Inwardly, Pilier seethed. Outwardly, he remained as placid as the music had been. “No, sir,” he said.
“‘Praise Eternity.’ The fifth movement of Messiaen’s Quatour pour le fin du temps. ‘The Quartet for the End of Time.’ Written in seven movements and an interlude, and premiered by its composer in a Nazi prison camp at Görlitz during the winter of 1940–41, for the instruments he had on hand: piano, violin, cello, and clarinet. Do you know what Messiaen said about it?”
The shame of ignorance was burning Pilier’s cheeks. He couldn’t compete with Skorzeny’s all-embracing, omniscient Weltanschauung.
“Of course you don’t. He said, ‘Never have I been heard with as much attention and understanding.’ In a concentration camp. Thus focusing the mind and concentration wonderfully. As I know from bitter experience.”
“It’s beautiful, sir,” mustered Pilier.
“It’s not beautiful,” barked Skorzeny. “It’s radiant. ‘Seven is the perfect number.’ But he wrote one extra movement, the interlude, so as not to compete with Creation. Le 7 de ce repos se prolonge dans l’éternité de devient le 8 de la lu-mière indéfectible, de l’inaltérable paix. ‘The seventh of his day of repose prolongs itself into eternity and becomes the eighth, of unfailing light, of immutable peace.’ Do you understand that? Unfailing light. Immutable peace.”
“Yes, sir. No, sir.” Pilier had no idea which the correct answer was, so he tried them both. How he wished the old man would just go to bed one night, and never wake up. All this blather about useless culture gave him a migraine.
“Messiaen believed it was his faith that got him safely through the camps, and made him one of the great to you. Draw him to your home turf and kill him. What could be easier? You have the defender’s advantage.”
For once, there was silence at the other end of the line. Milverton’s face betrayed no emotion, but nothing came out of his mouth.
“It’s perfect, don’t you see?” said Skorzeny, pausing a little longer than necessary for effect. “One last misdirection, while the real work occurs elsewhere.” Milverton wasn’t sure if he liked this idea, but stayed silent. “While you two settle an old score…In the meantime, if by any chance you should see Miss Harrington, please ask her to call me immediately. I require her presence tomorrow at the country house in France.”
Amanda. So that was what this was all about. The old bastard was on to them. Had he wrung a confession out of her when he was in London? Milverton realized that he hadn’t been able to get ahold of Amanda, either, that she hadn’t answered his calls. “The country house?”
“Yes. With the insurance policy.”
The insurance policy. This was getting worse by the second.
“I’m not sure I understand, Mr. Skorzeny.”
Milverton knew that, had they been face to face, Skorzeny would have looked upon him as if he were an idiot child. Or worse, that iron mannequin holding out the begging bowl on Regent Street with the sign saying SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SPASTIC, or whatever politically correct thing it said these days.
Skorzeny chuckled. “Of course you do.”
He was being set up. Even at this distance, Milverton could smell the stench of desperation on Skorzeny, even as he could smell the scent of Amanda Harrington on him. That was what this was all about.
Her. With the biggest, most audacious play of his life right in front of him, Emanuel Skorzeny was losing focus over a woman.
So unimportant to a man of Milverton’s age and experience. So vitally important to a man of Skorzeny’s age and experience. And he never saw it coming. What a fool he had been.
“It’s him, isn’t it? The man whom I seek.”
“Yes, sir, it is.”
Milverton could feel the excitement radiating from the other end of the continental trunk line. Skorzeny had overplayed his hand. He had given something away. His need. He had never seen that before. His lust—for money, power, women—of course. But never need. Never desperation. Skorzeny’s need, if Milverton played his cards right, would be the thing that kept him alive.
“Then make us both happy. Draw him to you and kill him.”
Even though he knew it was a trap, even though he knew that Skorzeny was setting him up, even though he knew that it didn’t matter to the old man which of them killed the other—because in the aftermath it wouldn’t really matter—Milverton could feel his own excitement rising. His own lust for combat. His own need to pay back
Which meant that he would get to face him. The shadow. The man who wasn’t there. This child whom Skorzeny sought. Protected by the NSA. Given up by Hartley. Very well, then. Bring him on.
And bring on Skorzeny too. He had put up with Caligula long enough, with his barely disguised contempt, with the way he had treated Amanda. He had not survived the training camps of the SAS, not run to ground the deadly operatives of the Provos in Spain, not cut the throats of the IRA men on the streets of Belfast and Londonderry, not dealt with the worst Soviet Georgian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Jewish gangsters to kowtow to a man whose only real claim to fame was that he was a victim. He would show Skorzeny what the word victim really meant.
Not a symbolic victim.
Not a possible victim.
Not a putative victim.
Not a potential victim.
A real victim.
A dead victim.
“Yes, sir,” he said, hanging up.
Nobody hung up on Emanuel Skorzeny.
Milverton didn’t care. He called Amanda Harrington again.
DAY SIX
Ask yourself, what is this thing in itself, by its own special constitution? What is it in substance, and in form, and in matter? What is its function in the world? For how long does it subsist?
—MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations, Book VIII
Chapter Fifty
ROSSLYN, VIRGINIA
Senator Robert Hartley strode to the podium at his hastily called press conference. He was clean, shaved, and sober, and was glad that everybody could tell.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, beaming at the cameras, “I have an important announcement.”
A modest hubbub ran through the modest crowd. Hartley’s staffers had done the best they could on short notice, but their IMs were only just beginning to pull in the public. Right now, it was mostly media.
“As you all know,” he continued, “I have spent my career in the Senate, reaching across the aisle, striving for bipartisanship to solve the issues that divide us as Americans. To that end, I have work assiduously with this president, Jas the Refrigerator fell in behind them. They were both dressed in black, just like real Secret Service agents now.
The Refrigerator handed him a secure cell phone. “You’ve got a phone call from the Big Guy.”
“Nice work,” came Tyler’s voice. “You actually sounded like you meant what you were saying out there.”
“Thank you, Mr. President. But there’s one thing I just don’t understand—”
Tyler knew where he was going with the question. “Why I’m doing this to myself, right? Simple. In order for me to deal with whatever the hell is going on here, I need to throw the jackals in the press some red meat. You know how they are, Bob. Basically, there’s room for only one story at a time in their precious little airheads. And now, thanks to you, the story today is that I’m a dirty low-down, double-dealing, malfeasant skunk who ought to be strung up on the Mall. Which is just fine with me at the moment.”
Hartley swallowed hard. “And I’m the red meat.”
“You more or less nominated yourself, didn’t you, Bob?”
“Who dropped the dime on me? I have to know?”
The president ignored the question. “Play this out until further notice and when we’re done, then you and I will call it even. The only acceptable answer is yes, sir.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have a nice day,” said Jeb Tyler, ringing off.
They rode back to the Watergate in silence.
Hartley w
as alone in his bedroom. His babysitters were in the front room. They’d sealed the windows so he couldn’t jump out. They’d taken everything sharp away from him. The only shoes he had were loafers.
Hartley lit a cigarette. A plan was forming in his mind—a way for him to get out of this mess with his dignity intact. Sure, he was a douchebag, like almost everybody in Congress, a corrupt hypocrite who preached one thing and did another; a man who constantly brayed about his devotion to his constituents as he went about screwing them as hard as he could. But maybe now he could make up for it in some small way.
He dug the folder marked HARTLEY out of his briefcase and put it in the trash can. Too bad nobody used metal trash cans more, but the gray plastic one would have to do. He opened it up so that there was plenty of air around the pictures and then set fire to it.
It took a few minutes for the smoke detectors to kick in, setting off a screech. Hartley wasn’t sure whether alarms would ring all over the complex, but it didn’t matter; a localized ruckus would be just fine. As the alarms shrieked, he moved behind the bedroom door and waited.
He’d kept himself in good physical shape for a man of his age and he realized with grim irony that his fitness was finally going to come in handy for something other than a barroom pickup. Well, better late than never. He picked up one of his bookends, a heavy read with the Falcon, fracturing his skull. As the man fell, Hartley quickly slammed the door and locked it. He knew the Refrigerator would burst though, but he only needed a few seconds. He grabbed the gun.
The Refrigerator didn’t bother with a knock. Hurling his weight he burst through the door. Hartley shot him three times, once in the chest, once in the groin, and once in the head, just for fun.
The trash can fire was still burning merrily. Hartley ran to the bathroom and sprinkled some aftershave on it, which caused the flames to leap higher. Then he wadded as much paper as could—the Washington Post came in handy—and finally the sprinklers went off.
Outside, in the hallway, he could hear shouting, running. Alarms started to whoop everywhere.
He sat on the bed, the water from the sprinklers pouring over him. He hadn’t prayed since he was a kid, but it was funny how the prayers came back to you when you needed them most.
His last thought was, This will really give them something to write about tomorrow. Then he put the Whippet’s gun in his mouth.
“Have a nice day, Jeb,” was his last thought before he pulled the trigger.
Chapter Fifty-one
LONDON/WASHINGTON, D.C.
Milverton picked up Hartley’s presser halfway through. He couldn’t believe his luck. Things were going just as they had planned. The bit about running for president was, he thought, inspired. He wondered if Hartley had thought of it all by himself.
Flush him out and kill him. That’s what Skorzeny wanted. Mission half-accomplished. If the FBI team he had sicced on his nemesis hadn’t succeeded, well, so what? He was better suited to do the job himself, right here in Blighty. Milverton had no idea why the old man was so keen on getting Devlin, but in this case business and pleasure were mixing admirably.
From the beginning, Skorzeny must have known, somehow, that they’d send Devlin to Edwardsville, must have known that Devlin’s catching sight of Milverton would only whet his appetite for score-settling, must have known that Devlin would then be a human yo-yo, shuttling back and forth between the coasts, trying to conceal his identity while wondering who the hell was doing this to him.
Milverton never made the mistake of underestimating an adversary, and he had learned the hard way that Devlin was every bit his equal in tradecraft. Hartley’s access, as head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had been solid gold, but Devlin had outwitted him in the battle of Fort Meade. Who knew, maybe he was on to him, on his way to him, and all Milverton had to do was sit back and await developments.
Hartley—now there was a good little boy. Milverton had to admit that Skorzeny’s Hoover-like collection of the personal peccadilloes of nearfoolproof, was therefore, QED, zero percent effective.
And yet, in the end, it was the thing that had brought down the Soviet Union. Milverton had been there, in Dresden, on that freezing cold night in 1985, when Erich Honecker, the last dictator of the late German Democratic Republic, had stood in forty-below-zero weather (no matter whether it was measured in Celsius or Fahrenheit, forty-below was the sole point of agreement on the two scales) and railed against the Stern-kriege. Five years later, he was gone, and the East Germans would be scarfing up bananas and porn and west-marks as the Wall came down. Whether SDI worked or not, it didn’t matter. Reagan had bluffed his ass off, and the Soviet communists, used to chess and not poker, toppled their king and walked away from the board.
And yet the movement had lived on, in men like Emanuel Skorzeny, who realized that true communism was capitalism by other means. There was no communist quite like a guilty plutocratic manipulator of the capitalist system. And, to paraphrase Baudelaire, Satan’s greatest accomplishment was to make the West believe that the two systems were fundamentally incompatible, when, in fact, they were the same thing, if only you know how to play the angles.
EMP.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, everything was for sale. Firearms, art, icons, women—it was a giant going-out-of-business fire sale. Seeing an opportunity where the hapless American administration had not, Skorzeny had swooped in, buying them all, and more. True, he had his setbacks; when “Captain Bob” Maxwell mysteriously went overboard on his yacht…well that was a deal gone wrong. But a lot of deals went right.
And now Emanuel Skorzeny had the ordnance to prove it.
Because missiles and missile shields were all beside the point. Like all right-thinking people, he had mourned the demise of the USSR as a noble experiment gone wrong. But the impulse that had given it birth, to control everything and everybody for their own good, was a fundamental human impulse. And so the Soviet Union had never really died; it had simply molted, mutated, gone both underground and above board—especially in the United States.
President Carter had cautioned Americans against their “inordinate fear of communism.” Stout fellow, laying the ground. The ongoing vilification of Joe McCarthy—never mind that the sainted Bobby Kennedy was his right-hand man—the destruction of Hoover’s posthumous reputation, the penetration of the American universities, political parties and media by brave men and women dedicated to the ideals of Marxism-Leninism—all this was at last bearing fruit.
Perhaps the most ambitious, and ultimately successful, operation had been the Soviet “illegals” program. This involved the expenditure of vast sums of cash—some of it financed by Skorzeny himself—in order to identify, indoctrinate, train and promote the careers of bright young things sympathetic to the Cause. Men and women who would benefit from fortunate and fortuitous scholarships to elite prep schools and universities, who would be mentored by former “radicals” turned “distinguished professors,” who relied on the short, indeed nonexistent, historical memories of their fellow countrymen; who would be taken in hand by powerful politicians in need of an infusion ofan antechamber away from the main hallway.
The orderly saluted him and waved him through. “The Secretary is expecting you, Colonel,” he said, and saluted.
Devlin returned the salute and walked to the open doorway. “Come in, Colonel Quigley,” said Rubin’s voice. “And please shut the door behind you.”
Rubin was a mild-mannered, soft-spoken man, not given to Tyler’s fierce fits of temper. But to say he was unhappy about this meeting was to say the least. “We meet at last. The most troublesome man in the service of the United States. There’s a dead FBI team in northern Virginia that I bet you know something about.”
Devlin didn’t have time either for apologies or pleasantries. “There will be a lot more dead people if you don’t listen to what I have to say and then do exactly what I tell you.”
Rubin bristled. Devlin was Seelye’s boy. He didn’t have to tak
e this kind of lip. “Watch your tone with me, Colonel,” he said.
Devlin stood in the doorway, trying to decide whether to stay or to go. He believed in protocol, in playing by the rules, until he didn’t, and this was one of those times.
“Mr. Secretary, I can walk out of here right now and take what I know with me. You can either let me go or have me arrested, imprisoned, and killed, but none of those courses of actions will do you any good, because you’ll never get the contents of my head onto your desk until it’s far too late. And by then you’ll either be dead or most definitely out of a job. So why don’t you drop the attitude and listen to what I have to say? Sir.”
For just a moment, Rubin was tempted to tell this man where to go. And for another moment, even more chilling, he realized the Devlin could kill him right here in his office, in the safest place in America, and probably get away with it. That is what Seelye, and by extension the U.S. government, had raised him to do, trained him to do, rewarded him for doing. “It’s your meeting,” Rubin finally admitted.
“We’ve been penetrated. Somebody sent that FBI team to my home. Where I live is absolutely beyond top secret, which means it’s far, far beyond the capacity of the FBI to get its hands on that information. So if it was you, say your prayers right now, because no matter how fast you are, I’m faster, and you’ll be dead before you can pick up the phone. You’re alive only at my forbearance, so don’t push your luck.” He watched as the blood drained out of Rubin’s face, then continued.
“Luckily for you, I don’t suspect you. It’s either Seelye or Hartley—”
“Bob Hartley is dead,” said Rubin. “Nobody knows it yet, but he apparently shot himself and a couple of other people at the Watergate earlier today.”
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