The Skorpion Directive Read online

  “The people we’re up against, they would have known that. So it had to have been driven there this morning. Based on the note, by people who knew your name. Somewhere there’s security video of the Saab arriving at Leopoldsberg. Video of the driver. Any idea of how we could get that?”

  “It would have been easy a while ago. As a member of the Overwatch, I could easily requisition the security videos.”

  “Do you have anyone on the inside who might do it for you?”

  She said nothing for a time, staring out at the autobahn. They were passing a string of river barges towed by a fat little red tugboat with blue flowers painted on its funnel. A little blond boy on the foredeck, shirtless, was waving cheerfully at them as they blew by. Veronika, deep inside her thoughts, waved back at him anyway.

  “Maybe . . . Jürgen Stodt.”

  “Who’s he?”

  She looked unhappy but managed to get it out.

  “For a time . . . we were together. Last year. He works with me on the Overwatch. You saw him last night? Tall, skinny, he shaves his head now . . .”

  “Wears big floppy hiking boots? Leaves the laces undone?”

  “Yes. That’s him.”

  Dalton didn’t say what he thought of Jürgen Stodt’s street skills, but if he’d managed to get more out of Veronika Miklas than the back of her hand he was better than he looked.

  “Could you trust him?”

  Veronika shrugged her shoulders, her cheeks reddening.

  “He’s a big, floppy puppy. He makes those . . . floppy puppy eyes . . . at me still. He’s really very sweet. Yes. He would do it.”

  “Would he keep his mouth shut?”

  “Jürgen? Goodness no. He’d wet himself and roll over on his back as soon as somebody raised his voice. He’s afraid of everyone, and especially Nenia Faschi. But would that matter if he could get the video first?”

  Dalton shook his head.

  “No. It wouldn’t. How would you get in touch with him?”

  She patted her laptop.

  “He’s addicted to his Treo. Never shuts it off. Day and night. We could find an Internet café, I could send him a message, check for a reply at the next café down the road? Could they—whoever they are—trace that?”

  “Yes. But that video’s worth the risk.”

  They cruised on for a time, passing through downtown Vienna and on out into the lowlands. The land was emerald green and rolling, dotted with white-walled farmhouses and the silvery spikes of church steeples.

  “These are very bad people, Micah. Do you have any idea who they are? He says ‘your old friend.’ Is it someone you know?”

  “I know a lot of people who don’t like me very much. Only a very few of them are capable of getting an edge on a man like Galan and then doing what they did to him.”

  “Your friend Galan. He was there?”

  “Yes. In the trunk.”

  “Oh, Micah . . . I’m so sorry. Was it very bad?”

  Dalton told her a little. Not much. It was enough. They were passing through the middle of Vienna, lost in the morning traffic stream. There was no obvious pursuit. No choppers in the air.

  In the far north behind him he could see a pillar of smoke rising into the sky above the green dome of Leopoldsberg: Issadore Galan’s funeral pyre.

  “You said only a few people could—how you say—get an edge on Galan? What does this mean?”

  “It means outmaneuver and defeat him. And there were very few men who could do that. There was a freelancer named Kiki Lujac. He used to work for Branco Gospic, and then he went into business with the KGB. He might do something like this. But this note—Lujac was fluent in English, well-educated, polished—he would never write a note like this. Besides, he would have taken pictures of the process and then put them on the Net. That was his . . . trademark.”

  “We don’t know that he hasn’t. Where is he now?”

  “Nobody knows. He was seen in Garrison, upper New York State, last winter. The FBI and NSA security people tore up the eastern seaboard looking for him, but they never got him.”

  “Is there anyone else?”

  “There was an old Comanche I ran into a while back. He’d have loved this kind of thing. But he’s dead now.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Dalton thought but did not say, Pretty sure, Veronika, since I put a couple of .357s into his face, hacked his head off with a hatchet, stuck it in a beer cooler with some dry ice, and FedEx’d it to a state trooper in Butte.

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Yes. A few. But this thing . . . it feels . . . Muslim.”

  “Do you mean al-Qaeda.”

  “No. Not their style. Too . . . byzantine. They like to blow up discos and incinerate office workers. This is more like the Chechens. Or the Albanians. Or the Serbs.”

  “Slick. That name. Didn’t the man, the one you called Smoke, didn’t he call you Slick?”

  “Yes. And he had an accent, sounded Balkan, maybe Russian. Lots of Muslims in the Balkans. And Yusef was definitely Muslim.”

  “Have you ever operated against al-Qaeda?”

  “Not since I joined the Agency. Before that, yes. With the Special Forces. In the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan. Waziristan. The Army had me in Kosovo and Bosnia for a while, before I got on with the Cleaners, and there was a heavy Muslim factor in that sector, although when I was there we were fighting to protect them from outfits like the Serb Skorpions. Maybe this Smoke guy was someone I knew. His fighting style was hard-core Special Forces. I think he might even be Spetsnaz. But if we had ever locked horns, it was sure as hell before he got all burned up. You see this Smoke guy now, you’re never going to forget him.”

  Blood-red veins.

  Pale green light.

  Once again, something deep in the well of his memory, something dark, began to rise, a shapeless, cloudy horror full of blood-red veins, wrapped in pale green light.

  He waited for the memory to declare itself, but instead it sank back again, clouded over, and was gone.

  Veronika glanced over at Dalton and then back at the highway rolling toward them. Beyond Vienna, as you go south and west, the land grows craggy and begins a gradual climb toward the Alps and the mountain passes that lead down into Italy. Far in the southwest, the sun was glinting off a row of white shark’s teeth: spring snow in the high passes.

  “So your friend did not betray you?” she said in a soft voice after a long silence.

  “No,” said Dalton. “He didn’t.”

  “What will we do now?”

  “We try to get to Venice. It’s what Galan wanted me to do.”

  “Did you set that up before . . . all this?”

  “No. He left me a message.”

  “How?”

  Dalton told her.

  “Merciful Christ.”

  “You think so? That hasn’t been my experience.”

  “What do those marks have to do with Venice?”

  “Galan has rooms in Cannaregio, on the Fondamenta degli Ormesini, across from the Tempio Israelitico, in the old Jewish quarter.”

  “The Ghetto?”

  “Yes. He has a flat on the top floor of a little villa, with a terrace overlooking the canal. The number of his flat is 8B.”

  CLASSIFIED UMBRA EYES DIAL

  INTERNAL AUDIT COMMITTEE

  File 92r: DALTON, MICAH

  Service ID: REDACTED

  Security cameras outside the Westbahnhof station Auto-Park in Vienna confirm that DALTON and MIKLAS arrived there at 0821 hours and that it appeared from their actions that some sort of physical intimacy had taken place, which is common in hostage situations if rape is a component.

  Although the main security camera at Leopoldsberg malfunctioned, peripheral cameras confirm that DALTON and MIKLAS were next seen in the parking lot of the castle at 0917 hours, just prior to the explosion of a brown Saab.

  In the confusion of the blast, which killed one and injured
two police officers, the authorities lost track of the pair, and their current location or direction remains unknown.

  MOSSAD confirms that the body found in the trunk of the Saab was that of GALAN, ISSADORE—a former MOSSAD agent currently in the employ of the Italian Carabinieri in Venice. BDS officers from the Vienna station have been dispatched to Venice to interview the local officials.

  As GALAN, ISSADORE, was an Israeli citizen, The MOSSAD have expressed a desire to assist us in our inquiries into this matter. As a courtesy and at the request of the Consulate, we have notified the MOSSAD of DALTON’s last known GPS coordinates, as well as a description of his vehicle.

  Actions considered at this time/date after consultation with Commander PEARSON, DD of Clandestine Services, and his Adviser Pro Tem, D. CATHER, former DD of Clandestine, with the DNI in attendance, include but are not limited to the possibility of an official Joint Task Force Liaison with elements of the FBI, the BDS, and the Justice Department, under the aegis of the Audit Committee’s Official Mandate: (op cit: Presidential Finding F2391).

  No conclusion has as yet been reached, pending final decisions from POTUS/DNI.

  LEGAL IMPLICATIONS:

  The Secretariat, having consulted with General Counsel Dir/CIA Justice and DNI, takes note that new POTUS Intelligence ROE Policy mandates that, since all subsequent events that occurred in the early hours of the following morning had their predicate cause in DALTON’s aggressive response to the possibility of surveillance by Parties Unknown to him, Presidential Finding F2391 requires that legal responsibility for these outcomes must devolve upon DALTON and not upon this Agency or the U.S. Government, since DALTON was not acting in any official capacity as a CIA employee but as a private citizen.

  CONCLUSION:

  We bear no legal responsibility for and offer no protection to DALTON, MICAH, in this matter. This is the official position of the United States Government and as such will be communicated to the relevant authorities in Vienna, the UN, Tel Aviv, INTERPOL, and the ICC officials in Bonn. No statement will be issued to the media or the press concerning this matter until it has been resolved by the investigating authorities or by external events.

  MARIAH VALE/OD/DD/EXECUTIVE SECRETARIAT

  Fort Meade, Maryland

  213 CAISSON STREET, SEVEN OAKS, MARYLAND, 1830 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  Nikki Turrin saw the navy blue Crown Victoria parked outside her town house as soon as she got off the Odenton transit bus. It was idling, like a whale in a lagoon, in the dappled shadows under the Civil War-era oaks that lined Caisson Street. Sunlight shimmered in a golden veil through the leaves and pooled on the walks and lawns where the kids were playing. A sprinkler was hissing away in the gardens in front of her place, sending a jet of diamond sparkles through the sunlight as it circled.

  As she came down the walkway she checked out the plate: U.S GOVERNMENT. The windows of the car were heavily tinted, but she could vaguely discern the shapes of two men inside, one in the back and another up front behind the wheel.

  The presence of an official vehicle outside her town house wasn’t particularly surprising to Nikki Turrin, since she was on the staff of the Assistant Director of Research and Analysis at the National Security Agency, an ex-Marine colonel named Hank Brocius. Nikki, an auburn-haired odalisque in the classic Italian style, kept her eyes on the rear door of the Crown Vic as she came up to her steps, shifting her briefcase to her left hand and, just as a precaution, freeing her right hand in case she needed the hammerless SIG she kept in a nylon holster at her waist.

  The rear door cracked just as she put her right foot on the stairs, opened up wide, hinges creaking, revealing a very elderly white male, lanky and rail thin, with age spots on his hands and face. Deacon Cather, the Gray Eminence of Clandestine Services.

  She knew him from his photograph on Hank Brocius’s office wall. The pair had served for a time together in the same AO in Central America, Cather with the CIA and Brocius with the Marines. She herself had had a glancing contact with him during a terrorist incident at the Port of Chicago the previous fall. Cather, never aglow with health, looked like a cadaver: bony, sunken features, hooded eyes, sallow, jaundiced-looking skin stretched too tight over prominent cheekbones, teeth like yellow tombstones in bright red gums, withered, age-spotted hands, twisted and arthritic.

  But his eyes were clear, alert, and seemed to radiate an icy light, as if all the fading forces of his aging body were being concentrated in his look. A subtle, cold-blooded reptile with a very long memory, he held most of the secrets of the Cold War in the stony labyrinths of his mind. And although he had recently been shunted out of Clandestine Services by the new administration, he still wore power as easily as he wore his navy blue pinstripe, his pristine white shirt, and the gold-and-ochre tie with its hieroglyphic pattern that was his signature accessory.

  “Miss Turrin,” he said in a raspy whisper, “may I impose for just a moment . . . ?”

  Nikki felt a momentary chill and found herself at a loss for words. The intelligence community was full of stories about Cather and his sudden appearances, impromptu and unexpected encounters where people who got invited to share a moment with him in a car quite frequently never came back to their offices or to their homes and families.

  “Of course, Mr. Cather,” she said, resisting the temptation to throw her briefcase at him and bolt for her town house door.

  He developed out of the car slowly like a wolf spider coming out of a drain, straightening up with an obvious effort, smiling his terrible rictus of a smile at her with as friendly an air as a man with his reputation could manage.

  “Thank you, Miss Turrin. It’s a lovely afternoon. Perhaps you would do an old man the honor of a stroll along the avenue?”

  Towering over her like a rusted derrick, he extended his left arm in a ghastly parody of chivalry. Nikki took it, feeling the forearm bone like a dry twig under the material of his suit jacket. They walked along together, arms linked, as Cather’s driver slowly eased the Crown Vic to a crawl, keeping pace with them, its motor growling and muttering like an unhappy guard dog.

  Nikki saw another blue Crown Vic parked a block up, facing their way, the shadows of two men visible in the tinted glass: Cather’s CIA security detail.

  “You have a good eye,” said Cather, following her glance. “I hope you can tolerate the melodrama. I think they’re convinced I’m going to defect, God bless their paranoid little hearts. Let us choose to ignore them.”

  Nikki looked up at him, at the side of his face. He was staring ahead, his eyes on the sidewalk in front of him, but there was an air of sadness around him, sadness and something else.

  He looked . . . worried. Troubled.

  “We never actually met, did we?” he said after a few moments. “I know we spoke on the phone during the . . . events . . . in Chicago last fall. Of course, Mandy Pownall was familiar with you, I recall, and her description of you—she compared you to Isabella Rossellini—seems to have been quite accurate. Compliments from a woman as formidable as Mandy Pownall are rather rare. I’m very glad that Hank has you around. He’s well, is he?”

  “Yes, sir. He’s on leave right now.”

  “Is he? I suppose even a Marine needs a break now and then. He’s had a difficult time recently, I know.”

  “His wife left him, sir. Because of the scarring.”

  Brocius had been badly burned in an IED explosion in Iraq, trying to get the fifty gunner out of a flaming Humvee.

  “I’m aware. Not at all Semper Fi, was she?”

  Did he know that Nikki and Hank Brocius had been lovers up until quite recently? Did he know that the AD of RA’s “leave” was being spent up in Garrison, New York, helping in ways Nikki did not care to contemplate a former lover named Briony Keating put her life back together after her son, a naval corpsman stationed in Crete, had been kidnapped and murdered by the KGB?

  Of course he knows.

  “No, sir. She sort of broke his heart, actually.”

&n
bsp; A few more steps. Cather, in a heavy silence, stalking like a heron, clearly enjoying the leafy avenue, the green lawns, the row of red brick, federal-style town houses, the children playing in the shady street, the Rockwellian perfection of it.

  An illusion, but how beautiful it was.

  “I’m imposing my wearisome presence upon you, Miss Turrin, for a reason, I’m afraid. A matter of some subtlety.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m here to do whatever I can for the service.”

  “I know that, Miss Turrin. You’ve been an extraordinary help in a number of areas not usually addressed by an NSA officer. Your unofficial mission to Trieste, and, in the winter, that business in Santorini and Istanbul. That is why I am here, as you may have already inferred. I’ve given this matter some careful consideration. Before I present my case, allow me to lay before you a few preliminary observations in order to harmonize our viewpoints. As an initial predicate, you’re familiar, I’m sure, with the recent changes that have taken place at Clandestine Services?”

  Nikki handled that one as if it were a Fabergé egg.

  “Only what has been circulated, Mr. Cather. I know that a Commander Pearson has taken over as Deputy Director.”

  Cather seemed to find her tact grimly amusing.

  “And that I’ve been . . . marginalized? Rendered an operational nullity?”

  “People who know your record, Mr. Cather, would never make the mistake of regarding you as ‘an operational nullity.’ ”

  He looked down at her, his yellow face cracking into planes and deltas, his eyes hardening into chilly blue stones.

  “But the intent is there, my child,” he said, squeezing her arm between his ribs and his forearm. “The doors are already closing as I come down the halls . . . Old friends and colleagues grow noncommittal. Communications go unanswered. The fog of irrelevance rises up around my barren desk. Well, let us not indulge in self-pity. None of this is unexpected, Miss Turrin . . . I have observed our great nation for many decades, from a position of power and influence. Change has come upon us again, as it must. America. I suppose all democracies are vulnerable in this way, although it seems to be a singularly American weakness. Our nation tends to lurch, to stagger drunkenly, from left to right, as if afflicted with an inner-ear problem. De Tocqueville predicted this, suggesting that it was a flaw woven into the very fabric of democracies. He appears to have been correct. We lunge at extreme positions of thought and ideology as if they were lampposts to lean on. We abandon the ancient Persian House of Pahlavi and blithely embrace the far greater evil of the Ayatollahs. We ignored the growing threat of Islamic terror in the early eighties, dreaming our isolationist dreams. In the late nineties, as the threat grew and grew, we indulged ourselves in the political persecution of a President for silly sexual follies that would have paled beside the saturnalian debaucheries of those Kennedy boys, creating as we did so a bitter divide in the House and Senate that continues to cripple us to this day. We slept on, until, in our folly—and, as a senior member of the intelligence services, I bear great responsibility for this disaster—we awoke to the horrors of September eleventh . . .”