Blasphemy

“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?” Hazelius asked, cutting off Edelstein.

The reason I have come to you.

“What is that?”

I have a task for you.

The singing sound of Isabella yawed suddenly, like a Doppler-shifted train going by. There was a rumble somewhere in the mountain, a vibration of the very backbone of the mesa. The screen flickered and a hiss of snow whipped across it, obliterating the words.

“Shit,” breathed Dolby. “Shit.” He struggled to adjust the software controls, his fingers pounding the keyboard.

“What the hell’s happening?” Hazelius cried.

“Decollimation of the beam,” Dolby said. “Harlan, damn it, you have power-flow alarms going off! Alan! Get back on your servers! What the hell are all of you doing standing around, for chrissakes!”

“Back to your stations!” Hazelius said.

Another rumble shook the Bunker. Everyone rushed back to their workstations. A new message hung on the screen, unread.

“Stabilizing,” St. Vincent said.

“Collimated again,” said Dolby. A sweat stain was spreading across the back of his T-shirt.

“Alan, the servers?”

“Under control.”

“What about the magnet?” asked Hazelius.

“Surviving” said Dolby, “but we don’t have much longer. That was damn close.”

“Well, then.” Hazelilus turned back to the Visualizer. “Why don’t you tell us what this task is?”

48

THE PICKUP RAN OUT OF GAS just beyond the top of the Dugway. Eddy used the last bit of momentum to coast off the road into the sagebrush, where the truck came to a bumpy halt. Above the skeletons of the pinons, a faint glow of light in the night sky marked the Isabella project, three miles to the east.

He climbed out of the truck, pulled out his knapsack, shrugged into it, and began walking down the road. The moon had not yet risen. While he could see the stars from his trailer, tonight, on top of the mesa, they seemed unnaturally bright, pools and swirls of phosphorescence that filled the dome of the sky. In the distance, faintly silhouetted against the firmament, a line of high-tension towers headed for Isabella.

He could feel every thump of his heart. He could hear the blood singing in his ears. He had never felt so alive. He hiked at a rapid pace, and in twenty minutes he had reached the turnoff to the old Nakai Rock Trading Post. Here he paused, and then decided to scout out the valley. In a few minutes he had reached the edges of the bluffs where the road dropped down into the valley. He focused his binoculars on the settlement.

A large tipi sat in the middle of the field, aglow from the flickering light of a fire inside. Nearby stood a helter-skelter structure, a dome of branches leaning together, covered with canvas tarps held down with rocks. Beyond it, a bonfire was burning down to coals, exposing inside a pile of cherry-red rocks.

He had seen this before: a Navajo sweat lodge.

The faint sounds of chanting and a rapidly beating drum drifted up on the dry, quiet air. How odd. The Navajos were having a ceremony. Had they sensed it, too—this great and powerful thing that was about to happen? Had they felt the coming wrath of God? But they were idolaters, worshipping false gods. He shook his head in sadness: “Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”

The sweat lodge and the tipi were one more sign that the End Days were fully come, that the devil walked among them.

Aside from the Navajos, the valley looked deserted, the scattered houses dark. Eddy looped around and bypassed the settlement, and in another ten minutes he came to the airstrip. Deserted, too, were the hangars against the night sky. The Antichrist and his disciples had gathered at Isabella, deep down in the mountain—he was sure of that.

He approached the chain-link fence around the security area, taking care not to get close enough to set off the alarms he assumed were there. It gleamed in the harsh sodium lights that illuminated the area. The elevator down to Isabella stood a few hundred yards away, a tall, ugly, windowless building topped with clusters of antennae and satellite dishes. He could feel the ground vibrate from deep within; he could hear the hum of Isabella. “And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon.”

His mind and spirit burned, as if in a fever. He looked up at the hulking steel towers that brought in the electricity to run the machine, and his flesh crawled. They could have been the devil’s very own army, striding through the night. The high-tension wires crackled and hummed like hair charged with static. He reached into his bag and grasped the warm leather of his Bible, feeling its reassuring solidity. Bracing himself with a short prayer, he walked toward the nearest tower, a few hundred yards away.

He stopped beneath the tower. The gigantic struts disappeared upward into the night, visible only by the lines of blackness they painted across the stars. The power lines spit and hissed like serpents, the sound mingling with the moaning of the wind through the struts, a symphony of the damned. Eddy shivered to the roots of his soul.

The phrase from Revelation came into his mind again: “ . . . to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty.” They would be coming—he was sure of that. They would answer his appeal. He needed to be ready. He needed a plan.

He began scouting the area, making notes of the topography and terrain, the roads, access points, fences, towers, other structures.

Above him, the high-tension lines hissed and spit. The stars winked. The earth turned. Russell Eddy moved through the dark, for the first time in his life supremely sure of himself.

49

LOCKWOOD WAS SURPRISED AT HOW SHABBY and bare-bones-functional the White House Situation Room was. It smelled like a basement rec room that needed airing out. The walls were painted ochre. A mahogany table dominated the center, with microphones strung down the middle. Flat-panel screens lined the walls. Chairs lined the two long walls, shoulder to shoulder.

The ugly, institutional clock at the end of the table read midnight, exactly.

The president strode in, looking crisp in his gray suit and mauve tie, white hair swept back. He turned to the Navy rating who evidently ran the electronics. “I want you to patch in the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, my National Security Advisor, DDHS, DFBI, and DCI.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Oh, and don’t forget the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee so he won’t bitch later about being out of the loop.”

He took a seat at the head of the table. Roger Morton, the chief of staff, patrician and cautious, took the seat to his right. Gordon Galdone, the campaign manager, as large and disheveled as an unmade bed, wearing a brown Wal-Mart suit, took the seat on the other side of the president. Jean occupied a chair against the wall in the corner, behind the president, primly perched with her steno pad at the ready.

“Let’s just go ahead—the others will join us when they join us.”

“Yes sir.”

Some of the flat panels were already lighting up with attendees. Jack Strand, the FBI director, was the first. He sat in his office over in Quantico, a giant FBI seal behind him, his square-jawed cop’s face touched with old acne scars staring relentlessly into the screen—a man to inspire confidence, or at least trying to.

The Secretary of DOE, a man named Hall, popped up next from his office on Independence Avenue, the man ostensibly in charge of Isabella. But he had never taken control—he was a genial delegator—and now he was a mess, his plump face covered with a sheen of sweat, his light blue tie knotted so tight it looked like he’d just tried to hang himself with it.

“All right,” said the President, clasping his hands on the table in front. “Secretary Hall, you’re the man in