Hostile Intent

Chapter Forty

Charles Augustus Milverton checked his chronometer. He loved modern technology. He didn’t believe in God, but if he were to believe in any kind of a god, he would imagine one that was half — or perhaps entirely — electronic. A kind of virtual Shiva, warlike and bloodthirsty and able to strike down his enemies from any distance. That was what really put fear into people: not the act of violence that they could see, but the act of violence whose arrival they dreaded and which, when it came, even when it was expected, came ex machina, like something out of a Handel opera — God from the skies, except this god was all Zeus and thunderbolts, not Danae’s rain of gold.

The rain of gold was his department. His specialty. His reward.

He punched up his computers, waking them from hibernation. While he was gone, they had been churning the data he had sent back from Edwardsville, especially what had happened at the end. Thank God for the Wiki-share, the DARPAs, the SETIs. Unused computing power no longer had to go unused. We were all linked now, even if we didn’t know it.

There it was. Him in the helicopter, and his antagonist below. This, after all, had been the primary attraction of the mission all along, to flush that man out from the dark hiding place where Milverton had long suspected he dwelled. And while he had not really got a good look at him, not while lifting off, and readying for the jump he knew must come upon impact of the Barrett’s speeding round into the engine block of the chopper, his video apparatus had. No matter how poor the quality, the computers would be able to extract an image, extrapolate concealed features simply from the shape of the chin or the earlobe.

On television, meanwhile, there was Skorzeny, front and center, framed by the giant Ferris wheel everybody called the “London Eye.” The old phony could really snow them. All that aid, rushing to Los Angeles, surplus crap he had no use for in the first place. Free turkeys for the poor, and more, all obscuring the real reason the ship had put into port, which was safely tucked away in the hold and buried on the manifest as “scientific experiment materials.”

Barnum, or Mencken, or somebody, almost had it right: no one ever went broke underestimating the sentimentality of the American public. The greatest country on earth, a country (it pained him to admit) even more powerful than the Empire at its zenith, was being brought low by its sappy Victorian fondness for morally uplifting “narratives.” Triumph and tragedy. Hope rising from the ashes. Smiling through the tears. Well, soon enough they would have something to smile about.

Damn it, but the old man loved the spotlight. Well, he supposed that had he had the upbringing Skorzeny did, he’d want to shine on as long as possible. To pay the world back in Christian coin for the wrongs it had visited upon him — that surely was the mark of the secular saint these days. Still, business was business, and his job was to follow instructions.

He punched a code on his BlackBerry and turned up the sound. All these years in the Anglosphere and the old fart still sounded like Dr. Strangelove.

“And so, ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to thank you from the bottom of my heart for offering me this platform today. A boy born in Germany, who grew up when our two countries were bitter enemies, when there was suffering and dying beyond compare….” The faker choked up briefly, then continued.

“Thus, I do what I can in return. Already, our ship the Stella Maris is in port in Los Angeles, along with our prayers. She is one of the most advanced ships on the seas, with a state-of-the-art navigation system and a titanium-hardened cargo hold. What we have for the people of California cannot be compromised or damaged in any way. It will be delivered. For we cannot wait for governments to act. Another Skorzeny humanitarian vessel, the Clara Vallis, will make port in Baltimore in three days. As you know, it is my fondest dream to see a new world order emerge before I die, one in which we all are citizens of the world, not simply citizens of whatever nation in which we happen to have been born. As the poet said, ‘No man is an island.’”

Skorzeny stopped. The “London Eye” turned. Behind them, the Thames flowed, as it had for thousands of years, since before the Romans settled the place and called it Londinium, and as it would after the Britons finally gave up and abandoned the place to its new fate of Londonistan. Too bad, thought Milverton. He was a native Londoner. He liked the place, and he would miss it, but there were plenty of other places in the world, and with better weather too. Might as well start the ball rolling toward the transition.

John Donne was his cue. He started the countdown. Three…two…one.

He’d run the simulation a dozen times. The reality was almost exactly as he’d planned.

Somewhere just off the southeast coast of England, a Tomahawk missile blasted out of the hold of a Liberian tanker and sped toward London at subsonic speed.

Skorzeny’s entourage had just left the area when the missile slammed into the Eye.

Milverton had charged the Tomahawk with just enough explosive power to take down the Eye. Naturally, given the velocity, there would be some collateral damage, but it was the visual he was after, the image of the Eye collapsing, and it was the visual he got.

Twisted, burning metal flew in all directions. Some cars, wholly intact, went flying; several landed in the Thames and sank straightaway. Other cars had their bottoms blown away, the passengers plunging screaming 443 feet to their deaths. At ground zero, vehicles exploded, or were tossed skyward.

A second set of codes and the hidden charges in the ship sent the tanker to the bottom. That part he had neglected to mention to the captain when he hired the vessel.

Message delivered, COD — not just to the United States this time, but to the West.

In the distance, he heard the front door open, then close again. No alarms went off. He didn’t even turn around as she entered the room.

He could hear the thunk of her shoes as she kicked them off, the rustle of her clothes as they fell to the floor. Her soft footpads as she made her way toward him. In his old SAS days, he might have killed her anyway, so thoroughly reflexive was his training. Maybe he was getting sloppy; maybe he was just getting old. Maybe he really wasn’t as controlled as he thought he was. And maybe he was in love with her — not just to guy the old man, but because he really was.

In any case, he knew who was behind him. And despite her inarguable beauty and indisputable nakedness, what was in front of him was even more interesting. A face, re-created by the computers. The face of the man he sought. The face of an old enemy, brought to him courtesy of the very latest in facial-recognition software.

“He got away OK?” she asked.

“That was the idea, wasn’t it?”

“Still, seemed a little close.”

Milverton tried not to let his irritation show. Everything had worked perfectly. The panic-driven restrictive policies instituted after September 11th had long since been sloughed away, like a snake shedding old skin. Keeping the shipping lanes open had proven more important than inspecting every piece of cargo in their holds. After today, that would all change, of course, but it didn’t really matter. What was in port was already in port.

“The idea was to make him look both heroic and like a victim simultaneously, just the way he likes it. It is an unfortunate fact of life, however, tragic accidents do happen.”

She gave Milverton a long look. “I didn’t think you cared,” she said.

“Why don’t you pour us both a drink?” he said over his shoulder.

She slipped her bare arms around his neck and set down two martinis in front of them on the desk. “Voilà,” she said.

He took a sip, then spun in his chair. Her breasts were already in his face. “It’s not nice to keep a lady waiting,” said Amanda Harrington.

“What about your daughter?” he asked as she wrapped her legs around his waist.

“I got a sitter,” she said.

Chapter Forty-one

The president was on the transatlantic hotline when Seelye entered the Oval Office. He expected a crowd, and was surprised to see that the president was alone.

Tyler motioned for Seelye to sit down as he continued his conversation; on the television, the markets were tanking. After three successive shocks, the Dow had lost more than half its value, and the bottom was nowhere to be seen.

“Annabel,” he was saying. “I can assure you that we had no inkling, none at all, that this…outrage, as you put it, was about to happen. Yes. Yes. No, I don’t care what the ‘chatter’ is. It’s not true. It’s simply not true.” He held the phone away from his ear and shot his visitor an exasperated glance; even from across the room they could hear the British prime minister’s voice, shouting angrily.

“Annabel — Madame Prime Minister — please be careful with your accusations. Do you think for a moment that if we had specific and credible evidence of a terrorist plot on British soil we would not have alerted you? Come on—”

Whatever he was about to say was cut off in a controlled explosion on the other end of the line. Annabel Macombie, the new British PM, was renowned for her Celtic temper. Seelye almost felt sorry for Tyler. Almost.

“Let me just say — excuse me, may I speak? The Dow is below 4,000, my approval numbers are in the toilet, and unless we can nail whoever is behind these outrages, I am not going to be reelected president of the United States next year. So I have a lot more to lose than you. Let me just say that we have our top people working on this. In fact, the director of the NSA has just walked into my office and I’ll get back to you as soon as I’ve had a chance to hear his report. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Yes, you too.”

He hung up. Seelye braced himself for what he knew was coming: Mount Tyler, exploding in a fiery shower of profanities. Which blew, right on schedule. “This is war,” said the president, after the volcano had subsided. “Flat-out war.”

“Yes, sir,” said Seelye. “But against whom?”

“That’s what you’re supposed to tell me. You and the rest of that useless bunch: Rubin, DHS, my national security advisor, what’s-her-name, and that fuckwit at CIA. Christ! How many intelligence agencies does a country have to have before one of them gets one fucking thing right?”

“Secretary Rubin’s a good man, sir, even if I personally don’t care for him.”

“What about the others?”

Seelye had no comment.

“Right. So what are he, and you, and I…what the fuck are we going to do?”

Seelye knew what that question meant. It didn’t mean, “What are we going to do?” It meant, “What can I tell the American people we are already doing and, if it goes wrong, put your head up on a pike and parade it down Constitution Avenue?”

“The first thing we need to do,” said Seelye, choosing his words carefully, “we’ve already done. The next-generation SDI shields are now fully operational on both coasts. Nobody’s gonna sneak a missile into New York or San Francisco.”

“If Congress knew, they’d have a cow,” said the president. “What about ships already in port?”

“The sensors have been in place for a while. So far, so good. No system is completely foolproof. But we believe we have enough safeguards. The real question is, why London?”

Tyler stepped eagerly up to the plate. This was something he could address. “Easy — because they’re not as ready as we are. They weren’t attacked in 2001, and when they finally were, the attack came on the buses and the subways. Because of the Special Relationship. Because the Brits are our friends, our allies. Our partners. Hell, they do what we tell ’em, no questions asked, if they know what’s good for them.”

Seelye shook his head. “With all…due respect, sir, I think not. Whoever just hit London doesn’t care a fig about the ‘special relationship.’ There’s a pattern here, if you can see it.”

Tyler couldn’t see it.

“Whiplash,” said Seelye, after a decent interval. “They’re trying to give us whiplash. Spinning us like a top. Or, to put it bluntly, fucking us up, down, and sideways until our eyeballs pop.”

That was something this president could understand. “Why?” he said.

“Because they want to. Because they can. Or, worst of all, because they’re about to ram it right up our ass.” He enjoyed putting complex ideas into terms the president could readily grasp.

“I thought you assured me Devlin was on this case.”

“He’s only one man, sir. He’s—”

Tyler smashed his fist down on the Resolute desk. “Goddamnit, Army, this is no time for pettifogging bullshit.” Only Jeb Tyler could yoke together two words like “pettifogging bullshit.” That was part of what made him so presidential. “Can he do the job or do I have to call in the Marines?”

“I believe he can, yes sir. Which is why—”

“But can he do it in time? I need you to lay all the cards on the table, right the hell now, so we’re both singing from the same choir book.” And only Jeb Tyler could shotgun-marry those two metaphors. Which is what made him an asshole. “Why what?”

“Which is why somebody is whipsawing him from coast to coast. Find out who that someone is and you’ve got your culprit.”

“I thought we decided it was this Milverton character.”

Seelye shook his head. “Milverton’s a hired gun, a soldier of fortune. We need to find out whom he’s working for. And, no offense, sir, but you’ve just made Devlin’s job a lot more difficult.”

“What do you mean?” asked Tyler, who hated criticism.

“Well, sir, insofar as ‘Branch 4’ is concerned…” he had to choose his words very carefully, “insofar as Branch 4 is concerned, you pretty much blew its existence at the press conference. I’m sure you had a good reason, but right now every foreign intelligence service, both friendly and hostile, will be working that out right now. And let me tell you, they’ll be plenty pissed that we haven’t been leveling with them about this. The friendlies, I mean.”

“Fuck ’em,” said President Tyler.

“Now, as far as Devlin is concerned, he’s is in California, and”—Seelye pretended to look at his watch—“is in no position at the moment to get to London, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Send somebody else, then,” said Tyler. “One of the other Branch 4’s.”

“There are—” began Seelye, and then stopped to rephrase. “Branch 4 ops work alone. They cannot be identified, even to members of their own service. You know that, sir.”

“Yes,” said Tyler, reddening, “but I don’t give a damn. I want results, not—”

“Not pettifogging bullshit,” supplied Seelye.

“Precisely.”

Seelye took a deep breath. Damage control, above all, damage control. I’ll do what I can do, sir…without harming operational security, of course.”

The president’s secretary, Millie Dhouri, was at the doorway. “Mr. President,” she said, “I think you should take this call.”

“Not now, Millie,” said Tyler, but the look on her face bespoke worry, and she had very sharp political instincts. For the call to have bumped its way up to her desk must mean something.

“It’s evil, sir,” she said softly, shaking. “What he’s saying.”

The president motioned for her to put the call through on speaker phone. The Oval Office speaker phone was not one of those tinny contraptions that sounded as if you were connected with a wire tied between two hamsters. Instead, it sounded like you were having a private conversation, which is exactly what it was intended to sound like.

“Okay,” said Tyler, signaling for her to trace the call. The White House number was in the phone book, and any idiot could call the switchboard. It was a democratic holdover from the days when John Quincy Adams used to go swimming nude in the Potomac, when Andy Jackson let the great unwashed troop through the White House, stealing everything they could lay their hands on, when Truman used to play poker with the press corps and fleece them out of their paltry weekly salaries and make them feel good about it. It was one of the things Tyler had decided he was going to have to change after his reelection.

Tyler picked up the phone. “This is the president of the United States. To whom am I speaking?”

“Mr. President,” said the ghostly voice at the other end of the ether, scrambled and opaque. “You are badly trying our patience.”

Seelye was already in action, punching in instructions to NSA headquarters. He knew they wouldn’t have much time, but at least the call was already being digitally recorded and analyzed. He wanted a full report on his PDA pdq, and made that quite clear as he listened to the conversation.

“We have given you clear instructions and an even clearer timeline. Because we are merciful, we spared the lives of the children in Illinois…most of them, anyway.”

Seelye was already relaying the conversation capture straight to Devlin. Seelye’s BlackBerry lit up as Devlin punched in.

“If anything, we should have thought that the incident in Los Angeles—”

HE’S BRITISH popped up on DIRNSA’s screen. KEEP HIM TALKING. Seelye had noticed that too: the pronunciation of “anything”—en-a-thing. The use of the word, “should.” Not to mention: “Loss ANGE-e-leese.”

“—focused your minds, but it appears that such was not the case. It appears that many more deaths will be required. Not just in America, as you have just seen, but all over the Christian West. The stakes have been raised. It is now immaterial whether you accept Allah. You are all doomed.”

THIS IS BULLSHIT.

“Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.”

AND THIS IS NOT. IT’S “REVELATION.”

The line went dead.

Seelye’s other BlackBerry buzzed. NSA, with the trace: the technology had been developed at Fort Meade using a fifth-generation network-centric system based on a Rijndael block cipher.

The call was coming from inside the White House. Which left only two possible conclusions: either the call really was coming from inside the White House, which was impossible, or whoever was making it had cracked the NSA defenses. Seelye decided the president didn’t need to know that yet.

“That was this Milverton, wasn’t it?”

Seelye had left the scrambled audio feed on, so Devlin could hear every word. “It may well be, yes, sir,” he said.

“Get Devlin on this immediately.”

I HEARD THAT. Then Devlin punched through another text message. Seelye read it and blanched.

Seelye’s perturbed look caught the president’s attention. “What’s he saying?” asked Tyler.

“He says to say thank you, sir.”

“Thank me for what?”

“I’m not sure you want to know, sir,” replied Seelye.

“I’m a big boy — let me see it.”

Seelye handed the president his BlackBerry: THANK YOU FOR BLOWING ME BEFORE YOU FUCKED ME.

Chapter Forty-two

Devlin switched off his secure PDA and tried to figure out what to do next. It was time for a new game plan. Telling the president of the United States to go fuck himself was as good a place as any to start.

Milverton, he was sure, was back in London; everything pointed to it, including the London Eye attack. But he was just the conductor; someone else had written this symphony and the tempo was going to keep picking up until they got to the climax. Which wasn’t going to be pretty, that was for sure. Already the American economy had been rocked back on its heels, and if this didn’t stop, and fast, the pieces of it that remained would hardly be worth picking up, although some vulture was sure to do so. And if the government of the United States had been parliamentary instead of republican, it might have already fallen.

But here he was in LA, thousands of miles from the action, with the clock ticking on his own personal presidential directive. What had seemed a good idea — to enlist Eddie Bartlett and mount a counteroperation — was already out of date. Eddie was AWOL, Milverton was too far up his decision loop, and he was getting outmaneuvered at each term. Once Milverton had him in his sights, Devlin knew, he would be a sitting duck for the kill shot.

Think: try to fit the pieces together.

The attack on Edwardsville made some sense, if testing the American defenses had been the point of the exercise. The quick and lethal response had made a point. But what if that was exactly beside the point? Seen in this light, the Grove attack made some sense as a follow-up. It got him pinned down in the wrong direction at the same time it pulled him in further, escalated the terror quotient, and hung him out to dry so that Milverton could execute the third leg of this triad, the attack in London. When you looked at the sequence that way, there was one conclusion: this was all about him.

Which was ridiculous. Why would Milverton, why would anybody, go to all this trouble just to flush Devlin out? Even the highly freighted, emotional angle — middle America, kids in peril — was no guarantee the president would order a Branch 4 operation. In fact, the opposite. Unless somebody in Washington was risking burning him for a higher purpose — or, worse, didn’t mind burning him at all.

If they had wanted to fire a missile at London, Milverton could have done that without Edwardsville and Los Angeles. For another, the damage there, while terrible, was not as extensive as in Los Angeles. It too was still a feint. Milverton was being used, just as Devlin was being used.

Unfortunately, that brought him back to where he started — that this really was all about him. What were the chances that he would get ordered into an operation, and at the presidential level no less, involving Milverton? Milverton, who had never shown any overt or covert connections to the various terrorist factions that had been floating around Europe since the 1980s. Who had always been a rogue freelancer.

What would Marcus Aurelius do? Marcus would let reason rule. Very well, then.

There were only three players involved in this drama that he could see: himself, Milverton, and whoever was paying him. Four, if you counted the possible mole in Washington, whose presence he sensed rather than saw at this point, like Pluto’s gravitational effect on Uranus’s orbit. Devlin, however, was a great believer in Occam’s Razor, which literally posited that beings should not be multiplied except out of necessity — meaning that the mole, if he or she existed, could also be the person running Milverton. So we were back to the triangle — the worst geometry in both love and intelligence work.

“What’s wrong?” Maryam joined him on the terrace. She was wearing one of his dress shirts. Possibly the sexiest outfit a woman could wear, but then she knew that already.

“London is what’s wrong.”

Her face fell, the joy draining out of it. “What is it now?”

“About forty dead,” he said. He handed her a small video screen and replayed the whole scene at the London Eye: Skorzeny’s press conference, the attack, the aftermath. “Could have been worse. The Brit papers have gone wall-to-wall, of course. Aunty, too. ‘Terrorism Strikes Britain Again.’”

Her first observation surprised him: “Funny name for a ship, isn’t it?” she said. That was something he hadn’t thought of. “Stella Maris is one of the Virgin’s titles,” she continued. “Star of the Sea. It’s one of the first things you learn when you’re named after her. Even in Iran. In this day and age, nobody names ships after religious figures. It’s too…politically incorrect. Besides,” she asked, “who uses a Tomahawk for an assassination attempt? It’s like using a mallet to swat a fly.”

“We do,” he replied. “We tried to get bin Laden with something similar, and the Israelis enjoy nailing whoever’s warming the chair marked ‘Hamas leader’ with one as often as possible—”

He stopped in midsentence. Assassination attempt? Put the pieces together. Milverton was whipsawing him. Somebody was running Milverton. The latest attack had come in London…had almost killed Skorzeny. And now the Stella Maris just so happened to be anchored in Long Beach Harbor. What were the odds?

Maryam was still talking. “It’s right here, don’t you see? The strike came just as Emanuel Skorzeny was leaving his press conference. It missed him by a matter of minutes. Not to mention half the London press corps.”

“Too bad,” said Devlin. “A bunch of reporters at the bottom of the Thames is almost as good a start as a bunch of lawyers at the bottom of the Thames.”

Maryam ignored the joke, if she even got it. “Why would anyone want to kill Emanuel Skorzeny?” she went on. “He’s one of the most respected, powerful men in Europe, maybe the world.”

“Is he?” asked Devlin, noncommittally, seeking to draw her out, play for time while he thought the sequence through, and what he had to do about it.

“You know he is. His foundation has helped more people internationally than most governments ever do. Look how he helped Zimbabwe, post-Mugabe. When that earthquake hit in China last year, his relief teams were some of the first on the scene. It’s only natural that he might be a target for…”

“For whom?”

“I don’t know. Some nuts. Some renegades — you know how many missiles are floating around. The old Soviet satellites. The North Koreans. The—”

“The mullahs?”

“The point is,” Maryam said, “Skorzeny is a saint. You heard what he just said. One of his company’s ships is in Long Beach Harbor right now, helping out with—”

One of Skorzeny’s ships.

He grabbed her by both shoulders and kissed her. “We have to go,” he said.

“To London — right?”

“Santa Monica for me, LAX for you. I’ll explain later.”

He rushed her into the guest room at the east end of the house. Yanked open the door to the closet—

Two rows of men’s clothes, in varying sizes, colors, and fashions. She didn’t ask; he didn’t explain. And one other thing — a single dress. Size 2. Bought in Paris, just before he left, in the hope for the day when he’d see her again. Her gaze traveled from the dress to his eyes. There was nothing to say.

He was already pulling “Mr. Grant’s” clothes. “Grant” was taller (lifts), fatter (thank you, Universal Studios prop department), slouchier, and sported a very unfashionable mustache and a set of discolored teeth. In the end, there really wasn’t much to the art of disguise. It was like caricature in reverse: you obscured your salient features and made people concentrate on the things that weren’t important. The rest could be done with voice, accent, and mien; after all, with the passage of time people often didn’t recognize their own relatives, so why should a total stranger be any different.

As he pulled on the fake midsection, he thought once more of Occam’s Razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. Easy for William of Ockham to say, hard for Devlin to live by.

She dropped his shirt to the floor and slipped on the dress. It fit her perfectly.

“Let’s go.”

Chapter Forty-three

The RAND Corporation building stood out among the buildings in “downtown” Santa Monica like the proverbial sore thumb — but only if you were already aware that you had just struck your opposable digit with a hammer. Located south of the Third Street Promenade, across Main Street from city hall and the courthouse, it was well away from the congeries of bums and winos — the “homeless”—who had transformed what was once LA’s foremost beach community into Berkeley South. Near RAND, however, there were no homeless to be seen: they didn’t have the requisite security clearance. Few did, homeless or not.

He did.

Devlin glanced at his watch. It was more than a watch, of course. The team leader could text him at any time, over a secure uplink, and his message would appear nearly instantly on the watch’s face.

He looked out at his audience in the small auditorium. Some of the faces — he never forgot a face, because that was how he’d been trained — were familiar. He smiled as he took inventory; to judge from the haircuts and the clothes, mostly Americans. A couple of MI-6 Brits in ill-fitting suits from the Savoy Tailors Guild. Members of the German Federal Intelligence Service, the Bundesnachrichtendient, in their motley. Queens-born Mossad and Shin Bet, at home in both worlds. Three or four Chinese, whose bona fides he immediately discounted by 50 percent; unlike the Russians, they were still new at this game, and incredibly obvious. He’d get the security report later, but already he was tailoring his remarks. The key to one of these speeches was to balance genuine information with even better disinformation, and he was more than up to the task.

“Let me be blunt,” he began without preamble. “In the years since September 11, despite all our intelligence triumphs — necessarily recondite — we as a society have grown complacent. Comfortable. Therefore, I hope and trust that the events of the past two days might serve as a wake-up call for all of us. For, whatever our political differences, we are all civilized men and women here.” There were very few women present, but linguistically he felt compelled to maintain the egalitarian fiction in case somehow his remarks got leaked to the Los Angeles Times Web site; even though the physical newspaper was dying, the handful of reporters tied in to the blogs and RSS and Twitter feeds could still make plenty of trouble. Loose lips still sank ships.

“I refer not only to the events of the past two days in Edwardsville and here in Los Angeles, but to the ongoing series of cyber-attacks on our mainframes at the Pentagon, in Langley, in Fort Meade, in Washington, and elsewhere. Forget everything you think you know about contemporary terrorism. We are no longer up against a nation-state, or even a stateless group of like-minded individuals motivated by ideology, such as al-Qaeda. That, as they say, is so yesterday.”

Murmurs and polite chuckles ripped through his select audience as he reached for the glass of water. Which enabled him to see what was going on in Long Beach via secure video feed in real time…

The Stella Maris was a magnificent vessel. Displacing nearly 200,000 metric tons, the big cargo ship was riding low in the water, preparing to get her cargo offloaded. The dock was a hive of activity as the longshoremen got ready to unload her, but in fact security forces were everywhere, disguised a teamsters, sailors, even casual passersby.

The red-zone call-in had pretty much confirmed that. Since September 11, every major American port was equipped with the latest radiation-detection devices. On three separate occasions, Middle Eastern terrorists had tried to smuggle in a suitcase nuke, but each time they had been tripped up by the detection devices on the docks.

But what if the docks were too late a line of defense? That was what the drone overflights were for. Except they didn’t look like drones. Not the kind that had struck fear into the hearts of late mujahedin in Iraq and Afghanistan, anyway. They looked like kites.

No California beach was complete without its complement of kites. It was amazing how high you could get some of them, and how sensitive the radiation sensors were these days. No matter how strong the ocean breeze, all they needed was a clear line of sight to their target, and the DHS agents who were lucky enough to draw beach duty could take their readings from the comfort of their beach blankets, while ogling the rear ends of the teenage girls wiggling by.

Devlin had the readings on his special PDA before he left the house, which triggered his “go” order to the SEAL team standing by in a sub off the coast of Huntington Beach on a training exercise. The SDVs were already launched and away by the time he got to Santa Monica.

“As you know, the National Security Research Division’s International Security and Defense Policy Center, based in Arlington, exists on the leading edge of threat assessment. Together with our governmental and NGO colleagues around the world, it is our duty to constantly evaluate and extrapolate, not simply from ‘known knowns’ to ‘known unknowns,’ but into the realm of ‘unknown unknowns’ as well. As the United States Marine Corps likes to say, ‘the difficult we do right away. The impossible takes a little longer.’ But let me assure you — since our national wake-up call on the morning of September 11, 2001, the impossible is not only what we seek to do, it is, in many respects, what we have already done.”

A small ripple of applause.

“The Marines have another saying, less widely known but, for our purposes, even more apposite. ‘Don’t worry about what your enemy might do. Worry about what he can do, and plan accordingly.’

“About our enemy’s intention, there can be no doubt. It is nothing less than the destruction of western civilization. By that, I don’t just mean the current American administration, or Israel, or global warming, or world hunger. We could dismantle the Cathedral of Notre Dame, obliterate Tel Aviv, reduce our carbon emissions to zero, return to the Stone Age, and starve ourselves to death, and that still would not be enough.

“Many of you have perhaps seen the motion picture, Independence Day. In it, the president of the United States confronts a captured alien invader and asks whether our two species might live in peace. ‘No peace,’ replies the alien. ‘What do you want us to do, then?’ inquires the president. ‘Die,’ replies the alien. That, in a nutshell, sums up our enemy’s demands. No amount of appeasement, short of suicide, will satisfy him. Ladies and gentlemen, we are not fighting a twenty-first-century war. We are fighting a nineteenth-century war — not so much against zealotry, but against Nietzschean nihilism, masked by religious doctrine, enervation, and anomie.”

As he expected, this did not go over well with some of those in attendance. Probably half the members of his audience were “root cause” types; the idea that sheer nihilism might lay at the dark heart of society’s enemies was something they were not prepared to admit. As they muttered among themselves, “Mr. Grant” took the opportunity to glance at his watch.

Seal Delivery Vehicles were the latest thing in delivering death to your ocean-borne doorstep. A kind of minisubmarine, they carried a six-man team consisting of a pilot, co-pilot, and combat swimmers. The SDV Devlin’s team was using was a Mark 8 Model 1, which ran on lithium-ion batteries and came fully equipped with its own navigation and communications systems. In other words, it was totally silent.

The radiation detectors had come back negative, which was exactly what he had expected. What also was expected was the dead zone in the center of the ship’s cargo hold, the lead-lined “scientific” area. Everything, even people, emit some sort of radiation, but not this blank space; using imaging radar, he had run the image through every NSA analytical program he could think of, but all that computing power had only served to confirm his suspicions. There was something there that Skorzeny didn’t want anybody to see.

Prior to arriving in Santa Monica, Devlin had taken a crash course on Emanuel Skorzeny. Aside from his well-publicized forays in international finance and philanthropy, he was not the sort of man to come across the CSS radar screens. He was immensely rich and powerful, of course, but the occasional indictment for insider trading notwithstanding — inevitable in his line of work — there was nothing criminal about the man. Indeed, there was much that was admirable, including his well-publicized personal story and his generous philanthropy.

Still, there was a strain of misanthropy running through Skorzeny’s tangled skein that bothered Devlin. He would have to spend a lot more time with the files, of course, but the outlines of a very disturbed individual were there to be seen. The childhood alone — the DP camps — would be enough to affect even the sanest boy. But the closer he had looked at Skorzeny, the stranger the man became.

Take his charitable causes, an odd mixture of cultural conservatism — through the Skorzeny Foundation, run by a British woman named Amanda Harrington, he lavishly funded orchestras and opera houses around the world — and political radicalism. There wasn’t a Green Party in Europe he didn’t donate generously to, and there was considerable evidence that, through cutouts, shells, dummies, and nonprofits, he was injecting vast sums of money into the American political process, no matter how illegal it was.

At home in Echo Park, Devlin had harnessed all the computing power at NSA, CIA, and Poughkeepsie to search every existing database — closed-and open-source — for a police record and had come up with nothing. About the only negative thing he could find was the sudden death of one of Skorzeny International’s board members, but strokes could happen to anybody.

As Devlin had learned from long experience in the trenches of classified material, nobody was clean. It was part of the human condition. Everybody had skeletons, past activities, furtive desires, illicit relationships, occasions of sin both venial and mortal. In the great court of law in the sky, everybody was guilty, especially in the age of computers and the Internet. The only question was, how you dealt with it: fake it, lie about it, cop a plea, or brazen it out. With the abolition of sin, the last option had become more and more attractive.

“Brazen” might let you skate in the courtroom, but the rules of evidence in the Moral Court were much less restrictive; there, anything went. So the smart play was to admit almost everything. Blow your own cover if you had to, give up your best friend, plead out to almost every charge. Toss them fish. But save the last minnow, the one part of your cover story that didn’t pass the smell test, until they pried it from your cold, dead hands.

But Skorzeny wasn’t just clean; he was scrubbed — scrubbed in a way only money and access could buy.

“In position,” crackled the voice in his hidden earpiece.

“And so the question arises, how do we fight back? Do we, in fact, even bother to fight back at all, or do we allow ourselves to succumb to the false dichotomy between the rule of law and the right of self-preservation? These are questions that each of us, each country, each society, must answer for itself. I imagine these are the same questions that the fifth-century poets of the Roman Empire asked themselves, just before the Vandals sacked their city. Perhaps from their example, we can glean the answer. Or at least understand what not to do.”

“Dr. Grant,” said one of the Germans, “I have a question…”

Devlin’s eyes, a nameless Navy SEAL, was standing in Angel’s Gate Park, overlooking the harbor to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the south.

They had caught one big break. The Stella Maris was not truly in port. Instead, she had dropped anchor in deeper waters outside the Los Angeles Main Channel. That in itself was only slightly suspicious — the urgency of offloading the supplies was the stated reason — but taken together with everything else, made Devlin sure he was doing the right thing.

Everybody had heard of the SEALs, but few Americans actually knew who they were, or what they did. The SEALs — SEa, Air, and Land forces — had grown out of the old Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT). Basically they were waterborne commandos who could slip into an enemy port, blow shit up, and retire without a trace.

Most people forgot that President Kennedy, in his famous 1961 speech about putting a man on the moon within the decade, had thrown the lamb chop past the wolf by strengthening the Special Ops in Vietnam at the same time. Not wanting to play second fiddle to the Army Rangers, the Navy got into the act, establishing Team One in Coronado and Team Two in Virginia. This is where it got serious. In addition to underwater demolition, the UDT lads got training in sabotage, hand-to-hand combat, even parachuting. Languages became a must; any SEAL who couldn’t pass for native in at least three languages washed out before the end of the training period. They were men after his own heart.

“Go,” he said, over the wallawalla.

“Roger that,” said the voice in his ear.

“It seems to me,” said the German, “that without the law, we have no society. So I am perhaps a bit confused by your implication that there might be, shall we say, a higher law than the law itself. Can you please clarify?”

Devlin resisted the temptation to reply in German. Schopenhauerian questions were best answered in the tongue whose syntax gave them birth, but “Mr. Grant’s” German was not totally fluent, and he didn’t feel like dumbing himself down at this point. Not with what was happening in Long Beach.

“Thank you, Dr. Hesse, for your most astute and provocative question. I think that what I am trying to say, in essence, is this — what we are up against is not something new. There have been forces of savagery antithetical to our culture since its beginning. Since the Irish monks salvaged the detritus of Roman civilization and retreated to the rocky western shores of Eire. Since St. Malachy mentored Bernard of Clairvaux. This savagery — I’m sorry, but there is really no other word to describe it — must be fought with both understanding and resolve and even, at times, utter ruthlessness. Fortunately we in the United States are blessed with some of the finest intelligence and security operatives in the world.”

The BND man pondered this for a moment. “But, if what you said about the nature of the threat is true, doesn’t that give these ‘operatives’ extraordinary executive authority with very little accountability?”

Inwardly, Devlin smiled. “The best way I can answer that question is to quote Wendell Phillips, in a speech before the Massachusetts Antislavery Society in 1852. ‘Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,’ he said. I really can’t improve on that.”

Half an hour later the news was on the radio, on television, and on the Web sites:

“Stella Maris Sinks at Long Beach.” By the time she sank, imploded from the bottom with limpet mines, placed with the aid of radar-and-ELINT-surveillance jammers, the SEALs had retrieved whatever had been in the dead zone, and would let him know sooner than ASAP; if his hunch was right, this was a major national-security issue now.

And by the time they did, he’d be on an airplane. Long Beach Airport was only ten minutes away and he’d booked a seat for himself on a flight to Baltimore. Maryam was already in the air.