Critical Mass

by Whitley Strieber

  “Okay, Linda, tie’s straight, suit’s looking sharp. So, now, my lady, let’s get the Nixon trenches out from under these old eyes.” He followed her into the bedroom suite, crossed to her makeup table, and sat down. “Maybe some mortician’s wax would be the ticket.”

  “It melts,” Linda said, “on skin that’s still warm.”

  “Oh, mine’s not.”

  “Well, I have some concealer,” she said.

  When she began to brush it under his eyes, it felt as if the life were sifting out of him, sifting out into her fingers, drawn away by the tickle of the brush.

  “Where’s that paladin of yours?” Linda asked as they went downstairs.

  “Yeah, Dad, that guy with the Muslim wife. Mr. and Mrs. Reliable.”

  “She’s got a lot to prove. And he’s effective.”

  “Which doesn’t answer my question,” Linda replied.

  “I’m not going to answer it.”

  The familiar sharpness in his voice stopped their inquiry. They’d strayed into classified territory.

  The doors opened. As they moved toward the Cabinet Room, he could see the press assembling in the Rose Garden, a huge throng of people and equipment. The demonstrators who had been on the front gate for so many hours had dwindled to a few. They had helped and inspired him more than they could know.

  He stood before the door to the Cabinet Room. “Are the spiders in the web?” he asked Logan.

  “The cabinet is waiting for you.”

  “Clear out the staffers.”

  “Sir?”

  “We have no way of knowing who’s loyal and who isn’t. Lay on guards. Weapons at the ready.”

  Logan nodded. Fitz saw that he’d turned his retainer the color of wet chalk. Well, let him worry. Fitz wanted them to think he was crazy. Crazy was weak, and he felt reasonably sure that something said by somebody on the other side of that door would reach the enemy. Not that there was a traitor in his cabinet, of course not, but somewhere among their staffs, yes, and more than one.

  And what of Linda’s question? Should he trust Deutsch and that wife of his, Nabila of the endlessly twisting hands?

  “These terrible hours,” Fitz muttered.

  Linda heard, put a hand on his shoulder.

  He entered the Cabinet Room. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. They all rose. He noticed that both Lucinda Goodavage and Marion Murphy wore discreet blue head scarves. “Courage,” he said, looking into Lucinda’s stricken face. “I want to thank you all for coming here. It took guts, and I know that.”

  Absolute silence. Time to deliver the bombshell. He took a deep breath. The curtains, he noticed, were green. First time he’d ever looked at the curtains. “I’m going to go out to the Rose in a moment, and I want to tell you why.” He looked around at all their faces. Did they all think him insane? No? Well, they would. “I’m going to do sahada.”

  “You can’t,” Homeland Security Chief Wilkes blurted.

  “Since when do you give the orders around here?”

  Wilkes’s face went gray. Lucinda Moore’s lips tightened. She would have a traitor on her staff, he thought, almost certainly. Her old-fashioned politics of openness made her an easy target.

  Henry Kerry stared down at the notepad before him. Here was another candidate, not because he was in any way weak—he wasn’t—but because the State Department was just too damn big not to be vulnerable. So Fitz had traitors close to him, of that he felt sure, some kid carrying coffee and listening to every word, some secretary, affable and trusted, who left her reports in a back alley somewhere.

  “Anybody wants to cry, do it outside.” He chuckled a little. Lay it on. They needed to leave here thinking he’d lost it. Tell their staffers, make him seem weak, a little mad. If he was lucky, the enemy would hear and become overconfident, and make some sort of mistake.

  “It’s surrender,” Secretary of Defense Ryland said. He was loud, his voice challenging. There were murmurs around the table, heads nodding.

  Now it was time for the president to lie. This was his prerogative. The greater interests of the country always came first. “We have firm intelligence that the threat in the latest document is damned close to being real. There are at least thirty-five bombs planted around the world, and probably the fifty he claims is a true number. And mark my words, if I don’t go out there and get on my knees, we will see them all detonated within a week.”

  “Like Washington? We’ve survived.”

  “Like Rome, man! Rome!”

  “Are you sure of this?” Ryland asked.

  Coming from a man who should certainly have been in the loop on this, it was a fair question. Fitz’s answer, however, was not fair. “We have acquired a hard disk from Pakistan. It’s being decoded, but slowly.”

  “What hard disk?”

  “Need-to-know, Mike,” he told Ryland smoothly.

  “I have a need to know!”

  Fitz would never say, in this room, that the hard disk had belonged to the Mahdi, and that the Mahdi had been killed. Because that would become news. They would leak it. And it was both true and false. The Mahdi was dead. Long live the Mahdi. Plus, the disk was proving a tough nut.

  “Mike, I’m sorry. You’re out of the loop and I can’t say why.”

  Ryland came slowly to his feet. He leaned over, got his briefcase, and slid the pad into it. “You have my resignation,” he said.

  “No! No, I won’t hear of it! Not now!”

  “You have my resignation!”

  “You sit down. When this is over, you can do what you want, but I can’t have cabinet officers quitting now. How would it look, for God’s sake!”

  “It’s gonna be over as soon as you say that damn prayer out there. So fine, I’ll resign after that. One minute after, I’m done.”

  Kerry stood, then Ryland, then the rest of them. Total rebellion.

  Fitz laughed; he walked to an arched window, gazed out toward the gathering press. “I’ve got quite a crowd,” he said. “Maybe I’ll do a little soft-shoe.” He danced a bit. “Yes, Sir, that’s my baby. . . .” He flashed his professional grin, purposely did it too bright. He laughed a little harder. “You’re like kids who threaten to run away, but you’re scared to leave Poppa. Well, hell, Poppa’s got thirty-five cities full of people and treasure and the life of a goddamn civilization to worry about, so either get out or sit down!”

  As he shouted at them, he kept the grin going. It must look wild. Absolutely bonkers. He’d done drama at Yale, but only a little. Too bad he hadn’t tackled Lear. Always wanted to, but he’d been a satisfactory Chance Wayne in Sweet Bird of Youth, also a well-reviewed Captain Warrington in Little Mary Sunshine. He laid his hand on his heart and sang, “In Izzenschnooken on the lovely Essenzook Zee . . .” Chuckled again. “I’m gonna become Muslim in English,” he said. “If I mispronounce the Arabic, we’re liable to lose another city.”

  “Mr. President,” Mike Ryland barked, “I’m not sure you’re well.”

  “You know, you’ve got a point. I’ve got a headache, and I’ve had a little gas. Actually, I could be coming down with something. Nothing very serious, though. Death, maybe?” He barked laughter, then cut it off by wiping the air in front of his face. “Never laugh at your own jokes, son. Wise advice.” He glanced at his watch. “Time to go and fuck the world to the wall.” He started out of the room.

  Ryland followed him, strutting along like a mechanical man, his bald pate as red as an apple. “Fitz, they can’t hit Washington! We know they’re not hidden in a building and they’re not in one of the tunnels, so they have to fly like they did in Vegas and Rome. They have to fly, Fitz! From Boston to Houston, any unauthorized aircraft has thirty seconds of airtime, Fitz! They cannot take us!”

  “Whoop-de-do,” Fitz replied. “So, we’ve given them Rome; let’s give them Paris and Venice and Berlin and Tokyo.”

  “Fitz, don’t do this!”

  Fitz stopped. “Do you know what they’re smelling right now i
n Athens? Roast. They’re smelling the Romans literally cooking to death. In Athens!”

  He could not say more. He could not face his cabinet any longer. He blamed himself for all this. He’d known how vulnerable the security services were to penetration. He’d known how few it would take on the inside to do this damage. But he had not pressed the inspector general, had he? He should have been shouting down telephone lines, forcing the bureaucracy out of its massive inertia.

  They had restricted Muslims in the intelligence services. So how hard was it to simply abandon your religious affiliation, especially if you had family and friends to help you? It was like the Cold War, when it had been so difficult to keep the communists out. But worse, there was the matter of money. A lot of cash, just to glance away for a few minutes, what did it matter? It was probably just a marijuana shipment, anyway.

  Oh, God. He was the accursed president. This was the worst.

  He went out into the Rose Garden. Approached the podium. Faces, camera lenses, microphones. “Good morning, Hugh. Selena. Hi there, Cokie. Okay, folks, we have a very brief time here.” He swallowed. Wanted water. There was no water. “All right.” As never before, he was aware of the silent presence behind the machines, of the billions who were watching this. The thirty or forty feet between him and the cameras, he imagined, was filled with angels. He allowed himself a little smile, a private moment in what was certainly the most public place in the history of the human species. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find that every man, woman, and child on the planet was watching or listening.

  “First, I would like to express my belief that there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.”

  Even the clicking of still cameras came to a halt. From deep within the crowd there was a sudden sound, a cry, instantly stifled. There it was—the end of this age, not a bang, not even a whimper, just that little sigh.

  Fitz thought, What a species we are, that a few words could mean so much. Then further, but deeper and more insubstantially, he reflected that the great curse of religion was that it tempted people into believing that the story of their deity was more important than the lives of human beings. It came to seem morally right to kill on behalf of the story.

  “Now, before Allah and our blessed Mahdi, our guide given to us by a loving God, I say this. Allah in his infinite mercy has allowed the Mahdi to see into our dark hearts, here in the West, and has revealed to him that we were indeed planning a maneuver—an attack—that would have killed the faithful. That’s right; we would have killed the faithful. I know you are wondering what that means. It means that we were ready to cause the death of hundreds of millions of people. Their lives were dangling at the end of our great and terrible Crusader sword. But no more. I have this day ordered the American Air Force and all the American military all through the world to stand down. Even as I speak, the planes are returning to their bases, and the missiles are being stowed in the holds of the ships that were about to launch them. And now, I call upon the Mahdi to bring forth new officers to help us enact the holy law of Allah in our land.”

  There were tears on faces, other faces disappearing into hands. How ironic that, of all that Fitz had learned and seen in life, the thing that had most truly defined his largest moment, in the end, was his experience as Chance Wayne. The truth was not the word of God. There was no word of God. It was the silence.

  Fitz turned and went quickly back into the White House, ignoring the voices wailing out their questions. The Roman emperors might have had problems with assassination, but they hadn’t had to worry about the press. Still, turning his back on the questions shamed him.

  But then again, there comes a time in every big hand when a player with good cards feels a tinge of conscience. As Fitz crossed toward the elevator, people rushed forward. “I know that every world leader, every major CEO, every big banker, is on hold. Tell them this. The president says that Šar’ah law is clear. Follow it.”

  Linda and Dan and Logan tried to enter the elevator with him. He held up his hand. They stood, staring out of red, devastated eyes, as he closed them out of his world. They could not follow him, not now.

  He did not return to the residence. Instead, he went down to the old Cold War–era White House shelter.

  The moment the doors slid open, he heard voices and the clatter of keyboards. An enormous job had been done here in just a matter of hours.

  The two Marines on guard duty confronted him. “Sir, the sequence.”

  If he got it wrong, they would shoot him immediately, and by his own order. But he would not get it wrong. He had created the sequence himself. “Dulcinea,” he said.

  “Sancho Panza,” the master sergeant replied.

  “Mahdi.”

  They stood aside, and Fitz stepped out into the transformed space. Gone were the elaborate electronic maps that had made this secret chamber one of the wonders of the Cold War world. What was left was raw concrete walls and people working at plastic tables brought in just hours ago. Power lines and fiber-optic cables ran out and down the long tunnel to the Potomac, where four more Marines manned a guard station that bristled with makeshift antennae.

  What he had here was a highly sophisticated signals acquisition and communications center that completely bypassed the whole intelligence-gathering infrastructure. It had limitations, of course, but surprisingly few. Jim Deutsch and Nabila al-Rahbi, and Nabila’s group leader, Margaret Pearson, had handpicked the minimum number of people essential for the work. They were from the National Reconnaissance Office, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Even so, there were just eleven people present and two Marines.

  Fitz went straight to Deutsch, who huddled with a group of technicians, staring at a laptop.

  “Where are we?”

  Nobody answered. Nobody stopped working. Fitz could smell the sweat of desperation, the stink of it mingling with the sour damp of the concrete.

  Jim Deutsch glanced up. “They have the disk contents uploaded from Pakistan pretty well decoded,” he said.

  Fitz’s heart literally bounded in his chest. A rush of blood made the world sway. “That’s wonderful!”

  “It doesn’t look good.”

  Elation, then the cliff. “Oh?”

  Marge Pearson said, “We’re looking at sixteen target cities.”

  “It’s not fifty, at least.”

  “We have no idea where the bombs are or how big they are, or even if there’s really a bomb present in all the cities.”

  “Which cities?”

  “Think world tour. Us, of course. Then New York, London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo, Riyadh, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, and, of course, Jerusalem.”

  “They got a bomb into Israeli territory?”

  “This one is going to be delivered from outside. From Syria, we think. A small plane or missile. In general, delivery is by small planes that are capable of using city streets as runways. In Rome, it was a racecourse.”

  “Okay, so my next step is to warn the Syrians.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Deutsch snapped.

  A paladin, for sure. Nobody talked to the president of the United States like that. Still, he forged on. “Why not, Mr. Deutsch?”

  Deutsch just shook his head, went back to whatever he was doing on that laptop. But Fitz didn’t care, because this tiny operation down here represented, however faint, the only chance of winning this war. It was Deutsch who had suggested that he bring in people who had been close to the known traitor, on the theory that they would be most angry and thus the most highly motivated. It was as counterintuitive as all hell, but Fitz had to hope that Deutsch was right and traitors didn’t run in packs.

  Nabila al-Rahbi, also, was almost certainly loyal. She had the credibility of her religion to save, and Fitz had seen that she was a faithful Muslim of the deepest, truest kind. In fact, her Islam reminded him of his mother’s Christianity. Her faith, also, ha
d not been simple, and her intelligence had also tested it constantly, and driven it deep. “Trust grace,” Mother had said. “Just trust grace. Faith is nothing but that.”

  Deutsch had suggested that he bring in Mark Chambers, Rashid’s supervisor, and Carol Wilkie, his closest coworker. They had been working hour after hour, without sleep, running drones, pulling data from satellites, all the time cloaking their activities so that other elements in the intelligence community would not be able to detect their mission.

  The more information the disk from Pakistan gave up, the more they could zero in on specific target cities, and perhaps isolate the location of the damned bombs.

  “What about the specialist teams?”

  “Operating in every known target city,” Nabila said.