Three
Product Description Enter a world where nothing is what it seems. Where your closest friend could be your greatest enemy.Kevin Parson is driving his car late one summer day when, suddenly, his cell phone rings. A man who identifies himself as Slater speaks in a breathy voice: You have exactly three minutes to confess your sin to the world. Refuse, and the car you're driving will blow sky high.Kevin panics. Who would make such a call? What sin? Kevin ditches the car. Precisely three minutes later, a massive explosion sets his world on a collision course with madness.From the #1 best-selling fiction author comes a powerful story of good, evil, and all that lies between. About the Author TED DEKKER is known for novels that combine adrenaline-laced plot twists with the supernatural and the surreal. He is the best-selling author of multiple titles including Heaven's Wager, When Heaven Weeps, Thunder of Heaven and the co-author of the best-selling series Blessed Child and A Man Called Blessed. Raised in the jungles of Indonesia, Ted now lives with his family in the mountains of Colorado. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1Praise FridayNoonTHE OFFICE had no windows, only electric lanterns to light the hundreds of spines standing in their cherry wood bookcases. A single lawyer’s lamp spread its yellow hue over the leather-topped desk. The room smelled of linseed oil and musty pages, but to Dr. John Francis it was the scent of knowledge."Evil is beyond the reach of no man.""But can a man remove himself beyond the reach of evil?" Kevin asked.The dean of academic affairs, Dr. John Francis, gazed over bifocals at the man who sat opposite him and allowed a small smile to nudge his lips. Those blue eyes hid a deep mystery, one that had eluded him since their first meeting three months earlier when Kevin Parson approached him after a philosophy lecture. They’d struck up a unique friendship that included numerous discussions such as this one. Kevin sat with his feet flat, hands on knees, eyes piercing and un-moving, hair ruffled despite a compulsive habit of running his fingers through his loose brown curls. Or because of it. The hair was an anomaly; in every other way the man groomed himself perfectly. Clean shaven, fashionably current, pleasantly scented–Old Spice, if the professor guessed right. Kevin’s ragged hair begged to differ in a bohemian sort of way. Others fiddled with pencils or twirled their fingers or shifted in their seats; Kevin ran his fingers through his hair and tapped his right foot. Not now and then or at appropriate breaks in the conversation, but regularly, to the beat of a hidden drum behind his blue eyes. Some might consider the idiosyncrasies annoying, but Dr. Francis saw them as nothing more than enigmatic clues to Kevin’s nature. The truth–rarely obvious and almost always found in subtle-ies. In the tapping of feet and the fiddling of fingers and the movement of eyes.Dr. Francis pushed his black leather chair back from the desk, stood slowly to his feet, and walked to a bookcase filled with the works of the ancient scholars. In many ways he identified with these men as much as he did with the modern man. Put a robe on him and he would look rather like a bearded Socrates, Kevin had once told him. He ran a finger over a bound copy of the Dead Sea Scrolls."Indeed," Dr. Francis said. "Can man step beyond evil’s reach? I think not. Not in this lifetime.""Then all men are condemned to a life of evil," Kevin said.Dr. Francis faced him. Kevin watched, unmoving except for his right foot, tapping away. His round blue eyes held steady, stared with the innocence of a child’s, probing, magnetic, unabashed. These eyes attracted long stares from the secure and forced the less secure to avert their gaze. Kevin was twenty-eight, but he possessed a strange blend of brilliance and naiveté that Dr. Francis could not understand. The full-grown man thirsted for knowledge like a five-year-