So for those people, he had to weigh risk against reward. The way a soldier does, the way a spy does.
And then there were those other minds. The dark ones. The dangerous ones.
There were not many of them, but he had encountered a few. They were sealed against him. Or, if he managed to get inside, the things he saw there terrified him. The worst of all had been that time he had tried to crawl inside the mind of the man who called himself Church.
God.
Such darkness there.
If people only knew.
If anyone knew.
He knew, though. The Dreamer knew.
It had taken weeks to recover from that one brief encounter. Even now he had nightmares. Real nightmares, not dreamwalking. He woke up screaming sometimes.
It had been a harsh lesson.
Since then he had focused on other minds, on sailing through less dangerous seas.
Where next? he wondered.
There were so many places he could still go.
So many.
So many…
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
He was the Mullah of the Black Tent.
That is what he came to be called.
He was born to a poor family near the Iraq-Kurdistan border. For the first forty-seven years of his life he was known by his given name, Maki Al-Faiz. He went to school to study Islamic traditions, known as hadithi, and spiritual law, fiqh, and over time he became a quiet, devoted, and respected man of his local mosque. Al-Faiz said his prayers and made his offerings. He was generous and humorous, but not a particularly brilliant cleric. However, since the villagers of his town were often less educated than Al-Faiz, over time they came to regard him as their mullah. When the mosque’s official cleric died, Al-Faiz became the mullah in fact and from then on it was the only thing people called him. The Mullah.
When the soldiers of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant took over the town, some of the men of the village joined them. Some fled with their families and what few possessions they could carry. Some died.
The Mullah listened to what the fighters of ISIL had to say and although he was not deeply involved with politics, he understood that to stand with them meant that fewer of the villagers would be killed. And so he raised the black flag.
When the Americans came and drove the ISIL garrison away, the Mullah stood wide-legged before the doors of the town’s tiny mosque, guarding it with his body, willing to die to keep it safe. He begged the soldiers for mercy on behalf of the villagers and this small, modest place of worship. Most soldiers might have pushed past him and searched that mosque anyway, but not the CIA man. He was in charge of this team of soldiers and he did not allow anyone to defile the mosque.
The CIA man was tall and powerful and you knew right away that this was not a green college boy who had gone off to fight. No, this tall man was a killer of men, and perhaps of many men.
He came up to where the Mullah stood and said nothing for a long time, merely staring in the cleric’s face. The CIA man asked the Mullah for his name, took his fingerprints, and then abruptly turned and left, taking the other American soldiers with him.
The mosque remained undefiled.
That night, however, Al-Faiz had a dream. And in the dream he fell backward out of his body. Not all the way, but far enough that he no longer felt like he was in control of his own flesh. Not anymore. It was as if someone else had taken over control of his muscles and nerves. When his hand moved, it was not Al-Faiz who moved it. He watched as some unseen hand worked the strings and moved his body with the dexterous skill of a puppeteer.
He rose from his bed and walked out into the moonlight where several men were up late, talking by the light of a small fire. These were men who had joined with ISIL and were being trained for the war. Al-Faiz came up to them and stood at the outer edges of the fire’s yellow glow. The other men greeted him, but he said nothing for a long time, and instead waited while the others gradually fell silent and turned inquiring faces toward him.
The quiet of the night settled around them and the moment gradually grew strange. Later, those gathered men would tell their friends and family — and anyone else who would listen — that weird fires seemed to burn in the Mullah’s eyes. They said that when the Mullah spoke it was not in his own voice. And though he spoke in Arabic, even his accent was different. The Kurdish inflection on certain words, common to all of the people in that region, was gone.
They never forgot what he said that night, because the words of the Mullah were the match that set fire to the world.
“I am no one,” he said. “I am a vessel through which God speaks. And I will tell you how we will destroy the infidels. I will tell you how to throw them into a world of darkness.”
INTERLUDE SIX
“What’s he building in there?”
Oscar Bell sat behind his desk and nodded to the papers. He didn’t get up and hand them across. He did not do that sort of thing. Not even to a physicist whose name had appeared on the Nobel ballot four times in seventeen years. It’s doubtful he would have done so had Dr. Gustafson in fact won those four prizes.
That was Oscar Bell.
For his part, Dr. Gustafson did not expect simple courtesies from this man — nor indeed any graces. He’d been warned by his colleagues and Bell’s senior assistant had given him a twenty-minute talk on deportment. A younger and wealthier man might have taken offense. It’s possible that a younger Gustafson might even have walked out. Youth and optimism can craft moments like that. Age and being an also-ran tended to make a person more conciliatory.
So he reached for them himself, opened the folder on his side of the big desk, and began sorting through the papers. He already knew that this would be something involving both advanced electronics and physics, but he was not at all prepared for what he saw.
What he saw confused him.
“Where did you get these plans?” he asked.
Bell sipped coffee from an expensive china cup, his face giving absolutely nothing away. “You tell me.”
“Ah. Well… see here?” said Gustafson, rising and spreading the papers out so they puzzled together one very large schematic. “In a general sense it appears to be a hadron collider. This circular chamber is the tunnel through which the particles are run. You aim and bang and study what happened during that impact. Most of these devices are designed as large rings, of course, because you can better regulate the speed of the particles. In either case what is absolutely necessary is to get the tunnel perfectly cylindrical. Imperfections cause explosions — miner ones, of course, but damaging and time-wasting. Or your particles can strike irregularities in the wall and then the nature of the experiment is warped due to interference, and with the materials used to make the tunnel. Ultra-high-speed collisions with a loose steel rivet can spoil weeks of careful planning, and if anything is chipped off you then have particulate contaminates. It would be like doing blood work in dirty test tubes. You could never separate out the impurities from the desired particles.”
“Firing tunnel and smooth bore,” said Bell. “Got it. What’s next?”
Gustafson shifted to a second set of papers. “Mmm, this looks like some kind of propulsion system. These are superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way. Very streamlined from what you typically see, but the structural design looks good. Very good, actually. This is elegant.” He named a number of other key components. “You see, inside an accelerator, two high-energy particle beams travel at close to the speed of light before they are forced to collide. The beams travel in opposite directions in separate beam pipes, like these two here and here. These tubes are kept at ultrahigh vacuum and are guided around the accelerator ring by the strong magnetic field maintained by the electromagnets. The electromagnets themselves are built from coils of special electric cable that operates in a superconducting state. So, essentially they conduct electricity without resistance or loss of energy. To accomplish this, the magnets need to be chilled to minus two hundred seventy-one point three degrees Celsius. That’s actually colder than the ambient temperature of deep space. This is really a fine piece of design work.” He went through more of the designs, then abruptly stopped and frowned. “Wait… no, that’s odd. This isn’t right.”