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what he'd just witnessed. They had missed it.
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He collapsed to the floor and wept for mercy, for himself, for his wife, for
his sons.
For he knew now with a certainty that nearly paralyzed him that for all the
evil the world had just experienced, it was merely a foretaste of the evil
that lay ahead.
EPILOGUE
* * *
A sense of gloom settled over them.
Galishnikov had barely slept in more than a week. Nor had his wife. Since "the
disappearances," they "hadn't stepped foot in their Medexco corporate offices
in Tel Aviv even once, despite the fact that oil prices had shot past a
thousand euros a barrel. They had not checked their portfolios or spoken with
their accountants or financial advisors
nor had it even occurred to them to do so despite the fact that gold had
already topped twenty-five hundred euros an ounce and most of their holdings
were in gold since the
Day of Devastation the previous October. Food had lost all taste. They were
subsisting on an occasional piece of fruit, a few crackers, and a sip of juice
or water now and then, and only because their housekeeper, a Filipino woman
who feared for their health, kept insisting.
Locked away in their palatial stucco and glass compound overlooking the
glistening
Mediterranean, they found themselves consumed with watching the news and
surfing the
Web for the latest developments, talking to their sons and various family
members and friends throughout Israel and around the world as often as they
could punch through on phone lines that were often overloaded and jammed,
missing dear friends like Jon and
Erin and Eli Mordechai, and studying the Scriptures deep into the night.
Together, they had already read the entire New Testament through three times,
from beginning to end.
On his own, Galishnikov had read it through twice more, while at the same time
poring over the prophecies of Daniel and Ezekiel, Jeremiah and Isaiah,
desperately trying to make sense of all that was happening and feverishly
trying to steel himself for all that was coming. He regretted not having
listened to Eli and Jon more while he'd had the chance.
For most of his life he had dreaded attending synagogue on Shabbat, much less
listening to the rabbi read the weekly Torah portion. But now he couldn't get
enough of
God's Word. Indeed, it was only when he read the Bible, or when Katya read it
aloud to him, that the pervasive sense of gloom and evil all around them
seemed to lift, even momentarily, and he felt any sense of peace at all.
Yet regardless of what else he studied, he found himself continually drawn
back the words of the apostle Paul in his first letter to the believers in
Yeshua gathered at
Thessalonica.
The Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the
archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Messiah will rise
first.
Then we who are alive and remain
will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the
air, and so we shall always be with the Lord.
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Therefore, comfort one another with these words.
Was this what had just happened? Galishnikov longed to know. Had the true
followers of
Yeshua HaMaschiach Jesus the Messiah actually been caught up with Him in the
air, just as the Scriptures had foretold two thousand years earlier, just and
Eli and Jon and many others like them had predicted over the past few years,
and even the past few months? At the moment the American president had
disappeared on television, he had thought so immediately, and so had Katya.
They had wavered in that initial conviction in recent days, but as hard as
they tried, they could come up with no other plausible explanation.
The Internet was full of conspiracy theories and crackpot claims, saying the
aliens had finally come, or that the earth had finally experienced the
"invasion of the body snatchers." Some insisted it was all a freak act of
spontaneous combustion. Others insisted it was all somehow a convergence of
global warming and static electricity. But none of that rang true to
Galishnikov.
To the contrary, the more he read articles and books online by evangelical
Christians and messianic Jews who had been predicting the coming "Rapture" of
the Church for years, the more convinced he was that they had just lived
through one of the most dramatic moments in Bible prophecy. That meant, of
course, that one day perhaps sooner than they realized they would have the
incredible joy and privilege of seeing Eli's face again in heaven. They would
get to walk the streets of gold with Jon and Erin and Natasha
Barak and so many other dear ones. And yet such thoughts both comforted and
terrified him at the same time, for they also meant that new evils were rising
more horrifying than any that had come before.
Then just before six o'clock on the morning of the ninth day, the unlisted
phone they kept in their home office began to ring. Galishnikov looked up from
his laptop where he had spent the night studying Revelation chapter six and
the coming of the "four horsemen of the apocalypse." He rubbed his bloodshot
eyes and glanced at the caller ID. A shot of adrenaline suddenly coursed
through his body. He picked up immediately.
"Hello?" he said, his voice raspy with fatigue.
"Is this Dmitri Galishnikov?" said a young woman who sounded nearly as tired
as he.
"Yes, I am Dmitri."
"Very well, please hold for Prime Minister Doron."
Galishnikov held his breath. Why was he calling? What could this mean?
Katya suddenly tapped him on the shoulder.
"Coffee?" she whispered.
Startled, Galishnikov nodded and gratefully squeezed her hand, and then Doron
was on the line.
"Dmitri, is that you?" came the familiar voice of his old friend.
"Yes, David, it's me," he replied, too close to the prime minister for
formalities, especially now. "How are you holding up?"
"Off the record?" Doron asked.
"Of course," Galishnikov said.
"Then I would be lying to you if I said I wasn't scared," Doron conceded. "All
of our allies are gone, Dmitri. All of them. And I don't know what to do."
"I don't understand," Galishnikov said. "What do you mean all of our allies
are gone?"
"I mean Mossad estimates thirty-nine world leaders are missing and all from
countries that are our closest friends," Doron explained. "It's not just the
president of the
United States. It's the prime ministers of Great Britain, Canada, Australia.
It's the president of South Korea and South Africa and dozens more like them
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all over the world."
Galishnikov felt as if someone had just kicked him in the stomach. He had been
tracking such events around the world, but he had been thinking about them in
personal terms, about friends and colleagues missing in each of those
capitals, and in spiritual terms, about how everything that was happening fit
into the trajectory of prophetic events the Bible described. He had not,
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