Critical Mass (27 page)

Nobody could see images like this and not be affected, and Muslims, inside themselves, found themselves saying,
This was done by people who pray as I do, who worship in the same mosques, who believe as I do
.

The reality of the crime, there for everybody to see, was, across the Muslim world, transforming jubilation into shame.

Women went about silently if at all, heads covered, eyes down. Men sat in tea and coffee shops, smoking and staring. If anybody played music, somebody would stop it with a curse. Men were angry and argued, but never about the pictures from Las Vegas. The images evoked a shame similar to that which attaches to pornography, because of the intimate connection between pleasure and violence, and they came to taste obscene.

The princes of Riyadh quietly dispersed, aware that their city was at once the capital of extremism and of moderation and that none knew where that left it, as an enemy of this mythical Mahdi or as his ally. Who knew, maybe he was even harbored here.

Certain Muslim leaders knew of Dream Angel, and there were anguished meetings taking place in various capitals. Some years ago, the Fitzgerald administration had intentionally leaked an outline of the plan to Tehran, and the government was well aware that while substantial areas of the city would be spared, an intricate pattern of bombing would so decimate the believers that the faith might collapse here and the country be given over to the powerful Western leanings that were its suppressed truth.

Riyadh did not know of Dream Angel but would have been appalled at the extent of the targeting in Saudi Arabia, where individual towns and specific neighborhoods in every city were marked for death. In all, Dream Angel would cut the population of the Kingdom by a third, and destroy the religious police utterly.

Even though elements within certain Muslim national intelligence agencies were aware that the Pentagon was creating an ultradetailed map of the Muslim world, and that it had military significance, they had been unable to obtain details.

So they inquired of the social sciences community, and found that something called a social-associative network could be involved.

Some of these states had constructed their own versions of the American map, using their own social scientists, so they knew roughly where the targets were.

They also knew that innocent people would die, and in staggering millions, something the West once would never have contemplated doing. It was genocide on a scale that made Hitler look like an amateur.

But these people were not innocent, not according to the new definition of guilt that the West, under increasing pressure and without consciously realizing what it was doing, had adopted. Guilt no longer attached only to action. Guilty wishes, guilty dreams, the inability to expel terrorists from your community—these were the new crimes.

But what was the sentence for committing them?

The Syrian and Iranian intelligence services both hit on the same answer: the target areas would be annihilated by small nuclear weapons delivered to their targets with great precision.

There could be only one type of bomb that would do this—a neutron weapon. It would deal death in the form of sheets of high-energy particles that would slaughter microscopically, instantaneously boiling the victims to death, cell by cell.

The mathematics of such bombs could be made as exact as the map of the targets, and only if they got very lucky indeed would any national air defense manage to shoot down a plane or two. None of the cruise missiles would be destroyed. Except for the West and Israel, there were no powers on earth that could intercept a cruise missile.

So, in conference rooms and offices across the whole of the Muslim world, the same question was asked: will they now kill us all?

What a few of the leaders knew, the whole population of the Muslim world suspected: there would be retribution, and it would be terrible. So the cities of the Muslim world were soon just as convulsed as the cities of the West, and even more so, because they were more densely populated and less well organized.

The old part of Jakarta was soon burning, the streets so packed with vehicles that dogs were jumping from car roof to car roof amid running crowds. Rumors were everywhere, and whenever a plane was heard overhead, thousands died, trampled.

Despite all this chaos, Washington was not the only place where people were struggling to find reconciliation, and the vast majority of Christians and Muslims saw themselves as being joined together on the same side in a desperate struggle against an evil so great that they had not been able to imagine that it could exist—until it emerged in the form of the fiery sun that had murdered Las Vegas.

At the moment of the explosion, it had been eight in the morning in Rome and the pope was in the dental chair in the small medical facility in his Vatican apartments. Guillermo Cardinal Mosconi, his secretary of state, approached. It was quite a surprise to the pope, because the formal nature of Vatican life meant that an unannounced visit like this was extremely unusual.

Mosconi, a short, quick man currently dressed in a business suit, made a sharp motion at the dentist as he approached the pontiff. “Holiness,” Mosconi said, “I am bringing news of the most critical nature.”

The pope got out of the chair and went straight into his private office, clearing his mouth of cotton as he walked, dropping it behind him. Mosconi was not given to outbursts. Whatever this was, it was extremely serious.

They sat across from each other. Behind Mosconi were many of the pope’s collection of twenty thousand books, which had been provided for when the apartments were remodeled after his election to the Throne of Saint Peter. Pope John Paul II had lived like a monk, but that discipline had died with him, and the apartments, therefore, were pleasant, this room decorated in deep, dignified reds and excellent woods. The desk was an antique that had been with the pope since he had been elevated to archbishop, a gift from the faithful of his home diocese.

Pulling off the dental apron, he sat heavily. The papacy was, in truth, a wearisome trial for him. He did it for love of the church, for love of Jesus and the great power of the sacraments. In his privacy, he longed for the rambles of his boyhood and the solitary evenings of his childhood summers.

He raised his eyebrows to Mosconi. “Cardinal?”

“There has been an atomic explosion in the United States.”

“God preserve them.”

“It has destroyed the city of Las Vegas. One million are dead. The churches all are burning. All.”

The pope had closed his eyes and turned his inner being toward the Lord. Surrendered himself, mind and heart. He had asked the question he dreaded to hear answered: “An accident?”

“Deliberate.”

Then he knew. It was the Muslims.

“Yes,” Mosconi said, reading the very familiar face of this man he had known for forty years. “An unknown Muslim organization. Unknown to the Americans, they say. It has demanded, also, that you order all churches to be closed. They are using the atomic threat to force the entire world to embrace Islam.”

The pope gave Mosconi a careful look. “So,” he said, “you are saying that we know more?”

“We have, as you know, a connection within the Belorussian exarchate—”

“Yes, Mosconi!” Of course he knew. “Go on.”

“There is indication that a plutonium bomb of Russian manufacture was used.”

If Mosconi said it, there was no question of any indication. It was certain. “And do the Americans know this?”

“I have no belief that they do.”

The pope realized immediately that he held the fate of nations in his hands. If he directed this information to the American president, the third world war that the church had fought so hard for so long to prevent would then unfold. Both the Americans and the Russians would fire their missiles at each other. Each side would be afraid not to, lest the other side fire first and destroy their ability to retaliate.

The key would be to reveal those directly responsible, the Muslim group that, the pope had immediately concluded, was the out-of-control tool of the Russians. They wanted the West on the defensive, not destroyed.

The people directly responsible could be punished, and nobody ever need know where the bomb had come from. “Are we aware of directly responsible parties?”

“There is this ‘Mahdi,’ so he calls himself.”

“Then he’s the one to drag into the light.”

“We don’t have the reach to do this.”

Inside himself, the pope begged the Lord for guidance. Perhaps the answer came in the cardinal’s next suggestion, which was to call the president.

The pope did this, offering his condolences. Then he asked if the Americans had any specific expectation that there was another bomb. Fitzgerald
said little, but the grave tone of his voice caused the pope to end the call in a mood of deepest foreboding.

“We have here a possible Antichrist,” he told Mosconi.

Both of them knew, of course, of the prophecy of Saint Malachy, and the fact that it had been written not by that twelfth-century holy man but by the odd and dangerous Michel de Nostredame, popularly known as Nostradamus, in the sixteenth century. There was something horrible about it, something profoundly unholy, that made the pope almost queasy when he so much as thought of it.

He thought of it now, though, in particular of the prophecy of the next pope, Peter the Roman, who was to be the last. He quoted, “ ‘In persecutione extrema sedebit Petrus Romanus.’ ”

As if to shield himself from the words, Mosconi raised his hands, brushed them across his face as if warding off an insect. “During the final persecution, the seat will be occupied by Peter of Rome. Yes, Holiness.”

The pope reached across the desk, and took Guillermo’s hand. “ ‘Qui pascet oves in multis tribulationibus: quibus transactis civitas septicollis diruetur, et Iudex tremêndus iudicabit populum suum.’ ”

“He will feed his sheep amid many trials, and when these things are finished, the city of the seven hills will be destroyed, and the great Judge will judge his people.”

The pope and the cardinal looked into each other’s eyes. “ ‘Finis,’ ” the pope said. The last word of the prophecy. “Is it happening, Willy?”

“This you must give to God.”

In the silence that followed, they heard voices coming from the square.

The pope stood up. “Dress me,” he called, and his dresser came quickly with the cassock and mantilla. The pope dressed, then went to the window in which popes customarily appeared.

Below, in the light of a gray morning, there had been perhaps a thousand souls, looking in the great square almost like none at all. But when they saw him, the cheer was so robust that it raised the pigeons, who flew in graceful arcs, their wings flashing when they swept into the sky.

By noon of that day, St. Peter’s Square was half-full. The pope was making preparations to speak to them from the balcony of the basilica. He would come at just before six in the evening, the hour of midnight in Washington, when it was expected by all the world that the American capital would be destroyed.

He had telephoned President Fitzgerald again, urging him to leave the city. The president would not leave. “Continuity of government has been assured,” the president had said.

Was the man committing suicide? The pope was not sure that he understood the president’s motive. A sort of desperate defiance, he thought. In his most private mind, the part of it he shared with no living man, he was coming to the conclusion that America was finished. For a long time now, they had been caught in a situation where their power was decompressing. Their inability to find an effective way to control Muslim guerillas and their failure to understand that what seemed like Muslim terror was often a projection of state power had brought them, inevitably, to this execution ground. The tool of Islamic terrorism was used by many hands.

“Holiness, Signore Manconi has arrived.”

He had asked earlier that Hilario Manconi, the president of the Vatican Bank, brief him on the world financial situation. “Very well.”

Manconi, whose dreary, equine face made his first name seem like a sardonic joke, proceeded into the presence. At a gesture from the pope, Manconi sat beside the desk and, with an officious snapping of latches, opened his briefcase and drew out a sheaf of papers. “It’s a catastrophe,” he said.

The pope was so tired, so emotionally stripped, that he almost blurted out a bark of laughter at the sight of the woebegone Hilario announcing disaster. “Go on,” he said.

“The dollar has collapsed. It is at this moment fifty-three dollars in the euro, and none can know where it will end. The U.S. central bank has exhausted its foreign currency reserve and nobody will buy treasury notes at this time. Gold is to four thousand, one hundred euros, tripling from the open. Bourses are closed, but not commodity exchanges, and everything—” He stopped. His throat worked.

“Continue.”

“I am continuing! Oh—sorry. Holiness!” He drew out another sheaf of papers. “The bank’s position is very sound. We have not much in dollar holdings. And our gold—” He shrugged. “The wealth we command is almost beyond calculation, Holiness.”

“My concern is the welfare of the people of the world. Are they starving, signore?”

“It’s chaos. Transport disrupted. All shipping lanes shut down. No flights. In Europe, not even road traffic, nor in America, but the U.S. authority is
collapsing. There are all sorts of presidential orders going out. Nobody obeys. They all run from the cities.”

“And here?”

“In Roma? Some, certainly.” He blinked, looked up sharply.

“Not here,” the pope said. “God willing.”

“No, Holiness!”

The pope waved him to silence. “If it is God’s will that this test be given us, then we are grateful for his faith, for God does not give unfair tests. So if the Mahdi succeeds, I have no doubt that St. Peter’s will become a great mosque, in the same manner as Holy Wisdom.” He referred to the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, which had been the greatest center of worship in Christendom for a thousand years, before being converted by the force of Islamic arms into a mosque.