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Authors: Michael Walsh

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C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-NINE
Lemoore Naval Air Station
The kids were already in bed. Hope felt bad about waking them up, but she had no choice.
Mrs. Atchison helped her get their things together. “It's all right, honey,” she said to Jade as Hope tended to Rory and Emma. “You're all going to New York City. Won't that be fun?”
Jade didn't care much one way or the other about New York City, but she doubted that either Rory or Emma would be looking forward to the trip, not after what happened to them there the last time.
“Thank you, Mrs. Atchison. Will I get to see my dad?”
Mrs. Atchison had obviously been fully briefed, because she drew Jade close and whispered in her ear: “Take care of them now. You all have to be strong for one another.”
Jade nodded. Tragedy was something she and the Gardner kids had in common. The loss of a parent. Of course, she hadn't had to endure what Emma had; she wondered if she would have been able to hold up as well, or emerge so relatively normal.
The admiral appeared in the doorway. “It's time.”
A driver took them to the airfield, where a transport plane was fueled and ready; both the admiral and his wife came along.
“Cool!” shouted Rory as he saw the interior of the plane.
“Just like being a real soldier or sailor, Rory,” said the admiral. “Do you think you'd like to the try that someday?”
“Would I ever!” exclaimed Rory.
“Then, when you're old enough, you be sure to write to me and I'll see what I can do.”
“Wow! Thank you, Admiral Atchison.”
As Mrs. Atchison helped get the kids strapped in, the admiral took Hope aside. “Listen,” he began, “I'm not privy to any of the details, but I do know that this operation involves you. Don't worry, it's not going to be dangerous. But your husband needs someone he can trust to act as a go-between in a very sensitive situation, and he asked for you.”
“He's not my husband,” said Hope softly.
“My error.”
Hope blushed a little. “I think he was going to propose to me in San Francisco. That's why we were heading up there, when . . . The last time we were in New York . . . well, you probably know.”
“I heard. You and your kids have been through a lot.”
“Is Danny going to meet us there?”
“I'm sorry, ma'am, I can't tell you that. I don't know—but even if I did, I couldn't.”
“I understand. Thank you for everything, Admiral.”
“Anything we can do . . .”
They left. The crew shut the doors. The plane rumbled down the taxiway and soared into the sky.
C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
Baku
“I am beginning to be concerned, Mlle. Derrida.”
She looked up from her reading. There was nothing to do in this godforsaken town. It still had the old Soviet smell about it, the same hopelessness, the same rundown atmosphere, as if tomorrow was inevitably going to be worse than today and there was not a damn thing anybody could about it.
She'd admired Baku Bay, seen the Azerbaijan State Philharmonic Hall, traipsed up and down the Maiden Tower, from which some princess or other was said to have thrown herself in an attempt to escape the place. She could certainly understand that.
“It's Iran,” she said. “Not France. Things happen.”
Skorzeny shot her a look. How unlike his late adjutant and majordomo, M. Paul Pilier, she was. He had been a man of impeccable taste and breeding, and quite handy in a tight spot. She, on the other hand, was a French lesbian intellectual.
The thought of the late M. Pilier got him to thinking about Maryam again—she had shot his man back at Clairvaux—and his impatience only grew. “Try her again.”
“I don't think that's a wise idea, M. Skorzeny,” she said. “You're wanted by the American government. You may assume that the Black Widow is tracking any unsecured communication, and no matter how good you think your technology is, theirs is better. So I advise you to maintain operational security and try to enjoy the wonders of Baku.”
“I trusted her,” he muttered, growing agitated.
“That's your problem,” said Mlle. Derrida, and returned to her reading.
He needed to get out of there. He was a man of property as well as principle. A man at home everywhere. “I am going out for a constitutional,” he informed her.
“Do you want me to shadow you in case someone tries to grab you?”
“Don't be absurd,” he said, and left.
Out on the street he took a deep breath of the sea air. There was, in fact, a man he wanted to meet. A man with whom he had business, and a man whom he counted on for the utmost discretion. He began to reach for his phone, then thought better of it; perhaps Mlle. Derrida was right. There was no point in coming all this way, and getting this far, only to blow it at the end over something as silly as a woman. He trusted her, and that was that.
The building he sought was near Boyukshor Lake, near the steel company. Not very fashionable. But that is exactly what he would have expected.
Slobodan Petrovich had come out of the old Soviet Union—where, exactly, was not clear—and after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. had made a fortune operating in the interstices of communism and capitalism. There were vast sums of money to be made in such tight spots, and Petrovich made them. And yet he lived here, anonymously. He was a man after Skorzeny's own heart.
The taxi stopped in front of a typical Soviet piece of industrial architecture. Skorzeny entered an office and spoke Russian to the functionary; he had not spent all that time as a guest of the Red Army at the end of the war without learning their language. He thought it might be difficult to see Petrovich, or that perhaps he was living there under a pseudonym, but no: he was told exactly where to find the man, and find him soon enough he did.
The door was made of steel. There were no peepholes or any visible security devices, but before he could rap on it, it slid to one side and there stood the financier, a cigar in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. “I've been expecting you,” he said, stepping aside to admit Skorzeny.
Skorzeny entered gingerly. He was not used to being a guest in someone else's house; in fact, lately he was not used to being in a home at all. With Tyler's fatwa against him, he had spent most of his recent life on board his specially outfitted Boeing 707, condemned like some latter-day Flying Dutchman to only the most unpleasant ports of call. Ah, but look how well that was going to work out, despite what happened to the late Arash Kohanloo and his merry band of terrorists in New York City.
Petrovich had helped with that operation. It was difficult—although not impossible—to launder money from the air, but to have an ally on the ground, living in a Muslim country but completely at home with the old Soviet ways of evading taxes and getting a maximum return on one's investment . . . well, that was invaluable. He needed a paymaster, fixer, and investor, and in Slobodan Petrovich, he got all three.
“Has the package been delivered?” said Petrovich. The man's tastes ran to the sybaritic, it was true, but then Skorzeny's own handsomely appointed apartments in Vaduz and Paris, with their priceless art and furnishings, bespoke his sophistication as well.
“Things are under way in Iran, yes,” said Skorzeny, not quite sure what to do with himself. Petrovich noticed his social discomfort, and yet did not move to offer him a seat, a cigar, or a drink.
“What about New York?”
“Countdown has begun. Timing is everything, and I believe I can predict with a degree of high confidence that simultaneity will be very nearly achieved. First the one, then the other.”
“And our Iranian friends get the blame?”
“Of course. After all, they are the ones who are guilty. You and I are . . . just bystanders.”
“And about to make a great deal of money shorting the market. I congratulate you. Now, tell me the real reason you honor my house with your presence. You've lost your girl, haven't you? Or, judging from your demeanor, both of them. There's a line from Oscar Wilde that might be appropriate right about now.”
Skorzeny finally chose an uncomfortable-looking chair and sat. He didn't plan to stay long. Just long enough to make sure their business arrangement was solid; later, if he had to, he could have Petrovich killed. In the aftermath of what was about to happen, no one would notice.
“I must say, Emanuel,” said Petrovich, relighting his cigar, “so far your plan is going splendidly. Have you seen the news from Africa today? The entire continent is in flames. Blend excitable people with machetes with competing superstitions and you have a prescription for a bloodbath that is making Rwanda look like a warm-up act at a bad Moscow nightclub. You've been to bad Moscow nightclubs, I assume?”
Skorzeny let the question float. “Tomorrow, the Philippines. Muslims and Christians have been fighting there since the Moros. It won't take much for the beheadings to start. Then, Paris—think of the reaction of the Muslims, and how much damage they will be able to do to Notre Dame and San Sulpice before the flics get out of bed. Paris will be lost to tourists forever.”
“The girls,” prompted Petrovich. “The girls.”
Skorzeny thought, then decided to tell the truth. “Radio silence.”
“You old fool. She's left you, and taken God only knows what with her.”
“Impossible. I am everything to her. And, in any case, it doesn't matter. Should the mullahs get their hands on both of them, well . . . that is one fewer problem for me in the days and weeks ahead.” He decided to change the subject. “Where will you go when it happens? Baku seems uncomfortably close to . . . ground zero.”
“I have my bolt-holes,” replied Petrovich, “as I'm sure do you.” He had remained standing throughout the interview, but now moved toward the door. “This conversation is very pleasant, more pleasant than I would have imagined, but as I never mix business with pleasure, it must come to an end, for we are not friends, merely business partners.... What do you suppose the damage will be? An idle question, but please indulge me.”
“I estimate that up to a million people will be killed in the blast, or will subsequently die from radiation poisoning, and much of the island will be rendered uninhabitable for a very long time. Manhattan will finished as a center for world finance.”
“That's it, then.” Petrovich helped Skorzeny to his feet and began to propel him to the door. Skorzeny could feel himself getting hot under the collar—nobody was supposed to touch him, and the fact that this parvenu thought he needed assistance was an outrage. He would most definitely deal with Tovarish Petrovich when the time came.
“My man has positioned the device as per your instructions, but, if I may say so, the thing has been well-hidden and not connected to any electrical source. What about the trigger?”
“Leave that to me.” said Skorzeny, exiting.
Outside, on the street, he brushed his lapels and his sleeves, then began looking for a taxi.
Typically Soviet, there were no taxis, and he would be damned if he were to stoop to bribing one of the workers for a ride in something that still looked distressingly like a Lada.
Very well, then, he would walk. And when he got back, it would be time to open the delicious little Maryam's precious laptop and see what mischief he could cause before all hell broke loose.
C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-ONE
In the air
Devlin had always been able to sleep on planes, sleep in elevators, sleep standing up, sleep wherever and whenever; in his line of work you never knew where your next nap or good night's sleep was going to come from. But now, here above the Atlantic and on his way to whatever Fate finally had in store for him, he couldn't.
Danny was racked out. Good, he and his boys would have the toughest part of the gig, getting in below Iranian air defenses and putting boots on the ground, in and out as fast as possible but not one second less than the mission called for. And nobody knew what that was going to be.
Devlin's job was, in a sense, simpler: get Maryam the hell out of there. Now that she was free, and roaming loose somewhere in the bowels of the Islamic Republic, she was no doubt amassing a treasure trove of actionable intelligence, something they were going to need when they explained to the world just why America had done what she'd done. But it would be too late for anybody to do anything about it.
Too late for the whiners, for the you-can't-do-that crowd, for the how-dare-you bunch, for the “higher moral authority” gang, for the lofty editorialists in the employ of Jake Sinclair, men and women who had never done a damn thing except learn to type. Too late for the blame-America-first johnnies, for the internationalists, for the one-worlders and the citizens of the planet. Devlin had spent half his life living overseas, spoke his languages better than most of the natives, and was at home everywhere. But he never felt that he was anything but an American.
Maybe that's how you felt when you saw your mother die in the service of her country and then be called a traitor.
Maybe that's how you felt when you saw your father killed trying to save your mother.
Maybe that's how you felt when you were raised by a man you despised, a man who had played both sides of the political street for so long that he'd forgotten which side was his. A man who helped ruin your family and create the monster you were now seeking. The man who raised you to be the perfect, anonymous killing machine, the perfect agent, the perfect invisible man.
Maybe that's how you felt when you could have anything in the world except happiness.
And that's why he, the American, was going into Iran to rescue the Iranian. Because only she offered him a way out. And all he had to do was trust her, implicitly and faithfully.
The roses, glistening in the rainless desert. The doorway. The call to repentance. There could be no rational explanation for what he saw, or why. The vision in the Mojave had been but a prelude for what he was now about to do. Was there really a God? Up 'til now, he'd never seen any evidence for one. But something had happened out there....
Which brought him to the real apparitions. It would have been easy to dismiss the one in Garabandal, a place that seemed to grow a new crop of impressionable schoolgirls every generation. All these BVM stories were depressingly the same—you'd think that when the Virgin finally decided to show, she'd have something new to say, something beyond her usual “repent” and “honor my Son” bromides. And always the same MO, appearing to kids, in Fatima, Lourdes, Medjugorje.
Until now. Maybe the first Zeitoun event, back in the sixties, had been faked—the photographs certainly looked absurd—but millions of people just saw
something
, and set off the tinderbox. And Kaduna . . . the savagery was appalling, especially when Mohammed got into the act. To think that in the twenty-first century human beings were still slaughtering other human beings like cattle, hacking each other to pieces with machetes. And now, according to some information just coming over his Android, there was trouble on Mindanao, where the fighting was said to be especially fierce. It was almost as if—
Wait a minute. Long ago he had learned that it was never “almost as if.” The proper formulation was: “It was as if . . .”
No “ifs” about it. Except for the first apparition, the Virgin's appearances had been in places of maximum religious and cultural tension, powder kegs that barely needed a spark. So why in the name of a merciful God would . . .
Merciful God, his foot. This had nothing to do with a merciful God. Somebody was doing this—somebody looking to destabilize as much of the planet as he—or they—could, before . . .
Before what? What was the end game? The Iranian nuclear program made sense; the crazies who controlled the government wanted a fireball, preferably in either Israel or a major American city, precisely because they desired the retaliation that surely must follow. The occluded Mahdi, dreaming for centuries at the bottom of his well, needed a provocation in order to render the apocalypse. But . . .
But what if . . .
But what if there was a puppet master behind even the Iranians? Someone with enough wealth and power and influence and reach to manipulate their superstition and turn it to his own ends?
An atheist's apocalypse. The End Times without an end game. No triumph of good over evil, no submission of all to the will of Allah . . . just an endless, barren emptiness, in which one lone voice could be heard crying out, “I told you so.”
Skorzeny. He'd been right about him all along.
Not motivated by money.
Not motivated by greed.
Not motivated by ideology.
Motivated solely by suffering and revenge. That was the meaning of the series of codes Atwater had solved, with its ultimate terminus in the nihilism of the double-cross-plusone:
XXX marks the spot.
The world didn't deserve its patrimony, of which Emanuel Skorzeny was very much a part, one of history's gifts to the unenlightened. The world didn't appreciate his taste, his refinement, his genius. The world had grown weak. And so he was going to deprive the world—the Western world, anyway—of its highest glories by unleashing upon it the one force that defined itself in opposition to the West, in opposition to Judeo-Christianity, and which would never rest, would never accept peaceful coexistence, until it destroyed the West, or was itself destroyed:
Radical Islam, led by the millenarian sect of Iranian Shiias.
He is starting a worldwide religious war
.
That's what this is all about.
Chaos theory in action.
That was what it had always been about, from the time Skorzeny financed the terrorist operation in Edwardsville, hoping to panic the American public. When he tried to launch an EMP attack on both coasts. The assault on Times Square. But now he was widening the scope of his ambition, not just using freelance proxies but co-opting as much of a religion as possible.
Devlin and his few allies were no longer up against just a man like Milverton, an opportunist like Kohanloo, or a crazy like that kid. They were up against millions. They had no chance.
Unless their plan worked.
The only way to defeat a belief is to discredit it. Christianity and Judaism had been through this many times before: the false messiahs and moshiachs who had gathered unto them hundreds, even thousands of followers, until the day came when the holy man or rabbi died and didn't get back up again. Until the day that the earth was supposed to stand still never happened. Until the end times came and went, and people went on, crying, lamenting, worrying, fearing, fighting, loving.
But Islam had not.
Devlin was not a religious man; the only ghosts that need apply in his world were the ones he dispatched himself. Like the Marines, he had been raised to believe that his job was to keep heaven, or hell, filled with fresh souls. But he'd be lying to himself if he didn't admit that whatever had happened near California City had shaken him profoundly. It didn't make him believe, exactly, nor did it make him a believer—but, he realized with a start, it had made him believe in something. And even if that something was the life of just one human, it was a start on the long road to salvation.
He glanced back over at Danny, still asleep. That was the sign of the true combat vet: get plenty of shut-eye before the shooting started. Danny had so much to live for now, a woman and three children, and the two ghosts who would always be with them.
His ghosts: Devlin's ghosts. The ghosts who had surrounded him since that day in Rome, ghosts all around.
It was time for him to leave the ghosts behind.
It was time for him to rejoin the living.

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