Hostile Intent

Chapter Twenty-five

Senator Robert Hartley kicked off his shoes, poured himself a drink, and looked out the window at the Potomac as it flowed past his apartment in The Watergate. It was after midnight. It had been a very long day and he was looking forward to some well-deserved relaxation.

He liked Washington, he decided, and even though he had promised the people of his state that three terms would be plenty, he had since found ample reason to rearrange his position on the subject. Seniority, for one thing, which was the only thing on Capitol Hill that outranked sex as a congressional motivating factor. All that was left now was how to pitch his repositioning as high principle, instead of opportunism.

After all, he was an effective pork-barreler — make that “constituent services provider”—and he kept federal dollars flowing into his state far in excess of what they paid out in taxes. Early on, he had learned that pork was a zero-sum contest among the fifty states, and so he’d found himself in complete agreement with Mr. Micawber: that taxes plus one extra dollar back from the feds equaled happiness, and taxes minus one dollar equaled misery. Especially at the ballot box.

Second, he knew his way around the corridors. One thing the Clintons had taught everybody — a lesson they in turn had learned from J. Edgar Hoover — that he who controls the files controls the capital, and Hartley had made it his first order of business upon arrival in the District of Columbia to get to know the men who knew the men who kept the secrets. Although privately he despised the FBI for the life it had forced Hoover and Clyde Tolson to lead, he knew enough to ingratiate himself with the Revolving Door known as the FBI director, as well as with the Empty Seat known as the Director of Central Intelligence. It was amazing how close you could get with somebody once you knew what really motivated him or her. Which was pretty much the same thing that motivated everybody: money, sex, and power.

Third, there was the war chest. So much cash that Hartley hadn’t yet mustered the courage to ask his bundlers where it was all coming from. Small donations, he was assured, all well within the campaign finance limits. Keeping track of stuff like this was beyond anybody’s powers except a fleet of high-priced lawyers with unlimited billable hours, but Hartley supposed that was the price you paid for democracy.

Not bad for a boy from the Bronx. As a kid, Hartley had set his cap for a ticket out of the old neighborhood, which in his case lay between Belmont and the Mosholu Parkway. As a teenager, he had started calling himself “Hartley” instead of his real name — it sounded so much tonier — and after a while it had become such second nature that he’d had it legally changed between the time he applied to Harvard Law and when he was accepted. Good-bye Kings College, hello Cambridge, Mass.

After Harvard, he’d clerked for one of the justices for a while, but realized soon enough that the life of a lawyer was not for him, that the law degree was only a means to an end, which was politics. He found he had a real knack for it, so when the time came for him to settle on a base of operations, he picked a state in the upper Midwest where the folks were just as nice as pie, a place where he could rub off the abrasive edges of his native accent and his personality but could still retain a trace of his otherness as he climbed the ladder from the state legislature to the House to the Senate.

He knew that a lot of people considered him a prick — you couldn’t rise as high as he had without making plenty of enemies — but his constituents didn’t seem to care: he was their prick, and he delivered. And, really, was that so bad? He wanted what everybody else wanted, status, respect, power, and, in those moments when he was truthful with himself, love. Even if he had to look for it in unsavory places sometimes. Oh well, he could live with that. In fact, he had been living with it for most of his life.

Which is why it was strange but true—“ironic,” even, in the currently debased usage of that word, which usually signified “coincidental”—that just about the only friend he had in the world was the man who was now sitting in the Oval Office.

But latterly a new element had just been injected into the forthcoming campaign: President Tyler’s sagging fortunes. What just happened in Edwardsville wasn’t going to help his poll numbers, that was for sure. Despite the false sense of security post–9/11, wouldn’t take much to swing the pendulum of fear back into the red zone. Another attack, God forbid, and…

Hartley realized in this game of high-low poker, he had a great hand to play. The only question was when to declare.

Declarations were not something politicians instinctively gravitated toward. Like most of his colleagues, Hartley preferred to dither and debate until events or circumstances or fate or whatever finally forced his hand. And then he jumped in the direction of the wind, principles as intact as possible, press releases at the ready.

Hartley didn’t live at The Watergate, of course. His residence of record was in Georgetown, like everybody else’s. He kept this particular flat rented under an assumed name that was protected by an ironclad confidential understanding with the management, and used it for special occasions.

He was mentally trying on the Oval Office for size when a sound outside in the hallway caught his attention. Sometimes his visitors from the agency were a little shy or inexperienced, and it took a friendly voice of encouragement, or a drink, or something stronger, to put them at ease. Few recognized him — hell, they were barely old enough to vote, most of them. To them, he was just another middle-aged white guy from the hinterland, come to the great city to stroll on what passed for the wild side on the banks of the Potomac.

He peered through the security peephole, but saw nothing. He put his ear against the door, but heard nothing. Hartley was no longer paranoid — liberation was a wonderful thing — but discretion was still part of his implicit deal with the voters and there was no point in pushing his luck.

He glanced at his watch and made a mental note to discuss tardiness with the manager of the service, the next time he encountered him in one of the District’s discreet watering holes that catered to powerful men with his tastes.

This time, the knock was unmistakable. Hartley turned back to the door, and yanked it open—

Nobody.

“Goddamnit—”

The man he didn’t see blew past him before he knew what was happening. Grabbed Hartley by the arm and pulled him inside. Closed the door behind them softly and said, “Ready?”

Hartley looked his unexpected visitor over. The fellow certainly didn’t look like he was from A Current Affair, the name of the escort service he regularly employed. Even were he into fetishes, this get-up — a good-looking blond hunk in a suit — wasn’t what he had ordered at all. “Who are you?”

“Right,” said the visitor, and the next thing Hartley knew he was on the floor, blood gushing from his nose. Just as he hadn’t seen the man, he hadn’t seen the punch either.

“I’m a United States senator!” he protested, fumbling for his handkerchief. He hated to ruin an Egyptian-cotton present from one of his admirers, but he really had no other choice.

“Don’t try to impress me,” said the man, settling into Hartley’s best chair. “I’ve met lepers with a better pedigree, and hookers with more taste.”

Hartley didn’t see why his unexpected visitor had to add insult to injury. He had not requested any role-playing this evening, and rough stuff was almost never on his agenda, but the lad was big and strapping and very good looking….

“I suppose you’ll want cash up front,” he said, wiping away the blood. “It’s in my bedroom.”

“Stay put, pops, it’s not your money I want.” The man had some kind of accent Hartley couldn’t quite place, but then he never was very good at languages. He was an American.

Hartley was about to inquire what he meant when the doorbell rang. He glanced at his visitor for instructions. “It’s for you,” the man said. Hartley wiped his face with what remained of his clean handkerchief and opened the door.

The boy was young, just old enough, which was the way he liked them, and dressed as he had requested, like a pizza delivery man. “Come in,” said Senator Hartley, turning back toward his guest. He just had time to breathe a small sigh of relief, thankful that there was somebody else in the apartment, a witness, to spare him from further trouble when he noticed that the blond man was no longer there.

“Um, mister…” said the boy, which was too bad, because they were his last words. In retrospect, thought Hartley, all of us would like a proper valedictory.

The .22 slug entered the boy’s head and bounced around his skull for less than a second, killing him without so much as a sigh. He fell, the empty pizza box with the hole punched in its bottom floating lightly on the air for a moment before it joined the lifeless body on the floor. Then the man put another bullet into his head, for good measure.

“Jesus—” was all Hartley could muster before he too landed on the floor, knocked unconscious, from a tremendous blow to his head.

Hartley awoke a few minutes later, in bed, naked, with the late pizza boy for a companion. His visitor sat opposite, watching CNN on the bedroom television, unruffled by the commotion. “You know what they used to say in the old South? That a politician couldn’t get reelected if he was caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy. Well, we’re about to go one step further.”

The BlackBerry camera flashed. Hartley was still stunned by the blow but he was tech-savvy enough to know that the photograph was already being uplinked somewhere, and that he was, basically, fucked. “What do you want?” he croaked.

“Now you’re making sense,” said the man. “The first order of business is you’re working for me. The second is this.” He handed Hartley a small slip of paper, upon which was printed a local Washington telephone number. “Memorize it.”

Hartley stared at the number, numb. “I think I have it.”

“Brilliant,” said the man. “Now, eat it.” Hartley realized he wasn’t kidding. He ate it. “Now dial it.” For encouragement, he pointed the gun at Hartley’s head. He dialed it, let it ring until the man disconnected the call. “Good. You passed the first test.”

He reached into his pocket and took out what looked like a minicomputer and fired it up. Hartley blanched when he saw the Web site, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. “Now, Mr. Chairman,” the man said, “let’s get started. We’ve got some hacking to do.”

Chapter Twenty-six

There were no visible televisions in the public rooms of Devlin’s home. No radios, either. A visitor would surely remark their absence, if he ever had visitors. The only rooms with what might be called “normal” furniture were those that, by chance, could be glimpsed from the outside in the evening, before the curtains were automatically drawn, but those rooms were just for show. There was only one wing of the house that mattered, one room where he spent the bulk of his time.

In which he now sat still, a spider at the center of his vast sigint web. On his main monitor, he could track all incoming calls by signal origin; those he wished to answer could be rerouted to a dead-zone mailbox for later retrieval. Random incoming calls were ignored. Those deemed suspicious or hostile were eliminated by sending back a retro-virus that fried the bounce-back receptors and eliminated the phone numbers from active use for at least forty-eight hours, by which time they had been reassigned to someone else.

He felt a twinge about the girl in Kentucky. Not about what they had done — that was natural, if slightly furtive and definitely transitory. And the emotions he felt for her at the moment were certainly genuine. One would have thought he’d long gotten over the lying that was a necessary part of the seduction, but what came naturally to other men in their endless, restless pursuit of conquest was the one element in his life that he preferred to keep separate from his day job.

He couldn’t, of course. He knew that the life of others was not the life given to him. And now that Milverton had reappeared on the scene, any hope he might have had of getting out after Edwardsville was long gone. He couldn’t just walk away now, not with the most dangerous man on the planet looking for him, his life forfeit to any other Branch 4 op any time the president or Seelye decided to punch his ticket. They had him by the balls.

Which is why he sat here, in the safe room of his house in the Virginia suburbs, surrounded by computers and keyboards, electronically connected anywhere in the world and yet absolutely alone.

To look at this room one might be surprised at its simplicity. Not for him were the vast NSA bullpens of Fort Meade, where the donkey work of electronic surveillance was carried out. If he wanted or needed access to anything in the great black box off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway he needed only to get in his car and drive there, less than an hour away, Beltway traffic willing, where he parked his car and entered the building as part of the custodial staff.

Devlin believed in hiding in plain sight. Devlin believed that naked is the best disguise. Which was why he lived here, alone, on North West Street. Once, Falls Church was a sleepy suburb, the smallest incorporated city in America, equally balanced between government time-servers and what was left of the Virginia gentry who first occupied the place. In recent years, however, Falls Church had undergone a dramatic ethnic shift. Illegal Mexicans clustered on street corners in the old downtown section, and mosques now stood where defunct businesses once had been. Ten miles from the nation’s capital, Arabic and Spanish jostled English as the lingua franca of the new, emergent United States.

Just as Jaguars had no visible radio antennas that would mar the sleek lines of the expensive automobiles, neither did Devlin’s house have any visible external indication of his profession, aside from a small satellite dish easily mistaken for a TV receiver but was in reality a beta-testing uplink that he had devised himself. Only the canniest of observers would have noticed that it was directed not toward the southern sky, where the television satellites were located, but to the southwest, where the secret comsats were.

Arrayed in a row on his desk were three laptops, each with a different operating system and a different web browser. Double-blind passwords, proprietary encryption algorithms. Each of the machines running DB2 and Intelligent Miner and hotlinked separately to the three parallel mainframe servers at the IBM RS/6000 Teraplex Integration Center in Poughkeepsie — the RS/6000 SP, the S/390, and the AS/400. Predictive and descriptive modes, depending on what he was looking for.

He was running Sharpreader on Windows, NetNewsWire on the Mac, Straw on Linux: his inbox was RSS-updated on a minute-by-minute basis, with real-time news and stories of interest on preselected topics. Level Five NSA firewall security, updated regularly. Complete virus, trojan, and spyware projection, automatically updated every twenty-four hours. His best friends. His data miners.

One of the flaws in the government’s security apparatus, he had long realized, was its very nature as a governmental organization. Although he tried to stay off the grid as much as possible, NSA/CSS could not avoid some of the oversight that came with taxpayer funds, and as a result they were blinkered and inhibited, like other governmental agencies. Not to the same extent, of course, or else they could not have functioned, and many of their activities were unfortunately but necessarily devoted to pretense, to the appearance of compliance, just to keep the bean-counters, the blue-noses, the civil-libertarians, and the recrudescent communists as pacified as possible.

But just as war was too important to be left to the generals, the business of national security was too vital to be left to the elected representatives of the people. So there had to be work-arounds, and open-source data mining was one of them.

Some of his fellow professionals scoffed at the notion. To them, “open-source” was synonymous with “amateur,” but amateurs had been responsible for many of the significant breakthroughs in almost every field, and even — perhaps especially — in today’s over-credentialed society they had their manifest uses.

Take, for example, something as simple as a relationship chart, generated by a global search; for any given name, the program could quickly extract all known personal and institutional associates and rank-order them by their proximity to the subject’s name in any news story, video clip, press release, bank record, money-transfer order, e-mail address book, iPhone, or PDA database, Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail accounts, etc. In a few seconds, the printer would spit out a chart graphically displaying the links and degrees of separation. It was often both amazing and instructive to see, visually, who was doing what to whom, and it helped him to make connections that otherwise might have slid by unnoticed.

Take Ali Abu-al-Hamza al-Saleh, for example. One of the problems with Arabic names was that practically every Arab male had more than one “real” name, all of them multiple variations on a relatively small pool of names that could be either patronymic, geographic, or descriptive. Thus, to express it in English, Tom the Fat Man could also be Thomas son of Walter or Tommy the Yemeni, depending. This particular dirtbag, an Israeli Arab, had used his twelve-year-old daughter as a human mule, packed her suitcase chock full of explosives, and put her on a bus bound for Haifa, where she took out an Israeli high-school soccer team that was going to spend the day at the shore.

Saleh had covered his tracks very well, but when the same thing happened a year later, involving an eight-year-old boy detonating amidst some German tourists near the Pyramids, Devlin opened up a file and began watching and linking anything remotely similar. The Case of the Incredible Exploding Children, he referred to it in his own mind, and it didn’t take long before he realized that what seemed frighteningly like a deadly new, inhuman, form of terrorism turned out to be limited to one very fecund and productive male, operating under multiple identities in multiple countries, who had devoted his life to siring as many expendable progeny as possible.

Devlin embedded the information in the infamous look-ma-no-undies Britney Spears video and sent it to a friend at the Jonathan Institute in Tel Aviv, who relayed it to the wet-work boys at Shin Bet, who acted appropriately when Saleh returned to Israel from a “vacation” to Turkey. Devlin was pleased to read press accounts of various body parts washing up on various Mediterranean beaches over a six-week period, until all the limbs, the torso, and finally the head of Mr. Saleh were accounted for. Case closed.

The thought had occurred to him to run a relationship chart on Seelye, but for some reason he hadn’t yet done so. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon was fun with your friends, less fun with your professional relationships. And not at all fun with the man who was, for all practical purposes, his father. O brave new world, where every man is both king and couch potato.

He wasn’t surprised when the first ping came through. In the aftermath of Edwardsville, his first thought was clearing the battlefield as quickly as possible, just in case Milverton’s trap was more complex than it first appeared. The night with the waitress in Lexington was as much for operational security as carnal pleasure, or so he told himself.

The header flashed top-secret, urgent, national-security. By law, he was supposed to answer it unless he was dead, incapacitated, or held under duress. Devlin hit the translator button, to view the content of Seelye’s pings. WHAT FUCKING HAPPENED BACK THERE? Pretty much as he thought, except the message was obviously coming from President Tyler, since Seelye never swore.

HELLO, MR. PRESIDENT, he responded, his reply thoroughly scrambled even over the dedicated fiber-optic line.

HOW DID YOU KNOW? He tried to get a read on where the president was — with Seelye somewhere, certainly.

YOUR ELOQUENCE IS UNMISTAKEABLE. That was sure to piss Tyler off.

Sure enough: LISTEN UP YOU ASSHOLE. I NEED TO KNOW IF THE SITUATION IS UNDER CONTROL. I CANNOT AFFORD ANY POLITICAL BLOWBACK FROM THIS.

I BELIEVE IT IS, YES, SIR. Only a white lie at this point, but…

CAN YOU GUARANTEE THAT?

WITH ALL RESPECT, SIR, PERHAPS YOU’D BETTER ASK GENERAL SEELYE ABOUT GUARANTEES. That would piss Seelye off for sure.

A longer pause: MY OFFICE IN FOUR HOURS. CAMP DAVID.

Not good. Camp David was very private. Asses got chewed off and spit out at Camp David.

DON’T WORRY I’M NOT GOING TO CHEW YOUR ASS OFF. Tyler was quite the mind-reader.

ROGER THAT, SIR.

GET MOVING. The line went dead.

He didn’t like it. No matter how complete his report, he had no intention at this time of mentioning his suspicion, no, make that his absolute dead-solid certainty, that Milverton had made him. That was his problem; no sense adding to it by begging for Branch 4 to be out looking for him as well. Besides, if someone high up was collaborating with Milverton and whoever was running him, compartmentalization was the order of the day.

Which meant that he was in no position to guarantee anything to anybody. And without 100 percent certainty and deniability, the whole purpose of Branch 4—Devlin’s very existence — was pretty much moot. Tyler was facing a tough reelection campaign, and sharks in both parties — like that creepazoid Hartley — were already sniffing blood in the water. An inquiry into Edwardsville, a leak or two, and suddenly one of the most closely guarded secrets in the American intelligence community was blown to hell and gone.

Which meant that Camp David could be a termination meeting.

It wasn’t that Devlin didn’t trust the president of the United States, it’s that he didn’t trust anybody, and so the president of the United States was as good a person to start with as anybody.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Since the rescue, Hope and Rory had been inundated by the moral detritus of modern America. They had surrounded her and Rory so fast that she only realized later that she never had time to thank the man who had saved both their lives. The “reporter” with the knife, who had lopped off that awful man’s arm with the utmost ease. Hope didn’t get a real good look at him, but she did catch his eyes and what she saw in them both thrilled and scared her.

She didn’t see fear. She didn’t see anger. She saw confidence. A sense of purpose, a sense of…professionalism.

The police, the FBI, the doctors, and the news crews had left. The grief counselors and social services people and “caregivers” she wouldn’t let in. There was nothing to say. Hope and Rory sat looking at each other across a half-empty dinner table. The silence in the house was both comforting and almost unendurable.

From time to time the phone rang, but she didn’t answer it. There was nothing to say to anybody, and nothing that could be said to her to make her feel any better.

They had found Jack’s body almost immediately. It wasn’t the blast itself that had killed him; he had been hit by a tiny shard of glass that had punctured his eyeball and penetrated his brain. When they found him, it was almost as if he’d lain down to take a short nap.

There was still no sign of Emma. The rescue workers had tried to tell her that that was a good sign, that maybe she somehow got out, and would turn up tomorrow, wandering dazed somewhere. But they’d also admitted that it might take them days to identify any remains at the blast site. Hope had tried to use her woman’s intuition, to look into her own heart, to listen very carefully to the small voice within and hear what it was saying, that either her daughter was still alive, or she wasn’t. But the voice was as silent as the rest of the house.

Oh well, she could make her peace with that. Plenty of families had gone through the same thing, military families, crime-victim families, and they somehow managed. Until today, Hope was like most of her neighbors; she never really gave much thought to whether her country was actually at war, or whether the whole thing was some fraud cooked up in Texas and Washington and Baghdad and God knows where else, a scam like “Remember the Maine” and “54–40 or Fight,” designed to separate the American people from their money and their children, to enrich men elsewhere.

Hope and Rory looked at each other over a cold meal, neither wishing to break the silence.

“I tried to save her, Mom,” Rory said, after a while.

“I know you did, Rory.”

“And I would have, too. If I’d a found her…”

The memory of him attacking that filthy animal washed over her — her little son, doing something that so many Americans were loath to do: fighting back.

Once more, she remembered how the man’s head had suddenly exploded and how another man suddenly had come out of nowhere and chopped off the arm that held her life in its now lifeless hand. She remembered the gratified look in his eyes when he realized that he had saved both her and her son.

And then she remember something else: the tattoo on his forearm of the winged centaur holding a sword, and a name: DANNY BOY. And, at that moment, she knew that she could not rest until she met him again, spoke with him, thanked him — and begged him to help her take her revenge on whoever had killed Jack and Emma. In his business, Jack had lots of military friends and she’d seen the tattoos on their arms, could tell military tattoos from the civilian ones that had popped up on everybody’s son’s and daughter’s body in the past decade. With some phone calls, she could probably find out what the centaur with the sword represented. Just get Rory to bed first.

She was lost in her thoughts until Rory again broke the awful silence. “What’re we going to do, Mom?” he asked.

“We’ll be okay,” she said, meaning it but not knowing how.

“Yeah, but…what’re we going to do?”

Hope looked at her son: “I don’t know yet. But we’re going to do something.” The phone rang again, but she let it go. She’d already spoken with her parents and with Jack’s mother, and there was nobody else she wanted to hear from right now. Least of all the media vultures. How could these people live with themselves?

It was just a matter of time, she knew, before the numbness and the grief wore off. The disbelief. They would go to bed tonight, she knew, telling themselves that Jack was out of town and Emma was away at a sleepover, and they might even believe it, for a minute. But when they woke up, there would be that gnawing hole in their souls. They were just going to have to live with it for a while. And then the blame would begin.

Mentally, she replayed the day. Jack had to go out of town. She had to take the kids to school. Nothing either of them had done was wrong, and Hope’s attempted rescue and Jack’s impetuous bravery, in the end, hadn’t affected the outcome one way or the other. In fact, she was lucky she hadn’t got both herself and Rory killed. What happened, happened.

But now, somehow, some way, she wanted payback. Payback for what these people — who had come to her town, to her school, unbidden, and foisted their grievances upon an innocent and unsuspecting community — had done to her and her family. She may not have wanted to be at war with them, but somebody was surely at war with her.

“What you did,” she said at last, “was amazing.” Immediately, she hated herself for using such a cheap, modish word. There had been nothing amazing about it. Rory’s actions had been simply stone-cold brave, the lion cub defending his mother.

“I wasn’t brave, Mom,” he said. “I was scared.”

“Sometimes they’re the same thing.”

Rory picked up a cold pea and ate it. “That man, the one with the sword, he was brave.” He pushed his plate away.

“There’s still a chance, Rory,” she said. “I heard her voice.”

“I heard it, too. She’s still alive, Mom. I know it.”

Hope swallowed hard. “I do too.”

“So what are we going to do about it?”

The look on his face made her so proud so could cry. But she had to hold back the tears. “We’re going to find out the truth,” she said at last, “and if Emma is still alive, we’re going to find her.”

Rory managed to muster the simulacrum of a smile. “Promise?”

“Double-dog-dare-ya promise,” she replied, trying to put on a brave face. And then it hit her. What if they did find Emma’s body tonight? Hope was a midwestern girl, not given to strong emotions. Emotions were for easterners, ethnics, southerners. The people of Edwardsville prided themselves on their equanimity, on their ability to get along and go along, and while they might harbor private anger, private grudges, they would be damned if they would ever let such emotions show.

But now, she was not so sure. Now she was becoming ever more sure that, somehow, if she ever found the men responsible for what had happened, she would kill them with her bare hands.

She caught herself. That was the kind of thing hillbillies did, folks from Cairo and the Ozarks in Missouri, and farther south. Guys who secreted handguns in their pants and blew away the defendant as he sat at the lawyers’ table or, better, in the witness box. The kind of people she had instinctively recoiled from, but whose ranks she now, goddammit, all of a sudden very much wanted to join.

Kill them. And keep killing them until they stopped. Stopped coming to her country, stopped shouting, stopped gesticulating, stop firing weapons into the air, stopped making those ungodly noises, stopped killing our soldiers, stopped. Wrapped up in her private emotions, she swept her arm and the butter dish fell to the floor, shattered.

“He took her with him. Charles. I know he did.” Rory was talking to her. Hope’s eyes gleamed as she saw so clearly what she so desperately wanted to believe. “He got away and he took her with him,” he said. “And then the helicopter crashed—”

“And they said they found only one body, the pilot. So what? Remember when that Muslim from Canada turned up dead at that political convention in Denver with a suitcase full of cyanide? No link to terrorism, they said. Remember when that Arab kid crashed his plane into that building in Florida? No link to terrorism, they said. Remember when those two Arabs turned up in North Carolina or wherever it was with bomb stuff in their cars and claimed they were joyriding around to set off some fireworks? No link to terrorism, they said. No link, no link, no link.” She pounded the table at its iteration of the word, “link.”

“Our own government is lying to us. Lying to us all the time. What is it they don’t want us to know? What kind of fools do they take us for, us hicks out here in flyover country? They take our tax money and they buy our votes and then they treat us like idiot children. They fly over us and they laugh at us on their way to Malibu or the Hamptons. Well, I’m not going to take it any more.”

“Mom, who was that man?” At first Hope thought Rory meant the man with the tattoo, but he continued, “The man who saved me. The man who grabbed me — he came out of nowhere and we jumped into the Dumpster. I thought he was a missionary.”

That caught her up short — something she hadn’t thought about. It was so hard to concentrate at a time like this, but yes…who was that man? She had assumed he was a rescue worker. “A missionary?” she asked. “What are you talking about?”

“Like cannibals and missionaries. You know, the game? I asked him if he was a missionary, and he said, ‘No, kid, I’m an angel.’”

“An angel?”

“That’s what he said, Mom.”

Hope thought for a moment: not one but two mystery men. She wondered if they had anything to do with each other. “Try to get some sleep, Rory,” she said at last.

“I’m not sleepy.”

“No, you’re not sleepy — you’re exhausted.” Finally, she broke down and started to cry. Rory rushed to her and held his mother. Then they both cried.

“I miss Dad,” he sobbed. “Why did it have to be him? Why, Mom, why?”

Hope brushed away her tears and tried to comfort her son. “I don’t know, Rory,” she said, letting the boy cry himself out. “It’s just part of God’s plan.”

“Well — it’s a sucky plan.”

“Shhh…” she said. “Try to get some sleep now.”

She led him into his bedroom and got him under the covers. He fell asleep before she even turned out the light.

Hope sat in the living room, trying to get ahold of herself. Her family may have been struck by unimaginable tragedy, but maybe there was something she could do about it. Some way she could fight back.

She knew exactly what she was going to do: find the man with the tattoo and hire him to find Emma. And maybe find the angel too.

She picked up the phone.

Chapter Twenty-eight

“Daddy!”

Jade jumped into his arms, and Eddie hugged her tight. He hated leaving his daughter, hated even more leaving his wife, hated in fact everything about his job except the job itself. He was also bone tired, happy that he had been able to rescue that woman and her son, and profoundly pissed off that the job had gone so wrong at the end. That had never happened with a “Tom Powers” job before…

“How was your ride in the chopper?”

Eddie Bartlett put his daughter down on the ground, stepped back, and then kissed her again. His wife, Diane, beamed from the kitchen doorway. Eddie was never quite sure what if anything Diane knew about what he did, but one of the reasons he had married her was that she was smart and she was discreet, and so he never asked and she never told.

“Lots of fun.”

“Will you take me with you the next time?”

“You bet, pumpkin.”

Jade pulled a face. “That’s what you always say.”

“And that’s what I always mean. So there we have it — means, motive…now all we need is the opportunity—”

“Which I hope to God never comes,” said Diane. She wrapped herself around him, kissing him as passionately as propriety permitted.

“Get a room, you two,” observed Jade.

“We’ve already got one,” said Eddie. “In fact, we’ve got a whole house. A bedroom, too. How do you think you got here?”

“Awww…”

“What do they teach you in that expensive private school of yours, anyway?”

Jade took a step back and smiled that knowing smile of hers, so much wiser and older than her eight years. “You don’t want to know.”

Eddie was about to say something when Diane stepped between them. “All right, you two, enough of this banter. You and I have some serious shopping to do, young lady, and I know just where we’re going to do it.”

So did Jade: “The Grove?” The Grove was a kind of Disneyland for shoppers adjacent to the old Farmer’s Market at Fairfax and Third, turning a forlorn corner of the old Kosher Canyon into one of the most successful outdoor malls and entertainment complexes in America.

As Diane nodded, Jade let out what sounded like a series of war whoops, which was the way young girls expressed enthusiasm these days. Then she turned to Eddie, “Are you coming, too, Daddy?”

Eddie shook his head. “I think I’m going to catch a little shut-eye, pumpkin,” he said. “If you don’t mind.”

Jade seemed a little disappointed, but Diane took her by the hand. “Your father’s been working hard and he needs a little nap, just like you do sometimes. By the time we get back, he’ll be tanned, rested, and ready — and then we’ll all go to Fat Fish for sushi. Okay?”

More war whoops. If there was anything Jade loved more than shopping at the Grove with her mom, it was sushi at Fat Fish, in West Hollywood.

“What are you spending my hard-earned money on today?” he asked, as a wave of exhaustion washed over him.

“Duh — a new MacBook? Can I get anything for you, Daddy?” asked Jade

Eddie looked at Diane and smiled. “Just bring your mommy home safe to me and we’ll call it even,” he said.

Diane kissed him on her way out the door. “Good-bye, Danny,” she said.

Danny Impellatieri was “Eddie Bartlett’s” real name, and the Impellatieri family lived quietly and unostentatiously in one of those houses in Los Feliz that most Angelenos never knew existed. Built by a random scion of the Chandler family in the mid-1920s, the house lay sheltered away on Hobart Street in the flats between Franklin Street and Los Feliz Boulevard, just west of Loughlin Park, the gated neighborhood where Hollywood had set down temporary roots between its founding in Echo Park and its later incarnation in Hancock Park, Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Bel-Air, and Pacific Palisades.

The great March to the Sea, however, was now over and many of the young Hollywood stars were now rediscovering the joys of living off the Wilshire-Beverly-Sunset grid and finding that they could somehow survive without getting shot in neighborhoods close to, you know, where “they” lived. “They” being LA PC-speak for People of Color.

The Impellatieri home boasted five bedrooms, a den, a swimming pool, a cabana, a billiards room, a formal dining room with fireplace and an elegant living room, all of which he bought half a dozen years ago for less than half a million. That was the beauty of LA, he thought: letting other people’s prejudices make you a fortune in real estate. The next thing you knew, houses in Echo Park would be hot again.

What a world, thought Eddie, kicking off his shoes and stumbling into bed. From Edwardsville he had traveled by car to a private airfield near Springfield, then flew to North Carolina to file his report with Xe and fill out the paperwork to get his men paid directly into their offshore bank accounts. He had caught the first commercial flight out this morning and so was back in LA by noon and home by one.

The pillow still smelled like Diane.

He grabbed the remote, to see what the cables were saying about Edwardsville. Sure enough, they were still running with the “Aftermath of the Tragedy” logos — these days, direct, murderous assaults on Americans were called “tragedies” instead of “acts of war”—interviews with the parents of the school kids, the local cops, even a clown or two from the FBI, whose pride was mixed with the egg on their faces from the explosion. He punched up the volume a couple of notches:

“We believe these were home-grown terrorists,” said a man identified as Leslie P. Waters, the special agent-in-charge for the St. Louis area. “Notwithstanding the allusions to Allah, etcetera, at this time there is no evidence that this was anything other than a…”

Right, thought Eddie, hitting the mute button. He supposed that the ability to make asinine weasel statements were part of the training at Quantico these days, but in this case he could cut Leslie P. Waters some slack, since there was no way anybody associated with “Tom Powers” was going to get fingered. Operational security in a Powers operation came before everything.

Although Eddie worked at his instruction, he had complete latitude in putting together his team. He had a few rules: no two men from the same past military unit at the same time, no two men with the same specialty, nobody except service members or those who had passed through Xe’s rigorous training program in North Carolina. Xe had come in for a lot of heat since the Iraq War, but it was still the goto protective service of choice for Republicans, Democrats, and journalists alike — those who wanted to live, anyway.

Still, there was something about the Edwardsville operation that was nagging him. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but the very fact that the operation had not been a complete success very nearly meant that it was a total failure. Not only in his eyes but, he was sure, in Tom Powers’s eyes as well. It wasn’t that the school assault itself was that surprising — hell, the government had been worrying about a Beslan copycat for years. It was that everything had gone so well, and yet ended so badly. He had never known Powers to fuck up like that, and it made him wonder. Wonder if Powers was slipping, wonder if their team somehow got compromised, wonder if something else, something he couldn’t see but only sense, was going on beneath the surface of an apparent terrorist operation.

Oh, well, plenty of time to hash that over when he was rested…

Sometimes, just before he fell asleep, he would think back to his days with the 160th. Although he rarely got behind the controls of a chopper these days, the gift of flight was still in his fingertips, and no matter how much the technology changed and evolved, his natural affinity for the soaring birds had not.

He left the tube on as he soared over, not rafted down, the River Lethe. His last memory was kissing Diane and Jade a little harder than normal, which hours later after uneasy slumber, he realized was just about the only thing he had done right.

Chapter Twenty-nine

If you were going to liquidate somebody, reflected Devlin, you couldn’t pick a better place than Camp David. For one thing, despite its deceptively idyllic mountain location in the Catoctins, its real name was Naval Support Facility Thurmont, with every sailor in the place, including the kitchen staff, boasting a “Yankee White” DoD security clearance — the highest available for this kind of duty. What happened at Camp David stayed at Camp David.

For another, it was guarded by an elite unit that even Devlin had to admire, the MSC–CD. This unit, whose acronym stood for Marine Security Company — Camp David, was the best the Corps had to offer, highly screened infantrymen handpicked for training at the Marine Corps Security Forces School in Chesapeake, Virginia. Camp David was 125 lethal acres of high-security rustication. FDR had dubbed it “Shangri-La,” a name later downgraded to Camp David by Ike, in honor of his grandson.

Devlin had forsaken all thoughts of monkey business straightaway. You came to Camp David and you took your medicine like a man. With Seelye, he normally insisted on as many security protocols as possible, but in a rural retreat with a handful of cabins and a whole lot of patrolled woods, there really wasn’t any place for him to hide.

He entered the camp using one of his false identities, this one proclaiming him to be a ship’s carpenter with a “Yankee White” clearance, which Seelye had determined was one of the two job openings on the base at the moment, the other being a gardener. As he passed through the gates, his practiced eye took in the myriad security cameras and other surveillance devices, not to mention the camouflaged Marines lurking just beyond the visible perimeter. Camp David was only sixty miles from Washington, not far from Gettysburg, and not exactly the biggest secret in the world, so many were the nutbags who packed their cars full of ammo and explosives and motored on up to see if the POTUS hunting was good that day. Some of them were detained until they sobered up, some of them arrested, and the worst of them sent off to prisons in Colorado and North Carolina for a very long time. A few of them were even shot, although their death certificates later read “automobile crash” or “hunting accident” or, his favorite, “domestic altercation.”

In the past decade, since September 11, security had been ratcheted up to a whole new level. It took only a couple of would-be car bombers for the government to revamp its watch list from “good ole boys with a snootful” to “armed moonbats/wingnuts” and “full-throttle jihadis.” While there was still a certain amount of on-site triangulation, nobody thought a goober with a gun was particularly funny any more, and as for Dinesh from Dearborn, he quickly found himself on a plane to a very nasty Egyptian prison, or pushing up daisies, or both.

The thermal scanners, both ground-based and aerial, were just the beginning. The one at the main gate, whose presence was obvious to anybody, also doubled as an X-ray machine with the power of a CAT scanner. Radiation detectors were stationed at viable intervals along every roadway and pathway; a miscreant didn’t actually have to have anything nuclear on his person for him to be detected, he just had to have been, once upon a time, within kissing distance of any such device, whether suitcase-nuke or dirty bomb. The Marine guards surveyed everyone with the same dead-eyed suspicion, their trigger fingers transparently itchy (to him, at least), which is something he understood; if you were going to catch this shit-ass bucolic duty, waiting for the president to kick back or, worse, entertain some scum-sucking bottom-feeder of a foreign potentate, you might as well be ready to party if and when the time came.

Seelye was waiting for him just beyond the main gate. “Trouble?”

“Not today, thanks,” he replied, trying to sort out his feelings.

They rarely saw each other, which was fine by both of them. If Seelye had drawn this up on the blackboard back in 1985, it couldn’t have turned out better for him, or worse for Devlin. The man who had made a whore of his mother and a cuckold out of his father, and who had inadvertently gotten both of them killed. The man who had brought Devlin back to life as someone he was not, re-created him, trained him to become…

To become what he was. Whatever that was.

Many were the times he’d thought of simply killing Seelye and getting the whole farce over with. With a gun, a knife, an ashtray, a fireplace poker, a shattered beer bottle, his bare hands, Colonel Mustard in the Parlor with the Lead Pipe. The thing could be done in moments, and either he would die in a hail of retaliatory gunfire, or be beaten into submission and arrested, or be given a medal and sent into well-deserved retirement. It didn’t matter. It was a way out.

“The president’s very much looking forward to meeting you,” Seelye was saying.

“Unfortunately, the feeling is very much not mutual.”

“Come on, he’s the president.”

“Which means he’s the guy I don’t want to meet. I don’t serve the man, Army, I serve the office. Better to imagine an empty suit than a man. Less disgusting too considering some of the men.”

Army smiled inwardly; Devlin had not lost his edge. “And an empty suit is precisely who you’re about to meet. So keep a civil tongue in your head, answer his questions, take your orders, and leave.”

“This was never part of our deal, Army. No face-to-face. Bulletproof deniability. What does he want?”

Seelye didn’t look at him. He hardly ever looked at him, even when Devlin was a kid. “He wants to see the man who saved all those middle-American schoolchildren from a bunch of ruthless terrorists. After all, ‘the children’—”

“‘—are our future.’”

“Something like that. Hey, it wins elections.”

“Is it going to win the next election?”

“Here we are.”

They were at Aspen Lodge, the presidential retreat. Dogwood, Maple, Holly, Birch, Rosebud — they were for visitors. Aspen was where the Big He lived.

“I don’t like it.”

“Then that makes you a minority of one,” said Seelye, ushering him through the door. “Churchill sure did. Sadat as well.”

“Look what happened to him,” said Devlin.

“Through those doors,” said Seelye, pointing ahead.

It was just cool enough outside for the walk-in fireplace to be roaring, consuming vast quantities of maple, birch, holly, dogwood, and aspen. Jeb Tyler was wearing a cardigan and an ascot. He was standing, framed against the fireplace, as they entered. “This must be—”

He caught himself and didn’t mention Devlin’s name, as he’d been briefed by Seelye not to do. “I thought you’d be taller.” The president didn’t offer his hand and neither did Devlin.

“I try to be, sir,” replied Devlin.

Tyler didn’t get the joke or the reference, as his expression showed.

“Doghouse Reilly. You know, Bogart? The Big Sleep?”

“The president doesn’t waste his time with movies—” suggested Seelye, throwing Tyler a lifeline.

He didn’t take it. “Loved that new Batman movie. Why doesn’t NSA have gadgets and gizmos like that?”

“It’s an honor to meet you, sir,” lied Devlin. “I’m sure the affairs of state must keep you very busy, so we should be brief.”

Tyler stood there with his famous smile frozen on his face. He thought he’d just been insulted, but he wasn’t sure. “Please sit down. Drink?”

“No thank you, sir,” replied Devlin, hitting the cushions. He figured that the faster he sat the quicker he could get up and out again, if he played his cards right. Unfortunately, he was holding a busted flush, nine-high. Still, he’d won with worse.

“I gather that there’s only one child missing—”

Tyler got that look on his face that he saved for all discussions of dead or dying kids. “And feared dead. The blast—”

“The blast didn’t kill her, sir.” You weren’t supposed to interrupt the president, but Devlin didn’t see what he had to lose, and pressed his advantage. “We tracked all the warm bodies with infrared before the assault, and only one kid was moved into the school proper. If she was there, she’d still be alive.”

Tyler was knocked off his game, but only just a little. He was, after all, a politician. “Cleanup teams scoured the place. No sign of her.”

“Then he took her with him. I don’t know why and I don’t want to think about why, but—”

“Who’s ‘he’? The man who tried to get away in the chopper?” Nice — Tyler was smarter than Devlin had expected.

“Which I shot down, yes, sir.”

“Then you might have killed her.”

“I might have, but I didn’t.”

“How do you know? The helicopter went down, killing the—”

“Killing the pilot, yes, sir. Who was expendable.”

“So how did—”

“Milverton, sir.”

Devlin heard Seelye gasp. Just a brief intake of breath, but as telling as if he’d just socked him in the gut. There — that cat was out of the bag and pissing on the table.

“I don’t understand,” said President Tyler, but Seelye was already punching up Milverton on his PDA.

“Charles Augustus Milverton, Mr. President,” said Seelye. “Not his real name, of course. ‘The most dangerous man in London,’ he likes to call himself. Most dangerous man in the world, or one of them, is more like it.”

“I don’t care what he calls himself. I call him dead,” said President Tyler.

“Working on it, sir,” said Devlin, realizing he’d just been handed a stay of execution, thanks to a little girl.

“Do it,” said Tyler. He got up and threw another log on the fire. One of the Marine sergeants would have done it, but the famously populist president snatched the birch log away from him and did the deed himself. “I don’t give a shit how you do it. Just get him.”

“It will be a real pleasure,” said Devlin.

Tyler turned, offering his hands to the Marine sergeant to wipe them off with a clean handkerchief. “Mr. Devlin, you said something to me over the phone about this being a misdirection. A feint, you called it. Is that still your considered opinion?”

“Yes, sir, it is.”

“So you think there’s more to come?”

“I don’t see why not. Even if we take what happened at face value, which we shouldn’t—”

“Tell that to the people of Edwardsville—”

“Yes, sir. But even if we do, then they didn’t get a thing that they ostensibly wanted. Unless Edwardsville was a very elaborate way of snatching one kid, which is obviously ridiculous. Which means either they’ll try again to get what they say they want, or — and this is what I’ve thought all along — it was a probe, to test our defenses. Which is why, one way or another, something else wicked this way comes.”

President Tyler thought for a moment. “How much time have we got?”

Devlin answered: “Assume none, if they’re doing it right.”

The president turned to Seelye. “Army, I want you to give Devlin all assistance, carte fucking blanche, to get this Milverton. No matter where the trail leads, no matter whose dicks get caught in the wringer, I want this man found, braced, grilled. I want his fucking head on a pike, and I want it ASAP. Top priority.”

“Yes, sir,” said Seelye.

“Failure is not an option. I want to know everything about this guy, including the names of his twelve best friends. I want to know whether this goes higher up the food chain, and if it does who’s the son of a bitch behind this whole thing. Fail me, and it’s your ass.” He looked at Devlin, as if for the first time. “You read me?”

Devlin decided to play his wild card. “I can name at least one of them for you right now. But you might not want to hear it.”

Tyler was fast and he was sharp. “Do you suspect someone in my administration?” Devlin’s estimation of him improved on the spot.

“Mr. President, I’d be lying to you if I didn’t say that I’m more than a little disturbed that knowledge of my existence has leaked beyond the inner circle. Especially since you’re the leak.”

Devlin waited for the nearly obligatory “how dare you?” speech as Tyler’s famously short fuse went off. But it never came. Devlin glanced over at Seelye, who wasn’t going to like this part. “On my own initiative, I cast a wide-net intercept flag in the Washington area on the telephones lines, cell and hard, all e-mail, text, and other PDA traffic as well.”

“And what did you find?” asked the President, impatiently.

“I found exactly one anomaly. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee—”

“Bob Hartley?” exclaimed the president.

“Yes, sir. The man who was in the Oval Office with you yesterday when my name came up. That’s who it was, wasn’t it?” The president chose not to answer, so Devlin took that as a yes and continued. “Last night, he made a call to a local number—”

“So?” Tyler was starting to lose it.

“—to a Washington number that does not exist. It’s a cutout, with how many bounces I don’t know yet. I’ve traced it as far as Los Angeles, but it may not end there. Whoever gave him that number thinks his secret is safe, but he doesn’t know that we’re smarter than he is.”

“What was this call about?”

“Nothing. No connection was made. I think it was a dry run.”

“Why? Do you think the next attack could come in LA?”

“I have no idea. But it’s a good place to start.”

“Dismissed, sailor,” said the president.

There was an unmarked car waiting at the gate. Seelye nodded in its direction. “Can I give you a lift?”

“I had a car here somewhere,” said Devlin.

“‘I had to crash that Honda, honey,’” replied Seelye, doing a passable imitation of Bruce Willis’s character Butch in Pulp Fiction. “In fact, it’s already pulped. It’s sleeping peacefully with Jimmy Hoffa somewhere in Pennsylvania. Just in case Milverton is in your shorts.”

Did he suspect something? Did he know something? Seelye knew perfectly well that made Branch 4 agents were soon dead Branch 4 agents, and the thought had occurred to Devlin that Seelye’s life would be so much easier once he was finally rid of his long-ago lover’s inconvenient son.

Seelye closed the door and pounded on the trunk twice, the signal for the driver to get a move on. Then he changed his mind, rapped on the window. Devlin rolled down his window, making sure that the partition between him and the driver was securely in place.

Seelye leaned through the window and asked, “How come you never call me ‘Dad’?”

Chapter Thirty

Hartley lay on his bed, shaking. He couldn’t believe what had happened, couldn’t believe what was about to happen. He had to get control of himself, calm down. Nothing was ever quite as bad as it seemed, not even this.

Well, maybe this.

Thank God the phone stopped ringing. The damn thing had been ringing all morning, his cell phone too. He knew it was the White House, which meant it was the president, which meant that sooner or later he was going to have to answer or else they’d send the Secret Service over to his flat to find out if he was okay. And, at this point, he was very fucking far from okay, and the Secret Service were the last people who needed to know just how far from okay everything really was.

The pizza boy was still there. That poor fellow wasn’t going anywhere, not of his own volition, and part of Senator Hartley’s problem at this moment was to figure just how and when to make him disappear. His unwelcome visitor had gone through the boy’s pockets after the murder and told him that the escort service had deliberately set Hartley up and would have exposed him to one of the supermarket tabloids or cable TV, so in a sense the stranger had done him a favor. Still, the corpse in his flat was the least of his worries right now; his nocturnal visitor was going to help Hartley with that, assuming he played ball on the main request.

Which had been, for him, relatively easy. Thank God and the Founding Fathers for civilian oversight of the military. And for access to certain files.

As Balzac once said, behind every great fortune is a great crime, and if Hartley played his cards right, he could wind up with everything — money, power, glory. Already there were stocks, rather a lot of them, that he was to sell short today, very short, and he was encouraged to spread the word to select individuals, corporate managers, defense contractors, and pension-fund bosses of his acquaintance — very discreetly — that rolling back their exposure to certain things, immediately if not sooner, would pay huge dividends. Besides, the man had assured him that no one would be thinking about insider trading in twenty-four hours, but that the political opportunities that were about to open up for a man of Senator Hartley’s perspicacity and intelligence were, literally, invaluable.

So Hartley had made all the phone calls, placed all the bets. The man had given him the number of what he said was a Swiss bank account to finance his transactions, and sure enough they had all gone through smoothly. Now it was time to make that one last phone call, to the number the man had given him, and the die was cast.

He dialed it.

Instead of an answer, he heard a series of clicks, like back in the old days when phones clicked instead of beeped as they ordered up a connection. The clicks stopped, replaced temporarily by silence, then a loud buzzing sound, as if a fax machine had picked up the line. He hung up. What the hell was going on?

He rose and looked out the window. He needed some air, so he stepped onto the balcony. Almost immediately, he was sorry he did. He could hear police sirens, approaching.

Hartley darted back inside, closed the plate-glass picture window, and pulled the curtains. His nerves were shot. Police sirens were always sounding in Washington, as in any big city. He thought about pouring himself a drink, but decided against it.

He padded back over to the window, parted the curtains, and looked down at the street. Nothing. See? He was letting his imagination run away with him. He looked at the phone in his hand and hit redial.

No clicks or noises — the connection went straight through. This time, a voice answered. It may or may not have been the same as his visitor’s, he couldn’t tell.

Hartley gave the man the information his visitor had demanded.

“I’m glad you’re seeing things…our way, Senator,” said the voice. Hartley realized that it was scrambled, disguising both the timbre and the accent of the speaker; that was why he couldn’t recognize it. “Look out the window.”

Two police cars were pulling up to the building’s service entrance.

“Don’t worry about the police, Senator. As long as you cooperate with us, they’ll sit tight. But if you fuck up, they’ll be at your door to investigate a report of a murder, and the next call you make will be to your lawyer. Understand?”

Hartley nodded dumbly.

“I can’t hear you.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“Well done,” the voice at the other end of the line said. “Now sit tight and await further instructions.” The fax-machine blast again, followed by the clicks. In his surprise and fear, Hartley dropped the phone, which bounced and settled on the sofa. He was still wondering what to do when there was a knock on the door.

He practically sprinted over and peered through the peephole. Two men in business suits. Hotel security. “What do you want?” he croaked.

“Routine security check,” came a voice from the other side. Hartley glanced behind him to make sure the bedroom door was closed and nothing untoward or suspicious was visible.

He opened the door a crack. No sooner had he done so when one of the men flashed a badge and pushed his way past him, followed by his partner, who shut the door and locked it.

“Who are you?” gasped Hartley.

“Don’t worry,” said the lead man. “We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.”

One of them — the bigger, beefier fellow — headed straight for the bedroom, while his smaller partner, a whippet, just stood there, staring at him.

“Nice,” said the voice from the bedroom. “Houston, I would say we have a situation here.”

The Whippet smiled. “Ain’t that a kick in the head.” He looked at Hartley. “Sit down, Senator. The president’s been worried about you.”

“And now we know why,” said the Refrigerator behind him.

Hartley sat, his mind racing. He knew he was in a lot of trouble, but after all he hadn’t killed the pizza boy. They could take paraffin tests or whatever more sophisticated procedures they were using these days, which would surely show he hadn’t fired a weapon. He could explain everything.

“Two pops in the head with this baby.” Hartley turned to see the Refrigerator holding up the gun. “Pro job — nice shooting, Senator.”

“Senator Hartley,” said Whippet. “I’m not going to fuck around with you. Unless you play ball with us, not only is your political career over, not only are you going to jail for the rest of your life, but your good friend from across the aisle, Jeb Tyler, is going to be heartbroken. At a time of national crisis and peril, to lose one of his closest and most trusted advisors, with an election coming up…well, I’m sure you agree that this unfortunate incident couldn’t possibly have come at a worse time. Which is why he’ll feed you to the dogs.”

Hartley nodded dully. “Am I under arrest?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t exactly call it arrest,” said the Refrigerator.

“More like day care,” said the Whippet.

“It’ll be fun,” said the Refrigerator. “We can bunk down out here.”

“Just the three of us,” said the Whippet.

“Four of us,” reminded the Refrigerator. “Until your playmate gets back in touch with you or the Boss says otherwise.”

“No, you can’t mean…” shouted Hartley as the implications sank in. “Not that.”

The Whippet smiled. “I’d think about it twice if I were you,” he said.

Hartley was about to protest that he was thinking about it when he felt the snub nose of the .22 pressed up against the back of his head.

“In fact,” said the Refrigerator behind him,” I’d think about it twenty-two times.”

Chapter Thirty-one

They were waiting for him by the time he got back from Camp David. The unmarked government car had dropped him at a Washington Metro station, and he had made it home from there, covering the last bit on foot.

From the outside, everything seemed all right. But Devlin knew it wasn’t. To a man living in the shadows, the smallest speck of light is like a laser beam: the front curtains were ever so slightly wrong.

Devlin had multiple ways into his house, but he needed to know the right one.

He took out his car keys, held down the alarm button, and punched the unlock button. That relayed the house’s interior security CCTV feed to his BlackBerry.

Front hall, side hall, LR, DR…empty. So far so good. But he still didn’t like it. Second floor. Empty BR. His private study was locked and unmolested. That told him something right there: these guys know enough not to touch it.

He had no idea who they were, but it almost didn’t matter: two makes in two days was double-plus ungood. Somehow, somebody had gotten hold of his private address. Or somebody with access had leaked it. Same difference.

He punched another button — the trunk lock, followed in quick succession by two clicks on the lock button. That activated the 180-degree infrared scanner, which would give him a rough look at the interior. If their hearts were beating, he’d see them.

There — three of them, one on the first floor and two on the second. Under the circumstances, the cellar door was the best way. He pressed the code on his house keys and it silently slid aside. There was a pair of infra-red goggles hanging on a hook in the darkness by the door. He grabbed them and put them on. He also took off his shoes.

Weapons: inside each of his back pockets he slipped throwing knives, and slid a K-Bar knife in its scabbard down the back of his jeans. Under each armpit he placed twin Glock 37s, with a pair of Colt .38s revolvers in special pockets sewn into the front of his jeans. A concussion grenade rounded out his ensemble.

There was what looked like a light switch at the top of the basement stairs. And it was. But if you moved it from side to side in a Morse Code pattern that spelled out his real middle name, it opened the door into the interior of the house. And then it temporarily disabled every electrical system except those on batteries.

He was inside, in the dark, where only he could see.

The man on the ground floor had his back to him, and that’s the way he died, Devlin’s K-Bar slipping easily between his ribs and puncturing his heart. It was a nice, clean kill, no sound, only instant death. Devlin wondered briefly if he knew the guy; he cared not at all whether he had a family. Everybody had a family, except for him.

Now—fast. Up the stairs, pulling the grenade, arming it, tossing it. The phosphorescent flash would temporarily blind them. He was, once more, the Angel of Death, deputized by God to decide which of his two visitors would live, however temporarily, and which would die.

As every soldier knew, time slows down in hand-to-hand combat even as it moves at warp speed. Man One had fallen to his knees, grabbing his eyes, so Devlin shot him in the head — no sense wasting a bullet on a Kevlar vest — and moved on to Man Two.

Not immediately visible, but it didn’t matter. He’d be where, for some reason, they always tried to hide. The bathroom. Pressing another button on his keys, Devlin activated all the interior door locks. Then he hit the gas. Each of the rooms in the house was equipped with nerve gas, hidden behind the green eye of the smoke detectors. It disabled the person but kept him alive and conscious, and able to talk. Most of the time.

He heard the sound of a body falling. Gun drawn, he unlocked and opened the door and shot the person inside through both legs.

There was no sense of triumph, or even of exhilaration, as he stepped through the doorway. If you had measured his pulse and heart rate, they would both have been near normal. Emotionally, he was entirely unaffected. He was just doing what they had trained him to do. What Seelye had trained him to do.

Even before he got the mask off her, Devlin knew it was a woman. There was political correctness for you — putting a woman on a clean team. Somebody’s daughter for sure; somebody’s sister, very likely; maybe even somebody’s mother.

“Who are you?” she gasped through her pain. The question caught him up short. If this were a team from CSS, they would have known.

“How did you get in?” he asked, lowering his weapon. Instead of answering, she went for her gun. This time, he shot her in both forearms. A spunky little thing, he had to give her that, and putting up a better fight than her dead male colleagues. “How?”

The pain must have been excruciating, but she wasn’t letting on. Instead, she was fading out, and Devlin hoped he hadn’t hit an artery. “FBI,” she said. “You’re under arrest.”

He ripped open her vest and found her badge. It was real. Then he saw all the blood, pooling under her body. It too was real, and as he’d feared: one of his leg shots had severed a femoral artery.

“On suspicion…” Her eyes started to roll. He was losing her.

He cradled her head in his arms. “Okay, you got me,” he said. “I’m your prisoner. What’s the charge?”

“Terrorism,” she whispered.

“I confess. Who ratted me out?”

She smiled at him, grateful. “That’s classified,” she said, and died.

He laid her to rest gently on the bathroom floor. His mind raced, trying to come up with a working hypothesis. A Branch 4 op would have just taken him out, not tried to arrest him. But the FBI — what the hell did they have to do with this? And how did they get into his house, or even know where it was?

The female special agent’s last word: terrorism. Somebody had fingered him for Edwardsville. There was only one person who knew him by sight at Edwardsville: Milverton. Somebody had hacked his file at NSA. There were only a handful of people who could do that. One of them he knew personally. Two of them he knew by sight. Three of them he knew by their offices. Which left one more person: Hartley. Devlin was suddenly glad he had dropped the dime on him to the president. He wasn’t authorized to conduct assassinations of duly elected American officials, and he hoped to hell his newfound respect for Tyler extended to the man’s sense of political self-preservation. Tyler may or may not be the secular saint or the blithering idiot his friends and foes made him out to be, but he was one very smart politician, and he hadn’t come this far because his instincts were mostly wrong.

Of course, just because Hartley had been added to the loop didn’t actually rule out any of the others. There might be a connection elsewhere. And if there was, then everything was a lie — the law, the Congress, the president, the whole damn United States of America. Everything that he had been raised to believe in, to live for, to fight for, to die for…a lie. A fixed fight, a gambler’s racket, a sucker’s game.

He sent the computers into lockdown/self-destruct mode; if anyone tried to access them, all data, right down to the keystroke loggers, would be destroyed. It would not be lost — he had mirrored sites at Internet dead drops all over the world, but he would not have the same ease of access to the material. Still, it would have to do for now.

He grabbed only what was necessary: the books his father gave him and the picture of himself and his parents in Rome.

He set the charges on the house. If anyone besides himself tried to enter, the whole place would implode in a controlled demolition. If the clean team really was FBI, he might be able to get Seelye to make sure everybody left the site alone, and down the institutional memory hole it would go. Still, he’d probably never go back there to live again.

If he was going to put a full-court press on Milverton, he needed help. He needed somebody he could trust to do the job right. There was only one such person he trusted. Maybe the time had come at last for a meeting. For he was already formulating a hypothesis. That the Edwardsville school operation had been a feint he had long been certain. It was a jab, a softening blow, to set up the knockout punch that would come at the end of a series of combinations, each of which would stagger the country a little more until finally it fell over.

Devlin punched up Eddie’s number, and waited. The cutouts worked smoothly, the line rang. And rang. And rang. No answer. Damn.

He knew Eddie had a family, had a little girl he adored, supposed he was out right this minute with her and her mother, doing the things family men who could afford to turn off their cell phones actually did. Sometimes, in fact, he wondered why Eddie stayed on this job, in this racket, when he had so much more to live for than, say, Devlin himself did. A little girl…

He wondered what it felt like to have a little girl. To have a creature he could unconditionally love, and who would love him back because she didn’t know any better, who didn’t ask anything from him except unconditional love. He probably would never know.

He tried again, this time on Eddie’s secure hot line. Family or no family, this was no time for fucking around.

Same result: no answer. Where the hell was he, anyway? He decided to leave a message: “Whaddya know, whaddya say?” Eddie would know what it meant, what level of security he would need to use to get in touch with Devlin and, most important of all, just how damn urgent this thing was getting.

There was a flight leaving from Dulles to LA soon, and he was already booked on it. He’d dispose of the bodies along the way. He felt bad about the woman, but she was part of the job.

Chapter Thirty-two

The fountain was dancing and Dean Martin was singing about the moon hitting your eye like a big pizza pie. The Asian tourists were cell-phoning photos of themselves back to Taipei and Tokyo. The chubby Latina girls with the tramp stamps above their ample muffin tops pretended not to notice as the rich Iranian girls — some of them headscarved, most not — waltzed by in wolf packs, radiating fuck-you wealthy. The trolley line was returning to the station, over by Abercrombie and Fitch. Diane and Jade were in the Apple store when it happened.

Later, investigators determined that the device had been hidden at the bottom of the fountain pool, with a trigger mechanism set to blow on the thirteenth time Dino sang the words “that’s amore.” It was the most popular song at the busiest time of day, and the perps were practically guaranteed a large audience, nearly all of whom were facing the waving fountains, delighting in the synchronicity of the music, the water, and the perfect southern California weather.

The bomb was a fairly typical, albeit extremely powerful IED, a roadside bomb from Baghdad with a college degree. It had also been packed with shrapnel of almost every kind that could be purchased in any hardware store: nails, ball bearings, broken glass, screws, which caused the initial fatalities at the blast site. Worse, it had been augmented with radioactive hospital waste in an attempt to fashion a crude “dirty bomb.”

The shock waves and debris radiated out, accompanied by a wall of contaminated water, tearing through the giant movie theater, blowing Nordstrom’s to rubble, imploding the plate-glass windows of the Apple Store and the Barnes & Noble bookstore, splashing across Third Street to contaminate Park La Brea and the Palazzo, demolishing the Farmer’s Market to the west and pancaking the huge parking structure directly to the north. In the aftermath, about the only thing left within the blast radius relatively unscathed was the Pan-Pacific Park to the east, and that only because much of it was below street level.

Diane and Jade were at the back of the store, on the upper level, when the blast hit. They had just bought Jade’s new laptop and were getting her old files transferred at the geek desk when it happened.

The plate-glass windows at the front of the store blew inward, killing or maiming almost everybody. The upper floor was better sheltered, especially at the back. The tech guy was decapitated by a window shard, but Jade was short, and Diane had just bent down to pick her change purse off the floor when suddenly she was slammed against the side of the counter, then propelled through it.

Jade was slammed back into the counter as well, but the impact of her mother’s body had torn it from its moorings, and so Jade was shoved along by the shock wave, through the space where the counter had stood and into the wall. Shelving came crashing down around her, and then a body, which is what saved her life. When they found her, unconscious but still alive, the shelves surrounding her were tattooed with shrapnel.

Diane was not so lucky. Even though she had taken the brunt of the blast, even with her skull fractured, she was able to reach for her daughter, grasp her hand, and then collapse on top of her as the wave of metal ripped through what was left of the store. Each screw, each nail tore through her body in that painless way that only the most grievous wounds can inflict, and she might even have survived had she not turned her head toward Jade one last time, as a ball bearing took out her left eye and exploded through the back of her head.

Diane was already dead when she fell across her daughter, still shielding her in death, her body warm as her child embraced it, but lying still, so very still, as the building collapsed around them. Jade couldn’t move, and couldn’t see much. Just the headless body of the tech guy, as the world went to hell and the fountains stopped dancing and Dino stopped singing and the moon hit your eye…

The head was staring right at her, the eyes wide open in the astonishment of sudden death. She had just enough strength to reach out and brush it away; it wobbled like a pumpkin on a splayed, bloody axis, then spun, rolled and tipped over.

“Mom?” she said. “Mama?”

Everything was really quiet. Those might be screams in the distance, and those might be moans closer by, but she couldn’t tell; her ears were still ringing. After what seemed forever, she realized that the distant screams were sirens, and that the sirens were getting louder.

There was something heavy and unmoving lying across her. Her mother, she knew, was also nearby. It took her a while to figure out that the two things were one and same.

Jade struggled a bit, then managed to slip out from beneath Diane. Death has no emotional meaning to a child of Jade’s age, other than as an abstract concept, and so in her mind it was perfectly possible for her mother to be both dead and with her at the same time. Diane’s face was turned away from Jade, but the back of her head was missing. That was the worst part. That was how, in her stunned and bloody state, she knew.

“Mama,” she said trying to turn her mother’s face to hers. “Mama?”

Aside from the missing eye, it was her mother’s face, the face she knew and loved so well and so much. Whatever the wounds Diane had endured — the autopsy report would later show that she was hit by eighteen separate pieces of bomb shrapnel, shattered glass, and assorted other objects demolished in the blast’s progression from fountain to store — they had come so fast and so furiously that she would have had almost no time to really suffer. She would have died knowing that she still held her little girl in her arms, that she could still protect her, and that, no matter the evil that men could fashion, she was still her mother.

Chapter Thirty-three

Emanuel Skorzeny and Paul Pilier had checked into the same hotel, the Savoy, but under different pseudonyms. In general, Skorzeny preferred never to alert either the authorities or the media to his presence in their countries. In the U.K., there had been that little bother over some insider-trading allegations a few years back, which had engendered a considerable amount of ill-will toward him until the Skorzeny Foundation suddenly found several high-profile projects on which to lavish equally high-profile support, and then the prime minister had embraced him on camera.

Still, to avoid the undue scrutiny of the Fleet Street paparazzi, they had taken the Chunnel, where they could spend the half-hour trip under the English Channel in the comfort of Skorzeny’s new Jaguar XJ Portfolio, then motor their way to London from Folkestone.

The Skorzeny Foundation could be found in the forefront of nearly every fashionable cause; from Darfur to land mines to female genital circumcision, there was hardly a position it took that did not meet with the enthusiastic approval of the editorial board of the New York Times. It supported renewable resources, delivered home heating oil to the poor at affordable prices, and generously funded medical research.

Through its Skorzeny Fellowships, the Foundation observed, monitored, and selected for advancement the brightest young minds in the countries — mostly the United States and Europe — where it bestowed its largesse. Without ever learning the source of their good fortune, since the scholarships were administered through a silent network of culturally sympathetic operatives, each supported by the Foundation in their roles as talent scouts, the young people “won” scholarships to the best prep schools and/or top universities in their respective countries. It was a little like the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grants, but with an entirely different purpose in mind: not the advancement of art, but the advancement of a certain political point of view, one long and fervently held since the appearance of Das Kapital: social justice.

Finally, but equally important, the Foundation actively supported politicians it found praiseworthy, funneling the money through a series of cut-outs and 527s, bundling where appropriate; in short, doing whatever it took to maintain its tax-exempt status in the United States while still affecting the outcome of every election that it possibly could.

Although the Foundation was headquartered in London, the United States was the principal focus of its activities. Emanuel Skorzeny had long taken a keen interest in the world’s largest economy and even after the advent of the European Union and its currency, the euro, he maintained his fixation on America.

Not that he would ever live there, of course. He found the people too common; he found the pop culture too vulgar when it was not downright disgusting; he found the food unhealthy, hormonal, and inedible. True, Old Europe was not what it used to be, but that was one of the things that Skorzeny liked about it. It was changing, right before his eyes and under the noses of everyone living there, a boiling frog happily swimming in a lukewarm bath that would slowly and very surely gradually grow warmer and warmer. He both mourned and celebrated its oncoming demise, determined both to hasten it and to profit from it before he too had to shuffle off the stage and into infinite blackness.

It was the task for which he had been chosen.

Emanuel Skorzeny had seen and experienced too much of life either to believe or disbelieve in God, and he was pleased and proud that so many others were beginning to see it his way. There had been a raft of books and television programs not only proclaiming the death of God but disputing whether he even existed at all; agnosticism was the way forward, not atheism. Skorzeny believe in hedging his bets when necessary.

Many of these books and programs were published by publishing houses in which Skorzeny maintained a sizable equity position. Some of the television programs had been underwritten by the Foundation via various ad hoc production companies. The empty cathedrals of France, the abandoned churches of Britain — these things were testimonials to the power of his ideas. He was, in his own mind, the modern incarnation of both Voltaire and Louis XV.

One of the phone extensions in the fifth-floor river suite buzzed. “Sir?” said Pilier, “your guest is here.”

Skorzeny rose and pulled on a smoking jacket. He didn’t smoke, but it was the sort of thing one wore in the Savoy when receiving visitors. As he moved toward the door he switched on the television and saw that the New York Stock Exchange was cratering. Then he opened the door.

It was she. “Good day, Miss Harrington,” he said, ushering her in.

Amanda Harrington kissed him lightly on both cheeks as she breezed past him in a rustle of silk and a zephyr of expensive perfume. There was, alas, nothing overtly affectionate about her greeting, just good manners and good breeding. After all, they had seen each other last night and had much urgent business to discuss.

“I thought you’d never ask,” she said, reclining unbidden on the sofa in the suite’s plush living room.

Skorzeny forgave Amanda sins that others would have to pay for. He walked to the bar, which was always stocked to his order, and poured Amanda a drink. It was one of the many ways in which this impossibly poised woman was a throwback to the great beauties of the 1940s and 1950s. Unless she was swimming, riding, or playing tennis, she never wore anything other than dresses and proper shoes. She had her hair immaculately done up every day. She never used a four-letter word, nor suffered one to be used in her presence. There was not a single tattoo on her glorious body. She would, he knew, have one drink and then get down to business, or brass tacks, depending.

Indeed, Skorzeny knew, the only flaw in her life was her inability to have a child. In that respect, she resembled the majority of her European sisters: resigned to sacrificing the Continent’s future to the immigrant hordes, in order to savor their Pyrrhic victory over the patriarchy.

Skorzeny handed her a shaken, ice-cold gin martini and stepped back to admire her as she took the first sip. Really, she was magnificent. She was the only woman in the world on whom he would gladly wait.

“When did you hear?” she asked.

“Just now,” he said.

“Luckily,” she said, “I’ve come prepared.”

One of Amanda’s few concessions to modernity was the array of electronic gadgets she habitually carried with her. As one of London’s most successful stockbrokers, she had worked her way to the top of the heap at the firm of Islay Partnership, Ltd., living proof that London’s reclaiming the title of the world’s financial capital was no mere jingoistic, John Bull dream. She worked all of the hours that she was not sleeping, but she did so without ever calling attention to the fact. In her professional life, as in everything else, she was the very soul of discretion.

That was why he had snatched her away from Islay and made her as chairman of the board of Skorzeny Foundation. That, and one other thing: her impossible beauty. Amanda Harrington was the kind of woman that not even his money could buy, which was why he kept trying. Emanuel Skorzeny had never met anyone he couldn’t purchase, or at least lease, and he was not about to break his unblemished record now.

She laid the instruments out on the table, occasionally flicking an eye at the running stock tables on the Sky News ticker. Still sipping on her martini, she punched in instructions on her battery of BlackBerrys, and at one point had not one but two cell phones working; there was something distinctly comic about her holding each of them to a separate ear as she talked, but Skorzeny was too much of a gentleman to laugh.

“Hand me the remote, would you, please?” she said, snapping both phones shut and putting the BlackBerrys on “silent.” Dutifully, he handed it over. No one who knew him would believe that the great Emanuel Skorzeny would heed a woman, even one as spectacular as Amanda Harrington, but there you were.

She turned up the sound and changed channels. It didn’t matter where she landed, the coverage from Los Angeles was everywhere. “Good God,” was all she said, looking at an aerial shot of the blast radius.

The Grove lay near the city’s geographic heart, and so its destruction affected the freedom of movement of all Angelenos. With both Third Street and Beverly Boulevard knocked out, two of the city’s most important east-west arteries had been cut; the north-south streets of Fairfax and La Brea were similarly affected. Gridlock was expanding outward, a ripple effect that would soon engulf Beverly Hills to the west, Hollywood to the north, and Los Feliz to the northeast.

That, however, was the least of the city’s problems. The Grove itself was a complete loss, and the historic Farmer’s Market as well. The CBS broadcast center was a smoking ruin and had temporarily knocked the network off the air. American networks were notoriously squeamish about showing dead bodies, but the Europeans felt no such Puritan compunctions, and even from this height, one could see that body parts were liberally strewn over a quarter-mile radius.

“Horrible,” said Amanda.

“Yes,” said Skorzeny softly. “We have to do something.”

“Already underway,” said Amanda briskly, knocking back the last of her martini. “I’ve rearranged our positions on the New York Stock Exchange in order to limit our exposure to—”

“That’s not what I mean, Miss Harrington,” said Skorzeny. “I mean, we have to help these poor people. Now.”

Amanda caught the shift in tone, but kept her voice level. “I’ve anticipated that, sir. At your word, I’m prepared to go public with a variety of Skorzeny Foundation initiatives, depending on the reaction of the American government. We can immediately make large cash donations to local hospitals and charities and, through our contacts in various European governments, we are also in a position to offer official aid if the Americans request or accept it. Further, our supply ships—”

“Yes, yes,” said Skorzeny softly. “I mean we also have to act politically, through our contacts in America, to ensure that the government of the United States is as good as its people. I’m afraid President Tyler has been something of a disappointment.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, making a note. “There are several senators and congressmen who benefit handsomely from our largesse, and I’m sure—”

A knock at the door. “You may enter, Monsieur Pilier,” said Skorzeny.

Paul Pilier stood in the doorway; his imperturbable face showed no emotions. “I was wondering if you had any instructions for me, sir?” he said.

“Who do we have on the ground in Los Angeles?” he asked, pronouncing the name of the city the old-fashioned way, with a hard “g.”

“The usual complement, sir,” replied Pilier.

“And what do they have to say?”

“Reports are just now coming in, sir. Many dead, many more wounded—”

“I can see that on television,” said Skorzeny impatiently.

“The freeways are at a standstill, the Red Line has been shut down as a security precaution…”

“Call a press conference at once,” said Skorzeny, decisively.

“A press conference, sir?” asked Pilier, but Skorzeny was already up and off the couch, pacing, thinking.

“A press conference announcing that the entire worldwide resources of the Skorzeny Foundation, Emanuel Skorzeny Enterprises, and ancillary businesses are hereby devoted to aiding and assisting the government of the United States of America in any way or capacity within our power. That I will shortly be contacting President Tyler to make this offer to him personally, and that, furthermore, we will be happy to assist the Central Intelligence Agency or any other agency of the U.S. government in identifying, locating, tracking down, capturing, and handing over to the proper authorities the person or persons responsible for this civilizational outrage.” He looked at Pilier. “Did you get all that down?”

“Of course, sir.”

“And you, Miss Harrington,” said Skorzeny, turning to Amanda. “This is a challenge for you as well.”

Amanda leaned forward. There were times that Skorzeny wished she wouldn’t do that, not attired as she was, and this was most definitely one of them.

“And you, Miss Harrington,” he began again. “While it is of the utmost urgency that we respond to this tragedy with all our humanitarian impulses, we must also make certain that we continue to have the delivery mechanism to do so. Do I make myself clear?”

Amanda was already punching her BlackBerrys. “Perfectly, sir.”

Skorzeny permitted himself the luxury of a small smile. “Very good. Now…” He went to the window and gazed out at London. That was the signal for Pilier to leave. He left.

“And now,” said Amanda, exploding the awkward silence, “I really must get things in order for your press conference.”

That caught him a little short. “Aren’t you accompanying me to dinner?” he inquired.

“I think you will find your dinner date both attractive and accommodating,” said Amanda.

“That was not what I had in—”

“There are arrangements to be made, and quickly. And if we’re to have all of our positions in place before the worldwide markets open…you do the math.”

She turned and smiled. “The sun never sets on the Skorzeny Empire.”

“Miss Harrington…”

She pulled a face. “You old goat,” she said. “Now get ready. You don’t want to be late. I’m told that she’s a lovely girl who finds older men fascinating.”

Chapter Thirty-four

Upon learning the news of Los Angeles, the president helicoptered aboard Marine One directly to the White House lawn, where he held an impromptu press conference. Even his worst enemies and most ardent critics had to admit that Jeb Tyler was made for moments like these. His natural empathy, his good looks, his unforced air of concern — these were some of the qualities that had gotten him elected and today was his finest hour.

Across from him, the usual assemblage of preening White House correspondents, augmented by the network anchors, had their microphones and notebooks at the ready, itching to shout their questions. But right now, the president had the floor:

“My fellow Americans,” Tyler began, with just the right quiver of rage in his voice. Dobson had whipped up the speech on the short chopper ride from Camp David, and it was probably the best thing she’d ever done. Did half the country think him a wimp? Very well then, he would show them. “Today, our country was attacked by wanton, vicious murdering scum.”

A ripple ran through the press corps. Scum? Several reporters made a mental note to contact…well, somebody…to see if any group could possibly take offense at such an un-PC characterization. So far, there had been no terrorist statement that anyone had heard, but it would surely come, and then the great national game of recriminating moral equivalence could begin in earnest. In the meantime, the president was still speaking:

“Many of our fellow citizens are dead. Many more lie dying. A significant portion of Los Angeles has been destroyed by a very powerful bomb. But it could have been worse. Reports are still fragmentary and preliminary, but it appears that the terrorists’ attempt to construct a so-called dirty bomb has largely failed. With the gracious acquiescence of Mayor Gonzales of Los Angeles, federal FEMA, Hazmat, and SWAT teams are either already on site or underway. We’ll have no Katrina here.”

He took a breath, but continued to look steadily and calmly into the TV cameras. “As of this moment, we have not received any communication from the people who have done this reprehensible deed. But let me assure you that we will find them, and we will bring them to swift and sure justice.

“I gather there already has been speculation that this attack was in retaliation for the foiling of the plot in Edwardsville yesterday. I have conferred with my senior national security staff, and they assure me that such a thing would be impossible. This operation was too well planned for it to be a simple act of revenge. No matter how Edwardsville had played out, no matter whether we had acceded to all their demands, it wouldn’t have mattered one whit. The attack on Los Angeles would have happened anyway. So if and when we hear from them, please keep that in mind. There is simply no grievance, whether real or imaginary, that justifies this cowardly and despicable act.”

The president paused. Something caught his eye: Pam Dobson, gesturing discreetly but urgently and pointing to her iPhone.

As President Tyler turned back to the cameras and the press corps he saw that they too were consulting their wireless devices. Pam Dobson walked over and showed him her screen. Tyler blanched, then made a command decision: show it.

“Are you sure?” whispered Pam.

“Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” said Tyler. “My fellow Americans,” said President Tyler, “behold our enemy.” And so the nation’s television feeds cut away from the White House lawn to the face of a terrorist in a ski mask. Tyler signaled for the audio feed to begin:

“…cowardly attack on our forces yesterday cried out to Heaven above for revenge,” the masked man was saying in a muffled and electronically scrambled voice. “And so has it been done. Let there be no mistake about our resolve. Unless the American government immediately and completely capitulates to our demands, these attacks will continue in ever-increasing ferocity until America and the West are destroyed in a holy rain of fire.”

The terrorist looked directly at the cameras. “And that day of reckoning will be the most terrible in the history of the world.” The video was shot in some empty room, blank white walls, no music. “You have had your chance. From this moment on, there will be no further communications, no negotiating. We made our justifiable demands and our reward was death. Now, we will visit death upon you. No justice, no peace, no surrender.”

The masked man stopped, looked at the camera. “Have a nice day.”

The president came back on, calm, unruffled, not a perfect hair on his perfect head out of place. Even the half of the country who hadn’t voted for him, who in fact despised him, had to admit that he was pretty damn impressive at this moment.

“My fellow Americans, everything you have just heard is a lie. You have just seen the hooded face of evil. I realize that some members of both parties have tried to tell you that the threat from beyond our shores is not real. That if we would just be nice to them, if we would just address their ‘legitimate grievances,’ all would be well.

“But let me tell you something. Yesterday’s events in Edwardsville opened my eyes. I too thought that health care and the capital gains tax were the issues most important to you, my fellow countrymen. How wrong I was. And I stand before you now, humbled and contrite of heart, and pledge to you that we will not rest, we will not falter, until we have eliminated this threat to the Republic, and our families can once again sleep soundly in their beds at night — secure in the knowledge that we employ rough men ready to do our enemies grievous harm for the actions they have taken against us today. My fellow Americans — we will not fail.”

It was a lucky thing that the cameras were on Tyler and not his group of advisors behind him; flies would have found comfortable nesting places in their mouths as he continued.

“This very day, I have ordered the leader of one of the most secret, the most elite units in the American intelligence hierarchy to stop at nothing to remove this threat. From this moment on, we will hunt down these folks and terminate them with the most extreme prejudice America has ever brought to bear on an enemy, and that includes Tojo’s Japan and Hitler’s Nazi Germany.”

One last pause. “Thank you, good night, and may God bless America.”

Several of the reporters — the Fox News correspondent most visibly — applauded as the president finished speaking. The ranks of advisors stepped forward to congratulate him. Pam Dobson beamed. As Rubin stepped forward to shake his hand, the president said, “How’s the market doing?”

Rubin glanced at his BlackBerry — the Dow had already lost another 800 points. “We might have to close the Street if things keep going south.”

Seelye was next in line. Before he could open his mouth—“Where’s Devlin?” the President asked.

Seelye thought twice before replying. The president of the United States had just blown one of the nation’s top secrets, and just condemned to death the man Seelye had guiltily raised as a foster son. “In the air, I believe, sir, just as you ordered. Bound for Los Angeles.”

Tyler gripped his hand a little longer than protocol demanded. “Well,” he said, “that’s a lucky break. Now just make sure that cocksucker doesn’t make a liar out of me.”

Chapter Thirty-five

In the window seat, Devlin was in the middle of a vigorous game of Spades with two morons and a blithering idiot when the president came on the air with the news of the Los Angeles bombing. The video on the screen remained the Spades game, but the audio came directly from the White House’s internal transmission system, which Devlin had taken the liberty of tapping into via Fort Meade the day Tyler was inaugurated.

His blood ran cold as he absorbed the awful news. Although the extent of the bombing in central Los Angeles was not yet clear, there were obviously going to be many, many casualties. Casualties were part of war, and this was a war, no matter whether half his countrymen felt otherwise. The thing that really raised his hackles was the President’s statement:

This very day I have ordered the leader of one of the most secret, the most elite units in the American intelligence hierarchy to stop at nothing to remove this threat. From this moment on, this individual will hunt down these folks and terminate them with the most extreme prejudice America has ever brought to bear on an enemy, and that includes Tojo’s Japan and Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

As he listened to the president’s words over his earbuds, rerouted through the “zone.com” link, the president’s challenge to him personally, he heard one thing and one thing only: his execution order.

Again the thought came to mind that someone was deliberately trying to get him killed — that there was some kind of mole inside NSA/CSS, maybe even inside Branch 4 itself, someone who had twigged Milverton to him in advance of Edwardsville. Who could it be?

There weren’t many suspects. If he had to bet, he’d bet on Seelye; when the day came that Devlin had outlived his usefulness to either the country or, more likely, the general, he would be left out in the cold. Seelye certainly didn’t need a living recrimination, proof of his sins, walking around in public.

This scenario assumed that someone in Washington bore him ill. But, to turn it around and look at it from their perspective, the “mole” could just as easily turn out to be Devlin himself, working in some strange consort with Milverton in order to…what? The best he could come up with was that he’d be running a sting operation against whoever was behind Milverton. A double flush-out, and the first guy whose head pops up above the underbrush gets it blown off.

Well, he was not that smart, or that daring, or that desperate. And Tyler was certainly stupid and boastful enough to have semi-blown Devlin’s cover out of sheer braggadocio. Which left the possibility that either Milverton or the man behind him already knew about Devlin, knew that this kind of operation was almost certain to bring him into the mix, after which Milverton could either kill Devlin himself or, better yet, have one of the other Branch 4 ops take him out.

He stayed calm; panic was for lesser men, and Devlin had long ago made fear his friend. It was true: nothing did concentrate the mind like the prospect of being hanged in the morning. There had to be some way for him to turn this chain of events into an advantage, but until he could, one thing was clear: Milverton was already inside his OODA loop. Devlin was heading out to LA, and already Milverton was one step ahead of him.

Devlin looked around the aircraft: no sign that anybody knew anything yet. Luckily, the equipment was an older plane on a budget airline, the kind with TV screens over every third or fourth row, and they were all showing the same movie. Still, it was only a matter of time until some wise-ass disobeying the cell phone restrictions would start shouting the news. Only one thing to do.

Viciously, he wiped out a stupid, first-position double-nil with a three of clubs. His partner, a Hungarian, flashed him a sarcastic “good job” and disappeared into cyberspace. “What an asshole,” he thought to himself as he slammed his laptop shut.

“Hey, mister, are you okay?”

The kid next to him, in the middle seat. A boy, about the same age as the one he’d rescued in Edwardsville. A typical innocent American kid, who had every right to believe that the world he knew now was going to be the world he would find himself in when he was a man. A poor, deluded, lied-to kid who at this moment had no clue about the Grove. Another act of war, a war that had been being waged asymmetrically against the United States since Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy.

His heart went out to the kid and his mother — the forty-something blonde in the aisle seat reading People. He looked her over. Not bad. Another time, another place…another lonely woman. He hated himself for the predatory thought.

“Gotta use the head,” he lied.

Gingerly, Devlin stepped over the boy. The blond smiled at him as she discreetly raised her gaze from People to his rear end and then, demurely, back to her magazine. “Excuse me, Missus…” he said.

“It’s ‘Ms.,’” she smiled invitingly. “I’m divorced.” Of course she was. He moved forward, toward business class.

Where he was stopped by one of the flight attendants. He flashed a badge at her — the genuine badge of a federal air marshal — and she moved aside. He took her by the arm and whispered into her ear: “I need to speak with the pilot immediately,” he said.

As if to emphasize the situation, a couple of cell phones started ringing. Nobody answered them. Good, obedient sheeple. The stew walked him to the front of the plane. He paid no attention to any of the passengers, and hoped like hell none of them paid him any mind.

She pulled him into the front galley while she phoned the pilot. Even the air marshals weren’t allowed inside the cockpit unless they were retaking it by force. Devlin waited as she spoke, then hung up. “He’ll be right out,” she said.

“Kill the video feeds. Do it now.” His tone and mien brooked no argument.

“This doesn’t have anything to do with the lady in 4A does it?” she asked.

“What about her?” asked Devlin. He hadn’t noticed anybody in particular on his way up front.

“Well…” the flight attendant lowered her voice, “she’s one of them. I mean, just look at her. And I heard her talking in some foreign language on her cell phone just before we took off.”

“What’s this all about?” barked the captain, emerging from the flight deck.

Devlin flashed his badge again. “Rocky Sullivan,” he said. He waited until the stewardess took the hint and left. “Captain, I assume you’ve heard about Los Angeles.”

The pilot’s stoic look, followed by concern, told him he had. “There’s been some kind of explosion at the Grove, near the Farmer’s Market. There are deaths, but we don’t know how many yet.”

Devlin took a deep breath. “Do you think they’ll close the airports in southern California?”

The man — his name tag read, “WILKINSON”—thought for a moment. “Maybe. Probably. We’re awaiting word now.”

“Then what? Where do we land?”

“Vegas, depending. Maybe John Wayne, but if this is as bad as…as bad as it could be, they’ll probably shut down the whole southland.”

“That’s what I figured,” said Devlin. “Which is why I need you to ignore any redirection order.”

Captain Wilkinson looked at Devlin like he was nuts. “Negative. That would cost me my wings.”

“Not if national security is at stake.” Devlin vamped, trying to come up with a plausible scenario. What was it the flight attendant had said about the woman in 4A. Devlin lowered his voice to a whisper. “There’s someone we’re watching on board this flight. She doesn’t know she’s being surveilled, but it’s imperative that I get her to Los Angeles.”

The captain thought for a moment. He seemed to know what Devlin was talking about. “Does she have anything to do with what just happened?”

“I can’t tell you that,” said Devlin, honestly, “but it’s crucial that we land in LA.”

A pause, and then—“Sorry, but I can’t. They’ll shoot us down. If we go Code Red, they’ll scramble at Edwards and you’ll have put 150 people in the Pacific.”

“We won’t go Code Red,” said Devlin. “I’ll guarantee it.”

“Then it’ll be a general aviation order.”

“And you can beat that, can’t you?”

At that moment, the cockpit door opened and the co-pilot stuck his head out. “Captain,” he began, eyeballing Devlin.

“It’s okay,” said Wilkinson. “Have they closed LAX?

The co-pilot was smart enough not to ask who Devlin was. “Affirmative, sir. We’re being diverted to Vegas.”

“Thanks, Ben,” said the captain. “I’ll be right in.” He turned back to Devlin. “Rocky, ol’ buddy, you’d better give me a goddamn good reason to even think about what you’re suggesting.”

Only one play left. Whoever the unlucky lady in 4A was, she was now going to be the goddamn good reason. He could take her into custody in a second, and then figure out how to frame her for something as they headed to LA.

“I’ll make the bust right now. Then you’ll have a high-value federal prisoner who must be delivered to LA without delay. I’ll get you all the CYA authorization you need. Deal?”

Captain Wilkinson thought for a moment. “That is one good-looking federal prisoner,” he said, shaking Devlin’s hand. “I’ll have the flight attendant ask the man in the seat next to her to come up front for a moment, for some bullshit message. Then you swap seats and do your thing. But try to keep the fireworks to a minimum, will ya?”

Devlin nodded. “Thanks,” he said. “One more thing — land in Burbank.”

The stew went to get the man in 4B. As he came forward, Devlin slipped past him and walked calmly but purposefully, head down, toward the empty aisle seat. He hated to burn one of his covers, hated to have spent as much time with the captain as he’d had to, but that’s the way it was.

The face of the woman in 4A was buried in a copy of Paris Vogue as he took the seat. She didn’t bother to look over, or acknowledge his presence, or absence, in any way. Under other circumstances, the perfect seat mate.

Then his world turned upside down.

Maybe it was the perfume, that magical madeleine that triggered involuntary memory. Maybe the shape of the left forearm. Maybe a sixth sense. It didn’t matter. They both knew immediately when she lowered the magazine and looked at him.

“Hello, Frank,” she said evenly. “Long time no see.”

It was a good thing he didn’t have a heart. “Hello, Maryam,” he said. “You’re under arrest.”

Chapter Thirty-six

He was in the city on a RAND clean-up operation. He was dressed as a Frenchman, loitering around the stage entrance of the Olympia waiting for his mark — a British SAS officer, who’d come over to Santa Monica with an MI-6 vet stamp in his dossier, but who was now suspected of running his own sideline business in sensitive SIGINT cables, hawking them to the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Egyptians, the Georgians, whoever came firstest with the mostest. Even a “22” couldn’t be allowed to get away with that. He was about to become, what they called in the trade, an exemplar. An object lesson. A warning.

Normally on a job like this, Devlin blended into the scenery and, whenever possible, the furniture. But only an idiot who was trying to attract attention would try not to attract attention in Paris. Every Frenchman considered himself the second coming of Yves Montand, and peacockery was de rigueur, and among the beures, the immigrants from north Africa and the Middle East, it was practically religious doctrine. So he was dressed well, in the current mode, and smoking a cigarette as he loitered and cast admiring glances at the young ladies passing by — who, after all, both expected and deserved nothing less.

She blindsided him. His French was excellent; hers was perfect. So when she somehow snuck up on him as he was checking out the derriere on a particularly good-looking Anamese salope and asked him for a light, he fumbled a vowel and she busted him on the spot.

“American, huh?” she said. She must have come out of the club, while his eyes were on Little Miss Saigon’s bum. Why she’d approached him, he had no idea. She spoke softly, so as not to embarrass him. “You can always tell. Match me.”

She produced an unlighted cigarette, leaned forward, and lit hers from his. The tips glowed as they met.

Now he looked at her, really looked at her. Middle Eastern, short, slender, very fashionably dressed. She filled it out nicely too without any hint of the future rotundity that almost invariably accompanied girls of her tribe. But it was the big, liquid brown eyes, the hint of olive in the skin, that really blew her cover.

“Persian, huh?” he retorted. “You can always tell. Especially when you’re trying to pass for French.”

“Touché, monsieur.”

“Frank.”

“Maryam.”

“Assalmu’Alayki Maryam.”

She crinkled her nose and laughed. “Your Arabic is even worse than your French…although they’re both okay.” He caught her eyes and held them until she looked away. “But I’m Iranian, remember?”

“Wanna go for Farsi too?” he said. “With three, you get egg roll.”

Now she laughed heartily, and he knew he had her, if he wanted her. And want her he did. Too bad he was on duty.

“Seriously,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

He glanced across the street. So far, nothing. “Waiting for a friend.”

“Dressed like a Marseilles pimp?”

“He’s a whore, so it’s okay.”

“Can I watch?”

“No, but you can have a rain check.”

“What’s a rain check?”

“I thought you said you spoke English.”

She made a moue. “I don’t think I like you any more.”

“Who said you ever did?” Movement in the doorway across the street. “I gotta go now, baby.”

“Don’t call me baby. I hate when men call me baby.”

He was moving now and so was she, tagging along. He either had to ditch her, kill her, or let her come. He didn’t like either of the first two choices, so he might as well make use of the cover. He took her by the hand. “Where are we going?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, “but you seem like a fun girl, so you’re getting your rain check right now.”

She had to hurry to keep up, her feet clattering her impossibly high heels on the Paris sidewalks.

The man he was trailing stopped, his keen ears tuned to the slightest discrepancy in his environment, visual or aural. In a flash, Devlin had pulled Maryam into the shadows of a nearby doorway and kissed her as hard as he could. He caught sight of the man turning and he knew he was, for the moment, safe. He kept kissing Maryam long after the man had started back along his way. She tasted that good.

At last, he let her up for air. “What was that for?”

“For saving my ass.”

“It’s a nice ass,” she said.

He waltzed her out onto the sidewalk. He stepped in some dog shit but he didn’t care. Dog shit was as much a part of the romance of Paris as the Seine, as the shellfish spilling out from their ice beds on the sidewalks, as the whiffs of perfume and body odor coming off the ugly but sexy women, as the sight of Notre Dame by night, as the Pont des Arts in late afternoon, and the Sacre-Coeuer against the morning sun.

The man ahead had stopped again. Did he sense something?

“Slap me,” he whispered. “Really, do it. Now.”

She learned fast. She slapped him hard. Harder, in fact, than he expected. Good. That meant she liked him.

“Encule de son père!” he shouted.

She came right back at him:

“Sale fils de pute enculée par un gros connard de pede!”

That hurt. So would this: “J’aurais te donner un coup de pied dans la choune, mais ça degueulasserais trop mon go-dasse!” He couldn’t believe the vile things that were coming from his mouth. Neither could she:

“Boro gomsho pedear soukteh, jakesh!” It was the choicest Tehran invective he had heard in years.

As he’d hoped, a crowd gathered around them, hoping for some action and blocking them from the sight of his quarry. Silently, he started counting down to ten, which was exactly how long he was going to let this little piece of street theater last.

“Goh bokhor!” he cried and pulled her close again.

“That was pretty good,” she said. “For an American.”

“Let’s go.”

They pushed their way through the crowd. The man Devlin was following was still in sight, but moving faster now, his wind up a bit, but not so much that he would disappear. To vanish would be to admit guilt to any pursuer. And then it would be war.

“Who is he?” she said.

“Somebody I want to talk to.”

“Just talk?” She grabbed him and whirled him around. “Enough to kill him?” She patted the gun under his left armpit, the one that was so well concealed that not even a drunken flic with a grudge against Americans would have noticed it on a first pat-down. Or even a second…

The sudden rush of emotion he was feeling was something new, unexpected. He’d spent his life after Rome living within a carefully constructed iron box that the world couldn’t dent, and now this girl comes along and cracks it right down the middle with one kiss.

He made a snap decision. The first rule of snap decisions was never to make them. The second rule was to make one exception. “You’d better leave now. Things could get ugly.”

Big brown eyes, looking right into his. “I’m from Shiraz. You think I haven’t seen ugly things?” She took off her heels, ready to run. Maybe the second rule was right after all.

Third rule: never underestimate a woman. Not her brains, not her heart, not her soul.

The man was heading toward the Seine. Inwardly, Devlin smiled; that’s where he would head at this point in the game too — someplace open, with a clear shot in every direction, one with plenty of shadows among the closed kiosks, lovers galore, bridge abutments. Open spaces could be killing fields, but only when the battlefield had already been prepped; otherwise, they were observation posts.

Okay, they could play it either way. “This could get rough,” he said. “And I want to see you again, after this is over.”

“I’ll have to think about it.”

“Make it snappy.”

“What’s your name?”

“Frank Ross,” he lied.

“Okay, Frank Ross,” she said with a hint of entirely accurate suspicion, “I’ll meet you at the Café de la Paix.”

“When?”

“I’ll be there all night. I’ll be the girl with a broken heart, playing ‘Hearts and Flowers’ on my violin, if you don’t show up.”

He kissed her again, for absolute real this time. “I’ll see you there.”

“Try not to get yourself killed, Frank Ross,” she whispered. Before she could say anything else, he was gone.

He hit the Seine across from Notre Dame. The man ahead of him was jogging now, down the left bank of the river along the Quai Malaquais, heading for the safety of the crowds at St.-Michel.

Devlin trailed him along the various quays. There could be no doubt now that the man was guilty. Or that he was good. Or that he was very dangerous. He had played the pickup just the way Devlin would have, sensing, sorting, then heading for safety, which meant that he had sized up his pursuer and would be ready for him.

It was a cliché, but it was also true: Paris really was for lovers. In the heart of one of the world’s greatest cities, his race along the Seine was run nearly alone, the auto-tunnels buried beneath him, the river quiet except for the passing barge or tourist boat, but everywhere, mostly unseen but never unsensed, in the shadows, were the lovers.

He realized with a start that, for the first time in his life, he had just joined their ranks.

The man tossed a glance over his left shoulder. Devlin peeled off near the rue de Seine, heading south, where he could cross the rue Mazarine and then cut back into the warren of streets in the Latin Quarter. He had a pretty good idea where the man was heading: the rue Galande.

Charles Augustus Milverton. At one time, “Milverton” had been one of the finest operatives in Britain’s most elite fighting force, a leader of the 22nd Regiment Special Air Service at Credenhill. Later, he moved on to “deep battle-space” assignment.

The best part of an SAS posting was that absolute anonymity prevailed, even when operating at home. SAS officers were not required to identify themselves either to police or civilian agencies; in effect, there was no bothersome review authority over them, which meant that Milverton was pretty much free to operate as he saw fit, even after he left the Two-Two’s Mobility Troop and had moved closer to home in the Artists Rifles reserve, in Regent’s Park. He had spent the past few years roaming the wreckage of the old Soviet Union as a kind of hired gun, sorting out communists and capitalists alike and burnishing his reputation for sudden, violent lethality. Milverton could kill you in dozens of different ways, but so could a lot of guys. What made him special is that he could kill you and be gone before you even knew you were dead.

Devlin passed south of the Place St.-Michel and turned left on the rue St.-Séverin, across the rue St.-Jacques. There it was, up ahead — the place he was looking for: 42 rue Galande.

Devlin moved slowly now, down the crowded street. This part of the Quarter was always packed with young humanity, pretty girls and phony-tough boys, the Arabs jostling their way in packs over and through the French, who still had not quite grasped the extent to which they were becoming strangers in their own capital city.

The spires of Notre Dame shone brightly just off the west: from the sacred to the profane in five minutes, and all you had to do was cross the Pont St.-Michel. It was as if the great cathedral had deliberately faced west, down the Seine, turning its back on the sin and sacrilege behind it.

He took a spot in a darkened doorway and waited. Mentally, he reviewed the intelligence. It was all NSA stuff, nothing from Langley, which meant that on a scale of one to ten it scored about a six, as opposed to a one. The rue Galande was where Milverton kept a safe house, a flat, in one of the last places in Paris that anyone would ever think to look for such a thing.

Maryam wandered briefly into his thoughts, but he cast her aside. He had her parting promise to meet him at the Café de la Paix, near the Opéra, and if she was true to her word, so would he be. He had no intention of getting killed by Milverton. He was there as judge, jury, and hooded executioner.

“I am the Angel of Death,” he said, under his breath.

There was no chance that Milverton would go through the front entrance. But he didn’t want him to. That was the way he was going to go in. And so he bought a ticket and entered the building.

Everybody was dressed for the occasion except him. Men in bustiers, fishnet stockings, and high heels. Women dressed as virginal brides, but wearing no underwear. Mock-hunchbacks. Vampirish whores. All there for The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

The cult movie had been playing at the Studio Galande since forever. It had taken the French a few years to catch on to the fact that the Tim Curry movie was not just a movie but an audience-participation extravaganza, but once they got the hang of it, they showed up with the same fervid and flamboyant enthusiasm as their counterparts in Boston, New York, and elsewhere.

Devlin had long since memorized the layout as he took a seat near the back of the auditorium. Thanks to NSA, liaising with DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, run out of the DoD), he knew that Milverton’s lair lay to the rear of the screen and just above, on the first floor, in Euro-speak. He gave Milverton about fifteen minutes to get comfortable, to feel safe. The audience was in the middle of “Let’s Do the Time Warp Again” when he made his move.

There was a conga line up on the stage in front of the screen. As he rose, several girls cheered him, got out of their seats, and sandwiched him as they propelled Devlin toward the stage. The girl behind him put her hands on his ass and squeezed it tight, while the one in front reached back and grabbed his balls.

And then they were up on the stage. The audience was screaming with delight and shouting encouragement.

Hands on hips, knees in tight…

The girls were very sexy. He found his thoughts flashing back to Maryam. No — get her out of your mind. Stay focused on the job.

The wings beckoned. He wasn’t the first Rocky Horror virgin to feel embarrassment and flee the stage.

Even behind the screen and the loudspeakers, the music was deafening.

He drew his silenced SigSauer and fired nine shots in quick succession, punching a perfect circle in the ceiling above. As the plaster showered down, he took out something that looked like a dart gun and fired.

The metal claw expanded as it hit the ceiling, grabbed a purchase on the floor above. He hit the retractor and the ceiling fell in.

Milverton came down at the speed of gravity, firing all the way. He was that good — better than Devlin even had thought. Faster too.

His first few shots shredded the screen from behind. Tim Curry took a bullet through the groin. Richard O’Brien, one through the hump. And Susan Sarandon, right in the titties.

Milverton continued firing as he hit the floor, rolling. The fall must have hurt like hell, if it didn’t actually break anything, but he didn’t seem to care. Devlin respected that; unless he had been killed by the plunge, he wouldn’t have cared about the pain either. All that mattered at this point was the job.

Shots splintered everything around him as he rammed another clip into the SigSauer. But he was bound by the rules of engagement: he couldn’t fire toward the audience.

Milverton rose and charged toward the screen from behind.

It’s just like Point Blank, though Devlin, trying both to stay hidden and get a clear shot. Observe, orient, decide—

There he was, outlined and back-lit against what was left of the screen.

Act.

Devlin held up. He couldn’t risk missing Milverton and hitting some poor kid. Milverton burst through the screen, firing back at Devlin, then dropping off the proscenium and into the first row of seats.

Devlin realized it was useless. He had to get up, expose himself, if he had any hope. He couldn’t believe how badly this operation had gone. And all because of the girl.

No, check that — all because him. Because of his weakness. Because of his need.

Devlin broke through the remains of the screen. Barry Bostwick and Little Nell were still singing on the soundtrack, but the picture was long gone. People were screaming and shoving each other to get out as Milverton bulled his way toward the front exit. He was holding the two girls who had sandwiched Devlin. Hostages now.

From his angle, he didn’t have a clear shot. Milverton raised his gun—

Then a shot, from somewhere in the auditorium. Milverton stumbled, lost his grip on the girls, who tore away from him and dove for cover. Another shot, which splintered the wall behind Milverton, who was already returning fire. He emptied a clip into the darkened auditorium, and a woman’s voice cried out in pain.

This was his chance. At full speed, Devlin leapt from the stage.

He landed on Milverton square, raining punches as they went down. The body blows didn’t do much damage. It was like socking steel.

Milverton’s first punch caught Devlin behind the neck, stunning him. He knew what was coming next, even as the SAS fighter pulled his knife and slashed at the back of Devlin’s knee. Had it landed, the knife thrust would have been a crippling, then a killing blow. Devlin would have been a marionette whose strings had just been cut, and lying there helpless, he would have been ripe for the final plunge into the neck.

But Milverton missed. He missed because everything in Devlin’s training had prepared him for moments like these and while someday he might meet a better shot than himself, he was not going to meet a better street fighter.

He blocked the blow with a forearm, then threw the other forearm at Milverton’s head. It caught him flush on the ear. He brought the butt of his gun down across the bridge of Milverton’s nose.

Devlin spun, grabbing Milverton’s wrist. With a sharp yank, he disarmed him, the knife clattering to the ground. His eyes briefly followed the knife—

“Look out!” A woman’s voice. He glanced left, just in time to see the shiv that had been yanked from Milverton’s boot heel heading for his face. He could feel the air as it missed.

“Drop it!” shouted the woman’s voice and now Devlin understood who she was.

Maryam held her Lady Glock steady on Milverton. She was a pro, but she wasn’t as good as he was.

Instead of breaking his motion, Milverton transferred the arc of the shiv in her direction and let it fly, like a dart. She tried to control the shock and the pain, but Devlin heard the breath punch out of her as she fell.

In a flash Milverton was up on his feet and running for the door. Devlin rolled and brought his pistol up, but it was too late.

Milverton was gone.

He found her slumped on the floor between a row of seats. He could hear the sirens, rapidly approaching. Leave her, shoot her, or fall in love with her, once and for all. Observe, orient, decide.

Act.

He picked her up. There was a side exit that led into a noxious Parisian alley. The kind of street where lovely ladies with blackened teeth and hairy armpits used to empty the contents of their chamber pots on the heads of peasants even blacker of tooth and hairier of body back in the seventeenth century.

No chamber pots tonight. He kept his pistol ready, just in case Milverton was waiting for him.

She was losing blood, going into shock now. A hospital was out of the question; too much curiosity. The agency had doctors here in Paris. It also had nurses, spies, whores, safe houses, safe cars, bought cops, cooperative members of the Deuxième Bureau, the works. They’d be here within minutes.

“Hold on, Maryam,” he said, punching a couple tones on his cell phone.

“Who are you?” she whispered as he carried her down the alley, her voice fading.

“Your guardian angel,” he said.

Paris was for lovers.

Chapter Thirty-seven

Danny Impellatieri’s first inkling that anything was amiss came as he gradually awoke to the soft, almost sexy, buzz of his secure cell phone, which he always slept with, under his pillow, right alongside his pistol. Swimming back to consciousness, he became aware of a symphony of sirens wailing somewhere to the south and west. At first he mistook them for the sounds of the radio, or perhaps a television commercial; the TV was still on, although he couldn’t see it from this angle. He was trying to synthesize this random information when he realized he had the phone in his hand. “Hello?”

Stupid. That hadn’t been a standard ring tone — it was his private message ring tone, the overture to Zampa, just energetic enough to be motivating, and clichéd enough to be comical. No answer was necessary. There was a crackle and a beep and he realized this was a message from “Tom Powers.” He punched his access code and waited for the clearance to go through. Then he saw it.

“Whaddya know, whaddya say?” That got him awake.

That was what he used to say when he was commanding his unit of the 160th, the Night Stalkers. Powers had asked him for a private phrase, one that only the two of them shared. Thus they learned that they both shared a love for Cagney movies, loved the way the banty little rooster from hell moved as he chomped through the scenery. Cagney just didn’t stand there, he vibrated. He didn’t just do nothing when he had nothing to do; he did something: flashed his devilish eyes, shot a leering grin, balanced expertly on the balls of his feet, ready for anything, ready to make love to a girl or punch a guy’s lights out. Cagney, they decided, was their role model.

So this message was not good. Danny had expected the small pleasures of homecoming and sleep, and then a significant rise in one of his off-shore bank accounts, the ones that, despite his overwhelming love for her — or perhaps because of it — he had never breathed a word of to Diane, but had put in her name in case anything happened to him. It was meant as a warning, to be ready; worse, it meant that something really nasty had come up.

Ready for what? What could have been worse than what they’d just gone through?

Normally, the first thing Danny would do was sit down at his computer in his secure room, boot it up, and do a quick scan of all available feeds, official, semiofficial, open source, and absolute bullshit. You could learn a lot from the first three, but sometimes you could learn even more from absolute bullshit, since it afforded you a window onto the thinking of the wingnuts, basket cases, moonbats, psychos, and all the other flotsam and jetsam of the human race, weightless amid the rapidly expanding junk of cyberspace.

That kind of war was not for him. Danny preferred a sidearm or a knife and an enemy, face to face, up close and personal. Like that Drusovic asshole. Danny was a good Catholic, but the thought that religion could compel a man to murder — no, to slaughter — was beyond him. He would have made a lousy Crusader, Deus lo vult and all that; he needed to know who he was killing and why. For Danny Impellatieri, it was always personal.

The phone rang again — this time the tone was the William Tell Overture. Another Devlin ring tone. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to answer it. If Devlin really had wanted to communicate something to him, he could have done it with his first message. If he just wanted to shoot the shit, well, there was plenty of time for that later. Maybe he should check his bank account first; it was a cardinal rule that “Eddie” never took on a new job before he got paid for the last. Anyway, he had to take a pee that would make Austin Powers proud.

He ignored the phone and staggered to the bathroom. Let the son of a bitch leave a proper message.

There it was, on the bathroom counter: Jade’s iPhone. Just like her to get so excited that she’d walked out the door without it. He had to laugh: the stuff kids had today would have made intel pros twenty years ago weep with envy; hell, he thought, we could have brought down the Soviet Union with two iPods and a set of steak knives if we had had this stuff back in 1989.

Then the iPhone rang. The William Tell Overture.

What the hell?

For a moment, Danny just stared at it dully. The chance that Jade had Rossini as one of her ring tones was impossible; she’d never even heard of Rossini. But the chance that Tom Powers would try to communicate with him via his kid’s phone was equally impossible. Their working agreement was founded on the bedrock principle that no way would Danny’s family ever get involved with business. Families were off-limits, sacrosanct.

Danny could feel his anger rising, his explosive temper boiling over. He couldn’t imagine what possessed Powers to do such a thing. Didn’t he realize how dangerous it was? And dragging his daughter, Jade, into this, was totally unconscionable. He’d better have a pretty goddamn good excuse for calling his daughter—

Just before he opened his mouth, Danny glanced over at the television set, which was still on. Then, unprofessionally but understandably, he dropped the phone and started screaming.

Chapter Thirty-eight

Danny made the short distance from Hobart Street to the Kaiser-Permanente hospital on Sunset and Edgemont in record time. Speeding east on Franklin, weaving in and out of traffic like an ace pilot, his mind raced faster than his car. Surely, Powers must have known what was coming — why else would he have called? Worse, Powers had had him and his family under surveillance — through his kid, for chrissakes! — the whole time, ever since the poisoned gift had arrived.

That fucking Skipjack. How could he have been so stupid? He had trusted this guy, bonded with him — insofar as you could bond with a man you’d never actually met face to face. But they’d been on a half a dozen missions together, and each one had ended in success and, even better, anonymity. He’d made a lot of money from Powers, and so had his men. They’d lost damn few Night Stalkers. But now…

Danny wasn’t pretending to think logically as he raced around a Mexican in a Ford pickup hauling three lawn mowers. There, up ahead — Edgemont Avenue, a sharp, screaming right. He didn’t quite beat the light at Hollywood Boulevard, but didn’t give a shit, didn’t even bother parking his car properly; such was his rage and grief that had any LAPD cop popped his head up, he would have blown it off on the spot and dealt with the consequences later.

After he saw his baby girl. After he’d made sure she was going to make it, no matter what it took. After he’d mourned her mother. If they wanted to fuck with him then, so be it. First things first.

He raced past the nurses, heading directly for the floor where his sources had told him his daughter was lying. The security scanners went nuclear as he blew past the metal detector, but that was another thing that would just have to be sorted out later. Besides, the city of Los Angeles had bigger problems at the moment than one grieving father with a weapon or two.

Into the elevator, where he frightened an old Chinese lady in a wheelchair surrounded by four or five members of family banging away in Cantonese. His Cantonese was rusty, but he could have told them to go fuck themselves had they given him any grief. Instead, they just cowered and complained as he barged into the lift, and then spewed some Chinese venom at him as he barreled out. Like he cared.

There was the room. Jade’s room.

Eddie Bartlett had seen a lot of things in his time. With the 160th, he’d seen men blown apart, men shredded by chopper blades, men decapitated in training accidents, men with their heads shattered as they smashed through the cockpit glass, men defenestrated, whether accidentally or, in combat, intentionally. He knew what a body looked like after it had fallen from a few thousand feet, knew what a hostile looked like after he’d been riddled with automatic weapons fire in a strafing run, knew what was left after man, woman, or child was hit by a cluster bomb or a missile.

His mind raced. His memory slowed.

The road to Baghdad, 2003. No matter what anybody said about who was responsible for 9/11, for the men on the ground it was payback time for the sand monkeys. Leading a SOAR team, in close air support of a forward Marine unit. Knife through rancid butter until one of the damned sandstorms appeared out of nowhere, a whirling, desert dervish like something out of The Mummy.

The Marine column was caught out in the open. Not so bad for them; they could hunker down, even under fire. He and his choppers were up in the air, with sand blasting through their rotors, enfilading their engines. If he didn’t get them down, they would all crash in the desert, like the ill-fated Carter mission, the one that had given birth to the SOARs in the first place.

The enemy was dug in at a village just up ahead. A few of Saddam’s inept Republican Guard’s wasted tanks were blocking the Marines’ way into the village. The dirty little secret of desert fighting was that the Iraqis didn’t like the sand any better than the Americans did; as a natural resource, it was a lousy ally. They would be having just as much trouble with their rifles and small arms as anybody else, just as little freedom of movement. The Arab response to almost any kind of adverse combat situation was to hunker down, lie low, and either turn tail — their ordinary course of action — or dig in, camouflaged, and then shoot their opponents in the back as they passed by.

If the Night Stalkers bailed now, the Iraqis would become emboldened by what they viewed as American cowardice. Although they thought nothing of abject surrender and honored what the West considered treachery, the Arabs preferred sure suicide to perceived dishonor, and they could pin the Marines down. The jarheads’ lifeline was Danny’s Black Hawks, and Danny would be damned if he was going to deny them that.

Was the situation dangerous? Damn straight. But that’s what the 160th was invented for in the first place.

“Captain?” The voice of one of his officers crackled in his ear. He had ten seconds to make up his mind.

Danny glanced at the radar — no letup in sight. The MH-60/DAP (Direct Action Penetrator) Black Hawks boasted state-of-the-art navigation systems, in addition to their airborne refueling capabilities, their infrared sensors, “disco light” IR jammers, SATCOM, and M-134 Miniguns, all bringing death at a top speed of 178 knots, but now it was time to shit or get off the pot. No amount of technology was going to get them through this. It was classic decision time.

Now or never, and now was always better than never.

They flew those babies in, right over the top of the village, hovering ten feet off the ground as their four-man crews scrambled down and opened fire. The Iraqis were astonished to see the Americans materialize from nowhere and in their seconds of hesitation, the SOARs’ infrared goggles and automatic weapons took them apart.

Danny stayed in the chopper, working the machine guns as his men went house to house, cleaning out the nests. The weather wasn’t getting any better. If they were going to get out, they had to do it now.

The hell with it. They’d leave when they were damn good and ready.

They took one casualty that day. The Iraqis lost every single fighter. In the morning, when the storm had cleared, they left a pile of bodies in the middle of the village, with one of the corpses holding a big sign: KILROY WAS HERE, for the Marines to find. They ought to shut their mouths for a while. And then they were gone.

And now he was here. With his daughter. Looking at her lying there, bandages everywhere, tubes everywhere, her eyes closed, hooked up to various machines, her chest rising and falling rhythmically but otherwise showing no signs of life. His beautiful little girl, Jade, whose only crime was going to the Apple store with her mother.

“Sir?” He turned to see a nurse with a couple of security men behind her, two men and a woman. “Would you please accompany these gentlemen downstairs?”

One of the security men laid a hand on his shoulder. Big mistake.

Danny wheeled and punched the man in the stomach. The second man he bounced off a wall. Then he held up his hands. “It’s okay, I’m leaving. I’m just a little overwrought, is all.”

On an ordinary day, they might have called the cops. Not today. There were no cops. They were all at the Grove.

The security guys glared at him. The hospital staff let him go.

He got into his car. Not even a ticket. He drove off.

There was only one man he knew who could have known about the Grove bomb in advance. The same man who had let the bomb go off in Edwardsville, after the mission was already accomplished.

The same man responsible for his wife’s body, lying in the downtown morgue, one of the hundreds of victims of his callousness.

“Tom Powers.”

He had to find him. But how? Their deal was that Powers had to initiate the contact. He had no number for him, nothing. He didn’t even know his real name.

Sort of made a mockery of his motto, NSDQ. Night Stalkers Don’t Quit.

For the first time in a very long time, Danny started to pray.

Chapter Thirty-nine

Traffic in central Los Angeles was at a standstill, and so they made their way over the hill from Burbank, avoiding the freeways, cutting around Griffith Park on San Fernando, crossing the LA River and darting down Glendale Boulevard and into Echo Park.

Deliberately, he kept a house in one of the most unfashionable neighborhoods in the city. The home on Laveta Terrace in once-fashionable Sunset Heights had been built in 1921 by a rich man, a member of the city’s prestigious Jonathan Club, but had slid downhill in the early 1930s once W. C. Fields, whose house was just three doors down, moved west to Los Feliz. It was a perfect place for him to live as anonymously as the nature of his job demanded.

Echo Park was the Greenwich Village of Los Angeles, a longstanding hotbed of radicals, gays, commies, lefties, greens, Latinos, and once upon a time, Aimee Semple McPherson herself. Indeed, her Angelus Temple lay just down the hill to the west, at the northern end of the Echo Park Lake. True, there was the occasional gunshot that broke the stillness of the night, but the view of downtown from his second-floor terrace was nothing short of spectacular, and on game nights, the lights of Chavez Ravine stabbed the night sky like some kind of secular cathedral.

“Am I still under arrest?” she asked. “That was cute.”

“No, it was clever.”

“We’d better get to work,” she said.

That was it. No mention of the Studio Galande and its aftermath, no reference to the last time they saw each other, no hint of her feelings when, after weeks of nursing her back to health at a safe house in Neuilly, he had suddenly and completely vanished from her life. She just picked up right where they’d left off.

“Don’t you want to know why—”

She held up a hand. “No. We don’t have time for that.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I know you are, Frank,” she replied.

“My name’s not Frank,” he admitted.

“I know it isn’t,” she said, moving toward him. “Everything you’ve told me since the day we met was a lie, but I accepted it.”

“Because you were lying too.”

“Because I accepted it.”

Observe, orient…fuck it. “Follow me.”

He led her into a tiny hallway that separated the west wing from the east wing, and then into what was once was, charmingly, the 1920s “telephone room,” a cubbyhole about the size of an old-fashioned phone booth under the central stairway that still had the hook for the home’s original telephone. The proper combination dialed on the reproduction wall phone he’d had installed would slide open to allow passage to the inner sanctum. The wrong combination would result in a slam-shut on the hallway side and the controlled explosion of a cyanide gas bomb in the enclosed space, followed by a trapdoor release of the corpse into a pit below. Nothing personal.

He dialed all the right numbers, shielding the combination from Maryam. “Still don’t trust me, do you?” she said, as the false wall slid open.

“I love you,” he said. “I loved you from that first kiss in Paris—”

“Our first kiss,” she said. “It takes two to tango.”

“From our first kiss in Paris. When you saved my life at the Studio Galande.”

She grew somber at the memory. “Like I said, it takes two to—”

“Love comes first. Trust comes later.”

The door slid open. The basement stairs beckoned. She grabbed his arm.

“It can’t be this easy, can it? People like us…”

“Even people like us get lucky, once in a while.”

Most people in LA not only didn’t have basements, they had never even heard of them. But his house, located on top of a hill, had what was known locally as a “California basement,” a half-cellar tucked beneath the living room on the downward slope, maybe eight by ten. Plenty of room for his needs: the inner sanctum of Devlin West.

He ran the video of the president’s news conference. There was the terrorist:

Unless the American government immediately and completely capitulates to our demands, these attacks will continue in ever-increasing ferocity until America and the West is destroyed in a holy rain of fire…And that day of reckoning will be the most terrible in the history of the world…We made our justifiable demands and our reward was death. Now, we will visit death upon you.

Devlin checked all lines of secure communication. Nothing from Seelye, or Rubin or, worse, Tyler. Didn’t matter — he’s already gotten his assignment from the president on national television. It would be good to keep a little radio silence for a while.

Now he knew he was absolutely right not to have bought the Muslim terrorist line. Everybody expected “terrorists” to be Muslims these days, especially the media. They were the politically incorrect bogeymen with incendiary “sensibilities.” They were also a singularly inept group of adversaries from cultures that could not build a flush toilet or maintain an electrical grid.

Real terrorists wouldn’t have shot that poor reporter — hell, the press was usually their most ardent sympathizer, ever ready to “understand” them. Plus, real terrorists wouldn’t have had such an absurd list of demands. The quick succession of new attacks also spoke against the conventional terrorist angle, since it took Muslim terrorists months or years to conceive, plan, mount, and execute their operations, most of which were half-baked and technically unfeasible anyway; that was one of the reasons why the United States had been able to roll up so many of their networks after September 11.

Even their vaunted Internet cadres had been busted down to buck private, thanks to NSA/CSS. This wasn’t Devlin’s department, but he was well aware of the extraordinary battle that had been waged, and now basically won, against Al-Qaeda in cyberspace. On September 19, 2008, the NSA warriors had taken down four of the five principal jihad sites, DSA’ed them to death, then poisoned them; what the Romans had done to Carthage, Fort Meade had done to what was left of bin Laden’s network. It was the kind of victory that should have been hailed on the editorial pages of every major newspaper, but of course wasn’t.

He tried Eddie Bartlett again. Nothing, not even a ring — straight to voice mail. Ditto for his satphone and the iPhone. Nix.

Worse than nix. For security reasons, if Eddie didn’t pick up on three secure lines, Devlin was supposed to drop him. It was his own rule, because Devlin had learned the hard way over the years that there was a penalty for breaking even arbitrary, self-imposed rules. Still…

“What?”

“I can’t raise my partner, the guy I was on my way out here to see when it happened. That’s never happened before.”

“And you think something happened to him.”

“I never think, until I know.”

“Let me work with you.” There, she said it.

He turned away from his computers and looked at her. “I guess we’re either going to have to trust each other or we’re going to have to kill each other, so why don’t we decide right now? Why did you follow me in Paris?”

“I wasn’t following you. I was there for you.”

“Who sent you?”

“That’s classified.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“Yes. You’re Frank Ross.”

“And do you know who Frank Ross was?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“He was a reporter who got framed and sent to jail. James Cagney played him in Each Dawn I Die.”

It was getting clearer now. “NCRI?” The National Council of Resistance of Iran. The great Iranian diaspora had put many of the richest Persians in America, a lot of them burning with desire to see the last of the mullahs.

She didn’t answer. “It’s my turn now. Why did you leave me?”

“How about a drink?”

“I’m Muslim, remember?”

“Not a Mormon?”

“No.”

“So…how about a drink?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

They took the private lift up to the second floor and stepped out onto the terrace. The lights of downtown Los Angeles were still on. Hundreds of people had just died to the west, and the city had a big hole in its heart, but life went on. That was the thing about tragedies: they were only tragic to the dead, who didn’t care, and those relatively few who cared for them. To the rest of humanity, tragedies were fodder for Oprah.

He kept a bar sheltered under the eaves. He poured them both a single malt Islay with a couple of ice cubes. They had their drinks in happy silence, with only the lights of downtown to accompany their thoughts.

Back to work. Devlin pulled out his PDA and ran the cutout number that Hartley had dialed from the Watergate. The one he had traced as far as LA. It was easier from here to tap into the LA phone system without attracting attention. He had no intention of dialing the number himself, only tracing the bounce-on from this point.

The first thing he did was to match the number to a subscriber who, of course, turned out to be a Mr. Henry A. Wong of Rancho Park, recently deceased. The second thing was to use the system’s internal assignment logarithm to freeze it and take it off the grid for another few days. It was like isolating a virus in a lab dish: now he could play with it.

The first bounce-on didn’t surprise him in the least. It was the private, unlisted telephone number of Senator Robert Hartley in Georgetown; that was a nice touch. The second bounce was the main switchboard at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade. OK, that told him something too. But it was the third and final bounce that he was really looking for: central London, somewhere between Highgate and Islington. Milverton just couldn’t resist showing off and now he just made the biggest mistake of his life. He let out a shout of triumph.

“Are you okay?” She’d finished her scotch.

“Never better.” So had he.

The master bedroom lay on the west side of the house, with a view toward Silverlake, Los Feliz, the Observatory, the Hollywood sign. The bed was up on a short pedestal, his closet just off to the right, the master bath to the south. He slipped out of his clothes and into bed. She was warm and smooth next to him.

“Why?” he asked, reaching for her.

“Why not?” she said, reaching for him.