The rose was withered now, but it was still a rose. Danny caught it in midair.
“When was the last time you saw a wild rose in the Mojave?”
“I’ve never seen a wild rose in the Mojave.”
“It’s the end of the world. That’s what Tyler said. You and I each have a piece of the puzzle. The White House, NSA, maybe Defense—they have their own pieces. We’re here to put them all together.”
“It’s because of her, isn’t it?”
Devlin turned and looked at Danny. They had come a long way together, and he had just breached his own most important protocol by bringing the man here. But trusting him was the least of his sins. The real sin, the only sin that mattered, was trusting her.
He had trusted her for absolutely no reason. Everything she had done from the time she’d picked him up in Paris years ago, to their “chance” meeting on board a commercial flight two years ago . . . everything screamed out for closer scrutiny. And yet he had given her none. Instead, he had forced the president to allow her on the Branch 4 team, reporting exclusively to him, his first partner. And then look what had happened.
Was it about her? “You’re damn right it’s about her. It’s always been about her and until the day I die it’s going to be about her.”
“Which means it’s really about you.”
“I thought I wanted out.”
“Your country needs you in. She needs you in. You believe in her, then go get her. Do we know where she is?”
“That’s one of the things we’re about to find out.”
As if on cue, the phone rang—a startlingly old-fashioned loud clanging that did not subside until Devlin had satisfied the security protocols. “I’m listening,” he said. He grunted a couple of times and then hung up. “They’re on their way.”
Devlin closed the panic room and together they headed downstairs. The living room, like everything on the ground floor, was startlingly conventional. Anyone looking through one of the windows would have seen nothing out of the ordinary—but anyone trying to break in would never have broken out again.
They could hear the sound of a car pulling up in front of the house. “They’re just going to walk right up to the door and ring the bell?” asked Danny. “What about security? What about decoys? What about—”
“What about just acting like a normal human being?” retorted Devlin. His own existence might be conducted completely in the shadows, but that was no reason not to act normal. His safety was assured by his anonymity; in his experience, the more a target tried to hide from him, the easier he was to find.
He opened the door and greeted the President of the United States. “Mr. President,” he said to the first man through the door. Tyler was wearing a baseball cap and dress-down clothes, and had adopted a slouching walk for the occasion. Behind him came Seelye, also in weekend civvies, and then Shalika Johnson, the secretary of defense. He was somewhat surprised to see a fourth person trailing behind, someone who looked more like a desk jockey than a field op. Maybe he should send out for pizza.
Devlin closed the door. “Please sit down.” He knew they were not alone, that members of the President’s Secret Service detail were outside, passing as pedestrians, waiting in cars, circling the block. But inside his house was one of the most secure locations in the D.C. area, fully vetted by all the relevant agencies.
Seelye made the introductions as President Tyler instinctively headed for best seat in the room. This was Devlin’s first encounter with Secretary Johnson, a large, tough woman, and he liked her on sight. No doubt she would prove to be a huge pain in the ass, but that was her job and he suspected she was very good at it.
“And this,” said the DIRNSA, “is Major Kent Atwater, the man who cracked the Dorabella cipher and has brought us all here together today.” Seelye looked at Atwater. “I ought to fire you, but in a time of war, certain liberties—certain judgments—sometimes need to be made. Thank you for making them.”
Devlin spoke up. “Mr. President, Madame Secretary, Major, Dad—this is Don Barker. He has my complete confidence. Anything you need to say to me you can say in front of him.”
“That’s what you said about her,” said Seelye.
Devlin struggled to control his rage. One of these days . . . “With all due respect to your crack intelligence acumen, Director Seelye, why don’t you wait until all the facts are in? For unless I’m very much mistaken, the wheel just took another spin—didn’t it, Mr. President?”
Tyler looked at him with a modicum of respect, which is all anyone got out of him. “We’ve just received an encoded message from somewhere in Iran, outside Tehran. It came through back channels, as if the sender didn’t have access to the NSA network, but it got here and it got bumped all they way up the chain of command, so I guess our boy—our girl—knows how the game is played. The trouble is, we don’t know what it means.”
“May I see it, please?” asked Devlin.
Tyler nodded at Seelye, who handed him a new Android. “No,” said Devlin. “Transmit it to me. Don’t worry, nothing gets out of this bubble that I don’t want to get out.”
Seelye pointed the device at Devlin’s own Android and pressed a button. “Thanks,” said Devlin.
He pressed several keys on his device and suddenly a piece of a side wall disappeared into the ceiling to reveal a large video screen. “This would be a little faster upstairs, but we can make it work,” he said. He thought a moment—
“The message appears to be encrypted inside some sort of video file,” said Devlin.
“Yes,” said Seelye. “It’s a clip of the recent royal wedding.”
“Fascinating,” said Devlin. “That tells us something already. And what is it?”
No one answered.
“That the sender is definitely a woman. Who else could possibly endure such tedium?”
On the screen, two newly wedded members of the British royal family were waving at their cheering subjects.
“Don’t you wish the public would cheer you like that, Mr. President?” said Devlin.
“Look here,” said Shalika Johnson, visibly annoyed at Devlin’s blithe tone. “I don’t like the way you speak to the President. He’s the President of the United States, which means he’s your Commander-in-Chief, so why don’t you show a little respect?” She glared at Devlin, and looked like she was ready to take a poke at him.
“Guess you haven’t read the memo,” replied Devlin, calmly. “Dad, why don’t you explain the facts of life to the secretary later? Right now, if this is what I think it is, we’ve got a big problem.”
They all turned their attention back to the screen. “It’s easy to embed a secondary or tertiary file in video material,” said Devlin. “We do it all the time, even for fairly routine stuff. That way we can use open-source platforms, publicly accessible things like Facebook, and get messages out easily and quickly. Hiding in plain sight.”
“We found it quickly enough,” said Major Atwater.
“And did it have anything to do with those codes of yours? It didn’t, did it?
The major looked sheepish. “No. I thought it would, but it was just some personal-services chatter—you know, mailorder brides, sex stuff. So we looked elsewhere, and didn’t find anything.”
“That’s because naked is the best disguise.” Devlin opened up the hidden file, which was just the sort of thing you could see on any website as an advertisement: Russian and Persian Brides for You.
“I didn’t want any of that stuff showing up on a government computer,” explained Atwater. “You know how sensitive the filters are . . . not to mention the penalties.”
Devlin glanced over at Danny. “No wonder we’re losing this war. We’d rather be dead than politically incorrect. Okay, Major, watch.”
Devlin drilled down into the ads. On a hunch he skipped over the photographs of the alluring Russian women—
“How do you know it isn’t in that section?” asked Secretary Johnson.
“Because t
his message isn’t for you. It isn’t for General Seelye. It isn’t even for that notorious lady-killer Jeb Tyler. It’s for me.”
He flashed through the Persian brides. He knew exactly what he was looking for, and headed straight to the city of Shiraz. “This is all I know about her,” he said while working. “I know you all think she’s a double agent, and that I might have been in on it with her. I know that’s why you cashiered me”—he looked straight at Tyler—“and I know that’s why I’m still alive. Because you thought by sending me on some crackpot mission about miracles in the desert and then wiping your prints off it, you didn’t have to admit to anybody who might be watching your little charade that I’d gone rogue. You could ruin me without signaling Skorzeny that you were on to me by killing me. So thanks for that.”
Tyler glanced over at Seelye and Johnson, who both shrugged and shook their heads. But Devlin was too wrapped up in his demonstration to notice.
“Here we go.”
A parade of round-faced, olive-skinned women, each one eager to meet an American man, preferably with money.
“You think her picture is just going to turn up in there?” asked Seelye.
“I know it is,” said Devlin, running through the sequence.
“Nobody’s that stupid,” said Seelye.
Devlin turned to his stepfather. “Except you. Now shut up and watch.”
With all the photos loaded in, he began to synthesize them using facial-recognition software that he had developed for just such an occasion.
“She didn’t use all the girls, just some of them, chosen by a single facial characteristic. Taken together, they’re a composite, like one of those gag photos you see on the Internet, where they combine pictures of President Tyler, the mean granny from ‘American Gothic,’ and a lemur to come up with . . . here we go.”
The synthesis was finished. Everybody looked at the screen.
“She probably had very little time,” said Devlin with a touch of pride. “Ordinarily, she might have added an additional step or two, made me work a little more. But here she is: Maryam.”
It was her, all right, every bit as beautiful as Devlin had remembered her, and stunning to those who had never seen her. He let the moment linger....
“Okay, so that’s how we know it’s her. We also know that she’s got access to some of the proprietary technology I gave her, probably her PDA. We know she’s alive and that she’s in Iran. Now let’s hear what she’s got to say.”
“She’ll use a Playfair cipher, of course,” said Major Atwater.
“Smart fellow,” said Devlin, assembling the first letters of all the names of the women into a row. “We’ll have to allow for some English orthographic variations in the notation of Farsi, but it will be close enough.”
On the screen, a square—five letters across and five letters deep—suddenly appeared. Rearranged, they spelled out: WE AR ED IS CO VE RE DS AV EY OU RS EL F.
“We are discovered. Save yourself,” said Atwater proudly.
“What?” said Seelye suddenly, and started fumbling through some briefing papers.
“The same line from Have His Carcase . . .”
“One more step,” said Devlin, now using the phrase as the key and re-coding—
TH MA HD II SR IS IN GF RO MT HI SW EL L.
Everyone could read that.
“It all makes sense now,” said President Tyler softly. “Sense, assuming you believe in miracles. But put it all together: the Iranian nuclear program. The apparitions of Mohammed and the Virgin Mary.”
“Don’t forget Farid Belghazi,” reminded Devlin. “Maryam and I snatched him in Budapest last year.”
“So what?” asked Secretary Johnson. “What’s that got to do with—”
“So he had been working at the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire, better known as CERN—working on the Large Hadron Collider in its search for the Higgs boson. The ‘God particle.’ ”
“And the codes . . . the threats . . . it’s all coming together now.”
“In more ways than you think, Mr. President,” said Seelye, finding what he was looking for. “We got this from a confidential informant inside the New York City Police Department’s Counter-Terrorism operation, relayed to us from Deputy Director Thomas A. Byrne of the FBI.”
Seelye handed the president a document. “This just came in. Someone phoned in an enigmatic message to the nuclearmedicine department at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, a statement that referenced a detective on the CTU needing to come in for an appointment. They used that exact same phrase—‘We are discovered. Save yourself.’ NYPD is investigating it as a possible bomb threat.”
“It is a bomb threat,” said Devlin. “Damn!”
He rose and addressed the group. “Captain Francis Byrne—the head of the CTU—and Mr. Barker here took out Kohanloo while I was tied up under the reservoir with that kid. Manhattan registered clean after we picked up the pieces. But it’s possible—not probable, but possible—that Kohanloo got the kid to deliver a . . . a nuclear device to Mount Sinai, which is where it’s been hiding in semi-plain sight for months now.”
“But why warn us about it? That’s the kind of thing villains only do in the movies.”
“It’s not a warning. It means they’re ready to make their move.” It was all clear to Devlin now. “There’s a sect of Shiites known as the Twelvers. They believe the Twelfth Imam, Ali, has been occluded at the bottom of a well in Qom for centuries, but that he will return, with Jesus by his side, at a time of maximum strife, discord, and bloodshed. And for that to happen, somebody has to cause that strife and bloodshed.”
“The apparitions,” said Secretary Johnson, getting it.
“Correct,” said Devlin. “Spain only started a media frenzy, Zeitoun a riot. But the one in Nigeria has set off an entire continental civil war. Let’s hope the Virgin Mary and Mohammed don’t start showing up in Jerusalem.”
“The end of the world,” muttered the president. “Even worse, the end of my administration. Hassett will kill me.”
“She’s already killing you, Mr. President,” said Devlin. “The question is, what are you prepared to do about it? This stuff isn’t just happening—somebody’s making it happen. Somebody without a national allegiance, somebody who can manipulate currencies, bribe officials with his limitless wealth—and somebody with a high personal animus against the West. Iran is only partly behind this; the mullahs that run that poor country are insane, and we can bring them down any time we want.” He directed that last remark to President Tyler.
“But we all know who’s behind this. I told you this after the EMP attempts on Los Angeles and Baltimore. This apocalypse isn’t religious—it’s atheistic. The revenge of one lone lost soul on a world he inherited and would now unmake.”
“Skorzeny.”
“Request permission to terminate with extreme prejudice, sir.”
“Request granted. Anything you need, you talk to Seelye and Johnson.”
“I’m going to need to get in touch with this Captain Byrne. As it turns out, I know him by sight—I saved his life on Forty-second street when the hot-dog vendor was about to kill him.”
“I know him, too,” said Danny. “He was the sharpshooter on the chopper when we got Kohanloo.”
“But we have no time,” said Devlin. “Mr. Barker here and I will be in Virginia Beach later, and we fly out from Oceana tomorrow.”
“If there’s a bomb in New York, the FBI—”
“If there’s a bomb in New York, Mr. President, the NYPD is best equipped to handle it. If I were you, I’d keep Deputy Director Byrne as far away from his brother as possible.”
Tyler didn’t like it, and Devlin knew that when Tyler didn’t like something, he had no intention of listening to anybody else. “Maybe, but . . .”
“It’s your call, sir.” A thought suddenly struck him. “If Tom Byrne has a source inside his brother’s unit, we’re going to need a secure line of communication to Captain
Byrne. Someone whom both Mr. Barker and I trust implicitly. Someone whose loyalty is unquestioned. And I think I know just who that person is.”
“Put him on the case,” ordered the President.
“Her.” Devlin looked at Danny. They both knew whom Devlin was talking about. “We’ll need special air transport from Lemoore to New York immediately, party of four.”
“Four?” asked Seelye.
“Just do it, Army,” said Tyler.
“And some special communications equipment—you know what I mean, right, Dad?”
Seelye said nothing.
“Okay, then that’s settled.”
Secretary Johnson spoke up. “If this bastard is going to try and hit us . . . let me just say that in my neighborhood in Philadelphia, we know how to handle this kind of shit.”
“And now,” said the President, rising to signal the end of the meeting, “I’m going home to the White House to study my polling data and drink myself to death.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Tehran
Amanda Harrington had already decided that she would prefer to be cremated than buried when she felt Maryam’s coffin move. Even for a corpse, being nailed inside a box was no way to enter the afterlife.
Then she heard the voices, muffled, male. She could not understand the words, but she knew curses when she heard them. And when one of the men dropped his end of the coffin and she very nearly toppled over, the imprecations and oaths were unmistakable.
They loaded her into some sort of vehicle—she doubted if it was a hearse—and then she felt the motor start and they were on their way. But where?
She had lost track of time. The coffin was too narrow for her to see the display on her PDA and she wouldn’t have wanted to use it anyway. At first she tried to sleep, but how could you sleep in a place like this when you weren’t already dead? It was the fear of death that kept you awake. From time to time she supposed she must have dozed and she found herself half-wishing she might have a shot of the fugu fish poison once more, just to make the torture a little more endurable.
He must know that something was wrong by now. She tried to imagine his reaction, just for the small pleasure it gave her. That he eventually would kill her, she had no doubt. Death was something to which she’d condemned herself with her affair with Milverton. But he couldn’t just murder her; no, he needed her submission first, her groveling apology, her protestations of eternal fidelity. Emanuel Skorzeny could endure many things, but abandonment was something he simply could not accept.
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