Hostile Intent (8 page)

I
N THE AIR
: D
EVLIN

For operational security, Devlin almost always flew commercial. And that was not all. Unless he was dealing directly through Seelye’s office, he paid for everything in cash, including road tolls, and never used a publicly available Web browser. He had no land line that any phone company knew about.

Although he was physically fit, Devlin dressed the part of an average American schlub, in T-shirts and jeans and a baseball cap. To look at him, you would see exactly what he wanted you to see—nothing.

He was the man who wasn’t there.

Devlin had long ago learned that hiding in plain sight was the only way to hide. Afflicted with perceptual blindness, people don’t notice what they see every day—they only notice its absence or its alteration. You could live on the same street for twenty years and not be able to accurately describe the sequence of houses, but you would notice, briefly, that one of them had been torn down. And once its replacement had stood for six months or so, you would likely never remember what had been there before.

Devlin had to laugh when he read spy novels or went to movie thrillers: the heroes were too chiseled, too toothy, and just too damn conspicuous. Operational security was one thing, but showboating secrecy was entirely another; Jason Bourne might be the closest fictional equivalent to the men and women—were there any women? Even Devlin didn’t know—of Branch 4, but Bourne, when you got right down to it, was little more than a homicidal midget with memory troubles. Still, Bourne was lucky—he couldn’t remember who he was. Devlin remembered all to well, and it was the toughest thing he did every morning to forget it for one more day.

He let his eyes wander around the interior of the fuselage. Early twenty-first-century Boobus Americanus at his finest. Worse dressed than they would have been twenty years ago, stupider, maybe, or at least more ignorant. Forget about getting the Mexicans to speak proper English these days; it was a stroke of pure luck to encounter a twenty-year-old woman who could wrap her lips and tongue around the syllables of the language and pronounce them properly in any place other than her nose.

As the plane descended, he visualized the school plans once more in his mind. It was a fairly standard layout, a typical concrete block standing amid acres of striped parking spaces. He almost wished the terrorists had taken over the other middle school, an older building located in town; infiltration there would have been much easier.

Still, American special ops had gone to school on Beslan, and knew how to avoid most of the mistakes the Russians had made. For one thing, they weren’t going to run out of patience and come charging in, shooting indiscriminately. Devlin and his Xe team would invest the battlefield but remain invisible. They would take out the terrorists, not one by one, but all at once. And when they finished, the bad guys would be lying dead—no, not just dead but spectacularly, object-lesson dead—and the team would be gone, a wraith in the night. KRV—kill, rescue, vanish. And no one the wiser. The FBI would take all the credit. As for the media, the press was more lapdog than watchdog. For Devlin understood one big thing about reporters: they might be alcoholic malcontents, frustrated screenwriters, snarky Harvard boys afraid of inanimate objects, and hallucinating politicians-in-waiting, but there was one thing they never wanted to be, and that was reporters. They were always playing another angle.

Wheels down brought Devlin out of his reverie. The flight attendant gave them the obligatory, insincere welcome to St. Louis, where the local time was whatever. He gathered his sports satchel from the overhead compartment, which contained everything he needed for an operation like this, and slung it over his shoulder.

There was a full rank of taxis outside, but he passed them by and headed straight to the parking garage. Devlin favored large black SUVs, since their owners should know better than to put such an ungainly, unwieldy, and unpatriotic vehicle on the road. Besides, the owner would get the insurance money, the plates would disappear from every police registry in the country, and everybody would be happy.

The Escalade was ridiculously easy to jack. The Arch gleamed as he swung over the I-70 bridge. The streets of East St. Louis were dark, dangerous urban prairies. Perfect.

He headed for the intersection of Martin Luther King Drive and North 7th Street. Every American city had a street named after Martin Luther King Jr. North 7th Street was only a few blocks in from the river.

There were six youths standing on the corner, very busy doing nothing. As he approached, he ran a quick scan with the infrared monitor inside his PDA. You never knew who was hiding in the garbage can.

A white man in a cap behind the wheel of an SUV was not exactly an unknown sight in ESL: a transaction was in the offing.

The young men crowded around him as he got out of the jacked wheels. As with every group of young men, there was a Big Dog and a pack. Devlin could always spot the Dawg—the drill sergeant of gangsters, the NCOs of urban crime.

“Yo, check it out,” said the Dawg. “I got smoke, coke, coke, smoke.”

“I’ve got an SUV,” said Devlin. “You want it or don’t you?” Fight or flight, he liked to get it down to basics, to get the bullshit out of the way.

“That piece of shit?”

“Is clean, is worth fifty grand new, twenty grand chopped, its owner doesn’t even know it’s gone yet, so I make that at least thirty K profit to you, give or take your paternity payments, asshat.” Devlin looked ostentatiously at his watch. “I don’t have all day.”

Asshat got in his face. “What if we just take it?” The others, the small dogs, began sniffing around.

“You could try,” said Devlin.

There was a kind of primitive beauty to every confrontation among men, primates reverting to type. No matter what the PC weenies insisted, might always made right in the end.

“You alone,” observed Asshat.

“Sure about that?”

“I don’t see nobody else.” Not quite as sure now.

“That’s different. Would I be dumb enough to come here in a fifty thousand dollar car if somebody didn’t have my back?” As Asshat considered this—

“On the other hand, I know you have five homies here and two watching us from that building, plus a lookout kid over there behind the trash pile. I know you’re carrying an old .38 that hasn’t been cleaned in a year and if you try to fire it you’ll blow your balls off. I know that the two guys in the window have machine pistols but from the way they’re handling them they probably couldn’t hit an elephant in the head if he was standing in front of them. I know your life sucks, and that you think there probably should be more to it than getting high and getting laid, but you don’t know what it is. And I know that you could use the money, so let’s just make our little transaction now and everybody stays alive.”

“You crazy.”

“That’s the chance you have to take.”

Asshat thought for a moment. “What it gonna cost me?”

“That.” Devlin pointed to an old Chevy Malibu. “Do we have a deal?”

I
N THE AIR
: B
ARTLETT

The Gulfstream was clean and comfortable. On the tarmac at Van Nuys Airport it looked like any of the other corporate jets that allowed the winners of life’s lottery to avoid the LAX nightmare. Whether you were flying down to Rio for a climate-change powwow, spending the weekend at your ranch in Montana, or just hopping over to Nevada for some stays-in-Vegas fun, the private jet was God’s way of telling a sizable number of people in the LA area that they were making just about the right amount of money.

Inside, however, the jet that was ferrying Eddie Bartlett and his friends to Scott Air Force Base near Belleville, Illinois, about twenty miles east of St. Louis, was a little different than, say, the Paramount jet. For one thing, it was a state-of-the-art arsenal, with everything from nonlethal ordnance to armor-penetrating RPGs. Concussion grenades, cluster bombs. Small arms of every description, including the AA-12 automatic shotgun that Xe developed at its training grounds in Moyock, North Carolina. All hidden behind rotating panels that answered only to the team leader’s palm prints, retinal scan, and voice register.

The jet was carrying two dozen men, each one of them identified only by a name tag. When he first came to Xe—it was called Blackwater then—the system had been to use only numbers, so as to inhibit the formation of personal relationships and the exchange of confidences. But numbers proved to be too impersonal for the unit’s own good; some cohesion was found to be necessary, and so he’d hit upon a rotating, mission-specific structure of common first names—Jim, Fred, Bob, Jose—that could easily be remembered and, later, forgotten. The name tags were worn only during mission prep and needed to be memorized; once in combat they were discarded.

The men—there were no women—were all handpicked for their résumés and their code of silence. Except for the very odd occasion when he needed a woman for camouflage or misdirection, Eddie Bartlett worked exclusively with men. He was old school that way. No sexual jealousy, not protective empathy. Not that Eddie didn’t have plenty of the latter—as a husband and father, he was a puddle of protective empathy. But when it came to taking care of business, he was all business.

So his team consisted of Delta, SEALs from Team 6, Green Berets, Rangers, 10th Mountaineers, Specials Operations Command personnel, some retired, some moonlighting, and some just freelancing. Officially, of course, none of them was there.

Once, men like these really were “special ops.” The Navy ferried the Marines, the Marines landed, the Army bore the brunt of the fighting and the mopping-up, and special ops were used sparingly, for intel and dirty work. Today, in the wake of the second Iraq War, special ops were the point of the spear—the first resort, not the last—with the regular Army acting in a support capacity. There was a lot of grumbling about it, but this was the brave new world of warfare.

Eddie Bartlett himself cut his teeth with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), 2nd Battalion, at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, better known as the Night Stalkers. Fast in, faster out, wholly lethal, the Night Stalkers were a special helicopter unit, trained to plan and execute the mission and extract everybody in one piece. All of them could fly a chopper between a nun’s legs and she’d never even feel the breeze.

Ironically, the unit originated with the failure of Operation Eagle Claw in the desert of Iran, after which President Carter had belatedly ordered up an outfit that could actually have accomplished Desert One. So the Army got its best fliers from the Screaming Eagles and elsewhere, put together the 160th SOAR, and had been doing some serious damage ever since.

One of his three secure, direct-access lines buzzed softly and Bartlett picked it right up. The man on the other end of the line didn’t have to identify himself and spoke, as he always did, without preamble or pleasantries:

“Be ready to bubble down the cell phone service for a ten-mile radius, except for our secure network.” In tech parlance, “bubbling down” meant to shut down cell towers within a given range. “I also want real-time infrared imaging, 3-D coverage.”

“Good idea. The school’s out in the middle of a field, surrounded by nothing. Couple of outbuildings, sheds, whatnots.”

The voice of “Tom Powers” crackled in his ear. “That’s why they picked it. They think they’ll see us coming. But they won’t. KRV. No heroes, no medals.”

Bartlett nodded to himself. He had the right crew for the job. “KRV. Roger that.”

“Got your playbook?”

“Consulting it now,” said Eddie. Actually, what he was looking at that precise moment was a computer playing the You Tube video of Miss Teen South Carolina desperately attempting to answer a simple question about Americans and maps, but he knew that “Powers,” who had sent him the link via a series of untraceable cut-out gmail addresses from a server in Abu Dhabi, had embedded the tactical plan inside the video; a self-extracting file, good for one use only, would call it up. And then the hard-drive would melt.

Bartlett looked up at the countdown clock located on both front bulkheads: just under an hour to touchdown.

“NSDQ,” he said, signing off.

When Miss Teen South Carolina got to her third repetition of “such as,” he clocked on the dummy link.

The download was nearly instantaneous. He had just enough time to hit the print button before the hard drive went into its controlled meltdown. The laptop’s titanium case would contain the electrical fire. He read the page as it spat from the high-speed laser printer:

“Patriots, Red 54–40.” Right. Eddie Bartlett turned to his team. “Lock and load, gentlemen. The zone is hot.”

I
N THE AIR
: S
KORZENY

Skorzeny’s Boeing 707 was not immodestly luxurious. This was, after all, a businessman’s plane, not a sheik’s whorehouse or a rock star’s pleasure palace. Tastefully appointed, leather seats, a private sleeping compartment in the back for long trips, it was capable of being refueled while in flight, which meant, as a practical matter, that he could stay airborne for days, even weeks at a time. Rarely were there more than two or three persons aboard, not counting the pilots and the staff.

Flying time to Paris was less than ninety minutes, so there would be no napping on this trip. Skorzeny sat, as he always did, at his built-in computer console, from which he controlled the worldwide activities of Skorzeny International; since he did business in nearly every time zone on earth, sleep was an unprofitable activity.

Skorzeny’s plane was equipped with an advanced, satellite-based air-traffic monitoring system, which allowed him to track his corporate fleet, on land, at sea, and in the air. To the naked eye, Skorzeny’s screen was an indecipherable series of blips and letter-number combinations, but he could read it the way a great conductor could read a complex symphonic score. Thanks to deals he had struck with just about every air-traffic control system on the planet, and using a sophisticated transponder triangulation system that he himself had modestly conceived and developed, he could keep track of just about everything that belonged to him.

Additionally, it allowed him to monitor, through GPS, the location of every one of his operatives anyplace in the world. Carrying the modified cell-and sat-phones issued by the company, Skorzeny’s employees could be instantly traced, located, and, if necessary, recalled or rescued. He trusted this information because it was provided by his own comsat, which he had piggybacked into space aboard one of the French
Ariane
rockets in the nineties. By corporate edict, everyone at a senior or operative level who worked for Skorzeny had to keep his or her GPS device on at all times. The only exception was when you were in duress, in durance, or dead.

“Sir?” Pilier’s voice, over his shoulder. “We’re approaching Paris.”

So engrossed was he that he’d missed the man’s approach. Skorzeny made a mental note to see his doctor soon; if this was a sign his senses had started to slip, he wanted to know about it right away. He preferred to think that his inattention was the residue of the excitement he was feeling, and nothing more.

“You’ve contacted HARBOR and BOREALIS?”

“Yes, sir. Their offices are closed at the moment, due to the lateness of the hour.” Given all of Skorzeny’s high-tech toys, what the old man wanted with this sort of thing was beyond him. Still, one of the ways Skorzeny was able to keep absolute communications security was through a network of microsatellites, which had been launched into geosynchronous orbit from high-altitude airplanes, so weather balloons probably had some practical use that he could not see. In any case, Pilier’s job was to execute, not wonder.

“Thank you.”

He tried not to let his excitement show, tried to control his emotions, even when they were responding to the beginning of the realization of his lifelong dream.

Ambition in a child is fueled by many things—parental expectation, want, force majeure, disaster—but Emanuel Skorzeny’s ambition was born of
Sippenhaft
: collective responsibility for actions of a family member. In the wake of the failed attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life on July 20, 1944, not only the conspirators suffered, so did their families. Some were executed, most were separated and sent to special camps, where the mothers died but where their children’s identities were expunged, where all memories of the sins of their fathers were extirpated, where they were allowed to live, albeit with new names and new souls. Emanuel Skorzeny was one of those children.

Skorzeny’s father died twisting at the end of some piano wire, but he himself was spared and sent by reason of
Sippenhaft
to purdah or, in his case, a camp near Dresden. On February 13, 1945, the jewel of the Elbe was liberated by “Bomber” Harris of the RAF, with American support, and the camp was demolished. He was in, of all places, the outhouse at the time of the attack and thus survived when the barracks took a direct hit.

There were those who whispered that he was the illegitimate son of Otto Skorzeny himself, the great
Standarten-führer
who had rescued Mussolini from the partisans. He let them think that: it made the story of his life so much more…redemptive.

Pilier strapped himself into his seat as the plane went into a steep descent. “Sir?” he reminded.

“In a moment, Monsieur Pilier.” Skorzeny’s fingers flew; for an old man, thought Pilier, he could handle himself around technology like a teenager. As Pilier watched, Skorzeny put on a headset to eliminate the noise of the plane’s engines and began to speak softly. Pilier couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he knew whom he was talking to: Amanda Harrington, who should be waiting for them in Paris.

Skorzeny finished his conversation and shut down the system. One of the conditions he was forced to accept when he bribed the French minister of the interior was to switch it off in French airspace. No matter how well shielded it was, it would not do to be discovered, and not wishing to annoy a duly appointed official of his host country, especially given his special needs within that host country, Skorzeny had reluctantly agreed. He prided himself on keeping his word.

“Do you read the Bible, Monsieur Pilier?”

Where that question came from, Pilier didn’t want to know. He braced himself for a new and strange line of inquiry. “You know I don’t, sir,” said Pilier. He was a good French Catholic, which meant that he never attended mass.

“What about the
Apocrypha?
The
Gnostic Gospels?
Surely,
Revelation?”

Where was the crazy old coot going with this? “No, sir.”

“The vision of St. John, a masterpiece of speculative superstition that some mistake for dogma. A book of visions, signs, terror, and wonders. Of the End Times. ‘And there appeared a great wonder in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.’ Chapter Twelve, Verse One.”

Now Pilier understood. It had something to do with Skorzeny’s Blake obsession.

“The woman clothed with the sun. The point is, the cartoon versions of reality and history that we see on our so-called ‘news’ channels are grossly distorted and lacking in specificity. But that, I suppose, is what comes from a century-long assault on western civilization. Don’t false dichotomies enrage you? Left, right, communism, national socialism, capitalism?”

Pilier had no idea what Skorzeny was talking about, and wondered whether the old man did, either.

The wheels barely bumped as they landed, which was the way Skorzeny liked it. They were still rolling to a stop when he rose from his seat and let Pilier throw his topcoat around his shoulders. He ran a comb through his hair.

He was first out the door, walking briskly toward the car. Pilier was trailing behind him, carrying their effects. Even though it was dark, he could see her silhouette in the backseat of the Citroën.