Michael Walsh Bundle (23 page)

L
OS
A
NGELES

Traffic in central Los Angeles was at a standstill, and so they made their way over the hill from Burbank, avoiding the freeways, cutting around Griffith Park on San Fernando, crossing the LA River and darting down Glendale Boulevard and into Echo Park.

Deliberately, he kept a house in one of the most unfashionable neighborhoods in the city. The home on Laveta Terrace in once-fashionable Sunset Heights had been built in 1921 by a rich man, a member of the city's prestigious Jonathan Club, but had slid downhill in the early 1930s once W. C. Fields, whose house was just three doors down, moved west to Los Feliz. It was a perfect place for him to live as anonymously as the nature of his job demanded.

Echo Park was the Greenwich Village of Los Angeles, a longstanding hotbed of radicals, gays, commies, lefties, greens, Latinos, and once upon a time, Aimee Semple McPherson herself. Indeed, her Angelus Temple lay just down the hill to the west, at the northern end of the Echo Park Lake. True, there was the occasional gunshot that broke the stillness of the night, but the view of downtown from his second-floor terrace was nothing short of spectacular, and on game nights, the lights of Chavez Ravine stabbed the night sky like some kind of secular cathedral.

“Am I still under arrest?” she asked. “That was cute.”

“No, it was clever.”

“We'd better get to work,” she said.

That was it. No mention of the Studio Galande and its aftermath, no reference to the last time they saw each other, no hint of her feelings when, after weeks of nursing her back to health at a safe house in Neuilly, he had suddenly and completely vanished from her life. She just picked up right where they'd left off.

“Don't you want to know why—”

She held up a hand. “No. We don't have time for that.”

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“I know you are, Frank,” she replied.

“My name's not Frank,” he admitted.

“I know it isn't,” she said, moving toward him. “Everything you've told me since the day we met was a lie, but I accepted it.”

“Because you were lying too.”

“Because I accepted it.”

Observe, orient…fuck it. “Follow me.”

He led her into a tiny hallway that separated the west wing from the east wing, and then into what was once was, charmingly, the 1920s “telephone room,” a cubbyhole about the size of an old-fashioned phone booth under the central stairway that still had the hook for the home's original telephone. The proper combination dialed on the reproduction wall phone he'd had installed would slide open to allow passage to the inner sanctum. The wrong combination would result in a slam-shut on the hallway side and the controlled explosion of a cyanide gas bomb in the enclosed space, followed by a trapdoor release of the corpse into a pit below. Nothing personal.

He dialed all the right numbers, shielding the combination from Maryam. “Still don't trust me, do you?” she said, as the false wall slid open.

“I love you,” he said. “I loved you from that first kiss in Paris—”

“Our
first kiss,” she said. “It takes two to tango.”

“From
our
first kiss in Paris. When you saved my life at the Studio Galande.”

She grew somber at the memory. “Like I said, it takes two to—”

“Love comes first. Trust comes later.”

The door slid open. The basement stairs beckoned. She grabbed his arm.

“It can't be this easy, can it? People like us…”

“Even people like us get lucky, once in a while.”

Most people in LA not only didn't have basements, they had never even heard of them. But his house, located on top of a hill, had what was known locally as a “California basement,” a half-cellar tucked beneath the living room on the downward slope, maybe eight by ten. Plenty of room for his needs: the inner sanctum of Devlin West.

He ran the video of the president's news conference. There was the terrorist:

Devlin checked all lines of secure communication. Nothing from Seelye, or Rubin or, worse, Tyler. Didn't matter—he's already gotten his assignment from the president on national television. It would be good to keep a little radio silence for a while.

Now he knew he was absolutely right not to have bought the Muslim terrorist line. Everybody expected “terrorists” to be Muslims these days, especially the media. They were the politically incorrect bogeymen with incendiary “sensibilities.” They were also a singularly inept group of adversaries from cultures that could not build a flush toilet or maintain an electrical grid.

Real terrorists wouldn't have shot that poor reporter—hell, the press was usually their most ardent sympathizer, ever ready to “understand” them. Plus, real terrorists wouldn't have had such an absurd list of demands. The quick succession of new attacks also spoke against the conventional terrorist angle, since it took Muslim terrorists months or years to conceive, plan, mount, and execute their operations, most of which were half-baked and technically unfeasible anyway; that was one of the reasons why the United States had been able to roll up so many of their networks after September 11.

Even their vaunted Internet cadres had been busted down to buck private, thanks to NSA/CSS. This wasn't Devlin's department, but he was well aware of the extraordinary battle that had been waged, and now basically won, against Al-Qaeda in cyberspace. On September 19, 2008, the NSA warriors had taken down four of the five principal jihad sites, DSA'ed them to death, then poisoned them; what the Romans had done to Carthage, Fort Meade had done to what was left of bin Laden's network. It was the kind of victory that should have been hailed on the editorial pages of every major newspaper, but of course wasn't.

He tried Eddie Bartlett again. Nothing, not even a ring—straight to voice mail. Ditto for his satphone and the iPhone. Nix.

Worse than nix. For security reasons, if Eddie didn't pick up on three secure lines, Devlin was supposed to drop him. It was his own rule, because Devlin had learned the hard way over the years that there was a penalty for breaking even arbitrary, self-imposed rules. Still…

“What?”

“I can't raise my partner, the guy I was on my way out here to see when it happened. That's never happened before.”

“And you think something happened to him.”

“I never think, until I know.”

“Let me work with you.” There, she said it.

He turned away from his computers and looked at her. “I guess we're either going to have to trust each other or we're going to have to kill each other, so why don't we decide right now? Why did you follow me in Paris?”

“I wasn't following you. I was there
for
you.”

“Who sent you?”

“That's classified.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“Yes. You're Frank Ross.”

“And do you know who Frank Ross was?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“He was a reporter who got framed and sent to jail. James Cagney played him in
Each Dawn I Die.”

It was getting clearer now. “NCRI?” The National Council of Resistance of Iran. The great Iranian diaspora had put many of the richest Persians in America, a lot of them burning with desire to see the last of the mullahs.

She didn't answer. “It's my turn now. Why did you leave me?”

“How about a drink?”

“I'm Muslim, remember?”

“Not a Mormon?”

“No.”

“So…how about a drink?”

“I thought you'd never ask.”

They took the private lift up to the second floor and stepped out onto the terrace. The lights of downtown Los Angeles were still on. Hundreds of people had just died to the west, and the city had a big hole in its heart, but life went on. That was the thing about tragedies: they were only tragic to the dead, who didn't care, and those relatively few who cared for them. To the rest of humanity, tragedies were fodder for Oprah.

He kept a bar sheltered under the eaves. He poured them both a single malt Islay with a couple of ice cubes. They had their drinks in happy silence, with only the lights of downtown to accompany their thoughts.

Back to work. Devlin pulled out his PDA and ran the cutout number that Hartley had dialed from the Watergate. The one he had traced as far as LA. It was easier from here to tap into the LA phone system without attracting attention. He had no intention of dialing the number himself, only tracing the bounce-on from this point.

The first thing he did was to match the number to a subscriber who, of course, turned out to be a Mr. Henry A. Wong of Rancho Park, recently deceased. The second thing was to use the system's internal assignment logarithm to freeze it and take it off the grid for another few days. It was like isolating a virus in a lab dish: now he could play with it.

The first bounce-on didn't surprise him in the least. It was the private, unlisted telephone number of Senator Robert Hartley in Georgetown; that was a nice touch. The second bounce was the main switchboard at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade. OK, that told him something too. But it was the third and final bounce that he was really looking for: central London, somewhere between Highgate and Islington. Milverton just couldn't resist showing off and now he just made the biggest mistake of his life. He let out a shout of triumph.

“Are you okay?” She'd finished her scotch.

“Never better.” So had he.

The master bedroom lay on the west side of the house, with a view toward Silverlake, Los Feliz, the Observatory, the Hollywood sign. The bed was up on a short pedestal, his closet just off to the right, the master bath to the south. He slipped out of his clothes and into bed. She was warm and smooth next to him.

“Why?” he asked, reaching for her.

“Why not?” she said, reaching for him.

C
AMDEN
T
OWN
, L
ONDON

Charles Augustus Milverton checked his chronometer. He loved modern technology. He didn't believe in God, but if he were to believe in any kind of a god, he would imagine one that was half—or perhaps entirely—electronic. A kind of virtual Shiva, warlike and bloodthirsty and able to strike down his enemies from any distance. That was what really put fear into people: not the act of violence that they could see, but the act of violence whose arrival they dreaded and which, when it came, even when it was expected, came
ex machina,
like something out of a Handel opera—God from the skies, except this god was all Zeus and thunderbolts, not Danae's rain of gold.

The rain of gold was his department. His specialty. His reward.

He punched up his computers, waking them from hibernation. While he was gone, they had been churning the data he had sent back from Edwardsville, especially what had happened at the end. Thank God for the Wiki-share, the DARPAs, the SETIs. Unused computing power no longer had to go unused. We were all linked now, even if we didn't know it.

There it was. Him in the helicopter, and his antagonist below. This, after all, had been the primary attraction of the mission all along, to flush that man out from the dark hiding place where Milverton had long suspected he dwelled. And while he had not really got a good look at him, not while lifting off, and readying for the jump he knew must come upon impact of the Barrett's speeding round into the engine block of the chopper, his video apparatus had. No matter how poor the quality, the computers would be able to extract an image, extrapolate concealed features simply from the shape of the chin or the earlobe.

On television, meanwhile, there was Skorzeny, front and center, framed by the giant Ferris wheel everybody called the “London Eye.” The old phony could really snow them. All that aid, rushing to Los Angeles, surplus crap he had no use for in the first place. Free turkeys for the poor, and more, all obscuring the real reason the ship had put into port, which was safely tucked away in the hold and buried on the manifest as “scientific experiment materials.”

Barnum, or Mencken, or somebody, almost had it right: no one ever went broke underestimating the sentimentality of the American public. The greatest country on earth, a country (it pained him to admit) even more powerful than the Empire at its zenith, was being brought low by its sappy Victorian fondness for morally uplifting “narratives.” Triumph and tragedy. Hope rising from the ashes. Smiling through the tears. Well, soon enough they would have something to smile about.

Damn it, but the old man loved the spotlight. Well, he supposed that had he had the upbringing Skorzeny did, he'd want to shine on as long as possible. To pay the world back in Christian coin for the wrongs it had visited upon him—that surely was the mark of the secular saint these days. Still, business was business, and his job was to follow instructions.

He punched a code on his BlackBerry and turned up the sound. All these years in the Anglosphere and the old fart still sounded like Dr. Strangelove.

“And so, ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to thank you from the bottom of my heart for offering me this platform today. A boy born in Germany, who grew up when our two countries were bitter enemies, when there was suffering and dying beyond compare….” The faker choked up briefly, then continued.

“Thus, I do what I can in return. Already, our ship the
Stella Maris
is in port in Los Angeles, along with our prayers. She is one of the most advanced ships on the seas, with a state-of-the-art navigation system and a titanium-hardened cargo hold. What we have for the people of California cannot be compromised or damaged in any way. It will be delivered. For we cannot wait for governments to act. Another Skorzeny humanitarian vessel, the
Clara Vallis
, will make port in Baltimore in three days. As you know, it is my fondest dream to see a new world order emerge before I die, one in which we all are citizens of the world, not simply citizens of whatever nation in which we happen to have been born. As the poet said, ‘No man is an island.'”

Skorzeny stopped. The “London Eye” turned. Behind them, the Thames flowed, as it had for thousands of years, since before the Romans settled the place and called it Londinium, and as it would after the Britons finally gave up and abandoned the place to its new fate of Londonistan. Too bad, thought Milverton. He was a native Londoner. He liked the place, and he would miss it, but there were plenty of other places in the world, and with better weather too. Might as well start the ball rolling toward the transition.

John Donne was his cue. He started the countdown. Three…two…one.

He'd run the simulation a dozen times. The reality was almost exactly as he'd planned.

Somewhere just off the southeast coast of England, a Tomahawk missile blasted out of the hold of a Liberian tanker and sped toward London at subsonic speed.

Skorzeny's entourage had just left the area when the missile slammed into the Eye.

Milverton had charged the Tomahawk with just enough explosive power to take down the Eye. Naturally, given the velocity, there would be some collateral damage, but it was the visual he was after, the image of the Eye collapsing, and it was the visual he got.

Twisted, burning metal flew in all directions. Some cars, wholly intact, went flying; several landed in the Thames and sank straightaway. Other cars had their bottoms blown away, the passengers plunging screaming 443 feet to their deaths. At ground zero, vehicles exploded, or were tossed skyward.

A second set of codes and the hidden charges in the ship sent the tanker to the bottom. That part he had neglected to mention to the captain when he hired the vessel.

Message delivered, COD—not just to the United States this time, but to the West.

In the distance, he heard the front door open, then close again. No alarms went off. He didn't even turn around as she entered the room.

He could hear the thunk of her shoes as she kicked them off, the rustle of her clothes as they fell to the floor. Her soft footpads as she made her way toward him. In his old SAS days, he might have killed her anyway, so thoroughly reflexive was his training. Maybe he was getting sloppy; maybe he was just getting old. Maybe he really wasn't as controlled as he thought he was. And maybe he was in love with her—not just to guy the old man, but because he really was.

In any case, he knew who was behind him. And despite her inarguable beauty and indisputable nakedness, what was in front of him was even more interesting. A face, re-created by the computers. The face of the man he sought. The face of an old enemy, brought to him courtesy of the very latest in facial-recognition software.

“He got away OK?” she asked.

“That was the idea, wasn't it?”

“Still, seemed a little close.”

Milverton tried not to let his irritation show. Everything had worked perfectly. The panic-driven restrictive policies instituted after September 11th had long since been sloughed away, like a snake shedding old skin. Keeping the shipping lanes open had proven more important than inspecting every piece of cargo in their holds. After today, that would all change, of course, but it didn't really matter. What was in port was already in port.

“The idea was to make him look both heroic and like a victim simultaneously, just the way he likes it. It is an unfortunate fact of life, however, tragic accidents do happen.”

She gave Milverton a long look. “I didn't think you cared,” she said.

“Why don't you pour us both a drink?” he said over his shoulder.

She slipped her bare arms around his neck and set down two martinis in front of them on the desk.
“Voilà,”
she said.

He took a sip, then spun in his chair. Her breasts were already in his face. “It's not nice to keep a lady waiting,” said Amanda Harrington.

“What about your daughter?” he asked as she wrapped her legs around his waist.

“I got a sitter,” she said.