Michael Walsh - Early Warning

“Happy days,” said Skorzeny.

Amanda took a tentative, flinching sip. The last martini she had accepted from his hand nearly killed her. But if he had wanted her dead in Clairvaux, in that horrible prison he called a country retreat, he would have killed her. Instead, he’d paralyzed her as punishment for her love for Milverton.

“I trust the libation is satisfactory?”

Amanda knew that had she replied in the negative, Mlle. Derrida’s days in Skorzeny’s employment, if not upon this earth, would be numbered. She decided to let the girl live. “Yes, sir,” replied Amanda, setting the drink down on the spotless table.

“Excellent. And now to work.” Skorzeny produced a manila folder, extracted a few papers, and spread them out on the desk. For a man addicted to computers-a facility remarkable in a man his age-he still preferred real paper for important things.

The papers were a curious lot. One was a map, with a series of international destinations. One, she could see at a glance, was Macao, so presumably the others would be places at which Skorzeny planned to call. Others appeared to be gibberish-rows of numbers, nonsense letters, childish scribblings. “What is the point of chess, Miss Harrington?” he asked.

“To win?”

Skorzeny shook his head. “No. Not to win. That is the inevitable effect of the point of chess. Please try again.”

Another of his infernal Socratic puzzles. “If not to win, then what?”

“Think.”

She knew how his mind worked. She got it. “Then, not to lose.”

He smiled a reptilian smile that, at some point, someone must have told him was as close to a simulacrum of pleasure as he was ever likely to display. “Very good. Not to lose. In fact, no one every really loses at chess. There is no killing blow, no coup de grâce, no severed head to exhibit to the throngs and multitudes, as the Mahdi’s men severed General Gordon’s head at Khartoum and lodged it in a tree branch, so that the birds could peck out its eyes, and the tree would be watered with the last of Gordon’s lifeblood, what little might remain.”

Amanda shuddered: Skorzeny had lost none of his taste for the grisly and the macabre. Whatever had happened in London, whatever had transpired at the old monastery while she lay in her drug-induced coma, he had been defeated and yet somehow he had escaped, determined to fight on. That was a quality in a man she usually admired, but in him it was only hateful.

“…not to lose,” he was still rattling on. “Instead, the lesser player resigns, turns his king over, surrenders, the way the smaller and weaker of two fighting lions eventually gives up his pride of lionesses and slinks off into the veldt, there to displace another lion weaker than himself, or to die. To fight on, or to give up: those are the only two choices life offers us. As you can see, I have made my choice.” This, she knew, was as close to admission of temporary failure as he was ever likely to come.

He pointed to the map. The places circled were far from his usual civilized haunts-remote parts of Asia, the Sub-continent, sub-Saharan Africa. “Are these the places we’re going?” she asked.

“No, those are the places I’ve been,” he replied. “Countries without extradition treaties with the United States. Gruesome places, without a modicum of refinement and, in most cases, evidence of civilization of any kind. In short, the only places that savage, President Tyler, would let me visit. But I turned it to my advantage. Preparing for this day.”

“And which day is that, Mr. Skorzeny?” It was amazing how quickly she fell back into her old role as his advisor, confidante and, when necessary, executrix.

Instead of answering, he asked: “What do you know of the End Times, Miss Harrington?”

“The End Times, sir?” she asked. “The Last Trump, you mean?”

“Indeed, I do.” He seemed very pleased with the prospect of this conversation. “Apocalypse. Armageddon.”

“Have you had a religious epiphany, then?”

Now he laughed out loud, a horrible barking laugh. “I should say not. Organized superstition is hardly my line, but adherents to the millenarian faiths often prove helpful. Useful idiots, as Lenin deemed them. And it is a fact that many cultures foretell the end of the world. Both Christianity and Shi’a Islam anticipate the day when Jesus will come again, although our Muslim brethren consign the Nazarene to a secondary role in the final drama. Still, they share a vision of turmoil, of war, until the end finally comes in a rain of quenching fire.”

“And then what?”

“That’s what we’re going to find out.”

“What do you want me to do?” she asked. She wasn’t sure he would answer, but his mood seemed temporarily expansive.

“You’ll learn out when we get there.”

“And where would that be, sir?”

Abruptly, startlingly, his hand landed with a thump on the desk, his right index finger pointing to a place not highlighted on the map. “Do you believe in God, Miss Harrington?” he said.

Manhattan

The screens that kept Manhattan safe stayed on. But Byrne already knew it was too late. Something had happened, something more than a probe, and now it was simply a matter of finding out just how bad it was. Silently, he cursed under his breath. This was not how he liked to fight. Byrne’s natural impulse toward hotheadedness he had outgrown with age, but he still liked to play offense, not defense.

This was no ordinary breach, that much he already knew. He not only knew it, he felt it. Like a lot of Irish cops, Byrne trusted his Celtic instincts, the little voice that whispered you’d be okay when you crashed through that apartment door in the Bronx or the one that warned you not to dash around the corner just this instant. He had gotten this far, and stayed alive this long, by listening to those little voices. Now he had a job to do.

It was the job he never wanted and yet was now closest to his heart: protecting New York City. If over the years he had earned a reputation as a cowboy, well so be it. A cowboy was what New York needed now, not some by-the-book bureaucrat, not some IA weasel or desk jockey who had never pulled his piece or fired his weapon. When Byrne got into trouble, as he had a couple of times, Matt White had had his back, and when this job opened up there really was only one man in the entire department White trusted with.

“Now what?” said Lannie.

“Let’s brainstorm this thing and try to figure out what we’re up against before the shit hits the fan.”

“You think it will?” asked Sid.

“Your father would never have asked such a dumb question.”

“That’s because the people he worked with couldn’t talk back to him.”

Byrne smiled. “That’s where you’re wrong, Sid. Nobody could make a dead man talk like Sy Sheinberg. Anything about a cause of death that Sy didn’t know or couldn’t discover wasn’t worth knowing or discovering. That’s what made him the best medical examiner I ever worked with.

“But our job is different-it’s the opposite, in fact. We’re not like normal cops, who basically show up to cart away the stiff and interview the witnesses. We’re here to stop things before they happen. Remember what the president said years ago: we have to be lucky all the time; the terrorists only have to be lucky once. Well, on 9/11 they got lucky, if you call shooting an unsuspecting man in the back lucky. I call it cowardly. But on my watch, lucky ain’t got nothing to do with it. So let’s stop some shit, whatever it is. Lannie, what’ve we got?”

Aslan Saleh tapped on a terminal and brought up the camera feeds, displayed on a large screen on the wall across from Byrne’s desk. It was like a fly’s-eye view of midtown, fractured into dozens of individual CCTV scans, but they were all virtuosos at reading the images, able to sense hinky body language before they could see it. And not by accident. The Department of Homeland Security had spent a fortune developing something called Project Hostile Intent, a kind of vaguely practical version of “pre-crime” that moviegoers saw in Minority Report. Lannie, in fact, had been recruited from DHS by Byrne himself, when he was looking for a native Arabic-speaker/computer geek to join the CTU, and Lannie had brought some of the principles of the program over with him.