by David Stone
Except on one occasion.
“The last time I saw him was in Carmel. The day Laura died. He was wearing a navy blue pin-striped suit. Other than being dead, he looked splendid.”
He didn’t tell her about seeing his ghost again, in a dream of Cortona, while he was lying bleeding on the steps of the Basilica in the piazza. Nor did he tell her that in the dream his old friend Porter Naumann had tried to talk him into dying.
“Porter always knew how to dress.”
“Yes. Taught me everything I know.”
Mandy smiled, put the turquoise cigarette to her red lips, inhaled, the tip of the cigarette flaring into a yellow cat’s-eye in the half dark. The scent of tobacco—rich, dark, Turkish—filled the room, and the smoke drifted upward into the shadows, writhing gently. They sat together in silence, watching the smoke. After a time, Mandy spoke.
“It wasn’t us, you know.”
Dalton’s face got rockier, his mouth hardening.
“I hear you telling me.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“I was wondering.”
“Cather wants you to know that.”
“Gosh. This eases my mind wonderfully. I was fretting so.”
“Stallworth lied to you, Micah. I believe him. At the end, Stallworth was lying to you.”
Jack Stallworth had been Dalton’s boss, the head of the Cleaners Unit in Langley, a subgroup run under Clandestine Services, essentially a cadre of covert fixers whose brief had been to go wherever someone in the Agency had left a dangerous bloody mess and clean it up. Dalton and Stallworth had disagreed about a Clandestine operation called Orpheus. Their disagreement had ended Dalton’s career and Stallworth’s life.
“How do we know this?”
“Cather told me himself.”
Dalton grinned, a sardonic rictus that chilled her.
“Well, that’s a relief. Hugs all ’round, then?”
“I believe him.”
“I’m sure he thinks you do. You’re here.”
“And not dead?”
“Not yet. Try going home after you’ve accomplished whatever it is you’re here to accomplish.”
“For God’s sake, Micah, I’m the one who told you about Orpheus. If Cather had wanted you dead because you knew about Orpheus, why am I still alive?”
“Perhaps you reached an understanding?”
Mandy’s face went white. She said nothing for a while, but her anger was making the air crackle.
“You’re a mean-tempered, sanctimonious little prick.”
“Little?”
“Fuck you.”
“If you’d like. Let me move these dishes.”
They glared at each other for a time. The ice around the Bollinger bottle cracked with a silvery tinkle. Dalton saw a motion in his left eye and turned, half expecting to see Naumann’s ghost leaning back in the banquette, a cynical smile on his dead lips. But there was nothing there. Mandy reached for the Bollinger and refilled her flute, her eyes down and her nostrils flared over thin white lips.
“Crane said you’d be a prick. And Stennis Corso said you’d listen.”
“So they’re both right. I’m listening.”
“Tony Crane has a problem. In Singapore. Cather wants you to fix it.”
“Me?”
“You.”
“And if I fix this problem in Singapore?”
“Cather says you can come in.”
In spite of his cynicism, Dalton felt his heart rate jump.
“Back to Langley?”
Mandy looked down and away and then sharply back.
“No. Not right away. The story they told State about you and Stallworth, it would have to be undermined. And it couldn’t come from us.”
“Why?”
“Cather says the only way to rehabilitate you is to sink Stallworth’s reputation. It could be represented then . . .”
“To the DI?”
“Yes. And to the Secretary. They’d be able to tell her that your collision with Jack was based on information you had about his financial dealings.”
“Around Orpheus?”
“God no. Anything but.”
“Okay. Say Cather manages to rehabilitate me by slanging a dead man. I’d be back in the Agency? Officially?”
“Yes.”
“Reinstated? Record cleared? Pension? Benefits? The key to the pool room?”
“It’s a serious offer, Micah. What else have you got?”
Dalton lifted his hands, made an inclusive gesture.
“I have Venice. The mad love of a dangerous woman.”
Mandy waved that away like smoke.
“Bosh. Utter bosh. You? Permanent exile? A stateless man? Without meaningful work? You’d rot in two seasons. I know you too well. We think it was Branco Gospic who tried to kill you.”
“Hardly a leap. File under Stunningly Obvious.”
“What do you plan to do about it?”
“Something massive.”
“We could help. With that.”
“How?”
“Logistics. Information. Travel assistance. People to help you.”
“Ducky. Sounds like a travel ad. Why would Cather offer that?”
“Gratitude. Inducement. Motivation. He’s pretty worried about this thing in Singapore. He thinks you’re the ideal man to fix it.”
Dalton lifted the flute, drank. Savored it. He set it down.
“Okay. Tell me what Cather wants.”
“Do you remember a contract agent named Ray Fyke?”
Dalton laughed out loud.
“Fyke! That fucking lunatic? How could I forget him?”
“Tony Crane said you two had a history.”
“Oh yes. We did. He tell you what it was?”
“The Horn? Then Kosovo? The Grand Hotel Pristina?”
Dalton went inward, seeing the Soviet-style hotel, the beefy, bullet-headed men with gold chains around their greasy necks, while, outside the hotel, the bloodstained rubble lay piled in the streets, and, in the middle distance, the endless, half-felt rumble of the heavy guns, the thudding chatter of a machine gun, the popcorn crackle of small arms, the dark shape of Ray Fyke a few yards ahead, down a sewage-stinking alley, staggering under the weight of a fat man’s corpse, both of them drunk on slivovitz and giggling like loons, Fyke’s snaggletoothed grin lighting up his black-bearded face, his shadow huge against a neon sign that read KOZY’S KRAZY KIT-KAT KLUB, Fyke reeking of sweat, blood, cheap brandy and cheaper cigars.
In November 2002, Ray Fyke had gone dark on what was supposed to be a routine trapline job—running a string of midlevel sources and trolling for workable Humlnt somewhere in Southeast Asia. Fyke dropped off the grid, as if he had stepped off a bridge into the abyss, leaving behind a fog of ugly rumors and the reek of failure vaguely connected to his binge drinking and a subsequent ClandestineOps cluster fuck, the exact nature of which was never openly discussed at Dalton’s pay-grade level.
Dalton had never seen him again.
“IBIS. Fyke was IBIS,” he said, more to himself than to Mandy.
“And you were SHRIKE. Tony says they called you the Birdmen.”
“Ray Fyke’s dead. Or he’s gone so native we’ll never find him.”
“Apparently not. Someone answering his description is sitting in Cluster C at the Changi Prison right now.”
“Jesus. Poor bastard. Who’s got him?”
“The SID.”
“Holy Christ. Then he’ll never get out. Even if he does, he’ll be . . .”
“Ruined?”
“Yes. Ruined. Worse than dead. What is he accused of?”
“As a pretext, the Home Ministry has him on dereliction of duty. He was first mate of a gypsy tanker called the Mingo Dubai.”
“Was?”
“It was reported sunk. In a storm. Off the Kepulauan Lingga lighthouse. Eastern outlet of the Strait of Malacca.”
“How’d Ray Fyke get blamed for the sinking?”
“Probably
because he was the only survivor. Singapore thinks the ship was steered into a rogue wave in the middle of a nasty storm. Broke in two and sank with all hands. It’s happened to tankers before.”
“All hands except Fyke.”
“Except Fyke. They fished him out of the South China Sea. He was drunk as a lord, and laid it all on pirates.”
“Pirates? Sounds just like him. Did he have any proof?”
“Not a jot. They put a chopper over the site and found a massive, caustic spill and lots of bodies. Wearing life jackets. Debris all over.”
“What about the EPIRB beacon? It’s water-activated.”
“Never came on. Considering the state of the ship, it was probably out of whack, anyway. Fyke claimed they were overrun by a crew of Dyaks and Malays, who assaulted from a speedboat. Said they were helped by some of the crew members.”
“He say who?”
“The SID’s not releasing anything at all about his interrogation. One of our stringers in Singapore managed to reach the pilot of the chopper that pulled him out of the water. The guy remembered Fyke raving on about somebody named Magic.”
“What, like Magic Johnson?”
“Who’s he?”
“Did you run it against the crew manifest?”
That brought a wry smile to Mandy’s face.
“Crew list? Micah, this boat didn’t have a working EPIRB beacon, and the only lifeboat they found was shot full of bullet holes.”
“Machine gun?”
“No. They pulled it out and found a bunch of .303 slugs from an old Lee-Enfield rifle. They figure somebody on the crew was using it for target practice. At any rate, there was no manifest.”
“How’d they ID Fyke?”
“He still had his implant. Singapore ran him through a scanner and the casing showed up.”
“His trace tag? Why the hell would he keep that? I had mine taken out after the Horn. It was too much a telltale. Not worth the risk.”
“Tony says they tried to use it to locate Fyke back in 2002, but the signal was too weak for a fix.”
“And the SID removed it? How’d they know it was one of ours?”
“We’ve been sharing low-level hardware with them for over a year now. Remember? The Minister Mentor’s New Partnership Against Terror?”
“And how’d we find out about all this? Like, how’d Langley come up with the serial number on a tag that is currently in the hands of the SID?”
Mandy gave that some thought.
“That’s a hard one. Cather never told me.”
“We’d have to have somebody inside the Home Ministry.”
“I have no idea. Does it matter? They’ve got him and we want him.”
“I’d like to know how we got wind of the serial number. That’s an important bit of data. We need to know how Langley got it.”
“I’ll ask.”
“If they won’t tell you, or they shine you on, I want to know.”
“Know why?”
“No. Just if. Just tell me if Langley won’t reveal the source of that tag info. If they won’t, it means they’re protecting somebody close to the SID.”
“If they’ve got somebody inside the SID . . . why this mission?”
“Good question, Mandy. Very good question. In fact, it’s the question. So make sure to ask. Jesus, you know, Fyke, all this, it’s self-inflicted bullshit. Ray went dark. He knows about going dark. He should have had it removed. If I recall, didn’t we put out a DSDNI order with a lot of our allied agencies? That would have included the Singaporean Intelligence guys. Protocol would have been to simply give us back our guy. I know those orders get ignored all the time. But why didn’t we insist?”
“Maybe Cather doesn’t want the SID to know we care that much. The official Agency position is, who the hell is Ray Fyke?”
“Stupid, stupid, stupid. Fyke should have had that thing removed.”
“Well, it’s stuck pretty deep into his back.”
“He never took that stuff seriously enough. The mook.”
“You liked him?”
“Yes. Yes I did. He was a good fieldman. For a Brit. The SID knows he’s a spook, then?”
“That’s right.”
“Jesus. Those guys will take him apart just for chuckles.”
“That’s what Cather thinks.”
“Why does he want me to help?”
“He told Tony that since IBIS is one of ours, it’s a London Station problem, and you were London Station too.”
“And Fyke was a friend of mine . . .”
“That was a consideration.”
“What does he want? Specifically?”
“You’re a Cleaner, aren’t you? Cather wants the problem cleaned.”
Dalton was silent. The sound of the Florian’s string quartet, playing its first set of the evening, drifted back from the piazza outside, something lilting and regal by Offenbach. Tales of Hoffmann. The candles guttered in a random breeze and golden smoke swirled upward into the dark.
“Why? Ray Fyke’s been dark for years. Whatever he knew back when he was operational, it’s of no tactical or strategic use to anyone now.”
“Tony told Cather that you’d ask that. Cather said to tell you that he can personally confirm that Fyke has indirect knowledge of an Intelligence asset that is of ongoing strategic importance to national security and that to have this asset compromised would be very damaging.”
“To whom?”
“Tony didn’t ask, of course. You know the drill.”
“I see. Not very persuasive, is it?”
“I guess everybody feels that you have no choice. And you’ve done this kind of thing before, haven’t you?”
“If you’re talking about Calixto Obregon, he was in Matamoros. That was a Mexican prison, full of terminally stupid American dopers and drunken guards addicted to La Mordida. Fyke’s in Changi Prison. In Singapore. They don’t take bribes in Singapore. There’s no way in hell anyone can get to him there. Not if the SID is holding him. It can’t be done. It’s an operational impossibility, even for one of our best extraction teams. And they’re not going to let any American in to see him. The only way to—”
“Cather knows that. He has a solution.”
That stopped him.
“And the solution is . . . ?”
Mandy lifted her hands, made an inclusive gesture that took in the room and somehow invoked most of Venice as well.
Not here.
“Fine. I’m going to be taking that on faith, am I?”
“Cather wants you to commit before we tell you. The thing is, he needs you to get Fyke out alive. Talking and walking.”
“Which means Cather wants to know if Fyke got dismantled enough to have him compromise this mysterious ongoing asset?”
“Yes. He’d have to be debriefed. In person.”
“Setting aside the complete impossibility of extracting Fyke from Cluster C . . . unless Cather has something deeply brilliant in mind—”
“He does.”
“Even so, Fyke’s not going to be debriefed by us. Unless Cather’s going to let us know what he’s trying to protect. Fyke would have to be handed over to an Agency team that knew precisely what it was looking for.”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“Hell, Fyke may not even know what he knows. It could be anything—some insignificant event that Fyke had a glancing connection to. The SID could put him feetfirst into a wood chipper and he wouldn’t know why until he screamed it out at the very end. Poor bastard. This is as ugly as it gets.”
“Yes. Nasty.”
“Very.”
“So, if this mission goes south . . . ?”
“Three muted cheers in the bubble, coffee and doughnuts all around, and another nameless star goes up on the Wall. What if the SID develops an interest in me, Mandy? I know all about Orpheus. The SID could get it out of me if they had enough time. Why would Cather risk that?”
“An excellent question. My guess is that whatever Fyke knows
is at the very least of equal importance—”
“I fail and they have us both. Fyke and me.”
“You’re to have a microsurette.”
“Not a chance. One wrong move with those inserts and you’re a three-line obit on page sixty-two of The Sentinel. Anyway, if the SID took me in, they’d scan me just like they scanned Fyke. They’d see it.”
“One would assume that by then you’d have activated it, and the point would be rather moot.”
“All this just to get Ray Fyke out of Changi so the Meat Hookers can gut and flay him themselves. To protect an ongoing asset somewhere?”
“That’s what our business is, Micah. So. Will you do it?”
Dalton considered her red lips and snow-white neck while he worked out the odds. Mandy, waiting, knew what he was thinking. He had few other options, and most of them would likely either ruin him slowly or kill him outright. Dalton lifted his glass to Mandy, who raised hers and waited.
“Fine. I’m in. Morituri.”
“Te salutas,” she replied, finishing an old joke, and they both drank. Mandy put her glass down, stood up. Dalton rose with her.
“How am I traveling?”
“I have papers in my room. Everything we’ll need.”
“We?”
“I’m going with you.”
“To Singapore? Like hell you are. And I don’t need a minder.”
“Yes you do, actually. Anyway, that’s the deal.”
“You knew I’d say yes, didn’t you?”
“We hoped.”
“Who’s in charge of this op, then?”
“Why, Micah. Darling. Of course you’ll be in charge.”
“Yeah. I see that.”
“Knew you would. You’re a dear boy.”
“If we’re going to go flying off the grid into darkest Southeast Asia, we’ll need buckets of hard cash.”
“We’ll have it. Whatever we need.”
“Where are you staying?”
“I have rooms at La Giostra. We can go there now?”
An invitation?
Dalton shook his head.
“No. In the morning.”
Mandy gave him a meaningful look.
“Are you still in Porter’s suite?”
“Yes.”
“I see,” she said, with an uneven smile that did not light her eyes.
The buzzer at the entrance to the suite chirped twice.
