The Skorpion Directive

by David Stone

  Broad and squat, but he moved like a duelist, on the balls of his feet. Stunningly quick. As elusive as smoke and water. And tough as a steel-toed boot. Dalton might as well have been punching an engine block.

  Smoke.

  A pit fighter, perhaps, but very well trained. Special Forces training? His style was mixed, some Thai, some Spetsnaz handiwork, and a few Delta Force tricks that Dalton had almost forgotten.

  And that face.

  That ruined face, literally featureless, two slit eyes and an ugly stump of a nose, bald, blue-veined skin as shiny as plastic, and totally earless. And the voice, harsh, guttural, as if the vocal cords had been scorched. Burned.

  Smoke had been in a fire, a very bad one, his features melted, burned away. Skin grafts, surgery, whatever had been done for him had not been done very well. Smoke was a walking horror.

  A fifty-foot drop onto a lawn would not kill something like that. Dalton wasn’t sure what would.

  Maybe an RPG.

  “I don’t think he’s dead, Veronika. I think we’ll see him again. Let’s get you into the shower. I think they bypassed the alarm, but your neighbors will have called the police.”

  She shook her head.

  “They’re turning this building into a co-op. That’s why there’s a big scrap bin out at the back. Renovations. They forced out most of the renters. There is only one other family on this floor, the Zuckermans, and they’re in Tel Aviv. The building is made of concrete. I don’t think anybody heard anything. And, if they did, they’d mind their own business. They’re old. They remember the Russians. Old Viennese do not call the police when they hear things in the night.”

  “We’ll have to go.”

  “We?”

  “Yes, Veronika. You can’t stay here.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I think Yusef was here to kill you.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  Dalton laid it out for her, how Smoke had held back, keeping Dalton busy, while Yusef had slipped past him and gone after her. When he was done, her eyes were full of a liquid light, and her skin was as pale as new snow. He took her in his arms and held on to her for a time. Gradually her breathing steadied.

  “Now what? What do we do now?”

  “You take a shower. I’ll clean up the place and dump Yusef in the bin. Then we get the hell out of Dodge.”

  She looked up at him, puzzled, and managed a smile.

  “Dodge? What is ‘get . . . out of Dodge’?”

  Dalton smiled grimly, and bent down to pick up what was left of Yusef, rolling him into the bloody mat, hoisting his skinny corpse easily, draping it over a shoulder.

  “I mean, we’re leaving. Leaving Vienna. Leaving now.”

  THEY cleaned up the flat as well as they could. Dalton carried Yusef’s body down the fire escape, dumping it into the construction bin at the bottom of the yard and burying it in a mounded heap of discarded shingles. When he got back up to Veronika’s flat to clean himself up, she was dressed and holding a small black leather bag.

  She looked shaken, confused, frightened, resolute, and very sad. Dalton, who was feeling a few of the same emotions, and a couple of different ones—guilt and anger being the strongest—thought she was feeling exactly the way she should be feeling.

  She had a small Volkswagen Jetta parked in the lot, a little black bullet with racing tires and a tuned exhaust. She eased it out of the lane, and they headed south through the deserted streets. In a few minutes they were on the Gürtel, and only a short distance from Mariahilfer Strasse. Dalton, in the passenger seat, scanned the streets and the skyline, and the road behind them, looking for a sign of surveillance. Unless they were a lot better than Jagermeir’s team, he was reasonably certain that they were not being followed.

  As they turned south on Mariahilfer Strasse, entering the maze of office clutter and antique housing that ringed the Westbahnhof, the sky in the east was full of a fiery orange light, and a huge flock of ravens was wheeling and spinning in the sunrise, their glossy black wings glinting with gold and copper flashes. Veronika, who had been, in the main, silent as she worked her way through the center of Vienna, finally found a way into the heart of her concerns.

  “Why me, Micah? Why are those men after me?”

  Dalton looked at the side of her face, lit by a shaft of rising sun as they cleared an intersection before plunging back into the shadowed canyons of the Ring District. Her skin was white, and her hands on the leather wheel of the Jetta were white with the force of her grip.

  What the hell have I gotten this woman into?

  “I have a theory.”

  “Please share. Before my hair bursts into flames.”

  “How would it look to your people, to the OSE, if you were to be found dead in your flat this morning? The first thing they’d do would be to look into what you were working on. Your unit, I mean. And your unit was working on me. I’d be the first person they’d want to see.”

  “But what about you? If I am killed, wouldn’t you stay around to sort it out? Explain it to the . . .”

  Her voice trailed into silence.

  “You said you’ve seen my files,” said Dalton. “See how it looks? I cut you out of the unit, followed you home, dragged you inside, forced you to show me your computer, and next morning you’re dead. Once they saw that, they wouldn’t see anything else. I’d be in Lödesburg Sink, wrapped in heavy chains, talking to a prosecutor from the ICC. The U.S. doesn’t recognize the International Criminal Court, so the ICC would have a dream come true, an undeclared CIA agent who murdered an Austrian OSE agent on their turf.”

  From the look on her face, cold and fixed, it was clear that Veronika found this statement uncongenial.

  “So. You would leave me there? Dead?”

  “I like to pay my debts in person, Veronika. To stay out of a holding cell and go after these people? Yes, I would have.”

  That created a difficult silence for a while.

  The barnlike hulk of the Westbahnhof was looming over the slate roofs of Mariahstadt. Traffic was beginning to build. A blue-and-white police car flashed past them, its klaxon wailing. Dalton wanted out of this Jetta soon. Very damned soon. Veronika had worked her way through the following chill and surfaced again, her face a little stonier.

  But she still had that iron.

  “What about Yusef’s body? What would they make of that?”

  “An accomplice. People see what they want to see. And even if I were gone, the police could still connect me to you. Remember, I did an Internet search on you last night?”

  “But wasn’t that on a secured CIA link?”

  Nothing seemed to change on Dalton’s face, but now he looked like a death mask.

  “Yes. It was. It was an Agency BlackBerry. Encrypted. There’s no way that anyone outside the Agency could have tracked my search string.”

  “Unless someone cracked the encryption.”

  “Not likely.”

  “But possible?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was . . . is your BlackBerry GPS-equipped?”

  “Yes. If it’s on, its location would be identifiable, but only to the Monitors at the National Security Agency in Maryland.”

  “Is the GPS locator also encrypted?”

  “Yes. Heavily.”

  “Who would be capable of cracking an encrypted CIA BlackBerry?”

  Dalton thought about it.

  “The Brits, I think. Maybe the Chinese . . .”

  Dalton did not name the third possibility, the Mossad, but it was at the forefront of his mind for a number of reasons.

  As it turned out, he wasn’t alone.

  They reached the entrance to the Auto-Park. Veronika pulled up across the street from a towering concrete labyrinth of open floors, each level packed with cars.

  Dalton was looking at the cameras over the automated gates. And thinking about the time stamps on parking receipts.

  And that blue-and-white police car.

  “When
does that construction bin at your apartment get emptied?”

  “Whenever it’s full. About once a month. How full was it?”

  “Less than half.”

  “That will give us time. Unless this day gets a lot hotter. Then he’ll make his presence felt pretty soon. In the meantime, we—”

  “That’s my point, Veronika. It isn’t going to be ‘we.’ Where’s the closest police station?”

  Her answer was short and sharp. And suspicious.

  “There is a transit police kiosk inside the station entrance.”

  “Good. Let’s go,” he said, cracking the passenger door.

  “To the Polizei? Why? You said—”

  “Not me. You. I’ll see you to the entrance, watch until you get to the transit station. Tell them everything. Everything. Nothing has happened up until now that compromises you in any way. Tell them I turned up at your flat last night, that I forced you inside. Tell them why. The truth, all of it, about the Nomenklatur, about the word Verwandtschaft—whatever that means—the whole thing. Hold nothing back. Get them to take you into protective custody. Maybe you can get your boss to tell you what Verwandtschaft actually referred to. You can say I forced you to drive me to the train station—”

  “Sure. And perhaps I can tell them that I submitted to rape just so I could get a sample of your DNA. Maybe they’ll even give me a raise.”

  This was said with such a bitter edge to it that it stopped Dalton for a moment. Her face was closing down fast, but Dalton cut across her and drove the argument home.

  “Look, Veronika, if the idea was to frame me with your killing, it’s not going to work very well if you’re not actually dead, is it? This isn’t your fight. You walk away right now—”

  “Not my fight? I killed a man last night. In my own home. And if I leave now, what happens to you?”

  “It’s two hundred and eighty miles to Venice. I have friends—”

  “Really? Like the man who puts the mark on that poster? That said everything was safe? Friends like that? Who else knew that you’d be coming up out of the Schottentor station? And when?”

  There wasn’t any other answer to that. Dalton had been visiting that prospect for several hours and wasn’t enjoying the view at all.

  “No one. He was the only one.”

  “The Cousins do not tell us who gave them the information about you. We both know Interpol doesn’t do anything but pass on data to real agencies. They’re just a clearinghouse.”

  “Yes.”

  “So he—whoever this friend is—it’s possible he’s the source that Interpol was covering for. He’s the one who put that tell on the poster and led you right into the trap. He wanted you watched so he could set you up somehow—”

  Dalton put up some fences just to see if she could clear them.

  “There’s no way he could have known about my contact with you, about the lighter. None of that was predictable—”

  “No. But you are. You said it yourself. If you’re under attack, the first thing you do is turn right around and go straight at them. The shark-in-shallow-water. If your friend knew you, he’d know that he could depend on you to—what do you say in English—percolate?”

  “Escalate.”

  “Right, and isn’t that what you would do. Every single time?”

  Veronika moved closer, leaned into her argument, her scent around him and her topaz eyes fixed on his.

  “If he has access somehow—we don’t know how—to your BlackBerry, then he knows you searched for the name of a unit member—me—and he knows where you are because of the GPS, so he sends in a team to kill me. Micah, listen, no one else could have. He’s the one behind all this. You had a fallback meet, didn’t you? I mean, everyone does. Where was it?”

  “Leopoldsberg. At ten this morning.”

  “Are you going to go?”

  Galan. Issadore Galan.

  Dalton could hear his laugh, a dry, creaking rasp. The voice of the Joshua tree. He could see his yellow skin, wrinkled and old beyond his years, and his eyes, the eyes of a crow, piercing black, full of sharp wit and cold intelligence. All these features were crowded into the center of a round, bald skull. Then there were the misshapen, clawlike hands, broken with hammers by the Jordanians, his body crippled after that. The stoic grace and resignation with which he bore these marks they had left on him, the things they had done in the months they had had him, things so terrible that when they finally dumped him, bound and naked, out in the Negev and then he later saw himself in the window glass of the Israeli Army medical unit, he quit the Mossad. And he never went back to his wife and family in Tel Aviv.

  Galan went to Venice, to put some sort of life together in history’s first Jewish ghetto, and eventually became the spymaster for Allessio Brancati, the chief of the Venetian Carabinieri. Both men had been Dalton’s allies in his private vendetta against the Serbian Mafia. He owed those two men his life. Galan would not—could not—have betrayed Dalton. There must be another answer.

  “I know this man, Veronika.”

  “I see. And does everybody love you, Micah?”

  Dalton’s face changed, hardened, like concrete setting. This was too close to his core. Much too close. He had been married once, to a lovely woman named Laura, and they had had a little girl. And now they were both dead. Veronika saw the effect of her question.

  “I’m sorry. I think that went where I did not mean it to go. What I mean is, have you perhaps become . . . inconvenient ?”

  Dalton didn’t immediately answer. But into his covert world, “change we can believe in” had come with a vengeance. The CIA was under heavy fire from the left wing for what it had done—or had not done—in the aftermath of September 11th and the wars that followed. There seemed to be a special venom reserved for any Agency officer who had ever terrified a terrorist, and there was to be no mercy granted even for officially sanctioned actions taken by field officers working under unbearable pressure in the aftermath of an unprecedented attack on the nation.

  A Special Prosecutor had been appointed, plea bargains were being cut, old friendships broken, loyalty and trust betrayed, long-standing but informal covenants between domestic and foreign agencies shattered. A miasma of fear floated in the corridors, the halls were full of informants, Iagos and Savonarolas listened at the keyholes and monitored the phones. The morale of the operational sectors had plummeted to abyssal levels. The flow of useful HumInt had dried to a trickle. Very few CIA officers, especially those with families, were willing to do—or to authorize—anything aggressive out in the field.

  Most of them were riding their desks, shuffling paper and keeping their heads down, waiting for the Great Eye to pass over and find another victim, any victim. The Big Chill had settled over the American intelligence community, drawing the amused contempt of America’s allies and greatly comforting her enemies. And if there was a list on a desk somewhere, the name of Micah Dalton had to be in the top one hundred.

  Inconvenient.

  Just like the old Uzbek.

  Veronika reached out and touched the side of his face. Her fingertips were cold, but his skin was warm. He did not react. He was staring straight ahead, his thoughts clearly in another place. The traffic was building up, and she could see a couple of foot patrolmen walking slowly along the walk, sipping coffee from paper cups, talking.

  Dalton was right, of course. Veronika knew that she should get out of the car now and walk into the train station and tell Dalton’s version of the story to the transit police. They’d believe her. Relations with the CIA Station Chief in Vienna would be severed for a while, and the OSE would be theatrically outraged. The papers would hear of it—an “international incident.” And of course she would never again be assigned to Overwatch because she’s notorious. On the other hand, Nenia Faschi would eat Rolf Jägermeier alive for letting this happen to her. But Veronika could, eventually, manage some kind of normal life. And of course the Krokodil would be gone forever.

  It was the
sensible thing to do.

  The Austrian thing to do.

  “Galan,” said Dalton.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Issadore Galan. That’s the name of the man we’re talking about. He’s an Israeli, used to work for the Mossad, left them to live in Venice. He runs the agenzia di spionaggo for the Carabinieri.”

  “Issadore Galan. He’s a Jew?”

  Dalton gave her a quick, hard look, but she didn’t feel it. She was staring out the window, her attention on something else.

  “You remember what Yusef said just before he died? You asked him who sent him. He used the term utazók. It means ‘wanderer,’ Micah. But I think in Hungarian it’s slang for ‘Hebrew.’ Hebrew actually means ‘wanderer’ or ‘homeless.’ ”

  Dalton looked over at her.

  “Okay. That’s enough. I think I know where he is.”

  “Then we should go and ask him a few rude questions. I can help you. I will call in to work and take some days off. They won’t find Yusef for a month. If ever. I have contacts in the OSE, contacts all over Europe. I can get access to the databases, this Smoke person. There would be paper on a man like that, with such terrible scars. I can drive—I can. What do you people say? ‘Scratch your back’?”

  In spite of his black mood, Dalton had to smile at that.

  “Watch my back, and you already have. No. You have a life here, Veronika. A good one. Much better than mine. Go back to it.”

  He was thinking, but did not say, People around me die.

  Veronika leaned over and gave him a kiss, a very fine one. The two patrol cops grinned as they passed by, their muffled voices carrying through the window glass. Dalton felt the kiss with varying degrees of intensity everywhere in his body. So did Veronika.

  She pulled back, touched his cheek again.

  “Maybe I don’t like my life that much.”

  LEOPOLDSBERG, a Catholic cathedral-fortress about three miles northwest of Vienna, was a limestone monolith perched on top of what they like to call mountains in that part of Austria. The Danube, not actually blue, ran in a broad, lazy curve around its base before straightening out, splitting in two, and running like a divided highway right down the middle of Vienna. The view from the stone terrace on the south side, a memorial to the war dead, took in the entire city, from the industrial regions in the east to the dense masses of pink stone buildings in the Ring District. Low green hills and tilled farmlands rose up almost to the forward glacis of the cathedral. At this time in the spring, everything was green and growing, and the old city glowed with a rose light under a pale yellow sun.