The Orpheus Deception Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Venice

  1 - The Mingo Dubai, Strait of Malacca, the South China Sea

  Chapter 2

  3 - Kotor, Montenegro

  4 - Venice

  5 - Somewhere in the Indonesian Archipelago

  6 - The Arsenal, Venice

  7 - Piazza San Marco, Venice

  8 - Cluster C, Changi Prison Complex, Singapore

  9 - The Lido Beach, Venice

  10 - Thai Airways International Airlines, Flight 919, inbound to Singapore

  11 - Kotor, Montenegro

  12 - The Celebes Sea

  13 - Changi Airport, Singapore

  14 - Gulfstream A990, thirty thousand feet

  15 - The Intercontinental Hotel, Singapore

  16 - The Celebes Sea

  17 - The Home Ministry, Singapore

  18 - The National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland

  19 - The Intercontinental Hotel, Singapore

  20 - The Home Ministry, Singapore

  21 - The National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland

  22 - The Intercontinental Hotel, Singapore

  23 - The Fragrance Hotel, 219 Joo Chiat Road, Geylang district, Singapore

  24 - The Intercontinental Hotel, Singapore

  25 - The National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland

  26 - Hendon Hills Golf and Country Club, Changi Village, Singapore

  27 - The Deck House, Hendon Hills Golf and Country Club, Changi Village, Singapore

  28 - The National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland

  29 - Changi Village, Singapore

  30 - Seletar Airfield, northern Singapore

  31 - USMC Air Unit, U.S. Embassy compound, Sembawang Field

  32 - Inbound to Kuta City, Bali, the Indonesian Archipelago, twenty thousand feet

  33 - The National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland

  34 - The Indian Ocean, fifteen miles off the coast of Somalia

  35 - Inbound to Kuta City, Bali, the Indonesian Archipelago

  36 - Selaparang airstrip, Tengarra Barat, sixty miles east of Kuta City

  37 - Ronchi dei Legionari Airport, Monfalcone, Italy

  38 - Sam Ratulangi Airport, Manado, northern Sulawesi

  39 - V-22 Osprey, airborne over the Celebes Sea

  40 - KIPAM Marine Blackhawk, airborne, one hundred and eight miles east of ...

  41 - Royal Air Force Lockheed P-3 Orion, nine hundred miles due west of Diego ...

  42 - Airborne, inbound to the USA

  43 - The Port of Chicago, southern Lake Michigan

  44 - Kotor, Montenegro

  45 - The Subito, Santorini, the Aegean Sea

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  For Catherine Stone

  . . . the Serbs reconquered Kosovo in 1912 and committed atrocities against the Albanians, who sided with Germany in 1914 and oppressed the Serbs, who regained control of Kosovo in 1918 and tyrannized the Albanians, who sided with the Germans again in 1939 and crushed the Serbs, who recaptured Kosovo in 1945 and persecuted the Albanians, who rioted in 1981 and beat and robbed the Serbs, who . . .

  —P. J. O’Rourke, Peace Kills

  I would rather be the hammer than the anvil.

  —Erwin Rommel

  prologue

  Venice

  After the killings, Dalton went to Venice, where the rain fell for two days and three nights, a hard, slicing torrent, and, under it, the threat of worse things coming, the deep, hard cold of the Venetian winter. At first light, unable to sleep, he had watched as a swirling mist rose up around the boats out on Saint Mark’s Basin. By noon, the Palladian façade of the San Giorgio Maggiore across the lagoon was little more than a formless white blur. Dalton stared at his own reflection in the window of the suite—colorless eyes deep-set in a haggard face, his long blond hair limp, and gray in the half-light, his cheeks sunken and seamed. He drew in a lungful of acrid smoke, breathed it out in a harsh exhalation, erasing his reflection in a cloud of blue smoke.

  Cora. Cora Vasari.

  She kept a little study in the Museo Civico, overlooking the Piazza San Marco, where she liked to revise and sharpen her lectures before going back to the academy in Florence in late November. He’d called her number from a pay phone next to the equestrian statue of Garibaldionly thirty minutes ago. She had answered the phone herself. He had listened to her slow and steady breathing for thirty seconds, knowing that anything he said in the clear could trigger a voice-recognition relay at Crypto City. But her . . . closeness . . . her presence, held him fast. After a full minute, Cora had spoken, in a whisper, only six words:

  Micah, do not come to Venice.

  Too late for that, Cora, he thought. I’m already here.

  Dalton poured a final glass of champagne, drained the crystal flute, and set it carefully down on the window ledge. He stubbed out his cigarette, shoved the Ruger into his shoulder holster, gave the suite one last look, and went out onto the crowded quay, pushing through the milling crush of oblivious tourists. The city was full to overflowing, even this late in the season; everyone had come to watch the Venice Marathon. They’d put a wooden boardwalk across the Grand Canal, a novelty and therefore an atrocity. Venice had its air of jaded carnival in place, although the streets were running with gray water, and the sky was low and sodden. He had to butt and shoulder his way through the cheering crowds lining the marathon route, moving right al
ong the edges of the runners’ lanes, heading west along the Riva degli Schiavoni—the Quay of Slavs—toward the Piazza San Marco.

  Reflexively, automatically, he searched each face in the throng, scanned every roofline, looking for something wrong; a fixed glare, a look that was a little too intense, eyes suddenly averted, a half-seen figure stepping back into a doorway as he bulled his way along the quay. But there was nothing: just the rain, the rank sewage smell of the flooding canals, the purring murmur of vaporettos and water taxis out on the fog-shrouded basin, the pressing crowds, the crush of runners pelting past his left shoulder.

  In the middle of the crossing near the Bridge of Sighs, his attention zeroed in on the faces of the people streaming toward him, he was struck suddenly, forcefully, from behind; struck hard enough to knock him, reeling, into the balustrade, almost hard enough to send him over the edge and into the canal below. He slammed into the stone banister, turned and saw a skinny blond girl in runner’s shorts and a dripping tunic with a number on the back: 559. She was glaring at him, her hard, red mouth twisted. She hissed something at him in a language he could not understand—not Italian—and he opened his mouth to say something equally stinging in reply, but no sound came, only a bright red spike of agony deep in his rib. He fingered the area and doubled over when he found a sharp, searing pain.

  The bitch had cracked his ribs.

  Dalton, whose temper was never far from the surface, began to stumble after the blond runner, breathing through thinned lips, indignant outrage driving him, but she was quickly lost in the crush of a hundred other runners flowing around him, their feet pounding and thudding, the air thick with the animal reek of their sweat and their urine, their rapid panting breaths, and now Dalton was caught up in the flow of the marathon, carried along the quay like a leaf in a flood, staggering, his ribs sending jagged bolts of pain up into his chest. As the press of runners turned the corner by the Palazzo Ducale, he was finally cast out of the stream and into a narrow cloister. He put a hand on a pillar and rested there for a moment, his chest heaving, his cracked rib burning in his side, cursing, miserable—he looked angrily around for the blond runner . . .

  . . . and there was Cora. Tall, her black hair flying in the wind-driven rain, her long blue trench coat flapping: she was hesitating by the steps of the Basilica, a sheaf of papers in her arms, watching the runners flowing around her, the pigeons swirling up like leaves. The piazza was packed with thousands of people and filled with a vast, roaring, thunderous cheering, wave after wave. He could hardly hear his own voice calling her name.

  Cora heard a call, turned, searching the sea of faces. Finally, she found him, a flash of recognition—a fleeting smile—and then her expression changed into shock as she looked down at his hands . . .

  IT WAS THE morning of the next day; Cora Vasari and Micah Dalton were in Cortona, for Porter Naumann’s funeral. The same cold, slanting rain that had drowned Venice the day before was beating against the shuttered houses along the Via Berrettini. Cora Vasari was a little way ahead of him, going up the steep hillside between the overhanging roofs, the tilting walls of medieval villas lining the narrow, cobbled street. She was walking with the Carabinieri major, Brancati. She was wearing a wide-brimmed black hat, a black silk coat, very long—she seemed to be in mourning, but her head was a fraction too close to Brancati, and her hand was on his arm, an intimacy that Dalton found just possible to overlook. Farther up the street, a group of men in black stood waiting—pallbearers, from the look of them—grouped around a huge rosewood casket.

  Naumann’s casket.

  Dalton turned his collar up, pulled his coat tight, and plodded doggedly upward in a file of solemn carabinieri, rain dripping down his face; funeral weather, and the streets of Cortona breathing of the grave.

  The column of men passed an open laneway, and, glancing to his right, Dalton saw through a curtain of dripping laundry the stone parapet that ran beside the Via Santa Margherita: beyond the parapet, in the cold, gray distance, he could see the faint outline of Lake Trasimeno. A familiar figure was leaning on the parapet, screened by a wall of rain, arms folded, white face staring. Dalton looked at this figure for a time, and then he called up the hill to Cora, but the rain drowned out his words, so he turned aside and stopped. The man standing there was Porter Naumann.

  To be precise, it was the ghost of Porter Naumann. Naumann’s ghost raised a hand, beckoning him down the lane, and, in spite of the rain and the wind, Dalton could hear Porter calling his name, a faint sound, lost in the hissing of running water. Dalton glanced up the street, saw Cora turn and look back, her broad black hat glistening in the downpour.

  He waved to her, lifted his wrist high, tapped his watch, and then stepped into the alley, hurrying away under the lines of dripping laundry. Water ran down his neck, but, oddly, the pain in his rib had suddenly disappeared. He reached the broad lane of the Via Margherita and crossed over to Naumann, a tall, elegant figure, leaning there with his arms crossed, smiling at him. He was wearing a pearl gray single-breasted suit over a pale pink shirt, a flaring charcoal tie held with a gold collar pin, and, over it all, his signature long blue Zegna overcoat. His face was as it had been in life, sharp, hard-planed, a great beak of a nose, pale blue eyes, bright and full of wry humor.

  “Micah, how are you?”

  “I’m fine, Porter. You’re going to miss your funeral.”

  Naumann shrugged, grinned.

  “I’m there in spirit. Walk with me a minute, will you?”

  Dalton looked at Porter Naumann’s ghostly face for a time, trying to read his expression. There was something in his voice . . . a warning note?

  “Can we do this later, Porter? Cora will be waiting.”

  “What are they going to do? Start without me?”

  A valid point, thought Dalton, as they walked off down the hill, the flat Tuscan landscape stretching away on their left, Lake Trasimeno barely visible through the mist, Naumann striding ahead, Dalton a little behind, his thoughts moving between the funeral and the Agency, what Deacon Cather may be planning for him, what little future he had left to worry about in the first place. In the front of his mind, he was also idly wondering what had conjured up this final visitation from an old, dead friend. Naumann was carrying something in his hand, Dalton could see, a slender, shining thing, colored green, some sort of long glass bottle, and he was fingering it as they walked down the hill, wrapped in his own silence.

  “Where are we going, anyway?” asked Dalton, finally.

  “Just a few blocks down. How’s the rib?”

  “It’s fine. Hurt like hell yesterday, but I seem to be okay now.”

  Naumann received the news with an absent nod, and they walked on. The gloomy sky was breaking up and the air around them was now glowing with diffused light. The broad valley below them was opening up as the mist burned away. They could see the distant lake, see pale sunlight glimmering on the water. Down at the bottom of the hill there was a large square: Dalton knew it very well, the Piazza Garibaldi, its broad stone pavilion surrounded by ancient oaks and cypress, extending far out over the cliff with the entire valley laid out before it, a medieval tapestry of green and amber and golden squares that stretched away into the purest smoky blue infinity. The square itself seemed to be full of people, a gathering or a reception of some sort. Naumann slowed his pace a few hundred feet from the plaza and turned to look at Dalton, his face showing affection, solemnity; an uncharacteristic display for Naumann.

  “Look, Micah, do you know what this is?”

  He held his hand out. In his palm was the slender green glass bottle.

  “No idea. Looks like Murano glass.”

  “It is. The old Venetian assassins used to use these.”

  “I know. I’ve heard about it. They say that Murano glass is so fine that a single drop of poison will shatter the bottle.”

  “That’s right. But that’s not what this is. This isn’t a bottle.”

  “What is it?”

 
; “It’s the hilt of a dagger. A dagger made out of Murano glass.”

  “Yow! Nasty. Where’s the blade?”

  “Well, that’s the thing.”

  “The thing? What thing?”

  Naumann stopped, turned, and looked him full in the face, his expression grave, his eyes gentle.

  “The thing is, the blade is in you, Micah.”

  Dalton looked skyward, sighing theatrically.

  “In me? The blade is in me? Oh for chrissakes, Porter. What the hell are you trying to say?”

  “The marathon runner, in Venice, the blond girl who ran into you near the Bridge of Sighs? She used this on you when she ran into you.”

  “Used it? On me? How . . . ?”

  “You’ve been stabbed with it.”

  “Stabbed? She broke a rib, Porter. A rib. Don’t go all blithering hysterical on me now. I broke a rib. I got better. I’m fine now. I’m . . .”

  Naumann shook his head.

  “No you’re not. The wound is mortal, Micah. You’re dying. Now. At this moment. Can you understand?”

  Dalton stared down at the long green glass hilt.

  “Stabbed? She stabbed me? With this?”

  “Yes. The dagger is made of Murano glass; the blade is very long and very thin. It goes in deep, but it leaves only a narrow mark. The hilt breaks off, leaving the blade in the body. In your body, Micah.”

  “The runner? She stabbed me? Why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the Serbs, for what you did to their people in Venice. Or maybe the Company. Cather. I don’t know why you’ve been stabbed. They don’t tell me these things. They just send you off on your mission. It seems that once you’re dead, you’re sort of out of the loop. But you have been stabbed. The blade went deep. The wound was mortal.”

  “Mortal?”

  “Yes. They tell me the blade cut an artery near your liver. Sliced it open.”

  Dalton felt his heart beating, a rapid, fluttering impulse in his neck and throat. Naumann’s pale eyes were kindly. Behind him, the sun was burning, and the day was now as warm as a summer afternoon.