The Left Behind Collection: All 12 Books by Tim Lahaye, Jerry B. Jenkins

first was from Steve Plank, his executive editor, addressed to all field personnel:
    Stay put. Do not try to come to New York. Impossible here. Call when you can. Check your voice mail and your e-mail regularly. Keep in touch as possible. We have enough staff to remain on schedule, and we want personal accounts, on-the-scene stuff, as much as you can transmit. Not sure of transportation and communications lines between us and our printers, nor their employee levels. If possible, we’ll print on time.
    Just a note: Begin thinking about the causes. Military? Cosmic? Scientific? Spiritual? But so far we’re dealing mainly with what happened.
    Take care, and keep in touch.
    The second message was also from Steve and was for Buck’s eyes only.
    Buck, ignore general staff memo. Get to New York as soon as you can at any expense. Take care of family matters, of course, and file any personal experience or reflections, just like everyone else. But you’re going to head up this effort to get at what’s behind the phenomenon. Ideas are like egos—everybody’s got one.
    Whether we’ll come to any conclusions, I don’t know, but at the very least we’ll catalog the reasonable possibilities. You may wonder why we need you here to do this; I do have an ulterior motive. Sometimes I think because of the position I’m in, I’m the only one who knows these things; but three different department editors have turned in story ideas on various international groups meeting in New York this month. Political editor wants to cover a Jewish Nationalist conference in Manhattan that has something to do with a new world order government. Why they care about that, I don’t know and the political editor doesn’t either. Religion editor has something in my in-box about a conference of Orthodox Jews also coming for a meeting. These are not just from Israel but apparently all over, and they are no longer haggling over the Dead Sea Scrolls. They’re still giddy over the destruction of Russia and her allies—which I know you still think was supernatural, but hey, I love you anyway. Religion editor thinks they’re looking for help in rebuilding the temple. That may be no big deal or have anything to do with anything other than the religion department, but I was struck by the timing—with the other Jewish group meeting at pretty much the same time and at the same place about something entirely political. The other religious conference in town is among leaders of all the major religions, from the standard ones to the New Agers, also talking about a one-world religious order. They ought to get together with the Jewish Nationalists, huh? Need your brain on this. Don’t know what to make of it, if anything.
    I know all anybody cares about is the disappearances. But we need to keep an eye on the rest of the world. You know the United Nations has that international monetarist confab coming up, trying to gauge how we’re all doing with the three-currency thing. Personally I like it, but I’m a little skittish about going to one currency unless it’s dollars. Can you imagine trading in yen or Euros here? Guess I’m still provincial.
    Everybody’s pretty enamored with this Carpathia guy from Romania who so impressed your friend Rosenzweig. He’s got everybody in a bind in the upper house in his own country because he’s been invited to speak at the U.N. in a couple of weeks. Nobody knows how he wangled an invitation, but his international popularity reminds me a lot of Walesa or even Gorbachev. Remember them? Ha!
    Hey, friend, get word to me you didn’t disappear. As far as I know right now, I lost a niece and two nephews, a sister-in-law I didn’t like, and possibly a couple of other distant relatives. You think they’ll be back? Well, save that till we get rolling on what’s behind this. If I had to guess, I’m anticipating some god-awful ransom demand. I mean, it’s not like these people who disappeared are dead. What in the world is going