No Survivors

by Tom Cain

  She walked right by the front of the hotel and went around the block to the staff entrance at the rear. The entrance was wide enough to admit vans into an unloading bay. To one side there was a small hut. Time clocks were fixed to the wall beyond it, where the cleaners and catering and maintenance staff clocked in and out. Alix went up to the porter standing guard in the hut and spoke in her worst French and strongest Russian accent.

  “Excuse, please,” she said.

  The porter was reading a tabloid newspaper. He ignored her.

  “Excuse,” she repeated. “Have appointment with housekeeper, fifteen hours, for get job chambermaid.”

  The porter reluctantly dragged his eyes to the date book in front of him.

  “Name?”

  “Yekaterina Kratochvilova,” said Alix, speaking quickly in an incomprehensible gabble of syllables.

  The porter gazed helplessly at the open page, an angry frown on his face. He clearly hadn’t a clue what she’d just said.

  “Not here,” he said. “Come back another time.”

  “Impossible! I make appointment. Please to look again, Yekaterina Kratochvilova.”

  A couple of uniformed maids walked by, turning their heads to see what the fuss was about. Alix caught their eye.

  “Maybe you help,” she called to them. “I come see housekeeper, have appointment. She can see me now, yes?”

  The maids looked to the porter for guidance.

  “It’s not my decision,” he insisted. “There’s nothing in the book.”

  Alix gave the two women another pleading stare. She’d timed her performance carefully. By three in the afternoon, any guests that were leaving a hotel would have checked out and their rooms prepared for the next occupants, but few of the coming night’s guests would have arrived. It was the quietest time of the working day, when even the busiest housekeeper might be able to see an unexpected job applicant.

  One of the maids took pity.

  “I’ll go and get her,” she said.

  “Thank you, thank you,” Alix gushed, while the porter looked on indifferently.

  The maids disappeared.

  Alix took a couple of steps backward, out of the light.

  The porter returned to his tabloid.

  A middle-aged woman appeared at the far end of the passage, tight-lipped and stern-eyed, her steel-colored hair pulled back in a bun, reading glasses hanging from a gold chain around her neck. She was talking to the chambermaid, clearly irritated by the intrusion.

  It took Alix no more than a couple of seconds to fix an image of the housekeeper in her mind’s eye. Then she slipped away from the entrance, unseen by anyone as she left. By the time the housekeeper got to the hut, she was long gone.

  13

  Kurt Vermulen looked around the banquet hall where the Commission for National Values was holding its private meeting. The room was located on the fifth floor of a modern hotel close by a shopping mall on the outskirts of Washington. The interior designer had gone for a gentlemen’s club effect, with dark paneling, lights in ornate sconces, and vintage oil paintings in gilt frames. Vermulen hoped the men he’d come to address weren’t equally phony.

  The meal had been cleared away, and the speeches were about to begin. Vermulen, however, would have to wait his turn. For now a stocky, pugnacious man, in a sober black suit, his shock of silver hair glinting in the glow of the chandeliers, was making his way to the podium, which had been placed on a low stage just behind the top table.

  His name was Reverend Ezekiel Ray. Across a swath of states in the South and Midwest he could draw crowds to hear him preach that would put platinum-shifting rock acts to shame, but today there were no more than eighty men present. No women had been invited, and the only brown faces in the room belonged to the waiters.

  This select congregation belonged to the innermost core of a secretive organization, invisible to the public eye. Its membership constituted some of the heaviest hitters in American conservatism: politicians, preachers, lobbyists, strategists, lawyers, academics, and business leaders. Their congregations ran into millions, their fortunes to tens of billions. They could bankroll candidates, or boycott TV stations. Though they were, for the time being, denied control of the White House, they still wielded enormous, if well-disguised influence on their nation’s politics.

  The “national values” with which the commission was concerned were defined in a very particular way. They felt that it was immoral, even blasphemous, to keep God out of government. Their God, however, was a very specific, Baptist Christian deity, and they regarded the followers of Islam with a fear and hatred equaled only by the loathing that Islamists felt toward America’s satanic, crusader culture.

  These were not Kurt Vermulen’s values. He believed in God, but his faith was a personal, private affair. When it came to the country for which he had so frequently risked his life, he believed that the Constitution was a more important document than the Bible, and that the nation’s Founding Fathers knew what they were doing when they argued for the separation of Church and State.

  At this moment, he wasn’t in the position to debate such philosophical niceties. He needed every friend he could get, and if that meant talking to his audience in their own language, he would do it. So Vermulen aimed to pay careful attention to Ezekiel Ray: to both what he said, and how.

  For a while, Ray stood in silence, acknowledging the applause that had greeted his arrival at the podium. He waited till it had risen to a crescendo before he bowed his head and clasped his hands in front of him, murmuring the words of Psalm 19: “ ‘Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer.’ ”

  His audience responded with a murmured “Amen.” Again, the preacher let the silence build, holding himself in a pose of prayer and contemplation until he suddenly stood tall again and flashed a smile that lit up the room as brightly as the chandeliers.

  “My friends,” he began, “I bring you joyous news of our Savior’s return! This is news of exultation for those who are brothers and sisters in Christ. But it is news of pain, and death, and eternal torment for those who have turned away from Christ, those unbelievers who mock the Lord and wallow in the sin and temptation offered by the Antichrist.

  “You know the news I’m talking about. You have the words of the first letter to the Thessalonians, chapter four, verses sixteen and seventeen, engraved upon your heart. ‘For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first:

  “ ‘Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.’ ”

  Many of the congregation had mouthed the words as they were spoken, and murmurs of approval greeted their conclusion.

  Ray nodded in acknowledgment. “Gentlemen, we only have to look around us today to see those who are pious, God-fearing, and living a life of decency and morality. But if we turn on the television, or read the poisonous words of the media elite, we see those who mock the word of God . . . who sneer at those who believe . . . who degrade the holy institution of matrimony . . . who wallow in decadence and fornication.

  “Believe me, they will soon be cut down by the sickle of Christ, and all the followers of the Antichrist with them. For their day of reckoning is coming soon, as the word of the Lord makes plain.

  “Consider the second epistle of Timothy, chapter three: ‘In the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection . . . despisers of those that are good . . . lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God.’

  “The Gospel of Matthew, chapter twenty-four, warns that ‘nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom . . . And many false prophets shall rise . . . iniquity shall abound.’

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sp; “Sounds familiar. Sounds like the world today. So now we wait for the final warning that the end is nigh, the arrival upon the earth of Satan himself. Gentlemen, you must be on your guard. For Satan will come soon, and when he does come we must make ready for war.

  “We know where that last, great battle will take place, for it is written that ‘he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.’

  “As you know, this place truly exists. It is the hill of Megiddo, which stands in the land of Israel. And you can visit this place. You can see it with your own eyes.

  “But do not be afraid of this great battle. For the Christ who will return in glory is a mighty Christ, a warrior Christ, riding on a white charger, a Christ who will make His enemies tremble. So be joyful that He comes. Be happy that you will be saved. But be prepared for that final conflict between good and evil.

  “For He is Christ . . .

  “He brings us rapture . . .

  “And He is on His way!”

  As the shouts of “Amen!” rang around him, and the Reverend Ezekiel Ray settled back down in his seat, accepting handshakes and backslaps from the men on either side, Kurt Vermulen clapped politely. He was assessing the room as he’d so often assessed a battlefield, looking for strong points and weaknesses, calculating threats and opportunities, seeking out hidden dangers. Above all, he was considering the men he was about to face. He knew now exactly what his audience wanted to hear. But could he give it to them?

  He was about to find out.

  14

  It was half past six, and Alix was sitting on a bus, three rows behind the housekeeper, as she made her journey home. She would, Alix knew, be carrying her own personal set of keys to virtually every working room in the hotel, as well as a pass card guaranteeing access to every guest room. Chambermaids had pass cards, too, but they were kept on cords tied around their waist so that they could not possibly be dropped or mislaid. Only staff as senior as a housekeeper were entitled to put their keys in a handbag. Somehow Alix had to get inside that bag.

  It happened in a neighborhood supermarket. Alix watched as the housekeeper paused by the first aisle, reached into her bag to get her shopping list and left it open as she put on her reading glasses, then ran her finger down the piece of paper, mentally ticking off everything that she had to buy.

  Alix walked by her, glancing down at the bag. There were two sets of keys clearly visible: a small ring with her car and front-door keys, and a much larger bunch of hotel keys, one of which looked like a credit card. That was the one Alix wanted.

  But for the next ten minutes she had to wait, her frustration growing, unable to find an opening. The housekeeper had almost reached the checkout when she suddenly stopped dead in the middle of an aisle. She replaced her glasses on her nose, consulted her list again, hissed crossly at her own forgetfulness, and scuttled away to another aisle, leaving her cart behind her.

  Alix walked steadily toward the cart. Making no sudden movements, she reached into the bag with her wire cutters and snapped the link that attached the housekeeper’s pass card to her key ring. She palmed the card and put it in her own shoulder bag. At the checkout she paid for a lettuce and a jar of Bolognese sauce, then disappeared into the night.

  15

  Kurt Vermulen looked out from the glare of the podium into the darkness of the room beyond. He had one last chance: one shot at getting the backing he needed to make his country aware of the threat building against it in mountains and deserts thousands of miles away. The nervous energy was building inside him, adrenaline parching his mouth. Then he began.

  He delivered a warning of a war that could engulf the world, a conflict to the death between religions and civilizations. And it was, he said, a war that America had brought upon itself.

  “I was there when it all began,” he said, his voice low-pitched but intense. “I saw our fatal mistake.”

  He took them back to the late summer of 1986 and the first secret shipments of Stinger antiaircraft missiles by the United States to the mujahideen, the resistance fighters battling the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. “They called this fight the jihad, which literally means ‘the effort,’ or ‘the struggle.’ To them it was a battle against the enemies of Islam. It was their duty to fight in the service of their God.”

  Vermulen was not an orator. He was a man of action, and he spoke simply, without any of the vocal flourishes of a preacher like Ezekiel Ray. But he could feel the atmosphere in the room change as he talked about men who fought for God. This was language that the men in front of him understood, even if theirs was a different deity.

  “These jihadists were given our most deadly weapons, and they were trained to use them by U.S. military advisers under my command. We thought we were teaching them to beat Commies. We forgot that we were also training them to beat us. And it wasn’t till the Red Army was finally kicked out of Afghanistan in 1989 that we figured out that these warriors of the jihad didn’t like Americans, or Christians, any more than they’d liked Russians. And by that point, a register had been taken of all the men who had fought as mujahideen. It was a list of names and contact details, and it was called ‘the base,’ or in Arabic, al-Qaeda.

  “A year later, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein, dictator of Iraq, the Muslim leader of a Muslim nation, invaded Kuwait, another Muslim nation, and took his armies right up to the borders of Saudi Arabia. And I guess you all know how they worship there.”

  There was a ripple of laughter through the room, a relieved release of tension. When it died away, Vermulen said, “We beat the bad guy, gave the Kuwaitis back their country, and helped our Saudi allies. But the men of al-Qaeda and their allies in Egyptian Islamic Jihad didn’t care about that. Far as they were concerned, the presence of infidel Americans in the same country as the holy shrines of Mecca and Medina was a sinful pollution. They hated us for being there and they have never forgiven us.

  “So, we know these folks are out there. We know their stated intentions to fight against us, our faith, and our way of life. They have already attacked U.S. forces in Sudan, Saudia Arabia, and Aden. But it was not enough for them to kill Americans. They wanted to strike directly at America itself. You know that on February 26, 1993, Islamic terrorists detonated a fifteen-hundred-pound bomb underneath the World Trade Center in New York City. The guys who carried out that bombing had links to al-Qaeda and also to our own intelligence services. The Trade Center conspirators used a bomb-making manual originally supplied to them by the CIA. They also had access to combat manuals from our own Special Forces Warfare Center. We taught these guys to blow us up and we’re still doing it.

  “Just look at the civil war that has torn apart the European nation that was once Yugoslavia. Islamic jihadists trained and armed by U.S. corporations were active in Bosnia, and are joining the conflict currently starting in Kosovo. Al-Qaeda and Egyptian jihadists are operating in Albania and throughout the former Yugoslavia. Their aim is to use that war as a means of opening a back door into Western Europe. Yet the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA remain in total denial about the threat they pose. Gentlemen, this is madness.”

  For the first time, Vermulen was raising his voice and putting extra emphasis into his words. He had paced his speech like a long-distance runner waiting till the final lap before he put in his big effort.

  Sitting at a table in the far corner of the room, Waylon McCabe was impressed. He was beginning to understand how Vermulen had earned three stars before his fiftieth birthday.

  “I fear that we are witnessing the first skirmishes in a great war between faiths that could determine the state of the world for decades, even centuries to come,” the general continued. “The soldiers of Islam won’t use tanks or rockets, but bombs, strapped to their own bodies. For they are prepared to sacrifice everything, including their own lives, while too many of us lack the courage or the will to sacrifice anything at all.

  “Our society is soft. Our leaders dare not confront the electora
te with the truth. They do not even want to hear the truth themselves. And so I come to you, the members of the Commission for National Values, because I know you will appreciate the stakes for which we are playing.

  “We are sleepwalking toward disaster. And if we do not wake up, our values, our freedom, and our faith will be murdered while we sleep.

  “Thank you.”

  As Vermulen stepped away from the podium, he sighed with relief, and felt his shoulders drop inches as the tension finally drained away. He’d been back at his table for a couple of minutes, sitting silently, too mentally spent to make conversation with the other men at his table, when he felt a tap on his shoulder.

  He turned in his seat to see an elderly man in a suit. But this was no amiable, silver-haired geezer. The face that looked down at Vermulen was as tanned and desiccated as a headhunter’s trophy, pierced by eyes that burned with a feverish intensity. And though the body beneath was clad in an expensively tailored suit, Vermulen could sense that it was as lean and tough as beef jerky.

  The man bent down and spoke in a rasping, dry-throated Texas accent.

  “Liked what you had to say, General. The name’s McCabe. I believe I could help you some. Maybe we could talk about that.”

  Then he turned away with a hurried “ ’Scuse me,” and hunched over with a hand to his mouth as his whole body was wracked by a fit of coughing that seemed to tear at his lungs like a ravenous predator, ripping his chest apart.

  16

  Alix put on her shades, then strode right into the Hotel Impérial as if she owned the place. Confidence was the key to acceptance. Aside from the occasional casual glance as she went by, no one paid the slightest attention as she walked toward the main staircase and made her way to the first floor of guest rooms.