The Tenth Circle (30 page)

Washington, DC

Zarrin flexed the stiffness from her hands, fought with her legs to give her all they could. Her body had been severely overtaxed these past few days, well beyond the capacity of the medication to moderate her symptoms. McCracken was right; a firefight like this required an entirely different skill set and mind-set, both of which had long grown foreign to her. She had been involved in her share of shootouts and gunfights, more than her share, but not against a force of this size, purpose, and training for a very long time. An assassin’s work was simple by comparison, seldom meeting any resistance, with escape being the paramount concern as opposed to survival. That gave her more respect for Blaine McCracken, the man having lived in this world for so many years.

Zarrin clacked off shots from her Heckler & Koch HK45 compact pistol with its slim-line grip and ten-shot magazine. It was smaller in length and height than the company’s standard model or any .45 caliber pistol. It also weighed considerably less while still offering the legendary .45 stopping power. Zarrin was not a fast draw or fast shot, but she’d trained herself to be deadly accurate, the precision involved not unlike that needed for playing the piano.

She’d led two of al-Asi’s commandos on a breach of the backside of the building, catching the enemy gunmen in a classic cross fire to regain the advantage briefly lost once the Rock Machine members had found cover amid the cluttered floor. The pumping station looked like the main deck of an oil rig to her, even as she clacked off shots at targets she’d zeroed in deliberate fashion. Four downed in her first magazine, two more with her halfway through the second.

That’s when the fingers on Zarrin’s right hand spasmed and locked, quivery and trembling now. She looked for the cover she’d need to steady herself and will the strength back into her hands. But there was nothing offering enough of it nearby, so Zarrin focused on a set of steel stairs leading to the catwalk swirling above and moved for that instead.

“It is our unfinished task to make sure that this government works on behalf of the many, and not just the few; that it encourages free enterprise, rewards individual initiative, and opens the doors of opportunity to every child across this great nation. The American people don’t expect government to solve every problem. They don’t expect those of us in this chamber to agree on every issue. But they do expect us to put the nation’s interests before party. They do expect us to forge reasonable compromise where we can. For they know that America moves forward only when we do so together; and that the responsibility of improving this union remains the task of us all.”

The clock continued to count down in McCracken’s head, the time drawing ever nearer to the moment when the White Death would be released into the system to rupture the soon-to-be-frozen pipes supplying the Capitol Building with water. He tried not to think beyond that, every resulting picture conjured by his mind being too devastating to even consider.

He continued to clack off single shots from his assault rifle, mixed in occasionally with a three-shot burst. The smokers had ultimately done as much harm as good by rendering it impossible for him to distinguish the controls for the feeder line holding the White Death.

Captain Seven hadn’t been able to produce a schematic of the facility for McCracken to memorize, as was his custom in preparation for such scenarios. The captain had, though, come up with a map of the exact route of piping from this facility all the way to the Capitol that Blaine had committed to memory instead. A path strangely zigzagging in nature thanks to the high water table and shale deposits that determined much of the route for the engineers who’d designed, or upgraded, the system.

Keeping a mental count in his head was difficult since he still had no firm grasp of the enemy’s actual number. Regardless, keeping track of the level and intensity of each side’s gunfire was far more important in determining the tide of the battle and its eventual victor anyway. His vast experience, far too much, had imbued him with an instinctive sense of place in relation to control of territory from a square foot to mile. And right now that instinct told him his forces were winning the day and, thus, hopefully forestalling the Rock Machine’s efforts to pump the White Death into Washington’s water system.

The lack of high-ground fire from the catwalk above told him Sal Belamo had been unable to claim that strategic point as originally planned. Through the thinning smoke, though, he saw Zarrin clamoring upward, even as he glimpsed the shape of Jeremiah Rule leaning over a railing with eyes closed and hands clasped in a position of prayer.

“Those of us who’ve been sent here to serve can learn a thing or two from the service of our troops. When you put on that uniform, it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white; Asian, Latino, Native American; conservative, liberal; rich, poor; gay, straight. When you’re marching into battle, you look out for the person next to you, or the mission fails. When you’re in the thick of the fight, you rise or fall as one unit, serving one nation, leaving no one behind.”

Boyd Fowler darted from one position of cover to another, trying to chart a path to the single lever that would transfer flow of outgoing water from one line to another. A routine procedure undertaken to rotate the city’s water supply among three separate tanks of purified, treated water sucked in from the McMillan Reservoir.

One of those tanks now held the contents of the barrels salvaged from the West Virginia mountain facility where they otherwise would have done no more than collect dust for decades. Organizing the transport process had been incredibly challenging in such a limited time frame, managed only thanks to his access to trained drivers, trucks, and the proper equipment. Add to that the crucial element of already having a man in place here at this facility to fulfill the reverend’s grand plan, and Fowler couldn’t help but wonder if there really was a higher power at work.

He finally got enough of his bearings back to chart a clear path from his current position to the control lever he needed to throw in just minutes now, barely two according to his watch counting down the time since they’d released the liquid Freon. Fowler fired an automatic burst high and purposefully off target to gauge the response. A single enemy gunman lurched out, having honed in on his position, and Fowler gunned him down with the rest of his magazine, pulverizing the man with bullets and enjoying the site of misty blood froth erupting from each wound on impact.

He was snapping a fresh magazine into place when a fellow gang member on his right went down, followed by one of his left. The angle told him the fire had come from above and he twisted to see the smaller shape of a woman poised on the catwalk, sighting down with a pistol like she was some methodical Olympic target shooter.

Jeremiah Rule watched Boyd Fowler fire a burst upward, but it missed, clanging off steel, and was returned instantly by a single shot from the woman that would’ve nailed him had not some sense of danger, some cosmic warning, sent him sprawling to the floor.

Higher power indeed, the reverend thought, guiding them even now.

His eyes followed Fowler crawling across the floor, propelling himself along on his elbows to reach a nearby set of stairs that would take him up to the catwalk as well. The giant seemingly rendered indestructible, now that God was on his side.

“Amen,” Rule said out loud.

Washington, DC

McCracken could barely hear a thing, his eardrums singed by the constant cacophony of gunfire intensified by the confined space. He could not remember a time or a battle where it had strummed more incessantly, and that forced him to rely more on his eyes.

The problem was those eyes showed him only two of the five men sent by Colonel al-Asi still standing against what looked to be far more downed members of the Rock Machine; as many as eighteen, Blaine thought. They still had more guns, but their reduced number allowed Johnny Wareagle to whirl unimpeded about the facility in phantom-like fashion. Appearing from the smoke out of nowhere behind or alongside one of the enemy whose fire ceased immediately as he dropped from the battle.

The strategy at this point was simple: Eliminate all of the enemy, and there would be no one to release the White Death into the Capitol’s water supply. Until that was the case, it was a matter of keeping members of the Rock Machine too concerned with staying alive to try reaching the feeder controls that would flush the White Death into the system.

McCracken whirled, one way and then the other, from a vast pump to an intricate coupling of piping for cover. His next twist brought him out into the open, though with far fewer guns to threaten his advance. His hearing returned in fluttery fashion, his ears giving up more to him as his eyes continued to sweep about in eerie rhythm with his assault rifle, locking on a shape coming up behind a crouching Zarrin.

Her fingers fought her but she won. Again. She felt the pain, welcoming it since it was much preferable to stiffness.

Steady, sight, fire… . Steady, sight, fire… .

Tchaikovsky’s Concerto no. 1 sounded in her head, the very same concerto she’d played in Istanbul, approaching its crescendo as three more motorcycle gang members dropped to her bullets. Zarrin paused again to snap another fresh magazine into her Heckler & Koch, the music only she could hear settling her mind and holding her to rhythm not at all unlike working the ivory keys.

And then she felt a shape that smelled like grass and standing water and unwashed hair and clothes pounce upon her and wrap itself around her like a snake.

“We should follow the example of a police officer named Brian Murphy. When a gunman opened fire on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, and Brian was the first to arrive, he did not consider his own safety. He fought back until help arrived, and ordered his fellow officers to protect the safety of the Americans worshiping inside, even as he lay bleeding from twelve bullet wounds. When asked how he did that, Brian said, ‘That’s just the way we’re made.’ That’s just the way we’re made. We may do different jobs, and wear different uniforms, and hold different views than the person beside us. But as Americans, we all share the same proud title.”

“Die, die now!” Rule screamed at the woman, as he tried to choke her. “Die in the name of God!”

But the woman wouldn’t die. In the next instant, she had regained her feet, jerking him backward and forcing the reverend up against the opposite side of the catwalk. He felt the steel rail slam his kidneys, nearly stripping him of breath. Still, Rule wouldn’t let go, content to hold on for as long as it took him to kill this whore who had come amid the opposition. Her gun was gone. He’d heard it rattle to the catwalk and believed his own foot had kicked it down to the floor in the struggle. That left them equals.

Briefly.

Because she lurched forward, the motion much too fast for the lumbering Rule to compensate for with a shift of his weight. His next conscious thought was that he was airborne, staring at the heavens, which in this case was a ridged, heavily insulated ceiling. Then he realized he was falling, his time in the air strangely slow and drawn out until the floor came up and caught him.

Zarrin knew it was the reverend, the maker of all this madness. The constant echoing din of gunfire kept her from hearing the thud of his body’s impact with the floor below. She wondered if an even worse fate had befallen him, perhaps impaled or badly gored by one of the many steel assemblages that sprouted everywhere through the building.

She glanced downward and saw the reverend’s body canted on an empty stretch of floor, shoulders and head having dropped into a sunken pit housing a series of auxiliary pumps. Zarrin couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead. Just pulled herself back to her feet to find the biggest man she’d ever seen, bald with ink seeming to leak down his face and scalp, standing there.

The giant leveled a submachine gun toward her, an instant away from firing when the equally large shape of McCracken’s longtime Native American protector, Johnny Wareagle, pounced on him from behind.

Rule regained enough of his senses to realize where he was in the pumping station, his fall having left him just a few feet away from the lever that, once thrown, would mean the end of a nation bred by weakness and concession to be replaced by one blessed by a God who was no stranger to blood. Blood had been so much His method, so often His means to a desired end. This, here and now, tonight, was no different than the many battles fought at God’s hand and in His name with His blessing. The blood of some needed to be spilled, the lives of others snuffed out, so that His word could be heard in a country that had too often turned a deaf ear.

In that moment of clarity and realization for Jeremiah Rule, all pain vanished. All thoughts of death and failure vanished too, because the Lord had seen fit to bestow upon him one last gift before He took Rule home to His kingdom and much-deserved salvation. The women who would have brought his likeness into the world were gone. The bones of the boys they would’ve replaced, lives he’d taken by lives he’d bequeathed, were gone.

But none of that mattered anymore. Only one thing did:

The tenth circle …
His to unleash, his own fate to bring to fruition.

The reverend knew his body was broken, even as he felt the final miracle he needed building inside him. A searing heat that chased away his pain and held his shattered bones together. Maybe he was already dead, his final act to take place in the midst of his own resurrection. Rule felt himself climbing back to his feet, warm blood soaking through his clothes, its slow oozing turning his vision blurry and world wobbly before him.

But he was moving.

Walking. Past the remains of the boys he’d killed and women he’d turned to his service from their own sins.

To bring the tenth circle of Hell upon the world.

Reaching for the lever suddenly and miraculously within his grasp, having appeared magically before him, as something hotter still stitched up his spine and stole the rest of his pain away.

McCracken fired on full auto, watching Jeremiah Rule’s body arch, twist, and spasm as his magazine clicked empty.

But Rule didn’t die. He somehow righted himself, walked on, and reached out for a lever mounted at eye level with the controls for the one of the facility’s pumps. He yanked it downward while McCracken snapped a fresh magazine home, sighting forward again to find the reverend sliding down the steel and the White Death now jetting toward the Capitol Building.

The sight of the reverend falling stole Boyd Fowler’s attention away. The man who had baptized him, restored purpose to his life, had fallen in the battle, but, incredibly, not before he managed to throw the switch that Fowler himself couldn’t reach.

Doing God’s work, completing the mission the Lord had given him. The mere thought of that gave Fowler the chills.

He looked back toward the woman, his finger finding the trigger just as hands draped from behind him jerked the barrel upward and forced his fire harmlessly into the ceiling. He twisted, finding himself face-to-face and eye-to-eye with a man every bit as big as he was, a fucking Indian with coal-black hair tinted with gray and pulled back in a ponytail.

“Boss!” an out-of-breath Sal Belamo called out from near the door when McCracken reached it.

“I know, Sal. Captain, can you hear me?” Blaine said into the Bluetooth device somehow still clipped to his ear.

“Yup, along with the third World War raging there. MacNuts, you are a walking commercial for gun control.”

“The White Death’s been released into the system.”

“Fuck …”

“How do we stop it?”

“You can’t. It’s a gravity-fed system. Once in the pipes, you can kiss it good-bye. Game over.”