Seven Unholy Days (30 page)

60

11:12 PM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

YELLOW CREEK

              The damage was extensive. Every building in the complex had broken windows and cracked walls. Roofs had caved in on several. Fortunately the control building was one of the least damaged. The main power was out but the emergency generator had kicked in and systems were coming back online. Abdul’s disappearing accent was very much on my mind but I decided to act as if I hadn’t noticed and keep a close eye on him.

With the help of a deputy outside adjusting the satellite dish, he had just gotten the videoconferencing feed to Larry operatio
nal. When our picture came into view on their end we heard several cheers. “You made it!” Larry said.

“Yeah, we picked up some battle scars down here but we came through, Larry. Is Major Thompson around?”

“I think he’s still in the building. You need him?”

“No, just pass along my thanks for his help.”

“Will do. We’re showing power still on all across the Central region. What’s the status of the facility?”

“Heavy damage. We’re on auxiliary power here. The RAD
IAC teams are sweeping for levels. Trace amounts of radioactivity right on top of the explosion, but other than that everything is looking negative. You got any updates for me?”

“You bet. Media outlets all over received a communiqué from our boy Hart several hours ago. We knew you had your hands full so we didn’t mention it.”

“Any new clues?”

“Nothing obvious. This dude’s a whack job from the word go. Signed it as God. Our analysts are studying it.”

“Trace?”

“Nope, thoroughly cloaked.”

“Send it over as soon as you can. What else?”

“The Omaha office is hot to talk to you. Turns out the Fulton lady brought a flash drive out with her when she escaped. Has the beginning of a letter on it from the guy she says planted the device down there. He’s dead and gave the key to her just b
efore he expired.”

“What’s in the letter?”

“I haven’t seen it yet. They’re supposed to email it directly to you. I gave them your addy.”

“Can you put me through to the office?”

“Sure thing. Hold.” He spun in his chair and worked a phone like a seasoned operator. “Patch is live. Go.”

“Mr. Decker?” It was the blissful voice of Jana Fulton.

“Call me Matt, Jana. How’s the horse?”

“Happy and well fed, I’m told. Was anyone hurt in the e
xplosion?”

“Nothing serious. I believe you’ve said it was Dane Chri
stian who planted the device here. Is he the one you got the flash drive from?”

“Flash? Oh, the thumbdrive. Yes, it was in his jacket. It has part of a letter on it, I think it was a confession. There was goodness in that man way down deep.”

“What about the rest of the letter?”

“It changes to gobbledy-gook after a couple of paragraphs. Hold on a second.” I heard her talking to someone in the bac
kground. “Matt, they said to tell you the file is corrupt but they’re sending it anyway.”

I got lost in her voice, which seemed pretty silly given the seriousness of the situation, but it captivated—”

“Did you hear me?” Jana said.

“Sorry, no.”

“They’re sending the file.”

My phone buzzed in my pocket. “I shut my laptop down b
efore the explosion and haven’t booted back up yet. Ask them to send it to Abdul’s address. I’d like to see it right away on something other than my phone.”

“Give me the address and I’ll tell them.”

“A-B-D-U-L dot A-B-I-D-I at G-C-E dot D-O-P-U dot G-O-V,” Abdul said.

“Got it. Is there anything else I can help with?” she said.

“Not right now. Thanks, Jana.”

“Goodbye, Matt.” I nodded to Larry and he killed the patch to Omaha.

Abdul’s machine chimed.

“Larry, I’ll get back to you after we look this over. Did you say there was something from Hart too?”

“Yeah, already sent that to you.”

“Okay, back to you in a few.”

“Roger that, bud.”

Abdul opened the Christian attachment:

MY NAME IS DANE RUDOLPH CHRISTIAN. IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH THIS MESSAGE MUST BE DELIVERED TO THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT. I HAVE BEEN INVOLVED FOR SEVERAL YEARS IN A PLOT TO CARRY OUT VARIOUS OPERATIONS FOR A MAN NAMED ABRAHAM HART. HE CLAIMS TO BE A MESSIAH AND HAS A HUGE NUMBER OF FOLLOWERS IN HIS CULT. THEY ARE EVERYWHERE, MORE THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE.

HART PAID ME AND MY LATE BROTHER, RIFFERT JAMES CHRISTIAN, TO ORGANIZE AND CARRY OUT CERTAIN ACTIONS. FOUR OPS ARE COMPLETE. I DO NOT KNOW NATURE OF FIFTH. SIXTH IS THERMONUCLEAR DEVICE HIDDEN BUILDING C YC COMPLEX. DISARM CODE 46656. I AM ATTACHING FILE FOR SEVENTH. SEVENTH IS DEVASTATING TO THE WHOLE WORLD AND MUST BE AT STOPPED AT ALL

Then garbled text went on for what would amount to tho
usands of pages.

“A corrupt file. Frigging unbelievable,” I said. “Now we know something ‘devastating to the whole world’ is in the works and we haven’t a clue.”

“I am afraid I do know what it is,” Abdul said. I turned to look at him and could’ve sworn that just for an instant I saw a flicker of a smile. Or maybe not.

“Talk to me,” I said.

“Look.” He tapped his display onto the big screen. “This is what was to be found in the final layer of the white horse steg file.”

There on the screen was a high-res image of a missile. Wit
hout any point of reference there was no way for us to know whether it was three feet long or thirty. The Russian writing on its side, however, was clear, as was the yellow international nuclear symbol near its business end. In light of my new leeriness of Abdul, I checked the file myself to be sure there were no more layers. There were not.

“Send this to Thompson, Abdul.” I gave him the major’s email address and he sent it.

“No riddles this time?” Tark said.

Abdul shook his head. “Only the one picture and nothing more.”

“Behold the seventh seal,” Tark said.

“Let’s look at the Hart document. Maybe it will give us a clue as to where this thing is headed.” Larry had already sent it to my mailbox so I reached for my laptop; it wasn’t there.

The vibration from the explosion had jarred it off the console. It was lying on the floor, the bottom casing cracked. I picked it up, plugged the AC adapter into the jack on the back, and hit the power button. Nothing. I looked closer and saw the crack wasn’t confined to the case; the power supply circuit board was split. The machine was trashed. “Just keeps getting better,” I said, then I found the email on my phone and forwarded it to Abdul.

I moved back into position at my workstation and soon had Larry back on screen. “You need to track Thompson down with all possible dispatch and tell him to check his email,” I said.
              “Consider it done.”

“Later, Larry.”

“Okay, bud.”

I was just about to click into standby when I remembered an issue that had been lost in the chaos. “Larry, you still there?”

“Yo.”

“Are we private?”

“Nobody close. What’s on your mind?”

“You remember me asking you about an earthquake issue this afternoon?”

“Sure thing. Didn’t know what you were talking about then.”

“But you do now?”

“You bet. That nuke was a simulated quake, the sixth seal. Right?”

“Exactly. Who mentioned the earthquake angle to you?”

He took a sip of Red Bull. “Nobody mentioned it. I read it.”

“Someone sent you a memo?”

“Hell, no, I looked up the seals in Revelation, all by my lonesome.”

“You’re telling me that there was no one in the Bureau off
icially working the idea of a simulated earthquake today?”

“I’m all over this case, Matt. When I’m not talking to you, I’m making calls, sending emails, doing everything I can to stay up to speed so I can keep you informed as to what we’re doing. The word ‘earthquake’ has not been uttered in an official B
ureau sense. Not here. Not Quantico. Not anywhere.”

I thanked him and clicked out. “Tark, you hear that?”

“Yep. Doesn’t sound good, Matthew.”

“It explains a lot, though, like why the Bureau’s making so little progress.”

“You got that right. How do we handle this?”

“We hand him a rope.”

“I like it,” Tark said, pulling out his pipe.

DAY SIX

SUNDAY

... lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth,

even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs,

when she is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.

Revelation 6:12-14

61

3:55 AM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

YELLOW CREEK

             
I woke up in the lounge after four hours of sporadic sleep and lay there in the dark trying to clear my head. There were no distinct days anymore, just one big nightmare that refused to end. The details of the current situation started coming back into focus.

After we read the Hart manifesto/gibberish, Tark went to the lounge and crashed on a mattress.

I soon followed, and dreamed I was back in my childhood church. I was grown, but everything around me was as it was back then. My Sunday School teacher, Mrs. Dixon, sat to my right on the very front pew, listening with rapt attention to every word my father rumbled from his pulpit, turning to me with a sweet smile and patting me on the knee every now and then. To my left was Jimmy Lee Tarkleton, eyes wide, soaking up the sermon like it was the grandest thing he’d ever heard. Mrs. Dixon would pat me on the knee, and Tark would reach up and squeeze my shoulder and whisper, “Now that man can preach!”

Time came for the offering, and there to pass the plate was none other than Abdul, except he had a thick shock of jet black hair swept back into a pony tail. Ha! For sure there would’ve been no pony-tailed ushers in my father’s church back in the day.

While Abdul passed the plate, the choir rose to sing. There was Mrs. Edelbrock, the first-grade teacher who used to whack me on the hand with her ruler for talking in class, singing her heart out. And Mr. Denton, and all the other fixtures of the town I grew up in. And right in the middle of the choir, with an angelic voice that lofted beautifully above the others, was Jana Fulton. She even looked like an angel. Her face radiated in a beautiful glow and her eyes looked right at me while she sang Love Lifted Me. Somewhere in the sanctuary, someone snored loudly.

I found myself drifting back into the same dream and shook my head to wake up again. Abdul was snoring on the other sofa so I got up and eased out of the room and down the hall to the control room. There was a coffee pot in the corner and I started a pot brewing, then fired up the link to Larry. He was dozing at his desk. When the coffee pot stopped gurgling, I poured a cup and tapped on the microphone on the front of the video camera. Larry jumped up, rubbed his eyes, and said, “Morning, Matt.”

“Hi, Larry. Got an I.D. on that missile yet?”

“Uh, hang on. Let me see ... ” He rubbed his eyes some more and fumbled through a stack of papers on his desk. “Yeah, the major knew exactly what it was. It’s Russian, but you already knew that. Let’s see, the model is—”

“The model won’t mean jack to me. How big is it?”

The look on his face said it before his mouth did. “Big enough, Matt. It’s one of the new-generation Scud-E jobs, GPS guidance, pinpoint accuracy. “

“How many could it kill?”

“In a populated area, millions. You want me to put you through to Major Thompson? He’s at the White House.”

“No, tell me what else you know about it. How can it be launched?”

He dug through more papers. “It can be fired from a silo.”

“Well, that’s a relief. There’s no way he’s built a friggin’ nuclear missile silo on the sly in this country.”

“It can be fired from a silo. It can also be fired from som
ething called a Topol-M, which is a truck-mounted launcher.”

“Geez, surely he hasn’t been able to smuggle in something like that.”

“I understand they’re in a serious pow-wow over at the big house, Matt. Military, NSA, CIA, the works. I heard the President has been up all night.”

I suddenly felt like an idiot for sleeping. “Any other deve
lopments in the past few hours?”

“This has pretty much taken top priority. A few more sketchy pieces of intel on Hart have dribbled in, but nothing useful.”

“Do we have a picture of this guy? I want to see what he looks like.”

“Not a one. Nothing. It’s like he hasn’t been near a camera in his life,” Larry said.

“Okay, thanks for the update. I’ll be in touch. Let me know the second anything breaks,” I said.

“You bet, bud.”

5:06 AM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

YELLOW CREEK

Tark was awake and we were examining the Hart document. “Blasphemous lunatic,” he said.

“How does the missile square with the seventh seal?”

“Hmmm.” He fetched his pipe and Bible and sat down on the sofa, the world’s first pair of eyeglasses riding the tip of his nose.

“Are you sentimentally attached to those glasses or som
ething?” I said.

“Belonged to my grandpa, why?”

“Just wondering.”

“Remember,” he said, “we’re actually a little bit ahead of him now. Before the countdown was accelerated, the bomb at the plant wasn’t supposed to go off until two-sixteen Eastern time this afternoon. That’s seal number six.”

“How does a nuclear missile mesh with number seven?”

“The seventh seal gets some pretty special treatment, Ma
tthew.” Puffing hard now. “You see, chapter six ends after the sixth seal. It talks of people being in a terrible state of fear after the earthquake, running here and there, trying to hide from the wrath of God. Take a look.”

He handed me the Bible and I read the last few verses:

15
 And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains;

16  And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb:

17  For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?

“Now read on into chapter seven a little bit,” he said. I did. “Tell me what you see there.”

“I don’t see anything about the seventh seal. It’s all about ‘sealing’ the foreheads of different tribes of Israel.”

“Exactly. Now look at chapter eight.”

I read the first verse out loud, “’And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.’ What kind of attack could silence be?”

“To understand it, we have to consider the whole picture of what happens between the sixth and seventh seals. Remember, this is all the same story, not a bunch of isolated incidents. The sixth seal, the earthquake, takes place first. We’ve already seen his version of that. Then the people of God are sealed, issued protection from the wrath still to come.”

“According to that brilliant document he sent out, he himself is God. So in that mindset, who are the people of God and how are they protected?”

“Who indeed. He thinks he’s the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and antichrist all rolled up into one big ball. He’s made it pretty clear he considers us all his children, so to get any meaning at all out of this part we have to assume he’s talking about the same chosen people the Bible is. And that would be the tribes of Israel. In the real tribulation, most Biblical scholars believe these people will be set aside and protected.”

I sensed a long-winded derailment coming and steered him back on course. “What about this; he says the Bible has been skewed, right?”

“Yup, that’s what he says. He’s wrong, but that’s his position.”

“And in his schizoid world, he’s also the antichrist, correct?”

“You got it, Matthew. What’s your point?”

“As far as people go, who will be the antichrist’s least favo
rite group?”

“The chosen people of God. The descendants of the ancient Israelites.”

“Jews, right?”

“It’s a little more complex than just saying ‘Jews’ but gene
rally speaking, yes.”

“Then I think we have to consider Jews to be his next most likely target.”

“I concur.”

“But what could he do targeting Jews that would be deva
stating to the whole world?”

“Maybe that was a bit of exaggeration by a twisted mind, like his substituting Earth, Texas, for the planet Earth.”

I shook my head. “No, if it were something from him, I’d buy that. This description came from Dane Christian, and he was warning us to stop it. There would be no reason for him to aggrandize the event.”

“Sure would be nice if we could see the rest of his letter.”

“Not just nice. Crucial.”