The Skorpion Directive Read online

  Dalton had met, and respected, Austrian special forces soldiers doing UN work in Bosnia and Kosovo, and Galan had once told him the Austrians had a detachment in permanent position on the Golan Heights. The Austrians had a more muscular definition of “neutrality” than the Swiss, and lately they had been taking “advice” from the KGB about their Chechen refugee problem.

  It wasn’t out of the question that they had also been taking “advice” from the KGB about a troublesome CIA officer named Micah Dalton. Well, there was only one reliable way to find the answers to all these questions, and that was to draw these unknown watchers out.

  To do that, he had to move.

  So he moved.

  CLASSIFIED UMBRA EYES DIAL

  INTERNAL AUDIT COMMITTEE

  File 92r: DALTON, MICAH

  Service ID: REDACTED

  Preliminary logs from BDS/WEIN have been entered as STET. Committee concurs with BDS After-Action Report assessment that DALTON detected the OSE Surveillance Team almost immediately after reaching the exit of the Schottentor station and that DALTON then commenced aggressive CS in an attempt to draw out and identify the members of the OSE/UD team assigned to contain and monitor him.

  There are conflicting reports concerning the reasons for the establishment of an OSE Overwatch operation on DALTON, although preliminary investigation suggests that it was done on behalf of an OGO (Other Governmental Organization) the identity of which must at some point be made part of this record.

  The purpose of Dalton’s visit to Vienna is unknown as of this writing, but it is a matter of record that he was traveling undeclared and in a private capacity, and was in no way charged with legitimate Agency matters, which, in view of the subsequent deaths and injuries that took place, allows for the argument to be made that there can be no official Agency liability for the actions of a private American citizen abroad.

  PARTIAL/INTERIM/ report continues.

  MARIAH VALE/OD/DD/EXECUTIVE SECRETARIAT

  Dalton walked slowly north along Währinger Strasse, crossing into the edge of Sigmund Freud Park, making a long lazy loop through the area, scanning the darker places, watching the people around him, checking out the cars and buses, the dim forms of people half seen in the evening shadows. Since the assumption was that he was already being watched, there was no reason to be tricksy about his countersurveillance tactics, no point ducking into alleyways or changing direction sharply, trying to force a watcher to react, to look sharply away, to suddenly find the window of a closed shop utterly fascinating. He wasn’t interested in losing these watchers; he wanted to isolate and identify them, establish the size, shape, and professionalism of the unit.

  Nor was it worth trying to convince these people—whoever they were—that he wasn’t worth watching; that decision had obviously already been made. He had to assume there’d be a box team on the street already, probably at least eight people, more likely twelve.

  One person would have the Eye—have Dalton in direct line of sight. Usually this person would be behind him, on foot, probably no farther back than thirty yards. There’d be a backup watcher another twenty yards behind the Eye, ready to overtake and step into the Eye position if the first watcher felt he was closing up too tight or if Dalton did anything that might compromise the Eye. And there’d be a third watcher across the street, moving in the same direction as he was, probably one of those ordinary-looking people over there who were already level with Dalton right now.

  The Eye would be in radio contact with the mobile units—very likely unremarkable sedans—always with four doors, since the “box team” members would be constantly switching in and out of the mobile units to prevent the target from seeing too many familiar faces.

  Everyone else would maintain radio silence. If Dalton turned right or left on a side street, the Eye would walk straight through the intersection, letting the backup watcher take over as the Eye while the third watcher across the street would close in and take up the second position. The first Eye would either be cycled back to a mobile unit or redeployed in the third position, across the street from and level with Dalton. All of this movement would be fed constantly to the control officer in one of the mobile units.

  Control would have a grid map of the city. The Brits, who had refined this kind of ad hoc street scramble into an art, called it a Spot Map. Control would track the reports coming in from the Eye, maneuvering the outlying box team to keep every alley and side street covered, switching agents in and out, pulling some back, closing in new ones, singles, pairs, breaking them up, mixing and matching as they moved, always at least three watchers keeping the target, Dalton, in the line of sight. A skilled team could do this sort of thing all day and all night, and no civilian would ever detect the operation. But there were things to see for those who knew how to look.

  For one thing, none of the watchers, if properly trained, would ever make eye contact with the target. Which meant that if the blonde coming out of the Volksbank were part of a surveillance unit, they had some training issues to deal with. Generally, by elimination, anyone passing him on the street who did give him a direct glance could be disregarded.

  The entire unit would also have gone gray, nobody would be wearing standout clothing—no reds, no blacks, no flashy jewelry. Green, gray, brown—mud colors—would be the choice. Since they all spent so much time walking, they tended to wear comfortable shoes—sneakers, rubber-soled slippers, hiking boots. They’d also be carrying bags, and wearing coats and sporting hats that could be taken off to alter their appearance—clothing baggy enough to hide radios and cameras.

  They’d have tics, even the best of them: touching ears or wrists where their mikes would be, rearranging uncomfortable belts and straps holding their radio gear. Some of the newer ones would have that happy-sappy aimless look—no clear focus, too obviously trying to look casual—“loitering with intent,” his instructor at Camp Peary had called it—instead of walking with the oblivious self-absorption that quite often allows experienced agents to get very close to the target without being sensed.

  Dalton looked for all of these indicators as he came slowly north past the park, checking, assessing, rejecting, rechecking, looking at the streetscape and the crowds through any reflective surface, stopping now and then, as if he were uncertain where he was going, very aware of any change in the rhythm of the pedestrian traffic around him, his breathing steady and calm, keeping his adrenaline under control.

  Twenty-five minutes later he had reached the intersection of Währinger Strasse and Rooseveltplatz, and he was reasonably certain that the rusted gray four-door Audi with the tinted windows parked near the cab stand in front of the Regina Hotel was part of the surveillance unit, as was the rat-brown Opel idling in front of Charlie P’s Irish Pub. He picked that one out when a traffic cop ticketed a car doing exactly the same thing a half a block away while completely ignoring the Opel.

  And he suspected that the young woman in a dull-green peasant head scarf, sitting in the trolley that had just rumbled past him, was the edgy blond goddess with the backpack who he had seen coming out of the Volksbank across from the Schottentor trolley station.

  There was a couple across the street, on the far side of Rooseveltplatz, sitting on the low pillared fence that ran around a grotesque red stone pile. Dalton had seen the woman standing at the bike stand in Sigmund Freud Park, quite alone, supposedly trying to unlock one of those bright yellow rent-a-bikes from the automated lock-stand. Now the same girl, in a different jacket, was necking with a tall, bald young man in a leather car coat and jeans and a pair of unlaced hiking boots made of what looked to be dried cow pies.

  Finally, the rather splendid young woman standing a yard behind him at the traffic light, fiddling with a cigarette and paying him no attention whatsoever, had spent most of his long walkabout through the park and up Währinger Strasse at a steady fifty feet back, keeping pace with him almost exactly.

  The traffic light was a long one. Just to raise her hackles a bit, Dal
ton took out a pack of his ridiculous Sobranie Cocktails—long gold-tipped cigarettes in a range of colors from turquoise to rose pink to canary yellow—selected a blue one, turned around and said, “Bitte, Fräulein. Haben Sie ein Feuerzeug?”

  The woman flinched very little, smoothly recovered. She looked a bit royal, and was quite handsome in that damn-your-eyes-my-family’sin-Debrett’s style that made him think of Mandy Pownall. Slender, an aurora of wild auburn hair, strong bones, and dark, intelligent eyes. Her pale cheeks bloomed a bit as she fumbled in her purse, an Hermès, but by the time she offered him her heavy silver Art Deco lighter with an insignia inlaid in ebony she had a fine cool smile in place, although in her eyes there was a faint flicker of fear. Dalton lit his Sobranie, studying the insignia as he did so—VRM—waved the cloud away, smiled, and handed the lighter back to her, saying, “ Vorzüglich, Fräulein. Wie Sie sind.”

  Exquisite, Fräulein.

  As are you.

  She held his look for a moment, quite steadily. The light changed. She smiled carefully, and turned to walk on in front of him. Dalton stayed where he was. As spectacular as she was—far too showy for any halfway competent box team—he had no doubt that she was the Eye. And now she would have to cross over Rooseveltplatz ahead of him, forfeiting her position to her backup. In order to indicate that she had to surrender the Eye, she would either give the couple across the street some visual indication—they were still locked in a pretty convincing embrace—or she would call it in to her Control.

  There was a spherical and hairless little man, carrying a Burberry raincoat, standing at a phone kiosk about a hundred feet back, apparently absorbed in a vigorous debate with someone on the other end of the line. He would be the second watcher. And in a moment, if she handed off, he would become the Eye.

  Halfway across the broad avenue, her back rigid and her shoulders a little too straight, she reached up to brush a strand of fine hair away from her left ear, holding her hand there for just a moment. Dalton saw a tiny black rectangle against the white skin of her wrist, a microphone. She had just called it in.

  She reached the far side of Rooseveltplatz and disappeared into a crowd of students without a backward glance. On the far corner, the couple was breaking apart—one last air kiss—the boy trudging off toward the Pension Franz, dragging his bootlaces, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, and the girl on her cell phone.

  As he watched her, something off to his left in the middle distance caught his eye. The head-scarf girl who had gone by in the trolley—the blonde he had first seen leaving the Volksbank—walked out from under the arched entrance of the Regina Hotel and got into the gray four-door Audi, which immediately pulled away.

  On the far side of the street, the girl with the cell had ended her call and was now walking in the same direction as he was. Behind him, the round fat man had put on his Burberry raincoat, opened an unnecessary umbrella, and was now following Dalton at the regulation fifty feet.

  There you go, thought Dalton. We have now officially confirmed the surveillance. Isn’t that just peachy.

  Now what?

  CLASSIFIED UMBRA EYES DIAL

  INTERNAL AUDIT COMMITTEE

  File 92r: DALTON, MICAH

  Service ID: REDACTED

  Within hours of the events of (REDACTED) BDS Incident Unit conducted NEGID Field Interviews with OSE/UD Aufzug Unit Commander Rolf Jägermeier as well as civilian employees of Regina Hotel and were able to assemble a detailed narrative of DALTON’s movements and decisions as they related to the events that subsequently took place. These interview transcripts have been entered into Audit Committee logs as STET.

  As well, NSA extractions of DALTON’s BlackBerry usage in the relevant time frame have been provided through the Inter-Agency Enforcement Agreement. These have also been entered into the Audit Committee logs.

  Report segments follow. PARTIAL/INTERIM/ report continues.

  MARIAH VALE/OD/DD/EXECUTIVE SECRETARIAT

  Now? thought Dalton.

  Now it was time for a drink, as Porter Naumann would say.

  Dalton crossed Rooseveltplatz, heading for the lobby of the Regina Hotel, for a couple of reasons. First, it would rattle his watchers, who were probably using the hotel’s lobby washrooms for pee breaks. At least, the head-scarf girl certainly was. Second, there was a pretty good cigar bar in the hotel, with a range of excellent scotch, and he intended to sit down there for a while and think this thing through. His meeting with Issadore Galan was only another block north on Währinger Strasse, at the Pension Franz, but Dalton had no intention of dragging this chain of watchers into Galan’s territory.

  The Audi four-door was nowhere to be seen by the time he reached the cab stand outside the Regina. He pushed open the double glass doors and walked into the ornate lobby, nodding to the gray counterman, in his gray suit, who returned his greeting with a gray smile and a perfunctory Guten Abend, mein Herr.

  The cigar bar was on the left, on the far side of a wall of wonderfully indecent satyrs and nymphs frolicking in a gravity-free pink marble Arcadia. There was no one around in the lobby other than a couple of comatose bellmen, apparently tricked out as extras in The Merry Widow. There was no one working in the newsstand and no one loitering about the lobby trying to look invisible.

  He figured Control would settle for having all the hotel exits covered rather than risk putting a watcher inside, where Dalton could get a closer look. This also told him that there was probably no electronic gear zeroed in on him, that the surveillance team’s mission was to track, monitor, and contain him, not to gather signals intelligence. He sat down at the far corner of the long bar—also quite deserted, the global recession having its effect even here in Vienna—got his back up against a wall, established a clear sight line to the lobby entrance, and ordered up a Laphroiag—doubled, no ice—from a stiff-necked old crowbar behind the counter who looked exactly like C. Aubrey Smith, right down to the craggy bloodhound face and the huge white handlebar mustache.

  The man had a miniature medal pinned to the left-hand lapel of his red mess jacket, a navy-blue-and-red swallowtail pennant with a gold iron cross, and over the cross the inscription 1WDK 1944-1947. Dalton recognized it as the breast badge of the First Warsaw Cavalry Division. He saw Dalton looking at it, said nothing, but gave him a short, comprehending smile, which Dalton returned with genuine respect. While the old Hussar—a brass tag over his breast pocket had his name, CESAR—was hunting down some Laphroiag, Dalton considered his situation, which boiled down to a simple question:

  Why me?

  Dalton’s current MOS, his operational designation, was Cleaner, an Agency “fixer,” working out of Clandestine Services, based in London Station, and at least nominally run by Tony Crane. Dalton’s tactical AO was Europe, Greece, the Balkans, and until recently he had been operating out of Venice. His drink arrived in a large crystal glass as heavy as a hand grenade. Dalton thanked Cesar. Cesar nodded, giving Dalton a moment of morose regard and apparently finding him marginally acceptable before turning away to shuffle massively down to the other end of the bar, where he began to polish some heavy hotel silver.

  Dalton went back to his situational analysis. He was usually assigned to fix, repair, or otherwise pressure-wash away the sticky residue of an endless variety of cluster fucks and self-inflicted disasters generated by field officers or their agents in place, all of whom were prone to nervous collapse, envy, greed, paranoia, delusions of adequacy, conniptions, hissy fits, the vapors, the marthambles, as well as most of the standard vices and—Dalton had to give them credit—a few stunningly original ones as well, the most memorable of which had involved live goldfish.

  Dalton did not run networks, did not attempt to construct or tend a trapline, made no brush contacts, serviced no drop boxes, recruited no sources, ran no covert agents, solicited no HumInt in other people’s backyards: in short, he did none of the back-channel double-dealing dirty work that so often irritated the living hell out of in-country agencies. That
kind of covert HumInt stunt was usually the responsibility of whatever station chief happened to be on the scene. His professional life had been pretty well summed up many years back by Warren Zevon, in his song lyric “Send lawyers, guns and money / The shit has hit the fan,” except that Dalton was no lawyer.

  So why all the attention?

  He checked his watch—a little after nine in the evening. It would be midafternoon in D.C. He punched in a few numbers, waited, hit the company access code, waited some more for the encryption to kick in . . . And then he heard, with some surprise, the voice of Sally Fordyce, once Jack Stallworth’s senior assistant and now, after Stall-worth’s death, apparently back on Fourth Floor West at Langley.

  “DeeDee’s office. Is that really you, Micah?”

  “Sally? You’re back at Clandestine?”

  “I am. The new man’s new guy likes me.”

  The “new man” was the new President. The “new guy” was Clay Pearson, an ex-Navy JAG officer who had served in the White House under Carter and emerged from the second-most-calamitous presidency in modern history with his career actually enhanced, which meant he was part cobra and part mongoose.

  Clay Pearson was the man chosen by the new President to replace Deacon Cather, Dalton’s aging mentor and the former DD of Clandestine, now forced to the sidelines with an honorary title as Adviser Pro Tem to DD Clandestine.

  Pearson, an African-American, was tall, lean, cool, calm, as steely smooth as the kiss of a guillotine, with a throaty baritone purr, a ready smile, and a great memory for the faces and family connections of anyone with even the faintest chance of becoming useful, one fine June day, to the lovely and talented Clay Pearson.