Showdown by Ted Dekker Read Free Book Online Page A

course he has; we both know that. We have to put a stop to it! He’s not the only one who’s been showing curiosity in the dark side lately. I’ve warned against this! I demand we put a stop to it. Immediately.”
    David set down his pen. “No.”
    He was a big man, more than six feet, and powerful. His blond hair rested on broad shoulders, which were covered by a brown hooded cloak. When he wasn’t wearing billowing white shirts and black slacks, he favored the common dress of the teachers. It had been his insistence that they wear clothing befitting of a monastery, as he put it. But in Andrew’s eyes he looked more like a Viking than a monk. Not that David pretended to be a monk—he was a world-renowned collector of antiquities and a professor of both psychology and history, tenured at Harvard, before he left it all for the project.
    â€œAbsolutely not, we can’t interfere, you know that.”
    â€œBut, sir—”
    â€œI said no!” David stood. He glanced out the window at black storm clouds gathering in the valley near the canyon. “We knew this moment would come. Don’t overreact.”
    â€œWe knew? I certainly didn’t know! I feared, but it was never a foregone conclusion. This wasn’t part of the plan.” Andrew was taken aback by the director’s lack of outrage. How could the prospect of failure not ruin him?
    â€œThe storm clouds always eventually come,” David said. “We always knew the children would be tested. The only question is how they will weather the storm.”
    â€œBilly’s failed already, by going in. The subterranean tunnels will ruin him.”
    The director stared at him without speaking for a few seconds. His jaw-line bunched with tightened muscles. “Or give him the kind of power that you and I only dream about.”
    Project Showdown had been a highly controversial concept from the beginning. Its stated purpose was appealing enough to attract some of the world’s best-educated and pious men of faith, but if the less discerning public knew what was happening here in this mountain, they might cry foul. Even David’s decision, however reluctantly made, to exclude female teachers and thereby any maternal influence in the monastery would come under fire. But in David’s mind, single-mindedness of the male teachers was paramount. It was a monastery after all, not a college. Andrew agreed.
    The proposal that Dr. Abraham sent out to a select group of clergy was simple: Harvard University was conducting a closely guarded and somewhat speculative examination of faith and human nature. The study sought to test the limits of mankind’s capacity to affect nature through faith. In simple terms, Project Showdown meant to discover the extent to which a man could indeed move mountains (metaphorically or materially) through faith. A showdown of faith and natural laws, so to speak.
    Put another way, the experiment was nothing less than an attempt to test the speculation that a noble savage—a child unspoiled by the rampant effects of evil in society, struggling only with the evil within themselves—might be taught skills that the rest of humanity could not learn. Certainly spiritual skills, perhaps even physical skills. If a person had no reason to doubt, and as such possessed unadulterated faith, they surely would be able to wield the power of their faith to humankind’s advantage.
    There was one problem, of course. Noble savages did not roam the streets of America or any other country in droves. So David Abraham intended to rear the noble savages from birth.
    He took possession of this ancient Jesuit monastery hidden deep in the Colorado mountains and spent millions of dollars transforming it into an ideal setting for his study. He then selected thirty-seven orphans, most from disadvantaged parts of Europe, and arranged for them to be brought to the monastery, where they would be raised in