Michael Walsh Bundle (9 page)

As a candidate, Tyler campaigned against the “wilderness of mirrors” that was the playing field for America's intelligence agencies. He had promised the electorate a new transparency. And yet now here he was, in the fun house with no way out.

“People think intelligence work is complicated, and it is,” explained Seelye. “But what it's not, is complex. It's actually very simple. What counts is not what's true, it's what you can make the other guy believe is true. So we play these elaborate games of she-loves-me, she-loves-me-not—or perhaps a two-hand version of musical chairs would be a more apt analogy—and the last man standing wins the pot. To mix a whole bunch of metaphors.”

Rubin chimed in. “So they're going to give us a patsy. That's who this Drusovic is. A guy meant to deflect attention from the real bad guys. A poisoned pawn, as it were.”

Seelye said: “Which means we have to give them one in return.”

“Who?” Tyler was confused. This was the sort of thing that gave him a headache. He had to think…and he kept thinking until he realized that neither Seelye nor Rubin had answered his question. “You're not talking about this ‘Devlin' character, are you?” he asked.

Seelye shrugged. “Why don't you let us worry about that, sir?” he said.

“But what if we fail? What if they get Devlin? What if…?”

Seelye smiled a weary smile. “I think you're finally beginning to get the hang of the intel business, sir.”

E
DWARDSVILLE
—J
EFFERSON
M
IDDLE
S
CHOOL

Rhonda Gaines-Solomon lay where she fell. So did the bodies of the dead teachers. Bodies, beyond indignity, and yet undignified, in impossible postures, with impossible expressions frozen on their faces, terrible and pathetic at the same time. Three people, chosen by death at random, as old as they were ever going to get, lying there, reproachful to the living, for all the world to see. Because all the world was watching.

And now a sense of helplessness began to wash over the country, given voice by the talking heads. How long was this going to go on? Where was the FBI, the National Guard, the Army, Air Force, and Marines? Where was the president of the United States? The head terrorist had spoken directly to him, given him an ultimatum—why wasn't he negotiating? The lives of
children
were at stake, for God's sake.

Hope Gardner learned all this listening to the radio. As soon as the news broke, she had rushed back to the school and found chaos. The main parking lot was blockaded, so she'd pulled around behind the school, on the far side of the athletic field.

At that moment, her cell phone rang. It was Jack. “Hope, what the heck's happening?” His tone was anxious, urgent.

“I don't know, Jack. I'm at the school now. The place is crawling with cops. Where are you?” She could hear crowd noises in the background, and the sound of Wolf Blitzer's voice yipping like a small puppy in his excitement over a big story.

“At the airport. They've got CNN on here, full blast. Are Rory and Emma okay? Are you okay?” He tried hard not to lose it. “Some nut, screaming at the president about Allah…”

As Hope sat there, as close as the police would allow any of the parents to get, cell phone to her ear, her children inside a building that had suddenly turned hostile, she found herself surprised by how unhysterical she was. Until something this terrible happened to them, most people in the therapeutic society naturally assumed that they wouldn't be able to handle it—that they would break down almost immediately. But Hope was learning something about herself she never would have suspected:

She wasn't breaking down. She was getting stronger by the minute.

“Listen, I'm bailing on the meeting. I'll be there as fast as I can.”

“Hurry, Jack. Hurry. And be careful.” She didn't know why she said that, but it seemed like the right thing to say. There was nothing to do except wait. And pray.

In the interstices between prayers, she thought of her children—of Emma, rushing off, into the arms of danger, and little Rory, hanging back. If only she had heeded him.

She spotted Janey Eagleton and jumped out of her car. They fell into each other's arms. All around them, chaos, uncertainty, fear. “What are we going to do, Hope,” cried Janey. “What do they want?”

“Nothing,” whispered Hope.

“What do you mean? They must want something—something reasonable.”

“They already have what they want, Janey.”

Janey recoiled, as if the thought had never actually occurred to her.

“No. They must want something. Something more. Something we can give them.”

Until this moment, Hope had never articulated what she was now feeling. She'd been a good American, taught from birth never to resist a mugger, never to defend herself, never to fight back—possessions were just
things
, after all, and while things were replaceable, your life was not—never to assert herself. She'd been taught from birth never to complain, never to raise a ruckus, to accept everything that fate threw her way without complaint. The government will handle it. The police will take care of it. As a midwesterner, too, she was disinclined by nature to outward displays of negative emotion.

And suddenly, in this moment of horror, she knew all that was a lie.

Her children weren't
things.
Her children weren't replaceable. They were
hers.
And she'd be goddamned if she was going to give them up without a fight. Because, as she thought back, she hadn't liked the way that man in the door had looked at her. She began to recall his features, willing herself to conjure up his face, just in case she needed to be able to identify him later, just in case the worst happened.

Now something began to well up inside her—not fear, not horror, not trauma, but an emotion even stronger: hatred. Hatred for the men who could do this to children. Whatever happened, and however long it took, she would see that they would pay, if it took her the rest of her life. The thought of Emma with their filthy hands on her and of Rory tied up beneath a live bomb unleashed a wellspring of visceral emotion she didn't know she possessed.

She didn't want to be defenseless any more; she didn't want to be weak and passive in the name of “understanding” or “tolerance.” She didn't care about their bullshit grievances, or the “root causes” of their behavior. She wanted this to be over, quickly and, if necessarily, lethally.

She wanted them dead.

“Yes, Janey,” she said. “There is something we can give them. We can give them hell.”

Her cell phone. Jack again. She hugged Janey and got back in the car. “I'm in the taxi, on the way to the school,” he said. “Where are you now?”

“Past the sports field.”

“Go home. There's nothing you can do there. Go home. Promise.”

“Promise,” she said.

“I love you, Jack,” she said. She flipped her Motorola phone shut and stepped on the accelerator.

The Jefferson Middle School was fairly new, built a little east of town. It was still partly surrounded by farmland, but everybody knew it was just a matter of time before the cornfields turned into subdivisions. Everything was a suburb now—not just of Edwardsville, or St. Louis, but of Washington, New York, and the world.

Still, the old Gondolf farm stood in the cornfields, just beyond to the east. She could park there, hidden from view. It would be dark soon enough, and then she could walk over and see what was happening.

She left the motor running and radio on. Some disembodied voice on NPR was trying to put what was happening in Edwardsville in “context,” blathering on about Israel and the Middle East and the Iraq War and the CIA's overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in the 1950s and—

Suddenly she found herself screaming at the radio, pounding the steering wheel and shouting, “Shut up! We are not the bad guys!
Shut the fuck up!
”

A rap at the window got her attention. A cop. That's when she realized she'd been pounding the horn in her anger and frustration. It was Ernie Dahl, whom she'd known for years, ever since he'd tried to paw her at the junior prom and she'd slapped his face. Just last week he gave her a ticket for ten miles over the posted limit when she had been doing a good twenty-five, rushing to take Rory to hockey practice. He was still feeling guilty about trying to feel her up way back when.

She rolled down the window. “Hi Ernie,” she smiled.

“Hope, I think you'd better go home,” he said. He took off his police cap and scratched his thinning hair. “There's nothing you can do here right now. So why don't you let us handle this? I'm sure everything's going to be fine.”

Hope looked through her open window at Ernie, at the out-of-shape local cop, the hopeless look in his eyes, and knew there was no way this thing was going to have a happy ending.

“My kids are in there.”

Visibly, Ernie struggled for words. He never was very good at English. “Hope,” he said, “
everybody's
kids are in there. But don't worry—the FBI is here.” Like that was supposed to make her feel better. “So go on home now.”

Suddenly, a plan occurred to her. It was insane, but it was the only plan she could come up with. “Maybe you're right, Ernie,” she lied, in a tone she hoped would pass for sheepish compliance. She put the car in gear and began to back away.

“That's it, Hope,” nodded Ernie. “Go along now. I'll make sure nothing happens to Rory or Emma.”

Hope could see him in her rearview mirror as she pulled around the corner and away from the school. He was waving good-bye.

I
N THE AIR
: D
EVLIN

For operational security, Devlin almost always flew commercial. And that was not all. Unless he was dealing directly through Seelye's office, he paid for everything in cash, including road tolls, and never used a publicly available Web browser. He had no land line that any phone company knew about.

Although he was physically fit, Devlin dressed the part of an average American schlub, in T-shirts and jeans and a baseball cap. To look at him, you would see exactly what he wanted you to see—nothing.

He was the man who wasn't there.

Devlin had long ago learned that hiding in plain sight was the only way to hide. Afflicted with perceptual blindness, people don't notice what they see every day—they only notice its absence or its alteration. You could live on the same street for twenty years and not be able to accurately describe the sequence of houses, but you would notice, briefly, that one of them had been torn down. And once its replacement had stood for six months or so, you would likely never remember what had been there before.

Devlin had to laugh when he read spy novels or went to movie thrillers: the heroes were too chiseled, too toothy, and just too damn conspicuous. Operational security was one thing, but showboating secrecy was entirely another; Jason Bourne might be the closest fictional equivalent to the men and women—were there any women? Even Devlin didn't know—of Branch 4, but Bourne, when you got right down to it, was little more than a homicidal midget with memory troubles. Still, Bourne was lucky—he couldn't remember who he was. Devlin remembered all to well, and it was the toughest thing he did every morning to forget it for one more day.

He let his eyes wander around the interior of the fuselage. Early twenty-first-century Boobus Americanus at his finest. Worse dressed than they would have been twenty years ago, stupider, maybe, or at least more ignorant. Forget about getting the Mexicans to speak proper English these days; it was a stroke of pure luck to encounter a twenty-year-old woman who could wrap her lips and tongue around the syllables of the language and pronounce them properly in any place other than her nose.

As the plane descended, he visualized the school plans once more in his mind. It was a fairly standard layout, a typical concrete block standing amid acres of striped parking spaces. He almost wished the terrorists had taken over the other middle school, an older building located in town; infiltration there would have been much easier.

Still, American special ops had gone to school on Beslan, and knew how to avoid most of the mistakes the Russians had made. For one thing, they weren't going to run out of patience and come charging in, shooting indiscriminately. Devlin and his Xe team would invest the battlefield but remain invisible. They would take out the terrorists, not one by one, but all at once. And when they finished, the bad guys would be lying dead—no, not just dead but spectacularly, object-lesson dead—and the team would be gone, a wraith in the night. KRV—kill, rescue, vanish. And no one the wiser. The FBI would take all the credit. As for the media, the press was more lapdog than watchdog. For Devlin understood one big thing about reporters: they might be alcoholic malcontents, frustrated screenwriters, snarky Harvard boys afraid of inanimate objects, and hallucinating politicians-in-waiting, but there was one thing they never wanted to be, and that was reporters. They were always playing another angle.

Wheels down brought Devlin out of his reverie. The flight attendant gave them the obligatory, insincere welcome to St. Louis, where the local time was whatever. He gathered his sports satchel from the overhead compartment, which contained everything he needed for an operation like this, and slung it over his shoulder.

There was a full rank of taxis outside, but he passed them by and headed straight to the parking garage. Devlin favored large black SUVs, since their owners should know better than to put such an ungainly, unwieldy, and unpatriotic vehicle on the road. Besides, the owner would get the insurance money, the plates would disappear from every police registry in the country, and everybody would be happy.

The Escalade was ridiculously easy to jack. The Arch gleamed as he swung over the I-70 bridge. The streets of East St. Louis were dark, dangerous urban prairies. Perfect.

He headed for the intersection of Martin Luther King Drive and North 7th Street. Every American city had a street named after Martin Luther King Jr. North 7th Street was only a few blocks in from the river.

There were six youths standing on the corner, very busy doing nothing. As he approached, he ran a quick scan with the infrared monitor inside his PDA. You never knew who was hiding in the garbage can.

A white man in a cap behind the wheel of an SUV was not exactly an unknown sight in ESL: a transaction was in the offing.

The young men crowded around him as he got out of the jacked wheels. As with every group of young men, there was a Big Dog and a pack. Devlin could always spot the Dawg—the drill sergeant of gangsters, the NCOs of urban crime.

“Yo, check it out,” said the Dawg. “I got smoke, coke, coke, smoke.”

“I've got an SUV,” said Devlin. “You want it or don't you?” Fight or flight, he liked to get it down to basics, to get the bullshit out of the way.

“That piece of shit?”

“Is clean, is worth fifty grand new, twenty grand chopped, its owner doesn't even know it's gone yet, so I make that at least thirty K profit to you, give or take your paternity payments, asshat.” Devlin looked ostentatiously at his watch. “I don't have all day.”

Asshat got in his face. “What if we just take it?” The others, the small dogs, began sniffing around.

“You could try,” said Devlin.

There was a kind of primitive beauty to every confrontation among men, primates reverting to type. No matter what the PC weenies insisted, might always made right in the end.

“You alone,” observed Asshat.

“Sure about that?”

“I don't see nobody else.” Not quite as sure now.

“That's different. Would I be dumb enough to come here in a fifty thousand dollar car if somebody didn't have my back?” As Asshat considered this—

“On the other hand, I know you have five homies here and two watching us from that building, plus a lookout kid over there behind the trash pile. I know you're carrying an old .38 that hasn't been cleaned in a year and if you try to fire it you'll blow your balls off. I know that the two guys in the window have machine pistols but from the way they're handling them they probably couldn't hit an elephant in the head if he was standing in front of them. I know your life sucks, and that you think there probably should be more to it than getting high and getting laid, but you don't know what it is. And I know that you could use the money, so let's just make our little transaction now and everybody stays alive.”

“You crazy.”

“That's the chance you have to take.”

Asshat thought for a moment. “What it gonna cost me?”

“That.” Devlin pointed to an old Chevy Malibu. “Do we have a deal?”