Assassins: Assignment: Jerusalem, Target: Antichrist (5 page)

“Can’t argue with that. But, um, where am I taking you?”

“Where do you think? Take a left, and I’ll take you out around the long way. Nobody will see you from the front of the building.”

“Then where?”

“My place.”

“What if the GC are there?”

“Then we’ll just keep going.”

“But if they’re not, you’ll try to nurse Floyd back to―”

“You’re not thinking, Mr. W―”

“Quit with the formality, Leah. You put a dying friend in my car, so just run down the program for me.”

“All right,” she said. “If we can beat GC to my apartment, I’m going to grab as much of my stuff as I can in sixty seconds. You know they’re on their way, as soon as they find me gone from Young.”

“Then where do I take you?”

“Where do you live?”

“Where do
I
live?”

“Bingo, Buck. I need to hide out. You and yours are the only people I know who have a place to hide.”

“But we’re not telling anyone wh―”

“Oh, yes, you are. You’re telling me. If you can’t trust me after all we’ve been through, you can’t trust anybody. I helped you discharge your patched-up pilot, Ritz. And I helped Doc with the miscarriage of guess-who’s baby. How’s that young woman doing, by the way?”

“Getting better.”

“There’s irony. Doc helps her beat the poison, and it’s going to kill him.”

“We lost Ritz.”

“Lost him?”

“Killed in Israel. Long story.”

Leah suddenly fell silent. She pointed directions and Buck lurched along, double-clutching and shifting till he thought his arm would fall off. “I liked that guy,” she managed finally.

“We all did. We hate this, every bit of it.”

“But you’re taking me in, cowboy. You know that, don’t you?”

“I can’t make that decision.”

She glared at him. “What are you going to do, leave me at the corner blindfolded while you and your compatriots vote? You owe me and you know it. This isn’t like me, inviting myself. But I’ve risked my life for you, and I have nowhere else to turn.”

Doc’s death rattle began. His labored, liquid breathing pierced Buck. “Should I pull over?”

“No,” she said. “There’s nothing I can do now but shoot him full of morphine.”

“That’ll help?”

“It’ll just make him pain free and maybe knock him out before he dies.”

“Something!” Floyd called out in a mournful wail. “Give me something!”

Leah spun and knelt in her seat, digging through her bag. Buck slowed involuntarily as he tried to watch. This was too much. Floyd was going to die while Buck was racing around in the car! No good-byes, no prayer, no comforting words. Buck felt as if he hardly knew the man, and he had been living with him for more than a year.

“Watch the road,” she said. “This will quiet him, but he’s never going to leave this car alive.”

Sobs rose in Buck’s throat. He wanted to call Chloe, to tell her and the others. But how do you do that on the phone? Doc’s dying and I’m bringing a nurse to live with us? Pulling into the safe house without notice, carrying Floyd’s corpse and a new houseguest wouldn’t be much easier. But Buck had run out of options.

Leah’s neighborhood, what was left of it, crawled with GC vehicles. The morphine had quieted Floyd. Leah slid onto the floor under the dash, and Buck avoided her street. He headed to Mount Prospect, hoping Floyd might at least have the privilege of dying in his own bed.

David Hassid walked Mac McCullum back to his quarters in the GC palace residential annex late that night. “There are things I haven’t told even Annie,” he said.

“I knew you had somethin’ to tell me, kid. Otherwise, you’d be walking her back, wouldn’t you?”

“We’re trying to not be seen together. I don’t even know if her meeting’s over.”

“So, what’s up?” Mac said as they stood in the corridor outside his door.

“You know I was on the palace antibugging installation task force.”

“Yeah, how’d you wangle that appointment?”

“Just kept telling Leon how important I thought it was to ensure total impregnability. I came in as a starry-eyed idealist, and they still see me that way. You know about the installation?”

Mac nodded. “Best in history and all that.”

“Yeah, except it needs constant monitoring.”

“Naturally.”

“I volunteered for that, and everybody was glad to let me have it,” David said.

“I’m listening.”

“So am I.”

“What?”

“I monitor the antibugging devices in Carpathia and Fortunato’s offices.”

“Go on.”

“My job is to find out if anyone’s trying to listen in. Well, I’m staying on top of it. And in the process I hear anything I want, any time I want.”

Mac shook his head. “I wouldn’t have minded not knowing that. Man, David, you’re sitting on a time bomb.”

“Don’t I know it. But it’s untraceable.”

“Guaranteed?”

“In one way it’s simple. In another it’s a miracle of technology. The stuff is actually being recorded onto a miniature disk embedded in the central processing unit of the computer that runs all of New Babylon.”

“The one people like to call the Beast.”

“Because it contains so much information about every living soul, yeah. But we both know the Beast is no machine.”

Mac folded his arms and leaned against the wall. “One thing I’ve learned in surveillance work is that you never want to have hard copies of anything. Anything can eventually fall into the wrong hands.”

“I know,” David said. “Let me tell you how I’ve protected it.”

Mac looked around. “You sure we’re secure here?”

“Hey! I’m in charge of that. What we’re saying could wind up on my disk, but no one else will ever hear it. I won’t hear it unless I choose to. If I do, it’s all categorized by date and time and location. And the fidelity is unparalleled.”

Mac whistled through his teeth. “Someone had to manufacture this for you.”

“That’s right.”

“Someone you trust with your life.”

“You’re looking at him.”

“So how’d you make sure no one ever finds it?”

“I’m not guaranteeing that. I’m saying they will never be able to access a thing from it. The disk is slightly smaller than an inch in diameter and, because of super-compression digital technology, can hold nearly ten years of spoken conversation if recorded twenty-four hours a day. Well, we don’t need that much time, do we?”

Mac shook his head. “They’ve got to have checks and balances.”

“They do. But they aren’t going to find anything.”

“What if they do?”

David shrugged. “Say someone catches on to me and starts looking for my bugs. They find ‘em, trace ‘em to the
CPU
, tear the whole thing apart, and find the disk. It is so heavily encrypted that if they tried random number combinations at the rate of ten thousand digits a second around the clock for a thousand years, they would have hardy begun. You know, even a fifteen-digit number has trillions of combinations, but theoretically it could be deciphered. How would you like to try to match an encrypted number containing three hundred million digits?”

Mac rubbed his eyes. “I was born too early. Where do you kids come up with this craziness? How can you access your disk if it’s that encrypted?”

David was just warming to his subject. “That’s the beauty of it. I know the formula. I know what pi to the millionth digit has to do with it and how the date and time to the current second have to be used as a multiplier, and how those figures float forward and backward depending on various random factors. The number that would unlock it now is different from the number a second from now, and it doesn’t progress rationally. But let’s say someone were to get far enough into my disk where the only step left was to match the encryption code, a miracle in itself. Even if they knew the number, only a lightning-speed computer grinding away for more than a year could enter it.”

“Has what you’ve heard been worth the work?”

“It will be to the Tribulation Force, don’t you think?”

“But how can you transmit it to them without jeopardizing your security or theirs?”

David pressed his back to the wall and slid to sit on the floor. “All that’s encrypted too, though certainly not to where it takes them forever to get into it. So far we have been able to communicate by both phone and Carpathia’s own cellular-solar technology on hidden scrambled bands. Of course, he’s constantly on me to find ways to monitor all citizens.”

“For their own good, no doubt.”

“Oh, absolutely. The potentate merely cares deeply about the morale of his global family.”

“But, David, can’t anything transmitted also be intercepted?”

David shrugged. “I like to think
I
can bug anything. But I’ve tested my own stuff against my tracing power, and unless I drop enough bread crumbs along the road, I’m powerless too. Random scrambling and channel switching, coordinated with miniaturization and speed that makes fiber optics look like a slow boat. . . well, nothing is beyond possible anymore.”

Mac stood and stretched. “Ever wonder about this stuff? Like what Dr. Ben-Judah says about Satan being the prince and power of the air? Transmitting through space and all that…”

“Scares me to death,” David said, still sitting. “It means I’m on the front lines against him. I didn’t know what I signed on for when I became a believer, but I wound up on the right side, didn’t I? It’s too late to change my mind. I walk the same halls with Antichrist himself, and I play around in the air with the devil. I’m careful, but the mark of the beast will change everything. There won’t be any believers working here after that, unless they find a way to fake the mark. And who would want to do that?”

“Not me,” Mac said, unlocking his door. “We’re all going to wind up in one safe house or another one of these days. I sure hope mine’s the same as yours.”

David was so moved by that compliment that he was too stunned to respond. “Long flight Friday,” Mac added. “I’ve got to find out who’s tagging along with Leon and whether I can get Abdullah in here in time to help.”

The tension of his role, exciting as it should have been for a young man, weighed on David. But he headed toward his own quarters with a lighter step.

Floyd was quiet. The morphine must have done its work. Buck slowed as he drew within a mile of the safe house. He peered in the rearview mirror. He had not been followed. His phone startled him. “Buck here,” he said.

“You were going to keep me posted,” Chloe said.

“Almost home. A few minutes.”

“Is Floyd with you?”

“Yeah, but he’s not well.”

“Hattie and I changed his bed and freshened the room.”

“Good. I’m going to need help with him.”

“Is he all right, Buck? Are you?”

“I’ll see you soon, hon.”

“Buck! Is everything all right?”

“Please, Chloe. I’ll see you in a minute.”

“All right,” she said, sounding displeased.

He clicked the phone shut and dropped it in his pocket. He glanced at Leah. “Is he going to last the night?”

“I’m sorry, Buck. He’s gone.”

Buck slammed on the brake and they lurched forward as the Rover slid in the dirt. “What?”

“I’m sorry.”

Buck turned in his seat. Leah had covered Floyd’s face again, but the sudden stop had pressed his body against the back of the front seat.

“Do you know who this man is?” Buck said, his own desperate voice scaring him.

“I know he was a good doctor and courageous.”

“He risked his life to tell me where the GC took Chloe. Came there himself to help her escape. Stayed up for days with Hattie. Saved her life. The miscarriage. Delivered our son. Was never too big to pitch in with the hard work.”

“I’m so sorry, Buck.”

Buck pulled the sheet from Floyd’s face. In the darkness he could barely make it out. He turned on the inside light and recoiled at the death mask. Floyd’s teeth were bared, his eyes open, still filled with blood around the pupils. “Oh, Doc!” he said.

Leah turned in her seat and rummaged in her bag for latex gloves. She carefully closed Floyd’s eyes and mouth, massaging his cheeks until he looked more asleep than dead. “Help me with that shoulder,” she said. Buck took one side and Leah the other, and they tugged at the body until Floyd looked more naturally reposed. Buck drove slowly, avoiding ruts and bumps.

When he pulled up to the safe house, the curtain parted and he saw Chloe peer out. She was nursing Kenny. He drove around the side but stopped short of the backyard. “Give me a minute,” he said. “You don’t mind staying here with him―”

“Go,” Leah said.

Chloe held open the back door with one hand, Kenny now over her other shoulder. “Who’s with you?” she said. “I didn’t see Floyd.”

Buck was spent. He leaned forward to peck Chloe on the cheek, then did the same to Kenny, just as the baby burped. “Can you put him down?” he said.

“Buck―”

“Please,” he said. “I need to talk to everybody.”

The others were already waiting in the kitchen. Chloe went to put the baby down and quickly returned. Rayford sat at the table, and it was clear from his clothes he had spent hours working in the basement. Hattie sat on the table. Tsion, with a sad, knowing look, leaned against the refrigerator.

Buck found it hard to speak, and Chloe came to him, wrapping an arm around his waist. “We have another martyr,” he said, and told the story, including that Leah was waiting in the car with Floyd’s body.

Tsion hung his head. “God bless him,” he said, his voice thick.

Hattie looked stricken. “He caught that from me? He died because of me?”

Chloe wrapped Buck in her arms and wept with him. “Are any of us susceptible?”

Buck shook his head. “We would have had symptoms by now. Floyd had symptoms but didn’t tell us.”

Buck stole a glance at Rayford. They would all look to him. Tsion would pray, but Rayford would walk them through the decision on Leah, the burial, everything. Yet Rayford had not moved. He sat without expression, forearms on the table. When Rayford’s eyes met his, Buck sensed he was demanding to know what was expected.

Where was Rayford the Leader, their take-charge guy?