The Shroud of Heaven

by Sean Ellis

  His fleeting glimpse into the shadows that surrounded that group had left him with more questions than answers, but what little he did know drove him deeper into the mystery. He knew that the Eiffel Tower was some kind of observatory, and that it would be a focal point for some experiment connected to atomic testing. Everything else was supposition.

  When in 1886 Alexandre Gustave Eiffel had submitted the plans for his entry in a competition to build a tower to celebrate French progress on the occasion of the centennial celebration of the revolution, he could not have imagined it would have anything to do with nuclear physics. Or could he? The architect, who in 1877 had designed the steel skeleton for the magnificent statue Liberty Enlightening the World, a gift from France to the United States of America, known universally as the Statue of Liberty, was without question a genius, but had his namesake tower been designed with an ulterior motive in mind?

  Chiron had come to believe that Eiffel too had been a member of the secret society of intellectuals, and that his tower reflected advance knowledge of the coming atomic age. More than that, he believed that Eiffel, and all the others in the inner circle, had known what he now knew: the Divine Entity, worshiped by many, reviled by some, resided in the earth’s magnetic field. An amalgam of charged photons and human psychic energy, God existed because of the faith of his followers and the unalterable constant of global magnetic force.

  But global magnetism wasn’t a constant. The charged poles were constantly shifting, changing the location of compass north. Moreover, recent experiments had shown that it was possible to obliterate the Van Allen radiation belts—the electromagnetic shroud which separated heaven from earth, and was, Chiron believed, the abode of the Entity.

  They had known it—Eiffel and his co-conspirators. Perhaps knowledge of the secret went back to the dawn of civilization, to the builders of the Tower of Babel itself, who said among themselves: “Let us build a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven.” They had tapped into that inexhaustible source, creating miracles which could only be described as magic. But Eiffel and the others had gone a step further.

  Chiron tried to recall what Kismet had said that day as they rolled along the highway toward Baghdad: We are the Chains of God….

  The memory was suddenly painful. Unbidden, the image of the cavern and the blank wall of steel with which he—he, Pierre Chiron who had sworn an oath to watch over that young man—had entombed Nick Kismet and left him to die.

  “This too, I lay at your feet,” he whispered. “And you will pay.”

  He had manhandled the stretcher into the turret and positioned it at the exact center of the structure. Now safely out of the line of sight of any observers, he could work undisturbed. He laid aside the ersatz trigger and began removing pieces from the device itself. A globe of black metal, the plutonium core of a Russian warhead, lay innocuously beside the French-designed Iraqi detonator. The nuclear fuel was relatively safe in this form; unlike the unstable isotopes of uranium that had powered the first atomic weapons, plutonium was not neutron heavy. The greatest threat to safety was a very high risk of lung cancer if particles of the element were inhaled, but Pierre Chiron knew that cancer would not be the cause of his death.

  ***

  The Eurocopter AS 565UB “Panther” roared above the city of lights like a Valkyrie charging toward an epic battlefield. Its twin Turbomeca Ariel 2C engines screamed like those mythical creatures, hungry for the flesh of dead warriors. The image was oddly appropriate; if the aircraft did not reach its destination in time, the streets of Paris would resemble the aftermath of Ragnarok—the Norse equivalent of Armageddon.

  Unlike Rebecca and the other DGSE commandos, Kismet didn’t have a flight helmet or even a headset to both muffle the harsh noise of the engines and keep him informed of their progress. The latter point was of little consequence. Their objective lay centered in the cockpit windscreen, stabbing heavenward and continuously sweeping the night with a blazing searchlight.

  It was impossible to know if they would reach the Eiffel Tower before Chiron activated his bomb. Every soul aboard the helicopter knew that at any moment the famed monument might erupt with the brilliance of a thousand suns, erasing them and the City of Light from existence, yet here they were rushing toward ground zero.

  Rebecca leaned close and shouted in his ear. “He hasn’t made any demands! The police say that he has a dead-man switch. If we try to kill him, it may trigger the device!”

  The words stunned Kismet. Kill Pierre? Despite what the old man had done to him, he had never expected that it would come down to that. He tapped the side of her helmet, indicating that he wished to answer. “You have to let me speak with him! Maybe I can talk him out of it!”

  Rebecca’s expression was grim and doubtful. “He tried to kill you! What makes you think he will want to listen now?”

  That stopped him. Chiron was no longer a creature of reason. What could Kismet possibly say that would turn him from his meticulously thought out endgame? If he could not convince Pierre to abort his scheme, what other options were there?

  He gestured for one of the commandoes to give up a headset, and at a nod from Rebecca, the man surrendered the earmuffs to Kismet. The foam insulation reduced some of the noise, but he still had to shout into the lip mic to be heard. “I’ve got an idea.”

  Rebecca stared in disbelief as he sketched out his plan, and when he had finished, shook her head. “Is that even possible?”

  “It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that Pierre has to believe we have done it. If we can do this, we’ll take away the only reason he’s up there.”

  No less incredulous, she shrugged in resignation. “What do you need?”

  Kismet took a deep breath before answering. He knew she was right. It was a crazy, desperate plan, and there was no way to know if it would be enough to disarm Chiron. But even a bad plan was better than simply waiting for the blade to fall.

  ***

  The Panther flared above the vast greenspace, two hundred meters from the base of the Tower. On a normal night, the area would be thick with tourists wandering through the Champ de Mars and lovers picnicking on blankets, but tonight those crowds had been pushed back another three hundred meters beyond the helicopters landing zone. The gendarmes controlling the scene knew only that a madman had ascended to the summit possibly with some kind of bomb, and believed five hundred meters to be an adequate margin of safety. Ghoulish spectators could rarely be persuaded to leave such a drama completely. No one on the ground could have imagined that the minimum safe distance that night would be not five hundred meters, but fifty thousand.

  Rebecca and Kismet hit the ground before the Panther’s wheels touched down and hastened toward a line of waiting vehicles just inside the perimeter. A dozen men stood nervously in front of the four utility trucks, each wearing workman’s coveralls and molded plastic hard hats. One of the men—his hat was white instead of yellow—moved forward to greet them.

  Kismet cut short the introductions and launched into a repeat of his earlier monologue. The chief engineer’s eyes grew wide as he spoke, but he waited until Kismet had finished to voice his concerns. “Monsieur, what you suggest—making the tower into an enormous solenoid—even if it could be done, it might tear the tower apart.”

  Kismet glanced at the brightly lit grid work towering above them. It was difficult to believe anything short of an atomic bomb could bring down the ten-thousand-ton structure. But the engineer continued. “You must understand. The tower, like any steel building, is aligned with the earth’s magnetic field. If you try to reverse the polarity, the tower will want to repel… It will try to flip over.”

  “We’ll have to take that chance,” Kismet declared. “It may not be the best idea, but I need to know if you can do it?”

  The man frowned, then glanced back at his team. “Oui. It can be done. We need perhaps… two hours?”

  “Try to do it in one. That’s about how long it will take for me to climb those s
tairs.”

  The engineer shook his head as he turned away, but immediately began shouting orders to his men. Kismet started moving in the opposite direction.

  “The lift is still operational,” Rebecca pointed out, racing to match his brisk pace.

  “Then disable it. We need to buy some time. Once Pierre knows I’m coming up, he’ll hold off taking any action.”

  “Nick, there is something else that I need to tell you.” She waited until she had his full attention, then took a deep breath. “That matter you asked me to investigate when we were back at Chiron's apartment. Your suspicions were correct.”

  For a moment, Kismet struggled to grasp what she was talking about. Then he remembered and swore under his breath. “I need to call her.”

  ***

  Buttrick almost jumped out of his skin when the telephone rang. The brief conversation with his friend at the Pentagon had not gone well and now he was… Damn it, I’m actually afraid. What kind of hornet’s nest had he stirred up?

  Nick Kismet, former 2LT in the Army Reserves, had an open file at the Defense Department, flagged for immediate action. Anyone who even attempted to look at the file came away with a big bull’s eye on their back. Who is this guy? Buttrick wondered, not for the first time.

  He allowed Marie to answer and held his breath as she spoke in French. The telephone call was not the “black spot” he had been expecting.

  “Nick?” A pause. “Mon dieu… oui…oui… Très bien. We will meet you there.”

  Buttrick could barely contain himself. As soon as she returned the handset to the cradle, he asked, “Well?”

  “That was Nick. We must go now.”

  ***

  Chiron had just finished connecting the timer mechanism to the primary when the public address speakers crackled to life. They had made several attempts to communicate with him. They used his name now, which was, he supposed, a good thing. They would know that he was no amateur, and would therefore make no hasty attempt to storm the tower and disarm him. He had been a little anxious about the helicopter that had set down to the southeast a few minutes before, but nothing had happened subsequent to its arrival.

  He ignored the hum of amplified sound and began keying in the time delay sequence. No sense in prolonging the inevitable, he thought. Acting on a perverse impulse, he punched in one digit three times: 6:66.

  “Pierre, this is Nick.”

  Chiron’s finger hovered above the ‘start’ button, motionless, but every cell in his body seemed to be quivering. Nick is alive! But that’s not possible.

  He was in that instant both overjoyed and filled with despair, torn between the love of a father for a son who has been rescued from the lion’s jaws and the guilt for having been the instrument of that peril.

  “Pierre, I need to talk to you. I know what you are doing, and what you think… what you have to do. I’m not going to do anything but talk, but there is something you need to know before you do this.”

  And then, something new was added to the stir. Chiron ignored the amplified voice issuing from the speakers and directed his gaze out over the night. “You did this,” he rasped, his joy turning to bile. “It’s just your self-defense mechanism. You’re no better than an animal.”

  Kismet, unaware of the imprecations, continued speaking. “The police have turned off the elevators so I’m going to have to climb the stairs. It’s going to take me a while, Pierre, maybe an hour. Please let me come up. Give me an hour, Pierre. I’m on my way up now.”

  “You saved him, just so he could stop me.” Chiron’s voice was taut. The thread holding his rage in check vibrated in his throat like a piano wire tuned too tightly and ready to snap. “You could do that, but you couldn’t give her what she asked for? What she begged for?”

  He lowered his gaze to the number pad for the timer. His finger was still poised above the start button. He moved it back to the six and pressed the numeral once more, then without hesitation, started the countdown. “Save yourself now. If you can.”

  ***

  Kismet had heard Parisian tour guides tell visitors that there were 1,792 steps to the summit of the Eiffel Tower, a number that commemorated the year of the birth of the French Republic. The tower engineer he had spoken with before beginning his ascent gave the official number, starting at ground level, as 1,665. The real number was probably somewhere in-between, but by any reckoning, the task of climbing more than eighty stories worth of stairs was not for the faint—or weak—of heart.

  Kismet was already weary as he topped the first flight, nearly four hundred steps, and was beginning to wonder if he had not erred in deciding not to make use of the elevators. At the time, it had seemed to best way to delay Chiron from executing his mad scheme, but now he was wondering if he had the stamina to make the three hundred meter vertical journey. Fifteen minutes had passed since he had made his plea to Chiron for one hour, and while he had not immediately commenced the climb, he now would be hard pressed to meet that deadline.

  But as he left the first level, he caught his second wind and began making steady-if-plodding progress. His conscious effort at breath control had the added benefit of helping focus his thoughts, and the enormity of what he was now marching toward no longer filled him with dread. His entire world consisted of nothing more than putting one foot ahead of the other, and before he knew it, he reached the second level, where the Jules Verne restaurant was located. Like almost every foreign visitor to Europe, Kismet had visited the Tower, but he had never seen it like this, completely deserted. If was as if the world had ended, and he was the sole survivor. Shaking off the dark image, he proceeded to the locked gate that secured the stairway to the uppermost level, and opened it using a key provided by the chief engineer.

  A few minutes later, a figure that had gone unnoticed by Kismet, moved out of the shadowy stillness and softly padded up the stairs behind him.

  Eighteen

  Chiron sat with sphinx-like calm at the top of the short flight up to the turret, the highest accessible point on the tower. Kismet kept a wary eye on his former mentor as he unlocked the gate at the end of the east pillar stairway, but said nothing until he was only a few meters away.

  It was an awkward moment, and Kismet sensed that Chiron felt it as well. Finally, he broke the stalemate with a gesture toward the Frenchman’s hands. “They said you had a dead-man switch.”

  Chiron glanced at his empty palms. “A necessary deception. It was the only thing that kept them back.”

  “Christ, Pierre, what are you doing?”

  The impassive mask cracked, but Chiron kept his composure. He gave a heavy sigh. “I’m glad you made it out of Iraq. Is Marie…?”

  “Marie is safe. Hussein didn’t make it.”

  “I’m sorry,” was the hoarse reply. A shadow fell over Chiron’s eyes, but then he straightened, as if once more finding his resolve. “I’m sorry you made it through that, only to come to this. I have to do this, Nick, and I think you know why.”

  “Because of Collette?” Kismet chose his words carefully. Chiron was beyond the reach of ordinary logic. “You believe that you can strike a blow against God—against the entity you believe occupies the earth’s magnetic field—because he let Collette die. Is that right, Pierre?”

  Chiron gave a sad, almost embarrassed smile. “It sounds absurd when you put it that way.”

  “Absurd? It’s obscene, Pierre. You’re willing to kill two million people just because you’re disappointed in a God you don’t even believe in?” He shot a surreptitious glance at his wristwatch. Fifty-eight minutes had elapsed since he had given the chief engineer his task. He could only hope that the job was done.

  Chiron’s smile did not falter, but something behind it changed, as though his blood had turned to acid. “Two million?”

  It was not the response Kismet had been expecting, and something about the way he said it made Kismet realize that he had underestimated both Chiron’s resolve and the magnitude of his scheme.

&
nbsp; Chiron continued speaking, a condemned man explaining his crimes, if not quite confessing and asking forgiveness. “Everything we know is a lien illusion created by our symbiosis with this… this thing called God. We have given Him life through generation after generation of faith, and He in turn has become a keystone to our continued existence.

  “The men who built this tower understood this all too well. With it, they sought to enslave the entity, to hold God in chains and bend him to their will. But like the banderillas of the bullfighter, this tower is an open wound in its body. What I do here today will not simply twist the knife, it will drive the blade to the very heart of God. And when it dies….”

  Kismet felt numb. He didn’t know if he believed what Chiron was saying, didn’t know if all of the wild speculation about God living in the Van Allen Belts held even a grain of truth. It was easy to say that, sane or not, Chiron was threatening the lives of more than a million Parisians who would be obliterated in an atomic fireball, but underlying that very real concern Kismet felt a growing dread. What if he’s right? What if the very fate of the world rests on this moment?

  “You would kill everyone on earth to avenge Collette? How can you imagine for even a second that she would want that?”

  “Everyone dies, Nick. Most people live miserably short lives, filled with pain and futility. Whom do you blame for that? You think I do this because of what happened to Collette? You are mistaken. I do this to avenge every soul who has ever died wondering why their beloved Holy Father has forsaken them.”