He had to laugh. Falls Church had once been a prosperous and stable small city-the smallest in the country-but like everything and every place in America, it had changed radically. Today, naturally, it was a hotbed of anti-American Islamic activity, just a few miles from the Capitol. One thing you could say about the Americans; they were going to let their newfound fetish tolerance run free if it got them all killed. And if and when it did, the hell with them.
He moved into his secure room, which was just as he left it. He had just witnessed a boy much like himself go willingly to his death out of passion-not for some abstract bullshit ideal, but for something he believed in, during the course of which he touched something he had never touched before-not just a woman, but the Other. In his sick, twisted way, Raymond Crankheit had caught a glimpse of the other side, the side where happiness dwelled, and he’d liked it well enough not to kill Principessa Stanley. Just as he, Devlin, had caught that glimpse with Maryam and decided to gamble everything on his one chance at happiness.
“Do you trust the bitch? You don’t even know her real name.”
Where the hell was she? He had not heard from her since her last message from Budapest, and though he knew he shouldn’t care, it was only business, she was on assignment-his assignment-and that op sec was indeed everything…he still cared.
Maybe it had been a mistake to bring her in. Maybe he should have killed her last year when he had the chance, after their night together in Echo Park, a mercy killing. Maybe he should have let her die in Paris, when she took a bullet for him.
Maybe…but then where would he be?
He’d watched the entire Kohanloo takedown from one of the safe houses on the Upper East Side, near Gracie Mansion. Using the electronic entrepôt that Byrne had given him-one that he knew would be temporary and limited to this operation-he was able to see the whole thing from the chopper’s built-in cams, part of the same mechanism that gave the flying machine its night vision. He would have liked to have been part of that, but he had acted on his intuition that Byrne was a right gee, as the cops used to say back in the old days, and he’d been proven correct.
He went into the bathroom. He could still see the bloodstains on the floor, where Evalina Anderson had died at his hand. He started to scrub them, but they were old and dried, and after a while he gave up. Then he threw up.
There were too many ghosts now, piling up, even right here in his own home. At some point, one of them would reach out of the past and claim him and then that would be that.
He switched on his systems in the panic room. He’d have to update them all, of course, and run endless security checks, but for now all he wanted to do was see if there were any urgent messages sent via the private T-3 line to The Building in Maryland.
There were.
URGENT-that would be from Seelye. The man never slept.
SPEAK
MESSAGE FOR YOU, FROM YOU
That could mean only one thing-a message Maryam had sent from the secure laptop had been received.
RELAY
I DON’T THINK YOU REALLY WANT TO SEE IT
DON’T FUCK WITH ME DAD.
WE CHECKED THE IP ADDRESS.
HUNGARY, SO WHAT?
NOT HUNGARY.
WHERE THEN?
YOU’RE NOT GOING TO LIKE THIS
WHERE??
There was a short pause before the answer came: IRAN. TEHRAN, TO BE PRECISE
Devlin tried to control his panic. MEANING WHAT?
WHAT DO YOU THINK? SHE’S DEFECTED
IMPOSSIBLE
ENTIRELY LIKELY. WE GOT A DOSSIER, COURTESY OF SENDER. IT’S ALL ABOUT HER. WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE IT? SEEMS SHE’S BEEN A DOUBLE AGENT THE WHOLE TIME
FOR WHAT PURPOSE?
WHY, BOY, FOR YOU. WHAT OTHER PURPOSE?
BUT SHE-He stopped. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t. REQUIRE PROOF. COULD BE SKORZENY DOUBLE, FALSE FLAG, ANYTHING
THERE WAS ONE OTHER THING
WHAT?
SIGNED BY HER
WHAT??
YOU SHOULD SEE FOR YOURSELF
SEND IT
I WILL. BUT YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT THIS NEGATES OUR PREVIOUS AGREEMENT. MY JOB IS NOW SECURE SO LONG AS TYLER STAYS PRESIDENT. WHICH YOU AND I WILL NOW ENSURE. DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR?
SEND IT AND WE’LL TALK LATER
SUIT YOURSELF.
Even before it came, he knew what was coming. A taunt, a jest? Or the truth?
It came across the screen:
It was the “Dorabella” Variation, written out in Elgar’s hand. The code Atwater had cracked. The substitution for the substitution. The most visible layer of the endless palimpsest that was his world, and hers as well.
And underneath, in her hand, the words: “I’m so sorry.”
He was not sure how long it was before he noticed a new sensation. It was a pain in his chest, a throbbing, searing pain-no, not pain, more like a new emotion, one that he had never experienced before, but one that brought on shortness of breath, sweats, shivers.
Then he became aware of a sound rushing in his ears, like the waters of a river, or the waves of a great ocean. There was the smell of salt in his nose, as of brine and felt himself toppling backwards into a tidal pool that splashed the world with ocean spray as the waves met the rocks on the shore.
He thrust his arms and let gravity take him, plunging down toward the sea, the primal sea, not Mother Earth but Mother Ocean, the place where blood and seed were the same, the place where life began and where death could take you any time it wanted. And all accompanied by the beating of a great drum, the tactus of the universe, the thing that set our rhythms, from the seconds to the minutes to the hours to the days to the weeks to the months to the-
The beating of the human heart.
The ghosts reached out, but he shook them off. Not yet. Too soon.
The beating grew louder, stronger, more urgent. Across the oceans of time he had heard her and could hear her now. Across oceans of distance, he would find her. The only thing he could not do, ever, was to doubt her.
Of one other thing, finally, there could be no doubt: at last he knew he had a heart.
Michael Walsh
***
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