Seven Unholy Days (31 page)

62

8:17 AM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME (LOCAL)

YELLOW CREEK

              Tark managed to round up some workers to start cleaning up around the complex in the aftermath of the explosion. Abdul found and fixed the glitch that had us on emergency power, and as soon as Tark and I gave the okay he patched us back into the grids. If I had believed in God I would have issued a word of thanks for allowing me to be born in the post-Freon era. Before this week, I didn’t realize what an air conditioning junkie I was.

I mulled over the Abdul situation some more and almost confronted him but decided to give it a while. It was possible, even likely, that he wasn’t aware of his faux pas. I didn’t want to believe he was a traitor—he had definitely been responsible for real breakthroughs during the week that only helped us—but it was possible it was an elaborate cover and I wanted to keep the upper hand.

Restoring the Christian file was top priority. I had a hunch about how it got corrupted, and I made a call to check the theory.

“Jana, when you went through the main door at Hart’s place, do you recall an unusual tingling sensation, like static electricity?”

“No, why?”

“I thought there might have been a data security field, an a
nti-espionage device that destroys data passing through it.”

“Sorry, Matt, no tingling.”

“Thanks, I’ll talk to you later.”

“Bye bye,” she said in that sweet drawl.

I hung up the phone, but I could still hear her voice. Lost in it again. What difference did the means of corruption make? None, I admitted, which made me a pretty sorry excuse for a hero, calling a girl while I was supposed to be saving the country, or maybe the world. I suddenly felt like an ass and went back to work.

The file reported a size of just over twelve megabytes, which might be accurate. Or just as easily, not. The attached file was what we needed, not the rest of Christian’s letter. An hour into the hack session, I located the marker that delineated the two components. It was a major step but it was going far too slowly. At this rate I’d still be hammering the keys while Hart did his thing on Monday.

The videoconferencing chime sounded and I pulled up the feed expecting to see Larry. What I got was something altogether different.

“Mr. Decker?”

“Yes, Mr. President.” I quietly asked if someone would grab me a glass of water.

“I want to personally thank you for your heroic efforts on this matter.”

“Thank you, sir, but—”

“Is this conversation private on your end, Mr. Decker?”

I made a few clicks. “Yes sir.”

“Do you mind if I call you Matt?”

“Of course not, sir.”

“Good. Matt, I need not tell you that we’re gravely co
ncerned about this possible missile threat. We’ve spent the whole night assessing possible target areas for such an attack, and quite frankly we’re coming up with goose eggs. Do you have anything else that may help us, anything at all?”

“I have a theory, sir, but I’m not sure how much help it will be.”

“By all means, let’s have it.”

“After conferring with my prophecy consultant, I believe Hart is planning to target Jews.”

“Why in the hell would he do that? Oh, never mind. Who cares why the crazy bastard is doing anything. The question is where and when.”

“We can almost certainly narrow the ‘when’ down to two-sixteen Eastern time tomorrow, most likely PM since he adhered to that pattern in four of the six events thus far. I have no idea where at this point.”

“I see. Matt, you’ve become our go-to man on this operation. I’m counting on you to come through on this. The moment you have any relevant information I want you to contact us. Your feed has been switched here to the situation room instead of the FBI, and I intend for it to remain here for the duration.”

“I’ll do my best, Mr. President.”

“I know you will. That is all.”

“Mr. President, before you go, is Director Brandon with you?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I just want him to know how grateful I am for the assi
stance he gave on the simulated earthquake issue.”

Stanton’s face registered confusion. “Simulated eart
hquake?”

“Yes, sir. I’ll let the director fill you in.”

“Very well. Goodbye for now, Mr. Decker.”

“Goodbye, sir.”

The screen went blank and I chugged the glass of water someone had fetched.

If Abdul was on the other side, he was doing a great job of working to maintain his cover. Shortly after I briefed Tark and him on the conversation, he said, “I know you are working on the file from the Mr. Christian, but have you been thinking to look at the original file of the Abraham Hart document that was sent to the press people?”

It took about ten seconds to soak into my brain in its depleted state. “Of course! There could easily be an encrypted layer to that file, just like the White Horse file.”

“That is what I am thinking, Matt Decker.”

The phones were reasonably operational but I couldn’t get a soul on the line at Fox News who had a technical clue. I couldn’t get a human on the line at any of the other major media centers at all. Working a step or two away from the President has its benefits. I raised Larry, who had moved his liaison operation to the White House, and explained our need for the original file. It arrived four minutes later. The Presidential little black book obviously has a different set of phone numbers.

I held my breath as I pulled the file up on my notebook, then deflated like a balloon at the sharp end of a pin. “Good idea, Abdul. But the file is only twenty-seven K. Nothing there but a dot-doc file.” I opened it and read through the babble one more time. It was still just babble.

“Maybe there’s a code in the text itself,” Tark said.

“Worth checking out,” I said. I asked Abdul to run it through a cryptology scan. He started working it and hitting dead ends, which wasn’t surprising. Looking for a needle in a haystack is easy compared to trying to uncover a code in five paragraphs of text without any reference point. Nonetheless, he tried. And tried. And tried some more. I paced and pondered, keeping a watchful eye on his efforts to be sure they were gen
uine. I saw nothing to indicate otherwise.

Tark paced the room with a copy of the document in his hand, leaving a trail of sweet smoke in his wake.

“I am having no luck,” Abdul said.

“Why don’t you try running the Bible code on it?” Tark said.

“Bible code? You want to start praying for an answer?”

“That wouldn’t hurt, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the Bible code. Surely you’ve heard of it?”

“Surely I haven’t, but I’m all ears now.”

“Back in the nineties, an Israeli mathematician found a bunch of hidden messages in the first five books of the Bible. There were a bunch of books out on it. A bunch of high-brow intellectuals tried for years to debunk it but couldn’t. It’s ama
zing stuff, Matthew.”

I had gargantuan doubts regarding the existence of hidden Bible messages, but we were getting nowhere with our shotgun approach and a Bible-related code would seem to fit the bill with our man. “You know anything about the methodology?”

“I remember that now,” Abdul said. “It was based on skipping letters. By skipping a certain number of letters ... ”

Abdul kept talking but it occurred to me that with the power back on I might have some luck finding some working Internet sites. I was right. My buddy Jeff Bezos over at Amazon.com had wasted no time getting his shop back online; even though the power at their main facility was still down, they had mirror data centers dotting the world.

My first search hit a book creatively titled The Bible Code. I read the reviews and a few excerpted pages, then started digging for more detailed information. Even with servers and backbones operational in only one region, there was still plenty of information to be found on the topic.

Abdul was right; the methodology was simple. Pick a star
ting point, then skip every other letter and see if you come up with a readable sequence. If not, try using a letter, skipping two, using a letter, skipping two more, and so on. Then skip three, then four, and so on. The so-called messages in the Bible were often found by skip sequences of up to thousands of letters. The resulting information was interesting, but that was brain candy for another day.

I brought Abdul up to speed and asked him if he thought he could come up with a quick kludge to apply the search to the Hart document. He grinned, rubbed his fingertips together, and went to work. The program was ready to go in minutes.

“Start with the first letter and let’s see if we get lucky,” I said. “And don’t count any spaces or punctuation, just the actual letters like they did when they were searching the Bible.”

“What skip sequence?”

“That’s easy. Skip two hundred fifteen; that’ll have us using every two hundred sixteenth letter. If he happened to use a code like this, I have no doubt that he used his magic number.”

We watched closely while the little program ran. Nothing. “Try starting with letter number two-sixteen,” I said. Again, nothing. Then starting with number four thirty-two. And six forty-eight. No matter where we started, the resulting sequence of letters was nothing but gibberish. I started pacing again.

On my third trip around the room I heard Abdul say, “Oh my goodness graciousness!”

“Got something?”

“I’ll put it on the big screen!”

I looked in disbelief and said, “How’d you get that?”

“I included punctuation marks in the last search.”

And there it was, plain as day and bigger than life. Using every two hundred sixteenth character, including punctuation marks, yielded a definite sequence:

My Dearest Children:

Prior to this momentous time, this world has existed in a state of chaos and confusion. It gives my heart and soul untold pleasure to announce that the end of this misery is at hand. Hear me explain!

Each human being craves to know that he or she ex
i
sts for a reason. This longing drives people to search for meaning in their everyday lives, meaning in the world about them, and meaning in the universe. For many millennia, untold numbers have clung to a plethora of religions and arcane belief systems, becau
s
e the human mind and spirit is generally incapable of deciphering the real meaning of life. I lived for years in just such a yearning existence myself. That has changed.

Throughout and during the past years I have discovered that I am not really human. I am immo
r
tal, the quintessential embodiment of life and all that it entails. There have been many false teachings purveyed by scores of false teachers and prophets. Some of these were well-meaning souls. Others were utter frauds. I will not call names for it would be
a
pure waste of time within this brief missive, but the Truth I shall soon share with you encompasses, supersedes, and nullifies all iconic religious personalities who have preceded me.

Regarding the current situation, as you are no doubt aware, a
e
ons have foretold the significant events have taken place over the past few days, primarily in the United States of America. Fear not! These happenings are the fulfillment of prophecy. A twisted version, a Program of Events so to speak, can be found seeded al
l
throughout the Book of Revelation in the Holy Bible. I encourage you to read the book, but please my children, bear in mind that the Bible was written long ago by many different MORTALS who were inspired by my lingering cosmic presence over a period of hundreds
o
f years, but their regrettably weak minds and numerous imbecilic translations have skewed the true meaning which I desired to impart.

Alas, the portions of the Bible that speak of the teacher known as Jesus have been hopelessly butchered. They lead to belie
v
e that this man was the Christ. Is it not extravagantly exciting to know that the real Christ is among you right now? I am Christ. I realize that all those who are reading this are likely beside themselves with spewing joy, but there are yet more good tidings. Tal
e
s concerning the so-called AntiChrist are also mangled groupings of incoherent thought. There is no separate AntiChrist. I am the Christ and I am the AntiChrist. There is no distinct personality known as Satan, beyond certain necessary elements of my immo
r
tal being. I am Satan. There is none other but me. I created the universe and all that exists within it, and have subsequently lain dormant with regard to my reverential being until now. I shall reveal myself fully unto you in the near future for you to worship me
!
You are henceforth warned that things are often not what they seem. Rely on my Word for your sustenance and survival. To that end, you may expect a series of further communications over the coming days. Until then, I bid you fond adieu.