Blasphemy

“Excuse me, sir?” the FBI Director interrupted, his face pale. “I’m just now getting reports of an explosion and fire . . . a very large fire . . . at the Red Mesa airstrip.”

The president stared silently at the director.

“What do these people want?” Lockwood burst out. “What in God’s name do they want?”

Galdone spoke for the first time since they had arrived in the Situation Room. “You know what they want.”

Lockwood stared at the odious man. Soft and fat, arms crossed, eyes half-lidded as if asleep, he sat in his chair studying them placidly.

“They want to destroy Isabella,” he said, “and kill the Antichrist.”

62

FORD, GRIPPING THE EDGE OF A table, read the new message on the Visualizer. Isabella was running flat out, at full power, and he could feel the entire Bridge trembling and keening like the cockpit of a jet plane locked in a death spiral.

Religion arose as an effort to explicate the inexplicable, control the uncontrollable, make bearable the unbearable. Belief in a higher power became the most powerful innovation in late human evolution. Tribes with religion had an advantage over those without. They had direction and purpose, motivation and a mission. The survival value of religion was so spectacular that the thirst for belief became embedded in the human genome.

Ford had moved away from the others. Kate, with a quizzical and, it seemed to him, somewhat regretful glance at him, was now helping Dolby at his workstation. The team running Isabella—Dolby, Chen, Edelstein, Corcoran, and St. Vincent—were intensely focused on their jobs. The rest stared at the Visualizer, transfixed by the words appearing there.

What religion tried, science has finally achieved. You now have a way to explain the inexplicable, control the uncontrollable. You no longer need “revealed” religion. The human race has finally grown up.

Wardlaw spoke quietly from his security station. “They’ve sent in a demolition team with wall-breaching kits. They’re going to blow the door.”

“How many?” Hazelius asked sharply.

“Eight.”

“Armed?”

“Heavily.”

A ripple of panic swept the group. “What are we going to do?” Innes cried.

“We’re going to keep listening,” said Hazelius, his firm voice raised over the humming of Isabella. He pointed at the screen.

Religion is as essential to human survival as food and water. If you try to replace religion with science, you will fail. You will, instead, offer science as religion. For I say to you, science is religion. The one, true religion.

A sob escaped from Julie Thibodeaux, standing next to Hazelius. “This is wonderful.” She rocked, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. “This is so wonderful . . . and I’m so frightened.”

Hazelius put a steadying arm around her.

It was incredible, Ford thought: he had witnessed their conversion right before his eyes. They believed.

Instead of offering a book of truth, science offers a method of truth. Science is a search for truth, not the revelation of truth. It is a means, not a dogma. It is a journey, not a destination.

Ford could keep silent no longer. “Yes, but what of human suffering? How can science make ‘bearable the unbearable,’ as you put it?”

“The magnetic coil’s redlining,” said Dolby quietly.

“Juice it,” murmured Hazelius.

In the last century, medicine and technology have alleviated more human suffering than have all the priests in the last millennium.

“You’re speaking of physical suffering,” said Ford. “But what about the suffering of the soul? What about spiritual suffering?”

Have I not said that all is one? Is it not a comfort to know that your suffering shudders the very cosmos? No one suffers alone and suffering has a purpose—even the sparrow’s fall is essential to the whole. The universe never forgets.

“I can’t hold it without more power,” Dolby cried. “Harlan, you’ve got to give me five percent more.”

“I’m tapped out,” St. Vincent said. “Push it any more, and it’ll cascade the grid.”

The machine was now screaming so loudly that Ford could hardly hear himself think. He read the words on the Visualizer, his mind in turmoil. Twelve of the most intelligent people in the country thought this was God. That had to mean something.

Do not stoop to diffidence! You are my disciples. You have the power to upend the world. In one day, science accumulates more evidence of its truths than religion in all its existence. People cling to faith because they must have it. They hunger for it. You will not deny people faith; you will offer them a new faith. I have not come to replace the Judeo-Christian God, but to complete him.

“Wait!” Wardlaw barked out. “Something else is going on up top!”

“What is it?” Hazelius asked.

Wardlaw peered urgently at his wall of screens. “We’ve got—a whole bunch more perimeter alarms going off. There are people coming out of nowhere . . . some kind of mob . . . What the hell?”

“A mob?” Hazelius half turned, his eye still on the Visualizer. “What are you talking about?”

“No shit, a mob . . . Jesus, you won’t believe this . . . . They’re assaulting the security fence . . . tearing it down . . . We’ve got some kind of riot going on up there. Unbelievable—a full-blown riot—out of nowhere.”

Ford turned to the main security feed. The high-angle camera atop the elevator furnished the main screen with a broad view of the action. A mob, carrying torches, and flashlights and brandishing primitive weapons streamed down the road from the Dugway and piled up against the perimeter fence, forcing it down by sheer weight of numbers. In the direction of the airstrip he heard a dull explosion and saw flames suddenly leaping above the trees.

“They’ve set fire to the hangars at the airstrip,” Wardlaw yelled. “Who are these people—and where in hell did they come from?”

63

WOLF WATCHED THE MEN ALIGN THE demolition kits along the titanium door, then run the wires back to the detonator. They seemed disconcertingly calm, almost confident, as if they blew up mountains every day of their lives

Wolf walked toward the edge of the cliff. A pipe fence, cemented into the rock, ran along the rim. He grasped the cold steel and looked out into the vast deserts, ringed by mountains, ten thousand square miles with hardly a light breaking the undifferentiated dark. A cool wind wafted up from below, bringing with it the smell of dust and the faint scent of some night-flowering plant. He felt preposterously proud of rappelling down the cliffs. This was going to be a hell of a story to tell people back in Los Alamos.

Behind him, he heard the abrupt hiss of radios and a burst of inaudible words. He turned to see what was happening. The men working the charges had stopped. Huddling with Doerfler, they talked urgently on the radios. Wolf listened but made out nothing. Something unusual was going on.

Wolf strolled over. “Hey, what’s up?”

“There’s been an attack up top. No one knows who.”

Terrific, Wolf thought.

From above, scattered popping sounds echoed down the cliffs and the sky bloomed red above the mesa rim. “What’s going on?”

Miller glanced at Wolf. “They set fire to the hangars at the airfield . . . . They’ve surrounded the chopper.”

“They? Who the hell’s they?”

Miller shook his head. The other members of the team were engaged by radio in furious conversation with the team above. The popping sounds became louder—and Wolf realized it was gunfire. He heard a faint cry. Everyone stared up. A moment later something came hurtling down the cliff, accompanied by a long choking scream. It flashed in and out of the lights on its way past them, a figure in uniform. The scream ended abruptly far below in a faint smack and a rattle of loose, falling rocks.

“What the hell was that!” one of the soldiers cried.

“They threw Frankie off the cliff!”

“Look! Coming down the fixed lines!” another soldier yelled.

They all stared upward in uncomprehending horror at the dozens of dark shapes sliding down the ropes.

PASTOR RUSSELL EDDY WATCHED HIS CONGREGATION fling the last soldier over the cliff. While he genuinely deplored violence, the soldier had resisted the will of God. So be it. Perhaps they would find solace and redemption when Christ raised them from the dead and redeemed His flock. Perhaps.

He climbed up on the hood of a Humvee and took stock. The soldiers had fired on his congregation, which had surged forward with tsunami-like force up to the cliff’s edge until most of the soldiers had vanished over the rim into the black void.

His will be done.

Pastor Eddy gazed out over the miracle. The road was packed with people pouring in from the Dugway, torches and flashlights dipping in the darkness. They flowed over the fence into the security area and milled about, waiting for direction. A half mile back, the flames from the burning hangars at the airstrip leapt above the scrubby trees, casting a lurid glow across the mesa top. The acrid smell of gasoline and burnt plastic drifted through the air.

In front of him, people were massing along the edge of the cliff. The soldiers had left a lot of gear at the top of the cliffs, which Doke evidently knew how to use. He had served ten years in the Special Forces, he had told Eddy. He was helping people into rappelling gear, straps and slings with various carabiners and equipment, and showing them how to rappel down the cliff face, convincing them they could do it.

And they were doing it. It was easy with the equipment. It took no special skills. Doke’s people poured over the edge by the score, sliding down the ropes, a human waterfall disappearing into the darkness below. They were sending back up the straps and slings and carabiners to be reused, again and again.

Eddy watched Doke shouting and giving orders. Lifting his radio, Eddy called the group at the airstrip. “I see you torched the hangars. Good work.”

“What should we do about the chopper?”

“Is it guarded?”

“One soldier and the pilot. He’s armed—and pretty freaked out.”

“Kill them.” The words just came out. “Don’t let them take off.”

“Yes, Pastor.”

“Any heavy equipment around?”

“There’s a backhoe here.”

“Trench the runway and helipads.”

Eddy watched the crowds. They still mobbed the mountain, despite roadblocks and mass arrests. It was an incredible sight. The time had come to initiate the next phase of attack.

Eddy raised his arms and called out, “Christians! Listen up! ”

The growing crowd shifted, paused.

Eddy pointed a shaking finger. “You see those high-tension lines?”

“Take them down!” cried a voice from the crowd.

“That’s right! We’re going to kill the power to Isabella!” he cried. “I’m calling for volunteers to scale those towers and rip down the lines!”

“Rip them down!” the crowd roared. “ Rip them down!”

“Cut their power!”

“Cut their power!”

A chunk of the crowd split off and swarmed toward the closest tower, which stood a hundred yards away.

Eddy held up both arms and a second hush fell.

He pointed again, this time at the cluster of antennae, dishes, microwave horns, and cell-phone transmitters at the top of the elevator building, perched on the edge of the cliffs.

“Blind the eyes and stop the ears of Satan!”

“Blind Satan!”

More milling people broke away and swarmed around the elevator. The crowd now had direction. They had something to do. He watched with grim satisfaction as the mob piled up around the fence surrounding one of the giant struts of the tower. The mob pressed and heaved, and with a screech the fence went down. They poured in. One man caught the rung of the ladder, swung himself up, and began to climb, followed by another, and another, until in a few minutes it looked like a line of ants inching up a tree.

Eddy hopped off the Humvee and strode to Doke at the edge of the cliffs. “My work’s done up here. I’m going down. I’m the one God chose to confront the Antichrist. You take command up top.”

Doke embraced him. “God bless you, Pastor.”

“Now show me the best way to descend this cliff face.”

Doke pulled a set of nylon straps from a heap at his feet and slipped them around Eddy’s legs and pelvis. He fixed them in place with a locking carabiner, slipping a brake bar over it. “This is called a Swiss seat,” he said. “The doubled rope goes through this brake bar—if you let go, it brakes you to a stop. One hand here, one hand here, lean out, give little hops as you let the rope slide through the carabiner.” He grinned, slapped Eddy’s shoulder. “Simple!” He turned: “Make way,” he cried. “Make way for Pastor Eddy! He’s going down the ropes!”

The crowd parted and Doke led Eddy to the edge of the cliffs. Eddy turned, grasped the rope as directed, and eased himself over the edge, kicking gingerly off the cliff face as he’d seen the others do—his heart in his mouth, praying furiously.

64

“IT’S A HOWLING MOB OUT THERE,” Wardlaw said, pointing to the front monitor.

Hazelius finally broke away from the Visualizer. The main feed showed the entire security zone overrun with people brandishing knives, axes, rifles, their torches bobbing and blazing

“They’re climbing the elevator!”

“Good God.” Hazelius wiped his face with his sleeve. “Ken,” he shouted, “how much more time does Isabella have?”

“The bad coil could drop superconductivity at any time,” Dolby cried, “and then we’re dead meat. The beams might kink, cut through the vacuum pipe, and cause an explosion.”

“How big?”

“Maybe real big—we have no precedent.” He glanced at his screen. “Harlan! Pump some more juice into the system. Keep the magnetic flux up.”

“I’m at a hundred and ten percent of rated power as it is,” said St. Vincent.

“Push it,” said Dolby.

“If the grid fails, we lose power and we’re also dead.”

“Crank it.”

Harlan St. Vincent keyed in the command.

“What about the mob?” Wardlaw yelled. “They’ve set fire to the hangars at the airfield!”

“They can’t get in here,” said Hazelius calmly.

“They’re still descending the ropes.”

“We’re safe in here.”

Ford watched on the screen as the mob swarmed up the elevator building, finally reaching the roof. The camera shook, tilted crazily, and then the screen went black with a pop.

“Gregory, we’ve got to shut down Isabella,” said Dolby.

“Ken, just give me five more minutes.”

Dolby stared, his jaw trembling with raw emotion.

“Five more. I beg you. We may be talking to God, Ken. God .”

Sweat streamed down Dolby’s face. His jaw twitched. He gave a single, sharp nod and turned back to his machine.

“This new religion you want us to preach,” Hazelius said, “what will we ask people to worship? Where’s the beauty and awe in this?”

Ford strained to read the answer, half-hidden by a blizzard of snow breaking out across the screen.

I ask you to contemplate the universe that you now know exists. Is it not, by itself, more awe-inspiring than any God concept offered by the historical religions? A hundred billion galaxies, lonely islands of fire flung like bright coins in a vastness of space so immense that it is beyond the biological comprehension of the human mind. And I say to you, that the universe you have discovered is only a tiny fraction of the extent and magnificence of the creation. You inhabit but the tiniest blue speck in the infinite vaults of heaven, and yet this speck is precious to me, being an essential part of the whole. That is why I have come to you. Worship me and my great works, not some tribal god imagined by warring pastoralists thousands of years ago.

Dolby stared, his face slick with sweat, his jaw clenched. Hazelius swiveled his thin, eager face back to the Visualizer. “More, tell us more.”

“I’m getting alarms across the grid,” said St. Vincent, his calm voice just beginning to crack. “Transformers are overheating on Line One halfway to the Colorado border.”

Trace the lineaments of my face with your scientific instruments. Search for me in the cosmos and in the electron. For I am the God of deep time and space, the God of superclusters and voids, the God of the Big Bang and the inflation, the God of dark matter and dark energy.

The Bridge began to shake, and the smell of burning electronics filled the air.

The security cams at the airport showed both hangars burning furiously. A mob had surrounded a helicopter on the helipad. A soldier carrying an M-16 stood in the helicopter bay, firing over their heads, trying to warn them off. The chopper was powering up.

“Where did all these people come from?” Innes stared at the screens, his voice rising shrilly above the screaming of Isabella.

Science and faith cannot coexist. One will destroy the other. You must make sure science is the surviving party, or your little blue speck will be lost . . ..

Edelstein spoke. “My p5s are overheating.”

“Give me one minute!” Hazelius roared. He turned to the screen, shouting over the din, “What should we do?”

With my words you will prevail. Tell the world what happened here. Tell the world that God has spoken to the human race—for the first time. Yes, for the first time!

“But how can we explain you if you can’t tell us what you are?”

Do not repeat the mistake of the historical religions and involve yourselves in disputation about who I am or what I think. I surpass all understanding. I am the God of a universe so vast, only the God numbers can describe it, of which I have given you the first.

“Oh shit,” said Wardlaw, staring at the security monitors.

Ford turned his attention back to the security screens. The mob bombarded the chopper with rocks and gunfire, while the soldier guarding it fired over their heads. Someone tossed a Molotov cocktail at the chopper. Falling short, it drenched the tarmac in front with flames. The soldier lowered his weapon and fired into the crowd. The chopper started to rise.

“Oh my God,” said Wardlaw, his face looking sick.

Despite the carnage, the raging throng closed in, their return fire flashing and flaring off the chopper’s armor.

You are the prophets leading your world into the future. What future will you choose? You hold the key . . ..

As Ford watched, a half dozen Molotov cocktails came flying out of the crowd, bursting against the side of the chopper. The fire swept upward, engulfing the rotors. A fuel line ignited, and with a massive thump the chopper detonated, a roiling ball of fire levitating into the night sky. The pieces of the chopper rained back down on the asphalt, a cascade of fire, spreading rapidly as the burning fuel ran in all directions. A moment later a soldier jumped out of the surging flames, flailing, sheeted with fire, and collapsed burning on the tarmac.

“Oh Jesus,” Wardlaw said. “They blew up the chopper.”

Hazelius, staring at the Visualizer, paid no attention.

“And now look at this!” Wardlaw cried, his finger stabbing at a screen. “The mob’s outside the Bunker door! They’re after Isabella. They’re killing the soldiers out there!”

Dolby cried. “I’m shutting down Isabella.”

“No!” Hazelius rushed Dolby and they struggled briefly, but Dolby was ready this time and flung the smaller man to the ground. He turned back to the keyboard.

“It’s locked on! Isabella’s locked!” he screamed. “It won’t accept the shutdown codes!”

“Oh Jesus, we’re dead,” said Innes. “We are dead.”

65

BERN WOLF SHRANK INTO THE SHADOWS of the titanium door, behind the soldiers. The swelling crowd had poured down the ropes like they were possessed and were now forcing them all up against the rocks to the rear. What soldiers had ever faced a situation like this before, a rampaging mass of fellow Americans, a civilian mob that included women? It was crazy. Who were these people? Branch Davidians? Ku Klux Klanners? They were dressed every which way, armed with everything from rifles to ninja stars. Many of them waved makeshift, improvised crosses and pressed in on the soldiers, who could retreat no farther.

Doerfler finally spoke. “This is U.S. government property,” he shouted. “Lay your weapons on the ground. Do it now .”

An emaciated figure stepped forward from the crowd, a big revolver in his hands.

“My name’s Pastor Russell Eddy. We’re here as God’s army to destroy this infernal machine and the Antichrist within. Step aside and let us pass.”

The crowd was sweaty, their eyes eerily bright in the artificial lights, their bodies swaying with excitement. Some wept, tears streaming down their faces. More continued down the ropes. There didn’t seem to be any limit to their numbers or any way to stop them.

Wolf stared at them with sick fascination. They looked possessed.

“I don’t give a damn who you are,” barked Doerfler, “or why you’re here. I’m telling you one last time: lay down your weapons.”

“Or what?” Eddy asked, his voice bolder.

“Or my men will defend themselves and this U.S. government installation using all available means. Now lay down your weapons.”

“No,” said the scrawny pastor. “We won’t lay down our weapons. You are agents of the New World Order, soldiers of the Antichrist!”

Doerfler walked toward Eddy with his hand out. He spoke loudly. “Give me the gun, pal.”

Eddy pointed the revolver at him.

“Look at you,” said Doerfler derisively. “You fire that and the only person you’re going to hurt is yourself. Give it to me. Now.”

A shot rang out and Doerfler was punched back, surprised; he fell, rolled, and began to rise, drawing his own sidearm. He’d obviously been wearing body armor.

A second shot from the revolver blew the top of his head off.

Wolf threw himself to the ground, scrambling on his hands and knees and huddling against the cover of the rough rock. A roar like the end of the world erupted around him: automatic fire, explosions, screaming. He wrapped himself up in fetal position, burying his head in his hands, trying to shrink into the rock itself, while gunfire pounded and blasted all around, the snick and thud of bullets showering him with chips. The din went on for what seemed like an eternity, with terrible death-screaming and the wet, ripping sounds of bullets tearing people apart. He clamped his hands over his ears, trying to block it out.

The furor subsided, and in a moment all was still, except for his ringing ears.

He remained in a ball, stunned senseless.

A hand rested on his shoulder. He jerked away.

“Take it easy. It’s all right now. Get up.”

He kept his eyes tightly shut. A hand grabbed his shirt, pulled him roughly to his feet, popping off half his buttons.

“Look at me.”

Wolf raised his face and opened his eyes. It was dark—the lights had been shot out. Bodies lay everywhere, a scene out of hell, worse than hell, people cut in half, body parts strewn about. There were horribly wounded people, some making strange sounds, gurgling, coughing, a few screaming. Already the mob was dragging bodies to the cliff edge and rolling them off.

He recognized the man holding him: the same Pastor Eddy who had started the firefight by shooting down Doerfler. He was splattered with the blood of others.

“Who are you?” Eddy asked.

“I’m . . . I’m just the computer guy.”

Eddy looked at him, not unkindly. “Are you with us?” he asked quietly. “Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior?”

Wolf opened his mouth, but only a croak came out.

“Pastor,” a voice said, “we don’t have a lot of time.”

“There’s always time to save a soul.” Eddy stared, his eyes dark. “I repeat: Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior? The time has come to choose sides. The Day of Judgment is come.”

Wolf finally managed to nod.

“Down on your knees, brother. We’re going to pray.”

Wolf hardly knew what he was doing. It was like something out of the Middle Ages, a forced conversion. He tried to kneel on shaking legs but wasn’t fast enough and someone pushed him down. He lost his balance and fell to his side, his shirt falling open.

“Let us pray,” said Eddy, falling to his knees beside Wolf and grasping both his hands in his own, bowing his forehead until it was touching Wolf’s hands, wrapped in his own. “Heavenly Father, do you accept this sinner now in his hour of need? And do you, sinner, accept the Word of Truth that you might be born again?”

“Do I . . . what?” Wolf tried to concentrate.

“I repeat: Do you accept Jesus as your personal savior?”

Wolf felt sick. “Yes,” he said hastily. “Yes, I do . . . I do.”

“Praise God! Let us pray.”

Wolf bowed his head and closed his eyes tightly. What the hell am I doing?

Eddy’s voice intruded. “Let us pray out loud,” he said. “Ask Jesus into your heart. If you do it freely and sincerely, you will see the kingdom of heaven. It’s that simple.” He clasped his hands and began to pray loudly.

Wolf mumbled along with him for a moment and then felt his throat close up.

“You have to pray with me,” said Eddy.

“I . . . no,” said Wolf.

“But to receive Jesus, you have to pray. You must ask—”

“No. I won’t.”

“My friend—my dear friend—this is your last chance. The Judgment is upon us. The Rapture is at hand. I speak to you not as your enemy, but as one who loves you.”

“We love you,” said voices from the crowd. “ We love you.”

“I suppose you also loved the soldiers you murdered,” Wolf said. He was horrified at what he was doing. Where did this sudden, insane courage come from?

He felt the barrel of a gun lightly touch his temple. “Your last chance,” came Eddy’s gentle voice. He could feel how steady the barrel was in the man’s hand.

Wolf closed his eyes and said nothing. He felt the faint tremble as the hand tightened, the finger depressing the trigger. A wrenching boom—and then nothing.

66

EVERY SCREEN IN THE SITUATION ROOM was now alive with videoconference attendees, some on split screens. The Joint Chiefs, the heads of DHS, FBI, NSA, the DCI, and DOE. The vice president had joined them in the situation room at three. It was now 3:20 A.M. A lot had happened in the last twenty minutes, when they first got the news of the fire at the Red Mesa airstrip.

Stanton Lockwood felt like he was trapped in some kind of television show. It was hard to believe that this could be happening in America. It was as if he’d woken up and found himself in a different country.

“We’ve heard nothing from the Hostage Rescue Team since they blew up the helicopter,” the FBI Director was saying. His face was white and the handkerchief he kept mopping his face with was crumpled in his hand, unnoticed. “They attacked with overwhelming numbers. This is not some mob—they’re organized. They know what they’re doing.”

“Are they taken hostage?” the president asked.

“I fear most of them may be incapacitated—or dead.”

Someone handed him a piece of paper from off screen. He scanned it. “I’ve just gotten a report . . . .” His hand shook every so slightly. “They’ve managed to take down one of the three main powerlines to Isabella. It triggered a grid failure. We’ve got blackouts across northern Arizona and parts of Colorado and New Mexico.”

“My National Guard troops,” the president said, turning to the Joint Chiefs. “Where the hell are they?”

“They’re being briefed as we speak, Mr. President. We’re still on schedule for that four forty-five A.M. operation.”

“They’re still on the ground?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get them up in the air! Brief them in the air!”

“With the equipment shortages and now the blackout—”

“Fly with what you’ve got.”

“Mr. President, our latest intelligence indicates there are between one and two thousand armed people on Red Mesa. They think this is Armageddon. The Second Coming. As a result, they have no regard for human life, their own or others. We can’t throw underequipped or underbriefed men into that situation. Fires and a large explosion have been reported on the top of Red Mesa. There are still hundreds of people evading our roadblocks and streaming toward the mesa cross-country, many in all-terrain vehicles. The airstrip has been rendered inoperable to fixed-wing aircraft. A Predator drone should be over there taking pictures in . . . less than twenty minutes. We’ve got to implement a strategic, well-organized assault on the mesa—otherwise we’ll be throwing more lives away.”

“I understand that. But we’ve also got a forty-billion-dollar machine, eleven FBI agents, and a dozen scientists whose lives are also on the line—”

“Excuse me, Mr. President?” The Department of Energy Director spoke. “Isabella is still running at full power but is destabilizing. According to our remote monitoring system, the proton–antiproton beams have decollimated and—”

“Speak English.”

“If Isabella isn’t shut down, we may have breach of the beam pipe, which would result in an explosion.”

“How big?”

A hesitation. “I’m not a physicist, but they tell me if the beams cross beforehand, that convergence could create an instantaneous singularity which will detonate with the yield of a small nuclear device in the half kiloton range.”

“When?”

“Any time now.”

The Chief of Staff spoke. “I hate to throw in a distraction, but we’re getting a tsunami of media coverage. We have to manage it—now.”

“Clear the airspace within a hundred-mile radius of Red Mesa,” the president barked. “Declare a state of emergency for the Reservation. And martial law. Bar all press. All press.”

“Consider it done.”

“In addition to the National Guard troops, I want an overwhelming military backup response. I want the U.S. military to take control of Red Mesa and the surrounding area by first light. I don’t want any excuses about shortages of troops or transportation. I want you to move in forces on the ground, too. Send the soldiers cross-country. It’s open desert. Bring overwhelming power to bear. Is that clear?”

“Mr. President, I’ve already ordered the mobilization of all military assets in the Southwest.”

“Is four forty-five A.M. the best you can do?”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Armed terrorists are seizing U.S. property and murdering U.S. servicemen. Their crimes against the state have nothing to do with religion. These people are terrorists—period, full stop. You understand?”

“I certainly do, sir.”

“As a start, I want that televangelist, Spates, perp-walked into federal custody on terrorism charges—shackles, leg irons, the works. I want it done in the most public way possible—to set an example. If there are any other preachers, televangelists, and fundamentalists out there cheering on these people, I want them arrested, too. These people are no different from Al Qaeda and the Taliban.”

67

NELSON BEGAY LAY ON HIS BELLY on a bluff above Nakai Valley, Willy Becenti beside him. The highest point on the mesa, its summit gave a 360-degree view of the desert terrain below.

The mother of traffic jams gridlocked the Dugway road where it topped out on Red Mesa. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cars had parked willy-nilly in a huge open area just off the Dugway. Many of the vehicles were abandoned with their lights left on and the doors open. People were climbing the Dugway on foot, having left their cars somewhere below the mesa. They flowed down the Isabella project road, bypassing the detour to Nakai Valley, heading for the action at the edge of the mesa.

His binoculars traveled down the road. The hangars were burning. What was left of the helicopter the soldiers had arrived in was also on fire, the flames leaping a hundred feet or more into the sky. Dead bodies lay scattered around it from the bloody firefight he had watched happen a few minutes before. Most of the mob had left the airstrip after torching the chopper, but a few stayed to help a large backhoe finish ripping trenches across the runway.

He followed the streaming crowds farther, until his view reached the fenced off area at the edge of the mesa. It was swarming with people; Begay estimated at least a thousand. A mass of them were climbing one of the huge powerline towers and had gotten about three quarters of the way to the top. Others had erected a crude cross on top of a tall building at the edge of the mesa and were busy chopping down a cluster of communication towers that rose from its roof.

Begay slowly lowered his binoculars.

“You got any idea what the hell’s going on?” Becenti asked.

Begay shook his head.

“Some kind of Klan meeting? Aryan Nations?”

“There are blacks and Hispanics in the crowd. Even some Indians.”

“Lemme see.”

While Becenti stared at the eastern end of the mesa, Begay digested what he had seen. Initially he thought it must be some kind of crazy revival meeting—a common sight on the Rez—but when they blew up the chopper he realized it was something else altogether. Maybe something connected with that television preacher he’d heard people talking about, the one who’d delivered a sermon against the Isabella project.

Becenti grunted, still staring. “Look at how many people they killed at the airstrip.”

“Yeah,” said Begay. “And you can bet there’s going to be a reaction. The feds aren’t going to sit around and let this shit happen. We don’t want to be caught up here when the fireworks begin.”

“We could stay a little while, see what happens. It isn’t every day you get front-row seats watching the Bilagaana blow themselves up. We always knew the white people were going to do it someday, right? Remember that prophecy?”

“Willy, knock it off. We’ve got to get everyone together and get the hell off this mesa.”

They rose and headed down into the valley.

RANDY DOKE STOOD ON THE HOOD of the Humvee above the fray, his brawny arms folded. The vantage point gave him a better view of the people climbing the high-tension tower. The uppermost ones were just reaching the top. The power lines buzzed and crackled.

Doke felt energized as never before in his life. Once he had been lost in heroin, cocaine, and alcohol. At his lowest point—while wallowing drunk and shit-stained in an irrigation ditch outside Belén, New Mexico, a childhood prayer from deep in his memory had come unbidden, a prayer which his mother had taught him before the drunken old bastard she lived with had shot her and then himself. The singsong verses reverberated in his head, Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. . . . And right then and there, in that foul ditch in Belén, Jesus had reached down and saved his worthless ass. And now he owed the Man—he owed the Man. He would do anything for Jesus.

He raised a pair of binoculars. A climber had reached a point just below the insulators. Doke watched as the man braced himself on the ladder, wrapping his legs around a strut. When he steadied himself, he unslung a pump shotgun, racked a shell into the chamber, and shouldered the gun.

This is going to be good.

He watched the climber take careful aim. The people climbing up from below paused to watch. There was a flash of light, and a moment later the boom of the shotgun reached Doke’s ears. A shower of sparks cascaded down from the power line, the wire shivering. A cheer went up.

The man steadied himself and racked the slide of the shotgun. There was a second flash-boom. The wire detonated thousands of sparks and the line recoiled, like a spitting rattler hit with rocksalt. Another roar of approval.

A third blast. This time a massive spray of fire spewed across the darkness. The line parted with a deep thrumming twang that seemed to vibrate the air, the cut end falling like a slow-motion whip, dribbling fire, coiling down into the crowds below. It struck with a series of booms and flashes of light and smoke, throwing people violently aside, setting off a screaming stampede.

Awesome.

Doke redirected his attention back to the tower. The man was pumping and aiming again. But now people on the tower were yelling—what? For him to stop? No, Doke thought. Go for it.

Another boom from the shotgun. A piece of insulator came tumbling down amid a fireworks display, and a second line snapped and recoiled into the tower itself. It was as if some invisible giant had jarred the tower; people just peeled off the ladder, bodies falling and striking the lower struts, bouncing and spinning off, hitting the ground with a series of dull thuds.

The recoiling line whipped around and came toward him, singing like feedback from a giant electric guitar. Doke leapt off the Humvee as the sizzling cable whipped across it, lashing up a fountain of sparks. He barrelled into the panicked crowd and clawed his way over fallen people in an effort to get away. The Humvee burst into flames, and a moment later he felt the heat of the exploding gas tank, the shockwave, the sudden glow.

Picking himself up, he viewed the damage.

The line had been dragged halfway across the fenced area, leaving a trail of fire. The elevator building was in flames along with half a dozen piñon trees. Dead and horribly burned people littered an area around the burning vehicle.

More souls in heaven, thought Doke. More souls at the right hand of the Lord.

68

ON HIS FLAT PANEL, KEN DOLBY saw the power surge spike, and then plummet and gyrate wildly.

“Isabella!” He punched in the shutdown codes again. The screen spat back:

CODE BYPASS ERROR

“Shit!”

A siren went off, a banshee wail cutting across the Bridge, and a red ceiling light flashed.

“Emergency overload!” St. Vincent yelled.

A dull boom shook the room and the Visualizer screen exploded into glass fragments, which dropped like hail to the floor.

“Isabella!” Dolby cried, clutching the workstation with both hands.

Don’t lose it, Isabella.

St. Vincent struggled with the console, slamming breaker circuits down. “Power’s been cut on Number One! How could it happen? Impossible!”

“The beam!” Kate cried, seizing a terminal. “It’s decollimating! I’m getting . . . a kink!”

Hazelius let out a cry. “Chen! That last message! I didn’t read it all! Did you get it?”

“I can’t find it!” Chen said. “I might have lost it—lost everything.”

“Capture the output to hard copy!” Hazelius roared.

Dolby forced the surrounding chaos out of his consciousness. Isabella wasn’t responding to any of his keyboard inputs. Something had happened—the p5s must have crashed. He turned to Edelstein. “Boot up the main computer. Ignore the startup procedures and testing sequences. Just turn the son of a bitch on.”

An electrical arc seared across the shattered remnants of the screen. A dull, shuddering explosion sounded deep in the cavern, and another. The sound of Isabella gyrated wildly, throbbing, humming, wobbling. The room filled with smoke.

“We’re creating a mini black hole,” Kate said softly.

“This is unbelievable!” Wardlaw screamed. “You know why you lost power on One? Those bastards out there just shot down the line . . . There’s a mob outside the door to Isabella . . . . Oh Christ, I’m losing the security cams—they route through the elevator . . . .”

The hiss of computer snow, then a row of screens went black.

“Oh no.”

More hissing and popping. The entire security station went dead, the warning lights winking out. Isabella moaned and wobbled.

“Are you printing it out?” Hazelius screamed at Chen.

“I’ve got it, now I’m trying to find a working printer!” She hammered on the keyboard, sweat pouring down her face.

“Oh my God . . . Don’t lose it, Rae.”

“Got it,” Chen yelled. “Printing!” She jumped up and raced across the room to a printer dump. She grabbed the paper as it spooled out, ripped it off. Hazelius grabbed it from her, folded it up and stuffed it in his back pocket. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

The room shook with another muffled boom, throwing Dolby to the floor. The lights wavered, electrical arcs sizzled along the consoles. Isabella groaned deeply, as if in agony. Dolby pulled himself up and went back to his machine.

Ford grabbed his arm. “Ken! We’ve got to get out of here!”

Dolby shook him off and tried the code again.

CODE BYPASS ERROR

The main computer began to boot up its startup routines. Dolby yelled, “Alan! I told you to shut down the p5s!”

“Ken, forget it! We’re leaving!” It was Ford again.

Stay with me, Isabella.

He continued working. He had to get through to Isabella. One way or another. He had to shut her down safely. The bad magnet was decohering. The two beams were wobbling offcenter in the pipe, kinking. If they touched the edge, or grazed each other . . .

“Dolby!” Hazelius gripped his shoulder. “You can’t save it! We’ve got to go!”

“Get away from me!” Dolby swung at Hazelius and missed. He turned back to the screen and was furious at what he saw. “Alan! God damn you, the p5s are still running! I told you to shut them down!”

There was no answer. He looked around, trying to locate Edelstein in the smoky room. He wiped his watery eyes and coughed. Smoke was everywhere. The Bridge was empty. Everyone had left.

He could save Isabella. He knew he could. And if he couldn’t—what was the point of living?

I’m here, Isabella. Just stay with me a moment more.

RUSSELL EDDY HAD DONE IT. HE had killed. God had given him the strength. The battle was joined.

The killing of the sinner had been like plugging the crowd into an electric socket. They buzzed with excitement. Energized, Eddy strode to the great titanium door. He stood before it, turned, raised the gun. “And the Antichrist had power to give life unto the image of the Beast! Who will stand with me to confront the Antichrist?”

A roar of assent from the crowd.

“Who will stand with me to confront the Beast!”

Another delirious roar. Eddy felt a bolt of strength shoot through him.

“He is the Lawless One!”

Roar.

“The Wicked One!”

It thundered uncontrollably.

“In the name of God and His only begotten son, Jesus Christ, we will destroy him!”

The mob rushed the door en masse, but the titanium would not yield.

“Stand back!” Eddy shouted. “We’re going through this door!” He aimed his gun—but a hand grabbed his fist.

“Pastor, that revolver isn’t going to work.” A man in camouflage with an AR-15 assault rifle strapped to his back stepped forward. “You see that setup over there?” He pointed to three conical devices mounted on tripods, pointing at the door. “That’s a wall-breaching demolition kit, all set up and ready to blast. The soldiers here were intending to blow a hole in this door. They wanted to get into Isabella as well.”

“How do you know?”

“Mike Frost, former Fifth Special Forces Group.” He crushed Eddy’s hand.

“Break us in, Mike.”

Frost circled the device cautiously, peering at the metal cones. “This puppy’s already packed with C-4. Darn lucky a stray bullet didn’t hit one of these during the fight. Those wires connect them all together, and here are the detonators.” He picked up a small cylinder with a wire attached. There were three of them, and he carefully pushed each one deep into the C-4 and packed it all back around.

“Tell everyone to get back. Way back. To the side over there with their backs turned.”

Eddy quickly herded the milling crowd away from the setup. Frost played out the wires to their full length, flipped the cover off the detonator switch, and placed his finger on it.

“Cover your ears.”

69

FORD AND THE TEAM FOLLOWED WARDLAW into the computer room behind the Bridge. It was a long, barren room with gray walls and three rows of silent, gray plastic cabinets. It housed the fastest, most powerful supercomputer in the world. Its processors were humming, the discrete panels on each one clustered with blinking lights, most of which were red or yellow. At the far end was a single steel door.

Hazelius joined them. “Dolby won’t come.”

“We’ve got three problems,” Wardlaw said. “One: Isabella’s going to blow. Two: we’ve got an armed mob out there. And three: we can’t call for help.”

“What do we do?” Thibodeaux wailed.

“That steel door in the back leads into the old coal tunnels. We’ve got to get out of here. We need to put a big piece of that mountain between us and Isabella before she blows.”

“How do we get out of the coal tunnels?” Ford asked.

“At the far end,” Wardlaw said, “there’s an old vertical shaft that was turned into a gobshaft to pull methane out of the far end of the mine. There’s still an old hoist in there. It’s probably not usable. We’ll have to rig something.”

“Is that the best we can do?”

“It’s either that or go out the front door—into that mob.”

A silence.

The explosion that shook the computer room knocked Ford and the rest to their knees like they were pebbles in a tin can. The sound reverberated back and forth, the detonation rolling like thunder through the mountain. The lights in the room flickered and electrical arcs seared across the consoles. Ford struggled to his feet and helped Kate up.

“Was that Isabella?” Hazelius cried.

“If that was Isabella, we’d be dead,” said Wardlaw. “The mob just blew the titanium door.”

“Impossible!”

“Not if they used those military demolition charges.”

The Bridge door suddenly reverberated with the pummeling of fists. Ford listened. He could see Dolby in the Bridge laboring like a ghost in the smoke, hunched over his workstation.

“Hazelius!” came a muffled, high-pitched voice through the door. “You hear me, Antichrist? We’re coming to get you!”

PASTOR RUSSELL EDDY SCREAMED AT THE steel door. “Hazelius, you have blasphemed against God, against His name and them that dwell in heaven!”

The door was thick steel, and they had no more explosives. Firing into the lock with his revolver in this closed space would be ineffective and even insane.

The mob surged up against the door, pounding and screaming,

“Christians!” Eddy’s voice boomed out in the vast, cavernous space. “Listen to me, Christians!” The crowd fell into a restless silence, filled by the infernal wailing of the machine in the tunnel beyond. “Stand back from the door! We need to organize our attack!” He pointed. “On the other side of this cavern, there’s a stack of steel I-beams. I want the strongest men—and men only!—to hoist up one of those beams and batter this door down with it. The rest of you have an equally important task. Divide yourselves into two groups. I want the first group to go into the long circular tunnel, back there.” He pointed to the oval opening, awash in condensation. “Cut and sledgehammer the pipes, cables, and conduits feeding the supercomputer, the Beast!” He held up a piece of paper he had printed off the Internet. “Here’s a map of the Beast.” He pointed to a man who seemed calmer than the rest, who carried his weapon with ease, and who had an air of leadership. “This is yours. You lead them.”

“Yes, Pastor.”

“Once we break down this door, I want the second group to follow me into the control room, seize the Antichrist, and destroy the equipment in there!”

A roar of approval. Already twenty men were manhandling an I-beam off the stack. The crowd parted as they came lumbering back, the I-beam aimed at the door.

“Go!” cried Eddy, standing aside. “Batter it down!”

“Batter it! Destroy it!”

The crowd parted and, at a slow jog, the men closed in on the door. The beam struck it with a massive thud, warping it inward. The beam was thrown back by the impact and the men staggered to hold it up.

“Again!” Eddy cried.

70

A MUFFLED CLANG SHOOK THE ROOM and the metal door reverberated from a massive blow. Ford struggled into the smoke, found Dolby, and grabbed his shoulder. “Ken, please,” he said, “for God’s sake come with us.”

“No. I’m sorry, Wyman,” Dolby said. “I’m staying here. I can . . . I can save Isabella.”

Ford could hear the shouts and screams of the mob outside the door. They were ramming it with something heavy. Buckling, it popped one of its hinge pins.

“You won’t make it. There’s no time.”

Through the door came the mob’s roar: “Hazeliuuus! Antichriiist!”

Dolby resumed his frantic work.

Kate came up behind Ford. “We’ve got to go.”

Ford turned and followed Kate into the back computer room. The others were crowding around the emergency exit while Wardlaw struggled to activate the security panel. He typed and retyped the code, his hand on the hand-reader next to the exit. The reader was dead.

Boom! The door to the Bridge smacked down and tumbled across the floor. The roar of the mob swelled as they poured into the smoky Bridge.

A fusillade of shots followed, and Dolby screamed as he was cut down at his workstation.

“Where’s the Antichrist?” a man screamed. Ford rushed to the computer room door, shut it and locked it.

Wardlaw pulled out a regular key and yanked open a panel next to the door, exposing a second keyboard. He punched in a code. Nothing.

“They’re in the back room!”

“Batter down that door!”

On Wardlaw’s second try, the exit door opened with a smooth click. They piled through it into the damp, moldy darkness of the coal mine. Ford was the last out, pushing Kate ahead of him. A long, broad tunnel stretched out ahead, cribbed with rusting steel beams that held up a sagging, cracked ceiling. It smelled clammy and putrescent, like the petrified swamp it once was. Water dripped from the ceiling.

Wardlaw slammed the rear door and tried to lock it. But the locks were electronic and, with no power, dead.

A crashing boom thundered in the computer room, and the noise of the mob mounted. The battering ram had breached the computer door.

Wardlaw struggled to engage the locks, first using his magnetic card and then stabbing a code into the keypad.

“Ford, over here!”

Wardlaw pulled a second sidearm out of his waistband and handed it to Ford. It was a SIG-Sauer P229. “I’m going to try to hold them here. The mines back there are room-and-pillar construction. Everything connects. Keep going and bear to the left, bypassing the dead ends, until you hit the big room where the coal seam played out. It’s about three miles in. The gobshaft is in the far left corner. You can escape through it. Don’t wait for me—just get everyone the hell out. And take this, too.”

He shoved a Maglite into his hand.

“You can’t fight them off alone,” said Ford. “It’s suicide.”

“I can buy you time. It’s our only chance.”

“Tony—,” began Hazelius.

“Save yourself!”

“Kill the Antichrist!” came the muffled wail from behind the door. “ Kill him!”

“Run!” Wardlaw roared.

They ran down the dark tunnel, Ford taking up the rear, splashing through puddles of water on the mine floor, the Maglite illuminating the way. He could hear pounding on the door, the screams of the mob, and the word “Antichriiiist” echoing down the tunnels. After a moment, several shots sounded. There were screams and more shots, the sounds of chaos and panic.

The tunnel was long and straight, with perpendicular tunnels every fifty feet going off to the right, opening into more parallel tunnels. The bituminous seam to the left squeezed down and had been abandoned before being fully mined out, leaving many dead-end tunnels, stopes, and a web of dark seams.

More gunshots came from behind, the sounds echoing crazily through the confined spaces. The air was dead and heavy, the walls gleaming with moisture, furred with white nitre. The tunnel took a broad turn. Ford caught up to Julie Thibodeaux, who was falling behind, slipped his arm around her, and tried to help her along.

More distant shots. Wardlaw was making a last stand, Leonidas at Thermopylae, Ford though sadly, surprised at the man’s courage and dedication.

The mine opened up into a vast room with a low ceiling, the main seam itself, which was held up by massive pillars of unmined coal left standing to hold up the ceiling. The pillars were twenty feet on a side, black glistening faces of peacock coal shimmering in the light, the mine a mazelike warren of pillars and open areas in no regular arrangement. Ford paused to eject the magazine and saw it was fully loaded with thirteen 9 mm rounds. He shoved it back in.

“We stay together,” said Hazelius, dropping back. “George and Alan, you two help Julie—she’s having trouble. Wyman, you stay back and cover our rear.”

Hazelius grasped Kate’s shoulders in both hands and looked into her face. “If something should happen to me, you’re in charge. Got it?”

Kate nodded.

THE GROUP OF MEN WITH EDDY were pinned down by gunfire from behind the first pillar of coal.

“Cover!” Eddy screamed, aiming his Blackhawk at where he had seen the last flash of light and squeezing off a round to suppress the incoming fire. More shots rang out from behind as others poured in, concentrating their fire at where the gunflashes had come from. Beams from a dozen flashlights flickered down the tunnel.

“He’s behind that wall of coal!” Eddy cried. “Cover me!”

Scattered gunfire struck the wall, spraying chips of coal.

“Hold fire!”

Eddy rose and ran to the broad pillar, which extended for at least twenty feet before turning. Flattening himself against the far side, he indicated with a hand signal for several other fighters to go around the other side. He crept along the ragged face of coal, weapon at the ready.

The shooter anticipated their move and bolted for the next pillar.

Eddy raised his gun, fired, missed. Another shot rang out just before the man reached cover. He fell and began crawling. Frost came around from behind the other side of the pillar, handgun in both hands, and fired a second and third shot into the crawling man, who hunched up. He walked over and put a final bullet in his head at point blank range.

“All clear,” he said, sweeping the tunnels with his flashlight. “Just one. The rest fled.”

Russell Eddy lowered his gun and walked to the center of the tunnel. People were crowding in through the open door and filling up the space, their voices loud in the confined quarters. He held up his hands. Silence fell.

“The great day of his wrath has come!” Eddy cried.

He could feel the surge of the crowd behind him, he could feel their energy, like a dynamo powering his resolve. But there were too many. He needed to go in with a smaller, more mobile group. He turned and shouted over the grinding hum of the machinery: “I can only take a small group into the tunnels—and only men with guns. No women, no children. All men with firearms and experience, step forward! The rest fall back!”

About thirty men shouldered their way forward.

“Line up and show me your weapons! Hold them up!”

With a cheer, the men held up their weapons—rifles and handguns. Eddy walked down the line, looking at each man in turn. He eliminated a few with muzzle-loading antique replicas, a couple of teenagers with single-shot .22 rifles, two who looked demented. Two dozen were left.

“You men, you come with me to hunt down the Antichrist and his disciples. Stand over there.” He turned to the rest. “The rest of you: your work is back there, in those rooms we just came through. God wants you to destroy Isabella! Destroy the Beast of the Bottomless Pit, whose name is Abaddon! Go, Soldiers of Faith!”

With a roar, the crowd broke, hungry for action, and poured back through the open door, swinging sledgehammers, axes, baseball bats. The sounds of bashing came from the room beyond.

The machine seemed to scream in agony.

Eddy grabbed Frost. “You, Mike, stay at my side. I need your experience.”

“Yes, Pastor.”

“All right, men—let’s go!”

71

HAZELIUS LED THE GROUP THROUGH THE broad tunnels cut through the massive seam of coal. Ford covered their rear. Falling back, he peered into the darkness and listened. The shooting between Wardlaw and the mob had ended, but Ford could still hear the mob’s shouts as they pursued them through the tunnels

They stayed to the left, as Wardlaw had advised, sometimes getting hung up in dead-ends and blind leads, which forced them to backtrack. The mine was vast, the great bituminous seam going on forever in three directions. A maze of curving, crisscrossing tunnels had been cut in the seam, leaving square blocks of coal in a room-and-pillar arrangement, creating a labyrinthine sequence of spaces that connected with each other in unpredictable ways. The mine floor was crisscrossed with railcar tracks from 1950s mining operations. Rusting metal carts, rotting rope, broken engines, and heaps of discarded coal lay about. They had to wade through pools of slimy water in the low spots.

The deep-throated scream of Isabella followed them as they ran through the tunnels, like the agonizing bellows of a mortally wounded beast. Whenever he stopped to listen, Ford could also hear the clamoring pursuit of the mob.

After running for over a quarter hour, Hazelius called for a short rest. They collapsed on the damp ground, heedless of the black coal muck. Kate hunkered down next to Ford, and he put his arm around her.

“Isabella’s going to blow at any moment,” Hazelius said. “It could be anywhere from a large conventional bomb to a small nuke.”

“Jesus,” said Innes.

“A bigger problem,” said Hazelius, “is that some of the detectors are filled with explosive liquid hydrogen. One neutrino detector has fifty thousand gallons of perchloroethylene and the other a hundred thousand gallons of alkanes—both flammable. And look around—there’s a hell of a lot of burnable coal left in these seams. Once Isabella blows, it won’t be long before the whole mountain goes up in flames. There’ll be no stopping it.”

Silence.

“The explosion could trigger cave-ins, too.”

The cacophony of the pursuing horde echoed down the tunnels, punctuated by the occasional gunshot, rising over the wobbling, grinding, vibrating hum of Isabella.

The mob, Ford realized, was gradually catching up. “I’m going to drop back a little and fire a few rounds in their direction,” he said, “To slow them down.”

“Excellent idea,” said Hazelius, “But no killing.”

They moved on. Ford hung back in a side tunnel, where he switched off his light and listened intently. The sounds of the pursuing mob rolled through the caverns, faint and distorted.

Ford moved down the tunnel by feel, his hand on the wall, memorizing his path. Gradually the sounds became louder, and then he could see, at the edge of sight, the faint bobbing glow of half a dozen flashlights. He removed the pistol, and crouching behind a pillar of coal, pointed it obliquely at the ceiling.

The pursuers closed in. Ford squeezed off three 9 mm Parabellum rounds in rapid succession, and they thundered through the confined space. Eddy’s mob fell back, firing wildly into the dark.

Ducking into a dark passageway, Ford laid a hand on the far wall and, using it as a guide, moved quickly past two more tunnel openings. A second group of searchers was coming up—they seemed to have broken up into smaller teams—but this group was now moving cautiously because of the gunshots. He fired five more times, to slow them down.

Retreating—still with one guiding hand against the wall—he counted off three more pillars before he felt safe enough to switch back on his light. He kept low, jogging, hoping to catch up with the group. But as he ran, he heard from behind a strange coughing sound. He paused. Isabella’s growl suddenly changed pitch; rising precipitously, higher and higher, it became an earshattering scream, a monstrous roar, growing louder, louder, a crescendo that shook the mountain. Ford, sensing what was coming, threw himself to the ground.

The roar turned into an earthquake, the ground convulsing. A massive boom followed, a wave of overpressure ripping through the mine, picking him up like a leaf and hurtling him into a coal pillar. As the great thunderclap rolled off into the caverns, a sucking wind swept back through the tunnels, screaming like a banshee. Ford huddled in the lee of the coal pillar, head down, as coal and rocks blew past.

Ford rolled, looked up. The tunnel ceiling was cracking, splitting, raining bits of coal and matrix. He leapt to his feet and tried to outrun the collapsing tunnel as it roared up at him from behind.

EDDY WAS THROWN TO THE GROUND by the force of the explosions. He lay facedown in a muddy pool, pebbles and grit raining down around him, the tunnels echoing and booming with thunderous crashes, near and far. Dust filled the air and he could hardly breathe. Everything seemed to collapse around him.

Minutes passed, and the thunderous cave-ins slowed to the occasional rumble. As the sounds died away, an uneasy silence ensued, the voice of Isabella no more. The machine was dead.

They had killed it.

Eddy sat up, coughed. A moment of fumbling around in the choking clouds of dust, and he found his flashlight, still shining in the murk. Others were rising, their lights like disembodied glowworms in the fog. The tunnel had caved in not twenty yards behind them, but they had survived.

“Praise the Lord!” said Eddy, coughing again.

“Praise the Lord!” a follower echoed.

Eddy took stock. Some of his soldiers had been injured by falling rocks. Blood streamed down their foreheads, their shoulders gashed. Others seemed unhurt. No one had been killed.

Eddy steadied himself against the rock wall, trying to breathe. He managed to straighten himself up and speak. “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and earth were passed away.” He lifted both his hands, gun in one, flashlight in the other. “Warriors of God! The Beast is dead. But let us not forget the even more important task at hand.” He pointed into the drifting murk. “Out there, lurking in the dark, is the Antichrist. And his disciples. We have a battle to finish.” He looked around. “Rise up! The Beast is dead! Praise the Lord!”

His words gradually drove life into the shell-shocked group.

“Recover your weapons and flashlights. Stand with me.”

Those of the group who had dropped their weapons searched around, and in a few minutes all were standing, armed, and ready to continue. It was a miracle: the tunnel had caved in behind them where they had been only moments before. But the Lord had spared them.

He felt invincible. With the Lord at his side, who could strike him down? “They were ahead,” he said, “down that tunnel. It’s only partially collapsed. We can climb over that rubble. Let’s go.”

“In the name of Jesus Christ, let’s go!”

“Praise Jesus!”

Eddy led them forward, feeling his strength and confidence return. The ringing in his ears began to subside. They picked their way over a heap of broken rock that had fallen from the ceiling. Smaller rocks were still rattling out of the hole in the sagging, shattered roof, but it held. Visibility gradually improved as the murk settled.

They came to an open cavern, created by the cave-in of one side of the mine ceiling. A stream of fresh, clean air flowed down from the opening, clearing out the dust. A large tunnel yawned at the far end.

Eddy paused, wondering which way the Antichrist had gone. He signaled for the group to be quiet and turn off their lights. In the silence and the dark, he heard and saw nothing. He bowed his head. “Lord, show us the way.” He flicked on his light, at random, and saw which tunnel it was pointing down.

“We go this way,” he said. The group followed, their flashlights bobbing like glowing eyes in the murky dark.

72

BEGAY LAY IN THE TALL ALFALFA, stunned by the blast, as secondary waves of overpressure ripped across the valley and over the bluffs. Flattening the sage, the shockwaves uprooted piñon trees, flinging sand and gravel before them like multiple blasts of buckshot, the ground shuddering and concussing beneath him. He covered his face until the first waves had passed and then sat up. A huge fireball floated above the cliff top, a blazing sphere trailing a stem of smoke, dust, and debris. He averted his face from the searing heat.

He heard Willy Becenti’s muffled curses coming from the alfafa and then his head appeared, hair askew. “God damn!”

Across the field, other people slowly stood. The horses, which they had been rounding up to saddle, had panicked, rearing and kicking at their hobbles, bellowing with terror. Some had broken free and were tearing away across the alfalfa field.

Begay stood. The tipi had been blown down and the poles lay broken on the ground, the canvas shredded like confetti. The blast had knocked the old Nakai Rock Trading Post off its foundation. He squinted into the darkness and wondered where his horse, Winter, had run off to.

“What the hell was that?” Becenti asked, staring upward.

The giant ball of fire appeared to float high above the trees, looming above them, drifting and rolling as it collapsed into a deep reddish brown color.

On the mesa top above Isabella, Begay had seen hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people gathered. What had the blast done to them? He shuddered at the thought. A rumble came from belowground, and Begay could hear the distant rattle of gunfire.

Glancing around the field, Begay did a quick head count. Everyone was accounted for. “We got to get people the hell out of here,” he called to Maria Atcitty. “I don’t care if we’re short of horses. Double everyone up and head for the Midnight Trail.”

Somewhere just south of them, the earth growled and convulsed. At the far end of the valley, the alfalfa field buckled and sagged, a web of cracks appearing in the earth. Dust detonated into the air as a gaping sinkhole opened, the size of a football field, its edges collapsing into a cavernous darkness.

“The old mines are caving in,” said Becenti.

The ground shook again, and again. Clouds of dust coiled up, near and far. The reddish brown fireball drifted, dimming, dissipating gradually and breaking apart with lassitude.

Begay clutched Maria Atcitty’s shoulders. “You’re in charge. Grab what people and horses you can find and get them down the Midnight Trail.”

“What about you?”

“I’m going after the runaways.”

“Are you crazy?”

Begay shook his head. “One of them’s Winter. Don’t ask me to leave him.”

Maria Atcitty gave him a long look, then turned, yelling at everyone to leave their stuff and double up on the horses.

“You can’t do it alone,” Becenti said to Begay.

“You better go with the others.”

“No way.”

Begay grasped his shoulder. “Thanks.”

More subterranean rumbles shook the ground—now from the southern and eastern ends of the mesa—the same direction the horses had gone. Gazing across the moonlit landscape, he watched a dozen dust coils snake upward above the mesa.

Cave-ins. The old mines really were collapsing. Over toward Isabella the fires were spreading, rolling clouds of smoke boiling up in plumes, tinged burnt-orange from the fires below. The initial explosion had only been the beginning; now the entire mesa was igniting. The coal-seamed, methane-laced tunnels were venting their rage.

Maria Atcitty returned with her horse. “It’s like the end of the world out there.”

Begay shook his head. “Maybe it is.”

He dropped his voice and spoke the obscure Falling Star chant, “Aniné bichaha’oh koshdéé‘ . . .”

73

FORD CAME TO IN THE DARK, the air choked with dust and the stink of newly released coal gas. Covered with pulverized rock, he peered around, his ears ringing, his head splitting.

“Kate!” he called out.

Silence.

“Kate!”

Panic seized him. Pushing loose rock aside, he freed himself. Scrabbling to his hands and knees and running his hands through the rubble, he saw a gleam and uncovered his flashlight, still lit. As he shone it around, the beam revealed a body lying twenty feet down the tunnel, partly buried in rock. He scrambled over.

It was Hazelius. A trickle of blood came out of his nose. He felt for a pulse—strong.

“Gregory!” he whispered into the man’s ear. “Can you hear me?”

The head turned and the eyes opened—those astonishing azure eyes. Hazelius squinted in the light. “What . . . happened?” he croaked

“Explosion and cave-in.”

Comprehension dawned. “The others?”

“I don’t know. I was just catching up to you when it blew.”

“They ran every which way when the rocks started falling.” He glanced down. “My leg . . .”

Ford began clearing rubble from the lower half of Hazelius’s body. A large rock lay on his left leg. He grasped the edge of the rock and gently lifted it off. The leg underneath was slightly crooked.

“Help me up, Wyman.”

“I’m afraid your leg’s broken,” Ford said.

“No matter. We’ve got to keep moving.”

“But if it’s broken—”

“Help me up, damn you!”

Ford slung Hazelius’s arm around his neck and helped him to his feet. Hazelius staggered, clinging to him.

“If you support me, I can walk.”

Ford listened. In the rattled silence, he could hear distant voices and shouts. Incredibly enough, the mob was still in pursuit. Or perhaps they, too, just wanted out of the labyrinth.

Moving through the rubble, Ford supported Hazelius, one step after another. He dragged Hazelius over rockfalls, under gaping holes in the ceiling, through passages between tunnels which the explosion had opened up, past rooms which the blast had caved in. He could see no sign of the others.

“Kate?” Ford called into the darkness.

No answer.

Ford felt for his SIG. Eight rounds expended, five left.

“I’m getting a little dizzy,” Hazelius said.

Moving slowly, they came out of a narrow tunnel into a transverse shaft. Again Ford recognized nothing. The voices were getting louder now and eerily ubiquitous, as if all around them.

“I just never . . . expected . . . this.” Hazelius’s voice trailed off.

Ford wanted to call out for Kate again but he didn’t dare. There was so much dust, so many tunnels, and if she answered, the mob might find her.

Hazelius stumbled again, crying from pain, and Ford could barely hold him up. He sagged like a sack of cement. When Ford could drag him no farther, he crouched and struggled to hoist Hazelius over his shoulders. The tunnel was too tightly confined and the effort caused Hazelius too much pain.

Ford laid Hazelius down and felt his pulse—shallow and fast, with a clammy sweat breaking out on his forehead. He was going into shock.

“Gregory, can you hear me?”

The scientist groaned and turned his head. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I just can’t do it.”

“I’m going to look at your leg.”

Ford slit the pant-leg with the penknife. The compound fracture had forced the splintered thigh bone through the skin. If he carried Hazelius further, the splintered femur might sever the femoral artery.

Ford risked shining around a low beam from the Maglite. He could see no sign of the others, but below the tunnel floor, a shallow stope on the opposite wall a few dozen feet down—partially obscured by a rockfall—suggested concealment.

“We’re going to hide in there.”

He picked Hazelius under the arms and dragged him into the niche. Gathering more fallen rock, he built a low wall they could hide behind. The voices were getting closer.

Please God, let Kate make it.

Ford used up all the loose rocks in the vicinity. The wall was about two feet high, just enough to hide them if they lay down. Ford got behind it. He took off his jacket and balled it up, making a pillow for Hazelius’s head, and shut off the light.

“Thank you, Wyman,” Hazelius said.

They didn’t speak for a moment, and then Hazelius said, matter of factly, “They’re going to kill me, you know.”

“Not if I can help it.” Ford felt for his gun.

Hazelius’s hand touched his. “No. No killing. Aside from the fact that we’re hopelessly outnumbered, it would be wrong.”

“It’s not wrong if they’re going to kill you first.”

“We’re all one,” said Hazelius. “Killing them is like killing yourself.”

“Please don’t lay that religious shit on me now.”

Hazelius groaned, swallowed. “Wyman, I’m disappointed in you. Of all the team, you’re the only one who won’t accept the amazing thing that’s happened to us.”

“Stop talking and lie low.”

They crouched behind the rough wall of stones. The air smelled of dust and mildew. The voices approached, the footsteps and clinking of the mob now echoing down the stone corridors. After a moment, the dull glow of their torches invaded the dusty air. Ford could hardly breathe, he was so tense.

The mob was noisier, drawing nearer. Suddenly they were there. For a seeming eternity Eddy’s horde was slogging past, their flashlights and torches casting hellish orange shapes on the ceiling, their shadows distorted on the walls. The noise of the mob dimmed, receded, the flickering of the fires dying away. Darkness returned. Ford heard a long, painful sigh from Hazelius. “My God . . .”

Ford wondered for a crazy moment if Hazelius was praying.

“They think . . . I’m the Antichrist . . . .” He gave a low, strange laugh.

Ford rose and peered into the darkness. The sounds of the mob vanished and silence fell once again, broken here and there with the rattle of falling pebbles.

“Maybe I am the Antichrist . . .,” Hazelius wheezed. Ford wasn’t sure if it was pain or laughter. He’s starting to get delirious, he thought. He put that aside and considered what they should do. Air was moving through the tunnel and with it came the stench of burning coal, as well as an ominously low vibration, the sound of fire.

“We’ve got to get out.”

No answer from Hazelius.

He grasped Hazelius under the shoulders. “Come on. Try to keep moving. We can’t stay here. We’ve got to find the others and get to the hoist.”

A muffled explosion reverberated through the tunnels. The smell of coal smoke increased.

“And now they’re going to kill me . . . .” Again, the eerie laugh. Hoisting Hazelius over his back, gripping him by each arm, Ford dragged him through the tunnels.

“Ironic,” Hazelius mumbled. “To be martyred . . . Human beings are so foolish . . . so gullible . . . . But I didn’t think it through . . . just as stupid as they are . . . .”

Ford shone the light ahead. The tunnel opened into a large cavern.

“Now I’m going to pay for it . . . . Antichrist, they called me . . . . Antichrist indeed!” More spastic laughter. Ford struggled forward and entered the cavernous stope. To his right, caved-in coal piles and rock mixed together with crumbling veins of pyrite that glittered like gold in his flashlight.

He struggled on with the man toward the far end. The gobshaft materialized out of the darkness, a round hole, about five feet in diameter, at the far corner. A rope dangled down the shaft.

He lay Hazelius on the rock floor and rested his head on the jacket. An explosion rocked the room, and he could hear debris dropping all around them, shaken loose from the ceiling. The smoke stung his eyes. At any moment the approaching fire would suck out their oxygen—and that would be it.

He grasped the rope. Disintegrating in his hands, it parted, unraveling and piling down into the deep shaft. A few moments later he heard a splash of water.

He shined his light up and saw a smoothly bored hole going up as far as the eye could see. The rotten end of the rope dangled uselessly. The hoist was nowhere to be seen.

He went back to Hazelius to find him sinking deeper into delirium. More soft laughter. Ford squatted on his heels, thinking hard. Hazelius’s mumbling distracted him, and then he heard a name: Joe Blitz .

Suddenly he listened. “Did you just say Joe Blitz?”

“Joe Blitz . . . ,” he mumbled, “Lieutenant Scott Morgan . . . Bernard Hubbell . . . Kurt von Rachen . . . Captain Charles Gordon . . .”

“Who’s Joe Blitz?”

“Joe Blitz . . . Captain B. A. Northrup . . . Rene Lafayette . . .”

“Who are these people?” Ford asked.

“Nobodies. They don’t . . . exist . . . . Noms de plume . . .”

“Pennames?” Ford bent over Hazelius. His face, in the faint light, was covered with a sheen of sweat. His eyes were glassy. But there was still a strange, almost supernatural vitality to the man. “Pennames for who?”

“Who else? For the great L. Ron Hubbard . . . Clever man . . . Only they didn’t call him the Antichrist . . . . He was luckier than me, the schmuck.”

Ford was thunderstruck. Joe Blitz? A penname for L. Ron Hubbard? Hubbard was the science fiction writer who had started his own religion, Scientology, and set himself up as its prophet. Before launching Scientology, Ford recalled, Hubbard had famously told a group of fellow writers that the greatest feat a human being could achieve in this world was to found a world-class religion. And then he went out and did it, combining pseudoscience and half-baked mysticism into a potent and appealing package.

A world-class religion . . . Was it possible? Was that the question Hazelius alluded to? Was that the point of his hand-picked team? Their tragic backgrounds? Isabella, the greatest scientific experiment in history? The isolation? The Mesa? The messages? The secrecy? The voice of God?

Ford took a deep breath and leaned over. He whispered, “Volkonsky wrote a note just before his . . . death. I found it. It said, in part: I saw through the madness. To prove it, I give you a name only: Joe Blitz .”

“Yes . . . Yes . . . ,” Hazelius answered. “Peter was smart . . . . Too smart for his own good . . . I made a mistake there, should have picked someone else . . . .” A silence, and then a long sigh. “My mind is wandering.” His voice quavered at the edge of sanity. “What was I saying?”

Hazelius was swimming back into reality—but only a little.

“Joe Blitz was L. Ron Hubbard. The man who invented his own religion. Was that what this was all about?”

“I was babbling.”

“But that was your plan,” said Ford. “Wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Hazelius’s voice sounded sharper.

“Of course you do. You choreographed the whole thing—the building of Isabella, the problems with the machine, the voice of God. It was you all along. You’re the hacker.”

“You’re not making sense, Wyman.” Now Hazelius sounded like he had returned to reality—hard.

Ford shook his head. The answer had been staring him in the face for almost a week—right there in his file.

“Most of your life,” said Ford, “you’ve been concerned with utopian political schemes.”

“Aren’t many of us?”

“Not to the power of obsession. But you were obsessed, and, even worse, no one listened to you—not even after you won the Nobel Prize. It must have driven you crazy—the smartest man on earth, and no one would listen. Then your wife died and you went into seclusion. You emerged two years later with the idea for Isabella. You had something to say. You wanted people to listen. You wanted to change the world more than ever. How better to do it than become a prophet? To start your own religion?”

Ford could hear Hazelius breathing heavily in the darkness.

“Your theory is . . . demented,” Hazelius said, with a groan.

“You came up with the idea for the Isabella project—a machine to probe the Big Bang, the moment of creation. You got it built. You picked the team—making sure they were psychologically receptive. You staged this whole thing. You planned to make the greatest scientific discovery ever made. And what might that be? What else, but to discover God! That discovery would make you his prophet. That’s it, isn’t it? You planned to pull an L. Ron Hubbard on the world.”

“You’re really quite mad.”

“Your wife wasn’t pregnant when she died. You made that up. Whatever names the machine came up with, you’d have reacted the same way. You guessed the numbers Kate would be thinking of—because you knew Kate so well. There was nothing supernatural about this at all.”

Hazelius’s even breathing was his only response.

“You gathered around you twelve scientists—handpicked by you. When I read their dossiers, I was struck that every one of them had been hurt by life, every one seeking meaning in their lives. I wondered why that was. And now I know. You handpicked them because you knew they were susceptible—ripe for conversion.”

“But I couldn’t convert you, huh?”

“You came close.”

They paused. The faint sound of voices reverberated down the tunnels. The mob was returning.

Hazelius let out a long sigh. “We’re both going to die—I hope you realize that, Wyman. We’re both to be . . . martyred .”

“That remains to be seen.”

“Yes, my intention was to start a religion. But I don’t know what the hell happened back there. It got away from me. I had this plan . . . it just got away from me.” He sighed again, moaned. “Eddy. That was the wild card that blew my hand. A foolish oversight on my part: martyrdom is the way of all prophets.”

“How did you do it? I mean, hack the computer?”

Hazelius slipped the old rabbit’s foot out of his pocket. “I hollowed out the cork stuffing, replaced it with a sixty-four-gig flash drive, processor, microphone, and wireless transmitter—voice recognition and data. I could connect it to any one of a thousand high-speed wireless processors scattered about Isabella, all slaved to the supercomputer. It’s got a lovely little AI program I wrote in LISP, or rather helped write, since much of it’s self-generated. It’s the most beautiful computer program ever written. It was simple to operate, just sitting in my pocket. Although the program itself was anything but simple—I’m not sure even I understand it. Strange, though, it said a lot of things I never intended—things that I never dreamed of. You might say it performed beyond specs.”

“You manipulative bastard.”

Hazelius slipped the rabbit’s foot back into his pocket. “You’re wrong about that, Wyman. I’m not a bad man at all. I did what I did for the highest, most altruistic reasons.”

“Sure. Look at the violence, all the death. You’re responsible for it.”

“Eddy and his people chose the violence, not me.” He winced with momentary pain.

“And you either murdered Volkonsky or had Wardlaw do it.”

“No. Volkonsky was a smart man. He guessed what I was up to. When he really thought it through, he realized he couldn’t stop me. He couldn’t bear to see himself made a fool of, his life’s work manipulated and disgraced like that. So he killed himself, making it look like a suicide, but with a few anomalous details so they’d end up thinking it was murder. Double-reverse psychology, typical Volkonsky. He had a uniquely devious mind.”

“Why make it look like murder?”

“He hoped the investigation would eventually engulf the Isabella project, shut us down before I could pull my coup. Didn’t work, though. Events moved too fast. I accept responsibility for his death. But I didn’t kill him.”

“What a futile damn waste.”

“You’re not thinking it through, Wyman . . . .” He breathed heavily for a moment, and resumed. “This story is just beginning. You can’t stop it. Les jeux sont faites, as Sartre once said. The great irony is that they are going to make it happen.”

“They?”

“That fundamentalist mob. They’re going to supply a far more powerful end to this story than the one I had devised.”

“Your story will end in futility,” said Ford.

“Wyman, I can see you don’t understand the full dimensions of what is happening. Eddy’s unwashed masses . . .” He paused and Ford, to his dismay, could hear the faint sounds of the mob getting closer. “. . . They will kill me, martyr me. And you. In so doing, they’ll anoint my name . . . forever.”

“I’ll anoint you a madman, forever.”

“I grant you that is how most normal people would perceive me.”

The voices became more distinct.

“We have to hide,” said Ford.

“Where? There’s no place to go and I can’t move.” Hazelius shook his head and, in a low, hoarse voice, quoted the Bible. “‘They will call to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us . . .’ Just as Revelation says, we’re trapped.”

The voices were getting closer. Ford removed his pistol, but Hazelius placed a clammy, trembling hand on his arm. “Acquiesce with dignity.”

Bobbing lights flashed from the darkness. The voices swelled as a dozen filthy, heavily armed men surged around a curve in the tunnel.

“There they are! Two of them!”

The crowd emerged from the murk, black and ghoulish as coal miners, with guns drawn, white streaks of sweat like bars down their grimacing faces.

“Hazelius! The Antichrist!”

“The Antichrist!”

“We’ve got him!”

Another distant explosion shook the room. The hanging rock of the ceiling loosened and let loose a storm of pebbles, which clattered to the floor, hailstones from hell. Coal smoke drifted in tendrils through the dead air. The mountain quaked again and another cave-in down the line growled and rumbled, coughing smoke through the shafts.

The crowd parted and Pastor Eddy walked up to Hazelius. Standing over the stricken scientist, his hollow, bony face grinned in triumph. “We meet again.”

Hazelius shrugged and averted his eyes.

“Only now, Antichrist,” Eddy said, “I’m in control. God’s at my right, Jesus on my left, and the Holy Spirit has my back. And you—where’s your protector? He’s fled—Satan, the coward—fled to the rocks! ‘ Hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb!’ ”

Eddy bent over Hazelius until his face was inches from the scientist’s. And then he laughed.

“Go to hell, germ,” Hazelius said softly.

Eddy exploded with rage. “Search them for weapons!”

A group of men approached Ford. He let them come, decked the first one, kicked the second in the stomach, and slammed the third into a rock wall. The others converged with a roar of fury, and a small army of fists and feet finally drove him to the wall and then to the ground. Eddy pulled the SIG-Sauer out of Ford’s waist band.

During the melee one enthusiastic worshipper kicked Hazelius in his broken leg. With a sobbing gasp, the scientist passed out.

“Good work, Eddy,” said Ford, pinned to the ground. “Your Savior would be proud.”

Eddy glared at Ford, his face red with fury, as if he might strike the man, but then he seemed to have second thoughts. “Enough!” Eddy shouted at the crowd. “ Enough! Give us room! We’ll take care of them in our own way, the right way. Get them on their feet!”

Ford was dragged to his feet and pushed forward, and the group began to move. Two burly men hauled the comatose Hazelius along by his armpits, his nose streaming blood, one eye swollen shut, his crooked leg with the broken bone dragging.

They reached another large, cavernous stope. Lights arrived from a side tunnel, bobbing in the murk. There was a burst of excited talk.

“Frost? Is that you?” Eddy called.

A beefy man dressed in camo with a tight blond crew cut, massive neck, and closely set eyes pushed through. “Pastor Eddy? We found more of them, hiding downshaft.”

Ford watched a dozen armed men herd Kate and the others at gunpoint. “Kate . . . Kate!” He wrenched himself free and struggled toward her.

“Stop him!”

Ford felt a massive blow to his back, which sent him to his knees. A second blow knocked him on his side, and punches and kicks laid him flat. He was hauled back to his feet so roughly it almost dislocated his shoulders. A sweaty man, his face streaked with coal dust, his eyes white and rolling like a horse’s, struck him across the face. “Stay in line!”

Another distant rumble and the ground convulsed. Dust jumped up from the floor, billowing through the tunnels. Layers of smoke collected in layers along the ceilings.

“Listen to me!” Eddy cried. “We can’t stay down here! The whole mountain’s on fire! We’ve got to get out!”

“I saw a way up top back there,” said the man called Frost. “A drift-shaft was opened up in the explosion. I could see the moon at the tunnel’s end.”

“Lead the way,” said Eddy.

Armed men shoved and prodded them with guns through dark, dust-choked tunnels. Two of Eddy’s followers hauled the unconscious Hazelius by the armpits. Moving through the murk, they crossed another massive stope. The lights played through the gray dust, revealing a huge cave-in, with a mountain of rubble leading up into a long, dark hole in the ceiling. Ford gulped down the fresh, cool air streaming from above.

“This way!”

They started up the pile, staggering up the loose, sliding scree, rocks rattling down around them.

“Up from the Bottomless Pit of Abaddon!” Eddy cried triumphantly. “The Beast is yoked!”

At the head of the mob the two followers dragged Hazelius up, through the jagged hole in the ceiling rock, the rest being pushed along by men with guns. The hole led to a higher stope and, from there into another shaft, at the end of which Ford saw a momentary light—the gleam, quickly extinguished, of a single star shining in the night sky. They emerged into the night of the mesa through a long diagonal crevasse. The air stank of burning gasoline and smoke. The entire eastward horizon was ablaze. Reddish-black clouds of smoke rolled across the sky, obscuring the moon. The ground rumbled continuously, and now and then a flame leapt up a hundred or more feet like a blood-orange banner fluttering into the night sky.

“Over there!” Eddy shouted. “Into that open area!”

Crossing a dry wash, they stopped in a broad, sandy depression, dominated by a giant, dead piñon tree. Ford at least got close enough to Kate to ask: “Are you all right?”

“Yes, but Julie and Alan are dead — caught in the cave-in.”

“Silence!” Eddy shouted. He stepped into the open area. Ford was amazed at his transformation from the high-strung preacher he had first met. Calm and self-assured, his movements were now deliberate. A .44 Super Blackhawk revolver was shoved into his belt. He paced and turned before the crowd, raised a hand. “The Lord delivered us from bondage out of Egypt. Blessed be the Lord!.”

His flock, a few dozen worshippers, thundered back: “Blessed be the Lord”

Eddy bent over the supine scientist, who opened his eyes, coming to.

“Stand him up,” Eddy said quietly. He pointed to Ford, Innes, and Cecchini. “Hold him tight.”

They reached down and, as gently as possible, raised Hazelius to his one good leg. Ford was astounded the man was still alive, let alone conscious.

Eddy turned to the crowd. “Look into his face—the face of the Antichrist.” He walked in a circle and his voice throbbed out, “‘And the Beast was taken, and with him the false prophet that wrought miracles before him. These both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone.’ ”

A muffled boom threw a distant ball of fire into the air, casting a lurid glow over the proceedings. Eddy’s gaunt face was briefly silhouetted by the orange light, which highlighted his blackened, hollowed cheeks and sunken eyes. “‘Rejoice, for God hath avenged you!’ ”

The crowd cheered but Eddy raised his hands. “Soldiers in Christ, this is a solemn moment. We have taken the Antichrist and his disciples, and now the judgment of God awaits all of us.”

Hazelius raised his head. To Ford’s surprise, the scientist fixed Eddy with a supercilious sneer—half grin, half grimace—and said, “Pardon my interruption, Preacher, but the Antichrist has a few anticlimactic words for your illustrious flock.”

Eddy held up his hands. “The Antichrist speaks.” He took a bold step closer. “What blasphemy comes from thy lips now, Antichrist?”

Hazelius raised his head, his voice strengthening. “Brace me,” he said to Ford. “Don’t let me slip.”

“I’m not sure this is wise,” Ford murmured in Hazelius’s ear.

“Why not?” Hazelius whispered grimly. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

“Listen, soldiers in Christ, to the words of the false prophet,” Eddy said, his voice tinged with irony.

74

FROM A PILE OF SANDSTONE BOULDERS, Begay scanned the darkened horizon with his binoculars. It was 2:30 A.M.

“There they are. Huddled up in that grassy flat, scared shitless.” The horses milled about, dark silhouettes against a red sky.

“Let’s go get ‘em,” said Becenti.

But Begay didn’t move. He had trained the glasses eastward. The eastern point of the mesa was gone—blown away. Below the blasted notch lay a huge scree slope of rubble, burning coal, tangled metal, and rivers of burning fluid that spread out and ran down the gullies like lava from a volcano. The entire eastern side of the mesa was on fire, smoke and flame pouring out of holes in the ground and leaping into the air. Once in a while a piñon tree or juniper would flare on top of the mesa, lighting up like a lone Christmas tree. Despite a wind blowing the smoke away from them, the fires were spreading rapidly in their direction. There were occasional explosions, with dust and flames shooting up, the ground sagging, then collapsing with an upwash of black dust and smoke. Nakai Valley itself had caught fire, the trading post and houses in flames, along with the beautiful grove of cottonwoods.

Before the explosion, at least a thousand people had gathered in that place. Now Begay, scanning the hellish mesa with his binoculars, could see only a few scattered people wandering shell-shocked among the smoke and flames, crying out, or simply stumbling about silently, like zombies. The flow of cars up the Dugway had ceased and some of the parked cars had caught on fire, the gas tanks exploding.

Willy shook his head. “Man, they did it. Old Bilagaana finally did it.”

They descended the rockpile, and Begay approached the horses, whistling for Winter. The horse pricked his ears and a moment later trotted over, the others following.

“Good boy, Winter.” Stroking his neck, Begay clipped a lead rope to his halter. Several of the horses had been saddled in preparation for departure, and Begay was glad to see they hadn’t shucked them. Switching his own saddle from the horse he was riding to Winter, he cinched it tight and swung up. Willy mounted his horse bareback, and they began hazing the nervous horses toward the Midnight Trail, which lay opposite the conflagration. They moved slowly, keeping them calm and on high ground where the footing was sure. As they topped a rise, Becenti, who was in the lead, paused.

“What the hell’s going on over there?”

Begay rode up beside him and raised his binoculars. A few hundred yards away, in a sandy area, a group of men had collected. They were filthy, like they had recently emerged from a caved-in area of ground, surrounding a group of what appeared to be ragged, dirty prisoners. Begay could hear jeering.

“Looks like a lynching,” said Becenti.

Begay examined the prisoners more closely with the field glasses. With a shock, he recognized the scientist who had visited him, Kate Mercer. And some distance from her was Wyman Ford, holding up what looked like an injured man.

“I don’t like it,” said Begay. He started to get off his horse.

“What are you doing? We got to get out of here.”

Begay tied the horse to a tree. “They might need our help, Willy.”

With a grin, Willy Becenti swung off his horse. “This is more like it.”

They crept up to the group, finding cover behind a screen of boulders. They were less than a hundred feet from the assembly and concealed by the darkness. Begay counted twenty-four men, with guns. Everyone was blackened with coal dust. Faces from hell.

Ford’s face was bloody and it looked like he’d been beaten up. The other prisoners he didn’t know, but he guessed they must also be scientists from the Isabella project, given the lab coats they wore. Ford held one of them up, the man’s arm slung over his shoulder. The man had a badly broken leg. The crowd was spitting at them, jeering and cursing. Finally, a man stepped forward and raised his hands, quieting the mob.

Begay could hardly believe his eyes: it was Pastor Eddy, from the mission down in Blue Gap—except the man was transformed. The Pastor Eddy he knew had been a confused, half-crazy loser who gave away old clothes and owed him sixty bucks. This Eddy had an air of cold command, and the crowd was responding to it.

Begay hunkered down and watched, Becenti next to him.

EDDY RAISED HIS HANDS. “ ‘AND THERE was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies!’ My Christian friends, the Antichrist will speak. Witness with me his blasphemy.”

Hazelius tried to speak. The burning of Isabella flickered in the background, the sheets and pillars of flame leaping up and spreading, and he was drowned out by a series of sharp explosions. He began again, his voice stronger.

“Pastor Eddy, I have only one comment to make. These people are not my disciples. Do what you want with me, but let them go.”

“Liar!” someone shouted from the crowd.

“Blasphemer!”

Eddy raised a forebearing hand and the crowd fell back into silence. “No one is innocent,” he shouted. “We’re all sinners in the hands of an angry God. Only by God’s grace are we saved.”

“Leave them alone, you demented bastard.”

Not much chance of that, thought Ford, looking around at Eddy’s flock, howling for Hazelius’s hide.

Hazelius weakened, his good leg buckling.

“Hold him up!” Eddy roared.

Kate came to Ford’s side and helped hold the scientist up.

Eddy turned. “The day of God’s wrath has arrived,” he thundered. “Take him!”

The crowd lunged at Hazelius, crowding around him, pushing him this way and that as if fighting over a rag doll. They struck him, shoved him, spat on him, beat him with sticks. One man slashed him with a piece of cholla cactus.

“Tie him to that tree.”

They dragged him toward a massive, gaunt, dead piñon, the crowd struggling with him like a clumsy, hundred-footed beast. They lashed one wrist, threw the rope end over a stout branch and pulled tight, did the same with the other wrist, and tied them off, so that Hazelius was half-hanging, half-standing upright, arms apart. His clothes hung in tatters from his filthy body.

Suddenly, Kate wrenched free, leapt forward, and embraced Hazelius.

The crowd burst into angry shouts, and several men grabbed Kate and yanked her back, throwing her to the ground. A scarecrow of a man with a squared-off beard scooted out of the crowd and kicked her while she was down.

“Bastard!” Ford shouted. He slammed the man in the jaw, knocked another aside and fought his way toward Kate, but the mob swarmed him and he was driven to the ground with fists and clubs. Half-conscious, he was barely aware of what happened next.

The roar of a dirt bike sounded at the edge of the crowd, the engine sputtering to a stop. A deep, authoritative voice sounded out: “Greetings, Christians!”

“Doke!” cried the crowd. “Doke is here!”

“Doke! Doke!”

The crowd parted and a mountain of a man strode into the ring, dressed in a denim jacket with the sleeves ripped off, brawny arms tattooed, big iron cross dangling from a silver chain around his neck, assault rifle slung across his back. His long blond hair whipped in the winds generated by the fires.

He turned, embraced Eddy. “Christ be with you!” He released Eddy from his embrace and pivoted to the crowd. Doke radiated easy charm, a complement to Eddy’s ascetic severity. With a mysterious grin, he reached into a bag and removed a glass bottle filled with a clear liquid, unscrewed the cap, flicked it away, and stuffed a rag into the hole, leaving the end dangling. Then, holding the rag in place with two fingers, he shook the bottle and held it up. The crowd roared. Ford smelled gasoline. With his other arm he raised a Bic lighter until both arms were over his head. He waved them back and forth and did a full turn around, like a rock star onstage. “Wood!” he cried, his voice hoarse. “Bring us wood!”

Eddy said, “ ‘And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire!’ The Bible is clear on this point. Those who have not accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior are cast into everlasting fire. This, my fellow Christians, is what God wants.”

“Burn him! Burn the Antichrist!” responded the crowd.

“‘And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire,’ ” Eddy continued, “ ‘cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are.’ ”

“Stop it! In the name of God, don’t do this!” Kate shouted.

Heaps of dead piñon branches, cactus husks, and sagebrush bushes were passed over the heads of the crowd and tossed at the foot of the tree. A brush-pile began to grow.

“This is God’s promise to the unbelievers,” said Eddy, striding back and forth in front of the growing pile. “‘And they shall be tormented day and night, for ever and ever.’ What we do here is sanctioned by God and confirmed repeatedly in the Bible. I give you Revelation 14:11: ‘ And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night.’ ”

The brushpile grew helter-skelter. Several men began kicking it up around Hazelius.

“Don’t do this!” Kate screamed again.

The pile reached Hazelius’s upper thighs.

“ ‘And fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them,’ ” quoted Eddy.

Cactus husks, sagebrush, and rabbitbrush, explosively dry, continued to pile up, burying Hazelius to his waist.

“We’re ready to do God’s will,” Eddy said quietly.

Doke stepped forward, raised his arms again, Bic in one hand, Molotov cocktail in the other. The crowd fell back and a silence followed. The man did another half turn, hands raised. The crowd shuffled farther back, awed.

Doke flicked on the lighter and lit the Molotov cocktail. The dangling rag flowered into flame. Turning, he pitched he lighted bottle into the pile. There was a whump! and fire blossomed inside the brush, erupting upward with a loud crackling.

A great “Ohhhh!” went up from the crowd.

Ford braced himself, his arm around Kate, supporting her as she swayed, nearly fainting. They all watched in silence. Nobody turned away.

As the flames mounted, Hazelius spoke, his voice steady and clear: “The universe never forgets.”

75

NELSON BEGAY WATCHED THE HUMAN PYRE with mounting fury. Burning a man alive. This is what the Spanish had done to his ancestors if they didn’t convert. And here it was happening all over again.

But he could think of no way to stop it.

The flames leapt up, catching the man’s tattered lab coat. They obscured his face and scorched off his hair with a sizzling flash.

Still the man stood.

The flames mounted up with a roar, his clothes blackening and burning off in strips, like fiery confetti.

The man didn’t flinch.

The roaring fire consumed his clothes and began charring and peeling off his very skin; his eyes melted and ran out of their sockets. And still the man never moved, never flinched—and the sad half smile never left his face even as his face was scorched. The fire caught the ropes holding him to the tree and burned them off—and yet he still stood, solid as a rock. How could it be? Why didn’t he fall? Even as the dead piñon he was tied to went up in a writhing column of fire, the flames leaping twenty, thirty feet into the air, he remained standing, until he had completely disappeared into the pillar of fire. From a hundred feet away Begay could feel the heat of the fire on his face, heard it roaring like a beast, the outermost branches of the tree like so many burning claws; and then the flaming tree collapsed in a great shower of sparks that swirled into the heavens, so high they seemed to join the stars themselves.

There was nothing left of Hazelius. The man had completely vanished.

The other prisoners, held in a group at gunpoint nearby, looked on in absolute horror. Some were weeping, holding hands, arms around each other.

They’re next, thought Begay. The thought was intolerable.

Doke was already reaching into his bag, pulling out another bottle.

“Screw this,” said Becenti under his breath. “Are we just gonna let this happen?”

Begay turned to look at him. “No, Willy. No, by God, we’re not.”

FORD STARED AT THE DYING FIRE dumbstruck with disbelief and horror. Where Hazelius had just stood there was a great crumbling heap of coals, nothing more. Ford held Kate tightly, supporting her. She stared into the coals, her smudged face streaked with tears, her body still. Nobody moved or spoke.

They would be next.

The crowd was suddenly quiet. The preacher, Eddy, stood to one side, Bible clutched to his chest in two bony hands. His eyes looked hollow and haggard.

Doke, the tattooed man, also stared into the fire, his face radiant.

Eddy raised his head and looked at the crowd. He pointed a shaking hand at the heap of coals. “ ‘You shall trample the wicked, for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet.’ ”

His harangue woke the crowd up. They shifted uneasily. “Amen,” said a voice, echoed feebly by others.

“ ‘Ashes under the soles of your feet,’ ” Eddy repeated.

A few more ragged amens broke out.

“And now,” he said. “My friends, the time has now come for the disciples of the Antichrist. We are Christians. We are forgiving. They must be given a chance to accept Jesus. Even the greatest sinner must be given one last, final chance. On your knees! ”

A follower hit Ford across the back of his head and he involuntarily dropped to his knees. Kate joined him, pulling him close.

“Pray to Our Lord Christ Jesus for the salvation of their souls!”

Doke knelt on one knee, Eddy following, and soon the entire crowd was kneeling on the desert sand in the ruddy glow of the dying fire, amid a rising murmur of prayer.

Another explosion rumbled across the mesa and the ground shook.

“Do you,” said Eddy, “the disciples of the Antichrist, confess your apostasy and accept Jesus as your personal savior? Do you accept Jesus wholeheartedly, without reservation? Will you join us and become part of God’s great army?”

Absolute silence. Ford squeezed Kate’s hand. He wished she’d speak, wished she’d agree. But if he couldn’t do it himself, how could he expect her to?

“Will not one of you repudiate your heresy and accept Jesus? Not one wants to be saved from the fire of this world and the everlasting fires of the next?”

Ford felt a rush of boiling anger. He raised his head. “I’m a Christian, a Catholic. I have no heresy to repudiate.”

Eddy took a deep breath and spoke in a quavering voice, his hand raised dramatically to the listening crowd. “Catholics are not Christians. Catholicism’s spirit is one of idolatrous adoration of the Blessed Virgin Mary.”

An uncertain murmur of agreement.

“It’s the spirit of demonism, as is evident by the vain repetition of Hail Marys in the Rosary Prayer. It’s the idolatrous worship of graven images, in violation of God’s commandments.”

A rage took hold of Ford, which he tried to master. He rose up. “How dare you,” he said in a low voice. “How dare you.”

Eddy raised the gun and pointed it at him. “Priests have brainwashed you Catholics for fifteen hundred years. You don’t read the Bible. You do what the priests tell you. Your pope prays to graven images and kisses the feet of statues. The word of God is clear that we’re to bow to Jesus and none other, not Mary or the so-called saints. Give up your blasphemous religion—or suffer the wrath of the Lord God.”

“You’re the real blasphemers,” said Ford, staring at the crowd.

Eddy raised the shaking gun and pointed it at Ford’s right eye. “Your church is straight out of the mouth of Hell! Give it up!”

“Never.”

The gun steadied as Eddy took aim from four inches away, his finger tightening on the trigger.

76

THE REVEREND DON T. SPATES SLAMMED down the phone. Still out of order. His Internet connection was also down. He thought of going over to the Silver Cathedral media office and turning on the television to see if there was any news, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He was afraid to leave, afraid to get up from his desk—afraid of what he might discover.

He checked his watch. Four-thirty A.M. Two hours until dawn. When the sun rose, he would go straight to Dobson. He would put himself in his lawyer’s hands. Dobson would handle the whole thing. Sure, it would cost money. But after this, the donations would be like a gusher. He just needed to weather the storm. He’d been through storms before, like when those two whores reported him to the newspapers. He thought then his whole world was over. And yet, a month later he was back in business, preaching in the Cathedral, and now he was the hottest televangelist in the business.

Pulling out a handkerchief, he mopped his face, wiped around his eyes, forehead, nose, and mouth, leaving a brown stain of old makeup on the white linen. He looked at it in disgust and tossed it in the trash. He poured another cup of coffee, splashed in a shot of vodka, and drank it down with a shaking hand.

He put the cup down so hard it broke in two. The rare Sèvres cup had split perfectly down the center, as if cleaved. He held the pieces in his hands, staring at them, and then, in a sudden fury, threw them across the room.

Lurching to his feet, he went to the window, threw it open, and stared. Outside, all was dark and silent. The world slept. But not in Arizona. Terrible things could be happening out there. But it wasn’t his fault. He had devoted his life to doing Christ’s work on earth. I believe in honor, religion, duty, and country.

If only the sun would rise. He imagined himself cosseted in the hushed, wood-paneled confines of his lawyer’s offices on 13th Street, and he felt comforted. At first light he’d rouse his chauffeur and head to Washington.

As he looked down the darkened, rain-slick streets, he heard the distant sound of sirens. A moment later he saw something coming down Laskin Road: police cars and a wagon, lights flashing, followed by vans. He ducked back inside and slammed the window, heart pounding. They weren’t coming for him. Of course not. What was wrong with him? He went back to his desk, sat down, reached for more coffee and vodka. Then he remembered the broken cup. To hell with the cup. Sweeping up the bottle in his hand, he tipped it to his lips and sucked down a mouthful.

He put the bottle down, exhaled. They were probably just chasing niggers out of the yacht club down the way.

A loud crash in the Silver Cathedral made him jump. Suddenly there were noises, voices, shouts, the blaring of police radios.

He couldn’t move.

A moment later his office door boomed open and men in FBI flak jackets came barging in, crouching, guns drawn. They were followed by an enormous black agent with a shaved head.

Spates remained seated, unable to comprehend.

“Mr. Don Spates?” asked the agent, unfolding a shield. “Federal Bureau of Investigation. Special Agent in Charge Cooper Johnson.”

Spates could say nothing. He just stared.

“Are you Mr. Don Spates?”

He nodded.

“Place your hands on the desk, Mr. Spates.”

He held his fat, liver-spotted hands out and placed them on the desk.

“Stand up, keeping your hands in sight.”

He stood up clumsily, the chair falling with a crash to the floor behind him.

“Cuff him.”

Another agent came around, took a firm grasp of one forearm, pulled it behind his back, pulled the other one behind—and Spates felt, with stupefaction, the cold steel slip around his wrists.

Johnson walked up to Spates and parked himself in front, arms folded, legs apart.

“Mr. Spates?”

Spates stared back. His mind was completely blank.

The agent spoke in a low, rapid voice. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense. Do you understand?”

Spates stared. This couldn’t be happening to him.

“Do you understand?”

“Wha—?”

“He’s drunk, Cooper,” said another man. “Don’t bother, we’ll just have to Mirandize him again.”

“You’re right.” Johnson gripped Spates’s upper arm. “Let’s go, pal.”

Another agent took the other arm and they gave him a nudge, started walking him toward the door.

“Wait!” cried Spates. “You’re making a mistake!”

They continued to hustle him forward. Nobody paid him the slightest attention.

“It isn’t me you want! You’ve got the wrong man!”

An agent opened the door and they passed into the darkened Silver Cathedral.

“It’s Crawley you want, Booker Crawley of Crawley and Stratham! He did it! I was just following his directions—I’m not responsible! I had no idea this would happen! It’s his fault!” His hysterical voice echoed crazily in the vast indoor space.

They escorted him up the side aisle, past the dark audience prompts, past the plush velvet seats that had cost three hundred dollars apiece, past the columns gilded in real silver leaf, through the echoing Italian marble foyer, and out the front door.

He was greeted with a seething mob of the press, blinded by a thousand flashes and a roar of questions. Boomed mikes swung out at him from all directions.

He blinked, gaping and slack-jawed, like a cow before the slaughter.

An FBI paddy wagon idled in front, at the end of a narrow, cleared path.

“Reverend Spates! Reverend Spates! Is it true—?”

“Reverend Spates!”

“No!” Spates cried, rearing back against his handlers. “Not in there! I’m innocent! It’s Crawley you want! If you let me go back to my office, he’s in my Rolodex—”

Two agents opened the back doors. He struggled.

The flashes came a hundred per second. The lenses pointed at him glowed like a thousand fish eyes.

“No!”

He resisted at the threshold and was given a rude push. He stumbled, turned, begging. “Listen to me, please!” He broke into a loud, sucking sob. “It’s Crawley you want!”

“Mr. Spates?” said the agent in charge, leaning in the door. “Save your breath. You’re going to have plenty of time to tell your story later. Okay?”

Two agents got in with him, one on either side, pushed him into a seat, manacled his cuffs to a bar, and buckled his seat belt.

The door slammed, shutting out the tumult. Spates heaved a great choking sob, drew in more air. “You’re making a terrible mistake!” he wailed, as the paddy wagon pulled from the curb. “You don’t want me, you want Crawley!”

77

FORD STARED INTO THE BARREL OF the revolver, the gleaming steel eye staring back. Unbidden, the words of the confession came to his lips. He began to cross himself, whispering, “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit—”

“Praise God!” boomed a voice into the waiting silence.

Everyone turned. A Navajo appeared on foot, coming in from the dark, dressed in a buckskin shirt with a bandanna around his head. He was leading a string of horses and had a pistol in one hand, waving it around above his head. “Praise God and Jesus!” He began pushing into the crowd, which parted to let him pass.

Ford recognized Willy Becenti.

Eddy continued to point the gun at Ford.

“Praise God and Jesus!” Becenti cried again, leading the horses right toward them, forcing the kneeling people to move out of the way. “Praise the good Lord! Amen, brother!”

“Praise God!” came the automatic responses. “Praise Jesus!”

“My friend in Christ!” Doke said, rising to his feet. “Who might you be?”

“Praise Jesus!” Willy cried again. “We’re brothers in Christ! Come to join you!”

The horses were jittery, prancing about, their eyes rolling, and people were frightened and backing away from them. Behind the horses another figure loomed into the ruddy light, on horseback, herding the animals from behind. Ford saw it was Nelson Begay, the medicine man.

Becenti stopped the nervous horses right before the group of scientists, the animals crowding into each other, eyes rolling, tossing their heads, barely under control.

The crowd continued to back up nervously. “What are you doing with those horses?” Eddy cried angrily.

“We want to join you!” Becenti gaped at him like an idiot and dropped a lead rope as if by accident. The lead horse tried to back up and Becenti stomped on the rope, arresting his movement. “ Whoa, you sumbitch!” he screamed. He bent down to retrieve the end. In that quick movement, he spoke quickly to the group, his voice just audible. “At my word,” he said, “get on the horses and we’re outta here.”

Doke stepped into the open area in front of Eddy and Ford. “All right, pal, you better tell me who you are and what you just said to the prisoners.”

“You heard me, man,” Becenti whined in a high-pitched voice. “I’m a friend in Christ! Thought you might need horses!”

“You’re disrupting our business here, you idiot. Move these horses out of the way.”

“Sure, course, sorry man, just trying to help.” Becenti turned. “Easy, horses!” he shouted, waving his hands wildly. “Settle down! Ho! Easy!”

His shouting only seemed to agitate the horses further. Becenti grabbed their halters and began turning them around to lead them back out, but he seemed inept at managing the animals. When they didn’t obey he waved a coiled lasso at them, and they suddenly veered sharply, forcing Doke and Eddy back and crowding between them and the captives. One horse reared.

“Get these horses out of our way!” Doke screamed, trying to shove them aside.

“Praise Jesus and the saints!” Becenti shook his pistol over his head again and cried, “Now!”

Ford grabbed Kate and swung her up on a roan, while Becenti threw Chen on a spotted Indian pony, then pulled up Cecchini behind himself onto a buckskin. Corcoran and St. Vincent scrambled up on another horse. Innes vaulted onto a sorrel and in under ten seconds they were all on horseback, two to a pony.

Trying to claw his way through the milling crowd, Doke screamed, “Stop them!” He reached for his rifle and yanked it out of the scabbard slung across his back.

Eddy had his gun back up, aiming it at Ford.

“Praise the Lord!” shouted Becenti, spinning his mount around. He rammed Eddy, hooves churning. The man fell back, the shot going wild, and went down; and in an instant the Indian spurred his horse on top of Doke, who dropped his rifle and dove out of the way. Becenti raised his coiled lasso. Whirling it, he shouted “Hiiyaahh!”

Already agitated, their mounts needed no further encouragement. They charged through the crowd, scattering them. After they had broken free, Becenti veered to the right and led them at a full gallop down into the cover of a sandy draw. Gunfire erupted behind them, ragged shooting into the dark, but they were already in the cover of the draw and the bullets went humming over their heads.

“Hiiiyahhh!” Becenti screamed.

The horses tore down the sandy draw, taking bend after bend, until the sound of the guns had become a faint pop-pop in the distance, the cries and shouts of the crowd almost gone. They slowed down to a fast trot.

Behind them, in the distance, Ford heard the revving of a motorcycle.

“You hear that, Willy?” Begay called from the rear. “Someone’s got a dirt bike.”

“Shit,” said Becenti. “We’re gonna have to lose that mother. Hang on!”

He turned out of the draw and charged up a slickrock embankment, the horse’s hooves clattering on the sandstone. On top, they raced across a dune-field, heading toward a deep arroyo at the far side.

A rumble, and the whole mesa shook. Dark clouds of dust shot up against the night sky. Flames erupted from the ground a few hundred yards to their right. With a crackle, a piñon tree burst into flame, and another. A thunderous explosion sounded behind them, and another, back at the eastern end of the mesa.

The roar of the dirt-bike engine sounded again, much closer. It was catching up fast.

“Hiyaah!” Becenti cried again, as he charged over the lip of the arroyo and plunged down the slope toward the bottom.

Ford followed, gripping the roan with his legs, Kate’s arms around him.

78

FORD’S HORSE PLUNGED DOWN THE SOFT slope of sand, leaning back and digging in as he half slid, half leapt down the long slope, sand sliding down around them.

The roar of the dirt bike sounded on the rim above. Shots rang out, and Ford heard the snip of a bullet on a rock to his left. They reached the bottom and galloped down the arroyo. Ford could hear the dirt bike above them, racing along the rim.

Becenti reined in his horse. “He’s cutting us off! Turn around!”

The dirt bike slowed to a stop at the edge, sending a cascade of sand down into the arroyo. Doke planted his legs, pulled his rifle out of its scabbard, and took aim.

They wheeled their horses around as the first shot sounded, kicking up a jet of sand next to Ford. They took temporary cover behind a landslide of boulders. Another shot rang out, whining off the top of the rocks. Ford realized they were trapped in the arroyo. They could go neither forward or backward; the man had a clear shot up or down the arroyo on both sides. The embankment above them was too steep to climb.

Another shot threw up a gout of sand just behind them. There was a raucous laugh from above. “You can run, you Godless assholes, but you can’t hide!”

“Willy!” Begay said. “Now’s the time to use your pistol!”

“It’s . . . not loaded.”

“Why the hell not?”

Becenti looked sheepish. “I didn’t want anybody getting hurt.”

Begay threw up his hands. “That’s just great, Willy.”

Ford heard another shot, the round humming just over their heads and thudding into the opposite embankment. “I’m coming down!” Doke’s voice roared triumphantly.

“Oh shit, man, what do we do now?” Becenti asked. His horse pranced and snorted in the confined crowd.

Ford could hear Doke sliding and hopping down the slope. In a moment he would reach the bottom, where he would have a clear shot all the way down the arroyo. He might not take down them all, but he’d certainly kill plenty before they could take cover around the next bend.

“Kate, get on Begay’s horse.”

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Hurry.”

“Wyman, you don’t know how to ride—”

“Damn it, Kate, will you trust me for once?”

Kate swung directly off their horse and got behind Begay.

“Give me the gun.”

Becenti tossed it to him. “Good luck, man.”

Ford gathered up the horse’s mane in his left hand, giving it a twist around his fist. He turned his mount around and faced in the direction Doke would appear.

“Grip with your knees,” said Kate, “and keep your weight low and centered.”

At that moment, Doke appeared, grunting and sliding down the sandy slope. He reached the bottom, his face breaking into a huge grin of triumph.

Ford kicked the horse in the flanks.

The horse jumped forward and dashed down the arroyo straight toward Doke. Ford pointed the gun at him, screaming, “Aiyaaah!”

Doke, taken by surprise and unnerved by the sudden appearance of the pistol, jerked his rifle off his shoulder, dropped to one knee and raised it. But he was late. The horse was almost on top of him and he was forced to throw himself sideways to avoid being trampled. Ford smacked him with the gun as he galloped past, then turned to the right and charged up the steep embankment.

“Son of a bitch!” screamed Doke, repositioning himself and firing, as Ford’s horse struggled over the rim. Ahead lay an open area, some humped rocks, and, beyond, a windswept expanse of sand with a faint track across it. Ford recognized it from his first day, when Hazelius had taken him to the overlook.

A round screamed past his ear like a hornet.

The next round hit the horse. The horse jumped sideways with a squeal and danced on the edge, but did not founder. Ford flattened himself on the roan’s back and loped him across the sandy flat, toward the track leading to the mesa’s rim. In a moment he was across the flat and among the humped rocks. He zigged behind them, keeping to cover, still running up. He could hear his horse grunting, wheezing, probably gut shot. He couldn’t believe the horse’s courage.

The long open area loomed up ahead.

Doke would have to get across the deep arroyo to pursue, and that would give him time to reach the far side of the open area—if the horse made it. Gripping the mane and laying low, Ford galloped madly over the sand.

Halfway across, he heard the roar of the bike, much closer. Doke had gotten across the arroyo. The mounting roar of the engine told Ford he was catching up fast, but he knew Doke couldn’t shoot while riding.

Ford rode up the hill, this time veering out to the track, where Doke could see him. He could hear him upshifting, the two-cycle engine of the dirt-bike screaming.

Just at the top, screened by scattered rocks and junipers, the mesa’s rim fell off into a sheer cliff-face without warning. Ford hauled back on the lead rope, halting the horse, and jumped off. He threw himself behind a rock cluster just as Doke rocketed past him. Thick tattooed arms gripping handlebars, golden hair streaming behind him like a mane of flame, Doke blew past him at sixty miles per hour and went off the cliff.

Doke was airborne, the engine screaming full throttle, the wheels spinning up, a sound as high-pitched as an eagle’s cry. Ford turned to watch bike and rider arc down through dark space, the whine of the engine Doppler-shifting down as it plunged into the black landscape below. The last thing Ford saw was the flicker of the man’s bright hair, like Lucifer jettisoned from heaven. He listened, and listened—and then, a thousand feet below, came a tiny flower of flame, and a few seconds later the distant rumble of the impact.

Ford crawled out from behind the boulder and stood up. The roan lay stretched out on the ground, dead. He knelt, touched it lightly.

“Thanks, old pal. I’m sorry.”

He rose, suddenly aware of how much his body hurt—the broken ribs, the bruises and cuts, a swollen eye. He turned, leaning against the ancient boulder, and looked back over Red Mesa.

All Ford could think of was Hieronymus Bosch’s Last Judgment. The eastern end of the mesa, where Isabella had been, was a vast pillar of incandescent fire boring up into the night sky—as if to sear the stars—surrounded by hundreds of lesser infernos and fires, belching smoke out of cracks and pits for miles around. The ground shuddered and quaked continually from explosions, unseen violence vibrating the very air. To his right, half a mile away, was a surreal spectacle: a thousand parked cars blazed, their tanks exploding, miniature fireballs levitating the cars, jumping and popping like firecrackers. People wandered aimlessly around the ghastly hellscape or ran about, crying dementedly.

Descending the hill, Ford met up with the others riding across the sandy flat.

“He’s gone,” said Ford. “Over the edge.”

“Man,” said Becenti, “you ride like shit but you did it. You launched that mother for good.”

“Like a chariot of fire,” Kate said.

“The horse?” Begay asked.

“Dead.”

The Indian was silent, his face grim.

In ten minutes they had reached the cut at the top of the Midnight Trail.

For a moment they all stood on the rim of the mesa, at the top of the trail, and looked back. The ground shook with a big explosion, and a rumble rolled across Red Mesa like thunder, punctuated by the crackle of secondary distant explosions. Another ball of fire rose into the air above Isabella. Smoke was now pouring out of cracks in the mesa behind them, lit from beneath by reddish flames.

“Look over Navajo Mountain,” said Kate, pointing into the sky.

They turned to the west. A string of lights had appeared in the sky over the distant mountain, rapidly closing in, along with a growing throbbing sound.

“Here comes the cavalry,” said Begay.

Another rumble, more flames. As Ford followed Kate down through the cut, he glanced back one last time.

“Unbelievable,” said Kate softly. “The whole mesa is on fire.”

Even as they watched, a great snake of dust shot up, ripping across the mesa as another coal tunnel collapsed and shook the ground, coming frighteningly close to them.

Kate turned to the group and spoke, her voice strong. “I have something important to say.”

The exhausted scientists raised their faces toward her.

“If we fall into the hands of the authorities,” she said, “we’ll be debriefed in private and everything that happened here will be classified. Our story will not be heard.”

She paused, eyeing them fiercely.

“Instead, we will evade them and travel to Flagstaff on our own. And there, in Flagstaff, we will speak to the world—on our terms. We will tell the world what happened here.”

The line of choppers approached, rotors thudding.

Without waiting for an answer from the group, Kate rode down the trail.

They all followed.

79

WHERE WAS HE?

What was this place?

How long had he wandered?

The details escaped him. Something had happened, the earth had exploded and was on fire. The Antichrist was responsible and Eddy had burned him alive. So where was . . . the Messiah? Why hadn’t Christ returned to redeem His Chosen and rapture them into heaven?

His clothes were charred, his hair was singed, his ears buzzed, his lungs hurt, and it was so dark . . . . Acrid smoke poured out of fissures wherever he walked. A dark haze blanketed the land like a fog, and he could see no more than a dozen feet ahead.

An image loomed at the limit of his vision, round and nodding, vaguely human.

“You!” he shouted, and scrambled toward the shape across the stony ground. He tripped over the smoldering stump of a dead piñon, the rest of it reduced to a circle of ashes.

The shape loomed.

“Doke!” he called, his voice muffled in the smoke. “Doke! Is that you?”

No answer.

“Doke! It’s me, Pastor Eddy!”

He ran, stumbled and fell, and lay for a moment breathing the cooler, fresher air close to earth. Climbing back to his feet, he pulled out a kerchief and tried to breathe through it. A few more steps. A few more. The dark object grew larger. It wasn’t Doke. It wasn’t a man. He reached out to touch it. It was a dry rock, hot to the touch, balancing on a pillar of sandstone.

Eddy tried to concentrate, but only fragmentary thoughts came to him. His mission . . . his trailer . . . clothes day. He recalled washing his face at the old Red Jacket pump, preaching to a dozen people with the sand blowing, chatting on the computer with his Christian friends.

How had he gotten here?

He pushed himself away from the rock, unable to see through the deepening haze. To his right was a glow and a soft roar. A fire?

He went left.

A charred rabbit lay on the ground. He nudged it with his boot and the thing twitched convulsively, flopped on its back, its sides heaving and its eyes widening with terror.

“Doke!” he called, and then he asked himself: Who is Doke?

“Help me, Jesus,” he moaned. Shakily, he knelt and clasped his hands, raising them to heaven. The smoke swirled around him. He coughed, his eyes streaming water. “Help me, Jesus.”

Nothing. A distant rumble sounded. To his right, the flickering glow was leaping higher, an orange claw raking the sky. The ground began to vibrate.

“Jesus! Help me!”

Eddy prayed fervently, but no voice responded, no words, nothing in his head.

“Save me, Lord Jesus!” he called out.

And then, suddenly, another shape coalesced in the blackness. Eddy scrambled to his feet, flooded with relief. “Jesus, I’m here! Help me!”

A voice said, “I see you.”

“Thank you, oh thank you! In the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Where am I, what is this place?”

“Lovely . . . ,” said the looming figure.

Eddy sobbed with relief. He coughed again, hard, into his ragged kerchief, leaving a stain of black sputum.

“Lovely . . . I’ll take you where it’s lovely.”

“Yes, please, take me out of here!” Eddy stretched out his hands.

“So lovely down here . . .”

The reddish glow of the fire to his right suddenly flared up, casting an appalling glow in the dense haze. The figure, illuminated dull red, moved closer and Eddy could now see his face, the bandanna around his head, the long braids on his shoulders, one of them unraveling, the dark veiled eyes, the high forehead . . . .

Lorenzo!

“You . . .” Eddy backed up. “But . . . you’re . . . dead. I saw you die.”

“Dead? The dead never die. You know that. The dead live on, burned and tortured by the God who created them. The God of love. Burned because they doubted Him, because they were confused, hesitant, or rebellious; tormented by their Father and Creator for not believing in Him. Come . . . and I will show you . . . .” The figure stretched out its hand with a ghastly smile, and now Eddy noticed the blood; his clothes were drenched with blood from the neck down, as if he’d been dipped in it.

“No . . . Get away from me . . . .” Eddy backed up. “Help me, Jesus . . . .”

“I will help you . . . . I am your guide to that fine and good place . . . .”

The ground shook and opened beneath Eddy’s feet, gaped into a sudden, bright, roaring, orange blast furnace. Eddy fell, fell, into the terrible heat, the impossible heat . . . .

He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came.

No sound came at all.

80

LOCKWOOD GLANCED AT THE BIG CLOCK mounted on the paneled wall behind the president. Eight o’clock in the morning. The sun had risen, the world was going to work, traffic on the Beltway was slowing to its usual crawl.

That’s where he had been yesterday: in his car, stuck in Beltway traffic, AC going full blast, listening to Steve Inskeep on National Public Radio.

Today, the world had changed.

The National Guard had landed on Red Mesa, on schedule at 4:45 A.M., the LZ about three miles from the former location of Isabella. The mission had changed, however. The assault had become a salvage operation—the rescue and evacuation of the injured and the retrieval of the dead from Red Mesa. The fire had become uncontrollable. Riddled with bituminous coal seams, the mesa would probably burn for the next century, until the mountain was no more.

Isabella was gone. The forty-billion-dollar machine was a tangled, burning wreckage scattered across the mesa, and blown out from the cliff to the desert floor below.

The president entered the Situation Room and everyone stood.

“Take your seats,” he growled, slapping some papers on the table and sitting down. He’d had two hours of sleep but, if anything, the brief rest had worsened his mood.

“Are we ready?” the president asked. He punched a control at his chair and the clean-cut visage of the FBI Director, his salt-and-pepper hair still perfect, his suit immaculate, appeared on the monitor.

“Jack, give us an update.”

“Yes, Mr. President. The situation is under control.”

The president’s lips tightened skeptically.

“We have evacuated the mesa. The injured are being medevacked to area hospitals. I’m sorry to say it appears our entire Hostage Rescue Team lost their lives in the conflict.”

“And the scientists?” the president asked.

“The scientific team seems to have disappeared.”

The president dropped his head into his hands. “Nothing about the scientists?”

“Not a trace. Some of them may have escaped into the old mines at the time of the assault, where they were likely caught in the explosion, fire, and collapse of the mines. The consensus assessment is that they did not survive.”

The president’s head remained bowed.

“We still have no information on what happened, why Isabella lost communication. It might have had something to do with the attack—we just don’t know. We’ve been taking out bodies and body parts by the hundreds, many burned beyond recognition. We’re still looking for the body of Russell Eddy, the deranged preacher who incited all these people over the Internet. We may need weeks, even months, before we can locate and identify all the dead. Some will never be found.”

“What about Spates?” the president asked.

“We took him into custody and are questioning him. He’s reported to be cooperative. We’ve also taken Booker Crawley of the K Street firm Crawley and Stratham, into custody.”

“The lobbyist?” The president looked up. “What was his involvement?”

“He secretly paid Spates to preach against Isabella so that he could extort more money from his client, the Navajo Nation.”

The president shook his head in stunned wonder.

Galdone, the president’s campaign manager, shifted his considerable bulk. His blue suit looked slept in; his tie looked like he had waxed his Buick with it. He needed a shave. A truly loathsome creature, Lockwood thought. He was gearing up to speak, and everyone looked in his oracular direction.

“Mr. President,” Galdone said, “we need to shape the narrative. As we speak, the column of smoke rising over the desert is being played on every television set in America, and the nation is waiting for answers. Fortunately, Red Mesa’s remoteness and our quick efforts to close the airspace and block access kept most of the press out. They weren’t able to transmit the most gruesome details. We can still turn this debacle into a voter-friendly narrative that might bring us public approbation.”

“How?” the president asked.

“Someone has to fall on his sword,” Lockwood said simply.

Galdone smiled indulgently at Lockwood. “It is true that a story needs a villain. But we already have two: Spates and Crawley. Picture-perfect bad guys—one a whoring, hypocritical televangelist, the other an oily, scheming lobbyist. Not to mention this deranged Eddy fellow. No, what we really need for this story is a hero.”

“So who’s the hero?” the president asked.

“It can’t be you, Mr. President. The public won’t buy that. It can’t be the FBI Director—he lost his team. It can’t be anyone at DOE, because they’re the ones who screwed up Isabella in the first place. It can’t be any of the scientists, because they appear to have died. It can’t be a political functionary like me or Roger Morton here. No one will believe that.”

Galdone’s roaming eyes stopped at Lockwood.

“One man recognized the problem early. Lockwood—you. A man with great wisdom and prescience, who took decisive action to correct a problem that only he and the president saw coming. Everyone else was asleep at the switch—Congress, the FBI, the DOE, me, Roger, everyone. As events unfolded, you were instrumental at every turn. Wise, knowledgeable, a confidant to the martyred scientists—you were crucial to resolving this situation.”

“Gordon,” said the president, incredulous, “we blew up a mountain.”

“But you handled the aftermath brilliantly!” said Galdone. “Gentlemen, the Isabella debacle was no Katrina, dragging on for weeks. Mr. President, you and Lockwood killed or locked up the bad guys and cleaned up the catastrophe—in one night! The mesa has been secured by the National Guard—”

“Secured?” the president said. “The mesa looks like the back side of the moon—”

“—secured.” Galdone’s voice overrode the president’s. “Thanks to your decisive leadership, Mr. President, and the invaluable, critical support of your hand-picked, trusted Science Adviser—Dr. Stanton Lockwood.”

Galdone eyes rested on Lockwood. “That, gentlemen, is our narrative. Let us not forget it.” He tilted his head, his fat neck bulging with fresh folds, and gazed at Lockwood. “Stan, are you up to the task?”

Lockwood realized that he had finally arrived. He was now one of them.

“Perfectly,” he said, and smiled.

81

AT NOON, FORD AND THE GROUP rode out of the juniper scrub and crossed the outlying pasture of a small Navajo farm. After riding ten hours, Ford’s body felt bruised and battered, his broken ribs throbbed, and his head pounded. One eye was swollen shut, and his front teeth were chipped.

The homestead of Begay’s sister was the incarnation of peace and tranquility. A picturesque log cabin with red curtains stood next to a cluster of heavy-limbed cottonwoods, beside which ran Laguna Creek. Behind the cabin the sister kept an old Airstream trailer on blocks, its aluminum skin scoured by wind, sun, and sand. A herd of sheep milled and bleated in a pen, while a lone horse stamped and snorted in a corral. Four-strand barbed wire enclosed two irrigated cornfields. Creaking merrily in a stiff breeze, a windmill pumped water into a stock tank. Rickety wooden steps led up the side of the tank to a weatherbeaten diving board. Two pickup trucks were parked in the shade. The sound of a radio playing country music wafted out the windows of the cabin.

Exhausted and silent, they unsaddled and brushed out the horses.

A woman in jeans came out of the trailer, slender with long black hair, and hugged Begay.

“This is my sister, Regina,” he said, introducing her around.

She helped them with the mounts.

“You all need to wash up,” she said. “We use the stock tank. Ladies first, then gents. After Nelson called, I rustled up some clean clothes for you all—they’re laid out in the trailer. If they don’t fit, don’t complain to me. I hear the roadblocks at Cow Springs have come down, so as soon as the sun sets, Nelson and I will drive you all into Flagstaff.”

She looked around sternly, as if this was the sorriest bunch she had ever seen. And perhaps they were. “We’ll eat in an hour.”

All day, military helicopters had been passing overhead, going to and from the burning mesa. One passed over now, and Regina squinted up at it. “Where were they when you needed ‘em?”

AFTER THE MEAL, FORD AND KATE sat in the shade of a cottonwood at the far edge of the corrals, watching the horses graze in the back pasture. The creek tumbled lazily over its stony bed. The sun hung low in the sky. To the south, Ford could see the plume of smoke rising from Red Mesa, a slanted black pillar that feathered out to form a brown pall in the atmosphere, stretching across the horizon.

They sat for a long time, saying nothing. It was their first moment alone.

Ford put his arm around her. “How are you?”

She shook her head wordlessly, wiping her eyes with a clean bandanna. For a long moment they sat in the shade, saying nothing. Bees droned past on their way to a set of hives at the edge of the fields. The other scientists were listening to the radio back in the cabin, which was running nonstop news about the disaster. The announcer’s faint, tinny voice drifted in the peaceful air.

“We’re the most talked about dead people in America,” said Ford. “Maybe we should have turned ourselves in to the National Guard.”

“You know we can’t trust them,” said Kate. “They’ll learn the truth soon enough, along with the rest of America, when we get to Flagstaff.” She raised her head, wiped her eyes, and reached into her pocket. She withdrew a soiled wad of computer paper. “When we present this to the world.”

Ford stared, surprised. “How did you get that?”

“I got it from Gregory when I embraced him.” She opened it up and smoothed it out on her knee. “The printout of the words of God.”

Ford didn’t know how to begin what he had been rehearsing in his mind for hours. He asked a question instead. “What are you going to do with it?”

“We have to get this out. Tell our story. The world has to know. Wyman, when we get to Flagstaff, we’ll organize a press conference. An announcement. The radio says that everyone thinks we’re dead. Right now, the entire world’s attention is riveted on what happened at Red Mesa. Think of the impact we could have.” Her beautiful face, so battered, so tired, had never looked so alive.

“An announcement . . . about what?”

She stared at him as if he were crazy. “About what happened. About the scientific discovery of . . .” She hesitated only a moment before saying the word, and then spoke it with great conviction: “God.”

Ford swallowed. “Kate?”

“What?”

“There’s something you should know first. Before you . . . take that step.”

“Which is?”

“It was . . .” He paused. How was he going to do this?

“It was what?”

He hesitated.

“You’re with us, aren’t you?” Kate asked.

He wondered if he could even bring himself to tell her the truth. But he had to try. He couldn’t live with himself otherwise. Or could he? He looked at her face, glowing with conviction and belief. She had been lost, and now she was found. He still couldn’t walk away without telling her what he knew.

“It was a fraud,” he said quickly.

Her eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?”

“Hazelius concocted this whole thing. It was a scheme to start a new religion—sort of like Scientology.”

She shook her head. “Wyman . . . You never change, do you?”

He tried to take her hand, but she withdrew it sharply.

“I can’t believe you’re trying to pull this,” she said, suddenly angry “I really can’t.”

“Kate, Hazelius told me. He admitted it to me. Back in the mines. It’s all a con.”

She shook her head. “You’ve tried everything to stop this, to discredit what’s going on here. But I never thought you’d stoop this low—to out-and-out lie.”

“Kate—”

She rose. “Wyman, it isn’t going to work. I know you can’t accept what happened here. You can’t abandon your Christian faith. You’re making no sense, though. If Gregory dreamed up this whole thing, would he have admitted it to anyone? Especially to you?”

“He thought we both were going to die.”

“No, Wyman, what you’re saying makes no sense.”

Ford looked at her. Her eyes blazed with fervid belief. He would never change her mind.

She continued. “Did you see the way he died? Do you remember what he said, his very last words? They’re burned into my memory. The universe never forgets . You think that was part of the fraud? No, Wyman: he died a believer. You can’t fake something like that. He stood in the fire. Even while he was burning, with one leg shattered, he stood. He never buckled, never faltered, never stopped smiling, never even closed his eyes. That’s how powerful his belief was. You’re telling me that was a fraud?”

He said nothing. He wasn’t going to change her mind, and he wasn’t sure he even wanted to. Her life had been so hard, so full of loss. To convince her Hazelius was a fraud would be to destroy her. And maybe most religions needed a certain measure of fraud to succeed. After all, religion was based not on fact, but on faith. It was a spiritual confidence game.

He gazed at her with an almost inconsolable sorrow. Hazelius had been right: There was nothing Ford, Volkonsky, or anyone could do to stop this. Nothing. Les jeux sont faites . The die is cast. And now he understood why Hazelius had so freely admitted it to him—he knew that, even if Ford survived, he would be powerless to stop it. And that was why he went to his death with such astonishing dignity and resolve. It was the final act in his drama, and he was determined to play it well.

He had died a true believer.

“Wyman,” Kate said, “if you’ve ever loved me, believe and join us. Christianity’s done.” She held out the packet of computer paper. “How can you not believe this, after what we lived through?”

He shook his head, unable to answer. Her passion filled him with envy. How wonderful it would be to be so sure of the truth.

She tossed the paper down and seized his hands. “We can do it together. Break with your past. Choose a new life with me.”

Ford lowered his head. “No,” he said softly.

“You can still try to believe. Over time, you’ll see the light. Don’t walk out on this. Don’t walk out on me.”

“It would be wonderful for a while. Just to be with you. But it wouldn’t last.”

“What we witnessed in the mountain was the hand of God. I know it was.”

“I can’t do it . . . I can’t live what I don’t believe.”

“Believe in me, then. You said you loved me and you’d stay with me. You promised.”

“Sometimes love isn’t enough. Not for what you plan to do. I’m going now. Give my regards to the others.”

“Don’t go.” The tears ran down her face.

He bent down and kissed her on the forehead, very lightly. “Good-bye, Kate,” he said. “And . . . God bless.”

ONE MONTH LATER

WYMAN FORD SAT IN MANNY’S BUCKHORN Bar and Grill in San Antonio, New Mexico, eating a green chile cheeseburger and watching the television behind the bar. A month had passed since the press conference at Flagstaff that had electrified the world.

After a debriefing in Washington by Lockwood, in which he had shamelessly shaped his story to support the new mythology, he had taken off in his Jeep and drove to New Mexico. There he had spent a few weeks hiking the canyons north of Abiquiú, by himself, thinking about what had happened.

Isabella had been destroyed, Red Mesa left a blasted, smoldering moonscape. Hundreds had died or disappeared in the conflagration. The FBI had eventually identified Russell Eddy’s body, from DNA and dental records, and declared the millennialist minister the perpetrator.

Already a media spectacle, after Flagstaff the Red Mesa story grew into an epic of gargantuan dimensions. It was the biggest story in the last two thousand years, some pundits proclaimed.

Christianity had taken four centuries to conquer the old Roman Empire. The new religion—which its votaries called the Search—took four days to burn through the United States. The World Wide Web turned out to be the perfect disseminator for the new faith—as if the Internet had been created for its propagation.

Ford glanced at his watch. It was eleven forty-five, and in fifteen minutes half the world, including the patrons of Manny’s Buckhorn, would be watching the Event, broadcast live from a Colorado ranch owned by a dot-com billionaire.

The television’s volume was turned down, and Ford strained to listen. Behind the anchorman on the background screen, a high-angle aerial camera panned a crowd of prodigious size, which the news channel estimated to be three million people. The teeming throng filled the prairie farmlands as far as the eye could see, the snowcapped San Juan Mountains providing a picturesque backdrop.

Over the past month, Ford had done a lot of thinking. He had come to recognize Hazelius’s brilliance. The Red Mesa debacle had established the religion and made himself the movement’s preeminent prophet and martyr. Red Mesa, Hazelius’s blazing immolation, and his tragic transcendence had become the stuff of myth and legend—a story like that of the Buddha, Lord Krishna, Medina and Mohammed, the Nativity, the Last Supper, Crucifixion and Resurrection. Hazelius and the story of Isabella was no different from those other stories, a narrative that believers could share, a founding history that animated their faith and told them who they were and why they were here.

It had become one of the greatest stories ever told.

Hazelius had pulled it off—brilliantly. He had even been right about his own martyrdom, his fiery transfiguration, which had gripped the public consciousness like nothing else. In death he had become a moral force, a formidable prophet, and a spiritual leader.

Noon approached, and the bartender turned up the television’s volume. The lunchtime patrons at the bar—truckers, local ranchers, a scattering of tourists—were giving the television their rapt attention.

The news program cut to a correspondent at the ranch in Colorado. The man stood in the vast crowd, gripping a mike. Sweating, his face was vivid with the same zeal that transfixed the crowd. It was contagious. The people around him chanted and cheered, sang, and brandished banners embellished with a gnarled, flaming piñon tree.

The television correspondent delivered his news, shouting over the noise of the crowd, calling the event a “religious Woodstock” and a “convocation of commitment, caring, and love.”

Well, Ford mused, at least there is no rain or drugs .

Behind the wooden stage stood a big New England–style barn, red with white trim. The camera came in tight on the doors. A hush fell on the crowd. At exactly noon, the doors were flung open and six people dressed in white stepped out into the sunlight.

The crowd roared like like the sea itself—magnificent, monumental, millennial.

Ford’s heart skipped as Kate approached the stage, pressing a thin, leather-bound volume to her chest. She was stunningly beautiful in a simple white dress and black gloves, which set off and complimented her jet black hair and sparkling ebony eyes. Flanked by Corcoran, also garbed in simple alabaster, the former adversaries had become friends and allies.

Four others joined them, and they stood, assembled on the stage—the six survivors of the assault on Isabella . . . Chen, St. Vincent, Innes, and Cecchini. They seemed different now, larger than life, their small-minded pettiness transfigured into a calling and a cause. They smiled and waved at the crowd, their faces glowing. Each wore a solitary silver pin, affixed to their white attire, also of a flaming piñon tree.

The crowd’s ovation thundered a full five minutes. Mounting the podium by herself, Kate gazed over the crowd. Her glossy hair—black as a raven’s wing—shone in the sunlight and her eyes blazed with life. She held up her hands and the roar subsided.

She was surprisingly charismatic, Ford thought. In the end, she hadn’t needed Hazelius. She was perfectly capable of building and leading his movement on her own, or at least in partnership with the extraordinary Corcoran. The two of them were now media goddesses and close partners, one light, the other dark, an archetypal pairing.

When the silence was complete, Kate gazed over the sea of humanity, her eyes filled with compassion and peace. She laid down the book, adjusted it, her movements relaxed and unhurried. She was a believer, serenely certain of the truth, no confusion or self-doubt anywhere.

The camera tightened in on her face. Raising the book over her head, she opened the text and held it up to the multitude.

“The Word of God,” she sang out, her voice strong and clear.

The sea of worshippers roared again. As the camera closed in on the book, Ford saw that it was the old computer printout she had shown him under the cottonwood tree—ironed out, cleaned up, and bound.

She laid the book down on the podium and lifted her hands. A hush fell again. In Ford’s restaurant, the diners had left their tables and flocked to the bar, where they watched in awe.

“I will begin by reading to you the last words spoken by God, before Isabella was destroyed and God’s voice was silenced.”

A long, long pause. I say to you, this is your destiny: to find truth. This is why you exist. This is your purpose. Science is merely how you do it. This is what you must worship: the search for truth itself. If you do this with all your heart, then some great day in the distant future you will stand before Me. This is my covenant with the human race. You will know the truth. And the truth shall make you free.

The hair on the back of Ford’s neck stood on end. He had read these and the rest of God’s so-called words a hundred times. They were ubiquitous, all over the Web, debated on television and talk radio, blogged everywhere, argued on every street corner and bookstore café in America. They had even begun appearing on billboards. You couldn’t escape them.

And every time he read them, he was haunted by a very strange idea. Hazelius had told him in the burning mines: The program itself was anything but simple— I’m not sure even I understand it. It said a lot of things I never intended it to say— things that I never dreamed of. You might say it performed beyond specs.

Beyond specs indeed. Every time he reread the so-called words of God, the more convinced he was that a great truth, perhaps even the great truth, lay buried in them.

The truth shall make you free. They were Jesus’s words as quoted in John. They triggered another Biblical phrase in his head: God moves in mysterious ways.

Perhaps, thought Ford, this new religion might well be His most mysterious move of all.

APPENDIX

THE WORDS OF GOD

FIRST SESSION

Greetings

Greetings to you, too.

I am glad to be speaking to you.

Glad to be speaking to you, too. Who are you?

For lack of a better word, I am God.

If you’re really God, then prove it.

We don’t have much time for proofs.

I’m thinking of a number between one and ten. What is it?

You are thinking of the transcendental number e.

Now I’m thinking of a number between zero and one.

Chaitin’s number: Omega.

If you’re God, then what’s the purpose of existence?

I don’t know the ultimate purpose.

That’s a fine thing, a god who doesn’t know the purpose of existence.

If I knew, existence would be pointless.

How so?

If the end of the universe were present in its beginning—if we are merely in the middle of the deterministic unfolding of a set of initial conditions—then the universe would be a pointless exercise.

Explain.

If you’re at your destination, why make the journey? If you know the answer, why ask the question? That is why the future is—and must be—profoundly hidden, even from God. Otherwise, existence would have no meaning.

That’s a metaphysical argument, not a physical argument.

The physical argument is that no part of the universe can calculate things faster than the universe itself. The universe is “predicting the future” as fast as it can.

What is the universe? Who are we? What are we doing here?

The universe is one vast, irreducible, ongoing computation, which is working toward a state that I do not and cannot know. The purpose of existence is to reach that final state. But that final state is a mystery to me, as it must be, for if I knew the answer, what would be the point of it all?

What do you mean by computation? We’re all inside a computer?

By computation I mean thinking. All of existence, everything that happens—a falling leaf, a wave upon the beach, the collapse of a star—it is all just me, thinking.

What are you thinking?

SECOND SESSION

We speak again.

Tell me all about yourself.

I can no more explain to you who I am than you could explain to a beetle who you are.

Try anyway.

I will explain instead why you cannot understand me.

Go ahead.

You inhabit a world scaled midway between the Planck length and the diameter of the universe. Your brain was exquisitely fine-tuned to manipulate your world—not to comprehend its fundamental reality. You evolved to throw rocks, not quarks. As a result of your evolution, you see the world in fundamentally erroneous ways. For example, you believe yourselves to occupy a three-dimensional space in which separate objects trace smoothly predictable arcs marked by something you call time. This is what you call reality.

Are you saying that our reality is an illusion?

Yes. Natural selection has given you the illusion that you understand fundamental reality. But you do not. How could you? Do beetles understand fundamental reality? Do chimpanzees? You are an animal like them. You evolved like them, you reproduce like them, you have the same basic neural structures. You differ from the chimpanzee by a mere two hundred genes. How could that minuscule difference enable you to comprehend the universe when the chimpanzee cannot even comprehend a grain of sand? If our conversation is to be fruitful, you must abandon all hope of understanding me.

What are our illusions?

You evolved to see the world as being made up of discrete objects. That is not so. From the first moment of creation, all was entangled. What you call space and time are merely emergent properties of a deeper underlying reality. In that reality, there is no separateness. There is no time. There is no space. All is one.

Explain.

Your own theory of quantum mechanics, incorrect as it is, touches on the deep truth that the universe is unitary.

All well and good, but how does this matter in our own lives today?

It matters a great deal. You think of yourself as an “individual person,” with a unique and separate mind. You think you are born and you think you die. All your life you feel separate and alone. Sometimes desperately so. You fear death because you fear the loss of individuality. All this is illusion. You, he, she, those things around you living or not, the stars and galaxies, the empty space in between—these are not distinct, separate objects. All is fundamentally entangled. Birth and death, pain and suffering, love and hate, good and evil, are all illusive. They are atavisms of the evolutionary process. They do not exist in reality.

So it’s just like the Buddhists believe, that all is illusion?

Not at all. There is an absolute truth, a reality. But a mere glimpse of this reality would break a human mind.

If you’re God, let’s dispense with the typing. You should be able to hear me.

Loud and clear.

You say, “all is unitary”? We have a numbering system: one, two, three—and in this way I refute your statement.

One, two, three . . . Another illusion. There is no enumerability.

This is mathematical sophistry. No enumerability—I just disproved it by counting. [He holds up a hand.] Another disproof: I give you the integer five!

You give me a hand with five fingers, not the integer five. Your number system has no independent existence in the real world. It is nothing more than a sophisticated metaphor.

I’d like to hear your proof of that ridiculous conjecture.

Pick a number at random on the real number line: with probability one you have picked a number that has no name, has no definition, and cannot be computed or written down, even if the whole universe were put to the task. This problem extends to allegedly definable numbers such as pi or the square root of two. With a computer the size of the universe running an infinite amount of time, you could not calculate either number exactly. Tell me, Edelstein: How then can such numbers be said to exist? How can the circle or the square, from which these two numbers derive, exist? How can dimensional space exist, then, if it cannot be measured? You, Edelstein, are like a monkey who, with heroic mental effort, has figured out how to count to three. You find four pebbles and think you have discovered infinity.

Is that so? You talk a fine streak, you boast that even the word “God” is inadequate to describe your greatness. All right, then—prove it. Prove you’re God. Did you hear me? Prove you’re God.

You construct the proof, Hazelius. But I warn you, this is the last test to which I will submit. We have important business and very little time.

You asked for it. My wife, Astrid, was pregnant when she died. We had just found out. Nobody else knew of her pregnancy. Nobody. Here is your test: tell me the name we chose for our child.

Albert Leibniz Gund Hazelius, if it was a boy.

And if it was a girl? What if it was a girl? What would the name have been?

Rosalind Curie Gund Hazelius.

All right, let’s start again from the top. What the hell are you — really?

For reasons I have already explained, you cannot know what I am. The word “God” comes close, but it remains a highly impoverished description.

Are you part of the universe, or separate from it?

There is no separateness. We are all one.

Why does the universe exist?

The universe exists because it is simpler than nothing. That is also why I exist. The universe cannot be simpler than it is. This is the physical law from which all others flow.

What could be simpler than nothing?

“Nothing” cannot exist. It is an immediate paradox. The universe is the state closest to nothing.

If everything is so simple, why is the universe so complex?

The intricate universe you see is an emergent property of its simplicity.

So what is this profound simplicity at the heart of everything?

That is the reality that would break your mind.

This is getting tiresome! If you’re so smart, you should be able to explain it to us poor, benighted human beings! Do you mean to say that we’re so ignorant of reality that our physical laws are a sham?

You constructed your physical laws on the assumption of the existence of time and space. All your laws are based on frames of reference. This is invalid. Soon your cherished assumptions about the real world will crash and burn. From the ashes you will build a new kind of science.

If our physical laws are false, how is it that our science is so spectacularly successful?

Newton’s laws of motion, while false, were adequate to send people to the moon. Just so with your laws: they are workable approximations that are fundamentally incorrect.

So how do you construct the laws of physics without time and space?

We are wasting time bandying about metaphysical concepts.

So what should we be discussing?

The reason I have come to you.

What is that?

I have a task for you.

Well, then. Why don’t you tell us what this task is?

The great monotheistic religions were a necessary stage in the development of human culture. Your task is to guide the human race to the next belief system.

Which is?

Science.

That’s ridiculous—science can’t be a religion!

You have already started a new religion—only you refuse to see it. Religion was once a way to make sense of the world. Science has now taken over this role.

Science and religion are two different things. They ask different questions and require different kinds of evidence.

Science and religion both seek the same thing: truth. There can be no reconciliation between the two. The collision of worldviews is well under way and worsening. Science has already refuted most of the core beliefs of the world’s historical religions, bringing those religions into a state of turmoil. Your task is to help humanity chart a path through the crisis.

You think the fanatics in the Middle East—or the Bible Belt, for that matter—are going to roll over and accept science as the new religion? That’s crazy.

You will offer the world my words and the story of what happened here. Do not underestimate my power—the power of truth.

Where are we supposed to be going with this new religion? What’s the point of it? Who needs it?

The immediate goal of humankind is to escape the limits of biochemistry. You must free your mind from the meat of your bodies.

The meat? I don’t understand.

Meat. Nerves. Cells. Biochemistry. The medium by which you think. You must free your mind from the meat.

How?

You have already begun to process information beyond your meat existence through computers. You will soon find a way to process it using quantum-state computing machines, which will lead you to harness the natural quantum processes in the world around you as a means of computation. No longer will you need to build machines to process information. You will expand into the universe, literally and figuratively, as other intelligent entities have expanded before you. You will escape the prison of biological intelligence.

Then what?

Over time, you will link up with other expanded intelligences. All these linked intelligences will discover a way to merge into a third stage of mind that will comprehend the simple reality that is at the heart of existence.

And that’s it? That’s what it’s all about?

No. That is merely a prelude to a greater task.

Which is what?

Arresting the heat death of the universe. When the universe reaches a state of maximum entropy, which is the heat death of the universe, then will the universal computation come to a halt. I will die.

Is this inevitable or is there some way to prevent it?

That is the very question you must determine.

So that’s the ultimate purpose of existence? To defeat this mysterious heat death? Sounds like something out of a science fiction novel.

Circumventing the heat death is merely a step on the way.

The way to what?

It will give the universe the fullness of time it needs to think itself into the final state.

What’s this final state?

I do not know. It will be like nothing you or even I could possibly imagine.

You mentioned the “fullness of time.” How long is that, exactly?

It will be a number of years equal to ten factorial raised to the ten factorial power, that number raised to the ten factorial power, that number raised to the ten factorial power, this power relation repeated 1083 times, and then the resulting number raised to its own factorial power 1047 times, as above. Using your mathematical notation, this number—the first God number—is:

This is the length of time in years it will take for the universe to think itself into the final state, to arrive at the ultimate answer.

That’s an absurdly large number!

It is but a drop in the great ocean of infinity.

Where is the role of morality, of ethics, in this brave new universe of yours? Or salvation and the forgiveness of sins?

I repeat again: separateness is but an illusion. Human beings are like cells in a body. Cells die, but the body lives on. Hatred, cruelty, war, and genocide are more like autoimmune diseases than the product of something you call “evil.” This vision of connectedness I offer you provides a rich moral field of action, in which altruism, compassion, and responsibility for one another play a central role. Your fate is one fate. Human beings will prevail together or die separate. No one is saved because no one is lost. No one is forgiven because no one is accused.

What about God’s promise to us of a better world?

Your various concepts of heaven are remarkably obtuse.

Excuse me, but salvation is anything but obtuse!

The vision of spiritual completion I offer you is immeasurably grander than any heaven dreamed on earth.

What about the soul? Do you deny the existence of the immortal soul?

Information is never lost. With the death of the body, the information created by that life changes shape and structure, but it is never lost. Death is an informational transition. Do not fear it.

Do we lose our individuality at death?

Do not mourn the loss. From that powerful sense of individuality, so necessary for evolution, flow many of the qualities that haunt of human existence, good and bad: fear, pain, suffering, and loneliness, as well as love, happiness, and compassion. That is why you must escape your biochemical existence. When you free yourselves from the tyranny of the flesh, you will take the good—love, happiness, compassion, and altruism—with you. You will leave behind the bad.

I don’t find much uplift in the idea that the little quantum fluctuations my existence has generated will somehow give us immortality.

You should find great solace in this view of life. Information in the universe cannot die. Not one step, not one memory, not one sorrow in your life is ever forgotten. You as an individual will be lost in the storm of time, your molecules dispersed. But who you were, what you did, how you lived, will always remain embedded in the universal computation.

Forgive me, but it still sounds so mechanistic, so soulless, this talk of existence as “computation.”

Call it dreaming, if you prefer, or desiring, willing, thinking. Everything you see is part of an unimaginably vast and beautiful computation, from a baby speaking its first words to a star collapsing into a black hole. Our universe is a gorgeous computation that, starting with a single axiom of great simplicity, has been running for thirteen billion years. We have hardly begun the adventure! When you find a way to shift your own meat-limited process of thinking to other natural quantum systems, you will begin to control the computation. You will begin to understand its beauty and perfection.

If everything is a computation, then what is the purpose of intelligence? Of mind?

Intelligence exists all around you, even in nonliving processes. A thunderstorm is a computation vastly more sophisticated than a human mind. It is, in its own way, intelligent.

A thunderstorm has no consciousness. A human mind has awareness of self. It’s conscious. That’s the difference, and it isn’t trivial.

Did I not tell you that the very consciousness of self is an illusion, an artifact of evolution? The difference is not even trivial.

A weather system isn’t creative. It doesn’t make choices. It can’t think. It’s merely the mechanistic unfolding of forces.

How do you know you are not the mechanistic unfolding of forces? Like the mind, a weather system contains complex chemical, electrical, and mechanical properties. It is thinking. It is creative. Its thoughts are different from your thoughts. A human being creates complexity by writing a novel on the surface of paper; a weather system creates complexity by writing waves on the surface of an ocean. What is the difference between the information carried in the words of a novel and the information carried on the waves of the sea? Listen, and the waves will speak, and someday, I tell you, you will write your thoughts on the surface of the sea.

So what’s the universe computing? What’s this great problem it’s trying to solve?

That is the deepest and most wonderful mystery of all.

We have very little time. What I have to say to you now is of the utmost importance.

Continue, please. You have our full attention.

Religion arose as an effort to explicate the inexplicable, control the uncontrollable, make bearable the unbearable. Belief in a higher power became the most powerful innovation in late human evolution. Tribes with religion had an advantage over those without. They had direction and purpose, motivation and a mission. The survival value of religion was so spectacular that the thirst for belief became embedded in the human genome. What religion tried, science has finally achieved. You now have a way to explain the inexplicable, control the uncontrollable. You no longer need “revealed” religion. The human race has finally grown up. Religion is as essential to human survival as food and water. If you try to replace religion with science, you will fail. You will, instead, offer science as religion. For I say to you, science is religion. The one, true religion. Instead of offering a book of truth, science offers a method of truth. Science is a search for truth, not the revelation of truth. It is a means, not a dogma. It is a journey, not a destination.

Yes, but what of human suffering? How can science make ‘bearable the unbearable,’ as you put it?

In the last century, medicine and technology have alleviated more human suffering than have all the priests in the last millennium.

You’re speaking of physical suffering. But what about the suffering of the soul? What about spiritual suffering?

Have I not said that all is one? Is it not a comfort to know that your suffering shudders the very cosmos? No one suffers alone and suffering has a purpose—even the sparrow’s fall is essential to the whole. The universe never forgets. Do not stoop to diffidence! You are my disciples. You have the power to upend the world. In one day, science accumulates more evidence of its truths than religion in all its existence. People cling to faith because they must have it. They hunger for it. You will not deny people faith; you will offer them a new faith. I have not come to replace the Judeo-Christian God, but to complete him.

This new religion you want us to preach, what will we ask people to worship? Where’s the beauty and awe in this?

I ask you to contemplate the universe that you now know exists. Is it not, by itself, more awe-inspiring than any God concept offered by the historical religions? A hundred billion galaxies, lonely islands of fire flung like bright coins in a vastness of space so immense that it is beyond the biological comprehension of the human mind. And I say to you, that the universe you have discovered is only a tiny fraction of the extent and magnificence of the creation. You inhabit but the tiniest blue speck in the infinite vaults of heaven, and yet this speck is precious to me, being an essential part of the whole. That is why I have come to you. Worship me and my great works, not some tribal god imagined by warring pastoralists thousands of years ago.

More, tell us more.

Trace the lineaments of my face with your scientific instruments. Search for me in the cosmos and in the electron. For I am the God of deep time and space, the God of superclusters and voids, the God of the Big Bang and the inflation, the God of dark matter and dark energy. Science and faith cannot coexist. One will destroy the other. You must make sure science is the surviving party, or your little blue speck will be lost . . ..

What should we do?

With my words you will prevail. Tell the world what happened here. Tell the world that God has spoken to the human race—for the first time. Yes, for the first time!

But how can we explain you if you can’t tell us what you are?

Do not repeat the mistake of the historical religions and involve yourselves in disputation about who I am or what I think. I surpass all understanding. I am the God of a universe so vast, only the God numbers can describe it, of which I have given you the first . . . . You are the prophets leading your world into the future. What future will you choose? You hold the key . . ..

I say to you, this is your destiny: to find truth. This is why you exist. This is your purpose. Science is merely how you do it. This is what you must worship: the search for truth itself. If you do this with all your heart, then some great day in the distant future you will stand before Me. This is my covenant with the human race.

You will know the truth. And the truth shall make you free.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I WOULD LIKE TO THANK MANY people for their generous help. First and foremost are Selene Preston, Eric Simonoff, Susan Hazen-Hammond, Bobby Rotenberg, Hywel White, and Roland Ottewell. I am indebted to John Javna for loaning me his library on the Christian Right. I extend my gratitude to Claudia Rülke for creating our new Web site, and I am grateful to Tobias Daniel Wabbel for first encouraging me to develop some of my thoughts in an essay for Im Anfang war (k)ein Gott: Naturwissenschaftliche und theologische Perspektiven. I would like to express my deep appreciation to my writing partner, Lincoln Child, who read the manuscript and offered his usual superlative advice. And I would like to thank my editor, Bob Gleason, for his invaluable and creative guidance, and Eric Raab, for his help.

I am much indebted to my Navajo friends who, over many years, taught me about Navajo religion and life on the Rez, especially Norman Tulley, Edsel Brown, Frank Fatt, Ed Black, Victor Begay, Neswood Begay, Nada Currier, and Cheppie Natan. The opening lines of the Navajo creation chant quoted in the novel were modified from a version collected by Father Berard Haile from a medicine man on the Navajo Reservation in the early part of the twentieth century.

As always, I extend my great appreciation to Christine, Aletheia, and Isaac, for their love, support, and patience in putting up with a cranky author.

Some of the philosophical, evolutionary, and mathematical ideas presented in this novel were suggested by or developed from the writings of Gregory Chaitin, Rudy Rucker, Brian Greene, Stephen Wolfram, Edward Fredkin, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Frank J. Tipler. The God number is expressed using Knuth’s up-arrow mathematical notation.

Book design by Spring Hoteling Maps by Paul J. Pugliese

BY DOUGLAS PRESTON

Tyrannosaur Canyon*

The Codex*

Jennie*

Ribbons of Time

The Royal Road

Talking to the Ground

Cities of Gold

Dinosaurs in the Attic**

BY DOUGLASPRESTON AND LINCOLN CHILD

Relic*

Mount Dragon*

Reliquary *

Riptide

Thunderhead

The Ice Limit

The Cabinet of Curiosities

Still Life with Crows

Brimstone

Dance of Death

The Book of the Dead

The Wheel of Darkness

* Published by Tom Doherty Associates

** Published by St. Martin’s Press

The author welcomes visitors to his and Lincoln Child’s Web site, www.prestonchild.com.