Michael Walsh - Early Warning

Maryam’s voice nearly startled him: “It’s him, isn’t it?” He didn’t need to ask who “him” was. They both knew and they both knew it was him. Hope was not a plan.

Devlin turned to Maryam. There was no point in lying to her. Instincts had kept them both alive for years, and to try to deny them was suicidal. Nevertheless, Devlin preferred to base his conclusions on evidence, which right now was in short supply.

Maryam saw it in his eyes, saw the lack of the comforting lie. “I know it. It’s him.” Her eyes flashed and, for an instant, changed color from deep brown to something more akin to gold. “He’ll never leave you alone. He’ll never leave us alone. Until we kill him.”

“Or he kills us. But right now this isn’t about us.”

“Of course it is. You’re going in. That makes it about us, whether it began that way or no.” He loved that, “or no.” There was a slight British quality to her speech that he would have to expunge if she ever really had to pass for an American overseas, but they could work on that later.

She placed her hand on his wounded shoulder, into which Milverton had plunged his killing knife. How close the thrust had come to severing an artery she would never know, and he would never speak of it. She only knew how close to death he had been when she got to him in that horrible cell in France. To watch the sight of his life’s blood draining away was a vision she never wanted to see again. “How do you feel? Are you fit enough?” It was not a question she should have asked, but one that she had to ask.

“Fine. In the pink. Never better.” He smiled. “Any other clichés I can lay on you to make you think twice about asking a stupid question?”

She gave him that look, that mysterious Oriental glance that women of the region had been giving their men since the days of Darius. The one that is at once challenge, taunt, reproach, and exhortation. He returned the glance as best a Westerner could, then glanced down at the computer. The safe house information had already been atomized and now only the screensaver-an animated gif of a bobblehead Alexander Graham Bell doll doing handsprings and backflips while rushing for a ringing telephone-now visible.

“This might tell us something while Washington figures out what’s going on.” He punched a few keys, and Maryam saw that he was tapping into the live Echelon II feeds across Manhattan. ATM cameras, CCTV cameras, bodega cameras, building security cameras-their cyclopean images floated across the tiny screen, stupefying in their uneventful reality.

“Nothing much-Jesus!”

Times Square. Something was happening there. It was hard to make out, but one of the rotating CCTV cameras was on to something…

A streetscape and then smoke. Flames. Even in grainy low-res, it was clear that something was happening. Devlin called up the cable news nets and divided the screen in four quadrants.

“We have to do something.” Maryam’s eyes were still glued to the unfolding disaster. Devlin turned to look at her, and then, once more, the voice of his old enemy sounded in his ear:

“What is she to you? She’s a dream, the dream of the prisoner in the condemned hold. You think that this time it’s going to be different, but when they string you up and drop the trap, you’ll realize as your neck snaps that it was all a fantasy.”

Milverton’s voice, in his head. Not the voice of his conscience, but of caution. The caution that, as the saying went, had been thrown to the winds in his desire for her, and in his desire to be free-from Seelye. Free of the past that had entrapped him and refused to let him go. But freedom was not a gift. It had to be won, and hard-won. Milverton had been there at the beginning, in Paris, and he had been there at the end, in London. He haunted them still.

Devlin’s hand shot out, grasped hers. The horror remained on the screen. “Are you real, or only a dream? Who are you?”

“What?” She pulled back a little, frightened by the intensity in his eyes. She knew that look. She was one of the few-perhaps the only one-to have seen it and lived.

Best not to show fear. “Who are you, Frank?”

“You know who I am,” he replied calmly. His touch was like ice. “I am the Angel of Death.”

The White House

Tyler had all the TV screens up and running as Seelye entered the private quarters. He was surprised to find Tyler alone. At the beginning of his presidency, Tyler would have been in the Oval Office, jacket off, sleeves rolled in his faux-populist style, hands on hips, barking orders to a room full of acolytes and subalterns, trying as hard he could to look presidential. Now, after nearly four years, he looked simply old and tired and in disbelief at what was occurring in New York.

“Where’s Secretary Johnson?” he asked, coming through the door. “Where’s Celina Sanchez? Melinda Dylan? Pam Dobson?” Sanchez was the National Security Advisor, Dylan, the Director of Central Intelligence, and Dobson, the press secretary. All of Tyler ’s top security officers were women.

That wasn’t quite true, of course, even in this time of female ascendancy. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was Marine Corps General Lance Higgins, the Director of National Intelligence was Lamont Sutton, and the head of the Department of Homeland Security was Bob Colangelo. But, in Seelye’s opinion, their input was pretty much negligible. Tyler came into office with a pronounced aversion to military men-he hardly ever laid eyes on his military attaché, Col. Al Grizzard, the man who controlled the nuclear football-which ruled out Higgins’s input. Sutton, in a politically incorrect opinion he kept exclusively to himself, was an affirmative-action appointment, and Colangelo was simply an idiot whose lack of organizational talent or intellectual acumen was perfectly suited to running the country’s most useless bureaucracy. So maybe Tyler was right to trust the women; after all, just about the only job in the U.S. government women hadn’t taken over was that of chief executive and that was just a matter of time-maybe a matter of months, if the polls were right. A President Angela Hassett meant the end of his career, the end of a lifetime of work. The end of Devlin as well, after which Devlin would be looking to cash in his chips. And that simply could not be allowed. He had to save Jeb Tyler’s ass to save his own.

“Sit down, Army, and give me what you’ve got.”

Seelye was ready with the numbers. “It began with a denial-of-service attack this afternoon on the Counter-Terrorism Unit of the New York City Police Department. A complete wipeout that lasted nearly five minutes, so bad it rang the alarm bells from Manhattan to Fort Meade.”

The president gestured at the television screens. “Best guess?”

Seelye hated to have to say what he was about to say. It represented a complete failure of all the safeguards that had been put in place since 9/11. It was the last thing a reeling Tyler Administration needed, and when the word got out, there was going to be unholy hell to pay. He took a deep breath.

“Best guess is that they’ve been planning this for months, maybe years. First they probed our defenses-and, as you know, despite all our best efforts, despite our crack Department of Homeland Security, our state of the art ain’t so great, especially as you travel down the bureaucratic food chain-set off a series of feints, hinted that they might strike the electrical grid, the water supplies. And then…”

“And then?” Tyler was in no mood for coy. He was watching midtown Manhattan burn live on national television.

“And then they rammed it right up our ass. How they smuggled the stuff into the city…” His voice trailed off. This was exactly the kind of thing all those sensors and hidden cameras were supposed to help prevent. All those city, state, and federal dollars. The networks of HUMINT. “We can only hope that the sensors were not down long enough not to detect anything fissionable.”