Michael Walsh Bundle

by Michael Walsh

  THREE DAYS LATER

  EPILOGUE

  Falls Church, Virginia

  Cautiously, Devlin disabled the security services on his old house in the near Virginia suburbs of Washington. He had not been in the house since the events of last year, had assumed in the wake of the FBI raid, he would have to blow it, which meant he painstakingly had to clear the charges to once more render it habitable.

  He had to laugh. Falls Church had once been a prosperous and stable small city—the smallest in the country—but like everything and every place in America, it had changed radically. Today, naturally, it was a hotbed of anti-American Islamic activity, just a few miles from the Capitol. One thing you could say about the Americans; they were going to let their newfound fetish tolerance run free if it got them all killed. And if and when it did, the hell with them.

  He moved into his secure room, which was just as he left it. He had just witnessed a boy much like himself go willingly to his death out of passion—not for some abstract bullshit ideal, but for something he believed in, during the course of which he touched something he had never touched before—not just a woman, but the Other. In his sick, twisted way, Raymond Crankheit had caught a glimpse of the other side, the side where happiness dwelled, and he’d liked it well enough not to kill Principessa Stanley. Just as he, Devlin, had caught that glimpse with Maryam and decided to gamble everything on his one chance at happiness.

  “Do you trust the bitch? You don’t even know her real name.”

  Where the hell was she? He had not heard from her since her last message from Budapest, and though he knew he shouldn’t care, it was only business, she was on assignment—his assignment—and that op sec was indeed everything…he still cared.

  Maybe it had been a mistake to bring her in. Maybe he should have killed her last year when he had the chance, after their night together in Echo Park, a mercy killing. Maybe he should have let her die in Paris, when she took a bullet for him.

  Maybe…but then where would he be?

  He’d watched the entire Kohanloo takedown from one of the safe houses on the Upper East Side, near Gracie Mansion. Using the electronic entrepôt that Byrne had given him—one that he knew would be temporary and limited to this operation—he was able to see the whole thing from the chopper’s built-in cams, part of the same mechanism that gave the flying machine its night vision. He would have liked to have been part of that, but he had acted on his intuition that Byrne was a right gee, as the cops used to say back in the old days, and he’d been proven correct.

  He went into the bathroom. He could still see the bloodstains on the floor, where Evalina Anderson had died at his hand. He started to scrub them, but they were old and dried, and after a while he gave up. Then he threw up.

  There were too many ghosts now, piling up, even right here in his own home. At some point, one of them would reach out of the past and claim him and then that would be that.

  He switched on his systems in the panic room. He’d have to update them all, of course, and run endless security checks, but for now all he wanted to do was see if there were any urgent messages sent via the private T-3 line to The Building in Maryland.

  There were.

  URGENT—that would be from Seelye. The man never slept.

  SPEAK

  MESSAGE FOR YOU, FROM YOU

  That could mean only one thing—a message Maryam had sent from the secure laptop had been received.

  RELAY

  I DON’T THINK YOU REALLY WANT TO SEE IT

  DON’T FUCK WITH ME DAD.

  WE CHECKED THE IP ADDRESS.

  HUNGARY, SO WHAT?

  NOT HUNGARY.

  WHERE THEN?

  YOU’RE NOT GOING TO LIKE THIS

  WHERE??

  There was a short pause before the answer came: IRAN. TEHRAN, TO BE PRECISE

  Devlin tried to control his panic. MEANING WHAT?

  WHAT DO YOU THINK? SHE’S DEFECTED

  IMPOSSIBLE

  ENTIRELY LIKELY. WE GOT A DOSSIER, COURTESY OF SENDER. IT’S ALL ABOUT HER. WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE IT? SEEMS SHE’S BEEN A DOUBLE AGENT THE WHOLE TIME

  FOR WHAT PURPOSE?

  WHY, BOY, FOR YOU. WHAT OTHER PURPOSE?

  BUT SHE—He stopped. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t. REQUIRE PROOF. COULD BE SKORZENY DOUBLE, FALSE FLAG, ANYTHING

  THERE WAS ONE OTHER THING

  WHAT?

  SIGNED BY HER

  WHAT??

  YOU SHOULD SEE FOR YOURSELF

  SEND IT

  I WILL. BUT YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT THIS NEGATES OUR PREVIOUS AGREEMENT. MY JOB IS NOW SECURE SO LONG AS TYLER STAYS PRESIDENT. WHICH YOU AND I WILL NOW ENSURE. DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR?

  SEND IT AND WE’LL TALK LATER

  SUIT YOURSELF.

  Even before it came, he knew what was coming. A taunt, a jest? Or the truth?

  It came across the screen:

  It was the “Dorabella” Variation, written out in Elgar’s hand. The code Atwater had cracked. The substitution for the substitution. The most visible layer of the endless palimpsest that was his world, and hers as well.

  And underneath, in her hand, the words: “I’m so sorry.”

  He was not sure how long it was before he noticed a new sensation. It was a pain in his chest, a throbbing, searing pain—no, not pain, more like a new emotion, one that he had never experienced before, but one that brought on shortness of breath, sweats, shivers.

  Then he became aware of a sound rushing in his ears, like the waters of a river, or the waves of a great ocean. There was the smell of salt in his nose, as of brine and felt himself toppling backwards into a tidal pool that splashed the world with ocean spray as the waves met the rocks on the shore.

  He thrust his arms and let gravity take him, plunging down toward the sea, the primal sea, not Mother Earth but Mother Ocean, the place where blood and seed were the same, the place where life began and where death could take you any time it wanted. And all accompanied by the beating of a great drum, the tactus of the universe, the thing that set our rhythms, from the seconds to the minutes to the hours to the days to the weeks to the months to the—

  The beating of the human heart.

  The ghosts reached out, but he shook them off. Not yet. Too soon.

  The beating grew louder, stronger, more urgent. Across the oceans of time he had heard her and could hear her now. Across oceans of distance, he would find her. The only thing he could not do, ever, was to doubt her.

  Of one other thing, finally, there could be no doubt: at last he knew he had a heart.

  SHOCK WARNING

  MICHAEL WALSH

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-
SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  TWO WEEKS LATER

  EPILOGUE

  For Greg Clary

  Adapt yourself to the place where your lot has been cast, and show true love to the fellow mortals with whom destiny has surrounded you.

  —MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations

  PROLOGUE

  New York City

  “Department of nuclear medicine,” said Celina S. Gomez into the telephone. Gomez was a technician in the radiology department at Mount Sinai Medical Center on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. A technician was nowhere near as prestigious as being a doctor or a nurse, but for a girl who had worked her way across town and down eighty blocks from Little Santo Domingo on the West Side, it was good enough.

  The S stood for Selena. Her mother had been such a fan of the late pop singer that she had, in effect, named her twice. “Just like New York, New York,” mamacita used to tell her. “The town so nice they named it twice.” Celina didn’t want anybody calling her Celina Selena, so she kept her middle name a closely guarded secret, but she enjoyed using her middle initial in honor of her mother and because it was cool.

  If only mama could see her now. But mama couldn’t, because she had been killed six years ago, when she caught a stray bullet as she was on her way to the supermercado over on Broadway. Celina had still been in high school then, a senior at Mother Cabrini in Washington Heights, and was on a day trip to The Cloisters in nearby Fort Tryon Park when she heard the news. The easy thing would have been to drop out of school at that point and get pregnant, like many of the girls she knew, but she stuck with it, buried her mother, and went to King’s College in Brooklyn.

  She’d made the right choice, because now here she was, living on the Upper East Side, in what the gringos used to call the little girls’ neighborhood—safe, boring, secure. She could walk to her apartment over on First Avenue, maybe even hit one or two of the bars on Second on the way home to her walkup, where she paid eighteen hundred dollars a month for the privilege of living with her cat.

  “I would like to speak to Saleh,” said a man’s insistent voice at the other end of the wire. She’d heard that expression “the wire” from one of the older women on the staff, and loved its retro sound. It was a throwback to the days when phones really were connected with wires—not like today, when cell phones and smartphones could give you brain cancer if you weren’t careful. Celina knew enough to stay away from as much unnecessary radiation as possible. In her line of work, she was exposed to it every day, to gamma radiation mostly, injected into heart patients to chart the blood flow through their damaged or diseased organs. She felt sorry for them, mostly middle-aged men who had suddenly realized they no longer had a shot at playing shortstop for the Yankees, or dating girls in their twenties, or a host of other fantasies that time had just disabused them of.

  “I’m sorry, there’s no Dr. Saleh in this department,” she replied without even looking at the directory. Celina knew everybody on the staff—not just in radiology, but pretty much the entire medical staff. She didn’t intend to stay a technician all her life, so she spent every spare waking moment studying the workings of the hospital, learning the names of all the doctors and nurses and even their faces whenever possible. How else was she ever going to be like them if she didn’t know them?

  “Are you quite sure?” said the voice. “No Saleh?”

  In a city of a million accents, this one stood out. In addition to a near-photographic memory, Celina had an outstanding ear for accents and dialects. New York, Boston, Southern, standard American, Long Island, Puerto Rican, Nyurican, Spanish Harlem, Jamaican, Haitian, Central American, Mexican, Canadian, British, Scottish, Irish, Australian, New Zealand, South African, Japanese, Chinese, subcontinental Hindu/Muslim, Atlantic Avenue Arabic, and whatever. This one was “whatever.” She had to find out more.

  She glanced at the phone’s display screen—no ID. Even when calls went through the main switchboard, the system generally preserved caller ID. Whoever had called this way, he didn’t want to be known. She went on alert. “Can you hold a moment, sir?” she said. She pressed the hold button and collected her thoughts.

  Since 9/11, all hospitals in New York City, and especially those in Manhattan, had instituted heightened security procedures. For hospitals were a terrorist’s dream, a veritable one-stop shopping depot for all manner of deadly things. It was ironic that a place devoted to healing the sick and saving lives should also be a potential source of destruction, but there you were. Why, right here in radiology, there was probably enough radioactive waste to fuel a small dirty bomb.

  She got back on the line. “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t seem to find anyone on the medical staff by that name.”

  “Are you sure you know how to spell it?” came the voice. “S-A-L-E-H. Aslan Saleh.”

  “What kind of name is that, sir?” she inquired.

  “An American name.” The tone had turned resentful. “What do you think?”

  “Of course it is. I meant, where does it come from? Sorry if I’m being nosy, but it’s kind of a hobby of mine. Names, cultures, languages . . . accents. You know the old saying: ‘Nothing human is foreign to me.’ ”

  “It’s Arabic,” said the man. “Yemeni, I believe. Maybe Palestinian. Lebanese. Whatever.”

  Whatever. “Well, I’ll certainly be happy to give Dr. Saleh a message for you. Can you please give me your name and telephone number?”

  A short pause. Then: “Of course. My number is . . . wait a moment. I want to make sure I have the right place.”

  Celina smiled. “Of course.” She could hear the man rummaging through some papers.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, coming back on the line. “I seem to have made an error.”

  “That’s quite all right, sir. Now, if you will just give me your name and number . . .”

  “I don’t know how I could have been such a fool. This is the New York City Police Department, isn’t it? The Counter-Terrorism Unit?”

  “No, sir, this is Mount Sinai Medical Center Radiology, Department of Nuclear Medicine.” This wasn’t good. Nobody made a mistake like this, unless they wanted to. But what could she do about it? Mr. Wald was due to arrive in five minutes for his stress test, and the last time she saw him, he didn’t look so good.

  “Yes,” said the voice. “It is, isn’t it?” The voice was cold now, ice cold, its temperature having dropped a hundred degrees in an instant. “So listen to me carefully, Celina S. Gomez. . . .”

  Her blood froze. How did he know her name?

  “I want you to get a message to Detective Aslan Saleh at the NYPD. Office of Counter-Terrorism. Are you listening to me? Are you writing this down?”

  “Yes, sir. I am.” She was scared but excited. This was like one of those episodes of Law & Order she liked to watch on TV, except that she was in it. If only Mama could see her now...

  “I’ve already spelt the name for you”—spelt, he said, not spelled—“so I expect you to get it right. His friends call him Lannie. So please tell Lannie that he has an appointment at Mount Sinai Hospital in three days’ time in the Department of Nuclear Medicine. It is quite urgent. In fact, tell him it is a matter of life and death.”

  Celina scanned the appointments book for three days from now. Nothing. “Life and death,” she repeated. “How am I supposed to find this Detective Saleh?”

  A longer pause this time. “That,” said the voice, “is your problem. Just give him the following message, please.”

  “And w
ho may I say is calling?”

  “You may not. Now take this down: ‘We are discovered. Save yourself.’ Do you have that? Repeat, please.”

  “ ‘We are discovered. Save yourself.’ May I ask—”

  “You may not. He’ll know what it means.”

  “Will he?” She was listening as hard as she could, soaking in every syllable, every nuance, every breath. There was something about the voice that gave her a chill. Something she couldn’t place. Something evil that this way came.

  She would get it. She would get him. From now on, it was a point of pride.

  “Can you repeat that for me, please? I want to make sure I have it just right.”

  Listen.

  Listen hard.

  Listen like your life depends on it.

  What an idiot she was! Why hadn’t she thought of this before? She switched on the recording device that came as part of the new phone system.

  He was still there. She knew it. She could, just barely, hear him breathing.

  He spoke, but this time the words came out in a rush and she didn’t understand them at all. Some foreign language, Arabic, Hebrew . . . she couldn’t tell.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, but he was gone.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Echo Park, Los Angeles

  Ghosts everywhere. Ghosts all around, ghosts of the past and ghosts yet to come. Ghosts looming through the fog, reaching out to him, some beseeching and pleading, some clawing and snarling. Vengeful ghosts, sorrowful ghosts. Ghosts of those whom he had once loved and ghosts whom he still hated. The ghosts of his mother, who died protecting him, and of his father, who died fighting back. The ghosts of Milverton, his back broken, and of Raymond, that boy under the Central Park Reservoir, his eye gouged out and his head blown off.

  All of them dead. And all dead because of him.

  Was there vengeance in the next world? “Vengeance is mine,” the Lord supposedly said, but if there was no God, then vengeance belonged to the shades, souls existing along the great continuum of being and nonbeing, of something and nothing.