The Orpheus Deception

by David Stone

  Galan said nothing. His hooded eyes studied the glass of Chablis before him with perfect stillness, as if he were a wizened Buddha contemplating a disappointing lotus. Mandy reached out and pinged the side of his glass with the lacquered nail of her index finger.

  “Really, Issadore, love. We know he’s not dead. You might want to ask me why we think you’ll admit this eventually.”

  Galan lifted his eyes and fixed her with a look. Mandy resisted the reflexive desire to sit back, to disengage from the force of that glare. Galan ran a dry, white-tipped tongue over his lower lip, took another sip of his Chablis. A flight of pigeons fluttered overhead, making a noise like flags snapping in a strong wind. The sun was now well below the roofline, and there was a damp chill rising from the old stones of the square. If the day had been mid-September, the evening was late November.

  “It was resented, you know?” he said, after a silence.

  “What was . . . resented?”

  “The taking of Omar. In Milan. In 2003. It was arrogant. A slap in our faces. Collectively. We—I personally—resented it. As you would resent it if we came to”—here he searched for a place-name that would convey the American heartland—“to Topeka. Came to Topeka, and took a man off your street there? In front of your own people?”

  Mandy held his look.

  “We—London—had nothing to do with that. You know that.”

  Galan was gracious enough not to pull the lie apart, there and then. Perhaps, he thought, Anthony Crane, the calculating Oxford aristocrat who was the current chief of London Station, had not told Mandy Pownall about their involvement in the operation. If he had not, there may be other things she did not know. For example, that many of the CIA’s Clandestine operators involved in the rendition had actually used their own personal credit cards to book hotel rooms in Milan. Why? To get the air miles. And that two of these people had come directly from the London office. This was an extraordinary breach of tradecraft, but the CIA had been a shadow of its former self ever since Clinton had ordered a thirty percent reduction in its overseas staff. Clinton had effectively gutted the CIA, just in time for September 11. Now Galan had respect only for a few members of the Clandestine Services, and most of them were ex-Special Forces. Like Dalton.

  “As you say,” he said, simply, letting the entire complicated issue pass, “I am curious as to why you think we would admit that your Mr. Dalton is not dead.”

  “The camera I gave you is a digital camera.”

  “So I observed.”

  “Why would I bring the camera when I could simply have brought a printout of the photograph?”

  “I’m sure you will enlighten me.”

  “The photo is a digital photo. It contains an encrypted text file. Like a digital watermark. We call it steganographic encoding. The boffins at Maidenhill decrypted it and found a random-number identifier. In effect, the file hidden in the digital matrix of this shot could be only one of two things.”

  Galan lifted his glass, turning it in the dying light. Mandy took the glass from him, refilled it, continued talking.

  “It could be a message. Or it could be a marker. Maidenhill ran some clever little program on it and determined that there was no message. So, a marker, then, something that made the shot unique.”

  “Not at all,” said Galan, smiling. “We sent many copies of the shot—”

  “You sent many versions of the shot. To all of your departments. In the expectation that one of the versions would be leaked.”

  “Leaked?”

  “Issadore, dear man. You have a mole.”

  Galan said nothing.

  Mandy snorted, pulled out a gold cigarette case and a heavy, well-worn Cartier lighter. She snapped the cigarette case open and held it out to Galan, a small golden tray full of long, slender cigarettes in deep turquoise, with dull-gold filters. They were ridiculous, and Galan was delighted to accept one. Mandy leaned forward and lit it for him, and then took one for herself, leaning back into the chair and regarding him with a grimly amused expression. She turned her head to one side, showing Galan the side of her neck and one delicate pink ear, and blew out a cloud of blue smoke. It coiled in the last of the light. The sound of a cello being tuned floated out onto the square from somewhere inside the dark-wooded cloisters of Florian’s.

  “We will give you your mole, Issadore.”

  “And in return?”

  “Micah Dalton.”

  Galan inhaled the cigarette, savoring it, took it from his mouth and held it on the tabletop between two crooked fingers heavily stained with nicotine. He shook his head, as if he were feeling genuine regret.

  “Even if this . . . speculation . . . were founded on anything but the fertile imagination of your Mr. Crane at London Station, my chief will never agree to such a bargain. Even for a dead man.”

  “We are prepared to show you an expression of our good faith.”

  “In what form?”

  “You know a man named Stefan Groz?”

  “Of course. A Serbian businessman.”

  “This digital shot was e-mailed to him through a local server. At just after midnight last night. We monitored the transmission—”

  “One message in a million? A very lucky break?”

  Galan was fully aware of the Agency’s latest program, targeting Internet cafés all over Europe. Agency personnel would simply circulate through hundreds of different Internet cafés and in each one they’d download an e-mail-monitoring program called Digital Network Intelligence. The Americans were probably monitoring Internet cafés all over Europe and the Middle East. Again, Galan had no reasonto betray this knowledge to Mandy Pownall. So he let that pass as well.

  Mandy Pownall smiled at the compliment.

  “Well, not so lucky. Groz is of interest to us.”

  Galan chuckled, a deep rumble in his bony chest.

  “Stefan Groz is of interest to most of the Intelligence agencies in Europe.”

  “Yes,” said Mandy. “My point being, we know the source of this e-mail to Stefan Groz. We have the computer IP address. As a gesture of goodwill, we’re prepared to give you the precise location of this computer.”

  “Some Internet café, most likely?”

  “Yes. The Café Electro in Campo San Stefano. You know it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then find out who used this particular computer at”—she hesitated, recalling the details she had painstakingly memorized under the judgmental consideration of Stennis Corso and Tony Crane—“precisely six minutes and eleven seconds after midnight last night, local time. The IP of the computer is . . . Do you wish to take this down?”

  Galan shook his head. Mandy looked around the plaza.

  “Issadore, you bounder. You have a mike on us?”

  Galan bowed, offered a gnomic smile.

  “Yes. We also have a camera in the Café Electro.”

  “You do?”

  “We have cameras in every Internet café in Italy.”

  Mandy thought this over.

  “Of course. A reasonable security measure.”

  “Yes. Well, this is much appreciated—”

  He had started to rise; Mandy placed a restraining hand on his arm.

  “Look, Issadore. Do you know about Micah and Porter Naumann?”

  “Of course. The bizarre affair of the red-skinned man.”

  “Do you know that Porter and I were lovers?”

  Galan looked away, not out of any sense of discomfort. Perhaps only to hide a momentary betraying glitter. He had several telephoto shots in his own filing cabinet, surveillance shots of Porter Naumann and this splendid woman in an intense embrace outside a car-rental office in the Piazzale Roma. Galan was no one’s lover and never would be again. Which was why he was living in Venice and had never gone home to his wife in Haifa after the Jordanians traded him back to the Mossad for six of their own spies. Galan had also read the Naumann file. He nodded.

  “Then you know that I would never hurt Micah. I giv
e you my word, Issadore. If Micah will only come in . . .”

  “This is not a decision that I am qualified to make. Such a determination would have to come from Major Brancati.”

  “Is Micah Dalton alive, Issadore?”

  There was a look in her face that reached him deep in his desiccated core. Friendship, affection. Love. There was no room for that sort of thing in this business. He knew Mandy Pownall was not a street agent. Tony Crane had sent her because she had a personal stake in Micah Dalton. Crane knew Galan would sense this. He was banking on it. The kindest thing he could do for this splendid woman would be to send her away with her hopes shattered and her loving heart broken. But Micah Dalton had become a card, in an unknown game being played by London Station and therefore by Deacon Cather himself, and for a card to be useful the card must be kept in play.

  “Yes, he is alive.”

  “Will he come in?”

  Galan shook his head.

  “Not to London Station.”

  “Then where?”

  Galan looked up toward a suite of windows in the offices above Florian’s, raised his hand. Then he looked back at Mandy, his black eyes glittering but his expression not unkind. If he had pity in him, he might have been feeling that, but he did not. It was closer to mild regret, and he was very familiar with regrets. He had many of them, but there was room in his damaged heart for a few more.

  “He’s here?” said Mandy.

  Galan nodded.

  “Yes. Come with me.”

  AROUND THE SAME time that Galan was sharing a decanter of icy Chablis with Mandy Pownall, Alessio Brancati was having his marine unit run down the white-over-blue Riva—the name SUBITO on the stern was done in glittering gold letters—the pursuit boat managing to intercept it after a confused, ambiguous, slow-speed, stop-and-start chase on the way to the ship channel north of the Lido. The man at the wheel, a lean, foxlike young man with vaguely Arab features and amazingly clear green eyes, was only too happy to bring his sixty-foot cruiser to a slow crawl—he had long lines in the murky water, running on downriggers. They trailed behind the boat as the marine unit pulled in closer.

  “I was fishing,” said the man at the wheel—there was something wrong with his radio, it seemed—while the Carabinieri crew in the long mahogany speedboat puttered to the gangway. He stood by the gangway to greet the young officer and his men as they came up the ladder, their faces set and stern, carrying HK MP5s at port arms.

  “Papers,” said the young officer, his voice not quite as deep as he would have wished. The young man, very tan, barefoot, in clean white slacks and a powder blue V-necked cashmere sweater with a long indigo scarf tied around his neck, gave the young officer a decidedlycarnal once-over and then led the little boarding party around to the fantail and along into the pilothouse. The boat was obviously expensive, done in brass and teak and hardwoods, uncluttered and elegantly appointed, and the young man—the owner, according to his papers, was Kiki Lujac. “The photographer!” blurted one of the junior carabiniere.

  “Yes,” said the Kiki Lujac, showing a brilliant smile, his face opening like a sunny dawn. “The same—”

  They searched his ship. They found nothing at all; he was quite alone, fishing idly and without any real desire to catch anything, it seemed, the downriggers still and untended. The officials thought there may have been a girl at some point in the past; the captain detected some lingering female scent in the master cabin—of course, this was only to be expected, as the man had this reputation. At any rate, they left, after many autographs and some chilled prosecco and then much more laughter, pulling away from the long, low, sleek Art Deco cruiser in a purring growl, powering up flamboyantly to impress Kiki, the mahogany chase boat carving a golden arc of spray through the dying glimmer of the setting sun on the broad lagoon, the youngest soldier explaining in detail to his captain just who Kiki Lujac was—the many photo spreads in Vanity Fair, the glamorous fashion sessions in Ibiza, seen in Capri with Tom Cruise, seen in Cannes with Lauren Hutton. “Lujac,” he said, in a hushed tone. Kiki Lujac, the globe-trotting, jet-setting nephew of a Montenegrin Duke. Kiki Lujac, the world-famous shooter.

  GALAN LED MANDY through the dimly lit, polished wooden labyrinth of Florian’s inner rooms, which smelled of cedar incense and wood polish and garlic, down a long, narrow, seventeenth-century hallway lined with Venetian-glass sconces. He stopped her a few feet short of a private booth, covered by a faded tapestry, turned to look at her in the flickering light of the candle sconces. When he spoke, his voice was low but contained an electric charge.

  “Miss Pownall . . .”

  “Mandy.”

  “Mandy . . . it is very important that you understand one thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Dalton has been wounded. He has recovered—he heals like a young dog—but he is not . . . invincible. He is damaged. By the blade, and also by the drug he was exposed to last month. The doctors feel his hallucinations may reoccur without warning. The drug has saturated his limbic system, they tell us. I have no idea what that means, but now he is . . . almost a Venetian himself. He has become close to an old Venetian family, the Vasaris, who have much influence here and in Tuscany. Also, and this is the part you must understand, he enjoys the protection—and remains effectively in the custody—of my chief, Major Brancati—”

  Mandy began to speak, but Galan held her with a look.

  “Major Brancati has objected to this meeting. But he left it to me to decide if you should see Mr. Dalton. So this meeting is happening. Major Brancati has no problem with you personally, and Mr. Dalton says you were a help to him in his last investigation for your agency. But you are connected in this to Mr. Crane, whom, after Milan, we do not now trust, and through Mr. Crane to Mr. Cather, your Director of Clandestine Operations in Langley, and Mr. Cather is well known to anyone in our business, right across Europe and into the east. His reputation is for subtle ruthlessness and for cruel intelligence. So, we—Major Brancati and I—wish to make this known to Mr. Cather—if you would be so kind, Mandy—and the thing to be known is that we—I speak of the Italian Intelligence arms—will resent very bitterly any harm that may come to Mr. Dalton as a result of our trusting you this evening. We will not hold you responsible, but Mr. Cather and Mr. Crane may take it as a certitude that in whateverways that may be open to us in the future we will . . . reply . . . to such a perfidy in coin. In coin. Am I understood? Mandy?”

  Standing in this dark hallway and staring into Galan’s small black eyes, Mandy had no trouble at all in understanding and believing everything that Issadore Galan was saying to her.

  “You are quite crystalline, Issadore. Now, may I see Micah?”

  Galan led them a little farther down the hallway, stopped, and pressed a mother-of-pearl button hidden by a fold of the tapestry. On the other side of the tapestry, he heard a muffled voice. He pulled back the curtain.

  Dalton was sitting at a low, round marquetry table, with his back to a banquette padded in golden silk shantung, lit from above by a dark-red-shaded lamp that cast an amber glow on the tabletop, on the silver tray that held a bottle of Bollinger and two tall flutes, on the Murano-glass bowl filled with figs and grapes, on the dull-blue Ruger that lay on its side next to the Murano bowl, on Dalton’s skull-like, deeply shadowed face, his blond hair glimmering in the downlight and on the hostile glitter in his pale eyes as he looked up at Mandy Pownall with a killing face.

  Dalton showed her his teeth, half rising. She stepped into the booth, dimly aware of Galan drawing the curtain behind her, conscious of Dalton’s scent in the room—Toscano cigars and under that something like soap and citrus. In this booth at Florian’s, she thought, he looks like a Medici prince. She held him, feeling the muscles under his white shirt, the bones under the muscles. He kissed her on the cheek and let her go.

  She slid into the booth opposite him, placed her broad-brimmed hat on the seat beside her, keeping her eyes on his death mask of a face.

  She was
surprised to find she was a little afraid of him.

  “Micah. I’m so happy to see you.”

  “Surprised and happy?”

  “No. Just glad. You look . . . terrible.”

  “And you look lovely, as always.”

  “May I smoke? I mean, are you healthy enough to . . . ?”

  “Only if you share.”

  She brought out her Cartier case, extracted a long turquoise cigarette, offered another to Dalton, and lit both with her heavy gold lighter. As she set it down, Dalton, now half hidden in a cloud of coiling smoke, reached out and picked it up. His hand looked like a leathery claw, the tendons standing out clearly and the muscles in his wrist writhing like snakes under the skin.

  “Porter gave you this, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. In Corfu. Two years ago. It was his father’s. How are you, Micah? Forgive me. You do look like hell. What kind of shape are you in?”

  Dalton shrugged, set the lighter down.

  “They picked nineteen pieces of Murano glass out of my guts. If the blade had nicked an artery, I’d be dead, and we wouldn’t be having this drink together. Other than that, and the fact that I’ve still got untold quantities of assorted hallucinogens fizzing around in my blood, I’d have to say I’m . . . peachy.”

  “Fucking peachy?” she said, mimicking Porter Naumann’s voice. “Fucking peachy” was one of his favorite expressions.

  “Yeah. Fucking peachy.”

  “Have you . . . seen Porter lately?”

  One of the side effects of his last mission had been a massive exposure to a high-potency mix of powdered datura and peyote. It had nearly killed him, and had kicked him into a series of vivid hallucinations, some of which included long and very complicated discussions with the ghost of Porter Naumann. Naumann’s ghost had worn a pair of emerald green silk pajamas throughout several appearances in the days that followed.