Mark of Evil (35 page)

But he was nearly dying from boredom. As he sat in front of the monitors, day after day, he found himself watching moms transporting their kids to and from school, delivery trucks on their routes, and occasionally, late at night, local kids drag racing on the part of the Alaska Highway that ran past the airport. The only promise of entertainment
was the dogsled competition that started right there in White Horse that he could catch on his monitors. But that presumed he would still be there when the snows came. Galligher dreaded the thought.

Today, while Galligher glanced at the monitors, he was feasting on a haddock sandwich with extra creamy dill sauce. One thing he had learned about that part of the world: they had incredibly finetasting fish.

Then something caught his eye. On one of the monitors there appeared a caravan of vehicles. He zoomed in. The first two vehicles were armored troop carriers. Both of them had the Global Alliance forces logo on the side—the roaring lion with its mouth open wide and long, deadly fangs. John Galligher mused to himself,
Gee
,
maybe someone, somewhere, way back when, should have started asking questions about the Alliance the minute they saw that logo.

Galligher thought that perhaps the troops were on maneuvers. But then he spotted the Global Alliance forces command vehicle and behind it a ZB D97 modified tank the Alliance had obtained from the Chinese, with a 100mm cannon on top and a 30mm cannon right next to it. Suddenly Galligher stopped chewing on his haddock sandwich. He was getting the feeling that a major assault might be on the menu. He tapped the emergency contact number on his Allfone. Up on the floor above him, in his digital communications center, Chiro picked up.

Galligher shouted, “Get ready for an invasion. I’m seeing Alliance military hardware chugging down the street toward our position.”

“How much time?” Chiro asked.

“They’re on the other side of town. I’d say we’ve got twenty minutes, to be on the conservative side.”

Galligher bolted out into the lobby where Bobby Robert was poring over a magazine.

“Bobby, I think things are going to start jumping.”

“What’s up?”

Galligher looked down at the hunting magazine. “That’s good,” he said pointing to it. “You shoot. That’s swell. But we’ve got a small army of Alliance forces heading our way. I think they want to rock our world. Call our local minutemen volunteers and tell them to get over here in fifteen minutes or less. If they have weapons, tell them to bring them. But they have to come here by the back way, the route along the Yukon River.”

Bobby reached under the desk, opened a cupboard, and pulled out two long-barreled Colt 45s, one in each fist. “I’ve got my shotgun and my bear rifle here in the closet too,” he said.

Galligher grinned. It appeared he had a new BFF. “That’s a great start,” he said as scenes from the movie
The Alamo
flashed in his head. Then Bobby lifted up his long Indian poncho shirt and revealed a massive hunting knife hanging from his belt.

“Okay,” Galligher shot back. “That makes you Jim Bowie. So I guess that makes me Davy Crockett.”

And then he had another thought, but kept that one to himself.
Which makes us both dead soon
.

FORTY-EIGHT

NEW BABYLON, IRAQ

Ethan realized that a miracle had just happened in the lab. As he hung there by his arms, cinched up with leather straps, he felt an electric surge of adrenaline racing through his body. Was that also a miracle? Wasn’t God the creator of adrenaline too? It was at that point that Ethan saw the whole escape plan unfold in front of him like a videotape.

So he acted out the plan and yanked himself up to an “iron cross” position like a gymnast on the rings. Then swung his legs over his head so he could use his feet to twist the straps around his ankles, thus taking some tension off of his arms and creating some slack at the wrists. He reached for a large shard of glass from the blast that was stuck into the leather strap cinched to his left arm. Upside down,
he had to swing himself over to that strap, hold himself in place with his powerful left arm, and with his right hand carefully grab hold of the piece of glass. It wouldn’t give; it was stuck hard into the leather.
Please, God, help me cut this strap.

Upside down, he gingerly yanked again at the shard of glass. Still, it didn’t give. Then he had a thought.
Don’t pull, just push.
So he started pushing on the glass like it was a miniature saw, back and forth, back and forth. He could then feel the leather giving way. But his arms were trembling with fatigue. He wasn’t sure he could do it.

And then some crazy memories started surfacing from somewhere.

Maybe it was the pain in his head. Or maybe he was dying. He couldn’t tell. But the memories and the images were there, filling his head. Out of the fog of his past, as real as ever, flashing before him.

He was back in his Triple-A baseball days as a struggling pitcher. That one ball game as the starting pitcher against the Yankee farm team from Scranton/Wilkes Barre. He could see the pro scouts watching him in the stands. Ethan had just thrown a fastball low and inside to the slugger of a centerfielder up to bat. The last inning with two outs and a full count. But the batter smacked a line drive to Ethan’s right side. It would have been just within his reach if in that instant Ethan had caught the speeding ball in his bare right hand. Even if he had broken a finger or two it would have been worth it—he would have won the game spectacularly, and with a no-hitter at that.

But instead he hesitated. The ball zinged past him and past the shortstop and landed perfectly with a hop past the right fielder, and the big batter made it to second base. And that started a rout. One after another, the opposing players started hitting singles and doubles and finally a home run as Ethan’s pitching style began to collapse in a series of out-of-control fastballs that were followed by failed knuckle-balls floating to the plate like birthday gifts to the batters. His chances of a baseball career died that day.

But now something else: the image of him training for months on
that rooftop in Athens—the daily rope climbing with a fifty-pound backpack. There was a reason for that. There were no accidents. Not in God’s universe.

Ethan was mentally back in that lab room again. His head was clearer now. He tried harder, holding himself by the power of his left arm and with his right pushing on the shard of glass, back and forth, in a sawing and cutting motion. Sawing and cutting. The strap was starting to give way . . .

It broke. He reached over and with his left hand unbuckled the leather band on his right wrist and fell clumsily to the floor.

After climbing through the big window frame where the glass had been shattered with the miraculous blast, Ethan could see that both lab scientists were still unconscious. He noticed that the younger guy with blond hair was roughly his size. Ethan stripped the blue lab coat off of him, removed his security card from around his neck, and hung it around his own. For good measure, he donned the guy’s horn-rimmed glasses. But Ethan had perfect vision, and the lab techie must have had the eyesight of a mole because the lenses were Coke-bottle thick. That added another carnival fun-house dimension to Ethan’s stumble-bum getaway.

Ethan made it to a stairwell. The lab explosion had set off red emergency lights that flashed up on the ceiling, and he could hear sirens wailing somewhere. Still dizzy, and squinting with the eyestrain from the prescription glasses, he swayed and tripped down the emergency stairs leading from the laboratory floor, trying to keep his balance against the rocking-horse vertigo in his head. The grotesque experiment had rattled his brain and left him with an off-kilter sensation that he couldn’t shake.

At the bottom of the stairwell, Ethan swung open the heavy metal door . . . to the sight of dozens of communications technology staffers rushing to the stairwell at the other end of the floor. Because of the alarm, all these middle-level tech staffers were avoiding the elevator,
blindly following the standard operating procedure in an emergency. Ethan used the security card around his neck to activate the elevator. He saw the Down light blinking over the elevator door. It was heading his way. A few more seconds, and then the door opened.

Ethan stepped into the elevator, still unsteady on his feet. There were three other men already there. Two of them were oversized fellows with thick necks and earbuds in their ears, and Ethan knew that they had to be security. They were on either side of a tall, handsome man in the middle. He looked familiar, but Ethan didn’t dwell on it. He turned around immediately, stumbling a little as he did, and faced the door as the elevator started down.

For a moment no one in the elevator talked. Then the man in the middle with the expensive-looking suit and the five-hundred-dollar haircut started to speak. When he did, Ethan knew once again that there was an unnerving familiarity to this individual.

The man said, “I was on my way to your lab. To see the experiment for myself. What happened?”

Ethan shook his head.

One of the big bodyguards punched him in the shoulder. “Answer when you are spoken to.”

Ethan slowly turned around and looked the tall, handsome man right in the eye. When he did, the shock of recognition had him stepping back. He was speechless, while inside of him a combination of righteous rage and terror shot through him like an electrical fire.

The other security guard was yelling at him now. “Answer Chancellor Colliquin, lab geek.”

Ethan was now face-to-face with Alexander Colliquin. And that is when he realized something else. Colliquin’s face was the image in the 3-D holograph, the one that had hung in the air in front of Ethan in the testing room and then by some hellish technology had wormed its way into his head, invading his mind and his thoughts. There was something else too. Ethan knew now that it had been
Colliquin in his visions all along—the human mask with the beast hiding behind it.

Ethan had to silently coach himself.
Hold it together. Stay cool. Don’t react.

Colliquin stared hard at Ethan, but with a detached, otherworldly expression on his face. It was as if his eyes were peering out from some dark, nameless place and didn’t belong to the rest of him. Colliquin asked, “What kind of tech failure went on up there?”

Ethan swayed a bit. “Tech failure? No. It wasn’t that.”

“Then what?” Colliquin snapped.

Ethan cemented his features to a bland expression as he replied, “Something else. Higher than technology. Way higher.”

One of the guards pointed to the side of Ethan’s head. “Hey, you’re bleeding from your ears. Better get to the infirmary.” The other guard added, as an aside to Colliquin, “Your Excellency, no wonder he’s acting stupid,” and snickered.

The elevator stopped and the two guards and Alexander Colliquin swept past Ethan and out of the elevator and began to stride down the hallway. Ethan turned in the opposite direction. He had to find an exit before somebody discovered that he was the lab rat and that he had just escaped from his cage.

FORTY-NINE

WHITE HORSE, YUKON TERRITORY

After Bobby Robert’s emergency call, four local Remnant volunteers from the city responded. They had been gone for a while, working on a commercial fishing boat, but now they were back and they showed up at the hotel with hunting rifles. One of them had an ancient revolver that looked like it could have belonged to Wild Bill Cody. In the old days, John Galligher would have thought that the whole scene looked like a sick joke. Particularly when he saw the armored Global Alliance vehicles begin to rumble up to the front of the hotel.

But Galligher was a different man now. No longer the cynical FBI special agent. Not anymore. God had changed everything for him. But it was clear He was going to have to work a big-time miracle if Chiro was to keep his communications center functioning. Galligher
had never been privy to the big picture—to the way in which Chiro’s mass of cables and computers upstairs fit into the global scheme to push back against Alexander Colliquin’s worldwide takeover, and the bigger plan to spread the gospel message throughout the disintegrating world. Because of that, Galligher may have resented Ethan for keeping him in the dark. But that was something Galligher would have to get over.

Galligher sprinted upstairs to Chiro’s tech lab. He found the computer genius peering into the guts of his eight-foot-high quantum computer through the machine’s two open doors.

Galligher spoke, puffing a little. “You’d better hunker down, Chiro. The guys with the black hats just pulled up.”

Chiro glanced out the one window of his second-floor lab overlooking the backyard. Then he whirled around with a look on his face that was strangely optimistic, given the drastic circumstances. “Yes, but our friend just showed up too,” he exclaimed. “In his red suit.”

Galligher threw him a confused look but couldn’t pass up the chance for a smart-aleck retort. “Red suit? Let’s hope he’s got some missile launchers on his sleigh.”

“Go down and see for yourself,” Chiro shouted, wide-eyed.

Galligher told Chiro to lock himself into his lab by closing the big metal security door they had installed to create a safe room for Chiro and his equipment. Then he charged downstairs and pulled his .357 Magnum from his shoulder holster. Bobby Robert and his four minutemen were hiding behind pieces of furniture in the lobby. The whole thing looked like an Old West shoot-out. Bobby Robert was ready for battle; he had his long black hair unbraided, a Tlinget tribal bandana tied around his forehead and war paint on his face.

“No one fires,” Galligher called to them, “until I say so. And let’s pray I don’t have to say so. Those are my rules of engagement. Any questions?”

Everyone shook their heads. Bobby Robert threw a tense smile.
Galligher looked over this small bunch of amateurs who were risking their lives and thought about how they all counted on him. He really didn’t want to screw this up now.