chase? None at all. Plus the handoff in the garage had been clean, of that he was sure. His mind raced, trying to spot the flaw in his argument, but he couldn’t find any. Not on short notice.
And the guy was following them.
Still…what if the guy was an amateur…
Too late. He pushed the button.
Sam Raclette was closing fast on her when all of a sudden his car stopped.
Except it just didn’t stop. It went from 40 to zero almost instantly. The engine shut off, the brakes locked, and the steering went out. There was a sharp jerk and then the back of the car came up off the ground and flipped over. The car’s windows exploded outward from the impact, the airbags popped and the theft-alarm system went off. In the gloom of the underpass, it spun on its roof once or twice, then settled. Tires screeched, horns honked, as the other cars tried to avoid the wreck.
Inside, Sam followed it head over heels in its tumble, and found himself hanging upside down by his seat belt. This fucking piece of shit he thought to himself. Outside, he heard the screech of tires as the cars behind him braked and squealed around him. All he needed was some idiot to smash into him now, before he could get out.
The noise inside the car was deafening; it was hard for him to hear any of what was going on outside. Still, the first thing was to get the hell out of there. With some difficulty, he released the seat-belt catch and slid down the seat. He was covered with broken glass, and there was blood running down his face, but nothing seemed to be broken except the damn car. Although he was stunned from the impact, Sam could still think clearly enough to understand that he had to get out fast, and that he was going to sue the ass off Ford Motor Company once he did.
And then he heard the klaxon of a semi, right behind him.
Devlin had a ringside seat as the truck clipped the Taurus. “Shit!” he exclaimed.
“What’s wrong?” Maryam glanced in the rearview mirror just in time to see the aftermath.
The Taurus spun crazily, a lopsided top sent careening toward one of the stanchions that held up the highway. The truck driver delay-reacted, swerving only after it was far too late, which caused several other cars to leap out of the way as best they could. Unable to stop, the truck righted itself and continued to plow on until the driver could bring the vehicle under control.
“We’ve gotta stop. Go back,” said Devlin. Unbidden to his mind came the memory of that FBI agent he’d killed in his home in Falls Church. The woman he’d shot in his bathroom—
Evalina Anderson. That was her name. He had found it out later, and had made sure that her family would never want for anything again. They were told you won the lottery and then they were whisked away from a modest home in Prince Georges County and resettled in northern California. They thought good fortune had at last smiled on them. But it was not good fortune. It was the Angel of Death.
Did he have to kill everything he touched? That was the way he’d been trained, practically from birth, and certainly from childhood. Raised by the man he most loathed in the whole world and condemned to this horrid existence as an operative of Branch 4 of the Central Security Service, the most secret intelligence unit of the United States government. Although the work of the CSS was fundamental to the overall mission of the National Security Agency, it was the CSS that had remained anonymous from the day it was ordered into existence by President Nixon on Dec. 23, 1971, his little Christmas present to the nation, courtesy of National Security Decision Memorandum 5100.20.
On paper, the CSS looked like a million other government agencies—how they had grown, until it was now they, rather than the elected officials, who ran the country—hiding behind a bland exterior and a mission statement that concealed rather than revealed. He could recite it by heart:
“The Central Security Service (CSS) provides timely and accurate cryptologic support, knowledge, and assistance to the military cryptologic community.
“It promotes full partnership between the NSA and the cryptologic elements of the Armed Forces, and teams with senior military and civilian leaders to address and act on critical military-related issues in support of national and tactical intelligence objectives. CSS coordinates and develops policy and guidance on the Signals Intelligence and Information Assurance missions of NSA/CSS to ensure military integration.”
The CSS was so secret that it didn’t even get its own emblem until 1996; the insignia showed five service emblems balanced around a five-pointed star; each emblem was that of one of the armed services’ cryptologic elements, including the United States Naval Network Warfare Command, the United States Marine Corps, the United States Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, the United States Air Force’s Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Agency, and the US Coast Guard. That ought to tell you nothing.
In fact, what the CSS was, was the muscle arm of the NSA. Nixon had originally intended CSS to be equal in stature with the other armed services—the “fourth branch,” which is where his unit got its in-house name—but the services are good at nothing if not turf warfare and so CSS took refuge at NSA, where it could take its creation as an “armed service” literally. As the focal point of interservice liaisons, and with the weight of the NSA behind it, there was nothing it could not do, nowhere it could not go.
As thus Devlin had been born. “Devlin” was not his real name. His real name had died long ago, along with his real parents, at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci airport, Christmas 1985, when Arab terrorists shot the place up, as well as Vienna’s Schwechat Airport. The eight-year-old Devlin had survived when his mother threw herself on him, but both she and his father—intelligence service professionals—had died in the attack.
The man who was not there that day had raised him from that moment on. He had taken him away, taken him off the grid, taught him, trained him to follow in both his parents’ footsteps, but stronger and tougher than even his father had been. His new father had had an apt pupil, one equally adept at combat and weapons training, at languages, and in ELINT and cryptology. He was Mime to Devlin’s Siegfried, trying to create and hone a fine, burnished weapon but unable to put on the finishing touches. Only Devlin could do that, and he had: completely anonymous, like his service, he was the CSS’s most valuable asset, his existence above SCI—Sensitive Compartmented Information, which was above top secret—and known to only a handful of the highest officials in the U.S. government: the President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense, and the Director of the National Security Agency.
And the man who had raised him, who had whisked him away after the death of his parents, the man who had been having an affair with Devlin’s mother, the man who had betrayed them to their worst enemy…that man was General Armond Seelye. His boss.
His worst enemy was the man who had financed the Abu Nidal operation, as he had financed the operations of the terror network across Europe in those days. The man who posed as a great benefactor of the people, the man who used his suffering at the hands of the Nazis as both a sword and a shield, the man whose philanthropy—although a pittance compared with the huge sums he’d made as a rapacious financial genius—was celebrated on the covers of magazines around the world…that man was Emanuel Skorzeny. Who, Devlin fully understood, not only wanted him dead but needed him dead.
Skorzeny had escaped the last time they met, in France. He wouldn’t be so lucky the next time.
“What are you going to do?” Maryam’s worried voice brought him back to reality.
He had to make this right. He had to. If the man in the trailing vehicle was still alive, he had to rescue
