He started eating. He was hungry and he was tempted to devour his contact’s stromboli too, except that he thought better of it when he remembered how dangerous the other guy was.
Bender turned to look over the customers in the room and spotted him. The other man strolled through the crowd, stopping just beyond the buffet line. Bender didn’t wave; he knew this man would already have researched him and would know who he was looking for. Bender was right.
Vlad Malatov was dressed in a dark-blue suit, white shirt, and tie, and he had a nice, close shave and a short haircut, almost military length. He spotted Bender and made his way through the tables with a relaxed smile, then sat down opposite him. Bender put the manila envelope in the middle of the table.
“Inside this envelope there is a large calendar. Stuck in between the months of November and December, you will find your credentials and badge and your transfer papers documenting your reassignment from the Miami Secret Service office to the Washington office, White House detail. No questions will be asked.”
As Bender studied Malatov’s face he suddenly realized that the man had taken the pains to get a good Florida-looking tan. A nice touch.
Bender glanced at the picture on the transfer papers and then looked at Malatov’s face. “Whoever did your face reconstruction deserves a medal. You’re a dead ringer for that Miami agent. Too bad he went missing today on his way up here to start his White House gig.” He chuckled. But after a moment’s reflection he asked, “So, just curious—why did Moscow pick that particular Miami agent all those years ago to be your, you know, your facemate?”
Malatov narrowed his eyes. Bender quickly realized it was a stupid question. Former Russian FSB agents didn’t share shoptalk with civilians. Whatever the scheme had been back then to substitute this Russian for the Miami agent so many years ago, it had been abandoned. But no matter. It proved to be a beautifully useful piece in the plan today.
Bender kept talking. “Anyway, there should be no questions asked. The Secret Service has about three thousand five hundred agents. Unlike the other law enforcement agencies of the feds—FBI, ATF, Border Patrol—the Secret Service moves their agents around like they’re on a shuffleboard. So your ‘reassignment’ won’t look weird when you show up.”
There was a questioning look on Malatov’s face.
Bender added, “Plus, we’ve got an inside contact. You’ll know him after you check in at the gate. I can’t tell you who he is, because I don’t know. All I know is that when he meets you for the first time he’s gonna say something to you about deep-sea diving for buried treasure—some sunken Spanish ship off the Florida Keys.”
There was a slow nod from Malatov.
“Oh, and one more thing,” Bender said. “You had better time your first show-up at the White House pretty closely. I don’t mean to tell you your business . . .” When he said that, Malatov’s eyes flashed and Bender leaned back a bit in his plastic chair. “Look, I’m just saying, you’re not gonna have a very big window of time between your initial show-up and the business you’ve got to get done.”
Bender forked a last bite of stromboli into his mouth, washed it down with a gulp of Diet Coke, and then grabbed his Styrofoam plate and cup and stood up. “Good-bye, Agent Ted Booth,” he said and then dumped his trash in a wastebasket and disappeared into the crowds.
Vlad Malatov’s face tensed slightly at the mention of his new name, Booth. But it was too late now. He hadn’t been part of the decision years before in Moscow to reconstruct him to look like a guy by that name who was a Miami field agent for the Secret Service. If it had been up to Malatov, he never would have picked it, considering the fact that President Abraham Lincoln had been fatally shot in the head right there in Washington, D.C., by a guy with that same last name.
Rivka had finished with Meifeng’s doctor visit and the two of them had just arrived back at Rivka’s Hong Kong flat when her Allfone rang. She was expecting a call from Ethan about now, but when she looked at the caller ID she saw the photo of Hadley Brooking flashing on the little screen. When she picked up, Brooking sounded flustered and rushed. He said that he was calling about Ethan, and that something had happened at the meeting with Jo Li and they needed to meet immediately, but he couldn’t go into it on the phone.
Rivka’s natural impulse was to demand answers about Ethan. She already had a sinking feeling. But her intelligence training kicked in. Not over an Allfone call. She suggested a little Cantonese café that she trusted. But Brooking said no, that he wanted to meet her down by the harbor, at the Clock Tower at the tip of the Kowloon Peninsula in the Tsim Sha Tsui section of town.
She balked for a moment. She hadn’t trusted Brooking from the beginning, and now he wanted her to come alone to an area near the public pier at Victoria Harbor. She knew that Jo Li’s super yacht had been anchored in that same harbor. Some disturbing scenarios raced through her head. But the worst one of all was the desperate feeling that something terrible had happened to Ethan.
Faced with no other choice, she told Brooking that she would be there, but when they met, he had to be forthright about absolutely everything he knew.
An hour later Rivka stood alone at the base of the Clock Tower that looked like an old brick lighthouse. There at the edge of the harbor, the night air was turning suddenly cool. A shiver ran down her back. She was in mid-prayer about Ethan and his safety when Hadley Brooking showed up, looking distracted and burdened.
“Over here,” he said, motioning to the other side of the Clock Tower, away from a few locals who milled around.
“Where is Ethan?” Rivka barked. “What happened?”
“I had nothing to do with it,” Hadley Brooking said. “You have to believe me.”
“What happened in that meeting?” she demanded, her voice cracking.
“Jo Li was there. I was there. Ethan arrived. Before the meeting I was simply told by one of Jo’s assistants that they wanted to cut some deal and wanted it to happen in my office. So I agreed. The next thing I know, a gang of Global Alliance soldiers showed up in the lobby, and they grabbed Ethan. He put up a fight, but they subdued him and put him in handcuffs and hauled him off. I think his injuries were only minor.”
“Who called the Alliance forces?”
“I have no idea. It wasn’t me,” Brooking insisted.
“Why should I believe you?” she cried. “Why? And why did they let you go?”
Hadley Brooking looked her straight in the eye. “There are things about me that I can’t explain yet. Let’s just say that I wear many hats, and different people believe I may be valuable for different things. But you can trust me because I am here, meeting with you. Telling you this. And because, dear girl, I came alone.” He took a quick look around and added, “And I am at risk right now even being here with you.”
Rivka stared into his face. Looking for signs of deception. But Brooking saw that too. “You’re searching my face,” he said with a smile. “Dilation of my pupils, contraction of my facial muscles. To see if I am lying. Yes, I know all the techniques.”
Suddenly, Rivka found herself reassessing her impression of Hadley Brooking as he continued talking. “There is a great deal that I simply cannot tell you about myself, Rivka. Just as you cannot tell me, either, about your years in the Israeli Mossad. I’ve done things . . . deliberately led men down the primrose path to their death. Some deserved it. Some did not. I mastered the art of calm, unperturbed betrayal. I’ve done extraordinarily deceptive things, and I am plagued with the realization every day that I will have to settle accounts with God over those. But you must believe me when I say this: betraying Ethan March is not one of them.”
“Where did they take him?”
“I’m not entirely sure.”
“You must have some idea.”
“I heard a comment by the leader of the Alliance commandoes. Jo Li was talking about a meeting with Alexander Colliquin. It sounded like he had turned Ethan over to the Global Alliance as part of a deal with Col
liquin. As they were leaving, the Alliance captain said that the commandoes were heading to HQ with Ethan and that he would check to see if Jo could travel along with them. What headquarters he was talking about, I can’t be sure. But I think we can both guess.”
Rivka blurted it out. “New Babylon.”
“Jo asked, rather jokingly, I think, ‘How should I dress for the occasion?’ The captain replied, ‘For the desert.’ ”
Now Rivka was left with two very disturbing questions. She wondered what kind of nightmare Colliquin had planned for Ethan. And then there was the more urgent question: she worried how a rescue team could break into Colliquin’s Iraq fortress before it was too late.
THIRTY-NINE
ANIMAL TESTING ROOM #6—DIGITAL IMAGERY LAB
New Babylon, Iraq
Ethan March’s arms were outstretched and strapped to a metal pole that hung just above him, crucifixion style. His legs were manacled to the floor. He could see a few men dressed in blue lab coats on the other side of the glass, talking together and checking instruments. He prayed silently for strength and endurance as the agony in his arms and shoulders increased by the minute. He repeated in his mind, over and over again, a verse from the New Testament. From the book of Philippians. “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.”
Somewhere in the back of his mind he could hear the voice of his mentor Josh Jordan. Something he had taught Ethan—something Josh had learned from his own experience in a torture chamber of his own. Josh had told Ethan to focus not on the pain or the fear, but on the fact that as long as he was alive—as long as he could still breathe and think and pray and plan and, yes, experience the pain—then God still had work for him to do and therefore God would be there with him, empowering him while he endured it.
Ethan’s task now was to control the natural anxiety that threatened to overwhelm his judgment—the racing thoughts about what would happen next and what this experiment was and what kind of horror awaited him. Instead, he had to focus on something else: the objective facts of his dilemma. And how that fit into the hellish agenda of his capturers. He would try to figure it out, all of it, in case by some miracle he got out of this alive. If he did, then he could use it for others. To save the rest. To help resist this monstrous evil.
But he regretted something now. If only he’d been an engineering genius like Josh Jordan. MIT graduate. A weapons inventor and designer. Then, like Josh, he could figure this all out coldly and analytically. As he hung from the metal bar by his wrists and stared through the glass at the scientists in their light-blue lab coats, he realized he wasn’t Josh.
The lab engineers touched some switches and then looked at Ethan. A hopeless despair flooded over him. It was as if someone had whispered in his ear that all was lost, that God was nowhere to be found. “No!” he screamed. “Get behind me, Satan!”
The scientists paused, looked up and stared at him through the window, and then began to laugh before they resumed their work.
Now Ethan struggled to think of the verse from the book of Ephesians, written by the apostle Paul through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Hadn’t Paul known extreme pain himself? Of course, he reassured himself. And fear. And starvation. And beatings. And sufferings. And stoning. And drowning. What was it that Paul had written?
“Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might. Put on the full armor of God, so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil.”
He talked to himself. Think, he said silently. What was it that the members of my team told me? And what did Dr. Adis tell me about Colliquin’s tech people working on a new radical form of digital imagery? He kept hinting at the possibility of a single image capable of appearing before the BIDTag of every human who received the laser code on the back of the hand or the forehead. A holographic image. An image that could command obedience. And an image that could send a data stream by laser into the person’s BIDTag code to activate the central nervous system of that person, and the brain too. To capture the mind.
He forced himself to figure out the rest. And in an instant, there it was. Colliquin’s transmission will also be capable of something else, something terrible. Thus the experiments with the chimps. If the data stream can reach the nervous system and brain, then perhaps it’s capable of sending a signal—to halt the heart, or maybe to stop the lungs. A message to kill the body.
Something clicked in the back of his mind. Something in the book of Revelation . . . What part? Where was it? Think . . .
It came to him. Revelation 13:15–17:
And it was given to him to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast would even speak and cause as many as do not worship the image of the beast to be killed. And he causes all, the small and the great, and the rich and the poor, and the free men and the slaves, to be given a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, and he provides that no one will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name.
Was this the fulfillment, then? It had to be. Dr. Adis had said the Alliance was on the verge of finalizing a digital design for global surveillance. But that was the last thing Ethan had heard from him. After that, Dr. Adis had gone silent.
And then there was Chiro, up in the Yukon. He was ready to launch the carefully planned electronic counterstrike. Chiro had told Ethan that if the demonic Revelation 13 plan used a technological grid, it would need to modify the BIDTag codes on the hands or foreheads of all of the tagged humans to increase the capacity to receive data from the Global Alliance masters. And then, Chiro guessed, they would use lasers to transmit the data into the BIDTag codes of the humans.
Lasers—that was ironic, wasn’t it? At first they were used only as blunt weapons to burn things up, but then it was discovered that lasers could be used to transmit data, and so Joshua Jordan had used them in his stupendously effective Return-to-Sender antimissile system to capture and then redirect the data in the nose cones of incoming enemy missiles to turn them around.
Ethan tried to maintain steady breathing, to regulate the pain in his arms and shoulders. Think . . . Keep thinking . . .
But if the plan of Colliquin and the Alliance was to manipulate the people with BIDTags, what about the nontaggers? So many of them, millions, were Jesus followers who had refused to receive the laser mark. Yes, that was it. That was the fly in the ointment, wasn’t it? They couldn’t be so easily manipulated. Their obedience and worship couldn’t be controlled. They had to be eliminated. Destroyed.
He realized that when he was first dragged into the lab and hog-tied to this hanging bar, a scientist had stripped him down and examined every inch of him. As if they were looking for something. The scientist had used an instrument that looked like a BIDTag scanner to carefully scan his entire body. So that was what they were looking for, wasn’t it? They were making sure that he didn’t have a BIDTag.
That is what I am, Ethan said to himself. The guinea pig. Now he knew that the experiment was to see if they could remotely destroy him, or manipulate him, even if he didn’t have a BIDTag.
The men in the light-blue lab coats had stopped talking. They were standing together, shoulder to shoulder, and each of them was reaching forward. It looked like they were working the computer console. Then a light flashed in Ethan’s room. From somewhere he heard a faint sound. He was aware that something was in the lab room with him. A presence. He saw it out of the corner of his eye. It was coming closer. An image of something. A face. Coming closer.
A three-dimensional face now filled the room, hovering in front of him. He knew this face because he had seen it before. On the outside, the appearance of the handsome face was unremarkable. Yet Ethan had been given the power to see behind the face, to visualize the evil that would soon come upon the entire human race, and to understand that this face would orchestrate the suffering of humanity. There it was—once again, his vision.
A voice yelled out
from somewhere. At first Ethan didn’t realize its origin, but then he understood—it was his own voice crying out.
“Oh, dear God, the beast.”
But he fought back. He yelled out what he had memorized from the Scriptures about Stephen, the first Christian martyr. He called out the words Stephen had spoken just moments before he was stoned to death: “ ‘But being full of the Holy Spirit, he gazed intently into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God; and he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened up and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” ’ ”
But the face of the image seemed to envelope Ethan like a spider consuming its prey, and it bellowed with a powerful voice, “Worship me, Ethan March, with all your heart and all your soul and all your might.”
Ethan answered, from somewhere very deep inside, the words he remembered from the Word of God, and from his servant, the apostle John. “ ‘For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist.’ ”
The image spoke again. “Those who do not worship me shall be destroyed.”
Before Ethan could respond, a molten-hot laser beam blasted from the eyes of the image and found its way with surgical precision into Ethan’s skull. The light beam reached deep into the interior of his cerebral cortex and into the very network of neurons there, and his mind seemed to explode with a flash of lightning. Ethan opened his mouth wide as he shook violently, groping for some way to scream, to find a voice against the horror that wrapped itself around his mind like an invisible python snake, squeezing his thoughts, crushing them. And in the darkness he saw the face of the beast. But it wasn’t out there in the room any longer, not in front of him at all. For a single, horrific moment the demonic creature raised its prehistoric, winged form before Ethan and made him wonder the unthinkable: Was this horrifying beast now inside his head? In his brain?