Just before he opened his mouth, Danny glanced over at the television set, which was still on. Then, unprofessionally but understandably, he dropped the phone and started screaming.
Chapter Thirty-eight
LOS ANGELES
Danny made the short distance from Hobart Street to the Kaiser-Permanente hospital on Sunset and Edgemont in record time. Speeding east on Franklin, weaving in and out of traffic like an ace pilot, his mind raced faster than his car. Surely, Powers must have known what was coming—why else would he have called? Worse, Powers had had him and his family under surveillance—through his kid, for chrissakes!—the whole time, ever since the poisoned gift had arrived.
That fucking Skipjack. How could he have been so stupid? He had trusted this guy, bonded with him—insofar as you could bond with a man you’d never actually met face to face. But they’d been on a half a dozen missions together, and each one had ended in success and, even better, anonymity. He’d made a lot of money from Powers, and so had his men. They’d lost damn few Night Stalkers. But now…
Danny wasn’t pretending to think logically as he raced around a Mexican in a Ford pickup hauling three lawn mowers. There, up ahead—Edgemont Avenue, a sharp, screaming right. He didn’t quite beat the light at Hollywood Boulevard, but didn’t give a shit, didn’t even bother parking his car properly; such was his rage and grief that had any LAPD cop popped his head up, he would have blown it off on the spot and dealt with the consequences later.
After he saw his baby girl. After he’d made sure she was going to make it, no matter what it took. After he’d mourned her mother. If they wanted to fuck with him then, so be it. First things first.
He raced past the nurses, heading directly for the floor where his sources had told him his daughter was lying. The security scanners went nuclear as he blew past the metal detector, but that was another thing that would just have to be sorted out later. Besides, the city of Los Angeles had bigger problems at the moment than one grieving father with a weapon or two.
Into the elevator, where he frightened an old Chinese lady in a wheelchair surrounded by four or five members of family banging away in Cantonese. His Cantonese was rusty, but he could have told them to go fuck themselves had they given him any grief. Instead, they just cowered and complained as he barged into the lift, and then spewed some Chinese venom at him as he barreled out. Like he cared.
There was the room. Jade’s room.
Eddie Bartlett had seen a lot of things in his time. With the 160th, he’d seen men blown apart, men shredded by chopper blades, men decapitated in training accidents, men with their heads shattered as they smashed through the cockpit glass, men defenestrated, whether accidentally or, in combat, intentionally. He knew what a body looked like after it had fallen from a few thousand feet, knew what a hostile looked like after he’d been riddled with automatic weapons fire in a strafing run, knew what was left after man, woman, or child was hit by a cluster bomb or a missile.
His mind raced. His memory slowed.
The road to Baghdad, 2003. No matter what anybody said about who was responsible for 9/11, for the men on the ground it was payback time for the sand monkeys. Leading a SOAR team, in close air support of a forward Marine unit. Knife through rancid butter until one of the damned sandstorms appeared out of nowhere, a whirling, desert dervish like something out of The Mummy.
The Marine column was caught out in the open. Not so bad for them; they could hunker down, even under fire. He and his choppers were up in the air, with sand blasting through their rotors, enfilading their engines. If he didn’t get them down, they would all crash in the desert, like the ill-fated Carter mission, the one that had given birth to the SOARs in the first place.
The enemy was dug in at a village just up ahead. A few of Saddam’s inept Republican Guard’s wasted tanks were blocking the Marines’ way into the village. The dirty little secret of desert fighting was that the Iraqis didn’t like the sand any better than the Americans did; as a natural resource, it was a lousy ally. They would be having just as much trouble with their rifles and small arms as anybody else, just as little freedom of movement. The Arab response to almost any kind of adverse combat situation was to hunker down, lie low, and either turn tail—their ordinary course of action—or dig in, camouflaged, and then shoot their opponents in the back as they passed by.
If the Night Stalkers bailed now, the Iraqis would become emboldened by what they viewed as American cowardice. Although they thought nothing of abject surrender and honored what the West considered treachery, the Arabs preferred sure suicide to perceived dishonor, and they could pin the Marines down. The jarheads’ lifeline was Danny’s Black Hawks, and Danny would be damned if he was going to deny them that.
Was the situation dangerous? Damn straight. But that’s what the 160th was invented for in the first place.
“Captain?” The voice of one of his officers crackled in his ear. He had ten seconds to make up his mind.
Danny glanced at the radar—no letup in sight. The MH-60/DAP (Direct Action Penetrator) Black Hawks boasted state-of-the-art navigation systems, in addition to their airborne refueling capabilities, their infrared sensors, “disco light” IR jammers, SATCOM, and M-134 Miniguns, all bringing death at a top speed of 178 knots, but now it was time to shit or get off the pot. No amount of technology was going to get them through this. It was classic decision time.
Now or never, and now was always better than never.
They flew those babies in, right over the top of the village, hovering ten feet off the ground as their four-man crews scrambled down and opened fire. The Iraqis were astonished to see the Americans materialize from nowhere and in their seconds of hesitation, the SOARs’ infrared goggles and automatic weapons took them apart.
Danny stayed in the chopper, working the machine guns as his men went house to house, cleaning out the nests. The weather wasn’t getting any better. If they were going to get out, they had to do it now.
The hell with it. They’d leave when they were damn good and ready.
They took one casualty that day. The Iraqis lost every single fighter. In the morning, when the storm had cleared, they left a pile of bodies in the middle of the village, with one of the corpses holding a big sign: KILROY WAS HERE, for the Marines to find. They ought to shut their mouths for a while. And then they were gone.
And now he was here. With his daughter. Looking at her lying there, bandages everywhere, tubes everywhere, her eyes closed, hooked up to various machines, her chest rising and falling rhythmically but otherwise showing no signs of life. His beautiful little girl, Jade, whose only crime was going to the Apple store with her mother.
“Sir?” He turned to see a nurse with a couple of security men behind her, two men and a woman. “Would you please accompany these gentlemen downstairs?”
One of the security men laid a hand on his shoulder. Big mistake.
Danny wheeled and punched the man in the stomach. The second man he bounced off a wall. Then he held up his hands. “It’s okay, I’m leaving. I’m just a little overwrought, is all.”
On an ordinary day, they might have called the cops. Not today. There were no cops. They were all at the Grove.
The security guys glared at him. The hospital staff let him go.
He got into his car. Not even a ticket. He drove off.
There was only one man he knew who could have known about the Grove bomb in advance. The same man who had let the bomb go off in Edwardsville, after the mission was already accomplished.
The same man responsible for his wife’s body, lying in the downtown morgue, one of the hundreds of victims of his callousness.
“Tom Powers.”
He had to find him. But how? Their deal was that Powers had to initiate the contact. He had no number for him, nothing. He didn’t even know his real name.
Sort of made a mockery of his motto, NSDQ. Night Stalkers Don’t Quit.
For the first time in a very long time, Danny started to
pray.
Chapter Thirty-nine
LOS ANGELES
Traffic in central Los Angeles was at a standstill, and so they made their way over the hill from Burbank, avoiding the freeways, cutting around Griffith Park on San Fernando, crossing the LA River and darting down Glendale Boulevard and into Echo Park.
Deliberately, he kept a house in one of the most unfashionable neighborhoods in the city. The home on Laveta Terrace in once-fashionable Sunset Heights had been built in 1921 by a rich man, a member of the city’s prestigious Jonathan Club, but had slid downhill in the early 1930s once W. C. Fields, whose house was just three doors down, moved west to Los Feliz. It was a perfect place for him to live as anonymously as the nature of his job demanded.
Echo Park was the Greenwich Village of Los Angeles, a longstanding hotbed of radicals, gays, commies, lefties, greens, Latinos, and once upon a time, Aimee Semple McPherson herself. Indeed, her Angelus Temple lay just down the hill to the west, at the northern end of the Echo Park Lake. True, there was the occasional gunshot that broke the stillness of the night, but the view of downtown from his second-floor terrace was nothing short of spectacular, and on game nights, the lights of Chavez Ravine stabbed the night sky like some kind of secular cathedral.
“Am I still under arrest?” she asked. “That was cute.”
“No, it was clever.”
“We’d better get to work,” she said.
That was it. No mention of the Studio Galande and its aftermath, no reference to the last time they saw each other, no hint of her feelings when, after weeks of nursing her back to health at a safe house in Neuilly, he had suddenly and completely vanished from her life. She just picked up right where they’d left off.
“Don’t you want to know why—”
She held up a hand. “No. We don’t have time for that.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I know you are, Frank,” she replied.
“My name’s not Frank,” he admitted.
“I know it isn’t,” she said, moving toward him. “Everything you’ve told me since the day we met was a lie, but I accepted it.”
“Because you were lying too.”
“Because I accepted it.”
Observe, orient…fuck it. “Follow me.”
He led her into a tiny hallway that separated the west wing from the east wing, and then into what was once was, charmingly, the 1920s “telephone room,” a cubbyhole about the size of an old-fashioned phone booth under the central stairway that still had the hook for the home’s original telephone. The proper combination dialed on the reproduction wall phone he’d had installed would slide open to allow passage to the inner sanctum. The wrong combination would result in a slam-shut on the hallway side and the controlled explosion of a cyanide gas bomb in the enclosed space, followed by a trapdoor release of the corpse into a pit below. Nothing personal.
He dialed all the right numbers, shielding the combination from Maryam. “Still don’t trust me, do you?” she said, as the false wall slid open.
“I love you,” he said. “I loved you from that first kiss in Paris—”
“Our first kiss,” she said. “It takes two to tango.”
“From our first kiss in Paris. When you saved my life at the Studio Galande.”
She grew somber at the memory. “Like I said, it takes two to—”
“Love comes first. Trust comes later.”
The door slid open. The basement stairs beckoned. She grabbed his arm.
“It can’t be this easy, can it? People like us…”
“Even people like us get lucky, once in a while.”
Most people in LA not only didn’t have basements, they had never even heard of them. But his house, located on top of a hill, had what was known locally as a “California basement,” a half-cellar tucked beneath the living room on the downward slope, maybe eight by ten. Plenty of room for his needs: the inner sanctum of Devlin West.
He ran the video of the president’s news conference. There was the terrorist:
Unless the American government immediately and completely capitulates to our demands, these attacks will continue in ever-increasing ferocity until America and the West is destroyed in a holy rain of fire…And that day of reckoning will be the most terrible in the history of the world…We made our justifiable demands and our reward was death. Now, we will visit death upon you.
Devlin checked all lines of secure communication. Nothing from Seelye, or Rubin or, worse, Tyler. Didn’t matter—he’s already gotten his assignment from the president on national television. It would be good to keep a little radio silence for a while.
Now he knew he was absolutely right not to have bought the Muslim terrorist line. Everybody expected “terrorists” to be Muslims these days, especially the media. They were the politically incorrect bogeymen with incendiary “sensibilities.” They were also a singularly inept group of adversaries from cultures that could not build a flush toilet or maintain an electrical grid.
Real terrorists wouldn’t have shot that poor reporter—hell, the press was usually their most ardent sympathizer, ever ready to “understand” them. Plus, real terrorists wouldn’t have had such an absurd list of demands. The quick succession of new attacks also spoke against the conventional terrorist angle, since it took Muslim terrorists months or years to conceive, plan, mount, and execute their operations, most of which were half-baked and technically unfeasible anyway; that was one of the reasons why the United States had been able to roll up so many of their networks after September 11.
Even their vaunted Internet cadres had been busted down to buck private, thanks to NSA/CSS. This wasn’t Devlin’s department, but he was well aware of the extraordinary battle that had been waged, and now basically won, against Al-Qaeda in cyberspace. On September 19, 2008, the NSA warriors had taken down four of the five principal jihad sites, DSA’ed them to death, then poisoned them; what the Romans had done to Carthage, Fort Meade had done to what was left of bin Laden’s network. It was the kind of victory that should have been hailed on the editorial pages of every major newspaper, but of course wasn’t.
He tried Eddie Bartlett again. Nothing, not even a ring—straight to voice mail. Ditto for his satphone and the iPhone. Nix.
Worse than nix. For security reasons, if Eddie didn’t pick up on three secure lines, Devlin was supposed to drop him. It was his own rule, because Devlin had learned the hard way over the years that there was a penalty for breaking even arbitrary, self-imposed rules. Still…
“What?”
“I can’t raise my partner, the guy I was on my way out here to see when it happened. That’s never happened before.”
“And you think something happened to him.”
“I never think, until I know.”
“Let me work with you.” There, she said it.
He turned away from his computers and looked at her. “I guess we’re either going to have to trust each other or we’re going to have to kill each other, so why don’t we decide right now? Why did you follow me in Paris?”
“I wasn’t following you. I was there for you.”
“Who sent you?”
“That’s classified.”
“Do you know who I am?”
“Yes. You’re Frank Ross.”
“And do you know who Frank Ross was?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“He was a reporter who got framed and sent to jail. James Cagney played him in Each Dawn I Die.”
It was getting clearer now. “NCRI?” The National Council of Resistance of Iran. The great Iranian diaspora had put many of the richest Persians in America, a lot of them burning with desire to see the last of the mullahs.
She didn’t answer. “It’s my turn now. Why did you leave me?”
“How about a drink?”
“I’m Muslim, remember?”
“Not a Mormon?”
“No.”
“So…how about a drink?”
; “I thought you’d never ask.”
They took the private lift up to the second floor and stepped out onto the terrace. The lights of downtown Los Angeles were still on. Hundreds of people had just died to the west, and the city had a big hole in its heart, but life went on. That was the thing about tragedies: they were only tragic to the dead, who didn’t care, and those relatively few who cared for them. To the rest of humanity, tragedies were fodder for Oprah.
He kept a bar sheltered under the eaves. He poured them both a single malt Islay with a couple of ice cubes. They had their drinks in happy silence, with only the lights of downtown to accompany their thoughts.
Back to work. Devlin pulled out his PDA and ran the cutout number that Hartley had dialed from the Watergate. The one he had traced as far as LA. It was easier from here to tap into the LA phone system without attracting attention. He had no intention of dialing the number himself, only tracing the bounce-on from this point.
The first thing he did was to match the number to a subscriber who, of course, turned out to be a Mr. Henry A. Wong of Rancho Park, recently deceased. The second thing was to use the system’s internal assignment logarithm to freeze it and take it off the grid for another few days. It was like isolating a virus in a lab dish: now he could play with it.
The first bounce-on didn’t surprise him in the least. It was the private, unlisted telephone number of Senator Robert Hartley in Georgetown; that was a nice touch. The second bounce was the main switchboard at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade. OK, that told him something too. But it was the third and final bounce that he was really looking for: central London, somewhere between Highgate and Islington. Milverton just couldn’t resist showing off and now he just made the biggest mistake of his life. He let out a shout of triumph.
“Are you okay?” She’d finished her scotch.
Michael Walsh Bundle Page 21
