Early Warning (3 page)

“Maybe he didn’t understand you,” suggest Maryam. “I told you to polish your street Arabic.”

“Yeah, well, let’s see how you do in the back alleys of Magdeburg with that Bavarian honk,” he said. “In the meantime, let’s move. Pop the trunk.”

Cautiously, Devlin switched off the dome light, opened the door and slid out, concealing himself between the other cars. Senses on full alert, he listened for the sound of a motor, but heard nothing. He moved around to the trunk and, standing, hoisted Farid out, and slung him over his shoulders. Maryam was already out of the car, weapons over her shoulder, searching for a place to hide.

European cities were not like American ones, full of open spaces, wide streets, and generous yards. Here, they nestled up against one other, sharing walls on both sides, and you were lucky to get a garden the size of a postage stamp in the back. Not that you entered the garden from the street: what gaps there were between buildings were closed off by high cement and stucco walls, their gates tightly locked. This part of the world had seen too many conquerors come and go to trust the good nature of their fellow man, or his benign designs.

A row of big European trash cans stood near the curb, the kind into which you could easily stuff a body or two. Devlin dumped Farid into one of them and closed the lid, marking it with a felt-tipped pen he produced from one of his pockets. He didn’t care how unpleasant it might be inside, with the coffee grounds, rotten vegetables, and soup bones; that was Farid’s tough luck. He should have thought ahead, before he started stealing secrets from CERN and passing them along to al-Qaeda. If that, in fact, was what he’d been doing. But with the rapid proliferation of nuclear technology, this was no time to take chances. The apocalyptic genie that had been confined to the bottle, largely successfully since the day after Trinity, was now well and truly loosed upon the earth.

Devlin scanned the street—and didn’t like what he saw; at either end of the road, blocking access and egress, were the two SUVs. They were trapped.

Devlin checked the Surge. He punched a couple of buttons and the video display suddenly turned to a four-block map of the area, right down to the smallest detail. He thought a moment, then entered a series of cipher codes and hit send.

In the distance, he could hear the sounds of one of the SUV’s doors opening, and voices. As they approached they would be close enough to scan, but he didn’t need a device to tell him what he already knew; they were outnumbered at least two to one, and there was no way out. Softly, Devlin cursed in Italian under his breath. He liked cursing in Italian. There was music to it, and somehow the mellifluousness of the language made almost every situation seem not so bad. He was hoping that was still true.

“Over here.” He turned to see Maryam in a stairwell that dipped below the surface of the pavement. There was a door at the bottom of the stairs, one that Devlin knew would lead into the old building’s ancient cellar. Devlin dashed over to her and spoke rapidly in French. “They’ll be here in a less than a minute. They’re going to find me. They are not going to find you, but that’s okay. Trust me, they won’t have time to think about it. Now blow the lock on this door, get in and get out.”

He took a quick look at the area map; her instincts, as usual, were impeccable. “There’s a garden in the back, which connects through to the buildings on the other side of the street. You can crawl out the cellar window, sprint across. The fence on the other side shouldn’t be a problem and then you’re out on the
utca
and away. Now ditch the wig and get out of here.”

“What about you?” There was no worry in her eyes, just professional curiosity. That was part of their deal.

“I have to wait for Duke Mantee.” He sensed, rather than saw, her look of incomprehension. “An old friend,” he explained. “Now get out of here. Seriously.”

She hesitated, for just an unprofessional instant—

“Arnaud’s, just like we planned. Bienville Street.”

“Order for me,” she smiled. And then she was gone.

Devlin slipped back into the car. “Duke Mantee” had his instructions. It was all going to happen very fast, it was all going to happen all at once, and it had better damn well work.

They were almost upon him now. He could hear voices, speaking in different languages. There was no point in listening to what they were saying. It would be over soon, one way or another. But, even though he’d never met him, he trusted “Duke Mantee” more than he trusted anybody else, except her.

He strained his ears above the voices, listening for the Duke.

The men came closer to the Prius, weapons drawn. They wouldn’t be expecting to see him sitting there, big as life, which is what he was counting on. All those crazy spy books and their Rube Goldberg plotting devices—he’d trade them all for the element of surprise. Naked was always the best disguise.

They’d have suppressors, of course, and a silencer was something he lacked, but if the Duke was punctual, he wasn’t going to need one. It was like trying to unwrap candy in a movie theater: never make a series of little noises when you can make one big noise and get it over with.

There—now he heard it. The
thwack
of a helicopter, approaching rapidly.

The men heard it, too. They stopped for a moment and looked up at the sky. Budapest was not Los Angeles, and the sound of a helicopter in the middle of the night was not a normal occurrence. They were amazed when the chopper roared over the buildings, dipped down, and hovered just over their heads.

Now—

Devlin opened fire with the shotgun, bringing down two of the men with one blast as the other two scattered and returned fire. He could hear the
pock
marks as the bullets slammed into the Prius, but he was already out of the car, rolling, the shotgun abandoned now in favor of the HK and one of the Armalites. He got off two quick rounds, heard one of the assailants groan. And then an extraordinary thing happened.

A lifeline descended from the chopper. But no ordinary lifeline. Instead, it was more like a grappling hook, rocketing down a winch and heading straight for—

The trash can
. It latched on and began winching the thing up.

Devlin shot the fourth man with the HK and sprinted away, in the opposite direction from Maryam. Op sec came before everything else, and he had planned the operation with multiple outcomes in mind.

One of the four was still alive as Devlin passed him, but there was no time for mercy. He shot him as he ran, heading straight for the other SUV at the end of the street, the two-man team. He could see they were out of the car now, firing at the helicopter. Devlin said a quick prayer that none of the rounds would clip Farid, but he kept running, staying on the sidewalk, in the gloom of the old 19th-century blocks of flats.

Now one of the men spotted him, redirecting his fire. Bullets gouged out chunks of the buildings. Devlin somersaulted twice and came up shooting. He dropped his man with two shots, even though it should have only taken one, and dashed for the SUV. He had time for a quick glance back, and saw that the trash can had disappeared into the chopper’s interior, and the big bird was already whirling away.

He was in the driver’s seat of the Benz before the last man standing knew he was there. Devlin popped the clutch and squealed into first gear as a bullet clanked off the rear window. Bulletproof. Good—he didn’t need to be driving around Budapest in the middle of the night with a rear window punched out. The man was still pursuing him, firing. Devlin caught a glimpse of his face in the side mirror—it was the Hungarian he had seen with Farid up on Castle Hill.

One more thing to do.

Abruptly, he slammed the big car in reverse. Before the man could react, Devlin ran him over. He never knew his name, never would know what crime, if any, the man had committed. But he had been trained to understand that it didn’t matter, and it didn’t. The back alleys of central Europe were littered with the bodies of nameless ops, who had vanished unknown and unmourned. That was his tough luck. Operational security was everything.

In the air

Emanuel Skorzeny did his best to relax into the leather seats of his private airplane. For the past nine months, he had been a veritable fugitive, airborne, fleeing the wrath of the U.S. government. Until last year, that had not been a thing worth fearing, not for a long time, not since Americans had landed on Normandy Beach, bridged Remagen, and came close enough to Berlin to let the Soviets and Zhukov hurry up and take the prize. So much for the bromide that violence never solved anything. It certainly sorted Hitler and the National Socialists out.

More—not since the Americans had cleared the Pacific islands from Tarawa and Iwo Jima to Okinawa, firebombed Tokyo, and dropped the Big One on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oddly enough, that was the end of Japanese militarism,
finis
to the Empire, the rude termination of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Thank God the Americans didn’t fight like that anymore.

Still, here he was, a prisoner of his own wealth and ambition. Airborne in his private 707, outfitted and retrofitted to his exact specifications, a home away from home, a flying living room if indeed he would ever have stooped to anything so vulgar as a living room. Free to fly the world, but never land, a contemporary Flying Dutchman, a Wandering Jew, the desolate hero of Schubert’s
Winterreise
—the living embodiment of a hundred European tragic heroes, but without the heroic deeds that had accompanied their ineluctable fates.

That devil, Devlin, had done this to him. The boy he had failed to kill when he had the chance, a latter-day Hercules, who had turned the tables on the snakes sent to throttle him in his cradle. And now, after all these years of waiting and plotting and planning, Devlin had defeated him again, defeated him and his most potent operative, Milverton, killed him with his bare hands in his own house, as Hercules had strangled the serpents. Broken his back, stopped his plot, razed his house, and nearly killed Skorzeny himself. He had underestimated his enemy. It was not a mistake he would make again. The next time they confronted each other would be the last time.

“Is there anything else, M. Skorzeny?” asked Emanuelle Derrida. Since the unfortunate demise of M. Pilier, Mlle. Derrida had taken his place as his most trusted assistant. She was younger than Pilier, and certainly prettier. She was also unmarried and seemed entirely uninterested in men. Which meant that, luckily, he was almost uninterested in her.

Mlle. Derrida was, like Chopin, half French and half Polish. From her French father she had inherited her Pascal-like rationality; she never bet, unless it was on a sure thing. From her Polish mother she got her blond good looks. The first time he had seen her, at a concert in Singapore, he had been struck by her willowy figure, the way the breeze moved over her dress and sent it clinging to her body, hugging her in a way that every man desired but no man would ever obtain. No matter: he had hired her on the spot.

Not that his was any life for a young person. Under his arrangement with Tyler, he had escaped the full wrath of the USA, but only under the condition that he stay confined to his home in Liechtenstein, or to those countries without a politically controversial extradition treaty with the United States. And yet she had accepted his offer unhesitatingly, as if there was something that she, too, was fleeing. Not that he had asked—other people’s troubles were none of his business, only his opportunities. But Mlle. Derrida needed the handsome salary he paid her, and he needed her, and that was that.

But not, he confessed to himself privately, the way he needed Amanda Harrington.

In these past nine months, he had thought often of Amanda Harrington. Of all the women in his life, of all the women he had known, she was the acme. When he heard that she had survived the poisoned chalice he had offered her, he had spared no expense on her treatment and recovery. He saw to it that, every day, her rooms were filled with roses, that she wanted for nothing, that as she progressed everything would be provided for, that her home in London would be taken care of. He gave her everything. The only thing he could not give her was the child she had loved briefly, and then lost. But, then, he could always try again. He was still potent, and in every respect. And now he would see her again. Things would be as they once had been.

“We are approaching Macao, sir,” she said.

Next to Dubai, Macao was one of his favorite places in the world. For an internationalist like Emanuel Skorzeny, the world really was pretty much his oyster, even if that oyster had been severely limited by the informal, unacknowledged sanctions Tyler had imposed on him in the wake of the EMP fiasco. Macao was the old Portuguese settlement on the southwest coast of China, dating back to the early 16th century. Along with the Portuguese foothold in Nagasaki, Macao was where the West had begun in its penetration of the East. Now, of course, it was the East that was penetrating the West.

“Thank you, Mlle. Derrida,” he said. “Please ensure that everything is in readiness for our arrival.”

“Indeed, sir,” she replied. She gave him a little smile—was it of encouragement? Advancement? Impossible to tell. He smiled back, neutrally, he hoped. Everything was a lawsuit these days; it was getting to be that a man couldn’t make an honest living as a pirate anymore.

Which is what both perplexed him and animated him. What had happened to the secure world he had once known? True, it had never existed, except in his own idealistic imagination, but that did not make it any less real. From his boyhood in a
Sippenhaft
camp in northern Germany near Lübeck—Sieglinde’s aria,
Der Männer sippe
was for him the most resonant part of Wagner’s
Ring
—through his
Wanderjähren
as a young man, to his arrival in Paris, to his first million on the trading floor of the DAX, he had held fast to his vision.

“Music,” he said, and as if on command, Elgar’s
Enigma Variations
came over the aircraft’s loudspeakers. One of the things he most liked about Mlle. Derrida was that she could read his mind. Something Pilier could never quite do.

The Boeing 707—the kind of planes they used to use for long-range international travel back in the early ’80s, when the Aught Seven was the last word in aircraft—bumped a little, then settled down. In its original configuration, it was basically a flying cigar tube with two rows of three seats on either side of a center aisle; in his specially outfitted version, he had reserved the entire center section of the aircraft, the safest part over the wings, for his own private quarters.

Toward the front, between him and the pilots, was the communications headquarters. Despite everything that had happened, he had maintained most of his agreements with international air controllers and national satellite systems, which meant that he could still monitor the position of every aircraft in the Skorzeny fleet, no matter how temporarily diminished in numbers. To the rear were the sleeping quarters, both his and the staff’s, and behind them, the galley and his personal chef’s quarters. He hadn’t yet made up his mind about Mlle. Derrida; she might prove to be more trouble than she was worth. But, fortunately for him, there were no sexual harassment laws at 40,000 feet.

Skorzeny let the music wash over him. A “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” That about summed it up. Most of the idiots who had inherited Western culture thought of Elgar—if they ever thought of him at all, which was doubtful—as a kind of Sherlockian Col. Blimp, a weird
doppelgänger
of King George V, the clueless monarch who torpedoed his country, his Empire, into the trenches of the Somme, with results that were now distressingly visible.

Enigma. The Morse Code of the principal theme. Two shorts, two longs. Followed by two longs and two shorts. In code:
I am. Am I
. The question mark practically screamed its presence. Man’s existential dilemma, made aural in music. “I am. Am I?”

Emanuel Skorzeny was a confirmed atheist, and had been since he watched his mother and father executed in the late winter of 1944. A God that could kill one’s family was capable of any enormity, and was one not worthy of worship. Just as the West, in its present incarnation, was not worthy of redemption.

The ninth variation sounded throughout the airplane. No matter how he steeled his heart, it always moved him.
Nimrod
, the Hunter. So appropriate. And followed by Dorabella, Elgar’s secret love, to whom he wrote coded communications, both musical and literary. What was he trying to say to “Dorabella,” Miss Dora Penny?

“Sir?” Mlle. Derrida startled him. “Are you quite all right?”

“I’m quite all right, Mlle. Derrida, yes, thank you,” he said, in a tone that warned: never interrupt me
en rêve.

“We’re preparing for final descent.”

“I am always prepared for final descent, Mlle. Derrida,” he said. “You would be well advised to do the same.”

The plane’s wheels touched down at Macao International Airport with as little disturbance as possible. Skorzeny prided himself on being able to find and hire pilots who made landing an art form. Instead of proceeding to the main terminal, however, the plane diverted onto a secondary runway, heading for a small collection of hangars well away from the main flight paths.

Mlle. Derrida rose and began to prepare the cabin for exit, but Skorzeny remained seated, still listening to the music, and relaxed even farther back into his chair. “You know the old saying, don’t you?” he inquired idly.

“I’m sure I don’t, M. Skorzeny,” his attendant replied.

“If Mohammed will not come to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammed.”

Mlle. Derrida froze. Any talk of Mohammed made her uncomfortable. Being relatively new, she was not sure exactly what Skorzeny’s religious views were, or whether he had any at all, but she was young enough and educated enough to know that, these days, one did not lightly discuss the Prophet. Bohemond, Charles Martel, Sobieski, and the rest of them were moldering in their graves, and yet the Messenger of God lived on; one spoke of the Prophet at one’s own peril. “Sir?” she inquired.

“I mean, Mlle. Derrida, that Mr. Arash Kohanloo will be meeting with me here, in my aeroplane. Chef, I believe, will have the meal ready in 15 minutes.” He let the look of surprise wash over, and then away from, her face. “Did you have an appointment here? Something, someone, to see? I hope I have not disappointed you, but the blandishments of Macao will have to wait for another time.”

“No sir, not at all, sir,” she replied quickly. “Might I inquire where—”

“You may not. Now please get ready to greet our guest and see that all is in readiness in the meeting room. I will need full communication capability, and please instruct the pilots to activate the mobile-phone jammers. I want and expect complete privacy.”

“Yes sir.” There was a new look of respect in Mlle. Derrida’s eyes. This was the first time she had really seen Emanuel Skorzeny in action, and he could sense that her opinion of him was rapidly undergoing a transformational change: not the doddering old rich fart with time on his hands and money to burn that she had thought him; but then, that was the point.

“Very well, then, sir,” she said, backing away and out of the private quarters. “All will be to your satisfaction.”

“Thank you, Mlle. Derrida,” he said. “Please ensure that it is.” And, with that, he dismissed her.

There were no briefing books or any electronic screens where Skorzeny sat. He had no need for them. He had long since committed to memory the particulars of the man with whom he would be meeting. Arash Kohanloo came from one of the first families of Qom, the holiest of Shi’ite Iran’s holy cities. Qom was where the Iranian nuclear program had been secretly developed for years, built impregnably into the side of a mountain. But, more important, Qom was also the city and redoubt of the 12th Imam, the long-awaited Mahdi, whose imminence would be presaged by a time of troubles that made Christian Revelation look like Eve at play in the Garden of Eden. He was, in other words, just the fellow Skorzeny was looking for.

Skorzeny rose and moved toward the front of the plane. As expected, everything was ready in the conference room, including a repast of
nan-e dushabi
,
panir
, dates, eggplant, lamb, and
faludeh
for desert, washed down with
doogh
. Off to one side, several computer screens blinked with rows of raw numerical data.

The door to the aircraft opened. “M. Kohanloo,” Skorzeny greeted him, “I bid you welcome.”

The Persian was short, wiry, with what looked like a month-old beard. He was dressed in Western garb, and he bowed to Skorzeny rather than kissing him. He, too, had been briefed: Skorzeny did not like to be touched.

The meal passed with only the basic exchange of pleasantries. Of the current geopolitical situation the two men said absolutely nothing. Skorzeny partook of the meal with the addition of a small glass of Shiraz wine from Australia. He had no intention of insulting his host, but neither did he wish to seem weak; for him Islam was just another human superstition, albeit more useful for his purposes at this moment than Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or any of the Far Eastern faiths.

When the plates were cleared and the palates cleansed with some aniseeds, Arash Kohanloo looked at his host and said: “You are an infidel, an unbeliever. You mock me with your wine, and insult me and my family; worse, you insult both the Prophet, blessings and peace be upon him, and the immanence of the Twelfth Imam, Abu’l Qasim Muhammad ibn Hasan ibn ‘Ali, who from the time of the Occultation has waited with infinite patience for the day of the troubles, when he will come again, accompanied by Isa—Jesus, to you—to bring peace and deliverance to your world.”

Skorzeny looked at him for a long moment, and then said: “Pick up your mobile phone.” Kohanloo extracted an iPhone from a suit pocket. “Look at it. Try it.”