by Tom Cain
22
The one indulgence Alix still had left was the hot, scented bath she liked to sink into before she went to work. It was the cheapest way she knew of feeling good. But this evening she had to call Larsson first. She felt bad about depending on him. He’d already done so much for her.
“They’ve given me a final notice,” she said when he answered the phone. “One week to pay. I don’t know what to do anymore.”
“There’s no progress, then, no chance of him remembering where he’s stuck his money?”
“In a single week, I don’t think so. . . . But why do we need the clinic at all? I can care for him myself.”
“How?” asked Larsson. “The man’s still sick. He needs constant supervision, drugs, therapy. How can you afford that? Look, if there’s really no other way, I could get a loan on my apartment.”
“No, that’s not fair. You’ve been a good friend to us, Thor, but even a good friend must look after himself. . . . Hell! I’ve got to go to work. We’ll finish this some other time.”
“I’m sorry, Alix. I wish I could have done more to help you.”
“You have. You listened. You cared. That was what I needed right now.”
She put down the phone. There would just be time to wash her hair before she left for the club. The bath would have to wait.
In an imposing Baroque office building on Lubyanka Square, in Moscow, the conversation between Alix and Larsson was recorded, transcribed, and passed on to a duty officer. He examined it, then leaned back in his chair and stared blankly at the ceiling, losing himself in thought as he considered his opinion and how best to present it. Finally he sat upright again and put a call through to his boss’s assistant.
“I need to meet the deputy director,” he said. “It is a matter of the utmost urgency.”
23
Waylon McCabe owned five thousand acres of Kerr County, Texas, a private kingdom between Austin and San Antonio, shaded by ancient live oaks and watered by twisting creeks and landscaped ponds. Up in the hills, a few miles from the main compound, stood a private retreat that McCabe reserved for his special guests. That was where he took Kurt Vermulen when he wanted a private conversation.
“You said you had something for me. What you got?”
Vermulen looked him in the eye. “A nuclear bomb.”
McCabe didn’t know if he was being taken for a fool.
“Is this some kind of joke, General?”
“Absolutely not. There are more than one hundred of them, cached around the world. They’ve been hidden for at least ten years. But I can obtain the document that tells me where they are.”
“You don’t have it yet, though?”
“No, but I expect to take possession of that information, along with the codes needed to arm the devices, within a matter of weeks. At that point, it’s just a matter of acquiring one functioning weapon.”
“Then what do you plan on doing with it?”
“Put it in the hands of Islamic terrorists.”
McCabe’s eyes widened. “Are you crazy?”
“Don’t worry. . . . I’ll be giving it to terrorists we’ve invented. A video will be sent to news agencies around the world by a radical offshoot of the Islamic jihadist movement—an offshoot that does not exist, one that has been created for this operation. The video will threaten the detonation of a nuclear bomb in a major city. The bomb will be filmed in such a way that defense analysts will immediately recognize that it is genuine.”
“Then what?”
“Then the world will see that Islamic terrorists have nuclear weapons and be forced to take the threat seriously.”
“What if the President tells the American people not to worry? Says that ain’t no bomb, folks, just some kinda fake. What then?”
“I don’t envision that happening. The evidence would be too strong. But anyway, I plan to take steps to make sure the bomb is discovered. Before it detonates, of course.”
McCabe looked skeptical.
“Same problem. Special Forces or the CIA find this thing, then they say it’s a fake. General, if you want people to know what it is, you’ve got to make it go off.”
“And hit a major city? Tens of thousands of people could die. We’d be no better than terrorists ourselves.”
“Sure, if it went off in a city. But why do it there? These radicals’d have some kinda hideout, somewhere they can’t easily be found. Maybe they’d be in the desert, or the mountains. Detonate your bomb out there in the boondocks, no one gets hurt, but you get yourself noticed, that’s for damn sure. . . . Shit!”
He’d started coughing again.
“You should see a doctor about that,” said Vermulen.
McCabe spat phlegm onto the ground.
“I got a chest infection. It’ll pass. You just answer one last question: How much is all this gonna cost me?”
“I haven’t budgeted it yet. But you’d have to allow several million bucks.”
McCabe laughed.
“Several million? That all? Hell, I thought you were gonna ask me for serious money.”
McCabe was impressed. He’d set Vermulen a challenge and the general had met it. That list of nukes would bring the war against the Antichrist a whole heap closer. So now he just had to find a place where a bomb could be the fuse that would make the whole world go up in smoke. Once Vermulen had been sent on his way back to Washington, McCabe went back to the estate house, where he’d installed a library of religious books. Then he poured himself a couple of fingers of bourbon and started his research.
His first thought was the hill of Megiddo itself, but it was just an outcrop in the countryside northeast of Tel Aviv, nothing much else around it. For sure it was the site where the final battle concluded. But it wasn’t the best place to start a war. For that, he needed a place that was already a flashpoint, somewhere sacred to both Christ and Antichrist alike.
He was sitting at his desk, wondering where to look next, when something caught his eye, a letter he’d recently received, asking for donations to assist the preservation of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Recently, the evangelical movement had found common cause with the Jews because both of them hated the Arabs. Now the Arabs were being accused of disrespecting the Jewish relics on the Mount. A lot of folks had been upset by that.
McCabe’s mind started turning over. He had little knowledge of Jewish theology and none at all of Islam. But he had as good an eye for an opportunity as anyone. He could see that different religions were already arguing over Temple Mount. That sounded worth his while to check out.
The significance of the Mount soon became very obvious. The Jews believed that the exposed bedrock on Temple Mount was the very Foundation Stone from which the world had been created, the center of everything. When Abraham had offered up his son Isaac in sacrifice, that happened on Temple Mount, too. Solomon had built his temple there, and he’d placed the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies right over the Foundation Stone. So that made the Mount the most sacred site in Judaism.
It was the Muslim angle, though, that really made McCabe’s head spin. He looked on Muslims as godless heathens, but the thing that blew his mind was not how different the teachings of Islam were from those of Judaism, but how similar they were.
They believed in the Foundation Stone, too. The Dome of the Rock, the oldest Islamic building in the world, had been built right on top of it. Muslims also agreed that Abraham had come to the Mount, which they called the Noble Sanctuary. Difference was, they held that he offered up his other son Ishmael for sacrifice, and that Ishmael was an ancestor of the Prophet Mohammed.
Muslim scripture stated that the Prophet had been visited in Mecca by the archangel Gabriel, who brought an animal called al-Buraq, on which he rode through the night to the stone on the Mount. Then the Prophet ascended to heaven, and met Adam, Jesus and John, Joseph, Enoch, Aaron, Moses, and Abraham, before coming face-to-face with Allah himself.
McCabe couldn’t understand how the Muslims co
uld claim prophets and angels from the Holy Bible. And what was Jesus doing in their heaven? Bottom line, though, there were now two ancient Muslim shrines on the Mount—the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque—which put it right up there with Mecca and Medina on the list of their holiest places.
Looking on a map of Jerusalem, McCabe also saw the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built on the site of Christ’s burial place. That was as important a shrine as existed in the whole Christian world, and it was just a few hundred yards away, in the heart of the Old City, well within range of any nuclear blast.
Suddenly the pain and fear of his disease was replaced by a glow of true contentment. Temple Mount was the flashpoint he’d been looking for. Nuke that, and all hell would break loose. Oh, yeah, that would do the trick, all right.
24
He was standing in the middle of the road and a black car was driving straight toward him. Its headlights were blazing right into his eyes, blinding him. He tried to close his eyes but his eyelids wouldn’t move. He struggled to turn away, but no matter how hard he wrenched his neck, his head was held fast. He couldn’t blink. He couldn’t move. Now the roar of the engine was filling his head and he couldn’t lift his hands to cover his ears and his brain was about to explode with noise and light and he wanted to scream, but he couldn’t because his mouth was gagged and his teeth seemed loose against the leather strap. And he was cold, so terribly, terribly cold . . .
Carver came to, his pulse racing and his throat constricted by a pervasive, unfocused panic. For a while, he could not focus his eyes, so he reached out blindly for her hand . . . and felt nothing.
He frowned and shook his head quickly from side to side, banishing the last bad fragments of his nightmare from his brain. Then he opened his eyes . . . and Alix wasn’t there.
Now he really had something to panic about. Carver told himself to calm down. There were very few things he knew for sure anymore, but one of them was that Alix came to see him every day. She had been there earlier, he was sure, and she’d be back again. It was just a matter of waiting. Maybe she was getting a meal or something to read. She did that sometimes, when she thought he was asleep. Yes, that was it. She would be back soon.
“Hello, Samuel.” There was a woman at the door of the room. She was smiling at him and her voice was friendly. But she wasn’t Alix. She was Nurse Juneau, bringing him food and medication.
She looked around as she came into the room, frowned to herself, then gave Carver another smile.
“Alix not here?” she asked perkily, then her voice took on a huskier tone: “At last, Samuel, we’re all alone.”
She looked at him over one shoulder teasingly. “After all this time—now what shall we do?”
She picked up one of his hands and stroked it.
Carver flinched at her touch. He found people confusing. He didn’t always understand what they meant by the things they said. He couldn’t work out what they were feeling when they spoke. Their intentions were unclear. He could see that Nurse Juneau was flirting with him, but he had the sense she was mocking him, too. He didn’t like that.
He decided to ignore her and concentrate on what was on his mind.
“Where’s Alix?” he croaked.
Nurse Juneau put the tray down across his bed and shrugged.
“I don’t know, Samuel.”
“Where has she gone?”
“I don’t know. Samuel,” Juneau repeated, with a little more emphasis, holding out a little paper cup in which sat three brightly colored capsules. “She’s just not here.”
She meant nothing by the remark. Nurse Juneau couldn’t see anything wrong with Alix giving herself a break. The poor girl deserved it, the amount of time she spent in this room.
But her words hit Samuel Carver like a shock from the belt that had tortured him. He gasped. His eyes widened in shock. He gripped his sheets. Then he flung his arms upward, throwing off his bed linens and sending the tray flying as plates, glasses, and cutlery clattered down onto the floor.
Nurse Juneau was used to Carver’s tantrums, his infantile fear of abandonment. But this time, she suddenly realized, his reaction to Alix’s absence had a whole new intensity.
As she screamed in alarm, Carver got out of bed, with an energy she had never seen in him before, his eyes blazing, his face twisted with a primal, unfettered rage. She backed away, but he came after her. He wrapped his fists around her upper arms, gripping them so hard she winced in pain, then he stuck his face right up close to hers and hissed, “Where is she?”
His voice had lost any trace of childlike innocence. It carried the threat of real fury, ready to tip into violence.
Nurse Juneau shook her head. “I don’t know,” she pleaded. “I promise I’m telling the truth. I don’t know where Alix has gone. But don’t get upset—you know she always comes back. Always.”
Carver threw her away from him, across the room. She crashed into the door frame, crying out with the pain of the impact.
“Alix!” shouted Carver, standing beside his bed. “Al-i-i-i-x!”
He stumbled across the room, almost tripping on the nurse’s dazed body, and headed out into the hallway.
Stabbing bolts of pain cut through Carver’s skull. His heart was palpitating. Images from his dreams were flashing before his eyes. But now, in this waking nightmare, everything was different. He knew where and when he had fought in that desert: a mission deep into Iraq in the midst of the Desert Storm campaign in 1991. He knew that he and his men had blown the cables and returned safely to base. And the woman in the dream was Alix. She’d been there, in that chalet outside Gstaad. But what else had happened there?
The memory would not come. Just another stab behind his eyes.
He made his way down the hall in his T-shirt and pajama pants, crashing into a cart laden with patients’ medications, barging past the nurse who was pushing it from one room to the next, shoving a patient out of the way as he tried to get to the stairs that led to the exit and the outside world. The dream visions had gone now and he realized he was seeing everything around him with a new clarity, born of comprehension. It was as if there had been a thick glass wall between him and the world—a wall that had suddenly been shattered. He understood his surroundings, appreciated the function and significance of things and people that had been meaningless to him for months. Above all, he understood who and what Samuel Carver really was.
From behind, he heard hurried footsteps, scurrying down the hall. He turned and saw two of the clinic’s male orderlies, men chosen as much for their physical strength as their caring natures, charging toward him. He tried to fend them off, but they ignored his flailing fists and charged right into him, knocking him over and pinning him to the ground.
A few seconds later, Dr. Geisel was kneeling beside him, holding a syringe.
“This is for your own good,” he said, sticking the needle into Carver’s upper arm.
Before the sedative hit him, Carver looked Geisel right in the eye.
“I know,” he hissed. “I know.”
Then the drugs hit his system and oblivion overcame him.
A minute later, as the orderlies were dumping Carver’s inert body back onto his bed, Nurse Juneau approached Dr. Geisel. She was rubbing the back of her head. Her eyes were red-rimmed and welling with tears.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I think so,” she said, wincing. “It is Samuel I am worried about. He seemed so shocked to be alone. I have never known him this bad before.”
“You think so?” Geisel replied. “It seems as though the opposite is true, in fact. One shock has reversed another. The trauma may be his catharsis. Now, at last, he has started to get better.”
25
The bierkeller’s dressing room reeked of stale smoke, hairspray, and cheap perfume. Alix stubbed out a cigarette and steeled herself to go back to work. She tugged at her short white stockings, snapping the elastic just above her knees. The waitresses all wore tarted-up Heidi c
ostumes: a short red skirt with a petticoat frill at the bottom; a lace-up black bodice, and a skimpy, low-cut white blouse. She pulled the laces tight, tying the ends in a bow beneath her breasts. Then she put her wig back on. It was bright blond, with pigtails, tied at the end with little red bows. She took a deep breath and stepped out into the bar.
Alix scanned the room, apparently greeting the customers with a smile or a flirtatiously blown kiss, but in actual fact examining each of them, watching for any indications of those who were likely to be particularly drunk or obnoxious. On the far side of the room she saw a woman sitting by herself at a table for two, next door to the banker and his clients.
The woman was small and wiry. Her pantsuit—plain, but perfectly tailored—was as black as the hair that framed her face in a severe, geometric bob. The dim light of the bierkeller had turned her thickly painted lips from vivid crimson to the dark, rich purple of a ripe eggplant. For a moment, as she looked at Alix, her face was utterly expressionless—until their eyes locked and the woman smiled back at Alix and kissed the air, mimicking her gestures with a sort of contemptuous mockery.
Alix stopped dead in her tracks. She seemed unable to process the information her eyes were supplying. Then she gasped, darted her eyes around the room, turned on her heel, and fled back to the dressing room.
As Alix turned and fled, the woman in black caught the eye of two men sitting at a nearby table and nodded in the direction of the dressing room. They got up and started walking toward the door through which Alix had just disappeared. The woman left thirty francs on her table and strolled to the main exit.
