Seven Unholy Days (17 page)

29

2:27 AM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

YELLOW CREEK

              “As embarrassing as it is to the Bureau, you do have our gratitude for identifying Rowe as a mole, Mr. Decker.”

“I didn’t figure him out soon enough, Director. I thought P
otella was the dirty one.”

Brandon snorted into the phone. “Walter Potella is an oaf and a disgrace who we keep confined to a desk. If it weren’t so damned hard to fire a government employee he would’ve been pounding a beat in some one-cruiser town years ago.”

“What about Julie Reynolds?”

“I don’t know Agent Reynolds. I’m told she has potential but she’s green as grass. I’ll have to say Rowe obviously did his best to assemble the sorriest team imaginable.”

“Any progress analyzing the emails on your end?”

“The task force at Quantico is working around the clock. They’ve just completed a profile on the UNSUB. White male b
etween forty and forty-nine years of age. English probably not native language, well educated, most likely in Europe. Very little else.”

“So he could be any of a few hundred million people.”

“Afraid so.”

“What are your plans going forward, Mr. Brandon?”

“We’ll be dispatching a new team to your location. I’ll pick and vet the members myself this time, so it’s going to take a little longer. Expect them in around twenty-four hours.”

“So long as they don’t interfere with what we’re doing.”

“We are grateful to you, Mr. Decker, but do realize when all is said and done we’re running this investigation, not you. You can participate but we will be calling the shots, both overall and at Yellow Creek.”

“Let’s discuss it later. Right now I need to get to work. Goodbye, Director.” I hung up the phone, shook my head at the obtuse nature of career bureaucrats, and went back to the lounge.

“Tark, to be sure we’re on the same page, you’re not thinking this fruitcake is really the antichrist, are you?” I of course didn’t believe in the notion of some supernatural evil devil-man at all, but I needed to know where he stood. I needed his biblical knowledge from an investigative standpoint but there was no room, no time, for religious emotionalism to further fog the situation.

“No, Matthew. This world may be approaching the end of days, but I plan to be raptured before antichrist is revealed. B
esides, antichrist will almost certainly enter the world stage disguised as some sort of wonderful, kind savior. I think this guy’s shot any chance he had at being perceived that way.”

“Agreed. Now let’s figure out who he is and how to stop him. Abdul, try every permutation of six-six-six you can think of on the password. Tark, you got a Bible around here?”

He came back from his office with a Bible the size of a small car. “Giant print edition,” he explained. “They gave me one of those over-the-hill birthday parties here last year when I turned fifty.”

“Let me know if you need a Geritol break,” I said with a smile. He laughed and slapped me on the back. When I got my breath back I opened the behemoth to its final book, Revelation. “Okay, let’s get inside this guy’s head. He thinks he’s the ant
ichrist. What—”

Abdul burst into the room. “Matt Decker, you must see this. Come now.”

We went to his station in the control room. The monitor was filled with a graphic that looked like an ancient parchment scroll with this inscription:
 

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.
 

We may not have hit the password but we were on the right track. “What’d you do to trigger this?” I asked after we walked back out of the control room and away from the bug.

“I was trying six-six-six for the password.”

I turned to Tark. “I assume this is from Revelation. Do you recognize it?”

“I don’t remember chapter and verse but it won’t take me long to find it.”

“Did anything else happen when you entered it?” I asked Abdul.

“Yes, there were sounds playing. Do not worry, for I had my volume low so it could not be heard by bug.”

“Something spoken?”

“No, they were horns blowing.”

“Like musical horns?” Tark said.

“Yes, they were like trumpets blowing.”

“That makes sense,” Tark said.

“How’s that?”

“Revelation’s got more trumpets than a marching band.”

Abdul went back to work on the password, and Tark and I moved back to the lounge. He was all worked up, giving me a nutshell explanation of end-times prophecy as he saw it. John, the guy who wrote Revelation, had one hell of an imagination. In our particular situation it didn’t matter one bit if it was true or not. Our psycho obviously believed it and had written himself into a starring role.

In
The End According to Tark
, there would be one main antichrist, the beast, and he’d have a helper, the false prophet. The beast would rise to world power right about the time all the good saved Christians were magically sucked up in the air to meet Jesus. The false prophet would be the beast’s right-hand man, taking care of the details of setting up the much-feared One World Government.

Right about the time they got started, God would begin pouring out his wrath on an evil world in a series of judgments. There were to be several different groups of judgments, inclu
ding the trumpet judgments. Some of these terms were vaguely familiar from my father’s old sermons, but that was a long time ago and the main things I got out of those sermons were terror and a seizing fear that some of these creatures might be under my bed.

“Those sounds weren’t in that code by accident. What’s the first trumpet judgment?”

“You’re jumping the gun. We need to cover the seven seals first.”

Seals. Trumpets. It all started running together. It was the middle of the night and still at least eighty-five degrees in the building. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since I’d eaten, much less showered. Reality started piling up and I felt overwhelmed. How could we fight this guy? We didn’t even know who he was. A feeling of hopelessness settled over me like a dark, pungent mist, choking me, blinding me. I suddenly realized that I was choking on it. Something was in the room, smothering me with a wet stench of death—

“Matthew ... Matthew! Wake up!”

I opened my eyes and shook my head.

“You dozed off,” Tark said. “We were talking about the seven seals.”

“Sorry, run through it again if you don’t mind. I’m spent.”

He reached over and gave me a one-armed hug. “You have a right to be worn out. Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay, seven seals.”

He went to the whiteboard and made a list numbered one through seven, writing more information as he talked. “These judgments get a lot of attention in the movies, but Hollywood usually doesn’t worry about being biblically accurate. In the movies, it’s always up to someone to do something to stop the judgments from taking place and postponing the end of the world as we know it.

“That’s hogwash. Once all this starts, it will go forward and no power in the universe will be able to stop it.”

“Okay, who’s supposed to be opening these seals?”

“Jesus. A lot of Revelation is symbolic, but a lot of scholars agree with some uniformity on the underlying meaning of the symbolisms.”

The clock on the wall said three o’clock. Seven hours and change until the deadline. “What’s number one?”

“Seals one through four will unleash the four horsemen,” he said, writing WHITE HORSE on the board beside seal number one as he lectured. “You may’ve heard these supernatural co
wboys referred to as the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The first rider will be on a white horse with a bow and a crown, generally thought to symbolize antichrist getting ready to conquer the world.”

“What kind of horse for our second cowboy?”

“A fiery red one, its rider equipped with a sword to symbolize bloodshed.” He wrote in RED HORSE. “Number three is a black horse.” BLACK HORSE. “Its rider appears to have some power over the buying and selling of goods.”

“And number four?”

PALE HORSE. “The pale horse is the sickly color of death, like bloodless corpses, which its rider is scheduled to dispense through a combination of warfare, famine, and pestilence. In fact, this rider is specifically called Death.”

He kept talking, but I’d tuned him out a bit and was focu
sing on the whiteboard. Something was there, beginning to come together, a vaporous outline I needed to cajole into an understandable structure. Sheriff Litman, who was hanging out in the control room with Abdul, walked into the room. “FBI on the horn for you, Decker.”

“Tark, you mind talking to them?” I said. “I want to stay on this.”

“I’ll take it in my office,” he said.

He and Litman left and I stared at the board. WHITE HORSE. RED HORSE. BLACK HORSE. PALE HORSE. Four horses. Four horsemen. WHITE HORSE. RED HORSE. BLACK HORSE. PALE HORSE. My mind was racing, processing, loo
king for the embedded clues. In four days and nights I had barely had enough real sleep for one night, but I was on fire now, the fatigue gone, my mind screaming for answers.

I stood at the board, closed my eyes, and tried to envision those horses and their riders, thundering across an open field side by side. No, that wouldn’t work. They weren’t a gang of bandits. Each man-and-beast team worked alone. One horse. One rider. One mission. And one distinct meaning to this ps
ycho.

The white horse would go first, the warrior-rider sitting high in the saddle, wearing his crown and wielding his bow, co
nquering all in his path. How long would that take? A week? A month? A day? My mind stopped and I opened my eyes. Yes, a day! I headed down the hall to get Tark.

30

3:18 AM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

HART COMPLEX

             
Jana wondered how long her luck would hold. She had made it to the elevator, which shot her up to ground level. Only when she stepped out did she realize that amid the excitement she had left the room without shoes. Her bare feet made for quiet movement on the balcony that wound around the perimeter of the main floor where all the computers were, but if she did happen to make it outside the building the lack of shoes would quickly shift from advantage to handicap.

She crouched behind the balcony wall and peeked down at the floor. She counted only four people, each of them working at a computer. Three were men, all working side by side on the same console. The fourth was a woman and she was alone and nearest the exit door. Jana stayed in a half-crouch and worked her way around the balcony. A metal spiral staircase wound down to the floor, and she slowly eased down it, keeping her eye on the woman. A support pillar blocked her view of the men in the center of the room.

The sound of rushing air startled her. She turned around and realized the sound was the elevator going back down. If it was going down it would no doubt rise shortly, probably bearing Hart. The elevator and the staircase were the only two ways off the balcony and one of the men from the center of the room below had moved to a console no more than ten feet from the foot of the stairs. The whoosh of the elevator whined to a stop, then restarted with a different sound. It was on the way up.

Each step of the steel staircase felt like ice to the soles of her naked feet. Five steps to go. Four. The third one from the bo
ttom creaked ever so slightly under her weight. She froze but it was too late. The man at the bottom turned toward the sound.

She had never hurt a living thing but she had no qualms about starting now.
THWUMP
went the man’s skull as Jana dove on him and landed a solid blow with the pistol butt. He slid to the carpeted floor and Jana felt his blood, warm and sticky like thin pancake syrup, on the butt of the gun as she withdrew it.

Above her on the balcony, the elevator’s pneumatic mech
anism faded to a stop a moment before the door opened. She dropped to her hands and knees and peeked around the corner of the console. The two men in the middle of the room were still working, talking to each other. Their conversation must have masked the sound of her cracking their friend’s skull. Crawling at an impossible pace, she worked her way across the room to within six feet of the woman working nearest the exit, then rose and closed the gap before bringing the pistol down on the crown of the woman’s head. She was quickly making up for her prior lack of inflicting bodily harm.

The door that led outside was twenty feet away. She eased the unconscious woman out of her chair and dragged her across the floor into the small entranceway, where she quickly stripped her of her sneakers and access card. The shoes were too big but they would have to do.

She stepped to the door, swiped the card, and said a quiet yes! when a green light pulsed and the massive doors began to slide open.

“Hey, what’s going on over there? You know we can’t exit without authorization,” one of the men said, his voice getting closer. The doors opened slowly and Jana turned sideways and pushed through as soon as the opening was wide enough.

The air was cool, the moon hanging brightly in a star-speckled sky as she ran in a dead sprint away from the building and toward an open-walled tractor shed about two hundred yards away. The shoes flopped on her feet and the sound of them slapping the damp grass was as loud as an eraser being banged on a chalkboard. Inside the shed, she leaned on the far side of a tractor to catch her breath. Ten seconds later an alarm started wailing back at the main building and the area lit up with floodlights. Looking back over the top of the tractor, she counted six men coming out of the building and fanning out. Two were headed directly toward her and she had nowhere to go. Looking away from the building, there was nothing but flat land spread out to infinity. She was trapped.

              Hart walked at a brisk clip from the elevator to the stairwell, stunned that the woman had dared to leave her room without permission. There would be a price to pay for her insolence, beginning with a reduction in status. Her tenure as queen was over before it started, a royal candle snuffed dark through her own wanton treachery.

She didn’t even deserve the title of concubine. She would henceforth be referred to by the unadorned moniker of whore. And there would be no more waiting. As soon as he found her, she would accompany him to his chambers and be immediately initiated into her new role. The bitch would undoubtedly enjoy that—as had every woman he had ever graced—but she would do well to keep that pleasure concealed if she had any thoughts of ever regaining a more elevated role within the structure. Queen was out, but reassuming the position of concubine was within the realm of possibility.

He stepped from the elevator and shouted from the balcony, “Where is the lady who just came down?”

“We think she made it outside the building, sir,” one of the three men said from the floor below. “Security has been d
eployed.”

Hart made his way briskly along the balcony. “How did this happen, my son?”

The man came to meet him, bowing slightly as he waited near the foot of the stairs. “She hit a female technician in the head and took her shoes and key card, sir.”

The staircase shook as Hart pounded down the steps, gro
wing more inflamed inside as he thought about the sheer incompetence around him. Fools. He was utterly surrounded by fools, and yet he was forced to pretend that all was well. “I see. Where is this technician?”

“She’s over here by the door. We called the doctor down to look at her head. It’s bleeding pretty badly.”

Hart walked to the woman and looked at the doctor. The trash was not worth the price of a bandage, but speaking with candor at this juncture could be problematic.

The doctor backed away as Hart approached and the wo
man—sitting barefoot on the floor, holding her hand to the back of her head—looked up through watery eyes. “I’m so sorry, sir. She snuck up behind—”

Hart kneeled and spoke with the reassuring voice of a father. “Fear not, child. All will be well.” Tears formed in her eyes as she looked into his.

“Thank you, sir.”

He nodded and turned to the doctor as he rose back to his feet. “See that this dear servant is healed.”

“Yes sir.”

Hart swiped his own card and stepped through the exit door into the night. As soon as the door closed behind him he raised his arms and wailed, “Security! Come unto me!” Two of the men arrived in a jog from behind the building, followed by two more, then two more. His voice returned to a soft calm. “Ge
ntlemen, where is my whore?”

One of the security officers, a thick-faced bull of a man, said, “We haven’t found her yet, sir, but we will. We’re trying to l
ocate Chief Christian, as well.”

“Mr. Christian will not be responding to your pathetic cries for assistance, you moronic slug. He has been terminated.”

“You fired Chief Christian?” the bull said, his face crinkled in disbelief.

“I said nothing about fired. He has been permanently term-i-na-ted, a fate you may well share if you do not produce my whore within the next sixty minutes. Is that clear?”

“Yes sir. Perfectly clear, sir.”

“When you locate her, deliver her to my quarters. I am hol
ding you personally responsible for that delivery.”

“I know it’s unlikely, but what if she makes it off the grounds. Should we—”

“You are authorized to pursue her into the pits of hell if need be. Bring her back.” Hart turned on his heel and walked back inside.

“Let’s go find the girl,” the bull said.