Tribulation Force: The Continuing Drama Of Those Left Behind (8 page)

“I’ll tell you only what Scripture says,” Bruce said, “and I will urge you to listen carefully to the news. We must be wise as serpents and gentle as doves.”

“That’s how I would have described Carpathia,” a woman said.

“Be careful,” Bruce said, “about ascribing Christlike attributes to anyone who doesn’t align himself with Christ.”

As the service ended, Buck took Chloe’s arm, but she seemed less responsive than he might have hoped. She turned slowly to see what he wanted, and her expression bore no sign of that expectant look she’d had Friday night. Clearly, he had somehow wounded her. “I’m sure you’re wondering what I was calling about,” he began.

“I figured you’d tell me eventually.”

“I just wondered if you wanted to see my new place.” He told her where it was. “Maybe you could drop over late tomorrow morning and see it, and then we could get some lunch.”

“I don’t know,” Chloe said. “I don’t think I can do lunch, but if I’m over that way maybe I’ll stop by.”

“OK.” Buck was deflated. Apparently it wasn’t going to be difficult to let her down gently. It certainly wasn’t going to break her heart.

As Chloe slipped into the crowd, Rayford reached to shake Buck’s hand. “So how are you, my friend?”

“I’m doing all right,” Buck said. “Getting settled in.”

A question gnawed at Rayford. He looked at the ceiling and then back at Buck. In his peripheral vision he saw hundreds of people milling about, wanting their individual moments with Bruce Barnes. “Buck, let me ask you something. Do you ever regret introducing Hattie Durham to Carpathia?”

Buck pressed his lips together and shut his eyes, rubbing his forehead with his fingers. “Every day,” he whispered. “I was just talking to Bruce about that.”

Rayford nodded and knelt on the pew seat, facing Buck. Buck sat. “I wondered,” Rayford said. “I have a lot of regrets about her. We were friends, you know. Coworkers, but friends, too.”

“I gathered,” Buck said.

“We never had a relationship or anything like that,” Rayford assured him. “But I find myself caring about what happens to her.”

“I hear she’s taken a thirty-day leave of absence from Pan-Con.”

“Yeah,” Rayford said, “but that’s just window dressing. You know Carpathia’s going to want to keep her around, and he’ll find the money to pay her more than she’s making with us.”

“No doubt.”

“She’s got to be enamored of the job, not to mention him. And who knows where that relationship might go?”

“Like Bruce says, I don’t think he hired her for her brain,” Buck said.

Rayford nodded. So they agreed. Hattie Durham was going to become one of Carpathia’s diversions. If there had ever been hope for her soul, it would be remote as long as she was in his orbit every day.

“I worry about her,” Rayford continued, “and yet because of our friendship I don’t feel I’m in a position to warn her. She was one of the first people I tried to tell about Christ. She was not receptive. Before that I had implied more of an interest in her than I had a right to have, and naturally she’s not real positive about me just now.”

Buck leaned forward. “Maybe I’ll get a chance to talk to Hattie sometime soon.”

“But what will you say?” Rayford asked. “For all we know they may already be intimate. She’ll tell him everything she knows. If she tells him you’ve become a believer and that you’re trying to rescue her, he’ll know he had no impact on your mind when he was brainwashing everyone else.”

Buck nodded. “I’ve thought about that. But I feel responsible for her being there. I am responsible for her being there. We can pray for her, but I’m going to feel pretty useless if I can’t do something concrete to get her out of there. We’ve got to get her back here where she can learn the truth.”

“I wonder if she’s already moved to New York,” Rayford said. “Maybe we’ll find a reason for Chloe to call her apartment in Des Plaines.”

As they separated and made their way out of the church, Rayford began wondering how much he should encourage the relationship between Chloe and Buck. He liked Buck a lot, what little he knew of him. He believed him, trusted him, considered him a brother. He was bright and insightful for a young guy. But the idea that his daughter might date or even fall in love with a man on speaking terms with the Antichrist … it was too much to fathom. He would have to be frank with them both about it, if it appeared their relationship was going anywhere.

But once he joined Chloe in the car he realized that was not something he needed to fret about just yet.

“Don’t tell me you’ve invited Buck to join us for lunch,” she said.

“Didn’t even think of it. Why?”

“He’s treating me like a sister, and yet he wants me to drop in and see his place tomorrow.”

Rayford wanted to say “So what?” and ask her if she didn’t think she was reading too much into the words and actions of a man she barely knew. For all she knew, Buck could be madly in love with her and not know how to broach it. Rayford said nothing.

“You’re right,” she said. “I’m obsessing.”

“I didn’t say a word.”

“I can read your mind,” she said. “Anyway, I’m mad at myself. I come away from a message like that one, and all I can think about is a guy I’ve somehow let slip away. It’s not important. Who cares?”

“You do, apparently.”

“But I shouldn’t. Old things are passed away and all things have become new,” she said. “Worrying about guys should definitely be an old thing. There’s no time for trivia now.”

“Suit yourself.”

“That’s just what I don’t want to do. If I suited myself I’d see Buck this afternoon and find out where we stand.”

“But you’re not going to?”

She shook her head.

“Then would you do me a favor? Would you try to reach Hattie Durham for me?”

“Why?”

“Actually, I’m just curious to know whether she’s already moved to New York.”

“Why wouldn’t she have? Carpathia’s hired her, hasn’t he?”

“I don’t know. She’s on a thirty-day leave. Just call her apartment. If she’s got a machine running, then she’s not made up her mind yet.”

“Why don’t
you
call her?”

“I think I’ve intruded enough in her life.”

Buck stopped for Chinese carryout on the way home and sat eating alone, staring out the window. He turned on a ball game but ignored it, keeping the sound low. His mind was full of conflict. His story was ready to be transmitted to New York, and he would be eager for a reaction from Stanton Bailey. He also looked forward to getting his office machines and files, which should arrive at the Chicago bureau office in the morning. It would be good to pick those up and get organized.

He couldn’t shake Bruce’s message, either. It wasn’t so much the content as Bruce’s passion. He needed to get to know Bruce better. Maybe that would be a cure for his loneliness—and Bruce’s. If Buck himself were this lonely, it had to be much worse for a man who had had a wife and children. Buck was used to a solitary life, but he’d had a network of friends in New York. Here, unless he heard from the office or someone else in the Tribulation Force, the phone was not going to ring.

He certainly wasn’t handling the Chloe situation well. When he had been demoted, Buck had considered the relocation from New York to Chicago a positive turn—he would get to see more of her, he’d be in a good church, get good training, have a core of friends. But he also felt he had been on the right track when he began to slow his pursuit of her. The timing was bad. Who pursues a relationship during the end of the world?

Buck knew—or at least believed—that Chloe was not toying with him. She wasn’t playing hard to get just to keep him interested. But whether she was doing it on purpose or not, it was working, and he felt foolish to be dwelling on it.

Whatever had happened, however she was acting, and for whatever reason, he owed it to her to have it out. He might regret the let’s-be-friends routine, but he didn’t see that he had any other choice. He owed it to her and to himself to just pursue the friendship and see what came of it. For all he knew, she wouldn’t be interested in more than that anyway.

He reached for the phone, but when he put it to his ear, he heard a strange tone, and then a recorded voice. “You have a message. Please push star two to hear it.”

[_A message? I never ordered voice mail. _]He pushed the buttons. It was Steve Plank.

“Buck, where the devil are you, man? If you’re not going to answer your voice mail, I’m going to quit leaving messages there. I know you’re unlisted there, but if you think Nicolae Carpathia is someone to trifle with, ask yourself how I got your phone number. You’ll wish you had these resources as a journalist. Now, Buck, friend to friend, I know you check your messages often, and you know Carpathia wants to talk to you. Why didn’t you call me? You’re making me look bad. I told him I’d track you down and that you’d come and see him. I told him I didn’t understand your not accepting his invitation to the installation meeting, but that I know you like a brother and you wouldn’t stand him up again.

“Now he wants to see you. I don’t know what it’s all about or even whether I’ll sit in on it. I don’t know if it’s on the record, but you can certainly ask him for a few quotes for your article. Just get here. You can hand deliver your article to the [_Weekly, _]say hi to your old friend Miss Durham, and find out what Nicolae wants. There’s a first-class ticket waiting for you at O’Hare under the name of McGillicuddy for a nine o’clock flight tomorrow morning. A limo will meet your plane, and you’ll have lunch with Carpathia. Just do it, Buck. Maybe he wants to thank you for introducing him to Hattie. They seem to be hitting it off.

“Now, Buck, if I don’t hear from you, I’m going to assume you’ll be here. Don’t disappoint me.”

“What’s the scoop?” Rayford asked.

Chloe imitated the recorded voice. “‘The number you have dialed has been disconnected. The new number is … ’”

“Is what?”

She handed him a scrap of paper. The area code was for New York City. Rayford sighed. “Do you have Buck’s new number?”

“It’s on the wall by the phone.”

Buck called Bruce Barnes. “I hate to ask you this, Bruce,” he said. “But could we get together tonight?”

“I’m about to take a nap,” Bruce said.

“You should sleep through. We can do it another time.”

“No, I’m not going to sleep through. You want the four of us to meet, or just you and me?”

“Just us.”

“How about I come to your place then? I’m getting tired of the office and the empty house.”

They agreed on seven o’clock, and Buck decided he would take his phone off the hook after one more call. He didn’t want to risk talking to Plank, or worse, Carpathia, until he had talked over and prayed about his plans with Bruce. Steve had said he would assume Buck was coming unless he heard back, but it would be just like Steve to check in with him again. And Carpathia was totally unpredictable.

Buck called Alice, the Chicago bureau secretary. “I need a favor,” he said.

“Anything,” she said.

He told her he might be flying to New York in the morning but he didn’t want Verna Zee knowing about it. “I also don’t want to wait any longer for my stuff, so I’d like to bring you my extra key before I head for the airport. If you wouldn’t mind bringing that stuff over here for me and locking back up, I’d really appreciate it.”

“No problem. I have to be going that way late morning anyway. I’m picking up my fiancé at the airport. Verna doesn’t have to know I’m delivering your stuff on the way.”

“You want to go to Dallas with me tomorrow morning, Chlo’?” Rayford asked.

“I don’t think so. You’re going to be in 757s all day anyway, right?”

Rayford nodded.

“I’ll stay around here. Maybe I’ll take Buck up on his offer to see his place.”

Rayford shook his head. “I can’t keep up with you,” he said. “Now you want to go over there and see the guy who treats you like a sister?”

“I wouldn’t be going to see him,” she said. “I’d be going to see his place.”

“Ah,” Rayford said. “My mistake.”

“You hungry?” Buck asked before Bruce had even gotten in the door that evening.

“I could eat,” Bruce said.

“Let’s go out,” Buck suggested. “You can see the place when we get back.”

They settled into a booth in a dark corner of a noisy pizza place, and Buck filled Bruce in on the latest from Steve Plank. “You thinking about going?” Bruce asked.

“I don’t know what to think, and if you knew me better, you’d know that’s pretty bizarre for me. My instincts as a journalist say yes, of course—go, no question. Who wouldn’t? But I know who this guy is, and the last time I saw him he put a bullet through two men.”

“I’d sure like to get Rayford’s and Chloe’s input on this.”

“I thought you might,” Buck said. “But I’d like to ask you to hold off on that. If I go, I’d rather they not know.”

“Buck, if you go, you’re going to want all the prayer support you can get.”

“Well, you can tell them after I’m gone or something. I should be having lunch with Carpathia around noon or a little after, New York time. You can just tell them I’m on an important trip.”

“If that’s what you want. But you have to realize, this is not how I see the core group.”

“I know, and I agree. But they both might see this as pretty reckless, and maybe it is. If I do it, I don’t want to disappoint them until I’ve had a chance to debrief them and explain myself.”

“Why not do that in advance?”

Buck cocked his head and shrugged. “Because I haven’t sorted it out myself yet.”

“It sounds to me like you’ve already made up your mind to go.”

“I suppose I have.”

“Do you want me to talk you out of it?”

“Not really. Do you want to?”

“I’m as much at a loss as you are, Buck. I can’t see anything positive coming from it. He’s a dangerous man and a murderer. He could wipe you out and get away with it. He did it before with a roomful of witnesses. On the other hand, how long can you dodge him? He gets access to your unlisted phone number two days after you move in. He can find you, and if you avoid him you’ll certainly make him mad.”

“I know. This way I can just tell him I was busy moving in and getting settled—”