Hostile Intent d-1

by Michael Walsh

  LOS ANGELES

  Devlin switched off his secure PDA and tried to figure out what to do next. It was time for a new game plan. Telling the president of the United States to go fuck himself was as good a place as any to start.

  Milverton, he was sure, was back in London; everything pointed to it, including the London Eye attack. But he was just the conductor; someone else had written this symphony and the tempo was going to keep picking up until they got to the climax. Which wasn’t going to be pretty, that was for sure. Already the American economy had been rocked back on its heels, and if this didn’t stop, and fast, the pieces of it that remained would hardly be worth picking up, although some vulture was sure to do so. And if the government of the United States had been parliamentary instead of republican, it might have already fallen.

  But here he was in LA, thousands of miles from the action, with the clock ticking on his own personal presidential directive. What had seemed a good idea — to enlist Eddie Bartlett and mount a counteroperation — was already out of date. Eddie was AWOL, Milverton was too far up his decision loop, and he was getting outmaneuvered at each term. Once Milverton had him in his sights, Devlin knew, he would be a sitting duck for the kill shot.

  Think: try to fit the pieces together.

  The attack on Edwardsville made some sense, if testing the American defenses had been the point of the exercise. The quick and lethal response had made a point. But what if that was exactly beside the point? Seen in this light, the Grove attack made some sense as a follow-up. It got him pinned down in the wrong direction at the same time it pulled him in further, escalated the terror quotient, and hung him out to dry so that Milverton could execute the third leg of this triad, the attack in London. When you looked at the sequence that way, there was one conclusion: this was all about him.

  Which was ridiculous. Why would Milverton, why would anybody, go to all this trouble just to flush Devlin out? Even the highly freighted, emotional angle — middle America, kids in peril — was no guarantee the president would order a Branch 4 operation. In fact, the opposite. Unless somebody in Washington was risking burning him for a higher purpose — or, worse, didn’t mind burning him at all.

  If they had wanted to fire a missile at London, Milverton could have done that without Edwardsville and Los Angeles. For another, the damage there, while terrible, was not as extensive as in Los Angeles. It too was still a feint. Milverton was being used, just as Devlin was being used.

  Unfortunately, that brought him back to where he started — that this really was all about him. What were the chances that he would get ordered into an operation, and at the presidential level no less, involving Milverton? Milverton, who had never shown any overt or covert connections to the various terrorist factions that had been floating around Europe since the 1980s. Who had always been a rogue freelancer.

  What would Marcus Aurelius do? Marcus would let reason rule. Very well, then.

  There were only three players involved in this drama that he could see: himself, Milverton, and whoever was paying him. Four, if you counted the possible mole in Washington, whose presence he sensed rather than saw at this point, like Pluto’s gravitational effect on Uranus’s orbit. Devlin, however, was a great believer in Occam’s Razor, which literally posited that beings should not be multiplied except out of necessity — meaning that the mole, if he or she existed, could also be the person running Milverton. So we were back to the triangle — the worst geometry in both love and intelligence work.

  “What’s wrong?” Maryam joined him on the terrace. She was wearing one of his dress shirts. Possibly the sexiest outfit a woman could wear, but then she knew that already.

  “London is what’s wrong.”

  Her face fell, the joy draining out of it. “What is it now?”

  “About forty dead,” he said. He handed her a small video screen and replayed the whole scene at the London Eye: Skorzeny’s press conference, the attack, the aftermath. “Could have been worse. The Brit papers have gone wall-to-wall, of course. Aunty, too. ‘Terrorism Strikes Britain Again.’”

  Her first observation surprised him: “Funny name for a ship, isn’t it?” she said. That was something he hadn’t thought of. “Stella Maris is one of the Virgin’s titles,” she continued. “Star of the Sea. It’s one of the first things you learn when you’re named after her. Even in Iran. In this day and age, nobody names ships after religious figures. It’s too…politically incorrect. Besides,” she asked, “who uses a Tomahawk for an assassination attempt? It’s like using a mallet to swat a fly.”

  “We do,” he replied. “We tried to get bin Laden with something similar, and the Israelis enjoy nailing whoever’s warming the chair marked ‘Hamas leader’ with one as often as possible—”

  He stopped in midsentence. Assassination attempt? Put the pieces together. Milverton was whipsawing him. Somebody was running Milverton. The latest attack had come in London…had almost killed Skorzeny. And now the Stella Maris just so happened to be anchored in Long Beach Harbor. What were the odds?

  Maryam was still talking. “It’s right here, don’t you see? The strike came just as Emanuel Skorzeny was leaving his press conference. It missed him by a matter of minutes. Not to mention half the London press corps.”

  “Too bad,” said Devlin. “A bunch of reporters at the bottom of the Thames is almost as good a start as a bunch of lawyers at the bottom of the Thames.”

  Maryam ignored the joke, if she even got it. “Why would anyone want to kill Emanuel Skorzeny?” she went on. “He’s one of the most respected, powerful men in Europe, maybe the world.”

  “Is he?” asked Devlin, noncommittally, seeking to draw her out, play for time while he thought the sequence through, and what he had to do about it.

  “You know he is. His foundation has helped more people internationally than most governments ever do. Look how he helped Zimbabwe, post-Mugabe. When that earthquake hit in China last year, his relief teams were some of the first on the scene. It’s only natural that he might be a target for…”

  “For whom?”

  “I don’t know. Some nuts. Some renegades — you know how many missiles are floating around. The old Soviet satellites. The North Koreans. The—”

  “The mullahs?”

  “The point is,” Maryam said, “Skorzeny is a saint. You heard what he just said. One of his company’s ships is in Long Beach Harbor right now, helping out with—”

  One of Skorzeny’s ships.

  He grabbed her by both shoulders and kissed her. “We have to go,” he said.

  “To London — right?”

  “Santa Monica for me, LAX for you. I’ll explain later.”

  He rushed her into the guest room at the east end of the house. Yanked open the door to the closet—

  Two rows of men’s clothes, in varying sizes, colors, and fashions. She didn’t ask; he didn’t explain. And one other thing — a single dress. Size 2. Bought in Paris, just before he left, in the hope for the day when he’d see her again. Her gaze traveled from the dress to his eyes. There was nothing to say.

  He was already pulling “Mr. Grant’s” clothes. “Grant” was taller (lifts), fatter (thank you, Universal Studios prop department), slouchier, and sported a very unfashionable mustache and a set of discolored teeth. In the end, there really wasn’t much to the art of disguise. It was like caricature in reverse: you obscured your salient features and made people concentrate on the things that weren’t important. The rest could be done with voice, accent, and mien; after all, with the passage of time people often didn’t recognize their own relatives, so why should a total stranger be any different.

  As he pulled on the fake midsection, he thought once more of Occam’s Razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. Easy for William of Ockham to say, hard for Devlin to live by.

  She dropped his shirt to the floor and slipped on the dress. It fit her perfectly.

  “Let’s go.”

  Chapter Forty-three

/>   SANTA MONICA/LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA

  The RAND Corporation building stood out among the buildings in “downtown” Santa Monica like the proverbial sore thumb — but only if you were already aware that you had just struck your opposable digit with a hammer. Located south of the Third Street Promenade, across Main Street from city hall and the courthouse, it was well away from the congeries of bums and winos — the “homeless”—who had transformed what was once LA’s foremost beach community into Berkeley South. Near RAND, however, there were no homeless to be seen: they didn’t have the requisite security clearance. Few did, homeless or not.

  He did.

  Devlin glanced at his watch. It was more than a watch, of course. The team leader could text him at any time, over a secure uplink, and his message would appear nearly instantly on the watch’s face.

  He looked out at his audience in the small auditorium. Some of the faces — he never forgot a face, because that was how he’d been trained — were familiar. He smiled as he took inventory; to judge from the haircuts and the clothes, mostly Americans. A couple of MI-6 Brits in ill-fitting suits from the Savoy Tailors Guild. Members of the German Federal Intelligence Service, the Bundesnachrichtendient, in their motley. Queens-born Mossad and Shin Bet, at home in both worlds. Three or four Chinese, whose bona fides he immediately discounted by 50 percent; unlike the Russians, they were still new at this game, and incredibly obvious. He’d get the security report later, but already he was tailoring his remarks. The key to one of these speeches was to balance genuine information with even better disinformation, and he was more than up to the task.

  “Let me be blunt,” he began without preamble. “In the years since September 11, despite all our intelligence triumphs — necessarily recondite — we as a society have grown complacent. Comfortable. Therefore, I hope and trust that the events of the past two days might serve as a wake-up call for all of us. For, whatever our political differences, we are all civilized men and women here.” There were very few women present, but linguistically he felt compelled to maintain the egalitarian fiction in case somehow his remarks got leaked to the Los Angeles Times Web site; even though the physical newspaper was dying, the handful of reporters tied in to the blogs and RSS and Twitter feeds could still make plenty of trouble. Loose lips still sank ships.

  “I refer not only to the events of the past two days in Edwardsville and here in Los Angeles, but to the ongoing series of cyber-attacks on our mainframes at the Pentagon, in Langley, in Fort Meade, in Washington, and elsewhere. Forget everything you think you know about contemporary terrorism. We are no longer up against a nation-state, or even a stateless group of like-minded individuals motivated by ideology, such as al-Qaeda. That, as they say, is so yesterday.”

  Murmurs and polite chuckles ripped through his select audience as he reached for the glass of water. Which enabled him to see what was going on in Long Beach via secure video feed in real time…

  The Stella Maris was a magnificent vessel. Displacing nearly 200,000 metric tons, the big cargo ship was riding low in the water, preparing to get her cargo offloaded. The dock was a hive of activity as the longshoremen got ready to unload her, but in fact security forces were everywhere, disguised a teamsters, sailors, even casual passersby.

  The red-zone call-in had pretty much confirmed that. Since September 11, every major American port was equipped with the latest radiation-detection devices. On three separate occasions, Middle Eastern terrorists had tried to smuggle in a suitcase nuke, but each time they had been tripped up by the detection devices on the docks.

  But what if the docks were too late a line of defense? That was what the drone overflights were for. Except they didn’t look like drones. Not the kind that had struck fear into the hearts of late mujahedin in Iraq and Afghanistan, anyway. They looked like kites.

  No California beach was complete without its complement of kites. It was amazing how high you could get some of them, and how sensitive the radiation sensors were these days. No matter how strong the ocean breeze, all they needed was a clear line of sight to their target, and the DHS agents who were lucky enough to draw beach duty could take their readings from the comfort of their beach blankets, while ogling the rear ends of the teenage girls wiggling by.

  Devlin had the readings on his special PDA before he left the house, which triggered his “go” order to the SEAL team standing by in a sub off the coast of Huntington Beach on a training exercise. The SDVs were already launched and away by the time he got to Santa Monica.

  “As you know, the National Security Research Division’s International Security and Defense Policy Center, based in Arlington, exists on the leading edge of threat assessment. Together with our governmental and NGO colleagues around the world, it is our duty to constantly evaluate and extrapolate, not simply from ‘known knowns’ to ‘known unknowns,’ but into the realm of ‘unknown unknowns’ as well. As the United States Marine Corps likes to say, ‘the difficult we do right away. The impossible takes a little longer.’ But let me assure you — since our national wake-up call on the morning of September 11, 2001, the impossible is not only what we seek to do, it is, in many respects, what we have already done.”

  A small ripple of applause.

  “The Marines have another saying, less widely known but, for our purposes, even more apposite. ‘Don’t worry about what your enemy might do. Worry about what he can do, and plan accordingly.’

  “About our enemy’s intention, there can be no doubt. It is nothing less than the destruction of western civilization. By that, I don’t just mean the current American administration, or Israel, or global warming, or world hunger. We could dismantle the Cathedral of Notre Dame, obliterate Tel Aviv, reduce our carbon emissions to zero, return to the Stone Age, and starve ourselves to death, and that still would not be enough.

  “Many of you have perhaps seen the motion picture, Independence Day. In it, the president of the United States confronts a captured alien invader and asks whether our two species might live in peace. ‘No peace,’ replies the alien. ‘What do you want us to do, then?’ inquires the president. ‘Die,’ replies the alien. That, in a nutshell, sums up our enemy’s demands. No amount of appeasement, short of suicide, will satisfy him. Ladies and gentlemen, we are not fighting a twenty-first-century war. We are fighting a nineteenth-century war — not so much against zealotry, but against Nietzschean nihilism, masked by religious doctrine, enervation, and anomie.”

  As he expected, this did not go over well with some of those in attendance. Probably half the members of his audience were “root cause” types; the idea that sheer nihilism might lay at the dark heart of society’s enemies was something they were not prepared to admit. As they muttered among themselves, “Mr. Grant” took the opportunity to glance at his watch.

  Seal Delivery Vehicles were the latest thing in delivering death to your ocean-borne doorstep. A kind of minisubmarine, they carried a six-man team consisting of a pilot, co-pilot, and combat swimmers. The SDV Devlin’s team was using was a Mark 8 Model 1, which ran on lithium-ion batteries and came fully equipped with its own navigation and communications systems. In other words, it was totally silent.

  The radiation detectors had come back negative, which was exactly what he had expected. What also was expected was the dead zone in the center of the ship’s cargo hold, the lead-lined “scientific” area. Everything, even people, emit some sort of radiation, but not this blank space; using imaging radar, he had run the image through every NSA analytical program he could think of, but all that computing power had only served to confirm his suspicions. There was something there that Skorzeny didn’t want anybody to see.

  Prior to arriving in Santa Monica, Devlin had taken a crash course on Emanuel Skorzeny. Aside from his well-publicized forays in international finance and philanthropy, he was not the sort of man to come across the CSS radar screens. He was immensely rich and powerful, of course, but the occasional indictment for insider trading notwithstanding — inevitable i
n his line of work — there was nothing criminal about the man. Indeed, there was much that was admirable, including his well-publicized personal story and his generous philanthropy.

  Still, there was a strain of misanthropy running through Skorzeny’s tangled skein that bothered Devlin. He would have to spend a lot more time with the files, of course, but the outlines of a very disturbed individual were there to be seen. The childhood alone — the DP camps — would be enough to affect even the sanest boy. But the closer he had looked at Skorzeny, the stranger the man became.

  Take his charitable causes, an odd mixture of cultural conservatism — through the Skorzeny Foundation, run by a British woman named Amanda Harrington, he lavishly funded orchestras and opera houses around the world — and political radicalism. There wasn’t a Green Party in Europe he didn’t donate generously to, and there was considerable evidence that, through cutouts, shells, dummies, and nonprofits, he was injecting vast sums of money into the American political process, no matter how illegal it was.

  At home in Echo Park, Devlin had harnessed all the computing power at NSA, CIA, and Poughkeepsie to search every existing database — closed-and open-source — for a police record and had come up with nothing. About the only negative thing he could find was the sudden death of one of Skorzeny International’s board members, but strokes could happen to anybody.

  As Devlin had learned from long experience in the trenches of classified material, nobody was clean. It was part of the human condition. Everybody had skeletons, past activities, furtive desires, illicit relationships, occasions of sin both venial and mortal. In the great court of law in the sky, everybody was guilty, especially in the age of computers and the Internet. The only question was, how you dealt with it: fake it, lie about it, cop a plea, or brazen it out. With the abolition of sin, the last option had become more and more attractive.

  “Brazen” might let you skate in the courtroom, but the rules of evidence in the Moral Court were much less restrictive; there, anything went. So the smart play was to admit almost everything. Blow your own cover if you had to, give up your best friend, plead out to almost every charge. Toss them fish. But save the last minnow, the one part of your cover story that didn’t pass the smell test, until they pried it from your cold, dead hands.