Left Behind: A Novel Of Earth's Last Days (40 page)

“Hey, Captain,” Buck said.

“We’re just doing some studying here,” Bruce said, “and we’ve hit a snag.” He told Buck what they had found and asked for more information.

“Well, he comes from a town, one of the larger university towns, called Cluj, and—”

“Oh, he does? I guess I thought he was from a mountainous region, you know, because of his name.”

“His name?” Buck repeated, doodling it on his legal pad.

“You know, being named after the Carpathian Mountains and all. Or does that name mean something else over there?”

Buck sat up straight and it hit him! Steve had been trying to tell him he worked for Stonagal and not Carpathia. And of course all the new U.N. delegates would feel beholden to Stonagal because he had introduced them to Carpathia. Maybe Stonagal was the Antichrist! Where had his lineage begun?

“Well,” Buck said, trying to concentrate, “maybe he was named after the mountains, but he was born in Cluj and his ancestry, way back, is Roman. That accounts for the blonde hair and blue eyes.”

Bruce thanked him and asked if he would see Buck in church the next day. Rayford thought Buck sounded distracted and noncommittal. “I haven’t ruled it out,” Buck said.

Yes, Buck thought, hanging up. I’ll be there all right. He wanted every last bit of input before he went to New York to write a story that could cost him his career and maybe his life. He didn’t know the truth, but he had never backed off from looking for it, and he wouldn’t begin now. He phoned Hattie Durham.

“Hattie,” he said, “you’re going to get a call inviting you to New York.”

“I already did.”

“They wanted me to ask you, but I told them to do it themselves.”

“They did.”

“They want you to see Carpathia again, provide him some companionship next week if you’re free.”

“I know and I am and I will.”

“I’m advising you not to do it.”

She laughed. “Right, I’m going to turn down a date with the most powerful man in the world? I don’t think so.”

“That would be my advice.”

“Whatever for?”

“Because you don’t strike me as that kind of girl.”

“First, I’m not a girl. I’m almost as old as you are, and I don’t need a parent or legal guardian.”

“I’m talking as a friend.”

“You’re not my friend, Buck. It was obvious you didn’t even like me. I tried to shove you off onto Rayford Steele’s little girl, and I’m not sure you even had the brains to pick up on that.”

“Hattie, maybe I don’t know you. But you don’t seem the type who would allow herself to be taken advantage of by a stranger.”

“You’re pretty much a stranger, and you’re trying to tell me what to do.”

“Well, are you that kind of a person? By not passing along the invitation, was I protecting you from something you might enjoy?”

“You’d better believe it.”

“I can’t talk you out of it?”

“You can’t even try,” she said, and she hung up.

Buck shook his head and leaned back in his chair, holding the yellow pad in front of him. My boss moves mountains, Steve had said. Carpathia is a mountain. Stonagal is the mover and shaker behind him. Steve thinks he’s really wired in deep. He’s not only press secretary to the man Hattie Durham correctly called the most powerful man on earth, but Steve is also actually in league with the man behind the man.

Buck wondered what Rayford or Chloe would do if they knew Hattie had been invited to New York to be Carpathia’s companion for a few days. In the end, he decided it was none of his, or their, business.

Rayford and Chloe watched for Buck until the last minute the next morning, but they could no longer save a seat for him when the sanctuary and the balcony filled. When Bruce began his message, Chloe nudged her father and pointed out the window, down onto the walk before the front door. There, in a small crowd listening to an external speaker, was Buck. Rayford raised a celebratory fist and whispered to Chloe, “Wonder what you’re going to pray for this morning?”

Bruce played the former pastor’s videotape, told his own story again, talked briefly about prophecy, invited people to receive Christ, and then opened the microphone for personal accounts. As had happened the previous two weeks, people streamed forward and stood in line until well after one in the afternoon, eager to tell how they had now, finally, trusted Christ.

Chloe told her father she had wanted to be first, as he had been, but by the time she made her way down from the last row of the balcony, she was one of the last. She told her story, including the sign she believed God had given her in the form of a friend who sat beside her on the flight home. Rayford knew she could not see Buck over the crowd, and Rayford couldn’t either.

When the meeting was over, Rayford and Chloe went outside to find Buck, but he was gone. They went for lunch with Bruce, and when they got home, Chloe found a note from Buck on the front door.

It isn’t that I didn’t want to say good-bye. But I don’t. I’ll be back for bureau business and maybe just to see you, if you’ll allow it. I’ve got a lot to think about right now, as you know, and frankly, I don’t want my attraction to you to get in the way of that thinking. And it would. You are a lovely person, Chloe, and I was moved to tears by your story. You had told me before, but to hear it in that place and in that circumstance this morning was beautiful. Would you do something I have never asked anyone to do for me ever before? Would you pray for me? I will call you or see you soon. I promise. Buck.

Buck felt more alone than ever on the flight home. He was in coach on a full plane, but he knew no one. He read several sections from the Bible Bruce had given him and had marked for him, prompting the woman next to him to ask questions. He answered in such a way that she could tell he was not in the mood for conversation. He didn’t want to be rude, but neither did he want to mislead anyone with his limited knowledge.

Sleep was no easier for him that night, though he refused to allow himself to pace. He was going into a meeting in the morning that he had been warned to stay away from. Bruce Barnes had sounded convinced that if Nicolae Carpathia were the Antichrist, Buck ran the danger of being mentally overcome, brainwashed, hypnotized, or worse.

As he wearily showered and dressed in the morning, Buck concluded he had come a long way from thinking that the religious angle was on the fringe. He had gone from bemused puzzlement at people thinking their loved ones had flown to heaven to believing that much of what was happening had been foretold in the Bible. He was no longer wondering or doubting, he told himself. There was no other explanation for the two witnesses in Jerusalem. Nor for the disappearances.

And the furthest stretch of all, this business of an Antichrist who deceives so many … well, in Buck’s mind it was no longer an issue of whether it was literal or true. He was long past that. He had already progressed to trying to decide who the Antichrist was: Carpathia or Stonagal. Buck still leaned toward Stonagal.

He slung his bag over his shoulder, tempted to take the gun from his bedside table but knowing he would never get it through the metal detectors. Anyway, he sensed, that was not the kind of protection he needed. What he needed was safekeeping for his mind and for his spirit.

All the way to the United Nations he agonized. Do I pray? he asked himself. Do I “pray the prayer” as so many of those people said yesterday morning? Would I be doing it just to protect myself from the voodoo or the beebiejeebies? He decided that becoming a believer could not be for the purpose of having a good luck charm. That would cheapen it. Surely God didn’t work that way. And if Bruce Barnes could be believed, there was no more protection for believers now, during this period, than there was for anyone else. Huge numbers of people were going to die in the next seven years, Christian or not. The question was, then where would they be?

There was only one reason to make the transaction, he decided—if he truly believed he could be forgiven and become one of God’s people. God had become more than a force of nature or even a miracle worker to Buck, as God had been in the skies of Israel that night. It only made sense that if God made people, he would want to communicate with them, to connect with them.

Buck entered the U.N. through hordes of reporters already setting up for the press conference. Limousines disgorged VIPs and crowds waited behind police barriers. Buck saw Stanton Bailey in a crowd near the door. “What are you doing here?” Buck said, realizing that in five years at Global he had never seen Bailey outside the building.

“Just taking advantage of my position so I can be at this press conference. Proud you’re going to be in the preliminary meeting. Be sure to remember everything. Thanks for transmitting your first draft of the theory piece. I know you’ve got a lot to do yet, but it’s a terrific start. Gonna be a winner.”

“Thanks,” Buck said, and Bailey gave him a thumbs up. Buck realized that if that had happened a month before, he would have had to stifle a laugh at the corny old guy and would have told his colleagues what an idiot he worked for. Now he was strangely grateful for the encouragement. Bailey could have no hint what Buck was going through.

Chloe Steele told her father of her plans to finally look into local college classes that Monday. “And I was thinking,” she said, “about trying to get together with Hattie for lunch.”

“I thought you didn’t care for her,” Rayford said.

“I don’t, but that’s no excuse. She doesn’t even know what’s happened to me. She’s not answering her phone. Any idea what her schedule is?”

“No, but I have to check my own. I’ll see if she’s flying today.”

Rayford was told that not only was Hattie not scheduled that day but also that she had requested a thirty-day leave of absence. “That’s odd,” he told Chloe. “Maybe she’s got family troubles out West.”

“Maybe she’s just taking some time off,” Chloe said. “I’ll call her later when I’m out. What are you doing today?”

“I promised Bruce I’d come over and watch that Carpathia press conference later this morning.”

“What time’s that?”

“Ten our time, I think.”

“Well, if Hattie’s not around for lunch, maybe I’ll come by there.”

“Call us either way, hon, and we’ll wait for you.”

Buck’s credentials were waiting for him at an information desk in the U.N. lobby. He was directed up to a private conference room off the suite of offices into which Nicolae Carpathia had already moved. Buck was at least twenty minutes early, but as he emerged from the elevator he felt alone in a crowd. He saw no one he recognized as he began the long walk down a corridor of glass and steel leading to the room where he was to join Steve, the ten designated ambassadors representing the permanent members of the new Security Council, several aides and advisers to the new secretary-general (including Rosenzweig, Stonagal, and various other members of his international brotherhood of financial wizards), and of course, Carpathia himself.

Buck had always been energetic and confident. Others had noticed his purposeful stride on assignment. Now his gait was slow and unsure, and with every step his dread increased. The lights seemed to grow dimmer, the walls close in. His pulse increased and he had a sense of foreboding.

The gripping fear reminded him of Israel, when he believed he was going to die. Was he about to die? He couldn’t imagine physical danger, yet clearly people who got in Carpathia’s way, or in the way of Stonagal’s plans for Carpathia, were now dead. Would he be just another in a line that stretched from Carpathia’s business rival in Romania years before, through Dirk Burton and Alan Tompkins, to Eric Miller?

No, what he feared, he knew, was not mortal danger. At least not now, not here. The closer he got to the conference room, the more he was repelled by a sense of evil, as if personified in that place. Almost without thinking, Buck found himself silently praying, God, be with me. Protect me.

He felt no sense of relief. If anything, his thoughts of God made his recognition of evil more intense. He stopped ten feet from the open door, and though he heard laughter and banter, he was nearly paralyzed by the atmosphere of blackness. He wanted to be anywhere but there, and yet he knew he could not retreat. This was the room in which the new leaders of the world congregated, and any sane person would have given anything to be there.

Buck realized that what he really wanted was to have been there. He wished it were over, that he had seen this welcoming of new people, this brief speech of commitment or whatever it was to be, and was already writing about it.

He tried to force himself toward the door, his thoughts deafening. Again he cried out to God, and he felt a coward just like everyone else, praying in the foxhole. He had ignored God for most of his life, and now when he felt the darkest anguish of his soul, he was figuratively on his knees.

Yet he did not belong to God. Not yet. He knew that. God had answered Chloe’s prayer for a sign before she had actually made the spiritual transaction. Why couldn’t he have answered Buck’s plea for calm and peace?

Buck could not move until Steve Plank noticed him. “Buck! We’re almost ready to begin. Come on in.”

But Buck felt terrible, panicky. “Steve, I need to run to the washroom. Do I have a minute?”

Steve glanced at his watch. “You’ve got five,” he said. “And when you get back, you’ll be right over there.”

Steve pointed to a chair at one corner of a square block of tables. The journalist in Buck liked it. The perfect vantage point. His eyes darted to the nameplates in front of each spot. He would face the main table, where Carpathia had placed himself directly next to Stonagal … or had Stonagal been in charge of the seating? Next to Carpathia on the other side was a hastily hand lettered nameplate with “Personal Assistant” written on it. “Is that you?” Buck said.

“Nope.” Steve pointed at the corner opposite Buck’s chair.

“Is Todd-Cothran here?” Buck said.

“Of course. Right there in the light gray.”

The Brit looked insignificant enough. But just beyond him were both Stonagal—in charcoal—and Carpathia, looking perfect in a black suit, white shirt, electric-blue tie, and a gold stickpin. Buck shuddered at the sight of him, but Carpathia flashed a smile and waved him over. Buck signaled that he would be a minute. “Now you’ve got only four minutes,” Steve said. “Get going.”