Michael Walsh - Early Warning

Skorzeny, she knew, would believe none of this bullshit. Men believed in action, not in fate; they were the architects of their own desires, triumphs, tragedies, and misfortunes. Women believed in soul mates.

There had to be something between then, something that antedated Harrington’s working with Skorzeny. Something in both their pasts that led them to each other, something that they would both mistake for Fate, even when it was simple Chance. You could be an atheist, and believe the entire universe was random, but when it came to crunch time, no one ever begged chance for one more chance.

And then she found it. So simple, so unprepossessing, and hiding where all good secrets, and the best intelligence agents, operated: in plain sight.

Money and Love.

When all else failed, use Occam’s razor: The simplest explanation was most likely to be true.

What else was there, but Money and Love?

Money had first brought them together, and sick Love had kept them together. The sick love Skorzeny had for money and his desire for the solace, however temporary, but satisfying, of women. The love Amanda had for money; how, in the absence of a man and a child in her life, it had made her feel equal to men; and when Skorzeny tapped her-among all others!-for the leadership of his Foundation, what a proof it offered to all her detractors. With money she succeeded and with money she became equal; nay, primus inter pares in the world of the City.

And Love? For him, she had none. But that didn’t matter to a man like Skorzeny. Pace the Beatles, Skorzeny believed, like most men, that money really could buy you love, and if not love, at least the simulacrum of love, which meant sex and a modicum of affection outside the bedroom.

Milton understood it. The oldest bargain there was, the source of the world’s oldest profession. Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste brought Death into the World and the source of all our mortal Woe, with the loss of Eden…

She looked back at Atwater’s report, which amounted to this simple equation, this simple cipher, that not all the cryptographic machines that the CIA, the NSA, the CSS, and everybody else could muster against. The equivalent of Einstein’s E = Mc 2. Which was this:

Money-Love = Revenge.

She took a deep breath. Were she not a Muslim, she would have taken a deep drink as well, but she only drank when she was in the West, with him, and now that she was back in the East, things were different. Even though no one could see her, there were rituals, formalities, to be observed. No one need know, but she would know and at this point, that was all that mattered.

They had to be here. They had to be here in Hungary, somewhere. There was an intersection, an interstice, and she had to find it. Because, whatever it was, it would lead her to them. Or them to her. But not right now. She had had a long journey. She needed time to think.

Maryam took off her clothes and luxuriated under a long hot shower. That was something else that was forbidden, to enjoy the pleasure of your own body, alone, to reach out and try to connect with the driving mechanism of the universe, the eternal piston engine that He had designed, which Newton had grasped under the apple tree: for every action, an equal and opposite reaction. What goes up must come down. One door opens, another closes. A man dies, a child is born…

A knock at the door, which she discerned only dimly as she toweled off her head. One of those intrusive hotel “welcome” packages that they reserved for VIPs, or people with money, or both. Eastern Europe still admired money, in a way the West did not. Maybe that was because the West didn’t have money anymore.

She wrapped the hotel bathrobe tightly around her. By hotel standards, it was pretty darned nice; assuming that roughly one-third of the guests would steal the robes, the prices charged were fairly reasonable.

The laptop lay open and operative on the coffee table.

There was a woman at the door. Not a room service woman, not an employee of the hotel, no one she was expecting, but someone she very much anticipated seeing.

“Hello,” said Amanda Harrington.

And, right behind her, Emanuel Skorzeny. “Bonjour, mon cher,” he said. He had a gun in his hand. He looked over her shoulder, into the room, toward the laptop, and smiled. “May we come in?”

Amanda brushed past her with only a sidelong glance, but Skorzeny seemed genuinely please to be meeting her for the first time. “Really, my dear, you are as lovely as I had heard. Truly splendid.” His mien darkened. “But, as you deprived me of the services of a very faithful and valuable retainer at our last encounter, I feel it necessary to introduce you to his successor.”

He moved to one side. Behind him stood another woman, blond and beautiful.

She had a gun in her hand, and looked like she knew how to use it, so there was no point in arguing. Maryam ushered them into the room and closed the door.

She turned, knowing there was nothing to do. Skorzeny sat down like he owned the place-which, come to think of it, was a distinct possibility. Amanda stood off to one side, almost flinching; her eyes met Maryam’s, just as they had back at Clairvaux, only this time their positions were reversed, and Maryam was now the helpless one, while Amanda was the one who might save her if she could, but not right now.

“Put on some music, please,” Skorzeny commanded, and Amanda dutifully obliged. The hotel came equipped with a flat-screen TV that also carried hundreds of audio channels. In just a few seconds, Amanda had found the channel she was looking for and the music came wafting into the room.

“Turn it up,” said Skorzeny, breaking into a broad smile as he heard the familiar strains of the overture: brassy, with urgent strings. He addressed his next remarks to her: “You recognize it, of course. Somehow approrpiate, wouldn’t you say?”

The second woman, the one with the gun-she must be Derrida-said nothing as she started to copy the laptop files. Skorzeny noticed and jumped from his seat:

“Good God, woman, what do you think you are doing? Don’t touch that. This devil poisons everything he touches.”

Mlle. Derrida stopped and backed away from the machine.

“Our hostess is going to close it down, as per the safety instruction manual. And then we are going to take it, and her, with us.”

Skorzeny turned back to Maryam. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the blonde preparing a needle, with her name on it. The fugu poison again? There was nothing she could do about it.

“You haven’t answered my question, my dear,” said Skorzeny as Mlle. Derrida approached her. She was powerless to resist. Better to let it happen now, to learn as much as possible while she was in captivity, to try and figure out a way to escape later, to-

The needle pinched a little, and almost immediately, she felt herself shutting down.

“The music?” Skorzeny looked at her, mouthed words at her, but she couldn’t make any sense of them in any language. She was so tired. Just before she went completely paralyzed, she might have heard him say:

“It’s the overture to La Forza del Destino. What an amazing coincidence.”

But then her world turned dark and she didn’t care anymore.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Principessa Stanley awoke with a start. She didn’t remember much, but what she did remember wasn’t good. Where was she? Where had she been last night?