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Authors: Michael Walsh

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C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-SEVEN
Qom
Col. Zarin looked out at the Shahab-3 missiles and felt proud. No longer would the infidels of the West impose their will on the sacred lands of Islam by force. No longer would the
dar al-Islam
have to suffer the Crusaders' indignities, their petty slights and their overt contempt. They had taken the technology of the West, purchased with the money derived from the same oil resources the West had discovered and developed, and turned it back against them. Allah be praised.
For a thousand years, they had waited in fear and darkness for the Coming, but were unable to effect it. Now there would be no stopping them. The missiles would slam into Israel and destroy the country, from Haifa to Be-er Sheva. Was not the Grand Ayatollah himself the incarnation of Seyed Khorasani, the great imam who would, according to holy prophecy, restore Jerusalem to Imam Mahdi? He was.
“What, may I ask, is your timing plan?” said Skorzeny. “Will you destroy Israel first and simultaneously set off the bomb in New York, or will the experience be more . . . theatrical?”
“You will see,” said the colonel.
“But Col. Zarin, I need to know. The New York part of this operation was mine, and—”
“You will see.”
“What about retaliation? You know the Israelis won't go quietly. Your cities will be destroyed. Other cities in the
ummah
will burn. When the Americans are hit, they too will lash out. Many millions of Muslims will die.”
“Their deaths are necessary, to bring Imam Mahdi to us.”
“But they are innocent.” How it pained him to say that; in Emanuel Skorzeny's world, no one was innocent, and all deserved to suffer and perish.
“They will die for the faith, as holy martyrs, and be welcomed into Paradise.”
Col. Zarin signaled for the countdown to begin. “And now, if you will excuse me, I must make sure that all is in readiness. Don't worry. You will be quite safe here.” And then he got into a staff car and drove off, leaving the three of them quite alone.
“He's not coming back for us, is he?” asked Mlle. Derrida. Skorzeny looked at her. It was easy to forget that for all her haughty Gallic exterior, she was still little more than a girl.
“No,” said Amanda. “They mean for us to die out here in the desert. If these missiles launch, this will be one of the first places hit, you can count on that. We will be destroyed by our own friendly fire.”
“Some friends,” said Mlle. Derrida.
Amanda looked at Skorzeny. This time, she knew, there would be no rescue. So, at least, she was getting her wish. This would be the day that she saw him die. And if it came at the price of her own life, very well then. She had become exactly like him, a human being with nothing left to live for. But she had had something to live for, once, and that was a claim he would never be able to make. She hoped he would realize that as the flesh melted from his body in the intense heat of the strike that was sure to come. She hoped she lived long enough to see him die.
In the distance came the sound of something very much like gunfire. “What is it?” she asked.
Skorzeny had barely noticed. “This is a military base, Miss Harrington,” he said. “Men are armed on military bases. Sometimes shots are fired.”
Mlle. Derrida, who had been growing more and more agitated, now completely lost it. “I have had it,” she exclaimed, wheeling on Skorzeny and blistering his ears in French. “When you asked me to join you, I had no idea this is what you would lead me into. You promised me a life of glamour and wealth and instead I am a fugitive. You promised me travel and look where I am. In the middle of a desert, thousands of miles from home. You promised me that I would be witness to greatness and what do I see? A bitter, dirty old man. For shame, M. Skorzeny, for shame.”
And then she walked over to him and slapped his face.
 
 
Devlin and Maryam made their way on foot through the harsh terrain. The Iranians had successfully hidden the enrichment site at Qom for years, counting on a compliant IAEA to provide them cover. When its location was finally discovered by American intelligence, the Iranians immediately declared it, in order to defuse international criticism. Besides, they said, it was not fully operational at the time of its discovery, and under International Atomic Energy Agency rules, they needed only declare a new facility six months before it came online.
The intel maps Danny had provided led them through the base's lax defenses. Any attack would surely come from the skies, not from the land, and the Iranian guards were indolent. Even today, on this day, half of them were in the barracks, playing cards, until such time as an officer came by, and then they pretended to be hard at work, doing something or other.
The first thing they needed was weapons. He had brought none with him, figuring it would be safer that way; and besides, the one thing that was plentiful in the Arab and Muslim world was guns. Everybody had one.
The Revolutionary Guards were still armed mostly with Chinese versions of the venerable Russian AK-47. It was easy to see why. The Kalashnikov, or “Kalash,” the Russians called it, was practically indestructible and absolutely Third World–proof. It did not require the loving care that the highend American-made automatic weapons required. You could run a tank over it, sink it in water, bury it in mud, and the odds were better than even money that the damn thing would come up firing the first time you pulled the trigger.
They were in desert camo now, which Devlin had brought with him in his kit. There was no sign that anyone was looking for them, so when they encountered their first guards, surprise was on their side. Maryam took the first man down with her knife, while Devlin broke the neck of the second man before he had even to look behind him, and killed the third and last man with a blow that drove the nasal bone into the man's brain.
Neither of them said a thing. This was how they had met, back in Paris when Devlin was trailing Milverton. Some first date: Maryam was wounded in the firefight and Devlin had saved her life—not knowing who she was, or why she was tailing him and Milverton, but in awe of her skill and already in love with her. Maybe someday they could tell their kids about it, if they lived to have kids.
If she'd have kids with him.
The thought made him smile inwardly. He could hardly imagine a time when he'd be too old for this line of work, when he'd be chasing rug rats around the floor in Falls Church or Echo Park or in Paris or in South America or wherever the two of them decided was safe enough for them to settle, to cash out their bank accounts that the government was maintaining secretly for them and take the money and run.
But that day was coming and, if he wanted to see it, he'd better do his job.
“What have we got?”
She was going from body to body, taking the sidearms. “1911s. Beretta M9s.”
Good. The Colt M1911 had served the U.S. military well from its first issuance in 1911 to 1985, and there were still damn few soldiers who would want to be without one. It was almost as reliable as the AK-47, had major stopping power, and never let you down. “Take them all. The Berettas too.”
“Got 'em. Cartridges too.”
“Rifles?”
She forced open a cabinet. “AK's, M16's—oh, look, a Viper.”
“We'll take it. And the magazines.”
She handed it to him. It was fairly new—must have come from the black market in Iraq, where the Shias were engaged in a lively weapons trade on both sides of the porous border. “I love a one-stop shop. Now let's get going.”
They both switched on their secure communicators. He could see Danny's progress across the desert. That was the thing about those new Black Hawks: they were fast, they were radar-deflective, and if anybody saw them, they could pass for local. For those reasons, they would not be flying in formation; no one knew exactly how many of the Iranian army's helicopters were still operational, since the quality of maintenance had fallen off precipitously since the Revolution, so it was best not to have more than one or two together. Nevertheless, they would all be converging exactly at the rendezvous point at the appointed time.
All except one—Danny's, which would be flying into the teeth of the shitstorm to get them out and bring them all safely home. Him, Maryam, Danny, Amanda Harrington, and Mlle. Derrida, if possible. Emanuel Skorzeny was the only one without a ticket on this particular flight. He would be getting his ticket punched elsewhere, and Devlin would do the punching.
And now for the pièce de résistance.
 
ARE YOU READY?
 
This to Seelye, back in Maryland.
NICE OF YOU TO CHECK IN. HAVING FUN YET?
WISH YOU WERE HERE
RETARGETING COMMENCING NOW
YOU'RE SURE YOU'VE GOT IT?
BELGHAZI SINGS LIKE AN ANGEL. THE LASERS ARE OURS
AND THEY WON'T KNOW?
NOT UNTIL IT'S TOO LATE. GONNA BE A LOT OF RED
FACES IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE TOMORROW
CERN?
NEED TO KNOW AND THEY DON'T NEED TO KNOW FOR
NOW
WE'RE GOOD TO GO THEN. WISH ME LUCK
YOU DON'T NEED IT
HOW DO YOU KNOW?
BECAUSE I RAISED YOU RIGHT. LUCK HAS NOTHING TO
DO WITH IT.
SOMETIMES LUCK HAS EVERYTHING TO DO WITH IT. ASK
MY PARENTS
YOU WANT PAYBACK, THIS IS YOUR BIG CHANCE, SON.
TAKE IT. AND THAT'S AN ORDER
Devlin didn't know how to respond to that. So he didn't:
OVER AND OUT
“We're good to go,” he said. “Do we have a fix?”
She looked up from her handheld. “I've just pinged her locator. Coordinates coming through now . . . 34.94373 N and 50.76056 E.”
“Last thing.” This was something he was really looking forward to.
His computer was on and it was telling him everything it was telling the Iranians. It was also sending back a steady stream of audiovisual information to Fort Meade, to feed the Black Widow's insatiable maw. And it was doing something else....
Not just injecting the STUXNET virus. He had anticipated that and loaded it before he gave the machine to Maryam. Not simply taking out the entire command and control electronic systems that would allow Iran to launch its missiles against Israel or anywhere else. His laptop was also issuing abort and destruct orders for every single missile in the Iranian arsenal. And that included missiles with armed nuclear warheads.
Which was why Danny had to be right on the money. This whole area was going to be radioactive for a century if the Iranians were foolish enough to arm their warheads anywhere near Iranian airspace. And yet, he couldn't have them arming over Iraq or, worse, over Israel. They were going to have to blow them in Iran, before they armed. Qom was not his holy city, but it was a holy place to a billion people, and it was not his brief to destroy it.
It would be enough, for now, to show the Shias that the end times were not near, that Imam Mahdi was not coming out of his well—and that the men leading their nation to ruin had been lying to them all along. The Green Revolution had almost succeeded the last time; it would be hard to imagine it would not succeed this time.
Maryam was going to get her country back.
He sent the final set of instructions to the computer, which acknowledged and began issuing them. Like a swiftmoving virus, the new codes were already in the central bloodstream. The Iranian nuclear program was about to suffer a setback from which, he hoped, it would never recover.
“Okay,” he said, grabbing the Viper. “Let's do this.”
C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-EIGHT
New York City
The Virgin was still sinking in the sky. They didn't have much time left.
Wherever that son of a bitch Crankheit had put the suitcase nuke, they couldn't find it. They had torn the hospital apart, disrupted the routine, probably cost a couple of terminal patients their lives. Byrne certainly hoped not, but there was no way to tell.
There was a chapel in the hospital, one of those spare, nondenominational places where you could “worship” in some peace and quiet. He would have preferred a church—St. Malachy, in the Times Square area, would have been his choice, or St. Mike's over on Thirty-fourth Street, once Irish gangland's church of choice for first-class send-offs. Because, unless Washington did its job, or they did theirs, a grand send-off was what they were about to get.
Think, you dumb paddy bastard. Think . . .
No, the chapel was too antiseptic. He decided to face the music outside.
Slowly, he became aware that there was somebody standing beside him, and that somebody was his brother. “Hello, Tom,” he said. “Getting any lately?”
“Nothin' you don't know about.”
“Yeah, well, for a reporter she's not bad.”
“It's just business, Frankie. You know how it is with me. Always just business.”
He couldn't help himself. “Was it business with Mary Claire, too?” Mary Claire Byrne had been Frankie's wife, until the pressures and misery of being a cop's wife had finally gotten to her and driven her right into Tom's arms. But that was a long time ago.
“Let's forget about that, Frankie.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“What would Pop have thought about all this? You know. I mean 9/11 and the way the city's changed and now . . .” Tom looked up at the sky, “. . . this fucking thing.”
Frankie shook his head. “I don't think Pop would have been surprised by much.”
“Just that dirtbag who snuck up behind him and his partner and killed them. What was the name of his partner back in sixty-eight . . . ?”
“Rodriguez. Alfonso Rodriguez. New York was already changing back then, but what did we know? We were still just kids.”
Tom took out a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and offered one to his brother. Frankie started to shake his head, then accepted. What did it matter now? “Does it still bother you that we never got him? The bad guy, I mean.”
“What chance did we have? He was probably some junkie, got picked up a few days later on some bullshit B and E beef and got shivved in prison and we never heard about it.”
“Mom took it hard.”
“Let's not talk about Mom.”
“How is she?”
“Still alive. Rufus still checks in on her every day. She's old now, Tommy. Real old.” There was nothing more to say on that subject. “The kid who did this . . .”
“Who planted the bomb, you mean?” said Tom.
“Yeah. He was a born tunnel rat. In another life, he could have been a sandhog, done something useful. Got himself killed but good under the Central Park Reservoir. Buried your girlfriend up to her neck behind the Met. So I keep thinking . . . underground. That's where he felt comfortable. That's where he felt safe.”
Byrne turned to look back at the building. They were looking at the oldest part, the Metzger Pavilion, which had been built back in 1904, long after the hospital had changed its name from the Jews' Hospital in the City of New York and moved uptown from Chelsea. But Brunner's original building had long since been augmented by other wings and had even leaped Madison Avenue to connect up with the Icahn Medical Institute. Connected by . . .
“A tunnel,” said Frankie, tossing the cigarette away. “That's it—the tunnel under Madison.” He was moving now, almost running. Tom jumped up and followed him. “It's in the fucking tunnel, Tommy. That's where he took it. That's where he set it up. We thought he'd put it among the other radioactive devices, but he didn't care about that—the whole damn place shows up radioactive in overflights and nobody was going to be poking around down here with sensors. The bomb didn't need a power source because now we know what the power source is.” He stopped and looked up to the sky. The sight of the BVM looming over the Upper East Side was so remarkable that he didn't even have time to think about it. Later, perhaps; later.
The plans for the tunnel were already waiting for them when they hit the reception desk, running. A receptionist ripped them out of the printer and handed them both copies as they charged toward the Madison Avenue side of the complex.
“Here,” said Tom, pointing as he ran. “There's a couple of service bays, an electrical closet . . . a water main . . .”
“That's it. That's how he knew about the Central Park Reservoir, how to get into it. I wondered about that. Here was some fucking bumpkin from flyover land and he knows his way around the bowels of New York like a born sandhog. Well, this is where he started his exploration.”
They were in the tunnel now, running, two crazy Irish brothers, trying to save the whole damn city.
They found the entrance to the old main. The Reservoir had been the lifeline of Manhattan for decades, its water running down below the park and Fifth Avenue, all the way to Forty-second Street, where the Public Library now stood, but which in the nineteenth century had also been a reservoir, a great watershed enclosed by something that looked like it had time-traveled from the Egypt of the pharaohs.
That was New York for you. Even the dead past kept on affecting the living, the city that never slept and the city that never died.
“Not on my watch,” said Frankie Byrne as they burst through the door.
“Son of a bitch,” said Tom.
There it was. Just sitting there, unmolested, undiscovered. The nasty bastard had brought it here, in something that looked like a large duffel bag, unnoticed by anybody. Just another anonymous kid in a deliveryman's outfit, going about his business.
“Careful,” said Tom to his brother as Frankie picked the accursed thing up. Frankie could not remember the last time his brother had looked out for him.
“Little help here,” he said.
“Right.” Tom was on the phone to the bomb squad two seconds later.
“Where are you going to take it?” ask Frankie. He had slung it over his shoulder and together they were making their way up into the lobby of the Icahn building. The squad would be coming down Madison any second now.
He was puffing hard as they made the street. Was it his imagination or was the rate of descent speeding up? How much time did they have? Would it be enough? It would have to be.
And there, right on Madison Avenue, Captain Francis Byrne fell to his knees, blessed himself, and said a prayer to the Virgin—the real Virgin, not this apparition—to spare his city, spare his people, the good and the bad, the saints and the sinners, all the people of New York. That was his sworn duty as a police officer to protect them, but now he was asking a higher power. It didn't even matter whether there even was such a higher power, whether the Lady was as much a fantasy as any other religion's icons.
None of that mattered now. Because, at a moment like this, all he had was his faith, and it was his faith that was going to have to get him through.
The bomb truck was there. The bomb went inside it.
And then it was gone.
“Captain Byrne!”
Byrne unfolded his hands and looked across the street to see Principessa and a camera crew filming him. Ignoring the traffic, she dashed across Madison. “That was great,” she said. “The perfect image. ‘The Praying Detective.' In two hours, you'll be famous.”
Byrne took her by the arm. “Listen, Ms. Stanley, I don't want to be famous. I don't even want to be rich. I just want to be Captain Francis Byrne, the kid from Queens who does his job.”
“But—”
“But nothing. Kill it. You want the same shot, shoot your boyfriend over there. Nobody who knows him will ever believe it, but go ahead. He's already famous. He's the great Tom Byrne of the FBI and you know what publicity hounds those clowns are.”
“But—”
“But nothing. You want me to help you find this Archibald Grant, you'll do it. If not, no dice.”
Principessa thought for a moment, but only a moment. “Deal,” she said.
“You really got a jones for this Grant guy, don't you?” said Byrne. “Why?”
She had her answers all set and ready. “Because he's a fraud and the public has a right to know about it. Because he's arrogant, cold, aloof, and superior. Because he put me in my place in an off-the-record RAND lecture and made me look ridiculous.”
Byrne got it. “In other words,” he said, “you're crazy about him.”
She hadn't expected that. She pulled back a little. “Promise you won't tell your brother?” she said.
“Believe me, sweetheart, he already knows. And you know what—he doesn't care.”
“A real bastard, huh?”
“You don't know the half of it.”
“I know the whole of it. But I don't care.”
“That's what they all say—at first.”
He started to walk away. Whatever happened now, it was out of his hands. Either the government would stop the laser or it wouldn't. Either the bomb squad would defuse a nuclear bomb or it wouldn't. Either the sun would come out tomorrow, or it wouldn't.
She was following him down Madison now. “Will you call me?”
“No.”
“Why not? Don't you like me?”
What a chance this would be. Payback time for Mary Claire and everything else. “No.”
She had caught up to him now, as they were crossing Ninety-eighth Street. “Why not? Don't you find me attractive?”
“I'd have to be blind not to. And I'm not blind.”
“Then why not?”
“I try not to share with my brother.”
She stopped. So he had to. “Strictly business, then?”
Byrne stepped back so he could get a good eyeful of her. He'd seen her on television many times, especially now that she'd become a big star. Just about every guy he knew desired her. She was single and so was he. The department generally frowned on cops boinking the media, but he knew Matt would turn a blind eye to it. That was their deal, locked into it for life: a blind eye to everything except what absolutely, positively, could not be ignored or swept under the rug.
They'd been sweeping stuff under the rug ever since Matt put two .38 slugs in Enrique Marcon's head and then gave him four more in the body just for good measure. Just to make sure he was dead. Just to make him feel the pain that Rosa Montez had felt when Marcon ice-picked her to death. It had been frontier justice in Park Slope, and it had been real justice.
“Strictly business,” said Frankie. They shook hands.
Then Principessa leaned over and kissed him tenderly on the cheek.
In the sky, the image of the Virgin had stopped descending and was now fading rapidly. In a few moments, she would be gone forever.
And then Principessa's news van pulled up and she was gone and Francis Byrne was left to find his own way back downtown.
Story of his life.

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