Critical Mass

by Whitley Strieber

  He walked out into a ghostly quiet. Stores were closed, some of them with steel shutters. This was actually helpful. Although he was the only person on the street, which obviously made him a target of the police, it was also true that it would be easy for him to spot the opposition.

  He walked steadily and quickly, keeping as close to buildings as he could, taking advantage of any overhead cover that presented itself. In tracking, he knew what he was capable of, and Mark was even better, and he would be highly motivated, for sure, Mark who was facing weeks of interrogation about the mole who had worked for him, and probably would see his career go into terminal decline. So Mark was up there in the sky looking right now, as were they all.

  In addition to worrying about what might be happening overhead, Rashid had to think about the police. There were few squad cars, thankfully, and the National Guard was not deployed in this death trap, so his chances of encountering anybody were not great. Still, he stayed off of short streets as much as possible. He didn’t want some damned cop to come swooping around the corner before he had a chance to conceal himself.

  He had been walking for three blocks when he heard a faint sound, perhaps a car engine. For a moment, he saw no place of concealment, but then he noticed that one of the stoops of the row houses he was passing had a small space under it. He slipped in, forcing himself down among the garbage cans that were kept there, making as little noise as possible.

  The sound became more distinct, an engine nearly on idle, coming closer. Automobile, he thought. No lights, though. The police, then, being very stealthy.

  This did not seem like a routine patrol. This seemed like what might happen if they had been sent here to look for somebody. Rashid forced himself not to look, not to even think about moving.

  Something tickled his ankle. Then he felt a pinch. Of all things, a damned rat was biting him. He loathed filthy creatures like snakes and rats. When he moved, though, the garbage cans immediately rattled, and the guttering of the engine was now distinct, so he had to simply hold his breath and bear it, an awful sensation, stinging, then tickling as the creature licked at the blood it was drawing. He was sickened; his skin crawled.

  Then he heard voices, soft, intent, and a shaft of light appeared, shining along the wall. He watched it play carefully around the stoop. A glow filled the cul-de-sac. He pressed himself hard against the back wall . . . and the light moved slowly away.

  He begged God to make them leave, because the rat was tearing at the skin now, sending excruciating waves of pain up Rashid’s leg. He tried to move the garbage cans, but again there was sound—a scraping. And again the light returned.

  Click. The car door had been opened. There were steps on the sidewalk, and the scuff of feet on the two steps down. Rashid could hear the cop breathing, in and out, in and out, a slight wheeze to it. Crashing, then.

  “Shit!”

  “What?”

  “They got every garbage can in town down here.”

  The pain in his leg stopped and the flashlight beam wavered as the rat sped into the pool of light that ended just an inch from Rashid’s crouching body.

  “It’s a rat,” the cop said, his voice now uninterested. A moment later he was back in the car and the danger had ended. Still Rashid crouched, trying to get his heart to slow down. Allah, he knew, had done this. What rat bites through a man’s trouser leg and chews at living flesh? No, it had been a miracle, God making sure that the rat would be present when needed. “Thanks be to God,” he breathed. He waited, though, until the guttering of the engine had entirely faded and been gone for a time. Then he came out, allowing the cans to clatter a little. At first, he stood in the shadow beneath the stoop. Then he stepped back up onto the sidewalk. With the streetlights out—and they had been turned off earlier all over the Washington area, presumably to make it more difficult for any pilot to locate his target—the street was now far darker than it had been. But even so, just before this Rashid had been able to see. Then he realized, of course, the moon had set.

  It had been over a year since he had gone online to find this house on a map. He had done it from a computer at a public library in Bethesda, and mapped a nearby location, not the actual house. He had also concealed his search in a series of other searches for local Wal-Marts and Target stores. This made him fairly sure that his tracks were covered, but again, he knew the skills of the analysts in Nabila’s department. Somehow, they might be able to uncover his search, although he could not imagine how.

  He moved through the silence and blackness, no longer bothering to keep close to walls. There was no point. That sort of maneuver made it harder to get visuals, but a single man walking the streets on a cool night had an unconcealable infrared signature. If the cops were being directed from above, they would be back very shortly, and this time he would not escape.

  He walked quickly, moving down one block and another, past houses, then bleak-fronted apartment buildings, their lobbies dark. A dog followed him for a time, a gray, panting shadow. “Come,” he murmured, “come along,” but the dog went off. Too bad; it would have appeared less suspicious.

  Here and there, he saw a parked car, but never one that looked as if it could be easily used. And then it hit him like thunder from the hollows of his soul: You are here to die. If you are successful, you will not see another dawn.

  He stopped, held his hands before him, two pale claws. His tongue felt his teeth, his skin the cool air. His mind was filled with images, memories, thoughts—and suddenly he saw inside himself a truth that he had been denying for years or, rather, covering with an increasing elaboration of prayer. This was that the Muslim promise of a heaven stocked with virgins seemed boring to him. More than that, he did not, he had to admit, believe in heaven at all, or hell, or anything, really, except the night air that surrounded him now, and the fact of death. So, why did he do this? He had no answer. He was face-to-face with the mystery of the soul.

  Then he came to the critical block. The house was just around the corner. He could not assess the situation by walking to one end, then doubling back, or going around the block, or anything like that. Anything except going directly to the house and quickly letting himself in would be immediately suspect. So he walked down the sidewalk, crossed in the middle of the street, and approached the door of the red-brick row house. The street was so quiet that the only sound was the whisper of his sneakers on the pavement. Although the Air Force planes cruising above showed no lights, he knew that they were there, too high to be heard, knife-edge planes piloted by magically skillful men who would swoop after him the moment he became airborne. He had no illusions about this. The flying of the plane would be his responsibility. The only question was, what had happened to the Aboud brothers? They had not been captured, of that he was certain, because his unit at the NGIA would have been among the first to know and he had not been discovered until after they had failed to detonate their bomb.

  He reached the front of the house and went up the steps. In his training, he’d learned the particular locks that were installed on all of the buildings that were in use for this project. Simple locks had been chosen intentionally, and the tongues had been filed to allow easy entry to anybody who knew the secret. Their security did not rest in things like locks. A lock couldn’t keep out the authorities, and they were the only threat that mattered.

  He drew his American Express card out of his wallet and pressed it into the doorjamb, an act that he had practiced many times in camp but never again, certainly not at home, where he had left the locks alone. Nabila’s department had installed the locks, the alarm system, and her safe room, and he did nothing but use what he was cleared to use.

  He slid the card but encountered no resistance. Odd. As he was sliding it again, he heard a distinct sound, very faint. He froze, listening. Was this a jet engine, perhaps, very high? A fighter, perhaps an E-4B . . . or no, a drone.

  But it was none of these things, and he knew instantly that a car was drawing near, was not a block a
way, was moving slowly along the street. Had he been spotted by an infrared system?

  Again, he slid the card. Again, no resistance.

  The engine noise became distinct. He slid the card—same result. Then he had a thought—perhaps the door was unlocked. He pushed at it . . . and it opened. Not a good sign.

  The blackness inside was so absolute that he could see only the faint sparks generated behind his eyes by his own nervous system. With this blindness came the unsettling feeling that somebody might be standing in front of him. He stepped forward, feeling with his hands. How might the house be laid out? The garage, he had seen as he came in, was to his right. That would be where the plane would be kept, presumably also the bomb. He felt in that direction but kept swiping air. Finally, he turned that way. There was no wall; therefore there must be a large room.

  He stepped once, twice—and his foot hit the leg of something. Glass shattered, and there were blue sparks. He had knocked over a floor lamp. From somewhere there came a sighing sound, as if somebody who had been holding their breath had tried to cover a sharp inhalation under the noise and not quite succeeded. For some time, Rashid stood motionless, listening to the house. Faintly, water ran in a toilet, the steady gurgle of a bad valve. There was an odor of cumin-seasoned food, old and stale. He took a step into what he knew now was the living room. Behind it would be the dining room and, somewhere on the far wall, a door into the kitchen. There, he hoped, he would be able to find a flashlight, which he would use to enter the garage. He knew how the plane would work, and he thought he might be able to extend the wings on his own. If not, he would detonate the bomb right here. Despite the fact that it would not be an airburst and it was ten miles from Washington, the destruction would be gigantic. Certainly the Pentagon would be completely destroyed. The Capitol’s dome would be smashed, the Washington Monument knocked down, the White House set ablaze. Alexandria and Arlington would be devastated and Georgetown set alight. Radiation would be everywhere, and the American government—what of it remained intact—would be forced to permanently relocate. The shame of it would haunt America for generations to come. The ruins of Washington would become a permanent symbol of America the powerless.

  Forcing himself to move slowly, to use his hands like eyes rather than flailing them, he found the far wall, which was bare. In fact, except for the one lamp he’d had the bad luck to hit, the room itself was almost empty. This was a mistake. A safe house should look in every respect like a home; that was what they had been taught, and it was good teaching.

  He found that he could see the outlines of windows faintly, and was soon able to guide himself into the kitchen. Then the door was under his hands. He took the knob and opened it.

  At once, there was a smell, and he knew that it was blood, raw blood, and not yet decayed. What was here? What was he finding? He fumbled down into the garage itself, into a complicated mass of protruding obstacles. Tools clattered on a workbench as he drifted his hands along it. And then he felt something else, a softness, wet and dense, like a soaked sponge, but large. Gingerly he felt its rough edges, its damper center, then along the smoothness of it, feeling farther and faster, the cold, elastic quality under his fingers.

  Frantic now, afraid of what this was, he felt for some sort of light, found a string, and pulled it, but uselessly. All the power in the region must be turned off.

  But then he had something in his hand—a metal tube. Yes—he found the button; he pressed it, and found himself shining the flashlight beam on a man’s severed leg.

  Gasping, forcing back his cries, he stumbled away from the workbench. Flashing the light around, he saw that there was blood everywhere, most especially on a green chain saw that had obviously been used to do this horrific thing.

  But why? Who?

  And then he understood. To be certain, he swung the light toward the bulky shape of the plane. It stood complete, the wings folded back. They had only to be drawn straight, he saw, and hooked down.

  In the cockpit was exactly what he expected to find, the slumped body of Balil Aboud. He had cut off his own leg to make himself light enough to get the plane off the ground. His brother, therefore, had either run away or died. Balil’s hands clutched the stick, his fingers skeletal claws. His face was twisted with concentration, his teeth bared in a grimace of rawest agony.

  Somehow, this man had sawed his own leg off, had dragged himself to the plane, had gotten in. But how? And why bother, given that he couldn’t hope to get it out onto the street, let alone open the wings? Then Rashid saw the prints of shoes in the blood on the floor, and they made what had happened here quite clear. Hani had faltered in his courage, and Balil had tried to replace him. The plan had been for Hani to push the plane out and lock the wings opened. But it had not happened that way, obviously.

  Had Balil died here and then Hani run away? Or had Hani been a traitor from the beginning, in the pay of the Americans, perhaps, or the Saudi king, who paid bribes to jihadists all the time, the filthy dog? In any case, what Rashid saw here was the reason that Washington still stood.

  “I have a gun.”

  He turned, shining the light in the direction of the voice. In the doorway stood what was almost a human skeleton, a hollow-eyed, sunken shadow of a human being. Held in both clenched fists, his arms shaking so much it seemed as if he would drop it at any moment, was a .38-caliber revolver, a Police Special. The man was so weak that he could barely lift the small weapon. With its short barrel, it was not particularly accurate, but Rashid would not take that chance.

  “Hani, Allah forgives. Allah is merciful.”

  “There is no Allah! Allah is a lie!”

  “Now, you know that isn’t true. You know that Allah is in your heart.”

  The pistol began to shake more. He was trying to fire it, to pull back the trigger, but he was very weak. To make him light enough to fly, his brother must have starved him.

  Rashid leaped at him, throwing him back into the kitchen. He hit hard, his head thudding against the floor. Rashid straddled him, no longer knowing where the gun was. He lifted Hani’s shoulders and slammed his head against to the floor. There was a grunt, and he lay still. When Rashid shone the flashlight on him, he cringed away from it.

  Rashid smiled at Hani. “It’s nothing. I understand. There’s no shame in this.”

  “There is shame.”

  “You still have a chance.”

  “I cannot fly the plane.”

  “But I can, Hani. I’m within the weight range.”

  Hani gave him a careful look. “I thought you would kill me.”

  Rashid wished dearly that he could. But never mind, Hani would get his justice along with the rest of the devils in this evil place. “No, no, there’s no shame. There’s no blame, Hani. You must do for me what your brother was going to do for you, and help me run the plane out.”

  “Who are you? How did you come here?”

  “I’m nobody from nowhere. Now come.”

  As he returned to the garage, Hani followed. Shining the light into the plane, Rashid saw, for the first time in his life, one of the legendary bombs. It was stowed in a carrier just behind Balil’s ruined body, a steel darkness. Rashid couldn’t make out the exact shape, except that it was a rough ball covered with what looked like blasting caps. There were many wires, which appeared disturbingly delicate.

  He followed the wire harness around beside the pilot’s seat to where it ended in a covered switch. He opened the switch cover. In tiny Arabic script were written below the silver toggle the words “Courage for the heart” and above “God is great.”

  He touched the switch. That was all that was necessary, simply to flip that toggle a quarter of an inch. That would forever change the world. Forever. “How great you are, O God,” he whispered, fingering it.

  “I thought of triggering it here. Right here.”

  “But you couldn’t even do that?”

  “I’ve never seen anything. I have never made love. I have no children.”
>
  “Help me now,” Rashid said.

  Balil’s body had stiffened, and as they forced it out of the plane, the garage was filled with the sound of cracking bones.

  “At midnight,” Rashid said, “I will fly.”

  “And will it . . . wreck this house?”

  For an instant, Rashid was going to tell him the truth. Just in time, though, he caught himself. “Oh no. The house will shake. Be damaged. But the explosion will not carry this far.” He gave Hani what he hoped was a believably reassuring smile. “It’s safe here for you. Safe enough.”

  As Rashid embraced Hani, he continued smiling, but to himself. May this devil burn in the firestorm that will be triggered by the bomb. May he burn slow.

  33

  A NIGHT-BLOOMING

  FLOWER

  “You’ve never done operational work, Nabby,” Jim Deutsch said to his wife. “Stay cool. Things can happen fast. Just rely on me; this is my office.”