Critical Mass (20 page)

“That would be Major Carstairs.”

“Very well, Colonel. Major Carstairs is going to Washington to an OSI emergency meeting involving border-related issues too sensitive to transmit. He is leaving as soon as clearances are in place.” Now came the big one. “Let me make that call.”

The colonel took him down the hall to the AFOSI station, where he was able to use an encrypted line. He called the number Logan had given him. It rang. Again. A third time. “Logan.”

“Secure on your end?”

“Go ahead.”

“Deutsch. I need clearance to fly Laughlin AFB, Texas, to Andrews immediate.”

“Done.”

“I’ll come to you direct from Andrews.”

“Is there anything you can say now that will help us?”

Jim glanced at the colonel, nodded toward the door. The colonel stepped out, closed it.

“I would take the ONI and FBI out of the loop immediately.”

“I can’t do that!”

“This is isolated. Small, but we have to assume that it’s perfectly positioned. Normally, I’d say that it wasn’t at the director level and that the overall organizations were secure. But under the circumstances—”

“He won’t shut them down, not on information like this.”

In other words, not on the recommendation of a field operative whom they’d never heard of before. “I can understand that. If he does nothing else, he needs to shut down their communications capabilities.”

“Thank you.”

Jim hung up. If it happened, it might buy some time. Then he thought,
Maybe it wouldn’t do that. Maybe it would do the opposite and make them move faster.
He said to the colonel, “You got any Tums?”

“No, Sir.”

“Send ’em to the plane. If they don’t get there before we take off, I’ll let my goddamn guts eat themselves. And minimize the number of people who see me, and see this plane take off.”

“Sir, I—”

“Best effort.”

“Yes, Sir.”

While the plane was being made ready, Jim was taken to the quarters of a lieutenant who was allegedly his size. The kid was not all that big, though, and Jim had to cram into the uniform.

A silent AP drove him to the jet. The colonel was as good as his word. Aside from the plane’s ground crew, there was not a soul to be seen.

“Sir,” the AP asked as Jim got out of the car, “what do we do with your car?”

“It’s not my car.”

“Is it rented?”

“Stolen. There’ll be a police report on it in Eagle Pass, be my guess. Tell them your lieutenant went joyriding.”

“I’ll be sure to do that, Sir.”

Jim climbed the steps and pulled the door closed, then secured it. He called up to the flight deck that he was ready to go.

Exhaustion overcame him, and he closed his eyes. He didn’t want to; he wanted to watch the route. What happened was not sleep, but it wasn’t consciousness, either. The plane became a boat; the morning, night; the air, an ocean. Wind screamed in the rigging; phosphorescent spray flew across the tops of the waves.

The storm was so hellish that he opened his eyes. He looked out across the cold military luxury of the cabin. Outside, white, clean clouds, blue sky, green, sweet land far below. His beautiful homeland, concealing now behind the smiling face that it presented to the sky the darkness of hell.

THE NECK MAN

Nabila’s familiar office felt unreal to her, as if her desk were a landscape from
somebody else’s life or the distant past. The leaves still clung to the trees outside her window and the morning garden was dappled with sunlight, all very pretty and peaceful, and for that reason the scene seemed more like a painting on a wall in hell than something real.

She looked at her personal cell phone. This was the number Jim used. If he could call her, it would come in on this line. And how strange that was also, the flush of longing she had felt when she’d heard that careful voice, low and precise and so maddeningly arid, telling of this terrible event, and drawing her into his needs. Later, they would investigate that call. They’d want to know what he had been doing ordering the plane and why she had violated so many rules to help him. There were lying phone calls to explain, forged orders.

She realized that she had not started loving Jim again. She had never stopped. Her heart was tortured with love for him and fear for him—above all, that. To bear her fear, she had suppressed her love. She had not been able to live with the endless worry, the long, dark nights, the cold bed, nor with that sense of being shut out of so much of his life and his thoughts. She recognized that he could share nothing with her of his life. She could share little of her own. But her heart—it recognized only the loneliness.

To stop caring about him, she had divorced him.

She looked at the cell phone, all but willing it to ring again.

Wives of lost intelligence officers waited in sweated anguish, often for years, often forever.

“Jimmy, where are you?” she whispered to the sun of midmorning.

Somehow, she would do her work, continuing to search the ugly backside of the web, the deadly electronic landscape of religious sociopaths and their ugly blogs, spitting hate and, sometimes, clues.

The television spoke of Muslims being killed in London, in Berlin, in Amsterdam, in Paris, even in Mexico City, being shot by truckloads of marauders ranging the streets, the sodden, ruined neighborhoods where the Libyans and Syrians and Iraqis and Palestinians and Algerians fried their little food and muttered over their sweet tea, the Egyptians with their careful, disrespected ways.

They were killing Muslims in their private ghettos, she thought, the lands of the sad.

The heretics—for that’s what the fundamentalists were—would not win this. Of course not. Nature and destiny did not work that way. The Arab world had made itself into a dead end. They were like a nation of men somehow washed through time from the distant past, muttering by their fires while the West soared overhead in gleaming planes.

They would not win, but Washington also would not win. Today, Washington would die. She knew this. She had read it certainly in the Mahdi’s message. The Mahdi, king of the end-times. What arrogant, stupid nonsense. There was no Mahdi, no more than there was a Wizard of Oz. And that idea of this being the end-times—she refused to consider it. Every woman had a right to experience being the wife of a good man and mother of children.

Washington would not win, because it had already lost. The mere fact that this could happen had ruined it. Now, the breathtaking vulnerability of the West was known.

Suddenly she wanted Rashid to hold her. She wanted to be the dutiful sister she had not been. She wanted not to loathe his effort to restore Šar
’ah in their lives.

She laughed a little. How self-serving was that thought?
Now that Ša
’ah might become the law of the world, you’re already seeking to surrender to its bondage. Fear corrodes.

She closed out her work, isolated herself from the network, then turned the computer off. She went to the door and confronted the large regulation security lock that was required to protect any computer as classified as hers. This room was well sealed, even its windows and the door. When she opened it, she could hear the church bells that had started in the midnight still ringing—she’d never known that there were so many bells in Washington, D.C.—and also sirens, wailing police cars, and the busy, frantic fire horns. There were other sounds, perhaps shots; she couldn’t be sure.

Then she heard clattering. She realized that Rashid was still here. She was astonished to find him working on his laptop.

To avoid seeing his screen, she stood in the doorway. “Rashid?”

“What?”

“Shouldn’t you be on dispersal?”

“I’m selling that rug.”

She almost cried out, she was so astonished. He’d received an emergency call, the country was at war with an enemy he was uniquely positioned to find, and here he was, selling the Sarouk he’d put on craigslist. “You are selling the rug? Now?”

“I have a bite.”

“There are people on craigslist today?”

“The offer came in last night.”

He was in denial. There could be no other explanation. You did not sell rugs in a city that probably had only hours to live. Or maybe you did. There had been that famous tobacco auction going on in Krakow when the Germans marched in, and in Baghdad the shops had stayed open as the Americans took the city. And wasn’t it Boethius who had commented on the barbarians traipsing through his garden while he wrote
The Consolation of Philosophy
?

She heard herself say, idiotically, “I wouldn’t have minded if it was the green.” The purple Sarouk had been in their mother’s bedroom.

“The dyes are bad.”

“The dyes are fine. The rug is precious.”

She could see his back stiffen. In Šar
’ah law, he was the one with authority to do this. “Would you beat me, then, if I disagree?”

He turned off his computer, got up, and came toward her, two steps. His face, the eyes so large, looked as it had when he was a child, so unsure. “You have a gun,” he said, laughing a little.

“I do have.” They’d issued it to her and made her learn its secrets. She could fire her AMT Backup with proficiency, difficult as it was to aim the little pistol. “It’s in my drawer.”

“Right now, it should be with you.”

She bowed her head. “You’re right, of course.” She did not add that he was in violation of Directive 51, still being here. Even craigslist didn’t explain it. It was two hours since he’d gotten his orders.

He slid his laptop into his backpack.

She wanted to say something about what was happening to them. “If we—” She stopped. She could not utter the truth. Her blood seemed to moan in her veins.

He looked her up and down.

“Cape May,” she said. “Do you remember?”

He nodded. “Blue sky, hot sand, running after the sandpipers.”

“Are you afraid, Rashid?”

“I am afraid.”

“Me, too. More than I thought I would be. Why didn’t they disperse me? If I were you, I’d have gone the second I got my order!”

“It’s all God’s will. If we live or die. It’s just—surrender. Surrender.”

“We are responsible for our lives.”

“That isn’t the story we’ve been told, Nabby. It isn’t faith, to put our own will in front of Allah’s.”

“Faith is deeper than doctrine. There is only one faith, beneath all the stories.”

He gave her a sidelong look. “If I tell you why am I selling rugs, will you tell me why you are spouting philosophy?”

“I’m trying to reach the brother I once had. I believe you’re still there, Rashid. I believe in you.”

He threw his arms around her. “Come with me, Nabila! Forget your orders and come!”

She shook her head, she fought her tears, but they came anyway, great, wracking sobs that brought with them a thousand memories, so many happy days. She and Rashid had been happy, before Mom and Dad died, and actually for a long time after. So happy!

She held him back away from her. “You go now.”

“Nabby—”

“Now, Rashid. God go with you!”

He held her to him, kissed her hair. “God go with you, Sister.”

Then Rashid drew back, stepped to one side, and went off toward the garage. She heard the kitchen door slam. Then came the silence of the house.