Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  With a sigh he realized that such messages were all he could do in that theater for now. He hoped even that much didn’t sound so paranoid that it would be ignored.

  Beyond all that, however, what Retticker had said was enough to keep Jim soldiering on. He knew he’d be awake with these matters all night. He examined the high-security measures the Saudis had put in place at the Great Mosque. He researched the history of that place, and the warnings that history gave of other “rogue elements.” Of the several hundred Sunni radicals—many of them connected with the Saudi national guard—who, under Najdi family scion Juhaiman ibn Muhammad ibn Saif al Utaiba, had captured the Great Mosque complex on November 20, 1979. Of their taking hundreds of pilgrims hostage and so thoroughly stymieing the Saudi security forces that French paratroopers were called in to help recover the complex—after a two-week siege in which 250 people died, including 127 Saudi troops.

  The Saudis had eventually beheaded sixty-seven captured militants for participating in the uprising. Ever since, as the divinely designated “Defenders of the Two Holy Mosques,” the Saudis had been very sensitive to security issues in Mecca and Medina. They were especially so now, what with the Shia in Iran and around the Gulf once again questioning their competence.

  The sort of frontal assault Juhaiman al Utaiba had made nearly forty years ago could stand little chance of succeeding against current security. What might, though? Missiles? Suicide bombers?

  No nation-state he could think of would purposely launch a missile attack on the holiest shrine of Islam, unless the world situation had already gone completely over the brink, into the sort of apocalyptic endgame Otis apparently envisioned. Thankfully, despite all that had happened on the Temple Mount, despite the fever-pitched tensions between Israel and Syria and Iran, no one seemed to be that crazy.

  Not even in an Arab world balkanized and gamed by Great Power players for more than two centuries.

  Might it go that crazy? The history of Arab and Muslim states in regard to the Palestinians had always been complicated. Their refugee status, all that. And no one ever did much to prevent or avenge the massacres at Sabra and Shatila—where the Christians were involved, too—all those years ago.

  You never knew, though. It might come down to who were the greatest pariahs: the Israelis, the Palestinians, or the Americans. Syria and Iran, maybe other Muslim states—they all might now have reached put-up-or-shut-up time. He just hoped what they “put up” didn’t turn out to be nuclear-tipped missiles, because then the Israelis would put ‘em up, too.

  Looking for any kind of silver lining to such lowering clouds, he consoled himself that, at the Great Mosque, the Saudis already had up and running the best explosives and biowar detection equipment in the world. No appreciable quantity of any known explosive or even highly flammable substance could pass through the Saudi safeguards unnoticed, not even if it were hidden inside the body of a human bomber. The same was true for all known biowar agents. Even should someone manage to suborn the security personnel, the simple ritual clothing the Hajj pilgrims wore would work against the likelihood of a successful suicide bombing, too, since no really threatening amount of explosive material could be concealed beneath it.

  Even if someone—Zaragosa, say?—were bent on revenge through some sort of spectacular symbolic violence—like blowing up the Kaaba?—even if someone could get through, what could he really do, with no weapons and no explosives? Set himself on fire? How, with no fuel?

  Spontaneous human combustion, Jim joked wryly to himself. The more he thought about it, however, the less a joke it became. During the Kwok-Cho affair, Jaron Kwok had managed to vanish in something more than “a puff of smoke”—something that looked rather like spontaneous combustion.

  Despite the lateness of the hour, he phoned Wang, Lingenfelter, and Amaral. He was unable to reach Dan, but he got hold of Steve and Bree. Within an hour they had joined him in his office. After making the appropriate apologies for such midnight-oil madness, he began to lay out his concerns to them.

  “I wouldn’t have bothered you to come down here at this hour if I hadn’t recalled receiving information, some time back, that Doctor Vang and George Otis were funding research into the debunking of spontaneous human combustion. What I want to know is: Would it be possible to turn the ‘anomalous ignition’ Jaron Kwok suffered into a weapon?”

  Lingenfelter and Wang glanced in perplexity at each other.

  “We’re not even sure it was an ignition,” Steve said. “Most of our colleagues favor the idea that Kwok was, in essence, turned into a human palimpsest, written over by information from a parallel universe. I don’t see what you’re getting at.”

  “I mean, would it be possible to turn someone into a human bomb? Not by taking an explosive device and strapping it onto him or stuffing it into him, but by creating something that would completely bypass all bomb-detection equipment…by turning the body itself into an explosive device. Is that possible?”

  Wang and Lingenfelter glanced at each other again.

  “Explosion is just fast combustion,” Bree said with a shrug. “I suppose if you could accomplish the slow version you could also achieve the fast one.”

  Wang nodded.

  “If you could instantaneously convert a human body entirely to energy, the result would probably have a yield in at least the high-kiloton range. But the idea that you could make someone into a ‘meat bomb’ or a ‘body bomb’…just the thought of it makes my head explode, so to speak.”

  “Very funny,” Jim said. “But I do recall that some in my predecessor’s Instrumentality cabal were very big on what they called ‘controlled cryptastrophes’ and ‘virtualization bombs.’”

  Wang and Lingenfelter squirmed uncomfortably in their chairs, at the same time, as if struck by the same thought.

  “Well?”

  “There is a way your human bomb might happen,” Steve Wang said. Bree Lingenfelter nodded in agreement.

  “How?”

  “The plenum physicists believe the total number of universes is essentially infinite,” Bree said, “but with the peculiarity that, from within any given universe, only that particular universe may be considered ‘real.’ All of the others are at best only ‘virtual.’ For a variety of reasons stemming from quantum entanglement and teleportation effects, displacement from real to virtual would most likely result in annihilation of the quantum cryptographic device and an area of some specifically calculable size around it.”

  Jim nodded slowly.

  “Might that displacement area be about the size of a human body?”

  “It might,” Steve said. “Though for entanglement and teleportation to cause such a displacement or parallel-universe overwrite, and the corresponding annihilation, it would require all the DNA in the ‘bomber’s’ body to function as a quantum computational system.”

  “‘A universe-bandwidth quantum Turing machine based on the interaction of binotech and DNA,’”

  Brescoll said, quoting his predecessor, “‘and capable of handling unprecedented densities of information.’”

  Wang and Lingenfelter nodded.

  “In a weird way it would be the mirror opposite of the telemorphy work Michelson was doing with the Mawari children,” Wang said, newly struck by the idea, and seemingly still in the process of working it out in his own mind.

  “Mirror opposite? How so?”

  “The quantum telemorphy state-sharing that Michelson was working on, according to his notes, was like the kind of nonlinear memory that appears when two standing waves merge, travel as one for a time, and then separate into their two former selves again. In the annihilation case, though, what would ordinarily be a wave of translation instantaneously interacts with its self-generated mirror opposite, as it were. The state-sharing results in destructive self-interference.”

  “Wouldn’t conservation of energy, or information, or something like that prevent such a thing from happening?” Jim asked.

  “Normally, yes,” Steve
said. “Quantum teleportation doesn’t transport a whole particle from one place to another but rather teleports the quantum state of a particle at one location to a particle at a different location. The quantum state of the original particle is destroyed, but that same quantum state is reincarnated on another particle at the destination, without the original having to cross any intervening distance. But in the annihilation case, it’s as if the original particle is destroyed, without its quantum state being able to find anywhere else to be reincarnated. A ghost, permanently virtual, never incarnating in any universe, passed over by an infinitude of universes.”

  Lingenfelter nodded with considerable enthusiasm, given the hour of night.

  “What Steve’s suggesting resembles matter-antimatter annihilation, in a way,” Bree said. “Particles, waves—the effect would be much the same. Even such quantum-state oblivion would leave a trace, though. Your human bomb’s explosion would be that trace, as the quantum device inside him oblivioned itself.”

  “This quantum device…could it be small enough to be implanted in a human body? Obscure enough to escape detection in a quick security X-ray?”

  Lingenfelter and Wang glanced at each other, then nodded, almost reluctantly.

  Jim whistled softly as the shadow of what he feared began to take on substance.

  “Can you think of any way to detect such an implant, chemically?”

  Wang looked at Lingenfelter.

  “That’s a tough one,” Bree said. “Most of the components could be made of silicon, silica, or silicate.

  Silicon is the most common element in the earth’s crust. Silica occurs naturally as quartz, sand, flint, agate, lots of others—and artificially in everything from glass to concrete. If the quantum DNA effect is triggered by a nonimmunogenic binotech implant—silica nanoparticles doped with organics, say—that would still make it difficult to distinguish them from any of a large number of abundant natural silicates that contain organic radicals.”

  Jim nodded. It would be like looking for a few particular grains of sand in the desert vastness of the Empty Quarter.

  “Have your people narrow it down for me on the organics, if they can. How about blocking the signal that triggers the implant?”

  “Doable,” Wang said, “if you know the nature of the signal. If you don’t know where it’s coming from, where it’s going to, when it’s going to be sent, or what its frequency is—at the very least—then we’ll have a heck of a time picking it out of the background noise.”

  “Do we know any of that information?” Bree asked.

  Jim pondered that a moment before answering.

  “Only when it’s going to be sent, and where it’s most likely to be originating from.”

  His two best scientific advisers looked expectantly at him. He exhaled slowly, before he spoke.

  “Most likely it’ll be sent from the vicinity of the Kaaba in the Great Mosque at Mecca. On September eleven.”

  He didn’t need to say any more. Steve and Bree nodded, fully aware of the gravity of the situation. They made no complaints as their discussion ended and they excused themselves in order to get to work. As his advisers were going out the door of his office, however, Jim overheard Bree mutter about how there just wasn’t enough time, not with the countdown to zero soon to be measurable not in days but in hours.

  Yes, he thought as he stared at his desktop. Not enough time.

  He was just about to call it a night—or an early morning—when he looked up at a noise to see Dan Amaral stumble in, hollow-eyed and clutching a cup of coffee. Jim frowned.

  “I know, I know,” Dan said. “Day late and a dollar short. I was reviewing interrogation vids of all the people taken into custody at Wabar—for ten hours straight, yesterday. I turned off all my contact machines so I could get some sleep. Sorry. What’s going on? I thought I saw Bree and Steve leaving the building. Mind bringing me up to speed?”

  Grudgingly, Jim recapped his discussions with Retticker, and Wang, and Lingenfelter. As he was finishing up the review, however, a couple of thoughts occurred to him.

  “Dan, that woman CSS took into custody at Wabar, the meteoriticist—”

  “Vida Nasr?”

  “Yes, that’s the one. She can identify Zaragosa?”

  “So she claims.”

  “Think she might be willing to go to Mecca to ID him?”

  “Hmm! That’s odd. She’s already suggested as much herself. You gotten psychic in your old age, or what?”

  “Not that I know of. We need to talk with her, though.”

  “We’ve got her in Riyadh, at the moment. She’s got family in the Gulf. She could travel with her brother to Mecca, if it came to that.”

  “We may need her to do more than just serve as our eyes and ears in the Holy City, too.”

  “If she’ll do it,” Amaral said. “Anything else?”

  “Yes. Victor Fremdkunst seems to have been one of the people Otis rescued. Back around the time I brought you into this whole meteorite mess, I seem to recall you saying something about Fremdkunst having a research camp in Israel, some Sodom and Gomorrah–linked thing…”

  “Near the Big and Little Craters, yes. What about it?”

  “I’m thinking some of our people who are missing in action might have ended up there.”

  Amaral nodded.

  “Might be worth hooking up with the Israelis and checking that place out, too,” he agreed. “But there’s not a lot of time before the drop-dead date.”

  “I’m well aware of that. It’ll just have to be enough time, for all our sakes.”

  PURER VENGEANCE

  After the gravel plain of Abu Bahr, flat and featureless, after the dead bushes in the wind-bent sands, after passing beneath the shadow of Saudi Arabia’s second-highest mountain, Ibrahim Jebel, along the dry riverbed of the Wadi Turabah, after all that, coming into Taif was a blessing beyond measure.

  Or so Avram felt, anyway, as he and Mahmoud rode out of the desert of the Najd. Their battered bodies on their battered ATVs were welcomed at last by cool breezes as they climbed the Taif-Jeddah Escarpment Road, to the city nestled between granite hills on the eastern slope of the Hijaz, a mile and more above sea level.

  They were welcomed, too, by the guards who checked their papers. “Checked” was the word, for the officers gave those documents only the most cursory of glances, especially after Mahmoud began regaling them with the story of how he and his comrade from South America, Ibrahim Fayez, rejoiced to have now come to Taif—the traditional gateway for pilgrims headed east on Hajj to Mecca—after traveling by night, for weeks, on ATVs, from deep in the sands of the Rub’ al-Khali.

  The chief of the men who stopped them was a fellow sporting an extravagant black mustache, and whose uniform stopped where it gave way to the traditional red-and-white kaffiyeh head cloth. He proudly informed them that he was of the Banu Thaqif people. Although he and his people had long since settled into a life of industrious farming, herding, and trade, they still had a broad and deep reverence for the desert and the ancient ways. To him, what Avram and Mahmoud had done was equal parts heroic, spiritual, and spit-in-the-eye-of-fate crazy.

  So it was that—no matter how much Avram might have wanted to stay out of the spotlight—the two travelers entered the city of Taif, official summer seat of the Saudi government, under escort of local representatives of that same government.

  Despite the fact that Taif was a city of some 350,000 souls now swollen to nearly double that by bureaucrats, summer tourists, and hajjis, the story of two men who had accomplished the Empty Quarter crossing to Mecca, at night and on ATVs—that was worthy of at least local press attention. Or so the extravagantly mustached officer believed, as he happily cell-phoned contacts in the local media to inform them that he and his “special friends” were coming into town.

  Providing Mahmoud and Avram with hands-free two-way radio headsets so that he might serve as their guide, the mustached officer drove his government-issue car behind them as
they proceeded, at his direction, on their sandstorm-blasted ATVs. Navigating streets lined with palms and oleanders, they passed through a city of modern government offices of marble and glass—the King’s Office, the Council of Ministers, Ministries too numerous to mention. Buildings where, according to Mahmoud, the Taif accords ending the war in Lebanon had been negotiated, and where the Kuwaiti government in exile had been housed during the Gulf War of 1990–91—all cheek by jowl with old mud edifices fronted with carved wooden doors and wooden louvre windows.

  They passed the rambling Great Mosque on King Faisal Street before coming into the center of the city.

  There, amid the most traditional buildings, they passed the markets with their Bedouin Taif souqs, where shopkeepers bargained with customers over the prices of Bedu carpets and jewelry, souvenirs, gold, silver, spices—and very non-Bedu electronics and French perfumes.

  The sight of the souqs led the officer to tell them about the most celebrated of all the annual market fairs of ancient Arabia, the Suq Okaz, to which by camel and donkey had come spices, perfumes, produce, rugs, camel-hair tents, sheepskins, jewelry, and pottery. Where, two thousand years before poetry-slams and battles-of-the-bands, poets and singers boasted their talents in combats lyrical rather than bloody.

  As the officer guided them on a circuitous route through the city—pointing out to them particularly the white Shubra Palace, summer residence of King Abdul Aziz, the founder of the modern Arabian Kingdom, who had died in Taif in 1953—it became clear to Avram how proud the man was of this town, whose name (as he told them) meant “encompassing” in Arabic.

  Certainly his knowledge of the place seemed so, as he exclaimed on the dammed wadis and terraced fields that had made possible the area’s many crops, among them the pomegranates, roses, grapes, and light golden honey it had produced seemingly forever. He dwelt particularly on the sweet red roses and the rose farmers, human bees who from ancient times had gathered petals and sent them by camel caravan to Mecca, where they were pressed into attar for perfumes famous throughout the Islamic world.