Hostile Intent

by Michael Walsh

  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.

  DAY TWO

  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

  Chapter Twenty-five

  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 work-arounds, 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.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  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—”