by David Stone
She moved past him down the hall, her shoulders straight, walking like an actress emerging on a stage. She straightened a floral arrangement on the table behind the sofa in the living room, stopped to take in the early-evening panorama of downtown Singapore—the lights were coming on now and the effect was magnificent—she passed on through the living room and slipped soundlessly down the hall toward her own master suite. Dalton watched her go with a certain amount of affectionate amusement.
His face changed as he went into the living room and stood at the window wall, staring out, seeing nothing but the cobblestone atrium and the pillared colonnade of the Uffizi in Florence. He didn’t want to make a cell-phone call, even on Mandy’s heavily encrypted fast-burst phone.
But he had no choice. The hotel lines were tapped. The suite had been politely ransacked. The signs were everywhere, if you knew where to look. It had been done with just enough roughness to send a message: we’ve been stamping around in your life and we can do it again anytime we want. Dalton didn’t care. They could have ripped the lining out of his suits and shredded his shoes. There was nothing to find but whatever items fit a banker’s life. They had learned nothing, and given away everything in the attempt. It was lousy tradecraft, and it made him feel a little better.
He used the remote to turn on the television, got the BBC, spiked the volume up to stun, picked up the phone and dialed Brancati’s cell-phone number. Venice was nineteen hours ahead of Singapore, on the other side of the date line. It would be the middle of yesterday for Brancati. Dalton didn’t give a damn if it was the middle of the night. The line rang three times and got picked up on the fourth.
“Brancati.”
“How is she?”
“Where are you? I have been trying to reach you.”
“I was in a dead zone. How is she?”
“It’s bad, my friend.”
“How bad?”
“She is out of surgery. In a private intensive care room. She was shot twice. The first bullet went through her left lung. Collapsed it, but not too much damage. A miracle. The second bullet struck her in the temple. Left side. Traveled around the left side of her head, lodged in the muscle near the base of her neck.”
“Spinal?”
“No. Missed the vertebrae. But some bleeding into the brain.”
“What kind of slug?”
“Small. Hollow-point. A .32 ACP. From a CZ Model 10.”
“That’s a Serbian piece, and a close-up gun. How did he get so close?”
“You cannot be on the streets in Florence and not be close to somebody. Florence is made for assassins. I told you this some time ago, when we first met. We told her this also. Many times. You do not control Cora, as you are aware. My men behaved well. Two are dead now. A third will be blind in his left eye. Cora . . . They have put her into a coma, to relieve pressure on the brain. She sleeps now. Her pulse is steady. She is not on a respirator. But her brain function is . . . it is not good, my friend.”
“Where is she— No. I don’t want to know.”
“I wasn’t going to tell you. Not on this. Her family is with her. They have come from all over Italy. None of them blame you. Will you come?”
Dalton was quiet for a time.
“She’s in a coma?”
Brancati’s tone was harder now, the tone you use when you are steeling yourself to share grief. The ghost of Porter Naumann flickered briefly to life in the reflection from the window glass.
Grief is coming, Micah. More than you know.
“Yes. Induced medically. But I must say to you, there is no telling how much time. She may sleep for a month. She may get up and go dancing. She may never awake. She may die within the hour.”
Grief is coming.
“Will she know me?”
“Only you can say. What will you do?”
In a coma.
Just like Laura.
His first wife, Laura, had suffered irreparable brain damage after a suicide attempt, an attempt brought on by Dalton’s unwillingness to forgive her for the accidental death of their baby girl. She had died more than a month ago, after years in a vegetative state. Now a second woman in his life was lying in a deadly sleep. This was punishment. Karma. Fate.
Will you go to Florence to sit by her bed?
Dalton knew the answer and hated it.
“The only way I can help her is to finish this.”
Now the silence was on Brancati’s end. Finally, he said:
“That is what I thought you would say.” He said it without obvious disapproval, and actually felt none, since a soldier in the field cannot jump up and run home whenever he wants, no matter how terrible the news.
“What about the shooter?”
“He is alive. My men are with him. His world is pain.”
“Good. Did you get anything?”
“Did we need anything? We know who he works for. Galan is dealing with that now. If you wish to be in at the kill, you should finish your work there quickly. The Carabinieri are going to make an example of this Serb.”
“He’s in tight with the Montenegrin government?”
“There is no Montenegrin government. There is only gangs.”
“Did you ever find out who did the girl?”
“A male, anyway. She had been raped just before she had been stabbed. We have the DNA. She was dragged behind a boat. Perhaps a fishing boat. We have a record of every craft that was in the lagoon or around the Lido during the time frame. We are checking the owners now. Also, we found a microphone. In the palms, near the hospital. A directional mike. You understand me?”
“We were heard.”
“Yes. The microphone?”
“Yes.”
“It was one of ours. From our own stores.”
“Was it your relative? DioGrazzi?”
“No. He was already being questioned.”
“Which means you still have a stranger in the house.”
“Apparently, yes. Galan always suspected it. When Dario was exposed . . . it was too easy. As if it were deliberate.”
“A diversion?”
“Galan thinks so.”
“Whoever killed the girl will know where I am now.”
“Yes.”
“He’ll be looking for me here.”
“Yes.”
Dalton watched a big Bell chopper hovering over the city spires, the last of the setting sun turning her into a fiery red-gold dragonfly. The sound of her rotors came through the glass, faint as a heartbeat in Florence.
“Good.”
“It is a reason to stay where you are. I will tell you something, as a friend. To take all this on as your own guilt, it will make you weak. And it is not true. We—I—am to blame for this. I let her go to Florence. I let someone get near her. This is not on your—how do you say?—your chest. It is on mine. You do what you need to. We will watch over Cora. No one will reach her again. Have you heard this? Have you understood me?”
“Yes. Yes, I have heard you.”
“One thing. When we find out who owned the boat, who do we call?”
Langley? Or do you not trust Langley?
“Me. You have this number?”
“No. It is encrypted.”
Dalton gave him the number.
“So, you directly?”
“Yes. No one else.”
You do not trust Langley? No. I do not trust Langley.
20
The Home Ministry, Singapore
The little Malay cop came out of the gate in front of the Home Ministry at nine-seventeen. Lujac dropped some Sing dollars on the table beside the untouched bucket of raw oysters. Something slimy served in an ashtray, was Miss Piggy’s take on oysters, and Lujac agreed. He had ordered them only because of the very nasty, razor-sharp shucking tool they always supplied with the oysters. He slipped this into his pocket and walked out of the café, his eyes hard on the target. The cop was dressed in too-tight designer jeans, bright red sneakers, and a black-and-white satin team jacket
with the logo of the Cleveland Indians on the back. He had on a lime green ball cap—he wore it backward—and what hair was showing under it was damp and slick as if he had just had a shower. From a style point of view, he looked like a two-legged circus wagon. Lujac spent some time looking for any sign of a service piece on the cop, concluded he was unarmed, which corresponded to his information on the off-duty carrying of weapons in Singapore, which was usually only allowed for a few senior officials. Like with most totalitarian states, one of Lee’s first priorities had been to ban the private ownership of handguns. An unarmed population is a docile one.
The cop’s small, pinched face was downcast, and the bruise around his black eye had opened up across his cheek like a deep-purple lotus. He carried his injured right hand in a makeshift sling made out of a washroom towel. The man looked like he had just finished a very bad day at the office and was now thinking only of a cold beer and the fitful sleep of the been-hard-done-by.
The cop made his way west until he got to the MRT subway entrance on Bridge Street, where he limped down the staircase and merged into a mass of people milling about waiting for the east-west line. Although there were hundreds of people jammed onto the subway platforms, the station was spotless and brilliantly lit. Under the glaring fluorescents, the little Malay’s lime green ball cap stood out like a roadside flare so Lujac was able to keep a line on him without getting too close.
A train arrived in a hissing clamor and the smell of ozone. Thirty doors chuffed open down the line; those passengers exiting engaged in a head-down, grunting-and-shoving match with those who wanted in. No voices were raised, no punches thrown, but for a man with some personal-space issues—and Lujac had them all—the Singapore MRT was trial by frottage.
The crowds were clean and not badly dressed. The Singapore style was extremely demure and conservative—if the Taliban golfed, this is what they would wear—but, to Lujac, they all smelled of soy and chili sauce and infrequent bathing, and there were far too many of them.
The doors closed, and Lujac tried to stand as far from everyone else as he could. The atmosphere was wonderfully chill, and nobody talked. Everybody kept their hands to themselves and their eyes on the ground. The Malay cop had found a seat at the far end of the car. He had his head down and his iPod plugged in, and he was looking at some sort of graphic novel—the pictures could be read from yards away. He favored his right hand, and winced a little each time he turned a page. There was a lost quality about him, and something else, a touching vulnerability, as if he was going through life with a secret sorrow.
That might be useful. Wait and see.
Lujac, sensing a long night, went inward and spent some happy time wondering what it would be like to spend several hours killing Micah Dalton. It would be delicious. The man was so beautiful to look at. Owning him for a while would be something to remember, to savor. The train barreled through the earth, flashing from strobe-lit darkness into flare-bright stations one after the other. The crowds had thinned out quite a bit, and now Lujac was growing a little concerned. He was dressed far better than anyone else in the car and he was tailing a cop.
A cop who had seen him at the hotel, in Dalton’s suite, only a few hours before. There was no reason to believe that the man was a bad cop, although Lujac suspected he wasn’t a very good one—he had absolutely no situational awareness—but even a bad cop will tumble to a tracker if you whack him about the ears with it.
Lujac got off the car when the train pulled into a stop called Kallang and got back on two cars down. It was a good move, because the next station was Paya Lebar Road, and everyone in the cars who looked like a Malay stood up and shuffled toward the doors. Including the cop.
Lujac waited until the cars had almost emptied and most of the crowds were riding the escalator up to the street exit. He stepped out of the car and followed along, taking his suit jacket off and draping it carefully over his left forearm. He could see the lime green ball cap bobbing along in the crowds about fifty feet ahead. The man never turned around, never looked from side to side. A portrait of morose oblivion. How had he ever been taken on by the Singapore police? Probably a government-forced diversity program.
Hire a Malay: They’re fun to watch.
It was full dark now. There was no such thing as a lingering twilight in these latitudes. Out on the street, there was a huge post office, a barbarous, modernist hulk built in the grand tradition of barbarous hulks all over the totalitarian world. The streetscape around this hulk was ratty and run-down, lit by cold-blue streetlamps that made everyone look like a vampire: it was a squalid tangle of badly built stores selling bootleg DVDs, Chinese knockoff hip-hop clothing, Third World electronics, hawker shops lit by bars of fluorescent lights and furnished with card tables covered in cheap plastic and with ugly plastic chairs. Thousands of Malays were out and about on this sultry Asian night, moon-eyed dating couples followed by their squat and surly female chaperones, married wage slaves trailing a line of little brown kids like mallards on a riverbank, all of this gathered into a sprawling shantytown called Malay Village that could only be improved by a typhoon.
A dense haze of steamy air that reeked of fish sauce and chili and raw sewage and fried beans hung over the neighborhood, the sound of Malaysian fusion bands carrying over the rooftops, a type of rhythmic, Asian-falsetto howling that made Lujac think of a castrato in a wheelchair falling down a fire escape. Most of the younger people were crowding the hawker shops and jostling into a large open-air marketplace that announced itself to the world with a large green-and-purple neon sign that read GEYLANG SERAI WET MARKET. Oooh, thought Lujac, his stomach rolling, how yummy.
The little cop worked his way into this ragtag market, stopping at various hawker stalls to gather together an assortment of ethnic Malayan delicacies—jellied goats’ eyes in a vomit reduction, very likely, and perhaps a side dish of pickled dog peckers—the cop got himself a couple of bottles of Tiger beer, fished out, dripping, from a large tin tub full of pee yellow water, took a seat at a long board table and settled in to his repast, hunched over the tray and eating with his left hand, an unhygienic offense that was attracting a great deal of nauseated regard from the people sharing the table.
The cop missed all that, too, sunk deep in his private misery and radiating broadband resentment. Ripe for the picking, thought Lujac, watching him chewing a jellied goat’s eye with his slack mouth open.
The trouble was, there were damn few ang mors around, ang mor being a derogatory Chinese phrase meaning “red-haired monkey”— in other words, Europeans. A few of those wretched backpackers who were all over Italy and Montenegro like a plague of roaches, but they looked nothing like him. Thank God. But if he was going to pick this guy off, Lujac needed to blend in, he needed cover, and there wasn’t much of that around.
No help for it, thought Lujac, wondering how this cop thing was going to play out as he stood in the half dark of a side alley and watched his man drain his fourth Tiger, his head back and his throat working. The answer came a few minutes later when the cop set down his fifth bottle of Tiger and made direct eye contact with a young Malay boy sitting alone at a table for two about ten feet away.
The boy was what the Singaporeans call an ah beng, a punk-style kid with gelled hair and a row of silver studs punched into both eyebrows. He was wearing a too-large flame-colored shirt with cross-stripes of jagged purple, baggy blue jeans hacked off at midcalf, and oversized black combat boots with the laces flapping loose. His expression was mixed, a kind of thuggish bravado masking an undercurrent of fear. If the kid was over fifteen, Lujac was the Bishop of Rome. The cop was now staring at him—gunning him, the Americans liked to say—and the kid was trying to hold up his end by staring right back. The stare down was taking place in a tense silence and in a crowd of totally unaware civilians.
Lujac watched this for a while and thought, Ahh.
Now I get it.
21
The National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland
After a time, frowning, Mr. Oakland sat back in his padded chair, creaking the springs. He interlaced his large pink fingers, turning the knuckles white as he did so, and folded his hands across his broad, white-shirted belly. The shirt strained open in the places between the buttons, showing Nikki three little patches of pink skin covered in pale blond fuzz.
Ask not what your country can do for you, she thought, waiting patiently for Mr. Oakland to deliver a verdict.
“It’s real, I think,” he said, after a minute.
“I think so too,” said Nikki, her heart jumping a little.
“What do you make out of the background?”
“I looked up the trees in our Botanicals database. They’re a kind of pygmy Norway white pine. They grow mainly in the Balkans, and as far north as the Po Valley in Italy. I cross-referenced the trees with that chain of low hills in the background—”
“How?”
“I have a friend in Terrain Mapping. He thinks those types of glacial moraine—they’re called drumlins—and the types of pines we see here, combined, make it likely that the video was shot somewhere in Albania or Kosovo. The rock formation in the foreground looks like sedimentary shale and quartzite schist, so it’s a seabed region, which also fits.”
“The house?”
Nikki frowned.
“Generic faux Baronial. You’ll see this kind of trash castle anywhere from Cali to Malibu to Montenegro. They’re mainly low-grade spruce frame, tricked out with gables and columns and all this neo-Romanesque crapola—”