Early Warning (19 page)

Originally invented for outdoorsmen who spent a lot of time in snake country, or at least quickly adopted by them, the Judge was a five-shot Tracker .45 revolver with a lengthened frame and cylinder, which meant that not only could it take a standard .45 Colt round, it could also fire a .410 shotgun shell, buckshot, or rifle slugs, and in any combination. Even the best shot sometimes found it difficult to nail a sidewinder on the first shot, which is why the dispersing firepower of a shotgun shell came in mighty handy at close quarters. So whether you were shooting at something fifty feet away or just about to bite you on the ass, the Judge made a perfect defensive weapon. Even the most appeasement-oriented State Department official couldn’t miss with one of these, although whether he’d want to take the shot, even in the interests of self-preservation, was another matter. Devlin briefly wondered at the suicide cult the American diplomatic establishment had become. Sometimes he felt like he was fighting a civil war against his own government, and half his own people.

“What about you?” Maryam’s voice intruded upon his lethal reverie. Devlin turned to look at her. Standard-issue saucer eyes, deep dark brown. Light olive skin that allowed her to pass for almost anything: Indian, Italian, Spanish, American Indian, Afghani. A generic Third World woman, if you viewed her that way. He did not. She was the woman he loved.

Perhaps, by any rational analysis, not a woman worth dying for. She was short and compact, like most Iranian women, and eventually she’d run to fat and turn into a little Persian butterball, able to spout Hafiz as well as Horace as she whipped up some
champa, naan, beryani,
and
chai,
and woe betide any son of a bitch that interrupted their repast. Hafiz, after all, had stared down Tamerlane, and she could do no less. In Devlin’s world the future was as ever-receding as the horizon, but not half so trustworthy.

“
Bulbul zi shakh-i sarw be gulbang-i pahlavi
/
Mikhwand dosh dars-i maqamat-i ma’navi
.”

“What did you say?” He never ceased to surprise her. It was one of the many things she loved about him.

“
Last night, from the cypress branch, the nightingale sang
—”

Without hesitation, she finished the couplet for him. “
In Old Persian tones, the lesson of spiritual stations.”
Although we could translate ‘spiritual’ as ‘meaningful,’ which sort of ruins it. Poetically, I mean.”

“Hafiz is never ruined, only misunderstood.”

“Like Horace?” She never ceased to surprise him. It was why they were perfect together even if they could never really trust one another…

He moved to kiss her, then refrained. It might, after all, be their last kiss, and he wanted it to mean something. Wanted it to mean more than any other kiss they had ever exchanged, whether in Paris or Los Angeles or Budapest. Whether in passion or friendship or love or opportunity or greeting or good-bye. No kiss could mean more than the next kiss he would give her. Unless it was the one,
inshallah
, that he would give her when they next met. Whenever and wherever that might be.

“Time to go,” he said, punching a last few keys on the computers. He grabbed a few things and made ready to leave.

“What about me?” she asked.

“You know what to do. I’ll contact you there.” She didn’t bother to ask how. She just knew he would. If he was still alive.

Devlin rose and handed Maryam the computer. She was going to need it more than he was, and besides, he’d have others waiting for him on-site. “Use this. It’s got a secure link to anyplace you’ll need to go. Guard it with your life. If anything happens, make sure to get this before they get you.”

He was about to go when he got another pingback, this one on his iPhone. He glanced at the screen. It was a message relayed from The Building. Devlin smiled as he looked at the screen.

“Who is it?” asked Maryam.

“Martin Ferguson.”

“Who’s that?”

“Someone who lived and died in 1951,” he replied. “He used to be somebody. In fact, he used to be an assistant district attorney in New York. Now…he needs a friend. And that would be me.”

He kissed her like it was the last time. And then he was gone.

New York

Hope lay amid the rubble, listening for the sounds of her children breathing. She had no idea what had happened, only the knowledge that something terrible had occurred, another manifestation of the evil that had visited her and her family back home in Edwardsville. Lightning never struck twice in the same place, except when it did. Some people went for years without an automobile accident, then had two of them in the space of a week. The law of averages held except when it didn’t, and that was when it was evening things out for someone else, somewhere else in the great wide world. We were all prisoners of numbers, and of ruthless dispassionate Nature. And of such singularity were religions born.

This Hope knew as she lay there in the choking blackness. How many stories had she read in which someone—a survivor—had said that God had singled him out for protection, even as others died? Such items were staples of the media because, after all, the dead could not speak, whereas the lucky among the living were there to bear false witness that Somebody Up There cared for them, had saved them, preserved them, from the fate of their comrades. Until, of course, they met the same fate, as eventually everybody must. Hope’s faith, never very strong, had now entirely evaporated.

“Mama?” A voice out of the bleak, endless darkness, soft but not weak. It was Emma. She was alive.

“Where’s your brother?” Hope asked. “Rory? RORY?”

For a moment, silence. Then—

“I’m over here, Mama. I’m okay.”

“Can you walk? Can you move?” Even in asking, Hope realized that she herself could not move. Gingerly, she tested her legs. They seemed to function, but they could not get herself up off the ground. Something was pinning her to the floor.

Hope tried to stay calm. Losing it now would help neither her nor the children. She tried to collect herself. Tried to think.

How could this be happening to her, again? What she had gone through in Edwardsville was nothing put up against what her children had gone through. What Jack had gone through…

She felt herself starting to break down. No: stop. Crying wouldn’t bring Jack back, wouldn’t erase what had happened. Jack was gone, and yet she was still here, and so were Emma and Rory. That was the way he would have wanted it, she was sure. No, she knew. That was the kind of man he was.

So why was she thinking of Danny?

Hope had often read of characters in the chick lit novels she sometimes glanced at, when Janey Eagleton slipped them to her, because she would never buy that kind of trash when Jack was alive, the kind of women that would forget their man the minute they met Fabio, or whatever name he was going by in this particular incarnation, how they would be literally swept off their feet, caught up in his strong arms, smothered by his kisses, their bodies thrilling to his harsh touch and his soft caresses, driving them crazy with the combination of tenderness and violence, sending their minds into paroxysms of confusion, torn between modern shibboleths and ancient passions and with everyone, author and reader, and character alike, knowing which side of the equations they were all about to come down upon in politically incorrect unison.

“Mom?” It was Rory. He had been brave before, not just once but many times, and now her young hero had come to her rescue once more.

The air was filling with smoke from what Hope knew was a raging fire below. They had to get out of here, and fast, or they would suffocate. But she couldn’t let on. She had to stay calm. If only she could get free…

“It’s okay, Mom,” Rory was saying. “I can handle it, I think.” She felt something move, something scraping across her legs, an awful weight being shifted, rearranged but not lifted.

“Try again, Rory.”

“Emma! Help me.”

In dread, Hope waited for Emma’s assent. Please, God, let her be able to move. Otherwise, they were all lost…

“I’m here, Rory,” said Emma. “I’m right beside you. Come on—push.”

Hope bit down hard as the heavy weight slid across her legs. Something warm and sticky ran down her calves. She could feel the fabric of her skirt rend, her flesh tear—but it was worth it to finally get that awful weight off her limbs.

No matter the pain, she managed to stand. “What was it?” she asked.

“The popcorn machine, Mom,” replied Rory. “Now let’s get outta here. I think the whole place is about to blow.”

At the moment, the building shifted on its foundations. The tilt was noticeable. They were at least ten stories in the air and while that was nowhere near the height of the World Trade Center as it collapsed, she had no wish to experience even one-tenth of the terror those poor souls felt as the Port Authority’s underpinnings failed them, and they were sped on their journey to heaven by a sudden, irrevocable plunge toward hell.

“Fire escape,” she managed to breathe. The air was getting heavier now. In a couple of minutes, they would have to crawl along the floor, searching for the outside exits.

“But where is it, Mama?” cried Emma.

She had no idea.

“Try your phone,” shouted Rory. “Get a map.”

Hope had no idea how to do what her son was suggesting. She could barely make him out in outline as she handed the instrument over. “You find it.”

Rory slid his fingers over the display. You no longer need to punch keys: now everything was touch-screen, the lighter touch the better. No need to hit anything anymore, no keyboards to pound. No longer even any need for the clicks that IBM once electronically tethered to its keyboards, just so the typists could have some sort of audible feedback. The digital world had replaced the analog, cause and effect were now irretrievably disconnected. It was a metaphor for the brave new world of nothing they were entering: a world in which everything mattered, and nothing caused it.

“Nothing, Ma. We’re shut down.”

“Then let’s get out of here. Any way we can.”

There was a great groan as the building shifted again, this time distinctly listing to one side. Hope didn’t know much about architecture, but she knew enough about the groans she was hearing to understand that the structure was in great distress, and was soon about to give up the unequal struggle. The building was going down, and the only question was whether they were going to go down with it.

“Come on!” shouted Rory, grabbing his sister’s hand. Hope would just have to fend for herself, but that was her generational role; she had done her duty to the species, to the culture, to the country. Now it was up to her children to survive, live on, fight on.

And then the floor fell out from beneath them.

It could have been worse. They could have plummeted four, five, six stories down as the huge structure collapsed upon itself. Instead, they dropped only a few feet, although the creaking of the structural steel continued to resonate throughout the theater complex.

“Mom—what’s happening?” screamed Emma. Hope knew her girl was the weak link. They had spent so many hours with the shrinks back home, making sure that she would be okay, no matter what, not that they or anyone could have foreseen this, but even so, Hope always knew that Emma would be the first to break should anything ever happen again, and now here it was, happening again, and so soon thereafter, and there was nothing she could do about it except reach for her baby and hold her and, if necessary, die trying to protect her.

“Come on, Emma—come to Mama!” she shouted She reached…reached…reached.

The AMC Theaters groaned, shifted, settled. Whatever had caused the explosion had happened on the ground floor, and it was only a matter of time before the entire building entropically headed to the source of the derangement. The scream of the wounded metal was terrifying, but to the Gardner family, it was as from a distance, a call to death that they would not heed.

Hope reached in the dark—and realized that reaching in the dark was all she had ever done. At the moment she had determined to do something about the Edwardsville hostage situation, she had begun to grope her way toward her ultimate goal. When she had crawled across the frozen blacktop on her hands and knees, she began to see it more clearly. When she had come up and fallen into the arms of that horrible man, when she was so close to her children, could practically hear them calling out to her, when she realized that she could only save one, that somebody would have to help her, when that somebody turned out to be her husband, Jack, and when he died…

Somebody else had to save them, then—Danny…

And in death there was life. In death for both of them there was life. And in death they had found each other, amid blood and misery and grief and loss. Oprah would have wept, but her audience would have understood—you took love where you found it, and damn the circumstances, the only principle of life was, after all, life itself, and no amount of death, or death cults, or people who loved death more than they loved life could defeat life itself.

And fuck everybody who didn’t understand that simple, fundamental principle of America and Americanism.

Again, Hope felt violence welling up inside her—a violence that she thought had long since been bred out of her, beaten out of her, beaten out of the America she had been born into, an America she had grown up with, an America she had been raised to think of as good and noble and true and honorable. And yet for years, they had been telling her—they, the impersonal they that ran the media, that ruled in Washington, that she saw every night on her TV set, the chirping anchors and the serious graybeards, the snarky commentators who celebrated what she had grown up to think of as deviancy, shoved it right in her face. She had often wondered, sitting at home with Jack watching the TV, why they let them get away with this, when she finally realized that the “they” she had long assumed were in charge of the America she had once known were no longer the “they” in charge, that the moral rules had changed, without even an election, that the rules were new, that the snarky commentators were on the other side, that without even so much as a press release, the power structure had changed, and she and everybody else she knew had suddenly come up on the short side of the equation. How did it happen, and how did it happen so fast?

Had her country gone from American dream to nightmare in her lifetime?

That was a question for another time. Right now, she had to figure out how to get out of here and how to get her kids out of here. It didn’t matter if she died, it only mattered whether she could save them

And, by God, she would—no matter how much “they” tried to drive God out of her life, and the life of a country whose money proclaimed “In God We Trust.” At that moment, Hope swore to herself that, if she lived, she would contest every local seat, every county board, every state house and senate sinecure, every national office, even the presidency itself. From now on, she would be their worst enemy. And they had no one but themselves to blame, because, finally, they had driven her to it. What a mighty force the American people could be, once aroused.

Emma’s hand was in hers. The pain was suddenly gone. Nothing could stop her now.

“Atta girl, Ma!” shouted Rory.

They ran. Not caring what was in front of them in the darkness, not caring whether it was popcorn boxes or movie posters or even dead bodies. The only thing that mattered now was to get to the exit, still vaguely but bravely illuminated against the carnage they knew lurked below.

If only they could make it before the building totally collapsed. If only they could cross the few short yards, no matter what her physical condition. Hope knew she could do it, and prayed passionately that her children could follow. She had never prayed much in her life, beyond the pro-forma Protestantism she had grown up with, a religion that didn’t much matter, like any religion, in times of peace. But now they were up against a religion that very much did matter in times of war, a religion that welcomed war, no matter if it was only a tiny minority, as the newspapers kept telling her, no matter if it was only a fraction, a fraction of a billion was a very large fraction and it was that fraction, she knew, that was causing them all this trouble.

The exit sign—

“Come, on Emma!” shouted Rory. “Come on, Mom!”

They ran. The building groaned once more. They ran faster. A small amount of ground, which on the outside you could leap over in a flash, not less than a heartbeat away. A heartbeat, one tick missed and you were gone, one tick missed and you were meeting your maker if Maker there was to meet.

Hope didn’t want to find out. She was not yet ready to put her faith to the test. Not ready to be able to answer Abraham’s challenge, not disposed to be confronted by an altar upon which she was supposed to sacrifice her children, not even one of them. They would all get out, or they would all die trying.

And then, against all odds, her phone rang.