“We can’t afford four more years of the same failed Jeb Tyler policies. Because we can’t afford any change in the tax system, any change in our military preparedness, any change in our relationship with our allies overseas, any change in the polar ice caps, we have to maintain the status quo—and then make it better!”
The crowd lapped up the nonsense and the non sequiturs. Hartley took a deep breath.
“And that’s why, even at this late date, I’m asking for your support. I need money and I need your vote. To turn Jeb Tyler out of office, and take back our country!”
Apeshit was not too mild a word to describe the reaction. He was riding the wave now. He held up the folder that Tyler had given him.
“I have here in my hand”—he waved the folder, like the red flag before the bull—“proof positive that our government has been lying to us all along. Their promises of transparency were worthless. That there exists, at the deepest and most hidden levels of the NSA, a rogue agency devoted to the subversion of everything we hold dear as Americans. And personally authorized by President Jeb Tyler to carry out its mission.”
A gasp ran through the crowd. Shouts of “Impeach him!” were heard.
Hartley held up his hands again for quiet. “We don’t have to impeach him. We just have to beat him. And when I’m president, you can bet your bottom dollar that I’m going to unleash a full-scale investigation and those responsible will get what’s coming to them! Thank you, and may God bless America!”
For a brief, exhilarating moment, he actually believed his own bullshit, until he caught sight of the Whippet and the Refrigerator standing off to one side, out of the view of the cameras. Then he remembered where he was, what was happening, and where this was all likely to end.
“Good job, Bob,” said the Whippet as 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 was 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 reproduction of the Maltese Falcon that he’d found in Provincetown one summer.
It was the Whippet first through the door, gun drawn, just as Hartley had hoped. He hit him square on the back of his head 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 nearly every major political figure in Europe, China, Japan, and the United States was second to none. It was like acupressure—you didn’t need an MRI of the whole body to know what would happen to it if pressure were applied just so and to just the right place. And it was so easy—with the intrusive scope of information technology today, nobody in his right mind would run for office except sociopaths, who either didn’t care who knew about their manifold skeletons (several U.S. Congressmen came immediately to mind) or who felt they were smarter than everybody else (more than one American president). A
more singular collection of intellectually mediocre, greedy psychopaths he had not encountered outside of a banana republic or sub-Saharan Africa or the city council of Milton Keynes.
What was it Ben Franklin once said about the American government? “A republic, if you can keep it.” Well, that question was fast being answered. America’s chickens were coming home to roost. It couldn’t happen to a worse country.
There was only one problem, from Milverton’s point of view: What if all this effort had been for naught, and Devlin would not engage in time? The clock was ticking, especially with Skorzeny’s demand that Amanda Harrington take the insurance policy to the country house in France.
That policy had been a tricky proposition, both in obtaining it and getting it conveyed to the proper place. It had cost him, personally, a lot, and the fact that Skorzeny suddenly wanted to shove his nose into what should have been a private—intimate, even—transaction between two consenting parties very definitely complicated matters. But then, when it came to affairs of Skorzeny’s heart, everything was unpredictable.
He rang Amanda’s number, but there was no answer. Ditto her mobile. Not a good sign.
Milverton had learned from long experience that when things went wrong, they went wrong in spades. And spades was his short suit at the moment. He didn’t have time for spades.
He rang Amanda again. No answer. Damn it!
OK, now he was officially worried. It made him hate Skorzeny all the more. It put him at a disadvantage, on the defensive, which was never a place he wanted to be. He was frozen in place, tethered to the timing of the “scientific experiment” off the coast of Baltimore, tomorrow. As the Clara Vallis approached port.
The weather balloon experiment. With nothing else to do at the moment, he decided to run through the codes, protocols, and security measures one more time.
Blowing operational security—the ultimate poisoned pawn gambit—was something only the best intelligence operatives could get away with. It was the ne plus ultra of the intel biz, beyond which there was nothing—only triumph or disaster. To blow one agent might look like a tragedy, but to blow an entire operation had damn well better look like carelessness, or you were well and truly fucked. Oscar Wilde would have understood the concept, if not the call letters: EMP. Electro-Magnetic Pulse. That was the genius of the thing.
Simplicity. First principles, as Hannibal Lecter or somebody once said, 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?
Since Reagan, the Americans had been obsessed with their SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars.” Friends in the American media—paid operatives, fellow travelers, Harvard-educated idiots—had done their best to mock it as an old cowboy’s fantasy, a pipe dream, something that, because it was not and could not be 100 percent foolproof, 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 of cash.
It took a little longer than “direct action,” but the result was the same. And men like Emanuel Skorzeny could beam with pride at what they had wrought.
In a way, he thought, it was like the nexus of the Pill, the Sexual Revolution, and Roe v. Wade. Disrupt the understanding that had obtained between men and women for eons: that there were consequences to choice. Convince the women that they were being “liberated” from their bodies: sex without consequences. Convince the men that their dreams had come true: sex without consequences. Convince society that the “choice” was not between keeping the baby or giving it up for adoption, but between having the baby and killing the baby.
Win-win-win for everybody but the baby. Sheer genius.
And then, in two generations, suddenly there were no more generations.
Bereft of progeny, the insurance systems would collapse. Then the private pensions. Finally the government pensions. The end would come quickly, in mutual recriminations and, with any luck, civil war as the Party of Take battled the Party of Give.
But, for Skorzeny, time was running out. Even the election of an “illegal” president of the United States could not come quickly enough for him. Like all secular saints, he needed to hasten the day of his investiture into the pantheon. Needed to see his icon. If the world began the day he was born, then it must end the day he died.
EMP.
This was where al-Qaeda and the raggedy-ass terrorists had got it all wrong. You didn’t have to nuke New York or Los Angeles. You didn’t have to try a dirty bomb in the subways or in the cargo hold of a container ship.
Weather balloons.
They could easily launch to 95,000 feet. Near space. And, thanks to “global warming,” as pure and innocent as radiation-free snow. Off-shore, from ships beyond the twenty-mile limit. A scientific experiment, to gauge the ice-melt of the permafrost of Tucson, Arizona, since the arrival of the first SUVs from Britain in 1492. Whatever.
No worries about a weather balloon. No detection of a payl
oad hovering in the semidarkness of the ionosphere. After all, a panel truck packed with explosives nearly took down the World Trade Center the first time. A couple of airplanes did the trick the second time.
And now a weather balloon. Asymmetrical warfare at its finest.
When the device went off, at his electronic signal, sent from the comfort of his study in Camden Town, the following would happen:
Every electrical system on the East Coast of the United States would immediately fail.
Telephone service would terminate. All cell phones would go out.
Nothing electrical would operate. Not ATMs, not gas pumps, not computers, not the Internet.
The United States would be blind, deaf, and dumb.
NSA would be dead.
SDI would be dead.
America would be vulnerable to every kind of threat. Fortress America, once so secure between her two vast oceans, would now be Sitting Duck America, a pincushion for every two-bit throw-weight power including France, Israel, and South Africa. She would be like one of those pathetic water buffaloes in the veldt, food for the lions, and then carrion for the jackals.
And yet, some would profit handsomely, Skorzeny foremost among them. There was a fortune to be made in catastrophe, as there had been ever since the year 410, Common Era. Just ask Alaric the Visigoth
Only this time, if he understood the man correctly, Skorzeny would be left to pick up the pieces, preserve what was left of the civilization, to be the Irish monks of his own time: the Saint Malachy, the Bernard of Clairvaux…
Clairvaux.
He punched back into the NSA net, using the codes that Hartley had given him. Thank God the Americans cared about security clearances for everybody but their elected officials.
The codes were still working.
One ’bot to another. Devlin, he was sure, would get the message, and come running to him. Back into his loving arms.
Michael Walsh Bundle Page 29