Michael Walsh: Early Warning

One more thing to do.

Abruptly, he slammed the big car in reverse. Before the man could react, Devlin ran him over. He never knew his name, never would know what crime, if any, the man had committed. But he had been trained to understand that it didn’t matter, and it didn’t. The back alleys of central Europe were littered with the bodies of nameless ops, who had vanished unknown and unmourned. That was his tough luck. Operational security was everything.

In the air

Emanuel Skorzeny did his best to relax into the leather seats of his private airplane. For the past nine months, he had been a veritable fugitive, airborne, fleeing the wrath of the U.S. government. Until last year, that had not been a thing worth fearing, not for a long time, not since Americans had landed on Normandy Beach, bridged Remagen, and came close enough to Berlin to let the Soviets and Zhukov hurry up and take the prize. So much for the bromide that violence never solved anything. It certainly sorted Hitler and the National Socialists out.

More-not since the Americans had cleared the Pacific islands from Tarawa and Iwo Jima to Okinawa, firebombed Tokyo, and dropped the Big One on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oddly enough, that was the end of Japanese militarism, finis to the Empire, the rude termination of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Thank God the Americans didn’t fight like that anymore.

Still, here he was, a prisoner of his own wealth and ambition. Airborne in his private 707, outfitted and retrofitted to his exact specifications, a home away from home, a flying living room if indeed he would ever have stooped to anything so vulgar as a living room. Free to fly the world, but never land, a contemporary Flying Dutchman, a Wandering Jew, the desolate hero of Schubert’s Winterreise-the living embodiment of a hundred European tragic heroes, but without the heroic deeds that had accompanied their ineluctable fates.

That devil, Devlin, had done this to him. The boy he had failed to kill when he had the chance, a latter-day Hercules, who had turned the tables on the snakes sent to throttle him in his cradle. And now, after all these years of waiting and plotting and planning, Devlin had defeated him again, defeated him and his most potent operative, Milverton, killed him with his bare hands in his own house, as Hercules had strangled the serpents. Broken his back, stopped his plot, razed his house, and nearly killed Skorzeny himself. He had underestimated his enemy. It was not a mistake he would make again. The next time they confronted each other would be the last time.

“Is there anything else, M. Skorzeny?” asked Emanuelle Derrida. Since the unfortunate demise of M. Pilier, Mlle. Derrida had taken his place as his most trusted assistant. She was younger than Pilier, and certainly prettier. She was also unmarried and seemed entirely uninterested in men. Which meant that, luckily, he was almost uninterested in her.

Mlle. Derrida was, like Chopin, half French and half Polish. From her French father she had inherited her Pascal-like rationality; she never bet, unless it was on a sure thing. From her Polish mother she got her blond good looks. The first time he had seen her, at a concert in Singapore, he had been struck by her willowy figure, the way the breeze moved over her dress and sent it clinging to her body, hugging her in a way that every man desired but no man would ever obtain. No matter: he had hired her on the spot.

Not that his was any life for a young person. Under his arrangement with Tyler, he had escaped the full wrath of the USA, but only under the condition that he stay confined to his home in Liechtenstein, or to those countries without a politically controversial extradition treaty with the United States. And yet she had accepted his offer unhesitatingly, as if there was something that she, too, was fleeing. Not that he had asked-other people’s troubles were none of his business, only his opportunities. But Mlle. Derrida needed the handsome salary he paid her, and he needed her, and that was that.

But not, he confessed to himself privately, the way he needed Amanda Harrington.

In these past nine months, he had thought often of Amanda Harrington. Of all the women in his life, of all the women he had known, she was the acme. When he heard that she had survived the poisoned chalice he had offered her, he had spared no expense on her treatment and recovery. He saw to it that, every day, her rooms were filled with roses, that she wanted for nothing, that as she progressed everything would be provided for, that her home in London would be taken care of. He gave her everything. The only thing he could not give her was the child she had loved briefly, and then lost. But, then, he could always try again. He was still potent, and in every respect. And now he would see her again. Things would be as they once had been.

“We are approaching Macao, sir,” she said.

Next to Dubai, Macao was one of his favorite places in the world. For an internationalist like Emanuel Skorzeny, the world really was pretty much his oyster, even if that oyster had been severely limited by the informal, unacknowledged sanctions Tyler had imposed on him in the wake of the EMP fiasco. Macao was the old Portuguese settlement on the southwest coast of China, dating back to the early 16th century. Along with the Portuguese foothold in Nagasaki, Macao was where the West had begun in its penetration of the East. Now, of course, it was the East that was penetrating the West.

“Thank you, Mlle. Derrida,” he said. “Please ensure that everything is in readiness for our arrival.”

“Indeed, sir,” she replied. She gave him a little smile-was it of encouragement? Advancement? Impossible to tell. He smiled back, neutrally, he hoped. Everything was a lawsuit these days; it was getting to be that a man couldn’t make an honest living as a pirate anymore.

Which is what both perplexed him and animated him. What had happened to the secure world he had once known? True, it had never existed, except in his own idealistic imagination, but that did not make it any less real. From his boyhood in a Sippenhaft camp in northern Germany near Lübeck-Sieglinde’s aria, Der Männer sippe was for him the most resonant part of Wagner’s Ring-through his Wanderjähren as a young man, to his arrival in Paris, to his first million on the trading floor of the DAX, he had held fast to his vision.

“Music,” he said, and as if on command, Elgar’s Enigma Variations came over the aircraft’s loudspeakers. One of the things he most liked about Mlle. Derrida was that she could read his mind. Something Pilier could never quite do.

The Boeing 707-the kind of planes they used to use for long-range international travel back in the early ’80s, when the Aught Seven was the last word in aircraft-bumped a little, then settled down. In its original configuration, it was basically a flying cigar tube with two rows of three seats on either side of a center aisle; in his specially outfitted version, he had reserved the entire center section of the aircraft, the safest part over the wings, for his own private quarters.

Toward the front, between him and the pilots, was the communications headquarters. Despite everything that had happened, he had maintained most of his agreements with international air controllers and national satellite systems, which meant that he could still monitor the position of every aircraft in the Skorzeny fleet, no matter how temporarily diminished in numbers. To the rear were the sleeping quarters, both his and the staff’s, and behind them, the galley and his personal chef’s quarters. He hadn’t yet made up his mind about Mlle. Derrida; she might prove to be more trouble than she was worth. But, fortunately for him, there were no sexual harassment laws at 40,000 feet.