Hostile Intent d-1

by Michael Walsh

  Wearing an Army uniform, “Lieutenant Colonel Dan Quigley” was on time for his appointment with Secretary Rubin. Civilians getting a tour of the Pentagon were always amazed at the relative informality of the secretary of defense’s Pentagon office: third floor, E-ring, between the eighth and ninth corridors. This office was similar, with the secretary’s private office just an antechamber away from the main hallway.

  The orderly saluted him and waved him through. “The Secretary is expecting you, Colonel,” he said, and saluted.

  Devlin returned the salute and walked to the open doorway. “Come in, Colonel Quigley,” said Rubin’s voice. “And please shut the door behind you.”

  Rubin was a mild-mannered, soft-spoken man, not given to Tyler’s fierce fits of temper. But to say he was unhappy about this meeting was to say the least. “We meet at last. The most troublesome man in the service of the United States. There’s a dead FBI team in northern Virginia that I bet you know something about.”

  Devlin didn’t have time either for apologies or pleasantries. “There will be a lot more dead people if you don’t listen to what I have to say and then do exactly what I tell you.”

  Rubin bristled. Devlin was Seelye’s boy. He didn’t have to take this kind of lip. “Watch your tone with me, Colonel,” he said.

  Devlin stood in the doorway, trying to decide whether to stay or to go. He believed in protocol, in playing by the rules, until he didn’t, and this was one of those times.

  “Mr. Secretary, I can walk out of here right now and take what I know with me. You can either let me go or have me arrested, imprisoned, and killed, but none of those courses of actions will do you any good, because you’ll never get the contents of my head onto your desk until it’s far too late. And by then you’ll either be dead or most definitely out of a job. So why don’t you drop the attitude and listen to what I have to say? Sir.”

  For just a moment, Rubin was tempted to tell this man where to go. And for another moment, even more chilling, he realized the Devlin could kill him right here in his office, in the safest place in America, and probably get away with it. That is what Seelye, and by extension the U.S. government, had raised him to do, trained him to do, rewarded him for doing. “It’s your meeting,” Rubin finally admitted.

  “We’ve been penetrated. Somebody sent that FBI team to my home. Where I live is absolutely beyond top secret, which means it’s far, far beyond the capacity of the FBI to get its hands on that information. So if it was you, say your prayers right now, because no matter how fast you are, I’m faster, and you’ll be dead before you can pick up the phone. You’re alive only at my forbearance, so don’t push your luck.” He watched as the blood drained out of Rubin’s face, then continued.

  “Luckily for you, I don’t suspect you. It’s either Seelye or Hartley—”

  “Bob Hartley is dead,” said Rubin. “Nobody knows it yet, but he apparently shot himself and a couple of other people at the Watergate earlier today.”

  “A couple of other people? Who?”

  Rubin mulled whether to tell the truth or lie, but decided in favor of the former. Even without the scope on a Barrett, Devlin could spot a liar a mile away. “Secret Service agents. Members of the president’s own personal detail. They were, um, protecting the senator—”

  “Son of a bitch,” exclaimed Devlin. “Tyler’s been running his own sting operation and didn’t tell anybody?” He thought things over for a moment. It was a smart play, a real smart play.

  “So Hartley was your man,” said Rubin: a statement, not a question. “Let’s move on.”

  “Let’s not and say we did. Hartley may well have been involved and, given his predilections, he probably was being blackmailed.”

  “That is an accurate statement,” said the Secretary.

  “But a dupe like Hartley is a two-way street of disinformation,” said Devlin. He placed his PDA on the desk in front of Rubin so that the secretary could see the screen. “This just came in,” he said.

  Rubin looked at the message. Gibberish, in the middle of which he could just barely discern what might be three stick figures, each one of them waving a little flag. “What is this supposed to mean?” he asked.

  “Other than illiteracy, do you have any other qualifications for your job, Mr. Secretary?” said Devlin, deliberately being provocative. He wanted to get a rise out of Rubin, to get his blood flowing, if he had any, if they hadn’t sucked it all out of him at Columbia, to make him understand the seriousness of the situation emotionally, not just intellectually.

  Contemptuously, Rubin spun the PDA back around so that it was facing Devlin. “This is kids’ stuff,” he spat.

  Devlin was on him so fast the last “f” wasn’t out of his mouth. He slapped the secretary of defense as hard as he could, right across the face. “This ‘kids’ stuff’ spells the end of the United States, you fool,” he said, “unless you listen to me, and do exactly what I tell you.”

  Rubin’s face was red where Devlin had slapped him, but the other side was reddening almost as fast. Devlin continued as if nothing had happened—

  “Ever since Edwardsville, I’ve believed that this whole thing, the school hostage situation, the bombing, everything — even the Stella Maris—has been a coordinated series of feints and misdirections, designed to sap our strength and our will, softening us up for the real blow — the one that we might have prevented were our attention not directed elsewhere.”

  “Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?” said Rubin, trying to regain his dignity.

  “But it wasn’t a simple misdirection after all — getting me involved so that they could set off the bomb in Los Angeles, and then the missile in London. It’s a double misdirection. A Trojan horse. Somebody — not Milverton, he’s not that smart — is inside our OODA loop, making us dance. I’ve been a puppet on a string, yo-yoing between the coasts, while very powerful forces have been having their way with us. Edwardsville was never about the school or the kids. It was about me.” There, he said it. “But this is where it stops.”

  The orderly’s voice came over the intercom. “General Seelye is here, Mr. Secretary.”

  Rubin shot a glance at Devlin, if only just to keep an eye on him. He nodded. “Send the general in, please.”

  The door opened and in came Seelye. He started to speak, then did a double take when he saw Devlin standing there in the uniform of an Army officer. Devlin watched his eyes carefully for any sign of untoward suspicion.

  “Hi, Dad,” he said. Rubin looked like he might topple out of his chair. “What the hell is going on here?” he barked.

  Devlin looked at Seelye but spoke to Rubin, “General Seelye here is going to give us a little dog-and-pony show. Isn’t that right, Pops?”

  Seelye thought seriously about trying to bluff his way through this, even as the look in Devlin’s eyes told him not even to think about it.

  Devlin reached in his military attaché case and took out two books, their covers still stained, the stains a dark brown now instead of blood-red.

  And then Seelye knew that the game was not only afoot, it was up.

  Devlin didn’t wait for Seelye to sit down. “The answer was in here all along. I don’t know why he did it. Maybe to leave a clue. Maybe for me to find some day. Maybe to show both of us that he’s the smartest guy in the room, the smartest guy on the planet. And maybe, Army, he did it to fuck you over, the way you fucked him over. The way you fucked my mother, over, under, and sideways. The way you wrecked my family.”

  Devlin spoke very softly, his body coiled. Army Seelye understood that if he so much as moved, tried to call for help, or worse, attack, Devlin would kill him on the spot and take his chances with Rubin later. Wisely, he did nothing.

  Devlin opened one of the books. The pages groaned and cracked. “When you grow up the way I did, without parents, well…you don’t have many friends either. But I had these, books my father had given to me in Rome, and one of them was about the movies. So I became a movie
fan. They were my escape. They were my family. And those characters played by Cagney and Bogart and Brando became more real to me than anybody real…including you, Dad.”

  “Why do you keep—” interjected Rubin, but Devlin paid him no attention.

  “So this book of movie stories was a boon companion. But an even greater boon companion was this.” He opened the other book, bloodier, more worn, and flipped it opened. It was covered in symbols, which zigged and zagged their way across the pages — the same dancing men as the symbols on Devlin’s BlackBerry.

  “Kids’ stuff,” blurted Seelye.

  “Right,” said Devlin. “Childish markings, the kind of basic substitution cipher that a father might teach his son, especially a father in our business. Except you forgot something. You forgot where my father gave me this book.”

  “Italy,” muttered Seelye.

  “Correctamundo,” said Devlin, his voice mirthless. “Italy. The home of some of the greatest minds western civilization ever produced. Machiavelli — I bet he was one of your special favorites. Michelangelo. And Leonardo.”

  There was a mirror on one wall. Devlin pointed to it. “Remember what Leonardo used to do? Mirror-writing. If he wanted to obscure something, he wrote it backward. You had to hold the text up to the mirror to decipher it. Later, it was common practice for some Europeans to start a letter normally and then, when they ran out of room, turn the parchment sideways and keep writing, right over what they had written before. And, of course, you could do both those things, backward. Sentence, retrograde, inversion, and retrograde inversion.

  “Cryptography’s a complicated thing, as we all know. But, at root, it’s not. It’s simply a way of communicating with people you like while making the subject of that communication opaque to people you don’t. That way, if it falls into the wrong hands, they can’t read it. And the rest, as they say”—Devlin gestured around the room, embracing the entire Raven Rock complex in his unspoken metaphor—“is commentary. So let’s see what the dancing men have to say.” He pretended to consult the book, although ever since he had fully deciphered their message, he had memorized it in its entirety.

  What he was about to do he wanted to do for a long time: he was about to face the past, and jerk it back into the present with a vengeance.

  “It’s a hell of a thing to discover at my age that everything you’ve been told about who you are and where you came from is a lie, but life is full of little surprises. I won’t bore you with the details, but — and Army can confirm all this to you later, Mr. Secretary — for years I believed that the general here and my mother were having an affair, that my father found out, that they all met up in Rome to sort things out and it just so happened that it was our bad luck to be in Leonardo da Vinci Airport that Christmas in 1985 when Abu Nidal came calling, and both my parents were killed.”

  “I saved your life,” growled Seelye.

  “Don’t rush me,” snapped Devlin, totally in control, “especially since the next part stars you, yourself, and you.”

  Neither of his superiors had anything to say. “But the reason for the meeting turns out to be quite something else. It wasn’t about my mother at all — oh, you may have been fucking her, but that wasn’t what brought you all together. It was…well, here, Army — why don’t you read it? It’s just a simple substitution cipher, and you’re the head of the freakin’ NSA.”

  Devlin tossed the book to Seelye, who stared at the dancing men with dull but visible comprehension. He didn’t need to read much. He closed the book gently, quietly, and left it sitting in his lap, one hand resting on the dried blood of Devlin’s mother.

  “I put her picture up on the wall for your sake,” said Seelye. “It was one of the ways I protected you. Even if…if anyone suspected that you’d survived, the last place they’d look for you was in an agency where your mother had been proclaimed a traitor.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” said Devlin, approvingly. “Protect me from whom?”

  “From him,” Seelye exhaled.

  “Say it out loud.”

  He had him. Seelye knew that every conversation in this office, just like every conversation in his own office at Fort Meade, was recorded. There was no way out.

  “From Emanuel Skorzeny. He wanted to kill you. He still does.”

  Rubin was incredulous. “And that’s what this is all about?”

  Seelye shrugged helplessly.

  Devlin answered, “Don’t worry, Mr. Secretary, it gets better. A man like Skorzeny never does anything twice when he can do it once. He’s making a move — a big move, and I’m just a bonus at this point. The problem is — tell him, General.”

  Seelye was beaten and he knew it. “The problem is, we don’t know what he’s planning. In less than a week, he’s ten times richer than he was before…” The professional in Seelye was starting to reassert itself. “But we feel, we all feel, that what’s past is just prologue to what is to come.”

  “Which is?” said Rubin.

  Devlin took a deep breath before answering. The book of dancing men lay on Seelye’s lap. He glanced down at it as he began to speak.

  “When I was a kid, just before the Rome Airport massacre, I overheard a conversation in Munich.” He didn’t need to bother looking at Seelye. “You were there, Army, along with my parents. I couldn’t quite piece together everything you were saying, especially since I didn’t know some of the languages then, but it turns out, it’s all in here.”

  Devlin picked up the book. “In late 1985, the world’s most dangerous terrorist was planning an attack on the Radio Free Europe office — that is to say, the CIA station — in Munich. This came after a series of bombings in Berlin and in France. He was the world’s most wanted man, and yet he operated with near-impunity from bases in Budapest, Baghdad, Aden. You know who I’m talking about?”

  “Carlos the Jackal,” said Rubin.

  “Right. Better known as Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez. The man you were supposedly after — right, Dad?”

  Seelye blanched, but stayed silent.

  “It’s okay. You were playing a double game against two men better at it than you were.” He looked at Seelye. “Was Skorzeny a CI, a confidential informant, or just redoubled?”

  “Neither,” said Seelye. “He was playing me, just like he played everybody.”

  Devlin nodded. “You knew that Skorzeny was working both sides of the street, operating as an honest if rapacious businessman aboveground, while doing his damnedest to destabilize European society by financing a loosely allied collection of bad guys: the IRA, the Red Brigades, the Basques, Abu Nidal, the PLO, you name it.”

  “He was working with all of them,” admitted Seelye, “the whole ‘terror network,’ as Claire Sterling called it.”

  “And everybody laughed at her when her book came out,” said Devlin. “But she knew the KGB tried to whack the Pope through a Bulgarian cutout and a Muslim Turk shooter and she was right. She knew that the terror groups may have been rivals, maybe even hated each other, but the enemy of my enemy is always my friend. And so they worked together, doing well by, as they saw it, doing good.”

  Now it was Seelye’s turn to nod as Devlin continued. “And Carlos was his main man. It’s really brilliant when you think about, and so very postmodern. Capitalist, communist, patriot, internationalist — what’s the difference? If you’re smart enough, and brazen enough, and rich enough, you can get away with it. And that’s what Skorzeny’s been doing, ever since. He made a monkey out of you and the only way you could deal with it, the only way you could cover your professional shame, was to take my parents off the board and cast yourself as the hero.”

  “Carlos is doing life in prison in France. Has been for years,” said Rubin.

  Devlin ignored him. He rose and loomed over Seelye. “Did you know about Rome?” he shouted, his voice rising. “Well, did you — you son of a bitch?” The accusation was bitter, but it felt good; it was a long time coming. It felt cathartic.

  “No
!” shouted Seelye. “I might have told him your family was leaving. I didn’t know anything about Abu Nidal. I didn’t know what they were planning for Rome and Vienna.” He looked around the room for absolution, but found none.

  Devlin was not satisfied. “I think you did, Army. I think you did. But it almost doesn’t matter. Maybe you just lucked into it, but either way, they were gone and your operation was off the hook. So same difference.”

  “And I’ve had to live with it every day since then. I did what I could for you.”

  “Yes, you did, said Devlin. “You made me into the man I am today. Ecce homo…And that’s why you dangled me in front of Tyler when Edwardsville came around. You were ready for it. You knew how to play Tyler’s emotions. And you knew that, if you got real lucky, you could kill three clichés with one stone: save the kids, flush out the bad guys, and get rid of me. I don’t blame you — that’s the play I would have made.” Devlin laughed bitterly. “It’s just that Tyler turned out to be smarter than all of us. I guess that’s why he’s the president and we’re sitting in a mountain, five hundred feet below the surface of the earth.”

  Seelye jumped to his feet, his face a mask of rage. Thank God the room was soundproof. “I saved your fucking life. And I’m still saving it! Don’t you understand?”

  If there had been a clock on the mantle, they could have heard it ticking in the silence that followed. But nobody had ticking clocks any more.

  “What are you talking about?” said Devlin.

  “He’s still trying to kill you. He knows you’re still alive. I tried to cover your tracks, but he’s too smart. He’s been researching you, spent a fortune following the trail. It’s taken him years but he’s patient. And he won’t rest until he eliminates you. Not just kills you but humiliates and destroys you. You’re an affront to him.”

  “And now,” said Devlin quietly, “I’m an obstacle too.” He placed the PDA between his two superiors, punching some keys to strip away all the textural white noise to reveal the three dancing men beneath.