Michael Walsh - Early Warning

And they had no need for the Large Hadron Collider.

No amount of computer linkage-and the Collider was not only linked to its own banks of computers but powered data to mainframes, desktops, laptops, and even netbooks all over the world, connected in much the same way that the SETI tapped underutilized, even dormant computing power on teenage boys’s laptops all over the world to analyze data. The teenagers wanted to be a part of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, but many of the Hadron computers were unwitting zombies, drawn over to the dark side in the search for something far more important than life in outer space. This search was for the origins of the universe and, if possible, for the “God Particle”-the Higgs Boson.

The last time he had tried an EMP, it was delivered by weather balloon. That had had a whiff of genius about it, with first the misdirection in California and then the real thing on the east coast, where it would have done the most damage. And the weather balloon was a nice touch, because what-except to an Area 51-obsessed nut-could be sinister about a weather balloon? Maryam hadn’t agreed with President Tyler’s decision to let him semi-skate, but she also knew that she and Devlin had carte blanche to take him out whenever he came out of his bolt-hole, and now he had.

Because, no matter how smart or how careful he was, there was no place for Skorzeny to hide. Not in this day of near-universal CCTV cameras in all the cities of Europe, of cell phone cameras and iPhones and instant uplinks. No one, no matter how rich, was immune from the prying eyes and, unless you lived in a cave in Afghanistan somewhere, someday you would be found. And, if necessary or desirable, taken out. Nor were she and Devlin immune. His job was getting harder by the day, and it didn’t matter how tough he was, one of these months or years he would run into somebody tougher, somebody smarter, somebody quicker and more ruthless-or maybe even somebody just luckier. And then it would be all over for him, and thus for her, too. She had to hurry. Double games were never easy, but they were the only one on offer for a girl like her.

So whatever had brought Emanuel Skorzeny out of his cell must be pretty damn big. And although there was no evidence to suggest it, she was also sure he was somehow involved in what was going on in New York. It made no sense to assume that it was a simple terrorist operation, not that any terrorist operation was simple. But the very technology that allowed her to monitor Skorzeny’s movements aboveground could easily allow him to monitor his men’s activities in the shadows. In Mumbai, the crew had been controlled by a Pakistani from his cell phone, guiding the poor, uneducated holy warriors on their killing spree and talking them through the acceptance of martyrdom so that they might have peace in their final moments-a peace not accorded their victims. There wasn’t much sophisticated about that operation, just a true believer’s willingness to kill in the name of Allah, but that was really all you needed when it came right down to it: where there was a Will to Power, there was a Way.

The attendant was at her side: “We’ll be landing in about an hour, Miss,” he said. No name. As far as anyone was concerned she didn’t have a name, and in fact this flight didn’t even exist. They’d land at a private airstrip in Austria, where she’d be given false papers and then driven across the border in an unmarked vehicle. Should anyone check the manifest, the plane would prove to have been a rich Belgian’s private aircraft, chartered through a company, sent to pick him up at a resort near Chamonix and ferry him home to his summer house in Austria’s easternmost province, Burgenland, where he could happily continue to make life miserable for the EU’s unhappy subjects from a country outside its purview. The old Soviet Union had never really died; it had simply moved to the Grand Place, where the food was better and the populace less restive.

There was no point in stopping in Geneva. The CSS had operatives throughout Switzerland, and although the prickly Swiss managed to be as unhelpful as possible, the best information was that he had left, accompanied by the woman. And, of course, there was to be no rough stuff, certainly not at the monitoring and shadowing level. The Swiss didn’t mind what you did so long as it did not upset the fondue cart for everybody else, which meant leaving them alone in peace to continue to make and hide money. Which was why she was landing in Budapest…

Because that was where the twin strains of this case intersected. That was where they had grabbed Farid Belghazi, and Belghazi had been working at CERN. Hungary was where the name “Skorzeny” had originated, and even though the trail to Emanuel Skorzeny dead-ended at Otto Skorzeny, Maryam was a great believer in linguistic resonance. In her experience, people chose aliases that they could live with, that were not too far off from their real names, that meant something to them, something deep and emotional and significant. Emanuel Skorzeny may not have been any more Hungarian than she was, but there was something in that country that drew him, some identification with it…

Did he speak Magyar?

She realized she didn’t know.

For all the work they had done on him in the aftermath of Edwardsville, that was something she had never bothered to wonder about. She had assumed no: nobody spoke Magyar, the language of Hungary, unless they were born to it. It was one of those rare languages, non-Indo-European in origin, related only to Finnish, of all things, a likely importation from central Asia and, if romance be true, swept into Europe with Attila the Hun and his conquering hordes. The Hungarians were half of the West and half of the East, on the border between Slav and Saxon, between Christian and Muslim, their language rolling like dactylic poetry, a parade of accented first syllables that gave the tongue a majesty and rhythm lacking in German dialects and Slavic variants with which it was nearly surrounded. Only on its eastern border, with Romania, did the Hungarians cede pride of historical place to the last outpost of the Roman empire.

Hungary -the nexus of Asia, the Roman legions, and the German colonists-was where the solution to the mystery lay, she was sure. Not just present-day Hungary, a shadow of its old self, but the lands that had once been Hungarian, including the Transylvanian district (the Germans called it Siebenburgenland, or “seven-castle land”) so beloved of western Christian mythology. The land of Vlad Tepes -

Dracula.

Was that where the monster’s lair really lay?

The flight attendant snapped her back out of her reverie. Even before he spoke, she’d caught him looking at her, the way men had been looking at her all her life, the unspoken and involuntary homage they paid to a beautiful woman. American women hated such attention, or at least they professed to, which was one of the many things she despised about American women. Only in America, she thought, could women have achieved so much and enjoyed it so little. In a land of “diversity,” their bland, homogenized beauty, grown so increasingly, so desperately conformist by the advent of plastic surgery, was designed to attract and yet their personalities were manufactured to repel. Maryam’s American accent-learned in Beverly Hills and along Westwood Boulevard in Los Angeles -was as regionally noncommittal as possible, but unless she had to use it, she preferred the native accents of Shiraz, or the French patois she had learned at her fancy private school in Switzerland. Given the choice between Schwyzerdütsch and Valley Girl, she’d take the Swiss Alemannic dialect every time, unless she was buying a movie ticket at the ArcLight in Sherman Oaks.

“Was it a pleasant dream?” he asked.