Apollyon: The Destroyer Is Unleashed (4 page)

“Does she need anything?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then let him sleep. She seems OK?”

“She’s trying to talk.”

“Tell her I’m coming down.”

Rayford staggered to the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. His heart raced. He hurried stiff-legged down the stairs to find Ken gently giving Hattie a drink of water.

“Captain Steele!” she rasped, eyes wide. She beckoned him close. “Could you excuse us?” she asked Ken. As he stepped away she reached for Rayford. “Nicolae wants me dead. He poisoned me. He can reach anywhere.”

“How do you know, Hattie? How do you know he poisoned you?”

“I knew he would.” Her voice was weak and thin. She gasped for air as she spoke. “He poisoned your friend Bruce Barnes.”

Rayford sat back. “You know this?”

“He bragged about it. Told me it was a time-released thing. Bruce would get sicker and sicker, and if all went according to plan, he would die after he returned to the States.”

“Are you strong enough to tell me more?” Hattie nodded. “I don’t want to cause you to get worse.”

“I can talk.”

“Do you know about Amanda?”

Her lips trembled, and she turned her face away.

“Do you?” he repeated. She nodded, looking miserable. “Tell me.”

“I’m so sorry, Rayford. I knew from the beginning and could have told you.”

He gritted his teeth, his temples pounding painfully. “Told me what?”

“I was involved,” she said. “It wasn’t my idea, but I could have stopped it.”

Rayford’s mind reeled. The farthest he had allowed his imagination to take him was that Amanda might have been a plant at the beginning. Hattie could have told Carpathia enough about Rayford and his first wife to give Amanda a believable story about having met Irene. But even if that was true, Amanda surely could not have faked her conversion. He would not accept that.

“Did Carpathia have her killed because she became a believer?”

Hattie stared at him. “What?”

“Hattie, please. I have to know.”

“You’ll hate me.”

“No. I care about you. I can tell you feel bad about your part in this. Tell me.”

Hattie lay panting. “It was phony, Rayford. All of it.”

“Amanda?”

She nodded and tried to sit up but needed Rayford’s help. “The E-mails were bogus, Rayford. I was trained to do it. I saw it all.”

“The E-mails?”

“The anonymous ones to Bruce. We knew someone would find them eventually. And the ones between Nicolae and Amanda, both ways. She didn’t even know they were on her hard drive. They were encrypted and encoded; she would have had to have been an expert to even find them.”

Rayford hardly knew what to ask. “But they sounded like her, read the way she expressed herself. They scared me to death.”

“Nicolae has experts trained in that. They intercepted all your E-mails and used her style against her.”

Rayford was drained. Tears welled up from so deep inside that he felt as if his heart and lungs would burst. “She was all I believed she was?” he said.

Hattie nodded. “She was more, Rayford. She loved you deeply, was totally devoted to you. I felt so despicable the last time I saw her, it was all I could do to keep from telling her. I knew I should. I wanted to. But what I had done was so awful, so evil. She had shown me nothing but love from the first. She knew about you and me. We disagreed about everything important in life, yet she loved me. I couldn’t let her know I had helped make her look like a traitor.”

Rayford sat shaking his head, trying to take it all in. “Thank you, Hattie,” he said. So the reason he had not seen the seal of God on Amanda’s forehead, besides her grotesque and discolored death mask, was that the plane had gone down before the mark appeared on any believers.

Rayford’s faith in Amanda had been restored, and he had never doubted her salvation. Even when he had been forced to wonder about how she had come to him in the first place, he never questioned the genuineness of her devotion to God.

Rayford helped Hattie lie back down. “I’ll get you something to eat,” he said. “And then we’re going to talk about you.”

“Spare me that, Rayford. You and your friends have been doing that for two years. There’s nothing you can tell me that I don’t know. But I just told you what I have done, and there’s even more that’s worse than that.”

“You know God will forgive you.”

She nodded. “But should he? I don’t believe that in my heart.”

“Of course he shouldn’t. None of us deserves forgiveness.”

“But you accepted it anyway,” she said. “I can’t do that. I know as well as God does that I’m not worthy.”

“So you’re going to decide for him.”

“If it’s up to me―”

“And it is.”

“I’ve decided I’m unworthy and can’t live with that much, um, what do you call it?”

“Grace?”

“Well, I guess, but I mean there’s too much of a gap between what may be true and what should be true.”

“Inequity.”

“That’s it. God saving me when he and I both know who I am and what I’ve done―that’s too much of an inequity.”

At quarter to five in the afternoon at Chaim Rosenzweig’s estate, Tsion asked Buck and Chloe to join him in his room. Buck smiled, noticing the ever-present laptop on a small table. The three knelt by the bed. “We will pray with the committee at the stadium,” Tsion said. “But in case the rush of the details gets in the way, I do not want to start the meeting without seeking the Lord.”

“May I ask,” Chloe said, “what message you sent back to Mr. Fortunato?”

“I merely told Chaim that I would neither acknowledge nor recognize Nicolae. Neither will I introduce him or ask anyone else to. If he comes to the platform, I will not stand in his way.” Tsion smiled wearily. “As you might expect, Chaim argued earnestly, warning me not to commit such an affront to the potentate. But how can I do otherwise? I will not say what I would like to say, will not rally the believers to express their distaste for him, will not expose him for who I know him to be. That is the best I can do.”

Chloe nodded. “When do you expect the witnesses?”

“I should think they are beginning to arrive even now.”

“I mean Eli and Moishe.”

“Oh! I have left that with the Lord. They said they would be there, and the conference extends to two more whole days and nights. You can be sure I will gladly welcome them to the platform whenever they choose to appear.”

Buck never failed to be moved by the heartfelt prayers of Dr. Ben-Judah. He had seen the rabbi at the lowest point of grief a man could bear, reeling from the slaughter of his wife and two teenagers. He had heard him pray in the midst of terror, certain he would be apprehended on a midnight flight from Israel. Now, as Tsion looked forward to uniting with tens of thousands of new brothers and sisters in Christ from all twelve tribes of Israel and from all over the world, he was on his knees in humility.

“God, our Father,” he began, “thank you for the privilege we are about to enjoy. On the front lines of battle we advance with your boldness, under your power and protection. These precious saints will be hungry to learn more of your Word. Give the other teachers and me the words. May we say what you would have us say, and may they hear what you want them to hear.”

Buck was deep in his own prayer when a tap at the door interrupted them. “Forgive me, Tsion,” Chaim said. “A GC escort is here.”

“But I thought Jacov would drive us―”

“He will. But they tell us you have to leave immediately if you hope to reach the stadium in time.”

“But it is so close!”

“Nevertheless. Traffic is already so thick that only the GC escort can ensure you will get there on time.”

“Have you decided to come with us, Chaim?”

“I will be watching on television. I have asked Jacov to load a case of bottled water for you. Those two preachers at the Wall have taken credit for blood in the drinking water again. Though it supposedly has cleared since the visitors began arriving, you never know. Westerners should not risk our tap water anyway.”

The GC escort proved to be two Jeeps with flashing yellow lights, each vehicle carrying four armed guards who merely stared at the Tribulation Force as they climbed into the Mercedes van. “Another bit of one-upmanship from Carpathia,” Chloe said.

“If he was smart,” Tsion said, “he would have left us to our own devices and let us be late.”

“You would not have been late,” Jacov said in his thick accent. “I would have gotten you there on time anyway.”

Buck had never seen―even in New York―traffic like this. Every artery to the stadium was jammed with cars and pedestrians. Neither had he seen so many happy faces since before the Rapture. Carrying satchels and notebooks and water bottles, the pedestrians hurried along, with earnest and determined looks. Many made better time than the cars and vans and buses.

Because of the conspicuous escort, the crowds recognized that the Mercedes carried Tsion Ben-Judah. They waved and shouted and gleefully pounded on doors and windows. The trailing GC vehicle shooed them away with warnings over a loudspeaker and by brandishing their automatic weapons.

“I hate to appear to be here under the aegis of the Global Community,” Tsion said.

“They don’t know the shortcuts anyway,” Jacov said. “All three of these vehicles are equipped to go off-road.”

“You know a faster way?” Tsion said. “Take it!”

“May I?”

“They won’t open fire. They’ll have to scramble just to keep up.”

Jacov whipped the wheel to the left, flew down and up a ditch in the median, picked his way through crawling cars on the other side, and headed toward open fields. The GC Jeeps blew their sirens and bounced crazily behind him. The lead car finally caught up and pulled ahead, the driver pointing out the window and shouting at Jacov in Hebrew.

“He says to never do that again,” Tsion said. “But I rather enjoyed it.”

Jacov slammed on the brakes, and the trailing Jeep tore up grass stopping short of him. Jacov opened his door and stood with his head high above the roofline. The lead driver finally noticed he was leaving Jacov and slid to a stop. He waited at first, then backed up as Jacov shouted, “Unless you want trouble for making us late, you will follow me!”

Tsion looked gleefully at Chloe. “What is it your father is so fond of saying?”

“Lead, follow, or get out of the way.”

As Jacov led the angry GC drivers to the stadium, it quickly became obvious that many more than twenty-five thousand hoped to get in. “Do we have monitors outside?” Tsion said.

Buck nodded. “The overflow was supposed to go to several off-site locations, but it appears they all want to stay here.”

Having been shown up by Jacov, the GC soldiers leaped from their vehicles and insisted on escorting the little entourage inside the stadium. They scowled at Jacov, who told Buck he would be waiting in the van where he had dropped them off.

“Can you see a monitor?” Buck asked, looking around.

Jacov pointed to one about twenty feet away. “And I can listen on the radio.”

“Does this interest you?”

“Very much. I find it confusing, but I have long been suspicious of the potentate, even though Dr. Rosenzweig admires him. And your teacher is such a wise and gentle man.”

“Did you see him on television when he―”

“Everyone did, sir.”

“Then this isn’t totally new to you. We’ll talk later.”

Inside, the local committee was ecstatic. Buck loved hearing group prayer in English, Hebrew, and a few other languages he couldn’t identify. All over the room he heard “Jesus the Messiah” and “Jesu Cristo” and “Yeshua Hamashiach.”

On his knees next to Chloe, Buck felt her strong grip. She laid her head on his shoulder. “Oh, Buck,” she said, “this is like heaven.”

He whispered, “And we haven’t even started.”

As the stadium filled, shouts and chants resounded. “What are they saying?” Buck said.

” ‘Hallelujah,’ and ‘Praise the Lord,’ ” someone said. “And they’re spelling out the name of Jesus.”

The master of ceremonies, Daniel, addressed the group as the clock sped toward seven. “As you know, the program is simple. I will give a brief welcome and then open in prayer. I will lead in the singing of ‘Amazing Grace,’ and I will then introduce Dr. Ben-Judah. He will preach and teach for as long as he feels led. You twelve translators should have your copy of Dr. Ben-Judah’s notes and know which of the microphones at the base of the stage is yours.”

“And remember,” Tsion said quietly, “I cannot guarantee I will follow the script. I will try not to get ahead of you.”

People in the room nodded solemnly, and many looked at their watches. Buck heard the rumble of chants and singing above and was as excited as he had ever been. “All these people are our brothers and sisters,” he told Chloe.

Three minutes before seven, as Tsion stood apart from the others, head bowed, a young man rushed in. “The other venues are empty!” he said. “Everyone is here. Everyone had the same idea!”

“How many?” someone asked.

“More than fifty thousand surrounding the stadium,” he said, “at least twice as many outside as in. And they are not all witnesses. They are not even all Jewish. People are just curious.”

Daniel raised his hands, and the room fell silent. “Follow me down this corridor, up the ramp, then up the stairs to the stage. You can watch from the wings, but translators go first and get into position at ground level in front of the platform. No one on the stage but Dr. Ben-Judah and me. Quiet please. Dear God in heaven, we are yours.”

With one hand still raised, he and Tsion led the group toward the back of the stage. Buck peeked out to see every seat filled and people in the aisles and the infield. Many held hands. Others wrapped their arms around each other’s shoulders and sang and swayed.

The interpreters slipped out and down the steps to get into position, and the crowd quieted. At seven, Daniel strode to a simple, wood lectern and said, “Welcome my brothers and sisters in the name of the Lord God Almighty, ...”

He paused for the interpreters, but before they could translate, the stadium erupted in cheering and applause. Daniel was taken aback and smiled apologetically at the translators. “I’ll wait for you,” he mouthed, as the thousands continued to cheer.