The Tenth Circle (6 page)

Tampa, Florida: The present

But now, here today in Tampa, it was the image of the boy that was back, except his hair wasn’t matted down by the rain and, on second glance, was black instead of blond. And his face wasn’t beaten and battered to a pulp. Approaching Rule now with a smile, full of life, taunting him with an offering.

The reverend looked down, half expecting to see his knuckles swollen and bloodied.

Haven’t I done enough in your service?
he demanded of God in his mind.
Have I not redeemed myself before your blessed eye yet?

Rule believed with all his heart that killing that boy had been part of some greater cosmic plan to set him on the road he needed to be on, the road that had brought him here to Tampa today. Doing the Lord’s work, spreading His word about the nature of true evil in the world. Because to fight that evil, to fully understand it, Rule needed to know the evil in his own heart. And in beating that boy to a pulp, in feeling his life drain away in gasps and spasms to the pounding of his fists, he had achieved that well enough to recognize it held some higher purpose for him. Not that day, surely, not even the following week or month. He kept his heart and mind open, waiting to learn how he was to serve Him.

“Here you are, Reverend,” the dark-haired boy said, in a voice distinctly different from the one Jeremiah Daniel Rule remembered so well, as he extended the rolled-up rug further.

“You killed my dog, mister! You killed my dog!”

So Rule shook off the illusion, the memory, and took the rug in his grasp. “And what have we here, son?”

“It’s a prayer rug,” the boy said, big eyed and grinning. “My daddy took it off one of them when he was in Afghanistan. After he shot him.”

“Praise be to your daddy, son.” Then, turning to his faithful, he said, “Praise be to this lad’s daddy!”

“My daddy’s dead, Reverend. Killed dead by those folk after he volunteered to go back for another tour. I wish they was all dead too.”

Rule touched the boy’s shoulder. “Your daddy’s a hero, son, a warrior in the service of the one true God—our Lord, not that of the heathens.” He eased the rolled-up rug back into the boy’s grasp. “I want you to do the deed, son. I want you to burn the offering so you might fan the flames of your late father’s love and know salvation. Do it, son. Feel His heat and His love.”

With that, the boy tossed the rug toward the flames, watching it unfurl on the way down before disappearing into ash embers that floated up toward the sky.

Rule clamped a hand tighter on the boy’s shoulder, all memory of his likeness to the boy he had slain at his becoming now vanquished. “Know this boy in your hearts, my brothers and sisters! Know this boy for the love he represents and the hatred we must all rid from the world! We will do it one object at a time, one offering at a time, and for each life of another brother or sister they take, the door to eternal damnation for all of their kind will open that much wider. We will push them through that door, my brothers and sisters, each and every one! Let them riot and loot, let them come to our shores and attack us in desperate retribution. We have smoked out the heathens and infidels, and their days of walking this blessed Earth will soon be done, as our Lord unleashes all of His wrath and fury upon their multitudes who walk with sickness in their souls.”

The crowd parted to allow a young woman to come forward, taking the boy’s place before Jeremiah Rule.

“I have nothing to offer!” she cried out, sinking to her knees and wrapping her arms tightly around his legs. “I have nothing to offer but my sin and my failure!”

The reverend stroked her hair tenderly. “Speak, my child. Free your soul.”

“I’ve been corrupted, Reverend,” the young woman said, squeezing his legs tighter. “I turned away from the Lord when I married one of them, turned away from my faith to theirs. And I’m sorry for it, Reverend, I’m so sorry, so lost.” Her face, soft and beautiful, looked up him pleadingly. “Can you help me, Reverend? Is there any hope for me at all?”

Rule separated himself from the young woman and backed away. “Rise, my child.”

He watched her long, dark hair tumbling past her shoulders, tossed about by the breeze as she climbed back to her feet.

“Can we save this child, my brothers and sisters?”

“Yes!”

“Can we save her?”

“Yes!”

“I say again:
Can we save her?
”

“YES!”

The applause, hoots, and cheers picked up again, rising through the crowd to a deafening crescendo that sounded like thunder booming in the sky with the portent of a storm in the offing.

“Be saved, child!” he screamed into the microphone, touching the young woman’s head. “Be saved!”

And she dropped back to her knees, sobbing.

“But my work is not done, child,” he said, speaking only to her with the microphone held away. “Come to my church, so it might be completed and you may know full salvation.” Then, to the crowd again,
“Praise the Lord, she is saved!”

And they exploded in deafening cheers again, everything Jeremiah Rule had set into motion the day he killed the boy and his dog coming to a crescendo as well.

“Be warned,” he continued, “there’s a storm coming, my brothers and sisters, a storm that will sweep away all those who do not see the world for what it is and have defied the Lord’s word. Find safe harbor from that storm with me, so when it comes, you will be spared its fury! For we will not stop, will not cease, will not relent, will not weaken until the last of their kind is rid from this earth with the pestilence that is their word and their very being! Because it is our mission, my brothers and sisters. And we will not rest until we see it done, until every Muslim on Earth has returned to the dirt that spawned them. Let them know our strength!”

“Amen!”

“Let them know our wrath!”

“Amen!”

“Let them know we shall not weaken in the face of their onslaught …”

“Amen!”

“… and for each of our lives they strike down, they shall pay a millionfold!”

“Amen!”

“Because their time has passed, my brothers and sisters, while ours fast approaches!” Rule finished, smiling smugly at the prophecy to be realized in a mere five days’ time, when the storm of his making finally arrived.

Five days
…

When it had taken even God one day more than that to create the world.

Washington, DC

“The Reverend Jeremiah Rule,” Folsom finished.

“Never heard of him,” Blaine said, having expected to hear something else entirely.

“It’s not surprising; he’s not exactly a household name, just a damn dangerous one, out there burning Korans and every other symbol of Islam. He’s gathered a million signatures on a petition to have all American Muslims declared enemy combatants and placed in internment camps or deported. That means he’s got followers, lots of them of the same mind, and that’s ended up unifying the Islamic radical world. They’ve activated all their sleeper cells and utilized every means they can find to infiltrate the country. It’s all-out war, McCracken. They’re pulling out all the stops, which means we must too.”

“That normally means me.”

Folsom didn’t nod or respond at all. “Glad you see my point.”

“Why not just arrest the whack job?”

“Rule hasn’t broken any laws.”

“How about accessory to murder?”

“We prefer to handle this internally. Outside the system.”

“That normally means me, too. But this vengeance thing is new to me.”

“Then don’t look at it that way, McCracken.”

“You got a better idea?”

The men fell silent, the remark hanging in the air between them until Folsom leaned back.

“You took out Natanz to save lives down the line, maybe millions of them.”

“What’s your point, Hank?”

“Same thing here. Jeremiah Rule is a walking nuclear bomb. He doesn’t go quietly into the night, lots more innocent folks get dropped into rivers and the body count keeps climbing.”

The remark stung McCracken, Folsom surprising him with such uncharacteristic directness. Then again, the situation called for it.

“I’m just not sure being a bigot with a big mouth makes a man worthy of assassination,” Blaine said finally.

“Tell that to this kid you know who fell into the Missouri River. Check the calendar, McCracken. These days a man can do a lot more damage with a bullhorn than a bullet. Jeremiah Rule lobs words as if they were bombs, and they’re taking out innocent people every time they land.” Folsom stopped to await a response, resuming when none came. “I know I don’t have to draw you a picture, because you’ve already seen it up close and personal.”

McCracken rose to his feet. “I’ve got lots of frequent-flier miles to use up, Hank. Just tell me where I can find Jeremiah Rule and forward the intel on.”

Folsom stood up, rattling the table slightly as he joined him. The two of them looked out the nearest window toward a street that should have been crammed with lunch-hour pedestrian and vehicular traffic. But cars buzzed on without much delay and figures bundled up against the harsh winter winds passed outside only sporadically. Washington, and most everywhere else in the country, was paralyzed with fear over where and when the next attack would come. Sheltering in place.

Then a sputtering car’s backfiring sent some pedestrians lunging for cover and others fleeing in all directions. Cars swerved wildly, brakes squealing, the sickening crunch of metal on metal signaling a chain collision had occurred just beyond McCracken’s view. Sirens, incredibly, were already sounding, rushing to respond to nothing at all.

Folsom’s phone buzzed and he looked down to check the text message, his expression paling and then turning grim. “Better make it fast, McCracken.”

San Francisco: Twenty minutes earlier

The Golden Gate Bridge was a mess. In both directions. Accidents everywhere, the worst of which had happened at virtually the same moment at the ends of both the east and west spans to keep commuters sitting just as they were. An average of 120,000 cars crossed the bridge every day and at that moment it seemed they were all stuck at once.

No one going anywhere. Because there was nowhere to go.

Even when an SUV centered on the eastern span and a minivan centered on the western one opened their doors to allow a half-dozen gunmen to spill out of each. Sheathed in masks, helmeted visors, black commando gear, and heavy body armor, they looked more like robots than men. Their assault rifles shined in the morning sun, the cacophony of their automatic fire disturbing the quiet breached moments before only by car horns. There were plenty of screams too, desperate and horrible, along with the screech of metal on metal as panicked commuters accelerated with no room to maneuver. Some shoved other vehicles forward with them. Others got nowhere at all before their windows were pierced by fusillades that were terrifying in their randomness and devastating in their destruction.

The gunmen ejected spent clips, exchanging fresh ones in their place while missing nary a beat in their relentless fire. Their targets were anything and everything their bullets could hit, picking up their pace only to cut down those commuters trying to flee on foot. All the blood made for a strange contrast with the orange of the steel girders and supports, its smell strangely like the bridge’s ever-present rust as it dried quickly in the sun.

When it was over, the gunmen shed their armor and gear to melt into the throngs fleeing in panic. A strange and uneasy silence, broken only by sobs, whimpers, and cries for help, settled over the bridge until the wail of sirens began. The sounds of those sirens bled into one another, even as the sun streamed through the pockmarked windshields, dappling the dashboards through the bullet holes and splaying onto the victims trapped behind their wheels.

Istanbul

Zarrin’s fingers flew across the keyboard, in rhythm with the air and the world beneath the huge concert hall’s golden lighting that reminded her of the setting sun. In moments like this, she surrendered herself to the music, so much bigger than any one artist whose job was not to play the notes but to channel them. Do justice to the composer.

Today’s performance featured Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1, among the most famous and greatest piano concertos ever composed. An immensely challenging piece given that it had been played and tried by every great pianist in history. The bar, then, was set understandably high, which suited Zarrin just fine.

Located along the shores of the Golden Horn, the Haliç Congress Center in the middle of Istanbul had long been one of her favorite venues in which to perform. Zarrin had arrived for her performance right around sunset, in time to see the sun’s rays reflect off the Horn’s waters in a way that cast the world in a golden glow. Parks and promenades rimmed the center on its other three sides, creating the perfect setting in which to let the beautiful music take possession of her. Surrender to it so that all else in the world seemed insignificant by comparison. So few were blessed enough to be a master of a single craft, never mind one as challenging and exacting as a concert pianist.

But Zarrin was actually master of two.

A smartphone rested in her lap, tuned to a video broadcasting an image of the road D.885 from Syria to Sanliurfa, Turkey, fifty miles north of the border. A group of rebel leaders had set out in a convoy after dark to attend a secret meeting concerning a final assault on Damascus at Urfa Castle. They were coming to plead with their Western allies for air support.

But they were never going to get there. Earlier that day, Zarrin had installed a speed-lowering rubber rumble strip across the road approaching the checkpoint at Akçakale. The thin layer of rubber concealed fifty pounds of plastic explosives she’d packed inside the hollowed-out rumble strip. And an application installed on her phone would tell her the speed of the convoy as it passed the camera she’d set up a half mile short of that spot. From there Zarrin needed only to calculate how many seconds it would take for the vehicles to get there, before pressing another key on her phone to trigger the explosives.

All routine, as was playing the concerto.

But then Zarrin’s hands betrayed her, unfortunately routine recently as well. She pictured the keys her fingers needed to grace, but was unable to move them as she needed. The sense, in that ever so anxious moment, was of a painless cramp that turned into a spasm. Her hands going off on their own against her mental instructions to the contrary. To play at this level meant that action needed to flow ahead of thought. Thinking about what you were doing meant you weren’t doing it, weren’t surrendering to the music and letting it dictate all. But even Tchaikovsky could not dictate to fingers suddenly twitching and caught in spasm. The audience seemed not to notice as Zarrin’s rhythm with the keys sputtered and slowed—just an infinitesimal change, yes, but one that separated the music from her being and left her playing it instead of it playing her.

Her cell phone beeped softly, the rear of the convoy passing before the camera by the time she glanced down. The number 105 was flashing on screen, giving her the convoy’s speed in kilometers, the calculation of the trigger point in her mind coming dangerously slow, slow enough to risk the entire operation.

Zarrin felt her fingers begin flowing smoothly again, enough in that moment to restore her full concentration, her training and experience doing the rest. At 105 kilometers per hour, she estimated it would take twenty-eight seconds to travel the half mile to the explosive-laden rumble strip.

The clock in her mind told Zarrin seventeen seconds had already past. Her right fingers were twitching madly and left had gone rigid by the time she reached the final sequence of the concerto. Her phone was programmed with voice commands, so she let the seconds count down in her mind until she reached three.

“Activate,” she said downward, as her fingers struggled across the keyboard, finally managing to complete the concerto’s finale at the very same moment her explosives should have destroyed the convoy and killed the rebel leaders.

The standing-room-only crowd erupted in applause, lurching to their collective feet, the hall rumbling and quaking as she stood and bowed with hands clasped tight behind her. In her heart, Zarrin felt the rhythm and beat of the concerto still pulsing. In her mind, she saw the bodies of the Syrian rebel leaders strewn in pieces across the road to Sanliurfa.

Before her, the standing ovation continued and Zarrin took another bow.