Michael Walsh - Early Warning

Sid struggled a bit. “I wanna be in the shit, boss,” he protested.

“We got plenty of guys in the shit already,” said Byrne. “And we’re taking them down.”

Sid seemed disappointed: the kid was no coward, that was for sure. Byrne looked around the room and spoke to the nurse. “Sister,” he said, even though nobody called nurses “sister” anymore except the very old-timers in the neighborhood, “would you please close the door and make sure we’re not disturbed?”

“Of course, officer,” the nurse said. She was from Haiti, but she’d been working on the old West Side for long enough to know the drill. They got plenty of shot-up cops around here and they all talked the same.

Byrne took out his departmental secure PDA and showed it to Sid and Lannie. “I got this a couple of hours ago. It gives the last known location of every one of the shooters, tracked by some GPS system I’ve never heard of. Which means…”

“Which means we got the fuckers!” exclaimed Lannie, who high-fived Sid.

“Which means that somebody in some department somewhere in this great land of ours has got better toys than we do and we need to find out who they are and how we can get some for ourselves.” He waited a beat. “I’m putting you both on the case, A-sap. I want you to find out who sent this to me-”

“And fuck him up?” blurted Sid, excited.

“And work with him. Or her. These guys are good, very, very good, and right now we need all the friends we can get. Just as long as they’re not…you know who.” Nobody needed to ask who you-know-who was. Capt. Byrne’s antipathetic relationship with certain parts of official Washington was the stuff of departmental legend.

Byrne handed the instrument to Lannie Saleh. “Open up a line of communication right now. We can trust these guys, whoever they are, DIA, CIA, NSA, I have no idea. I just know this.” He unfolded the piece of paper he’d found in his pocket and showed it to them:

YOUR GUARDIAN ANGEL.

Lannie and Sid both looked at the note in amazement. “What the hell is that supposed to mean, Captain?” asked Sid.

“It means this guy, whoever he is, saved my life, so as far as I’m concerned he’s already established his bona fides. And we’re going to work with him in any way he wants us to. So get cracking”

Lannie’s face dropped. “But I was going to stay here with Sid, keep him-”

“I didn’t say you had to do it at HQ, did I? And if you’re not smart enough to be able to make this thing sing and dance, then you’re not as smart as I think you are.”

“Okay, boss,” said Lannie.

“But we’re getting them all, right?” ventured Sid. “The bad guys.” Like every cop, and certainly the men under Byrne’s command, he took any attack on his city deeply personally.

“Looks that way,” Byrne said. “I got our best guys-not counting you two clowns-on it, and they’ve registered eleven kills.” He decided not to tell them that six of those kills had been made by somebody not on the team. That was a mystery that either would sort itself out or it wouldn’t, so he’d keep that to himself. “So…” he said, looking at Sid, “just as soon as you stop goldbricking, we can get back to-”

His phone rang. His personal cell phone. He glanced down at the number on caller ID: blocked. He wondered briefly if he should take it. Normally he wouldn’t, especially not on the job, since all official calls came over their crack internal communication system, the one that had so distinguished itself on 9/11. But this was an emergency, and you never knew-

“Hello?”

“Hello, Frankie, how’s it hanging?” said the voice, and Byrne recognized it right away. It was his brother, Tom Byrne, deputy director of the FBI.

Budapest

So she was back where they had started, on the hunt for Farid Belghazi, that guy from CERN, which had been much in the news lately. Despite a series of unfortunate events, the Large Hadron Collider was once again operable and going about its business. Recently, it had set a new record by colliding particle beams at seven tera electric volts as two proton beams, guided by thousands of large electromagnets, collided head-on at 3.5 TeV, registering more than half a million collision events. But that was nothing: some time in the near future, the Hadron Collider would be ramped up to reach 14 TeV.

Budapest was also, according to the NYPD, the source of the denial-of-service attack that had preceded the assault on midtown Manhattan. An hour ago, her inbox had suddenly filled to overflowing as a direct line of communication with the CTU had suddenly opened, and she knew she had Frank Ross to thank for that. Now she was directly in touch with members of the CTU, operating anonymously but under the strictest security protocols, built into the laptop and verified by relays.

It was a two-way street: she was able to transmit information relayed to her by Frank Ross and in turn they were helping her draw a bead on the source of the DoS attack that had temporarily blinded CTU and allowed the gunmen to smuggle in their weapons and get into place. Slowly but surely, she was homing in on the source of the attack: just where she had feared it might be, but the only place that made any sense: eastern Hungary, near the Romanian border. Szeged.

Szeged today was just off the motorway, but closer in spirit to Timi oara in neighboring Romania than it was to Budapest. Once one of the major border towns of the Hungarian empire, it had fallen to the Turks in 1526 and had become an important Ottoman administrative center; liberated 160 years later, it played an important role in the revolution of 1848, and was completely destroyed in the flood of 1879. It was supposed to be very beautiful, having been rebuilt in the grand Austro-Hungarian style.

In short, it fit Skorzeny to a T: once Muslim, happily radical, formerly communist, yet filled with creature comforts, good food, and the beautiful Hungarian women. Limited in his movements, he still had plenty of clout in some of the former communist countries in the old Soviet sphere of influence, and it would not be surprising if he could come and go with relative impunity, so long as nobody made a fuss. Though penetrated by German traders in the Middle Ages, the area had never really been civilized, and as one of the central battlegrounds in the war between Islam and the West, it bore the bloody scars of a millennium of conflict.

The best part, from his perspective, was that it was right on the border of Romania and Serbia, which certainly had no love for the United States, and within striking distance of both Ukraine and Bulgaria, and the ports along the Black Sea.

And across the Black Sea, of course, lay eastern Turkey and then, Iran. Her home, still. No matter where she lived, no matter what happened, and no matter where she ended up, she would always think of it that way.

She shook off feelings, brought on by her hunt for Skorzeny and Amanda Harrington. On the flight, she had brought herself up to speed on every action the man had made since their last encounter in Clairvaux. Using both classified information and open-source material she’d been able to assemble a picture of the monster. His movements were severely restricted, but he was still allowed to operate his business interests-much reduced since the failure of his attack on America-and his Foundation, whose real purpose and activities continued to fly under the media radar.

He was a devil, she had to give him that. Perhaps as a result of his childhood, he had become a master of playing both sides of the street. He was both a rapacious capitalist and a committed one-worlder, whose largesse benefited both former communist societies and the Western poor alike. Renowned for his taste in classical music, there was hardly a symphony orchestra or an opera company on earth that did not benefit from his largesse, and until he went to ground last year, he could often be seen in his private boxes around the globe, taking in a performance of Tosca or Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Less visibly, he was in league with just about every terrorist organization on the face of the earth, surreptitiously funneling money to them through a variety of dummy corporations and charities, destabilizing smaller countries, then swooping in and making a killing. None of it, of course, could be directly traced to him; he had as much plausible deniability as any head of state.