Critical Mass (26 page)

He entered its back garden. A hundred and fifty feet away stood the
brownstone, with black wrought-iron steps leading up to its rear door. There was a tiny patio with an expensive-looking barbecue grill to one side, and a table and chairs, also wrought iron.

He could see from the way the dry grass was bent here that Nabby had headed directly for the steps. As she’d entered the yard, she’d been moving fast. Running from somebody who her computer had told her was coming after her.

He opened the gate, following the dry, bent grass. A glance at the house revealed only locked windows. No sign of movement along the roofline, either, so no sniper taking aim at him.

Looking down, he followed the track a few more feet. Here she had stopped, and suddenly. When he raised his eyes, he saw why—there was a figure in there, first visible from this point. It was a male, wearing a white shirt, standing back from the window. He carried a rifle across his chest. Jim remained motionless, evaluating the gun by its outline. There was a thick barrel, a gas canister below it. It was only an air rifle, but the guy probably felt protected by it. This was useful, because when people felt protected they were vulnerable.

Jim waved, to indicate to the man that he was seen, then mounted the steps and twisted the ancient spring bell that was affixed to the doorjamb. Almost at once, the inner door opened. The screen was still locked.

“May I help you?”

“Actually, I’m from over there—” He pointed toward Nabila’s own back garden. “I’m trying to find my wife.”

He did not respond.

“Dark hair, five three. She’s an Arab and I’m worried . . . you know, given the situation.”

“Not here.”

“Has she been here, then?”

He shook his head. So Jim grasped the handle of the screen and gave it a couple of the quick, twisting shakes that would spring the lock, and barged right into the guy’s face.

The man fell back against his kitchen table, then recovered himself. Jim stepped up to him, turning to one side to deflect the aim of the air rifle. Then he grasped it with both hands and plunged the stock into the man’s stomach.

The power of the blow made him cry out as he flew backward across the table and crashed into the swinging door on the far side of the kitchen. He hit the floor with a thud, and the door banged back against him. He lay between the kitchen and the dining room, making little gasping sounds, “oh . . . oh.”

“Nice kitchen,” Jim said, “love your granite.” He went over to the prone figure. “You’re looking pretty peaked, fella.” He put his foot down on the man’s face. “Crush a guy’s jaw, it kills him if he can’t get treatment. Windpipe swells closed, but it’s slow as hell. Tell me where my wife is.”

“F-f-f-f—”

“Fuck me? Wrong answer.” He pressed down until he felt the nose bend. Now the hands came up and grappled with Jim’s ankle. “You don’t tell me the truth, it gets worse right now. Where is she?”

“I am Undersecretary of Defense Charles Walters, and I don’t know where in hell your wife is!”

“DoD Comptroller Walters. I thought all of you guys were Georgetown clowns. What’re you doing over here on Capitol Hill?”

“Get off me!”

Jim pressed down harder. “Nonessential personnel, so no dispersal. They left you behind without even a Secret Service party. Shame on them.”

Walters growled—or perhaps groaned—through his shoe-stifled mouth.

“Now, I know she was here because I tracked her here. So you’re lying and if you lie again, right now, you will be demolished, Sir. Understand this clearly: as far as your god-for-damned title is concerned,
I do not care
. So, let’s start again.”

The shoe-stifled voice became complex enough to convince Jim to remove his foot.

Walters leaped to his feet. “How dare you!”

“Your face has a footprint on it. Where’s my wife?”

“Let me see your cred!”

“You got
cojones
, I’ll give you that. Sure, I’ll let you see my cred.” Jim pulled out his real credential.

Walters opened it, read it. Then looked up at Jim. Then down again. “You really are Jim Deutsch.”

“I really am.”

Walters went into the dining room and sat down at the gleaming mahogany
table. It was a splendid big room, with gorgeously detailed moldings and a fine, glittering chandelier.
What would blast effect do to it?
Jim wondered.

“She was here. She established her bona fides and I confirmed her clearance with ONI.”

“That was stupid.”

“I know the whole story and I know that now, too! But they were already on to her. A whole capture and suppression team, with shoot-to-kill orders.”

“You’re certain of this?”

He nodded. “Five minutes after she left, they appeared. Wanting to know if I’d seen her. It was a full-bore security detail. I contacted ONI again, and they couldn’t confirm anything. The office was in chaos by then, so who knows? By the time I’d returned to the door, the team was gone.”

“The front door, since she’s the only person who came in the back. Did she also leave by the front?”

“You’re good. I bet you earn your money.”

“So, what you’re saying is, she had a five-minute lead on them.”

“The Metro was still running then, so she might have done a little better.”

“You know it was running? How do you know?”

“You feel it. The line’s under this street and you feel it.”

“She mentioned me. Did she have any message for me?”

“The cred looks real. I wish I could confirm that.”

“So, she had a message. What was the message?”

Walters slumped, a man filled with defeat. “The phones are dead. The computer is off-line.”

“You aren’t on a secure network?”

“DoD shut down everything except intelligence traffic. I’m out in the cold.”

“I’d hate to be an accountant.”

Walters sniffed a laugh out of his swelling nose.

“You’ve gotta trust my cred,” Jim added.

From his office in the Pentagon this man must see a lot of craziness, disappointment, and culpability. The money men always know the skeletons personally.

“Mr. Walters, I need any information you have
now
.”

“She said, ‘Rashid knows. Tell Jim that Rashid knows.’ ”

The cold of absolute zero. The explosion of an electric shock. Then heat rushing into his face, his hands going tight, needing to kill.

No wonder the divorce had made Rashid so furious. No more production to be derived from Jim’s comings and goings. However infrequent, they must have been incredibly useful.

He told Walters, who was rubbing his face, “You treat that with ice.”

“I know how to treat it!”

He had to control Rashid, but that involved determining his dispersal location, then getting there. Only the White House might be able to help. “Do you have a car?”

Then it hit him. So obvious. “Never mind.” He went out the back again, thundered down the steps, and ran across the yard. He threw open the gate and in moments he was in Nabila’s back garden. Then he was in the house. He went upstairs, went to her office—and found the door closed.

He stood there, for a moment too stunned to move. But—when he’d seen that her network was live, he must have instinctively pulled the door closed. Not a problem, though. He never forgot a number. He input the combination. Waited. Nothing happened. He did it again. “Shit!” She’d changed the damn thing.

He gave the door a kick so ferocious that he heard things falling off shelves downstairs, but he didn’t even leave a dent. Of course not. It would take a shoulder-launched rocket to knock this thing down. He ran his fingers across the lock. There was no way around it, not without the combination or explosives.

Even so, he shouldered the door and got a sharp, cracking pain for his trouble. “Goddamn it!”

He’d seen the room being installed. He knew there was no point in trying the attic or coming in through the wall or the windows.

Despair settled into him at last. Resourceful though he was, he now felt sure that midnight was going to arrive and Washington was going to find its fatal end. He would not be able to communicate with the White House in time for there to be any chance at all of locating the bomb.

His jaw clenched, his teeth bared. What a useless gesture, keeping the White House open. Noble today, but what about the leaderless country tomorrow? “Sure, there’s the veep,” he muttered. “But it’s the symbol, you moron! The civilization rides on the
symbol
!”

A three-thousand-year journey toward human freedom was ending. He
had no illusions: when Washington went, and Fitz with it, the Western world would bow to its new conqueror. Then, gradually and over time, Russia would emerge as the new superpower, as the one source of relief from the Mahdi’s awful rule. Oh, that was the plan. He knew it. He knew those old KGB types, understood the way they thought.
We play poker with foreign policy; they play chess
. For them, the end of the Cold War was only a setback, strictly temporary.

Then he was aware that the movement of air around him had just changed. Something was moving in the house, he thought, and at the same instant was aware that the quality of light around him had altered as well. Without looking, he knew that her office door had been opened from inside, and very quietly.

The next moment, he smelled a woman—woman’s sweat, edged with soap and scent.

“Come into the doorway where I can see you, please. I have a gun.”

“Nabila!”

“Jim?”

Then she was there. Before him. So small; he had remembered her as formidable, but she was only this little slip. She raised eyes that were red from crying but shimmering with joy.

In that instant, he recognized that the power of love becomes overwhelming when it touches souls together and that this had never happened between them before, but it was happening now, and he threw open his arms and she rushed into them, and they covered each other with kisses and whispered names, and he felt himself stirring—no, exploding—and she threw back her head and laughed but also pushed away from him.

They stood like two duelists now, suddenly wary, expecting anything. “Rashid,” she said, “my brother—”

“Walters told me.”

“I tried to get out there, to get to him.” She showed Jim her AMT Backup. “I would have killed him.”

Jim took her face and kissed her. “You don’t want to go down that road, Nabby.”

Here came that delicious small smile of hers, touching the edges of her full lips, the sides of her dark eyes. And he thought,
O Arabia
, and cared nothing but for the beauties and magic. A strange, forbidding, and gorgeous place, a fragile, artful civilization . . . and the darkness invested there, its parasitic
talons sunken into the same holy book that gave the Arabs the poetry in their souls and, he was beginning to admit to himself, their connection to the God whose silent reality defines us all.

What people did not understand was that his reality makes true every name he has ever been given. God is Allah, Yahweh, Ahura Mazda, Athene, Zeus, Ra, on and on, each name representing another human convergence with the mystery.

All of this passed in just an instant, in the compression of a man’s intimate, inner shorthand, and in the next instant Jim said, “He’s on dispersal. Where?”

“Maryland 28. Westmond. In a building there. But I had problems—there’s a shooter team after me. I nearly got killed!”

“I know.”

“I saw I had to do this at any cost, shooters or no shooters. But I didn’t even get to the Beltway. The car was attacked, Jim! Time and again! And my face—I look too Arab; I just about got shot! I was lucky to get back here at all. Did you get my message?”

He shook his head.

“On your cell.”

“I haven’t had it on. Danger of detection.”

“I found a code Rashid sent. The word ‘purple.’ ”

“To whom?”

“Somebody in Alexandria. It went to the cable company’s servers there. Then I lost it.”

“Purple” would be a case identifier. When they got that word, they would know which case was being activated. “Alexandria,” he said. You thought of it as a D.C. suburb, but it was a big city. You could easily hide a nuke in Alexandria, and if you could somehow get it on a plane, you’d be not five minutes from an airburst over the White House. Even if you didn’t have a plane, a nuclear detonation there that was the size of the Vegas one would devastate the whole region.

“I’ve got all the ASP readouts from there, but nothing shows up,” Nabby said.

He considered that piece of information. It would be easy to conclude that the bomb wasn’t there, but his sense of it was that this would be wrong. The location was too perfect. “It’s there,” he said.

“I concur. But it’s a big place.”

“Nabila, we have one card left to play.”

“But—what? How?”

“Call it the Card of the Lovers. Low card, odds always against it. But if you trust it, it’s a powerful card.”

“In Islam, trust is surrender.”

He wanted to kiss her, to somehow melt away the scars. But there was no time.

She followed him downstairs and outside, into the dangerous streets.

SOME SORT OF LIFE

As midnight swept westward, city after city rose from cringing desperation, and
knew that life—some sort of life—would continue there at least for a little more time. Because Las Vegas had been destroyed at midnight, the world had become focused on that as the hour of lightning. But why must it be midnight? The truth was far more bleak, and was reflected in the offices of intelligence chiefs and their screaming prime ministers, presidents, dictators, and kings across the whole planet. With the exception of a few professionals like Jim Deutsch, who understood something of the mind they were dealing with, nobody knew if midnight actually mattered. The inner circles of the world feared that another bomb could go off at any moment, and that made them panicky, and their panic played right into the hands of the Mahdi. The more chaos, the better. Chaos, for Inshalla, was safety.

In the Muslim world, the stunned jubilation—the joy riots of Cairo and Tehran, Karachi and Baghdad and Gaza, and a thousand other places—faded as the images from Las Vegas began to march across TV screens. Initially, the scenes had been of burning buildings and lines of cars on highways, all taken from helicopters miles away. Now, though, video shot on the streets was appearing, and the horror was beyond imagination, even to people who lived in a world of street-corner bombings and public executions. One image,
of a little girl being sucked toward the firestorm, followed by her shrieking parents, broke hearts across the planet. All three had died. The man with the camera had died. A reporter had found the camera. Thousands of burnt bodies littered the streets in gutted neighborhoods, and now great clouds of buzzards and gulls descended on the city, circling in swarms, spreading their wings over the corpses like feathery shrouds.