Free Left Behind: A Novel Of Earth's Last Days by Tim Lahaye, Jerry B. Jenkins Page A

phone.
    “No, I’m not, but it was sure fun to see you swing into action.”
    “You creep,” she had said. “Anybody else I’d be throwing out of here on his can.”
    “But you love me. You can’t help yourself.”
    “That wasn’t even Christian,” she had said.
    “Don’t start with that again.”
    “Come on, Cameron. You know you got your mind right when you saw what God did for Israel.”
    “Granted, but don’t start calling me a Christian. Deist is as much as I’ll cop to.”
    “Stay in town long enough to come to my church, and God’ll getcha.”
    “He’s already got me, Lucinda. But Jesus is another thing. The Israelis hate Jesus, but look what God did for them.”
    “The Lord works in—”
    “In mysterious ways, yeah, I know. Anyway, I’m going to London Monday. Working on a hot tip from a friend there.”
    “Yeah? What?”
    “Not on your life. We don’t know each other that well yet.” She had laughed, and they had parted with a friendly embrace. That had been three days ago.
    Buck had boarded the ill-fated flight to London prepared for anything. He was following a tip from a former Princeton classmate, a Welshman who had been working in the London financial district since graduate school. Dirk Burton had been a reliable source in the past, tipping off Buck about secret high-level meetings among international financiers. For years Buck had been slightly amused at Dirk’s tendency to buy into conspiracy theories. “Let me get this straight,” Buck had asked him once, “you think these guys are the real world leaders, right?”
    “I wouldn’t go that far, Cam,” Dirk had said. “All I know is, they’re big, they’re private, and after they meet, major things happen.”
    “So you think they get world leaders elected, handpick dictators, that kind of a thing?”
    “I don’t belong to the conspiracy book club, if that’s what you mean.”
    “Then where do you get this stuff, Dirk? Come on, you’re a relatively sophisticated guy. Power brokers behind the scenes? Movers and shakers who control the money?”
    “All I know is, the London Exchange, the Tokyo Exchange, the New York exchange—we all basically drift until these guys meet. Then things happen.”
    “You mean like when the New York Stock Exchange has a blip because of some presidential decision or some vote of Congress, it’s really because of your secret group.”
    “No, but that’s a perfect example. If there’s a blip in your market because of your president’s health, imagine what it does to world markets when the real money people get together.”
    “But how does the market know they’re meeting? I thought you were the only one who knew.”
    “Cam, be serious. OK, not a lot of people agree with me, but then I don’t say this to just anyone. One of our muckety-mucks is part of this group. When they have a meeting, no, nothing happens right away. But a few days later, a week, changes occur.”
    “Like what?”
    “You’re going to call me crazy, but a friend of mine is related to a girl who works for the secretary of our guy in this group, and—”
    “Whoa! Hold it! What’s the trail here?”
    “OK, maybe the connection is a little remote, but you know the old guy’s secretary is not going to say anything. Anyway, the scuttlebutt is that this guy is real hot on getting the whole world onto one currency. You know half our time is spent on exchange rates and all that. Takes computers forever to constantly readjust every day, based on the whims of the markets.”
    Buck was not convinced. “One global currency? Never happen,” he had said.
    “How can you flatly say that?”
    “Too bizarre. Too impractical. Look what happened in the States when they tried to bring in the metric System.”
    “Should have happened. You Yanks are such rubes.”
    “Metrics were only necessary for international trade. Not for how far it is to the outfield wall at Yankee Stadium or how many kilometers it is from Indianapolis