Nicolae: The Rise Of The Antichrist (34 page)

Buck brought Amanda, Chloe, Rayford, and Tsion up to speed on their new laptop computers. Tsion had been using his secure phone to talk to everyone at Loretta’s place, which they began calling their “safe house.” More than once Loretta said, “That man sounds like he’s next door.”

“That’s cellular technology for you,” Buck said.

Tsion required daily visits from his fellow Tribulation Force members, just to keep his spirits up. He was fascinated by the new technology, and he spent much of his time monitoring the news. He was tempted to try to communicate via E-mail to many of his spiritual children around the world; however, he feared they might be tortured in attempts to determine his whereabouts. He asked Buck to ask Donny how he might go about communicating widely without the recipients of his missives suffering for it. The solution was simple. He would merely put his messages on a central bulletin board, and no one would know who was accessing them.

Tsion spent much of his days poring over Bruce’s material and getting it into publishable shape. That was made easier by Buck’s getting it to Tsion on disk. Frequently Tsion uploaded portions and in essence broadcast them to certain members of the Tribulation Force. He was especially impressed with what Bruce had to say about Chloe and Amanda. In his personal journal Bruce frequently mentioned his dream that they work together, researching, writing, and teaching cell groups and house churches.

Eventually it was agreed that Amanda would not return to New Babylon until after Rayford got back from his flight to Rome. That would give her a few more days with Chloe to plan a ministry similar to what Bruce had outlined. They didn’t know where it would take them or what the opportunities would be, but they enjoyed working together and seemed to learn more that way.

Buck was glad Verna Zee was keeping her distance. Much of the staff of the Chicago office was deployed to various bombed-out cities to report on the resultant chaos. There was no doubt in Buck’s mind that the black horse of plagues and famine and the pale horse of death had come galloping in on the heels of the red horse of war.

On Wednesday evening, Amanda drove Rayford to Milwaukee for his flight to Iraq.

“Why couldn’t Mathews fly on his own plane to see Carpathia?” she said.

“You know Carpathia. He likes to take the upper hand by being the most deferential and kind. He not only sends a plane for you, he also comes along and accompanies you back.”

“What does he want from Mathews?”

“Who knows? It could be anything. The increase in converts we’re seeing has to be very troubling for Mathews. We are one faction that doesn’t buy into the one-world faith routine.”

At six Thursday morning, Loretta’s household was awakened by the phone. Chloe grabbed it. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and told Buck, “Loretta’s got it. It’s Hattie.”

Buck leaned close to listen with her. “Yes,” Loretta was saying, “you woke me, darlin’, but it’s all right. Captain Steele said you might call.”

“Well, I’m flying through Milwaukee on my way back to New Babylon, and I purposely scheduled a six-hour layover. Tell anybody there who cares that I’ll be at Mitchell Field if they want to talk to me. They shouldn’t feel obligated, and I won’t be offended if they don’t come.”

“Oh, they’ll come, hon. Don’t you worry about that.”

That same hour was three o’clock in the afternoon in Baghdad when Rayford’s commercial flight landed. He had planned to stay onboard to wait for the short flight on to New Babylon a little over an hour later, but his cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He wondered if this would be the call from Buck, or from Carpathia about Buck, that would end the speculation and suspicion of the Tribulation Force. They all knew it couldn’t be long before Buck’s position was jeopardized past the point of safety. Rayford also had a fleeting thought that this might be a call from Hattie Durham. He had waited as long as he could before heading back, hoping to connect with her before her return. Like Carpathia and Fortunate, he had no luck trying to reach her by phone in Denver.

But the call was from his copilot, Mac McCullum. “Get off that plane, Steele, and stretch your legs. Your taxi is here.”

“Hey, Mac! What’s that mean?”

“It means the big boss doesn’t want to wait. Meet me at the helipad on the other side of the terminal. I’m coptering you back to headquarters.”

Rayford had wanted to put off his return to New Babylon as long as possible, but at least a helicopter ride was a diversion. He envied McCullum’s ability to easily switch back and forth between copiloting jumbo jets and flying whirlybirds. Rayford hadn’t piloted a helicopter since his military days more than twenty years before.

Global Community Weekly was released to the public every Thursday, with the following Monday’s date on the cover. Buck tingled with excitement merely anticipating that day’s issue.

At the safe house it was decided that Amanda and Chloe would drive up to Milwaukee to pick up Hattie. Loretta would come home from the church office in time to host a small luncheon for her. Buck would go to the office to see the first copies of the magazine and head for Loretta’s house when he got the call from Chloe that she and Amanda and Hattie were home.

Buck had gone out on a limb with his cover story.

Purporting, as usual, to take a neutral, objective, journalistic viewpoint, Buck started with much of the material Bruce would have preached the Sunday morning of his own funeral. Buck did the writing, but he assigned reporters from every Global Community Weekly office still standing in several countries to interview local and regional clergymen about the prophecies in the book of Revelation.

For some reason, his reporters-most of them skeptics-went at this task with glee.

Buck was faxed, modemed, phoned, couriered, and mailed dispatches from all over the world. His cover story title, and the specific question he wanted his reporters to ask religious leaders, was “Will we suffer the ‘wrath of the Lamb’?”

Buck had enjoyed this self-assigned task more than all the other cover stories he had ever done. That included his Man of the Year stories, even the one on Chaim Rosenzweig. He had spent nearly three days and nights, hardly sleeping, collating, contrasting, and comparing the various reports.

He, of course, could detect fellow believers in some of the comments. Despite the skepticism and cynicism of most of the reporters, tribulation-saint pastors and a few converted Jews were quoted that the “wrath of the Lamb” predicted in Revelation 6 was literal and imminent. The vast majority of the quotes were from clergy formerly representing various and sundry religions and denominations, but now serving Enigma Babylon One World Faith. Almost to a person, these men and women “faith guides” (no one was called a reverend or a pastor or a priest anymore) took their lead from Pontifex Maximus Peter Mathews. Buck himself had talked to Mathews. His view, echoed dozens of times, was that the book of Revelation was “wonderful, archaic, beautiful literature, to be taken symbolically, figuratively, metaphorically. This earthquake,” Mathews had told Buck by phone, a smile in his voice, “could refer to anything. It may have happened already. It may refer to something someone imagined going on in heaven. Who knows? It may be some story related to the old theory of an eternal man in the sky who created the world. I don’t know about you, but I have not seen any apocalyptic horsemen. I haven’t seen anyone die for their religion. I haven’t seen anyone ‘slain for the word of God,’ as the previous verses say. I haven’t seen anyone in a white robe. And I don’t expect to endure any earthquake. Regardless of your view on the person or concept of God, or a god, hardly anyone today would imagine a supreme spirit-being full of goodness and light subjecting the entire earth-already suffering from so recent a devastating war-to a calamity like an earthquake.”

“But,” Buck had asked him, “are you not aware that this idea of fearing the ‘wrath of the Lamb’ is a doctrine still preached in many churches?”

“Of course,” Mathews had responded. “But these are the same holdovers from your right-wing, fanatical, fundamentalist factions who have always taken the Bible literally.

These same preachers, and I daresay many of their parishioners, are the ones who take the creation account-the Adam and Eve myth, if you will-literally.

They believe the entire world was under water at the time of Noah and that only he and his three sons and their wives survived to begin the entire human race as we now know it.”

“But you, as a Catholic, as the former pope-”

“Not just the former pope, Mr. Williams, also a former Catholic. I feel a great responsibility as leader of the Global Community’s faith to set aside all trappings of parochialism. I must, in the spirit of unity and conciliation and ecumenism, be prepared to admit that much Catholic thought and scholarship was just as rigid and narrow-minded as that which I’m criticizing here.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t care to be too specific, at the risk of offending those few who still like to refer to themselves as Catholics, but the idea of a literal virgin birth should be seen as an incredible leap of logic. The idea that the Holy Roman Catholic Church was the only true church was almost as damaging as the evangelical Protestant view that Jesus was the only way to God. That assumes, of course, that Jesus was, as so many of my Bible-worshiping friends like to say, ‘the only begotten Son of the Father.’ By now I’m sure that most thinking people realize that God is, at most, a spirit, an idea, if you will. If they like to infuse him, or it, or her, with some characteristics of purity and goodness, it only follows that we are all sons and daughters of God.”

Buck had led him. “The idea of heaven and hell then . . . ?”

“Heaven is a state of mind. Heaven is what you can make of your life here on earth. I believe we’re heading toward a Utopian state. Hell? More damage has been done to more tender psyches by the wholly mythical idea that-well, let me put it this way: Let’s say those fundamentalists, these people who believe we’re about to suffer the ‘wrath of the Lamb,’ are right that there is a loving, personal God who cares about each one of us. How does that jibe? Is it possible he would create something that he would eventually burn up?

It makes no sense.”

“But don’t Christian believers, the ones you’re trying to characterize, say that God is not willing that any should perish? In other words, he doesn’t send people to hell. Hell is judgment for those who don’t believe, but everyone is given the opportunity.”

“You have summarized their position well, Mr. Williams. But, as I’m sure you can see, it just doesn’t hold water.”

Early that morning, before the door was unlocked, Buck picked up the shrink-

wrapped bundle of Global Community Weeklys and lugged them inside. The secretaries would distribute one to each desk, but for now Buck ripped off the plastic and set a magazine before him. The cover, which had been tweaked at the international headquarters office, was even better than Buck had hoped. Under the logo was a stylized illustration of a huge mountain range splitting from one end to the other. A red moon hung over the scene, and the copy read: “Will You Suffer the Wrath of the Lamb?”

Buck turned to the extra-long story inside that carried his byline. Characteristic of a Buck Williams story, he had covered all the bases. He had quoted leaders from Carpathia and Mathews to local faith guides. There was even a smattering of quotes from the man on the street.

The biggest coup, in Buck’s mind, was a sidebar carrying a brief but very cogent and articulate word study by none other than Rabbi Tsion Ben-Judah. He explained who the sacrificed Lamb was in Scripture and how the imagery had begun in the Old Testament and was fulfilled by Jesus in the New Testament.

Buck had been suspicious about not having been called on the carpet by anyone but his old friend Steve Plank regarding his potential involvement in the escape of Tsion Ben-Judah. Quoting Tsion extensively in his own sidebar could have made it seem as if Buck were rubbing in the faces of his superiors his knowledge of Ben-Judah’s whereabouts. But he had headed that off. When the story was filed and sent via satellite to the various print plant facilities, Buck added a note that “Dr. Ben-Judah learned of this story over the Internet and has submitted his view via computer from an undisclosed location.”

Also amusing to Buck, if anything about this cosmic subject could be amusing, was that one of his enterprising young reporters from Africa took it. upon himself to interview geological scholars in a university in Zimbabwe. Their conclusion? “The idea of a global earthquake is, on the face of it, illogical. Earthquakes are caused by faults, by underground plates rubbing against each other. It’s cause and effect. The reason it happens in certain areas at certain times is, logically, because it’s not happening other places at the same time. These plates move and crash together because they have nowhere else to go. You never hear of simultaneous earthquakes. There is not one in North America and one in South America at precisely the same time. The odds against one earth-wide geological event, which would really be simultaneous earthquakes all over the globe, are astronomical.”

McCullum landed the chopper on the roof of the Global Community international headquarters building in New Babylon. He helped carry Rayford’s bags into the elevator that took them past Carpathia’s Suite 216, an entire floor of offices and conference rooms.

Rayford had never understood its address, as it was not on the second floor at all.

Carpathia and his senior staff occupied the top floor of the eighteen-story building.

Rayford hoped Carpathia would not know precisely when they arrived. He assumed he would have to face the man when he flew him to Rome to pick up Mathews, but Rayford wanted to get unpacked, freshen up, and settle in at his cfondo before getting back on board a plane again right away. He was grateful they were not intercepted. He had a couple of hours before takeoff. “See you on the 216, Mac,” he said.

The phones began ringing at the Global Weekly office even before anyone else began to arrive. Buck let the answering machine take the calls, and it wasn’t long before he rolled his chair to the receptionist’s desk and just sat listening to the comments. One woman said, “So, Global Community Weekly has stooped to the level of the tabloids, covering every latest fairy tale to come out of the so-called church. Leave this trash to the yellow journalists.”