Free Critical Mass by Whitley Strieber

protected by their tanks and their knights. They were eating the world, gobbling its gold and its oil and its precious water, spitting out bangles and baubles and sweets, and suffering meaningless desires and fornicating, then drowning it all in a soul-rotting slurry of alcohol and drugs. He’d had a blue Mercedes CLS in Peshawar, and the women who had come to him—what a life!
    No, to be forgotten. He turned his mind back to the Crusaders. Filthy! Curse that CLS and the temptations it brought!
    He felt something on his neck, and knew, then, that it was the boy’s hand. Wasim had laid a kindly hand on Aziz’s neck. He felt the light child’s touch, and the heart of the child also.
    Wasim held him, then looked at his face. Solemnly Wasim lifted a corner of his thin coat and wiped Aziz’s cheeks, drying the tears that he had known would be there, that were always there after prayer.
    Aziz smiled. “May Allah be with you, Wasim,” he said.
    The boy muttered something.
    “What is it you say, Wasim?”
    “That’s not my name!”
    The boy went away then, to the far side of the room. He worked a moment, then returned with a pomegranate sliced on a little tray.
    Aziz took the food, and ate. “I have a message,” he said. He had thought long on this message. It must be one of two randomly chosen words, “purple” or “green.”
    He would try now to find God in his mind. Would he see a horseman, a wandering beggar, an eagle rising in dawn light? There were many images of God in his mind, secret, impious things that had been there since he was a small boy and first praying and then wondering how this God who so dominated their lives must appear.
    When he had said, “God is an eagle in dawn light,” his father had given him a shaking. When he had asked his father, “Is God like a horseman on a fine mare?” his father had slapped him and said, “God would not ride a mare.” He had asked his father later if God was like a beggar on the road, and his father had gone to the kitchen and returned to their schoolroom with a broom, and beaten his back with its long wooden handle.
    He had not asked again what God looked like, but the images still danced in his mind when he prayed.
    Then he saw God the eagle with his dark wings, God crying rage into the dawn.
    “The word is ‘purple,’ boy. The English word ‘purple.’ Tell Eshan now.”
    Wasim hurried from the room.
    Aziz felt the Mahdi within him, and the Mahdi’s heart seemed to swell with joy. All would be well, now. Happiness was at hand.

     

8
    ESCALATION

     

     
    Jim Deutsch’s world had ended. He’d been in plenty of trouble in his life, but not like this. No matter how bad it had gotten—running from one bunch of semi-official thugs into the arms of another, you name it—somebody had always had his back.
    No more, not after the fantastic escalation that had taken place at the motel in Carrizo Springs. In that dingy room, his world had collapsed around him. The Brewster Jennings problem was one issue that he was aware of but was obviously not the end of the compromise of American counterproliferation. The system was deeply penetrated, and at high levels. It had to be.
    What had happened had placed him in the worst position an agent could find himself. He dared not expose what he had discovered to the very system that was designed to support him in his work, because he would be revealing it to the enemy.
    So he had continued on his own, and now an exhausted, scared man moved through the Colorado Springs Greyhound station listening to his Geiger counter tick over and trying desperately to guess where they would have taken the plutonium from here.
    He needed the WMD interdiction infrastructure; he needed satellite lookdowns and the support of CIA analysts; he needed the FBI’s investigatoryskills and powers; he needed the local and state police and the entire national enforcement and detection apparatus.
    He’d assumed that the assassination attempt had