Early Warning

by Michael Walsh

  “One with ketchup, one with mustard, and one with sauerkraut,” replied Rory.

  “You got it,” said the man, much friendlier, coming up with the three hot dogs.

  “My name’s Rory. Rory Gardner. What’s yours?” For a moment, Rory thought the man was going to snap at him, but instead he smiled a nice smile and replied, “Ben. My name’s Ben.”

  Ben stuffed the hot dogs into buns, added the condiments, and handed them over.

  “Thank you so much,” said Hope, handing him a $20 bill as Emma and Rory tucked in. “Please forgive my son. He’s just curious, is all.”

  Ben smiled again. “First time in New York, huh?” he said. “Have a nice day.” And then he was gone.

  “People sure are weird here,” said Emma. Rory made a face at Emma as they walked and ate, just like real New Yorkers. Hope was glad to see them laughing and kidding…and then she remembered the hurt and the void at the center of her heart. She took a bite out of her hot dog and looked up at the sky. The noise had distracted her: not just one helicopter now, but two, three, more, circling in the clear blue sky.

  A taxi slowed to turn the corner. It was available. “Come on, kids,” shouted Hope, signaling to the cab. Astoundingly, it rolled to a stop. “Who’s up for a movie?” Gleefully, they all piled into the backseat.”

  “Times Square, please,” said Hope. The driver hit the pedal, sending them tumbling back into the seat cushion. This was going to be fun.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  New Orleans

  Maryam noticed the car behind them before Devlin did. “Seven o’clock,” she said. They were driving up Canal Street, past the ghost of Ignatius J. Reilly and the clock.

  “Bogies?”

  “What is bogies?”

  Sometimes he felt older than he actually was. Why would she know what “bogies” were?

  “Bad guys. Like Bogey, before he became a good guy.”

  “Right-who is Bogey?”

  Devlin took a deep breath. “He was a bad guy before he became a good guy.”

  She moved the car ahead faster, but not too much faster. Maryam was an expert. She knew that too sudden a movement would indicate they had something to hide, or, worse, something to flee from.

  She swerved around a low-riding Chevy and a Prius, then cut in front of both of them as she took a hard right on St. Charles Avenue. The Howard Avenue roundabout was coming up fast.

  “Where are you-”

  “Shut up,” she said. “And hang on.” She floored it.

  The car behind them picked up speed. Whoever was tailing them was inexpert and obvious. But he was a good driver.

  They shot under the Pontchartrain Expressway. The Garden District was dead ahead, served by the famous St. Charles Avenue streetcar, which trundled down the middle of the boulevard from Canal Street to the terminus, thirteen miles away. “Slow down,” said Devlin. Maryam obeyed instantly, knowing he would have a reason.

  Devlin used the darkness of the underpass to flip over into the backseat, where his briefcase was. There were weapons in it, but he didn’t need a weapon at the moment. A special hand-held would do just fine.

  Most drivers didn’t realize it, but today’s cars were basically computers attached to a drive train, and topped with a home entertainment center. The days of “driving” a car were long gone; the computer drove it and you just steered it. There was no need anymore to shoot out tires of a pursuing vehicle, or run it off the road; all you had to do was knock out its computer and a $50,000 Mercedes became just another expensive piece of immobile junk. And the jalopy behind them was no Mercedes.

  Devlin punched the make and model of the car into his PDA. It was a little something of his own devising, which he had developed in his spare time in his office at Fort Meade. At close enough range, it could access a car’s onboard computer and get a complete readout of the vehicle, including its VIN; via a satellite uplink, Devlin could then take control of the car, jam it, disable it, or even wreck it if he so chose. All he had to do, once the readout was complete, was push a button.

  Sam Raclette was enjoying the ride. It wasn’t every day that he got a call from a big-shot network correspondent to “follow that car,” but today was his lucky day, in more ways than one. For one thing, he had just happened to be hanging around RAND when the call came in, hoping to squeeze off a shot or two of somebody famous, but idling in the parking lot having coffee, all he saw was some dumpy guy get into a car. Then Ms. Stanley stuck her head out as if she was looking for him, so naturally his curiosity was aroused and he decided to grab a couple of pictures of the Principessa when she saw him and started to chew his ass out until she had a better idea.

  “Follow that car,” she said, just like in the movies, and slipped him a couple of hundred fresh simoleons. Well, as it turned out the damn car didn’t go anywhere except into the parking garage, but he never saw the dumpy guy get out and when the car next to it pulled out, he decided what the hell, especially after he got a load of the babe behind the wheel.

  And now here he was, chasing a woman into the Garden District and enjoying it. He’d catch up to her soon enough, somewhere at a light on St. Charles, and try to calm her fears. All he wanted to do was talk to her, ask her a couple of questions, maybe get her number. He heard cops did that sort of shit all the time, pulled over a hot chick just for the heck of it, pretend she was doing 50 in a 35-mph zone, check out her license and registration, let her off with a friendly warning and then give her a call a couple of days later.

  There she was, just ahead. The damn tinted windows made it hard to see through the back windshield, which was really pissing him off. He was going to have to get closer, but she kept pulling away from him.

  Suddenly, the car in front of him slowed. Maybe she was getting tired of the game. Maybe she’d caught a glimpse of him in the rearview mirror and liked what she saw. He was known to have that effect on women, if he did say so himself. NOLA was a pretty easy town to get laid in, especially if you didn’t mind big girls, but Sam liked a challenge, and who didn’t?

  Something caught his eye, something he hadn’t noticed before. There was somebody else in the car with her: a man. A man who had just climbed into the backseat. Damn! Suddenly his whole fantasy of scoring with the hot chick didn’t seem so plausible anymore. Now it was back to business, try to flag them down and-

  What if the guy in the car was the dumpy guy? Then he’d really be on to something. There was an underpass below the Pontchartrain Expressway just ahead. If he sped up now he might be able to catch them in the darkness.

  He gunned it.

  Something was wrong. The readout on the car came through okay, but that was part of the problem. It was an ordinary, off-the-lot Taurus from a few years back, nothing at all special. If the guy following them was really on to them, he would have been driving something up to the challenge. If he really suspected something or if he were sent by somebody who did, he would be driving a lot differently. If it really was an enemy and not a random dope, they wouldn’t even have spotted him until it was almost too late. Something was definitely wrong.

  It can’t be, thought Devlin, his finger on the button. What were the odds of a civilian picking them up and giving chase? None at all. Plus the handoff in the garage had been clean, of that he was sure. His mind raced, trying to spot the flaw in his argument, but he couldn’t find any. Not on short notice.

  And the guy was following them.

  Still…what if the guy was an amateur…

  Too late. He pushed the button.

  Sam Raclette was closing fast on her when all of a sudden his car stopped.

  Except it just didn’t stop. It went from 40 to zero almost instantly. The engine shut off, the brakes locked, and the steering went out. There was a sharp jerk and then the back of the car came up off the ground and flipped over. The car’s windows exploded outward from the impact, the airbags popped and the theft-alarm system went off. In the gloom of the underpass, it spun on its roof once or
twice, then settled. Tires screeched, horns honked, as the other cars tried to avoid the wreck.

  Inside, Sam followed it head over heels in its tumble, and found himself hanging upside down by his seat belt. This fucking piece of shit he thought to himself. Outside, he heard the screech of tires as the cars behind him braked and squealed around him. All he needed was some idiot to smash into him now, before he could get out.

  The noise inside the car was deafening; it was hard for him to hear any of what was going on outside. Still, the first thing was to get the hell out of there. With some difficulty, he released the seat-belt catch and slid down the seat. He was covered with broken glass, and there was blood running down his face, but nothing seemed to be broken except the damn car. Although he was stunned from the impact, Sam could still think clearly enough to understand that he had to get out fast, and that he was going to sue the ass off Ford Motor Company once he did.

  And then he heard the klaxon of a semi, right behind him.

  Devlin had a ringside seat as the truck clipped the Taurus. “Shit!” he exclaimed.

  “What’s wrong?” Maryam glanced in the rearview mirror just in time to see the aftermath.

  The Taurus spun crazily, a lopsided top sent careening toward one of the stanchions that held up the highway. The truck driver delay-reacted, swerving only after it was far too late, which caused several other cars to leap out of the way as best they could. Unable to stop, the truck righted itself and continued to plow on until the driver could bring the vehicle under control.

  “We’ve gotta stop. Go back,” said Devlin. Unbidden to his mind came the memory of that FBI agent he’d killed in his home in Falls Church. The woman he’d shot in his bathroom-

  Evalina Anderson. That was her name. He had found it out later, and had made sure that her family would never want for anything again. They were told you won the lottery and then they were whisked away from a modest home in Prince Georges County and resettled in northern California. They thought good fortune had at last smiled on them. But it was not good fortune. It was the Angel of Death.

  Did he have to kill everything he touched? That was the way he’d been trained, practically from birth, and certainly from childhood. Raised by the man he most loathed in the whole world and condemned to this horrid existence as an operative of Branch 4 of the Central Security Service, the most secret intelligence unit of the United States government. Although the work of the CSS was fundamental to the overall mission of the National Security Agency, it was the CSS that had remained anonymous from the day it was ordered into existence by President Nixon on Dec. 23, 1971, his little Christmas present to the nation, courtesy of National Security Decision Memorandum 5100.20.

  On paper, the CSS looked like a million other government agencies-how they had grown, until it was now they, rather than the elected officials, who ran the country-hiding behind a bland exterior and a mission statement that concealed rather than revealed. He could recite it by heart:

  “The Central Security Service (CSS) provides timely and accurate cryptologic support, knowledge, and assistance to the military cryptologic community.

  “It promotes full partnership between the NSA and the cryptologic elements of the Armed Forces, and teams with senior military and civilian leaders to address and act on critical military-related issues in support of national and tactical intelligence objectives. CSS coordinates and develops policy and guidance on the Signals Intelligence and Information Assurance missions of NSA/CSS to ensure military integration.”

  The CSS was so secret that it didn’t even get its own emblem until 1996; the insignia showed five service emblems balanced around a five-pointed star; each emblem was that of one of the armed services’ cryptologic elements, including the United States Naval Network Warfare Command, the United States Marine Corps, the United States Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, the United States Air Force’s Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Agency, and the US Coast Guard. That ought to tell you nothing.

  In fact, what the CSS was, was the muscle arm of the NSA. Nixon had originally intended CSS to be equal in stature with the other armed services-the “fourth branch,” which is where his unit got its in-house name-but the services are good at nothing if not turf warfare and so CSS took refuge at NSA, where it could take its creation as an “armed service” literally. As the focal point of interservice liaisons, and with the weight of the NSA behind it, there was nothing it could not do, nowhere it could not go.

  As thus Devlin had been born. “Devlin” was not his real name. His real name had died long ago, along with his real parents, at Rome ’s Leonardo da Vinci airport, Christmas 1985, when Arab terrorists shot the place up, as well as Vienna ’s Schwechat Airport. The eight-year-old Devlin had survived when his mother threw herself on him, but both she and his father-intelligence service professionals-had died in the attack.

  The man who was not there that day had raised him from that moment on. He had taken him away, taken him off the grid, taught him, trained him to follow in both his parents’ footsteps, but stronger and tougher than even his father had been. His new father had had an apt pupil, one equally adept at combat and weapons training, at languages, and in ELINT and cryptology. He was Mime to Devlin’s Siegfried, trying to create and hone a fine, burnished weapon but unable to put on the finishing touches. Only Devlin could do that, and he had: completely anonymous, like his service, he was the CSS’s most valuable asset, his existence above SCI-Sensitive Compartmented Information, which was above top secret-and known to only a handful of the highest officials in the U.S. government: the President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense, and the Director of the National Security Agency.

  And the man who had raised him, who had whisked him away after the death of his parents, the man who had been having an affair with Devlin’s mother, the man who had betrayed them to their worst enemy…that man was General Armond Seelye. His boss.

  His worst enemy was the man who had financed the Abu Nidal operation, as he had financed the operations of the terror network across Europe in those days. The man who posed as a great benefactor of the people, the man who used his suffering at the hands of the Nazis as both a sword and a shield, the man whose philanthropy-although a pittance compared with the huge sums he’d made as a rapacious financial genius-was celebrated on the covers of magazines around the world…that man was Emanuel Skorzeny. Who, Devlin fully understood, not only wanted him dead but needed him dead.

  Skorzeny had escaped the last time they met, in France. He wouldn’t be so lucky the next time.

  “What are you going to do?” Maryam’s worried voice brought him back to reality.

  He had to make this right. He had to. If the man in the trailing vehicle was still alive, he had to rescue him. “I’m going to save him.”

  Maryam turned right on Erato Street and doubled back on Carondelet and turned right again on Clio, which brought them back to the scene of the accident. The cops had not arrived yet and, knowing the New Orleans cops, it would be hours before they got out of the donut shops or the bars. Before they got to St. Charles, he jumped out, fully outfitted for the task, and ran. He gave a tug on his Tigers cap, making sure it obscured as much of his face as possible. In a situation like this, no one would remember anything but the truck hitting the car, but no point in taking chances; he’d had enough bad luck for one afternoon.

  The Taurus was shoved up against the side of the underpass, and traffic had slowed. Good. This would make things a lot easier.

  The first thing he had to do was stop traffic. A couple of smoke grenades rolled down the street accomplished that in a hurry; traffic, already crawling, simply came to a stop as it neared the underpass.

  He tossed a couple of flares to mark the car’s location. Good Samaritans did that all the time. Psychologically, they would further serve to keep nosy civilians away.

  He shone a light into the car, a powerful beam that he activated from his key ring: nothing fancy, the kind you
could buy commercially to use both as a flashlight or as a distress signal, but amazingly useful.

  The driver was alive but unconscious. His face was covered in blood, but Devlin could see at a glance the blood was coming from a cut forehead. He pulled up an eyelid and directed the light into the man’s eyes. The pupil reacted: good.

  Maryam had the car right where he needed it, backed into the underpass, trunk opened. Devlin got the man into the trunk, closed it, and hopped back in. Then they were around the corner and up onto Highway 90, the famous Gulf Coast Highway that soon enough would turn into I-10 and get them to the airport.

  Devlin lowered the rear seats and slid the unconscious man into the back of the car. He could give him some first aid, but they’d be at Charity Hospital in five minutes, and he’d never remember a thing.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Washington, D.C. -late afternoon

  President John Edward Bilodeau Tyler slumped back in his chair in the private quarters, alone. As the first unmarried president since James A. Buchanan, he had the ultimate bachelor pad. If you couldn’t get chicks to come home to the White House, you were a sorry-assed loser for sure. But that was just the problem-even had he wanted to, he couldn’t get chicks to come back to the private quarters of the White House because, in a time of heightened security, the Secret Service would blow them out of their high heels. So he was a sorry-assed loser after all.

  There was a soft knock at the door, which he at once recognized as Manuel’s. Manuel Concepcion was his private steward, bartender, shrink, priest, and rabbi all rolled into one short Filipino whose English was still inflected with the cadences of his native Samar. The Concepcions had been fighting on the side of the Americans since the Philippines insurrection of 1902; even in an age of ethnic grievances, there was no question where his loyalty lay. Since the death of Bill Hartley, Manuel was, in fact, the only person the president of the United States really trusted. “Come in.”