Brink of Chaos by Tim Lahaye Page A

You’ve got an extraordinary family. The more of you the merrier.”
    The rest of the group was now slowly migrating back toward the table. Cal got a back-slap from former FBI agent John Gallagher, a favorite of his, as they sauntered back to their chairs. Cal congratulated Gallagher on looking so fit.
    “Dropped forty pounds, and now I’m a lean, mean fighting machine,” the former special agent remarked. “Problem is, Cal, I still have the urge to be an eating machine. Got to work on that.”
    Cal looked around at the accomplished array — a dozen leaders in business, the military, the media, and the law. He had recently found himself yearning to be included. He wasn’t sure exactly when ithappened, but his plans to go to art school had given way to something else: an intense desire to follow the path forged by his parents — fighting to restore the most basic freedoms in the country they loved. It was almost laughable — how he used to shrug off his parents’ commitment — he had silently considered it just a “political obsession.” Now he had come to realize it wasn’t about politics at all. This was a spiritual battle for the soul of a nation at a time in history when the world looked like it was about to head right into its darkest hour. Even some of Cal’s Christian friends called him an “end-times freak” now. A few of them attributed his turnaround to the scary encounter he had had with a terrorist in a New York train station.
    And, Cal thought, maybe it did have something to do with that.
    Whatever the genesis, Cal had a powerful sense of calling to do what the Roundtable was doing. He would have wanted to be part of it even if his parents weren’t involved.
    For him, the timing seemed perfect. He had graduated early from Liberty University and had plenty of time before starting law school. Until then he would act as a paralegal for the Roundtable, something he had been pursuing like a dog on a bone. His parents had finally relented to his request. Joshua and Abigail told him, after everything he had been through, he had earned a seat at the table, even though they feared there could be political — and even legal — fallout against their son for his involvement. After all, they pointed out, under the Tulrude Administration, the Department of Justice had filed a vindictive criminal case two years before against every member of the Roundtable. True, for tactical reasons the DOJ had dropped the charges against everyone except Joshua, their prime target, but Cal’s parents told him this might be the beginning of political retaliation.
    Cal didn’t care. It wasn’t reckless abandon. Instead, it was a rock-solid conviction that this is where God wanted him, at least for the next few months. The Roundtable existed to counteract the ruthless, abject corruption that had been spawned in the corridors of power in Washington, and Cal now felt privileged to be part of the Roundtable, even in a small way, like today, when his primary task was to adjust the video feed on the big screen, as he was doing now.
    The screen at the end of the room lit up. Ethan March’s face appeared. The image was a little scrambled.
    “Cal, is that you?” Ethan asked.
    “Sure is,” Cal replied and reached for the remote. “The feed’s off. Let me reset the telemetry here.”
    “Fine. I’ll sit tight,” Ethan said. “I’m standing in for Josh, playing the part of a test dummy.”
    Cal chuckled. There had been a time, when Ethan first started working with Joshua, that Cal harbored some bad feelings about the arrangement. Envy? Maybe. Though Cal and his father had been through some tough, amazing things that had brought them closer together, still, there were occasional sparks between the two of them. He used to blame his dad for those. But lately Cal wondered whether he wasn’t more like his dad than he had ever imagined. And now Cal felt comfortable with Ethan as a kind of adopted part of the family, even if he was