The Orpheus Deception

by David Stone

  “Nikki. I don’t suppose I could kiss you?”

  “If you want to, sir, but, in the meantime—”

  The AD of RA hugged her tight and kissed her hard on the left cheek, a chaste, fatherly smack. She blushed a little but found the experience interesting. His scarred cheek felt like alligator hide, and, God knows, he was terrible to look at, but he smelled of cigarettes and spicy cologne and green apple shampoo, and he was wonderfully strong. He released her, beaming.

  “God. A real estate listing. Deep in the heart of Crypto City, and the kid looks it up on fucking Google. Your generation kills me.”

  “Thank you, sir. The house was registered in the name of Zonia Sluja Korol, but we did a search of the utilities bills—”

  “How did you do that?”

  “Actually, I didn’t. I had the real estate agent who had the listing do it for me. I told her I was thinking of buying it—”

  “Did you give your name?”

  “Yes I did. She recognized it—”

  “She recognized your name?”

  “Not my name personally, sir. The family. My people are from Friuli—there are lots of Turrins around the Friuli region—so it helped that she knew my name, because she was very willing to go the extra mile to sell it to someone from the area, which really paid off. I wanted to know what the utilities and taxes were. She faxed me all the most recent bills—”

  “I don’t fucking believe this—”

  “With respect, sir, maybe now that I’ve let you kiss me on the cheek you could stop saying fucking all the time. It undermines your authority—”

  “I certainly will. And I apologize. Nikki, you are quite a package—”

  “Thank you, sir. And the bills were all in her name—Zonia Korol— but there was one bill for an appraisal of the property in the spring of last year, and the appraiser’s bill was paid by a check from the personal account of Dzilbar Kerk—I have a facsimile of it, and it shows a signature that matches the handwriting we had on file of Dzilbar Kerk—the house was appraised at one-point-nine million euros at that time, and it is now listed for one-point-one million—”

  “Dropped a bit. The deaths?”

  “I would think so. I asked her that—her name is Antonia Baretto—and she was pretty straightforward about it. She said there had been some kind of party at the villa, and the caterer had apparently served some oysters that had been contaminated by a bacteria called vibrio. It causes terrible lesions on the skin—similar to necrotizing fasciitis, the flesh-eating disease. At any rate, everybody died—something like nine people. Antonia said the corpses were all cremated to kill the bacteria. And the Carabinieri charged the caterer, who was conveniently a Slovenian—everybody around Trieste hates the Slovenians, unless they marry them. Anyway, they charged him with criminal negligence causing death, and, before they could bring him to trial, the caterer, claiming he was innocent, ran away, back to his home in Slovenia, where he couldn’t be extradited. So then everybody knew he was guilty, because everybody knows only the guilty run. That was pretty much the end of it.”

  “Nobody mourned the dead girls?”

  “The people who lived there were pretty much hated by the people of Muggia and San Rocco. It’s just a small fishing village, maybe five thousand families, kind of sleepy, and these people were loud, vulgar boors, throwing money around and coming on to the daughters and having skanky hookers fly in from Slovenia and generally being utterly and completely obnoxious. So, with God’s help, they all died, and everybody was quite okay with that.”

  “Cold.”

  “Italians can be quite pragmatic. So now the villa is up for sale—”

  “For sale by whom?”

  “A corporation registered in Budva, sir. Called ZYKLON.”

  “Any idea who controls the corporation?”

  “No, sir. The company seems to be based in Budva, but all we have are numbers. East of the Adriatic, the records of corporate ownership are pretty sketchy. I guess they like it that way. Sorry I couldn’t get more info—”

  “She told you quite a bit, for a real estate agent.”

  “She wants to make the sale. And she doesn’t like Montenegrins any better than she likes Slovenians. She wants an Italian to buy it. Even better, I’m Friuliani. So, she’s really doing the full-court press.”

  “Budva? I don’t know it.”

  “Budva is a coastal port not far from Sveti Stefan, which is a sort of luxury resort island connected to the mainland by this narrow causeway. It used to be big in the sixties and then it went into a decline. It’s being rebuilt, turned into a hyperluxury resort by this same ZYKLON real estate outfit.”

  “And now ZYKLON has the villa up for sale too?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The AD of RA fell silent, staring out at the lights coming on all over Crypto City. The wind was rising, and there was a biting edge to it now. He realized that Nikki was shivering. He whipped off his cashmere scarf and draped it around her shoulders, in spite of her protests. It smelled of his cologne and was warm from his body. She pulled it in tight and smiled at him in a way that was not completely chaste, but his mind was in Italy.

  “This agent . . . sounds like you made a personal connection with her.”

  “She’s a professional, and I liked her.”

  “When you called her, did you use one of our own lines?”

  Nikki gave him a look.

  “No, sir. And I didn’t use my cell either. I drove to a Starbucks in Annapolis Junction. My friend runs it. She let me use her office phone. She’s also taking messages for me if Antonia calls back.”

  “We do have masked lines.”

  “I know. But Miss Chandler said you were really busy, so I would have had to ask Mr. Oakland to set one up, and he’s not too happy with me right now. And he would have wanted to know why I needed one.”

  “Good. Of course. Nice work, Nikki. How’s your Italian?”

  “Pretty good, sir,” she said, her heart blipping.

  “Nikki, I know this is a leap. Would you consider going to Muggia? See the property? If you can, bag some residue samples around the pool? FedEx them back for Forensics? The HazMat people will show you how to do it safely. If we could get a sample of this substance, then we’d have the muscle to make things happen. Force State and the CIA to take preemptive action.”

  “Sir, I’m completely ready to go, but I’m a Monitor. Not a—”

  “I know. Not a Field Agent. Here’s the thing, Nikki. I’ve officially stopped trusting the CIA. Normally, I’d hand what you’ve developed over to them and let them find sixteen different ways to . . . screw it up. But nine people died horrible deaths in that pool, and one of them connects to the deaths of all those Biopreparat people, and the villa is owned by a corporation with the same name as Zyklon B, which was the nerve gas the Nazis used to kill fifteen million people in their concentration camps. Something’s in the wind. I can smell it. If I trusted the CIA not to fuck—not to mess it up, I’d hand it to them. But I don’t. But if the NSA or the DIA does it officially, we’ll need all kinds of formal liaison with the Italians, and that means more risk of blowing the security. You worked for the DA’s office back in Pittsburgh. You know what evidence is. You’re in and you’re out in less than a week. Would you be ready to do that? Come in quiet, just a potential buyer? If anything looks weird, if anybody gets curious, you split. Would you be ready to do that? And stop calling me sir, will you?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll try. But will the Director let me do this?”

  “Good question. Let’s go find out.”

  “Us? Me? Now?”

  “Yeah. Us. You. Now.”

  34

  The Indian Ocean, fifteen miles off the coast of Somalia

  Their world was a giant brass bowl overturned on a copper plate that stretched away in every direction, merging with a purely theoretical sky in a band of dirty yellow haze. The sun hung low and burned smoky red behind a veil of ochre cloud. And inside this brass-and-c
opper chamber lived the heat, a blast furnace of heat that scorched their lungs when they inhaled it and seared their lips when they breathed it back out. The thick air was dense with diesel fumes and the salty stink of sea rot, and what little breeze there was flapped in from the west, carrying on its scaly back the fetid reek of some squalid coastal village just below the horizon line. At the wheel, Vigo Majiic watched the compass and the empty ocean all around and felt himself a condemned man doomed to spend the rest of eternity trying to reach a mythical green shore that was always receding into a burning and inconceivable immensity. Emil Tarc, a self-contained man not overly troubled by a hostile universe or febrile intimations of mortality, was out on the flying bridge, staring through a pair of binoculars at two, low sharklike boats that a few minutes ago had been only twin brown smudges out on the western horizon but had now approached close enough for him to make out the faces of the men in the boats and the weapons that they carried.

  “I don’t believe this,” he said, more to himself than anyone else, but Majiic heard him through the headset communications gear they were wearing. He stared through the windshield at the incoming boats.

  “What are they?” he asked over the radio.

  “Two fast-attack boats, both got twin Mercs the size of cart horses, doing maybe forty knots. Damn. Look at the spray flying around their cutwaters—”

  “Customs? Military?”

  “No. Civilians. Maybe fifteen men in each boat, no uniforms— they look like jihadis—got those keffiyeh things and their faces covered—loaded with AKs and RPGs. Fucking Somali pirates, is my guess.”

  “What do we do? We can’t let them come aboard.”

  “All we have are the SAWs. Only really effective out to five hundred yards max. But they can pop an RPG into us from a thousand. And we can’t let them shoot the shit out of the hull or cripple the rudder either, can we?”

  “What will we do?”

  Tarc came back into the wheelhouse, his sharp face rocky and his expression murderous. Through the open door, Majiic could hear the hornet sound of the outboards over the rhythmic rumble of the tanker’s engines. The radio hissed and crackled on channel 16, the public frequency, a hoarse, guttural string of Somali and then an abrupt switch to accented English.

  “You, on the tanker. We are the Somali Coast Guard! You are in Somali waters. Make full stop. We will board and check your papers. Reply!”

  Within a few seconds, the speedboats were less than a hundred yards out, two long, low cigarette boats with rust-stained hulls and huge twin outboards. Both boats were packed with skinny, long-skulled men with chiseled Caucasian features and light brown skin, the distinctive Somali mix of Arab and African blood. One boat cut right in a spray of white curl and headed for the stern of the tanker, taking a position fifty yards off the seething water around the prop and the rudder. A small, bent man in the bow aimed an RPG at the prop, set himself, and waited for the order. The other boat carved a slicing arc left through the water and came up alongside their port side, at a range of less than a hundred feet, where it slowed to match the pace of the huge tanker. The tanker loomed over the cigarette boat like the edge of a cast-iron cliff, massive and unscalable. The ship’s radio came alive again, a man barking orders in a hard, snarling tone.

  “On the boat. Switch to channel 30.”

  Majiic looked at Tarc.

  “Do it,” said Tarc. “Everybody listens to 16. We don’t need the damn U.S. Navy coming to help us.”

  Majiic got on the radio, said, “Roger. Switching to 30.”

  Tarc was on the ship’s intercom.

  “Jakki, you there?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You see these fucking niggers alongside?”

  “I do. You want us to come on deck?”

  “No. I don’t want the hull marked up. We have to clear the Customs wharf in Aden. Stay below. Get everyone ready. Keep your coms on.”

  “Yes, sir. Will do. Out.”

  The radio crackled up again, a hectoring bray.

  “On the ship. I am Colonel Mahmud Sia, of the Somali Coast Guard. Lower your gangway, and get all papers ready.”

  Majiic could see the man who was talking, a tall, skeletal, gray-haired Somali wearing a ragged tan shirt over baggy cargo pants and some sort of British forage cap without any brass badge on the peak. The rest of the men—boys, really, all of them in their late teens and early twenties—looked like feral dogs; unshaven, eyes reddened by the sea wind, dripping with sweat in the blast-furnace heat, wearing everything from basketball shirts and jeans to the shalwar kameez of Pakistan. They were obviously members of some warlord’s army, but it seemed to Majiic that they had fallen on hard times. They looked hungry and dirty, and their weapons might have been stored in a litter box. But Majiic knew that you could drop an AK-74 in the sand and drive a truck over it, then pick it up, work the bolt, and light up a platoon. He had seen it done.

  “Emil, what am I supposed to tell this guy?”

  Tarc had made a decision. The decision scared him a little, that much Majiic could see in his eyes, and that worried him even more, because, if Emil Tarc was going to do something that frightened even Emil Tarc, then things were about to get seriously hairy. Tarc got on the intercom again.

  “Jakki, send a couple of your smaller guys up to lower the gangway. No weapons. Tell them to look nervous.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “You’re gonna let them come on board, Emil? Jakki and his men could blow those sand niggers out of the water in two minutes.”

  “And what if we catch an RPG in the rudder and can’t steer anymore and we have to get towed to Aden? And they’ll get at least one shot off, you can count on that. I can’t get this hull marked up. We steam into Aden with a string of AK fire stitched across the bow and there’ll be a huge investigation. Everybody’ll know we tangled with the Somalis. The U.S. Navy is all over this region. I don’t want to draw any attention. You follow?”

  “You let those niggers on board and they’ll kill us all.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll have to see.”

  Majiic stared at Tarc, who gave him back a slate-hard glare for a moment, and then he broke into a crazy grin. He looked like a happy jackal.

  “What the hell? Come on, Vigo. It is a good day to die!”

  Majiic groaned. During the crossing of the Indian Ocean, the crew had passed the time watching old DVDs on the ship’s ancient television. Last night, the feature was Dances with Wolves. It was hopeless.

  A few minutes later, he and Tarc were standing by the rail with compliant expressions on their faces while the first of the Skinnies came up the railing. Two of Jakki’s men—both in mufti and trying to look harmless, in spite of their shaved heads and hard eyes—stood nearby, watching the older one, the gray-haired man in the British cap and the ragged tans, as he stepped down onto the decking, glaring around the ship, the whites of his eyes showing, his ragged teeth bared as he wiped his forehead with a filthy sleeve. Up close, he looked feverish and sickly, and he stank of urine. Was he seasick? Or was it something worse? He had a large Colt .45 in his left hand, and he pointed it at Tarc’s head, his trigger finger inside the rusty guard.

  “I am Colonel Mahmud Sia. Who are you?”

  “My name is Captain Emil Tarc, Colonel Sia. You don’t need that gun, sir. We’re all unarmed, and happy to cooperate with the Somali Coast Guard. This is my first mate, Vigo Majiic.”

  Colonel Sia blinked at the two of them, perhaps a little puzzled by their bland, smiling countenances. Could these two unarmed fools actually believe there was such a thing as a Somali Coast Guard? Their polite manner had put him off balance. But, then, never before had the captain of such a large ship ever let them come on board. Usually, they’d throw down a valise of cash just to be left alone. Colonel Sia found himself dizzily contemplating an undreamed-of success, actuallytaking a huge oil tanker that, alas, none of his men knew how to operate. So, for now, no killing.

  The rest of his men—th
irty-two, by Majiic’s count—had clambered aboard and were milling about, staring uneasily at Colonel Sia and waiting for his signal to start the killing. A group of them walked over to Jakki’s men and stood right in front of them, glowering, eye to eye, screaming in a rush of Somali. Jakki’s men looked straight ahead into the middle distance, stony. Colonel Sia barked at them and they backed away.

  “Where are your crew?”

  “All below, sir. Too hot to stay on deck.”

  Colonel Sia frowned at Tarc, as if he had forgotten his name or how he had come to be standing in front of him. Sia was blinking in the heat, his red eyes glazing over. It took him a few seconds to process what Tarc had said. Watching Sia, Majiic felt he was under the influence of a drug. Hashish, or maybe just khat. The man’s focus would come in and out, as if he was in a half-world between dreaming and waking. He opened his mouth, wiped his forehead with his sleeve again, and then his focus seemed to return. He snarled out some orders. His men flinched and then they grinned and ran into the gangway doors, clanging down the stairs into darkness, leaving only Sia and, presumably, his bodyguard, a comically short, one-eyed man with a torso too large for his skinny legs and an expression on his face that reminded Majiic of the look that some KLA soldiers had worn when they were getting ready to rape their captives—a wet-lipped, open-mouthed, slack-jawed look. He was holding a short-stock AK-74. He had some sort of native stiletto shoved into his belt. Colonel Sia holstered his Colt, snapping the retaining band over the butt.

  He made a hard face and held out a pink-palmed hand.

  “Papers!”

  Tarc handed him a sheaf of meaningless papers he had hastily scooped up off the plotting table, glancing briefly at Sia’s bodyguard as Sia fumbled through the papers. Sia’s drugged mind churned aimlessly, as he tried to get an idea of what the cargo was, thinking about where he would sell it and how much he could make on it. And who would buy the tanker itself, once he had killed the crew. But, mainly, how he could avoid sharing the money with these dirty mongrels at his heels, and how good it felt to be on the winning side of destiny again after so many years of failure and squalid defeat. He folded the papers up and stuffed them into his shirt.