Not the End of the World (51 page)

‘Terence Nately and Oswald Vernon weren’t home either,’ Steel added ‘but that’s because they’re both in blister‐
packs at the Glendale morgue.’

‘However,’ Brisko continued, ‘it may be significant to note that the three I mentioned are listed as living at rented accommodation – all having sold properties in LA in the past two months. Also active in the real‐
estate market is our friend the Reverend St John. He’s been buying up land in both Arizona and Nevada, which is going to be worth a hell of a lot more if LA floods and the city has to expand eastwards.’

‘So now we get to call him Lex Luthor St John,’ Steel said drily.

There was a burst of static from the radio. Steel proved that his fatigue hadn’t affected his reflexes, grabbing the handset and responding in less than a second. Agent Chai’s impatient voice cut through the breathless hush throughout the lab.

‘Peter, this is all for real now. We got a bomb. They just found it.’

‘Give me McCabe,’ Steel ordered. ‘Patch me through on a relay.’

‘You got it.’

There was a moment of silence. Larry swallowed. Brisko was already reaching for his mobile.

‘Agent, Steel, this is McCabe,’ said a distorted voice, words difficult to discern among amplified breathing noises. ‘We’re in real trouble.’

‘What are we looking at, Jim?’

‘It’s a warhead all right, CHIB‐
class, and it’s already armed, on a countdown. We got six hours, three minutes and fourteen seconds, then surf’s up.’

Brisko’s phone clattered to the floor. Steel looked briefly at the men surrounding him. No one had anything dazzling to contribute.

‘Can you defuse it?’

‘Not for sure. Maybe. But there could be two more of these things and it’s taken us four hours to find the first.’

‘Jesus Christ. We better get ready to evacuate.’

‘No, wait up,’ McCabe said. He spoke firmly and slowly, the echoing sounds of breathing punctuating his words. ‘Listen. Your CHIB is a vehicle‐
mounted, remote‐
launch nuke. That means you don’t arm the warhead locally. It was a safeguard against it falling into non‐
Soviet hands. You had to transmit the launch codes before you could fire the missile. The codes initiate the launch, and simultaneously arm the warhead.’

‘So what?’ Steel asked.

‘So there’s a gizmo out there someplace with an “Abort” switch on it.’

‘We gotta evacuate,’ Brisko declared, reaching down for the black plastic mobile where it lay on the tiles. ‘We gotta evacuate.’

Larry kicked the phone away from his reach. ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘You’re not from LA, are you man? We tell this city to evacuate and the panic’ll cause half as much damage as the wave. Instead of getting drowned in their homes, they’ll all get drowned in their cars, caught in gridlock on Wilshire Boulevard when five million vehicles try to drive east at the same time. We got six hours. I say let’s go after the detonator.’

‘Are you nuts, Sergeant? How do you know it still exists? How do you know they haven’t destroyed it?’

‘No chance,’ Steel said. ‘I don’t care how crazy you are, if you’re dealing with fifty‐
kiloton nuclear weapons, you don’t put gum in the Off switch. Especially not a control‐
freak like St John.’

‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this. Time is running out, gentlemen, and you want to play hunt‐
the‐
thimble.’

‘Agent Brisko, I got a wife teaching right now in a Santa Monica high school – I do not need to be apprised of the gravity of the situation. My money says that detonator is still intact, and if Luther St John doesn’t have it on him personally, then he knows a man who does. So just give us a little time, and if we get nothing, start the evac.’

‘What the hell are you planning to do?’

‘We can have agents at Bleachfield in twenty minutes,’ Steel said. ‘We get inside and we tear the place apart until we find the thing.’

‘And what if it ain’t there?’

‘We get someone to stand on St John’s balls until he talks.’

‘No,’ Larry said. ‘We evacuate. If it ain’t there, we evacuate the city, that’s it. St John won’t talk, no matter what you do to him. He knows you can only stand on his balls for a few hours and then all your evidence goes up in mushroom‐
shaped smoke.’

Larry looked Brisko in the eye.

‘Give us one hour playing hunt‐
the‐
gizmo, please. That still leaves as much time as would make no difference to the nightmare you’re about to unleash.’

‘I can’t afford to gamble an hour on—’

‘You’re gambling one hour, yes,’ Larry interrupted, ‘but believe me, it’s worth the stake.’

Brisko sighed.

‘All right, you got an hour on the announcement. But I’m calling the Governor now.’

‘Cool.’

‘Time for me to make a call too,’ Steel said.

‘No,’ Larry told him, placing a hand on the telephone. ‘I mean, sure, get your agents ready to rock, but think about it. He hears you guys are in the house and St John’s gonna know he’s made. He’s got guards, guns – he gives the order and it’s Waco Two. And let me remind you once more, if he turns it into a stand‐
off, Koresh’s record isn’t under threat. St John only has to keep you guys out for six hours.’

‘So what do you want us to do? Teleport our way in?’

‘A little simpler. You just need somebody to keep St John immobilised while your men get inside.’

‘And how do we get that guy inside in the first place?’

‘Easy. He’s already there.’

‘Huh?’

‘Well, Jesus johnnybags,’ Steff said, walking back in and closing the door behind him. ‘Madeleine, hen, you better take a seat.’

‘Whassup?’ she asked, looking up from the makeup bag she was unpacking in front of the mirror.

‘What’s up? Eh, how should I put this …’

Freeman’s call had come on Madeleine’s mobile shortly after they’d been shown to the dressing room. The sergeant asked to speak to Steff and he had gone outside to take the call, the fire exit at the room’s rear leading straight out into the desert sun. Arizona was beautiful, absolutely fucking stunning. Luther St John didn’t deserve to live there – Harthill would have been much fairer.

It had taken some stubborn insistence before Freeman finally spilled out exactly why he needed Steff’s help, but Steff could hardly blame the guy for saying it was on a need‐
to‐
know basis. This was not the kind of thing you’d be in a hurry to share with members of the public. Nonetheless, you equally couldn’t ask a member of the public to do what Freeman was requesting without disclosing fully what he was getting himself into. This was a bit more elaborate than asking some bystander to call an ambulance.

It would be fair to say the news took him a second or two to digest. Steff had long ago run out of surprise at what magnitude of stupidity religion could engender, but even he had to admit he was impressed with this one. It certainly vindicated his concern that he and Madeleine weren’t going to be left alone quite yet to live happily ever after.

He disconnected the call and looked out across the desert, taking a moment to collect himself ahead of what he was about to undertake. He might have been reeling from the sheer scale, madness and plain old‐
fashioned evil of what St John was planning, but that was sweeties compared to just how fucking angry he was, and he needed to be cool, focused and rational.

Once he knew the truth he hadn’t needed to be asked twice, whatever the danger. Not just because of the multitude of lives at stake; not just because he was hoping to spend some time in LA with his new girlfriend and it would be easier if it was still there.

For Steff, this wasn’t a matter of bravery, selflessness or even self‐
preservation. This was therapy.

This was pay‐
back.

The fundamental problem with fundamentalists was that no matter how much touchy‐
feely love and peace their religions professed, in practice they always turned into prescriptions for moral contempt. Reasons to hate were given divine sanction. ‘Hate the sin, love the sinner,’ they said, a phrase Steff had always considered among the most disingenuous moral cop‐
outs the human race ever devised, right up there alongside ‘I was only obeying orders’. If you consider somebody’s behaviour or beliefs an affront to your God for which they will suffer an eternity of pain and humiliation, it makes it kind of hard then to treat that person as an equal human being.

Holy war. Crusade. Jihad. Fatwah. And now a tidal wave. That was what ‘hate the sin, love the sinner’ had led to. Please, Steff thought, love us all less.

All us sinners.

Because we were all of us heretics, every day committing obscene thought‐
crimes and unforgivable transgressions of moral and theological orthodoxies. All of us. Every one. Most of the time we didn’t mean it, but that in itself was often the nature of the infidelity; and when was ignorance of the law ever a mitigating excuse?

With so many belief systems having evolved around the world, it was impossible to adhere to all of them; indeed, adherence to one was often deeply heretical in the eyes of another. Therefore, even the most conscientious devotee, leading the most ascetic, self‐
denying, disciplined, austerely moral, dull, drab, joyless and utterly, utterly self‐
nullifying existence was unfortunately guilty of acts and thoughts that would be found decadent, licentious and downright evil in the scrutinising eyes of another religion. Some wee old spinster in Coatbridge, in her hairy coat, plastic Rainmate and furry boots, nipping into the Co‐
op minimarket for a half‐
pound of cheap mince on the way home from the chapel, Scottish Catholic Universe under her arm, might tell herself she wasn’t, spiritually speaking, doing any harm. But she’d be kidding herself. And acting the humble innocent wouldn’t help. Hardline Islamics would have her on the dress‐
code, for a start. Vain, shameless slattern, flaunting herself like that in public, for all the world to see. Hindus wouldn’t go a bundle on her planned ingestion of bloody flesh, or her wider complicity in the sacred animal’s slaughter. Attendance at the ‘temple of the Satanic anti‐
Christ of Rome’ remains something of a no‐
no as far as the Scottish Free Presbyterians and Ian Paisley’s mob are concerned. And as for a woman being able to read, well, ask the Taleban about that in Kabul. Then duck.

Cumulatively, the world’s religions could provide a God‐
given justification to hate anything about anybody. Steff had decided some years ago to hate them all back.

He was what the devout would call a ‘lapsed Catholic’, a term he resented because it sounded like he was suffering from some kind of helpless affliction. It also carried the insulting and deeply smug implication that this was a temporary fault and ultimately he would be back.

Steff Kennedy would not be fucking back. Put the house on it.

He had been brought up a Catholic; a ‘good Catholic’, even, as the phrase went. He’d always striven to be good, a good boy for his mum and dad, good at school, good at home, good at church. Being a good boy meant being a good Catholic; being a good Catholic meant being a good boy.

It was only when he became old enough to start thinking about what any of it actually meant that his ‘faith’ ran into difficulties. Unfortunately, this development came after he had signed up for the seminary.

Again, he was just trying to be as good as his parents – or more importantly God – would like him to be. At school the Catholic teachers told you about ‘vocations’, about the calling, about how God chose people to become priests and nuns. At the same time they usually laid it on pretty thick about the abject shortage of both and how miffed God would get if you KB‐
ed His job offer. They gave the impression that if you ever found yourself wondering – even for a second – what it might be like to be a priest, then that was your card marked: God was calling you, and it was a Mortal Sin to ignore Him.

He was not priest material, anyone could have seen that. Neither was any of the six other boys from his year at St Matthew’s Secondary in Motherwell who signed up at the same time – all, coincidentally, after seeing the Augustine’s College video. The Church in Scotland was just so desperate that they were cramming all manner of unsuitable candidates into the seminary in the blind hope that a few of them would go the distance.

The video worked like one of those Army recruitment films, where they show you guys skiing down Alpine mountainsides and drinking beers in Belize, when the reality is a street corner in Belfast with angry young Irishmen lobbing bricks at your head. The Augustine’s College ‘Do You Hear the Calling?’ video was all swimming pools, tennis courts and walks in the hills. The reality was a damp, prison‐
like building in Ayrshire, where the angry Irishmen were middle‐
aged, and it wasn’t their bricks you had to worry about.

Lives were wrecked in that place. Young lives.

Steff heard boys cry in their beds every night, tormented by things they would not talk about. Secrets stalked the halls; whispered rumours and silent fears. But he only learned the truth when the whisky‐
reeking Father Meehan summoned him to ‘private prayers’ in his study, and locked the door behind them.

Unfortunately for the priest, his drunken misjudgement had led him to pick on someone, even at thirteen, more than his own size.

Steff remembered hearing the sirens as he sat upstairs in Father Cahill’s office, and being surprised when he looked out the window to discover there was only an ambulance, no police cars. But then he’d had a lot to learn about what the Church’s priorities were that night. The ambulance‐
men were told Father Meehan fell down the stairs (which probably seemed fairly plausible, given that he was drunk), but pressure must have been brought to bear so that nobody asked how many times he’d fallen down them to end up with a face like that. Steff, having terrified visions of graduating straight from seminary to borstal for GBH, thought it was him the priests were protecting.

They had both spent their last day at Augustine’s College. Steff went back to Motherwell the next morning, but he didn’t know where Father Meehan went until nine years later when he saw him on TV, charged with a string of sexual offences against boys in his charge at a seminary in Galway. Steff hadn’t been very happy to discover that these offences were not coming to light after decades of silence – the Church had placed Meehan in the Galway seminary after his expulsion from Ayrshire. Still, what were a few anal rapes to protect the Church’s holy name from scandal? Didn’t these kids have any sense of loyalty?