“Good. The world needs no more Beslans.” He reached for and sipped from a small glass of Saint-Geron, as a prophylactic against anemia. It was one of his strictures that his quarters always be outfitted with the distinctive long-necked Alberto Bali — designed bottles, and M. Pilier was diligent in his discharge of that duty. “And yet, given the course of action upon which we have just embarked, this could be a helpful development.”
“Helpful, sir?”
“In our business, chaos and uncertainty, while deplorable, can be our friends. Do you disagree?”
Pilier shook his head. “No, sir. Of course not. The vote today was clear, and obviously it’s in the best interests of our company. After all—”
“After all,” interrupted Skorzeny, “it’s the business we’re in. Making money. So that the Foundation can tend to the needs of the world’s poor. The hungry. The oppressed. The needy. Doing good by doing well. The bedrock of philanthropy is selfishness — greed, if you will. One of life’s petty little oxy-morons, but there you are…Contact all our sources in America and place our trades accordingly. I want everything in order when the markets open tomorrow morning. We are on a holy crusade.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And see that my jet is fueled and ready for Paris. We leave immediately.”
Chapter Ten
WASHINGTON, D.C. — THE OVAL OFFICE
Pam Dobson looked at her watch. She had long, blond hair, which she wore as if she were still twenty-eight, which she wasn’t. “We’ve only got a few hours to get this over with, Mr. President — unless, that is, you want to accept Allah while standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial tomorrow morning.”
“Have we got a bead on the guy who shot the reporter?” asked Tyler. They were in his private study off the Oval Office, all but Colonel Grizzard, who had been dismissed. The president wanted as few military men in his face as possible, and Seelye was more than enough.
“No sir, no yet,” she replied.
“That’s not quite right, Mr. President,” said Seelye. He pulled out a secure, upgraded version of the civilian BlackBerry and consulted it. “The man has been positively identified as Suleyman Drusovic, a Kosovar Muslim currently resident in Montreal.”
“So he’s Canadian?” wondered the president. “What would a Canadian have against an American school?”
“With all due respect, Mr. President,” said Seelye, trying to conceal his frustration, “he’s an ethnic Albanian, a Muslim, who just so happens to hold a Canadian passport at this time. He’s no more ‘Canadian’ than you are.” To Seelye, “Canadians” were hockey players and moose hunters, Scottish Presbyterians with names like Maitland and MacGregor, not Balkan Muslims. But what did he know? The world he knew was fast receding, and whatever would replace it fast approaching.
The intercom buzzed. “Secretary Rubin is here, sir,” came a female voice. That was Millie Dhouri, a Lebanese Christian from Detroit, who had been with Tyler since the day after September 11, when he suddenly realized his personal staff needed to be more inclusive. The door opened and in walked Howard Rubin, the secretary of defense.
The president addressed him as if he’d been part of the conversation all along. “What else do we know, Howard?”
The SecDef was a mild-mannered intellectual, who had come to government service from the Ivy League. He believed all problems were inherently solvable with enough wit and will; under him, the military had suffered fairly draconian cutbacks. To say he was not particularly popular with the brass would be an understatement. He and Seelye cordially loathed each other, even as they were yoked together in the service of their country.
“Our forces around the world are on high alert, Mr. President,” Rubin said. “Keyhole birds report no significant adverse activity in NoKo, Iran, or the breakaway ’stans. We’re still watching the Columbia-Venezuela-Bolivia axis, though.”
“What about the film the terrorists showed us? What can we tell from that?”
That was Seelye’s department. “Being analyzed right now, sir. Results shortly.”
The president thought for a moment. “So…do we raise the threat level? Get the other agencies involved?”
As far as Seelye was concerned, the second question answered itself. This thing was too urgent to fuck around with the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, or even the director of National Intelligence. “Not at this time, Mr. President. No sense letting them know they’re in our shorts before we get into theirs. As to your second question”—he looked at Rubin, whose face betrayed nothing—“my advice is that we keep this as compartmentalized as possible until we figure out what’s going on.”
No one dissented. Seelye’s BlackBerry buzzed. He hooked it up to a video port and switched on the screen. “NSA has run the tape through advanced face-recog software against all known terrorists in multiple databases, including CIA and FBI. Apologies for the quality, but it’s a gen2 beta system that we’re still testing.”
Everyone watched, fascinated. “As you can see, all of the commandos except Drusovic have some parts of their features obscured, which ordinarily wouldn’t be a problem for our equipment, since we can use almost any feature or distinguishing characteristic to—”
“Spare us the details of your wondrous toys, General,” ordered Tyler. “What you’re saying is, it is a problem.”
“In a sense,” replied Seelye. “But in an interesting sense. We’re drawing a blank on every single one of the commandos. Which means they’re all new recruits, fresh blood — or fresh meat — recruited for this specific occasion.”
“In other words, you don’t have the slightest idea who we’re dealing with.”
“In other words, we’re dealing with rookies,” replied Seelye.
Tyler frowned. “Why would this Drusovick—”
“It’s pronounced ‘Dru-so-vich,’ sir—”
“This ‘Drusovic’ want to show his face?”
Rubin got it in one. “Because whoever’s behind him wants us to see it.”
The president still didn’t get it.
“He’s not running the operation,” said Seelye. “He’s just a patsy, a pawn. A very expendable front man with dreams of martyrdom glory. He—” Seelye looked down at a modified descendant PDA, a special, limited-access, NSA-issued prototype that allowed him full access to just about everything. “Oh, shit.”
On the screen now was live coverage from Edwardsville: HOSTAGES SHOT read the graphic.
There were two bodies, lying in front of the main entrance to the school, where they had been dumped. A man and a woman. The woman had half her face blown away, but as soon as the live feed picked her up, it disappeared from the screen. Some details were too gory for the delicate sensibilities of the American public.
“Did I see what I think I just saw?” asked the president. “Why the hell aren’t they showing us what happened? Why did they cut away?”
“The networks don’t want to inflame public sentiment,” said Secretary Rubin. “And I must say, I don’t blame them. All we need now are some gun-toting nuts to jump in their pickup trucks and—”
“And what, Howard?” asked Seelye. “Defend their children?”
“Shut up,” barked the president. “He’s talking again.”
It was Drusovic, sneeringly stepping aside to make sure the bodies would stay in the shot with him.
“These are for you, Mr. President,” the man shouted. “And they will keep coming until we get your answer. And when we finish with the teachers…we start on the children.”
He grinned maliciously. “We want the world to see what you have done, Mr. President. What happens here tonight will make history and we want the world to witness it. Every newspaper, every channel, worldwide. They are welcome. But anybody tries anything and — everybody dies.”
Pam Dobson started to cry. The ashen look on the president’s face spoke to their common humanity. Tyler may be a fool, thought Seelye, but no one doubted his capacity for empathy or his ability
to touch the heart of the average man. It was the quality that had made him such a formidable lawyer and politician.
“Pam, he said, “we’re all going to have to be strong now. Strong for each other, strong for the country. So why don’t you go back to your office and pull yourself together. I’m going to need your best work.”
Dobson rose. “Yes, sir,” she said. “Thank you, sir.”
Seelye took the opening. “Sir, there’s something Secretary Rubin and I need to discuss with you. As you may recall from your briefing—”
Millie’s voice wafted over the intercom again: “Senator Hartley is still waiting, Mr. President.”
Tyler thought for a moment, then said, “Send him in.”
Seelye objected immediately: “Mr. President, I really must object to Senator Hartley’s presence in this meeting. He is not authorized to—”
“He’s the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, General,” replied the president. “Whatever we decide to do, however this plays out, both parties are going to have to be involved.”
Seelye glanced over at Rubin, who took the hint. “Sir,” he said, “we’re not questioning Bob’s loyalty or his committee’s legitimate legislative oversight. But what we’re about to discuss is SCI.” Sensitive Compartmented Information, essentially, was above Top Secret.
Tyler shook his head. “I don’t care. As the president, I am authorized to release any information to anybody any time I want to, and this is one of those times. I need political backup on this and I also need plausible deniability. Bob Hartley is my friend, even if he is from the other party. So let’s get on with it. Hello, Bob…take a seat.”
Seelye and Rubin nodded in acknowledgment as Hartley entered the room. That was about all the courtesy they were prepared to show him at this moment.
Seelye pretended Hartley wasn’t there; not for nothing was “civilian” the dirtiest word in his vocabulary, even if Hartley was a senator. “Under the authority of National Security Decision Memorandum 5100.20, signed by President Nixon on December 23, 1971, and amended by President G. H. W. Bush on June 24, 1991,” said General Seelye, “the Sec Def and I believe that you should provisionally authorize a Central Security Service operation to terminate the ongoing incident in Edwardsville.”
“Terminate, how?” asked Hartley.
“Shut the fuck up, Bob,” said Tyler. “You’re here to observe, not talk.” Hartley bristled a little. Tyler noticed and didn’t care; they had been friends for too long for Hartley to take it personally. “Terminate, how, General?”
“With extreme, exemplary prejudice, sir,” replied Seelye.
President Tyler vaguely remembered the CSS, a special division of the National Security Agency that not one American in a million had even heard of, much less understood its function. The CSS had been created originally under the Nixon administration as the “fourth branch” of the armed services, to complement the Army, the Air Force, and the Navy/Marines in the burgeoning field of electronic intelligence and combat. But the traditional-minded put up the predictable bureaucratic fuss, and the CSS was quietly folded in the NSA, authorized to work with each of the individual service branches in capturing and decoding enemy SIGINT. So when, for example, a Navy submarine tapped an undersea Soviet communications cable, or one of the Air Force’s many electronic surveillance overflights picked up hostile transmissions, they were relayed to the CSS for evaluation and, if necessary, action.
But the CSS chafed at being a bystander and, using the “No Such Agency” cloak of anonymity, quickly moved into the void, coordinating covert strikes on Soviet assets with the utmost plausible deniability—“accidents” were amazingly common — and establishing its own presence as a service to be reckoned with. Still, resistance from the uniformed services kept it in the shadows of its birth, where it lurked now — the incognito, but highly effective, muscle arm of the NSA.
“Specifically, Section 6.1.21,” added Rubin.
“What’s that?” interjected Hartley.
“Shut the fuck up, Bob,” barked Tyler. “Remind me again what that is,” he asked Rubin.
“It’s the section of the NSDM that says that the CSS may ‘perform such other functions as the Secretary of Defense assigns.’”
“We’re talking about a Branch 4 operation, sir,” said Seelye. “It’s that simple.”
“Remind me again what Branch 4 is?”
Seelye ignored the question. “Sir, Branch 4 was established precisely to deal with situations like these, so unless you’re prepared to see kiddie corpses start flying out those windows, we strongly advise you to let us get this operation up and running ASAP.”
The president’s gaze drifted from face to face to the TV set on the other side of the Oval Office, to Edwardsville and the two dead teachers. Finally, it alighted on Rubin. “And your advice is, Howard? Branch 4 or…?”
“Or surrender before anybody else gets killed and run the risk of impeachment from Senator Hartley’s party for dereliction of duty. It’s that simple.”
The president glanced over at Hartley, who silently nodded his assent. “General?”
“I’ve been involved in counterterrorism since the 1980s,” said Seelye, “and if this isn’t a job for Branch 4, then nothing is. We need to get in there, take them out, and disappear.”
The president was confused but convinced. “So how do we do it?”
“Get ‘Devlin.’ Now.”
“Who’s Devlin?” asked Hartley.
“Shut the fuck up, Bob,” ordered the president.
“Mr. President, sir,” objected Hartley, “you invited me here and—”
Tyler ignored him. “Who’s Devlin?” he asked.
“‘Devlin’ is the code name for Branch 4’s most trusted and highly skilled operative,” explained Seelye, with uncontrolled pride. “He’s an expert in cryptology, in electronic surveillance, in marksmanship, and in hand-to-hand combat. In fact, he’s the best we’ve got.”
The president’s incredulous look begged Seelye to continue. “Nobody knows his real name. If it exists on record at all, it’s buried deep in the NSA files. Operationally, however, he used a rotating series of other pseudonyms, never the same one twice. Not even we know what they are when he goes into action.”
President Tyler was incredulous. “You mean to tell me that the United States government has an anonymous operative we can’t really control?”
“No, sir,” replied Seelye. “Not the United States government. We do. The three of us in this room.” Seelye caught himself, looked over at Hartley. “And one member of congressional oversight.”
If Tyler regretted his decision to let Hartley sit in on the meeting, his face didn’t betray him. “Go on,” he ordered, glancing over at Hartley with an unspoken warning: shut the fuck up, Bob.
“Imagine a platoon of high-tech exterminators, who do the job other American agents can’t or won’t do,” explained Rubin. “Each agent has an unbreakable alias or cover. They operate completely off the shelf and under the radar; and they work under pain of death.”
“What do you mean, ‘pain of death’?” asked the president.
“Operational security is not only everything, it’s the only thing,” offered Seelye. “The identity of each Branch 4 agent is unknown even to another Branch 4 agent. They put together their own teams, the members of which are unaware for whom they’re really working. And should their identities ever become known even to a fellow member of the unit…” His voice trailed off, his meaning clear.
“Are you telling me that the United States government employs professional assassins?”
“I wouldn’t use that word, Mr. President,” replied General Seelye. “More like the business end of our forward defenses. The tip of the tip of the spear.”
“Branch 4 is a unit whose very existence — until this moment — is authorized to be known to only three governmental officials: POTUS, the SecDef, and DIRNSA,” continued Rubin, turning his attention to Hartley, trying to imp
ress on him the importance of keeping his mouth shut. “Notice I did not use our names. Branch 4 existed before we assumed our offices and it will continue to exist after we leave. No matter who is sitting in our chairs…”
The president did a slow burn. “Why is this the first time I’m hearing about it?”
“It’s not, sir,” said Seelye, quietly. “It’s just that you’ve made domestic considerations the top priority of your administration thus far.”
President Tyler was in a box. He hated being in a box. He hated Rubin and Seelye for putting him in a box. When this was over, especially if it ended badly, he was going to have both their heads on pikes, to be displayed in the Rose Garden until the next election. “This Branch 4, this Devlin…sounds like God.”
“The next best thing,” said Seelye. “Plus, Branch 4, you get your prayers answered one hundred percent of the time. Devlin never fails.”
The president thought for a moment. “Does this mean I won’t have to convert to Islam?” he asked. “I don’t think that would go over very well with the folks back home in Lafayette.”
“That’s exactly what it means,” said Seelye.
That seemed to please Jeb Tyler. “Get Devlin,” said the president of the United States.
Chapter Eleven
LEONARDO DA VINCI AIRPORT, ROME, CHRISTMAS, 1985
The man known as “Devlin” was born on December 27, 1985, in Rome, Italy. At the time, he was eight years old.
Survivors of shootings almost always say that, at first, they thought the gunshots were something else. A car backfiring. A man chipping ice off a windshield on a freezing winter’s day. Birthday balloons popping. The mind attempts to process what it already knows, and instinctively blocks that which it doesn’t wish to recognize. Such things are called “memories.”
“Mama, can I have one?” One what? He could only remember the want, not the object. Some trifle for sale in one of the kiosks.
“No,” she said.
Far better to remember her, his mother, as she was, young and beautiful, young to him, beautiful to him and at least two others — but that he only found out about later, when he was older, not young.
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