The Skorpion Directive Page 28

  AN hour later, at the table in the seaside café, Fyke, Nikki Turrin, and the others listened to the story, the two Mossad members with growing concern. Joko Levon let Dalton finish and then laid his heavy hands on the table in front of him.

  “We’re not declared, Dalton. If this Navy guy wants to call for the Lear manifest, he’ll see that we came in with you. He’ll want to know who we are. And what if he digs into you? Will the Castle cover stand up?”

  “To a cursory search, yes. And if you’re not declared, you have plausible ID.”

  “Yes. Of course. That’s not the point. If it comes to it, Tel Aviv will let us declare, but then we’ll have to share this whole damned thing with the Royal Navy. The last thing I want is Kirikoff and Milan Babic, let alone this Vukov guy if he’s still alive, sitting in a brig in Gibraltar while we try to get Her Majesty to let us extradite them.”

  “The idea,” said Roth, calmer but no less intense, “is to either take them back to Tel Aviv or leave them all dead. We don’t do due process in Tel Aviv. The other risk here is that Woodside will turn up something about the Blue Nile that we weren’t counting on. Or something about either of you two.”

  Nikki shook her head.

  “I think they did the right thing, Mr. Roth,” she said, holding her own pretty well in this sort of company. “The idea is to find the Blue Nile. That’s the only thing we have that connects to Kirikoff. If the seven of us spent the rest of the summer combing every port in the western Med—”

  “Or up and down the African coast,” said Mandy.

  “Or the Atlantic,” Nikki said with a grateful glance at Mandy. “We’d never find that boat. But the Royal Navy, if they get interested, has access to the satellite, ships in every port, literally thousands of contacts—”

  “What good will that do us if the guys we want end up in somebody else’s jail?” asked Joko, scowling into his beer.

  “A British jail,” said Fyke with some heat, “is a good jail. Where would you rather have them?”

  “Look, Ray—” Joko began, but Dalton cut in.

  “We’re committed now, Joko. No point arguing about it after the fact. Woodside will grill Maloutsis in the morning. Maybe he’ll get something out of him. Personally, I doubt it. All Maloutsis has to do is play dumb.”

  “So what’s the upside?” asked Roth, cooler but still unhappy.

  “The upside is, Maloutsis—who is in this up to his shorts, by the way, along with his entire crew of Serbs and Croats—gets his cage rattled hard enough to make him call for instructions. Who’s he going to call?”

  “Kirikoff,” said Roth. “Or Babic.”

  “Yes,” said Dalton, nailing it down. “Or Vukov, if he’s still in the mix. If we get all of Maloutsis’s communications lines monitored, maybe we can get a line on Kirikoff.”

  “Nice trick,” said Roth. He looked at Nikki, who, as they all knew by now, had a line directly to Deacon Cather. “Will your guy do that? Can he get the NSA to do that?”

  Nikki shook her head.

  “I don’t think so. They’ve got him pretty isolated. Micah tried to get some help from . . . What was her name, Micah?”

  “Sally Fordyce.”

  “Sally Fordyce. She was senior aide at Langley. She disappeared right after Micah called her—”

  “And nobody has heard from her since,” said Dalton. “We can’t ask Cather for anything. He’s done what he could, with Nikki and Ray. Mandy’s not in the game anymore, not officially. That leaves you two.”

  Joko and Roth exchanged looks.

  “We’re not up to that. It would take . . .”

  Fyke was getting a little red around the edges.

  “You wanted in, Joko. Now that you’re here, so far you’re just cargo. You said Dagan would give you some help. Nobody taps a line better than the Mossad. You could get that done in an hour.”

  Joko leaned back, leaving it up to Roth, who was still on active duty. Roth fingered his swollen upper lip absently while staring at Fyke not at all lovingly.

  “Okay,” he said, getting up. “I’ll see about it. What’s the guy’s full name?”

  “Nickolu Maloutsis,” said Mandy, who had gotten the data from Captain Woodside. She pulled a sheet of paper out of her case, handed it to Roth. “It’s all there. Ship registry, her call sign, even Maloutsis’s cell-phone number. Woodside said he’d contact Maloutsis as soon as the GPA office opened in the morning. That gives you—what?—six hours to get his electronics into the system. Do you need a warrant?”

  Roth showed his teeth, a bloody gap right in the upper front.

  “No. We leave that crap to you Americans. You guys would have to wake up Carl Levin, see if he was okay with it. Wait here. I’ll be back.”

  Roth turned away, striding across the half-empty dining room, pushing his way out the glass doors and into the night. After he was gone, a silence fell over the table, mostly fatigue, frustration. Some free-floating blame looking for a place to land.

  Dobri Levka, so far silent, leaned into the circle of light.

  “Excuse, but there was also other way to find boat. No?”

  “The cell phone?” asked Dalton.

  “What cell phone?” asked Joko. Dalton nodded to Levka, who filled Joko in—and Fyke and Nikki Turrin as well—on the possibility that his Motorola cell phone might still be on the Blue Nile and might be remotely turned on and that might . . .

  “Jesus, Dobri,” said Joko, blinking across the table at Levka. “That’s a lot of mights. I’m gonna start calling you Mighty Mouse.”

  Nikki, who was an NSA agent, spoke up after a pause.

  “Don’t laugh. It could work.”

  She had the full attention of the table.

  “Dobri, do you know the model number of the phone?”

  “Yes. Is K1M. Motorola Krzr. With MP3 player. Phone number is three-eight-zero-six-five-six-one”—Nikki was scribbling on a n apkin—“three-two-nine-four-nine.”

  Nikki looked at her watch: a little after midnight.

  “What time is it in Maryland right now?”

  “Around seven in the evening,” said Dalton.

  Nikki got up, pulled out her BlackBerry, started hitting buttons as she walked away. “Give me an hour.”

  “Well,” said Mandy, picking up her champagne and looking around the table, “that leaves us five. Anyone for poker?”

  “Not yet,” said Dalton. “Here comes Roth.”

  “Oh dear,” said Mandy, watching the intense young man striding across the floor. “He does not look happy.”

  “I’m not,” said Roth as he reached the table, looking back to the entrance and then scanning the room as he took a chair. “I’ve been talking to Tel Aviv—”

  “Do we get the tap?” asked Dalton.

  “They said yes, but that’s not the point. We also monitor marine communications along the Med. What was the name of the port captain you spoke to . . . Was it Woodside?”

  “Yes,” said Mandy. “Dugal Woodside. What’s the problem?”

  “Well, he’s just filed a formal notification with the IMO that he’s decided to seize the Novotny Ocean. Under suspicion of smuggling stolen yachts. In the filing, he says he already had some problems with the Panama registration. And he has the authority to commence a formal investigation. He’s already got a guard on the wharf, and he’s quarantined the entire crew on board. Including Captain Maloutsis.”

  “We thought he might do that,” said Dalton. “We hoped he would. Why so worked up?”

  “According to the bulletin, he intends to stage this inquiry here at Gibraltar. And he’s going to call for anyone connected with the matter to come in and make a formal deposition.”

  “Oh . . . bloody hell,” said Dalton.

  “I’d have put it stronger than that,” said Roth. “That means he’s going to want to talk to you and Mandy. He’s already left an official notice at the hotel requiring you not to leave Gibraltar until you come in and provide an affidavit. Mandy’s cre
dentials will stand up, of course, but how about yours, Micah? I think not. They’ll hold you and start digging. None of which we have the time for. We have to find that boat. Where’s Nikki Turrin?”

  “Outside. She’s on the line to somebody in Maryland,” said Fyke. “About Levka’s cell phone.”

  Roth got up, looked around the table at a series of shocked expressions he found quite impressive, particularly for range and impact. “I warned you about this. I suggest we go find her—”

  “And get the hell out of Gib,” said Mandy, rising.

  “You can stay, if you want—”

  “Like hell,” said Mandy.

  “Then, let’s go,” said Roth. “Dagan’s having them fly the Legacy in from Athens. It’ll be on the ground at Boukhalef field in Tangier. If we can get there.”

  “Yes. And how are we supposed to get to Tangier? The Lear’s definitely out,” said Mandy. “We can’t avoid a Royal Navy inquiry by buggering off in Poppy’s jet. He’d have a fit.”

  “A pox on Poppy,” said Fyke, looking down at the darkened marina, at the cruisers moored there, hundreds of shapes and sizes, a sea of masts and flying bridges, rocking gently in the changing tides. “Anyone up for a little piracy?”

  IT was sixty klicks across the strait to Tangier. The motor yacht, a classic wooden Chris-Craft about fifty feet long, which was chosen by Fyke for its primitive electronics, making it easy to jump-start, and approved by Dalton on the possibility that it wouldn’t have any modern GPS gear, which it didn’t, covered the sixty klicks in five hours, with no sign of pursuit either from the sky or from some naval patrol boat out of Gibraltar.

  A long, narrow, sharp-bowed, spear-shaped boat without a flying bridge, the Chris-Craft also had a wooden hull and low superstructure that made it a good choice if you were hoping to avoid radar detection. It was not a good choice if any of the passengers were prone to seasickness. A long, narrow hull in open water tends to pitch and yaw with every roller. So although the boat covered the sixty klicks in five hours, for some of the more delicate passengers, such as the two Mossad agents and Ray Fyke, these were not happy hours.

  Levka, at the wheel of the boat—she was called Tropical Dancer—and back in his element, seemed content just to be driving a big cruiser again even if it was likely to result in a lengthy jail sentence in some North African hellhole. It had occurred to Levka that staring Third World prisons in the face made up a large part of his daily duties when in Micah Dalton’s employ.

  Dalton, standing beside him, listening to the chatter on the marine radio, smoking a Sobranie, and staring out at the lights of Tangier as they started to spread out across the black horizon, was thinking about the size, shape, and dimensions of the problem that was also spreading itself out on his own black horizon.

  Down in the lounge, all teak and brass and mahogany, with a lovely stainless-steel galley and a cozy little stateroom in the bow, Mandy was reclining on a leather couch, watching Nikki Turrin set about making chicken soup. It was about the only thing the men had been able to keep down, but even that not for very long.

  Ray Fyke, Joko Levon, and Danny Roth were out on the fantail under the open sky, a place with easy and frequent access to the ocean from all three sides. Perhaps in honor of Fyke, whose sainted mother was from County Clare, all three men were green. Although he had spent a lot of time at sea with the SAS, and later during a turn as first mate on a gypsy tanker in the South Seas, this bouncy little voyage across the straits in what he felt was little better than a high-toned canoe was just too damned much.

  Behind the flat stern of the boat, far off in the east, the light was beginning to change, the sky turning from a featureless void to a pinkish gray. In the cabin, Levka, still on the question of staring prison in the face, drained his coffee cup, set it down in the gimbal ring, and glanced sideways at Dalton.

  “So, boss, no offendings, but what are we going to do when we get into Tangier?”

  Dalton’s hard face creased in the dim light, the red glow from the instrument panel giving his smile a sardonic cast.

  “Mandy met me in Sevastopol with, among other useful things, a bag of gold wafers. I’m told they like gold in Tangier.”

  Levka found this comforting, but he followed the line of inquiry awhile longer.

  “You got any idea what is all about? Kidnap me, take my boat, set you up for killing Mr. Galan?”

  “I’m beginning to. We’ve been following the Blue Nile all the way from Kerch to Gibraltar. And I’ve left a paper trail all the way along the line. Vienna. Venice. Kerch. Istanbul. Athens. Gibraltar. If they manage to use your boat for something spectacular, I’ll be the one most closely associated with it. And you? I think that was why they kept you alive. The idea was, after . . . whatever it is . . . they’d find your body in the boat. Mine too, and Mandy’s as well, if the trap on the road to Staryi Krim had worked a little better. I have no idea how they managed to get Burke and Single on the owners’ list of Northstar Logistics—”

  “That your company in London?”

  “Not mine. But it’s a CIA front. That’s another marker. If you could see it how the authorities would see it, Galan has a contact with you through Irina Kuldic, he turns up dead, and I’m the guy in the Leopoldsberg parking-lot video, so you and I are connected, we own the boat. The boat turns up at some disaster. They could make a case against us that would hold up in the court of world opinion, if not in a real court.”

  “A—what you call—propaganda?”

  “Yes. Something like that. Embarrass England and the U.S. Implicate the CIA in some atrocity. Ramp up the tensions between us and Israel. Not to mention further inflame the Muslim world against the Great Shaitan. Typical Russian ploy. The part I can’t figure out is . . . where.”

  “But Bogdan, he know the truth.”

  “Killing Bogdan Davit wouldn’t faze them. The only witness to what happened in Leopoldsberg is an Austrian OSE agent. Brancati’s got her in the Arsenale. I don’t think they can get to her. But all she has is what she saw. And that can be picked apart.”

  “But, where they do this . . . propaganda?”

  “It has to be at this end of the Med, or why waltz us all the way out here in the first place?”

  “So. To know this, we need find boat.”

  “Yes. Wherever your boat is, that’s where it will happen.”

  “Where what will happen?” asked Mandy, coming up from the lounge with two cups of soup in her hands. She looked out at the stern and saw what looked like three dead men sprawled along the benches back there. No, not dead. One of them was up and over the stern again. “Dear God. You’d think they’d be empty by now.”

  She turned and handed a cup to Levka and kept the other one for herself, delicately sipping at the rim, steam rising up.

  “Where what will happen?” she asked again.

  Dalton laid it out for her. She listened in silence, nodding from time to time. When he was finished, she said, “Let’s get Nikki up here. She’s the one with friends at the NSA.”

  Nikki came up the stairs carrying a cup of coffee for Dalton, looking a little drawn. Going from a sunny spring afternoon in Seven Oaks to hunting gators in the Florida Panhandle to a midnight race across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangier is the kind of thing that sounds better than it lives.

  She looked out the windshield, saw Tangier filling up their future, the scattered lights of the Medina piling crazily up the sides of the hill, the radio masts on the top of Cape Spartel blinking in the dark, the sky turning from black to gray behind them, and wished she found the sight wonderfully romantic. As it was, she needed a shower, she was hungry, she was homesick, and she was scared. Mandy looked at her for a while, feeling a strange emotion for her . . . Sympathy? Compassion? Affection?

  “Sit, Nikki,” she said, pushing her over to the copilot chair and putting a sweater over her shoulders. It was chilly out on the water, the dampness working its way into the bones. Mandy stepped back, looked at Nikki, reached out
to brush a strand of hair out of her eyes. The girl was very beautiful, if you liked those dusky Mediterranean odalisques like Isabella Rossellini or Juliette Binoche. Mandy supposed some men did.

  God knew why.

  “We’ve reached a dead end, Nikki,” she said, folding her arms across her chest, cocking her head sideways. “These two berks haven’t a clue. It’s down to you and that trick with the cell phone. Were you able to get anywhere with that?”

  Nikki sighed, looked up at Mandy.

  What a simple question, and the answer was a killer.

  “Yes. I managed. I ended up calling Hank Brocius.”

  “The AD of RA,” said Dalton. “The Marine with the IED burns. I heard he was on leave.”

  “Yes. He’s in Garrison, Upstate New York. With Briony Keating.”

  Mandy and Dalton exchanged a charged look.

  “With?” asked Mandy, who knew something of their history. “Or with ?”

  “I have no idea which,” she said, hardening up. “And I don’t really care. What’s important is, he said he’d put a tech on it and get back to me.”

  She lifted up her BlackBerry, turned it in the red glow of the instrument panel. “That was . . . hours ago. So far, nothing.”

  They heard a low moan and the sound of heavy feet dragging across the decking, turned and saw Daniel Roth making unsteady progress toward the gangway that led down to the head. He looked about as bad as a man can look and not be on an autopsy table. “I need,” he said, swallowing carefully, “to visit the facilities. You might wish to stand clear in case I do not make it.”

  He got level with the pilot chair, stopped to stare out at Tangier, surprised to see how close it was.

  “God be praised. Dry land. I may yet live. Is that Tangier?”

  “It had better be,” said Dalton. “If it’s not, Levka goes overboard.”