The Tenth Circle

by Jon Land

  “Because there wasn’t any.”

  “Don’t take me for a fool, Zarrin. Your return to the United States is hardly advisable at this time. Somebody may have seen you, be able to identify you, in which case you’d be in a position to identify me. The Republic of Iran does not need that right now.”

  And Colonel Kosh terminated the call before Zarrin could respond.

  Ohio, he’d said, a church bombing.

  … has your trademark all over it …

  The ATF woman held the twisted husk of metal out but didn’t hand it over. “Well, what we’ve got here is the classic two-chain trigger. Minor amount of explosive to ignite a much larger amount of accelerant consistent with exactly what happened here.”

  “You mind if I take a look?” Zarrin asked the female ATF agent, pulling plastic gloves over her hands.

  The woman passed the trigger over. Zarrin felt its familiar heft and raised it toward her nose to sniff.

  “What has your investigation revealed so far about the bombing itself?”

  “The perpetrators soaked the floor in a chemical compound we’ve identified as an offshoot of kerosene,” another of the ATF agents explained. “We believe they were in the guise of a cleaning crew on the premises without prior authorization. No security cameras, though. They might as well have been invisible.”

  Just as she’d once done in Istanbul, to the letter, and more than enough to arouse Colonel Kosh’s suspicions of her involvement.

  “Survivors all describe a massive flame burst,” the female agent picked up. “What the perpetrators essentially did was turn the entire church into a fuel-air bomb.”

  Istanbul again, as well an office building in Amman. A signature of hers, almost certain to be matched up to this bombing. Meaning that she was about to become a suspect.

  But why would someone go through so much trouble to implicate her? And since she wasn’t responsible for this bombing, who was?

  “Thanks for your help,” Zarrin said, disciplining herself to keep her English measured and perfect, as she walked away.

  Zarrin had her cell phone out and at her ear by then, waited until she neared the jagged facade riddled with blast debris to press out a number.

  “I need to see you,” she said, after a beep sounded prior to a single ring. “Please make time immediately. I’m on my way.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Blountstown, Florida

  Jeremiah Rule took Rachel from behind to avoid having to look at her face and the horrible swelling from the wound that remained bloody and unhealed. He needed to bed her tonight because she was ripe and ready, a blessed opportunity not to be squandered. He took her in his stiflingly hot bedroom, the windows all closed to shut out the sound of the rain while leaving the air fetid and stale.

  Rule lived on the same grounds as his church in a simple one-story modular home that was actually composed of several prefabricated modules joined together. He had retreated there to join the young woman once his prayers were done, but only after draining the buckets collecting the spill from another January storm.

  “All men have demons, child,” he said out loud, as he continued to ease himself in and out of Rachel, listening to her whimpers and sobs as the blood dribbling from her mouth soaked his pillows and sheets. “They can never be vanquished, but they can be controlled. The strongest among us are capable of that. I was not always counted among that number, yet my weakness has painful roots all its own that help to explain my helplessness, my yielding to temptation. I offer the truth of my past not as excuse, only so you understand the path that brought me to a terrible place that could have been my end had not light shined bright and found me in its glow.”

  Rule’s thrusts quickened. He pushed himself deeper inside her.

  “I was orphaned as a young boy, abandoned actually by my parents and forced to live in a boys’ home. The orphanage was a cold place in the mountains of North Carolina. An ugly place surrounded by beauty, which made no sense to me, even as a boy. I remember it seemed cold all the time, except in the summer where the cottages—that’s what we called them—were like ovens. In winter, the cottages were heated by steam pipes, which were strung overhead like something out of a science-fiction movie. They’d hiss and clack and drip hot water on you as you slept.”

  Rule felt the passion, the moment, building inside him.

  “I learned my religion there. Mass every day of the week with the longest saved for Sundays. I learned to love God because I hated everything else. Had these older kids, late teens or early twenties maybe, watching us, called counselors. One day, one of them lost a five-dollar bill and accused us nine-year-olds of stealing it. When nobody confessed, the counselors made us hang from the steam pipes until our hands began to blister. Each time a boy finally let go and fell off, he was beaten. I was the last to fall and they beat me worst of anyone. Then this fat kid who smelled bad confessed and gave back the five dollars, but I was the one forced to suffer for his sins more than anyone else.”

  Almost there now, the moment of bliss that would beget an even greater plan nearly upon him. Rule pounded Rachel more feverishly, yanking back on her hair and fighting for his own breath, not caring how much she sobbed or whimpered beneath him.

  “I had God back then,” he gasped. “God was all I had, and I promised, I promised to serve Him all my days if He saved me from that awful place. Every morning I’d pray to get through that day and every night I’d pray to get through the next. And since the Lord delivered for me, I figured the least I could do was deliver for Him. So I got that job selling Bibles, feeling even then He had some bigger plans for me and I guess I was right, wasn’t I? Wasn’t I?”

  And with that he exploded, hard and fast, holding Rachel by the hips until he’d emptied himself inside her.

  Rule had just pulled out of her when he heard a heavy knocking on the door and pushed himself back to his feet. The pounding had grown loud enough to rattle whole front of his house by the time he had pulled his clothes back on and moved to answer the door. He opened it to find Colonel Alvin Turwell standing there silhouetted by the sun.

  “You wanted to see how we’re going to change the future, Reverend. I’ve got a plane standing by.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Roanoke Island

  “Forget about where they take the tourists, this is the actual site of the colony … and the original weapon of mass destruction,” Captain Seven said, breath misting before his face in the chilly, dank air. The temperature was dropping fast in advance of an approaching storm forecast to spread a mix of rain and snow through the mainland. Powerful gusty winds and lots of pre­cipitation were fast approaching, further darkening a cloudy day lit in splotchy fashion by the stray light able to sift through the forest’s thin, bare canopy. “This is where John White must have found his people when he returned with Captain Glanville and his men the day after he made that entry in his journal.”

  “Hold on—the colonists were never found.”

  “That’s what history says, and technically it’s accurate, since White didn’t find them alive.”

  “Graves,” McCracken realized. Prior to making the trip, he’d done his best to change his appearance, including shaving his beard for the first time since his first tour in Vietnam and combing his hair straight back. “You’re talking about graves… .”

  The captain nodded. “Lined up one after the other, all one hundred eighteen of the colonists, including White’s own family. One grave for each settler dug by members of the Croatan Indian tribe that lived nearby. Hence that one word carved into a tree as a signal to alert anyone who showed up who’d buried the bodies. See, the colonists were killed all right, but not in an attack. Nope, those poor bastards didn’t fall to hostile action at all. They fell to something much worse and much more dangerous.”

  “Any idea exactly what?” McCracken asked the captain, after exchanging a gl
ance with Johnny Wareagle, who’d joined them for the trip.

  “I’m almost there, MacNuts, but not quite. It all comes down to isolating a weapon that could kill so many people so fast way back in 1590. White figured out the disturbances he spotted in the ground and topsoil to be graves, dozens and dozens of them. He came back the next day to set fire to the very ground we’re standing on to erase any trace of their presence and, hopefully, whatever it was that killed them.”

  Wareagle knelt and smoothed the grass, as if it might yield some further clues.

  “Johnny?” Blaine prompted.

  “There was a legend in these parts even before the first settlers arrived prior to the doomed Roanoke party, Blainey. A legend of an invisible force, violent and wild, that rises when conditions are right to wreak havoc on the land and its residents. Each of the tribes had their own version, along with their own name in their own language. But the legend’s the same. Always something monstrous and malevolent.”

  “Big fella’s more than right,” Captain Seven echoed. “Makes me think he’s been lying to us all these years about having his own private patch of homegrown, because that kind of perception does not come without some chemical enhancement, I shit you not. See, a few days before his death, and following a disappearance that remains unexplained to this day, Edgar Allan Poe was brought to his deathbed in a state of delirium whispering the word Croatoan. The same word was found in other places at other times: scribbled in the journal of Amelia Earhart after her disappearance in 1937, carved into the post of the last bed that the celebrated horror author Ambrose Bierce slept in before he vanished in Mexico in 1913, and scratched on the wall of the cell that the notorious stagecoach robber Black Bart inhabited before he was released from prison in 1888, never to be seen again. And, most disturbingly of all, written on the last page of the logbook of the ship Carroll A. Deering when it ran aground with no one aboard on Cape Hatteras in 1921.”

  “What’s your point, Captain?”

  “More of an observation, MacNuts, that maybe we’re not the first to figure out that something big and bad got loose here.”

  McCracken moved his gaze back to Wareagle. “Tell me more about these conditions you mentioned.”

  “Fog, mist, the air sometimes hot and sometimes cold. Always in the midst of a storm or just in advance of one, Blainey.”

  Captain Seven whistled. “Yup, real dark and stormy night shit, I’d say. The point being something killed these colonists in the blink of an eye, and I’ll bet you my stash it’s not done yet.”

  CHAPTER 36

  Roanoke Island

  “Talk to me about this weapon of mass destruction, Captain,” McCracken said in the center of the brush-riddled clearing amid the increasing chill and darkening sky.

  “Already told you, I haven’t figured that part out yet.”

  “But you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have some idea.”

  “I’ve had some idea for a long time, but I’m just beginning to figure out I’ve been right all along. Should’ve known better than to doubt myself.”

  “About what exactly?”

  “Go back to what the big fella said about weather conditions.”

  “Mist, fog, a storm coming or already there.”

  Captain Seven grinned. “See, you know this shit as well as I do.”

  “Not really.”

  “Atmospheric conditions, MacNuts, specifically low barometric pressure. Whatever killed the colonists feeds on that, at least thrives on it. The two sailors Captain Glanville lost in his first trip ashore with John White died in the fog as a storm approached. Yup, it all adds up.”

  “To what?”

  “To something we need to consider on an entirely different plane of understanding, and I mean a plane even beyond what ganja can do for you.” The captain stopped, getting his bearings of the camp as it had been over four hundred years ago. “Remember the cartoon that had the WABAC machine in it? Sherman and his dog Mr. Peabrain or something?”

  “I think it was Mr. Peabody, Captain.”

  “Whatever. Anyway, imagine you and me climbing into that WABAC machine and going back to 1590 right where we’re standing. What do you think we’d find?”

  “Living colonists, if we picked the date right.”

  “I’m talking about in nature.”

  “Why don’t you just enlighten me? Nature’s been your specialty for as long as I’ve been digging foxholes in it.”

  “Well, the fact of the matter is, at the time of the Roanoke Colony, this land was pretty much unspoiled, even untouched for a million years or so. No development, no building, no exploration. Even the Indian tribes stuck to a pretty small area, maybe because all the legends about the danger in these woods led them to steer clear of this very site. Might also explain why they proved so inhospitable to the colonists, since they were afraid of them unleashing whatever had laid claim to this land. Comes down to the fact that sometimes when you start digging to build a world, you end up unearthing the kind of stuff that goes bump in the night.”

  “You think that’s what the colonists did?”

  “I think they were exposed to something never introduced into the world before, something that exists under a set of biochemical rules they understood no more than they could possibly understand what was killing them.”

  “What, as opposed to who. Care to elaborate?”

  “Uh-uh. I’m not nearly stoned enough to manage the effort.”

  “Something that powerful doesn’t just go away. So tell me what happened to your original weapon of mass destruction after the colonists let it out.”

  The question seemed to ruffle Captain Seven, his big, crazed eyes suddenly narrowing, looking uncharacteristically unsure. “It went back into hiding, an inert state until the right conditions arose to trigger it again, at which point—”

  He stopped when he saw McCracken twist suddenly toward Johnny Wareagle. “What is it, Indian?”

  Wareagle’s eyes were sweeping left to right, focused on the woods. “Someone’s watching us, Blainey.”

  CHAPTER 37

  Dearborn, Michigan

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Colonel,” Zarrin said to the man bouncing the toddler on his knee amid a birthday party raging around him in Chuck E. Cheese’s.

  “Your message said it was an emergency.”

  Zarrin looked around at the festivities for one of her mentor’s older grandchildren. “You don’t look happy to see me.”

  “I’m not,” said Nabril al-Asi, a resident of Dearborn for nearly a decade, along with the rest of his family, since he’d fled Palestine. “Your presence here endangers my family. I do not wish to be seen with you. I’m an American citizen now.”

  “I had nothing to do with the church bombing in Ohio.”

  “The evidence indicates otherwise.”

  “What about my word?”

  Zarrin could see al-Asi’s mind working, the colonel virtually unchanged from the first time she’d spotted him walking through the Palestinian refugee camp where she’d grown up. “Then someone went through a lot of trouble to cast you with the blame.”

  “That’s why I came to you, Colonel. To find out who.”

  “That could be a very long list, Zarrin. You have many imitators. Your work is admired throughout the world you helped create.”

  “I was never a terrorist, any more than you were.”

  “No,” al-Asi said, with a twinge of irony in his voice, “for us it was always about politics. At least that’s what we told ourselves.”

  “You think differently now?”

  “Perspective changes with the years, and I choose to look toward what’s ahead of me, not behind.”

  As al-Asi finished, a ball plucked from a ball pit closed for repairs jetted straight for his grandson’s face, only to be snatched out of the air by Zarrin in the i
nstant it crossed her line of vision.

  “Nice to see you’ve kept up with your practice, Zarrin.”

  “A master always does, Colonel.”

  Nabril al-Asi eased his two-year-old grandson from his left knee to the right, the one reconstructed at an Israeli hospital in a time where a flirtation with peace elevated him to one of the most powerful positions in the Palestinian Authority. As head of the Palestinian Protective Security Service, al-Asi had presided over what began as Yasir Arafat’s secret police, but under his tutelage morphed into a sophisticated security agency. In large part, this was due to the force of his own personality and the fact that al-Asi had the support of his competing agencies in Israel, unthinkable now but attainable in the mid-1990s after the signing of the Oslo Accords.

  “It seems so long ago now, doesn’t it, Colonel?” Zarrin asked, as if reading his mind.

  “Because it was. And I’m not a colonel anymore. Just a grandfather and a father living without fear or headaches. Until this new wave of attacks brought new scrutiny down on all Muslims.”

  “And what have you done about it?”

  “Planned my grandson’s birthday party.”

  “This coming from the spymaster whose Protective Security Service kept the opposition groups in check and held the fragile and fractured politics of Palestine together almost on its own… .”

  “I don’t know that man anymore.”

  “Too bad, because he’s needed again, now more than ever.”

  Al-Asi stared at her for several long moments. “I used to buy all your recordings,” he said suddenly, thoughts veering. “Now I download them, starting with the Live at Lincoln Center performance. My eight-year-old granddaughter showed me how. That’s one of a thousand things I enjoy about my new life here. That’s the man I am now.”

  Al-Asi stopped bouncing his grandson, eyes suddenly scanning the Chuck E. Cheese’s in search of another family member to take the toddler off his hands. He gestured toward his daughter as Zarrin realized his hair and mustache were just sprinkled with black now, gray having claimed the rest. The colonel’s daughter approached and took the toddler from his grasp.