Sneak peek at Puzzle Master Trilogy Book Three: Missing Pieces
Chapter 1
I am.
If I thought the words “You are” were the most troubling words to hear repeated over and over in my head, it’s only because I had not yet heard “I am” echoing through my mind.
I am the world’s best hope for stopping a war, but I have no army.
I am the one who can see pieces of the puzzle, but even I can’t put them together.
I am Christianity’s best hope for survival, but that hope is fading.
I am the new rock on which His church will continue to be built.
Is it really possible that I’m part of God’s plan? Or is this just my own ego talking? If I am part of His plan, why must it be so hard to see?
It’s a lot to contemplate when you’re in the middle of a mission, but somehow thinking about the big picture sharpens my focus on more immediate issues.
I reach out to the knob of the command center door.
“Don’t try it, Cephas. It can’t be done,” my cousin James says.
“Do you have a better plan?”
Of course he doesn’t. Zip and a combat team stormed Bethany House and are holding three of our people hostage behind this door, demanding my surrender in exchange for their lives. This is the only way in or out. We tried to reverse the ventilation system to flood the room with a sleeping gas, but they somehow thwarted us and even sent much of it back in our faces, leaving a direct assault as our only option.
Why does the world keep putting a gun into my hand?
“The math is simple, Cephas. There are ten of them, all with guns pointed at this door or at the heads of the hostages. Your stun gun has a maximum fire rate of five shots per second so even if you could hit all ten targets in under three seconds they’ll still have time to execute our people.”
“Don’t say ‘our people’ like you’ve never met them. My wife and your sister are two of the hostages,” I say.
“It doesn’t change the math.”
“Then I will. I’ll double my fire rate.”
I grab his stun gun from its holster and kick in the door with a gun in each hand. My first two shots hit Zip and a member of her team who are indeed holding their guns to the heads of Martha and Cindi. Next down is a man holding a rifle, followed by a woman who shoots and hits the door frame next to me. Number five is hit as he dives for the cover of a table and six when he raises his gun to shoot Cindi. The next two reveal their positions when they shoot from shadowed spots in the corners. I’m already moving forward so they miss, but I feel the electric charge race past before I disable them both. Number nine drops his gun and surrenders and number ten follows suit.
“I knew you could shoot left-handed!” Martha says.
“You also knew I’d do anything necessary to end this and keep our date tonight.”
“Zip,” who was being played by Misty gets up from the floor.
“You two do realize that these things still hurt, even on the lowest setting, right?”
“Sorry, Misty. How many times does that make today? Seven?”
“You lose both count and feeling after three.”
“Thanks everyone,” Martha says. “Be ready to practice a new assault scenario tomorrow.”
“Okay, but you get to be Zip next time,” Misty says.
The command center returns to normal operations and I look for an empty station I can use. The only one available is the one everyone avoids, Amelia’s old station. After seeing her in a video from Indonesia the general assumption is that she’s dead. There’s been talk of having a memorial service, but Martha has been putting it off until we know for sure. Given the mass cremations of the dead, confirmation may never come.
I sit and review a map of the progress of the toxin that killed her which the media is now calling “The Plague.” The map also shows areas where the Center for World Health is “vaccinating” as they attempt to get ahead of outbreaks. The CWH shipped its first batch of vaccine to Borneo after half of the population was already infected. The vaccine only works if taken before a person is infected, so riots broke out at the airport when the cargo planes landed. Anyone who looked sick was stoned by the crowds to keep them back. Kill teams from the Corps were assigned to protect the vaccine and shot hundreds more as they tried to storm the planes.
The reason is no puzzle. The Corps is keeping tight control of the vaccine to ensure it stays out of the hands of Christians who are living off the government grid. We received a report of a family that had walked four days in the jungle to reach a clinic, but were denied doses and arrested for fraud because three of their five children were not on the grid. As far as we know, they weren’t even Christian, they were off grid simply because they lived in a remote area. The last report said the entire family was killed by the toxin.
Tight control of the vaccine also allows the Corps to control the level of fear. As the tension eased on Borneo, the plague showed up in Java and Sumatra and the cycle started all over again. Vaccine had barely arrived there, when Malaysia saw its first cases. Adding to the confusion is the fact that in rare cases the vaccine itself causes a high fever that mimics the plague. Several people who had received their dose were killed before it was figured out.
Why don’t the experts see this isn’t acting like a disease? It’s acting like a toxin that’s being selectively distributed.
CWH scientists are being heralded as heroes for stemming the death toll, but there’s going to be a lot more death. Henry wants people to take the vaccine without question so the plague will be made to look like an unstoppable wave traveling around the world. Everywhere the disease goes, the vaccine will arrive just in time. There’ll be enough death to keep everyone scared and controlled.
The screen I’m using goes dark except for a small blinking icon in the lower corner that looks like a stick with a snake coiled around it. I select it and some sort of code starts downloading, then prompts me to select the stick again to complete a remote link. I know enough about technology to understand this is some sort of hacking and that I should purge the new code before anyone can gain remote access. I complete the link anyway.
“Thank God,” Amelia says as her face comes up on the screen.
She’s wearing an isolation suit, but has the hood off.
“I knew it would be you, Cephas. You’re the only one there who would see the backdoor I wrote into my station for downloading medical texts and not delete it as a hack.”
“You’re alive!”
Finally, some good news.
Heads come up all over the room at my shout followed by people crowding around the station.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“We got the video you made of the pile of bodies. You looked like you had the plague.”
“I told you I was fine, whatever it was it passed in no time. I can only hold this link for a minute, so here’s my report. I’m in Makassar, Indonesia, but you’d think I’m on the set of a horror movie. This entire city is going to be wiped out. My hotel got converted into a hospital, so I’m volunteering as a nurse to collect more samples. I even flirted with a cult hunter who said he’d been vaccinated and got a blood sample from him.”
“Did you find anything?”
“I’m sure they’re doing this with a genetic toxin just like Jocie said, but it breaks down too quickly after a patient dies for those samples to be of any use. I ran the cult hunter’s vaccinated DNA through a sequencer to try to locate the artificial sequence that’s designed to counteract the toxin, but the human genome has over three billion base pairs. It’s a needle in a haystack.”
“If you’re working as a nurse, can you get access to the vaccine?”
“They didn’t bring vaccine to Makassar. They set up a perimeter to keep everyone inside, then wrote the city off as a loss. A few people tried to get out early on and were shot. Now the entire island is quarantined and they’re using drones to blow up anyone who attempts to leave by boat. From the roof of the hotel you can see a dozen or more explode and burn at sea every night.”
“So what’s your next move?” I ask.
She pauses then looks into the camera. I’ve never seen her eyes look so tired.
“The same as every other Christian living off the grid. Survive.”