A few minutes later, a figure that had gone unnoticed by Kismet, moved out of the shadowy stillness and softly padded up the stairs behind him.
Eighteen
Chiron sat with sphinx-like calm at the top of the short flight up to the turret, the highest accessible point on the tower. Kismet kept a wary eye on his former mentor as he unlocked the gate at the end of the east pillar stairway, but said nothing until he was only a few meters away.
It was an awkward moment, and Kismet sensed that Chiron felt it as well. Finally, he broke the stalemate with a gesture toward the Frenchman’s hands. “They said you had a dead-man switch.”
Chiron glanced at his empty palms. “A necessary deception. It was the only thing that kept them back.”
“Christ, Pierre, what are you doing?”
The impassive mask cracked, but Chiron kept his composure. He gave a heavy sigh. “I’m glad you made it out of Iraq. Is Marie…?”
“Marie is safe. Hussein didn’t make it.”
“I’m sorry,” was the hoarse reply. A shadow fell over Chiron’s eyes, but then he straightened, as if once more finding his resolve. “I’m sorry you made it through that, only to come to this. I have to do this, Nick, and I think you know why.”
“Because of Collette?” Kismet chose his words carefully. Chiron was beyond the reach of ordinary logic. “You believe that you can strike a blow against God — against the entity you believe occupies the earth’s magnetic field — because he let Collette die. Is that right, Pierre?”
Chiron gave a sad, almost embarrassed smile. “It sounds absurd when you put it that way.”
“Absurd? It’s obscene, Pierre. You’re willing to kill two million people just because you’re disappointed in a God you don’t even believe in?” He shot a surreptitious glance at his wristwatch. Fifty-eight minutes had elapsed since he had given the chief engineer his task. He could only hope that the job was done.
Chiron’s smile did not falter, but something behind it changed, as though his blood had turned to acid. “Two million?”
It was not the response Kismet had been expecting, and something about the way he said it made Kismet realize that he had underestimated both Chiron’s resolve and the magnitude of his scheme.
Chiron continued speaking, a condemned man explaining his crimes, if not quite confessing and asking forgiveness. “Everything we know is a lien illusion created by our symbiosis with this… this thing called God. We have given Him life through generation after generation of faith, and He in turn has become a keystone to our continued existence.
“The men who built this tower understood this all too well. With it, they sought to enslave the entity, to hold God in chains and bend him to their will. But like the banderillas of the bullfighter, this tower is an open wound in its body. What I do here today will not simply twist the knife, it will drive the blade to the very heart of God. And when it dies….”
Kismet felt numb. He didn’t know if he believed what Chiron was saying, didn’t know if all of the wild speculation about God living in the Van Allen Belts held even a grain of truth. It was easy to say that, sane or not, Chiron was threatening the lives of more than a million Parisians who would be obliterated in an atomic fireball, but underlying that very real concern Kismet felt a growing dread. What if he’s right? What if the very fate of the world rests on this moment?
“You would kill everyone on earth to avenge Collette? How can you imagine for even a second that she would want that?”
“Everyone dies, Nick. Most people live miserably short lives, filled with pain and futility. Whom do you blame for that? You think I do this because of what happened to Collette? You are mistaken. I do this to avenge every soul who has ever died wondering why their beloved Holy Father has forsaken them.”
His measured tone left little room for negotiation. Chiron had become a true believer, as driven as any suicide bomber. There would be no turning him from his path. Kismet had one card left to play. He spoke very slowly, afraid that the older man would panic in the face of an ultimatum. “Pierre, I can’t let you do this.”
“You cannot stop it,” Chiron replied, matter-of-factly. There was no defiance in his tone, only grave certainty.
“I already have. Before I came up here, I had the Tower engineers start wrapping the corner pylons in copper wire. As of—” he made a show of checking his wristwatch, but paid no real attention to what the face showed, “—about five minutes ago, they started running an electrical current through that wire.”
He saw comprehension in the other man’s eyes, but continued talking, hoping that the sound of his voice and the confidence he projected would be enough to disarm Chiron where reason had failed. “You see, I was paying attention when you talked about this in Babylon. I know that you think the Eiffel Tower is your Solomon Key, your magic staff to control — or destroy — the magnetic fields. So I had to come up with some way to neutralize it: magnetism. We’ve turned the Tower into an oppositely polarized electromagnet. Right now, whatever sort of interaction this structure had with the radiation in the atmosphere has diametrically changed. I’ve taken away your Solomon Key. You can still hurt a lot of innocent people, but that’s all. It’s over, Pierre.”
Chiron stared back at him like he was speaking a foreign language. But as the weight of the words settled in, he seemed to deflate. “Two million,” he mumbled. “For nothing. What have I done?”
Kismet advanced on Chiron, but the latter paid no heed. Chiron buried his head in his hands and sagged onto the stairs. Kismet muscled past him and ascended into the turret. Only there, as he caught sight of the detonator, did the reality of the situation finally hit home. His employer and mentor, a person almost as close to him as his father, had assembled an atomic weapon with the sole intention of wiping out all life on earth. He bit his lip and banished the paralyzing emotional response. Rage and incredulity weren’t going to help him avert this catastrophe. Only a clear head and rational thought process stood a chance of doing that. But as he reached the turret and gazed at the now completely assembled detonator, even his best attempt to remain dispassionate failed.
Bomb disposal was not something Kismet had been trained for, but he understood the principles of making and detonating most devices. Everything from a stick of dynamite, to a hand grenade, to this, a medium-yield nuclear device, worked on the basic principle of pushing an unstable chemical to its flashpoint. This was typically done through the introduction of a blasting cap — a small explosive that, when activated by a very low voltage electric charge, would trigger a cascade reaction in the larger payload. A nuclear detonator required engineering at an unparalleled level. The titanium sphere had to be machined to meet the highest tolerances, and the timing of the primary explosions had to be precise to within nanoseconds. Yet, for all the necessary exactitude, it remained a simple, electrically activated fuse. The trigger could be anything from a barometric device designed to activate at a preset altitude, to a radio-controlled detonator, but the end result would be the same: a tiny electrical charge would activate the blasting caps impregnating the plastic explosives, and a chain reaction lasting less than a tenth of a second would begin.