“Marcel has the mouth of a young man,” Laslos said. “You must both learn to say little and listen much.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Am I talking too much? Just excited, that’s all. I haven’t felt this way since the day Mr. Williams let me go.”
Marcel nodded.
“So I can’t see your gun, Mr. Laslos?”
“Miklos. I do not bring my gun out of my home. I am not looking to hurt anyone. It is for my safety, that’s all.”
“But K has a gun,” she said, squeezing his shoulders again. “Don’t you, young man?”
K smiled shyly and shook his head as he pulled the car back onto the road.
“You watch too much television,” Laslos said. “American TV, am I right?”
“Not for a long time. When I do see it, it’s all Carpathia, Carpathia, Carpathia.”
Laslos’s leg was still bouncing, his hands still pressed together. “You’re both clear on the plan, then?” he said.
“If Marcel is, I am,” Georgiana said. “He’s the one who told me. We’re meeting this George guy off the road up from the airport. He’ll take us in like we’re his prisoners, and the computer will show that’s what he’s there for.”
“Yes, and you must avoid eye contact, look sullen, and just go directly to the plane with him. Maybe you could let Marcel wear your hat low enough to cover his eyes and you could let your hair hang in your face.”
She was still rubbing her hands together. “This thing wouldn’t fit him. Anyway, we’ll recognize the pilot how again?”
“He should be the only man on the road looking for you,” Laslos said.
“But he’s a big man, right? An American?”
“Way over six feet tall and almost two hundred and fifty pounds,” Marcel said. “Light hair, blue eyes, and—”
“You’ll know him,” Laslos said. “We should pray.”
“Yes,” Georgiana said. “Please.”
“Why don’t you pray?” Laslos said.
“I’m too nervous,” she said.
“All right,” Laslos said. “Lord, we thank you for these young people and ask you to go before them and protect them. We—”
“There he is!” Georgiana said. “Is that him?”
A big, young man strode purposefully up the right side of the road. He wore big boots, khaki pants, and a light, zippered jacket. His hair looked almost white, his face dark. Laslos couldn’t make out the eye color, but the man stopped and looked directly into the car as K slowed and passed, pulling over fifty yards beyond him.
Marcel reached for his door handle, and Georgiana reached for her bag.
“Wait!” Laslos said. “He’s early.” He rolled down his window and leaned to stick his head out, aware that Georgiana was digging in her bag and ready to go.
“Mr. Miklos?” the man called out, but Laslos thought he detected a European accent.
“Hey, Mr. Sebastian!” Marcel shouted before Laslos could shush him.
Now jogging and having cut the distance between him and the car, the man hollered, “Marcel? Georgiana?”
“Keep rolling, K,” Laslos said. “This isn’t right.”
“Why?” Georgiana said. “What’s wrong?”
“If that’s Sebastian,” Laslos said as K slowly pulled back onto the road, “he’ll find us.”
“No!” Georgiana whined. “Stop!”
“We’ll not make this transfer in the middle of the road,” Laslos said.
“K, pull over,” Georgiana said with sudden authority. She pulled a huge handgun with a silencer from her bag and pressed it against Laslos’s temple. “I’ll kill him if you don’t stop.”
“Don’t stop, K!” Laslos cried. “Marcel is for real! I know him!”
K stopped accelerating but coasted. “Stop now,” she said. “I mean it.”
Marcel whipped around, kneeling on the seat to face her. He yanked her cap off, and as the silencer pulled away from Laslos’s head, he turned to see Georgiana’s forehead and the mark of the beast. The whistling, abbreviated punch of the shot filled the car with the acrid smell of gunpowder, and Marcel was driven back with such force that he folded under the dashboard. The windshield was covered with gore, and Laslos grimaced at the gaping hole in the back of the boy’s head.
“Stop now, K!” she wailed, pointing the gun at the back of his head. The older man wrenched the wheel back and forth, pushing the accelerator to the floor. The little car rocked violently, and Laslos felt himself bang into his door handle before his bulk went flying back over Marcel’s bag toward the girl.
She fired through K’s neck and he went limp, the car losing speed and angling toward the gravel. Laslos wrapped his massive arms around the girl and pressed the bottoms of his feet against the door on his side, trying to smash her against her own door. He could only hope the gun was buried somewhere in the crush, but the sounds of more than one set of running footsteps told him that unless he wrestled it away from her, he would soon join his wife in heaven.
The car thudded to a stop, and they both rolled forward into the back of K’s seat. Two other men had joined the Sebastian impostor, and all carried weapons. One jerked the girl’s door open and dragged her out with one hand. Laslos tried to hang on, but he had no leverage. He lay on Marcel’s bag across the backseat, his arms leaden, gasping.
“You all right, Elena?” one of the men said.
Laslos saw her nod with disgust. “He’s the only one left,” she said, pressing the gun to his forehead. He turned his hands over, opening his palms toward heaven, and closed his eyes.
“We’re short-staffed tonight, sir. Hard copy is quicker than the computer, if you don’t mind.”
“I hear you,” George said. “But I told you, Old Man Elbaz had me on recon runs over rebel territory in the Negev, and we were all required to leave our IDs at the field HQ. It’s all in the computer.”
The airport GC clerk swore. “They never think about what those decisions mean to us little guys.”
“They never think at all,” George said. “Sorry.”
“What’re ya gonna do?” the clerk said, sighing as he tapped his fingers atop the monitor, waiting for the info. “Hey, what about all the guys goin’ AWOL in Jordan?”
“Don’t think I wasn’t tempted,” George said. “Strangest deal I’ve ever seen.”
“You get the boils?”
“Who didn’t?”
“Here it is. You’re good. You got a number for me? Six digits.”
“Zero-four-zero-three-zero-one.”
“That’s it. And where’re your prisoners?”
“Being held up the road.”
“Need a vehicle?”
“That would be great.”
“You’re coming right back?”
“Right back. I’ll secure ’em in the plane and bring the wheels directly to you.”
The clerk tossed him a set of keys and pointed to a Jeep. George decided he could get used to Trib Force work, if it was all this easy. Couldn’t be.
He sped a mile and a half up the road and pulled over. What was that in the distance? The girl? Alone? He turned on his brights. She was running toward him. Screaming.
He stepped out. “Georgiana?”
“George?”
“Yes!”
“We were ambushed!”
As she got closer he saw she was covered in blood. He reached for her. “What happened? Where are the oth—”
But as the girl slumped against him, wrapping her arms around his waist, she called out, “Unarmed!” Two men, one about his size, rushed from the bushes with weapons trained on him. Another pulled a Jeep into view, doors standing open.
The big man jumped into the car George had borrowed at the airport. The other kept a weapon on him as the girl handcuffed and blindfolded him. He was tempted to drive his bulk into her, make her pay for whatever she was involved in. But he wanted to conserve his strength for any real chance to escape. They pushed him into the Jeep, and as it took off, he hea
rd the other vehicle behind.
“We’re going to have fun with you, Yank,” the driver said. “By the time we’re through, we’ll know everything you know.”
Fat chance, George thought—and wanted to say. But he had already blundered enough, leaving his plane and his weapons unprotected and venturing unarmed into enemy territory, trusting a risky plan devised by well-intentioned brothers, but civilians after all. Maybe the proverbial horse had already escaped the open barn, but too late or not, his training kicked in. Not only would he not say, “Fat chance,” but he would also not say anything. The only way these people would know he was capable of uttering a word was if they remembered he had spoken to the girl. Unless he somehow escaped, his next word would be spoken in heaven.
He bounced and lost his balance as the Jeep accelerated, and he kept bouncing off the door, then almost into the lap of the captor to his left. The man kept pushing George back upright. He could have planted his feet more firmly and kept from jostling so much, but he didn’t mind being a two-hundred-forty-pound irritant to the enemy.
“So, George Sebastian of San Diego,” the driver said, “and a newly recruited Judah-ite. A little information will buy you some dinner, and a lot will have you on your way back to the wife and little one before you know it. Hungry?”
George did not respond, not even with a nod or shake of the head.
“Lonely then, perhaps?”
The man next to George, less fluent in English, said, “Do you know who is really Elbaz? Because we think we do.”
“We do!” the girl said.
George let the next curve throw him into the man, who pushed him back. “Sit up, you big stupid person!”
CHAPTER 19
Sound asleep over the Atlantic and never so happy to be heading home, Rayford at first thought the incoming call was a dream. Then he wished it were.
The caller ID showed it originating in Colorado. Before Rayford could speak, a weird, nasal voice said, “I believe I followed your instructions on how to call you securely, but could you confirm that before I proceed?”
Rayford sat straight up. “Stand by,” he said, believing he knew whom he was talking to. He checked the tiny LCD readout as David Hassid had instructed him. “You’re secure,” he said.
“You’ve got trouble,” the voice said. “Do you have anybody inside at New Babylon to replace your guy that died?”
Rayford hesitated.
“Hey, it’s me.”
“Who?”
“Ah, you may know me as Pinkerton Stephens. GC stationed in Colorado.”
“I need to be dead sure, Mr. Stephens.”
“Aka Steve Plank.”
“A little more, please.”
“Your grandson’s name is Kenny Bruce.”
“How did you know our guy died?”
“Everybody knows, man. Didn’t he go down with three others right in front of Carpathia?”
“Not really, Steve.”
“Not bad, Captain. But anyway, New Babylon thinks he’s dead, so he’s clearly not inside.”
“We’re covered inside.”
“Good. Then maybe you know this.”
“What?”
“About your trouble. Where are you?”
Rayford told him.
“And you have not been brought up to speed by the palace?”
“I thought I had.”
“You’ve been compromised.”
“Me personally?” Rayford said.
“Actually, no. Depending on what alias you’re using, I think you’re okay. But I just got a high-level, for-your-eyes-only briefing from Intelligence, and for the first time I thought I’d better take you up on your request to be informed.”
“I’m listening.”
“The alias your friend, the one I met, is using has been exposed. I and S is speculating that Deputy Commander Marcus Elbaz is actually a former black marketer out of Al Basrah.”
“How?”
“This is mostly coming out of Greece, Rayford.”
“Oh no. Tell me we weren’t wrong about the guy we sent in there.”
“Sebastian? No, he’s solid. But they’ve got him.”
“Oh no. Start from the top.”
“First, you’ve got your Elbaz character flying your plane right now, right? And the craft is ostensibly a GC issue.”
“Right.”
“His name and that bird are on everybody’s screens, so don’t—”
“Got it. Don’t land as GC or as Elbaz.”
“You’re scheduled into Kankakee, right?”
“You got it. What happened in Greece, Steve?”
“Stay with me. First, I think I’ve found a way to get you close to where you want to go. Back to Chicago, correct?”
“Affirmative.”
“Okay, listen up. I put in a request for cargo out of Maryland with a stop at the auxiliary field near where Midway used to be. That’s as close to Chicago as they’ll let anybody land, due to the radiation, you know.”
“Right.”
“You know as well as I do that you could put down at Midway.”
“You think?”
“Sure.”
“We’re not going to draw any suspicion from heat-seeking stratospheric GC recon planes?”
“Not if your guy keeps the phony radiation levels up to speed on the database.”
“This is a pretty big jet.”
“You’ve got reverse thrusters, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“It can be done. But listen, Ray, if your guy is still keeping track of Chicago and what the GC thinks about it, he’d better get in there and tinker.”
“What’re you saying?”
“I doubt anybody else has checked lately, but just to be sure I wasn’t leading you into a trap, I looked up that area, and something was giving off moving heat signals down there within the last several hours.”
“We always tell him before we go out, walking, driving, or with the chopper. That way he can head off any readings we emit.”
“Well, somebody’s on the move down there. Not much, but it’ll arouse suspicion like it did with me.”
“So back to Greece, Steve. We know Buck’s Jack Jensen ID is history.”
“That’s not the worst of it. He cut loose a couple of kids from a detention center and one of ’em—the girl, Stavros—got herself caught. You can’t blame her; she’s just a teenager, but apparently she cracked and gave up a lot. Story she told matched up with what they figure happened with the boy, who had used the name Paulo Ganter. ’Course Ganter was still in there, so they figured out by process of elimination who got sprung. Kid named Papadopoulos. His parents both refused to take the mark. GC in Greece plants a young woman with similar looks to this Stavros in the underground. She starts askin’ around about the boy, somebody gets ’em connected, and she tells him her story—which is just like his. Bada-bing, she had to be freed by the same guy, nobody checks her out, she stays away from people who would know she wasn’t who she claimed to be, and—”
“—she walks our people into an ambush.”
“Yeah, and it’s bad, Rayford.”
“Just tell me.”
“GC says the ruse went squirrelly at the end and their operatives wind up having to kill an old man named Kronos, a big fish—name of Miklos—and the boy.”
Rayford sat in the screaming jet with the phone to his ear, head in his hand, eyes shut. “And Sebastian?”
“Alive and well, but they’re confident they can get what they need from him to lead them to Ben-Judah. He’s former military, so he might be tougher than they think.”
“Plus he doesn’t know that much.”
“He was supposed to bring the kids to you, though, right? He’s got to know enough to hurt you.”
“He does. Any idea about the disposition of the real Stavros?”
“I think that goes without saying, now that they have a connection to you guys. She’s served her purpose.”
“We don’t have to assume the worst.”
“Oh, sure we do, Rayford. Of course we do. I always do.”
Plank asked if Rayford had anybody on board whose face was not known to the GC. “Well, I’ve got three people aboard who are thought dead.”
“Can any of ’em look like a Middle Easterner?”
“One’s a Jordanian.”
“Perfect. Does he have a turban?”
Rayford leaned over and woke Abdullah. “Do you have a turban, or can you make yourself one?” Abdullah gave him a thumbs-up and went back to sleep. “That’s affirmative, Steve.”
“Can you put him on the radio and pretend he’s your pilot?”
“He flies.”
“Perfect. Here’s his new name and a refueling docket number for Maryland. Your next stop after that should be Resurrection Field here, south of Colorado Springs. I won’t expect you.”
“No, but you’ll log us in as if we made it.”
“Of course.”
“Words aren’t adequate, Steve. . . .”
“Hey, one of these days I’m gonna need a place to hole up . . . if I survive that long.”
With Buck, Hannah, Leah, and Mac also asleep, Rayford chose to tell only Albie what was going on. There would be plenty of time for Abdullah and Albie to switch seats. Rayford called Chang.
Twelve hours later Chang sat at his terminal in the office, grateful he’d been able to sleep after a flurry of emergency activity in the night. He wondered how David had managed this on his own and prayed that God would either deliver him or send someone to help him. Chang was unaware of any other believers in New Babylon, but still he held out hope. While he sat monitoring the overwhelming reports of death and ruin on the bloody high seas, he was recording the meeting of the ten regional potentates with Carpathia, Akbar, Fortunato, and Viv Ivins.
The workday was interminable, but Chang walked a fine line. He had to appear above reproach while maintaining a typically irreverent attitude. David had warned him that if he appeared too good to be true, someone would assume he was. And new as he was in assisting the Tribulation Force, he feared he would be unable to keep pace emotionally. Losing David had rocked him. He couldn’t imagine how the others dealt with the loss of Miss Durham, then their main contact in Greece. Things were supposed to get worse and worse. Fear and loneliness didn’t begin to describe his feelings. He prayed that until he was rescued from this assignment, God would somehow allow him to stay rested, stay strong, and be able to carry on despite the danger and tragedy.