DECEPTIO (EXCERPT)

Ever since Jeremiah Walker had been transferred to the Chicago office of the FBI from New Orleans, he had made no secret of the fact that he liked her. So he only liked her, a voice in her head scoffed. Liked? Liked was a lukewarm word, the voice in her head mocked. Well, extremely attracted to her, she revised mentally. And he felt she was attracted to him too, which Camilla didn't deny. He had therefore seen nothing wrong with taking the mutual attraction to the next logical level by having an affair. But while Camilla was willing to admit that she liked him as a friend, she wasn't about to get into a relationship with him. Because they were different.

Camilla had been raised in a strict Mexican Catholic home where good girls did what they were told and said their rosaries or else they would end up in hell. There were also consequences to be faced here on earth. Her parents had died when she was just two; the victims of a gang war on holiday in Mexico to visit relatives and she had been raised by her maternal grandmother. Her grandmother was a no nonsense disciplinarian who didn't take kindly to all the shenanigans that boys and girls got up to when they were unsupervised by adults.

However, while in college, she had truly discovered what it meant to be a Christian and apart from a slight blip, (to be honest, a major blip) along the way, she had held on to her faith in God. And in this crazy, changing world, that meant more to her than anything.

On the other hand, Jeremiah didn't believe in God or “all that nonsense” as he referred to anything that had to do with the mention of salvation, redemption or the like. He had grown up with an abusive father who used to hit his children and their mother. Yet, he had been some kind of leader in his church. When his father had dropped dead from a heart attack, he had left behind everything that reminded him of God.

Camilla had experienced the problems that arose from being involved with someone who did not share her faith and she was not ready to walk down that road again. There was no way anything was going to happen between them. Jeremiah however didn't seem to see things the way she did. He felt she was being unnecessarily difficult and that hopefully she would come round to his way of thinking and that he would be patient till that happened. That meant he would be patient till hell froze over.

“Have you noticed anything suspicious or out of place?” he asked, eating the last piece of his hot dog and wiping his hands.

“No, nothing. And I don’t think that anything will happen. I think the whole threat thing is a hoax,” she replied.

“Are you saying that the senator imagined the threat?” he asked dryly. “Or maybe you think he wrote those letters to himself? He might not be my favorite person in the world but I fail to see what he would gain from that.”

Camilla shrugged. She also didn't see what he would gain but she wasn't going to say so. “I just think that he’s trying to give Christians a bad name so that the American public can have another excuse for hating us,” she fumed.

“Do you really think people need any excuse to hate Christians?” he asked, his voice mocking. “You persist in believing in a God that doesn't exist, you try ramming your archaic and funny opinions down other people’s throats and you wonder why people seem not to like you,” he said.

It was interesting that on one level he found her faith in God annoying and funny yet he wouldn't mind sleeping with her. Talk about schizophrenia. “It’s so funny that the same people who don’t believe in God can’t just relax in the knowledge that he doesn't exist. They always seem to be trying their best to “kill” a God that doesn't exist,” she said dryly. “A world with over 6 billion people, the majority of whom believe in God in one way or another, and yet the tiny minority who claim they don’t, feel threatened and would want all of us to say that God doesn't exist so that they can go on killing babies and doing all the other crazy things they like doing without their consciences troubling them.”

Jeremiah sighed. “When did this become a discussion about abortion?” he asked, shaking his head.

“It’s a discussion about everything we believe,” she replied heatedly. “You say that the things we believe in, to quote you, are “archaic and funny”, but I thought the constitution guaranteed my right to believe whatever I wanted to believe?”

“As long as you don’t try getting people believe a tissue of lies while trying to pass it off as the truth,” he said.

“And who told you that you had the monopoly on the truth?” she asked. “You wouldn't know what the truth was even if it hit you in the face.”

He sighed again raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I can see that we are not going to agree on anything. There’s work to be done. Why don’t we get back to work and leave the arguments till later.”

JC Cruz is the author of DECEPTIO published by WestBowPress, a division of Thomas Nelson publishers, http://bookstore.westbowpress.com/Products/SKU000194087/Deceptio.aspx and LOST, BUT FOUND available at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DPLLEUQ/. You can follow him on Twitter @Cruz_JCReal.