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Authors: Michael Walsh

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C
HAPTER
T
WO
Tehran, Iran
The Grand Ayatollah paused and waited for the reaction from his subalterns. Like all great imams—and none was greater than he, certainly not those Sunni infidels in Cairo, no matter their exalted titles at Al-Azhar University. Unbelievers, all of them. As they—and the world—would soon discover.
He paused for a moment, collecting his thoughts, making sure they were in accordance with the sacred word of Allah, divinely revealed through his Prophet, Mohammed. He took a deep breath. How wonderful to have been freed of Western superstition—the blasphemy they called “science”—by revelation. Those years spent in England, at the London School of Economics—what a waste. How foolish had been his country and his countrymen, still in thrall to the throne of England, upon which, in just a few decades or, Allah (PBUH) willing, a few years, the new caliph would sit, resplendent in his glory and beckoning to the twelfth Imam, the Mahdi, the expected one, to deliver the world from iniquity and unbelief.
How close it all was.
“O Muslims,” he began, his intonation stentorian, as befit his station. Another pause. He looked out upon the sea of humanity—all male—that faced him expectantly. Hanging on his every word. Watching him for signs and wonders. Never was he more conscious of his station, or of his sacred duty.
The Grand Ayatollah Ali Ahmed Hussein Mustafa Mohammed Fadlallah al-Sadiq said a silent prayer to Mohammed ibn al-Hasan al-Mahdi, still occulted at the bottom of his well in Qom.
Soon, my lord, soon will you come again, accompanied by Issa to unite the world of holy Muslims and benighted Christians against the Jews and infidels, ushering in the final era of peace and submission to Allah's holy will.
Soon.
“O Muslims,” he began again. “For thirteen hundred years have we, the Faithful, awaited this holy day. For thirteen centuries, O my brothers, have we patiently and faithfully observed the strictures and commandments of the one true faith. Triumphant have we been, and oppressed by the lies of the Jews and infidels, who have taken from us the holy cities of al-Quds, of al-Andalus. We have patiently awaited the day of deliverance, the day on which even the rocks and the trees cry out to alert us to the presence of the Jew, and reveal to our holy warriors his infernal hiding place, that we might kill him, his women, and his children.”
The crowd rose and cheered its approval. The Faithful could always be counted upon.
“Signs and portents were we promised by the Prophet and his holy Imams. And today I stand before you, Ali Ahmed Hussein Mustafa Mohammed Fadlallah al-Sadiq, to bring you the joyous news of fulfillment. O Muslims, I bring you the news of our Brother Arash Kohanloo, a glorious martyr to the sacred cause, who has struck a great blow against the Great Satan, the United States—such a blow as not even the Great Atta and his fellow martyrs on that happy day of September 11, 2001, could have dreamed.”
An enormous roar rumbled up from the crowd of the Faithful, here in Azadi Square, beneath the great tower of Freedom. Let the infidels of New York call their blasphemous tower, still rising after more than a decade, a sign of their surpassing impotence and of the immanence of the Twelfth Imam, call their pitiful attempt at reconstruction the Freedom Tower. Here was the heart of true freedom, brought by the Arabs a millennium and a half ago but since purged and purified of their desert savagery. The destruction of the Sassanid Empire and the abolition of the Zoroastrian religion was a small price to pay for enlightenment.
Thus spake Zarathustra? Only in the infidel lands. Here, only Allah spoke, and always spoke the truth, immutable and eternal and preserved forever in the Holy Qu'ran.
From here he could see the Alborz Mountains to the north, from what used to be called the Square of the Shahs, Shahyad, before the Revolution. How inspiring they were—almost as inspiring as the Holy City of Qom and the holy mosque of Jamkaran.
Soon.
“O Muslims,” he began again. “Of signs and portents and wonders have we long spoken. Of the Occultation. Of the Expected One. For centuries have we endured and suffered under the false promises of men such as Mohammed Ahmad, who slew the infidel Gordon at Khartoum but left us with nothing but blood and desolation and disappointment while the Crusaders took our lands, even unto the blessed city of al-Quds, where the Jew sits, plotting against us.
“O Muslims—the time has come, for I bring you joyous news.” He paused once again, for effect but more—for divine inspiration. He breathed the air in deeply, letting the breath of Allah wash over him, purging and cleansing him, revealing holy Truth to him as had been vouchsafed to only a handful of great men in the centuries since al-Hasan secluded his holy person in the sacred well.
Greatness. It felt good. It felt holy. It felt right.
“O Muslims. The Day of Deliverance is at hand.”
He stopped and waited. Part of being a holy man was the sacred caesura, the final dramatic pause that signified to the Believers that Truth had been revealed, the sacred Promises had been made—Promises that must and would be kept. Because a holy man also knew that Promises unrealized, Promises unkept would be turned back on him with the force of a thousand suns—with the force of the infidel Jew Oppenheimer, who said “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” at the birth of Trinity.
So far away and yet so near. Deep in the heart of the Jew city of New York, at one of the Jew holy places for a people who had lost their faith. No longer would the Brothers bomb their so-called holy places, for not even the Jew believed in them anymore.
No, this time they would strike at the heart. Their great financial center the Believers had already destroyed. But that was not enough. Not enough for the Jew, who could always find money. Money could be lost and found again—they had been doing that for centuries, frustrating the Believers, who had forced them into
dhimmitude
in al-Andalus and made both them and the Christian dogs like it.
But health—life—was something else. They might die for money, but unlike the Believers, they would not die for Death.
The infidel West no longer believed in the afterlife. It was too cowardly, too solicitous of its own misery. But a Believer would willingly give up his life and the lives of his women and children, in furtherance of the Truth.
Which was, at last, in the person of Ali Ahmed Hussein Mustafa Mohammed Fadlallah al-Sadiq, so near to hand.
“O Muslims,” he shouted. “The Messiah will not rise unless fear, great earthquakes, and sedition take place. The worst kind of humans will become leaders. Women will rid themselves of the hijab. Men will dress like women. Adultery will become common.”
They responded with a roar. The signs and portents were all around. They knew that the time of the Coming was near. They were shaking their fists at the heavens, their ranks a sea of signs proclaiming
DEATH TO THE GREAT SATAN
,
DEATH TO ISRAEL
,
DEATH TO
AMERICA.
“O Muslims, on all sides we are afflicted with oppression and injustice, just as the holy Prophet, blessings and peace be upon him, so long ago predicted. And what did he say? That a nation from the east will rise . . .”
He was working the crowd now, letting their anger and their faith swell and build like a mighty wave.
“. . . and prepare the way . . .”
“
Allahu akbar
!” shouted the crowd.
“. . . prepare the way—for
the Coming of the Imam Mahdi
!”
He threw out his arms as if to embrace all of creation, slowly raising them upward.
As that moment, a blinding flash of light tore through the sky. It was like a lightning bolt hurtled from the hand of Allah, propelled to earth, there to form and coalesce into . . .
“O Muslims,” shouted al-Sadiq, “so it is written, so shall it be done. After a thousand years—behold the Face!”
For a moment, as the vision became manifest, nobody said or did anything. And then, as one, the men prostrated themselves upon their prayer rugs in homage, and let out a deafening cry that shook the heavens:
“
Allahu akbar!”
“
Allahu akbar!”
“
Allahu akbar!”
And then, once more as one, they rose, their faces purple with rage and yet suffused with a divine fire. Truly had they become holy warriors,
mujahideen
, ready for the final battle, which was now at hand.
The Face hung in the sky, the Face that none had ever looked upon, the Face that only blasphemers and infidels had ever imagined in their degenerate art . . . the Face now revealed at last to the Believers, the Face that would lead them to the final confrontation and to ultimate victory.
The Face of the Prophet, as he had been in life, and so was in life eternal.
“
Allahu akbar!”
he cried, and then dared to gaze once more upon its magnificence, forbidden no longer.
He glanced in the direction of the sacred well of Qom, the holy well in which dwelt Ali, the occulted Twelfth Imam, in hiding from the infidels and the crusaders all the Unbelievers since the year 941 in the Christian dog calendar. Deep within, he could already sense the stirrings. . . .
“Allahu akbar!!”
He heard the sound. And it was good.
At last, after more than a thousand years, He was coming.
And he, the Grand Ayatollah Ali Ahmed Hussein Mustafa Mohammed Fadlallah al-Sadiq, was the instrument of his holy wrath.
C
HAPTER
T
HREE
Central California—the San Joaquin Valley near Coalinga
“Get ready for stinky!” shouted Danny Impellatieri as they drove north on the Golden State Freeway toward San Francisco. The Five, people called it now, just as they now called the Santa Monica Freeway the Ten. It was a sign of the decline, he decided. The end of the world, for all real Californians. In the old days, when he was growing up in Los Angeles, people knew the difference between the Santa Monica Freeway, heading west, and the San Bernardino Freeway, heading east. Between Highway 101, heading north through the Cahuenga Pass, and the Hollywood Freeway, after it split off in Valley Village and became Highway 170. Between the 110 that was the Pasadena Freeway and the 110 that was Harbor Freeway.
Between the days when California had names and today, when it had numbers. Between romance and quantification. The poetry had fled, to be replaced by the accountant's green eyeshades. And yet the state was broke, diminished, destroyed.
Progress.
Hope, Emma, and Rory had never been to San Francisco, and they were more than a little trepidatious. To all too many Americans, especially those in the Midwest, the City by the Bay was a combination of Sodom and Gomorrah without Lot's saving grace—as Herb Caen used to call it, Baghdad by the Bay, back in the day when Baghdad meant Sin City, not Saddam City. But to Danny, it was the city of DiMaggio and Lefty O'Doul; the city of Geary Street, not O'Farrell Street. The city of white-gloved women on their way to take in
Lucia di Lammermoor
at the Opera, of foghorns, and the military might of America, over in Oakland, or Vallejo, or on Treasure Island. To Danny, it was a city of what America used to be, not what America had become.
All of which made him today the bad guy. When the thought police, the PC Nazis, came, he would be one of the first to go—maybe to Alcatraz, maybe straight to the needle at San Q. How fast the country had changed. But somebody had to be the bad guy, and it might as well be him. After all, his wife, Diane, was dead. And with her had died so much, more than a year ago....
He reached over and laid his hand, ever so gently, on the thigh of the woman sitting next him in the passenger seat. Not his dead wife but soon enough his new wife—the woman for whom he had released the past and embraced a new future that he had never envisioned, had never prepared or planned for, but which he joyously welcomed.
Was it wrong? Could you stay married to a ghost, or did the ghosts of the past demand that we, the living, go on living? Why wouldn't they? Didn't they want to go on living themselves? Had they died willingly? Didn't all God's creatures want to live? Wasn't that the first principle of life, of the life force? To go on living, even after death? If you fought against the dying of the light, if you fought against death, did not that bring you closer go God? Or was He just another myth, a fairy tale told to children by their elders to explain away the terrors of the night? Those things that exploded in the midst of the safest environments, that robbed you of your certainty just before they stole your life and the lives of others, randomly, capriciously, in the way of the Greek gods, or the Fates, or, God help us, the meaningless lares and penates.
Her name was Hope. Hope Gardner—and soon enough, if she accepted him, Impellatieri. And then where once there were two families with four parents and three children, there would now be one family with three children.
He was going to propose to her in San Francisco.
“I know this place on Clement Street.” He pronounced it right, with the accent on the second syllable. In every city, there were test words, the ones that separated the natives from the locals. Cle-MENT Street was one of them. Like HOUSE-ton Street in New York. Not only was all politics local, so was pronunciation. And it was precisely in these interstices that spies and illegals and confidential ops got killed.
It was never the big things. It was never the cover stories. It was the little things, the details, that tripped you up, like DiMaggio's batting average. The Great DiMaggio, who accompanied Hemingway's Old Man on his fateful journey to the Sea, in spirit, if not in person. Simplicity, not complexity. The best cover story was 99.9 percent true. Everything important must be true except for the sliver of a lie that you told. Even to the ones you loved most.
And this was your life; to lie to everybody important to you, to everybody you loved, and to tell the truth, the whole truth and almost the entire truth, to those whom you despised, to those whom you loathed, to those whom you were about to kill.
After all they'd been through in the past year, it was a vacation well-deserved, and in his favorite city. No matter how nutty it was, San Francisco was still the best town in the country, a place devoted to wine, food, natural beauty, and the pursuit of sybaritic happiness. If Thomas Jefferson were alive, thought Danny, he'd live in San Francisco. Although maybe not George Washington . . .
“How stinky, Dad?” asked Jade, his daughter, from the back of the BMW. He could almost hear her mother's voice. Diane's voice. Diane, whom he'd loved so much that they had conceived the most wonderful daughter together. But she was gone now. And no matter how much you loved a woman, you could not make love to a ghost. You could not even love a ghost. All you could do was honor her memory and love the creature that allowed her to live on....
“Real stinky, I hope!” shouted Rory, Hope's son and younger child. “Gross-out stinky! Barf-in-your-socks stinky! Girl gross-out stinky!”
Rory was sitting in the backseat, between his sister and Jade, still getting used to the idea that, horrors, he might have yet another sister in his future. Two against one was by his standards a fair fight on the playground, but the backseat of a car was an entirely different proposition. You couldn't hit a girl, not if you were a real man. Not if you were like his dead father, or like Danny, who had lost his wife in that terrorist attack in Los Angeles, or like the weird guy who had saved him from the bomb back in Edwardsville, Illinois, where they used to live before his dad got killed and his mom met Danny and . . .
“Okay, hold your noses, kids!” shouted Danny. “Here comes Cowschwitz.”
Hope bit her tongue even as she held her nose. Everybody knew the term “Cowschwitz” was incredibly un-PC, even as most Californians who drove up and down I-5 between L.A. to San Francisco used it.
There would be cows as far as the eye could see on both sides of the freeway, that Rory knew. Cows for miles. Nothing but cows, mooing, lowing, farting, sending vast plumes of methane into the atmosphere, killing the ozone, destroying the climate, and alerting the aliens on Mars, or the Mother Ship or the planets orbiting Alpha Centauri or Betelgeuse to our malevolent presence. Nothing good could come out of Cowschwitz, thought Rory, except maybe some milk and some really good steaks.
The girls squealed. Rory expected shrieks from Emma, his real sister, but Jade, Danny's daughter and only child, was an altogether mysterious creature. She was four years younger than Emma, but she seemed older, wiser, more mature. Maybe that was because she had lost her mother and she was an only, whereas he and Emma had lost their dad, but at least they had each other. And their mom . . .
“Here we go!” said Danny, gunning it.
Instinctively, Rory threw his arms around his sister, Emma.
“Any moment now,” said Hope, getting into the spirit of things. Rory glanced at his mother just as she tossed a smile at Danny. There was definitely something going on with those two....
Jade clutched his hand. “Ready, Rory?” she asked. He nodded, then made like a deep-sea diver and held his nose as he went under.
“Pee-you!” shouted the kids, almost in unison.
Emma was the first to see it. She said nothing, but only let out a small gasp, as if the gap between expectation and reality were something that might be papered over in the next quarter mile. Rory, however, had long ago learned to interpret his sister's gasps—
“What is it?” he asked.
“Look,” she said, pointing. And whispering.
At first, Rory only saw the vast expanse of the Central Valley in all its uncinematic nonsplendor. Miles and miles of nothing, flatlands, with invisible mountains to the east of them and to the west of them, and a vast ocean not far away.
Then Rory saw it—
A dead cow.
One, at first. And then two. And then ten. And then at least a hundred.
Dead, all dead.
“Mommy!” screamed Emma. “Make it stop. Make them go away!!”
The car hurtled northward at more than seventy-five miles an hour. The CHP never stopped anybody on this stretch of I-5. But still the dead cows would not stop. They kept on coming, in serried ranks collapsed in homage to a bovine Morpheus, lying on their sides as if sleeping, but their bellies already bloated with death, some of them already burst open, their guts spilling out, the stench rising....
“Oh, my God,” said Hope. “What . . . ?”
“I don't know,” said Danny, already punching the keys of his secure iPhone. As per the agreed-upon code with Fort Meade, he hit a pound key in the middle of his home phone number, then a series of rotating digits depending on the day of the week minus four, which he knew would send the message directly over a secure channel to the one man who could possibly answer his question. To the one man whom he needed to alert, right now, before the situation got even further out of hand. To a man he'd never met, but whom he trusted beyond all others.
There was an overpass, just ahead. As they approached—
“Look!” shouted Rory. “Over there—people!”
Danny slammed on the brakes, screeching and skidding. A small group of people was clustered to one side of the overpass. He could see candles flickering as they huddled around something, looked at something—something that, to judge from their gazes, was on the concrete wall of one of the bridge's struts.
The car slowed and rolled to a stop. “Stay inside,” Danny commanded, but it was Hope who relayed the order and gave it parental authority.
“Nobody move,” she said. “Let Danny handle it.”
He got out of the car, ready for anything.
A group of Mexicans, farmworkers, was huddled together, their faces illuminated, flickering in the light of scores of candles, all eyes turned toward an object on the wall . . . muttering to themselves in Spanish. No, not muttering—praying.
Dios te salve, María, llena eres de gracia, el Señor es contigo. Bendita tú eres entre todas las mujeres, y bendito es el fruto de tu vientre, Jesús. Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros, pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte. Amen
And then he saw it. “
Jesús, Maria,
” he gasped

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