Michael Walsh Bundle (57 page)

Midtown Manhattan

Alexander Stegmaier had never heard of Minsky's, nor seen the movie about the famous raid, nor had any appreciation at all of the famous burlesque house, so the irony of the fact that he was standing inside the New Victory Theater on 42nd Street, which had once proudly been the Republic and the flagship of the Minsky empire, was completely lost on him. He wasn't interested in naked women, except in the up-close-and-personal, but as he had no experience with the strange and exotic species, it was all theoretical.

Never mind. He was standing in the heart of the modern Gomorrah, the city of such wicked depravity that the Brothers had not stopped trying to take it down, and never would until it was leveled. The city that once gloried in its sinfulness, latterly become a home to “family entertainment,” as if that would save it from God's wrath. This vile cesspool, from which was he was even now picking off pedestrians from his perch in the second-story window.

Alex Stegmaier was not a Muslim and would have been horrified at the thought. His alliance with the Brothers was pragmatic, not religious, but since the enemy of my enemy is my friend, it was not hard for them to make common cause, at least temporarily, until such time as the apocalypse was well and truly summoned, after which it was up to beings far greater than himself to sort out the final conflict. His job was to bring it on.

At first, the cars had been his primary targets. It was so satisfying to pull the trigger, hear the glass shatter, and watch the effects as the car veered, accelerated, or simply stopped, depending on whether his bullet had found a home in flesh or metal. It was not that he was a crack shot exactly, but his periods of training in Oregon, in the mosques of Dearborn, and in the encampments in upstate New York had given him a self-confidence that he had always lacked back home in Marin County, California. There, he had always been a misfit, a nerd, a weakling who had never been much good either at science or math, not to mention hopeless at sports. He stuttered, which left him off the debate team, and after he'd been routinely beaten by a parade of underclassmen at chess, he'd stopped competing at pretty much everything.

He leaned out the window. The main action lay to the east, but the west was a target-rich environment of cop cars and emergency vehicles, clustered around the Eighth Avenue intersection. He looked through his 8x-power scope and found an unmarked vehicle, overturned. A man was trying to drag another man, obviously wounded, out of the wrecked car. Alex decided that they would be good target practice and was lining up a shot when his cell phone rang.

Damn!

He lowered his sights and glanced at the caller ID: Control. He didn't know Control's name, but that was what they all called him, all of the brave warriors on the operation, whose names and real identities were unknown to each other and known only to him. Control was as close as he ever hoped to get to God in this life.

“Tammy.” That was his code name, for Mount Tamalpais, the sleeping Indian maiden turned into a mountain that dominated Marin County, across the Golden Gate from San Francisco. It was a girl's name, and he resented it a little, but he was not about to let on about that now. Not in the middle of the most glorious moments of his life.

“Where are you?” The man had a slight foreign accent, although being a Californian, almost everybody sounded foreign to Alex.

“Base One,” he replied. “
Neuer Sieg.
” He liked to show off his knowledge of German, because he thought it made him sound more threatening; even if the grammar and the cases more often than not defeated him.

“Good. Hold in place, but get ready to fall back, to the east. A great vision of glory awaits you.”

Alex tried to control his excitement. The vision of glory was something he had sought for many years, the moment of transcendence that would allow him to lord it over, however briefly, his tormentors. That was all he ever asked of God when he was at prayer: that just for one brief instant, he would not only be in command but that the others, his antagonists, would be forced to acknowledge his dominance. He would see the looks in their eyes, the worm turned, the worm Ouroboros devouring its own tail, the perfect circle of life and death.

And he knew something the others didn't, the swine. This was one of the things that was going not only to win him accolades and plaudits, but
earn
them: he knew, being German and all, that the word
Worm
didn't mean worm at all, but Dragon. He'd seen the movie and read the book and even looked up the images of the paintings online, he knew all about Blake and his
Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun
, and if he could not appreciate the visions for their artistic conception and execution, he could happily acknowledge their raw power, their controlled glimpse into the divine madness of Revelation.

Blake, however, was long gone, at one with the worms, small “w,” returned to the earth by being devoured and shat out the assholes of other creatures, rejuvenating Mother Gaia as they destroyed one another. Just as he was doing now.

Damn that woman. Even amid all this tumult, her shrieks had been driving him crazy. Once more he leaned out the window and peered through his scope. This time he found her.

She was across the street, on the roof of what had been the AMC Theaters. The building was on fire, so it was only a matter of time before she would finally shut the fuck up and take those two mewling brats with her, but there was no law that said he couldn't hasten her demise along. It wouldn't be an easy shot, but at least it was a free throw—no one would notice, and if he bagged her, so much the better. Practice made perfect.

He fired.

And missed.

At least he assumed he missed. There was no reaction from the woman, at least not that he could notice, and the damn kids were still hopping around like Mexican jumping beans. But they weren't going anywhere. The flames were licking up the side of the building, the foundations were visibly shifting, and pretty soon their only choice would be to go down with the ship or stand there and let him put a bullet through their goddamn skulls.

He fired again.

And missed.

Shit.

He was lining up the third shot when the phone rang again. He didn't want to take the call, but he was a good soldier, this was his duty, and the kill could wait. On an island of two million people, there was plenty of time and plenty of targets.

“Tammy.”

The voice again. “Bring as many souls to God as you can.”

“Where do you want me after that?”

“That is known only to God. But to you, brave warrior, it is given to defend the Brothers. You will shoot them as they come from the west. Do you see them, O my brother?”

Alex Stegmaier glanced down the street; the sun was hanging over Jersey now, lowering into his eyes.

“Yes, I think so.”

“Many are the police. They wish to kill you. You understand that, O my brother?”

“Of course I do. You think I am afraid?”

“I know you are not. But sometimes to a man comes fear unbidden, like a
houri
in the night, and he cannot resist her seductive beauty. You understand that, O my brother?”

“I do.”

“And you are willing to confront this temptress, this whore?”

“Of course I am. As I have many times before.” That part was a lie, of course, and perhaps Control knew that. But it was a brave lie, and when the time came, he knew that he would in fact have the courage to view Death's handmaiden unflinchingly.

“Then go bravely to your reward, my son.”

“To the virgin?”

“Always to the virgin. Let her know pleasure only through you.”

“Thy will be done.”

“Not my will, but that of Allah.”

Alexander Stegmaier was about to say something clever, but he couldn't think of anything. “Whatever,” he knew, would simply not do, not given the high-toned and -falutin level of this discourse, which was like something out of a Sir Walter Scott novel, maybe
The Talisman
. Cleverness had never been his long suit.

He was still trying to think of something when he realized he was looking down the barrel of a gun. There was obviously a man holding it, but in the darkness of the parterre of the New Victory, he couldn't make out his face or his features.

“Do you know what this is?”

Alex Stegmaier thought hard. They had pointed a number of weapons at him during his training, and he thought he could still get most of them, but this one was a little different.

“It's a Colt .45.”

“Very good.”

Alex felt himself swelling with pride. “Am I right?”

“No, but pretty close.”

The man lowered the sidearm a bit, so Alex could get a good look at it. He must be one of the Brothers, he thought, come to show him the way out of this place, and into the light. “Do you know who I am?”

“A Brother,” replied Alex, confidently.

The man gave a rueful laugh. At least it sounded rueful, although in this environment it could have been jocular or sardonic or any of those other words he had never quite learned the meaning of back in high school in Marin County. Nuance was for chumps with time on their hands. He was going places.

“This is a Judge,” said the Brother. “It is the last thing you will ever see. Do you understand that?”

Alex said he thought he did. It occurred to him that perhaps the Brother was going to give the weapon to him, for use in one final blaze of martyrdom. “Who are you?” he asked.

“I'm your angel.”

Now this was something Stegmaier could understand. He would never let on, not even to this Brother, but he'd just about had it with the other Brothers, the ones who were always spouting off about Allah and Akbar and all those other guys, who in the end might as well have been Vishnu or Durga or one of those other Hindu gods, not counting the cows. Angels were in his wheelhouse. He could sing the choirs: angels and archangels, thrones…

This was no time for the damn cell phone to ring, not with him so close to heaven, but it did. He was about to push the talk button, to speak with Control, when the Angel took the instrument from his grasp. Instead of speaking, though, he waited until he heard Control's voice at the other end of the ether. Then he said: “
Quels est-ce que sont les noms de Dieu
?” followed by a stream of gibberish that sounded like the language the Brothers sometimes spoke, but different. Alex Stegmaier was never very good at languages, not even English.

The Angel hung up, but pocketed his phone. Well, this was war, so of course he would take it. Control had told him to kill anyone who tried to take his instrument away from him, but under the circumstances—and given that he was a Brother—there was not much he could do about it. After all, it was only a cell phone. Besides, he had more urgent, more pressing concerns.

“What kind of angel are you?” he asked. “Angel, archangel, cherubim, seraphim, thrones, powers, dominions, what? There are nine of them, you know, divided into three choirs.”

“Only one kind,” the angel replied. “The Angel of Death.”

Alex thrilled to this news. A real Brother at last, not one of those muttering fakirs with their beads and their dirty feet, the feet they were always washing, to no apparent end. How could you wash your feet when you hardly used any water? For him, a nice long hot shower was always the answer for what ailed him.

He was still thinking about, and anticipating, a hot shower when the Brother did something entirely unexpected, at least as far as Alex was concerned. He fired.

The shotgun shell blew through Stegmaier's forehead, tearing off the top of his head and leaving behind only the mandible and one eyeball still attached to the stalk. Devlin had seen many men die before, and killed more than a few of them himself, but this death was different. This was not a wartime killing but an act of mercy, an act of deliverance. This was not a death to be mourned, or even to be received indifferently. This was a death to be appreciated.

He had the cell phone. He had the number. And now, just to be sporting, their runner knew he was on to them. What was the point of being the best at what you did if there was no one around to appreciate it? The poor boy on the floor had met his maker, and gone contentedly to his end. But something told Devlin that the man on the other end of the line—the Iranian, whom he had just threatened in Farsi—would not go quite so quietly, or happily.

Very well then. Let it be.

Night was falling, and darkness had always been his friend.

Geneva, Switzerland

Skorzeny's car was waiting for them as they disembarked in Geneva. Switzerland being neutral, and there being no actual warrant for his arrest, just an informal understanding between that rotter, Tyler, and countries with which the United States had an extradition treaty, they were free to enter. Switzerland would turn a blind eye to his presence in the country, just long enough for him to do what he had to do, make a substantial deposit in one of the banks, and be on his way.

Geneva was the most French of Swiss cities, which meant that despite its proximity to the French border, it was not French at all. It didn't matter whether the Swiss spoke French, Italian, Romansch, or German, at their heart they remained Swiss—insular at the top of their mountains, clannish despite their linguistic divisions, and dedicated solely to the proposition that making money and keeping it hidden was the highest goal of life.

Skorzeny's eyes roamed over the city as they approached. Here and there, a mosque caught his eye, and although the Swiss had recently voted to outlaw the construction of any more minarets, which they rightly deemed emblematic of the coming Islamic supremacy, he knew there would be more coming. Like some poor hypnotized creature facing down a cobra, the West had lost the will to resist its centuries-old challenger, and even here, in the very heart of rational, Calvinist, capitalist Europe, the green shoots of the coming caliphate were everywhere in evidence.

“You still haven't answered my question,” he reminded Amanda. Wearing a fashionable black dress that extended just below the knee, she was sitting as close to him as politically necessary and as far away as propriety allowed.

Even though she was used to reading his mind, Amanda had no idea what he was talking about. “Mr. Skorzeny?” she said.

He shot her a look of annoyance, as if she had somehow let him down. And after what he'd done to her. But in her heart she knew he would not see it that way at all. A man as rich as he was could afford to indulge his sociopathy, all the while telling himself that it was his very love for humanity that made him hate people so. “About God, I mean.”

She was hoping he'd forgotten, but the old reptile never forgot anything. Should he be incapacitated, chained to a gurney, his limbs cut off, his malevolent memory would machinate on, until the day the darkness he so passionately believed in but just as passionately tried to avoid finally descended. “I'm sure we've had this conversation before, Mr. Skorzeny,” she dodged.

“If we have, I cannot recall it.”

“Mr. Skorzeny—”

“Your former lover, the late Mr. Milverton, was an atheist.”

He always knew to put her at a disadvantage, how to wound her. “I believe that had something to do with the way he was raised, sir,” she replied.

“Whereas I have come by my skepticism independently—is that what you are saying, Miss Harrington?”

“I'm sure I don't know, sir.”

“What do you know about the Higgs boson?”

She expected anything from Skorzeny, but this query caught her by surprise. “Sir?”

“I think I speak English passably well, Miss Harrington. So please answer my question.”

“Higgs boson, sir?”

“Despite my advancing years, I am not deaf, madam.”

Amanda decided to rewind the conversation to more secure ground. She could not hope to compete with him here, in the stratosphere of his psychosis. “Mr. Skorzeny, all I know about your background—”

“I have told you. Which is all you need to know. So, what is your answer?”

She never thought she would miss the icy M. Pilier. He had borne the brunt of Skorzeny's endless insane questions. She wondered what had become of him, but “no longer in service to us,” was about all she could pry out of Skorzeny. He probably said that about all the dead people in his life. Somehow, just looking at him, she knew he had had a lot of experience with dead people. What was his family like? What sort of people, no matter what the provocation, could have produced this monster?

“I'm not sure I can give you one at this moment, Mr. Skorzeny,” she replied.

“Which is why, Miss Harrington,” he said, twisting the knife, “most likely you are childless at this moment. Because, were you not a charter member of your generation's suicide cult, you'd have five by now.”

She felt herself reddening. “Sir?”

“Don't by coy with me, Miss Harrington, you know perfectly well what I mean. You know that if you truly believed in your country, in your culture, in yourself, and in your future, you'd have done what every other woman since Eve has done: have a child. Invest in the future. Have a stake in the benefits you demand of your government. Have some skin in the game.”

“Mr. Skorzeny—”

“But no.” He spat out his words with contempt. “But no, you cannot even be bothered to do that. A moment of pleasure, nine months of pain and the work 'twere done. That the next generation might live.”

“Sir! I really must pro—”

“But you won't even give it that chance. Instead, you deny it life, or should it be conceived by some unhappy circumstance after a night of liquor and concupiscence, you throttle it—not in its cradle, like Hercules—but in your dark womb, where sins go unpunished and heroes die unborn.”

Amanda felt a wave of murderous hostility wash over her. If she could have plunged a knife into his dark heart, she would have, though it cost her her life. If, like some character from a movie, she could have taken any weapon to hand—a champagne flute, a pair of eyeglasses, a pencil—and gouged out his eyes, she would have. But she could do nothing. She had to sit there, take it, and pretend to like it.

“Allow me to make myself quite clear, Miss Harrington as, at the moment, you are the only person, it seems, whom I can trust in this deceitful and slanderous world.”

“Yes, sir.” Might as well encourage him. “Please do, that I might better understand.”

He smiled that reptilian smile of his, the smile she had learned so well, the same smile that creased his unholy visage even when he was making love to her.

“Making love.” The very thought nauseated her. To him, she was nothing but chattel, a piece of ass masquerading as a piece of property, just as she had been on that day at the Savoy Hotel. She, one of the most recognizable and accomplished women in the City of London, reduced to the state of a Soho drab in one horrifying encounter. For which she would never forgive him. The fact that he didn't realize that was his weakness, his Achilles' heel.

But she did. And that was all that mattered. That realization, that knowledge, was her weapon against him. And by God, she would wield it, even though it took her last breath.

He had killed the only man she had ever loved. Killed him as surely as if he had killed him himself. Killed him by sending him up against the one man in the world he could not defeat, although his pride would never allow him to admit that. Killed him by forcing a face-off between them, even though he himself was hundreds of miles away, safe in his lair, with her paralyzed from the drug he had given her.

Killed him. A murder for which she would now have her revenge.

“The Higgs boson, sir?” she said, doing her best to steer the conversation back to its original topic. But Skorzeny would have none of her gambit. Instead, he focused his basilisk gaze out the window, at a group of buildings looming in the near distance.

“Do you know what drives me, Amanda?” he asked. It was the first time he had ever used her Christian name that she could remember. He, who hated Christianity, and Judaism, and Islam, and all the world's great religions, with a dispassionate, egalitarian, tolerant hatred that swept all before it, stooping to use a Christian name. Emanuel Skorzeny was the one man in the world who could profess tolerance, and then murder in its name.

Destroy the world, in fact, all in the name of his senseless revenge.

“No, sir, I'm sure I do not,” she replied evenly. That was a lie. She had plenty of ideas, notions, about what drove him; even from the limited personal information he had imparted to her over the years that she had run his Skorzeny Foundation. His animus against the world knew no bounds. He would either be its master or nothing; he would not be God's madman. Which is why he hated God so much, and so personally.

“Because of the Higgs boson, of course,” he replied, as if it were the most obvious answer in the world. “Because of the Higgs boson—not just the secret to life itself, no. Much more important than that—the secret to the origins of the universe. Not just our life, but life everywhere—anywhere.”

“I'm not sure I follow you, sir,” she said. They had entered the city proper now and were speeding toward their destination. Their trip would be very short, just long enough for Skorzeny to ascertain the information he required, and then they would be back across the border to France, in the plane, and off again. These days, even the Swiss could not be trusted: the Americans had put so much pressure that even the
Bahnhofstrasse
lawyers thought twice before routinely falsifying information that might be used in a court of law against them.

“It's very simple,” he said. “So simple that even a girl child could understand my subtext, I am surprised and disappointed that you do not.”

“I will try not to disappoint in the future,” she said.

“As you have in the past.”

“An aberration, sir,” she said, hoping not to let her dual loyalties show.

“There are no aberrations, Miss Harrington,” he said.

They rode in silence for a while, until at last a cluster of buildings presented itself to the west. They were nearly on the French border now, having doubled back almost to where they had started, but security was security, and Emanuel Skorzeny owned France.

“No aberrations. Everything is planned, thought out, organized. In a rational universe, that is. The kind of world and place you believe in. This is why your lot clings to your religions, or should I say your superstitions, because they are comforting and because they give you solace in your last, agonizing moments.”

“What about you, sir?” Amanda ventured. “Don't you long for the solace of the afterlife?”

“A child's fantasy, and a bad novelist's fiction,” he retorted sharply. “Had you seen what I have seen, had you experienced what I have experienced, had you been through what I have been through, you would never hazard such an absurd notion.” He settled back into his leather seat. “Really, my dear, you disappoint me.”

“I try not to, sir,” she said, thinking furiously. Where was this conversation going? What point was he trying to make? Amanda Harrington had been with Emanuel Skorzeny long enough to know that he never asked a question to which either he already knew the answer or genuinely wanted to know the truth. The problem was telling the questions apart.

“You do,” he said with finality. “And have, repeatedly. Nevertheless, I have forgiven you, despite everything.”

That was the opening she had been waiting for. The lust that still coursed through the man's veins, no matter his age. Long ago she had learned the truth of the axiom that, at heart, every man was eighteen years old, no matter what the birth certificate said, and that when and if women ever learned that simple truth, the world was theirs. He had raped her once before, on that horrible day at the Savoy in London, and not only would it never happen again, but she would have her vengeance.

“Thank you, Mr. Skorzeny,” she said.

He glanced at her across the plush leather seats of the car's interior.

“Sir?”

“You have more to say.”

“I'm sure I don't sir.” At times like this, she adopted the tone and the language of an aggrieved Victorian heroine. She had been born in the wrong century, of that she was sure. The only question now—far more pressing than any of Skorzeny's queries about money—was what she was going to do about it.

“Then I do.”

She breathed a small sigh of relief. Baton passed. All she had to do now was listen. Which is exactly what she got paid to do.

“Allow me to extend and amplify.”

“Please do, sir,” she said. They were only minutes away from their destination, but at least this exegesis would likely take up most or all of the time.

Skorzeny yawned and stretched, as if he had given this same speech a thousand times before, in hundreds of different situations, to dozens of people. It was like talking to God, if God had no conscience.

“Do you know the
Credo
?” he asked.

“
Credo in Unum Deum
,” she dutifully recited, good Anglo-Catholic girl that she once had been. Meaningless words, yet words that had once motivated not just a country but a culture, had called to war millions of men who charged off to die in the trenches of the Somme. Who would die for the Creed today?

It was uncanny, how he could read her thoughts. “No one believes such a thing anymore,” he said. “Meaningless drivel, mumbo-jumbo, hocus-pocus.

Amanda forced herself to pay attention to his lecture, for she knew from long experience that he was going somewhere with it.

“And yet, it's deceptively simple, isn't it? Does evil need a purpose, an object of its animus, in order to exist? Or can it simply
be
? Iago believes in God, but in a cruel God, crueler than the Allah of the Mohammedans, and he understands and embraces the notion that, because he is a man in the image and likeness of God, he is also diabolical: ‘I am evil because I am a man.'”

Here it came: “I could well say the same thing about myself. Oh, I don't consider myself evil, certainly not in the accepted understanding of the world. What I am trying to do, the grand project of my life upon which I am irrevocably embarked, would not be understood by most of the world's population. But I am, in my own way, an artist as great as Shakespeare. And do you know why, Miss Harrington?”