Michael Walsh Bundle (67 page)

The 50-caliber round punched through the boat as if it wasn't there, tearing through the hull and exiting out the back. But he had missed the engine block itself, and so the distance between them was closing rapidly.

The shot had also given away Byrne's position within the craft. He could feel the bullet whizzing by his head as the man trained his fire upon him. “Don't you people ever give up?” he groused to no one in particular, then realized what he'd said. No time for apologies. He heard Lannie's answer as he fired—

“No, Boss—do the Irish?”

This time, the shot hit the engine block square and the boat suddenly went dead in the water. Not motionless, though: its forward moment kept propelling it toward the chopper.

“Want me to pull out, Captain?” shouted Danny. The man was fearless, Byrne would give him that. “You can get a clean shot from any angle.”

Byrne shook his head. “Evasive action, but keep me lined up.”

Danny didn't bother to shout that evasive action was going to be sickening action, as he would be swinging the craft from side to side, moving her up and down like one of those low-riders the Mexican gangbangers back in L.A. used to cruise and bruise. “Hold on.”

The Koala hopped. Kohanloo fired another burst. Byrne squeezed the trigger.

 

Arash Kohanloo felt the bullet tear off his right arm. Not go through it, but tear it completely off. The AK-47, still on full auto, fell into the river. The pain made him delirious, the blood made him happy. He smiled and cheered and yelled at the man with the rifle. “Shoot me again! Shoot again, you dog! You coward! You cannot kill me, for I am a Brother. I go to immortality!”

 

Lannie fed him another round. This one was greasy, slippery, and as Byrne looked down at his hand, he noticed it was bloody. “What the hell?”

Lannie held up a small vial of viscous fluid. “Pig's blood. I want you to send this bastard to hell for what he does to me and my people and my faith. I want him cursed for all eternity, the Shi'a swine.”

Byrne tossed the round back to Aslan. “Save it for somebody who really needs it,” he shouted. “I'm going to send him to hell the good old-fashioned Irish way. With one in the brain.”

“
Allahu Akbar!
” shouted Kohanloo.

“Fuck you,” muttered Byrne, and he fired the third shot.

The recoil knocked his father's sidearm to the lip of the door…

For less than a tenth of a second the world moved in slow motion for Arash Kohanloo, as Allah himself slowed it to a crawl. Gone was the pain, and in its place came the certainty of knowing that heaven was his, that all he had to do was reach out and embrace it, embrace his fate, embrace his destiny.

The round entered Kohanloo's open mouth, blew out the back of his head and then, on its downward trajectory, punched a hole through the bottom of the boat. Quickly, it filled with water and began to sink.

…and as Danny throttled forward to fly over the wrecked boat, the gun toppled out the door and into the East River.

Byrne looked at Lannie: “Get down there, right now. Hurry.”

Lannie hesitated. “You mean, retrieve the gun?' He would if ordered. From this moment on he would do anything his captain asked him to do.

“No, you dumb raghead. Get on that boat before the fucker sinks and grab what you can. Martin, can you put us—”

Already done. They were right over the sinking craft. Lannie threw out the rope ladder and went over the side—

“Get papers, equipment, whatever. Forget the gun. And him,” he said, indicating the corpse, “you leave for the fishes.”

Falls Church, Virginia

Cautiously, Devlin disabled the security services on his old house in the near Virginia suburbs of Washington. He had not been in the house since the events of last year, had assumed in the wake of the FBI raid, he would have to blow it, which meant he painstakingly had to clear the charges to once more render it habitable.

He had to laugh. Falls Church had once been a prosperous and stable small city—the smallest in the country—but like everything and every place in America, it had changed radically. Today, naturally, it was a hotbed of anti-American Islamic activity, just a few miles from the Capitol. One thing you could say about the Americans; they were going to let their newfound fetish tolerance run free if it got them all killed. And if and when it did, the hell with them.

He moved into his secure room, which was just as he left it. He had just witnessed a boy much like himself go willingly to his death out of passion—not for some abstract bullshit ideal, but for something he believed in, during the course of which he touched something he had never touched before—not just a woman, but the Other. In his sick, twisted way, Raymond Crankheit had caught a glimpse of the other side, the side where happiness dwelled, and he'd liked it well enough not to kill Principessa Stanley. Just as he, Devlin, had caught that glimpse with Maryam and decided to gamble everything on his one chance at happiness.

“Do you trust the bitch? You don't even know her real name.”

Where the hell was she? He had not heard from her since her last message from Budapest, and though he knew he shouldn't care, it was only business, she was on assignment—his assignment—and that op sec was indeed everything…he still cared.

Maybe it had been a mistake to bring her in. Maybe he should have killed her last year when he had the chance, after their night together in Echo Park, a mercy killing. Maybe he should have let her die in Paris, when she took a bullet for him.

Maybe…but then where would he be?

He'd watched the entire Kohanloo takedown from one of the safe houses on the Upper East Side, near Gracie Mansion. Using the electronic entrepôt that Byrne had given him—one that he knew would be temporary and limited to this operation—he was able to see the whole thing from the chopper's built-in cams, part of the same mechanism that gave the flying machine its night vision. He would have liked to have been part of that, but he had acted on his intuition that Byrne was a right gee, as the cops used to say back in the old days, and he'd been proven correct.

He went into the bathroom. He could still see the bloodstains on the floor, where Evalina Anderson had died at his hand. He started to scrub them, but they were old and dried, and after a while he gave up. Then he threw up.

There were too many ghosts now, piling up, even right here in his own home. At some point, one of them would reach out of the past and claim him and then that would be that.

He switched on his systems in the panic room. He'd have to update them all, of course, and run endless security checks, but for now all he wanted to do was see if there were any urgent messages sent via the private T-3 line to The Building in Maryland.

There were.

URGENT—that would be from Seelye. The man never slept.

SPEAK

MESSAGE FOR YOU, FROM YOU

That could mean only one thing—a message Maryam had sent from the secure laptop had been received.

RELAY

I DON'T THINK YOU REALLY WANT TO SEE IT

DON'T FUCK WITH ME DAD.

WE CHECKED THE IP ADDRESS.

HUNGARY, SO WHAT?

NOT HUNGARY.

WHERE THEN?

YOU'RE NOT GOING TO LIKE THIS

WHERE??

There was a short pause before the answer came: IRAN. TEHRAN, TO BE PRECISE

Devlin tried to control his panic. MEANING WHAT?

WHAT DO YOU THINK? SHE'S DEFECTED

IMPOSSIBLE

ENTIRELY LIKELY. WE GOT A DOSSIER, COURTESY OF SENDER. IT'S ALL ABOUT HER. WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE IT? SEEMS SHE'S BEEN A DOUBLE AGENT THE WHOLE TIME

FOR WHAT PURPOSE?

WHY, BOY, FOR YOU. WHAT OTHER PURPOSE?

BUT SHE—He stopped. It couldn't be. It couldn't. REQUIRE PROOF. COULD BE SKORZENY DOUBLE, FALSE FLAG, ANYTHING

THERE WAS ONE OTHER THING

WHAT?

SIGNED BY HER

WHAT??

YOU SHOULD SEE FOR YOURSELF

SEND IT

I WILL. BUT YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT THIS NEGATES OUR PREVIOUS AGREEMENT. MY JOB IS NOW SECURE SO LONG AS TYLER STAYS PRESIDENT. WHICH YOU AND I WILL NOW ENSURE. DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR?

SEND IT AND WE'LL TALK LATER

SUIT YOURSELF.

Even before it came, he knew what was coming. A taunt, a jest? Or the truth?

It came across the screen:

It was the “Dorabella” Variation, written out in Elgar's hand. The code Atwater had cracked. The substitution for the substitution. The most visible layer of the endless palimpsest that was his world, and hers as well.

And underneath, in her hand, the words: “I'm so sorry.”

He was not sure how long it was before he noticed a new sensation. It was a pain in his chest, a throbbing, searing pain—no, not pain, more like a new emotion, one that he had never experienced before, but one that brought on shortness of breath, sweats, shivers.

Then he became aware of a sound rushing in his ears, like the waters of a river, or the waves of a great ocean. There was the smell of salt in his nose, as of brine and felt himself toppling backwards into a tidal pool that splashed the world with ocean spray as the waves met the rocks on the shore.

He thrust his arms and let gravity take him, plunging down toward the sea, the primal sea, not Mother Earth but Mother Ocean, the place where blood and seed were the same, the place where life began and where death could take you any time it wanted. And all accompanied by the beating of a great drum, the
tactus
of the universe, the thing that set our rhythms, from the seconds to the minutes to the hours to the days to the weeks to the months to the—

The beating of the human heart.

The ghosts reached out, but he shook them off. Not yet. Too soon.

The beating grew louder, stronger, more urgent. Across the oceans of time he had heard her and could hear her now. Across oceans of distance, he would find her. The only thing he could not do, ever, was to doubt her.

Of one other thing, finally, there could be no doubt: at last he knew he had a heart.