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.
Chapter Forty-five
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.
&n
bsp; 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.
DAY FIVE
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
Chapter Forty-seven
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
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