the air beside his head, but none of the programs responded.
The environment shattered into a million fragments and Ruppert lost his balance, then fell backwards. He tumbled into an open, dark space. Bright silver skulls snapped at him from the dark, their shining teeth clacking together. The seal of the Department of Terror rose like a monolith before him, ten stories high, then a hundred. The animated, three-dimensional seal depicted a silver bald eagle soaring against a moonlit night sky, breathing fire, shooting lightning from its talons. The eagle’s hooked beak opened, and another painful metallic squeal sounded in Ruppert’s ears.
A cold male voice boomed out at Ruppert: “You are in violation of Department of Terror Code 207-B. Importation of enemy propaganda and unauthorized data. You are under arrest. Now submitting your case to an automated tribunal. The tribunal has ruled you guilty of terrorist activity. Sentencing will be adjudicated by a Department of Terror official.”
Ruppert reached out to bang on his control panel again, but it had disappeared. He tore the video goggles from his head, then peeled the input gloves from his hands.
Every indicator light on the surface of his little computer glowed bright red. He jabbed the power button with his thumb, but Terror had seized the computer and he had lost control.
Ruppert hurled the computer against the concrete wall of the storage cell. It fell and crashed to the floor, but all the little lights still burned. He threw it twice more, than a third time, finally opening a short hairline crack along one edge, but the device was tough and he had no real means of destroying it.
Ruppert lifted the latch on the cell’s garage door, then took a deep breath. Terror men, or whatever police or Guardsmen happened to be available, would likely be waiting outside with their guns high. If he moved too quickly, they would cut him down instinctively.
He eased the door up, hearing every individual clank as each panel slid into the overhead track. He looked out to where he’d parked his car.
No one was here. His car had not even been disturbed. He listened carefully to the night around him-there was music and gunfire in the distance, but nothing happening in the storage complex.
Ruppert hurried to his car, loving the sound of the door unlocking for him. As the door opened, he thought that maybe his precautions were good enough, that they didn’t actually know who’d used the computer, and he could get away clean if he was fast enough.
Then he heard the approaching whump-whump-whump of a helicopter, flying low. He looked up, and a searing white glare enveloped him.
Ruppert felt his whole body turn to ice. He wanted nothing more than to jump into his car and drive, but his arms and legs wouldn’t move. He stood trembling in the light like a stupid animal, staring up at it, giving the helicopter’s cameras a clear view of him as the wind from the rotors blasted his hair back from his face.
Then it was over. The light swept on down another alley of the complex as the helicopter pulled away from him.
The immobilizing fear collapsed into wild panic, and he leapt into his car and drove for the exit gate before the car's door had time to close.
As he chugged north through crushing traffic on the 405, he saw several more helicopters, mostly police, but also one very small black craft with no markings. One of the police crafts lingered above Ruppert’s car for what seemed like a very long time. The helicopter did not address him over its loudspeakers or seize control of his car’s systems, and finally it thundered away without incident.
In his mind, Ruppert chastised himself for his carelessness. He’d paid for the unit in cash, but he should have been prepared to destroy the computer at a moment’s notice. A baseball bat. A simple bucket of water to drop it in. Anything.
Terror would be able to track the computer to the storage unit. The manager might be able to describe Ruppert, though he hadn’t seen him since Ruppert rented the unit. Terror could eventually find one of Ruppert’s fingerprints or hairs. They could crosscheck with the videolog of the police helicopter that had studied him, if it had been the police. There were a thousand ways Terror could identify him if they wanted to go to the trouble.
NINE
Ruppert lay awake in bed the rest of the night, twitching at every car horn and barking dog. Madeline had come home from church and regaled him with the intricacies of the power struggle surrounding the selection of a new chairlady for her gardening group. He couldn’t follow exactly what made her so angry, but she was too wrapped up in the subject to notice his extreme nervousness, or that he didn’t even ask his usual question about why she was in a gardening group when she paid a landscaper to keep up their yard.
Then she took her evening pill and drifted off to sleep, leaving him alone and waiting for Terror.
He struggled through a day of attempting to act normal at work, hearing himself talk a bit too fast and laugh a bit too loud. When the on-site Terror agent George Baldwin passed him in the hall, the broad-shouldered man gave him a cheerful greeting, and Ruppert’s heart nearly collapsed of shock. Baldwin was not normally an outgoing man. He always wore the suit of a Terror man-black coat, black shirt, black tie-and rarely had much use for the newsreaders, or anyone below the executive level. Nothing came of it, though. Perhaps Baldwin was just in a rare good mood.
It was Tuesday, so after work he attended his Revelation group, where once again they discussed how the final clash between the armies of good and evil was playing out across the globe. Naturally, everything was following the Biblical prophecies of the End Times, even if it took some jiggling to make the details fit.
The group had become a maudlin comedy to Ruppert as he watched the other men try to fit the Book of Revelation to the latest news reports, while Ruppert knew the reports themselves were mostly false. Tonight’s subject: Is Muhammad al Taba the Antichrist? Ruppert guessed no, partly because he knew al Taba had already been captured, and partly because he knew al Taba would be eventually be forgotten, and there would be a whole new Antichrist in a year or two. There always was.
After the meeting, O’Shea buttonholed Ruppert at the corner of the classroom, his rubbery smile even wider and toothier than usual.
“Looks like this is it, Daniel,” O’Shea said to him. “It finally happened.”
“What’s that?” Ruppert slid his hands in his pockets to conceal their shaking. If even O’Shea could scare him now, Ruppert thought, there was no hope.
“I heard from Pastor John’s office this morning,” O’Shea said.
“Yeah?”
“Yep! And you’ll never guess what they told me.”
Ruppert glanced around the room. He was left alone now with O’Shea, whose pudgy body blocked his path to the door.
“What’s that?” Ruppert asked. “What did you hear?”
“Just take a guess. I bet you can guess if you try. Think about it.”
“I don’t have any idea, Liam.” Ruppert looked out the door into the empty hall to see if any Terror men were approaching, but he saw nobody unusual, just men passing on their way out of various classes and study groups and discussion groups and activity groups.
“You don’t want to try and guess?”
“Liam, I need to go and meet Madeline-”
“They approved my application!” O’Shea brandished a laminated badge featuring his picture, in which O’Shea’s mouth sagged wide open as if he had no idea he was having his picture taken. The logo of the World Dominion Church was stamped above the picture-a golden sword, its upright handle the shape of a cross, skewering the Earth right through the North Pole, its tip protruding somewhere near Tierra del Fuego.
“I am now an official lay pastor here at Golden Tabernacle. I now have the authority to watch for those who show signs of straying from the flock, and to counsel them how best to correct their life’s course.”
As if you ever needed official sanction to do that, Ruppert thought. He felt himself sag with relief-this was about O’Shea, not him.
“Congratulations, Liam,” he said. “That does call for a little celebration. Let me buy you a Fizzer at the Fishes
