Michael Walsh Bundle (18 page)

“So?” Tyler was starting to lose it.

“—to a Washington number that does not exist. It's a cutout, with how many bounces I don't know yet. I've traced it as far as Los Angeles, but it may not end there. Whoever gave him that number thinks his secret is safe, but he doesn't know that we're smarter than he is.”

“What was this call about?”

“Nothing. No connection was made. I think it was a dry run.”

“Why? Do you think the next attack could come in LA?”

“I have no idea. But it's a good place to start.”

“Dismissed, sailor,” said the president.

There was an unmarked car waiting at the gate. Seelye nodded in its direction. “Can I give you a lift?”

“I had a car here somewhere,” said Devlin.

“‘I had to crash that Honda, honey,'” replied Seelye, doing a passable imitation of Bruce Willis's character Butch in
Pulp Fiction
. “In fact, it's already pulped. It's sleeping peacefully with Jimmy Hoffa somewhere in Pennsylvania. Just in case Milverton is in your shorts.”

Did he suspect something? Did he know something? Seelye knew perfectly well that made Branch 4 agents were soon dead Branch 4 agents, and the thought had occurred to Devlin that Seelye's life would be so much easier once he was finally rid of his long-ago lover's inconvenient son.

Seelye closed the door and pounded on the trunk twice, the signal for the driver to get a move on. Then he changed his mind, rapped on the window. Devlin rolled down his window, making sure that the partition between him and the driver was securely in place.

Seelye leaned through the window and asked, “How come you never call me ‘Dad'?”

W
ASHINGTON
, D.C.

Hartley lay on his bed, shaking. He couldn't believe what had happened, couldn't believe what was about to happen. He had to get control of himself, calm down. Nothing was ever quite as bad as it seemed, not even this.

Well, maybe this.

Thank God the phone stopped ringing. The damn thing had been ringing all morning, his cell phone too. He knew it was the White House, which meant it was the president, which meant that sooner or later he was going to have to answer or else they'd send the Secret Service over to his flat to find out if he was okay. And, at this point, he was very fucking far from okay, and the Secret Service were the last people who needed to know just how far from okay everything really was.

The pizza boy was still there. That poor fellow wasn't going anywhere, not of his own volition, and part of Senator Hartley's problem at this moment was to figure just how and when to make him disappear. His unwelcome visitor had gone through the boy's pockets after the murder and told him that the escort service had deliberately set Hartley up and would have exposed him to one of the supermarket tabloids or cable TV, so in a sense the stranger had done him a favor. Still, the corpse in his flat was the least of his worries right now; his nocturnal visitor was going to help Hartley with that, assuming he played ball on the main request.

Which had been, for him, relatively easy. Thank God and the Founding Fathers for civilian oversight of the military. And for access to certain files.

As Balzac once said, behind every great fortune is a great crime, and if Hartley played his cards right, he could wind up with everything—money, power, glory. Already there were stocks, rather a lot of them, that he was to sell short today, very short, and he was encouraged to spread the word to select individuals, corporate managers, defense contractors, and pension-fund bosses of his acquaintance—very discreetly—that rolling back their exposure to certain things, immediately if not sooner, would pay huge dividends. Besides, the man had assured him that no one would be thinking about insider trading in twenty-four hours, but that the political opportunities that were about to open up for a man of Senator Hartley's perspicacity and intelligence were, literally, invaluable.

So Hartley had made all the phone calls, placed all the bets. The man had given him the number of what he said was a Swiss bank account to finance his transactions, and sure enough they had all gone through smoothly. Now it was time to make that one last phone call, to the number the man had given him, and the die was cast.

He dialed it.

Instead of an answer, he heard a series of clicks, like back in the old days when phones clicked instead of beeped as they ordered up a connection. The clicks stopped, replaced temporarily by silence, then a loud buzzing sound, as if a fax machine had picked up the line. He hung up. What the hell was going on?

He rose and looked out the window. He needed some air, so he stepped onto the balcony. Almost immediately, he was sorry he did. He could hear police sirens, approaching.

Hartley darted back inside, closed the plate-glass picture window, and pulled the curtains. His nerves were shot. Police sirens were always sounding in Washington, as in any big city. He thought about pouring himself a drink, but decided against it.

He padded back over to the window, parted the curtains, and looked down at the street. Nothing. See? He was letting his imagination run away with him. He looked at the phone in his hand and hit redial.

No clicks or noises—the connection went straight through. This time, a voice answered. It may or may not have been the same as his visitor's, he couldn't tell.

Hartley gave the man the information his visitor had demanded.

“I'm glad you're seeing things…our way, Senator,” said the voice. Hartley realized that it was scrambled, disguising both the timbre and the accent of the speaker; that was why he couldn't recognize it. “Look out the window.”

Two police cars were pulling up to the building's service entrance.

“Don't worry about the police, Senator. As long as you cooperate with us, they'll sit tight. But if you fuck up, they'll be at your door to investigate a report of a murder, and the next call you make will be to your lawyer. Understand?”

Hartley nodded dumbly.

“I can't hear you.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“Well done,” the voice at the other end of the line said. “Now sit tight and await further instructions.” The fax-machine blast again, followed by the clicks. In his surprise and fear, Hartley dropped the phone, which bounced and settled on the sofa. He was still wondering what to do when there was a knock on the door.

He practically sprinted over and peered through the peephole. Two men in business suits. Hotel security. “What do you want?” he croaked.

“Routine security check,” came a voice from the other side. Hartley glanced behind him to make sure the bedroom door was closed and nothing untoward or suspicious was visible.

He opened the door a crack. No sooner had he done so when one of the men flashed a badge and pushed his way past him, followed by his partner, who shut the door and locked it.

“Who are you?” gasped Hartley.

“Don't worry,” said the lead man. “We're from the government, and we're here to help.”

One of them—the bigger, beefier fellow—headed straight for the bedroom, while his smaller partner, a whippet, just stood there, staring at him.

“Nice,” said the voice from the bedroom. “Houston, I would say we have a situation here.”

The Whippet smiled. “Ain't that a kick in the head.” He looked at Hartley. “Sit down, Senator. The president's been worried about you.”

“And now we know why,” said the Refrigerator behind him.

Hartley sat, his mind racing. He knew he was in a lot of trouble, but after all he hadn't killed the pizza boy. They could take paraffin tests or whatever more sophisticated procedures they were using these days, which would surely show he hadn't fired a weapon. He could explain everything.

“Two pops in the head with this baby.” Hartley turned to see the Refrigerator holding up the gun. “Pro job—nice shooting, Senator.”

“Senator Hartley,” said Whippet. “I'm not going to fuck around with you. Unless you play ball with us, not only is your political career over, not only are you going to jail for the rest of your life, but your good friend from across the aisle, Jeb Tyler, is going to be heartbroken. At a time of national crisis and peril, to lose one of his closest and most trusted advisors, with an election coming up…well, I'm sure you agree that this unfortunate incident couldn't possibly have come at a worse time. Which is why he'll feed you to the dogs.”

Hartley nodded dully. “Am I under arrest?” he asked.

“I wouldn't exactly call it arrest,” said the Refrigerator.

“More like day care,” said the Whippet.

“It'll be fun,” said the Refrigerator. “We can bunk down out here.”

“Just the three of us,” said the Whippet.

“Four of us,” reminded the Refrigerator. “Until your playmate gets back in touch with you or the Boss says otherwise.”

“No, you can't mean…” shouted Hartley as the implications sank in. “Not that.”

The Whippet smiled. “I'd think about it twice if I were you,” he said.

Hartley was about to protest that he
was
thinking about it when he felt the snub nose of the .22 pressed up against the back of his head.

“In fact,” said the Refrigerator behind him,” I'd think about it twenty-two times.”

F
ALLS
C
HURCH

They were waiting for him by the time he got back from Camp David. The unmarked government car had dropped him at a Washington Metro station, and he had made it home from there, covering the last bit on foot.

From the outside, everything seemed all right. But Devlin knew it wasn't. To a man living in the shadows, the smallest speck of light is like a laser beam: the front curtains were ever so slightly wrong.

Devlin had multiple ways into his house, but he needed to know the right one.

He took out his car keys, held down the alarm button, and punched the unlock button. That relayed the house's interior security CCTV feed to his BlackBerry.

Front hall, side hall, LR, DR…empty. So far so good. But he still didn't like it. Second floor. Empty BR. His private study was locked and unmolested. That told him something right there:
these guys know enough not to touch it.

He had no idea who they were, but it almost didn't matter: two makes in two days was double-plus ungood. Somehow, somebody had gotten hold of his private address. Or somebody with access had leaked it. Same difference.

He punched another button—the trunk lock, followed in quick succession by two clicks on the lock button. That activated the 180-degree infrared scanner, which would give him a rough look at the interior. If their hearts were beating, he'd see them.

There—three of them, one on the first floor and two on the second. Under the circumstances, the cellar door was the best way. He pressed the code on his house keys and it silently slid aside. There was a pair of infra-red goggles hanging on a hook in the darkness by the door. He grabbed them and put them on. He also took off his shoes.

Weapons: inside each of his back pockets he slipped throwing knives, and slid a K-Bar knife in its scabbard down the back of his jeans. Under each armpit he placed twin Glock 37s, with a pair of Colt .38s revolvers in special pockets sewn into the front of his jeans. A concussion grenade rounded out his ensemble.

There was what looked like a light switch at the top of the basement stairs. And it was. But if you moved it from side to side in a Morse Code pattern that spelled out his real middle name, it opened the door into the interior of the house. And then it temporarily disabled every electrical system except those on batteries.

He was inside, in the dark, where only he could see.

The man on the ground floor had his back to him, and that's the way he died, Devlin's K-Bar slipping easily between his ribs and puncturing his heart. It was a nice, clean kill, no sound, only instant death. Devlin wondered briefly if he knew the guy; he cared not at all whether he had a family. Everybody had a family, except for him.

Now—
fast
. Up the stairs, pulling the grenade, arming it, tossing it. The phosphorescent flash would temporarily blind them. He was, once more, the Angel of Death, deputized by God to decide which of his two visitors would live, however temporarily, and which would die.

As every soldier knew, time slows down in hand-to-hand combat even as it moves at warp speed. Man One had fallen to his knees, grabbing his eyes, so Devlin shot him in the head—no sense wasting a bullet on a Kevlar vest—and moved on to Man Two.

Not immediately visible, but it didn't matter. He'd be where, for some reason, they always tried to hide. The bathroom. Pressing another button on his keys, Devlin activated all the interior door locks. Then he hit the gas. Each of the rooms in the house was equipped with nerve gas, hidden behind the green eye of the smoke detectors. It disabled the person but kept him alive and conscious, and able to talk. Most of the time.

He heard the sound of a body falling. Gun drawn, he unlocked and opened the door and shot the person inside through both legs.

There was no sense of triumph, or even of exhilaration, as he stepped through the doorway. If you had measured his pulse and heart rate, they would both have been near normal. Emotionally, he was entirely unaffected. He was just doing what they had trained him to do. What Seelye had trained him to do.

Even before he got the mask off her, Devlin knew it was a woman. There was political correctness for you—putting a woman on a clean team. Somebody's daughter for sure; somebody's sister, very likely; maybe even somebody's mother.

“Who are you?” she gasped through her pain. The question caught him up short. If this were a team from CSS, they would have known.

“How did you get in?” he asked, lowering his weapon. Instead of answering, she went for her gun. This time, he shot her in both forearms. A spunky little thing, he had to give her that, and putting up a better fight than her dead male colleagues. “How?”

The pain must have been excruciating, but she wasn't letting on. Instead, she was fading out, and Devlin hoped he hadn't hit an artery. “FBI,” she said. “You're under arrest.”

He ripped open her vest and found her badge. It was real. Then he saw all the blood, pooling under her body. It too was real, and as he'd feared: one of his leg shots had severed a femoral artery.

“On suspicion…” Her eyes started to roll. He was losing her.

He cradled her head in his arms. “Okay, you got me,” he said. “I'm your prisoner. What's the charge?”

“Terrorism,” she whispered.

“I confess. Who ratted me out?”

She smiled at him, grateful. “That's classified,” she said, and died.

He laid her to rest gently on the bathroom floor. His mind raced, trying to come up with a working hypothesis. A Branch 4 op would have just taken him out, not tried to arrest him. But the FBI—what the hell did they have to do with this? And how did they get into his house, or even know where it was?

The female special agent's last word: terrorism. Somebody had fingered him for Edwardsville. There was only one person who knew him by sight at Edwardsville: Milverton. Somebody had hacked his file at NSA. There were only a handful of people who could do that. One of them he knew personally. Two of them he knew by sight. Three of them he knew by their offices. Which left one more person: Hartley. Devlin was suddenly glad he had dropped the dime on him to the president. He wasn't authorized to conduct assassinations of duly elected American officials, and he hoped to hell his newfound respect for Tyler extended to the man's sense of political self-preservation. Tyler may or may not be the secular saint or the blithering idiot his friends and foes made him out to be, but he was one very smart politician, and he hadn't come this far because his instincts were mostly wrong.

Of course, just because Hartley had been added to the loop didn't actually rule out any of the others. There might be a connection elsewhere. And if there was, then everything was a lie—the law, the Congress, the president, the whole damn United States of America. Everything that he had been raised to believe in, to live for, to fight for, to die for…a lie. A fixed fight, a gambler's racket, a sucker's game.

He sent the computers into lockdown/self-destruct mode; if anyone tried to access them, all data, right down to the keystroke loggers, would be destroyed. It would not be lost—he had mirrored sites at Internet dead drops all over the world, but he would not have the same ease of access to the material. Still, it would have to do for now.

He grabbed only what was necessary: the books his father gave him and the picture of himself and his parents in Rome.

He set the charges on the house. If anyone besides himself tried to enter, the whole place would implode in a controlled demolition. If the clean team really was FBI, he might be able to get Seelye to make sure everybody left the site alone, and down the institutional memory hole it would go. Still, he'd probably never go back there to live again.

If he was going to put a full-court press on Milverton, he needed help. He needed somebody he could trust to do the job right. There was only one such person he trusted. Maybe the time had come at last for a meeting. For he was already formulating a hypothesis. That the Edwardsville school operation had been a feint he had long been certain. It was a jab, a softening blow, to set up the knockout punch that would come at the end of a series of combinations, each of which would stagger the country a little more until finally it fell over.

Devlin punched up Eddie's number, and waited. The cutouts worked smoothly, the line rang. And rang. And rang. No answer. Damn.

He knew Eddie had a family, had a little girl he adored, supposed he was out right this minute with her and her mother, doing the things family men who could afford to turn off their cell phones actually did. Sometimes, in fact, he wondered why Eddie stayed on this job, in this racket, when he had so much more to live for than, say, Devlin himself did. A little girl…

He wondered what it felt like to have a little girl. To have a creature he could unconditionally love, and who would love him back because she didn't know any better, who didn't ask anything from him except unconditional love. He probably would never know.

He tried again, this time on Eddie's secure hot line. Family or no family, this was no time for fucking around.

Same result: no answer. Where the hell was he, anyway? He decided to leave a message: “Whaddya know, whaddya say?” Eddie would know what it meant, what level of security he would need to use to get in touch with Devlin and, most important of all, just how damn urgent this thing was getting.

There was a flight leaving from Dulles to LA soon, and he was already booked on it. He'd dispose of the bodies along the way. He felt bad about the woman, but she was part of the job.