Early Warning

by Michael Walsh

  Morse code: I am. Am I? A phrase and then the reverse. A yearning, strange and ineffable. Hesitant, coy and coquettish by turns, masterful and manly by others. Everyone assumed that the work was as Elgar said: portraits of various friends. Program music, the scholars called it.

  But what if that, too, was all misdirection? What if the central enigma of the Enigma Variations wasn’t so enigmatic after all, but hiding right there in plain sight? There, hidden away in one of the lesser variations-not the magisterial “Nimrod,” which had come, like the Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, to symbolize the very spirit of Victorian Britain itself, but the one that immediately followed it.

  The “Dorabella” variation.

  The squiggly “eeees.”

  The squiggly, ornamented melodic line of the “Dorabella” Variation, supposedly meant to express the girl’s slight hesitancy in her speech patterns. But listen closer: the variation does not simply depict one person, but two. The strings twitter, but the woodwinds answer.

  Dora. Bella. Dora the Beautiful.

  And she is having a conversation with the composer.

  It was all coming together. The wife, the flighty and often amusing friends. All building on the Morse Code, on the unheard, unspoken, unarticulated, unwritten “real” theme as the music drove toward to the titanic “Nimrod” variation and then…the whole point of the piece, carefully and calculatedly inserted precisely at the point where the audience would still be in thrall to the majesty of the Ninth Variation and never suspect that the real declaration of love would come, dramatically, where they were least expecting it.

  Match it up:

  There it was, staring at him, plainly. The contrary motion of the great tune, the unanswered question of I am. Am I? The inverse, the mirror image. The counterpoint of existence, the yin and the yang, the harmonic balance: one door closes, another door opens. One man dies, another child is born. Perpetual contrary motion.

  Look at it.

  No: listen to it.

  Read it. Not the way one would usually “read,” but the way a musician would read:

  Hearing it as he-or, in this case, she-read.

  It wasn’t about a code at all.

  It was the unheard theme of the Enigma Variations, written out in Elgar’s private shorthand two years before he composed his first masterpiece, and communicated to the woman he loved but whom he could not have. He had to hide his affections-after all, he was married, and he and his wife had just been on a visit to Dora, her father, and her step-mother-and so he disguised them.

  Not only disguised them. Gave them voice. Orchestrated them. And then let the world hear them.

  It was about Love.

  In his excitement, Major Atwater leaped to his feet and began to sing. Then he stopped, caught up short-

  Love was followed by the Double Cross: XX. The symbol of Death.

  Not substitution ciphers-substitutions. Symbols of symbols. Telling a tale of love declared and love frustrated. Of love unrequited and love confounded.

  “We are discovered. Save Yourself.”

  It wasn’t about Love after all.

  It was about Revenge.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  St. Clare’s Hospital

  “It’s St. Vincent’s now, officer,” the admitting specialist had said last night, “for however long we stay in business”-but Lannie wasn’t in the mood for a history lesson. He’d gotten Sid immediate medical attention. As it turned out, Sid’s leg was broken in four places, but otherwise he was going to be okay. The doctors had shot him full of painkillers and done the best they could with the leg, but it was going to be a while, if ever, before he could resume his alternate career as shortstop for the New York Yankees.

  “What’s the score?” asked Sid, wide-awake, but full of more dope than Lenny Bruce.

  “We’re winning,” Lannie lied.

  “Correction,” came a voice behind them. “We’re going to win, but right now we are at the mercy of my least favorite people in the world.”

  Lannie and Sid turned to see Capt. Byrne stepping into Sid’s room. His shoulder was bandaged and he was a little pale, but otherwise he appeared pretty much his old nail-chewing self. “In the old days,” he said, “this was the place they brought all the gangsters, after they’d been ventilated in some dustup or other in Hell’s Kitchen. They even brought the great Owney Madden here in 1912, after he’d gotten himself shot up by the Hudson Dusters. Filled him full of lead, eleven shots in all, and still the son of a bitch didn’t die.” Byrne pulled back the covers to take a look at Sid, and smiled. “You’ve got nowhere near eleven rounds in you, boyo.”

  Sid smiled weakly. Why did it have to be him? Everybody always made fun of him, the Jewish kid, supposedly the smart one, but not the tough one. All he’d wanted was a chance to show the boss that he was as tough and as brave as anyone in the CTU. And look at him…

  “And show us you did, Sidney,” said Byrne. It was uncanny how the man could read minds. That’s what made them all love him. Sure, he was a tough, politically incorrect, mean SOB, but then so was his uncle, Sy Sheinberg, who had practically been a father to Byrne. “Think Yiddish, dress British,” had been the motto of Sy’s generation, but he had turned it on its head: “Yiddish think, Irish drink,” was his version, and it was the way he had lived, right up to the moment he died. How he had died, and what combination of courage and desperation had driven him to, essentially, conduct his own autopsy on himself while he was still alive, Sid could not image. And Frankie had never talked about it, even though he had been the one who had found him, bottle in one hand, scalpel in the other. “You’ll be out of here in no time.”

  Sid struggled a bit. “I wanna be in the shit, boss,” he protested.

  “We got plenty of guys in the shit already,” said Byrne. “And we’re taking them down.”

  Sid seemed disappointed: the kid was no coward, that was for sure. Byrne looked around the room and spoke to the nurse. “Sister,” he said, even though nobody called nurses “sister” anymore except the very old-timers in the neighborhood, “would you please close the door and make sure we’re not disturbed?”

  “Of course, officer,” the nurse said. She was from Haiti, but she’d been working on the old West Side for long enough to know the drill. They got plenty of shot-up cops around here and they all talked the same.

  Byrne took out his departmental secure PDA and showed it to Sid and Lannie. “I got this a couple of hours ago. It gives the last known location of every one of the shooters, tracked by some GPS system I’ve never heard of. Which means…”

  “Which means we got the fuckers!” exclaimed Lannie, who high-fived Sid.

  “Which means that somebody in some department somewhere in this great land of ours has got better toys than we do and we need to find out who they are and how we can get some for ourselves.” He waited a beat. “I’m putting you both on the case, A-sap. I want you to find out who sent this to me-”

  “And fuck him up?” blurted Sid, excited.

  “And work with him. Or her. These guys are good, very, very good, and right now we need all the friends we can get. Just as long as they’re not…you know who.” Nobody needed to ask who you-know-who was. Capt. Byrne’s antipathetic relationship with certain parts of official Washington was the stuff of departmental legend.

  Byrne handed the instrument to Lannie Saleh. “Open up a line of communication right now. We can trust these guys, whoever they are, DIA, CIA, NSA, I have no idea. I just know this.” He unfolded the piece of paper he’d found in his pocket and showed it to them:

  YOUR GUARDIAN ANGEL.

  Lannie and Sid both looked at the note in amazement. “What the hell is that supposed to mean, Captain?” asked Sid.

  “It means this guy, whoever he is, saved my life, so as far as I’m concerned he’s already established his bona fides. And we’re going to work with him in any way he wants us to. So get cracking”

  Lannie’s face dropped. “But I was
going to stay here with Sid, keep him-”

  “I didn’t say you had to do it at HQ, did I? And if you’re not smart enough to be able to make this thing sing and dance, then you’re not as smart as I think you are.”

  “Okay, boss,” said Lannie.

  “But we’re getting them all, right?” ventured Sid. “The bad guys.” Like every cop, and certainly the men under Byrne’s command, he took any attack on his city deeply personally.

  “Looks that way,” Byrne said. “I got our best guys-not counting you two clowns-on it, and they’ve registered eleven kills.” He decided not to tell them that six of those kills had been made by somebody not on the team. That was a mystery that either would sort itself out or it wouldn’t, so he’d keep that to himself. “So…” he said, looking at Sid, “just as soon as you stop goldbricking, we can get back to-”

  His phone rang. His personal cell phone. He glanced down at the number on caller ID: blocked. He wondered briefly if he should take it. Normally he wouldn’t, especially not on the job, since all official calls came over their crack internal communication system, the one that had so distinguished itself on 9/11. But this was an emergency, and you never knew-

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Frankie, how’s it hanging?” said the voice, and Byrne recognized it right away. It was his brother, Tom Byrne, deputy director of the FBI.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Budapest

  So she was back where they had started, on the hunt for Farid Belghazi, that guy from CERN, which had been much in the news lately. Despite a series of unfortunate events, the Large Hadron Collider was once again operable and going about its business. Recently, it had set a new record by colliding particle beams at seven tera electric volts as two proton beams, guided by thousands of large electromagnets, collided head-on at 3.5 TeV, registering more than half a million collision events. But that was nothing: some time in the near future, the Hadron Collider would be ramped up to reach 14 TeV.

  Budapest was also, according to the NYPD, the source of the denial-of-service attack that had preceded the assault on midtown Manhattan. An hour ago, her inbox had suddenly filled to overflowing as a direct line of communication with the CTU had suddenly opened, and she knew she had Frank Ross to thank for that. Now she was directly in touch with members of the CTU, operating anonymously but under the strictest security protocols, built into the laptop and verified by relays.

  It was a two-way street: she was able to transmit information relayed to her by Frank Ross and in turn they were helping her draw a bead on the source of the DoS attack that had temporarily blinded CTU and allowed the gunmen to smuggle in their weapons and get into place. Slowly but surely, she was homing in on the source of the attack: just where she had feared it might be, but the only place that made any sense: eastern Hungary, near the Romanian border. Szeged.

  Szeged today was just off the motorway, but closer in spirit to Timi oara in neighboring Romania than it was to Budapest. Once one of the major border towns of the Hungarian empire, it had fallen to the Turks in 1526 and had become an important Ottoman administrative center; liberated 160 years later, it played an important role in the revolution of 1848, and was completely destroyed in the flood of 1879. It was supposed to be very beautiful, having been rebuilt in the grand Austro-Hungarian style.

  In short, it fit Skorzeny to a T: once Muslim, happily radical, formerly communist, yet filled with creature comforts, good food, and the beautiful Hungarian women. Limited in his movements, he still had plenty of clout in some of the former communist countries in the old Soviet sphere of influence, and it would not be surprising if he could come and go with relative impunity, so long as nobody made a fuss. Though penetrated by German traders in the Middle Ages, the area had never really been civilized, and as one of the central battlegrounds in the war between Islam and the West, it bore the bloody scars of a millennium of conflict.

  The best part, from his perspective, was that it was right on the border of Romania and Serbia, which certainly had no love for the United States, and within striking distance of both Ukraine and Bulgaria, and the ports along the Black Sea.

  And across the Black Sea, of course, lay eastern Turkey and then, Iran. Her home, still. No matter where she lived, no matter what happened, and no matter where she ended up, she would always think of it that way.

  She shook off feelings, brought on by her hunt for Skorzeny and Amanda Harrington. On the flight, she had brought herself up to speed on every action the man had made since their last encounter in Clairvaux. Using both classified information and open-source material she’d been able to assemble a picture of the monster. His movements were severely restricted, but he was still allowed to operate his business interests-much reduced since the failure of his attack on America-and his Foundation, whose real purpose and activities continued to fly under the media radar.

  He was a devil, she had to give him that. Perhaps as a result of his childhood, he had become a master of playing both sides of the street. He was both a rapacious capitalist and a committed one-worlder, whose largesse benefited both former communist societies and the Western poor alike. Renowned for his taste in classical music, there was hardly a symphony orchestra or an opera company on earth that did not benefit from his largesse, and until he went to ground last year, he could often be seen in his private boxes around the globe, taking in a performance of Tosca or Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Less visibly, he was in league with just about every terrorist organization on the face of the earth, surreptitiously funneling money to them through a variety of dummy corporations and charities, destabilizing smaller countries, then swooping in and making a killing. None of it, of course, could be directly traced to him; he had as much plausible deniability as any head of state.

  Personally, he was fastidious to a fault, almost enough to make Howard Hughes at the end look sane. He chose his assistants carefully for their skills and their discretion. She had already had experience with one of them, the man named Pilier whom she had shot on the roof of Clairvaux prison, just before he could bring down the rescue helicopter. Now, if she read things correctly, he had a woman named Derrida, Emanuelle Derrida. Maryam chuckled. She liked that. It showed a sense of humor on the old goat’s part: a deconstructionist for an act of deconstruction. For she had no doubt that was what he was up to.

  And now this business with Elgar. “Frank Ross” had relayed her Atwater ’s findings and theory immediately. For years, the Dorabella cipher had tantalized amateur cryptologists and Elgar lovers, and here was the simplest explanation of all, and one that would have presented itself immediately to any composer-that Elgar was writing out in a kind of shorthand the sketch of his plan for his first great orchestral work. Up to that point he had been a lesser composer; after it, he had taken his place among the greats. And all for the love of a woman.

  It made perfect sense to her. Crazy love-random, unpredictable, mad, and often bad love-was really what made the world go round. True, institutional love with all its trappings gave society stability, provided for orderly succession of property and authority; without it, there could be no civilizations. But it was l’amour fou that caused the real breakthroughs, mad passion, meet one night and elope tomorrow, or throw away everything for a shot at the most inappropriate person imaginable. That was when great things happened, whether for good or for ill.

  Combined with her training, Maryam set her woman’s intuition to work, playing back everything she remembered from that séance in the French prison. She had insinuated herself into the small orchestra Skorzeny had engaged for the occasion-Swiss boarding schools were very good, not only for languages but for musical instruction-and she had seen, up close, the look on that woman’s face: a prisoner of Skorzeny’s mad love. Skorzeny had nearly killed Amanda Harrington that day, and had they not gotten there in time to rescue the American woman’s daughter, Amanda might have died. Now she was with Skorzeny again, most likely unwillingly, and there could be only one reason: amour fou.


  Amanda Harrington would be the way they were going to get Skorzeny.

  Using the laptop he’d provided her and a 4G WNIC, Maryam worked the intel network feverishly, drawing a bead on Miss Harrington. Not for the first time, she blessed Frank for having given her this, one of the most sacred and secret tools in the CSS arsenal. Innovation was the way the West could always stay one step ahead of the East.

  Her thoughts flashed back to her lover, somewhere on the ground in Manhattan. Oddly, she had no fears for him. Certainly not in the realm of direct combat. There was only one thing she feared: the wild card. In his battle in London against Milverton, she might have been able to accept his death, since it would have come against a worthy adversary, a man whose skills and kills were known to her first hand; she had seen him in action. Charles Augustus Milverton had died that day in Camden Town, but it could almost as easily have been “Frank Ross.” That she could have accepted and moved on. But not the chance shot, the senseless death. Then, life really would be as meaningless and random as the atheists said. And Maryam was nothing if not a good Muslim.

  That night, in her room on the Pest side of the Hungarian capital, in one of those old commie-era hotels that had been acquired by a high-end Western chain, with the Danube flowing just outside to the west, she immersed herself in everything there was to discover about Amanda Harrington. Her birth, her schooling, her early lovers. Her life as one of London ’s “It” girls, her failed marriage, her abortion.