David Stone

by Micah Dalton 04 - The Skorpion Directive (v5)

  ? Why? You said—” “Not me. You. I’ll see you to the entrance, watch until you get to the transit station. Tell them everything. Everything

  . Nothing has happened up until now that compromises you in any way. Tell them I turned up at your flat last night, that I forced you inside. Tell them why. The truth, all of it, about the Nomenklatur

  , about the word Verwandtschaft

  —whatever that means—the whole thing. Hold nothing back. Get them to take you into protective custody. Maybe you can get your boss to tell you what Verwandtschaft

  actually referred to. You can say I forced you to drive me to the train station—” “Sure. And perhaps I can tell them that I submitted to rape just so I could get a sample of your DNA. Maybe they’ll even give me a raise.” This was said with such a bitter edge to it that it stopped Dalton for a moment. Her face was closing down fast, but Dalton cut across her and drove the argument home. “Look, Veronika, if the idea was to frame me with your killing, it’s not going to work very well if you’re not actually dead, is it? This isn’t your fight. You walk away right now—” “Not my fight? I killed a man last night. In my own home. And if I leave now, what happens to you?” “It’s two hundred and eighty miles to Venice. I have friends—” “Really? Like the man who puts the mark on that poster? That said everything was safe? Friends

  like that? Who else knew that you’d be coming up out of the Schottentor station? And when

  ?” There wasn’t any other answer to that. Dalton had been visiting that prospect for several hours and wasn’t enjoying the view at all. “No one. He was the only one.” “The Cousins do not tell us who gave them the information about you. We both know Interpol doesn’t do anything but pass on data to real agencies. They’re just a clearinghouse.” “Yes.” “So he—whoever this friend

  is—it’s possible he’s the source that Interpol was covering for. He’s the one who put that tell

  on the poster and led you right into the trap. He wanted you watched so he could set you up somehow—” Dalton put up some fences just to see if she could clear them. “There’s no way he could have known about my contact with you, about the lighter. None of that was predictable—” “No. But you

  are. You said it yourself. If you’re under attack, the first thing you do is turn right around and go straight at them. The shark-in-shallow-water. If your friend knew you

  , he’d know that he could depend on you to—what do you say in English—percolate?” “Escalate.” “Right, and isn’t that what you would

  do. Every single time?” Veronika moved closer, leaned into her argument, her scent around him and her topaz eyes fixed on his. “If he has access somehow—we don’t know how—to your BlackBerry, then he knows you searched for the name of a unit member—me—and he knows where you are because of the GPS, so he sends in a team to kill me. Micah, listen, no one else could

  have. He’s the one behind all this. You had a fallback meet, didn’t you? I mean, everyone does. Where was it?” “Leopoldsberg. At ten this morning.” “Are you going to go?” Galan. Issadore Galan. Dalton could hear his laugh, a dry, creaking rasp. The voice of the Joshua tree. He could see his yellow skin, wrinkled and old beyond his years, and his eyes, the eyes of a crow, piercing black, full of sharp wit and cold intelligence. All these features were crowded into the center of a round, bald skull. Then there were the misshapen, clawlike hands, broken with hammers by the Jordanians, his body crippled after that. The stoic grace and resignation with which he bore these marks they had left on him, the things they had done in the months they had had him, things so terrible that when they finally dumped him, bound and naked, out in the Negev and then he later saw himself in the window glass of the Israeli Army medical unit, he quit the Mossad. And he never went back to his wife and family in Tel Aviv. Galan went to Venice, to put some sort of life together in history’s first Jewish ghetto, and eventually became the spymaster for Allessio Brancati, the chief of the Venetian Carabinieri. Both men had been Dalton’s allies in his private vendetta against the Serbian Mafia. He owed those two men his life. Galan would not—could not—have betrayed Dalton. There must be another answer. “I know

  this man, Veronika.” “I see. And does everybody

  love you, Micah?” Dalton’s face changed, hardened, like concrete setting. This was too close to his core. Much too close. He had been married once, to a lovely woman named Laura, and they had had a little girl. And now they were both dead. Veronika saw the effect of her question. “I’m sorry. I think that went where I did not mean it to go. What I mean is, have you perhaps become . . . inconvenient

  ?” Dalton didn’t immediately answer. But into his covert world, “change we can believe in” had come with a vengeance. The CIA was under heavy fire from the left wing for what it had done—or had not done—in the aftermath of September 11th and the wars that followed. There seemed to be a special venom reserved for any Agency officer who had ever terrified a terrorist, and there was to be no mercy granted even for officially sanctioned actions taken by field officers working under unbearable pressure in the aftermath of an unprecedented attack on the nation. A Special Prosecutor had been appointed, plea bargains were being cut, old friendships broken, loyalty and trust betrayed, long-standing but informal covenants between domestic and foreign agencies shattered. A miasma of fear floated in the corridors, the halls were full of informants, Iagos and Savonarolas listened at the keyholes and monitored the phones. The morale of the operational sectors had plummeted to abyssal levels. The flow of useful HumInt had dried to a trickle. Very few CIA officers, especially those with families, were willing to do—or to authorize—anything aggressive out in the field. Most of them were riding their desks, shuffling paper and keeping their heads down, waiting for the Great Eye to pass over and find another victim, any

  victim. The Big Chill had settled over the American intelligence community, drawing the amused contempt of America’s allies and greatly comforting her enemies. And if there was a list on a desk somewhere, the name of Micah Dalton had to be in the top one hundred. Inconvenient. Just like the old Uzbek. Veronika reached out and touched the side of his face. Her fingertips were cold, but his skin was warm. He did not react. He was staring straight ahead, his thoughts clearly in another place. The traffic was building up, and she could see a couple of foot patrolmen walking slowly along the walk, sipping coffee from paper cups, talking. Dalton was right, of course. Veronika knew that she should get out of the car now and walk into the train station and tell Dalton’s version of the story to the transit police. They’d believe her. Relations with the CIA Station Chief in Vienna would be severed for a while, and the OSE would be theatrically outraged. The papers would hear of it—an “international incident.” And of course she would never again be assigned to Overwatch because she’s notorious. On the other hand, Nenia Faschi would eat Rolf Jägermeier alive for letting this happen to her. But Veronika could, eventually, manage some kind of normal life. And of course the Krokodil

  would be gone forever. It was the sensible thing to do. The Austrian

  thing to do. “Galan,” said Dalton. “I’m sorry?” “Issadore Galan. That’s the name of the man we’re talking about. He’s an Israeli, used to work for the Mossad, left them to live in Venice. He runs the agenzia di spionaggo

  for the Carabinieri.” “Issadore Galan. He’s a Jew?” Dalton gave her a quick, hard look, but she didn’t feel it. She was staring out the window, her attention on something else. “You remember what Yusef said just before he died? You asked him who sent him. He used the term utazók

  . It means ‘wanderer,’ Micah. But I think in Hungarian it’s slang for ‘Hebrew.’ Hebrew actually means ‘wanderer’ or ‘homeless.’ ” Dalton looked over at her. “Okay. That’s enough. I think I know where he is.” “Then we should go and ask him a few rude questions. I can help you. I will call in to work and take some days off. They won’t find Yusef for a month. If ever. I have contacts in the OSE, contacts all over Europe
. I can get access to the databases, this Smoke person. There would be paper on a man like that, with such terrible scars. I can drive—I can. What do you people say? ‘Scratch your back’?” In spite of his black mood, Dalton had to smile at that. “Watch

  my back, and you already have. No. You have a life here, Veronika. A good one. Much better than mine. Go back to it.” He was thinking, but did not say, People around me die

  . Veronika leaned over and gave him a kiss, a very fine one. The two patrol cops grinned as they passed by, their muffled voices carrying through the window glass. Dalton felt the kiss with varying degrees of intensity everywhere in his body. So did Veronika. She pulled back, touched his cheek again. “Maybe I don’t like my life that much.” LEOPOLDSBERG,

  a Catholic cathedral-fortress about three miles northwest of Vienna, was a limestone monolith perched on top of what they like to call mountains in that part of Austria. The Danube, not actually blue, ran in a broad, lazy curve around its base before straightening out, splitting in two, and running like a divided highway right down the middle of Vienna. The view from the stone terrace on the south side, a memorial to the war dead, took in the entire city, from the industrial regions in the east to the dense masses of pink stone buildings in the Ring District. Low green hills and tilled farmlands rose up almost to the forward glacis of the cathedral. At this time in the spring, everything was green and growing, and the old city glowed with a rose light under a pale yellow sun. They were in Dalton’s ancient Mercedes-Benz, a squared-off and gleaming black tank with a black-leather-and-rosewood interior, that Dalton had inherited from Porter Naumann, along with his town house in Wilton Row and his hotel suite in Venice. It was a wildly impractical car, too damned big for most European towns. Getting it through a chicane was like riding a rhino down a wet clay bank. Every time he filled it up, he got a thank-you note from the Sultan of Brunei. It had the carbon footprint of a five-alarm fire in a rubber tire plant, but it was as hard to stop as a heart attack. Dalton could drive it through a brick wall. And the engine block had once taken three 7.62 rounds without missing a stroke. Try that with a Smart car sometime. Veronika, when she had first seen it, said all of the same things about it that everyone else did—the Austrians being an earnest and eco-minded people—but by the time they were coming up the long curving drive that led to the parking lot, she wanted to give up her flat and move in. The car had international plates—Dalton always kept a couple of valid sets in a hideaway under the trunk—and today he was using a set linked to an actual consulting firm in Marseille, where he had a freelance stringer who’d cover for him on any official check. And Europe was jam-packed with old black Mercedes-Benzes. So, all things considered, including the black-tinted windows, it was a good ride. It was about nine in the morning. The parking lot was full, and the café-restaurant was crowded with people. Hundreds of mangy back-packers and overstuffed tourists were milling about the grounds. Veronika wheeled the Benz slowly up and down the ranks of parked cars while Dalton scanned the plates and looked for anyone in the crowds around the cathedral steps who was paying a little too much attention to them. But no one was. It was just another sunny Viennese morning, God was in his Heaven, and all was right with the local tourist trade. An ice-cream truck had set up shop in one corner of the cobblestoned park, under the shelter of a twenty-foot stone wall, and a platoon of little kids in matching uniforms—blue and white—was lining up for ice cream and chocolate sauce. The sun was growing in strength, and parasols were popping up here and there above the crowds like flowers in a summer garden. From the far side of the cathedral—Dalton assumed it was from the terrace—a string quartet was playing, of course, Tales from the Vienna Woods

  . There was no sign at all of Issadore Galan. Dalton was early, of course, but Galan always arrived at a meet about an hour before just to check out the terrain. They came around the last bend and rolled up beside a short row of vehicles: a large green maintenance van, a small blue Audi, a silver Opel Meriva, and a mud-brown 1986 Saab sedan with rusted fenders, sagging shocks, and bald tires. It looked empty. Dalton, watching the Saab carefully, asked Veronika to keep rolling and park the Benz a few rows away. She found a slot two rows beyond, managed to back the tank into it without scratching the paint-work, and shut the Benz down. “Was that his car?” she asked. “The Saab?” “Yes,” he said, pulling his SIG out of the lockdown under the glove compartment. “Aren’t we sort of out in the open here?” “Can’t be helped. You know what to do?” “Yes,” she said, patting the little H&K on the seat beside her. “If you’re hurt or killed or taken, I drive like hell to the nearest police station and tell them everything. If anybody tries to stop me, I run them down or I shoot them with this. Or both. And, yes, it’s loaded.” Dalton gave her a smile, and a kiss on the lips in case it was his last, shoved the SIG into his belt under his navy V-neck, pulled the gold silk scarf around his neck, and climbed out of the car, patting the hood as he closed the door. The sun was strong on the back of his neck as he walked through the car ranks, and he studied every face in the crowds around him as carefully as he studied every car and truck he passed and the walls of the cathedral-fortress that overlooked the parking lot. Down in his lizard brain, whatever lived there was sleeping soundly. He did not feel that he was being watched. Not even by Issadore Galan. But now he was quite certain that Galan was here. Dalton reached the Saab. It was parked at the rear of the lot, hard up against a low stone wall, more or less in the corner farthest away from the cathedral itself. The Saab just sat there, forlorn, squat, as ugly as the man himself, covered in dust, looking as if it had been there since the war. Dalton ran a fingertip through the dust, lifted it up. The dust was not from this parking lot. It was greasy brown and smelled of diesel, sewage, and seaweed. The scent reminded him of Venice in the summer. He came around to the driver’s side, wiped some dust off the glass. The interior of the Saab was clean, nothing on the seats, nothing on the floorboards. The ashtray, which Galan usually kept stuffed to overflowing with crushed-out Gitane butts, was empty. The interior looked as if it had been recently vacuumed, which was very unlike Galan, who treated the backseat like a Dumpster and could not be persuaded to clean the vehicle until he couldn’t see out the back window. Dalton dropped to a knee, leaned down, and checked the underbody carefully. No wires. No explosives taped to the exhaust. His heart heavy and a tight feeling in his chest, he walked around to the rear of the car and stood for a time looking down at the trunk lid. The dust lay thick on it and had not been disturbed at all. If there was anything in the trunk, it had been there for a while. He looked across the roofs of the other cars, saw the big square Benz fifty feet away rising above the rounded little eco-cars like a bull in a rabbit hutch. The sun was on his face. The sky was a perfect sky blue, as was only right, and the air was full of the scent of spring flowers and strong Austrian coffee. He was young and healthy, and his unreliable libido was in working order again after a very long hiatus. It was a good day to die. He reached down, grabbed the trunk handle, braced himself, and jerked it upward. The trunk lock popped as it always did, which was useful since Galan was always leaving his keys inside. Dalton let his breath out slowly, relieved to find that he was still in one piece. He held the lid for a moment, leaning down to look for a detonator, a wire, a trigger mechanism of any kind, although anything clever would have gone off as soon as he popped the lock. There was no wire. But in the narrow gap he could see brown burlap sacking stained with something dark. And now the stench hit him, drove him backward, his eyes watering. As he stepped back, his hand came off the trunk lid, and it rose slowly on its springs, opening up like the lid of a coffin. Crowded—no, stuffed—stuffed into the trunk like a load of dirty laundry was a large man-shaped bundle wrapped in burlap soaked with dried blood. Dalton reached down, got his fingers into the fabric, and ripped it away. It was stiff with blood and shredded as it came off Galan’s body. Dalton stood for a time looking down at what had been done to Galan. A cursory glance told him that almost everything t
hat the Jordanians had not

  done to Galan these new people finally had. Based on the bleeding and the bruising and the dried blood pooled in his empty eye sockets and around his exposed intestines and the obscenity of his genitals, it had been done while he was still alive. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? I mean, otherwise, what’s the fucking point? No man could have endured this without, in the end, telling them everything—anything—they wanted to know. In a way, it was a kind of relief to Dalton. Galan had not turned against him, and whatever he had revealed in those last terrible moments of his life had been torn from him by utterly vile men who were going to die as soon as Dalton could find them. But Galan had not betrayed him. Inevitably, he had told—whoever did this—everything about the meeting. The Schottentor trolley station. The tell