Michael Walsh - Early Warning

But she did. And that was all that mattered. That realization, that knowledge, was her weapon against him. And by God, she would wield it, even though it took her last breath.

He had killed the only man she had ever loved. Killed him as surely as if he had killed him himself. Killed him by sending him up against the one man in the world he could not defeat, although his pride would never allow him to admit that. Killed him by forcing a face-off between them, even though he himself was hundreds of miles away, safe in his lair, with her paralyzed from the drug he had given her.

Killed him. A murder for which she would now have her revenge.

“The Higgs boson, sir?” she said, doing her best to steer the conversation back to its original topic. But Skorzeny would have none of her gambit. Instead, he focused his basilisk gaze out the window, at a group of buildings looming in the near distance.

“Do you know what drives me, Amanda?” he asked. It was the first time he had ever used her Christian name that she could remember. He, who hated Christianity, and Judaism, and Islam, and all the world’s great religions, with a dispassionate, egalitarian, tolerant hatred that swept all before it, stooping to use a Christian name. Emanuel Skorzeny was the one man in the world who could profess tolerance, and then murder in its name.

Destroy the world, in fact, all in the name of his senseless revenge.

“No, sir, I’m sure I do not,” she replied evenly. That was a lie. She had plenty of ideas, notions, about what drove him; even from the limited personal information he had imparted to her over the years that she had run his Skorzeny Foundation. His animus against the world knew no bounds. He would either be its master or nothing; he would not be God’s madman. Which is why he hated God so much, and so personally.

“Because of the Higgs boson, of course,” he replied, as if it were the most obvious answer in the world. “Because of the Higgs boson-not just the secret to life itself, no. Much more important than that-the secret to the origins of the universe. Not just our life, but life everywhere-anywhere.”

“I’m not sure I follow you, sir,” she said. They had entered the city proper now and were speeding toward their destination. Their trip would be very short, just long enough for Skorzeny to ascertain the information he required, and then they would be back across the border to France, in the plane, and off again. These days, even the Swiss could not be trusted: the Americans had put so much pressure that even the Bahnhofstrasse lawyers thought twice before routinely falsifying information that might be used in a court of law against them.

“It’s very simple,” he said. “So simple that even a girl child could understand my subtext, I am surprised and disappointed that you do not.”

“I will try not to disappoint in the future,” she said.

“As you have in the past.”

“An aberration, sir,” she said, hoping not to let her dual loyalties show.

“There are no aberrations, Miss Harrington,” he said.

They rode in silence for a while, until at last a cluster of buildings presented itself to the west. They were nearly on the French border now, having doubled back almost to where they had started, but security was security, and Emanuel Skorzeny owned France.

“No aberrations. Everything is planned, thought out, organized. In a rational universe, that is. The kind of world and place you believe in. This is why your lot clings to your religions, or should I say your superstitions, because they are comforting and because they give you solace in your last, agonizing moments.”

“What about you, sir?” Amanda ventured. “Don’t you long for the solace of the afterlife?”

“A child’s fantasy, and a bad novelist’s fiction,” he retorted sharply. “Had you seen what I have seen, had you experienced what I have experienced, had you been through what I have been through, you would never hazard such an absurd notion.” He settled back into his leather seat. “Really, my dear, you disappoint me.”

“I try not to, sir,” she said, thinking furiously. Where was this conversation going? What point was he trying to make? Amanda Harrington had been with Emanuel Skorzeny long enough to know that he never asked a question to which either he already knew the answer or genuinely wanted to know the truth. The problem was telling the questions apart.

“You do,” he said with finality. “And have, repeatedly. Nevertheless, I have forgiven you, despite everything.”

That was the opening she had been waiting for. The lust that still coursed through the man’s veins, no matter his age. Long ago she had learned the truth of the axiom that, at heart, every man was eighteen years old, no matter what the birth certificate said, and that when and if women ever learned that simple truth, the world was theirs. He had raped her once before, on that horrible day at the Savoy in London, and not only would it never happen again, but she would have her vengeance.

“Thank you, Mr. Skorzeny,” she said.

He glanced at her across the plush leather seats of the car’s interior.

“Sir?”

“You have more to say.”

“I’m sure I don’t sir.” At times like this, she adopted the tone and the language of an aggrieved Victorian heroine. She had been born in the wrong century, of that she was sure. The only question now-far more pressing than any of Skorzeny’s queries about money-was what she was going to do about it.

“Then I do.”

She breathed a small sigh of relief. Baton passed. All she had to do now was listen. Which is exactly what she got paid to do.

“Allow me to extend and amplify.”

“Please do, sir,” she said. They were only minutes away from their destination, but at least this exegesis would likely take up most or all of the time.

Skorzeny yawned and stretched, as if he had given this same speech a thousand times before, in hundreds of different situations, to dozens of people. It was like talking to God, if God had no conscience.

“Do you know the Credo?” he asked.

“Credo in Unum Deum,” she dutifully recited, good Anglo-Catholic girl that she once had been. Meaningless words, yet words that had once motivated not just a country but a culture, had called to war millions of men who charged off to die in the trenches of the Somme. Who would die for the Creed today?

It was uncanny, how he could read her thoughts. “No one believes such a thing anymore,” he said. “Meaningless drivel, mumbo-jumbo, hocus-pocus.

Amanda forced herself to pay attention to his lecture, for she knew from long experience that he was going somewhere with it.

“And yet, it’s deceptively simple, isn’t it? Does evil need a purpose, an object of its animus, in order to exist? Or can it simply be? Iago believes in God, but in a cruel God, crueler than the Allah of the Mohammedans, and he understands and embraces the notion that, because he is a man in the image and likeness of God, he is also diabolical: ‘I am evil because I am a man.’”

Here it came: “I could well say the same thing about myself. Oh, I don’t consider myself evil, certainly not in the accepted understanding of the world. What I am trying to do, the grand project of my life upon which I am irrevocably embarked, would not be understood by most of the world’s population. But I am, in my own way, an artist as great as Shakespeare. And do you know why, Miss Harrington?”

He turned to her, and she saw what she always saw in his eyes: greed, hatred, lust and, behind those deadly sins, a vast soulless emptiness. “No, sir,” she said.

“Because I am going to destroy them. They thought that through their art they could approach God, but they were fools, and mortal fools as that, dust; to say they live on through their plays and their music is laughable. They are as dead as your former lover. And to them I am going to write finis.” He gestured out the widow at the city. “I am going to destroy all this because the amateur Iagos who live here are not worthy of it. They have sold their birthright to men like me, not for a mess of pottage but for something even meaner: the illusion of security. They have turned their backs on God just as I approach Him. And here is where He is currently living.”