The Remnant: On the Brink of Armageddon Read online

  “Stop the racket or I’ll kill you!” Elena yelled.

  George heard no one else. He kept pounding. How was she going to reach the lock? unlock it? open the doors?

  She swore, and he heard movement. She was dragging something near the elevator. He heard the key in the lock, then heard it turn over. It sounded like she had stepped down from the chair or whatever she had used to elevate herself. Now she was trying to open the doors. Not even Plato had been able to do it alone. George just sat there pounding.

  “I’m trying to get to you!” she said. “But when I do, you’re going to be sorry.”

  Thump!

  Thump!

  Thump!

  “I’ll shoot through the door!”

  Thump!

  Thump!

  Thump!

  “You’d better cut that out, and I’m not kidding!”

  He could tell she was struggling with the doors. There was no way she could open them. If only he could get her to forget they were unlocked. He quit banging.

  “That’s better!”

  He heard her step up again. The key was going into the lock.

  Thump!

  Thump!

  Thump!

  “No! I’m onto you! I’m locking it, and you can just thump all night!”

  She locked it.

  George stood and found the other boot. He put one on each hand. Now he leaned forward with his hands above his head, the boots pressing against the doors. He dragged them as he slowly slid to the floor and let them drop. George made sure his knee hit first, hard. Then his hip, then his side, then the boots, then his hands. He lay still.

  “You finished playing around in there? . . . Huh? Are you? . . . You’re going to get yourself shot! . . . You okay in there? . . . Hey!”

  She swore again, and he heard her on the phone. “. . . was banging around in there. I threatened to shoot him and he quit, but now I think he’s passed out . . . because it sounded like it . . . like he collapsed. You know there’s no air in there. No ventilation. Where? I’ll look.”

  She slapped the doors twice. “Hold on in there. I’ll get you some air.”

  Chang found the tape of radio transmissions among local GC Peacekeepers in Ptolemaïs, but the quality was so poor, the conversion facility couldn’t turn it into readable words. He downloaded it into his own computer and tried listening through earphones.

  “Chloe,” he reported, “I’m guessing, so what you do with this is totally up to you. I believe there is only one car following you, and it’s not official GC. They’ve farmed out your surveillance to two Morale Monitors. They’re armed, of course, but all they’re supposed to do is report who you warn about a raid.”

  “But you’re guessing.”

  “I have to be honest, Chloe. I’m pretty sure that’s what I heard.”

  “How sure are you?”

  “Fifty-five percent.”

  She laughed.

  “That’s funny?”

  “No. It’s just that I was hoping for at least sixty. If I can get you to move to sixty, I’ll buy this car today.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing. Could it be sixty-forty?”

  “Max.”

  “We’re going to give it a go.”

  Elena was still on the phone, but George had to press his ear flat against the elevator door to hear, and unless she was shouting, he could barely make it out.

  “On the wall next to the elevator?” it seemed she was saying. “Yeah. Gray door. Got it. There’s dozens of them in here, man. . . . Well, like furnace, air, water heater—yeah, they sound like downstairs stuff. . . . How should I know? About twenty of them look like that stuff. Okay, twenty-one and further . . . okay, maybe this is first floor. . . . Alarm system, emergency lights, outside lights, stairwell lights, elevator. . . . Different one for vent, fan, or light? Doesn’t look like it. . . . Yeah, all on one. . . . But I have to. He’s going to suffocate in there. . . . No! Prop those open even an inch and I’d have to watch him every second.

  “What if I turned it on but kept the doors locked? . . . Every floor? So I lock them on every floor. Then there’s nowhere for him to go, right? . . . I’ll call you.”

  George heard her leave the lobby and start up some stairs. He kept his ear against the door and could feel and hear her locking the outer elevator doors on the three floors above him. So she was going to flip on the circuit breaker for the elevator so the fan would run and he could get some ventilation. That wouldn’t do. He had to somehow get her to open the doors.

  She would be listening for the fan and for evidence of his being conscious. George reached up and felt the fan and the lights, pushing firmly around the sides. The panels were screwed on tight, but housings were hooked to wiring above the car, so those had to be the weakest panels in the ceiling. He pulled the gloves on and pushed hard. The metal was too tough and sharp in some places, even with the gloves on. Elena had to be nearly all the way back down.

  George quickly slipped on the socks and boots, bent low, and stood on his hands, quietly walking up the sides of the car until the soles pressed against the ceiling. He toed around until he was sure he was pushing against light and fan, then stiffened his legs and pushed up from the floor with all his strength.

  The fluorescents popped and fell; the fan blades bent and twisted and began to give way. His biceps shook and his chest ached, but he continued to push as if his life depended on it. He felt the panels tear away and the housing break away from the wires. The ceiling had to be a mess.

  George tried to keep from gasping or making noise as he slowly brought his feet back down and lay panting on the floor, carefully brushing the debris into a corner. He heard Elena hurry past toward the circuit-breaker box and flip the breaker all the way off and then back on. The lights of the floor buttons on the panel came on, and he heard a hum in the ceiling where the light and fan should have been.

  Trying to regulate his breathing, George turned himself around, laced up the boots and, catlike, moved into position.

  “Getting any air in there?” Elena called out. She slapped the door. “Hey! Better?”

  George got on all fours and crept backward until his feet were flat against the back wall. He reared up onto his knees until his seat was planted on his calves. Then he leaned forward and placed his palms on the floor, turned his face to the right, and lay his left cheek and ear flat on the floor. He fought to breathe deeply and slowly, preparing himself to hold his breath and appear dead.

  Two more smacks on the door. “C’mon! That fan should be running. Is it? Give me a knock if you’re getting any air!”

  George lay there, crouched back against the wall, looking for all the world as if he had collapsed onto his face.

  “All right! I’m unlocking these doors, but if you try anything, you’re a dead man.”

  Now she was up on the chair. Metal into metal. The click. George was tempted to hit the Open Door button himself, but he knew she would be standing there with her weapon leveled at him. He blinked several times to moisten his eyes so he could lie there with them open, unblinking, hopefully able to see enough peripherally to know when to act.

  “I’m opening the doors, so don’t move! I’d rather the brass find you shot than dead by accident.”

  He heard her push the button, felt the car vibrate with the mechanism, and the doors began to separate. He wanted to drink in the cool, fresh air, but he dared not. In the faint light of the Exit signs and a light from down the hall, he saw her in his peripheral vision silhouetted before him, feet spread, both hands on the high-powered weapon.

  She swore. She took a step closer. She took her left hand off the gun and reached for his carotid artery. As soon as her fingers touched his skin, he knew she would know he was alive. That touch would be his cue to spring.

  “I’ll do whatever you say, Chloe,” Hannah said, “but I’ve got a priority higher than our getting out of here alive.”

  “Mac?”

  “Of course.�
�

  “Me too. And George.”

  “I just can’t imagine he’s still alive, Chloe. What’s in it for them to keep him around?”

  “Don’t think that way.”

  “Come on! We’re not schoolkids anymore. Not thinking about it isn’t going to change whether it’s true.”

  “I’m just hoping they think they can still get something out of him.”

  “Well, I had limited contact with him, Chloe, but let me tell you something. He looked like the kind of a guy who was going to do what he was going to do, and nobody was going to make him do different. I’ll bet he hasn’t given them diddly.”

  “Pull over there.”

  “You’re sure this will work?”

  “Sure? I have to be sure?”

  “Let’s just not be too obvious.”

  “That’s why you’re stopping here and not at the front door, Hannah. When I head for the store, you stand outside the car, like you’re watching for nosey nellies.”

  “Nosey nellies?”

  “You know, GC or Morale Monitors nosing around.”

  “Nosey nellies?”

  “I didn’t know that was so obscure. I forgot you grew up on a reservation.”

  “Well, I will be looking for GC or MMs. So what do I do if they show up?”

  “They won’t. They just want to raid whoever we’re warning.”

  “Or at least there’s a 55 percent chance of that.”

  “Sixty.”

  “So a 40 percent chance they arrest us, or worse.”

  “You’re carrying an Uzi. I’ve seen what you can do with a shotgun, and I can only imagine what you might do with a DEW.”

  “I’m just telling you, Chloe. If anybody comes, I’m jumping back in the car, honking the horn, and coming to get you.”

  “Well, I should hope so.”

  At the first sensation of skin on skin, George Sebastian called on all his years of training, football, and lifting. As he pushed off the floor with his palms and drove his heels into the back of the elevator, the massive quads and hamstrings in his thighs drove him up and into Elena, who had murdered her last believer.

  George’s 240 pounds slammed into her so fast and hard that as he wrapped his arms around her waist he felt the top of his head push her stomach against her spine. She projectile regurgitated over him into the elevator before her face banged off his back and her boots hit his knees.

  He sailed four feet high and ten feet into the lobby with her body folded in two. When he landed, his chest pinned her legs, her torso whiplashed, and the back of her head was crushed flat on the marble floor. George pounced to his feet and ripped the weapon from her hand. He stuffed her phone and radio in his pockets, then grabbed her by the belt and slung her lifeless body into the elevator. He locked the doors and left the key on the chair she had used to reach the lock.

  George laid a small rug from near the entry door over the gore where she had died and used the gloves to wipe up the blood trail to the elevator. He was about to charge out the back door to see if he could find a car to hot-wire when he heard keys in the entry door and looked up to see an old man smiling and waving at him.

  The man wore a mismatched custodial uniform and carried two mops. As he entered, he said something in Greek.

  “English?” George said, certain he was flushed and looked like an escaped hostage who had just killed his captor.

  “I was wonder if elevator still to not work.”

  “Yes.”

  “Work?”

  “No.”

  “Not to work.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay. Howdy, English, how are you?”

  “Fine. Good-bye, sir.”

  “Bye-bye to you.”

  Chloe set her Uzi, gripping it with her right hand, and reached with her left to open the door. As soon as Hannah stopped the car in the shadows of an alley three blocks from Chloe’s target, she stepped out and moved quickly.

  Tempted to look back or to glance from right to left for GC Peacekeepers, Chloe kept her eyes on the storefront, where earlier that day she had watched the bombing of Petra on television. The place was dark, but in the back were at least two apartments with lights burning.

  She banged loudly on the glass door with the heel of her hand. It would be customary for the locals to ignore such a knock, assuming a drunk was stumbling around at that hour of the night. So she persisted until she heard someone call out, “Closed!”

  She banged and banged some more. Finally a light and a door, and a craggy man in a bathrobe and slippers ventured out. “What is it? Who are you?”

  “GC!” she stage-whispered. “Open up. Just a moment, please.”

  He came, scowling, but would not open the door. “What do you want?”

  “I have an urgent message for you, sir, but I don’t want to yell it aloud.”

  He shook his head and unlatched the door but would open it only a couple of inches. “What’s so urgent?”

  “I wanted to tip you off, sir, about a sweep through this neighborhood tonight, probably later.”

  “A what? A sweep?”

  “A raid.”

  “Looking for what?” he said, pointing to his forehead and his 216.

  “For that,” she said. “You are a loyal citizen, so we wanted to warn you early so you would not be alarmed.”

  “Well, you alarmed me!”

  “I apologize. Good night.”

  He slammed and locked the door without a word, and Chloe hurried back to the car. “Well, that went well,” she said. “Zap anybody?”

  Hannah pulled away. “What?”

  “With the ray gun.”

  “Is this how you cover your fear? Banter?”

  “Must be. I’m numb all over.”

  “I saw no one, Chloe. I don’t know what that means. Either they’re very, very good, or we’re paranoid.”

  “Probably both. We could hang around and see if the GC come looking for the underground.”

  “I hope you’re not serious.”

  “Of course not, but you have to admit it would be fun. Especially when they ask that old guy if he was tipped off about the raid.”

  “Where to now, Batgirl?”

  “I feel like we’re sitting ducks, Hannah. We can’t call Mac unless we know he’s somewhere he can talk. Chang will tell us what he can when he can. I say we look for somewhere we can wait without being seen, and watch for Mac and George.”

  “You’re dreaming.”

  Rayford had been assigned a tent at Petra and was about to settle down for the night. He couldn’t imagine sleeping after all he had experienced. As he studied the stars, he heard his phone, rolled up onto his side, and dug it out from his bag. He didn’t recognize the calling number.

  Rayford affected a Middle Eastern accent he was sure was awful. “This is Atef Naguib,” he said.

  “Ray?”

  “Who is calling, please?”

  “I memorized two numbers,” the caller said. “Yours and Chang’s. But this is not a secure phone, and I didn’t want to expose him.”

  “Sebastian?” Rayford sat up. “They found you?”

  “Who’s they? I just busted loose. Is there a safe house around here? Somewhere I can crash until I figure a way out?”

  Rayford was suddenly on his feet. He gushed the information about the Trib Force contingent in Greece and how Sebastian could get to the local Co-op. “I’ll get to Chang and have him let the others know.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Mac lay in the dewy grass next to the Jeep, overcome with gratitude though aware that neither he nor his team was out of the woods yet. His overheated body arched and drew in the night air, and he thanked God over and over for having given him the strength to run this far.

  He had barely been able to respond when Chang told him all that had gone on, but it quickly became obvious that of the four fugitives in Greece, Chloe and Hannah were now in the most immediate danger.

  They had been followed, were in a
GC vehicle, were in Ptolemaïs, and did not dare try to get to the Co-op, even on foot. They were heavily armed, but also inexperienced. George Sebastian had gone from most precarious to temporarily most secure, provided he had found the Co-op.

  Mac painfully sat up and leaned back against the car. He had longed for and yet dreaded this operation. He had wanted to spring George, but the odds were so bad. When it had started, he thrilled to how easy it had seemed to snow the locals. Then it had gone haywire and fallen nearly hopeless. Now, little credit to Mac, the whole multifaceted effort had become straightforward again. Mac now had one job: reunite with the other three and get out of Dodge.

  Chang was inconsolable over not discovering the connection between Akbar and Stefanich before the operation started. Mac tried to tell him that the whole Global Community hierarchy was so new and spread out that no one could have anticipated that those two would know each other. Chang had redeemed himself by breaking through the security and the ostensibly indecipherable codes. He and Mac now knew more about Stefanich’s and the hostage takers’ plans than they did. For one thing, Mac knew Sebastian was on the loose. Of Stefanich, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, and Elena, the only one who knew that was dead.

  Through his fast yet thorough examination of the interaction between Akbar and Stefanich, Chang discovered they had hatched the plan to draw Mac and Chloe and Hannah into the woods. There they would get them to move to where they would be far outnumbered by GC forces, most of whom had no idea what was going on. Even if the tables had turned and Mac and his people had gotten the drop on the Peacekeepers, few would have known enough to give away the double cross.

  The GC expected Mac’s people to lead them to the Judah-ite underground, then eventually be apprehended themselves. Johnson, Sebastian, Jinnah, and Irene would be reunited at local GC headquarters, then carted off to New Babylon as feathers in the cap of Stefanich, the newest palace member of Akbar’s staff.

  “Stefanich is beside himself looking for you,” Chang had told Mac. “They were worried when they couldn’t get through to Elena for a while, but they have reached her now and have been assured everything is fine at headquarters.”