The Orpheus Deception

by David Stone

  The engine powered up in a throaty rumble, and the limo slipped away into the night, showing a brief flash of taillights as it braked on Netheravon Road, and then Dalton was alone under the low, dimly lit mahogany marquee, breathing in the scent of salt air, his heartbeat gradually returning to sub-myocardial-infarction levels. In the distant south, in the first pale glow of the oncoming sunrise, he could see a silvery plane heading skyward out of a glow of hard-white light that could only be Changi Airport.

  He pulled out his cell, considered and rejected the idea of calling the U.S. Embassy and asking for Mandy Pownall. Either she had made it or she hadn’t. The absence of a panicked phone call from Langley argued for the former. He flipped the phone shut, extracted a pack of Mandy’s Balkan Sobranie Cocktail cigarettes, pondered the color scheme and had just chosen turquoise, when he heard a whispered hiss of wood on steel and a shaft of warm yellow light fell across him. A tall, slender figure, silhouetted in the amber light pouring from the open door, bowed once, and said:

  “Mr. Dalton. Please come in. We are ready for you now.”

  25

  The National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland

  “What am I looking at here, Oakland?”

  Mr. Oakland, who preferred to be called Mr. Oakland, kept his eyes on the monitor, partly because the short and nasty little snuff video held a sick fascination for him that never seemed to weaken, but also because the Assistant Director of Research Analysis was a retired Marine Corps Intelligence Colonel who had been terribly maimed in a roadside bombing in Anbar Province, and now the left side of his face and most of his neck looked like he was wearing the peeled skin of a purple lizard as a kind of half mask. Mr. Oakland, an intelligent and ambitious but rather diffident man, did not want to cause any further offense to the AD of RA by visibly flinching away from a direct look at the injury, which he had done twice already. Mr. Oakland was aware, on a subliminal level, that the AD of RA couldn’t give a rat’s kidney what Mr. Oakland thought of his face, but this insight never seemed to drill its way through to the surface of his mind.

  Mr. Oakland pursed his soft red lips in silent consideration.

  “Well, sir, I’ve had our people do a great deal of analysis on the terrain, and I can confirm that the film was taken in the central cordillera of Eastern Europe, possibly in the northern Balkans or even in northern Italy somewhere. Time of year, based on the vegetation, between late August and early September. It was shot on a Sony digital camera from a distance of about fifty yards, using a five-power digital zoom and a three-power optical zoom. The Internet image is reasonably dense, so we can assume that the camera was pretty high on the pixel range and the original footage was pretty clear. So an expensive camera, and new. Which means the events taking place in the video would be recent, as recent as the fall of this year. I had the techs pull out and enhance facials of as many of the people in the footage as they could. We got negative FR on all the women, but this one individual got a strong positive, the large chap with the tattoo across his chest. The tattoo shows a lance bearing the flag of the Kosovo Liberation Army, and, as you can see, it’s depicted as piercing the breast of an American bald eagle. The Face Recog boys”—Oakland liked to say things like “the Face Recog boys”; it sounded so operational that he simply had to repeat it—“the Face Recog boys have positively ID’d the man as Dzilbar Svetan Kerk. He’s wanted by The Hague for war crimes committed in Kosovo while under the command of Radko Mladic and Slobodan Milošević. Face Recog also made some tentative IDs of two of the other guys”—here, he freeze-framed the video and closed in on two of the beefy guys in too-tiny Speedos—“this guy with the gray goatee could be a KA of Kerk’s by the name of Josef Perchak, and this other—”

  “What’s a KA?”

  “A known associate, sir—”

  “Well, say so, Oakland. I had it up to here with jargon in the Corps.”

  “Yes, sir. Well, sir, as I was saying—”

  “Are you convinced the video’s for real? These are actual deaths. Not faked for some fucking sicko movie about to be released? Some PR thing?”

  “Well, my people seem to feel the video is genuine. But, of course, absent any real on-site inquiry, we would need to have SOCOM insert a team to pull tissues, samples.”

  “SOCOM, Oakland?”

  Mr. Oakland reddened.

  “I’m sorry. I mean—”

  “I know who you mean, Oakland. You get anything from our own system on this Dzilbar Svetan Kerk asshole? Or Perchak?”

  Oakland seemed to swell up a little. He licked his soft red lips.

  “Yes, sir. We certainly did.”

  “What’d you get?”

  “We have HumInt and SigInt. Both confirm that Kerk was last seen in Pristina. At the Grand. In June of this year. The Germans think he’s in business with the Chechyns now, trading guns and shape charges for opium base out of Afghanistan. The Taliban are involved. But the really key issue is a rather disturbing digital packet from one of our FISA searches in which Kerk is heard making a reference to a scientist named Vladimir Pasechnik, a microbiologist working for an organization called Biopreparat.”

  “Jesus. I know what that was!”

  “Yes. Biopreparat was the Soviet germ warfare laboratory. Alebikov, the defector, worked there until 1992. After September eleven, he was all over the talk shows, telling everybody who would listen about the things they were working on. Weaponized smallpox. Anthrax spores. After the Soviets fell apart, Alebikov told Sam Nunn that as many as seventy thousand people who used to work there had gone off to places like North Korea and Iraq. That was part of the reason we went into Iraq in the first place.”

  “Tell me about it. Fucking Eye-raq. Fucking WMDs. Far as I’m concerned, WMD stands for Where’s My Dick? Didn’t Pasechnik die under some kind of weird circumstance?”

  “Yes. After he defected from Biopreparat, he worked in the U.K., formed his own company, Regma Biotechnics. He was found dead of an apparent stroke, although he had no previous diagnosis. In the FISA packet, Kerk is heard saying that he managed the Pasechnik file.”

  “Who was he talking to?”

  “A woman. Unknown. Unknown location too. The call was routed through a microwave tower in Odessa, but it seemed to be only a switch box. We lost the track after Odessa. The Pasechnik case is only part of the picture. Over the next few months, as many as ten more people, all of them involved in Biopreparat or in similar fields of weaponized germ warfare, were killed or died under mysterious circumstances. Set Van Nguyen was working on a virulent mouse pox strain when he died of asphyxia in Geelong, Australia. Two Russians, Ivan Glebov and Alexi Brushlinski—Biopreparat scientists—were murdered in Moscow a few weeks later. Victor Korshunov, massive head trauma, in Moscow. Then Ian Langford in the U.K. Several others, all around the world. All dead in the space of six months. All died violently or were said to have committed suicide. Three more— Avishai Berkman, Amiramp Eldor, Yaacov Matzner—were on a Siberian Airlines flight from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk. The flight was hit by a Ukrainian surface-to-air missile and crashed into the Black Sea. The Ukrainians denied any involvement, but the investigators decided it had been an accidental shoot down by some half-trained Ukrainian soldier stoned on vodka.”

  “I remember those news stories. Big sensation, and then it all disappeared. The CIA have anything for you? On this Dzilbar Kerk guy? Any other link to Pasechnik or Korshunov or any of the others?”

  “Well, since all those leaks to the New York Times, we’ve been a little wary of letting the CIA have everything we find. We try to channelit directly to Defense and State, and let them walk it back to Langley.”

  “So you haven’t asked Langley? Yet?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Don’t. Leave them out of the loop. Oakland, I gotta say, I don’t like this Kerk guy’s connection with a bunch of dead germ warfare people. I mean, what the fuck killed these people in this video? That’s no coincidence. That’s tactical. Where’d you find th
is clip, anyway?”

  “Ahh, it . . . Well, it first appeared on YouTube, sir.”

  “On YouTube? How the fuck did it get on YouTube?”

  “Thousands of clips are posted on YouTube every day.”

  The AD of RA gave Oakland a long considering appraisal that Oakland could feel in his boxers. His courting tackle was retracting like the head of a nervous turtle. A very small, nervous turtle.

  “The important question here isn’t how, Mr. Oakland. It’s why. You follow the Internet closely, do you, Mr. Oakland? Got your own Facebook page? Read all the hot blergs?”

  “That’s blog, sir.”

  “I’m heating you up, Oakland. Try to roll with it. So you’re a crackerjack Webster’s, are you?”

  Mr. Oakland reddened slightly, and his eyes flicked around the room, coming back to rest on a point midway between the second and third button on the AD of RA’s shirt.

  “I . . . dabble . . . a bit. Of course, I’m not an aficionado—”

  “No. Neither am I. Come clean, pal. Some geek kid on your staff bring this video to you?”

  “Well, we cast a pretty wide net in my department, of course. All on the same team. All in harness, you know, working shoulder to shoulder—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who brought this to your desk?”

  “Well, I’d have to look at the staffing sheets.”

  “The staffing sheets?”

  “Yes. The—”

  “You do that. Whoever spotted this clip, I want to meet him. Now.”

  “Ahh . . . Her, actually. I think. It’s coming back to me.”

  “Yeah?” said the AD of RA, smiling.

  Possibly smiling. It was hard to tell with the AD of RA.

  “I thought it would.”

  26

  Hendon Hills Golf and Country Club, Changi Village, Singapore

  Dalton came through the doors and into the soft, warm light of a long, wood-paneled lobby that stretched away into darkness. The building smelled of wood polish and incense, and music was playing faintly in the air, something lush and full of soaring strings but Asian and rather strange at the same time. Dalton got it in a second. It was the soundtrack to Memoirs of a Geisha. Yo-Yo Ma. He had the CD in his flat in Belgravia. Right now, he missed his flat in Belgravia. If he ever got back there with Cora whole and well, he intended to lock the door and rip the phone out of the wall and kill a bottle of Bolly and keep her safe in his bed for a hundred days. The person who had greeted him, a tall, athletic-looking Chinese man in a soft-tan linen shirt and pale green silk slacks, stepped back into the glow of a downlight, studying Dalton the way a keeper studies the big cats, a calm, self-contained, heavy-lidded gaze, his lean face shadowed, and two small points of reflected light in his dark, deep-set eyes.

  “I am Mr. Kwan,” he said, bowing formally.

  “Mr. Kwan,” said Dalton, waiting.

  “May I ask you if you are armed, Mr. Dalton?”

  “You may. I’m not.”

  Mr. Kwan smiled. His teeth were in excellent condition, but the man himself seemed ageless, neither young nor old. His skin was dry, and although his carriage was erect and firm, he had an air of suppleness and ease of movement. Martial arts, Dalton decided, blended disciplines. Skilled. Could he take him? Yes. Would it be fun? No.

  “We will assume you are a man of honor, Mr. Dalton. Will you walk this way, please?”

  Dalton stifled the Groucho Marx comeback, sleeplessness and a killer hangover making him a little giddy, and he padded down the long, carpeted hallway behind Mr. Kwan, who appeared to glide rather than walk. Dalton tried to glide too, but the best he could manage was a kind of hip-swinging sashay, which he stopped when he got a look at himself in a full-length mirror at the end of the hall. Mr. Kwan made a left and rolled smoothly off toward a pair of intricately carved wooden doors inlaid with brass-and-silver bars in a pleasing geometric pattern. The doors were huge and heavy, but when Mr. Kwan touched one of them it opened in a silent sweep to reveal a warm, wood-lined, low-ceilinged, amber-lit denlike room filled with comfortable leather chairs. A fire was crackling away in a huge limestone-slab fireplace. A woman was sitting in one of two club chairs positioned by the fire. She was Minister Dak Chansong. She rose as Mr. Kwan stepped back to hold the door open for Dalton. Dak Chansong was smiling. The smile looked unconvincing on her sour face, but it seemed reasonably sincere. Dalton smiled back as he reached the fireplace.

  “Mr. Dalton,” she said. “Thank you for coming.”

  “Always a pleasure, Minister. I find Sergeant Ong quite stimulating.”

  Dak Chansong’s smile spread across her parchment face and reached her sharp black eyes, the eyes of a raven or a raptor.

  “Sergeant Ong returns the compliment. Mr. Kwan . . . ?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “May I trouble you for some tea? And then perhaps you would be so kind as to go and see if our guest is settling in. Tea, Mr. Dalton?”

  Dalton hated tea.

  “Yes, please.”

  Kwan bowed, withdrew in a glide. Dalton and Dak Chansong sat down in their respective chairs. The fire crackled away tastefully. Dak was wearing a high-necked Chinese jacket in deep plum over a pair of black silk pleated trousers. A ring on her left hand glimmered in the firelight, a large ruby in a gold-wire setting. In the half-light, she looked quite lovely, except for the raven’s eyes. Neither spoke during the two minutes it took for Mr. Kwan to return with a large silver tray and a full English tea service, which he set down on a low teak table between them. He performed the classic English tea ceremony in solemn silence, stood up again, and looked down at the Minister with an expression of affection, turned to give Dalton a formal bow, with a rather-less-loving expression, and was gone. Silence, then, and the crackle of the fire. Chinese silence; a kind of contest between two opposing wills. Whoever breaks it loses . . . something. Dalton was never sure quite what.

  He sipped at his tea—he still hated tea—and set the cup down.

  “The Home Minister,” she said, after a while. Then paused.

  “Yes? The Home Minister . . . ?”

  “Sends his regrets. He was unable to attend. He has been called away unexpectedly. I am here on his behalf. May we set aside the diplomatic protocols for a while and speak plainly to one another?”

  “By all means, Minister.”

  “By the way, I have something for you,” she said, leaning forward and offering two navy blue portfolios with the crest of the U.K. stamped in gold on the covers. “Your passports. Minister Chong has retrieved them for you.”

  Dalton took the documents without a sarcastic comment, smiled nicely. She took in a breath, held it for a time, and then relaxed into her chair, crossing her legs at the ankles and folding her hands in her lap.

  “We are prepared to give serious consideration to your request. In the matter of this poor British sailor, Mr. Fyke. His case has touched the heart of the Minister Mentor, Mr. Lee Kwan Yew.”

  Here, Dak Chansong bowed her head slightly, and her tone took on a hieratic purr, as if she were speaking about a deity. Dalton resisted the urge to say something pert and British about “dear old Uncle Harry.”

  “As well, we are concerned to preserve the excellent relations we have already established with our American friends. You are not everything you appear to be, Mr. Dalton. We are now fully apprised of your connections with American Intelligence, and we intend to honor them.”

  Somebody talked, thought Dalton. Somebody at the U.S. Embassy, which meant that Mandy had reached it safely and given them a heads-up. Something she would only have done with Deacon Cather’s permission. So, the deal to trade the Chinese techs was now in official play. Which meant Dalton’s work here in the exotic paradise of Singapore was nearly through and he could catch the next flight to Milan. Minister Dak paused to let Dalton take in the new arrangements.

  “Yes. Well, in view of the humanitarian nature of your mission, the Minister Mentor has chosen not to resent the unorthodox n
ature of your covert arrival. We have confirmed that your agency—the Central Intelligence Agency—did in fact issue what you call a Detain, Sequester, Do Not Interrogate order in connection with Mr. Fyke, which was duly noted by our own Intelligence people. The confusion initially arose from Mr. Fyke’s attempt to deceive our officials. Naturally, once the identity of Mr. Fyke had been established, we were about to begin the process of notifying your agency when you yourself arrived. In such a . . . timely way.”

  Dalton smiled, said nothing.

  “However, there are impedimenta that must be dealt with before we can release Mr. Fyke into your custody.”

  “What form would these impedimenta take, Minister?”

  “Mr. Fyke was instrumental in a marine disaster which took the lives of twenty-nine men, Mr. Dalton. This disaster took place within our two-hundred-mile limit, and it is therefore our solemn responsibility to ensure that a full and frank accounting of this dereliction of duty be extracted from Mr. Fyke and a condign punishment be decided upon.”

  “You want to bring Mr. Fyke before a Maritime tribunal?”

  Dak closed her eyes, shook her head slightly, and then opened her eyes again, giving Dalton the full force of her official persona.

  “No. We are willing to allow your country to conduct an investigation into Mr. Fyke’s culpability in the loss of the Mingo Dubai and to carry out whatever censure seems appropriate. However, during the period of Mr. Fyke’s residence in a secure facility—he was deemed to be a flight risk—he was, unfortunately, drawn into some sort of vulgar prison brawl in the cafeteria, during which he sustained some rather severe injuries.”

  “Are you about to tell me Mr. Fyke is dead, Minister?”

  “No. Not at all. But he will require some form of medical transport if you wish to arrive in America with a living man in your care. It is the Minister Mentor’s expectation that you will understand that every possible precaution was taken by our authorities to ensure Mr. Fyke’s health and happiness and safety while in our care, and that these injuries which he has suffered can in no way be considered the moral responsibility of the officials of Changi Prison. After all, such incidents are known to happen even in your wonderful American prisons, are they not?”