Michael Walsh Bundle (7 page)

President Tyler was incredulous. “You mean to tell me that the United States government has an anonymous operative we can't really control?”

“No, sir,” replied Seelye. “Not the United States government. We do. The three of us in this room.” Seelye caught himself, looked over at Hartley. “And one member of congressional oversight.”

If Tyler regretted his decision to let Hartley sit in on the meeting, his face didn't betray him. “Go on,” he ordered, glancing over at Hartley with an unspoken warning:
shut the fuck up, Bob.

“Imagine a platoon of high-tech exterminators, who do the job other American agents can't or won't do,” explained Rubin. “Each agent has an unbreakable alias or cover. They operate completely off the shelf and under the radar; and they work under pain of death.”

“What do you mean, ‘pain of death'?” asked the president.

“Operational security is not only everything, it's the only thing,” offered Seelye. “The identity of each Branch 4 agent is unknown even to another Branch 4 agent. They put together their own teams, the members of which are unaware for whom they're really working. And should their identities ever become known even to a fellow member of the unit…” His voice trailed off, his meaning clear.

“Are you telling me that the United States government employs professional assassins?”

“I wouldn't use that word, Mr. President,” replied General Seelye. “More like the business end of our forward defenses. The tip of the tip of the spear.”

“Branch 4 is a unit whose very existence—until this moment—is authorized to be known to only three governmental officials: POTUS, the SecDef, and DIRNSA,” continued Rubin, turning his attention to Hartley, trying to impress on him the importance of keeping his mouth shut. “Notice I did not use our names. Branch 4 existed before we assumed our offices and it will continue to exist after we leave. No matter who is sitting in our chairs…”

The president did a slow burn. “Why is this the first time I'm hearing about it?”

“It's not, sir,” said Seelye, quietly. “It's just that you've made domestic considerations the top priority of your administration thus far.”

President Tyler was in a box. He hated being in a box. He hated Rubin and Seelye for putting him in a box. When this was over, especially if it ended badly, he was going to have both their heads on pikes, to be displayed in the Rose Garden until the next election. “This Branch 4, this Devlin…sounds like God.”

“The next best thing,” said Seelye. “Plus, Branch 4, you get your prayers answered one hundred percent of the time. Devlin never fails.”

The president thought for a moment. “Does this mean I won't have to convert to Islam?” he asked. “I don't think that would go over very well with the folks back home in Lafayette.”

“That's exactly what it means,” said Seelye.

That seemed to please Jeb Tyler. “Get Devlin,” said the president of the United States.

L
EONARDO DA
V
INCI
A
IRPORT
, R
OME
, C
HRISTMAS
, 1985

The man known as “Devlin” was born on December 27, 1985, in Rome, Italy. At the time, he was eight years old.

Survivors of shootings almost always say that, at first, they thought the gunshots were something else. A car backfiring. A man chipping ice off a windshield on a freezing winter's day. Birthday balloons popping. The mind attempts to process what it already knows, and instinctively blocks that which it doesn't wish to recognize. Such things are called “memories.”

“Mama, can I have one?” One what? He could only remember the want, not the object. Some trifle for sale in one of the kiosks.

“No,” she said.

Far better to remember her, his mother, as she was, young and beautiful, young to him, beautiful to him and at least two others—but that he only found out about later, when he was older, not young.

He and she both knew she didn't mean it. But it was what she had to say. Because her husband, his father, would instantly overrule her had she said yes, that whatever it was he'd wanted would be dismissed as trivial, transient, of no moment. Unworthy. His father always said no.

The boy who would die that day loved his mother. All his childhood memories were of her, because she was the one fixed constant in his life. For as long as he could remember, through all the moves, all the travel, all the strange cities and foreign languages and new friends, there was always his mother there to comfort him, buck him up, and send him back into the fray that he already knew was life.

Civilians always ask service kids whether growing up without a hometown, without old friends, is hard. Absent the familiar anchors, the life that the boy and thousands of others like him lived seemed difficult, intimidating. Better to stay in one place. Better to have a hometown. Nothing ever happens in a hometown.

Harder to grow up without a father or, worse, with an absent father. Devlin's father's business was entirely his own. Later, Devlin understood the nature of that business, perforce embraced it, and took it to lengths his father never could have dreamed. Ironic that he hated his father, hated the business that kept his father away from him, hated the thing that took both his father and his mother away from him, and yet here he was. In it, deeper and darker than dear old Dad ever could have hoped to be. Not by choice, of course.

Until it ended the way it ended, that trip was the happiest memory of his life. Corfu, Biarritz, Palma de Majorca, and finally the Eternal City, where they'd stayed at the Villa Hassler atop the Spanish Steps. How beautiful his mother looked in her bathing suit on the Mediterranean beaches, in her evening dress when they went to the opera performances, in her slacks and blouse, sweater thrown casually over her shoulders, when they threw the petty coins into the Fontana di Trevi, when they stuck their hands in the Bocca della Verita and hoped the Thing inside the Mouth of Truth wouldn't bite them off.

And the best part was, they didn't even have to travel that far. Not one of those long trips that his father took, not one of those overnight airplane flights, the daylong train trips. They were living in Munich, where his father was working at Radio Free Europe, although some of the German kids in his
Grundschule
liked to tease him that RFE really meant CIA. When Devlin would ask his mother where his father was, she would always reply that he was trying to stop some very bad men who were trying to hurt people. Americans, like them.

One night, lying in bed, he managed to overhear a scrap of his parents' conversation. There was somebody else in the room. They were talking in low voices with someone else, switching languages from English to German to Italian to Spanish to Russian to a couple of other tongues that Devlin did not have, practically in midsentence, as they often did.

He was too young to follow everything they spoke about, but he could still catch scraps. At eight, Devlin not only spoke fluent German, but Bavarian as well. From listening to ORF, he had also picked a very fashionable, if slightly goofy, Austrian accent, and could differentiate among Tyrolean, Viennese, and the Italian-inflected
Südtirolisch
of Merano and the
Alto Adige;
his mother loved to ski. Languages were something he didn't even have to think about. They were like listening to music, or working out long division in that particularly German way that so mystified his American-born parents. No “carry-the-anything.” Keep the whole thing in your head and just do it.

One of the things they were talking about—no, arguing about—was some kind of animal: a hyena, a dingo, something like that. Devlin had read about beasts like these, opportunistic scavengers that ripped the living flesh from wounded animals, and he wondered why three grown-ups would be discussing creatures from the veldt in the middle of the night.

A burst of Russian followed, and he picked out the word, “Ilyich,” and he was proud that he already knew who he was: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. His father spent a lot of time in the Soviet Union; not that he ever admitted it to Devlin, directly, of course, but from time to time Devlin would find a few unused rubles in the coin cup on his father's dresser and, once in a while, a tin of caviar in the refrigerator. He liked it when his father went to Russia.

Now they were talking about Hungary and Syria and Radio Free Europe. The talk grew louder, more agitated. Somebody yelled something about somebody named Sanchez. Finally, his mother asked for quiet, and the conversation fell back into low murmurs. He listened as long as he could until he drifted off to sleep…

Bang
. He was in Rome now. In the airport.

No, not bang.
Crack
. That was the sound:
crack
. The sound of the world splintering.

It was a sound he had since made his friend over the intervening years, a sound that at once announced the truth—la Bocca della Verita. Once his enemy, no matter that it became the enemy he loved, the enemy he relied upon, the enemy he could not do without. The friend he could never quite trust.

CRACK
.

His father knew that friend immediately.

His mother had been in denial—“No,” she was in midsentence—when Dad suddenly shoved her to the ground, knocking her on top of Devlin.

It wasn't the first time his father had pushed his mother, not the first time he'd hit her, struck her, really, a hard blow that sent her to the floor, but it may have been the first and only time such a blow had been delivered out of love instead of anger or jealousy. Devlin himself had been on the receiving end of many such blows, but this was the first and only one that saved his life.

Memories.

Imagine a string of the loudest cherry bombs you ever heard going off. Imagine the branches of every tree in your neighborhood suddenly and simultaneously stripped from their trunks, as if by some sudden ice storm, and sent crashing to the ground. Really fast.

But it wasn't cherry bombs. It wasn't tree branches. It was automatic gunfire, raking the terminal. The sound of bullets chipping marble and plaster, ricocheting off wood and bone. The flash and thunder of hand grenades.

Chunks of flesh, pieces of skull. An arm, severed from its body. A head, rolling. Feet without legs. The dismemberment made more gruesome by the nails, shrapnel, lug nuts, washers, and screws embedded in the ordnance. So many ordinary household objects, so much extraordinary damage. The banality of evil, indeed.

Mother, toppling, catching whatever portion of the ordnance that was meant for him.

They were lying as flat, flattened, her body over his, shielding him. “Stay down, Mama,” he begged her, but she was a brave woman, defending her young, and so she raised her head, just a little trying to see the source of danger, trying to make a plan of safety, trying to see if there was any escape from this man-made hell on earth, when something caught in the side of her head and that was that.

It is thankfully not given to many sons to see their mothers die before their eyes, but it was given to Devlin. And at that moment, Devlin learned something extraordinary about himself:

He didn't care.

In retrospect, of course, he did. No boy ever grieved more for this mother than he. But that was later. Not now. Not now, when the bullets and bombs were flying. At that moment—in this moment—Devlin had only one thought:

Self-preservation. He burrowed beneath her still-warm body, waiting for Death to stop.

And he had lived with her death, as the organizing moral principle of his life, ever since. It was what animated him, fueled, propelled him. He was alive because she had died, she who had already given him life once before, and if nothing else he owed it to her to live and keep on living, to kill and keep on killing, until the madness that had engulfed his family either was put to rest, or he was.

The death of his father he witnessed with more equanimity. He had always known his father was a hero, that his father had accomplished great deeds, which he could never hope to match or equal. For as long as Devlin could remember, he had been aware that his father had sought precisely this life, which meant that he had also sought precisely this death.

Up to this moment, the only grenades Devlin had ever seen were in war movies. German television was full of war movies, in which the good Americans killed the beastly Germans or the even beastlier Japs. For some reasons, Germans enjoyed being the bad guys, and for all Devlin knew maybe they still did, but every movie had a scene in which the Germans tossed one of those funny long skinny grenades, so unlike our grenades, and then their grenades would roll around our trenches until either they exploded, killing at least one of the secondary characters in the movie, or one of our guys picked it up and threw it back at the Germans—we played baseball, so they got it right between their beady little blue eyes—or, best of all, one of our guys fell on the grenade, muffled the explosion with his belly and saved the lives of everybody else in the trench. Even though he died.

Of course, it wasn't like that in real life. Memories:

Father, pulling his service pistol, trying to return fire. His father was a good shot and Devlin thinks he remembers dad knocking down one of the Arabs with a single shot. True or not, he wants to remember it that way. Otherwise, his father's death was as meaningless as his mother's, and as everyone else's who died that day.

Devlin's last view of him came as he dove onto a rolling grenade. There wasn't much left of him to bury next to his wife, just a bloody trunk and the severed fingers of one hand.

When it was over, when the Israelis guarding the El Al terminal that was the target of the attack had killed three of the four Arabs, eighty people were wounded, and sixteen of them died. A nearly simultaneous attack on Vienna's Schwechat Airport took two more lives, and wounded sixty more, all at the behest of Abu Nidal. The same Abu Nidal who, years later, had turned up mysteriously dead in Baghdad as a guest of Saddam Hussein.

The only surviving Palestinian gunman, Ibrahim Mohammed Khaled—twenty years old at the time of the attack—was given a reduced sentence of thirty years in prison. The defense lawyers had argued for leniency on the grounds of Khaled's youth, his cooperation with the authorities, and the “trauma” of his childhood in a refugee camp. A refugee from Israel, those Nazis…

Meanwhile, “Devlin” was one of the survivors who was rushed to the hospital. There, his father's friend, the man in the Munich apartment, told the doctors to stop. He told them the boy was dead. And then he ordered them back to work, saving the lives of those who could be saved.

And so that boy, whatever his name once had been, was no more.

He was adopted into that officer's own family—unofficially, of course—and he changed his name like he changed his socks. At each overseas duty station, and they were all overseas duty stations, he got a new name, a new identity, a new history, a new school transcript, a new life.

Along the way, the boy learned. Blessed with his father's facility for deception and his mother's unerring ear for melody, he learned languages the way other kids learned sports or ate Cracker Jacks. He didn't just learn them, he snacked on them until he had mastered at least as many tongues and dialects as his idol, the great nineteenth-century British explorer and adventurer Sir Richard Francis Burton, including all the major European languages, the Slavic tongues, Hindi, Arabic, Pashtun, Urdu, Japanese, and several dialects of Chinese, including Mandarin and Cantonese. Years later, when a woman asked him how he knew Italian, he replied, “One afternoon it was raining, so I learned Italian.” There was no point in exaggerating.

Instead of formal schooling, he studied at the feet of his new father. Boxing and martial arts. Weapons training. He could fight equally well left-handed and right-handed; he could fire two different caliber handguns, one in each hand, and put the bullets in the same spot in the target, whether it was made of paper or, later, flesh and blood. The boy had a head for puzzles, a body for fighting, and a soul for solitude. Not for nothing was his favorite author the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and he consulted the
Meditations
regularly, always finding inner strength in the
pensées
of the second-century Roman monarch and philosopher.