The Skorpion Directive

by David Stone

  The man heard steps on the cobblestones coming closer, and he carefully creased the paper into a narrow rectangular strip, placing it on his bony knees and folding his long-fingered white hands, blue-veined and large-knuckled, on top of it. He moved slightly toward the left side of the bench as the man he was waiting for stopped in front of him, smiling carefully down.

  “Gerhardt. Thank you for coming.”

  Kleinst considered the large man in front of him, his roast-beef face, his bright green eyes and the flicker of anarchic amusement around them, his heavy hands shoved into the pockets of his baggy camel-hair coat, under which were tailored jeans and brown cowboy boots. He had a general air of rowdiness with a touch of latent malice. They were not friends, but they were friendly on this occasion, inasmuch as their interests coincided.

  Kleinst indicated the seat beside him, shifting to give Fyke room, which Fyke took, being careful not to touch Kleinst as he sat down. Kleinst, a fastidious man, intensely disliked being touched. They sat for a time in silence, both men staring out at but not quite seeing the low rolling parklands, the ancient oaks and lindens, haloed in a green mist. A rivulet of fog was moving along the base of a bronze statue of Siegfried, helm on his lap, broadsword at his booted heel, his cold eyes looking back to glorious ages lost.

  “You . . .” Kleinst began, his dry rustle of a voice failing him. He swallowed with difficulty—his health was poor—and tried again. “You . . . have shaved your beard off.”

  “Yes. I needed a change.”

  “You made an impression in Tel Aviv, I see.”

  Fyke grinned, his gaze resting briefly on Kleinst, on his bony hands folded in his lap.

  “That I did, Gerhardt.”

  “Yet, here you are.”

  “I never go into a place without having a couple of ways to get back out.”

  “In this case, you had a fast boat down the shoreline.”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  Kleinst made a dry, creaking sound, his version of laughter.

  “You are the kind of man who always has a fast boat down the shoreline. The woman? This Gandolfo . . . legend, of whom I hear so much . . . This . . . Madonna . . . where is she?”

  “In the car. A few blocks away.”

  “Am I to know who she really is?”

  “Do you need to know?”

  Kleinst considered it for a while.

  “Information is always useful. But, perhaps, no. Your friend Joachim was not helpful, as I understand.”

  “No. The Israelis are convinced that Dalton killed Issadore Galan. They have been offered a proof of some kind.”

  “An audiotape?”

  “Yes. On the tape, Dalton directly threatens Galan.”

  “Of course he does. Tapes are easily doctored. The Mossad are usually much harder to persuade.”

  Fyke made a face, rubbed his forehead.

  “The new administration has tried damned hard to alienate their affections. Israel no longer feels that it has a . . . friend . . . in the White House. This is having an effect all along the chain.”

  “Yes,” said Kleinst, who, although a Stalinist, was by birth, and even now in spirit, a Jew, and he retained a dream of Jerusalem even though he knew he would never see it himself. “For one thing, Raymond, it virtually assures that Israel will do something about Iran within a year. For Israel, Iran is an existential threat. They will not wait for this young Hamlet to wake up. Frankly, as he is not a reliable friend, why should they?”

  “Hamlet will wake up when they hit those sites.”

  “By then, it will be too late. Total war will come to the Middle East and soon after engulf the West. Old Europe fails. Islam rises. The West . . . hesitates. We have seen all this before, in different disguises and under different flags. You wished to know something about this offensive against your friend?”

  “Whatever you have, Gerhardt. We’re at sea, I’m afraid.”

  “How is he, if I may ask?”

  “I haven’t seen him in months. Last time we were together was in Southeast Asia. He was . . . effective. A little . . . fey?”

  “Pixielated?”

  “Yes. Witchy. Like the fairies had got at him.”

  “This was the affair of Chong Kew Sak,” he said, his lips working around the foreign words. “With whom you disagreed so forcefully in Papua New Guinea. Does Dalton still see ghosts?”

  “Not when I was with him.”

  “He is . . . an anachronism, that young man. See these . . . warriors out here?” He indicated the statues for which the park was created, mythical gods and Valkyries, kings and heroes of the Old Norse tales, knights of the Nibelungen.

  “He has visions, he engages in crusades and vendettas. In his heart, he seeks a good death, as these saints and kings and heroes did. As if there were such a thing. Still, I respect the man, and I am prepared to do what I can for him. Much good will it do. He is too good for the people he serves, you know? He carries this new scorpion king across the river because it is in his nature to do so, because he thinks it is the patriotic thing to do. He thinks he serves your country—”

  “Not mine, Gerhardt. I cleave to the bosom of perfidious Albion. I’m backing the man here, not the scorpions he works for.”

  Kleinst sent him a wry look, a bright flicker of his old fire glimmering in his huge wet eyes.

  “You cleave to someone’s bosom, Raymond, that I do not doubt. You were always a rake. Well, enough of this. I will need a reciprocal gesture.”

  “Of course. Name it.”

  “You know I am not well.”

  “I know you always say so. You are always about to die, yet you go on. And on.”

  Kleinst led his head go forward slightly, showing his teeth, the skin around his cheekbones pulling tight. It was as if the skull beneath his flesh was trying to break through.

  “Yes. I persist. Now, about Geli. Although I have struggled against it, acquiring wealth has not been a gift. I would like to leave something for Geli, other than my few shabby sticks of furniture.”

  “Where is she?”

  Kleinst was quiet for a time.

  “I do not know exactly where. Last I heard, in Hamburg. We do not speak.”

  Kleinst, a ex-Stasi intelligence officer, had fallen out with his daughter, Geli, over the matter of a large concrete wall that once ran down the middle of Berlin. Geli felt that it should come down. Kleinst disagreed with her. The wall in Berlin came down, and the wall between Geli and Kleinst went up.

  “But I think, Raymond, that you can find her. I know she is not living very wisely, that she has fallen in with this ‘social justice’ crowd and spends her time organizing silly marches. They dress up like storm troopers of the Apocalypse and affront the police with plastic bags of urine and sacks filled with dog feces, for which intolerable impudence they are duly pepper-sprayed, perfunctorily beaten, and briefly arrested. Upon release, they scuttle back to their squalid little warrens, aflame with sanctimonious zeal, and there they copulate like dogs in a ditch. I find it grimly amusing that we fell out over a wall that separated two forms of governance, socialism and democracy, and now that she has her . . . democracy”—he pronounced the word with evident distaste—“she busies herself in futile efforts to undermine it.”

  “My father used to say that one of civilization’s biggest challenges was seeing that it didn’t get ruined by the political fantasies of its children. I have resources, Gerhardt. I’ll find her, see that she’s on solid ground.”

  “Thank you. If you have time, one other matter. I understand she has taken up with an unsuitable boy and that he beats her. I would like this boy to be chastised and sent on his way.”

  “I’d be delighted to chastise the boy. You have my word.”

  Kleinst, nodding, took a small white handkerchief out of his coat pocket, dabbed at his blue lips, folded it and put it away. A flurry of crows erupted from a stand of alders and whirled into the darkening sky, their harsh cries echoing off the cathedra
l walls. Kleinst and Fyke stared at the alders for a time with fixed intensity. And then they gradually relaxed.

  “I know this about our Dalton: he has a lot of enemies. The fee for the surveillance in Vienna? It was paid to a file the OSE called Verwandtschaft. In German, this word means ‘kinship’ or ‘family.’ It is a highly classified OSE term for NATO.”

  “The surveillance was NATO’s idea?”

  “It was billed to NATO, but my informant believes that the request originated in D.C. My informant suspects that it came from within the CIA itself.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “My informant is in a position to know these things, but that does not mean that this particular item of information is correct.”

  “Spoken like a Jesuit, Gerhardt. Your guy have any idea who might have done this . . . in the CIA?”

  “We all know the list of people who could make such a thing happen is short. Beyond that, we cannot help you. Are you aware of a Russian operative named Piotr Kirikoff ?”

  “Yes. By reputation. Intelligent. Looks a bit like a garden slug. Likes the ladies. And the lads. A deep-background player, not a field-man. Skilled. Dangerous. He ran a honey-trap operation against an NSA code breaker last year using a Montenegrin field agent. Damned near worked. Dalton broke it up.”

  “Yes. Kirikoff has decided to make an example of Dalton. In this effort, I believe he has enjoyed the perhaps inadvertent assistance of people highly placed in the CIA or the NSA, inasmuch as he has managed to intercept and decrypt Dalton’s BlackBerry and GPS data, which, as you know, is impossible without prime-number algorithms from the encrypting agency. As well, there are some tectonic shifts within the Agency. People are being punished for . . . a lack of reforming zeal, let us say.”

  “Goddamned Special Prosecutor,” huffed Fyke.

  Kleinst lifted a calming hand, swallowed drily, and went on.

  “All of this is merely inferential. My observations follow naturally from the events. However, you may rest upon it, Kirikoff is not operating without the full consent of his Russian masters. Putin would not allow the weight of his intelligence arms to be brought down upon the head of one lone CIA agent no matter how troublesome. Kirikoff˙’s operation is directed toward an endgame, a result that suits Putin’s purposes, the nature of which must be well worth the risk involved. I do not know what this endgame may be, although one can infer from the effort and coin being expended that it is . . . significant.”

  Here, he turned his magnified myopic glare on Fyke, driving his observation home, his blue lips tight and his expression cold.

  “I hear you, Gerhardt,” said Fyke, “I’m listening.”

  “Good. In some obscure way, I feel that I am betraying the cause. But Germany was my cause, not Vladimir Putin’s febrile hegemonic obsessions. Well, I do have information concerning what sort of people have been recruited by Kirikoff. You’re familiar, I know, with the Serb Skorpions.”

  “Too bloody familiar,” said Fyke.

  “In Kerch—this is a port city in the Ukraine, something of a lawless frontier outpost full of mercenaries and soldiers of fortune, the flotsam and jetsam of various wars—Kirikoff got in touch with an ex-Skorpion paramilitary leader with direct ties to Ratko Mladic. As you know, Mladic is wanted by the ICC for war crimes committed in the Kosovo wars. He is thought to be hiding in Serb provinces, protected by a cadre of the KLA. Mladic had a unit commander named Milan Babic. Babic’s XO, his executive officer, was one Aleksandr Vukov. A very able man, he had been trained by the Spetsnaz as a sort of KLA commando. In 1999, in the town of Podujevo, while fighting alongside the KLA, he was assaulted by a group of captives in a mosque, Bosnian Muslims. As he struggled to get away, a U.S. Special Forces unit that had been observing Skorpion activity in and around the mosque for two days, unaware of the presence of captives inside, painted it for an aerial strike. A Nighthawk put two Paveways into the mosque, incinerating the captive Muslims, over a hundred and fifty women, children—”

  “A setup. Christ. Jesus Christ.”

  Kleinst turned and smiled at him, a death’s-head grin.

  “Alas, Christ was a nonparticipant, as He usually is. Yes. The idea was to be able to portray the Americans as careless and barbaric. Vukov had managed to travel partway through an escape tunnel. When the Paveways hit, he was effectively roasted alive in this tunnel. He lived— these sorts of creatures often do. Perhaps the Devil sees to his own children. He was taken to Belgrade, hideously burned, a monster, and underwent several years of reconstructive surgery, which was not very effective. Although now physically quite repulsive, he was, from the reports before the flames reached him, a very handsome young man and much caressed by the ladies. However, his gruesome war wounds have given him a mythic stature with the Serbs and Croats, the Macedonians, who cannot forget their long centuries of torment under the Turks and the Albanians. They burn with the shame of their dhimmitude, their forced submission to the daily humiliations of life as infidels under the boot of Islam. Now they repay this brutality in kind. Babic and Vukov have lately emerged as the charismatic leaders of a resurgent KLA underground. Their area of operations is, of course, the Balkans—drugs and guns, kidnap, rape, extortion—working, I am told, out of a farm his family owns in the central Crimean highlands. Vukov especially has conceived a great hatred of NATO, and in particular the United States, a Christian nation that in Bosnia took the side of the hated Muslims and made war against its own Christian brothers. Kirikoff made contact, I believe at a bar called The Double Eagle on the Kerch waterfront, with Vukov and his cadre, perhaps with Milan Babic himself, and has placed them at the head of this operation against Dalton. Shall I tell you why Vukov took the job?”

  “Dalton was the SFO man on the ground in Podujevo.”

  Kleinst looked at Fyke. “He told you?”

  “No. But it follows. Dalton was in the area at that time. I don’t believe in coincidences. What I’d like to know is—”

  “Who told Kirikoff ? Exactly. Trace that information, and you will find the spider at the center of this entire web. Another line of inquiry would take you to Athens, my friend.”

  “What’s in Athens?”

  “Kirikoff draws his operating expenses through a corporate entity known as Arc Light Engineering. This firm does extensive business throughout the Mediterranean, from Spain all the way down to sub-Saharan Africa. It is a legitimate construction-and-design firm, specializing in large civil-works projects in developing nations, as well as privately funded construction in wealthy Arab nations such as the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Morocco. It is an umbrella corporation with many subsidiaries, some quite recently acquired. One of these recently acquired subsidiaries is indirectly controlled by a Moscow-based oligarch by the name of Yevgeny Korchoy. Korchoy, a friend and supporter of Vladimir Putin, is, in the Tolstoyan labyrinth of Russian familial kinships, distantly related to Piotr Kirikoff.”

  “Do you know the name of this subsidiary?”

  “I believe it is called Cobalt Hydraulic Systems.”

  “What’s Kirikoff ’s official title?”

  “Assistant Director. His mandate is unclear, his duties nonexistent, but his draws from the company funds are substantial. The company maintains a large motor yacht for his personal use called Dansante. He berths it at the Flisvos Marina. I suggest that it may be useful to take a closer look at Cobalt Hydraulic Systems.”

  “Based in Athens.”

  “Their HQ is not there, but that is where Kirikoff is alleged to maintain a sort of branch office. I have not been able to discover the precise location. However, he is also an investor in a seaside restaurant called Serenitas, on the Flisvos Marina. He was seen dining there last week but has not appeared . . . since . . .”

  Kleinst sighed heavily, slumping a little into himself.

  “Other than this . . .” Kleinst went on almost in a whisper, “I have only one thing to add. As I have said, this is not merely a vendetta. I was a satrap of the Soviet Empire for
many years. I truly believed in the Socialist cause as the last best hope for humanity to have lasting peace. Thus, I justified its . . . excesses. History has demonstrated that I was grossly in error. For my sins, I am now an exile. I once thought the Russian Empire was in the dust, but it rises, Raymond, it rises. It senses weakness, indecision, in the West. Already it has made inroads. What inference should the people here in Prague, and the Poles, draw from America’s craven consent to the removal of a missile shield, a groveling appeasement which got them only mockery from the Kremlin and the contempt of America’s allies . . . ?” He lifted his hands, let them fall.

  Fyke stood up, offered his hand. Kleinst, after a moment’s hesitation, took it.

  “Can I offer you a lift somewhere, Gerhardt?”

  “No, Raymond. I am happy to sit here for a while with the monuments. See to Geli, that will be enough. And to her unsuitable boy. Will you go to Athens?”

  “Yes. We’ll go tonight.”

  “You and the . . . Italian legend?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she very beautiful?”

  “Yes. Heartbreaking.”

  “You are lovers?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? You are not old, life is short, the road is fraught . . .”

  “I’m trying . . . to be faithful.”

  “You are? To what?”

  Fyke looked away into the gathering darkness, sighed, and came back. “To myself, Gerhardt.”

  Kleinst dabbed at his blue lips, settled into his voluminous coat like a turtle, pulling it tight around him, his breath misting the chilly air, the shadows drawing in. Prague hummed and boomed and clattered in the distance: electric, vital, remote, oblivious.

  “To yourself, is it? How brave. I tried that, Raymond, a long while ago, with Geli’s mother. Before I knew that I had lost myself in the places in between, like water slipping through a grate.”

  “ ‘In between’? In between what?”