Michael Walsh Bundle (25 page)

S
ANTA
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ONICA
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ALIFORNIA

The RAND Corporation building stood out among the buildings in “downtown” Santa Monica like the proverbial sore thumb—but only if you were already aware that you had just struck your opposable digit with a hammer. Located south of the Third Street Promenade, across Main Street from city hall and the courthouse, it was well away from the congeries of bums and winos—the “homeless”—who had transformed what was once LA's foremost beach community into Berkeley South. Near RAND, however, there were no homeless to be seen: they didn't have the requisite security clearance. Few did, homeless or not.

He did.

Devlin glanced at his watch. It was more than a watch, of course. The team leader could text him at any time, over a secure uplink, and his message would appear nearly instantly on the watch's face.

He looked out at his audience in the small auditorium. Some of the faces—he never forgot a face, because that was how he'd been trained—were familiar. He smiled as he took inventory; to judge from the haircuts and the clothes, mostly Americans. A couple of MI-6 Brits in ill-fitting suits from the Savoy Tailors Guild. Members of the German Federal Intelligence Service, the
Bundesnachrichtendient,
in their motley. Queens-born Mossad and Shin Bet, at home in both worlds. Three or four Chinese, whose bona fides he immediately discounted by 50 percent; unlike the Russians, they were still new at this game, and incredibly obvious. He'd get the security report later, but already he was tailoring his remarks. The key to one of these speeches was to balance genuine information with even better disinformation, and he was more than up to the task.

“Let me be blunt,” he began without preamble. “In the years since September 11, despite all our intelligence triumphs—necessarily recondite—we as a society have grown complacent. Comfortable. Therefore, I hope and trust that the events of the past two days might serve as a wake-up call for all of us. For, whatever our political differences, we are all civilized men and women here.” There were very few women present, but linguistically he felt compelled to maintain the egalitarian fiction in case somehow his remarks got leaked to the
Los Angeles Times
Web site; even though the physical newspaper was dying, the handful of reporters tied in to the blogs and RSS and Twitter feeds could still make plenty of trouble. Loose lips still sank ships.

“I refer not only to the events of the past two days in Edwardsville and here in Los Angeles, but to the ongoing series of cyber-attacks on our mainframes at the Pentagon, in Langley, in Fort Meade, in Washington, and elsewhere. Forget everything you think you know about contemporary terrorism. We are no longer up against a nation-state, or even a stateless group of like-minded individuals motivated by ideology, such as al-Qaeda. That, as they say, is so yesterday.”

Murmurs and polite chuckles ripped through his select audience as he reached for the glass of water. Which enabled him to see what was going on in Long Beach via secure video feed in real time…

 

The
Stella Maris
was a magnificent vessel. Displacing nearly 200,000 metric tons, the big cargo ship was riding low in the water, preparing to get her cargo offloaded. The dock was a hive of activity as the longshoremen got ready to unload her, but in fact security forces were everywhere, disguised a teamsters, sailors, even casual passersby.

The red-zone call-in had pretty much confirmed that. Since September 11, every major American port was equipped with the latest radiation-detection devices. On three separate occasions, Middle Eastern terrorists had tried to smuggle in a suitcase nuke, but each time they had been tripped up by the detection devices on the docks.

But what if the docks were too late a line of defense? That was what the drone overflights were for. Except they didn't look like drones. Not the kind that had struck fear into the hearts of late
mujahedin
in Iraq and Afghanistan, anyway. They looked like kites.

No California beach was complete without its complement of kites. It was amazing how high you could get some of them, and how sensitive the radiation sensors were these days. No matter how strong the ocean breeze, all they needed was a clear line of sight to their target, and the DHS agents who were lucky enough to draw beach duty could take their readings from the comfort of their beach blankets, while ogling the rear ends of the teenage girls wiggling by.

Devlin had the readings on his special PDA before he left the house, which triggered his “go” order to the SEAL team standing by in a sub off the coast of Huntington Beach on a training exercise. The SDVs were already launched and away by the time he got to Santa Monica.

 

“As you know, the National Security Research Division's International Security and Defense Policy Center, based in Arlington, exists on the leading edge of threat assessment. Together with our governmental and NGO colleagues around the world, it is our duty to constantly evaluate and extrapolate, not simply from ‘known knowns' to ‘known unknowns,' but into the realm of ‘unknown unknowns' as well. As the United States Marine Corps likes to say, ‘the difficult we do right away. The impossible takes a little longer.' But let me assure you—since our national wake-up call on the morning of September 11, 2001, the impossible is not only what we seek to do, it is, in many respects, what we have already done.”

A small ripple of applause.

“The Marines have another saying, less widely known but, for our purposes, even more apposite. ‘Don't worry about what your enemy might do. Worry about what he
can
do, and plan accordingly.'

“About our enemy's intention, there can be no doubt. It is nothing less than the destruction of western civilization. By that, I don't just mean the current American administration, or Israel, or global warming, or world hunger. We could dismantle the Cathedral of Notre Dame, obliterate Tel Aviv, reduce our carbon emissions to zero, return to the Stone Age, and starve ourselves to death, and that still would not be enough.

“Many of you have perhaps seen the motion picture,
Independence Day
. In it, the president of the United States confronts a captured alien invader and asks whether our two species might live in peace. ‘No peace,' replies the alien. ‘What do you want us to do, then?' inquires the president. ‘Die,' replies the alien. That, in a nutshell, sums up our enemy's demands. No amount of appeasement, short of suicide, will satisfy him. Ladies and gentlemen, we are not fighting a twenty-first-century war. We are fighting a nineteenth-century war—not so much against zealotry, but against Nietzschean nihilism, masked by religious doctrine, enervation, and anomie.”

As he expected, this did not go over well with some of those in attendance. Probably half the members of his audience were “root cause” types; the idea that sheer nihilism might lay at the dark heart of society's enemies was something they were not prepared to admit. As they muttered among themselves, “Mr. Grant” took the opportunity to glance at his watch.

 

Seal Delivery Vehicles were the latest thing in delivering death to your ocean-borne doorstep. A kind of minisubmarine, they carried a six-man team consisting of a pilot, co-pilot, and combat swimmers. The SDV Devlin's team was using was a Mark 8 Model 1, which ran on lithium-ion batteries and came fully equipped with its own navigation and communications systems. In other words, it was totally silent.

The radiation detectors had come back negative, which was exactly what he had expected. What also was expected was the dead zone in the center of the ship's cargo hold, the lead-lined “scientific” area. Everything, even people, emit some sort of radiation, but not this blank space; using imaging radar, he had run the image through every NSA analytical program he could think of, but all that computing power had only served to confirm his suspicions. There was something there that Skorzeny didn't want anybody to see.

Prior to arriving in Santa Monica, Devlin had taken a crash course on Emanuel Skorzeny. Aside from his well-publicized forays in international finance and philanthropy, he was not the sort of man to come across the CSS radar screens. He was immensely rich and powerful, of course, but the occasional indictment for insider trading notwithstanding—inevitable in his line of work—there was nothing criminal about the man. Indeed, there was much that was admirable, including his well-publicized personal story and his generous philanthropy.

Still, there was a strain of misanthropy running through Skorzeny's tangled skein that bothered Devlin. He would have to spend a lot more time with the files, of course, but the outlines of a very disturbed individual were there to be seen. The childhood alone—the DP camps—would be enough to affect even the sanest boy. But the closer he had looked at Skorzeny, the stranger the man became.

Take his charitable causes, an odd mixture of cultural conservatism—through the Skorzeny Foundation, run by a British woman named Amanda Harrington, he lavishly funded orchestras and opera houses around the world—and political radicalism. There wasn't a Green Party in Europe he didn't donate generously to, and there was considerable evidence that, through cutouts, shells, dummies, and nonprofits, he was injecting vast sums of money into the American political process, no matter how illegal it was.

At home in Echo Park, Devlin had harnessed all the computing power at NSA, CIA, and Poughkeepsie to search every existing database—closed-and open-source—for a police record and had come up with nothing. About the only negative thing he could find was the sudden death of one of Skorzeny International's board members, but strokes could happen to anybody.

As Devlin had learned from long experience in the trenches of classified material, nobody was clean. It was part of the human condition. Everybody had skeletons, past activities, furtive desires, illicit relationships, occasions of sin both venial and mortal. In the great court of law in the sky, everybody was guilty, especially in the age of computers and the Internet. The only question was, how you dealt with it: fake it, lie about it, cop a plea, or brazen it out. With the abolition of sin, the last option had become more and more attractive.

“Brazen” might let you skate in the courtroom, but the rules of evidence in the Moral Court were much less restrictive; there, anything went. So the smart play was to admit almost everything. Blow your own cover if you had to, give up your best friend, plead out to almost every charge. Toss them fish. But save the last minnow, the one part of your cover story that didn't pass the smell test, until they pried it from your cold, dead hands.

But Skorzeny wasn't just clean; he was scrubbed—scrubbed in a way only money and access could buy.

“In position,” crackled the voice in his hidden earpiece.

 

“And so the question arises, how do we fight back? Do we, in fact, even bother to fight back at all, or do we allow ourselves to succumb to the false dichotomy between the rule of law and the right of self-preservation? These are questions that each of us, each country, each society, must answer for itself. I imagine these are the same questions that the fifth-century poets of the Roman Empire asked themselves, just before the Vandals sacked their city. Perhaps from their example, we can glean the answer. Or at least understand what
not
to do.”

“Dr. Grant,” said one of the Germans, “I have a question…”

 

Devlin's eyes, a nameless Navy SEAL, was standing in Angel's Gate Park, overlooking the harbor to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the south.

They had caught one big break. The
Stella Maris
was not truly in port. Instead, she had dropped anchor in deeper waters outside the Los Angeles Main Channel. That in itself was only slightly suspicious—the urgency of offloading the supplies was the stated reason—but taken together with everything else, made Devlin sure he was doing the right thing.

Everybody had heard of the SEALs, but few Americans actually knew who they were, or what they did. The SEALs—SEa, Air, and Land forces—had grown out of the old Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT). Basically they were waterborne commandos who could slip into an enemy port, blow shit up, and retire without a trace.

Most people forgot that President Kennedy, in his famous 1961 speech about putting a man on the moon within the decade, had thrown the lamb chop past the wolf by strengthening the Special Ops in Vietnam at the same time. Not wanting to play second fiddle to the Army Rangers, the Navy got into the act, establishing Team One in Coronado and Team Two in Virginia. This is where it got serious. In addition to underwater demolition, the UDT lads got training in sabotage, hand-to-hand combat, even parachuting. Languages became a must; any SEAL who couldn't pass for native in at least three languages washed out before the end of the training period. They were men after his own heart.

 

“Go,” he said, over the wallawalla.

 

“Roger that,” said the voice in his ear.

 

“It seems to me,” said the German, “that without the law, we have no society. So I am perhaps a bit confused by your implication that there might be, shall we say, a higher law than the law itself. Can you please clarify?”