He rifled through the man’s pockets to find his ID: Francis Xavier Byrne, Captain, and chief of the Counter-Terrorism Unit. What were the odds?
Actually, the odds were pretty good. Everyone who had ever lived or visited midtown Manhattan had had the experience of looking up and seeing an old friend from high school across the bar, or encountering a former boss on the subway, which begged the question of how many times could that have happened were it not for fate: that you miss the old flame by a matter of minutes or even seconds; that you turned your head and so didn’t see the guy who’d owed you money for ten years.
So here, in a mostly deserted Times Square, in the middle of a firefight, how unusual was it really that he should encounter the one man he needed to know, the one many who could really be of use to him down the line, either as an ally or as a decoy? Using a hand scanner, he quickly sucked up all Byrne’s personal information and uplinked it to CSS. He also got the numbers of the cop’s department phone and the personal cell phone they weren’t supposed to carry, but all of them did. He felt around for a drop piece, but didn’t find any. This guy was both very honest and very sure of himself.
Devlin cracked some smelling salts—that’s what they still called them—under Byrne’s nose and saw the man’s eyelids flutter. He was going to be fine. He scribbled something on a piece of paper and stuck it in the cop’s inside breast pocket, where he kept his shield.
Then he was gone.
Byrne took a deep breath and staggered to his feet. The noises and shouts and screams and gunfire from the direction of Times Square grew louder. There was no time for reflection, nor for wonderment at miracles. There were still ghosts who were not yet ghosts, and Frankie Byrne had to save as many of them as he could. Then he stopped—
His dad’s service revolver was in his hand, although he couldn’t really remember how it got there. So it was true: this really was the kind of gun they would have to pry from his cold, dead hands. Then he noticed that his wounded shoulder had been expertly field dressed, and that there was little or no pain. He had a vague memory of a man with his face concealed, a brief struggle…but that might have been the morphine talking.
Morphine? Since when were they dealing with terrorists who brought their own corpsmen with them? And why would a terrorist not just kill him, but save him?
So he wasn’t a terrorist then, even though, as memory returned, he was wearing a balaclava, just like the old PLO Fatah guys had worn back in the day. Which meant there was a foreign element in the city, that Manhattan wasn’t truly sealed, and that he could only be a fed of some kind. FBI? No, they weren’t that good…
Then—voices from behind. “Hey, mister,” said one of them and at first Frankie couldn’t tell whether it was male or female. He turned, ready for anything, gun trained—
A boy, then an older girl. Finally, a woman. All three were covered with soot and grime but no blood that he could see.
“Don’t shoot, mister,” said the kid.
“I’m Hope Gardner,” said the woman.
“I’m a cop,” said Francis Byrne. He hadn’t said that in years. It felt good.
And now to work.
The passage through the PATH train tunnel had been uneventful. The cameras might have picked up his presence, but in the half-light of the shut-down tunnel, no one would be able to make him out, even if they bothered to go back and look at the grainy security films, which they wouldn’t. In one of the service bays—the tunnel was lined with them every few hundred yards; they contained emergency equipment, oxygen, firefighting canisters, first-aid supplies—he had found what he was looking for: a spec-ops version of the Lewis Machine and Tool MRP semi-automatic AR rifle with a SOPMOD buttstock and firing the 6.8 SPC (“special purpose cartridge”) round. The rifle was broken down into five component parts, including a suppressor and a Schmidt und Bender 3-12x50 mm scope, which meant he could shoot the eyes out of anything at ranges up to one hundred meters and beyond. The best part was that, with a hex head torque wrench, you could sub different calibers and barrel lengths on the weapon, depending on availability and necessity. There were also a few concussion grenades and some climbing clips in case he needed them, as well as a netbook with a satellite uplink, with which he could access all but the most secure NSA databases.
As in Mumbai, the attackers were coordinating via cell phones, which meant his instincts had been right. The NYPD’s first reaction probably had been to shut down cell service, but his instructions to Seelye had obviously been executed, and he could read them clearly. No point in deactivating the bubble when it was going to be your best friend, and right now they might as well be wearing signs around their necks advertising their locations. As long as his uplink held, and they remained relatively stationary, he’d be able to identify and terminate any of them the cops didn’t get to first.
Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.
In Mumbai, the cops had been hampered by a lack of technology: they could record the cell phone conversations of the attackers, but they couldn’t triangulate and track them in real time. As a result, the killers had been left free to roam throughout the city, shooting up the train station, the Jewish center, and the luxury hotel pretty much with impunity until they were finally surrounded and cut down by superior firepower. It was agonizing to listen to, these conversations between the delusional young men who thought they were fighting and dying for Allah and their handler in Pakistan, who so casually sent all but one of them to their deaths. The targets had been carefully selected for maximum object-lesson value, and each gunman had been kitted out not only with armaments but maps and building plans, so as to make his deadly work go as smoothly as possible. The quality of mercy had not been strained, since there was none; Indian, Jew, and foreign tourist alike had been gunned down without so much as a single act of mercy, since the word had no meaning in this context. With the killers on a quest for martyrdom, the victims were nothing more than means to an end, their lives as meaningless as the locks of hair and the scraps of flesh from his victims that a serial killer kept not as a memento but as proof of his own skill and moral rectitude.
The killers had gone to school on the Mumbai attack, that much was clear. The attack on Times Square had been well-coordinated, the timing of the subway explosion perfect, the sealing of at least the Holland Tunnel a masterstroke. In fact, Devlin was counting on their professionalism. Professionals were many things, but one thing above all was that they were predictable. Training had instilled in them discipline and with discipline came adherence to the rules—not arbitrary rules but rules that worked, rules that were proven to keep your ass alive in the toughest spots. Professionals could be dealt with, as he had dealt with Milverton in Paris and London; you might win or lose in direct hand-to-hand combat, but you knew the rules of the game.
Amateurs, however, were a different story. Most of them could be picked off rather easily, since their true-believer rage caused them to blunder time and again, as they hoped to make up for in anger what they lacked in basic tradecraft. Amateurs were like the guy who drove all the way across the country, took the Metro to the Pentagon, and opened fire at the guards at the civilian entrance; he managed to wound two before they cut him down and killed him. He’d made his point, but for what? He should have just shot himself back home in California and saved time.
Tyler had reacted exactly as the attackers had hoped he would, by sealing off the city and leaving the task to the NYPD. That’s what he would have done, thought Devlin, play it right down the middle, leaving it to the pros without making a federal case out of it, but inserting some agents just in case. How many hands Tyler was playing, of course, was known only to him and maybe to Seelye; no doubt there would be other Branch 4 ops involved, plus any military units, probably at the platoon level, that they might have in-filtrated. But there wasn’t going to be any big action—even a reporter would eventually notice that, and Tyler’s only hope lay in ending this fast without hyping it, mourning the dead and rebu
ilding the city as quickly as possible. With any luck, he could spin the entire episode to his advantage, have Americans rally round the flag, hand out yellow ribbons to his heart’s content, have his Hollywood buddies organize a couple of telethons, and hope like hell the rebuilding effort didn’t turn out to be Freedom Tower II. It was his only chance if he wanted a second term.
In the end, of course, none of that really mattered to Devlin. He had a job to do, and he was going to do it or die trying. The weightier issues of state were best left to the men and women to whom they were assigned, however inept or unqualified they might be; the decisions he made in the field were tactical, not strategic. His failure to kill Skorzeny when he had the man in his grasp in Clairvaux was something he was going to have to live with, and Devlin had not the slightest doubt in his mind that whatever soup he was about to walk into had something to do with that failure. Emanuel Skorzeny was a sick, twisted individual animated in equal parts by greed and hatred, and he would continue his atheist’s war against God and civilization until the day somebody proved to him the reality of Hell.
They were swarming now, the enemies of America. For decades, maybe even centuries, they had lain in wait, hoping to take down the country and the civilizational ethos it represented. They had attacked from within and without. They had sent infiltrators disguised as philosophers, as artists, as educators, as clergymen, as patriots, and, the worst, as lawyers to manipulate the system, bore in, and hollow it out. They had created a mind-set by which up was down, black was white, and in was out. They had called into question every tenet of the American experiment and posited that it was illegitimate and inimical. They had used the failures of other societies as proof of the malfeasance of the American society. And now their handiwork lay all around him—the smoking rubble of Times Square.
And yet Devlin welcomed this challenge. Not solely for the thrill of the fight—that was a given. With his ticket out already punched, he could leave the fray whenever he wanted and, in the aftermath of Edwardsville, he had thought to depart and take Seelye down with him. But she had changed all that.
But his welcoming of the challenge had roots far deeper. Devlin engaged because by the very act of engaging, he was proclaiming the best of American values. Most of the time, the debate over the soul and the future of the country came where it properly belonged, in the classrooms, in Congress, in the newspapers and the blogosphere, and on the political stump. But war was politics by other means, and so when it came to that, as Jefferson knew it must, it had to be fought with the same passionate ferocity. As Al Capone famously said, “in my neighborhood you get farther with a kind word and a gun than with just a kind word.” The problem had been that, since the end of World War II, the poison had seeped into the body politic, Schopenhauer’s Wille zur Macht had been delegitimized as the intellectually and morally absurd doctrine of “proportionate” response had gained first a toe-hold, then a foothold and finally had become, if not accepted doctrine among war-fighters, then at least the media-fueled template that framed the issue and thus limited discussion.
All of this could be argued in the pages of one of Jake Sinclair’s newspapers. Devlin was prepared to argue it where the argument properly belonged: on the battlefield. Manhattan was now a petri dish of political pathology, a lab experiment into which he had now injected himself.
He stepped over some rubble and looked around. He was in the remains of what had once been a legit theater, but was now a heap of rubble. He ducked down behind a collapsed wall, popped open his netbook, and got a read on the situation. Using an advance logarithm that screened out legit subscribers, emergency workers, and governmental accounts from possible rogues, he counted thirteen separate suspicious entities in use within a ten-block radius. He wouldn’t have to take them all out—the cops would take care of some of them—so he would start with the most difficult targets, the ones whose locations made them feel the most secure, and make an example out of them. Against these adversaries, there was nothing like a head on a pike to focus their attention on what was about to happen to them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Midtown Manhattan
Alexander Stegmaier had never heard of Minsky’s, nor seen the movie about the famous raid, nor had any appreciation at all of the famous burlesque house, so the irony of the fact that he was standing inside the New Victory Theater on 42nd Street, which had once proudly been the Republic and the flagship of the Minsky empire, was completely lost on him. He wasn’t interested in naked women, except in the up-close-and-personal, but as he had no experience with the strange and exotic species, it was all theoretical.
Never mind. He was standing in the heart of the modern Gomorrah, the city of such wicked depravity that the Brothers had not stopped trying to take it down, and never would until it was leveled. The city that once gloried in its sinfulness, latterly become a home to “family entertainment,” as if that would save it from God’s wrath. This vile cesspool, from which was he was even now picking off pedestrians from his perch in the second-story window.
Alex Stegmaier was not a Muslim and would have been horrified at the thought. His alliance with the Brothers was pragmatic, not religious, but since the enemy of my enemy is my friend, it was not hard for them to make common cause, at least temporarily, until such time as the apocalypse was well and truly summoned, after which it was up to beings far greater than himself to sort out the final conflict. His job was to bring it on.
At first, the cars had been his primary targets. It was so satisfying to pull the trigger, hear the glass shatter, and watch the effects as the car veered, accelerated, or simply stopped, depending on whether his bullet had found a home in flesh or metal. It was not that he was a crack shot exactly, but his periods of training in Oregon, in the mosques of Dearborn, and in the encampments in upstate New York had given him a self-confidence that he had always lacked back home in Marin County, California. There, he had always been a misfit, a nerd, a weakling who had never been much good either at science or math, not to mention hopeless at sports. He stuttered, which left him off the debate team, and after he’d been routinely beaten by a parade of underclassmen at chess, he’d stopped competing at pretty much everything.
He leaned out the window. The main action lay to the east, but the west was a target-rich environment of cop cars and emergency vehicles, clustered around the Eighth Avenue intersection. He looked through his 8x-power scope and found an unmarked vehicle, overturned. A man was trying to drag another man, obviously wounded, out of the wrecked car. Alex decided that they would be good target practice and was lining up a shot when his cell phone rang.
Damn!
He lowered his sights and glanced at the caller ID: Control. He didn’t know Control’s name, but that was what they all called him, all of the brave warriors on the operation, whose names and real identities were unknown to each other and known only to him. Control was as close as he ever hoped to get to God in this life.
“Tammy.” That was his code name, for Mount Tamalpais, the sleeping Indian maiden turned into a mountain that dominated Marin County, across the Golden Gate from San Francisco. It was a girl’s name, and he resented it a little, but he was not about to let on about that now. Not in the middle of the most glorious moments of his life.
“Where are you?” The man had a slight foreign accent, although being a Californian, almost everybody sounded foreign to Alex.
“Base One,” he replied. “Neuer Sieg.” He liked to show off his knowledge of German, because he thought it made him sound more threatening; even if the grammar and the cases more often than not defeated him.
“Good. Hold in place, but get ready to fall back, to the east. A great vision of glory awaits you.”
Alex tried to control his excitement. The vision of glory was something he had sought for many years, the moment of transcendence that would allow him to lord it over, however briefly, his tormentors. That was all he ever asked of God when he was at prayer: that just for one brief instant, he woul
d not only be in command but that the others, his antagonists, would be forced to acknowledge his dominance. He would see the looks in their eyes, the worm turned, the worm Ouroboros devouring its own tail, the perfect circle of life and death.
And he knew something the others didn’t, the swine. This was one of the things that was going not only to win him accolades and plaudits, but earn them: he knew, being German and all, that the word Worm didn’t mean worm at all, but Dragon. He’d seen the movie and read the book and even looked up the images of the paintings online, he knew all about Blake and his Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun, and if he could not appreciate the visions for their artistic conception and execution, he could happily acknowledge their raw power, their controlled glimpse into the divine madness of Revelation.
Blake, however, was long gone, at one with the worms, small “w,” returned to the earth by being devoured and shat out the assholes of other creatures, rejuvenating Mother Gaia as they destroyed one another. Just as he was doing now.
Damn that woman. Even amid all this tumult, her shrieks had been driving him crazy. Once more he leaned out the window and peered through his scope. This time he found her.
She was across the street, on the roof of what had been the AMC Theaters. The building was on fire, so it was only a matter of time before she would finally shut the fuck up and take those two mewling brats with her, but there was no law that said he couldn’t hasten her demise along. It wouldn’t be an easy shot, but at least it was a free throw—no one would notice, and if he bagged her, so much the better. Practice made perfect.
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