Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle Of The Ages (8 page)

Chloe was sure she had cracked a rib. During the twenty-five-minute ride to the local GC headquarters, Chloe began to pray. “God, give me strength. Let me die before I give away anything. Be with Kenny and Buck and Dad.”

She remembered George regaling them with stories about how he had said absolutely nothing to his captors in Greece. If only she had that kind of fortitude. She would rather banter, anger them, mislead them. Was it better to sit and take it or to shoot back, to let them know she was no pushover?

Torture. Could she handle that? “With your strength, God. Let me trade my body for the ones I love.”

At headquarters she was uncuffed, searched, and again asked her name and home region. Chloe said nothing. She gingerly pressed a palm against her face and felt the abrasions on her forehead and cheeks.

“She already told us. Phoebe Evangelista, American.”

“Then there ought to be a -6 somewhere under that blood. Get a wet cloth and wash that off.”

Someone held Chloe by the back of her head and dragged the cloth across her face. She cried out.

“I don’t see anything. Doesn’t mean it’s not there. We running her name and description?”

“Yeah. Nothing so far.”

“Jock will be in at nine. Get her cleaned up and in a jumpsuit. And fingerprinted.”

Chloe was tempted to go limp again and make the GC undress her, hose her down, and dress her, but she did what she was told. She came out of the shower with her face stinging, changed into the dark green jumpsuit, and clenched her fists.

When she was led to the photo area and printing sta-tion, she kept her hands balled. Chloe looked so different from the girl who had been at Stanford six years before, she wasn’t worried about her photo giving anything away.

A matronly Mexican guard reached for Chloe’s hand and said, “Right first, please.”

Chloe shook her head.

“Come on, honey. You don’t want to fight me. You’re going to get yourself fingerprinted, so you might as well just let me do it.”

Chloe shook her head again.

“I’m going to do this, so how’s it going to happen? Do I have to get a couple of guys in here to hold you down? Because If I do, here’s what I’m going to use.”

The woman showed Chloe an ugly adjustable metal cord similar to the tool dogcatchers use at the ends of poles to snag puppies. “I wrap this about three inches above your wrist. When it tightens, your hand comes open. I don’t know who you are or why you’re in here, but you don’t want to endure this.”

Chloe shook her head again, and the woman spoke into her radio, asking for help. Chloe resisted the two young men, but as the matron had said, it was hardly worth the effort. When that metal loop tightened around her arm, her fingers popped open, and the GC had finger-prints that were sent via the Internet to their databases all over the world.

“We also read your eyes with the camera, honey. If you’ve ever had a driver’s license, been to college, gotten married, anything, we’ll find a match.”

Chloe only hoped the GC were as shorthanded as everyone else. Maybe it would take long enough that Buck and George and the rest could bust her out.
Who am I kidding?

Rayford had hoped for a day or two of rest before jetting back to San Diego, but he had no choice but to leave Petra as soon as he could refuel. He was stunned to find Mac McCullum waiting for him.

“Got the word from Buck,” Mac said. “Thought Tsion and Chaim ought to know so they could get the folks here praying. Albie’s already got a contact on the Al Hillah thing, so he doesn’t need me. I’ll be your pilot.”

“Mac, I can’t ask you to-”

“You didn’t. I volunteered. Now unless you’re gonna be a mule and pull rank on me, saddle up.” Rayford was more grateful than he could express. In the air Mac told him, “You can think, pray, sleep, or talk. I’ve got this baby on a path to San Diego, and I’m looking forward to seeing those people again and meet-ing some new ones. My prediction is that Chloe will be there waiting for us.”

“I was with you right up until that last,” Rayford said. “I’ve got a bad, bad feeling about this. If Buck and George don’t find her soon, or if they find out the GC has her, we’ve got to get those people out of there.”

“And take them where?”

“Petra is the only place I know anymore.”

“Chloe ain’t gonna give the GC a thing. Unless they saw her coming out of the underground, what’ve they got?”

“She had to be in the area. Unless she can convince them she came from somewhere else, she sure gives them a place to start looking.”

Rayford buried his head in his hands and tried to sleep. No dice. All he could do was pray. Chloe had been Daddy’s girl from day one. She loved school, was inquisitive, single-minded, stubborn. She was the last person in the family to come to Christ, and Rayford had no illusions that he was responsible for that. He had taught her to believe only in what she could see and smell and touch.

Chloe always wanted to be in the middle of the action, and if someone wouldn’t put her there, she’d put herself there. He wanted to resent her for it, especially now, but he was overwhelmed with worry and fear. All he wanted was to know she was safe and back with Buck and Kenny. He knew that no matter what happened, they would be reunited someday, and that it would be less than a year from now. But somehow that wasn’t as com-forting as he thought it might be.

They were destined to be with Christ when they died, and should they survive, they would be with him on earth for a thousand years. But the prospect of dying was still a fearful thing. It was likely that any of the Tribulation Force who died during the next year would be martyrs to the cause of Christ, but their loved ones would still mourn them, still miss them. Worst of all, Rayford realized, he didn’t want to think about how his loved ones might die.

The suffering might be short-lived, but no one wants to think of his beloved going through anything terrifying or torturous or agonizing. “Father,” Rayford said, “let this be a mission of relocation at worst. I have no reason more valid than anyone else to deserve special treatment, to have my daughter supernaturally protected. You don’t need her; you don’t need any of us. But we have pledged ourselves to you and trust you know what you’re doing.”

Jock turned out to be a tall, heavy man with a uniform that may once have fit him but now encased him like a sausage. He had his underlings bring Chloe from a small cell to a slightly larger room. He pointed to a chair and she sat directly across from him at a metal table.

Jock dropped an accordion file on the table and took off his jacket, draping it over the back of the chair. He sat wearily and let out a loud sigh. “So, Phoebe Evangelista. Where’d you come up with that one?”

Chloe stared at him. She detected an Australian accent and noticed the number
18
on his forehead. On the back of his right hand was a tattoo of Nicolae Carpathia’s face.

“Mind if I smoke?”

Chloe raised her eyebrows and nodded.

“Well, what do I care whether you mind or not? I’ve got a lot of work to do today, young lady, and you’re keeping me from it.”

“Go do it,” Chloe said.

“So, she talks,” Jock said, pulling a small cigar from his pocket. “I thought you were going to be one of those name-rank-and-serial-number types, minus the last two. Well, you are my work, and you’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been lying to my people, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You want to fess up, or you want me to tell you what we found?”

Chloe shrugged.

“We’re not getting a thing out of you, are we?”

“No.”

“Took a while, but we got it. Besides being short of people, our systems are crashing, and-”

“You’re breaking my heart.”

Jock reached for his file. “Yeah, well, from what we found, I can imagine. I have good news and bad news this morning, Mrs. Williams. Which would you like?”

So, there it was. In a matter of hours, the prints or the eye reading had given her away. “Nothing you can say will be good news.”

“Don’t be rash. We’re reasonable people, much as you and yours would like to think otherwise and per-suade all the sheep who follow that kook Ben-Judah.”

Tsion has more brains in his eyebrows than any ten GCs I’ve ever met.

“I have a proposition for you, ma’am.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“Sure you do.”

“Let me guess. My freedom for a few leads?”

“Well, you can play high-and-mighty all you want, Mom, but I’d think you’d be open to hearing me out when the benefit to you deals with your own child.”

ALBIE’S
BLACK-MARKET
world was a shadowy landscape of operators who largely went by nicknames and initials. Albie himself had fashioned his name from his home-town, Al Basrah. People who needed to know who he was knew enough to reach him. Before he became a believer, Albie had been one of the top three black mar-keters in the Middle East. His conversion to Christ had left only two, and the death of one of them, reputedly at the hands of the other in a deal gone bad, left one. And that was who Albie needed to get ahold of.

He had never liked Double-M, or Mainyu Mazda, even when Albie was of the same ilk and character. Killing was nothing new for Mainyu. It was how he maintained his reputation and control. You wanted something, anything, he was the man. But pity anyone who ever, ever tried to swindle or even shortchange the man. Legend had it that he had personally murdered a dozen people-one of them one of his own wives-who had not lived up to their end of some bargain. None dared calculate how many he may have hired others to eliminate.

Those who claimed to know said Mainyu celebrated each personal killing by adding a tattooed double-M to his neck. He had begun twenty years before when he had strangled a guard in a Kuwaiti prison. He applied the first tattoo himself, the ink a concoction of rubber shavings from the soles of his shoes, paint chips from the prison bars, and blood. A sharpened paper clip heated by a cigarette lighter was his applicator. He put that first double-M directly under his Adam’s apple. He added one on either side of the original for each subsequent murder, so people could tell whether he was on an odd or even number by whether or not his tattooed necklace was even on both sides.

The last time Albie had seen Mainyu, his necklace had one more double-M on the left than on the right and his count stood at twelve. The more recent tattoos were clearer and more professionally done, and supposedly the one for his wife had a feminine flair.

Albie put the word on the street that he wanted an audience with Mainyu, and within two hours a note was slipped under his door with an address deep in the street markets on Abadan Island on the Shatt al Arab River in southwestern Iran.

It was like MM to follow the money. Pipelines con-nected Abadan’s huge refinery to the oil fields of Iran.

Of course Mainyu did his black marketing in the city’s underbelly.

Like anyone anywhere who didn’t bear a mark of loy-alty to Carpathia, Albie had become nocturnal. He and Mac shared a flat in a forsaken corner of Al Basrah, where the landlord didn’t know or care about one’s loyalty to the Global Community provided the rent enve-lope was full and waiting the first of every month. Albie had taught Mac that the best way to get around was on motor scooters small and light enough to be stored indoors or hidden in the woods near where they hid their small plane.

Albie would wait for the sun to disappear before ven-turing out to a ferry that would get him and his scooter to the island, where he would find the address some thirty miles from home.

When big Jock said something about it probably being past Chloe’s breakfast time, her mouth watered. “But as you can understand, ma’am, we don’t feed uncooper-ative prisoners. Oh, at some point, you’ll get some sort of nutrition bar that’ll keep you alive until your execu-tion.” He patted the big file. “I can’t say for sure until I hear from International, but this has all the makings of a spectacle. Wouldn’t you say?”

“That’s not my call.”

“But your baby-what’s the name?”

Chloe leveled her eyes at Jock and pressed her lips together. How she loved to say her baby’s name.
Ken-neth Bruce Williams. Kenny Bruce. Kenny B.
But she would not tell this man. There was no official record of Kenny’s birth, and the GC didn’t even know whether she’d had a boy or a girl.

“Surely there’s no harm in my knowing the name.” “Phoebe Evangelista Jr.”

Jock looked at the ceiling. “You know what? I am not the least bit amused. I’m not surprised either, because I’ve dealt with enough of your type. Some say there’s something admirable about you people, sticking with something this long even though in the end you’re going to lose, and you know it. But I would have thought a religious person-and come on, that’s what you are, isn’t it?-I would have thought you’d care a little more about the disposition of your child. Is it a girl? How old is she now?”

“Look,” Chloe said, “you know who I am and what I am and what I’m not, which is a Carpathia loyalist. That’s punishable by death, so why don’t you just-”

“Oh, now hold on, ma’am. These things are still nego-tiable. Don’t be jumping to concl-”

“I will not be providing you any information to reduce my sentence. I’m not interested in life in prison. I would not take the mark even if you promised freedom for my family. And everybody knows that even those who take the mark now are executed anyway.”

“Oh, where did you hear that? That’s terrible. And a lie.”

“Whatever you say.”

Jock leaned back in his chair and called out, “Nigel?”

“Sir?”

“Could you open a window? It’s stuffy in here.”

The young guard entered and opened a window behind heavy bars. There would be no escaping.

“It’s only fair that I outline what I have to offer,” Jock said. “You see, we know more than your name. We know you dropped out of Stanford University six years ago. We know you’re the daughter of Potentate Carpathia’s first pilot. We know that you know that your father became a subversive and may have either conspired or participated in the assassination of the potentate.