The Tenth Circle

by Jon Land

  “What the …” The shape in the doorway’s voice froze there. His heavy work boots hammered the steel stairs until they stopped at the bottom, eyes narrowing with recognition as the sun hit his bald head, rife with tattoos. “Wait a sec, I know you… .”

  Rule stood there speechless, the rock gone from his grasp to thump against the parched earth.

  “You’re that reverend, the one hates all the damn Muslims.”

  Addressing him like one of the faithful. Rule could see it in his eyes, which the sun couldn’t make squint, hear it in the giant’s voice. He’d never seen a man this big and layered so heavy with muscle.

  “That I am,” he managed, “that I am.”

  “I heard of you, I heard all about you.”

  The man stopped there, his expression opening into a smile. A few of the teeth Rule glimpsed were chipped, the residue of bar fights perhaps, except the reverend couldn’t imagine anyone mixing it up with this guy, at least not doing so and coming away to talk about it. He towered over the world, stretching nearly to the size of the mobile home minus the concrete slabs on which it was perched. Black leather biker vest worn right over his flesh, cutting off some of the tattoos layered over his torso. Those tattoos stretched across his shoulders and deltoids too. Up and down both arms as if there was a story in them somewhere, a beginning and end to follow along some ink-laden trail that looked wet in the sunlight.

  The giant took another step forward and Rule felt his bowels turn to ice. His hands looked like slabs of dry, crusty meat, warped and scarred at the knuckles. The reverend started to take in some breath but stopped short of completing the effort.

  “Been meaning to get to one of your services, Reverend,” the giant said. “Like where you’re coming from, I surely do, but God and me, we never have gotten along so good.”

  “My services give back what you bring to them, no matter what that is,” Rule managed.

  The giant straightened a bit, seeming to grow even taller. “I killed my share of Arabs, back in the real Gulf War, the one where we got to let loose and fight. Stuff went on over there nobody ever heard about, on account if they did, they’d never let us do it again.”

  The giant winked, flashing his chip-toothed grin.

  “Name’s Boyd Fowler,” he continued, extending one of those meat slab hands. “This here’s my boy Jimmy.”

  Rule eased his hand forward, felt it utterly swallowed by Boyd Fowler’s. “How many Muslims you figure you killed, sir?”

  Fowler scratched at his scalp. “Can’t rightly say. I lost count after the first dozen, most after the war had officially ended but that didn’t stop the 5th Armored Cavalry when those sand jockeys took some potshots at us.”

  “And have you killed any since?”

  “Reverend?”

  “Since you’ve been back, here in the States.”

  Fowler twisted his neck toward Jimmy, making Rule think an uncoiling snake tattooed across the top of his chest was about to strike. “Go inside, son.”

  Jimmy did as he was told, the door rattling closed behind him.

  “I killed plenty since I been back, Reverend, mostly since I got out of prison, but no Muslims among them. I’m not saying I’m proud of what I’ve done, what I do, but they were mostly bad people and punching their tickets puts food on the table. Man’s primary responsibility is to take care of his own, right?”

  “It is indeed, Boyd. Can I call you Boyd?” Rule asked, the light dawning on him growing brighter.

  “You sure can, Rev.”

  “It’s the very same thing I do in my work, Boyd. I take care of my own. God’s children. I take care of them all when they come to hear me speak His word. He speaks to everyone who stands before me in my voice.”

  Rule took a step forward, shrinking the distance between them. He could feel the heat radiating off Boyd Fowler and pricking at the air. It was like standing near a bakery oven.

  “You know, Boyd, I had a spat of trouble the other day.”

  “I heard about that on the news.”

  “I need someone willing to stand up against the heathens who want to silence my voice. I need someone to guard God’s word so it may continue to be spoken through me.”

  Now it was Fowler who took a step forward, close enough to Rule for him to feel something like static electricity leaping off the giant, the two of them trapped in a dark patch by the shade trees.

  “I might be the just the man for the job, Rev,” the giant grinned, those chipped teeth flashing again. “And I can bring others of the same mind.”

  “A blessing, Boyd,” Rule grinned back, realizing that the Lord had directed him here to Countryside Estates for an entirely different purpose altogether. “Just one question: What was it you were jailed for in the first place?”

  “Treason, Reverend. Trying to do right by this country.”

  CHAPTER 51

  Dearborn, Michigan

  “What exactly are you looking for, Zarrin?” Nabril al-Asi asked her in the private office space he occupied on Dearborn’s Warren Avenue.

  The colonel had purchased the three-story office building shortly after settling in the city a decade before. Office suites on the first two floors were occupied by a staid combination of lawyers and accountants, the third taken up entirely by businesses maintained by his family members and the Palestinian Progressive Foundation he’d founded shortly after immigrating.

  “I’m not sure exactly,” she told him. She worked the laptop atop his desk to rewind the digital recording from the surveillance cameras on the Golden Gate Bridge and watched it again, this time in slow motion. “Did you isolate the pictures like I asked?”

  “On another flash drive, yes.”

  Al-Asi inserted the other flash drive and keyed up the faces in question.

  “There,” he told her.

  Zarrin clicked on each of the individual pictures, none of which were either familiar to her or could be matched up with any database, and stored them in a single file. The nationalities and ethnicities were clearly varied, including Middle Eastern and African. But, grouped alongside one another, there was something about them that bothered her, the hair and beard styles too similar.

  “What are you up to, Zarrin?”

  “Whoever’s behind this must’ve managed to erase any individual pictures of the perpetrators, turning them into ghosts. Now that we’ve expanded our selection, let’s see if they managed to do the same thing with any group shots that might have been taken. How good’s your software?”

  “I still have the codes for the government servers.”

  “Which government?”

  Al-Asi couldn’t help but smile. “All of them.”

  “This can’t be,” al-Asi said, even after checking the results a second and third time, after the server’s work was complete. “There must be some mistake.”

  “Ours, Colonel, for not realizing it earlier.”

  “It makes no sense, Zarrin, none at all.”

  “It makes plenty.”

  “They’ll never believe us.”

  “One man will, and you need to help me find him.”

  CHAPTER 52

  Boston, Massachusetts

  McCracken stood across Congress Street, flush with the statue­ of Samuel Adams centered amid the three long rectangular slabs of buildings that made up Fanueil Hall.

  “We think it’s code for a meeting, the where and when. Four-two-seven-one-F-H-one-two-one,” Folsom had told him earlier that morning, repeating the sequence of numbers and letters Blaine had found filled in down a row of boxes in the crossword puzzle. “The first four numbers are longitude-latitude designations for the city of Boston. One-two-one is January twenty-first, today’s date.”

  “And F-H?”

  “We believe that’s ‘Faneuil Hall,’ a combination indoor/outdoor shopping and restaura
nt complex. Prime tourist attraction, especially during the lunchtime rush.”

  “Which makes it a prime target for terrorists, ideal choice for the next attack.”

  “I don’t buy it, McCracken.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because how could my undercover agent have learned that from inside Rule’s camp?”

  “Good question.”

  “I assume you’ve got an answer.”

  “Not yet, Hank. But if I’m right, this is our shot to catch them in the act. Get the Indian and me a plane and have the cavalry standing by when we call.”

  The one-hour flight passed mostly in silence, save for one stretch where Blaine’s thoughts got the better of him, taking him back to the trip he’d made to Crazy Horse, South Dakota, where Johnny had been holed up for months on his latest mission. Not reconnaissance, rescue, or extraction, but the completion of a monument to the greatest Sioux warrior of all time, Chief Crazy Horse.

  Once completed, it would be the largest sculpture in the world: a granite portrait of the famed warrior on horseback, carved, blown, and whittled out of the imposing Black Hills. In scale as well as complexity, the final product would dwarf even the collection of presidential profiles on nearby Mount Rushmore, the portrait’s nose alone stretching to twenty-seven feet. Construction had actually started way back in 1948, subject over the years to endless financial and political setbacks before suffering further stagnation in recent years, despite eighty-five full-time staff members dedicated to its construction.

  Wareagle’s involvement originated in the lack of an accurate rendering of what Crazy Horse actually looked like. Descended from a long line of Sioux warriors, Johnny had been the beneficiary of old drawings picturing subjects from his own warrior lineage standing with the legend himself—his great-­grandfather and great-great-great-grandfather, if memory­ served McCracken correctly. These were deemed the most accurate of any Crazy Horse portraits. But the level of Wareagle’s­ contribution changed as soon as he visited the site and proclaimed he could not, would not leave until he saw the portrait out of granite completed.

  “Remember when I came and rescued you from that mountain in South Dakota last year, where you were chiseling away at the monument, Indian?” he asked suddenly.

  “Not exactly my recollection, Blainey, but yes, I do.”

  “You weren’t wearing a safety harness.”

  Wareagle looked at him, a bit befuddled by McCracken’s stating the obvious.

  “That’s the way I feel right now,” he continued, getting to the point. “Like I just stepped off the ledge with nothing to keep me from falling.”

  “This is about the missing boy.”

  “We can hope he’s only missing.”

  “And therein lies the problem, Blainey,” Wareagle said in his typical, sage-like fashion, the cold wind blowing hairs that escaped his ponytail about his face. “You have never been one to hope, always one to believe instead. It’s what has kept you—us—going so long.”

  “You think I’ve adopted a defeatist attitude, Indian?”

  “No, I think you’ve come to question your invincibility.”

  “I never considered myself invincible, just lucky more than my share of times.”

  “You miss my point, Blainey. You were invincible because nobody could hurt you emotionally, the greatest strength both you and I possess. It’s why we live alone, apart, why I chose to spend time pounding away at a granite face, because it made me feel connected to something other than the fleeting causes we serve. That statue of Crazy Horse carved out of the mountain won’t be fleeting. It will survive for centuries and ages, beyond our lifetimes and many to come.”

  “I’m still missing the point, Indian.”

  Wareagle responded without missing a beat. “When you stood next to me on that mountain, could you see the face I was toiling before?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “We were too close to it.”

  “Exactly. To see it in its entirety, we’d need to step back, change our perspective. This boy’s disappearance in an attack at the hands of the enemy we now face changed your perspective the same way. It left you too close, so you couldn’t see the entire picture.”

  “His last name,” McCracken said suddenly.

  “Blainey?”

  “I was looking at what was left of the bridge, standing next to this Homeland Security spook, and I couldn’t remember Andrew’s last name. It’s Ericson, but I stood there then unable to remember it.”

  “This worries you?”

  “Because maybe I didn’t want to remember, maybe I’d blocked it out. Just like you said, so it couldn’t hurt me. But it still did.”

  “That’s not all I said. On the mountain, you see everything from too close up because you have no choice. Once off it, the choice of how much to see and feel is yours to make. That’s why you told Folsom to let us handle this instead of shutting the site down.”

  “Indian?”

  “You want to know who did this to the boy. You want to see the faces of your enemy.”

  “Spirits have anything to say about whether Andrew Ericson is still alive?”

  Wareagle shrugged his huge shoulders. “Sometimes they see the future more clearly than the present, Blainey.”

  It was closing in on lunchtime now, Wareagle having entered Faneuil Hall ahead of McCracken to scout the scene. While waiting for him to return, McCracken busied himself with a review of what he knew about Faneuil Hall itself, a model for other developments like it all across the country, combining strong historic elements with modern shopping convenience. The colonial buildings, restored to their original beauty, housed a variety of shops ranging from food and clothing to electronics and touristy knickknacks sold from open-air pushcarts that operated through all seasons, though today with considerably less bustling traffic. The central Quincy Market was separated from its twin parallel appendages by walkways stretching maybe three hundred yards in length and running about thirty yards in width. McCracken’s mind inevitably transposed everything into such logistical concerns, adding windows that would make the best shooting perches and other areas offering potential concealment.

  He spotted Johnny crossing Congress Street toward him, still a dozen feet away when Blaine caught the look on his face: resolve, resignation, and surprise all mixed together.

  “Indian?”

  “Twelve men, Blainey, scattered between the two levels, all with concealed heavy weaponry. Getting ready to launch an attack.”

  “Six Africans from Yemen or Somalia probably,” Wareagle continued. “Four appear Middle Eastern. Two indeterminate.”

  “I’ve never known African and Middle Eastern terrorists to work together in the same group.”

  “Something’s not right here, Blainey. Something doesn’t fit. The problem is I can’t put my finger on what.”

  “I think I can, and we’re running out of time, Indian. Lunch hour’s about to peak; Boston’s as defiant as ever,” he added, wishing in that moment that the city was sheltering in place, more like Washington.

  “There’s something else,” Wareagle was saying. “Someone else inside. Someone who noticed me.”

  “Not a terrorist.”

  “A different agenda entirely. And skill set. I felt his eyes on me.”

  “We can’t worry about that now.”

  McCracken put himself in the minds of the terrorist masterminds behind the attacks. With the country paying notice, changing their behavior and becoming willing prisoners in their homes, the availability of potential targets was substantially reduced. Settings like Faneuil Hall were the last gathering points still likely to draw crowds large enough to be thought of as legitimate soft targets. With each attack, that list would be reduced further to the point where, at least for a time, it would be whittled to practically nothing b
y attrition.

  And then the terrorists would have won. But they weren’t going to win today, not here.

  “I’m calling Folsom,” McCracken told Wareagle, phone already in hand. “Let Homeland Security hit the panic button with first responders.”

  He pressed Folsom’s preprogrammed number, waited for the ring that never came.

  “The number you have reached is not in service at this time. Please check the number and—”

  McCracken pressed the end button, tried again as his stomach muscles began to knot, hearing the welcome click of the phone being picked up this time.

  “State your name and designation,” an unfamiliar voice droned.

  “Who is this?”

  “State your name and designation.”

  McCracken looked at the number still showing on his screen. “Is this Homeland Security?”

  “State your name and—”

  Blaine pressed END again. “Folsom’s been taken out of the picture,” he said, dialing 9-1-1. “Let’s see if we can bring the cavalry on board ourselves. I’ve got to figure local authorities have heavily armed response teams standing by and ready to move.”

  But his call never went through, Blaine heard a dull hum in the background.

  “The terrorists have taken the 9-1-1 system off the grid,” he told Wareagle, turning his gaze back on Faneuil Hall. “Looks like it’s just us, Indian.”

  CHAPTER 53

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Zarrin watched, waited. The appearance of the huge Native American, whom she recognized as Blaine McCracken’s legendary right-hand man, had unnerved her, suggesting something awry and unexpected. Al-Asi’s contact had said nothing about McCracken’s purpose in coming to Boston, or the presence of Johnny Wareagle at all. But the way the big man had scouted the site clearly indicated their presence here to be far from innocuous.

  Once, she watched him stiffen below her on the first floor and actually turn to gaze upward, almost directly at her position as if he’d felt her eyes upon him. Zarrin maintained the presence of mind not to dart or turn, nothing to give herself away.