by Mark Alpert
“I’m not starving,” he told Tamara. But he was hungry. And he was thirsty, too. A human being could survive for only three to seven days without water.
“I know you’re frightened,” Tamara said. “It was a very long trip in the airplane. And now you’re in an unfamiliar place. But you need to eat.”
Michael looked at the bag of potato chips again. He knew it would be wrong to eat the snack. He hadn’t done any of the Good Things that were on the list that David Swift had written, so he didn’t really deserve the reward. But he supposed that the usual rules didn’t apply if Tamara had made the snack instead of David. And even if she was his enemy, he reasoned that it would be all right to eat her food. It would make him strong, so he could fight her better.
He approached the desk and sat down in the chair. He was so hungry, his hands shook as he opened one of the ketchup packets. He removed a potato chip from the bag and dabbed it with two drops of ketchup, each the size of a dime. Then he put it in his mouth and quickly prepared another. He groaned as he chewed, his jaw humming.
From the corner of his eye he saw Tamara step forward. She was breaking her promise to stay far away from him, but he was too busy eating to protest.
“Whoa, slow down!” she said. “You’re going to choke!”
She let out a couple of high-pitched yelps. At first Michael thought they were cries of pain, but then he realized that Tamara was laughing. He had no idea why, and he didn’t care. He squeezed ketchup onto two more potato chips and put both in his mouth at the same time. Chewing rapidly, he mashed the chips into a damp doughy clump. Then he used his molars to divide the clump and began swallowing the pieces.
Tamara moved toward him until she was just a couple of feet away. “That’s better, isn’t it?” she said. “You look happy now. Very happy.”
Michael avoided looking at her. He kept his eyes on the tray and put another chip in his mouth. Then he reached for the can of Sprite and took a long drink.
“You have such an interesting face,” she said. “Your grandfather was from India, wasn’t he? I bet that’s where you got that beautiful black hair.”
She reached out and touched the side of his head. He felt the bandaged fingers of her left hand running through his hair, just above his right ear. Michael stopped chewing. She’d just broken another promise. He sat there motionless for several seconds. The damp potato-chip clump rested heavily on his tongue. He forced himself to swallow it.
“I know you haven’t had much happiness in your life, Michael. Brother Cyrus told me about all the pain and sadness you’ve been through. Like what happened to your grandfather two years ago. And your poor mother, Elizabeth. You must miss her so much.”
He didn’t want to talk about his mother. He reached into the bag of potato chips again and pulled out a handful.
“Cyrus told me she was an addict. And a prostitute. And that you lived with her until you were thirteen.” She moved her hand lower. Her bandages scratched the back of his neck. “Then your grandfather took you away from her. Which was the right thing to do, I suppose. But it must’ve been very difficult.”
Michael’s hands were shaking again. He managed to rip open another Heinz packet, but he squeezed it too hard. Ketchup splattered on the tray.
“It’s horrible to watch bad things happen to the people you love. Sometimes you just can’t help them. There’s nothing you can do.” Tamara’s hand slid to his shoulder. “Cyrus told me she died of an overdose. Of methamphetamine.”
He closed his eyes. His mother had died six months after he’d started living in New York. David Swift and Monique Reynolds had organized a memorial service for her. A minister in a black suit had stood behind a coffin of gleaming wood, so shiny that it reflected all the lights in the church. Michael had wanted to open the coffin so he could look at his mother one last time, and he began to scream when they wouldn’t let him. He didn’t calm down until David Swift told him the truth. Elizabeth, he said, had been dead for two weeks before they found her. Her body was already half gone. There was nothing left to see.
Tamara squeezed his shoulder. The sensation was unbearable. “I know what it’s like, Michael. My little brother Jack was an addict, too. He used to disappear for months at a time. I yelled myself hoarse, trying to get him to stop. But he didn’t listen. The last time I saw him, at the Greyhound station in Louisville, his face was yellow and half his teeth were gone. And there were track marks all over his arms.”
The grip on his shoulder tightened for a moment. Then Tamara let go. Michael took a deep breath, relieved that she was no longer touching him. He waited about ten seconds, then opened one eye and saw her leaning against the wall to the right of the desk. She stared at the cement floor and shook her head. “The worst part of it was, Jack used to be so beautiful. He had black hair just like yours, Michael. And the prettiest smile.”
He glanced at her face, daring a quick peek. Then she suddenly raised her head and looked straight at him. At the same time, she let out another high-pitched laugh. “But I have good news!” she shouted. “Wonderful news! I’m going to see Jack again very soon. And you’ll see your mother, and your grandfather, too!”
Her voice was too loud. Michael pushed his chair backward, trying to get away from her. She was smiling and pointing at the ceiling.
“This is what the Almighty has promised! He’s called on Brother Cyrus to open the Kingdom of Heaven, where we’ll joyfully reunite with all of our loved ones. With every single creature that the Lord has ever created! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” She looked up at the ceiling and stretched her hand toward it. Then she looked down at Michael. “You know about the Kingdom of Heaven, don’t you? Your mother must’ve told you about it, right?”
Michael had heard the word “heaven” before, of course. His mother had often used the phrase “stinks to high heaven.” And he once saw a children’s book that had a picture of heaven, a place in the sky where dead people wore wings and walked on the clouds. The minister at his mother’s memorial service had mentioned it, too, saying that Elizabeth’s soul had risen to heaven. But Michael knew that this was another exaggeration. There was no heaven in the sky. Above the earth were the layers of the atmosphere—troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere—and above those was the void of space. The earth revolved around the sun, and the sun sped through the Milky Way, and all the galaxies hurtled away from one another as the universe expanded at an ever-increasing rate. Michael had seen illustrations of all these things in The Concise Scientific Encyclopedia. But the book said nothing about heaven.
“It’s not in the sky,” Michael said. “If it were in the sky, astronomers would see it with their telescopes.”
Tamara laughed again, hurting his ears. “You’re right! It’s not in the sky. People have so many wrong ideas about heaven—they think it’s like Never Never Land, some magical place where their souls will go when they die. But that’s not what the Bible says.” She reached into the pocket of her fatigues and pulled out a small black book. “The Bible says the Lord will establish the Kingdom of Heaven after the Second Coming, the End of Days. At that holy hour, the Lord shall cast aside our fallen world and replace it with His kingdom. Then the dead shall be resurrected from their long sleep and we shall be at one with God.” She opened the small book and pointed to one of its pages. “It’s right here in Corinthians, chapter fifteen. In a moment, in a twinkling of the eye, the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible!”
Michael shook his head. He didn’t understand. “Dead people will come back to life?”
“Not just people, Michael. Everything will be resurrected. We live in a corrupt world, full of sin and death, but the Lord is giving us a chance now to redeem His Creation. He’s called on Brother Cyrus to hasten the coming of the End of Days. And in the Kingdom of Heaven, all the things that have lived and died in our broken world will be reborn. The whole history of the universe will come together in a single eternal moment, and we will live in God�
��s embrace forever!”
He shook his head again. “I still don’t—”
Tamara stepped behind Michael and grabbed the back of his chair. With a heave she dragged it to the left, positioning him directly in front of the computer screen. Then she leaned over his shoulder and hit the machine’s power switch. “It’s easier to show it to you here,” she said. “Brother Cyrus says you’re very good at mathematics, so you should be able to understand. These are the tools the Lord has given us to remake His Creation.”
The computer screen flashed blue, then displayed a translucent yellow sphere that slowly rotated around the word LOGOS. After a few seconds the rotating sphere vanished and a row of icons appeared on the screen. Tamara grasped the mouse and clicked on an icon that looked like a hydrogen atom, and then on an icon that looked like a star. Then her hands descended to the keyboard and she typed a series of passwords, moving her fingers so rapidly that they blurred over the keys.
“Here’s the first part,” she said. “These are the equations that Brother Cyrus pieced together from the FBI reports and the other intelligence sources. I think you’ll recognize them. They’re the formulas of the unified field theory. Or at least half of them.”
The equations came on the screen. At first Michael didn’t recognize them. Many of the symbols were unfamiliar—squiggles and bull’s-eyes and backward Bs and Zs. But he could identify the mathematical operations that the equations were performing, and after several seconds he saw that Tamara was telling the truth. The formulas on the computer screen corresponded to the memorized equations in Michael’s brain; the only difference was the notation used to write them down. Brother Cyrus possessed about half of the equations in the Einheitliche Feldtheorie. Although they were expressed in an alternative symbolic language, they were essentially the same.
“And this is the second part,” Tamara said, typing on the keyboard again. “Brother Cyrus hired a team of computer experts and they’ve been working on this program for the past year. They couldn’t complete it because they didn’t know all the equations in the unified theory. But now that you’re here, you can finish the job.”
She clicked on an icon that looked like an abacus. The computer monitor went black, showing nothing at all for several seconds. Then a block of software code emerged from the bottom of the screen. Hundreds of lines of instructions scrolled upward at a furious pace. The code rose so quickly to the top of the screen that Michael couldn’t read very much of it. He saw enough, though, to realize that it wasn’t an ordinary program. He was familiar with most of the common programming languages—he’d learned Java, FORTRAN, C++, and BASIC from studying the computers at the autism center—but the code he was looking at now was full of commands he’d never seen before. He leaned forward to take a closer look at the strange operators and variables: qubit, qureg, CNot, Hadamard . . .
“What kind of program is this?” Michael asked. As he stared at the code his forehead began to ache. “What does it do?”
“Brother Cyrus can explain it better than I can. He’ll be here tomorrow morning, so you can ask him then. But I can tell you what Cyrus told me.” She pointed at the screen and the rising tower of code. “This is the thing that locks the gate to God’s kingdom. And you hold the key, Michael. All you have to do is plug the missing equations into the code. Remember the Book of Isaiah? A child shall lead them.”
The ache in Michael’s forehead sharpened. It felt like a shard of glass had pierced his skull, just above his left eyebrow. He looked again at the lines of code and shook his head. “I can’t do it. I don’t know how.”
“Just think of it as a puzzle. You like to solve puzzles, don’t you?”
8
BROTHER CYRUS GAZED WITH WONDER AT THE SUNRISE. HE STOOD ON A hilltop in the Adraskan district, a desolate part of western Afghanistan where the Second Marine Expeditionary Brigade was battling the Taliban and the only patches of color amid the arid, stony landscape were the green fields of poppies being grown for the heroin trade. It was a no-man’s land in the truest sense—Marine Corps convoys sped along the district’s roads during the day and Taliban fighters descended the mountain trails at night, but the land itself belonged only to God. The jagged ridges and barren valleys were deserted now, and the sinful world of Man seemed far away. Cyrus shouted, “Hallelujah!” as he gazed at the scene. It was beautiful because the Lord had fashioned it, folding and crimping the brown earth with His mighty hands.
But no place in the world was entirely free of Man’s taint. The jihadis hid in their mud-walled compounds in the mountains while the Americans circled in their fighter jets overhead. Both sides claimed to be fighting for God, but in reality they were all foot soldiers in Satan’s army, vomiting their foulness on Creation. They’d corrupted this part of the world so thoroughly that Cyrus couldn’t wander alone here. One of his bodyguards stood on a neighboring hilltop a hundred yards away, and three more patrolled the surrounding terrain. His bodyguards were his closest followers, his True Believers. They shielded him every minute with their rifles and vigilance. He’d chosen them carefully, selecting only those with the strongest faith. They rejoiced in the tasks Cyrus assigned, because they knew the reward of eternal life awaited them.
He turned around and faced west, where the hills snaked toward the Iranian border, seventy miles away. Even the tools of the devil, Cyrus knew, could be used for holy purposes, and in this manner the Iranians had turned out to be quite useful. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards had been so eager to build their nuclear bomb that they were willing to negotiate with an outsider who could speed the development of the weapon. Cyrus had the expertise to help them—before he received the Lord’s call, he’d spent many years working with nuclear warheads. He still had friends and informants at the American and Russian military laboratories, so he’d had no trouble supplying the resources that the Iranians needed. And in return he’d received something much more valuable. The Iranian nuclear test had served as a grand experiment, and the results were nothing less than astonishing. Now Cyrus knew exactly how to carry out the Lord’s will.
Next, he turned to the north and raised his binoculars, fitting the eyepieces into the slit in his head scarf. About two miles away he saw a long line of Humvees speeding northwest on a two-lane highway. There were also more than forty U.S. Army trucks on the road, including a dozen heavy-duty flatbeds carrying tarpaulin-covered loads. Cyrus smiled as he observed the convoy, which was so long that it took several minutes to pass. He knew that these weren’t ordinary American soldiers. He was looking at the First Battalion of the 75th Ranger Regiment, one of the Special Operations forces commanded by Lieutenant General Sam McNair. They were headed for Turkmenistan, the Central Asian country to the north of Iran, where the final battle against Satan’s army would begin.
Thanks to his informants in the U.S. Special Operations Command, Cyrus knew about Cobra, the secret plan to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities from the north. Unlike the border between Iran and Afghanistan, where the Revolutionary Guards had positioned hundreds of antiaircraft missiles, Iran’s border with Turkmenistan was lightly defended. Sensing an opportunity, the Americans had brokered a clandestine deal with Turkmenistan’s president-for-life, a tin-pot dictator who was in desperate need of hard currency. In exchange for a substantial payment to his Swiss bank account, the president-for-life would allow the U.S. Army Rangers to quietly enter his country and travel to a hidden staging point near the Iranian border. Once the assault group was in place, it would launch the surprise attack on the nuclear installation.
Cyrus kept his binoculars trained on the convoy until he saw nothing but the cloud of dust in their wake. In less than an hour the Ranger battalion would reach the Afghan city of Herat, where they would hunker down until nightfall. Then they would cross into Turkmenistan under the cover of darkness and advance to the staging point. And Brother Cyrus would follow them, leading his much smaller convoy of True Believers. Everything was proceeding according to the Lord’s plan. The path t
o Redemption lay straight ahead.
Finally, Cyrus lowered his binoculars and turned back to the east. The high peaks of the Hindu Kush were hundreds of miles away, too far to be glimpsed as even a faint blue smudge, but he sensed their presence over the horizon. That was the place where the Lord had blessed him, while he was a prisoner in the bowels of Hades. In a cave underneath Gazarak Mountain, near the Afghan-Pakistani border, Satan’s foot soldiers had tortured him with ingenious cruelty. For three long days they’d maimed his body and violated his soul, driving him into a state of such helpless agony that his mind broke and his faith crumbled. Stripped of all hope, he became a man without God, a naked, bleeding animal yearning only for death. And then, during one of the rare intervals when his torturers allowed him a few minutes of sleep, the Lord showed His face. Cyrus saw it floating above him, just inches away. He recognized it instantly. It was radiant with love.
Several years had passed since then, but Cyrus could still see the Lord’s face when he closed his eyes. He saw it now as he stood on the hilltop: a face that was neither white nor black, neither broad nor thin, neither young nor old. A face that showed all human features at once. A face that had never appeared in the flesh but would be familiar to even the smallest child.
With his eyes closed, Cyrus unwrapped his head scarf. He wished to stand face-to-face with his God, even though his own features were sinful and hideous. As he removed the black fabric he felt the rays of the early-morning sun on his cheeks. Tossing the scarf aside, he knelt on the stony ground and lowered his head.
“Lord of Hosts, Lord of Glory,” he whispered. “We humbly seek Your aid. Give us the strength to carry out Your will. Guide our hands so we can bring Your loving Redemption to this corrupt world. And guide our hearts so we can enter Your heavenly kingdom without shame.” His voice cracked. His throat was parched from the desert air. “Oh Lord, You are so close! In a short while we will open the gates of heaven and stand before You! We will kneel by Your throne and behold Your blessed face!”