Apollyon: The Destroyer Is Unleashed (11 page)

“I’ve got a problem, Rayford, but I hardly know you.”

“Friendships, acquaintances, everything has to necessarily be telescoped these days,” Rayford said. “You and I could live together the rest of our natural lives, and it would be less than five years. If you’ve got something on your chest, you might as well shoot. You want to criticize me, fire away. I can take it. My priorities are different than they used to be, needless to say.”

“Aw, no, it’s nothing like that. In fact, I figure you’ve got cause to scold me a bit after today.”

“For snapping at me in the heat of battle? Hey, I’ve done my share of that. In medical emergency situations, you’re in charge. You bark at whomever you have to bark at.”

“Yeah, but even though I know Tsion is sort of our pastor, you’re the chief. I need you to know that I know that and respect it.”

“There’s no time for hierarchy anymore, Doc. Now what’s on your mind?”

“I’ve got a Hattie problem.”

“We all do, Floyd. She was an attractive, bright girl once. Well, maybe more attractive than bright, but you’re seeing the worst of her just now, and I think she’s coming around. You might appreciate her more in a few weeks.”

“Just so you know, I got the drift that she and you used to work together and that, while you never actually had an affair―”

“Yeah, OK. Not proud of it, but I acknowledge it.”

“Anyway, this isn’t about her being in a bad way and being so difficult. I’m moved by how you all seem to care so much for her and want her to become a believer.”

Rayford sighed. “This business of her believing but not wanting to accept has me buffaloed. She’s even halfway logical about it. She’s not one who has to be convinced she’s unworthy, is she?”

“She’s so convinced she refuses to accept what she knows is free.”

“So, what’s your problem, Doc? You think she’s a lost cause spiritually?”

Floyd shook his head. “I wish it was that easy. My problem makes zero sense. You said yourself there’s nothing attractive about this girl. It’s obvious that when she was healthy she was a knockout. But the poison has done its work, and the illness has taken its toll. She makes no sense when she talks, and spiritually she’s bankrupt.”

“So you want to throw her out, and that makes you feel guilty?”

Floyd stood and turned his back to Rayford. “No, sir. What I want is to love her. I do love her. I want to hold her and kiss her and tell her.” His voice grew quavery. “I care so much for her that I’ve convinced myself I can love her back to health in every way. Physically and spiritually.” He turned and faced Rayford. “Didn’t expect that one, did you?”

As Buck and Chloe lay in bed, Buck said, “Will you be able to sleep if I go out for awhile?”

She sat up. “Out? It’s hardly safe.”

“Carpathia is too focused on Eli and Moishe to worry about us right now. I want to see if I can find Jacov. And I want to see what the witnesses will do in response to Nicolae’s threats.”

“You know what they’ll do,” she said, lying back down.

“They’ll do what they want until the due time, and woe to the one who tries to make points with the potentate by trying to kill them before that.”

“Just the same, I’d like―”

“Do me this favor, Buck. Promise you won’t leave this place until I’m sound asleep. Then I’ll worry only when I have to, if you’re not here when I wake up in the morning.”

Buck dressed and went looking to see if Tsion was still up. He wasn’t, but Rosenzweig was on the phone. “Leon, I insist on talking with Nicolae. . . . Yes, I know all about your cursed titles, and I remind you that I knew Nicolae as a friend before he was His Excellency and the potentate of this and that. Now please, put him on the phone. . . . Well, then you tell me what has happened to my driver!”

Rosenzweig noticed Buck, motioned for him to sit, and hit the speaker button on the phone. Leon was in mid-threat. “Our intelligence sources tell us your man turned.”

“Turned what? He’s not Jewish anymore? Not Israeli? Doesn’t work for me? What are you talking about? He’s been with me for years. If you know where he is, tell me and I will come get him.”

“Dr. Rosenzweig, all due respect, sir, I’m telling you your man is one of them. We wanted GC guards to personally escort Rabbi Ben-Judah back to Jacov’s vehicle, but he came running from the stadium firing off a high-powered weapon. Who can say how many guards and innocent civilians were killed.”

“I can. None. It would have been all over the news. I heard the same story. Your people were coming after Ben-Judah to exact revenge for the embarrassment to Nicolae and might have done who-knows-what to him if he had not slipped away on his own.”

“He wasn’t on his own. He was with Buck Williams’s wife, who has proven to be an American subversive who escaped from one of our facilities in Minnesota, where she had been detained for questioning.” Rosenzweig glanced at Buck, who sat shaking his head slowly as if wondering where they dreamed up this stuff. Fortunato continued, “She was suspected of looting after the earthquake.”

“Leon, is Jacov alive?” There was a pause. Rosenzweig grew irate. “I swear, Leon, if something has happened to that young man―”

“Nothing has happened to him, Doctor. I’m trying to train you to address me properly.”

“Oh, for the sake of heaven, Leon, are there not more important things to worry about right now? Like people’s lives!”

“Supreme Commander, Dr. Rosenzweig.”

“Supreme Nincompoop!” Rosenzweig shouted. “I am going out to search for my Jacov, and if you have any information that would help me, you’d better give it to me now!”

“I don’t need to be spoken to that way by you, sir.”

And Leon hung up.

Rayford put an arm on Floyd’s shoulder as they went back into the house. “I’m no love counselor,” he said, “but you’re right when you say this one makes no sense. She’s not a believer. You’re old enough to know the difference between pity and love and between medical compassion and love. You hardly know her, and what you know is not that pretty. It doesn’t take a scientist to see that this is something other than what you think it is. You lonely? Lose a wife in the Rapture?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Better tell me about her.”

Buck peeked in on Chloe before heading out with Chaim. She appeared sound asleep.

“Do you mind driving?” Chaim asked. “It has been so long since I was allowed.”

“Allowed?”

Chaim smiled wearily. “Once you become, how shall I say it, a personality in this country, especially in this city, you are treated like royalty. I cannot go anywhere unescorted. I was not even famous when first you did the cover story on me.”

“You were revered, however.”

Chaim checked with his gateman, Jonas, for the latest word on Jacov. “Stefan?” Buck heard him say. Then something urgent and frustrated in Hebrew.

Chaim directed Buck to the last stall in the garage, and Buck slid behind the wheel of an ancient sedan. “I don’t want everyone to know I am coming. The Mercedes is well known. You drive a stick shift, do you not?”

Buck feathered the throttle and quickly caught on to the vagaries of the manual transmission. He worried more about the bald state of the tires. “Any idea where we’re going?”

“Yes, I am afraid I do,” Chaim said. “Jacov is an alcoholic.”

Buck shot him a double take. “You have an alcoholic as your driver?”

“He’s dry. Recovering they call it. But in times of crisis, he reverts.”

“Falls off the wagon?”

“I do not know that expression.”

“It’s an old Americanism. Early in the twentieth century the Women’s Christian Temperance Union would roll the Temperance Wagon into town, decrying the evils of alcohol and calling on offenders to give it up and get on the wagon. When a sober man went back to drinking, it was called falling off the wagon.”

“Well, I’m afraid that is what has happened here,” Chaim said, pointing where Buck was to turn. As they moved into smaller neighborhoods with houses and buildings closer together, Buck began noticing things he hadn’t seen on the drive from Chaim’s to the stadium. Jerusalem had grown seedy. How he had loved to visit this city just a few years before! It had had its rundown areas, but overall it had been kept with pride. Since the disappearances, certain types of crime and lewd activity had sprung up that he never expected to see in public here. Drunks staggered along, some with their arms slung around ladies of the evening. As Buck drove farther into the city he saw strip clubs, tattoo parlors, fortune-telling shops, and triple-X-rated establishments.

“What has happened to your city?”

Chaim grunted and waved dismissively. “This is something about which I would love to speak to Nicolae. All that money spent on the new temple and moving the Dome of the Rock to New Babylon! Ach! This Peter the Second fellow wearing the funny costumes and welcoming the Orthodox Jew into the Enigma Babylon faith. I am not even a religious man, and I wonder at the folly of it. What is the point? The Jews have maintained for centuries that they worship the one true God, and this somehow now fits with a religion that accepts God as man and woman and animal and who knows what else? And you see what effect it has had on Jerusalem. Haifa and Tel Aviv are worse! The Orthodox are locked away in their gleaming new temple, slaughtering animals and going back to the literal sacrifices of centuries gone by. But what impact do they have on this society? None! Nicolae is supposed to be my friend. If he will see me, I will inform him of this, and things will change.

“When my Jacov―a wonderful, spirited man, by the way―falls off the wagon, as you put it, he winds up on the same street in the same bar and in the same condition.”

“How often does this happen?”

“Not more than twice a year. I scold him, threaten him, have even fired him. But he knows I care for him. He and his wife, Hannelore, still grieve over two little ones they lost in the disappearances.”

Buck was chagrined to realize he had pushed Jacov spiritually without getting to know him. He just hoped Chaim was wrong about Jacov and that they would not find him where the old man expected to.

Chaim pointed Buck to a parking place in the middle of a row of cars and vans that lined a crowded street. It was after midnight now, and Buck was suddenly overcome with fatigue. “The Harem?” he said, reading the neon sign. “You sure this is only a bar?”

“I’m sure it is not, Cameron,” Rosenzweig said. “I don’t want to think about what else goes on in there. I’ve never been inside. Usually I wait out here while my security chief goes in and drags Jacov out.”

“That’s why I’m here?”

“I would not ask you to do that. But you may need to help me with him because if he resists, I am no match for him. He will not hurt me, even when drunk, but a little old man cannot make a thick mule of a young man go anywhere he does not want to go.”

Buck parked and sat thinking. “I’m hoping you’re wrong, Dr. Rosenzweig. I’m hoping Jacov will not be here.”

Chaim smiled. “You think because he became a believer he will not get drunk after being shot at? You are too naive for an international journalist, my friend. Your new faith has clouded your judgment.”

“I hope not.”

“Well, you see that green truck there, the old English Ford?” Buck nodded. “That belongs to Stefan of my valet staff. He lives between here and Teddy Kollek Stadium, and he is Jacov’s drinking partner. Stefan does not suffer as Jacov does. He can hold his liquor, as we like to say. He was off work today, but if I was a man of wagers, I would bet Jacov ran to him while escaping the Global Community guards. Naturally shaken and scared out of his wits, he no doubt allowed Stefan to take him to their favorite place. I cannot hold this against Jacov. But I want him safe. I don’t want him making a spectacle of himself in public, especially if he is a fugitive from the GC.”

“I don’t want him to be here, Dr. Rosenzweig.”

“I don’t either, but I am not a young man with stars in his eyes. Wisdom is supposed to come with age, Cameron. I wish less came with it, frankly. I have gained wisdom I cannot now recall. I have what I call ‘mature moments,’ where I recall in detail something that happened sixty years ago but cannot remember that I told the same story half an hour before.”

“I’m not even thirty-three yet, and I have my share of those.”

Chaim smiled. “And your name again was?”

“Let’s go look for Jacov,” Buck said. “I say he’s not in there, even if Stefan is.”

“I hope Jacov is,” Chaim said, “because if he is not, that means he is lost or caught or worse.”

Dr. Floyd Charles’s story was so similar to Rayford’s it was eerie. He too had had a wife serious about her faith, while he, a respected professional, played at the edges of it. “Fairly regular church attendee?” Rayford asked from experience. “Just didn’t want to get as deep into it as your wife?”

“Exactly,” Floyd said. “She was always telling me my good works wouldn’t get me into heaven, and that if Jesus came back before I died, I’d be left behind.” He shook his head. “I listened without hearing, you know what I mean?”

“You’re telling my story, brother. You lose kids too?”

“Not in the Rapture. My wife miscarried one, and we lost a five-year-old girl in a bus accident her first day of school.” Floyd fell silent.

“I’m sorry,” Rayford said.

“It was awful,” Floyd said with a thick voice. “Gigi and I both saw her off at the corner that morning, and LaDonna was happy as she could be. We thought she would be shy or scared―in fact, we kinda hoped she would be. But she couldn’t wait to start school with her new outfit, lunch box, and all. Gigi and I were basket cases, nervous for her, scared. I said putting her on that big old impersonal bus made me feel like I was sending her off to face the lions. Gigi said we just had to trust God to take care of her. Half an hour later we got the call.”

Rayford shook his head.

“Made me bitter,” Floyd said. “Drove me farther from God. Gigi suffered, sobbed her heart out till it almost killed me. But she didn’t lose her faith. Prayed for LaDonna, asked God to take care of her, to tell her things, all that. Real strain on our marriage. We separated for a while―my choice, not hers. I just couldn’t stand to see her in such pain and yet still playing the church game. She said it wasn’t a game and that if I ever wanted to see LaDonna again, I’d ‘get right with Jesus.