Shock Warning

by Michael Walsh

  Devlin and his few allies were no longer up against just a man like Milverton, an opportunist like Kohanloo, or a crazy like that kid. They were up against millions. They had no chance.

  Unless their plan worked.

  The only way to defeat a belief is to discredit it. Christianity and Judaism had been through this many times before: the false messiahs and moshiachs who had gathered unto them hundreds, even thousands of followers, until the day came when the holy man or rabbi died and didn’t get back up again. Until the day that the earth was supposed to stand still never happened. Until the end times came and went, and people went on, crying, lamenting, worrying, fearing, fighting, loving.

  But Islam had not.

  Devlin was not a religious man; the only ghosts that need apply in his world were the ones he dispatched himself. Like the Marines, he had been raised to believe that his job was to keep heaven, or hell, filled with fresh souls. But he’d be lying to himself if he didn’t admit that whatever had happened near California City had shaken him profoundly. It didn’t make him believe, exactly, nor did it make him a believer—but, he realized with a start, it had made him believe in something. And even if that something was the life of just one human, it was a start on the long road to salvation.

  He glanced back over at Danny, still asleep. That was the sign of the true combat vet: get plenty of shut-eye before the shooting started. Danny had so much to live for now, a woman and three children, and the two ghosts who would always be with them.

  His ghosts: Devlin’s ghosts. The ghosts who had surrounded him since that day in Rome, ghosts all around.

  It was time for him to leave the ghosts behind.

  It was time for him to rejoin the living.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Baku

  As he walked, Emanuel Skorzeny had a chance to think back over his life, what its purpose had been, and how he had—by sheer force of will—come to this moment. Just as he was doing now, he had always lived in the present. The past was dead, immutable; the future unknowable. One could plan, one could scheme, but in the end, nobody really knew. You placed your bets and hoped for the best.

  But the present, that was something else. You were always in the moment, always the master of your own fate. When he fled Dresden with Father Otto, when he survived in the woods on nothing but jerky and water, when he encountered the Russians and made up his mind to survive—then he had been master of his own fate. In the moment there was nothing to the future; each decision you made was sovereign, each step irrevocable. That was how you triumphed.

  Take this moment. At this moment he was walking the streets of Baku. In half an hour or so, provided he kept putting one foot in front of another—something that was completely within his power to control—he would be back at the residence and greeting Mlle. Derrida and Miss Harrington. He could not be sure of the latter, but this he knew: that if she was not there, he would consider it enemy action.

  Other men might well have cursed themselves for fools, but not Emanuel Skorzeny. His judgment about human nature was unerring. He knew his men, and his women. In his considerable experience, everyone could be bought, bribed, or threatened. The Christian notion of free will he found risible, as ludicrous as the notion that all men really yearned to be free. What foolishness that had been for an American president to sow, and what terrible things would he, Skorzeny, now reap. The human heart was not yearning for freedom, it was pursuing security, always in headlong flight from largely imaginary terrors. Without security, there was nothing and nobody an individual wouldn’t cheerfully sell out for the mess of pottage he laughingly called his soul.

  And that’s why he trusted Amanda Harrington. Because she had nowhere else to go.

  That’s why she would be there, her flight delayed, the business in Tehran having been slightly more complicated than they expected.

  That’s why she would be both delighted and relieved to see him, to take her place at his side once more, secure in the notion that no woman could ever possibly be a rival for his affections, not so long as she breathed.

  That’s why he never even considered betrayal—having ventured away from his orbit once, she had learned a brutal but necessary lesson, and certainly would not repeat that mistake again.

  This religion business—what was it, really? Just another search for security, this time in the arms of a fictional deity, the legend of which had been concocted and then handed down by a succession of savage tribes until it had taken on a permanence of its own. True, one branch of the universal superstition had given birth to much of the art and architecture he especially admired, but that religion no longer believed in its own fantasies, and hence was no longer worthy of survival. The church militant that had sent its combative and hormonal young knights off to the Holy Land to do battle with the Saracens now molested altar boys and ran food banks. The sooner it disappeared, the better.

  He was just the man to put an end to it, to put the whole Western world out of the prolonged misery caused by its own lack of faith in itself. Had he not already given them good and sufficient warning of his intentions? The school near St. Louis, Times Square, everything else he had tried? And yet the benighted fools would not listen. They were too busy watching sports and their idiotic television programs and arguing about politics to notice what was happening. Soon, perhaps, they would heed him.

  Because he was just the man for the job. His whole life had been preparation for this one heroic task. How did Lee Harvey Oswald translate Yeletsky’s aria from Pique Dame? “I am ready right now to perform a heroic deed of unprecedented prowess for your sake. Oh, darling, confide in me!” His sentiments precisely. After all, Oswald had changed the world with his puny Mannlicher-Carcano; how much greater would his accomplishment be, and how much more would she love him for it.

  He was closer now, the smell of brine in the air. He breathed it in. Soon enough he would be in the air, observing the holocaust below with a combination of dispassion over the loss of life and pleasure in the role he had played in it all. Might as well enjoy the scent of earth and sea while he had the chance.

  Except in those unbidden reveries, he hardly ever thought about his own past. That had all been prologue to this moment, this glorious present. What emotions of loss and longing still dwelled deep in his breast he rigorously controlled. In his imagination, his father still dangled at the end of a piece of piano wire while Party members cursed and mocked him and a film crew recorded his Totentanz for the private amusement of the Führer. His mother as well, and the fact that he hardened his heart and consigned that memory to the shades spoke well of his training as a young German. That was what the Führer had always preached and what he commanded the SS Einsatzgruppen to do as they lined up the Jews, the Slavs, the gypsies and all the other Untermenschen: to harden their hearts against all weak and useless feelings of human emotion and to do their duty. And the nation had followed him, right up to the moment when he put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  The trigger. Yes, the trigger.

  That old woman, Petrovich, was worried about the trigger. Did he have no imagination? No trust in Skorzeny’s infallibility? That fool, Farid Belghazi, had not brought him news of the Higgs boson when he was Skorzeny’s man inside CERN, but the boy was a whiz with both lasers and computers and had given him exactly what he had needed in order to realize the plan that was now unfolding around the world. For CERN was practically the epicenter of GRID computer research, able to reach out anywhere on the Internet that it had been so instrumental in developing. It really was easy when you had the right people in place.

  Unfortunately, the bastard who called himself Devlin had grabbed Belghazi and cut off the flow of information, but not before Skorzeny had what he needed.

  There was the building, just up ahead.

  He felt so much better as he entered. But his mood was ruined almost at once.

  Miss Harrington was nowhere to be found.

  “Where is she?” he demanded of M
lle. Derrida, who was out on the balcony, sunning herself. He had to admit she looked quite fetching topless.

  Mlle. Derrida gave a Gallic shrug and rolled over.

  At that moment, his secure PDA buzzed in his pocket. Surely, this was she, messaging him that she was on her way in from the airport.

  But the message was not from her. It was from Col. Zarin in Tehran and it read:

  WHO IS THIS WOMAN?

  The present had just changed. And so he must change with it. “Mlle. Derrida,” he barked. “We leave for Tehran at once. See that we are in the air in one hour’s time.”

  He looked at the computer—her computer; no, his computer. It was still hard for him to credit that the whelp had used his own lover as a poisoned pawn, but then again, why would he not? Human kindness meant nothing to him. From youth he had been trained by Seelye to hate humanity and kill without remorse. But that was his ethos, Skorzeny’s credo, and Devlin was much more a son to him than he ever could be to Armond Seelye. It was a shame to have to kill him, but the thing must and would be done.

  He picked up the computer. It, too, would be making the trip to Tehran.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Qom

  She must have dozed, but it was the stopping of the car that woke her up. Not just stopping, slamming on the brakes. She felt the coffin shift. She wasn’t sure how much of this she could take.

  She had stifled the panic attacks thus far, but she was beginning to lose it. She was not particularly claustrophobic, but the realization that she was trapped inside a box that might never be opened again was gradually sinking in. What if they opened the coffin and just shot her? What if they just buried her? Torture, anything but being shut in here, was starting to seem like a good idea.

  She heard the voices again, the sound of the doors opening, and then felt the coffin move. She could feel herself slide across the floor of the vehicle, then fall a little as it cleared the transport and landed with a thud on something. Then that something started to move. She must be on some sort of handcart.

  She could hear some doors creaking, then silence for a moment as she was wheeled somewhere. She stopped, and then felt the jerk of what must be an elevator as the lift started to ascend—or maybe descend, it was hard to tell. Her panic was rising now, faster, as it seemed the end of her ordeal might be near. An end that could not come fast enough, no matter how it ended.

  She was in a large room now—she could tell by the different acoustical environment. More voices now, but not a crowd. She could even make out some words, but as they were in Farsi, she didn’t understand them.

  Then a banging on the top of the coffin as someone jimmied a screwdriver or a wedge into the top. She heard someone grunting. Then—crack—the top came off the box and she instantly closed her eyes at the unaccustomed light.

  Shouts as a man rudely yanked her to her feet. She was soaked in sweat and reeking of urine. A man she couldn’t see slapped her. Someone else punched her. She fell back into the coffin, her head spinning. She grabbed the oxygen tank.

  Her eyesight was gradually returning. A man was coming forward, toward her. She raised the empty tank above her head and brought it down on his skull. She could hear the crack of the bone as he fell.

  Someone grabbed her from behind. She brought an elbow back and caught him in the Adam’s apple.

  Now half a dozen men were on her, punching her and ripping at her clothes. She clawed and gouged and bit. She could feel flesh rend and hear men scream and curse. She would not go down without a fight, not this close to freedom. Not this close to death.

  They were too much for her. When they had finished beating her into submission they stripped her naked and tied both her hands behind her back and hung her on a hook. The pain was excruciating, but she knew she could endure it for a while. She had sworn to herself that she would get Maryam to safety and she would fulfill that promise.

  There were about twenty men in the room now, laughing at her. Spitting at her, fondling her, touching her, slapping her. It was as if at least half of them had never seen a naked woman before, had never come this close to a Western woman before. She was at once an object of scorn and lust, of repulsion and desire. She was the West, helpless before the East and yet somehow still potent, still threatening.

  One man ventured a little too close and she struck out with her right foot, smashing his nose. He spouted blood and fell to the floor. It was like throwing chum into a shark tank. His mates turned their attention away from her and circled round him, laughing, pointing. One of them lashed out with a foot, in imitation of her, only this foot was shod and the point of the shoe caught the man right under the chin.

  His head snapped back, and that was the signal for the others to fall upon him, beating and cursing him, cursing him for the shame of being bested by a woman, by a naked woman, by a Western woman. Even after he stopped moving and crying out, they continued to beat him like a dead ass in the street whose owner has not realized he has just lost a prized possession, and they kept on beating him, pulping him until—

  A gunshot. A single gunshot. It was the most welcome sound she had ever heard.

  Two men cut her down, wrapped her in a blanket, and carried her into another room. She was inside some sort of government building, spartan and functional, moving from what looked like a squad room and into more private quarters. Yes: now that her vision had cleared, she could see that the men were wearing uniforms—the uniforms of the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, better known as the Revolutionary Guards.

  A bearded officer approached her and spoke to her harshly in Farsi. She shook her head: I don’t understand. He stepped closer, caught sight of her English blue eyes, and recoiled. She was not the woman he had been expecting.

  He turned and barked something to the two other men in the room, who quickly departed. Once the door had closed, he lit a cigarette and took a deep drag.

  “My name is Col. Navid Zarin. Welcome to Iran,” he said.

  “I suppose that was your special welcoming committee? Is that how modern Persians greet their guests?”

  Col. Zarin smiled. Spunky. Breaking this one was going to be fun. “A guest, yes—but under irregular circumstances. May I get you something to drink? I would offer you coffee, but as you know we observant Muslims do not drink coffee, even though we invented it and the Turks brought it to the gates of Vienna with them. Pity. I did enjoy it when I was a student at UC Irvine, back in the day.”

  She shook her head, said nothing.

  “There is a bathroom through that door,” he said. “Please clean yourself up. When you come out, I will have some clothes here. You will put them on, so as not to tempt my men with your beauty. And then we will have a little talk.”

  He came closer to her, cigarette in hand. “We are not supposed to smoke, either, but old habits die hard. After all, we are not Mormons.” He laughed heartily at his own joke.

  The cigarette was dangerously close to her face now. She could feel the heat from its glowing tip. She knew that the temperature of the tip of cigarette could reach up to seven hundred degrees Celsius, and leave a mark forever. Closer . . . closer . . .

  “You’re sure you wouldn’t like a drag?” he said, with a smile. She closed her eyes, flinching from the burn she knew was coming.

  But it never came. Instead, the officer stubbed the cigarette out and pointed toward the bathroom. “In there. Don’t worry, you’ll be safe. None of my men will molest you. You have my word as an officer and an Iranian gentleman. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to make an important telephone call.”

  Amanda wrapped the blanket tightly around her and slowly backed away. All her instincts were on alert, but she couldn’t read this man. Would he show traditional Muslim respect toward a helpless woman, or did he consider her a Western whore who could be raped or killed without consequence? She supposed she would find out soon enough.

  The hot water was a welcome relief. She could stay in the shower, mean as it was,
forever. She found some soap and scrubbed herself, then washed her hair with it. She wasn’t going to look her best, but then that didn’t really matter right at the moment. She was lucky to be out of Maryam’s coffin, and lucky to be alive.

  The moment. She would take a page from Skorzeny’s book, since he had always preached the gospel of the present to her. The future might hold terrors or wonders or both, but there was nothing she could do about it for now, except to be as ready for it as she could.

  When she emerged from the shower, still clutching the blanket to her, the office was empty. There, on one of the chairs, was a full-length chador, much like the one she had left for Maryam.

  She put it on. She felt like she was going to a costume party in Mayfair, but this was no joke. She had just finished dressing when the door opened and the officer walked back in.

  “Beautiful,” he said. “Not exactly what we were expecting, but nonetheless beautiful. Now, you will please come with me, there are several people who would very much like to meet you.”

  If Maryam thought the Grand Ayatollah’s ringing invocation was the end of it she was mistaken. As one, the crowd turned toward the sacred mosque where the vision of the Prophet now floated over the holy place.

  “O Muslims, behold!” shouted the Grand Ayatollah.

  “Until today, was not such a thing forbidden? And yet you are witness. For so I proclaim that I am Seyed Khorasani, in fulfillment of the hadith—I, the man from the East, from our blessed Persian tradition, here to unite two great cultures, and bring together all the ummah. O Muslims, this is the beginning of the days you have been awaiting for more than a thousand years. And thus do I proclaim to you that the days of the Occultation are nearing an end, and that the Coming is nearly upon us!”