The Scorpio Illusion

by Robert Ludlum

  “Thank you. Is there a number where I can reach you?”

  “Are you crazy?” The line went dead, replaced by a dial tone.

  Bajaratt hung up the phone; she got out of bed and for several minutes paced back and forth in front of the pile of luggage and boxes from the shops on Worth Avenue. It was a minor thing, she thought, looking at the packages and complimenting herself on her foresight, but she had requested that all price tags and marks of the newly-purchased be removed from the clothing. Packing everything would be far easier in the morning. That was minor; something else was not.

  “Nicolo!” she said loudly, slapping his bare feet that extended beyond the lifted sheets. “Wake up!”

  “What …? What is it, Cabi? It’s dark.”

  “It isn’t now.” The Baj walked to the floor lamp next to the sofa and turned it on. The dock boy sat up, rubbing his eyes and yawning. “How much did you drink?” asked Bajaratt.

  “Two or three glasses of wine,” he answered angrily. “Is that a crime, signora?”

  “No, but did you study the information in those pages as you said you would?”

  “Of course. I studied them last night for hours, then this morning on the plane, and in the taxis and before we went to the elegant stores. Tonight I read for at least an hour; you were asleep.”

  “Can you remember everything?”

  “I remember what I can remember, what do you want from me?”

  “Where did you go to school?” asked the Baj harshly, standing at the foot of the bed.

  “I was tutored at our estate in Ravello for ten years,” replied the young man, the answer an emphatic robotic reflex.

  “And then?”

  “L’École du Noblesse in Lausanne,” Nicolo shot back. “In preparation for—for—”

  “Quickly! In preparation for what?”

  “For the Université de Genève, that’s it!… And then my ailing father called me back to Ravello to absorb the family business … yes, he called me back, the family business.”

  “Don’t hesitate! They’ll think you’re lying.”

  “Who?”

  “After your father called you back?”

  “I employed my own tutors—” Nicolo paused, squinting, then the memorized words came rushing from his mouth. “… for two years to make up for my lack of university training—five hours every day! I’m told that my scores on the esami di stato in Milano placed me in the highest levels.”

  “Also documented,” said Bajaratt, nodding. “You did that very well, Nico.”

  “I will do it better, but it’s all false, isn’t it, signora? Suppose someone who speaks Italian asks me questions I cannot answer?”

  “We’ve gone over that. You simply change the subject, which I will change for you.”

  “Why did you wake me up and go through all this?”

  “It was necessary. You didn’t hear it, the wine blocked your ears, but I had a telephone call. When we arrive at the hotel tomorrow, there will be newspaper people who want to interview you.”

  “No, Cabi. Who would care to interview a dock boy from Portici? They don’t want to interview me, they want to interview the barone-cadetto di Ravello, is it not so?”

  “Listen to me, Nico.” The Baj, hearing the discontent in his voice, sat at the edge of the bed next to Nicolo. “You can really be that barone-cadetto, you know. The family has seen photographs of you, and they have learned of your sincere aspirations to become an educated man, a fine nobile italiano. They’re prepared to welcome you as the son they never had.”

  “Once more you speak crazy words, signora. Who among the nobility wants their bloodlines tainted by the docks?”

  “This family does, for it has nothing left but someone like you. They trust me, as you must trust me. Exchange your miserable life for another, far better, far richer.”

  “But until that time comes, if it ever comes, it’s you who wants me to be the barone-cadetto, is that not so?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “It’s very important to you, for reasons you say I must not inquire about.”

  “Considering everything I’ve done for you, including saving your life, I think I deserve that respect.”

  “Oh, yes, you do, Cabi. And I deserve to be rewarded for all the studying I’ve done on your behalf, not mine.” Nicolo raised his arms, placing his hands on her shoulders, and pulled her slowly across the bed. She did not resist the boy-man.

  10

  It was shortly past two A.M. when Hawthorne and Poole, in their black wet suits, crawled over the sharp rocks that were their point of entry on the unmapped island, the third of the volcanic atoll.

  “Stay on your stomach,” said Tyrell into his radio. “Up ahead hug the ground like you were part of the dirt, have you got that?”

  “Hell, yes, don’t you worry about it” was the whispered reply.

  “Once we’re past the first trips, stay low for another fifty to sixty feet, okay? The trip beams will recede at various heights for about thirty feet on the premise that humans will stand up before then once on shore, but snakes and rabbits can’t, now do you read me?”

  “There are snakes here?”

  “No, there are not snakes here, I’m simply trying to explain how these systems work,” Tye said sharply. “Just stay down until I get up.”

  “Whatever you say,” said Poole.

  Sixty-eight seconds later, they had reached a flat stretch of the sun-scorched grass so common to the islands, a barren field incapable of nurturing palms or flamboyant trees. “Now,” said Hawthorne, getting to his feet. “We’re clear.” They raced across the acre of wasteland, suddenly stopping at strange, muffled sounds in the distance, animal sounds, high-pitched and erratic. “Dogs,” whispered Tyrell into the radio. “They’ve picked up our scent.”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “It’s the wind—it’s from the northwest.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means we run like hell southeast. Follow me.” Hawthorne and Poole ran diagonally to their left toward the shoreline, entering a grove of traveler’s-palms. Breathless and standing next to each other under the cover of the spreading foliage, Tyrell spoke. “This doesn’t make sense.”

  “Why? The dogs aren’t yipping.”

  “We’re out of their wind scent, but that’s not what I mean.” Tye looked around, angling his eyes up and around. “These palms are traveler’s; they grow out like fans, the kind you wave in front of your face.”

  “So?”

  “They’re the first to crack in heavy winds—see, a few have broken from the storms, but a lot of them haven’t.”

  “So?”

  “What we saw from the sub, directly in front of the cove. Most everything had been leveled, uprooted, flat on the ground.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. Some trees survive, some don’t. So what?”

  “These are on fairly high ground, the cove’s lower.”

  “Freaks of nature,” explained Poole. “When Lake Pontchartrain blows, all kinds of crazy things happen. One time the whole left side of our summer place was ripped off, but a doghouse right in front of it wasn’t touched. No accountin’ for nature.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Come on.” They threaded their way through the thick fan-shaped trees until they came to a small promontory that overlooked the cove. Tyrell removed the pair of night-vision binoculars from his belted pouch and brought them to his eyes. “Come here, Jackson. Look through these—directly across, near the top of the hill over there—and tell me what you see.” Tyrell gave the younger man the binoculars and watched him as Poole scanned the ground above the cove.

  “Hey, it’s weird, Tye,” said the air force officer. “There’s a few blurred lines of light through the trees, goin’ straight across a long way and angled down, but no source.”

  “Deep green hurricane shutters, camouflaged. No one’s ever designed the perfect machinery for exterior ‘hurricanes’; the slats haven’t
been invented that close perfectly every time, every inch. Your beeping machines were on the mark, Lieutenant. That’s one big mother of a house over there, and inside is someone very important to this insanity, maybe the bitch herself.”

  “Y’know, Commander, don’t you think it’s about time you told the major and me what this whole goddamned thing’s about? We hear things like ‘that bitch’ and ‘terrorists’ and ‘disappearin’ secret papers’ and ‘international chaos,’ and we’ve been damn well ordered not to ask questions. Well, Cath won’t say it ’cause she’s by-the-book Neilsen, and like me she’s doin’ what she’s doin’ because of Charlie, but here I part company with her. I don’t give a fiddler’s fart about orders. If I’m goin’ to get my precious body blown away, I want to know why.”

  “Good heavens, Lieutenant, I didn’t know you had so many words in you.”

  “I’m one bright son of a bitch, Commander. Now, what the fuck is this all about?”

  “Insubordinate too. All right, Poole, I’ll level. It’s about the assassination of the President of the United States.”

  “What…?”

  “And the terrorist is a woman who might just pull it off.”

  “You’re out of your mind! That’s plain crazy!”

  “So were Dallas and Ford’s Theatre … The word we’ve received from the Baaka Valley is that if this assassination takes place, there are three other targets—the Prime Minister of England, the President of France, and the head of the Israeli government. All to follow quickly. The signal is the killing of the President.”

  “it couldn’t happen!”

  “You saw what happened on St. Martin’s, what happened to Charlie and your plane despite guaranteed maximum security on one of our most classified tech-weapons. What you don’t know is that a team of deep-cover FBI agents was massacred in Miami while on surveillance relative to this operation, and I was nearly killed on Saba tracking down an unrelated situation because somebody learned I’d been recruited. There are leaks in Paris and Washington that we know about; London is still an enigma. In the words of a friend of mine, who I hate to admit is a terrific intelligence officer with MI-6, this woman and her people have resources no one ever dreamed of. Does that answer your question, Lieutenant Poole?”

  “Oh, my God!” came the scratchy voice of Major Catherine Neilsen over Poole’s radio.

  “Yeah,” said the lieutenant, glancing down at the pouch that held the radio. “I had it on, hope you don’t mind. Saves you from repeating it all.”

  “I could break you both down to privates for that!” exploded Hawthorne. “Did it occur to you that whoever’s in that house might have a frequency scanner?”

  “Correction,” said Neilsen’s voice over the radio. “This is military-direct, off frequency within two thousand meters. We’re secure.… Thank you, Jackson, I think we can proceed now. And thank you, Mister Hawthorne. Sometimes the troops have to have a clue, I’m sure you understand that.”

  “I understand that you two are impossible! The end of tolerance.… Where are you, Cathy?”

  “About four hundred feet west of the cove. I figured you’d be going back there.”

  “Head into it, but stay submerged at least forty feet from shore. We don’t know the capability of the trip beams.”

  “Right on. Out.”

  “Out,” said Poole, reaching down into his pouch and snapping off the radio.

  “That was a dirty trick, Jackson.”

  “Surely was, but look how much we got cleared up. Before we had Charlie, now we got even more.”

  “Don’t forget Mancini, your ersatz pal, Sal. He would have had you blown out of the sky without thinking twice.”

  “I don’t want to think about him. I can’t handle it.”

  “Then don’t.” Tyrell pointed below to the cove. “Let’s go.” The two black-suited figures moved like roving silhouettes, zigzagging down the incline to the cove. “On your stomach,” Hawthorne whispered into the radio as they reached the beach. “We’ll crawl up to that stretch of flat bush. If I’m not mistaken, it’s a wall.”

  “Well, I’ll be a shorn possum!” exclaimed Poole when they had crept to the sheer vine-laden embankment and he thrust his hand through the foliage. “It is a wall, pure concrete.”

  “With more steel struts than an airport runway,” added Tyrell. “This was made for bombs, not little typhoons or mere hurricanes. Stay low!… Come on, I have an idea we’ll find a few more surprises.”

  They did. The first was a layer of green Astroturf that covered an ascending row of stone steps leading to a break in the hill just below the top. “We’d never spot this airborne,” said the lieutenant.

  “That’s the point, Jackson. Whoever it is doesn’t roll out a red carpet, he rolls down a green one.”

  “Must be a very private kind of individual.”

  “I’d say you’re right. Stay to the left and slither up like a snake.” The two men made their way up on their stomachs step by covered step, slowly, silently, until they came to a break in the stone staircase that seemed to lead to the outlines of a palm-covered structure beyond. Hawthorne lifted the carpet of green, revealing a flagstone path. “My God, it’s so simple,” he whispered to Poole. “You could do it with any house in the countryside or at the shore and never spot it from the air or the water.”

  “Sure could,” agreed the air force officer, impressed. “This grass stuff is a snap, but those palm trees, they’re a whole whale of a lot of difference.”

  “What?”

  “They’re fake.”

  “They are?”

  “You’re no country boy, Commander, at least not one from Louisiana. Palms sweat in the early morning hours; it’s the change in temperature ’cause they’re alive. Look, there’s not a glisten of moisture on those big leaves. They’re nothin’ more than big dead cotton flowers, also too big for the trunks, which are probably plastic.”

  “Which means they’re mechanized cover—camouflage.”

  “Probably computerized, easy to do if you access-code your radar to your machinery.”

  “Huh?”

  “Come on, Tye, it’s simple. Like garage doors that open when headlights hit the receptors; this is just the reverse. The sky and sea sensors pick up the unfamiliar, and the equipment goes to work. They close up the shop.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Sure. A plane or a boat that comes too close, say three or four thousand feet up or a couple of miles out on the water, the disks send the information to a computer and the machines are activated, like garage doors closin’ down by remote. I could design a system like that for a few thousand bucks, but the Pentagon doesn’t want to hear my figures.”

  “You’d bankrupt the economy,” Hawthorne whispered.

  “That’s what my daddy says, but my little sister agrees with me.”

  “The young shall inherit the earth and all its buttons.”

  “What do we do now? Walk through those big cotton leaves and announce ourselves?”

  “No, we don’t walk, we crawl very silently around those big cotton leaves and do our best not to be announced.”

  “What are we lookin’ for?”

  “Whatever we can see.”

  “What then?”

  “Depends on what we see.”

  “You’re filled with all kinds of plans.”

  “Some things you can’t put into a computer, young man. Come on.”

  They crept over the hard, sharp zoysia grass, a favored ground cover in the Caribbean, and swept around the uprooted false palms, both men peering down into the machinery and touching the “bark” of the first “trunk.” Poole nodded in the moonlight, as if to confirm his previous guesswork that it was a thick tube of mottled plastic, indistinguishable from the real thing but a far lighter load on the mechanism. Hawthorne gestured at a low break in the greenery, indicating that the lieutenant should follow him.

  One behind the other they crawled through the tunnel of dyed cloth to a p
oint directly below a line of light from a parted slat. Both quietly stood up and looked inside; there was no activity to be seen, so Tyrell separated the shutter strip an additional inch for a better view. What they saw was astonishing.

  The interior of the house had the appearance of some doge’s Renaissance villa, huge arches leading from one area to another, gold-flaked marble everywhere, and on the white walls tapestries of a quality usually inherited or on loan to museums. A figure came into sight, an old man in a motorized wheelchair. He was crossing under the archways from one room to another. He disappeared from view, but following him was a blond-haired giant, his massive shoulders stretching the cloth of his guayabera jacket. Hawthorne touched Poole’s shoulder, pointing out the length of the house, and by his gesture telling the air force officer again to follow him. The lieutenant did so, each man sidestepping his way, silently pushing the huge cloth palms away as he progressed, until Tyrell reached what he estimated to be the area where the old man in the wheelchair had gone. The hurricane shutters emitted no light in this stretch of the wall, so Hawthorne grabbed Poole’s arm, pulled the lieutenant beside him, and parted a slat at eye level.

  Inside was the unbelievable, a fantasy created by a gambling maniac. It was a miniature casino designed for an emperor, an emperor racked with insomnia. There were slot machines, a pool table, a very low, curved blackjack table, and a wheel of fortune, all waist level for the wheelchair, the flat surfaces covered with stacks of paper money at the edges. Whoever the old man was, he was betting both for and against the house. He couldn’t lose.

  The blond bodyguard—he couldn’t be anything else—stood beside the gaunt, balding white-haired man in the wheelchair, yawning as the old man put coins into a slot and laughed or grimaced at the results. Then a second man appeared, wheeling in a cart of food with a carafe of red wine and placing it alongside the invalid. The old cripple scowled, then shouted at his second guard-cum-chef, who instantly bowed and removed a dish, apparently stating it would be replaced immediately.

  “Come on!” whispered Tyrell. “There won’t be a better time. We’ve got to find a way in while that other gorilla is gone!”