Shock Warning

by Michael Walsh

His secure smartphone buzzed. He looked at the screen. A single word:

  DORABELLA

  Oh, Jesus.

  He switched off voice contact and the browser, but left messaging on. Might as well give eternity and redemption his best shot, and yet still stay in touch with the outside world. It was the least he could do. After all, he was on his way to meet the Blessed Virgin Mary.

  There was a map on the front seat, with a location in the desert outside California City circled in red. There was a Polaroid camera, loaded and ready to shoot—extra film, too.

  And one other thing. Actually, many other things: rose petals and hyacinths, all over the seats.

  A voice from the backseat. He looked in the rearview mirror to make sure he was not seeing a ghost. But it was only Jacinta.

  No time for questions. No time for thinking. Only time for believing. He wasn’t sure he had that in him, but he would have to try.

  What was the Hollywood motto? Fake it ’til you make it.

  Or was it, Fuck you, sucker?

  No matter. He hit the gas and the car sped off, toward the desert.

  He glanced in the rearview mirror. Nothing was following him, at least nothing corporeal.

  Ghosts, he couldn’t do anything about.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  California City, California

  The procession was taking forever and the cell phone service was terrible. But what did you expect out here?

  Dorabella could mean only one thing. Skorzeny. And Maryam.

  It was the last communication the Central Security Service, his agency, had received from her, the unbreakable code that Major Atwater over at NSA had finally cracked by understanding that the series of squiggles, all variations on the Greek letter e, was not a conventional cipher at all, not a substitute for clear text but a substitute for musical notation. The unseen, unheard mystery of a melody that only Elgar could notate.

  He looked around for Jacinta, but she had disappeared. How could he have lost her? She must be here somewhere, commingled with the mostly Hispanic crowd.

  California City was probably the unlikeliest place to be named after the Golden State. Flat, dry, dusty, a collection of desert cinder-block architecture married to macadam and concrete, it was the kind of place old priests with dark secrets went to die, just like in True Confessions. Out here in the Mojave, there was nothing between you and God except your faith or lack of it, and his lack of it was manifest, even to himself and the God he didn’t believe in.

  Make that, no longer believed in. It was hard to believe in a merciful and compassionate and just God when your mother died in your arms, instead of the other way around, like He did.

  Why “Juan Diego” had picked this spot over all the others eluded him. The same desolate desert landscape stretched in all directions. The Mojave wasn’t like the Sahara or the Gobi—it was not a limitless expanse of sand and camel dung. On the contrary, the California desert was the same only different in each direction you looked: mountainous here, rolling hills there, flat over there, with cactus and desert flowers and Gila monsters and horned toads and dry dirt and drier gullies that miraculously filled with water a few times each year.

  There was a clump of rocks and near it a tent. Vendors hawked sacred bullshit, mostly images of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Euro-tourists, big blond Swedish women hoping for a walk on the wild side with Geronimo, strolled around in short shorts and cameras. Polaroids. Everybody had Polaroids.

  Finally, the procession was approaching the tent. Was that Jacinta among them? It certainly looked like her, but then half the women in this crowd looked like her.

  Devlin had spent plenty of time in Mexico, and his admiration for the Mexican people knew . . . well, it knew one bound. Drugs had destroyed these good, religious, hardworking, faithful people—demolished their families and turned the entire country into a sewer of hopelessness and despair. They were beheading people in Mexico now. Every day, the pathologies of the Middle East were drawing nearer—the clash of civilizations was no longer at Tours, or Seville or Vienna, but on the Tijuana border.

  A dry wind blew across his face, snapping him out of his reverie—and propelling him headlong into another. Not all deserts looked, felt, or smelled alike. The California desert reminded him of another desert altogether, the one surrounding the Iranian city of Tabas, hemmed in by high mountains. The place where Jimmy Carter’s feckless Desert One mission, Operation Eagle Claw, came a cropper in 1980. At that moment, the Iranians lost their fear of the Great Satan.

  Was Maryam there?

  No time to dwell on that now. They were both in need of redemption, but the only soul he could save at the moment was his own.

  He kept respectfully silent as “Juan Diego” passed by, an imitation priest surrounded by imitation acolytes. The voodoo pull of the Whore of Rome still exerted a powerful attraction; had Vatican II never happened, had the reforms instituted by Pope John XXIII never happened, odds were that the world would be a better place. Faith might be crap, but it was better than nothing, and it was obviously a terrible thing to lose.

  The crowd of worshippers and tourists fell to its knees as “Juan Diego” began to pray. Devlin’s Mexican Spanish was long since up to snuff and he heard the man’s words directly, in his head and in his heart:

  “O brothers and sisters,” began the charismatic preacher. “O beloved of Jesus and of His holy mother, Mary.” Devlin could hear the rosary beads clicking as the old ladies told the prayers, ripping through the Our Fathers and Hail Marys at lightning speed.

  “We are gathered here today, as we gather on the thirteenth of each holy month, to honor our Blessed Mother, and to hear her. For she is angry, my brothers and sisters. Angry at the way God’s people have turned their backs on her Son. Angry at the indolence and corruption of the people, who lack only a Golden Calf to make their degradation complete.

  “She comes, bringing us the Word. It is not a happy Word, not the Word of joy, but the Word of warning—there are trials and tribulations ahead, O my brothers and sisters. Days of great sorry, of misery and despair. And we are here to witness her warning.

  “But do not abandon Hope. For so it must be, for so it is written and so shall it be done. Behold—she comes, roses strewn in her path!”

  Somehow, a stray cell signal got through. His phone buzzed. Still kneeling, he glanced down at the display:

  LOVE = HATE.

  Quickly, he tried to retrace the call, but no luck: the signal had evaporated like moisture in the desert.

  “. . . believe, my brothers and sisters. Point your cameras toward the heavens, and witness the miracle of love.”

  The “priest” pointed up at the blazing sun. Five hundred Polaroids pointed in its direction.

  He looked up, trying at once to avert his gaze and yet stare directly into the sun. Then he remembered the camera he was carrying. The Polaroid Jacinta had left for him.

  “Behold—the Door of Heaven!”

  He aimed and fired.

  The camera whirred, then spit out its picture. It would take a minute or so for it to develop.

  He shielded his eyes from the sun and looked back up, but his hand had been just slightly too late and the rays caught him with full force. For a moment, he couldn’t see a thing.

  In his blinded state, he suddenly felt something brush against his forehead. He swatted it away as respectfully as he could. The cell phone messages could only have come from one man, and he knew that that one man would only contact him in the midst of a dire emergency.

  Slowly his sight was returning. He blinked, the reverse images—like X-rays—still flashing in his brain. There was something there, at the edge of his vision, but he couldn’t quite see it.

  He was moving back toward normal polarity now. Gradually, he became aware of a murmuring in the crowd, a swell turning into a shout of hope and radiant glory.

  He didn’t want to, but he had to—the thing he sought was still there, at the edge of his vision, but fading quickly.
Try as he might, he couldn’t grasp it as it slipped away.

  Gone.

  He opened his eyes.

  Rose petals everywhere. People were picking them up, pressing them into devotionals, putting them into their pockets, even eating them in the hopes of absorbing some of their miraculous patrimony.

  His eyes fell upon the Polaroid picture, now fully developed. It was the shot he had taken of the sun. There it was:

  A rectangle of light, created by the aperture in reverse. And, at its center, darkness where there should be have been light. Darkness . . . and something else.

  A figure? The image of a woman? Once you were blinded, whether by the sun or by superstition, anything could look like anything.

  Then he saw the word. Anything could look like anything, but nothing could look like this. It was what it was.

  A single word: Repent.

  Time to go.

  He found the car, just where he had left it. No sign of Jacinta.

  Just a single rose on the passenger seat—fresh, glistening as if plucked from a spring shower.

  About ten miles south of California City, his phone buzzed again. Devlin hit the scramble button. President Tyler himself didn’t have access to the encoding technology that his smartphone did. As soon as he hit the TALK button, the entire conversation would be encrypted, uplinked to a secure tech satellite, voice-scrambled, digitally unsequenced, retransmitted, and then unscrambled at the point of reception.

  “Who am I talking to?” He waited for the operation code. There was only one right answer; otherwise he would assume the relationship had been compromised and would act accordingly. That would be too bad. He liked Danny, the man had always been there for him. But rules were rules.

  “Don Barker.”

  “Speak.”

  A brief pause. Something was wrong. “What do you know about poisons?”

  “Get to the point.” Secure wireless conversations didn’t stay secure forever.

  “V- series nerve agent, Novichoks, QNB—I can’t tell yet.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Coalinga, heading north to San Francisco. Every cow within fifty miles is dead.”

  “People?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then it’s probably not poison. What’s the news say?”

  He could hear “Don Barker” fiddling with the radio. He could hear other voices. Devlin’s keen ears picked them up—three females, one boy.

  “Reports just coming in now.”

  “Get over to Lemoore and stand by.” Lemoore was a naval air station between Coalinga and Visalia. “Hope and the kids will be safe there.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Do you believe in miracles?”

  Until an hour ago, the answer would have been no. “Yes,” he said, and rang off.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Washington, D.C.

  President John Edward Bilodeau Tyler looked at the latest poll numbers on his computer screen, then turned and reached for the fresh whiskey that Manuel Concepcion, his personal steward, always had ready for him. Especially these days.

  “This fucking bitch.”

  That would be Angela Hassett, the other party’s nominee. She’d been crowned in Kansas City, at their convention, her candidacy covered by the cable news networks as breathlessly as the Second Coming. The First Woman Major Party Candidate! The greatest orator since . . . since, well, the last one. Surprisingly feminine—hot, even—and yet as ruthless as any man. A ball breaker, as a matter of fact, and wasn’t that great? About time the boys got a taste of their own. Served them right for hundreds of years of male chauvinist piggery-pokery, to coin a word.

  As for him, let him so much as take a swing at her and the enemedia immediately went into its protective crouch, deploying its legions of sycophants and feuilletonistas in her defense. A fixed fight would have been one thing, but a fixed fight in which the designated tomato can wasn’t even allowed to throw a fig-leaf punch was another. Now he knew what Robert Ryan must have felt like in The Set-Up, except at least he fought back. And look what happened to him. Reflexively, he glanced down at his right hand, to make sure it was still working.

  There were just weeks to go before the election, he was behind by double digits, he couldn’t seem to lay a glove on her, and the country hated him even more today than it did in the aftermath of the Times Square disaster. He used to think his doofus predecessor was a moron, but now he was acquiring a strange new respect, as the media hacks liked to say. It was a match between a puncher and a boxer, and the boxer was kicking his ass. Still, all he needed was one punch, something to put the bitch on her butt, to teach the women that more than a century after the Nineteenth Amendment, if they wanted to play with the big boys, they had to be prepared for some broken bones and bloody noses.

  He didn’t even have to ask Manuel for a refill, because, as always, it was always there. If he had to go into premature retirement, he had to figure out a way to take Manuel with him.

  “Anything else, Mr. President?” asked Manuel.

  “Better poll numbers?”

  “I don’t think we have that, sir,” replied Manuel.

  “A decent movie in the White House theater tonight?”

  “You’ll have to ask Hollywood for that, sir,” said Manuel. “It’s above my pay grade.”

  “Mine too,” mused Tyler.

  In one smooth motion, Manuel slipped him a new glass and whisked away the empty. “Besides,” he said, “they’re all going to vote for her.”

  Tyler grabbed the glass and downed the whole thing. “Don’t I know it,” he said. “And after all I’ve done for them. “No justice,” said Manuel.

  “No peace,” finished Tyler. “Now, what do you want, besides getting me drunk?

  “General Seelye is here to see you, sir.”

  Tyler sighed. “Hasn’t he caused me enough trouble? After what’s happened, he’s lucky I haven’t fired his ass.”

  “Maybe you should have, sir.”

  “And look like an ungrateful sonofabitch who can’t or won’t defend his own people? What happened in New York wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t the NYPD’s fault. Hell, it wasn’t even the fault of those useless wankers at the Langley Home for Lost Boys. It was the Iranians’ fault—that bastard Kohanloo and that woman I let . . .” He caught himself. “Never mind. That’s classified.”

  “Above my pay grade.”

  “Correct. Now show General Seelye in. And bring me another drink. This one will be gone before you know it.”

  Concepcion turned to leave. Tyler followed him to the door and opened it to admit Seelye. Then he noticed the refill was already on the Resolute desk. Good man, Concepcion.

  “What is it, General?” he said.

  “It’s important, Mr. President,” said the head of the National Security Agency.

  “It had better be. Can’t you see there’s a war on and I’m losing it?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Seelye. “May I sit down?”

  Tyler waved him to a chair. “Give it to me straight.”

  Seelye tossed a manila folder on Tyler’s coffee table. “These were taken by one of our operatives in Iran yesterday. Qom, to be exact.”

  “We have operatives in Iran?” said the president, sarcastically. “Who knew?”

  “Please look at the pictures, Mr. President.”

  Gingerly, Tyler picked up the folder. He didn’t like it when Seelye called him “Mr. President.” It was too formal. It meant trouble.

  A bunch of mustachioed men with their asses in the air. A big mosque. Clouds. Sky. “What am I looking at?” He had been handed pictures like these for years; in the middle of the eternal War on Terror, Muslim men at prayer or in rage were a staple of the morning intelligence briefing, just as they had been for his predecessor and would be for his successor. Make that, successors. For it would never be over until either the West brought down the hammer in most brutal, final way possible, or Islam subm
itted. And that, he knew, would never happen. Not until the Last Trump. This was a fight to the finish, even if only one side had figured that out.

  Well, as the old saying went, better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. For months now, his political advisers had been advocating a bold stroke—something so dramatic that it changed the game overnight. The nuclear option, so to speak.

  Except this time, it really was the nuclear option.

  The October Surprise, for which Angela Hassett would have no answer, no reply, no comeback. Two days before the election, he had already decided, he would use the bomb on the Iranian nuclear facilities, as payback for the 1979 hostage crisis and for every other sin the Muslim world had visited upon the West and Israel since then. There was nothing to lose except the good opinion of the Europeans, and they couldn’t vote, and a world of rich Iranian votes in Los Angeles to gain.

  Whatever jack-in-the-box Angela Hassett and her minions were planning on springing on him in October, it would be no match for his little gift to the American people.

  After all, wasn’t freedom just another word for nothing left to lose?

  “The sky,” sir,” General Seelye was saying. “Look at the sky.”

  Maybe he should have fired Seelye after New York. Sure, his boy Devlin had cleaned up that mess, salvaged what was left of the city, taken down Kohanloo, and dealt with some other putz with a peripheral involvement—a kid about whom there had been repeated inquiries by that broad on the People’s News Network, who’d apparently had a run-in with him near the Metropolitan Museum. For Tyler’s money, she looked better in a wig, after that scalping she took, but what did he know? In any case, it had been a good career move, since Ms. Stanley was now anchoring the evening news on the highest-rated news network in the world.

  “The sky, Mr. President.”

  Very well, then, the sky. Tyler looked. Nothing. “What am I looking for?” he asked.

  “Can’t you see it?”

  What was this? Twenty Questions?

  “See what?”

  “The image, sir. The image.”