Hostile Intent – Michael Walsh

Tyler didn’t get the joke or the reference, as his expression showed. “Doghouse Reilly. You know, Bogart? The Big Sleep?” “The president doesn’t waste his time with movies—” suggested Seelye, throwing Tyler a lifeline. He didn’t take it. “Loved that new Batman movie. Why doesn’t NSA have gadgets and gizmos like that?” “It’s an honor to meet you, sir,” lied Devlin. “I’m sure the affairs of state must keep you very busy, so we should be brief.” Tyler stood there with his famous smile frozen on his face.

He thought he’d just been insulted, but he wasn’t sure. “Please sit down. Drink?” “No thank you, sir,” replied Devlin, hitting the cushions. He figured that the faster he sat the quicker he could get up and out again, if he played his cards right. Unfortunately, he was holding a busted flush, nine-high. Still, he’d won with worse. “I gather that there’s only one child missing—” Tyler got that look on his face that he saved for all discussions of dead or dying kids.

“And feared dead. The blast—” “The blast didn’t kill her, sir.” You weren’t supposed to interrupt the president, but Devlin didn’t see what he had to lose, and pressed his advantage. “We tracked all the warm bodies with infrared before the assault, and only one kid was moved into the school proper. If she was there, she’d still be alive.”

Tyler was knocked off his game, but only just a little. He was, after all, a politician. “Cleanup teams scoured the place. No sign of her.” “Then he took her with him. I don’t know why and I don’t want to think about why, but—” “Who’s ‘he’? The man who tried to get away in the chopper?”

Nice— Tyler was smarter than Devlin had expected. “Which I shot down, yes, sir.” “Then you might have killed her.” “I might have, but I didn’t.” “How do you know? The helicopter went down, killing the—” “Killing the pilot, yes, sir. Who was expendable.” “So how did—” “Milverton, sir.” Devlin heard Seelye gasp. Just a brief intake of breath, but as telling as if he’d just socked him in the gut. There—that cat was out of the bag and pissing on the table.

“I don’t understand,” said President Tyler, but Seelye was already punching up Milverton on his PDA. “Charles Augustus Milverton, Mr. President,” said Seelye. “Not his real name, of course. ‘The most dangerous man in London,’ he likes to call himself. Most dangerous man in the world, or one of them, is more like it.” “I don’t care what he calls himself.

I call him dead,” said President Tyler. “Working on it, sir,” said Devlin, realizing he’d just been handed a stay of execution, thanks to a little girl. “Do it,” said Tyler. He got up and threw another log on the fire.

The morning school bell was clattering in the distance as Hope Gardner sandwiched her Volvo station wagon between Mrs. Moscone’s Escalade and Janey Eagleton’s Prius. She only nicked the Prius’s bumper, or rather the plastic piece of junk that passed for a bumper these days, and the gentle thump went unnoticed by her two children in the backseat of her car.

She wished she had the guts to ding the Escalade a little, just to make it fair, but the Cadillac belonged to Mrs. Moscone, and nobody wanted Mrs. Moscone mad at them. Her husband was from The Hill in St. Louis, the kind of neighborhood where The Sopranos was considered a documentary. She wondered briefly whether she should leave a note, but that notion flew out of her head as the back door rocketed open.

“Bye, Mom!” shouted Emma, her twelve-year-old. Emma was blond, green-eyed, and filling out with a rapidity that surprised Hope, even though she had gone through the same transformation herself when she was her daughter’s age. One moment a skinny kid, the next…And if she noticed, how much more quickly the boys noticed too. More than anything, Emma wanted to grow up to be Gwyneth Paltrow, win an Oscar, and marry a rock star, more or less in that order.

Hope didn’t have the heart to tell her that the odds were several million to one against any of those things happening. But childhood was for dreaming; Emma would learn about the harsh realities of life soon enough. Emma was halfway across the schoolyard as Hope turned to Rory. Rory was different. Small for his age, he was skittish, unsure, easily alarmed, especially for a ten-year-old. And right now his nose was running too. “Come on, honey,” said Hope, wiping his face with a clean handkerchief and pulling his zipper up tight.

“You don’t want to be late.” The first snarl of winter had come early to southern Illinois, and there was a stiff, chill breeze blowing into Edwardsville from the Mississippi, just a few miles to the west. Edwardsville was an exurb of St. Louis, but the big city across the river might as well be in a different country, not just another state. Edwardsville still had an old-fashioned, midwestern small-town feel to it, and that’s the way folks liked it.

Nothing ever happened in Edwardsville. Rory snuffled again and wiped his nose on his sleeve; she could never get him to stop doing that. In the distance, they could both hear the school bell ringing, this time longer and louder.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 799d0c901ca2bf08
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 1,825,512 bytes (1.741 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 328
• Language: English (en)

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• Estimated Reading Time: 533.58 minutes
• Total Words: 106,715
• Total Characters: 610,639
• Average Words per Page: 325.35
• Average Characters per Page: 1861.7

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