Michael Walsh - Early Warning

They were very close now, her face close to his, her mouth near his left cheek. He thought about kissing her, then reconsidered the impulse. There would be plenty of time for friskiness later, if it came to that. Imagine, fucking the President of the United States! He was starting to gain a new appreciation for Judith Campbell and the rest of JFK’s mistresses.

“So, the way I see politics, is that it’s a giant puzzle. In order to win, you have to fit all the pieces together. But you don’t have infinite time; you have to get it right and you have to get it right under fire. Any election can be won or lost depending on which day the people vote. On which news comes out when. Stories get timed, then launched. He’s a drunk, she’s a slut. She had an abortion when she was fourteen; he’s a recovering drug addict who did time in that rehab clinic in Park City and the only people who knew were Hollywood types. He has a taste for little boys; she for little girls. Scandals are not what they used to be, but they can still be potent. It all just depends on how you fit the pieces together.”

Sinclair was getting to be pretty uncomfortable now, but what was he going to do? Ask permission to leave the bathroom? They were in there for a reason, and that reason was, she didn’t trust him, didn’t trust him not to monitor their conversation, not to record it, not to keep it as a weapon against her, or at least an insurance policy, against such time as he would need it, against such time when they, like thieves everywhere, would fall out and turn on each other. He hoped that day would never come, but he was too smart and too experienced and too cynical not to allow for its possibility. And so, he knew, was she.

“So what’s the deal?”

She pushed back a bit, and ran her fingers through her hair, then wiped her face. “You take him down with everything you’ve got. His past as an ambulance-chaser. How he put doctors out of business all over Louisiana until poor pregnant black women were hitchhiking from Lake Charles to Houston to drop their babies somewhere half-civilized. How he’s probably gay.”

She watched his eyes closely to see how he’d react. Surely he knew, or at least suspected. Everybody did. It was the worst-kept rumor in Washington, the first bachelor president, with his great reputation as a womanizer, the ultimate get for every single gal from Bethesda to Escondido, all a sham.

“You can’t prove it,” said Sinclair. “Nobody can.”

“What does it matter? All you have to do is raise the question. What does he have to hide?” She moved back in closer, this time for the kill. “And what about the Edwardsville fiasco? What about that dead reporter? What about his embrace of Islam? If any of those crazy mujahideen get near him, he’s as good as dead-why aren’t they telling us about this threat to national security? Can we really afford such a man in the White House, in the Oval Office? It’s time for a change.”

She placed both hands on his cheeks, then slowly moved them up the sides of his head until her fingers were now running through his hair, gently tousling it.

“And what’s in it for me?”

“You’ll be the last man standing,” she said. “My administration will make sure of it.”

Sinclair made one last attempt to find and assert his manhood. “But the same could be said for you. Nobody knows anything about you. Your past is a closed book, your records sealed. All you are is-”

“All I am is a fresh new face. All I am is not Jeb Tyler. And considering what’s going on in New York City right now, that’s all I have to be.”

She had him there. “I guess we have a deal, then,” he said. Jake Sinclair had never met anyone quite like Angela Hassett.

“Then let’s seal it.” She tilted her face upward, and her lips found his. She was hungrier than he expected, and they stayed that way for a while, longer than necessary for a business deal, not quite long enough for anything else to happen, leaving the promise hanging in the air.

She broke it first, pulled back and just stood there, looking at him. He broke the awkward silence:

“What about your husband?”

She laughed, then tossed him a towel with which to wipe his face. “Don’t try to fuck me, Jake,” she said.

She turned off the water, turned toward him. He wasn’t sure what to expect, but whatever it was it wasn’t this:

A slap across the face, hard.

“If you ever keep me waiting again,” she said, “I’ll kill you.”

Manhattan

Something was nagging at Devlin, just as it had at Edwardsville. It was too easy.

Not the killing; that was hard. No matter how good you were at it, it was always hard. He was up against trained killers, and although they were not in his class, and he was armed with superior intelligence and firepower, each of them had presented a different challenge.

Once he had blown his own cover to the Iranian, things happened exactly as he expected them to. There had been one last message, blasted from the hotel to the operatives still in the field, which is exactly what Devlin had hoped would happen. That would be the stand-down message, or the save-yourself message, or the await-further-instructions message, with maybe a verse of two of the Koran thrown in for good measure. The boys and girls back at Fort Meade would know. All that mattered to Devlin was that Arash Kohanloo had just burned his entire operation.

The face-recognition software at NSA is the best in the world, and the little UAV had done its job well. Within five minutes The Building had processed the visual information and had relayed it back to him via a series of cutouts:

KOHANLOO, ARASH. Iranian businessman, with many financial interests in the West. At home, he professed to be a devout Muslim and was tight with the mullahs, but once outside the dar al-Islam he could be as much a party animal as any Saudi princeling. He was a familiar type in all religions, a hypocrite, but why he wanted to involve himself in something like this-well, that was the mystery. Actually, it was not all that big of a mystery; in Devlin’s experience, Money and Love, or her naughty sister, Lust, pretty much explained everything.

Devlin opened up his netbook and logged onto a secure, encrypted channel to Seelye:

KOHANLOO-WHAT’S THE CONNECTION?

TO WHOM? came the immediate reply.

DON’T BULLSHIT ME, DAD.

TO SKORZENY YOU MEAN?

EXACTAMUNDO

WORKING ON IT

WORK HARDER. WHAT’S TYLER ’S PLAY IN THIS?

A pause, then:

NO PLAY. HE’S LETTING NYPD HANDLE IT. DOESN’T WANT TO PANIC THE COUNTRY

LETTING ME HANDLE IT, YOU MEAN

SAME THING

LIKE BLOWING UP TIMES SQUARE HASN’T ALREADY PANICKED THE COUNTRY. IT’S ABOUT THE ELECTION, RIGHT?

IT’S ALWAYS ABOUT THE ELECTION. HASSETT HAD A MEETING WITH SINCLAIR, AND HE’S BEATING TYLER ’S BRAINS OUT 24/7

So that was the play. Tyler didn’t want to panic America, as he had the last time with his dumb stunt of practically negotiating with the terrorists, so he was letting the cops deal with it. With the information Devlin could give them, they’d be able to run them down and wrap things up pretty easily. He could see it now, as Tyler saw it: a bunch of dead people followed by a slew of yellow ribbons, some official boo-hoo, and then Jeb himself standing at the center of the Square, promising New Yorkers and the American People that a new Times Square would rise gloriously from the ashes, better and cleaner and safer than before, a place for families to disport themselves in freedom from fear.

And, of course, that this would never happen again. If Devlin could link Kohanloo to the Iranian government, there’s no telling what Tyler wouldn’t do to win the election. The President not only had a bully pulpit, he had the combined weight of the American armed services behind him, and taking on, or even taking out, Iran would satisfy the public’s bloodlust. Plus there was a big swath of his constituency that had been wanting payback for the hostage crisis since the Carter administration. Even Sinclair’s media empire would have to look the other way, as long as he did it quickly enough.