Critical Mass (14 page)

“Stuck in committee, Sir.”

“Goddamn it.” The act would provide a structure for the governors to reconstruct the federal government, in the event that Washington was destroyed before the federal emergency dispersal program could be enacted. He took a deep breath.
Okay, fella, this is why they elected you. Good in a pinch
. “Where’s Matt?”

“The vice president is moving.”

The president headed out toward the Rose Garden and the waiting helicopter. He stepped into its plush, nearly silent interior, followed by a running Logan. But the Marines closed the door and took off. Their orders were clear: during an imminent peril emergency, move the moment POTUS is aboard.

Because there was only the dispersal program and no continuity act, if a nuclear weapon was detonated in Washington without warning the U.S. government would collapse. Why such an act had not been passed years ago was beyond President Fitzgerald’s comprehension. And yet he’d let it get stuck in committee, hadn’t he? You didn’t like to think about things like that. You didn’t want to believe it could really happen—which was your weakness, the enemy’s strength. As things stood, the government had to survive or the country was ruined.

“Get this thing moving,” he shouted into the intercom. “Flat out, boys!”

He closed his eyes. At least Linda and Polly and Dan were all right, for the moment. But God help the American people. And . . . oh, God, Las Vegas. “Damn those bastards;
damn them
!” Fitzgerald would not stoop to hating all Muslims. No, not this president. But he was tempted, because there was an incredible weapon being constructed that he could potentially use to entirely change the face of human society. Dream Angel offered him that much power. To order it activated, though . . . it would be the most monstrous, most terrible thing ever undertaken by any human power. What was worse, it was still unfinished. Parts of it were just theoretical. More terrifyingly, nobody really knew what it would do—except for the fact that it would kill millions.

He was going to be asked to make the decision about whether or not to attempt Dream Angel. If he lived. “Where are we?”

“Eight miles out.”

“Put on the goddamn gas!”

A WORLD AT BAY

It was now one ten in the morning in Las Vegas, four ten in Washington, and
eleven ten in England. A benign sun shone on the spires of London and the new skyscrapers that increasingly defined the skyline, and flashed against the wings of the pigeons wheeling above Trafalgar Square. In Regent’s Park, the roses were lingering in the long, warm autumn, and Queen Mary’s Garden was filled with noonish strollers. One by one, they took out their cell phones and one and then another stopped and concentrated on what their friends were telling them. Then they noticed bells beginning to ring, everywhere, bells.

In seventeen languages around the world, the BBC’s announcers read the same main story: “Bulletin from America: The U.S. city of Las Vegas, Nevada, has sustained a large explosion and has fallen out of communication. There are reports of extensive damage and fires in outlying areas. Area witnesses report a blinding flash followed by a series of severe explosive shocks. A fiery cloud hangs over the city at this time. Many are believed dead, and there has been much property damage. Owing to the darkness there, a full assessment of the damage, and an official announcement about the nature of the explosion, will not be forthcoming until the predawn light in approximately an hour and a half.”

Radio 4 went back to the reading of the letters of Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle to his mother, Mary Doyle, and the prime minister, who was watching a live video feed from Las Vegas being provided him by MI6, became sick in the toilet of his office at 10 Downing Street. Then his security personnel came and soon he, also, was in motion. Like the United States and every other Western country at risk of nuclear terrorism, the United Kingdom lacked a definite continuity-of-government process. If London was destroyed this moment, the British people would not only be without a government; they would also be without the slightest means to reconstruct one.

In Dharmsala, India, Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, considered the dark event. He made an unprecedented decision to telephone His Holiness the Pope, who came to the instrument from his luncheon. The Dalai Lama stepped into his small garden, where the sun was setting over the wide-leafed trees. The pope listened with shock and concern to the old man. He did not consider that there was any doctrinal validity to the Dalai Lama’s beliefs, but the pope certainly respected the man’s sincerity. As the pope listened to the description of the catastrophe, he knew precisely why this other religious leader had called him. This was the beginning of an attack on religion; that was clear. And, more specifically, an attack on Christianity.

The pope next telephoned the prime minister of Italy and asked that he send troops to seal off the Vatican immediately. Then the pope ordered the Swiss Guards into action, and they began moving through St. Peter’s and the Sistine, quietly but persistently directing the tourists to leave. In the crypt beneath the great church, other men moved among the tombs with powerful flashlights, finding here and there lovers, and once a priest on some nameless mission, who hurried away. Along with the interlopers, the tourists at the tomb of Saint Peter were returned to the surface.

In Paris, police surrounded important public buildings and the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, and the Musée d’Orsay were closed, as were the Uffizi in Florence and the Prado in Madrid. All European governments made similarly frantic efforts to escape their capitals, and all faced the same danger—total lack of continuity in the event of sudden catastrophe.

The United States, Canada, the European Union, Mexico, Japan, India, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, and many other countries grounded all flights immediately. Most countries issued grounding directives, but many did not have sufficient control over their own airspace for this to be effective.
Flights over most of Africa and various Asian countries continued, at least until planes made scheduled landings. All flights incoming to the United States, the European Union, and Canada were either turned back or landed under fighter escort.

The news reached the Middle East at approximately ten thirty in the morning local time, when Al Jazeera carried a grim bulletin: “The U.S. city of Las Vegas is in flames after the detonation of a nuclear bomb. There is no communication with the city, but news helicopters just arriving on the scene report that the entire metropolis is burning. The famous gambling strip is no more.”

For a few moments, the channel went back to its regularly scheduled program,
The Fabulous Picture Show
, featuring an interview with Sudanese film director Lina Makboul about her latest project, called
Water
. A moment later, the channel returned to the news and the same feed of the city burning, now in the pink light of the predawn, that was being broadcast worldwide.

Cairo, Baghdad, New Delhi, Rawalpindi, Kabul, Tehran, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem—all the great cities of the Middle East—simply stopped. Cars stopped in the streets; people stopped on the sidewalks.

As soon as it had received the alert from Mossad, the Israeli government had put its military on immediate alert. Across Jerusalem, across Tel Aviv, in the streets of London, of Paris, of Berlin, of New York, of Houston, of Mexico City, a great silence descended. But that was not true in Cairo, it was not true in Tehran, in Riyadh, in Damascus, in Gaza, where people rushed cheering into the streets, leaping, dancing, and soon the news crews were there, too, taping the sweating men, the dark rush of women.

After ten minutes of this in Cairo, the Egyptian government, desperate not to offend the Americans, sounded the air-raid sirens, with the result being panic and confusion, then a stampede to evacuate the city. In Iran, a frantic military went into defensive posture but was careful not to put more than a few aircraft in the air. President Ahmadinejad issued an announcement on state television that any attempt to attack Iran would be met with “fierce resistance.” Immediately thereafter, along with the rest of the government, he left for a mountain retreat north of Tehran. Privately, he was furious. Who had done this? He sent a message of condolence to the U.S. president, assuring the Americans that Tehran was not responsible. But would they believe it?

Similar messages were sent by Syria, Pakistan, Sudan, North Korea, and every other country that worried that it might be held responsible.

In the Pamir Panhandle in Afghanistan, a clear, quiet noontime arrived and people took their lunches of olives and cheese, of lamb and tomatoes, eating quietly in the profound silence of the place, while the grasses bowed in the noon wind and a truck passed on the road, its gears grinding as it began working its way up a hill.

In London and Paris, New York and Los Angeles, and most especially in Washington, it crossed many a mind that they might be in trouble, too, and quietly, in twos and threes, in family groups, among friends, they got in their cars or on trains, or on planes or busses, and left, and the roads at first whispered with their passage, then hummed, then roared, and finally the highways thundered and the terminals howled with terrified hordes, and the employees left and the security officers, and riots spread through shattered streets, and children fell first.

As the sun rose over Las Vegas, a sight never seen before presented itself, for Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been lightly constructed, while Las Vegas was huge and complicated and packed with the complex wealth of material objects that defined the modern world—and people, of course, such a vastness of human detail.

The great cloud that was moving east with the prevailing winds turned rose red on its western flank, black in the east, for no light could pass through its density. Its leading edge was filled with glittering dots that appeared from afar like sequins or snowflakes. Some of them probably were sequins from Cirque du Soleil or one of the more traditional floor shows, but the cloud had lifted brassieres, glasses, seat cushions, chair legs, legs, hands, heads with dead eyes, bits of cars, sheet music, CDs, DVDs, watches, some on arms and some not, toilet paper in grand streamers, jewels driven to an altitude of thirty thousand feet and dropped in the endless sky, and all of this came with the fallout, dropping in gardens, on roofs, on speeding cars, on the runners and the dead alike, festooning trees with plastic toys and skirts and diapers and meat, diaries, stuffed animals in bits, wallets, money, chips like rain, some of them covered with ice and become hail.

So it is: when a giant place is exploded the center of it is vaporized, but then the blast sweeps out, snatching all and tearing all from its moorings, spreading tornadic, unexpected chaos far and wide. For the first time humankind knew the truth that had occupied the sweated nights of two generations
of statesmen and generals: what a modern atomic bomb does, even one of moderate size, is even more unimaginably ghastly than the public has been allowed to know.

Terror rode on the shoulders of the world.

THE FIVE PILLARS

OF ISLAM

Nabila was at her home workstation trying to find anything, anything at all that
might help, all the while imagining Jim out there in the night, imagining his peril, when the phone rang. She snatched it up. It was Operations, telling her that the deputy director had not appeared at Deer Valley Airport.

She forced her heart down out of her throat. “Move the plane anyway,” she said, obedient to Jim’s instructions.

Had she just lost the husband whose love she had so unexpectedly rediscovered on this terrible night? She might never know.

She wanted coffee and, even more, a cigarette, but no more of that. But the fragrance was so comforting, the tobacco scent of memory.

She found Rashid standing silently in the kitchen, staring at the television that stood on the counter. She could not offer him the comfort she had given him when he was little and afraid. She held her own tears in, her anguish—no, despair—for her husband, her life, her poor, misconstrued faith, and the people who were suffering and dying now in Nevada.

“I feel so responsible,” she whispered. “If only we’d been better!”

He turned to face her. “We must respect God’s will.”

“This isn’t God’s will. Evil is
never
God’s will!”

“All is God’s will.”

She stopped her angry reply in her throat. This was no time for a religious
argument. Like him, she’d read every word of the Quran. But she had approached it with a Western eye to the text, and had come to believe that Mohammed alone had not written the whole book. The reason was that the writing style changed so much. She saw that there were three Qurans. One of them soared above the mind of man, another was practical and wise in the way God must be wise, and a third, very different document was about brutality and power and the ruin of all who did not embrace the faith. She thought that the Muslims needed to reform their approach to the Book. As the Christians had gradually abandoned Deuteronomy 13, with its admonition to kill all nonbelievers, the Muslims must accept that the violent suras were a corruption inserted by human beings and not the word of God.

The clock on the stove ticked its frantic ticking. Outside the open window, the lower branches of the oak stirred with a predawn breeze. How was it, when she looked back across her life in the Company, that it always seemed to be night? The sky was deep blue, dawn just visible now at the top of the window.

She and Rashid were both waiting for their pagers. All across the planet, military and intelligence operations were going into action, as the vast, immensely complex protective infrastructure of the world raced to crisis mode.

Certain countries, she knew, would be preparing for the worst: Iran would fear attack, and Syria. North Korea would not, because they had dismantled their nuclear program in 2007. But, of course, everyone in the community suspected that they had actually sold the highly enriched uranium that they had produced, probably to Hezbollah. In fact, the nuclear material that the Israelis had destroyed in Syria in 2007 was believed to have come from North Korea. Damascus hadn’t protested the incursion because the central government had not known that the shipment of highly enriched uranium was even present in the country. It did, know, however, that the detonation of a nuclear weapon in Israel would not only decimate the Jewish population, it would kill millions of Palestinians, too, and lead to the immediate destruction of Damascus.