Michael Walsh Bundle (17 page)

L
OS
A
NGELES

“Daddy!”

Jade jumped into his arms, and Eddie hugged her tight. He hated leaving his daughter, hated even more leaving his wife, hated in fact everything about his job except the job itself. He was also bone tired, happy that he had been able to rescue that woman and her son, and profoundly pissed off that the job had gone so wrong at the end. That had never happened with a “Tom Powers” job before…

“How was your ride in the chopper?”

Eddie Bartlett put his daughter down on the ground, stepped back, and then kissed her again. His wife, Diane, beamed from the kitchen doorway. Eddie was never quite sure what if anything Diane knew about what he did, but one of the reasons he had married her was that she was smart and she was discreet, and so he never asked and she never told.

“Lots of fun.”

“Will you take me with you the next time?”

“You bet, pumpkin.”

Jade pulled a face. “That's what you always say.”

“And that's what I always mean. So there we have it—means, motive…now all we need is the opportunity—”

“Which I hope to God never comes,” said Diane. She wrapped herself around him, kissing him as passionately as propriety permitted.

“Get a room, you two,” observed Jade.

“We've already got one,” said Eddie. “In fact, we've got a whole house. A bedroom, too. How do you think you got here?”

“Awww…”

“What do they teach you in that expensive private school of yours, anyway?”

Jade took a step back and smiled that knowing smile of hers, so much wiser and older than her eight years. “You don't want to know.”

Eddie was about to say something when Diane stepped between them. “All right, you two, enough of this banter. You and I have some serious shopping to do, young lady, and I know just where we're going to do it.”

So did Jade: “The Grove?” The Grove was a kind of Disneyland for shoppers adjacent to the old Farmer's Market at Fairfax and Third, turning a forlorn corner of the old Kosher Canyon into one of the most successful outdoor malls and entertainment complexes in America.

As Diane nodded, Jade let out what sounded like a series of war whoops, which was the way young girls expressed enthusiasm these days. Then she turned to Eddie, “Are you coming, too, Daddy?”

Eddie shook his head. “I think I'm going to catch a little shut-eye, pumpkin,” he said. “If you don't mind.”

Jade seemed a little disappointed, but Diane took her by the hand. “Your father's been working hard and he needs a little nap, just like you do sometimes. By the time we get back, he'll be tanned, rested, and ready—and then we'll all go to Fat Fish for sushi. Okay?”

More war whoops. If there was anything Jade loved more than shopping at the Grove with her mom, it was sushi at Fat Fish, in West Hollywood.

“What are you spending my hard-earned money on today?” he asked, as a wave of exhaustion washed over him.

“Duh—a new MacBook? Can I get anything for you, Daddy?” asked Jade

Eddie looked at Diane and smiled. “Just bring your mommy home safe to me and we'll call it even,” he said.

Diane kissed him on her way out the door. “Good-bye, Danny,” she said.

Danny Impellatieri was “Eddie Bartlett's” real name, and the Impellatieri family lived quietly and unostentatiously in one of those houses in Los Feliz that most Angelenos never knew existed. Built by a random scion of the Chandler family in the mid-1920s, the house lay sheltered away on Hobart Street in the flats between Franklin Street and Los Feliz Boulevard, just west of Loughlin Park, the gated neighborhood where Hollywood had set down temporary roots between its founding in Echo Park and its later incarnation in Hancock Park, Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Bel-Air, and Pacific Palisades.

The great March to the Sea, however, was now over and many of the young Hollywood stars were now rediscovering the joys of living off the Wilshire-Beverly-Sunset grid and finding that they could somehow survive without getting shot in neighborhoods close to, you know, where “they” lived. “They” being LA PC-speak for People of Color.

The Impellatieri home boasted five bedrooms, a den, a swimming pool, a cabana, a billiards room, a formal dining room with fireplace and an elegant living room, all of which he bought half a dozen years ago for less than half a million. That was the beauty of LA, he thought: letting other people's prejudices make you a fortune in real estate. The next thing you knew, houses in Echo Park would be hot again.

What a world, thought Eddie, kicking off his shoes and stumbling into bed. From Edwardsville he had traveled by car to a private airfield near Springfield, then flew to North Carolina to file his report with Xe and fill out the paperwork to get his men paid directly into their offshore bank accounts. He had caught the first commercial flight out this morning and so was back in LA by noon and home by one.

The pillow still smelled like Diane.

He grabbed the remote, to see what the cables were saying about Edwardsville. Sure enough, they were still running with the “Aftermath of the Tragedy” logos—these days, direct, murderous assaults on Americans were called “tragedies” instead of “acts of war”—interviews with the parents of the school kids, the local cops, even a clown or two from the FBI, whose pride was mixed with the egg on their faces from the explosion. He punched up the volume a couple of notches:

“We believe these were home-grown terrorists,” said a man identified as Leslie P. Waters, the special agent-in-charge for the St. Louis area. “Notwithstanding the allusions to Allah, etcetera, at this time there is no evidence that this was anything other than a…”

Right, thought Eddie, hitting the mute button. He supposed that the ability to make asinine weasel statements were part of the training at Quantico these days, but in this case he could cut Leslie P. Waters some slack, since there was no way anybody associated with “Tom Powers” was going to get fingered. Operational security in a Powers operation came before everything.

Although Eddie worked at his instruction, he had complete latitude in putting together his team. He had a few rules: no two men from the same past military unit at the same time, no two men with the same specialty, nobody except service members or those who had passed through Xe's rigorous training program in North Carolina. Xe had come in for a lot of heat since the Iraq War, but it was still the goto protective service of choice for Republicans, Democrats, and journalists alike—those who wanted to live, anyway.

Still, there was something about the Edwardsville operation that was nagging him. He couldn't quite put his finger on it, but the very fact that the operation had not been a complete success very nearly meant that it was a total failure. Not only in his eyes but, he was sure, in Tom Powers's eyes as well. It wasn't that the school assault itself was that surprising—hell, the government had been worrying about a Beslan copycat for years. It was that everything had gone so well, and yet ended so badly. He had never known Powers to fuck up like that, and it made him wonder. Wonder if Powers was slipping, wonder if their team somehow got compromised, wonder if something else, something he couldn't see but only sense, was going on beneath the surface of an apparent terrorist operation.

Oh, well, plenty of time to hash that over when he was rested…

Sometimes, just before he fell asleep, he would think back to his days with the 160th. Although he rarely got behind the controls of a chopper these days, the gift of flight was still in his fingertips, and no matter how much the technology changed and evolved, his natural affinity for the soaring birds had not.

He left the tube on as he soared over, not rafted down, the River Lethe. His last memory was kissing Diane and Jade a little harder than normal, which hours later after uneasy slumber, he realized was just about the only thing he had done right.

C
AMP
D
AVID
, M
ARYLAND

If you were going to liquidate somebody, reflected Devlin, you couldn't pick a better place than Camp David. For one thing, despite its deceptively idyllic mountain location in the Catoctins, its real name was Naval Support Facility Thurmont, with every sailor in the place, including the kitchen staff, boasting a “Yankee White” DoD security clearance—the highest available for this kind of duty. What happened at Camp David stayed at Camp David.

For another, it was guarded by an elite unit that even Devlin had to admire, the MSC-CD. This unit, whose acronym stood for Marine Security Company—Camp David, was the best the Corps had to offer, highly screened infantrymen handpicked for training at the Marine Corps Security Forces School in Chesapeake, Virginia. Camp David was 125 lethal acres of high-security rustication. FDR had dubbed it “Shangri-La,” a name later downgraded to Camp David by Ike, in honor of his grandson.

Devlin had forsaken all thoughts of monkey business straightaway. You came to Camp David and you took your medicine like a man. With Seelye, he normally insisted on as many security protocols as possible, but in a rural retreat with a handful of cabins and a whole lot of patrolled woods, there really wasn't any place for him to hide.

He entered the camp using one of his false identities, this one proclaiming him to be a ship's carpenter with a “Yankee White” clearance, which Seelye had determined was one of the two job openings on the base at the moment, the other being a gardener. As he passed through the gates, his practiced eye took in the myriad security cameras and other surveillance devices, not to mention the camouflaged Marines lurking just beyond the visible perimeter. Camp David was only sixty miles from Washington, not far from Gettysburg, and not exactly the biggest secret in the world, so many were the nutbags who packed their cars full of ammo and explosives and motored on up to see if the POTUS hunting was good that day. Some of them were detained until they sobered up, some of them arrested, and the worst of them sent off to prisons in Colorado and North Carolina for a very long time. A few of them were even shot, although their death certificates later read “automobile crash” or “hunting accident” or, his favorite, “domestic altercation.”

In the past decade, since September 11, security had been ratcheted up to a whole new level. It took only a couple of would-be car bombers for the government to revamp its watch list from “good ole boys with a snootful” to “armed moonbats/wingnuts” and “full-throttle jihadis.” While there was still a certain amount of on-site triangulation, nobody thought a goober with a gun was particularly funny any more, and as for Dinesh from Dearborn, he quickly found himself on a plane to a very nasty Egyptian prison, or pushing up daisies, or both.

The thermal scanners, both ground-based and aerial, were just the beginning. The one at the main gate, whose presence was obvious to anybody, also doubled as an X-ray machine with the power of a CAT scanner. Radiation detectors were stationed at viable intervals along every roadway and pathway; a miscreant didn't actually have to have anything nuclear on his person for him to be detected, he just had to have been, once upon a time, within kissing distance of any such device, whether suitcase-nuke or dirty bomb. The Marine guards surveyed everyone with the same dead-eyed suspicion, their trigger fingers transparently itchy (to him, at least), which is something he understood; if you were going to catch this shit-ass bucolic duty, waiting for the president to kick back or, worse, entertain some scum-sucking bottom-feeder of a foreign potentate, you might as well be ready to party if and when the time came.

Seelye was waiting for him just beyond the main gate. “Trouble?”

“Not today, thanks,” he replied, trying to sort out his feelings.

They rarely saw each other, which was fine by both of them. If Seelye had drawn this up on the blackboard back in 1985, it couldn't have turned out better for him, or worse for Devlin. The man who had made a whore of his mother and a cuckold out of his father, and who had inadvertently gotten both of them killed. The man who had brought Devlin back to life as someone he was not, re-created him, trained him to become…

To become what he was. Whatever that was.

Many were the times he'd thought of simply killing Seelye and getting the whole farce over with. With a gun, a knife, an ashtray, a fireplace poker, a shattered beer bottle, his bare hands, Colonel Mustard in the Parlor with the Lead Pipe. The thing could be done in moments, and either he would die in a hail of retaliatory gunfire, or be beaten into submission and arrested, or be given a medal and sent into well-deserved retirement. It didn't matter. It was a way out.

“The president's very much looking forward to meeting you,” Seelye was saying.

“Unfortunately, the feeling is very much not mutual.”

“Come on, he's the president.”

“Which means he's the guy I don't want to meet. I don't serve the man, Army, I serve the office. Better to imagine an empty suit than a man. Less disgusting too considering some of the men.”

Army smiled inwardly; Devlin had not lost his edge. “And an empty suit is precisely who you're about to meet. So keep a civil tongue in your head, answer his questions, take your orders, and leave.”

“This was never part of our deal, Army. No face-to-face. Bulletproof deniability. What does he want?”

Seelye didn't look at him. He hardly ever looked at him, even when Devlin was a kid. “He wants to see the man who saved all those middle-American schoolchildren from a bunch of ruthless terrorists. After all, ‘the children'—”

“‘—are our future.'”

“Something like that. Hey, it wins elections.”

“Is it going to win the next election?”

“Here we are.”

They were at Aspen Lodge, the presidential retreat. Dogwood, Maple, Holly, Birch, Rosebud—they were for visitors. Aspen was where the Big He lived.

“I don't like it.”

“Then that makes you a minority of one,” said Seelye, ushering him through the door. “Churchill sure did. Sadat as well.”

“Look what happened to him,” said Devlin.

“Through those doors,” said Seelye, pointing ahead.

It was just cool enough outside for the walk-in fireplace to be roaring, consuming vast quantities of maple, birch, holly, dogwood, and aspen. Jeb Tyler was wearing a cardigan and an ascot. He was standing, framed against the fireplace, as they entered. “This must be—”

He caught himself and didn't mention Devlin's name, as he'd been briefed by Seelye not to do. “I thought you'd be taller.” The president didn't offer his hand and neither did Devlin.

“I try to be, sir,” replied Devlin.

Tyler didn't get the joke or the reference, as his expression showed.

“Doghouse Reilly. You know, Bogart?
The Big Sleep
?”

“The president doesn't waste his time with movies—” suggested Seelye, throwing Tyler a lifeline.

He didn't take it. “Loved that new
Batman
movie. Why doesn't NSA have gadgets and gizmos like that?”

“It's an honor to meet you, sir,” lied Devlin. “I'm sure the affairs of state must keep you very busy, so we should be brief.”

Tyler stood there with his famous smile frozen on his face. He thought he'd just been insulted, but he wasn't sure. “Please sit down. Drink?”

“No thank you, sir,” replied Devlin, hitting the cushions. He figured that the faster he sat the quicker he could get up and out again, if he played his cards right. Unfortunately, he was holding a busted flush, nine-high. Still, he'd won with worse.

“I gather that there's only one child missing—”

Tyler got that look on his face that he saved for all discussions of dead or dying kids. “And feared dead. The blast—”

“The blast didn't kill her, sir.” You weren't supposed to interrupt the president, but Devlin didn't see what he had to lose, and pressed his advantage. “We tracked all the warm bodies with infrared before the assault, and only one kid was moved into the school proper. If she was there, she'd still be alive.”

Tyler was knocked off his game, but only just a little. He was, after all, a politician. “Cleanup teams scoured the place. No sign of her.”

“Then he took her with him. I don't know why and I don't want to think about why, but—”

“Who's ‘he'? The man who tried to get away in the chopper?” Nice—Tyler was smarter than Devlin had expected.

“Which I shot down, yes, sir.”

“Then you might have killed her.”

“I might have, but I didn't.”

“How do you know? The helicopter went down, killing the—”

“Killing the pilot, yes, sir. Who was expendable.”

“So how did—”

“Milverton, sir.”

Devlin heard Seelye gasp. Just a brief intake of breath, but as telling as if he'd just socked him in the gut. There—that cat was out of the bag and pissing on the table.

“I don't understand,” said President Tyler, but Seelye was already punching up Milverton on his PDA.

“Charles Augustus Milverton, Mr. President,” said Seelye. “Not his real name, of course. ‘The most dangerous man in London,' he likes to call himself. Most dangerous man in the world, or one of them, is more like it.”

“I don't care what he calls himself. I call him dead,” said President Tyler.

“Working on it, sir,” said Devlin, realizing he'd just been handed a stay of execution, thanks to a little girl.

“Do it,” said Tyler. He got up and threw another log on the fire. One of the Marine sergeants would have done it, but the famously populist president snatched the birch log away from him and did the deed himself. “I don't give a shit how you do it. Just get him.”

“It will be a real pleasure,” said Devlin.

Tyler turned, offering his hands to the Marine sergeant to wipe them off with a clean handkerchief. “Mr. Devlin, you said something to me over the phone about this being a misdirection. A feint, you called it. Is that still your considered opinion?”

“Yes, sir, it is.”

“So you think there's more to come?”

“I don't see why not. Even if we take what happened at face value, which we shouldn't—”

“Tell that to the people of Edwardsville—”

“Yes, sir. But even if we do, then they didn't get a thing that they ostensibly wanted. Unless Edwardsville was a very elaborate way of snatching one kid, which is obviously ridiculous. Which means either they'll try again to get what they say they want, or—and this is what I've thought all along—it was a probe, to test our defenses. Which is why, one way or another, something else wicked this way comes.”

President Tyler thought for a moment. “How much time have we got?”

Devlin answered: “Assume none, if they're doing it right.”

The president turned to Seelye. “Army, I want you to give Devlin all assistance, carte fucking blanche, to get this Milverton. No matter where the trail leads, no matter whose dicks get caught in the wringer, I want this man found, braced, grilled. I want his fucking head on a pike, and I want it ASAP. Top priority.”

“Yes, sir,” said Seelye.

“Failure is not an option. I want to know everything about this guy, including the names of his twelve best friends. I want to know whether this goes higher up the food chain, and if it does who's the son of a bitch behind this whole thing. Fail me, and it's your ass.” He looked at Devlin, as if for the first time. “You read me?”

Devlin decided to play his wild card. “I can name at least one of them for you right now. But you might not want to hear it.”

Tyler was fast and he was sharp. “Do you suspect someone in my administration?” Devlin's estimation of him improved on the spot.

“Mr. President, I'd be lying to you if I didn't say that I'm more than a little disturbed that knowledge of my existence has leaked beyond the inner circle. Especially since you're the leak.”

Devlin waited for the nearly obligatory “how dare you?” speech as Tyler's famously short fuse went off. But it never came. Devlin glanced over at Seelye, who wasn't going to like this part. “On my own initiative, I cast a wide-net intercept flag in the Washington area on the telephones lines, cell and hard, all e-mail, text, and other PDA traffic as well.”

“And what did you find?” asked the President, impatiently.

“I found exactly one anomaly. The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee—”

“Bob Hartley?” exclaimed the president.

“Yes, sir. The man who was in the Oval Office with you yesterday when my name came up. That's who it was, wasn't it?” The president chose not to answer, so Devlin took that as a yes and continued. “Last night, he made a call to a local number—”