The Orpheus Deception (36 page)

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Authors: David Stone

BOOK: The Orpheus Deception

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“I’m Alice Chandler. You’re Nikki Turrin?”

“Yes. I’m here to see the—”

“Have you ever met him?”

“No. I haven’t.”

“Have you seen a picture of him?”

Nikki looked a little puzzled. Miss Chandler shook her head.

“He’s scarred, Miss Turrin. It gives some people a start. It’s okay to start, Miss Turrin. I just thought I’d warn you. You can go in now. Would you like some coffee?”

“I’d love some.”

“Black?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Go along now. I’ll be right in.”

Nikki gathered herself and walked through the half-open doorway behind Miss Chandler’s desk and found herself in a shaft of strong sunlight that was pouring in through the slatted blinds of the AD of RA’s office. The room was simple and unadorned, but there was a U.S. flag on a staff in the corner—the military kind, with the gold thread trim—bare wooden floors, and a long, low wooden desk, behind which a large, heavy-framed man in a blue suit and white shirt unbuttoned at the collar sat in a swivel chair, staring back at her. He got up as she came into the room, stepping into the shaft of light as he came around the side of his desk with his hand out. Nikki did not start. She took his hand as he introduced himself—his name was vaguely Western, but she only heard his title, the AD of RA, because she was trying to cope with his facial scarring, and that took up a lot of her mental energy. The AD of RA did not seem to notice. By now, he was used to it.

He pulled a chair around and patted the frame.

“Sit down, Miss Turrin. Thanks for coming.”

Nikki sat.

“Yes, sir. Mr. Oakland—”

“Screw him. He tried to cut you out of this.”

“He . . . I . . .”

The AD of RA laughed; a short, rasping cough.

“You’re the one who pulled this video off YouTube, right?”

“Yes.”

“Took it to Oakland? Who promptly cut you out of the loop.”

“Yes. He did. It was okay. The video seemed to call for something.”

“Yes. It did. We’ve been all over it, and it’s got us worried. Has that pompous dickhead told you anything more about it?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. At least the little shit knows the
fucking
rules. Sorry. Excuse that. We’re giving you a clearance to Indigo, Miss Turrin.”

“Indigo?”

“Yes. We’ve been over your file, and there’s no reason why we can’t bring you into this. Every reason why we should.”

“I’m . . . honored, sir. May I ask what
this
is?”

“Consider yourself sworn, Miss Turrin. May I call you Nikki?”

“Please.”

“We’ve opened a file on this video, Nikki. So far we know a lot about it. Would you like me to fill you in?”

“Please.”

The AD of RA filled her in. It took about six minutes. In the middle of the story, Miss Chandler came in with a trayful of doughnuts, along with two cups of black coffee. The AD of RA never stopped the story, thanked Miss Chandler with a smile and a nod, and went back to the narrative, ending with the deaths of the three Israeli scientists on the flight from Tel Aviv. When he was done, Nikki’s chest was tight again.

“So, what do you think? What’s the first question that pops into your head?”

“The first? I guess, why post this video at all?”

“Yeah. Me too. Why is this thing on the Web in the first place? I mean, it looks like somebody poisoned the water in this pool, killing a lot of people, including this guy named Dzilbar Kerk, who has an indirect but worrisome connection to the deaths of a lot of microbiologists around the world, some of whom were working for Biopreparatin the old USSR. So, anybody has to take what happens to these people pretty seriously, because the thing sure as hell looks like a security threat, and that’s what we’re paid to look out for. What I don’t get is, why take the MPEG and throw it on the Web? Why set off all these alarms? Makes no sense, except it has to, doesn’t it? I mean, unless some unhappy underling threw it on the Web just to piss off his boss? Which, based on the video, would be suicidal. You follow?”

“Yes. I understand.”

“Yeah. I figured you would. You know this stuff reasonably well?”

“The Internet? As well as most. Better than some. I grew up with it, of course, but, once I got into the Monitors, I really paid attention.”

“How do you post something on YouTube?”

“Go online, through your server; go to the website, sign up—”

“You can’t post anonymously?”

“No. You have to have an e-mail identity, and it has to be a legitimate one. It all goes through your server—AOL or EarthLink, or whatever—and, since you pay for those services, they have to know who you are. So you need an account to post, and that’s an identifier right there.”

“What about Internet cafés?”

“That’s a loophole. You could sign on to YouTube and post anything from an Internet café, except the posting would be traceable to that particular café. So you’d be vulnerable on that level.”

“But I could travel, couldn’t I? Take a flight to East Frogfart on the Fen and find a café and post the video from there. Right?”

“Yes. You could.”

“And then the video gets picked up and reposted around the world?”

“Not necessarily. It could just sit on YouTube and get accessed. Collect hits. That’s how YouTube rates a posting. The number of hits.”

“Can YouTube ID where those hits are coming from?”

“What’s the point, sir? If your search field is in the millions, where are you? How many man-hours would we have to devote to checking every hit on this video? And why would we? We want to know where it came from, not who looked at it afterward. Right, sir?”

“Right. Good point. You have a flair for this, Nikki.”

Nikki smiled. In the sunlight, her smile was dazzling. Actually,
she
was dazzling, a genuine Italian stunner in the classic Sophia Loren style. Her perfume was spicy and complex, not at all floral. He figured it was probably called Ashes of Men. The AD of RA was divorced now, since his wife had found his physical and spiritual wounds impossible to bear, but Nikki was . . . well, who cared how pretty she was. The observation was totally unprofessional, anyway. How old was she? Twenty-eight max? By her terms, he was the walking dead. Not to mention being a grotesque monster. But it
was
a great smile. He found himself smiling back at her, or at least
trying.

“Anyway, basically, as I told you, we know the video was shot in Eastern Europe, probably the Balkans. The big guy who dies in this video, Dzilbar Kerk—I think you may have heard of him?”

“Yes. I’ve seen his name on the Monitors’ List.”

“Well, then you know that Kerk is wanted by everybody, from the FBI to the Sheriff of Nottingham, so he probably had to stay close to home, and we figure home is this butt-ugly gunrunner’s palazzo in the video. So if we can find the villa, then we’re a lot closer to finding out who made the video.”

“Yes. We are.”

“So, what’s the
second
thing that strikes you about this video?”

“The second thing? I guess that maybe we’re seeing what we’re supposed to see and maybe not seeing what is really there.”

“Good. Great. Like what?”

“Like how do we know it’s the pool water that kills them?”

“What do you mean?”

“All we see is some fat, ugly, greasy, hairy thugs drinking some clear liquid out of a vodka bottle, and then they all go swimming and die. How do we know what killed them was in the water and not in the vodka bottles? Or in the air, like a weaponized bacterial spray of some sort?”

“Good. I like that.”

“Next, how do we know they
died
in the first place?”

“You mean the thing is faked? It isn’t. I wish it had been, but it wasn’t. We had every frame blown up and examined by our best forensic pathologists. I mean, super-high-density resolution. Image enhancement. They were even able to get in tight enough on the throats to analyze and time the blood flow in the carotids, got the heartbeats, got a real close look at the kinds of hemorrhaging in the retinas, the inflammation of the nasal areas, catastrophic drop in respiration . . . They went over everything, and they all agreed that what we were watching was real. Those people died, Nikki. And they died
hard.
You follow?”

“I do.”

“So, you get it that this is dangerous stuff ?”

“I do.”

“Good. You need to be ready for that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You ever in the field, Nikki?”

“In the field? No, sir. I’m a Monitor. Isn’t fieldwork a CIA thing?”

“Fuck the CIA. They’re leaking like a used . . . like a used diaper. They’re nothing but a
fucking
sedition mill for those goddam treasonous pinheads at the
New York Times.
Pardon my
fucking
language. I don’t trust
any
of them. If you go into the field, I can get you some off-the-books tactical support from the DIA. And I do think, Nikki, before you’re through, this file might take you outside.”

“Yes. Sir. Understood. What do you need?”

“I’m giving you complete access to our NIMA and NASA data banks. Including the military ones. We’re going to give you an image of what this villa would look like from straight up, then you can run it through the Balkan and Albanian databases. Look for a match. This is between you and me. No leaks anywhere. This is critical. I want you to put a set of crosshairs right over this stinking pink palazzo. You locate it, and, if we’re good, we find something that leads us to the . . . person who made this video.”

“And then?”

“And then we, very nicely, ask him why.”

“What if he won’t tell us?”

“We’ll hand him over to people who don’t do
very nicely.”

Changi Village, Singapore

Everybody in Changi Village heard the chopper as it came in from the north, heard it long before they saw it, heard that deep bass beat thrumming in the air itself. People in the streets looked up and over the tree line, straining to see what was coming, thinking
Some celebrity flying in from Seletar Airfield. That’s where all the stars land.
The thunder of the rotors filled the pool house and sent Fyke’s monitor up into the low hundreds again. Five hundred yards away, Lujac stopped what he was doing to Corporal Ahmed and went to take a look out across the canopy. Sure enough, there was a big olive-drab chopper coming in low over the tree line. It was heading straight for the rooftop deck of the Hendon Hills Golf and Country Club. He got the binoculars just as that Chinese guy who looked like a gazelle reappeared on the pool deck, staring into the north, shading his eyes against the sun. The chopper, an old Huey, had big white letters painted on the fuselage—USMC—and a red cross inside a white circle.

“Christ,” said Lujac, while he tried to keep the roof deck in his view, speaking to no one particular, sure as hell not Corporal Ahmed, who was on the floor rolled into a naked, sweaty little skin ball and weeping soundlessly. Well, at least he was
soundless,
which was a definite improvement.

“They’re gonna medevac the guy out.”

Hadn’t planned on that. Now what?

MISS LOPEZ OPENED
the lanai screen and knocked gently on the wall. Fyke was trying to sit up in the bed, plucking at his covers. Dalton was standing now, looking at Miss Lopez and hearing the thudding shudder of the blades. The rotor wash was starting to kick up dust inside the pool house, and the lanai screens were rattling. Fyke somehow got himself sitting up straight. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and gave Dalton a hard look. “Well, lad, what’s the plan?”

Miss Lopez glanced at Fyke and then back to Dalton.

“What does he mean?”

“He means I can’t let him go to Guam.”

Miss Lopez looked at him, her expression hardening.

“Why? What are they going to do to him in Guam?”

“He has to be debriefed.”

Miss Lopez, who had been around the covert world awhile, got it in one. Her pretty young face reddened, and her expression got even stonier.

“Because he’s been in enemy hands, you mean?”

“Yeah. Basically.”

“He was AWOL, wasn’t he? Weren’t you?”

Fyke’s face reddened, but he nodded. The chopper was right overhead, shaking the pool deck like a cyclone shakes a house.

“Tell me,” she said, “will they hurt him?”