The Skorpion Directive

by David Stone

  Well-armed little prick, aren’t you? thought Dalton, a little out of breath. He then pulled out a spare cell phone borrowed from Brancati, hit SEND.

  A hundred feet down, on the other side of the Ormesini Canal, Brancati’s own cell phone, the ringer turned off, began to vibrate in his pocket. Brancati stepped out of a darkened archway on the north bank of the Ormesini and began to walk along the quay in the direction of Galan’s villa, moving fast like a man with a serious purpose in mind.

  As he neared the boat where he had first spotted the watcher, he saw a vaguely manlike shape rising up out of the craft.

  Dalton, with the Collarset in his ear, heard a man’s voice, a spidery rustle but clear enough, speaking English with a strong Boston accent. Six and two, this is one. I have a male approaching. Dalton did a double click on the transmitter, usually taken by security units to mean Heard and understood, but the voice said nothing.

  Brancati was less than fifteen feet from the entrance to Galan’s villa, doing everything he could to look like Micah Dalton would look in a heavy fog, when the figure stepped out of the boat and onto the quay, facing Brancati, raising a pistol as he did so.

  There was a ghostlike flutter of rapid movement behind the man. A second figure appeared and seemed to melt silently into the first. There was a brief but vicious struggle, almost soundless. Brancati moved forward in time to jerk a small pistol from the man’s grip as Dalton drove the man down to the stones.

  Dalton delivered a sharp blow to the base of the man’s skull. The man’s body went boneless. Brancati, kneeling, cuffed the man and then began a quick body search while Dalton moved to the door of Galan’s villa, keyed the transmitter, and said, in whisper, “Six and two, I got him.”

  A voice in his earpiece, female, saying, “Good, hold him.” Thirty seconds later, a smaller figure, a woman, dressed like the other two, in boots, jeans, and turtleneck, pushed her way out of the entrance gate, saw Brancati kneeling beside a prone figure, made entirely the wrong assumption, and went slamming down hard onto her belly, with a knee across her neck and the blunt muzzle of an H&K MP-55 jammed very roughly into her left cheekbone.

  “How many?” asked Dalton in a low, purring hiss.

  “I’m an agent of the U.S. government,” hissed the women, struggling, red-faced, outraged. “You’re interfering with a Bureau of Diplomatic Security operation. You will be—”

  But Brancati cut her off, sticking a large gold-plated, leather-backed badge in her face and saying in a low, grating tone and in English, “I am Major Brancati of the Venice Carabinieri. I have not been informed of any authorized BDS mission. You are undeclared and therefore you are illegal. You are under arrest. If you are wise, you will shut up now. Capisce?”

  A quick search of her uniform revealed, among other things, a set of plastic wrist restraints that Dalton used to truss her up, along with the other man, who was coming around, still groggy. The woman, a whipcord-thin but wiry redhead with a sharp hawklike face, wisely seemed to have taken Brancati’s advice and shut up, contenting herself with a glare that she fixed on Dalton, never wavering.

  The other man, only semiconscious, was in no state to discuss anything for the moment. Dalton and Brancati lifted the two of them into a kneeling position, stuffed gloves into their mouths, and shoved them face-first against a stone wall.

  Dalton left Brancati to cover them with the Heckler while he sprinted back across the bridge, returning a few minutes later with the body of the third man, now wide awake, draped over his shoulder. Dumping the man with a thud onto the cobbles next to the other two, Dalton looked up at Brancati.

  “You should go get Veronika and the launch.”

  Brancati nodded, turned to go, stopped, hesitating.

  “Micah . . .”

  “They’ll be fine. Go.”

  Brancati headed back down the quay toward the bridge where Veronika was waiting with the launch. As he walked away, the first man Dalton had taken, the one with the silenced Heckler, twisted himself around and started to say something to the woman. Dalton jerked his head backward until the man’s face, covered with caked blood from his broken nose, was inches from Dalton’s.

  He had the Sykes blade pressed against the man’s Adam’s apple, drawing a thread of blood from the skin as he snarled into the man’s sweating face. “Talk to me. Who the fuck are you?”

  The man tried to move his neck away from the blade, but Dalton pressed it in harder, opening the flesh, the blood beginning to stream down the man’s muscular neck.

  “Jeez, man, stop! Stop—”

  “I asked you a question. Who the fuck are you?”

  “We’re . . . We’re Americans. Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Rome office. The female is Leah Trent. She’s in charge—”

  “Why are you here?”

  The man’s face paled and his mouth worked, and then he shook his head, glaring up defiantly at Dalton.

  “Fuck you, asshole. You know why we’re here.”

  Dalton shoved a glove into the man’s mouth, cramming it down hard, and then whipped the blade tip in a shallow slashing cut right across the man’s forehead. As blood sheeted into his eyes, the man began to thrash and struggle on the cobblestones, his screams muffled by the glove crammed into his mouth. Dalton stood up, kicked him hard in the stomach, and then dragged Leah Trent over, showing her the man curled up on the quay, face covered in blood. He pulled the glove from her mouth

  “You’re next. Why are you here?”

  Her face went white, and she seemed unable to look away from the bloodied face of her agent. Dalton shook her and she came back, her breathing short and sharp.

  “We’re here to take you into custody.”

  “On whose orders?”

  “The Justice Department. There’s a warrant—”

  “On what charges?”

  She blinked up at him, clearly wondering how he could not know why they were here in Venice.

  “Vienna. You killed a Mossad agent, left his body in a car wired to explode—”

  “Why?”

  She blinked, tried to swallow, her throat closing up.

  “Why—”

  “He was my friend. One of the best. Why the hell would I kill him? They give you a reason?”

  “I . . . Look, I don’t . . . This comes from your own boss. Pearson, the DD at Clandestine. Word is, you’ve gone outside—”

  “Horseshit. I am being set up. I want to know by whom.”

  She stared up at him, a muscle in her left cheek twitching.

  “Set up? Set up how?”

  “Listen carefully. Try to remember this. The car bomb in Vienna was placed there by a burn-scarred man, ex-paramilitary, maybe a Serb or a Russian. He’s on a videotape, delivering the Saab. I have that videotape. Now, hear me. I did not set that car bomb and I did not kill Issadore Galan. I am being set up by somebody who has access to U.S. covert security systems. That means somebody inside your own government. So if you’re really BDS, if you’re really a pro, get your head around that and do something about it. Now, tell me. Do you know anything about a program or an agency called Verwandtschaft ?”

  She blinked up at him, her mouth working like a gaffed fish. Dalton could smell her fear, her warm breath on his face, feel the heat coming off her body. But, above all that, he was very aware that he was fighting against the urge to let his red dog run, to use the knife in his hand, to punish America for this. How many years of uninterrupted combat, how many years of open and covert killing . . . and this was his reward? BDS agents in the night. The Mossad given a free hand to take him out. Left to die a squalid little death, branded a traitor, abandoned and condemned by his own agency? This was the America he was supposed to risk his life for?

  Trent could see the rage moving in his face like something inhuman that lived under his skin and was trying to break through. If she was going to live through this encounter, she had to change the music. She swallowed, swallowed again, found her voice, and said in the kind of tone you
would use to negotiate with a junkyard dog, “Mr. Dalton, I hear you. Maybe I even believe you. And I promise you that if what you’re saying checks out, the BDS will do everything it can to make things right. About something called Verwandtschaft . . . is that what you said? Because I truly do not know what you’re talking about.”

  Something in her tone penetrated the blood-red cloud that was filling his mind. He stared down at her, trying to regain his self-control. “You’ve never heard of anything called Verwandtschaft?”

  “It’s just a German word. I don’t even speak German.”

  “You’ve never heard the name used by any U.S. agency?”

  She shook her head, closed her eyes slowly, seemed to go away to a far better place, opened her eyes again, and he saw resignation, and the truth, in her face.

  He released her, moving back a few feet, looking at her for a long, timeless interlude, while she blinked back at him, her chest heaving as she tried to get her panic under control. “What about my man? He’s bleeding out.”

  “No. He’s all right,” he said, going inward and feeling himself quite distant from this place and these events. “He’ll need some stitches. I just marked him.”

  “Why . . . Why did you do that?”

  Dalton smiled at her, a sideways grimace. His head was a little light, and he felt slightly dizzy, as the anger that had flooded through him gradually receded.

  “I was trying to get your attention.”

  “Well,” she said, closing her eyes, “you surely did that. Clandestine warned us about you. We should have listened better.”

  A beam of light caught them. He looked up as Brancati and Veronika Miklas came up the walk. Brancati dropped the beam onto the huddled shapes at Dalton’s feet, the light playing on the fresh blood on the cobblestones, on Leah Trent’s white wet face as she stared wide-eyed back into the glare.

  Brancati, seeing the man with what looked like a severe head trauma, started to come forward

  “Micah—”

  Dalton stood up, lifted a hand, palm out.

  “He’s okay, Allessio. He’s okay. I didn’t hurt him.”

  Brancati, giving him a hard glare, brushed by Dalton, kneeling down to check the man out for himself. Dalton, feeling suddenly weak, put a hand on the stone wall of Galan’s villa, steadying himself.

  He closed his eyes, trying to get some equilibrium again, stunned by the depth of his anger and what he had contemplated doing in the rush of it, what that was saying about his mental state. When he opened his eyes again, Veronika was standing in front of him, staring intently into his face. Her expression was remote. “You did . . . this ?” she asked in a shaken tone.

  Dalton looked around at the people on the ground. Leah Trent was sitting on the stones, her cord cuffs in pieces at her feet, her arms wrapped around herself, her face wet, her mouth a little open, slumping into herself, obviously sinking into shock.

  “I do,” he said, his face hardening in light of her disapproval, her chilly stare, “what is necessary.”

  “Crocodile,” she said in a whisper mostly to herself, cold judgment in her eyes. She went past him and knelt down beside Leah Trent, putting a hand on her shoulder and speaking in the low, soothing tone one would use with an injured animal.

  Brancati came over to him, his face grave.

  “We must deal with these people,” he said. “They have no identification papers, but I think they are truly Bureau of Diplomatic Security. My men have taken another four, all dressed the same way, down at the Savoia. A total of seven men, according to the Trent woman. She admits that they are a covert team, sent in to take you without the problem of extradition. This does not surprise me. The CIA did much the same a few years ago on the streets of Milan. I have called for a police launch. My people will hold them in the Arsenale for a few days incommunicado. I will question them further. One will need dei punti—stitches—for his face. Also, he has a broken nose, and I think a commozione cerebrale— a concussion. And the woman, I think she is in going into shock. The third one did not receive . . . your attention . . . so much, so he is unhurt. The woman will need to be hospitalized”—here he gave Dalton a look of reproach, shaking his head—“but she will survive. Allora. It is done. What do you wish to do now?”

  Find a bottle of scotch and climb inside, he was thinking. What he said was, “Finish this. That’s what I wish to do, Allessio. Find out what’s going on and finish it.”

  THE medieval door to Galan’s flat had been taken from a ruined villa in San Sepulcro. Beside the silver plaque with 8B GALAN engraved on it, the door carried the signature images of that famous old Tuscan town—macabre skeletal figures carrying scythes and swords and axes, grinning masks of death dancing and prancing—carved into three-dimensional cartouches and surrounded by demons from the underworld—imps, dragons, spiders, scorpions, vipers coiled around bundles of bones. The skeletons glared down at them in the glow of the hallway lamps as Brancati fished around in the pocket of his coat, finally pulling out a ring with several large brass keys on it.

  He was about to set the key into the lock—a brand-new dead bolt with DIEBOLD engraved on the face—when Dalton put a hand on his arm. Brancati stepped back and watched while Dalton ran a fingertip carefully up the jam and then across the top of the door. He brought his hand down and showed Brancati a single white hair, with a black root.

  “I forgot,” said Brancati. “From Cora.”

  “Cora?” asked Veronika, still distant but not quite as cold. Brancati glanced at Dalton and looked back at Veronika.

  “Galan has a cat. He named her after Cora Vasari, a woman he much admired,” said Brancati with a sidelong glance at Dalton. “He always takes from this cat a hair and sticks it somewhere around the door so he knows if somebody has been in the flat while he was out. The windows on the terrace are barred, so this is the only way in. Maybe we should take out our pistols anyway.”

  He slipped the key into the lock, pulling out his Beretta as he did so. The well-oiled tumblers clicked heavily, the latch gave way, and the door swung slowly open, revealing a darkened living room, and, beyond that, a kitchen and an open door leading to a bedroom and the terrace.

  Galan’s flat was a spare, monkish space, with two antique wooden chairs set across from a battered green leather couch with an old bronze reading lamp. There was a tiny wood-burning stove, stained with four hundred years of soot. On the walls were several very small but well-executed oils, scenes of the Chianti District, atmospheric studies of rolling golden hills marked with the slender spires of cypress trees, a study of the Amalfi Coast, and what looked like a watercolor of the Negev.

  There was a heavy oak sideboard holding a Seabreeze record player, next to that a small bar with some dusty bottles of Chianti and an ice bucket. And there was a collection of photos—his long-gone wife and children, Dalton knew—as well as a new-looking and very striking silver-framed portrait of Cora Vasari sitting on a big bay horse, looking down with a playful smile at the camera, her long hair cascading over her shoulders, the quintessential Hussar in a trim military tunic that fit her lush body very well, jodhpurs, gleaming black boots with silver spurs.

  Dalton registered shock, seeing this photo, and a red rush of guilt. Although she was cut off from him, being sheltered from his chaotic effect by her family in their seventeenth-century villa in Anacapri, she was still the last faint promise of a normal life beyond the Agency, beyond the life he was leading.

  Past the sideboard, under a cork bulletin board filled with papers and notes, stood a plain wooden table with a very modern desktop Dell on it, and a wide-screen monitor, which was dark, the tower shut down.

  To the right, a galley kitchen, spotless in the dim glow of a hallway sconce, dishes stacked neatly in a drying rack, a linen dishrag folded carefully in thirds and draped over the tap.

  To the left was an open door into a tiny bedroom with a sloping wooden roof. There was a single bed with a table next to it, some hardcover books piled on the table,
and on the far side of the bed a set of heavily barred leaded-glass doors leading out to the terrace. Through the translucent glass, they could see the lights of the Campo Novo Park on the other side of the Ormesini Canal. The flat smelled of tobacco smoke and coffee, dust and decay, and carried a whiff of the canals under that.

  If a flat can be filled with absence, this one was.

  As a precaution, Brancati went through the place while Dalton and Veronika waited in the living room. Dalton was feeling a searing sense of sadness welling up as he looked at what Galan’s life had come down to: a nearly penniless, crippled old man surrounded by a few sticks of cheap furniture and some worthless souvenirs in a shabby little flat in shabby little Cannaregio, as cramped and gloomy as his homeland had been sun-filled and blue-sky open, the sun-warmed paradise he would never see again as a living man. And waiting for him at the far end of this life like a cobra under his pillow, a death more terrible than any nightmare, dying in agony, torn apart on a tin table, surrounded by hate. It occurred then to Dalton that since he was on the same road, he might be looking at his own future.

  Brancati came back from the bedroom, putting his Beretta into his holster, his face showing as much sadness as Dalton was feeling.

  He walked over to Galan’s computer, pressed the ON button, and they waited for the machine to cycle up. The monitor opened up with a flaring light, showing them the ENTER PASSWORD bar. Brancati pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket, held it out at arm’s length—his eyes were going—and punched in a series of letters, numbers, and special characters.