Early Warning

by Michael Walsh

  MI5, Britain ’s internal security service, had compiled a handsome dossier on her, largely attributable to her work as a City financial wiz and later the head of the Skorzeny Foundation, and it was a treasure trove of information. Like the FBI reports in the U.S., MI5 reports contained a great deal of unsubstantiated information, even gossip, but none of this had to be provable in a court of law. That was the problem with America these days, she thought: the threshold for conviction had become the de facto standard for everything, including the court of public opinion. The populace had become cowed, afraid to think a single thought that would not be admissible under the highly restrictive and defendant-friendly rules of evidence that had evolved over more than two centuries of constitutional law.

  None of that interested her. At this moment, she was not an intelligence agent, but a woman, a fellow woman. Drill down:

  The abortion. Not, according to the dossier, the product of her marriage to a probably homosexual lesser peer, but the result of a fling, a one-night stand, in New York while in town on business. The prospective father never knew; Amanda had dealt with the consequences of her actions privately, personally. But Maryam knew, she just knew, that this had been the event that had changed Miss Harrington’s life.

  Suddenly, she understood everything.

  The reason for the kidnapping of the American girl, Emma Gardner.

  She scrolled back through the dossier: medical reports, medical reports…There-

  As a result of the abortion, subject lost the physical ability to have children.

  The girl Milverton had snatched in Edwardsville and presented to Amanda as a present. The one thing she had wanted more than anything else in the world. The one thing a lifelong career woman never had had time for. The one thing she, personally, could never have: a daughter.

  So why was she with Skorzeny again?

  Simple: it was he who had sicced “Frank Ross” on Milverton. He who had rolled the dice, in the realization that it almost didn’t matter which of the equally matched adversaries-Hector and Achilles-won, that either way he, Skorzeny, would be the true victor. That Milverton had died that day was just as well. His death removed a rival for Amanda’s hand, and the fact that Amanda, no thanks to Skorzeny, had survived her bout with the paralyzing poison-tetrodotoxin, the hospital report said, most likely derived from the poison of the Japanese fugu fish administered in a nonlethal dose-was evidence that Skorzeny still desired her and had, on some sick level, forgiven her.

  She was his captive. And they were here, together, somewhere in Hungary.

  Come on, girl: find her.

  Search. Search for relationships, hidden relationships, the kind people used to easily be able to conceal, but now, with the aid of ERMs-Entity-Relationship Models-it was child’s play to create a diagram of nearly everybody’s business and personal relationships. That’s the thing most folks never understood, Maryam realized as she called up the diagram, that everything they typed on the computer, every picture or piece of personal information they posted on the social-networking sites, every comment they made on a website, which could be easily traced back to their IP addresses, went into their permanent file, their publicly available dossier, there not only for everybody living to see, but for all future generations as well. If there ever was a morality enforcer-and given the understanding that morality’s definition would change from generation to generation-the Internet was it.

  It had to be here. It had to be. The one missing piece of information. The thing she needed to know. The overlooked item that would link Amanda Harrington and Emanuel Skorzeny to each other, inextricably link them in some sort of sick relationship that neither of them could gainsay, that they would assume Fate had dictated for them long before they were born.

  Skorzeny, she knew, would believe none of this bullshit. Men believed in action, not in fate; they were the architects of their own desires, triumphs, tragedies, and misfortunes. Women believed in soul mates.

  There had to be something between then, something that antedated Harrington’s working with Skorzeny. Something in both their pasts that led them to each other, something that they would both mistake for Fate, even when it was simple Chance. You could be an atheist, and believe the entire universe was random, but when it came to crunch time, no one ever begged chance for one more chance.

  And then she found it. So simple, so unprepossessing, and hiding where all good secrets, and the best intelligence agents, operated: in plain sight.

  Money and Love.

  When all else failed, use Occam’s razor: The simplest explanation was most likely to be true.

  What else was there, but Money and Love?

  Money had first brought them together, and sick Love had kept them together. The sick love Skorzeny had for money and his desire for the solace, however temporary, but satisfying, of women. The love Amanda had for money; how, in the absence of a man and a child in her life, it had made her feel equal to men; and when Skorzeny tapped her-among all others!-for the leadership of his Foundation, what a proof it offered to all her detractors. With money she succeeded and with money she became equal; nay, primus inter pares in the world of the City.

  And Love? For him, she had none. But that didn’t matter to a man like Skorzeny. Pace the Beatles, Skorzeny believed, like most men, that money really could buy you love, and if not love, at least the simulacrum of love, which meant sex and a modicum of affection outside the bedroom.

  Milton understood it. The oldest bargain there was, the source of the world’s oldest profession. Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste brought Death into the World and the source of all our mortal Woe, with the loss of Eden…

  She looked back at Atwater’s report, which amounted to this simple equation, this simple cipher, that not all the cryptographic machines that the CIA, the NSA, the CSS, and everybody else could muster against. The equivalent of Einstein’s E = Mc2. Which was this:

  Money-Love = Revenge.

  She took a deep breath. Were she not a Muslim, she would have taken a deep drink as well, but she only drank when she was in the West, with him, and now that she was back in the East, things were different. Even though no one could see her, there were rituals, formalities, to be observed. No one need know, but she would know and at this point, that was all that mattered.

  They had to be here. They had to be here in Hungary, somewhere. There was an intersection, an interstice, and she had to find it. Because, whatever it was, it would lead her to them. Or them to her. But not right now. She had had a long journey. She needed time to think.

  Maryam took off her clothes and luxuriated under a long hot shower. That was something else that was forbidden, to enjoy the pleasure of your own body, alone, to reach out and try to connect with the driving mechanism of the universe, the eternal piston engine that He had designed, which Newton had grasped under the apple tree: for every action, an equal and opposite reaction. What goes up must come down. One door opens, another closes. A man dies, a child is born…

  A knock at the door, which she discerned only dimly as she toweled off her head. One of those intrusive hotel “welcome” packages that they reserved for VIPs, or people with money, or both. Eastern Europe 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. By hotel standards, it was pretty darned nice; assuming that roughly one-third of the guests would steal the robes, the prices charged were fairly reasonable.

  The laptop lay open and operative on the coffee table.

  There was a woman at the door. Not a room service woman, not an employee of the hotel, no one she was expecting, but someone she very much anticipated seeing.

  “Hello,” said Amanda Harrington.

  And, right behind her, Emanuel Skorzeny. “Bonjour, mon cher,” he said. He had a gun in his hand. He looked over her shoulder, into the room, toward the laptop, and smiled. “May we
come in?”

  Amanda brushed past her with only a sidelong glance, but Skorzeny seemed genuinely please to be meeting her for the first time. “Really, my dear, you are as lovely as I had heard. Truly splendid.” His mien darkened. “But, as you deprived me of the services of a very faithful and valuable retainer at our last encounter, I feel it necessary to introduce you to his successor.”

  He moved to one side. Behind him stood another woman, blond and beautiful.

  She had a gun in her hand, and looked like she knew how to use it, so there was no point in arguing. Maryam ushered them into the room and closed the door.

  She turned, knowing there was nothing to do. Skorzeny sat down like he owned the place-which, come to think of it, was a distinct possibility. Amanda stood off to one side, almost flinching; her eyes met Maryam’s, just as they had back at Clairvaux, only this time their positions were reversed, and Maryam was now the helpless one, while Amanda was the one who might save her if she could, but not right now.

  “Put on some music, please,” Skorzeny commanded, and Amanda dutifully obliged. The hotel came equipped with a flat-screen TV that also carried hundreds of audio channels. In just a few seconds, Amanda had found the channel she was looking for and the music came wafting into the room.

  “Turn it up,” said Skorzeny, breaking into a broad smile as he heard the familiar strains of the overture: brassy, with urgent strings. He addressed his next remarks to her: “You recognize it, of course. Somehow approrpiate, wouldn’t you say?”

  The second woman, the one with the gun-she must be Derrida-said nothing as she started to copy the laptop files. Skorzeny noticed and jumped from his seat:

  “Good God, woman, what do you think you are doing? Don’t touch that. This devil poisons everything he touches.”

  Mlle. Derrida stopped and backed away from the machine.

  “Our hostess is going to close it down, as per the safety instruction manual. And then we are going to take it, and her, with us.”

  Skorzeny turned back to Maryam. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the blonde preparing a needle, with her name on it. The fugu poison again? There was nothing she could do about it.

  “You haven’t answered my question, my dear,” said Skorzeny as Mlle. Derrida approached her. She was powerless to resist. Better to let it happen now, to learn as much as possible while she was in captivity, to try and figure out a way to escape later, to-

  The needle pinched a little, and almost immediately, she felt herself shutting down.

  “The music?” Skorzeny looked at her, mouthed words at her, but she couldn’t make any sense of them in any language. She was so tired. Just before she went completely paralyzed, she might have heard him say:

  “It’s the overture to La Forza del Destino. What an amazing coincidence.”

  But then her world turned dark and she didn’t care anymore.

  DAY THREE

  A black heart! A womanish, willful heart;

  the heart of a brute, a beast of the field;

  childish, stupid, and false;

  a huckster’s heart, a tyrant’s heart.

  – MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations, Book IV

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art

  Principessa Stanley awoke with a start. She didn’t remember much, but what she did remember wasn’t good. Where was she? Where had she been last night?

  Let’s take them in reverse order, she decided. She had already noticed she couldn’t move her arms or her legs, but right now her arms were her primary concern, if only to wipe the dirt and the goo off her face, however it got there. But she couldn’t move her arms, and therefore her legs were the last of her worries at the moment.

  The main worry was the plastic bag over her head and the rag in her mouth. Luckily, she could breathe, which was a duh because if she couldn’t have breathed, she would have been dead long ago. So whoever did this to her at least had enough of a heart to keep her alive, although for what, she’d rather not think…

  Principessa Stanley was a good reporter. In fact, she was a better reporter than most of her rivals, including those on the newspapers. She had earned her job fairly, with a high degree from a good School of Communication, which was what all the former journalism schools were calling themselves these days. It was not her fault that she was pretty and had a killer body; those assets were only the deciding factors, the extras, whenever she had been up for a gig in the past. At her level now, every woman was either good-looking or unemployed. Such was the triumph of feminism.

  So why was she here, buried up to her neck in a dirt grave behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Who had done this to her?

  She tried not to panic. That was what she always heard. Panic would get you nowhere. Worse, panic would get you killed even faster. Take deep breaths…

  She panicked. She struggled and writhed and tried to pretzel her way out of the shallow grave, but it was useless. She was planted in the backyard of the Met, like some kind of human vegetable like Farmer Brown’s victims in that ridiculous horror movie from the eighties, Motel Hell. Her assailant probably had seen the damn thing, which is what had given him the idea. Fucking hicks from flyover country were all the same: right-wing nuts who ought to be hunted down and exterminated. When Angela Hassett beat that horrid Jeb Tyler in the fall, things were going to change, but good. She could hardly wait, not that she would ever admit that on the air or anything. After all she was a neutral journalist.

  She caught herself and stopped moving. Clearly, she wasn’t going to get out all at once. She was going to have to work her way out of this, wriggle out of it, like a worm or something, a quarter-inch at a time. Slow and steady wins the race.

  She tried pushing down at whatever solid ground might be below her, but couldn’t get much of a purchase. The soil was soft and loamy, freshly dug; all she was managing to do was sink a little deeper, which obviously wasn’t the way to go. Once again she stopped, and this time she realized she was already out of breath. What a ripoff that gym membership had been. All that cardio exercise was supposed to help you in situations like this, wasn’t it?

  Think.

  Then she felt something move between her legs. If she could have jumped, she would have. Instead, she thought her heart was going to stop, right then and there.

  What the hell was in the pit with her?

  Her mind raced. She was starting to lose it.

  A snake? Did they even have snakes in Central Park? There must be snakes in Central Park. There were coyotes in Central Park now, and she had to admit that she always felt a small thrill whenever another wild animal was sighted within the five boroughs. It was long past time that humans should move aside and start sharing the limited space on the planet with animals who, afterall, were just people without lawyers of their own species.

  It moved again.

  It didn’t feel like a snake. It didn’t feel like it was slithering, whatever slithering felt like. Snakes didn’t travel underground, did they? She remembered that time when she was a girl when she saw a sunning snake slither back into its lair, in a hole in the ground. So it could be a snake, after all.

  But what if it was a gopher, or a groundhog, or a woodchuck, something with teeth? Would that be worse than a snake? Something that would start by nibbling on her extremities, get a tasty bite or two, and then set about making a meal out of her, so that when they finally found her, when the city wasn’t in lockdown anymore, they’d reach for her head and that would be all that was left of her, the rest having gone to nourish a colony of woodchucks the size of Staten Island.

  There it went again. That same feeling. Whatever its source, it didn’t seem to be moving, just sitting there between her knees and her crotch, buzzing, tickling her, vibrating…in other context, she might even have enjoyed the experience. But not now.

  She tried to push herself up again, which was a dumb idea, because she moved farther south, and she also felt whatever it was slide a little as it vib
rated once more.

  It was a cell phone. Her cell phone, which she had been looking at when that bastard assaulted her. If she could somehow slide her hand down and grab it…well, that was the first half of the plan. The second half would be to somehow get her arm out from underneath the dirt and bring the phone to her face, where she would somehow manage to get the damn thing to work, even if she had to press the talk button with her nose.

  She reached. It was like fighting her way through molasses, but amazingly she could make a little progress. That was the upside of the loamy soil; her hand could actually move a little. Inch by inch. Keep it simple. Baby steps. Get to the goal eventually, even if it took forever.

  Wait a minute-she didn’t have forever. She tried to recall what she read about people living without food and water. You could go without food for weeks-just look at those Irish hunger-strikers-but water, she was pretty sure, was a nonnegotiable commodity. Maybe a day or two, then madness set in, followed by death. What if the crisis wasn’t over by then? The way the cops fought these days, it might take them a week to round up the dudes for the fair trials. She couldn’t wait to cover the proceedings.

  Her thoughts continued to run along these lines until she realized that she was already slipping into madness. Goddamnit, didn’t that bastard know who she was? He couldn’t treat her like this! The minute she got out of here, she was going to hunt his ass down, find him, and rat him out to the cops. She’d testify at the trial and hope to hell he’d get the death penalty. Normally, she was against the death penalty, but in this case she’d make an exception.

  The buzzing again. Her hand moved closer. It brushed up against something. By God, she was closer to it all along than she had thought! Now we were getting somewhere.