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Having managed to hold on to his budget with an understandably harried Carpatescu, the Foreman settles in to both watch the treaty signing and make sure that every part of the world can see it. Thanks to his efforts, the only people who will miss it will be a few folks in the African interior, who will no doubt get it rebroadcast over radio; he estimates that this is being watched by more people, in both absolute numbers and percentage, than the moon landing.

The Foreman tunes in on a small CRT monitor, alone in his office. Everyone who has a scrap of time is standing by to make sure that any EM noise events are filtered out.

. . . When the applause dies and the crowd resumes their seats, Carpatescu stands, microphone in hand. “This is an historic day,” he begins with a smile. “While all this has come about in record time, it has been nonetheless a herculean effort to pull together all the resources necessary to make it happen. Today we honor many individuals. First, my beloved friend and mentor, a father figure to me, the brilliant Dr. Chaim Rosenzweig of Israel!”

The crowd responds with enthusiasm, and Chaim rises unsteadily, waving his little wave and smiling like a small boy.

Carpatescu sings the praises of the chief rabbi, of the Israeli prime minister, and finally of “the Honorable Hugh Fitzgerald, president of the United States of America, the greatest friend Israel has ever had.”

To some, the president has become a tragic figure, reduced to a mere token. After serving his country for most of two terms in office, he now has effectively self-relegated to a suite in the Executive Office Building and has lost most of the trappings from his previous role. Now his Secret Service protection consists of three men rotating every twenty-four hours, and they are financed by the Global Community.

More thunderous applause. Fitzgerald rises a few inches from his chair to acknowledge the response, and just when it’s about to die down, Carpatescu himself keeps it going, tucking the microphone under his arm and stepping back to applaud loudly himself.

Fitzgerald appears embarrassed, almost flustered, and looks to Carpatescu as if wondering what to do. Carpatescu beams, as if thrilled for his friend the president.

He shrugs and offers the microphone to Fitzgerald. At first the president doesn’t react, then he seems to wave it off. Finally he accepts it, to the roar of the audience. Clearly this is something he had choreographed. But what will Fitzgerald do now? Surely the only appropriate reaction would be to thank the people and toss a few bouquets at his good friends the Israelis. And despite Fitzgerald's dawning awareness of the devious agenda of Nicolae Carpatescu, he would have to acknowledge Nicolae's role in the peace process.

Fitzgerald's chair scrapes noisily as he stands, pushing back awkwardly against his own secretary of state. He has to wait for the crowd to quiet, and the process seems to take forever. Carpatescu rushes to Fitzgerald and thrusts his hand aloft, the way a referee does with the winning boxer, and the Israeli crowd cheers all the more.

Finally, Carpatescu steps into the background and President Fitzgerald stands in the center of the dais, obligated to say a few words. As soon as Fitzgerald begins to speak, it is obvious that Carpatescu's charisma was at work, for the Hugh Fitzgerald speaking to the enthusiastic throng is anything but the frustrated lame duck president people had become accustomed to.

“The last thing I want to do at a moment like this,” President Fitzgerald said, “is to detract in any way from the occasion at hand. However, with your kind indulgence and that of our great leader of the aptly renamed Global Community, I would like to make a couple of brief points.

“First, it has been a privilege to see what Nicolae Carpatescu has done in just a few short weeks. I am certain we all agree that the world is a more loving, peaceful place because of him.”

Carpatescu makes an effort to take back the microphone, but President Fitzgerald resists. “Now I have the floor, sir, if you don't mind!” This brings a peal of laughter. “I've said it before, and I'll say it again, the secretary general's idea for global disarmament is a stroke of genius. I support it without reservation and am proud to lead the way to the rapid destruction of 90 percent of our weapons and the donation of the other 10 percent to Global Community, under Mr. Carpatescu's direction.

“As a tangible expression of my personal support and that of our nation as a whole, we have also gifted Global Community with the brand-new Air Force One. We have financed its repainting and titling, and it can be viewed at Ben Gurion International.

“Now I surrender the microphone to the man of destiny, the leader whose current title does not do justice to the extent of his influence, to my personal friend and compatriot, Nicolae Carpatescu!”

Nicolae appears to accept the microphone reluctantly and seems embarrassed by all the attention. He looks bemused, as if helpless to know what to do with such a recalcitrant U.S. president who doesn’t know when enough is enough.

When the applause finally dies down, Carpatescu affects his humblest tone and says, “I apologize for my overexuberant friend, who has been too kind and too generous, and to whom the Global Community owes a tremendous debt.”

The Israeli dignitaries, except Rosenzweig of course, look vaguely uncomfortable with all the talk of destroying weapons and disarming. A strong military had been their best defense for decades, and without the covenant with Global Community, they would have been loath to agree to Carpatescu's disarmament plan.

The rest of the ceremony is anticlimactic after the rousing speech of the president. Fitzgerald seems more enamored of Carpatescu every time they are together. But his view only mirrors that of most of the populace of the world. Other leaders make innocuous speeches and rattle on about the importance and historicity of the document they are about to sign.

Several decorative pens are produced as television, film, video, and still cameras zero in on the signers. The pens are passed back and forth, the poses struck, and the signatures applied. With handshakes, embraces, and kisses on both cheeks all around, the treaty is inaugurated.

At the famed Wall, the "two witnesses." At the tops of their voices, the sound carrying to the far reaches of the Temple Mount and beyond, they call out the news: “Thus begins the last terrible week of the Lord!”

The Foreman can't really do a network congestion analysis on an analog stream, but he figures that most people will tune away from GNN before the next program starts.

Apparently, some rabbi named Tsion Ben-Judah has been commissioned by GNN and the outgoing Israeli government to do a three-year study on Messianic prophecies in what the West calls the Old Testament; today happens to be the anniversary of the 1263 Disputation of Barcelona, and it fit into the program.

What shows up on screen is an angry man maybe five years the Foreman’s senior, going on on what seems to be an unhinged rant about how in those three years, he had ended up converting to Protestantism without telling anyone.

“One of the prophecies we Jews do not like and tend to ignore is that Messiah will be rejected by his own people. Isaiah prophesied, ‘He is despised and rejected by men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.’”

The rabbi looks at his watch. “My time is fleeting,” he says, “so I want to speed through a few more clear prophecies and tell you what conclusion I have drawn . . ."

The Foreman gets a short email from Carpatescu when the rant is over—surprisingly, he has been listening to it, even though the Foreman knows he must've been at the signing ceremony's conclusion. If the Foreman has developed a Nomenklator system, maybe so has he; it'd explain the never-out-of-place hair.

“Let me close by saying that the three years I have invested in searching the sacred writings of Moses and the prophets have been the most rewarding of my life. I expanded my study to books of history and other sacred writings, including the New Testament of the Gentiles, combing every record I could find to see if anyone has ever lived up to the messianic qualifications. Was there one born in Bethlehem of a virgin, a descendant of King David, traced back to our father Abraham, who was taken to Egypt, called back to minister in Galilee, preceded by a forerunner, rejected by God's own people, betrayed for thirty pieces of silver, pierced without breaking a bone, buried with the rich, and resurrected?

“According to one of the greatest of all Hebrew prophets, Daniel, there would be exactly 483 years between the decree to rebuild the wall and the city of Jerusalem ‘in troublesome times’ before the Messiah would be cut off for the sins of the people.”

Ben-Judah looks directly into the camera. “Exactly 483 years after the rebuilding of Jerusalem and its walls, Jesus Christ of Nazareth offered himself to the nation of Israel. He rode into the city on a donkey to the rejoicing of the people, just as the prophet Zechariah had predicted: ‘Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your King is coming to you; He is just and having salvation, lowly and riding on a donkey, a colt, the foal of a donkey.’

“Jesus Christ is the Messiah!” the rabbi concludes, by now shouting like a televangelist. “There can be no other option. I had come to this answer but was afraid to act on it, and I was almost too late. Jesus came to rapture his church, to take them with him to heaven as he said he would. I was not among them, because I wavered. But I have since received him as my Savior. He is coming back in seven years! Be ready!”

A service message tells the Foreman that the TV studio hosting Trion's interview is crawling with activity. Orthodox rabbis are calling, angry Israelis are pounding on the doors, studio technicians are looking for the cue to pull the plug.

“Now that was anticlimactic,” Nicolae Carpatescu comments a couple of days later in a press release. “I would have liked him saying he himself was the Messiah better. This is old news. Lots of people believe this myth. So they have a primo Hebrew rabbi convert. Big deal. The Ecumenical Babylon One World Faith Covenant guarantees freedom of religion to all; it would be prevaricatory of me to declare myself for or against this.”

The next quarter rolls around, and the Foreman must plan out CATS’ operation for the first month of it. He makes note of the starting conditions. The final two satellites are scheduled to launch from Broglio Space Center but there are no fleet assets to take the team there. Additionally, Carpatescu has agreed to provide security for their operations this month . . . which can be good or bad depending on what the team wants to get into.

First, the Foreman hires a barge to carry the two converted Soviet ICBMs to the Broglio launch platform; a few of his guys note that the platform isn't much bigger than the barge itself, so it may be feasible to build a launch platform himself. Others point out the air launch systems like the Pegasus aircraft, which has been in operation for a few years. In passing, he’s shown a paper written by a Sheldon Cooper about reusable first stages in orbital rocketry, but the math is abstruse and he has a large supply of former nuclear missiles to go through, anyway; the fledgling Global Community website highlights that their reuse as comm satellite vectors is part of the new administration's swords-to-plowshares initiative. By now, these launches are routine, and he expects no problems.

To make the most of the free security while they have it, the Foreman commits four work teams to establish cellular and Internet coverage in east and central Africa. Another two teams will be researching expert systems.

The Foreman puts Dr. Robertson on research. Dr. Robertson is somewhat familiar with data science, in that his current main project requires a fair amount of computing power and so he has a few programmers on payroll. This allows him to prevent his workgroup from reinventing the wheel, speeding up progress.

As for the Foreman himself, he spends some time reading up on radiomedicine, learning that in the 1970s and 1980s, things like the "cobalt bomb" (cobalt-60 radiotherapy) were largely replaced by much safer and more controllable linear accelerators, at least in hospitals that could afford it. Much of the older equipment was donated to developing countries, where it has been in use according to the availability of consumables.

Notably, he finds that cobalt-60 was affected; his aides find him some papers about statistical anomalies in its half life.

He also discovers that the availability of that particular stuff has actually gone up, simply because after all the world's nuclear reactors were shut off, there was a scramble about where to put fission byproducts. However, material such as plutonium for radiothermal generators is now considerably harder to find, to the point that NASA is having to scrap some planned outer solar system missions. Dr. Robertson did complain about it . . .

In passing, he also discovers that the Carpatescu administration has caved in to post-Event demands by the public that most nuclear research be halted or curtailed; the hot trend in nuclear engineering right now is containment system design, since there's both a practical and political demand for the mothballed reactors to be secured permanently.

When it comes time to send out the teams to Africa, including another team establishing a Cellular-Solar pylon in north Africa (deployed in voice mode), the Foreman has to consider cost. Renting the fleet assets necessary for such a massive deployment is going to make a dent in his budget, but he figures that it's more efficient to handle fleet operations as a service, for now. Most of his field teams deploy to various places in Africa; enough so that the local subpotentate, Rehoboth, takes notice.

The team's assessment of the man is anything but positive: He is a tyrant who pillaged his own country of Sudan and made multi-millionaires of his wives and children, and thus is greatly hated by his own people. He was given the subpotentate position as an insult to Mwangati Ngumo, who had stepped down from his role as the Secretary General of the United Nations, expecting to be given both the subpotentate role and licensed use of the synthetic fertilizer formula created by Chaim Rosenzweig to help his own country, Botswana. At least Carpatescu has been keeping him in check, mostly.

The Foreman figures it would be best if he goes with one of his teams to meet the man personally. He has to admit that the GC security detail makes him feel bigger and taller as he meets the aged (arguably former) dictator. He seems to go for pomp and circumstance: the Foreman is given a lengthened-chassis Range Rover to go meet him in, there's a red carpet made dusty by the desert wind, and there’s a plethora of hangers-on. There's even a band.

After the obligatory ribbon cutting ceremony for one of the pylons, the man thanks the Foreman for fulfilling Carpatescu's vision of a world of equality. He endures the ceremony in the hot, windy climate.

Once they are behind closed doors and with the air conditioning running at full blast, the man's demeanor changes drastically.

"We don't need white boys like you telling us how to do our business here. Next time you want to do any such amount of work, you go through me, understand? There are channels, you will want to use local manpower, the tissue of society must not be disturbed by these disruptions."

The Foreman doesn’t like what he’s hearing. “Congratulations, your thinly veiled demand for a bribe has been recorded by my Nomenklator and will be forwarded to Carpatescu in an hour unless I say otherwise. Note that the people at the other end are smart enough to detect if I am under duress.”

This is the one guy he wants to handle with a rod.

Then he hears AK-47s being chambered behind him.

"Oh, that's fine, Mister Foreman," Rehoboth says, relaxing visibly.

"Carpatescu knows every detail of my career. He doesn't mind one little bit, you see. People like you sleep soundly in your beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do you harm. I've been one of these men. I've broken a lot of eggs to make my omelet, Foreman.

"Do you think it's easy to keep this continent under control? Take your average American white boy, or even black boy, they'll probably think Africa is one big blob of heat and scarcity. Do you have any idea how many languages are spoken between here and the next city not even five hundred miles away? How many clans, tribal groups, movements? The only way to hold it all together is with my left hand holding the horn of plenty, and my right holding an AK. Don't think you can threaten me. Carpatescu can find another nerdy phone repairman in a week, but I? I'm a lot less replaceable than you.

"Now you've got thirty seconds to tell me why I shouldn't nod at my man behind you, GC uniform or not, and he'll shoot you in the neck. Your boys can send your recording to the big boss if they want; it'll never leave his office."

The Foreman decides to call his bluff. "Nomenklator team, global broadcast of audio buffer in 60 seconds if you hear nothing more from me. Every home in the world that has a TV will hear it."

Or that’s what he plans to say. He, of course, does not have time to tell the Nomenklator team all that.

Fortunately, they're smart enough to get the gist of it by the few words he does manage to get out.

Unfortunately, Rehoboth hasn't achieved near-supreme power over a whole continent after decades of being a bloodthirsty warlord by bluffing.

It doesn't hurt; it just feels strangely cold. The Foreman hears the shot AFTER feeling the hit, maybe because the bullet was sufficiently supersonic, maybe because his brain is trying to process things with a chunk of his cerebellum having gone missing.

His consolation is that he hears this exchange replay on the small TV in the room, with an "Urgent News Bulletin" graphic in place on the screen. The bodyguards assigned to him come in and shoot his attacker in an automatic burst; one of the bullets shoots the CRT screen, which ironically leaves the speaker playing. From his spot on the floor, the Foreman sees Rehoboth raise his hands.

As a rational, modern man, he knows exactly what the whole "tunnel of light" thing is: rather than being any sort of divine experience, it's his brain releasing a lot of endorphins to cope with the blood loss and his visual cortex starting to misfire.

He hears Rehoboth's cell phone, a gift from the Foreman himself, go off. The ringtone is "Hail to the Chief," which lets him guess Carpatescu is calling his subordinate. The Foreman may even live long enough to know if the African subpotentate is as replaceable as himself after all.

SEVEN YEARS LATER

Jesus said, "You became a willing tool of the devil himself. "

Nicolae did not protest, did not beg. He merely lowered his head even more and nodded.

"Ultimately your plans and your regime have failed. And now, who do you say that I am?"

The pause was interminable, the silence deadly. Finally, in a humble, weak voice, Nicolae croaked, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God, who died for the sins of the world and rose again the third day as the Scriptures predicted."

Carpatescu sank even lower. "I confess, " he whispered, "that my life was a waste. Worthless. A mistake. I rebelled against the God of the universe, whom I now know loved me."

The archangels Michael and Gabriel stepped forward, Michael to pull the False Prophet and Antichrist from the ground and to a standing position. He stood before Jesus as if awaiting instructions while the wasted Nicolae was hunched and elderly looking, hanging his head.

A hole three feet in diameter opened in the ground and a putrid, sulphuric odor burst forth. This was followed by a whistling blue flame that erupted from the hole.

Without hesitation, Michael briskly walked the two to the edge of the hole. Carpatescu did not struggle. He merely covered his face with his forearms as he was dropped in, and then his bawling echoed throughout Jerusalem until he had fallen far enough away. The hole closed as quickly as it had opened, and the Beast and the False Prophet were no more.

ONE DAY AFTER THAT

The larger mass of survivors, the group to Jesus' left, immediately fell to their knees again and began shouting and wailing, "Jesus Christ is Lord! Jesus Christ is Lord!"

He said, "Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels: for I was hungry and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink; I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, sick and in prison and you did not visit Me. "

The millions began shouting and pleading, "Lord, when?"

Jesus said, "I say to you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me. You will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life. "

But despite their numbers and the dissonance of their desperate bawling, Jesus could be heard above them.

The believers, and those born during the Tribulation and therefore too little to understand, watched as those to Jesus' left beat their breasts and fell wailing to the desert floor, gnashing their teeth and pulling their hair. Jesus raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again.

From the throne, Jesus said, "Surely, as I have thought, so it shall come to pass, and as I have purposed, so it shall stand."

Wait, let's try that again.

Or... is it over? Not in a thousand years.