The Skorpion Directive (18 page)

There was a heavy oak sideboard holding a Seabreeze record player, next to that a small bar with some dusty bottles of Chianti and an ice bucket. And there was a collection of photos—his long-gone wife and children, Dalton knew—as well as a new-looking and very striking silver-framed portrait of Cora Vasari sitting on a big bay horse, looking down with a playful smile at the camera, her long hair cascading over her shoulders, the quintessential Hussar in a trim military tunic that fit her lush body very well, jodhpurs, gleaming black boots with silver spurs.

Dalton registered shock, seeing this photo, and a red rush of guilt. Although she was cut off from him, being sheltered from his chaotic effect by her family in their seventeenth-century villa in Anacapri, she was still the last faint promise of a normal life beyond the Agency, beyond the life he was leading.

Past the sideboard, under a cork bulletin board filled with papers and notes, stood a plain wooden table with a very modern desktop Dell on it, and a wide-screen monitor, which was dark, the tower shut down.

To the right, a galley kitchen, spotless in the dim glow of a hallway sconce, dishes stacked neatly in a drying rack, a linen dishrag folded carefully in thirds and draped over the tap.

To the left was an open door into a tiny bedroom with a sloping wooden roof. There was a single bed with a table next to it, some hardcover books piled on the table, and on the far side of the bed a set of heavily barred leaded-glass doors leading out to the terrace. Through the translucent glass, they could see the lights of the Campo Novo Park on the other side of the Ormesini Canal. The flat smelled of tobacco smoke and coffee, dust and decay, and carried a whiff of the canals under that.

If a flat can be filled with
absence
, this one was.

As a precaution, Brancati went through the place while Dalton and Veronika waited in the living room. Dalton was feeling a searing sense of sadness welling up as he looked at what Galan’s life had come down to: a nearly penniless, crippled old man surrounded by a few sticks of cheap furniture and some worthless souvenirs in a shabby little flat in shabby little Cannaregio, as cramped and gloomy as his homeland had been sun-filled and blue-sky open, the sun-warmed paradise he would never see again as a living man. And waiting for him at the far end of this life like a cobra under his pillow, a death more terrible than any nightmare, dying in agony, torn apart on a tin table, surrounded by hate. It occurred then to Dalton that since he was on the same road, he might be looking at his own future.

Brancati came back from the bedroom, putting his Beretta into his holster, his face showing as much sadness as Dalton was feeling.

He walked over to Galan’s computer, pressed the ON button, and they waited for the machine to cycle up. The monitor opened up with a flaring light, showing them the ENTER PASSWORD bar. Brancati pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket, held it out at arm’s length—his eyes were going—and punched in a series of letters, numbers, and special characters.

The screen flickered, and Galan’s desktop came up, the screen saver a photo of Jerusalem taken under a full moon, the hills bathed in a silvery light.

Brancati sat down at the chair, touched the keys, and pulled up a list of documents. All of the document titles were in Italian and, according to Brancati, a duplication of the same working files Galan had carried on his office computer.

A quick look at the contents of the drive showed nothing else. Galan’s relationship with computers did not extend to the Internet and, from the look of his file history, barely reached beyond e-mail and Word documents. There were no hidden files, no family photos, and, aside from the initial password, no serious attempt had been made to encrypt anything.

“We will go through them,” said Brancati, “but I have already looked at his worksheet at the Arsenale and these are identical. As you can see, Galan did not keep very much on computers. He was an old-fashioned man and did not trust them. Most of his ongoing cases he kept in his head. I do not see very much here. And it is unlikely that if he had anything he wanted you to see that he’d put it on a computer that could be hacked into so easily. But there is this one file—”

He tapped the screen, indicating a title in a strange script.

Brancati looked over his shoulder at Dalton and Veronika. “It looks like Yiddish. Can either of you read it?”

They both shook their heads, so Brancati hit OPEN.

The file contained only one thing, a photo of what looked like some sort of abstract artwork.

“Perfetto,”
said Brancati with a note of frustration. “
Che cosa è questo?
What is this? Galan is buying paintings?”

Veronika, her curiosity overcoming the coldness she was feeling toward Dalton, leaned in, touched the Yiddish letters.

“You could cut and paste these into a translation program. If you want to, I can do it for you.”

Brancati, thinking it over, stood up and offered her the chair. Veronika sat down, hit a few keys, got a translation program up, cut and pasted the characters into it, asking with a nice sense of tact, thought Dalton, for a reply in Italian.

The program ticked over for a moment, and then she got:

Which, in spite of the violent confrontation they had just been through and its disturbing aftermath, made them all smile.

“Well, it must have meant
something
,” said Brancati. “Issadore did not play games with his computer. This is there for a reason. We should have a copy.”

Veronika asked Brancati if he had a flash drive.

“This is Venice,” he said, puzzled. “We don’t
drive
in Venice. For myself, I have a launch?”

“I think she means one of these,” said Dalton, picking up a storage stick and inserting it into the computer’s USB drive.

Veronika gave him a tentative smile, some of her former warmth returning.

“If you like, Micah,” she said in a friendlier tone, “I’ll see if I can copy all of his most recent e-mails. If there are any drafts, I’ll copy them too.”

“Yes,” said Dalton, smiling back. “If you would, great.”

Brancati seemed a little uneasy about letting a woman he knew nothing about have that kind of access to Galan’s computer, but she went to work with such obvious speed and skill that he accepted it after a sidelong look at Dalton.

The two men stepped back, giving Veronika some room to work, and turned to consider the room.

“You’re right,” said Dalton. “Galan wouldn’t have left anything important in the computer or anywhere else obvious. But he wanted me to come here. To his flat. So there must be something here. Something he wanted me to see.”

“I agree,” said Brancati, tugging out a cigar and firing it up. “But it will take us days to go through this place.”

“Days I don’t have,” said Dalton, beginning to pace slowly around the main room, trying to put himself inside Galan’s mind. Brancati walked over to the row of pictures and picked up Cora’s portrait, turning it over to see if something was taped to the back. There was nothing. He checked the others as well but without much conviction.

“It must be on his computer,” he said, frustrated and suddenly very tired. “There’s no other logical place. Galan was a very
precise
man. Not a fanciful man. He usually meant exactly what he said.”

Dalton stopped pacing, looked across at Brancati.

“And what exactly did he say?”

Brancati considered it.

“If you mean, what message did he leave, in his own flesh, it was two marks. The figure 8 and the letter
B
.”

“Yes,” said Dalton. “Exactly.”

He walked over to the front door, pulled it open, and tapped on the silver plaque screwed into it.

“Eight B. Does Galan have a toolbox?”

That brought a wry smile from Brancati, his lined face creasing up, his eyes bright.

“You have never seen Galan trying to fix anything,” he said, walking over to the plaque and studying the screws that held it in place. He pulled a small cigar-cutting tool out of his shirt pocket, used the edge of it to pry the plaque off the door.

The plaque popped away, leaving a rectangle of unpainted pine underneath it. Taped in the middle of the rectangle was a tiny microchip. Brancati pulled it carefully away from the wood, peeled the tape off it, and held it up in the light.

“Bravo, Micah,” he said with a wry smile. “Well done.”

 

 

THERE
were three items on the microchip, which was neither encrypted nor password-protected. Two were Word files, and the third was a JPEG. Veronika opened the first Word file, titled simply DALTON ONE. It appeared to be a copy of a news report.

“Podujevo,” said Veronika with a wary glance at Dalton.

“Yes. And the Skorpions. I remember them.”

“This is the place Micah won’t talk about,” she said with a warning tone. “The man he fought in my apartment, he has my e-mail address and he sent us a picture of this Podujevo.”

Brancati wasn’t following.

“You know about these Skorpions?”

“Yes,” said Dalton. “I’ve gone up against a few.”

“This Podujevo,” said Brancati carefully, since he could see that the situation between Dalton and the Miklas woman was developing some stress fractures, “this village means something personal to you, Micah?”

Dalton sighed, and his light seemed to dim.

“Yes. Veronika got the e-mail from Galan’s server. I think she’s right, that it was sent to her by the man who killed Galan. There was a picture of a burned-out building, rows of charred bodies, and two men in black BDUs with KLA insignias, one holding a fragment of a Paveway missile—an American air-to-ground weapon—and the other one lifting up a sign in Serbian, roughly translated as ‘American murderers did this.’ ”