The Skorpion Directive (14 page)

Dalton could hear a vaporetto out in the Tronchetto, the sound of her engines muffled by the dense fog, chugging and popping across the channel, making for the boathouses on the far side of the Giudecca.

The rest was hushed, and the clinging moisture of the fog coating the windshield, and from out of the fogbank the clanging of a marker buoy somewhere out in the lagoon.

He started the Benz, put it in gear—keeping the lights off—and rolled it slowly down the ramp toward the entrance to the Auto-Park. He eased the car into a slot, killed the engine, and looked across at Veronika, curled up under a soft white cotton blanket she had bought in Udine a few hours earlier.

The glow from the parking lamps cast a cold light on her cheekbones and made dark pools of her eyes. Her lips were slightly parted, her breathing deep and regular. She looked very young and very vulnerable, a fragile elfin thing, but she had killed a man last night.

Veronika, sensing that they had stopped moving, the engine suddenly stilled, woke up with a reflexive start, her face bone white, her eyes wild. Dalton touched her cheek, calmed her, comforted and reassured her, and, when she was more awake, handed her a thermos of coffee.

“Where are we?” she said, blinking into the dark.

“Venice. The Piazzale Roma. Near the Dorsoduro.”

She looked around her, trying to shake off her confusion, the fog of deep sleep.

“What building are we in?”

“The Auto-Park. We have to leave the Benz here.”

She sat up straighter, sipped at the coffee, her hair down over her face, her hands gripping the thermos tightly as the state of things came pressing back in.

“I had . . . such dreams.”

“Yusef ?”

She nodded, said nothing for a while. He thought about a cigarette but did not want to show a flame. She sipped at her coffee again and then straightened her back, set her shoulders.

“Okay. Enough of that. Let’s get this over with. Do you still intend to try for Galan’s flat?”

“We don’t have much of a choice, Veronika.”

“But is it
safe
to go there?”

“Probably not. We’ll have to take the chance anyway. I checked the boathouse. Porter’s launch is still there. There’s heavy fog. That will muffle the sound of the engine. I know the canal system pretty well. As I said, if anyone is waiting for us, they’ll be over in the San Marco District, around the hotel. How well do you know Venice?”

“I was here five years ago, part of a cruise we took on the Minoan Lines. Three days and nights in Venice. So, not very well.”

Dalton didn’t ask who had been with her. He didn’t want to know. Her past, and her future, did not belong to him, aside from his commitment to seeing that she lived to have one. She drank some more coffee, set the thermos down. Laying her head back, she closed her eyes again.

“The news said a police officer was killed back there in Vienna and two others burned. They’re saying it was a terrorist incident, Micah. How did we ever get across the Alps?”

“Great question. Right now, my money is on bureaucratic incompetence. We moved fast, and it’s been my experience that cross-jurisdictional screwups happen all the time.”

“Do you believe that? In this case?”

“Not entirely. But it’s possible. It’s harder to fix a border crossing than you think it is. No matter how well placed you are. Border guards are a cantankerous lot. I’m accepting it as a tactical reality.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“We’re about to find out. Before we do, check your laptop one more time. Maybe Jürgen got back to you.”

“Can we get a signal here?”

“Yes. The Sole Spa over there has an unsecured connection.”

Veronika took out her laptop, turned it on. The glow lit up the interior of the Benz with a bluish light. In a moment, the wireless icon blipped on, and she was at her incoming-mail site and a German carrier called
Quecksilber
.

She had about forty messages altogether, thirty-eight of which were from this same sender and contained the same message:

Dalton, looking over her shoulder, couldn’t make it out.

“That looks like trouble.”

“It is. It’s an order from my boss, I am to report in to headquarters immediately, under penalty of formal charges.”

She shrugged it off, hit DELETE, wiping out the entire list except for the other two messages.

Both messages had been sent within the last hour, long after midnight. Both had attachments. Veronika looked at the second one and then over at Dalton.

“The first one is from Jürgen. But this other one? This cannot be from your friend. And how could he have my private e-mail address?”

“It’s not from him,” said Dalton, his face hardening. “Save it and open the other one.”

She did.

“It’s from him. He says he has the video, says it’s a bit odd. He asks if I am safe and asks me to call him on his green line. Then he says somebody is there and he has to go. What does that mean, somebody is here? It was one in the morning when he sent this. Is he in trouble? Have I gotten him into trouble, Micah?”

Her eyes glittered in the laptop light, filling with moisture. She began to cry and then crushed it down, drawing in a long, shuddering breath.

“It had to be done, Veronika. We needed that video.”

“I . . . I know.”

“If it’s the police, he won’t resist. He’ll be okay.”

“And if it wasn’t the police?”

“It was the police, Veronika. The bad guys don’t knock or ring the doorbell. What’s his ‘green line’?”

“Jürgen likes to play spy. He has a cell phone he bought on the street. It is in someone else’s name. Not traceable to him. He uses it to make horse-race bets. Also he orders—how do you say—
Kokain
?”

“Cocaine?”

“Yes. He uses it to stay awake on the job.”

“Do you?”

She gave him a look that did not quite sear his cheek and did not quite convince him she wasn’t lying.

“No. That is why we broke up. This cocaine drug.”

“I have some SIM cards. If you want to call his green line, see if he’s okay, we can switch out the SIM on your cell phone.”

She considered him for a time, something elusive flickering in her eyes, a veiled look, and then she cleared.

“Maybe. Let’s see the video.”

She opened the attachment, an MPEG with a time stamp. The code stated that it was four minutes long. She copied it onto a separate flash drive and then hit PLAY.

The video quality was poor, a cheap record from a cheap analog source. The POV was limited, a view of the Leopoldsberg parking lot from the top of a post in the middle of the yard. The camera turned slowly on a base, sweeping erratically around the lot. The clock was running, starting at 0630.23. The lot was empty and the light very dim. At 0631.12 the camera caught a glow coming up the drive, then swiveled away, returning to that spot at 0632.15 just in time to catch a fleeting glimpse of the brown Saab driving across the deserted yard toward the far corner, where Dalton had found it later. The camera, turning, then showed them a view of the sky growing slightly less dark and then the circles of lamplight in the parking-lot gravel. It came around again at 0633.05, and there was a large hulk standing by the side of the Saab, slope-shouldered, his long ropy arms hanging loose at his sides, his face staring up at the camera as it swept by.

The face was a blur, but Dalton could make out the slash of a mouth, see the shine of scar tissue on the ruined face.

“Is that him?” asked Veronika. “The man you fought?”

“Yes. It is,” said Dalton, watching the video. His face felt hot and his chest hurt. He thought that what he was feeling was fear. If this was true, it had to be driven down.

The question was how.

The camera moved away, showing them another maddening round of gravel, sky, gravel, stone wall, gravel, sky. And then, at 0641.06, it came back to the Saab and the apelike figure standing next to it.

The figure was naked, his pants in a heap around his ankles. He was holding his genitals out with one hand, his hips grinding, his other hand rhythmically busy, a simian leer on his slash of a mouth. Before the camera could move off, the man raised his left hand, pointed something dark at the camera. There was no sound, but they could see a narrow red laser beam coming from the thing in the man’s hand. The video image disappeared in a burst of white lines. The MPEG ran for another few seconds and then ended. Veronika closed the screen and sat back into the seat.

“My God, Micah. He’s a monster.”

“Yes. He is. Have you got this on the flash drive as well?”

“I copied it all. To the hard drive also.”

“Don’t lose it. We’ll need it before this is over. Open the other one. If you’re up to it?”

She hesitated, and then clicked on the one from Issadore Galan’s e-mail account. It opened with an attachment, a large file labeled JPEG. The message read:

“How did he get my e-mail?” asked Veronika, deeply shocked at how
close
this creature was getting.

“He says how he did it. The same way he got my GSP coordinates. Somebody has cracked my BlackBerry encryption. I found your e-mail on the InteliLink database. He has my records. It was right there.”

“Somebody is . . . helping . . . him?”

“Somebody is
running
him, Veronika.”

Veronika moved the cursor over the attachment, got the DOWNLOAD box, and stopped.

“It’s a picture, Micah. Do we really want to see a picture from this man?”

“Open it,” said Dalton, his voice hoarse.

She clicked DOWNLOAD, and a moment later they were looking at a clear, crisp color photo of what looked like a burned-out building, stone, with heavy wooden beams that had fallen inward, bringing the walls down with them.

On the ground in front of the building lay a long row of dead bodies, all horribly charred, limbs twisted up into the fetal position as the fire had scorched their tendons. They lay on their backs, faces up to the cold clear sky, their mouths open, their blackened faces bloated and distorted.

But you could still tell that they were all women and children of varying ages: infants, toddlers, young girls, old women. They were displayed as if in a propaganda shot.

Two large men in black camos, their hair shaved into Mohawks and their faces streaked with camo paint, stood on either end of the row of dead people, one with an AK slung over his back and holding up a hand-painted sign, the other holding up what looked like a fragment of some sort of missile or rocket. On the fragment a row of letters could just be made out:

Dalton knew, in a detached, reptilian way, that his skin was getting hot. He could feel the burn on his forehead and along his chest. Interesting. Understandable, given the stimulus. So why was his belly full of ice? Never mind. It didn’t matter, really. He knew what was going on. But thinking about his autonomic responses was a way to avoid thinking about that place in the picture for a few seconds.

And that was about all he got.

Veronika stared at the picture for a time. She was in an intelligence service, so pictures of atrocities did not shake her the way they would have shaken an ordinary civilian. Dalton could feel her thoughts, as she stared at the picture and the words. She knew this was something very serious, that it involved Dalton, and that if she asked him what it was he might tell her and then everything would change. Perhaps she wouldn’t ask him.

“What . . . what do those words mean, Micah?”

“The first word is a place-name. In Serbian.”

“Do you know what place?”

“Yes. It’s called Podujevo.”

“And where is Podujevo?”

“It’s a village in northern Kosovo.”

“It looks like a war is going on in that picture. Was it during the war there?”

“Yes. In 1999.”

“Were you there, in 1999?”

“Officially, no.”

There was a long pause.

“And what do the other words mean?”

“They mean ‘American murderers did this.’ ”

More silence—this time a tight, pounding silence. Dalton listened to his own pulse thumping in his ears and to Veronika’s shallow breathing.