Early Warning

by Michael Walsh

  Devlin turned to Maryam. There was no point in lying to her. Instincts had kept them both alive for years, and to try to deny them was suicidal. Nevertheless, Devlin preferred to base his conclusions on evidence, which right now was in short supply.

  Maryam saw it in his eyes, saw the lack of the comforting lie. “I know it. It’s him.” Her eyes flashed and, for an instant, changed color from deep brown to something more akin to gold. “He’ll never leave you alone. He’ll never leave us alone. Until we kill him.”

  “Or he kills us. But right now this isn’t about us.”

  “Of course it is. You’re going in. That makes it about us, whether it began that way or no.” He loved that, “or no.” There was a slight British quality to her speech that he would have to expunge if she ever really had to pass for an American overseas, but they could work on that later.

  She placed her hand on his wounded shoulder, into which Milverton had plunged his killing knife. How close the thrust had come to severing an artery she would never know, and he would never speak of it. She only knew how close to death he had been when she got to him in that horrible cell in France. To watch the sight of his life’s blood draining away was a vision she never wanted to see again. “How do you feel? Are you fit enough?” It was not a question she should have asked, but one that she had to ask.

  “Fine. In the pink. Never better.” He smiled. “Any other clichés I can lay on you to make you think twice about asking a stupid question?”

  She gave him that look, that mysterious Oriental glance that women of the region had been giving their men since the days of Darius. The one that is at once challenge, taunt, reproach, and exhortation. He returned the glance as best a Westerner could, then glanced down at the computer. The safe house information had already been atomized and now only the screensaver-an animated gif of a bobblehead Alexander Graham Bell doll doing handsprings and backflips while rushing for a ringing telephone-now visible.

  “This might tell us something while Washington figures out what’s going on.” He punched a few keys, and Maryam saw that he was tapping into the live Echelon II feeds across Manhattan. ATM cameras, CCTV cameras, bodega cameras, building security cameras-their cyclopean images floated across the tiny screen, stupefying in their uneventful reality.

  “Nothing much-Jesus!”

  Times Square. Something was happening there. It was hard to make out, but one of the rotating CCTV cameras was on to something…

  A streetscape and then smoke. Flames. Even in grainy low-res, it was clear that something was happening. Devlin called up the cable news nets and divided the screen in four quadrants.

  “We have to do something.” Maryam’s eyes were still glued to the unfolding disaster. Devlin turned to look at her, and then, once more, the voice of his old enemy sounded in his ear:

  “What is she to you? She’s a dream, the dream of the prisoner in the condemned hold. You think that this time it’s going to be different, but when they string you up and drop the trap, you’ll realize as your neck snaps that it was all a fantasy.”

  Milverton’s voice, in his head. Not the voice of his conscience, but of caution. The caution that, as the saying went, had been thrown to the winds in his desire for her, and in his desire to be free-from Seelye. Free of the past that had entrapped him and refused to let him go. But freedom was not a gift. It had to be won, and hard-won. Milverton had been there at the beginning, in Paris, and he had been there at the end, in London. He haunted them still.

  Devlin’s hand shot out, grasped hers. The horror remained on the screen. “Are you real, or only a dream? Who are you?”

  “What?” She pulled back a little, frightened by the intensity in his eyes. She knew that look. She was one of the few-perhaps the only one-to have seen it and lived.

  Best not to show fear. “Who are you, Frank?”

  “You know who I am,” he replied calmly. His touch was like ice. “I am the Angel of Death.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The White House

  Tyler had all the TV screens up and running as Seelye entered the private quarters. He was surprised to find Tyler alone. At the beginning of his presidency, Tyler would have been in the Oval Office, jacket off, sleeves rolled in his faux-populist style, hands on hips, barking orders to a room full of acolytes and subalterns, trying as hard he could to look presidential. Now, after nearly four years, he looked simply old and tired and in disbelief at what was occurring in New York.

  “Where’s Secretary Johnson?” he asked, coming through the door. “Where’s Celina Sanchez? Melinda Dylan? Pam Dobson?” Sanchez was the National Security Advisor, Dylan, the Director of Central Intelligence, and Dobson, the press secretary. All of Tyler ’s top security officers were women.

  That wasn’t quite true, of course, even in this time of female ascendancy. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was Marine Corps General Lance Higgins, the Director of National Intelligence was Lamont Sutton, and the head of the Department of Homeland Security was Bob Colangelo. But, in Seelye’s opinion, their input was pretty much negligible. Tyler came into office with a pronounced aversion to military men-he hardly ever laid eyes on his military attaché, Col. Al Grizzard, the man who controlled the nuclear football-which ruled out Higgins’s input. Sutton, in a politically incorrect opinion he kept exclusively to himself, was an affirmative-action appointment, and Colangelo was simply an idiot whose lack of organizational talent or intellectual acumen was perfectly suited to running the country’s most useless bureaucracy. So maybe Tyler was right to trust the women; after all, just about the only job in the U.S. government women hadn’t taken over was that of chief executive and that was just a matter of time-maybe a matter of months, if the polls were right. A President Angela Hassett meant the end of his career, the end of a lifetime of work. The end of Devlin as well, after which Devlin would be looking to cash in his chips. And that simply could not be allowed. He had to save Jeb Tyler’s ass to save his own.

  “Sit down, Army, and give me what you’ve got.”

  Seelye was ready with the numbers. “It began with a denial-of-service attack this afternoon on the Counter-Terrorism Unit of the New York City Police Department. A complete wipeout that lasted nearly five minutes, so bad it rang the alarm bells from Manhattan to Fort Meade.”

  The president gestured at the television screens. “Best guess?”

  Seelye hated to have to say what he was about to say. It represented a complete failure of all the safeguards that had been put in place since 9/11. It was the last thing a reeling Tyler Administration needed, and when the word got out, there was going to be unholy hell to pay. He took a deep breath.

  “Best guess is that they’ve been planning this for months, maybe years. First they probed our defenses-and, as you know, despite all our best efforts, despite our crack Department of Homeland Security, our state of the art ain’t so great, especially as you travel down the bureaucratic food chain-set off a series of feints, hinted that they might strike the electrical grid, the water supplies. And then…”

  “And then?” Tyler was in no mood for coy. He was watching midtown Manhattan burn live on national television.

  “And then they rammed it right up our ass. How they smuggled the stuff into the city…” His voice trailed off. This was exactly the kind of thing all those sensors and hidden cameras were supposed to help prevent. All those city, state, and federal dollars. The networks of HUMINT. “We can only hope that the sensors were not down long enough not to detect anything fissionable.”

  “You mean nukes. A suitcase nuke?”

  “Or two. Or four. Or, God willing, none.”

  “How could they get them into the city so fast?”

  Tyler wasn’t going to like this answer. “Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they were there all along, waiting. You know how patient these people are. They’re still fighting battles from a thousand years ago, nursing grudges, plotting. For them, revenge is a dish that cannot possibly be cold enough.”

/>   “I don’t understand.”

  “Maybe the devices-if they’ve got them and that’s a big if at this point-were already in Manhattan, secreted there and then activated before all our shields were back up. There’s a lot of places they could hide them: in hospitals, swimming pools-”

  “Not a lot of swimming pools in Manhattan,” said Tyler, reddening. Seelye braced for what he knew would be the eventual eruption of Mount Tyler. Maybe this time, he thought, the president would keep his cool. Maybe this time he would control himself and his fiery temper. Maybe this time, he’d act like an adult. If not, they were all doomed.

  “You’d be surprised, sir. There are lots of indoor swimming pools in the city. Any Y will do just fine. But that’s worst-case scenario, and the rest of it is barn-door stuff. The real question is, what are we going to do about this?” He gestured at the televisions.

  From every angle, on every network, the extent of the destruction was awesome. Half the great intersection was afire, and 42nd Street was burning as well. Down the block, the wreck of the AMC theaters was plainly visible. Across the expanse of the square itself, heavily armed cops were engaging in a running firefight with an unknown number of assailants, and they were taking casualties.

  “Has the governor sent in the National Guard yet?” asked Tyler. Hurricane Katrina had taught every succeeding president that one could stand too long on ceremony and chain of command.

  “NYPD hasn’t yet called for military assistance, so the answer is presumably no. We’re monitoring the governor’s office and the official police communication channels, of course.”

  “Of course.” Another bourbon and branch had materialized on a side table, but as much as he wanted another drink, this was no time to lose his faculties. “What’s the SIGINT chatter?”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary. If this was an al-Qaeda operation, they’d be shouting from the tops of their mud huts already. But everything’s quiet. Which means…”

  Tyler arched an eyebrow.

  “Which means,” continued Seelye, “that we’re not up against a group of terrorists. We’re up against something that can keep a secret, that holds absolute operational security. In other words, one man.”

  “In other words, Emanuel Skorzeny,” said Tyler, one eye glued to the TV screens.

  Seelye chose his words carefully; there was a play for him here, a chance to settle the oldest and most personal score in his book, but he had to be careful how he laid it out. “No, sir, I think not. He’s old, he’s taken a terrific financial beating, and he’s content to fly around all day in that airborne fuck palace of his, trying to put the pieces of his empire back together. I don’t think we have anything to worry about from Skorzeny at this point. Besides, he knows he exists at your sufferance, so why go out of his way to attract unwelcome attention?”

  “Simple,” said Tyler. “Best reason there is: because he can. Look, he’s old, he’s mean, he’s ornery, and he’s guilty as sin. He’s already got his ticket punched straight to Hell, whether he believes in it or not…” Tyler thought for a moment. After all, it was he who had let Skorzeny off-in order to protect the CSS, Branch 4, and Devlin, to be sure. “Who then?”

  Seelye tossed a couple of dossiers in front of the president. “This man,” he said. “Arash Kohanloo.”

  Tyler ’s heart sank as he picked up the first manila folder, stamped SCI, eyes only. “Please don’t tell me he’s Iranian.”

  “With a name like that, of course he is,” replied Seelye as the President leafed through the folder. “But he’s no ordinary Persian. He’s not one of the mullah’s thugs. He’s older, for one thing. He remembers a time before the Islamic Revolution. He attended the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, and went on to Yale. How the CIA missed recruiting him with that pedigree, I’ll never understand. Got a doctorate at the London School of Economics, then another degree at the Sorbonne. Speaks six languages fluently. For some reason the ayatollahs seem to trust him, and pretty much let him have the run of the planet, which means that whatever scam he’s running is enriching all of them and clearly serves their geo-political ambitions. He spends as much time looking after his private business interests in Macao, Goa, Dubai, Los Angeles as he does in Tehran. In short, he’s a sophisticated man of the world. Just like…”

  Tyler put the folder down, took his eye off the TV, and gave Seelye his full attention. “Just like…?”

  “Just like Emanuel Skorzeny, with whom he met in Macao within the past twenty-four hours.”

  Tyler took a deep breath through his nose, held the air a moment, then expelled it slowly. Good; breathing exercises might keep him calm, at least for a while. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, sir. Skorzeny uses some pretty sophisticated hamming equipment, and of course he’s bought off half the air-traffic control systems in the world, but we can still track the old goat. Just waiting for the word from you for him to have an unfortunate aeronautics accident.”

  “Well, just don’t let him have it over Iran, for Chris-sakes,” said Tyler. The United States was still having trouble living down its wipeout of an Iranian civilian airliner in 1988, near the end of the Iran-Iraq war-a purpose pitch and small payback for the hostage crisis that still inflamed anti-American sentiment, as if Iran needed any more reasons to hate the Great Satan. “Two questions: what’s this Kohanloo’s weakness?”

  Seelye had been expecting those very queries. “I wish I could tell you he had some exotic vices, Mr. President,” he said. “That he raises tropical fish and uses them as an aphrodisiac for the little girls he kidnaps on school playgrounds, but no such luck. He’s a good Muslim. He doesn’t smoke or drink, conducts his financial affairs in accordance with Islamic principles, and in general lives according to Shari’a law.”

  “So what’s his vice?” Tyler certainly knew from vices; in his view a man without a vice wasn’t a man at all.

  “His vice is that, outside the caliphate, in the West, he does as the Romans do. He gambles at all the best London clubs, and there isn’t a reasonably attractive woman in the Western world he hasn’t tried to seduce.”

  “And the Iranian security services let him get away with that?”

  “I think the question answers itself, sir. He’s still kicking.”

  “So how do we get to him?”

  “At the moment, we don’t.” Seelye pointed back at the screen. “We have to see how this plays out. It might be a coordinated attack-and I think the evidence is clear on that point-but it might also be sheer coincidence, the timing of the DoS attack and the bombing. Probably it’s not, but stranger things have happened. But we’re not without certain, er, weapons.”

  Tyler was already mentally calculating the amount of money the feds were going to have to send to New York, even assuming this incident got resolved quickly. He was also weighing the hit his reputation was going to take, and how much political hay that bitch Hassett would be able to make out of this once the fires were out and the victims were buried. “What weap-?”

  Tyler was cut off by the sound of the intercom. It was Millie Dhouri, his private secretary. “Deputy Director Byrne is here, Mr. President,” said the disembodied voice.

  “Read the other dossier first,” advised Seelye.

  “Ask Director Byrne to wait just a couple more minutes,” said Tyler, opening the dossier.

  One thing you had to admit about Tyler, Seelye thought, the man was a quick study. A lot of lawyers were, especially trial lawyers, but Tyler was exceptional. He could speed-read the densest page and absorb it in one gulp. Not only could he sell igloos to Eskimos, carry coals to Newcastle, and hawk oil burners in the Sahara, he could sell himself to the American people as something other than what he was: a millionaire trial lawyer who had made his reputation and his fortune putting doctors out of business with crippling lawsuits, all the while posing as a champion of women’s reproductive rights. It was either a commentary on Tyler ’s political skills, or the stupidity of the American public, or both. And yet…<
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  And yet there was no question that he had a knack for the presidency, in a way many of his predecessors didn’t. Maybe you really could grow in office.

  Tyler tossed the dossier back onto the table. “Show him in,” he said.

  A knock at the door, and in came Byrne. At sixty-two, Tom Byrne had lost neither a hair on his black Irish head nor his good looks, and he moved with the confident grace of a man who held an awful lot of secrets. Like his brother, Frankie, Tom had grown up in Woodside, Queens, when it was still a Paddy stronghold, and even though New York had long since ceased being the city of the Irish, Italians, and Jews, nobody had had the guts to tell him that. Tom Byrne believed passionately in George Washington Plunkitt’s dictum that “the Irish were born to rule.”

  “Mr. President,” he said by way of acknowledgment. “General Seelye.”

  Seelye rose and shook hands. Despite all his years in Washington, this was the first time he had ever met the fabulous creature in the flesh. Stories about Byrne were legendary, particularly his Kennedyesque appetite for women, but NSA and the FBI had very little to do with each other, and both sides endeavored to keep it that way.

  “Sit down, Mr. Byrne, and tell me what you make of the situation in New York. You know why I’ve asked you to come here, I’m sure.”

  Byrne smiled. “Because my little brother, Frankie, is head of CTU.”

  “Precisely,” said Tyler. “What do you hear from him?”

  “Hear from him?” replied Byrne. “Nothing. We haven’t talked in years, except through official channels.”

  “You two don’t like each other very much, is that it?”

  “No, sir. But that’s no secret. We’ve hated each other since we were kids.”

  “May I ask why?”

  Byrne smiled. “It’s complicated, Mr. President. And, with all due respect, I think we have a lot bigger fish to fry at the moment.”

  “Where do you suppose your brother is right now?”

  Now Byrne laughed. “Not at his desk, that’s for sure. Frankie’s got this big mick, first-through-the-door attitude, so if I know my bro, he’s out there right now, in the middle of the sh-in the middle of it.”