The Orpheus Deception

by David Stone

  “Yes?” said Dalton, giving Mandy a warning look.

  “It’s me. Alessio.”

  Dalton set the Ruger down as Brancati pulled the tapestry back, filling the entrance with navy blue and gleaming black leather, his seamed face set and stony. He nodded to Mandy Pownall.

  “Please excuse me, Signorina Pownall.”

  Mandy, who had seen surveillance pictures of Brancati but had never seen the man in the flesh—especially not in the striking uniform of a major in the Carabinieri—had a look of frankly sexual delight on her face. She did not exactly sparkle at him, but Brancati’s face colored just a little and he gave her a brief, predatory once-over before turning back to Dalton, who was now on his feet and wary.

  “You need to come,” said Brancati. “I have a boat waiting.”

  “Where?”

  “The Lido beach. Near the ospedale.”

  “Now?”

  “Now,” said Brancati.

  8

  Cluster C, Changi Prison Complex, Singapore

  Fyke had been here—wherever here was—for either the last four weeks or since the Rape of Nanking, during which time he’d been beaten so often—they wore padded leather gloves and cheerfully delivered short, sharp, lead-weighted rap-and-slaps, as if his head were a speed bag—beaten so vigorously that he felt he was now sufficiently stunned to sit in the House of Lords. They had been careful in only one regard. They never damaged the incision in his back, where the SID doctors had removed his tag. Decent of them, really. Oddly, his beaters had asked no questions at all, had not even spoken to each other, as if he had just been one of the Nautilus machines. Anyway, all that had stopped a while ago, he was reasonably sure.

  Or not.

  Time was a relative concept, as either Einstein’s or Fyke’s very first hooker had once pointed out. Lately, his keepers—three SID knuckle-dragging goons he called Big Dink, Little Dink, and No Dink—had taken to running the light-and-dark-and-cold thing—keeping the lights on for hours, then turning them off for hours, or days, or ten minutes, there was no way to tell, since he was naked and therefore watchless—by the way, it had been a lovely watch, too, an original thirties-era Hamilton that had belonged to a Marine Recon vet he had worked with in Mogadishu—the Skinnies had gotten at him while he was still alive, but Fyke had dropped in on them like the Hammer of God. Killing all the Skinnies hadn’t saved the Recon vet, but he did save the Hamilton—it was still on the guy’s wrist, although the guy’s wrist was some distance from what may have been the rest of him—well, anyway, the Recon vet was longtime dead, and Fyke figured they’d be reunited soon—he found himself humming a bar or two from “Memories” and clapped a stopper over that as soon as he realized it. Perhaps he was completely losing it. For a while now, Fyke had taken to sitting in a corner of the stark, staring, chill-to-the-bone white cell and watching the big, thick door—padded, so he couldn’t hurt himself, as was the whole room—watching the door the way a caged cat will watch the door: coiled, ready.

  Ready?

  Not exactly.

  If he tried to stand, he’d fall over sideways. He couldn’t go two rounds with Elton John. He scrubbed at his naked arms with the padded cotton mittens—thumbless—that they had strapped on him after he’d tried to pluck out his carotid—an old SID trick to frustrate prisoners who wanted to arrange their own exits; actually, he’d tried it only to freak out Big Dink and get him to say something. On the other hand, regarding the whole carotid-plucking-out thing, and notwithstanding the fact that his old Escape and Evasion teacher at Hereford, a dipsomaniacal Ulsterman named McAvity, hotly contended that he had actually seen it done, Fyke’s heart wasn’t really in it. Not quite yet, anyway.

  He’d check in again on the idea in a few weeks, if he was still alive. At any rate, for all of the above reasons, Ray Fyke was finding his mental clarity harder to locate than Michael Moore’s neck.

  When he was more lucid—after the last beating?—pain concentrated the mind wonderfully, but not for very long—he had tried to figure out why the SID was interested in him at all. Yes, he had once been SAS, and, yes, he had once been seconded to the Americans at London Station and had got up to all sorts of sticky work with those dashing boyos—he flashed briefly on Kosovo and a hard-faced, pale-eyed Special Forces spook he’d nicknamed the Crocodile because of the snaky way he could slither up on a sentry . . .

  Dalton.

  Micah Dalton . . . that was his name.

  Known as SHRIKE to London Station, one of the famous Bird-men. Actually, Mikey had been a pretty good fieldman, for an American. He’d met him in the Horn and worked on a couple of tricksy ops in Pakistan and then later in Kosovo . . . A very good man—could drink you into a coma, too, which was saying something, coming from an SAS man—and there had been others, other ops and other jolly good toffs to work with . . .

  Of course, all of that was before . . .

  Before his last mission . . . before it all went to rat shit in one cataclysmic, self-inflicted cluster fuck. Don’t go there, Raymond, old lad. Don’t ever go there . . . God, he could use a drink . . . But, for the life of him, he could not get a grip on anything that he would have that the SID might be interested in. He hadn’t been in the field since . . . before.

  On the other hand, in the good-news column, he still had most of his teeth, and he still retained the field-issue kit of fully operational male genitalia, which the SID was famous for ripping out right after your Intake because it amused the hell out of them and demoralized the hell out of you, sitting there . . . Cold. Naked. Toothless.

  He tried to say “testicleless” out loud, but it was just too damn hard. Anyway, as you can imagine, it was all very depressing. And it all meant . . . nothing. Just bloody bad luck. Should have had the Agency tag taken out after he went dark. Never got around to it. And, anyway, the battery had died the year . . . before.

  He figured that the SID was just rooting around inside his brain on the off chance that they’d come across something intriguing. Just fishing, really. Putting a mixed bag of Intel into their computers—raw data—and then seeing if anything related to other data, cross-checking files and names, that would explain the disorganized and routine nature of his interrogation.

  If the SID had reason to believe he was in possession of something truly spectacular, they’d have a team of truly gifted sadists working on him night and day. This felt more like a training mission that Big Dink was running for the edification of Little Dink and No Dink:

  Yon Captive Brit: How to Deconstruct.

  Well, anyway, whatever it was they were up to, he was going to die here—he’d heard enough about the SID from everyone in the business—so the idea was to hold up his end and not let these fucking Asiatics see a Noble Briton crawl. So, as he was saying, he crouched there naked in the corner and watched the door like a feral cat. And while he watched it, he drifted off a little—the mind becomes a wanderer when the body is in a box—and, this time, it wandered farther away than the walls of . . .

  Changi Prison.

  Cluster C in Changi Prison. That’s where he was.

  Crikey.

  Changi Prison. Three-time nominee for Worst Festering Rathole in This Spiral Arm, by the Venusian Academy of Darts and Fetters. Oh my. Better to close your eyes for just a second and think of your mummy.

  So he did. His eyes grew heavy, and he began to slide.

  Sleep came in on little cat’s feet; his eyes grew heavy . . .

  . . . And then he soared.

  Like an albatross, he soared, high above the concrete bunkers of Changi Prison—high above Cluster C, sailing over the forty-foot-high walls and the motion-sensing cameras and the heat sensors and, of course, the lovely chain-gun towers—soaring higher and higher, leaving Changi Prison far beneath, high enough now to see the airport by the water, then, higher still, the pancake-flat island of Singapore receding wonderfully, and he could see north all the way to Kuala Lumpur and south to the Malacca Strait, and higher, ever higher, un
til he could look to his left as he flew northward over Kuala Lumpur . . . he could just see Madagascar far across the Indian Ocean . . . and, in the north, at the farthest edge of the horizon, a strip of white sand edged by palms . . . the beaches of Phuket . . . and, beyond those crescent shores, the reptile green, softly mounded domes of the Central Highlands of Viet—

  The door slammed open, and they were on him again: Big Dink— a flat-faced, pock-skinned, jaundiced-looking, bald-headed, foul-breathed sweathog in too-tight prison blues—along with his two reptilian sidekicks, a tall, effeminate coffee-colored Hindu—No Dink—and the compact, flexible little rat boy who looked a bit like a Gurkha—Little Dink. Fyke was jolted earthward, as they pinned his writhing body to the greasy padding of the floor. He felt a knee on the back of his neck and his arms being wrenched out of their sockets, as they held him fast . . . and then a sharp, piercing pain in his back. Then . . . warmth . . . a river of warm, rushing bliss that began in his skull and rushed down his neck and spread out like the Thames into the broad deltas of his chest and belly and thighs . . . apparently, the light and cold and sensory-deprivation part of the softening process had come to an end and now the SID had taken things to Level 2. His last thought, as the tide of warmth and calm rose up over his head and covered him in blessed sleep, was that a real cat would have been watching the door.

  9

  The Lido Beach, Venice

  The Carabinieri pursuit boat was shell gray over matte black; long, lean, and fast, with a deep V hull that sliced through the choppy crosscurrents of the lagoon with a hissing snarl. Inside the low-ceilinged cabin, his grim face uplit by red-glowing dials and a small halogen lamp near the pilot chair, Brancati stared silently out at the black night as a beaded necklace of red-and-green lights in the distance grew closer—the gap of San Niccolò by the airport, and, beyond that, the broad Adriatic Sea, roaring and restless in a rising wind, white shark’s teeth curling on the tips of long, unsteady rollers. Weather was coming in, a growing bank of green clouds on the radar display. Dalton eyed it from time to time, the way a man might watch the slow progression of a snake across a marble floor, but he said nothing to break the silence in the ship.

  Brancati was smoking one of his Toscanos with a closed and brooding expression, his thoughts turned inward, wondering what he was going to do about Dario DioGrazzi, the twenty-four-year-old Carabinieri clerk they were holding in the Lazaretto right now. As hard as it was for Brancati to accept, Galan’s proof was undeniable— a clear videotape of DioGrazzi sitting in a chair at the Café Electro last night, sending the digital shot of Dalton off to an IP address in Montenegro operated by a known associate of Stefan Groz. DioGrazzi was being questioned right now by one of their midlevel security people—so far, quite gently—in the early stages of an attempt to uncover how much had been betrayed and for how long.

  Why was a matter for later.

  The difficulty for Brancati—aside from his murderous anger at the fact of the betrayal—was that young Dario was a distant cousin of his wife’s family and had been recruited and trained under Brancati’s wing. It was a cold comfort to Brancati that Issadore Galan had not suspected the boy either. Galan had been following another faint scent, looking in another direction entirely, so the exposure of this lad had come as a shock to both of them, if for very different reasons.

  Still, what to do with him now was a troubling matter, since the penalty for selling state secrets to a foreign entity was twenty very hard years. So, Brancati was radiating suppressed rage, and the young carabiniere at the wheel was glancing at him from time to time with wary apprehension.

  Dalton stood behind Brancati, bracing himself on the chairback, staring out through the windshield at the lights of the Lido streaming past on their starboard rails, his mind as far from here as Brancati’s, playing on the immense frying pan full of steaming heat and bustling crowds that was the island of Singapore, and on the northeast part of the city in particular, on the square mile of white concrete bunkers that was Changi Prison.

  This uncomfortable silence, heavy with meanings not fully understood, oppressed all three men, carried each across the dark water in a tightly sealed carapace, each man alone in his thoughts. In a few minutes, they had reached and rounded the Lido gap by the airport. The Adriatic took them into its vast, booming dark, and the shop-worn Lido beaches unwound along their starboard side like a string of dirty pearls, half lit in hard, mercury lights, glowing a greasy blue in the dampness, each light surrounded by a distinct halo. Drops of rain began to spatter the windshield and the young captain, glancing nervously at Brancati, finally spoke, in Italian, his voice tight and his lips thinned by stress.

  “Sir, Major Brancati, sir—you did not say which beach.” Brancati, looking back at Dalton with a startled air, as if he had forgotten he was there, faced out to sea again and answered the boy in English, a brooding, baritone growl, almost too low to hear over the muted burbling of the boat’s Maserati engines.

  “Have you no eyes, Rafael? You see the lights! The bagni communale, by the Ospedale al Mare,” he said, gesturing toward a low cluster of buildings a hundred yards up an arc of gray sand lit by a string of cold-blue beach lights. In the middle of the narrow crescent of sand, close to the waterline, they could see a flare of brighter lights, hard and yellow, and two police boats, bobbing in the shallow surf, blue lights slowly churning. The pilot brought the boat in through the chop, slowing as the gravel shoals of the long bay rose up under the keel. The tone of the engines dropped, and the stern rose up as their wake caught up with them. The boat surfed the last few hundred feet until the keel scraped on the beach, where it settled and steadied, the waves curling around the hull.

  Two men—black figures silhouetted against the lights of the beach—strode out into the shallows and took the prow in hand. Brancati looked at Dalton, gave him a weary smile, and both men climbed out and stepped off the bow and onto the coarse, sandy beach. The air was dank, smelling of dead fish and rotting seaweed. Twenty feet down, the men, gathered around a brightly lit tent on the beach, watched in silence as Brancati and Dalton slogged their way through the sand. Issadore Galan—short, bent, moving unsteadily—detached himself from the group, shuffling through the shale, dragging his left foot slightly.

  They met him at the edge of the light cast by portable lamps positioned around the tent, which was actually more of a standing nylon wall pinned to the sand with aluminum rods. Three young men in Carabinieri uniforms and one old man in a yellow slicker stood in silence, watching them. Seven hundred yards out in the Adriatic, Kiki Lujac sat at the wheel of the darkened Subito, his attention fixed on the shoreline. The Subito was riding on two heavy Danforths, her lines straining against the wind; Lujac had a long Steadicam lens that was trained on the men on the beach. Music was playing softly on the ship’s sound system—Pink Martini—and a heavy crystal glass full of Oban sat in a gimballed tray at his left hand. The ship rose and fell on the waves like a dreamer breathing in deep sleep. Kiki watched the men from out of the great darkness of the Adriatic Sea and felt the light-headedness, the short, rapid beating, the rush of blood in his throat, the erotic charge that he always felt when he watched people from a long distance.

  Kiki Lujac liked to watch, and this evening he was watching Micah Dalton, had the lens fixed on his hard cheek as he stood in a little group of men, his pale eyes fixed on the face of Issadore Galan. Lujac felt close enough to reach out and run his fingertips gently along the man’s jawline. He was truly a beautiful thing, with the kind of natural physical grace you would see in a racehorse or a cliff diver. Lujac hoped he would have a chance to photograph him before he died. And then after. Perhaps even during. That would be a show to start the critics talking. The idea warmed his lower belly, and he ran off a series of telephoto shots just to keep the charge running. Without taking his eye away from the viewfinder, Lujac reached out and turned up the gain on a radio receiver.

  The hissing sound of beach curl came from the speakers and fille
d the cabin of the Subito, along with the mutter of idling police boats, and, under that, the muted murmur of men’s voices and the droning hum of the portable generator powering the police lights. Lujac turned a dial on the radio set beside him, and the white noise diminished enough for him to make out the voices of the three men standing apart, down at the water’s edge. Early in the day, Gospic’s man in the Carabinieri had placed a remote-controlled directional mike in the palm line not far from the place Lujac had chosen. Now Lujac watched and listened.

  “SHE HAS NOT been in the water long,” Galan was saying. “One of the gardeners found her here, a few feet from the water. The gulls have been at her, but not too much.”

  “Which way is the current going?” asked Brancati. Galan made a gesture, indicating the rolling surf, the dark sea beyond, his black eyes sliding across but not seeing the low black mass far out on the water.

  “Out now, more or less. It runs slantwise to the Lido at this time of year, and makes no more than three or four knots at best.”

  “So she was brought here by the currents?”

  Galan shook his head but not with conviction.

  “We cannot say. If she went into the water up there”—he indicated the gap of San Niccolò airport—“then she might have been caught up in the flow and brought down the shoreline until she reached the shallows. Then the wave action might have brought her ashore. There is no way to be sure. The tides here are affected by the shallows, by the shoals, so there is no clear stream to judge by.”

  “And what do you think?” asked Brancati, gently.

  “I think we cannot know. It is only a feeling. The current is running out. But she should have been drawn out with the rush and she was not. The season is over, but there are always a few people walking the beach. If she had been here in the afternoon, they would have seen her. Yet here she lies. But there is always ambiguity in this kind of a finding.”