Critical Mass

by Whitley Strieber

  The guard snapped his bolt. Other Marines came trotting closer. Around Jim and Nabby the crowd sighed and surged.

  One of the officers in the Humvee said something into a microphone, and the guard pointed his gun into the air. Jim saw his finger close around the trigger. He had just been ordered to deliver warning shots.

  “You’re gonna have a bloodbath, you panic these people!”

  “Jim, let’s go! It’s too dangerous!”

  He turned on her, suddenly hot with rage. “Nabby, I don’t think you understand. If I don’t get in, then I have to die here. This is my mission, Nabby. I will carry it out at any cost.”

  “Jim, you’re more valuable alive! Jim, think!”

  He tossed in the credential. The guard took a step back. Another. He lowered his weapon.

  “It’s a quarter past,” somebody shouted.

  The old woman began crying out the words again: “Give peace a chance. . . .” She had come out of nowhere to this place; all of them had. Why had they thought to come here? What had moved them to risk their lives?

  Jim found these thoughts moving him deeply. They were here to lend their memories to the same martyrdom old Fitz had accepted, in that solemn, silent mansion.

  “You have to listen! I have essential information—”

  Somebody grabbed his shoulder and roughly turned him around. He found himself looking into the face of a man in a suit, a hard, cold man with an earpiece. Secret Service, FBI, CIA—who knew? He was a man following orders, and it was clear from his eyes what he had been ordered to do.

  Then Nabila cried out, and Jim saw that two other of these men were pulling her away. They would be fast, but he also was fast. He chopped the Adam’s apple of the one confronting him, with a stiff, driving finger, then, as his head snapped downward, spun around him and got an arm around Nabby’s waist.

  Jim saw the black glint of a gun in one of the men’s hands. “No,” he cried, but it was too late. A woman saw it, too, then two other people, and they shrank away as she screamed, her voice rising to a trembling, penetrating wail, “He has a gun!”

  The crowed seemed to sigh, an oddly soft, oddly gentle sound. Then the fool raised the gun, bringing it into the view of hundreds of people.

  The entire crowd recoiled. The man struggling with his throat went down in the spreading rampage, followed by the one attempting to pull Nabila from Jim’s grasp.

  Jim hugged her to him. A shot rang out, followed by a roar of terrified voices. People ran, their eyes glazed, their faces twisted to animal forms. It was too much for them, all the hours of waiting, and despite the noble struggle and the ideals when they finally lost it, they lost it all, and in an instant the band of heroes became a mob of animals.

  Then the gates swung open, and the Humvee came slowly forward. And, incredibly, Fitz was there. Fitz was standing in the damned thing and so was his wife and so was Logan.

  Its horn blasting again and again, it moved out into the crowd, with Fitz standing there in his shirtsleeves, his arms raised in the air. Beside him, the First Lady was impassive, as motionless as a statue—and, somehow, the dignity of her pose combined with the passion in her husband’s stance brought the couple so vividly to life that the energy of the riot was literally absorbed and people turned and they became silent.

  Trotting along beside the Hummer, Nabila still cradled in his arm, Jim called up to Logan, “I’m the guy on the phone! I need to talk! We’ve got a target!”

  The roaring of the Hummer, the clapping, chanting crowd—Logan couldn’t hear him.

  Then a Marine started working his way toward them. In the now-clear space before the gate, Jim saw the crumpled form of the man he had struck. The face was black. Jim had collapsed the poor guy’s windpipe.

  Then the Marine was on Jim, his big hand coming down, grasping his shoulder. He could waste the Marine—pop an eye or crush his windpipe, too. The kid could not survive a man so lethal as Jim Deutsch. But look at him; he probably hadn’t been shaving for more than a year.

  “Sir, the president wants to see you.”

  Jim looked into the tight young eyes, silent diamonds. “Let’s go,” he said.

  Nabby climbed into the Hummer, too, and in another moment President Fitzgerald and Tom Logan had descended into the cramped crew compartment with them.

  Nabby said, “A principal in the organization here in Washington is Rashid al-Rahbi. He knows crucial codes. He is an analyst with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. I am ashamed to say that he is my brother.”

  “We’ve known that he was a traitor for about four hours,” Jim added. “We’ve been trying to come in, but there’s a lot of resistance. Whoever is working for the other side has the ability to order arrests and lethal actions. Attempts have been made on both of us.”

  The Hummer arrived at the side entrance to the White House, and Marines opened the doors as the presidential party emerged. They entered the White House reception area. Jim was surprised at how weathered it all looked, the tired glass doors, the steel desk where some of the world’s most prominent people must stop to present their identification, the elaborate—but, he knew, quite ineffective—X-ray entry system. He could easily get a weapon through one of those things. It was like so much security hardware—great on paper.

  As they walked down a dim corridor, Jim said, “This thing goes—”

  The president turned on him, grabbed his shoulders. The great, leathery face—that Rushmore visage of his—glared, eyes dense with exhaustion, lips slack and dry. The president shook his head. “Not here,” he said in a voice that seemed to rise from the tomb.

  They went up a small elevator to the private suite. Here was a small foyer, on the far side a closed door. When Logan opened it for the First Family, Jim had enough of a shock to make him gasp audibly, and he was not a man who shocked easily.

  The entire room had been stripped of its carpets, its furniture, even its flooring, even its plaster. He found himself looking at bare studs and framing, and walking across big hewn beams on a plywood path.

  “They’re everywhere,” the president muttered.

  “The bugs,” his wife said in a chipper voice. Jim could hear something like despair there.

  “I’m not wrong,” the president said.

  “No,” Jim agreed.

  “Are you implanted?” Logan asked.

  “I am,” Nabila said. “My brother may still be.”

  “Not folks in my line of work,” Jim said. “We don’t want the other side finding Uncle Sam under our skin. We go naked.”

  “You people are implanted?” the president asked. “With what?”

  She held out her arm. “To track us if we’re kidnapped,” she said. There was a neat red scar an inch below her elbow, on her cloud-soft inner skin. “This is why I have had so much danger today,” she said, her voice tight. “If the wrong people have your code, you cannot get away.”

  “Your brother has one of these, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s reach out for this guy,” the president said to Logan.

  “Consider it done,” Logan replied. He opened a cell phone.

  “Wait,” Jim said.

  Logan looked up sharply. The president half-turned. They weren’t used to this sort of intervention. This was the president of the United States who had just given an order.

  “We don’t want to go through channels, Sir.”

  Logan looked to the president.

  “We need to go directly to this man’s personal supervisor,” Jim added. “Bypass the entire system.”

  “Just how extensive is this conspiracy?” Logan asked.

  “That’s what we don’t know,” Jim said.

  “You’re right, Mr. . . . Deutsch,” the president said. “But this presents a problem. I’ve got—God, how many levels between me and him? I have no idea.” He shook his head. “Nothing this big works right,” he muttered. “It just cannot work.”

  Jim could not agree more. Streamli
ning was what the federal services needed, not the additional layers of authority that had been imposed over the last few administrations.

  “I can call him,” Nabila said. “On his, um—well, there’s back channels that we all use.”

  “His cell phone will be out,” Logan said. “We’ve shut the entire system down.”

  “Call his supervisor.” Jim said. “Not him. His direct, personal supervisor.”

  “And if he’s part of it, too, Jim?”

  “Nabila, would he be?”

  “I have no way to know that!”

  “Call him,” the president said.

  She took the military phone and dialed. Mark answered immediately.

  “Mark, it’s Nabby.”

  “Rashid is—”

  “No, Mark, listen to me. Mark, are you near him?”

  “I’m in my office.”

  “Good. Now, listen. This is life or death. Life-or-death telephone call.”

  “Yes.”

  She looked desperately at the president, who motioned to her to keep on.

  “Mark, there has been a major security breach in your sector.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I am going to put somebody on the line. This is going to be unusual.”

  She handed the phone to the president.

  “This is President Fitzgerald. Do you recognize my voice? . . . Good. You are to get this man—”

  “Sir,” Jim said, “don’t have him arrested. Get him to—uh, may I do this?”

  “Mr. Chambers, this man speaks for me.” He handed Jim the phone.

  “Hello, Mark. Listen carefully. What I want you to do are two things. First, I want you to read back Rashid’s entire con for the past hour. I want you to tell me every satellite he’s used, everything he’s flown, all of it. And I want you to send him a signal. Shut down his con. Close him down. Almost certainly he’s already looking for some excuse to leave. Let him go.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get back to us with every scrap of information you pull off his station.” He hung up.

  Rashid was surprised when he was messaged for an emergency conference. He stuck his head over the partition. “Hey, Carol, what’s this conference?”

  “What conference?”

  When he turned back, he saw that his monitors all were plated. He knew instantly what those blank screens meant. Somebody had identified him.

  As always, God had made his plans for him. In truth, he had been trained for this contingency by experts, Russian mercenaries working for the private army BlackWatch. They’d gotten twelve thousand dollars cash to put him through four days on the BlackWatch avoidance course in Georgia. He’d been CrackBerrying Nabila and Mark and whoever else he could think of from Bermuda that week when his real location had been Burge Island, where the accursed mosquitoes were the size of the ever-present and disgusting shrimp.

  There was nothing for it now. He’d just been flushed, no question.

  He hurried down the corridor to the front desk, passed the desk officer without a word, ignoring the, “Excuse me,” that was called out behind him.

  He got past the perimeter guards also, and he knew why. The NIO was watching him run, of course. They would want him to leave.

  He reached his car, got in, and drove quickly away.

  Mark Chambers was soon back on the line. “He’s bolted all right.”

  “Okay, you keep on him,” Jim said.

  “He knows everything about this type of surveillance.”

  “And he will eventually evade us. But we will still learn something before that happens, and let’s hope it’s what we need.”

  For the first time, Linda Fitzgerald spoke. “Does this mean that Washington is out of danger?” In that trembling lilt Jim recognized hysteria. This woman was about to explode in their faces, and he did not blame her.

  He answered carefully. “This man may lead us to the bomb. That’s all I can say.”

  “But it could go off—”

  “Linda, it could go off at any time,” her husband said, his voice betraying a level of anger. “It hasn’t happened yet, that’s all.”

  For a moment, she was silent. Then she pitched forward as if struck a blow in the stomach. Fitz touched her, distantly, as he might a wounded soldier during a tour of Walter Reed. “Come on, gal,” he said softly. “Let’s pull together.”

  “Excuse me,” Logan said. “How do we get a secure lookdown on this man? Where do we go for that? Not to his boss, for God’s sake.”

  Given the need for speed, Rashid’s own unit was the only place they could turn to. “We have no choice.”

  “What if they’re all in it? Come on, man, think!”

  “I’ve done that, obviously! And we have no choice.”

  “This is a big government. There’s always a choice.”

  “Okay, first, how do you know we’ll be secure someplace else? Second, it’ll take time and we don’t have that, do we?”

  “We could engage the National Reconnaissance Office.”

  “The man is actually physically running right now, so can you manage that in twenty seconds?”

  “Tom, goddamn it, will you stop this arguing?” the president said.

  “Sir—”

  “Mr. Deutsch, get on the horn and get us this man’s location! Do it!”

  Rashid stopped his car near some woods. On the other side was the Columbia Pike and, just north of here, a small neighborhood. He got out and moved in among the trees. A Rugby would be passing over now, and there were drones, he felt sure, running high and silent. Moving from trunk to trunk, he made his way beneath the thickest foliage he could find. If they were able to locate his implant without NAVSTAR online—and he assumed that they were—they probably didn’t need a Rugby to find him now. But you never knew; he might get lucky.

  He had to get to Alexandria and get that bomb detonated. Even if he needed to do it in the garage, that was fine. Just get the thing to go off, that was the key. If they’d turned coward or been killed—whatever—he would do it himself, never mind, and regard the task as what it was—a privilege. Death excited him, and the prospect of the wonderful heaven Allah had prepared was delicious. He’d wanted a boy first, then a girl. He’d wanted his own house, and the love of a wife. But those things were not to be, because Allah, it seemed, wanted him.

  Walking out of the woods and into the little neighborhood, he wondered if he would have to kill now, which person, innocently living? It didn’t matter. He would kill if he had to, but stealth was better.

  The first house he came to was empty. Shortly he would need a car, but right now this was exactly right. He went to the garage, broke a pane in the door, and went in. As he did so, a small dog began barking frantically. It hopped up his leg, groveling and panting, absurdly grateful that he had come.

  Of course, there was nothing absurd about its gratitude. The animal had been left in this garage with nothing but a bowl of water.

  Well, good, in a moment he could make use of the dog.

  How American this garage was, so tidy and yet so cluttered with possessions. Why would a man with a tiny property like this one require a chain saw? Or a collection of model ships, gathering dust on the workbench? It was all stupid, all this obsession they had with material. The Crusaders fed their hunger for God with rubbish like this. Television instead of prayer. That was no way to live.

  He went into a splendidly appointed kitchen, where he found a good knife, small but with a blade of excellent quality. For some little time he sharpened it in the electric sharpener that stood on the gleaming granite counter. Then he went through the dining room with its silver-laden sideboard and glowing mahogany table, and into the bedroom wing. He found a bathroom, where he searched the cabinets for alcohol.

  Because he had no choice but to do it this way, he took the knife in his clumsy left hand and sawed away at his right arm. Gritting his teeth, sucking back his screams, he cut deep, dissecting away fluffy folds of fat and l
ean strips of muscle, until he found the dull silver capsule he was seeking. Pushing at it, working the wound until it frothed and bubbled, he gradually got the thing between his fingers.

  He looked at it. Featureless, dull silver. Inside, he knew, there was an intricate array of circuitry, a masterpiece of subminiaturization. The telemetry the thing generated could even be used to determine his state of consciousness, whether or not his eyes were open and functioning, his speed of movement, and, if he was wounded, how long he had to live.