by Tim LaHaye
“Do I look like a Tangvald?”
“Goldman, and my father is sick. Let us in!”
“We’re full!”
“You’re lying! You held two rooms till you went to bed and then gave them both away?”
“Leave me alone!”
“I’ll knock until you let us in!”
“I’ll shoot you if you knock once more!”
The light went out. Buck put his phone in his pocket and banged on the door with both fists.
“You’re a dead man!”
“Just open up and give us a room!”
More swearing, then the light, then the door opened an inch. The man stuck his fingers out. “Five hundred Nicks cash.”
“Let me see the key.”
The man dangled it at the end of a six-inch block of wood. Buck produced the cash, and the key came flying out. “Around back, third floor. If I didn’t need the money, I’d have shot you.”
“You’re welcome,” Buck said.
The room was a hole. A single bed, one straight-back chair, and a toilet and sink. Buck pulled out his phone and sat in the chair, pointing Chaim to the bed. As Buck tried Chloe’s phone, Chaim kicked off his slippers and stretched out on the bed, atop the ratty spread and under his own blanket.
“Tsion!” Buck said. “No, don’t wake her. . . . Underground? That’s probably good for now. Just tell her I’m all right. I need to get hold of T. May need him to get Chaim and me out of here. . . .”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Chaim mumbled from the bed. “I’m a dead man.”
“Yeah,” Buck said to Tsion, “just like you and me. . . . Kenny OK? . . . We’ll keep in touch.”
Buck couldn’t get an answer at Palwaukee Airport or on T’s cell phone. He put his phone away and took a deep breath, kicking his bag under the chair. “Chaim, we have to talk,” he said. But Chaim was asleep.
Rayford awoke with a start just after dawn, feeling refreshed. He grabbed his bag and padded past a dozing Demetrius to the bathroom, smelling breakfast from the kitchen. While in the tiny bathroom, however, he heard tires on the gravel and pulled the curtain back an inch. A small pickup pulled into view.
Rayford leaned out the door and called to Laslos. “Company,” he whispered. “You expecting anyone?”
“It’s all right,” Laslos said, setting a pan of food on the table and wiping his hands on an apron. “Get a shower and join us for breakfast as soon as you can.”
Rayford tried to run hot water in the sink. It was lukewarm. Laslos interrupted with a knock. “Don’t shave, Mr. Steele.”
“Oh, Laslos, I really need to. I’ve got several days of growth and—”
“I’ll explain later. But don’t.”
Rayford shrugged and squinted at himself in the mirror. He was due for a haircut, more and more gray appearing at his temples and in the back. His beard was salt-and-pepper, which alarmed him. Not that he cared so much about gray in his mid-forties. It was just that it had seemed to happen almost overnight. Until this morning, he had felt every one of his forty-plus years. Now he felt great.
The shower, a trickle from a rusty pipe, was also lukewarm. It made him hurry, but by the time he scrubbed himself dry with a small, thin towel and dressed, he was ravenous. And curious. He emerged eager to get going, but also intrigued by yet another guest at the table, a pudgy man a few years older than he with slick, curly black hair and wire-rimmed glasses.
Rayford leaned past Laslos and Demetrius and shook the man’s hand. The mark of the believer was on his forehead, so Rayford used his own name.
The man looked at Laslos and shyly back at Rayford.
“This is Adon, Mr. Steele,” Laslos said. “He speaks no English, but as you can see, he is a brother.”
As they ate, Laslos told Rayford about Adon. “He is an artist, a skilled craftsman. And he has brought with him contraband items that could get him locked away for the rest of his life.”
Adon followed the conversation with blank eyes, except when Laslos or Demetrius broke in to translate. Then he shyly looked away, nodding.
As Laslos cleared the table, Demetrius helped Adon bring in his equipment, which included a computer, printer, laminator, digital camera, dyes, hair clippers, even a cloth backdrop. Rayford was positioned in a chair under the light and near the window, where the early sun shone in. Adon draped a sheet around him and pinned it behind his neck. He said something to Laslos, who translated for Rayford.
“He wants to know if it is OK to make you bald.”
“If you all think it’s necessary. If we could get by with very short, I’d appreciate it.”
Laslos informed Adon, whose shyness and hesitance apparently did not extend to his barbering. In a few swipes, he left Rayford’s hair in clumps on the floor, leaving him with a quarter inch of dark residue such as Rayford had not seen since high school. “Mm-hmm,” Rayford said.
Then came the dye that made what was left of the hair on his head look like the lightest of the gray in the long stubble on his chin.
Adon spoke to Laslos, who asked Rayford if he wore glasses.
“Had the surgery,” Rayford said.
“Then these will work,” Laslos said, and Adon produced a pair of colored contacts.
Adon asked for Rayford’s documents, shot a few pictures, and got to work on the computer. While he transformed Rayford’s papers with the new photograph, Rayford stole away to the bathroom for a peek. The shorter, grayer hair and the gray stubble added ten years. In the glasses, he hardly recognized himself.
The technology allowed Adon to produce old-looking new documents in less than an hour. Rayford was eager to get going. “What do I owe you?” he said, but neither Laslos nor Demetrius would translate that.
“We’ll be sure Adon is taken care of,” Laslos said. “Now, Pastor is going to ride back to Ptolemaïs with him, and I will drop you at Kozani. I called ahead to have your fuel tanks topped off.”
David sat bleary-eyed before his computer in New Babylon, his phone turned off. He had programmed the autopsy to be recorded on his own hard drive and anything from the evidence room to go onto Mac’s computer. Meanwhile he continued to study the Chicago skyscraper he felt had potential as a new safe house. If he was right, it could accommodate hundreds of exiles, if necessary.
The Strong Building was a technical marvel, wholly solar powered. Giant reflectors stored enough energy every day to run the tower’s power plant for weeks. So even a several-day stretch without bright sunlight never negatively impacted the building.
It was clear to David that neither the foundation nor at least the first thirty-five or so stories had been compromised by the damage above. The building appeared to have suffered a direct hit, but the impact had knocked the top half of the floors away from the rest of the structure rather than sending them crashing through those below. The question was what had happened to the solar panels and whether there was any way people could live in the unaffected portion of the structure without being detected.
It took David more than two hours of hacking through a morass of classified layers of information before he was able to turn his code-breaking software loose on the gateways that led to the mainframe that controlled the Strong Building. Reaching that point gave him a thrill he couldn’t describe, though he would try to describe it later to Annie.
David was amazed that satellite phone technology got him as far as it did, and he had to wonder how much untapped energy was still operative in the condemned city. The longer everyone else remained convinced the place was radioactively contaminated, the better for him and the Tribulation Force. At every cybergateway along the path, he planted warnings of high radioactive levels. And while he was at it, he launched a robotic search engine that found all the original probe readouts and changed more than half of them to positive results. Civilian and GC planes were automatically rerouted so they couldn’t fly over Chicago, even at more than thirty thousand feet.
David had to feather his way through the Strong Building mainframe
by trial and error, seeing if he could remotely control the heating and cooling system, the lights, phones, sanitation system, elevators, and security cameras. The best video game in history would not have been more addictive.
The state-of-the-art monitoring system clearly reflected how much of the building was malfunctioning. More than half the elevators were off-line due to incomplete circuits. David clicked on More Information and found “Undetermined error has broken circuits between floors 40 and 80.” He checked two dozen elevators that serviced the first thirty-nine floors and found that most appeared in running order.
By the time he had played with the system for another forty-five minutes, David had determined which security cameras worked, how to turn on lights on various floors, then the cameras, to show him whether the elevators would run, open, and shut. From nine time zones away, he was running what was left of a skyscraper in a city that had been abandoned for months.
Recording his keystrokes in a secure file, David fired up the camera on the highest floor he could find, the west end of the thirty-ninth. It showed water on the floor, but the mainframe indicated that it was being successfully redirected to keep it from flooding the floors below. He maneuvered the camera to show the ceiling and blinked. There was no ceiling, only a three-sided shell of the building that rose maybe another ten stories and revealed the inky sky, moon shining, stars twinkling.
So the Strong Building had been designed to withstand the worst nature could offer and had largely survived even what man threw at it. David stayed with his search until he found cameras that gave him a good view of what now served as the roof of the tower. By the time he had saved most of the information, he had an idea what the place looked like. In essence, it was a modular tower that appeared mortally wounded but had a lot to offer. Unusual in a modern skyscraper, the blueprints showed an inner core of offices hidden from outside view, surrounding the elevators on every floor. Here was unlimited floor space, water, plumbing, power, light—all undetectable by anyone who dared venture into an area that had been officially condemned and rendered off limits anyway.
The open top appeared large enough to accommodate a helicopter, but David couldn’t determine remotely whether the new roof by proxy, which at first appeared to be the ceiling of the thirty-ninth floor, would support significant weight. He found parking underneath the tower, though debris from the top floors blocked two of the main garage entrances. It was a long shot, but David believed that if he could get the stateside Trib Force to the place, they could find ways in and out of that underground carport.
And that gave him another idea. The last rain of bombs to hit Chicago had come with little warning. Employees and residents of tall buildings fled to the streets, but no one would have been allowed below ground with buildings falling. Underground garages would have been automatically sealed off with the city so gridlocked. How many vehicles might still be in that garage? David clicked away until he found the underground security cameras and the emergency lighting system. Once he had the lights on in the lowest level, he panned one of the security cameras until the vehicles came into view. Six levels below the street, he found more than a dozen cars. The problem, of course, was that drivers would have had the keys.
David kept trying cameras at different levels, looking for valet parking. He struck pay dirt near the elevators on the first level below the street. Nearly fifty late-model and mostly expensive cars, at least one of them a Hummer and several others sport-utility vehicles, were parked in the vicinity of a glassed-in shack clearly labeled Valet Parking. David manipulated the closest camera until he could make out a wall next to the cash register, replete with sets of keys. It was as if this place was made for the Trib Force, and he couldn’t wait to send someone in to investigate. David wondered how soon he and Annie might be living there.
A call startled him. It was the director of the Global Community Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, an Indonesian named Bakar. “I need your help,” the man said.
What else was new?
“Fire away,” David said, shutting down his computer with everything saved and hidden.
“Moon is all over me about why we didn’t bring back the video microchips from the Gala. I thought we had. Anyway, we have them secured now, and I had arranged to have them flown here commercially. Walter tells me now that he’ll have my job if those chips are out of GC hands for one second.”
“Who’s got ’em, Bakar?”
“One of our guys.”
“Can’t he just bring them?”
“Yeah, but he’d have to fly commercially.”
“So? He’s still not letting the discs out of his sight.”
“Commercial flights are full coming here, and Moon doesn’t want to wait.”
“So you want us to send a plane for one guy?”
“Exactly.”
“Do you know the cost of that?”
“That’s why I’m begging.”
“How did I get so popular all of a sudden?”
“What?”
“Nothing. Be at the hangar by ten this morning.”
“Me?”
“Who else?”
“I don’t want to go, Director. I want our guy picked up.”
“I’m not going to have our sleep-deprived first officer fly a multimillion-dollar, er, Nick, fighter to Israel and have to find your guy, Bakar. You’re going to ride along so Mr. Smith doesn’t have to leave the cockpit. And I won’t charge you the thousands for fuel.”
“I appreciate it, Director. But couldn’t I just have my guy be at a certain place and—”
“Earth to Bakar! This is a seller’s, or I should say giver’s, market, sir. You make Smith go alone and I’ll charge you depreciation on the jet, fuel, and his time. And his time is not cheap.”
“I’ll be there.”
“I thought you would.”
David called Abdullah.
“I was up anyway,” Abdullah said. “I was hoping something would take me away from here today.”
“You know how to work a chip-copying machine?”
“I don’t know, boss. Is it more complicated than a fighter-bomber? Of course.”
“I’m sending one with you. When Bakar finds his guy, you take the chips into the cockpit and tell them regulations say you have to personally log all cargo. Copy them, tag them as logged, and give them back to the TV boys.”
“And bring you the copies.”
“We’re on the same page, Smitty.”
David was next to giddy about the Trib Force all being in touch with each other via phone. He would feel better when he knew Buck was out of Israel and that Rayford was also on his way home, but David was unaware he had a message to call Buck.
Rayford shook Laslos’s hand with both of his, got his promise to again personally thank Pastor Demeter and Adon, then loped into the airport and to the hangar. His head felt cool with so little insulation, but he didn’t want to keep running his hand over it for fear of making it obvious that it was new to him.
A tower official met him at the Gulfstream. “You must be Mr. Berry.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Here’s your fuel bill. Your papers?”
Rayford dug them out and paid his bill in cash.
“Lot of currency to have on your person, Mr. Berry,” the man said, shuffling through Rayford’s documents.
“A risk I’m willing to take to keep from going bankrupt again.”
“Credit cards do you in, did they, sir?”
“Hate ’em.”
“Wow, this picture looks like it was taken today.”
Rayford froze, then forced himself to breathe. “Yeah?”
“Yes, look here. Karl! Come look at this!”
A mechanic in coveralls wandered over, looking peeved that he had been interrupted.
The official held Rayford’s ID photo next to Rayford’s face. “Look at this. He got this, let me see here, eight, nine months ago, but his hair’s the same length and, if I’m not mistak
en, he’s wearing the same shirt.”
“Sure enough,” the mechanic said, leaving as quickly as he had come. Rayford watched to make sure he wasn’t going to call someone, but he just moseyed back to the engine he’d been working on.
“Yes, that’s something,” the man said. “Did you notice that?”
“Nope,” Rayford said. “Lemme see that. Well, I’ll be dogged. I had just got a haircut when this was taken, but ’course the hair doesn’t grow much anymore, anyway. And that probably is the same shirt. I don’t have that many.”
“Your own plane and not that many shirts? There’s priorities for you.”
“My own plane, I wish. I just drive ’em for the company.”
“And what company’s that, sir?” The man handed back his documents.
“Palwaukee Global,” Rayford said.
“What do you transport?”
“Just the plane today. They had too many this side of the ocean.”
“That so? You could pick up some business running from Jerusalem to New Babylon this week, you know.”
“I heard. Wish I had the time.”
“Safe flight.”
“Thank you, sir.” And thank you, Lord.
At ten in the morning in New Babylon, David strolled past the makeshift evidence room, pretending to be checking progress on the nearby Carpathia statue. He knew if he appeared to be snooping on the evidence, Intelligence Director Jim Hickman would shoo him. But Hickman also liked to impress, and allowing a colleague an inside look seemed to make him feel special.
David slowed as he walked by, hoping to run into Jim. Not seeing him, he knocked at the door. An armed guard opened it, and David spotted Jim across the room with a technician on his knees in the middle of a fifteen-by-one-hundred-foot drapery. “Don’t want to bother anybody,” David said. “Just want to make sure Director Hickman and his team have everything they need. I’ll call him in his office.”
“I’m in here, David!” Hickman called.
“Oh! So you are!”
“Let ’im in, Corporal! Come over here, David. Slip your shoes off. I wanna show you something.”
“I don’t want to intrude.”
