Michael Walsh Bundle (24 page)

W
ASHINGTON
, D.C.

The president was on the transatlantic hotline when Seelye entered the Oval Office. He expected a crowd, and was surprised to see that the president was alone.

Tyler motioned for Seelye to sit down as he continued his conversation; on the television, the markets were tanking. After three successive shocks, the Dow had lost more than half its value, and the bottom was nowhere to be seen.

“Annabel,” he was saying. “I can assure you that we had no inkling, none at all, that this…outrage, as you put it, was about to happen. Yes. Yes. No, I don't care what the ‘chatter' is. It's not true. It's simply not true.” He held the phone away from his ear and shot his visitor an exasperated glance; even from across the room they could hear the British prime minister's voice, shouting angrily.

“Annabel—Madame Prime Minister—please be careful with your accusations. Do you think for a moment that if we had specific and credible evidence of a terrorist plot on British soil we would not have alerted you? Come on—”

Whatever he was about to say was cut off in a controlled explosion on the other end of the line. Annabel Macombie, the new British PM, was renowned for her Celtic temper. Seelye almost felt sorry for Tyler. Almost.

“Let me just say—excuse me, may I speak? The Dow is below 4,000, my approval numbers are in the toilet, and unless we can nail whoever is behind these outrages, I am not going to be reelected president of the United States next year. So I have a lot more to lose than you. Let me just say that we have our top people working on this. In fact, the director of the NSA has just walked into my office and I'll get back to you as soon as I've had a chance to hear his report. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Yes, you too.”

He hung up. Seelye braced himself for what he knew was coming: Mount Tyler, exploding in a fiery shower of profanities. Which blew, right on schedule. “This is war,” said the president, after the volcano had subsided. “Flat-out war.”

“Yes, sir,” said Seelye. “But against whom?”

“That's what you're supposed to tell me. You and the rest of that useless bunch: Rubin, DHS, my national security advisor, what's-her-name, and that fuckwit at CIA. Christ! How many intelligence agencies does a country have to have before one of them gets one fucking thing right?”

“Secretary Rubin's a good man, sir, even if I personally don't care for him.”

“What about the others?”

Seelye had no comment.

“Right. So what are he, and you, and I…what the fuck are we going to do?”

Seelye knew what that question meant. It didn't mean, “What are we going to do?” It meant, “What can I tell the American people we are already doing and, if it goes wrong, put your head up on a pike and parade it down Constitution Avenue?”

“The first thing we need to do,” said Seelye, choosing his words carefully, “we've already done. The next-generation SDI shields are now fully operational on both coasts. Nobody's gonna sneak a missile into New York or San Francisco.”

“If Congress knew, they'd have a cow,” said the president. “What about ships already in port?”

“The sensors have been in place for a while. So far, so good. No system is completely foolproof. But we believe we have enough safeguards. The real question is, why London?”

Tyler stepped eagerly up to the plate. This was something he could address. “Easy—because they're not as ready as we are. They weren't attacked in 2001, and when they finally were, the attack came on the buses and the subways. Because of the Special Relationship. Because the Brits are our friends, our allies. Our partners. Hell, they do what we tell 'em, no questions asked, if they know what's good for them.”

Seelye shook his head. “With all…due respect, sir, I think not. Whoever just hit London doesn't care a fig about the ‘special relationship.' There's a pattern here, if you can see it.”

Tyler couldn't see it.

“Whiplash,” said Seelye, after a decent interval. “They're trying to give us whiplash. Spinning us like a top. Or, to put it bluntly, fucking us up, down, and sideways until our eyeballs pop.”

That was something this president could understand. “Why?” he said.

“Because they want to. Because they can. Or, worst of all, because they're about to ram it right up our ass.” He enjoyed putting complex ideas into terms the president could readily grasp.

“I thought you assured me Devlin was on this case.”

“He's only one man, sir. He's—”

Tyler smashed his fist down on the
Resolute
desk. “Goddamnit, Army, this is no time for pettifogging bullshit.” Only Jeb Tyler could yoke together two words like “pettifogging bullshit.” That was part of what made him so presidential. “Can he do the job or do I have to call in the Marines?”

“I believe he can, yes sir. Which is why—”

“But can he do it in time? I need you to lay all the cards on the table, right the hell now, so we're both singing from the same choir book.” And only Jeb Tyler could shotgun-marry those two metaphors. Which is what made him an asshole. “Why what?”

“Which is why somebody is whipsawing him from coast to coast. Find out who that someone is and you've got your culprit.”

“I thought we decided it was this Milverton character.”

Seelye shook his head. “Milverton's a hired gun, a soldier of fortune. We need to find out whom he's working for. And, no offense, sir, but you've just made Devlin's job a lot more difficult.”

“What do you mean?” asked Tyler, who hated criticism.

“Well, sir, insofar as ‘Branch 4' is concerned…” he had to choose his words very carefully, “insofar as Branch 4 is concerned, you pretty much blew its existence at the press conference. I'm sure you had a good reason, but right now every foreign intelligence service, both friendly and hostile, will be working that out right now. And let me tell you, they'll be plenty pissed that we haven't been leveling with them about this. The friendlies, I mean.”

“Fuck 'em,” said President Tyler.

“Now, as far as Devlin is concerned, he's is in California, and”—Seelye pretended to look at his watch—“is in no position at the moment to get to London, if that's what you're asking.”

“Send somebody else, then,” said Tyler. “One of the other Branch 4's.”

“There are—” began Seelye, and then stopped to rephrase. “Branch 4 ops work alone. They cannot be identified, even to members of their own service. You know that, sir.”

“Yes,” said Tyler, reddening, “but I don't give a damn. I want results, not—”

“Not pettifogging bullshit,” supplied Seelye.

“Precisely.”

Seelye took a deep breath. Damage control, above all, damage control. I'll do what I can do, sir…without harming operational security, of course.”

The president's secretary, Millie Dhouri, was at the doorway. “Mr. President,” she said, “I think you should take this call.”

“Not now, Millie,” said Tyler, but the look on her face bespoke worry, and she had very sharp political instincts. For the call to have bumped its way up to her desk must mean something.

“It's evil, sir,” she said softly, shaking. “What he's saying.”

The president motioned for her to put the call through on speaker phone. The Oval Office speaker phone was not one of those tinny contraptions that sounded as if you were connected with a wire tied between two hamsters. Instead, it sounded like you were having a private conversation, which is exactly what it was intended to sound like.

“Okay,” said Tyler, signaling for her to trace the call. The White House number was in the phone book, and any idiot could call the switchboard. It was a democratic holdover from the days when John Quincy Adams used to go swimming nude in the Potomac, when Andy Jackson let the great unwashed troop through the White House, stealing everything they could lay their hands on, when Truman used to play poker with the press corps and fleece them out of their paltry weekly salaries and make them feel good about it. It was one of the things Tyler had decided he was going to have to change after his reelection.

Tyler picked up the phone. “This is the president of the United States. To whom am I speaking?”

“Mr. President,” said the ghostly voice at the other end of the ether, scrambled and opaque. “You are badly trying our patience.”

Seelye was already in action, punching in instructions to NSA headquarters. He knew they wouldn't have much time, but at least the call was already being digitally recorded and analyzed. He wanted a full report on his PDA pdq, and made that quite clear as he listened to the conversation.

“We have given you clear instructions and an even clearer timeline. Because we are merciful, we spared the lives of the children in Illinois…most of them, anyway.”

Seelye was already relaying the conversation capture straight to Devlin. Seelye's BlackBerry lit up as Devlin punched in.

“If anything, we should have thought that the incident in Los Angeles—”

HE'S BRITISH popped up on DIRNSA's screen. KEEP HIM TALKING. Seelye had noticed that too: the pronunciation of “anything”—
en-a-thing
. The use of the word, “should.” Not to mention: “Loss ANGE-e-leese.”

“—focused your minds, but it appears that such was not the case. It appears that many more deaths will be required. Not just in America, as you have just seen, but all over the Christian West. The stakes have been raised. It is now immaterial whether you accept Allah. You are all doomed.”

THIS IS BULLSHIT.

“Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath
but
a short time.”

AND THIS IS NOT. IT'S “REVELATION.”

The line went dead.

Seelye's other BlackBerry buzzed. NSA, with the trace: the technology had been developed at Fort Meade using a fifth-generation network-centric system based on a Rijndael block cipher.

The call was coming from inside the White House. Which left only two possible conclusions: either the call really was coming from inside the White House, which was impossible, or whoever was making it had cracked the NSA defenses. Seelye decided the president didn't need to know that yet.

“That was this Milverton, wasn't it?”

Seelye had left the scrambled audio feed on, so Devlin could hear every word. “It may well be, yes, sir,” he said.

“Get Devlin on this immediately.”

I HEARD THAT. Then Devlin punched through another text message. Seelye read it and blanched.

Seelye's perturbed look caught the president's attention. “What's he saying?” asked Tyler.

“He says to say thank you, sir.”

“Thank me for what?”

“I'm not sure you want to know, sir,” replied Seelye.

“I'm a big boy—let me see it.”

Seelye handed the president his BlackBerry: THANK YOU FOR BLOWING ME BEFORE YOU FUCKED ME.

L
OS
A
NGELES

Devlin switched off his secure PDA and tried to figure out what to do next. It was time for a new game plan. Telling the president of the United States to go fuck himself was as good a place as any to start.

Milverton, he was sure, was back in London; everything pointed to it, including the London Eye attack. But he was just the conductor; someone else had written this symphony and the tempo was going to keep picking up until they got to the climax. Which wasn't going to be pretty, that was for sure. Already the American economy had been rocked back on its heels, and if this didn't stop, and fast, the pieces of it that remained would hardly be worth picking up, although some vulture was sure to do so. And if the government of the United States had been parliamentary instead of republican, it might have already fallen.

But here he was in LA, thousands of miles from the action, with the clock ticking on his own personal presidential directive. What had seemed a good idea—to enlist Eddie Bartlett and mount a counteroperation—was already out of date. Eddie was AWOL, Milverton was too far up his decision loop, and he was getting outmaneuvered at each term. Once Milverton had him in his sights, Devlin knew, he would be a sitting duck for the kill shot.

Think: try to fit the pieces together.

The attack on Edwardsville made some sense, if testing the American defenses had been the point of the exercise. The quick and lethal response had made a point. But what if that was exactly beside the point? Seen in this light, the Grove attack made some sense as a follow-up. It got him pinned down in the wrong direction at the same time it pulled him in further, escalated the terror quotient, and hung him out to dry so that Milverton could execute the third leg of this triad, the attack in London. When you looked at the sequence that way, there was one conclusion: this was all about him.

Which was ridiculous. Why would Milverton, why would anybody, go to all this trouble just to flush Devlin out? Even the highly freighted, emotional angle—middle America, kids in peril—was no guarantee the president would order a Branch 4 operation. In fact, the opposite. Unless somebody in Washington was risking burning him for a higher purpose—or, worse, didn't mind burning him at all.

If they had wanted to fire a missile at London, Milverton could have done that without Edwardsville and Los Angeles. For another, the damage there, while terrible, was not as extensive as in Los Angeles. It too was still a feint. Milverton was being used, just as Devlin was being used.

Unfortunately, that brought him back to where he started—that this really was all about him. What were the chances that he would get ordered into an operation, and at the presidential level no less, involving Milverton? Milverton, who had never shown any overt or covert connections to the various terrorist factions that had been floating around Europe since the 1980s. Who had always been a rogue freelancer.

What would Marcus Aurelius do? Marcus would let reason rule. Very well, then.

There were only three players involved in this drama that he could see: himself, Milverton, and whoever was paying him. Four, if you counted the possible mole in Washington, whose presence he sensed rather than saw at this point, like Pluto's gravitational effect on Uranus's orbit. Devlin, however, was a great believer in Occam's Razor, which literally posited that beings should not be multiplied except out of necessity—meaning that the mole, if he or she existed, could also be the person running Milverton. So we were back to the triangle—the worst geometry in both love and intelligence work.

“What's wrong?” Maryam joined him on the terrace. She was wearing one of his dress shirts. Possibly the sexiest outfit a woman could wear, but then she knew that already.

“London is what's wrong.”

Her face fell, the joy draining out of it. “What is it now?”

“About forty dead,” he said. He handed her a small video screen and replayed the whole scene at the London Eye: Skorzeny's press conference, the attack, the aftermath. “Could have been worse. The Brit papers have gone wall-to-wall, of course. Aunty, too. ‘Terrorism Strikes Britain Again.'”

Her first observation surprised him: “Funny name for a ship, isn't it?” she said. That was something he hadn't thought of.
“Stella Maris
is one of the Virgin's titles,” she continued.
“Star of the Sea
. It's one of the first things you learn when you're named after her. Even in Iran. In this day and age, nobody names ships after religious figures. It's too…politically incorrect. Besides,” she asked, “who uses a Tomahawk for an assassination attempt? It's like using a mallet to swat a fly.”

“We do,” he replied. “We tried to get bin Laden with something similar, and the Israelis enjoy nailing whoever's warming the chair marked ‘Hamas leader' with one as often as possible—”

He stopped in midsentence.
Assassination
attempt? Put the pieces together. Milverton was whipsawing him. Somebody was running Milverton. The latest attack had come in London…had almost killed Skorzeny. And now the
Stella Maris
just so happened to be anchored in Long Beach Harbor. What were the odds?

Maryam was still talking. “It's right here, don't you see? The strike came just as Emanuel Skorzeny was leaving his press conference. It missed him by a matter of minutes. Not to mention half the London press corps.”

“Too bad,” said Devlin. “A bunch of reporters at the bottom of the Thames is almost as good a start as a bunch of lawyers at the bottom of the Thames.”

Maryam ignored the joke, if she even got it. “Why would anyone want to kill Emanuel Skorzeny?” she went on. “He's one of the most respected, powerful men in Europe, maybe the world.”

“Is he?” asked Devlin, noncommittally, seeking to draw her out, play for time while he thought the sequence through, and what he had to do about it.

“You know he is. His foundation has helped more people internationally than most governments ever do. Look how he helped Zimbabwe, post-Mugabe. When that earthquake hit in China last year, his relief teams were some of the first on the scene. It's only natural that he might be a target for…”

“For whom?”

“I don't know. Some nuts. Some renegades—you know how many missiles are floating around. The old Soviet satellites. The North Koreans. The—”

“The mullahs?”

“The point is,” Maryam said, “Skorzeny is a saint. You heard what he just said. One of his company's ships is in Long Beach Harbor right now, helping out with—”

One of Skorzeny's ships.

He grabbed her by both shoulders and kissed her. “We have to go,” he said.

“To London—right?”

“Santa Monica for me, LAX for you. I'll explain later.”

He rushed her into the guest room at the east end of the house. Yanked open the door to the closet—

Two rows of men's clothes, in varying sizes, colors, and fashions. She didn't ask; he didn't explain. And one other thing—a single dress. Size 2. Bought in Paris, just before he left, in the hope for the day when he'd see her again. Her gaze traveled from the dress to his eyes. There was nothing to say.

He was already pulling “Mr. Grant's” clothes. “Grant” was taller (lifts), fatter (thank you, Universal Studios prop department), slouchier, and sported a very unfashionable mustache and a set of discolored teeth. In the end, there really wasn't much to the art of disguise. It was like caricature in reverse: you obscured your salient features and made people concentrate on the things that weren't important. The rest could be done with voice, accent, and mien; after all, with the passage of time people often didn't recognize their own relatives, so why should a total stranger be any different.

As he pulled on the fake midsection, he thought once more of Occam's Razor:
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
. Easy for William of Ockham to say, hard for Devlin to live by.

She dropped his shirt to the floor and slipped on the dress. It fit her perfectly.

“Let's go.”