by David Stone
Sevastopol, shelled into ruins by the Brits during the Crimean War and halfheartedly repaired by czarist Russia, today nominally a Ukrainian holding, was still living under the shadow of the Russian Navy, which had a twenty-year lease on the port, granted in 1997 by the Ukrainians, a reluctant concession profoundly influenced by the guns of the Black Sea Fleet.
The town itself was pleasant enough to look at, full of lights and glitter, with many charming white limestone homes, blue-roofed town-house developments, gaily canopied seaside restaurants scattered along the embankment, dense, tree-shaded neighborhoods of apartments and town-house blocks rising up into in a cascading range of green hills, some neoclassical buildings dotted here and there about the town, and a large drum-shaped war museum set out on a hilltop, dominating the town and the harbor.
But to Micah Dalton, it looked, walked, talked, and smelled like a Russian satrap, which to him had always meant the dead-meat stink of totalitarian oppression and the mute, miasmic dread of a captive citizenry. Dalton had been here before. He had followed the progress of a Russian trawler through the Black Sea, a trawler that was suspected of carrying a shipment of missile-guidance systems to the Iranians. Dalton had found the place . . . unfriendly, having to leave by private boat under the cover of darkness just a few hundred yards ahead of a detachment of Russian naval security forces.
He was back now, checked into a nice suite of rooms under the name of Dylan Castle, an investment analyst working for a London-based private bank known to the fiscal set as Burke and Single. The Castle “legend,” which had worked well enough to get him out of Venice and all the way to the Crimean, had been laid out by Porter Naumann under the cover of Burke and Single, a CIA false-front bank monitoring currency transactions around the world. It was only safe to use now because Naumann had firewalled the legend from Tony Crane and the people at London Station, mainly because he was afraid that one fine day he’d need it himself.
Along with a lot of other things Dalton had inherited from Naumann, the Dylan Castle cover was about the only ironclad thing he had left now that Mariah Vale and the CIA had shut down his bank accounts, his credit cards, published his picture and description all over the covert world, and taken initial steps to freeze his assets in London and Venice.
As Dylan Castle, he had a valid American passport, two credit cards—one from Barclay’s and the other from the Banca Raiffeisen—and peripheral supporting cards. It was risky taking a legend that existed literally under the eaves of the CIA, but it had been his experience that the CIA, always obsessed with the big picture, often overlooked tiny details sitting on its doorstep.
Dalton checked his watch and looked seaward again for any sign of the Nordside ferry, which was now about fifteen minutes overdue. Yes. There it was, a small oblong of yellow light butting through the channel swells, carving a white curve through the darkening water. By the time it docked in the little harbor below his balcony, thumping into the concrete jetty with an audible crunch while the props boiled the water at her blunt stern, Dalton had called the waiter over and placed an order for a bottle of chilled Bollinger and two iced flutes, and made detailed arrangements for a large rack of lamb to follow.
A tall, long-legged and elegant woman in a charcoal knitted sheath dress under a long black coat, her black-and-silver hair flying in the wind, came striding down the gangplank, trailing a black leather rolling bag, one gray-gloved hand shading her eyes from the floodlights as she scanned the hotel balcony.
Dalton lifted a hand, and the woman waved back, crossing the jetty and disappearing under the trees.
Four minutes later, the glass doors behind him opened—he was, of course, now standing—as Mandy Pownall, listed in Burke’s Peerage as Cynthia Magdalene deLacey Evans Pownall, late of London Station, now on a kind of tactical sabbatical, came through the doors with a broad smile on her fine patrician features, her gray eyes shining, the cashmere dress clinging to her graceful curves like a morning mist on the bend of a river.
She stepped lightly into Dalton and gave him a full-body hug, nose to toes, pressing herself into him so tightly he could feel her full breasts, her gently rounded belly, the heat of her hips, while her scent, White Linen, overloaded his senses, as she knew damned well. She kissed him full on the mouth, a lingering kiss, her red lips parted and her spicy breath blood warm on his burning cheek.
She stepped back, gave him a delighted assessment, taking in and approving of his light gray suit, his gray shirt, the gold silk tie, his black Allen Edmonds slip-ons.
“Well, for a desperado, you look very chic.”
“I try to please, Mandy,” he said, feeling his somber mood lighten as it always did when Mandy was around. “You do look splendid.”
Mandy surveyed the crowded harbor as they sat down, sniffing at the usual Sevastopol smell of kerosene and diesel and seaweed but approving of the clear, tangy scent of the eucalyptus shrubs that ringed the balcony. She watched with a slight smile playing on her fine-boned, pale-skinned face as Dalton poured her a flute of Bollinger and held out his cigarette case, lined with fresh Cocktails, thinking, with an internal flinch, of Veronika Miklas back in Venice locked away in the Arsenale.
Mandy lifted her glass in a toast, they pinged and sipped, and then she sat back in her chair, drew on her cigarette, turned her head to blow the smoke away, looking very much like the young Katharine Hepburn as she did. She then let her smile lose some wattage and gave him a considering glare.
“So. Did you screw her?”
“Screw who?” asked Dalton rather weakly.
“That little Austrian gumshoe. The one who latched onto you in Vienna. Vickie Mukluks or something like that?”
“Veronika Miklas?”
Mandy waved that away with a dismissive hand.
“Answer the question, you slithering toad.”
“Do toads slither?”
“You do. Out with it. They say confession is good for the soul, although I’ve never tried it myself. Did you shag the girl?”
“No,” said Dalton, summoning as much force as his guilty mind could muster and working heroically to keep his expression expressionless. “No. I did not.”
Mandy lifted an eyebrow.
“On your sacred honor, as an officer and a gentleman?”
“On my sacred honor, as an officer and a gentleman.”
She reached for her flute, put it to her full red lips, and studied him over the glittering crystal rim as though he were the remaining half of some crawling thing she had found in her salad. She set the flute down carefully, leaned over, and used his tie to pull him close enough for a hungry, searching kiss.
“You,” she whispered in his ear, “are a lying shit.”
“SETTING that aside,” Mandy said, leaning back again, “what is our agenda here in this squalid Soviet sinkhole, Mr. Castle?”
Their rack of lamb—paired with asparagus, mint sauce, and tiny roasted potatoes—floated in on a large silver platter unsteadily piloted by a small mud-brown man with an absurd mustache and wearing a gravy-stained monkey suit that looked as if it zipped up the back and a bow tie that looked like it was made out of spray-painted cardboard. The lamb was, however, brilliant, and Dalton, suddenly ravenous, settled in for the long haul, as did Mandy, for whom all of the sensual appetites had irresistible charm. After a decent interval, the wreckage hauled away and the table duly whisked, Dalton poured out the last of the Bollinger, handed Mandy her flute along with a demitasse of thick espresso.
“Our agenda,” he said softly, taking her in and thinking that his libido, which had once been MIA, seemed to have reasserted itself in force, “is to address the killing of Galan and, while we’re at it, dig me out of a cesspit. How much do you know?”
Her face lost some of its cheer.
“I have most of it from Allessio. Poor Issadore. The Hessian gumshoe, that . . . hideous burned creature . . . you fought with in her flat. The car bomb at Leopoldsberg. The note from Dobri Levka. Is it true about the Mossad?
”
Dalton, his face growing stonier, said yes.
“Oh my,” said Mandy, a worried expression flickering across her face like the shadow of a swift. “Have you seen any sign? Not that one normally does until it’s too late.”
“None so far. And I’ve been looking.”
“What will you do if they do take a run at you?”
“Try to reason with them,” he said with a wry smile.
“In other words, strew their guts about the landscape in the usual Dalton style. That’ll do so much for U.S.-Israeli relations.”
“I think that’s the idea,” he said seriously.
“Kirikoff ? You flatter the man. That’s rather too clever for that fat gray slug, don’t you think?”
“He led us quite a dance up and down the Bosphorus and across the Black Sea, Mandy. And then got clean away.”
“With his pants flapping around his ankles and his great, wobbly plum pudding of an arse in the wind, I remind you. About this Mariah Vale creature, did I not warn you repeatedly about what was landing on our heads if Harvard Yard really took the town? Why do you think I went on leave?”
“Mandy, my darling, you went on leave because your daddy threatened to cut off your allowance and you couldn’t finance the Sloane Square Fandango on a paycheck from Langley.”
She made a moue and then smiled.
“Poppy’s such a teapot. Iraq was giving him a migraine. And he was being an awful bugger about my stipend. But I’m glad to be out of it for a while. Really, I don’t know how it will all end.”
“No? I’m getting a rough idea.”
“Yes,” she said, frowning. “That’s why I’m here.”
“And I thank you for it. How did you manage it?”
“Getting here without Langley knowing? Poppy commandeered the Lear and billed it to Threadneedle Street. I wasn’t even on the manifest. At this end, I was met by a lovely man who runs Poppy’s mining interests in the central Ukraine. His name is Earl Ford. He’s a cross between a Mafia hit man and the piano player in an upscale brothel. Quite well-off on his own. He keeps a pretty sloop in Balaklava. Has a huge condo there too.”
“Sounds like a good man to know.”
“Poppy thinks so,” she said quite seriously. “If all this goes south, I’d advise us to bear him in mind.”
“We will.”
Mandy stretched, sighed, gave him a coy and sleepy smile.
“So, Mr. Castle, dear boy, here I am, in the sinfully silky flesh. Tell me, are we leaving for Kerch right this very minute?”
Dalton shook his head.
“No. Too late in the day. It’s two hundred and fifty klicks overland, sixty from here to Simferopol—”
“God. That rathole—”
“Yes, and worse ratholes to follow. And a long, hard one hundred klicks over the spine and down to Feodosiya on the coast, and another one hundred klicks across some pretty bleak terrain to get into Kerch by the back door. Two-lane blacktop most of the way, but some of it could have worn down to dirt and gravel to within a hundred miles of Kerch. The hotel here has a fleet of Mitsubishi Lancers for rent. I’ve got one with an off-road upgrade, and I’m asking for extra tanks, a GPS, and some water bottles.”
“What’s our story? For the Russkies, I mean.”
“You’re my mistress. Locals love infidelity. It adds spice to their lives. You have pretensions to being a photographer and are simply on fire to document the entire Crimean Peninsula.”
“God,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Can’t we just take Poppy’s Lear? We could be there in a half hour.”
“The idea is to come in low, look around, find Irina Kuldic and Bogdan Davit, see if we can get a handle on what Kirikoff is up to. I don’t want to swan into town like Di and Dodi.”
“Dead, you mean?” she said, blinking sweetly. “Poor Lady Di. Always wanted a halo around her head and all she got was a steering wheel. By the way, how are you fixed for funds?”
“Until you arrived, I figured that I had enough for a month. With you here, I’ll be flat broke by Tuesday.”
“Well, I have good news for both of us. Allessio had a package waiting for me at Stansted airfield. I have it in my bag.”
“What is it?”
“Your trousseau, darling,” she said, quite pleased with herself. “The one you had stashed away in the Savoia.”
Dalton had kept a steel briefcase hidden at the back of a cleaner’s closet in the Savoia Hotel. In it, he had twenty grand in mixed euros, another ten thousand in U.S. dollars, and a small Crown Royal bag filled with 99.9 percent pure Canadian gold wafers. Along with a Colt Anaconda and four boxes of .44 Magnums.
“Including the Colt?” said Dalton, since flying public airways as he just had meant leaving his SIG behind in Venice.
“God yes,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Weighs a ton! Bloody great stainless-steel hand cannon with an eight-inch barrel. If I hadn’t already seen you naked, I’d think you were compensating for a personal shortcoming.”
“Anything for you?”
Mandy, taking another Cocktail and lighting it up with Dalton’s gold Cartier, nodded through the smoke. “Yes. I have my cute little SIG. And some of those spare bullet-holder thingys.”
“Magazines?”
“Whatever,” she said, waving away the comment with the smoke cloud. Dalton was very impressed about the trousseau’s unexpected arrival and said so.
“So was I,” said Mandy. “I just adore a man with bags full of solid-gold wafers. May I have just a teeny one? As a keepsake?”
Dalton, who knew his Pownalls, said, “How many have you already lifted?”
“Only two,” she replied with a sideways smile. “For mad money. So . . . we’re staying the night . . . are we?”
“Yes. I’ve already booked you an adjacent suite.”
“How very tactful. It follows that you already have a suite?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Mr. Castle, as your designated harlot I’ll be bunking with you. In flagrante. If only for the sake of the mission.”
“Mandy . . . we need to keep this—”
She set her flute down, glaring at him through the smoke.
“Oh no you don’t, you manky little git! I have had it with all this Hamlet hearts Ophelia stuff. Cora Vasari, a grown woman, on the flimsy excuse of a teensy-caliber bullet to the head, which she acquired only because she couldn’t follow Pascal’s simple instruction to sit quietly in her room, has allowed herself to be shut up in a tower like some dago Rapunzel, while you, my dear, have flirted with me as few men have and lived to tell the tale. Oh yes. I know. I let it slide after you stood me up in the middle of the Black Sea last winter. And if I were a cruel woman, I would call that the act of a sniveling eunuch. However, now that you’ve already boinked the Hessian Hussy, you will either stand and deliver tonight or die valiantly in the attempt. Are we clear on that?”
Tel Aviv
JOKO’S BEACH BAR, TEL AVIV BOULEVARD, NINE P.M. LOCAL TIME
The Mediterranean side of Tel Aviv Boulevard looked a lot like Panama City Beach, as Nikki Turrin and Ray Fyke walked across the still-warm sand toward the squared-off, bunker-style building that housed Joko’s Beach Bar. From the outside, at least, it was exactly the kind of migraine-inducing, rock-and-rolling stucco-walled beer joint that would have been packed with drunken kids from Ole Miss back on the Redneck Riviera. A few hard-nosed sago palms jutted up out of the grainy sand around Joko’s like jagged green bomb bursts, and the waterside deck was trimmed in red-and-blue neon, pulsing in time to the music. But when you looked the other way, back across Tel Aviv Boulevard, it was another story entirely.
Then you were looking at South Beach in Miami or Santa Monica, row upon row of expensive and stylish houses and condos, Art Deco hotels, first-class dining, upscale shops. Tel Aviv had floodlights and neon and glittering marquees stretching for miles in either direction along a wide four-lane street lined with royal palms, softly waving in the gentle wind of
f the Med.
This warm spring evening, the beachside walks were crowded with families out for a stroll, dating couples, kids running wild on the sand, and even a few surfers, like seals in their black wet suits, trying out tonight’s truly hopeless waves.
When she thought of Israel, Nikki had to admit, she pictured stony battlegrounds and ancient settlements: the Sinai and the Negev and the Golan Heights, battered but eternal Jerusalem, and the bleeding sores of Gaza and the West Bank. She did not think of the beaches and luxury hotels of Tel Aviv, of the river of SUVs and luxury sedans hissing past, the intricately laid stones of the walkway, the sparkling fountains, and the light off the wide Mediterranean floating above them like an aurora.
Ray Fyke, walking along beside her, almost but not quite taking her hand, seemed oblivious to the glamour. He was a looming presence in black slacks and a black polo, his muscular forearms and bulky chest stretching the material, his shaggy head moving from side to side as he studied the crowds swirling all around them, his easy loping stride covering the ground as she struggled to keep up with him in the deep sand.
They reached the entrance to Joko’s, and Fyke put out a hand to get the door for her. He was quite gallant for a drunken Irish roustabout, thought Nikki, who was gradually getting used to traveling with him. It was rather like traveling with your own personal panther. Fyke paused and grinned at her, his green eyes alight in the glow of the entrance floods.
