Early Warning

by Michael Walsh

Genres: Thrillers; Spy Thrillers; Political Thrillers; Terrorism & Assassination Thrillers

Synopsis

All Enemies Foreign And Domestic The NSA's most lethal weapon is back. Code-named Devlin, he operates in the darkest recesses of the US government. When international cyber-terrorists allow a deadly and cunning band of radical insurgents to breach the highest levels of national security, Devlin must take down an enemy bent on destroying America--an enemy more violent and ruthless than the world has ever known. "Michael Walsh is the new master of the political thriller. With the sophistication of Forsyth, the intrigue of le Carré, and the intensity of Ludlum, Early Warning is an incredible thriller. This book should be stamped Satisfaction Guaranteed! " -- Brad Thor, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Foreign Influence Raves for Hostile Intent " Early Warning is a great, great, great political thriller. You'll love Walsh's books. . .Vince Flynn caliber."–Rush Limbaugh "Compelling, fast, dangerous"–Robert Ferrigno "The Vince Flynn for the 21st century."–John Fasano, Darkness Falls "Hostile Intent kept me up most of the night. Hold on, is all I can tell you."–Jay Nordlinger, National Review "Walsh knows what he's up to."– USA Today "Hold on to your heartbeat. . .explodes from start to finish."–Andrew C. McCarthy, former Assistant United States Attorney and author of Willful Blindness "Hostile Intent is audacious in the extreme, and a lot of fun."–FrontPagemag.com "Michael Walsh writes hot blazing prose, compelling, fast, honest and dangerous. More than just a master of style, he writes about the most important subject in the world: terrorism, what it is and what it takes to defeat it. You need to read this book."–Robert Ferrigno, author of Prayers for the Assassin "Sic pages into Hostile Intent and I began to feel uneast. By page nine I'd been punched in the gut. And it just doesn't stop."–Bill Whittle, author of Silent America Michael Walsh is an amazing gentleman and a wordsmith in several disciplines who has achieved critical and commercial acclaim for everything from music criticism to successful screenplays to novels. The latter, which Walsh writes all too infrequently, are memorable and unusual, each a bit different from the other. His latest novel, Hostile Intent, is in a class all by itself: a full-throttle, energy-packed thriller that slices across espionage and politics with enough explosions, fisticuffs and firepower to fill five books with a bit left over for the next.

Release date: September 1, 2010

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 400

Sample

London, England

Dressed entirely in black, Amanda Harrington stood silent as the chauffeur opened the Bentley’s rear passenger door, and involuntarily flinched as she got in.

Nothing on the seat. Nothing on the center console. No note, no gifts, no flowers, no champagne, no chocolate. Good.

She relaxed a little as the liveried driver closed the door. The drugs had worn off after about a month—he had given her a far stronger dose than the attending physicians at Cromwell Hospital had at first thought—and they said it was a miracle that she hadn’t died. It took another couple of months for her to be able to breathe without mechanical assistance, and still more time to regain the use of her limbs.

Then it was another few months at Bethlem Royal, where she underwent a battery of psychological tests and counseling, to make sure she was ready to take her place back in society, that the stress of reentry—and the possibility of encountering him—would not be too much for her still-fragile psyche to bear.

All of this was done in complete seclusion and secrecy. Of the events in France, the newspapers and the BBC had carried not a word; the British government had thrown the cloak of the Official Secrets Act around the whole episode, managed her affairs while she recovered, tended to her property in London as well as to a villa in Costa Rica that nobody even knew she owned. She didn’t know who had ordered that courtesy, or why, but at this point she was simply grateful to be allowed to return home. Even with the shock of her terrible loss still as fresh as it had been nine months ago.

London in the summer was a dicey proposition, but today was as warm and welcoming as it got. Still, she felt a little chill wash over her as the car pulled up in front of her home, 4 Kensington Park Gardens in Holland Park.

“Your residence, madam,” said the driver, opening the door and offering her an arm. Amanda accepted it gratefully.

The man—he was either Indian or Pakistani, which was far from unusual in London—gently but firmly helped her up the few steps to the front door of her home. “May I help you with your keys, madam?” he inquired.

“No, thank you, that’s quite all right,” she replied. Though she was still weak, she wanted to be able to do something for herself, and entering her own home under her own steam was a good place to start.

“You’re quite sure?” The man was very kind, and he had a pleasing twinkle in his eye, as if her infirmity was a secret that only the two of them shared.

“Yes, quite sure,” she said, trying to smile but failing. She put the key in the lock and turned it. It opened with the same satisfying thunk she was so used to, and for a brief moment all seemed right with the world. The door swung open, and the front hall lay before her.

As the driver fetched her luggage, Amanda stood in the doorway, breathing in the familiar smells. It seemed that she had been gone for ages, and that she had just left, on his order, bringing with her what he had called so vulgarly the “insurance policy…”

No—she didn’t want to think about that. Not yet. Not now. Maybe not ever.

The driver was standing behind her, her belongings in his hands. “Madam?” he prompted.

Amanda stood aside to let him pass, and he went into the hallway. “Set them down there, thank you,” she said.

“You’re sure?”

She managed to muster a weak smile of confidence. “Yes, thank you. That will be all.”

They stood in the doorway for an awkward moment, and this time it was he who stepped aside to allow her entry. Then he moved past her, onto the top step, nodded, and turned to go.

“I’m terribly afraid I’ve completely forgotten my manners,” said Amanda suddenly, fumbling in her purse. But the driver waved her off without a word: he was not accepting gratuities today. “In that case,” said Amanda, “please tell me your name.”

“Achmed,” said the man, with a slight bow.

“Thank you, Achmed,” said Amanda. And then he was gone.

Inside the house, Amanda fixed the lock once more but made no further move to enter her home. Instead, she stood stock-still, as if listening for voices. But the only sound she could hear was that of her own shallow breathing.

She turned right, into the parlor. If there was going to be anything, she hoped it would be here, right in the first room, to spare her any further suspense. But the room was as she had left it, the piano still in the corner, the books still on the shelves, even the decanters still on the sideboard. She felt like pouring herself a drink, but the doctors had warned her not to, not for a while anyway. Perhaps tomorrow. Or next week. Or never.

Again, she listened. Again, nothing.

Amanda returned to the hall and started up the steps. She left the luggage in the hallway. There was plenty of time to retrieve it, and besides she had closets full of clothing upstairs. It suddenly occurred to her to wonder how she had come to have any luggage at all, since she had brought almost nothing to France, but someone must have provided her with some of her things during her long hospital stay.

Maybe him. God, she hoped not.

She ascended the long flight of stairs up to the first floor.

Nothing but silence greeted her at the stop of the stairs. The guest rooms yawned tidy but empty. There wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere, nothing to betray her long absence.

She went up another flight of stairs, to her floor, her personal floor. The one that had been their floor together.

The door to the child’s room was shut, and she decided not to enter it. Too many bad memories there. She sniffed the air: faintly, just faintly, she believed she could make out the smell of Indian food, one of their last meals together here.

She turned back to her bedroom. The bed was made, her things exactly where she had left them. Cautiously, she kicked off her shoes and scrunched her toes against the carpet. Then she lay down, across the bed, staring at the ceiling, glad she was home at last and yet wishing she were anywhere but here, feeling every inch a bereaved mother, every inch an orphan and every inch a widow.

How long she lay like that she could not tell, but eventually she was awakened by the soft tones of a mobile phone, ringing somewhere in the house. Somewhere nearby.

That was impossible. Her legendary battery of mobiles, BlackBerrys, and PDAs had been lost in France and not replaced. She lay there, not wishing to rise, hoping that the sound was merely an illusion, an after-effect of her ordeal, a side effect of her treatments.

The sound stopped. She breathed in. And then the ringing started again.

There must be a phone in the house she had forgotten about. One that she had left plugged in. One whose service somehow hadn’t been canceled.

No, it was impossible. But something was still ringing.

Amanda rose and moved toward the bedroom door. The sound grew louder.

She stepped into the hall: louder still. She prayed to a God she didn’t quite believe in that it was not coming from down the hall. From her room. But it was.

No. She had free will. She had free choice. She didn’t have to answer it.

The ring tone stopped, then started up again almost immediately. This time there was no denying it: somebody was calling her.

A crazy thought struck her. Maybe it was her. Her child. No matter what those doctors had tried to tell her, tried to beat out of her, tried to beat into her, no matter how much she understood rationally that the whole thing had been a delusion, deep down she didn’t believe them. She knew herself, knew her instincts, knew her inner voices.

She stopped, caught herself. No. Her lover was dead. She was gone. It was over.

And then the phone rang again and this time she knew she had no choice. She had to answer it. Had to go in there.

She opened the door. The room was just as she had left it nine months ago, a perfect dream room for a twelve-year-old girl, filled with fluffy pillows and stuffed animals. She could practically smell her presence, and if she squinted hard enough, could imagine that she saw the outlines of the girl’s body still visible in the bedclothes. Then the phone rang again.

Now she heard the melody clearly: Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony. She shuddered, moved in the direction of the sound, searching for it until she realized that it was staring right at her: on Emma’s bed, lying atop the stack of pillows like the princess atop the pea.

It was still ringing as she picked it up, if you could call what phones did these days ringing. “Hello?” she said in a voice that she hoped was strong. She flinched at the silence, dreading whatever was at the other end of the line. Waiting, waiting…

And then he spoke: “Compassionate leave is over. It’s time to get back to work.”

Amanda Harrington collapsed unconscious onto the floor.

Budapest, Hungary

From Castle Hill, the view was straight east, across the Danube and into central Asia. Nobody thought of it that way anymore, of course, but two hundred years ago, before unification, the change in topography mirrored the change in the people and in the culture. On the right bank was Buda, rugged and hilly, while on the left lay the old city of Pest, gateway to the steppes of central Asia. From here it was practically a straight shot across Hungary to Nyiregyhaza, through the Carpathians and into the Ukraine, and thence to the Ural Mountains, and Siberia.

He had been here; Devlin knew it. If he sniffed the air, he could practically smell him. He had lost the trail in France, in that horrible refuge the monster kept in the old Abbey of Clairvaux, now a maximum-security French prison. Lost him thanks to Milverton’s nearly lethal knife thrust through his shoulder, and Skorzeny’s final, desperate kick. Milverton had been every bit as good as he had thought, and Skorzeny even more dangerous and clever. But the former was no longer with us; for the latter, it would be only a matter of time. Devlin had sworn that to the President of the United States, to himself and, most of all, to her.

The sound of voices, speaking softly in Hungarian, wafted across the still night air.

The Hilton Budapest was a near-ideal blending of the sacred and the profane, constructed in and around the ruins of a 13th-century Dominican Church and a baroque-era Jesuit college. The St. Matthias Church stood nearby, and behind it the Fisherman’s Bastion, with its seven towers and filigreed walkways. In the dark, it was a perfect place to hide. Devlin stepped back into the shadows and waited.

Operational security was everything.

The voice drew closer. Two men walked within fifteen feet of him, lost in conversation, wreathed in cigarette smoke. The rest of the civilized world had gradually kicked the habit, but not in central Europe. Good. Cigarettes dulled the senses, and not only of taste or, depending on which hand the smoker used, touch, but also of hearing. The small sounds associated with smoking, on a night as quiet as this, seemed many decibels louder: the inhaling, the exhaling, the spitting. Devlin had long ago learned to turn anything to an advantage, and now he was going to allow a filthy habit to shelter him until the moment was right.

He had trailed one of them from Geneva, Switzerland, across the Alps, through Austria, where he had narrowly missed him in Vienna and finally here to Budapest. His name was Farid Belghazi, an Algerian-born French scientist attached to the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire, better known as CERN, and among the projects he had been assigned to was the Large Hadron Collider, the proton-smashing experiment that was attempting nothing less than to re-create the conditions that obtained at the dawn of the universe: the Big Bang. In short, they were searching for the “God particle.”

Belghazi was hardly after anything so grand, but as someone who had a top security clearance throughout the facility, his knowledge of the other research into high-energy particle physics that was going on near the French-Swiss border could be invaluable to civilization’s professed enemies. In addition, CERN had been the birthplace of the World Wide Web, and was actively involved in GRID computing to power data analysis; a virtual supercomputer of networked workstations, all working on the same problem. If you were going to insinuate a spy into a sensitive agency, CERN was probably the next best target after NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, itself. The National Security Agency had first picked up Belghazi’s trail by flagging a series of phone calls and e-mails. As the lead operative of the Central Security Service’s Branch 4, Devlin naturally had access to the information. Now he was going to find out what it all meant.

About ten meters ahead, Devlin shadowed the two men, keeping within the cover of the Fisherman’s Bastion. Now he could hear the voices clearly. The pair was speaking Hungarian, one speaker a native, the other his man, Belghazi. Magyar was not one of Devlin’s best languages, and he knew he could not hope to pass for a Hungarian unless the conversation was brusque and confined to a few sentences. He’d have to act fast before he aroused any suspicions.

In Devlin’s experience, the direct approach was almost always the best. Fishing a pack of Marlboros out of his pocket, he stuck an unlighted cigarette in his mouth and stepped out of the shadows and into their path. “Have you got a light?” he mumbled, offering the pack around as was customary in this part of the world. Obligingly, the Hungarian instinctively extended a lighter. Although it was dark, he could see a light flash in Belghazi’s eyes, but by then it was too late. Devlin grabbed the Hungarian by the wrist and yanked, sending him sprawling into the darkness behind them. Under the rules of engagement of a snatch-and-grab operation like this—rules that even applied to him—he was not allowed to terminate unknown civilians unless he was a) sure of hostile intent and b) had total deniability. Meanwhile, he had a more immediate problem.

Belghazi went for his knife, but Devlin was ready for it. He spun, his left hand chopping down hard on the knife thrust. At the same time, he crossed with his right and met the point of the Algerian’s jaw, knocking him backward toward the road where, at that same moment, a small black Prius glided up soundlessly, its trunk already opened. In one motion, Devlin stuck a needle into the Algerian’s neck and heaved him into the trunk; the drug would only incapacitate him, not render him unconscious. Without a trace of haste, he closed it as if he had just tossed in his suitcase. Then he walked around the car and got into the front passenger seat.

She was at the wheel, the car already moving as the door closed. The blond hair fell nearly to her shoulders. “What do we know?” she asked.

“Not much, but we’ll soon know a lot more.”

The Prius—still something of an anomaly in these precincts—made its way down the winding streets, heading for the Erzsébet hid—the Elisabeth Bridge—and Pest beyond. The safe house was there, disguised as a garage and tucked away in a service alley behind the row of glittering Western hotels that now lined the river.

The first sign that anything was amiss came on the bridge. “Trouble,” said Maryam.

Devlin pulled out what to all outward appearances was an ordinary Nokia Surge, the kind with a rectangular screen that disguised a slide-out mini-keyboard and, indeed, it could function that way should anyone ask. This one, however, was also an infrared sensor/scanner that could monitor all electronic devices up to a range of fifty meters; in a few seconds they would know how many men were chasing them and even read and listen in on their communications.

“How many?”

Her eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, and then to the side mirrors. “Two Mercedes SUVs, tinted windows. One after another, behind us. They’ll be on either side of us as soon as we leave the bridge.

“Weapons?”

“In the back.”

Devlin looked down and saw a golf bag on the floor. He pulled it open to find an array of small arms, including a brace of Heckler & Koch Mark 23 Special Ops, a Beretta UGB autoloader shotgun, and a couple of Armalite semi-automatics. “They’ll do,” he said, handing her one of the HKs and sliding the shotgun, barrel down, between his legs.

They jumped off the Elisabeth Bridge and turned right on the Váci utca. There was no way they could outrun the Benzes, and compartmentalized security dictated that they go nowhere near the safe house. They were going to have to improvise, but they were both good at that—they had been doing it all their lives. The Prius dove into the maze of streets, the remnants of ancient cattle trails and goat paths that had somehow or other survived the grand visions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at its zenith, and had been allowed to remain as they were practically since Attila had swept out of the East, bringing revolution, retribution, destruction, and death.

They would use the streets as their defense.

There was no way the Benzes could follow them closely. European drivers, Devlin knew, could race down narrow passageways with a bravado that more cautious Americans would never dare; it was not unusual for drivers to kiss mirrors as they passed each other, but rarely did they scrape a building or knock down a passing pedestrian or bicyclist. Still, this was going to be a challenge, and all they needed was enough time to ditch the Prius and get the backup unit in place when they were ready to hop.

“How did they pick us up?” Maryam hissed as she drove. “I thought you said we had complete op sec.”

“RoE,” replied Devlin. “I should have taken the other guy out, but…” He didn’t need to finish the sentence. Since the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, every op had chafed at the ridiculous rules imposed on them, mostly by the State Department. Foggy Bottom had never met a country or even an enemy it didn’t think it could bore to death in a great gaseous fog.

They whizzed along the narrow streets. In the old days, before the revolution of 1989, the streets would have been pretty much deserted at this hour, not only because communist governments deemed anyone out after hours as automatically suspicious but also because very few people could afford to own an automobile. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union that had all changed, but the late hour was working in their favor.

As Maryam drove—unpredictably, never following a pattern and sometimes reversing course in the middle of a street, and darting down one-way streets if circumstances allowed—Devlin punched in the safe house contact number. This was not the time for the flat-out emergency number, the one that signaled that the entire op had gone tits up and that an extraction team was necessary. Besides, under the terms of his incarnation as Branch 4’s deadliest and most classified operative, his identity was to be kept secret at all times. The only people who even knew of his existence were the president, the secretary of defense, and the head of the NSA.

And now, of course, her. But that was by choice, not necessity or command.

The Nokia sent its signal. Even if they were monitoring the Prius’s electronic transmissions, they would never be able to detect it. Devlin’s infrequent field communications bounced through a row of encrypted cutouts, with a ping off Fort Meade, where they were re-encrypted via the Dual_EC_DRBG, a pseudo-random number generator, and then redirected, so that whoever was on the receiving end would have no way of telling the signal’s provenance. In the never-ending war between the hunter and the hunted, The Building’s encryption technology was subjected to relentless and rigorous upgrades; sometimes it seemed that half the best minds in the Puzzle Palace were at work and making sure their own SIGINT was safe from predatory eyes and ears, while the other half penetrated the bad guys’ innermost defenses. Whether anyone would ever win this game was moot, but once you were in it, you were in it to win it.

Still, the Mercedes-Benzes shadowed them, keeping to parallel streets when necessary, but always on their tail, as if they were electronically tracking them.

“Are you sure this car is clean?” barked Devlin.

“Stole it myself this morning, completely randomly,” she replied. “There’s no way they could have known about it.”

“Then they were following you.”

“Impossible. I just got in country.”

“Then they picked you up at origination.”

“Also impossible. I bought three tickets to three different destinations, each one in a different name. No ghosts.”

“That you saw.”

She shot him a quick, angry glance. “Are you challenging my professionalism?” she asked, zipping the Prius between two oncoming vehicles and splitting them perfectly.

“Absolutely not,” he replied, and that was the truth. She was as good as they came. Where she had grown up, and what she’d had to endure, had made her so. “But you know the old saying: when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

“Wild Bill Donovan?”

“Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of the Four…”

“Hold on!”

The car careered to the left, nearly tipped, then righted itself and regained traction. Behind them, the two Benzes gained.

“Slow down and let them pass us,” said Devlin. Just as their pursuers were about to pull even, Maryam hit the brakes and the SUVs, their drivers caught by surprise, went zipping by. “Got ’em both,” said Devlin. “Now lose ’em while I digest this.”

Maryam wheeled left onto the Irányi utca, then made her way back north a couple of blocks to pick up the Kossuth utca, named after the 19th-century freedom fighter, a wide boulevard heading into the heart of Pest and then out to the motorway. They might be able to ditch them in the warren of back streets on either side, but Devlin doubted it. Unless they wanted to lose both their prisoner and their lives, they were going to have to stand and fight.

“Who are they?”

Devlin knew he had less than two minutes before the unknown tormentors would pick them up again. “There are six in all, two in the lead car and four shooters in the trailing vehicle.”

“Not good.”

“Up to us to make it better. Even things out.”

She gave him a quick smile, then glanced back at the rearview mirror. There was no sign of the SUVs. “I think we might have lost them.”

“Impossible. Even an amateur on a bicycle could follow this piece of Nipponese plastic. They’re waiting for us, up ahead somewhere. Stop the car—over there.”

Maryam pulled off into a side street, and circled the block three-quarters of the way. There was no place to park, but then there was never anyplace to park in Budapest, so she wedged the car perpendicularly between an ancient Lada and a new Ford and killed the lights.

Devlin climbed into the back and lowered one of the fold-down seats, keeping his HK trained on their unwilling passenger. “Farid, are you all right?” he asked his unwilling passenger in Arabic.

There was no sound from the trunk. Devlin turned the Nokia backlight on and peered in. Belghazi was relaxed, his eyes open, but he didn’t look happy, and no sound came from his mouth.

“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. . .