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  That’s where he had been yesterday: in his car, stuck in Beltway traffic, AC going full blast, listening to Steve Inskeep on National Public Radio.

  Today, the world had changed.

  The National Guard had landed on Red Mesa, on schedule at 4:45 A.M., the LZ about three miles from the former location of Isabella. The mission had changed, however. The assault had become a salvage operation—the rescue and evacuation of the injured and the retrieval of the dead from Red Mesa. The fire had become uncontrollable. Riddled with bituminous coal seams, the mesa would probably burn for the next century, until the mountain was no more.

  Isabella was gone. The forty-billion-dollar machine was a tangled, burning wreckage scattered across the mesa, and blown out from the cliff to the desert floor below.

  The president entered the Situation Room and everyone stood.

  “Take your seats,” he growled, slapping some papers on the table and sitting down. He’d had two hours of sleep but, if anything, the brief rest had worsened his mood.

  “Are we ready?” the president asked. He punched a control at his chair and the clean-cut visage of the FBI Director, his salt-and-pepper hair still perfect, his suit immaculate, appeared on the monitor.

  “Jack, give us an update.”

  “Yes, Mr. President. The situation is under control.”

  The president’s lips tightened skeptically.

  “We have evacuated the mesa. The injured are being medevacked to area hospitals. I’m sorry to say it appears our entire Hostage Rescue Team lost their lives in the conflict.”

  “And the scientists?” the president asked.

  “The scientific team seems to have disappeared.”

  The president dropped his head into his hands. “Nothing about the scientists?”

  “Not a trace. Some of them may have escaped into the old mines at the time of the assault, where they were likely caught in the explosion, fire, and collapse of the mines. The consensus assessment is that they did not survive.”

  The president’s head remained bowed.

  “We still have no information on what happened, why Isabella lost communication. It might have had something to do with the attack—we just don’t know. We’ve been taking out bodies and body parts by the hundreds, many burned beyond recognition. We’re still looking for the body of Russell Eddy, the deranged preacher who incited all these people over the Internet. We may need weeks, even months, before we can locate and identify all the dead. Some will never be found.”

  “What about Spates?” the president asked.

  “We took him into custody and are questioning him. He’s reported to be cooperative. We’ve also taken Booker Crawley of the K Street firm Crawley and Stratham, into custody.”

  “The lobbyist?” The president looked up. “What was his involvement?”

  “He secretly paid Spates to preach against Isabella so that he could extort more money from his client, the Navajo Nation.”

  The president shook his head in stunned wonder.

  Galdone, the president’s campaign manager, shifted his considerable bulk. His blue suit looked slept in; his tie looked like he had waxed his Buick with it. He needed a shave. A truly loathsome creature, Lockwood thought. He was gearing up to speak, and everyone looked in his oracular direction.

  “Mr. President,” Galdone said, “we need to shape the narrative. As we speak, the column of smoke rising over the desert is being played on every television set in America, and the nation is waiting for answers. Fortunately, Red Mesa’s remoteness and our quick efforts to close the airspace and block access kept most of the press out. They weren’t able to transmit the most gruesome details. We can still turn this debacle into a voter-friendly narrative that might bring us public approbation.”

  “How?” the president asked.

  “Someone has to fall on his sword,” Lockwood said simply.

  Galdone smiled indulgently at Lockwood. “It is true that a story needs a villain. But we already have two: Spates and Crawley. Picture-perfect bad guys—one a whoring, hypocritical televangelist, the other an oily, scheming lobbyist. Not to mention this deranged Eddy fellow. No, what we really need for this story is a hero.”

  “So who’s the hero?” the president asked.

  “It can’t be you, Mr. President. The public won’t buy that. It can’t be the FBI Director—he lost his team. It can’t be anyone at DOE, because they’re the ones who screwed up Isabella in the first place. It can’t be any of the scientists, because they appear to have died. It can’t be a political functionary like me or Roger Morton here. No one will believe that.”

  Galdone’s roaming eyes stopped at Lockwood.

  “One man recognized the problem early. Lockwood—you. A man with great wisdom and prescience, who took decisive action to correct a problem that only he and the president saw coming. Everyone else was asleep at the switch—Congress, the FBI, the DOE, me, Roger, everyone. As events unfolded, you were instrumental at every turn. Wise, knowledgeable, a confidant to the martyred scientists—you were crucial to resolving this situation.”

  “Gordon,” said the president, incredulous, “we blew up a mountain.”

  “But you handled the aftermath brilliantly!” said Galdone. “Gentlemen, the Isabella debacle was no Katrina, dragging on for weeks. Mr. President, you and Lockwood killed or locked up the bad guys and cleaned up the catastrophe—in one night! The mesa has been secured by the National Guard—”

  “Secured?” the president said. “The mesa looks like the back side of the moon—”

  “—secured.” Galdone’s voice overrode the president’s. “Thanks to your decisive leadership, Mr. President, and the invaluable, critical support of your hand-picked, trusted Science Adviser—Dr. Stanton Lockwood.”

  Galdone eyes rested on Lockwood. “That, gentlemen, is our narrative. Let us not forget it.” He tilted his head, his fat neck bulging with fresh folds, and gazed at Lockwood. “Stan, are you up to the task?”

  Lockwood realized that he had finally arrived. He was now one of them.

  “Perfectly,” he said, and smiled.

  81

  AT NOON, FORD AND THE GROUP rode out of the juniper scrub and crossed the outlying pasture of a small Navajo farm. After riding ten hours, Ford’s body felt bruised and battered, his broken ribs throbbed, and his head pounded. One eye was swollen shut, and his front teeth were chipped.

  The homestead of Begay’s sister was the incarnation of peace and tranquility. A picturesque log cabin with red curtains stood next to a cluster of heavy-limbed cottonwoods, beside which ran Laguna Creek. Behind the cabin the sister kept an old Airstream trailer on blocks, its aluminum skin scoured by wind, sun, and sand. A herd of sheep milled and bleated in a pen, while a lone horse stamped and snorted in a corral. Four-strand barbed wire enclosed two irrigated cornfields. Creaking merrily in a stiff breeze, a windmill pumped water into a stock tank. Rickety wooden steps led up the side of the tank to a weatherbeaten diving board. Two pickup trucks were parked in the shade. The sound of a radio playing country music wafted out the windows of the cabin.

  Exhausted and silent, they unsaddled and brushed out the horses.

  A woman in jeans came out of the trailer, slender with long black hair, and hugged Begay.

  “This is my sister, Regina,” he said, introducing her around.

  She helped them with the mounts.

  “You all need to wash up,” she said. “We use the stock tank. Ladies first, then gents. After Nelson called, I rustled up some clean clothes for you all—they’re laid out in the trailer. If they don’t fit, don’t complain to me. I hear the roadblocks at Cow Springs have come down, so as soon as the sun sets, Nelson and I will drive you all into Flagstaff.”

  She looked around sternly, as if this was the sorriest bunch she had ever seen. And perhaps they were. “We’ll eat in an hour.”

  All day, military helicopters had been passing overhead, going to and from the burning mesa. One passed over now, and Regi
na squinted up at it. “Where were they when you needed ‘em?”

  AFTER THE MEAL, FORD AND KATE sat in the shade of a cottonwood at the far edge of the corrals, watching the horses graze in the back pasture. The creek tumbled lazily over its stony bed. The sun hung low in the sky. To the south, Ford could see the plume of smoke rising from Red Mesa, a slanted black pillar that feathered out to form a brown pall in the atmosphere, stretching across the horizon.

  They sat for a long time, saying nothing. It was their first moment alone.

  Ford put his arm around her. “How are you?”

  She shook her head wordlessly, wiping her eyes with a clean bandanna. For a long moment they sat in the shade, saying nothing. Bees droned past on their way to a set of hives at the edge of the fields. The other scientists were listening to the radio back in the cabin, which was running nonstop news about the disaster. The announcer’s faint, tinny voice drifted in the peaceful air.

  “We’re the most talked about dead people in America,” said Ford. “Maybe we should have turned ourselves in to the National Guard.”

  “You know we can’t trust them,” said Kate. “They’ll learn the truth soon enough, along with the rest of America, when we get to Flagstaff.” She raised her head, wiped her eyes, and reached into her pocket. She withdrew a soiled wad of computer paper. “When we present this to the world.”

  Ford stared, surprised. “How did you get that?”

  “I got it from Gregory when I embraced him.” She opened it up and smoothed it out on her knee. “The printout of the words of God.”

  Ford didn’t know how to begin what he had been rehearsing in his mind for hours. He asked a question instead. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “We have to get this out. Tell our story. The world has to know. Wyman, when we get to Flagstaff, we’ll organize a press conference. An announcement. The radio says that everyone thinks we’re dead. Right now, the entire world’s attention is riveted on what happened at Red Mesa. Think of the impact we could have.” Her beautiful face, so battered, so tired, had never looked so alive.

  “An announcement . . . about what?”

  She stared at him as if he were crazy. “About what happened. About the scientific discovery of . . .” She hesitated only a moment before saying the word, and then spoke it with great conviction: “God.”

  Ford swallowed. “Kate?”

  “What?”

  “There’s something you should know first. Before you . . . take that step.”

  “Which is?”

  “It was . . .” He paused. How was he going to do this?

  “It was what?”

  He hesitated.

  “You’re with us, aren’t you?” Kate asked.

  He wondered if he could even bring himself to tell her the truth. But he had to try. He couldn’t live with himself otherwise. Or could he? He looked at her face, glowing with conviction and belief. She had been lost, and now she was found. He still couldn’t walk away without telling her what he knew.

  “It was a fraud,” he said quickly.

  Her eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?”

  “Hazelius concocted this whole thing. It was a scheme to start a new religion—sort of like Scientology.”

  She shook her head. “Wyman . . . You never change, do you?”

  He tried to take her hand, but she withdrew it sharply.

  “I can’t believe you’re trying to pull this,” she said, suddenly angry “I really can’t.”

  “Kate, Hazelius told me. He admitted it to me. Back in the mines. It’s all a con.”

  She shook her head. “You’ve tried everything to stop this, to discredit what’s going on here. But I never thought you’d stoop this low—to out-and-out lie.”

  “Kate—”

  She rose. “Wyman, it isn’t going to work. I know you can’t accept what happened here. You can’t abandon your Christian faith. You’re making no sense, though. If Gregory dreamed up this whole thing, would he have admitted it to anyone? Especially to you?”

  “He thought we both were going to die.”

  “No, Wyman, what you’re saying makes no sense.”

  Ford looked at her. Her eyes blazed with fervid belief. He would never change her mind.

  She continued. “Did you see the way he died? Do you remember what he said, his very last words? They’re burned into my memory. The universe never forgets . You think that was part of the fraud? No, Wyman: he died a believer. You can’t fake something like that. He stood in the fire. Even while he was burning, with one leg shattered, he stood. He never buckled, never faltered, never stopped smiling, never even closed his eyes. That’s how powerful his belief was. You’re telling me that was a fraud?”

  He said nothing. He wasn’t going to change her mind, and he wasn’t sure he even wanted to. Her life had been so hard, so full of loss. To convince her Hazelius was a fraud would be to destroy her. And maybe most religions needed a certain measure of fraud to succeed. After all, religion was based not on fact, but on faith. It was a spiritual confidence game.

  He gazed at her with an almost inconsolable sorrow. Hazelius had been right: There was nothing Ford, Volkonsky, or anyone could do to stop this. Nothing. Les jeux sont faites . The die is cast. And now he understood why Hazelius had so freely admitted it to him—he knew that, even if Ford survived, he would be powerless to stop it. And that was why he went to his death with such astonishing dignity and resolve. It was the final act in his drama, and he was determined to play it well.

  He had died a true believer.

  “Wyman,” Kate said, “if you’ve ever loved me, believe and join us. Christianity’s done.” She held out the packet of computer paper. “How can you not believe this, after what we lived through?”

  He shook his head, unable to answer. Her passion filled him with envy. How wonderful it would be to be so sure of the truth.

  She tossed the paper down and seized his hands. “We can do it together. Break with your past. Choose a new life with me.”

  Ford lowered his head. “No,” he said softly.

  “You can still try to believe. Over time, you’ll see the light. Don’t walk out on this. Don’t walk out on me.”

  “It would be wonderful for a while. Just to be with you. But it wouldn’t last.”

  “What we witnessed in the mountain was the hand of God. I know it was.”

  “I can’t do it . . . I can’t live what I don’t believe.”

  “Believe in me, then. You said you loved me and you’d stay with me. You promised.”

  “Sometimes love isn’t enough. Not for what you plan to do. I’m going now. Give my regards to the others.”

  “Don’t go.” The tears ran down her face.

  He bent down and kissed her on the forehead, very lightly. “Good-bye, Kate,” he said. “And . . . God bless.”

  ONE MONTH LATER

  WYMAN FORD SAT IN MANNY’S BUCKHORN Bar and Grill in San Antonio, New Mexico, eating a green chile cheeseburger and watching the television behind the bar. A month had passed since the press conference at Flagstaff that had electrified the world.

  After a debriefing in Washington by Lockwood, in which he had shamelessly shaped his story to support the new mythology, he had taken off in his Jeep and drove to New Mexico. There he had spent a few weeks hiking the canyons north of Abiquiú, by himself, thinking about what had happened.

  Isabella had been destroyed, Red Mesa left a blasted, smoldering moonscape. Hundreds had died or disappeared in the conflagration. The FBI had eventually identified Russell Eddy’s body, from DNA and dental records, and declared the millennialist minister the perpetrator.

  Already a media spectacle, after Flagstaff the Red Mesa story grew into an epic of gargantuan dimensions. It was the biggest story in the last two thousand years, some pundits proclaimed.

  Christianity had taken four centuries to conquer the old Roman Empire. The new religion—which its votaries called the Search—took four days to burn through the Unit
ed States. The World Wide Web turned out to be the perfect disseminator for the new faith—as if the Internet had been created for its propagation.

  Ford glanced at his watch. It was eleven forty-five, and in fifteen minutes half the world, including the patrons of Manny’s Buckhorn, would be watching the Event, broadcast live from a Colorado ranch owned by a dot-com billionaire.

  The television’s volume was turned down, and Ford strained to listen. Behind the anchorman on the background screen, a high-angle aerial camera panned a crowd of prodigious size, which the news channel estimated to be three million people. The teeming throng filled the prairie farmlands as far as the eye could see, the snowcapped San Juan Mountains providing a picturesque backdrop.

  Over the past month, Ford had done a lot of thinking. He had come to recognize Hazelius’s brilliance. The Red Mesa debacle had established the religion and made himself the movement’s preeminent prophet and martyr. Red Mesa, Hazelius’s blazing immolation, and his tragic transcendence had become the stuff of myth and legend—a story like that of the Buddha, Lord Krishna, Medina and Mohammed, the Nativity, the Last Supper, Crucifixion and Resurrection. Hazelius and the story of Isabella was no different from those other stories, a narrative that believers could share, a founding history that animated their faith and told them who they were and why they were here.

  It had become one of the greatest stories ever told.

  Hazelius had pulled it off—brilliantly. He had even been right about his own martyrdom, his fiery transfiguration, which had gripped the public consciousness like nothing else. In death he had become a moral force, a formidable prophet, and a spiritual leader.

  Noon approached, and the bartender turned up the television’s volume. The lunchtime patrons at the bar—truckers, local ranchers, a scattering of tourists—were giving the television their rapt attention.

  The news program cut to a correspondent at the ranch in Colorado. The man stood in the vast crowd, gripping a mike. Sweating, his face was vivid with the same zeal that transfixed the crowd. It was contagious. The people around him chanted and cheered, sang, and brandished banners embellished with a gnarled, flaming piñon tree.