The Skorpion Directive (8 page)

She had a small Volkswagen Jetta parked in the lot, a little black bullet with racing tires and a tuned exhaust. She eased it out of the lane, and they headed south through the deserted streets. In a few minutes they were on the Gürtel, and only a short distance from Mariahilfer Strasse. Dalton, in the passenger seat, scanned the streets and the skyline, and the road behind them, looking for a sign of surveillance. Unless they were a lot better than Jagermeir’s team, he was reasonably certain that they were not being followed.

As they turned south on Mariahilfer Strasse, entering the maze of office clutter and antique housing that ringed the Westbahnhof, the sky in the east was full of a fiery orange light, and a huge flock of ravens was wheeling and spinning in the sunrise, their glossy black wings glinting with gold and copper flashes. Veronika, who had been, in the main, silent as she worked her way through the center of Vienna, finally found a way into the heart of her concerns.

“Why
me
, Micah? Why are those men after me?”

Dalton looked at the side of her face, lit by a shaft of rising sun as they cleared an intersection before plunging back into the shadowed canyons of the Ring District. Her skin was white, and her hands on the leather wheel of the Jetta were white with the force of her grip.

“I have a theory.”

“Please share. Before my hair bursts into flames.”

“How would it look to your people, to the OSE, if you were to be found dead in your flat this morning? The first thing they’d do would be to look into what you were working on. Your unit, I mean. And your unit was working on me. I’d be the first person they’d want to see.”

“But what about you? If I am killed, wouldn’t you stay around to sort it out? Explain it to the . . .”

Her voice trailed into silence.

“You said you’ve seen my files,” said Dalton. “See how it looks? I cut you out of the unit, followed you home, dragged you inside, forced you to show me your computer, and next morning you’re dead. Once they saw that, they wouldn’t see anything else. I’d be in Lödesburg Sink, wrapped in heavy chains, talking to a prosecutor from the ICC. The U.S. doesn’t recognize the International Criminal Court, so the ICC would have a dream come true, an undeclared CIA agent who murdered an Austrian OSE agent on their turf.”

From the look on her face, cold and fixed, it was clear that Veronika found this statement uncongenial.

“So. You would leave me there? Dead?”

“I like to pay my debts in person, Veronika. To stay out of a holding cell and go after these people? Yes, I would have.”

That created a difficult silence for a while.

The barnlike hulk of the Westbahnhof was looming over the slate roofs of Mariahstadt. Traffic was beginning to build. A blue-and-white police car flashed past them, its klaxon wailing. Dalton wanted out of this Jetta soon. Very damned soon. Veronika had worked her way through the following chill and surfaced again, her face a little stonier.

But she still had that iron.

“What about Yusef’s body? What would they make of that?”

“An accomplice. People see what they want to see. And even if I were gone, the police could still connect me to you. Remember, I did an Internet search on you last night?”

“But wasn’t that on a secured CIA link?”

Nothing seemed to change on Dalton’s face, but now he looked like a death mask.

“Yes. It was. It was an Agency BlackBerry. Encrypted. There’s no way that anyone outside the Agency could have tracked my search string.”

“Unless someone cracked the encryption.”

“Not likely.”

“But possible?”

“Yes.”

“Was . . . is your BlackBerry GPS-equipped?”

“Yes. If it’s on, its location would be identifiable, but only to the Monitors at the National Security Agency in Maryland.”

“Is the GPS locator also encrypted?”

“Yes. Heavily.”

“Who would be capable of cracking an encrypted CIA BlackBerry?”

Dalton thought about it.

“The Brits, I think. Maybe the Chinese . . .”

Dalton did not name the third possibility, the Mossad, but it was at the forefront of his mind for a number of reasons.

As it turned out, he wasn’t alone.

They reached the entrance to the Auto-Park. Veronika pulled up across the street from a towering concrete labyrinth of open floors, each level packed with cars.

Dalton was looking at the cameras over the automated gates. And thinking about the time stamps on parking receipts.

And that blue-and-white police car.

“When does that construction bin at your apartment get emptied?”

“Whenever it’s full. About once a month. How full was it?”

“Less than half.”

“That will give us time. Unless this day gets a lot hotter. Then he’ll make his presence felt pretty soon. In the meantime, we—”

“That’s my point, Veronika. It isn’t going to be ‘we.’ Where’s the closest police station?”

Her answer was short and sharp. And suspicious.

“There is a transit police kiosk inside the station entrance.”

“Good. Let’s go,” he said, cracking the passenger door.

“To the
Polizei
? Why? You said—”

“Not me. You. I’ll see you to the entrance, watch until you get to the transit station. Tell them everything.
Everything
. Nothing has happened up until now that compromises you in any way. Tell them I turned up at your flat last night, that I forced you inside. Tell them why. The truth, all of it, about the
Nomenklatur
, about the word
Verwandtschaft
—whatever that means—the whole thing. Hold nothing back. Get them to take you into protective custody. Maybe you can get your boss to tell you what
Verwandtschaft
actually referred to. You can say I forced you to drive me to the train station—”

“Sure. And perhaps I can tell them that I submitted to rape just so I could get a sample of your DNA. Maybe they’ll even give me a raise.”

This was said with such a bitter edge to it that it stopped Dalton for a moment. Her face was closing down fast, but Dalton cut across her and drove the argument home.

“Look, Veronika, if the idea was to frame me with your killing, it’s not going to work very well if you’re not actually dead, is it? This isn’t your fight. You walk away right now—”

“Not my fight? I killed a man last night. In my own home. And if I leave now, what happens to you?”

“It’s two hundred and eighty miles to Venice. I have friends—”

“Really? Like the man who puts the mark on that poster? That said everything was safe?
Friends
like that? Who else knew that you’d be coming up out of the Schottentor station? And
when
?”

There wasn’t any other answer to that. Dalton had been visiting that prospect for several hours and wasn’t enjoying the view at all.

“No one. He was the only one.”

“The Cousins do not tell us who gave them the information about you. We both know Interpol doesn’t do anything but pass on data to real agencies. They’re just a clearinghouse.”

“Yes.”

“So he—whoever this
friend
is—it’s possible he’s the source that Interpol was covering for. He’s the one who put that
tell
on the poster and led you right into the trap. He wanted you watched so he could set you up somehow—”

Dalton put up some fences just to see if she could clear them.

“There’s no way he could have known about my contact with you, about the lighter. None of that was predictable—”

“No. But
you
are. You said it yourself. If you’re under attack, the first thing you do is turn right around and go straight at them. The shark-in-shallow-water. If your friend knew
you
, he’d know that he could depend on you to—what do you say in English—percolate?”

“Right, and isn’t that what you
would
do. Every single time?”

Veronika moved closer, leaned into her argument, her scent around him and her topaz eyes fixed on his.

“If he has access somehow—we don’t know how—to your BlackBerry, then he knows you searched for the name of a unit member—me—and he knows where you are because of the GPS, so he sends in a team to kill me. Micah, listen, no one else
could
have. He’s the one behind all this. You had a fallback meet, didn’t you? I mean, everyone does. Where was it?”

“Leopoldsberg. At ten this morning.”

“Are you going to go?”

Dalton could hear his laugh, a dry, creaking rasp. The voice of the Joshua tree. He could see his yellow skin, wrinkled and old beyond his years, and his eyes, the eyes of a crow, piercing black, full of sharp wit and cold intelligence. All these features were crowded into the center of a round, bald skull. Then there were the misshapen, clawlike hands, broken with hammers by the Jordanians, his body crippled after that. The stoic grace and resignation with which he bore these marks they had left on him, the things they had done in the months they had had him, things so terrible that when they finally dumped him, bound and naked, out in the Negev and then he later saw himself in the window glass of the Israeli Army medical unit, he quit the Mossad. And he never went back to his wife and family in Tel Aviv.

Galan went to Venice, to put some sort of life together in history’s first Jewish ghetto, and eventually became the spymaster for Allessio Brancati, the chief of the Venetian Carabinieri. Both men had been Dalton’s allies in his private vendetta against the Serbian Mafia. He owed those two men his life. Galan would not—could not—have betrayed Dalton. There must be another answer.

“I
know
this man, Veronika.”

“I see. And does
everybody
love you, Micah?”

Dalton’s face changed, hardened, like concrete setting. This was too close to his core. Much too close. He had been married once, to a lovely woman named Laura, and they had had a little girl. And now they were both dead. Veronika saw the effect of her question.

“I’m sorry. I think that went where I did not mean it to go. What I mean is, have you perhaps become . . .
inconvenient
?”

Dalton didn’t immediately answer. But into his covert world, “change we can believe in” had come with a vengeance. The CIA was under heavy fire from the left wing for what it had done—or had not done—in the aftermath of September 11th and the wars that followed. There seemed to be a special venom reserved for any Agency officer who had ever terrified a terrorist, and there was to be no mercy granted even for officially sanctioned actions taken by field officers working under unbearable pressure in the aftermath of an unprecedented attack on the nation.

A Special Prosecutor had been appointed, plea bargains were being cut, old friendships broken, loyalty and trust betrayed, long-standing but informal covenants between domestic and foreign agencies shattered. A miasma of fear floated in the corridors, the halls were full of informants, Iagos and Savonarolas listened at the keyholes and monitored the phones. The morale of the operational sectors had plummeted to abyssal levels. The flow of useful HumInt had dried to a trickle. Very few CIA officers, especially those with families, were willing to do—or to authorize—anything aggressive out in the field.

Most of them were riding their desks, shuffling paper and keeping their heads down, waiting for the Great Eye to pass over and find another victim,
any
victim. The Big Chill had settled over the American intelligence community, drawing the amused contempt of America’s allies and greatly comforting her enemies. And if there was a list on a desk somewhere, the name of Micah Dalton had to be in the top one hundred.

Veronika reached out and touched the side of his face. Her fingertips were cold, but his skin was warm. He did not react. He was staring straight ahead, his thoughts clearly in another place. The traffic was building up, and she could see a couple of foot patrolmen walking slowly along the walk, sipping coffee from paper cups, talking.

Dalton was right, of course. Veronika knew that she should get out of the car now and walk into the train station and tell Dalton’s version of the story to the transit police. They’d believe her. Relations with the CIA Station Chief in Vienna would be severed for a while, and the OSE would be theatrically outraged. The papers would hear of it—an “international incident.” And of course she would never again be assigned to Overwatch because she’s notorious. On the other hand, Nenia Faschi would eat Rolf Jägermeier alive for letting this happen to her. But Veronika could, eventually, manage some kind of normal life. And of course the
Krokodil
would be gone forever.

It was the sensible thing to do.

The
Austrian
thing to do.

“Galan,” said Dalton.

“I’m sorry?”

“Issadore Galan. That’s the name of the man we’re talking about. He’s an Israeli, used to work for the Mossad, left them to live in Venice. He runs the
agenzia di spionaggo
for the Carabinieri.”

“Issadore Galan. He’s a Jew?”

Dalton gave her a quick, hard look, but she didn’t feel it. She was staring out the window, her attention on something else.

“You remember what Yusef said just before he died? You asked him who sent him. He used the term
utazók
. It means ‘wanderer,’ Micah. But I think in Hungarian it’s slang for ‘Hebrew.’ Hebrew actually means ‘wanderer’ or ‘homeless.’ ”

Dalton looked over at her.

“Okay. That’s enough. I think I know where he is.”

“Then we should go and ask him a few rude questions. I can help you. I will call in to work and take some days off. They won’t find Yusef for a month. If ever. I have contacts in the OSE, contacts all over Europe. I can get access to the databases, this Smoke person. There would be paper on a man like that, with such terrible scars. I can drive—I can. What do you people say? ‘Scratch your back’?”