The Left Behind Collection: All 12 Books (229 page)

“How
did
we find each other?” Buck said.

“I couldn’t think of any other place you might look, except at my home, and I didn’t expect you to risk that. I don’t think anybody is there anyway. I haven’t been able to raise anybody.”

Buck was struck by that unfortunate choice of words.

“They’re there, Chaim.”

“You
did
go there? Why don’t they answer? Did Jacov make it back? I expected he would call me.”

Buck spotted a cab sitting a couple of blocks off a busy thoroughfare. Grateful he didn’t have to answer Chaim directly yet, he said, “Wait here, and keep that blanket over your face.”

“You workin’?” he asked the cabbie.

“Hundred and fifty Nicks, only in the city.”

“A hundred, and my father is contagious.”

“No contagious.”

“OK, a hundred and fifty. We’re only going to the Night Visitors. You know it?”

“I know. You keep old man in back, and don’t breathe on me.”

Buck signaled to Chaim, who shuffled over, hidden in the blanket. “Don’t try to talk, Father,” he said, helping him into the backseat. “And don’t cough on this nice young man.”

As if on cue, Chaim covered his mouth with the blanket and both hands and produced a juicy, wheezing cough that made the driver look quickly into the rearview mirror.

The Night Visitors was dark, not even an outside light on. “Are they closed?” Buck said.

“Only for now,” the driver said. “Probably open again at dawn. One-fifty. I gotta go.”

“Wait until I see if I can rouse anybody,” Buck said, getting out.

“Don’t leave him in here! I gotta go. Money now!”

“You’ll get your money when we get a room.”

The driver slammed the car into Park and turned it off, folding his arms across his chest.

Buck’s phone rang as he was trying to peer through the front window of the Night Visitors. “Laslos!” he said, stepping around the corner of the building and into the shadows. The cabbie honked, and Buck signaled him to wait a minute.

“Get this man out of my cab!”

“Five minutes!” Buck said.

“Fifty more Nicks!”

“He’s there with you, Lukas?” Buck said. “How am I supposed to—does he know he’s wanted here—he does? . . . Is Leah with him? . . . Oh, that’s good. We need a way out of here, and there’s no way he can risk coming back. Never mind. I’ll handle that. Listen, does he have to see anyone before he takes off? . . . You can’t be sure airport personnel won’t be on alert. His face is on international TV every few minutes. Do you know anyone who can give him a new look? . . . He’ll need new papers too. Thanks, Laslos! I have to call my wife.”

Buck dialed Chloe, but her phone rang and rang.

When he returned to the cab, the driver was out and screaming. “Now! Go! No more this man in my car!”

Buck paid him and helped Chaim out, pushing him into an alley while he banged on the windows and door and tried to rouse the manager.

Tsion heard something upstairs and ran to the utility box to shut down the power. If the GC searched the place, it would be clear someone had been living there recently, as food in the refrigerator would still be fresh and lots of personal belongings remained. But if they found power meters still spinning, they would know someone was still there somewhere.

Tsion held his breath in the darkness. It was a phone! Had Chloe forgotten to bring hers down? He rushed to the stairs, pushed the plywood away from the bottom of the freezer, pushed up the smelly rack, and lifted himself out. He felt his way to Chloe’s room and followed the sound to her phone. Just as he reached it, it stopped ringing. The caller ID showed Buck’s code. Tsion hit the callback button, but Buck’s phone went to voice mail.

While continuing to bang with one hand, Buck speed-dialed David Hassid with the other. He got only David’s voice mail too. When he hung up, his call button was illuminated. His caller ID showed he had received a call from Chloe’s phone. He was about to call her back when a light came on in the Night Visitors, followed by slamming, stomping, and cursing.

“We have a reservation!” Buck shouted.

“You’ll have a bullet if you don’t shut up!” came the voice from inside. “We closed at midnight and we open again at six!”

“You’re up now, so give us our room!”

“You lost your room when you didn’t show up! Who are you, Tangvald or Goldman?”

Buck whispered desperately to Chaim, “Who are we?”

“Do I look like a Tangvald?”

“Goldman, and my father is sick. Let us in!”

“We’re full!”

“You’re lying! You held two rooms till you went to bed and then gave them both away?”

“Leave me alone!”

“I’ll knock until you let us in!”

“I’ll shoot you if you knock once more!”

The light went out. Buck put his phone in his pocket and banged on the door with both fists.

“You’re a dead man!”

“Just open up and give us a room!”

More swearing, then the light, then the door opened an inch. The man stuck his fingers out. “Five hundred Nicks cash.”

“Let me see the key.”

The man dangled it at the end of a six-inch block of wood. Buck produced the cash, and the key came flying out. “Around back, third floor. If I didn’t need the money, I’d have shot you.”

“You’re welcome,” Buck said.

The room was a hole. A single bed, one straight-back chair, and a toilet and sink. Buck pulled out his phone and sat in the chair, pointing Chaim to the bed. As Buck tried Chloe’s phone, Chaim kicked off his slippers and stretched out on the bed, atop the ratty spread and under his own blanket.

“Tsion!” Buck said. “No, don’t wake her. . . . Underground? That’s probably good for now. Just tell her I’m all right. I need to get hold of T. May need him to get Chaim and me out of here. . . .”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Chaim mumbled from the bed. “I’m a dead man.”

“Yeah,” Buck said to Tsion, “just like you and me. . . . Kenny OK? . . . We’ll keep in touch.”

Buck couldn’t get an answer at Palwaukee Airport or on T’s cell phone. He put his phone away and took a deep breath, kicking his bag under the chair. “Chaim, we have to talk,” he said. But Chaim was asleep.

Rayford awoke with a start just after dawn, feeling refreshed. He grabbed his bag and padded past a dozing Demetrius to the bathroom, smelling breakfast from the kitchen. While in the tiny bathroom, however, he heard tires on the gravel and pulled the curtain back an inch. A small pickup pulled into view.

Rayford leaned out the door and called to Laslos. “Company,” he whispered. “You expecting anyone?”

“It’s all right,” Laslos said, setting a pan of food on the table and wiping his hands on an apron. “Get a shower and join us for breakfast as soon as you can.”

Rayford tried to run hot water in the sink. It was lukewarm. Laslos interrupted with a knock. “Don’t shave, Mr. Steele.”

“Oh, Laslos, I really need to. I’ve got several days of growth and—”

“I’ll explain later. But don’t.”

Rayford shrugged and squinted at himself in the mirror. He was due for a haircut, more and more gray appearing at his temples and in the back. His beard was salt-and-pepper, which alarmed him. Not that he cared so much about gray in his mid-forties. It was just that it had seemed to happen almost overnight. Until this morning, he had felt every one of his forty-plus years. Now he felt great.

The shower, a trickle from a rusty pipe, was also lukewarm. It made him hurry, but by the time he scrubbed himself dry with a small, thin towel and dressed, he was ravenous. And curious. He emerged eager to get going, but also intrigued by yet another guest at the table, a pudgy man a few years older than he with slick, curly black hair and wire-rimmed glasses.

Rayford leaned past Laslos and Demetrius and shook the man’s hand. The mark of the believer was on his forehead, so Rayford used his own name.

The man looked at Laslos and shyly back at Rayford.

“This is Adon, Mr. Steele,” Laslos said. “He speaks no English, but as you can see, he is a brother.”

As they ate, Laslos told Rayford about Adon. “He is an artist, a skilled craftsman. And he has brought with him contraband items that could get him locked away for the rest of his life.”

Adon followed the conversation with blank eyes, except when Laslos or Demetrius broke in to translate. Then he shyly looked away, nodding.

As Laslos cleared the table, Demetrius helped Adon bring in his equipment, which included a computer, printer, laminator, digital camera, dyes, hair clippers, even a cloth backdrop. Rayford was positioned in a chair under the light and near the window, where the early sun shone in. Adon draped a sheet around him and pinned it behind his neck. He said something to Laslos, who translated for Rayford.

“He wants to know if it is OK to make you bald.”

“If you all think it’s necessary. If we could get by with very short, I’d appreciate it.”

Laslos informed Adon, whose shyness and hesitance apparently did not extend to his barbering. In a few swipes, he left Rayford’s hair in clumps on the floor, leaving him with a quarter inch of dark residue such as Rayford had not seen since high school. “Mm-hmm,” Rayford said.

Then came the dye that made what was left of the hair on his head look like the lightest of the gray in the long stubble on his chin.

Adon spoke to Laslos, who asked Rayford if he wore glasses.

“Had the surgery,” Rayford said.

“Then these will work,” Laslos said, and Adon produced a pair of colored contacts.

Adon asked for Rayford’s documents, shot a few pictures, and got to work on the computer. While he transformed Rayford’s papers with the new photograph, Rayford stole away to the bathroom for a peek. The shorter, grayer hair and the gray stubble added ten years. In the glasses, he hardly recognized himself.

The technology allowed Adon to produce old-looking new documents in less than an hour. Rayford was eager to get going. “What do I owe you?” he said, but neither Laslos nor Demetrius would translate that.

“We’ll be sure Adon is taken care of,” Laslos said. “Now, Pastor is going to ride back to Ptolemaïs with him, and I will drop you at Kozani. I called ahead to have your fuel tanks topped off.”

David sat bleary-eyed before his computer in New Babylon, his phone turned off. He had programmed the autopsy to be recorded on his own hard drive and anything from the evidence room to go onto Mac’s computer. Meanwhile he continued to study the Chicago skyscraper he felt had potential as a new safe house. If he was right, it could accommodate hundreds of exiles, if necessary.

The Strong Building was a technical marvel, wholly solar powered. Giant reflectors stored enough energy every day to run the tower’s power plant for weeks. So even a several-day stretch without bright sunlight never negatively impacted the building.

It was clear to David that neither the foundation nor at least the first thirty-five or so stories had been compromised by the damage above. The building appeared to have suffered a direct hit, but the impact had knocked the top half of the floors away from the rest of the structure rather than sending them crashing through those below. The question was what had happened to the solar panels and whether there was any way people could live in the unaffected portion of the structure without being detected.

It took David more than two hours of hacking through a morass of classified layers of information before he was able to turn his code-breaking software loose on the gateways that led to the mainframe that controlled the Strong Building. Reaching that point gave him a thrill he couldn’t describe, though he would try to describe it later to Annie.

David was amazed that satellite phone technology got him as far as it did, and he had to wonder how much untapped energy was still operative in the condemned city. The longer everyone else remained convinced the place was radioactively contaminated, the better for him and the Tribulation Force. At every cybergateway along the path, he planted warnings of high radioactive levels. And while he was at it, he launched a robotic search engine that found all the original probe readouts and changed more than half of them to positive results. Civilian and GC planes were automatically rerouted so they couldn’t fly over Chicago, even at more than thirty thousand feet.