Michael Walsh Bundle (22 page)

Devlin had long since memorized the layout as he took a seat near the back of the auditorium. Thanks to NSA, liaising with DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, run out of the DoD), he knew that Milverton's lair lay to the rear of the screen and just above, on the first floor, in Euro-speak. He gave Milverton about fifteen minutes to get comfortable, to feel safe. The audience was in the middle of “Let's Do the Time Warp Again” when he made his move.

There was a conga line up on the stage in front of the screen. As he rose, several girls cheered him, got out of their seats, and sandwiched him as they propelled Devlin toward the stage. The girl behind him put her hands on his ass and squeezed it tight, while the one in front reached back and grabbed his balls.

And then they were up on the stage. The audience was screaming with delight and shouting encouragement.

Hands on hips, knees in tight…

The girls were very sexy. He found his thoughts flashing back to Maryam. No—get her out of your mind. Stay focused on the job.

The wings beckoned. He wasn't the first
Rocky Horror
virgin to feel embarrassment and flee the stage.

Even behind the screen and the loudspeakers, the music was deafening.

He drew his silenced SigSauer and fired nine shots in quick succession, punching a perfect circle in the ceiling above. As the plaster showered down, he took out something that looked like a dart gun and fired.

The metal claw expanded as it hit the ceiling, grabbed a purchase on the floor above. He hit the retractor and the ceiling fell in.

Milverton came down at the speed of gravity, firing all the way. He was that good—better than Devlin even had thought. Faster too.

His first few shots shredded the screen from behind. Tim Curry took a bullet through the groin. Richard O'Brien, one through the hump. And Susan Sarandon, right in the titties.

Milverton continued firing as he hit the floor, rolling. The fall must have hurt like hell, if it didn't actually break anything, but he didn't seem to care. Devlin respected that; unless he had been killed by the plunge, he wouldn't have cared about the pain either. All that mattered at this point was the job.

Shots splintered everything around him as he rammed another clip into the SigSauer. But he was bound by the rules of engagement: he couldn't fire toward the audience.

Milverton rose and charged toward the screen from behind.

It's just like
Point Blank,
though Devlin, trying both to stay hidden and get a clear shot. Observe, orient, decide—

There he was, outlined and back-lit against what was left of the screen.

Act.

Devlin held up. He couldn't risk missing Milverton and hitting some poor kid. Milverton burst through the screen, firing back at Devlin, then dropping off the proscenium and into the first row of seats.

Devlin realized it was useless. He had to get up, expose himself, if he had any hope. He couldn't believe how badly this operation had gone. And all because of the girl.

No, check that—all because him. Because of his weakness. Because of his need.

Devlin broke through the remains of the screen. Barry Bostwick and Little Nell were still singing on the soundtrack, but the picture was long gone. People were screaming and shoving each other to get out as Milverton bulled his way toward the front exit. He was holding the two girls who had sandwiched Devlin. Hostages now.

From his angle, he didn't have a clear shot. Milverton raised his gun—

Then a shot, from somewhere in the auditorium. Milverton stumbled, lost his grip on the girls, who tore away from him and dove for cover. Another shot, which splintered the wall behind Milverton, who was already returning fire. He emptied a clip into the darkened auditorium, and a woman's voice cried out in pain.

This was his chance. At full speed, Devlin leapt from the stage.

He landed on Milverton square, raining punches as they went down. The body blows didn't do much damage. It was like socking steel.

Milverton's first punch caught Devlin behind the neck, stunning him. He knew what was coming next, even as the SAS fighter pulled his knife and slashed at the back of Devlin's knee. Had it landed, the knife thrust would have been a crippling, then a killing blow. Devlin would have been a marionette whose strings had just been cut, and lying there helpless, he would have been ripe for the final plunge into the neck.

But Milverton missed. He missed because everything in Devlin's training had prepared him for moments like these and while someday he might meet a better shot than himself, he was not going to meet a better street fighter.

He blocked the blow with a forearm, then threw the other forearm at Milverton's head. It caught him flush on the ear. He brought the butt of his gun down across the bridge of Milverton's nose.

Devlin spun, grabbing Milverton's wrist. With a sharp yank, he disarmed him, the knife clattering to the ground. His eyes briefly followed the knife—

“Look out!” A woman's voice. He glanced left, just in time to see the shiv that had been yanked from Milverton's boot heel heading for his face. He could feel the air as it missed.

“Drop it!” shouted the woman's voice and now Devlin understood who she was.

Maryam held her Lady Glock steady on Milverton. She was a pro, but she wasn't as good as he was.

Instead of breaking his motion, Milverton transferred the arc of the shiv in her direction and let it fly, like a dart. She tried to control the shock and the pain, but Devlin heard the breath punch out of her as she fell.

In a flash Milverton was up on his feet and running for the door. Devlin rolled and brought his pistol up, but it was too late.

Milverton was gone.

He found her slumped on the floor between a row of seats. He could hear the sirens, rapidly approaching. Leave her, shoot her, or fall in love with her, once and for all. Observe, orient, decide.

Act.

He picked her up. There was a side exit that led into a noxious Parisian alley. The kind of street where lovely ladies with blackened teeth and hairy armpits used to empty the contents of their chamber pots on the heads of peasants even blacker of tooth and hairier of body back in the seventeenth century.

No chamber pots tonight. He kept his pistol ready, just in case Milverton was waiting for him.

She was losing blood, going into shock now. A hospital was out of the question; too much curiosity. The agency had doctors here in Paris. It also had nurses, spies, whores, safe houses, safe cars, bought cops, cooperative members of the
Deuxième Bureau
, the works. They'd be here within minutes.

“Hold on, Maryam,” he said, punching a couple tones on his cell phone.

“Who are you?” she whispered as he carried her down the alley, her voice fading.

“Your guardian angel,” he said.

Paris was for lovers.

L
OS
A
NGELES

Danny Impellatieri's first inkling that anything was amiss came as he gradually awoke to the soft, almost sexy, buzz of his secure cell phone, which he always slept with, under his pillow, right alongside his pistol. Swimming back to consciousness, he became aware of a symphony of sirens wailing somewhere to the south and west. At first he mistook them for the sounds of the radio, or perhaps a television commercial; the TV was still on, although he couldn't see it from this angle. He was trying to synthesize this random information when he realized he had the phone in his hand. “Hello?”

Stupid. That hadn't been a standard ring tone—it was his private message ring tone, the overture to
Zampa
, just energetic enough to be motivating, and clichéd enough to be comical. No answer was necessary. There was a crackle and a beep and he realized this was a message from “Tom Powers.” He punched his access code and waited for the clearance to go through. Then he saw it.

“Whaddya know, whaddya say?” That got him awake.

That was what he used to say when he was commanding his unit of the 160th, the Night Stalkers. Powers had asked him for a private phrase, one that only the two of them shared. Thus they learned that they both shared a love for Cagney movies, loved the way the banty little rooster from hell moved as he chomped through the scenery. Cagney just didn't stand there, he vibrated. He didn't just do nothing when he had nothing to do; he did something: flashed his devilish eyes, shot a leering grin, balanced expertly on the balls of his feet, ready for anything, ready to make love to a girl or punch a guy's lights out. Cagney, they decided, was their role model.

So this message was not good. Danny had expected the small pleasures of homecoming and sleep, and then a significant rise in one of his off-shore bank accounts, the ones that, despite his overwhelming love for her—or perhaps because of it—he had never breathed a word of to Diane, but had put in her name in case anything happened to him. It was meant as a warning, to be ready; worse, it meant that something really nasty had come up.

Ready for what? What could have been worse than what they'd just gone through?

Normally, the first thing Danny would do was sit down at his computer in his secure room, boot it up, and do a quick scan of all available feeds, official, semiofficial, open source, and absolute bullshit. You could learn a lot from the first three, but sometimes you could learn even more from absolute bullshit, since it afforded you a window onto the thinking of the wingnuts, basket cases, moonbats, psychos, and all the other flotsam and jetsam of the human race, weightless amid the rapidly expanding junk of cyberspace.

That kind of war was not for him. Danny preferred a sidearm or a knife and an enemy, face to face, up close and personal. Like that Drusovic asshole. Danny was a good Catholic, but the thought that religion could compel a man to murder—no, to slaughter—was beyond him. He would have made a lousy Crusader,
Deus lo vult
and all that; he needed to know who he was killing and why. For Danny Impellatieri, it was always personal.

The phone rang again—this time the tone was the
William Tell Overture
. Another Devlin ring tone. He wasn't sure if he wanted to answer it. If Devlin really had wanted to communicate something to him, he could have done it with his first message. If he just wanted to shoot the shit, well, there was plenty of time for that later. Maybe he should check his bank account first; it was a cardinal rule that “Eddie” never took on a new job before he got paid for the last. Anyway, he had to take a pee that would make Austin Powers proud.

He ignored the phone and staggered to the bathroom. Let the son of a bitch leave a proper message.

There it was, on the bathroom counter: Jade's iPhone. Just like her to get so excited that she'd walked out the door without it. He had to laugh: the stuff kids had today would have made intel pros twenty years ago weep with envy; hell, he thought, we could have brought down the Soviet Union with two iPods and a set of steak knives if we had had this stuff back in 1989.

Then the iPhone rang. The
William Tell Overture.

What the hell?

For a moment, Danny just stared at it dully. The chance that Jade had Rossini as one of her ring tones was impossible; she'd never even heard of Rossini. But the chance that Tom Powers would try to communicate with him via his kid's phone was equally impossible. Their working agreement was founded on the bedrock principle that no way would Danny's family ever get involved with business. Families were off-limits, sacrosanct.

Danny could feel his anger rising, his explosive temper boiling over. He couldn't imagine what possessed Powers to do such a thing. Didn't he realize how dangerous it was? And dragging his daughter, Jade, into this, was totally unconscionable. He'd better have a pretty goddamn good excuse for calling his daughter—

Just before he opened his mouth, Danny glanced over at the television set, which was still on. Then, unprofessionally but understandably, he dropped the phone and started screaming.

L
OS
A
NGELES

Danny made the short distance from Hobart Street to the Kaiser-Permanente hospital on Sunset and Edgemont in record time. Speeding east on Franklin, weaving in and out of traffic like an ace pilot, his mind raced faster than his car. Surely, Powers must have known what was coming—why else would he have called? Worse, Powers had had him and his family under surveillance—through his kid, for chrissakes!—the whole time, ever since the poisoned gift had arrived.

That fucking Skipjack. How could he have been so stupid? He had trusted this guy, bonded with him—insofar as you could bond with a man you'd never actually met face to face. But they'd been on a half a dozen missions together, and each one had ended in success and, even better, anonymity. He'd made a lot of money from Powers, and so had his men. They'd lost damn few Night Stalkers. But now…

Danny wasn't pretending to think logically as he raced around a Mexican in a Ford pickup hauling three lawn mowers. There, up ahead—Edgemont Avenue, a sharp, screaming right. He didn't quite beat the light at Hollywood Boulevard, but didn't give a shit, didn't even bother parking his car properly; such was his rage and grief that had any LAPD cop popped his head up, he would have blown it off on the spot and dealt with the consequences later.

After he saw his baby girl. After he'd made sure she was going to make it, no matter what it took. After he'd mourned her mother. If they wanted to fuck with him then, so be it. First things first.

He raced past the nurses, heading directly for the floor where his sources had told him his daughter was lying. The security scanners went nuclear as he blew past the metal detector, but that was another thing that would just have to be sorted out later. Besides, the city of Los Angeles had bigger problems at the moment than one grieving father with a weapon or two.

Into the elevator, where he frightened an old Chinese lady in a wheelchair surrounded by four or five members of family banging away in Cantonese. His Cantonese was rusty, but he could have told them to go fuck themselves had they given him any grief. Instead, they just cowered and complained as he barged into the lift, and then spewed some Chinese venom at him as he barreled out. Like he cared.

There was the room. Jade's room.

Eddie Bartlett had seen a lot of things in his time. With the 160th, he'd seen men blown apart, men shredded by chopper blades, men decapitated in training accidents, men with their heads shattered as they smashed through the cockpit glass, men defenestrated, whether accidentally or, in combat, intentionally. He knew what a body looked like after it had fallen from a few thousand feet, knew what a hostile looked like after he'd been riddled with automatic weapons fire in a strafing run, knew what was left after man, woman, or child was hit by a cluster bomb or a missile.

His mind raced. His memory slowed.

The road to Baghdad, 2003. No matter what anybody said about who was responsible for 9/11, for the men on the ground it was payback time for the sand monkeys. Leading a SOAR team, in close air support of a forward Marine unit. Knife through rancid butter until one of the damned sandstorms appeared out of nowhere, a whirling, desert dervish like something out of
The Mummy.

The Marine column was caught out in the open. Not so bad for them; they could hunker down, even under fire. He and his choppers were up in the air, with sand blasting through their rotors, enfilading their engines. If he didn't get them down, they would all crash in the desert, like the ill-fated Carter mission, the one that had given birth to the SOARs in the first place.

The enemy was dug in at a village just up ahead. A few of Saddam's inept Republican Guard's wasted tanks were blocking the Marines' way into the village. The dirty little secret of desert fighting was that the Iraqis didn't like the sand any better than the Americans did; as a natural resource, it was a lousy ally. They would be having just as much trouble with their rifles and small arms as anybody else, just as little freedom of movement. The Arab response to almost any kind of adverse combat situation was to hunker down, lie low, and either turn tail—their ordinary course of action—or dig in, camouflaged, and then shoot their opponents in the back as they passed by.

If the Night Stalkers bailed now, the Iraqis would become emboldened by what they viewed as American cowardice. Although they thought nothing of abject surrender and honored what the West considered treachery, the Arabs preferred sure suicide to perceived dishonor, and they could pin the Marines down. The jarheads' lifeline was Danny's Black Hawks, and Danny would be damned if he was going to deny them that.

Was the situation dangerous? Damn straight. But that's what the 160th was invented for in the first place.

“Captain?” The voice of one of his officers crackled in his ear. He had ten seconds to make up his mind.

Danny glanced at the radar—no letup in sight. The MH-60/DAP (Direct Action Penetrator) Black Hawks boasted state-of-the-art navigation systems, in addition to their airborne refueling capabilities, their infrared sensors, “disco light” IR jammers, SATCOM, and M-134 Miniguns, all bringing death at a top speed of 178 knots, but now it was time to shit or get off the pot. No amount of technology was going to get them through this. It was classic decision time.

Now or never, and now was always better than never.

They flew those babies in, right over the top of the village, hovering ten feet off the ground as their four-man crews scrambled down and opened fire. The Iraqis were astonished to see the Americans materialize from nowhere and in their seconds of hesitation, the SOARs' infrared goggles and automatic weapons took them apart.

Danny stayed in the chopper, working the machine guns as his men went house to house, cleaning out the nests. The weather wasn't getting any better. If they were going to get out, they had to do it now.

The hell with it. They'd leave when they were damn good and ready.

They took one casualty that day. The Iraqis lost every single fighter. In the morning, when the storm had cleared, they left a pile of bodies in the middle of the village, with one of the corpses holding a big sign: KILROY WAS HERE, for the Marines to find. They ought to shut their mouths for a while. And then they were gone.

And now he was here. With his daughter. Looking at her lying there, bandages everywhere, tubes everywhere, her eyes closed, hooked up to various machines, her chest rising and falling rhythmically but otherwise showing no signs of life. His beautiful little girl, Jade, whose only crime was going to the Apple store with her mother.

“Sir?” He turned to see a nurse with a couple of security men behind her, two men and a woman. “Would you please accompany these gentlemen downstairs?”

One of the security men laid a hand on his shoulder. Big mistake.

Danny wheeled and punched the man in the stomach. The second man he bounced off a wall. Then he held up his hands. “It's okay, I'm leaving. I'm just a little overwrought, is all.”

On an ordinary day, they might have called the cops. Not today. There were no cops. They were all at the Grove.

The security guys glared at him. The hospital staff let him go.

He got into his car. Not even a ticket. He drove off.

There was only one man he knew who could have known about the Grove bomb in advance. The same man who had let the bomb go off in Edwardsville, after the mission was already accomplished.

The same man responsible for his wife's body, lying in the downtown morgue, one of the hundreds of victims of his callousness.

“Tom Powers.”

He had to find him. But how? Their deal was that Powers had to initiate the contact. He had no number for him, nothing. He didn't even know his real name.

Sort of made a mockery of his motto, NSDQ. Night Stalkers Don't Quit.

For the first time in a very long time, Danny started to pray.