The Orpheus Deception

by David Stone

  A slight pause.

  “I am. A Serbo-Croatian gangster. How does this connect with—”

  “Is the NSA monitoring his lines?”

  “That’s classified matter, Micah. And beside the point. We were . . .”

  Dalton’s attention trailed away as the Humvee pulled to a stop ten yards away. A tall, rangy-looking Marine got out before the Humvee stopped rocking, rigged out in BDUs and wearing a Beretta in a brown-leather shoulder rig. He had a sandblasted face and a long, vulturine beak, and dark eyes that contained a gleaming, crazy spark. He wore his hair in a Marine Corps high-and-tight, and carried the general air of a hungry raptor. He strode, heavy boots coming down hard on the tarmac, to where Mandy and Dalton were standing. Mandy moved in to intercept him while Dalton lifted a hand to acknowledge his arrival, pointing to the cell in his hand. “Major Holliday,” he called, “I have Langley here. One minute?”

  Holliday frowned and settled, turning his attention to Mandy, who began to talk to him in a low tone, leaning in close, which had the effect she intended, as Major Holliday’s fight-or-flirt response kicked in fast. He gave her a large, predatory grin, glancing from time to time over at Micah Dalton with ferocious intensity mixed with curiosity. Dalton went back to the cell phone, speaking with restrained anger and a great deal of urgency.

  “Sir, I’m sorry, that was Major Holliday, the Marine in charge here. Let me lay this out for you as I see it. Raymond Fyke’s tanker, the Mingo Dubai, a five-hundred-foot-long ship, was hijacked by a group of Serbians led by a man named Vigo Majiic. He was the third mate on the ship. I believe that Vigo Majiic may have been working for Branco Gospic.”

  “And what takes you there, Micah?”

  “A Carabinieri major called me this morning. A woman who tried to kill me in Venice was found dead on the Lido beach. Brancati identified her as Saskia Todorovich. Her home town was Kotor, in Montenegro. Branco Gospic is based in Kotor. Brancati thinks the man who killed her was Kiki Lujac, also a Montenegrin. Lujac has followed me to Singapore. He’s here now. I saw him yesterday, at the hotel. I think it’s plausible, from the connections, to infer that he’s here on Gospic’s orders.”

  “Yes,” said Cather, evenly, “that’s a reasonable inference. I still don’t see how this brings us to Mr. Fyke and his allegedly hijacked ship.”

  “If Fyke is right and the ship really was hijacked by a Serbian outfit, Major Brancati says there are only two crime families in the Serbo-Croatian regions capable of mounting an operation like that.”

  “Stefan Groz and Branco Gospic,” said Cather, his voice less remote.

  “Yes. That’s right. When Fyke and I were together in Pristina, one of the outfits we were trying to penetrate was run by Stefan Groz. We knew of another but weren’t able to develop a name. But the DIA opened a file on Groz, and I’m willing to bet that, by now, we’ve got a FISA warrant on Branco Gospic too. Am I right?”

  “That’s a security matter. I cannot comment.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes. Have the Monitors picked up anything that connects Gospic to Vigo Majiic?”

  “I have no reply to that. But I’m willing to follow your argument for a while longer.”

  “Did you know that Gospic had sent a man to Singapore? To follow Mandy and me?”

  “If I had, wouldn’t I have warned you?”

  “Sir, you always said that a card is only useful if it’s in play. Let’s assume you did. Let’s assume that you got a packet from your automated surveillance of Gospic’s line that contained a reference to Micah Dalton. Why did you pick me to get Ray Fyke out of Changi? And why did you send Mandy Pownall along with me?”

  A pause. Mandy and Major Holliday were both watching Dalton now, sensing the tension in his voice. Fyke and the others had gone on to the mess tent. A warm wind swept across the airfield, stirring the palms. It smelled of sea salt and rain. In the north, a huge green-and-black front was moving in. Cather’s silence stretched out. Finally, he said:

  “I do not admire indiscretion. I trust you have not been indiscreet, Micah.”

  “If Mandy and I were killed on this mission, that would solve a major security problem for you, wouldn’t it, sir?”

  Clever lad, thought Cather.

  “That’s not at all true. At any rate, that vulnerability has been addressed. The asset is being reconfigured—at no small expense, by the way. What once you may have known is now operationally irrelevant. And, I must say, I find it rather stinging that, in order to contain a security breach, you think me capable of sending two fine young agents out into the field in the hope that they might be killed.”

  “The fact remains, sir, that our knowledge of it can be seen as a problem for the Agency. It doesn’t have to be. I had no objection to the program at all. Neither did Miss Pownall. We both approved of it. My interest lay in another direction, a personal one, and it ended when Jack Stallworth died.”

  “I sense that all this is leading to a request, Micah. What is it?”

  “I want you to let Mandy and Fyke and me try to find this missing ship. I want your permission, and I want your help.”

  “Why would I want to help you in some quixotic and very likely expensive quest to hunt a chimera on the word of a drunken deserter?”

  “I think Branco Gospic had the Mingo Dubai hijacked. I think he went to a lot of trouble to do it. Gospic trades opium base for weapons with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. That’s what they do in Pristina.”

  In one detached part of Cather’s mind, he was recalling the first time that Branco Gospic had come to his official attention. It was in August 1998; U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam had been attacked by al-Qaeda and President Clinton had just ordered retaliatory missile strikes on Khartoum in the Sudan and Khost in Afghanistan. Eighty cruise missiles—a billion American dollars’ worth—rained down on Khartoum and Khost, killing a night watchman at a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum and five al-Qaeda trainees in Khost. Sadly, a more effective response was deemed not quite apropos, since the President’s moral authority had been rather undermined by a sloe-eyed young houri named Monica Lewinsky, who was, that same week, sitting in front of a grand jury and retailing her serial encounters with what Jack Stallworth had described at the time as the President’s staff. What brought Branco Gospic into it was that seven of the Tomahawks that hit Khost had failed to detonate, and bin Laden later sold five of the most intact ones to China for ten million U.S. dollars, which allowed China to reverse engineer them and thereby establish a solid basis for its own nascent missile program. The other two went to Pakistan and North Korea. Branco Gospic brokered the deal and pocketed fifteen percent. So, yes, he was professionally interested in Gospic. Dalton was summing up his case, the passion in his voice ringing out clear.

  How brightly the young burned, thought Cather.

  “So, I know you’re on Gospic. That’s why you have the NSA monitoring his communications. If you didn’t have the NSA watching him, it would be a gross dereliction of duty. He’s a terrorist, or an ally of terrorists. Now he may have acquired a five-hundred-foot tanker. What does an ally of terrorists want with a five-hundred-foot tanker? I think you need to know the answer to that question, sir. I think it’s your duty to know the answer.”

  Cather, who had begun his long service to his country in the early years of the cold war, disliked being lectured on duty by anyone. His reply was dipped in acid and served on the edge of a straight razor.

  “If there is anything in your theory, then the disappearance of this tanker—inasmuch as it may affect the security of the United States— falls within the purview of the counterterrorism unit at the FBI, in New York, and the Coast Guard. Protocol would require me to notify the SAIC at Federal Plaza. Fyke would then become an informant for the FBI, and you would be free to retire to the scented chambers of your little divertimento in Venice.”

  Dalton, stung, started low and grating, but he redlined fast.

  “My little divertimento in Venice, Mr. Cather, is c
urrently in a coma in a hospital bed in Florence with a bullet in her head, a bullet put there by Branco Gospic.”

  He realized he was actually snarling at the Director of Clandestine Services. And he was doing it on a cell phone in the middle of a sunny afternoon in the middle of Sembawang Field with a Marine Corps Major and a pale-looking Mandy Pownall staring at him as if his hair had just burst into flames. He was damaging his credibility with the Marine, and with Mandy, and picking a fight with the only man who could help him. It was childish, and, even worse, it was lousy leadership.

  “I apologize for that, sir. But you yourself said that the CIA needs to redeem itself, sir, and so far the only thing some of our people in Langley have done in that direction is to undermine critical surveillance programs by leaking the details to the goddam New York Times. All I’m asking for here is a chance to run down a missing tanker. Let the CIA be what it used to be, an active force out here in the real world and not just another Ivy League think tank, padding its budget and fragging the competition. If I find this tanker and it is a threat, then you can take it to the FBI and the Coast Guard, and I’m out of your life and back in Florence, waiting for one of the finest women I’ve ever had the honor to meet to either wake up or die.”

  Cather was quite capable of silence. Indeed, he was only fully alive inside his silences. This was, Dalton realized, Cather’s own version of that familiar Chinese silence.

  Cather let it run, and then, surprisingly, broke it himself.

  “I am told the Chinese personnel have been taken into custody by the Singaporean authorities and will be promptly repatriated to China. So, that part of the mission has been accomplished. I was interested in this—”

  Dalton, still stinging from the divertimento barb, tried and failed to keep his mouth shut. “Might that be because you’ve doubled one, or all, of them. Or you’ve loaded them up with false data in a confusion operation.”

  There was a long and forbidding silence on the other end. Dalton knew he had gone too far, but there was no way to take it back. When Cather finally spoke, his voice was controlled and cool, but he had receded.

  “Very byzantine, if it were true. Perhaps you should consider a career in the movies. What a charming schoolboy daydream, however, because it would mean that we would have an advantage in our long struggle with the Chinese. Since this is very likely to be the last official communication we will ever have, and in honor of your previous service to the country, I will grant you the possibility that getting Mr. Fyke out of Changi may have been subordinate to the collateral purpose of this mission, which may have been to create a pretext for the plausible reinsertion of three technicians into the electronic surveillance matrix of the Chinese Intelligence establishment. And, further, I will admit that you were selected for this mission because you were both reliable and expendable. You have laid the matter before me with all of your usual tact and charm, and now the decision is mine. I take it the Major—the Marine officer; I’ve forgotten his name— Holliday? Is Major Holliday still in attendance there?”

  “Yes, sir. He is.”

  “Fine. Let me have a word with him.”

  LUJAC HAD HIS hand on the door of the top-floor room in the Changi-Lah Hotel and Suites, had stopped for a moment to take in the room one last time and make sure it looked the way it needed to look and that nothing he had left in it was going to ever become a problem for him, and then his cell phone rang and that became a problem for him because it was Branco Gospic and he had some bad news.

  “Larissa got that GPS data for you.”

  “Good. I thought she was going to call.”

  “No. She isn’t. You want to know where the phone is?”

  “Sure, boss—”

  “The phone is at a place called Sembawang Field. You know it?”

  “I think so. It’s an airfield up in the north, near the Strait of Johor.”

  “Yeah. It is. I looked it up. Part of it belongs to the United States Marine Corps. Guess which part has your phone in it?”

  Great. Now what?

  “The Marine Corps part?”

  “Very good. Guess what else? I’m watching the screen right now. Can you look out a window, or something; see that far?”

  Lujac glanced at the open balcony doors and out across the forest canopy.

  “I think so.”

  “Then go do it. Do it now.”

  Something had happened, and Gospic was different. Lujac’s nerve endings began to pop, and part of his skin—large patches of it—got crawly and cold. Lujac had been around Gospic when Gospic got like this and Lujac had not liked it. He wished he was still talking to Larissa. He walked across the floor and out onto the balcony, looked into the north.

  “What can you see?”

  “Forest. Downtown. A golf course.”

  “Can you see something, small and shiny, going up into the air?” Lujac tried, could see nothing.

  “No. I can’t.”

  “That’s too bad. There’s a U.S. government plane taking off from Sembawang Field right now. Your phone is on it. I’m literally watching the GPS numbers roll. What are you going to do about it?”

  Lujac’s throat was a little tight.

  “Do you know where it’s going?”

  “Yeah. Larissa says they filed a flight plan for a place called Kuta. Do you know where Kuta is?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s a resort town in Bali.”

  “Kiki, you’re not doing real well down there, are you?”

  “I’m managing.”

  “Yeah? Well, I’m sending you some help.”

  Not good news.

  “Not necessary. All I need is the Gulfstream—”

  “The people I sent you there to deal with are currently on a plane going to Bali. Maybe surrounded by United States Marines. You’re stuck in Changi with your thumb up your ass. You need more than a really nice plane. You need some serious guys with some serious ordnance. Listen carefully. There’s a landing strip on the island of Tenggara Barat, next island east of Bali. There’s a landing strip there called Selaparang. About sixty miles from Kuta. Are you getting this?”

  “Yes, sir. Selaparang. Sixty miles from Kuta.”

  “Good. The Gulfstream is still on the pad at Changi Airport. Is there anything at the hotel you can’t leave behind?”

  “No. Some clothes. Some camera gear I took along for cover.”

  “Any other loose ends?”

  Lujac glanced toward the bathroom. The tub was full of ice from the machine down the hall. Plus, he’d run the shower on the kid for an hour, so there’d be no DNA. He’d even scooped out the tub drain, just to make sure. Most of the action had happened in the bathroom, and he’d wiped it all down. This was after he took some pictures with the digital camera in his cell phone and e-mailed them through Gospic’s fire wall to the Home Ministry website, just because it amused him to do that sort of thing. They’d paid cash for a month. If he stuck a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, turned on the radio, and jacked up the air-conditioning, Corporal Ahmed could last a week.

  “No. Everything’s cool.”

  “What’s your cover at the hotel?”

  “Duhamel. Jules Duhamel. A French passport.”

  “Don’t check out. Leave it all. It’ll be safe until you get back.”

  “Is everything okay, Branco?”

  “Okay? No. Everything is not okay. That wop Brancati is fucking with my operation. He’s trying to shut down accounts in Zurich; he’s rolled up everybody I had in Venice and he’s squeezing them until they bleed. He’s saying that Radko shot the Vasari broad because she’s an infidel aristocrat and he’s a fanatical Muslim. He’s trying to get the Italian government to declare us a terrorist operation. The Carabinieri has gone to war with us—”

  “No offense, boss, but I tried to warn you about the Vasari thing.”

  “Yeah? Did you? I don’t remember. Anyway, fuck Brancati. He’s a dead man. Get to the plane, and tell Bierko to fly you to Selaparang. Right now. It’s a
bout eleven hundred miles. Put it down there and wait.”

  “For what, boss?”

  “Just wait.”

  32

  Inbound to Kuta City, Bali, the Indonesian Archipelago, twenty thousand feet

  Ray Fyke said Kuta, in Bali, was the place to start, and then they all looked expectantly at Doc Holliday, whose rocky face went through a number of changes while he took in all the implications, and then he shrugged his shoulders and ordered up the paperwork that would give them the temporary use of the unmarked Lockheed JetStar—not without an internal struggle, since the plane had been a gift to the U.S. Embassy in Singapore from the collection of the Sultan of Brunei, given in return for confidential Embassy services rendered in connection with an errant nephew—and it was intended as a gift from the U.S. Embassy to the Minister Mentor on the occasion of his grandson’s fifth birthday. Which explained why the plane had no markings. It was in the process of being repainted in the Minister Mentor’s favorite colors, sky blue and gold.

  Cather’s request for any and all assistance from Major Holliday, reinforced minutes later by a call from Bob Neller, the General in command of the Third Marine Division in Okinawa, got them a full-courtpress by the ground crew. The Marine Corps in action was a delight to watch. They even sent a couple of MPs to collect all of their things from the Intercontinental. The plane itself was a gem: the avionics and navigation gear were all updated and in first-rate condition—the Sultan of Brunei could afford it—the interior refinishing had been completed the week before, twelve comfortable seats and a well-stocked galley with a full bar, and smelled like a brand-new Cadillac. All it needed was two full wing tanks. Holliday even dug up four brand-new Berettas, and spare magazines; pistols carried on the armorer’s books as failed bench test, a masterpiece of creative inventory manipulation that only a combat Marine with a master’s degree in Petty Pilfering could pull off. They also delivered some additional medical supplies for Fyke, which left them nothing to wish for but a properly filed flight plan. They got that and a clearance from Sembawang air control in five minutes. Doc Holliday flirted for a while longer with Mandy Pownall while they waited for the Marines to get back from the hotel with their luggage. Then he cheerfully wished them Godspeed, and said he damn well wanted his plane back in one piece.