Shock Warning

by Michael Walsh

  Byrne and Lannie exchanged glances. Schmidt caught the look. “How long have we got?” he asked.

  What had the caller said?

  “Three days, max,” said Byrne. “Probably less now.”

  “This is for real, isn’t it?” said Alonzo. “Serious, I mean.”

  “You know the old saying,” replied Byrne. “Serious as a heart attack. And I bet you get a lot of those around here.”

  A few minutes later they were back at ground level, shaking hands with Schmidt in the main entrance. “Thanks very much for all your help, Mr. Schmidt,” said Lannie. “I don’t have to tell you that—”

  “—that it’s all completely confidential. I know the drill. And you can count on me.”

  Byrne and Saleh each handed him a card. “This is where you reach us.” Byrne took out a pen and wrote something on the back of his card. “That’s my private cell number. You learn anything, you call it any time day or night. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  They stepped into the street. Byrne’s car was parked in front of the hospital. In retrospect that was probably an error, since anyone with functioning eyeballs and half a brain could figure out it was a cop car. And, as luck would have it, such a person was right there.

  “Captain Byrne?” The sound of a throaty female voice behind them got both Byrne’s and Lannie’s attention. As soon as he turned around, though, Byrne immediately regretted it.

  She was still wearing a wig, although it was pretty damn lifelike, and she certainly was quite a dish, but Principessa Stanley was the last person in Manhattan Byrne wanted to see at this moment.

  “Captain Byrne? I’m Principessa Stanley.”

  Byrne started walking toward the car. He wished Lannie would learn how to close his jaw.

  Principessa kept up with them as they walked. “Captain, I wonder if I might have a word with you.”

  “I hate ambushes, Miss Stanley,” he said.

  “I have something I think you ought to listen to.” Byrne kept moving. The car wasn’t far now. “It’s some new evidence about the terrorist incident that’s just come to light.”

  Interesting, but not interesting enough to stop right at this moment.

  Stanley sprinted around ahead of them and stopped. She was holding a cell phone in her hand. “Listen, Captain, I know you played a major role in stopping what those animals did to our city, and I know you got wounded doing it. Well, so did I.”

  There was no way around her. Both men stopped. Byrne clicked the unlock button to signal they had urgent business elsewhere, but that was as rude as he was willing to be, under the circumstances.

  “I was buried alive, Captain. He scalped me. He was probably going to rape me and he might have killed me. And while I know that he’s dead, whoever he was, I think you need to hear this. Because somebody saved my life, and I need to know who that man was.”

  “How am I supposed to know that?” asked Byrne.

  “I thought you might recognize his voice. Because I do. Listen.”

  Even out here on the street, Byrne could tell at once that the man was speaking a foreign language—a language that, in fact, sounded remarkably like the one they had just heard on Celina Gomez’s sound capture. Not the same voice, far from the same voice, but the same—

  “It’s Farsi,” said Lannie. “Again.”

  Principessa turned her famous eyes on Lannie; standing next to him, Byrne could feel him melting, the soles of his shoes fusing with the pavement.

  “Great. Let me play it again and perhaps you’ll be kind enough, Detective . . . Detective . . . ?”

  “Aslan Saleh. My friends call me Lannie.”

  “Lannie.” She pressed PLAY.

  “ ‘Listen, you cocksucker,’ ” Lannie translated. “ ‘I am coming for you. O my brother, this will be the last dawn you shall ever see,’ or something like that. I’m an Arab, not a Persian.”

  Principessa paused the playback for a moment. “And then he ends with this,” she said, and hit the play button again. “For I am sending you to hell.”

  “Do you have what you need now, Ms. Stanley?” said Byrne, pushing past her and opening the driver’s door. Reluctantly, Lannie followed, climbing in the passenger’s side. Byrne started the engine and rolled down the window.

  “I know who he is, Captain,” shouted Principessa. “And I think you do, too.”

  “Who’s that?” he asked. He recognized the voice, too—it was the man who’d saved him from Ben Addison, Jr. Looks like they shared a guardian angel, not that he was going to tell a reporter that. Whoever the man was, he deserved his anonymity.

  “His name is Archibald Grant, and he’s a consultant for the RAND Corporation,” she shouted. “I heard him give a speech last year in New Orleans on terrorism. Please, you have to help me find him.”

  The name meant nothing to Byrne, but he would check it out soon enough. “I’ll see what I can do, Ms. Stanley,” he said, and pulled into the Fifth Avenue traffic, heading back downtown. He had more pressing and urgent issues on his mind than some guy at the RAND Corp., such as whether there was likely to be a radioactive crater at the corner of Ninety-eighth and Fifth. It was highly unlikely that some pasty-faced academic could have done the things Byrne witnessed during that terrible day.

  “You got that, Lannie?” he asked as they moved down Fifth. But Lannie was looking out the window at Central Park. As they passed the Metropolitan Museum, he pointed and said, “That’s where she was, isn’t it? Over there, behind the museum.”

  “Did you hear a word I said, Detective?” asked Byrne.

  “No, Chief.”

  “The get your head out of her admittedly splendid ass and write this name down. Archibald Grant, RAND Corporation. Got that?”

  “Got it, boss.”

  “Sure you do.” Byrne put the flasher on; he didn’t feel like fucking around with traffic at this moment. “There’s something else you’d rather be getting and we both know what it is, don’t we?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Falls Church, Virginia

  They were in the secure room of Devlin’s home on North West Street. He hadn’t spent much time in this house lately, not since it had been assaulted by a hit team from the FBI and he had had to take them all out, including poor Evalina Anderson. Milverton, the rogue SAS operative, had done this to him, had discovered the location of his house while blackmailing poor Senator Hartley, and for a time Devlin thought he would never be able to come back. But the place was too useful and, with a few security modifications, it had been made airtight once more.

  They were in the “panic room”—the ultra-secure location from which Devlin could monitor the vast wide world beyond. Even if the house’s formidable defenses were penetrated, this room could be instantly sealed off and protected externally by a lethal jolt of electricity. On his desk was the old-fashioned black telephone that looked like something out of The Roaring Twenties and really wasn’t a telephone at all, but a direct incoming link from the Oval Office, Fort Meade, and the Pentagon.

  “Now that’s what I call retro,” said Danny Impellatieri, reaching for it.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said Devlin.

  Danny’s hand froze in midair. “Booby-trapped, right?”

  “You might say that,” said Devlin. “For one thing, it’s incoming only. For another, only my voice can activate it via voice-recognition software I designed myself; don’t ask. For a third, the grip is also a fingerprint reader. Finally, I have to look directly into the instrument within five seconds of its ringing—both the receiver and the transmitter pieces—for a retinal scan.”

  “What happens if you don’t? What happens if someone else picks up?”

  “The phone self-destructs in a shrapnel fireball, and that’s the end of whoever’s fucking with me. Of course, if it gets that far, it means I’m probably already dead. Still, I sleep easier at night.”

  Danny looked around the room at the range of computers and weapons.
That was all that was in the room: multiple laptops and multiple weapons. The place was a cross between Best Buy and an Afghani weapons bazaar.

  “Like I said,” said Devlin, reading his mind, “I sleep easier at night.”

  For open-source data mining, there were three laptops, each with a different operating system and a different Web browser. Double-blind passwords, proprietary encryption algorithms. Each of the machines running DB2 and Intelligent Miner and hotlinked separately to the three parallel mainframe servers at the IBM RS/6000 Teraplex Integration Center in Poughkeepsie—the RS/6000 SP, the S/390, and the AS/400. Predictive and descriptive modes, depending on what he was looking for.

  True, some of his systems needed updating. He was running Sharpreader on Windows, NetNewsWire on the Mac, Straw on Linux: his in-box was RSS-refreshed on a minuteby-minute basis, with real-time news. Level Five NSA firewall security, updated regularly. Complete virus, trojan, and spyware projection, automatically renewed every forty-eight seconds.

  “While we’re waiting,” said Devlin, “let me show you something.”

  He opened the folders the priest had given him. A few articles from the Los Angeles Times and other local newspapers about the monthly gathering in the California City desert. Surveillance photos of unknown provenance. Some background information on “Juan Diego.” But the bulk of the material had to do with the larger phenomenon of what the true believers referred to as the Marian Apparitions—the purported manifestations of the BVM at obscure and remote places around the world, whether in person, as at Fatima and Lourdes: a reflection or image, as at Knock, in Ireland; or visualized as a salt stain on a highway underpass, as in Chicago a few years back.

  “This is what I saw,” said Danny, pointing to the Chicago images.

  “Those were eventually vandalized and removed,” said Devlin, “but I have to admit the likeness is striking.”

  Danny kept one eye on the telephone as he spoke. “Do you think they’re really coming? I’ve never met a president before.”

  “You’ll get over it pretty quickly.”

  “And why are you involved in all this?” asked Danny, referring to the Marian information. During the plane ride to Washington, they hadn’t spent much time in conversation. Danny was too busy putting together a team for any eventuality, while Devlin mostly slept—although whether he was sleeping or thinking, it was impossible to tell.

  “Because,” came the reply. “Because a woman I never met before asked me to. Because a priest in a deconsecrated cathedral who probably doesn’t really exist gave me these dossiers. Because I went out to California City and saw something. Because of this.”

  The rose was withered now, but it was still a rose. Danny caught it in midair.

  “When was the last time you saw a wild rose in the Mojave?”

  “I’ve never seen a wild rose in the Mojave.”

  “It’s the end of the world. That’s what Tyler said. You and I each have a piece of the puzzle. The White House, NSA, maybe Defense—they have their own pieces. We’re here to put them all together.”

  “It’s because of her, isn’t it?”

  Devlin turned and looked at Danny. They had come a long way together, and he had just breached his own most important protocol by bringing the man here. But trusting him was the least of his sins. The real sin, the only sin that mattered, was trusting her.

  He had trusted her for absolutely no reason. Everything she had done from the time she’d picked him up in Paris years ago, to their “chance” meeting on board a commercial flight two years ago . . . everything screamed out for closer scrutiny. And yet he had given her none. Instead, he had forced the president to allow her on the Branch 4 team, reporting exclusively to him, his first partner. And then look what had happened.

  Was it about her? “You’re damn right it’s about her. It’s always been about her and until the day I die it’s going to be about her.”

  “Which means it’s really about you.”

  “I thought I wanted out.”

  “Your country needs you in. She needs you in. You believe in her, then go get her. Do we know where she is?”

  “That’s one of the things we’re about to find out.”

  As if on cue, the phone rang—a startlingly old-fashioned loud clanging that did not subside until Devlin had satisfied the security protocols. “I’m listening,” he said. He grunted a couple of times and then hung up. “They’re on their way.”

  Devlin closed the panic room and together they headed downstairs. The living room, like everything on the ground floor, was startlingly conventional. Anyone looking through one of the windows would have seen nothing out of the ordinary—but anyone trying to break in would never have broken out again.

  They could hear the sound of a car pulling up in front of the house. “They’re just going to walk right up to the door and ring the bell?” asked Danny. “What about security? What about decoys? What about—”

  “What about just acting like a normal human being?” retorted Devlin. His own existence might be conducted completely in the shadows, but that was no reason not to act normal. His safety was assured by his anonymity; in his experience, the more a target tried to hide from him, the easier he was to find.

  He opened the door and greeted the President of the United States. “Mr. President,” he said to the first man through the door. Tyler was wearing a baseball cap and dress-down clothes, and had adopted a slouching walk for the occasion. Behind him came Seelye, also in weekend civvies, and then Shalika Johnson, the secretary of defense. He was somewhat surprised to see a fourth person trailing behind, someone who looked more like a desk jockey than a field op. Maybe he should send out for pizza.

  Devlin closed the door. “Please sit down.” He knew they were not alone, that members of the President’s Secret Service detail were outside, passing as pedestrians, waiting in cars, circling the block. But inside his house was one of the most secure locations in the D.C. area, fully vetted by all the relevant agencies.

  Seelye made the introductions as President Tyler instinctively headed for best seat in the room. This was Devlin’s first encounter with Secretary Johnson, a large, tough woman, and he liked her on sight. No doubt she would prove to be a huge pain in the ass, but that was her job and he suspected she was very good at it.

  “And this,” said the DIRNSA, “is Major Kent Atwater, the man who cracked the Dorabella cipher and has brought us all here together today.” Seelye looked at Atwater. “I ought to fire you, but in a time of war, certain liberties—certain judgments—sometimes need to be made. Thank you for making them.”

  Devlin spoke up. “Mr. President, Madame Secretary, Major, Dad—this is Don Barker. He has my complete confidence. Anything you need to say to me you can say in front of him.”

  “That’s what you said about her,” said Seelye.

  Devlin struggled to control his rage. One of these days . . . “With all due respect to your crack intelligence acumen, Director Seelye, why don’t you wait until all the facts are in? For unless I’m very much mistaken, the wheel just took another spin—didn’t it, Mr. President?”

  Tyler looked at him with a modicum of respect, which is all anyone got out of him. “We’ve just received an encoded message from somewhere in Iran, outside Tehran. It came through back channels, as if the sender didn’t have access to the NSA network, but it got here and it got bumped all they way up the chain of command, so I guess our boy—our girl—knows how the game is played. The trouble is, we don’t know what it means.”

  “May I see it, please?” asked Devlin.

  Tyler nodded at Seelye, who handed him a new Android. “No,” said Devlin. “Transmit it to me. Don’t worry, nothing gets out of this bubble that I don’t want to get out.”

  Seelye pointed the device at Devlin’s own Android and pressed a button. “Thanks,” said Devlin.

  He pressed several keys on his device and suddenly a piece of a side wall disappeared into the ceiling to reveal a large video sc
reen. “This would be a little faster upstairs, but we can make it work,” he said. He thought a moment—

  “The message appears to be encrypted inside some sort of video file,” said Devlin.

  “Yes,” said Seelye. “It’s a clip of the recent royal wedding.”

  “Fascinating,” said Devlin. “That tells us something already. And what is it?”

  No one answered.

  “That the sender is definitely a woman. Who else could possibly endure such tedium?”

  On the screen, two newly wedded members of the British royal family were waving at their cheering subjects.

  “Don’t you wish the public would cheer you like that, Mr. President?” said Devlin.

  “Look here,” said Shalika Johnson, visibly annoyed at Devlin’s blithe tone. “I don’t like the way you speak to the President. He’s the President of the United States, which means he’s your Commander-in-Chief, so why don’t you show a little respect?” She glared at Devlin, and looked like she was ready to take a poke at him.

  “Guess you haven’t read the memo,” replied Devlin, calmly. “Dad, why don’t you explain the facts of life to the secretary later? Right now, if this is what I think it is, we’ve got a big problem.”

  They all turned their attention back to the screen. “It’s easy to embed a secondary or tertiary file in video material,” said Devlin. “We do it all the time, even for fairly routine stuff. That way we can use open-source platforms, publicly accessible things like Facebook, and get messages out easily and quickly. Hiding in plain sight.”

  “We found it quickly enough,” said Major Atwater.