The Rising: Antichrist Is Born (32 page)

“Nicolae? You seem—”

“Good guess, Reiche.”

“You seem so young—”

“To be making more money than you? Was that what you were going to say?”

“No. I just—”

“Because that will be true soon; will it not?”

“Well,
I—I
mean, the powers that be will have to decide whether your being a businessman is in the best interest of—”

Nicolae stood. “Please, Reiche, spare me the time, would you?”

Planchette sighed and hefted the folder, scowling.

“You are going to resent working for me; are you not, Reiche?”

Planchette cocked his head. “Am I?”

“Going to resent it or going to work for me? Because there is no question of the latter. The only question is the former.”

“I am a loyal soldier, Nick… olae. Nicolae. I will do what I am called upon to do.”

“I know you will. Tell me something. When does one get the privilege of talking to the big guy, the leader, the boss?”

“Stonagal?”

Nicolae laughed. “You think he is in charge? Maybe that is why you will be working for me before long. You know who

I am talking about.”

“The chief spirit? That is a privilege. A rare privilege.”

“How about you, Reiche? Have you had the privilege?”

“Two different times, now many years ago. Ms. Ivinisova too. Just once for her. But I can tell you this: it isn’t like you talk to him; he talks to you.”

“But you can then respond, right?”

“Of course.”

“I cannot wait.”

When he finally became a captain, Rayford believed he had arrived. He got his finances under some modicum of control,

and he looked forward to the birth of Rayford Jr., whom Irene was already referring to as Raymie.

“That makes no sense if he’s a Rayford Jr.,” Rayford said, but the name stuck.

He loved flying, being in charge, supervising a crew, chatting up the passengers; and he took satisfaction in his perfect safety record. But when Rayford allowed himself the luxury of assessing his life, he had to admit he was living for himself, not for anyone else. Oh, he did things for Irene and Chloe and soon Raymie. But everything revolved around him..

  Rayford was proud he had never allowed his love for alcohol to impede his work. One December afternoon, just after he arrived for a flight, O’Hare had been shut down due to heavy snow. The forecast looked bleak, and he assumed he would be sent home soon. So he and a few colleagues enjoyed a couple of martinis each, then hung around in the pilots’ lounge, waiting to be released.

But suddenly the snow stopped, the plows gained purchase on the runways, and the announcement came that takeoffs would begin again in half an hour. Rayford asked his teammates if they were up to flying after drinking. To a person, each said he had had only a couple and felt fine about proceeding.

Rayford felt the same but also believed he shouldn’t risk it. He called his supervisor, Earl Halliday. “I’ll take whatever dock in pay you have to mete out, Earl,” he said, “but I had a couple of martinis when I was sure we’d be grounded, and now I’m afraid I had better ground myself.”

“Where’m I gonna get a replacement at this hour, Steele?” Halliday said. “You sure two martinis are going to have an effect on a big guy like you?”

“I’m sorry, Earl. But I’m not going to drive a fully loaded heavy tonight.”

Halliday slammed down the phone, but on Rayford’s way home—confident to drive himself but not to be responsible for hundreds of passengers—he took a call from Earl. “Got somebody, in case you’re interested.”

“That’s a relief. Sorry about that, Chief. I won’t let it happen again. What’s it going to cost me?”

“Nothing.”

“Say again?”

“You did the right thing, Steele, and I’m proud of you. You gave me a headache, but the alternative could have been a nightmare. Good man.”

Irene seemed to love to tell that story. Rayford had to ask her to quit referring to him as her “straight-arrow captain,” though secretly he was thrilled that she was proud of him. That’s why his brush with infidelity would have flattened her. He could never tell Irene, and he lived with the guilt of it—even though, thankfully, it stopped short of actual adultery—for years.

It happened just two weeks after he had grounded himself. He and Irene were about to head to Earl Halliday’s staff Christmas party when at the last minute Irene announced she couldn’t make it. She was two weeks from delivery and not feeling well, but she insisted he go and enjoy himself and greet everyone for her.

He wasn’t scheduled to fly that night, of course, and knowing he could get a cab home, Rayford did not temper his thirst. He was not the type to dance on tables, but he sensed himself getting louder and friendlier as the night wore on. Trish, a beautiful young intern in Earl’s office—the one who always smiled when he dropped by—flirted with him all evening. Her boyfriend was out of town, and when she said one too many times that she would love to get Rayford alone, he said, “You’d better quit advertising if you’re not selling.”

“Oh, I’m selling,” she said, “if you’re buying.”

While some were holding forth at the top of their lungs around the piano and others were dancing, Trish grabbed Rayford’s hand and pulled him into a secluded closet.

Five minutes later, after some heavy necking, Rayford pulled away. “I’m not going to do this,” he said.

“Oh, come on, Captain. I won’t tell.”

“Neither would I, but I would know. And I’d like to be able to face myself tomorrow. Irene is—”

“I know,” she said. “Go home to your pregnant wife. There are more where you came from.”

Two days later, racked by a guilt he would never fully shed, Rayford dreaded a visit to Earl’s office. The boss just had routine business with him, but Rayford didn’t want to face Trish. No such luck. She greeted him on his way in and asked if he had a minute later.

On his way out she beckoned him to a corner where they could be seen but not heard. “I want to apologize for the other night,” she said.

“Don’t give it another thought,” he said. “We were both drunk.”

“Not as drunk as I got later, thinking about my boyfriend. He’s about to pop the question, and I feel terrible.”

“Imagine how I feel, Trish.”

“Forgive me,” she said.

“It never happened,” he said.

But it happened over and over in his mind for the next several years. The pangs hit him at the strangest times. It might be when he was frolicking with Raymie or playing with Chloe or just talking with Irene. At times he felt such a compulsion to confess to his wife that he had to find other things to distract himself. Nothing bad really happened, and while it had been stupid and would have infuriated him if it had been Irene with some guy, he knew telling her would only hurt her and that nothing positive could come of it besides getting it off his conscience. Trish had long since left the airline, married, and moved away.

Strangely, in the last several months, Irene had seemed to grow restless. “There has to be more,” she said more than once. “Don’t you ever feel like you’d like to reconnect with God, Rayford? Personally, I mean.”

He had to think about that one. “That implies we were once connected.”

“Weren’t you, ever? I feel like I was. Until He didn’t answer my prayers.”

Rayford shook his head. “I was never really into it. I mean, I’m okay with church. And I believe in God; don’t get me wrong. But I don’t want to become some fundamentalist or literalist or whatever they call those people who talk to God every day

and think He talks to them too.”

“I don’t want to be a weirdo either, Rare,” Irene said. “But feeling like you’re actually talking with God and He’s communicating with you? What could be better than that?”

By age twenty-one, Nicolae Carpathia was nearly finished with graduate school and ran an import/export empire with Reiche Planchette low on his payroll. Carpathia was on the cover of every business magazine in Europe, and while he had not yet made the cover of Time or Global Weekly, that couldn’t be far off.

He lived in a mansion on the outskirts of Bucharest, ¦’ not a half mile from where his biological fathers had been assassinated a few years before. Viv Ivins enjoyed quarters on the top floor and managed his personal affairs. She supervised his valets, his drivers, his house-. hold and garden staff. His every need was cared for.

Nicolae was in the middle of two projects: clandestinely hiring an off-the-books cadre of professional facilitators who would make sure his least cooperative competitors met the same fate his fathers and his mother had, and surrounding himself with the politically astute. His next horizon was government. First he would get himself elected to the Romanian parliament. Then he would angle for the presidency. Next step Europe. Ultimate goal: the world.

There was no such position yet, of course, leader of the world. But by the time he ascended, there would be. He just knew it.

The day would come when Rayford Steele tried desperately to communicate with God. He and Irene had been married a dozen years. Chloe was eleven, Raymie three.

Rayford had just been named captain on a Pan-Con Boeing 747-400 and was about to fly from O’Hare to
LAX
with a first officer who introduced himself as Christopher Smith. “I go by Chris.” A couple of years younger than Rayford, Chris said he was married and had two elementary-school-age boys. He seemed a seasoned, no-nonsense guy—the type Rayford appreciated. Having only two men in the cockpit of a heavy was going to take some getting used to.

The only other newbie on the crew was a young flight attendant named Hattie Durham, who looked enough like the infamous Trish that Rayford had to once again slug it out with his conscience over the Christmas party fiasco a few years before. Hattie was introduced to him by his favorite senior flight attendant, Janet Allen. When she sent Hattie back to her chores, Janet whispered, “Just between you and me, Captain, she’s a little ditzy. Ambitious, though, I’ll give her that. Wants my job on an international route.”

“Think she’ll make it?”

“I’m not sure she knows when we’re in the air or on the ground just yet.”

As he and Chris Smith settled into the cockpit, Rayford said, “I love flying these. They handle nice and solid on final because of the weight.”

“Tell me about it,” Smith said. “Wind doesn’t affect ‘em much, does it?”

“Got to love a stable approach,” Rayford said. “The downside is you can’t maneuver quickly. It’s no fighter jet.”

Once in the air, First Officer Smith split his time between reading the Chicago Tribune, monitoring the instruments, and answering all radio calls from traffic control. Rayford was a stickler for rules and would not have read recreationally while

in the air, but since Smith seemed an old hand and didn’t miss a thing, he didn’t say anything.

The sun hung just below Rayford’s glare shield, making him squint even behind his dark gray lenses. The next time Chris

Smith looked up, he said, “Oops, how long has that been there?”

“What?”

“That message,” Smith said, pointing. He tossed his paper on the jump seat and sat up straighter.

Rayford shielded his eyes and found the message screen reading “
ENGINE
#1
OIL
FILT
.”

His lower monitor, normally blank, now displayed engine readings. Oil pressure was normal, even on the engine in question, the one farthest to his left. “Engine number one oil-filter checklist, please,” he said.

“Roger,” Chris said, digging into the right side pocket for the emergency manual. Rayford did not recall this procedure on his last simulator ride and so assumed it was not a big deal. On the other hand, neither had he finished checking the maintenance log.

While Chris was finding the right section, Rayford grabbed the log and speed-read. Sure enough, engine number one had required an oil-filter change in Miami before the leg to O’Hare, and metal chips had been detected on the used filter. They

must have been within acceptable limits, however, as the mechanic had signed off on the note. And the plane had made it to Chicago without incident.

Rayford followed the procedure and watched the message screen. The throttle reached idle, but the message still shone.

After a minute he said, “It’s not going out. What next?”

“‘If
ENG
OIL
FILT
message remains displayed with thrust lever closed:
FUEL
CONTROL
SWITCH
...
CUTOFF
.’”

Rayford grabbed the control cutoff switch and said, “Confirm number one cutoff switch?”

“Confirmed.”

He and Chris determined a new altitude, and he instructed Chris to call air-traffic control at Albuquerque to get clearance to descend to 32,000 feet. They then positioned a transponder to warn other traffic that they might be unable to climb or maneuver properly if there was a conflict.

Rayford had no question they could reach Los Angeles without incident now. He called Janet. “You probably noticed we descended awhile back.”

“I did. Seemed a little early for step-down into
LAX
.”

“Right. I shut down number one due to a minor oil problem. I’ll make an announcement shortly.”

Rayford became aware of the strain on his right foot and remembered he had to increase pressure to compen-; sate for the uneven thrust of the remaining engines. C’mon, Rayford. Fly the airplane.

“Mind taking the controls for a minute, Chris? I should call the company.”

“I have the airplane,” Chris said.

Following protocol, Rayford confirmed, “You have the airplane.”

After Rayford informed Pan-Con of the situation, the dispatcher told him of low visibility at
LAX
. “You’ll want to check weather as you get closer.”

“We have plenty of fuel if we have to divert,” Rayford said. “In fact, I wish we had less. We’re going to land a little heavy.”

“Roger.”

Chris said, “Auto brakes.”

Rayford responded, “Three set.”