Shock Warning

CHAPTER NINE

President John Edward Bilodeau Tyler looked at the latest poll numbers on his computer screen, then turned and reached for the fresh whiskey that Manuel Concepcion, his personal steward, always had ready for him. Especially these days.

“This fucking bitch.”

That would be Angela Hassett, the other party’s nominee. She’d been crowned in Kansas City, at their convention, her candidacy covered by the cable news networks as breathlessly as the Second Coming. The First Woman Major Party Candidate! The greatest orator since… since, well, the last one. Surprisingly feminine — hot, even — and yet as ruthless as any man. A ball breaker, as a matter of fact, and wasn’t that great? About time the boys got a taste of their own. Served them right for hundreds of years of male chauvinist piggery-pokery, to coin a word.

As for him, let him so much as take a swing at her and the enemedia immediately went into its protective crouch, deploying its legions of sycophants and feuilletonistas in her defense. A fixed fight would have been one thing, but a fixed fight in which the designated tomato can wasn’t even allowed to throw a fig-leaf punch was another. Now he knew what Robert Ryan must have felt like in The Set-Up, except at least he fought back. And look what happened to him. Reflexively, he glanced down at his right hand, to make sure it was still working.

There were just weeks to go before the election, he was behind by double digits, he couldn’t seem to lay a glove on her, and the country hated him even more today than it did in the aftermath of the Times Square disaster. He used to think his doofus predecessor was a moron, but now he was acquiring a strange new respect, as the media hacks liked to say. It was a match between a puncher and a boxer, and the boxer was kicking his ass. Still, all he needed was one punch, something to put the bitch on her butt, to teach the women that more than a century after the Nineteenth Amendment, if they wanted to play with the big boys, they had to be prepared for some broken bones and bloody noses.

He didn’t even have to ask Manuel for a refill, because, as always, it was always there. If he had to go into premature retirement, he had to figure out a way to take Manuel with him.

“Anything else, Mr. President?” asked Manuel.

“Better poll numbers?”

“I don’t think we have that, sir,” replied Manuel.

“A decent movie in the White House theater tonight?”

“You’ll have to ask Hollywood for that, sir,” said Manuel. “It’s above my pay grade.”

“Mine too,” mused Tyler.

In one smooth motion, Manuel slipped him a new glass and whisked away the empty. “Besides,” he said, “they’re all going to vote for her.”

Tyler grabbed the glass and downed the whole thing. “Don’t I know it,” he said. “And after all I’ve done for them. “No justice,” said Manuel.

“No peace,” finished Tyler. “Now, what do you want, besides getting me drunk?

“General Seelye is here to see you, sir.”

Tyler sighed. “Hasn’t he caused me enough trouble? After what’s happened, he’s lucky I haven’t fired his ass.”

“Maybe you should have, sir.”

“And look like an ungrateful sonofabitch who can’t or won’t defend his own people? What happened in New York wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t the NYPD’s fault. Hell, it wasn’t even the fault of those useless wankers at the Langley Home for Lost Boys. It was the Iranians’ fault — that bastard Kohanloo and that woman I let…” He caught himself. “Never mind. That’s classified.”

“Above my pay grade.”

“Correct. Now show General Seelye in. And bring me another drink. This one will be gone before you know it.”

Concepcion turned to leave. Tyler followed him to the door and opened it to admit Seelye. Then he noticed the refill was already on the Resolute desk. Good man, Concepcion.

“What is it, General?” he said.

“It’s important, Mr. President,” said the head of the National Security Agency.

“It had better be. Can’t you see there’s a war on and I’m losing it?”

“Yes, sir,” said Seelye. “May I sit down?”

Tyler waved him to a chair. “Give it to me straight.”

Seelye tossed a manila folder on Tyler’s coffee table. “These were taken by one of our operatives in Iran yesterday. Qom, to be exact.”

“We have operatives in Iran?” said the president, sarcastically. “Who knew?”

“Please look at the pictures, Mr. President.”

Gingerly, Tyler picked up the folder. He didn’t like it when Seelye called him “Mr. President.” It was too formal. It meant trouble.

A bunch of mustachioed men with their asses in the air. A big mosque. Clouds. Sky. “What am I looking at?” He had been handed pictures like these for years; in the middle of the eternal War on Terror, Muslim men at prayer or in rage were a staple of the morning intelligence briefing, just as they had been for his predecessor and would be for his successor. Make that, successors. For it would never be over until either the West brought down the hammer in most brutal, final way possible, or Islam submitted. And that, he knew, would never happen. Not until the Last Trump. This was a fight to the finish, even if only one side had figured that out.

Well, as the old saying went, better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. For months now, his political advisers had been advocating a bold stroke — something so dramatic that it changed the game overnight. The nuclear option, so to speak.

Except this time, it really was the nuclear option.

The October Surprise, for which Angela Hassett would have no answer, no reply, no comeback. Two days before the election, he had already decided, he would use the bomb on the Iranian nuclear facilities, as payback for the 1979 hostage crisis and for every other sin the Muslim world had visited upon the West and Israel since then. There was nothing to lose except the good opinion of the Europeans, and they couldn’t vote, and a world of rich Iranian votes in Los Angeles to gain.

Whatever jack-in-the-box Angela Hassett and her minions were planning on springing on him in October, it would be no match for his little gift to the American people.

After all, wasn’t freedom just another word for nothing left to lose?

“The sky,” sir,” General Seelye was saying. “Look at the sky.”

Maybe he should have fired Seelye after New York. Sure, his boy Devlin had cleaned up that mess, salvaged what was left of the city, taken down Kohanloo, and dealt with some other putz with a peripheral involvement — a kid about whom there had been repeated inquiries by that broad on the People’s News Network, who’d apparently had a run-in with him near the Metropolitan Museum. For Tyler’s money, she looked better in a wig, after that scalping she took, but what did he know? In any case, it had been a good career move, since Ms. Stanley was now anchoring the evening news on the highest-rated news network in the world.

“The sky, Mr. President.”

Very well, then, the sky. Tyler looked. Nothing. “What am I looking for?” he asked.

“Can’t you see it?”

What was this? Twenty Questions?

“See what?”

“The image, sir. The image.”

Tyler was still struggling.

“The face.”

Seelye’s right index finger landed on the photograph, pressing hard. “This face.”

Gently, Tyler moved Seelye’s finger, then his whole hand, aside. Looked hard… harder…

And then he saw it.

His first thought was that it was one of those Danish cartoons, the ones that had caused such consternation and mayhem among the Believers when they were published in some newspaper or other. The ones that had set off riots across the Muslim world, had caused the deaths of thousands and rained down a host of threats upon the West for the simple act of putting pen to paper.

Naturally, there was a host of fellow travelers who decried the cartoonists’ effrontery — their blasphemy — and more or less gave tacit, if not actual vocal, approval to the various assassination attempts that ensued. Always eager to be on the right side — that is to say, the anti-Western, anti-Judeo-Christian side — of any issue, the international loonies had howled like werewolves at the moon, a suicide cult eager for the dropping of the blade, preferably accompanied by shouts of “Allahu akbar.” God is the greatest.

Well, as far as Jeb Tyler was concerned, Dire Straits was the greatest, followed closely by Elvis, BeauSoleil, and his mother. And he’d be good and goddamned if a bunch of ragheads were going to tell him different. He was the fucking President of the United States, which meant that he was the last man on earth who had to adhere to the intellectual fascism known as political correctness.

And if it cost him the presidency, so be it.

“This?” he said. “Mohammed?”

“Mohammed, yes, sir,” replied Seelye. “Or somebody who looks very much like him.”

“A projection — like a searchlight. Hollywood does this sort of thing all the time. Look — up in the sky. It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s Batman. Or whatever.”

“It’s not Batman, sir. It’s Mohammed.”

“Call Spielberg and ask him how they did it.”

Seelye took a respectful step back. “They didn’t do it, sir,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Because it’s not a projection, Mr. President. At least not from earth.”

Tyler reached for his scotch and saw that the glass was empty, with no Manuel in sight. “What do you mean, it’s not a projection from earth? What the hell is it?”

“We don’t know. It appears to be some sort of holographic image, generated from space, creating the impression you can see here.”

Tyler took a closer look. Once you got past the denial your Western brain imposed upon the image, it was pretty clear: The image, floating in the clouds, was that of a bearded Arab man, his eyes blazing….

“We’ve compared the images to all known images of the Prophet—”

“I thought Islam brooked no representations of their so-called ‘prophet,’ ” said Tyler.

“Not a hard-and-fast rule, sir,” said Seelye. “In the first few hundred years of Islam, pictures of Mohammed abounded, especially in Iran. Remember, sir, Iran has a rich cultural history that antedates the Arab conquest… ”

“Worst thing that ever happened to them,” mused Tyler.

“Why couldn’t they be more like the Indians? Why didn’t they fight back?”

Seelye was in no mood for a history lesson, but the timely application of one never hurt. “Because the Indians had Hindusim,” he explained. “Some of them converted, mostly by the sword, which is where Pakistan comes from. But Persian Zoroastrianism could not withstand the onslaught. And here we are.”

“With Islam.”

“Yes, sir. No, sir. With Shiite Islam. With a kind of imitation of Jewish and Christian eschatology.”

“What?” Tyler didn’t like big words. Big numbers, that was different.

“Eschatology, sir. The end times. Jews and Christians, as you know, believe in the Messiah. The Moshiach. For the Christians, He has already come; the Jews are still waiting, having had many false messiahs along the way. In fact, there was one in Brooklyn a few years ago… ”

“Forget Brooklyn,” snapped Tyler. “Get to the point. What about the Shiites?”

Seelye thought for a moment, wondering how best to proceed. “That would be the Twelfth Imam, sir,” he said. “Whose current residence is down a well in Qom. Where these pictures just happen to have been taken. The city, I mean. Not the well.”

Seelye tossed another manila envelope to the president. “Go ahead, take a look.”

This time the pictures were clearer. Color, not black and white. Clearly of the sky, although the sky was seen in reverse-image, deep-night black when it should have been blindingly blue, the sun a gaping black hole surrounded by a corona. Inside the hole was an illuminated rectangle, in which he could just make out—

“What the hell is this?” barked Tyler.

“I don’t know, Mr. President,” admitted Seelye.

“Then who does? Who took these pictures?” As Tyler stared more closely, he could see the outline of a figure — female, it seemed to him, beckoning….

The head of the National Security Agency took a deep breath. A very deep breath. “Devlin, sir,” he admitted.

That was all Tyler needed to hear. “I thought you fired his ass,” he said. “In lieu of killing him, I mean. After all, the man is a traitor.”

“We don’t know that for sure, Mr. President,” said Seelye.

“Terrific,” said Tyler, rising to signal that the meeting was over. “And where is he now?”

“In Los Angeles, sir,” replied Seelye, also rising and gathering up the folders. “On administrative leave, as you ordered once we intercepted—”

Wrong thing to say. The famous Jeb Tyler volcano was just about the spew molten lava. “Where is she? I want her found or dead, and preferably both.”

“We’re not sure, Mr. President,” said Seelye, backing away like a bonze in the Forbidden City circa 1800. “Working on it.”

Tyler took a final swig of the dregs of his empty glass. “Where in Los Angeles?”

Seelye took a last look at the final picture in the L.A. series before shoving it into the folder. “From the looks of things,” he said, “communing with the Virgin Mary.”

His secure communicator buzzed. Normally, he shut everything off and down before entering the Oval Office, but the old norms no longer applied. Everyone who mattered was available 25-7, to distinguish from the peons who were only available 24-7. It was a world in which privacy had died and the First Amendment had been repealed and nobody knew it and nobody had voted on it and nobody cared. The NSA had gone from No Such Agency to the nation’s snooping nanny, reading everybody’s private e-mails in the name of national security, seeing every teenage girl’s Sweet Sixteen topless party pictures in the name of national security, every psycho’s threats, every nutsack’s nocturnal emissions.

In the future, everybody will be notorious for fifteen seconds. And fucked for life.

Did somebody say fucked?

“Mr. President,” began Seelye, “I think you’d better have a look at this. Sending to you now, sir… ”

It was against protocol, sending something from a wireless device to an Oval Office computer, but under the circumstances it didn’t matter. Not only was this a matter of national security, it was a matter of presidential reelection: an October Surprise that this president would want to know about.

Something chimed softly on the President’s computer screen, incoming.

“On your screen, Mr. President,” said Seelye. “Highest security level and FYEO.”

For Your Eyes Only. No fucking around with mere SCI — Sensitive Compartmented Information. This had to go right to the top. Who, as it happened, was sitting right across from him.

Tyler was already punching buttons. For a president, Seelye had to admit, he wasn’t quite a complete idiot.

“Do you have it?”

“I think so, yes…” More button-punching. “Cows.”

“Dead.”

“All of them.”

“A vegan’s wet dream, yes sir. Fruit-bat paradise: no more meat.”

“Your words, sir, not mine.”

Tyler slide-showed the photos. Rows upon rows, ranks upon ranks of dead cows. “Who sent these?”

“One of Devlin’s ops, sir.”

“Name?”

“We don’t know. He’s Devlin’s man. You know the drill.”

Mount Tyler seethed for a moment, then subsided. “I can’t have a possible traitor operating a private army, General Seelye. I simply can’t have it.”

“Devlin’s in California, sir. In exile. As per your wishes.” A pause. “Perhaps you’d like to recall him, send him up north. What have we got to lose?”

Tyler shot Seelye a glance. “The presidency?”

“Paris is worth a Mass, Mr. President.”

“Go to hell.”

“I’d rather go to Paris, if it’s all the same to you, sir. After all, if you’re going to fire me…”

The volcano finally exploded. Tyler picked up the monitor and hurled it across the room. In the old days of computer monitors, it might have exploded in a shower of sparks; today’s monitors simply guttered like dead candles and went out. Everything was a metaphor these days.

Seelye waited a decent interval. “… if you’re going to fire me, it ought to be over something important. Human life or death — the kind of thing that wins elections. Dead cows — we can handle that.”

Tyler was settling down. “But what do they mean? What do those pictures mean? What the hell is going on?”

It was time to leave and get to back to work. “Three choices, sir,” said Seelye. “One, happenstance. Two, coincidence. Three, enemy action. Me, I’m for number three.”

Tyler smiled. “You know your James Bond, Director Seelye.” At last, his real title; he’d never advance as a general again, so DIRNSA was as far as he was ever going to go. “So… Devlin?”

“Only you can bring him back. But let me tell you something, sir — if you don’t you won’t be sitting in this office for very much longer. You and I both know there’s a link between whatever the Iranians are up to and what’s happening in Central California.”

“What do you recommend?”

“Have Secretary Colangelo order immediate DHS lockdown on the reservoirs, Hetch Hetchy, L.A. Water and Power, everything. In case it’s poison.”

The idea of getting Homeland Security involved did not thrill him. He had zero confidence in the cumbersome, useless bureaucracy’s ability to get anything done and wished to God he had the political capital to get rid of the whole damn thing. Maybe after he won the next election… If he won the next election. “Then what?”

“Get Devlin. And pray.”

Tyler looked at Seelye for a long moment, then nodded his head: dismissed. The general said nothing as he left the room, leaving the president deep in thought. After a decent interval, Tyler pressed the buzzer under the Resolute.

After an indecent interval, Manuel Concepcion appeared in the doorway. “You rang, Mr. President?”

The scotch was already on the silver tray.

“Am I as dumb as I look? Wait — don’t answer that.”

Too late — the words were already out of Manuel’s mouth. “No, sir.”

Tyler thought for a moment, then smiled. “Good answer,” he said, reaching for the fresh drink.

His private phone line buzzed — that would be Millie Dhouri, his secretary. “What is it?” he barked, a little more loudly than necessary. Better slow down on the scotch.

“Major Atwater to see you, sir,” she said. “He says it’s extremely urgent.”

President Tyler had the drink halfway to his mouth, then set it back down. If anybody knew what the hell was going on, it was Atwater. The man was dutiful and smart; if he’d decided to buck the chain of command by coming directly to the White House, it must be pretty damned important. Otherwise, it was Atwater’s ass, but he knew that already.

Tyler liked moxie. And when you were as fucked as he was, what harm could it do? He glanced over at Manuel, who had gone into statue mode. No help there. He was on his own.

“Send him in, Millie,” he said.

The door opened. The major stood in the doorway, holding a salute.

“At ease, Major,” said Tyler. “Come in.”

The President rose to greet the analyst. The man had done good work, that he knew, cracking one of the famous unbreakable codes — something to do with classical music, which Tyler couldn’t even pretend to understand. He gestured to an empty chair. “Sit down, Major. Drink?”

“Yes, sir. No thank you, sir.”

“Sure about that?” asked Tyler. “You’ve come in here, elided your chain of command, barely just missed seeing your boss, so what you have to tell me is obviously pretty damn important and for my eyes only, so if I were you I’d have me a stiff one because I know I only got one chance to make my case and if I don’t I’ve just kissed my career good-bye.”

Atwater eyed the president’s whiskey. “No, thank you, Mr. President,” he replied.

Tyler grabbed the drink and handed it to him. “Drink this. And that’s an order from your commander in chief.”

Atwater picked up the drink. “Down the hatch,” ordered Tyler. And down the hatch it went. “Feel better now, son?”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“Now get to it.”

Atwater took a deep breath. The fellow had balls, Tyler had to give him that.

“The codes,” he began. “The ones Director Seelye asked me to interpret.”

“And so you did, especially that, whattyacallit one, the Elgar thing.”

“The Dorabella cipher, yes sir. Not a code at all but a blueprint. That was the clue that gave the whole thing away. I’m sorry that I didn’t see that until just now, Mr. President.”

Tyler had no idea what the man was talking about, or why, if this was some inside-baseball code discussion, he didn’t take it up with Seelye or some other NSA geek. Before he could say anything, Atwater was banging away again.

“Here they are, sir — notes that came in via e-mail directly to the DIRNSA’s classified inbox. Each one alludes to a famous code, either in literature or reality. The first one reads, ‘DIRNSA Seelye — What are the Thirty-Nine Steps?’ ”

“ ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps is an organization of spies,’ ” quoted Tyler from memory.

“Right, sir, the Hitchcock movie. But that line’s not in the book — in Buchan’s book, the steps are just that: steps. They have nothing to do with an organization of spies. It’s a clue — not to the code but to the sender’s intent. You see what I’m getting at?”

Tyler’s expression told him he didn’t.

“It’s a signal from the sender that we’re not to take the codes literally, but figuratively. Steps. In other words, taken together, they are sending us one big message. So let’s look at the next one. ‘To Lt. General Armond Seelye or To Whom It May Concern, Edgar Allan POE. (signed) the Magician.’ ”

Tyler decided he might as well play along. “What the hell does that one mean?”

Atwater looked the President right in the eye. “Well, this one tells us that the overall message is really for you, sir — which is why I took the liberty of coming directly to you about it. You see, back in 1839, Poe published a couple of cryptograms as a challenge to his readers. The first was deciphered fairly quickly — it was a basic substitution cipher — but the second had to wait for nearly one hundred fifty years and the advent of computer technology. It was a doozy; the letter e alone had fourteen variants… ”

“Get to the point, Major.”

“Right. So the point is, the cipher was eventually cracked and it turned out to be just crummy poetry, but it’s not so much the codes as the name under which Poe published them: W. B. Tyler. We think Poe did that to annoy President John Tyler, who had ignored his entreaties for a government job.”

“What’s ‘the Magician’ got to do with it?” asked the President.

“Ah, that — that comes from a line this ‘Tyler’ wrote in submitting the ciphers, in which he said that the art of concealment by cryptography gave him ‘a history of mental existence, to which I may turn, and in imagination, retrace former pleasures, and again live through bygone scenes — secure in the conviction that the magic scroll has a tale for my eye alone.’ ”

“So it’s a threat?”

“Yes, sir. I believe it is, sir… Shall I continue?

Tyler nodded.

“The third one everybody knows: ‘UG RMK CSXH-MUFMKB TOXG CMVATLUIV.’ That’s the substitution cipher from Dorothy L. Sayers’s book Have His Carcase, and it means ‘We are discovered. Save yourself.’ Has to do with lovers, I believe. You see where we’re headed?”

It was clear that the President was still evaluating the veiled threat, so Atwater plunged ahead:

“The numbers—317, 8, 92, 73, 112, 79, 67, 318, 28, 96, 107, 41, 631, 78, 146, 397, 118, 98, 114—well, they’re the Beale cipher, the one that was deciphered. This one’s a double whammy — the Beale Cipher refers to a still-unlocated buried treasure somewhere in Virginia, which picks up the Poe theme, since Poe’s most famous exercise in cryptography, “The Gold-Bug,” also has to do with buried treasure. But the key to deciphering Beale Cipher No. 2 turned out to be the Declaration of Independence.”

“Which brings the whole plot right back to this office,” said Tyler.

“Not quite. Because while the sender is obviously obsessed with exacting some sort of revenge upon you and the United States government, he’s also consumed with sexual jealousy. We see that in the Sayers quote and even more transparently in the Dorabella cipher, which as you know I may modestly say that—”

“You broke it.”

“Not by breaking it, but understanding what its true nature was: a blueprint for something else.”

“Let me see that damn thing again,” said Tyler.

Eighty-seven characters, squiggles based on the letter E, arranged in three rows:

“So that’s what love looks like,” he muttered. “And the last one?”

Atwater brightened. He may have been discussing matters of crucial national importance, but he was still a code breaker, and this was his finest hour. “ ‘Masterman. XX.’ The overt reference is to the British practice of doubling captured German spies during World War Two and using them for disinformational purposes. The Roman numerals stand for the Committee of Twenty, which was run by Cecil Masterman. But, sir, I think as you can now see, they have a more sinister significance… ”

“Death,” said Tyler. “Twin Xs, negating everything that has gone before. A double cross…”

Atwater was impressed — Tyler really was as quick a study as his reputation suggested. Maybe that was why he was president, and Atwater was not.

“Very good, Mr. President, and not only that… look, it’s really quite ingenious. The final clue refers back to the first one, to The Thirty-Nine Steps, both wartime references to German spies. Our correspondent is a creative artist in his own right, a man of immense wealth — that’s what the double image of buried treasure signifies — and one with a tremendous animus toward our country and to you, and also one who is severely suffering in love. This is a very angry man, Mr. President, and an extremely dangerous one.”

Tyler had never been more ready for another drink in his life. “So he’s closing the circle. Wrapping things up. You missed that, Major Atwater, didn’t you? There’s a ticking clock here, the sands on the hourglass are running out. That’s also what the two Xs mean — time’s up, show’s over, the end. All he needs is one more X. Oh Jesus — that’s it!”

“What’s ‘it,’ Mr. President?”

Tyler threw an arm around Atwater’s shoulder as he walked him to the door. “Son,” he said, “have you ever heard of an October Surprise? Well, unless you boys do your job, we’re in for a hell of a big one.”

Manuel appeared. Tyler took the libation, but not before he had shouted to Ms. Dhouri, “Get General Seelye and Secretary of Defense Johnson in here, on the double.”

Then he had his drink.