Hostile Intent

Chapter Forty-four

It was a shaken Emanuel Skorzeny who absorbed the shock of the sinking of the Stella Maris just after midnight in his suite at the Savoy. It was all over Sky News by the time Amanda Harrington reached the fifth floor. The river and the lights of the South Bank held no charm either for her or her boss at this moment. “Mr. Skorzeny,” she began. “I’m so—”

Skorzeny gave her his best basilisk glare. “This is war,” he said, “Someone is at war with us, Miss Harrington.”

“Sir, there’s no evidence—”

“Evidence is for lawyers. I am interested in reality. And the reality is, someone is waging war against me, and I want something done about it.”

“Yes, sir.” As usual, she was juggling a brace of cell phones. “I’ve already—”

“Please sit down. Turn those things off and put them away. Sit here, by me.” He patted the empty space on the sofa next to him. Lying on the coffee table was one of the Savoy’s Victorian signatures: a three-button panel with which one could summon the maid, room service, or the valet. The help.

Warily, she crossed the room and sat. The TV was still on, flashing its silent images. “I gather they’re saying it was some kind of accident, an explosion in the ship’s—”

“Let me be blunt. I believe the U.S. government was involved in this. In fact, I am certain of it. I want my protestations to reach the ear of the president, with the understanding that I will go public with them if I do not receive some sort of satisfaction. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We have many people in Washington on our payroll, including several congressmen and senators. I am thinking of one senator in particular who has long been a friend to us and, I am given to believe, is now even more sympathetic. Despite their political differences, he is a friend to the current president and has his ear. He is the chairman of a powerful committee. He knows things.”

Amanda wasn’t quite sure where Skorzeny was going with this. “What is it, exactly, that you wish me to do, Mr. Skorzeny?” she asked.

Skorzeny leveled his gaze at her. It always made her flesh crawl, they way he looked at her. “I want the man behind this punished.”

How she was supposed to accomplish that was beyond her. “Sir, the United States is a sovereign country. Even assuming that you’re right and for some reason an American operative was involved, what can we do about it?”

“This American operative,” said Skorzeny levelly, “is a devil, whose very existence is an affront to me and everything I hold dear. He must be terminated.”

Amanda gasped. “Are you asking me to kill him? You…I don’t—”

Skorzeny waved away her objection. “No. I am saying they can kill him. And that is what I want Senator Hartley to effect.”

“And just how am I supposed to convince him to do that?”

“You aren’t. That is a job for your boyfriend. Your job is to make sure he carries it out.”

Her heart nearly stopped. Had he been following them? Monitoring them? Had Milverton blabbed? They had been as discreet as possible, which was to say very. Or was he just guessing?

“Boyfriend? I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, sir. My duties as a mother preclude…”

He reached out and stroked her hair. “There, there,” he purred. “You look tired, stressed out.”

She tried to relax a little. “It’s been a very bad day all around.”

“I should say so. I was nearly killed.” Another dig, another suspicion?

“Mr. Skorzeny,” she said. “Milverton calibrated the missile strike exactly, to the second. As we all agreed. It was meant to be close, to make you look good. Heroic. A victim, in the modern fashion.” She was glad that Milverton had already prepped her.

“I’ve already been a victim,” he said, “many times over…and yet something went wrong.”

“Nothing went wrong, Mr. Skorzeny. You are here.” She reached out and took his hand away from her hair, but continued to hold it. “We are here. Together.”

That was all the encouragement he needed. He tugged her hand closer, pulling her toward him. And then he lunged for her, throwing his arms around her, kissing her, his mouth seeking hers.

She knew that to pull away now was to risk everything. She had seen, so often, the side of Emanuel Skorzeny few others had: the Caligula-side, in which the slightest frustration of his will to power was met with instant punishment. The uncontrollable, raging man-child, bearing the hurt of generations in his breast and the vengeance of centuries in his heart.

And so, despite her loathing, she kissed him back, stroked him, and kept stroking him. At this moment she wished him dead, wished the missile strike had hit him, that they had gone ahead and done the deed and rid themselves and the world of this monster. But now it was too late.

At last, she felt him softening, relaxing, withdrawing. When at last he subsided, she pulled herself away, smoothing her skirt. “There,” she said soothingly. “There…”

Gradually, his breathing returned to normal. If he felt any shame, it was not reflected in his face. “Do you know what Blake said, Miss Harrington? He said, ‘Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.’ I could not agree more.”

He looked at her with that reptilian, penetrating, blinkless gaze he could always muster when he needed to stare down an opponent. There was no way to beat him, no way to insult him, no way to fight back. He was impervious to normal human emotions. All except one.

“Are you my enemy, Amanda?” he said. It was the first time he had used her Christian name.

“No, sir. I am not your enemy.”

“Then carry out my wishes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You do love me, don’t you, Miss Harrington?” he said as he reached for her again. She had just enough time to be amazed that he could recover this quickly when he was on her again, like an old tiger leaping upon a piece of helpless prey and tearing it limb from limb.

I hate you, she thought as he ripped her clothes away. I hate you and I wish you were dead.

As she fell backward on the couch, her eye caught the three-button panel lying on the coffee table, and thought about reaching out, pressing, calling for help. But she knew if she did that, she’d never leave the Savoy alive. And there was a little girl at home who needed her.

“Do not fail me,” he said as she closed her eyes and thought of England.

Chapter Forty-five

President Jeb Tyler looked toward the west over the Chesapeake Bay and took a deep breath. Either this gamble would pay off or it wouldn’t. It wasn’t just his job on the line, it was the fate of the entire country. Even for an experienced and avid poker player like himself, this was the biggest gamble of his life.

Nothing — no advisors, no campaign managers, no public relations assholes — prepared you for this. All his life he’d been a politician, and to him “politician” wasn’t a dirty word. Sure it was sometimes mean, sure you had to associate with some pretty unsavory characters and, most of all, you had to forgo the notion that the ends never justified the means. That was for sissies and nuns: in politics, the ends were the only thing that could possibly justify the means. And if you believed in those ends, believed in the rightness and the justice of them, then you were in it to win it by any means necessary short of murder. And, sometimes, not even that, if some of the tales told of his predecessors were to be believed.

Still, Jeb Tyler never thought it would happen to him. He’d led a charmed life, a golden boy life, a life too good to willingly change. When he’d first announced that he was running for president, his friends told him he was insane to subject his life to the kind of scrutiny he had been able to avoid during his single term as a senator. Politics, he reflected, was like a love affair, and at the right time, he had been Mr. Right.

But this…this was different. He had never expected to be a war president, not like his predecessors, never expected to have an atrocity like this happen on his watch. And while Louisiana’s politics were plenty dirty, they were nothing like what he was about to go through. What he was about to do.

Betray his only friend in the capital. Not “betray” exactly — the betrayal had already occurred — but certainly destroy. At last he understood the old joke; if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.

“May I get you something, sir?” asked his orderly, Manuel. Manuel Concepcion was a Filipino, like many of the servants in the White House. Twenty years ago, he would have been black.

“What about a Labrador Retriever?”

Manuel was used to the president’s jokes, but he didn’t get this one. “Excuse me, sir?”

“A joke, Manny…how’s the market doing?” He knew the answer was going to be bad, the only question was how bad.

Manuel glanced away. “Down another six hundred points or so,” he said.

After three straight incidents, the shock to the world’s stock markets had been devastating. He might have to shut the markets down by early this afternoon.

“On second thought, I’ll have a gin and tonic. And a whiskey neat for my guest.”

“Yes, sir,” said Manuel, withdrawing for real this time.

Jeb Tyler sighed. He’d only been president for three years and already the demands of the office were wearing him down. He hated looking in the mirror any more; every year in the White House added at least four years to his face and took a decade off his ticker. Nobody got out alive from this gilded cage, nobody’s reputation survived unsavaged, and, as he often did, he wondered why he had spent so much time and money and love and friendship attaining the office. Far better, he sometimes thought, to just…

To just what? This is what he lived for. Elections. Campaigns. Votes. He really didn’t want to do anything else, but he was surprised when he walked into the Oval Office on the first day and realized he didn’t have the slightest idea what to do. Somehow, it looked easier from the outside. He felt like Robert Redford in The Candidate, at the end, just after he wins the senate race, asking his strategist, “What do we do now?”

So not only was it time for results, it was time for a political play, a game-changer. It was time for him to start acting like a president instead of a politician.

In the distance, he could hear the car pulling up, doors opening, feet hitting the gravel; for him, the rubber meeting the road.

Manuel materialized at his side, the drinks ready on a silver tray, which he set down on a small table. “Would you kindly ask the senator to meet me down here, at the dock. No SS either. I cannot think with their earpieces up my ass. Besides, this is just between us girls.”

Manuel looked dubious. “But, sir, Mr. Willson—”

“Works for me and the American people, Manuel,” said the president. “So, if he gives you any shit, tell him to go fuck himself and tell him I said so.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” said Manuel.

Jeb Tyler plucked a skimmer out of his pocket and sent it sailing across the water on a six-bounce on the Chesapeake. A minor river suddenly turned into a mighty bay, surging its way toward the Atlantic. Nothing, abruptly becoming something. Just like a politician. Just like a president.

The Senate, on the other hand, had become a hotbed of blow-dried, Botoxed seditionists, each one plotting to succeed him, if and when they got their chance. His visitor was no exception — friend or no friend.

“Hello, Bob,” he said, turning around at the footfalls. “You look like shit.”

Hartley was a mess. There was blood all over his shirtfront and the lapels of his suit. His hair was mussed. He looked like he hadn’t slept for a month. He was dazed, disoriented, and right where Tyler wanted him.

Hartley tried to speak, but couldn’t. He couldn’t believe what was happening to him. In just a couple of days his entire world had been turned upside down. And now here he was, at the president’s private retreat on Maryland’s eastern shore. Tyler liked to come here to crab and fish and be alone. Even members of his inner circle rarely got an invitation.

Tyler took one of the drinks and, tantalizingly, left the other sitting on the tray.

Hartley wanted a drink. Even more, he wanted a hot shower and a change of clothes, but that apparently was not on the agenda today. “I gather you’re thinking of running against me,” said Tyler. “Even for an opportunistic asshole like you, Bob, the audacity is breathtaking. But I guess that’s what I get for reaching across the aisle. I guess that’s what I get for considering you a friend.”

He sipped, savoring his gin and tonic. “But what the hell, go ahead. Run. I want you to do it. I want you to give me the fight of my life. I want you to tear me a new one. In fact, let’s drink to it.”

Tyler handed Hartley his whiskey: “To an honorable campaign,” the president said. They didn’t clink glasses.

Hartley took a long draught of his whiskey. He was trying to wrap his mind around what the president was saying to him, and why. There was no way Jeb Tyler didn’t still want to be president. It had to be a trap.

Hartley wiped his bloody nose on his sleeve and mustered as much dignity as possible. “Why are you doing this to me?”

“Good question. I could ask you the same thing. Complicated answers to both. Right?” Tyler looked at the steward, who hovered back into view. “Manuel?”

Carefully, Manuel laid two dossiers on the table. Even in his condition, Hartley could see that one was marked HARTLEY and the other, SCI.

“Which one am I supposed to look at?”

“You’re the guest — you choose.”

Gingerly, Hartley set his drink down and took the one marked SCI. He knew it had to be dynamite. “I want you to make a big stink about this — a very big stink,” the president said. “About how I haven’t been fully leveling with the American people in this time of crisis. That you have somehow gotten your hands on this explosive information and, given this grave threat to our national security, you feel compelled to share it with your fellow citizens. And you’ll do it exactly when I tell you.”

This was crazy. Hartley’s mind reeled as he tried to glean Tyler’s angle. “But, Jeb — Mr. President — this doesn’t make any sense. I can’t. This is a matter of national security. I won’t.”

“Have it your way, Bob,” said Tyler, pushing the other dossier toward him.

Somehow, Hartley knew what was in there even before he opened it. Probably the photos of himself and the dead boy. Probably the photos that awful man had taken of him, after he’d knocked Hartley out. Not just career-ending pictures, but life-ending pictures. If these ever got out, he’d just have to kill himself. “Where did you get these?” he stammered.

Tyler laughed. “Over the e-transom, as it were. They were delivered embedded in the Paris Hilton blowjob video. I guess somebody out there has a sense of humor, eh?”

“And you’ll release these if I don’t—”

“Ain’t bipartisanship grand?”

A new thought hit Hartley just before a wave of nausea swept over him. Suddenly, the whiskey didn’t taste so great any more and he just had time to turn away from the president and his valet before he hurled. Neither of them made a move to help him or offer him a towel. Hartley wiped his frothing mouth on his sleeve and tried to compose himself as much as possible under the circumstances. “What if I win?” he croaked

The president didn’t have to answer that question and, after a moment, even Hartley understood: he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t and finished politically either way. Tyler would take a scurrilous beating while he presented himself to the American people as their savior. And then this stuff would come out, and Tyler would win in a walk. It was brilliant politics. Hartley nodded mutely, defeated.

Tyler slapped him, hard, on the back. A cold, hard slap, with the none of the affectionate bonhomie he was used to. Jeb Tyler had changed.

“I’m glad that’s settled, Bob. Here — take your file with you. There’s plenty of copies where that came from.” He turned to the Filipino steward. “Manuel, burn the other one.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” said Manuel.

He motioned toward the house and a few seconds later Hartley could see the Whippet and the Refrigerator marching toward them. He’d never liked Augie Willson, the head of the Secret Service presidential detail, and assumed they were Willson’s way of telling him the feeling was mutual.

Hartley had nothing left to lose. “Why Jeb?” he asked. “Why are you doing this to me? I’ve always been your—”

“My what?” Tyler shot back. “You’ve always been your own best friend, Bob, until you got yourself a new little playmate. Well, we found out about him, and now I’m going to fuck him up and fuck up everybody else involved with this…with this clusterfuck.” Hartley couldn’t help but thinking that, for the first time in his presidency, Jeb Tyler was actually acting like a president. Even if it was at his expense.

“The other day, a very wise and brave man said something to me. Okay, not said. He texted it to me. Wanna know what he said?”

The Whippet and the Refrigerator were almost upon them now.

“THANK YOU FOR BLOWING ME BEFORE YOU FUCKED ME.” That’s what he said to me. What do you supposed he meant by that, Bob? I mean, I figured you might be able to translate.”

The two goons flanked him, side by side. “I believe you’ve already made the acquaintance of two of the best members of my Secret Service detail,” said Tyler. “They’re going to be your new best friends for the duration of this situation. They’re going to make sure you do exactly as you’re told. And if you don’t, they’re going to help you meet with a very unfortunate and painful accident. Are we clear about this, Bob?”

“Yes, sir.” Hartley started to add something, but Tyler cut him off.

“And don’t even think about asking me if you can clean up. You’re going to stay in those clothes until you get back to the Watergate and then, if you’re a good boy, your new roomies may think about letting you have some shower time before you announce. Which, by the way, will be when you drop your first bombshell about that rogue intelligence operation that the American people need to know about. Understood?”

Hartley nodded, but his eyes were vacant.

“Good. Now get out of here. You disgust me.” Tyler signaled to Hartley’s babysitters. As they led him away—

“Oh, and Bob — one more thing.” He paused for effect, then fired. “Don’t drop the soap.” Tyler watched as the two Secret Service men led Hartley away. One chess piece in motion, another couple to go.

“Did you catch most of that, Army?” said Tyler to General Seelye, emerging from the woods.

“Yes, sir,” Seelye had never been here before, to the president’s private retreat, so close to the White House and yet worlds away.

“Army, what I’m doing may seem strange, but I need you to trust me.” Usually, Tyler indulged in some small talk, especially after a snort, but today he was all business. “I know you and some of the others think I’m weak, that I’m a sob sister, a weenie — hell, I know half the country does too. And these last three days haven’t been good ones, to say the least. But now I need you to do something for me, even if it doesn’t seem at first glance the right thing to do.”

Seelye studied Tyler carefully. For the first time since he became president, Tyler actually seemed like a human being instead of a politician. “You’re the president. You give me an order, my job is to execute.” He decided not to say a word about Hartley’s appearance, or what the president had just asked him to do. It was none of his business unless Tyler brought it up.

“Good,” said Tyler. “I want you to suspend Devlin’s operation, effective immediately.”

That was something completely unexpected. “Suspend, Mr. President?”

“As in, terminate.”

General Armond Seelye took a step back from the president of the United States. “You do understand the implications of that order, sir?”

“You and Rubin explained them to me all too well during the Edwardsville thing. About Branch 4 and its internal rules.”

“Senator Hartley was present too as I recall.” It was as gentle a remonstrance as he could manage under the circumstances.

“Yes, he was…well, as the lawyers like to say, you can’t unring the bell. So why don’t you let me deal with Bob Hartley.”

Now Seelye got it. “The phone tap that Devlin put on him. That’s what this is about, isn’t it?” Jesus Christ, was Tyler running his own operation now?

“Bob was in contact today with someone claiming to represent Emanuel Skorzeny, the owner of the Stella Maria.”

“The ship that sank yesterday at Long Beach.”

“Yes. Skorzeny is convinced that we did it.”

“Of course we did. Devlin did. You authorized him to take any measures that—”

“Well, now I’m un-authorizing him. Turns out there was nothing on that ship, just humanitarian supplies and some equipment that one of Skorzeny’s companies was going to use for some high-atmosphere ecological experiments. I gather that, because of the sensitivity of the instruments, they kept it in a shielded vault in the hold.”

That was just great. Seelye tried his best to put a good face on Devlin’s actions. “Which obviously aroused his suspicions.”

“Which just as obviously were ill-founded,” snapped Tyler. “Then there’s the little matter of an FBI team that ended up dead in NoVa. We found three bodies in a van parked in Tyson’s Corners. They were all laid out neat; a phone tip told the Director where to find them. Any guesses?”

There was nothing to say. The president went on. “It’s clear to me that Devlin has been blown, and that his usefulness to us is now at an end. Hell, he practically said it himself.”

A cold chill was dancing up and down Seelye’s spine, the hand of a long-dead ghost passing over him. “You realize what you’re saying?”

Tyler turned and looked Seelye square in the eye, as if he were trying to press a particularly crucial point home in a closing argument.

“All I know is what you’ve told me about Branch 4. Your procedures are your procedures. Do I make myself clear?”

At first, Seelye was not sure he did. “Yes, sir. According to the rules, any Branch 4 operative who is publicly—”

“As I said,” said Tyler, turning away. “Your rules are your rules. Now, I suggest you get back to Fort Meade and act accordingly.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Oh, and Army…” Seelye looked at his commander in chief. “You were right. I am getting the hang of this intel business.”

Chapter Forty-six

Weather balloons?

That was what was in the hold of the Stella Maris. A couple of fucking weather balloons.

Devlin switched off his PDA, atomizing the confidential report sent to him anonymously by his SEAL buddies in San Diego. He parked his car in the far lot and made his way toward the big black building. Even though it was his home office, so to speak, he hardly ever came here. When he did, he came as he did now, as a custodian in overalls, a nonentity who would blend in with the rest of the night staff, and nobody the wiser. It was, he reflected, a fitting metaphor for his life.

Who was he, really? Everything else flowed from that, including the reason that somebody was trying to flush him out, humiliate him, and kill him.

He came in via one of the service entrances, where his low-level security pass would gain him admission. At this hour, late afternoon, most of the salaried workers were on their way out the door, heading for the Baltimore-Washington parkway and the comforts of spousal, suburban Maryland and Virginia.

“Hey, Brick,” said one old hand to Devlin as he shuffled toward the front of the building. That was how he was known here. “Brick” Davis. Nobody got the joke.

Brick wasn’t very bright and sure wasn’t very threatening. In fact, unlike his Cagney namesake, he wasn’t much of anything at all, which is why hardly anybody ever noticed him. Just the way Devlin liked things.

“Hey, Jake,” he mumbled, not looking up.

Just off the main hall, he slipped into a custodial room. Like everything at Fort Meade, this room too demanded a level of operational security. There was too much access to the building’s support systems, its wiring, its air ducts, its ventilation, its electronic infrastructure, which was why he had chosen to put his office here.

The station included several rooms, including a locker room, a bathroom, and a room in which all the tools of the janitor’s trade were kept. Devlin headed straight for the bathroom.

Inside, he closed the door. He moved toward the sink and stared at it hard for the retinal scan. He placed his left hand at a certain spot on the mirrored glass and with his right hand, flushed the toilet. The back of the medicine cabinet slid open, revealing the control panel behind it. As he began punching in the codes that only he knew—

A banging on the door. The jiggling of the doorknob. A desperate voice. “Anybody in there?”

No time to close the back of the medicine chest. He shut the mirror as quietly as he could. “I’m on the john,” he croaked. “Gonna be a while.”

“Yeah, well hurry it up will ya? I got a four-alarm fire going here.”

He recognized the voice. It was Jasper Reddiwood, the old Baltimorean who had worked here for years, knew every square inch of the building, and never opened his mouth about anything. He flushed and ran the sink. “Be right out, Jasper.”

“Brick, is that you?” came the voice from the other side of the door. “Jesus, man, I’m sorry, but—”

“No sweat, Jasper.” The codes were already activated, but there was no way he could close the panel without aborting the sequence. The way he’d designed it, an abort and reset meant that he would have to wait at least one hour before reinitializing the sequence. He didn’t have an hour.

Even worse, he still had to punch in the finishing sequence codes, otherwise…well, there was no otherwise. A powerful plastic explosive would rip through the room and kill them both. He had twelve minutes.

He opened the door. Jasper looked like he was about to have a brown cow. “Thanks, man,” gulped Jasper, heading for the can. But Devlin made no move to leave. Instead, he went back to the sink and proceeded to wash his hands, slowly and carefully. Jasper looked at him like he was nuts.

“Be my guest,” said Devlin, looking away. Jasper had no choice. He dropped his drawers and did his business with an explosive, audible sense of relief. Devlin kept washing his hands.

Jasper finished up and moved toward the sink. Devlin was still washing. He moved aside to let Jasper clean himself, but still made no move to leave. Jasper ran the hot water over his soapy hands without saying a word, then turned to the blow dryer, and dried himself off. Devlin moved back to the sink and started washing up again..

“What’s wrong with you man?”

“Not feeling too well myself, Jasper,” he replied, still facing away.

“Brick, you are one weird dude,” said Jasper.

“That’s what everybody says,” said Devlin, still washing. “Thick as a brick.”

Jasper edged out the door. “You have yourself a nice night, Brick, you hear?”

“I got a lot of work to do, Jasper,” he said. “Cleaning up and all. Cleaning up.”

“Right,” said Jasper, and then he was gone.

Devlin whipped open the medicine chest door and finished the sequence with less than two minutes to spare.

The back wall of the bathroom slid open and he stepped into the next room. His office.

Not even Seelye’s office was this well equipped. It was a mirror of his Falls Church home, but with the added advantage of zero possible security leaks; everything was wired directly into NSA’s main system; whatever No Such Agency was watching and listening to, so was he.

There was a message waiting for him as he logged in. It was from Seelye: ABORT A/P POTUS DIRECTIVE THIS DAY.

He sat there for a moment, absorbing the import. That was it, then. He was well and truly fucked. The president of the United States had compromised operation security, hung him out to dry, and signed his death warrant. The sinking of the Stella Maris had just clobbered him with blowback. It was time to get out, and fast. But not before he got what he came here for.

Think.

Everything had a pattern — that was the entire basis of cryptography. Even the most of basic of codes — a simple substitution cipher, like his father had taught him when he was a kid — had some sort of pattern, and where there was a pattern, there was a key.

Edwardsville brought him into the game, got him spinning toward Los Angeles. The Grove turned him around again, looking at London after the missile attack. Milverton, Skorzeny, the Stella Maris…misdirection everywhere he looked.

There was an old Sherlock Holmes story—“The Adventure of the Dancing Men”—that he’d first read when he was a child; it was in that book of codes that his dad had given him, the book that had survived the Rome Airport massacre, the book that he hadn’t cracked since that awful day, not wanting to sully the memory of his parents with the blood of his mother that was still on the book.

Dancing men, each one standing for a letter of the alphabet. A substitution cipher, whose message gradually became clear as Holmes filled in the missing letters. Filled in the blanks. Time to do the same thing.

He ran a full sequencing deep drill on his keywords. Concentric relationship patterns. Google and other search engines, including NSA’s own. All levels of security clearances, including Seelye’s. Local, global, and universal. Leave nothing to chance:

His father and mother’s full names, plus his own real first name. No one ever called him by that name, and hadn’t since his mother died in his arms, but he still remembered it. Compartmentalization was the name of the game. In “real life,” he couldn’t remember anything about his past, but at the mighty Wurlitzer, he remembered everything.

He threw in Seelye’s name, too. And now he added “MILVERTON, CHARLES A.” and “SKORZENY, EMANUEL.”

The full search would take awhile, even at the speed at which the NSA mainframes operated. No matter how fast they were, though, real time was always faster. Civil libertarians might quail, but the fact was that SIGINT and ELINT were always going to be a step or two behind reality. NSA officers were like those people who went to Disney World and recorded everything they did and saw, then replayed it when they got back home. It took them the same amount of time to relive the experience as to actually have the experience, which meant that they had not only lost one day to the blandishments of the Walt Disney Co., they had lost two.

Devlin rose and, securing the door to his inner sanctum, stepped through the bathroom and out into the main hall. There was something he had to see while the hamsters churned.

Near the front of the NSA building, there is a long hallway, adorned with photographs. At first glance, it might seem like the foyer of the CIA in Langley, whose ostentatious wall of anonymity commemorates the Company operatives who died in the line of duty. Heroes all. But the NSA hall was different.

At first glance, nothing special about the wall. Quintessential NSA guys, smiling white men in suits mostly, family men, all of whom had one thing in common: they were traitors.

Devlin had been down this hallway many times before, but this time he scrutinized each face as if he’d never seen it before. Somewhere on this wall lay the clue to his past, the missing link, the man or (in very rare cases) the woman who could provide the missing cipher code to the mystery of his past.

“G-night, Brick.” More of the staff, heading home.

“Haven’t seen you around much lately, Brick — you okay?”

“Retard.” This last muttered sotto voce.

Dancing men, all of them, dancing men. He pushed his mop past the ranks of photos methodically. He had walked past their ranks many times, but now he put his photographic memory to good use, scrutinizing every face, filing it away for future reference. It could be a useless exercise in memorization, but in his line of work there were no useless exercises in memorization.

There she was. His mother. Give her a name.

Carol Telemacher, née Cunningham. Code name, Polly. It wasn’t until many years after her death that Devlin knew his mother had worked for NSA. She had started in the 1970s with the top-secret NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office, which together with its sister service, the National Reconnaissance Program, had been founded in 1961 to coordinate the aerial surveillance activities of the CIA and the Air Force. Nobody could read a map like his mother, and even on that final, fatal trip, she had guided through the labyrinthine streets of the Italian cities with ease.

Her presence here was Seelye’s revenge. Or maybe homage. What difference did it make?

There she was, so close to him, so near, and yet so very, very impossibly far. Put there by the man who had used her and then betrayed her, exhibited like a traitor, to cover his own shame and complicity in her death. One thing was clear though; no matter how many years had passed, Army Seelye was still in love with his mother. That was why her picture was up on the wall, where he could walk by it every day. Devlin could respect, even admire, him for that.

His brain formed the sentence, but his lips didn’t move. “I love you.” A sentiment he could never give voice to, for fear of certain discovery; in this place, the walls not only had eyes, they had ears too. But one that was always in his heart. Right alongside the anger and thirst for vengeance, which was growing with each passing day.

Devlin rolled his mop and bucket back toward the custodial room. The computers would be finished by now.

One of the programs he had run, called PHIZREC — some in-house geek had a sense of humor — accessed the records of all the faces on the wall. Not just their pictures, but their entire dossiers, including the crimes they had committed that had gotten them on the Wall of Shame in the first place.

He was under no illusions that his presence in NSA would go undetected for long. He was smart, but Army Seelye was at least as smart as he was. In the game of cat and mouse that had evolved between them, they were fully equals.

Hurry. Think. Sequence.

Concentric circles, flowing outward, like the ripple of a stone in the middle of a pond. No one went through life leaving no traces, even a spook. You always affected someone else’s orbit.

He had programmed his search to a Level 10 sensibility, to trigger anything, no matter how small.

Misdirection. That had to be the key. The old magic trick — focusing attention on the irrelevant while the trick was worked practically in plain sight. Or what would have been plain sight, if not for—

His screen blipped amber. His program was set to detect roaming spybots, and it had just found one.

Spybots were protective pawns that could be set to detect any untoward inquiries, especially at his level of security clearance. Devlin had to identify the ’bot without giving away his position or, indeed, letting the drone know he was even there.

Follow the drone.

It was pointing to his personal file. Above top secret. Above SCI. So secret, in fact, that only he and Seelye even knew it existed.

Holy shit. It wasn’t a spybot, it was a guide dog, pointing for him to look at something. An embed message. He clicked on it:

“ABORT A/P POTUS DIRECTIVE THIS DAY.” Abort the mission as per today’s presidential directive — that much he already knew. But this time there was an addendum. It read, AND I QUOTE: “YOUR RULES ARE YOUR RULES. ACT ACCORDINGLY.”

Both a reprieve and a misdirection. He was officially off the case, but unofficially on it. He had no idea whether the president or Seelye was playing him, but at this point it didn’t matter. Time to get what he was coming for and get the hell out.

The screen flashed: BOT APPROACH. A real ’bot this time. A small red light began flashing, at first slowly and then with increasing rapidity. It meant that his probe had been spotted but not yet ID’ed: full red would be confirmation, but he didn’t intended to wait around that long.

His fingers flew: FALSNEGS TIL MIS/ACC.

There were workarounds against even the most sophisticated ’bots. He knew, because he had developed half of them. He could feed the crawler a steady diet of false negatives, contradictory instructions that would cause it to lose valuable time sorting through the mutual impossibilities, until his mission was accomplished.

He had taken something of a risk by his blunt, frontal assault on the databases, but it would still take counterintel a while to find a single command in a nearly infinite series of code lines. But it could be done.

One more thing: SEELYE SKORZENY MILVERTON POLLY CUNNINGHAM.

The ’bot’s red light was still flashing, steadily. Then — something he didn’t expect.

PRIOR ACCESS DETECTED. CONT? Y/N?

Somebody else, some other fox, had been in the hen house. The one who had set the FBI team on him. Hartley’s cutout: Milverton.

YES

WORKING. The fastest artificial brains in the NSA server rooms whirred. A green light popped up.

MISACC read the screen. Mission accomplished.

DOWNLOAD. A flash drive, no bigger than his thumb, blinked as it absorbed the data.

DONE.

Quickly, Devlin shut down his terminal, using an extraction route that passed him through multiple, routine, authorized identities; it would take a little longer but it would cover his tracks.

He put the thumbnail drive into his pocket. Already, however, he’d learned enough.

He was off the case, but he wasn’t.

He was marked for termination. Maybe Seelye would protect him as long as he could, and maybe he wouldn’t.

He had to sort this out as quickly as possible if he was to have any chance at survival.

London, the terminus for Hartley’s mysterious caller.

Milverton.

Ships. Something tugged at his memory. Something Skorzeny had said at his press conference, just before the missile struck. The name of his other ship, which was…on its way to Baltimore. The Clara Vallis.

Weather balloons.

The Stella Maris.

Dancing Men.

Misdirection.

The Clara Vallis.

Oh, Jesus.

France.