Critical Mass

by Whitley Strieber

As he drove up the entrance to the Beltway, however, he found that the outbound lanes were in gridlock. He could see people out of their cars, some fighting, others trying to push stalled and wrecked cars off the roadway. It was hell, he thought, with children peering out the windows.

  Then he realized that he was looking at an SUV coming straight at him. He swerved—only to see another big grill as the cab of an eighteen-wheeler bore down on him, horns screaming. In the windshield, he could see a girl driving. The cab was full of kids.

  He ripped the ungainly car’s steering wheel and missed the truck cab by inches. The entire road was crowded with traffic leaving. The only way he could make progress was to drive next to the inner barrier, flashing his lights and hitting his horn continuously.

  As a car with cardboard boxes badly lashed to its top passed him, a guy in the passenger seat showed a silver Magnum. His grimacing, teeth-bared face said, Try me, Uniform.

  No, thank you.

  Then there came a fight across the anarchy of lanes. Jim slid between two cars, then went around a pickup that was on its side and burning. When he slowed, people on foot began beating on his windows, one woman making spiderwebs on the windshield with a spike heel. There was a sickening crunch when he sped up to get past them, and the kind of lurch that meant only one thing: he’d driven over a body. “God,” he whispered, “God help him.”

  There was no way to stay up here, so Jim pulled off on the D Street exit and went down into the streets. Despite the alleged twenty-four-hour curfew, he had not so far seen a single police vehicle. No doubt, the cops had stopped reporting to work or even had been themselves dispersed. One thing was clear: public order was nonexistent.

  There was a man lying on the sidewalk, his face so flat against it that Jim knew that he was dead. Jim also knew how he’d been killed—he had been clubbed in the face, then, as he pitched back, pulled to his feet and clubbed again, then knocked over with a body blow from behind. You saw bodies like this in alleys, in the world’s hard places.

  A hurrying crowd moved around the dead man, their feet grinding his blood into the sidewalk in long, red smears. There were people with backpacks, pulling children’s wagons full of clothes, cases of bottled water, boxes of cornflakes, you name it. Down the street, a gutted convenience store burned.

  Once again, the car attracted attention. Here came a woman festooned with kids, her face soaked with tears and blood, her clothes torn. From another direction, a man with a deer rifle at port arms approached, trotting as if he’d spent time in the military. He probably knew how to use that weapon, too. It was clear that if Jim was going to keep this vehicle, he was going to need to kill to do it, but doing that was going to slow down his progress toward his objective, so it wasn’t a necessary option for him to take, thank God.

  The moment he stepped away from the car, a crowd leaped on it.

  Walking to the ONI offices from here was too dangerous, but he was only a few blocks from Nabila’s place. Given that his mobility was so limited, he would risk using her secure equipment to connect with the White House. She’d be on dispersal, of course, but he might be able to get to it.

  By the time he had reached the end of the block, he saw that there were probably a hundred people fighting over the car. Ahead, a man sat on the curb laughing and firing a shotgun into the air, the booms creating a permanent swooping riot of pigeons, some of which lay in the street, ruined puffs of feathers. The detonations snapped off the buildings, the explosions coming as regularly as metronome ticks. Two women passed, leading six children linked together with a clothesline. Another body, this one burnt and smoking, was curled up under the stoop of a brownstone.

  The beauty of Nabila’s neighborhood was wildly out-of-focus with the mayhem unfolding in it. Percy’s, a restaurant they had loved, stood open. For an instant, it seemed to be untouched; then he saw a cardboard barrel of sugar burst just inside the doorway and a tattered Irish setter frantically gobbling the spilled contents, its russet dewlaps touched as if with snow.

  He would not see Nabby, of course, but he wanted to as badly as he had ever wanted anything. Not only was she beautiful, but she also had a gorgeous, supple mind, which had made their love affair also an ongoing conversation, at least at first, when they were both stationed here and their marriage had flourished. True, they had lost that when he’d moved to Operations and become involved in counterproliferation and ended up halfway around the world and in situations where he couldn’t communicate with her.

  Then even the trips home had stopped working. They’d slipped into being strangers, and he knew from her dutiful tension that even lovemaking had come to seem to her like an affair with a stranger.

  Until Las Vegas, he had not wanted to see her, not because he didn’t love her but because he did. In the field, he’d become a sort of addict. He needed the tension of lonely places now, the sense of being a player in a dangerous game. He was able to kill, and although it was a huge issue, it was also a source of pride. The warrior’s way. In a job where a second’s hesitation could mean your life, you had to be able to do violence with ease, and he could do that, and it excited him and made him feel fantastically capable.

  He was a form of wildlife that had thought itself domesticated—like those dogs of the old rancher down in Texas, being transformed into killers by the taste of blood.

  She had said, before they were married, that she wanted a quiet life. Deep inside this fiercely independent woman, he had come to understand, were expectations born out of her upbringing and her culture. Home was sacred to her in a way that could feel confining to a Westerner. He loved her so damn much, and knew now that she still loved him—and knew that she was probably suffering agonies right now, wondering about his safety.

  But they were back to the old problem—no communication. As things were now, calling her and telling her he was all right might be the exact thing that destroyed him. From the moment he did it, he would no longer know whether or not his presence in Washington had been detected.

  God, he had never thought to see this city like this. Washington had warts, for sure, but this scramble—it was grotesque. Ancient Rome must have been like this when it was being sacked. Except for one huge difference—technology had enabled the barbarians to become invisible men. They were here, all right, just as they had been in Rome . . . but here, in the magical modern world, you couldn’t see them but only feel the effects of their savagery.

  As he approached Pennsy Avenue, though, he was surprised to find that the atmosphere was beginning to change. Now, closer to Eastern Market, people were walking, not running. There were fewer guns, and he hadn’t seen a body in a block.

  Ahead, to his amazement, he heard singing. He knew the music. It was “Amazing Grace,” and the voices were ragged at first, then richer and bigger, and when he turned the corner and had the whole Eastern Market plaza before him, he saw that it was an assembly point for some sort of rally or perhaps even a march. Children held their parents’ hands; there were baby strollers everywhere, people in turbans and djellabas, people in Western street clothes.

  Few of the Muslim women wore the hijab, but the Westerners were getting blue veils out of cardboard boxes. He saw Muslim women dropping their head scarves as they joined the group.

  Dogs jumped and capered, and the song rose, grew stronger, then tailed away. Somebody spoke through an electronic bullhorn in a Middle Eastern accent, a portly man with a dark moustache. From his demeanor and his accent Jim thought he was Lebanese. He stood in a sea of video cameras, some of them professional, most amateur.

  The man had an iPhone and a BlackBerry and was reading text messages. Then he looked up. “We are with more cities! Six in this country, and London joins us and Cairo. Cairo joins us! Mexico, we are in Mexico; we are in Peshawar. We are in Peshawar, too, it’s true!” He held up his BlackBerry. “It is here; I see the video; it’s true! Peace, peace is coming!”

  So the Mahdi wasn’t the only one who could use the Internet.


  “We start to move, start to move! Everybody join us, chant it, let’s go, hey, TV—” He waved at the cameras. “We do it! Here we go!” He turned and strode off up the broad avenue, bellowing “Amazing Grace” through the bullhorn in his dense Middle Eastern accent. Then, “We are all together, all together!” The crowd shouted back, “All together.” Various hymns came and went, ragged, brief. Snatches of “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” “Happy Land,” and others.

  People raised placards, “Sura 2:125/Genesis 17:9,” “God is God,” “Islam is Holy is Christianity is Holy.” A tiny, gray-haired Asian woman threw back her head and shouted at the sky, “All we are asking is give peace a chance.” The voice, though small, brought a silence. This was a woman these people wanted to hear. Then the leader was standing, waving the crowd past him. Jim recognized senators, congressmen, and a cardinal. He saw familiar faces—was that Meryl Streep, and the little, intense woman beside her Ellen Page? Was the tiny old lady actually Yoko Ono? In a wheelchair, a man who looked like Jimmy Carter was being pushed by a woman Jim thought might be Shirley MacLaine. All of these people must have been in Washington making movies or doing benefits or for other reasons. Certainly they had not arrived after Las Vegas. Or had they? It was always a mistake, he thought, to underestimate the power of the people. Somehow, they would find a way.

  Then the leader had connected with the small gray-haired lady, who took the bullhorn and shouted again, “All we are asking is give peace a chance!”

  Jim had to fight back tears, just to see this enormous crowd, every one of them certainly aware that they could be vaporized at any moment, but still here, still trying.

  The voices rose, the chant spread, and blue veils became a sea, and turbaned men and hatless men, a smattering of black fedoras, even. The voice of the crowd deepened. The milling mass swirled, took form, and the march magically organized itself, heading off toward the center of the city.

  A girl carrying a newborn in a sling came trotting up to him. Her eyes were as blue as her scarf, her face so pure that it seemed as if it had been brushed by a shaft of light. She reached out and before he could stop her took his hand. “Come on,” she said. “Don’t be scared.” Then he saw her baby sleeping in her innocence, and a great, choked sound gushed out of him. She squeezed his hand. “I know it’s hard, but you can do it.” She met his eyes with her own, and the courage seared him.

  He said, “I’m on a mission.”

  “There’s only one mission now,” she said. “Come on. Come with us. This is Madison. I’m Senna.” Her smile, it seemed to him, contained within its glow some sort of proof of what he had always denied, that there was such a thing as the human soul. He thought he was being touched not just by this young woman but also by the God who had willed her—and him, and all—to be.

  Only sentiment, no doubt, but there was certainly something here that the barbarians did not have. They owned only the shadows. These people owned the light.

  He went with her, and she smiled up at him but then was off, trotting to a group who had come out of a house. “Come join us,” she shouted as she ran to them. She would carry her baby for all the miles. She would go to everybody she saw with her message. She would not stop.

  He saw skeletons, hers wrapped around her baby’s, skeletons and flies. If only he’d been a little faster, a little less rule bound. Had she known that she was talking to the man whose failure had let this happen, what would she have said then?

  He reached the far side of the march and suddenly was on a street sacred to his heart, the short block of D Street, SW, where Nabila had her house. Every inch of this sidewalk had meaning. Here she had taught him “In Doha Ya Doha,” when they had been planning to have children. She had sung it on a raw winter night, when they walked on crunching snow and the moon glared through the naked trees. “In doha ya doha, wa al-ka’aba banooha . . .” for a child who now never would be born.

  That was the truth of Jim Deutsch, right here in this street, his barren truth.

  He faced the house itself, looked up to the bedroom where they had made their happiness. He climbed the short steps to the front door and started to ring the bell. He stopped, though, because his instincts told him instantly that the house was empty. Buildings do not lie, and this one was saying two things. First, there were no living creatures within. Second, something was wrong.

  He pulled out his picklock, worked it for a moment, and was in. He closed the door behind him, being careful to reset the lock. Here was the familiar coatrack, Rashid’s blue pea jacket hanging there . . . and his own old corduroy with the weathered leather elbows and the pocket she had mended for him in another life, long ago.

  He threw off the uniform tunic and went deeper into the house. “Rashid? Nabby?”

  Jim knew that silence would be the only answer, but he called them anyway. He went upstairs and turned down the hallway that led to her office and the bedroom he had once shared with her.

  When he saw that the office door was open, he knew instantly that she was in terrible trouble. There was no way she would leave this house on her own initiative without locking and alarming that door. Just no way. The office had been secured by the Company. Its door moved on quiet hinges, the steel of the thing concealed by veneer that matched the other mahogany doors of the old house. Inside the wall there was a copper grid to keep prying electronics at bay and on the desk another to further secure her computer.

  Had it been locked, this door would not have been passable, not even by a well-equipped professional. Because Jim had seen her coming and going, he was aware of the combination. He’d memorized it; he hadn’t been able to help himself.

  He stepped into the office and had another shock: her computer was on. Incredibly, the secure network was wide open from this terminal. Anyone could come in here, sit down, and enter a deep tier of classification.

  So he wouldn’t be risking the use of this terminal; that was crystal clear.

  He looked around for some clue as to what had happened. Taking the steps four at a time, he went down to the kitchen and yanked open the garage door. Both cars were gone.

  Back up he went, back to their bedroom. What he saw there stopped him, but not because of danger. It was because nothing had changed. She had told him she had redecorated, had said it with a sneer of anger in her voice, but it wasn’t true. He was everywhere in the room, his books, his Bose radio, his bedside CD collection—even the novel he had been reading on the last night, when their battle had stirred the neighbors and he had left and hadn’t come back, even that lay undisturbed on the bedside table where he had left it.

  He stood silent, bowing his head to the sacredness of the love he saw here. He sucked air through his teeth—he had to fix this. Fix it all. Find the murderous bastards who had wrecked Vegas and put the noose around Washington’s neck, find Nabila, find what he had lost of himself and his marriage.

  A glance at his watch revealed what he most did not want to face: if he was right about the way the enemy thought, he and his world and the woman he loved—if she was still in Washington—had just five hours to live.

  Forcing himself, he went methodically through the rooms, looking for some clue, some indication of what had happened to her.

  There was nothing. Again, forcing himself, he went back upstairs, and took advantage of the presence of his clothes to shed the uniform.

  As he was leaving, he noticed that the back door was not completely shut. Without going too close, he looked out into the garden. To find out more, he needed to go out there.

  That could be death.

  24

  THE CARD OF THE LOVERS

  He stepped out quickly, moving toward the nearest shrubs as fast as possible. Every visible window—and there was an entire row of brownstones across the alley, all of them looking straight into this garden—potentially concealed a sniper. He looked for slightly open windows, because he’d never encountered a sniper who would shoot through glass and risk deflection of the bullet.

>   As Jim approached the end of the garden, he saw breaks in the shrubbery, twigs that had been snapped. He’d tracked in places a lot more challenging than a Washington back alley, so he knew at once that she had pushed through the shrubs to the alley gate. There were a couple of partial prints on the ground—sneakers, woman’s size. Nobody following, so whatever had happened to drive her from the house, it had not been somebody behind her.

  She had been using her computer when she left—so quickly that she’d violated every regulation in the book.

  He went through the overgrowth to the back fence, and opened the gate. A quick glance told him that she’d taken a left. He followed, and soon saw that she’d turned and moved into the yard of a nearby house, one that fronted on South Carolina, the street opposite hers.

  He entered its back garden. A hundred and fifty feet away stood the brownstone, with black wrought-iron steps leading up to its rear door. There was a tiny patio with an expensive-looking barbecue grill to one side, and a table and chairs, also wrought iron.

  He could see from the way the dry grass was bent here that Nabby had headed directly for the steps. As she’d entered the yard, she’d been moving fast. Running from somebody who her computer had told her was coming after her.