He felt the searing heat of the bullet between his shoulder blades just before he heard the report of the shot. He reached for the doorknob and heard the SNAP of a dry fire. Hart was empty. He hobbled through the door and made it to the tube-shaped elevator, which raised him quickly to the uppermost subterranean level where Jana was being held. Leaving a trail of blood, he half walked half crawled to her door and swiped his magnetic key through the lock before collapsing onto the floor.
Jana heard a noise and saw the green light flash on the door lock. She opened the door to find Christian sprawled face down on the floor, the top of his back bleeding profusely. “Dane! Dane! Wake up, we have to get you inside. He rolled over and muttered something unintelligible and she saw blood pouring from his mouth and nose. She pulled him inside and propped him against a wall, leaving his arm between the door and frame until she could stick a towel in the doorjamb to prevent it from closing and locking her inside.
“My ... jacket ... ” he said in an awful gurgling voice, pointing toward the bed. Jana looked and saw he had left his fatigue jacket on the bed when he was there earlier. She started to pick it up, then saw the bottle of pills that had fallen out of the pocket and onto the bed. That’s what he wanted from the jacket.
Jana’s nursing experience made reality plain enough. Dane Christian, her one best—if not only—hope would be dead within minutes. She shook a whole handful of the powerful painkillers out of the bottle and gave them to him along with a glass of water.
He forced the pills down through a mouth and throat full of blood and again pointed toward his jacket. “More pills aren’t going to help, Dane. Give those a few minutes to take hold.” He tried again to say something else but couldn’t get the words out and finally gave up. Jana held his hand until the narcotics started to work. His shallow breathing slowed and his eyes glazed over, his lips barely moving as he slipped into a twilight sleep. Then he died.
Jana knew the trail of blood would quickly lead Dane’s erstwhile foe—most likely Hart himself—to her door, and she needed to make an immediate exit. She gently closed Dane’s eyes and laid him down on the floor. He may have been a terrible man but he seemed repentant at the end and she couldn’t bear to leave him there propped up against the wall like a stuffed animal. She thought about how ironic it was that his brother had died in exactly the same position, in her brother’s house, probably at his hand.
She went to get Dane’s jacket to drape over him and was surprised by its weight. Something heavy was in the pocket. A revolver, .38 caliber. That could come in handy. She popped the cylinder out to check her ammunition, suddenly grateful to her farmer father who had insisted she learn how to handle weapons as a teenager. “Just in case,” he always said. She had rolled her eyes at the time, but she was rolling the cylinder now and snapping it back in place, ready for action if need be. The time for passivity was over.
Feeling around in the other pockets of the jacket yielded two full Speed-Loaders, bringing her total store to fifteen rounds. Maybe the gun was what Dane was really pointing her to, not the pills. She checked the last pocket and found a thumbdrive. She needed the fatigue jacket’s cargo pockets, so she pulled the towel from the doorjamb, laid it over Dane’s face, put the jacket on, and hit the door running.
Outside the door she headed left down the long hallway that led to the elevator. If she could get up top she might have a fighting chance. The people she’d seen working in that computer room when she first got here looked like a gaggle of nerds and she liked her chances against nerds with a .38 Special. She had the elevator in sight fifty feet ahead when the heard a soft electronic tone and a whoosh of air. Someone was about to disembark the elevator.
She had just passed a crossing hallway and quickly retreated and ducked into it before the doors on the elevator opened. She flattened herself against the wall, the gun in her right hand with her finger on the trigger. The steps were coming quickly down the hall, echoing off the hard tile floor and cinder-block walls. Her body was frozen as Hart walked by the intersection of the hallways, his eyes on the blood trail that would lead him to her former cage.
She heard him open the door, waited five seconds, then hit the main hallway and headed back toward the elevator as quickly and quietly as she could.
29
2:27 AM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)
YELLOW CREEK
“As embarrassing as it is to the Bureau, you do have our gratitude for identifying Rowe as a mole, Mr. Decker.”
“I didn’t figure him out soon enough, Director. I thought Potella was the dirty one.”
Brandon snorted into the phone. “Walter Potella is an oaf and a disgrace who we keep confined to a desk. If it weren’t so damned hard to fire a government employee he would’ve been pounding a beat in some one-cruiser town years ago.”
“What about Julie Reynolds?”
“I don’t know Agent Reynolds. I’m told she has potential but she’s green as grass. I’ll have to say Rowe obviously did his best to assemble the sorriest team imaginable.”
“Any progress analyzing the emails on your end?”
“The task force at Quantico is working around the clock. They’ve just completed a profile on the UNSUB. White male between forty and forty-nine years of age. English probably not native language, well educated, most likely in Europe. Very little else.”
“So he could be any of a few hundred million people.”
“Afraid so.”
“What are your plans going forward, Mr. Brandon?”
“We’ll be dispatching a new team to your location. I’ll pick and vet the members myself this time, so it’s going to take a little longer. Expect them in around twenty-four hours.”
“So long as they don’t interfere with what we’re doing.”
“We are grateful to you, Mr. Decker, but do realize when all is said and done we’re running this investigation, not you. You can participate but we will be calling the shots, both overall and at Yellow Creek.”
“Let’s discuss it later. Right now I need to get to work. Goodbye, Director.” I hung up the phone, shook my head at the obtuse nature of career bureaucrats, and went back to the lounge.
“Tark, to be sure we’re on the same page, you’re not thinking this fruitcake is really the antichrist, are you?” I of course didn’t believe in the notion of some supernatural evil devil-man at all, but I needed to know where he stood. I needed his biblical knowledge from an investigative standpoint but there was no room, no time, for religious emotionalism to further fog the situation.
“No, Matthew. This world may be approaching the end of days, but I plan to be raptured before antichrist is revealed. Besides, antichrist will almost certainly enter the world stage disguised as some sort of wonderful, kind savior. I think this guy’s shot any chance he had at being perceived that way.”
“Agreed. Now let’s figure out who he is and how to stop him. Abdul, try every permutation of six-six-six you can think of on the password. Tark, you got a Bible around here?”
He came back from his office with a Bible the size of a small car. “Giant print edition,” he explained. “They gave me one of those over-the-hill birthday parties here last year when I turned fifty.”
“Let me know if you need a Geritol break,” I said with a smile. He laughed and slapped me on the back. When I got my breath back I opened the behemoth to its final book, Revelation. “Okay, let’s get inside this guy’s head. He thinks he’s the antichrist. What—”
Abdul burst into the room. “Matt Decker, you must see this. Come now.”
We went to his station in the control room. The monitor was filled with a graphic that looked like an ancient parchment scroll with this inscription:
Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.
We may not have hit the password but we were on the right track. “What’d you do to trigger this?” I asked after w
e walked back out of the control room and away from the bug.
“I was trying six-six-six for the password.”
I turned to Tark. “I assume this is from Revelation. Do you recognize it?”
“I don’t remember chapter and verse but it won’t take me long to find it.”
“Did anything else happen when you entered it?” I asked Abdul.
“Yes, there were sounds playing. Do not worry, for I had my volume low so it could not be heard by bug.”
“Something spoken?”
“No, they were horns blowing.”
“Like musical horns?” Tark said.
“Yes, they were like trumpets blowing.”
“That makes sense,” Tark said.
“How’s that?”
“Revelation’s got more trumpets than a marching band.”
Abdul went back to work on the password, and Tark and I moved back to the lounge. He was all worked up, giving me a nutshell explanation of end-times prophecy as he saw it. John, the guy who wrote Revelation, had one hell of an imagination. In our particular situation it didn’t matter one bit if it was true or not. Our psycho obviously believed it and had written himself into a starring role.
In The End According to Tark, there would be one main antichrist, the beast, and he’d have a helper, the false prophet. The beast would rise to world power right about the time all the good saved Christians were magically sucked up in the air to meet Jesus. The false prophet would be the beast’s right-hand man, taking care of the details of setting up the much-feared One World Government.
Right about the time they got started, God would begin pouring out his wrath on an evil world in a series of judgments. There were to be several different groups of judgments, including the trumpet judgments. Some of these terms were vaguely familiar from my father’s old sermons, but that was a long time ago and the main things I got out of those sermons were terror and a seizing fear that some of these creatures might be under my bed.
“Those sounds weren’t in that code by accident. What’s the first trumpet judgment?”
“You’re jumping the gun. We need to cover the seven seals first.”
Seals. Trumpets. It all started running together. It was the middle of the night and still at least eighty-five degrees in the building. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since I’d eaten, much less showered. Reality started piling up and I felt overwhelmed. How could we fight this guy? We didn’t even know who he was. A feeling of hopelessness settled over me like a dark, pungent mist, choking me, blinding me. I suddenly realized that I was choking on it. Something was in the room, smothering me with a wet stench of death—
“Matthew ... Matthew! Wake up!”
I opened my eyes and shook my head.
“You dozed off,” Tark said. “We were talking about the seven seals.”
“Sorry, run through it again if you don’t mind. I’m spent.”
He reached over and gave me a one-armed hug. “You have a right to be worn out. Don’t worry about it.”
“Okay, seven seals.”
He went to the whiteboard and made a list numbered one through seven, writing more information as he talked. “These judgments get a lot of attention in the movies, but Hollywood usually doesn’t worry about being biblically accurate. In the movies, it’s always up to someone to do something to stop the judgments from taking place and postponing the end of the world as we know it.
“That’s hogwash. Once all this starts, it will go forward and no power in the universe will be able to stop it.”
“Okay, who’s supposed to be opening these seals?”
“Jesus. A lot of Revelation is symbolic, but a lot of scholars agree with some uniformity on the underlying meaning of the symbolisms.”
The clock on the wall said three o’clock. Seven hours and change until the deadline. “What’s number one?”
“Seals one through four will unleash the four horsemen,” he said, writing WHITE HORSE on the board beside seal number one as he lectured. “You may’ve heard these supernatural cowboys referred to as the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The first rider will be on a white horse with a bow and a crown, generally thought to symbolize antichrist getting ready to conquer the world.”
“What kind of horse for our second cowboy?”
“A fiery red one, its rider equipped with a sword to symbolize bloodshed.” He wrote in RED HORSE. “Number three is a black horse.” BLACK HORSE. “Its rider appears to have some power over the buying and selling of goods.”
“And number four?”
PALE HORSE. “The pale horse is the sickly color of death, like bloodless corpses, which its rider is scheduled to dispense through a combination of warfare, famine, and pestilence. In fact, this rider is specifically called Death.”
He kept talking, but I’d tuned him out a bit and was focusing on the whiteboard. Something was there, beginning to come together, a vaporous outline I needed to cajole into an understandable structure. Sheriff Litman, who was hanging out in the control room with Abdul, walked into the room. “FBI on the horn for you, Decker.”
“Tark, you mind talking to them?” I said. “I want to stay on this.”
“I’ll take it in my office,” he said.
He and Litman left and I stared at the board. WHITE HORSE. RED HORSE. BLACK HORSE. PALE HORSE. Four horses. Four horsemen. WHITE HORSE. RED HORSE. BLACK HORSE. PALE HORSE. My mind was racing, processing, looking for the embedded clues. In four days and nights I had barely had enough real sleep for one night, but I was on fire now, the fatigue gone, my mind screaming for answers.
I stood at the board, closed my eyes, and tried to envision those horses and their riders, thundering across an open field side by side. No, that wouldn’t work. They weren’t a gang of bandits. Each man-and-beast team worked alone. One horse. One rider. One mission. And one distinct meaning to this psycho.
The white horse would go first, the warrior-rider sitting high in the saddle, wearing his crown and wielding his bow, conquering all in his path. How long would that take? A week? A month? A day? My mind stopped and I opened my eyes. Yes, a day! I headed down the hall to get Tark.
30
3:18 AM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)
HART COMPLEX
Jana wondered how long her luck would hold. She had made it to the elevator, which shot her up to ground level. Only when she stepped out did she realize that amid the excitement she had left the room without shoes. Her bare feet made for quiet movement on the balcony that wound around the perimeter of the main floor where all the computers were, but if she did happen to make it outside the building the lack of shoes would quickly shift from advantage to handicap.
She crouched behind the balcony wall and peeked down at the floor. She counted only four people, each of them working at a computer. Three were men, all working side by side on the same console. The fourth was a woman and she was alone and nearest the exit door. Jana stayed in a half-crouch and worked her way around the balcony. A metal spiral staircase wound down to the floor, and she slowly eased down it, keeping her eye on the woman. A support pillar blocked her view of the men in the center of the room.
The sound of rushing air startled her. She turned around and realized the sound was the elevator going back down. If it was going down it would no doubt rise shortly, probably bearing Hart. The elevator and the staircase were the only two ways off the balcony and one of the men from the center of the room below had moved to a console no more than ten feet from the foot of the stairs. The whoosh of the elevator whined to a stop, then restarted with a different sound. It was on the way up.
Each step of the steel staircase felt like ice to the soles of her naked feet. Five steps to go. Four. The third one from the bottom creaked ever so slightly under her weight. She froze but it was too late. The man at the bottom turned toward the sound.
She had never hurt a living thing but she had no qualms about starting now. THWUMP went the man’s skull as Jana dove on him and lande
d a solid blow with the pistol butt. He slid to the carpeted floor and Jana felt his blood, warm and sticky like thin pancake syrup, on the butt of the gun as she withdrew it.
Above her on the balcony, the elevator’s pneumatic mechanism faded to a stop a moment before the door opened. She dropped to her hands and knees and peeked around the corner of the console. The two men in the middle of the room were still working, talking to each other. Their conversation must have masked the sound of her cracking their friend’s skull. Crawling at an impossible pace, she worked her way across the room to within six feet of the woman working nearest the exit, then rose and closed the gap before bringing the pistol down on the crown of the woman’s head. She was quickly making up for her prior lack of inflicting bodily harm.
The door that led outside was twenty feet away. She eased the unconscious woman out of her chair and dragged her across the floor into the small entranceway, where she quickly stripped her of her sneakers and access card. The shoes were too big but they would have to do.
She stepped to the door, swiped the card, and said a quiet yes! when a green light pulsed and the massive doors began to slide open.
“Hey, what’s going on over there? You know we can’t exit without authorization,” one of the men said, his voice getting closer. The doors opened slowly and Jana turned sideways and pushed through as soon as the opening was wide enough.
The air was cool, the moon hanging brightly in a star-speckled sky as she ran in a dead sprint away from the building and toward an open-walled tractor shed about two hundred yards away. The shoes flopped on her feet and the sound of them slapping the damp grass was as loud as an eraser being banged on a chalkboard. Inside the shed, she leaned on the far side of a tractor to catch her breath. Ten seconds later an alarm started wailing back at the main building and the area lit up with floodlights. Looking back over the top of the tractor, she counted six men coming out of the building and fanning out. Two were headed directly toward her and she had nowhere to go. Looking away from the building, there was nothing but flat land spread out to infinity. She was trapped.
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