The Scorpio Illusion (6 page)

Until age and illness forced the
padrone
to retreat to his impregnable island. And then, suddenly, a woman came into his life. Across the globe, Bajaratt had been severely wounded in the Cyprus port of Vasilikos while hunting down an execution unit sent out by the Mossad to kill a Palestinian hero who had been spotted there, the firebrand who later became her husband. Leading the counterstrike, the Baj had trapped the executioners offshore, and like a pirate queen, flanking and outflanking them in a fast boat at night, had forced them into the shoals under floodlights, while continuously firing murderous rounds into the cornered Israelis. She had caught four bullets in her stomach, tearing apart her intestines, her life all but given up for lost.

An underground doctor on Cyprus made it plain that he could only patch her up, partially stemming the internal bleeding. Heavily iced, she might last a day or two, but that was all without advanced surgery. And there was another consideration: No hospital or surgical team with the required technology—either in the civilized Mediterranean or Europe itself—would accept an obviously wounded terrorist without alerting the authorities … and the Soviet Union was no longer a refuge.

However, repeated urgent calls to the Baaka Valley revealed a possible solution, certainly no guarantee that
she would live, but at least an attempt—if she could last two days, or, better, three. There was a man in the Caribbean, a powerful broker of all things, from narcotics to industrial espionage to military secrets and extraordinary arms shipments. He had worked frequently with and for the Baaka, realizing well over two billion American dollars for his endeavors throughout the Middle East. He could not refuse the High Councils; even he dared not do so.

For several hours he had tried, but the notorious freedom fighter whose life the woman had saved would not be denied. Should the man in the Caribbean refuse, he swore to bring down all the knives in the Baaka Valley, first and foremost his own, across the throats of the ungrateful broker and his allies everywhere.

Half dead, the Baj had been flown to Ankara, and from there on a military cargo jet to Martinique, where she was transferred to a dual-engine seaplane. Eleven hours after leaving Cyprus, she arrived at the dock on the
padrone
’s uncharted island. A team of surgeons from Miami who had been in consultation with the doctor on Cyprus were waiting for her; her life had been saved, no expense spared by the reluctant
padrone
.

As Bajaratt and Nicolo approached the stone staircase that led up to the fortress-estate, the Baj could not help but suddenly laugh out loud.

“What is it?” asked Nicolo sharply. “I don’t find anything to be happy about.”

“It’s nothing, my adorable Adonis. I was just remembering my first days here. You wouldn’t find it interesting.… Come now, the steps are a trial, but they are splendid to run up and down to regain one’s strength.”

“I need no such exercise.”

“I once did.” As they began the climb, the memories of those early weeks with the
padrone
came back to her, and recalling them, there was a great deal to laugh about. At first, when she became mobile, they were like two
circling, suspicious cats, she outraged by the luxury he permitted himself, he frustrated by her interference with his opulent way of life. Then, quite accidentally, she invaded his kitchen when he was displeased with the cook’s cannelloni Sambuca Florentine—the same cook who now lay dead thirty feet behind them at the water’s edge. With great apologies to the servant, Bajaratt prepared her own; it pleased the unpleasant owner of the island. Next came chess. The
padrone
claimed he was a master; the young mistress beat him twice, then quite obviously let him win the third time. He roared with laughter, knowing what she had done and appreciating her charity.

“You are a lovely woman,” he had said, “but never do that again.”

“Then I shall beat you every time, and you’ll be angry.”

“No, my child, I will learn from you. It’s the story of my life. I learn from everyone.… I once wanted to be a big movie star, believing my height and my body and my shining yellow hair would be loved by the camera. Do you know what happened? Never mind, I’ll tell you. Rossellini saw a test I made for Cinecittà in Rome; guess what he said?… Never mind, I’ll tell you. He said there was an ugliness in my blue eyes, an evil he could not explain. He was right, I went elsewhere.”

From that night on they spent hours together, the two on equal footing, each recognizing the obsessions of the other, each accepting the other’s genius. Finally, one late afternoon, sitting on the veranda, looking at a magenta sun, the
padrone
said, “You are the daughter I could never have.”

“You are my only real father,” Bajaratt had replied.

Nicolo, a step ahead of the Baj, held out his arm as they reached the top step. A flagstone path in front of them led to a huge, wide engraved door at least three inches thick. “I think it’s open, Cabi.”

“It is,” agreed Bajaratt. “Hectra must have been in a hurry and forgot to close it.”

“Who?”

“It’s not important. Give me the rifle in case a dog is loose.” They approached the half-closed door. “Kick it open, Nicolo,” she said.

Suddenly, as they walked inside, from nowhere and everywhere explosions filled the great hall. The blasts of powerful, short-barreled shotguns echoed off the stone walls as Bajaratt and the boy sprang to the marble floor, Amaya firing indiscriminately—again nowhere and everywhere—until she was out of shells. Then, as the billows of smoke began to rise to the high ceiling, there was silence, a sudden quiet that found both intruders without harm. And both raised their heads as the smoke disappeared through the shafts of the setting sun, streaking through the small windows; each was alive and neither knew why. Then, revealed through the rising smoke was the figure of an old man in a wheelchair propelling himself forward from a recess at the far end of the hall. On the semicircular balcony above the curving staircase stood two men holding the Sicilian weapon of choice—the short-barreled
lupo
shotgun. They were smiling; their ammunition had been false, shells without lethal contents—blanks.

“Oh,
my
, Annie!” cried the frail voice from the wheelchair, the language English but with the rasp of an accent. “I never thought you would do it.”

“You’re in Miami—you’re always in Miami! For your treatments!”

“Come now, Baj, how much more good can they do for me?… But to kill your old friend Hectra, who nursed you back to health five years ago, that killing was an act of commitment.… Incidentally, you owe me a woman of like loyalty. Shall it be you?”

Bajaratt got slowly to her feet. “I needed this place for only a few days and no one,
no
one, could know where I was or what I was doing, or whom I was going
to meet, not even Hectra. You have the radios, the satellites—you showed me them yourself!”

“You say no one knows what you’re doing, or, more precisely, what you intend to do? Do you think this decrepit figure before you has lost his mind before his body?… I assure you, I have not. Any more than I have lost my familiars from the Baaka to the French Deuxième to the brilliant MI-6 and their less than admirable American colleagues. I know exactly what your intentions are.… ‘Muerte a toda autoridad,’ is it not true?”

“It is my life—the end of my life, no doubt, but I shall do it,
padrone
.”

“Yes, I understand. No matter how much we inflict, each of us can take only so much pain. I’m sorry for your loss, Annie, your newest loss, the death in Ashkelon, of course. I’m told he was an outstanding man, truly a leader, decisive and fearless.”

“I saw in him a great deal of you,
padrone
, of what you were at his age.”

“He was somewhat more idealistic, I imagine.”

“He could have been so many things, anything he wanted to be, but the world would not let him. Any more than it would me. The things we can’t control control us.”

“Quite true, my daughter. I wanted to be a movie star, did I ever tell you that?”

“You would have been brilliant, my only real father,” said Bajaratt. “But will you let me fulfill my final mission in life?”

“Only with my help, my only real daughter. I, too, want all the controllers dead—for they have made both of us what we are.… Come and embrace me, as you used to do. You are home.”

As Bajaratt knelt and extended her arms to the old invalid, he gestured toward the young man, who still crouched on the marble floor, taking in the scene with fascinated, frightened eyes.

“Who the hell is he?” he asked.

“His name is Nicolo Montavi, and he’s the essential core of my plan,” whispered the Baj. “He knows me as Signora Cabrini and he calls me Cabi.”

“Cabrini? As in the beloved American saint?”

“
Naturalmente
. For through my actions I will become the second American saint, won’t I?”

“Delusions call for a great deal of rum and a very large meal. I’ll see to it.”

“You’ll let me go on, won’t you,
padrone
?”

“Of course I will, my daughter, but only with my help. The killing of such men—the world will be gripped by fear and panic. It will be our ultimate statement before we die!”

3

T
he Caribbean sun burned the earth and the rocks and the sand on the island of Virgin Gorda. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, prelude to the scorching hour of noon, and Tyrell Hawthorne’s “charters” protected themselves under the thatched roof of the outdoor beach bar, doing whatever they could possibly do to alleviate their nausea. When told by their captain that due to a mechanical emergency they could not sail until midafternoon at the earliest, four sighs of relief accompanied three one-hundred-dollar bills pressed into his hand by a banker from Greenwich, Connecticut, who pleaded, “For Christ’s sake, make it tomorrow.”

Tyrell returned to the villa, where Mickey stood guard over Cooke and Ardisonne while his colleague, Marty, attended to the docks. By now the two intruders had been stripped to their shorts, their clothes deposited at the hotel laundry. Hawthorne slammed the door and turned to the mechanic. “Mick, do me a favor. Go to the chickee and bring me two bottles of Montrachet Grand Cru—forget it, two bottles of white wine and I don’t care if it’s Thunderbird.”

“What year?” asked Ardisonne.

“Last week,” replied Tyrell. Mickey left quickly and Hawthorne continued. “All right, you secret agents you, let’s ‘carry on,’ as the English say.”

“You’re not funny,” said Cooke.

“Oh, it’s great when you Euros come up with your fog-bound narrow streets and your trench coats lurking
around waterfronts, but why don’t you face it? High tech has replaced you, just as it replaced me. Amsterdam taught me that, unless they all lied on their own, which they couldn’t have. They were programmed by the numbers, do and say what the machines tell you, that’s all you know!”

“Not true,
mon ami
. Put simply, we are not equipped to deal with that technology. We are of the old school, and believe me when I tell you, it is coming back in ways you cannot imagine. The computers and their modems, the satellites and their high-altitude photographs, borders crossed by television and radio signals—all are
magnifique
, but they do not and cannot deal with the human condition. We did that … 
you
did that. We meet a man or a woman face-to-face, our eyes and our instincts tell us whether he or she is the enemy. Machines cannot do the same.”

“Is that lecture by way of telling me our combined medieval practices can find this dragon lady, Bajaratt, quicker than faxing her photograph, description, and whatever else you’ve got to your secure sources on roughly fifty habitable islands? If so, I can only presume you should immediately be forced back into retirement.”

“I believe what Jacques is suggesting,” broke in Cooke, “is that our expertise, combined with available technology, can be more effective than one without the other.”

“Well said,
mon ami
. This psychopathic female, this killer, is not without brains or resources.”