The Tenth Circle (5 page)

Missouri River

McCracken stood on the shore just short of the cordoned-off eastbound span of the Daniel Boone Bridge that had been blown up by placing explosives strategically in line with the aging supports. The entire span had ruptured, plunging more than sixty vehicles into the waters below the previous morning while he was still in Iran.

He ran his eyes past the assortment of uniformed and other investigative personnel identified by the initials on their jackets, stopping on a civilian who viewed the scene with feigned detachment. Blaine made his way toward him, watching rescue and search efforts that had continued unabated for twenty-four straight hours now.

He reached the civilian standing apart from all the others and flashed an ID he hadn’t used in years, still enough to make the man’s eyebrows flicker and to study Blaine’s face closer.

“I read you as the kind of man who goes after the shitheads who pull of shit like this,” the stranger said.

“Likewise.”

“Di Oppresso Liber,”
the man said, quoting the Special Forces motto: To Free the Oppressed. “Wish I was still in that game. Rather be pulling grenade pins than strings.”

“ ’Nam?”

The man didn’t nod, didn’t have to. “We got two hundred in the water. A man like you shows up on a scene like this, I’m guessing it’s about one of them.”

The whole trip here, McCracken had been replaying a visit he’d had from an old friend twenty-five years ago. There hadn’t been a lot of lovers in his life, and Henri Dejourner came with news about one of them.

“She died two months ago.”

“You haven’t come here to inform me I was mentioned in her will.”

“In a sense, I have. Lauren Ericson is survived by a son. He’s yours.” Dejourner had a memo pad out and was reading from it. “The boy’s name is Matthew. He’s three months past twelve and is enrolled in the third form at the Reading School in Reading, England. He is, at present, a boarder at the school after having lived the rest of his life in the village of Hambleden twenty-five minutes away.”

“How did Lauren die?”

“Traffic accident.”

“Does the boy …”

“No,
mon ami
. He has no knowledge of you. Lauren told him his father deserted them.”

“Then he does have some knowledge of me.”

Matthew had turned out not to be his son at all, but that hadn’t stopped Blaine from treating him like one through the rest of the boy’s youth, never prouder than when the young man was admitted into Britain’s Special Air Service. Matthew had had a son out of wedlock, but had ultimately married the woman who later ran off, leaving Matthew to raise Andrew Ericson by himself. Blaine had met the boy once, years before, but had no idea he was in the United States for the year on a student exchange program until Johnny and Sal broke the news of the terrorist attack in which Andrew been caught.

Matthew, meanwhile, was on a mission somewhere, the Middle East probably. He couldn’t be reached, and Blaine didn’t want him getting this kind of news from some mountain messenger when he’d never leave his squad anyway. That left the task at hand to him. McCracken had let himself hope it wouldn’t be this bad. That the drop wouldn’t be as long or the waters as cold and deep. But he’d been on scenes like this often enough to know the odds of a successful rescue diminished by the hour under these conditions, and the grim expression worn by the man by his side pretty much said it all.

“Sixty rescued so far with a bunch of those not expected to make it,” the man continued.

“How deep’s the water?”

“Averages seventy-five feet. Temperature’s just under forty degrees. You want a reason for hope? Bodies will be washing up on the shoreline as far as fifty miles away for the next two days and a few of them will still be alive. A few.”

“Sounds like you’ve been here before,” McCracken told him.

“Haven’t we all?”

“It’s different when it’s personal.”

The man slid closer to him, took his hands out of his pockets as if about to comfort Blaine with a touch to his shoulder, but then just left them there dangling. “My advice? Don’t get involved.”

McCracken gazed back at the remnants of the classic cantilever bridge built way back in 1932. Ironically, construction of a replacement span was already nearing completion. Blaine took his phone from his pocket to snap some pictures, but it slipped from his grasp to the cold ground.

The stranger retrieved the phone and handed it back to him. “My second piece of advice: Keep this handy in case you need to call 9-1-1.”

“I am 9-1-1,” McCracken told him.

The man stuffed his hands back into his pockets. “Then I guess it’s unfortunate you were too late to help that kid.”

Washington, DC

“Washington’s on lockdown,” said Henry Folsom, gazing across the table at McCracken. “The whole country’s on lockdown. Can you believe this shit?”

“I came straight to meet you from the airport.”

“Not like you to initiate contact.”

“I made an exception.”

“What changed?”

“Keep talking, Hank.”

“Forty-eight hours ago, terrorists firebombed a church in Ohio. Over a hundred casualties. Just over twenty-four hours ago, they blew up a bridge in Missouri. Those two attacks came in the wake of two gunmen shooting up a restaurant and an explosion on a subway train. They’re hitting us coast to coast, going after infrastructure as well as innocents.”

“Like 9/11, every goddamn day.” Blaine nodded.

Folsom studied McCracken closer. “But at least there’s some good news. I hear Iran’s nuclear enrichment plant in Natanz nuked itself yesterday.”

“Did it now?”

“Yes, sir. No further details available. But you didn’t come straight from landing back in country to see me.”

“No, I came from Missouri, the Daniel Boone Bridge specifically, where bodies are still being pulled from the water.”

They’d met the same place they had the first time circumstances had brought them together: the F Street Bistro in the State Plaza Hotel, a pleasant enough venue with cheery light and a slate of windows overlooking the street that Blaine instinctively avoided. Today, that street was crammed with police and a few National Guardsmen sprinkled in for good measure. On alert, assault rifles not far from their grasps.

McCracken had arrived first, as was his custom, and staked out a table as close to a darkened corner as the place had to offer. He’d used this location in the past because of its status as one of Washington’s best-kept secrets. But the last time he was here, the room had filled up around him, every table occupied within minutes with an army of waiters scurrying between them. McCracken found himself missing that kind of bustle today. Theirs was the only table occupied. Washington looked to be staying home for the day, along with the rest of the country, in the wake of four terrorist attacks in little more than a week.

Folsom leaned back in his chair. He had the look of a man born in a button-down shirt. Hair neatly slicked back, horn-rimmed glasses, and youthful features that would make him appear forty forever. The Department of Homeland Security probably had a thousand just like him.

“Soft targets all,” Folsom elaborated. “Civilians, infrastructure … Like the Missouri attack. You telling me that’s what brought you here? What the hell for?”

“Because somebody important to me was on that bridge when it blew.”

Folsom remained silent for several long moments once McCracken was done.

“Saved me the trouble of calling you in on this, I guess,” he said finally.

“Well, here I am.”

Folsom leaned across the table, looking almost relieved. “That bridge and all the other attacks were carried out by Islamic extremist groups, because of one man’s crusade against them.”

“And who’s that?”

“A man who doesn’t care if this country burns, McCracken.”

Tampa, Florida

“When I see a Muslim, I turn away,” the Reverend Jeremiah Rule said to all those gathered around the fire pit.

His faithful applauded.

“If he does not turn away, I shove him aside!”

His faithful cheered.

“And if he is still there, I spit in his face!”

His faithful cried out their agreement, deafening Rule to all other noise. Many pounded the air with their fists. Others held their hands high toward the sky. Still more dropped to their knees in reverence to him; those who followed the reverend from stop to stop, place to place, seeing in him the one true spokesman for their most deep-seated feelings and hatred.

I speak for you
, he thought as the cheering, unrestrained and cathartic, continued.
I speak for all those who’ve lost their voices or been silenced by others who would betray this country.

Then Rule looked down at the flames rising from the pit the closest of his devoted had dug just that morning in the ground of Tampa’s Al Lopez Park, within view of a beautiful pond well stocked for fishing. The “cleansing service,” as he called it, had been scheduled to take place in a different park, but had been moved here at the last minute when his permit was rescinded. There’d been no time to arrange permission for the fire now raging, and Rule welcomed any attempt by Tampa authorities to make their way through the five hundred faithful gathered for the service to shut him down for violating some ordinance he didn’t even know existed.

Five hundred
, Rule thought reverently. There’d been times, not too long ago, when he’d preached these very same words to no more than five and only as many as fifty on his very best day. Then he came to the realization that actions spoke far louder and better than words. That was the day he’d doused a copy of the Koran in gasoline and lit it on fire before an audience of twenty-five faithful followers. One of those twenty-five recorded the burning with his phone and put it up on YouTube, where it went viral. The Islamic world exploded with violence and vengeance, ravaging American consulates as they took to the streets like crazed, rabid animals that revealed them, in Rule’s mind anyway, as the heathens and barbarians they were. His actions had exposed their true faces to the world, and the reverend ratcheted up his efforts to bring that truth further into the light so the world might know them in their true form.

“But this is your service, not mine, my brothers and sisters!” he blared into the microphone to the faithful who’d greeted him in Tampa, feedback sent screeching out the outdoor speakers. “This is your time to lash out and be heard. For I give you a voice when everyone else ignores your words. So come forth now and offer a token to the flames so you might be cleansed. Come forth with whatever symbols you bring of the cursed people who would infest our land with the ugliness of their word and unholy nature of their purpose, the sin of their very being, brothers and sisters!”

It was cool for January in central Florida, but Rule’s face glowed with a light sheen of sweat from his proximity to the fire pit dug six feet down, his feet flirting precariously with the edge. He was a big, husky man with skin the texture of leather from spending years selling Bibles door to door. His long graying hair was gnarled together in snakelike strands that flapped side to side with each twist of his head. His thick mustache curled upward at the end, wet with sweat and snot from his own wild rants that had whipped him, as well as the crowd, into a frenzy.

“Come forward!” he urged again. “Who will be the first to offer a symbol of all that must burn in the eternal fire of damnation!”

A young boy, eleven or twelve maybe, slid out of the crowd holding a small rolled-up carpet. Rule’s heart skipped a beat. The boy seemed to glide, not walk, his steps making no imprint in the park grass.

It couldn’t be
…

The boy, appearing to float now, smiled at Rule with reverence.

A ghost from his long forgotten past
…

The boy mocked him with his big blue eyes, still coming forward.

Be gone with you, demon!
Rule wanted to shout.
Get thee back to damnation!

The boy extended the rolled-up rug out to him now. Only it wasn’t a rug anymore; it was the body of a dog, stiff and dead.

Because the boy was dead too, drying blood caked up on his skull and brow, the tears and splits made in flesh and bone by the reverend’s own hands.

A long time ago.

Alabama: The past

How many years ago had it been?

More than the man who’d then been known simply as “J. D. Rule” wished to count. He’d been driving the Alabama country­side in a beat-up van that stank of sweat and beer, complete with a moth-eaten mattress, on which he slept in rest stops or parking lots after another failed day of trying to sell Christian Bibles door to door. An especially bad day, an especially hot day, finishing in a thunderstorm that soaked him to the gills in the walk back to his van from a farmhouse where the residents hadn’t had the courtesy to even open the door. Then, halfway to his van, an ugly square shape of dog, all muscle and jaw, lunged out at him.

Rule’s sample Bible went flying off into the mud, and the dog lunged at him again when he stooped to retrieve it. Rule took the good book in hand and smashed the dog’s snout with it. And when the animal yelped, he struck at it again, missing but driving the dog backward toward the oak tree to which it was chained. Some kind of mangy, bony hound, ugly and scarred. He’d kicked at it, loving the sound and feel of his work boot mashing flesh and ribs through fur. The dog cowered and wailed as he kicked it again and again, then smashed it with his ruined sample Bible until it wailed no more.

Rule was nearly out of breath when he turned to find a blond-haired boy, ten or eleven maybe, staring at him in wide-eyed despair and horror.

“You killed my dog, mister! You killed my dog!”

Rule came toward him, realizing the dog’s blood had splattered his clothes.

“No, I … I … er—”

The boy turned and ran back for the house.

“Hey. Hey!”

Rule caught him just short of the steps, intending to just get the boy quiet, settle him down a bit. But he wouldn’t stop his screaming and in that moment all of Rule’s anger and bitterness over the lot he’d been cast spilled over. First slapping the boy, then striking him with closed fists until his knuckles split and bled, and the screaming became a whimper and then a strange airless gurgle that left the boy’s blue eyes bulging and sightless.

God, forgive me
…

Rule stumbled up off the dead kid, covered in more blood, along with muck and rain and urine from where the boy had pissed through his jeans. Leaving the body there, he hightailed it back to his van, speeding off on bald tires with his weak windshield wipers barely able to slap the rain away and his shredded, swollen hands fiery with pain.

“Oh Lord, how I have failed you,” he sobbed as he drove, the van whipsawing back and forth across the two-lane road. His hands hurt so much from striking the boy’s skull and face, he could barely close them on the wheel. “I carry your word in books but not in my heart. And all these weeks I’ve sold not a single one, because I am not pure enough to know your word. But I resolve to change that. Here and now, I promise to be your faithful servant spreading your word through more than just the good book. If you’ll have me in your kingdom, I swear on all that is holy that I will be worthy of your grace.”

That was it. He’d dedicated his life to God then and there, resolved to commit himself to the service of the Lord to avoid eternal damnation. Not selling Bibles, but buying back broken souls like his own. Showing them that the error of their ways was through no fault of their own, that there were others to blame who must be vanquished so their very beings could be free. Killing the boy had been the making of his own transition to spiritual completion, committing the ultimate sin so he could know how to help those guilty of smaller ones.

The key was to give them something to rally against, something to make the true nature of their beings and moralities rise to the surface to bury all else beneath it. It wasn’t enough to have faith.

They needed something to hate.

And Rule found the answer to what in his own heart, a heart that had forever detested Muslims and their cursed religion from his days selling Bibles door to door. He’d found himself in a neighborhood devoted to Islam once, and to this day he could not get the hateful stares cast his way and doors slammed in his face out of his mind. Undeterred, he’d gone to a local mosque and presented a Bible to the imam, who promptly tossed it in the trash and lit it on fire as Rule watched.

That memory resurfaced when the epiphany to burn Korans struck him in the wake of a Muslim being elected president of the United States. Regardless of all the protestations otherwise, Rule knew that to be the truth. He could see it in the man’s eyes and hear it in his voice, could sense the secret agenda he’d brought with him to the White House.

The time had come to make a stand, to set the whole country on fire if that’s what it took to make people wake up and know the truth as he did.

Set the whole country on fire
…

An image he came back to again and again in his mind. Because it was more than a prophecy.

Because it was coming.