Critical Mass

by Whitley Strieber

  “Tell him,” Gloria said.

  “Shut up!”

  “You tell me if you know, Gloria, and you’ll be spared the needle.”

  Her eyes were furtive now, stopping at the door, stopping at the window. The parrot flew round and round, his cries as precise as a metronome.

  She lifted a hand, as if to capture the bird. “He’ll fly into the window!”

  Jim braced the pistol in her face. “Last night, Arthur burned sixty thousand or so children to death.” He had made up the number. “So you can understand why I don’t give a shit about the damn bird.”

  “Don’t tell him anything,” Arthur snarled.

  Jim put the muzzle of the gun against Arthur’s knee. “This will blow your leg in two.”

  “I’ll go into shock.”

  “She knows, Arthur. And I know she knows. So your life no longer matters.”

  Arthur closed his eyes. “We had an ONI officer come down here. He met with me and we went over to Piedras Negras together and had dinner with Vasquez. That night, I was ordered to stand the bridge detail down for twenty-five minutes between four and five in the morning, which I did. I saw men in the river; then I heard noises under the structure. That was it.”

  “The ONI officer showed a badge?”

  “He sure did, and it checked out.”

  “You did a GSA secure database run? You personally compared the officer to the photograph?”

  “It was the same guy.”

  “Name?”

  “His name is Franklin Isbard Matthews. He’s in ONI security, works out of Washington.”

  Probably a real person who had no idea that he was following orders generated by the enemy. In other words, a dead end, not even worth following.

  The parrot flew past screaming and Jim reached up and caught the little green guy, and carefully returned him to its cage.

  “God, you’re fast.”

  “Fast,” Jim responded without interest. He pushed the gun into his belt. “Thanks for the piece.” He would not leave them bound. They were useless now, and nothing they could do would change anything.

  As he left, though, he went along the side of the building until he found their phone line. He ripped it out and shattered the switch box with his heel. Then he stepped into the yard, backed up until he could see their satellite dish. He drew the gun from his waist, aimed it, and fired. This produced a deafening roar and the predictable hard kick. But he was practiced with many pistols, and he loved a .45 automatic, and one of the reasons was what happened on the roof, as the dish and its box of electronics shattered into dozens of pieces, accompanied by another scream from Gloria and the cries of grackles that rose from the mesquite trees surrounding the house.

  He went to the Kenneallys’ car, opened the hood, and pulled off the distributor cap. Taking it with him, he faded back into the brush, moving as if he was angling toward the road their property fronted on. He passed mesquites and cacti, inhaling the dry air, faintly sweet with autumn rot, the smell of the ripe mesquite beans the grackles were eating.

  When he was invisible from the house, he shifted direction, and headed for the actual location of his car, a little-used fence road two miles back on a neighboring ranch. On the way, he tossed the distributor cap aside.

  When he got to his car, he opened the bottle of water he’d left on the seat and drank it down, then ate the power bar he’d bought after he’d crossed the river. His first stop had been Piedras Negras, where Mr. Vasquez and his entire family now lay dead in their house. Unpleasant task. Horrible, even. But Jim was past caring about small deaths.

  He pushed away the memory of their struggles, the plump wife, the twenty-year-old son with the eyes of a rodent, and Vasquez himself, flapping his hands as if Jim were an annoying fly.

  He went onto the roof of the car and looked across the low, brushy land. He’d chosen his position carefully, because from here he could see Arthur’s little homestead. The trailer was a white gleam in the sea of yellow-green mesquite. Nothing moving. The truck was still there. Arthur would be wanting medical attention, so he’d probably already be on the hoof. If he got lucky and a car stopped, he might be in Eagle Pass in an hour.

  Just to check, Jim opened his cell phone, put the battery back in, and watched as it powered up. A moment passed. Another. Nothing. He didn’t want the phone’s carrier signal to be available for more than a few seconds, so he removed the battery as soon as he was certain that there was no incoming service. Then he got back into the car, started it, and pulled out onto the fence road. The Global Positioning System came up, but the screen was simply white. No detail. He zoomed out all the way to fifty miles, but still nothing. It didn’t matter, he knew where he was going, but still, it was impressive that the 50th Space Wing had shut down NAVSTAR. Made sense, though. A lot of it.

  He had one objective, now: Get what he had learned to the president. To Logan. Jim had no intention of giving any names to security at any level, not FBI, CIA, ONI, none of them. If he could get hold of Logan, that would be it.

  How far the country had slid, that ordinary civil service types like Arthur Kenneally and Franklin Matthews would do what they had done, probably for a couple of grand.

  Jim arrived at the ranch compound he’d passed, lights out, at four thirty this morning. The ranch had just been getting up, and nobody had noticed the silent, dark car that had moved along the fence line.

  They noticed now, though. The rancher, a short, portly man in a weathered straw Stetson, came marching over, waving at Jim to stop. “Yessir,” the rancher said as he hurried along, “yessir.” As he got closer, he added, “I ain’t gonna see none’a my game in your trunk, I hope.”

  Jim waited for him with his creds in hand. He showed the best he could, which was his real credential. It was not a wallet he often opened, but this was getting actionable on a whole lot of different levels, and if the country survived this crisis, there was going to be an inquiry into every move he made from the moment he discovered the missing detectors on that bridge.

  “Well, Sir,” the rancher said. “I’m Tom Folbre; you’re on the Cut Four Ranch.”

  “I need the use of a phone and I need it to be private.”

  “Sir, I can’t do that—”

  “This is—”

  “Sir, they shut down all the phone lines along the whole border. All we have is the TV and radio. No way to call out until further notice. Plus, it’s martial law, on-site curfew from Brownsville to El Paso. Nobody leaves home except in an emergency. They got the Army on its way down from San Antonio.”

  Jim left the man standing there, whipping with the Stetson at the dust Jim’s car kicked up. At least the rancher hadn’t been as ornery as that old and pitiful guy with the dogs.

  Now, what could Jim do? There was another bomb. In fact, there were probably many other bombs.

  He wished that he could throw himself on them, become a human shield. He could not have felt more alone.

  18

  THE FIELDS OF HOME

  Jim turned west on Highway 277 and headed for Laughlin Air Force Base near Del Rio. It was a training facility, but a major one, and if there was no C-37 on station, Colonel Adams was going to be able to get Jim to Lackland in San Antonio, where he could pick one up, this time to fly to Washington for real. His call to Nabila had told whoever must certainly be watching him that he was on his way from Deer Valley. That little misdirection was over, though, because that plane had landed empty. He could assume that locating and killing him was once again a number one priority of the people who were enabling this horror to happen.

  He turned on the radio. All the stations were broadcasting news. He listened to a border blaster rebroadcasting WFED, Federal News Radio, out of Mexico City. The Hipódromo de las Américas had been closed. The Federal Security Police Service was claiming that the bomb had not entered the United States through Mexico, and the president was protesting the militarization of the border. All flights of any kind had been grounded. Citiz
ens of the Federal District were urged not to buy gasoline unless needed, and a general traffic curfew was in effect.

  The chaos and suffering that must be behind these reports infuriated Jim. This was what the bastards had done—not only murdered a great city but also sent all the rest of them, worldwide, into turmoil. How many would be trampled in frightened mobs, how many fail to receive essential drugs, how many go without water or food? And the economic costs were incalculable. Even as things stood now, it would take the world years to recover and there would be blood and sorrow.

  His jaw clenched so hard it cracked. He fought back a surge of self-hate that was itself a kind of black internal tidal wave, a rage against his own failure so great that he would have jumped out of this car if he weren’t needed to repair the damage.

  “Don’t,” he said aloud. His work depended on self-confidence. He had to push his despair back down into the pit for now.

  With an angry stab of his finger, he hit the radio’s scan button. Here was WOAI in San Antonio, the voice grimly announcing that all military reserves must report to their units. CONUS was no doubt scrambling for bodies. Jim’s guess was that there were under a hundred thousand military personnel available for deployment in the United States.

  World stock markets were closed, but the price of gold had gone up eight hundred dollars and oil was pushing through three hundred dollars a barrel. Ships at sea had been ordered to stop, all of them, and the U.S., British, Japanese, and European navies would sink any vessel that entered their territorial waters. Europe had also stopped any nonessential road traffic.

  The litany went on and on and on. Jim saw a picture of a world that had been frozen in place as it fell into chaos. How long would it last, though? What of the massive traffic jams, the people fleeing the great cities? Where were they in this? Who was enforcing the various curfews? The answer was clear: nobody.

  He moved on along the dial, this time picking up something called KGOD-FM. A Reverend James Haggerty was telling his congregation that God had used the heathens to destroy a place of sin and evil and good Christians must rejoice and fill the churches and prepare to meet God, for the rapture was at hand.

  The clash between Muslim fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism was a battle between two grotesque distortions of religion. The mad battling the mad over, in Jim’s opinion, nothing. God’s silence was God’s truth, and that was what they could not bear to face. Somewhere, there had to be a heaven, justice, and a better life.

  Life may or may not be preparation for heaven; Jim didn’t know. What he did know was that a hungry kid or a ruined businessman or a worker on a breadline was real, now. And all those burnt bodies, and all this suffering, this was what was real. And it was his.

  The car’s tires whined. He was doing an eighty-eight, and this vehicle, older than the one he’d had on his way to Eagle Pass, had no more in her. He really didn’t care to be out here when Army regulars started their deployment. They would be scared, confused, and armed to the teeth. Getting past them was going to be real hard.

  He passed Laughlin’s auxiliary base and radar station, then shot through the tiny towns of Normandy and Quenado, glimpses of rural poverty and rural peace. He saw chickens in a yard, a little stone house. The lights you saw from the sky at night, in the lonely places—these little towns were such places. He wished he could stop, go into one of those houses, and that would be it.

  But his mind returned to Washington. Even if the president and the world did all that the document demanded, Jim thought that the terrorists would destroy Washington if they could, and other American cities. The gauntlet was down. They had to break America now, or they would gain nothing.

  He pressed the gas pedal until his foot tingled, but the car would not pass ninety.

  He began to watch on his right, waiting for the big, friendly sign that generally announced a U.S. Air Force base. The car seemed to be drifting, the highway gliding past like a slow, old river.

  Whereupon he saw the sign and also a dark blue Air Force bus and what looked like a squad of APs in full battle dress. As he dropped his speed, he surveyed the men—kids, actually. They were armed, for sure, but did they have a laptop? If so, they would run whatever ID he gave them, and he didn’t trust anything to pass at a time like this except his real cred. If they got a bad answer, he had no idea what they might do. Problem was, his real cred was going to be flagged by the folks who were after him.

  No choice, though. As he slowed, they turned toward him, stirring nervously, their hands clutching their weapons. Pulling off the side of the road under the eyes of kids this scared and this well armed was not a pleasant experience. Their lieutenant’s lips were dry, his eyes staring. Jim knew how dangerous the stillness of these young men was. If they so much as glimpsed his pistol, they would kill him.

  “Sir, get out of the car.”

  He moved to conceal the gun.

  “Get out of the car!”

  “Coming out! Coming out slow!” He pulled the door handle. “I want to warn you, there is a weapon on my person.”

  One of the squaddies rushed the car like a charging lion. “Get out of the car; get on the ground!” He threw the door open.

  “Okay! Take it easy!” Jim hit the deck, digging into the hot tarmac and the dusty hardscrabble beside it. He could hear insects buzzing, smell dry autumn grass and the sweet, hot odor of his engine, could hear the overstrained block tinkling as it cooled. “I’m a CIA officer. My name is James Deutsch.”

  “No CIA around here,” a piping young voice screeched.

  “I am going to move. I am going to get my credential.”

  A gun barrel thrust into his back. “Where is it?”

  “Left side.” He hesitated. “When you get it, you will feel the pistol in my belt.”

  They backed away, then consulted together in hurried voices. Arguing. Then the lieutenant got on his radio.

  “No!”

  The kid froze. Stared at him.

  “Do not put this on a radio. If you’ve got a gate phone, fine, but if you broadcast this, you are murdering me.”

  Now they argued again, and this time it was furious. The lieutenant sounded outnumbered. These kids were certainly not prepared to face a situation like this. Their experience probably ran to extracting drunk pilots from beer joints and manning guard stations where they knew everybody who came and went by name.

  While they were busy, he pulled out the .45 and slid it toward them.

  All the weapons came up. “Stay on the ground.”

  Next, he pushed out his cred. “That’s my credential. You read it now, Lieutenant, and then take me to Colonel Adams.” Nobody moved. “Do it now!”

  The lieutenant kicked the pistol away and picked up the cred. Looked at it. “I don’t know what one of these things is supposed to look like.”

  Those words told Jim that this boy knew he needed help. Jim was good at projecting authority. “The credential is fine,” he said.

  The kid looked down at him. “Where are you from? Why are you here?”

  Jim took a calculated risk and got up. Nobody threatened him. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to shoot you.”

  “You don’t have a weapon.”

  “Okay, let’s go,” Jim replied, “and leave that radio turned off.”

  He walked over and got into the car, passenger side. “You need to post a guard on me. That’s what your colonel’s gonna expect—what’s your name?”

  “Rawson, Sir.”

  “Okay, Lieutenant Rawson, you drive and post your guard in the backseat.”

  With one of the airman sitting behind them, they drove onto the base—which, on first viewing, appeared to be abandoned. Jim knew that this was because it was in its highest alert state, which meant that personnel did not move unless ordered and all aircraft were under cover. The sky would normally have been full of trainers and the streets full of vehicles and airmen. But the only things flying there now were buzzards, wheeling with dark grace
.

  As they entered the base proper, they passed a golf links. “Decent course, Lieutenant?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Where am I going, son?” As long as it wasn’t the guardhouse, these two boys were going to be able to keep their weapons and preserve the fiction that they were in control of this vehicle, which they were not. If he had to, Jim could disarm both of them in five seconds. In another five, their necks would be broken . . . if he had to.

  “You’re going to HQ. We called it in on the guardhouse phone.”

  That was acceptable. “Can you tell me if there’s a thirty-seven on base?”

  “Nothing’s flying, sir.”