Michael Walsh - Early Warning

Now it was a male voice that spoke: “Target located. Sherry-Netherland Hotel.”

“Stand by,” said the infidel woman.

Then silence.

Arash Kohanloo tried to control his breathing. His heart rate was up, that he knew. The doctors had told him to keep it down, keep it calm, keep it within the target range lest he find himself in trouble. Damn that Skorzeny and his wily ways. Here he was, in a situation he should never have been in, and his heart rate was rising along with his blood pressure. He tried to stay calm and listen for whatever came next. There was nothing to worry about.

The fools! They had no idea he was not in the Sherry-Netherland.

“Shall I send a UAV?”

A few more crackles, then-

“Put the bird in the air and stand by.”

“The bird is in the air.”

Kohanloo couldn’t believe his ears. Surely they would not deploy a UAV-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, more commonly known as a drone-to blast away an entire floor of an expensive hotel in midtown Manhattan. The Americans didn’t do things like that. They were always more concerned about collateral damage than they were about the success of a mission; why, a single snail darter could not only bring down a dam in Alaska, it could probably stop a convoy of Abrams tanks as well.

“Stand by to fire on my orders.”

It was a bluff. It had to be. His eyes stole toward the window of his luxury suite; the curtains were drawn. With the cell phone still pressed up hard against his ear, he moved slowly and quietly toward the window.

Now another voice came on the line. He couldn’t swear to it-and a good Muslim never took an oath except in a religious context-but it sounded awfully like that of the man he had spoken to earlier. In fluent Farsi, he said: “Go to the window.”

He hesitated a moment.

“Go to the window now.”

He went to the window.

“Now, open the curtains.”

How did they know he even had a window where he was? Or that there were curtains?

“Open them.” He didn’t like the man’s tone of voice, his peremptory way. An unbeliever should never talk to one of the Faithful like that. “Go ahead…”

He took a deep breath and opened the curtains, trying not to flinch-

“What do you see?”

The panorama of New York City. No hint of the sun yet, but on this summer morning, it would be up soon. Just the gleam of the lights and, to the southwest, smoke reflected in the wasteful glare.

He slowly exhaled. “I see exactly what I expect to see, and nothing more.”

“Do you see me?”

He was feeling a little braver now, more like his old self. “Of course not. Now who are you? What do you want?”

“Do you see me now?”

Was that the sun? The sky had brightened a bit, or perhaps his eyes were simply getting used to the darkness. He switched off the nearest floor lamp in order to see better.

“Do you know who I am?”

Still nothing. It was all a bluff. Somehow they had managed to trace the Brother’s cell signal. A cheap trick, and one that any Palestinian kid with a Bulgarian computer could manage. Nothing to-

“Smile, asshole.” That was in English.

A blinding flash. For a moment, Arash Kohanloo was sure he was dead, and that he would soon be entering paradise. He cursed himself for a fool, that he had not had time to perform his ritual ablutions in preparation for martyrdom, and then remembered he was not expecting to be martyred this time out.

He was still alive. He could see.

The drone was right outside his window. It had him on video, and was transmitting his picture somewhere. Operational security was blown. It was time to regroup. He started to turn away-

“Stop. Don’t move or you’re a dead man.”

Kohanloo froze.

“Look on the wall across from you.”

Kohanloo looked.

A video image danced across the plaster and the reproduction of a Monet cathedral. It was the image of a man. “Look upon me,” said the voice at the other end of the cell phone. Funny; he had forgotten he was still holding it.

“Do you know who I am now?”

“No. I do not.”

“I am Azra’il. Malak al-Maut. He Whom God Helps.”

The name sent shivers down Kohanloo’s spine. Azra’il, the Arabic version of the Biblical Azrael, was not to be found in the Holy Koran, but Malak al-Maut was. Another of his names. It meant the Angel of Death.

“And you,” the voice said, “are now mine.”

The Upper East Side -morning

The dawn was breaking as Principessa Stanley cautiously made her way around the corner from Park Avenue and turned left on 92nd Street, where some of the shooting had been yesterday. It wasn’t that she was afraid, exactly; indeed, she moved with the supreme confidence of a cable-network star. Nothing ever happened to cable-network stars. In fact, with the occasional and unfortunate exception of that poor girl back in St. Louis, or wherever it was last year-you know, the one they gave that posthumous award to a couple of months ago-journalists were free to come and go as they pleased in the United States of America. This was not some kind of Third World shithole, where you had to wear a sign around your neck that blared “PRENSA” in various wog tongues, none of which she happened to know. Principessa Stanley was firmly of the opinion that if information could not be expressed in English it was of no use to her, since none of her viewers would be able to understand it any better than she could.

And to think she had almost missed this “terrorist” attack by fooling around in New Orleans, wasting her time with her boyfriend of the moment after covering that useless RAND meeting-none of which she could use anyway. It had been a real trick to find a flight into New York after they shut the airports down, and so she had hopped aboard a military plane from the Naval Air Station, Joint Reserve Base about twenty minutes south of the city. It had taken her to the old Stewart AFB, where the New York Air National Guard was still operational, and from there a car service had brought her down to the city. Her press credentials had gotten her through the blockade last night and so she’d be able to freshen up in her own apartment on Carnegie Hill before tackling her latest assignment. If she played her cards right, this was an Emmy for sure.

The trick was to go where everybody else wasn’t. The shootings at the Y had already been written off as isolated incidents, perhaps copycat killings. The real action was still at Times Square, where gunmen were still active, but this area had been quiet for hours. Besides, the police cordon was slowly constricting around 42nd and Seventh, and the 92nd Street Y now lay outside the zone.

Which suited her journalistic purposes just fine. The gunman-whoever he or she was-was still on the loose. She’d find him, if it was the last thing she did, and bring him in for an exclusive interview. The cops and the military, whoever, would wax the other schmucks, but she could talk a cat out of a tree, and surely she’d be able to talk this guy down and into her custody. She’d have him on the air fifteen minutes later, depending on traffic.

Raymond Crankheit woke up and stretched. He’d spent the night under a copse near the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, all things considered, felt quite refreshed. This was one of the first spots in New York City he’d visited when he first arrived, the place where Robert Chambers, the “Preppie Killer” had strangled Jennifer Levin to death during what Chamber had called “rough sex.” Raymond had never had sex, so he wasn’t quite sure what, exactly, was the distinction between rough sex and garden-variety sex, but he hoped to find out someday, and today was as good a day as any. As soon as he’d finished what he came here to do, he’d find a girl and give it a try. Maybe he too could get lucky at Dorrian’s Red Hand, but that was fairly far away, over on Second Avenue, and he didn’t have time for the trek just now. He’d had have to find somebody closer and more available.