Early Warning

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Geneva, Switzerland

Skorzeny’s car was waiting for them as they disembarked in Geneva. Switzerland being neutral, and there being no actual warrant for his arrest, just an informal understanding between that rotter, Tyler, and countries with which the United States had an extradition treaty, they were free to enter. Switzerland would turn a blind eye to his presence in the country, just long enough for him to do what he had to do, make a substantial deposit in one of the banks, and be on his way.

Geneva was the most French of Swiss cities, which meant that despite its proximity to the French border, it was not French at all. It didn’t matter whether the Swiss spoke French, Italian, Romansch, or German, at their heart they remained Swiss-insular at the top of their mountains, clannish despite their linguistic divisions, and dedicated solely to the proposition that making money and keeping it hidden was the highest goal of life.

Skorzeny’s eyes roamed over the city as they approached. Here and there, a mosque caught his eye, and although the Swiss had recently voted to outlaw the construction of any more minarets, which they rightly deemed emblematic of the coming Islamic supremacy, he knew there would be more coming. Like some poor hypnotized creature facing down a cobra, the West had lost the will to resist its centuries-old challenger, and even here, in the very heart of rational, Calvinist, capitalist Europe, the green shoots of the coming caliphate were everywhere in evidence.

“You still haven’t answered my question,” he reminded Amanda. Wearing a fashionable black dress that extended just below the knee, she was sitting as close to him as politically necessary and as far away as propriety allowed.

Even though she was used to reading his mind, Amanda had no idea what he was talking about. “Mr. Skorzeny?” she said.

He shot her a look of annoyance, as if she had somehow let him down. And after what he’d done to her. But in her heart she knew he would not see it that way at all. A man as rich as he was could afford to indulge his sociopathy, all the while telling himself that it was his very love for humanity that made him hate people so. “About God, I mean.”

She was hoping he’d forgotten, but the old reptile never forgot anything. Should he be incapacitated, chained to a gurney, his limbs cut off, his malevolent memory would machinate on, until the day the darkness he so passionately believed in but just as passionately tried to avoid finally descended. “I’m sure we’ve had this conversation before, Mr. Skorzeny,” she dodged.

“If we have, I cannot recall it.”

“Mr. Skorzeny-”

“Your former lover, the late Mr. Milverton, was an atheist.”

He always knew to put her at a disadvantage, how to wound her. “I believe that had something to do with the way he was raised, sir,” she replied.

“Whereas I have come by my skepticism independently-is that what you are saying, Miss Harrington?”

“I’m sure I don’t know, sir.”

“What do you know about the Higgs boson?”

She expected anything from Skorzeny, but this query caught her by surprise. “Sir?”

“I think I speak English passably well, Miss Harrington. So please answer my question.”

“Higgs boson, sir?”

“Despite my advancing years, I am not deaf, madam.”

Amanda decided to rewind the conversation to more secure ground. She could not hope to compete with him here, in the stratosphere of his psychosis. “Mr. Skorzeny, all I know about your background-”

“I have told you. Which is all you need to know. So, what is your answer?”

She never thought she would miss the icy M. Pilier. He had borne the brunt of Skorzeny’s endless insane questions. She wondered what had become of him, but “no longer in service to us,” was about all she could pry out of Skorzeny. He probably said that about all the dead people in his life. Somehow, just looking at him, she knew he had had a lot of experience with dead people. What was his family like? What sort of people, no matter what the provocation, could have produced this monster?

“I’m not sure I can give you one at this moment, Mr. Skorzeny,” she replied.

“Which is why, Miss Harrington,” he said, twisting the knife, “most likely you are childless at this moment. Because, were you not a charter member of your generation’s suicide cult, you’d have five by now.”

She felt herself reddening. “Sir?”

“Don’t by coy with me, Miss Harrington, you know perfectly well what I mean. You know that if you truly believed in your country, in your culture, in yourself, and in your future, you’d have done what every other woman since Eve has done: have a child. Invest in the future. Have a stake in the benefits you demand of your government. Have some skin in the game.”

“Mr. Skorzeny-”

“But no.” He spat out his words with contempt. “But no, you cannot even be bothered to do that. A moment of pleasure, nine months of pain and the work ’twere done. That the next generation might live.”

“Sir! I really must pro-”

“But you won’t even give it that chance. Instead, you deny it life, or should it be conceived by some unhappy circumstance after a night of liquor and concupiscence, you throttle it-not in its cradle, like Hercules-but in your dark womb, where sins go unpunished and heroes die unborn.”

Amanda felt a wave of murderous hostility wash over her. If she could have plunged a knife into his dark heart, she would have, though it cost her her life. If, like some character from a movie, she could have taken any weapon to hand-a champagne flute, a pair of eyeglasses, a pencil-and gouged out his eyes, she would have. But she could do nothing. She had to sit there, take it, and pretend to like it.

“Allow me to make myself quite clear, Miss Harrington as, at the moment, you are the only person, it seems, whom I can trust in this deceitful and slanderous world.”

“Yes, sir.” Might as well encourage him. “Please do, that I might better understand.”

He smiled that reptilian smile of his, the smile she had learned so well, the same smile that creased his unholy visage even when he was making love to her.

“Making love.” The very thought nauseated her. To him, she was nothing but chattel, a piece of ass masquerading as a piece of property, just as she had been on that day at the Savoy Hotel. She, one of the most recognizable and accomplished women in the City of London, reduced to the state of a Soho drab in one horrifying encounter. For which she would never forgive him. The fact that he didn’t realize that was his weakness, his Achilles’ heel.

But she did. And that was all that mattered. That realization, that knowledge, was her weapon against him. And by God, she would wield it, even though it took her last breath.

He had killed the only man she had ever loved. Killed him as surely as if he had killed him himself. Killed him by sending him up against the one man in the world he could not defeat, although his pride would never allow him to admit that. Killed him by forcing a face-off between them, even though he himself was hundreds of miles away, safe in his lair, with her paralyzed from the drug he had given her.

Killed him. A murder for which she would now have her revenge.

“The Higgs boson, sir?” she said, doing her best to steer the conversation back to its original topic. But Skorzeny would have none of her gambit. Instead, he focused his basilisk gaze out the window, at a group of buildings looming in the near distance.

“Do you know what drives me, Amanda?” he asked. It was the first time he had ever used her Christian name that she could remember. He, who hated Christianity, and Judaism, and Islam, and all the world’s great religions, with a dispassionate, egalitarian, tolerant hatred that swept all before it, stooping to use a Christian name. Emanuel Skorzeny was the one man in the world who could profess tolerance, and then murder in its name.

Destroy the world, in fact, all in the name of his senseless revenge.

“No, sir, I’m sure I do not,” she replied evenly. That was a lie. She had plenty of ideas, notions, about what drove him; even from the limited personal information he had imparted to her over the years that she had run his Skorzeny Foundation. His animus against the world knew no bounds. He would either be its master or nothing; he would not be God’s madman. Which is why he hated God so much, and so personally.

“Because of the Higgs boson, of course,” he replied, as if it were the most obvious answer in the world. “Because of the Higgs boson-not just the secret to life itself, no. Much more important than that-the secret to the origins of the universe. Not just our life, but life everywhere-anywhere.”

“I’m not sure I follow you, sir,” she said. They had entered the city proper now and were speeding toward their destination. Their trip would be very short, just long enough for Skorzeny to ascertain the information he required, and then they would be back across the border to France, in the plane, and off again. These days, even the Swiss could not be trusted: the Americans had put so much pressure that even the Bahnhofstrasse lawyers thought twice before routinely falsifying information that might be used in a court of law against them.

“It’s very simple,” he said. “So simple that even a girl child could understand my subtext, I am surprised and disappointed that you do not.”

“I will try not to disappoint in the future,” she said.

“As you have in the past.”

“An aberration, sir,” she said, hoping not to let her dual loyalties show.

“There are no aberrations, Miss Harrington,” he said.

They rode in silence for a while, until at last a cluster of buildings presented itself to the west. They were nearly on the French border now, having doubled back almost to where they had started, but security was security, and Emanuel Skorzeny owned France.

“No aberrations. Everything is planned, thought out, organized. In a rational universe, that is. The kind of world and place you believe in. This is why your lot clings to your religions, or should I say your superstitions, because they are comforting and because they give you solace in your last, agonizing moments.”

“What about you, sir?” Amanda ventured. “Don’t you long for the solace of the afterlife?”

“A child’s fantasy, and a bad novelist’s fiction,” he retorted sharply. “Had you seen what I have seen, had you experienced what I have experienced, had you been through what I have been through, you would never hazard such an absurd notion.” He settled back into his leather seat. “Really, my dear, you disappoint me.”

“I try not to, sir,” she said, thinking furiously. Where was this conversation going? What point was he trying to make? Amanda Harrington had been with Emanuel Skorzeny long enough to know that he never asked a question to which either he already knew the answer or genuinely wanted to know the truth. The problem was telling the questions apart.

“You do,” he said with finality. “And have, repeatedly. Nevertheless, I have forgiven you, despite everything.”

That was the opening she had been waiting for. The lust that still coursed through the man’s veins, no matter his age. Long ago she had learned the truth of the axiom that, at heart, every man was eighteen years old, no matter what the birth certificate said, and that when and if women ever learned that simple truth, the world was theirs. He had raped her once before, on that horrible day at the Savoy in London, and not only would it never happen again, but she would have her vengeance.

“Thank you, Mr. Skorzeny,” she said.

He glanced at her across the plush leather seats of the car’s interior.

“Sir?”

“You have more to say.”

“I’m sure I don’t sir.” At times like this, she adopted the tone and the language of an aggrieved Victorian heroine. She had been born in the wrong century, of that she was sure. The only question now-far more pressing than any of Skorzeny’s queries about money-was what she was going to do about it.

“Then I do.”

She breathed a small sigh of relief. Baton passed. All she had to do now was listen. Which is exactly what she got paid to do.

“Allow me to extend and amplify.”

“Please do, sir,” she said. They were only minutes away from their destination, but at least this exegesis would likely take up most or all of the time.

Skorzeny yawned and stretched, as if he had given this same speech a thousand times before, in hundreds of different situations, to dozens of people. It was like talking to God, if God had no conscience.

“Do you know the Credo?” he asked.

“Credo in Unum Deum,” she dutifully recited, good Anglo-Catholic girl that she once had been. Meaningless words, yet words that had once motivated not just a country but a culture, had called to war millions of men who charged off to die in the trenches of the Somme. Who would die for the Creed today?

It was uncanny, how he could read her thoughts. “No one believes such a thing anymore,” he said. “Meaningless drivel, mumbo-jumbo, hocus-pocus.

Amanda forced herself to pay attention to his lecture, for she knew from long experience that he was going somewhere with it.

“And yet, it’s deceptively simple, isn’t it? Does evil need a purpose, an object of its animus, in order to exist? Or can it simply be? Iago believes in God, but in a cruel God, crueler than the Allah of the Mohammedans, and he understands and embraces the notion that, because he is a man in the image and likeness of God, he is also diabolical: ‘I am evil because I am a man.’”

Here it came: “I could well say the same thing about myself. Oh, I don’t consider myself evil, certainly not in the accepted understanding of the world. What I am trying to do, the grand project of my life upon which I am irrevocably embarked, would not be understood by most of the world’s population. But I am, in my own way, an artist as great as Shakespeare. And do you know why, Miss Harrington?”

He turned to her, and she saw what she always saw in his eyes: greed, hatred, lust and, behind those deadly sins, a vast soulless emptiness. “No, sir,” she said.

“Because I am going to destroy them. They thought that through their art they could approach God, but they were fools, and mortal fools as that, dust; to say they live on through their plays and their music is laughable. They are as dead as your former lover. And to them I am going to write finis.” He gestured out the widow at the city. “I am going to destroy all this because the amateur Iagos who live here are not worthy of it. They have sold their birthright to men like me, not for a mess of pottage but for something even meaner: the illusion of security. They have turned their backs on God just as I approach Him. And here is where He is currently living.”

The car slowed as they approached their destination: the CERN laboratory. The location of the Large Hadron Collider. Where the Higgs boson-the “God particle”-either would or would not be found. Where, if this madman was to be believed, the fate of the world would be decided in some way that she could not understand.

“What must He think of His creatures,” said Skorzeny, his tone taunting. “They replicate Hell on earth and answer evil with evil. All Europe has become a suicide cult of relativism, of an unshakeable belief in nothing besides the self. It is a culture that has turned its back on its culture, a world of perpetual, petulant, resentful adolescence, a world in which young women have been taught that it is virtuous for them to kill their own unborn children. Is that sophistication? Or is it savagery?”

He glanced over at her. “And as I know how much you want a child, I think I also know your answer to my question.”

It was everything she could do, took every ounce of self-control for Amanda Harrington not to explode, not to tear his hair out by the roots and gouge out his eyes. Then the famous Ice Maiden once again took control.

All her life she had pursued money to the exclusion of almost everything else, including love and children, and for a time she had been one of the richest women in London. Thanks to the lust to become even richer, she had signed on with the Skorzeny Foundation, of which she was still the nominal head, but what a Faustian bargain that had turned out to be. She had lost both the love she had found and, however briefly, the only child she had ever known-his gift. And now, looking at this thing, who had all the money in the world, however temporarily damaged financially by his first active foray into attacking America, she could feel only revulsion for what she had been, and what she had once hoped to become. At the moment, Amanda Harrington knew the cause to which she would henceforth devote the rest of her life-however long that would prove to be.

Just enough time left to think before she was once again caught up in whatever mad scheme had taken his fancy. But she had this to thank him for: after nine long months, her mind was clear now. She knew who he was and, more important, she knew who she was. Her man was dead. Her child was gone. From this moment henceforth, she was no longer Amanda Harrington of No. 4, Kensington Park Gardens, London.

She was the Black Widow. And she would have her vengeance.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

In the air-Maryam

Good-byes were for fools and women who read romance novels. In the real word, there were no good-byes. Not in the life they had chosen. You parted and that was that. The rest was for the future, and to no woman was the future vouchsafed.

She’d be in Budapest in eight hours, maybe less if the tail-winds increased in speed. She needed all the luck she could get, because she had to pick up Skorzeny’s trail fast. What she was learning was very disturbing, in ways she didn’t quite know how to express at this point.

CSS had picked up Skorzeny in Switzerland, upon entry. That was the beauty of electronic surveillance: it didn’t matter how much money you had, in any civilized country you would be photographed at a hundred different locations before you could go to ground. No matter how secure your bolt-hole, there was always a camera to catch you unawares, no matter your level of situational awareness-and Skorzeny’s was preternatural. The international system as monitored at Fort Meade had evolved far beyond Echelon, to the point where the images could be read practically in real time; as long as there was one authoritative photograph, age almost irrelevant, the Black Widow could project and track just about any version of you-older, younger, with hair and without-that disguises or plastic surgery could create. In a world dedicated to personal freedom, every citizen was now on file.

The internal contradictions of the Western capitalist system did not concern Maryam at the moment. Using Devlin’s equipment, much of which he had himself designed, she was busily bringing herself up to speed on every move Skorzeny had made since he entered Western ken. She knew that under his take-it-or-leave-it arrangement with Tyler, he was not supposed to be anywhere near a country with an extradition treaty with the United States. So there was something in Geneva that was worth risking however brief a visit he was planning to make. Something so important that he would risk his freedom and what was left of his financial empire for it.

He was, of course, with a woman, and Maryam knew exactly who she was. She was the women she’d seen in the prison at Clairvaux, at Skorzeny’s macabre private concert, the woman with whom she’d made eye contact just before the performance had begun. Their eyes had met as enemies, but also as sisters, and in a flash Maryam had realized that Amanda Harrington could not move, could not speak, could barely even see, that she was a prisoner of Emanuel Skorzeny as surely as all the men at Clairvaux were prisoners of the French government.

And now she was here, with Skorzeny again, apparently of her own volition. That, Maryam was sure, was impossible. She had not been privy to all the details of the Skorzeny operation, having been brought on board to Branch 4 by Devlin after it was over, after the girl was rescued and after she shot the rifleman whose name she never learned, the man firing at the helicopter. As for what had happened in London, she didn’t want to know. All she knew, and all she cared to know, was that her lover had come back to her wounded but alive, and with a burning desire to finish the job. He was, after all, a professional. Just like her.

It took Maryam all of five minutes to realize what Skorzeny was up to: the last shot of him was entering the secure area at CERN-the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire. That was where this whole thing had started, she realized, in Budapest, with Farid Belghazi. Something big was going on at CERN, but for the life of her she couldn’t imagine what it was.

Because, according to just about everybody, the place was a near-failure. Every time they’d started up the Collider, in an attempt to duplicate the conditions under which the Big Bang might have started the universe, it had failed. Once it had even been brought down by a bird, which had dropped something down the shaft. And now it was down for at least another year. It was almost as if God himself was trying to prevent the damn thing from working.

Maryam found herself fascinated with the history of the Collider. Her life up until now had not exactly revolved around science at this level, both technical and conceptual. The intricacies did not concern her. But the search for the origins of life, of existence, of the universe itself-that was something every human being could get behind. That was something every human being had wondered about since the dawn of time, when man first looked to the heavens and realized there was something out there, something bigger than himself, something full of wonder and majesty and mystery. Something infinite.

And now, here in the century of ascendent science, the age-old religious questions were being asked once more. Indeed, it seemed that the more science declared that the research was settled, that the questioning was over, and that all questions had been answered, the more people sought and questioned. Real science, of course, never really settled anything: Newtonian physics, as settled as anything ever could be, held sway for several centuries, and gave way to Einstein; in time, Einstein himself would be succeeded by something and somebody else. That was the course of history.

Only religion refused to ask. Only religion claimed the answers, infallibly. The problem was: which one was right? First-hand, she had seen the result of a religious state, one in which all questions had long ago been settled by the force of dogma. And not just Islam: all over the world, the Third World variants of European Christianity were awash in signs and wonders, mysterious apparitions. Whether they were Twelfthers, like the regime in Iran, or Marianists, who believed the Virgin Mary was appearing to them in places as disparate as California City, California, and Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina, or poor Mexican women who saw Jesus’s face in a taco, or in a salt stain on a freeway underpass, they all had one thing in common: they believed.

And they had no need for the Large Hadron Collider.

No amount of computer linkage-and the Collider was not only linked to its own banks of computers but powered data to mainframes, desktops, laptops, and even netbooks all over the world, connected in much the same way that the SETI tapped underutilized, even dormant computing power on teenage boys’s laptops all over the world to analyze data. The teenagers wanted to be a part of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, but many of the Hadron computers were unwitting zombies, drawn over to the dark side in the search for something far more important than life in outer space. This search was for the origins of the universe and, if possible, for the “God Particle”-the Higgs Boson.

The last time he had tried an EMP, it was delivered by weather balloon. That had had a whiff of genius about it, with first the misdirection in California and then the real thing on the east coast, where it would have done the most damage. And the weather balloon was a nice touch, because what-except to an Area 51-obsessed nut-could be sinister about a weather balloon? Maryam hadn’t agreed with President Tyler’s decision to let him semi-skate, but she also knew that she and Devlin had carte blanche to take him out whenever he came out of his bolt-hole, and now he had.

Because, no matter how smart or how careful he was, there was no place for Skorzeny to hide. Not in this day of near-universal CCTV cameras in all the cities of Europe, of cell phone cameras and iPhones and instant uplinks. No one, no matter how rich, was immune from the prying eyes and, unless you lived in a cave in Afghanistan somewhere, someday you would be found. And, if necessary or desirable, taken out. Nor were she and Devlin immune. His job was getting harder by the day, and it didn’t matter how tough he was, one of these months or years he would run into somebody tougher, somebody smarter, somebody quicker and more ruthless-or maybe even somebody just luckier. And then it would be all over for him, and thus for her, too. She had to hurry. Double games were never easy, but they were the only one on offer for a girl like her.

So whatever had brought Emanuel Skorzeny out of his cell must be pretty damn big. And although there was no evidence to suggest it, she was also sure he was somehow involved in what was going on in New York. It made no sense to assume that it was a simple terrorist operation, not that any terrorist operation was simple. But the very technology that allowed her to monitor Skorzeny’s movements aboveground could easily allow him to monitor his men’s activities in the shadows. In Mumbai, the crew had been controlled by a Pakistani from his cell phone, guiding the poor, uneducated holy warriors on their killing spree and talking them through the acceptance of martyrdom so that they might have peace in their final moments-a peace not accorded their victims. There wasn’t much sophisticated about that operation, just a true believer’s willingness to kill in the name of Allah, but that was really all you needed when it came right down to it: where there was a Will to Power, there was a Way.

The attendant was at her side: “We’ll be landing in about an hour, Miss,” he said. No name. As far as anyone was concerned she didn’t have a name, and in fact this flight didn’t even exist. They’d land at a private airstrip in Austria, where she’d be given false papers and then driven across the border in an unmarked vehicle. Should anyone check the manifest, the plane would prove to have been a rich Belgian’s private aircraft, chartered through a company, sent to pick him up at a resort near Chamonix and ferry him home to his summer house in Austria’s easternmost province, Burgenland, where he could happily continue to make life miserable for the EU’s unhappy subjects from a country outside its purview. The old Soviet Union had never really died; it had simply moved to the Grand Place, where the food was better and the populace less restive.

There was no point in stopping in Geneva. The CSS had operatives throughout Switzerland, and although the prickly Swiss managed to be as unhelpful as possible, the best information was that he had left, accompanied by the woman. And, of course, there was to be no rough stuff, certainly not at the monitoring and shadowing level. The Swiss didn’t mind what you did so long as it did not upset the fondue cart for everybody else, which meant leaving them alone in peace to continue to make and hide money. Which was why she was landing in Budapest…

Because that was where the twin strains of this case intersected. That was where they had grabbed Farid Belghazi, and Belghazi had been working at CERN. Hungary was where the name “Skorzeny” had originated, and even though the trail to Emanuel Skorzeny dead-ended at Otto Skorzeny, Maryam was a great believer in linguistic resonance. In her experience, people chose aliases that they could live with, that were not too far off from their real names, that meant something to them, something deep and emotional and significant. Emanuel Skorzeny may not have been any more Hungarian than she was, but there was something in that country that drew him, some identification with it…

Did he speak Magyar?

She realized she didn’t know.

For all the work they had done on him in the aftermath of Edwardsville, that was something she had never bothered to wonder about. She had assumed no: nobody spoke Magyar, the language of Hungary, unless they were born to it. It was one of those rare languages, non-Indo-European in origin, related only to Finnish, of all things, a likely importation from central Asia and, if romance be true, swept into Europe with Attila the Hun and his conquering hordes. The Hungarians were half of the West and half of the East, on the border between Slav and Saxon, between Christian and Muslim, their language rolling like dactylic poetry, a parade of accented first syllables that gave the tongue a majesty and rhythm lacking in German dialects and Slavic variants with which it was nearly surrounded. Only on its eastern border, with Romania, did the Hungarians cede pride of historical place to the last outpost of the Roman empire.

Hungary -the nexus of Asia, the Roman legions, and the German colonists-was where the solution to the mystery lay, she was sure. Not just present-day Hungary, a shadow of its old self, but the lands that had once been Hungarian, including the Transylvanian district (the Germans called it Siebenburgenland, or “seven-castle land”) so beloved of western Christian mythology. The land of Vlad Tepes -

Dracula.

Was that where the monster’s lair really lay?

The flight attendant snapped her back out of her reverie. Even before he spoke, she’d caught him looking at her, the way men had been looking at her all her life, the unspoken and involuntary homage they paid to a beautiful woman. American women hated such attention, or at least they professed to, which was one of the many things she despised about American women. Only in America, she thought, could women have achieved so much and enjoyed it so little. In a land of “diversity,” their bland, homogenized beauty, grown so increasingly, so desperately conformist by the advent of plastic surgery, was designed to attract and yet their personalities were manufactured to repel. Maryam’s American accent-learned in Beverly Hills and along Westwood Boulevard in Los Angeles -was as regionally noncommittal as possible, but unless she had to use it, she preferred the native accents of Shiraz, or the French patois she had learned at her fancy private school in Switzerland. Given the choice between Schwyzerdütsch and Valley Girl, she’d take the Swiss Alemannic dialect every time, unless she was buying a movie ticket at the ArcLight in Sherman Oaks.

“Was it a pleasant dream?” he asked.

She gave him her best fake smile, the kind of smile she’d been delivering on cue for years. “Yes, thank you,” she replied. “I guess I didn’t get enough sleep last night.”

That was an opening she hadn’t meant to give him, but luckily his manners were good and his training impeccable, although his eyes registered receipt of a message that, even if it were true, would never be acted on. And she acknowledged his courtesy back. So it went in the endless dance between the sexes, another thing that was lost on the American sisterhood, to their eternal loss, in Maryam’s opinion.

The wheels touched down. Maryam looked out the window and saw nothing but the flat plain. No wonder they called this Burgenland-Fortress land. The only protection here was man-made, not nature-provided. Here you had to fend for yourself; at the interstices of not just cultures but civilizations and religions, it was every woman for herself. The Austro-Hungarian border had once been eradicated by royal fiat, but the Great War had ended that fiction and now it was back, a line on a map but always a line in the hearts of the people, and a line in the sand.

Her car rolled toward the border, crossed it, left the West, and entered the East.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

New York City

Arash Kohanloo had spent a great deal of time in New York, especially for an Iranian national. Under some circumstances, his passport might have proven a bit of a bother, but the Tyler Administration had been determined to turn its back on the old ways. The fact that he was attached, however tangentially, to his country’s U.N. mission facilitated matters greatly and, even if all else failed, he had multiple passports from multiple countries, including a Swiss passport that was tantamount to an international laissez-passer. It was amazing what the combination of money and power and fear could win you.

The hotel, of course, was in lockdown. The New York authorities were smart; they had learned from the Mumbai massacre, and knew that the fancy hotels were natural targets for gunmen with grudges. The elevators were all switched off, except for a couple of service elevators being guarded by private security. You could order room service to eat, but you had to stay in the hotel, and preferably in your room, until the “incident” was over.

All of which was fine with Kohanloo. In fact, that was just the way he wanted it. Fewer people milling about suited him just fine, and as long as the cell phone service worked he could stay in touch with everyone with whom he needed to stay in touch, and then events would unfold as they unfolded.

At the first news of the attack he had informed his people back home. He had also made certain that a specific sum of money had been wired to several bank accounts in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, and one of the Channel Islands between Britain and France. One could no longer rely solely on the discretion of the Swiss. In the crackdown on international money transfers that followed in the wake of 9/11, including the so-called Swift program that enabled the government to trace “terrorist” financing and thus disrupt the usual remittance channels and other mechanisms of Shari’a-compliant finance, the damned Americans had interfered with everything. This had necessitated a change in the networks that funneled money between the Muslim lands and their bankers in London and Brussels, and for a time the stream was partly dammed. But money is like water and soon enough it finds its way to its inevitable destination.

He didn’t have to come here, and it was not part of his arrangement with Skorzeny that he do so. But the opportunity to strike a blow at the heart of a politically correct America and to supervise the operation right under their noses and in the heart of the greatest city as an honored guest was too good to resist. Skorzeny had warned him against taking personal charge, but Skorzeny was a bitter old man, with too many weaknesses, and whatever game he was playing was known only to him.

Kohanloo looked at the array of cell phones on the table in front of him. They were all local, off-the-shelf, no-contract communication devices-“plain vanilla,” as the Americans said. To anyone tracking cell phone use-and even the Americans were not so stupid as to not be doing that-they would appear to be completely innocuous. What a pleasure it was to use the enemy’s technology against him, to take the things his infidel culture had created and to turn even the simplest things into weapons. Whether the Brothers had used box cutters or knives on 9/11 was immaterial; the real weapons they wielded on that glorious day was the institutional cowardice of the Americans, especially the men. They had turned that weakness into the powerful flying bombs that, Allah be praised, had taken down the Twin Towers and nearly the Pentagon itself.

For what sort of men were these, who would not fight back? Who would not defend their women and children? Who would go so willingly to their deaths, Christian lambs to the slaughter? For all its sexuality, its braggadocio, its exaggerated cartoons of men and women, Western culture was at root exhausted, played out, expired. This was one thing that he and Skorzeny had agreed upon from the start: that what they were doing was not murder but euthanasia, the merciful thing to do when a living organism was in its terminal stages.

The idea behind the operation was simplicity itself. Either America would fight back or she wouldn’t. The Holy Martyrs who had struck the Great Satan on 9/11 had succeeded beyond the Sheikh’s wildest dreams, but in a larger sense they had failed. They had not precipitated the final war between the dar al-Islam and the dar al-Harb, nor had they set the Americans to each other’s throats in a civil war over their precious national freedoms.

But this was different. This was a direct attack, man to man, on the streets of the Great Satan’s financial capital and its greatest city. This was a challenge so direct that not even the New York Times could rationalize it away. This was the event that would finally force the cowardly Americans to choose sides and then, once they had, it would be the work of a lifetime or two to hunt the infidel dogs down-with the assistance of the collaborators, of course-and destroy them. In the end, all would be well, and all would accept the Call or die.

But there was another, larger, and vastly more important reason behind the martyrdom operation. The arrival of the Twelfth Imam, pbuh, could only be hastened by blood; he would not come, with Jesus at his side, until the Great Conflict was well and truly under way. All was in readiness in the Holy City of Qom, where the path had been made straight and the centuries of the false Mahdis would soon come to an end. What better way to encourage Mohammed ibn Hasan al-Mahdi al-Muntazar to finally reappear than to set the dar al-Harb aflame?

Arash Kohanloo glanced over at the television set, another typical product of Western decadence. Who had need of such a monstrosity, when a simple black-and-white set would do? This was the problem with America: need had nothing to do with its desires, and the word “want” had transferred its meaning from the former to the latter. He was from a far older culture, an infinitely greater culture whose art and poetry before the Conquest had been unsurpassed, and while some sacrifices had had to be made in order to accommodate Revelation, the memory of the Persian Empire was imprinted on every Iranian’s soul. Even the name of the country-its new name, not the old one-signified its glorious antiquity and pride of place in the human community: Aryan.

He had lost a few of the warriors yesterday, but the rest had gone to ground as per instructions, while they waited. This, too, was part of the plan. Warriors were only martyrs who had not entered heaven yet, and his job was to supply the afterlife with fresh souls.

Still, losing warriors was one thing; having one of the enemy speak to you in Farsi was another. He sounded like a Brother, from his accent, but his words had been puzzling and mysterious, beginning with his question in French about the number of the names of God and continuing on with various obscure theological questions about the suras and the life of the Prophet, concluding with a discussion of the Twelfth Imam. And then he had lost contact with Brother Alex, whom he now must assume was dead.

But why would a Brother kill Alex? It was possible that it had been a mercy killing, that Brother Alex had somehow been wounded and had been put out of his misery in order to enter paradise. It was also possible that Brother Alex’s security had been compromised, and another of the Brothers had terminated him. It was even remotely possible that Brother Alex had been taken out by one of the New York City Police Department operatives, although the chances that the man would be a native Persian, or speak Farsi like one, were nil.

There was a fourth, and more worrisome possibility, however: that Skorzeny had double-crossed him.

Kohanloo thought for a moment. His eyes fell upon the mini-bar. It was so tempting…In the interests of taqiyya it was permitted a devout Muslim to deceive the enemy. A beer, or perhaps two, would aid in the deception.

That Skorzeny would attempt to euchre him would not surprise him in the least. The man’s reputation preceded him and if, in fact, that turned out to be the truth, it would be the last time he ever did that. For while it was permissible for him, Arash Kohanloo, to deceived a Westerner with false promises, such behavior in an infidel-worse, an atheist-would not be acceptable, and would have to be punished with the utmost Koranic severity.

In fact, as he looked back on it, he realized that Skorzeny had been planning an elaborate deception all along, especially the bit about his not having to come to New York. Clearly, that had been his intention all along: to force Kohanloo to accept the challenge to his manhood and specifically ignore the advice he was being given. Skorzeny had wanted him to supervise the operation from ground zero, and not from the safety of, say, Canada, where the Brothers were numerous and the government almost as naive, trusting, and unsuspecting as those of Scandinavia. Islam had never laid historic claim to any of the lands of the North, not to mention the new world, but now, with so many Brothers acting religiously as an army of infiltration, taking advantage of the enemy’s trusting nature, his generous social-welfare programs (which were really just an inverted form of racism, since the Brothers were discouraged from gainful employment), there would soon be enough Believers to assert Islam’s historically necessary pride of place and conquer all the lands of the West, once and for all time.

He looked at the cell phone that linked him directly to Brother Alex. Should he pick it up and dial again? For one of the few times in his life, Arash Kohanloo hesitated. This was a new experience for him. Having survived multiple changes of regime in Iran, from Mossadegh to the Shah to the Ayatollahs to whatever undoubtedly was coming next, he was used to acting boldly and decisively. In the Middle East, nothing was ever to be gained by caution, except the perpetuation of the same way of life that had obtained for hundreds of years. For all his piety, Kohanloo was a man of the future, not of the past: he looked forward to the inevitable victory of the dar al-Islam and was doing his best to hasten it.

He picked up the phone, a basic Nokia. Then another thought occurred to him:

What if it was the NCRI? The National Council of Resistance of Iran?

That put a whole different spin on things. The NCRI, up to this moment, had been a joke. But the open rebellion against the fixed Iranian elections of 2010 had only served to encourage the diaspora of Iranians, at least half of whom, it seemed, lived in Beverly Hills or elsewhere in the Greater Los Angeles area. In the old days, poor countries used to export their most miserable people to the United States, so that the those left behind might have a fighting chance at survival. Iran had gone history one better: it had exported its best and its brightest and its richest, its doctors and its bankers and its lawyers. The Revolution had driven away precisely those people a functioning modern country needed, and sent them screaming into the arms of the Great Satan himself, to luxuriate in the southern California climate and plot revenge; they were like the post-Castro Cubans, but with more money.

Up to this point, neither he nor any of the mullahs with whom he did such a profitable, if irreligious, business, had given much of a thought to the NCRI. To put the organization in historical context, it was like one of those movements of national liberation that popped up everywhere in the 19th and 20th centuries, groups of raggedy-assed anarchists who threw bombs and occasionally got lucky in their choice of targets, but aside from Princip had very little effect upon the course of human history.

Of course, Gavrilo Princip had had a very great effect upon the course of human history. Incredibly lucky-imagine the Archduke Franz Ferdinand returning by the very same route on which he had dodged Princip’s first attempt on his life earlier that same day-but also incredibly determined, Princip had rearranged the map of Europe and, all unwittingly, doomed the West, although it had taken just about a century on the nose for that fact to become so abundantly clear. The cream of the crop of the infidel had died in the trenches and at the Somme and at Verdun, and those who were not killed were removed from the gene pool three decades later when the same war broke out all over again. As an example of national and cultural suicide, it was unequalled; no wonder their enfeebled descendents wanted nothing so passionately as to terminate themselves, their offspring, and their civilization.

Well, he was here to help them with that. If the West had become a giant suicide cult, Islam was just the death cult it was longing to meet. At last, a battle that had been waged since the seventh century was about to enter its final stages.

He still held the cell phone in his hand. In every operation, once the shooting started, there was something that would go wrong, and almost immediately. War plans were blueprints for buildings that would never get built; what emerged instead was some bastard combination of thought, luck, and happenstance, and you lived with the result until you were strong enough to overturn it, or weak enough to be unable to defend it.

He pushed the redial button.

The phone rang. Once, twice…

The security signal was four rings. Anything after four rings meant the connection was compromised, and that the Brother was considered compromised, whether he was in fact dead or not. A wounded Brother was of no use to him. At four rings, the order would automatically go out to the others, identifying the fallen Brother’s last known location, with the orders that he or she should be terminated immediately. Mercy was an unknown commodity, for only Allah could dispense mercy.

Three times…

Nothing.

Arash Kohanloo’s finger hovered over the Stop button. As soon as the fourth ring ended, he would end the call and send the signal.

Four-

“Hello?”

A voice, in American English. What he expected, but not at all what he expected.

“Who is this?” he found himself saying.

There was a long pause at the other end of the line-of course, there was no line, only the infidel’s technology, which Kohanloo and his countrymen, although unable to duplicate, were only too happy to employ against the enemy-and what sounded like a clicking noise.

“Go ahead please,” came a female voice.

Now it was a male voice that spoke: “Target located. Sherry-Netherland Hotel.”

“Stand by,” said the infidel woman.

Then silence.

Arash Kohanloo tried to control his breathing. His heart rate was up, that he knew. The doctors had told him to keep it down, keep it calm, keep it within the target range lest he find himself in trouble. Damn that Skorzeny and his wily ways. Here he was, in a situation he should never have been in, and his heart rate was rising along with his blood pressure. He tried to stay calm and listen for whatever came next. There was nothing to worry about.

The fools! They had no idea he was not in the Sherry-Netherland.

“Shall I send a UAV?”

A few more crackles, then-

“Put the bird in the air and stand by.”

“The bird is in the air.”

Kohanloo couldn’t believe his ears. Surely they would not deploy a UAV-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, more commonly known as a drone-to blast away an entire floor of an expensive hotel in midtown Manhattan. The Americans didn’t do things like that. They were always more concerned about collateral damage than they were about the success of a mission; why, a single snail darter could not only bring down a dam in Alaska, it could probably stop a convoy of Abrams tanks as well.

“Stand by to fire on my orders.”

It was a bluff. It had to be. His eyes stole toward the window of his luxury suite; the curtains were drawn. With the cell phone still pressed up hard against his ear, he moved slowly and quietly toward the window.

Now another voice came on the line. He couldn’t swear to it-and a good Muslim never took an oath except in a religious context-but it sounded awfully like that of the man he had spoken to earlier. In fluent Farsi, he said: “Go to the window.”

He hesitated a moment.

“Go to the window now.”

He went to the window.

“Now, open the curtains.”

How did they know he even had a window where he was? Or that there were curtains?

“Open them.” He didn’t like the man’s tone of voice, his peremptory way. An unbeliever should never talk to one of the Faithful like that. “Go ahead…”

He took a deep breath and opened the curtains, trying not to flinch-

“What do you see?”

The panorama of New York City. No hint of the sun yet, but on this summer morning, it would be up soon. Just the gleam of the lights and, to the southwest, smoke reflected in the wasteful glare.

He slowly exhaled. “I see exactly what I expect to see, and nothing more.”

“Do you see me?”

He was feeling a little braver now, more like his old self. “Of course not. Now who are you? What do you want?”

“Do you see me now?”

Was that the sun? The sky had brightened a bit, or perhaps his eyes were simply getting used to the darkness. He switched off the nearest floor lamp in order to see better.

“Do you know who I am?”

Still nothing. It was all a bluff. Somehow they had managed to trace the Brother’s cell signal. A cheap trick, and one that any Palestinian kid with a Bulgarian computer could manage. Nothing to-

“Smile, asshole.” That was in English.

A blinding flash. For a moment, Arash Kohanloo was sure he was dead, and that he would soon be entering paradise. He cursed himself for a fool, that he had not had time to perform his ritual ablutions in preparation for martyrdom, and then remembered he was not expecting to be martyred this time out.

He was still alive. He could see.

The drone was right outside his window. It had him on video, and was transmitting his picture somewhere. Operational security was blown. It was time to regroup. He started to turn away-

“Stop. Don’t move or you’re a dead man.”

Kohanloo froze.

“Look on the wall across from you.”

Kohanloo looked.

A video image danced across the plaster and the reproduction of a Monet cathedral. It was the image of a man. “Look upon me,” said the voice at the other end of the cell phone. Funny; he had forgotten he was still holding it.

“Do you know who I am now?”

“No. I do not.”

“I am Azra’il. Malak al-Maut. He Whom God Helps.”

The name sent shivers down Kohanloo’s spine. Azra’il, the Arabic version of the Biblical Azrael, was not to be found in the Holy Koran, but Malak al-Maut was. Another of his names. It meant the Angel of Death.

“And you,” the voice said, “are now mine.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

The Upper East Side -morning

The dawn was breaking as Principessa Stanley cautiously made her way around the corner from Park Avenue and turned left on 92nd Street, where some of the shooting had been yesterday. It wasn’t that she was afraid, exactly; indeed, she moved with the supreme confidence of a cable-network star. Nothing ever happened to cable-network stars. In fact, with the occasional and unfortunate exception of that poor girl back in St. Louis, or wherever it was last year-you know, the one they gave that posthumous award to a couple of months ago-journalists were free to come and go as they pleased in the United States of America. This was not some kind of Third World shithole, where you had to wear a sign around your neck that blared “PRENSA” in various wog tongues, none of which she happened to know. Principessa Stanley was firmly of the opinion that if information could not be expressed in English it was of no use to her, since none of her viewers would be able to understand it any better than she could.

And to think she had almost missed this “terrorist” attack by fooling around in New Orleans, wasting her time with her boyfriend of the moment after covering that useless RAND meeting-none of which she could use anyway. It had been a real trick to find a flight into New York after they shut the airports down, and so she had hopped aboard a military plane from the Naval Air Station, Joint Reserve Base about twenty minutes south of the city. It had taken her to the old Stewart AFB, where the New York Air National Guard was still operational, and from there a car service had brought her down to the city. Her press credentials had gotten her through the blockade last night and so she’d be able to freshen up in her own apartment on Carnegie Hill before tackling her latest assignment. If she played her cards right, this was an Emmy for sure.

The trick was to go where everybody else wasn’t. The shootings at the Y had already been written off as isolated incidents, perhaps copycat killings. The real action was still at Times Square, where gunmen were still active, but this area had been quiet for hours. Besides, the police cordon was slowly constricting around 42nd and Seventh, and the 92nd Street Y now lay outside the zone.

Which suited her journalistic purposes just fine. The gunman-whoever he or she was-was still on the loose. She’d find him, if it was the last thing she did, and bring him in for an exclusive interview. The cops and the military, whoever, would wax the other schmucks, but she could talk a cat out of a tree, and surely she’d be able to talk this guy down and into her custody. She’d have him on the air fifteen minutes later, depending on traffic.

Raymond Crankheit woke up and stretched. He’d spent the night under a copse near the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, all things considered, felt quite refreshed. This was one of the first spots in New York City he’d visited when he first arrived, the place where Robert Chambers, the “Preppie Killer” had strangled Jennifer Levin to death during what Chamber had called “rough sex.” Raymond had never had sex, so he wasn’t quite sure what, exactly, was the distinction between rough sex and garden-variety sex, but he hoped to find out someday, and today was as good a day as any. As soon as he’d finished what he came here to do, he’d find a girl and give it a try. Maybe he too could get lucky at Dorrian’s Red Hand, but that was fairly far away, over on Second Avenue, and he didn’t have time for the trek just now. He’d had have to find somebody closer and more available.

He was only a little surprised the cops had not found him, but then they weren’t really looking for him. The main action was with the Brothers; a few dead Jews far away from ground zero would have to wait. Unless he did something stupid, he could spend the entire day picking off whomever he chose.

He peeked out from under some bushes. Even on a normal day, there wouldn’t have been many people stirring, just the custodial staff at the Museum, which he really should visit someday except that he’d heard it was boring. His extra ammo was still here, right where he’d buried it, and so he’d reloaded before he’d gone to sleep and was now ready to go.

He’d had a chance to think a lot of things over last night, and come to several conclusions. One was that he didn’t mind killing people at all. Upstate, during training, he’d been deemed a little squeamish, and he found he really didn’t enjoy it when he had to saw that guy’s head off with a kukri knife. They never told him exactly whose head was being sawed off, just that the man was an Infidel and an Enemy and that no one would miss him. To Raymond, the poor schmo looked like just another homeless black guy, probably some bum from nearby Hancock or, better yet, Callicoon. Anyway, he didn’t struggle much, but it was still gross.

The second thing he’d discovered was that he didn’t mind killing women. He’d been raised never to hit a girl, but when he saw that broad outside the Y something had just gone off inside his head or his heart or whichever, and he’d taken her out without so much as a second thought. She probably wouldn’t have gone to bed with him, either, just like every other girl he’d ever met, and so she’d had to pay the price for the crimes of her sisters. And then the rest of them followed.

So, now that he was over that hump, he knew that sex couldn’t be far behind. At last, it was going to happen, because-thanks to the Brothers and their endless talk about the virgins and houris and all the pleasures of the flesh that would be available to him in the afterlife, pleasures that may or may not be denied to him in this life-he could make it happen. All it required was the Will.

And then his cell phone rang-that special ring that came only from the commander of the Brothers. Good: more fun.

Principessa Stanley decided to use her head, instead of the rest of her, which is pretty much what had gotten her on the air in the first place. The days when on-air female journalists earned their face time thanks to the force of their personalities, the cogency of their reports, and the reliability of their sources was long gone. Fox News had blazed that trail, rediscovering, as if rediscovery were needed, the old adages that sex sold and that everybody, male and female, loved a pretty girl. Short skirts and a law degree didn’t hurt, either.

So, instead of heading toward the Y, where there was very likely nothing to be seen anyway except a lot of police-line tape, she decided to wander into Central Park. From her youthful days at the University of Michigan ’s journalism school, she’d been taught the old police reporter’s motto, that to catch a criminal, you had to think like a criminal. One of the reasons she was such a good reporter, in her opinion, was that it was easy for her to put herself in a psycho killer’s shoes; in fact, she prided herself on thinking that she would have made quite a good psycho killer had she chosen to go into that particular line of work.

Which is why she found herself at this moment crossing Fifth Avenue. Sure, it was obvious that the park was where to hide, which is why it made such a brilliant hiding place. In her opinion, police work had become far too sophisticated, too dependent on computers; the shortest way between two points was still a straight line, and that was exactly what she making at this point as she triangulated in her mind between a possible hideout and the scene of the crime, which so happened took her at a diagonal from the Y to the Museum and thence to the infamous copse of bushes behind the Met. Like the Empire State Building, they were there for all to see, but if you lived in New York, somehow you never actually visited them yourself.

So this was the famous spot. Like every other famous crime scene she had visited-and, truth to tell, there weren’t all that many, since Principessa Stanley’s reporting career had been almost entirely confined to the classroom at Michigan and the news desk of a couple of low-and medium-rent boondock TV stations until the Show had finally called-this one was fairly unprepossessing in person. Like Dealey Plaza in Dallas, it seemed unworthy of such a crime.

She loved New York at this hour. Many was the time she’d gone for a run around the Reservoir in the morning, sharing the well-pounded path with a few other celebrities and some of the hoi polloi who were either decent enough not to invade her sunglassed-and baseball-capped privacy, or else too stupid to know who she was. Even at the height of summer, which was approaching, the air at least pretended to be fresh before the smell of the uncollected garbage could perfume it, before the effluence of the subways could poison it, and before the body odors of the two million people who called Manhattan home, not to mention the millions of commuters, could foul it.

“Hello, Miss,” came a voice behind her.

He was not that bad-looking, for a geek or a homeless person. From the looks of him, he had spent the night in the park but had somehow remained relatively clean. True, there was dirt on both his hands, black dirt, and had she had time to think about its provenance, she might have realized that there was no black dirt in Central Park. But firearms training, like logic, languages, history, comparative religion, culture, and literature, was one of the things they didn’t teach you in journalism school, and so she remained innocent in her knowledge of all those arcane and most likely dangerous subjects. She was, however, proud of her ability to craft a lede and should the occasion ever present itself again, she could no doubt develop a fine inverted-pyramid of a news story.

“Hello.”

Raymond Crankheit just stood there, not sure what to do next. This fine-looking woman standing before him had caught him completely by surprise, and he was suddenly as deep into a conversation with a woman as he’d been in years. He had to think of something to say next, something that wouldn’t scare her away, and send her running, perhaps to the cops. He couldn’t cope with cops just now.

“I was wondering…do you have the time?”

Principessa Stanley unholstered her BlackBerry and consulted it. “Nearly seven,” she said.

“Thank you.” Raymond hoped he hadn’t exhausted all his conversational gambits in one fell swoop. “I was wondering-could you tell me…is this Central Park?” It was lame, but it was also the only thing he could think of. He was a little agitated by what the commander had just told him…

Principessa looked at him with a bemused smile. Of all the lame lines she’d ever heard, and she had pretty much heard them all, this was one of the lamest. This was the kind of line a guy might use in the early afternoon on Fifth Avenue, or when he caught her coming out of her office on Sixth. In fact, it was so dumb that it just might be genuine. “What do you think it is- Coney Island?” she replied with a laugh.

Under normal circumstances, that would have been the correct answer. A real New Yorker-which Principessa had tried so hard to become-would have recognized it at once as a stock reply, the kind of answer one gave to the hapless tourists standing at the corner of 34th Street and Fifth Avenue, wondering if that tall building in front of them was the Empire State Building or, worse, the World Trade Center. It was the kind of response that said subtextually, what do you take me for, a fool? A fellow tourist? And the joke would have been on the interlocutor, not the respondent. But these were not normal circumstances. And Raymond Crankheit was not a normal person.

As Principessa realized as soon as she saw the look on his face. What she had hoped would be taken as a joke had obviously fallen flat. This hour of the morning was no time for an argument so she immediately decided to backfill. She gave him her best coquettish laugh. “Sorry, just a little joke there. Of course it is. I didn’t realize you were from out of town.” For a tourist or a bridge-and-tunnel guy, he wasn’t that bad, and she felt a stab of compassion for him. All her life she’d been accused of being a bitch on wheels, and now here was her chance to change that image, even if it was only with a guy she’d just met.

Raymond Crankheit, however, heard the backtrack quite differently. “From out of town.” What the hell did she mean by that? Had she made him? The Brothers had warned him about women like her, the temptresses who would use you and then mock you, the way the women in the United States Army had done to the fedayeen in Iraq. The tanks and the Humvees that had entered Baghdad had played recordings over loudspeakers, taunting the Brothers over the size of their members, insulting them in a woman’s voice that Believers had little dicks. This of course had enraged the Holy Warriors and out they charged, screaming and thirsting for vengeance and prepared to put the lie to the libel with a glorious martyr’s death. Unfortunately, that was exactly what they had received, as the diabolical followers of Satan had expected just such a manly reaction and shot them down as they poked their heads from windows and doorways.

Women were never to be trusted. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before, Miss?” he asked as politely as he could, trying to conceal his anger and his contempt. “You’re that Princess girl, right?”

Principessa smiled. Getting recognized was one of the hazards of the profession, but it irked her when a young male of a certain age did not recognize her, and she took the implied insult personally. What, she wasn’t famous enough? She wasn’t pretty enough? She wasn’t successful enough? She would show this twerp.

“Sorry,” she said, not sorry at all, “but I don’t have time for an autograph right now. But I was wondering whether a homeless guy like yourself might be able to tell me something about what’s going on around here. Were you here yesterday? Did you see anything? Hear anything?”

So he was right after all: she was on to him. She was asking questions like a cop. That tore it. For the first time in his life, he was being nice to a girl and she was being nice back at him, but something had gone wrong-something always went wrong-and now here she was, grilling him the way some of the others did, asking him questions designed to make him look stupid.

In the old days, he would have run away. He would have endured the humiliation of being bested by a twist and being unable to do anything about it. But now he didn’t have to, not any longer. As he discovered yesterday, he could do something about it. In fact, here, on this hallowed spot, he could do a couple of things, and then come back for more.

Raymond turned away from Principessa for a moment. At once, she regretted her words and her actions. The poor boy had no idea who she was. He was some lost soul, an out-of-towner, probably simple, who’d gotten caught up in yesterday’s events and didn’t know where to go or what to do. In fact, he most likely wasn’t homeless at all. He probably had a room in one of those cheap Times Square hotels, but had been unable to get to it due to the emergency. She felt like a real heel…

“Sorry,” she said, “that was rude. I am Principessa Stanley. What’s your name?”

This was a shy boy she was dealing with, she could tell that. A lot of men went all weak in the knees when they actually met her in the flesh; she was used to that. Time for a little of the old noblesse oblige.

“Raymond,” he said. “Raymond Crankheit. From Wahoo, Nebraska. You ever been to Wahoo?”

“No,” she replied, because after all why in the hell would she ever have been to some nowhere dump like Wahoo, or even Nebraska, when there were still places in South America and China and India she hadn’t visited yet?

However, as it turned out, “no” was the last thing she said, for Raymond suddenly wheeled and struck her with the stock of his rifle as if he was swinging a baseball bat-another thing he had never been particularly good at, but at which at this moment he was more than proficient. The woman fell hard, soundlessly, face-first into the ground, her head bleeding. But she was still moving, trying to say something but producing only muffled noises, little bleats and whimpers, just the way the Japanese schoolgirls in those porn videos he watched for free on the Internet did.

Perfect.

He trussed her up with some of the rope in his kit, just the way the Brothers had taught him, bound her tightly. He wanted her alive, for later.

He pushed her deep into the bushes and into the hole where he had buried his weapons. It wasn’t deep enough to fully cover her, but he could get a lot of her into it, including her arms, and by tamping down the dirt he could effectively immobilize her. He covered the rest of her with some camouflage they had given him, and turned her face up and looked at her. She was bloody and dirty, but that didn’t really matter at this point. She was still a woman, she was alive, and this was likely as close as he was going to get to a creature like this.

Raymond Crankheit kissed Principessa Stanley as hard as he could. It was inexpert and clumsy, but he got what he wanted out of it. For the first time in his life, he knew what a woman tasted like. He took one of his spare T-shirts, ripped it apart and bound her eyes with it. The remainder he stuffed into her mouth. He pulled a plastic garbage bag over her head, and left her there, waiting for him.

He picked up his rifle and made ready to go, then stopped. Something wasn’t right. He’d heard that guys who were dating always liked to have a little something of their girlfriend’s to remember them, a souvenir, to wear or keep in a pocket or billfold. He went back to Principessa and slowly lifted the Baggie so that he could get a good look at her.

Her ears were shapely and well-formed, and he thought about cutting one of them off but decided against it because he didn’t want her all bloody when he got back. He wanted her alive and beautiful, just the way she was now. That ruled out her nose as well, and as for her fingers, they were buried and thus out of the question.

He put the rifle down and started at the back of her head, working his way around. He did his best not to draw blood, although some of that was unfortunately necessary. Just a prick here or two. Had he been a wild Red Indian, like the kind who used to roam the plains of Nebraska? Not near Wahoo, because as anybody knew, Wahoo was near Omaha, which was on the river, but farther to the west, the Wild West of cowboy movies, which is mostly where he’d seen it, except for a drive across the state one time to visit some relative out there by Scottsbluff someplace-he couldn’t remember.

It took a while, but by the time was finished he had most of her hair. Carefully, he replaced the Baggie and patted her on the head, to let her know everything was all right and that he’d be back to claim the rest of his trophies later. But it was time to go.

He picked up his rifle again. There were, he’d heard, millions of people in Manhattan, which meant that he would run out of ammo long before he ran out of targets. It would not be until later that he realized his cell phone had fallen out of his pocket and was probably buried along with the woman.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Century City -morning

If he had had time, Jake Sinclair would have enjoyed being in his new offices. All the right folks were moving to the old Fox back lot these days, including two of the major talent agencies and some entertainment law firms, to go along with the usual mixture of financial-services companies and shopping malls. Everything from the marble floors to the strategically placed Persian carpets to the art on the walls and the sculptures in the halls was the result of his taste and his choice. It was amazing how much art you could buy when half of Hollywood was feeling poor.

And here he was the one-the media mogul in a declining business-who was supposed to be feeling the pinch, not the stars who used to make twenty million a picture, and now were reduced to the relative penury of fourteen million. But it all made sense. When the stars made less, then everybody made less, including the agents, producers, the co-stars, and the writers. Hollywood may be Moscow-on-the-Pacific, at least as far as its social sense of itself was concerned, but in reality it was the purest form of trickle-down capitalism in the country. Sure, it was “high school with money,” but the high-school pecking order made a lot of sense in a Lord of the Flies sort of way; it quickly sorted out the winners from the losers, the beauties from the nerds, the popular kids from the dorks, and those lessons stayed with you a lifetime.

Show people were so easy to manipulate, it was like a vacation.

But on this day Jake Sinclair had no time for self-congratulation. He had a very important meeting with the woman who would be the next president of the United States, especially if she continued to play ball.

He moved quickly from the private elevator through the public halls, where his employees could see him-a general needed to be seen from time to time-and past the ranks of video screens displaying live television feeds, his newspapers’ stories as they were in the process of being written, and the websites that had latterly become such a large part of his operations.

Angela Hassett was waiting for him, standing in his office and watching one of the video feeds intently. When she became president, it was he who would have to show up early for appointments, and get used to being kept waiting, but at the moment he was delivering a Hollywood power message, which was that the more important person in the meeting dictated the schedule and the other person took it and liked it. “Ms. Hassett,” he said as he swept into the room, “so sorry to keep you waiting. You know the traffic in this town.”

Truth was, traffic had nothing to do with it, but Jake Sinclair always liked to make an entrance, and so he affected that L.A. air of frazzled bemusement, as if the torture of being confined in his new Mercedes during the commute from Los Feliz to Century City was akin to spending ten years on Devil’s Island, except you didn’t actually have to do the time. “Can I get you something to-”

“Mr. Sinclair,” she interrupted, “Neither of us has time for coffee, Diet Coke, or bullshit. So let’s get started, shall we? What do you make of what’s going on in New York?”

Angela Hassett was, he had to admit, a rather striking woman. Her photographs didn’t do her justice, and just the way she moved and tossed her head revealed the coquette beneath the frosty exterior. Sinclair understood at once that here was a woman for whom “by any means necessary” was not just a slogan but a way of life. He liked her: they could do business together. They were soul mates.

“A terrible thing, of course,” he said blandly.

“I mean about the cease-fire, or whatever it is. I want to know everything you know about it.”

“Perhaps we should speak privately,” he said. As his people moved toward the door, she flashed the same look at her people, who quickly got the message and similarly headed toward the exits. “I agree,” she said.

The door closed. They were alone. He dropped the pretense of bonhomie. “I don’t know,” he said. “We’re working on it. In fact, we have our best reporters in the field. But I gather the gunmen, whoever they are, have gone to ground.”

“Does Tyler have anything to do with this?”

“How would I know?”

“You’re supposed to be the media mogul, not me. All I’m doing is running for president.”

Her tone was beginning to piss him off. “Then how can I help you, Ms. Hassett?”

She didn’t like his tone any more than he’d liked hers. “There’s no point in wasting any time, Mr. Sinclair,” she said frostily. “We both know why I’m here.”

“Call me Jake-”

“Mr. Sinclair,” she continued, ignoring him. “What we have is strictly a business arrangement at this point. You have something I need and I have something you want. Need and want are not the same thing in order of magnitude, which means that at the moment you have me over a barrel, hierarchically speaking. That will change come November, but for the nonce let us simply say that thus far things have worked out well, I am here to accommodate you.”

Sinclair smiled. He liked a woman-or a man, for that matter-who got right to the point. There would be no time-wasting jockeying as the two adversaries sorted out whose dog was bigger. Things were clear.

“I don’t have to tell you that Jeb Tyler is weak and that he’s in trouble. Neither do I have to tell you why. He’s weak because he’s a fool and a coward. All his life he’s played it safe by playing it down the middle; he thought a smile, a shoeshine, and a nice haircut could take him as far as he wanted to go, and up until last year he was right. But events and circumstances have a way of dislodging the best-laid plans, and now he’s in over his head and sinking rapidly. I can beat him. I know it, you know it, and he knows it. All he needs is a little push.” She glanced at one of the televisions.

“Tell me something I don’t already know.”

“I can guarantee you a place at the table.”

“As I said…”

The coquette disappeared. “Don’t fuck with me, buster. You and I both know that your media empire is being held together with spit and bubblegum, and if you don’t get some tax breaks and subsidies from the feds, you’re screwed.” She gestured around the room, with all its expensive furnishings and its panoramic view of this part of Los Angeles. “You’re William Randolph Hearst minus the girlfriend and the castle, but if things don’t turn around, you’re going to end up just like him-bankrupt and impotent…So now that I’ve got your attention, let’s talk turkey.”

Sinclair wasn’t used to being spoken to like this. Usually, whoever was unfortunate enough to be sitting across from him in a negotiation was the one on the receiving end of the obloquy, but this woman had waltzed into his office and taken command. Jeb Tyler was in more trouble than he knew. “I’m all ears,” he said.

“Good. Here’s my offer. I’m making this only once, so listen carefully.” Abruptly, she rose. “Where’s the bathroom?” she inquired. Sinclair indicated a door off to one side. “Will you follow me, please?”

Puzzled but intrigued, he followed her into the loo. Like any self-respecting executive washroom, it was equipped with a shower, a bidet, and a wide selection of toiletries, only some of which had been filched from various hotels in Cannes and Tokyo.

She closed the door. “Don’t get any bright ideas,” she said, reaching past him and into the shower. With a quick turn of her wrists, she turned the mixer on full force. The water gushed forth, a vivid realization of old man Mulholland’s famous exhortation when he opened the floodgates of the dammed, siphoned water from the Owens Valley and told Los Angeles: “There it is. Take it.”

“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” she said, “but I don’t trust you.” She pulled him close to her. The steam from the hot water was already turning the confined space into a steam bath. Sinclair felt the beads of sweat mingle with the water vapor as it rolled down his face and down his chest.

“All my life, I’ve been fascinated with puzzles,” said Angela Hassett. “Codes, ciphers, what have you. Not crosswords or Sudoku-real puzzles. They were my hobby as a kid and so they’ve remained. In another life, perhaps I would have gone into the CIA or the NSA, but I chose another path.” She moved even closer, so he could hear her over the running water. “Still, my love remains constant.”

They were very close now, her face close to his, her mouth near his left cheek. He thought about kissing her, then reconsidered the impulse. There would be plenty of time for friskiness later, if it came to that. Imagine, fucking the President of the United States! He was starting to gain a new appreciation for Judith Campbell and the rest of JFK’s mistresses.

“So, the way I see politics, is that it’s a giant puzzle. In order to win, you have to fit all the pieces together. But you don’t have infinite time; you have to get it right and you have to get it right under fire. Any election can be won or lost depending on which day the people vote. On which news comes out when. Stories get timed, then launched. He’s a drunk, she’s a slut. She had an abortion when she was fourteen; he’s a recovering drug addict who did time in that rehab clinic in Park City and the only people who knew were Hollywood types. He has a taste for little boys; she for little girls. Scandals are not what they used to be, but they can still be potent. It all just depends on how you fit the pieces together.”

Sinclair was getting to be pretty uncomfortable now, but what was he going to do? Ask permission to leave the bathroom? They were in there for a reason, and that reason was, she didn’t trust him, didn’t trust him not to monitor their conversation, not to record it, not to keep it as a weapon against her, or at least an insurance policy, against such time as he would need it, against such time when they, like thieves everywhere, would fall out and turn on each other. He hoped that day would never come, but he was too smart and too experienced and too cynical not to allow for its possibility. And so, he knew, was she.

“So what’s the deal?”

She pushed back a bit, and ran her fingers through her hair, then wiped her face. “You take him down with everything you’ve got. His past as an ambulance-chaser. How he put doctors out of business all over Louisiana until poor pregnant black women were hitchhiking from Lake Charles to Houston to drop their babies somewhere half-civilized. How he’s probably gay.”

She watched his eyes closely to see how he’d react. Surely he knew, or at least suspected. Everybody did. It was the worst-kept rumor in Washington, the first bachelor president, with his great reputation as a womanizer, the ultimate get for every single gal from Bethesda to Escondido, all a sham.

“You can’t prove it,” said Sinclair. “Nobody can.”

“What does it matter? All you have to do is raise the question. What does he have to hide?” She moved back in closer, this time for the kill. “And what about the Edwardsville fiasco? What about that dead reporter? What about his embrace of Islam? If any of those crazy mujahideen get near him, he’s as good as dead-why aren’t they telling us about this threat to national security? Can we really afford such a man in the White House, in the Oval Office? It’s time for a change.”

She placed both hands on his cheeks, then slowly moved them up the sides of his head until her fingers were now running through his hair, gently tousling it.

“And what’s in it for me?”

“You’ll be the last man standing,” she said. “My administration will make sure of it.”

Sinclair made one last attempt to find and assert his manhood. “But the same could be said for you. Nobody knows anything about you. Your past is a closed book, your records sealed. All you are is-”

“All I am is a fresh new face. All I am is not Jeb Tyler. And considering what’s going on in New York City right now, that’s all I have to be.”

She had him there. “I guess we have a deal, then,” he said. Jake Sinclair had never met anyone quite like Angela Hassett.

“Then let’s seal it.” She tilted her face upward, and her lips found his. She was hungrier than he expected, and they stayed that way for a while, longer than necessary for a business deal, not quite long enough for anything else to happen, leaving the promise hanging in the air.

She broke it first, pulled back and just stood there, looking at him. He broke the awkward silence:

“What about your husband?”

She laughed, then tossed him a towel with which to wipe his face. “Don’t try to fuck me, Jake,” she said.

She turned off the water, turned toward him. He wasn’t sure what to expect, but whatever it was it wasn’t this:

A slap across the face, hard.

“If you ever keep me waiting again,” she said, “I’ll kill you.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Manhattan

Something was nagging at Devlin, just as it had at Edwardsville. It was too easy.

Not the killing; that was hard. No matter how good you were at it, it was always hard. He was up against trained killers, and although they were not in his class, and he was armed with superior intelligence and firepower, each of them had presented a different challenge.

Once he had blown his own cover to the Iranian, things happened exactly as he expected them to. There had been one last message, blasted from the hotel to the operatives still in the field, which is exactly what Devlin had hoped would happen. That would be the stand-down message, or the save-yourself message, or the await-further-instructions message, with maybe a verse of two of the Koran thrown in for good measure. The boys and girls back at Fort Meade would know. All that mattered to Devlin was that Arash Kohanloo had just burned his entire operation.

The face-recognition software at NSA is the best in the world, and the little UAV had done its job well. Within five minutes The Building had processed the visual information and had relayed it back to him via a series of cutouts:

KOHANLOO, ARASH. Iranian businessman, with many financial interests in the West. At home, he professed to be a devout Muslim and was tight with the mullahs, but once outside the dar al-Islam he could be as much a party animal as any Saudi princeling. He was a familiar type in all religions, a hypocrite, but why he wanted to involve himself in something like this-well, that was the mystery. Actually, it was not all that big of a mystery; in Devlin’s experience, Money and Love, or her naughty sister, Lust, pretty much explained everything.

Devlin opened up his netbook and logged onto a secure, encrypted channel to Seelye:

KOHANLOO-WHAT’S THE CONNECTION?

TO WHOM? came the immediate reply.

DON’T BULLSHIT ME, DAD.

TO SKORZENY YOU MEAN?

EXACTAMUNDO

WORKING ON IT

WORK HARDER. WHAT’S TYLER ’S PLAY IN THIS?

A pause, then:

NO PLAY. HE’S LETTING NYPD HANDLE IT. DOESN’T WANT TO PANIC THE COUNTRY

LETTING ME HANDLE IT, YOU MEAN

SAME THING

LIKE BLOWING UP TIMES SQUARE HASN’T ALREADY PANICKED THE COUNTRY. IT’S ABOUT THE ELECTION, RIGHT?

IT’S ALWAYS ABOUT THE ELECTION. HASSETT HAD A MEETING WITH SINCLAIR, AND HE’S BEATING TYLER ’S BRAINS OUT 24/7

So that was the play. Tyler didn’t want to panic America, as he had the last time with his dumb stunt of practically negotiating with the terrorists, so he was letting the cops deal with it. With the information Devlin could give them, they’d be able to run them down and wrap things up pretty easily. He could see it now, as Tyler saw it: a bunch of dead people followed by a slew of yellow ribbons, some official boo-hoo, and then Jeb himself standing at the center of the Square, promising New Yorkers and the American People that a new Times Square would rise gloriously from the ashes, better and cleaner and safer than before, a place for families to disport themselves in freedom from fear.

And, of course, that this would never happen again. If Devlin could link Kohanloo to the Iranian government, there’s no telling what Tyler wouldn’t do to win the election. The President not only had a bully pulpit, he had the combined weight of the American armed services behind him, and taking on, or even taking out, Iran would satisfy the public’s bloodlust. Plus there was a big swath of his constituency that had been wanting payback for the hostage crisis since the Carter administration. Even Sinclair’s media empire would have to look the other way, as long as he did it quickly enough.

So he’d sealed off the city, but hadn’t sent in troops. Not bad. Devlin would have played it the same way, especially with himself as his ace in the hole. But the discovery of Kohnaloo had just ramped up the stakes. If this was an operation financed by the Iranians and executed by Hamas, there was no way Tyler was going to be able to keep the lid on it.

Seelye read his mind: SO GET THIS OVER WITH PRONTO

ROGER THAT, POP he wrote, and signed off.

Thus the operation had fallen silent, the shooting had stopped as the enemy regrouped. Depending on how well they had canvassed the city, and how long they had planned, the surviving shooters would have gone to ground by now, each to a separate bolt-hole while the Iranian plotted the next move. And, if past experience were any guide, his next move would be to get the hell out of New York and leave his team to its fate.

Which meant things were working out exactly the way Devlin expected them to. Which was another thing that worried him.

Things never went according to plan: the first rule of warfare was that if they did, your plan wasn’t working. He had lived long in the worlds of violence and deception, so long that not only could he tell them apart, he had long ago realized that deception was superior.

Which was why he had blown his surveillance. By sending the shooters scurrying-by forcing them into Plan B-he had accomplished two objectives. The first was to put the heat on Mr. Big and make him do something either expected or stupid, which amounted to the same thing. The second was to force the NYPD SWAT units to stand down; he didn’t need to bump into them while he was carrying out his orders, to run the risk of exposure if one of the cops happened upon him. He needed the fuzz out of the way, and so he relied on the dead-solid-certain fact that when there was trouble, New York wanted an immediate and overwhelming response, but the instant the shooting stopped, the residents demanded flowers in the barrels of the guns and cue the defense lawyers. It had to be the most suicidal city in the nation, professing “never again,” but inviting it constantly.

He had taken out six more of the shooters since his encounter in the New Victory. Three of them came before the cell phone security alert had been raised.

The first was a woman, and that always made it difficult for him. He could not control his sentimental streak, or whatever it was, because killing a woman reminded him of his mother’s death in the Rome airport, when a group of very bad men, convinced of the rightness and morality of their cause, had robbed him forever of her smile, her laugh, her presence, her spirit, her soul.

Well, perhaps not forever. On the subject, the afterlife, religion, however you named it, he was agnostic. Certainly, he had never seen any evidence of its power at the moment of death, when the Angel of Death inhabited him and he did his duty by country, if not God.

He shot her from a distance, as she was leaning out a window of the Brill Building. He hoped she had a song on her lips, but if she was like her fellow Muslims, she probably didn’t; the Brill Building was Tin Pan Alley and the heyday of New York showbiz in brick, steel, and mortar, home to hundreds of music and entertainment companies. In the old days, everybody who was anybody in the music business was headquartered in Lefcourt’s Brill Building. Firing from across the street, the MRP took her out clean with a single shot to the head, and she fell eight stories down, landing on Broadway with a sickening thud that he could hear two hundred yards away, although of course she didn’t feel a thing.

The next man the Angel visited was more up close and personal. Moving in the shadows, Devlin had found him in a storeroom of one of the many pizza places that inhabited the square. Pretending to be a looter, he had easily disarmed him and then eviscerated him with his own kukri knife. He left the body on the pizza counter, pour encourager les autres.

The third was another man. At least, Devlin thought it was a man, but the only good look he got was at the back of his head lining up a night-sight shot on 47th Street as he ran east. Devlin had been triangulating his GPS signal, watched the hinky behavior, and when the guy tossed the cell phone in a trash can, he put one through the back of his skull.

The other three he had already forgotten about. Track and kill. Track and kill. The only trick to it was for him to stay invisible, but there was no place for invisibility like a battlefield that had been emptied of civilians: the only bodies moving out there were either cops, who were easy to spot, even in plain clothes, or the bad guys, who were even easier to spot. You could say a lot about the NYPD, but one thing you could never say was that the front-line men and women were cowards.

In a sense, he had been fighting this enemy since 1985, although he didn’t realize it at the time, and had made it his life’s work to understand how he thought and, more important, what he feared. Forget all that crap about pig’s blood and ham sandwiches and unclean women and women in general; what he most feared was humiliation, especially humiliation in death. In this he was not unlike the great hero of the Trojans, who had begged Achilles that, however their battle ended, humiliation should not be a part of it. But, of course, Achilles had spurned that offer as a sign of weakness, killed Hector, and dragged his body around the walls of the city with his chariot.

In Devlin’s opinion, Achilles had gotten exactly what was coming to him, divine karma, when he was killed by the coward Paris with a lucky shot to the one unprotected area of his body, his heel.

Would that be his fate? Would his pride eventually bring him down? Since his conquest of Milverton, there was no man who could take him, no man that he knew about at least. But he also knew that there were hundreds of them out there, thousands, all itching for the chance to take him on. They would not know him by name, or even by reputation, but they would all be animated, as all the best young fighters were, by the notion that there was somebody out there older and better than they, and that they would not be warriors until they had tested their mettle against his.

Very well, then: bring them on. There was only one thing he feared.

The lucky amateur. The 21st-century Paris.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Fort Meade, Maryland

Major Atwater sat at his desk, puzzling over the material his chief had assigned to him. Of all the things to have do at this time, when the country was riveted by what was going on in New York City, this scut work was the worst. Sifting through ancient ciphers-what a waste of time. Stuff that had been gone over and gone over for decades, centuries even, with no one the wiser. Useless crap.

The Thirty-Nine Steps? Not even the figment of a screen-writer’s imagination, since in the original novel by Buchan the thirty-nine steps were exactly that-thirty-nine steps leading down to the sea; it was only in the Hitchcock movie that the steps were “an organization of spies” revealed by the mentalist. How lame was that?

The second message obviously referred to the Poe Cryptographic Challenge, which had been driving amateur cryptologists crazy since the 19th century. It took until 1992 for someone to crack the first substitution cipher, and until 2000 for the second one to be solved. And these were ciphers dreamed up by a drunk living in the Bronx and Baltimore.

Substitution cipher-maybe that was the clue, and not the cipher itself. Substitution ciphers were among the oldest and easiest to crack: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had used one in The Adventure of the Dancing Men, and for some reason they were much favored by fugitive lovers, furtively communicating by means of crude stick figures. As if anybody couldn’t figure out in a heartbeat that the most recurring stick figure would stand for the letter “e,” and figure the rest out from there. It was nearly impossible to compose an English sentence-or a sentence in any Western language, for that matter-without using the letter “e,” and even though that Frenchy Perec had managed the feat in La Disparition and Ernest Wright had pulled off the lipogram even earlier in Gadsby thirty years before.

The things that occupied the human mind. Substitution ciphers, mirror writing, inverted mirror writing…those damn mystery writers never knew when to leave well enough alone.

The third was a bit more complex: It was unsigned.: UG RMK CSXHMUFMKB TOXG CMVATLUIV. Any first-year student at the Wyoming Cryptography School, where he had gone as an undergraduate, could spot that: Have His Carcase by Dorothy L. Sayers, the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey. “We are discovered. Save Yourself.” Piece of cake.

The fourth was a series of numbers: 317, 8, 92, 73, 112, 79, 67, 318, 28, 96, 107, 41, 631, 78, 146, 397, 118, 98, 114.

Beale Ciphers, not that that was much of a help. The three ciphers, first published in a pamphlet in Virginia in 1885, were said to show the way to a great treasure, but only the second cipher had ever been cracked-it turned out to be a numerological correspondence to the wording of the Declaration of Independence which, when read en clair, said:

I have deposited in the county of Bedford, about four miles from Buford’s, in an excavation or vault, six feet below the surface of the ground, the following articles:…The deposit consists of two thousand nine hundred and twenty one pounds of gold and five thousand one hundred pounds of silver; also jewels, obtained in St. Louis in exchange for silver to save transportation… The above is securely packed in iron pots, with iron covers. The vault is roughly lined with stone, and the vessels rest on solid stone, and are covered with others…”

Lots of luck with that. No one-not even the finest minds at NSA or CIA, just screwing around in their spare time, had broken the other two; if they had, they might have found the buried treasure and retired very wealthy men. So wealthy, in fact, that they might even have been able to afford their houses in Potomac and Great Falls.

The fifth was the familiar series of 87 characters, squiggles based on the letter “E,” arranged in three rows:

Again, every first-year student knew this one. It was the secret message sent by the famous composer, Sir Edward Elgar, to his inamorata, Miss Dora Penny-“Dorabella”-one of the recipients of a dedication in the great Enigma Variations for orchestra. This one was tough, because most cryptographers were not musicians and most musicians were not cryptographers, although come to think of it their disciplines had a lot in common, since each was based on writing in a language that bore no resemblance to the meaning, except by fiat.

But the Enigma Variations were tricky, even by musical standards. Elgar had composed a series of variations on a theme that, he claimed, was never actually heard in the piece itself. That is to say, the “theme”-angular and descriptive, which led some to suggest that it was nothing more than the topographic outlines of the Malvern Hills that Elgar knew so well, expressed in music-was only the counterpoint to the Unheard Melody. Scholars had spent most of the last century trying to identify the hidden tune.

Well, Major Atwater was no musician, so he didn’t much care about the mysterious melody. What he had in front of him, the famous “Dorabella” set of squiggles, was much more interesting.

For a century, amateurs and professionals alike had been trying to break the code, mostly in expectation of discovering some Victorian-Edwardian raciness secreted within, like one of the “snuggeries” that so feverishly occupied the Victorian pornographic imagination. And that the fact that Elgar had further memorialized Ms. Penny in the great orchestral work itself indicated that his affection for her ran very deep. “These are deep waters indeed, Watson,” as Sherlock Holmes famously said in some adventure or another. Despite the fact that a very high percentage of intelligence professionals were Sherlock Holmes fans, Major Atwater had never quite managed to see the charm of a world in which it was always 1895.

And then there was “Masterman XX.”

Work backward. Whoever assembled these ciphers had meant for that to be the punch line. It had to have some meaning. The reference was obvious-the famous “Double-Cross System” developed by the British during World War II. It was essentially a method of doubling captured German agents, returning them home, and then using them to spread disinformation. The XX stood both for the double-cross itself and for the Committee of Twenty, which oversaw the operations. Crude by contemporary standards of HUMINT tradecraft, to be sure, but there was always a first time for everything, and after the war, as the Allies split apart to become antagonists, it became the template for every doubled and re-doubled agent, every disinformation and false-flag operation that the American and the Soviets ran against each other.

He ran his hands through his hair. Already, it was thinning, he had to admit that. Life just wasn’t fair. Time to think this through again.

A series of ciphers, each one famous. Some easily solved, like the substitution ciphers, and others the object of countless efforts to crack them by amateur and professional alike. What was the common thread?

There wasn’t any. Literary references, imaginary ciphers, real ciphers, love-letter ciphers…what were the common themes?

Love and money, unless you counted the double-cross. But weren’t double-crosses always about either love or money? He felt like he was living in some kind of wacky film noir, a modern-day Philip Marlowe transplanted to suburban Washington, but with exactly zero chance of a hot blonde walking through the door with a big problem and a little piece of money.

Hang on. Follow your own damn logic. Think. That’s what they pay you do.

No, not just think. Associate. That’s what code-makers did, and it was up to him to reverse-engineer the damn thing, like the Japanese after World War II, trying to figure out how Western technology worked, and how they could do it better.

A code consisted not only of the actual cipher itself, but the overall concept behind it. In the Beale cipher, for example, the clues to the location of the buried treasure were hidden behind the referential numbers, but the real key was the Declaration, which obviously meant something to the code-maker. This is where it got tricky.

The Declaration might have had a primal, emotional resonance for the man calling himself Thomas Jefferson Beale-his very name would suggest that-but it also might, might be totally coincidental. His real name might not have been Thomas Jefferson Beale, and the use of the Jefferson ’s great call to arms might simply have reflected its ubiquity in American culture at that time. Correlation is not causation.

But, like master bomb-makers, master code-makers saw their work as a higher calling, an art form so special that they could not resist leaving some clue to their identity, or to the code’s purpose. Like the medieval artisans who would sneak signatures onto their work, in the hopes of living forever in stone or wood, the code-writers each had a style that spoke to their purpose. This is why I am doing this was, at root, the code behind every code, and if the applause came decades or centuries down the road, then so be it.

So why was he doing this?

Love and money. Money and love. That the code-writer was a man was a safe assumption. Most code-writers were men, and even if it was politically incorrect, it was a safe assumption that a woman had not sent these missives to Seelye-or, if she had, she was merely a courier. Men loved numbers, codes, statistics, hidden meanings, conspiracy theories. Not every man, of course, nor was every woman automatically ruled out as a participant. But every now and then you just had to play the odds, and the hell with the feelings of some female professor at Harvard.

He looked at the assemblage again, and again. Waited for it to fall into place. Waited for it to assume shape and form and meaning. Waited for it to reveal itself, to expose itself, naked, to his gaze. It was almost erotic.

Suddenly, he saw it. What a fool he had been. What fools they had all been.

Love. The Dancing Men were about love, the kind of mad love that careers out of the past to curse the present. Have His Carcase was about the Playfair cipher-hell, it was practically a “how-to” guide to the damn thing-but it was also a story of discovered lovers. And who was more emblematic of the 19th century than the tortured, malevolent genius of Edgar Allan Poe?

Line them up: prelude, theme, development, deceptive cadence (the Beale cipher, although it too must have resonance), climax, and coda. And what was the climax?

Dorabella.

It wasn’t about sight at all. It was about sound.

It was all about Elgar and Dorabella.

This was what the culture got and deserved for ignoring one of its principal senses-hearing-in favor of its default mode, sight. What if the squiggles really were what some had suggested, just a bunch of jocular shit, a goof by an older man impossibly in love with a younger woman, who had hidden his real message, his declaration of love inside the music?

Knowing that, even in the 19th century, when the standard of education was infinitely higher than it was today, Elgar might have counted on the once-remove that music gave him. After all, he lived in the days of the fictional My-croft Holmes, Sherlock’s arguably smarter elder brother, who often was the British government when he was not successfully masquerading as a civil servant. At the apogee of British society, in the days before credentialism, that quintessentially American disease of bureaucrats and apparatchiks, Sir Edward would have had a panoply of cultural and linguistic references available to him. No wonder it was in this period that Britain reached its zenith; culturally confident, a synthesis of classical civilization and Anglo-Saxon ferocity, able to subjugate the native Celts and harness their scientific and literary genius in the service of the Empire.

Morse code: I am. Am I? A phrase and then the reverse. A yearning, strange and ineffable. Hesitant, coy and coquettish by turns, masterful and manly by others. Everyone assumed that the work was as Elgar said: portraits of various friends. Program music, the scholars called it.

But what if that, too, was all misdirection? What if the central enigma of the Enigma Variations wasn’t so enigmatic after all, but hiding right there in plain sight? There, hidden away in one of the lesser variations-not the magisterial “Nimrod,” which had come, like the Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, to symbolize the very spirit of Victorian Britain itself, but the one that immediately followed it.

The “Dorabella” variation.

The squiggly “eeees.”

The squiggly, ornamented melodic line of the “Dorabella” Variation, supposedly meant to express the girl’s slight hesitancy in her speech patterns. But listen closer: the variation does not simply depict one person, but two. The strings twitter, but the woodwinds answer.

Dora. Bella. Dora the Beautiful.

And she is having a conversation with the composer.

It was all coming together. The wife, the flighty and often amusing friends. All building on the Morse Code, on the unheard, unspoken, unarticulated, unwritten “real” theme as the music drove toward to the titanic “Nimrod” variation and then…the whole point of the piece, carefully and calculatedly inserted precisely at the point where the audience would still be in thrall to the majesty of the Ninth Variation and never suspect that the real declaration of love would come, dramatically, where they were least expecting it.

Match it up:

There it was, staring at him, plainly. The contrary motion of the great tune, the unanswered question of I am. Am I? The inverse, the mirror image. The counterpoint of existence, the yin and the yang, the harmonic balance: one door closes, another door opens. One man dies, another child is born. Perpetual contrary motion.

Look at it.

No: listen to it.

Read it. Not the way one would usually “read,” but the way a musician would read:

Hearing it as he-or, in this case, she-read.

It wasn’t about a code at all.

It was the unheard theme of the Enigma Variations, written out in Elgar’s private shorthand two years before he composed his first masterpiece, and communicated to the woman he loved but whom he could not have. He had to hide his affections-after all, he was married, and he and his wife had just been on a visit to Dora, her father, and her step-mother-and so he disguised them.

Not only disguised them. Gave them voice. Orchestrated them. And then let the world hear them.

It was about Love.

In his excitement, Major Atwater leaped to his feet and began to sing. Then he stopped, caught up short-

Love was followed by the Double Cross: XX. The symbol of Death.

Not substitution ciphers-substitutions. Symbols of symbols. Telling a tale of love declared and love frustrated. Of love unrequited and love confounded.

“We are discovered. Save Yourself.”

It wasn’t about Love after all.

It was about Revenge.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

St. Clare’s Hospital

“It’s St. Vincent’s now, officer,” the admitting specialist had said last night, “for however long we stay in business”-but Lannie wasn’t in the mood for a history lesson. He’d gotten Sid immediate medical attention. As it turned out, Sid’s leg was broken in four places, but otherwise he was going to be okay. The doctors had shot him full of painkillers and done the best they could with the leg, but it was going to be a while, if ever, before he could resume his alternate career as shortstop for the New York Yankees.

“What’s the score?” asked Sid, wide-awake, but full of more dope than Lenny Bruce.

“We’re winning,” Lannie lied.

“Correction,” came a voice behind them. “We’re going to win, but right now we are at the mercy of my least favorite people in the world.”

Lannie and Sid turned to see Capt. Byrne stepping into Sid’s room. His shoulder was bandaged and he was a little pale, but otherwise he appeared pretty much his old nail-chewing self. “In the old days,” he said, “this was the place they brought all the gangsters, after they’d been ventilated in some dustup or other in Hell’s Kitchen. They even brought the great Owney Madden here in 1912, after he’d gotten himself shot up by the Hudson Dusters. Filled him full of lead, eleven shots in all, and still the son of a bitch didn’t die.” Byrne pulled back the covers to take a look at Sid, and smiled. “You’ve got nowhere near eleven rounds in you, boyo.”

Sid smiled weakly. Why did it have to be him? Everybody always made fun of him, the Jewish kid, supposedly the smart one, but not the tough one. All he’d wanted was a chance to show the boss that he was as tough and as brave as anyone in the CTU. And look at him…

“And show us you did, Sidney,” said Byrne. It was uncanny how the man could read minds. That’s what made them all love him. Sure, he was a tough, politically incorrect, mean SOB, but then so was his uncle, Sy Sheinberg, who had practically been a father to Byrne. “Think Yiddish, dress British,” had been the motto of Sy’s generation, but he had turned it on its head: “Yiddish think, Irish drink,” was his version, and it was the way he had lived, right up to the moment he died. How he had died, and what combination of courage and desperation had driven him to, essentially, conduct his own autopsy on himself while he was still alive, Sid could not image. And Frankie had never talked about it, even though he had been the one who had found him, bottle in one hand, scalpel in the other. “You’ll be out of here in no time.”

Sid struggled a bit. “I wanna be in the shit, boss,” he protested.

“We got plenty of guys in the shit already,” said Byrne. “And we’re taking them down.”

Sid seemed disappointed: the kid was no coward, that was for sure. Byrne looked around the room and spoke to the nurse. “Sister,” he said, even though nobody called nurses “sister” anymore except the very old-timers in the neighborhood, “would you please close the door and make sure we’re not disturbed?”

“Of course, officer,” the nurse said. She was from Haiti, but she’d been working on the old West Side for long enough to know the drill. They got plenty of shot-up cops around here and they all talked the same.

Byrne took out his departmental secure PDA and showed it to Sid and Lannie. “I got this a couple of hours ago. It gives the last known location of every one of the shooters, tracked by some GPS system I’ve never heard of. Which means…”

“Which means we got the fuckers!” exclaimed Lannie, who high-fived Sid.

“Which means that somebody in some department somewhere in this great land of ours has got better toys than we do and we need to find out who they are and how we can get some for ourselves.” He waited a beat. “I’m putting you both on the case, A-sap. I want you to find out who sent this to me-”

“And fuck him up?” blurted Sid, excited.

“And work with him. Or her. These guys are good, very, very good, and right now we need all the friends we can get. Just as long as they’re not…you know who.” Nobody needed to ask who you-know-who was. Capt. Byrne’s antipathetic relationship with certain parts of official Washington was the stuff of departmental legend.

Byrne handed the instrument to Lannie Saleh. “Open up a line of communication right now. We can trust these guys, whoever they are, DIA, CIA, NSA, I have no idea. I just know this.” He unfolded the piece of paper he’d found in his pocket and showed it to them:

YOUR GUARDIAN ANGEL.

Lannie and Sid both looked at the note in amazement. “What the hell is that supposed to mean, Captain?” asked Sid.

“It means this guy, whoever he is, saved my life, so as far as I’m concerned he’s already established his bona fides. And we’re going to work with him in any way he wants us to. So get cracking”

Lannie’s face dropped. “But I was going to stay here with Sid, keep him-”

“I didn’t say you had to do it at HQ, did I? And if you’re not smart enough to be able to make this thing sing and dance, then you’re not as smart as I think you are.”

“Okay, boss,” said Lannie.

“But we’re getting them all, right?” ventured Sid. “The bad guys.” Like every cop, and certainly the men under Byrne’s command, he took any attack on his city deeply personally.

“Looks that way,” Byrne said. “I got our best guys-not counting you two clowns-on it, and they’ve registered eleven kills.” He decided not to tell them that six of those kills had been made by somebody not on the team. That was a mystery that either would sort itself out or it wouldn’t, so he’d keep that to himself. “So…” he said, looking at Sid, “just as soon as you stop goldbricking, we can get back to-”

His phone rang. His personal cell phone. He glanced down at the number on caller ID: blocked. He wondered briefly if he should take it. Normally he wouldn’t, especially not on the job, since all official calls came over their crack internal communication system, the one that had so distinguished itself on 9/11. But this was an emergency, and you never knew-

“Hello?”

“Hello, Frankie, how’s it hanging?” said the voice, and Byrne recognized it right away. It was his brother, Tom Byrne, deputy director of the FBI.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Budapest

So she was back where they had started, on the hunt for Farid Belghazi, that guy from CERN, which had been much in the news lately. Despite a series of unfortunate events, the Large Hadron Collider was once again operable and going about its business. Recently, it had set a new record by colliding particle beams at seven tera electric volts as two proton beams, guided by thousands of large electromagnets, collided head-on at 3.5 TeV, registering more than half a million collision events. But that was nothing: some time in the near future, the Hadron Collider would be ramped up to reach 14 TeV.

Budapest was also, according to the NYPD, the source of the denial-of-service attack that had preceded the assault on midtown Manhattan. An hour ago, her inbox had suddenly filled to overflowing as a direct line of communication with the CTU had suddenly opened, and she knew she had Frank Ross to thank for that. Now she was directly in touch with members of the CTU, operating anonymously but under the strictest security protocols, built into the laptop and verified by relays.

It was a two-way street: she was able to transmit information relayed to her by Frank Ross and in turn they were helping her draw a bead on the source of the DoS attack that had temporarily blinded CTU and allowed the gunmen to smuggle in their weapons and get into place. Slowly but surely, she was homing in on the source of the attack: just where she had feared it might be, but the only place that made any sense: eastern Hungary, near the Romanian border. Szeged.

Szeged today was just off the motorway, but closer in spirit to Timi oara in neighboring Romania than it was to Budapest. Once one of the major border towns of the Hungarian empire, it had fallen to the Turks in 1526 and had become an important Ottoman administrative center; liberated 160 years later, it played an important role in the revolution of 1848, and was completely destroyed in the flood of 1879. It was supposed to be very beautiful, having been rebuilt in the grand Austro-Hungarian style.

In short, it fit Skorzeny to a T: once Muslim, happily radical, formerly communist, yet filled with creature comforts, good food, and the beautiful Hungarian women. Limited in his movements, he still had plenty of clout in some of the former communist countries in the old Soviet sphere of influence, and it would not be surprising if he could come and go with relative impunity, so long as nobody made a fuss. Though penetrated by German traders in the Middle Ages, the area had never really been civilized, and as one of the central battlegrounds in the war between Islam and the West, it bore the bloody scars of a millennium of conflict.

The best part, from his perspective, was that it was right on the border of Romania and Serbia, which certainly had no love for the United States, and within striking distance of both Ukraine and Bulgaria, and the ports along the Black Sea.

And across the Black Sea, of course, lay eastern Turkey and then, Iran. Her home, still. No matter where she lived, no matter what happened, and no matter where she ended up, she would always think of it that way.

She shook off feelings, brought on by her hunt for Skorzeny and Amanda Harrington. On the flight, she had brought herself up to speed on every action the man had made since their last encounter in Clairvaux. Using both classified information and open-source material she’d been able to assemble a picture of the monster. His movements were severely restricted, but he was still allowed to operate his business interests-much reduced since the failure of his attack on America-and his Foundation, whose real purpose and activities continued to fly under the media radar.

He was a devil, she had to give him that. Perhaps as a result of his childhood, he had become a master of playing both sides of the street. He was both a rapacious capitalist and a committed one-worlder, whose largesse benefited both former communist societies and the Western poor alike. Renowned for his taste in classical music, there was hardly a symphony orchestra or an opera company on earth that did not benefit from his largesse, and until he went to ground last year, he could often be seen in his private boxes around the globe, taking in a performance of Tosca or Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Less visibly, he was in league with just about every terrorist organization on the face of the earth, surreptitiously funneling money to them through a variety of dummy corporations and charities, destabilizing smaller countries, then swooping in and making a killing. None of it, of course, could be directly traced to him; he had as much plausible deniability as any head of state.

Personally, he was fastidious to a fault, almost enough to make Howard Hughes at the end look sane. He chose his assistants carefully for their skills and their discretion. She had already had experience with one of them, the man named Pilier whom she had shot on the roof of Clairvaux prison, just before he could bring down the rescue helicopter. Now, if she read things correctly, he had a woman named Derrida, Emanuelle Derrida. Maryam chuckled. She liked that. It showed a sense of humor on the old goat’s part: a deconstructionist for an act of deconstruction. For she had no doubt that was what he was up to.

And now this business with Elgar. “Frank Ross” had relayed her Atwater ’s findings and theory immediately. For years, the Dorabella cipher had tantalized amateur cryptologists and Elgar lovers, and here was the simplest explanation of all, and one that would have presented itself immediately to any composer-that Elgar was writing out in a kind of shorthand the sketch of his plan for his first great orchestral work. Up to that point he had been a lesser composer; after it, he had taken his place among the greats. And all for the love of a woman.

It made perfect sense to her. Crazy love-random, unpredictable, mad, and often bad love-was really what made the world go round. True, institutional love with all its trappings gave society stability, provided for orderly succession of property and authority; without it, there could be no civilizations. But it was l’amour fou that caused the real breakthroughs, mad passion, meet one night and elope tomorrow, or throw away everything for a shot at the most inappropriate person imaginable. That was when great things happened, whether for good or for ill.

Combined with her training, Maryam set her woman’s intuition to work, playing back everything she remembered from that séance in the French prison. She had insinuated herself into the small orchestra Skorzeny had engaged for the occasion-Swiss boarding schools were very good, not only for languages but for musical instruction-and she had seen, up close, the look on that woman’s face: a prisoner of Skorzeny’s mad love. Skorzeny had nearly killed Amanda Harrington that day, and had they not gotten there in time to rescue the American woman’s daughter, Amanda might have died. Now she was with Skorzeny again, most likely unwillingly, and there could be only one reason: amour fou.

Amanda Harrington would be the way they were going to get Skorzeny.

Using the laptop he’d provided her and a 4G WNIC, Maryam worked the intel network feverishly, drawing a bead on Miss Harrington. Not for the first time, she blessed Frank for having given her this, one of the most sacred and secret tools in the CSS arsenal. Innovation was the way the West could always stay one step ahead of the East.

Her thoughts flashed back to her lover, somewhere on the ground in Manhattan. Oddly, she had no fears for him. Certainly not in the realm of direct combat. There was only one thing she feared: the wild card. In his battle in London against Milverton, she might have been able to accept his death, since it would have come against a worthy adversary, a man whose skills and kills were known to her first hand; she had seen him in action. Charles Augustus Milverton had died that day in Camden Town, but it could almost as easily have been “Frank Ross.” That she could have accepted and moved on. But not the chance shot, the senseless death. Then, life really would be as meaningless and random as the atheists said. And Maryam was nothing if not a good Muslim.

That night, in her room on the Pest side of the Hungarian capital, in one of those old commie-era hotels that had been acquired by a high-end Western chain, with the Danube flowing just outside to the west, she immersed herself in everything there was to discover about Amanda Harrington. Her birth, her schooling, her early lovers. Her life as one of London ’s “It” girls, her failed marriage, her abortion.

MI5, Britain ’s internal security service, had compiled a handsome dossier on her, largely attributable to her work as a City financial wiz and later the head of the Skorzeny Foundation, and it was a treasure trove of information. Like the FBI reports in the U.S., MI5 reports contained a great deal of unsubstantiated information, even gossip, but none of this had to be provable in a court of law. That was the problem with America these days, she thought: the threshold for conviction had become the de facto standard for everything, including the court of public opinion. The populace had become cowed, afraid to think a single thought that would not be admissible under the highly restrictive and defendant-friendly rules of evidence that had evolved over more than two centuries of constitutional law.

None of that interested her. At this moment, she was not an intelligence agent, but a woman, a fellow woman. Drill down:

The abortion. Not, according to the dossier, the product of her marriage to a probably homosexual lesser peer, but the result of a fling, a one-night stand, in New York while in town on business. The prospective father never knew; Amanda had dealt with the consequences of her actions privately, personally. But Maryam knew, she just knew, that this had been the event that had changed Miss Harrington’s life.

Suddenly, she understood everything.

The reason for the kidnapping of the American girl, Emma Gardner.

She scrolled back through the dossier: medical reports, medical reports…There-

As a result of the abortion, subject lost the physical ability to have children.

The girl Milverton had snatched in Edwardsville and presented to Amanda as a present. The one thing she had wanted more than anything else in the world. The one thing a lifelong career woman never had had time for. The one thing she, personally, could never have: a daughter.

So why was she with Skorzeny again?

Simple: it was he who had sicced “Frank Ross” on Milverton. He who had rolled the dice, in the realization that it almost didn’t matter which of the equally matched adversaries-Hector and Achilles-won, that either way he, Skorzeny, would be the true victor. That Milverton had died that day was just as well. His death removed a rival for Amanda’s hand, and the fact that Amanda, no thanks to Skorzeny, had survived her bout with the paralyzing poison-tetrodotoxin, the hospital report said, most likely derived from the poison of the Japanese fugu fish administered in a nonlethal dose-was evidence that Skorzeny still desired her and had, on some sick level, forgiven her.

She was his captive. And they were here, together, somewhere in Hungary.

Come on, girl: find her.

Search. Search for relationships, hidden relationships, the kind people used to easily be able to conceal, but now, with the aid of ERMs-Entity-Relationship Models-it was child’s play to create a diagram of nearly everybody’s business and personal relationships. That’s the thing most folks never understood, Maryam realized as she called up the diagram, that everything they typed on the computer, every picture or piece of personal information they posted on the social-networking sites, every comment they made on a website, which could be easily traced back to their IP addresses, went into their permanent file, their publicly available dossier, there not only for everybody living to see, but for all future generations as well. If there ever was a morality enforcer-and given the understanding that morality’s definition would change from generation to generation-the Internet was it.

It had to be here. It had to be. The one missing piece of information. The thing she needed to know. The overlooked item that would link Amanda Harrington and Emanuel Skorzeny to each other, inextricably link them in some sort of sick relationship that neither of them could gainsay, that they would assume Fate had dictated for them long before they were born.

Skorzeny, she knew, would believe none of this bullshit. Men believed in action, not in fate; they were the architects of their own desires, triumphs, tragedies, and misfortunes. Women believed in soul mates.

There had to be something between then, something that antedated Harrington’s working with Skorzeny. Something in both their pasts that led them to each other, something that they would both mistake for Fate, even when it was simple Chance. You could be an atheist, and believe the entire universe was random, but when it came to crunch time, no one ever begged chance for one more chance.

And then she found it. So simple, so unprepossessing, and hiding where all good secrets, and the best intelligence agents, operated: in plain sight.

Money and Love.

When all else failed, use Occam’s razor: The simplest explanation was most likely to be true.

What else was there, but Money and Love?

Money had first brought them together, and sick Love had kept them together. The sick love Skorzeny had for money and his desire for the solace, however temporary, but satisfying, of women. The love Amanda had for money; how, in the absence of a man and a child in her life, it had made her feel equal to men; and when Skorzeny tapped her-among all others!-for the leadership of his Foundation, what a proof it offered to all her detractors. With money she succeeded and with money she became equal; nay, primus inter pares in the world of the City.

And Love? For him, she had none. But that didn’t matter to a man like Skorzeny. Pace the Beatles, Skorzeny believed, like most men, that money really could buy you love, and if not love, at least the simulacrum of love, which meant sex and a modicum of affection outside the bedroom.

Milton understood it. The oldest bargain there was, the source of the world’s oldest profession. Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste brought Death into the World and the source of all our mortal Woe, with the loss of Eden…

She looked back at Atwater’s report, which amounted to this simple equation, this simple cipher, that not all the cryptographic machines that the CIA, the NSA, the CSS, and everybody else could muster against. The equivalent of Einstein’s E = Mc². Which was this:

Money-Love = Revenge.

She took a deep breath. Were she not a Muslim, she would have taken a deep drink as well, but she only drank when she was in the West, with him, and now that she was back in the East, things were different. Even though no one could see her, there were rituals, formalities, to be observed. No one need know, but she would know and at this point, that was all that mattered.

They had to be here. They had to be here in Hungary, somewhere. There was an intersection, an interstice, and she had to find it. Because, whatever it was, it would lead her to them. Or them to her. But not right now. She had had a long journey. She needed time to think.

Maryam took off her clothes and luxuriated under a long hot shower. That was something else that was forbidden, to enjoy the pleasure of your own body, alone, to reach out and try to connect with the driving mechanism of the universe, the eternal piston engine that He had designed, which Newton had grasped under the apple tree: for every action, an equal and opposite reaction. What goes up must come down. One door opens, another closes. A man dies, a child is born…

A knock at the door, which she discerned only dimly as she toweled off her head. One of those intrusive hotel “welcome” packages that they reserved for VIPs, or people with money, or both. Eastern Europe still admired money, in a way the West did not. Maybe that was because the West didn’t have money anymore.

She wrapped the hotel bathrobe tightly around her. By hotel standards, it was pretty darned nice; assuming that roughly one-third of the guests would steal the robes, the prices charged were fairly reasonable.

The laptop lay open and operative on the coffee table.

There was a woman at the door. Not a room service woman, not an employee of the hotel, no one she was expecting, but someone she very much anticipated seeing.

“Hello,” said Amanda Harrington.

And, right behind her, Emanuel Skorzeny. “Bonjour, mon cher,” he said. He had a gun in his hand. He looked over her shoulder, into the room, toward the laptop, and smiled. “May we come in?”

Amanda brushed past her with only a sidelong glance, but Skorzeny seemed genuinely please to be meeting her for the first time. “Really, my dear, you are as lovely as I had heard. Truly splendid.” His mien darkened. “But, as you deprived me of the services of a very faithful and valuable retainer at our last encounter, I feel it necessary to introduce you to his successor.”

He moved to one side. Behind him stood another woman, blond and beautiful.

She had a gun in her hand, and looked like she knew how to use it, so there was no point in arguing. Maryam ushered them into the room and closed the door.

She turned, knowing there was nothing to do. Skorzeny sat down like he owned the place-which, come to think of it, was a distinct possibility. Amanda stood off to one side, almost flinching; her eyes met Maryam’s, just as they had back at Clairvaux, only this time their positions were reversed, and Maryam was now the helpless one, while Amanda was the one who might save her if she could, but not right now.

“Put on some music, please,” Skorzeny commanded, and Amanda dutifully obliged. The hotel came equipped with a flat-screen TV that also carried hundreds of audio channels. In just a few seconds, Amanda had found the channel she was looking for and the music came wafting into the room.

“Turn it up,” said Skorzeny, breaking into a broad smile as he heard the familiar strains of the overture: brassy, with urgent strings. He addressed his next remarks to her: “You recognize it, of course. Somehow approrpiate, wouldn’t you say?”

The second woman, the one with the gun-she must be Derrida-said nothing as she started to copy the laptop files. Skorzeny noticed and jumped from his seat:

“Good God, woman, what do you think you are doing? Don’t touch that. This devil poisons everything he touches.”

Mlle. Derrida stopped and backed away from the machine.

“Our hostess is going to close it down, as per the safety instruction manual. And then we are going to take it, and her, with us.”

Skorzeny turned back to Maryam. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the blonde preparing a needle, with her name on it. The fugu poison again? There was nothing she could do about it.

“You haven’t answered my question, my dear,” said Skorzeny as Mlle. Derrida approached her. She was powerless to resist. Better to let it happen now, to learn as much as possible while she was in captivity, to try and figure out a way to escape later, to-

The needle pinched a little, and almost immediately, she felt herself shutting down.

“The music?” Skorzeny looked at her, mouthed words at her, but she couldn’t make any sense of them in any language. She was so tired. Just before she went completely paralyzed, she might have heard him say:

“It’s the overture to La Forza del Destino. What an amazing coincidence.”

But then her world turned dark and she didn’t care anymore.