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Authors: Michael Walsh

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He reached in his pocket and pulled out his iPhone.
Under the rules, there was no way he could know if his earlier alert had gone through. He was not supposed to follow up.
Time to break the rules.
You weren't supposed to text while driving, but this was another rule just begging to be broken under the circumstances. Quickly, he typed in a single word, a word he'd been told would immediately summon him.
DORABELLA
He punched a single key and the word shot into the cloud, was instantly erased from the phone and all the civilian networks. A word that had never existed, but a word that meant so much.
It would find him, and it would bring him. It had to.
C
HAPTER
S
IX
Los Angeles
Devlin got into the backseat alongside Jacinta, who slid over as far away from him as possible—which, given the size of the Cadillac tank, was saying something. The doors locked automatically as the driver slipped the SUV into gear and turned east on Sixth Street. He checked out the driver: an ambulatory refrigerator in a formfitting chauffeur's uniform. Native American? Samoan? Aleutian Islander? Los Angeles made New York look positively monochrome.
Riding several feet above the traffic was not his idea of a good time. Most SUV drivers, in Devlin's experience, fell into three categories: small blond women, small Asian women, and small Persian women. All of them rich.
“Where are we going?” he asked. If either of his compadres knew, they weren't talking.
No habla ingles.
The allpurpose excuse. Gardeners, Major League Baseball players, even California politicians could conveniently forget the English language whenever it suited their purposes; hell, some California politicians never bothered to learn English at all. There sure weren't any votes in it.
East on Sixth. Unless you were going to Hancock Park—not the La Brea Tar Pits park, but the tony residential neighborhood of the same name, Beverly Hills before there was a Beverly Hills—nobody went east on Sixth. Because nobody knew anybody who lived there. Los Angeles was not only one of America's biggest cities, it was one of America's most segregated cities, with ethnic neighborhoods as clearly delineated as though Chief William Parker had drawn them up on a blackboard. Which, in a way, he had. And though Parker had been dead for decades, his vision of Los Angeles, enforced by the LAPD and by consenting patterns of residential segregation, lived on. Nobody went east on Sixth.
They flew past Western, heading for Vermont, riding in silence across the endless urban landscape of strip malls and three-story buildings, the dead end of the American Dream. California ugly.
Los Angeles had leapfrogged this part of town, bounding from Bunker Hill, hopscotching up from West Adams, pogo-sticking past Hancock Park and its front-row-center view of the Hollywood Sign, and finally landing west of Robertson, where Beverly Hills began. And from there it was “the west side,” all the way to Pacific Palisades and the ocean. The only place to go from here was back home or in the drink. Defeat in both directions.
Supermarquetas,
check-cashing places, bail bondsmen. Korean beauty shops, Korean barbecue. Wary white and black cops, locked inside their black-and-whites, obliquely eyeing brazen street people in the only part of town it wasn't a crime to be a pedestrian.
He glanced over at Jacinta, who was fingering some wooden rosary beads. Just for fun, he tried to remember the Mysteries: Sorrowful, Joyful, Glorious, and the new one, whatchamacallit, each with five subdivisions. No wonder the Protestants thought of Catholics as idolaters. Mary worshippers. Heathens.
“Why me?” It was worth a try.
The Escalade humped over one of L.A.'s innumerable unnoticed hills. San Francisco fetishized its humps, turned them into tourist attractions. L.A. pretended they weren't there.
“Because you don't believe.” Although her eyes were invisible beneath her visor, Devlin knew they were trained on him.
“I don't believe in Santa Claus, either.”
“But you did, once. So there's still hope.”
The mute driver wheeled left on Rossmore, then took a hard right on Third.
Which is where the trailing car handed them off to the next pursuer.
He hadn't wanted to say anything, because officially this assignment didn't exist and officially he didn't exist, and thanks to Maryam he already was in enough trouble. This gig most likely had been a mercy fuck from Seelye, something to keep him active while Tyler and that hard-ass new secretary of defense, Shalika Johnson, decided what to do with him.
Maybe
this
was what they'd decided to do with him. Maybe he was going for a ride.
Better than anybody, Devlin knew the code of Branch 4 ops—the minute your cover was blown, or you were otherwise compromised, you were a dead man. You were Ishmael, with your hand against every man's and every man's hand against yours. And that included fellow Branch 4 ops, people whose names and faces he didn't know, but who would have complete access to his dossier, for the sole purpose of killing him.
And here he'd trusted his stepfather, the man who had raised him—General Armond “Army” Seelye, now the head of the National Security Agency/Central Security Service, and thus his direct superior.
For him, Devlin was lightly armed. Leaving his house in Echo Park, he'd selected a pair of H&Ks Mark 23 .45s with twelve-round magazines, and a throwing knife from his underground armory. The Heckler & Koch sidearms had been developed for the Navy SEALs and the Army's Special Forces; at a couple of thousand bucks apiece they were expensive but as reliable as the old Colt 1911 .45 that they had replaced. They ought to be able to handle a single—
No, make that two trailing vehicles. Whoever was tailing them was good. And they weren't just tailing anymore. They were getting ready to box the big Caddy and probably flip it. Auto accidents happened every day in the City of the Angels, and even on the surface streets you could get up enough speed to kill yourself if you tried; Third Street in this part of town was one of them. If some other car was forcing you to that speed . . .
Devlin looked over at Jacinta, but she was too wrapped up in miracle pictures of marigolds to have noticed anything. The driver's shaded eyes remained on the road.
One of the trailing cars, a Mercedes with tinted windows, suddenly sped up and pulled even with the backseat. It drove nearly parallel with them for a bit, then dropped back, as if the driver had decided not to try and pass the Caddy after all. Just as it dropped back, Devlin pointed what looked like an Android at them and pressed the button.
He glanced down at the screen: a complete image of the inside of the vehicle, courtesy of advanced backscatter X-ray technology that Homeland Security had been developing for a couple of years now. The otherwise-useless DHS was using a less sophisticated version in the roving anonymous vans it had deployed on the streets of major American cities; they could scan both vehicles and pedestrians for weapons and explosives involuntarily, Fourth Amendment or no Fourth Amendment. The CSS had simply “borrowed” the technology and, as the liaison with the cryptology divisions of the armed services, had improved and weaponized it based on a prototype he'd developed for use in the field.
A third car had joined the pursuit, just up ahead at the intersection with Western. He knew it would pull out in front of them and drive them toward the gas station on the southeast corner, and probably right into the pumps. It would make for a hell of an explosion and a great lede for the evening news, unless he did something about it.
His Android had also taken an electronic reading of the Benz's vital systems and had hacked into the onboard computer, which meant he could control the vehicle. Down in New Orleans, he'd taken out that poor snoopy reporter's car on a race down St. Charles by freezing the engine block, which flipped the car; he'd had to go back and risk his life and his identity saving the guy's sorry ass.
No worries about that this time. This was enemy action.
The car up ahead, a new Jag, was making its move, getting ready to turn left into Third Street.
The Mercedes was pulling up again in the left lane.
The other car, a Honda, was inching up behind them, getting ready to give them a push from the rear.
Seconds now.
A quick glance at the driver—still impassive. He was in on it. He had to be—
A hidden partition suddenly appeared between front and back, slowly rising.
They were almost at the intersection....
For the first time, the driver turned his head to the right, a little smile playing across his lips.
NOW.
In practically a single motion, Devlin thwacked the driver behind his right ear, while at the same time pressing a button on the Android. Its steering disabled and its accelerator torqued, the Mercedes spun out to the left, a guided missile headed straight for the Jag.
The unconscious driver's foot slipped off the Escalade's gas pedal, causing the trailing Honda to smash into the much larger vehicle from the read. The sudden jolt knocked the Escalade forward and into the intersection, just as—
—the Mercedes broadsided the Jaguar—
—Devlin fired a single shot into the Escalade's dashboard control panel, stopping the partition—
—the Honda rammed them again—
—the Mercedes caromed off the Jag and back into the intersection—
—and Devlin swung himself feetfirst into the front seat. The driver had slumped over to the right, blocking the steering wheel. Devlin went over him, his right foot landing on the accelerator, his left foot on the brake.
He hit them both simultaneously. The big car jerked and tailed off to the right, sliding aside as the damaged Mercedes spun past them.
From behind, the Honda rammed them again, but this time it wasn't a clean ram, more a glancing blow, which caused the Honda to spin out to the left, rear first, whipping the front end of the car around and around as it sailed, rudderless, to the northeast, finally colliding with the hulk of the Jag.
Both cars exploded into flames.
The Mercedes continued south on Western, past the gas station pumps, running up on the sidewalk and then crashing headfirst into the retaining wall on the other side of the alley.
And then they were through the intersection and speeding east on Third, as if nothing had happened.
It would be only a few minutes, Devlin knew, before the sirens would start and the cops and the fire trucks got there. He needed to be far away. He turned at the next side street and dropped down to Sixth again. It was slow going through the side streets, but a zigzag course was the best idea under the circumstances, since the LAPD hardly ever ventured off the main arteries in this part of town. Whatever minor damage had been done to the Escalade would go unnoticed.
At a safe distance, he stopped the car.
“Help me, Jacinta,” he said, but there was no response from the backseat. Had something happened to her? Was she dead? No time to worry about that.
He reached into one of the man's ears and pulled out an earbud. No wonder he couldn't hear him.
Devlin took out the other earbud and held them both up to his ears. There was some kind of music playing, more chanting really. He brought the earbuds closer.
Music
and
chanting. The music he recognized. It was Schubert's “Ave Maria,” sung in Spanish, and the chanting was the voices of a congregation reciting the “Hail Mary” in Spanish.
Not dispositive. He could have been religious and still one of the bad guys. And he wasn't blind—he should have seen those tail cars, should have responded.
Devlin was strong, but the man was big and out cold. He rolled him over the front seats and practically into Jacinta's lap. She showed no emotion, didn't move. “Sister,” said Devlin, “you have to help me. At least get out of the way.”
She did neither. She looked up from her photographs and stared at him, her lips moving.
“Okay, have it your way.” He managed to fold down half of the backseat and roll the body into the Escalade's capacious rear compartment. The rear windows were tinted, which was legal in California. With any luck, they'd be downtown shortly. And then he could sort out the problem of the driver.
He slipped back into the driver's seat and swung east. They were in the twilight zone between Latino Broadway, Little Tokyo, and Chinatown. The old L.A. downtown, ten times farther from Beverly Hills than New York City.
At Main Street he turned left. At Second, he turned right and continued down the street, almost to Los Angeles Street and, beyond it, Little Tokyo, until he could duck in behind the old church.
Not just any church: the Cathedral of St. Vibiana. Second and Main streets. Crippled since the Northridge earthquake of 1994, condemned since 1996. Restored now—not as a church but a community arts center, called, simply, Vibiana. Saints need not apply around here anymore. Especially third-century virgin martyrs. Come to think of it, virgins need no longer apply, either.
Devlin got out of the car, catching the blast furnace right in the face, stepping over the flopped homeless in their cardboard boxes, their shopping carts parked neatly outside. Everybody had wheels in Los Angeles.
He turned. Jacinta was nowhere to be seen. It was as if she had never existed.
And then the doors of the dead basilica swung open and Devlin stepped inside a piece of vanished Los Angeles.
He knew just how the mammoth felt.

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