Michael Walsh Bundle (19 page)

L
OS
A
NGELES

The fountain was dancing and Dean Martin was singing about the moon hitting your eye like a big pizza pie. The Asian tourists were cell-phoning photos of themselves back to Taipei and Tokyo. The chubby Latina girls with the tramp stamps above their ample muffin tops pretended not to notice as the rich Iranian girls—some of them headscarved, most not—waltzed by in wolf packs, radiating fuck-you wealthy. The trolley line was returning to the station, over by Abercrombie and Fitch. Diane and Jade were in the Apple store when it happened.

Later, investigators determined that the device had been hidden at the bottom of the fountain pool, with a trigger mechanism set to blow on the thirteenth time Dino sang the words “that's
amore.
” It was the most popular song at the busiest time of day, and the perps were practically guaranteed a large audience, nearly all of whom were facing the waving fountains, delighting in the synchronicity of the music, the water, and the perfect southern California weather.

The bomb was a fairly typical, albeit extremely powerful IED, a roadside bomb from Baghdad with a college degree. It had also been packed with shrapnel of almost every kind that could be purchased in any hardware store: nails, ball bearings, broken glass, screws, which caused the initial fatalities at the blast site. Worse, it had been augmented with radioactive hospital waste in an attempt to fashion a crude “dirty bomb.”

The shock waves and debris radiated out, accompanied by a wall of contaminated water, tearing through the giant movie theater, blowing Nordstrom's to rubble, imploding the plate-glass windows of the Apple Store and the Barnes & Noble bookstore, splashing across Third Street to contaminate Park La Brea and the Palazzo, demolishing the Farmer's Market to the west and pancaking the huge parking structure directly to the north. In the aftermath, about the only thing left within the blast radius relatively unscathed was the Pan-Pacific Park to the east, and that only because much of it was below street level.

Diane and Jade were at the back of the store, on the upper level, when the blast hit. They had just bought Jade's new laptop and were getting her old files transferred at the geek desk when it happened.

The plate-glass windows at the front of the store blew inward, killing or maiming almost everybody. The upper floor was better sheltered, especially at the back. The tech guy was decapitated by a window shard, but Jade was short, and Diane had just bent down to pick her change purse off the floor when suddenly she was slammed against the side of the counter, then propelled through it.

Jade was slammed back into the counter as well, but the impact of her mother's body had torn it from its moorings, and so Jade was shoved along by the shock wave, through the space where the counter had stood and into the wall. Shelving came crashing down around her, and then a body, which is what saved her life. When they found her, unconscious but still alive, the shelves surrounding her were tattooed with shrapnel.

Diane was not so lucky. Even though she had taken the brunt of the blast, even with her skull fractured, she was able to reach for her daughter, grasp her hand, and then collapse on top of her as the wave of metal ripped through what was left of the store. Each screw, each nail tore through her body in that painless way that only the most grievous wounds can inflict, and she might even have survived had she not turned her head toward Jade one last time, as a ball bearing took out her left eye and exploded through the back of her head.

Diane was already dead when she fell across her daughter, still shielding her in death, her body warm as her child embraced it, but lying still, so very still, as the building collapsed around them. Jade couldn't move, and couldn't see much. Just the headless body of the tech guy, as the world went to hell and the fountains stopped dancing and Dino stopped singing and the moon hit your eye…

The head was staring right at her, the eyes wide open in the astonishment of sudden death. She had just enough strength to reach out and brush it away; it wobbled like a pumpkin on a splayed, bloody axis, then spun, rolled and tipped over.

“Mom?” she said. “Mama?”

Everything was really quiet. Those might be screams in the distance, and those might be moans closer by, but she couldn't tell; her ears were still ringing. After what seemed forever, she realized that the distant screams were sirens, and that the sirens were getting louder.

There was something heavy and unmoving lying across her. Her mother, she knew, was also nearby. It took her a while to figure out that the two things were one and same.

Jade struggled a bit, then managed to slip out from beneath Diane. Death has no emotional meaning to a child of Jade's age, other than as an abstract concept, and so in her mind it was perfectly possible for her mother to be both dead and with her at the same time. Diane's face was turned away from Jade, but the back of her head was missing. That was the worst part. That was how, in her stunned and bloody state, she knew.

“Mama,” she said trying to turn her mother's face to hers. “Mama?”

Aside from the missing eye, it was her mother's face, the face she knew and loved so well and so much. Whatever the wounds Diane had endured—the autopsy report would later show that she was hit by eighteen separate pieces of bomb shrapnel, shattered glass, and assorted other objects demolished in the blast's progression from fountain to store—they had come so fast and so furiously that she would have had almost no time to really suffer. She would have died knowing that she still held her little girl in her arms, that she could still protect her, and that, no matter the evil that men could fashion, she was still her mother.

L
ONDON
, E
NGLAND

Emanuel Skorzeny and Paul Pilier had checked into the same hotel, the Savoy, but under different pseudonyms. In general, Skorzeny preferred never to alert either the authorities or the media to his presence in their countries. In the U.K., there had been that little bother over some insider-trading allegations a few years back, which had engendered a considerable amount of ill-will toward him until the Skorzeny Foundation suddenly found several high-profile projects on which to lavish equally high-profile support, and then the prime minister had embraced him on camera.

Still, to avoid the undue scrutiny of the Fleet Street paparazzi, they had taken the Chunnel, where they could spend the half-hour trip under the English Channel in the comfort of Skorzeny's new Jaguar XJ Portfolio, then motor their way to London from Folkestone.

The Skorzeny Foundation could be found in the forefront of nearly every fashionable cause; from Darfur to land mines to female genital circumcision, there was hardly a position it took that did not meet with the enthusiastic approval of the editorial board of the
New York Times
. It supported renewable resources, delivered home heating oil to the poor at affordable prices, and generously funded medical research.

Through its Skorzeny Fellowships, the Foundation observed, monitored, and selected for advancement the brightest young minds in the countries—mostly the United States and Europe—where it bestowed its largesse. Without ever learning the source of their good fortune, since the scholarships were administered through a silent network of culturally sympathetic operatives, each supported by the Foundation in their roles as talent scouts, the young people “won” scholarships to the best prep schools and/or top universities in their respective countries. It was a little like the MacArthur Foundation's “genius” grants, but with an entirely different purpose in mind: not the advancement of art, but the advancement of a certain political point of view, one long and fervently held since the appearance of
Das Kapital
: social justice.

Finally, but equally important, the Foundation actively supported politicians it found praiseworthy, funneling the money through a series of cut-outs and 527s, bundling where appropriate; in short, doing whatever it took to maintain its tax-exempt status in the United States while still affecting the outcome of every election that it possibly could.

Although the Foundation was headquartered in London, the United States was the principal focus of its activities. Emanuel Skorzeny had long taken a keen interest in the world's largest economy and even after the advent of the European Union and its currency, the euro, he maintained his fixation on America.

Not that he would ever live there, of course. He found the people too common; he found the pop culture too vulgar when it was not downright disgusting; he found the food unhealthy, hormonal, and inedible. True, Old Europe was not what it used to be, but that was one of the things that Skorzeny liked about it. It was changing, right before his eyes and under the noses of everyone living there, a boiling frog happily swimming in a lukewarm bath that would slowly and very surely gradually grow warmer and warmer. He both mourned and celebrated its oncoming demise, determined both to hasten it and to profit from it before he too had to shuffle off the stage and into infinite blackness.

It was the task for which he had been chosen.

Emanuel Skorzeny had seen and experienced too much of life either to believe or disbelieve in God, and he was pleased and proud that so many others were beginning to see it his way. There had been a raft of books and television programs not only proclaiming the death of God but disputing whether he even existed at all; agnosticism was the way forward, not atheism. Skorzeny believe in hedging his bets when necessary.

Many of these books and programs were published by publishing houses in which Skorzeny maintained a sizable equity position. Some of the television programs had been underwritten by the Foundation via various ad hoc production companies. The empty cathedrals of France, the abandoned churches of Britain—these things were testimonials to the power of his ideas. He was, in his own mind, the modern incarnation of both Voltaire and Louis XV.

One of the phone extensions in the fifth-floor river suite buzzed. “Sir?” said Pilier, “your guest is here.”

Skorzeny rose and pulled on a smoking jacket. He didn't smoke, but it was the sort of thing one wore in the Savoy when receiving visitors. As he moved toward the door he switched on the television and saw that the New York Stock Exchange was cratering. Then he opened the door.

It was she. “Good day, Miss Harrington,” he said, ushering her in.

Amanda Harrington kissed him lightly on both cheeks as she breezed past him in a rustle of silk and a zephyr of expensive perfume. There was, alas, nothing overtly affectionate about her greeting, just good manners and good breeding. After all, they had seen each other last night and had much urgent business to discuss.

“I thought you'd never ask,” she said, reclining unbidden on the sofa in the suite's plush living room.

Skorzeny forgave Amanda sins that others would have to pay for. He walked to the bar, which was always stocked to his order, and poured Amanda a drink. It was one of the many ways in which this impossibly poised woman was a throwback to the great beauties of the 1940s and 1950s. Unless she was swimming, riding, or playing tennis, she never wore anything other than dresses and proper shoes. She had her hair immaculately done up every day. She never used a four-letter word, nor suffered one to be used in her presence. There was not a single tattoo on her glorious body. She would, he knew, have one drink and then get down to business, or brass tacks, depending.

Indeed, Skorzeny knew, the only flaw in her life was her inability to have a child. In that respect, she resembled the majority of her European sisters: resigned to sacrificing the Continent's future to the immigrant hordes, in order to savor their Pyrrhic victory over the patriarchy.

Skorzeny handed her a shaken, ice-cold gin martini and stepped back to admire her as she took the first sip. Really, she was magnificent. She was the only woman in the world on whom he would gladly wait.

“When did you hear?” she asked.

“Just now,” he said.

“Luckily,” she said, “I've come prepared.”

One of Amanda's few concessions to modernity was the array of electronic gadgets she habitually carried with her. As one of London's most successful stockbrokers, she had worked her way to the top of the heap at the firm of Islay Partnership, Ltd., living proof that London's reclaiming the title of the world's financial capital was no mere jingoistic, John Bull dream. She worked all of the hours that she was not sleeping, but she did so without ever calling attention to the fact. In her professional life, as in everything else, she was the very soul of discretion.

That was why he had snatched her away from Islay and made her as chairman of the board of Skorzeny Foundation. That, and one other thing: her impossible beauty. Amanda Harrington was the kind of woman that not even his money could buy, which was why he kept trying. Emanuel Skorzeny had never met anyone he couldn't purchase, or at least lease, and he was not about to break his unblemished record now.

She laid the instruments out on the table, occasionally flicking an eye at the running stock tables on the Sky News ticker. Still sipping on her martini, she punched in instructions on her battery of BlackBerrys, and at one point had not one but two cell phones working; there was something distinctly comic about her holding each of them to a separate ear as she talked, but Skorzeny was too much of a gentleman to laugh.

“Hand me the remote, would you, please?” she said, snapping both phones shut and putting the BlackBerrys on “silent.” Dutifully, he handed it over. No one who knew him would believe that the great Emanuel Skorzeny would heed a woman, even one as spectacular as Amanda Harrington, but there you were.

She turned up the sound and changed channels. It didn't matter where she landed, the coverage from Los Angeles was everywhere. “Good God,” was all she said, looking at an aerial shot of the blast radius.

The Grove lay near the city's geographic heart, and so its destruction affected the freedom of movement of all Angelenos. With both Third Street and Beverly Boulevard knocked out, two of the city's most important east-west arteries had been cut; the north-south streets of Fairfax and La Brea were similarly affected. Gridlock was expanding outward, a ripple effect that would soon engulf Beverly Hills to the west, Hollywood to the north, and Los Feliz to the northeast.

That, however, was the least of the city's problems. The Grove itself was a complete loss, and the historic Farmer's Market as well. The CBS broadcast center was a smoking ruin and had temporarily knocked the network off the air. American networks were notoriously squeamish about showing dead bodies, but the Europeans felt no such Puritan compunctions, and even from this height, one could see that body parts were liberally strewn over a quarter-mile radius.

“Horrible,” said Amanda.

“Yes,” said Skorzeny softly. “We have to do something.”

“Already underway,” said Amanda briskly, knocking back the last of her martini. “I've rearranged our positions on the New York Stock Exchange in order to limit our exposure to—”

“That's not what I mean, Miss Harrington,” said Skorzeny. “I mean, we have to help these poor people.
Now
.”

Amanda caught the shift in tone, but kept her voice level. “I've anticipated that, sir. At your word, I'm prepared to go public with a variety of Skorzeny Foundation initiatives, depending on the reaction of the American government. We can immediately make large cash donations to local hospitals and charities and, through our contacts in various European governments, we are also in a position to offer official aid if the Americans request or accept it. Further, our supply ships—”

“Yes, yes,” said Skorzeny softly. “I mean we also have to act politically, through our contacts in America, to ensure that the government of the United States is as good as its people. I'm afraid President Tyler has been something of a disappointment.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, making a note. “There are several senators and congressmen who benefit handsomely from our largesse, and I'm sure—”

A knock at the door. “You may enter, Monsieur Pilier,” said Skorzeny.

Paul Pilier stood in the doorway; his imperturbable face showed no emotions. “I was wondering if you had any instructions for me, sir?” he said.

“Who do we have on the ground in Los Angeles?” he asked, pronouncing the name of the city the old-fashioned way, with a hard “g.”

“The usual complement, sir,” replied Pilier.

“And what do they have to say?”

“Reports are just now coming in, sir. Many dead, many more wounded—”

“I can see that on television,” said Skorzeny impatiently.

“The freeways are at a standstill, the Red Line has been shut down as a security precaution…”

“Call a press conference at once,” said Skorzeny, decisively.

“A press conference, sir?” asked Pilier, but Skorzeny was already up and off the couch, pacing, thinking.

“A press conference announcing that the entire worldwide resources of the Skorzeny Foundation, Emanuel Skorzeny Enterprises, and ancillary businesses are hereby devoted to aiding and assisting the government of the United States of America in any way or capacity within our power. That I will shortly be contacting President Tyler to make this offer to him personally, and that, furthermore, we will be happy to assist the Central Intelligence Agency or any other agency of the U.S. government in identifying, locating, tracking down, capturing, and handing over to the proper authorities the person or persons responsible for this civilizational outrage.” He looked at Pilier. “Did you get all that down?”

“Of course, sir.”

“And you, Miss Harrington,” said Skorzeny, turning to Amanda. “This is a challenge for you as well.”

Amanda leaned forward. There were times that Skorzeny wished she wouldn't do that, not attired as she was, and this was most definitely one of them.

“And you, Miss Harrington,” he began again. “While it is of the utmost urgency that we respond to this tragedy with all our humanitarian impulses, we must also make certain that we continue to have the delivery mechanism to do so. Do I make myself clear?”

Amanda was already punching her BlackBerrys. “Perfectly, sir.”

Skorzeny permitted himself the luxury of a small smile. “Very good. Now…” He went to the window and gazed out at London. That was the signal for Pilier to leave. He left.

“And now,” said Amanda, exploding the awkward silence, “I really must get things in order for your press conference.”

That caught him a little short. “Aren't you accompanying me to dinner?” he inquired.

“I think you will find your dinner date both attractive and accommodating,” said Amanda.

“That was not what I had in—”

“There are arrangements to be made, and quickly. And if we're to have all of our positions in place before the worldwide markets open…you do the math.”