Early Warning (24 page)

The car slowed as they approached their destination: the CERN laboratory. The location of the Large Hadron Collider. Where the Higgs boson—the “God particle”—either would or would not be found. Where, if this madman was to be believed, the fate of the world would be decided in some way that she could not understand.

“What must He think of His creatures,” said Skorzeny, his tone taunting. “They replicate Hell on earth and answer evil with evil. All Europe has become a suicide cult of relativism, of an unshakeable belief in nothing besides the self. It is a culture that has turned its back on its culture, a world of perpetual, petulant, resentful adolescence, a world in which young women have been taught that it is virtuous for them to kill their own unborn children. Is that sophistication? Or is it savagery?”

He glanced over at her. “And as I know how much you want a child, I think I also know your answer to my question.”

It was everything she could do, took every ounce of self-control for Amanda Harrington not to explode, not to tear his hair out by the roots and gouge out his eyes. Then the famous Ice Maiden once again took control.

All her life she had pursued money to the exclusion of almost everything else, including love and children, and for a time she had been one of the richest women in London. Thanks to the lust to become even richer, she had signed on with the Skorzeny Foundation, of which she was still the nominal head, but what a Faustian bargain that had turned out to be. She had lost both the love she had found and, however briefly, the only child she had ever known—his gift. And now, looking at this thing, who had all the money in the world, however temporarily damaged financially by his first active foray into attacking America, she could feel only revulsion for what she had been, and what she had once hoped to become. At the moment, Amanda Harrington knew the cause to which she would henceforth devote the rest of her life—however long that would prove to be.

Just enough time left to think before she was once again caught up in whatever mad scheme had taken his fancy. But she had this to thank him for: after nine long months, her mind was clear now. She knew who he was and, more important, she knew who she was. Her man was dead. Her child was gone. From this moment henceforth, she was no longer Amanda Harrington of No. 4, Kensington Park Gardens, London.

She was the Black Widow. And she would have her vengeance.

In the air—Maryam

Good-byes were for fools and women who read romance novels. In the real word, there were no good-byes. Not in the life they had chosen. You parted and that was that. The rest was for the future, and to no woman was the future vouchsafed.

She’d be in Budapest in eight hours, maybe less if the tail-winds increased in speed. She needed all the luck she could get, because she had to pick up Skorzeny’s trail fast. What she was learning was very disturbing, in ways she didn’t quite know how to express at this point.

CSS had picked up Skorzeny in Switzerland, upon entry. That was the beauty of electronic surveillance: it didn’t matter how much money you had, in any civilized country you would be photographed at a hundred different locations before you could go to ground. No matter how secure your bolt-hole, there was always a camera to catch you unawares, no matter your level of situational awareness—and Skorzeny’s was preternatural. The international system as monitored at Fort Meade had evolved far beyond Echelon, to the point where the images could be read practically in real time; as long as there was one authoritative photograph, age almost irrelevant, the Black Widow could project and track just about any version of you—older, younger, with hair and without—that disguises or plastic surgery could create. In a world dedicated to personal freedom, every citizen was now on file.

The internal contradictions of the Western capitalist system did not concern Maryam at the moment. Using Devlin’s equipment, much of which he had himself designed, she was busily bringing herself up to speed on every move Skorzeny had made since he entered Western ken. She knew that under his take-it-or-leave-it arrangement with Tyler, he was not supposed to be anywhere near a country with an extradition treaty with the United States. So there was something in Geneva that was worth risking however brief a visit he was planning to make. Something so important that he would risk his freedom and what was left of his financial empire for it.

He was, of course, with a woman, and Maryam knew exactly who she was. She was the women she’d seen in the prison at Clairvaux, at Skorzeny’s macabre private concert, the woman with whom she’d made eye contact just before the performance had begun. Their eyes had met as enemies, but also as sisters, and in a flash Maryam had realized that Amanda Harrington could not move, could not speak, could barely even see, that she was a prisoner of Emanuel Skorzeny as surely as all the men at Clairvaux were prisoners of the French government.

And now she was here, with Skorzeny again, apparently of her own volition. That, Maryam was sure, was impossible. She had not been privy to all the details of the Skorzeny operation, having been brought on board to Branch 4 by Devlin after it was over, after the girl was rescued and after she shot the rifleman whose name she never learned, the man firing at the helicopter. As for what had happened in London, she didn’t want to know. All she knew, and all she cared to know, was that her lover had come back to her wounded but alive, and with a burning desire to finish the job. He was, after all, a professional. Just like her.

It took Maryam all of five minutes to realize what Skorzeny was up to: the last shot of him was entering the secure area at CERN—the
Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire.
That was where this whole thing had started, she realized, in Budapest, with Farid Belghazi. Something big was going on at CERN, but for the life of her she couldn’t imagine what it was.

Because, according to just about everybody, the place was a near-failure. Every time they’d started up the Collider, in an attempt to duplicate the conditions under which the Big Bang might have started the universe, it had failed. Once it had even been brought down by a bird, which had dropped something down the shaft. And now it was down for at least another year. It was almost as if God himself was trying to prevent the damn thing from working.

Maryam found herself fascinated with the history of the Collider. Her life up until now had not exactly revolved around science at this level, both technical and conceptual. The intricacies did not concern her. But the search for the origins of life, of existence, of the universe itself—that was something every human being could get behind. That was something every human being had wondered about since the dawn of time, when man first looked to the heavens and realized there was something out there, something bigger than himself, something full of wonder and majesty and mystery. Something infinite.

And now, here in the century of ascendent science, the age-old religious questions were being asked once more. Indeed, it seemed that the more science declared that the research was settled, that the questioning was over, and that all questions had been answered, the more people sought and questioned. Real science, of course, never really settled anything: Newtonian physics, as settled as anything ever could be, held sway for several centuries, and gave way to Einstein; in time, Einstein himself would be succeeded by something and somebody else. That was the course of history.

Only religion refused to ask. Only religion claimed the answers, infallibly. The problem was: which one was right? First-hand, she had seen the result of a religious state, one in which all questions had long ago been settled by the force of dogma. And not just Islam: all over the world, the Third World variants of European Christianity were awash in signs and wonders, mysterious apparitions. Whether they were Twelfthers, like the regime in Iran, or Marianists, who believed the Virgin Mary was appearing to them in places as disparate as California City, California, and Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina, or poor Mexican women who saw Jesus’s face in a taco, or in a salt stain on a freeway underpass, they all had one thing in common: they believed.

And they had no need for the Large Hadron Collider.

No amount of computer linkage—and the Collider was not only linked to its own banks of computers but powered data to mainframes, desktops, laptops, and even netbooks all over the world, connected in much the same way that the SETI tapped underutilized, even dormant computing power on teenage boys’s laptops all over the world to analyze data. The teenagers wanted to be a part of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, but many of the Hadron computers were unwitting zombies, drawn over to the dark side in the search for something far more important than life in outer space. This search was for the origins of the universe and, if possible, for the “God Particle”—the Higgs Boson.

The last time he had tried an EMP, it was delivered by weather balloon. That had had a whiff of genius about it, with first the misdirection in California and then the real thing on the east coast, where it would have done the most damage. And the weather balloon was a nice touch, because what—except to an Area 51–obsessed nut—could be sinister about a weather balloon? Maryam hadn’t agreed with President Tyler’s decision to let him semi-skate, but she also knew that she and Devlin had carte blanche to take him out whenever he came out of his bolt-hole, and now he had.

Because, no matter how smart or how careful he was, there was no place for Skorzeny to hide. Not in this day of near-universal CCTV cameras in all the cities of Europe, of cell phone cameras and iPhones and instant uplinks. No one, no matter how rich, was immune from the prying eyes and, unless you lived in a cave in Afghanistan somewhere, someday you would be found. And, if necessary or desirable, taken out. Nor were she and Devlin immune. His job was getting harder by the day, and it didn’t matter how tough he was, one of these months or years he would run into somebody tougher, somebody smarter, somebody quicker and more ruthless—or maybe even somebody just luckier. And then it would be all over for him, and thus for her, too. She had to hurry. Double games were never easy, but they were the only one on offer for a girl like her.

So whatever had brought Emanuel Skorzeny out of his cell must be pretty damn big. And although there was no evidence to suggest it, she was also sure he was somehow involved in what was going on in New York. It made no sense to assume that it was a simple terrorist operation, not that any terrorist operation was simple. But the very technology that allowed her to monitor Skorzeny’s movements aboveground could easily allow him to monitor his men’s activities in the shadows. In Mumbai, the crew had been controlled by a Pakistani from his cell phone, guiding the poor, uneducated holy warriors on their killing spree and talking them through the acceptance of martyrdom so that they might have peace in their final moments—a peace not accorded their victims. There wasn’t much sophisticated about that operation, just a true believer’s willingness to kill in the name of Allah, but that was really all you needed when it came right down to it: where there was a Will to Power, there was a Way.

The attendant was at her side: “We’ll be landing in about an hour, Miss,” he said. No name. As far as anyone was concerned she didn’t have a name, and in fact this flight didn’t even exist. They’d land at a private airstrip in Austria, where she’d be given false papers and then driven across the border in an unmarked vehicle. Should anyone check the manifest, the plane would prove to have been a rich Belgian’s private aircraft, chartered through a company, sent to pick him up at a resort near Chamonix and ferry him home to his summer house in Austria’s easternmost province, Burgenland, where he could happily continue to make life miserable for the EU’s unhappy subjects from a country outside its purview. The old Soviet Union had never really died; it had simply moved to the Grand Place, where the food was better and the populace less restive.

There was no point in stopping in Geneva. The CSS had operatives throughout Switzerland, and although the prickly Swiss managed to be as unhelpful as possible, the best information was that he had left, accompanied by the woman. And, of course, there was to be no rough stuff, certainly not at the monitoring and shadowing level. The Swiss didn’t mind what you did so long as it did not upset the fondue cart for everybody else, which meant leaving them alone in peace to continue to make and hide money. Which was why she was landing in Budapest…

Because that was where the twin strains of this case intersected. That was where they had grabbed Farid Belghazi, and Belghazi had been working at CERN. Hungary was where the name “Skorzeny” had originated, and even though the trail to Emanuel Skorzeny dead-ended at Otto Skorzeny, Maryam was a great believer in linguistic resonance. In her experience, people chose aliases that they could live with, that were not too far off from their real names, that
meant
something to them, something deep and emotional and significant. Emanuel Skorzeny may not have been any more Hungarian than she was, but there was something in that country that drew him, some identification with it…

Did he speak Magyar?

She realized she didn’t know.

For all the work they had done on him in the aftermath of Edwardsville, that was something she had never bothered to wonder about. She had assumed no: nobody spoke Magyar, the language of Hungary, unless they were born to it. It was one of those rare languages, non-Indo-European in origin, related only to Finnish, of all things, a likely importation from central Asia and, if romance be true, swept into Europe with Attila the Hun and his conquering hordes. The Hungarians were half of the West and half of the East, on the border between Slav and Saxon, between Christian and Muslim, their language rolling like dactylic poetry, a parade of accented first syllables that gave the tongue a majesty and rhythm lacking in German dialects and Slavic variants with which it was nearly surrounded. Only on its eastern border, with Romania, did the Hungarians cede pride of historical place to the last outpost of the Roman empire.

Hungary—the nexus of Asia, the Roman legions, and the German colonists—was where the solution to the mystery lay, she was sure. Not just present-day Hungary, a shadow of its old self, but the lands that had once been Hungarian, including the Transylvanian district (the Germans called it
Siebenburgenland
, or “seven-castle land”) so beloved of western Christian mythology. The land of Vlad Tepes—

Dracula
.

Was that where the monster’s lair really lay?

The flight attendant snapped her back out of her reverie. Even before he spoke, she’d caught him looking at her, the way men had been looking at her all her life, the unspoken and involuntary homage they paid to a beautiful woman. American women hated such attention, or at least they professed to, which was one of the many things she despised about American women. Only in America, she thought, could women have achieved so much and enjoyed it so little. In a land of “diversity,” their bland, homogenized beauty, grown so increasingly, so desperately conformist by the advent of plastic surgery, was designed to attract and yet their personalities were manufactured to repel. Maryam’s American accent—learned in Beverly Hills and along Westwood Boulevard in Los Angeles—was as regionally noncommittal as possible, but unless she had to use it, she preferred the native accents of Shiraz, or the French patois she had learned at her fancy private school in Switzerland. Given the choice between
Schwyzerdütsch
and Valley Girl, she’d take the Swiss Alemannic dialect every time, unless she was buying a movie ticket at the ArcLight in Sherman Oaks.

“Was it a pleasant dream?” he asked.

She gave him her best fake smile, the kind of smile she’d been delivering on cue for years. “Yes, thank you,” she replied. “I guess I didn’t get enough sleep last night.”

That was an opening she hadn’t meant to give him, but luckily his manners were good and his training impeccable, although his eyes registered receipt of a message that, even if it were true, would never be acted on. And she acknowledged his courtesy back. So it went in the endless dance between the sexes, another thing that was lost on the American sisterhood, to their eternal loss, in Maryam’s opinion.

The wheels touched down. Maryam looked out the window and saw nothing but the flat plain. No wonder they called this
Burgenland
—Fortress land. The only protection here was man-made, not nature-provided. Here you had to fend for yourself; at the interstices of not just cultures but civilizations and religions, it was every woman for herself. The Austro-Hungarian border had once been eradicated by royal fiat, but the Great War had ended that fiction and now it was back, a line on a map but always a line in the hearts of the people, and a line in the sand.