Shock Warning d-3 Read online

  Shock Warning

  ( Devlin - 3 )

  Michael Walsh

  Countdown To Armageddon

  It begins in California with a devastating biological attack — a horrific display of homegrown terror unseen on U.S. soil — just weeks before the presidential election. For the White House, it is a political nightmare, as it threatens to plunge the country into panic and economic chaos. But for the NSA's undercover agent Devlin, it is the ultimate warning. Devlin knows who's behind the mayhem. He knows who controls the media. And he knows that, unless he can stop it, the End of Days begins… on Election Day.

  Michael Walsh

  Shock Warning

  For Greg Clary

  Adapt yourself to the place where your lot has been cast, and show true love to the fellow mortals with whom destiny has surrounded you.

  — MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations

  PROLOGUE

  New York City

  “Department of nuclear medicine,” said Celina S. Gomez into the telephone. Gomez was a technician in the radiology department at Mount Sinai Medical Center on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. A technician was nowhere near as prestigious as being a doctor or a nurse, but for a girl who had worked her way across town and down eighty blocks from Little Santo Domingo on the West Side, it was good enough.

  The S stood for Selena. Her mother had been such a fan of the late pop singer that she had, in effect, named her twice. “Just like New York, New York,” mamacita used to tell her. “The town so nice they named it twice.” Celina didn’t want anybody calling her Celina Selena, so she kept her middle name a closely guarded secret, but she enjoyed using her middle initial in honor of her mother and because it was cool.

  If only mama could see her now. But mama couldn’t, because she had been killed six years ago, when she caught a stray bullet as she was on her way to the supermercado over on Broadway. Celina had still been in high school then, a senior at Mother Cabrini in Washington Heights, and was on a day trip to The Cloisters in nearby Fort Tryon Park when she heard the news. The easy thing would have been to drop out of school at that point and get pregnant, like many of the girls she knew, but she stuck with it, buried her mother, and went to King’s College in Brooklyn.

  She’d made the right choice, because now here she was, living on the Upper East Side, in what the gringos used to call the little girls’ neighborhood — safe, boring, secure. She could walk to her apartment over on First Avenue, maybe even hit one or two of the bars on Second on the way home to her walkup, where she paid eighteen hundred dollars a month for the privilege of living with her cat.

  “I would like to speak to Saleh,” said a man’s insistent voice at the other end of the wire. She’d heard that expression “the wire” from one of the older women on the staff, and loved its retro sound. It was a throwback to the days when phones really were connected with wires — not like today, when cell phones and smartphones could give you brain cancer if you weren’t careful. Celina knew enough to stay away from as much unnecessary radiation as possible. In her line of work, she was exposed to it every day, to gamma radiation mostly, injected into heart patients to chart the blood flow through their damaged or diseased organs. She felt sorry for them, mostly middle-aged men who had suddenly realized they no longer had a shot at playing shortstop for the Yankees, or dating girls in their twenties, or a host of other fantasies that time had just disabused them of.

  “I’m sorry, there’s no Dr. Saleh in this department,” she replied without even looking at the directory. Celina knew everybody on the staff — not just in radiology, but pretty much the entire medical staff. She didn’t intend to stay a technician all her life, so she spent every spare waking moment studying the workings of the hospital, learning the names of all the doctors and nurses and even their faces whenever possible. How else was she ever going to be like them if she didn’t know them?

  “Are you quite sure?” said the voice. “No Saleh?”

  In a city of a million accents, this one stood out. In addition to a near-photographic memory, Celina had an outstanding ear for accents and dialects. New York, Boston, Southern, standard American, Long Island, Puerto Rican, Nyurican, Spanish Harlem, Jamaican, Haitian, Central American, Mexican, Canadian, British, Scottish, Irish, Australian, New Zealand, South African, Japanese, Chinese, subcontinental Hindu/Muslim, Atlantic Avenue Arabic, and whatever. This one was “whatever.” She had to find out more.

  She glanced at the phone’s display screen — no ID. Even when calls went through the main switchboard, the system generally preserved caller ID. Whoever had called this way, he didn’t want to be known. She went on alert. “Can you hold a moment, sir?” she said. She pressed the hold button and collected her thoughts.

  Since 9/11, all hospitals in New York City, and especially those in Manhattan, had instituted heightened security procedures. For hospitals were a terrorist’s dream, a veritable one-stop shopping depot for all manner of deadly things. It was ironic that a place devoted to healing the sick and saving lives should also be a potential source of destruction, but there you were. Why, right here in radiology, there was probably enough radioactive waste to fuel a small dirty bomb.

  She got back on the line. “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t seem to find anyone on the medical staff by that name.”

  “Are you sure you know how to spell it?” came the voice. “S-A-L-E-H. Aslan Saleh.”

  “What kind of name is that, sir?” she inquired.

  “An American name.” The tone had turned resentful. “What do you think?”

  “Of course it is. I meant, where does it come from? Sorry if I’m being nosy, but it’s kind of a hobby of mine. Names, cultures, languages… accents. You know the old saying: ‘Nothing human is foreign to me.’ ”

  “It’s Arabic,” said the man. “Yemeni, I believe. Maybe Palestinian. Lebanese. Whatever.”

  Whatever. “Well, I’ll certainly be happy to give Dr. Saleh a message for you. Can you please give me your name and telephone number?”

  A short pause. Then: “Of course. My number is… wait a moment. I want to make sure I have the right place.”

  Celina smiled. “Of course.” She could hear the man rummaging through some papers.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, coming back on the line. “I seem to have made an error.”

  “That’s quite all right, sir. Now, if you will just give me your name and number…”

  “I don’t know how I could have been such a fool. This is the New York City Police Department, isn’t it? The Counter-Terrorism Unit?”

  “No, sir, this is Mount Sinai Medical Center Radiology, Department of Nuclear Medicine.” This wasn’t good. Nobody made a mistake like this, unless they wanted to. But what could she do about it? Mr. Wald was due to arrive in five minutes for his stress test, and the last time she saw him, he didn’t look so good.

  “Yes,” said the voice. “It is, isn’t it?” The voice was cold now, ice cold, its temperature having dropped a hundred degrees in an instant. “So listen to me carefully, Celina S. Gomez… ”

  Her blood froze. How did he know her name?

  “I want you to get a message to Detective Aslan Saleh at the NYPD. Office of Counter-Terrorism. Are you listening to me? Are you writing this down?”

  “Yes, sir. I am.” She was scared but excited. This was like one of those episodes of Law & Order she liked to watch on TV, except that she was in it. If only Mama could see her now…

  “I’ve already spelt the name for you”—spelt, he said, not spelled—“so I expect you to get it right. His friends call him Lannie. So please tell Lannie that he has an appointment at Mount Sinai Hospital in three days’ time in the Department of Nuclear Medicine. It is quite urgent. In fact, tell him
it is a matter of life and death.”

  Celina scanned the appointments book for three days from now. Nothing. “Life and death,” she repeated. “How am I supposed to find this Detective Saleh?”

  A longer pause this time. “That,” said the voice, “is your problem. Just give him the following message, please.”

  “And who may I say is calling?”

  “You may not. Now take this down: ‘We are discovered. Save yourself.’ Do you have that? Repeat, please.”

  “ ‘We are discovered. Save yourself.’ May I ask—”

  “You may not. He’ll know what it means.”

  “Will he?” She was listening as hard as she could, soaking in every syllable, every nuance, every breath. There was something about the voice that gave her a chill. Something she couldn’t place. Something evil that this way came.

  She would get it. She would get him. From now on, it was a point of pride.

  “Can you repeat that for me, please? I want to make sure I have it just right.”

  Listen.

  Listen hard.

  Listen like your life depends on it.

  What an idiot she was! Why hadn’t she thought of this before? She switched on the recording device that came as part of the new phone system.

  He was still there. She knew it. She could, just barely, hear him breathing.

  He spoke, but this time the words came out in a rush and she didn’t understand them at all. Some foreign language, Arabic, Hebrew… she couldn’t tell.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, but he was gone.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Echo Park, Los Angeles

  Ghosts everywhere. Ghosts all around, ghosts of the past and ghosts yet to come. Ghosts looming through the fog, reaching out to him, some beseeching and pleading, some clawing and snarling. Vengeful ghosts, sorrowful ghosts. Ghosts of those whom he had once loved and ghosts whom he still hated. The ghosts of his mother, who died protecting him, and of his father, who died fighting back. The ghosts of Milverton, his back broken, and of Raymond, that boy under the Central Park Reservoir, his eye gouged out and his head blown off.

  All of them dead. And all dead because of him.

  Was there vengeance in the next world? “Vengeance is mine,” the Lord supposedly said, but if there was no God, then vengeance belonged to the shades, souls existing along the great continuum of being and nonbeing, of something and nothing.

  And, as every scientist knew, the greatest difference in the universe lay between zero and one. Everything else was commentary.

  If the greatest distance between two points was not one and infinity but one and zero, then the shortest distance was between life and death. Until the lights go out, there is yet light — but in darkness there is only nothing.

  He strained his eyes in the darkness. Not yet nothing; he could hear his own breath. Even if the points of light he could still see with his eyes closed were illusions, optical memories, random bits of electrical impulses shooting through his eyeballs, there was yet light. God created light with a command, and Lucifer, best-loved, was the Bringer of Light. The light was both friend and enemy; in darkness lay solace. Because something was more terrifying than nothing.

  Not yet nothing: his heart was yet pounding, his newfound heart, his reborn heart, his breathing becoming shallower and more insistent. He clutched life as he dealt death.

  And there she was, just beyond his grasp, as real as he was. Looking away, unable to see him or hear the sound of his voice, her gaze fixed on something distant, her dark hair cascading down her naked back, moved not by the wind but by a careless toss of her head, almost coquettish, as she gestured to one unseen.

  Was she looking at him, perhaps in her own dream, her own vision, her own fantasy? Or was there another?

  Close enough to touch her now, he reached for her — and she dissolved at his touch. Melted, not like a real woman should but as a dream woman does, filigreeing away in a shower of light, as if she had never really existed, merely a figment of his imagination, a succubus come to save him from his own private demons, not a real woman to console him in his own private hell.

  “Maryam,” he heard himself saying. Her name was an incantation to a god in whom he did not believe.

  She could not hear him. Something was drowning him out. A sound, like the beating of the wings of a gigantic bird, the thwack thwack thwack of a helicopter’s blades, like the roar of an approaching tornado. Like the gunning engine of an airplane, and him alone on the Midwestern plain, helpless, mystified, and alone, like George Kaplan or Roger Thornhill. Or, worse, like his namesake, T. R. Devlin, who put the woman he loved in needless, fatal peril, just to do his job, and risked everything to get her out.

  He screamed—

  — and sat bolt upright in his bed in the house in Echo Park. The traffic on Sunset, down the hill, was quiet at this hour, the Mexican restaurants closed, the Dodgers game at the nearby Stadium long over. Not even the sound of gangrelated gunfire, which occasionally punctured the stillness of L.A. nights. The city was never this quiet, especially this close to downtown and the intersection of two great freeways, but at this moment he was all alone in the world. He could even hear the freight trains, passing through the central city like the ghosts of civilizations past.

  But over everything was the beating of his hideous heart.

  He rose and shook his head, trying to clear it of the ghosts who haunted him now, more than ever. But they would not go gently…

  He shook his head again, harder. A confidential op should never see ghosts. Seeing ghosts was a sign of weakness, or sentimentality, a sign of — if you were given to portents and runes — impending doom. Seeing ghosts was a sign of conscience. A sign of a heart. And a heart was the one thing he could not have. Not if he wanted to live.

  A heart was no use in prison, especially a prison in which the lights were always turned off. In which you were not plunged into darkness, but in which you dwelled in darkness — the vast emptiness wherein the only sound was the voice of Lucifer, whispering that he could bring light that God Himself could not — would not. That he could salve the wounds, sever the irons bonds of superstition, and welcome you home.

  “Maryam!” he cried.

  A couple of blocks away, the spires of St. Andrew’s, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, caught the first motes of sunbeams, the gleam in the eye of God.

  He was not alone.

  He would save her, no matter where she was, no matter what it took.

  No matter what it cost him, no matter whether it cost him his life.

  For a life was a small price to pay, to banish the ghosts and see the light once more.

  For, God help him, he had sent her into the monster’s lair, a poisoned pawn, bearing the gift of NSA technology in the form of the secure computer he had given her. They both knew the chance she was taking, and they had both signed off on the operation. Consenting adults, and all that. It was only business.

  But that didn’t make him feel like less of a heel.

  He stepped into the shower and let the scalding water play over him. Water was a precious commodity in Los Angeles. He didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything — not about the ghosts, not about himself, not about anything. He cared nothing for the whole fucking lot of them. He only cared about her.

  In the distance, the secure phone. Only three people on earth had that number, all of them on a need-to-know basis. Even more important, on a need-to-call basis. Since the events in New York and their aftermath, there had been little to know, and even less to call. The last phone call, the one from his stepfather, had said it all:

  Stand down, for your own safety. Branch 4 will go forward without you. Keep your head down, stay out of sight, and, whatever you do, do not try to find her.

  From this moment forward, she is dead to you, dead to us. While she may yet still live, her death is merely a formality of the future, an i to be dotted, a t to eventually be crossed, and crossed off. If you’re lucky, your photo an
d hers will go on the Wall of Shame in Fort Meade. If not… then you already have all the immortality you are ever going to need.

  The phone, more insistent. The relays kicked in, routing the call through a series of secure servers, to determine the real number and the actual location from which the call was being made. Anybody could fake anything these days, especially the National Security Agency, but he knew them — because he was them. At least, he had been, for as long as he could remember.

  It must be some sort of a joke. After what had happened, why would anyone call? Why would Seelye call him, or the new secretary of defense — or, even more unthinkable, the President of the United States? Skorzeny had escaped again, Maryam had defected to her native country, and everything he had done for his country, all the bodies he had left in his lethal wake, amounted to nothing.

  Most likely, they had burned him, as they always said they would. It was the code of Branch 4, that once an op was burned he or she was no better than dead, and it was only a matter of time before the killer announced himself, two .22s in the back of the head, just like the mafia but more lethal.

  It was always your friend, and never your enemy, because what worse enemy could a man in his line of work have than a friend?

  This line was designed so that, if the incoming call passed all the security checks, the ring would continue to loop until it was answered. It didn’t matter that the person on the other end of the line would have rung off; the instant he picked up the secure instrument, he would automatically be connected, via a series of secure cutouts, with the person who had called. That way, the security checks ran in both directions, and both parties could be sure they really were speaking to each other.

  He picked up the line and waited. No beeps and blips, just utter silence… until, finally, a voice:

  “Is that you?”

  “Who else?”