Shock Warning

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Danny had always known it would come like this, fired on from behind, the one sound in his entire life he would not hear and never would hear. Every op in his business, no matter how high or how low, knew this for a dead-solid fact. It might come from a friend or it might come from an enemy, but come it would. The only way out of the business was feetfirst.

“Keep walking.”

Well, that was a start. At least he was hearing it. At least he was able to keep walking.

They were on the outskirts of the base. He had driven to where “Bert Harris” had told him to drive, and then walked across the Little League baseball field, across the field in front of the social center, past the boathouse for the artificial lake that the genius of the American mind had created out here in the Central Valley, a valley only in geography, unwatered and unirrigated until the Okies and Harvard boys and the Nevada silver miners and the Appalachian coal miners and the failed farmers from the Upper Midwest had all arrived and seen the possibilities and realized them. That was California in the old days, a melting pot of minds, not races, a cooperative of farmers, not ethnicities, a state that worked instead of a state that had failed.

“Don’t worry. And I won’t look back.”

“They might be gaining on you.”

“Am I talking to Bert Harris or Satchel Paige?”

“Does it make a difference?”

“At this moment, no.”

“Right answer.”

They were past the irrigated fields now, past the ball fields, past the garden plots. This may have been California, where everything grew year-round, but Danny knew that was an illusion — nothing grew here in the saline desert, so hard by the ocean, unless man made it grow. California was Schopenhauer’s world as will and idea, and after more than a century, both the will and the idea were failing.

“No roses. Have you noticed?” The voice came from behind, unfamiliar but familiar. New in intonation and yet old in rhythm.

“No roses.”

“None. The ones the housewives try to grow are shitty. Crap. Roses need rain. Why do you suppose that is?”

Danny thought. “Because roses really do need rain?”

He could feel something in the small of his back. “Precisely. Because roses really do need rain. Because man needs woman. Because the internal-combustion engine needs gasoline. Because universities need people who could never get jobs elsewhere, to teach idiots who will never get jobs elsewhere that they have no chance of ever getting a job elsewhere, which is why they need to stay in universities. You get my drift?”

“Loud and clear, sir.”

“Good. I like that word, sir. Nobody ever calls me sir.”

“And yet you can kill just about anybody you want, whenever you want.’

“That doesn’t mean they have to call me sir or else I kill them.”

“That’s white of you.”

“Nobody says that anymore. It’s un-PC.”

“I know.”

Danny stopped and was about to turn around.

“Don’t. Keep walking. Do not look upon me.”

“You know, I’m sick of this shit. How long have we been working together?”

“Not long enough for us to meet. Keep moving.”

Danny stopped again. If Bert Harris wanted to put a bullet through his spine, now was as good a time as any. “No. You’re either going to have to shoot me or talk to me. I’m not the guy you used to know.”

“So I see.”

“Do you? My wife died at the Grove, and Jade nearly did too. Hope’s husband died at Edwardsville. Emma damn near died when that bastard kidnapped her. Everywhere you go there’s trouble. Everything you touch turns to shit for somebody else. And yet you always walk away, Casper the unfriendly ghost. Who the hell are you, anyway?”

The reply was soft. “I am the Angel of Death.”

“So you always say. In fact, I’ve heard you say it.”

“It’s the only way I can live with myself. But sometimes even the Angel of Death needs a guardian angel.”

They were on the far outskirts of the base now. “So here’s the deal,” said Bert Harris. “Do you want to die now or die later?”

Danny had no fear. He knew that the man behind him, who could end his life and who had ended the lives of many, would not now harm him. They had been together too long — not that that counted for anything but that they knew each other — and trusted each other, and with a big job ahead of them, this was the only time they were going to have to get the ground rules straight. “That’s pretty much the same choice everybody has every day, so what’s so special about it today?”

“Because we’re going to Iran and we may not come back.”

“Iran? Where?”

“How does Desert One sound? Payback time.”

“Tabas,” said Danny. “Eagle Claw.”

“Eagle Clusterfuck was more like it. Your unit was born in its wake. Interested in a little payback?”

They were nearly at the wire now, the demarcation line that separated the base from the civilians. It looked like an innocent chain-link fence with barbed wire on the top, but Danny could tell at a glance that it was far more than that. Everything that came near the fence was photographed, recorded, monitored. If by chance some miscreant attempted to scale the wire with a cell phone on him, the SKIPJACK chip that Apple had agreed with the government to insert in every phone in order to trace its owner’s movements would give him away.

“So where are we going with this?” asked Danny. “I was going to tell you that I wanted out. I’m getting married again. To Hope. You remember Hope.”

The voice was soft. “I ought to. I saved her son.”

“And you got her husband killed. I guess I ought to thank you for that. Funny how life works out. And we both saved her daughter. My daughter now. So why should I listen to you?”

“Because you don’t have any choice. Listen up and listen good…”

For the next five minutes, Danny heard just about everything he had never wanted to hear in his life, his worst fears. Only a few men could prevent them from full realization, and two of them were standing out in field in the Central Valley of California, in a godforsaken part of the world, trying to decide what to do.

“That doesn’t explain what I saw in Coalinga,” said Danny.

“Or what I saw in California City,” said Devlin.

“Which was?”

“Roses. Roses and hyacinths… but let’s stopping worrying about what we may or may not have seen — what we think we saw — and start worrying about how we’re going to fix our problem. Because if we don’t, the whole world is going to have a problem.”

Danny started to say something and then, without warning, wheeled around. If Bert Harris or Tom Powers of any of the other names he had used in their work together over the years was going to kill him… well, let it happen, here, now, in front of the security cameras. Danny had so much to live for now that he almost didn’t care — if he died on the spot, he would die happy, his life once again given meaning and shape.

He was not surprised that the man he was suddenly confronting was so ordinary. It was entirely possible that he had walked past him every day for years, that he had seen on the street in L.A., or in a diner in Kansas City, or in a thousand other places both at home and abroad. His was the kind of face you saw all the time and never noticed: not handsome, not ugly, not remarkable but not plain either.

It was only when you looked into those deep blue eyes that you saw what was special about him: cold, unemotional, lethal. The perfect killing machine on behalf of president and country disguised as Everyman. No wonder he was so effective. No wonder he was so miserable.

Because Danny also was not surprised to find that, no matter how fast he had been, the man was holding a knife to his throat.

“Are you in or are you out?” was all he said.

Danny didn’t even have to think. “Payback’s going to be a real bitch. When do we leave?”

“An hour soon enough? First stop, Washington. There’s some folks you need to meet.”

“What about… you know?”

“They’ll be safe here. Admiral Atchison extends his hospitality. Rory will have the run of the base. Girls will be girls.”

“Deal,” said Danny.

But Devlin was already gone.