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.
14
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.
Had the North Koreans been somehow responsible for what had just happened to Las Vegas? Her mind flashed with an image of Pyongyang in the springtime, the streets empty, flower boxes everywhere blooming with pink Kimjongilias, the begonia variant cultivated to honor Kim Jong Il’s birthday in 1988. She had never been there physically, but she had traveled those streets in real time, when she’d worked on a photomapping program that was designed to map every important place in the world.
“I’m not getting a call yet,” Rashid said.
“Me, neither.”
“Suppose they don’t call us because we’re Muslim.”
“We’re cleared. They have to call us. Especially—”
Her pager beeped—screamed, it seemed to her.
“—especially you.”
It was not a call to go on dispersal. It was her emergency code requiring immediate action. “I have to go on the secure network here, right now,” she said.
His beeper warbled. He looked at it. “I’m on dispersal.”
The reality of what the two messages meant was immediately clear to both of them.
She looked into his eyes. Saw the shock there, in their wideness, their liquid glassiness. His tongue touched suddenly dry lips.
What had just happened was that he had been ordered to go to dispersal and live, she to stay in Washington and probably die.
They embraced. If his unit was on dispersal and she wasn’t even being given time to drive to Langley, it could mean only one thing: her services were needed immediately because Washington itself was under threat and the Internet might help them deal with it in some way right now. His work did not require him to be in harm’s way. He would therefore come under provisions of National Security Presidential Directive 51, which required him to go immediately to a secondary location outside of the metro area.
Without speaking, he turned and went into his bedroom. She heard him pulling out his emergency case and then went back to her own office, closed and locked the door, and drew the curtains. She turned on the green gooseneck lamp on her desk, then pulled the radio-frequency shield out of its hiding place in her bottom drawer. It was designed to absorb any radio frequencies emanating from her laptop—frequencies that could be picked up by ultrasensitive satellites. Her every keystroke could potentially be logged and transmitted to any location in the world.
The shield was green plastic emb
edded with copper screen. She fitted the laptop into it, then opened it and turned the computer on. This was not a home computer. It was a highly sophisticated instrument in a smallish box. It flashed on at once. She saw the seal of the secure network, and waited as a link was established. Saw Marge come up. She was in her home office also. They could communicate verbally, but it was less secure. Marge’s message box said: “We’ve got orders to do a selective shutdown of the Internet. Isolate the U.S. west of the Rockies, no I/O. Thoughts?”
“BI.” Meant “bad idea,” which it was.
“?”
“They need information. Take it from them, you spread panic.”
“WTU.” Meant: Will Transmit your opinion Upstairs.
One of Nabila’s ’bots began flashing. She double-clicked it.
And there was the most stunning, the most monstrous thing she had ever seen in her life.
It was a Web site coming out of Japan. In an instant she saw that it had originated at the Toyama Campus of Waseda University in Tokyo. She grabbed the site, just glancing at the first few words.
The site wasn’t intended just for her, not this time. It was in the open.
She saw that it must not be allowed to reach the media, not in this form, not at any cost. Her fingers flew as she plunged into the Japanese Internet backbone, racing after Waseda’s server farm.
She found it, shot Marge an instant message: “Doing a DSA Waseda University. MTC.”
She set a million calls a second on Waseda’s servers. That would freeze them. She could only hope that nobody else had seen this, because it was the most incendiary single document ever written by the hand of man, and it almost made her literally scream aloud, howling her terror into the dawn light that was beginning to stream in the windows.
She ported her copy of the website over to Marge, then watched her ’bots. They weren’t finding anything else like it. No, this had been done the same way as the hijab document—a single website, probably put up for just a short time. But she couldn’t risk that. As far as she was concerned, Waseda would remain off-grid forever.
They could have posted the site in a million different places, public as all hell, but they had not done that, and she now realized why. It was the humiliation factor. World leaders—the president first—were going to have to tell their people about this.
COMMUNICATION FROM THE MAHDI OF THE EARTH OF MUSLIM PEOPLE
GLORY TO GOD, THE CALIPHATE OF ETERNAL PEACE IS COME.
THE END OF TIME IS HERE.
Because the Crusader harlots, fallen daughters of God all, did not bow their heads beneath the veil, there was a serious consequence.
Now, bowing before God, all must pray. The Five Pillars of Islam are established for all, and all must now join themselves to the joy of prayer as established in the Law.
All law, and the only law, is now the law of Šar’ah. Immediately, all must perform sadaha in accordance with the Law.
The Crusader King, William Johnson Fitzgerald, must perform sadaha before all mankind at once. He must say before all the world, “Ašhadu ’al-l ilha ill-llhu wa ’ašhadu ’anna muammadan raslu-llh,” in a clear voice. He must then say in his uncivilized tongue, that the ignorant may understand, “I testify that there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet,” and must say, then, that he is humble to the Faith. He must open the vaults of his weapons and cause his soldiers to lay down their guns in all the world. The minions and viziers and soldiers of the Crusader King must all perform sadaha at once and be seen to face Mecca in prayer, in accordance with the Law. They must remain in the dirty city of Washington. They may not leave.
All lairs of apostasy are closed and may not be entered. Anyone entering a Christian church is apostate and subject to the Law. Anyone entering a Jewish synagogue is apostate and subject to the Law. All worship in the names of false gods and statues now ends, and the Hindu, the Christian, the Jew, and all others proclaim sadaha in accordance with Law.
From the high places all around, henceforth this is ordered: that the prayers be proclaimed in loud voice at the appointed times, in performance of the salah, the five prayers of each day.
This must be done at once, or there will be a serious consequence. Your savior loves you, and will be pleased to communicate further with God’s people, when God wills.
15
A LOST WORLD
The president was still in his helicopter when news of the latest Mahdi communication came in the form of an urgent bulletin from the Director of National Intelligence. The president took one look at it and picked up the phone. “Logan?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Is Matt safe?”
“They’re in their bunker.”
“Thank God.” So the vice president could reconstruct the government if he had to. Or rather, when. “I’m coming back.”
“Sir, you can’t—”
He hung up, then communicated with the flight deck. “Take us back,” he said.
Immediately the chopper banked and began its churning return to the White House. A headwind made it bounce. Outside, dawn burst forth in shades of pink and red. They flew low over the glowing trees of Bethesda, so low that he could see autumn leaves running along the streets.
His secure phone rang. Webb Morgath, Director of National Intelligence. The president snatched it up. “Webb?”
“This document requires the entire U.S. government to remain undispersed.”
“Make sure that no media says anything about the Fifty-one activation. And nobody—I repeat, nobody—is to know that I left the White House at all. If there’s any media awareness, invoke national security and suppress it. It can’t look like we came back with our tail between our legs.”
The chopper circled and came in for a landing on the lawn. He saw that the entire damn press corps was swarming outside the closed gates, waiting to be let in.
As he stepped out, Tom Logan met him. “Sir, we have evidence of deep penetration of the FBI and probably the operational infrastructure of the CIA. There is an agent coming in with more detail.”
“Reliable?”
“You’re never sure, are you?”
“What’s his résumé?”
“He’s a counterproliferation expert. The deputy director says he’s the best there is.”
“Is he reliable or not? Come on, goddamn it, evaluate the man!”
“Reliable!”
“Okay, hit me.”
“He won’t disclose anything over the phone.”
“Crap!”
“What else can he do?”
“Yeah, if they’re out there, they’re gonna be after White House communications, for sure.”
The president’s thoughts went to Leandro Aragoncillo, living proof of White House vulnerability. He’d been in the Office of the Vice President for years. Because of that case, an effort was being made to establish an effective internal security program that would cover all sensitive services.
Two months ago, in response to Fitz’s request, the inspector general of the Justice Department had reported that their efforts were “progressing,” which he knew was bureaucratese for “nothing doing.”
Aragoncillo, a Secret Service agent, had worked in the offices of Al Gore and Dick Cheney, and had been reporting to the Philippines, for the love of God. And who the hell had those bastards been selling the information to?
That, plus Brewster Jennings and other situations—who knew how deep the problem might be? One thing was very clear: Fitz was master of a ship with a broken rudder, and they were in shoal waters.
As he walked toward the White House, breathing the cool, tart air of a smoggy morning, Tom continued, “The pope and the prime minister are both holding. France is scheduled in twenty minutes, then Germany, Japan, and Italy. Russia—”
“No Russia.”
“Israel?”
“I want Webb Morgath, Wally Benton, and the generals on a conference call in my office in fifteen minutes.” That would be the Director of Nat
ional Intelligence, the CIA director, and the Joint Chiefs. “I want the statutories on call.” That was the National Security Council and its statutory advisers. “I want no support personnel on the line whatsoever. I want a Marine guard around the White House and around my person. The Secret Service is going to have to withdraw.”
“Sir?”
“You heard me. Do it, Tommy.”
“Sir, the Secret Service?”
“If we are looking at a penetration, we have to assume that they would try hard to compromise my personal detail.” He stopped, looked at Tommy’s ashen face. “Your eye is twitching.”