The Devil's Light
Authors: Richard North Patterson
Also by Richard North Patterson
In the Name of Honor
The Spire
Eclipse
The Race
Exile
Conviction
Balance of Power
Protect and Defend
Dark Lady
No Safe Place
Silent Witness
The Final Judgment
Eyes of a Child
Degree of Guilt
Private Screening
Escape the Night
The Outside Man
The Lasko Tangent
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
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Copyright © 2011 by Richard North Patterson
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First Scribner hardcover edition May 2011
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2011004754
ISBN 978-1-4516-1680-4
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FOR DAVID LEWIS
A
t ten o'clock on a night in late summer, a private aircraft ends a vertiginous upward climb by releasing a nuclear bomb over the city.
Seconds later, a missile turns the invader into an orange fireball against the night sky. As the bomb detonates in midair, a brilliant yellow light obliterates the darkness like a sheet of sun. After a last instant of silence there is a terrible explosion.
At the epicenter of the blast, the temperature is one million degrees Fahrenheit. Men and women on the sidewalks or in cars become ash; homes and apartments collapse into dust indistinguishable from their occupants; a massive wave sweeps the ocean, swamping boats and drowning anyone in them. For miles from its center the city is a radioactive scar without features. Farther out there are the photographic prints of buildings that no longer exist, imposed like shadows on the husks of ruined structures and charred bodies by the stunning light of the blast.
At its edge, walls of fire rise from nothing. On the highways ringing the city, cars collide, the eyeballs of their drivers and passengers turned to fluid. Others, also blinded, are buried in collapsing concrete or eviscerated by spears of falling glass. Birds ignite in midflight; a thick cloud of dust obscures the moon; airborne poisons fall like black rain; skin slides off the bodies of victims crying out in torment. The city itself is silent, the only movement ashes stirring in a nuclear wind. Two hundred thousand people no longer exist.
The slow death of a nation has begun.
*Â Â *Â Â *
PAKINSTAN 2009
Osama Bin Laden listened in silence, his long legs folded in front of him, his liquid eyes still in a face so sallow it seemed to match his whitening beard. When the narrator had finished, he said, “All this with a single bomb.”
Sitting at the edge of the carpet, Ayman Al Zawahiri looked from Bin Laden to the narrator, his eyes darting and suspicious behind steel-framed glasses. With a voice thickened by emotion, Amer Al Zaroor replied, “I believe so, yes. If we use it well.”
Dressed in robes and turbans, the three men were alone and, for a moment, wordless. They had risked much to be together; though their leader had powerful protectors within Pakistan, the compound in which he hid might well be closely watched. To Al Zaroor it felt as though Bin Laden's deep contemplation had rendered the others muteâthe strange power, he supposed, of a man who faces death by holding fiercely to his vision. At last Bin Laden said, “A seductive dream, Amer. In which everything depends on our choice of targets.”
Amer Al Zaroor nodded. “I understand this, Renewer.”
“Do you?” Zawahiri cut in harshly. “Then surely you have weighed the consequences if such a dream becomes reality. You ask us to risk all.”
Al Zaroor faced him, aware of the magnetism that his lean, handsome face and reasoned manner exerted on othersâeven Osama Bin Laden. “Our situation is bleak,” he said. “We are inferior to the crusaders and Jews in knowledge, technology, resources, finance, and military training. Across the Muslim world we are betrayed by corrupt Saudi princes who have sold their souls to the Americans, the lackeys of the West in Egypt and Jordan, the infidels and compromisers in Pakistan, the apostates in Iran who posture as revolutionaries while siphoning their people's wealth.” He turned to Bin Laden, and his words pulsed with quiet urgency. “There is one way for Muslims to defeat our enemies. A single blow so cataclysmic that it changes the world in an instant.”
An odd light appeared in Zawahiri's face.
“
Inshallah
,”
he said. God willing.
Ignoring this, Bin Laden, the poet, remained true to a character that Al Zaroor reveredâreflective, almost gentle, with a keen intelligence that required no bluster outside pronouncements crafted for the West. “Still,
Ayman's caution is appropriate. After our triumph in 2001, the Americans nearly destroyed us in Afghanistanâonly the stupidity of their adventure in Iraq revitalized our cause. Should your plan succeed, the fury of the West would be incalculable.”