Hostile Intent

by Michael Walsh

  “And they said they found only one body, the pilot. So what? Remember when that Muslim from Canada turned up dead at that political convention in Denver with a suitcase full of cyanide? No link to terrorism, they said. Remember when that Arab kid crashed his plane into that building in Florida? No link to terrorism, they said. Remember when those two Arabs turned up in North Carolina or wherever it was with bomb stuff in their cars and claimed they were joyriding around to set off some fireworks? No link to terrorism, they said. No link, no link, no link.” She pounded the table at its iteration of the word, “link.”

  “Our own government is lying to us. Lying to us all the time. What is it they don’t want us to know? What kind of fools do they take us for, us hicks out here in flyover country? They take our tax money and they buy our votes and then they treat us like idiot children. They fly over us and they laugh at us on their way to Malibu or the Hamptons. Well, I’m not going to take it any more.”

  “Mom, who was that man?” At first Hope thought Rory meant the man with the tattoo, but he continued, “The man who saved me. The man who grabbed me—he came out of nowhere and we jumped into the Dumpster. I thought he was a missionary.”

  That caught her up short—something she hadn’t thought about. It was so hard to concentrate at a time like this, but yes…who was that man? She had assumed he was a rescue worker. “A missionary?” she asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “Like cannibals and missionaries. You know, the game? I asked him if he was a missionary, and he said, ‘No, kid, I’m an angel.’”

  “An angel?”

  “That’s what he said, Mom.”

  Hope thought for a moment: not one but two mystery men. She wondered if they had anything to do with each other. “Try to get some sleep, Rory,” she said at last.

  “I’m not sleepy.”

  “No, you’re not sleepy—you’re exhausted.” Finally, she broke down and started to cry. Rory ru

  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.

  , MARYLAND

  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 this shit-ass bucolic duty, waiting for the pre
sident 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 w

  “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 hiDevlin 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—”

  “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 clore 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’?”

  Chapter Thirty

  WASHINGTON, 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.