Buck felt awkward in the small home of Tsion Ben-Judah, whose wife embraced him tearfully and then sat with her children in another room, sobbing loudly. “I support you, Tsion,” she called out. “But our lives are ruined!”
Tsion answered the phone and motioned for Buck to pick up the extension in the other room. Mrs. Ben-Judah tried to quiet herself while Buck was listening in.
“Yes, this is Rabbi Ben-Judah.”
“This is Eli. I spoke to you last night.”
“Of course! How did you get my number?”
“I called the one you mentioned on the broadcast, and the student who answered gave it to me. Somehow I convinced her who I was.”
“It’s good to hear from you.”
“I rejoice with you, Tsion my brother, in the fellowship of Jesus Christ. Many have received him under our preaching here in Jerusalem. We have arranged for a meeting of new believers in Teddy Kollek Stadium. Would you come and address us?”
“Frankly, brother Eli, I fear for the safety of my family and myself.”
“Have no fear. Moishe and I will make clear that anyone who threatens harm to you will answer to us. And I think our record is plain on that account.”
CHAPTER 18
Eighteen months later
It was frigid in Chicago. Rayford Steele pulled his heavy parka out of the closet. He hated lugging it through the airport, but he needed it just to get from the house to the car and from the car to the terminal. For months it had been all he could do to look at himself in the mirror while dressing for work. Often he packed his Global Community One captain’s uniform, with its gaudy gold braids and buttons on a background of navy. In truth, it would have been a snappy-looking and only slightly formal and pompous uniform, had it not been such a stark reminder that he was working for the devil.
The strain of living in Chicago while flying out of New York showed on Rayford’s face. “I’m worried about you, Dad,” Chloe had said more than once. She had even offered to move with him to New York, especially after Buck had relocated there a few months before. Rayford knew Chloe and Buck missed each other terribly, but he had his own reasons for wanting to stay in Chicago for as long as possible. Not the least of which was Amanda White.
“I’ll be married before you will if Buck doesn’t get on the ball. Has he even held your hand yet?”
Chloe blushed. “Wouldn’t you like to know? This is just all new to him, Dad. He’s never been in love before.”
“And you have?”
“I thought I had been, until Buck. We’ve talked about the future and everything. He just hasn’t popped the question.”
Rayford put on his cap and stood before the mirror, parka slung over his shoulder. He made a face, sighed, and shook his head. “We close on this house two weeks from tomorrow,” he said. “And then you either come with me to New Babylon or you’re on your own. Buck could sure make life easier for all of us by being a little decisive.”
“I’m not going to push him, Dad. Being apart has been a good test. And I hate the idea of leaving Bruce alone at New Hope.”
“Bruce is hardly alone. The church is bigger than it’s ever been, and the underground shelter won’t be much of a secret for long. It must be bigger than the sanctuary.”
Bruce Barnes had done his share of traveling, too. He had instituted a program of house churches, small groups that met all over the suburbs and throughout the state in anticipation of the day when the assembling of the saints would be outlawed. It wouldn’t be long. Bruce had gone all over the world, multiplying the small-group ministry, starting in Israel and seeing the ministry of the two witnesses and Rabbi Tsion Ben-Judah swell to fill the largest stadiums on the globe.
The 144,000 Jewish evangelists were represented in every country, often infiltrating colleges and universities. Millions and millions had become believers, but as faith had grown, crime and mayhem had increased as well.
Already there was pressure from the Global Community North American government outpost in Washington, D.C., to convert all churches into official branches of what was now called Enigma Babylon One World Faith. The one-world religion was headed by the new Pope Peter, formerly Peter Mathews of the United States. He had ushered in what he called “a new era of tolerance and unity” among the major religions. The biggest enemy of Enigma Babylon, which had taken over the Vatican as its headquarters, were the millions of people who believed that Jesus was the only way to God.
To say arbitrarily, Pontifex Maximus Peter wrote in an official Enigma Babylon declaration, that the Jewish and Protestant Bible, containing only the Old and New Testaments, is the final authority for faith and practice, represents the height of intolerance and disunity. It flies in the face of all we have accomplished, and adherents to that false doctrine are hereby considered heretics.
Pontifex Maximus Peter had lumped the Orthodox Jews and the new Christian believers together. He had as much problem with the newly rebuilt temple and its return to the system of sacrifices as he did with the millions and millions of converts to Christ. And ironically, the supreme pontiff had strange bedfellows in opposing the new temple. Eli and Moishe, the now world-famous witnesses whom no one dared oppose, often spoke out against the temple. But their logic was an anathema to Enigma Babylon.
“Israel has rebuilt the temple to hasten the return of their Messiah,” Eli and Moishe had said, “not realizing that she built it apart from the true Messiah, who has already come! Israel has constructed a temple of rejection! Do not wonder why so few of the 144,000 Jewish evangelists are from Israel! Israel remains largely unbelieving and will soon suffer for it!”
The witnesses had been ablaze with anger the day the temple was dedicated and presented to the world. Hundreds of thousands began streaming to Jerusalem to see it, nearly as many as had begun pilgrimages to New Babylon to see the magnificent new Global Community headquarters Nicolae Carpathia had designed.
Eli and Moishe had angered everyone, including the visiting Carpathia, the day of the celebration of the reopening of the temple. For the first time they had preached other than at the Wailing Wall or at a huge stadium. That day they waited until the temple was full and thousands more filled the Temple Mount shoulder to shoulder. Moishe and Eli made their way to the temple side of the Golden Gate, much to the consternation of the crowd. They were jeered and hissed and booed, but no one dared approach, let alone try to harm them.
Nicolae Carpathia had been among the cadre of dignitaries that day. He railed against the interlopers, but Eli and Moishe silenced even him. Without the aid of microphones, the two witnesses spoke loudly enough for all to hear, crying out in the courtyard, “Nicolae! You yourself will one day defile and desecrate this temple!”
“Nonsense!” Carpathia had responded. “Is there not a military leader in Israel with the fortitude to silence these two?”
The Israeli prime minister, who now reported to the Global Community ambassador of the United States of Asia, was caught on microphone. “Sir, we have become a weaponless society, thanks to you.”
“These two are weaponless as well!” Carpathia had thundered. “Subdue them!”
But Eli and Moishe continued to shout, “God does not dwell in temples made with hands! The body of believers is the temple of the Holy Spirit!”
Carpathia, who had been merely trying to support his friends in Israel by honoring them for their new temple, asked the crowd, “Do you wish to listen to me or to them?”
The crowd had shouted, “You, Potentate! You!”
“There is no potentate but God himself!” Eli responded.
And Moishe added, “Your blood sacrifices shall turn to water, and your water-drawing to blood!”
Buck had been there that day as the new publisher of the renamed Global Community Weekly. He resisted Carpathia’s urging him to editorialize about what Nicolae called the intrusion of the two witnesses, and he persuaded the Global Community potentate that the coverage could not ignore the facts. The blood let from a sacrific
ed heifer had indeed turned to water. And the water drawn in another ceremony turned to blood in the pail. The Israelis blamed the two witnesses for debasing their celebration.
Buck hated the money he was making. Not even an outrageous salary could make his life easier. He had been forced to move back to New York. Much of the old guard at Global Weekly had been fired, including Stanton Bailey and Marge Potter, and even Jim Borland. Steve Plank was now publisher of the Global Community East Coast Daily Times, a newspaper borne out of the merger of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. Though Steve wouldn’t admit it, Buck believed the luster had faded from Steve’s relationship to the potentate too.
The only positive factor about Buck’s new position was that he now had the means to isolate himself somewhat against the terrible crime wave that had broken all records in North America. Carpathia had used it to sway public opinion and get the populace behind the idea that the North American ambassador to the Global Community should supplant the sitting president. Gerald Fitzhugh and his vice president were now headquartered in the old Executive Office Building in Washington, in charge of enforcing Potentate Carpathia’s global disarmament plan in America.
Buck’s one act of resistance to Carpathia was to ignore the rumors about Fitzhugh plotting with the militia to oppose the Global Community regime by force. Buck was all for it and had secretly studied the feasibility of producing an anti–Global Community Web site on the Internet. As soon as he could figure out a way to do it without its being traced back to his penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue, he would do it.
At least Buck had convinced Potentate Carpathia that Buck’s moving to New Babylon would be a mistake. New York was still the world publishing capital, after all. He was already heartbroken that Chloe’s father was being required to relocate to New Babylon. The new city was palatial, but unless a person lived indoors twenty-four hours a day, the weather in Iraq was unbearable. And despite Carpathia’s unparalleled popularity and his emphasis on the new one-world government and one-world religion, there were still enough vestiges of the old ways in the Middle East that a western woman would feel totally out of place there.
Buck had been thrilled at how Rayford and Amanda White had taken to each other. That took pressure off Buck and Chloe, wondering about the future, worrying about leaving her father alone if they were ever to marry. But how could Rayford expect an American woman to live in New Babylon? And how long could they live there before the potentate began to step up his attacks on Christian believers? According to Bruce Barnes, the days of persecution were not far off.
Buck missed Bruce more than he thought possible. Buck tried to see him every time he got back to Chicago to see Chloe. Anytime Bruce came through New York or they happened to run into each other in a foreign city, Bruce tried to make the time for a private study session. Bruce was fast becoming one of the leading prophecy scholars among new believers. The year or year and a half of peace, he said, was fast coming to a close. Once the next three horsemen of the Apocalypse appeared, seventeen more judgments would come in rapid succession, leading to the glorious appearing of Christ seven years from the signing of the covenant between Israel and the Antichrist.
Bruce had become famous, even popular. But many believers were growing tired of his dire warnings.
Rayford was going to be out of town until the day before he and Chloe and the new buyers were to close on the house. He smiled at the idea of buyers securing a thirty-year mortgage. Someone was going to lose on that deal.
With Rayford gone, Chloe would be left with much of the work, selling stuff off, putting furniture into storage, and arranging with a moving company to ship her things to a local apartment and his all the way to Iraq.
For the past couple of months, Amanda had been driving Rayford to O’Hare for these long trips, but she had recently taken a new position and couldn’t get away. So today, Chloe would take Rayford by Amanda’s new office, where she was chief buyer for a retail clothier. When they had said their good-byes, Chloe would drive him to the airport and bring the car back home.
“So how’s it going with you two?” Chloe asked in the car.
“We’re close.”
“I know you’re close. That’s obvious to everybody. Close to what, is the question.”
“Close,” he said.
As they drove, Rayford’s mind drifted to Amanda. Neither he nor Chloe had known what to make of her at first. A tall, handsome woman a couple of years Rayford’s senior, she had streaked hair and impeccable taste in clothes. A week after Rayford had returned from his first assignment flying Global Community One to the Middle East, Bruce had introduced her to the Steeles after a Sunday morning service. Rayford was tired and none too happy about his reluctant decision to leave Pan-Con for the employ of Nicolae Carpathia, and he was not really in the mood to be sociable.
Mrs. White, however, seemed oblivious to Rayford and Chloe as people. To her they had been just names associated with a former acquaintance, Irene Steele, who had left an indelible impression on her. Amanda had insisted on taking them to dinner that Sunday noon and was adamant about paying. Rayford had not felt much like talking, but that seemed not to be an issue for Amanda. She had a lot to say.
“I’ve wanted to meet you, Captain Steele, because—”
“Rayford, please.”
“Well, I’ll call you Mr. Steele for now, then, if captain is too formal. Rayford is a little too familiar for me, though that is what Irene called you. Anyway, she was the sweetest little woman, so soft-spoken, so totally in love and devoted to you. She was the sole reason I came as close as I did to becoming a Christian before the Rapture, and—second only to the vanishings themselves—she was the reason I finally did come to the Lord. Then I couldn’t remember her name, and none of the other ladies from that Bible study were still around. That made me feel lonely, as you can imagine. And I lost my family, too, I’m sure Bruce told you. So it’s been hard.
“Bruce has certainly been a godsend though. Have you learned as much from him as I have? Well, of course you have. You’ve been with him for weeks.”
Eventually Amanda slowed down and shared her own story of the loss of her family. “We had been in a dead church all our lives. Then my husband got invited to some outing at a friend’s church, came home, and insisted that we at least check out the Sunday services there. I don’t mind telling you, I was not comfortable. They made a big deal all the time about being saved.
“Well, before I could get my little mind around the idea, I was the only one in my family who wasn’t saved. To tell you the truth, the whole thing sounded a little white trashy to me. I didn’t know I had a lot of pride. Lost people never know that, do they? Well, I pretended I was right there with my family, but they knew. They kept encouraging me to go to this women’s Bible study, so finally I went. I was just sure it was going to be more of the same—frumpy middle-aged women talking about being sinners saved by grace.”
Somehow, Amanda White managed to finish her meal while talking, but when she got to this part of her story she clouded up and had to excuse herself for a few minutes. Chloe rolled her eyes. “Dad!” she said. “What planet would you guess she’s from?”
Rayford had chuckled. “I do want to hear her impressions of your mother,” he said. “And she certainly sounds ‘saved’ now, doesn’t she?”
“Yeah, but she’s a long way from frumpy white trash.”
When Amanda returned, she apologized and said she was “determined to get this said.” Rayford smiled encouragingly at her while Chloe made faces at him behind her back, trying to get him to laugh.
“I’m not going to bother you anymore,” she said. “I’m an executive and not the type to insert myself into people’s lives. I just wanted to get together with you one time to tell you what your wife, and your mother, meant in my life. You know, I had only one brief conversation with her. It came after that one meeting, and I was glad I got the chance to tell her how she had impressed me.
> “If you’re interested, I’ll tell you about it. But if I’ve already rattled on too long, tell me that, too, and I’ll let you go with just the knowledge that Mrs. Steele was a wonderful lady.”
Rayford actually considered saying that they had had a tiring week and needed to get home, but he would never be that rude. Even Chloe would likely chastise him for a move like that, so he said, “Oh, by all means, we’d love to hear it. The truth is,” he added, “I love to talk about Irene.”
“Well, I don’t know why I forgot her name for so long, because I was so struck by it at first. Besides sounding a little like iron and steel, I remember thinking that Irene sounded more like a name of someone many years older than your wife. She was about forty, right?”
Rayford nodded.
“Anyway, I took the morning off, and I arrived at this home where the ladies were meeting that week. They all looked so normal and were wonderful to me. I noticed your wife right off. She was just radiant—friendly and smiling and talking with everyone. She welcomed me and asked about me. And then during the Bible study, prayer, and discussion, I was just impressed by her. What more can I say?”
A lot, Rayford hoped. But he didn’t want to interview the woman. What had so impressed her? He was glad when Chloe jumped in.
“I’m glad to hear that, Mrs. White, because I was never more impressed with my mother than after I had left home. I had always thought her a little too religious, too strict, too rigid. Only when we were apart did I realize how much I loved her because of how much she cared for me.”
“Well,” Amanda said, “it was her own story that moved me, but more than that, it was her carriage, her countenance. I don’t know if you knew this, but she had not been a Christian long either. Her story was the same as mine. She said her family had been going to church sort of perfunctorily for years. But when she found New Hope Village Church, she found Christ.
“There was a peace, a gentleness, a kindness, a serenity about her that I had never seen in anyone else. She had confidence, but she was humble. She was outgoing, yet not pushy or self-promoting. I loved her immediately. She grew emotional when she talked about her family, and she said that her husband and her daughter were at the top of her prayer list. She loved you both so deeply. She said her greatest fear was that she would reach you too late and that you would not go to heaven with her and her son. I don’t remember his name.”