The Orpheus Deception

by David Stone

  “A . . . black op, is that how you say it?”

  “Yes. A black operation.”

  “And you can’t tell me the name of this . . . op?”

  “No.”

  “No? Then maybe I tell you. Was it something called Orpheus?”

  Dalton’s face seemed to harden up, close down, like concrete setting. Which of course told Brancati, a trained interrogator, all he needed to know.

  “I see that it was,” said Brancati, not without sympathy.

  “It was called that, yes. I suppose I talked . . .”

  “I’m considering the application of morphine in all our future interrogations. So much happier for all concerned than a beating. Everyone smiling. Dreamy. Much happy talk.”

  “What did I say . . . about Orpheus?”

  “Everything! Like a chattering cuckoo. I know all, Micah. Tutti.”

  Dalton looked at the man for a while, his breathing constricted, and then he remembered that Brancati was also a cop.

  “Like hell you do. I don’t believe you.”

  Brancati held a sharpened glare for a while and then broke into a grin.

  “No, of course you don’t. But you did say the name. So now that we know the name, will you tell me what is behind the name?”

  “I can’t, Alessio.”

  “Okay. Allora. Whatever Orpheus is, is it a threat to any Italians?”

  “No. Not at all. It’s not a threat to any civilian anywhere. It’s not even something I disapprove of. I don’t think you would either. My problem is, I found out about it. It was handed to me by . . . a dead friend—”

  “Mr. Naumann?”

  “Yes. But indirectly. Through an intermediary.”

  “And the intermediary . . . ?”

  “His secretary. In London. A woman named Mandy Pownall. She was also his lover, I suspect. But now that I know about Orpheus, it can’t be unknown, and it’s quite plausible that some men connected to the operation will do whatever is necessary to make sure I don’t talk.”

  “Are you likely to talk?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Then say so. Tell the Company. What did Le Carré say . . . ‘come in from the cold’? Reassure them. You’re a trusted man, a proven man.”

  What Brancati was saying made sense. Maybe it was still possible to come in from the cold. In the CIA, the tricky bit about being a prodigal son returning was surviving your welcome-home party. In the meantime, Brancati’s restless mind had run on to his own official concerns.

  “Micah, what you cannot tell me about Orpheus—this thing that’s apparently fatal to know—would it cause the CIA to send someone to kill you in Venice?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Like this blond girl?”

  “Possibly. But I don’t see them using a stolen glass blade to do it in the first place. If the Company wants you dead, most of the time it happens so quietly that no one ever thinks of it as a murder. We don’t like attention. This stabbing, right out in the open, in front of thousands of witnesses, it looks more like a revenge thing, a demonstration, a point of honor. It just doesn’t feel like an Agency stunt.”

  “Yes. I agree. Which brings us back to our Serbian friends. About the CIA, I should tell you that we have unofficial inquiries from the Americans here. At the Consulate. And in London. They wish to know if you are here, in Venice. Even in the Arsenal. They are being very aggressive.”

  “What have you told them?”

  Brancati said nothing for a time.

  “So far, we are officially uncommunicative. We admit to holding the corpse of a murdered tourist and that we are making inquiries. For the time being, we will tell the CIA nothing more than that.”

  “Why?”

  “An excellent question . . . I myself find it hard to answer. Of course, the relations between America and Italy are not good—have not been good since your own Clandestine Services people kidnapped Abu Omar off the streets of Milan a few years ago. The government has chosen to resent this, and there has been a trial—in absentia, in Milan—a trial of twenty-five American citizens. All convicted. There has been an official demand for their extradition. This, of course, has been farted upon by the Americans.”

  “Farted upon?” said Dalton, laughing in spite of his stitches.

  “Yes. Farted. As one would blow out a candle?”

  Brancati made a pursed-lips gesture, puffing his cheeks out.

  “I think you mean blown off?”

  “Blown off?”

  “Yes. Dismissed. Ignored.”

  Brancati repeated the phrase in a whisper, considering.

  “I think I like my word better. Anyway, after Milan, when the American Consul raises her voice with the Director of the Carabinieri, this does not make us tremble quite so much as it used to.”

  Here he broke off, going inward for a time.

  “So, I have a problem. It affects you.”

  Dalton waited.

  “In the last few weeks, there have been breaches. Information has been given to the Serbian mafia.”

  “How much Serbian mafia is there?”

  “Effectively, the whole of Serbia and Croatia and Montenegro is divided up between two outfits that have agreed to share the territory. There is Stefan Groz, an aging ermafrodito who collects little boys—a Pantaloon in that area but a viper in his business—and there is your friend Branco Gospic. They are the two houses. For the rest, they are freelance brigante who operate on the fringes. No, Gospic and Groz, they are the only ones with the organization for this kind of spionaggio.”

  “Where’s the information coming from?”

  Brancati shrugged, his eyes hardening.

  “From here. This office. In Venice.”

  “You have a mole?”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not a mole but someone with divided loyalties.”

  “Divided between . . . ?”

  “Between his duty and the euro, I suppose.”

  “Do you know who he is?”

  “No. I am looking. But the information that has been leaked, it is of a specific nature. Of use to only a few men.”

  “So you’re trying to identify the mole by defining the buyer?”

  “That is one method. We are employing others.”

  “We?”

  “My security chief, Issadore Galan.”

  “And I’m concerned?”

  “Yes. Very. You are officially dead. Your murder was a public sensation. We have circulated digital pictures of your corpse to various departments—”

  “How did you do that?”

  Brancati grinned.

  “We made you up to look dead. While you were sedated.”

  “Son of a bitch. May I see them?”

  “Sweet Christ no! Very gruesome. Very disturbing.”

  “Jesus . . .”

  “And the digital photos—”

  “Contain hidden text files identifying each version.”

  Brancati nodded.

  “So if the shot surfaces, we will know where it came from.”

  “How will you know if it surfaces?”

  Brancati touched the side of his nose.

  “I am not just a pretty face.”

  “So what I am is bait. You’re after Gospic yourself, aren’t you?”

  “He has my attention, yes.”

  “For sending people to attack Cora Vasari last month?”

  “For that. Also for drug running. Weapons traffic. Bribery. Corruption of officials. Manipulation of the stock markets. Being a . . .”

  “Pain in the ass?”

  “Yes. A very big pain in the ass. I have had enough of him. Venice has had enough of him. I have made him a personal project.”

  “And his vendetta with me . . . ?”

  “If it truly is Gospic who sent the girl, then it makes you useful. To Venice. To the people of Venice. To me. You are not offended?”

  “No. It explains a great deal. It explains your amazing hospitality, and why you’ve protected me from the Agenc
y. Where does this leave me?”

  Brancati raised an eyebrow, gave him a twisted grin.

  “It leaves you here, in the Arsenal, until you are stronger. Then perhaps you will do me the honor of staying a few weeks with me at our villa in Arezzo. My wife is there now, with the girls. I am a bachelor in Venice for two weeks now. I have my little apartment upstairs, with a view of the lagoon. So, you will stay with us here for a time, and we will have some more talk about this trouble you are in and what we should—”

  A knock at the door, soft but firm, and the sound of boots on stone; both men looked up from their separate seas of trouble and saw a woman standing in the open door, tall, with a shining bell of long blue-black hair, deep-set hazel eyes in a strong handsome face, prominent cheekbones and a wide sensual mouth, red-lipped. She was wearing a long black leather trench coat over a black leather skirt, a severe white silk blouse buttoned to the neck over her full breasts, her long legs encased to the knees in black leather riding boots. Her features were made for kindness, for wit and playful talk, but the expression they were carrying at this moment was not in any way a loving one. Both men got to their feet in a reflexive convulsion, but only Brancati managed to stay upright. Dalton collapsed back into the chair, his face whitening rapidly as the pain burned up from his incision.

  “Cora . . .”

  “Signorina Vasari . . .”

  Cora Vasari ignored both greetings, stalking forward into the room, her boot heels hitting the old stones hard, her face set and accusatory.

  “Alessio! You have been interrogating him!”

  Brancati did not have the appearance of a man capable of stuttering, but he managed it.

  “I . . . I have NOT . . .”

  Cora Vasari leaned down and kissed Dalton on the cheek, her hair falling forward and enveloping him in the scent of her perfume, a strong, complex aroma composed of citrus and spices. Her lips left a mark on Dalton’s cheek. He tried to reciprocate, but she straightened up again and turned on Brancati with a grim intensity.

  “Alessio—bruto! Minacciare un infermo! Che cosa—”

  “I am not browbeating an invalid, Cora. We were—”

  Cora’s face colored as she prepared a rebuke that was not to be heard—perhaps just as well—since it seemed to Dalton that the stones of the floor underneath his feet were rising to meet him. He had the illusion of effortless flight over a countryside made of various square fields in shades of blue and gray, toward which he was descending . . . turning . . . turning . . . Brancati caught him just before he hit the floor, and that pretty much made it a day, as far as Micah Dalton was immediately concerned.

  5

  Somewhere in the Indonesian Archipelago

  In the half-light of a veiled moon, the tanker eased her way through a narrow passage flanked by steep hills covered in dense jungle growth. At quarter slow, her prop was barely turning, just enough to keep a little headway against the ebbing tide. In the black mountains to starboard, the sound of her engines was like a low murmur of distant thunder, and the villagers who were awake to hear it put it firmly out of their minds. The Babi Rusa Brigade owned this island, and all the oceans between Papua and the Lembah Strait in northern Sulawesi. The Babi Rusa Brigade did not encourage curiosity about the movement of ships in and out of its secret dry dock at the end of the passage.

  The tanker was running without lights and was being guided by a pair of outrider Zodiacs. The outriders communicated with the man on the bridge with short-range radios. The man on the bridge, Vigo Majiic, felt the wheel fighting in his sweaty hands. Without real headway, the ship would yaw and veer as the tides worked along her flanks. His attention was rigidly fixed on the depth-finder screen in front of him. The bright, full-color screen showed an undersea canyon with sharp sides and a vicious turning only a quarter mile ahead. The ebbing tide was running down the canyon like a flash flood down a dry wash. It was trying to force the tanker into the jagged reefs only a few feet off his starboard side. Majiic was trying very hard not to let it win this battle, because, if the ship so much as brushed the sides of this narrow channel, the fox-faced, black-bearded young man named Emil Tarc, standing behind him and watching the bow of the ship as it moved against the starry sky, would bring up the muzzle of his pistol and put Majiic’s brains all over the control panel. Emil Tarc was here as Branco Gospic’s enforcer. So, of course, Majiic’s attention was rigidly fixed.

  “Slow, now—slow,” came a crackling message from the radio handset in the leading Zodiac. Majiic picked up the handset and answered in a taut growl: “I can’t slow her any more—she’s already losing steerageway!”

  He clicked off, and looked at Tarc.

  “They should have provided a pilot.”

  “They’re tribesmen, Vigo. Not sailors. Just do the job.”

  “We should have kept the Dyaks on board. At least they could help.”

  “Like they helped by trying to shoot down that chopper that buzzed us off the coast of Borneo? We’re better off without them.”

  Majiic had nothing to say about that. In Tarc’s world, the phrase better off without them had included cutting them all down with his MP5 while they were gathered on the bow decks to receive their share of the spoils and then tossing their bloody corpses into the shark-infested waters of the Sulawesi Strait, a few miles southwest of Diapati. Emil Tarc stepped forward and peered into the enveloping dark, as if he had night vision. His posture was tight, and his face, pocked with shrapnel fragments from a tour in Kosovo and lit up in a red glow from the control screens, looked slightly satanic. In his left hand was a Tokarev pistol taken from the body of a Russian Major. It was fitted with a suppressor, and he held it a little apart from his body as if ready to place it against Majiic’s temple and squeeze the trigger.

  “They say slow, Vigo.”

  In spite of his fear, Majiic snarled back at him: “You want the wheel?”

  “No. But be careful.”

  “Then be quiet, Emil. Please.”

  Tarc grunted and fell silent. The deck plates hummed with the contained power of the ship’s engines. A bat flickered past the windshield, a red flutter with a green spark in one eye. A single green-and-white light showed like a star on the distant bow. The ship’s wheelhouse still reeked of dried blood, and a plywood board had been screwed onto the shattered starboard window where the man Majiic knew only as Brendan Fitch had fired his last two rounds before leaping into the dark. Part of the FLIR screen showed brittle clumps of some unidentifiable matter, perhaps some of them containing the neurons that had held Anson Wang’s last thoughts of his family in Singapore before Emil Tarc had blown all of Wang’s memories out through his forehead. In Majiic’s hands, the wheel fought him, and his sweat slicked the green metal.

  Tarc and Majiic looked up as the stars were slowly blotted out by a dark cloudlike screen; the Babi Rusa Brigade had rigged a camouflage net across the narrowing entrance to the dry dock. Large enough to hide an entire ship, it stretched out like a fan from pylons drilled into the cliffs on either side of the fjordlike inlet. On the netted surface, the shapes and colors of jungle growth had been laboriously hand-painted, months of work carried out by the entire population of the entire island under the guns of the Babi Rusa. From the air, the inlet looked like a shallow bay on the eastern edge of an insignificantisland lost in the immensity of the South China Sea. The whole five hundred feet of the bamboo-and-wood scaffolding was hidden by the overhead netting. The Babi Rusa leased the facility out to anyone with enough money and the right connections with the international terrorist brotherhood that had sprung up in the middle nineties, while America had amused itself with far-more-pressing questions, such as the exact legal meaning of the word is.

  The channel’s left turn was on them now, and Majiic eased the wheel to starboard. The ship slowed even more as the light on the bow moved across an arc of black night. A range of hooded lights became visible in the distance, an opening V like a double string of landing markers on an airfield. Maji
ic lined up with the markers and felt his chest and belly muscles easing. Steering a five-hundred-foot tanker through a narrow passage in absolute darkness while a sociopathic lizard stood ready to kill you for the slightest error had Vigo Majiic regretting his career choices.

  “We’re under the netting,” said Majiic. “May I put on the bow lights?”

  Tarc grunted again, as if he had to pay for words expended. Majiic flipped a breaker and the waterway in front of the boat sprang into sharp relief. Hard-faced, brown-skinned men stared back into the glare of the halogens, red pin lights in their eyes. Many were armed.

  “What if they try to take the ship?” said Majiic.

  “They won’t,” said Tarc. “At least, not until it’s ready.”

  “And then?”

  Tarc turned to look at Majiic, his eyes two tiny red lights in the shadowed wheelhouse. He smiled, showing small, uneven teeth that were painted bloody red by the binnacle glow.

  “By then, we will be ready too.”

  6

  The Arsenal, Venice

  Brancati, whose wife and three daughters were spending the fall in his mother’s villa near Citerna in Tuscany, had turned his office in the tower of the Arsenal into a kind of private apartment, with a kitchen and a spartan bedroom connected to his official quarters. There was also a small, terraced balcony that looked north over the ship channel—crowded with the bulkheads and the hydraulic machinery of the Moses project, which was somehow going to save Venice from the rising waters of the lagoon—and, beyond that, the graveyard island of San Michele across the lagoon. The weather had turned in the last few days and now was unseasonably warm for this late in November, so warm that a long white-over-blue Riva cruiser was idling across the lagoon, trailing a lacy white wake across the deep-blue water. The sun on the water was sending shimmers of golden light onto the plastered ceiling as Dalton sat in a beach chair, nursing a glass of pinot grigio and watching the afternoon gliding dreamily toward the evening. He heard Brancati’s phone ring on his desk insidethe main room and Brancati’s muted baritone as he answered. He spoke a few words, set the phone down, and walked out onto the terrace.