Michael Walsh - Early Warning

The car slowed as they approached their destination: the CERN laboratory. The location of the Large Hadron Collider. Where the Higgs boson-the “God particle”-either would or would not be found. Where, if this madman was to be believed, the fate of the world would be decided in some way that she could not understand.

“What must He think of His creatures,” said Skorzeny, his tone taunting. “They replicate Hell on earth and answer evil with evil. All Europe has become a suicide cult of relativism, of an unshakeable belief in nothing besides the self. It is a culture that has turned its back on its culture, a world of perpetual, petulant, resentful adolescence, a world in which young women have been taught that it is virtuous for them to kill their own unborn children. Is that sophistication? Or is it savagery?”

He glanced over at her. “And as I know how much you want a child, I think I also know your answer to my question.”

It was everything she could do, took every ounce of self-control for Amanda Harrington not to explode, not to tear his hair out by the roots and gouge out his eyes. Then the famous Ice Maiden once again took control.

All her life she had pursued money to the exclusion of almost everything else, including love and children, and for a time she had been one of the richest women in London. Thanks to the lust to become even richer, she had signed on with the Skorzeny Foundation, of which she was still the nominal head, but what a Faustian bargain that had turned out to be. She had lost both the love she had found and, however briefly, the only child she had ever known-his gift. And now, looking at this thing, who had all the money in the world, however temporarily damaged financially by his first active foray into attacking America, she could feel only revulsion for what she had been, and what she had once hoped to become. At the moment, Amanda Harrington knew the cause to which she would henceforth devote the rest of her life-however long that would prove to be.

Just enough time left to think before she was once again caught up in whatever mad scheme had taken his fancy. But she had this to thank him for: after nine long months, her mind was clear now. She knew who he was and, more important, she knew who she was. Her man was dead. Her child was gone. From this moment henceforth, she was no longer Amanda Harrington of No. 4, Kensington Park Gardens, London.

She was the Black Widow. And she would have her vengeance.

In the air-Maryam

Good-byes were for fools and women who read romance novels. In the real word, there were no good-byes. Not in the life they had chosen. You parted and that was that. The rest was for the future, and to no woman was the future vouchsafed.

She’d be in Budapest in eight hours, maybe less if the tail-winds increased in speed. She needed all the luck she could get, because she had to pick up Skorzeny’s trail fast. What she was learning was very disturbing, in ways she didn’t quite know how to express at this point.

CSS had picked up Skorzeny in Switzerland, upon entry. That was the beauty of electronic surveillance: it didn’t matter how much money you had, in any civilized country you would be photographed at a hundred different locations before you could go to ground. No matter how secure your bolt-hole, there was always a camera to catch you unawares, no matter your level of situational awareness-and Skorzeny’s was preternatural. The international system as monitored at Fort Meade had evolved far beyond Echelon, to the point where the images could be read practically in real time; as long as there was one authoritative photograph, age almost irrelevant, the Black Widow could project and track just about any version of you-older, younger, with hair and without-that disguises or plastic surgery could create. In a world dedicated to personal freedom, every citizen was now on file.

The internal contradictions of the Western capitalist system did not concern Maryam at the moment. Using Devlin’s equipment, much of which he had himself designed, she was busily bringing herself up to speed on every move Skorzeny had made since he entered Western ken. She knew that under his take-it-or-leave-it arrangement with Tyler, he was not supposed to be anywhere near a country with an extradition treaty with the United States. So there was something in Geneva that was worth risking however brief a visit he was planning to make. Something so important that he would risk his freedom and what was left of his financial empire for it.

He was, of course, with a woman, and Maryam knew exactly who she was. She was the women she’d seen in the prison at Clairvaux, at Skorzeny’s macabre private concert, the woman with whom she’d made eye contact just before the performance had begun. Their eyes had met as enemies, but also as sisters, and in a flash Maryam had realized that Amanda Harrington could not move, could not speak, could barely even see, that she was a prisoner of Emanuel Skorzeny as surely as all the men at Clairvaux were prisoners of the French government.

And now she was here, with Skorzeny again, apparently of her own volition. That, Maryam was sure, was impossible. She had not been privy to all the details of the Skorzeny operation, having been brought on board to Branch 4 by Devlin after it was over, after the girl was rescued and after she shot the rifleman whose name she never learned, the man firing at the helicopter. As for what had happened in London, she didn’t want to know. All she knew, and all she cared to know, was that her lover had come back to her wounded but alive, and with a burning desire to finish the job. He was, after all, a professional. Just like her.

It took Maryam all of five minutes to realize what Skorzeny was up to: the last shot of him was entering the secure area at CERN-the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire. That was where this whole thing had started, she realized, in Budapest, with Farid Belghazi. Something big was going on at CERN, but for the life of her she couldn’t imagine what it was.

Because, according to just about everybody, the place was a near-failure. Every time they’d started up the Collider, in an attempt to duplicate the conditions under which the Big Bang might have started the universe, it had failed. Once it had even been brought down by a bird, which had dropped something down the shaft. And now it was down for at least another year. It was almost as if God himself was trying to prevent the damn thing from working.

Maryam found herself fascinated with the history of the Collider. Her life up until now had not exactly revolved around science at this level, both technical and conceptual. The intricacies did not concern her. But the search for the origins of life, of existence, of the universe itself-that was something every human being could get behind. That was something every human being had wondered about since the dawn of time, when man first looked to the heavens and realized there was something out there, something bigger than himself, something full of wonder and majesty and mystery. Something infinite.

And now, here in the century of ascendent science, the age-old religious questions were being asked once more. Indeed, it seemed that the more science declared that the research was settled, that the questioning was over, and that all questions had been answered, the more people sought and questioned. Real science, of course, never really settled anything: Newtonian physics, as settled as anything ever could be, held sway for several centuries, and gave way to Einstein; in time, Einstein himself would be succeeded by something and somebody else. That was the course of history.

Only religion refused to ask. Only religion claimed the answers, infallibly. The problem was: which one was right? First-hand, she had seen the result of a religious state, one in which all questions had long ago been settled by the force of dogma. And not just Islam: all over the world, the Third World variants of European Christianity were awash in signs and wonders, mysterious apparitions. Whether they were Twelfthers, like the regime in Iran, or Marianists, who believed the Virgin Mary was appearing to them in places as disparate as California City, California, and Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina, or poor Mexican women who saw Jesus’s face in a taco, or in a salt stain on a freeway underpass, they all had one thing in common: they believed.