Free Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle Of The Ages by Tim Lahaye, Jerry B. Jenkins Page B

“Yeah, well, from what we found, I can imagine. I have good news and bad news this morning, Mrs. Williams. Which would you like?”
    So, there it was. In a matter of hours, the prints or the eye reading had given her away. “Nothing you can say will be good news.”
    “Don’t be rash. We’re reasonable people, much as you and yours would like to think otherwise and per-suade all the sheep who follow that kook Ben-Judah.”
    Tsion has more brains in his eyebrows than any ten GCs I’ve ever met.
    “I have a proposition for you, ma’am.”
    “I don’t want to hear it.”
    “Sure you do.”
    “Let me guess. My freedom for a few leads?”
    “Well, you can play high-and-mighty all you want, Mom, but I’d think you’d be open to hearing me out when the benefit to you deals with your own child.”

CHAPTER FIVE
    ALBIE’S BLACK-MARKET world was a shadowy landscape of operators who largely went by nicknames and initials. Albie himself had fashioned his name from his home-town, Al Basrah. People who needed to know who he was knew enough to reach him. Before he became a believer, Albie had been one of the top three black mar-keters in the Middle East. His conversion to Christ had left only two, and the death of one of them, reputedly at the hands of the other in a deal gone bad, left one. And that was who Albie needed to get ahold of.
    He had never liked Double-M, or Mainyu Mazda, even when Albie was of the same ilk and character. Killing was nothing new for Mainyu. It was how he maintained his reputation and control. You wanted something, anything, he was the man. But pity anyone who ever, ever tried to swindle or even shortchange the man. Legend had it that he had personally murdered a dozen people-one of them one of his own wives-who had not lived up to their end of some bargain. None dared calculate how many he may have hired others to eliminate.
    Those who claimed to know said Mainyu celebrated each personal killing by adding a tattooed double-M to his neck. He had begun twenty years before when he had strangled a guard in a Kuwaiti prison. He applied the first tattoo himself, the ink a concoction of rubber shavings from the soles of his shoes, paint chips from the prison bars, and blood. A sharpened paper clip heated by a cigarette lighter was his applicator. He put that first double-M directly under his Adam’s apple. He added one on either side of the original for each subsequent murder, so people could tell whether he was on an odd or even number by whether or not his tattooed necklace was even on both sides.
    The last time Albie had seen Mainyu, his necklace had one more double-M on the left than on the right and his count stood at twelve. The more recent tattoos were clearer and more professionally done, and supposedly the one for his wife had a feminine flair.
    Albie put the word on the street that he wanted an audience with Mainyu, and within two hours a note was slipped under his door with an address deep in the street markets on Abadan Island on the Shatt al Arab River in southwestern Iran.
    It was like MM to follow the money. Pipelines con-nected Abadan’s huge refinery to the oil fields of Iran.
    Of course Mainyu did his black marketing in the city’s underbelly.
    Like anyone anywhere who didn’t bear a mark of loy-alty to Carpathia, Albie had become nocturnal. He and Mac shared a flat in a forsaken corner of Al Basrah, where the landlord didn’t know or care about one’s loyalty to the Global Community provided the rent enve-lope was full and waiting the first of every month. Albie had taught Mac that the best way to get around was on motor scooters small and light enough to be stored indoors or hidden in the woods near where they hid their small plane.
    Albie would wait for the sun to disappear before ven-turing out to a ferry that would get him and his scooter to the island, where he would find the address some thirty miles from home.
     
     
    When big Jock said something about it probably being