Mark of Evil (29 page)

But he regretted something now. If only he’d been an engineering genius like Josh Jordan. MIT graduate. A weapons inventor and designer. Then, like Josh, he could figure this all out coldly and analytically. As he hung from the metal bar by his wrists and stared through the glass at the scientists in their light-blue lab coats, he realized he wasn’t Josh.

The lab engineers touched some switches and then looked at Ethan. A hopeless despair flooded over him. It was as if someone had whispered in his ear that all was lost, that God was nowhere to be found. “No!” he screamed. “Get behind me, Satan!”

The scientists paused, looked up and stared at him through the window, and then began to laugh before they resumed their work.

Now Ethan struggled to think of the verse from the book of Ephesians, written by the apostle Paul through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Hadn’t Paul known extreme pain himself? Of course, he reassured himself. And fear. And starvation. And beatings. And sufferings. And stoning. And drowning. What was it that Paul had written?

“Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might. Put
on the full armor of God, so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil.”

He talked to himself.
Think
, he said silently.
What was it that the members of my team told me
?
And what did Dr. Adis tell me about Colliquin’s tech people working on a new radical form of digital imagery? He kept hinting at the possibility of a single image capable of appearing before the BIDTag of every human who received the laser code on the back of the hand or the forehead. A holographic image. An image that could command obedience. And an image that could send a data stream by laser into the person’s BIDTag code to activate the central nervous system of that person, and the brain too. To capture the mind.

He forced himself to figure out the rest. And in an instant, there it was.
Colliquin’s transmission will also be capable of something else, something terrible. Thus the experiments with the chimps. If the data stream can reach the nervous system and brain, then perhaps it’s capable of sending a signal—to halt the heart, or maybe to stop the lungs. A message to kill the body.

Something clicked in the back of his mind.
Something in the book of Revelation . . . What part? Where was it? Think . . .

It came to him. Revelation 13:15–17:

And it was given to him to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast would even speak and cause as many as do not worship the image of the beast to be killed. And he causes all, the small and the great, and the rich and the poor, and the free men and the slaves, to be given a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, and he provides that no one will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name
.

Was this the fulfillment, then? It had to be. Dr. Adis had said the Alliance was on the verge of finalizing a digital design for global
surveillance. But that was the last thing Ethan had heard from him. After that, Dr. Adis had gone silent.

And then there was Chiro, up in the Yukon. He was ready to launch the carefully planned electronic counterstrike. Chiro had told Ethan that if the demonic Revelation 13 plan used a technological grid, it would need to modify the BIDTag codes on the hands or foreheads of all of the tagged humans to increase the capacity to receive data from the Global Alliance masters. And then, Chiro guessed, they would use lasers to transmit the data into the BIDTag codes of the humans.

Lasers—that was ironic, wasn’t it? At first they were used only as blunt weapons to burn things up, but then it was discovered that lasers could be used to transmit data, and so Joshua Jordan had used them in his stupendously effective Return-to-Sender antimissile system to capture and then redirect the data in the nose cones of incoming enemy missiles to turn them around.

Ethan tried to maintain steady breathing, to regulate the pain in his arms and shoulders.
Think . . . Keep thinking . . .

But if the plan of Colliquin and the Alliance was to manipulate the people with BIDTags, what about the nontaggers? So many of them, millions, were Jesus followers who had refused to receive the laser mark. Yes, that was it. That was the fly in the ointment, wasn’t it? They couldn’t be so easily manipulated. Their obedience and worship couldn’t be controlled. They had to be eliminated. Destroyed.

He realized that when he was first dragged into the lab and hog-tied to this hanging bar, a scientist had stripped him down and examined every inch of him. As if they were looking for something. The scientist had used an instrument that looked like a BIDTag scanner to carefully scan his entire body. So that was what they were looking for, wasn’t it? They were making sure that he didn’t have a BIDTag.

That is what I am
, Ethan said to himself.
The guinea pig
. Now he knew that the experiment was to see if they could remotely destroy him, or manipulate him, even if he didn’t have a BIDTag.

The men in the light-blue lab coats had stopped talking. They were standing together, shoulder to shoulder, and each of them was reaching forward. It looked like they were working the computer console. Then a light flashed in Ethan’s room. From somewhere he heard a faint sound. He was aware that something was in the lab room with him. A presence. He saw it out of the corner of his eye. It was coming closer. An image of something. A face. Coming closer.

A three-dimensional face now filled the room, hovering in front of him. He knew this face because he had seen it before. On the outside, the appearance of the handsome face was unremarkable. Yet Ethan had been given the power to see behind the face, to visualize the evil that would soon come upon the entire human race, and to understand that this face would orchestrate the suffering of humanity. There it was—once again, his vision.

A voice yelled out from somewhere. At first Ethan didn’t realize its origin, but then he understood—it was his own voice crying out.

“Oh, dear God, the beast.”

But he fought back. He yelled out what he had memorized from the Scriptures about Stephen, the first Christian martyr. He called out the words Stephen had spoken just moments before he was stoned to death: “ ‘But being full of the Holy Spirit, he gazed intently into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God; and he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened up and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” ’ ”

But the face of the image seemed to envelope Ethan like a spider consuming its prey, and it bellowed with a powerful voice, “Worship me, Ethan March, with all your heart and all your soul and all your might.”

Ethan answered, from somewhere very deep inside, the words he remembered from the Word of God, and from his servant, the apostle John. “ ‘For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who
do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist.’ ”

The image spoke again. “Those who do not worship me shall be destroyed.”

Before Ethan could respond, a molten-hot laser beam blasted from the eyes of the image and found its way with surgical precision into Ethan’s skull. The light beam reached deep into the interior of his cerebral cortex and into the very network of neurons there, and his mind seemed to explode with a flash of lightning. Ethan opened his mouth wide as he shook violently, groping for some way to scream, to find a voice against the horror that wrapped itself around his mind like an invisible python snake, squeezing his thoughts, crushing them. And in the darkness he saw the face of the beast. But it wasn’t out there in the room any longer, not in front of him at all. For a single, horrific moment the demonic creature raised its prehistoric, winged form before Ethan and made him wonder the unthinkable: Was this horrifying beast now inside his head? In his brain?

Ethan couldn’t scream or weep or speak or even find the words to pray. All he could do now was endure and believe that somehow he could overcome as he tumbled headlong, deeper and deeper, down into his inner hell.

FORTY

Alexander Colliquin was alone. He had cloistered himself inside the chapel located in the chancellor’s palace. The business before him was no longer just the geopolitics of the Alliance or the bringing together of all nations—although that was on the verge of being accomplished now that the United States would soon be forced to join the fold.

Nor was this about the unification of the world’s economies, though that had been accomplished as well.

This moment of Colliquin’s inside the chapel wasn’t really about religion either—not exactly. Although as planned, the soft, pliable metal of the world’s religions had been effectively soldered together by Bishop Dibold Kora under Colliquin’s supervision. Kora’s arrogant boasting had to be endured so that the task could be completed. And now that too was done.

No, this moment was about Alexander Colliquin. It belonged to him.

He glanced at the stained glass wall at the end of the chapel. He
had personally commissioned it from one of the great neopagan artists of Brazil. It portrayed the blooming Tree of Knowledge from the garden of Eden, where wrapped around the trunk of the tree was a red-eyed serpent consuming its own tail. Whenever he was asked by a reporter why he had commissioned that particular imagery on the stained glass, Colliquin would grin and remark, “I always felt that the real hero of that story was the Tree of Knowledge. Isn’t knowledge and enlightenment something we all yearn for?”

That was his public statement. But within the very small circle of Colliquin’s close advisors, it was known that the global chancellor really had a different opinion. He privately joked that he thought that the
real
hero was the scaly creature wrapped around the tree.

Now, in the flickering light from eleven huge candles on eleven gothic candle stands mounted on the altar of the chapel, Colliquin knelt down beneath the stained glass image. As he did, he ran his finger across the golden profile fashioned on the ring on his left hand—the image of the ruby-eyed serpent.

“Today,” Colliquin said aloud, “your manifestations through the ages—Baal and Astoreth and Molech—are consummated in me. I am the vengeance of Cain. I am the right hand of the lord of the air, who is my god and sovereign. I am the one who has accomplished every one of the tasks that were set before me. Nothing has been left undone. I ask that I be granted your power, every bit of it. For I crave it all.”

His lord answered him.

An hour later Ho Zhu arrived outside of the chapel, looking for Colliquin. He knew he was forbidden to enter. But he also knew that Colliquin must be inside the chapel because he could see a vague shape through the glazed glass of the outer door, set off against the flickering light of candles.

A few more minutes passed, and then the door to the chapel opened and Alexander Colliquin stepped out. But Ho Zhu noticed something different about him, and it caused him to take a step back with a startled look, as a pedestrian might halt at the sight of a menacing figure in a dark alley.

“Don’t be afraid,” Colliquin said in a gentle voice. “Everything is perfect.”

Ho Zhu paused and gathered himself. “I have been told,” he said, “that Ethan March, the Jesus Remnant leader, is now in the digital lab and is being subjected to the nontagger protocol in lab testing room number six.’’

Colliquin smiled at that. “Of course he is,” he replied nonchalantly, as if he knew it without even being told. As if he also knew that the tipping point for his plan for Planet Earth had finally been achieved and that it was now utterly unstoppable.

Ethan was no longer in darkness. He was now in a place flooded with light. He had the strangest feeling that time had ceased, and that he had found himself in a region where schedules, deadlines, and the laws of nature were irrelevant.

All around him there was a golden illumination, like the kind that comes from the welcoming warmth of burning logs in a fireplace. At the same time, the light had the brilliance of a burning star, though there was no harshness in it and it didn’t blind his eyes.