Inviting her in out of the cold, she touches the lintel of the door as if steadying her slight frame then seems to skate inside.

"Cold night for a job like yours," I say. She doesn't reply but looks around the ordinary cabin as if fascinated by it; she places the pouch on the knotty-pine tabletop.

"Peaceful ... and wonderful, isn't it? The cold night?" she says, apparently happy to be shivering, "The chill allows all the stars to shine brighter." She removes her hood, and I notice her very short-cropped hair, sandy colored, and her nose and eyebrow piercings; she's very white. Taking the pizza box out of the bag, she places it on the table and opens it for me. I look around for my wallet.

"The woman already paid for it," she says.

Cryptic. What woman? I'm alone. I think.

"The tip," I say.

"Even the tip," she replies, "Look, it is ready for you now. Our special dough, which you can only get up here. On the mountain. You should eat of it while it is fresh." She talks funny for a delivery kid, but I'm more taken by the most amazing light in her eyes. And her voice, while young, has a smooth, rich timbre, unlike any I've heard before.

"Thanks, yeah, I will," I say.

"Please understand me, do not wait too long," she adds with more an advisory than an admonishing tone; she breaks out into a grin. "In this place where you are, in the thin cold air, that which is warm can grow cold quickly."

Are we talking about pizza here?

The room lights up and I feel a strong erotic urge out of nowhere. I am now in a palace, like the one Miramee described when she told me of the third temptation of Yeshua in the desert. The girl is still here but I know she's not the same. She looks different but I don't register the change much more than that.

"I am the Angel Nura, remember?" she says with a beautiful, radiant smile, her black hair in a thick braid that cascades down her right shoulder. She wears a classic Greek gown of white with a diaphanous layer of silken blue.

"Sorry. I'm sure we've never met," I say, clearing my throat; she's big breasted, sensual. Suddenly I remember that she is Satan in disguise and I lurch backwards. Her face reddens with anger; I think she could explode.

"Pay no attention to Gavri'el," she says.

"Gavri'el?" I ask, "Seriously?" Was the kid with the pizza really the great Archangel Gavri'el, Eema's angel, the one who asked her to conceive the infant Yeshua?

"Yes, Jack Castro," she replies, "You are so weak and ignorant, so easily deceived. Can you not see that she brings trouble for you? Stay away from the priest or, surely, you shall die and there are many, many others who will die as well. Stay in this land of yours, spend freely from the treasure given you and to which you have a right, and, please, live richly in peace — for your own sake. In the other place, in the other time, you shall do great damage with your unworthy presence!"

She stares me down and I feel her darkness creeping into my heart. She's right; my presence is unworthy but I have no intention of going back to Miramee, although I miss her every day. And Yeshua, I desire to see him but I'm fearful of letting go like that again. So, no plans to head back to his time and place; if you could imagine a presence like his belonging to any time and place. So, I have no idea why she's come to warn me. Fear now grips me as she smiles and then giggles, now laughs at me derisively; a sinister laughter that you hear from villains in the movies — except hers rings in an intensified sense of self-hopelessness, an absence of any redeemable good in me.

Suddenly, her amusement ends when we are both startled by the whole palace beginning to shake violently as if it were a ship slammed by a rogue wave. A pillar crashes nearly missing me and she vanishes but, before she departs, I see the terror in her eyes. What's happening here? The chandelier on a chain swings violently over my head.

Am I dying again? Am I dying here in Satan's palace, amid the lavish lie of Hell?

CHAPTER 2

AD 2010 and the second year of the presidency of Barack Obama, in the air above Rome

BUMP!

Eyes snap open. Turbulence. It was just turbulence. A relieved sigh wheezes out of me; another nightmare. A small thump gives a second love tap to the venerable 747. As if planned, the cabin lights brighten accompanied by the gentle, familiar chime.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, we land at Aeropuerto de Fiumicino in thirty minutes, please prepare, grazie." The feminine lilt of the flight attendant's Italian accent awakens us. I yawn now and stretch, realizing I slept most of the eleven-hour flight from San Francisco.

"Ahhhhh!" Another big yawn.

She offers me a small, crisp towel and I wipe the sleep from my face. Returning with a plastic trash bag and I plop in some crumpled tissues. Her dark moist eyes sparkle, seeming to smile as broadly as her full lips, as if I had just given her something to be treasured. The smile reminds me transiently of the not-so-angelic Angel Nura and I shiver reflexively.

"Grazie and good morning, Mr. Castro," she says brightly, but frowns slightly at my reaction. I try to return a "Good Morning" as I compose myself, and then glance to my right and see the eyes of my wife flutter open briefly, and then shut lightly again as she shifts in the first-class lounge chair. Feeling better. What remains of the dream's erotic wave washes over me briefly as I reach over Sharon's curvy, blanketed hip to lift the curtain; the late morning sun streams in, the light crumpling her smooth forehead into a frown. Feeling more relaxed, I smile with a small, private satisfaction; in my dad-mode, I enjoy waking my family up.

"Oh, Jack! I slept this time!" Sharon yawns now and scans the cabin with groggy amazement, "Those pills Mike gave me worked!" She is speaking of Dr. Michael Kohen, her boss and the cardiac surgeon to whom I owe my life. Sharon blissfully closes her eyes once more.

Squinting out at the hazy Italian landscape below, my attention turns back to the flight attendant as she brushes past me again, her Milanese perfume lightly lingering in the musty cabin air. These last seven years seem to have brushed by me as quickly; all that remains is the same brief fragrance of memories. There's a lot of life, a lot of calls, agricultural insurance policies written, speaking engagements, graduations, weddings, and even some funerals but still it seems ... fast.

We lost my dad to cancer last January and Mom sold her house; all of us decided it would be better if she lived with us. She's had a hard time adjusting to a widow's life and it seems to have rekindled her religious faith. A month following Dad's funeral mass, she decided to start attending services on Sundays at the old Carmel Mission. Because of her macular degeneration, her vision prevents her from driving anymore so I usually drop her off and pick her up. Typically, when Mom is in church, I have breakfast at Loulous's, my favorite dive on the working wharf in my hometown, Monterey, which is the Steinbeck-ian seaport on California's rugged central coast. I enjoy a leisurely weekend omelet as the boats chug in and out of the harbor. Mostly, I like watching the birds eat. The gulls grasp and plunge, fluttering around the pilings, joining the otters and seals in receiving Yeshua without knowing it is he. Maybe they do in some unnamable way; maybe we are the tough ones to convince. Andreas — the apostle Saint Andrew — told me in Greece that when I can find Yeshua in the bread, I can find him anywhere. No one has to instruct the gulls or the otters; they already get it. I'm a denser student so I am — so Traveler is — only beginning to understand that Yeshua is in the bread.

And everywhere.

No small task. I must allow him to rewrite the code for all the programming in my head and that's a lot of work. That's a lot of trust.

Traveler ...

Only once in these past seven years did I break my silence about Traveler and the first century, and then to one person only. About a week before he died, Dad was at home on a morphine drip attended by those angels disguised as Hospice caregivers. His stomach cancer had spread and, even in his opiate-dulled agony, he was still aware that those were his final days. Our daughters, Sharon, and I, along with my sister, Becky, took turns keeping watch, and helping Mom.

Coming in for my late-night shift, I sent Mom to her room for some needed rest. She was as strong as her Missouri pioneer stock bred her to be and as self-disciplined as she was when she worked in security for a local office of the Department of Defense. But at seventy-six and with five weeks of this vigil behind her, she was slowly burning out. Dad was taking his good time. When the caregiver went out onto the deck for a breather, a smoking-type breather, I sat with my father who was fully awake, clear-eyed, and laboring to speak to me. I leaned my ear closer to him. He had been a man of few words throughout his life, always reserved, but he seemed to want to talk that evening.

"Jacky," he rasped, "you know your great, great, great — many greats — grandfathers built that old mission church. One was an Indian and the other was a Spanish soldier. They did not know then that their children would one day marry each other in that church. We are part of this place, our blood and bones are here, son."

"Yes, Dad," I replied, wondering why he was reviewing the family history right then.

"Jacky, you almost died that time, with your heart? Remember?" he said, half voiced, half whispered.

"Yeah, Dad, I remember."

"Do you think there's a Heaven? They always said if we were good in our lives, there was another place we go — up there — even though our bones belong here. Do you think it is true?" His voice was stronger even with the morphine leaking into him. His bloodshot eyes watered up. The question was so simple, childlike, that I understood what Yeshua meant when he called people his lambs. The second innocence of the human being emerging at these critical and vulnerable life moments seems to stir up, or free up, the love within all those present. I paused a moment before I decided how to answer as he looked up into my eyes with the deepest, most hopeful, most innocent expression. Yet, I couldn't help sensing that he suspected I knew more than I had spoken about these last seven years. I did.

Decision made, I cleared my throat. Here goes. It felt like diving into a deep pool, one where I couldn't see the bottom.

"Dad, I haven't told you this before. I haven't told a soul — not even Sharon — and I am not going to tell anyone else, not even Mom. Not now. Because most of the time I've trouble believing it myself, yet, it is true, I'm certain. It happened the day I had the heart attack."

"What happened, son?" he asked, his eyebrows knit together in a familiar scowl.

How do I say it?

"I saw the angels. The bright angels. And I saw Yeshua, Jesus. I saw him, too."

His beleaguered expression softened into wonder.

"You did?" he asked, his voice crescendoing upward. The Hospice caregiver came back into the room but Dad waved her off. She nodded and two practical nurse shoes shuffled her round white form out again as the scent of L'Air de Cigarette lingered in the air. The door clicked and my throat tightened a bit. Onward, Jack! Shit!

"Yes. I did," I said, swallowing down the lumpy fear forming on my vocal chords. "And, Dad, when they are near, you cannot imagine the light and colors, the sounds and fragrances around them."

"Really?" he asked, "Did you see ... God?" Calmer now, feeling a lightness within me, I waited for the right answer to come into my mind. Then,

"Couldn't miss Him," I said with a smile.

"Ohhh," he exhaled with a sigh, smiling weakly, "I'm tired now. Come back tomorrow and tell me more. I will wait for you, Jacky." The faint smile faded as he drifted off into sleep again and I sat with him for a while. I will wait for you, Jacky. Dad's parting sentence that night bore a deeper meaning.

Over the next six days, I talked with him, careful to ensure no one else was listening; this was for him and him alone. I told Dad about the stream in the wilderness park — he remembered where it was — and how, through a process I couldn't define rationally, I was able to go from there back in time to another place, without moving. I told him about the stone house in the mountains near Ephesus, about my guide, the golden-skinned beauty, Miramee, the nickname for Mary Magdalene, and about the man called Yeshua.

Dad marveled when I spoke of the Immerser, John the Baptist, and how I sat with him in his stinking pit of a prison cell, of how he told me of Yeshua's baptism that day in the Jordan River. Miramee met Yeshua at a desert camp when a caravan had brought him in injured during his forty-day walkabout in what is now the Jordanian Desert. After Yeshua recovered enough to speak, they became friends, and he confided in her, telling in detail of his journey of self-discovery in the wilderness. I spoke more about the Immerser's prison and the music from Herod Antipater's party overhead.

Dad listened, never falling asleep. He even asked a question or two but they did not indicate doubt. Not the huggy, touchy type during his many years, he held my hand as we spoke, less for affection but more like a lifeline. I went on to tell him about the temptations, about how, in the desert, Yeshua came to the realization that he and the Father were one. Finally, I finished with the stories about Andreas and the calling of the first disciples, of Gat-Shemanin, the cave containing the large olive oil press hidden in an orchard near Jerusalem, the place we call Gethsemane, and of my conversations with Yeshua, as well as my encounter with the Tempter and Ose, the leopard-like Lord of Hell. He looked frightened when I told him of those two.

"They are a disagreeable, yet essential, part of the whole, Dad," I said, "Just as Yeshua, as Jesus is, or you, or me are parts, too. There can't be his light in us without the cracks they create. At least for now, anyway."

I had no idea how I knew that but I've become accustomed to the inspirations or revelations that I call downloads; it's been that way for seven years. He looked confused and tired. Then I shared the secret of Miramee giving me the little piece of Yeshua's mantle; how it still is in the shirt pocket I wore that day. I think I shared that with him more for my peace than his. I needed to tell someone. Finally, I spoke about Azra'el, the Archangel of Death.

"When the time is right," I said, "the boy with the silver hair will show you where to go." He mustered a broad smile, his Spanish teeth still strong and bright white.

"I know who you are talking about! I've seen him already," he said brightly as a shard of sorrow knifed through me. As he fell off to sleep and my heart fell off a cliff, I turned to see my mother standing in the doorway behind me. She appeared agitated.

"How long have you been there, Mom?"

"Not long," she snipped, nerves raw. "I wasn't eavesdropping if that's what you're worried about!"

"It's okay, Mom. It's okay. Sorry," I said as I hugged her slight but sturdy figure. She didn't react as she normally does; she was stiff. I searched her worried eyes. "You okay?"