Still, there were the security cameras. Every place had them these days, if only for insurance purposes; another thing to thank the lawyers for. Not that anybody actually live-monitored them, or even bothered to look at them, unless something happened. And, until today, nothing ever happened in Edwardsville.
Which is why he always carried optical camouflage.
It sounded like something out of science fiction: a kind of raincoat that he could don and, essentially, be rendered invisible, especially to the cheap CCTV cameras. But it was real. First developed by the Tachi Lab at Todai, the University of Tokyo, “crystal vision” or, they rendered it, “X’tal vision,” it gave the appearance of transparency by using retro-reflective materials and a head-mounted projector. It was a kind of magic trick, but NSA/CSS had quickly taken the technology and improved it. The CCTV feed, which was largely static, he had hacked via Echelon and digitalized on the way over, so it was a simple matter to project it onto his coat as the cameras made their desultory scans. All he needed was screen shots of the hallways and he was in like Flynn. Which he now was. If anybody ever reviewed the tapes, he would see nothing.
A minute later Devlin was on the roof.
Through the scope, he could easily see the school. Washington had allowed the helicopter to land on the roof, just as he’d advised. It was one more indication that the whole “terrorist attack” scenario was crap. Terrorists were ready to die. Somebody in there wanted to live, and get away fast. Still, it made for good theater for the journalists, giving them the impression that, were their demands only satisfied, the bad guys would simply vanish into thin air.
So whose ride was the chopper? Faster almost than the thought was the deed, and he had Seelye on the scrambled cell line. “What about the blond guy video? The teacher?”
“Sent it to you ages ago. Must not have gone through.” Even NSA had glitches.
“Resend ASAP.”
This time it came through in an instant. Devlin muffled a choice curse under his breath: billions and billions spent on intelligence and here we were, just as susceptible to snafus as the remotest Fourth World shithole.
He brought up a picture of a man’s ear. The man he’d spotted immediately, the one he’d made for the guy running the operation. Not Drusovic, but the only guy who planned on getting out of there alive. Devlin punched the ear into the database, and went audio with a Fort Meade tech. “Match me, Sidney.”
That was the signal to match the ear to the man, and while the man’s face wasn’t visible it didn’t matter, since no two ear shapes are precisely alike. Using a sophisticated form of the AFIS system that police departments all over the country employed, CSS was able to match the ear to the face of anyone in its vast database, which included not only known hostiles, but all friendlies as well, and a great many — the number at this point ran into the millions — of ordinary civilians, blissfully unaware they had made the National Security Agency’s home movies. What that guy did in Gorky Park, CSS could do in less than a minute. It was a civil libertarian’s nightmare, but an agent’s dream.
“Back at ya,” said the disembodied voice in his ear as it evaporated.
They were both obeying the first rule of the CSS — that everyone is always listening to you, including your nosy aunt Hilda. The transmitted information that followed was a stream of gibberish to anyone listening in, routed through two other secure cell phones, then decoded and recoded in sequence until finally a single name popped up on Devlin’s screen:
Milverton.
Devlin felt a rush of bile. He knew this day was going to have to come, had known it for years, had wondered what took him so long.
Milverton. “The worst man in London.” It was his little joke.
For Sherlock Holmes, Charles Augustus Milverton was a blackmailer of society women and all-around dirt bag. For the CSS, he was the most dangerous rogue agent on earth. Former Special Air Services, discharged under murky circumstances. Where Doyle’s Milverton was fiftyish, plump, and hairless, this Milverton was blond, blue-eyed, physically fit, and ruthless—200 pounds of lethal weapon happily married to killer instinct.
Devlin decided that, for the moment, he’d keep the ID to himself. Milverton and he had a history, and he didn’t want anyone thinking this was personal. But his suspicions had been right from the start: Devlin was in mortal danger. Whether Fort Meade or Washington knew that too, and sent him anyway, was a question he didn’t even have to ask. Not one pawn in play now, but two. Both poisoned.
Devlin felt his fury rising. This couldn’t just be a coincidence. In his line of work, there were no such things as coincidences.
In the eternal game of cross and double-cross that was intelligence work, you had less to worry about from your enemies than your friends. Because while your enemies could always be relied upon for their hostile intent, you could never really trust your friends. In this case, however, both friend and foe had the exact same mission: they wanted Milverton to find him.
Devlin took a deep breath, not wishing to confront the implications. His whole purpose in life was to dwell in the shadows, work in the shadows, live in the shadows, and, eventually, die in the shadows. Branch 4 rules were clear: his existence was to stay unknown.
And now Milverton had come looking for him. The past, which for Devlin didn’t exist, was about to catch up to him. And however this situation in Edwardsville ended, there would be hell to pay back in Washington.
Very well, then. Time to get it on.
Devlin buzzed Bartlett. Two beeps, followed by a short and a long: “Go on signal.” Syllables in reverse. It wasn’t a suggestion. No answer was necessary
Devlin called up a three-dimensional map of the school and the surrounding area. Not one of those Google Earth civilian applications, but the latest word in imaging. Every time a certain type of government plane overflew any given ten-square-acre quadrant of the United States of America, a bank of cameras photographed every inch of the target. Those photos were scrambled, encoded, uplinked to a satellite no one had ever heard of, re-encoded, rescrambled and then downlinked to Fort Meade via a series of cutouts in Christchurch, New Zealand; Barrow, Alaska; and Tupelo, Mississippi, the last because a previous administration had been big Elvis fans. Not to mention the new NSA Regional Operations Security Center that had recently come on line in Wahiawa, Oahu.
He flash-memorized the layout, every detail, then rose, ready to act…
What was that?
Out on the school grounds, somebody’s cell phone was getting a call. Which meant it was punching back GPS coordinates. A parent. An idiot. A hero?
No time to lose. The cell-phone bubble would be in place soon. And then all communications would be cut off, to give Devlin and his men complete communications command of the battlefield.
Most civilians didn’t realize this, but their cell phones were the government’s best friends. Without any coercion whatsoever, nearly the entire American population had been persuaded to carry around a locating device. You didn’t even have to be using your cell phone for someone to track you; it just had to be switched on, sending out those little locating beeps that futzed with your radio if you left it on your bedside table at night, beep-beeping your location to anyone who cared to notice. Might as well wear an ankle bracelet, then paint a bull’s eye on your ass.
Devlin fed in the cell phone’s information, uplinked, and got back the name of the subscriber: Mrs. Hope Gardner.
He flipped open what looked like a hooded BlackBerry but was in actuality a motion-capture videophone that worked like a TiVo; he could “rewind” to any point in the past hour to see whatever the naked eye had missed: using the field of coverage provided by the school’s hidden motion detectors — all newly built schools had them since Beslan, although the public knew nothing about them — he could observe the entire perimeter. He went visual. There:
He could barely make out the blur, but he knew at once it was a human figure, female. Around the back, near the electrical shed. On
her hands and knees, disappearing from view just as the chopper settled on the roof. Unfortunately, the video was not real time. The United States had not yet fully descended into Big Brother country, where everything you did was on a live feed, but it was only a matter of time.
He checked the time: four minutes ago. Wherever that woman was, she wasn’t there any more.
“Leave your cell phone on, lady,” Devlin breathed to himself. “And don’t do anything stupid.”
He knew that was probably a forlorn hope.
Chapter Twenty
EDWARDSVILLE — JEFFERSON MIDDLE SCHOOL
Charles Augustus Milverton was sleeping. No, not sleeping — half asleep, almost dreaming. In that special state between wakefulness and slumber, when the mind races, leaps, and makes unique connections between different and disparate people, places, and things. The gym bench was hard, but somehow he managed.
Children. That was the key. Childhood. Think back.
The north of England. Geordie country, Tyneside. The Borders, with the heathen Scots just a stone’s throw away. And him a vicar’s son. The only son, the eldest child, with one sister, so beautiful, so weak, so helpless in the face of Fate.
Anglo-Catholic. The worst kind. Higher than C of E, lower than the Whore of Rome. All the strictures of the Church of England, but without divorce. No way out. One sin, unconfessed and unrequited, and you were damned to Hell for all eternity. It focused the mind even as it corroded the soul.
The sermons. The lectures, unending. The history lessons, that went on forever. What did he care about history? About England? He had better and bigger places to go. England was nothing to him, a place, a climate, a series of vaguely related accents, a semishared history of conquest and kings. Although sometimes, standing here, near Hadrian’s Wall, he could feel himself as one with the Romans and their Anglo-Saxon successors, nervously eyeing the Picts to the north, spears and shields at the ready.
Who dares, wins. That was his motto. Perhaps history had a useful lesson or two after all. That was what his father had tried to impress upon him, anyway. One of the few times in the vicar’s life that he had not been cowed by ritual and superstition.
Under normal circumstances, he never would have let that raghead hit him. A savage from the outer limits of Europe, a country so weak it has been easily conquered by Islam and, worse, had stayed conquered. Not like France, under Charles Martel. Not like Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella, who had chucked out the Muslims and the Jews, for good measure, and then had sent Columbus packing across the Atlantic Ocean, pretty much in a single inning. Not like Austria, with Sobieski defending the gates of Vienna.
That Europe was gone now. Even England no longer had to worry about the Picts and the Scots and Irish. There were mosques in Newcastle, and in Leeds, and in York, and in Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, and London. England was finished.
And without a fight. That was the bit that still surprised him. When Rhodesia went, he could understand it; Cecil Rhodes was Colonel Blimp, and Ian Smith was a giant pantomime horse for the Fleet Street johnnies of their day, riding high atop their moral dudgeon. He could have sworn South Africa would put up a fight, especially given their nuclear alliance with Israel, but at the end of the day, Johannesburg folded quietly, leaving the Boers and the Huguenots to fend for themselves in the brave new world of Nelson and Winnie Mandela.
He was too young for Rhodesia, but he had fought in South Africa and elsewhere, as a mercenary on the Dark Continent, trying desperately to reclaim not the White Man’s Burden but the White Man’s Gold; half a century after the end of colonialism, Africa was sliding back into savagery, its infrastructure failing, its farms collapsing, its education and political systems in tatters. And now it, and Britain’s former colonies in the Middle East and “Asia”—India and Pakistan — were taking their well-deserved revenge on the Mother Country, exporting their charming native pathologies back to Birmingham and Sheffield and Manchester and Newcastle: female circumcision, “honour killings,” stoning homosexuals, subway bombings, the lot.
He hated them all. He hated them for what they had done to his childhood views of Empire, but most of all he hated them for the lie they had given to what his father had taught him.
And yet he also admired them. Admired them for their audacity to challenge civilization and dare it to defend itself and its so-called “superiority.” Theirs was the rule of the AK-47, not of Article 3, Section 1; the rule of the id, not of the superego. Theirs was the will to power, whether they knew Schopenhauer or not.
And that was the flaw in his father’s belief: that he could stand there, watching the oncoming blue-painted Picts and Celts, bones in their noses and the flesh of their enemies between their teeth, with equanimity, and see souls to be saved. Even when his sister had died, screaming in pain from a ruptured appendix, begging for help that had never come because their father had had to attend to his superstition, minister to his flock, while she writhed and bled and died, the lesson had not changed. It was God’s will…and there yet remained souls to be saved.
Whereas Milverton saw not souls but enemies to be slaughtered before they breached the Wall. His father’s church was an imaginary refuge, a false castle, a hive of fairy tales about Jesus, the Apostles, the Crusades, Urban II, Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Malachy and his prophecies, St. Louis. The Middle Ages was a nightmare, the Renaissance but a dream, a brief respite before Europe too succumbed and slid back into that endless night that had followed the fall of Rome.
That was why he had joined SAS, the 22s, as soon as he was legally able, that was why he had pushed himself, that was why he had passed all the tests, risen through the ranks, punished England’s enemies both at home and abroad, taken the fight to the IRA in Belfast and Gibraltar; and after that operation had gone tits up thanks to the gutter press, had moved into the private sector, working across Europe, Africa, and Asia and now in America. It was hard work but it was good work and it paid very well. In fact, it paid top dollar, as well it should: pound for pound, he was best fighter on the planet.
It was the sound of a female voice that woke him from his reverie. The sound of a little girl screaming. The one sound in the world he could not abide.
Milverton shot off the bench. If he had to break character, if he was no longer “Charles” the teacher, so be it.
Upright now, he tensed for trouble. This hadn’t been part of the plan, and he had no idea how the men in the balaclavas were going to react, especially with Drusovic out of the gym.
He walked slowly, unthreateningly, through the ranks of the captive kids and teachers. With the example of Nurse Haskell fresh in everyone’s mind, no one dared move his or her head to follow him as he went. Still, Milverton could feel the eyes of the boy, Rory, on him. He felt sorry for the spunky little bugger, but in for a penny, in for a pound.
“Charles,” whispered Rory as he walked by him. “He took my sister. He took Emma.”
He kept his voice low. “Don’t worry, Rory,” he said, a thought occurring to him. “I’ll make sure she’s safe.”
Rory managed a very small smile. “Who dares, wins, right?” the kid asked.
“Absolutely.”
Now he noticed the smell. Fear had a stench all its own, and the bodily function by-products were just that, manifestations of the state of mind. He’d had plenty of men beg for their lives before he neutralized them, but this was different. These were children. Not that he cared one way or the other about their fate, but he knew that America was a sentimental country, especially about its kids, and if anything happened to any of them — or worse, a lot of them — the response would be more than they’d bargained for at this point in the operation. The kids were supposed to be very potent and photogenic hostages, nothing more.
That’s why he was angry at Drusovic. It was time to sort the bloody fucker out.
And then he heard the girl, Emma, scream again.
The lift shuddered to a stop. Even with no light, Hope more or less knew
where she was. Moving carefully so as not to knock anything over, bark her shins, or skin her knees any worse than they already were, she felt her way down the long, rectangular supply room, past the copy machines and the boxes of paper, past the supplies, her eyes and ears straining into the darkness and the silence.
Her heart was pounding. She’d always thought that expression was literary license, but now that it was happening to her, rocketing, sending shock waves soaring throughout the building, she knew it was for real. Breath short, sweat glands fully engaged. But hearing preternatural. Sight, even in this Stygian darkness, supernatural. With her children in danger, Hope Gardner was Superwoman.
A door was just up ahead. In her excitement and confusion, Hope wasn’t exactly sure where it led to, but she didn’t care. Gingerly, she opened it onto a storage room, which she knew led out into a secondary hallway near the back of the school, one that made a T-intersection with the main hall. The gym was nearby.
She reached for the hallway door, praying that it wouldn’t make a sound, that there would be nobody on the other side, that…
Then she heard the screams. And she knew, in an instant, the way mothers always do, that it was the voice of her daughter.
The hell with what was on the other side.
The hallway was dark and empty. Only the soft glow of the emergency lights kept it from being completely pitch black. In the distance, at the other end of the long central hallway, she could hear the sound of running footsteps.
Hope hugged the wall as she crept forward. She wanted to run, she wanted to cry out, to tell Emma that Mommy was coming for her, that everything was going to be all right, but she knew a single word from her would probably mean both their deaths.
There were voices, shouting loudly, somewhere beyond the gym. That must be where Emma was.
Hope dropped to her hands and knees, creeping through the darkness. The lights were on in the gym, casting a small patch of light on the hallway floor via the windows. She would have to go right past it.
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