The sermon that followed was long and full of assertions that a more critical Bible scholar might have taken issue with. But the men of the militia, many of whom expected to die this coming day, listened attentively and without objection.
Sitting alone in a pew at the back of the nave was a man with a plain silver cross in his lapel. He was the militia’s chief strategist and he had provided the intelligence that had resulted in this gathering being called, although he had lied about where his information had come from.
The strategist’s Christian name was Peter Lightfield. He claimed to be a descendant of Thomas Jefferson; in truth he knew nothing of his ancestry, having been raised in a series of foster homes. To his secret masters in Al Qaeda, he was known as Ibn Abihi, “his father’s son,” and Ibn Abihi was also how he thought of himself, though for reasons of personal amusement he preferred the Aramaic rendering: Bar Abbas.
Bar Abbas sat through the reading of the scripture and the first few minutes of the sermon, but got up before the preacher could start blaspheming against Islam. If anyone had asked, Bar Abbas would have said he was going to check on the progress of the bomb-laying team, which was true—but first he had a different call to make.
He stepped out into the narthex and went downstairs to the church basement, which was divided into three rooms. The front room contained mostly paper: old church newsletters, handbills attacking the Coalition Authority and threatening retaliation against collaborators, and stacks and stacks of comic-book tracts that explained, using crude images and semiliterate prose, the connection between the Antichrist and the Arab and Persian governments.
A padlocked door gave access to the church armory. As was the American custom, every weapon carried a scriptural reference—either an actual Bible verse or a coded citation. The sights of the assault rifles racked along the front wall were all engraved with the legend JER50:14 (“Take up your positions around Babylon, all you who draw the bow. Shoot at her! Spare no arrows, for she has sinned against the LORD.”). The grip of a .45-caliber handgun was stamped PSA110:5 (“The LORD is at your right hand; he will crush kings on the day of his wrath”) and the stock of a machine gun read JDG15:16 (“Then Samson said, ‘With a donkey’s jawbone, I have made donkeys of them. With a donkey’s jawbone, I have killed a thousand men.’ ”). The lid of a crate of hand grenades had been stenciled with the words of 1st Samuel, chapter 17, verse 45: “David said to the Philistine, ‘You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the LORD Almighty, whom you have defied.’ ” And a case holding the militia’s prize possession, a Scorpion man-portable surface-to-air missile launcher, was painted with a verse from Revelation chapter 12: “Satan was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.”
The third room was a disused janitor’s closet that now held random junk. Sitting on a chest-high shelf was a dusty laptop; it looked like it hadn’t been touched in a long time, but its battery was fully charged and it started up immediately when Bar Abbas pressed the power button. While the operating system loaded, Bar Abbas retrieved a webcam from behind a box of crèche figurines and plugged it into the laptop. He opened a videoconferencing window and entered a series of passwords. There was a burst of sand-like static, and then he was staring into the face of Idris Abd al Qahhar.
“You are late,” Idris said.
“I had to wait until the service started.” Bar Abbas glanced at the armory’s outer door, which he had bolted behind him. “We’re less likely to be interrupted this way.”
“Did you locate Samir Nadim?”
“Yes,” said Bar Abbas. “I gave him the cell phone and told him what to do. But I don’t know if he’ll go through with it.”
“You told him what would happen if he didn’t?”
“Yes, and from the way he reacted, it’s clear he loves his sons’ lives more than his own. But that may not be enough when the moment comes. He seems . . . weak-willed.”
“He is a coward,” Idris said sternly. “You have a contingency plan?”
Bar Abbas nodded. “I’ll be there to set it off if he doesn’t.”
He might have asked, Why involve this Samir at all? but Idris would likely regard such a question as impertinent. Bar Abbas assumed it was a subterfuge of some kind: Military investigators would find the modified cell phone on Samir’s body, and Idris would use that fact to cast him and his colleagues as traitors, and discredit whatever government agency had sent them on their mission to America. Hearing the way Idris said “He is a coward,” Bar Abbas decided there might be a secondary motive, as welclass="underline" Perhaps Idris, for personal reasons, wanted Samir’s last hours to be filled with fear and torment. This was not professional behavior for an Al Qaeda leader, but Bar Abbas, who had tortured a number of his own enemies in the past, was in no position to pass judgment.
“What about the other matter?” Idris said next. “Have you investigated V. Howell Industries?”
“I took a squad of men to the address you gave me,” Bar Abbas told him. “The offices were abandoned—but recently. It looks like they cleared out in a hurry.”
“They knew you were coming.”
“If they did, it wasn’t any of my people who warned them. There wasn’t time.”
“And you found nothing?”
“There were some artifacts in one of the rooms. Books, mostly.”
“Books about what?”
“The history of Arabia,” Bar Abbas said. “The real history, I mean.”
Idris’s face expanded on screen as he leaned forward. “What did you do with these books?”
“Burned them in a dumpster behind the facility.” Or most of them. Bar Abbas had saved a few volumes for himself.
“And the other men who were with you . . .”
“They were curious, but nobody read anything they weren’t supposed to. Anyway,” he couldn’t resist adding, “it doesn’t matter. Once God lifts the mirage, everyone’s going to know the truth.”
“Yes, but until that day, there are certain truths we don’t want widely known . . . What else did you find?”
“A Texas state flag. That was in another room that was being used as a dormitory. There were some empty pill bottles in a wastebasket.”
“What kind of pills?”
“The bottles weren’t labeled, but I’d guess Valium or some other sedative,” Bar Abbas said. “Almost everyone takes something to sleep here.”
“What else?”
“Just some personal effects. Somebody must be a Green Desert fan—I found a copy of the Son of Cush CD under one of the dormitory beds.”
“Son of Cush? What is Son of Cush?”
“Alternative punk rock,” Bar Abbas explained, which judging from Idris’s expression didn’t clarify matters. “Don’t worry, none of the songs are about Osama bin Laden.”
“If it’s music, you should destroy it anyway.”
“Already done.” Bar Abbas lied. He looked up, hearing a board creak overhead. “I should go. I still have preparations to make.”
“You’ll contact me again when it’s accomplished?”
“If I can,” said Bar Abbas. “If you don’t hear from me, it’s because God had other plans.”
At that same hour not far away, two disciples crouched on a wooded ridge overlooking the Jeff Davis Pike.
The lead disciple’s name was Timothy. He was tall and thin, and paler than any man who ever sat at the foot of the living Christ. He wore a pair of night-vision goggles and was using them to spy on a trio of Christian militiamen as they planted an IED in a culvert beneath the roadbed.