But that day was coming and, if he wanted to see it, he’d better do his job.
“What have we got?”
She was going from body to body, taking the sidearms. “1911s. Beretta M9s.”
Good. The Colt M1911 had served the U.S. military well from its first issuance in 1911 to 1985, and there were still damn few soldiers who would want to be without one. It was almost as reliable as the AK-47, had major stopping power, and never let you down. “Take them all. The Berettas too.”
“Got ’em. Cartridges too.”
“Rifles?”
She forced open a cabinet. “AK’s, M16’s—oh, look, a Viper.”
“We’ll take it. And the magazines.”
She handed it to him. It was fairly new—must have come from the black market in Iraq, where the Shias were engaged in a lively weapons trade on both sides of the porous border. “I love a one-stop shop. Now let’s get going.”
They both switched on their secure communicators. He could see Danny’s progress across the desert. That was the thing about those new Black Hawks: they were fast, they were radar-deflective, and if anybody saw them, they could pass for local. For those reasons, they would not be flying in formation; no one knew exactly how many of the Iranian army’s helicopters were still operational, since the quality of maintenance had fallen off precipitously since the Revolution, so it was best not to have more than one or two together. Nevertheless, they would all be converging exactly at the rendezvous point at the appointed time.
All except one—Danny’s, which would be flying into the teeth of the shitstorm to get them out and bring them all safely home. Him, Maryam, Danny, Amanda Harrington, and Mlle. Derrida, if possible. Emanuel Skorzeny was the only one without a ticket on this particular flight. He would be getting his ticket punched elsewhere, and Devlin would do the punching.
And now for the pièce de résistance.
ARE YOU READY?
This to Seelye, back in Maryland.
NICE OF YOU TO CHECK IN. HAVING FUN YET?
WISH YOU WERE HERE
RETARGETING COMMENCING NOW
YOU’RE SURE YOU’VE GOT IT?
BELGHAZI SINGS LIKE AN ANGEL. THE LASERS ARE OURS
AND THEY WON’T KNOW?
NOT UNTIL IT’S TOO LATE. GONNA BE A LOT OF RED
FACES IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE TOMORROW
CERN?
NEED TO KNOW AND THEY DON’T NEED TO KNOW FOR
NOW
WE’RE GOOD TO GO THEN. WISH ME LUCK
YOU DON’T NEED IT
HOW DO YOU KNOW?
BECAUSE I RAISED YOU RIGHT. LUCK HAS NOTHING TO
DO WITH IT.
SOMETIMES LUCK HAS EVERYTHING TO DO WITH IT. ASK
MY PARENTS
YOU WANT PAYBACK, THIS IS YOUR BIG CHANCE, SON.
TAKE IT. AND THAT’S AN ORDER
Devlin didn’t know how to respond to that. So he didn’t:
OVER AND OUT
“We’re good to go,” he said. “Do we have a fix?”
She looked up from her handheld. “I’ve just pinged her locator. Coordinates coming through now . . . 34.94373 N and 50.76056 E.”
“Last thing.” This was something he was really looking forward to.
His computer was on and it was telling him everything it was telling the Iranians. It was also sending back a steady stream of audiovisual information to Fort Meade, to feed the Black Widow’s insatiable maw. And it was doing something else....
Not just injecting the STUXNET virus. He had anticipated that and loaded it before he gave the machine to Maryam. Not simply taking out the entire command and control electronic systems that would allow Iran to launch its missiles against Israel or anywhere else. His laptop was also issuing abort and destruct orders for every single missile in the Iranian arsenal. And that included missiles with armed nuclear warheads.
Which was why Danny had to be right on the money. This whole area was going to be radioactive for a century if the Iranians were foolish enough to arm their warheads anywhere near Iranian airspace. And yet, he couldn’t have them arming over Iraq or, worse, over Israel. They were going to have to blow them in Iran, before they armed. Qom was not his holy city, but it was a holy place to a billion people, and it was not his brief to destroy it.
It would be enough, for now, to show the Shias that the end times were not near, that Imam Mahdi was not coming out of his well—and that the men leading their nation to ruin had been lying to them all along. The Green Revolution had almost succeeded the last time; it would be hard to imagine it would not succeed this time.
Maryam was going to get her country back.
He sent the final set of instructions to the computer, which acknowledged and began issuing them. Like a swiftmoving virus, the new codes were already in the central bloodstream. The Iranian nuclear program was about to suffer a setback from which, he hoped, it would never recover.
“Okay,” he said, grabbing the Viper. “Let’s do this.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
New York City
The Virgin was still sinking in the sky. They didn’t have much time left.
Wherever that son of a bitch Crankheit had put the suitcase nuke, they couldn’t find it. They had torn the hospital apart, disrupted the routine, probably cost a couple of terminal patients their lives. Byrne certainly hoped not, but there was no way to tell.
There was a chapel in the hospital, one of those spare, nondenominational places where you could “worship” in some peace and quiet. He would have preferred a church—St. Malachy, in the Times Square area, would have been his choice, or St. Mike’s over on Thirty-fourth Street, once Irish gangland’s church of choice for first-class send-offs. Because, unless Washington did its job, or they did theirs, a grand send-off was what they were about to get.
Think, you dumb paddy bastard. Think . . . No, the chapel was too antiseptic. He decided to face the music outside.
Slowly, he became aware that there was somebody standing beside him, and that somebody was his brother. “Hello, Tom,” he said. “Getting any lately?”
“Nothin’ you don’t know about.”
“Yeah, well, for a reporter she’s not bad.”
“It’s just business, Frankie. You know how it is with me. Always just business.”
He couldn’t help himself. “Was it business with Mary Claire, too?” Mary Claire Byrne had been Frankie’s wife, until the pressures and misery of being a cop’s wife had finally gotten to her and driven her right into Tom’s arms. But that was a long time ago.
“Let’s forget about that, Frankie.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“What would Pop have thought about all this? You know. I mean 9/11 and the way the city’s changed and now . . .” Tom looked up at the sky, “. . . this fucking thing.”
Frankie shook his head. “I don’t think Pop would have been surprised by much.”
“Just that dirtbag who snuck up behind him and his partner and killed them. What was the name of his partner back in sixty-eight . . . ?”
“Rodriguez. Alfonso Rodriguez. New York was already changing back then, but what did we know? We were still just kids.”
Tom took out a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and offered one to his brother. Frankie started to shake his head, then accepted. What did it matter now? “Does it still bother you that we never got him? The bad guy, I mean.”
“What chance did we have? He was probably some junkie, got picked up a few days later on some bullshit B and E beef and got shivved in prison and we never heard about it.”
“Mom took it hard.”
“Let’s not talk about Mom.”
“How is she?”
“Still alive. Rufus still checks in on her every day. She’s old now, Tommy. Real old.” There was nothing more to say on that subject. “The kid who did this . . .”
“Who planted the bomb, you mean?” said Tom.
“Yeah. He was a born tunnel rat. In another life, he could have
been a sandhog, done something useful. Got himself killed but good under the Central Park Reservoir. Buried your girlfriend up to her neck behind the Met. So I keep thinking . . . underground. That’s where he felt comfortable. That’s where he felt safe.”
Byrne turned to look back at the building. They were looking at the oldest part, the Metzger Pavilion, which had been built back in 1904, long after the hospital had changed its name from the Jews’ Hospital in the City of New York and moved uptown from Chelsea. But Brunner’s original building had long since been augmented by other wings and had even leaped Madison Avenue to connect up with the Icahn Medical Institute. Connected by . . .
“A tunnel,” said Frankie, tossing the cigarette away. “That’s it—the tunnel under Madison.” He was moving now, almost running. Tom jumped up and followed him. “It’s in the fucking tunnel, Tommy. That’s where he took it. That’s where he set it up. We thought he’d put it among the other radioactive devices, but he didn’t care about that—the whole damn place shows up radioactive in overflights and nobody was going to be poking around down here with sensors. The bomb didn’t need a power source because now we know what the power source is.” He stopped and looked up to the sky. The sight of the BVM looming over the Upper East Side was so remarkable that he didn’t even have time to think about it. Later, perhaps; later.
The plans for the tunnel were already waiting for them when they hit the reception desk, running. A receptionist ripped them out of the printer and handed them both copies as they charged toward the Madison Avenue side of the complex.
“Here,” said Tom, pointing as he ran. “There’s a couple of service bays, an electrical closet . . . a water main . . .”
“That’s it. That’s how he knew about the Central Park Reservoir, how to get into it. I wondered about that. Here was some fucking bumpkin from flyover land and he knows his way around the bowels of New York like a born sandhog. Well, this is where he started his exploration.”
They were in the tunnel now, running, two crazy Irish brothers, trying to save the whole damn city.
They found the entrance to the old main. The Reservoir had been the lifeline of Manhattan for decades, its water running down below the park and Fifth Avenue, all the way to Forty-second Street, where the Public Library now stood, but which in the nineteenth century had also been a reservoir, a great watershed enclosed by something that looked like it had time-traveled from the Egypt of the pharaohs.
That was New York for you. Even the dead past kept on affecting the living, the city that never slept and the city that never died.
“Not on my watch,” said Frankie Byrne as they burst through the door.
“Son of a bitch,” said Tom.
There it was. Just sitting there, unmolested, undiscovered. The nasty bastard had brought it here, in something that looked like a large duffel bag, unnoticed by anybody. Just another anonymous kid in a deliveryman’s outfit, going about his business.
“Careful,” said Tom to his brother as Frankie picked the accursed thing up. Frankie could not remember the last time his brother had looked out for him.
“Little help here,” he said.
“Right.” Tom was on the phone to the bomb squad two seconds later.
“Where are you going to take it?” ask Frankie. He had slung it over his shoulder and together they were making their way up into the lobby of the Icahn building. The squad would be coming down Madison any second now.
He was puffing hard as they made the street. Was it his imagination or was the rate of descent speeding up? How much time did they have? Would it be enough? It would have to be.
And there, right on Madison Avenue, Captain Francis Byrne fell to his knees, blessed himself, and said a prayer to the Virgin—the real Virgin, not this apparition—to spare his city, spare his people, the good and the bad, the saints and the sinners, all the people of New York. That was his sworn duty as a police officer to protect them, but now he was asking a higher power. It didn’t even matter whether there even was such a higher power, whether the Lady was as much a fantasy as any other religion’s icons.
None of that mattered now. Because, at a moment like this, all he had was his faith, and it was his faith that was going to have to get him through.
The bomb truck was there. The bomb went inside it.
And then it was gone.
“Captain Byrne!”
Byrne unfolded his hands and looked across the street to see Principessa and a camera crew filming him. Ignoring the traffic, she dashed across Madison. “That was great,” she said. “The perfect image. ‘The Praying Detective.’ In two hours, you’ll be famous.”
Byrne took her by the arm. “Listen, Ms. Stanley, I don’t want to be famous. I don’t even want to be rich. I just want to be Captain Francis Byrne, the kid from Queens who does his job.”
“But—”
“But nothing. Kill it. You want the same shot, shoot your boyfriend over there. Nobody who knows him will ever believe it, but go ahead. He’s already famous. He’s the great Tom Byrne of the FBI and you know what publicity hounds those clowns are.”
“But—”
“But nothing. You want me to help you find this Archibald Grant, you’ll do it. If not, no dice.”
Principessa thought for a moment, but only a moment. “Deal,” she said.
“You really got a jones for this Grant guy, don’t you?” said Byrne. “Why?”
She had her answers all set and ready. “Because he’s a fraud and the public has a right to know about it. Because he’s arrogant, cold, aloof, and superior. Because he put me in my place in an off-the-record RAND lecture and made me look ridiculous.”
Byrne got it. “In other words,” he said, “you’re crazy about him.”
She hadn’t expected that. She pulled back a little. “Promise you won’t tell your brother?” she said.
“Believe me, sweetheart, he already knows. And you know what—he doesn’t care.”
“A real bastard, huh?”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“I know the whole of it. But I don’t care.”
“That’s what they all say—at first.”
He started to walk away. Whatever happened now, it was out of his hands. Either the government would stop the laser or it wouldn’t. Either the bomb squad would defuse a nuclear bomb or it wouldn’t. Either the sun would come out tomorrow, or it wouldn’t.
She was following him down Madison now. “Will you call me?”
“No.”
“Why not? Don’t you like me?”
What a chance this would be. Payback time for Mary Claire and everything else. “No.”
She had caught up to him now, as they were crossing Ninety-eighth Street. “Why not? Don’t you find me attractive?”
“I’d have to be blind not to. And I’m not blind.”
“Then why not?”
“I try not to share with my brother.”
She stopped. So he had to. “Strictly business, then?”
Byrne stepped back so he could get a good eyeful of her. He’d seen her on television many times, especially now that she’d become a big star. Just about every guy he knew desired her. She was single and so was he. The department generally frowned on cops boinking the media, but he knew Matt would turn a blind eye to it. That was their deal, locked into it for life: a blind eye to everything except what absolutely, positively, could not be ignored or swept under the rug.
They’d been sweeping stuff under the rug ever since Matt put two .38 slugs in Enrique Marcon’s head and then gave him four more in the body just for good measure. Just to make sure he was dead. Just to make him feel the pain that Rosa Montez had felt when Marcon ice-picked her to death. It had been frontier justice in Park Slope, and it had been real justice.
“Strictly business,” said Frankie. They shook hands.
Then Principessa leaned over and kissed him tenderly on the cheek.
In the sky, the image of the Virgin had stopped de
scending and was now fading rapidly. In a few moments, she would be gone forever.
And then Principessa’s news van pulled up and she was gone and Francis Byrne was left to find his own way back downtown.
Story of his life.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Outside Qom
“There they are.” In the desert, near the launchpads.
The Viper could be used as a sniper rifle, and while Devlin didn’t have a sniper scope on this one, what he did have was powerful enough to let him draw a clear bead on the three figures in the distance.
He could put a bullet through Skorzeny’s head right now, and none the wiser.
At first Maryam wasn’t sure whether he was talking about the Shahabs or the hostages. Three people standing alone in the desert. Even from this distance, she recognized Amanda’s tall form, Mlle. Derrida, short and chic, and Skorzeny. She shuddered inwardly, and hoped it didn’t show.
“I should kill them all now, save us time and trouble,” Devlin said.
“Don’t you trust your friend?” She wasn’t sure which name he was going by for this operation and could not ask.
“Don Barker. That’s his name. Don Barker.”
“Just like yours is Frank Ross.”
“It is to you—little Miss No Last Name.”
“Do you think we’ll ever trust each other?”
Devlin resighted. Pumpkin time: one, two, three . . . “Probably not.”
“Does it matter?”
“Probably not.” And then he heard it. Thwack thwack thwack . . . It was like the beating of wings.
Danny.
“I used to think that sound was angels,” she said.
“It is,” he said, up and sprinting now. “Black Angels.”
The sound was bringing out the soldiers, but that didn’t matter. Danny was here, right on schedule. The poison in the system of the Iranian nuclear program was working. The lasers were being retargeted. In a few minutes, if his aim held true and his nerve was steady and his luck held, they would all be on the chopper, heading for the rendezvous point at Desert One while the Super Hornets came in and bombed every single one of the Iranian nuclear-enrichment facilities. The Iranian air force would be no match for them, and with chaos breaking out all over the country as the miracle failed to appear, their pilots would be distracted. The mullahs would be the bride stripped bare by her bachelors, helpless against the rage of their people.
Michael Walsh Bundle Page 97
