Michael Walsh Bundle

by Michael Walsh

  “My man has positioned the device as per your instructions, but, if I may say so, the thing has been well-hidden and not connected to any electrical source. What about the trigger?”

  “Leave that to me.” said Skorzeny, exiting.

  Outside, on the street, he brushed his lapels and his sleeves, then began looking for a taxi.

  Typically Soviet, there were no taxis, and he would be damned if he were to stoop to bribing one of the workers for a ride in something that still looked distressingly like a Lada.

  Very well, then, he would walk. And when he got back, it would be time to open the delicious little Maryam’s precious laptop and see what mischief he could cause before all hell broke loose.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  In the air

  Devlin had always been able to sleep on planes, sleep in elevators, sleep standing up, sleep wherever and whenever; in his line of work you never knew where your next nap or good night’s sleep was going to come from. But now, here above the Atlantic and on his way to whatever Fate finally had in store for him, he couldn’t.

  Danny was racked out. Good, he and his boys would have the toughest part of the gig, getting in below Iranian air defenses and putting boots on the ground, in and out as fast as possible but not one second less than the mission called for. And nobody knew what that was going to be.

  Devlin’s job was, in a sense, simpler: get Maryam the hell out of there. Now that she was free, and roaming loose somewhere in the bowels of the Islamic Republic, she was no doubt amassing a treasure trove of actionable intelligence, something they were going to need when they explained to the world just why America had done what she’d done. But it would be too late for anybody to do anything about it.

  Too late for the whiners, for the you-can’t-do-that crowd, for the how-dare-you bunch, for the “higher moral authority” gang, for the lofty editorialists in the employ of Jake Sinclair, men and women who had never done a damn thing except learn to type. Too late for the blame-America-first johnnies, for the internationalists, for the one-worlders and the citizens of the planet. Devlin had spent half his life living overseas, spoke his languages better than most of the natives, and was at home everywhere. But he never felt that he was anything but an American.

  Maybe that’s how you felt when you saw your mother die in the service of her country and then be called a traitor.

  Maybe that’s how you felt when you saw your father killed trying to save your mother.

  Maybe that’s how you felt when you were raised by a man you despised, a man who had played both sides of the political street for so long that he’d forgotten which side was his. A man who helped ruin your family and create the monster you were now seeking. The man who raised you to be the perfect, anonymous killing machine, the perfect agent, the perfect invisible man.

  Maybe that’s how you felt when you could have anything in the world except happiness.

  And that’s why he, the American, was going into Iran to rescue the Iranian. Because only she offered him a way out. And all he had to do was trust her, implicitly and faithfully.

  The roses, glistening in the rainless desert. The doorway. The call to repentance. There could be no rational explanation for what he saw, or why. The vision in the Mojave had been but a prelude for what he was now about to do. Was there really a God? Up ’til now, he’d never seen any evidence for one. But something had happened out there....

  Which brought him to the real apparitions. It would have been easy to dismiss the one in Garabandal, a place that seemed to grow a new crop of impressionable schoolgirls every generation. All these BVM stories were depressingly the same—you’d think that when the Virgin finally decided to show, she’d have something new to say, something beyond her usual “repent” and “honor my Son” bromides. And always the same MO, appearing to kids, in Fatima, Lourdes, Medjugorje.

  Until now. Maybe the first Zeitoun event, back in the sixties, had been faked—the photographs certainly looked absurd—but millions of people just saw something, and set off the tinderbox. And Kaduna . . . the savagery was appalling, especially when Mohammed got into the act. To think that in the twenty-first century human beings were still slaughtering other human beings like cattle, hacking each other to pieces with machetes. And now, according to some information just coming over his Android, there was trouble on Mindanao, where the fighting was said to be especially fierce. It was almost as if—

  Wait a minute. Long ago he had learned that it was never “almost as if.” The proper formulation was: “It was as if . . .”

  No “ifs” about it. Except for the first apparition, the Virgin’s appearances had been in places of maximum religious and cultural tension, powder kegs that barely needed a spark. So why in the name of a merciful God would . . .

  Merciful God, his foot. This had nothing to do with a merciful God. Somebody was doing this—somebody looking to destabilize as much of the planet as he—or they—could, before . . .

  Before what? What was the end game? The Iranian nuclear program made sense; the crazies who controlled the government wanted a fireball, preferably in either Israel or a major American city, precisely because they desired the retaliation that surely must follow. The occluded Mahdi, dreaming for centuries at the bottom of his well, needed a provocation in order to render the apocalypse. But . . .

  But what if . . .

  But what if there was a puppet master behind even the Iranians? Someone with enough wealth and power and influence and reach to manipulate their superstition and turn it to his own ends?

  An atheist’s apocalypse. The End Times without an end game. No triumph of good over evil, no submission of all to the will of Allah . . . just an endless, barren emptiness, in which one lone voice could be heard crying out, “I told you so.”

  Skorzeny. He’d been right about him all along.

  Not motivated by money.

  Not motivated by greed.

  Not motivated by ideology.

  Motivated solely by suffering and revenge. That was the meaning of the series of codes Atwater had solved, with its ultimate terminus in the nihilism of the double-cross-plusone: XXX marks the spot.

  The world didn’t deserve its patrimony, of which Emanuel Skorzeny was very much a part, one of history’s gifts to the unenlightened. The world didn’t appreciate his taste, his refinement, his genius. The world had grown weak. And so he was going to deprive the world—the Western world, anyway—of its highest glories by unleashing upon it the one force that defined itself in opposition to the West, in opposition to Judeo-Christianity, and which would never rest, would never accept peaceful coexistence, until it destroyed the West, or was itself destroyed:

  Radical Islam, led by the millenarian sect of Iranian Shiias.

  He is starting a worldwide religious war. That’s what this is all about.

  Chaos theory in action.

  That was what it had always been about, from the time Skorzeny financed the terrorist operation in Edwardsville, hoping to panic the American public. When he tried to launch an EMP attack on both coasts. The assault on Times Square. But now he was widening the scope of his ambition, not just using freelance proxies but co-opting as much of a religion as possible.

  Devlin and his few allies were no longer up against just a man like Milverton, an opportunist like Kohanloo, or a crazy like that kid. They were up against millions. They had no chance.

  Unless their plan worked.

  The only way to defeat a belief is to discredit it. Christianity and Judaism had been through this many times before: the false messiahs and moshiachs who had gathered unto them hundreds, even thousands of followers, until the day came when the holy man or rabbi died and didn’t get back up again. Until the day that the earth was supposed to stand still never happened. Until the end times came and went, and people went on, crying, lamenting, worrying, fearing, fighting, loving.

  But Islam had not.

  Devlin was not a religious man; the only ghosts that need apply in h
is world were the ones he dispatched himself. Like the Marines, he had been raised to believe that his job was to keep heaven, or hell, filled with fresh souls. But he’d be lying to himself if he didn’t admit that whatever had happened near California City had shaken him profoundly. It didn’t make him believe, exactly, nor did it make him a believer—but, he realized with a start, it had made him believe in something. And even if that something was the life of just one human, it was a start on the long road to salvation.

  He glanced back over at Danny, still asleep. That was the sign of the true combat vet: get plenty of shut-eye before the shooting started. Danny had so much to live for now, a woman and three children, and the two ghosts who would always be with them.

  His ghosts: Devlin’s ghosts. The ghosts who had surrounded him since that day in Rome, ghosts all around.

  It was time for him to leave the ghosts behind.

  It was time for him to rejoin the living.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Baku

  As he walked, Emanuel Skorzeny had a chance to think back over his life, what its purpose had been, and how he had—by sheer force of will—come to this moment. Just as he was doing now, he had always lived in the present. The past was dead, immutable; the future unknowable. One could plan, one could scheme, but in the end, nobody really knew. You placed your bets and hoped for the best.

  But the present, that was something else. You were always in the moment, always the master of your own fate. When he fled Dresden with Father Otto, when he survived in the woods on nothing but jerky and water, when he encountered the Russians and made up his mind to survive—then he had been master of his own fate. In the moment there was nothing to the future; each decision you made was sovereign, each step irrevocable. That was how you triumphed.

  Take this moment. At this moment he was walking the streets of Baku. In half an hour or so, provided he kept putting one foot in front of another—something that was completely within his power to control—he would be back at the residence and greeting Mlle. Derrida and Miss Harrington. He could not be sure of the latter, but this he knew: that if she was not there, he would consider it enemy action.

  Other men might well have cursed themselves for fools, but not Emanuel Skorzeny. His judgment about human nature was unerring. He knew his men, and his women. In his considerable experience, everyone could be bought, bribed, or threatened. The Christian notion of free will he found risible, as ludicrous as the notion that all men really yearned to be free. What foolishness that had been for an American president to sow, and what terrible things would he, Skorzeny, now reap. The human heart was not yearning for freedom, it was pursuing security, always in headlong flight from largely imaginary terrors. Without security, there was nothing and nobody an individual wouldn’t cheerfully sell out for the mess of pottage he laughingly called his soul.

  And that’s why he trusted Amanda Harrington. Because she had nowhere else to go.

  That’s why she would be there, her flight delayed, the business in Tehran having been slightly more complicated than they expected.

  That’s why she would be both delighted and relieved to see him, to take her place at his side once more, secure in the notion that no woman could ever possibly be a rival for his affections, not so long as she breathed.

  That’s why he never even considered betrayal—having ventured away from his orbit once, she had learned a brutal but necessary lesson, and certainly would not repeat that mistake again.

  This religion business—what was it, really? Just another search for security, this time in the arms of a fictional deity, the legend of which had been concocted and then handed down by a succession of savage tribes until it had taken on a permanence of its own. True, one branch of the universal superstition had given birth to much of the art and architecture he especially admired, but that religion no longer believed in its own fantasies, and hence was no longer worthy of survival. The church militant that had sent its combative and hormonal young knights off to the Holy Land to do battle with the Saracens now molested altar boys and ran food banks. The sooner it disappeared, the better.

  He was just the man to put an end to it, to put the whole Western world out of the prolonged misery caused by its own lack of faith in itself. Had he not already given them good and sufficient warning of his intentions? The school near St. Louis, Times Square, everything else he had tried? And yet the benighted fools would not listen. They were too busy watching sports and their idiotic television programs and arguing about politics to notice what was happening. Soon, perhaps, they would heed him.

  Because he was just the man for the job. His whole life had been preparation for this one heroic task. How did Lee Harvey Oswald translate Yeletsky’s aria from Pique Dame? “I am ready right now to perform a heroic deed of unprecedented prowess for your sake. Oh, darling, confide in me!” His sentiments precisely. After all, Oswald had changed the world with his puny Mannlicher-Carcano; how much greater would his accomplishment be, and how much more would she love him for it.

  He was closer now, the smell of brine in the air. He breathed it in. Soon enough he would be in the air, observing the holocaust below with a combination of dispassion over the loss of life and pleasure in the role he had played in it all. Might as well enjoy the scent of earth and sea while he had the chance.

  Except in those unbidden reveries, he hardly ever thought about his own past. That had all been prologue to this moment, this glorious present. What emotions of loss and longing still dwelled deep in his breast he rigorously controlled. In his imagination, his father still dangled at the end of a piece of piano wire while Party members cursed and mocked him and a film crew recorded his Totentanz for the private amusement of the Führer. His mother as well, and the fact that he hardened his heart and consigned that memory to the shades spoke well of his training as a young German. That was what the Führer had always preached and what he commanded the SS Einsatzgruppen to do as they lined up the Jews, the Slavs, the gypsies and all the other Untermenschen: to harden their hearts against all weak and useless feelings of human emotion and to do their duty. And the nation had followed him, right up to the moment when he put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  The trigger. Yes, the trigger.

  That old woman, Petrovich, was worried about the trigger. Did he have no imagination? No trust in Skorzeny’s infallibility? That fool, Farid Belghazi, had not brought him news of the Higgs boson when he was Skorzeny’s man inside CERN, but the boy was a whiz with both lasers and computers and had given him exactly what he had needed in order to realize the plan that was now unfolding around the world. For CERN was practically the epicenter of GRID computer research, able to reach out anywhere on the Internet that it had been so instrumental in developing. It really was easy when you had the right people in place.

  Unfortunately, the bastard who called himself Devlin had grabbed Belghazi and cut off the flow of information, but not before Skorzeny had what he needed.

  There was the building, just up ahead.

  He felt so much better as he entered. But his mood was ruined almost at once.

  Miss Harrington was nowhere to be found.

  “Where is she?” he demanded of Mlle. Derrida, who was out on the balcony, sunning herself. He had to admit she looked quite fetching topless.

  Mlle. Derrida gave a Gallic shrug and rolled over.

  At that moment, his secure PDA buzzed in his pocket. Surely, this was she, messaging him that she was on her way in from the airport.

  But the message was not from her. It was from Col. Zarin in Tehran and it read:

  WHO IS THIS WOMAN?

  The present had just changed. And so he must change with it. “Mlle. Derrida,” he barked. “We leave for Tehran at once. See that we are in the air in one hour’s time.”

  He looked at the computer—her computer; no, his computer. It was still hard for him to credit that the whelp had used his own lover as a poisoned pawn, but then again, why would he not? Human
kindness meant nothing to him. From youth he had been trained by Seelye to hate humanity and kill without remorse. But that was his ethos, Skorzeny’s credo, and Devlin was much more a son to him than he ever could be to Armond Seelye. It was a shame to have to kill him, but the thing must and would be done.

  He picked up the computer. It, too, would be making the trip to Tehran.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Qom

  She must have dozed, but it was the stopping of the car that woke her up. Not just stopping, slamming on the brakes. She felt the coffin shift. She wasn’t sure how much of this she could take.

  She had stifled the panic attacks thus far, but she was beginning to lose it. She was not particularly claustrophobic, but the realization that she was trapped inside a box that might never be opened again was gradually sinking in. What if they opened the coffin and just shot her? What if they just buried her? Torture, anything but being shut in here, was starting to seem like a good idea.

  She heard the voices again, the sound of the doors opening, and then felt the coffin move. She could feel herself slide across the floor of the vehicle, then fall a little as it cleared the transport and landed with a thud on something. Then that something started to move. She must be on some sort of handcart.

  She could hear some doors creaking, then silence for a moment as she was wheeled somewhere. She stopped, and then felt the jerk of what must be an elevator as the lift started to ascend—or maybe descend, it was hard to tell. Her panic was rising now, faster, as it seemed the end of her ordeal might be near. An end that could not come fast enough, no matter how it ended.

  She was in a large room now—she could tell by the different acoustical environment. More voices now, but not a crowd. She could even make out some words, but as they were in Farsi, she didn’t understand them.