There were those who whispered that he was the illegitimate son of Otto Skorzeny himself, the great Standarten-führer who had rescued Mussolini from the partisans. He let them think that: it made the story of his life so much more…redemptive.
Pilier strapped himself into his seat as the plane went into a steep descent. “Sir?” he reminded.
“In a moment, Monsieur Pilier.” Skorzeny’s fingers flew; for an old man, thought Pilier, he could handle himself around technology like a teenager. As Pilier watched, Skorzeny put on a headset to eliminate the noise of the plane’s engines and began to speak softly. Pilier couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he knew whom he was talking to: Amanda Harrington, who should be waiting for them in Paris.
Skorzeny finished his conversation and shut down the system. One of the conditions he was forced to accept when he bribed the French minister of the interior was to switch it off in French airspace. No matter how well shielded it was, it would not do to be discovered, and not wishing to annoy a duly appointed official of his host country, especially given his special needs within that host country, Skorzeny had reluctantly agreed. He prided himself on keeping his word.
“Do you read the Bible, Monsieur Pilier?”
Where that question came from, Pilier didn’t want to know. He braced himself for a new and strange line of inquiry. “You know I don’t, sir,” said Pilier. He was a good French Catholic, which meant that he never attended mass.
“What about the Apocrypha? The Gnostic Gospels? Surely, Revelation?”
Where was the crazy old coot going with this? “No, sir.”
“The vision of St. John, a masterpiece of speculative superstition that some mistake for dogma. A book of visions, signs, terror, and wonders. Of the End Times. ‘And there appeared a great wonder in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.’ Chapter Twelve, Verse One.”
Now Pilier understood. It had something to do with Skorzeny’s Blake obsession.
“The woman clothed with the sun. The point is, the cartoon versions of reality and history that we see on our so-called ‘news’ channels are grossly distorted and lacking in specificity. But that, I suppose, is what comes from a century-long assault on western civilization. Don’t false dichotomies enrage you? Left, right, communism, national socialism, capitalism?”
Pilier had no idea what Skorzeny was talking about, and wondered whether the old man did, either.
The wheels barely bumped as they landed, which was the way Skorzeny liked it. They were still rolling to a stop when he rose from his seat and let Pilier throw his topcoat around his shoulders. He ran a comb through his hair.
He was first out the door, walking briskly toward the car. Pilier was trailing behind him, carrying their effects. Even though it was dark, he could see her silhouette in the backseat of the Citroën.
Chapter Seventeen
EDWARDSVILLE—JEFFERSON MIDDLE SCHOOL
Emma caught Rory’s glance, but tried not to let on. She didn’t want any of the bad men to realize they knew each other. She didn’t want any harm to come to her brother. If anything happened to him…
She wasn’t sure how she knew, but at some point before they had dragged his body away she had realized that Mr. Nasir-Nassaad was dead. She had never seen a dead person before, not even in a funeral home, and all of a sudden there had been two of them right in front of her. All four of her grandparents were not only still alive, they were thriving in North Carolina and Florida. Everybody lived forever these days. Except, of course, for Nurse Haskell and Mr. Nasir-Nassaad.
She’d wondered what it felt like to be dead. Wondered if it hurt, the way it hurt when you cut yourself really bad, and whether it kept on hurting even after you were dead. Or if your soul just jumped out of your body and went its merry way up to heaven or wherever, or whether you got to stick around for a while, to see what was happening.
These weren’t pleasant thoughts, but under the circumstances, they were the most pleasant thoughts she could muster.
And then doors opened and the man with the funny accent was back again.
He was talking to a few of the other men, like he was the captain of the basketball team calling up a play or something. They broke and the other men went away, out of the gym, carrying their guns. After they’d gone, he started yelling again. “Okay, okay, we don’t want no heroes now. Nobody going to get hurt. Everything going to be fine, but now we see if your mother, father love you or not.”
Emma had no idea what he meant by that—she was certain that her parents loved her and Rory—but it seemed to amuse him, because he started laughing again, and already she had seen enough of what happened when he started to laugh.
She closed her eyes.
What a difference. It was a world of stillness. But the tranquility had a trade-off: the silence in the gym was not really silence at all, but a mixture of deep breathing, small whimpers and groans, the muttering of bad men.
And the smells. You didn’t notice them so much when your eyes were open, but now they jumped right out at you. Many of the children had soiled themselves, and that pungent odor wafted everywhere. Emma hoped she would be able to control her bladder when the time came because she didn’t want to embarrass herself and she sure didn’t want to ruin her new Citizens of Humanity jeans, which had cost her dad more than a hundred dollars.
A sudden, stinging slap across her face brought her wide awake back to brute reality.
It was him, leering into her face. “No sleeping missy. You wouldn’t want to have bad dreams now, would you?”
The smell of his breath made her want to retch, and she fought down the rising bile. He was brown-eyed, with a stubble of scraggly beard and a hawk nose, and he made her even sicker just looking at him. Especially the way he was smiling at her, with his rotten teeth and stinking breath.
“OK pretty missy, brave girl, big hero, huh? When time comes, I think you will be nice date.”
He reached out and grabbed one of her breasts and squeezed it—
She said nothing.
He fondled her other breast and then leaned forward and licked the inside of her left ear.
Emma couldn’t catch Rory’s eye, which she knew was a good thing. The last thing she wanted to do now was to set this animal on her brother. She would just have to take it.
She’d heard some of her older girlfriends talk about kissing and licking and what it felt like when a boy licked your ear, how hot it was, but there was nothing hot about this at all. It was disgusting, and she vowed to herself at this moment that she’d never let another boy do this to her again as long as she lived.
Then he started to laugh again. And lick again.
Nobody said anything. Nobody did anything.
Suddenly, Emma was jerked to her feet, her hands still bound behind her. As she opened her eyes, all she could see was a very large, very sharp knife, which he was holding in front of her face.
“Okay, pretty missy, we go now.” And suddenly she was being pulled along by the man, out of the gym, toward the double doors that led into the main hallway and to the front entrance of the school.
Emma could feel her brother’s eyes upon her, but there was nothing that either one of them could do. She shot him a quick, discreet, “don’t worry” glance. Everything was as it had been before, except—and she only realized this later—the blond teacher who had been lying on one of the benches was gone.
“What do you want?” she said as they passed through the doors. The hallways was dead silent. No lockers slamming, no bells ringing, no voices shrieking, laughing, crying. She couldn’t believe she was brave enough to say something, but she did.
The man still had her by the hand. “Nothing much,” he said.
Emma couldn’t understand what was happening. Edwardsville wasn’t one of those faraway places where the houses were made out of dirt, where the soldiers were fighting. This was a place of regular homes and regular families. “T
hen why are you here?” she asked.
The man stopped abruptly. The knife he’d used to cut her bonds was sticking in his belt. “We do what we are told. Just like you.” He smiled. She was afraid he was going to start laughing again, but he didn’t. Instead he pulled out a cell phone and pressed the Talk key, redialing the last number he called.
“Ready?” he asked, then nodded. “When? Few minutes? Good.”
As scared as she was, Emma couldn’t control her curiosity. “What’s happening? What do you want?”
He gave her a look, the kind of look she didn’t want to see. There was nobody else in the hallway. At this moment, there was nobody else in the world.
“You, pretty missy.”
She screamed as he reached for her and dragged her into the closet.
Chapter Eighteen
EDWARDSVILLE
Thwack thwack thwack…
Hope was watching from her hiding place on the Gondolf farm as the helicopter landed on the roof of the school. Her heart leapt—at last, somebody was going to do something about the standoff. She waited for what seemed like ages before she realized that nobody was either leaving it or entering it. It just sat there, its rotors gradually slowing, then stopping. The escape vehicle, she finally realized.
Maybe that was a good sign, she told herself. They couldn’t possibly take all the children on board, which meant they were going to leave them behind. Then she thought some more, and decided maybe this was not such a good sign after all.
She thought of her children, waiting for someone to come and rescue them. She knew she had no chance against a group of armed and ruthless men. She knew that she was supposed to let the professionals handle it—the hostage negotiators, the SWAT teams.
But what if they failed? Then the other teams would come, the grief counselors, the ministers, the insurance adjustors, the reporters, the lawyers. If she could only get inside, maybe she could do something, maybe she could help in some small way, get them out maybe, but if not then offer herself as a hostage in her children’s place, to let them take her instead of them. Because, in the end, she would far rather take her chances with the hard men with knives, bombs, and guns than to see the heralds of the Grief Society show up on her doorstep.
She would, literally, rather be dead.
But how? Ever since the hostage situation had begun, the place had been cordoned off, ringed with cops and emergency services vehicles. The feds were there, too, wearing those silly jackets with “FBI” emblazoned across the back, so they wouldn’t shoot each other by mistake.
She slipped out of her car on the passenger’s side and closed the door as quietly as she could. She had thought ahead and killed the dome light, and so she didn’t need to close it all the way, just enough to make it look normal.
Up ahead, ringed by the lights of the media and the emergency services, the school building had been plunged into complete darkness. There was no chance she’d be able to cross the parking lot without being spotted.
Then she remembered the storage shed.
The storage shed was exactly the kind of place you never noticed. It just stood there, crammed with old tools, cleaning stuff, junk, entered once in a very blue moon when the custodial staff couldn’t find something in the main building. She’s been in it a couple of times. Even in the dead of winter. Because the shed was connected to the school by an underground tunnel that linked it to the loading dock in the basement.
The shed wasn’t that far away. If she ducked and crawled, keeping the shed between her and the main building as much as possible, she could make it. Her teacher’s master key would open the door. And the tunnel would get her into the school.
She knew it was crazy, but she didn’t care.
She slithered on her hands and knees, across the athletic field and onto the cold blacktop. Thank God she’d worn jeans. The palms of her hands picked up dirt, stray pebbles, squished into something she didn’t want to know what. It would wash off later. Or not.
She crept on.
Damn! Her cell phone was ringing. Loudly, of course. Vibrating, too. Hope always kept the ring tone at seven, in case she was singing along to ABBA in the car when Jack or Emma or her mother called.
No way to answer. She thought about stopping to turn it off, but decided instead to keep moving; the sooner she reached the relative safety of the shed, the better. She could turn it off then.
She caught a quick glimpse of the school as she opened the lock and slipped inside the shed. The helicopter was still squatting on the roof, like a giant grasshopper.
Even though the shed was made of corrugated steel, she didn’t dare turn the light on. Instead, she felt her way through the darkness to the back, where the tunnel door was. She pushed it open.
Pitch black, but that didn’t matter. She fished her cell phone out of her pocket and flipped it open. The dim light was plenty bright enough for her to see by.
The missed call was from Jack. For an instant she thought about calling him back, to let him know she was all right when she realized that she was very far from all right and was even less likely to be all right in a few minutes than she was now.
There—just up ahead: the hydraulic platform where shipments came in. For the first time in her life, Hope Gardner blessed the systemic corruption of the Illinois political system, which siphoned money out of the taxpayers’ pocket with the promise of a better tomorrow and passed along the cash to the relatives in the contracting business. Only one problem: the hydraulics made a not so joyful noise as they shuddered to life.
She breathed a short prayer that no one would hear anything as she punched the button on the lift, and ascended toward God only knew what.
Chapter Nineteen
EDWARDSVILLE
Devlin’s route took him well around the school, which was surrounded by cops, but that suited his purposes just fine. He wasn’t going to the school, anyway. His destination was the Community Christian Church, which lay to the east about a mile away. It was the tallest building in the area, and it was perfect for his needs.
He pulled in the parking lot of what looked more like an insurance office building than a church and doused his car’s lights. Long ago, somebody had loved this vehicle and babied it, but the car thieves had stripped it of most of its optional accessories, so now it was down to a standard state: a perfectly innocuous American car. Which was just fine with him, because all he needed was a working cigarette lighter.
His field kit consisted of a NSA-level minilaptop, a secure, enhanced BlackBerry, and a micro U3 8-gig smart drive complete with its own security protocols and defense systems; if he had to, he could travel the world with just the drive, and be up and fully operational ten minutes after buying, begging, borrowing, or stealing a laptop. In the intel business, redundancy was a wonderful thing. Untraceable redundancy was even better.
He plugged the laptop into the cigarette lighter and booted it up. The battery was good for at least six hours, but Devlin had learned long ago that to waste not was to want not. Indeed, the older and more experienced he got, the more he realized that nearly every one of the old bromides worked just as well in the twenty-first century as in the eighteenth or nineteenth. Folklore, word of mouth, and old wives’ tales, like stereotypes, always contained a generous dollop of truth, especially when it came to human behavior.
As he saw things, the history of the twentieth century—a century that in the name of ideology saw more deaths than all those attributed to religion combined—was a desperate, although often successful attempt to convince otherwise intelligent people that black was white, up was down, inside was outside, right was wrong, and dissent was patriotism. Orwell basically had it right.
Which is why he never felt the slightest twinge of conscience whenever he killed any enemy, foreign or domestic. Unlike most of the recent presidents, Devlin took his oath of office seriously: to protect and defend. He had a job—not a job he might have chosen, a job that had chosen him, but a job that he nevertheless t
ook as seriously as he took his own life—and he had discharged his oath as completely and efficaciously as he could.
To be a CSS officer was an honor vouchsafed to only a few. To be a member of Branch 4, even fewer. He had no regrets about anything he had ever done. No victims stared him in the face as he was falling asleep. Remorse was for the weak, for the shrink-addled and psychologist-oppressed. That a Viennese snake-oil salesman named Freud had been able to convince so many that their imaginations were more powerful in their lives than reality, that their parents had injured them to the point that they were unable to function, that if only lawyers could sue the dead they would be made whole, was a wonder he could never quite grasp. Analysis was for sissies.
Devlin was, to say the least, therapy-adverse. He didn’t need counselors, or bartenders, or rabbis, or ministers, or priests. He lived a life without liability, without drugs, without memories. He wanted out for mundane reasons—he wanted to live. And a man in his business who wanted to live had better get out before he got killed.
This was a new emotion to Devlin. Since that terrible day in Rome, there was nothing he cared less for than life. True, the instinct for self-preservation in him was as strong or stronger as it was in every man, but the tribal taboo against death had long ago lost its shamanistic power against him. He’d seen it too many times not to have made it his friend.
And that’s why he was quitting. Because he wasn’t a real American any more, if indeed he ever was. He was a beau ideal from another generation, a throwback, an avatar—not simply the Man Who Wasn’t There, but the Man Who Was No Longer Necessary.
Many was the time he’d thought about quitting, about walking away, the way his mom and dad never could have, because they had taken the bullets that might have found him. Which meant that he must now carry on their work, to take the fight to the enemy for them—to bring them back to life. Which so far, he had failed to do.
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