Dancing men, each one standing for a letter of the alphabet. A substitution cipher, whose message gradually became clear as Holmes filled in the missing letters. Filled in the blanks. Time to do the same thing.
He ran a full sequencing deep drill on his keywords. Concentric relationship patterns. Google and other search engines, including NSA’s own. All levels of security clearances, including Seelye’s. Local, global, and universal. Leave nothing to chance:
His father and mother’s full names, plus his own real first name. No one ever called him by that name, and hadn’t since his mother died in his arms, but he still remembered it. Compartmentalization was the name of the game. In “real life,” he couldn’t remember anything about his past, but at the mighty Wurlitzer, he remembered everything.
He threw in Seelye’s name, too. And now he added “MILVERTON, CHARLES A.” and “SKORZENY, EMANUEL.”
The full search would take awhile, even at the speed at which the NSA mainframes operated. No matter how fast they were, though, real time was always faster. Civil libertarians might quail, but the fact was that SIGINT and ELINT were always going to be a step or two behind reality. NSA officers were like those people who went to Disney World and recorded everything they did and saw, then replayed it when they got back home. It took them the same amount of time to relive the experience as to actually have the experience, which meant that they had not only lost one day to the blandishments of the Walt Disney Co., they had lost two.
Devlin rose and, securing the door to his inner sanctum, stepped through the bathroom and out into the main hall. There was something he had to see while the hamsters churned.
Near the front of the NSA building, there is a long hallway, adorned with photographs. At first glance, it might seem like the foyer of the CIA in Langley, whose ostentatious wall of anonymity commemorates the Company operatives who died in the line of duty. Heroes all. But the NSA hall was different.
At first glance, nothing special about the wall. Quintessential NSA guys, smiling white men in suits mostly, family men, all of whom had one thing in common: they were traitors.
Devlin had been down this hallway many times before, but this time he scrutinized each face as if he’d never seen it before. Somewhere on this wall lay the clue to his past, the missing link, the man or (in very rare cases) the woman who could provide the missing cipher code to the mystery of his past.
“G-night, Brick.” More of the staff, heading home.
“Haven’t seen you around much lately, Brick—you okay?”
“Retard.” This last muttered sotto voce.
Dancing men, all of them, dancing men. He pushed his mop past the ranks of photos methodically. He had walked past their ranks many times, but now he put his photographic memory to good use, scrutinizing every face, filing it away for future reference. It could be a useless exercise in memorization, but in his line of work there were no useless exercises in memorization.
There she was. His mother. Give her a name.
Carol Telemacher, née Cunningham. Code name, Polly. It wasn’t until many years after her death that Devlin knew his mother had worked for NSA. She had started in the 1970s with the top-secret NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office, which together with its sister service, the National Reconnaissance Program, had been founded in 1961 to coordinate the aerial surveillance activities of the CIA and the Air Force. Nobody could read a map like his mother, and even on that final, fatal trip, she had guided through the labyrinthine streets of the Italian cities with ease.
Her presence here was Seelye’s revenge. Or maybe homage. What difference did it make?
There she was, so close to him, so near, and yet so very, very impossibly far. Put there by the man who had used her and then betrayed her, exhibited like a traitor, to cover his own shame and complicity in her death. One thing was clear though; no matter how many years had passed, Army Seelye was still in love with his mother. That was why her picture was up on the wall, where he could walk by it every day. Devlin could respect, even admire, him for that.
His brain formed the sentence, but his lips didn’t move. “I love you.” A sentiment he could never give voice to, for fear of certain discovery; in this place, the walls not only had eyes, they had ears too. But one that was always in his heart. Right alongside the anger and thirst for vengeance, which was growing with each passing day.
Devlin rolled his mop and bucket back toward the custodial room. The computers would be finished by now.
One of the programs he had run, called PHIZREC—some in-house geek had a sense of humor—accessed the records of all the faces on the wall. Not just their pictures, but their entire dossiers, including the crimes they had committed that had gotten them on the Wall of Shame in the first place.
He was under no illusions that his presence in NSA would go undetected for long. He was smart, but Army Seelye was at least as smart as he was. In the game of cat and mouse that had evolved between them, they were fully equals.
Hurry. Think. Sequence.
Concentric circles, flowing outward, like the ripple of a stone in the middle of a pond. No one went through life leaving no traces, even a spook. You always affected someone else’s orbit.
He had programmed his search to a Level 10 sensibility, to trigger anything, no matter how small.
Misdirection. That had to be the key. The old magic trick—focusing attention on the irrelevant while the trick was worked practically in plain sight. Or what would have been plain sight, if not for—
His screen blipped amber. His program was set to detect roaming spybots, and it had just found one.
Spybots were protective pawns that could be set to detect any untoward inquiries, especially at his level of security clearance. Devlin had to identify the ’bot without giving away his position or, indeed, letting the drone know he was even there.
Follow the drone.
It was pointing to his personal file. Above top secret. Above SCI. So secret, in fact, that only he and Seelye even knew it existed.
Holy shit. It wasn’t a spybot, it was a guide dog, pointing for him to look at something. An embed message. He clicked on it:
“ABORT A/P POTUS DIRECTIVE THIS DAY.” Abort the mission as per today’s presidential directive—that much he already knew. But this time there was an addendum. It read, AND I QUOTE: “YOUR RULES ARE YOUR RULES. ACT ACCORDINGLY.”
Both a reprieve and a misdirection. He was officially off the case, but unofficially on it. He had no idea whether the president or Seelye was playing him, but at this point it didn’t matter. Time to get what he was coming for and get the hell out.
The screen flashed: BOT APPROACH. A real ’bot this time. A small red light began flashing, at first slowly and then with increasing rapidity. It meant that his probe had been spotted but not yet ID’ed: full red would be confirmation, but he didn’t intended to wait around that long.
His fingers flew: FALSNEGS TIL MIS/ACC.
There were workarounds against even the most sophisticated ’bots. He knew, because he had developed half of them. He could feed the crawler a steady diet of false negatives, contradictory instructions that would cause it to lose valuable time sorting through the mutual impossibilities, until his mission was accomplished.
He had taken something of a risk by his blunt, frontal assault on the databases, but it would still take counterintel a while to find a single command in a nearly infinite series of code lines. But it could be done.
One more thing: SEELYE SKORZENY MILVERTON POLLY CUNNINGHAM.
The ’bot’s red light was still flashing, steadily. Then—something he didn’t expect.
PRIOR ACCESS DETECTED. CONT? Y/N?
Somebody else, some other fox, had been in the hen house. The one who had set the FBI team on him. Hartley’s cutout: Milverton.
YES
WORKING. The fastest artificial brains in the NSA server rooms whirred. A green light popped up.
MISACC read the screen. Mission accomplished.
DOWNLOAD. A flash drive, no bigger than his thumb, blinked as it absorbed the data.
DONE.
Quickly, Devlin shut down his terminal, using an extraction route that passed him through multiple, routine, authorized identities; it would take a little longer but it would cover his tracks.
He put the thumbnail drive into his pocket. Already, however, he’d learned enough.
He was off the case, but he wasn’t.
He was marked for termination. Maybe Seelye would protect him as long as he could, and maybe he wouldn’t.
He had to sort this out as quickly as possible if he was to have any chance at survival.
London, the terminus for Hartley’s mysterious caller.
Milverton.
Ships. Something tugged at his memory. Something Skorzeny had said at his press conference, just before the missile struck. The name of his other ship, which was…on its way to Baltimore. The Clara Vallis.
Weather balloons.
The Stella Maris.
Dancing Men.
Misdirection.
The Clara Vallis.
Oh, Jesus.
France.
DAY FIVE
How ridiculous not to flee from one’s own wickedness, which is possible, yet endeavor to flee from another’s, which is not.
—MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations, Book VII
Chapter Forty-seven
LONDON
It was well after midnight by the time Amanda Harrington unlocked the door to No. 4 Kensington Park Gardens. The big house yawned, silent, nearly empty. She liked it that way, which was why she had lied about the sitter.
“I’m home, darling!” she shouted up the stairs; despite what had just happened, the humiliation she felt, she tried to sound cheery, motherly. The past few days had been very difficult, with the traveling and the treatments. Sometimes she wondered whether it was worth all the trouble. And then she remembered the look in the girl’s eyes, and realized that the question had answered itself.
Not for nothing was No. 4 known as one of the finest private homes in London. Backing up onto the park, with a stunning solarium parkside, four spacious, elegant floors of living space, plus a basement and an attic, it had been featured in every social and architectural magazine in Britain over the past quarter of a century. And it was hers, all hers.
The first thing she did was take a shower, to wash every trace of him off her and out of her.
She was still shaking as she wrapped herself in her bathrobe and padded into the parlor. A 1927 Hamburg Steinway was the featured attraction, along with the collection of first editions, many of them signed, by Graham Greene, T. E. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, and T. S. Elliot.
There was a bar on a side shelf near the piano, well stocked, and she poured herself a whiskey before sitting down at the keyboard. Even if she only played ten minutes a day, it was better than all the therapy in the world. She choose something from memory, one of the Brahms Op. 116 piano pieces, the soulful and autumnal A minor intermezzo, because that was the way she was feeling right now.
This couldn’t go on much longer.
Amanda Harrington was thirty-nine years old, unmarried, and had lived alone since her parents died.
Her hands sank into the keys. You couldn’t play Brahms by pounding the keyboard. Instead, you had to become one with it, ease into it, practically have sex with it, so that the tips of your fingers touched the strings, atomizing the keys and hammers and dampers and flanges and whatever else Cristofori had devised to come between the player and the played.
She wasn’t sure if she really liked Milverton, or whatever his name really was. SAS men, she had found, rarely made good boyfriends, much less husband material, and at her age a girl had to think ahead. Especially now, in modern Britain, where the native population would be a minority in its own country in less than two generations unless the women of England stepped up to the wicket. At least she was doing her part.
Still, the more she thought about it, the more useful Milverton became. He had been freelancing, or perhaps just testing the waters, at the London Eye, but…there was always a next time.
She caught herself. Skorzeny, she was quite sure, had bugged her house, maybe even her brain. Despite what he had done for her and her daughter, there was no plumbing the depths of his malevolence.
She finished the piece and looked around the room, at the books on the bookshelves, at the names of long-dead authors who had believed in Britain, who thought its ideals would never die, who had lived, and sometimes fought and even died through the first and second Somme, and Dunkirk, and Singapore. And what had they given their lives for? New Labour? Posh and Beck? The Finsbury Park mosque?
She closed the keyboard, protectively. There was something about the purity of the ivories—ivories that were now illegal, perhaps even a hanging offense, in modern Britain. The country of Burton and Speke and Stanley, of the greatest hunters and explorers and scientists, had become a nasty little island of guilt, shame, and political correctness.
Fuck them, the sob sisters and the nancy boys and the chinless wonders who nattered about morality while they rutted with the commonest whores of the old Empire. Fuck the politicians who sold out their old constituencies in anticipation of the constituencies to come. This instrument was hers. This house was hers. The child upstairs was hers. She tossed back her whiskey and headed upstairs, to check on her daughter.
The girl was lying in her bed, where Amanda had left her. She didn’t believe in nannies or any of that claptrap. Besides, the bindings were not too onerous and hardly left a mark.
The drugs were wearing off, but still working. Good. That made things easier, just the way the doctors had said they would.
“I’m home, darling,” she whispered, brushing the girl’s fevered brow. “It’s all right now.”
“Mama?” muttered the girl from her deep sleep.
“I’m here.”
“I want to go home.”
“You are home. This is your home. You’re safe here. Safe in my arms.” How she loved her, despite all the adoption troubles.
The girl’s eyes fluttered open briefly. But they were still blank stares, wide pupils, unfocused irises. The doctors had told her that this was natural, that after the shock and the trauma, it would take time. Days, a week, maybe a little more.
Amanda loosened the restraints, which were for the girl’s own good. They left no visible marks. “I’m hungry,” the girl said.
“Dinner’s on its way.” Thank God she had called ahead for delivery. Sometimes, without meaning to, she forgot. A lot had been going on this week. “Indian, just the way you like it.”
One of her phones buzzed. She glanced over: him. She decided not to take the call.
“Mama,” whispered the girl, “I’m scared.”
“Mummy’s right here,” she said, stroking her daughter’s hair.
“What happened?” said the girl, her voice still weak.
“Nothing, darling,” soothed Amanda. “Nothing.”
“There was a man. He hurt me. Then fire…” Totally normal post-traumatic stress reaction; at least that was what the shrinks had said.
“There was no man, and no fire, my darling,” she said. “It’s all in your head.” She wondered if she should call Dr. Knightley, just in case a needle was needed, instead of the array of pills he had prescribed. But her soothing hand quickly had the desired calming effect, and the girl fell back asleep. Once again, the combination of Morpheus and morphine was irresistible.
The phone buzzed again. Milverton, this time. Once more, she didn’t answer. Everybody had down time, even her. She’d call him back later, when she had poured herself another whiskey, when she got downstairs, when she had slipped out of her clothes and stood naked in the solarium, with all the lights out, staring into the darkness of Kensington Park, stripped bare and alone not with her thoughts, which were for sale, but with her emotions, which weren’t. She might even invite him over, but she wasn’
t sure if she wanted another man’s hands on her just now. Better to keep him on the hook, interested, pliable…useful.
Amanda rose and tiptoed away from the bed. She didn’t want to risk the chance of waking the girl. The phone buzzed once more. It wasn’t a call, it was a text message, from Skorzeny. She ignored it for now. The girl stirred. She must have heard the buzz. “What is it?” she said in her sleep.
“Nothing, darling,” replied Amanda.
The girl might have smiled. “Are we going home?”
“We are home,” replied Amanda. “Remember?”
“Is everything okay?”
“Never better. Now go back to sleep.”
“Good night, Mom,” said the girl.
“Good night, Emma.”
Her phone buzzed once more. She let it ring and turned on the telly. The president of the United States was announcing that he had closed down the stock and commodities markets until further notice. Betting on the bears, the Foundation had just made another 40 million pounds sterling.
Maybe, for once in her life, everything really was right with the world. Maybe she had done her job well. Maybe she had finally got her reward.
She turned off all her phones. Beeb-2 was rerunning highlights of Beyond the Fringe. The world could wait, for a change.
Chapter Forty-eight
LOS ANGELES
The taxi pulled into the parking lot of the Griffith Park Observatory and a woman and a boy got out. “Eddie Bartlett” had been watching them all the way up the hill, to make sure they weren’t being followed, but the cab checked out and there was no tail. He put away his binoculars and sprinted down the steps from the roof to meet them at the entrance.
What he was about to do he would never have done under ordinary circumstances. But these times were hardly ordinary. Since the nightmare at the Grove, his world had been turned upside down, and he knew that for this woman, this Hope Gardner, the nightmare had started a day earlier, and had been even worse. At least Jade was going to make it.
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