The Skorpion Directive (42 page)

“Yes. I’ll have a drink,” she said, stepping past him, sweeping with immense dignity into the great room and flicking on a table lamp. Yellow light flared out, revealing a stone-walled room with low wooden beams, a massive granite fireplace, lots of warm plaids in all the colors of autumn, and a large green-leather sofa. Vale got to the long bar by the wall of windows, started clattering crystal, her hands shaking as she did.

Dalton walked over to the coffee table—a single slab of maple—picked up a bottle of Laphroiag and a glass, poured her a stiff one, set it down on a side table by one of the plaid armchairs. He picked up two ice cubes and dropped them gently into her glass and stepped away, the revolver sloping down, then took a seat in the wingback again.

Mariah Vale came over—vibrating still but mastering herself with effort—sat down, straightened the crease of her navy blue slacks, plucked at her starched white blouse, picked up her scotch, and looked at him, her face settling into a magistrate’s cold judgmental regard. She had learned this intimidating look from her grandfather, a famous jurist and a senior lecturer in law at Cornell.

“How did you get on my island in the first place, Mr. Dalton? Some secret covert-ops trickery?”

“Yes. I hired a boat. Don’t tell anyone. It’s a trade secret.”

“I’m at a loss to understand why you are here. You have been reinstated. Allegations quietly dropped. Your contribution to the prevention of an atrocity in Morocco has been recognized . . .”

“It’s also been classified and sealed. And the Moroccan authorities are still calling it a Jewish plot foiled by the Brits.”

“I am not responsible for what those people manage to convince themselves of,” she said. “And the Israelis can take care of themselves. Regarding your achievements, there are stars on the wall at Langley. Many of those stars record acts that have also been sealed and the details classified. No one finds that demeaning.”

Dalton nodded.

“I get that. I’m fine with it.”

She sipped at her drink, seeming to relax into herself, feeling more like the judge than the prisoner now.

“And yet here you are, effectively throwing it all away. And why? So you could throw a fright into a person you dislike?”

“I don’t dislike you, Miss Vale. I
disagree
with you.”

“You’re thinking of the role my committee plays in righting some of the Agency’s past wrongs? Mr. Dalton, we are attempting to redress grievous excesses, acts of prolonged savagery, that have stained our national honor.”

“I’m not recording this, Mariah. You can hold the Patrick Henry stuff. I’m not even here to try to set you straight. I think, in the main, you’re doing what you really think is the right thing to do. I don’t even think you’re an evil person. You’re sort of accidentally dangerous. You can’t help yourself.”

He shrugged, took a sip of the scotch, went on in a low, amiable rumble, his expression calm.

“I think you may be a little too . . . fastidious . . . for the job. And I’m puzzled why it’s okay with you that we stand off at twenty thousand feet and launch Hellfires and Paveways into crowded villages in Yemen and Waziristan, knowing with absolute certainty we’re going to kill and maim at least a few innocent women and kids in order to take out a couple of jihadists and a donkey but it’s not okay to rough up a prisoner who might know which train station or airport his buddies are going to blow up.”

“The first is war, but the second is not. It’s a violation of the Geneva Convention.”

“So’s embedding your fighters in the middle of a crowded village packed with innocent civilians, like Hamas did in Gaza, knowing they’re going to die and being happy to use their deaths as propaganda.”

“The world can be dark,” she said. “We are the light. We remain true to what is American by
never
compromising our sacred principles in exchange for some fleeting sense of security. America shines through the darkness
because
of those principles.”

Dalton pulled at his scotch, set it down again.

“Fine, ringing words,” said Dalton.” We’ll see how that all works out for you. We’ll see if the American people are ready to lose sons and daughters so you and your crowd can feel really good about yourselves. I find it’s risky to preen at funerals. Anyway, this is not really why I came. This is between you and me. It’s personal.”

Her face paled slightly, and she reached for her glass.

“Fine,” she said. “It’s personal, I’m tired. I’d like to go to bed. Make your point, say your say, and then get out and swim for it.”

Dalton reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a piece of paper, walked it over to her. She put on a pair of gold reading glasses and held it up to the glow of the table lamp. Dalton noticed that the sheet of paper was vibrating very slightly.

Vale read the page without comment. Only a very slight tremor in her hands and a certain fixed look in her eyes gave anything away. She set the page down, looked at him over the rims of her reading glasses, her mouth a little prim.

“First, this is a highly classified document. How did you obtain it?”

“Fell off a truck. Tough read, isn’t it? More of an indictment than a report.”

“This was how the events were interpreted,” she said, looking away and then coming back. “The report is a reasonable inference from the facts on the ground, as they were—”

“That passive voice . . . it always gets me. I’ll bet Pilate used it in his official report to Rome. ‘After due deliberation, a decision was reached to crucify the subject according to accepted practice. A regulation cross of recycled wood was obtained from on-site inventory and nails procured from local suppliers after a competitive and open-bidding process, subject to appeal. Regulation hammers were then deployed as per the manual.’ ”

“Please. You’re hardly Jesus Christ.”

“True enough. Anyway, what I’m getting at is that middle part, where you write you have notified the Mossad of my last known GPS coordinates as well as a description of my vehicle. I found that interesting. I mean, aside from how happy you were to feed me to the Mossad. But the bit about the GPS data, I wondered about that, since part of the indictment against me was that I deliberately shut down my BlackBerry to avoid any kind of tracing operation and that after the fact none of my BlackBerry voice recordings were available.”

“That’s hardly conclusive—”

“No. Just suggestive. But then there’s this . . .”

He held up a small digital recorder.

“Couple of guys in the Mossad got me this little sound bite. Care to hear it?”

She nodded, her eyes fixed on the machine.

Dalton clicked the button. A tinny voice came out but recognizably his own.

“Pretty damning, isn’t it, Mariah? Turned out not to be quite accurate. The Mossad worked the tape over and determined that it had been doctored. A slice of the digital recording had been taken out. By somebody good. It was an important slice. I managed to get hold of the original. It was when I was talking to a woman named Sally Fordyce, in Clay Pearson’s office. Another one of those voice records that dropped off the grid after I got out of Vienna. Lend an ear, Mariah.”

He held the machine up again, clicked the button.

He reversed it, hit the button again.

There was a silence. Dalton put the recorder away.

“Well,” said Vale. “It’s obviously been doctored.”

“Obviously.”

“In an attempt to . . .
incriminate
you.”

He smiled at her, nodding, pulled out a pack of Sobranies.

“Care for one?”

She looked at the pack for a time.

“Yes. I think I would.”

Dalton leaned across, the pack open. She took a turquoise one, and Dalton lit it for her. She inhaled, started to cough, mastered it.

“Sorry. I don’t smoke,” she said through a cloud, her face reddening, her eyes watering. “Or at least, I didn’t.”

“Couple other things,” said Dalton, lighting one for himself. “A woman named Veronika Miklas was able to get a video of the main surveillance camera at Leopoldsberg. It showed a man we subsequently identified as Aleksandr Vukov, in the early morning hours, delivering a brown Saab to the Leopoldsberg parking lot. This tape, which clearly shows that at the very least I had an accomplice, was supposed to have gone missing. The kid who obtained it, a young man named Jürgen Stodt, a member of the Austrian OSE, was later found floating face-down in the Danube. He had been beaten to death.”

“How terrible!”

“Yes. Veronika Miklas was shattered by it.”

“I would imagine so. Where is she now?”

“In Venice. Under the protection of the Carabinieri.”

“Do you have a copy of that video fragment?”

“I sent it to the Audit Committee. You didn’t get a copy?”

“I’m . . . temporarily on leave from the Secretariat. For administrative . . . realignment. Clay Pearson will step into the chair until the process works through.”

“Really? You’re being hung out to dry, then, for failing to nail me to the door of Clandestine Services?”

“Micah, I have willingly shouldered much of the blame for the procedural errors that led to your . . . situation. Concerning these . . .”