The Left Behind Collection: All 12 Books (162 page)

Buck’s heart sank. He knew Jacov had been sincere in his conversion, and God had proved it with the seal on his forehead. How could Jacov desecrate his own salvation this way? Had his brush with the GC been more gruesome than Buck could imagine?

“Where?” Rosenzweig pressed, clearly disgusted.

“In there!” Stefan pointed with his drink, laughing and coughing all the while. “He’s up on a table having the time of his life! Now let me through so I don’t have an accident right here!” He lurched off, laughing so hard tears ran down his face.

Chaim, appearing overcome, strained to see into the main room, from which music blared and strobe lights flashed. “Oh, no!” he moaned, backing into Buck. “He’s totally drunk. This shy, young man who hardly looks you in the eye when he greets you is carrying on in front of everyone! I can’t take this. I’ll bring the car up. Could you just get him down off that table and drag him out? You’re bigger and stronger than he is. Please.”

Buck didn’t know what to say. He’d never been a bouncer, and while he had once enjoyed the nightlife himself, he had never liked loud bars, especially ones like this. He jostled past Chaim as the old man hurried out. Buck shouldered his way through several clusters of revelers until he came to dozens whose attention was on the crazy young Israeli holding forth atop a table. It was Jacov all right.

Rayford hurried to the basement and found Ken with Donny Moore’s telescope in his lap and his microscope on the desk. Ken was reading Donny’s technical journals. “Kid was a genius, Ray. I’m learning a ton that’s gonna help us. If you can get this stuff to your other pilot and your inside techie over there, they can have us up to speed when their cover is blown and we’re all just tryin’ to stay alive. What can I do you for?”

“I want to go with you Friday to Israel.”

“You barely escaped. Didn’t your friend Mac say you were as good as dead if you had stayed?”

“It’s not like me to run. I can’t hide from Carpathia for the rest of my life anyway, short as it may be.”

“What the heck’s got into you, Ray?”

“Just talked with Chloe. I smell trouble. No way Nicolae is going to let them out of Israel alive. We have to go get them.”

“I’m game. How do we do it?”

Buck quit excusing himself; he was being cursed anyway. Finally, he was close enough to hear Jacov, but he was railing in Hebrew and Buck understood none of it. Well, almost none. Jacov was shouting and gesturing and trying to keep people’s attention. They laughed at him and seemed to curse him, whistling and throwing cigarette butts at him. Two women splashed him with their drinks.

His face was flushed and he looked high, but he was not drinking, at least then. Buck recognized the word
Yeshua
, Hebrew for Jesus. And
Hamashiach
, the word for Messiah.

“What’s he saying?” he asked a man nearby. The drunk looked at him as if he were from another planet. “English?” Buck pressed.

“Kill the English!” the man said. “And the Americans too!”

Buck turned to others. “English?” he asked. “Anyone know English?”

“I do,” a barmaid said. She carried several empties on a tray. “Make it quick.”

“What’s he saying?”

She looked up at Jacov. “Him? Same thing he’s been saying all night. ‘Jesus is the Messiah. I know. He saved me.’ All that nonsense. What can I tell you? The boss would have thrown him out long ago, but he’s entertaining.”

Jacov was little more than entertaining. His motive might have been pure, but he was having zero impact. Buck moved close and grabbed his ankle. Jacov looked down. “Buck! My friend and brother! This man will tell you! He was there! He saw the water turned to blood and back again! Buck, come up here!”

“Let’s go, Jacov!” Buck said, shaking his head. “I’m not coming up there! No one is listening! Come on! Rosenzweig is waiting!”

Jacov looked amazed. “He is here? Here? Have him come in!”

“He was in. Now let’s go.”

Jacov climbed down and eagerly followed Buck out, accepting cheers and slaps on the back from the merrymakers. They were near the front door when Jacov spotted Stefan heading the other way. “Wait! There’s my friend! I must tell him I’m leaving!”

“He’ll figure it out,” Buck said, steering him out the door.

In the car Rosenzweig glared at Jacov. “I was not drinking, Doctor,” he said. “Not one drop!”

“Oh, Jacov,” Rosenzweig said as Buck pulled away from the curb. “The smell is all over you. And I saw you atop the table.”

“You can smell my breath!” he said, leaning forward.

“I don’t want to smell your breath!”

“No! Come on! I’ll prove it!” Jacov breathed heavily into Rosenzweig’s face, and Chaim grimaced and turned away.

Rosenzweig looked at Buck. “He had garlic today, but I do not smell alcohol.”

“Of course not!” Jacov said. “I was preaching! God gave me the boldness! I am one of the 144,000 witnesses, as Rabbi Ben-Judah says! I will be an evangelist for God!”

Chaim slumped in his seat and raised both hands. “Oy,” he said. “I wish you
were
drunk.”

After hearing what had gone on behind the scenes in Israel, Ken agreed it was likely Carpathia would manufacture “some tragedy outside his control, somethin’ he can blame on somebody else, but no matter how you slice it, people we care about are gonna die.”

“I don’t want to be foolhardy, Ken,” Rayford said. “But I’m not going to hide here and just hope they get out.”

“I been sky-jockeyin’ that son-in-law of yours since the disappearances, and you’d have to go some to be more foolhardy than that boy. We’re gonna hafta get in touch with your copilot over there though. I can teach you a lot about the Gulfstream, but nobody can put it down without a runway.”

“Meaning?”

“You’re gonna be looking at a quick pickup, right? Probably from this Rosen-whatever estate?”

“Yeah, I’m going to suggest to Tsion that he announce plans for Saturday, something Carpathia will believe he wouldn’t want to miss. Then we get in there after midnight Friday and get them out of there.”

“Unless they meet us somewhere near the airport, we’re going to have to drop in and get ’em. And that means a chopper.”

“Can’t we rent one? I could ask David Hassid, our guy inside the GC, to have one waiting for us at Jerusalem or Ben Gurion.”

“Fine, but we’re gonna need two fliers. No way McCullum can get away to help us.”

“What am I, chopped liver?”

Ken smacked himself in the head. “Listen to me,” he said. “What an idiot! You’re trained in a copter, then?”

“Mac brought me up to speed. I land near the complex and shuttle them to you at the airport, right?”

“You’d better get a layout of the place before we go. You’re going to have precious little time as it is, puttin’ one of them noisy jobs down in a residential area. Somebody sees you in their yard, the gendarmes’ll be there before you can get airborne again.”

“Does your wife know where you’ve been?” Rosenzweig asked Jacov as Buck pulled in front of his apartment building.

“I called her. She wants to know what in the world I’m talking about.”

“Why did you go to that awful place first?”

“I escaped to Stefan’s house. He wanted to go. I thought, what better place to start preaching?”

“You’re a fool,” Rosenzweig said.

“Yes I am!”

Buck tossed Jacov his cell phone. “Call your wife so you don’t scare her to death when you walk in.”

But before Jacov could dial, the phone rang. “What’s this?” he said. “I didn’t do that.”

“Push Send and say, ‘Buck’s phone.’”

It was Chloe. “She needs to talk with you right away, Mr. Williams.”

Buck took the phone and told Jacov, “Wait here until we can warn your wife you’re coming.”

Chloe told Buck about the call from her father and his request for a schematic of Rosenzweig’s estate. “I’ll bring it up when it’s appropriate,” Buck whispered.

Later, when he finally drove through the gates at Chaim’s place, the time didn’t seem right to raise the issue of the schematic. Rosenzweig was still a Carpathia sympathizer and would not understand. He might even spill the beans. Buck remained in the car as Rosenzweig got out.

“You’re not coming in?”

“May I borrow your car for a while?”

“Take the Mercedes.”

“This will be fine,” Buck said. “If Chloe is still up, tell her she can call me.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’d rather not say. If you don’t know, you don’t have to lie if anyone asks.”

“This is entirely too much skullduggery for me, Cameron. Be safe and hurry back, would you? You and your friends have another big day tomorrow. Or I should say today.”

Buck drove straight to the Wailing Wall. As he expected, after the squabbling between the two witnesses and Carpathia and the threats Nicolae made on international television, huge crowds pressed near the fence where Eli and Moishe held court. The GC was well represented, armed guards ringing the crowd.

Buck parked far from the Temple Mount and moseyed up like a curious tourist. Moishe and Eli stood back-to-back with Eli facing the crowd. Buck had never seen them in that position and wondered if Moishe was somehow on the lookout. Eli was speaking in his forceful, piercing voice, but at that moment he was competing with the head of the GC guard unit and his bullhorn. The guard was making his announcement in several languages—first in Hebrew, then in Spanish, then in an Asian tongue Buck couldn’t place. Finally, he spoke a broken English with a Hebrew accent, and Buck realized the GC guard was an Israeli.

“Attention, ladies and gentlemen! I have been asked by the Global Community supreme commander to remind citizens of the proclamation from His Excellency, Potentate Nicolae Carpathia—” here the crowd erupted into cheering and applause—“that the two men you see before you are under house arrest. They are confined to this area until the end of the Meeting of the Witnesses Friday night. If they leave this area before that, any GC personnel or private citizen is within his rights to detain them by force, to wound them, or to exterminate them. Further, if they are seen anywhere, repeat anywhere, after that time, they shall be put to death.”

The crowd near the fence cheered wildly again, laughed, taunted, pointed fingers, and spat toward the witnesses. But still the crowd hung back at least thirty feet, having heard of, if not seen, those whom the witnesses had killed. While many claimed the two capriciously murdered people who got too close, Buck himself had seen a mercenary soldier charge at them with a high-powered rifle. He was incinerated by fire from the witnesses’ mouths. Another man who had leaped toward them with a knife had seemed to hit an invisible wall and fell dead.