The Omega Theory (32 page)

The man nodded. “My name is Nicodemus. And yes, I followed you to Beit Shalom. That was another good day for killing Jews.” He smiled. “How many did we kill there? Thirteen? Fourteen? Funny, it’s about the same number we killed today.”

Lucille glared at him. “Don’t forget, the Jews killed some of your men, too.”

His upper lip twitched, but he kept smiling. “No, I haven’t forgotten. That’s why I arranged this operation. When I discovered you were going to Turkmenistan, I rushed here to join my fellow True Believers. They’d already removed the X-ray laser from this depot, but there was another one that was damaged beyond repair, so we used the spare cylinder as a decoy and filled it with C-4. Then we found a hiding spot in the ravine and waited for you to arrive.” He pointed at the line of corpses. “It worked quite well, don’t you think? We killed nearly all of you. Olam ben Z’man and Monique Reynolds slipped away, but they won’t get far. They’ll try to regroup with the six Israelis who were riding reconnaissance, then head back to the Zodiacs. But we have a squadron waiting for them there.”

Lucille tightened her grip on David’s arm. But it wasn’t fear, he sensed—it was hope. Monique and Olam were still alive. And this surge of hope reminded David of the reason he was here, why he’d traveled so many thousands of miles to this awful place. “Where’s my son?” he demanded, looking Nicodemus in the eye. “Where’s Michael Gupta?”

“Oh, he’s dead, too. We killed him after he gave Brother Cyrus the information we needed. But I can assure you that it was done in the most humane way. Brother Cyrus is the Redeemer, holy and compassionate. Much more compassionate than I am.”

David faltered for a moment, but he kept staring at Nicodemus. The man’s eyes slid to the left and his lip twitched again. And David felt another surge of hope, because he knew that the man was lying. “No, Michael’s not dead,” he said firmly. “Maybe you wanted to kill him. Maybe you were planning to. But it didn’t happen.”

Nicodemus stopped smiling. He gave up all pretense and glowered at David, widening his nostrils. Then he turned to his men and shouted, “Get them up!”

A pair of soldiers grabbed David and lifted him to his feet. Another pair lifted Lucille. Nicodemus reached for his belt and removed a long knife from a leather sheath. He stepped forward and held the knife a few inches in front of David’s eyes. The blade shone in the strengthening light of dawn. “You killed my friend Bashir and for that I should slit your throat. But Brother Cyrus wants to speak to you, so it will have to wait.”

David felt dizzy but he clenched his teeth. “That’s too bad. My heart is breaking for you.”

“Yes, it’s very funny. I must obey Brother Cyrus, so I can’t kill you.” He clasped the knife’s handle and drew his hand back. “But I can kill this one.”

In one quick motion, he stepped toward Lucille and cut her throat. She looked at David for an instant, her wet eyes beseeching him, her mouth opening and closing soundlessly. He saw the slit across her neck, a bright red line. Then the blood streamed down and her head fell forward.

30

MICHAEL DID EXACTLY WHAT TAMARA HAD TOLD HIM TO DO. HE KEPT RIDING
south on the Ural motorcycle, looking for another village where he could make a telephone call. He rode through the desert until the late afternoon, constantly scanning the horizon. He saw sand dunes, of course, and some scraggly bushes with leafless white branches, and at one point he saw a pair of camels walking across a stretch of hard, flat ground. But he saw no villages, no trails, and no telephone poles. And then at four o’clock, after he’d traveled 181 kilometers (Michael checked the odometer), the motorcycle sputtered to a halt. He’d run out of gas.

For the next three hours he tried to push the Ural south, but he didn’t get very far. As the sun began to set, he rolled the bike into a sandy trough between two dunes, where there was some shelter from the wind. He was very thirsty, but he had no water. When he opened the storage compartment at the back of the sidecar, he found only a can of peaches and a rolled-up magazine with pictures of naked women on the cover. He managed to puncture the can by ramming it against the Ural’s fender, and he sucked the peach syrup out of the hole, swallowing every drop. But when he was finished, he was thirstier than ever. He tried to ignore it by looking at the pictures of the naked women, which he studied until it was too dark to see.

The wind grew stronger after sunset, and sand blew into Michael’s eyes. It also got colder. He climbed into the Ural’s sidecar and curled up inside the padded space. Even though he was still cold, he managed to sleep for a few hours. Then the sun rose, and by eight o’clock the sidecar was too hot. He took off his shirt and created a sunshade by tying the sleeves to the Ural’s handlebars. But it was hot even in the shade, and Michael’s lips were dry and cracked. He remembered that a human being could live for three to seven days without water. But
The Concise Scientific Encyclopedia
had also mentioned that the survival time decreased significantly when the air temperature was high. Because more moisture evaporated from the body. And you couldn’t stop evaporation.

Michael tried to focus on the magazine again, but his vision had become blurry. When he raised his head and looked at the sand dunes, they seemed to move across his field of vision, flowing like waves on the ocean. He thought he could also hear the sloshing of the waves, but he knew this was just the sound of his own pulse, which he could hear very clearly when he clamped his hands over his ears. David Swift had once told him that there were six quarts of blood in his body, and when Michael had first heard this fact he’d imagined storing his blood in three half-gallon milk cartons, which would take up most of the space on the top shelf of their refrigerator. But now he pictured his blood soaking into the sand, binding the loose grains into thick reddish clumps, like the ones he’d seen the last time he’d looked at Tamara.

He closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to look at the dunes anymore. Tamara was dead, he knew that. And he’d failed to do what she’d told him. He hadn’t found a village or a telephone, and he’d never gotten a chance to talk to David Swift. His eyes stung and his stomach ached as he thought about all the things he’d done wrong. You’re a failure, he told himself. You’ve failed in every way.

And then he heard David Swift’s voice. It sounded as if it were coming from just behind him.

You’re not a failure, Michael. You’re a wonderful boy.

Michael turned around. There was nothing behind him but the Ural motorcycle. But he spoke to David anyway. “No, I’m not. I broke my promise. I told Cyrus the code.”

It’s not your fault. You held out for as long as you could. I’m proud of you, Michael. Very proud.

His eyes stung but he couldn’t cry. He was too dehydrated. “But it doesn’t matter! I broke my promise and now Cyrus is going to alter the program. He’s going to kill the world!”

No, he can’t do that. He can’t kill the world. Just look at it, Michael. Look how beautiful it is.

Michael looked up. He saw nothing but sand dunes. And in his mind’s eye he saw things that were worse. The man falling into the burning crater. The soldiers blown apart by the grenade he’d thrown. “It’s already dead,” he told David. “There’s nothing alive here.”

What about those birds?

At first Michael didn’t understand. The sky was a blank, searing sheet of blue. But a moment later he spotted them: two big black birds flying over the dunes. Except they weren’t flapping their wings. And they seemed to be getting larger. Then Michael heard a distant thumping, percussive and deep, like the sound of a giant beating his club against the great bass drum of the desert.

“They’re not birds,” he whispered. “They’re helicopters.”

31

THEY DIDN’T EVEN BURY HER. AFTER NICODEMUS CUT LUCILLE’S THROAT, HIS
soldiers dumped her on top of the corpses of the Israeli commandos. David got one last look at Agent Parker—her eyes wide open, her head tilted back, her shirt smeared with blood—before the soldiers threw him down and pushed his face into the dirt. One of them tied his hands behind his back and another bound his legs at the ankles and a third gagged him with a strip of cloth that tasted of motor oil. Then they dragged him to a convoy of gray Land Cruisers and tossed him into the back of one of the cars.

He thrashed on the floor of the Cruiser’s cargo area, banging his head against the folded seats. Three soldiers in brown fatigues got into the car, two settling in the front seats and one climbing into the cargo area with David. This soldier had a face like a hatchet, with a sharp chin and a long nose. As the convoy started moving, the soldier grinned at David and asked, “Are you comfortable, Brother?” David let out a roar and tried to stomp his bound feet into the bastard’s face, but the soldier punched him in the stomach. Then he tied another rope around David’s knees and anchored it to a bolt protruding from the floor. David kept thrashing for several minutes, straining against the rope while the soldiers laughed. Finally, he lay still and closed his eyes, but his torment continued. In his mind’s eye he saw Lucille after her throat had been slashed, opening and closing her mouth as the blood poured out of her. As if she were trying to tell him something.

He wanted to die. But first he wanted to kill everyone around him.

The road they were traveling on was in terrible shape. The car bumped over ruts and ridges and potholes, reducing their speed to about thirty miles per hour. But David didn’t feel any turns, so he knew the road ran straight. After a while he opened one eye and saw the morning sunlight illuminating the hatchet face of the soldier sitting beside him. They were moving southeast.

Slowly, he began to recover. He thought of Monique and Michael and Olam. Despite everything, they were still alive. By some miracle, they’d beaten the odds and escaped, and that meant David shouldn’t give up hope. But then he thought of Excalibur and his heart sank again. Nicodemus said his so-called True Believers had removed the Russian laser from the depot. And because they’d already tested the American prototype in Iran, exploding a nuclear bomb to power the device, they knew what it could do. David didn’t know why they wanted to crash the universe, but in the end it didn’t matter. Fanatics didn’t need reasons. Their leader was obviously this Brother Cyrus, whom Nicodemus had called the Redeemer. David assumed he was a religious leader of some kind, a messianic cult figure, but one who was rich enough to equip a small army and powerful enough to collaborate with the Iranians. That was the worst kind of fanatic, he thought—a smart, disciplined madman with power.

After about four hours of driving, the True Believers ate their lunch in the car. The soldiers in the front seats passed a hunk of bread and a crooked black sausage to Hatchet Face. They didn’t offer any food to David, and he wouldn’t have accepted it if they had. They traveled for another hour on a smoother highway, then made a right turn. After a while David sensed that the road was sloping upward. He craned his neck to look through the car windows and saw mountains looming on either side. The convoy of Land Cruisers was leaving the desert behind and entering a mountain pass. The road snaked between steep, brown slopes sprinkled with loose stones. David’s ears popped from the change in altitude. In less than ten minutes they rose thousands of feet.

As they ascended, David tried to determine where they were. Thirty-six hours before, back when he was on the transport plane flying from Israel to Azerbaijan, he’d studied one of Olam’s maps of Turkmenistan. Now he pictured the map in his head and drew a diagonal line across the country, starting at Yangykala Canyon. He estimated that they’d driven about two hundred miles southeast. Extending the line on his mental map, he saw that it stretched to the Kopet Dag, the mountain range that ran along Turkmenistan’s southern border. David’s stomach clenched—they were on a road that crossed the mountains, heading straight for the Islamic Republic of Iran.

He started thrashing again, trying to snap the rope that tied him down. Once they crossed the border there would be no chance of escape. Brother Cyrus was probably waiting for them at the Kavir test site, along with the Russian laser and another nuclear bomb. They were driving toward Armageddon, the final battle, where the human race would prove its ingenuity by triggering the quantum crash.

Then the Land Cruiser pulled off the road and stopped. David jerked his head from side to side, looking for signs of a border crossing—a guardhouse, a pair of flags, a lowered gate. He screamed behind his gag, hoping to attract the attention of the border guards, although Brother Cyrus had probably bribed them to look the other way. The other Land Cruisers in the convoy also pulled off the road and parked nearby.

The two soldiers in the front seats stepped out of the car, walked to the back of the vehicle, and opened the rear door. Meanwhile, Hatchet Face pulled a knife out of the sheath on his belt. David froze and thought of Lucille again, remembering the look on her face after her throat was slit. But the soldier simply cut the rope that tied David to the car’s floor, then grasped his ankles and pulled him out of the Land Cruiser. The other two soldiers grabbed his arms.

David twisted his body, trying to squirm out of their grasp, but he was weaker now—he hadn’t eaten in sixteen hours. The three True Believers carried him away from the car, walking across a stretch of flat, dusty ground at the foot of a steep slope. As he struggled vainly to free himself, David saw other soldiers emerging from their Land Cruisers and lining up in front of the cars. But he saw no gates or flags or guardhouses. It wasn’t a border crossing—the convoy had stopped in the middle of nowhere.

Then the three soldiers carrying David stopped in their tracks. He turned his head and saw Nicodemus approaching. The man draped his checkered keffiyeh over his shoulders, then bent over David’s suspended body and smiled. “Did you enjoy the drive, Professor Swift?”

David yelled, “Fuck you,” behind his gag. It came out as a pair of grunts, but Nicodemus seemed to catch the meaning. His smile broadened. “I have some news for you. Before leaving Yangykala, we informed the Turkmen Army that several Israeli commandos had slipped into their country. Now a Turkmen helicopter division is hunting down the intruders. Do you think your wife and your friend Olam will surrender? Or will they go down shooting?”