Michael Walsh - Early Warning

So he’d sealed off the city, but hadn’t sent in troops. Not bad. Devlin would have played it the same way, especially with himself as his ace in the hole. But the discovery of Kohnaloo had just ramped up the stakes. If this was an operation financed by the Iranians and executed by Hamas, there was no way Tyler was going to be able to keep the lid on it.

Seelye read his mind: SO GET THIS OVER WITH PRONTO

ROGER THAT, POP he wrote, and signed off.

Thus the operation had fallen silent, the shooting had stopped as the enemy regrouped. Depending on how well they had canvassed the city, and how long they had planned, the surviving shooters would have gone to ground by now, each to a separate bolt-hole while the Iranian plotted the next move. And, if past experience were any guide, his next move would be to get the hell out of New York and leave his team to its fate.

Which meant things were working out exactly the way Devlin expected them to. Which was another thing that worried him.

Things never went according to plan: the first rule of warfare was that if they did, your plan wasn’t working. He had lived long in the worlds of violence and deception, so long that not only could he tell them apart, he had long ago realized that deception was superior.

Which was why he had blown his surveillance. By sending the shooters scurrying-by forcing them into Plan B-he had accomplished two objectives. The first was to put the heat on Mr. Big and make him do something either expected or stupid, which amounted to the same thing. The second was to force the NYPD SWAT units to stand down; he didn’t need to bump into them while he was carrying out his orders, to run the risk of exposure if one of the cops happened upon him. He needed the fuzz out of the way, and so he relied on the dead-solid-certain fact that when there was trouble, New York wanted an immediate and overwhelming response, but the instant the shooting stopped, the residents demanded flowers in the barrels of the guns and cue the defense lawyers. It had to be the most suicidal city in the nation, professing “never again,” but inviting it constantly.

He had taken out six more of the shooters since his encounter in the New Victory. Three of them came before the cell phone security alert had been raised.

The first was a woman, and that always made it difficult for him. He could not control his sentimental streak, or whatever it was, because killing a woman reminded him of his mother’s death in the Rome airport, when a group of very bad men, convinced of the rightness and morality of their cause, had robbed him forever of her smile, her laugh, her presence, her spirit, her soul.

Well, perhaps not forever. On the subject, the afterlife, religion, however you named it, he was agnostic. Certainly, he had never seen any evidence of its power at the moment of death, when the Angel of Death inhabited him and he did his duty by country, if not God.

He shot her from a distance, as she was leaning out a window of the Brill Building. He hoped she had a song on her lips, but if she was like her fellow Muslims, she probably didn’t; the Brill Building was Tin Pan Alley and the heyday of New York showbiz in brick, steel, and mortar, home to hundreds of music and entertainment companies. In the old days, everybody who was anybody in the music business was headquartered in Lefcourt’s Brill Building. Firing from across the street, the MRP took her out clean with a single shot to the head, and she fell eight stories down, landing on Broadway with a sickening thud that he could hear two hundred yards away, although of course she didn’t feel a thing.

The next man the Angel visited was more up close and personal. Moving in the shadows, Devlin had found him in a storeroom of one of the many pizza places that inhabited the square. Pretending to be a looter, he had easily disarmed him and then eviscerated him with his own kukri knife. He left the body on the pizza counter, pour encourager les autres.

The third was another man. At least, Devlin thought it was a man, but the only good look he got was at the back of his head lining up a night-sight shot on 47th Street as he ran east. Devlin had been triangulating his GPS signal, watched the hinky behavior, and when the guy tossed the cell phone in a trash can, he put one through the back of his skull.

The other three he had already forgotten about. Track and kill. Track and kill. The only trick to it was for him to stay invisible, but there was no place for invisibility like a battlefield that had been emptied of civilians: the only bodies moving out there were either cops, who were easy to spot, even in plain clothes, or the bad guys, who were even easier to spot. You could say a lot about the NYPD, but one thing you could never say was that the front-line men and women were cowards.

In a sense, he had been fighting this enemy since 1985, although he didn’t realize it at the time, and had made it his life’s work to understand how he thought and, more important, what he feared. Forget all that crap about pig’s blood and ham sandwiches and unclean women and women in general; what he most feared was humiliation, especially humiliation in death. In this he was not unlike the great hero of the Trojans, who had begged Achilles that, however their battle ended, humiliation should not be a part of it. But, of course, Achilles had spurned that offer as a sign of weakness, killed Hector, and dragged his body around the walls of the city with his chariot.

In Devlin’s opinion, Achilles had gotten exactly what was coming to him, divine karma, when he was killed by the coward Paris with a lucky shot to the one unprotected area of his body, his heel.

Would that be his fate? Would his pride eventually bring him down? Since his conquest of Milverton, there was no man who could take him, no man that he knew about at least. But he also knew that there were hundreds of them out there, thousands, all itching for the chance to take him on. They would not know him by name, or even by reputation, but they would all be animated, as all the best young fighters were, by the notion that there was somebody out there older and better than they, and that they would not be warriors until they had tested their mettle against his.

Very well, then: bring them on. There was only one thing he feared.

The lucky amateur. The 21st-century Paris.

Fort Meade, Maryland

Major Atwater sat at his desk, puzzling over the material his chief had assigned to him. Of all the things to have do at this time, when the country was riveted by what was going on in New York City, this scut work was the worst. Sifting through ancient ciphers-what a waste of time. Stuff that had been gone over and gone over for decades, centuries even, with no one the wiser. Useless crap.

The Thirty-Nine Steps? Not even the figment of a screen-writer’s imagination, since in the original novel by Buchan the thirty-nine steps were exactly that-thirty-nine steps leading down to the sea; it was only in the Hitchcock movie that the steps were “an organization of spies” revealed by the mentalist. How lame was that?

The second message obviously referred to the Poe Cryptographic Challenge, which had been driving amateur cryptologists crazy since the 19th century. It took until 1992 for someone to crack the first substitution cipher, and until 2000 for the second one to be solved. And these were ciphers dreamed up by a drunk living in the Bronx and Baltimore.

Substitution cipher-maybe that was the clue, and not the cipher itself. Substitution ciphers were among the oldest and easiest to crack: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had used one in The Adventure of the Dancing Men, and for some reason they were much favored by fugitive lovers, furtively communicating by means of crude stick figures. As if anybody couldn’t figure out in a heartbeat that the most recurring stick figure would stand for the letter “e,” and figure the rest out from there. It was nearly impossible to compose an English sentence-or a sentence in any Western language, for that matter-without using the letter “e,” and even though that Frenchy Perec had managed the feat in La Disparition and Ernest Wright had pulled off the lipogram even earlier in Gadsby thirty years before.