Early Warning

by Michael Walsh

  “Yes, I do.” She rose, letting everyone in the audience get a good look at her. Like all the interchangeable blondes on the cable newscasts, she was leggy, bosomy, brash, and the proud possessor of a law degree. One more button on her blouse was unbuttoned than absolutely necessary. “And finally…what do you have against the news media? Wasn’t it also Jefferson who also said that given a choice between a government without newspapers and newspapers without government, he would happily choose the latter?”

  Mr. Grant smiled; she had walked right into his trap. “Yes, Ms. Stanley. To which George Washington replied, ‘I consider such vehicles of knowledge’-that’s newspapers to you-‘more happily calculated than any other to preserve the liberty, stimulate the industry, and ameliorate the morals of a free and enlightened people.’ And by ‘industry,’ of course, he meant-”

  “I know what he meant by ‘industry,’ Mr. Grant,” she retorted.

  His return glance indicated that he very much doubted that. “What Washington meant, Ms. Stanley, was that vigorous political opposition was a good thing, but that a news media, to give it its current favored term, that saps the will of the people, that reduces them to pleading, whining petitioners and diminishes the morals of the public is not one to be admired. The First Amendment does not protect sedition.”

  “But it sounds to me like you’re arguing in favor of American exceptionalism. Isn’t that a form of elitism?”

  “On the contrary. I’m arguing in favor of results. Which, in my world, are the only things that count.” He shuffled his papers, reassembling in an unmistakable sign that the talk was over. These days, all of the reporters’ questions emanated from a mountain of moral certitude, which crumbled the second it was assailed.

  Principessa reddened, sat down, seethed. “This all sounds rather jingoistic to me,” she said.

  Mr. Grant looked at her with all the pity in world. “Who cares what it sounds like to you?” he said, and left the stage.

  That went well he thought to himself as he stepped into the wings, to the sound of applause. He moved swiftly, glancing down at his secure BlackBerry. A quick glance at the screen caused him to double his speed. He exited by an emergency door.

  There was a car waiting, a nondescript black sedan with four tinted windows. He got into the back seat, closed the door and hit: AUTO-START.

  Driverless, the car started up and moved forward. He could control the steering from a console on the back of the driver’s seat. He wasn’t going far.

  He glanced in the rearview mirror: a door was opening, and he could see a woman’s head peeking out. It was Ms. Stanley, eyeballing the car and talking into her cell phone. It was too bad he couldn’t treat reporters the way he treated enemies of the Republic…

  As the car moved, Mr. Grant underwent a remarkable transformation. His teeth fell out of his head; his midsection slid away, a hairpiece came off. And all the while he was wondering whether the raw data he was receiving was as sinister as it seemed, or worse.

  The car reached the far end of the parking lot and slid into a reserved, covered space. He ran a brush through his hair, popped a pair of brown contact lenses from his eyes. He had to hurry.

  He opened the door and, keeping low, slid into the adjoining Mercedes, its engine purring, as the front passenger door opened.

  “Not bad,” came a voice from the driver’s seat. He didn’t turn to look at her, but he didn’t have to. He knew every line of her lovely face. “But that reporter sure was a bitch.”

  “You were watching?”

  “And listening. Every word, every gesture…”

  Jealous. He liked that in a woman. Especially one he hardly knew, but trusted with his life. “You know there’s-”

  She turned toward him and, as usual, he fell in love with her all over again. His mouth covered hers.

  “Really, Frank, I think you’re slipping,” she said, breaking away. “Why put yourself in-”

  He reclined and, for the first time in two hours, stretched. They both knew the answer to that question, which was: there was no answer. “My name’s not Frank.”

  “You’re telling me.” She pulled the car out of the lot and into traffic. “How bad is it?”

  “Hard to say. Cyber attack, maybe a security breach.”

  “Against us?”

  Mr. Grant shook his head. “Worse-NYPD. Fort Meade is still monitoring, but the situation is unclear. And you know how tough it is to get any information out of the cops. They’d rather see the city nuked than share anything with us. We need to get to Teterboro A-sap.”

  “So I guess Arnaud’s is out of the question.”

  He smiled. “Arnaud’s, Galatoire’s Brennan’s, Congo Square, Exchange Alley-the whole nine yards.”

  Maryam hit the radio button twice and nodded to Devlin. He took the cigarette lighter out of its holder and pressed it against his thumb. The biometric reader vetted him, and suddenly the navigator screen leaped to life. He punched in his instructions.

  “Go.”

  The car leaped forward, speeding west out of town and toward Louis Armstrong Airport. There would be a private plane there, fully equipped, on the director’s orders. In no time, he and Maryam would be fully up to speed and, if possible, already fighting back. There were contingency plans for something like this, but plans went out the window as soon as the first shots were fired, and from the looks of this…

  No matter. He was doing what he was born to do. He was himself again.

  He was Devlin.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Los Angeles

  Jake Sinclair had a choice: to stay sober or to get drunk?

  Not just drunk, but, like Elmer Gantry, eloquently drunk, lovingly drunk. Elmer Gantry was one of his favorite characters in literature-not that he had ever read the novel, but he had seen the movie many times over, and he loved Burt Lancaster’s performance, even if the movie left out most of the novel. He loved it so much that he owned a print of it-not a DVD, but an honest-to-God movie print-and had it shown in the screening room at his house in Loughlin Park whenever he wished. It was easy; he owned the studio.

  From his custom-built, body-contoured easy chair, Sinclair looked longingly across the room at the built-in wet bar, a relict of a time when real men not only drank but also smoked.

  Loughlin Park was the Beverly Hills of Los Feliz. Sinclair was very proud of himself for living in Los Feliz. Los Angeles had moved as far west as it could go without actually trying to build houses in the Pacific Ocean-although there were more than a few movie industry types of his acquaintance who were convinced they could walk on water-so now the smart money had begun to move back east, or at least as far east as Griffith Park Boulevard, where houses that might go for twenty million dollars in the bird streets above Beverly Hills could be snapped up for two or three, and yet you were still dozens of blocks away from the nearest Mexicans. Now that was what he called smart shopping.

  Now, about that drink…after all, it was always five o’clock somewhere.

  The house had been built by W. C. Fields when he decided to follow Hollywood ’s path westward and move in next door to Cecil B. DeMille. Although Sinclair had “modernized” the place, Mrs. Sinclair had insisted on sparing a few of the period touches, and so the wet bar still stood, its hidden refrigerators filled with designer waters like Saint-Géron, which was supposed to be a prophylactic against anemia. Mrs. Sinclair was enamored of the distinctive long-necked Alberto Bali-designed bottles. But there was no booze in the wet bar, nor anywhere else in the house, in keeping with Hollywood ’s new, healthy, raw-foods-and-Brita-filtered-water lifestyle. Thank God tennis and sportfucking were still allowed.

  The reason Sinclair wished he was drunk had to do with business. Almost everything in his life had to do with business, including the current Mrs. Sinclair. She was, of course, not the first Mrs. Sinclair; Jake Sinclair eagerly subscribed to the Hollywood custom in which every man of significance is or was married to some other man of significance’s
wife, and every man owned, at one time or another, a house that had formerly belonged to one of his rivals, colleagues, or mortal enemies, and then either totally remodeled it or tore down. As the saying went: Hollywood is a relationship business. And, as far as relationships went, he’d had quite a few.

  Luckily, the current, although soon-to-be-ex Mrs. Sinclair was Jennifer, just like the first Mrs. Sinclair, which is why he thought of her as Jennifer II or Jenny the Second. Like some arranged marriage between European potentates in the 16th century, she had come to him as a kind of reverse dowry. Jennifer Gailliard was the daughter of one of the biggest investors in the country, an investor Sinclair had been wooing with even greater ardor than he would later woo the man’s daughter. The three-day celebration of their marriage on the island of Corfu was in all the gossip magazines-the photo rights alone went for more than $2 million to People-and it was quickly followed with the news that the bride’s father had invested upwards of $500 million in Jake Sinclair’s media company for acquisitions, with which money he partly financed his hostile takeover of Time Warner and thus now owned People. So the two million bucks was money well spent, especially since it had landed back in his pocket. Plus he had some really great family photos.

  He liked Jenny the Second well enough, but he would have liked her more had she allowed him his favorite Scotch at a time like this. Which was the closing of yet another deal. For even by Jake Sinclair standards-Sinclair often thought of himself in the third person, although he rarely slipped into that particular locution, at least in public-it was a big deal. As his father often told him, it was a stupid man who could not make financial hay in an economic meltdown, and Jake Sinclair’s father had not raised a stupid child.

  Which was why, at this moment, he had just decided to divorce her.

  Since he had been a kid, he had anticipated this day. Not just to own a major newspaper chain, a major newsweekly, a major television network, and even a major Hollywood studio-but to own all four. The superfecta of media, made possible by other men’s blind greed, blinkered overreaching, and sheer sightless stupidity. During the 1980s, when corporations were merging faster than actors on a movie set, Sinclair-then a junior executive in a media mini-conglomerate-had watched, listened, and learned. Watched as one moron after another, so fearful of being left behind in the tsunami of M &As, had yanked the cord on his golden parachute and sold out his company for a mess of pottage and a face-saving seat on the board, which was soon revoked. One dope after another had fallen for the snake-oil salesman’s charms of “high tech” whispers and “transformative transaction” pornography. Most of them, like his principal rival, had ended up padding the beach at Santa Monica with their New Age replacement wife in tow, spouting some holistic bullshit and telling Us Weekly how glad they were to finally be out of the rat race and living on a mere million dollars a year.

  Well, fuck them. They were out and he was very much in, and glad to be here. For it wasn’t an honor just to be nominated-for Jake Sinclair, the only honor that counted was to see his face on the cover of as many magazines as possible, to have his minions chart how many hits his name garnered on Google every day, to ferret out references to himself in novels, television shows, and movies, where he often appeared, thinly veiled as an Important Tycoon or a Media Mogul.

  Well, fuck that, too. He was not just an important Media Mogul. He was the Media Mogul. He could afford to divorce Jenny II and get seriously involved with the Other Woman.

  That was another thing. Most people laughed at him when, during a time of collapsing “old media” value, Sinclair Holdings, LLC, had snapped up failing properties like Time Inc. and the New York Times. Well, they were as dumb as the people who bailed on New York City during the Abe Beame administration, when Gerald Ford famously told the city to drop dead.

  He could taste the Scotch. The cigarette, too. And, if he tried real hard, he could taste her.

  Jake Sinclair rose and padded toward the bar. He pressed a switch under the sink, recessed behind the garbage disposal. The false back of one of the cabinets slid aside, revealing his private stash of Oban Scotch and Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, the ones with his initials monogrammed on each coffin nail.

  Houses were like wives, he thought as he sipped his Scotch and sent the smoke from the Sobranie cigarette spiraling toward the extractor fan, in that you didn’t hang on to them for the memories-you tore them down, rebuilt them, or replaced them with somebody’s else’s. Memories, good or bad, were noxious.

  He was glad he didn’t have any children. This was an evil world, and it would be criminal to bring an innocent life into it. The thought hadn’t occurred to him that perhaps, in the instant before conception, his own parents had thought this way, and their parents before them. That if, going back to Adam and Eve at the Fall, every prospective pair of parents had thought this way, there would be no human race all.

  Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste brought Death into the World…

  “Yum.” He looked around the room for the voice and then realized it was his own. That’s what often happened after a drink or two, and for that he blamed Jenny II. If she let him have a nip every now and then, this wouldn’t have happened. Yes, he definitely was going to divorce her. He made a mental note to call his personal attorney in the morning.

  Anyway, fuck Milton. Sinclair had hated it when they made him read Paradise Lost in school, mostly because he found the sentences hard to understand.

  In fact, it was Paradise Lost and its lit-class ilk that had set him on his current path. For Jake Sinclair believed two things: that he was always the smartest guy in the room, and anything he couldn’t readily understand would be too hard for his fellow citizens to grasp. Therefore, in the name of humanity, he had made it his life’s work to “dumb down” all of his publications and broadcasts and movies and television shows, so that people less fortunate then he would not have to be confronted on a daily basis with the proof of their own ignorance.

  He was so wrapped up in thoughts of his own magnanimity that it took him a few seconds to realize the phone was ringing. He downed the last gulp of scotch and jacked the extractor fan to High. Jennifer would be home from her tennis game at any minute. “Hello?”

  The caller ID revealed the identity of every one of his callers and, on the off chance that the ID was blocked, he simply refused to answer: in fact, the phone company bumped it immediately to voice mail heaven. Which he never checked. If it was a solicitor, they could call his business manager; if it was someone trying to evade security, the hell with them; if it was a petitioner, then fuck him.

  It was none of the above.

  A brief beat as switching and relay systems from Los Feliz to Mars did their thing. This was another perk of the office: a massive security system that, once having identified a legitimate caller-especially this one-encrypted all voice communications into something that nobody, not even the National Security Agency, would be able to readily decode.

  Finally, the voice came on the line. As agreed, the chatter was kept to under 2.3 seconds, so as best to avoid the tender mercies of Fort Meade. No matter which political party you bribed, in the end, they were both going to fuck you. But there was no mistaking the sweet sound of her voice:

  “They took the offer.”

  Sinclair hung up, poured himself another drink, and looked at the clock. What the hell was he worried about? Jenny II wouldn’t be home for at least another half hour. He made it a double. Now he wouldn’t have to calculate how much a divorce would cost him. He’d just made half a billion dollars by answering the phone, and that would be more than enough to take care of her.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Manhattan -afternoon

  Byrne and Saleh rode in silence up the elevator, Byrne slumped back against the lift’s wall, watching his subordinate’s agitation. “You know the old joke, right?” he said. “About the old bull and the young bull?”

  “Huh? Joke?”

 
“Yeah, joke. Don’t they tell jokes in Ragville?”

  Lannie got that aggrieved look on his face so characteristic of young people these days. “You know, Chief, I could-”

  Byrne finished the sentence for him. “Bust me down to buck private for hate speech? Maybe. But I can bust all your teeth down your throat first, so the choice is yours.” They went through this all the time, half-joking, half-serious.

  “It’s always the Irish way with you, isn’t is, Boss? Punch first, ask questions later?”

  The elevator shuddered to a stop. “It’s the only way that works,” said Byrne, getting off first.

  As long as he had been on the force, Byrne had never quite gotten used to his new digs. He was used to shit-ass quarters in precincts around the city, at Police Plaza, which even to his office had just enough room for one desk, two chairs, and a window. Even the city’s best detectives were lucky if they had access to a computer that worked only slightly more often than a civil servant.

  This was different. In the aftermath of 9/11, the NYPD had spared absolutely no expense in outfitting the CTU with the finest equipment available, and if it wasn’t available, to create it. How the brass had managed to conceal the vast expenditures it took to get CTU up and running was beyond Byrne. But, over the years, his former partner and permanent friend Matt White had mastered bureaucratic infighting to an extent that Byrne never would have thought possible. Matt was the living reincarnation of the old Irish Tammany bosses-John Kelly, Richard Croker, Charlie Murphy. Not bad for a black guy from Houston.

  Byrne and Saleh badged their way in. This was no ordinary cop shop; you couldn’t just waltz past a metal detector, plow through the busted hookers, and get to some sad-sack sergeant to report that your car had been stolen. Instead, a scanner read a microchip on your special NYPD badge, a second scanner zapped your eyeballs, and a third made sure you were not carrying any unauthorized weapons-even Byrne’s daddy’s.38 had to pass muster.