Blasphemy (34 page)

Ford felt Kate’s hand instinctively tighten around his.

BOOKER CRAWLEY TOOK THE CUP OF coffee into his study and settled in his chair in front of the TV. Once again he picked up the remote and flipped through the news stations. Nothing. There didn’t seem to be any blowback from the wild accusations Spates had made on his show. Still, Crawley couldn’t shake the feeling that something was about to happen. He glanced at the clock. It was thirty minutes past one, eastern daylight time—eleven thirty in Arizona. Or was it ten thirty?

He exhaled and swallowed a bitter mouthful of coffee. He was getting worked up over nothing. So far everything had gone as planned, and Spates’s show, even if it was nutty, was sure to scare the crap out of the Navajo Tribal Council.

That thought made him feel better.

Still . . . It wouldn’t hurt to check in with Spates and find out where the hell he had gotten that crazy information about Isabella claiming it was God.

He dialed Spates’s office number first, on the off chance he might still be at work. Surprisingly, the line was busy. No voice mail, just busy. He waited several minutes and dialed again, then again, still without getting through.

Probably out of order.

He dialed Spates’s cell number next, and got routed immediately to his voice mail. “You have reached the voice mailbox of Reverend Don T. Spates,” a pleasant female voice said. “The mailbox is currently full. Please try later.”

Crawley dialed the reverend’s home phone. It, too, was busy.

Christ, it was stuffy in the study. He walked to the window, unlatched it, and slid it open. A stream of night air, fresh and lovely, washed in, swelling the lace curtains. He took a few deep breaths. He told himself again there was no reason for alarm. He sipped his coffee while staring into the darkened street, wondering what exactly had him spooked. A busy phone?

The reverend would have a Web site. Maybe there would be information posted there.

He sat down at his desk, booted up his laptop, and Googled:

Spates God’s Prime Time

The first hit was indeed the televangelist’s official Web site,
www .godsprimetime.com
. He clicked on the link and waited.

After a frustrating minute, an error message appeared.

BANDWIDTH LIMIT EXCEEDED
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching bandwidth limit. Please try again later.
Apache/1.3.37 Server at www.godsprimetime.com Port 80

His uneasiness climbed a notch. Busy phones, server down . . . Could Spates’s Web site be under a denial-of-service attack? Maybe other Christian sites would have posted something.

He Googled:

Isabella God Spates

A bunch of unfamiliar Christian Web sites came up, with names like jesus-is-savior.com, raptureready.com, antichrist.com. He clicked on a link at random and immediately it opened to a document.

My Friends in Christ,

Many of you watched the show
Roundtable America
earlier tonight, hosted by the Reverend Don T. Spates . . .

Crawley read the letter once. He read it again. A faint chill crawled up his spine. So this was Spates’s source, a nutcase pastor out there in Navajoland. The note at the bottom indicated the crazy pastor had sent the letter just a few hours ago. From the list of hits it seemed to have been posted at a fair number of Web sites.

How many? There was a way to find out. He Googled the first sentence of the letter, enclosing it in quotation marks to retrieve only Web sites that had posted the exact text. A split second later the list of hits came up. The standard notation at the top indicated how many:

Results 1–10 of about 56,500 for
“Many of you watched the show
Roundtable America
earlier tonight, hosted by the Reverend Don T. Spates”

For a long time Crawley sat in the silent Georgetown study. Could it be true that the letter had already been posted to over fifty thousand Web sites? Unthinkable. He breathed in and out, steadying himself. If his role behind Spates’s attack on the Isabella project should become known, he’d fall harder than his old pal Jack Abramoff. The problem was, when he got down to it, he really didn’t know much about Spates and his evangelical orbit. Crawley felt like a man who’d casually thrown a rock into a dark place and now could hear dozens of buzzing rattlesnakes. He rose again, walked to the window. Outside, Georgetown slept. The street was empty. The world was at peace.

As he stood, he heard his computer chime, indicating he had received an e-mail. He walked back to check it out. A little window popped up to give him the subject heading:

Fwd:Fwd: Red Mesa
=
Armageddon

He opened it up, began reading, and was shocked to find it was the exact same letter he had just read. Did someone know about his contact with Spates? Was this some kind of veiled threat? Had
Spates
sent this to him? But when he looked at the vast header over the e-mail, listing dozens of e-mail addresses, he realized he had not been singled out. Nor did he recognize the address of the sender. This was a scattershot e-mail, viral marketing as it were. Viral marketing for Armageddon. And it had come into his mailbox by chance.

As he read the letter again in disbelief, trying to guess the probability of his getting that particular e-mail at that particular moment, his mail program chimed again and another e-mail appeared. It had the same subject heading — almost.

Fwd:Fwd:Fwd:Fwd: Red Mesa
=
Armageddon

Booker Crawley grasped the arms of his chair and rose unsteadily. As he made his way across the study, the computer chimed again, and again, as more e-mails hit it. He staggered into the bathroom at the far end of his study. Gripping the edge of the sink with one hand and holding his tie back with the other, he vomited.

BERN WOLF HUNKERED DOWN IN THE bay of the chopper, chewing nervously on a cud of gum and watching eleven heavily armed men dressed in black climb on board and settle silently into their seats. The only insignia on their uniforms was a small FBI shield on the breast. Wolf felt uncomfortable in his camouflage gear, flac jacket and helmet. He tried without success to adjust his gangly limbs into something reminiscent of comfort, shifted irritably, and crossed his arms. His ponytail stuck out from under the helmet and he didn’t have to see himself in a mirror to know it looked ridiculous. His head was sweating and his ears rang from the first leg of the flight.

Once the men had buckled in, the helicopter took off, rising into the night sky, turned, and accelerated. A gibbous moon had risen, bathing the desert landscape below in a silvery sheen.

Wolf chewed and chewed. What the hell was going on? He’d been roused out of his house without explanation, dragged out to the Los Alamos airstrip, hustled into a chopper. Nobody would tell him a bloody thing. It was like the beginning of a bad film.

Through the window he could see the distant peaks of the San Juan Mountains in Colorado. The helicopter cleared the foothills, and Wolf glimpsed a faint ribbon of reflected starlight below: the San Juan River.

They followed the approximate course of the river, past patches of lights marking the towns of Bloomfield and Farmington, then on into the empty darkness. As the craft dipped south again, Wolf saw the dark hump of Navajo Mountain in the distance, and that was when he guessed their destination: the Isabella project.

He masticated his ball of gum, pondering. He’d heard rumors—everyone in the high-energy physics community had—about problems with Isabella. He’d been as shocked as anyone about the suicide of his former colleague, Peter Volkonsky. Not that he’d ever liked the Russian, but he had always respected the man for his programming skills. He wondered what was going on that required a black-clad goon squad to fix.

Fifteen minutes later the black outline of Red Mesa loomed dimly ahead. A bright patch of lights at its edge signaled the location of Isabella. The chopper swung down, raced along the mesa top, and slowed at an airfield illuminated by two long rows of blue lights, then turned and settled down on a helipad.

The rotors powered down and one of the team shifted out of his seat and opened the cargo door. Wolf’s handler placed a hand on his shoulder and gestured for him to wait. The door slid open and the FBI team jumped out, one at a time, crouching and running in the rotor wash, like they were securing the landing zone.

Five minutes passed. Then the handler gestured him out. Wolf slung his pack over his shoulder and took his sweet time—he wasn’t going to hustle and break his leg. He climbed down with excessive care and scuttled beyond the backwash. The handler touched his elbow lightly and pointed toward a Quonset hut. They walked over, and the handler opened the door for him. The hut smelled of fresh lumber and glue and was almost empty, except for a desk and a row of cheap chairs.

“Have a seat, Dr. Wolf.”

Wolf dumped his backpack onto a chair near the desk and slumped down in the one next to it. He could hardly imagine a less comfortable seat, especially at this hour, so far from the pillow and bed where he belonged. He was still squirming when one of the men came in. The man extended his hand. “Special Agent in Charge Doerfler.”

Wolf shook it halfheartedly, without getting up.

Doerfler sat down on the edge of the desk and tried to appear friendly and relaxed. It didn’t succeed: the man was as wound up as the Energizer Bunny. “I bet you’re wondering why you’re here, Dr. Wolf.”

“How did you guess?” He distrusted people like Doerfler, with their whitewall haircuts, southern accents, and smooth-talking language. He had dealt with too many of them during the design phase of Isabella.

Doerfler glanced at his watch. “We don’t have much time, so I’ll be brief. They tell me you’re familiar with Isabella, Dr. Wolf.”

“I should hope so,” he said irritably. “I was assistant director of the design team.”

“Have you been here before?”

“No. My work was all on paper.”

Doerfler leaned over on his elbow, his face serious. “Something’s happened out here. We don’t exactly know what. The scientific team has sealed itself inside the mountain and turned off all external communications. They’ve shut down the main computer and they’re running Isabella at full power using backup computer systems.”

Wolf licked his lips. This was too far out to believe.

“We have no idea what’s going on. It may be a hostage situation, it may be a mutiny, it may be an accident or some kind of unanticipated equipment or power failure.”

“So what’s my role?”

“I’ll get to that in a moment. The men you flew in with are members of an FBI Hostage Rescue Team. It’s like an elite SWAT team. That doesn’t necessarily mean there are hostages, but we have to plan for that contingency.”

“Are you talking about
terrorists
?”

“Perhaps. The HRT is going to enter the facility, perform hostage rescue if necessary, neutralize undesirables, isolate the scientists, and escort them from the premises.”

“Neutralize undesirables—you mean shoot people?”

“If necessary.”

“You’re shitting me.”

Doerfler frowned. “No, sir, I am not.”

“You woke me up to join a commando raid? I’m sorry, Mr. Doerfler, but you’ve got the wrong Bern Wolf.”

“You needn’t be concerned in the slightest, Dr. Wolf. I’ve assigned you a handler. Agent Miller. Totally reliable. He’ll be at your side, guiding you every step of the way. Once the facility is secure, he’ll take you in and you’ll perform your assignment.”

“Which is?”

“Turn off Isabella.”

FROM A PERCH AT THE TOP of the bluffs above Nakai Valley, Nelson Begay scanned the Isabella complex with a pair of old army binoculars. A chopper had passed low over the tipi, its rotors drowning out their Blessing Way ceremony and shaking the tipi like a dust devil. Begay and Becenti had climbed up the hillside for a better view, and they could see it had landed at the airstrip, a mile away.

“They coming after us?” Willy Becenti asked.

“No idea,” said Begay, watching. Men with guns were piling out of the chopper. After breaking into a hangar, they drove out two Humvees and began transferring gear into them.

Begay shook his head. “I don’t think it has anything to do with us.”

“You sure?” Becenti sounded disappointed.

“I’m not sure. We better head over and take a closer look.” He glanced at Becenti, saw the eager restlessness in his eyes. Begay laid a hand on his shoulder. “Just keep your cool, all right?”

STANTON LOCKWOOD LIFTED HIS CUFF TO peek at his Rolex. Quarter to two in the morning. The president had ordered in the FBI Hostage Rescue Team at midnight, and now the operation was in full swing. A few minutes ago, the HRT had landed at the airstrip. They were now transferring their gear to Humvees to take them the half-mile to the secure zone at the cliff’s edge, directly above the opening to the Bunker.

The atmosphere in the Oval Office was edgy. Jean, the president’s secretary, was shaking the tension out of her writing hand.

“They’ve loaded the first Humvee,” said the FBI Director, who had been giving the president a running commentary. “Still no sign of anyone. They’re all down in the Bunker, as we thought.”

“No luck contacting them?”

“None. All communications from the airstrip to the Bunker are turned off.”

Lockwood shifted in his chair. He searched his mind for a logical explanation. There was none.

The situation room door opened, and Roger Morton entered carrying several sheets of paper. Lockwood followed him with his eyes. He had never liked the man, but now he detested him, with his horn-rimmed glasses, his immaculate suit, his tie that looked like it had been glued to his shirtfront. Morton was the quintessential Washington operator. With these sour thoughts in mind, he watched Morton conferring with the president, their heads together, scrutinizing the piece of paper. They waved Galdone over and all three took a long look.