An all-knowing eye – beautiful, pitiless, irresistible – stared into Robert’s soul. He fought to control his breathing, to transform his fear.
I offer myself in their place. Take me. Let them go…
His heart was pounding. He was on the brink of success or failure. Millions of lives hung by a thread.
… I pray for my captor…
He could hear and see nothing, but he knew the Device was near by. He could feel its power rippling through him.
… as we forgive those who trespass against us…
He fought against panic.
… deliver us from evil…
Its raw energy was terrifying. The light of a thousand suns. His mind raced, deducing, estimating, remembering: downtown Manhattan, underground.
… thy will be done…
The air was dense, crackling with hostile energy, with words unsaid, like burning breathon his skin. His senses crept outwards, feeling menace, hurt to come, yet something else too: some desire not to harm him, an awareness that he provoked caution, even fear.
… fill my heart with compassion…
He felt the eye’s searching gaze reach into the most hidden corners of his soul. The Device – the Malice Box, the Ma’rifat’ – wanted to know him. It was a bomb about to blow, a barely contained chain reaction, feeding on the hearts of those around it. It asked questions: Who are you? What are your most secret desires?
He had chosen to be here, wanted it, sought it out with his actions. He fought to close his fear off, hold it to one side.
… turn fear into love…
Shapes and fragments of city scenes played before his eyes. Curving arches, tunnels and squares and vertical monuments, fingers and spines pointing from the earth to the heavens, spirals and hexagons and numbers and stars.
… mind like a mirror…
Seven days earlier the hunt had begun, and with it the destruction of everything he’d thought of as his life.
He’d cracked one code after another, followed strange and wonderful trails through the city, traced lines of light and longing, lust and fear. A scavenger hunt, a geo-caching game. Decode the city. Penetrate the labyrinth. Read the secret story before the enemy do.
The clock always returns to zero. Here he was facing his end, and he was back where he’d started.
… merciful heart…
He peered deeper into the blackness as he lay on the ground, straining for a glimpse of the Device. He twisted his head. Then he saw it: an intricately carved gold and white drum, gleaming dully, its sides decorated in what looked like Arabic script, inlaid with precious metals. In the half-darkness, it defied focus, as though sitting in its own geometry. Its upper and lower rims appeared to rotate slowly in opposite directions. The Ma’rifat’. It was armed, on the verge of detonation.
A man’s voice, hoarse and violent, jolted him like a bolt of electricity.
When he tried to speak, his mouth was sticky, his throat clogged, and nothing came out.
It was time to fight. He was ready. He cast his mind far into the past.
… forgive him…