The Tenth Circle Read online

  “I came straight to meet you from the airport.”

  “Not like you to initiate contact.”

  “I made an exception.”

  “What changed?”

  “Keep talking, Hank.”

  “Forty-eight hours ago, terrorists firebombed a church in Ohio. Over a hundred casualties. Just over twenty-four hours ago, they blew up a bridge in Missouri. Those two attacks came in the wake of two gunmen shooting up a restaurant and an explosion on a subway train. They’re hitting us coast to coast, going after infrastructure as well as innocents.”

  “Like 9/11, every goddamn day.” Blaine nodded.

  Folsom studied McCracken closer. “But at least there’s some good news. I hear Iran’s nuclear enrichment plant in Natanz nuked itself yesterday.”

  “Did it now?”

  “Yes, sir. No further details available. But you didn’t come straight from landing back in country to see me.”

  “No, I came from Missouri, the Daniel Boone Bridge specifically, where bodies are still being pulled from the water.”

  They’d met the same place they had the first time circumstances had brought them together: the F Street Bistro in the State Plaza Hotel, a pleasant enough venue with cheery light and a slate of windows overlooking the street that Blaine instinctively avoided. Today, that street was crammed with police and a few National Guardsmen sprinkled in for good measure. On alert, assault rifles not far from their grasps.

  McCracken had arrived first, as was his custom, and staked out a table as close to a darkened corner as the place had to offer. He’d used this location in the past because of its status as one of Washington’s best-kept secrets. But the last time he was here, the room had filled up around him, every table occupied within minutes with an army of waiters scurrying between them. McCracken found himself missing that kind of bustle today. Theirs was the only table occupied. Washington looked to be staying home for the day, along with the rest of the country, in the wake of four terrorist attacks in little more than a week.

  Folsom leaned back in his chair. He had the look of a man born in a button-down shirt. Hair neatly slicked back, horn-rimmed glasses, and youthful features that would make him appear forty forever. The Department of Homeland Security probably had a thousand just like him.

  “Soft targets all,” Folsom elaborated. “Civilians, infrastructure … Like the Missouri attack. You telling me that’s what brought you here? What the hell for?”

  “Because somebody important to me was on that bridge when it blew.”

  Folsom remained silent for several long moments once McCracken was done.

  “Saved me the trouble of calling you in on this, I guess,” he said finally.

  “Well, here I am.”

  Folsom leaned across the table, looking almost relieved. “That bridge and all the other attacks were carried out by Islamic extremist groups, because of one man’s crusade against them.”

  “And who’s that?”

  “A man who doesn’t care if this country burns, McCracken.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Tampa, Florida

  “When I see a Muslim, I turn away,” the Reverend Jeremiah Rule said to all those gathered around the fire pit.

  His faithful applauded.

  “If he does not turn away, I shove him aside!”

  His faithful cheered.

  “And if he is still there, I spit in his face!”

  His faithful cried out their agreement, deafening Rule to all other noise. Many pounded the air with their fists. Others held their hands high toward the sky. Still more dropped to their knees in reverence to him; those who followed the reverend from stop to stop, place to place, seeing in him the one true spokesman for their most deep-seated feelings and hatred.

  I speak for you, he thought as the cheering, unrestrained and cathartic, continued. I speak for all those who’ve lost their voices or been silenced by others who would betray this country.

  Then Rule looked down at the flames rising from the pit the closest of his devoted had dug just that morning in the ground of Tampa’s Al Lopez Park, within view of a beautiful pond well stocked for fishing. The “cleansing service,” as he called it, had been scheduled to take place in a different park, but had been moved here at the last minute when his permit was rescinded. There’d been no time to arrange permission for the fire now raging, and Rule welcomed any attempt by Tampa authorities to make their way through the five hundred faithful gathered for the service to shut him down for violating some ordinance he didn’t even know existed.

  Five hundred, Rule thought reverently. There’d been times, not too long ago, when he’d preached these very same words to no more than five and only as many as fifty on his very best day. Then he came to the realization that actions spoke far louder and better than words. That was the day he’d doused a copy of the Koran in gasoline and lit it on fire before an audience of twenty-five faithful followers. One of those twenty-five recorded the burning with his phone and put it up on YouTube, where it went viral. The Islamic world exploded with violence and vengeance, ravaging American consulates as they took to the streets like crazed, rabid animals that revealed them, in Rule’s mind anyway, as the heathens and barbarians they were. His actions had exposed their true faces to the world, and the reverend ratcheted up his efforts to bring that truth further into the light so the world might know them in their true form.

  “But this is your service, not mine, my brothers and sisters!” he blared into the microphone to the faithful who’d greeted him in Tampa, feedback sent screeching out the outdoor speakers. “This is your time to lash out and be heard. For I give you a voice when everyone else ignores your words. So come forth now and offer a token to the flames so you might be cleansed. Come forth with whatever symbols you bring of the cursed people who would infest our land with the ugliness of their word and unholy nature of their purpose, the sin of their very being, brothers and sisters!”

  It was cool for January in central Florida, but Rule’s face glowed with a light sheen of sweat from his proximity to the fire pit dug six feet down, his feet flirting precariously with the edge. He was a big, husky man with skin the texture of leather from spending years selling Bibles door to door. His long graying hair was gnarled together in snakelike strands that flapped side to side with each twist of his head. His thick mustache curled upward at the end, wet with sweat and snot from his own wild rants that had whipped him, as well as the crowd, into a frenzy.

  “Come forward!” he urged again. “Who will be the first to offer a symbol of all that must burn in the eternal fire of damnation!”

  A young boy, eleven or twelve maybe, slid out of the crowd holding a small rolled-up carpet. Rule’s heart skipped a beat. The boy seemed to glide, not walk, his steps making no imprint in the park grass.

  It couldn’t be …

  The boy, appearing to float now, smiled at Rule with reverence.

  A ghost from his long forgotten past …

  The boy mocked him with his big blue eyes, still coming forward.

  Be gone with you, demon! Rule wanted to shout. Get thee back to damnation!

  The boy extended the rolled-up rug out to him now. Only it wasn’t a rug anymore; it was the body of a dog, stiff and dead.

  Because the boy was dead too, drying blood caked up on his skull and brow, the tears and splits made in flesh and bone by the reverend’s own hands.

  A long time ago.

  CHAPTER 12

  Alabama: The past

  How many years ago had it been?

  More than the man who’d then been known simply as “J. D. Rule” wished to count. He’d been driving the Alabama country­side in a beat-up van that stank of sweat and beer, complete with a moth-eaten mattress, on which he slept in rest stops or parking lots after another failed day of trying to sell Christian Bibles door to door. An especially b
ad day, an especially hot day, finishing in a thunderstorm that soaked him to the gills in the walk back to his van from a farmhouse where the residents hadn’t had the courtesy to even open the door. Then, halfway to his van, an ugly square shape of dog, all muscle and jaw, lunged out at him.

  Rule’s sample Bible went flying off into the mud, and the dog lunged at him again when he stooped to retrieve it. Rule took the good book in hand and smashed the dog’s snout with it. And when the animal yelped, he struck at it again, missing but driving the dog backward toward the oak tree to which it was chained. Some kind of mangy, bony hound, ugly and scarred. He’d kicked at it, loving the sound and feel of his work boot mashing flesh and ribs through fur. The dog cowered and wailed as he kicked it again and again, then smashed it with his ruined sample Bible until it wailed no more.

  Rule was nearly out of breath when he turned to find a blond-haired boy, ten or eleven maybe, staring at him in wide-eyed despair and horror.

  “You killed my dog, mister! You killed my dog!”

  Rule came toward him, realizing the dog’s blood had splattered his clothes.

  “No, I … I … er—”

  The boy turned and ran back for the house.

  “Hey. Hey!”

  Rule caught him just short of the steps, intending to just get the boy quiet, settle him down a bit. But he wouldn’t stop his screaming and in that moment all of Rule’s anger and bitterness over the lot he’d been cast spilled over. First slapping the boy, then striking him with closed fists until his knuckles split and bled, and the screaming became a whimper and then a strange airless gurgle that left the boy’s blue eyes bulging and sightless.

  God, forgive me …

  Rule stumbled up off the dead kid, covered in more blood, along with muck and rain and urine from where the boy had pissed through his jeans. Leaving the body there, he hightailed it back to his van, speeding off on bald tires with his weak windshield wipers barely able to slap the rain away and his shredded, swollen hands fiery with pain.

  “Oh Lord, how I have failed you,” he sobbed as he drove, the van whipsawing back and forth across the two-lane road. His hands hurt so much from striking the boy’s skull and face, he could barely close them on the wheel. “I carry your word in books but not in my heart. And all these weeks I’ve sold not a single one, because I am not pure enough to know your word. But I resolve to change that. Here and now, I promise to be your faithful servant spreading your word through more than just the good book. If you’ll have me in your kingdom, I swear on all that is holy that I will be worthy of your grace.”

  That was it. He’d dedicated his life to God then and there, resolved to commit himself to the service of the Lord to avoid eternal damnation. Not selling Bibles, but buying back broken souls like his own. Showing them that the error of their ways was through no fault of their own, that there were others to blame who must be vanquished so their very beings could be free. Killing the boy had been the making of his own transition to spiritual completion, committing the ultimate sin so he could know how to help those guilty of smaller ones.

  The key was to give them something to rally against, something to make the true nature of their beings and moralities rise to the surface to bury all else beneath it. It wasn’t enough to have faith.

  They needed something to hate.

  And Rule found the answer to what in his own heart, a heart that had forever detested Muslims and their cursed religion from his days selling Bibles door to door. He’d found himself in a neighborhood devoted to Islam once, and to this day he could not get the hateful stares cast his way and doors slammed in his face out of his mind. Undeterred, he’d gone to a local mosque and presented a Bible to the imam, who promptly tossed it in the trash and lit it on fire as Rule watched.

  That memory resurfaced when the epiphany to burn Korans struck him in the wake of a Muslim being elected president of the United States. Regardless of all the protestations otherwise, Rule knew that to be the truth. He could see it in the man’s eyes and hear it in his voice, could sense the secret agenda he’d brought with him to the White House.

  The time had come to make a stand, to set the whole country on fire if that’s what it took to make people wake up and know the truth as he did.

  Set the whole country on fire …

  An image he came back to again and again in his mind. Because it was more than a prophecy.

  Because it was coming.

  CHAPTER 13

  Tampa, Florida: The present

  But now, here today in Tampa, it was the image of the boy that was back, except his hair wasn’t matted down by the rain and, on second glance, was black instead of blond. And his face wasn’t beaten and battered to a pulp. Approaching Rule now with a smile, full of life, taunting him with an offering.

  The reverend looked down, half expecting to see his knuckles swollen and bloodied.

  Haven’t I done enough in your service? he demanded of God in his mind. Have I not redeemed myself before your blessed eye yet?

  Rule believed with all his heart that killing that boy had been part of some greater cosmic plan to set him on the road he needed to be on, the road that had brought him here to Tampa today. Doing the Lord’s work, spreading His word about the nature of true evil in the world. Because to fight that evil, to fully understand it, Rule needed to know the evil in his own heart. And in beating that boy to a pulp, in feeling his life drain away in gasps and spasms to the pounding of his fists, he had achieved that well enough to recognize it held some higher purpose for him. Not that day, surely, not even the following week or month. He kept his heart and mind open, waiting to learn how he was to serve Him.

  “Here you are, Reverend,” the dark-haired boy said, in a voice distinctly different from the one Jeremiah Daniel Rule remembered so well, as he extended the rolled-up rug further.

  “You killed my dog, mister! You killed my dog!”

  So Rule shook off the illusion, the memory, and took the rug in his grasp. “And what have we here, son?”

  “It’s a prayer rug,” the boy said, big eyed and grinning. “My daddy took it off one of them when he was in Afghanistan. After he shot him.”

  “Praise be to your daddy, son.” Then, turning to his faithful, he said, “Praise be to this lad’s daddy!”

  “My daddy’s dead, Reverend. Killed dead by those folk after he volunteered to go back for another tour. I wish they was all dead too.”

  Rule touched the boy’s shoulder. “Your daddy’s a hero, son, a warrior in the service of the one true God—our Lord, not that of the heathens.” He eased the rolled-up rug back into the boy’s grasp. “I want you to do the deed, son. I want you to burn the offering so you might fan the flames of your late father’s love and know salvation. Do it, son. Feel His heat and His love.”

  With that, the boy tossed the rug toward the flames, watching it unfurl on the way down before disappearing into ash embers that floated up toward the sky.

  Rule clamped a hand tighter on the boy’s shoulder, all memory of his likeness to the boy he had slain at his becoming now vanquished. “Know this boy in your hearts, my brothers and sisters! Know this boy for the love he represents and the hatred we must all rid from the world! We will do it one object at a time, one offering at a time, and for each life of another brother or sister they take, the door to eternal damnation for all of their kind will open that much wider. We will push them through that door, my brothers and sisters, each and every one! Let them riot and loot, let them come to our shores and attack us in desperate retribution. We have smoked out the heathens and infidels, and their days of walking this blessed Earth will soon be done, as our Lord unleashes all of His wrath and fury upon their multitudes who walk with sickness in their souls.”

  The crowd parted to allow a young woman to come forward, taking the boy’s place before Jeremiah Rule.

  “I have nothing to offer!” she
cried out, sinking to her knees and wrapping her arms tightly around his legs. “I have nothing to offer but my sin and my failure!”

  The reverend stroked her hair tenderly. “Speak, my child. Free your soul.”

  “I’ve been corrupted, Reverend,” the young woman said, squeezing his legs tighter. “I turned away from the Lord when I married one of them, turned away from my faith to theirs. And I’m sorry for it, Reverend, I’m so sorry, so lost.” Her face, soft and beautiful, looked up him pleadingly. “Can you help me, Reverend? Is there any hope for me at all?”

  Rule separated himself from the young woman and backed away. “Rise, my child.”

  He watched her long, dark hair tumbling past her shoulders, tossed about by the breeze as she climbed back to her feet.

  “Can we save this child, my brothers and sisters?”

  “Yes!”

  “Can we save her?”

  “Yes!”

  “I say again: Can we save her?”

  “YES!”

  The applause, hoots, and cheers picked up again, rising through the crowd to a deafening crescendo that sounded like thunder booming in the sky with the portent of a storm in the offing.

  “Be saved, child!” he screamed into the microphone, touching the young woman’s head. “Be saved!”

  And she dropped back to her knees, sobbing.

  “But my work is not done, child,” he said, speaking only to her with the microphone held away. “Come to my church, so it might be completed and you may know full salvation.” Then, to the crowd again, “Praise the Lord, she is saved!”

  And they exploded in deafening cheers again, everything Jeremiah Rule had set into motion the day he killed the boy and his dog coming to a crescendo as well.

  “Be warned,” he continued, “there’s a storm coming, my brothers and sisters, a storm that will sweep away all those who do not see the world for what it is and have defied the Lord’s word. Find safe harbor from that storm with me, so when it comes, you will be spared its fury! For we will not stop, will not cease, will not relent, will not weaken until the last of their kind is rid from this earth with the pestilence that is their word and their very being! Because it is our mission, my brothers and sisters. And we will not rest until we see it done, until every Muslim on Earth has returned to the dirt that spawned them. Let them know our strength!”