Shock Warning

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Devlin had always been able to sleep on planes, sleep in elevators, sleep standing up, sleep wherever and whenever; in his line of work you never knew where your next nap or good night’s sleep was going to come from. But now, here above the Atlantic and on his way to whatever Fate finally had in store for him, he couldn’t.

Danny was racked out. Good, he and his boys would have the toughest part of the gig, getting in below Iranian air defenses and putting boots on the ground, in and out as fast as possible but not one second less than the mission called for. And nobody knew what that was going to be.

Devlin’s job was, in a sense, simpler: get Maryam the hell out of there. Now that she was free, and roaming loose somewhere in the bowels of the Islamic Republic, she was no doubt amassing a treasure trove of actionable intelligence, something they were going to need when they explained to the world just why America had done what she’d done. But it would be too late for anybody to do anything about it.

Too late for the whiners, for the you-can’t-do-that crowd, for the how-dare-you bunch, for the “higher moral authority” gang, for the lofty editorialists in the employ of Jake Sinclair, men and women who had never done a damn thing except learn to type. Too late for the blame-America-first johnnies, for the internationalists, for the one-worlders and the citizens of the planet. Devlin had spent half his life living overseas, spoke his languages better than most of the natives, and was at home everywhere. But he never felt that he was anything but an American.

Maybe that’s how you felt when you saw your mother die in the service of her country and then be called a traitor.

Maybe that’s how you felt when you saw your father killed trying to save your mother.

Maybe that’s how you felt when you were raised by a man you despised, a man who had played both sides of the political street for so long that he’d forgotten which side was his. A man who helped ruin your family and create the monster you were now seeking. The man who raised you to be the perfect, anonymous killing machine, the perfect agent, the perfect invisible man.

Maybe that’s how you felt when you could have anything in the world except happiness.

And that’s why he, the American, was going into Iran to rescue the Iranian. Because only she offered him a way out. And all he had to do was trust her, implicitly and faithfully.

The roses, glistening in the rainless desert. The doorway. The call to repentance. There could be no rational explanation for what he saw, or why. The vision in the Mojave had been but a prelude for what he was now about to do. Was there really a God? Up ’til now, he’d never seen any evidence for one. But something had happened out there….

Which brought him to the real apparitions. It would have been easy to dismiss the one in Garabandal, a place that seemed to grow a new crop of impressionable schoolgirls every generation. All these BVM stories were depressingly the same — you’d think that when the Virgin finally decided to show, she’d have something new to say, something beyond her usual “repent” and “honor my Son” bromides. And always the same MO, appearing to kids, in Fatima, Lourdes, Medjugorje.

Until now. Maybe the first Zeitoun event, back in the sixties, had been faked — the photographs certainly looked absurd — but millions of people just saw something, and set off the tinderbox. And Kaduna… the savagery was appalling, especially when Mohammed got into the act. To think that in the twenty-first century human beings were still slaughtering other human beings like cattle, hacking each other to pieces with machetes. And now, according to some information just coming over his Android, there was trouble on Mindanao, where the fighting was said to be especially fierce. It was almost as if—

Wait a minute. Long ago he had learned that it was never “almost as if.” The proper formulation was: “It was as if…”

No “ifs” about it. Except for the first apparition, the Virgin’s appearances had been in places of maximum religious and cultural tension, powder kegs that barely needed a spark. So why in the name of a merciful God would…

Merciful God, his foot. This had nothing to do with a merciful God. Somebody was doing this — somebody looking to destabilize as much of the planet as he — or they — could, before…

Before what? What was the end game? The Iranian nuclear program made sense; the crazies who controlled the government wanted a fireball, preferably in either Israel or a major American city, precisely because they desired the retaliation that surely must follow. The occluded Mahdi, dreaming for centuries at the bottom of his well, needed a provocation in order to render the apocalypse. But…

But what if…

But what if there was a puppet master behind even the Iranians? Someone with enough wealth and power and influence and reach to manipulate their superstition and turn it to his own ends?

An atheist’s apocalypse. The End Times without an end game. No triumph of good over evil, no submission of all to the will of Allah… just an endless, barren emptiness, in which one lone voice could be heard crying out, “I told you so.”

Skorzeny. He’d been right about him all along.

Not motivated by money.

Not motivated by greed.

Not motivated by ideology.

Motivated solely by suffering and revenge. That was the meaning of the series of codes Atwater had solved, with its ultimate terminus in the nihilism of the double-cross-plusone: XXX marks the spot.

The world didn’t deserve its patrimony, of which Emanuel Skorzeny was very much a part, one of history’s gifts to the unenlightened. The world didn’t appreciate his taste, his refinement, his genius. The world had grown weak. And so he was going to deprive the world — the Western world, anyway — of its highest glories by unleashing upon it the one force that defined itself in opposition to the West, in opposition to Judeo-Christianity, and which would never rest, would never accept peaceful coexistence, until it destroyed the West, or was itself destroyed:

Radical Islam, led by the millenarian sect of Iranian Shiias.

He is starting a worldwide religious war. That’s what this is all about.

Chaos theory in action.

That was what it had always been about, from the time Skorzeny financed the terrorist operation in Edwardsville, hoping to panic the American public. When he tried to launch an EMP attack on both coasts. The assault on Times Square. But now he was widening the scope of his ambition, not just using freelance proxies but co-opting as much of a religion as possible.

Devlin and his few allies were no longer up against just a man like Milverton, an opportunist like Kohanloo, or a crazy like that kid. They were up against millions. They had no chance.

Unless their plan worked.

The only way to defeat a belief is to discredit it. Christianity and Judaism had been through this many times before: the false messiahs and moshiachs who had gathered unto them hundreds, even thousands of followers, until the day came when the holy man or rabbi died and didn’t get back up again. Until the day that the earth was supposed to stand still never happened. Until the end times came and went, and people went on, crying, lamenting, worrying, fearing, fighting, loving.

But Islam had not.

Devlin was not a religious man; the only ghosts that need apply in his world were the ones he dispatched himself. Like the Marines, he had been raised to believe that his job was to keep heaven, or hell, filled with fresh souls. But he’d be lying to himself if he didn’t admit that whatever had happened near California City had shaken him profoundly. It didn’t make him believe, exactly, nor did it make him a believer — but, he realized with a start, it had made him believe in something. And even if that something was the life of just one human, it was a start on the long road to salvation.

He glanced back over at Danny, still asleep. That was the sign of the true combat vet: get plenty of shut-eye before the shooting started. Danny had so much to live for now, a woman and three children, and the two ghosts who would always be with them.

His ghosts: Devlin’s ghosts. The ghosts who had surrounded him since that day in Rome, ghosts all around.

It was time for him to leave the ghosts behind.

It was time for him to rejoin the living.