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            That evening, the media frenzy began.  The expose on Bishop Prince and New Kingdom Church was leading news on all the major television and cable networks.

            By then, Anthony and his family had left town.  On the way, he sought medical attention at an urgent care clinic and had his gunshot wound attended to, and it was a minor injury, as he’d hoped. 

            Later, using an alias, they checked into a beachfront hotel in Panama City, Florida.     

            The staggering influx of Internet traffic shut down the server that hosted his Web site, but hundreds of news sites and blogs already had downloaded the documents and posted them on their own servers.  The evidence would circulate through cyberspace indefinitely, outpacing the church’s capacity—and soon, ability—to squash it.

            Over the next two weeks, Bishop Emmanuel Prince was charged with several hundred counts of various federal crimes, including but not limited to extortion, blackmail, solicitation to murder, conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to commit terrorist acts, embezzlement, mail fraud, racketeering, child pornography, and child sexual abuse. 

            Several members of the bishop’s inner circle stepped forward to negotiate plea deals, including the Director of the Armor of God.

            Even a high-ranking Senator, a favorite for the White House in the next Presidential election, went down in flames, damned by his close association with the bishop.  Numerous federal and state judges and law-enforcement officials either resigned, or tried to disavow their church ties.          

            The Kingdom Campus was shut down, and residents were given time to secure alternate housing, and schooling for their children.  To Anthony, the sight on television of families leaving the church grounds after having invested so much of their lives in the organization was perhaps the saddest spectacle of the whole affair.

            Through it all, Bishop Prince confessed to nothing and refused to cooperate.  “God will deliver me from the snares of the wicked,” was his consistent response to the charges.  Legal pundits predicted that he would serve a life sentence at a federal prison, with no possibility of parole. 

            Late one night, lying in bed in their hotel room with an ocean view, Anthony said to Lisa, “You awake?”

            She murmured, turned over, her face a dark oval in the blackness.

            He stroked her cheek with the back of his finger.  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.”

            “About?”

            “You know.  What we did.”

            “And?”

             “I’ve changed my mind about something.”

            She traced a gentle circle across his chest.  “Go on.”

            “I’m ready to be a father, if you’re ready to be a mother,” he said.

            “Really?” 

            “I’m sorry it took me so long to come to this decision.  I guess I . . . I had to go through some things first.”

            “What about what you’d said before, about not being able to protect a child from the world?”

            “Well . . . we can’t spend our lives worrying about what the world might do to us.  We’ll take life one day at a time—and when we have to, we’ll fight.”  He kissed the tip of her nose.  “You ready to be a mother?”

            She took his hand in hers and slid it down her stomach, and lower still, to her warm center.            

            “I’ll take that as a ‘yes,’ ” he said, and kissed her again.