Michael Walsh - Early Warning

Personally, he was fastidious to a fault, almost enough to make Howard Hughes at the end look sane. He chose his assistants carefully for their skills and their discretion. She had already had experience with one of them, the man named Pilier whom she had shot on the roof of Clairvaux prison, just before he could bring down the rescue helicopter. Now, if she read things correctly, he had a woman named Derrida, Emanuelle Derrida. Maryam chuckled. She liked that. It showed a sense of humor on the old goat’s part: a deconstructionist for an act of deconstruction. For she had no doubt that was what he was up to.

And now this business with Elgar. “Frank Ross” had relayed her Atwater ’s findings and theory immediately. For years, the Dorabella cipher had tantalized amateur cryptologists and Elgar lovers, and here was the simplest explanation of all, and one that would have presented itself immediately to any composer-that Elgar was writing out in a kind of shorthand the sketch of his plan for his first great orchestral work. Up to that point he had been a lesser composer; after it, he had taken his place among the greats. And all for the love of a woman.

It made perfect sense to her. Crazy love-random, unpredictable, mad, and often bad love-was really what made the world go round. True, institutional love with all its trappings gave society stability, provided for orderly succession of property and authority; without it, there could be no civilizations. But it was l’amour fou that caused the real breakthroughs, mad passion, meet one night and elope tomorrow, or throw away everything for a shot at the most inappropriate person imaginable. That was when great things happened, whether for good or for ill.

Combined with her training, Maryam set her woman’s intuition to work, playing back everything she remembered from that séance in the French prison. She had insinuated herself into the small orchestra Skorzeny had engaged for the occasion-Swiss boarding schools were very good, not only for languages but for musical instruction-and she had seen, up close, the look on that woman’s face: a prisoner of Skorzeny’s mad love. Skorzeny had nearly killed Amanda Harrington that day, and had they not gotten there in time to rescue the American woman’s daughter, Amanda might have died. Now she was with Skorzeny again, most likely unwillingly, and there could be only one reason: amour fou.

Amanda Harrington would be the way they were going to get Skorzeny.

Using the laptop he’d provided her and a 4G WNIC, Maryam worked the intel network feverishly, drawing a bead on Miss Harrington. Not for the first time, she blessed Frank for having given her this, one of the most sacred and secret tools in the CSS arsenal. Innovation was the way the West could always stay one step ahead of the East.

Her thoughts flashed back to her lover, somewhere on the ground in Manhattan. Oddly, she had no fears for him. Certainly not in the realm of direct combat. There was only one thing she feared: the wild card. In his battle in London against Milverton, she might have been able to accept his death, since it would have come against a worthy adversary, a man whose skills and kills were known to her first hand; she had seen him in action. Charles Augustus Milverton had died that day in Camden Town, but it could almost as easily have been “Frank Ross.” That she could have accepted and moved on. But not the chance shot, the senseless death. Then, life really would be as meaningless and random as the atheists said. And Maryam was nothing if not a good Muslim.

That night, in her room on the Pest side of the Hungarian capital, in one of those old commie-era hotels that had been acquired by a high-end Western chain, with the Danube flowing just outside to the west, she immersed herself in everything there was to discover about Amanda Harrington. Her birth, her schooling, her early lovers. Her life as one of London ’s “It” girls, her failed marriage, her abortion.

MI5, Britain ’s internal security service, had compiled a handsome dossier on her, largely attributable to her work as a City financial wiz and later the head of the Skorzeny Foundation, and it was a treasure trove of information. Like the FBI reports in the U.S., MI5 reports contained a great deal of unsubstantiated information, even gossip, but none of this had to be provable in a court of law. That was the problem with America these days, she thought: the threshold for conviction had become the de facto standard for everything, including the court of public opinion. The populace had become cowed, afraid to think a single thought that would not be admissible under the highly restrictive and defendant-friendly rules of evidence that had evolved over more than two centuries of constitutional law.

None of that interested her. At this moment, she was not an intelligence agent, but a woman, a fellow woman. Drill down:

The abortion. Not, according to the dossier, the product of her marriage to a probably homosexual lesser peer, but the result of a fling, a one-night stand, in New York while in town on business. The prospective father never knew; Amanda had dealt with the consequences of her actions privately, personally. But Maryam knew, she just knew, that this had been the event that had changed Miss Harrington’s life.

Suddenly, she understood everything.

The reason for the kidnapping of the American girl, Emma Gardner.

She scrolled back through the dossier: medical reports, medical reports…There-

As a result of the abortion, subject lost the physical ability to have children.

The girl Milverton had snatched in Edwardsville and presented to Amanda as a present. The one thing she had wanted more than anything else in the world. The one thing a lifelong career woman never had had time for. The one thing she, personally, could never have: a daughter.

So why was she with Skorzeny again?

Simple: it was he who had sicced “Frank Ross” on Milverton. He who had rolled the dice, in the realization that it almost didn’t matter which of the equally matched adversaries-Hector and Achilles-won, that either way he, Skorzeny, would be the true victor. That Milverton had died that day was just as well. His death removed a rival for Amanda’s hand, and the fact that Amanda, no thanks to Skorzeny, had survived her bout with the paralyzing poison-tetrodotoxin, the hospital report said, most likely derived from the poison of the Japanese fugu fish administered in a nonlethal dose-was evidence that Skorzeny still desired her and had, on some sick level, forgiven her.

She was his captive. And they were here, together, somewhere in Hungary.

Come on, girl: find her.

Search. Search for relationships, hidden relationships, the kind people used to easily be able to conceal, but now, with the aid of ERMs-Entity-Relationship Models-it was child’s play to create a diagram of nearly everybody’s business and personal relationships. That’s the thing most folks never understood, Maryam realized as she called up the diagram, that everything they typed on the computer, every picture or piece of personal information they posted on the social-networking sites, every comment they made on a website, which could be easily traced back to their IP addresses, went into their permanent file, their publicly available dossier, there not only for everybody living to see, but for all future generations as well. If there ever was a morality enforcer-and given the understanding that morality’s definition would change from generation to generation-the Internet was it.

It had to be here. It had to be. The one missing piece of information. The thing she needed to know. The overlooked item that would link Amanda Harrington and Emanuel Skorzeny to each other, inextricably link them in some sort of sick relationship that neither of them could gainsay, that they would assume Fate had dictated for them long before they were born.