Michael Walsh Bundle

by Michael Walsh

  “Two pops in the head with this baby.” Hartley turned to see the Refrigerator holding up the gun. “Pro job—nice shooting, Senator.”

  “Senator Hartley,” said Whippet. “I’m not going to fuck around with you. Unless you play ball with us, not only is your political career over, not only are you going to jail for the rest of your life, but your good friend from across the aisle, Jeb Tyler, is going to be heartbroken. At a time of national crisis and peril, to lose one of his closest and most trusted advisors, with an election coming up…well, I’m sure you agree that this unfortunate incident couldn’t possibly have come at a worse time. Which is why he’ll feed you to the dogs.”

  Hartley nodded dully. “Am I under arrest?” he asked.

  “I wouldn’t exactly call it arrest,” said the Refrigerator.

  “More like day care,” said the Whippet.

  “It’ll be fun,” said the Refrigerator. “We can bunk down out here.”

  “Just the three of us,” said the Whippet.

  “Four of us,” reminded the Refrigerator. “Until your playmate gets back in touch with you or the Boss says otherwise.”

  “No, you can’t mean…” shouted Hartley as the implications sank in. “Not that.”

  The Whippet smiled. “I’d think about it twice if I were you,” he said.

  Hartley was about to protest that he was thinking about it when he felt the snub nose of the .22 pressed up against the back of his head.

  “In fact,” said the Refrigerator behind him,” I’d think about it twenty-two times.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  FALLS CHURCH

  They were waiting for him by the time he got back from Camp David. The unmarked government car had dropped him at a Washington Metro station, and he had made it home from there, covering the last bit on foot.

  From the outside, everything seemed all right. But Devlin knew it wasn’t. To a man living in the shadows, the smallest speck of light is like a laser beam: the front curtains were ever so slightly wrong.

  Devlin had multiple ways into his house, but he needed to know the right one.

  He took out his car keys, held down the alarm button, and punched the unlock button. That relayed the house’s interior security CCTV feed to his BlackBerry.

  Front hall, side hall, LR, DR…empty. So far so good. But he still didn’t like it. Second floor. Empty BR. His private study was locked and unmolested. That told him something right there: these guys know enough not to touch it.

  He had no idea who they were, but it almost didn’t matter: two makes in two days was double-plus ungood. Somehow, somebody had gotten hold of his private address. Or somebody with access had leaked it. Same difference.

  He punched another button—the trunk lock, followed in quick succession by two clicks on the lock button. That activated the 180-degree infrared scanner, which would give him a rough look at the interior. If their hearts were beating, he’d see them.

  There—three of them, one on the first floor and two on the second. Under the circumstances, the cellar door was the best way. He pressed the code on his house keys and it silently slid aside. There was a pair of infra-red goggles hanging on a hook in the darkness by the door. He grabbed them and put them on. He also took off his shoes.

  Weapons: inside each of his back pockets he slipped throwing knives, and slid a K-Bar knife in its scabbard down the back of his jeans. Under each armpit he placed twin Glock 37s, with a pair of Colt .38s revolvers in special pockets sewn into the front of his jeans. A concussion grenade rounded out his ensemble.

  There was what looked like a light switch at the top of the basement stairs. And it was. But if you moved it from side to side in a Morse Code pattern that spelled out his real middle name, it opened the door into the interior of the house. And then it temporarily disabled every electrical system except those on batteries.

  He was inside, in the dark, where only he could see.

  The man on the ground floor had his back to him, and that’s the way he died, Devlin’s K-Bar slipping easily between his ribs and puncturing his heart. It was a nice, clean kill, no sound, only instant death. Devlin wondered briefly if he knew the guy; he cared not at all whether he had a family. Everybody had a family, except for him.

  Now—fast. Up the stairs, pulling the grenade, arming it, tossing it. The phosphorescent flash would temporarily blind them. He was, once more, the Angel of Death, deputized by God to decide which of his two visitors would live, however temporarily, and which would die.

  As every soldier knew, time slows down in hand-to-hand combat even as it moves at warp speed. Man One had fallen to his knees, grabbing his eyes, so Devlin shot him in the head—no sense wasting a bullet on a Kevlar vest—and moved on to Man Two.

  Not immediately visible, but it didn’t matter. He’d be where, for some reason, they always tried to hide. The bathroom. Pressing another button on his keys, Devlin activated all the interior door locks. Then he hit the gas. Each of the rooms in the house was equipped with nerve gas, hidden behind the green eye of the smoke detectors. It disabled the person but kept him alive and conscious, and able to talk. Most of the time.

  He heard the sound of a body falling. Gun drawn, he unlocked and opened the door and shot the person inside through both legs.

  There was no sense of triumph, or even of exhilaration, as he stepped through the doorway. If you had measured his pulse and heart rate, they would both have been near normal. Emotionally, he was entirely unaffected. He was just doing what they had trained him to do. What Seelye had trained him to do.

  Even before he got the mask off her, Devlin knew it was a woman. There was political correctness for you—putting a woman on a clean team. Somebody’s daughter for sure; somebody’s sister, very likely; maybe even somebody’s mother.

  “Who are you?” she gasped through her pain. The question caught him up short. If this were a team from CSS, they would have known.

  “How did you get in?” he asked, lowering his weapon. Instead of answering, she went for her gun. This time, he shot her in both forearms. A spunky little thing, he had to give her that, and putting up a better fight than her dead male colleagues. “How?”

  The pain must have been excruciating, but she wasn’t letting on. Instead, she was fading out, and Devlin hoped he hadn’t hit an artery. “FBI,” she said. “You’re under arrest.”

  He ripped open her vest and found her badge. It was real. Then he saw all the blood, pooling under her body. It too was real, and as he’d feared: one of his leg shots had severed a femoral artery.

  “On suspicion…” Her eyes started to roll. He was losing her.

  He cradled her head in his arms. “Okay, you got me,” he said. “I’m your prisoner. What’s the charge?”

  “Terrorism,” she whispered.

  “I confess. Who ratted me out?”

  She smiled at him, grateful. “That’s classified,” she said, and died.

  He laid her to rest gently on the bathroom floor. His mind raced, trying to come up with a working hypothesis. A Branch 4 op would have just taken him out, not tried to arrest him. But the FBI—what the hell did they have to do with this? And how did they get into his house, or even know where it was?

  The female special agent’s last word: terrorism. Somebody had fingered him for Edwardsville. There was only one person who knew him by sight at Edwardsville: Milverton. Somebody had hacked his file at NSA. There were only a handful of people who could do that. One of them he knew personally. Two of them he knew by sight. Three of them he knew by their offices. Which left one more person: Hartley. Devlin was suddenly glad he had dropped the dime on him to the president. He wasn’t authorized to conduct assassinations of duly elected American officials, and he hoped to hell his newfound respect for Tyler extended to the man’s sense of political self-preservation. Tyler may or may not be the secular saint or the blithering idiot his friends and foes made him out to be, but he was one very smart politician, and he hadn’t come this far becau
se his instincts were mostly wrong.

  Of course, just because Hartley had been added to the loop didn’t actually rule out any of the others. There might be a connection elsewhere. And if there was, then everything was a lie—the law, the Congress, the president, the whole damn United States of America. Everything that he had been raised to believe in, to live for, to fight for, to die for…a lie. A fixed fight, a gambler’s racket, a sucker’s game.

  He sent the computers into lockdown/self-destruct mode; if anyone tried to access them, all data, right down to the keystroke loggers, would be destroyed. It would not be lost—he had mirrored sites at Internet dead drops all over the world, but he would not have the same ease of access to the material. Still, it would have to do for now.

  He grabbed only what was necessary: the books his father gave him and the picture of himself and his parents in Rome.

  He set the charges on the house. If anyone besides himself tried to enter, the whole place would implode in a controlled demolition. If the clean team really was FBI, he might be able to get Seelye to make sure everybody left the site alone, and down the institutional memory hole it would go. Still, he’d probably never go back there to live again.

  If he was going to put a full-court press on Milverton, he needed help. He needed somebody he could trust to do the job right. There was only one such person he trusted. Maybe the time had come at last for a meeting. For he was already formulating a hypothesis. That the Edwardsville school operation had been a feint he had long been certain. It was a jab, a softening blow, to set up the knockout punch that would come at the end of a series of combinations, each of which would stagger the country a little more until finally it fell over.

  Devlin punched up Eddie’s number, and waited. The cutouts worked smoothly, the line rang. And rang. And rang. No answer. Damn.

  He knew Eddie had a family, had a little girl he adored, supposed he was out right this minute with her and her mother, doing the things family men who could afford to turn off their cell phones actually did. Sometimes, in fact, he wondered why Eddie stayed on this job, in this racket, when he had so much more to live for than, say, Devlin himself did. A little girl…

  He wondered what it felt like to have a little girl. To have a creature he could unconditionally love, and who would love him back because she didn’t know any better, who didn’t ask anything from him except unconditional love. He probably would never know.

  He tried again, this time on Eddie’s secure hot line. Family or no family, this was no time for fucking around.

  Same result: no answer. Where the hell was he, anyway? He decided to leave a message: “Whaddya know, whaddya say?” Eddie would know what it meant, what level of security he would need to use to get in touch with Devlin and, most important of all, just how damn urgent this thing was getting.

  There was a flight leaving from Dulles to LA soon, and he was already booked on it. He’d dispose of the bodies along the way. He felt bad about the woman, but she was part of the job.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  LOS ANGELES

  The fountain was dancing and Dean Martin was singing about the moon hitting your eye like a big pizza pie. The Asian tourists were cell-phoning photos of themselves back to Taipei and Tokyo. The chubby Latina girls with the tramp stamps above their ample muffin tops pretended not to notice as the rich Iranian girls—some of them headscarved, most not—waltzed by in wolf packs, radiating fuck-you wealthy. The trolley line was returning to the station, over by Abercrombie and Fitch. Diane and Jade were in the Apple store when it happened.

  Later, investigators determined that the device had been hidden at the bottom of the fountain pool, with a trigger mechanism set to blow on the thirteenth time Dino sang the words “that’s amore.” It was the most popular song at the busiest time of day, and the perps were practically guaranteed a large audience, nearly all of whom were facing the waving fountains, delighting in the synchronicity of the music, the water, and the perfect southern California weather.

  The bomb was a fairly typical, albeit extremely powerful IED, a roadside bomb from Baghdad with a college degree. It had also been packed with shrapnel of almost every kind that could be purchased in any hardware store: nails, ball bearings, broken glass, screws, which caused the initial fatalities at the blast site. Worse, it had been augmented with radioactive hospital waste in an attempt to fashion a crude “dirty bomb.”

  The shock waves and debris radiated out, accompanied by a wall of contaminated water, tearing through the giant movie theater, blowing Nordstrom’s to rubble, imploding the plate-glass windows of the Apple Store and the Barnes & Noble bookstore, splashing across Third Street to contaminate Park La Brea and the Palazzo, demolishing the Farmer’s Market to the west and pancaking the huge parking structure directly to the north. In the aftermath, about the only thing left within the blast radius relatively unscathed was the Pan-Pacific Park to the east, and that only because much of it was below street level.

  Diane and Jade were at the back of the store, on the upper level, when the blast hit. They had just bought Jade’s new laptop and were getting her old files transferred at the geek desk when it happened.

  The plate-glass windows at the front of the store blew inward, killing or maiming almost everybody. The upper floor was better sheltered, especially at the back. The tech guy was decapitated by a window shard, but Jade was short, and Diane had just bent down to pick her change purse off the floor when suddenly she was slammed against the side of the counter, then propelled through it.

  Jade was slammed back into the counter as well, but the impact of her mother’s body had torn it from its moorings, and so Jade was shoved along by the shock wave, through the space where the counter had stood and into the wall. Shelving came crashing down around her, and then a body, which is what saved her life. When they found her, unconscious but still alive, the shelves surrounding her were tattooed with shrapnel.

  Diane was not so lucky. Even though she had taken the brunt of the blast, even with her skull fractured, she was able to reach for her daughter, grasp her hand, and then collapse on top of her as the wave of metal ripped through what was left of the store. Each screw, each nail tore through her body in that painless way that only the most grievous wounds can inflict, and she might even have survived had she not turned her head toward Jade one last time, as a ball bearing took out her left eye and exploded through the back of her head.

  Diane was already dead when she fell across her daughter, still shielding her in death, her body warm as her child embraced it, but lying still, so very still, as the building collapsed around them. Jade couldn’t move, and couldn’t see much. Just the headless body of the tech guy, as the world went to hell and the fountains stopped dancing and Dino stopped singing and the moon hit your eye…

  The head was staring right at her, the eyes wide open in the astonishment of sudden death. She had just enough strength to reach out and brush it away; it wobbled like a pumpkin on a splayed, bloody axis, then spun, rolled and tipped over.

  “Mom?” she said. “Mama?”

  Everything was really quiet. Those might be screams in the distance, and those might be moans closer by, but she couldn’t tell; her ears were still ringing. After what seemed forever, she realized that the distant screams were sirens, and that the sirens were getting louder.

  There was something heavy and unmoving lying across her. Her mother, she knew, was also nearby. It took her a while to figure out that the two things were one and same.

  Jade struggled a bit, then managed to slip out from beneath Diane. Death has no emotional meaning to a child of Jade’s age, other than as an abstract concept, and so in her mind it was perfectly possible for her mother to be both dead and with her at the same time. Diane’s face was turned away from Jade, but the back of her head was missing. That was the worst part. That was how, in her stunned and bloody state, she knew.

  “Mama,” she said trying to turn her mother’s face to hers. “Mama?”

&nb
sp; Aside from the missing eye, it was her mother’s face, the face she knew and loved so well and so much. Whatever the wounds Diane had endured—the autopsy report would later show that she was hit by eighteen separate pieces of bomb shrapnel, shattered glass, and assorted other objects demolished in the blast’s progression from fountain to store—they had come so fast and so furiously that she would have had almost no time to really suffer. She would have died knowing that she still held her little girl in her arms, that she could still protect her, and that, no matter the evil that men could fashion, she was still her mother.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  LONDON, ENGLAND

  Emanuel Skorzeny and Paul Pilier had checked into the same hotel, the Savoy, but under different pseudonyms. In general, Skorzeny preferred never to alert either the authorities or the media to his presence in their countries. In the U.K., there had been that little bother over some insider-trading allegations a few years back, which had engendered a considerable amount of ill-will toward him until the Skorzeny Foundation suddenly found several high-profile projects on which to lavish equally high-profile support, and then the prime minister had embraced him on camera.

  Still, to avoid the undue scrutiny of the Fleet Street paparazzi, they had taken the Chunnel, where they could spend the half-hour trip under the English Channel in the comfort of Skorzeny’s new Jaguar XJ Portfolio, then motor their way to London from Folkestone.

  The Skorzeny Foundation could be found in the forefront of nearly every fashionable cause; from Darfur to land mines to female genital circumcision, there was hardly a position it took that did not meet with the enthusiastic approval of the editorial board of the New York Times. It supported renewable resources, delivered home heating oil to the poor at affordable prices, and generously funded medical research.