The Tenth Circle (28 page)

Washington, DC

“Reverend?”

For an instant, just an instant, Rule thought it was the voice of God speaking to him, reassuring him, lending reason to the moment. The man on the other end of the line had found his hideaway, the spiritual retreat to which he banished his dark places. To an actual pit instead of a metaphorical one. The women would never bear his children now, but he realized it didn’t matter, because that gift he’d intended to bestow upon the world had been replaced by another much greater one.

To be unleashed here. Tonight.

“Reverend?” the voice repeated.

Rule realized a fresh shadow had fallen over him and turned to find Boyd Fowler standing just to his side, dressed all in black above his army boots, flak jacket worn under his shirt making his torso look even more huge.

“Who were you talking to?” the big man asked him.

Rule realized he was still holding his phone. “A man without faith who will fall with all the others.”

“I need to ask you something, Reverend, and I need you to promise me you’ll say yes.”

“You were delivered onto me for a purpose that leaves me in your debt, Boyd. So you have my solemn promise. Take it as the word of the Almighty.”

“This thing we’re about to do …”

“God’s work, Boyd. We’re about to fulfill His divine plan.”

“That’s the point. I’ve never been much when it came to religion or church, was never even baptized. And such things tend to plague a man at a time like this.”

“What can I do to relieve your pain?”

“Can you baptize me here and now, before it’s time for us to do the deed?”

Rule looked toward the waters of the reservoir, frigid in the chill January wind with waves of cold seeming to ripple on the surface.

“It would be my greatest pleasure to do so, Boyd.”

The big man stripped off his shirt and shed his flak jacket right after it. He was down to his skivvies in seconds, revealing a strangely symmetrical mix of tattoos and heavy muscle. Rule left his clothes on, believing somehow it would keep him warmer when he stepped into the frigid water, still cloaked by the shadows cast by the tree cover. He welcomed this blessing as a distraction and another moment bringing him closer to God even as the time of his greatest service approached.

A steep bank led down into the reservoir, not much footing between the end of the drop and the start of the water. The pumping station, contained in a stately brick shell, rose a block to the south and was mostly automated these days, maintaining only a skeletal staff that had been told by their supervisor not to come in today for security reasons related to the State of the Union. And, likewise, its location and relatively innocuous purpose rendered it immune from Secret Service scrutiny as well. Nothing that would deter Jeremiah Rule from completing his holy mission with the help of Boyd Fowler and the Rock Machine.

“You ready, Reverend?” Fowler asked, his massive form looming over him on the rise overlooking the McMillan Reservoir.

“I am, Boyd. I am indeed.”

Washington, DC

“It’s five o’clock, Captain. State of the Union speech is four hours away,” McCracken said into his phone. “I hope you’ve got some answers.”

“I do indeed, my man. But you’re not gonna like them, not at all. I have gone through an entire quarter ounce of primo weed since last we spoke, and I still get numb to what I think I’ve figured out.”

“Stop toking and start talking.”

“Sorry about that, MacNuts,” Captain Seven said between coughs. “Like I told you before, nobody ever figured out what the Rock Machine’s plan was for attacking the Capitol Building, but I think I’ve got on a notion. On a clear day, you can see the answers. Must’ve been cloudy up until now because I’ve been focusing on the Rock Machine members that stood trial, not the ones who didn’t.”

“Why bother?”

“My thinking exactly, but that doesn’t make it right. See, when I widened my searched a bit, I came up with the fact that a Rock Machine member who was never charged has built himself a career as a city worker with Washington’s Department of Public Works—specifically, supervisor of the pumping station on Bryant Street down by the McMillan Reservoir.”

“Don’t tell me—the facility that supplies the Capitol Building its water.”

“Okay, I won’t tell you.”

“This doesn’t sound good, Captain.”

“It gets worse, lots worse. How much you know about the manufacture of methamphetamines, MacNuts?”

“It’s on my to-do list.”

“Then let me spare you part of the trouble. Care to hazard a guess as to the prime solvent used in the cleanup process?”

“I thought you were sparing me the trouble.”

“Liquid Freon.”

“Oh shit …”

“Yup, it makes a great cleaning agent, but it’s also what powers air-conditioning units. You see where I’m going with this?”

“I’d rather just listen to the expert.”

“How do pipes burst, MacNuts?”

“They freeze.”

“And
voil
à
! Rule’s motorcycle gang stooges first pump liquid Freon into the line. Freon doesn’t work its magic until it reaches the end of the line in the pipes that supply water to the Capitol through piping that runs exposed along the length of the tunnel that connects the House of Representatives to the building. The Freon freezes the pipes pretty much on contact but they won’t burst until pressure is brought back up again.”

“Which will happen as soon as they flood the pipes with the White Death,” McCracken surmised.

“Mixed with water refilling the line. The pipes burst and release the already formed gas and everyone within a square mile of the Capitol, and maybe a whole lot more than that, is exposed—meaning dead, asphyxiated—within minutes. Colonel Turwell’s original plan made infiltrating the Capitol itself a necessity, but now the Reverend Rule can wipe out virtually the entire United States government from around three miles away.”

“Maybe he’s doing us a favor. No way we could have found a way into the Capitol, but that pumping station is something else entirely.”

“Might be just what we need, MacNuts.”

“What we really need is the cavalry,” McCracken said, checking his phone to see if there was a message from Zarrin yet.

Washington, DC

Jeremiah Rule’s feet were already chilled when he dropped into the waist-deep water of the McMillan Reservoir before it deepened just a few more yards out. The sky had shed the sun, the night moonless, which made the descent a dreadful experience done in fits and starts down the slick bank.

“Easy there, Reverend,” he heard Boyd Fowler say, “I’ve got you.”

The giant did indeed, hand braced over Rule’s shoulder to guide him every step of the way and keep him from falling, while showing no ill effects from entering the frigid water himself. He beamed with a child’s excitement and expectation, his slight trembling that of a man about to truly meet the Lord for the first time. To distract himself from the cold’s utter seizure of his mind and senses, even his breath locking in his chest, Rule focused on the wondrous matter at hand, the miracle he was about to bestow on the world in keeping with the word of the Lord.

The pumping facility that would forge his miracle was deceptively simple in design, in keeping with its singular purpose of sucking water from this reservoir fed by the Potomac, running it through various stages of cleansing and treatment, and then sending millions of gallons on their way through its respective city grid. That grid included the U.S. Capitol Building, somewhere between two and three miles away.

Rule stretched his hands upward and laid them on Boyd Fowler’s massive shoulders on the downward slope of his trapezius muscles.

“Heavenly Father, in your love you have called us to know you, led us to trust you, and bound our life with yours.”

Rule paused to pray silently, but his mind jerked him back inside the pumping station where it was warm and dry and cluttered with piping that looked like giant steel snakes coiled about the walls and floor. There were massive tanks too, strung together by labyrinths of pipes leading from one to the other. A sophisticated network of interconnected catwalks rose like a spiderweb over the entire assemblage of steel and PVC, of levers and switches, of manifolds and circulators, of mounted controllers and system pressure gauges, of easy bleed and backup systems.

“Surround this man, and yet still child of God, with your love. Protect him from evil.”

Here, Rule moved his numb, throbbing hands to Boyd Fowler’s bald skull, easing his whole frame downward under their force. The moments passed with more thoughts of the Bryant Street facility’s layout and contents. An entire floor comprised of little more than piping rising from underground, strung in serpentine fashion across the floor and climbing the walls, controlled by a combination of manual toggle switches, automated relays flashing green and old-fashioned crank wheels with rust showing through their color-keyed paint. Heavy steel ductwork and manifolds seemed to hang free in the air, like some outer-space spider responsible for weaving the web-like network of catwalks that allowed ready to access to all from above. The piping shared a uniform shade of easy blue, not dark enough to be navy but not light either.

“Fill him with the Holy Spirit and receive him into the family of our church,” Rule continued, Boyd Fowler’s head now sinking with the rest of him below the surface of the McMillan Reservoir, “that he may walk with us in the way of Christ, and grow in the knowledge of your love.”

Inside the facility, before he’d come out here to pray, Rule had witnessed Fowler’s men working on one of the pumps and the assemblage of piping running in and out of it. Connecting the white, plastic drums they’d brought with them via thick, rubber hosing joined by wide, copper line to the assemblage that supplied the facility’s northern grid, which included the Capitol. Nearby, the fifty-five-gallon barrels Fowler’s men and trucks had hauled away from the mountain filled out the floor near another network of piping that began the actual process of pumping drinking water to a large portion of the city. Rule had seen a bypass being readied so the pipes would carry the contents of those barrels north for the Capitol, instead of the purified water gestating in the holding tanks that towered over the scene.

Rule saw the bubbles flutter to the surface of the McMillan Reservoir as Fowler let out his breath. “May this child of the Lord know your power and your glory, your wisdom and your grace. And I ask you, oh Lord, to welcome him into your house as one of the true faithful in your ways who will keep your word now and forever.”

With that, Rule lifted Boyd Fowler’s head and torso from the river as if it weighed nothing at all, as if he was a child in body as well as spirit. Their eyes met and held, Fowler’s as happy and celebratory as any the reverend had ever seen, the man still shaking not in the slightest, just blowing water from his mouth and nose with his breath.

“Praise the Lord, Boyd! Praise the Lord, so you may know His glory! It’s a true miracle, a true miracle!”

“Today’s full of them, Reverend.”

“And the biggest one is yet to come,” Rule told him, thinking of how the country would look when tomorrow dawned.

Washington, DC

Zarrin’s flight landed at Dulles just about the same time as the flight from Detroit carrying the five security operatives Colonel Nabril al-Asi had brought with him to the United States from Palestine did. She knew them all, both from experience and reputation. All members of his private security force trained by Mossad, all having journeyed here when the dream of peace was replaced by calls for the heads of the old guard that had raised so many false hopes. They’d fought alongside the Sayeret, the Israeli Special Forces, on any number of raids and pretty much matched them, as well as their American counterparts, in their precision, training, and experience.

While waiting to meet up with the five men about to return to the violence that had ruled their lives for so long, Zarrin pictured what was happening beyond in the city right now. For starters, air traffic over Washington was about to be shut down. Only US Air Force fighter jets based at Air Combat Command in Langley, Virginia, would be flying along with Predator drones almost certain to be on station. Beneath their sweep, fifteen hundred Capitol Police officers would be either posted or on patrol in and around the Capitol—this after a redundant triple-check of the entire building, including under every seat in the chamber, was made for any and all conceivable explosives. National Guardsmen would cover the street areas outside the sweep of either the Capitol Police or Secret Service who would also be securing every potential sniper’s nest atop buildings or trees. Agents and their Capitol Police counterparts had been on high-security patrol since yesterday, knowing full well trained operatives may well have chosen to hunker down that long in advance to avoid detection closer to an actual planned attack.

The House wing of the Capitol Building, meanwhile, would have already been shut down at this hour, no admittance whatsoever allowed until the entry doors were opened. Similarly, the plaza on the east side of the Capitol would now have been closed to all unauthorized persons, and all streets adjoining the building would have been barricaded with Jersey barriers, including main thoroughfares, like Independence and Constitution Avenues. All this combined to create a daunting task to even conceive of a means to stage an attack during the State of the Union address. But, as McCracken told it, the Reverend Jeremiah Rule had found the ideal work-around, something no one could ever possibly have conceived.

Not unless they too had solved the interconnected mysteries of the lost Roanoke Colony and, now, the
Mary Celeste
.

Zarrin recognized Colonel al-Asi’s operatives as they approached together, looking at first glance much more like polished family men than the hardened killers they had once been. But as they drew closer she saw the familiar bent in their eyes, their wariness and fluid movements, and knew they were actually both now, able to shift nimbly from one pursuit to the other.

How long had it been since they’d seen action? Zarrin wondered, certain that al-Asi would have insured they remained sharp and ready, never knowing where the next war might take them or when it would come.

And it had come today—here, far away from the Middle East, that world sure to be rocked dramatically as well if these men were unable to help change the outcome.

She took her phone out to call McCracken.