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.”
Chapter Thirteen
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.”
Chapter Sixteen
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 sat-phones 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.
Chapter Seventeen
EDWARDSVILLE—JEFFERSON MIDDLE SCHOOL
Emma caught Rory’s glance, but tried not to let on. She did
n’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 Do
yle’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.
Hostile Intent Page 5
