The Orpheus Deception (25 page)
Read The Orpheus Deception Online
Authors: David Stone
“These are not matters that I, as Home Secretary, will discuss with a mere civilian, certainly not with one who has offered no diplomatic credentials. And I will not be subjected to an impertinent harangue by anyone, no matter for whom he pretends to speak. Minister Dak has made some very serious allegations against your assistant—”
Here he turned and found to his surprise that Minister Dak had, on little cat’s feet, made a clean getaway. Angry now, he glanced at Mandy, and she saw something worse than brutality in his face; she saw carnal appreciation. “And the cylinder that was discovered in her possession has been sent to our laboratory for analysis. Should—”
“Should you work that vein a second longer, I’ll see to it that the U.S. Ambassador here lodges a formal protest with the Prime Minister for your failure to report the unlawful detention—and, I suspect, the sustained torture—of a person under an American DSDNI order. As the former head of the SID and the man who until last week ran Cluster C at Changi Prison . . . that means you personally get to stand up in front of Lee Hsien Loong and explain to him exactly why you have your American allies royally pissed off at you after only seven days at your new post. How’s that work for you?”
“You are—”
“I am
tired,
Mr. Secretary. My
partner,
not my
assistant,
and I have traveled several thousand miles to improve commercial relations with your nation, and, I admit, to be
informal
emissaries on a mission of mercy. We have been, since the moment we arrived in Singapore, the subject of insupportable affronts. Affronts to representatives of the world’s foremost banking community at a time, I must tell you, when Singapore is reeling from the collapse of its dot-com ambitions and looking at the rise of a formidable economic power only a few hundred miles to the north. Your government cannot
afford
to indulge incompetent ministers and, I assure you, if presented with a complete narrative of these events by an angry representative of the United States, will take action to
correct
them. So here’s what I propose. We’re taking a cab back to the Intercontinental, where we will refresh ourselves. We must sadly decline the invitation of the HSBC to attend the reception this evening, but we
may—
I repeat, we
may—
not inform the bank of the
true
reasons for our absence, which is our dismay at the way we have been treated by certain officials of the host government.”
tired,
Mr. Secretary. My
partner,
not my
assistant,
and I have traveled several thousand miles to improve commercial relations with your nation, and, I admit, to be
informal
emissaries on a mission of mercy. We have been, since the moment we arrived in Singapore, the subject of insupportable affronts. Affronts to representatives of the world’s foremost banking community at a time, I must tell you, when Singapore is reeling from the collapse of its dot-com ambitions and looking at the rise of a formidable economic power only a few hundred miles to the north. Your government cannot
afford
to indulge incompetent ministers and, I assure you, if presented with a complete narrative of these events by an angry representative of the United States, will take action to
correct
them. So here’s what I propose. We’re taking a cab back to the Intercontinental, where we will refresh ourselves. We must sadly decline the invitation of the HSBC to attend the reception this evening, but we
may—
I repeat, we
may—
not inform the bank of the
true
reasons for our absence, which is our dismay at the way we have been treated by certain officials of the host government.”
That one hit home. Chong looked a little green around the edges.
“There, at the Intercontinental, we will await your decision concerning our request to have our compatriot, Mr. Fyke, released without further delay—alive, well—into our custody. Miss Pownall, gather yourself. We’re leaving. Mr. Chong, I will not say good day to you.”
Dalton did not look at Mandy as he bowed—a short, insulting bow, during which he never took his eyes off Chong’s face—he had made an enemy, he could see. But right now, he didn’t give a damn. He straightened, and walked easily to the door. Chong turned to follow, his face set and his body poised to do . . . something.
But he did nothing. Mandy breezed by him with a half smile on her lips and her heart in her mouth. The open doorway, where Dalton was waiting with an expression of polite impatience on his face, looked a hundred miles away, and the long hallway beyond it seemed to recede into infinity. No one stopped them at the stairwell. No one stepped into their path at the front gate. They hailed a cab and left the compound. A short while later, leaning back into the greasy vinyl of a lime green gypsy Hyundai, Mandy found that she could actually breathe. She looked across at Dalton.
“Micah, I think I want to bear your children.”
Dalton, staring out the window, had already made three futile calls to Venice. Brancati was in Florence. Galan was out. No one knew anything.
“Yeah. I was pretty good.”
“Good? You were magnificent. It was like watching Rupert Everett dress down Jabba the Hutt. I particularly liked
insupportable affronts.”
insupportable affronts.”
Dalton’s mind remained in Florence. They sat a while in silence.
“Try calling again,” she said.
“The battery’s dead. Do you have your phone?”
“In the room. Needed a charge. Sorry.”
Mandy was quiet again, for a few blocks.
“This cyberhacker thing worries me. It’s always the X factor that gets you. This is definitely an X factor. Maybe it’s time to get out of Dodge.”
Dalton looked at her.
“What, you mean cheese it and scarper?”
“It’s a thought. I’m not happy with the idea of being in a cell alone with Chong Kew Sak. Nor am I thrilled with the alternate plan, which involves being dead. My long-term plans did not include being dead.”
“Nor did mine. Anyway, we can’t scarper. Chong will have sent someone to scoop our passports from the hotel. That’s why they held us for an hour and thirteen minutes. They also went through our suite. There’ll be taps, bugs, maybe even a camera.”
“So we go to the Oriental. Or Raffles.”
“No. We’re supposed to be English bankers. Moving out of the hotel would kill that cover. Only surveillance-aware people would do that.”
“Jolly. So we stay. Where do I shower?”
“I wouldn’t.”
Mandy shuddered. Dalton could feel her shaking next to him. He leaned in to her, trying to comfort her. Mandy’s eyes were shining again. She was a good agent, but fieldwork was not her specialty. Why had Cather sent her along? He always had reasons. What were they? Mandy sighed, seemed to gather herself again, smiled and gave him one of her sidelong looks.
“Micah, we’re bloody
spies,
aren’t we? We could do something all Matt Damon-ish. Overpower somebody and use our top secret thingy-whatsit to gain entry to the hidden whatsa-hoozit and whisk us all to safety.”
spies,
aren’t we? We could do something all Matt Damon-ish. Overpower somebody and use our top secret thingy-whatsit to gain entry to the hidden whatsa-hoozit and whisk us all to safety.”
“Sorry. The top secret thingy-whatsit is in the shop.”
“So we’re staying?”
“Afraid so.”
“Rats.”
“Rats?”
Mandy nodded.
“Right now, rats is
le mot juste.”
le mot juste.”
Another interlude; two solitudes of dark thought.
Mandy said:
“About Fyke. Do you think your bluff will work?”
“Chong will either cover his ass with Lee and then have us arrested on some sort of bullshit charge or he’ll come back with a face-saving counteroffer. If he does come back, we deal out the Chinese techs.”
“Where’s your money going?”
“Mandy, I haven’t a clue.”
Mandy thought that over for a block. They could see the Intercontinental sign looming over a tower. The sky was clouding up. The monsoon season was about to begin. Mandy let out a long sighing breath.
“One good thing, anyway, Micah.”
“Yes?”
“Whatever they’ve been doing to Ray Fyke, they’ll stop.”
18
The National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland
Nikki Turrin, sitting at an empty table in the Crypto City Starbucks, stared down at the top of her
Vente
mocha-fratte-latte-whatever and tried not to compare it with the exquisite cup of
caffè corretto
she had shared with a lovely young Italian boy on a terrace in Lucca on a Tuscan summer’s day that may have happened light-years away. The surface of the
Vente
whatever was sprinkled with a substance the
barista
stoutly maintained was free-trade, shade-grown Brazilian chocolate. Nikki, one of the Monitors and therefore of an analytical turn, had examined the material closely and was coming to the unhappy conclusion that it was actually organic carob shavings. Nikki’s heritage was Italian, so she loathed carob as much as she loathed anything even remotely vegan. She pushed the cup aside and turned again to her shell pink Apple notebook, where she had hit PAUSE in the middle of a YouTube video that had her a little troubled.
Vente
mocha-fratte-latte-whatever and tried not to compare it with the exquisite cup of
caffè corretto
she had shared with a lovely young Italian boy on a terrace in Lucca on a Tuscan summer’s day that may have happened light-years away. The surface of the
Vente
whatever was sprinkled with a substance the
barista
stoutly maintained was free-trade, shade-grown Brazilian chocolate. Nikki, one of the Monitors and therefore of an analytical turn, had examined the material closely and was coming to the unhappy conclusion that it was actually organic carob shavings. Nikki’s heritage was Italian, so she loathed carob as much as she loathed anything even remotely vegan. She pushed the cup aside and turned again to her shell pink Apple notebook, where she had hit PAUSE in the middle of a YouTube video that had her a little troubled.
It was grainy, handheld, a little shaky, and seemed to have been shot from a distance, through a screen of forest growth of some sort. The camera had been trained on a swimming pool, large, not well maintained, but full of clear water. In that background was a villa of a type she had seen on a trip to Bulgaria a few years back, all pillars and turrets and arched windows, none of them agreeing with anything else. The villa gave the impression of vulgar wealth. In the foreground, a party seemed to be going on, not the kind of party she would have enjoyed. Hookers and thugs, was the impression she got as the video rolled, lots of skinny girls getting naked and being manhandled by beefy, beer-gutted men wearing too much gold.
One fellow stood out: a very large, bald-headed hog of a man with a tattoo that covered his entire chest, perhaps an eagle—an American eagle—with a lance through its chest and some kind of flag or banner attached to the lance. The action unrolled, turned greasy, then nasty, and ended with what appeared to be the horrible choking death of everyone who got into the pool. It had been posted on YouTube by someone who identified himself as YaanMonkey223. YaanMonkey223 claimed to have copied it off an Internet video site in Finland, but in the world of YouTube no serious questions were ever asked about the source or reliability of
content.
What counted was
hits,
how many times it had been viewed, and this video showed some signs of going
viral,
since it had spread as far as her Apple computer in Maryland.
content.
What counted was
hits,
how many times it had been viewed, and this video showed some signs of going
viral,
since it had spread as far as her Apple computer in Maryland.
The video troubled her because it wasn’t an obvious fake, a setup, as were most of the terminally tedious clips posted on YouTube. This one had a terrible plausibility. Something about it suggested a real place and real deaths. YaanMonkey223 had added a short description of it, calling it a promo tape that had been deliberately leaked in order to create a cyberspace buzz for somebody’s upcoming flick. Nikki was not convinced. The deaths looked real, and the quality of the foot-age—blurry, handheld—reeked of covert surveillance. Before coming to the NSA she had worked for a prosecutor’s office in Pittsburgh; she’d seen a lot of surveillance footage during a protracted investigation involving thefts from a container yard.
She played it twice more, thinking it over. Then she copied it to her hard drive, inserted a small Sony Micro Vault into a USB port, and copied the video onto that. She disconnected the Micro Vault and slipped it into the pocket of her jeans. It felt warm against her thigh, almost radioactive.
She left the
Vente
whatever on the table, nodded to some coworkers, gathered up her Apple and her purse, and left the cafeteria.
Vente
whatever on the table, nodded to some coworkers, gathered up her Apple and her purse, and left the cafeteria.
Somebody needed to see this video.
She wasn’t sure who.
She wasn’t sure why.
But somebody needed to see it.
19
The Intercontinental Hotel, Singapore
When they pulled up under the portico of the Intercontinental, a liveried doorman had the cab doors open before it had come to a complete stop. A dashing Sikh about seven feet tall gave Mandy a dazzling smile and welcomed her return to the hotel in such convincing tones that Mandy wondered if he was a long-lost cousin. Dalton was left alone to extract himself on the starboard side, almost colliding with a lean, wolfish-looking young man with fine, shoulder-length black hair that shimmered like silk, very tan, absurdly handsome in a hard-cut, slightly Hispanic way, resplendent in a superbly executed navy blue lightweight suit and a crisp white shirt that might have been made by Pink’s. Their eyes met briefly, as he stepped back and waited for Dalton to get out of the cab; although he was obviously in a hurry, his open, friendly regard caught Dalton’s attention because his eyes were a shade of pale green that Dalton had never seen before. The man—the boy—was slender, looked very fit, and had a kind of hardness under the charming smile that wasn’t visible unless you knew what to look for. The man’s smile grew wider.
“Forgive me,” he said, bowing slightly. “Don’t mean to push.”
His accent was . . . odd. French, perhaps, but not exactly. Educated.
“Not at all,” said Dalton, returning the smile.
Gay?
thought Dalton. Decided no. But something was there, a kind of friendly but critical attention, as if Dalton was being appraised by a potential buyer. He yielded the cab, and the man slid into it with an easy, athletic grace, closing the door without another glance at Dalton.
thought Dalton. Decided no. But something was there, a kind of friendly but critical attention, as if Dalton was being appraised by a potential buyer. He yielded the cab, and the man slid into it with an easy, athletic grace, closing the door without another glance at Dalton.
The cab pulled away, and Dalton was looking at Mandy across the empty space. She was watching the cab merge into Singapore traffic with evident interest. She realized he was looking at her and, in spite of her mood, flashed him one of her electric smiles, pulling her sunglasses down and looking at him over the rims:
“Oh my,” she said.
“BACK WHERE YOU
just came from, please,” said Lujac. The driver twisted around to look at him.
just came from, please,” said Lujac. The driver twisted around to look at him.
“The Home Ministry, sir?”
“Yes, the Home Ministry, please.”
The ride to the Parliament grounds took about thirty minutes through thickening afternoon traffic. On the way, Lujac pulled out his cell phone and dialed a number in Odessa, got a beeping tone, hit the pound sign, followed by a nine-character, alphanumeric pin number, and waited. Not long.
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