Free Tribulation Force: The Continuing Drama Of Those Left Behind by Tim Lahaye, Jerry B. Jenkins Page B

wouldn’t she have? Carpathia’s hired her, hasn’t he?”
    “I don’t know. She’s on a thirty-day leave. Just call her apartment. If she’s got a machine running, then she’s not made up her mind yet.”
    “Why don’t
you
call her?”
    “I think I’ve intruded enough in her life.”

    Buck stopped for Chinese carryout on the way home and sat eating alone, staring out the window. He turned on a ball game but ignored it, keeping the sound low. His mind was full of conflict. His story was ready to be transmitted to New York, and he would be eager for a reaction from Stanton Bailey. He also looked forward to getting his office machines and files, which should arrive at the Chicago bureau office in the morning. It would be good to pick those up and get organized.
    He couldn’t shake Bruce’s message, either. It wasn’t so much the content as Bruce’s passion. He needed to get to know Bruce better. Maybe that would be a cure for his loneliness—and Bruce’s. If Buck himself were this lonely, it had to be much worse for a man who had had a wife and children. Buck was used to a solitary life, but he’d had a network of friends in New York. Here, unless he heard from the office or someone else in the Tribulation Force, the phone was not going to ring.
    He certainly wasn’t handling the Chloe situation well. When he had been demoted, Buck had considered the relocation from New York to Chicago a positive turn—he would get to see more of her, he’d be in a good church, get good training, have a core of friends. But he also felt he had been on the right track when he began to slow his pursuit of her. The timing was bad. Who pursues a relationship during the end of the world?
    Buck knew—or at least believed—that Chloe was not toying with him. She wasn’t playing hard to get just to keep him interested. But whether she was doing it on purpose or not, it was working, and he felt foolish to be dwelling on it.
    Whatever had happened, however she was acting, and for whatever reason, he owed it to her to have it out. He might regret the let’s-be-friends routine, but he didn’t see that he had any other choice. He owed it to her and to himself to just pursue the friendship and see what came of it. For all he knew, she wouldn’t be interested in more than that anyway.
    He reached for the phone, but when he put it to his ear, he heard a strange tone, and then a recorded voice. “You have a message. Please push star two to hear it.”
    [_A message? I never ordered voice mail. _]He pushed the buttons. It was Steve Plank.
    “Buck, where the devil are you, man? If you’re not going to answer your voice mail, I’m going to quit leaving messages there. I know you’re unlisted there, but if you think Nicolae Carpathia is someone to trifle with, ask yourself how I got your phone number. You’ll wish you had these resources as a journalist. Now, Buck, friend to friend, I know you check your messages often, and you know Carpathia wants to talk to you. Why didn’t you call me? You’re making me look bad. I told him I’d track you down and that you’d come and see him. I told him I didn’t understand your not accepting his invitation to the installation meeting, but that I know you like a brother and you wouldn’t stand him up again.
    “Now he wants to see you. I don’t know what it’s all about or even whether I’ll sit in on it. I don’t know if it’s on the record, but you can certainly ask him for a few quotes for your article. Just get here. You can hand deliver your article to the [_Weekly, _]say hi to your old friend Miss Durham, and find out what Nicolae wants. There’s a first-class ticket waiting for you at O’Hare under the name of McGillicuddy for a nine o’clock flight tomorrow morning. A limo will meet your plane, and you’ll have lunch with Carpathia. Just do it, Buck. Maybe he wants to thank you for introducing him to Hattie. They seem to be hitting it off.
    “Now, Buck, if I don’t hear