Apollyon: The Destroyer Is Unleashed Read Online Free PDF

plan, he would die after he returned to the States.”
    “Are you strong enough to tell me more?” Hattie nodded. “I don’t want to cause you to get worse.”
    “I can talk.”
    “Do you know about Amanda?”
    Her lips trembled, and she turned her face away.
    “Do you?” he repeated. She nodded, looking miserable. “Tell me.”
    “I’m so sorry, Rayford. I knew from the beginning and could have told you.”
    He gritted his teeth, his temples pounding painfully. “Told me what?”
    “I was involved,” she said. “It wasn’t my idea, but I could have stopped it.”

THREE
    Rayford’s mind reeled. The farthest he had allowed his imagination to take him was that Amanda might have been a plant at the beginning. Hattie could have told Carpathia enough about Rayford and his first wife to give Amanda a believable story about having met Irene. But even if that was true, Amanda surely could not have faked her conversion. He would not accept that.
    “Did Carpathia have her killed because she became a believer?”
    Hattie stared at him. “What?”
    “Hattie, please. I have to know.”
    “You’ll hate me.”
    “No. I care about you. I can tell you feel bad about your part in this. Tell me.”
    Hattie lay panting. “It was phony, Rayford. All of it.”
    “Amanda?”
    She nodded and tried to sit up but needed Rayford’s help. “The E-mails were bogus, Rayford. I was trained to do it. I saw it all.”
    “The E-mails?”
    “The anonymous ones to Bruce. We knew someone would find them eventually. And the ones between Nicolae and Amanda, both ways. She didn’t even know they were on her hard drive. They were encrypted and encoded; she would have had to have been an expert to even find them.”
    Rayford hardly knew what to ask. “But they sounded like her, read the way she expressed herself. They scared me to death.”
    “Nicolae has experts trained in that. They intercepted all your E-mails and used her style against her.”
    Rayford was drained. Tears welled up from so deep inside that he felt as if his heart and lungs would burst. “She was all I believed she was?” he said.
    Hattie nodded. “She was more, Rayford. She loved you deeply, was totally devoted to you. I felt so despicable the last time I saw her, it was all I could do to keep from telling her. I knew I should. I wanted to. But what I had done was so awful, so evil. She had shown me nothing but love from the first. She knew about you and me. We disagreed about everything important in life, yet she loved me. I couldn’t let her know I had helped make her look like a traitor.”
    Rayford sat shaking his head, trying to take it all in. “Thank you, Hattie,” he said. So the reason he had not seen the seal of God on Amanda’s forehead, besides her grotesque and discolored death mask, was that the plane had gone down before the mark appeared on any believers.
    Rayford’s faith in Amanda had been restored, and he had never doubted her salvation. Even when he had been forced to wonder about how she had come to him in the first place, he never questioned the genuineness of her devotion to God.
    Rayford helped Hattie lie back down. “I’ll get you something to eat,” he said. “And then we’re going to talk about you.”
    “Spare me that, Rayford. You and your friends have been doing that for two years. There’s nothing you can tell me that I don’t know. But I just told you what I have done, and there’s even more that’s worse than that.”
    “You know God will forgive you.”
    She nodded. “But should he? I don’t believe that in my heart.”
    “Of course he shouldn’t. None of us deserves forgiveness.”
    “But you accepted it anyway,” she said. “I can’t do that. I know as well as God does that I’m not worthy.”
    “So you’re going to decide for him.”
    “If it’s up to me―”
    “And it is.”
    “I’ve decided I’m unworthy and can’t live with that much, um, what do you call it?”
    “Grace?”
    “Well, I