Michael Walsh - Early Warning

The first sign that anything was amiss came on the bridge. “Trouble,” said Maryam.

Devlin pulled out what to all outward appearances was an ordinary Nokia Surge, the kind with a rectangular screen that disguised a slide-out mini-keyboard and, indeed, it could function that way should anyone ask. This one, however, was also an infrared sensor/scanner that could monitor all electronic devices up to a range of fifty meters; in a few seconds they would know how many men were chasing them and even read and listen in on their communications.

“How many?”

Her eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, and then to the side mirrors. “Two Mercedes SUVs, tinted windows. One after another, behind us. They’ll be on either side of us as soon as we leave the bridge.

“Weapons?”

“In the back.”

Devlin looked down and saw a golf bag on the floor. He pulled it open to find an array of small arms, including a brace of Heckler & Koch Mark 23 Special Ops, a Beretta UGB autoloader shotgun, and a couple of Armalite semi-automatics. “They’ll do,” he said, handing her one of the HKs and sliding the shotgun, barrel down, between his legs.

They jumped off the Elisabeth Bridge and turned right on the Váci utca. There was no way they could outrun the Benzes, and compartmentalized security dictated that they go nowhere near the safe house. They were going to have to improvise, but they were both good at that-they had been doing it all their lives. The Prius dove into the maze of streets, the remnants of ancient cattle trails and goat paths that had somehow or other survived the grand visions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at its zenith, and had been allowed to remain as they were practically since Attila had swept out of the East, bringing revolution, retribution, destruction, and death.

They would use the streets as their defense.

There was no way the Benzes could follow them closely. European drivers, Devlin knew, could race down narrow passageways with a bravado that more cautious Americans would never dare; it was not unusual for drivers to kiss mirrors as they passed each other, but rarely did they scrape a building or knock down a passing pedestrian or bicyclist. Still, this was going to be a challenge, and all they needed was enough time to ditch the Prius and get the backup unit in place when they were ready to hop.

“How did they pick us up?” Maryam hissed as she drove. “I thought you said we had complete op sec.”

“RoE,” replied Devlin. “I should have taken the other guy out, but…” He didn’t need to finish the sentence. Since the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, every op had chafed at the ridiculous rules imposed on them, mostly by the State Department. Foggy Bottom had never met a country or even an enemy it didn’t think it could bore to death in a great gaseous fog.

They whizzed along the narrow streets. In the old days, before the revolution of 1989, the streets would have been pretty much deserted at this hour, not only because communist governments deemed anyone out after hours as automatically suspicious but also because very few people could afford to own an automobile. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union that had all changed, but the late hour was working in their favor.

As Maryam drove-unpredictably, never following a pattern and sometimes reversing course in the middle of a street, and darting down one-way streets if circumstances allowed-Devlin punched in the safe house contact number. This was not the time for the flat-out emergency number, the one that signaled that the entire op had gone tits up and that an extraction team was necessary. Besides, under the terms of his incarnation as Branch 4’s deadliest and most classified operative, his identity was to be kept secret at all times. The only people who even knew of his existence were the president, the secretary of defense, and the head of the NSA.

And now, of course, her. But that was by choice, not necessity or command.

The Nokia sent its signal. Even if they were monitoring the Prius’s electronic transmissions, they would never be able to detect it. Devlin’s infrequent field communications bounced through a row of encrypted cutouts, with a ping off Fort Meade, where they were re-encrypted via the Dual_EC_DRBG, a pseudo-random number generator, and then redirected, so that whoever was on the receiving end would have no way of telling the signal’s provenance. In the never-ending war between the hunter and the hunted, The Building’s encryption technology was subjected to relentless and rigorous upgrades; sometimes it seemed that half the best minds in the Puzzle Palace were at work and making sure their own SIGINT was safe from predatory eyes and ears, while the other half penetrated the bad guys’ innermost defenses. Whether anyone would ever win this game was moot, but once you were in it, you were in it to win it.

Still, the Mercedes-Benzes shadowed them, keeping to parallel streets when necessary, but always on their tail, as if they were electronically tracking them.

“Are you sure this car is clean?” barked Devlin.

“Stole it myself this morning, completely randomly,” she replied. “There’s no way they could have known about it.”

“Then they were following you.”

“Impossible. I just got in country.”

“Then they picked you up at origination.”

“Also impossible. I bought three tickets to three different destinations, each one in a different name. No ghosts.”

“That you saw.”

She shot him a quick, angry glance. “Are you challenging my professionalism?” she asked, zipping the Prius between two oncoming vehicles and splitting them perfectly.

“Absolutely not,” he replied, and that was the truth. She was as good as they came. Where she had grown up, and what she’d had to endure, had made her so. “But you know the old saying: when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

“Wild Bill Donovan?”

“Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of the Four…”

“Hold on!”

The car careered to the left, nearly tipped, then righted itself and regained traction. Behind them, the two Benzes gained.

“Slow down and let them pass us,” said Devlin. Just as their pursuers were about to pull even, Maryam hit the brakes and the SUVs, their drivers caught by surprise, went zipping by. “Got ’em both,” said Devlin. “Now lose ’ em while I digest this.”

Maryam wheeled left onto the Irányi utca, then made her way back north a couple of blocks to pick up the Kossuth utca, named after the 19th-century freedom fighter, a wide boulevard heading into the heart of Pest and then out to the motorway. They might be able to ditch them in the warren of back streets on either side, but Devlin doubted it. Unless they wanted to lose both their prisoner and their lives, they were going to have to stand and fight.

“Who are they?”

Devlin knew he had less than two minutes before the unknown tormentors would pick them up again. “There are six in all, two in the lead car and four shooters in the trailing vehicle.”

“Not good.”

“Up to us to make it better. Even things out.”

She gave him a quick smile, then glanced back at the rearview mirror. There was no sign of the SUVs. “I think we might have lost them.”

“Impossible. Even an amateur on a bicycle could follow this piece of Nipponese plastic. They’re waiting for us, up ahead somewhere. Stop the car-over there.”

Maryam pulled off into a side street, and circled the block three-quarters of the way. There was no place to park, but then there was never anyplace to park in Budapest, so she wedged the car perpendicularly between an ancient Lada and a new Ford and killed the lights.