Shock Warning

by Michael Walsh

  “That is very thoughtful of you, Mehrdad,” she said, slipping her hand behind his head and bringing his ear close to her lips. “But I wouldn’t want to hurt your feelings if you came upstairs and I got a look at your shriveled little dick that would never be able to stand up properly because I am too much woman for you. So why don’t you go home and practice with one of your sisters, or perhaps a goat, and spare yourself needless humiliation?”

  She said all this with a radiant smile, batting her eyes at Habib as she spoke to his brother. Habib’s teeth flashed in delight, and no doubt he would soon be pressing Mehrdad for the joy that was sure to await them later that evening. How puzzled he would be when Mehrdad refused to talk about it, or suggested some other avenue of delight. For Mehrdad would never repeat what she’d said—it would be too shameful—and so her little stunt might also drive a wedge between the brothers, as Habib would be convinced that Mehrdad was concealing something from him. And that would keep the both of them away from her this evening.

  One evening was all she would need she put her plan into motion.

  She bid both boys good-bye, kissed them on the cheek, and went upstairs.

  The room was plain, as she expected. There was a television, but it only got six local Persian channels plus the BBC and CNN international. There was limited wireless Internet service, so heavily filtered by the government that it might as well be dial-up. Room service, but no wine. No matter, she didn’t need it.

  She kicked off her shoes and stretched. Were there hidden cameras in the room? It would be just like them to have a snooping device in the rooms, just so they could see a Western woman naked.

  She pulled her dress over her head and stood there in her bra and panties. If they wanted to have a limited look, now was the time.

  Skorzeny had given her one of his little toys, a bug scanner that would instantly locate—and neutralize, if the bearer wished—and listening or video devices in the room.

  She went into the bedroom, pulled the curtains, took off her clothes, and turned off the lights and let out a curse. “Damn, I dropped an earring,” she said for the benefit of her minders.

  She got down on her knees and reached under the bed. The infrareds couldn’t penetrate under the bed, so that’s where she activated the device. Any watchers would be too fixated on her bare ass to wonder why she was looking under the bed.

  Three devices: one in the bedroom, one in the sitting room, and one in the bathroom.

  Fucking pervs.

  She decided to leave the one in the bathroom and take out the other two, lest a clean sweep arouse their suspicions. She didn’t care if they saw her naked, if they went home after jerking off; at least it would give their wives some peace. Not to mention the goats.

  When the techies finally got around to investigating, each device’s failure would be chalked up to a different cause: the wiring here, a transistor there. And by that time she’d be long gone.

  She threw herself down on the bed and tried not to think of Maryam—which meant, of course, she thought about Maryam. Who the hell was she? Why was she working for the Americans? What was her surname? How had she come to know the man Skorzeny called “Devlin”? Which side was she really working for?

  None of that mattered. What mattered was that Maryam—whatever her real name was—had tried to save her in Clairvaux—in fact, had saved her in Clairvaux, at that awful prison Skorzeny called “the country house,” the maximumsecurity French prison that had once been a famous monastery, and where the devil kept a suite of rooms on the not-unreasonable theory that he would be safe there.

  As indeed, he had been, until Maryam showed up.

  Amanda let the long-repressed image play again in her mind, hearing the music as well. Skorzeny had ordered a private orchestra to play one of his favorite pieces, Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen for twenty-three solo strings. He liked it because of what it represented: the end of Western civilization and the beginning of the descent into eternal cultural darkness. For Skorzeny, the West was finished, a suicidal basket case that needed only one good push to finish it off. For him, the destruction of what used to be called Christian civilization was a mercy killing, which is why he had so eagerly made common cause with the Islamists: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

  Except that civilization was not really Skorzeny’s enemy. He had made too much money from it, and no matter what had happened to him as a youth in Nazi Germany—no matter what terrible things he’d been forced to do after his parents were hanged by Hitler and he was entrusted to the care of none other than Otto Skorzeny, the most dashing figure in the Reich—he still loved the culture of the West with a mad passion. The music, the paintings, the great cathedrals—these were as mother’s milk to a boy who had never really known mother’s milk.

  In his mind, he was not destroying it, but preserving it, preserving it as it was, frozen in time, frozen at its apogee, before times had changed, before people stopped caring, before the capitalist West descended into that long night of its long-forgotten and long-disparaged soul.

  And now she was so very far away. She was here, in the heart of the Islamic Republic, in the heart of Shiia Islam itself, an Islam poised on the verge of earth-shattering things. An Islam that believed, as the West no longer did. An Islam that was not simply about oil and control and retribution, but the other Islam, the Islam that sat atop one of the world’s great civilizations, a culture that had battled Alexander and Sparta and Rome alike, a culture that proved its mettle, even in defeat.

  She rose and padded over to the window and pulled the curtains: there were the great mountains in the distance, snowcapped already.

  How far she had come.

  She left the curtains open and sank back on the bed. Sometimes she thought about him, about the man who’d called himself Milverton, the man who had nearly freed her from Skorzeny. Together they had nearly killed Skorzeny with the missile that destroyed the London Eye, but they had both paid for that act of lèse-majesté—he with his life and she very nearly with hers. She had been ready to die on that day, by the Thames, and she was no less ready today—as long as she could take him with her.

  And who had killed Milverton? Why, none other than the lover of the woman in the coffin down below.

  Two broken circles, very nearly contiguous. And she had the power to fix one of them, to make it whole again.

  Which would it be?

  She rose and stepped into the shower. At least the place had hot water. She didn’t care who was watching.

  A knock at the door, which she discerned only dimly as she toweled off. One of those intrusive hotel “welcome” packages that they reserved for VIPs, or people with money, or both. Iran still admired money, in a way the West did not. Maybe that was because the West didn’t have money anymore.

  She wrapped the hotel bathrobe tightly around her and went to the door—

  And caught herself. What the hell was she doing? You didn’t answer the door in a strange place, in a strange hotel room, in a place where you knew nobody. She had already learned that lesson from Maryam.

  She looked for the peephole, but there was none.

  Another knock.

  “Who is it?” she said, in what she hoped was a weak, helpless feminine voice. If there was going to be trouble, that would trigger it.

  Instead, nothing.

  She got out her device, pressed a button, and pointed it at the door.

  It worked like ground-penetrating radar, only now she could see whomever was standing on the other side of the door on the screen. Not clearly, but at least the outline of the body, from which she could deduce whether it was animal, vegetable or mineral, male or female, young or old, friend or foe. Well, not quite that, but from the preceding, she could make an educated guess.

  Two men. Habib and Mehrdad, no doubt, unable to take no for an answer.

  They shouldn’t be here—they shouldn’t even be allowed upstairs and, according to the Islamic law, they should not be visiting a si
ngle, unrelated woman, even if she was an English Christian whore.

  Another knock.

  She looked at her device. Hell, it was still a phone—with a direct satellite uplink.

  She called Skorzeny.

  He answered.

  She explained the situation.

  He hung up.

  Unless they had a key, she would be safe. She turned on the BBC and turned the volume all the way up. It was good to hear the accents of home.

  She did not hear the footsteps in the hallway. She did not hear the sounds of heads cracking, of bodies falling to the carpet and being dragged away.

  She was watching an ancient rerun of The Dukes of Hazzard. She had been hoping for Dynasty, but this would have to do.

  After five minutes or so, the infernal machine buzzed. She picked up on the second buzz. “Yes?”

  “It’s done. And so to bed.”

  “And so to work, you mean.”

  “We, each of us, have our priorities.” In the background she could hear the usual lugubrious music. She wondered if Mlle. Derrida were there. She wondered if she, too, were nude. Mlle. Derrida, as everybody knew, had no interest in Emanuel Skorzeny’s masculinity, but she very much did have an interest in his fortune, and it would be just like him to consider her conquered when she merely considered herself rented. Maybe that was the real definition of a whore.

  “Emanuel,” she said, thinking of the two Iranian boys she had just condemned to death. Or did they condemn themselves? After all, she had warned them, and yet they came.

  “Yes, Amanda?” he said. He almost never called her by her Christian name.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I know you are, my dear. Which is why I trust you.”

  “I’m glad you do.”

  “Why else would I let you out of my sight? Had I not trusted you, you would be long since dead. As I’m sure you understand.”

  “I do, Emanuel.”

  “I do, too, Amanda. Now finish your business and come home. Even the sight of Mlle. Derrida’s delicious body, which I am forbidden by contract to touch, does not compensate me for the loss of your company.”

  So there it was. The one weakness he could never overcome. His Achilles’ heel, located right between the old goat’s legs.

  She let the line dangle for a moment; she still had the power of a woman over him, could still dictate the tenor and the rhythm of the conversation:

  “Emanuel, are you still there?”

  Now it was his turn to pause. “Of course, my dear, of course I am still here. Is the package ready for pickup?”

  “Yes, in the basement, in a secure room.”

  “Excellent. Your flight from Imam Khomeini Airport to Baku is booked. You may check in at the airport, or at your hotel desk. Don’t worry, there’s no bother about customs. It’s all taken care of.”

  “Thank you, Emanuel.”

  “Hurry home, my darling.”

  “Yes, my love.” If she could have torn her tongue out by the roots rather than utter those loathsome words, she would have. But she had no choice.

  There was no response from the other end of the line. Which, actually, was all to the good. Had he suspected her, had he had the slightest inkling that something in her heart was awry, he would have kept her on the line, kept her whispering sweet nothings until he could track her down and kill her.

  She exhaled.

  Cautiously, she opened the door. There might have been a bloodstain on the carpet, there might not have been. God or Allah only knew what these hotel corridors had seen.

  She closed the door. Went to her suitcase. Pulled on an all-black outfit of form-hugging clothes. She was like Catwoman in the old Batman TV series, only slinkier. Grabbed a bag she had prepared. Left the room.

  No one would see her. No one would hear her. Only Maryam, alone in her grave, in the bowels of the building, awaiting she knew not what, had any inkling what she was about to do.

  But she, Amanda Harrington, knew. Once the darling of the City, the darling of the Street, the head of one of the most powerful charities in the world, a woman known by sight to every one of the London paparazzi, a woman whose love life had been the topic of speculation in every London tabloid, page three after every night at the old Annabel’s, every night at the Groucho Club, every night at one of the anonymous casinos at which the Sunni Arabs from Yemen and Abu Dhabi had tried their luck with the roulette wheels, the cards, the loaded dice, and the compromised women, dragged from one den of iniquity to another knocking shop, the Empire turned on its head, the maid made mistress, La serva padrona, the end of the world.

  She turned on the television again. Whatever had happened to Habib and Mehrdad was no concern of hers. No doubt the hotel would report it, but Skorzeny’s money would see to a satisfactory resolution of the attempted rape of a British woman by a couple of priapic Tehranians. Such things were to be expected at the interstices of the conflict between the West and Islam. Shit happened.

  Something was going on in the holy city of Qom.

  The government cameras were inside the mosque at Jamkaran, homing in on the sacred well. From the outside, it was not much to look at, enclosed above ground level by some sort of structure that allowed the faithful to fold up a slip of paper and then insert it into the narrowing openings of concentric squares. It was like the Wailing Wall, only rotated ninety degrees, and just as indifferent to the prayers of the petitioners.

  Nevertheless, legions of the faithful, each bearing tiny folded-up oracular origami, were shuffling toward the sacred well, bowing, mouthing prayers, and inserting the pieces of paper into the slots provided by the nonrepresentational design. On any other planet not corrupted by the absurd ghost of political correctness—which, in some perversion of Christianity, posited that the wrong were always right, and the weak were really strong—such petitioners would have been dismissed as the fools they were. But not here. Not now.

  Skorzeny was right. Superstition had taken over the earth, belief had trumped science, man had defeated a pitiful, helpless God

  The Great Chastisement was nigh—but whether it came from above or below was not exactly clear.

  It was time to move.

  She stepped out in the hall and closed the door. She had her camera killer ready, and she was ready to use it.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Lemoore Naval Air Station

  Danny had always known it would come like this, fired on from behind, the one sound in his entire life he would not hear and never would hear. Every op in his business, no matter how high or how low, knew this for a dead-solid fact. It might come from a friend or it might come from an enemy, but come it would. The only way out of the business was feetfirst.

  “Keep walking.”

  Well, that was a start. At least he was hearing it. At least he was able to keep walking.

  They were on the outskirts of the base. He had driven to where “Bert Harris” had told him to drive, and then walked across the Little League baseball field, across the field in front of the social center, past the boathouse for the artificial lake that the genius of the American mind had created out here in the Central Valley, a valley only in geography, unwatered and unirrigated until the Okies and Harvard boys and the Nevada silver miners and the Appalachian coal miners and the failed farmers from the Upper Midwest had all arrived and seen the possibilities and realized them. That was California in the old days, a melting pot of minds, not races, a cooperative of farmers, not ethnicities, a state that worked instead of a state that had failed.

  “Don’t worry. And I won’t look back.”

  “They might be gaining on you.”

  “Am I talking to Bert Harris or Satchel Paige?”

  “Does it make a difference?”

  “At this moment, no.”

  “Right answer.”

  They were past the irrigated fields now, past the ball fields, past the garden plots. This may have been California, where everything grew year-round, but Danny knew that wa
s an illusion—nothing grew here in the saline desert, so hard by the ocean, unless man made it grow. California was Schopenhauer’s world as will and idea, and after more than a century, both the will and the idea were failing.

  “No roses. Have you noticed?” The voice came from behind, unfamiliar but familiar. New in intonation and yet old in rhythm.

  “No roses.”

  “None. The ones the housewives try to grow are shitty. Crap. Roses need rain. Why do you suppose that is?”

  Danny thought. “Because roses really do need rain?”

  He could feel something in the small of his back. “Precisely. Because roses really do need rain. Because man needs woman. Because the internal-combustion engine needs gasoline. Because universities need people who could never get jobs elsewhere, to teach idiots who will never get jobs elsewhere that they have no chance of ever getting a job elsewhere, which is why they need to stay in universities. You get my drift?”

  “Loud and clear, sir.”

  “Good. I like that word, sir. Nobody ever calls me sir.”

  “And yet you can kill just about anybody you want, whenever you want.’

  “That doesn’t mean they have to call me sir or else I kill them.”

  “That’s white of you.”

  “Nobody says that anymore. It’s un-PC.”

  “I know.”

  Danny stopped and was about to turn around.

  “Don’t. Keep walking. Do not look upon me.”

  “You know, I’m sick of this shit. How long have we been working together?”

  “Not long enough for us to meet. Keep moving.”

  Danny stopped again. If Bert Harris wanted to put a bullet through his spine, now was as good a time as any. “No. You’re either going to have to shoot me or talk to me. I’m not the guy you used to know.”

  “So I see.”

  “Do you? My wife died at the Grove, and Jade nearly did too. Hope’s husband died at Edwardsville. Emma damn near died when that bastard kidnapped her. Everywhere you go there’s trouble. Everything you touch turns to shit for somebody else. And yet you always walk away, Casper the unfriendly ghost. Who the hell are you, anyway?”