Mark of Evil (42 page)

He slipped off the breastplate and scampered over to Agent Decker. The hall was now crawling with Secret Service agents and special-ops men in black attack fatigues. But they were all too late. That was when the scope of the somber tragedy really started sinking in.

“Did he get to the president?” Decker asked, choking on his words as another agent applied pressure to stop his bleeding.

“I’m afraid so,” Bolling said, trying to fight back tears. But he couldn’t stop them, and they started to stream down his face.

Bolling stayed with Decker, even after they loaded him in the EMS vehicle and it raced toward Georgetown Medical Center. “I had a kinda weird feeling about that guy,” Decker explained, trying to raise his voice above the siren as Bolling squatted next to him in the ambulance. “Couldn’t put my finger on it.”

The medics told Decker not to talk, but Decker ignored them. “I had this hunch, but nothing concrete, except our first conversation. Kept thinking back to it. That’s why I asked you to come today, to check out the new guy, just on a lark . . .”

“What about that first conversation?”

Decker was trying to manage a smile. “His papers said he was transferred from the Miami office. He told me he was a Marlins fan. He said that only
after
they fired Ozzie Guillen as manager way back in 2012 did the team start to take a nosedive. But any Marlins fan would know that wasn’t true. The season before that, they were in last place in the National League East.”

FIFTY-SEVEN

NORTHERN IRAQ

Rivka had been flown to a hospital where the Kurds were still friendly to the Americans. Ethan didn’t want to leave her alone, but the two helicopter pilots from the CIA promised they would arrange trusted guards to keep her safe for the next few days while she recovered. That had to be good enough for Ethan.

He bent down at Rivka’s hospital bed and gave her a long kiss. “There’s more where that came from,” he said, smiling. “When I get back.”

But she didn’t smile in return. Ethan figured she had a pretty good idea where he was going next, and she knew that for him the danger was only just beginning.

“You have to promise me you’ll be safe,” she said with a gentle quality to her voice. “You’re going into the belly of the beast.”

He nodded and took her pretty face in his hands. She was shockingly pale from blood loss, and they had her hooked up to a transfusion line. Although he was preparing to leave her, he was drenched in lingering regrets.
Man alive, I wish I could stay here with her
. He bent down next to her ear and whispered, “When I get back, I have a question to ask you. I’ll even get down on my knee to ask it. And the answer has got to be a yes.”

In her bleary state, Rivka just stared back at first, but then a light bloomed in her eyes. “Oh, Ethan . . . I love you so . . .”

With a final kiss, he let her go and stepped out into the hall where the two CIA helicopter pilots were waiting for him.

Ethan had already heard the shocking news that Hank Hewbright had been assassinated. The mainstream press was spinning the story that it had been a hit orchestrated by Moscow as revenge for Hewbright’s support for Israel, the nation that thoroughly embarrassed Russia by miraculously withstanding Russia’s terrifying coalition attack a few years before. But Ethan knew better than that. Bart Kingston and his staff at AmeriNews would now have to tell the real story: that Alexander Colliquin wanted a new president in the White House for his own purposes, someone who would do his bidding and bring the U.S. into the Global Alliance. And so he’d made it happen.

Ethan was one of the few people who saw the really big picture. He had experienced it firsthand as a guinea pig in one of Colliquin’s cruel labs. Colliquin’s plan was to track and then control the human race through his 3-D digital holography system. But he still needed a computer data center that had adequate computing power to accomplish that. But which one, and where? Dr. Iban Adis was the one who had been tasked to nail that down for him. Ethan needed that intel immediately. It had been nearly two weeks since he had heard from him.

The pilots told Ethan that the Agency had received orders to transport Ethan back to the White House for a debriefing regarding
the Global Alliance. The chief pilot added, “Even with President Hewbright gone now, and with President Zandibar sworn in, we still have to follow a standing order, unless someone—the director or DOD or the White House—reverses it.”

They looked as if they were waiting for Ethan to fill in the blanks. So he did. “That’s fine with me,” he said. “I just need to ask a favor: you may need to take me on a little side trip first. I just have to figure out
where.
”

The two CIA guys nodded. “Just name the place.”

Rivka had given her Allfone to Ethan before he left the hospital. He needed it to call into his encrypted Remnant site to pick up messages that may have collected for him after his capture in Hong Kong. As he was being driven to a secret CIA air base in the north outside of Kirkuk to be flown back to the U.S., he logged in. On his digital message bank there were calls from Rivka and Pack. There were also several from Remnant supporters in Iraq, mentioning the torture and killing of an unnamed lab scientist in New Babylon. Following those, he saw a text from someone he didn’t recognize at first—Farrah Adis.

Then it struck him. She was Dr. Iban Adis’ wife. And judging from the other messages that he had received, he realized she must now be a widow. It was clear that Alexander Colliquin’s people must have found out Dr. Adis was undercover for the Remnant. But apparently not before he sent an encrypted e-mail to his wife containing three vital pieces of information she was now sharing with Ethan.

The first thing she shared was the location of the computing center that Colliquin was after: the National Data Center at Bluffdale, Utah. Ethan nodded at that.
Of course, it all makes sense—why Colliquin needed access to the United States. To take over its massive intelligence computer center.

Second, Farrah recited a Bible verse that her husband had messaged to her. Revelation 13:15. Ethan knew that one by heart:
“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.”

But the third piece of information in Farrah’s message was perplexing. It read,
Binary aka base 2
and was followed by a string of ten binary characters in
0
s and
1
s.

Ethan immediately forwarded the text to Chiro Hashimoto up in the Yukon Territory with an urgent plea for him to call back. He then leaned forward in the sedan and addressed the pilot and copilot in the front seat. “I’ve got the location I would like to visit first.”

“Shoot,” the pilot said as he drove.

“Bluffdale, Utah. Or as close as you can get.”

The two CIA operatives shared a quick side glance. Ethan wondered if the U.S. government wasn’t already aware of the importance of that location to Alexander Colliquin.

“There’s a military airport right next to the National Data Center,” the pilot shot back. “We’ll give you door-to-door service.”

As they drove through Kirkuk, heading to the air base miles outside of the city, Ethan leaned his head against the window. He was exhausted, and his head was still dizzy and swimming in pain, but there was no time for that. He watched the scenes of life in Kurdish Iraq flash by the window—the modern office buildings, the neighborhoods that had been bombed into rubble interspersed with palm trees and a few gardens.

The car pulled to a stop at an intersection. Ethan spotted a group of old men in turbans sitting in a courtyard, smoking and talking. They seemed oblivious to the cataclysm that would soon be visited on the earth. They had to be warned. They had to be told about Jesus Christ. Everyone needed to hear that. Back in the lab, God had given Ethan a glimpse of the heavenly kingdom to come. Ethan wanted everyone to have a chance to be transformed by the love of Jesus. Before it was too late.

But there was still much work to do before that. Suddenly, Ethan
felt the urge to catch up with world events. He waved his finger over the AmeriNews icon on his Allfone. The headlines of the day popped up. He felt relief that at least for today the Roundtable’s news feed was still being distributed on the Allfone communications system. But now that Darrell Zandibar was president and the White House controlled all Internet information sites, that could end at any time.

The major story was the assassination of Hewbright. AmeriNews questioned the official story that blamed it on a Russian plot—as all the other media outlets had been claiming—and suggested that the Global Alliance actually had a hand in it. But the second story was all about President Darrell Zandibar’s agenda and his first comments as chief executive. His “highest priority,” he announced to the American people, would be “to unite America with the Global Alliance, to forge a new and prosperous tomorrow.”

There it was. Ethan had to get to Bluffdale. And more important, he needed Chiro to transport his quantum computer down there immediately. He was about to call Chiro when his Allfone buzzed. Chiro was beating him to the punch. He had already read the forwarded message from Farrah Adis. Chiro’s voice cranked up a notch as he exclaimed, “Ethan, this is it.”

“Break it down for me. Not the Bluffdale, Utah, part. I understand that. But that long binary code, the series of
0
s and
1
s.”

“Binary code—with the 1 representing
on
and the 0 representing
off
—is the basis of all digital communications and computer language,” Chiro said. “Basic on/off, true/false, open/shut kind of commands. Based on the fundamentals of logic.”

“But what does Dr. Adis’ string of binary characters mean?”

“Those ten binary characters Dr. Adis discovered in the program at the New Babylon lab are the new internal code for everyone’s BIDTag.”

“Speak English,” Ethan pleaded.

“Alexander Colliquin is going to link his 3-D holographic image
to the global BIDTag grid, which is already synced to the Internet. That way he’ll be able to appear at will before every man, woman, and child with a BIDTag. But first his technicians will have to reprogram the entire QR code system in the grid so that everybody’s BIDTag is imbedded with the same universal binary code.”

“Accomplishing what?”

“I think it’s going to do two things. First, it will give Babylon the ability to use a person’s skin implant as a direct access to their neural pathways.”

“Make it simple, please.”

“Influence their brain functions. Control them.”

Ethan nodded. “Yeah, I know something about that one. Been there, done that. And the second?”

“It is going to prove how true the Bible is.”

“How?”

“This binary string of ten characters in base 2 that will be fed into everyone’s BIDTag, the code that will control them, actually represents a whole number.”

“And the number is . . .”

“Six hundred and sixty-six.”

Ethan could feel the little hairs on the back of his neck standing on end. He had thought that if he ever arrived at this point in history, he wouldn’t be shocked, that he would be mentally prepared. But now he was here, and he felt himself trembling. He had to silently tell himself to get a grip.

Remembering that he was not alone in the sedan, Ethan said to Chiro, “I’m about to send you an encrypted text. Read it. Then you must follow it immediately.”

A few minutes later Ethan messaged Chiro:
Pack up your C-Note quantum computer, and you and John Galligher need to get it down to the National Data Center in Utah. I’m activating the plan. I’ll take care of the other arrangements. Further instructions to follow.

Then Ethan called Bart Kingston in New York. He was in the newsroom, and Ethan was put on hold for a few minutes before Bart picked up.

“Good story on Hewbright,” Ethan said. “He was a brave American and a Christian statesman. The forces of darkness are closing in. Do you have our special project ready to roll?”

“Oh yeah. We’ll blow the lid off the lie about the supposed mass suicides of Christians as the reason for their disappearances. We’ll include the video statement from our image forensics expert. And a side feature exposing how the Alliance and Alexander Colliquin were behind the attempt to cover up the truth about the Rapture.”

“Good to hear it.”

“We can feed our video feature to any site you want.”

“I am counting on that fact,” Ethan said. “We’ll be in touch.”

FIFTY-EIGHT

JERUSALEM, ISRAEL

The Two Witnesses stood in the middle of a huge crowd on the plaza below the temple. Their codes names of Mashah and Tishbite had given way to their true names—those that were inscribed in the pages of God’s dealings in human history. Moses and Elijah. At the top of the Temple Mount next to the temple, Bishop Dibold Kora stood on his private stage with its grand view of the Old City. As he stood over the crowds below, Kora wore a wireless microphone connected by satellite to every household in Israel. His spiteful message against Moses and Elijah could be heard by every family in the tiny nation.

“The two of you,” Kora cried out, with his finger pointing down to Moses and Elijah, “are false prophets of catastrophe. True religion should bring peacefulness, comfort, and abundance. But you bring
only death and destruction. You have blood on your hands, having massacred our Alliance soldiers. Soon enough we will be rid of you, and then the whole world will see the divine light that rises in the east and the world will embrace the image of the all-powerful one who comes out of New Babylon like a bright and shining star.”

Moses raised his right hand and the chatter in the crowd around him stopped abruptly. He cried out in a loud voice, “You speak of blood? Then blood you shall have! That all of Israel may know I have been sent from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and that the earth may know that the Lord God is the Father of Jesus the Christ, His Son. I now declare by the power of God that all the waters of Israel shall become blood. And the stench of it shall rise up in the nostrils of this people so that the whole world might repent and might believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and receive Him by faith and be saved.”