The Left Behind Collection: All 12 Books (306 page)

The news had also proved devastating at the safe house. Chang reported from New Babylon that he had been able to cover in the computer for the motion and heat activity of Chloe’s movements that might otherwise have raised a red flag, and Tsion told Rayford by phone that Chloe was sick about having been responsible. “But she has exciting news,” Dr. Ben-Judah said. “She is insisting on being the one to pick you up. And yes, we have the young Mr. Wong covering for your landing and your transport here.”

The landing was a test of Rayford’s skills, and as he touched down as close to the water as possible, he wondered if he would have been smart to let Mac handle it. But the thrust reversers and carbon brakes left him with room to spare, and he maneuvered the jet between two abandoned buildings, where it could be recognized from the stratosphere only from an angle available just a few seconds a day.

The others allowed Buck out first to greet Chloe. She drove a Humvee from beneath the Strong Building and had brought Ming to hold Kenny. Rayford stretched and watched the reunion as the other five clambered out and unloaded luggage. Finally safe again in the building, introductions were made all around before they knelt and prayed and wept over lost and endangered loved ones. Rayford showed them the urn of Hattie’s ashes, and Hannah passed around David’s phone.

“’Course we ain’t leavin’ this George guy by himself in Greece, right?”

“Exactly, Zeke,” Mac said. “But we’ve got a lot of planning to do in a short time, and you’re gonna be as busy as any of us.”

“I know some people I’ll bet would want to help,” Chloe said.

Chang’s day had been filled with coworkers’ rumors and gossip. Two Indian stewards from Carpathia’s plane were to be put to death for leaking secrets to a mole in New Babylon. Everyone was under suspicion and tested. The general invitation for all employees to visit the spectacular new office of the supreme potentate had been suspended with his earlier-than-expected return from Israel. But those who saw it gushed about the ceiling that rose to the now transparent roof, so it was as if the office itself looked into heaven. It had been widened, the walls of adjoining offices and conference rooms demolished to make one gargantuan space in which the king of the world could relax or conduct business or hold meetings. Which he had done all day with the potentates of the ten world regions.

Chang hurried to his apartment to hear the recording of that meeting, but first he checked copies of what the assembled computer whizzes had sent around the world from their secure system in Petra. What a thrill to see Chaim’s pronouncements and accounts of the miracles retold and broadcast to the globe. Reports had come back immediately of people on every continent printing these out or passing them on electronically. Secret house churches were encouraged, and many people were becoming new believers. People undecided and disillusioned with Carpathia sought out the believers, and international revival was happening right before Chang’s eyes.

And it was none too soon, considering Carpathia’s high-level meeting. He had quickly quelled the cooing over his new digs and gotten down to business. “The world has changed, gentlemen,” he said, “as much in the last several days as in the last three and a half years. Please, no hands. I know all your problems and want to talk about mine today. Without some miraculous intervention, the oceanic catastrophe will not soon be remedied. We must be creative in our approaches to it. But have you noticed something, my friends? Is it as obvious to you as it is to me? We have the Jews to thank for our current predicament.

“Yes, the Jews. Who have been among the last to embrace Carpathianism? The Jews. Who is their new Moses? A man who calls himself Micah but whom we believe to be none other than the Jew who vainly assassinated me, Dr. Chaim Rosenzweig.

“Who are the Judah-ites? They claim to be Jesus-followers, but they follow Ben-Judah, a Jew. Jesus himself was a Jew. They are fond of referring to me as Antichrist. Well, I will embrace Anti-Jew. And so will you. This is war, gentlemen, and I want it waged in all ten regions of the world.

“For my part, we are planning to stagger and ultimately eradicate the so-called Jesus-believers who are nothing but Judah cultists. Tsion Ben-Judah himself, who claims a billion adherents, has publicly announced what will prove to be his fatal blunder. He has accepted an invitation from the brash Micah you-know-who—whom we have to thank for the plague of sores and the seas of blood—to personally speak at Petra to the million cowards who refused to express loyalty to me and yet ran like children when they had the chance.”

“Excellency,” someone said, “could you not have stopped them before they reached Petra?”

“Please do not interrupt! Of course we could have easily overrun them, but they have made it much easier and more economical for us. They are now all in one location, and as soon as Ben-Judah makes good on his promise, we will welcome him with a surprise. Or two. Or three. Security and Intelligence Director Suhail Akbar . . .”

“Thank you, Your Worship,” Akbar said. “We are carefully monitoring the activities of the Judah-ites, and while we have not infiltrated the Jews at Petra, they have confined themselves to that area, saving us the work. We are prepared to rally two fighter-bombers when we know Ben-Judah is en route—we believe him to be only one or two hours from Petra anyway—and we should be able to drop one annihilation device from each craft directly onto Petra, literally within minutes of his arrival. We will follow with the launch of a missile that will ensure total destruction. That was scheduled to be launched from an oceangoing vessel but will now be launched from land.”

Chang had to chuckle at the Intelligence area’s falling for the clock ruse from Tsion’s pirated TV appearance.

Carpathia took over again. “The Judah-ites have proven to be such hero worshipers and so dependent on the daily Internet babblings of Ben-Judah that his death alone may mean the end of that nuisance. While we are aware of other pockets and strongholds of Judah-iteism, we do not believe any other leader has the charisma or leadership required to withstand our unlimited resources.

“But make no mistake, my loyal friends. The Jew is everywhere. Is there one potentate here who would aver that you do not have a significant Jewish population somewhere in your region? No one, of course. Here is the good news, something to make you forget the inconvenience of this journey I required on short notice. I am opening the treasury for this project, and no reasonable request will be denied. This is a war I will win at all costs.

“Maintain your loyalty mark application sites and make use of the enforcement facilitators. But, effective immediately, do not execute Jews discovered without the mark. I want them imprisoned and suffering. Use existing facilities now but build new centers as soon as possible. They need not be fancy or have any amenities. Just make them secure. Be creative, and share with each other your ideas. Ideally, these people should either long to change their minds or long to die. Do not allow that luxury.

“They will find few remaining Judah-ites to sympathize with them. They will be alone and as lonely as they have ever been, even though their cell mates will be fellow Jews. There are no limits on the degradation I am asking, requiring, you to inflict. No clothes, no heat, no cooling, no medicine. Just enough food to keep them alive for another day of suffering.

“I want reports, gentlemen. Pictures, accounts, descriptions, recordings. These people will wish they had opted for the guillotine. We will televise your best, most inventive ideas. From time immemorial these dogs have claimed the title ‘God’s chosen people.’ Well, they have met their god now. I have chosen them, all right. And they will not find even death a place they can hide.

“Apply for all the funds, equipment, rolling stock, and weapons you need to ferret out these weasels. The potentate who demonstrates the ability to keep them alive the longest, despite their torment, will be awarded a double portion in next year’s budget.

“Questions?”

George Sebastian had planned to wait to eat until he had his charges on board and was free in the air again, leaving Greece. Now, of course, hunger was the least of his problems, but weakness wouldn’t help either. The Greeks, particularly the thugs who had ambushed him and—he assumed—the people with whom he had been expected to connect, hoarded their water supply. The news from the high seas had everyone rushing to lakes and rivers to stock up on freshwater fish. Water would soon be more valuable than gold.

His captors were well connected, he could tell that. After they drove more than forty minutes north, then about twenty east, if he still had his bearings, they plowed through softer soil, and he heard leaves and branches brush heavily against the Jeep. It sounded as if the vehicle he had appropriated was still behind them.

George was grateful for his training, which had included blindfolding and mock torture. He had been astounded at how helpless he felt, even when he knew his own people were in charge. To be bound and blind, even knowing you weren’t going to die, was a dreadful, sickening, fearful thing. He had been allowed to get hungry and thirsty, and the most harrowing part was being left alone long enough for his mind to play tricks on him. Back then he knew he was still in California, not far from San Diego, not far from home. But his timekeeping techniques, his mind games to keep himself calm and sane, quickly dissipated with the passing of the minutes, and the young, strong, healthy recruit began imagining it had been hours.

He wanted to take what he had learned from that trauma and use it in this one, but he hated to even recall it. Having no resources had been the worst. George had been considered one of the most creative and innovative soldiers in his platoon. When they were dropped into the middle of the woods thirty miles from base, wearing only shorts and boots, he was always the first one back. He could improvise, find his way based on shadows, foliage, intuition. He knew how to protect himself from the sun, to keep from walking in circles—somehow a common malady for people who had lost any sense of direction.

But being left in a dark room without so much as the sound of one other person breathing, no muffled sounds outside of officers or fellow recruits gossiping about how long he’d been there, that had been true torture. Though he had quickly freed himself from the bindings, he could not free his hands from each other. But he was able to stand and walk, getting a measure of the room, helping time pass by remembering songs and poems and birth dates and special occasions.

But when he ran out of all that and began losing count after two hours, he had been tempted to call out, to tell his fellow GIs that he had had enough, that he got the point, that it was time to return him to normal. But who did that, other than the weaklings, the washouts? He had to face that he too wanted to cry, to scream, to beg and plead, to kick at the wall, to ask if they hadn’t forgotten him. He had succumbed to the temptation at long last to make noise so at least if he
had
been forgotten, they would be reminded and could save face by pretending it was all part of the drill.

He remembered what it was like to be hungry and thirsty and desperate, but there had always been that fail-safe. Deep in the recesses of his fast-unraveling mind had been the knowledge that this
was
training, this
wasn’t
real, there was no real threat to his life and health and mind. No one was going to inflict permanent injury, no one would threaten his new bride, nothing would happen to his parents.

His superiors had trained the men in basic transcendental meditation, which most of them passed off as something for weirdos, druggies, and holy men from the East. Yet George had seen some benefit to thinking beyond his consciousness, or at least trying to. Even back then, even before becoming a believer in Christ, he didn’t want anything to do with any religious aspects of meditation. But he did long to transcend this life, to reach a point beyond himself, to be able to park his senses and emotions on a plane where they would be safe from the threat of mere mortals.

It hadn’t worked long then, and that was what he feared now. This was the real thing. While he regulated his breathing and told himself not to think about his hunger and thirst, they were things he could not blot from his mind. The more he tried, the worse they invaded.

He was nudged along in the night—no light whatever peeked through his blindfold—by the butt of a rifle, and as much as he tried to catalog all the information he could remember since the girl had clumsily frisked him and he had been jumped, his overriding emotion was shame.

No, he had not been the one who got the teenagers caught—along with anyone helping them. But while the assignment excited him, he had not treated it like a military operation. Back in the Negev, that was war, pure and simple—except when they had been surrounded by superior firepower and it went from armed conflict to no fair. It had done his soul good to see what happened to anyone who thumbed his nose at God.
Our general is better than your general,
he thought,
so game over.

That almost made him smile. Why should he worry about the people who held him now when Michael the archangel could step in and make them faint dead away—if they were lucky?

He was held up briefly, then heard two doors open. He was nudged inside and sensed a light come on. A few more steps, another door, a musty smell, a shove from behind, steps leading down, but how many? He started carefully, feeling with his foot, but he was bumped again, rushed his feet hoping he would come to the bottom before he lost balance, and failed.

George didn’t know how far he might tumble down these wood stairs. The best he could do was tuck his chin to his chest, clamp his eyes shut as tightly as possible, and draw his knees up to his chest. He counted two, three, four stairs, then hard-packed dirt. His momentum carried him a couple of rolls, and the whole way down, he expected to hit a wall or who-knows-what with some part of his body.

When he finally came to rest on his right side, he could hear from their footsteps that his feet faced his captors. He kept his knees drawn up and feigned more pain than he had. He groaned slightly and did not move. He waited until steps drew close to him, then thrust out both feet with all that was in him.

No one on his base could do squats with more weight, and no one could touch him in leg presses. Had he been able to see the man before him, he could have broken both his legs. But his thrust had found purchase on only one of the man’s legs. The man cried out, something giving way in the knee, it seemed to George. The man went flying and rolled, his weapon clattering.

“Idiot!” the other man said, and George heard the girl stifle a laugh.

“I’ll kill him!” the one on the floor said, grunting and whimpering in pain as he struggled to his feet and cocked his weapon.

“Stop it!” the other said. “He’s our only link.”

“Well, she didn’t have to drop all three of them.”

“What’s done is done. He’s it, so don’t do anything stupid again.”

“Again?”

“You don’t think that was stupid? What are you doing over there?”

A muzzle at his neck. “Keep still there, big boy. Up we go.” A hand on the cuffs, pulling until he had to get up or injure his arms. He was led to a chair and pushed back onto it. He had the impression only two of the men and the girl were downstairs with him. Footsteps upstairs. He tried to slow his breathing so he could hear. The one upstairs was talking, but no one was responding. He was on the phone, talking about the car—probably to the clerk who had lent it. Then he said something about the plane. George decided it would serve him right if they shot him right there. He had treated this assignment like a game and now had exposed the entire Tribulation Force. And, if these men had any credibility, the others in Greece had been killed.

Cigarette smoke. Blown in his face.
Please,
he thought. These people had seen too many movies. Maybe cataloging their gaffes would help. Someone squatted next to him, he assumed the second one down the stairs. The other would be wary for a while.

“We can make this hard or make this easy,” the man whispered, and George couldn’t help himself. He pressed his lips together hard, but he couldn’t keep from giggling. He wanted to ask if they were going to try good-cop, bad-cop too, but he had resolved to say nothing.

“We know who you are, Mr. Sebastian,” and George lost it. He laughed aloud, knowing what the next line had to be. “We know who you work for.”

Trying to keep from laughing only made it worse, and he sat there, shoulders heaving, squealing to keep from guffawing. He took a backhand directly on the mouth, splitting his upper lip against his teeth.

George was almost relieved when that sobered him. He wiped his mouth on his shoulder, tasted blood, and spat. At least he wouldn’t get himself killed for being unable to stop laughing. When the man said he would cut to the chase, trying to make it sound normal with his thick accent, George almost laughed again. But his stinging lips were swelling, and he had a hunch that would be the least of his pain by the time this was over.

“All we need to know is where we can find your people. Your information proves correct; you are free to go.” As if they wouldn’t kill him for not having the mark of loyalty. “We have them narrowed to the United Carpathian States.”

George cocked his head ever so slightly. That had surprised him, and he didn’t mind it showing, because he knew they would think he was shocked that they knew. It was no secret Tsion Ben-Judah would soon be on his way to Petra, so why did they care about anyone else?

“You might be more surprised by how much we know. Rosenzweig is no threat as long as he stays in the mountains. His assistant we know to be Cameron Williams, who illegally transmits over the Internet material subversive to the Global Community, a crime punishable by death. We know there is a mole connected to the Judah-ites somewhere within the GC. And the pilot who has disguised himself as a GC officer has pushed his luck too far. He has been linked with another Williams identity, who also passed himself off as GC and temporarily freed two rebel prisoners. We have reason to believe a former guard at the Buffer, now AWOL, may be connected with these people.”

George wondered if they had made the connection between Ming Toy and Chang Wong. Maybe the fact that she had been married and now had a different last name would delay that realization. It would be only a matter of time, of course. Chang had to get out of New Babylon.

George’s captor sounded as if he believed George was surprised by how much they knew. In fact, the opposite was true. Apparently they had never connected the crash of the Quasi Two with the Trib Force, and no one even knew it had been empty.

More smoke in his face. “So, you just tell us where to look, and when you are proved trustworthy, you go home to your family.”

Most ironic of all, George would not have been able to give away the Trib Force if he’d wanted to. For his own safety, Rayford had told him only to fly Marcel and Georgiana to a Kankakee, Illinois, airstrip and that he would meet George there. Whether George accompanied them to the safe house, wherever it was, or flew on home to San Diego, would have depended on timing, weather, and any suspicion that might have arisen over whether the GC were onto him.

The man near him tried the next strategy in the hostage-taker’s guidebook. He laid a hand gently on George’s shoulder and whispered, “All we need is a specific location. No one knows where we got it, you go free, and everybody’s happy.”

The man had been so full of clichés that George was tempted to answer with one of his own: a bloody spit to the face. But if there was one thing he knew well, it was that apathy was more offensive than resistance. As long as he resisted, his captors knew they were getting to him. When he ignored them, they had nothing to grab on to, and the insult of not being taken seriously had to drive them crazy.

Ironically, George had learned that from his wife. He didn’t mind when she argued with him. But when she gave up and said she didn’t care,
that
got to him. Disengaging, he knew, was a cruel strategy. And he employed it now with a vengeance. He didn’t shake his head. He didn’t try to kick. Since he had shown a modicum of surprise over the man’s asserting that he knew the Trib Force was in the local region, George had barely moved a muscle. The man had to wonder if he was even listening. In fact, he wasn’t.

To keep from even the temptation of responding nonverbally, George began reciting silently the books of the Bible. Then his favorite verses. Then his favorite songs.

The Greek nudged him with his weapon, and George didn’t want him to think he had dozed off. He raised his chin.

“Well, what will it be, Sebastian? You’re refusing? At least say so. No? Tell me you’ve chosen not to say anything. You just want to give me rank and serial number? We already know your name. Come on. Not even that?”

Chang monitored all the various feeds and sites as he continued to listen to the Carpathia meeting recording. Most alarming was a list directed to Suhail Akbar that informed him of all the AWOL GC employees his department was aware of. Chang found his sister’s name and deleted it, but he knew he might have been too late. How many knew that she was his sister? Perhaps not even Akbar. Moon had known. And Carpathia himself had known. Chang could only hope that such detail stayed below the potentate’s radar level. Who knew what could come of it? Yes, he appeared to be loyal, even to the point of the mark. But if investigated, how long could he keep his parents and his sister out of it? Now wasn’t the time, but one day soon he would have to raise the issue with Rayford Steele. He believed he could monitor the palace and GC headquarters from the safe house.