Michael Walsh - Early Warning

And behind those cave dwellers? Who financed them, manipulated them, stroked them, plied them with fake understanding? Devlin had already met one of them, a man so implacable and hate-filled that their one, brief, unfinished encounter had chilled him to his soul. He-a man famously without a soul-had looked into the ferocious eyes of nihilism and had recoiled from the void. Pray to God that he would never end up like that, that he could hold on to just enough of his humanity to keep him on the other side of the line from well-educated beasts bent on an apocalypse far beyond anything that Wagner had dreamed of at Bayreuth.

Skorzeny. It had to be him.

They had come so close to him in Budapest. But even the tender ministrations of an Egyptian rendition stint had not been enough to get Farid Belghazi to talk, and so he had died, his body dismembered and fed to the crocodiles that still could be found along the Nile. President Tyler had given them permission to take Skorzeny out, but they had failed. And now, here he was.

The mission was simple: get into the beleaguered city and terminate each and every one of the terrorists the NYPD had not yet captured or killed. As usual, he was to remain invisible to the locals at all times, tracking and killing without ever revealing his presence either to friend or foe. To any NYPD officer he encountered, he was just another endangered civilian, and should they make him, he would have to kill them. That was the part about the job he hated. It was easy to kill the other side. They had richly deserved their fate and, in fact, many of them actively sought and embraced it. Devlin’s dispatching them made no difference to either of them, and it had the salubrious effect of creating one less dirtbag in the world. But the good guys didn’t deserve it.

Get Skorzeny and get out. That’s what the voice inside his head had been telling him for months now. Get out and take Maryam with him. Retire, and take your money with you-let the government take care of you for a change, the way it took care of so many these days, instead of you taking care of it. Take this woman, even though you know next to nothing about her. Have never allowed yourself to run so much as a cursory investigation on her. Never bothered to check her cover story with the NCRI, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, or even the scattered remnants of SAVAK, half of whom now lived in Los Angeles. Didn’t care. If she was right she was right.

And if in the end she was the one who had his name tattooed on a bullet in her gun, well, that was a fate he was gladly going to accept. It would put an end to all this, to this life he saw vanish anyway, before his eyes, at the airport in Rome, to the lie he had been living for so long. It would be the end of him, but it would be the end of Seelye, too, and half the NSA. If this was martyrdom, then so be it. Perhaps he had something in common with the scores of men he had killed. In the end, when your turn came, there was nothing left to do but take it, and like it.

Get in, get out.

Get into the tunnel. Once inside he would find a change of clothes in a utility station, adjacent to one of the early monitoring posts that constantly measured the conditions in the tunnel for air quality, radiation, minute increases in humidity-anything that might signal the approach of catastrophe. In the locker he would find any other weapons he needed, in case any of his became unusable after the submersion, along with some heavier firepower beyond what the Gulfstream had provided.

He cleared his mind. He had done this many times before, although never under such hostile conditions. But at root the job was as simple as it always was.

Get in, get out.

Rely on his superior training, his instincts, and the vast emptiness at the bottom of his soul to get him through. Above all, don’t think of her. She was on her way back to Europe. She was already dead to him and should by chance she be resurrected after this was over and they were together again, well, it was just another of the miracles that life held in store for a man in his profession.

He stepped into the water. Nobody saw him, nobody noticed him. What eyes there were nearby were focused on what was going on across the river.

Ten feet, twenty at the most. He stayed in the bathtub longer as a kid, head at the bottom, pretending he was a hero, a treasure-hunter, a deep-sea diver about to come up with rare pearls for the naked Japanese girls admiring him from the shore. For men like him, there were rewards in both heaven and hell.

He filled his lungs with air and slipped beneath the surface of the Hudson.

Times Square

Francis Xavier Byrne had waited his whole life for a moment like this. It sounded horrible to say, but it was true. Every cop, every politician, every reporter, dreamed of such a moment. Not death and destruction, but opportunity. That was the way they saw it-opportunity to prove what they were made of. Unfortunately, it most often included violent death.

The country had so devolved, and heroism had been so devalued, that it was politically incorrect for little boys-and some girls-to imagine themselves the heroes of their own dramas. Peace might seem like a good idea to the ninnies of Code Pink and MoveOn, but it took a real crisis for the men to separate themselves from the boys and the cable news anchors and to step up. It was something they lived their lives for, hoping it would happen. Not for blood, but for glory. And if the two were intertwined, well, so what? The entire course of human history up until the 1950s had proclaimed that one simple truth, and only in a country infected with the postwar guilt-ridden moral relativism of America-the insane notion that up was down, black was white, and good was evil-could it be questioned or challenged.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, some of the old virtues had briefly returned. Suddenly the cops and firemen were heroes again, instead of public enemies and figures of fun on account of their lack of an Ivy League education, their Queens accents. The motto of the NYPD had long been “first through the door,” a stone-brave Irish attitude that said you’d rather die than let your pals think you a coward. Cops and firefighters didn’t call their lawyers when they got punched in the nose, didn’t sue their neighbors or fight with them on the condo boards-in fact, they didn’t even live in condos, preferring rentals in Middle Village or small houses in Orange County, which were pretty much all they could afford. Instead, they sucked it up, put their kids through school as best they could, survived their divorces without eating their.38s, most of them anyway, and got on with their lives. Although Byrne had managed to move across the East River to the city, and his place on 50th Street and Tenth Avenue in what had once been the dregs of Hell’s Kitchen had turned into a very fashionable part of town, he’d never forgotten his roots, nor lost his fear of ever doing anything less than his duty.

A dying breed, he thought, that’s what I am. And if today is the day that the breed finally vanishes, well, so be it. He had the.38 in his hand, drawn and ready to fire, as he hit the wreckage of the AMC.

He’d never seen anything like the destruction.

Being a cop in New York City, especially when you’d been on the force as long as he had-which meant going back to the bad old days of the Dinkins administration-meant you had seen a lot of terrible things. But those bad things were usually small family tragedies, a single point of blackness located among the thousand points of light that were the lives of the normal New Yorkers, everyday New Yorkers-in other words, those who had not gotten themselves killed on this particular day.

Most cops went through their whole careers, from the Academy to roundsman to squad cars to donuts and coffee to the desk sergeant to retirement, without every being involved in violence, except after the fact, when the crime, no matter how gruesome, had stopped bleeding and was even now bloating, swelling, and heading for the corruption of the grave. And even that was rare. Most cops only ever experienced corruption when it came to them not in the form of a popper fished out of the river or a dismembered body half-buried up near the Cloisters, but in the form of a bribe or a payoff, from a city councilman or a drug dealer or even just a two-bit hooker who offered you a blow job in lieu of a bust, and every once in a while you took it because it beat the alternative, which was nothing.