Early Warning (10 page)

“Sir?” said Atwater, saluting.

“At ease, Major,” said Seelye, gathering up the sheaf of papers and handing them to Atwater. “Please take a look at these and give me your first reaction. Don’t think, just react. And please sit down.”

Atwater was already through the papers by the time his rear hit the seat. He said, “Anybody who knows anything about the history of cryptography knows what these are. Someone with a literary bent.”

“Indeed,” replied Seelye.

“I mean,
The Gold Bug
, Dorothy L. Sayers, the Beale Treasure. The only thing missing is the Voynich Manuscript. What is this, sir, a treatment for the next
National Treasure
movie?”

“You tell me, Major.”

Atwater thought for a moment. “Well,” he began, “obviously it can’t be as simple as it looks.”

“Does it really look that simple? And what if it is? Sometimes the best codes are the simplest.” Seelye suddenly flashed on those ridiculous “Dancing Men” from the Sherlock Holmes story, the substitution cipher that he had overlooked, but that had unlocked Devlin’s past, and thus given his most potent agent complete power over him, the nominal boss.

Which brought today’s events full circle. President Tyler had just ordered Devlin into action, and Seelye had no choice but to obey. And yet, under his agreement with Tyler, Devlin could terminate Seelye at any time, for any reason. That was something that was going to have to change.

“…me to do, sir?” Atwater was saying. Seelye looked up—

“Sorry, Major, say again?”

“I said, what do you want me to do, sir?” inquired Atwater.

“I want you to track down the sender—that shouldn’t be too hard—and I want you to tell me what all these references to bygone codes—”

“Some of which have never been cracked,” interjected Atwater. The man was evincing just the slightest signs of borderline insubordination, which was another thing that would have to be addressed. As if he’d read Seelye’s mind, Atwater immediately apologized. “If you’ll pardon the interruption, sir.”

Seelye ignored the mea culpa. “Just give me your best assessment on this, Major. It goes without saying that, since this directly affects the operations of DIRNSA, your report is eyes-only.”

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”

“That’s all.”

Atwater shot to his feet. “Yes, sir,” he said, saluted once more, performed a crisp about-face, and pushed the door open the instant he heard Seelye unlock it.

“Fail me not,” said Seelye as the Major left. Or maybe he said it to himself. It wasn’t clear, even to him.

In the air

Emanuel Skorzeny was so absorbed in the numbers dancing in front of him on a computer screen that he almost forgot his manners. “Would you like a drink, my dear?” he inquired, reaching out to pat her on her knee. “A gin martini, ice-cold, just the way you like them? All you have to do is ask, and Mlle. Derrida here will be more than happy to fetch one for you. Isn’t that right, Mlle. Derrida?”

Whether she was happy or not didn’t really matter. Emanuelle Derrida swallowed both her tongue and her pride as she awaited a request—no, an order—from the woman who had boarded the plane in Macao and who was now on her way with them toward their next destination. Where that was, exactly, Skorzeny had not told her, but it didn’t really matter: wherever he went, she went, no questions asked or answered.

Amanda Harrington stiffened at his touch. That he was insane, there could be no doubt. After what he had done to her in London and in France, and now here, as if nothing untoward had occurred. And there was nothing she could do about it. She hated the evil bastard, and dreaded whatever it was he now wanted from her. Maybe a martini would help. She nodded assent, and Ms. Derrida went to fetch it, leaving them alone.

Skorzeny gazed at her with those relentless eyes, so used to command, to fulfillment. Then he spoke:

“It seems that we underestimated the opposition,” he began, without preamble, as if the past nine months were but a single day. That was Emanuel Skorzeny’s secret of success, an indefatigable focus, a refusal to accept defeat. “And of course the loss of…”—here it came—“the loss of Mr. Milverton was regrettable. But here again perhaps I overestimated his powers.”

Amanda had never fully learned the whole story of her lover’s last moments in London, and she had no way of knowing how much Skorzeny knew of her relationship with the man called Milverton.
That
he knew, of course, was indisputable—she was barely living proof of his jealousy and malice. “How did he die?” she managed to ask.

“But here is Mlle. Derrida with your libation,” he said. The assistant set the drink down in front of her and awaited further instruction. “That will be all, Mlle. Derrida,” he said dismissing her. The woman shot Amanda a look as she left.

“Happy days,” said Skorzeny.

Amanda took a tentative, flinching sip. The last martini she had accepted from his hand nearly killed her. But if he had wanted her dead in Clairvaux, in that horrible prison he called a country retreat, he would have killed her. Instead, he’d paralyzed her as punishment for her love for Milverton.

“I trust the libation is satisfactory?”

Amanda knew that had she replied in the negative, Mlle. Derrida’s days in Skorzeny’s employment, if not upon this earth, would be numbered. She decided to let the girl live. “Yes, sir,” replied Amanda, setting the drink down on the spotless table.

“Excellent. And now to work.” Skorzeny produced a manila folder, extracted a few papers, and spread them out on the desk. For a man addicted to computers—a facility remarkable in a man his age—he still preferred real paper for important things.

The papers were a curious lot. One was a map, with a series of international destinations. One, she could see at a glance, was Macao, so presumably the others would be places at which Skorzeny planned to call. Others appeared to be gibberish—rows of numbers, nonsense letters, childish scribblings. “What is the point of chess, Miss Harrington?” he asked.

“To win?”

Skorzeny shook his head. “No. Not to win. That is the inevitable effect of the point of chess. Please try again.”

Another of his infernal Socratic puzzles. “If not to win, then what?”

“Think.”

She knew how his mind worked. She got it. “Then, not to lose.”

He smiled a reptilian smile that, at some point, someone must have told him was as close to a simulacrum of pleasure as he was ever likely to display. “Very good. Not to lose. In fact, no one every really loses at chess. There is no killing blow, no coup de grâce, no severed head to exhibit to the throngs and multitudes, as the Mahdi’s men severed General Gordon’s head at Khartoum and lodged it in a tree branch, so that the birds could peck out its eyes, and the tree would be watered with the last of Gordon’s lifeblood, what little might remain.”

Amanda shuddered: Skorzeny had lost none of his taste for the grisly and the macabre. Whatever had happened in London, whatever had transpired at the old monastery while she lay in her drug-induced coma, he had been defeated and yet somehow he had escaped, determined to fight on. That was a quality in a man she usually admired, but in him it was only hateful.

“…not to lose,” he was still rattling on. “Instead, the lesser player resigns, turns his king over, surrenders, the way the smaller and weaker of two fighting lions eventually gives up his pride of lionesses and slinks off into the veldt, there to displace another lion weaker than himself, or to die. To fight on, or to give up: those are the only two choices life offers us. As you can see, I have made my choice.” This, she knew, was as close to admission of temporary failure as he was ever likely to come.

He pointed to the map. The places circled were far from his usual civilized haunts—remote parts of Asia, the Sub-continent, sub-Saharan Africa. “Are these the places we’re going?” she asked.

“No, those are the places I’ve been,” he replied. “Countries without extradition treaties with the United States. Gruesome places, without a modicum of refinement and, in most cases, evidence of civilization of any kind. In short, the only places that savage, President Tyler, would let me visit. But I turned it to my advantage. Preparing for this day.”

“And which day is that, Mr. Skorzeny?” It was amazing how quickly she fell back into her old role as his advisor, confidante and, when necessary, executrix.

Instead of answering, he asked: “What do you know of the End Times, Miss Harrington?”

“The End Times, sir?” she asked. “The Last Trump, you mean?”

“Indeed, I do.” He seemed very pleased with the prospect of this conversation. “Apocalypse. Armageddon.”

“Have you had a religious epiphany, then?”

Now he laughed out loud, a horrible barking laugh. “I should say not. Organized superstition is hardly my line, but adherents to the millenarian faiths often prove helpful. Useful idiots, as Lenin deemed them. And it is a fact that many cultures foretell the end of the world. Both Christianity and Shi’a Islam anticipate the day when Jesus will come again, although our Muslim brethren consign the Nazarene to a secondary role in the final drama. Still, they share a vision of turmoil, of war, until the end finally comes in a rain of quenching fire.”

“And then what?”

“That’s what we’re going to find out.”

“What do you want me to do?” she asked. She wasn’t sure he would answer, but his mood seemed temporarily expansive.

“You’ll learn out when we get there.”

“And where would that be, sir?”

Abruptly, startlingly, his hand landed with a thump on the desk, his right index finger pointing to a place not highlighted on the map. “Do you believe in God, Miss Harrington?” he said.

Manhattan

The screens that kept Manhattan safe stayed on. But Byrne already knew it was too late. Something had happened, something more than a probe, and now it was simply a matter of finding out just how bad it was. Silently, he cursed under his breath. This was not how he liked to fight. Byrne’s natural impulse toward hotheadedness he had outgrown with age, but he still liked to play offense, not defense.

This was no ordinary breach, that much he already knew. He not only knew it, he felt it. Like a lot of Irish cops, Byrne trusted his Celtic instincts, the little voice that whispered you’d be okay when you crashed through that apartment door in the Bronx or the one that warned you not to dash around the corner just this instant. He had gotten this far, and stayed alive this long, by listening to those little voices. Now he had a job to do.

It was the job he never wanted and yet was now closest to his heart: protecting New York City. If over the years he had earned a reputation as a cowboy, well so be it. A cowboy was what New York needed now, not some by-the-book bureaucrat, not some IA weasel or desk jockey who had never pulled his piece or fired his weapon. When Byrne got into trouble, as he had a couple of times, Matt White had had his back, and when this job opened up there really was only one man in the entire department White trusted with.

“Now what?” said Lannie.

“Let’s brainstorm this thing and try to figure out what we’re up against before the shit hits the fan.”

“You think it will?” asked Sid.

“Your father would never have asked such a dumb question.”

“That’s because the people he worked with couldn’t talk back to him.”

Byrne smiled. “That’s where you’re wrong, Sid. Nobody could make a dead man talk like Sy Sheinberg. Anything about a cause of death that Sy didn’t know or couldn’t discover wasn’t worth knowing or discovering. That’s what made him the best medical examiner I ever worked with.

“But our job is different—it’s the opposite, in fact. We’re not like normal cops, who basically show up to cart away the stiff and interview the witnesses. We’re here to stop things before they happen. Remember what the president said years ago: we have to be lucky all the time; the terrorists only have to be lucky once. Well, on 9/11 they got lucky, if you call shooting an unsuspecting man in the back lucky. I call it cowardly. But on my watch, lucky ain’t got nothing to do with it. So let’s stop some shit, whatever it is. Lannie, what’ve we got?”

Aslan Saleh tapped on a terminal and brought up the camera feeds, displayed on a large screen on the wall across from Byrne’s desk. It was like a fly’s-eye view of midtown, fractured into dozens of individual CCTV scans, but they were all virtuosos at reading the images, able to sense hinky body language before they could see it. And not by accident. The Department of Homeland Security had spent a fortune developing something called Project Hostile Intent, a kind of vaguely practical version of “pre-crime” that moviegoers saw in
Minority Report
. Lannie, in fact, had been recruited from DHS by Byrne himself, when he was looking for a native Arabic-speaker/computer geek to join the CTU, and Lannie had brought some of the principles of the program over with him.

Byrne thought much of Project Hostile Intent was typical Washington bullshit, the kind of gee-whiz crap that got gobs of money thrown its way, but at its core was simply good old-fashioned police work, the kind that used to be SOP across the country before the ACLU and its fleet of lawyers sank their teeth into the cop on the beat. In a normal civilian setting, “pre-crime” would be laughed out of court, dismissed on all sorts of procedural grounds, with the racism flag fluttering ominously in the background. The program relied heavily on facial expressions and body language, but also employed a battery of sensors that could read body temperature and brain waves; it had even developed a laser radar to monitor pulse and breathing rates from a distance. Now dubbed FAST, for Future Attribute Screening Technologies, the program was still in development, but was being discreetly deployed at various airports and other ports of entry around the country.

Byrne had simply stolen it. Lannie and his handpicked crew had installed advanced prototypes at key points around Manhattan—at Wall Street, City Hall and the Tweed Courthouse, Brooklyn Bridge, Gracie Mansion (the mayor, who took everything personally, had insisted on that), and, of course, in Times Square. It was mind-numbingly boring to spend half your life watching people go about their daily business, or lack of it; but it had to be done, if only as a complement to the computers that never tired of monitoring human beings, finding them as endlessly fascinating as cows watching traffic on a country road.

The CTU’s computers were outfitted with advanced facial-recognition software, in part developed right here in Chelsea and—not being hampered by the strictures of political correctness or probable cause—the CTU was empowered to act on whatever information, leads, and hunches the combination of men and machines developed. Byrne had drilled into his men that they were to stay out of the courts if at all possible, which was why dead-solid takedowns never got reported, either into the main NYPD database or, God forbid, to the media. Terrorists had rights in every court and police precinct in America, except here. Sure, there were mistakes from time to time, but they either were hushed up, paid off, or buried in unmarked graves.

“Okay, let’s play catch-up,” said Byrne.

On the screens, everything was as it had been ten minutes earlier. Out in the command room, teams were busy retro-tracing the DoS tracks, piecing together a model that would help prevent future blindsides. But that was barn-door stuff; right now, Byrne was more interested in what was going to happen next.

“What’s your hunch, Captain?” asked Saleh.

“Times Square.” It was less a hunch than a wager he would take to Vegas. Nothing would shout maximum impact more than an attack on Times Square. Nobody in America cared about the mayor, or even knew where Gracie Mansion was.

Brooklyn Bridge was iconic, but would be plenty tough to bring down, especially with the unadvertised but very real police boat presence on both sides of the East River. If a dog so much as took a dump on the bridge, the likelihood was that the cops knew about it before the pooch’s owner did.

All at once, sixteen different angles of Times Square jumped onto the screen. Nobody said a word as they scanned the crowds. The usual: tourists gawking, theater crowds milling, a few hookers trolling, pickpockets sniffing the wind. Gazing at the human comedy day in and day out, Byrne often thought that it was a miracle that cities existed at all, that citizens were not constantly at each other’s throats, the hunters and the prey, but in this jungle the ratio of prey to predator was thousands to one, and so ignorance, and the law of averages, was bliss.

“What’s that?” said Byrne, pointing. “Gimme a zoom.”

It was a pushcart vendor. Normally, no big deal. There were pushcart vendors all over the city and had been for two centuries. But this guy was different.

For one thing, he was running. Vendors paid the city for their allotted spaces, but these were general licenses. There was no need to rush to your spot, like a homeless guy who had dibs on a certain step of one of the West Side Protestant churches, which now functioned as impromptu shelters for those too proud or too strung out to enter a real shelter. But this guy was out of breath. He was also doing something even fishier—he was looking at his cell phone like his life depended on it.

“Nobody’s in that big a rush to sell hot dogs,” said Byrne. “Let’s snuggle up a little closer to this baby.” Lannie zoomed in. Although the cameras shot in black and white, they could clearly relay facial features, skin tone, even hair color.

Now the man was doing something hot dog vendors didn’t usually do. He put down his cell phone and opened up his cart, but didn’t appear terribly interested, for all his haste, in the presence of customers. Instead, he was fiddling with something under the cart.

“Who’s in the area?” asked Byrne. “What units, foot, horse—what’ve we got?”

Sid was already punching up the data. NYPD cops in Manhattan never went anywhere without GPS locators on them, which really cut down the time they could spend with their girlfriends and mistresses, but which meant that One Police Plaza brass and others could find them instantly. At first the cops had bitched about it, but after a couple of lives were saved in officer-shot situations, they quickly came around.

“Couple of Tacs over on Eighth, Johnson, Guttierez, Adderly and Kemp between 42nd and 45th, and Bradley and Petrovich on the ponies.”

“Converge,” said Byrne, rising. “On the double.”

Byrne was already through the door of his office and into the command center by the time Lannie and Sid saw what he had seen.

Protruding from the hot dog vendor’s waistband as he got up from underneath his cart was the unmistakable grip of a.45 automatic.