C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN
San Sebastian de Garabandal, Spain
They were passing by the church, as they did every day after school, four of them, four schoolgirls, two named Mari, after the Virgin, and Jacinta, and Conchita. Just like the girls back in the early sixties, same first names and all, the ones who had seen the vision, and heard the warning about the Great Chastisement that was sure to come if her words were not heeded.
Like schoolgirls everywhere, they babbled and giggled as they passed the parish church. The time was long past that they thought maybe they just might catch a glimpse of what those girls had seen so long ago: a vision of radiant loveliness, her face creased with sorrow, her message stern:
Repent.
It had been easier to believe when they were children. It was easy to repent of sins you had not yet committed, not even in your heart, and yet almost impossible to imagine what those sins could really be. They were things only whispered about, to be savored and to be feared.
The first message had been delivered on October 18, 1961:
We must make sacrifices, perform much penance, and visit the Blessed Sacrament frequently. But first, we must lead good lives. If we do not, a chastisement will befall us. The cup is already filling up and if we do not change, a very great chastisement will come upon us.
Chastisement was a word they all understood. Franco’s Spain died long before they were born, but its memory lingered on, especially here in northern Spain, not far from Santander. Chastisement meant punishment and pain. Especially in light of the second message, the one Conchita alone received:
Previously, the Cup was filling; now it is brimming over. Many priests are following the road to perdition, and with them they are taking many more souls.... We should turn the wrath of God away from us by our own efforts. If you ask His forgiveness with a sincere heart, He will pardon you. . . . You are now being given the last warnings.... Reflect on the Passion of Jesus.
They could all recite the words by heart, for they had been hearing them all their lives. Tourists came and went through the small village and occasionally a man from the Vatican, which was still investigating the apparition, trying to decide whether it was real or fake. Of the hundreds and thousands of Marian apparitions around the world, fewer than a dozen were officially recognized by the Catholic Church.
So there was no reason to suspect that this glorious October day would be any different from all the others—or that it would be the same as that day back in 1961.
It was early morning, and at first they thought it was the glistening of the sun, past its summer prime. Later, in talking to the villagers and to the newspeople who showed up at their doorsteps, they described it as a blinding flash of light that caught them all in the eyes, as if someone were shining a very powerful searchlight directly at them. And yet, it was focused on each them, individually.
It took a few moments for them to begin to be able to see clearly once more as their retinas began to synthesize the light and the image.
She was framed against what appeared to be a celestial doorway, but on later reflection they realized it was the portals of the simple parish church that served the spiritual needs of the three hundred souls living near the Bay of Biscay. She wore a crown and a cloak. They could see her clearly, silhouetted against an impossible backdrop of the clear blue sky and the shining sun.
But all these details came later. Because, for many weeks, after the apparition, they could not really remember what the Lady had looked like, or how she was dressed, or whether she was holding anything in her arms. They could only remember that her lips were moving but that, strain as they might, they could not hear what she was saying.
But they could see her clearly enough, and that was all that young Jacinta needed. For Jacinta was deaf and she had learned to read lips—not only in Spanish but in Basque and border French—from the time she was young. St. Bernadette, who had seen her own famous vision not terribly far from here, in Lourdes, had heard the Lady speak in Pyrenean patois:
“Que soy era immaculada concepciou.”
And so had Jacinta—not heard, but seen.
And this was the proof, the evidence, that what they had seen was not an illusion, not a fake like so many of the so-called apparitions. This was real, in the way that Guadalupe had been real, and Lourdes had been real, and Fatima had been real. The Virgin had not spoken to them in Castilian Spanish, but in their Cantabrian dialect. Halfway between the Basque country and the French Pyrenees. This was the reason that at first hundreds, then thousands, and then tens of thousands of pilgrims had flocked to Garabandal back in the day. This was the reason they were now on the news.
Because they knew the secret. They knew the Word. And what a sacred word it was. It was the word the Lady had been saying for a hundred years—an eternity to them, but the blink of an eye to the Lady, who was still mourning the death of her Son and yet celebrating His coming apotheosis. There could be no final triumph without trouble, no everlasting transfiguration without confrontation. The final battle between good and evil must be enjoined, and Jacinta knew that it was her sacred and spiritual duty to make that happen as fast as possible.
Therefore, no matter how rigorous the questioning from the priests—some of them Spanish, some of them French, some of them black Africans and races she had never even imagined before, not here in her little village of Garabandal—she had stuck to her story,
their
story. Jacinta had emerged as their leader, and the leader she would stay. Even if she was only twelve years old.
For the Lady had spoken but a single word, but that one word was chilling in its simplicity, and its warning:
“Repent!”
C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN
New York City
“There something I don’t like, boss,” said Lannie Saleh to Captain Francis X. Byrne. Byrne was the commander of the Counter-Terrorism Unit of the New York City Police Department and Aslan Saleh was his subordinate, but he didn’t act much like it. Which was one of the things Frankie Byrne liked about him.
“Haven’t you Arabs caused enough trouble around here already?” replied Byrne. They were in CTU command headquarters in Chelsea, still picking up the pieces of the assault on Times Square.
“Iranians aren’t Arabs, remember? Shiites aren’t Sunnis.”
“But you all look alike,” said Byrne. “What’s the difference?”
“What’s the difference between Orangemen and Catholics in Londonderry, Northern Ireland?”
“You mean Derry, Ulster.”
“I rest my case.”
“Then take your case and shove it up your ass. Don’t you realize that the Irish are the only people on the planet with legitimate grievances?”
“What about the Jews, boss?” sang out Sid Sheinberg. “We’ve got plenty of legitimate grievances.”
“That’s all you got, Sheinberg,” cracked Lannie. “Grievances. Comin’ out your ears.”
Byrne let them go. That was the way it used to be in the old days, when he and Sy Sheinberg, and Matt White had all been young, before the lawyers and the politicians had infected everything with their sophistry, corrupted everything with their relativism, blocked everything with their protocols, outlawed both thought and deed, word and action, and criminalized emotions in the name of . . . well, superior emotion.
Police work was so much easier in the old days. Law in one hand, nightstick in the other. That was how New York had been tamed of the likes of Happy Jack and Owney Madden, back in the days when the Irish ruled the roost, on Fourteenth Street, at Tammany Hall, and on the wild West Side, on Battle Row and in the sanctuary at St. Mike’s, and in the Gopher hidey-holes under the docks and under the streets and up your arse if you weren’t careful. Law of the jungle, when you stopped to think about it, worked every time it was tried.
Only cowards and lawyers feared the law of the jungle. And now they, along with the women and the eunuchs, were running the show. Today, it was like
1984
, with Big Brother on every corner, CCTV everywhere, revenue and citizen control directed straight from Gracie Mansion, for your safety and protection. Fascism could be fun, if only you would shut up and let it have its way.
What had happened to his country?
No time to worry about that now. Saving the world was not part of his job description. Keeping Matt White happy was.
Frankie looked at his men. And yes, they were all men. It was a good thing the names of all the members of the CTU were secret, just as their location was secret, or else the bowtied bed-wetters at
The New York Times
would have a conniption, railing from the anonymous safety of their homes in Riverdale and Bronxville and Scarsdale about the unfairness of it all and exposing his men’s identities for all to read. Everyone single one of Byrne’s men lived within the five boroughs of the City of New York, joined since 1898, fifteen years after the Brooklyn Bridge and the father-and-son team of John and Washington Roebling had transformed a small island into the capital city of the country, in deed if not in word.
New York needed fewer lawyers, and more men like the Roeblings, if it ever wanted to get anything done again. One look at the hole downtown, where the World Trade Center had once stood, told you everything you needed to know about the state of America these days. Sue everybody, accomplish nothing, and have the
Times
cheer your uselessness on. And on and on and on . . .
Until the next attack.
Until the next deaths.
Until the next opportunity for grief counselors and shrinks and candlelight vigils and makeshift memorials and weeping, as if the dead were just so many John Lennons writ small, never-were celebrities made briefly less anonymous by the arbitrary hand of the Reaper and the tabloids and the network news shows’ crocodile tears in the pursuit of transient ratings.
What was their motto? “We don’t have to be right. We just have to be right today.”
Byrne’s shoulder had pretty much healed, but Sid Sheinberg’s broken leg was never going to be the same: he was looking at a lifetime of desk duty. But the gunshot wound that Byrne had sustained in his duel with Ben Addison, Jr., otherwise known as the late Ismail bin-Abdul al-Amriki, was the least of his problems. Arash Kohanloo’s coordinated attack had been a very near thing: their electronic eyes blinded; their computers crashed; billions of dollars worth of damage to Forty-second Street, Times Square itself, the subway lines, the surrounding buildings . . .
He was lucky he hadn’t lost his job. His personal heroism that day had won him yet another medal from the mayor, but he was acutely aware of how signally they had failed their city. After 9/11, the NYPD had adopted the Israelis’ motto of “never again,” but again it was, 9/11 all over again, this time perhaps even worse. Because all their equipment and their independence and their courage had been defeated by a denial-of-service attack from somewhere thousands of miles away. Just a few minutes was all it took to render them eyeless in Gaza, for the bad guys to smuggle in the weapons through the same old riverside tunnels and hidey-holes the Gopher Gang was probably using back when Madden was a pup.
The worst of it was that they had recruited so many Americans—not just Ben Addison, Jr., a converted con, but hillbillies like the kid they found with his head blown off in the pump house under the Central Park Reservoir. They’d probably never get a firm ID on him, since whoever killed him had made damn sure there no prints, teeth, or any other identifying characteristics. Sure, they could grab some DNA, but unless the punk was in the database—which he wasn’t—he would molder forever in an unmarked grave, unclaimed and unmourned—just another stiff in the ongoing history of the island of the Manhattoes.
Byrne had promised himself that he would find the man’s killer. Not necessarily to bring him to justice, or to shake his hand and thank him for a job well done, but to come face-to-face with a man he very much wanted to meet. The man who had saved him from Ben Addison, Jr., the man who had cleaned his gunshot wound and left him safe in the maelstrom of Forty-second Street. The man who had guided him to the chopper, to the shooter, and to the final confrontation with Kohanloo on the East River.
“We shoulda struck back, right away, hard,” said Sid, still walking with a cane. Sid was the nephew of Frankie’s old friend, rabbi, and mentor, Sy Sheinberg. That was back in the day when medical examiners were hard-drinking standup comics, not civil servants as bloodless as the corpses they dissected for fun and profit at the taxpayers’ expense.
“At who?” snapped Lannie. He was that rarity, a real street Arab turned American, a Palestinian kid whose grandparents had come over during the first oil shock to run first one gas station, then two, then ten, then fifty in Brooklyn. He had money but he didn’t act like it, which Byrne admired, and he had street cred, which Byrne prized. The country needed more people like Lannie Saleh. Especially when they spoke both Arabic and Farsi.
“I dunno,” said Sid, sitting down. There were computer terminals at every workstation, and Sid’s hands unconsciously flew over the keys, bringing the instrument to life. Both he and Lannie were virtuosi, and their rivalry was intense. So was their friendship. “Anywhere in the Middle East, ex—”
“Except Israel. Right,” said Lannie. “Anyway, Boss, as I was saying, there’s something I don’t like, and I don’t just mean Sheinberg here. What I don’t like is—”
At that moment the door opened and everybody shot to their feet. For the figure in the door was none other than J. Arness White, commissioner of police, otherwise known as Matt to the troops. He was the
capo di tutti capi
of the NYPD, he was big, he was black, and he was Frankie Byrne’s best friend in the whole world. He was also the only thing that stood between Byrne and forced retirement.
“What
I
don’t like,” said White in his booming Texas voice, “what I cannot stand, is failure. You want failure, you work for some other city department. They’ll show you failure. You want failure, you try your hand at teaching in the public schools, or collecting the garbage in a snowstorm, or passing laws against smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk or at Coney Island or in some Mafia social club on Mulberry Street where the goombahs got more firepower than we do. That, my friends, is failure—baked in the cake.
“You want failure, I will happily shove it up your rear end, like Tiny on his wedding night with a Rikers Island virgin, but not that much fun. You want failure, I will give it to you like a gambler about to have his kneecaps broken by a baseball bat on account of nonpayment. You want failure, I will show it to you, the way Patton showed the krauts failure at the Battle of the Bulge. We are talking epic fail here, people, and it cannot and will not be repeated. Are we clear?”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
Without another word, White chose a seat—Frankie’s seat. Everybody got the message. The Big Dog was in the house.
“What
I
don’t like,” continued White, “is a bunch of screwups, accountable to nobody, who let my beloved city suffer an even worse indignity than 9/11. Even worse, a bunch of unaccountable screwups responsible only to my sorry black behind. Is my meaning clear?”
Matt was glowering. Not a pretty sight. Nobody liked it when Matt was glowering. Least of all Byrne. They might be old friends, they might even have something or two on each other, but that didn’t mean White couldn’t fire him any time he chose. And that Frankie wouldn’t accept his fate quietly. That was their unspoken deal, and Byrne would be damned if he’d be the one to break it.
“What the commissioner is saying,” Byrne began, “is that failure of any kind is no longer an option. And this failure, when you get right down to it, was mine.”
Byrne moved toward the front of the room. “Lads,” he began, “Commissioner White and I have been friends and partners for nearly twenty years. We’ve been through a lot together—and I don’t think I have to explain to you what ‘a lot’ means in this day and age. There is no space between us, zip, zero, nada—you want to speak to Matt, you speak to me. I love this man like a brother—no, belay that. I love this man like I love myself, and you bastards all know in what a high regard I keep myself and my family.”
Well, that was a lie and everybody who worked for him knew it.
“What about your real brother, Captain?” came a voice from the back of the room. Byrne knew who it was, but didn’t feel like making a fuss. Besides, the guy was right. What about his real brother?
His goddamned brother. The deputy director of the FBI. And the sonofabitch who now had President Tyler’s ear. That was the one question he didn’t want to answer. The one question he’d never wanted to answer.
Frankie didn’t want to have to think about the variegated ways his brother had him over the proverbial barrel. Misprision of felony, for starters. And so much else. You couldn’t do time for things that happened when you were kids, but if you could do time, Frankie knew, either he or his brother would be in the slammer simply for imagining what was coming down the line.
In the future, everybody would be a criminal for at least fifteen minutes, whether they wanted to be or not. Which meant that everybody would be a victim, too.
“With the exception of my brother, Tom,” he said with a smile. “But he has a job to do, just like I have a job to do, just like we all have a job to do, and sometimes those jobs are going to come into conflict with each other. But we can’t worry about that. So let’s do our jobs. Sid, what have we got? Make it snappy, because Matt doesn’t have all day.”
Sid Sheinberg turned away from his ranks of computers to address the group. “We took a hit, no question. A good part of Forty-second Street was destroyed, along with much of the Times Square subway station, which took out a good deal of the MTA’s capacity until a work-around was found. That necessitated opening up some of the disused stations, and it’s been wonderful what we’ve found, but that’s just about the only silver lining in the transportation cloud for the nonce.
“We’re still finding bits of bodies around the Times Square area, including pieces of bone and teeth embedded in buildings six stories up from the force of the blasts. This was a very sophisticated operation, far worse than Bombay, and if the ringleader had not been so quickly identified and taken out . . .”
Everybody looked at Frankie. They all knew that it was he who’d fired the shots that killed Arash Kohanloo, the Iranian operative whose name, miraculously, had not yet found its way into the papers or the blogosphere, and with luck, never would.
“Right,” said Frankie. “Thanks, Sid. Lannie?”
Lannie gave Sid’s curly hair a tousle as he rose and walked to the front of the room. In the heat of the battle, he had saved Sid’s life, and forged a bond that could never be broken. He signaled to Sid for the start of the AV presentation.
“Arash Kohanloo was a real piece of work,” he began, as a picture of Kohanloo flashed on one of the main monitors. “A favorite of the regime, he was able to move freely between the
dar al-Harb
and the
dar al-Islam,
between the world of War, which is where we live, and the world of the perfect peace of Islam—which is where everyone will live when the final triumph of Islam is wrought by the sword and by submission.