Michael Walsh - Early Warning

“What happened in the window?”

“Running a recap now…And it’s not Baku. It’s Budapest.”

Maryam looked up with a half-smile of disbelief on her lips. “You bugged the NYPD?”

Devlin shrugged. “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.”

“ Budapest,” she said.

“It’s as good a place to start as any. Besides, you know your way around that town, as I recall.”

Devlin stood and punched in some codes on one of the overhead storage compartments. He could have opened it with the latch, but that would have gotten him nowhere. It might even have gotten them both killed. Any plane authorized for use by the Central Security Service came fully equipped with extreme-prejudice countermeasures should any trolls or doubles be aboard. The easiest and most effective preventative measure was the sudden injection of poison gas into the passenger compartment, on the theory that once the mission was compromised there was no point in trying to preserve any of the operationals; all had been lost and all must be liquidated in the name of Op Sec.

Codes were a good thing.

The latch opened and the compartment door popped open, but instead of revealing pieces of luggage and presents for the kids, the rear of the space opened up and moved forward, offering Devlin a wide choice of personal weapons.

He outfitted himself the way he liked to fight. Throwing knives inside each of his back pockets, a KA-BAR in its scabbard down the back of his jeans, and a couple of grenades in his jacket. Twin Glock 37s with ten-shot magazines under each armpit, with a pair of Colt.38s revolvers for the special pockets that were always sewn into the front of his pants. Anything else he needed, he could pick up in combat. The bad guys always came armed, and one of his first orders of business was to disarm them with extreme prejudice and appropriate their weapons as necessary. Most often of Chinese or old Soviet manufacture, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

And then, just as promised, there was the Judge.

The Taurus Judge was, at its cold little heart, simplicity itself. Most of the time you used a handgun, the target was standing nearly directly in front of you. Sure, the movies showed cops trading shots with.38s from distances of several hundred feet, but in real life that hardly ever happened-and besides there were better weapons for that sort of killing. A handgun was more like a sword, a weapon best wielded as close-in distances; marksmanship was less important than a steady hand and willingness to pull the trigger. It so happened that Devlin was a marksman with a handgun, as he was with every other weapon he had ever trained on or been instructed in. But the Judge was something different.

Originally invented for outdoorsmen who spent a lot of time in snake country, or at least quickly adopted by them, the Judge was a five-shot Tracker.45 revolver with a lengthened frame and cylinder, which meant that not only could it take a standard.45 Colt round, it could also fire a.410 shotgun shell, buckshot, or rifle slugs, and in any combination. Even the best shot sometimes found it difficult to nail a sidewinder on the first shot, which is why the dispersing firepower of a shotgun shell came in mighty handy at close quarters. So whether you were shooting at something fifty feet away or just about to bite you on the ass, the Judge made a perfect defensive weapon. Even the most appeasement-oriented State Department official couldn’t miss with one of these, although whether he’d want to take the shot, even in the interests of self-preservation, was another matter. Devlin briefly wondered at the suicide cult the American diplomatic establishment had become. Sometimes he felt like he was fighting a civil war against his own government, and half his own people.

“What about you?” Maryam’s voice intruded upon his lethal reverie. Devlin turned to look at her. Standard-issue saucer eyes, deep dark brown. Light olive skin that allowed her to pass for almost anything: Indian, Italian, Spanish, American Indian, Afghani. A generic Third World woman, if you viewed her that way. He did not. She was the woman he loved.

Perhaps, by any rational analysis, not a woman worth dying for. She was short and compact, like most Iranian women, and eventually she’d run to fat and turn into a little Persian butterball, able to spout Hafiz as well as Horace as she whipped up some champa, naan, beryani, and chai, and woe betide any son of a bitch that interrupted their repast. Hafiz, after all, had stared down Tamerlane, and she could do no less. In Devlin’s world the future was as ever-receding as the horizon, but not half so trustworthy.

“Bulbul zi shakh-i sarw be gulbang-i pahlavi / Mikhwand dosh dars-i maqamat-i ma’navi.”

“What did you say?” He never ceased to surprise her. It was one of the many things she loved about him.

“Last night, from the cypress branch, the nightingale sang-”

Without hesitation, she finished the couplet for him. “In Old Persian tones, the lesson of spiritual stations.” Although we could translate ‘spiritual’ as ‘meaningful,’ which sort of ruins it. Poetically, I mean.”

“Hafiz is never ruined, only misunderstood.”

“Like Horace?” She never ceased to surprise him. It was why they were perfect together even if they could never really trust one another…

He moved to kiss her, then refrained. It might, after all, be their last kiss, and he wanted it to mean something. Wanted it to mean more than any other kiss they had ever exchanged, whether in Paris or Los Angeles or Budapest. Whether in passion or friendship or love or opportunity or greeting or good-bye. No kiss could mean more than the next kiss he would give her. Unless it was the one, inshallah, that he would give her when they next met. Whenever and wherever that might be.

“Time to go,” he said, punching a last few keys on the computers. He grabbed a few things and made ready to leave.

“What about me?” she asked.

“You know what to do. I’ll contact you there.” She didn’t bother to ask how. She just knew he would. If he was still alive.

Devlin rose and handed Maryam the computer. She was going to need it more than he was, and besides, he’d have others waiting for him on-site. “Use this. It’s got a secure link to anyplace you’ll need to go. Guard it with your life. If anything happens, make sure to get this before they get you.”

He was about to go when he got another pingback, this one on his iPhone. He glanced at the screen. It was a message relayed from The Building. Devlin smiled as he looked at the screen.

“Who is it?” asked Maryam.

“Martin Ferguson.”

“Who’s that?”

“Someone who lived and died in 1951,” he replied. “He used to be somebody. In fact, he used to be an assistant district attorney in New York. Now…he needs a friend. And that would be me.”

He kissed her like it was the last time. And then he was gone.

New York

Hope lay amid the rubble, listening for the sounds of her children breathing. She had no idea what had happened, only the knowledge that something terrible had occurred, another manifestation of the evil that had visited her and her family back home in Edwardsville. Lightning never struck twice in the same place, except when it did. Some people went for years without an automobile accident, then had two of them in the space of a week. The law of averages held except when it didn’t, and that was when it was evening things out for someone else, somewhere else in the great wide world. We were all prisoners of numbers, and of ruthless dispassionate Nature. And of such singularity were religions born.

This Hope knew as she lay there in the choking blackness. How many stories had she read in which someone-a survivor-had said that God had singled him out for protection, even as others died? Such items were staples of the media because, after all, the dead could not speak, whereas the lucky among the living were there to bear false witness that Somebody Up There cared for them, had saved them, preserved them, from the fate of their comrades. Until, of course, they met the same fate, as eventually everybody must. Hope’s faith, never very strong, had now entirely evaporated.