Early Warning (4 page)

The Persian ran his thumb over the screen, trying to access an application, then punched up a number. Nothing.

“We are in a completely controlled environment here, M. Kohanloo. Nothing we say leaves this room, and only those communications which I wish to receive can enter it. You may speak frankly here, without fear. So let’s cut the bullshit, pardon my Farsi, and get down to business, shall we?”

Now Kohanloo smiled—a broad smile of recognition that he was with a kindred spirit. “Deep packet inspection,” he said.

“The key to your success. In fact, the thing that keeps your government operating. With the enthusiastic cooperation of suicidal Western telecommunications companies, you are able to monitor all Internet traffic going into and out of your country. There is nothing you cannot eavesdrop upon and, should you so choose, you can selectively block, record or disrupt, as the case may be. For a primitive nation in the grip of an imported and imposed superstition, you have adapted remarkably well to the 21st century, M. Kohanloo. I congratulate you.”

Kohanloo’s lips formed the simulacrum of a smile, although his dead eyes gave nothing away. “What was it your Lenin said? ‘You will provide us with the rope with which to hang you’? So it is written, so shall it be done. If you will pardon my misquotation of sacred scripture—in this secure environment, of course.”

“The Americans’ National Security Agency can only look upon what your nation does and weep that they have not the moral strength to engage in such ruthless activity. For there is a genius in that, a moral liberation. The higher ends must always be served, no matter the immediate cost. This I learned as a child in Germany. One must set one’s heart against all emotion, against all entreaties, to let the cries of both the innocent and the guilty fall upon your deaf ears, that the greatest good for the greatest number be served.”

Kohanloo’s visage took on a conspiratorial mien. “But what of the Black Widow?” he hissed. “Cannot the Americans do the same thing?”

Skorzeny suppressed a laugh by disguising it as a cough. “They could, but they won’t. One of their whiny little senators in our employ would make a speech, calling upon his countrymen to ‘defend the Constitution’ or some such. Or one of their media captains, who draws a considerable sum from our exchequer monthly, would lead a secular crusade against the government, challenging it to live up to America’s highest ideals.”

“Which apparently includes suicide,” Kohanloo said. “Still, I worry about the Widow….”

“Let me worry about her,” consoled Skorzeny. “And now, to business.” He pointed to the dancing computer screens, on which a very large sum of money had appeared on the screen, expressed in various currencies: dollars, euros, yen, yuan. “Take your pick,” he said.

Kohanloo barely glanced at the screens before turning back to Skorzeny. “How dare you insult me with money?” he said, and rose to leave.

“M. Kohanloo.” Something in Skorzeny’s voice stopped him in his tracks. “What you believe or don’t believe is absolutely immaterial to me. I myself, as you note, am a proud unbeliever in many faiths; all of them, in fact. But I see that you are a man of principle, and I like that. So I will make you a new offer.”

“And what is that?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

Kohanloo thought for a moment, and then a big smile broke over his face. “Under the present worldwide economic circumstances, recruitment has been going exceptionally well, especially in your prisons. By constantly harping on the iniquities of your society, our friends in the media have prepared the people for revolution—a necessary precondition for the arrival of
al-Mahdi
. As for our Sunni brothers, apostates though they may be, they need to know nothing of our larger purpose, and only wish to fight and die as martyrs for Allah.”

Kohanloo opened his briefcase, took out a manila folder, and placed it on the polished table. “So do we have a deal?”

Skorzeny looked down at the dossier and smiled. Then he stuck out his hand. “We have a deal,” he said.

Manhattan

Francis Xavier Byrne had a choice: the .38 or the 9-millimeter?

It was the same choice that every senior officer in the New York City Police Department had to make every year, a choice not given to the grunts, to the junior officers, to the rank and file, but to only a select few, those with seniority and experience.

He had earned that right. Earned it long ago and continued it every day he spent on the force. And every year, when this moment rolled around at the Police Academy on E. 20th Street, Captain Francis Xavier Byrne made the same choice:

He took the .38 Colt Detective Special.

As he raised the weapon into firing position, sighting on the first of the targets, he took a moment to reflect. He was 51 years old now and most definitely old school. No matter how many times he fired the various 9 mms. the department authorized, he still preferred the security and heft of a revolver. The Glock 19 was a plastic piece of shit with a six-pound pull—not the thing for some frightened rookie to be wielding in a crisis—and even retrofitted with a twelve-pound-pull “NY-2 Trigger,” it still felt like a lethal toy gun. The Smith & Wesson 5946 and the Sig P226 were improvements, although not by much. Byrne and his men also had the option of carrying the Kahr K9s as backup pieces or off-duty weapons, but in his opinion, unless the brass was willing to admit the past century of semi-automatic firearms technology was a mistake and get some old-fashioned Colt 1911s, he was going to stick to the trusty revolver as his sidearm until they pried it from his cold, dead hands.

He slid his right index finger down the frame from just below the cylinder toward the trigger. That was the way they taught it now at the Academy: no fingers on the triggers until you were ready to fire. Until you were ready to shoot. Until you were ready to kill.

Byrne brought the Colt up to eye level. He used a one-handed, full-frontal stance, right eye closed, his dominant left eye sighting down the barrel. Not for him was the sideways stance, in which you were essentially aiming over your shoulder. Not for him was any flashy, muzzle-waving, sideways-pointing ghetto grip: throughout his career, he had several times staked his life on the proposition that the safest place to stand between a gangbanger with a Glock and whatever he was shooting at was right in front of the target.

Fuck it: it didn’t feel natural. The whole “finger on the side of the gun” crap was a “safety” rule—for the perp’s safety, not the cop’s. He dropped his finger onto the trigger, let it curl around the trigger in a lover’s caress. There was next to no chance of a double-action revolver going off accidentally, or even of a bed-wetting patrolman jerking the trigger hard enough by accident to fire the weapon.

Byrne let out his breath, then held it. Despite the noise of the range all around him, only partly muffled by his protective ear wear, he always felt at peace here. It was so unlike real life: just you and the target, standing there motionless, a big bull’s-eye at its center, dangling twenty feet away, just begging you to shoot it. Of course, it wasn’t really shooting. It was just punching holes, very quickly, through a piece of paper. But it still felt good, and the fact that there was no return fire was a bonus.

Byrne pulled back the hammer:
now
the weapon had a hair trigger. He fired and punched a hole near the center of the target, just slightly to the left. Each year, as he requalified, his astigmatism got a little worse, and each year he had to learn to compensate for it a little more. Some of the men—Vinnie Mancuso, his old partner back in the days when they were both young and hungry, now working in Commissioner White’s office and about ready to start pulling his pension as he counted down the days—suggested that he wear his glasses to the range, but to Byrne that was like making love with them on. You didn’t really need to see what you were doing as long as you knew what it was and how to do it.

He compensated a little to the left and fired again. Closer; good enough for government work. Not good enough for him. Another slight shift, another shot: perfect.

“You’re getting old, Frankie,” shouted a voice off to his left. With his headgear on, the voice to Byrne was like a whisper. He didn’t have to turn or look to know who it was.

“Move ’em back another fifteen, Lannie,” he barked. “And this time make it hard.”

Aslan “Lannie” Saleh stifled the crack he almost made. Something about “old” and “hard.” After all, Capt. Byrne was his boss, the man who had given him his break, and even though the unit operated more or less full-time in politically incorrect mode, Lannie Saleh knew that for Frankie Byrne the shooting range was the next best thing to St. Michael’s on Easter Sunday. He knew better than to break the boss’s sacramental concentration.

Lannie said nothing as he hit the control button and dragged the shredded target forward. Everybody kidded everybody in the Counter-Terrorism Unit about their marksmanship, but over fifty or not, Capt. Byrne was still the best shot in the department. There were all sorts of stories about him; about the time when he had caught a burglar in his mother’s apartment in Queens and, without even looking, had put a bullet in the man and knocked him through a window.

Lannie pinched up a paper bad guy and sent it fleeing into the distance. Twenty-five feet, thirty, thirty-five—

“Keep going.”

He stopped at fifty. Byrne was reloading. Lannie admired the way the boss so smoothly, so effortlessly, slipped the .38 cartridges into the cylinder, then snapped it into place with a flick of his wrist. That was something you weren’t supposed to do; you were supposed to politely shut the cylinder with your free hand. But Frankie Byrne was at heart an Irish cowboy, and his men loved him for it.

“What did you say?” shouted Byrne. Saleh shook his head: nothing. Jesus, the man really was a mind reader, just like everybody said.

Byrne turned back toward the target and let out his breath. Instead of holding it this time, he kept exhaling; instead of cocking the hammer and firing single-action, he fired double-action, each pull of the trigger doing double duty, each pull cocking the hammer and then releasing it. Six shots. Lannie didn’t even have to look at the target as he reeled it back in to know the extent of the damage.

The first shot, he knew, would be right in the bad guy’s head; the other five were just for show. Or, knowing Byrne, to make a point. In the CTU, setting a good example and, from time to totally unreported time, creating an object lesson for the mother of some son of a bitch back home in Amman, was simply good manners.

Byrne grunted as he looked at his handiwork. Head, heart, stomach, spleen, balls, and, for good measure, a kneecap. Mission accomplished. “Your turn,” he said.

Lannie felt his heart drop into his shoes. He hadn’t come prepared to shoot, and certainly hadn’t expected to perform in front of the boss. Byrne slapped the protective earmuffs on his head and thrust the Glock into his hand. “You’re good to go,” he said.

The new target rocketed out. The book said that most sidearm confrontations took place from point-blank range to no more than twenty-five feet, but Byrne had just sent Osama bin Laden flapping in the breeze at least ten meters.

Lannie took the pistol and tried to steady himself. Even though he had already qualified this year, it didn’t matter: Byrne could fire him at any moment for any reason. The CTU was the most highly regarded and hard to get into unit in the NYPD, and the most top-down in its hierarchy; its members didn’t have to answer to any civilian review board, fat-bottomed top brass, or even the mayor. Once, shortly after 9/11, some deputy chief had tried to insert one of his stooges into the CTU’s secret headquarters, which in those dark days were in Brooklyn. Byrne, or so the story went, marched down to One Police Plaza and threatened to put the dope’s head through one of the double-glazed windows on the fourteenth floor; and since Frankie and Commissioner Matt White had been partners in the old days, that was the end of departmental interference in the CTU.

Lannie took a deep breath of pride—pride in his unit and pride in what he had already accomplished just getting into it—and squeezed off nine shots in lightning succession. Three hits, six misses, but at this distance that was pretty good, good enough for government work.

“You shoot like a sand nigger,” said Byrne, inspecting the target. “No wonder you guys always lose.”

Had anyone else said that to him, Lannie would have brought him up on charges; from Byrne, it was a compliment. “You know, I could have your badge for a crack like that, Captain,” he ventured.

Byrne laughed. “Which is one of the things that’s wrong with this country today. In the old days, in New York, that’s how we used to talk to each other, the Irish to the Italians to the Jews. Nowadays, you foreign pussies go running to the U.N. if somebody looks at you askance.”

“Askance? What does that mean?”

“It means you’re in America now, Buckwheat, so learn American.” Byrne slipped the .38 he had been using back into the holster that he wore on his right hip. He popped the clip—there was another term they didn’t want you to use anymore—out of the Glock and left both pieces of the weapon on the shelf.

They walked together out of the old Academy and into the glorious sunlight of an afternoon in New York City. Almost instinctively, Lannie turned east, toward Second Avenue, but Byrne took him by the arm and headed west, toward Gramercy Park, instead. “We’re in Chelsea, remember?” he said.

The corpse of Cabrini Medical Center lay directly across the street. The century-old Catholic hospital had closed down in the spring of 2008. Byrne could feel Lannie’s gaze on him as he reacted to the sight. “What is it?” said Saleh.

“It’s an old hospital.”

“I know that.”

“Cabrini Medical Center. One of the oldest Catholic hospitals in the city. Not financially viable, the state said. And now it’s gone.”

Lannie shrugged. “So what? New York’s got plenty of hospitals.”

Byrne put a hand on his shoulder: gently, but firmly. “It’s what we were just talking about. It’s the past, old New York. It’s what used to be. And now it’s not.”

Lannie still didn’t get it. Byrne kept his hand on his shoulder as he spoke:

“It was named after Mother Cabrini. Frances Xavier Cabrini, an Italian nun from Lombardy. She was the first American citizen ever canonized as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. In 1946, every wop in this town went apeshit when Pius XII punched her ticket to heaven. If you don’t believe me, ask Vinnie.”

“So I guess that makes her pretty special.” Lannie hoped his tone came off as encouraging, but knew it didn’t.

Byrne seemed to let it slide. “I’ll say. I was born there. I was named after her. And one other thing—”

Byrne still hadn’t moved. His hand was still on Lannie’s shoulder, his eyes still focused across the street, at the back of what used to be Cabrini Medical Center.

“My father died there.”

Lannie felt his cell phone buzz in his pocket, but he didn’t answer it, or even glance at it. He didn’t want to break the mood, even though to him this was all ancient history, and foreign ancient history at that. “I’m sorry, boss,” he said.

“It was a long time ago,” replied Byrne.

They started walking. “You know,” said Lannie, “not all Muslims are Arabs.”

“So the Iranians tell me,” said Byrne. “But you’re not Persian. Hell, you’re not even Irish.”

“And not all Arabs are Muslims,” Lannie said, undeterred. “Some of us are Christians.”

“And not all Christians are Catholics, but all Catholics are Christians. So what does that prove?”

Lannie had no answer. He was 24 years old, and even though he knew pretty much everything about life that was worth knowing, like computers and girls, he also knew that he knew almost nothing about anything that actually mattered. He was on the CTU thanks to Capt. Byrne, especially considering he couldn’t shoot for shit.

Byrne buttoned his overcoat against the raw spring wind. “So, is that your own personal .38?” Lannie asked. Walking with the boss was awkward, and it helped to have some neutral conversational topic.

“Yes, it’s mine. And no, not originally. It belonged to my dad. He was wearing it the day he was killed in the line of duty.”

Byrne got that faraway look in his eyes that everybody in the department knew so well. It was a look that said: this far and no farther. There are some lines not to be crossed.

Byrne had picked up the tempo now, barreling west past Teddy Roosevelt’s birthplace and across Fifth Avenue. It was as if he knew something was up, was responding to some unarticulated urgency, and it was all Lannie could do to keep up with the old man…on any level.

They had crossed Seventh Avenue, into Chelsea, and were heading north when Lannie felt his cell phone buzz again. Involuntarily, he stopped and pulled the phone out of his pocket. It was one of those shitty departmental phones, standard-issue, not his BlackBerry, which he had left back at his desk in case something really important happened.

“What is it?” asked Byrne. If it were really important, whoever was on the other end of the line would have called him. On the other hand, if it had anything to do with computers, Lannie would be the go-to guy. And that was, after all, the reason Byrne had hired him. Certainly not for his marksmanship.

Lannie glanced at the display: URGENT. He picked up the pace. They didn’t have to say anything. Byrne got it. That was one of the things that made him such a good chief.

They hit the intersection of 20th and Eighth, nearly running now, and headed north.

They rounded the corner. Up ahead was an old, nondescript warehouse, one of the few buildings that hadn’t been converted into artists’ lofts or art galleries. Actually, that was not quite true: most of it had in fact been converted, but there was still a big chunk of the giant building, which occupied a full city block in two dimensions and rose five stories into the air, that had been given over to the CTU. Not that any of the other tenants knew about it.

That was one of the things that still made New York New York, thought Byrne as he spied the building: not making eye contact with neighbors was still considered a virtue.