Michael Walsh Bundle

by Michael Walsh

  “Right,” said the visitor, and the next thing Hartley knew he was on the floor, blood gushing from his nose. Just as he hadn’t seen the man, he hadn’t seen the punch either.

  “I’m a United States senator!” he protested, fumbling for his handkerchief. He hated to ruin an Egyptian-cotton present from one of his admirers, but he really had no other choice.

  “Don’t try to impress me,” said the man, settling into Hartley’s best chair. “I’ve met lepers with a better pedigree, and hookers with more taste.”

  Hartley didn’t see why his unexpected visitor had to add insult to injury. He had not requested any role-playing this evening, and rough stuff was almost never on his agenda, but the lad was big and strapping and very good looking….

  “I suppose you’ll want cash up front,” he said, wiping away the blood. “It’s in my bedroom.”

  “Stay put, pops, it’s not your money I want.” The man had some kind of accent Hartley couldn’t quite place, but then he never was very good at languages. He was an American.

  Hartley was about to inquire what he meant when the doorbell rang. He glanced at his visitor for instructions. “It’s for you,” the man said. Hartley wiped his face with what remained of his clean handkerchief and opened the door.

  The boy was young, just old enough, which was the way he liked them, and dressed as he had requested, like a pizza delivery man. “Come in,” said Senator Hartley, turning back toward his guest. He just had time to breathe a small sigh of relief, thankful that there was somebody else in the apartment, a witness, to spare him from further trouble when he noticed that the blond man was no longer there.

  “Um, mister…” said the boy, which was too bad, because they were his last words. In retrospect, thought Hartley, all of us would like a proper valedictory.

  The .22 slug entered the boy’s head and bounced around his skull for less than a second, killing him without so much as a sigh. He fell, the empty pizza box with the hole punched in its bottom floating lightly on the air for a moment before it joined the lifeless body on the floor. Then the man put another bullet into his head, for good measure.

  “Jesus—” was all Hartley could muster before he too landed on the floor, knocked unconscious, from a tremendous blow to his head.

  Hartley awoke a few minutes later, in bed, naked, with the late pizza boy for a companion. His visitor sat opposite, watching CNN on the bedroom television, unruffled by the commotion. “You know what they used to say in the old South? That a politician couldn’t get reelected if he was caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy. Well, we’re about to go one step further.”

  The BlackBerry camera flashed. Hartley was still stunned by the blow but he was tech-savvy enough to know that the photograph was already being uplinked somewhere, and that he was, basically, fucked. “What do you want?” he croaked.

  “Now you’re making sense,” said the man. “The first order of business is you’re working for me. The second is this.” He handed Hartley a small slip of paper, upon which was printed a local Washington telephone number. “Memorize it.”

  Hartley stared at the number, numb. “I think I have it.”

  “Brilliant,” said the man. “Now, eat it.” Hartley realized he wasn’t kidding. He ate it. “Now dial it.” For encouragement, he pointed the gun at Hartley’s head. He dialed it, let it ring until the man disconnected the call. “Good. You passed the first test.”

  He reached into his pocket and took out what looked like a minicomputer and fired it up. Hartley blanched when he saw the Web site, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. “Now, Mr. Chairman,” the man said, “let’s get started. We’ve got some hacking to do.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  FALLS CHURCH

  There were no visible televisions in the public rooms of Devlin’s home. No radios, either. A visitor would surely remark their absence, if he ever had visitors. The only rooms with what might be called “normal” furniture were those that, by chance, could be glimpsed from the outside in the evening, before the curtains were automatically drawn, but those rooms were just for show. There was only one wing of the house that mattered, one room where he spent the bulk of his time.

  In which he now sat still, a spider at the center of his vast sigint web. On his main monitor, he could track all incoming calls by signal origin; those he wished to answer could be rerouted to a dead-zone mailbox for later retrieval. Random incoming calls were ignored. Those deemed suspicious or hostile were eliminated by sending back a retro-virus that fried the bounce-back receptors and eliminated the phone numbers from active use for at least forty-eight hours, by which time they had been reassigned to someone else.

  He felt a twinge about the girl in Kentucky. Not about what they had done—that was natural, if slightly furtive and definitely transitory. And the emotions he felt for her at the moment were certainly genuine. One would have thought he’d long gotten over the lying that was a necessary part of the seduction, but what came naturally to other men in their endless, restless pursuit of conquest was the one element in his life that he preferred to keep separate from his day job.

  He couldn’t, of course. He knew that the life of others was not the life given to him. And now that Milverton had reappeared on the scene, any hope he might have had of getting out after Edwardsville was long gone. He couldn’t just walk away now, not with the most dangerous man on the planet looking for him, his life forfeit to any other Branch 4 op any time the president or Seelye decided to punch his ticket. They had him by the balls.

  Which is why he sat here, in the safe room of his house in the Virginia suburbs, surrounded by computers and keyboards, electronically connected anywhere in the world and yet absolutely alone.

  To look at this room one might be surprised at its simplicity. Not for him were the vast NSA bullpens of Fort Meade, where the donkey work of electronic surveillance was carried out. If he wanted or needed access to anything in the great black box off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway he needed only to get in his car and drive there, less than an hour away, Beltway traffic willing, where he parked his car and entered the building as part of the custodial staff.

  Devlin believed in hiding in plain sight. Devlin believed that naked is the best disguise. Which was why he lived here, alone, on North West Street. Once, Falls Church was a sleepy suburb, the smallest incorporated city in America, equally balanced between government time-servers and what was left of the Virginia gentry who first occupied the place. In recent years, however, Falls Church had undergone a dramatic ethnic shift. Illegal Mexicans clustered on street corners in the old downtown section, and mosques now stood where defunct businesses once had been. Ten miles from the nation’s capital, Arabic and Spanish jostled English as the lingua franca of the new, emergent United States.

  Just as Jaguars had no visible radio antennas that would mar the sleek lines of the expensive automobiles, neither did Devlin’s house have any visible external indication of his profession, aside from a small satellite dish easily mistaken for a TV receiver but was in reality a beta-testing uplink that he had devised himself. Only the canniest of observers would have noticed that it was directed not toward the southern sky, where the television satellites were located, but to the southwest, where the secret comsats were.

  Arrayed in a row on his desk 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.

  He was running Sharpreader on Windows, NetNewsWire on the Mac, Straw on Linux: his inbox was RSS-updated on a minute-by-minute basis, with real-time news and stories of interest on preselected topics. Level Five NSA firewall security, updated regularly. Complete virus, trojan, and spywar
e projection, automatically updated every twenty-four hours. His best friends. His data miners.

  One of the flaws in the government’s security apparatus, he had long realized, was its very nature as a governmental organization. Although he tried to stay off the grid as much as possible, NSA/CSS could not avoid some of the oversight that came with taxpayer funds, and as a result they were blinkered and inhibited, like other governmental agencies. Not to the same extent, of course, or else they could not have functioned, and many of their activities were unfortunately but necessarily devoted to pretense, to the appearance of compliance, just to keep the bean-counters, the blue-noses, the civil-libertarians, and the recrudescent communists as pacified as possible.

  But just as war was too important to be left to the generals, the business of national security was too vital to be left to the elected representatives of the people. So there had to be work-arounds, and open-source data mining was one of them.

  Some of his fellow professionals scoffed at the notion. To them, “open-source” was synonymous with “amateur,” but amateurs had been responsible for many of the significant breakthroughs in almost every field, and even—perhaps especially—in today’s over-credentialed society they had their manifest uses.

  Take, for example, something as simple as a relationship chart, generated by a global search; for any given name, the program could quickly extract all known personal and institutional associates and rank-order them by their proximity to the subject’s name in any news story, video clip, press release, bank record, money-transfer order, e-mail address book, iPhone, or PDA database, Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail accounts, etc. In a few seconds, the printer would spit out a chart graphically displaying the links and degrees of separation. It was often both amazing and instructive to see, visually, who was doing what to whom, and it helped him to make connections that otherwise might have slid by unnoticed.

  Take Ali Abu-al-Hamza al-Saleh, for example. One of the problems with Arabic names was that practically every Arab male had more than one “real” name, all of them multiple variations on a relatively small pool of names that could be either patronymic, geographic, or descriptive. Thus, to express it in English, Tom the Fat Man could also be Thomas son of Walter or Tommy the Yemeni, depending. This particular dirtbag, an Israeli Arab, had used his twelve-year-old daughter as a human mule, packed her suitcase chock full of explosives, and put her on a bus bound for Haifa, where she took out an Israeli high-school soccer team that was going to spend the day at the shore.

  Saleh had covered his tracks very well, but when the same thing happened a year later, involving an eight-year-old boy detonating amidst some German tourists near the Pyramids, Devlin opened up a file and began watching and linking anything remotely similar. The Case of the Incredible Exploding Children, he referred to it in his own mind, and it didn’t take long before he realized that what seemed frighteningly like a deadly new, inhuman, form of terrorism turned out to be limited to one very fecund and productive male, operating under multiple identities in multiple countries, who had devoted his life to siring as many expendable progeny as possible.

  Devlin embedded the information in the infamous look-ma-no-undies Britney Spears video and sent it to a friend at the Jonathan Institute in Tel Aviv, who relayed it to the wet-work boys at Shin Bet, who acted appropriately when Saleh returned to Israel from a “vacation” to Turkey. Devlin was pleased to read press accounts of various body parts washing up on various Mediterranean beaches over a six-week period, until all the limbs, the torso, and finally the head of Mr. Saleh were accounted for. Case closed.

  The thought had occurred to him to run a relationship chart on Seelye, but for some reason he hadn’t yet done so. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon was fun with your friends, less fun with your professional relationships. And not at all fun with the man who was, for all practical purposes, his father. O brave new world, where every man is both king and couch potato.

  He wasn’t surprised when the first ping came through. In the aftermath of Edwardsville, his first thought was clearing the battlefield as quickly as possible, just in case Milverton’s trap was more complex than it first appeared. The night with the waitress in Lexington was as much for operational security as carnal pleasure, or so he told himself.

  The header flashed top-secret, urgent, national-security. By law, he was supposed to answer it unless he was dead, incapacitated, or held under duress. Devlin hit the translator button, to view the content of Seelye’s pings. WHAT FUCKING HAPPENED BACK THERE? Pretty much as he thought, except the message was obviously coming from President Tyler, since Seelye never swore.

  HELLO, MR. PRESIDENT, he responded, his reply thoroughly scrambled even over the dedicated fiber-optic line.

  HOW DID YOU KNOW? He tried to get a read on where the president was—with Seelye somewhere, certainly.

  YOUR ELOQUENCE IS UNMISTAKEABLE. That was sure to piss Tyler off.

  Sure enough: LISTEN UP YOU ASSHOLE. I NEED TO KNOW IF THE SITUATION IS UNDER CONTROL. I CANNOT AFFORD ANY POLITICAL BLOWBACK FROM THIS.

  I BELIEVE IT IS, YES, SIR. Only a white lie at this point, but…

  CAN YOU GUARANTEE THAT?

  WITH ALL RESPECT, SIR, PERHAPS YOU’D BETTER ASK GENERAL SEELYE ABOUT GUARANTEES. That would piss Seelye off for sure.

  A longer pause: MY OFFICE IN FOUR HOURS. CAMP DAVID.

  Not good. Camp David was very private. Asses got chewed off and spit out at Camp David.

  DON’T WORRY I’M NOT GOING TO CHEW YOUR ASS OFF. Tyler was quite the mind-reader.

  ROGER THAT, SIR.

  GET MOVING. The line went dead.

  He didn’t like it. No matter how complete his report, he had no intention at this time of mentioning his suspicion, no, make that his absolute dead-solid certainty, that Milverton had made him. That was his problem; no sense adding to it by begging for Branch 4 to be out looking for him as well. Besides, if someone high up was collaborating with Milverton and whoever was running him, compartmentalization was the order of the day.

  Which meant that he was in no position to guarantee anything to anybody. And without 100 percent certainty and deniability, the whole purpose of Branch 4—Devlin’s very existence—was pretty much moot. Tyler was facing a tough reelection campaign, and sharks in both parties—like that creepazoid Hartley—were already sniffing blood in the water. An inquiry into Edwardsville, a leak or two, and suddenly one of the most closely guarded secrets in the American intelligence community was blown to hell and gone.

  Which meant that Camp David could be a termination meeting.

  It wasn’t that Devlin didn’t trust the president of the United States, it’s that he didn’t trust anybody, and so the president of the United States was as good a person to start with as anybody.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  EDWARDSVILLE

  Since the rescue, Hope and Rory had been inundated by the moral detritus of modern America. They had surrounded her and Rory so fast that she only realized later that she never had time to thank the man who had saved both their lives. The “reporter” with the knife, who had lopped off that awful man’s arm with the utmost ease. Hope didn’t get a real good look at him, but she did catch his eyes and what she saw in them both thrilled and scared her.

  She didn’t see fear. She didn’t see anger. She saw confidence. A sense of purpose, a sense of…professionalism.

  The police, the FBI, the doctors, and the news crews had left. The grief counselors and social services people and “caregivers” she wouldn’t let in. There was nothing to say. Hope and Rory sat looking at each other across a half-empty dinner table. The silence in the house was both comforting and almost unendurable.

  From time to time the phone rang, but she didn’t answer it. There was nothing to say to anybody, and nothing that could be said to her to make her feel any better.

  They had found Jack’s body almost immediately. It wasn’t the blast itself that had killed him; he had been hit by a tiny shard of glass that had punctu
red his eyeball and penetrated his brain. When they found him, it was almost as if he’d lain down to take a short nap.

  There was still no sign of Emma. The rescue workers had tried to tell her that that was a good sign, that maybe she somehow got out, and would turn up tomorrow, wandering dazed somewhere. But they’d also admitted that it might take them days to identify any remains at the blast site. Hope had tried to use her woman’s intuition, to look into her own heart, to listen very carefully to the small voice within and hear what it was saying, that either her daughter was still alive, or she wasn’t. But the voice was as silent as the rest of the house.

  Oh well, she could make her peace with that. Plenty of families had gone through the same thing, military families, crime-victim families, and they somehow managed. Until today, Hope was like most of her neighbors; she never really gave much thought to whether her country was actually at war, or whether the whole thing was some fraud cooked up in Texas and Washington and Baghdad and God knows where else, a scam like “Remember the Maine” and “54–40 or Fight,” designed to separate the American people from their money and their children, to enrich men elsewhere.

  Hope and Rory looked at each other over a cold meal, neither wishing to break the silence.

  “I tried to save her, Mom,” Rory said, after a while.

  “I know you did, Rory.”

  “And I would have, too. If I’d a found her…”

  The memory of him attacking that filthy animal washed over her—her little son, doing something that so many Americans were loath to do: fighting back.

  Once more, she remembered how the man’s head had suddenly exploded and how another man suddenly had come out of nowhere and chopped off the arm that held her life in its now lifeless hand. She remembered the gratified look in his eyes when he realized that he had saved both her and her son.