Critical Mass

by Whitley Strieber

  All of that, and the only thing it would do now was feed a hopping, snorting little dog. Not much of a watchdog, this little thing. He opened the fridge and found a plastic container of turkey salami. Taking out a slice, he folded it around his implant, then gave it to the animal, which ate with the frantic gusto of the starving.

  Taking it by the scruff of the neck, he put it out into the garden. It ran yapping to the back fence and began jumping at the gate. He followed it, remaining close to the few trees, then using a garden shed as cover.

  When he opened the gate, the animal raced out, dashing off along the alley.

  So now they had a dog to catch.

  Rashid had no idea which Mahdi sympathizers in the FBI or the CIA cut orders to arrest or kill people like Jim Deutsch—or even if they were Mahdi sympathizers. Maybe they had other agendas. That was the nature of intelligence, now. There were too many players, too many agendas. The entire process was out of control. Unbeknownst even to most world leaders, the whole vast planetary community of spies had long since descended into anarchy.

  Rashid reached the house, went through it onto the front porch, and walked quickly down its covered expanse. There was a little rail, a porch swing, some drying flowers on a white stand. This had once been somebody’s refuge, their little nook where they had, perhaps, sat and read books. Filth. Western nonsense. He hated it all. The only book was the Quran. The rest was worthy only of the fire, all of it from Genesis to The Great Gatsby and beyond, without exception. He even favored burning the Islamic texts, the endless interpretations and such. Why did you need this when you had the original word of God?

  Read the word, pray, do your work—this was the world that was being created, a happy world at last, freed of the vast burdens of the soul that the Crusaders had imposed, as part of their service to darkness.

  He passed down off the porch, into the yellowing grass beside the house, and went into the next yard, where a red Dodge stood in the driveway. He looked in the window and saw no Global Positioning System in the dash. Good, the car could be used. But he needed a key. Perhaps it was in the owner’s pocket, of course, but it could be in the house. He could get lucky. God could help him.

  He went up the driveway, and stepped onto a porch similar to the one next door. There were shadings of difference, though—different plants, no swing. Also, the front door was solid, no windowpanes. So he kicked in one of the windows. Why not? What did the property of these faithless creatures matter? He reached in, opened the door, and entered.

  “Excuse me!”

  Rashid froze. A man stood back in the shadows of the room, a plump man of perhaps thirty-five, wearing shorts and a T-shirt. For a moment, he seemed like some sort of hallucination, his presence was so unexpected. But then he came forward, and in his hand Rashid saw a small vase. Then the man reached down and lifted a side chair by its leg and threw it.

  As Rashid stepped aside to avoid the chair, he pulled out the knife he had used to cut the implant from his arm. He advanced on the man, who was fat and confused but still quick enough to slam the vase into the side of Rashid’s head.

  Just in time, Rashid turned, causing the blow to glance off behind his left ear. It hurt, but it did not stun him, and he slashed backward with the knife.

  It connected; the man drew in breath; then Rashid thrust as hard as he could, digging and cutting, pistoning his fist as he had been taught.

  The man gasped; his foot stomped so hard the whole house shook; then he drew back away from the knife, as Rashid had been trained that he would do. Rashid followed him, still cutting, feeling the resistance of cartilage and organs, feeling blood, hot, fast, gushing out around his plunging fist.

  The man hit him with the flat of his hand, hit him hard enough to make his ear ring. Then the man came off the knife and fell against the wall. He made a noise, low, like he was gargling, as black blood gushed from his mouth. He slid down the wall, his eyes fixing on Rashid. “Hey, man,” he said, then another word, a garbled mutter. His head slumped onto his chest.

  Rashid found himself kicking the man, and when he did, there was an almost musical sigh, a poetic little sound.

  He looked down at the figure. Was he only pretending? Or was this, truly, death? Rashid watched the chest. No breathing. The eyes were still open, also fixed, slightly misted over. Dead, then.

  Gingerly Rashid pushed a hand into one pocket, then the other. He took the wallet, the keys. He went quickly through the house and out the side door that led to the driveway. There was a pot boiling on the stove, which he shut off. No reason to attract attention with a fire.

  Then he saw, sitting in the sun in a tiny breakfast nook, an ancient woman. She was silent, staring, her face so deeply wrinkled that it looked false, like a caricature of great age. In front of her was an empty soup bowl. In her hand, in among knuckles like great stones, was a silver spoon.

  He went back to the stove, got the pot, and went to her. He poured her some soup. Her mouth began to work—and then she turned with all the sudden intensity of a striking snake and said, “You’re crazy; you killed my son. You’re crazy.”

  He slammed the pot down on the top of her head with a huge clang. Soup splashed everywhere as her head snapped forward into the bowl.

  He left, got in the car, grabbing the steering wheel as if it would somehow preserve his life.

  At least the traffic was less daunting now, since the dispersal of the government was complete and most of the evacuees had left the area. He had no idea how long it would take him to get to Alexandria, but he had no doubt, now, that he was going to make it. His arm hurt. His heart was still pounding. The time for prayers had come, and he twisted his body so that it was indicating the east, Mecca, the true home of the human soul.

  29

  THE ITALIAN LESSON

  For the pope, the day had been long and oppressively difficult, with numerous appearances, the reading of speeches, and the constant, vaguely disturbing presence of the Mufti. He had gone at last to the Domus Sanctae Marthae for the night. The pope could not house him in the Apostolic Palace itself, of course; that was not appropriate. Fortunately, he had not objected to the Domus. In fact, all day he had been faultlessly polite, even kneeling with the pope before the great altar in St. Peter’s to pray through the six o’clock hour, as a terrified world waited for Washington to be destroyed.

  He looked at the clock on the table beside his favorite chair. It was just going midnight now, so the danger was perhaps past in America, at least for the moment. He had telephoned two hours ago to offer his support to the president, whom he had met and found to be a man deserving of respect. Instead, the call had gone to the vice president, a clipped individual with a difficult name, who had thanked him politely and rung off.

  For a moment, his eyes closed. When they opened again, they swam across the prayer he had been reading in his Breviary. The midnight nocturne, so familiar to a man who often did not sleep. Cares dragged at him late. He saw the ruin of the world coming, in the form of melting ice, storms, drought, starvation, and the end of oil. He saw it also in the strangeness of the violence that seemed these days to be everywhere. He felt his prayers as a drop of pure water in the dirty torrent of the demon. But here, now, in this silent room, with his beloved Breviary open in his hands, he felt close not only to God but also to the caressing arms of the Shepherd and his holy mother.

  “Holiness!”

  He looked up, startled at the sudden voice. Who would enter here without a knock?

  A Swiss Guard was before him, and the expression on the man’s face caused a horror of coldness to sweep the pope’s whole body. “They have struck again?”

  “Holiness, there is an airplane. An airplane in the night.”

  He did not understand, and his face must have communicated his confusion, because the man spoke again.

  “Holiness, there is an airplane, a small airplane. From the cupola, we have a call to alarm. Holiness, please come.”

  He got up and foll
owed the man. As they entered the corridor, other Swiss Guards came running, surrounding the pope.

  “What is this airplane? Is the air force there?”

  “The airplane is buzzing—we hear it. We can see nothing. And there are no jets.”

  “Has anyone called the Aeronautica?”

  “There is alarm. There is alarm.”

  They went down the great staircase, now a whole phalanx of guards. “Where do we go?”

  “Holiness, to the crypt.”

  And with those words, the great tide of history that was sweeping the world entered the Vatican, for they would be the last words spoken in that place for thirty-one years.

  The next instant, the tall windows that the pope was passing belched fire like the maws of a row of monster blast furnaces. The pope and his guards instantly became blackened ash, their bodies flying with the molten glass into the grandeur of the hall they had been passing through, imprinting their shadows on the opposite wall, which, a fraction of a second later, became dust.

  The first millisecond after the detonation slammed St. Peter’s with an overpressure of 51 psi, the roof of the great church split with a massive crack. In the plaza, where many people were still praying, a sheet of light came that left them all reduced to ash. There was no attempt to escape; it happened too fast. Their prayers had prevented them from hearing the buzzing of the airplane.

  On the plane, a young Albanian mother had struggled with the controls, shifting the tiny airframe clumsily around the sky, trying to position the aircraft directly above St. Peter’s.

  She had taken off from the Ippodromo delle Capannelle south of Rome. The plane had been hidden in a garage nearby, and brought there by her brother and her husband after dark. The Arabs had taken her children, Agim, Teuta, and tiny, dear Gezime, still nursing, poor little thing.

  They would call on the cell phone and Gezime’s wailing would be heard, only her wailing. But now she would never again get mother’s milk! It was life, though, life for the children, if the woman did this. Otherwise, she was to be taken to them and watch as they were baked to death one by one in an oven. The Arabs has promised this, and she knew that they would keep their promise.

  She had been taught to fly, but on the ground. This was her first experience actually in the air.

  An hour ago, they had sent a video of Teuta with her hair burning, screaming, poor baby, her hair with smoke! So the woman and her husband and his brother had done as they had been told to do, had pulled the black plane onto the racetrack, and there a man had come, and instructed her. He had showed her how to make the plane rise only, not how to make it land.

  Her body had grown sick very soon in the plane. The night was big, the city full of confusing lights. She had kept the thing straight, keeping the bubble in the right place on the faintly glowing dashboard. The thing belonged to the devil. It was a machine of the devil.

  She had not seen her husband and her brother solemnly taking the money, the stack of euros, after she had flown into the night. She had not known that her children had been abandoned in the cellar where they had been taken, simply left there locked away to die on their own, and their father, who would soon be in Beirut with ten thousand euros, would never think of them again.

  The two Arabs were now on a train that was sweeping down the coast to Naples, its windows lighting the dry farmland through which it passed. They sipped coffees.

  Her brother and her husband, having been exposed to the naked bomb, were being sick in the dirt of the racecourse, their vomit black in the sand, euros blowing about on an easy little breeze.

  Ahead, she saw the great church, the largest thing in the city, although she had for a moment been confused by the Vittorio Emmanuel monument. She knew nothing of any of these places. Her family worked in the fields. She and her husband sometimes made a baby of cardboard and cotton cloth for her to thrust at tourists, so that they would grab at it while her husband and her brother picked their pockets.

  The men were not good pickpockets. They seldom succeeded.

  The family was crushed together in a shack outside the A90 in Ciampino. Somehow, the Arabs had come into their lives. She did not know how. When the Arabs had taken the children, her husband had rolled on the ground and torn at his hair. How could so many misfortunes befall him? How could this be?

  She could not fly this machine long. It swooped, it was buffeted by wind, it roared, and as she became more afraid, the instruments became harder to understand. Where was the bubble? Was she going right, left? Where was the compass?

  Lights were rising to the north. She had been warned of this. Air fighters to shoot her down. Her mind fixed on her screaming daughter, on the smoking hair, the frantically bobbing head.

  The machine hummed and vibrated. It reeked of petrol, and then something flew past outside—a roof! She had dropped almost to the ground: she pushed the rudder pedals, causing the whole contraption to shudder, and some sort of horn to start blatting in her ears.

  There was pain all over her body. To the left, a great red wave that was not racing toward her but was the last electrical effect of an exploding brain.

  Absolute fire in the sky. She, a vapor, not even that. Shattered atoms.

  Rome was not expecting this at all. There had been no indication that the city was in any way a target. All eyes had been on places such as Washington, New York, and London. The theory was that Muslims would know, or would have strong suspicions, and would leave threatened cities.

  They had not left Rome, nor Paris, nor Berlin, but the Muslims of Bay Ridge in Brooklyn and Finsbury Park in London had departed in large numbers, ignoring curfews, ignoring everything—which had, in turn, sparked mass evacuations from both cities.

  In truth, these people had no special knowledge, but they also were well aware of the extremists among them, and the fact that America and England were considered the Crusader capitals of the world.

  Not even these people, however, knew enough of history to make the obvious prediction, that after the great sin pot of Las Vegas the Crusaders’ religious capital would certainly be the next target.

  From Urban II in 1095 through Boniface VIII in 1271, all the popes had called for crusades. This had happened in response to Muslim invasion of various parts of the Eastern Roman Empire, which had, by 1095, been Christian for over seven hundred years, part of the Roman evolution from paganism to Christianity that had accompanied the slow decline of the old Western empire.

  The fact that the only religious invaders in the area had been Muslim and they had taken Christian people by force did not matter to the Mahdi and his followers, for the Quran told them to “fight against those who have been given the scripture but do not believe in Allah.” And again, “wage war on the idolaters, as they wage war on you.”

  So ancient prophecy came true on that night, when the Whore of Babylon at last was brought low, Rome, the treasure-house of the Western spirit.

  The fire swept down, charging the roof of the Sistine Chapel with far more pressure than it could bear. Unseen by any man, a fissure appeared between the finger of Adam and the finger of God, snapped, and spread, and in the next instant the greatest artistic expression ever created by the human hand was atomized dust speeding and vaporizing in the searing heat.

  The doors of the Vatican Library smashed inward, comets blazing fire, and librarians looked up and were made hollow, and papyrus and parchment began burning with a fury never known before. The Codex Vaticanus, with its careful script, leaped into flame and was gone in an instant. When this early Bible was transcribed, ancient Rome still ruled the world and the hand, neat and Greek, that had done the work had belonged to a human being who had looked upon the soaring marbles of the Temple of Jupiter, and heard the roar of the crowd in the Coliseum, and the thunder of horses in the Circus Maximus, and shopped in the ink-sour bookstores along the Argilitum in the jammed quarter called the Subura, to which the Roman poet Juvenal attributed “the thousand dangers of a savage city.”

&n
bsp; The library then imploded, and the Vatican Museum, and the great church itself, the skylights in its dome briefly spitting columns of fire into the interior, making it look as if the spokes of a great wheel of fire had invaded the space. In grand silence, as a young priest twisted toward the Blessed Sacrament that lay in the golden Tabernacle on the altar, the dome came down in great blocks, shattering the altar, the priest, the floor, and crashing with such force that parts of the nave collapsed into the crypt below, and in the tomb of Saint Peter there resounded a noise never heard there or anywhere else, the shrieking, weeping thunder of thousands of tons of concrete and art pulverizing.

  The tombs of the popes were smashed, broken open, cracked, remains strewn and then set ablaze, ancient vestments and bones coming to lazy fire in the wrecked marble, fitful red pools flickering in the thick dark.

  The great glass wall before the crypt of Saint Peter smashed into dust, and the lights there fluttered out. An instant later, debris from the floor of the church above smashed down, filling the space with stone that would not be removed again, not even in vast time.