Michael Walsh Bundle

by Michael Walsh

  Had her country gone from American dream to nightmare in her lifetime?

  That was a question for another time. Right now, she had to figure out how to get out of here and how to get her kids out of here. It didn’t matter if she died, it only mattered whether she could save them

  And, by God, she would—no matter how much “they” tried to drive God out of her life, and the life of a country whose money proclaimed “In God We Trust.” At that moment, Hope swore to herself that, if she lived, she would contest every local seat, every county board, every state house and senate sinecure, every national office, even the presidency itself. From now on, she would be their worst enemy. And they had no one but themselves to blame, because, finally, they had driven her to it. What a mighty force the American people could be, once aroused.

  Emma’s hand was in hers. The pain was suddenly gone. Nothing could stop her now.

  “Atta girl, Ma!” shouted Rory.

  They ran. Not caring what was in front of them in the darkness, not caring whether it was popcorn boxes or movie posters or even dead bodies. The only thing that mattered now was to get to the exit, still vaguely but bravely illuminated against the carnage they knew lurked below.

  If only they could make it before the building totally collapsed. If only they could cross the few short yards, no matter what her physical condition. Hope knew she could do it, and prayed passionately that her children could follow. She had never prayed much in her life, beyond the pro-forma Protestantism she had grown up with, a religion that didn’t much matter, like any religion, in times of peace. But now they were up against a religion that very much did matter in times of war, a religion that welcomed war, no matter if it was only a tiny minority, as the newspapers kept telling her, no matter if it was only a fraction, a fraction of a billion was a very large fraction and it was that fraction, she knew, that was causing them all this trouble.

  The exit sign—

  “Come, on Emma!” shouted Rory. “Come on, Mom!”

  They ran. The building groaned once more. They ran faster. A small amount of ground, which on the outside you could leap over in a flash, not less than a heartbeat away. A heartbeat, one tick missed and you were gone, one tick missed and you were meeting your maker if Maker there was to meet.

  Hope didn’t want to find out. She was not yet ready to put her faith to the test. Not ready to be able to answer Abraham’s challenge, not disposed to be confronted by an altar upon which she was supposed to sacrifice her children, not even one of them. They would all get out, or they would all die trying.

  And then, against all odds, her phone rang.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Under the Hudson River

  Few civilians knew that the Hudson River was crisscrossed by tunnels, those both successful and in use, and those failed and long since fallen into desuetude. The old North River—that had been its name until the mid-20th century, reflecting its origins as part freshwater river and part brackish estuary, like the East River—had been the object of man’s desire to simplify the crossing from Manhattan to Jersey for more than two hundred years. The Hudson and Manhattan Tunnels dated back to 1874, when the first attempts were made to dig beneath the silt of the river bottom and snake a tube across to the west side of the island. Because the technology was not up to the task, those early efforts collapsed, but they remained beneath the water today, unfinished and unused. Until now.

  Devlin approached the edge of the water. He had committed to memory the old maps Maryam had showed him aboard the plane and, triangulating with his GPS device, knew precisely where they were.

  He would have less than two minutes to find the old opening, long since buried in the river and under about ten feet of water. When the tubes eventually were successfully built—the railroad they had once served had become the PATH trains from New Jersey, operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which also controlled the other bridges from Jersey, as well as the late World Trade Center—most of the aborted tunnels had been simply left to rot. But bits of them had been incorporated into the design and, if the maps were correct, there was still access. All Devlin had to do was dive down, locate the ingress, and try to hold his breath long enough to get in.

  There was no entry from the Jersey side. When Tyler had issued his order to close off the city, all trains had immediately stopped running. Both the passenger vehicle tunnels had been choked off at the Jersey end as well. And, since he did not officially exist, there was no use trying to pull rank on the PA cops. He was going in, and he was going in invisibly.

  Diving was something else few people knew anything about, except divers, of course. What seemed like just a short distance—say, a hundred feet—might as well be a mile to a diver. The pressure grew exponentially with every few feet down, and while man may well have originated in the primal soup, he had long since accepted his fate as a breathing biped. Water might be fun at the Jersey shore sixty miles south of where he was standing, but at this point, it was an enemy.

  Across the river, Devlin could see the smoke rising from where Times Square would be, to the north of where he was now standing. The prevailing winds were from the west, as usual, so he couldn’t smell anything, but he knew from his survey of the situation aboard the Gulfstream that the world’s most famous intersection was now very likely uninhabitable. The acridity of the smoke, the ongoing gunfire, the rapidly spreading fires were sure to destroy the place, and not even the best men in the NYPD and the Fire Department were likely to be able to stop it. How many times did this have to happen, he wondered, before the United States was ready to go on offense? To hit back, hard, to lay waste to its enemies without the albatross of the lawyers and the JAGs perched on its shoulder, warning, hedging, caviling?

  He took a deep breath, then exhaled. Then another, deeper breath, expanding his lungs, prepping them for what was to come.

  But whom to attack? In the world of asymmetrical warfare, it was impossible for the leaders of nation-states to make their decisions. There were no diplomatic establishments to deal with, no ultimatums to be issued and then either accepted or ignored. The country was fighting a shadow army, led by invisible commanders, troglodytes who could issue their commands from cell phones and sat phones in far-off caves in countries that only existed as diplomatic fictions. Sometimes it seemed that most of the world was a giant Potemkin village, a simulacrum of a country; only kick down the false front to reveal the savage beating heart behind it, so filled with jealousy and hatred.

  And behind those cave dwellers? Who financed them, manipulated them, stroked them, plied them with fake understanding? Devlin had already met one of them, a man so implacable and hate-filled that their one, brief, unfinished encounter had chilled him to his soul. He—a man famously without a soul—had looked into the ferocious eyes of nihilism and had recoiled from the void. Pray to God that he would never end up like that, that he could hold on to just enough of his humanity to keep him on the other side of the line from well-educated beasts bent on an apocalypse far beyond anything that Wagner had dreamed of at Bayreuth.

  Skorzeny. It had to be him.

  They had come so close to him in Budapest. But even the tender ministrations of an Egyptian rendition stint had not been enough to get Farid Belghazi to talk, and so he had died, his body dismembered and fed to the crocodiles that still could be found along the Nile. President Tyler had given them permission to take Skorzeny out, but they had failed. And now, here he was.

  The mission was simple: get into the beleaguered city and terminate each and every one of the terrorists the NYPD had not yet captured or killed. As usual, he was to remain invisible to the locals at all times, tracking and killing without ever revealing his presence either to friend or foe. To any NYPD officer he encountered, he was just another endangered civilian, and should they make him, he would have to kill them. That was the part about the job he hated. It was easy to kill the other side. They had richly deserved their fate and, in fact, many of them activ
ely sought and embraced it. Devlin’s dispatching them made no difference to either of them, and it had the salubrious effect of creating one less dirtbag in the world. But the good guys didn’t deserve it.

  Get Skorzeny and get out. That’s what the voice inside his head had been telling him for months now. Get out and take Maryam with him. Retire, and take your money with you—let the government take care of you for a change, the way it took care of so many these days, instead of you taking care of it. Take this woman, even though you know next to nothing about her. Have never allowed yourself to run so much as a cursory investigation on her. Never bothered to check her cover story with the NCRI, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, or even the scattered remnants of SAVAK, half of whom now lived in Los Angeles. Didn’t care. If she was right she was right.

  And if in the end she was the one who had his name tattooed on a bullet in her gun, well, that was a fate he was gladly going to accept. It would put an end to all this, to this life he saw vanish anyway, before his eyes, at the airport in Rome, to the lie he had been living for so long. It would be the end of him, but it would be the end of Seelye, too, and half the NSA. If this was martyrdom, then so be it. Perhaps he had something in common with the scores of men he had killed. In the end, when your turn came, there was nothing left to do but take it, and like it.

  Get in, get out.

  Get into the tunnel. Once inside he would find a change of clothes in a utility station, adjacent to one of the early monitoring posts that constantly measured the conditions in the tunnel for air quality, radiation, minute increases in humidity—anything that might signal the approach of catastrophe. In the locker he would find any other weapons he needed, in case any of his became unusable after the submersion, along with some heavier firepower beyond what the Gulfstream had provided.

  He cleared his mind. He had done this many times before, although never under such hostile conditions. But at root the job was as simple as it always was.

  Get in, get out.

  Rely on his superior training, his instincts, and the vast emptiness at the bottom of his soul to get him through. Above all, don’t think of her. She was on her way back to Europe. She was already dead to him and should by chance she be resurrected after this was over and they were together again, well, it was just another of the miracles that life held in store for a man in his profession.

  He stepped into the water. Nobody saw him, nobody noticed him. What eyes there were nearby were focused on what was going on across the river.

  Ten feet, twenty at the most. He stayed in the bathtub longer as a kid, head at the bottom, pretending he was a hero, a treasure-hunter, a deep-sea diver about to come up with rare pearls for the naked Japanese girls admiring him from the shore. For men like him, there were rewards in both heaven and hell.

  He filled his lungs with air and slipped beneath the surface of the Hudson.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Times Square

  Francis Xavier Byrne had waited his whole life for a moment like this. It sounded horrible to say, but it was true. Every cop, every politician, every reporter, dreamed of such a moment. Not death and destruction, but opportunity. That was the way they saw it—opportunity to prove what they were made of. Unfortunately, it most often included violent death.

  The country had so devolved, and heroism had been so devalued, that it was politically incorrect for little boys—and some girls—to imagine themselves the heroes of their own dramas. Peace might seem like a good idea to the ninnies of Code Pink and MoveOn, but it took a real crisis for the men to separate themselves from the boys and the cable news anchors and to step up. It was something they lived their lives for, hoping it would happen. Not for blood, but for glory. And if the two were intertwined, well, so what? The entire course of human history up until the 1950s had proclaimed that one simple truth, and only in a country infected with the postwar guilt-ridden moral relativism of America—the insane notion that up was down, black was white, and good was evil—could it be questioned or challenged.

  In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, some of the old virtues had briefly returned. Suddenly the cops and firemen were heroes again, instead of public enemies and figures of fun on account of their lack of an Ivy League education, their Queens accents. The motto of the NYPD had long been “first through the door,” a stone-brave Irish attitude that said you’d rather die than let your pals think you a coward. Cops and firefighters didn’t call their lawyers when they got punched in the nose, didn’t sue their neighbors or fight with them on the condo boards—in fact, they didn’t even live in condos, preferring rentals in Middle Village or small houses in Orange County, which were pretty much all they could afford. Instead, they sucked it up, put their kids through school as best they could, survived their divorces without eating their .38s, most of them anyway, and got on with their lives. Although Byrne had managed to move across the East River to the city, and his place on 50th Street and Tenth Avenue in what had once been the dregs of Hell’s Kitchen had turned into a very fashionable part of town, he’d never forgotten his roots, nor lost his fear of ever doing anything less than his duty.

  A dying breed, he thought, that’s what I am. And if today is the day that the breed finally vanishes, well, so be it. He had the .38 in his hand, drawn and ready to fire, as he hit the wreckage of the AMC.

  He’d never seen anything like the destruction.

  Being a cop in New York City, especially when you’d been on the force as long as he had—which meant going back to the bad old days of the Dinkins administration—meant you had seen a lot of terrible things. But those bad things were usually small family tragedies, a single point of blackness located among the thousand points of light that were the lives of the normal New Yorkers, everyday New Yorkers—in other words, those who had not gotten themselves killed on this particular day.

  Most cops went through their whole careers, from the Academy to roundsman to squad cars to donuts and coffee to the desk sergeant to retirement, without every being involved in violence, except after the fact, when the crime, no matter how gruesome, had stopped bleeding and was even now bloating, swelling, and heading for the corruption of the grave. And even that was rare. Most cops only ever experienced corruption when it came to them not in the form of a popper fished out of the river or a dismembered body half-buried up near the Cloisters, but in the form of a bribe or a payoff, from a city councilman or a drug dealer or even just a two-bit hooker who offered you a blow job in lieu of a bust, and every once in a while you took it because it beat the alternative, which was nothing.

  But he, Francis Xavier, would have no such luck. Sure, Mary Claire had left him long ago, and Doreen as well, and with her his entrée to the downtown Manhattan society he had always despised. But then came Ingrid and that mess with his brother Tom, and once again he had had to corrupt himself, to take a perfectly good bust and turn it, not in the direction of justice but to his own advantage, to give him power over people, over Ingrid, whom he’d condemned, and over his brother, whom he’d always loathed. He’d gotten out of that one alive and well and even prospering, just as his boss, Matt White, had, so many years ago. In that incident they both remembered all too well but which they never discussed, never could discuss, because to do so would mean the end of both of them. Behind every great fortune is a great crime, Balzac said, but far worse was the policeman’s axiom that behind every great career was an even greater crime, as he understood all too well.

  He could still see Rikki Marcon, holding his dead girl, Rosa, who had begged the cops to save her from her violent boyfriend, and whom he’d loved so much that he’d gone to work on her with an ice pick, and there wasn’t much left of her when Matt and Frankie came upon them and without hesitation Matt had capped Enrique twice in the head with his .38 and that was the end of that. That was the reality of the city streets in those days, of bloody love and violent death, the only way these things could end when you got right down to it, which was maybe for the best. It sp
ared everyone the happily-ever-after bullshit, the broadening of the hips, the weakening of the libido, the screaming children, the fights, the broken crockery, the sound of gunshots breaking the semi-stillness of the night in the south Bronx or Bed-Stuy or Brownsville or East New York or…

  “RIP, motherfucker,” was all Matt had said when he blew Rikki away, and as far as Byrne was concerned, that was about all the valedictory and eulogy any one of us deserved.

  From that moment on, neither of them had even mentioned the incident. It was the unspoken scales of Blind Justice between them, both of them eternally complicit in what had been a righteous kill, but what had also been a crime, and the fact that one of them was now Commissioner and the other the head of the CTU was the only possible virtuous outcome in a world long ago condemned.

  And now here he was, twenty years later, not as fit as he was back then but twice as smart, not as clever but twice as wise, not as amoral but twice as opportunistic, faced with an opportunity even he had never dreamed of. Not even when he and Tom were boys, sleeping in their bunk beds back in Queens, Tom the older, Tom the tougher, Tom the dominant, Tom the one he’d hated all his life. Tom who lorded it over him after the death of their father, Tom the successful one, Tom the FBI agent, the lawyer with the gun, whereas he was just Frankie the cop, the Fordham grad with the old .38, because he was too old or too dumb or too scared or simply too lazy to change.