Assassins: Assignment: Jerusalem, Target: Antichrist (21 page)

David’s own department was slowly being decimated. Survivors, scared to be outdoors and yet no less vulnerable indoors, worked double shifts and still walked around in terror.

Whatever joy David and Annie might have had in the first love stage of their relationship was dampened by the travail of so many. Those who knew them, who might have been excited for them and encouraged them, now considered personal relationships trivial. And as much as David and Annie loved each other, they couldn’t argue that point. People were dying and going to hell. David was so saddened that he seriously considered escaping the palace with Annie and going somewhere where they could help evangelize people before it was too late.

Annie helped him realize anew the unique position he was in. They sat in his office one night, hunched over his computer, holding hands. A simple Y clip allowed them both to listen in on a conversation between Leon and Peter II in Peter’s office at the Faith palace.

“Carpathia’s day is past, Leon. Now, you must stop reacting that way every time I use other than those ridiculous titles you two have thrust upon each other.”

“But you insist on being called―”

“I have earned my title, Leon. I am a man of God. I head the largest church in history. Millions around the world pay homage to my spiritual leadership. How long before they demand that I lead them politically as well? The religious Jews and the fundamentalist Christians are the only factions who have not brought themselves into step with Enigma Babylon Faith.

“Factions? Pontiff, we estimate that a billion people access Ben-Judah’s Web site every day.”

“That means nothing. I am one of them. How many of those are devotees? I certainly am not, yet I have to keep tabs on their nonsense. I have been patient with them, allowed them their uniqueness and dissidence in the name of tolerance, but that day is closing.

“I have begged Carpathia to make it illegal to practice religion outside the One World Faith. Soon I will step up the punishment for the same and dare him to do something about it. Does he really want to go on record as countering the most beloved religious figure of all time? My people expect no less of me than to take swift, definite action against intolerant apostates. But you believe Carpathia himself is deity.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Worthy of worship.”

“I do, Pontifex.”

“Why, then, is such a god/man impotent in the face of the two preachers? They have made him a laughing-stock.”

“But he negotiated with them and―”

“And gave away the store. He said himself he had upheld his end of the bargain, refusing to persecute believers if the two so-called witnesses would let the Israelis drink water instead of blood! Well, they may be drinking pure water, but they are also choking to death in droves! Who’s been made the fool, Leon?”

No answer.

“You can’t say it, can you, Leon? You can’t admit your godlike boss is incapable of doing the right thing. You yourself would not stand for such insolence from your subjects. Rest assured, whoever those two codgers are, wherever they’re from, and whatever magical powers they tap into, they are not above the law. They are subject to the Global Community, and if Leon Fortunato were potentate, that problem would have been taken care of long before now. Am I right? Huh, Leon? You’d do what I would do, wouldn’t you? You’d have those two eliminated.”

No response.

“Once I do that, Leon, you’ll want to stay close, hear me? Stay close. If I am beloved now, if revered, if deferred to, imagine my subjects when I rid them of these plague-mongers. Admit it, Leon, Nicolae is biding his time. Isn’t he? Waiting them out. Now there’s courage. There’s diplomacy. There’s impotence! Defend him, Leon! You can’t, can you? You can’t.”

“I must hurry to another appointment, Pontifex, but I must say that when I hear you speak so decisively, I do yearn for a return to that kind of leadership.”

“There are regional potentates who agree with you, Leon,” Mathews said.

“Well, if I may be perfectly frank, Pontifex, a man in my position would have to be deaf and blind to not see how the potentates, to a man, venerate you.”

“Neither am I blind to their respect, Leon. I appreciate knowing you recognize it as well. I should like to think they would welcome my leadership in areas other than just spiritual.

The new computers had been installed, and David Hassid’s depleted workforce was grinding away. Bright young minds combined with the latest technology, driven and analyzed by the computers, to try to get a lead on the origin of the transmissions from Tsion Ben-Judah and Cameron Williams. The former had become the best-known name in the world, save Carpathia himself. He disseminated encouragement, exhortation, sermons, Bible teaching, even language and word studies based on his lifetime of study.

Buck, on the other hand, produced a weekly cyber-magazine called The Truth. He too had a huge following who remembered when he was the celebrated youngest senior writer for Global Weekly. He became publisher when all news outlets, print and electronic, were taken over by Carpathia and the magazine had been renamed Global Community Weekly. When Buck’s true sympathies were exposed and he became known as a believer in Christ, he became a fugitive. Linked with Carpathia’s former lover, Hattie Durham, as well as with Tsion Ben-Judah, he had to live in hiding or travel incognito.

Buck urged his readers, “Keep your copy of Global Community Weekly, the finest example of newspeak since the term was coined. The day before each new issue, visit The Truth on-line and get the real story behind the propaganda the government has foisted upon us.”

David Hassid loved the reaction at the palace to Buck’s weekly counters of GC Weekly. The Truth was indeed the truth, and everyone knew it. David had written a program that allowed him to monitor every computer in the vast compound. His statistics showed that more than 90 percent of GC employees visited Buck’s magazine Web site weekly, second in popularity only to the porn and psychic sites.

Using the enormous satellite tracking dishes and microwave technology, it was theoretically possible to trace any cyberspace transmission to its source. Most clandestine operators moved around a lot or built in antitracking shields that made detection difficult. Besides having helped design the transmission protocol for the stateside Trib Force, David took double precautions by inserting a glitch into the computers in his department.

The complicator was purely mathematical. A key component in plotting coordinates, of course, is measuring angles and computing distances between various points. On paper such calculations would take hours. On a calculator, less time. But on a computer, the results are virtually instantaneous. David planted, however, what he called a floating multiplier. In layman’s terms, any time the computer was assigned a calculation, a random component transposed side-by-side digits in either the third, fourth, or fifth step. Not even David knew which step it would select, let alone which digits. When the calculation was repeated, the error would be duplicated three times in a row, so checking the computer against itself was useless.

Should someone’s suspicions be raised and they checked the computer against an uncontaminated calculator, the computer would eventually flush the bug and give a correct reading. Once the techie was convinced the previous had been human error or a temporary glitch, he would move on to the next calculation and probably not realize until hours or days later that the computer had a mind of its own again.

David assumed that by the time the inconsistencies of the machines became an issue, the project would fall so far behind that it would be scrapped. Meanwhile, the computers used to generate Tsion’s teaching and Buck’s magazine were programmed to change their signal randomly, changing every second between 9 trillion separate combinations of routes.

Under the guise of getting a bead on Williams’s base, the techies in David’s department spent a lot of time studying the on-line magazine itself. It was clear to everyone that Williams had inside information, but no one knew his sources. David knew Buck used dozens of contacts, including David himself, but Buck always cleverly shaded the input to protect his informants.

The last issue of GC Weekly had carried the story of the failed assassination attempt on Carpathia by Regional Potentate Rehoboth. The magazine pretended to be totally forthcoming by revealing that this had been a shock to the Carpathia regime. “Honest, forthright men of character seek to discuss their differences diplomatically,” an editorial began.

Such a man of honor was Mwangati Ngumo of Botswana, who insisted more than three years ago that Nicolae Carpathia replace him as secretary-general of the United Nations. That selfless, forward-thinking gesture resulted in the great Global Community we enjoy today, a world divided into ten equal regions, each governed by a subpotentate.

His Excellency asked Supreme Commander Leon Fortunato to visit the honorable Mr. Ngumo and try to persuade him to let the potentate’s reconstruction effort rebuild Botswana. Ngumo, the great African statesman, had insisted that his own nation wait until even poorer countries were helped. Mr. Ngumo had been so benevolent that the meeting had to be held in Johannesburg rather than Gaborone, because the Botswanian capital airport still could not accommodate the large GC plane.

When United States of Africa potentate Rehoboth learned of the meeting, he generously offered every courtesy and offered to sit in for the sake of diplomacy. This the Global Community politely declined, because the nature of the business was more personal than political. Potentate Rehoboth was promised his own meeting with His Excellency.

Rehoboth must have misunderstood somehow and assumed that Potentate Carpathia himself would attend the meeting with Mr. Ngumo. While the GC was unaware of any jealousy or anger over Rehoboth’s exclusion from the meeting, clearly the regional potentate was murderously angry. He assigned assassins to murder Ngumo and his aides, replace them as impostors, and board Global Community One (the Condor 216) to murder His Excellency.

While his henchmen succeeded in destroying the plane and killing four staff personnel, heroic measures by both the pilot and first officer―Captain Montgomery (Mac) McCullum and Mr. Abdullah Smith―saved the life of the supreme commander. Immediate response by Global Community Peacekeeping Forces resulted in the deaths of the assassins.

Photos of the grand celebration honoring the wounded cockpit crew accompanied the article. The Truth, six days later, took the story apart. In his breezy style, Buck ran down the facts:

What the Global Community brass doesn’t want citizens to know is that the relationship between Carpathia and Ngumo had long ago gone south. Ngumo had not been so magnanimous as we have been led to believe. He stepped down from his UN post under heavy pressure, believing he would receive one of the ten regional potentate positions and that Botswana would be awarded use of the agricultural formula discovered in Israel, which Carpathia has used in negotiating with many other countries.

Ngumo had gone from near deity to pariah in his own homeland because of the shameless neglect on the part of the Global Community. The formula was never delivered. Botswana was ignored in the reconstruction effort. Ngumo saw his potentate status bestowed instead on his archrival, the despot Rehoboth―who had pillaged his own nation of Sudan and made multimillionaires of his many wives and offspring. He was so unpopular in Sudan that he located the opulent GC regional palace in Johannesburg rather than Khartoum, as inconveniently noncentral as he could have without placing it in Cape Town.

The GC knew Rehoboth and Ngumo were bitter rivals, and by deliberately scheduling the high level meeting on board GC One, they forced it onto Rehoboth’s own turf. Rehoboth assumed Carpathia was on board and vulnerable to attack because Ngumo thought he was on board as well. This ruse to slap Ngumo in the face also fooled Rehoboth, who had been invited to join the meeting as yet another surprising insult to Ngumo.

Personnel who escaped with their lives were more lucky than heroic. GC Peacekeeping Forces had been swayed by Rehoboth and did not respond for several minutes after the plane was fired upon. The assassins were not shot. One fled and two died from the smoke and fire and sulfur plague, as did many others that day.

Rehoboth knew enough to stay at his palace during what he hoped was Carpathia’s execution. When it went awry and he himself was eliminated, the peacekeeping forces once again immediately fell into line and finally contained the area. The deaths of Rehoboth’s entire family, attributed by the GC to the plague, were clearly executions. Thus far the plague has killed roughly 10 percent of the earth’s population. What are the odds that every member of an extensive household would be stricken in one day?

Buck’s cybermagazine commented on all the follies of the Carpathia regime, the “penchant for putting a pretty face on international tragedy, and an assumption that you care about parades in the potentate’s honor when death marches the globe.”

David enjoyed patching in to Carpathia and Fortunato’s offices shortly after Buck’s magazine hit the Net each week. “Where are we on tracing this?” Carpathia demanded of Leon that morning.

“We have an entire department section on it full-time, sir.”

“How many?”

“I believe seventy were scheduled, but due to attrition, probably sixty.”

“That should be plenty, should it not?”

“I should think so, sir.”

“Where is he getting his information? It is as if he is camped outside our door.”

“You said yourself he was the best journalist in the world.”

“This goes beyond skill and writing ability, Leon! I would accuse him of making this up, but we both know he is not.”

That afternoon David received a memo from Leon, asking that the metal detectors destroyed in the airplane be replaced “before His Excellency appears in public again.” That gave David an idea. Might he have a role in Carpathia’s demise if he could ensure the metal detectors would malfunction at strategic junctures? If he could make computers whimsical, could he make metal detectors fickle?