The Tenth Circle (7 page)

Istanbul

She opened her dressing room door to more applause, two broad-shouldered figures standing over a third smaller one seated on the bench set before the piano placed here to facilitate her preparations.

“Bravo!” the smaller man said, rising to his feet. “Bravo! Your performance was brilliant tonight, truly masterful.”

“Thank you, Colonel Kosh.”

Kosh stopped clapping and tapped at the keys to produce a harmonic drivel. He had a large round head, much too large for his small frame, clean-shaven so it looked like a basketball. “I always wanted to learn how to play. Perhaps you could give me a lesson.”

“I’m too expensive for you, Colonel.”

Kosh tapped two different keys at the same time, listening to the contrast between their respective sounds. “Money can be no object if you wish to work with the best.”

As head of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and National Security, also known as VEVAK, Kosh had long provided Zarrin with an endless stream of missions, for which she was paid exorbitantly well. She tightly clenched the fingers of both her hands to keep them from trembling, as he tried to string his tapping into an actual melody.

“It’s not as easy as it looks,” he reflected.

“Few things are. Being the best at anything requires an extraordinary amount of practice and commitment.”

“So you think I’d be wasting my time with lessons.”

“I do.”

“But someone taught you, didn’t they?”

“I was different.”

“And why is that, Zarrin?”

“Because I pursue perfection, not mediocrity.”

“A fact much in evidence tonight,” Kosh complimented. “Here, as well as in Syria. Congratulations are in order.”

“You normally don’t stop by to give them personally, Colonel.”

“As I said, I was thinking about taking lessons.”

“Why don’t you try some Tchaikovsky, Colonel?”

Kosh laughed. “A bit beyond my skill level, I’m afraid.”

“Would you like to know the primary reason why? There’s almost no rest at all in his concertos, like the one I played tonight. But it’s become too much even for me, given that I’m not as young as I used to be.”

“But equally skilled, I trust. Just more selective with your performances. Amazing the things you can learn growing up in a Palestinian refugee camp.”

“Where the closest thing we had to a musical instrument was a stick banging against tin cans,” Zarrin said, stiffening at the memories. “Except for a single legless piano.”

“On which you learned while being raised there as an orphan after witnessing the Israelis murder both your parents,” Kosh continued. “Rescued and trained by a legendary Palestinian intelligence official, trained himself by the Soviets at the height of their power. The legendary Zarrin, specialist in every weapon, but renowned for making use of objects that aren’t weapons at all, allowing for close-in kills utterly impossible for all others who practice your trade. Then, of course, there is your expertise with explosives, thanks to which the Syrian rebels are now looking for new leaders and Iran’s interests there will remain secure, at least for the time being.”

“What do you want, Colonel?”

“I have another job for you.”

Zarrin flexed her hands, pushing the blood back into them and hoping Kosh wouldn’t notice, lest she appear vulnerable in any way. “I’m not interested.”

“You haven’t heard about the job yet,” Kosh said, extracting a picture from his pocket and unfolding it. “You are familiar with this man?”

Zarrin regarded the picture without taking it in hand. Something changed in her expression. “Blaine McCracken. I thought he was dead.”

“Then it must have been a ghost who destroyed Natanz and our country’s dreams along with it.”

Zarrin moved to her dressing table and eased both her hands into ice-laden, frigid water. The agony waned quickly, leaving her hands numb and still. Every day a bit worse than the day before.

“Name your price, Zarrin.”

“I already said I was too expensive for you.”

“An example must be set,” Kosh told her, thin shoulders stiffening. “Otherwise we stand for nothing.”

“Then that will be price for McCracken: nothing.”

Kosh’s eyes narrowed. “What’s the catch?”

“How many of your operatives did I kill all those years ago on behalf of the Iraqis?”

“I lost count.”

“Sixteen. I want a million dollars for each of them. Consider McCracken a bonus.”

“And what would an artist like yourself do with so much money?”

Zarrin finished her mental count to thirty and yanked her hands from the ice bath. She dried them with a fresh white towel and looked back at Kosh.

“Maybe I’ll buy a villa in the Mediterranean.”

“Why not your own private island, Zarrin? But then who would you perform before?”

“Myself, Colonel. In the end, that’s the most important person to please.”

“I’m sure Blaine McCracken feels the same way.”

“Not for long,” Zarrin told him.

Mobile, Alabama

“Brothers and sisters,” the Reverend Jeremiah Rule greeted, his voice booming over the crowd of 750 gathered around the fire pit in Crawford Park, “welcome to your future. Welcome to salvation by renouncing the heathens among us, who have infiltrated our culture to besmirch His word. They would try to weaken us by slaying the innocent, but their efforts only make us stronger, toughening our resolve.”

McCracken watched and listened to the service from the adjoining road, high up in the bucket of a utility truck, an unfamiliar feeling tugging at his insides and leaving them knotted. He couldn’t look at Jeremiah Rule without thinking of Andrew Ericson, as close to a grandson as he’d ever have, missing in the frigid waters of the Missouri River in the wake of the terrorist bombing inspired by this madman’s rants. Blaine kept imagining he’d spotted Andrew in the crowd, only to shake off the vision as cold sweat rose to the surface of his skin.

He wanted to kill Jeremiah Rule so much that he could feel his hands clenching and unclenching, the same way they did in the moments before he readied fire with an assault rifle. Wanted to do that so bad now he could feel himself quivering. An altogether foreign feeling.

McCracken rotated a smaller version of standard binoculars to better view the festivities and had come equipped with a laser microphone rigged to an earpiece to better listen to them. He’d chosen this spot mostly for the vantage point it provided the sniper rifle that looked, at first and second glance, like a sophisticated camera equipped with telephoto lens. It fired not a bullet, but a tiny dart loaded with a potassium-rich toxin that would bring on a heart attack within minutes to an hour.

A chilly drizzle was falling, accompanied by a shrill winter wind beneath a gray sky soaked thick with clouds. The wind and cold combined to cast Rule’s wild gray hair into a matted mess that looked like thick, stringy clumps of dust and dirt balls. The clumps flew wildly from side to side with each frequent shift of his head, as he sought to meet the collective gaze of all who’d gathered in a circle around him.

McCracken noted the presence of Alabama highway patrolmen posted just far enough away, and casually dressed, broad-shouldered men who stood inside the circle facing the crowd instead of the reverend. He would have pegged them as professional private-security personnel even before noticing the wireless buds coiling from their ears and neat pistol bulges beneath their jackets. The cut of their clothes and hair, the way their eyes moved and scanned the crowd, told McCracken they were ex-military for sure, perhaps even special ops. Just a sense he was getting from the way they’d positioned themselves, the careful proximity of one to another.

So how
, McCracken thought,
did a man like the Reverend Rule end up with that kind of security?

Rule’s rally, revival, service, or whatever you wanted to call it was being held in Crawford Park, a municipal facility located on the city’s outskirts where suburban homes began to dot the landscape with increasing frequency amid wooded patches. McCracken arrived in the unseasonably cold and damp weather for Alabama in January, just as a backhoe had completed the task of digging what would become a fire pit, laying the mound of excavated earth carefully to the side so the ground could be restored to its former condition. Municipal employees had handled that chore, though under the supervision of Reverend Jeremiah Rule himself.

McCracken had known enough fanatics in his time to be keenly aware that they feasted on incidents sparked by their own ill-conceived and self-serving proclamations. That was the thing that was most striking about men like Rule; they may have claimed to serve a higher power when all they really cared about was furthering their own. More akin to cult leaders, they thrived on chaos of their own causing, reveling in it, creating a moral cesspit of low-thinking humanity willing to soak in the stink it spread. So many had died senselessly in service to men like the reverend. McCracken had known them in countless countries, speaking in countless languages to countless numbers of the wide-eyed impressionable who knew no better and accepted their word as convenient, ready dogma. He’d once heard it called drive-thru religion and couldn’t agree more after seeing the damage it had done on every continent he and Johnny Wareagle had fought. The lives they’d seen squandered for causes that were thinly disguised shams, cult-like in their singular notion of fanaticism. Rule was no different; he was just better at it.

And now, soon, he’d be dead.

With that thought, McCracken raised the camera-like sniper rifle up to his eye. It was remarkably light and one twist of its lens brought the madman so clearly into focus, Blaine thought he could reach out and touch him. A simple touch of the same button normally used to snap a picture was all it would take to silence the Reverend Jeremiah Rule once and for all. Blaine kept him in focus as he edged a finger into position, ready to press, starting to apply the necessary pressure. Pictured the man dropping dead, just as he deserved.

But then he stopped and moved his finger away. Because one of the reverend’s security guards had slid into the edge of the frame, making the part of McCracken’s mind that wasn’t focused on Andrew Ericson once more wonder where the man had come from. Who was paying him and the others for their services?

Those questions gave Blaine enough pause to make him swap the sniper weapon for his binoculars again. If there was someone behind Jeremiah Rule, someone backing him with the resources and contacts required to arrange for a security detail composed of special-ops veterans, then assassinating the reverend here and now was unlikely to achieve its desired effects. Sure, it would eliminate Rule, but not those perhaps equally responsible for the bridge bombing that may have claimed Andrew Ericson’s life.

Someone was supporting Rule, someone was helping enable him to inflame the entire Muslim world and unleash the Islamic radicals now unified in their holy war against the United States.

Beyond that, it was even possible that Rule’s assassination would unleash his venomous followers, which included any number of white supremacist and militia groups, creating even more chaos in the name of ending it. There were literally millions of armed crazies who fit that bill, many of them of the survivalist mode who hated government and were convinced the black helicopters were hovering over their homes even now. McCracken had known enough of them in his time to be as frightened of their convictions and capabilities as those of any terrorist. He needed to get closer to Rule right now, to feel the energy and anger of the crowd. It was much easier to judge a man up close than through binoculars and listening devices, and Blaine would get a better look at his private security detail from that vantage point as well.

Blaine moved to the bucket’s controls and lowered it. He wanted to see Jeremiah Rule up close and personal. If nothing changed, he’d approach to shake Rule’s hand at the end of the service and jab the potassium-rich dart into his wrist. Feel him go cold, just the way it had been for Andrew when he hit the frigid waters of the Missouri River.

“Every man’s fate is his own to control,” he heard Rule clamor, as the bucket thumped to a halt just short of the ground. “And every man must accept the consequences of that.”

Couldn’t have said it any better myself,
McCracken thought.

Mobile, Alabama

“Soon we will accept your offerings to the flames, your symbolic rejection of the teachings of heathens who have infested and corrupted our culture and that of the world. For a time, a long time,” the reverend continued, his booming voice rising through the chill mist as he moved about the circle, backlit by the flames, which cast him in an almost surreal glow, “I was lost in a wasteland of confusion and quandary. Of not grasping the true origins of those who must be vanquished or the purpose they provide for the rest of us, the test they provide every day. But then a beautiful light burned bright before me through the dark decay, and I saw the truth. I saw a truth, brothers and sisters, I will now share with you.”

God won’t be able to help you if you got Andrew killed,
McCracken thought, approaching across the grass.

He watched Rule stop and look down, more at the ground than the flames rising from the pit. It had started to drizzle ahead of an approaching storm, seeming to quell the flames briefly before a stiff wind fanned them further. Two fronts were about to collide, unseasonably warm air flooding the region with the portent of powerful thunderstorms and even scattered tornadoes through the Mobile area. As he approached across the park through the steady drizzle, McCracken thought he saw the reverend’s lips moving, perhaps in silent prayer, his face scrunched up tightly enough to wrap the folds of his skin around each other. Then his eyes opened again, narrow and wild in their intensity.

“Dante wrote that there are nine circles of Hell. The circles are concentric, my bothers and sisters, representing the gradual increase in wickedness and evil, and culminating at the center of the earth, where the Devil himself reigns. Each circle’s sinners are punished in a fashion befitting their crimes. Each sinner is afflicted for all of eternity by the chief sin he committed. People who sinned but sought forgiveness and absolution through prayer before their deaths are found not in Hell but in Purgatory, where they labor to be free of their sins. Those in Hell, who inhabit one of the nine circles, are people who tried to justify their sins and seek no penance.”

A clap of thunder boomed, as if to echo the message of his words. The wind picked up to a steady, howling gust. The drizzle became a light rain that left the attendees reaching for the hoods on their jackets or sweatshirts. But their wide eyes never left Rule, waiting to scream and shout their affirmations of his word.

Rule stopped and rotated his gaze about the crowd that had refused to budge, undeterred by the elements. True to form, the crowd had gone utterly silent, hanging on his next words, many with hands raised high for the heavens. Only the reverend’s professional security personnel stood out, their expressionless visages rotating from left to right and back again, the intentions held in their eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses.

“But then, one day, I realized. I realized, brothers and sisters, that the craven heathens who would besmirch and defame the word of the one true God have a circle of Hell all to themselves where they live for eternity among others just as vile and without compassion or regard for human life. A residence reserved for the most damned who seek nothing but death and destruction during their wasted time as interlopers in the world of our Lord.

“The tenth circle,” Rule finished to the wild cheers and impassioned cries from the crowd. “Home to the hopeless!”

The crowd’s blustering response bubbled McCracken’s ears.

You think you know what hell is?
McCracken thought to himself.
Not even close… .

“Residence of the reviled!”

The response grew louder.

“Destination of the damned!”

Louder still, so loud it nearly swallowed the next clap of thunder that sounded like a tree splitting.

“Brothers and sisters,” Rule continued, as the fervor approached a crescendo, McCracken feeling it like an electronic wave or pulse charged with energy that radiated from person to person, “let those who have brought offerings to the pit come forward so they may be returned to the tenth circle, where they belong, for eternity. Let us begin with the cursed word that has justified so much wanton death and destruction!”

And with that the reverend yanked a tattered book from inside his jacket. The rain intensified, drenching his hair and clothes, making him look even more wild in the bluster of a storm that rivaled his own. McCracken couldn’t see the book from where he was standing, but knew it could only be a copy of the Koran, watching Rule raise it high for all to see before dropping it into the flames before them. Close enough to tempt their reach. Much of the crowd now sank to their knees as they hooted and hollered and cheered amid the spiraling winds and quaking trees. More Islamic radicals about to be inflamed and inspired, this man of hateful rhetoric not caring at all about the loss of more innocent lives like Andrew Ericson’s.

The body hasn’t been found yet,
McCracken reminded himself.
The boy’s not dead. There’s still hope… .

Another clap of thunder roared, followed by something else.

Pop, pop, pop …

Even amid the deafening roar, McCracken knew gunshots the moment he heard them. And he could tell Rule’s professional security detail recognized the sound too, converging on the reverend with their own pistols already drawn. One of the guards went down and then another to more gunshots, Rule himself never wavering from standing shrouded by and aglow in the flames, hands held high with eyes closed as if to welcome his fate until his security detail tackled him to the ground.

McCracken heard another pop, louder this time, and a woman just a few feet in front of him went down. He had his SIG Sauer palmed in the next moment, eyes sweeping the crowd as panic finally set in, the highway patrolmen starting to rush in as well.

“There he is!” someone screamed. “It’s him!”

It took a full instant for McCracken to realize arms and fingers were being thrust his way, identifying him as the shooter, the guilty party.

“Somebody stop him!”

In that moment, McCracken saw Rule’s remaining guards aiming pistols his way through widening slivers in the fleeing crowd. Pictured them seeing him with SIG steadied in his hand, pistols ready in theirs as well.

They were going to shoot; two of them, sighting in even now. McCracken had no choice and, even if he had, instinct and experience overruled it.

He readied himself to fire. But then …

Pop, pop, pop, pop …

Again, the SIG held cold and unfired in his hand. The guards were there, standing and about to fire themselves, and then they weren’t. When the crowd parted next, he saw two more downed bodies on the damp ground not far from where others had toppled the Reverend Rule and continued to protectively cover him.

The skies opened, unleashing a windswept downpour that engulfed the scene. Thunder boomed and a bolt of lighting seemed to arc downward directly over Rule’s toppled frame.

McCracken lit into motion through the torrents, instinct again taking charge. He caught up to the thickest swatch of the fleeing throng and melted into it, knees bent to reduce his size and thus target, gun camouflaged against his hip. Felt the mass shift as highway patrolmen pierced it, likely on his trail. But they were quickly swallowed up, and McCracken centered his attention on a grove of trees and thick brush rimming the park where he could elude them across Straight Street near a basketball court.

The storm proved a blessing now, providing camouflage he could never have concocted on his own. Making every soaked form separating from the swell of the crowd to flee the area look the same. McCracken might have to abandon his rental vehicle, still a small price to pay for getting away.

“There he is! Over there!” a voice cried out.

“Somebody, stop him!”

“Shoot him! Shoot him!”

And McCracken saw fingers thrust his way ahead of the gunshots.