Mark of Evil

by Tim LaHaye

  But he wasn’t much interested in the architecture now. He was concerned about the fact that the place was swarming with security. He could see hundreds of blue, well-armed droid-bots marching around the place. And Global Alliance armored jeeps patrolling with big-caliber guns. And more Alliance guys with automatic weapons at various sectors just inside the inner razor-wire perimeter. But not a sign of American military presence. President Zandibar had obviously put a massive rush on the transfer of power here at Bluffdale.

  Galligher kept searching the area, but Ethan March was nowhere to be found. Galligher was about to blow a gasket. He had his own doubts about Ethan anyway, but now he had traveled across the country and was parked outside the target site right on time, yet the Remnant’s fearless leader was AWOL. He took his binoculars again and scanned the sandy flats around him.

  Then he spotted something moving. It was a man crossing the desert toward him, about a mile away, and he was walking fast. Galligher kept peering through his binoculars until he could make out the man. Then he smiled. “Okay,” he muttered to himself. “Nicely done.”

  Ethan March was walking alone through scrub brush heading toward the truck. The whole thing reminded Galligher of the old John Wayne movie Hondo, with the Duke shuffling out of the badlands on foot—his horse having given out—carrying only his saddle. But Ethan wasn’t the Duke, and anyway, that was just a movie. What was happening around him today was real, and so were the bullets in the weapons that studded the framework of those droids and in the clips of the machine guns carried by the Global Alliance security forces down there in the complex.

  Ethan was dirty and tired looking by the time he reached the truck. He was wearing a sand-colored jumpsuit that blended with the landscape and the hills. He quickly unzipped it and pulled it off. “Had to parachute down,” he said. “They gave me one of those nifty triangle canopy stealth chutes—super-fast descent and almost invisible to detection.” Galligher gave him a confused look and Ethan added, “It’s a long story. Anyway, I buried my chute in the sand. Any sign of drone-bots flying overhead yet?”

  Galligher shook his head no and trotted over to the back of the truck to tell Chiro to climb out and join them. As soon as the three of them stood next to the truck, Galligher jumped right into it. “What’s the plan?”

  Ethan raised an eyebrow. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

  Galligher started to boil. “You’re kidding, right?” When Ethan said that he wasn’t, Galligher mumbled loud enough for everyone to hear, “God, give me patience with this guy.”

  But Ethan shrugged it off. “We’re going to have to improvise, John. That’s the fact. Time to put our game faces on.”

  Chiro joined in. “Up at our hotel in White Horse, I tried to figure a way to hack into the system from the outside, using an Internet virus, like a bot-net,” he said. “But it’s impervious to initial entry that way. Maybe if I had more time . . . This transfer of American facilities over to the Alliance came way too fast. I owe everyone an apology for my failure—”

  Ethan cut him short. “Listen to me, Chiro. You’re a godsend. The Lord is going to use your computer brilliance today, I’m sure of it.”

  As Ethan turned to give Chiro a pat on the shoulder, Galligher noticed something. There was dried blood in the inside of Ethan’s ear. Galligher moved around to the other side of Ethan’s head and saw more blood, and some of it caked in his hair. Galligher looked intently at Ethan’s face. The man had dark circles under his eyes and looked like he hadn’t slept for a few days. And something else—his left eye was vibrating like a little NFL figurine on a car dashboard.

  Back when Galligher worked in the Bureau, a few of his fellow agents had sustained serious head injuries in the line of duty, and he’d learned to recognize some of the signs. “What did they do to you in that lab anyway?” he asked Ethan.

  “Messed with my head,” Ethan replied quietly.

  Galligher nodded, struggling with how to respond to this younger man he had resented for way too long and for all the wrong reasons. Finally he said to Ethan, “Okay, chief, you’re the boss. What do you want us to do? The security guard told me if I didn’t check into the computer complex we’d be up a creek without a paddle.”

  Ethan lowered his head as he thought it through. “We know that the Global Alliance will be shutting down the Internet worldwide—that’s why they needed all seven of those ICANN code cards to restart it again after they’ve finished reprogramming it for their own purposes. Knowing that, Chiro, what are our options?”

  “Just two. One is that we go down there”—and he pointed down to the uber-guarded National Data Center—“and we get inside the building so I can reprogram directly into the guts of their computer hardware.”

  “My guess is that’s a long shot,” Galligher grunted. “I got past the first guard with my doctored papers, but down there in Tron Central, how long do you think it’ll take them to find out that we’re part of a Trojan horse?”

  “You’re right,” Ethan said. “So option two?”

  “We do it old school,” Chiro said. “We cut into the fiber-optic lines running into the data center. But we’d need to locate a junction box somewhere around here. My research leads me to believe that they’ve located the core switches underground out here in the desert somewhere, possibly as a backup system in case the data center itself suffered an attack. But I don’t know where they buried it.”

  “Great,” Galligher grunted with desperation. “I noticed your toolboxes in the truck, Chiro, but I didn’t happen to see a tractor or maybe a well-digging rig or even a team of geologists who could locate it under the ground. Anyway, I thought there was sonar for this kind of stuff.”

  “There is,” Chiro snapped back. “But I didn’t have access to military-grade ground sonar equipment on such short notice. It’s not easy to come by.”

  Ethan was trying to keep the group focused. “Let’s deal with what we know. We need to break into their system during the short window of time when the whole Internet is down, right?”

  Chiro nodded.

  “How short a window?” Galligher asked.

  “Maybe an hour,” Chiro replied. “Maybe longer. I just can’t be sure how long it will take Colliquin’s people to shut down the web and load their program into the data center’s computer system. But we’ll know when it happens, because our Allfones will all go down at the same time.”

  Ethan held his hands up to the sky. Galligher studied him closer and then noticed that Ethan’s eyes were closed and that he was praying out loud.

  Oh, Lord, as You took pity on Hagar and Ishmael and found them water in the secret place in the wilderness, and as You led Abraham to dig a well and find water at Beersheba, so now, Lord God, help us find the entrance to the core switches to this computer center. The evil one has captured this place for evil, but You, Lord, still have plans for good.

  When Ethan was finished he looked around the flat wilderness area. “I say the three of us start walking in three different directions and look for signs of a ground entrance or disruption of the soil—power lines, cables . . . anything.”

  Galligher suggested that Ethan was looking pretty lousy and that he ought to scout out the area while driving the truck. Meanwhile he and Chiro would go it on foot. But Ethan shook his head. “Can’t do that. The terrain’s too rough. It could shake up Chiro’s computer.”

  Chiro reluctantly nodded in agreement.

  As the three men started to stride out into the brush, it became obvious to all of them: they were looking for a needle in a haystack, and the haystack had a ticking time bomb inside. Not the explosive kind, perhaps, but something even more insidious—a sick, warped plan to capture and control the human race from the inside of everyone’s cerebral cortex.

  Ethan’s Allfone went off. He checked it. “It’s the Roundtable,” he shouted out to the other two men. “Probably wants to make sure we arrived safely. I’ll call them back later.”

  Gallighe
r was scanning the ground, but he stopped every few seconds to search the sky. It was just a matter of time before they caught on to the fact that Ethan’s team had not officially checked in with the data center as required, and then the drone-bots would spot them from the air, or maybe the droid-bots would start running at them from the ground. Galligher had heard those Alliance robo-cops had a top speed of forty-five miles per hour, and once the droids started chugging their way, it wouldn’t take them very long to reach the truck, find the computer, and then scuttle the entire mission.

  SIXTY-TWO

  JERUSALEM, ISRAEL

  Jimmy Louder and Rabbi ZG sat in the back of a little shop where the Remnant’s secret communications office was located. The place was just off of Batei Mahseh Square in the old Jewish Quarter section of the city with a storefront made to look like a fish market, complete with a Jesus Remnant person dressed in a fishmonger’s apron ready to wait on customers. But now that the waters of Israel were flowing with blood rather than water, killing the fish trade, shoppers wouldn’t be bothering them today.

  Their job now was to wait with their Allfones on. They were hoping to get an encrypted message from Bart Kingston in New York; in turn, they knew he would be waiting for a secure message from Ethan March.

  “Come on, Bart,” Jimmy Louder whispered. “Let’s hear from you.”

  AMERINEWS HEADQUARTERS

  New York City, New York

  Bart Kingston and Terri Schultz had cued up the video feed, checked their connection to the Yukon computer station where Manfred was running things, and tested their link to Jerusalem. But they hadn’t received the go-ahead from Ethan. The small staff had brought sleeping bags to the office and were prepared to stay through the night until they did.

  The buzzer sounded on the outside of the double entrance doors to the AmeriNews lobby. Kingston checked the video surveillance monitor. It was the guy from the office next door. Terri had checked them out and said they had a sparse but active website and their corporation was registered in Delaware, but there were no other public filings.

  The buzzer kept sounding. Kingston clicked on the intercom. “Sorry, but we’re unable to come to the door.”

  “Mr. Kingston,” the voice came back, “this is Kasmir Dellatar. I am with the ISA—the Global Alliance Information Security Agency. The ISA has authorized me to search your premises.”

  “On what grounds?” Kingston replied curtly.

  “Illegal possession of news footage obtained in Amman, Jordan.”

  “Have you ever heard of freedom of the press or the First Amendment?” Kingston threw back.

  But Dellatar had an answer. “Have you ever heard of the Global Alliance, which is now in control of your country?”

  BLUFFDALE, UTAH

  Ethan was fifty yards into the desert, looking for something, anything, but not knowing exactly what. Suddenly he had the nagging feeling that he was forgetting something. The call from the Roundtable—was it Judge Rice again? More information on the authority of the DOD? He decided he ought to return the call after all, before things got really crazy. He dialed the number on his Allfone. But instead of Fort Rice, Alvin Leander picked up. Leander immediately launched into details regarding a call he had just received from a guy named Dillon Ritzian. The man had called from Las Vegas. At first Ethan only half listened as he scoured the ground and kept an eye out for Alliance security forces. Leander said the man had complained about a girlfriend named Darlene and said he had a defense security clearance with the United States government. But when Leander said the caller had worked with Triple T Construction Company in Utah, Ethan heard Fourth of July fireworks going off in his brain.

  “He was contacted by some shadowy characters months ago,” Leander said. “They wanted his schematics and codes for the National Data Center. He said it has something to do with the Global Alliance takeover.”

  Filled with excitement, Ethan told the retired senator that he needed to get back to Ritzian. ”You need to get the GPS coordinates from him for the underground entrance to the fiber-optic core switches just outside the data center complex. This is urgent.”

  After that, Ethan messaged Galligher and Chiro and told them both to head back to the truck immediately. As he sprinted toward the truck with the Triple T logo painted on it, his head reeled. He hadn’t told anyone what the world looked like from inside his skull. He had been wracked with relentless pain and nonstop vertigo, and out of his left eye he saw things in a constant state of vibration. But this was the bottom of the ninth inning. He had to just push through it.

  When the three men rejoined, Ethan gave a rapid-fire account of his conversation with Leander. Now they could only wait.

  Ten minutes later Leander called back with the coordinates. Two minutes after that, the three of them were in the truck, with Galligher driving slowly so as not to rock the computer in the back. Chiro had his eyes glued to the GPS location-finder as they eased their way over the terrain, until he finally shouted, “Stop here! This is it.”

  The trio piled out and began to survey the area dotted with scrub brush and cactus. Then Ethan pointed to something about fifty feet away—a five-foot-square metal hatch set into the hard desert floor.

  “Wow, that was too easy,” Galligher called out with a smile.

  “You’re right, too easy,” Chiro said. He was nodding to the ring of little red lights creating a perimeter of about twenty feet around the hatch. “Infrared security.”

  “Right,” Galligher grunted. “We trip those, and the electric goon squad shows up.”

  Chiro scurried around to the back of the truck and snatched one of his big toolboxes and lugged it outside. He opened it up and pulled out a plastic container with a hook on the top. The device was the size of a Kleenex box, and it looked like a homemade science experiment, with a battery pack connected to the bottom and large orbs on each of the four corners that looked like hemispherical lenses. He began to narrate his plan as he pulled out the segments of two portable aluminum fishing rod lengths and started to assemble them together in one long pole. “I figured that the government had an advanced infrared system for this site,” he said. “Which means the type that uses the newest PWM system—pulse-width modulation—that keeps the LED lights cool and avoids overheating with a rapid on/off pulse. Which means there’s a digital code for those pulses. Which also means I had to build a decoding device that tells the LED lights to stay on the off pulse until we are safely out of here.”

  Galligher cocked an eyebrow and gave Chiro a confused look. “I’m glad you know what you’re talking about . . .”

  After switching his box on, Chiro hooked it to the end of the fishing rod and clumsily lifted it into the air. Galligher studied him for a moment and then reached out toward the extended rod with the strange bait on the end and gently lifted it out of Chiro’s hands. “I’ve done more fishing than you,” he said. “Let me give that a try.”

  Chiro told him the plan: the goal was to drop the box down as close as he could to the center of the metal hatch. He had a pair of night-vision goggles and he handed them over to Ethan, telling him to make sure the infrared beams were off. But Ethan shook his head. He was still seeing the left side of the world from a carnival tilt-a-whirl ride. “You’d better do that part, Chiro.”

  As Chiro coached him, Galligher dropped the box right down over the center of the metal hatch until it was about two feet off the surface. Finally Chiro announced that the LED security lights had been deactivated; he snapped the night-vision goggles off while Ethan grabbed a wrench from the toolbox and carefully crawled through the dirt and over to the metal hatch, where he unscrewed each of the lug nuts. Ethan slid the hatch off to the side of the opening. He could see a metal ladder that extended thirty feet down to the underground computer vault where green safety lights illuminated a corridor at the bottom.

  While Galligher held the pole and decoding box steady over the hole, Chiro and Ethan scrambled back to the truck. They released the straps from
the C-Note computer and wheeled it down the ramp and then began to roll it through the sand and dirt until they could cautiously lift it up and over the infrared light perimeter and set it down next to the square opening in the ground, close enough so they could run cables from it to the core switches underground.

  Chiro snatched a few more devices from his toolbox and filled his pockets until they bulged. Ethan fetched a large roll of fiber-optic cable from the truck and Chiro hooked up one end of it to the computer while Ethan plugged the power cord of the computer to a cable that fed into the power outlet in the truck’s dashboard. Chiro thumbed the On switch, and the big black computer started to scream in a perfect-pitch high-C note. Ethan and Galligher both smiled. Chiro’s name for the quantum computer now made sense.

  Ethan ducked under the box dangling from the end of Galligher’s fishing pole and started down the ladder first, lugging the big roll of fiber-optic cable that was connected to the computer. Chiro was beginning to climb after him when Galligher called out to him with a cocky grin, “Hey, Chiro, I thought you said this wouldn’t be that easy.”

  Chiro nodded as Galligher announced that the box at the end of the line felt like it weighed about ten pounds and his arms were getting tired. He asked exactly when he could put the fishing rod down. “You can’t,” Chiro called back to him with a smile and then he disappeared down the ladder.

  Two miles away, in the security control room in the National Data Center, the Alliance staff was receiving an operational crash-course from a National Security Agency advisor from Washington. The NSA official had to respond to all of their questions, even if it meant answering through gritted teeth.

  “What about the signal here,” one of the Alliance technicians asked. “It says that the infrared LED system out there in the desert is showing an anomaly: the system protecting the outside bypass hatch is reading Low Power on the PWM pulse. Maybe there was an intrusion into the exterior data vault out there. Someone could be accessing the fiber-optic core switches. Perhaps we should send out a squad of droid-bots to check it out?”