CHAPTER 7
Buck had always had the ability to sleep well, even when he couldn’t sleep long. He could have used a dozen or more hours the night before, after the day he had had. However, seven-plus hours had been just enough because when he was out, he was out. He knew Chloe had slept fitfully only because she told him in the morning. Her tossing and turning and winces of pain had not affected his slumber.
Now, as Ken Ritz landed the Learjet in Easton, Pennsylvania, “just to top off the tank before headin’ to Tel Aviv,” Buck was alert. He and the lanky, weathered, veteran pilot in his late fifties seemed to have picked up where they left off the last time he had employed this freelance charter service. Ritz was a talker, a raconteur, opinionated, interesting, and interested. He was as eager to know Buck’s latest thoughts on the vanishings and the global war as he was in sharing his own views.
“So, what’s new with the jet-setting young magazine writer since I saw you last, what, almost two years ago?” Ritz had begun.
Buck told him. He recalled that Ritz had been forthright and outspoken when they first met, admitting that he had no more idea than anyone else what might have caused the vanishings but coming down on the side of aliens from outer space. It had hit Buck as a wild idea for a buttoned-down pilot, but Buck hadn’t come to any conclusions at that time either. One theory was as good as the next. Ritz had told him of many strange encounters in the air that made it plausible that an airman might believe in such things.
That gave Buck the confidence to tell his own story without apology. It didn’t seem to faze Ritz, at least negatively. He listened quietly, and when Buck was through, Ritz simply nodded.
“So,” Buck said, “do I seem as weird to you now as you did to me when you were propounding the space aliens theory?”
“Not really,” Ritz said. “You’d be amazed at the number of people just like you that I’ve run into since the last time we talked. I don’t know what it all means, but I’m beginning to believe there are more people who agree with you than agree with me.”
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Buck said, “if I’m right, I’m still in big trouble. We are all gonna go through some real horror. But people who don’t believe are going to be in worse trouble than they could ever imagine.”
“I can’t imagine worse trouble than we’re in right now.”
“I know what you mean,” Buck said. “I used to apologize and try to make sure I wasn’t coming on too strong or being obnoxious, but let me just urge you to investigate what I’ve said. And don’t assume you’ve got a lot of time to do it.”
“That’s all part of the belief system, isn’t it?” Ritz said. “If what you say is true, the end isn’t that far off. Just a few years.”
“Exactly.”
“Then, if a fella was gonna check it out, he better get to it.”
“I couldn’t have said it better myself,” Buck said.
After refueling in Easton, Ritz spent the hours over the Atlantic asking “what if” questions. Buck had to keep assuring him he was not a student or a scholar, but he amazed even himself at what he remembered from Bruce’s teaching.
“It must have hurt like everything to lose a friend like that,” Ritz said.
“You can’t imagine.”
Leon Fortunato instructed everyone on the plane when to get off and where to stand for the cameras when they finally reached New Babylon.
“Mr. Fortunato,” Rayford said, careful to follow Leon’s wishes, at least in front of others, “McCullum and I don’t really need to be in the photograph, do we?”
“Not unless you’d like to go against the wishes of the potentate himself,” Fortunato said. “Please just do what you’re told.”
The plane was on the ground and secure in New Babylon for several minutes before the doors were opened and the Carpathia-controlled press was assembled. Rayford sat in the cockpit, still listening over the two-way intercom. “Remember,” Carpathia said, “no smiles. This is a grave, sad day. Appropriate expressions, please.”
Rayford wondered why anyone would have to be reminded not to smile on a day like this.
Next came Fortunato’s voice: “Potentate, apparently there’s a surprise waiting for you.”
“You know I do not like surprises,” Carpathia said.
“It seems your fiancée is waiting with the crowd.”
“That is totally inappropriate.”
“Would you like me to have her removed?”
“No, I am not sure how she might react. We certainly would not like a scene. I just hope she knows how to act. This is not her strength, as you know.”
Rayford thought Fortunato was diplomatic to not respond to that.
There was a rap at the cockpit door. “Pilot and copilot first,” Fortunato called out. “Let’s go!”
Rayford buttoned his dress uniform jacket and put his hat on as he stepped out of the cockpit. He and McCullum trotted down the steps and began the right side of a V of people who would flank the potentate, the last to disembark.
Next came the flight service crew, who seemed awkward and nervous. They knew enough not to giggle, but simply looked down and walked directly to their spots. Fortunato and two other Carpathia aides led the seven ambassadors down the steps. Rayford turned to watch Carpathia appear in the opening at the top of the stairs.
The potentate always seemed taller than he really was in these situations, Rayford thought. He appeared to have just shaved and washed his hair, though Rayford had not been aware he had the time for that. His suit, shirt, and tie were exquisite, and he was understatedly elegant in his accessories. He waited ever so briefly, one hand in his right suit pocket, the other carrying a thin, glove-leather portfolio. Always looking as if he’s busily at the task at hand, Rayford thought.
Rayford was amazed at Carpathia’s ability to strike just the right pose and expression. He appeared concerned, grave, and yet somehow purposeful and confident. As lights flashed all around him and cameras whirred, he resolutely descended the steps and approached a bank of microphones. Every network insignia on each microphone had been redesigned to include the letters “GCN,” the Global Community Network.
The only person he couldn’t fully control chose that moment to burst Carpathia’s bubble of propriety. Hattie Durham broke from the crowd and ran directly for him. Security guards who stepped in her way quickly realized who she was and let her through. She did everything, Rayford thought, except squeal in delight. Carpathia looked embarrassed and awkward for the first time in Rayford’s memory. It was as if he had to decide which would be worse: to brush her off or to welcome her to his side.
He chose the latter, but it was clear he was holding her at bay. She leaned in to kiss him and he bent to brush her cheek with his lips. When she turned to plant an open-mouthed kiss on his lips, he pulled her ear to his mouth and whispered sternly. Hattie looked stricken. Near tears, she began to pull away from him, but he grabbed her wrist and kept her standing next to him there at the microphones.
“It is so good to be back where I belong,” he said. “It is wonderful to reunite with loved ones. My fiancée is overcome with grief, as I am, at the horrible events that began so relatively few hours ago. This is a difficult time in which we live, and yet our horizons have never been wider, our challenges so great, our future so potentially bright.
“That may seem an incongruous statement in light of the tragedy and devastation we have all suffered, but we are all destined for prosperity if we commit to standing together. We will stand against any enemy of peace and embrace any friend of the Global Community.”
The crowd, including the press, applauded with just the right solemnity. Rayford was sick to his stomach, eager to get to his own apartment, and desperate to phone his wife as soon as he was sure it was daytime in the States.
“Don’t worry about me, buddy boy,” Ken Ritz told Buck as he helped him off the Learjet. “I’ll hangar this baby and find a place to crash for a few days. I’ve always wanted to tour this country, and it’s nice to be in a place that hasn’t been blown to bits. You know how to reach me. When you’re ready to head back, just leave a message. I’ll be checking messages frequently.”
Buck thanked him and grabbed his bag, slinging it over his shoulder. He headed toward the terminal. There, beyond the plate-glass window, he saw the enthusiastic wave of the wispy little old man with the flyaway hair, Chaim Rosenzweig. How he wanted this man to become a believer! Buck had come to love Chaim. That was not an expression he would have used about the other man back when he first met the scientist. It had been only a few years, but it seemed so long ago. Buck had been the youngest senior writer in the history of Global Weekly—in fact, in the history of international journalism. He had unabashedly campaigned for the job of profiling Dr. Rosenzweig as the Weekly’s “Person of the Year.”
Buck had first met the man a little more than a year before that assignment, after Rosenzweig had won a huge international prize for his invention (Chaim himself always called it more of a discovery) of a botanic formula. Rosenzweig’s concoction, some said without much exaggeration, allowed flora to grow anywhere—even on concrete.
The latter had never been proven; however, the desert sands of Israel soon began to blossom like a greenhouse. Flowers, corn, beans, you name it, every spare inch of the tiny nation was quickly cleared for agriculture. Overnight, Israel had become the richest nation in the world.
Other nations had been jealous to get hold of the formula. Clearly, this was the answer to any economic woes. Israel had gone from vulnerable, geographically defenseless country to a world power—respected, feared, envied.
Rosenzweig had become the man of the hour and, according to Global Weekly, “Person of the Year.”
Buck had enjoyed meeting him more than any powerful politician he had ever interviewed. Here was a brilliant man of science, humble and self-effacing, naive to the point of childlikeness, warm, personable, and unforgettable. He treated Buck like a son.
Other nations wanted Rosenzweig’s formula so badly that they assigned high-level diplomats and politicians to court him. He acceded to audiences from so many dignitaries that his life’s work had to be set aside. He was past retirement age anyway, but clearly here was a man more comfortable in a laboratory or a classroom than in a diplomatic setting. The darling of Israel had become the icon of world governments, and they all came calling.
Chaim had told Buck at one point that each suitor had his own not-so-hidden agenda. “I did my best to remain calm and diplomatic,” he told Buck, “but only because I was representing my mother country. I grew almost physically ill,” he added with his charming Hebrew-accented dialect, “when each began trying to persuade me that I would personally become the wealthiest man in the world if I would condescend to rent them my formula.”
The Israeli government was even more protective of the formula. They made it so clear that the formula was not for sale or rent that other countries threatened war over it, and Russia actually attacked. Buck had been in Haifa the night the warplanes came screaming in. The miraculous delivery of that country from any damage, injury, or death—despite the incredible aerial assault—made Buck a believer in God, though not yet in Christ. There was no other explanation for bombs, missiles, and warships crashing and burning all over the nation, yet every citizen and building escaping unscathed.
That had sent Buck, who had feared for his life that night, on a quest for truth that was satisfied only after the vanishings and his meeting Rayford and Chloe Steele.
It had been Chaim Rosenzweig who had first mentioned the name Nicolae Carpathia to Buck. Buck had asked the old man if any of those who had been sent to court him about the formula had impressed him. Only one, Rosenzweig had told him; a young midlevel politician from the little country of Romania. Chaim had been taken with Carpathia’s pacifist views, his selfless demeanor, and his insistence that the formula had the potential to change the world and save lives. It still rang in Buck’s ears that Chaim Rosenzweig had once told him, “You and Carpathia must meet one day. You would like each other.”
Buck could hardly remember when he had not been aware of Nicolae Carpathia, though his first exposure even to the name had been in that interview with Rosenzweig. Within days after the vanishings, the man who had seemingly overnight become president of Romania was a guest speaker at the United Nations. His brief address was so powerful, so magnetic, so impressive, that he had drawn a standing ovation even from the press—even from Buck. Of course, the world was in shock, terrified by the disappearances, and the time had been perfect for someone to step to the fore and offer a new international agenda for peace, harmony, and brotherhood.
Carpathia was thrust, ostensibly against his will, into power. He displaced the former secretary-general of the United Nations, reorganized it to include ten international mega-territories, renamed it the Global Community, moved it to Babylon (which was rebuilt and renamed New Babylon), and then set about disarming the entire globe.
It had taken more than Carpathia’s charismatic personality to effect all this. He had a trump card. He had gotten to Rosenzweig. He had convinced the old man and his government that the key to the new world was Carpathia’s and Global Community’s ability to broker Rosenzweig’s formula in exchange for compliance with international rules for disarmament. In exchange for a Carpathia-signed guarantee of at least seven years of protection from her enemies, Israel licensed to him the formula that allowed him to extract any promise he needed from any country in the world. With the formula, Russia could grow grain in the frozen tundra of Siberia. Destitute African nations became hothouses of domestic food sources and agricultural exports.
The power the formula allowed Carpathia to wield made it possible for him to bring the rest of the world willingly to its knees. Under the guise of his peacenik philosophies, member nations of the Global Community were required to destroy 90 percent of their weaponry and to donate the other 10 percent to Global Community headquarters. Before anyone realized what had happened, Nicolae Carpathia, now called the grand potentate of the Global Community, had quietly become the most militarily powerful pacifist in the history of the globe. Only those few nations that were suspicious of him kept back any firepower. Egypt, the new United States of Great Britain, and a surprisingly organized underground group of American militia forces had stockpiled just enough firepower to become a nuisance, an irritant, a trigger for Carpathia’s angry retaliation. In short, their insurrection and his incredible overreaction had been the recipe for World War III, which the Bible had symbolically foretold as the Red Horse of the Apocalypse.
The irony of all this was that the sweet-spirited and innocent Chaim Rosenzweig, who always seemed to have everyone else’s interests at heart, became an unabashed devotee of Nicolae Carpathia. The man whom Buck and his loved ones in the Tribulation Force had come to believe was Antichrist himself played the gentle botanist like a violin. Carpathia included Rosenzweig in many visible diplomatic situations and even pretended Chaim was part of his elite inner circle. It was clear to everyone else that Rosenzweig was merely tolerated and humored. Carpathia did what he wanted. Still, Rosenzweig nearly worshiped the man, once intimating to Buck that if anyone embodied the qualities of the long-sought Jewish Messiah, it was Nicolae himself.
That had been before one of Rosenzweig’s younger protégés, Rabbi Tsion Ben-Judah, had broadcast to the world the findings of his government-sanctioned quest for what Israel should look for in the Messiah.
Rabbi Ben-Judah, who had conducted a thorough study of ancient manuscripts, including the Old and New Testaments, had come to the conclusion that only Jesus Christ had fulfilled all the prophecies necessary to qualify for the role. To his regret, Rabbi Ben-Judah had come just short of receiving Christ and committing his life to him when the Rapture occurred. That sealed for sure his view that Jesus was Messiah and had come for his own. The Rabbi, in his midforties, had been left behind with a wife of six years and two teenage stepchildren, a boy and a girl. He had shocked the world, and especially his own nation, when he withheld the conclusion of his three-year study until a live international television broadcast. Once he had clearly stated his belief, he became a marked man.
Though Ben-Judah had been a student, protégé, and eventually a colleague of Dr. Rosenzweig, the latter still considered himself a nonreligious, nonpracticing Jew. In short, he did not agree with Ben-Judah’s conclusion about Jesus, but mostly it was simply something he didn’t want to talk about.
That, however, made him no less a friend of Ben-Judah’s and no less an advocate. When Ben-Judah, with the encouragement and support of the two strange, otherworldly preachers at the Wailing Wall, began sharing his message, first at Teddy Kollek Stadium and then in other similar venues around the world, everyone knew it was just a matter of time before he would suffer for it.
Buck knew that one reason Rabbi Tsion Ben-Judah was still alive was that any attempt on his life was treated by the two preachers, Moishe and Eli, as attempts on their own. Many had died mysterious and fiery deaths trying to attack those two. Most everyone knew that Ben-Judah was “their guy,” and thus he had so far eluded mortal harm.
That safety seemed at an end now, and that was why Buck was in Israel. Buck was convinced that Carpathia himself was behind the horror and tragedy that had come to Ben-Judah’s family. News reports said black-hooded thugs pulled up to Ben-Judah’s home in the middle of a sunny afternoon when the teenagers had just returned from Hebrew school. Two armed guards were shot to death, and Mrs. Ben-Judah and her son and daughter were dragged out into the street, decapitated, and left in pools of their own blood.
The murderers had driven away in a nondescript and unmarked van. Ben-Judah’s driver had raced to the rabbi’s university office as soon as he heard the news, and he had reportedly driven Ben-Judah to safety. Where, no one knew. Upon his return, the driver denied knowledge of Ben-Judah’s whereabouts to the authorities and the press, claiming he had not seen him since before the murders and that he merely hoped to hear from him at some point.