The Skorpion Directive (2 page)

Dalton pulled in a breath, let it out slowly. If Galan had made a tradecraft error here in Vienna—as unlikely as that was—there was only one way to confirm it.

He paused for a moment, gathering himself, taking in the city.

Vienna, like most aging harlots, was at her best in the twilight: Baroque façades lined the Ring District, richly detailed five- and six-story wedding cakes in pink and cream stone, coffer-roofed, every available inch of wall surface covered in gilded nymphs, onyx satyrs, alabaster cherubs, copper putti, bronze Valkyries, winged stallions with nostrils flaring—all of this
Dream of Ossian
imagery overlooking a maze of streets packed with earnest little Austrian eco cars bustling up and down the avenues under a glittering web of trolley wires, like fat white rabbits, late, too late, for a very important date.

It had rained hard most of the day, clearing around seven, turning the Viennese sky into a luminous California sunset. The Ring smelled of wet stone, early-spring mosses, diesel fumes, and, floating on the misty air from a student café across the
Strasse,
the biting tang of fresh dark coffee.

In this threshold moment, Lasha Seigel took one last chance to pull in tight on the target, filling her lens with the glowing image of a taut, muscular man, narrow-hipped but broad at the shoulders, a little less than six feet, with longish blond hair, a slightly cruel face made of angles and edges, deep-set eyes hooded by the downlight. He was too well dressed to be a student or a tourist, in a long blue overcoat over navy slacks, a blue V-neck sweater, a scarf of pale gold silk, expensive black wingtips.

Her heart rate rose perceptibly as she studied Dalton’s uncompromising face in the lens. Back at the Office, during their final Tactical Briefing, trying to drive home just how dangerous this target was, the unit chief, Nenia Faschi, had told them that the Serbian Mafia, who had tangled with the target several times last year, were calling him the
Krokodil.
Seigel had to admit he had that . . .
look.
The voice of Rolf Jägermeier, in his Mobile 2 unit in front of the Regina Hotel, came up in her earpiece. Jägermeier had seen the transmitted image from her digital camera, checked it with a file photo in his laptop.

Double-clicking her throat mike to let Jägermeier know she had heard and would comply, Seigel noticed that the Viennese, a wary people, were giving this
Krokodil
a certain space. She packed up her gear, stopping at the door to see that she had left no traces, and slipped out into the deserted hallway, heading for the stairs, thinking, as she came hurriedly down the darkened hall,
He can’t lose us in the Ring. Too many buildings, too much street light.

Across the
Strasse
, Dalton was thinking exactly the same thing: this was bad ground for a covert meeting. Too brightly lit, too many rooflines, too many long walled-in blocks, and no room at all to maneuver.
A cattle chute to the slaughterhouse
, Dalton’s CQB instructor at Fort Campbell would have said. Exposed, lines of fire from every angle, fully in enfilade, no chance to get to cover. It must have been hellish to fight in the streets of Vienna during the war, although the Panzers and the Stukas would have been a great help.

There was a broad open space to his right—Sigmund Freud Park, looking threadbare and tired after a hard Austrian winter—and, on the far side of the park, he could see the floodlit yellow hulk of the Regina Hotel. To the left of the Regina, the twin spires of the Votivkirche glittered like silver spikes against the fading glow of the evening sky. A red-and-cream trolley rumbled past on steel tracks, heavy as a Tiger tank, shaking the ground under his feet. A young blond woman in faded jeans and a mud-brown ski vest popped out of a door in the Volksbank Building across the street, clearly in a hurry. She glanced in his direction, seemed to flinch away, and then she jerked her head around sharply, turning north on Währinger Strasse, lugging her camo-colored backpack, melting quickly into the street crowds. That jumpy glance, and her body language as she headed away from him, that was all it took.

His vague ripples of unease hardened into a near certainty. He made the professional decision to assume he was under surveillance. It was the only safe thing to do. But surveillance by whom?

Possibly the KGB.

He had, just a few weeks ago, exposed a KGB mole buried deep inside the U.S. Army, in the process decimating a KGB network in Istanbul and Kerch, so the KGB had no reason to love Dalton. And these days the KGB—who had changed their official name to the FSB in 1991 but who were still thought of as the KGB by every opposing agency—were thick on the ground in Vienna, now that over two hundred thousand Chechen refugees had made their way here.

Or it could be the Serbs and Croats, who had declared a vendetta against him ever since he had run a small but extremely brutal private war against the Serbian Mafia in Venice. Another contender would be the Singaporean SID, whom Dalton had managed to piss off quite spectacularly only a few months ago.

Whoever it was, the Austrians were old hands at the spy game, and neither the KGB nor any other foreign security service would be allowed to run a surveillance operation without the permission, and perhaps the assistance, of the OSE, the
Österreichische Spionage Abwehr Einheit.
Austria had an official policy of neutrality—had ever since 1955—but that didn’t mean that allowances could not be made when it served the state.

Dalton had met, and respected, Austrian special forces soldiers doing UN work in Bosnia and Kosovo, and Galan had once told him the Austrians had a detachment in permanent position on the Golan Heights. The Austrians had a more muscular definition of “neutrality” than the Swiss, and lately they had been taking “advice” from the KGB about their Chechen refugee problem.

It wasn’t out of the question that they had also been taking “advice” from the KGB about a troublesome CIA officer named Micah Dalton. Well, there was only one reliable way to find the answers to all these questions, and that was to draw these unknown watchers out.

To do that, he had to move.

So he moved.

Dalton walked slowly north along Währinger Strasse, crossing into the edge of Sigmund Freud Park, making a long lazy loop through the area, scanning the darker places, watching the people around him, checking out the cars and buses, the dim forms of people half seen in the evening shadows. Since the assumption was that he was already being watched, there was no reason to be tricksy about his countersurveillance tactics, no point ducking into alleyways or changing direction sharply, trying to force a watcher to react, to look sharply away, to suddenly find the window of a closed shop utterly fascinating. He wasn’t interested in losing these watchers; he wanted to isolate and identify them, establish the size, shape, and professionalism of the unit.

Nor was it worth trying to convince these people—whoever they were—that he wasn’t worth watching; that decision had obviously already been made. He had to assume there’d be a box team on the street already, probably at least eight people, more likely twelve.

One person would have the Eye—have Dalton in direct line of sight. Usually this person would be behind him, on foot, probably no farther back than thirty yards. There’d be a backup watcher another twenty yards behind the Eye, ready to overtake and step into the Eye position if the first watcher felt he was closing up too tight or if Dalton did anything that might compromise the Eye. And there’d be a
third
watcher across the street, moving in the same direction as he was, probably one of those ordinary-looking people over there who were already level with Dalton right now.

The Eye would be in radio contact with the mobile units—very likely unremarkable sedans—always with four doors, since the “box team” members would be constantly switching in and out of the mobile units to prevent the target from seeing too many familiar faces.

Everyone else would maintain radio silence. If Dalton turned right or left on a side street, the Eye would walk straight through the intersection, letting the backup watcher take over as the Eye while the third watcher across the street would close in and take up the second position. The first Eye would either be cycled back to a mobile unit or redeployed in the third position, across the street from and level with Dalton. All of this movement would be fed constantly to the control officer in one of the mobile units.

Control would have a grid map of the city. The Brits, who had refined this kind of ad hoc street scramble into an art, called it a Spot Map. Control would track the reports coming in from the Eye, maneuvering the outlying box team to keep every alley and side street covered, switching agents in and out, pulling some back, closing in new ones, singles, pairs, breaking them up, mixing and matching as they moved, always at least three watchers keeping the target, Dalton, in the line of sight. A skilled team could do this sort of thing all day and all night, and no civilian would ever detect the operation. But there
were
things to see for those who knew how to look.

For one thing, none of the watchers, if properly trained, would ever make eye contact with the target. Which meant that if the blonde coming out of the Volksbank were part of a surveillance unit, they had some training issues to deal with. Generally, by elimination, anyone passing him on the street who
did
give him a direct glance could be disregarded.

The entire unit would also have
gone gray
, nobody would be wearing standout clothing—no reds, no blacks, no flashy jewelry. Green, gray, brown—mud colors—would be the choice. Since they all spent so much time walking, they tended to wear comfortable shoes—sneakers, rubber-soled slippers, hiking boots. They’d also be carrying bags, and wearing coats and sporting hats that could be taken off to alter their appearance—clothing baggy enough to hide radios and cameras.

They’d have tics, even the best of them: touching ears or wrists where their mikes would be, rearranging uncomfortable belts and straps holding their radio gear. Some of the newer ones would have that happy-sappy aimless look—no clear focus, too obviously trying to look casual—“loitering with intent,” his instructor at Camp Peary had called it—instead of walking with the oblivious self-absorption that quite often allows experienced agents to get very close to the target without being sensed.

Dalton looked for all of these indicators as he came slowly north past the park, checking, assessing, rejecting, rechecking, looking at the streetscape and the crowds through any reflective surface, stopping now and then, as if he were uncertain where he was going, very aware of any change in the rhythm of the pedestrian traffic around him, his breathing steady and calm, keeping his adrenaline under control.

Twenty-five minutes later he had reached the intersection of Währinger Strasse and Rooseveltplatz, and he was reasonably certain that the rusted gray four-door Audi with the tinted windows parked near the cab stand in front of the Regina Hotel was part of the surveillance unit, as was the rat-brown Opel idling in front of Charlie P’s Irish Pub. He picked that one out when a traffic cop ticketed a car doing exactly the same thing a half a block away while completely ignoring the Opel.

And he suspected that the young woman in a dull-green peasant head scarf, sitting in the trolley that had just rumbled past him, was the edgy blond goddess with the backpack who he had seen coming out of the Volksbank across from the Schottentor trolley station.