6
Bennett scanned the emergency room.
It was empty. He took a seat in the waiting room, closed his eyes, and felt a gnawing, wrenching pain rising from deep inside his stomach. Grief was clawing its way to the surface, and with it the terrible realization that in the next few minutes or hours — short of a miracle — he might be utterly and completely alone.
His father was dead. His mother lived half a world away. He had no brothers or sisters. His mentor had been gunned down on the road to Jerusalem eight months before. Most of his closest friends and colleagues had been killed over the past few years, often in front of him. And Erin was teetering on the brink of eternity, a heartbeat away from joining them and leaving him behind.
Was this it? Was this his destiny — to be all by himself in the universe, until the Lord came to take him home? He knew the Scriptures. He knew Jesus said He would never leave him nor forsake him. But at this moment, life seemed terribly cruel.
Bennett tried to push such thoughts away, but they refused to leave. They clung to him, haunted him.
He’d never remarry. There wasn’t time. The Rapture, he was certain, was imminent. Any moment, he and millions of believers like him would disappear from the earth, in the blink of an eye, to be with Christ for eternity, and then the end would come. But what if the Lord in His sovereignty chose to kick the prophetic can down the road a couple of months or even years? What if the Rapture was years away, or decades, or longer? Bennett knew he would never find someone else like Erin. How could he? It had taken them long enough to find each other, and now he wanted to be together for eternity.
“Till death do us part” wasn’t enough for Jonathan Meyers Bennett. He wanted Erin Christina McCoy forever. They were no longer two separate people leading two separate lives. They were no longer simply best friends, walking the road of life side by side. Somehow in the last few months, he and Erin had fused together into one body, one soul, one spirit. It was a mystery. It was magic. It might sound corny to some, but it was true. And in that moment, Bennett knew that if Erin died tonight, he would not be long for this world. He simply could not survive without her. He wasn’t being melodramatic. He couldn’t explain it. He couldn’t prove it. He just knew it.
Some people could endure the death of a spouse and go on to lead normal, healthy lives. He just wasn’t one of them. Erin was, quite simply, the oxygen that sustained him, and he could already feel himself beginning to suffocate.
“Sir… hello… can you hear me?”
The voice startled him. Bennett opened his eyes and was surprised by the sight of a hospital administrator of some sort staring down at him. She was a large, severe-looking woman with gray hair pulled back in a bun and dark, joyless eyes fixed on the clipboard in her hands, not on him.
“I must ask you questions,” she said without emotion, without compassion, in a heavy Italian accent.
“My wife,” Bennett replied. “I want to see my wife.”
“Later,” the woman said. “Now I ask questions.”
It was late. Bennett was exhausted. He was worried. He had no desire to answer a bunch of ridiculous questions for some U.N. bureaucracy or compassionless insurance company that would never pay out the trillions already claimed by the region’s survivors, much less by new victims of the Day of Devastation. Millions had died from the earthquake, the pestilence, the hailstorms, and the firestorms that came just as Ezekiel had foretold more than 2,500 years before. Nearly a year later, pandemics such as the avian flu and Ebola were still claiming the lives of hundreds every day, thousands every month.
Was Erin about to be next? As careful as they had both been, had she somehow contracted one of those deadly diseases?
Ebola-Zaire was the one he worried about most. Tens of thousands of birds from Africa had come to Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan after the War of Gog and Magog. As the Bible predicted, they had feasted on the bodies of those slain during the judgment. They had brought the dreaded avian flu, to be sure. But that was not all. Bennett knew from searching various Web sites that Ebola-Zaire had the highest mortality rate of any Ebola strain, killing as many as nine in ten of its victims. There had been more outbreaks of the Ebola-Zaire strain than any other Ebola virus, and once you had it, that was it. You were finished.
The Wikipedia article Bennett had read had been particularly disturbing. The first Ebola-Zaire case was recorded in 1976, in Yambuku, a town in northern Zaire. The man’s name was Mabalo Lokela. He was a forty-four-year-old schoolteacher whose high fever had initially been diagnosed and treated as malaria. A week later, his symptoms had included uncontrolled vomiting, bloody diarrhea, headache, dizziness, and labored breathing. Soon after, he had begun bleeding from his nose and mouth.
Fourteen days later, Mabalo Lokela was dead.
Bennett had seen firsthand the carnage wrought by Ebola-Zaire. So had Erin. Dozens had died these slow, cruel deaths in this camp alone. In southern Lebanon and in parts of Damascus, the virus was taking the lives of untold thousands. Neither Jon nor Erin was directly involved in any care or treatment for such victims. Rather, they served on a team that cooked and distributed the meals the refugees were given each day — at eight o’clock every morning, at one in the afternoon, and at six in the evening.
They had been briefed by the medical staff on the risks they were taking. They knew what to look for and what to avoid. They had taken every precaution. They had been given every possible vaccine. They wore plastic gloves and surgical masks and ate only the food flown in from Europe every week for them and the rest of the camp staff.
But anything was possible in such an environment, and as he remembered those grim warnings from their first day in the camp, Bennett’s fears began to grow again and a flood of emotions forced its way to the surface.
“Name?” the administrator demanded. “I need full name.”
7
On approach to Staples Center, Corsetti’s phone rang.
He checked the caller ID on his secure satellite phone and found it was Secretary James from the Department of Homeland Security. His stomach tightened. “Hello?”
“Bob, it’s Lee. I know you’re extremely busy but Ken Costello and I need a minute,” James said from his penthouse suite at the Hilton Boston, where he was staying the night. The national security advisor was patched in from the White House.
“Of course, Mr. Secretary,” Corsetti replied. “What is it?”
“Ken, you start,” James said.
“Sure,” Costello said. “Look, Bob, I just got off the phone with the Canadian prime minister. His intelligence services have informed him that three so-called security officers at the Chinese embassy in Ottawa have been missing for a week.”
“And?” Corsetti asked, checking his watch.
“And our border patrol just picked up one of them trying to cross from Niagara Falls into Buffalo. During his interrogation, he said his colleagues left for Los Angeles several days ago. They were supposedly coming in on a flight from Montreal to Seattle, using fake passports. He claims he doesn’t know if they got in or not and says they weren’t supposed to have any contact until they were ‘in place.’”
“In place?” Corsetti repeated. “What does that mean?”
“That’s just it; we don’t know, Bob,” Secretary James interjected. “Nor does the Canadian PM. But given what’s going on, Ken and I just called Jackie Sanchez, and then Scott Harris at the Bureau and Danny Tracker over at Langley. They all thought you and the president would want to know. And there’s something else, as well.”