Michael Walsh: Early Warning

Danny heard that and throttled forward, the chopper responding to the master’s touch. But he also turned sharply to the right; Lannie lost his grip on Byrne, who slid forward. His gun fell out of his suit pocket, toward the open door.

Byrne had a choice: the shot or his father’s pistol. For years he had carried that gun around with him like a cross, as a way of honoring his dad, but now he realized that the gun was just an inanimate object, something that long ago lost any and all meaning for his father, something in fact that had failed him in his moment of need. All these years Byrne had carried it in his memory, even used it in his memory, had shot his own half-brother with it.

There was the boat. There was the man. Ferguson, or whoever the hell he was, needed to make another turn and get them head-on at the target. And then he would take him out. “Get me a clean shot!” he yelled.

Lannie saw what was going to happen, but there was nothing he could do. He dropped the computer and grabbed both of Byrne’s legs. If the gun went, the gun went; the Boss would just have to get used to the 9 mm.

Danny threw her into a hard turn, spun once as he gained full control of the aircraft, then dropped her down practically to the water itself. Damn, the man was as good as he said he was. Not that it was up to him to be as good as he said he was.

The miracle appeared before him, floating like an angry, evil dragonfly above the surface of the choppy waters. Allah be praised! He would now show himself worthy of this great honor that had been granted him.

Arash Kohanloo reached for an AK-47 and begin firing it at the approaching helicopter.

The windscreen was bulletproof, but Francis Byrne was not. He had to make his shot. No need for ID now. Just take him out. Byrne squeezed the trigger, aiming for the hull.

The 50-caliber round punched through the boat as if it wasn’t there, tearing through the hull and exiting out the back. But he had missed the engine block itself, and so the distance between them was closing rapidly.

The shot had also given away Byrne’s position within the craft. He could feel the bullet whizzing by his head as the man trained his fire upon him. “Don’t you people ever give up?” he groused to no one in particular, then realized what he’d said. No time for apologies. He heard Lannie’s answer as he fired-

“No, Boss-do the Irish?”

This time, the shot hit the engine block square and the boat suddenly went dead in the water. Not motionless, though: its forward moment kept propelling it toward the chopper.

“Want me to pull out, Captain?” shouted Danny. The man was fearless, Byrne would give him that. “You can get a clean shot from any angle.”

Byrne shook his head. “Evasive action, but keep me lined up.”

Danny didn’t bother to shout that evasive action was going to be sickening action, as he would be swinging the craft from side to side, moving her up and down like one of those low-riders the Mexican gangbangers back in L.A. used to cruise and bruise. “Hold on.”

The Koala hopped. Kohanloo fired another burst. Byrne squeezed the trigger.

Arash Kohanloo felt the bullet tear off his right arm. Not go through it, but tear it completely off. The AK-47, still on full auto, fell into the river. The pain made him delirious, the blood made him happy. He smiled and cheered and yelled at the man with the rifle. “Shoot me again! Shoot again, you dog! You coward! You cannot kill me, for I am a Brother. I go to immortality!”

Lannie fed him another round. This one was greasy, slippery, and as Byrne looked down at his hand, he noticed it was bloody. “What the hell?”

Lannie held up a small vial of viscous fluid. “Pig’s blood. I want you to send this bastard to hell for what he does to me and my people and my faith. I want him cursed for all eternity, the Shi’a swine.”

Byrne tossed the round back to Aslan. “Save it for somebody who really needs it,” he shouted. “I’m going to send him to hell the good old-fashioned Irish way. With one in the brain.”

“Allahu Akbar!” shouted Kohanloo.

“Fuck you,” muttered Byrne, and he fired the third shot.

The recoil knocked his father’s sidearm to the lip of the door…

For less than a tenth of a second the world moved in slow motion for Arash Kohanloo, as Allah himself slowed it to a crawl. Gone was the pain, and in its place came the certainty of knowing that heaven was his, that all he had to do was reach out and embrace it, embrace his fate, embrace his destiny.

The round entered Kohanloo’s open mouth, blew out the back of his head and then, on its downward trajectory, punched a hole through the bottom of the boat. Quickly, it filled with water and began to sink.

…and as Danny throttled forward to fly over the wrecked boat, the gun toppled out the door and into the East River.

Byrne looked at Lannie: “Get down there, right now. Hurry.”

Lannie hesitated. “You mean, retrieve the gun?’ He would if ordered. From this moment on he would do anything his captain asked him to do.

“No, you dumb raghead. Get on that boat before the fucker sinks and grab what you can. Martin, can you put us-”

Already done. They were right over the sinking craft. Lannie threw out the rope ladder and went over the side-

“Get papers, equipment, whatever. Forget the gun. And him,” he said, indicating the corpse, “you leave for the fishes.”

Falls Church, Virginia

Cautiously, Devlin disabled the security services on his old house in the near Virginia suburbs of Washington. He had not been in the house since the events of last year, had assumed in the wake of the FBI raid, he would have to blow it, which meant he painstakingly had to clear the charges to once more render it habitable.

He had to laugh. Falls Church had once been a prosperous and stable small city-the smallest in the country-but like everything and every place in America, it had changed radically. Today, naturally, it was a hotbed of anti-American Islamic activity, just a few miles from the Capitol. One thing you could say about the Americans; they were going to let their newfound fetish tolerance run free if it got them all killed. And if and when it did, the hell with them.

He moved into his secure room, which was just as he left it. He had just witnessed a boy much like himself go willingly to his death out of passion-not for some abstract bullshit ideal, but for something he believed in, during the course of which he touched something he had never touched before-not just a woman, but the Other. In his sick, twisted way, Raymond Crankheit had caught a glimpse of the other side, the side where happiness dwelled, and he’d liked it well enough not to kill Principessa Stanley. Just as he, Devlin, had caught that glimpse with Maryam and decided to gamble everything on his one chance at happiness.

“Do you trust the bitch? You don’t even know her real name.”

Where the hell was she? He had not heard from her since her last message from Budapest, and though he knew he shouldn’t care, it was only business, she was on assignment-his assignment-and that op sec was indeed everything…he still cared.

Maybe it had been a mistake to bring her in. Maybe he should have killed her last year when he had the chance, after their night together in Echo Park, a mercy killing. Maybe he should have let her die in Paris, when she took a bullet for him.

Maybe…but then where would he be?

He’d watched the entire Kohanloo takedown from one of the safe houses on the Upper East Side, near Gracie Mansion. Using the electronic entrepôt that Byrne had given him-one that he knew would be temporary and limited to this operation-he was able to see the whole thing from the chopper’s built-in cams, part of the same mechanism that gave the flying machine its night vision. He would have liked to have been part of that, but he had acted on his intuition that Byrne was a right gee, as the cops used to say back in the old days, and he’d been proven correct.