Jacob's Trouble 666 is a novel by Terry, which was published a number of years ago. It tells the story of Jacob Zen, a young, lower echelon U.S. government official, who is forced to take on staggering responsibilities, when millions of people vanish, and his world begins coming apart. Terry wanted to share with you this fictionalized account of the Rapture and of the first part of the Tribulation era in serialized form. Although it is fiction, it is a story that could take on startling reality with your very next breath, because Christ's shout: "Come up hither" (Rev 4:1) could happen at any moment!
Chapter 5
Karen rested her cheek against the side of his chest and used a tissue to dry her tears. Jacob held her close and looked past her, out the dark window of the funeral sedan, seeing the small white mausoleum in which Hugo Marchek's body had 20 minutes earlier been entombed. Now, only the minister and a few family members stood near the crypt, while a caretaker locked its iron-barred door-gate. Light rain fell from heavily overcast skies and ran in many rivulets down the window. Karen's body suddenly shook and she began to cry bitterly.
Jacob's forehead vibrated with the shrill call - INterface Watchers putting all Sector Coordinators on notice that there were duties to perform. It was the more gentle prodding by the masters, calling him not from the forbidden overdosed state, but from the authorized time of rest. Two opposite emotions kneaded his dulled senses while he struggled to fully know his present circumstance; he was pleased he did not have to relive Karen's agony over losing the old man she loved even more than she realized. This was a loss which he, too, felt with great pain — but at the same time, he ached with the realization that he was not with her.
No time for regret, for remembrance; time only to do that demanded of him. He could afford no further slip-ups if he was to survive to kill some of the enslavers, and himself. Feeling the belt of plastic explosives brought him fully back to reality. He pulled the hip-length jacket over the belt and smoothed the material before removing the blanket and standing from the hard sofa.
Electronic impulses again vibrated his skull, and he saw the INRU Scanner's lens rotate, following his limping movement to the console chair, his knees bruised and aching from his fall. What did they want of John I. Garver this time? It pleased him to be able to think clearly enough to separate himself from the assumed identity — something he had found hard to do for many months, thanks to Trachetrol II. Could it be that this more gentle call was a pardon for the earlier sin of having not instantly answered his master's beckoning? Not likely; INterface was, if anything, unforgiving. Watcher Control most likely figured to use him until the time of his erasure from the system, simply because it was not expedient to send another Sector Coordinator to do the required surgery on behalf of INterface.
When he pressed the appropriate key, the screen, which had displayed the pyramid symbol, changed to a map of Sector 550, each of its 66 geographical portions graphically represented, separated by black lines drawn on a field of brilliant yellow. The computer voice informed him:
"John I. Garver -- six, six, six, IN, three, one, eight, eight, eight, two, seven, one.
Identification will not be effected. Video Scanner perceives -- IN are you. Prepare to receive visual.
Subject: Enemies to be excised from INterface Response Unity. Respond."
Excision! How he did hate them! How he wished to have all the perverted, abscessing monsters within range of the explosive! Should he defy them? Refuse to do it? Sickness burned in the pit of his stomach, in his soul — if such an entity existed.
How many must be excised this time? Cut off from all food, medical help and clothing by a mere flick of a finger, erasing them from INterface Response Unity. Cut from the computer's memory — the children, no older than three or so, born after the great disappearance, the dissipation that took all the other children.
"Respond!" the voice demanded, interrupting the tortured thoughts of what complying with the order would mean to the poor creatures at his mercy — people already crazed with worry and hunger and disease. He had no choice, he had to respond as commanded. They would come and do the job themselves, otherwise, and his chance to carry out his plan against the murderers would be lost.
He looked at the digital clock above the Scanner's lens "13:21." He pushed the key on his console.
"Response noted," said the synthesized voice.
He computed silently. It was 7:21 — 2 hours, 39 minutes until the confrontation at Facility 500.
Much of the nerve-twisting guilt feeling left him; hatred for those forcing him to commit the atrocity consumed it. Justification for his action would come when he sacrificed himself at Facility 500 to avenge what he must now do.
"Identifier Numbers belonging to enemies within your Sector are being file-interrogation programmed."
"Acknowledge feed."
Jacob pushed a key on the console board and gave the verbal response called for. "Feed perceived."
"Filemark -- Now!" the computer said.
The screen filled with hundreds of Identifier Numbers belonging to enemies, who would shortly be deprived of access to the INterface computer network.
"Filemark noted," Jacob said.
"Sector 55D infection coming visual -- Now!"
The Response Unit's screen again displayed the black outlined, yellow map. Hundreds of red points of light flashed, showing Jacob and Controller Central the precise location of every person to be cut from INterface Response Unity. Each subject had the biosensor implanted beneath the skin of the forehead or on the back of the right hand, the sensor programmed with data that included his or her Identifier Number and a Universal Product Code, which, when scanned by a Product Decoder, gave access to commercial computers throughout INterface for transacting day-to-day business. The need to carry easily stolen or lost cards was thus eliminated. Jacob's action would instantaneously destroy the Universal Product Code portion of the Allegiant implanted within each person selected for excision. The Identifier Number would not be affected but would remain activated, enabling the state to keep track of the excised subject until his or her death.
"Execute!"the computer voice commanded.
He pressed a red button above the Interact keys and saw on the monitor the results.
"Excision completed," he reported, seeing the flashing red lights change to steadily glowing green ones. Hundreds of them, each representing a human being who was no longer 77V.
"Lock toggle guard before end of Interact," the voice warned with dispassion equal to its previous order.
He pulled the red metal guard to a covering position over the Excision Button to prevent accidentally eliminating commercial computer access for loyal citizens.
The clock above the Scanner Eye displayed 19:35 hours, which was only 25 minutes until, possibly, his own elimination. He was more fortunate than those he had seconds ago victimized.
One shattering instant would send him and as many as he could take with him at Facility 500, into eternity. What about eternity? Would it be an improvement? He did not know why he considered such things at this moment, but the words written in the book ran swiftly through his mind:
"...And that no man might buy or sell except he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name..."
Why remember the words so clearly? He had not memorized them. Was it some preternatural phenomenon? The eschatologist calling to him from the grave? No. Marchek would say he was not in the grave. His essence was some other place — Heaven? Was Marchek reaching out to him from Heaven? Marchek's spirit nudging Jacob toward some Deity-directed conclusion? "Watch after Karen... sweet, lovely Karen." the voice urged, as if it spoke within the echo chamber that was his skull. The voice... Marchek's... The mental image... Karen's beautiful face. He had finally lost his reason.
He stood from the console chair, sweat streaming profusely from his face and body. He did not notice the perspiration, feeling instead the terrible cold of his isolation.
It was the drug, or rather the lack of it, he thought, shaking off his depression, suddenly desperate to go to the Trachetrol. Wanting to turn the bottle's bottom to the ceiling and down as many of the capsules as he could swallow. To die in a state of drugged self-immersion — to be baptized into the black, bottomless waters from which there could be no return. No INterface, no Master Manya ~ no excisions to perform.
He stopped his downward cerebral plunge. Such a death would be one of defeat. There was enough of his spirit left to see his plan through to the end that he chose... not one that the grisly computer-state chose for him.
The Trachetrol's call to him eased, but he moved from the console chair toward the cabinet, as if defying its pull with direct confrontation that would fortify his resolve to beat the addiction. He stood peering through the window, its panes stained by the pollution-saturated atmosphere that engulfed the entire globe. Below, on the deteriorating street, several people walked to whatever destination each sought, most holding cloth to their mouths and noses to prevent inhaling the filth rushing toward their lungs with each labored breath. A bicycle bumped along one pocked street, its rider, his head down, watching for the biggest of the holes in his path. He seemed, along with the black Decap Unit that passed by the bicycle, to personify life within INterface society. Symbolized in hybrid purity, the oppression of all tyrannical states to which mankind had ever been subjected. What life had, finally, come down to.
Suddenly a 20-foot section of facade broke free from the rim of the building directly across the street from his window and shattered into a thousand pieces against the sidewalk and street; the man and the bicycle were instantly crushed.
The Decap Unit slowed, the controllers watching the cloud of dust billowing behind them, then continued on its way at its former speed.
Jacob thought of the Trachetrol in the drawer of the cabinet at his side. How he did want the Trachetrol! Had he, like the world around him, degenerated to this? Forgotten humanity? Turned from even a hint of concern for human plight, like the controllers who drove uncaringly away from the poor devil lying squashed beneath the rubble on the street? Like Jacob Zen had turned from thoughts of the crushed man to thoughts of fixing his craving for the drug, which the monster-state provided so the inhumanity could continue with as little opposition from its victims as possible? He wanted to be sickened and repulsed by his own insensitivity to the man's dying, but all he desired, in fact, was to swallow the capsule.
He managed, after watching the tremendous dust cloud thin then become a part of the already thickly participated air, to turn his thoughts to the first time he saw the deadly tentacles of the monster break out of its cocoon of technological promise.
"I assure you, Jacob, the thing defies the imagination, even to someone as inventive as Horstz Buckingham. He got so hyper the first time he saw it, I thought he would have a stroke on the spot. Couldn't praise it enough."
"The same Buckingham who never liked anything done by anybody except himself? That is saying something for it."
"It's that critical striving for perfection that's made him the top U.S. scientist in these developing international linkage technologies," Conrad Wilson said.
"His endorsement makes me even more anxious to have a look. I'm honored that you've let me come along."
"It was the President's idea, not mine. Your hard work and ability earned you this trip."
"I hope I can contribute something."
"If you couldn't, he would never have asked you to come with me. Relax, and remember our motto: 'The race can't be won, by a man who won't run and go till it's done!'99
Wilson was obviously happy to see the smile come on Jacob's face when the old man quoted the saying the two of them used often during the younger man's childhood.
Filling the student's head with such apothegms was part of the Wilson methodology, and it pleased Jacob that his mentor still took delight in tutoring him.
"I remember another little gem... 'Nobody loves a conceited fool, but the fool who is himself!"
Wilson laughed. "Yes, I suppose I always have had one for most all occasions, haven't I? And, as I recall, that one was well placed."
"And taken to heart," agreed Jacob. "It was tough learning that I was not, in fact, the finest quarterback ever to play at Middlebrook Prep."
"The coach said you would in time be a good one, but that first you had to learn to forgive the trespasses and dropped passes of your teammates..."
"I thought I was a real leader of men back then," Jacob interrupted. "Coach Dibetto was quick to point out that I was slightly off in my evaluation of one Jacob Zen. But you know what?" He looked at Conrad Wilson. "What bothered me most, I should say, what really brought home to me that I had erred, was: 'No one loves a conceited fool, but the fool who is, himself!' It was the first time I had seen you disappointed with me."
"You were as good a son as a man could want," the old diplomat said, patting Jacob's knee. "Still are!"
"I determined right then to shut my mouth and concentrate on making Jacob Zen somebody you wouldn't be ashamed of. I didn't always stick to it, but it did make me a bit more humble, I think."
"Your gifts are considerable, my boy. And it's time for you to put self-doubts aside, where your value to the President and Project Eagle is concerned. We've got quite a job ahead of us. This trip to Brussels is absolutely crucial to our getting a governing handle on terrorism and the economic problems, but it's much more critical that we get the upper hand in this Euro-American unification process. Now, you certainly wouldn't have been chosen for something so important if you weren't qualified — no matter what kind of pull you have." Jacob said nothing, but felt his nervousness growing. He wished he had confidence equal to the ability with which his foster father credited him.
"Miss!" He called to the hostess, who had just served a passenger several rows forward. A drink seemed in order.
Thirty-seven minutes later he had managed to calm himself. The captain's voice, announcing the approach to Brussels, startled him out of what was on the verge of becoming a sound sleep, and he straightened, rubbing his eyes.
"There it is over there," Conrad Wilson said, motioning with a nod of his head; Jacob looked out the window next to him. What had centuries before been a city of symmetrical, pentagonal configuration, with a sparse population, now sprawled mightily, looking to Jacob like a giant amoeba.
"A real paradox — Brussels and the European Community," Wilson said. "It's one of the most disruptively divided cities in history with an almost feud-like hostility between the Flemish and Walloons. Sort of the whole of European disunity in microcosm. Yet the EEC, and now the organizational nucleus for an even more pronounced effort at unification, resides in this very city, as well as in European Rome. It's a case of split personality. On the one hand, they adhere religiously to local governmental sovereignty and linguistic autonomy, divided between chiefly Flemish- and French- speaking folk. On the other hand, Brussels seems to possess this mysteriously magnetic force that pulls all of Western Europe, and now the entire trilateral sphere, toward free-world union.
"Only it's not really so mysterious, I think. The real power is economic power. There's more than five-hundred U.S. companies in the city, not to mention the hundreds of major European and Japanese corporations represented here. Last count, there were some thirty-nine-thousand employers, employing more than seven-hundred-thousand people. That doesn't take into account the thousands of subsidiary jobs like craftsman-type people working in the tourist and luxury trades."
Jacob's thoughts had turned to other things, and Wilson saw he had lost him. "Thinking about Karen, huh?" he said after studying Jacob's face for several seconds.
Jacob nodded, looking out the porthole. Wilson gripped his arm. "She's going to be okay at Stone Oaks, Son. You know we have a security force second to none. The Vice President wondered out loud last time we visited if there weren't more security people around Stone Oaks than around him -- torqued his jaws just a bit, I think," Wilson said, trying to lighten Jacob's mood. "Secretary Laxton won't even talk to me anymore because of it," he chuckled. The tactic worked; Jacob smiled.
"I know there's nothing I could do if I were there, any more than is already being done. But at least she'd have me there to hold on to."
"You heard me instruct those Treasury men. They'll be with her around the clock." Conrad Wilson grinned, a thought coming to him. "Maybe you had better worry, come to think of it. There are some mighty fine looking young fellows in that group. And she's a beauty!"
"If that's all I had to worry about, there'd be no worry. Some things in life are irreplaceable."
Wilson laughed heartily. "Time for another talk about conceit and fools," he said, happy to see he had made Jacob feel better.
"She'll want to get out of there and go back to work for PAL," Jacob said, turning serious again. "I hope she waits until I get back."
"If not, it's going to look like a presidential motorcade every morning, because those agents have orders to stick with her." "Taxpayers wouldn't like it," Jacob joked. "That's one good thing about today's world, Son. The taxpayers are too busy having a good time — spending as much on credit as they can, then worrying about how to pay for it — to concern themselves with how their tax dollars are being spent. So long as we can keep crime from overrunning their neighborhoods and terrorists from blowing everything up, the good citizens will let us do whatever we think necessary with their money."
"I guess that's what we're going to Brussels for — to keep the madmen of the world from blowing it up a little at a time — until we more civilized types decide to blow it up on a grand scale."
"Project Eagle will deal with terrorism and crime, of course. What really matters is experience in controlling nuclear weaponry. The U.S. absolutely must be in the leadership position for that very reason. The Europeans, and the rest, simply do not have the practical experience to deal with issues involving nuclear weapons."
"We haven't done an exactly superb job, ourselves."
"Maybe not, but we're still here, aren't we?" Conrad Wilson said.
"For how long? The Russians are looking pretty hard at the Middle East."
"An even bigger reason why America must be perceived, right from the start of these unification meetings, to be clearly in charge. The Russian coalition respects the nuclear sledgehammer we've always protected our interests with. They would be tempted to test any European who controlled nuclear deterrence to see how far they could push before such leadership would tell them to stop, or risk losing everything. The Russians are definitely watching to see how things go in Brussels, believe me."
The plane's shaking startled Jacob, who never got used to the turbulence generated by the lowering of flaps. The big aircraft smoothed out and dropped rapidly, the buildings near the runway passing swiftly. The pilot cut back throttle to the five engines and pulled the nose slightly toward the sky, then allowed the rearmost tires to settle on the concrete.
"Juice has run checks of every conceivable sort," Wilson said, looking out the limousine's window while they moved along Boulevard De L 'Empereur, past Grand Place, then turned right on Ru Du Lombard. "He can't find a hint of who might want Marchek and his organization silenced — not enough to employ such violent methods."
"All I know is that he's dead, and Karen and I were almost murdered the same night. It's more than just coincidence. Whoever they are and whatever their reasons, it involves higher stakes than merely wanting to knock some little religious man off his soapbox," Jacob said with irritation.
"I didn't mean to imply that the matter should be dismissed, or even downplayed, Jake."
"Of course you didn't. I appreciate everything you've done. It's just that I'm here, and she's there, and whoever's responsible is free to sit back and wait for the chance to try to get at her again."
"The Director has taken a personal interest in the murder, and he's put some of the Bureau's best men on it. Everything was almost totally consumed in that wreckage. They've only been able to determine that the smaller truck was probably one stolen from a wrecker service somewhere in Maryland."
The Mercedes turned left on Avenue De Stalingrad and rolled past Manneken-Pis, where the statue stood of the little boy known affectionately to the people of Brussels as the city's oldest citizen. Neither man acknowledged seeing the historic figure, while the black car picked up speed in its journey to the hotel which they would call home for the next five days.
Hotel Clemenseau was all Wilson had promised before their flight to Brussels. The three
rooms of the suite were huge, with furnishings Napoleon himself would have found fit for an emperor. Every aspect of the building's design remained faithful to the ornate architecture prevalent throughout the old city, yet the hotel was less than three years old, Wilson told him.
Jacob looked for the telephone in his own portion of the suite, letting estimated figures on the cost of such an undertaking - the ancient architecture at today's prices - run through his mind. He let the thought pass when he spotted the French white and brass telephone on a small white gold-leafed table in one corner.
"Miss Fitzwill?" he said, finally able to make the connection after 10 minutes of trying. "This is Jacob."
After answering questions about Conrad Wilson's health and the old diplomat's faithfulness to his medication schedule, Alexandra Fitzwill turned the connection over to Karen.
"There's something you've got to see, Jacob," she said when the perfunctory greetings were ended. "I... I've been to Dr. Marchek's home... I don't think I should talk about it, but I've got to tell you."
There was fear in her voice, and he wished video phone was available. At least, then, she could feel he was closer to her. "What's wrong? Why can't you talk?"
"He knew more than he told either of us, Jake. I shouldn't say anything over this phone - I'm afraid someone might be listening. I know it sounds paranoid, but that's what you thought before we were nearly killed and Dr. Marchek was... murdered."
"Karen, we don't have any choice. I'm an ocean away. We're going to have to take a chance.
Tell me what you've found out."
She was right. She could be in danger! If the lines were monitored — if Treasury had done the killing, protecting what they considered national security, or some other agency. The Bureau... CIA... NSA... they would just as quickly eliminate her.
"I drove to his house this morning. I wanted to collect some of the things I knew meant the most to him ~ to keep people from taking whatever they wanted, once the relatives are allowed in. I came across a note. It was a reminder to himself to tell me about what he called a 'secret place' where he kept some things that he hadn't told anyone about... not even me. Jacob, he never had time to tell me or to finish the note. He died the night he started writing it."
Jacob was silent while Karen regained control of her emotions. "Oh, Jake... I found the secret place and the things he was talking about in the note!"
"Calm down, Kay. It's all right. Everything is okay. Now... what did you find?"
"I found out the reason he was murdered!"
"What?!" He could hear her sobbing.
"I found out they killed Dr. Marchek because he learned that this country, that is, some people at the top, have..." There was a click. She had been cut off!!