

In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, and his fame doubtful.
---MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations, Book II

EDWARDSVILLE, ILLINOIS
The morning school bell was clattering in the distance as Hope Gardner sandwiched her Volvo station wagon between Mrs. Moscone's Escalade and Janey Eagleton's Prius. She only nicked the Prius's bumper, or rather the plastic piece of junk that passed for a bumper these days, and the gentle thump went unnoticed by her two children in the backseat of her car. She wished she had the guts to ding the Escalade a little, just to make it fair, but the Cadillac belonged to Mrs. Moscone, and nobody wanted Mrs. Moscone mad at them. Her husband was from The Hill in St. Louis, the kind of neighborhood where The Sopranos was considered a documentary.
She wondered briefly whether she should leave a note, but that notion flew out of her head as the back door rocketed open.
"Bye, Mom!" shouted Emma, her twelve-year-old. Emma was blond, green-eyed, and filling out with a rapidity that surprised Hope, even though she had gone through the same transformation herself when she was her daughter's age. One moment a skinny kid, the next...And if she noticed, how much more quickly the boys noticed too.
More than anything, Emma wanted to grow up to be Gwyneth Paltrow, win an Oscar, and marry a rock star, more or less in that order. Hope didn't have the heart to tell her that the odds were several million to one against any of those things happening. But childhood was for dreaming; Emma would learn about the harsh realities of life soon enough.
Emma was halfway across the schoolyard as Hope turned to Rory. Rory was different. Small for his age, he was skittish, unsure, easily alarmed, especially for a ten-year-old. And right now his nose was running too. "Come on, honey," said Hope, wiping his face with a clean handkerchief and pulling his zipper up tight. "You don't want to be late."
The first snarl of winter had come early to southern Illinois, and there was a stiff, chill breeze blowing into Edwardsville from the Mississippi, just a few miles to the west. Edwardsville was awarm, then walked back toward the car. She made a short detour around the Prius, to see if its bumper was perhaps worse than she'd thought and was surprised to see that it wasn't Janey Eagleton's all, but one with Missouri plates. Now she didn't feel so guilty.
It was not until she was halfway home that she remembered thinking it was odd they were lowering the iron bars on the school windows just as instruction was starting.
EDWARDSVILLE---JEFFERSON MIDDLE SCHOOL
Mrs. Braverman's fourth grade arithmetic class opened each school day with a moment of silence. It wasn't exactly a prayer, which the children all knew would be illegal, but neither was it a chance to sneak in a few more winks of sleep before the day began in earnest. Mrs. Braverman saw to that as she patrolled the aisles between the desks.
Rory offered up some quick thoughts in favor of his parents, his dad going away on business, his mom always rushing around in the Volvo, which she treated more like a ferryboat than a car, locked in an eternal game of Cannibals and Missionaries.
Which was, in fact, one of Rory's favorite pastimes: trying to figure out how to get various odd numbers of cannibals and missionaries across a river without ever leaving more man-eaters than men of the cloth on either side. It was a frequent subject of his doodles, but on this morning he tried very hard to visualize the scene: scary dark men with bones in their noses looking hungrily upon pale-faced creatures wearing what seemed to him to be full-length black dresses. You didn't see many holy men around Edwardsville these days, and even though the Gardners were more or less Lutherans, their minister usually wore jeans.
Rory had gotten several moves into his game of mental gymnastics when Mrs. Braverman's midwestern caw brought him out of his reverie and back to attention. He glanced at the clock on the wall and saw that, as usual, only two minutes had passed. Rory didn't like math, and of course wasn't very good at it, but he already had a firm grip on Einstein's theory of relativity: the forty-five minutes between 8:05 and 8:50 A.M. were the Methuselahs of minutes.
Rory knew the drill, and so he flipped his book open to the homework page even before Mrs. Braverman got the words out of her mouth. Except that, on this morning, the words never came out of her mouth. Most of the other kids had done the same thing, but Mrs. Braverman had left her desk and gone over to the classroom door, a wooden one with a large pane of glass in it, the better for the principal, Mr. Nasir-Nassaad, to be able to glance in and give the class one of those looks he was famous for. Which is why, behind his back, the kids all called him Mr. Nasty-Nosy.
Some said Mr. Nasir-Nassaad was from Lebanon, others that he was really from Cleveland, and still others whispered ominously that they knew for a fact that he was a long-lost brother of Osama bin Laden. The funny part was that Mr. Nasir-Nassaad was actually pretty nice, even if he did remind Rory of one of his imaginary cannibals. It was always a disappointment when he opened his mouth and s
It wasn't the principal at the door, however. Rory didn't have a very good view of the door, but from the look on Mrs. Braverman's face, the visitor was somebody she didn't recognize. He could tell, because whenever she was unexpectedly interrupted, unless it was by Nasty-Nosy, she got this how-dare-you look, because as far as Mrs. Braverman was concerned, teaching was the most important thing in the world, and not to be lightly distracted.
She opened the door a crack and stuck her face in the opening. Rory could see only the back of her head. She spoke lowly, inaudibly, then took two steps back and opened the door wide.
A man came in---a man Rory recognized at once. It was the same man who had ushered him through the door as he scooted in. The blond man.
"Children," said Mrs. Braverman. "This is Mr.---what was your name again?"
"Charles," the man replied. He had an accent. He didn't sound like he was normal, or like he was from Edwardsville.
"Charles. He's one of our new substitute teachers, and he's going to be helping out in class today. So let's all give him a big Mississippi River welcome on his first day with us."
The children applauded politely. "I'm just going to run down to the principal's office for a moment," said Mrs. Braverman. "Won't be a minute."
Mrs. Braverman took a step or two out the door, then staggered back inside the classroom as if profoundly puzzled by something that had just happened. There was an extraordinary look on her face as she turned to the class, and then she fell to the floor---sat down, heavily, as if bearing an intolerably heavy burden. She tried to say something, but no sound came out. Instead, blood suddenly poured from her mouth, her head rolled back, and her skull hit the floor with an egg-cracking report that Rory would never forget.
The new teacher, Charles, jumped into action. He leaped over Mrs. Braverman and slammed the door, locking it. Then he turned to the children.
"Everybody down," he said. "Get under your desks and don't look up, no matter what."
Everybody did what he or she was told. Everybody was too shocked to scream. Everybody was real scared.
From under his desk, Rory could hear Mrs. Braverman's labored breathing, growing slower. He knew she'd been shot, but had no idea who shot her. He wondered whether Charles knew first aid or CPR and, if so, when he was going to start helping her.
From outside the door came the sound of screaming and gunfire. Of running feet and the thud of bodies falling. It went on for only a couple of minutes, but childhood minutes are long, and these minutes were as close as youth gets to eternity.
Mrs. Braverman had stopped breathing. From his spot near the back, on the floor, Rory could see a widening puddle of red that had stained her pantsuit and was now spreading across the floor, toward where An over Mrs. Braverman, and stopped in front of the door. The rest of Charles was obviously listening.
"Boys and girls," said Charles after a few long moments. His voice was calm. Rory thought that was cool---that Charles kept it together despite what had just happened. Rory's own heart was pounding like mad. He hoped that when he grew up, he could be cool, like Charles.
"I want you all to stand up, leave your things behind and---very quietly---follow me. Everything is going to be all right. Okay?"
Nobody moved.
"You have to trust me. Stand up, keep silent, and we'll all get out of here."
This time, everybody moved and nobody made a sound. All that fire drill practice was finally paying off. As the children began Indian-filing out of the classroom, Rory noticed that none of the girls looked at Mrs. Braverman's body through their tears, but the boys each sneaked a peek as they shuffled by. Nobody spoke a word.
"There's a good girl...good lad," murmured the man. As Rory approached, the man's free hand reached out and stopped him. "Hold it."
The line stopped; the children froze. It crossed Rory's mind that the man was somehow going to blame him for what happened to Mrs. Braverman. "You were almost late for school," the man said. "What's your name?"
"Rory Gardner."
"Was that your mother dropping you off?"
"Yes, sir." He was close enough to Mrs. Braverman's body that he could have touched her with his foot. He closed his eyes in prayer. He didn't care whether it was illegal. He didn't care if they came to arrest him later. He had a good excuse.
When he opened his eyes, Charles was still looking at him. "It's good to have you on the team, Rory." Charles held out his hand to Rory. "You know what our team's motto is?"
"No, sir."
"Who Dares, Wins."
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI
KXQQ billed itself as "the St. Louis Metro Area's Number One Source for News," but everyone knew that was bullshit. Most of the reporters were fresh out of Penney-Missouri or BU, young kids in their first jobs, ambitious but lazy, fluent in contemporary psychobabble and absolute masters of the jailhouse-jive hand gestures now de rigueur for all TV reporters, but otherwise illiterate, innumerate, and ahistorical. Deep down inside, they really wanted to be cable news anchors or Hollywood screenwriters. By the time any reporters at KXQQ found out about a story, the story was usually over.
Rhonda Gaines-Solomon stared dully at CNN with one ear cocked at the police scanner and the new issue of Entertainment Weekly in her hand. She was twenty-fated the Midwest, hated the widebodies who inhabited this part of the country, hated the awful weather, and pretended she was really from Los Angeles, if anybody asked.
"What's hot today, Ms. Solomon?" Mr. Dunkirk always said that, especially when it was she who was hot, which was most days. Like all female on-air talent these days, Rhonda Gaines-Solomon was good looking in that tramp-next-door sort of way that everyone seemed to want lately, and she did the best she could with what God, her parents, and a discreet visit to a plastic surgeon had given her.
Still, she thought, one day she could bust Mr. Dunkirk for sexual harassment if she really set her mind to it. She noticed the way he looked her, had seen his fat wife, and figured him for a possible play if the going got tough, or she wasn't out of this burg in six months, or both.
"All quiet on the midwestern 't, weird and guttural and scary. "You are all prisoners of war."
Rory expected one of the teachers, maybe Mr. Treadway, who was widely regarded as the meanest man in the school, to say something back. Mr. Treadway was always going on about how America was the worst country in history, which made most people in Edwardsville plenty mad, and how the white man was the worst man in history, but since he taught social studies it was more or less okay. Indeed, Rory had wanted to go find some black people to apologize to, but there weren't all that many of them in Edwardsville, and his parents wouldn't let him go to East St. Louis, where apparently they were pretty easy to find.
With a shotgun taped beneath his chin, though, Mr. Treadway wasn't quite as brave as his reputation.
Rory tried to catch his sister's eye, but as he turned to look her way a blow to the side of his head got his full attention. When the stars stopped shooting, he could see that it was the Top Dog, who had just hit him a glancing blow with the butt of his rifle.
"You don't move! You don't move unless I say so! You hear me?"---he was addressing his remarks to the assembly now. "None of you sons of bitches moves unless I say so. Eyes straight ahead! Eyes straight ahead! Or else!"
Everybody froze. The Top Dog turned away from Rory.
Now an unusual emotion began to well up inside him. Practically from birth, Rory had been taught to hide his emotions, to conceal them, suppress them, be afraid of them. It wasn't nice to feel bad things, and it was even less nice to express them. Boys, his teachers told him, were different now: they didn't yell, they didn't fight, even when they wanted to, they got along, even when they didn't want to. Not to conform was to risk a trip to Mr. Nasty-Nosy's office or, worse, to the Infirmary, where Nurse Haskell gave you a couple of those pills that supposedly settled you down.
Be nice, they told you. But he didn't want to be nice any more. He didn't want to be afraid any more. He wanted to fight, the way Charles had fought.
"Please, please." It was Nurse Haskell. She was crying, which was making it difficult for her to keep her arms in the right position.
The Top Dog saw her struggles, heard her entreaties. He came over. He took her by the arm and led her toward the center of the gym floor, where Mr. Nasir-Nassaad was lying. He slipped his arms around her waist, propping up her elbows, and waltzed her around a bit.
Then he laughed in her face and released her.
Unsupported, her elbows dropped. She twisted her head just in time---so instead of blowing off the top of her skull, the force of the blast took off the lower half of Nurse Haskell's jaw, sending her teeth showering over those unlucky enough to be close by.
She fell across Mr. Nasir-Nassaad, writhing. Several of the female teachers screamed. But the children were stock-still, as they had been ordered.
The terrorists just laughed. And nobody laughed louder or longer than the Top Dog.
"Okay, okay," he shouted. "Now you see. You see what happens when yAugie Willson. Willson didn't much like Hartley, and even with a Secret Service poker face, he was somehow always able to let his personal disdain for the man shine through. "Go ahead, Augie," he said.
"It all started a few minutes ago," the Secret Service man explained, switching on the video screen. The big type at the bottom of the screen was all too familiar:
SCHOOL HOSTAGE SITUATION. Illinois middle school crisis.
Senator Robert Hartley glanced briefly at the screen, then returned his attention to notes. He was trying to explain to Tyler that his poll numbers were dropping precisely because he was seen as a weak leader by a majority of Americans. The liberal social agenda he had campaigned on---universal health care, hate-crimes legislation, state-sponsored day care for all working mothers---had been largely enacted, and so a fickle country had become restless, which is why it was so difficult to be a two-term president these days: the country craved change, even when it didn't need it. America was an entire nation suffering from attention deficit disorder.
As far as Hartley was concerned, President Tyler was the one who really needed a change: a change of attitude, a change of image. Tyler needed to "rebrand" himself, as the ad men said, as a strong, masculine leader; even the women who had voted him into office and supported his social programs had tired of his metrosexual persona, and were craving something more along the lines of a lumberjack, a biker, or a serial killer.
Truth to tell, Hartley found his own emotions mixed. If Tyler's popularity sank any further, his bid for reelection was going to be in serious trouble, and that left Hartley with both a problem and an opportunity. For President Tyler and Senator Hartley were members of opposite parties, thrown together in an unholy but productive marriage of convenience thanks to Hartley's overweening ambition and Tyler's fetish for bipartisanship. Hartley was intensely disliked within his own party, widely viewed as a weasel who would sell out anybody at any time, and he knew it. Not that it bothered him.
But as Tyler's popularity sank, the chances that Hartley's party had a real shot at the White House increased in lockstep. Like every other senator who looked in the mirror in the morning, Hartley saw a potential president staring back, and as the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, he made sure he was in front of the cameras as often as possible. Indeed, he was so cozy with the media, so happy to leak certain things if it could help his career, that he was known as "Senator Sieve."
So Hartley at first ignored the television. Hostage situations usually played themselves out fairly quickly---half a dozen or so people dead and then the gunman ate his own weapon and that was that. There followed the inevitable suicide note, the video game type revenge You Tube fantasy, the grief counselors, the calls for more gun control, the national navel-gazing about the root causes of violence, etc., etc. Just another day in the USA, especially in the yahoo rural heartland. He was about to urge the president to concentrate on the poll numbers when Tyler turned to Augie Willson and said, "Turn it up, Augie."
Even though the station was a national cable network, the correspondent in front of the locked-dowbe better off without them, she believed, and saw no reason to change her mind now.
As the man drew nigh, she could clearly see the gun in his hand. She couldn't tell what kind it was---some reporters could do that on sight, but she wasn't one of them---but she had to assume it was loaded. And, to keep her sanity and her wits about her, she had to assume he didn't intend to use it on her. After all, why would he? She was his conduit to the outside world, and he needed her.
"Sir"---she began, extending her microphone toward him---"can you tell us---"
There was the sound of a gunshot, and Rhonda Gaines-Solomon screamed and dropped to the ground.
"Jesus Christ!" exclaimed President Tyler, watching the scene unfold at 24,000 feet.
Rhonda couldn't believe he shot her. He knew she was a reporter, neutral, there to hear his side, and to take it if necessary. But one of her legs hurt like hell.
Without even breaking stride, the man in the ski cap picked up her microphone, looked at her cameraman, and said, "I speak now to the president of the United States. Listen very carefully, everybody, and nobody get hurt no more..."
LOS ANGELES
"Eddie Bartlett" was out with his eight-year-old daughter, Jade, when his secure cell phone buzzed urgently in his jacket pocket. It was a lovely day in southern California, warm and dry and smog-free. Fire season was just about over and the winter rains hadn't arrived yet. They were hiking together in Griffith Park near the Observatory, high above the city.
"Dad," Jade was saying. "Why do people live in Chicago? Or New York? When they could live here?"
Eddie laughed. It was the kind of question he was used to from Jade: one that came out of the blue. "It sure would be awfully crowded, pumpkin," he replied. From here you see the sweep of the city, from downtown, past the greensward of Hancock Park, to the towers of Century City and all the way to Santa Monica. "Where would we put everybody? Isn't LA traffic bad enough?"
"That's not what I mean," she said, somewhat exasperated with his obtuseness.
"What do you mean, then?"
"I mean..." she said, choosing her words with great care, "I mean, why would anybody live someplace where the weather is always terrible and the people are always angry?"
The phone buzzed again, and he knew he couldn't ignore it, much as he wanted to. Say what you would about what kind of man Eddie Bartlett was, nobody could say he wasn't a good father. Given the confidential and often turned away from his little girl as he spoke. Or rather, as he listened. He already knew who it was. Because only one person ever called him on this line.
"It's Tom Powers. Are you watching this?" As usual, the voice was soft, low, scrambled for security.
"No. I'm in the park with my kid."
"Then grab Jade's iPhone and I'll stream it to you."
The phone was a gift from the man who was on the other end of the line. A man whom he'd never met face to face. "Tom Powers" was what he was calling himself today. "Jade---can I borrow your phone?"
Jade looked up from the cactus she was inspecting. "You've already got one, Daddy."
"I need yours, baby. Just for a minute."
Jade fished in her backpack and pulled it out. "How's the reception up here?" Eddie asked her.
"Loud and clear, sir," she replied, handing it to him.
He started the streaming video, and it took only a nanosecond thereafter to realize the purpose of the call. "Is this a go situation?" he asked as, on the screen, a man with heavy Slavic accent rolled off a list of demands: "...Abandonment of the Zionist entity. Withdrawal of all forces from the ummah..."
"Albanian Kosovar, maybe Azerbaijani," said Eddie softly.
"...The abolition of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization...Finally, and most important..." With the whole world watching, the camera came in for a tight close-up. Randomly, Eddie Bartlett thought of the last scene of The Blair Witch Project, except that movie wasn't scary. "We call upon President Tyler to publicly embrace and accept Islam on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial no more than twenty-four hours from...now."
The camera pulled back. The man's features were very clear: eastern European, unsmiling. His eyes were not the eyes of a fanatic, but rather of a man whose purpose was clear and deadly serious.
"This guy looks familiar. Running face-recognition scan now," said Powers. "The demands are bullshit, of course. What do they really want?"
The terrorist spoke again: "Until then, we demand the removal of all your police forces from this area. No helicopters, no sharpshooters. Turn off all your klieg lights, infrared scopes, electronic surveillance devices. The air space over the school must be kept clear. And we insist that your spies and operatives lay down their arms and identify themselves.
"My comrades and I are not afraid to die. Neither are we afraid to kill all your children. For we have many children each. And you---weak, decadent, intent on your own pleasure---have only one or two. To you, death is an unutterable tragedy. To us, it is the meaning of ing up everything in the NSA/CSS arsenal: Echelon video feeds, RSS chatter sorters, real-time simultaneous translations of Internet café activity in China, India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, keyword trigger-coded for instant relay. All conversations could be heard live or as downloaded audio, and read as saved transcriptions in both the original language and in English.
He sampled a few, dipping in and out. He'd lost track of how many languages he spoke fluently, because when you started toting up you had to factor in dialects, subdialects, and even random bastardizations like Hawaiian pidgin and Marshallese. Nothing about what was happening in Edwardsville. Plenty of the usual stuff---angry but idle threats against the Great Satan, obscure religious and cultural diatribes, boastful European white supremacist rants, obscure American-sourced swagger---but nothing that stood out. No trip wires. And trip wires were his business.
Nearly a decade after September 11, the American security apparatus had come a long way. Plenty of attacks had been foiled, some---especially early on, when al-Qaeda had the tactical advantage---particularly horrific. There was the Arab cell that had come down from Canada, trying to pass themselves off as American Indians on one of the upstate New York reservations while they waited for the activation codes on a low-yield nuclear device they had smuggled from the former Soviet Union to Halifax, financing the operation by bootlegging cigarettes from the reservation to the outside world and pocketing a fortune in tax avoidance.
The good guys had lucked out on that one: an alert cop in Watertown had noticed the ink on the phony tax stamp rubbing off on his hand, and grabbed the "Indian," who had led him to the other cell members. The cop was shot and killed during the rendezvous, but he had been smart enough to order backup and so the group was rounded up and sent to some especially nasty rendition prisons in Egypt and Slovakia. The cop's widow got a handsome payout from the feds; he got buried at Arlington and the public was never the wiser.
The phone stayed stubbornly silent. Just as well, probably.
Tom Powers stood up and stepped out of the secure room. The rest of his house on North West Street was equally secure, although less dramatically, so he didn't seal the room as he did when he left home.
To enter the front door, for example, he inserted the key into the lock, but rather than aligning a series of tumblers, the key's real work was done by his fresh thumbprint on the head of the key, which was read by the scanner in the door to allow entry.
Once inside, he would glance at the mirror/retinal scanner, which flashed his eyeballs. Anyone who somehow had gained unauthorized entry via the front door---an intruder who forced him to open the door at gunpoint, for example---would miss that beat, with the result that a security gate would descend from the ceiling and trap him in the antechamber, where he could easily be neutralized or dispatched. Video cameras connected directly by dedicated fiber-optic cable to NSA/CSS headquarters in Maryland could be called up on any video screen in the house, and the giant wall-mounted flat screen in the den doubled as a backup, fail-safe control module in a worst-case scenario. Even an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) blast couldn't knock out his communications.
He looked out the window, into his backyarart of northern Virginia. But what almost nobody knew was that, at the edge of the backyard, a small marker, buried in the brush, once marked the southern tip of the District of Columbia. Originally laid out on land ceded by Maryland and Virginia, the District was conceived as a diamond, bisected by the Potomac. Virginia got its land back when the federal district stopped at the river. But there the marker was---a signpost to what might have been---surveyed, the local legend had it, by none other than George Washington himself.
He looked through the doorway at the black phone and wondered again whether he really wanted to hear it ring.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Marine One had barely hit the South Lawn when President Tyler bounded out. Pam Dobson, Senator Hartley, General Seelye, and Augie Willson bounded behind him in his wake. He really was very fit.
The media jackals were shouting at him---he thought he caught something about "saving kids" and "will you convert to Islam for the children?"---but he ripped a page out of Reagan's playbook and feigned a sudden, inexplicable attack of deafness. Hand cupped behind his ear, pearly whites flashing, Jeb Tyler was the very image of a modern American president: deaf, dumb, and blind to everything he didn't wish to register.
"What's our readiness status?" he snapped at Colonel Al Grizzard, his principal military attaché and the man who controlled the football. Jeb Tyler mistrusted the military and tried to keep "Grizzy" as far away from him as possible and as close to the vice president, Norman Snowden, as constitutionally permissible. Snowden had been a brigadier general in his earlier life, with just enough combat action to make him seems a plausible running mate for a man whose military credentials were, charitably, nonexistent. As far as Tyler was concerned, all military men were trigger-happy maniacs until proven otherwise. He certainly never let the Veep sit in on important affairs of state.
"FBI's in place, sir, and we have special ops airborne now. Delta, Rangers, SEALS, Xe---"
"No Xe," barked the president. "We can't take the hit if this thing goes tits over teacups."
"No Xe," repeated Grizzy, barking into his cell phone.
"And get the FBI and everybody else the hell away. You heard the man."
This time, Colonel Grizzard didn't bark into his cell phone. He couldn't believe his ears: the president of the United States adhering to a terrorist's demand? "Sir?" he said softly.
"You heard me, Colonel. Until we can get a handle on this thing, I'll be goddamned if I'm going to let these bastards harm a single hair on any child's head."
"Special ops, stand down, the Oval Office. His face grew visibly redder, and then he exploded, "God fucking damn it, how the fuck did something like this fucking happen?"
VADUZ, LIECHTENSTEIN
Paul Pilier switched off the president of the United States, then laid the remote gently upon the polished-crystal table, next to the vase of white roses, careful not to muss the surface in the slightest. "Sir?" he asked.
The man to whom the question was addressed didn't so much as look up from the banks of laptops purring in front of him. They were neatly arrayed on his teak desk, each one tracking a different international financial market in which he had an interest---which was to say, all of them. As was his habitual wont, he was sipping a glass of Russian tea, the red-hot glass protectively surrounded by a burnished silver holder that was probably worth five thousand American dollars all by itself.
Emanuel Skorzeny was past seventy, but he had the physical vigor of a man half his age and the intellectual firepower of two of them combined. His longstanding talent for multitasking had not deserted him, and so it was that he could listen to the president's speech, monitor its effect on the Nikei, the Dow, the Dax, and the Bourse, make trades, and play a game of simultaneous chess (anonymously, of course) against twelve other players from around the world and still find time to polish his nails. He was very vain about his appearance. "What other news?"
Pilier looked at him from across the room. "May I approach?"
"You may."
The aide placed a sheaf of papers on the desk, printouts of e-mail communications with one of Skorzeny's most trusted lieutenants, being careful not to so much as brush the wood with his fingers or the vase of white roses that adorned the boss's desk as well. Skorzeny had an abhorrence of body oils, and anyone who left so much a trace of his DNA on anything he owned was summarily fired.
Skorzeny glanced through the papers---he was a speed-reader, and could memorize anything on sight. He nodded and then said, "Shred them."
"Yes sir," said Pilier, immediately feeding the documents into an NSA-strength security shredder that sat concealed within a sideboard. He had been with Skorzeny for nearly three years, and was the only one who didn't have to wear gloves at all times. This was a very great sign of trust indeed.
"Have the board members arrived?"
Instinctively, Pilier took three respectful steps backward. "Yes, sir, in the antechamber."
"Show them in, please."
As he awaited his board members, Skorzeny roamed around the room, making sure everything was in its exact place. The furniture, the rugs, and, most important of all, his peerless collection of the he wanted and he was prepared to pay whatever it took to get it.
Take, for example, the work of Blake's that caught his eye now, his favorite. The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun. Not the one made famous from that sensational novel in which the psychopath ate it. That painting was still hanging in the Brooklyn Museum: The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun. Different title, different work.
True, his painting was only on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. And the number of chits he had had to call in to get it was almost higher than he was willing to pay. But when it came to Blake, there was almost no such thing as almost. Because Blake understood, as no one else did until Emanuel Skorzeny came along, the misery and mystery of man. That was why his temporary acquisition of it had made headlines around the world. It also reminded people how rich and powerful he was.
Regretfully, his gaze traveled from Blake's masterpiece, out the window and over the mountain-ringed city. Skorzeny International occupied the top three floors of the Tiefen-thaler building, which Skorzeny himself owned via one of his many subsidiary companies, and boasted a spectacular view of the Alps in every direction. The boardroom was on the penultimate floor, a state-of-the-art conference chamber from which Skorzeny could rule his vast multinational financial and philanthropic empire. Below were the staff offices. Skorzeny's personal chambers were on the top floor, the penthouse, where only he and a few selected guests were ever allowed entré.
Skorzeny moved the short distance from his desk to the chairman's seat, at the head of the mahogany table, which also boasted a crystal vase of white roses---refilled daily, like all the others---as its centerpiece. The table had been a gift from the Sultan of Brunei, in gratitude for some particularly astute investment advice Skorzeny had given him. The rest of the gifts, including the women, Skorzeny had parceled out among his lieutenants: his appetites generally ran to less earthy pleasures.
The board members trooped in and took their seats. No one said a word.
Skorzeny let the silence speak for him. It was, he knew, a subtle but telling way to exercise and display power. No one could speak until he spoke; no one could speak unless spoken to; and every conversation began and ended with Emanuel Skorzeny.
"Gentlemen, thank you for coming. As you know, there's been an incident in America that I believe will affect all of us. It will certainly affect the Skorzeny Foundation, as the New York Stock Exchange is quite sensitive to these sorts of dislocations, especially these days. Monsieur Pilier?"
Pilier snapped on the huge flat-screen television, which instantly divided into multiple quadrants, broadcasting news networks from around the world: CNN, Fox, SKY, BBC1, ARD, ZDF, and others.
"A representative sample," noted Skorzeny who, from time to time glanced at a laptop and tapped a few keys. "Pick one, please."
Pilier turned up the volume on CNN, where und was muted.
Skorzeny spoke, "This is the United States of America, Anno Domini 2009. Excuse me, Common Era, 2009. The Lord is not much in our minds these days." A flicker of a smile crossed his lips, signaling to the others that they were permitted a brief display of inaudible mirth. "Not the fearsome warrior it once was. Instead, a country ruled by women and eunuchs. Some call what is happening in Illinois a tragedy. We, however, here at Skorzeny International, call it something else. And what is it that we call it, gentlemen?"
As one: "An opportunity."
"Precisely. An opportunity. After the first Gulf War, the first President Bush proclaimed the dawn of a New World Order. Even though he was ahead of his time, how right he was. By dint of careful, selected and...targeted...investments, we have been able to treble our operating capital. For you see, gentlemen, it is not true that the race belongs to the swift, or that the future belongs to the strong. Indeed not. The future belongs to the rich and the rich belong to the future. It is a symbiotic relationship, and one that will serve us all very handsomely in the coming days and weeks."
Skorzeny indicated the slender manila folders in front of each board member. On his signal, each man opened his folder, read the contents of the single sheet enclosed therein, then dropped it into the shredder slot next to each seat.
Skorzeny watched them all intently as they digested his action plan. There was one among them who clearly demurred. "Signor Tignanello has a problem," said Skorzeny.
Tignanello was not the man's real name, of course, but was rather his favorite kind of Italian wine. No one but Skorzeny used his real name here; such was the volume of entreaties for foundation support that the board members would never know a moment's peace should their true identities be revealed.
And, of course, Skorzeny's name was not really "Skorzeny," either, but no one needed to know that.
Tignanello looked around the room, trying to avoid Skorzeny's basilisk glare. All eyes turned to him.
"Monsieur Skorzeny," he began, "I have nothing against making money. None of us here does. We are, after all, all rich men." He emitted a brief chuckle, hoping to bring his fellow board members around to his side via a small dollop of humor. In this he was immediately disappointed. "Still, what you are proposing here...I cannot, in good conscience..."
Skorzeny let Tignanello's words trail off, "conscience" hanging in midair and gradually fading away into silence. It was not a word heard often in this boardroom, and it seemed to foul the air.
"So it's not unanimous then?" asked Skorzeny, although it wasn't a question. "I am disappointed. As you all know, we make no decisions here without complete and utter unanimity."
A glance from Skorzeny to Pilier, and the secretary took up a position just behind the Italian.
"Far be it from me to..." Tignanello's head was wrestling with his heart, and his heart was starting to lose when Pilier put his hands onstatement. He and Seelye cordially loathed each other, even as they were yoked together in the service of their country.
"Our forces around the world are on high alert, Mr. President," Rubin said. "Keyhole birds report no significant adverse activity in NoKo, Iran, or the breakaway 'stans. We're still watching the Columbia-Venezuela-Bolivia axis, though."
"What about the film the terrorists showed us? What can we tell from that?"
That was Seelye's department. "Being analyzed right now, sir. Results shortly."
The president thought for a moment. "So...do we raise the threat level? Get the other agencies involved?"
As far as Seelye was concerned, the second question answered itself. This thing was too urgent to fuck around with the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, or even the director of National Intelligence. "Not at this time, Mr. President. No sense letting them know they're in our shorts before we get into theirs. As to your second question"---he looked at Rubin, whose face betrayed nothing---"my advice is that we keep this as compartmentalized as possible until we figure out what's going on."
No one dissented. Seelye's BlackBerry buzzed. He hooked it up to a video port and switched on the screen. "NSA has run the tape through advanced face-recog software against all known terrorists in multiple databases, including CIA and FBI. Apologies for the quality, but it's a gen2 beta system that we're still testing."
Everyone watched, fascinated. "As you can see, all of the commandos except Drusovic have some parts of their features obscured, which ordinarily wouldn't be a problem for our equipment, since we can use almost any feature or distinguishing characteristic to---"
"Spare us the details of your wondrous toys, General," ordered Tyler. "What you're saying is, it is a problem."
"In a sense," replied Seelye. "But in an interesting sense. We're drawing a blank on every single one of the commandos. Which means they're all new recruits, fresh blood---or fresh meat---recruited for this specific occasion."
"In other words, you don't have the slightest idea who we're dealing with."
"In other words, we're dealing with rookies," replied Seelye.
Tyler frowned. "Why would this Drusovick---"
"It's pronounced 'Dru-so-vich,' sir---"
"This 'Drusovic' want to show his face?"
Rubin got it in one. "Because whoever's behind him wants us to see it."
The president still didn't get it.
"He's not running the operation," said Seelye. "He's just a patsy, a pawn. A very expendable
On the screen now was live coverage from Edwardsville: HOSTAGES SHOT read the graphic.
There were two bodies, lying in front of the main entrance to the school, where they had been dumped. A man and a woman. The woman had half her face blown away, but as soon as the live feed picked her up, it disappeared from the screen. Some details were too gory for the delicate sensibilities of the American public.
"Did I see what I think I just saw?" asked the president. "Why the hell aren't they showing us what happened? Why did they cut away?"
"The networks don't want to inflame public sentiment," said Secretary Rubin. "And I must say, I don't blame them. All we need now are some gun-toting nuts to jump in their pickup trucks and---"
"And what, Howard?" asked Seelye. "Defend their children?"
"Shut up," barked the president. "He's talking again."
It was Drusovic, sneeringly stepping aside to make sure the bodies would stay in the shot with him.
"These are for you, Mr. President," the man shouted. "And they will keep coming until we get your answer. And when we finish with the teachers...we start on the children."
He grinned maliciously. "We want the world to see what you have done, Mr. President. What happens here tonight will make history and we want the world to witness it. Every newspaper, every channel, worldwide. They are welcome. But anybody tries anything and---everybody dies."
Pam Dobson started to cry. The ashen look on the president's face spoke to their common humanity. Tyler may be a fool, thought Seelye, but no one doubted his capacity for empathy or his ability to touch the heart of the average man. It was the quality that had made him such a formidable lawyer and politician.
"Pam, he said, "we're all going to have to be strong now. Strong for each other, strong for the country. So why don't you go back to your office and pull yourself together. I'm going to need your best work."
Dobson rose. "Yes, sir," she said. "Thank you, sir."
Seelye took the opening. "Sir, there's something Secretary Rubin and I need to discuss with you. As you may recall from your briefing---"
Millie's voice wafted over the intercom again: "Senator Hartley is still waiting, Mr. President."
Tyler thought for a moment, then said, "Send him in."
Seelye objected immediately: "Mr. President, I really must object to Senator Hartley's presence in this meeting. He is not authorized to---"
"He's the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, General," replied the president. "Whatever we decide to do, however this plays out, both parties areommittee's legitimate legislative oversight. But what we're about to discuss is SCI." Sensitive Compartmented Information, essentially, was above Top Secret.
Tyler shook his head. "I don't care. As the president, I am authorized to release any information to anybody any time I want to, and this is one of those times. I need political backup on this and I also need plausible deniability. Bob Hartley is my friend, even if he is from the other party. So let's get on with it. Hello, Bob...take a seat."
Seelye and Rubin nodded in acknowledgment as Hartley entered the room. That was about all the courtesy they were prepared to show him at this moment.
Seelye pretended Hartley wasn't there; not for nothing was "civilian" the dirtiest word in his vocabulary, even if Hartley was a senator. "Under the authority of National Security Decision Memorandum 5100.20, signed by President Nixon on December 23, 1971, and amended by President G. H. W. Bush on June 24, 1991," said General Seelye, "the Sec Def and I believe that you should provisionally authorize a Central Security Service operation to terminate the ongoing incident in Edwardsville."
"Terminate, how?" asked Hartley.
"Shut the fuck up, Bob," said Tyler. "You're here to observe, not talk." Hartley bristled a little. Tyler noticed and didn't care; they had been friends for too long for Hartley to take it personally. "Terminate, how, General?"
"With extreme, exemplary prejudice, sir," replied Seelye.
President Tyler vaguely remembered the CSS, a special division of the National Security Agency that not one American in a million had even heard of, much less understood its function. The CSS had been created originally under the Nixon administration as the "fourth branch" of the armed services, to complement the Army, the Air Force, and the Navy/Marines in the burgeoning field of electronic intelligence and combat. But the traditional-minded put up the predictable bureaucratic fuss, and the CSS was quietly folded in the NSA, authorized to work with each of the individual service branches in capturing and decoding enemy SIGINT. So when, for example, a Navy submarine tapped an undersea Soviet communications cable, or one of the Air Force's many electronic surveillance overflights picked up hostile transmissions, they were relayed to the CSS for evaluation and, if necessary, action.
But the CSS chafed at being a bystander and, using the "No Such Agency" cloak of anonymity, quickly moved into the void, coordinating covert strikes on Soviet assets with the utmost plausible deniability---"accidents" were amazingly common---and establishing its own presence as a service to be reckoned with. Still, resistance from the uniformed services kept it in the shadows of its birth, where it lurked now---the incognito, but highly effective, muscle arm of the NSA.
"Specifically, Section 6.1.21," added Rubin.
"What's that?" interjected Hartley.
"Shut the fuck up, Bob," barked Tyler. "Remind me again w
"We're talking about a Branch 4 operation, sir," said Seelye. "It's that simple."
"Remind me again what Branch 4 is?"
Seelye ignored the question. "Sir, Branch 4 was established precisely to deal with situations like these, so unless you're prepared to see kiddie corpses start flying out those windows, we strongly advise you to let us get this operation up and running ASAP."
The president's gaze drifted from face to face to the TV set on the other side of the Oval Office, to Edwardsville and the two dead teachers. Finally, it alighted on Rubin. "And your advice is, Howard? Branch 4 or...?"
"Or surrender before anybody else gets killed and run the risk of impeachment from Senator Hartley's party for dereliction of duty. It's that simple."
The president glanced over at Hartley, who silently nodded his assent. "General?"
"I've been involved in counterterrorism since the 1980s," said Seelye, "and if this isn't a job for Branch 4, then nothing is. We need to get in there, take them out, and disappear."
The president was confused but convinced. "So how do we do it?"
"Get 'Devlin.' Now."
"Who's Devlin?" asked Hartley.
"Shut the fuck up, Bob," ordered the president.
"Mr. President, sir," objected Hartley, "you invited me here and---"
Tyler ignored him. "Who's Devlin?" he asked.
"'Devlin' is the code name for Branch 4's most trusted and highly skilled operative," explained Seelye, with uncontrolled pride. "He's an expert in cryptology, in electronic surveillance, in marksmanship, and in hand-to-hand combat. In fact, he's the best we've got."
The president's incredulous look begged Seelye to continue. "Nobody knows his real name. If it exists on record at all, it's buried deep in the NSA files. Operationally, however, he used a rotating series of other pseudonyms, never the same one twice. Not even we know what they are when he goes into action."
President Tyler was incredulous. "You mean to tell me that the United States government has an anonymous operative we can't really control?"
"No, sir," replied Seelye. "Not the United States government. We do. The three of us in this room." Seelye caught himself, looked over at Hartley. "And one member of congressional oversight."
If Tyler regretted his decision to let Hartley sit in on the meeting, his face didn't betray him. "Go on," he ordered, glancing over at Hartley with an unspoken warning: shut the fuck up, Bob.
"Imagine a platoon of high-tech exterminators, er the radar; and they work under pain of death."
"What do you mean, 'pain of death'?" asked the president.
"Operational security is not only everything, it's the only thing," offered Seelye. "The identity of each Branch 4 agent is unknown even to another Branch 4 agent. They put together their own teams, the members of which are unaware for whom they're really working. And should their identities ever become known even to a fellow member of the unit..." His voice trailed off, his meaning clear.
"Are you telling me that the United States government employs professional assassins?"
"I wouldn't use that word, Mr. President," replied General Seelye. "More like the business end of our forward defenses. The tip of the tip of the spear."
"Branch 4 is a unit whose very existence---until this moment---is authorized to be known to only three governmental officials: POTUS, the SecDef, and DIRNSA," continued Rubin, turning his attention to Hartley, trying to impress on him the importance of keeping his mouth shut. "Notice I did not use our names. Branch 4 existed before we assumed our offices and it will continue to exist after we leave. No matter who is sitting in our chairs..."
The president did a slow burn. "Why is this the first time I'm hearing about it?"
"It's not, sir," said Seelye, quietly. "It's just that you've made domestic considerations the top priority of your administration thus far."
President Tyler was in a box. He hated being in a box. He hated Rubin and Seelye for putting him in a box. When this was over, especially if it ended badly, he was going to have both their heads on pikes, to be displayed in the Rose Garden until the next election. "This Branch 4, this Devlin...sounds like God."
"The next best thing," said Seelye. "Plus, Branch 4, you get your prayers answered one hundred percent of the time. Devlin never fails."
The president thought for a moment. "Does this mean I won't have to convert to Islam?" he asked. "I don't think that would go over very well with the folks back home in Lafayette."
"That's exactly what it means," said Seelye.
That seemed to please Jeb Tyler. "Get Devlin," said the president of the United States.
LEONARDO DA VINCI AIRPORT, ROME, CHRISTMAS, 1985
The man known as "Devlin" was born on December 27, 1985, in Rome, Italy. At the time, he was eighalloons popping. The mind attempts to process what it already knows, and instinctively blocks that which it doesn't wish to recognize. Such things are called "memories."
"Mama, can I have one?" One what? He could only remember the want, not the object. Some trifle for sale in one of the kiosks.
"No," she said.
Far better to remember her, his mother, as she was, young and beautiful, young to him, beautiful to him and at least two others---but that he only found out about later, when he was older, not young.
He and she both knew she didn't mean it. But it was what she had to say. Because her husband, his father, would instantly overrule her had she said yes, that whatever it was he'd wanted would be dismissed as trivial, transient, of no moment. Unworthy. His father always said no.
The boy who would die that day loved his mother. All his childhood memories were of her, because she was the one fixed constant in his life. For as long as he could remember, through all the moves, all the travel, all the strange cities and foreign languages and new friends, there was always his mother there to comfort him, buck him up, and send him back into the fray that he already knew was life.
Civilians always ask service kids whether growing up without a hometown, without old friends, is hard. Absent the familiar anchors, the life that the boy and thousands of others like him lived seemed difficult, intimidating. Better to stay in one place. Better to have a hometown. Nothing ever happens in a hometown.
Harder to grow up without a father or, worse, with an absent father. Devlin's father's business was entirely his own. Later, Devlin understood the nature of that business, perforce embraced it, and took it to lengths his father never could have dreamed. Ironic that he hated his father, hated the business that kept his father away from him, hated the thing that took both his father and his mother away from him, and yet here he was. In it, deeper and darker than dear old Dad ever could have hoped to be. Not by choice, of course.
Until it ended the way it ended, that trip was the happiest memory of his life. Corfu, Biarritz, Palma de Majorca, and finally the Eternal City, where they'd stayed at the Villa Hassler atop the Spanish Steps. How beautiful his mother looked in her bathing suit on the Mediterranean beaches, in her evening dress when they went to the opera performances, in her slacks and blouse, sweater thrown casually over her shoulders, when they threw the petty coins into the Fontana di Trevi, when they stuck their hands in the Bocca della Verita and hoped the Thing inside the Mouth of Truth wouldn't bite them off.
And the best part was, they didn't even have to travel that far. Not one of those long trips that his father took, not one of those overnight airplane flights, the daylong train trips. They were living in Munich, where his father was working at Radio Free Europe, although some of the German kids in his Grundschule liked to tease him that RFE really meant CIA. When Devlin would ask his mother where his father was, she would always reply that he was trying to stop some very bad men who were trying to hurt people. American a couple of other tongues that Devlin did not have, practically in midsentence, as they often did.
He was too young to follow everything they spoke about, but he could still catch scraps. At eight, Devlin not only spoke fluent German, but Bavarian as well. From listening to ORF, he had also picked a very fashionable, if slightly goofy, Austrian accent, and could differentiate among Tyrolean, Viennese, and the Italian-inflected Südtirolisch of Merano and the Alto Adige; his mother loved to ski. Languages were something he didn't even have to think about. They were like listening to music, or working out long division in that particularly German way that so mystified his American-born parents. No "carry-the-anything." Keep the whole thing in your head and just do it.
One of the things they were talking about---no, arguing about---was some kind of animal: a hyena, a dingo, something like that. Devlin had read about beasts like these, opportunistic scavengers that ripped the living flesh from wounded animals, and he wondered why three grown-ups would be discussing creatures from the veldt in the middle of the night.
A burst of Russian followed, and he picked out the word, "Ilyich," and he was proud that he already knew who he was: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. His father spent a lot of time in the Soviet Union; not that he ever admitted it to Devlin, directly, of course, but from time to time Devlin would find a few unused rubles in the coin cup on his father's dresser and, once in a while, a tin of caviar in the refrigerator. He liked it when his father went to Russia.
Now they were talking about Hungary and Syria and Radio Free Europe. The talk grew louder, more agitated. Somebody yelled something about somebody named Sanchez. Finally, his mother asked for quiet, and the conversation fell back into low murmurs. He listened as long as he could until he drifted off to sleep...
Bang. He was in Rome now. In the airport.
No, not bang. Crack. That was the sound: crack. The sound of the world splintering.
It was a sound he had since made his friend over the intervening years, a sound that at once announced the truth---la Bocca della Verita. Once his enemy, no matter that it became the enemy he loved, the enemy he relied upon, the enemy he could not do without. The friend he could never quite trust.
CRACK.
His father knew that friend immediately.
His mother had been in denial---"No," she was in midsentence---when Dad suddenly shoved her to the ground, knocking her on top of Devlin.
It wasn't the first time his father had pushed his mother, not the first time he'd hit her, struck her, really, a hard blow that sent her to the floor, but it may have been the first and only time such a blow had been delivered out of love instead of anger or jealousy. Devlin himself had been on the receiving end of many such blows, but this was the first and only one that saved his life.
Memories.
Imagine a string of the loudest cherry bombs you ever heard going off. Imagine the branches of every tree in your neighborhood suddenly and simultaneously stripped from their trunks, as if by some sudden ice storm, and sent cra
Other than Marcus, his only boon companion was the movies, which his stepfather took him to as often as possible.
And all of this because his parents had decided to take a Roman holiday. To create the finest intelligence officer in the service of the United States of America. The "Branch 4" prototype. Creation by expiation of a man without a name, without a country, without a native language, without so much as a social security number. A man who, in short, did not officially exist.
The fellow officer's name was Armond Seelye.
The boy's name is Devlin.
FALLS CHURCH/WASHINGTON, D.C.
At last, the phone rang.
Not the black phone. A nonexistent phone, in fact, one that registered in his consciousness as the sound of chimes, gently clanking in the wind. Except, of course, it wasn't chimes at all, but a distinguishing ring tone that was signaled to him in one of his many compartmentalized capacities and incarnations. He spoke into a Blu-Ray mouthpiece as he answered:
"Mr. Grant's office," he said. Whenever he took a call on this line, his voice was altered to sound like a British woman's---the status symbol of executive assistants in Los Angeles.
Another woman was on the line. "Hello, Helen," she said, "it's Marjorie Takei, just calling to remind Mr. Grant that he's due to speak at RAND the day after tomorrow."
He pretended to consult something on the computer. Click-clack, click-clack. "Yes," he replied, "I have the appointment in the book. 'Assessing the Threat: The Legal, Practical, and Moral Challenges.' He's very much looking forward to it."
"Good," replied the caller. Her tone changed. "It's terrible, what's going on in St. Louis, isn't it?" "Helen" was silent. "Well, I suppose that makes Mr. Grant's remarks all the more topical, doesn't it?"
"There's a silver lining in everything, I suppose," said Helen, ringing off. British secretaries were nothing if not curt, and nobody, especially in LA, thought them rude.
"Archibald Grant" was one of his favorite identities, yet probably his most dangerous. He was not just an off-the-shelf disposable cover, but an ongoing creation with his own richly imagined life, invented past and borrowed memories. Unlike Devlin's other shades and apparitions, Grant had a continuing existence as one of the RAND Corporation's most important consultants, whose expert exigeses on international terrorism and counterterrorism were delivered at the highest levels of the Santa Monica--based think tank, and think of it, was how he met her.
An old-fashioned "ring," just like real phones used to ring before they started playing snatches of 50 Cent, took him out of his reverie and back to reality. The black phone.
His hand picked up the receiver. Fingerprints scanned, the line was uplinked via satphone to one of the NSA's birds, scrambled with level three remodulation logarithms. A stealth-encryption field descended, so that even the most adept or malicious hacker would be left trying to apprehend emptiness.
Now "Tom Powers" looked into the receiver. His iris scan was digitalized, encoded, and flashed over the separate T-3 line to Fort Meade for confirmation.
"Devlin," he said.
He knew who it was right away. "This is DIRNSA," said Seelye. "You're on with POTUS and the SecDef. You're fully up to speed on the sit in Edwardsville." A statement, not a question. Typical Seelye.
"Who else is there with you?" His voice had an otherworldly quality as it crackled over the hidden speakers.
Seelye looked at Hartley, then to the president, who shook his head. "Nobody," he lied.
"Wrong answer."
"We don't have time for games."
"Neither do I. I'll speak to you, the secretary, and the president. That's the way it is, and it's non-negotiable. You've got ten seconds to get whoever I hear breathing in there the hell out."
Rubin saw that Tyler had that look on his face that he got whenever he was about to blow his stack. He shot him a warning look: don't do it. The president controlled his temper. Hartley got the message and slipped out the door.
"This is President Tyler. I'm---"
Devlin didn't care that he was talking to the president of the United States. He interrupted him anyway. "Not recommending direct Branch 4 involvement at this time."
"Why not?" barked Tyler.
"Because something about this stinks, Mr. President."
President Tyler's eyes flashed. "Are you saying we should just sit back and do nothing?"
"No, I'm saying we need to observe."
"Those kids need to be rescued."
"Yes, sir, they do. We know it---and the terrorists know it. But I don't think this is really about the kids."
The president was irritated at this display of independence. Who was commander in chief around here? "Then what do you think it is?"
"Not sure yet. Some kind of feint, or probe, to see how we react."
"You're children's lives. Getting me involved now could potentially make things more difficult for all of us in the end."
"That's a chance I'm willing to take," said the president. "Where are you now?"
"That's classified, sir. And even your authorization doesn't reach that high."
Tyler exploded, "Goddamnit, I'm the fucking president of the United States!"
Even with the electronic scrambling, Devlin's voice came across low and clear and confident. "Yes, sir," he said, "you are. At least until the next election."
Inwardly, General Seelye smiled. Rubin kept a poker face, badly. Devlin paused for a moment, then continued, "I've got your feed on my screen, General. Run the reporter's tape again. I'll show you what I'm talking about."
"Cueing it up now," said Seelye. Once again the tape: the kids, the bombs, the teachers, the shotguns---.
"Hold it. Right there," said Devlin. "See it?" Seelye paused the feed. What was Devlin talking about? "The guy on the bench there, at click 4,156.07." A blond man in a sport coat and tie, lying on the bench with the tied-up teachers, his face only partially visible.
"One of the teachers, obviously," said the president.
"Why, obviously? Look at the way he's dressed. Look at that sport coat---it's an Armani, costs two thousand bucks. Middle school teachers don't wear things like that. General, run an NSA physio scan on this guy. Complete reconstruction---" They could hear the sound of typing. "And match it up with this."
Tapping into the school's internal video feeds, Devlin brought up a shot from inside the school: the main hall, looking toward the front doors. A man in the doorway, holding open the door as a boy rushes in, late.
Zoom. The man up close, from behind. Grainy, but visible.
"Full reconstruction---strip him naked and build him back up again." It wasn't protocol to give orders to the president, but this was no time to stand on ceremony.
Everyone could see, but just barely make out, the man under discussion. Tallish, powerfully built, with his back to the camera. But the back of his head was clearly visible, including one ear. "That ear will be especially helpful," said Devlin.
"We'll get him," said Seelye. "Mag it up---see his hair?" Closer: light hair, maybe blond.
"Not a lot of blond Muslims, Mr. President," observed Rubin.
"Which is why he could be anybody," said General Seelye. "A merc, a Russian spesh-op, a white South African glory hunter."
"Or a teacher," said the president, stubborrestricted by race, religion, or ethnicity. I don't want any PC bullshit here. Any tics, any gestures. Run video hair-and-fiber infrared analysis, see what you come up with. Got that, General?"
Tyler bristled at Devlin's tone. "Listen, Devlin, I don't think I like your---"
"On it," said Seelye, intervening.
"Overfly ASAP, let's get a radioactivity read, just in case. We don't want any surprises in the basement or the girls' bathroom."
"On that, too..."
"And I'll need our best guesstimates of their weaponry, worst-case. Then, I'll call you back."
The president look confused. Was this "Devlin" on the job or not? He wished that America were a kinder, gentler nation, one that didn't need hard, rough men like Devlin to keep the women and children safe from people with legitimate grievances and misunderstood motives. He swallowed his pride. "Are you in or are you out, Devlin?"
"I'm not sure yet. What about chatter?"
"Nothing specific or credible," replied Seelye.
"September eleventh was neither specific nor credible until the first plane hit the World Trade Center," said Devlin.
"So what action do you recommend?" asked Tyler.
"That we await developments. I'll put a team in place. But things might have to get worse, before I can make them better. As in the level of causalities. It's a risk-reward situation, especially for me, and under the terms of my employment, not even you get to make that call, sir."
"That is unacceptable." Devlin could hear the steam escaping from Tyler's ears. "I will not sacrifice another innocent person."
"Then, with all due respect, sir, let the FBI handle it. Just make sure you have enough body bags when they fuck up and the shit hits the fan. In the meantime, you might want to start learning Arabic."
President Tyler looked over at Seelye and Rubin, absorbing the confident audacity of the man at the other end of the line. A Branch 4 op had every right to refuse a presidential request. With their lives on the line every time, they were the arbiters of their own fate. No choice but to play it his way. "Okay," said Tyler.
"Also, this really is it for me. If we go red zone and score, I'm out. Last job. I disappear, you never hear from me again, and you damn sure never contact me. Yes or no, General?"
The only thing to do was lie. "Agreed," said Seelye. "But---"
"One last thing. If I so much as smell a fart wafting from Langley's direction, I'm gone." And then he really was gone.
At last, Tyler broke the silence. "You're sure nobody else knows about this Branch 4?"
Seelye and Rubin looked at each other. Seelye spoke first, "No one except the three of us and, now, your
The president felt the sting. Maybe he had been rash in insisting on political cover. But what was he supposed to do? He was a politician. "But he doesn't know the details. The specifics."
"He knows everything he needs to know to blow Branch 4 sky-high," said Rubin. "And, given his track record, "Senator Sieve' is just about the last person I'd want entrusted with the combination to my high school locker, much less the national security apparatus of the United States."
"So you're telling me I made a mistake?" The question answered itself. "What do we do about it then?"
"We make it work for us," said Seelye.
The president got up and started pacing around the room. What had he done? "How?" he asked.
Seelye took over. "You heard Devlin himself tell you how, sir," he said. "He smells a rat here. And he's right to do so. Here's why." Seelye opened his laptop, and as it awoke from standby he placed it on the president's desk. The White House wi-fi was as encrypted and as safe as the best minds as the NSA could make it, which didn't preclude an Israeli or Bulgarian teenager from hacking in occasionally. But it was a chance that, for a brief moment, they were going to have to take.
He tapped a couple of keys and an animated dossier sprang onto the screen. Tyler pondered what he was looking at, trying hard to absorb it all, then nodded. Seelye tapped another key sequence and suddenly the electronic version of the dossier was atomized---scattered to the four winds of cyberspace
"The evidence is all circumstantial, but that's not surprising. These forces have been coming together for quite a while, like a perfect storm. But if our suspicions are correct..."
The president got it. "If your suspicions are correct, then you've asked me to send our most valuable operative into a situation that might be---no, is---a trap."
As Seelye nodded dispassionately, Rubin observed, "A very special kind of trap, sir."
"And you're willing to run that risk?"
"Absolutely we are, yes, Mr. President," said Rubin.
"But why?"
"So we can run the same trap on them."
"Won't they be expecting that?"
"Of course they will, sir," replied Seelye. "Which is why we have to play the hand out. First guy that blinks, loses."
As a candidate, Tyler campaigned against the "wilderness of mirrors" that was the playing field for America's intelligence agencies. He had promised the electorate a new transparency. And yet now here he was, in the fun house with no way out.
"People think intelligence work is complicated, and it is," explained Seelye. "But what it's not, is complex. It's actually very simple. What counts is not what's true, it's what you can make the other guy believe is true. So we play these elaborate games of she-lovloves-me-not---or perhaps a two-hand version of musical chairs would be a more apt analogy---and the last man standing wins the pot. To mix a whole bunch of metaphors."
Rubin chimed in. "So they're going to give us a patsy. That's who this Drusovic is. A guy meant to deflect attention from the real bad guys. A poisoned pawn, as it were."
Seelye said: "Which means we have to give them one in return."
"Who?" Tyler was confused. This was the sort of thing that gave him a headache. He had to think...and he kept thinking until he realized that neither Seelye nor Rubin had answered his question. "You're not talking about this 'Devlin' character, are you?" he asked.
Seelye shrugged. "Why don't you let us worry about that, sir?" he said.
"But what if we fail? What if they get Devlin? What if...?"
Seelye smiled a weary smile. "I think you're finally beginning to get the hang of the intel business, sir."
EDWARDSVILLE---JEFFERSON MIDDLE SCHOOL
Rhonda Gaines-Solomon lay where she fell. So did the bodies of the dead teachers. Bodies, beyond indignity, and yet undignified, in impossible postures, with impossible expressions frozen on their faces, terrible and pathetic at the same time. Three people, chosen by death at random, as old as they were ever going to get, lying there, reproachful to the living, for all the world to see. Because all the world was watching.
And now a sense of helplessness began to wash over the country, given voice by the talking heads. How long was this going to go on? Where was the FBI, the National Guard, the Army, Air Force, and Marines? Where was the president of the United States? The head terrorist had spoken directly to him, given him an ultimatum---why wasn't he negotiating? The lives of children were at stake, for God's sake.
Hope Gardner learned all this listening to the radio. As soon as the news broke, she had rushed back to the school and found chaos. The main parking lot was blockaded, so she'd pulled around behind the school, on the far side of the athletic field.
At that moment, her cell phone rang. It was Jack. "Hope, what the heck's happening?" His tone was anxious, urgent.
"I don't know, Jack. I'm at the school now. The place is crawling with cops. Where are you?" She could hear crowd noises in the background, and the sound of Wolf Blitzer's voice yipping like a small puppy in his excitement over a big story.
"At the airport. They've got CNN on here, full blast. Are Rory and Emma okay? Are you okay?" He triedhe didn't care about their bullshit grievances, or the "root causes" of their behavior. She wanted this to be over, quickly and, if necessarily, lethally.
She wanted them dead.
"Yes, Janey," she said. "There is something we can give them. We can give them hell."
Her cell phone. Jack again. She hugged Janey and got back in the car. "I'm in the taxi, on the way to the school," he said. "Where are you now?"
"Past the sports field."
"Go home. There's nothing you can do there. Go home. Promise."
"Promise," she said.
"I love you, Jack," she said. She flipped her Motorola phone shut andof Miss Teen South Carolina desperately attempting to answer a simple question about Americans and maps, but he knew that "Powers," who had sent him the link via a series of untraceable cut-out gmail addresses from a server in Abu Dhabi, had embedded the tactical plan inside the video; a self-extracting file, good for one use only, would call it up. And then the hard-drive would melt.
Bartlett looked up at the countdown clock located on both front bulkheads: just under an hour to touchdown.
"NSDQ," he said, signing off.
When Miss Teen South Carolina got to her third repetition of "such as," he clocked on the dummy link.
The download was nearly instantaneous. He had just enough time to hit the print button before the hard drive went into its controlled meltdown. The laptop's titanium case would contain the electrical fire. He read the page as it spat from the high-speed laser printer:
"Patriots, Red 54--40." Right. Eddie Bartlett turned to his team. "Lock and load, gentlemen. The zone is hot."
IN THE AIR: SKORZENY
Skorzeny's Boeing 707 was not immodestly luxurious. This was, after all, a businessman's plane, not a sheik's whorehouse or a rock star's pleasure palace. Tastefully appointed, leather seats, a private sleeping compartment in the back for long trips, it was capable of being refueled while in flight, which meant, as a practical matter, that he could stay airborne for days, even weeks at a time. Rarely were there more than two or three persons aboard, not counting the pilots and the staff.
Flying time to Paris was less than ninety minutes, so there would be no napping on this trip. Skorzeny sat, as he always did, at his built-in computer console, from which he controlled the worldwide activities of Skorzeny International; since he did business in nearly every time zone on earth, sleep was an unprofitable activity.
Skorzeny's plane was equipped with an advanced, satellite-based air-traffic monitoring system, which allowed him to track his corporate fleet, on land, at sea, and in the air. To the naked eye, Skorzeny's screen was an indecipherable series of blips and letter-number combinations, but he could read it the way a great conductor could read a complex symphonic score. Thanks to deals he had struck with just about every air-traffic control system on the planet, and using a sophisticated transponder triangulation system that he himself had modestly conceived and developed, he could keep track of just about everything that belonged to him.
Additionally, it allowed him to monitor, through GPS, the location of every one of his operatives anyplace in the world. Carrying the modified cell-and satphones issued by the company, Skorzeny's employees could be instantly traced, located, and, if necessary, recalled or rescued. He trusted this information because it was provided by his own comsat, which he had piggybacked into space aboard one of the French Ariane roirspace. No matter how well shielded it was, it would not do to be discovered, and not wishing to annoy a duly appointed official of his host country, especially given his special needs within that host country, Skorzeny had reluctantly agreed. He prided himself on keeping his word.
"Do you read the Bible, Monsieur Pilier?"
Where that question came from, Pilier didn't want to know. He braced himself for a new and strange line of inquiry. "You know I don't, sir," said Pilier. He was a good French Catholic, which meant that he never attended mass.
"What about the Apocrypha? The Gnostic Gospels? Surely, Revelation?"
Where was the crazy old coot going with this? "No, sir."
"The vision of St. John, a masterpiece of speculative superstition that some mistake for dogma. A book of visions, signs, terror, and wonders. Of the End Times. 'And there appeared a great wonder in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.' Chapter Twelve, Verse One."
Now Pilier understood. It had something to do with Skorzeny's Blake obsession.
"The woman clothed with the sun. The point is, the cartoon versions of reality and history that we see on our so-called 'news' channels are grossly distorted and lacking in specificity. But that, I suppose, is what comes from a century-long assault on western civilization. Don't false dichotomies enrage you? Left, right, communism, national socialism, capitalism?"
Pilier had no idea what Skorzeny was talking about, and wondered whether the old man did, either.
The wheels barely bumped as they landed, which was the way Skorzeny liked it. They were still rolling to a stop when he rose from his seat and let Pilier throw his topcoat around his shoulders. He ran a comb through his hair.
He was first out the door, walking briskly toward the car. Pilier was trailing behind him, carrying their effects. Even though it was dark, he could see her silhouette in the backseat of the Citroën.
EDWARDSVILLE---JEFFERSON MIDDLE SCHOOL
Emma caught Rory's glance, but tried not to let on. She didn't want any of the bad men to realize they knew each other. She didn't want any harm to come to her brother. If anything happened to him...
She wasn't sure how she knew, but at some point before they had dragged his body away she had realized that Mr. Nasir-Nassaad was dead. She had never seen a dead person before, not even in a funeral home, and all of a sudden there had been two of them right in front of her. All four of her grandparents were not only still alive, they were thriving in North Carolina and Florida. Everybody lived forevert like to be dead. Wondered if it hurt, the way it hurt when you cut yourself really bad, and whether it kept on hurting even after you were dead. Or if your soul just jumped out of your body and went its merry way up to heaven or wherever, or whether you got to stick around for a while, to see what was happening.
These weren't pleasant thoughts, but under the circumstances, they were the most pleasant thoughts she could muster.
And then doors opened and the man with the funny accent was back again.
He was talking to a few of the other men, like he was the captain of the basketball team calling up a play or something. They broke and the other men went away, out of the gym, carrying their guns. After they'd gone, he started yelling again. "Okay, okay, we don't want no heroes now. Nobody going to get hurt. Everything going to be fine, but now we see if your mother, father love you or not."
Emma had no idea what he meant by that---she was certain that her parents loved her and Rory---but it seemed to amuse him, because he started laughing again, and already she had seen enough of what happened when he started to laugh.
She closed her eyes.
What a difference. It was a world of stillness. But the tranquility had a trade-off: the silence in the gym was not really silence at all, but a mixture of deep breathing, small whimpers and groans, the muttering of bad men.
And the smells. You didn't notice them so much when your eyes were open, but now they jumped right out at you. Many of the children had soiled themselves, and that pungent odor wafted everywhere. Emma hoped she would be able to control her bladder when the time came because she didn't want to embarrass herself and she sure didn't want to ruin her new Citizens of Humanity jeans, which had cost her dad more than a hundred dollars.
A sudden, stinging slap across her face brought her wide awake back to brute reality.
It was him, leering into her face. "No sleeping missy. You wouldn't want to have bad dreams now, would you?"
The smell of his breath made her want to retch, and she fought down the rising bile. He was brown-eyed, with a stubble of scraggly beard and a hawk nose, and he made her even sicker just looking at him. Especially the way he was smiling at her, with his rotten teeth and stinking breath.
"OK pretty missy, brave girl, big hero, huh? When time comes, I think you will be nice date."
He reached out and grabbed one of her breasts and squeezed it---
She said nothing.
He fondled her other breast and then leaned forward and licked the inside of her left ear.
Emma couldn't catch Rory's eye, which she knew was a good thing. The last thing she wanted to do now was to set this animal on her brother. She would just have to take it.
She'd heard some of her older girlfriends talk about kissing and licking and what it felt like when a boy licked your ear was down, inside was outside, right was wrong, and dissent was patriotism. Orwell basically had it right.
Which is why he never felt the slightest twinge of conscience whenever he killed any enemy, foreign or domestic. Unlike most of the recent presidents, Devlin took his oath of office seriously: to protect and defend. He had a job---not a job he might have chosen, a job that had chosen him, but a job that he nevertheless took as seriously as he took his own life---and he had discharged his oath as completely and efficaciously as he could.
To be a CSS officer was an honor vouchsafed to only a few. To be a member of Branch 4, even fewer. He had no regrets about anything he had ever done. No victims stared him in the face as he was falling asleep. Remorse was for the weak, for the shrink-addled and psychologist-oppressed. That a Viennese snake-oil salesman named Freud had been able to convince so many that their imaginations were more powerful in their lives than reality, that their parents had injured them to the point that they were unable to function, that if only lawyers could sue the dead they would be made whole, was a wonder he could never quite grasp. Analysis was for sissies.
Devlin was, to say the least, therapy-adverse. He didn't need counselors, or bartenders, or rabbis, or ministers, or priests. He lived a life without liability, without drugs, without memories. He wanted out for mundane reasons---he wanted to live. And a man in his business who wanted to live had better get out before he got killed.
This was a new emotion to Devlin. Since that terrible day in Rome, there was nothing he cared less for than life. True, the instinct for self-preservation in him was as strong or stronger as it was in every man, but the tribal taboo against death had long ago lost its shamanistic power against him. He'd seen it too many times not to have made it his friend.
And that's why he was quitting. Because he wasn't a real American any more, if indeed he ever was. He was a beau ideal from another generation, a throwback, an avatar---not simply the Man Who Wasn't There, but the Man Who Was No Longer Necessary.
Many was the time he'd thought about quitting, about walking away, the way his mom and dad never could have, because they had taken the bullets that might have found him. Which meant that he must now carry on their work, to take the fight to the enemy for them---to bring them back to life. Which so far, he had failed to do.
Which failure had brought him to this pass.
In a field east of Edwardsville, Illinois. In a stolen Chevrolet, with his laptop plugged into an enemy of the people cigarette lighter, using state-of-the-art technology authorized, however unknowingly, by faceless bureaucrats in Washington who not only had he never met but never would meet, not if they were both doing their jobs. About to share an operation with someone to whom he had only ever spoken on the telephone, a man whom he counted among his friends, but a man whom he would have to kill immediately should "Tom Powers" ever be made as "Devlin."
One of his secure cell phones buzzed. guy running the operation. Not Drusovic, but the only guy who planned on getting out of there alive. Devlin punched the ear into the database, and went audio with a Fort Meade tech. "Match me, Sidney."
That was the signal to match the ear to the man, and while the man's face wasn't visible it didn't matter, since no two ear shapes are precisely alike. Using a sophisticated form of the AFIS system that police departments all over the country employed, CSS was able to match the ear to the face of anyone in its vast database, which included not only known hostiles, but all friendlies as well, and a great many---the number at this point ran into the millions---of ordinary civilians, blissfully unaware they had made the National Security Agency's home movies. What that guy did in Gorky Park, CSS could do in less than a minute. It was a civil libertarian's nightmare, but an agent's dream.
"Back at ya," said the disembodied voice in his ear as it evaporated.
They were both obeying the first rule of the CSS---that everyone is always listening to you, including your nosy aunt Hilda. The transmitted information that followed was a stream of gibberish to anyone listening in, routed through two other secure cell phones, then decoded and recoded in sequence until finally a single name popped up on Devlin's screen:
Milverton.
Devlin felt a rush of bile. He knew this day was going to have to come, had known it for years, had wondered what took him so long.
Milverton. "The worst man in London." It was his little joke.
For Sherlock Holmes, Charles Augustus Milverton was a blackmailer of society women and all-around dirt bag. For the CSS, he was the most dangerous rogue agent on earth. Former Special Air Services, discharged under murky circumstances. Where Doyle's Milverton was fiftyish, plump, and hairless, this Milverton was blond, blue-eyed, physically fit, and ruthless---200 pounds of lethal weapon happily married to killer instinct.
Devlin decided that, for the moment, he'd keep the ID to himself. Milverton and he had a history, and he didn't want anyone thinking this was personal. But his suspicions had been right from the start: Devlin was in mortal danger. Whether Fort Meade or Washington knew that too, and sent him anyway, was a question he didn't even have to ask. Not one pawn in play now, but two. Both poisoned.
Devlin felt his fury rising. This couldn't just be a coincidence. In his line of work, there were no such things as coincidences.
In the eternal game of cross and double-cross that was intelligence work, you had less to worry about from your enemies than your friends. Because while your enemies could always be relied upon for their hostile intent, you could never really trust your friends. In this case, however, both friend and foe had the exact same mission: they wanted Milverton to find him.
Devlin took a deep breath, not wishing to confront the implications. His whole purpose in life was to dwell in the shadows, work in the shadows, live in the shadows, and, eventually, die in the shadows. Branch 4 rules were clear: his existence was to stay unknown.
And now Milverton had come looking for him. The past, which for Devlin didn't exist, was about to catch up to him. And however this situate hell to pay back in Washington.
Very well, then. Time to get it on.
Devlin buzzed Bartlett. Two beeps, followed by a short and a long: "Go on signal." Syllables in reverse. It wasn't a suggestion. No answer was necessary
Devlin called up a three-dimensional map of the school and the surrounding area. Not one of those Google Earth civilian applications, but the latest word in imaging. Every time a certain type of government plane overflew any given ten-square-acre quadrant of the United States of America, a bank of cameras photographed every inch of the target. Those photos were scrambled, encoded, uplinked to a satellite no one had ever heard of, re-encoded, rescrambled and then downlinked to Fort Meade via a series of cutouts in Christchurch, New Zealand; Barrow, Alaska; and Tupelo, Mississippi, the last because a previous administration had been big Elvis fans. Not to mention the new NSA Regional Operations Security Center that had recently come on line in Wahiawa, Oahu.
He flash-memorized the layout, every detail, then rose, ready to act...
What was that?
Out on the school grounds, somebody's cell phone was getting a call. Which meant it was punching back GPS coordinates. A parent. An idiot. A hero?
No time to lose. The cell-phone bubble would be in place soon. And then all communications would be cut off, to give Devlin and his men complete communications command of the battlefield.
Most civilians didn't realize this, but their cell phones were the government's best friends. Without any coercion whatsoever, nearly the entire American population had been persuaded to carry around a locating device. You didn't even have to be using your cell phone for someone to track you; it just had to be switched on, sending out those little locating beeps that futzed with your radio if you left it on your bedside table at night, beep-beeping your location to anyone who cared to notice. Might as well wear an ankle bracelet, then paint a bull's eye on your ass.
Devlin fed in the cell phone's information, uplinked, and got back the name of the subscriber: Mrs. Hope Gardner.
He flipped open what looked like a hooded BlackBerry but was in actuality a motion-capture videophone that worked like a TiVo; he could "rewind" to any point in the past hour to see whatever the naked eye had missed: using the field of coverage provided by the school's hidden motion detectors---all newly built schools had them since Beslan, although the public knew nothing about them---he could observe the entire perimeter. He went visual. There:
He could barely make out the blur, but he knew at once it was a human figure, female. Around the back, near the electrical shed. On her hands and knees, disappearing from view just as the chopper settled on the roof. Unfortunately, the video was not real time. The United States had not yet fully descended into Big Brother country, where everything you did was on a live feed, but it was only a matter of time.
He checked the timediv>
EDWARDSVILLE---JEFFERSON MIDDLE SCHOOL
Charles Augustus Milverton was sleeping. No, not sleeping---half asleep, almost dreaming. In that special state between wakefulness and slumber, when the mind races, leaps, and makes unique connections between different and disparate people, places, and things. The gym bench was hard, but somehow he managed.
Children. That was the key. Childhood. Think back.
The north of England. Geordie country, Tyneside. The Borders, with the heathen Scots just a stone's throw away. And him a vicar's son. The only son, the eldest child, with one sister, so beautiful, so weak, so helpless in the face of Fate.
Anglo-Catholic. The worst kind. Higher than C of E, lower than the Whore of Rome. All the strictures of the Church of England, but without divorce. No way out. One sin, unconfessed and unrequited, and you were damned to Hell for all eternity. It focused the mind even as it corroded the soul.
The sermons. The lectures, unending. The history lessons, that went on forever. What did he care about history? About England? He had better and bigger places to go. England was nothing to him, a place, a climate, a series of vaguely related accents, a semishared history of conquest and kings. Although sometimes, standing here, near Hadrian's Wall, he could feel himself as one with the Romans and their Anglo-Saxon successors, nervously eyeing the Picts to the north, spears and shields at the ready.
Who dares, wins. That was his motto. Perhaps history had a useful lesson or two after all. That was what his father had tried to impress upon him, anyway. One of the few times in the vicar's life that he had not been cowed by ritual and superstition.
Under normal circumstances, he never would have let that raghead hit him. A savage from the outer limits of Europe, a country so weak it has been easily conquered by Islam and, worse, had stayed conquered. Not like France, under Charles Martel. Not like Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella, who had chucked out the Muslims and the Jews, for good measure, and then had sent Columbus packing across the Atlantic Ocean, pretty much in a single inning. Not like Austria, with Sobieski defending the gates of Vienna.
That Europe was gone now. Even England no longer had to worry about the Picts and the Scots and Irish. There were mosques in Newcastle, and in Leeds, and in York, and in Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, and London. England was finished.
And without a fight. That was the bit that still surprised him. When Rhodesia went, he could understand it; Cecil Rhodes was Colonel Blimp, and Ian Smith was a giant pantomime horse for the Fleet Street johnnies of their day, riding high atop their moral dudgeon. He could have sworn South Africa would put up a fight, especially given their nuclear alliance with Israel, but at the end of the day, Johannesburg to reclaim not the White Man's Burden but the White Man's Gold; half a century after the end of colonialism, Africa was sliding back into savagery, its infrastructure failing, its farms collapsing, its education and political systems in tatters. And now it, and Britain's former colonies in the Middle East and "Asia"---India and Pakistan---were taking their well-deserved revenge on the Mother Country, exporting their charming native pathologies back to Birmingham and Sheffield and Manchester and Newcastle: female circumcision, "honour killings," stoning homosexuals, subway bombings, the lot.
He hated them all. He hated them for what they had done to his childhood views of Empire, but most of all he hated them for the lie they had given to what his father had taught him.
And yet he also admired them. Admired them for their audacity to challenge civilization and dare it to defend itself and its so-called "superiority." Theirs was the rule of the AK-47, not of Article 3, Section 1; the rule of the id, not of the superego. Theirs was the will to power, whether they knew Schopenhauer or not.
And that was the flaw in his father's belief: that he could stand there, watching the oncoming blue-painted Picts and Celts, bones in their noses and the flesh of their enemies between their teeth, with equanimity, and see souls to be saved. Even when his sister had died, screaming in pain from a ruptured appendix, begging for help that had never come because their father had had to attend to his superstition, minister to his flock, while she writhed and bled and died, the lesson had not changed. It was God's will...and there yet remained souls to be saved.
Whereas Milverton saw not souls but enemies to be slaughtered before they breached the Wall. His father's church was an imaginary refuge, a false castle, a hive of fairy tales about Jesus, the Apostles, the Crusades, Urban II, Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Malachy and his prophecies, St. Louis. The Middle Ages was a nightmare, the Renaissance but a dream, a brief respite before Europe too succumbed and slid back into that endless night that had followed the fall of Rome.
That was why he had joined SAS, the 22s, as soon as he was legally able, that was why he had pushed himself, that was why he had passed all the tests, risen through the ranks, punished England's enemies both at home and abroad, taken the fight to the IRA in Belfast and Gibraltar; and after that operation had gone tits up thanks to the gutter press, had moved into the private sector, working across Europe, Africa, and Asia and now in America. It was hard work but it was good work and it paid very well. In fact, it paid top dollar, as well it should: pound for pound, he was best fighter on the planet.
It was the sound of a female voice that woke him from his reverie. The sound of a little girl screaming. The one sound in the world he could not abide.
Milverton shot off the bench. If he had to break character, if he was no longer "Charles" the teacher, so be it.
Upright now, he tensed for trouble. This hadn't been part of the plan, and he had no idea how the men in the balaclavas were going to react, especially with Drusovic out of the gym.
He walked slowly, unthreateningly, through the ranks of the captive kids and teachers. With the example of Nurse Haskell fresh in everyone's mind, no one dared move his or her head to follow him as he went. Still, Milverton could feel the eyes of the boy, Roer, but in for a penny, in for a pound.
"Charles," whispered Rory as he walked by him. "He took my sister. He took Emma."
He kept his voice low. "Don't worry, Rory," he said, a thought occurring to him. "I'll make sure she's safe."
Rory managed a very small smile. "Who dares, wins, right?" the kid asked.
"Absolutely."
Now he noticed the smell. Fear had a stench all its own, and the bodily function by-products were just that, manifestations of the state of mind. He'd had plenty of men beg for their lives before he neutralized them, but this was different. These were children. Not that he cared one way or the other about their fate, but he knew that America was a sentimental country, especially about its kids, and if anything happened to any of them---or worse, a lot of them---the response would be more than they'd bargained for at this point in the operation. The kids were supposed to be very potent and photogenic hostages, nothing more.
That's why he was angry at Drusovic. It was time to sort the bloody fucker out.
And then he heard the girl, Emma, scream again.
The lift shuddered to a stop. Even with no light, Hope more or less knew where she was. Moving carefully so as not to knock anything over, bark her shins, or skin her knees any worse than they already were, she felt her way down the long, rectangular supply room, past the copy machines and the boxes of paper, past the supplies, her eyes and ears straining into the darkness and the silence.
Her heart was pounding. She'd always thought that expression was literary license, but now that it was happening to her, rocketing, sending shock waves soaring throughout the building, she knew it was for real. Breath short, sweat glands fully engaged. But hearing preternatural. Sight, even in this Stygian darkness, supernatural. With her children in danger, Hope Gardner was Superwoman.
A door was just up ahead. In her excitement and confusion, Hope ma was.
Hope dropped to her hands and knees, creeping through the darkness. The lights were on in the gym, casting a small patch of light on the hallway floor via the windows. She would have to go right past it.
In the distance, the sound of violence, a body falling. She moved faster, nearing the gym now.
She knew she shouldn't look, shouldn't risk it, but she had to look. Swiftly, she crossed the hall, sidling up to the gym doors, straightening her legs, rising.
She glanced, catching only a glimpse. But what she saw almost made her throw up.
Children, bound; teachers, with guns trained on them. And explosives everywhere. If the cops or the FBI or whoever tried to rush the school, everyone would die. And Rory was in there, somewhere.
She ducked back down and kept moving.
It didn't take long for Milverton to find Drusovic and Emma. Under any rational circumstance, he'd never take a bollocks crew like this one into battle, but that was the whole point of the exercise: they were all chattel, born to die and, as far he was now concerned, the sooner the better. Well, he could help move the timetable along.
He ripped open the door. Drusovic was where he had expected to find him, on top of the girl. Milverton's left hand shot out, grabbing the Albanian by the scruff of his neck and yanking him backward. As Drusovic fell, Milverton delivered a punch to the man's right cheekbone; a little higher, on the temple, and it would have killed him, but Milverton needed to keep him alive for the moment. A kick to the groin put Drusovic on the floor.
Milverton turned to Emma. Luckily, the savage hadn't tried to undress her; quickly, he restored some semblance of order to her disheveled clothing and looked into her eyes to see if she was all right. The girl was speechless, her eyes wide and her mouth trying to move, but no sound emerging. Milverton swept her up in his arms, carrying her effortlessly under one arm.
With his free hand, he hoisted Drusovic back to his feet. "You sodding arsehole," he said, "I ought to rip your fucking balls off and feed them to the nearest pig. And then you can explain to Allah why you won't be shagging any more virgins." Since he was, in fact, holding Drusovic's balls in his hand, this was not an idle threat. "Now pull your pants up and let's get on with it."
Milverton carried the girl into the darkened hallway. She had fainted, which was good. He opened the door to one of the classrooms and laid her down on a bench. There was a quilt nearby, so he threw it over her. Then he stepped back into the hallway.
Hope saw the door at the far end of the hall open, and she almost screamed when she saw a man emerge with a girl under his arm. Her girl. Her Emma. Unconscious, or...
Don't think about it. Calm down. The man carrying Emma was wearing a suit. He wasn't one of them. As she watched, they disappeared into a classroom.
She had to get closer. She rose to her feet---
And then Revolution, we were back to square one as far as tactics were concerned. True, the Redcoats didn't come marching down the middle of the field in serried ranks any more, but in many ways the terrorists were their functional equivalent; what they considered hostages, Devlin and his men thought of as anchors that destroyed their mobility and distracted their attention. You couldn't shoot a hostage and defend yourself at the same time, assuming you even had the time to choose.
Terrorists never really changed their methods. By keeping their hostages down, immobilized, they thought they could prevent communication and mutiny. What they were really doing, however, was protecting their captives, keeping them alive during the only moments that mattered, the moments of rescue and revenge.
It was all about the OODA Loop. Observe. Orient. Decide. Act. Rinse, and repeat, until the other guy was dead. About getting inside your opponent's decision loop, staying at least one beat ahead of him, as if you were inside his head. Which is where one or more of Devlin's bullets soon would be. The Barrett fired both the .416 and the .50-caliber round, but he preferred the 400-grain .416 round; wherever he put his shot, the man was going to be very, spectacularly dead.
He checked the computer, streaming the coverage. With GPS coordinates superimposed over the grid, he hardly needed a scope, since he could train on what he was seeing on the screen and calibrate accordingly. But even at this distance, it was more sporting to shoot a man while looking at him.
Via the infrared scans and rad sensors, he'd also located the bomb control---a laptop computer that would sequence the bomb explosions. Like a cell phone, a computer announces its presence through mild radiation and wireless signaling. Taking it out would be a tougher shot, because his second round would have to follow the first by less than a second and he had to hope like hell nobody would touch the machine in the meantime. But, if everything went right, from the same angle he could take out Drusovic and then punch a round through the computer before the terrorists could react. And by then, they'd all be dead.
What about the Gardner woman? He'd almost forgotten about her.
Suddenly the news crews' lights grew brighter. Devlin glanced down at the screen. Someone was coming out, Drusovic probably, to make another statement. Terrorists loved a stage. No time to worry about the woman now.
There were dozens of reporters on the scene. Their trucks kept their distance, but the standup artists were primping and the print johnnies were inching forward, notepads in hand. As he watched, a taxi pulled up on the perimeter, and a man got out. Another civilian, most likely a parent. Just what he needed, another wild card. He lost sight of the man as he was swallowed up by the crowd of cops, firemen, EMS workers, and FBI agents.
Devlin's videophone leapt to life. His heart sank. He was inside the Oval Office, looking at Army Seelye and Secretary Rubin. This was such a breach of security protocol that he wanted to shoot Army on the spot. "Listen up," said his boss. "The president's about to make a statement."
Tyler was sitting behind his desk. "I speak now to Suleyman Drusovic. Yes, we know who you are. And know this as well---we will not let you harm our at the computer in the gym, obliterated the machine, punched through the rear wall of the school, demolished the windshield of a parked car, ricocheted, and killed a cow a half-mile away.
Then the gym walls exploded, punched out with Semtex A and RPGs. The terrorists tried to react, but the firing lines coordinated into a killing zone from which no target could escape. Firing on fully automatic, the AA-12 shotguns armed with Frag-12 armor-piercing rounds hit the terrorists at the rate of 120 per minute, and cut them down like God's own scythes.
From the time Devlin squeezed the trigger to the extinction of the terrorists, less than ten seconds had elapsed.
Devlin had no time to celebrate. The instant he fired his second shot, he set the charge on the computer and grabbed the Barrett and took aim at the helicopter.
So he missed Rory, rushing back into the school to find his sister.
The chopper was rising, its rope ladder dangling. Devlin knew he had to take it down before Milverton could clamber aboard. He took aim---
Fire from an AK-47 kicked up all around him. Instinctively, Devlin dropped. He felt like Cary Grant in North by Northwest: a sitting duck, except not quite so good looking.
He rolled, trying to regain the initiative. But the Barrett was a big gun and not easily swung; by the time he got it righted, the helicopter had gained altitude, still spitting fire at him. The rope ladder was no longer dangling. Damn!
Devlin came out of his roll prone, both elbows on the ground. He elevated the barrel. The helicopter was fast but the Barrett was faster.
His third round missed. His fourth penetrated the skin of the Sikorsky and smashed into the engine block. The bird sputtered, then went into a dive.
Devlin was on his feet now, running. His plan had been to leave the Barrett behind, to let Eddie's crew clean it but that was impossible now. He stripped it as he ran down the stairs, jamming pieces into his clothing.
He made the Malibu and stashed the pieces of the rifle under its backseat. He started the car and floored it.
There was a dirt road through the cornfields, prepped for a new blacktop that would bisect the farmer's field. It was rough and potholed, but he didn't care. The Malibu's axles had survived worse than this. So had his teeth. He hammered down on the accelerator and roared through the stalks.
He hit the school from the northeast. Cops and ambulances were descending on the scene from all sides. Their attention was on the chopper, now in flames, sputtering one last time and then plunging to earth somewhere near the Mississippi.
Then it hit him. The chopper! What a chump he was.
Devlin didn't have to see the wreckage. He knew that only one body would be found, that of the hapless pilot.
Milverton wasn't on that chopper. All he needed was that one brief instant inside Devlin's OODA loop, one second to regroup, and he'd moved ahead in their chess match.
He'd never intended to get on that chopper.
Which to---a double misdirection.
Redundant systems, just in case.
Devlin, out of the car and sprinting toward the school, just another local Good Samaritan trying to help. He could see Hope, free of the bomb, but Eddie was long gone.
He couldn't see the boy. But he could see the man, rushing into the school, the civilian who had showed up in the taxi. Rushing straight toward---
Oh, Jesus.
Complete chaos had broken out in the building, with police and FBI collapsing on it from all directions. Devlin blended in immediately, ducked inside the school.
Smoke and dust everywhere. Alarms blaring. The freed children, rushing about, nearly blind, nearly mad.
There, the kid. The one shouting, "Emma, Emma!"
Devlin scooped him up under one arm and ran as fast as he could for the back of the building.
"Emma!" the kid shouted.
"Rory!" came a voice in the distance. The man from the taxi.
"Daddy!" cried the kid.
No time. No time. Tough luck about the dad.
The Dumpster would have to do.
The explosion ripped through the gym.
"Are you a cannibal or a missionary?" the kid asked him as they huddled together in the garbage can, flaming debris raining down around them.
"Neither, kid," he replied. "I'm an angel."
The rain of fiery shit finally stopped. The metal interior was hot to the touch. The boy still lay within the protective embrace of Devlin's arms. "What about my sister?" said the boy, very softly. It was almost as if he knew what must have happened to his father.
"I don't know," whispered Devlin. "I'm not that good of an angel."
"Can't you find out?" said the boy.
"I'll try," said Devlin. He left the boy safely in the Dumpster and slipped away, with a hole in his soul. In Jeb Tyler's America, one dead kid was one too many.
Somebody had set him up---maybe more than one somebody. But who?
He didn't know that, either. But he did know one thing: he knew he was made.
And when a Branch 4 op was made, he was as good as dead. Any time Seelye chose, every intel and special ops agent could be after him. Not to mention Milverton and the forces behind him, whoever they were.
Poison pawn or sacrificial lamb? In the end, it didn't really matter. Friend and foe were the same person.
What was that saying of Bartlett's? The old 160th motto?
"N
WASHINGTON, D.C.
There was utter silence for a moment in the Oval Office as the three men watched the school explode. Then Washington exploded.
"GodDAMNit!" exclaimed the president, lunging for the phone. He knew his first thought should be for the people who had just lost their lives, however many of them there were. With any luck, the place was mostly cleared out, but right now he couldn't take that chance. The political fallout, whatever it was going to be, had to be minimized and it had to be minimized fast. "Millie, get the speaker and the majority leader in here, on the double. I don't care if you have to roust them out of bars or beds, but get them in here. Senator Hartley too."
"Yes, sir," said Ms. Dhouri from the outer office.
Rubin, meanwhile, was on the cell phone with the commanding officer at Scott Air Force Base. If there were going to be any other nasty surprises, the country needed a military presence in Edwardsville pronto. "Make sure you get that wreckage of the helicopter before the cops stomp all over it," he shouted.
Seelye, for his part, did not use the phone. Instead, he was working through a series of cutouts using the NSA's in-house communications system, trying to reach Devlin, and getting no response. He was still trying when the president said, "All right, gentlemen. Now, how do we play this?" His face was red and Seelye knew that Tyler's ultra-political mind was already factoring how this was going to play at the next election.
"The speaker and the leader are on their way, Mr. President," squawked Millie over the intercom. "I can't reach the senator."
"Send them in the minute they get here," said the president, who then turned to Seelye. "Well, Army, looks like your man Devlin just screwed the pooch."
Seelye put down his PDA and looked across the room at Tyler. "With all due respect, sir, he did not. From all the available evidence," he glanced at his PDA in case there was a message, but no light was blinking, "most of the children have been rescued. Under normal circumstances, we would call his mission a brilliant success."
Tyler snorted, and gestured at the television screen. Smoke was still billowing from the wreckage. "You call that a success? Do you have any idea what's going to happen to the markets tomorrow morning unless we get out front on this pretty damn quick? I can see the headlines now---'AMERICAN BESLAN.' This is just fucking great. I thought you told me this Devlin was the best we've got."
Time to defend the honor of the agency and to protect his turf. "He is sir," said Seelye. "Take a look at that screen---what do you see?"
"I think the pictures pretty well speak for themselves."
"Precisely. Yes, part of the building was destroyed, but all of the terrorists were killed. Sure, it was a nasty
Tyler considered that for a moment. The expression on his face said you might be right. Seelye pressed forward. The earlier you established the "legend," the more likely it was that everyone would believe it. "You see where I'm going with this"
Tyler plainly didn't.
"The point is," explained Seelye, "the bomb detonated after the operation was over. Devlin accomplished his mission---"
"But we took some casualties."
"We may have, yes. And, politically, that's bad. Your predecessors have pretty much established a zero-tolerance level for casualties, and I can certainly understand why you'd want to continue their policies. But look at it this way: You have a bunch of dead terrorists, a bunch of rescued kids, and a bunch of happy families. The grief counselors for the few will only add to the poignancy, not detract from it. Surely we still have some friends in the media."
Seelye noticed the president was scribbling notes as he listened. He punched the intercom button again. "Millie, I have some notes here and I want them delivered to Pam Dobson right away." He switched off and addressed Seelye. "What's your point about the bomb going off after the rescue?"
Seelye couldn't believe Tyler couldn't see it. On second thought, yes, he could. "Simple, Mr. President," he said. "We're dealing with two separate operations." He paused to let that sink in. "The first one, the hostages---that was for the cameras. A feint, if you will. The second was a punctuation mark, a way of their letting us know that they got the joke."
Tyler was completely confused by now. He looked at Rubin for guidance.
"I think what Army is saying, sir, is that the hostage situation was a distraction. Whoever set this up couldn't have cared less what happened either to the kids or to the terrorists. But, with the bomb blast, he left his signature."
"Which means..." said Tyler, hoping that someone would fill in the blanks. Their job was to figure this out. His job was to play it politically.
"Which means that this is only the beginning," supplied Seelye. "Even worse, it means that someone---a very well-financed and ruthless someone---is testing us, probing us, trying to see how we'd react in a moment of national crisis. After all, there hasn't been a major terrorist incident directed against Americans since September eleventh. Memories fade, emotions jump. What have you done for us lately, you incompetent son of a bitch." He looked right at Tyler. "You take my point."
The PDA buzzed in his left hand. The red light flashed. "Excuse me, sir," Seelye said and called up the message. It was from Devlin:
YOU KNEW, YOU FUCKER, DIDN'T YOU?
The president was nothing if not observant. "What the hell is it, Army?"
YOU SET ME UP, YOU SON OF A BITCH.
The head of the have a problem."
"Can you translate that" asked Tyler.
The intercom buzzed. Millie said, "The speaker and the leader are here, sir."
Tyler caught the warning look in Seelye's eyes. "Ask them to wait a moment." He turned back to Seelye. "Okay, genius, you have the floor for the next fifteen seconds."
"Mr. President," said Seelye, rising. "What just went down in Edwardsville was no ordinary terrorist incident."
"No shit, Sherlock," said Tyler. "What are you---we---going to do about it?"
"Be prepared for more trouble. This was not a one-off. Whoever planned and executed this was playing a double game with his own people. His stooges, if you will. I have no doubt that he and whoever is either working with him or standing behind him has a lot in store for us."
The intercom buzzed again. Tyler ignored it. "So what do we do?"
"Give me twenty-four hours. Not even. Let me debrief Devlin---he understands what's going on. And he's the perfect man for the job."
The president looked dubious. "After what just happened..."
Seelye gestured to the door of the Oval Office, beyond which the congressional leaders were cooling their heels. "Remember your public, sir. This was a triumph. The next one, though, will be a tragedy if we don't stop it."
The president rose, signaling the end of the meeting. "From your lips to God's ears," he said, ushering them out. "Just don't fuck up."
PARIS, FRANCE
Pilier switched off the television and turned to Skorzeny, who had already turned his back on the screen and was looking out one of the panoramic display windows. The boss loved to watch the river traffic on the Seine, especially the bateaux mouches as they sailed by, lights blazing.
Not that he had much time for movies, since he didn't even watch the ones his movie studio made, even though he was the company's majority silent investor. As far as Skorzeny was concerned, movies were propaganda tools, fairy tales for the masses, and nothing more.
"Horrible," said the factotum.
"Yes," agreed Skorzeny, who had been in a bad mood since they had reached the apartment, and all because of her. "How dare she tell me she had to get back to London? Doesn't she enjoy my company?"
"Of course she does, sir," replied Pilier. "We all do. But I believe she has some preparation to attend to. You can perhaps forgive her...anticipation."
Skorzeny kept his gaze fo floated by, casting its Platonic reflections on the walls of Skorzeny's elegant cave. The old man's face danced in and out of the chiaroscuro. "Do you think the God who once resided in that prime piece of Parisian real estate ever murdered a school child? A virgin? A nun? Of course He did. So if what happened today in Edwardsville wasn't a tragedy, then what was it?"
"As you said, sir---an occurrence." He realized that Skorzeny liked to take both sides in an argument, but it was getting late. Even Skorzeny had to sleep some time.
Skorzeny began to move toward the interior stairway, toward his private chambers. It was only at moments like that the man showed even a glimmer of his age. There was the hint of a shuffle in the walk, a moue of weariness at the mouth. Both of which would have vanished by morning---which, on Skorzeny's schedule, was only a few hours away. "Really, Monsieur Pilier, you disappoint me."
As Skorzeny passed him, Pilier tried once more: "An opportunity?"
"Precisely," said Skorzeny. "Good night, Monsieur Pilier."
"Good night, sir."
Skorzeny stepped into the hallway. He never took reading to bed. When it was time to sleep, that's what he did. Efficiency above everything. Tonight, however, he had a valedictory. "Do you ever wonder where He went?"
"Who, sir?"
Skorzeny shot him a look. Suddenly, one bony hand shot out, grasping Pilier hard. "Inform our other British member that I expect to receive his report of his American activities at the London board meeting. That is all."
That was his signal. Pilier nodded and went to retrieve a portable basin of water spiced with lemon juice in which Skorzeny ritually washed his hands before retiring, reflecting his absolute abhorrence of dirt. Mentally, Pilier referred to it as the "Pontius Pilate" bowl.
"Thank you," Skorzeny said, wiping his hands on the freshly laundered linen towel draped over Pilier's left forearm, which would go straight to the laundry service in the morning.
Pilier stood motionless as Skorzeny disappeared up the stairs. He had learned from experience not to move until he heard the music---you never knew when Skorzeny would poke his head out one last time with a request or an observation. What would it be tonight? What elegy to accompany Emanuel Skorzeny into slumber?
Sure enough, the voice wafted from above: "Do you remember who St. Bernard was, Monsieur Pilier?"
"Something to do with Clairvaux, sir?" hazarded Pilier, trying not to shout.
"The abbot of the great monastery, to be precise. In the twelfth century, the man who preached the Second Crusade in 1146. Friend to Saint Malachy, he of the apocalyptic prophecy of papal succession in 1139. Of the 111th Pope, Peter the Roman, and the revenge of the dragon."
Pilier had no idea what he was talking about. When Skorzeny went off on one of these numerological, Monsieur Pilier?"
Pilier thought for a moment. Of course it was a trick question. They were all trick questions. "Prudence, sir?" he replied.
"Cowardice," said Skorzeny, shutting the door again.
Silence for a moment, and then the music: the opening strains of the Elgar cello concerto, first movement. Skorzeny's taste was impeccable, as always.
LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY
Devlin caught the Greyhound bus from St. Louis to Lexington, Kentucky, where he bought an airplane ticket under the name "Matt Nolan," bound for Reagan International. There, he would pick up a CSS drop car in the long-term parking lot and drive himself home.
Things weren't as bad as he'd feared in Edwardsville. The explosion had demolished the gym, but ironically the fact that Bartlett's team had blown holes in the walls during their assault had dispersed the power of the bomb and saved the rest of the school.
The bad news was there was one child still missing---Emma, the daughter of Hope Gardner, the woman who had so bravely and foolishly penetrated the school, the sister of the boy he had pulled to safety into the Dumpster when Milverton's little going-away present blew. There was no way to tell whether she was alive or dead at this point, but the longer they went without finding her body, the better the chances of finding her were. Unless, of course, she had been blown to bits.
The other bad news was that the hero, the guy he'd seen breaking through the police lines and had gotten himself killed for no reason---that man had been identified as Hope's husband, Jack. That family had really taken a hit.
One part of Devlin admired him. But the time for civilian heroes was when trouble started, not when it was almost over. A civilian hero was the customer sitting munching his Big Mac with a .45 in his pocket when the punks tried to hold up the McDonald's, the man who, seeing a couple of thugs breaking into his neighbor's house, racks up his 12-gauge, blows the perps out of their socks, and then waits for the cops to show up.
Devlin knew all this because had been tracking the aftermath of the school operation via his next-generation iPhone, which after all had been licensed to Apple and AT&T by the NSA in a top-secret agreement that gave the agency discretionary but complete access to all audio and visual files transmitted over the system. Even now, the NSA computers in Fort Meade and the huge data chompers in Poughkeepsie were busily sorting through teenage pranks, the exotic but enervating sexual practices of random couples, and the idle chatter of millions of cell-phone laundry lists and bitch-out sessions.
Still, the panic that had overtaken the New York Times and its fellow travelers when word of the "warrantless wiretapping" program had leaked into print was ridiculous. Nobody, least of all him and the operatives in Branch 4, had the time or the patience to sort through granny's recipes for apple pan dowdy. The vast ma pointed to the name tag just above her left breast.
Devlin shook his head. "No, not Amber." The girl looked momentarily puzzled, which is exactly what he expected. "I've met all the girls named Amber and I sure would have remembered you." He was smiling now. "No, I'm pretty sure your name is Destiny."
It took her a couple of seconds to get the joke. She gave him one of those quizzical, excuse-me smiles this generation was so adept at. Instinctively, she moved to the next level, something else he was counting on. "I think it was at Marengo?" The mock-shake of the head, the sarcastic furrowing of the eyebrows. "Remember?"
Devlin pretended to think. This was going to be easier than he thought. Marengo was a nice touch, and out of anybody else's mouth but hers it might have raised a flag or two. "Marengo? Whose side were you on---Napoleon's, the Austrians', or the chicken's?"
She giggled. "You're smart, aren't you? I can tell."
"No one's ever told me that before."
That got her laughing again. "I was talking about the club---you know, the one downtown?"
"Right," he said. "Maybe you could take me there?" He watched her eyes as she was making up her mind. As soon as he saw assent---"What time do you get off?"
"Don't you have somewhere to go?" she smiled. "I mean, you are here at the airport."
"My flight just got canceled."
"Ten o'clock," she said "What did you say your name was?"
Thank God there was a flight to Washington early the next morning. Sometimes the loneliness was crushing.

Facts stand wholly outside our gates; they are what they are, and no more; they know nothing about themselves, and they pass no judgment upon themselves. What is it, then, that pronounces the judgment? Our own guide and ruler, reason.
---MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations, Book IX

WASHINGTON, D.C.
Senator Robert Hartley kicked off his shoes, poured himself a drink, and looked out the window at the Potomac as it flowed past his apartment in The Watergate. It was after midnight. It had been a very long day and he was looking forward to some well-deserved relaxation.
He liked Washington, he decided, and even though he had ity, for one thing, which was the only thing on Capitol Hill that outranked sex as a congressional motivating factor. All that was left now was how to pitch his repositioning as high principle, instead of opportunism.
After all, he was an effective pork-barreler---make that "constituent services provider"---and he kept federal dollars flowing into his state far in excess of what they paid out in taxes. Early on, he had learned that pork was a zero-sum contest among the fifty states, and so he'd found himself in complete agreement with Mr. Micawber: that taxes plus one extra dollar back from the feds equaled happiness, and taxes minus one dollar equaled misery. Especially at the ballot box.
Second, he knew his way around the corridors. One thing the Clintons had taught everybody---a lesson they in turn had learned from J. Edgar Hoover---that he who controls the files controls the capital, and Hartley had made it his first order of business upon arrival in the District of Columbia to get to know the men who knew the men who kept the secrets. Although privately he despised the FBI for the life it had forced Hoover and Clyde Tolson to lead, he knew enough to ingratiate himself with the Revolving Door known as the FBI director, as well as with the Empty Seat known as the Director of Central Intelligence. It was amazing how close you could get with somebody once you knew what really motivated him or her. Which was pretty much the same thing that motivated everybody: money, sex, and power.
Third, there was the war chest. So much cash that Hartley hadn't yet mustered the courage to ask his bundlers where it was all coming from. Small donations, he was assured, all well within the campaign finance limits. Keeping track of stuff like this was beyond anybody's powers except a fleet of high-priced lawyers with unlimited billable hours, but Hartley supposed that was the price you paid for democracy.
Not bad for a boy from the Bronx. As a kid, Hartley had set his cap for a ticket out of the old neighborhood, which in his case lay between Belmont and the Mosholu Parkway. As a teenager, he had started calling himself "Hartley" instead of his real name---it sounded so much tonier---and after a while it had become such second nature that he'd had it legally changed between the time he applied to Harvard Law and when he was accepted. Good-bye Kings College, hello Cambridge, Mass.
After Harvard, he'd clerked for one of the justices for a while, but realized soon enough that the life of a lawyer was not for him, that the law degree was only a means to an end, which was politics. He found he had a real knack for it, so when the time came for him to settle on a base of operations, he picked a state in the upper Midwest where the folks were just as nice as pie, a place where he could rub off the abrasive edges of his native accent and his personality but could still retain a trace of his otherness as he climbed the ladder from the state legislature to the House to the Senate.
He knew that a lot of people considered him a prick---you couldn't rise as high as he had without making plenty of enemies---but his constituents didn't seem to care: he was their prick, and he delivered. And, really, was that so bad? He wanted what everybody else wanted, status, respect, power, and, in those moments when he was truthful with himself, love. Even if that word, which usually signified "coincidental"---that just about the only friend he had in the world was the man who was now sitting in the Oval Office.
But latterly a new element had just been injected into the forthcoming campaign: President Tyler's sagging fortunes. What just happened in Edwardsville wasn't going to help his poll numbers, that was for sure. Despite the false sense of security post--9/11, wouldn't take much to swing the pendulum of fear back into the red zone. Another attack, God forbid, and...
Hartley realized in this game of high-low poker, he had a great hand to play. The only question was when to declare.
Declarations were not something politicians instinctively gravitated toward. Like most of his colleagues, Hartley preferred to dither and debate until events or circumstances or fate or whatever finally forced his hand. And then he jumped in the direction of the wind, principles as intact as possible, press releases at the ready.
Hartley didn't live at The Watergate, of course. His residence of record was in Georgetown, like everybody else's. He kept this particular flat rented under an assumed name that was protected by an ironclad confidential understanding with the management, and used it for special occasions.
He was mentally trying on the Oval Office for size when a sound outside in the hallway caught his attention. Sometimes his visitors from the agency were a little shy or inexperienced, and it took a friendly voice of encouragement, or a drink, or something stronger, to put them at ease. Few recognized him---hell, they were barely old enough to vote, most of them. To them, he was just another middle-aged white guy from the hinterland, come to the great city to stroll on what passed for the wild side on the banks of the Potomac.
He peered through the security peephole, but saw nothing. He put his ear against the door, but heard nothing. Hartley was no longer paranoid---liberation was a wonderful thing---but discretion was still part of his implicit deal with the voters and there was no point in pushing his luck.
He glanced at his watch and made a mental note to discuss tardiness with the manager of the service, the next time he encountered him in one of the District's discreet watering holes that catered to powerful men with his tastes.
This time, the knock was unmistakable. Hartley turned back to the door, and yanked it open---
Nobody.
"Goddamnit---"
The man he didn't see blew past him before he knew what was happening. Grabbed Hartley by the arm and pulled him inside. Closed the door behind them softly and said, "Ready?"
Hartley looked his unexpected visitor over. The fellow certainly didn't look like he was from A Current Affair, the name of the escort service he regularly employed. Even were he into fetishes, this get-up---a good-looking blond hunk in a suit---wasn't what he had ordered at all. "Who are you?"
"Right," said the visitor, and the next thing Hartley knew he was on the floor, blood gushing from his nose. Just as he hadn't seen the man, he hadn't se smallest incorporated city in America, equally balanced between government time-servers and what was left of the Virginia gentry who first occupied the place. In recent years, however, Falls Church had undergone a dramatic ethnic shift. Illegal Mexicans clustered on street corners in the old downtown section, and mosques now stood where defunct businesses once had been. Ten miles from the nation's capital, Arabic and Spanish jostled English as the lingua franca of the new, emergent United States.
Just as Jaguars had no visible radio antennas that would mar the sleek lines of the expensive automobiles, neither did Devlin's house have any visible external indication of his profession, aside from a small satellite dish easily mistaken for a TV receiver but was in reality a beta-testing uplink that he had devised himself. Only the canniest of observers would have noticed that it was directed not toward the southern sky, where the television satellites were located, but to the southwest, where the secret comsats were.
Arrayed in a row on his desk were three laptops, each with a different operating system and a different web browser. Double-blind passwords, proprietary encryption algorithms. Each of the machines running DB2 and Intelligent Miner and hotlinked separately to the three parallel mainframe servers at the IBM RS/6000 Teraplex Integration Center in Poughkeepsie---the RS/6000 SP, the S/390, and the AS/400. Predictive and descriptive modes, depending on what he was looking for.
He was running Sharpreader on Windows, NetNewsWire on the Mac, Straw on Linux: his inbox was RSS-updated on a minute-by-minute basis, with real-time news and stories of interest on preselected topics. Level Five NSA firewall security, updated regularly. Complete virus, trojan, and spyware projection, automatically updated every twenty-four hours. His best friends. His data miners.
One of the flaws in the government's security apparatus, he had long realized, was its very nature as a governmental organization. Although he tried to stay off the grid as much as possible, NSA/CSS could not avoid some of the oversight that came with taxpayer funds, and as a result they were blinkered and inhibited, like other governmental agencies. Not to the same extent, of course, or else they could not have functioned, and many of their activities were unfortunately but necessarily devoted to pretense, to the appearance of compliance, just to keep the bean-counters, the blue-noses, the civil-libertarians, and the recrudescent communists as pacified as possible.
But just as war was too important to be left to the generals, the business of national security was too vital to be left to the elected representatives of the people. So there had to be workarounds, and open-source data mining was one of them.
Some of his fellow professionals scoffed at the notion. To them, "open-source" was synonymous with "amateur," but amateurs had been responsible for many of the significant breakthroughs in almost every field, and even---perhaps especially---in today's over-credentialed society they had their manifest uses.
Take, for example, something as simple as a relationship chart, generated by a global search; for any given name, the program could quickly extract all known personal and institutional associates and rank-order them by their proximity to the subject's name in any news story, video clip, press release, bank record, money-transfer order, e-mail address book, iPhone, or PDA database, Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail accounts, etc. In a few seconds, the printer would spit out a chart graphically displK FROM THIS.
I BELIEVE IT IS, YES, SIR. Only a white lie at this point, but...
CAN YOU GUARANTEE THAT?
WITH ALL RESPECT, SIR, PERHAPS YOU'D BETTER ASK GENERAL SEELYE ABOUT GUARANTEES. That would piss Seelye off for sure.
A longer pause: MY OFFICE IN FOUR HOURS. CAMP DAVID.
Not good. Camp David was very private. Asses got chewed off and spit out at Camp David.
DON'T WORRY I'M NOT GOING TO CHEW YOUR ASS OFF. Tyler was quite the mind-reader.
ROGER THAT, SIR.
GET MOVING. The line went dead.
He didn't like it. No matter how complete his report, he had no intention at this time of mentioning his suspicion, no, make that his absolute dead-solid certainty, that Milverton had made him. That was his problem; no sense adding to it by begging for Branch 4 to be out looking for him as well. Besides, if someone high up was collaborating with Milverton and whoever was running him, compartmentalization was the order of the day.
Which meant that he was in no position to guarantee anything to anybody. And without 100 percent certainty and deniability, the whole purpose of Branch 4---Devlin's very existence---was pretty much moot. Tyler was facing a tough reelection campaign, and sharks in both parties---like that creepazoid Hartley---were already sniffing blood in the water. An inquiry into Edwardsville, a leak or two, and suddenly one of the most closely guarded secrets in the American intelligence community was blown to hell and gone.
Which meant that Camp David could be a termination meeting.
It wasn't that Devlin didn't trust the president of the United States, it's that he didn't trust anybody, and so the president of the United States was as good a person to start with as anybody.
EDWARDSVILLE
Since the rescue, Hope and Rory had been inundated by the moral detritus of modern America. They had surrounded her and Rory so fast that she only realized later that she never had time to thank the man who had saved both their lives. The "reporter" with the knife, who had lopped off that awful man's arm with the utmost ease. Hope didn't get a real good look at him, but she did catch his eyes and what she saw in them both thrilled and scared her.
She didn't see fear. She didn't see anger. She saw confidence. A sense of purpose, a sense of...professionalism.
The police, the FBI, the doctors, and the news crews had left. The grief counselors and social services people and "caregivers" she wouldn't let in. There was nothing to say. Hope and Rory sat looking at each other across a half-empty dinner table. The silence in the house was both comforting and almost unendurable.
From to make her feel any better.
They had found Jack's body almost immediately. It wasn't the blast itself that had killed him; he had been hit by a tiny shard of glass that had punctured his eyeball and penetrated his brain. When they found him, it was almost as if he'd lain down to take a short nap.
There was still no sign of Emma. The rescue workers had tried to tell her that that was a good sign, that maybe she somehow got out, and would turn up tomorrow, wandering dazed somewhere. But they'd also admitted that it might take them days to identify any remains at the blast site. Hope had tried to use her woman's intuition, to look into her own heart, to listen very carefully to the small voice within and hear what it was saying, that either her daughter was still alive, or she wasn't. But the voice was as silent as the rest of the house.
Oh well, she could make her peace with that. Plenty of families had gone through the same thing, military families, crime-victim families, and they somehow managed. Until today, Hope was like most of her neighbors; she never really gave much thought to whether her country was actually at war, or whether the whole thing was some fraud cooked up in Texas and Washington and Baghdad and God knows where else, a scam like "Remember the Maine" and "54--40 or Fight," designed to separate the American people from their money and their children, to enrich men elsewhere.
Hope and Rory looked at each other over a cold meal, neither wishing to break the silence.
"I tried to save her, Mom," Rory said, after a while.
"I know you did, Rory."
"And I would have, too. If I'd a found her..."
The memory of him attacking that filthy animal washed over her---her little son, doing something that so many Americans were loath to do: fighting back.
Once more, she remembered how the man's head had suddenly exploded and how another man suddenly had come out of nowhere and chopped off the arm that held her life in its now lifeless hand. She remembered the gratified look in his eyes when he realized that he had saved both her and her son.
And then she remember something else: the tattoo on his forearm of the winged centaur holding a sword, and a name: DANNY BOY. And, at that moment, she knew that she could not rest until she met him again, spoke with him, thanked him---and begged him to help her take her revenge on whoever had killed Jack and Emma. In his business, Jack had lots of military friends and she'd seen the tattoos on their arms, could tell military tattoos from the civilian ones that had popped up on everybody's son's and daughter's body in the past decade. With some phone calls, she could probably find out what the centaur with the sword represented. Just get Rory to bed first.
She was lost in her thoughts until Rory again broke the awful silence. "What're we going to do, Mom?" he asked.
"We'll be okay," she said, meaning it but no. Guys who secreted handguns in their pants and blew away the defendant as he sat at the lawyers' table or, better, in the witness box. The kind of people she had instinctively recoiled from, but whose ranks she now, goddammit, all of a sudden very much wanted to join.
Kill them. And keep killing them until they stopped. Stopped coming to her country, stopped shouting, stopped gesticulating, stop firing weapons into the air, stopped making those ungodly noises, stopped killing our soldiers, stopped. Wrapped up in her private emotions, she swept her arm and the butter dish fell to the floor, shattered.
"He took her with him. Charles. I know he did." Rory was talking to her. Hope's eyes gleamed as she saw so clearly what she so desperately wanted to believe. "He got away and he took her with him," he said. "And then the helicopter crashed---"
"And they said they found only one body, the pilot. So what? Remember when that Muslim from Canada turned up dead at that political convention in Denver with a suitcase full of cyanide? No link to terrorism, they said. Remember when that Arab kid crashed his plane into that building in Florida? No link to terrorism, they said. Remember when those two Arabs turned up in North Carolina or wherever it was with bomb stuff in their cars and claimed they were joyriding around to set off some fireworks? No link to terrorism, they said. No link, no link, no link." She pounded the table at its iteration of the word, "link."
"Our own government is lying to us. Lying to us all the time. What is it they don't want us to know? What kind of fools do they take us for, us hicks out here in flyover country? They take our tax money and they buy our votes and then they treat us like idiot children. They fly over us and they laugh at us on their way to Malibu or the Hamptons. Well, I'm not going to take it any more."
"Mom, who was that man?" At first Hope thought Rory meant the man with the tattoo, but he continued, "The man who saved me. The man who grabbed me---he came out of nowhere and we jumped into the Dumpster. I thought he was a missionary."
That caught her up short---something she hadn't thought about. It was so hard to concentrate at a time like this, but yes...who was that man? She had assumed he was a rescue worker. "A missionary?" she asked. "What are you talking about?"
"Like cannibals and missionaries. You know, the game? I asked him if he was a missionary, and he said, 'No, kid, I'm an angel.'"
"An angel?"
"That's what he said, Mom."
Hope thought for a moment: not one but two mystery men. She wondered if they had anything to do with each other. "Try to get some sleep, Rory," she said at last.
"I'm not sleepy."
"No, you're not sleepy---you're exhausted." Finally, she broke down and started to cry. Rory ru
The pillow still smelled like Diane.
He grabbed the remote, to see what the cables were saying about Edwardsville. Sure enough, they were still running with the "Aftermath of the Tragedy" logos---these days, direct, murderous assaults on Americans were called "tragedies" instead of "acts of war"---interviews with the parents of the school kids, the local cops, even a clown or two from the FBI, whose pride was mixed with the egg on their faces from the explosion. He punched up the volume a couple of notches:
"We believe these were home-grown terrorists," said a man identified as Leslie P. Waters, the special agent-in-charge for the St. Louis area. "Notwithstanding the allusions to Allah, etcetera, at this time there is no evidence that this was anything other than a..."
Right, thought Eddie, hitting the mute button. He supposed that the ability to make asinine weasel statements were part of the training at Quantico these days, but in this case he could cut Leslie P. Waters some slack, since there was no way anybody associated with "Tom Powers" was going to get fingered. Operational security in a Powers operation came before everything.
Although Eddie worked at his instruction, he had complete latitude in putting together his team. He had a few rules: no two men from the same past military unit at the same time, no two men with the same specialty, nobody except service members or those who had passed through Xe's rigorous training program in North Carolina. Xe had come in for a lot of heat since the Iraq War, but it was still the goto protective service of choice for Republicans, Democrats, and journalists alike---those who wanted to live, anyway.
Still, there was something about the Edwardsville operation that was nagging him. He couldn't quite put his finger on it, but the very fact that the operation had not been a complete success very nearly meant that it was a total failure. Not only in his eyes but, he was sure, in Tom Powers's eyes as well. It wasn't that the school assault itself was that surprising---hell, the government had been worrying about a Beslan copycat for years. It was that everything had gone so well, and yet ended so badly. He had never known Powers to fuck up like that, and it made him wonder. Wonder if Powers was slipping, wonder if their team somehow got compromised, wonder if something else, something he couldn't see but only sense, was going on beneath the surface of an apparent terrorist operation.
Oh, well, plenty of time to hash that over when he was rested...
Sometimes, just before he fell asleep, he would think back to his days with the 160th. Although he rarely got behind the controls of a chopper these days, the gift of flight was still in his fingertips, and no matter how much the technology changed and evolved, his natural affinity for the soaring birds had not.
He left the tube on as he soared over, not rafted down, the River Lethe. His last memory was kissing Diane and Jade a little harder than normal, which hours later after uneasy slumber, he realized was just about the only thing he had done right.
, MARYLAND
If you were going to liquidate somebody, reflected Devlin, you couldn't pick a better place than Camp David. For one thing, despite its deceptively idyllic mountain location in the Catoctins, its real name was Naval Support Facility Thurmont, with every sailor in the place, including the kitchen staff, boasting a "Yankee White" DoD security clearance---the highest available for this kind of duty. What happened at Camp David stayed at Camp David.
For another, it was guarded by an elite unit that even Devlin had to admire, the MSC-CD. This unit, whose acronym stood for Marine Security Company---Camp David, was the best the Corps had to offer, highly screened infantrymen handpicked for training at the Marine Corps Security Forces School in Chesapeake, Virginia. Camp David was 125 lethal acres of high-security rustication. FDR had dubbed it "Shangri-La," a name later downgraded to Camp David by Ike, in honor of his grandson.
Devlin had forsaken all thoughts of monkey business straightaway. You came to Camp David and you took your medicine like a man. With Seelye, he normally insisted on as many security protocols as possible, but in a rural retreat with a handful of cabins and a whole lot of patrolled woods, there really wasn't any place for him to hide.
He entered the camp using one of his false identities, this one proclaiming him to be a ship's carpenter with a "Yankee White" clearance, which Seelye had determined was one of the two job openings on the base at the moment, the other being a gardener. As he passed through the gates, his practiced eye took in the myriad security cameras and other surveillance devices, not to mention the camouflaged Marines lurking just beyond the visible perimeter. Camp David was only sixty miles from Washington, not far from Gettysburg, and not exactly the biggest secret in the world, so many were the nutbags who packed their cars full of ammo and explosives and motored on up to see if the POTUS hunting was good that day. Some of them were detained until they sobered up, some of them arrested, and the worst of them sent off to prisons in Colorado and North Carolina for a very long time. A few of them were even shot, although their death certificates later read "automobile crash" or "hunting accident" or, his favorite, "domestic altercation."
In the past decade, since September 11, security had been ratcheted up to a whole new level. It took only a couple of would-be car bombers for the government to revamp its watch list from "good ole boys with a snootful" to "armed moonbats/wingnuts" and "full-throttle jihadis." While there was still a certain amount of on-site triangulation, nobody thought a goober with a gun was particularly funny any more, and as for Dinesh from Dearborn, he quickly found himself on a plane to a very nasty Egyptian prison, or pushing up daisies, or both.
The thermal scanners, both ground-based and aerial, were just the beginning. The one at the main gate, whose presence was obvious to anybody, also doubled as an X-ray machine with the power of a CAT scanner. Radiation detectors were stationed at viable intervals along every roadway and pathway; a miscreant didn't actually have to have anything nuclear on his person for him to be detected, he just had to have this shit-ass bucolic duty, waiting for the president to kick back or, worse, entertain some scum-sucking bottom-feeder of a foreign potentate, you might as well be ready to party if and when the time came.
Seelye was waiting for him just beyond the main gate. "Trouble?"
"Not today, thanks," he replied, trying to sort out his feelings.
They rarely saw each other, which was fine by both of them. If Seelye had drawn this up on the blackboard back in 1985, it couldn't have turned out better for him, or worse for Devlin. The man who had made a whore of his mother and a cuckold out of his father, and who had inadvertently gotten both of them killed. The man who had brought Devlin back to life as someone he was not, re-created him, trained him to become...
To become what he was. Whatever that was.
Many were the times he'd thought of simply killing Seelye and getting the whole farce over with. With a gun, a knife, an ashtray, a fireplace poker, a shattered beer bottle, his bare hands, Colonel Mustard in the Parlor with the Lead Pipe. The thing could be done in moments, and either he would die in a hail of retaliatory gunfire, or be beaten into submission and arrested, or be given a medal and sent into well-deserved retirement. It didn't matter. It was a way out.
"The president's very much looking forward to meeting you," Seelye was saying.
"Unfortunately, the feeling is very much not mutual."
"Come on, he's the president."
"Which means he's the guy I don't want to meet. I don't serve the man, Army, I serve the office. Better to imagine an empty suit than a man. Less disgusting too considering some of the men."
Army smiled inwardly; Devlin had not lost his edge. "And an empty suit is precisely who you're about to meet. So keep a civil tongue in your head, answer his questions, take your orders, and leave."
"This was never part of our deal, Army. No face-to-face. Bulletproof deniability. What does he want?"
Seelye didn't look at him. He hardly ever looked at him, even when Devlin was a kid. "He wants to see the man who saved all those middle-American schoolchildren from a bunch of ruthless terrorists. After all, 'the children'---"
"'---are our future.'"
"Something like that. Hey, it wins elections."
"Is it going to win the next election?"
"Here we are."
They were at Aspen Lodge, the presidential retreat. Dogwood, Maple, Holly, Birch, Rosebud---they were for visitors. Aspen w
"Milverton, sir."
Devlin heard Seelye gasp. Just a brief intake of breath, but as telling as if he'd just socked him in the gut. There---that cat was out of the bag and pissing on the table.
"I don't understand," said President Tyler, but Seelye was already punching up Milverton on his PDA.
"Charles Augustus Milverton, Mr. President," said Seelye. "Not his real name, of course. 'The most dangerous man in London,' he likes to call himself. Most dangerous man in the world, or one of them, is more like it."
"I don't care what he calls himself. I call him dead," said President Tyler.
"Working on it, sir," said Devlin, realizing he'd just been handed a stay of execution, thanks to a little girl.
"Do it," said Tyler. He got up and threw another log on the fire. One of the Marine sergeants would have done it, but the famously populist president snatched the birch log away from him and did the deed himself. "I don't give a shit how you do it. Just get him."
"It will be a real pleasure," said Devlin.
Tyler turned, offering his hands to the Marine sergeant to wipe them off with a clean handkerchief. "Mr. Devlin, you said something to me over the phone about this being a misdirection. A feint, you called it. Is that still your considered opinion?"
"Yes, sir, it is."
"So you think there's more to come?"
"I don't see why not. Even if we take what happened at face value, which we shouldn't---"
"Tell that to the people of Edwardsville---"
"Yes, sir. But even if we do, then they didn't get a thing that they ostensibly wanted. Unless Edwardsville was a very elaborate way of snatching one kid, which is obviously ridiculous. Which means either they'll try again to get what they say they want, or---and this is what I've thought all along---it was a probe, to test our defenses. Which is why, one way or another, something else wicked this way comes."
President Tyler thought for a moment. "How much time have we got?"
Devlin answered: "Assume none, if they're doing it right."
The president turned to Seelye. "Army, I want you to give Devlin all assistance, carte fucking blanche, to get this Milverton. No matter where the trail leads, no matter whose dicks get caught in the wringer, I want this man found, braced, grilled. I want his fucking head on a pike, and I want it ASAP. Top priority."
"Yes, sir," said Seelye.
"Failure is not an option. I want to know everything about this guy, including the names of his twelve best friends. I want to know whether this goes hiDevlin decided to play his wild card. "I can name at least one of them for you right now. But you might not want to hear it."
Tyler was fast and he was sharp. "Do you suspect someone in my administration?" Devlin's estimation of him improved on the spot.
"Mr. President, I'd be lying to you if I didn't say that I'm more than a little disturbed that knowledge of my existence has leaked beyond the inner circle. Especially since you're the leak."
Devlin waited for the nearly obligatory "how dare you?" speech as Tyler's famously short fuse went off. But it never came. Devlin glanced over at Seelye, who wasn't going to like this part. "On my own initiative, I cast a wide-net intercept flag in the Washington area on the telephones lines, cell and hard, all e-mail, text, and other PDA traffic as well."
"And what did you find?" asked the President, impatiently.
"I found exactly one anomaly. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee---"
"Bob Hartley?" exclaimed the president.
"Yes, sir. The man who was in the Oval Office with you yesterday when my name came up. That's who it was, wasn't it?" The president chose not to answer, so Devlin took that as a yes and continued. "Last night, he made a call to a local number---"
"So?" Tyler was starting to lose it.
"---to a Washington number that does not exist. It's a cutout, with how many bounces I don't know yet. I've traced it as far as Los Angeles, but it may not end there. Whoever gave him that number thinks his secret is safe, but he doesn't know that we're smarter than he is."
"What was this call about?"
"Nothing. No connection was made. I think it was a dry run."
"Why? Do you think the next attack could come in LA?"
"I have no idea. But it's a good place to start."
"Dismissed, sailor," said the president.
There was an unmarked car waiting at the gate. Seelye nodded in its direction. "Can I give you a lift?"
"I had a car here somewhere," said Devlin.
"'I had to crash that Honda, honey,'" replied Seelye, doing a passable imitation of Bruce Willis's character Butch in Pulp Fiction. "In fact, it's already pulped. It's sleeping peacefully with Jimmy Hoffa somewhere in Pennsylvania. Just in case Milverton is in your shorts."
Did he suspect something? Did he know something? Seelye knew perfectly well that made Branch 4 agents were soon dead Branch 4 agents, and the thought had occurred to Devlin that Seelye's life would be so much easier once he was finally rid of his long-ago lover's inconvenient son.
Seelye clore that the partition between him and the driver was securely in place.
Seelye leaned through the window and asked, "How come you never call me 'Dad'?"
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Hartley lay on his bed, shaking. He couldn't believe what had happened, couldn't believe what was about to happen. He had to get control of himself, calm down. Nothing was ever quite as bad as it seemed, not even this.
Well, maybe this.
Thank God the phone stopped ringing. The damn thing had been ringing all morning, his cell phone too. He knew it was the White House, which meant it was the president, which meant that sooner or later he was going to have to answer or else they'd send the Secret Service over to his flat to find out if he was okay. And, at this point, he was very fucking far from okay, and the Secret Service were the last people who needed to know just how far from okay everything really was.
The pizza boy was still there. That poor fellow wasn't going anywhere, not of his own volition, and part of Senator Hartley's problem at this moment was to figure just how and when to make him disappear. His unwelcome visitor had gone through the boy's pockets after the murder and told him that the escort service had deliberately set Hartley up and would have exposed him to one of the supermarket tabloids or cable TV, so in a sense the stranger had done him a favor. Still, the corpse in his flat was the least of his worries right now; his nocturnal visitor was going to help Hartley with that, assuming he played ball on the main request.
Which had been, for him, relatively easy. Thank God and the Founding Fathers for civilian oversight of the military. And for access to certain files.
As Balzac once said, behind every great fortune is a great crime, and if Hartley played his cards right, he could wind up with everything---money, power, glory. Already there were stocks, rather a lot of them, that he was to sell short today, very short, and he was encouraged to spread the word to select individuals, corporate managers, defense contractors, and pension-fund bosses of his acquaintance---very discreetly---that rolling back their exposure to certain things, immediately if not sooner, would pay huge dividends. Besides, the man had assured him that no one would be thinking about insider trading in twenty-four hours, but that the political opportunities that were about to open up for a man of Senator Hartley's perspicacity and intelligence were, literally, invaluable.
So Hartley had made all the phone calls, placed all the bets. The man had given him the number of what he said was a Swiss bank account to finance his transactions, and sure enough they had all gone through smoothly. Now it was time to make that one last phone call, to the number the man had given him, and the die was cast.
He dialed it.
Instead of an you."
"And now we know why," said the Refrigerator behind him.
Hartley sat, his mind racing. He knew he was in a lot of trouble, but after all he hadn't killed the pizza boy. They could take paraffin tests or whatever more sophisticated procedures they were using these days, which would surely show he hadn't fired a weapon. He could explain everything.
"Two pops in the head with this baby." Hartley turned to see the Refrigerator holding up the gun. "Pro job---nice shooting, Senator."
"Senator Hartley," said Whippet. "I'm not going to fuck around with you. Unless you play ball with us, not only is your political career over, not only are you going to jail for the rest of your life, but your good friend from across the aisle, Jeb Tyler, is going to be heartbroken. At a time of national crisis and peril, to lose one of his closest and most trusted advisors, with an election coming up...well, I'm sure you agree that this unfortunate incident couldn't possibly have come at a worse time. Which is why he'll feed you to the dogs."
Hartley nodded dully. "Am I under arrest?" he asked.
"I wouldn't exactly call it arrest," said the Refrigerator.
"More like day care," said the Whippet.
"It'll be fun," said the Refrigerator. "We can bunk down out here."
"Just the three of us," said the Whippet.
"Four of us," reminded the Refrigerator. "Until your playmate gets back in touch with you or the Boss says otherwise."
"No, you can't mean..." shouted Hartley as the implications sank in. "Not that."
The Whippet smiled. "I'd think about it twice if I were you," he said.
Hartley was about to protest that he was thinking about it when he felt the snub nose of the .22 pressed up against the back of his head.
"In fact," said the Refrigerator behind him," I'd think about it twenty-two times."
FALLS CHURCH
They were waiting for him by the time he got back from Camp David. The unmarked government car had dropped him at a Washington Metro station, and he had made it home from there, covering the last bit on foot.
From the outside, everything seemed all right. But Devlin knew it wasn't. To a man living in the shadows, the smallest speck of light is like a laser beam: the front curtains were ever so slightly wrong.
Devlin had multiple ways into his house, but he needed to know the right one.
He took out his car keys, held down the alarm security CCTV feed to his BlackBerry.
Front hall, side hall, LR, DR...empty. So far so good. But he still didn't like it. Second floor. Empty BR. His private study was locked and unmolested. That told him something right there: these guys know enough not to touch it.
He had no idea who they were, but it almost didn't matter: two makes in two days was double-plus ungood. Somehow, somebody had gotten hold of his private address. Or somebody with access had leaked it. Same difference.
He punched another button---the trunk lock, followed in quick succession by two clicks on the lock button. That activated the 180-degree infrared scanner, which would give him a rough look at the interior. If their hearts were beating, he'd see them.
There---three of them, one on the first floor and two on the second. Under the circumstances, the cellar door was the best way. He pressed the code on his house keys and it silently slid aside. There was a pair of infrared goggles hanging on a hook in the darkness by the door. He grabbed them and put them on. He also took off his shoes.
Weapons: inside each of his back pockets he slipped throwing knives, and slid a K-Bar knife in its scabbard down the back of his jeans. Under each armpit he placed twin Glock 37s, with a pair of Colt .38s revolvers in special pockets sewn into the front of his jeans. A concussion grenade rounded out his ensemble.
There was what looked like a light switch at the top of the basement stairs. And it was. But if you moved it from side to side in a Morse Code pattern that spelled out his real middle name, it opened the door into the interior of the house. And then it temporarily disabled every electrical system except those on batteries.
He was inside, in the dark, where only he could see.
The man on the ground floor had his back to him, and that's the way he died, Devlin's K-Bar slipping easily between his ribs and puncturing his heart. It was a nice, clean kill, no sound, only instant death. Devlin wondered briefly if he knew the guy; he cared not at all whether he had a family. Everybody had a family, except for him.
Now---fast. Up the stairs, pulling the grenade, arming it, tossing it. The phosphorescent flash would temporarily blind them. He was, once more, the Angel of Death, deputized by God to decide which of his two visitors would live, however temporarily, and which would die.
As every soldier knew, time slows down in hand-to-hand combat even as it moves at warp speed. Man One had fallen to his knees, grabbing his eyes, so Devlin shot him in the head---no sense wasting a bullet on a Kevlar vest---and moved on to Man Two.
Not immediately visible, but it didn't matter. He'd be where, for some reason, they always tried to hide. The bathroom. Pressing another button on his keys, Devlin activated all the interior door locks. Then he hit the gas. Each of the rooms in the house was equipped with nerve gas, hidden behind the green eye of the smoke detectors. It disabled the person but kept him alive and conscious, and able to talk. Most of the time.
He heard the sound of a body falling. Gun drawn, he unlocked and opened the door an computers into lockdown/self-destruct mode; if anyone tried to access them, all data, right down to the keystroke loggers, would be destroyed. It would not be lost---he had mirrored sites at Internet dead drops all over the world, but he would not have the same ease of access to the material. Still, it would have to do for now.
He grabbed only what was necessary: the books his father gave him and the picture of himself and his parents in Rome.
He set the charges on the house. If anyone besides himself tried to enter, the whole place would implode in a controlled demolition. If the clean team really was FBI, he might be able to get Seelye to make sure everybody left the site alone, and down the institutional memory hole it would go. Still, he'd probably never go back there to live again.
If he was going to put a full-court press on Milverton, he needed help. He needed somebody he could trust to do the job right. There was only one such person he trusted. Maybe the time had come at last for a meeting. For he was already formulating a hypothesis. That the Edwardsville school operation had been a feint he had long been certain. It was a jab, a softening blow, to set up the knockout punch that would come at the end of a series of combinations, each of which would stagger the country a little more until finally it fell over.
Devlin punched up Eddie's number, and waited. The cutouts worked smoothly, the line rang. And rang. And rang. No answer. Damn.
He knew Eddie had a family, had a little girl he adored, supposed he was out right this minute with her and her mother, doing the things family men who could afford to turn off their cell phones actually did. Sometimes, in fact, he wondered why Eddie stayed on this job, in this racket, when he had so much more to live for than, say, Devlin himself did. A little girl...
He wondered what it felt like to have a little girl. To have a creature he could unconditionally love, and who would love him back because she didn't know any better, who didn't ask anything from him except unconditional love. He probably would never know.
He tried again, this time on Eddie's secure hot line. Family or no family, this was no time for fucking around.
Same result: no answer. Where the hell was he, anyway? He decided to leave a message: "Whaddya know, whaddya say?" Eddie would know what it meant, what level of security he would need to use to get in touch with Devlin and, most important of all, just how damn urgent this thing was getting.
There was a flight leaving from Dulles to LA soon, and he was already booked on it. He'd dispose of the bodies along the way. He felt bad about the woman, but she was part of the job.
LOS ANGELES
The fountain was dancing and Dean Martin was singing about the moon hitting your eye like a big pizza pie. The Asian tourists were cell-phoning photos of themselves back to Taipei and Tokyo. The chubby Latina girls with the tramp stamps above their ample muffin tops pretended not to notice as the rich Iranian girls---some of them headscarved,...
The head was staring right at her, the eyes wide open in the astonishment of sudden death. She had just enough strength to reach out and brush it away; it wobbled like a pumpkin on a splayed, bloody axis, then spun, rolled and tipped over.
"Mom?" she said. "Mama?"
Everything was really quiet. Those might be screams in the distance, and those might be moans closer by, but she couldn't tell; her ears were still ringing. After what seemed forever, she realized that the distant screams were sirens, and that the sirens were getting louder.
There was something heavy and unmoving lying across her. Her mother, she knew, was also nearby. It took her a while to figure out that the two things were one and same.
Jade struggled a bit, then managed to slip out from beneath Diane. Death has no emotional meaning to a child of Jade's age, other than as an abstract concept, and so in her mind it was perfectly possible for her mother to be both dead and with her at the same time. Diane's face was turned away from Jade, but the back of her head was missing. That was the worst part. That was how, in her stunned and bloody state, she knew.
"Mama," she said trying to turn her mother's face to hers. "Mama?"
Aside from the missing eye, it was her mother's face, the face she knew and loved so well and so much. Whatever the wounds Diane had endured---the autopsy report would later show that she was hit by eighteen separate pieces of bomb shrapnel, shattered glass, and assorted other objects demolished in the blast's progression from fountain to store---they had come so fast and so furiously that she would have had almost no time to really suffer. She would have died knowing that she still held her little girl in her arms, that she could still protect her, and that, no matter the evil that men could fashion, she was still her mother.
LONDON, ENGLAND
Emanuel Skorzeny and Paul Pilier had checked into the same hotel, the Savoy, but under different pseudonyms. In general, Skorzeny preferred never to alert either the authorities or the media to his presence in their countries. In the U.K., there had been that little bother over some insider-trading allegations a few years back, which had engendered a considerable amount of ill-will toward him until the Skorzeny Foundation suddenly found several high-profile projects on which to lavish equally high-profile support, and then the prime minister had embraced him on camera.
Still, to avoid the undue scrutiny of the Fleet Street paparazzi, they had taken the Chunnel, where they could spend the half-hour trip under the English Channel in the comfort of Skorzeny's new Jaguar XJ Portfolio, then motor their way to London from Folkestone.
The Skorzeny Foundation could be found in the forefront of nearly every fashionable cause; from Darfur to land mines to female genital circumcision, there was hardly a position it took that did not meet with the enthusiastic approval of the editorial board of the New York Times. I. Then he opened the door.
It was she. "Good day, Miss Harrington," he said, ushering her in.
Amanda Harrington kissed him lightly on both cheeks as she breezed past him in a rustle of silk and a zephyr of expensive perfume. There was, alas, nothing overtly affectionate about her greeting, just good manners and good breeding. After all, they had seen each other last night and had much urgent business to discuss.
"I thought you'd never ask," she said, reclining unbidden on the sofa in the suite's plush living room.
Skorzeny forgave Amanda sins that others would have to pay for. He walked to the bar, which was always stocked to his order, and poured Amanda a drink. It was one of the many ways in which this impossibly poised woman was a throwback to the great beauties of the 1940s and 1950s. Unless she was swimming, riding, or playing tennis, she never wore anything other than dresses and proper shoes. She had her hair immaculately done up every day. She never used a four-letter word, nor suffered one to be used in her presence. There was not a single tattoo on her glorious body. She would, he knew, have one drink and then get down to business, or brass tacks, depending.
Indeed, Skorzeny knew, the only flaw in her life was her inability to have a child. In that respect, she resembled the majority of her European sisters: resigned to sacrificing the Continent's future to the immigrant hordes, in order to savor their Pyrrhic victory over the patriarchy.
Skorzeny handed her a shaken, ice-cold gin martini and stepped back to admire her as she took the first sip. Really, she was magnificent. She was the only woman in the world on whom he would gladly wait.
"When did you hear?" she asked.
"Just now," he said.
"Luckily," she said, "I've come prepared."
One of Amanda's few concessions to modernity was the array of electronic gadgets she habitually carried with her. As one of London's most successful stockbrokers, she had worked her way to the top of the heap at the firm of Islay Partnership, Ltd., living proof that London's reclaiming the title of the world's financial capital was no mere jingoistic, John Bull dream. She worked all of the hours that she was not sleeping, but she did so without ever calling attention to the fact. In her professional life, as in everything else, she was the very soul of discretion.
That was why he had snatched her away from Islay and made her as chairman of the board of Skorzeny Foundation. That, and one other thing: her impossible beauty. Amanda Harrington was the kind of woman that not even his money could buy, which was why he kept trying. Emanuel Skorzeny had never met anyone he couldn't purchase, or at least lease, and he was not about to break his unblemished record now.
She laid the instruments out on the table, occasionally flicking an eye at the running stock tables on the Sky News ticker. Still sipping on her martini, she punched in instructions on her battery of BlackBerrys, and at one point had not one but two cell phones working; there was something distinctly comic about her holding each of them to a separate ear as she talked, but Skorzeny was too much of a gentleman to laugh.
"Hand me the remote, would you, pleaseerrys on "silent." Dutifully, he handed it over. No one who knew him would believe that the great Emanuel Skorzeny would heed a woman, even one as spectacular as Amanda Harrington, but there you were.
She turned up the sound and changed channels. It didn't matter where she landed, the coverage from Los Angeles was everywhere. "Good God," was all she said, looking at an aerial shot of the blast radius.
The Grove lay near the city's geographic heart, and so its destruction affected the freedom of movement of all Angelenos. With both Third Street and Beverly Boulevard knocked out, two of the city's most important east-west arteries had been cut; the north-south streets of Fairfax and La Brea were similarly affected. Gridlock was expanding outward, a ripple effect that would soon engulf Beverly Hills to the west, Hollywood to the north, and Los Feliz to the northeast.
That, however, was the least of the city's problems. The Grove itself was a complete loss, and the historic Farmer's Market as well. The CBS broadcast center was a smoking ruin and had temporarily knocked the network off the air. American networks were notoriously squeamish about showing dead bodies, but the Europeans felt no such Puritan compunctions, and even from this height, one could see that body parts were liberally strewn over a quarter-mile radius.
"Horrible," said Amanda.
"Yes," said Skorzeny softly. "We have to do something."
"Already underway," said Amanda briskly, knocking back the last of her martini. "I've rearranged our positions on the New York Stock Exchange in order to limit our exposure to---"
"That's not what I mean, Miss Harrington," said Skorzeny. "I mean, we have to help these poor people. Now."
Amanda caught the shift in tone, but kept her voice level. "I've anticipated that, sir. At your word, I'm prepared to go public with a variety of Skorzeny Foundation initiatives, depending on the reaction of the American government. We can immediately make large cash donations to local hospitals and charities and, through our contacts in various European governments, we are also in a position to offer official aid if the Americans request or accept it. Further, our supply ships---"
"Yes, yes," said Skorzeny softly. "I mean we also have to act politically, through our contacts in America, to ensure that the government of the United States is as good as its people. I'm afraid President Tyler has been something of a disappointment."
"Yes, sir," she said, making a note. "There are several senators and congressmen who benefit handsomely from our largesse, and I'm sure---"
A knock at the door. "You may enter, Monsieur Pilier," said Skorzeny.
Paul Pilier stood in the doorway; his imperturbable face showed no emotions. "I was wondering if you had any instructions for me, sir?" he said.
"Who do we have on the ground in Los Angeles?" he asked, pronouncing the name of the city the old-fashioned way, with a hard
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Upon learning the news of Los Angeles, the president helicoptered aboard Marine One directly to the White House lawn, where he held an impromptu press conference. Even his worst enemies and most ardent critics had to admit that Jeb Tyler was made for moments like these. His natural empathy, his good looks, his unforced air of concern---these were some of the qualities that had gotten him elected and today was his finest hour.
Across from him, the usual assemblage of preening White House correspondents, augmented by the network anchors, had their microphones and notebooks at the ready, itching to shout their questions. But right now, the president had the floor:
"My fellow Americans," Tyler began, with just the right quiver of rage in his voice. Dobson had whipped up the speech on the short chopper ride from Camp David, and it was probably the best thing she'd ever done. Did half the country think him a wimp? Very well then, he would show them. "Today, our country was attacked by wanton, vicious murdering scum."
A ripple ran through the press corps. Scum? Several reporters made a mental note to contact...well, somebody...to see if any group could possibly take offense at such an un-PC characterization. So far, there had been no terrorist statement that anyone had heard, but it would surely come, and then the great national game of recriminating moral equivalence could begin in earnest. In the meantime, the president was still speaking:
"Many of our fellow citizens are dead. Many more lie dying. A significant portion of Los Angeles has been destroyed by a very powerful bomb. But it could have been worse. Reports are still fragmentary and preliminary, but it appears that the terrorists' attempt to construct a so-called dirty bomb has largely failed. With the gracious acquiescence of Mayor Gonzales of Los Angeles, federal FEMA, Hazmat, and SWAT teams are either already on site or underway. We'll have no Katrina here."
He took a breath, but continued to look steadily and calmly into the TV cameras. "As of this moment, we have not received any communication from the people who have done this reprehensible deed. But let me assure you that we will find them, and we will bring them to swift and sure justice.
"I gather there already has been speculation that this attack was in retaliation for the foiling of the plot in Edwardsville yesterday. I have conferred with my senior national security staff, and they assure me that such a thing would be impossible. This operation was too well planned for it to be a simple act of revenge. No matter how Edwardsville had played out, no matter whether we had acceded to all their demands, it wouldn't have mattered one whit. The attack on Los Angeles would have happened anyway. So if and when we hear from them, please keep that in mind. There is simply no grievance, whether real or imaginary, that justifs devices. Pam Dobson walked over and showed him her screen. Tyler blanched, then made a command decision: show it.
"Are you sure?" whispered Pam.
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant," said Tyler. "My fellow Americans," said President Tyler, "behold our enemy." And so the nation's television feeds cut away from the White House lawn to the face of a terrorist in a ski mask. Tyler signaled for the audio feed to begin:
"...cowardly attack on our forces yesterday cried out to Heaven above for revenge," the masked man was saying in a muffled and electronically scrambled voice. "And so has it been done. Let there be no mistake about our resolve. Unless the American government immediately and completely capitulates to our demands, these attacks will continue in ever-increasing ferocity until America and the West are destroyed in a holy rain of fire."
The terrorist looked directly at the cameras. "And that day of reckoning will be the most terrible in the history of the world." The video was shot in some empty room, blank white walls, no music. "You have had your chance. From this moment on, there will be no further communications, no negotiating. We made our justifiable demands and our reward was death. Now, we will visit death upon you. No justice, no peace, no surrender."
The masked man stopped, looked at the camera. "Have a nice day."
The president came back on, calm, unruffled, not a perfect hair on his perfect head out of place. Even the half of the country who hadn't voted for him, who in fact despised him, had to admit that he was pretty damn impressive at this moment.
"My fellow Americans, everything you have just heard is a lie. You have just seen the hooded face of evil. I realize that some members of both parties have tried to tell you that the threat from beyond our shores is not real. That if we would just be nice to them, if we would just address their 'legitimate grievances,' all would be well.
"But let me tell you something. Yesterday's events in Edwardsville opened my eyes. I too thought that health care and the capital gains tax were the issues most important to you, my fellow countrymen. How wrong I was. And I stand before you now, humbled and contrite of heart, and pledge to you that we will not rest, we will not falter, until we have eliminated this threat to the Republic, and our families can once again sleep soundly in their beds at night---secure in the knowledge that we employ rough men ready to do our enemies grievous harm for the actions they have taken against us today. My fellow Americans---we will not fail."
It was a lucky thing that the cameras were on Tyler and not his group of advisors behind him; flies would have found comfortable nesting places in their mouths as he continued.
"This very day, I have ordered the leader of one of the most secret, the most elite units in the American intelligence hierarchy to stop at nothing to remove this threat. From this moment on, we will hunt down these folks and terminate them with the most extreme prejudice America has ever brought to bear on an enemy, and that includes Tojo's Japan and Hitler's Nazi Germany."
One last pause. "Thank you, good night, and then---"Sorry, but I can't. They'll shoot us down. If we go Code Red, they'll scramble at Edwards and you'll have put 150 people in the Pacific."
"We won't go Code Red," said Devlin. "I'll guarantee it."
"Then it'll be a general aviation order."
"And you can beat that, can't you?"
At that moment, the cockpit door opened and the co-pilot stuck his head out. "Captain," he began, eyeballing Devlin.
"It's okay," said Wilkinson. "Have they closed LAX?
The co-pilot was smart enough not to ask who Devlin was. "Affirmative, sir. We're being diverted to Vegas."
"Thanks, Ben," said the captain. "I'll be right in." He turned back to Devlin. "Rocky, ol' buddy, you'd better give me a goddamn good reason to even think about what you're suggesting."
Only one play left. Whoever the unlucky lady in 4A was, she was now going to be the goddamn good reason. He could take her into custody in a second, and then figure out how to frame her for something as they headed to LA.
"I'll make the bust right now. Then you'll have a high-value federal prisoner who must be delivered to LA without delay. I'll get you all the CYA authorization you need. Deal?"
Captain Wilkinson thought for a moment. "That is one good-looking federal prisoner," he said, shaking Devlin's hand. "I'll have the flight attendant ask the man in the seat next to her to come up front for a moment, for some bullshit message. Then you swap seats and do your thing. But try to keep the fireworks to a minimum, will ya?"
Devlin nodded. "Thanks," he said. "One more thing---land in Burbank."
The stew went to get the man in 4B. As he came forward, Devlin slipped past him and walked calmly but purposefully, head down, toward the empty aisle seat. He hated to burn one of his covers, hated to have spent as much time with the captain as he'd had to, but that's the way it was.
The face of the woman in 4A was buried in a copy of Paris Vogue as he took the seat. She didn't bother to look over, or acknowledge his presence, or absence, in any way. Under other circumstances, the perfect seat mate.
Then his world turned upside down.
Maybe it was the perfume, that magical madeleine that triggered involuntary memory. Maybe the shape of the left forearm. Maybe a sixth sense. It didn't matter. They both knew immediately when she lowered the magazine and looked at him.
"Hello, Frank," she said evenly. "Long time no see."
It was a good thing he didn't have a heart. "Hello, Maryam," he said. "You're under arrest."
Chapter Thirty-six
He glanced across the street. So far, nothing. "Waiting for a friend."
"Dressed like a Marseilles pimp?"
"He's a whore, so it's okay."
"Can I watch?"
"No, but you can have a rain check."
"What's a rain check?"
"I thought you said you spoke English."
She made a moue. "I don't think I like you any more."
"Who said you ever did?" Movement in the doorway across the street. "I gotta go now, baby."
"Don't call me baby. I hate when men call me baby."
He was moving now and so was she, tagging along. He either had to ditch her, kill her, or let her come. He didn't like either of the first two choices, so he might as well make use of the cover. He took her by the hand. "Where are we going?" she asked.
"I don't know," he said, "but you seem like a fun girl, so you're getting your rain check right now."
She had to hurry to keep up, her feet clattering her impossibly high heels on the Paris sidewalks.
The man he was trailing stopped, his keen ears tuned to the slightest discrepancy in his environment, visual or aural. In a flash, Devlin had pulled Maryam into the shadows of a nearby doorway and kissed her as hard as he could. He caught sight of the man turning and he knew he was, for the moment, safe. He kept kissing Maryam long after the man had started back along his way. She tasted that good.
At last, he let her up for air. "What was that for?"
"For saving my ass."
"It's a nice ass," she said.
He waltzed her out onto the sidewalk. He stepped in some dog shit but he didn't care. Dog shit was as much a part of the romance of Paris as the Seine, as the shellfish spilling out from their ice beds on the sidewalks, as the whiffs of perfume and body odor coming off the ugly but sexy women, as the sight of Notre Dame by night, as the Pont des Arts in late afternoon, and the Sacre-Coeuer against the morning sun.
The man ahead had stopped again. Did he sense something?
"Slap me," he whispered. "Really, do it. Now."
She learned fast. She slapped him hard. Harder, in fact, than he expected. Good. That meant she liked him.
"Encule de son père!" he shouted.
She came right back at him:
"Sale fils de pute enculée par un gros connard de pede!"
That hurt. So would this: "J'aurais te don from his mouth. Neither could she:
"Boro gomsho pedear soukteh, jakesh!" It was the choicest Tehran invective he had heard in years.
As he'd hoped, a crowd gathered around them, hoping for some action and blocking them from the sight of his quarry. Silently, he started counting down to ten, which was exactly how long he was going to let this little piece of street theater last.
"Goh bokhor!" he cried and pulled her close again.
"That was pretty good," she said. "For an American."
"Let's go."
They pushed their way through the crowd. The man Devlin was following was still in sight, but moving faster now, his wind up a bit, but not so much that he would disappear. To vanish would be to admit guilt to any pursuer. And then it would be war.
"Who is he?" she said.
"Somebody I want to talk to."
"Just talk?" She grabbed him and whirled him around. "Enough to kill him?" She patted the gun under his left armpit, the one that was so well concealed that not even a drunken flic with a grudge against Americans would have noticed it on a first pat-down. Or even a second...
The sudden rush of emotion he was feeling was something new, unexpected. He'd spent his life after Rome living within a carefully constructed iron box that the world couldn't dent, and now this girl comes along and cracks it right down the middle with one kiss.
He made a snap decision. The first rule of snap decisions was never to make them. The second rule was to make one exception. "You'd better leave now. Things could get ugly."
Big brown eyes, looking right into his. "I'm from Shiraz. You think I haven't seen ugly things?" She took off her heels, ready to run. Maybe the second rule was right after all.
Third rule: never underestimate a woman. Not her brains, not her heart, not her soul.
The man was heading toward the Seine. Inwardly, Devlin smiled; that's where he would head at this point in the game too---someplace open, with a clear shot in every direction, one with plenty of shadows among the closed kiosks, lovers galore, bridge abutments. Open spaces could be killing fields, but only when the battlefield had already been prepped; otherwise, they were observation posts.
Okay, they could play it either way. "This could get rough," he said. "And I want to see you again, after this is over."
"I'll have to think about it."
"Make it snappy."
"What's your name?"
"Frank Ross," he lied.
"Okay, Frank Ross," she said with a hint of entirely accurate suspicion, "I'll meet you at the Cafest, down the Seine, turning its back on the sin and sacrilege behind it.
He took a spot in a darkened doorway and waited. Mentally, he reviewed the intelligence. It was all NSA stuff, nothing from Langley, which meant that on a scale of one to ten it scored about a six, as opposed to a one. The rue Galande was where Milverton kept a safe house, a flat, in one of the last places in Paris that anyone would ever think to look for such a thing.
Maryam wandered briefly into his thoughts, but he cast her aside. He had her parting promise to meet him at the Café de la Paix, near the Opéra, and if she was true to her word, so would he be. He had no intention of getting killed by Milverton. He was there as judge, jury, and hooded executioner.
"I am the Angel of Death," he said, under his breath.
There was no chance that Milverton would go through the front entrance. But he didn't want him to. That was the way he was going to go in. And so he bought a ticket and entered the building.
Everybody was dressed for the occasion except him. Men in bustiers, fishnet stockings, and high heels. Women dressed as virginal brides, but wearing no underwear. Mock-hunchbacks. Vampirish whores. All there for The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
The cult movie had been playing at the Studio Galande since forever. It had taken the French a few years to catch on to the fact that the Tim Curry movie was not just a movie but an audience-participation extravaganza, but once they got the hang of it, they showed up with the same fervid and flamboyant enthusiasm as their counterparts in Boston, New York, and elsewhere.
Devlin had long since memorized the layout as he took a seat near the back of the auditorium. Thanks to NSA, liaising with DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, run out of the DoD), he knew that Milverton's lair lay to the rear of the screen and just above, on the first floor, in Euro-speak. He gave Milverton about fifteen minutes to get comfortable, to feel safe. The audience was in the middle of "Let's Do the Time Warp Again" when he made his move.
There was a conga line up on the stage in front of the screen. As he rose, several girls cheered him, got out of their seats, and sandwiched him as they propelled Devlin toward the stage. The girl behind him put her hands on his ass and squeezed it tight, while the one in front reached back and grabbed his balls.
And then they were up on the stage. The audience was screaming with delight and shouting encouragement.
Hands on hips, knees in tight...
The girls were very sexy. He found his thoughts flashing back to Maryam. No---get her out of your mind. Stay focused on the job.
The wings beckoned. He wasn't the first Rocky Horror virgin to feel embarrassment and flee the stage.
Even behind the screen and the loudspeakers, the music was deafening.
He drew his silenced SigSauer and fired nine shots in quick succession, punching a perfect circle in the ceiling above. As the plaster showered down, he took out something that looked like a dart gun and fired.
The metal claw expanded as it hit the ceiling, grabbed a purchase on the floor above. He hit the retractor and the
Milverton came down at the speed of gravity, firing all the way. He was that good---better than Devlin even had thought. Faster too.
His first few shots shredded the screen from behind. Tim Curry took a bullet through the groin. Richard O'Brien, one through the hump. And Susan Sarandon, right in the titties.
Milverton continued firing as he hit the floor, rolling. The fall must have hurt like hell, if it didn't actually break anything, but he didn't seem to care. Devlin respected that; unless he had been killed by the plunge, he wouldn't have cared about the pain either. All that mattered at this point was the job.
Shots splintered everything around him as he rammed another clip into the SigSauer. But he was bound by the rules of engagement: he couldn't fire toward the audience.
Milverton rose and charged toward the screen from behind.
It's just like Point Blank, though Devlin, trying both to stay hidden and get a clear shot. Observe, orient, decide---
There he was, outlined and back-lit against what was left of the screen.
Act.
Devlin held up. He couldn't risk missing Milverton and hitting some poor kid. Milverton burst through the screen, firing back at Devlin, then dropping off the proscenium and into the first row of seats.
Devlin realized it was useless. He had to get up, expose himself, if he had any hope. He couldn't believe how badly this operation had gone. And all because of the girl.
No, check that---all because him. Because of his weakness. Because of his need.
Devlin broke through the remains of the screen. Barry Bostwick and Little Nell were still singing on the soundtrack, but the picture was long gone. People were screaming and shoving each other to get out as Milverton bulled his way toward the front exit. He was holding the two girls who had sandwiched Devlin. Hostages now.
From his angle, he didn't have a clear shot. Milverton raised his gun---
Then a shot, from somewhere in the auditorium. Milverton stumbled, lost his grip on the girls, who tore away from him and dove for cover. Another shot, which splintered the wall behind Milverton, who was already returning fire. He emptied a clip into the darkened auditorium, and a woman's voice cried out in pain.
This was his chance. At full speed, Devlin leapt from the stage.
He landed on Milverton square, raining punches as they went down. The body blows didn't do much damage. It was like socking steel.
Milverton's first punch caught Devlin behind the neck, stunning him. He knew what was coming next, even as the SAS fighter pulled his knife and slashed at the back of Devlin's knee. Had it landed, the knife thrust would have been a crippling, then a killing blow. Devlin would have been a marionette whose strings had just been cut, and lying there helpless, he would have been ripe for the final plunge into the neck.
But Milverton missed. He missed because everything in Devlin's training had prepared him for moments like these and while someday he might meet a better shot than himself, he was not going to me...dialthet a better street fighter.
He blocked the blow with a forearm, then threw the other forearm at Milverton's head. It caught him flush on the ear. He brought the butt of his gun down across the bridge of Milverton's nose.
Devlin spun, grabbing Milverton's wrist. With a sharp yank, he disarmed him, the knife clattering to the ground. His eyes briefly followed the knife---
"Look out!" A woman's voice. He glanced left, just in time to see the shiv that had been yanked from Milverton's boot heel heading for his face. He could feel the air as it missed.
"Drop it!" shouted the woman's voice and now Devlin understood who she was.
Maryam held her Lady Glock steady on Milverton. She was a pro, but she wasn't as good as he was.
Instead of breaking his motion, Milverton transferred the arc of the shiv in her direction and let it fly, like a dart. She tried to control the shock and the pain, but Devlin heard the breath punch out of her as she fell.
In a flash Milverton was up on his feet and running for the door. Devlin rolled and brought his pistol up, but it was too late.
Milverton was gone.
He found her slumped on the floor between a row of seats. He could hear the sirens, rapidly approaching. Leave her, shoot her, or fall in love with her, once and for all. Observe, orient, decide.
Act.
He picked her up. There was a side exit that led into a noxious Parisian alley. The kind of street where lovely ladies with blackened teeth and hairy armpits used to empty the contents of their chamber pots on the heads of peasants even blacker of tooth and hairier of body back in the seventeenth century.
No chamber pots tonight. He kept his pistol ready, just in case Milverton was waiting for him.
She was losing blood, going into shock now. A hospital was out of the question; too much curiosity. The agency had doctors here in Paris. It also had nurses, spies, whores, safe houses, safe cars, bought cops, cooperative members of the Deuxième Bureau, the works. They'd be here within minutes.
"Hold on, Maryam," he said, punching a couple tones on his cell phone.
"Who are you?" she whispered as he carried her down the alley, her voice fading.
"Your guardian angel," he said.
Paris was for lovers.
LOS ANGELES
Danny Impellatieri's first inkling that anything was amiss came as he gradually awoke to the soft, almost sexy, buzz of his secure cell phone, which he always slept w a television commercial; the TV was still on, although he couldn't see it from this angle. He was trying to synthesize this random information when he realized he had the phone in his hand. "Hello?"
Stupid. That hadn't been a standard ring tone---it was his private message ring tone, the overture to Zampa, just energetic enough to be motivating, and clichéd enough to be comical. No answer was necessary. There was a crackle and a beep and he realized this was a message from "Tom Powers." He punched his access code and waited for the clearance to go through. Then he saw it.
"Whaddya know, whaddya say?" That got him awake.
That was what he used to say when he was commanding his unit of the 160th, the Night Stalkers. Powers had asked him for a private phrase, one that only the two of them shared. Thus they learned that they both shared a love for Cagney movies, loved the way the banty little rooster from hell moved as he chomped through the scenery. Cagney just didn't stand there, he vibrated. He didn't just do nothing when he had nothing to do; he did something: flashed his devilish eyes, shot a leering grin, balanced expertly on the balls of his feet, ready for anything, ready to make love to a girl or punch a guy's lights out. Cagney, they decided, was their role model.
So this message was not good. Danny had expected the small pleasures of homecoming and sleep, and then a significant rise in one of his off-shore bank accounts, the ones that, despite his overwhelming love for her---or perhaps because of it---he had never breathed a word of to Diane, but had put in her name in case anything happened to him. It was meant as a warning, to be ready; worse, it meant that something really nasty had come up.
Ready for what? What could have been worse than what they'd just gone through?
Normally, the first thing Danny would do was sit down at his computer in his secure room, boot it up, and do a quick scan of all available feeds, official, semiofficial, open source, and absolute bullshit. You could learn a lot from the first three, but sometimes you could learn even more from absolute bullshit, since it afforded you a window onto the thinking of the wingnuts, basket cases, moonbats, psychos, and all the other flotsam and jetsam of the human race, weightless amid the rapidly expanding junk of cyberspace.
That kind of war was not for him. Danny preferred a sidearm or a knife and an enemy, face to face, up close and personal. Like that Drusovic asshole. Danny was a good Catholic, but the thought that religion could compel a man to murder---no, to slaughter---was beyond him. He would have made a lousy Crusader, Deus lo vult and all that; he needed to know who he was killing and why. For Danny Impellatieri, it was always personal.
The phone rang again---this time the tone was the William Tell Overture. Another Devlin ring tone. He wasn't sure if he wanted to answer it. If Devlin really had wanted to communicate something to him, he could have done it with his first message. If he just wanted to shoot the shit, well, there was plenty of time for that ad told him his daughter was lying. The security scanners went nuclear as he blew past the metal detector, but that was another thing that would just have to be sorted out later. Besides, the city of Los Angeles had bigger problems at the moment than one grieving father with a weapon or two.
Into the elevator, where he frightened an old Chinese lady in a wheelchair surrounded by four or five members of family banging away in Cantonese. His Cantonese was rusty, but he could have told them to go fuck themselves had they given him any grief. Instead, they just cowered and complained as he barged into the lift, and then spewed some Chinese venom at him as he barreled out. Like he cared.
There was the room. Jade's room.
Eddie Bartlett had seen a lot of things in his time. With the 160th, he'd seen men blown apart, men shredded by chopper blades, men decapitated in training accidents, men with their heads shattered as they smashed through the cockpit glass, men defenestrated, whether accidentally or, in combat, intentionally. He knew what a body looked like after it had fallen from a few thousand feet, knew what a hostile looked like after he'd been riddled with automatic weapons fire in a strafing run, knew what was left after man, woman, or child was hit by a cluster bomb or a missile.
His mind raced. His memory slowed.
The road to Baghdad, 2003. No matter what anybody said about who was responsible for 9/11, for the men on the ground it was payback time for the sand monkeys. Leading a SOAR team, in close air support of a forward Marine unit. Knife through rancid butter until one of the damned sandstorms appeared out of nowhere, a whirling, desert dervish like something out of The Mummy.
The Marine column was caught out in the open. Not so bad for them; they could hunker down, even under fire. He and his choppers were up in the air, with sand blasting through their rotors, enfilading their engines. If he didn't get them down, they would all crash in the desert, like the illfated Carter mission, the one that had given birth to the SOARs in the first place.
The enemy was dug in at a village just up ahead. A few of Saddam's inept Republican Guard's wasted tanks were blocking the Marines' way into the village. The dirty little secret of desert fighting was that the Iraqis didn't like the sand any better than the Americans did; as a natural resource, it was a lousy ally. They would be having just as much trouble with their rifles and small arms as anybody else, just as little freedom of movement. The Arab response to almost any kind of adverse combat situation was to hunker down, lie low, and either turn tail---their ordinary course of action---or dig in, camouflaged, and then shoot their opponents in the back as they passed by.
If the Night Stalkers bailed now, the Iraqis would become emboldened by what they viewed as American cowardice. Although they thought nothing of abject surrender and honored what the West considered treachery, the Arabs preferred sure suicide to perceived dishonor, and they could pin the Marines down. The jarheads' lifeline was Danny's Black Hawks, and Danny would be damned if he was going to deny them that.
Was the situation dangerous? Damn straight. But that's what the 160th was invented for in the first place.
"Captain
LOS ANGELES
Traffic in central Los Angeles was at a standstill, and so they made their way over the hill from Burbank, avoiding the freeways, cutting around Griffith Park on San Fernando, crossing the LA River and darting down Glendale Boulevard and into Echo Park.
Deliberately, he kept a house in one of the most unfashionable neighborhoods in the city. The home on Laveta Terrace in once-fashionable Sunset Heights had been built in 1921 by a rich man, a member of the city's prestigious Jonathan Club, but had slid downhill in the early 1930s once W. C. Fields, whose house was just three doors down, moved west to Los Feliz. It was a perfect place for him to live as anonymously as the nature of his job demanded.
Echo Park was the Greenwich Village of Los Angeles, a longstanding hotbed of radicals, gays, commies, lefties, greens, Latinos, and once upon a time, Aimee Semple McPherson herself. Indeed, her Angelus Temple lay just down the hill to the west, at the northern end of the Echo Park Lake. True, there was the occasional gunshot that broke the stillness of the night, but the view of downtown from his second-floor terrace was nothing short of spectacular, and on game nights, the lights of Chavez Ravine stabbed the night sky like some kind of secular cathedral.
"Am I still under arrest?" she asked. "That was cute."
"No, it was clever."
"We'd better get to work," she said.
That was it. No mention of the Studio Galande and its aftermath, no reference to the last time they saw each other, no hint of her feelings when, after weeks of nursing her back to health at a safe house in Neuilly, he had suddenly and completely vanished from her life. She just picked up right where they'd left off.
"Don't you want to know why---"
She held up a hand. "No. We don't have time for that."
"I'm sorry," he said.
"I know you are, Frank," she replied.
"My name's not Frank," he admitted.
"I know it isn't," she said, moving toward him. "Everything you've told me since the day we met was a lie, but I accepted it."
"Because you were lying too."
"Because I accepted it."
Observe, orient...fuck it. "Follow me."
He led her into a tiny hallway that separated the west wing from the east wing, and then into what was once was, charmingly, the 1920s "telephone room," a cubbyhole about the size of an old-fashioned phone booth under the central stairway that still had the hook for the home's original telephone. The proper combination dialed on the reproduction wall phone he'd had installed would slide open to allow passage to the inner sanctum
Even their vaunted Internet cadres had been busted down to buck private, thanks to NSA/CSS. This wasn't Devlin's department, but he was well aware of the extraordinary battle that had been waged, and now basically won, against Al-Qaeda in cyberspace. On September 19, 2008, the NSA warriors had taken down four of the five principal jihad sites, DSA'ed them to death, then poisoned them; what the Romans had done to Carthage, Fort Meade had done to what was left of bin Laden's network. It was the kind of victory that should have been hailed on the editorial pages of every major newspaper, but of course wasn't.
He tried Eddie Bartlett again. Nothing, not even a ring---straight to voice mail. Ditto for his satphone and the iPhone. Nix.
Worse than nix. For security reasons, if Eddie didn't pick up on three secure lines, Devlin was supposed to drop him. It was his own rule, because Devlin had learned the hard way over the years that there was a penalty for breaking even arbitrary, self-imposed rules. Still...
"What?"
"I can't raise my partner, the guy I was on my way out here to see when it happened. That's never happened before."
"And you think something happened to him."
"I never think, until I know."
"Let me work with you." There, she said it.
He turned away from his computers and looked at her. "I guess we're either going to have to trust each other or we're going to have to kill each other, so why don't we decide right now? Why did you follow me in Paris?"
"I wasn't following you. I was there for you."
"Who sent you?"
"That's classified."
"Do you know who I am?"
"Yes. You're Frank Ross."
"And do you know who Frank Ross was?"
"Yes."
"Tell me."
"He was a reporter who got framed and sent to jail. James Cagney played him in Each Dawn I Die."
It was getting clearer now. "NCRI?" The National Council of Resistance of Iran. The great Iranian diaspora had put many of the richest Persians in America, a lot of them burning with desire to see the last of the mullahs.
She didn't answer. "It's my turn now. Why did you leave me?"
"How about a drink?"
"I'm Muslim, remember?"
"Not a Mormon?"
"No."
"So...how about a drink?"
"I thought you'd never ask."
They took the private lift up to the
"Not now, Millie," said Tyler, but the look on her face bespoke worry, and she had very sharp political instincts. For the call to have bumped its way up to her desk must mean something.
"It's evil, sir," she said softly, shaking. "What he's saying."
The president motioned for her to put the call through on speaker phone. The Oval Office speaker phone was not one of those tinny contraptions that sounded as if you were connected with a wire tied between two hamsters. Instead, it sounded like you were having a private conversation, which is exactly what it was intended to sound like.
"Okay," said Tyler, signaling for her to trace the call. The White House number was in the phone book, and any idiot could call the switchboard. It was a democratic holdover from the days when John Quincy Adams used to go swimming nude in the Potomac, when Andy Jackson let the great unwashed troop through the White House, stealing everything they could lay their hands on, when Truman used to play poker with the press corps and fleece them out of their paltry weekly salaries and make them feel good about it. It was one of the things Tyler had decided he was going to have to change after his reelection.
Tyler picked up the phone. "This is the president of the United States. To whom am I speaking?"
"Mr. President," said the ghostly voice at the other end of the ether, scrambled and opaque. "You are badly trying our patience."
Seelye was already in action, punching in instructions to NSA headquarters. He knew they wouldn't have much time, but at least the call was already being digitally recorded and analyzed. He wanted a full report on his PDA pdq, and made that quite clear as he listened to the conversation.
"We have given you clear instructions and an even clearer timeline. Because we are merciful, we spared the lives of the children in Illinois...most of them, anyway."
Seelye was already relaying the conversation capture straight to Devlin. Seelye's BlackBerry lit up as Devlin punched in.
"If anything, we should have thought that the incident in Los Angeles---"
HE'S BRITISH popped up on DIRNSA's screen. KEEP HIM TALKING. Seelye had noticed that too: the pronunciation of "anything"---en-a-thing. The use of the word, "should." Not to mention: "Loss ANGE-e-leese."
"---focused your minds, but it appears that such was not the case. It appears that many more deaths will be required. Not just in America, as you have just seen, but all over the Christian West. The stakes have been raised. It is now immaterial whether you accept Allah. You are all doomed."
THIS IS BULLSHIT.
"Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the he trace: the technology had been developed at Fort Meade using a fifth-generation network-centric system based on a Rijndael block cipher.
The call was coming from inside the White House. Which left only two possible conclusions: either the call really was coming from inside the White House, which was impossible, or whoever was making it had cracked the NSA defenses. Seelye decided the president didn't need to know that yet.
"That was this Milverton, wasn't it?"
Seelye had left the scrambled audio feed on, so Devlin could hear every word. "It may well be, yes, sir," he said.
"Get Devlin on this immediately."
I HEARD THAT. Then Devlin punched through another text message. Seelye read it and blanched.
Seelye's perturbed look caught the president's attention. "What's he saying?" asked Tyler.
"He says to say thank you, sir."
"Thank me for what?"
"I'm not sure you want to know, sir," replied Seelye.
"I'm a big boy---let me see it."
Seelye handed the president his BlackBerry: THANK YOU FOR BLOWING ME BEFORE YOU FUCKED ME.
LOS ANGELES
Devlin switched off his secure PDA and tried to figure out what to do next. It was time for a new game plan. Telling the president of the United States to go fuck himself was as good a place as any to start.
Milverton, he was sure, was back in London; everything pointed to it, including the London Eye attack. But he was just the conductor; someone else had written this symphony and the tempo was going to keep picking up until they got to the climax. Which wasn't going to be pretty, that was for sure. Already the American economy had been rocked back on its heels, and if this didn't stop, and fast, the pieces of it that remained would hardly be worth picking up, although some vulture was sure to do so. And if the government of the United States had been parliamentary instead of republican, it might have already fallen.
But here he was in LA, thousands of miles from the action, with the clock ticking on his own personal presidential directive. What had seemed a good idea---to enlist Eddie Bartlett and mount a counteroperation---was already out of date. Eddie was AWOL, Milverton was too far up his decision loop, and he was getting outmaneuvered at each term. Once Milverton had him in his sights, Devlin knew, he would be a sitting duck for the kill shot.
Think: try to fit the pieces together.
The attack on Edwardsville made some sense, if testing the American defenses had been the point of the exercise. The quick and lethal response had made a point. But what if that was 'Hamas leader' with one as often as possible---"
He stopped in midsentence. Assassination attempt? Put the pieces together. Milverton was whipsawing him. Somebody was running Milverton. The latest attack had come in London...had almost killed Skorzeny. And now the Stella Maris just so happened to be anchored in Long Beach Harbor. What were the odds?
Maryam was still talking. "It's right here, don't you see? The strike came just as Emanuel Skorzeny was leaving his press conference. It missed him by a matter of minutes. Not to mention half the London press corps."
"Too bad," said Devlin. "A bunch of reporters at the bottom of the Thames is almost as good a start as a bunch of lawyers at the bottom of the Thames."
Maryam ignored the joke, if she even got it. "Why would anyone want to kill Emanuel Skorzeny?" she went on. "He's one of the most respected, powerful men in Europe, maybe the world."
"Is he?" asked Devlin, noncommittally, seeking to draw her out, play for time while he thought the sequence through, and what he had to do about it.
"You know he is. His foundation has helped more people internationally than most governments ever do. Look how he helped Zimbabwe, post-Mugabe. When that earthquake hit in China last year, his relief teams were some of the first on the scene. It's only natural that he might be a target for..."
"For whom?"
"I don't know. Some nuts. Some renegades---you know how many missiles are floating around. The old Soviet satellites. The North Koreans. The---"
"The mullahs?"
"The point is," Maryam said, "Skorzeny is a saint. You heard what he just said. One of his company's ships is in Long Beach Harbor right now, helping out with---"
One of Skorzeny's ships.
He grabbed her by both shoulders and kissed her. "We have to go," he said.
"To London---right?"
"Santa Monica for me, LAX for you. I'll explain later."
He rushed her into the guest room at the east end of the house. Yanked open the door to the closet---
Two rows of men's clothes, in varying sizes, colors, and fashions. She didn't ask; he didn't explain. And one other thing---a single dress. Size 2. Bought in Paris, just before he left, in the hope for the day when he'd see her again. Her gaze traveled from the dress to his eyes. There was nothing to say.
He was already pulling "Mr. Grant's" clothes. "Grant" was taller (lifts), fatter (thank you, Universal Studios prop department), slouchier, and sported a very unfashionable mustache and a set of discolored teeth. In the end, there really wasn't much to the art of disguise. It was like caricature in reverse: you obscured your salient features and made people concentrate on the things that weren't important. The rest could be done with voice, accent, and mien; after all, with n't recognize their own relatives, so why should a total stranger be any different.
As he pulled on the fake midsection, he thought once more of Occam's Razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. Easy for William of Ockham to say, hard for Devlin to live by.
She dropped his shirt to the floor and slipped on the dress. It fit her perfectly.
"Let's go."
SANTA MONICA/LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA
The RAND Corporation building stood out among the buildings in "downtown" Santa Monica like the proverbial sore thumb---but only if you were already aware that you had just struck your opposable digit with a hammer. Located south of the Third Street Promenade, across Main Street from city hall and the courthouse, it was well away from the congeries of bums and winos---the "homeless"---who had transformed what was once LA's foremost beach community into Berkeley South. Near RAND, however, there were no homeless to be seen: they didn't have the requisite security clearance. Few did, homeless or not.
He did.
Devlin glanced at his watch. It was more than a watch, of course. The team leader could text him at any time, over a secure uplink, and his message would appear nearly instantly on the watch's face.
He looked out at his audience in the small auditorium. Some of the faces---he never forgot a face, because that was how he'd been trained---were familiar. He smiled as he took inventory; to judge from the haircuts and the clothes, mostly Americans. A couple of MI-6 Brits in ill-fitting suits from the Savoy Tailors Guild. Members of the German Federal Intelligence Service, the Bundesnachrichtendient, in their motley. Queens-born Mossad and Shin Bet, at home in both worlds. Three or four Chinese, whose bona fides he immediately discounted by 50 percent; unlike the Russians, they were still new at this game, and incredibly obvious. He'd get the security report later, but already he was tailoring his remarks. The key to one of these speeches was to balance genuine information with even better disinformation, and he was more than up to the task.
"Let me be blunt," he began without preamble. "In the years since September 11, despite all our intelligence triumphs---necessarily recondite---we as a society have grown complacent. Comfortable. Therefore, I hope and trust that the events of the past two days might serve as a wake-up call for all of us. For, whatever our political differences, we are all civilized men and women here." There were very few women present, but linguistically he felt compelled to maintain the egalitarian fiction in case somehow his remarks got leaked to the Los Angeles Times Web site; even though the physical newspaper was dying, the handful of reporters tied in to the blogs and RSS and Twitter feeds could still make plenty of trouble. Loose lips still sank ships.
"I re to the ongoing series of cyber-attacks on our mainframes at the Pentagon, in Langley, in Fort Meade, in Washington, and elsewhere. Forget everything you think you know about contemporary terrorism. We are no longer up against a nation-state, or even a stateless group of like-minded individuals motivated by ideology, such as al-Qaeda. That, as they say, is so yesterday."
Murmurs and polite chuckles ripped through his select audience as he reached for the glass of water. Which enabled him to see what was going on in Long Beach via secure video feed in real time...
The Stella Maris was a magnificent vessel. Displacing nearly 200,000 metric tons, the big cargo ship was riding low in the water, preparing to get her cargo offloaded. The dock was a hive of activity as the longshoremen got ready to unload her, but in fact security forces were everywhere, disguised a teamsters, sailors, even casual passersby.
The red-zone call-in had pretty much confirmed that. Since September 11, every major American port was equipped with the latest radiation-detection devices. On three separate occasions, Middle Eastern terrorists had tried to smuggle in a suitcase nuke, but each time they had been tripped up by the detection devices on the docks.
But what if the docks were too late a line of defense? That was what the drone overflights were for. Except they didn't look like drones. Not the kind that had struck fear into the hearts of late mujahedin in Iraq and Afghanistan, anyway. They looked like kites.
No California beach was complete without its complement of kites. It was amazing how high you could get some of them, and how sensitive the radiation sensors were these days. No matter how strong the ocean breeze, all they needed was a clear line of sight to their target, and the DHS agents who were lucky enough to draw beach duty could take their readings from the comfort of their beach blankets, while ogling the rear ends of the teenage girls wiggling by.
Devlin had the readings on his special PDA before he left the house, which triggered his "go" order to the SEAL team standing by in a sub off the coast of Huntington Beach on a training exercise. The SDVs were already launched and away by the time he got to Santa Monica.
"As you know, the National Security Research Division's International Security and Defense Policy Center, based in Arlington, exists on the leading edge of threat assessment. Together with our governmental and NGO colleagues around the world, it is our duty to constantly evaluate and extrapolate, not simply from 'known knowns' to 'known unknowns,' but into the realm of 'unknown unknowns' as well. As the United States Marine Corps likes to say, 'the difficult we do right away. The impossible takes a little longer.' But let me assure you---since our national wake-up call on the morning of September 11, 2001, the impossible is not only what we seek to do, it is, in many respects, what we have already done."
A small ripple of applause.
"The Marines have another saying, less widely known but, for our purposes, even more apposite. 'Don't worry about what your enemy might do. Worry about what he can do, and plan accordingly.'
"About our enemy's intention, there can be no F' doubt. It is nothing less than the destruction of western civilization. By that, I don't just mean the current American administration, or Israel, or global warming, or world hunger. We could dismantle the Cathedral of Notre Dame, obliterate Tel Aviv, reduce our carbon emissions to zero, return to the Stone Age, and starve ourselves to death, and that still would not be enough.
"Many of you have perhaps seen the motion picture, Independence Day. In it, the president of the United States confronts a captured alien invader and asks whether our two species might live in peace. 'No peace,' replies the alien. 'What do you want us to do, then?' inquires the president. 'Die,' replies the alien. That, in a nutshell, sums up our enemy's demands. No amount of appeasement, short of suicide, will satisfy him. Ladies and gentlemen, we are not fighting a twenty-first-century war. We are fighting a nineteenth-century war---not so much against zealotry, but against Nietzschean nihilism, masked by religious doctrine, enervation, and anomie."
As he expected, this did not go over well with some of those in attendance. Probably half the members of his audience were "root cause" types; the idea that sheer nihilism might lay at the dark heart of society's enemies was something they were not prepared to admit. As they muttered among themselves, "Mr. Grant" took the opportunity to glance at his watch.
Seal Delivery Vehicles were the latest thing in delivering death to your ocean-borne doorstep. A kind of minisubmarine, they carried a six-man team consisting of a pilot, co-pilot, and combat swimmers. The SDV Devlin's team was using was a Mark 8 Model 1, which ran on lithium-ion batteries and came fully equipped with its own navigation and communications systems. In other words, it was totally silent.
The radiation detectors had come back negative, which was exactly what he had expected. What also was expected was the dead zone in the center of the ship's cargo hold, the lead-lined "scientific" area. Everything, even people, emit some sort of radiation, but not this blank space; using imaging radar, he had run the image through every NSA analytical program he could think of, but all that computing power had only served to confirm his suspicions. There was something there that Skorzeny didn't want anybody to see.
Prior to arriving in Santa Monica, Devlin had taken a crash course on Emanuel Skorzeny. Aside from his well-publicized forays in international finance and philanthropy, he was not the sort of man to come across the CSS radar screens. He was immensely rich and powerful, of course, but the occasional indictment for insider trading notwithstanding---inevitable in his line of work---there was nothing criminal about the man. Indeed, there was much that was admirable, including his well-publicized personal story and his generous philanthropy.
Still, there was a strain of misanthropy running through Skorzeny's tangled skein that bothered Devlin. He would have to spend a lot more time with the files, of course, but the outlines of a very disturbed individual were there to be seen. The childhood alone---the DP camps---would be enough to affect even the sanest boy. But the closer he had looked at Skorzeny, the stranger the man became.
Take his charitable causes, an odd mixture of cultural conservatism---through the Skorzeny Foundation, run by a British woman named Amanda Harrington, he lavishly funded or the world---and political radicalism. There wasn't a Green Party in Europe he didn't donate generously to, and there was considerable evidence that, through cutouts, shells, dummies, and nonprofits, he was injecting vast sums of money into the American political process, no matter how illegal it was.
At home in Echo Park, Devlin had harnessed all the computing power at NSA, CIA, and Poughkeepsie to search every existing database---closed-and open-source---for a police record and had come up with nothing. About the only negative thing he could find was the sudden death of one of Skorzeny International's board members, but strokes could happen to anybody.
As Devlin had learned from long experience in the trenches of classified material, nobody was clean. It was part of the human condition. Everybody had skeletons, past activities, furtive desires, illicit relationships, occasions of sin both venial and mortal. In the great court of law in the sky, everybody was guilty, especially in the age of computers and the Internet. The only question was, how you dealt with it: fake it, lie about it, cop a plea, or brazen it out. With the abolition of sin, the last option had become more and more attractive.
"Brazen" might let you skate in the courtroom, but the rules of evidence in the Moral Court were much less restrictive; there, anything went. So the smart play was to admit almost everything. Blow your own cover if you had to, give up your best friend, plead out to almost every charge. Toss them fish. But save the last minnow, the one part of your cover story that didn't pass the smell test, until they pried it from your cold, dead hands.
But Skorzeny wasn't just clean; he was scrubbed---scrubbed in a way only money and access could buy.
"In position," crackled the voice in his hidden earpiece.
"And so the question arises, how do we fight back? Do we, in fact, even bother to fight back at all, or do we allow ourselves to succumb to the false dichotomy between the rule of law and the right of self-preservation? These are questions that each of us, each country, each society, must answer for itself. I imagine these are the same questions that the fifth-century poets of the Roman Empire asked themselves, just before the Vandals sacked their city. Perhaps from their example, we can glean the answer. Or at least understand what not to do."
"Dr. Grant," said one of the Germans, "I have a question..."
Devlin's eyes, a nameless Navy SEAL, was standing in Angel's Gate Park, overlooking the harbor to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the south.
They had caught one big break. The Stella Maris was not truly in port. Instead, she had dropped anchor in deeper waters outside the Los Angeles Main Channel. That in itself was only slightly suspicious---the urgency of offloading the supplies was the stated reason---but taken together with everything else, made Devlin sure he was doing the right thing.
Everybody had heard of the SEALs, but few Americans actually knew w."
How she was supposed to accomplish that was beyond her. "Sir, the United States is a sovereign country. Even assuming that you're right and for some reason an American operative was involved, what can we do about it?"
"This American operative," said Skorzeny levelly, "is a devil, whose very existence is an affront to me and everything I hold dear. He must be terminated."
Amanda gasped. "Are you asking me to kill him? You...I don't---"
Skorzeny waved away her objection. "No. I am saying they can kill him. And that is what I want Senator Hartley to effect."
"And just how am I supposed to convince him to do that?"
"You aren't. That is a job for your boyfriend. Your job is to make sure he carries it out."
Her heart nearly stopped. Had he been following them? Monitoring them? Had Milverton blabbed? They had been as discreet as possible, which was to say very. Or was he just guessing?
"Boyfriend? I'm sure I don't know what you mean, sir. My duties as a mother preclude..."
He reached out and stroked her hair. "There, there," he purred. "You look tired, stressed out."
She tried to relax a little. "It's been a very bad day all around."
"I should say so. I was nearly killed." Another dig, another suspicion?
"Mr. Skorzeny," she said. "Milverton calibrated the missile strike exactly, to the second. As we all agreed. It was meant to be close, to make you look good. Heroic. A victim, in the modern fashion." She was glad that Milverton had already prepped her.
"I've already been a victim," he said, "many times over...and yet something went wrong."
"Nothing went wrong, Mr. Skorzeny. You are here." She reached out and took his hand away from her hair, but continued to hold it. "We are here. Together."
That was all the encouragement he needed. He tugged her hand closer, pulling her toward him. And then he lunged for her, throwing his arms around her, kissing her, his mouth seeking hers.
She knew that to pull away now was to risk everything. She had seen, so often, the side of Emanuel Skorzeny few others had: the Caligula-side, in which the slightest frustration of his will to power was met with instant punishment. The uncontrollable, raging man-child, bearing the hurt of generations in his breast and the vengeance of centuries in his heart.
And so, despite her loathing, she kissed him back, stroked him, and kept stroking him. At this moment she wished him dead, wished the missile strike had hit him, that they had gone ahead and done the deed and rid themselves and the world of this monster. But now it was too late.
At last, she felt him softening, relaxing, withdrawing. When at last he subsided, sthing returned to normal. If he felt any shame, it was not reflected in his face. "Do you know what Blake said, Miss Harrington? He said, 'Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.' I could not agree more."
He looked at her with that reptilian, penetrating, blinkless gaze he could always muster when he needed to stare down an opponent. There was no way to beat him, no way to insult him, no way to fight back. He was impervious to normal human emotions. All except one.
"Are you my enemy, Amanda?" he said. It was the first time he had used her Christian name.
"No, sir. I am not your enemy."
"Then carry out my wishes."
"Yes, sir."
"You do love me, don't you, Miss Harrington?" he said as he reached for her again. She had just enough time to be amazed that he could recover this quickly when he was on her again, like an old tiger leaping upon a piece of helpless prey and tearing it limb from limb.
I hate you, she thought as he ripped her clothes away. I hate you and I wish you were dead.
As she fell backward on the couch, her eye caught the three-button panel lying on the coffee table, and thought about reaching out, pressing, calling for help. But she knew if she did that, she'd never leave the Savoy alive. And there was a little girl at home who needed her.
"Do not fail me," he said as she closed her eyes and thought of England.
EASTERN SHORE OF MARYLAND
President Jeb Tyler looked toward the west over the Chesapeake Bay and took a deep breath. Either this gamble would pay off or it wouldn't. It wasn't just his job on the line, it was the fate of the entire country. Even for an experienced and avid poker player like himself, this was the biggest gamble of his life.
Nothing---no advisors, no campaign managers, no public relations assholes---prepared you for this. All his life he'd been a politician, and to him "politician" wasn't a dirty word. Sure it was sometimes mean, sure you had to associate with some pretty unsavory characters and, most of all, you had to forgo the notion that the ends never justified the means. That was for sissies and nuns: in politics, the ends were the only thing that could possibly justify the means. And if you believed in those ends, believed in the rightness and the justice of them, then you were in it to win it by any means necessary short of murder. And, sometimes, not even that, if some of the tales told of his predecessors were to be believed.
Still, Jeb Tyler never thought it would happen to him. He'd led a charmed life, a golden boy life, a life too good to willingly change. When he'd first announced that he was running for president, hisas like a love affair, and at the right time, he had been Mr. Right.
But this...this was different. He had never expected to be a war president, not like his predecessors, never expected to have an atrocity like this happen on his watch. And while Louisiana's politics were plenty dirty, they were nothing like what he was about to go through. What he was about to do.
Betray his only friend in the capital. Not "betray" exactly---the betrayal had already occurred---but certainly destroy. At last he understood the old joke; if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.
"May I get you something, sir?" asked his orderly, Manuel. Manuel Concepcion was a Filipino, like many of the servants in the White House. Twenty years ago, he would have been black.
"What about a Labrador Retriever?"
Manuel was used to the president's jokes, but he didn't get this one. "Excuse me, sir?"
"A joke, Manny...how's the market doing?" He knew the answer was going to be bad, the only question was how bad.
Manuel glanced away. "Down another six hundred points or so," he said.
After three straight incidents, the shock to the world's stock markets had been devastating. He might have to shut the markets down by early this afternoon.
"On second thought, I'll have a gin and tonic. And a whiskey neat for my guest."
"Yes, sir," said Manuel, withdrawing for real this time.
Jeb Tyler sighed. He'd only been president for three years and already the demands of the office were wearing him down. He hated looking in the mirror any more; every year in the White House added at least four years to his face and took a decade off his ticker. Nobody got out alive from this gilded cage, nobody's reputation survived unsavaged, and, as he often did, he wondered why he had spent so much time and money and love and friendship attaining the office. Far better, he sometimes thought, to just...
To just what? This is what he lived for. Elections. Campaigns. Votes. He really didn't want to do anything else, but he was surprised when he walked into the Oval Office on the first day and realized he didn't have the slightest idea what to do. Somehow, it looked easier from the outside. He felt like Robert Redford in The Candidate, at the end, just after he wins the senate race, asking his strategist, "What do we do now?"
So not only was it time for results, it was time for a political play, a game-changer. It was time for him to start acting like a president instead of a politician.
In the distance, he could hear the car pulling up, doors opening, feet hitting the gravel; for him, the rubber meeting the road.
Manuel materialized at his side, the drinks ready on a silver tray, which he set down on a small table. "Would you kindly ask the senator to meet me down here, at the dock. No SS either. I cannot think with their earpieces up my ass. Besides, this is just between us girls."
Manuel looked dubious. "But, s going to fuck him up and fuck up everybody else involved with this...with this clusterfuck." Hartley couldn't help but thinking that, for the first time in his presidency, Jeb Tyler was actually acting like a president. Even if it was at his expense.
"The other day, a very wise and brave man said something to me. Okay, not said. He texted it to me. Wanna know what he said?"
The Whippet and the Refrigerator were almost upon them now.
"THANK YOU FOR BLOWING ME BEFORE YOU FUCKED ME." That's what he said to me. What do you supposed he meant by that, Bob? I mean, I figured you might be able to translate."
The two goons flanked him, side by side. "I believe you've already made the acquaintance of two of the best members of my Secret Service detail," said Tyler. "They're going to be your new best friends for the duration of this situation. They're going to make sure you do exactly as you're told. And if you don't, they're going to help you meet with a very unfortunate and painful accident. Are we clear about this, Bob?"
"Yes, sir." Hartley started to add something, but Tyler cut him off.
"And don't even think about asking me if you can clean up. You're going to stay in those clothes until you get back to the Watergate and then, if you're a good boy, your new roomies may think about letting you have some shower time before you announce. Which, by the way, will be when you drop your first bombshell about that rogue intelligence operation that the American people need to know about. Understood?"
Hartley nodded, but his eyes were vacant.
"Good. Now get out of here. You disgust me." Tyler signaled to Hartley's babysitters. As they led him away---
"Oh, and Bob---one more thing." He paused for effect, then fired. "Don't drop the soap." Tyler watched as the two Secret Service men led Hartley away. One chess piece in motion, another couple to go.
"Did you catch most of that, Army?" said Tyler to General Seelye, emerging from the woods.
"Yes, sir," Seelye had never been here before, to the president's private retreat, so close to the White House and yet worlds away.
"Army, what I'm doing may seem strange, but I need you to trust me." Usually, Tyler indulged in some small talk, especially after a snort, but today he was all business. "I know you and some of the others think I'm weak, that I'm a sob sister, a weenie---hell, I know half the country dised operation security, hung him out to dry, and signed his death warrant. The sinking of the Stella Maris had just clobbered him with blowback. It was time to get out, and fast. But not before he got what he came here for.
Think.
Everything had a pattern---that was the entire basis of cryptography. Even the most of basic of codes---a simple substitution cipher, like his father had taught him when he was a kid---had some sort of pattern, and where there was a pattern, there was a key.
Edwardsville brought him into the game, got him spinning toward Los Angeles. The Grove turned him around again, looking at London after the missile attack. Milverton, Skorzeny, the Stella Maris...misdirection everywhere he looked.
There was an old Sherlock Holmes story---"The Adventure of the Dancing Men"---that he'd first read when he was a child; it was in that book of codes that his dad had given him, the book that had survived the Rome Airport massacre, the book that he hadn't cracked since that awful day, not wanting to sully the memory of his parents with the blood of his mother that was still on the book.
Dancing men, each one standing for a letter of the alphabet. A substitution cipher, whose message gradually became clear as Holmes filled in the missing letters. Filled in the blanks. Time to do the same thing.
He ran a full sequencing deep drill on his keywords. Concentric relationship patterns. Google and other search engines, including NSA's own. All levels of security clearances, including Seelye's. Local, global, and universal. Leave nothing to chance:
His father and mother's full names, plus his own real first name. No one ever called him by that name, and hadn't since his mother died in his arms, but he still remembered it. Compartmentalization was the name of the game. In "real life," he couldn't remember anything about his past, but at the mighty Wurlitzer, he remembered everything.
He threw in Seelye's name, too. And now he added "MILVERTON, CHARLES A." and "SKORZENY, EMANUEL."
The full search would take awhile, even at the speed at which the NSA mainframes operated. No matter how fast they were, though, real time was always faster. Civil libertarians might quail, but the fact was that SIGINT and ELINT were always going to be a step or two behind reality. NSA officers were like those people who went to Disney World and recorded everything they did and saw, then replayed it when they got back home. It took them the same amount of time to relive the experience as to actually have the experience, which meant that they had not only lost one day to the blandishments of the Walt Disney Co., they had lost two.
Devlin rose and, securing the door to his inner sanctum, stepped through the bathroom and out into the main hall. There was something he had to see while the hamsters churned.
Near the front of the NSA building, there is a long hallway, adorned with photographs. At first glance, it might seem like the foyer of the CIA in Langley, whose ostentatious wall of anonymity commemorates the Company
He had programmed his search to a Level 10 sensibility, to trigger anything, no matter how small.
Misdirection. That had to be the key. The old magic trick---focusing attention on the irrelevant while the trick was worked practically in plain sight. Or what would have been plain sight, if not for---
His screen blipped amber. His program was set to detect roaming spybots, and it had just found one.
Spybots were protective pawns that could be set to detect any untoward inquiries, especially at his level of security clearance. Devlin had to identify the 'bot without giving away his position or, indeed, letting the drone know he was even there.
Follow the drone.
It was pointing to his personal file. Above top secret. Above SCI. So secret, in fact, that only he and Seelye even knew it existed.
Holy shit. It wasn't a spybot, it was a guide dog, pointing for him to look at something. An embed message. He clicked on it:
"ABORT A/P POTUS DIRECTIVE THIS DAY." Abort the mission as per today's presidential directive---that much he already knew. But this time there was an addendum. It read, AND I QUOTE: "YOUR RULES ARE YOUR RULES. ACT ACCORDINGLY."
Both a reprieve and a misdirection. He was officially off the case, but unofficially on it. He had no idea whether the president or Seelye was playing him, but at this point it didn't matter. Time to get what he was coming for and get the hell out.
The screen flashed: BOT APPROACH. A real 'bot this time. A small red light began flashing, at first slowly and then with increasing rapidity. It meant that his probe had been spotted but not yet ID'ed: full red would be confirmation, but he didn't intended to wait around that long.
His fingers flew: FALSNEGS TIL MIS/ACC.
There were workarounds against even the most sophisticated 'bots. He knew, because he had developed half of them. He could feed the crawler a steady diet of false negatives, contradictory instructions that would cause it to lose valuable time sorting through the mutual impossibilities, until his mission was accomplished.
He had taken something of a risk by his blunt, frontal assault on the databases, but it would still take counterintel a while to find a single command in a nearly infinite series of code lines. But it could be done.
One more thing: SEELYE SKORZENY MILVERTON POLLY CUNNINGHAM.
The 'bot's red light was still flashing, steadily. Then---something he didn't expect.
PRIOR ACCESS DETECTED. CONT? Y/N?
Somebody else, some other fox, had been in the hen house. The one who had set the FBI team on him. Hartley's cutout: Milverton.
YES
WORKING. The fastest artificial brains in the NSA server rooms whirred. A green light popped up.
MISACC read the screen. Mission accomplished.
DOWNLOAD. A flash drive
Quickly, Devlin shut down his terminal, using an extraction route that passed him through multiple, routine, authorized identities; it would take a little longer but it would cover his tracks.
He put the thumbnail drive into his pocket. Already, however, he'd learned enough.
He was off the case, but he wasn't.
He was marked for termination. Maybe Seelye would protect him as long as he could, and maybe he wouldn't.
He had to sort this out as quickly as possible if he was to have any chance at survival.
London, the terminus for Hartley's mysterious caller.
Milverton.
Ships. Something tugged at his memory. Something Skorzeny had said at his press conference, just before the missile struck. The name of his other ship, which was...on its way to Baltimore. The Clara Vallis.
Weather balloons.
The Stella Maris.
Dancing Men.
Misdirection.
The Clara Vallis.
Oh, Jesus.
France.

How ridiculous not to flee from one's own wickedness, which is possible, yet endeavor to flee from another's, which is not.
---MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations, Book VII

LONDON
It was well after midnight by the time Amanda Harrington unlocked the door to No. 4 Kensington Park Gardens. The big house yawned, silent, nearly empty. She liked it that way, which was why she had lied about the sitter.
"I'm home, darling!" she shouted up the stairs; despite what had just happened, the humiliation she felt, she tried to sound cheery, motherly. The past few days had been very difficult, with the traveling and the treatments. Sometimes she wondered whether it was worth all the trouble. And then she remembered the look in the girl's eyes, and realized that the question had answered itself.
Not for nothing was No. 4 known as one of the finest private homes in London. Backing up onto the park, with a stunning solarium parkside, four spacious, elegant floors of living space, plus a basement and an attic, it had been featured
She was still shaking as she wrapped herself in her bathrobe and padded into the parlor. A 1927 Hamburg Steinway was the featured attraction, along with the collection of first editions, many of them signed, by Graham Greene, T. E. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, and T. S. Elliot.
There was a bar on a side shelf near the piano, well stocked, and she poured herself a whiskey before sitting down at the keyboard. Even if she only played ten minutes a day, it was better than all the therapy in the world. She choose something from memory, one of the Brahms Op. 116 piano pieces, the soulful and autumnal A minor intermezzo, because that was the way she was feeling right now.
This couldn't go on much longer.
Amanda Harrington was thirty-nine years old, unmarried, and had lived alone since her parents died.
Her hands sank into the keys. You couldn't play Brahms by pounding the keyboard. Instead, you had to become one with it, ease into it, practically have sex with it, so that the tips of your fingers touched the strings, atomizing the keys and hammers and dampers and flanges and whatever else Cristofori had devised to come between the player and the played.
She wasn't sure if she really liked Milverton, or whatever his name really was. SAS men, she had found, rarely made good boyfriends, much less husband material, and at her age a girl had to think ahead. Especially now, in modern Britain, where the native population would be a minority in its own country in less than two generations unless the women of England stepped up to the wicket. At least she was doing her part.
Still, the more she thought about it, the more useful Milverton became. He had been freelancing, or perhaps just testing the waters, at the London Eye, but...there was always a next time.
She caught herself. Skorzeny, she was quite sure, had bugged her house, maybe even her brain. Despite what he had done for her and her daughter, there was no plumbing the depths of his malevolence.
She finished the piece and looked around the room, at the books on the bookshelves, at the names of long-dead authors who had believed in Britain, who thought its ideals would never die, who had lived, and sometimes fought and even died through the first and second Somme, and Dunkirk, and Singapore. And what had they given their lives for? New Labour? Posh and Beck? The Finsbury Park mosque?
She closed the keyboard, protectively. There was something about the purity of the ivories---ivories that were now illegal, perhaps even a hanging offense, in modern Britain. The country of Burton and Speke and Stanley, of the greatest hunters and explorers and scientists, had become a nasty little island of guilt, shame, and political correctness.
Fuck them, the sob sisters and the nancy boys and the chinless wonders who nattered about morality while they rutted with the commonest whores of the old Empire. Fuck the politicians who sold out their old constituencies in anticipation of the constituencies to come. This instrument was hers. This house was hers. The child upstairs was hers. She tossed back her whiskey and headed upstairs, to check on her daughter.
The girl was lying in her bed, where Amanda had left her. She didn't believe in nannies or any of that claptrap. Besides, the bindings were not too onerous and ing off, but still working. Good. That made things easier, just the way the doctors had said they would.
"I'm home, darling," she whispered, brushing the girl's fevered brow. "It's all right now."
"Mama?" muttered the girl from her deep sleep.
"I'm here."
"I want to go home."
"You are home. This is your home. You're safe here. Safe in my arms." How she loved her, despite all the adoption troubles.
The girl's eyes fluttered open briefly. But they were still blank stares, wide pupils, unfocused irises. The doctors had told her that this was natural, that after the shock and the trauma, it would take time. Days, a week, maybe a little more.
Amanda loosened the restraints, which were for the girl's own good. They left no visible marks. "I'm hungry," the girl said.
"Dinner's on its way." Thank God she had called ahead for delivery. Sometimes, without meaning to, she forgot. A lot had been going on this week. "Indian, just the way you like it."
One of her phones buzzed. She glanced over: him. She decided not to take the call.
"Mama," whispered the girl, "I'm scared."
"Mummy's right here," she said, stroking her daughter's hair.
"What happened?" said the girl, her voice still weak.
"Nothing, darling," soothed Amanda. "Nothing."
"There was a man. He hurt me. Then fire..." Totally normal post-traumatic stress reaction; at least that was what the shrinks had said.
"There was no man, and no fire, my darling," she said. "It's all in your head." She wondered if she should call Dr. Knightley, just in case a needle was needed, instead of the array of pills he had prescribed. But her soothing hand quickly had the desired calming effect, and the girl fell back asleep. Once again, the combination of Morpheus and morphine was irresistible.
The phone buzzed again. Milverton, this time. Once more, she didn't answer. Everybody had down time, even her. She'd call him back later, when she had poured herself another whiskey, when she got downstairs, when she had slipped out of her clothes and stood naked in the solarium, with all the lights out, staring into the darkness of Kensington Park, stripped bare and alone not with her thoughts, which were for sale, but with her emotions, which weren't. She might even invite him over, but she wasn't sure if she wanted another man's hands on her just now. Better to keep him on the hook, interested, pliable...useful.
Amanda rose and tiptoed away from the bed. She didn't want to risk the chance of waking the girl. The phone buzzed once more. It wasn't a call, it was a text message, from Skorzeny. She ignored it for now. The girl stirred. She must have heard the buzz. "What is it?" she said in her sleep.
"Nothing emotions in check. She was so much stronger than she ever would have thought, before all this happened. She had come all this way. And she wasn't about to take no for an answer.
"You're a liar," she said. "That's not at all what you're going to do. You're never going to rest until you get revenge."
She was uncomfortably under his skin. "What makes you say that?"
"Because I saw you chop that man's arm off...with a smile. You're a killer, so don't try to pretend otherwise."
Danny felt his heart racing. This little woman had just rocked him back on his heels in a way no man could. "Like I said, it's your meeting."
"The 160th. You guys are supposed to be the best."
He looked back at the car. There was a video player built into the backseats, and he had put a movie on for Rory. "We're pretty good."
She took that as a yes. "So's Xe, I hear."
Danny was impressed; this lady had done her homework. "We try. We take a lot of bum raps, but whenever any Congress critter or media nitwit needs to keep his ass safe, we keep his ass safe. Not that we get any thanks for it."
"I know she's alive."
"I already told you---"
"I don't care. A mother knows these things...Besides---I know about the other man. And I want to hire him too."
"What did you say? About another man?" That part she hadn't mentioned on the phone. She had his full attention now.
"The man who saved Rory's life when the bomb went off. An angel, he called himself."
"Can Rory describe him?"
Hope was confused. "I thought you might know him."
"I might," said Danny. "But I need to hear from Rory first."
"Okay." Hope had thought to keep Rory out of this, but she realized that would be impossible. They walked back to the car. As they did, she said, "So does this mean you'll help us?"
"I haven't decided yet," said Danny.
They got into the car, feeling relief from the heat, dry or otherwise. Danny glanced at the temperature gauge on the dashboard---well over 90. A red-flag day. "Tell me about the man you saw, Rory," he said. "The angel."
Rory threw his mother a look and she nodded: go ahead. "I didn't get a real good look at him," he began. "All of a sudden, he just grabbed me and we both dove in the big trash can. I was scared---you know..."
"But he said he was an angel. What kind of angel?"
Rory shrugged. "I asked him if he was a missionary. Like in cannibals and missionaries. Hope and Rory, a woman and a child. Not helpless, exactly, but as vulnerable as the missionaries to the cannibals. "Looks like I'm going to have to," he said.
He knew what he had to do.
He had to keep them safe.
He had to help Hope find her daughter.
He had to avenge Diane and give himself and Jade something to live for.
How he was going to do all this, he had no idea. He'd already missed three calls from "Tom Powers," but somehow he had to track him down.
"Are you in or are you out?" Hope asked him. An hour in LA and she was already speaking the local lingo.
"Let's go," he said, slamming the car into gear and roaring down the dusty trail toward Hollywood.
Twenty minutes later they were flying down Highland Avenue. The Kodak Center was the new fresh underbelly of the entertainment beast, where the Oscars were now held, a vast, sprawling complex that took in everything from the intersection of Hollywood and Highland, west to what used to be Grauman's Chinese Theater, now owned by the Mann group. The one with the hand-and footprints.
Just before the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard, Danny turned right into the parking garage and headed to the lowest level.
There wasn't much to subterranean Los Angeles, not like New York or even Seattle, but he had a small piece of it. The Red Line ran right under the complex and where subways traveled, so also did clandestine offices flourish.
Instead of punching the button, Danny slapped an ID card up against a plate on the elevator bank. The doors opened. Then he pushed a key into the console. "Security code, please," said an electronic woman's voice. Using the floor keys, he punched in a five-digit number. "Going down," said the synthesized voice, even though there were no "down" floors visible.
After what seemed an eternity, the doors slowly slid open. Even three stories beneath Hollywood Boulevard, it looked like a normal office floor in anybuilding, anywhere, USA.
Danny led them down a private hallway. Hope caught a glimpse of people in some of the offices---cops, guys in suits talking quietly into telephones. He unlocked a door and ushered them into a small office. At once, Danny set to work, firing up computers, flicking switches, checking voice mails. Video screens flickered to life, audio streams came online; from a tomb, the room was suddenly alive with activity.
Furiously, he punched numbers into a keyboard, from time to time consulting old-fashioned black loose-leaf code binders, flipping through pages of what to her eye looked like gibberish. It wasn't gibberish to Danny. Every keystroke, every glance, had a purpose.
Nothing. He had mined every database, run every kind of tracking software, done a dozen concentric-circle relationship charts, and he still couldn't find out who the hell Tom Powers was, or how to contact him. One-way streets were a bitch, especially when they were blind alleys.
He was about to turn to Hope and tell her that he was sorry, that he couldn't help her after all, when suddenly Rory said---"Cool. An iPhone."
There it was, in his bag. It had been there all along.
Fucking Skipjack. That was how he was going to get in touch with Powers, whether he liked it or not. Walk the dog backward...
Its contract with the U.S. government stipulated that Xe had to be ready to put a team on the ground anywhere within twenty-four hours. Sub rosa, untraceable. Just enough men to do the job, but not one more than necessary. He couldn't roll without the kind of authorization that Powers could pull, but with it, in a heartbeat, he could have a full complement of men who had served in the 160th: in, up somebody's ass, out. The Night Stalkers.
The Stella Maris. That had to be what "Powers" had been calling him about. Somehow, it must be related to what had happened at the Grove. And, in his grief, he had blown the assignment. Nobody could blame him for that, but---
Thank God Jade was going to make it. When he'd visited her today, she was awake, barely. Her eyes had lit up at the sight of him, and for a long time he said nothing. He just sat there, stroking his little girl's hair and telling her everything was going to be okay. He didn't say anything about Diane. He didn't know whether she knew, whether she remembered. She'd learn soon enough.
He thought of Diane and all the pain and rage and guilt and blame came flooding back. And yet, she was gone and no amount of remembrance could bring her back. It could only honor her, passively---
"Stay a little longer, Daddy," came a weak little voice. Danny looked down at Jade and squeezed her hand.
"I'll be back as soon as I can and not one second less. And then we'll go for that chopper ride...all of us."
But maybe it was more appropriate to honor her memory actively. Proactively.
What the hell was Powers up to? Whatever it was, it was big. Whatever had started in Edwardsville, it was time to finish it. For the sake of his family---for the sake of all their families---he had to be a part of it.
Well, that was what he had this office for. Up to now, he had abided by Powers's rules. But this was no time to stand on ceremony.
It wasn't simply a matter of a last-number call-back. Powers's contacts went through multiple cutouts. But however many there were, in the end his call would have to be vetted by the Skipjack chip embedded in Jade's iPhone, a chip that Powers himself had placed there. He could reverse-engineer the sequence, and one of those cutouts, no matter how many there were, would have to be real, and would accept the handshake from its very own mole, inside a little girl's cell phone. He had no idea how long it would take, but there was no time like the present to start.
He said a silent prayer. The hamsters started spinning.
He was in luck.
The l"I am not interested in old news, Monsieur Pilier," said Skorzeny coolly. "I am referring to the Clara Vallis. How is she making?"
"On schedule."
"And our experiments?"
"Ready to launch."
"Good." Skorzeny glanced over at the eternal television screen. "Shut that infernal thing off and sit down so we can have a proper talk."
Pilier clicked the remote and the TV winked off. He took the nearest chair and sat. It wasn't very comfortable, but that was the way the boss liked it. The only congenial chair in the room was Skorzeny's; everybody else had to suffer. It was like being at Bayreuth without Wagner's music. Death without Transfiguration. Skorzeny stared at Pilier for an uncomfortably long time before he spoke.
"There is a mighty wind coming, Monsieur Pilier. Perhaps you have not noticed it, but rest assured that I have. For years, decades, I have felt its approach, smelt its dragon breath. And when it blows through, when it has wrought what it was sent to wreak, who will be left to mourn what it leaves in its wake?"
Pilier had no idea what the old man was talking about. He almost wished he was still on the subject of the lovely Amanda Harrington---a woman, he had to confess to his inner chaplain, who had often figured in his erotic fantasies, some of them quite exotic. She embodied, he supposed, what the late Roman Catholic Church meant by "an occasion of sin."
"I'm sure I don't know, sir."
"I will. I and those closest to me."
Skorzeny fell silent for a while, contemplating the art on the walls, from time to time humming some small snatch of music to himself. To Pilier, he seemed in the grip of a great agitation, which even his iron will could not quite control.
"I have not been able to reach her by telephone or text."
So it was back to Amanda again. "Sir, you saw her last night, in London."
Skorzeny seemed to struggle back to his senses. "Yes," he said. "London. The last piece of our little puzzle. What of our representative there?"
Pilier checked the time. "He is due to report in to you by teleconference shortly. I am led to believe that you will be very happy with his report, sir."
Skorzeny folded his hands together. "Then everything is in order. And now it is in the hands of God, if He has any interest in us left...One last thing. Please make ready our holiday home for occupancy."
That caught Pilier by surprise. Although he had multiple residences in many of the world's garden spots, Skorzeny only ever used that phrase, "holiday home" to refer to one place in particular. "Yes, sir."
Skorzeny reached for one of the remotes and switched on some music. Usually, he waited until he had retired for the evening's concert, but on this night it was as if he wanted to share it with Pilier, with the world.
The music sounded. A soft, mournful, cello line above a contemplative piano accompaniment, sloffsEmanuel Skorzenyow, very slow, but steady, like the beating of a broken heart. Pilier was about to ask what it was, but Skorzeny anticipated his question and held up his hand peremptorily for silence. Pilier obeyed.
For more than eight and a half eternal minutes, the music continued, unchanging on its infinitely slow, ecstatic course.
"Do you know what that was, Monsieur Pilier?" asked Skorzeny, when the last, dying note could no longer be heard.
"No, sir," he replied, truthfully.
"And yet you are a graduate of the Sorbonne. Amazing. You might as well have attended Harvard and emerged no less an ignorant, though perhaps more ideologically blinkered, savage."
Skorzeny signaled for the ablution bowl. "'I saw a mighty Angel descending from heaven...and the Angel swore by Him who lives forever and ever, saying: there will be no more Time...the mystery of God will be completed.' The Book of Revelation, written by John the Evangelist on Patmos, as the Christians believe. Now can you tell me what that music was?"
Inwardly, Pilier seethed. Outwardly, he remained as placid as the music had been. "No, sir," he said.
"'Praise Eternity.' The fifth movement of Messiaen's Quatour pour le fin du temps. 'The Quartet for the End of Time.' Written in seven movements and an interlude, and premiered by its composer in a Nazi prison camp at Görlitz during the winter of 1940--41, for the instruments he had on hand: piano, violin, cello, and clarinet. Do you know what Messiaen said about it?"
The shame of ignorance was burning Pilier's cheeks. He couldn't compete with Skorzeny's all-embracing, omniscient Weltanschauung.
"Of course you don't. He said, 'Never have I been heard with as much attention and understanding.' In a concentration camp. Thus focusing the mind and concentration wonderfully. As I know from bitter experience."
"It's beautiful, sir," mustered Pilier.
"It's not beautiful," barked Skorzeny. "It's radiant. 'Seven is the perfect number.' But he wrote one extra movement, the interlude, so as not to compete with Creation. Le 7 de ce repos se prolonge dans l'éternité de devient le 8 de la lu-mière indéfectible, de l'inaltérable paix. 'The seventh of his day of repose prolongs itself into eternity and becomes the eighth, of unfailing light, of immutable peace.' Do you understand that? Unfailing light. Immutable peace."
"Yes, sir. No, sir." Pilier had no idea which the correct answer was, so he tried them both. How he wished the old man would just go to bed one night, and never wake up. All this blather about useless culture gave him a migraine.
"Messiaen believed it was his faith that got him safely through the camps, and made him one of the great to you. Draw him to your home turf and kill him. What could be easier? You have the defender's advantage."
For once, there was silence at the other end of the line. Milverton's face betrayed no emotion, but nothing came out of his mouth.
"It's perfect, don't you see?" said Skorzeny, pausing a little longer than necessary for effect. "One last misdirection, while the real work occurs elsewhere." Milverton wasn't sure if he liked this idea, but stayed silent. "While you two settle an old score...In the meantime, if by any chance you should see Miss Harrington, please ask her to call me immediately. I require her presence tomorrow at the country house in France."
Amanda. So that was what this was all about. The old bastard was on to them. Had he wrung a confession out of her when he was in London? Milverton realized that he hadn't been able to get ahold of Amanda, either, that she hadn't answered his calls. "The country house?"
"Yes. With the insurance policy."
The insurance policy. This was getting worse by the second.
"I'm not sure I understand, Mr. Skorzeny."
Milverton knew that, had they been face to face, Skorzeny would have looked upon him as if he were an idiot child. Or worse, that iron mannequin holding out the begging bowl on Regent Street with the sign saying SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SPASTIC, or whatever politically correct thing it said these days.
Skorzeny chuckled. "Of course you do."
He was being set up. Even at this distance, Milverton could smell the stench of desperation on Skorzeny, even as he could smell the scent of Amanda Harrington on him. That was what this was all about.
Her. With the biggest, most audacious play of his life right in front of him, Emanuel Skorzeny was losing focus over a woman.
So unimportant to a man of Milverton's age and experience. So vitally important to a man of Skorzeny's age and experience. And he never saw it coming. What a fool he had been.
"It's him, isn't it? The man whom I seek."
"Yes, sir, it is."
Milverton could feel the excitement radiating from the other end of the continental trunk line. Skorzeny had overplayed his hand. He had given something away. His need. He had never seen that before. His lust---for money, power, women---of course. But never need. Never desperation. Skorzeny's need, if Milverton played his cards right, would be the thing that kept him alive.
"Then make us both happy. Draw him to you and kill him."
Even though he knew it was a trap, even though he knew that Skorzeny was setting him up, even though he knew that it didn't matter to the old man which of them killed the other---because in the aftermath it wouldn't really matter---Milverton could feel his own excitement rising. His own lust for combat. His own need to pay back
Which meant that he would get to face him. The shadow. The man who wasn't there. This child whom Skorzeny sought. Protected by the NSA. Given up by Hartley. Very well, then. Bring him on.
And bring on Skorzeny too. He had put up with Caligula long enough, with his barely disguised contempt, with the way he had treated Amanda. He had not survived the training camps of the SAS, not run to ground the deadly operatives of the Provos in Spain, not cut the throats of the IRA men on the streets of Belfast and Londonderry, not dealt with the worst Soviet Georgian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Jewish gangsters to kowtow to a man whose only real claim to fame was that he was a victim. He would show Skorzeny what the word victim really meant.
Not a symbolic victim.
Not a possible victim.
Not a putative victim.
Not a potential victim.
A real victim.
A dead victim.
"Yes, sir," he said, hanging up.
Nobody hung up on Emanuel Skorzeny.
Milverton didn't care. He called Amanda Harrington again.

Ask yourself, what is this thing in itself, by its own special constitution? What is it in substance, and in form, and in matter? What is its function in the world? For how long does it subsist?
---MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations, Book VIII

ROSSLYN, VIRGINIA
Senator Robert Hartley strode to the podium at his hastily called press conference. He was clean, shaved, and sober, and was glad that everybody could tell.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, beaming at the cameras, "I have an important announcement."
A modest hubbub ran through the modest crowd. Hartley's staffers had done the best they could on short notice, but their IMs were only just beginning to pull in the public. Right now, it was mostly media.
"As you all know," he continued, "I have spent my career in the Senate, reaching across the aisle, striving for bipartisanship to solve the issues that divide us as Americans. To that end, I have work assiduously with this president, Jas the Refrigerator fell in behind them. They were both dressed in black, just like real Secret Service agents now.
The Refrigerator handed him a secure cell phone. "You've got a phone call from the Big Guy."
"Nice work," came Tyler's voice. "You actually sounded like you meant what you were saying out there."
"Thank you, Mr. President. But there's one thing I just don't understand---"
Tyler knew where he was going with the question. "Why I'm doing this to myself, right? Simple. In order for me to deal with whatever the hell is going on here, I need to throw the jackals in the press some red meat. You know how they are, Bob. Basically, there's room for only one story at a time in their precious little airheads. And now, thanks to you, the story today is that I'm a dirty low-down, double-dealing, malfeasant skunk who ought to be strung up on the Mall. Which is just fine with me at the moment."
Hartley swallowed hard. "And I'm the red meat."
"You more or less nominated yourself, didn't you, Bob?"
"Who dropped the dime on me? I have to know?"
The president ignored the question. "Play this out until further notice and when we're done, then you and I will call it even. The only acceptable answer is yes, sir."
"Yes, sir."
"Have a nice day," said Jeb Tyler, ringing off.
They rode back to the Watergate in silence.
Hartley was alone in his bedroom. His babysitters were in the front room. They'd sealed the windows so he couldn't jump out. They'd taken everything sharp away from him. The only shoes he had were loafers.
Hartley lit a cigarette. A plan was forming in his mind---a way for him to get out of this mess with his dignity intact. Sure, he was a douchebag, like almost everybody in Congress, a corrupt hypocrite who preached one thing and did another; a man who constantly brayed about his devotion to his constituents as he went about screwing them as hard as he could. But maybe now he could make up for it in some small way.
He dug the folder marked HARTLEY out of his briefcase and put it in the trash can. Too bad nobody used metal trash cans more, but the gray plastic one would have to do. He opened it up so that there was plenty of air around the pictures and then set fire to it.
It took a few minutes for the smoke detectors to kick in, setting off a screech. Hartley wasn't sure whether alarms would ring all over the complex, but it didn't matter; a localized ruckus would be just fine. As the alarms shrieked, he moved behind the bedroom door and waited.
He'd kept himself in good physical shape for a man of his age and he realized with grim irony that his fitness was finally going to come in handy for something other than a barroom pickup. Well, better late than never. He picked up one of his bookends, a heavy read with the Falcon, fracturing his skull. As the man fell, Hartley quickly slammed the door and locked it. He knew the Refrigerator would burst though, but he only needed a few seconds. He grabbed the gun.
The Refrigerator didn't bother with a knock. Hurling his weight he burst through the door. Hartley shot him three times, once in the chest, once in the groin, and once in the head, just for fun.
The trash can fire was still burning merrily. Hartley ran to the bathroom and sprinkled some aftershave on it, which caused the flames to leap higher. Then he wadded as much paper as could---the Washington Post came in handy---and finally the sprinklers went off.
Outside, in the hallway, he could hear shouting, running. Alarms started to whoop everywhere.
He sat on the bed, the water from the sprinklers pouring over him. He hadn't prayed since he was a kid, but it was funny how the prayers came back to you when you needed them most.
His last thought was, This will really give them something to write about tomorrow. Then he put the Whippet's gun in his mouth.
"Have a nice day, Jeb," was his last thought before he pulled the trigger.
LONDON/WASHINGTON, D.C.
Milverton picked up Hartley's presser halfway through. He couldn't believe his luck. Things were going just as they had planned. The bit about running for president was, he thought, inspired. He wondered if Hartley had thought of it all by himself.
Flush him out and kill him. That's what Skorzeny wanted. Mission half-accomplished. If the FBI team he had sicced on his nemesis hadn't succeeded, well, so what? He was better suited to do the job himself, right here in Blighty. Milverton had no idea why the old man was so keen on getting Devlin, but in this case business and pleasure were mixing admirably.
From the beginning, Skorzeny must have known, somehow, that they'd send Devlin to Edwardsville, must have known that Devlin's catching sight of Milverton would only whet his appetite for score-settling, must have known that Devlin would then be a human yo-yo, shuttling back and forth between the coasts, trying to conceal his identity while wondering who the hell was doing this to him.
Milverton never made the mistake of underestimating an adversary, and he had learned the hard way that Devlin was every bit his equal in tradecraft. Hartley's access, as head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had been solid gold, but Devlin had outwitted him in the battle of Fort Meade. Who knew, maybe he was on to him, on his way to him, and all Milverton had to do was sit back and await developments.
Hartley---now there was a good little boy. Milverton had to admit that Skorzeny's Hoover-like collection of the personal peccadilloes of nearfoolproof, was therefore, QED, zero percent effective.
And yet, in the end, it was the thing that had brought down the Soviet Union. Milverton had been there, in Dresden, on that freezing cold night in 1985, when Erich Honecker, the last dictator of the late German Democratic Republic, had stood in forty-below-zero weather (no matter whether it was measured in Celsius or Fahrenheit, forty-below was the sole point of agreement on the two scales) and railed against the Stern-kriege. Five years later, he was gone, and the East Germans would be scarfing up bananas and porn and west-marks as the Wall came down. Whether SDI worked or not, it didn't matter. Reagan had bluffed his ass off, and the Soviet communists, used to chess and not poker, toppled their king and walked away from the board.
And yet the movement had lived on, in men like Emanuel Skorzeny, who realized that true communism was capitalism by other means. There was no communist quite like a guilty plutocratic manipulator of the capitalist system. And, to paraphrase Baudelaire, Satan's greatest accomplishment was to make the West believe that the two systems were fundamentally incompatible, when, in fact, they were the same thing, if only you know how to play the angles.
EMP.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, everything was for sale. Firearms, art, icons, women---it was a giant going-out-of-business fire sale. Seeing an opportunity where the hapless American administration had not, Skorzeny had swooped in, buying them all, and more. True, he had his setbacks; when "Captain Bob" Maxwell mysteriously went overboard on his yacht...well that was a deal gone wrong. But a lot of deals went right.
And now Emanuel Skorzeny had the ordnance to prove it.
Because missiles and missile shields were all beside the point. Like all right-thinking people, he had mourned the demise of the USSR as a noble experiment gone wrong. But the impulse that had given it birth, to control everything and everybody for their own good, was a fundamental human impulse. And so the Soviet Union had never really died; it had simply molted, mutated, gone both underground and above board---especially in the United States.
President Carter had cautioned Americans against their "inordinate fear of communism." Stout fellow, laying the ground. The ongoing vilification of Joe McCarthy---never mind that the sainted Bobby Kennedy was his right-hand man---the destruction of Hoover's posthumous reputation, the penetration of the American universities, political parties and media by brave men and women dedicated to the ideals of Marxism-Leninism---all this was at last bearing fruit.
Perhaps the most ambitious, and ultimately successful, operation had been the Soviet "illegals" program. This involved the expenditure of vast sums of cash---some of it financed by Skorzeny himself---in order to identify, indoctrinate, train and promote the careers of bright young things sympathetic to the Cause. Men and women who would benefit from fortunate and fortuitous scholarships to elite prep schools and universities, who would be mentored by former "radicals" turned "distinguished professors," who relied on the short, indeed nonexistent, historical memories of their fellow countrymen; who would be taken in hand by powerful politicians in need of an infusion ofan antechamber away from the main hallway.
The orderly saluted him and waved him through. "The Secretary is expecting you, Colonel," he said, and saluted.
Devlin returned the salute and walked to the open doorway. "Come in, Colonel Quigley," said Rubin's voice. "And please shut the door behind you."
Rubin was a mild-mannered, soft-spoken man, not given to Tyler's fierce fits of temper. But to say he was unhappy about this meeting was to say the least. "We meet at last. The most troublesome man in the service of the United States. There's a dead FBI team in northern Virginia that I bet you know something about."
Devlin didn't have time either for apologies or pleasantries. "There will be a lot more dead people if you don't listen to what I have to say and then do exactly what I tell you."
Rubin bristled. Devlin was Seelye's boy. He didn't have to take this kind of lip. "Watch your tone with me, Colonel," he said.
Devlin stood in the doorway, trying to decide whether to stay or to go. He believed in protocol, in playing by the rules, until he didn't, and this was one of those times.
"Mr. Secretary, I can walk out of here right now and take what I know with me. You can either let me go or have me arrested, imprisoned, and killed, but none of those courses of actions will do you any good, because you'll never get the contents of my head onto your desk until it's far too late. And by then you'll either be dead or most definitely out of a job. So why don't you drop the attitude and listen to what I have to say? Sir."
For just a moment, Rubin was tempted to tell this man where to go. And for another moment, even more chilling, he realized the Devlin could kill him right here in his office, in the safest place in America, and probably get away with it. That is what Seelye, and by extension the U.S. government, had raised him to do, trained him to do, rewarded him for doing. "It's your meeting," Rubin finally admitted.
"We've been penetrated. Somebody sent that FBI team to my home. Where I live is absolutely beyond top secret, which means it's far, far beyond the capacity of the FBI to get its hands on that information. So if it was you, say your prayers right now, because no matter how fast you are, I'm faster, and you'll be dead before you can pick up the phone. You're alive only at my forbearance, so don't push your luck." He watched as the blood drained out of Rubin's face, then continued.
"Luckily for you, I don't suspect you. It's either Seelye or Hartley---"
"Bob Hartley is dead," said Rubin. "Nobody knows it yet, but he apparently shot himself and a couple of other people at the Watergate earlier today."
"A couple of other people? Who?"
Rubin mulled whether to tell the truth or lie, but decided in favor of the former. Even without the scope on a Barrett, Devlin could spot a liar a mile away. "Secret Service agents. Members of the president's own personal detail. They were, um, protecting the senator---"
"Son of a bitch," exclaimed Devlin. "Tyler' started to speak, then did a double take when he saw Devlin standing there in the uniform of an Army officer. Devlin watched his eyes carefully for any sign of untoward suspicion.
"Hi, Dad," he said. Rubin looked like he might topple out of his chair. "What the hell is going on here?" he barked.
Devlin looked at Seelye but spoke to Rubin, "General Seelye here is going to give us a little dog-and-pony show. Isn't that right, Pops?"
Seelye thought seriously about trying to bluff his way through this, even as the look in Devlin's eyes told him not even to think about it.
Devlin reached in his military attaché case and took out two books, their covers still stained, the stains a dark brown now instead of blood-red.
And then Seelye knew that the game was not only afoot, it was up.
Devlin didn't wait for Seelye to sit down. "The answer was in here all along. I don't know why he did it. Maybe to leave a clue. Maybe for me to find some day. Maybe to show both of us that he's the smartest guy in the room, the smartest guy on the planet. And maybe, Army, he did it to fuck you over, the way you fucked him over. The way you fucked my mother, over, under, and sideways. The way you wrecked my family."
Devlin spoke very softly, his body coiled. Army Seelye understood that if he so much as moved, tried to call for help, or worse, attack, Devlin would kill him on the spot and take his chances with Rubin later. Wisely, he did nothing.
Devlin opened one of the books. The pages groaned and cracked. "When you grow up the way I did, without parents, well...you don't have many friends either. But I had these, books my father had given to me in Rome, and one of them was about the movies. So I became a movie fan. They were my escape. They were my family. And those characters played by Cagney and Bogart and Brando became more real to me than anybody real...including you, Dad."
"Why do you keep---" interjected Rubin, but Devlin paid him no attention.
"So this book of movie stories was a boon companion. But an even greater boon companion was this." He opened the other book, bloodier, more worn, and flipped it opened. It was covered in symbols, which zigged and zagged their way across the pages---the same dancing men as the symbols on Devlin's BlackBerry.
"Kids' stuff," blurted Seelye.
"Right," said Devlin. "Childish markings, the kind of basic substitution cipher that a father might teach his son, especially a father in our business. Except you forgot something. You forgot where my father gave me this book."
"Italy," muttered Seelye.
"Correctamundo," said Devlin, his voice mirthless. "Italy. The home of some of the greatest minds western civilization ever produced. Machiavelli---I bet he was one of your special favorites. Michelangelo. And Leonardo."
There was a mirror on one wall. Devlin pointed to it. "Remember what Leonardo used to do? Mirror-writing. If he wanted to obscure something, he wrote it backward. You had to
Using Hartley's Watergate phone number as the origination, Devlin punched in the number that Hartley had called and put the instrument on speakerphone, so they could all hear the cutout clicks as the call was rerouted. He let it ring once and then hung up.
"He'll suspect something." warned Seelye.
"Of course he will," replied Devlin. "That's his job. But he'll do worse than suspect if he doesn't hear from Hartley pretty soon. Right now, it's just a dropped call. The next call he gets from me is going to come in person. One last thing---"
"Name it," said Rubin.
"I want my mother's picture down off the Wall of Shame. I want her files erased from the NSA/CSS system---don't fuck with me on this, because if you don't do it, I'll know. I want my father rehabbed and given a star at Langley. And I want your resignation, General Seelye, whenever I ask for it."
Devlin turned to Rubin. "Good-bye, Mr. Secretary," he said. "You'll never see me again." And then he really was gone.
After he'd left, Rubin looked at Seelye with a mixture of contempt, disappointment, and disgust. "Why didn't you tell him?" he asked.
"Tell him what?"
"That there is no death sentence. That there is no other member of Branch 4. That, in fact, he is Branch 4."
"It's on a need-to-know basis," said Seelye. "And he doesn't need to know. Not now, maybe not ever."

Always remember the dictum of Heraclitus, "Death of earth, birth of water; death of water, birth of air; from air, fire; and so round again."
---MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations, Book IV

VILLESOUS-LA-FERTÉ, FRANCE
Emanuel Skorzeny drank deeply of the air. This was not his favorite part of France---except for the champagne, it was nobody's---but if he closed his eyes and projected himself back a millennium, he could appreciate what its Cistercian founders might have seen in it. Troyes was the nearest town; Chaumont was closer, but there was nothing there. Paris itself lay 235 kilometers to the west/northwest. At
Once a cell block, always a cell block.
The guard waved them through on sight. No matter how many times he was here, Pilier never got over an involuntary shudder. Clairvaux Prison was home to some of the toughest convicts in France. It had a high population of violent Muslim immigrants, who had gone from being warehoused in the Paris banlieues to being warehoused in the French penal system with nary a stop in between. It was home to murderers, rapists, armed robbers, the lot. Even terrorists; in fact, one very famous terrorist in particular.
Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez.
Skorzeny's quarters, made in arrangement with the French government, were hidden away at the back of the complex. Here, he was as secure as the most high-security prisoner, fully protected from the outside world and from any malevolence it might want to visit upon him. But there was also a strange peacefulness about the place. His suite of rooms looked out at some of the ruins. Even across a distance of nearly a thousand years, he could see the outlines of what had once been the fish ponds, so important to a Cistercian monastery. The monks were great gardeners, great tillers of the soil, great husbanders of natural resources, great foresters. They were men of peace.
"And yet their Abbot preached the Second Crusade," muttered Skorzeny, giving voice to his innermost thoughts as Pilier unpacked his things and laid them out on his bed.
The fact that Skorzeny kept secure quarters in a prison was not as fanciful as it might seem. Conscious of the abbey's place in French history, the government was excavating and restoring the ruins of the old abbey, so there were nonprisoners living at the site. There was even a short concert series in the fall, at the Hostellerie des Dames, where the music included works by Mozart, Ravel, Debussy, and, of course, Messiaen.
"The musicians are ready?" asked Skorzeny, breaking the conversational silence.
"Everything awaits your presence."
Skorzeny glanced at his watch. He was one of those men who still wore a watch. Pilier read his mind. "She'll be here any---"
A soft buzz on the telephone. It was the guard at the front gate. Pilier put down the receiver and said, "She's here."
Skorzeny was still looking at his watch. Pilier waited a decent interval and then coughed quietly. "I said, Miss Harrington is here."
"Excellent," replied Skorzeny, although the tone of his voice signaled anything but pleasure. He tossed one more glance at his watch, as if calculating something. "Is everything in order?"
Pilier had no idea what he was talking about. "Yes, sir. The musicians---"
"I don't mean the musicians. I mean the Clara Vallis."
"On schedule, sir, with no trouble from the authorities. In fact, they're being quite cooperative."
The doorbell buzzed even more softly than the telephone. "
Skorzeny cut her off. "Why don't you shut up?" he said.
The brutality of his tone caught her by surprise. She was just wondering what it was all about when she felt the martini kick in. Except it wasn't the martini, it was whatever Pilier had slipped into it. Some kind of drug. The glass slipped from her hand and shattered on the flagstone floor.
"That's better," said Skorzeny.
Pilier escorted Amanda to a chair and set her down into it. Her eyes were open, but she couldn't move.
"You're probably wondering what's happening to you. Please, don't be afraid. The condition is not permanent, and there is no lasting damage. You will find it hard to speak, so just nod your head to my questions and everything will be fine. Do you understand?"
Amanda nodded, almost imperceptibly, but it would have to do. She cursed herself for falling for it. Her suspicions had been right all along---the old man thought they were trying to kill him at the London Eye. And maybe Milverton was. She had nothing to do with that.
Then another thought hit her. Maybe Milverton had somehow planted the notion in Skorzeny's mind that she wished him dead. That she was tired of his importunities, and would shed hardly a tear if something happened to him. That with Skorzeny dead, she, more than anybody except perhaps that creepy Pilier, would have access to all the money until the lawyers kicked in, by which time she could be long gone. After all, she'd got what she wanted out of the deal.
She'd finally got her child.
"Were you trying to kill me in London?" There it was. She shook her head, no.
"Don't lie to me. I will have independent corroboration of everything I ask you, and if you lie to me, it will go very hard with you. Very hard, indeed. Do I make myself clear?"
She nodded.
"Very well, then, I repeat. Were you trying to kill me in London?"
There was no way to answer the question. If only she could say something. She tried to move her lips and tongue, but no sound came out. She hoped the desperation she was feeling was somehow reflected in her eyes, hoped that the old man would see the flash and understand, take pity on her. But she also knew that was a forlorn hope.
"Are you cheating on me? Having it off with Milverton, that rotter? Plotting against me?"
Amanda tried, but she couldn't. Couldn't move, couldn't answer. Whatever fate he had in store for her, she had to accept it.
Skorzeny turned to Pilier. "I think we are ready for our concert now," he said.
"Very well, sir." He picked up the phone and spoke softly to someone. Amanda could hear his voice, barely, but couldn't make out any words. "On their way," said Pilier, hanging up.
Skorzeny looked at Amanda, sitting paralyzed in her chair
Workers poured in, setting up folding chairs in semicircles. They finished quickly. When everything was ready, about twenty musicians, both men and women, each attired in formal dress, entered and took their places: a string orchestra.
"What will replace our culture when it's gone?" continued Skorzeny. Pilier got the sense he was speaking more to himself than anybody else at this point. "What will replace Michelangelo and Leonardo and Bach? The bray of Madonna or the wail of the muezzin?" He was lost in thought for a moment. "Better, perhaps, to end it all now, and spare us the agony of having to eat our own entrails as we die." He turned to the orchestra. "You may begin."
From the opening strains, Amanda knew what the piece was: Metamorphosis for Strings by Richard Strauss. A late work, one of his last, a threnody for the German civilization he and his music had once exemplified. It had all the glorious radiance of his early works, but none of their expansive joy. This was the work of an old man, composing his own funeral music. As if to underscore the point, near the end, he even quoted Beethoven's funeral march from the "Eroica" Symphony.
It was music to accompany the end of the world.
The last mournful strains died away. There was no applause. As one, the musicians rose and filed out of the room. In her delirium, Amanda might have imagined that one of the violinists, a woman, gave her a searching, sympathetic look, but there was no way she could communicate with her. She could only hope.
They were alone. Skorzeny sat slumped in his chair, his mind still on the music.
Amanda's mind was on the music as well, but in a different way. She had no doubt what was going to happen to her. She was never going to leave this horrible place alive, never going to realize her dream of taking her new daughter, who would learn to love her in time, and moving somewhere, anywhere, as long as it was far away. Never going to realize her dream of leaving Emanuel Skorzeny and all he represented far behind.
Amanda's turmoil was invisible to Skorzeny. Not that he would have cared. He was long past caring.
"It was all so simple, until you...what is the word you young people use all the time...fucked it up. I do mean that literally. After all I did for you. Sacrificed for you. Risked for you."
She twitched and tried to blink her eyes, to communicate in some way. It was no use. Her strength was failing her. Just when she needed it most.
"It's over. Don't you see? All of this. A cathedral turned into a prison. A culture turned into a cesspool. A continent into a sewer. An entire civilization into a souk. And so, rather than being pissed on...I piss on it. 'I am become Death, destroyer of Worlds,' as both Oppenheimer and the Bhagavad Gita famously said. I am the day after Trinity. And which of them was stronger---the Indian poet or the American scientist?"
She couldn't even move her head to acknowledge the question.
"Once upon a time, I should have sDo you understand?
"But now, even I no longer believe. During the last century, Europe tried twice to commit suicide. Both times America saved it from its own worst instincts---the second time, just barely. We celebrated America for her selfless sacrifice. We created a worker's paradise of 'social democracy.' Six weeks' vacation, unlimited medical insurance, abortion on demand---why have children if they were going to interfere with your lifestyle? With the rights of women, Western society's proudest achievement. Other cultures, lesser cultures, scorned us, laughed at us, and..."
He stopped, looked at her, then kissed her one last time. "They were right." He fussed with something in his pocket. "What was it Louis XV said? Après moi, le deluge. Or was in Madame de Pompadour? No matter: the sentiment still obtains."
Amanda tried to mouth some words. Skorzeny pretended to put his ear to her lips.
He had played his hand perfectly, calling forth the shade of someone he once thought dead, but knew in his heart had never died. His old friend and rival, Seelye, had covered his tracks very well. "Scrubbed" him, brilliantly.
Which is why everything he'd ordered Milverton to do had been leading to this very moment. Flushing the specter out from the shadows, whipsawing him around the Western world as he ratcheted up the stakes. Keeping him so involved in his own personal vendetta that he would never see the big strike coming. The one man he had to rid himself of, because in him Seelye had created the only person who could stop Skorzeny's magnificent Götterdämmerung.
Amanda struggled mightily against her own body's self-imposed bonds. There were so many things she had to say, so much to plead for, to live for. But she couldn't even move a muscle. She realized it was useless. She stopped struggling. It was over.
"If only you hadn't betrayed me. Did you not realize that my eyes and ears were everywhere? In your house, in your phones, inside his vaunted ranks of computers? I may be an old man, but certain principles never change. And spies are among the immutables."
Her mouth managed to form the word, Why?
"I can understand him. He is a man, like me. He has the same desires that I do. The same lusts. A will to power. The will to live. But what, my dear, is your excuse?"
She tried to move her head, but she couldn't.
"I should have thought better of a woman," he said.
She didn't know whether to believe him, that the effects would wear off. She didn't know if she would ever wake up again, ever see Emma again. She felt herself slipping away...
When she was quite unconscious, Skorzeny signaled to Pilier. "Inhe was ever going to be. CSS had few functional ops in Britain, but SAS and DoD communicated regularly. Devlin liked the SAS guys. They were tough. They were a throwback to the Brits of yore, the guys who set out to make the world England and damn near succeeded. There was, after all, something to be said in favor of an intact gene pool. When you kill off the best, the brightest, the bravest...and leave only the losers, the weak, the objectors, the physically and mentally unfit...well---what would Darwin say?
He checked his messages. Maryam was in place. His hunch, her research. She was a woman of many talents.
Once more, Devlin marveled at the chance that had brought them together. On the surface, she was just the kind of woman he should avoid, if not kill. Her fortuitous appearance in Paris when he was first stalking Milverton, her forbearance through the long silence that followed, her reappearance on the plane to Los Angeles...
And yet perhaps it was time for a play not in the playbook. Maybe it was time to trust your instincts instead of the probability charts. Whoever had sent her to Paris to track him, whatever the reason she had waited so long, however she had managed for their paths to cross again on the way to LA---it didn't matter.
Could he trust her? Of course not.
Was he going to trust her? Absolutely.
Because, for once in his life, he was going to experience the joys of an absolutely unconditional relationship. Even if it cost him that life.
A "22" masquerading as a cabbie picked him up at Heathrow. The London weather was, as usual, miserable, cold, damp, and raw. "What's the Bulgarian bride's lucky number in Casablanca?" Devlin asked, leaning in the window, as if he were giving the driver his final destination.
"Twenty-two, black, gov'nor," came the reply.
Devlin got in. "Louis," he said, "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
"I know it is, sir," said the cabbie. "I can feel it in me bones."
"Damn right you can," replied Devlin.
A Glock 31 with a 17-shot magazine was in the back of the cab. Enough to do the job, if he did it right. No knives, though. Oh well. He had the element of surprise and that, plus superior firepower, should be enough to take the job on.
Number 22 Buck Street was not the sort of place a tourist would stumble upon. It was a dead end between Camden High Street and Kentish Town Road, lined with ramshackle dwellings, some of which had been squatters' dumps back in the 1970s, now rehabbed but still unstylish.
The driver dropped him off at the corner of the Camden High Street. A short walk.
Devlin pretended to pay him: twenty-two pounds, on the nose. The cabbie pretended to accept.
"Why?" said Devlin as the driver put the car in gear and made ready to drive off.
"Why not?" said the cabbie. "The malfeasance of one diminishes us he chopper, did you? I was rather proud of that myself, although I was surprised you went for it so easily. Unworthy of you, really..."
"The little girl?"
"Oh, she's quite safe. Better off than she ever would have been in that dreadful American burg."
"Her mother wants her back."
Milverton took a long drag on his cigarette. "I would say that's up to you, now. Which is another one of your current disadvantages...Do you trust her?"
"Trust who? The kid?" Throughout their enforced conversation, Devlin had been sizing up Milverton's own weaponry, which he had concealed on his person as skillfully as Devlin had concealed his hardware. He had also scoped out the internal security measures, the redundant systems. Basically, he was screwed.
"No, not Emma. The pretty little sand nigger I almost killed in Paris," Milverton was saying. "The one who picked you up so inexpertly. That was when I realized that you weren't as good as your reputation, and frankly, nothing you've done since has persuaded me otherwise."
"Maybe today's my lucky day."
"I think not. You're sure you don't want a drink? I hate to imbibe alone. In fact, I insist."
"Bottled beer, then."
"Very good," said Milverton, rising. "Please don't get up---the motion sensors are activated, and...well, you know. That 'X'tal vision' really does work, doesn't it?"
Devlin was trying to decide whether to call Milverton's bluff as the SAS man returned bearing two bottles of Grolsch. "Don't worry---one hundred percent purity guaranteed," said Milverton as he returned. Nearly simultaneously, they each flipped the metal switch that popped open the sealed top of the beer bottles, which both, satisfyingly, whooshed. "Happy days," said Milverton.
"How do you want to play this?" asked Devlin.
"Simple," replied Milverton. "I want you to give yourself up. To give me everything I need to get Skorzeny off my back."
"To sign my own death warrant."
"That's your problem. Frankly, I don't care what happens to you. I still owe you for Paris, and I just know that you're itching to find out which of us is better. That's something I'd welcome too, but it hardly seems critical at the moment, does it?"
Milverton took another swig of beer. "At the end of the day, I'm a businessman, and right now I'm doing business with a very nasty man whose money and resources command a great deal of my respect. Still, I am eager to get this particular transaction over with, and what happens to my current employer after that..."
And then Milverton did something that caught Devlin completely by surprise: he gave him a sympathetic, man-to-man look, unaffect"In the end, we both want the same thing, don't we?"
"A woman..." said Devlin. "And that's why you're offering me a deal."
Milverton shook his head. "No. There's no deal. It's strictly take it or leave it. Skorzeny's been looking for you for a long time, and my job is to deliver you to him."
There was nothing to lose. "Where is he?" asked Devlin.
Milverton laughed. "He's in France, at his 'country house.' You know what a history buff the old bugger is, and he's taken it into his head that the safest and most discreet place for him to be at the moment is in the monastery of Clairvaux."
"The Clara Vallis. Latin for Clairvaux. At least he hasn't lost his famous sense of humor. You know, the one that nearly broke the Bank of England." Devlin didn't mention he'd already figured that out, and had acted accordingly.
Milverton flashed anger. "England is finished," he barked, "and I'll thank you not to rub it in...anyway, what happens after I deliver you to him is none of my business."
"You mean, you don't care if I kill him."
"Shit, as they say, happens. I'm offering you a swap---your life for your country's. If you refuse, I give you an EMP blast that will cripple your country for...for long enough for your enemies to finish you off."
"What about the little girl?"
"Unfortunately, she's not part of the transaction."
"Then let's get this over with, then," said Devlin.
"Not until you answer my question," replied Milverton. "Do you trust the bitch? I don't see why you should. She was on to you in Paris before I was. She's good. Very good." Milverton took another swig of his beer. "You know, for a professional, you're a bit of a nancy boy, emotionally speaking. You don't even know her real name, do you?"
Devlin decided to ignore the question. In fact, come to think of it, he didn't. "The bomb. The EMP. Launching it from a ship---on a weather balloon---on the open seas. That is very clever."
Milverton laughed again, this time for real. "We try." He rose, walked over to a desk, and opened the lid of a laptop. "No, don't get up. It isn't safe."
The laptop sprang back to life. Milverton touched a few keys, then spoke into the laptop's mic. "Whither away," was all he said. Then he turned back to Devlin. "The Clara Vallis is still safely beyond American territorial waters, and the weather balloon is now well and truly launched. All that remains for me to do is arm the package and in a few hours an EMP blast will ripple across the eastern United States and that, as they say, will be that. Which is why my offer's sell-by date is getting shorter by the minute."
The room's sensor controls, Devlin knew,
"It's showtime, O my brother. The pity is, we'll neither of us ever get to know each other on, shall we say, a real first-name basis." Milverton punched in the arming codes. The only way for Devlin now to stop the bomb was to get to that laptop, to force Milverton to give him the rollback codes. But first he had to disable it, to give himself freedom of movement. Right.
At that moment, Devlin's phone rang.
He didn't move, but only looked at Milverton, who nodded. "Maybe it's your girlfriend."
Carefully, Devlin pulled the BlackBerry out of his breast pocket. It was still ringing. "It's her," he said.
"Well, bloody talk to her," urged Milverton. "Never let it be said that I was not enough of a gentleman to allow the condemned a last tender moment. Who Dares, Wins."
Devlin pressed the Talk button, at the same time he hit the "Sym" key. "I'm having the nicest chat," he said into the phone as he electronically swept the room. "I think a vacation in France would be lovely. Yes. Some historic little town tucked away in a valley where we can drink absinthe and make love...."
He was right: the motion sensors were being controlled from the laptop. Blind the laptop and he just might have a chance. Let's see just how good he was.
Milverton laughed and signaled for him to wrap it up.
"Good-bye, Maryam," he said. "Wish me luck."
Milverton let out a chuckle. "Very touching. And now, for the last time, I ask, what is she to you?
Devlin realized he was serious. "I don't know," he said.
"Then you're fooling yourself. She's a dream, the dream of the prisoner in the condemned hold. You think that this time it's going to be different, but when they string you up and drop the trap, you'll realize as your neck snaps that it was all a fantasy. Blokes like us, we spend our lives not trusting anybody but ourselves and our weapons, and then some skirt comes along, the one with our name on her arse, and down we go. Happens to the best of us. And you and I...we are the best."
Now or never.
Devlin leaped, rolled, firing four shots from the semiautomatic Glock as fast as he could. No time for niceties, just marksmanship. The laptop's LCD screen shattered. He was that fast.
So was Milverton. The return fire nearly took his head off. Then the lights went out. That much he expected. The strobe light, he didn't. Like a seventies' disco, but brighter and more blinding. Illuminating the target, which was him.
He charged, hit the sofa, and flipped it over, ducking beneath it as the shots rained down. Mentally, he calculated the trajectory. Milverton was slightly above him, on a stairway, seizing the high ground, firing down. His temporary refuge was now a killing field. He had to get out of thehis eye, then his aim, then his fire.
Big mistake.
The Glock still had plenty of ammo left.
The whirling strobe died first. Then he put a perfect multi-round shot group where his senses and his experience told him Milverton would be.
He was wrong. Milverton was that fast.
Milverton landed on him from behind, clawing, tearing, scratching. Devlin was knocked to the ground by the impetus.
Knives. He had none. And Milverton, he knew from experience, would have several. The first order of business was to protect himself. The killing thrust would come almost immediately. He rolled...
And took it right in the shoulder. Deep, slicing through the trapezius, the supraspinatus, and the head of the triceps. More than deep enough.
He was prepared for the pain. He welcomed it.
For it froze Milverton's knife hand, just long enough...
He came up firing.
He could hear Milverton groan as his insides were shredded. It would take him an agonizing while to die.
Which meant he was more dangerous than ever.
No time to relax. Dead wasn't dead until dead was dead.
He shot him again. He could hear the man's agonized breathing, then a scrabbling as he moved, clawing his way toward something.
Toward the computer, its shattered screen casting off sparks. But it was still dangerous---as dangerous as Milverton.
In his pain, a vision of the dying FBI agent came to him. The woman, whose name he never knew and never would know, her face turned to his, her last question on her lips: "Who are you?"
Another unanswered question.
Ahead, he heard a crashing. Of things swept away, to the floor. Of desperation as Milverton lunged for the laptop. "You're too late!" came the voice in the darkness. Big mistake.
His last shot followed the voice trail, striking Milverton square amidships. He fell.
Time to end this.
Devlin dove, landing hard on Milverton's back, full force. He could hear the spine break.
"Get it over with," said the paralyzed man lying beneath him. The pain must have been agonizing. Devlin could feel the involuntary twitching, as the body's neuromuscular system shut down. It would not be long now.
"No luck," he said. "I'm not that nice a guy."
"Who are you?" begged Milverton, still clutching the laptop beneath him.
Devlin popped another clip into his weapon. "The codes. I need those codes."
"Fuck you!"
"Not interested. You're done. You've never done a single worthwhile thing in
Whether he had touched his conscience or whether it was the beating of the wings of the Angel of Death, Milverton suddenly softened. "Trade," said the dying man.
"Trade," soothed Devlin.
"Save her..." Milverton released the laptop.
"If I can," said Devlin, grabbing it. "The codes?"
The light was going out in Milverton's eyes. "Bernard, Malachy..." he whispered. The pain must have been excruciating, but the SAS man was a tough guy to the end.
Devlin patched the laptop into his PDA and punched what had to be the codes: 1146--1139.
Bernard. Malachy. The years of the Second Crusade and the Malachy prophecies. Things that obviously meant something to Skorzeny. What the hell were they dealing with here? A madman, yes, but a special kind of madman. A madman whose battle was not with the world, but with God.
He had been right all along: the "terrorist" angle was just a smokescreen. St. Bernard, St. Malachy, the passage from Revelation that Milverton had quoted to the President...There was an apocalypse coming all right, but it didn't have anything to do with the Hidden Imam or the Second Coming.
Milverton was telling the truth. The message flashed:
OVERRIDE SEQUENCE. ABORT Y/N?
He had time. Just enough time. He looked back at Milverton.
"Where is she? Where's Emma?"
He could just barely hear the words. "With her."
He took pity on him.
Devlin turned the sofa upright, lifted Milverton off the floor, and laid him down, gently, on the couch. "Die in bed, O my brother," he said.
He tossed the flat, took everything that was useful, including the hard drive, set the charges---SAS could pick up the rubble later---and downed his beer.
There was a picture of a beautiful woman on Milverton's desk. At last he understood what had happened to Emma.
He memorized the face and laid the picture over Milverton's dead heart.
CLAIRVAUX PRISON
Emanuel Skorzeny got into the elevator that would take him down to Level Seven, the most secure part of the prison. It was the French equivalent of the Supermax facility in Colorado, reserved for the most dangerous inmates in the country.
Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, the notorious "Carlos the Jackal," was lying across his bunk with his back to the cell door, smoking a cigarette. France having succumbed to the antismoking hysteria that ear the voices quite clearly now, rough voices speaking in French, Arabic, Urdu, Chinese, Vietnamese...the mother country's violent progeny. "You're a powerful man, Monsieur Ramirez Sanchez."
"Yeah, well," said Carlos, "look where it got me.... Anyway, what you want? I guess if you're here, the shit really is about to hit the fan."
Skorzeny wished he had some water in which to wash his hands. Just being near this man made him feel unclean. "I wanted to tell you"---here he was, off-balance again---"that it's been a pleasure doing business with you. What we've done together, this day---"
"Or else you scared of something."
Skorzeny despised it when anyone interrupted him, but there wasn't anything he could do about it. His power was useless here. "The only thing I fear is the beating of the wings of the Angel of Death, and I intend to postpone that as long as possible."
Carlos sat back down and looked Skorzeny over. "Yeah, well, from the looks of you, that won't be all that long. You still scared of that kid whose parents you killed. You and those Arabs."
This was hitting uncomfortably close to home. "We all...took part in that conversation. You, me...the American." Skorzeny was referring to Seelye.
"And that's why he fucked you. 'Cause you fucked him. Everybody guilty, and everybody gotta pay. Way of the world. Me, I'm already doing it. You got a ways to go."
Skorzeny tried to control his rising anger and anxiety. "You're wrong. That boy is dead. If he wasn't then, he is now. Our plan is going to work---"
"What's in it for you? More money? Ain't you got enough?"
"Revenge is what's in it for me. And altruism."
Carlos laughed in his face. "That's a good one. You keep telling yourself that."
"Euthanasia, then," said Skorzeny. Why was he on the defensive?
"That's a big word for murder, Manny."
That did it. Skorzeny actually raised his voice: "How many times do I have to tell you---"
"What'you going to do about it, baby? Have me killed? One word from me and every porch monkey in this joint gonna be looking to fuck you up. So why don't you shut up and listen for once in your sorry-ass life?"
This was getting out of hand. "Listen to what?" demanded Skorzeny. He had better things to do than to sit here and---
"Listen to this," said Carlos, holding up a hand for silence.
The voices had stopped. That much he could tell. Skorzeny strained his ears, to pick up whatever it was that Carlos was hearing.
And then he heard it.
Thwack thwack thwack...It was like the beating of wings.
But it was
"I think you got company," said Carlos, lying back down on his bunk. "It was a real pleasure doing business with you, Manny. Have a nice day."
CLAIRVAUX PRISON
"Eddie Bartlett" brought his MH-60/DAP Black Hawk down low and fast. The United States didn't have bases in France any more, not since de Gaulle had withdrawn from NATO, but American ships still put into port in the south of France and so he had come aboard the USS Heliotrope near St. Paul-de-Vence, where the Black Hawk was gassed and good to go.
There was no flak over French air space. Not that he had expected actual gunfire, but usually the French got a serious wedgie whenever the Americans looked crossways at them. This must be a very special occasion.
He put the whirlybird down right on target, in the middle of the yard, which had been cleared in advance. God, it felt good to be flying one of these babies again.
He had two passengers: Hope and Rory Gardner. But he was thinking about Jade. She always wanted a helicopter ride. "When you're all better, honey," he thought to himself. Then the two of them would go up and spread Diane's ashes over the Pacific.
There---there was the woman he'd been told look for. It had to be her. But who was that with her? A girl.
"Oh, my God!" screamed Hope. "Oh, my God. EMMA!"
The rotors were whirring for a fast take-off. The woman on the ground couldn't hear her.
"It's her! It's Emma." Hope threw her arms around Danny's neck and hugged him. "You found her! You---"
A bullet smashed into the side of the Hawk.
Danny leaned out the side of the helicopter, motioning for them to run toward him. The girl started to run---unsteadily, groggily, but she was running.
Rory saw his sister. "Come on, Emma!" he shouted.
Several more bullets pierced the Black Hawk. ark, he knew how to use it.
Still, who was he supposed to shoot at? Danny scanned the yard. No guards to be seen.
WTF? Rory had stopped running.
He was gesturing, gesticulating. Not at anybody in particular, but at the heavens themselves.
"Come on!" he was shouting. "Shoot me! But let her go! She's my sister!"
Rory was dead. That much Danny knew. The fatal shot would come any second now...
Nothing.
Emma staggered into her brother's arms.
Nothing.
Danny made ready to take off. The rotors whirred faster now.
Besides, there was still that other woman on the ground. Who the hell was she? He was supposed to grab the kid and get the hell out of there as fast as possible.
Fuck that noise.
He didn't want to take off. He wanted to fight. It was payback time.
The Brügger spat suppressing fire.
The Black Hawk started to rise.
Come on, kids, goddammit. Come on!
The first thing Skorzeny saw was Amanda, lying where he had left her.
But no Emma. No Pilier.
He was still standing there, in his private quarters, when he was hit from behind.
Punches, raining down, like the Lord's burning wind. Two blows, one each, to the kidneys. Something cut his legs out from underneath him. Falling, he lashed out with a kick.
Another punch, this one more painful than the last. Skorzeny fumbled for one of his pockets. For the canister. He cracked it. A simple vial, like the vial they had given him when he was a child. In case the Russians caught him. Or the Americans. Death before dishonor. Meine Treue ist meine Ehre. My Faithfulness Is My Honor.
He managed to roll over as the capsule cracked. Struggled to his feet, a handkerchief over his mouth. He thought he could hear Carlos laughing at him, mocking him, from his cell in Hell.
The man fell back. His mouth, too, was covered. The cyanide had failed.
Only one chance now---
Rory and Emma ran for Danny's chopper. And then the gunfire began again. Not directed at them. Directed at him. And this time, it meant business.
Smart, very smart. Wait for them all to get on board. Then take them out.
Too close quarters to use the Black Hawk's armaments. This was supposed to be an in and out, only necessary force.
There---up on the roof. A big, powerful man with a very nasty looking gun. The BrWASHINGTON, D.C.
They met at the Willard Hotel, where Tyler kept a private suite of rooms, for moments just like this. There was a TV camera there, ready to start videotaping.
Tyler took his place behind a desk that looked just like the desk in the Oval Office. In close-up, nobody would be able to tell he wasn't at the White House. Tyler nodded at his small audience and began speaking.
" collapse of the international financial system."
"Which is why you've let him skate. That was smart. But he'll resurface once he thinks he's in the clear."
"Why?" asked Tyler. "He has enough money. He can just disappear."
"But he won't. He has unfinished business. With the world, and with me. End-times craziness. An atheist's apocalypse. This isn't over."
"Permission granted," said Tyler.
"With one condition."
"Name it," said the president.
"That Branch 4 expands by at least one member. Someone I can trust, someone who..."
"Someone who doesn't have to kill you just because they know you," supplied Seelye.
Devlin shot him a killer look. "And only I know this person's identity."
Tyler looked at Seelye, who looked at Rubin. No sense telling the truth now, either to Devlin or the president. What had once been a fiction---Branch 4---was now becoming a reality, whether they liked it or not. The monster was becoming a man.
"Agreed," said President Tyler.
"Thank you, sir."
The meeting was over. The decision had been made. The President started to gather up some things on his desk, then turned back.
"Who are you, really?" he asked, but the man was nowhere to be seen. Just a voice out of the shadows.
"Call me Devlin," he said.
In a novel about clandestine services and prototype technology, especially involving the National Security Agency and the Central Security Service, there are necessarily those who cannot be publically thanked, but thanks to them anyway.
Thanks also to Gary Goldstein, my editor at Kensington Books; Cristina Concepcion, my literary agent at Don Congdon Associates; Eva Lontscharitsch, my manager at Imprint Entertainment; Neda Niroumand of Vincent Cirrincione Associates; and Jeff Berg, the chairman of International Creative Management in Los Angeles, all of whom contributed invaluable suggestions to help bring Devlin out of the shadows and onto the page.
Thanks to my screenwriter colleague, John Fasano, for his helpful suggestion of the Barrett .50-caliber rifle as one of Devlin's weapons of choice; to Bruce Feirstein, for his friendship; to Bill Whittle, who taught me about the OODA loop; and to the gang at Yamashiro's and FOA in Los Angeles, good fellows all.
Thanks to my friend and fellow Eastman School of Music alum, Deborah Richards, her father, Bob, and her sister, Kate Motley, for showing me around their home town of Edwardsville, Illinois, a wonderful place in which, really, nothing ever happens.

