Early Warning. Michael Walsh

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 him. “I’m going to save him.”

      Maryam turned right on Erato Street and doubled back on Carondelet and turned right again on Clio, which brought them back to the scene of the accident. The cops had not arrived yet and, knowing the New Orleans cops, it would be hours before they got out of the donut shops or the bars. Before they got to St. Charles, he jumped out, fully outfitted for the task, and ran. He gave a tug on his Tigers cap, making sure it obscured as much of his face as possible. In a situation like this, no one would remember anything but the truck hitting the car, but no point in taking chances; he’d had enough bad luck for one afternoon.

      The Taurus was shoved up against the side of the underpass, and traffic had slowed. Good. This would make things a lot easier.

      The first thing he had to do was stop traffic. A couple of smoke grenades rolled down the street accomplished that in a hurry; traffic, already crawling, simply came to a stop as it neared the underpass.

      He tossed a couple of flares to mark the car’s location. Good Samaritans did that all the time. Psychologically, they would further serve to keep nosy civilians away.

      He shone a light into the car, a powerful beam that he activated from his key ring: nothing fancy, the kind you could buy commercially to use both as a flashlight or as a distress signal, but amazingly useful.

      The driver was alive but unconscious. His face was covered in blood, but Devlin could see at a glance the blood was coming from a cut forehead. He pulled up an eyelid and directed the light into the man’s eyes. The pupil reacted: good.

      Maryam had the car right where he needed it, backed into the underpass, trunk opened. Devlin got the man into the trunk, closed it, and hopped back in. Then they were around the corner and up onto Highway 90, the famous Gulf Coast Highway that soon enough would turn into I-10 and get them to the airport.

      Devlin lowered the rear seats and slid the unconscious man into the back of the car. He could give him some first aid, but they’d be at Charity Hospital in five minutes, and he’d never remember a thing.