Shock Warning

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

As he walked, Emanuel Skorzeny had a chance to think back over his life, what its purpose had been, and how he had — by sheer force of will — come to this moment. Just as he was doing now, he had always lived in the present. The past was dead, immutable; the future unknowable. One could plan, one could scheme, but in the end, nobody really knew. You placed your bets and hoped for the best.

But the present, that was something else. You were always in the moment, always the master of your own fate. When he fled Dresden with Father Otto, when he survived in the woods on nothing but jerky and water, when he encountered the Russians and made up his mind to survive — then he had been master of his own fate. In the moment there was nothing to the future; each decision you made was sovereign, each step irrevocable. That was how you triumphed.

Take this moment. At this moment he was walking the streets of Baku. In half an hour or so, provided he kept putting one foot in front of another — something that was completely within his power to control — he would be back at the residence and greeting Mlle. Derrida and Miss Harrington. He could not be sure of the latter, but this he knew: that if she was not there, he would consider it enemy action.

Other men might well have cursed themselves for fools, but not Emanuel Skorzeny. His judgment about human nature was unerring. He knew his men, and his women. In his considerable experience, everyone could be bought, bribed, or threatened. The Christian notion of free will he found risible, as ludicrous as the notion that all men really yearned to be free. What foolishness that had been for an American president to sow, and what terrible things would he, Skorzeny, now reap. The human heart was not yearning for freedom, it was pursuing security, always in headlong flight from largely imaginary terrors. Without security, there was nothing and nobody an individual wouldn’t cheerfully sell out for the mess of pottage he laughingly called his soul.

And that’s why he trusted Amanda Harrington. Because she had nowhere else to go.

That’s why she would be there, her flight delayed, the business in Tehran having been slightly more complicated than they expected.

That’s why she would be both delighted and relieved to see him, to take her place at his side once more, secure in the notion that no woman could ever possibly be a rival for his affections, not so long as she breathed.

That’s why he never even considered betrayal — having ventured away from his orbit once, she had learned a brutal but necessary lesson, and certainly would not repeat that mistake again.

This religion business — what was it, really? Just another search for security, this time in the arms of a fictional deity, the legend of which had been concocted and then handed down by a succession of savage tribes until it had taken on a permanence of its own. True, one branch of the universal superstition had given birth to much of the art and architecture he especially admired, but that religion no longer believed in its own fantasies, and hence was no longer worthy of survival. The church militant that had sent its combative and hormonal young knights off to the Holy Land to do battle with the Saracens now molested altar boys and ran food banks. The sooner it disappeared, the better.

He was just the man to put an end to it, to put the whole Western world out of the prolonged misery caused by its own lack of faith in itself. Had he not already given them good and sufficient warning of his intentions? The school near St. Louis, Times Square, everything else he had tried? And yet the benighted fools would not listen. They were too busy watching sports and their idiotic television programs and arguing about politics to notice what was happening. Soon, perhaps, they would heed him.

Because he was just the man for the job. His whole life had been preparation for this one heroic task. How did Lee Harvey Oswald translate Yeletsky’s aria from Pique Dame? “I am ready right now to perform a heroic deed of unprecedented prowess for your sake. Oh, darling, confide in me!” His sentiments precisely. After all, Oswald had changed the world with his puny Mannlicher-Carcano; how much greater would his accomplishment be, and how much more would she love him for it.

He was closer now, the smell of brine in the air. He breathed it in. Soon enough he would be in the air, observing the holocaust below with a combination of dispassion over the loss of life and pleasure in the role he had played in it all. Might as well enjoy the scent of earth and sea while he had the chance.

Except in those unbidden reveries, he hardly ever thought about his own past. That had all been prologue to this moment, this glorious present. What emotions of loss and longing still dwelled deep in his breast he rigorously controlled. In his imagination, his father still dangled at the end of a piece of piano wire while Party members cursed and mocked him and a film crew recorded his Totentanz for the private amusement of the Führer. His mother as well, and the fact that he hardened his heart and consigned that memory to the shades spoke well of his training as a young German. That was what the Führer had always preached and what he commanded the SS Einsatzgruppen to do as they lined up the Jews, the Slavs, the gypsies and all the other Untermenschen: to harden their hearts against all weak and useless feelings of human emotion and to do their duty. And the nation had followed him, right up to the moment when he put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

The trigger. Yes, the trigger.

That old woman, Petrovich, was worried about the trigger. Did he have no imagination? No trust in Skorzeny’s infallibility? That fool, Farid Belghazi, had not brought him news of the Higgs boson when he was Skorzeny’s man inside CERN, but the boy was a whiz with both lasers and computers and had given him exactly what he had needed in order to realize the plan that was now unfolding around the world. For CERN was practically the epicenter of GRID computer research, able to reach out anywhere on the Internet that it had been so instrumental in developing. It really was easy when you had the right people in place.

Unfortunately, the bastard who called himself Devlin had grabbed Belghazi and cut off the flow of information, but not before Skorzeny had what he needed.

There was the building, just up ahead.

He felt so much better as he entered. But his mood was ruined almost at once.

Miss Harrington was nowhere to be found.

“Where is she?” he demanded of Mlle. Derrida, who was out on the balcony, sunning herself. He had to admit she looked quite fetching topless.

Mlle. Derrida gave a Gallic shrug and rolled over.

At that moment, his secure PDA buzzed in his pocket. Surely, this was she, messaging him that she was on her way in from the airport.

But the message was not from her. It was from Col. Zarin in Tehran and it read:

The present had just changed. And so he must change with it. “Mlle. Derrida,” he barked. “We leave for Tehran at once. See that we are in the air in one hour’s time.”

He looked at the computer — her computer; no, his computer. It was still hard for him to credit that the whelp had used his own lover as a poisoned pawn, but then again, why would he not? Human kindness meant nothing to him. From youth he had been trained by Seelye to hate humanity and kill without remorse. But that was his ethos, Skorzeny’s credo, and Devlin was much more a son to him than he ever could be to Armond Seelye. It was a shame to have to kill him, but the thing must and would be done.

He picked up the computer. It, too, would be making the trip to Tehran.