CHAPTER 6
As Rayford followed the wheelchair down the hall, barely able to breathe, his mind reeled with his mistakes. Were it somehow possible to extricate himself from this, he would be the most decisive leader the Tribulation Force could imagine.
They repaired to an office even smaller than the original. Pinkerton Stephens opened the door and neatly pivoted his chair so he could hold it open and leave room for Rayford and Albie to enter. He pointed Rayford to a steel gray chair near the wall, facing a desk of the same color and material. Albie sat to Rayford’s left.
Stephens let the door shut and locked it, breathed something nasally about the room being secure and not bugged, then steered himself to the other side of the desk, plowing a standard chair out of the way. He maneuvered his wheelchair up to and under the desk, leaned forward and rested his elbows atop it, and folded his hand and a half under his chin.
Part of Rayford could hardly bear to look at the man; another part could not take his eyes off him. “Now then,” Stephens began slowly, “Deputy Commander Elbaz—if that’s your real name—you may restrap your side arm and keep your hand off it. We’re both on the same team, and you have nothing to fear. As for you, Mr. Berry, while you may be out of uniform and likely using an alias yourself, neither do you have anything to fear. You are about to be pleasantly surprised to find that the three of us are on the same team.”
Rayford wanted to say, “I doubt it,” but feared he would emit no sound if he tried.
“Shall we start over, gentlemen?” Stephens said.
If only . . . , Rayford thought.
“Mr. Elbaz, as the superior officer, I believe it falls to you to begin our session with the proper protocol.”
“He is risen,” Albie said, miserably in Rayford’s opinion.
“Who is risen indeed?” Stephens responded, and Rayford attributed the mispronunciation to the man’s malady, whatever it was. Albie just stared at Stephens. Rayford noticed that while Albie had taken his hand off his gun, he had not fastened the strap. Rayford wondered if he could grab the gun, kill them both, and get away with Hattie.
“Commander Elbaz, you have business here, and I will let you get to it after I satisfy the curiosity on both your parts. I realize that I am difficult to look at, that you both have to be wondering what happened to me, and that as hard as I have worked on my speech, I am difficult to understand. Have either of you ever seen someone with most of his face missing?”
Both shook their heads, and Stephens placed his good thumb beneath his chin. “Once I remove my prosthesis, I will be unable to be understood at all, and so I will not attempt to speak.”
Snap!
Rayford flinched as Stephens unsnapped the plastic covering under his chin.
Snap! Snap!
As he continued, it became clear that the prosthesis was all one piece that substituted for most of his chin, nose, eye sockets, and forehead. It was held in place by metal fasteners embedded in what was left of the original facial bones. Stephens kept it in place with his stubfingered hand and said, “Prepare yourselves; I won’t make you look long.”
Albie held up a hand. “Mr. Stephens, this is unnecessary. We have business here, yes, and I don’t see the need to—”
He stopped when Stephens pulled the piece away from his face, revealing a monstrous cavity. Only what was left of his lips hinted at anything human, and Rayford fought to keep from covering his own eyes. The man had no nose and his entire eyeballs were exposed. Through gaps in his forehead, Rayford believed he could see through to the brain.
Rayford could breathe again when Stephens refastened the appliance. “Forgive me, gentlemen,” he said, “but just as I assumed, neither of you really saw what I wanted you to see.”
“And what was that?” Albie said, clearly shaken.
“Something that explains what I see on your faces.”
“I’m lost,” Rayford said.
“Oh, but you’re not,” Stephens said with a twisted smile. “You once were lost, but now you’re found. Would you like me to remove the prosthesis again and—”
“No,” Rayford and Albie said in unison. And Albie added, “Just get to the point.”
Pinkerton folded his hands beneath his chin again, and his eyes seemed to bore into Albie. “How did I respond when you said, ‘He is risen’?”
Albie seemed to have regained his voice and composure. “Sounded like you said, ‘Who is risen indeed?’”
“That’s what I said. What’s your answer?”
Albie shifted and cleared his throat. “I believe the protocol is that I say, ‘He is risen,’ and that you respond, ‘He is risen indeed.’”
“Fair enough, but my question remains. Who is risen indeed?”
So, Rayford concluded, somehow he’s onto me. And yet he sat silent, knowing a moment of truth had arrived and waiting to see what would come of it.
“Humor me one more time, Commander.”
Albie sighed and glanced at Rayford. Albie’s phony mark sure looked real. “He is risen,” Albie muttered.
“Who is risen indeed?” Stephens said, forcing another smile through the misshapen lips.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” Albie said. “I’m tired of this game.”
“Christ!” Stephens whispered excitedly. “Come on, brothers! The answer to the question is ‘Christ!’ Christ is risen indeed! I see the marks of the believer on both your foreheads! You missed mine for the horror of the rest of my face. Now look!”
He unfastened the prosthesis from the top this time and merely peeled it back. Rayford and Albie leaned forward, and there, amidst the gore, the mark was clear. As Stephens reapplied the piece, Rayford turned and grabbed Albie’s head in both hands. He cupped the back with his left hand and rubbed the forehead hard with his right.
“Satisfied?” Albie said, smiling.
Rayford felt like jelly. He flopped back in his chair, panting and unable to move.
“So who are you anyway?” Stephens said.
Rayford leaned forward, “I’m—”
“Oh, I know who you are. I knew almost immediately, though I like the new look. But who’s this character?”
Albie introduced himself.
Stephens leaned forward and shook his hand. He nodded to Rayford. “I’ve got Mr. Steele completely dumbfounded, don’t I?”
“That’s an understatement,” Rayford said.
“You and I both worked for Carpathia at the same time, Rayford, and before that your son-in-law worked for me.”
“Steve Plank?”
“In the flesh, or what’s left of it. Crushed, chopped up, burned, and left for dead by the wrath of the Lamb earthquake. I’d been on the edge for weeks, reading Buck’s stuff, realizing things about Carpathia. I decided that if Buck and other believers were right about a global earthquake, I was in at the sound of the first tremor. I was praying the prayer as the building came down.”
Rayford shook his head. “But why the ruse—why work for the GC again?”
“It came to me in the hospital. No one, including me, knew who I was. When my memory returned, I made up a name and a history. That was twenty-one months ago, and all through a year of therapy and rehab, I had time to think about where I wanted to land. I wanted to take Carpathia down from the inside.”
“But why not tell anyone? Everyone thought you were dead.”
“The best secrets are kept between two people, providing one of them is dead. One of the most shameless stunts Carpathia pulled was how he treated Hattie Durham. I got myself into the Peacekeeping Force and kept my eye on her till I tracked her out here. I prayed this day would come. I’ll follow orders, obey the rules, do my job, and you’ll rescue her.”
David panicked. After sitting through the surreal performance by Carpathia, Fortunato, and Viv Ivins, he was in line to leave with the others. But Carpathia stood by the door, accepting embraces, handshakes, kisses, and bowing from each director. The shameless Hickman fell to his knees and wrapped his arms around Nicolae’s knees, weeping loudly. The potentate rolled his eyes and gave Fortunato a look that would have put a wart on a gravestone.
When he was about sixth in line, David prayed desperately. What was he to do? In the flesh he wanted to fake whatever he had to fake in order to not be found out and jeopardize the rest of the Force. But he could not, would not, bow the knee to Antichrist. It was impossible that his breach of etiquette would go unnoticed. From what he could tell, it appeared he would be the only director who did not gush over the resurrected leader.
“God, help me!” he prayed silently. Was this the end? Should he merely bolt now and hope for the best? Or shake Carpathia’s hand and say something neutral: “Glad you’re feeling better after that dying thing”? “Welcome back”?
Except for his obvious disgust with Hickman, Carpathia oozed graciousness and humility as his people poured on the sugar. “Oh, thank you. I am grateful for your partnership and support. Great days ahead. Yes. Yes.”
Now second in line, David was nauseated. Literally. His tender scalp vibrated against the bandages with every beat of his heart. He tried to pray, tried to be sensitive to what God wanted him to do. But as the director in front of him finally pulled away from a long embrace of the potentate, David stood there blankly.
Carpathia spread his arms and said, “David, my beloved David.”
David could not move and sensed the turning heads of those nearby. Carpathia looked puzzled, seeming to beckon him. David said, “Pothen—potenth—Exshell—” and pitched forward. His last image before crashing to the floor, head banging the marble, was that he had vomited all over Carpathia.
“How you doing, Zeke?” Buck said.
He pictured the all-black-wearing, flabby forger huddled underground at his dad’s one-pump filling station in ravaged Des Plaines. “I’m OK,” came the whispered reply. “I been watchin’ TV to keep from gettin’ bored, and I got all kinds of food down here. Kinda dark though. And ’course there’s nothing on but all this Carpathia junk.”
“Have you been keeping an eye on the GC?”
“Yeah, every time I hear a car I scoot over to my monitor and watch what they do. Some of these people aren’t even our real customers. They just see the pump and stop in. Then the GC car swings over from across the road and parks right in front of ’em.”
“A jeep?”
“No, it’s a little four door, a dark compact.”
“Good.”
“Why’s that good, Mr. Williams?”
“Because when I come for you, I’m going to be in a white Hummer, and it’ll squash a compact like a bug.”
“It’s not a VW, sir. It’s—”
“That was just an expression, Zeke.”
“Oh, I getcha.”
“So they don’t pull up in front and behind the car?”
“No, there’s only one GC car over there. I looked.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. I know I shouldn’t’ve, but I was real bored, so I sneaked up the stairs where I was still in the dark and could see across the way. You know this road never really got rebuilt. They threw some asphalt on it a little over a year ago, but there was no real base, so it went to potholes and now it’s just chunks of pavement. We don’t get much traffic.”
“You don’t think the GC knows you’re there, do you?”
“Nope, and I’m real sure they don’t know there’s a basement. There didn’t use to be. Dad and I dug it ourselves.”
“Where’s the debris?”
“Out back, through the door at the back of the service bay.”
“Hmm, never noticed it. How close are the secret stairs to the underground?”
“Maybe ten feet. It’s kinda hidden in the corner.”
“So if I was to drive to the back of the station, I’d see a door right about in the middle of the building, a door you could get to by sneaking up the stairs and moving about ten feet along the back wall.”
“Yeah.”
“So if you knew exactly when I was coming, you could sneak out the back without the GC stakeout guys seeing you.”
“They’d probably see you, though.”
“I’ll worry about that. We don’t want them to know you were ever in the underground. You come out and crawl in the back and I’ll have a blanket you can hide under.”
“I’ll have a lot of my stuff.”
“That’s OK. If they see me and stop me, I’ll bluff my way out of it, but I’m going to try to do it in a way where they won’t even know I’m there.”
A beep told Buck he had another call. It was Rayford. “Zeke, let me call you back. It could be a while, so be packed.” He pushed the button. “Buck here.”
“Buck, you’re not going to believe who I just prayed with.”
“Hattie?”
“No, you’d never guess.”
David awoke in the palace hospital during the wee hours to someone caressing his hand.
“Don’t speak,” she whispered. It was Nurse Palemoon. “You’re a celebrity.”
“I am?”
“Shh. It’s all over the palace that you blew chunks on Carpathia.”
David was on an IV again. He felt better. “Did you change my dressing?”
“Yes, now be quiet.”
“I thought you were off duty.”
“So did I, but I was yanked in here because I was the one who had stitched you up, and you know no doctor was going to be dragged out of bed.”
“Hannah, I’ve got to get out of here.”
“No, you should have been with us a few days anyway, and now you’ve got the chance.”
“I can’t and neither can you.” He quickly whispered what he had learned at the meeting. “We’ve got to be out of here before thirty days from today or be prepared for the consequences.”
“I’m prepared, David. Aren’t you?”
“You know what I mean. I’ve got to find my fiancée and my pilots, and if you know of any other believers—”
“Fiancée? You’re attached?”
“The Phoenix cargo chief, Annie Christopher.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, David. If she were here, she’d be in the system by now.”
“Would you check again for me? And see if you can get Mac McCullum and Abdullah Smith to visit me.”
“That’s quite an alias, Albie,” Plank said. “You want me to report that a Deputy Commander Elbaz came in here with the proper credentials and that I followed the letter of the law?”
“I’m so visible on the GC database, no one will even question it,” Albie said. “They’ll probably wonder why they haven’t met me yet.”
“And soon enough,” Rayford said, “I’ll be enlisted and we’ll make sure Albie reports to me. I just worry about compromising our inside guy, the one who sets this stuff up for us.”
“How will they trace it to him or even to the palace?” Albie said.
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s precluded that, but we’ll have to let him know what’s happening.”
Plank led them out the door and down the hall, past the receptionist and into the cell area. “I heard a noise back there a minute ago,” Mrs. Garner called out from the desk.
“Trouble?”
“Somethin’ banging, that’s all.”
Plank led the men to Hattie’s door and knocked but heard no response. “Ma’am,” he called out, “GC personnel are here to transport you back to Buffer.” He winked at Rayford and Albie. “May I come in, ma’am?”
Plank fished for his key ring, unlocked the door, and pushed it open about an inch until it met resistance. Albie and Rayford stepped forward to help, but Plank said, “I got this.”
He backed up his chair, then threw it forward, bashing into the door and pushing past the bed that had been wedged against it. “Oh, no!” he said, and Rayford stepped over him, driving his shoulder into the door to force his way in.
The room was dark, but when he flipped the light switch, sparks startled him from the ceiling where the fixture had been. Light from the hall showed the fixture now on the floor, knotted at the end of a sheet. The other end was tight around Hattie’s neck, and she lay there twitching.
“Tried to hang herself from a flimsy light,” Plank said, as Albie leaped past him and slid up to Hattie on his knees. He and Rayford dug and tore at the sheet until it came loose. Rayford gently turned her on her back, and she flopped like a dead woman. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, he saw that hers were open, pupils dilated.
“She was moving!” Albie whispered, grabbing her belt and lifting her hips off the floor. Rayford plugged her nose, forced her mouth open, and clamped his mouth over hers. Her tiny frame rose and fell as he breathed into her.
“Shut the door,” Albie told Plank.
“You don’t need the light?”
“Shut it!” he whispered desperately. “We’re going to save this girl, but nobody but us is going to know it.”
Plank steered his chair to push the bed out of the way, then shut the door.
“She’s got a pulse,” Albie said. “You OK, Ray? Want me to take over?”
Rayford shook his head and continued until Hattie began to cough. Finally she gulped in huge breaths and blew them out. Rayford sat heavily on the floor, his back against the wall. Hattie cried and swore. “I can’t even kill myself,” she hissed. “Why didn’t you let me die? I can’t go back to Buffer!”
She collapsed in tears and lay rocking on the floor on her knees and elbows.
“She doesn’t recognize anybody,” Albie said.
Hattie looked up, squinting. Rayford leaned over and turned on a small lamp. “No, I don’t,” she said, peering at Albie and glancing at Rayford. “I know Commander Pinkerton here, but who are you losers?”
Albie pointed to Rayford. “He saved your life. I’m just his loser friend.”
Hattie sat in the middle of the floor, her knees pulled up, hands clasped around them. And she swore again.
“You’re not going to Buffer, Hattie,” Rayford said finally, and it was clear she recognized his voice.
“What?” she said, wonder in her voice.
“Yeah, it’s me,” Rayford said. “There are no secrets in this room.”
“You came?” she squealed, scrambling to him and trying to embrace him.
He held her away. She looked at Plank. “But . . .”
“We’re all in this together,” Rayford said wearily.
“I almost killed myself,” Hattie said.
“Actually,” Albie said, “you did.”
“What?”
“You’re dead.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You want out of here? You want the GC off your back? You go out of here dead.”
“What are you saying?”
“You called your old friend to rescue you. He refused. You were despondent. When you gave up hope and were convinced you were going to Buffer, you lost all hope, wrote a note, and hung yourself. We came to get you, discovered you too late, and what could we do? Report the suicide and dispose of the body.”
“I did write a note,” she said. “See?” She pointed to a slip of paper that had fallen off the bed.
Rayford picked it up and read it under the lamp. “Thanks for nothing, old FRIENDS!!!” she had written. “I vowed never to go back to Buffer, and I meant it. You can’t win them all.”
“Sign it,” Rayford said.
Hattie massaged her neck and tried to clear her throat. She found her pen and signed the note.
“How long can you hold your breath?” Albie asked.
“Not long enough to kill myself, apparently.”
“We’re going to wheel you out of here under a sheet, and you’re going to have to look dead when we load you on the plane too. Can you pull that off?”
“I’ll do whatever I have to.” She looked at Plank. “You’re in on this too?”
“The less you know, the better,” he said. He glanced at Albie, then Rayford. “She never needs to know, far as I’m concerned.” They nodded.
Plank told them to leave the sheet the way it was, with the light fixture still embedded in one end. “Use the other sheet from the bed to cover her, and do it now.”
Rayford ripped the sheet from the bed, and Hattie lay on the bare mattress. He floated the sheet atop her and let it settle. Plank opened the door. “Mrs. Garner!” he called, “we’ve had a tragedy here!”
“Oh my—”
“No, don’t come! Just stay where you are. The prisoner hanged herself, and the GC will dispose of the remains.”
“Oh, Commander! I—is that what I heard?”
“Possibly.”
“Could I have done something? Should I have?”
“There’s nothing you could have done, ma’am. Let’s let these men do their work. Bring the gurney from Utility.”
“I don’t have to look, do I, sir?”
“I’ll handle it. Just get it for me. I’ll dictate a report later.”
Despite her ashen countenance and protestations, Rayford noticed that Mrs. Garner watched the “body” until it was loaded into the minivan. He was amazed at Hattie’s ability to look motionless under that sheet.
Plank agreed to call ahead to the former Carpathia Memorial Airstrip to clear the way for Deputy Commander Elbaz and his driver to pull Judy Hamilton’s vehicle right up to their fighter jet in order to load a body for transport. No, they would not need any assistance and would appreciate as little fuss as possible over it.
Hattie slipped back under the sheet a few miles from the airstrip, and though curious eyes peered through the windows, Rayford and Albie carried her aboard without arousing undue suspicion.