Chihuahuan Desert, Texas, USA. That night at dinner, Karen was concerned about what Hansen had revealed to her, who noticed that she did not take her eyes off Gilbert. It was true that he was not very talkative, but somehow Joseph managed to make him talk to him and feel comfortable with his presence. Sometimes he would look at her for a few seconds and Karen thought he had the same look as her son, but a little more enigmatic and penetrating, and also intimidating, or at least that was the impression he gave her. Perhaps she was conditioned by what she had just learned. She also watched Donna from time to time, wondering how a woman could deal with the fact that she had the antichrist himself for a son, and do nothing. Maybe she didn't know, and if she did, it was her maternal instinct, she told herself, preventing her from suffocating him at night with a pillow or doing something much worse to him. In one of her musings, she even asked how th

Chihuahuan Desert, Texas, USA.  The night before had been too busy in the complex and Hansen could not sleep well, worried about the constant arrival of more guests. When he was about to go out for breakfast, there was a knock on his room door; he opened it and was met by the smiling figure of Harvey. This time Hansen thought it was a forced smile."Mr. Richmond is waiting for you in his private study. Please follow me.”“You hadn’t told me that he had a private study.”“I didn’t it because it isn’t available to you.” Harvey said solemnly as they descended the stairs. “Besides Mr. Richmond’s room, of course.”Hansen found that comment a bit rude, but understood he was in no position to reply, at least not yet. They went through the spacious living room to the southwest corner and they found a kind of corridor, also wide, which ended in a kind of reading ro

Tel Aviv, Israel.  The five men had talked animatedly for a few minutes in one of the rooms of the old house on the outskirts of town. Abinadab was outside waiting, heard a car stop in front of the house, looked out the window and saw three men coming out of it. He recognized them and hurried to open the door for them, letting them in. Prior to the closure he made sure there was no suspicious person on the street.“Where are they?” One of them asked.“In that room,” Abinadab pointed to one of the rooms. The three men entered the room and found the other Israelis sitting on the floor in a rug, immediately ending the conversation.“Our friends, the gringos!” One of them said, the leader of the group. “Come on! Come on! Sit down with us.”The newcomers sat down next to them.“We heard there was a problem with the missiles,” the American leader said in

Tel Aviv, Israel.  Justin had taken advantage of the fact that his friends were already drunk when he decided to leave the bar to find a quiet place to try to call his country. He had stolen one of his companions' jeeps and already was on the outskirts of Tel Aviv when he saw in the distance what appeared to be two missiles traveling through the Israeli sky, almost at the same time, and after a few seconds slightly take two different directions approaching the ground. Within seconds he heard a loud bang and saw a huge cloud of smoke and dust rise. In the bar he had heard one of his former colleagues say that the stolen missiles had already been launched against Iran, so he assumed that those that had just hit the city had been launched by Iran in response to the initial attack.He pulled off the road and stopped about two hundred yards from it in the middle of the barren landscape. It was already waning the afternoon. He took the satellite p