Critical Mass (35 page)

Some of the Tiber bridges had been smashed, but not all, and one that remained was the Ponte Milvio, which was originally built over twenty-two hundred years ago by the Roman consul Gaius Claudius Nero. In 2006, Roman lovers had taken to commemorating the eternity of their vows by putting padlocks on one of the bridge’s lampposts. When the lamppost had become so choked with locks that it had nearly collapsed, lovers had moved their vows instead to a website.

Now, both the lamppost and the servers containing the website were destroyed, and with them so many young lives, which had with hopeful fingers locked those locks.

As had happened in Las Vegas, communications initially failed completely. At the U.S. Air Force base at Aviano, there was an immediate alert. As was true the world over, there were patrols flying, here under overall command of NATO.

“We have a fireball—” came a transmission from an F-15 on patrol over the Tyrrhenian Sea.

“Say again?”

The plane was still on radar, but there were no further transmissions. Immediately a signal was sent to NATO Headquarters in Brussels: “Possible major explosion, Rome area.”

The Aeronautica Militare, which had numerous bases in the area and was flying active patrols over the city, also experienced a regional communications failure due to the pulse of electromagnetic energy emitted by the bomb. But NATO’s land-based communications infrastructure was left intact, and controllers who could not reach patrolling aircraft certainly could see, from bases around the city, that a mushroom cloud was rising over Rome. Second Air Region Command was instantly informed, but all attempts to reach the prime minister failed—as, indeed, all such efforts would continue to fail.

Parliament was in session, and most of the government was present in Rome. Prime Minister D’Agostini had made an appearance at six with the pope and the Mufti, praying with them as the hour passed and all the world waited for Washington to be destroyed.

When it was not, the mass in commemoration planned at seven became a mass in celebration. D’Agostini was one of hundreds of world leaders who had telephoned the president after it appeared that the danger had passed. He was one of many whom Fitzgerald, in the darkness where he dwelled, did not bother to answer.

D’Agostini awoke to a flash so terrific he leaped from the bed, crying out, “It’s us, it’s us.” When his wife heard this, the perpetual fear that lives in the hearts of all world leaders and all who love them, instantly sped to the forefront of her mind. “A rocket,” she screamed.

The prime minister did not know why the room was burning, but he thought perhaps the Islamists had indeed launched an attack against the residence. He had no chance to think more, though, as the blast followed almost instantly and the burning curtains, the window frame, the glass, and most of the wall around it exploded inward, tearing him and Mirania
to pieces, burying the smoking chunks of their bodies in the fiery debris.

So each soul started with a question, entered a moment of horror, then knew death.

As in Las Vegas, the lucky died first. Because the bomb that had been detonated over Vegas was large, that had included most of the people exposed to its power. Not so here. Only the residents of the Vatican and those in taller structures or, like the prime minister, residing in a residence luxurious enough to be open to the sky were killed at once.

Like other world governments, the Italian government had no decapitation plan in place, and this instant was therefore the beginning of what would stretch into two generations of costly, sometimes violent and disappointing conflict over the reconstruction of the state.

Most Romans were trapped in what became a hell even more terrible than the hell of Las Vegas, as over a million separate fires commenced in ninety thousand structures and people with shattered limbs in apartments, in houses, in restaurants, busses, cars, everywhere they happened to be, soon saw flames and smoke, and began to burn in such numbers that the smoke drifting eastward with the prevailing wind smelled of cooking meat.

This was how Rome died, in a conflagration greater by far than the one that had consumed it in the year 64, and that fire had reached a heat so intense that it melted brick.

The true shock of what had happened almost at once began to be felt in the world. With the death of the Eternal City, a part of every decent human heart died, no matter if they were in Scotland or Syria, in China or Kansas.

In Beijing, the Central Committee called another emergency meeting. Previously, Chinese intelligence had viewed this as a problem involving only the Americans. Nevertheless, a report from the “Autumn Orchid” group that watched political activities in Hong Kong had indicated that an American retaliatory strike against targets in both Malaysia and Indonesia was possible, judging from rumors being traded among politicians there.

The primary concern of the Central Committee was not, however, the nuclear damage being done. It was the way that the upheaval would affect trade. Already, every cargo ship headed for the United States was stopped, on orders from the American authorities. The People’s Bank of China had frozen all dollar-related monetary activities, but the breathtaking collapse of the American currency had rendered China startlingly illiquid, and forced
movement of value to the euro, the only other currency with enough liquidity to provide a useful basis for trade.

Now, in a paroxysm of panic, the euro was also being sold in every bourse on the planet. In point of fact, value was being transferred by others to the yen and China’s own yuan. The movement was of historic enormity, and could only lead to one conclusion: the collapse of value in the Western currencies and the subsequent inability of the West to continue trade.

Not since the fall of the Roman Empire had Western currency been so damaged, and the Chinese leadership, steeped in history in ways that Western leadership was not, remembered how profound the effects of that last unwinding of civil life in the West had been.

Marxist theory taught that capitalist systems were highly susceptible to destabilization, and the discussion touched on this. The West was falling. How far would it fall? Would governments and corporate entities embrace Šar
’ah law? If so, what of debt? Specifically, what of the gigantic debt that the West owed China, which was the world’s true banker? China had poured out the sweat of its people and the wealth of its lands, in return for IOUs from the West, and now they were becoming worthless.

Outside of the theoretical value of currency and debt, there was not enough symbolic wealth to continue the functioning of the world economy. Not even with gold trading at present in London at six thousand euros an ounce was there enough of it to back a new world reserve currency. The only thing that could conceivably back such a currency might be the combined central banks of China, Taiwan, and Japan.

So China began discussions with both countries, and never mind the difficulties with the illegal government in Taiwan. While Rome burned, Asia struggled to save whatever shreds of economic civilization that it could.

And there were still bombs, more bombs, and waiting pilots, some eager, some too afraid to say no.

In the Kremlin, there was increasingly frantic activity, as the reality of the conspiracy involving former KGB officers became more and more evident. Terror literally gripped the Putin government. If these bombs were determined to be of Russian origin, there would almost certainly be another revolution, followed by massive, crippling reparations to the West, if not a nuclear attack.

Vladimir Putin had made a choice to isolate Russia and its client states
from the West, so that he could manipulate world affairs in such a way that oil prices would stay high, but this was far more than he had bargained for, and he was, behind the scenes, a shattered, terrified man.

Without his direct knowledge, the old KGB had been working outside governmental authority to break the superpower of the United States in the same way that the Russian superpower had been broken by the Cold War. In the KGB’s madness, they believed that this would leave Russia free to restore its ancient empire, because it was not thought that Europe, in the absence of organized American support, would stand against any Russian reoccupation of lost territories, such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and, the greatest prize, Poland.

In history, the independence of these states had never lasted long, and the secretive former KGB officers did not intend that it would last much longer now. Russia needed a territorial buffer to its west. Who knew when another Napoléon or Hitler would arise? Given the ferment in the ramshackle democracies that England and the United States had imposed on Europe after World War II, anything could happen.

Vladimir Putin paced his office. When FSB chief Alexandrov appeared, Putin looked at him, Alexandrov thought, with the same infamous beady-eyed fury that Stalin had, in legend, regarded his staff with.

“We’re going to be held responsible,” Putin said. “But we are not responsible.”

“Now the Americans will release Dream Angel,” Alexandrov said.

“That may happen,” Putin replied.

“Do we open our silos? What do we do?”

“Do you think it matters?” Putin asked.

“Our missiles are the only real deterrent to theirs on the planet!”

Putin scoffed at him. How could the man be so naïve? “What the military conceals from us cannot be
capability,
” he said, trying to force a mildness into his voice that was at odds with the anger and panic he was trying to control. “The generals conceal only their inabilities. When have you received a readiness report that you could believe?”

“I . . . I’m—well, certainly there is a level of readiness.” Both men knew that launch facilities that had been listed as fully operational had been found by the Kremlin’s inspectors to be abandoned and in ruins.

“A level of readiness. I’m sure. God only knows what would happen if
they tried to launch. The whole country would probably be blown up. Our country!”

The missiles were old and liquid fueled, and many of them were so unstable that they could not even be removed from their silos, let alone fired.

“Perhaps the Ameris don’t know our situation,” Alexandrov said.

“No? All the Kremlin is a stage.” Putin chuckled. “We should dance and sing, provide some entertainment.”

This had once been Lenin’s office, bugged with radios disguised as filing cabinets. Now it was nanotechnology. Dust that communicated with satellites. You fight your way to the summit only to find that it is not power but the illusion of power that defines you.

“What is to be done?” Alexandrov asked.

Knowing all he knew, Putin could do nothing more than shrug.

“We can’t have Dream Angel,” Alexandrov said.

“Oh? Perhaps we want them to launch, but let’s not speak further here, not on that.”

“We must execute Case Forty,” Alexandrov said. “Our friends must.”

“It’s finished,” Putin said. Case Forty was the assassination of Aziz, the idiot who called himself Mahdi.

Alexandrov met his eyes.

“Yes, finished—as in, failed,” Putin said bitterly. Then he shrugged, looked up at the ceiling. For all he knew, there could even be video cameras recording his every gesture for the Ameris right here in this room. The Kremlin was a theater. “Case Forty has failed and we will not be heroes to the world. Aziz is in Pakistan now.”

“But how could he escape? Your man—”

“Dear Vladimir. Indeed, how could my man fail? Such a man? Aziz must have known that he was coming.”

“So we have a traitor?”

“You know what Stalin used to say—everybody is a traitor. So, yes, we have a traitor. We need a general purge.”

“Dare we do that?”

“To survive? Certainly. Kill them all. That way you can’t miss. Another of Stalin’s famous techniques.”

“I don’t have the apparatus to conduct a purge. I don’t have the informants, the trained teams of officers. That’s all gone now.”

Putin shrugged. “Perhaps the Bible has it right. Perhaps we’ve come to the end of time.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“Well then, you can believe this. Our intent was to unleash a nasty little cat to torment the Ameris. But that isn’t what we have done. We opened the cage of the nasty little cat, but there was a lion in the damned thing, and now the lion is running free, my friend, and anything can happen. Even here. They could come to Moscow.”

Alexandrov looked out the window, where the domes of St. Basil’s glowed in the artificial light that flooded the old cathedral. “Here? It’s unthinkable!”

Putin gazed also at the cathedral. “ ‘And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.’ ” He smiled his small and careful smile.

“What is that from?”

“The Revelation of John. From the Roman Bible.”

“Ah, yes. But still, it’s about Rome, not Moscow.”

“The world is Rome, you fool!” He laughed now, as cold a sound as Alexandrov had ever heard. “I don’t know that Aziz will win. The Mahdi! And the Muslims believe him. They’re rejoicing!”