Mark of Evil Read Free Page A

For some way to provide a financial system for millions of new Jesus Remnant members around the world. And for some way to protect them as long as he could while the rest of the world continued to collapse.

THREE
    When Ethan arrived at the large rock outcropping near the ancient ruins of the Acropolis, Louder and Gikas were there, along with a big, ominous-looking “assistant” who Ethan took to be the bodyguard. Gikas, a short, stocky man with bushy eyebrows, announced that he was the local agent for Jo Li, the reputed mastermind behind an underground network for buying and selling. But Gikas looked distracted. He kept nervously scanning the sky. When Ethan started to dialogue, Gikas put up his hand to silence him. Gikas craned his head quickly back and forth, surveying the Acropolis. After a moment he said, “I thought I heard one of them.”
    “One what?” Ethan asked.
    “One of those Global Alliance drone-bots they use for flyovers. Very little armed security on the ground here in the ruins.”
    “We’ve noticed that,” Louder said.
    “Yeah, now they are doing it from the air,” Gikas continued. “They use the drones for nontaggers like you guys.”

    Gikas launched into a diatribe on the problems that global surveillance had created. Everyone—and especially Ethan—knew what Gikas was talking about. Ethan didn’t need a lecture on the dilemma of nontaggers who, like his own group, had refused to receive a BIDTag—the invisible, biological identification tattoo with a hidden QR code, required by force of law to be lasered onto the backs of hands or on the foreheads of every citizen on the planet, including those in America. People had been told it was for homeland security purposes. But with the onslaught of global depression, the BIDTag had been converted for another use as a human debit card—a cashless, worldwide electronic system for payment and banking.
    When they’d worked shoulder to shoulder in Israel, Josh Jordan had continually drilled Ethan on the significance of those events. Josh kept reminding his younger apprentice how it fit into the tapestry of Bible prophecy. So when Josh and his family were raptured, Ethan was already trained to understand “the signs of the times,” as Josh would put it: the geopolitical events happening around the world and in the United States. Like the fact that the United States Congress had voted to join the world’s universal payment scheme, but President Hank Hewbright had promptly vetoed it. Then Congress overrode his veto in a squeaker of a vote. That’s where matters still stood in America. Appeals to the Supreme Court had been fruitless; the vanishing of several Supreme Court justices at the Great Disappearance meant a weakened high court, with several members missing and President Hewbright unable to get any of his judicial nominees confirmed.
    Standing there in the shadow of the huge rock outcropping, Gikas was going on and on about the robotically operated drone planes that had been employed by the Global Alliance for surveillance and police work. “If they scan you from the air and don’t see your BIDTag, you get one warning over the loudspeaker from the drone, telling you to stop and to wait for someone to arrive on the ground to arrest you. A second warning if you don’t stop. Then they start shooting from the air.”

    Ethan nodded. This was old news for him. Except that he knew something Gikas didn’t: for Ethan there would be no second warning, or even a first.
    “Yeah,” Louder replied. “We’re pretty up on all of that.” He gave a knowing glance at Ethan. Both of them knew that because Ethan was a leader of the resistance, his image had been cataloged into the facial-recognition program of the Global Alliance ID data centers—the main one in New Babylon, Iraq, and the others in Rome, London, Frankfurt, and Singapore—and they were all digitally linked and uploaded to the drone-bots around the world.
    Gikas concluded his point.