Critical Mass (24 page)

“Hello, Carol.”

“God is a woman.”

“He will be surprised to hear that.”

“Saint Teresa of Avila went bald. Would she still have to wear a veil?”

“Why wouldn’t she want to?”

“It’s time for Asr,” Carol said, “by my reckoning.”

“Ah, thank you, my
adan
. I was far away.”

“Your keys told me that. Anything up?”

“It’s nothing. . . .” She was not need-to-know for his area, and compartmentalization here was extremely strict, especially now. “Actually, even this peering over the divider is illegal.”

She gave him a questioning frown.

“To look in here. You’re not cleared to see what I am doing.”

She sighed. “They should’ve put the walls all the way to the ceiling. Damn congressional cheapskates.” She laughed a little, and it was very pleasant to see and hear. She wore a black veil, out of respect for her coworker’s sense of modesty. It was a fine thing, and he was very appreciative of her for this act of respect for him—and, for that matter, for herself.

He was tempted by Carol of the long, soft hands and the wide eyes that
so deliciously pretended innocence. But not now; she was not part of his mission and she had to go away.

“Want to meet for tea?” she asked.

“No tea today. Just work.”

“Understood.” She snapped him a salute and disappeared.

He unrolled his carpet and used a moist towelette to make quick
wadu,
then went down to his prayers, imagining his soul flowing across the world to Mecca, and coming as a supplicant to the feet of God. How he longed to be with God! How he loved God!

During the prayer, though, Rashid’s computer beeped the alarm of an incoming urgent message. One of the satellites had detected movement on the ground. He had consulted his mullah about moments like this, and it had been decided that Rashid could compress the prayer. Pilots did it, surgeons, soldiers in the heat of battle. You wrapped the whole prayer up into a single word, and sent it off to Allah with praise and thanks. Allah understood these things. Rashid had been instructed, “You must obey Allah and follow Allah’s laws to the letter, but you must also love Allah and enjoy Allah. Allah is the vengeful lion, but Allah is also the pomegranate in the summer garden, ripe for plucking.”

It smacked of Sufism, but Rashid had accepted it, for this man who instructed him had himself an excellent reputation among Saudis in America, and had been the choice of Rashid’s father. He had known little of Salafism. He had not understood the beauty of its purity, or the power of its message of reform. He had not understood how it felt to belong to the deep truth of the faith, which was only available through total acceptance of the precepts of the Kita at-Tawib, and a return to the ways of the first and best generation, the generation of Mohammed.

Another beep came, and Rashid sent his prayer off on its voyage, and returned to his console, where he saw that a passing Rugby had detected movement along the river, seven figures moving south and west. They had sheep. Rugby satellites had almost no dwell time—a little more than the Lacrosse series they had replaced—but it had been enough to project the probable route the figures were taking.

He knew that this was the Mahdi Aziz and his entourage, escaping into Pakistan. Nobody would drive sheep in that hostile region, a freezing desert without sufficient grass to sustain them, let alone fatten them for market. So
this meant only one thing: the Mahdi and his followers had escaped from the Russians in the BRDM.

Rashid saw a chance to end this threat. His supervisors would not know that there were no shepherds in that region. He could safely peg the alarm: “Shepherds seeking lowland pasture due to seasonal weather changes.” It was October, so of course they would be going to lower pastures, and nobody would ever know that he had saved the Mahdi, the very man who was delivering the human species from its long age of darkness into the light of Islam.

Rashid looked at the perfect image, the little band struggling along in what appeared to be a nasty wind. A glance at weather conditions told him that it was minus 8 degrees Celsius there, wind at twenty-two klicks out of the north. Winter was coming to the Kush, even though the Crusader billions were doing the work of Satan and destroying Allah’s beautiful world. They had no respect for the Tawid, the unity of God with his creation: “And it is He who spread the earth, and set the firm mountains upon it, and the rivers; and all manner of fruit.” So it was law that man respect the world, and not eat it with the jaws of a hungry caterpillar.

Then a hand came down on Rashid’s shoulder. His cubicle was locked; only his supervisor could enter. “Hello, Mark,” he said without looking.

“What is it?”

“Shepherds, I think. Have a look.”

“Running from whoever was in that BRDM?”

“With their sheep? I doubt it. Unless the Russkis are out for mutton.”

“Could be, could be. I see you called for a closer look from ISAF.”

“Something seems off. Why are the Russians there?”

“Those old installations are listed as destroyed, not useable.”

“So they say, Mark. But what’s on the books and what’s real—” He shrugged.

“Well, we’ll soon find out. They’ve got a chopper going in. Live bait.” That was the term around here for manned reconnaissance aircraft. The best possible information, but—well, there were many people in that area who might shoot at a NATO helicopter. Even children, just for a little excitement.

Rashid thought of the men in the chopper, churning through the cold dawn, being buffeted by the winds, watching for the wink of rifle fire, or the swift white arrow that marked a speeding rocket.

Mark shook his shoulder. “Good work, Rashid. If anything comes of it, I’ll buy you supper.”

“If anything comes of it, I’ll eat my hat.”

They laughed together. It was a close comradeship, here in this office. So very close.

SNIPER COUNTRY

As Jim’s plane landed at Andrews, he watched two dark blue jeeps loaded with air
police pace it, then maneuver onto the apron that stood in front of the VIP receiving area. Of course they would assume that anybody flying in under current circumstances would be important. It went against Jim’s instincts, this. He preferred to be the same color as the walls he passed.

In the plane, he’d slept, but badly. Every time he began to go under, he’d see that terrible light blooming across the cowling of that bastard Ressman’s plane.

When they banked on their way to their landing approach, Jim had seen Washington in the distance, white structures afloat in the colors of autumn. He had come here to track backward through ONI records, trying to determine if Franklin Isbard Matthews, who had supposedly duped Arthur Kenneally into pulling the detector off Bridge 1 in Eagle Pass, was a real person. If he was, Jim was going to force information out of him.

That was the way it worked in this business. You swung on vines of information through a jungle of lies. Eventually, either you reached a dead end or you didn’t.

It was seven hours and forty-five minutes from now that frightened Jim. Given that they hadn’t already detonated the bomb that was certainly hidden here, they were going to do it at the most dramatic moment,
which he thought would be the same as at Las Vegas: midnight. This would show their power, their absolute control of the situation. They could blow up cities on schedule, no matter how hard anyone tried to stop them.

As the plane’s engines wound down, he stepped to the rear and cracked the door. “Thanks, gentlemen,” he called up to the cockpit. “You got the fuel, I’d turn this lady around pronto.”

The pilot came into the cabin. “Yessir, we’re ready to roll.”

“Then go. Right now. Don’t even stop for a drink of water.”

The young man nodded and disappeared into the cockpit.

As Jim went quickly down the worn aluminum steps, the engines began gaining power. He heard the faint thump of the door closing but did not look back toward the departing plane.

He hardly saw the APs, either. He couldn’t bear looking at their young faces flickering with hope that this might be the man who
does
something. The weight of history oppressed Jim acutely. He crossed the tarmac, his worn sneakers whispering on the asphalt, a strange contrast with the uniform. As he moved toward the glass doors, the details of the moment crowded him, the faint rustling of his trousers, the slight movement of an awning, the smell of burning jet fuel lingering in the air, and the sweet, infinitely sad scent of—of all things—some sort of late-season flower. Where was it growing, he wondered, in this ocean of concrete?

A Sufi he had known and had sat with in a stifling tiny room in—God, was it Kabul, was it Herat?—had said to him, “The world is memory.” He had reacted in the way a young man does when facing the profound, with nervous, uncomprehending affection. He remembered that old, weathered man now, with his water pipe and his tea and the laugh lines around his eyes.

Jim pushed through the glass doors into the freezing, over-air-conditioned lobby. It was empty, utterly silent, a wide expanse of Air Force blue carpet, rows of plush leather seats, a large color photo of Secretary Robertson on the wall, beside him the smiling face of President Fitzgerald. Jim knew that Fitz was canny, but was he smart? There was a difference, and it could be huge. Jim needed Fitz to grasp things fast, above all to understand why an out-of-place operative was bucking the chain of command and agree to see him.

When he’d been in training, they had been given a lecture by old Gus
McCall, a legendary guy, a very bright man, who had done hard things for his country. He had said something Jim had never been able to forget: “Presidents are scared. Not sometimes. All the time. And scared men can be dangerous. You are the messenger, remember, and the news you bring is always bad. If you do your job right or if you don’t, in the end he will want your head.”

How a man dealt with this fear was the measure of his success in that monstrously difficult office. Jimmy Carter had been frozen by it, Richard Nixon driven mad. Eisenhower had overcome it, Lincoln been made great by it, Johnson victimized by it. Fear—relentless, open-ended, cruelly distorting of everybody and everything—drove all presidents. So the question was, what was it doing to Fitz right now?

Out the far side of the building, Jim found a courtesy car waiting, a sedan that he knew at once would not survive a chase. But he wouldn’t be in it long. He knew that every intelligence service in the world had been interested in who was on the plane that flew from Texas to Washington during the tightest lockdown in history. He knew that AFOSI, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, had this car bugged and fitted with tracking devices.

He drove quickly off the base, heading along the Capital Beltway into the city. His plan was to ditch the car as soon as possible and take the Metro to the Mt. Vernon Square stop and from there walk to the ONI offices. There he hoped to talk his way onto a secure line to the White House and an invitation to meet with Fitzgerald.

As he drove up the entrance to the Beltway, however, he found that the outbound lanes were in gridlock. He could see people out of their cars, some fighting, others trying to push stalled and wrecked cars off the roadway. It was hell, he thought, with children peering out the windows.

Then he realized that he was looking at an SUV coming straight at him. He swerved—only to see another big grill as the cab of an eighteen-wheeler bore down on him, horns screaming. In the windshield, he could see a girl driving. The cab was full of kids.

He ripped the ungainly car’s steering wheel and missed the truck cab by inches. The entire road was crowded with traffic leaving. The only way he could make progress was to drive next to the inner barrier, flashing his lights and hitting his horn continuously.

As a car with cardboard boxes badly lashed to its top passed him, a guy
in the passenger seat showed a silver Magnum. His grimacing, teeth-bared face said,
Try me, Uniform
.

No, thank you.

Then there came a fight across the anarchy of lanes. Jim slid between two cars, then went around a pickup that was on its side and burning. When he slowed, people on foot began beating on his windows, one woman making spiderwebs on the windshield with a spike heel. There was a sickening crunch when he sped up to get past them, and the kind of lurch that meant only one thing: he’d driven over a body. “God,” he whispered, “God help him.”

There was no way to stay up here, so Jim pulled off on the D Street exit and went down into the streets. Despite the alleged twenty-four-hour curfew, he had not so far seen a single police vehicle. No doubt, the cops had stopped reporting to work or even had been themselves dispersed. One thing was clear: public order was nonexistent.

There was a man lying on the sidewalk, his face so flat against it that Jim knew that he was dead. Jim also knew how he’d been killed—he had been clubbed in the face, then, as he pitched back, pulled to his feet and clubbed again, then knocked over with a body blow from behind. You saw bodies like this in alleys, in the world’s hard places.

A hurrying crowd moved around the dead man, their feet grinding his blood into the sidewalk in long, red smears. There were people with backpacks, pulling children’s wagons full of clothes, cases of bottled water, boxes of cornflakes, you name it. Down the street, a gutted convenience store burned.

Once again, the car attracted attention. Here came a woman festooned with kids, her face soaked with tears and blood, her clothes torn. From another direction, a man with a deer rifle at port arms approached, trotting as if he’d spent time in the military. He probably knew how to use that weapon, too. It was clear that if Jim was going to keep this vehicle, he was going to need to kill to do it, but doing that was going to slow down his progress toward his objective, so it wasn’t a necessary option for him to take, thank God.

The moment he stepped away from the car, a crowd leaped on it.