The Left Behind Collection: All 12 Books (230 page)

David had to feather his way through the Strong Building mainframe by trial and error, seeing if he could remotely control the heating and cooling system, the lights, phones, sanitation system, elevators, and security cameras. The best video game in history would not have been more addictive.

The state-of-the-art monitoring system clearly reflected how much of the building was malfunctioning. More than half the elevators were off-line due to incomplete circuits. David clicked on More Information and found “Undetermined error has broken circuits between floors 40 and 80.” He checked two dozen elevators that serviced the first thirty-nine floors and found that most appeared in running order.

By the time he had played with the system for another forty-five minutes, David had determined which security cameras worked, how to turn on lights on various floors, then the cameras, to show him whether the elevators would run, open, and shut. From nine time zones away, he was running what was left of a skyscraper in a city that had been abandoned for months.

Recording his keystrokes in a secure file, David fired up the camera on the highest floor he could find, the west end of the thirty-ninth. It showed water on the floor, but the mainframe indicated that it was being successfully redirected to keep it from flooding the floors below. He maneuvered the camera to show the ceiling and blinked. There was no ceiling, only a three-sided shell of the building that rose maybe another ten stories and revealed the inky sky, moon shining, stars twinkling.

So the Strong Building had been designed to withstand the worst nature could offer and had largely survived even what man threw at it. David stayed with his search until he found cameras that gave him a good view of what now served as the roof of the tower. By the time he had saved most of the information, he had an idea what the place looked like. In essence, it was a modular tower that appeared mortally wounded but had a lot to offer. Unusual in a modern skyscraper, the blueprints showed an inner core of offices hidden from outside view, surrounding the elevators on every floor. Here was unlimited floor space, water, plumbing, power, light—all undetectable by anyone who dared venture into an area that had been officially condemned and rendered off limits anyway.

The open top appeared large enough to accommodate a helicopter, but David couldn’t determine remotely whether the new roof by proxy, which at first appeared to be the ceiling of the thirty-ninth floor, would support significant weight. He found parking underneath the tower, though debris from the top floors blocked two of the main garage entrances. It was a long shot, but David believed that if he could get the stateside Trib Force to the place, they could find ways in and out of that underground carport.

And that gave him another idea. The last rain of bombs to hit Chicago had come with little warning. Employees and residents of tall buildings fled to the streets, but no one would have been allowed below ground with buildings falling. Underground garages would have been automatically sealed off with the city so gridlocked. How many vehicles might still be in that garage? David clicked away until he found the underground security cameras and the emergency lighting system. Once he had the lights on in the lowest level, he panned one of the security cameras until the vehicles came into view. Six levels below the street, he found more than a dozen cars. The problem, of course, was that drivers would have had the keys.

David kept trying cameras at different levels, looking for valet parking. He struck pay dirt near the elevators on the first level below the street. Nearly fifty late-model and mostly expensive cars, at least one of them a Hummer and several others sport-utility vehicles, were parked in the vicinity of a glassed-in shack clearly labeled Valet Parking. David manipulated the closest camera until he could make out a wall next to the cash register, replete with sets of keys. It was as if this place was made for the Trib Force, and he couldn’t wait to send someone in to investigate. David wondered how soon he and Annie might be living there.

A call startled him. It was the director of the Global Community Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, an Indonesian named Bakar. “I need your help,” the man said.

What else was new?

“Fire away,” David said, shutting down his computer with everything saved and hidden.

“Moon is all over me about why we didn’t bring back the video microchips from the Gala. I thought we had. Anyway, we have them secured now, and I had arranged to have them flown here commercially. Walter tells me now that he’ll have my job if those chips are out of GC hands for one second.”

“Who’s got ’em, Bakar?”

“One of our guys.”

“Can’t he just bring them?”

“Yeah, but he’d have to fly commercially.”

“So? He’s still not letting the discs out of his sight.”

“Commercial flights are full coming here, and Moon doesn’t want to wait.”

“So you want us to send a plane for one guy?”

“Exactly.”

“Do you know the cost of that?”

“That’s why I’m begging.”

“How did I get so popular all of a sudden?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Be at the hangar by ten this morning.”

“Me?”

“Who else?”

“I don’t want to go, Director. I want our guy picked up.”

“I’m not going to have our sleep-deprived first officer fly a multimillion-dollar, er, Nick, fighter to Israel
and
have to find your guy, Bakar. You’re going to ride along so Mr. Smith doesn’t have to leave the cockpit. And I won’t charge you the thousands for fuel.”

“I appreciate it, Director. But couldn’t I just have my guy be at a certain place and—”

“Earth to Bakar! This is a seller’s, or I should say giver’s, market, sir. You make Smith go alone and I’ll charge you depreciation on the jet, fuel,
and
his time. And his time is not cheap.”

“I’ll be there.”

“I thought you would.”

David called Abdullah.

“I was up anyway,” Abdullah said. “I was hoping something would take me away from here today.”

“You know how to work a chip-copying machine?”

“I don’t know, boss. Is it more complicated than a fighter-bomber? Of course.”

“I’m sending one with you. When Bakar finds his guy, you take the chips into the cockpit and tell them regulations say you have to personally log all cargo. Copy them, tag them as logged, and give them back to the TV boys.”

“And bring you the copies.”

“We’re on the same page, Smitty.”

David was next to giddy about the Trib Force all being in touch with each other via phone. He would feel better when he knew Buck was out of Israel and that Rayford was also on his way home, but David was unaware he had a message to call Buck.

Rayford shook Laslos’s hand with both of his, got his promise to again personally thank Pastor Demeter and Adon, then loped into the airport and to the hangar. His head felt cool with so little insulation, but he didn’t want to keep running his hand over it for fear of making it obvious that it was new to him.

A tower official met him at the Gulfstream. “You must be Mr. Berry.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Here’s your fuel bill. Your papers?”

Rayford dug them out and paid his bill in cash.

“Lot of currency to have on your person, Mr. Berry,” the man said, shuffling through Rayford’s documents.

“A risk I’m willing to take to keep from going bankrupt again.”

“Credit cards do you in, did they, sir?”

“Hate ’em.”

“Wow, this picture looks like it was taken today.”

Rayford froze, then forced himself to breathe. “Yeah?”

“Yes, look here. Karl! Come look at this!”

A mechanic in coveralls wandered over, looking peeved that he had been interrupted.

The official held Rayford’s ID photo next to Rayford’s face. “Look at this. He got this, let me see here, eight, nine months ago, but his hair’s the same length and, if I’m not mistaken, he’s wearing the same shirt.”

“Sure enough,” the mechanic said, leaving as quickly as he had come. Rayford watched to make sure he wasn’t going to call someone, but he just moseyed back to the engine he’d been working on.

“Yes, that’s something,” the man said. “Did you notice that?”

“Nope,” Rayford said. “Lemme see that. Well, I’ll be dogged. I
had
just got a haircut when this was taken, but ’course the hair doesn’t grow much anymore, anyway. And that probably
is
the same shirt. I don’t have that many.”

“Your own plane and not that many shirts? There’s priorities for you.”

“My own plane, I wish. I just drive ’em for the company.”

“And what company’s that, sir?” The man handed back his documents.

“Palwaukee Global,” Rayford said.

“What do you transport?”

“Just the plane today. They had too many this side of the ocean.”

“That so? You could pick up some business running from Jerusalem to New Babylon this week, you know.”

“I heard. Wish I had the time.”

“Safe flight.”

“Thank you, sir.”
And thank you, Lord.

At ten in the morning in New Babylon, David strolled past the makeshift evidence room, pretending to be checking progress on the nearby Carpathia statue. He knew if he appeared to be snooping on the evidence, Intelligence Director Jim Hickman would shoo him. But Hickman also liked to impress, and allowing a colleague an inside look seemed to make him feel special.

David slowed as he walked by, hoping to run into Jim. Not seeing him, he knocked at the door. An armed guard opened it, and David spotted Jim across the room with a technician on his knees in the middle of a fifteen-by-one-hundred-foot drapery. “Don’t want to bother anybody,” David said. “Just want to make sure Director Hickman and his team have everything they need. I’ll call him in his office.”

“I’m in here, David!” Hickman called.

“Oh! So you are!”

“Let ’im in, Corporal! Come over here, David. Slip your shoes off. I wanna show you something.”

“I don’t want to intrude.”

“Come on!”

“If you insist. This is fascinating.”

“You haven’t seen anything yet.”

But David had. Three techies in the corner were hunched over the remains of the wood lectern. They had magnifying lamps and large tweezers, similar to what the technician had in the middle of the drape. He wore a helmet with a light on it and hand held his magnifier.

“Look at this, David,” Hickman said, motioning to him. “Got your shoes off?”

“I can come right out there where you are?”

“If I say you can, and I do! Now come on, time’s a-wastin’.”

David got to within about ten feet of Hickman and the techie when Jim said, “Stop and look down. Whoever was shootin’ at this thing had to know what he was doin’. Looks like it went right through the middle. I mean, I never even knew Steele was a shooter, but to get a round, one round, to go through that pulpit dealie and then through the center of this curtain, well . . .”

“What am I looking at here, Jim?” David said, staring at a strange configuration about ten feet in diameter.

Hickman rose and limped over, joining David at the edge of the pattern. “Gettin’ old,” he said, grunting. “Now look here. The bullet coming from a weapon like that creates a mini tornado. If a real Kansas twister had the same relative strength, it would mix Florida and Maine with California and Washington. This one popped an eight-inch hole through the curtain there—you can see it from here.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But what you see at your feet is the effect it had on fibers this far from the center.”

The force of the spinning disk had ripped the individual threads out of place and yanked them uniformly to create the huge twisted image.

“Now, c’mere and look at this.”

Hickman led David to the top of the curtain, where brass eyeholes were set six inches apart along the whole one-hundred-foot edge. “Hooks went through these holes to suspend the whole thing from the iron piping.”

“Wow,” David said, astounded at the damage. The eight holes on either side of the center had been ripped clean, brass casings and all. The next several dozen were split apart, then more on each side had mangled hooks still attached, all the way to the ends, where the eyeholes were intact but the hooks were missing.