“Misdirection, just as I said from the start. Sure it would be great for him to get me, great to blow the cover off the entire Branch 4 operation, great to give our enemies even more fuel for their hate-America fires. But that’s just the means to an end.”
He hit two more keys and now the dancing men were upright. Devlin took charge. “This came from Milverton today.” Another key and they began dissolving…into letters of the alphabet. Letters than spelled:
EMP.
“Good God,” said Rubin, softly. “A good thing SDI is fully operational on both coasts.”
“Against weather balloons?”
“What?”
“That’s what we found in the hold of the Stella Maris, Skorzeny’s ‘humanitarian’ ship that sank at Long Beach. But there were no nukes on board, no explosives, nothing. Just weather balloons.”
“And he raised hell about it,” said Rubin. “Demanded that — oh, Jesus — that, in recompense, and in exchange for not making a run on our currency, his other ship, the Clara Vallis, be given every courtesy…”
“When does she make port?”
“Tomorrow, late in the day. Baltimore.” Seelye lunged for the secure phone. “We’ll blow her out of the water right—”
Devlin grabbed the phone and set it back in its cradle. “No. Leave her alone. Start circling her now and she’ll get that bird in the air. Not optimal — the balloon needs to be over land for max damage — but close enough for government work.”
“What are we going to do?” asked Rubin.
“We’re going to go for the feint once more. There’s a reason Skorzeny wants me to tango with Milverton in London.”
“It’s a trap,” said Seelye.
“Of course it is.”
“He wants Milverton to kill you.”
“Duh. And the feeling is most definitely mutual. So I want carte blanche, no questions asked. I want what I want and I want what I need and I want what I don’t know about yet and I want it all yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And one thing I most definitely want is access to French airspace — low-flying stuff, beneath radar, EZ-in, EZ-out if the frogs don’t get their panties in a bunch. There will be some damage, but we’ll try to keep it to a minimum — small arms fire, maybe a Sidewinder or two.
“That might be—” said Rubin.
“Who’s in charge here? POTUS or Foggy Bottom? Tell Tyler I get what he’s been up to. He’ll do it. Plus, I want the Branch 4 death sentence on me lifted. Deal?”
“Deal,” said Rubin. “I’ll personally guarantee it with the president.”
“One more thing. I want you to make it right with those FBI families and make sure they’re taken care of. For life.”
“Done.”
“Especially that girl I killed. And keep the lid on Hartley’s death for as long as you can. In the meantime, we have to let Milverton know that everything is still hunky-dory.”
Using Hartley’s Watergate phone number as the origination, Devlin punched in the number that Hartley had called and put the instrument on speakerphone, so they could all hear the cutout clicks as the call was rerouted. He let it ring once and then hung up.
“He’ll suspect something.” warned Seelye.
“Of course he will,” replied Devlin. “That’s his job. But he’ll do worse than suspect if he doesn’t hear from Hartley pretty soon. Right now, it’s just a dropped call. The next call he gets from me is going to come in person. One last thing—”
“Name it,” said Rubin.
“I want my mother’s picture down off the Wall of Shame. I want her files erased from the NSA/CSS system — don’t fuck with me on this, because if you don’t do it, I’ll know. I want my father rehabbed and given a star at Langley. And I want your resignation, General Seelye, whenever I ask for it.”
Devlin turned to Rubin. “Good-bye, Mr. Secretary,” he said. “You’ll never see me again.” And then he really was gone.
After he’d left, Rubin looked at Seelye with a mixture of contempt, disappointment, and disgust. “Why didn’t you tell him?” he asked.
“Tell him what?”
“That there is no death sentence. That there is no other member of Branch 4. That, in fact, he is Branch 4.”
“It’s on a need-to-know basis,” said Seelye. “And he doesn’t need to know. Not now, maybe not ever.”
DAY SEVEN
Always remember the dictum of Heraclitus, “Death of earth, birth of water; death of water, birth of air; from air, fire; and so round again.”
— MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations, Book IV
Chapter Fifty-three
VILLE-SOUS-LA-FERTÉ, FRANCE
Emanuel Skorzeny drank deeply of the air. This was not his favorite part of France — except for the champagne, it was nobody’s — but if he closed his eyes and projected himself back a millennium, he could appreciate what its Cistercian founders might have seen in it. Troyes was the nearest town; Chaumont was closer, but there was nothing there. Paris itself lay 235 kilometers to the west/northwest. At the speeds Pilier drove, a little over two hours. It was close, it was convenient and, best of all, absolutely unfashionable. Especially his piece of it.
“Is everything ready?” he inquired of Pilier. Visits to the country needed to be set up in advance, even for him. There were security arrangements to be made, money that needed to change hands, preparations, especially when he was bringing guests.
“I think you will find the arrangements satisfactory, yes, sir,” he replied.
“That goes without saying,” said Skorzeny with some asperity. “Competence and trustworthiness. That’s what I pay all my people for.”
Not for the first time, Skorzeny wondered if he could trust M. Pilier. For one thing, the man had no taste in music. When Skorzeny requested that a private orchestra be prepared to perform a certain piece for strings alone, Pilier had looked at him in puzzlement. As if a cultured man could profess ignorance of such a masterpiece! And then he remembered that Pilier was of the younger generation, the postwar generation, the ones who had learned to despise their cultures, to hate their societies, to root for the man with the knife, even when the knife was at their throats.
The bomb throwers of 1968, of the May uprising that had toppled De Gaulle were, forty years on, the men and women who had been running the country for decades. Now aging themselves, they were long past the age where they qualified for the generous pensions and benefits of the welfare state they had, in part, created. Filled with self-loathing, obsessed by a “fairness” principle that could never be fully realized, they had turned France, and much of western Europe, into a land in which women declined the rigors and joys of childbirth in order to realize their potential as incomplete men. One generation and out — who knew it would be that easy? Two generations after the defeat of fascism, Europe had turned into a suicide cult.
Poor stewards of a thousand years of glory, it was time for them to go.
Although standing here, on a small hill above Vallée d’Absinthe, above the town where Bernard had built his great Abbey, he could still feel the resonance of what once had been. Bernard, who had preached his Crusade, founded the knights Templar, battled Abelard, suckled at the teat of the Blessed Virgin Mary herself and drank the holy breast milk, died and was buried, only to be exhumed after the dissolution of the monastery during the French Revolution and reinterred in Troyes Cathedral. A man who, like Skorzeny, had lived long enough to witness the death of his own civilization. Despite everything that separated them, his kith, his kin.
Here, in what the Romans called the clara vallis, the sheltered valley that had preserved the knowledge of the ancient world and had passed it on, from Bernard to St. Malachy, to the Irish monks and wandering scholars, to the goliards, the Minnesingers, the troubadours, to the emerging West, he felt right at home.
“Do you know how a parasite operates on the nervous system, Monsieur Pilier? How it destroys the organism benignly?”
Always with the questions. “Yes, sir. It’s a Trojan horse, a poi
soned pawn, a triumph that turns to tragedy, a pleasure that turns to pain—”
Skorzeny clapped his hands together, like a child. “Indeed. It burrows, it wheedles, it infects. And every time its victim looks in the mirror, what does she see? That which she wants to see — herself, her former, beautiful self. Not the patch over her damaged eye. Not her inchoate rage against the man she cannot have. O don fatale!” He turned to Pilier. “You know the reference, of course?”
“Verdi, I believe, sir.”
“Don Carlos. Princess Eboli and the fatal gift which, as we might say today, keeps on giving.”
“Life is full of frustrations, sir,” said Pilier, noncommittally.
Skorzeny caught his tone, and its possible subtext. “Then let us take up our residency.” They got back into the Citroën limousine and moved off.
Skorzeny looked out the window as they approached the ancient building. “It’s magnificent, isn’t it?” he said.
From the outside, it was hard to imagine what it once had been: the ancient monastery of Clairvaux, dating back to the twelfth century. Today, it looked more like an eighteenth-century chateau, flying the Tricolor over the main entrance — a relict of the Enlightenment, concealing the bones of the civilization that had made it possible.
What would St. Bernard make of his Abbey today? Contemporary reports of the monastery back in the Middle Ages depicted a place of quiet contemplation, of living in harmony with nature. Scholarship and silence were the watchwords. For more than six hundred years, the Abbey had stood, its fortunes shifting with those of Christendom, until it was swamped by the rising tide of secularism and anticlericalism that culminated in the French Revolution. The monastery was closed, appropriated by the state, and fell into ruins, eventually to rise again.
But it wasn’t a chateau. And it was no longer an abbey.
“What of Miss Harrington?”
“In transit, sir.”
“You’re certain?”
Pilier hated to see the old man like this. Abject. Supplicative. Needy. It was his one weakness. She was his one weakness.
“She received your text message.”
“You’re sure she’s on her way. With the policy?”
“I see no reason to—”
“Do you think me a fool, Monsieur Pilier?” blurted Skorzeny, as they approached the massive fortress. The question was not entirely unexpected.
“If I may be so bold…yes, sir, I do.”
In the backseat, Skorzeny flinched. “May I ask why?”
“Because you don’t need her, sir,” replied Pilier. “She’s a destabilizing element. Something even you can’t control. You’ve always warned me against that sort of thing. Against that sort of woman.”
“We learn from our mistakes, Monsieur Pilier,” said Skorzeny with some asperity. Pilier realized that he might have gone too far.
“Here we are, sir,” said Pilier.
And there they were, passing through the barbed-wire fence and pulling up before the main gates. The perfect setting for his mood. The perfect setting for what was about to happen. The perfect refuge from the end of the world:
Clairvaux Prison.
Once a cell block, always a cell block.
The guard waved them through on sight. No matter how many times he was here, Pilier never got over an involuntary shudder. Clairvaux Prison was home to some of the toughest convicts in France. It had a high population of violent Muslim immigrants, who had gone from being warehoused in the Paris banlieues to being warehoused in the French penal system with nary a stop in between. It was home to murderers, rapists, armed robbers, the lot. Even terrorists; in fact, one very famous terrorist in particular.
Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez.
Skorzeny’s quarters, made in arrangement with the French government, were hidden away at the back of the complex. Here, he was as secure as the most high-security prisoner, fully protected from the outside world and from any malevolence it might want to visit upon him. But there was also a strange peacefulness about the place. His suite of rooms looked out at some of the ruins. Even across a distance of nearly a thousand years, he could see the outlines of what had once been the fish ponds, so important to a Cistercian monastery. The monks were great gardeners, great tillers of the soil, great husbanders of natural resources, great foresters. They were men of peace.
“And yet their Abbot preached the Second Crusade,” muttered Skorzeny, giving voice to his innermost thoughts as Pilier unpacked his things and laid them out on his bed.
The fact that Skorzeny kept secure quarters in a prison was not as fanciful as it might seem. Conscious of the abbey’s place in French history, the government was excavating and restoring the ruins of the old abbey, so there were nonprisoners living at the site. There was even a short concert series in the fall, at the Hostellerie des Dames, where the music included works by Mozart, Ravel, Debussy, and, of course, Messiaen.
“The musicians are ready?” asked Skorzeny, breaking the conversational silence.
“Everything awaits your presence.”
Skorzeny glanced at his watch. He was one of those men who still wore a watch. Pilier read his mind. “She’ll be here any—”
A soft buzz on the telephone. It was the guard at the front gate. Pilier put down the receiver and said, “She’s here.”
Skorzeny was still looking at his watch. Pilier waited a decent interval and then coughed quietly. “I said, Miss Harrington is here.”
“Excellent,” replied Skorzeny, although the tone of his voice signaled anything but pleasure. He tossed one more glance at his watch, as if calculating something. “Is everything in order?”
Pilier had no idea what he was talking about. “Yes, sir. The musicians—”
“I don’t mean the musicians. I mean the Clara Vallis.”
“On schedule, sir, with no trouble from the authorities. In fact, they’re being quite cooperative.”
The doorbell buzzed even more softly than the telephone. “I’ll get it,” said Skorzeny, moving with uncharacteristic swiftness toward the door.
Pilier had no fears for his boss’s safety; anybody who got this close had to pass three multiple layers of security, including a weapons check. Skorzeny opened the door. Framed in it was Amanda Harrington. Pilier had to admit she was a fine-looking specimen of womanhood. He could see, almost feel, what attracted Skorzeny so powerfully to her.
Standing next to her was a girl of about twelve. From the dull look in her eyes, Pilier could see that she was sedated. She held Amanda’s hand limply, like a rag doll. In return, Amanda was clutching the girl’s hand tightly in hers, as if she were afraid it would just slip away and never return.
“My dear Miss Harrington,” said Skorzeny, “may I say you look lovelier than ever.” His eyes fell upon the girl. “And this must be your charming daughter.” He leaned down a bit and looked the girl in the face. “What is your name, dear?” he asked.
If the child heard him, she showed no signs of it. In any other context, the silence might have been embarrassing, or at least awkward. Finally, Amanda jogged the girl a little. “Tell Mr. Skorzeny your name, darling,” she commanded, gently. “Go on.”
A small light came back in the girl’s eyes as she registered Amanda’s order. “Emma,” she said at last. “Emma Gard—”
“Emma Harrington,” corrected Amanda, who looked at Skorzeny. Neither of them had embraced, kissed or even shaken hands. “The adoption papers—”
Skorzeny motioned for Amanda and Emma to step inside. “Are in progress,” he said. “Isn’t that right, Monsieur Pilier?” Pilier had no idea what the old man was talking about, but pretended he did.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “In fact, I was in touch with our London solicitors earlier today and everything should be ready within…within a fortnight.”
“That’s too long,” said Amanda curtly.
“Would you like a drink?” asked Skorzeny, which was Pilier’s cue to head for the bar.
“Let’s get Emm
a to bed first,” she said. Skorzeny indicated one of the back bedrooms. Amanda swept Emma up in her arms and whisked her away.
“She seems agitated,” observed Skorzeny. “Perhaps with some reason.”
“What do you mean, ‘adoption papers,’ sir?” asked Pilier. “This is the first that I’ve…Who is the girl?”
“My insurance policy,” replied Skorzeny. “Against untoward events and harmful visitors. Now, please mix Miss Harrington her favorite martini, if you don’t mind.”
Pilier was shaking the martini when Amanda emerged from the bedroom. The look on her face was cold. “I’ve given her her medicine,” she said. “She should sleep for quite a while now. It’s been a long day.”
Amanda took the martini from Pilier without acknowledgment or thanks and downed it. “What the hell is going on?” she said, suddenly, angrily. “Why the urgent summons from London when you know perfectly well that I have work to do. Your work. For the Foundation. In the middle of an international crisis, I really don’t have the time for—”
Skorzeny cut her off. “Why don’t you shut up?” he said.
The brutality of his tone caught her by surprise. She was just wondering what it was all about when she felt the martini kick in. Except it wasn’t the martini, it was whatever Pilier had slipped into it. Some kind of drug. The glass slipped from her hand and shattered on the flagstone floor.
“That’s better,” said Skorzeny.
Pilier escorted Amanda to a chair and set her down into it. Her eyes were open, but she couldn’t move.
“You’re probably wondering what’s happening to you. Please, don’t be afraid. The condition is not permanent, and there is no lasting damage. You will find it hard to speak, so just nod your head to my questions and everything will be fine. Do you understand?”
Amanda nodded, almost imperceptibly, but it would have to do. She cursed herself for falling for it. Her suspicions had been right all along — the old man thought they were trying to kill him at the London Eye. And maybe Milverton was. She had nothing to do with that.
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