for him at the store.
But who — even Farrooq Al-Harbi himself — would have guessed what good use those hours spent watching his mother sew would come to?
When the six pouches were firmly stitched into the seam allowances of the cassocks, he unlocked the single closet in his tiny apartment and took out the pound of C-4 his brother had given him only yesterday. He held the explosive reverently in his hands, and then held it up as an offering to Allah.
“For the glory of God,” he whispered.
Then he returned to his sewing machine and unwrapped the brick of plastique. He marked it into thirds, and then sixths. Very slowly and with well-rehearsed movements, he began pinching off pieces of the gray compound, rolled them into balls that were slightly less than an inch in diameter, and dropped them down into the first pouch. When a sixth of the brick had disappeared into the pouch, Farrooq gently squeezed it to press the plastique into a single mass.
Next went the small blasting cap, along with the batteries to which it was wired, and the firing mechanism, all of which had been fitted together by someone with far more knowledge of such things than he himself possessed.
All he had to do was follow the instructions he’d been given.
Soon, all that was left to do was to feed the trigger wire through the seams to the cuff, where the detonation button would be sewn, easily accessible to the altar servers.
When all three cassocks had been completely wired, each with two sets of explosives, carefully wrapped in tissue paper and packed into their original boxes, he let out a great sigh.
It would be a very dramatic High Mass.
Something that Boston had never seen before.
And Catholics the world over would watch, and know the wrath of Allah.
For him, though, and for his brother, the fate of the Pope would be far more personal. All of the wrongs committed by the Church against his family would at last be avenged. He and his brother would at last be at peace.
Farrooq clicked off the light over his sewing machine and rotated his head to stretch some of the stiffness from his neck. He had worked through the night, but the project was nearly finished. He had yet to deliver the garments and demonstrate how they worked. When that was done, though, all would be left in the hands of Allah.
He opened the refrigerator, and squinted against the bright light in the gloom of the predawn apartment. The shelves were empty but for a shrink-wrapped case of bottled water. He pulled one free, twisted off the top and drained it in a single protracted gulp.
Farrooq stretched out on the floor to ease his aching muscles. The early light of dawn crept in around the closed blinds. He would rest — just for a few moments — before morning prayers. He closed his eyes and gloried in the satisfaction that he had done good work tonight.
He had done Allah’s work.
Now the rest was up to his brother, who would see the mission to completion.
CHAPTER 50
RYAN LOOKED INTO the gaping jaws of Hell.
Jagged shards of poisonous multicolored razors surrounded him, growing ever closer. If he could only take a giant leap, he could jump over them to safety, but with each breath, they came nearer. He couldn’t get a running start. In fact, they were now slicing into the toes of his shoes, but he couldn’t back up, they were all around. He couldn’t escape them. In a moment, the greedy, bloodthirsty things would carve away his feet until he fell and let them rip him to shreds.
Like looking up through deep water toward the light, Ryan saw consciousness above, and he began to swim toward it, but it wasn’t water, it was some thick, gelatinous stuff that clogged his nose and mouth. He could barely move his arms and legs. As he got closer to the light, he felt colder. He strove to wrap his arms around his chest, to curl up in a cozy position, but he couldn’t move his arms or legs. They seemed to be strapped down.
He heard a low, soothing voice intoning.
He swam hard against the current that sucked him down, the gelatin smelling of sickening, noxious fumes.
Then something tugged hard from the inside of his stomach, pulling on his naval, and he felt his belly rip open.
He paused in his desperate ascent to consciousness and looked down to see what it was.
A gnarled hand reached out of his gut and sank its claws into his flesh, and began to haul itself out of him.
Ryan flailed at it with ineffective hands that seemed to move right through the creature. He thrashed desperately in slow motion, but the creature was with him, of course, it was inside him.
But it wasn’t just a dream. The creature sank back inside before showing his face. But now Ryan could feel it roaming around inside of him. Then it started to inhabit him. It felt as if it were trying him on, as if Ryan were nothing more than a rubber suit.
He felt the thing squeeze into his legs, then his torso. Ryan felt pinched out of his own chest. The creature commandeered his heartbeat, and then it rammed itself inside Ryan’s arms.
But when it started pushing up through Ryan’s neck, he began to choke and gag.
And then he was lying on a stone slab, tied down.
His stomach heaved, and he retched.
Sister Mary David held a cloth to his lips to catch the bile.
Father Sebastian raised a bloody heart high in an offering, and when he placed the dripping thing on Ryan’s naked chest, Ryan thought he was going to throw up again, and his entire being was seized by a terrible dizziness and disorientation. He lay inert for a moment, cold and confused.
And then his mouth opened and a voice — a voice he’d never before heard, emerged from his lips. As the strange voice uttered words he couldn’t even begin to understand, Ryan felt himself slipping into the dark abyss of unconsciousness. He fought against it, struggling against the blackness, but when he opened his eyes, he was faced not with any reality, but a scene from a nightmare that seemed to be suspended directly above him. It was a face, but a face that wavered and changed with every breath Ryan took. One moment it looked like the face of evil incarnate, but the next moment Ryan recognized it as something else.
It was his own face, twisted and contorted into something terrible.
Ryan tried not to look at it, but he couldn’t turn away.
“Get away from me!” he whispered.
The thing suspended above him only laughed, but the laughter seemed to emerge from somewhere deep in his own mind.
“No!” Ryan screamed, but even as he tried to banish the vision, he felt the demon becoming part of him.
A part of him he would never be rid of again.
“Dad!” he cried, the word emerging as nothing more than a broken sob. But from a long way off, a tiny whisper rose out of the echoing vastness.
It was his father’s voice — he was sure of it.
“Dad?” Ryan clung to his own awareness even as it slipped away from him. “Dad?”
