'You know, we're a victim of our own success,' the former senator said quietly. 'We've managed to handle every nation-state that ever crossed us, but these invisible bastards who work for their vision of God are harder to identify and track. God is omnipresent. So are His perverted agents.'
'Gerry, my boy, if it was easy, we wouldn't be here.'
'Tom, thank God I can always count on you for moral support.'
'We live in an imperfect world, you know. There isn't always enough rain to make the corn grow, and, if there is, sometimes the rivers flood. My father taught me that.'
'I always meant to ask you — how the hell did your family ever end up in goddamned Nebraska?'
'My great-grandfather was a soldier — cavalryman, Ninth Cavalry, black regiment. He didn't feel like moving back to Georgia when his hitch ran out. He'd spent some time at Fort Crook outside of Omaha, and the dumbass didn't mind the winters. So, he bought a spread near Seneca and farmed corn. That's how history started for us Davises.'
'Wasn't any Ku Klux Klan in Nebraska?'
'No, they stayed in Indiana. Smaller farms there, anyway. My great-grandfather shot himself some buffalo when he got started. There's the biggest damned head over the fireplace at home. Damned thing still smells. Dad and my brother mainly hunt longhorn antelope now, the 'speed-goat,' they call it at home. Never got to like the taste.'
'What's your nose say on this new intel, Tom?' Hendley asked.
'I'm not planning to go to New York anytime soon, buddy.'
East of Knoxville, the road divided. I-40 went east. I- 81 went north, and the rented Ford took the latter through the mountains explored by Daniel Boone when the western frontier of America had scarcely stretched out of sight of the Atlantic Ocean. A road sign showed the exit for the home of someone named Davy Crockett. Whoever that was, Abdullah thought, driving downhill through a pretty mountain pass. Finally, at a town named Bristol, they were in Virginia, their final major territorial boundary. About six more hours, he calculated. The land here, in the sunlight, was lush in its greenness, with horse and dairy farms on both sides of the road. Even churches, usually white-painted wooden buildings with crosses atop the steeples. Christians. The country was clearly dominated by them.
Unbelievers.
Enemies.
Targets.
They had their guns in the trunk to deal with them. First, I-81 north to I-64. They'd long since memorized their routing. The other three teams were surely in place now. Des Moines, Colorado Springs, and Sacramento. Each a city large enough to have at least one good shopping mall. Two were provincial capitals. None were major cities, however. All were what they called 'Middle America,' where the 'good' people lived, where the 'ordinary,' 'hardworking' Americans made their homes, where they felt safe, far from the great centers of power — and corruption. Few, if any, Jews to be found in those cities. Oh, maybe a few. Jews like to run jewelry stores. Maybe even in the shopping malls. That would be an added bonus, but only something to be scooped up if it accidentally offered itself. Their real objective was to kill ordinary Americans, the ones who considered themselves safe in the womb of ordinary America. They would soon learn that safety in this world was an illusion. They'd learn that the thunderbolt of Allah reached everywhere.
'So, this is it?' Tom Davis asked.
'Yes, it is,' Dr. Pasternak replied. 'Be careful. It's fully loaded. The red tag, you see. The blue one is not charged.'
'What does it deliver?'
'Succinylcholine, a muscle relaxant, essentially a synthetic and more potent form of curare. It shuts down all the muscles, including the diaphragm. You can't breath, speak, or move. You're fully awake. It'll be a miserable death,' the physician added in a cold, distant voice.
'Why is that?' Hendley asked.
'You can't breathe. Your heart rapidly goes into anoxia, essentially a massive induced heart attack. It won't feel very good at all.'
'Then what?'
'Well, the onset of symptoms would take about sixty seconds. Thirty seconds more for the full effects of the drug to present themselves. The victim would collapse then, say, ninety seconds after the injection. Breathing stops completely about the same time. The heart is starved for oxygen. It will try to beat, but it's not delivering any oxygen to the body, or to itself. Heart tissue will die in about two or three minutes — and will be extremely painful as it does so. Unconsciousness will happen at about the three-minute mark unless the victim had been exercising beforehand — in that case, the brain will be highly infused with oxygen. Ordinarily, the brain has about three minutes' worth of oxygen in it to function without additional oxygen infusion, but at about the three-minute mark — after onset of symptoms, that is; four and a half minutes after being stuck — the victim will lose consciousness. Complete brain death will take another three minutes or so. After that, the succinylcholine will metabolize in the body, even after death. Not entirely, but enough so that only a really sharp pathologist will pick it up on a toxicology scan, and then only if he's prepped to look for it. The only real trick is to get your test subject in the buttocks.'
'Why there?' Davis asked.
'The drug works just fine with an IM — intramuscular — injection. When people are posted, it's always faceup so that you can see and remove the organs. They rarely turn the body over. Now, this injection system does leave a mark, but it's hard to spot under the best of circumstances, and then only if you're looking at the right area. Even drug addicts — that will be one of the things they check for — don't inject themselves in the rump. It will appear to be an unexplained heart attack. Those happen every day. Rare, but not at all unknown. Tachycardia can make it happen, for example. The injector pen is a modified insulin pen like the kind Type I diabetics use. Your mechanics did a great job of disguising it. You can even write with it, but if you rotate the barrel, it swaps out the pen part for the insulin part. A gas charge in the back of the barrel injects the transfer agent. The victim will probably notice it, like a bee sting but less painful, but inside a minute and a half, he won't be telling anybody about it. His most likely reaction will be a minor 'Ouch' and then rub the spot — if that much. Like a mosquito bite on the neck. You might slap at it, but you don't call the police.'
Davis held the safe 'blue' pen. It was a little bulky, like a third-grader might use on his first official introduction to a ballpoint pen after using thick-barrel pencils and crayons for a couple of years. So, as you approached your subject, you took it out of your coat pocket, and swung it in a reverse stabbing motion, and just kept going. Your backup hitter would watch the subject fall to the sidewalk, maybe even stop to render assistance, then watch the bastard die, and get up and go on his way — well, maybe call an ambulance so that his body could get sent to the hospital and be properly dismantled under medical supervision.
'Tom?'
'I like it, Gerry,' Davis replied. 'Doc, how confident are you about this stuff dissipating after the subject goes down for the count?'
'Confident,' Dr. Pasternak answered, and both of his hosts remembered that he was professor of anesthesiology at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He probably knew his stuff. Besides, they'd trusted him enough to let him in on the secrets of The Campus. It was a little late to stop trusting him now. 'It's just basic biochemistry. Succinylcholine is made up of two acetylcholine molecules. Esterases in the body break the chemical down into acetylcholine fairly rapidly, so it is very likely to be undetectable, even by someone up at Columbia-Presbyterian. The only hard part: to have it done covertly. If you could bring him into a doctor's office, for example, it would just be a matter of infusing potassium chloride. That would put the heart into fibrillation. When cells die, they give off potassium anyway, and so the relative increase would not be noticed, but the IV mark would be hard to hide. There are a lot of ways to do this. I just had to pick one that is applied relatively conveniently by fairly unskilled people. As a practical matter, a really good pathologist might not be able to determine the exact cause of death — and he would know that he didn't know, and that would bother him — but that's only if the body is examined by a really talented guy. Not too many of them around. I mean, the best guy up at Columbia is Rich Richards. He really hates not knowing something. He's a real intellectual, a problem solver, and genius biochemist in addition to being a superb physician. I asked him about this, and he told me it would be extremely difficult to
