Hostile Intent

by Michael Walsh

  No, check that—all because him. Because of his weakness. Because of his need.

  Devlin broke through the remains of the screen. Barry Bostwick and Little Nell were still singing on the soundtrack, but the picture was long gone. People were screaming and shoving each other to get out as Milverton bulled his way toward the front exit. He was holding the two girls who had sandwiched Devlin. Hostages now.

  From his angle, he didn’t have a clear shot. Milverton raised his gun—

  Then a shot, from somewhere in the auditorium. Milverton stumbled, lost his grip on the girls, who tore away from him and dove for cover. Another shot, which splintered the wall behind Milverton, who was already returning fire. He emptied a clip into the darkened auditorium, and a woman’s voice cried out in pain.

  This was his chance. At full speed, Devlin leapt from the stage.

  He landed on Milverton square, raining punches as they went down. The body blows didn’t do much damage. It was like socking steel.

  Milverton’s first punch caught Devlin behind the neck, stunning him. He knew what was coming next, even as the SAS fighter pulled his knife and slashed at the back of Devlin’s knee. Had it landed, the knife thrust would have been a crippling, then a killing blow. Devlin would have been a marionette whose strings had just been cut, and lying there helpless, he would have been ripe for the final plunge into the neck.

  But Milverton missed. He missed because everything in Devlin’s training had prepared him for moments like these and while someday he might meet a better shot than himself, he was not going to me…dialthet a better street fighter.

  He blocked the blow with a forearm, then threw the other forearm at Milverton’s head. It caught him flush on the ear. He brought the butt of his gun down across the bridge of Milverton’s nose.

  Devlin spun, grabbing Milverton’s wrist. With a sharp yank, he disarmed him, the knife clattering to the ground. His eyes briefly followed the knife—

  “Look out!” A woman’s voice. He glanced left, just in time to see the shiv that had been yanked from Milverton’s boot heel heading for his face. He could feel the air as it missed.

  “Drop it!” shouted the woman’s voice and now Devlin understood who she was.

  Maryam held her Lady Glock steady on Milverton. She was a pro, but she wasn’t as good as he was.

  Instead of breaking his motion, Milverton transferred the arc of the shiv in her direction and let it fly, like a dart. She tried to control the shock and the pain, but Devlin heard the breath punch out of her as she fell.

  In a flash Milverton was up on his feet and running for the door. Devlin rolled and brought his pistol up, but it was too late.

  Milverton was gone.

  He found her slumped on the floor between a row of seats. He could hear the sirens, rapidly approaching. Leave her, shoot her, or fall in love with her, once and for all. Observe, orient, decide.

  Act.

  He picked her up. There was a side exit that led into a noxious Parisian alley. The kind of street where lovely ladies with blackened teeth and hairy armpits used to empty the contents of their chamber pots on the heads of peasants even blacker of tooth and hairier of body back in the seventeenth century.

  No chamber pots tonight. He kept his pistol ready, just in case Milverton was waiting for him.

  She was losing blood, going into shock now. A hospital was out of the question; too much curiosity. The agency had doctors here in Paris. It also had nurses, spies, whores, safe houses, safe cars, bought cops, cooperative members of the Deuxième Bureau, the works. They’d be here within minutes.

  “Hold on, Maryam,” he said, punching a couple tones on his cell phone.

  “Who are you?” she whispered as he carried her down the alley, her voice fading.

  “Your guardian angel,” he said.

  Paris was for lovers.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  LOS ANGELES

  Danny Impellatieri’s first inkling that anything was amiss came as he gradually awoke to the soft, almost sexy, buzz of his secure cell phone, which he always slept w a television commercial; the TV was still on, although he couldn’t see it from this angle. He was trying to synthesize this random information when he realized he had the phone in his hand. “Hello?”

  Stupid. That hadn’t been a standard ring tone—it was his private message ring tone, the overture to Zampa, just energetic enough to be motivating, and clichéd enough to be comical. No answer was necessary. There was a crackle and a beep and he realized this was a message from “Tom Powers.” He punched his access code and waited for the clearance to go through. Then he saw it.

  “Whaddya know, whaddya say?” That got him awake.

  That was what he used to say when he was commanding his unit of the 160th, the Night Stalkers. Powers had asked him for a private phrase, one that only the two of them shared. Thus they learned that they both shared a love for Cagney movies, loved the way the banty little rooster from hell moved as he chomped through the scenery. Cagney just didn’t stand there, he vibrated. He didn’t just do nothing when he had nothing to do; he did something: flashed his devilish eyes, shot a leering grin, balanced expertly on the balls of his feet, ready for anything, ready to make love to a girl or punch a guy’s lights out. Cagney, they decided, was their role model.

  So this message was not good. Danny had expected the small pleasures of homecoming and sleep, and then a significant rise in one of his off-shore bank accounts, the ones that, despite his overwhelming love for her—or perhaps because of it—he had never breathed a word of to Diane, but had put in her name in case anything happened to him. It was meant as a warning, to be ready; worse, it meant that something really nasty had come up.

  Ready for what? What could have been worse than what they’d just gone through?

  Normally, the first thing Danny would do was sit down at his computer in his secure room, boot it up, and do a quick scan of all available feeds, official, semiofficial, open source, and absolute bullshit. You could learn a lot from the first three, but sometimes you could learn even more from absolute bullshit, since it afforded you a window onto the thinking of the wingnuts, basket cases, moonbats, psychos, and all the other flotsam and jetsam of the human race, weightless amid the rapidly expanding junk of cyberspace.

  That kind of war was not for him. Danny preferred a sidearm or a knife and an enemy, face to face, up close and personal. Like that Drusovic asshole. Danny was a good Catholic, but the thought that religion could compel a man to murder—no, to slaughter—was beyond him. He would have made a lousy Crusader, Deus lo vult and all that; he needed to know who he was killing and why. For Danny Impellatieri, it was always personal.

  The phone rang again—this time the tone was the William Tell Overture. Another Devlin ring tone. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to answer it. If Devlin really had wanted to communicate something to him, he could have done it with his first message. If he just wanted to shoot the shit, well, there was plenty of time for that ad told him his daughter was lying. The security scanners went nuclear as he blew past the metal detector, but that was another thing that would just have to be sorted out later. Besides, the city of Los Angeles had bigger problems at the moment than one grieving father with a weapon or two.

  Into the elevator, where he frightened an old Chinese lady in a wheelchair surrounded by four or five members of family banging away in Cantonese. His Cantonese was rusty, but he could have told them to go fuck themselves had they given him any grief. Instead, they just cowered and complained as he barged into the lift, and then spewed some Chinese venom at him as he barreled out. Like he cared.

  There was the room. Jade’s room.

  Eddie Bartlett had seen a lot of things in his time. With the 160th, he’d seen men blown apart, men shredded by chopper blades, men decapitated in training accidents, men with their heads shattered as they smashed through the cockpit glass, men defenestrated, whether accidentally or, in combat, intentionally. He knew what a body looked like af
ter it had fallen from a few thousand feet, knew what a hostile looked like after he’d been riddled with automatic weapons fire in a strafing run, knew what was left after man, woman, or child was hit by a cluster bomb or a missile.

  His mind raced. His memory slowed.

  The road to Baghdad, 2003. No matter what anybody said about who was responsible for 9/11, for the men on the ground it was payback time for the sand monkeys. Leading a SOAR team, in close air support of a forward Marine unit. Knife through rancid butter until one of the damned sandstorms appeared out of nowhere, a whirling, desert dervish like something out of The Mummy.

  The Marine column was caught out in the open. Not so bad for them; they could hunker down, even under fire. He and his choppers were up in the air, with sand blasting through their rotors, enfilading their engines. If he didn’t get them down, they would all crash in the desert, like the ill-fated Carter mission, the one that had given birth to the SOARs in the first place.

  The enemy was dug in at a village just up ahead. A few of Saddam’s inept Republican Guard’s wasted tanks were blocking the Marines’ way into the village. The dirty little secret of desert fighting was that the Iraqis didn’t like the sand any better than the Americans did; as a natural resource, it was a lousy ally. They would be having just as much trouble with their rifles and small arms as anybody else, just as little freedom of movement. The Arab response to almost any kind of adverse combat situation was to hunker down, lie low, and either turn tail—their ordinary course of action—or dig in, camouflaged, and then shoot their opponents in the back as they passed by.

  If the Night Stalkers bailed now, the Iraqis would become emboldened by what they viewed as American cowardice. Although they thought nothing of abject surrender and honored what the West considered treachery, the Arabs preferred sure suicide to perceived dishonor, and they could pin the Marines down. The jarheads’ lifeline was Danny’s Black Hawks, and Danny would be damned if he was going to deny them that.

  Was the situation dangerous? Damn straight. But that’s what the 160th was invented for in the first place.

  “Captain

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  LOS ANGELES

  Traffic in central Los Angeles was at a standstill, and so they made their way over the hill from Burbank, avoiding the freeways, cutting around Griffith Park on San Fernando, crossing the LA River and darting down Glendale Boulevard and into Echo Park.

  Deliberately, he kept a house in one of the most unfashionable neighborhoods in the city. The home on Laveta Terrace in once-fashionable Sunset Heights had been built in 1921 by a rich man, a member of the city’s prestigious Jonathan Club, but had slid downhill in the early 1930s once W. C. Fields, whose house was just three doors down, moved west to Los Feliz. It was a perfect place for him to live as anonymously as the nature of his job demanded.

  Echo Park was the Greenwich Village of Los Angeles, a longstanding hotbed of radicals, gays, commies, lefties, greens, Latinos, and once upon a time, Aimee Semple McPherson herself. Indeed, her Angelus Temple lay just down the hill to the west, at the northern end of the Echo Park Lake. True, there was the occasional gunshot that broke the stillness of the night, but the view of downtown from his second-floor terrace was nothing short of spectacular, and on game nights, the lights of Chavez Ravine stabbed the night sky like some kind of secular cathedral.

  “Am I still under arrest?” she asked. “That was cute.”

  “No, it was clever.”

  “We’d better get to work,” she said.

  That was it. No mention of the Studio Galande and its aftermath, no reference to the last time they saw each other, no hint of her feelings when, after weeks of nursing her back to health at a safe house in Neuilly, he had suddenly and completely vanished from her life. She just picked up right where they’d left off.

  “Don’t you want to know why—”

  She held up a hand. “No. We don’t have time for that.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I know you are, Frank,” she replied.

  “My name’s not Frank,” he admitted.

  “I know it isn’t,” she said, moving toward him. “Everything you’ve told me since the day we met was a lie, but I accepted it.”

  “Because you were lying too.”

  “Because I accepted it.”

  Observe, orient…fuck it. “Follow me.”

  He led her into a tiny hallway that separated the west wing from the east wing, and then into what was once was, charmingly, the 1920s “telephone room,” a cubbyhole about the size of an old-fashioned phone booth under the central stairway that still had the hook for the home’s original telephone. The proper combination dialed on the reproduction wall phone he’d had installed would slide open to allow passage to the inner sanctum

  Even their vaunted Internet cadres had been busted down to buck private, thanks to NSA/CSS. This wasn’t Devlin’s department, but he was well aware of the extraordinary battle that had been waged, and now basically won, against Al-Qaeda in cyberspace. On September 19, 2008, the NSA warriors had taken down four of the five principal jihad sites, DSA’ed them to death, then poisoned them; what the Romans had done to Carthage, Fort Meade had done to what was left of bin Laden’s network. It was the kind of victory that should have been hailed on the editorial pages of every major newspaper, but of course wasn’t.

  He tried Eddie Bartlett again. Nothing, not even a ring—straight to voice mail. Ditto for his satphone and the iPhone. Nix.

  Worse than nix. For security reasons, if Eddie didn’t pick up on three secure lines, Devlin was supposed to drop him. It was his own rule, because Devlin had learned the hard way over the years that there was a penalty for breaking even arbitrary, self-imposed rules. Still…

  “What?”

  “I can’t raise my partner, the guy I was on my way out here to see when it happened. That’s never happened before.”

  “And you think something happened to him.”

  “I never think, until I know.”

  “Let me work with you.” There, she said it.

  He turned away from his computers and looked at her. “I guess we’re either going to have to trust each other or we’re going to have to kill each other, so why don’t we decide right now? Why did you follow me in Paris?”

  “I wasn’t following you. I was there for you.”

  “Who sent you?”

  “That’s classified.”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “Yes. You’re Frank Ross.”

  “And do you know who Frank Ross was?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me.”

  “He was a reporter who got framed and sent to jail. James Cagney played him in Each Dawn I Die.”

  It was getting clearer now. “NCRI?” The National Council of Resistance of Iran. The great Iranian diaspora had put many of the richest Persians in America, a lot of them burning with desire to see the last of the mullahs.

  She didn’t answer. “It’s my turn now. Why did you leave me?”

  “How about a drink?”

  “I’m Muslim, remember?”

  “Not a Mormon?”

  “No.”

  “So…how about a drink?”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  They took the private lift up to the

  “Not now, Millie,” said Tyler, but the look on her face bespoke worry, and she had very sharp political instincts. For the call to have bumped its way up to her desk must mean something.

  “It’s evil, sir,” she said softly, shaking. “What he’s saying.”

  The president motioned for her to put the call through on speaker phone. The Oval Office speaker phone was not one of those tinny contraptions that sounded as if you were connected with a wire tied between two hamsters. Instead, it sounded like you were having a private conversation, which is exactly what it was intended to sound like.

  “Okay,” said Tyler, signaling for her to trace the call. The White Hous
e number was in the phone book, and any idiot could call the switchboard. It was a democratic holdover from the days when John Quincy Adams used to go swimming nude in the Potomac, when Andy Jackson let the great unwashed troop through the White House, stealing everything they could lay their hands on, when Truman used to play poker with the press corps and fleece them out of their paltry weekly salaries and make them feel good about it. It was one of the things Tyler had decided he was going to have to change after his reelection.

  Tyler picked up the phone. “This is the president of the United States. To whom am I speaking?”

  “Mr. President,” said the ghostly voice at the other end of the ether, scrambled and opaque. “You are badly trying our patience.”

  Seelye was already in action, punching in instructions to NSA headquarters. He knew they wouldn’t have much time, but at least the call was already being digitally recorded and analyzed. He wanted a full report on his PDA pdq, and made that quite clear as he listened to the conversation.

  “We have given you clear instructions and an even clearer timeline. Because we are merciful, we spared the lives of the children in Illinois…most of them, anyway.”

  Seelye was already relaying the conversation capture straight to Devlin. Seelye’s BlackBerry lit up as Devlin punched in.

  “If anything, we should have thought that the incident in Los Angeles—”

  HE’S BRITISH popped up on DIRNSA’s screen. KEEP HIM TALKING. Seelye had noticed that too: the pronunciation of “anything”—en-a-thing. The use of the word, “should.” Not to mention: “Loss ANGE-e-leese.”

  “—focused your minds, but it appears that such was not the case. It appears that many more deaths will be required. Not just in America, as you have just seen, but all over the Christian West. The stakes have been raised. It is now immaterial whether you accept Allah. You are all doomed.”

  THIS IS BULLSHIT.

  “Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the he trace: the technology had been developed at Fort Meade using a fifth-generation network-centric system based on a Rijndael block cipher.