“That’s because naked is the best disguise.” Devlin opened up the hidden file, which was just the sort of thing you could see on any website as an advertisement: Russian and Persian Brides for You.
“I didn’t want any of that stuff showing up on a government computer,” explained Atwater. “You know how sensitive the filters are… not to mention the penalties.”
Devlin glanced over at Danny. “No wonder we’re losing this war. We’d rather be dead than politically incorrect. Okay, Major, watch.”
Devlin drilled down into the ads. On a hunch he skipped over the photographs of the alluring Russian women—
“How do you know it isn’t in that section?” asked Secretary Johnson.
“Because this message isn’t for you. It isn’t for General Seelye. It isn’t even for that notorious lady-killer Jeb Tyler. It’s for me.”
He flashed through the Persian brides. He knew exactly what he was looking for, and headed straight to the city of Shiraz. “This is all I know about her,” he said while working. “I know you all think she’s a double agent, and that I might have been in on it with her. I know that’s why you cashiered me”—he looked straight at Tyler—“and I know that’s why I’m still alive. Because you thought by sending me on some crackpot mission about miracles in the desert and then wiping your prints off it, you didn’t have to admit to anybody who might be watching your little charade that I’d gone rogue. You could ruin me without signaling Skorzeny that you were on to me by killing me. So thanks for that.”
Tyler glanced over at Seelye and Johnson, who both shrugged and shook their heads. But Devlin was too wrapped up in his demonstration to notice.
“Here we go.”
A parade of round-faced, olive-skinned women, each one eager to meet an American man, preferably with money.
“You think her picture is just going to turn up in there?” asked Seelye.
“I know it is,” said Devlin, running through the sequence.
“Nobody’s that stupid,” said Seelye.
Devlin turned to his stepfather. “Except you. Now shut up and watch.”
With all the photos loaded in, he began to synthesize them using facial-recognition software that he had developed for just such an occasion.
“She didn’t use all the girls, just some of them, chosen by a single facial characteristic. Taken together, they’re a composite, like one of those gag photos you see on the Internet, where they combine pictures of President Tyler, the mean granny from ‘American Gothic,’ and a lemur to come up with… here we go.”
The synthesis was finished. Everybody looked at the screen.
“She probably had very little time,” said Devlin with a touch of pride. “Ordinarily, she might have added an additional step or two, made me work a little more. But here she is: Maryam.”
It was her, all right, every bit as beautiful as Devlin had remembered her, and stunning to those who had never seen her. He let the moment linger….
“Okay, so that’s how we know it’s her. We also know that she’s got access to some of the proprietary technology I gave her, probably her PDA. We know she’s alive and that she’s in Iran. Now let’s hear what she’s got to say.”
“She’ll use a Playfair cipher, of course,” said Major Atwater.
“Smart fellow,” said Devlin, assembling the first letters of all the names of the women into a row. “We’ll have to allow for some English orthographic variations in the notation of Farsi, but it will be close enough.”
On the screen, a square — five letters across and five letters deep — suddenly appeared. Rearranged, they spelled out:
WE AR ED IS CO VE RE DS AV EY OU RS EL F.
“We are discovered. Save yourself,” said Atwater proudly.
“What?” said Seelye suddenly, and started fumbling through some briefing papers.
“The same line from Have His Carcase…”
“One more step,” said Devlin, now using the phrase as the key and re-coding—
TH MA HD II SR IS IN GF RO MT HI SW EL L.
Everyone could read that.
“It all makes sense now,” said President Tyler softly. “Sense, assuming you believe in miracles. But put it all together: the Iranian nuclear program. The apparitions of Mohammed and the Virgin Mary.”
“Don’t forget Farid Belghazi,” reminded Devlin. “Maryam and I snatched him in Budapest last year.”
“So what?” asked Secretary Johnson. “What’s that got to do with—”
“So he had been working at the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire, better known as CERN — working on the Large Hadron Collider in its search for the Higgs boson. The ‘God particle.’ ”
“And the codes… the threats… it’s all coming together now.”
“In more ways than you think, Mr. President,” said Seelye, finding what he was looking for. “We got this from a confidential informant inside the New York City Police Department’s Counter-Terrorism operation, relayed to us from Deputy Director Thomas A. Byrne of the FBI.”
Seelye handed the president a document. “This just came in. Someone phoned in an enigmatic message to the nuclearmedicine department at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, a statement that referenced a detective on the CTU needing to come in for an appointment. They used that exact same phrase—‘We are discovered. Save yourself.’ NYPD is investigating it as a possible bomb threat.”
“It is a bomb threat,” said Devlin. “Damn!”
He rose and addressed the group. “Captain Francis Byrne — the head of the CTU — and Mr. Barker here took out Kohanloo while I was tied up under the reservoir with that kid. Manhattan registered clean after we picked up the pieces. But it’s possible — not probable, but possible — that Kohanloo got the kid to deliver a… a nuclear device to Mount Sinai, which is where it’s been hiding in semi-plain sight for months now.”
“But why warn us about it? That’s the kind of thing villains only do in the movies.”
“It’s not a warning. It means they’re ready to make their move.” It was all clear to Devlin now. “There’s a sect of Shiites known as the Twelvers. They believe the Twelfth Imam, Ali, has been occluded at the bottom of a well in Qom for centuries, but that he will return, with Jesus by his side, at a time of maximum strife, discord, and bloodshed. And for that to happen, somebody has to cause that strife and bloodshed.”
“The apparitions,” said Secretary Johnson, getting it.
“Correct,” said Devlin. “Spain only started a media frenzy, Zeitoun a riot. But the one in Nigeria has set off an entire continental civil war. Let’s hope the Virgin Mary and Mohammed don’t start showing up in Jerusalem.”
“The end of the world,” muttered the president. “Even worse, the end of my administration. Hassett will kill me.”
“She’s already killing you, Mr. President,” said Devlin. “The question is, what are you prepared to do about it? This stuff isn’t just happening — somebody’s making it happen. Somebody without a national allegiance, somebody who can manipulate currencies, bribe officials with his limitless wealth — and somebody with a high personal animus against the West. Iran is only partly behind this; the mullahs that run that poor country are insane, and we can bring them down any time we want.” He directed that last remark to President Tyler.
“But we all know who’s behind this. I told you this after the EMP attempts on Los Angeles and Baltimore. This apocalypse isn’t religious — it’s atheistic. The revenge of one lone lost soul on a world he inherited and would now unmake.”
“Skorzeny.”
“Request permission to terminate with extreme prejudice, sir.”
“Request granted. Anything you need, you talk to Seelye and Johnson.”
“I’m going to need to get in touch with this Captain Byrne. As it turns out, I know him by sight — I saved his life on Forty-second street when the hot-dog vendor was about to kill him.”
“I know him, too,” said Danny. “He was the
sharpshooter on the chopper when we got Kohanloo.”
“But we have no time,” said Devlin. “Mr. Barker here and I will be in Virginia Beach later, and we fly out from Oceana tomorrow.”
“If there’s a bomb in New York, the FBI—”
“If there’s a bomb in New York, Mr. President, the NYPD is best equipped to handle it. If I were you, I’d keep Deputy Director Byrne as far away from his brother as possible.”
Tyler didn’t like it, and Devlin knew that when Tyler didn’t like something, he had no intention of listening to anybody else. “Maybe, but…”
“It’s your call, sir.” A thought suddenly struck him. “If Tom Byrne has a source inside his brother’s unit, we’re going to need a secure line of communication to Captain Byrne. Someone whom both Mr. Barker and I trust implicitly. Someone whose loyalty is unquestioned. And I think I know just who that person is.”
“Put him on the case,” ordered the President.
“Her.” Devlin looked at Danny. They both knew whom Devlin was talking about. “We’ll need special air transport from Lemoore to New York immediately, party of four.”
“Four?” asked Seelye.
“Just do it, Army,” said Tyler.
“And some special communications equipment — you know what I mean, right, Dad?”
Seelye said nothing.
“Okay, then that’s settled.”
Secretary Johnson spoke up. “If this bastard is going to try and hit us… let me just say that in my neighborhood in Philadelphia, we know how to handle this kind of shit.”
“And now,” said the President, rising to signal the end of the meeting, “I’m going home to the White House to study my polling data and drink myself to death.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Tehran
Amanda Harrington had already decided that she would prefer to be cremated than buried when she felt Maryam’s coffin move. Even for a corpse, being nailed inside a box was no way to enter the afterlife.
Then she heard the voices, muffled, male. She could not understand the words, but she knew curses when she heard them. And when one of the men dropped his end of the coffin and she very nearly toppled over, the imprecations and oaths were unmistakable.
They loaded her into some sort of vehicle — she doubted if it was a hearse — and then she felt the motor start and they were on their way. But where?
She had lost track of time. The coffin was too narrow for her to see the display on her PDA and she wouldn’t have wanted to use it anyway. At first she tried to sleep, but how could you sleep in a place like this when you weren’t already dead? It was the fear of death that kept you awake. From time to time she supposed she must have dozed and she found herself half-wishing she might have a shot of the fugu fish poison once more, just to make the torture a little more endurable.
He must know that something was wrong by now. She tried to imagine his reaction, just for the small pleasure it gave her. That he eventually would kill her, she had no doubt. Death was something to which she’d condemned herself with her affair with Milverton. But he couldn’t just murder her; no, he needed her submission first, her groveling apology, her protestations of eternal fidelity. Emanuel Skorzeny could endure many things, but abandonment was something he simply could not accept.
What would he do? Go ahead with his plan, she supposed. She was never entirely clear on what was going to happen to Maryam once they’d arrived in Tehran — she was being traded to the mullahs for something, but what? So now, like a nude girl popping out of a cake at a bachelor party, she would be the surprise guest at whatever event was scheduled.
She steeled herself. Yes, steeled. She loved that fine old English expression, now sadly fallen into disuse. No one steeled herself anymore; instead they whined and complained and begged and sniveled. St. George wasn’t interested in slaying the dragon and rescuing the damsel in distress anymore; he’d rather get drunk with his mates and beat the crap out of some queers.
No more stop-and-go traffic. The car was moving along an open road. They were out of the city. So it wasn’t to be Tehran after all? Where?
She could not possibly imagine.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Qom, Iran
Attired head to toe in the chador, Maryam moved through the streets of the holy city. Although it was not required, she also wore a veil pulled across the lower half of her face. If the Islamic dress code was going to make it easy for her to walk publicly and in disguise, why not?
Most of her strength had returned to her, which was a good sign and also a bad sign. Good for her, bad for Amanda, since it meant that Skorzeny had been keeping her alive and in reasonably good shape in order to deliver her to something far worse than death by paralysis.
It was possible that he had deciphered her background; after all, she had been trailing his man Milverton as long as Frank Ross had. Skorzeny left absolutely nothing to chance and he certainly would have moved heaven and earth to learn more about her. What protected her was that there was so little to learn.
Her parents were both dead. The Revolution had seen to that. Her father had been a scientist, her mother a professional woman, such as used to exist in the Shah’s Iran — a judge, in fact. But the Islamic Republic had no use for women in positions of authority over men, and so, despite the fact that she had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Ayatollah Khomeini when he first arrived back from Paris, the regime quickly soured on her and she was soon fired, demoted to charwoman where once she had held court.
Her father, too, was devoured by the Revolution, as someone who had held a privileged position under the Shah — he had been one of the earliest Iranian scientists working on the quest for peaceful atomic energy, all the rage in the 1950s. He had in fact spent some time at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory as a research fellow at Cal Berkeley, which was why he’d been forced to undergo a political cleansing process. At first, he went along with the charade, but soon enough no demonstration of ideological and religious fealty was enough — no matter how much he cast off his Western ways, forced the women in his family to conform to the new normal, or otherwise showed his enthusiastic support for the Revolution, it was impossible for him to be pure enough. One day the secret police came for him and she never saw him again.
Her mother died shortly thereafter, her dreams shattered, and Maryam was left to be raised by family under the strict supervision of the religious police. The last thing the Revolution wanted was an angry young orphan who blamed it for the death of her parents. But that was exactly what it got.
The mosque at Jamkaran was dead ahead. There was some activity in the square, as workmen were busily finishing a substantial speaker’s platform, which was flanked by two large video screens. Such spontaneous religious harangues were not uncommon in the Islamic Republic.
From the outside, the mosque resembled a smaller version of the Taj Mahal, its large central dome flanked by the pillars of the muezzin. Inside, there would be segregation of the sexes and in fact the women’s area had its own version of the holy well, to which, using pieces of string, the faithful could attach their written prayers to the Occluded Twelfth Imam, in the hopes that he would grant their wishes on the fateful day of his return.
She knew just what she was going to wish for.
Maryam listened to the conversations around her as she approached the mosque. Normally they were the usual idle chatter of daily life, but there was something different about this group — a tone of hushed, expectant reverence. From snatches of conversation, it was clear that some sort of awful battle between Islam and Christianity was taking place in central Africa. Hundreds of thousands of people were dead, and the battles were still raging.
She entered the mosque and made her way toward the women’s well, her written prayer clutched in her hand. When it came her turn, she knotted it into the strings that hung from the slats protecting the sacred waters below and slipped away. In the morning, the strings would be cut, the prayers would tumble into the
well for Imam Ali to read, and the cycle of petition and penitence would begin again.
She emerged back into the light. Around the reflecting pool hundreds of people had gathered. It must be a holy man, she thought to herself, come to entertain and enlighten the Islamic tourists on a pilgrimage to one of the holy sites in Shia Islam. That was the reason for the low voices and reverential atmosphere.
The holy man was mounting the platform. An acolyte switched on the loudspeakers. Suddenly, Maryam realized whom she was looking at: none other than the Grand Ayatollah Ali Ahmed Hussein Mustafa Mohammed Fadlallah al-Sadiq, one of the most powerful men in the government.
“O Muslims!” he began. “Raise your voices in prayer, for today a great sign is to be given to you here at this holy place.”
The Ayatollah held up his right hand, its image clear and strong on the video screens. Everyone could see a black mark on it — the healed wound, complete with powder burns permanently embedded in the skin, from an assassination attempt many years ago, as the mullahs had struggled to consolidate their power after the death of Khomeini.
“Am I not from the province of Khorasan, as prophesied in the hadith? Do I not have the mark upon the right hand, as is written in the hadith? And do not all holy Muslims, Sunnis and Shia alike, accept that the great imam, Seyed Khorasani, will arise in the east to hand the holy banner of Islam to the Mahdi?”
An ululation went up from the women in the crowd, signifying the immanence of the moment.
“Is it not written that Khorasani must make the way clear and straight for the Twelfth Imam, in order to lead him into a world rent by death and destruction, by terror and oppression of Allah’s chosen people?”
A cry went up from the men, as one, full-voiced and throaty.
The Grand Ayatollah was a master speaker, and he knew how to play to a crowd. Maryam looked around and noticed that the mosque was entirely surrounded by the faithful, come to witness the holy miracle in the flesh.
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