Michael Walsh Bundle (27 page)

“Good,” said Tyler. “I want you to suspend Devlin's operation, effective immediately.”

That was something completely unexpected. “Suspend, Mr. President?”

“As in, terminate.”

General Armond Seelye took a step back from the president of the United States. “You do understand the implications of that order, sir?”

“You and Rubin explained them to me all too well during the Edwardsville thing. About Branch 4 and its internal rules.”

“Senator Hartley was present too as I recall.” It was as gentle a remonstrance as he could manage under the circumstances.

“Yes, he was…well, as the lawyers like to say, you can't unring the bell. So why don't you let me deal with Bob Hartley.”

Now Seelye got it. “The phone tap that Devlin put on him. That's what this is about, isn't it?” Jesus Christ, was Tyler running his own operation now?

“Bob was in contact today with someone claiming to represent Emanuel Skorzeny, the owner of the
Stella Maria.
”

“The ship that sank yesterday at Long Beach.”

“Yes. Skorzeny is convinced that we did it.”

“Of course we did. Devlin did. You authorized him to take any measures that—”

“Well, now I'm un-authorizing him. Turns out there was nothing on that ship, just humanitarian supplies and some equipment that one of Skorzeny's companies was going to use for some high-atmosphere ecological experiments. I gather that, because of the sensitivity of the instruments, they kept it in a shielded vault in the hold.”

That was just great. Seelye tried his best to put a good face on Devlin's actions. “Which obviously aroused his suspicions.”

“Which just as obviously were ill-founded,” snapped Tyler. “Then there's the little matter of an FBI team that ended up dead in NoVa. We found three bodies in a van parked in Tyson's Corners. They were all laid out neat; a phone tip told the Director where to find them. Any guesses?”

There was nothing to say. The president went on. “It's clear to me that Devlin has been blown, and that his usefulness to us is now at an end. Hell, he practically said it himself.”

A cold chill was dancing up and down Seelye's spine, the hand of a long-dead ghost passing over him. “You realize what you're saying?”

Tyler turned and looked Seelye square in the eye, as if he were trying to press a particularly crucial point home in a closing argument.

“All I know is what you've told me about Branch 4. Your procedures are your procedures. Do I make myself clear?”

At first, Seelye was not sure he did. “Yes, sir. According to the rules, any Branch 4 operative who is publicly—”

“As I said,” said Tyler, turning away. “Your rules are your rules. Now, I suggest you get back to Fort Meade and act accordingly.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Oh, and Army…” Seelye looked at his commander in chief. “You were right. I am getting the hang of this intel business.”

F
ORT
M
EADE
, M
ARYLAND

Weather balloons?

That was what was in the hold of the
Stella Maris.
A couple of fucking weather balloons.

Devlin switched off his PDA, atomizing the confidential report sent to him anonymously by his SEAL buddies in San Diego. He parked his car in the far lot and made his way toward the big black building. Even though it was his home office, so to speak, he hardly ever came here. When he did, he came as he did now, as a custodian in overalls, a nonentity who would blend in with the rest of the night staff, and nobody the wiser. It was, he reflected, a fitting metaphor for his life.

Who was he, really? Everything else flowed from that, including the reason that somebody was trying to flush him out, humiliate him, and kill him.

He came in via one of the service entrances, where his low-level security pass would gain him admission. At this hour, late afternoon, most of the salaried workers were on their way out the door, heading for the Baltimore-Washington parkway and the comforts of spousal, suburban Maryland and Virginia.

“Hey, Brick,” said one old hand to Devlin as he shuffled toward the front of the building. That was how he was known here. “Brick” Davis. Nobody got the joke.

Brick wasn't very bright and sure wasn't very threatening. In fact, unlike his Cagney namesake, he wasn't much of anything at all, which is why hardly anybody ever noticed him. Just the way Devlin liked things.

“Hey, Jake,” he mumbled, not looking up.

Just off the main hall, he slipped into a custodial room. Like everything at Fort Meade, this room too demanded a level of operational security. There was too much access to the building's support systems, its wiring, its air ducts, its ventilation, its electronic infrastructure, which was why he had chosen to put his office here.

The station included several rooms, including a locker room, a bathroom, and a room in which all the tools of the janitor's trade were kept. Devlin headed straight for the bathroom.

Inside, he closed the door. He moved toward the sink and stared at it hard for the retinal scan. He placed his left hand at a certain spot on the mirrored glass and with his right hand, flushed the toilet. The back of the medicine cabinet slid open, revealing the control panel behind it. As he began punching in the codes that only he knew—

A banging on the door. The jiggling of the doorknob. A desperate voice. “Anybody in there?”

No time to close the back of the medicine chest. He shut the mirror as quietly as he could. “I'm on the john,” he croaked. “Gonna be a while.”

“Yeah, well hurry it up will ya? I got a four-alarm fire going here.”

He recognized the voice. It was Jasper Reddiwood, the old Baltimorean who had worked here for years, knew every square inch of the building, and never opened his mouth about anything. He flushed and ran the sink. “Be right out, Jasper.”

“Brick, is that you?” came the voice from the other side of the door. “Jesus, man, I'm sorry, but—”

“No sweat, Jasper.” The codes were already activated, but there was no way he could close the panel without aborting the sequence. The way he'd designed it, an abort and reset meant that he would have to wait at least one hour before reinitializing the sequence. He didn't have an hour.

Even worse, he still had to punch in the finishing sequence codes, otherwise…well, there was no otherwise. A powerful plastic explosive would rip through the room and kill them both. He had twelve minutes.

He opened the door. Jasper looked like he was about to have a brown cow. “Thanks, man,” gulped Jasper, heading for the can. But Devlin made no move to leave. Instead, he went back to the sink and proceeded to wash his hands, slowly and carefully. Jasper looked at him like he was nuts.

“Be my guest,” said Devlin, looking away. Jasper had no choice. He dropped his drawers and did his business with an explosive, audible sense of relief. Devlin kept washing his hands.

Jasper finished up and moved toward the sink. Devlin was still washing. He moved aside to let Jasper clean himself, but still made no move to leave. Jasper ran the hot water over his soapy hands without saying a word, then turned to the blow dryer, and dried himself off. Devlin moved back to the sink and started washing up again..

“What's wrong with you man?”

“Not feeling too well myself, Jasper,” he replied, still facing away.

“Brick, you are one weird dude,” said Jasper.

“That's what everybody says,” said Devlin, still washing. “Thick as a brick.”

Jasper edged out the door. “You have yourself a nice night, Brick, you hear?”

“I got a lot of work to do, Jasper,” he said. “Cleaning up and all. Cleaning up.”

“Right,” said Jasper, and then he was gone.

Devlin whipped open the medicine chest door and finished the sequence with less than two minutes to spare.

The back wall of the bathroom slid open and he stepped into the next room. His office.

Not even Seelye's office was this well equipped. It was a mirror of his Falls Church home, but with the added advantage of zero possible security leaks; everything was wired directly into NSA's main system; whatever No Such Agency was watching and listening to, so was he.

There was a message waiting for him as he logged in. It was from Seelye: ABORT A/P POTUS DIRECTIVE THIS DAY.

He sat there for a moment, absorbing the import. That was it, then. He was well and truly fucked. The president of the United States had compromised operation security, hung him out to dry, and signed his death warrant. The sinking of the
Stella Maris
had just clobbered him with blowback. It was time to get out, and fast. But not before he got what he came here for.

Think.

Everything had a pattern—that was the entire basis of cryptography. Even the most of basic of codes—a simple substitution cipher, like his father had taught him when he was a kid—had some sort of pattern, and where there was a pattern, there was a key.

Edwardsville brought him into the game, got him spinning toward Los Angeles. The Grove turned him around again, looking at London after the missile attack. Milverton, Skorzeny, the
Stella Maris
…misdirection everywhere he looked.

There was an old Sherlock Holmes story—“The Adventure of the Dancing Men”—that he'd first read when he was a child; it was in that book of codes that his dad had given him, the book that had survived the Rome Airport massacre, the book that he hadn't cracked since that awful day, not wanting to sully the memory of his parents with the blood of his mother that was still on the book.

Dancing men, each one standing for a letter of the alphabet. A substitution cipher, whose message gradually became clear as Holmes filled in the missing letters. Filled in the blanks. Time to do the same thing.

He ran a full sequencing deep drill on his keywords. Concentric relationship patterns. Google and other search engines, including NSA's own. All levels of security clearances, including Seelye's. Local, global, and universal. Leave nothing to chance:

His father and mother's full names, plus his own real first name. No one ever called him by that name, and hadn't since his mother died in his arms, but he still remembered it. Compartmentalization was the name of the game. In “real life,” he couldn't remember anything about his past, but at the mighty Wurlitzer, he remembered everything.

He threw in Seelye's name, too. And now he added “MILVERTON, CHARLES A.” and “SKORZENY, EMANUEL.”

The full search would take awhile, even at the speed at which the NSA mainframes operated. No matter how fast they were, though, real time was always faster. Civil libertarians might quail, but the fact was that SIGINT and ELINT were always going to be a step or two behind reality. NSA officers were like those people who went to Disney World and recorded everything they did and saw, then replayed it when they got back home. It took them the same amount of time to relive the experience as to actually have the experience, which meant that they had not only lost one day to the blandishments of the Walt Disney Co., they had lost two.

Devlin rose and, securing the door to his inner sanctum, stepped through the bathroom and out into the main hall. There was something he had to see while the hamsters churned.

Near the front of the NSA building, there is a long hallway, adorned with photographs. At first glance, it might seem like the foyer of the CIA in Langley, whose ostentatious wall of anonymity commemorates the Company operatives who died in the line of duty. Heroes all. But the NSA hall was different.

At first glance, nothing special about the wall. Quintessential NSA guys, smiling white men in suits mostly, family men, all of whom had one thing in common: they were traitors.

Devlin had been down this hallway many times before, but this time he scrutinized each face as if he'd never seen it before. Somewhere on this wall lay the clue to his past, the missing link, the man or (in very rare cases) the woman who could provide the missing cipher code to the mystery of his past.

“G-night, Brick.” More of the staff, heading home.

“Haven't seen you around much lately, Brick—you okay?”

“Retard.” This last muttered sotto voce.

Dancing men, all of them, dancing men. He pushed his mop past the ranks of photos methodically. He had walked past their ranks many times, but now he put his photographic memory to good use, scrutinizing every face, filing it away for future reference. It could be a useless exercise in memorization, but in his line of work there were no useless exercises in memorization.

There she was. His mother. Give her a name.

Carol Telemacher, née Cunningham. Code name, Polly. It wasn't until many years after her death that Devlin knew his mother had worked for NSA. She had started in the 1970s with the top-secret NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office, which together with its sister service, the National Reconnaissance Program, had been founded in 1961 to coordinate the aerial surveillance activities of the CIA and the Air Force. Nobody could read a map like his mother, and even on that final, fatal trip, she had guided through the labyrinthine streets of the Italian cities with ease.

Her presence here was Seelye's revenge. Or maybe homage. What difference did it make?

There she was, so close to him, so near, and yet so very, very impossibly far. Put there by the man who had used her and then betrayed her, exhibited like a traitor, to cover his own shame and complicity in her death. One thing was clear though; no matter how many years had passed, Army Seelye was still in love with his mother. That was why her picture was up on the wall, where he could walk by it every day. Devlin could respect, even admire, him for that.

His brain formed the sentence, but his lips didn't move. “I love you.” A sentiment he could never give voice to, for fear of certain discovery; in this place, the walls not only had eyes, they had ears too. But one that was always in his heart. Right alongside the anger and thirst for vengeance, which was growing with each passing day.

Devlin rolled his mop and bucket back toward the custodial room. The computers would be finished by now.

One of the programs he had run, called PHIZREC—some in-house geek had a sense of humor—accessed the records of all the faces on the wall. Not just their pictures, but their entire dossiers, including the crimes they had committed that had gotten them on the Wall of Shame in the first place.

He was under no illusions that his presence in NSA would go undetected for long. He was smart, but Army Seelye was at least as smart as he was. In the game of cat and mouse that had evolved between them, they were fully equals.

Hurry. Think. Sequence.

Concentric circles, flowing outward, like the ripple of a stone in the middle of a pond. No one went through life leaving no traces, even a spook. You always affected someone else's orbit.

He had programmed his search to a Level 10 sensibility, to trigger anything, no matter how small.

Misdirection. That had to be the key. The old magic trick—focusing attention on the irrelevant while the trick was worked practically in plain sight. Or what would have been plain sight, if not for—

His screen blipped amber. His program was set to detect roaming spybots, and it had just found one.

Spybots were protective pawns that could be set to detect any untoward inquiries, especially at his level of security clearance. Devlin had to identify the 'bot without giving away his position or, indeed, letting the drone know he was even there.

Follow the drone.

It was pointing to his personal file. Above top secret. Above SCI. So secret, in fact, that only he and Seelye even knew it existed.

Holy shit. It wasn't a spybot, it was a guide dog, pointing for him to look at something. An embed message. He clicked on it:

“ABORT A/P POTUS DIRECTIVE THIS DAY.” Abort the mission as per today's presidential directive—that much he already knew. But this time there was an addendum. It read, AND I QUOTE: “YOUR RULES ARE YOUR RULES. ACT ACCORDINGLY.”