Kingdom (37 page)

Yet seconds morphed into minutes and no one came for him. Campbell sat still, listening, waiting. He could hear the soft hum of the air conditioner, the vents vibrating as cool air struggled against the heat that seemed to permeate every inch of the arcology. There were other noises as well: the desert wind had kicked into a frenzy and the individual panes were rattling so hard Campbell was convinced the blast resistant glass would shatter. But the whiskey felt warm and even though he felt older than he ever remembered feeling, he pulled himself to his feet, the realization that Morrison’s men were not, at least yet, coming for him reverberating through his skull as he made his way toward the corpse. It would be dawn soon, and Campbell had a great deal of work left to do.

A few hours later, a security camera watched as Miles Lynch, suitcase in hand and still wearing his surgical scrubs, as well as a surgical mask, exited Jonathan Campbell’s 15th-floor laboratory suite and headed down the hall toward the elevators. Although the camera’s facial recognition software was unable to verify Lynch’s identity—the surgical mask made an accurate scan impossible—satisfactory identification was presented at each of the floor’s two automated security checkpoints: The individual in question produced Lynch’s ID card as well as his laboratory clearance chip. And given that Lynch had the top-level clearance necessary to access the 15th floor, no alarms were triggered and Lynch was allowed to continue.

Another camera then picked up Lynch at the end of the hallway, slipping into an elevator, still clutching the black suitcase, still wearing his surgical mask. According to the elevator logs, he got off on the third floor and then there was more video of him moving toward one of the shipping bays and then he was gone.

It wouldn’t be until three days later that Morrison’s security would discover Lynch’s bloated corpse, rotting in Campbell’s bed. By then, Campbell was over a thousand miles away.

Campbell moved quickly, cutting his way toward the end of the continent. He passed shantytowns thrown up along the perimeter of great, dying
American cities and remembered his time wandering in the desert, before the Order, wondering if redemption would ever come. He had been afraid then; he wasn’t afraid now. These were the lands where Exodus was born; these were the lands where Campbell would die. But first, he would be redeemed.

Morrison’s assassin—al-Salaam—was hunting him, but it was too late. Campbell spoke the language of the new America that was emerging in violent fits and starts from the rotting carcass of a dying nation-state—the America of those who lived in the shadows of great failed cities, but who were determined to forge something out of the nothing they were given. Al-Salaam knew only the desert. As Campbell made his way through the sprawl that sprang up along the Rio Grande, he followed. Al-Salaam believed Campbell was going toward the two other camps operated by the Order: Golan and Bosor. Al-Salaam was wrong.

Billion dollar satellites aided in the hunt, attempting to track Campbell’s movements from space; hackers who had gone corporate monitored pay phones, cell phones, email, websites, VOIP, text messages. Every modern method of communication was covered; Morrison’s men assured him that any attempt to warn the Order through these methods would fail. They were right.

But there were other ways of communicating, of telling a story, of sending a message, that were forever beyond the reach of the thousand metal moons orbiting the earth: These were the means through which Campbell would warn the Order.

And so Campbell continued across the heart of the fading American empire, using whatever means of transportation was available to carry him from city to city; there was an increasing number of cars left at the edge of the desert by their owners as if they were some kind of sacrifice, an offering to the gods of unsustainable financing terms. Or perhaps some people just gave up and melted away into the desert nothingness. Campbell pressed forward, weaving in and out of immigrant slums and homeless encampments, stopping only to sleep, eat, or visit a church—not the iridescent megachurches but the older structures left to rot in abandoned neighborhoods. So much graffiti covered the walls of these forgotten structures that when Campbell added a new symbol to the mosaic of urban artwork—just like the Order had taught him—
almost
no one noticed. There would be a few watching, a
few who would see the asterisk drawn inside of a circle and know: Evacuate the camps.

On the seventh day, al-Salaam caught up with Campbell. In the cities that twisted and bent around the deserts of the American Southwest, men lived in fear. And al-Salaam, the desert emissary, understood this fear, he knew how to manipulate it, how to amplify it—men were eager to tell him their secrets and so learning of the old gringo limping through the sprawl, drawing on the walls of abandoned churches, was simple.

Kill the old man before he could warn the camps: that was al-Salaam’s order. But it was no longer clear that Campbell was going to the camps. Campbell’s fixation on abandoned religious structures amused him, so al-Salaam was content to shadow him for a little while, a predator toying with his prey, pleased that the old man had gone mad; pleased that fear drove him to old gods long dead—their inability to save Campbell only reinforced their impotence, their irrelevance.

Yet, on this last day, Campbell did not visit a church. Instead, he spent most of the day wandering through one of the slums pressed between Los Angeles and the desert. He spoke to no one: He moved silently, watching the people—the displaced, the transient, the ones who went off the grid, the ones for whom the American dream never quite clicked—before stopping at a tiny cemetery at the center of the slum. There were no marble mausoleums, no massive monuments to mortality: just rows of makeshift memorials—chunks of jagged scrap metal strung together with barbed wire to approximate a cross.

Campbell moved from grave to grave, repeating the prayers Jael had taught him. He spoke to her mother; her grandfather, her sisters, to the anonymous crosses and the broken, ruined children whose lives had been given in the name of Project Exodus; he explained that tonight there would be redemption. And as the sun began to dip below the horizon, Campbell smiled and, before turning toward the desert, told Jael’s people he’d be joining them soon.

As darkness stole across the land, al-Salaam continued to shadow Campbell, following him as he moved from the slums to one of the dozens of industrial zones that stretched out into the Chihuahuan desert. The red lights of the Morrison Biotech arcology were visible on the distant horizon, stretching so far into the heavens that, from the desert floor, they were almost indistinguishable from the other celestial bodies and strange lights visible in the dying summer sky.

Campbell stopped in front of a multistoried brick building accented only by a huge red neon sign stating “Heritage Industries,” but the H and S, the beginning and the end, had burnt out and no one bothered to replace them. This was it, al-Salaam decided. This is where he would confront Campbell. The old man would suffer and then the old man would die.

Campbell entered the factory through a backdoor and al-Salaam followed, moving like a ghost. The only source of light was a faint glow emerging from a giant cylindrical tower jutting out from atop the factory, pouring smoke up toward the heavens, and it was through this half-light that Morrison’s lieutenant followed the old man, taking an elevator that went down instead of up, pushing further into the earth’s crust, creaking and groaning as it struggled down an ancient shaft. Several times during the descent the elevator paused, as though it were hesitant to go much further into the earth. And each time it paused al-Salaam waited, the temperature rising, and this patience elicited an odd metallic groan from the machine, the gears yielding before the assassin’s will, shuddering back to life and pushing further down into the darkness.

When the freight elevator lurched to a stop and its doors retracted into the sides of the wall, al-Salaam slid out onto a steel ramp, savoring the smell of sulfur and burning metal that strangled all life from the atmosphere. It was a fitting place to confront the man who betrayed Michael Morrison.

The ramp leading away from the elevator ushered him into the belly of a dark, sweltering foundry. Rusted hooks and pulleys crisscrossed overhead, carrying the tools of industry back and forth, up and down. To al-Salaam’s left and right, conveyor belts descended from the ceiling, forming a giant V as they funneled garbage and other disregarded scrap toward the center of the room, where they were dumped into a enormous cylinder- shaped vat of bubbling molten held aloft by two mammoth titanium prongs. Beneath the prongs, the nothingness stretched out toward infinity and al-Salaam was pleased: He had indeed chosen the right place to confront Campbell.

For each piece of forsaken scrap that tumbled out of the darkness and into the molten, steam belched into the atmosphere before drifting up toward the rudimentary filtering system installed in the ceiling above. Eventually, these noxious fumes wound their way through the filtering system, primitive as it was, and into the plant’s primary smokestack. This main smokestack served as a marker for the tomb these lands had become, blasting out deadly chemicals into an iridescent sky. And it was miles below this poisoned sky that al-Salaam reached the main walkway, finally falling on his prey: Campbell was standing a ten yards or so away at the edge of the platform staring down into the swirling, expectant molten.