Assassins: Assignment: Jerusalem, Target: Antichrist

  “I clicked through the listings, amazed that he had posted a significant teaching message every day for weeks already. When I came upon one called “For Those Who Mourn,” I nearly fainted. I felt warm all over, then a chill. I locked my door and hoped the GC hadn’t begun monitoring our laptops. I had the greatest sense of anticipation ever. Somehow I knew this man had something for me. I printed out that message and carried it with me for months, until David and I discovered each other and he warned me I shouldn’t be caught with it. So I memorized it before I destroyed it.”

  Mac shot her a double take. “You memorized an entire Ben-Judah message?”

  “Pretty much. Want to hear the first paragraph?”

  “Sure.”

  “He wrote, ‘Dear troubled friend, you may be mourning the loss of a loved one who either disappeared in the Rapture or has been killed in the ensuing chaos. I pray God’s peace and comfort for you. I know what it is to lose my immediate family in a most unspeakable manner. But let me tell you this with great confidence: If your loved ones were alive today, they would urge you to be absolutely certain you’re ready to die. There is only one way to do that.’”

  David could tell Mac was moved.

  “Dr. Ben-Judah explained God and Jesus and the Rapture and the Tribulation so clearly that I desperately wanted to believe. All I had to do was look back at his other teachings to realize that he was right about the Bible prophecies. He has predicted every judgment so far.”

  Mac nodded, smiling.

  “Well,” she said, “of course you know that. I switched back to the archived message and read how to pray, how to tell God you know you’re a sinner and that you need him. I laid facedown on my bed and did that. I knew I had received the truth, but I had no idea what to do next. I spent the rest of the day and night, all night, reading as much of the teaching as I could. It became quickly obvious why the GC tried to counter Dr. Ben-Judah. He was careful not to mention Nicolae by name, but it was clear the new world order was the enemy of God. I didn’t understand much about the Antichrist, but I knew I had to be unique among GC employees. Here I was, in the shelter of the enemy of God, and I was a believer.”

  “That’s where I come in,” David said. “She thought I was making eyes at her.”

  “Don’t get ahead of the story,” Annie said. “The next time I went out into the employee population, I was afraid I looked like a believer. I thought anybody I talked to would be able to tell that I had a secret. I wanted to tell somebody, but I knew no one. I had arrived in the middle of chaos and was assigned quarters, given a uniform, and told to report to Communications. I was working several levels below David, but I noticed him looking at me. First he seemed alarmed, then he smiled.”

  “He saw your mark,” Mac said.

  “Well, yeah, but see, I had not gotten far enough into Tsion’s teachings to know about that. Anyway, David sent word down through the various supervisors that he wanted to meet with me. I said, ‘Personally?’

  “As soon as I got in there and the door was shut, he said, ‘You’re a believer!’

  “I was scared to death. I said, ‘No, I—a believer in what?’

  “He said, ‘Don’t deny it! I can see it on your face!’ He had to be fishing, so I denied it again. He said, ‘You deny Jesus one more time, you’re going to be just like Peter. Watch out for a rooster.’

  “I had no idea what he was talking about. I couldn’t have told you that Peter was a disciple, let alone that he had denied Christ. David had guessed my secret, mentioned someone named Peter, and was jabbering about a rooster. Still I couldn’t help myself. I said, ‘I’m not denying Jesus.’

  “He said, ‘What do you call it?’

  “I said, ‘Fearing for my life.’

  “He said, ‘Welcome to the club. I’m a believer too.’

  “I said, ‘But how did you know?’

  “He said, ‘It’s written all over you.’

  “I said, ‘But really, how?’

  “And he said, ‘Literally, God wrote it on your forehead.’ That’s when I knew I had stepped off the edge.”

  As soon as Buck and Floyd Charles entered Young Memorial, the teenage receptionist called out, “Miz Rose, your friends are here.”

  “Keep your voice down!” Leah said, hurrying from her office. “Gentlemen, I’m not sure I can do anything for you today. What’s the trouble?”

  Floyd whispered it to her quickly. “God help us,” she said. “This way. Grab that.”

  “Have you had any symptoms?” Doc said.

  She shook her head. Buck appropriated a wheelchair and pushed Floyd behind Leah. She led them down a short ramp, past the main elevators, and around a corner to the service elevator. She used a key from a huge, jangly ring to access it. “If you see anyone, hide your face,” she said. “Just don’t make it obvious.”

  “Yeah, that wouldn’t be obvious,” Buck said.

  She glared at him. “I know you know what real danger is, Mr. Williams, so I’d appreciate it if you’d not underestimate mine.”

  “Sorry.”

  They boarded and the doors shut. Leah used her key again and held the sixth floor button. “Don’t know if this’ll work,” she said. “On the other one you can bypass other floors by turning the key and holding down the button.”

  It didn’t work. The car stopped on two. Buck immediately knelt before Doc as if chatting with him. That blocked both their faces from the door. “Sorry,” Leah told the people waiting. “Emergency.”

  “Oh, man!” someone said.

  The same thing happened on five and elicited an even more frustrated response.

  “This is not good,” Leah said as the doors shut again. “Be prepared for people in the hallway on six. We’re going left.”

  Fortunately, the trio was ignored as Leah led the way to an empty room. She shut the door and locked it, then closed the blinds. “Get him into the bed,” she told Buck, “and get those wet clothes off him. You sleep that way, Doctor?”

  Doc nodded, looking tired.

  Buck hated the bright red around his dark pupils. “What’s wrong with him, Leah?”

  She ignored Buck, grabbing a gown from a cabinet and tossing it to him. “If he needs to use the bathroom, now’s the time. He’s not likely to get out of that bed again.”

  “For how long?” Buck said.

  “Ever,” Doc slurred. “She knows what’s going down here.”

  Leah pushed the speaker button on the wall phone and continued working as she talked. “CDC delivered some antivenin yesterday. Get me two vials to 6204.”

  “Stat?” her receptionist said.

  Leah made a face. “Yes, stat!” she said. “Like now.”

  “You’ve got a phone call.”

  “Do I sound free to take a call? Stat was your word, girl. Would you hurry please?”

  “OK,” the girl said. “Don’t say I didn’t tell you.”

  Leah tugged Buck’s sleeve and pulled him close to Doc’s bed. “I need to ask him some questions. When that girl knocks, just take the medicine and shut the door.”

  He nodded.

  “Now, Doctor,” she said. “First symptoms?”

  “Quite a while ago,” he mumbled.

  “Not good enough. When?”

  “I’m a fool.”

  “We know that. How soon after you brought that miscarriage in here?”

  “Maybe six months.”

  “You’ve done nothing about it?”

  He shook his head. “Just hoped.”

  “That’s not going to work.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  “You know the closest CDC can get to an antidote is antivenin, and no one knows—”

  “It’s too late anyway.”

  Leah looked at Buck and shook her head. “He’s right,” she said. “The antivenin won’t even let him die comfortably.”

  “What’re you telling me?” Buck said. “He hasn’t even got a chance?”

  Doc shook his
head and closed his eyes.

  “The maximum antivenin dosage will be like spitting into the wind,” Leah said. “What can you see, Doctor?”

  “Not much.”

  Leah pressed her lips together.

  There was a knock at the door. Buck opened it, reached for the medicine, and the girl pulled back. He made a lunge for it and ripped it from her hands.

  “Miz Rose,” she called over his shoulder. “That call was from GC!”

  Buck shut the door, but Leah pushed past him and called after her. “GC where?”

  “Wisconsin, I think.”

  “What’d you tell them?”

  “That you were busy with a patient.”

  “You didn’t say who, did you?”

  “I don’t know who. ’Cept he’s a doctor.”

  “You didn’t say that, did you?”

  “Shouldn’t I have?”

  “Wait right there.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Just wait there a second.”

  Leah returned and quickly filled two syringes. She drove them into Floyd’s hip, and he didn’t even flinch. “Have her come in here,” Leah told Buck.

  He looked down the hall and signaled for the girl. She hesitated, then came slowly. “C’mon!” he said. “No one’s going to hurt you.”

  As soon as she poked her head in the door, Leah said, “Bring me my purse as fast as you can, will you?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “Stat, sweetheart. Stat!”

  The girl ran off.

  “What’s happening?” Buck said.

  “Get your vehicle and bring it around the back. There’s a basement exit, and that’s where I’ll come.”

  “But if he’s dying, how can y—”

  Leah grabbed his arms. “Mr. Williams, Doctor Charles and I have not just been talking. This man could be dead before we get him to the car. If you want to bury him or cremate him or do anything with him other than have him found here, I’ll deliver him to the back door. GC in Wisconsin ring any bells? That’s where he worked, remember? That’s where he’s AWOL from. They’ve been nosing around, watching for him, figuring he’s in this area and might show up here sometime. They don’t know—at least from me—that he was already here once. I’ve been lying through my teeth. They find him here, dead or alive, we’re all in trouble. Now go!”

  “Any chance you can save him?”

  “Get the car.”

  “Just tell me if he’s better off here or in the c—”

  Leah whispered desperately, “He’s dying. It’s just a matter of when. Where is irrelevant now. The best I can do for him I have already done. The absolute worst would be his being discovered here.”

  Mac looked at his watch. “Just enough time for you two to tell me how you got together, you know, romantically.”

  “I think you’ve heard enough details, Captain.”

  “C’mon! I’m an old romantic.”

  “It hasn’t been easy,” David said. “Obviously I kept her from you and Rayford.”

  “Yeah, what’s that all about?”

  “At the time we believed the fewer who knew the better.”

  “But we need all the comrades we can get.”

  “I know,” David said. “But we’re both so new at this, we don’t know who to trust.”

  “If you wondered about Ray and me, you sure never showed it.”

  “It was a good exercise, let me just say that. What’s going to happen when the brass start looking for a mark that’s not there, rather than not seeing a mark that is?”

  “There’ll be no hiding then, kids.”

  Buck took the main elevator to the first floor and realized he had to exit past the receptionist. The last thing he wanted was to have her see his Rover. He planned to distract her with a fake emergency, but as he breezed through the lobby toward the front door, a substitute was in her place, a thick, middle-aged woman. Of course! The original girl was taking Leah her purse. Leah had thought to divert her.

  Buck hurried to his car. As he pulled around the side of the building toward the back, he saw the substitute standing at the window, staring at him. He only hoped Stat Girl had not told her to find out what he was driving.

  Buck skidded to a stop on an asphalt apron that led to a basement exit. He leapt from the Rover and opened the door as Leah, her bag over her shoulder, rolled out a gurney containing Floyd Charles with a sheet to the top of his head.

  “He’s gone already?” Buck said, incredulous.

  “No! But people kept their distance, and nobody’s going to identify him, are they?”

  “Only your receptionist.”

  Buck lowered the backseat and Leah slid the whole bed in. “You’re stealing that?” he said.

  “I put more in my purse than that bed’s worth,” she said. “You want to debate ethics or fight the GC?”

  “I don’t want either,” he said, as they climbed into the front seat. “But we’re committed now, aren’t we?”

  “I don’t know about you, Williams, but I’m in with both feet. This hospital has been GC-run for ages. How long was I going to be able to work for Carpathia when there’s no way I’d ever take the mark of the beast? I’d die first.”

  “Literally,” Buck said.

  “Well, I just appropriated a bed and a lot of medicine from the enemy. If you have a problem with that, I’m sorry. I don’t. This is war. All’s fair, as they say.”

  “Can’t argue with that. But, um, where am I taking you?”

  “Where do you think? Take a left, and I’ll take you out around the long way. Nobody will see you from the front of the building.”

  “Then where?”

  “My place.”

  “What if the GC are there?”

  “Then we’ll just keep going.”

  “But if they’re not, you’ll try to nurse Floyd back to—”

  “You’re not thinking, Mr. W—”

  “Quit with the formality, Leah. You put a dying friend in my car, so just run down the program for me.”

  “All right,” she said. “If we can beat GC to my apartment, I’m going to grab as much of my stuff as I can in sixty seconds. You know they’re on their way, as soon as they find me gone from Young.”

  “Then where do I take you?”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Where do I live?”

  “Bingo, Buck. I need to hide out. You and yours are the only people I know who have a place to hide.”

  “But we’re not telling anyone wh—”

  “Oh, yes, you are. You’re telling me. If you can’t trust me after all we’ve been through, you can’t trust anybody. I helped you discharge your patched-up pilot, Ritz. And I helped Doc with the miscarriage of guess-who’s baby. How’s that young woman doing, by the way?”

  “Getting better.”

  “There’s irony. Doc helps her beat the poison, and it’s going to kill him.”

  “We lost Ritz.”

  “Lost him?”

  “Killed in Israel. Long story.”

  Leah suddenly fell silent. She pointed directions and Buck lurched along, double-clutching and shifting till he thought his arm would fall off. “I liked that guy,” she managed finally.

  “We all did. We hate this, every bit of it.”

  “But you’re taking me in, cowboy. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I can’t make that decision.”

  She glared at him. “What are you going to do, leave me at the corner blindfolded while you and your compatriots vote? You owe me and you know it. This isn’t like me, inviting myself. But I’ve risked my life for you, and I have nowhere else to turn.”

  Doc’s death rattle began. His labored, liquid breathing pierced Buck. “Should I pull over?”

  “No,” she said. “There’s nothing I can do now but shoot him full of morphine.”

  “That’ll help?”

  “It’ll just make him pain free and maybe knock him out before he dies.”

&nbs
p; “Something!” Floyd called out in a mournful wail. “Give me something!”

  Leah spun and knelt in her seat, digging through her bag. Buck slowed involuntarily as he tried to watch. This was too much. Floyd was going to die while Buck was racing around in the car! No good-byes, no prayer, no comforting words. Buck felt as if he hardly knew the man, and he had been living with him for more than a year.

  “Watch the road,” she said. “This will quiet him, but he’s never going to leave this car alive.”

  Sobs rose in Buck’s throat. He wanted to call Chloe, to tell her and the others. But how do you do that on the phone? Doc’s dying and I’m bringing a nurse to live with us? Pulling into the safe house without notice, carrying Floyd’s corpse and a new houseguest wouldn’t be much easier. But Buck had run out of options.

  Leah’s neighborhood, what was left of it, crawled with GC vehicles. The morphine had quieted Floyd. Leah slid onto the floor under the dash, and Buck avoided her street. He headed to Mount Prospect, hoping Floyd might at least have the privilege of dying in his own bed.

  CHAPTER 4

  David Hassid walked Mac McCullum back to his quarters in the GC palace residential annex late that night. “There are things I haven’t told even Annie,” he said.

  “I knew you had somethin’ to tell me, kid. Otherwise, you’d be walking her back, wouldn’t you?”

  “We’re trying to not be seen together. I don’t even know if her meeting’s over.”

  “So, what’s up?” Mac said as they stood in the corridor outside his door.

  “You know I was on the palace antibugging installation task force.”

  “Yeah, how’d you wangle that appointment?”

  “Just kept telling Leon how important I thought it was to ensure total impregnability. I came in as a starry-eyed idealist, and they still see me that way. You know about the installation?”