by Tim LaHaye
Fortunato pointed at her, and a ball of fire roared from the black sky, illuminating the whole area. Hattie burst into flames. The masses fell away, screaming in terror as she stood burning, mighty tongues of fire licking at her clothes, her hair, enveloping her body. As she seemed to melt in the consuming blaze, the clouds rolled back, the lightning and thunder ceased, and the sun reappeared.
A soft breeze made Hattie topple like a statue. People gaped as she was quickly reduced to ash, her silhouette branded onto the ground. As the fire died and the smoke wafted, Hattie’s remains skittered about with the wind.
Fortunato drew the attention back to himself. “Marvel not that I say unto you, all power has been given to me in heaven and on the earth!” Carpathia carefully made his way down the Place of the Skull, and the silent crowds moved to follow. As people passed the smoldering ashes, some spit, and others kicked at the powdery stuff.
Buck was overwhelmed with memories of meeting Hattie, of introducing her to Carpathia. He turned and grabbed the praying Rosenzweig by the shoulder and yanked him to his feet. “That should have been you,” he hissed. “Or me! We should not have left her with the responsibility!”
He let go of the man’s robe and marched off toward the Garden Tomb, not caring whether Chaim kept up with him. If Rosenzweig would not accept the mantle, despite having been a believer even longer than Hattie, maybe Buck was being called to stand in the gap. He didn’t know what Carpathia or Fortunato had in store for the tomb, but this time, if need be, he would be the one to oppose Antichrist.
Rayford hadn’t felt as motivated or useful since he had first become a believer. Supervising the advance of his Operation Eagle troops, he had kept just an intermittent eye on what Carpathia was up to. It would be clear when Chaim revealed himself and sent the remnant toward refuge. That would be his cue to start watching for the return to Mizpe Ramon and the airlift to safety.
But now his phone was alive with messages. He took Chloe’s call first. “What was that?” she asked. “Clearly Fortunato zapped someone, but they didn’t show who! Was it Chaim?”
“I don’t know,” Rayford said. “Let me call you back.”
David reported the same thing just before Rayford heard from Mac and then Abdullah. “I’ll call Buck,” he told them.
But Buck wasn’t answering.
David spent the next hour setting up near what he knew to be a “high place,” a site used centuries before by pagans who believed they were sacrificing to their gods by being as close to heaven as possible. He was lonely already, Albie having headed back as soon as he was unloaded. David didn’t know how long it would be before he was joined by as many as a million others. So far he had seen only from the air the stunning red-rock masterpiece of a city carved from stone. He couldn’t imagine what it would look like from close-up when he had the time to explore.
No one seemed to know what happened with Fortunato and the crowd at Calvary, and David’s occasional glances at the screen merely showed the crowds making their way to the Garden Tomb. Then he heard a tone and stood still in the lofty quiet of the high place. Someone was trying to reach him on his computer. David scrambled from a cave he had decided might be his first living quarters. He reached his computer and sat cross-legged before it. The play-by-play from Jerusalem droned on, commentators filling time before the next event, no one specific about what had gone on at the last site. He checked the encoded Operation Eagle site but found nothing new.
The tone sounded again, and he switched screens to receive a summons from Chang Wong in his apartment at the palace in New Babylon.
“I found the mother lode!” Chang had written. “Uploading so you can celebrate with me.”
Supreme Commander Walter Moon was clearly not comfortable in front of a crowd, particularly the size of the one pressing around the Garden Tomb. A microphone and sound system had been hastily rigged up for him, and he read nervously from notes. Buck had been among the first to arrive, and he had lost Chaim.
The attitude of the crowd had changed. The festive, eager anticipation had given way to dread, yet no one seemed to feel free to leave. They had seen the power delegated to Leon Fortunato, and surely no one wanted to give the impression they weren’t following through on their commitment to taking the mark of loyalty.
“Thank you for being with us today,” Moon began. “As you may know, I’m Global Community Supreme Commander Walter Moon, and I’m filling in temporarily for the Most High Reverend Father Fortunato as he goes on ahead to prepare for Potentate Nicolae Carpathia’s address at the Temple Mount an hour from now.”
“Is he all right?” someone called out.
“Oh, he’s better than all right,” Moon said, “judging by his performance at Golgotha.” He apparently thought that would elicit a laugh, and when it didn’t, he searched his notes again to find his place.
Buck called Chang. “We on secure phones, Mr. Wong?” he asked. “Be sure.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Williams, and I just communicated with Mr. Hassid by computer that—”
“Sorry, kid, no time. Check with Medical and see what’s happening with Fortunato.”
“I’m sorry?”
“What didn’t you hear?”
“I heard you all right, sir, but I was under the impression you were with the pageant there in Jerusalem. That’s where Carpathia and Fortunato are, along with—”
“Fortunato’s disappeared and they’re saying he’s gone on ahead for preparations.”
“I’m on it.” Buck heard him tapping at a keyboard. “Good call, Mr. Williams,” he said. Now reading, “ ‘Classified, top secret, director-level eyes only . . . Most High Reverend, blah, blah, blah, under care of palace surgeon in chief, mobile unit, Jerusalem, blah, blah.’ Ah, here it is. ‘Preliminary diagnosis rash, several boil-like epidermal eruptions, testing for carbuncles.’ That’s all that’s here for now.”
CHAPTER 4
Tsion worried about Chloe. She had a lot on her mind, sure, and the pressure had to be enormous. But she seemed so distracted. No doubt she dreaded Buck’s being in yet another dangerous situation, but if Tsion had to guess, being so far from the action frustrated her. Everyone in the Trib Force had, at one time or another, tried to impress upon Chloe that she was among its most crucial members and that few people anywhere could do what she was doing. But she was a young woman of action. She wanted to be there in the thick of it. Tsion wished he could dissuade her.
He had enjoyed the respite from his uncomfortable cot, but while he and Chloe monitored the boring TV feed from Jerusalem, waiting for the fiasco to reach the Garden Tomb, Kenny had fallen asleep. Chloe looked at Tsion apologetically as she attempted to rise with the toddler in her arms. She poked out a free hand and he reached to pull her off the couch. As she made her way to Kenny’s crib, Tsion thought he heard something from his study. Chang again?
He padded back and found a timed message composed two days before and sent automatically on a schedule determined by the sender. It read:
Dr. Ben-Judah,
Please pass this along to my brothers and sisters in Christ, old friends and new. I don’t know what to make of it except that I believe I have been called of God to risk my life for the cause. It certainly was nothing I was seeking, and I hope you all know I have no grandiose view of myself.
I knelt to pray in my hotel room in Tel Aviv . . .
Tsion stood, his spirit recognizing that this was no frivolous imagining from a new believer. He bent over the screen and read, finally groaning and making his way back out to where Chloe was watching the end of a brief speech by Walter Moon. “I have forwarded a message to your computer that you need to read right away,” he said, knowing his quavering voice scared her.
“Is it Buck?” she said. He shook his head. “Chaim?”
“No,” he said. “Please wake the others. We will want to pray. And you will want to call Cameron.”
David ignored the signal that he had a message from Tsion. That could wait as he check
ed the upload from Chang. Not only had the young man pieced together recordings from devices in the palace, starting in the Wongs’ guest apartment the morning in question, but he had also taken the time to include a translation, where necessary, from Chinese to English. David would check the tape with Ming later to be sure the translation was accurate. Chang began with the news that he remembered “only snatches of this before the so-called anesthetic. You must have known they use no such thing.”
David knew. But he hadn’t known any more than Chang about what had really gone on. Chang’s pieced-together production began with the audio of another loud argument between him and his father. Mrs. Wong kept trying to pacify her husband and son, but she failed.
“You will be among the first to take the mark of loyalty!” the subtitles read, as David listened to Mr. Wong fiercely whisper to the boy in Chinese.
“I will not! You are loyal to Carpathia. I am not!”
“Do not speak such heresy to me, young man! My family is loyal to the international government as I have always been to my superiors. And now we know the potentate is the son of god!”
“He is not! I know no such thing! He could be the son of Satan for all I know!”
David heard a slap and someone crashing to the floor. “That was I,” Chang wrote.
“You saw the man resurrected! You will worship him as I do!”
“Never!”
A door slammed. Then a phone call. “Missah Moon! Son talk crazy. Say he not want mark, but he just scared of needle. You got tranquilizer?”
“I can get a tranquilizer, Mr. Wong, but it comes in the form of an injection.”
“Injection?”
“Shot. Hypodermic needle?”
“Yes! Yes! I can do.”
“You can administer the injection?” Moon said.
“Pardon?”
“Give the shot?”
“Yes! You bring!”
They rang off, and Mr. Wong apparently returned to where Chang had locked himself in a room. “You be ready to go in ten minutes!”
“I’m not going!”
“You will go or answer to me!”
“I’m answering to you now. I’m telling you I’m not going. I don’t want to work here. I want to go home.”
“No!”
“I want to talk with Mother.”
“Very well! Mother will talk some sense into you.”
A few minutes later, a quiet knock. “Mother?”
“Yes.” The door opened. “Son, you must do what your father says. We cannot survive in this new world without showing loyalty to the leader.”
“But I don’t believe in him, Mother. Neither does Ming.”
A long silence.
“She doesn’t, Mother.”
“She told me. I fear for her life. I cannot tell your father.”
“I agree with her, Mother.”
“You are a Judah-ite too?”
“I am, and I will say so if he tries to make me take the mark.”
“Oh, Chang, don’t do this. I will lose both of my children!”
“Mother, you must read what Rabbi Ben-Judah writes too! At least look into it. Please!”
“Maybe, but you cannot cross your father today. You take the mark. If you are right, your God will forgive you.”
“It doesn’t work that way. I have already made my decision.”
Mr. Wong returned. “Let’s go. Mr. Moon is waiting.”
“Not today,” Mrs. Wong pleaded. “Let Chang think about it awhile.”
“No more time for thinking. He will embarrass the family.”
“No! I won’t! You can’t make me.”
Silence. Mrs. Wong: “Please, Husband.”
“Very well, then. I will tell Mr. Moon not today.”
“Thank you, Father.”
“But someday soon.”
“Thank you for your patience, Husband.”
It sounded as if both parents left. Then the door opened.
“Father?”
“You will think about it?”
“I have been thinking about it a lot.”
The bed squeaked. “Father, I—ow! Don’t! What are you doing? What’s that?”
“Help you relax. You get some rest now.”
“I don’t need any rest! What did you do?”
“See? You are not so afraid of needles! That did not hurt.”
“But what was it?”
“It will help you calm down.”
“I’m calm.”
“You rest now.”
The door shut.
“How long take, Missah Moon?”
“Not long. Don’t wait too long or he won’t be able to walk by himself.”
“Okay. You help.”
They returned.
“Chang?”
“Mmm?”
“You come with us now?”
“Who?”
“Missah Moon and me.”
“Who?”
“You know Missah Moon.”
“No, I—”
“Come on now.”
“I will not . . . take . . . the . . . mmm . . .”
“Yes, you will.”
“No, I’m . . .”
The sound continued with the two men encouraging Chang to walk with them and his mumbling in Chinese and English about not wanting to, refusing.
“Now, watch this,” Chang wrote. “The surveillance camera from the hallway picks up that they’re pretty much carrying me down the hall, and look what I’m doing! Crossing myself! I don’t even know where I got that! And look! Here, I’m pointing toward heaven! I know it’s impossible to prove what I was doing, since whatever they gave me made me forget even the conversation with my mother. And I can’t tell what words I’m trying to form there, but I had to be trying to say I was a believer!”
The whole rest of the way, as Chang tied together the angles from various cameras all the way to the corridor leading to Building D, David watched as Walter Moon and Mr. Wong prodded Chang along. At some point a third man met them, carrying a camera. The boy wept, pointed, and tried to form words. Moon reassured the photographer and any onlookers that the boy was “all right. He’s okay. Just a little reaction to medication.”
Most shocking was that indeed there was a surveillance camera in Building D, and by the time they got Chang there, he was unconscious, eyes shut, drooling, moaning. “Take cap off,” his father said. “Smooth hair.”
A woman technician who looked Filipino fired up the device. “This boy, he is all right?” she said.
“Fine,” Moon said. “What’s the region code for the United Asian States?”
“Thirty,” the tech said, setting the implanter. “I worry that I might get into trouble for—”
“Do you know who I am?”
“Of course.”
“I’m telling you to do your job.”
“Yes, sir.”
The woman swabbed Chang’s lolling forehead with a tiny cloth and pressed the mechanism onto his skin, producing a loud click and whoosh. “Thank you,” Moon said. “Now be sure this place is ready for the lines in about an hour.”
The technician left, and Mr. Wong and Mr. Moon took turns keeping Chang sitting up. “Thing wears off almost as fast as it goes to work,” Moon said.
“Fix hair more,” Mr. Wong said, slapping Chang’s cheeks. “We get picture.”
The photographer shot Chang with a digital camera. The boy came to, and his father held the camera before his face. “There!” Mr. Wong said. “Look at new employee, one of first to take mark!”
Chang wobbled and pulled back, reaching for the camera and trying to focus on the picture. His shoulders drooped and he glared at his father, his face stony. When Mr. Wong and Mr. Moon stood him up, he said, “Where’s my hat?”
He jammed it on and stood there until he regained his equilibrium. He said something to his father in Chinese. “I said, ‘What have you done?’ ” he wrote.
“Someday you thank me,” Mr. Wong said. �
�Now we go somewhere, relax till interview.”
“I remember just snatches of the argument from the apartment and my father injecting me,” Chang wrote. “I have a vague recollection of the flash of the camera and being angry at my father. After that, I only remember sitting awhile in a side room with Moon and my father and slowly realizing that I had been given the mark of loyalty. I wanted to kill them, but I was also embarrassed. I worried what you would think. I was still out of it for the first part of our meeting, but then I decided to play tough, try to make you see the benefits. You already know, though I didn’t, that the meeting in your office was recorded too. I can send that if you need reminding, but that’s the end of this upload.”
David sat back and realized his legs had gone to sleep. He rolled his head to release tension in his neck. By now, Chang should be busy monitoring the Garden Tomb. David clicked on the message that had been forwarded from Tsion.
Buck’s phone vibrated in his pocket, but he didn’t look to see who it was. He was prepared if God was calling him to take Chaim’s place, but that was foolish. Surely, the chosen one would be an Israeli believer. Maybe Chaim was calling, lost in the crowd. Buck reached in his pocket and shut off the phone. Let him find his own way. It was long past time for the man to accept his role. Nobody said it would be easy. Nothing was easy anymore. But God’s call wasn’t hard to recognize. It was clearly on Chaim. If Hattie had the courage to do what she had done, surely knowing she couldn’t survive, how could any of them shirk their duties again?
Carpathia stepped from behind a draped curtain near the tomb, smiled, and opened his arms to the crowd. Less animated now, they merely applauded. The cheering, the kneeling, the waving were over. It seemed most just wanted to get on to the Temple Mount and get in line for their mark. That would insure them against the fiery fate of the crazy woman at Mount Calvary.
“I was never entombed!” Carpathia announced. “I lay in state for three days for the world to see. Someone was said to have risen from this spot, but where is he? Did you ever see him? If he was God, why is he not still here? Some would have you believe it was he behind the disappearances that so crippled our world. What kind of a God would do that? And the same people would have you believe I am the antithesis of this great One. Yet you saw me resurrect myself! I stand here among you, god on earth, having taken my rightful place. I accept your allegiance.”