The Skorpion Directive (3 page)

There was a couple across the street, on the far side of Rooseveltplatz, sitting on the low pillared fence that ran around a grotesque red stone pile. Dalton had seen the woman standing at the bike stand in Sigmund Freud Park, quite alone, supposedly trying to unlock one of those bright yellow rent-a-bikes from the automated lock-stand. Now the same girl, in a different jacket, was necking with a tall, bald young man in a leather car coat and jeans and a pair of unlaced hiking boots made of what looked to be dried cow pies.

Finally, the rather splendid young woman standing a yard behind him at the traffic light, fiddling with a cigarette and paying him no attention whatsoever, had spent most of his long walkabout through the park and up Währinger Strasse at a steady fifty feet back, keeping pace with him almost exactly.

The traffic light was a long one. Just to raise her hackles a bit, Dalton took out a pack of his ridiculous Sobranie Cocktails—long gold-tipped cigarettes in a range of colors from turquoise to rose pink to canary yellow—selected a blue one, turned around and said,
“Bitte, Fräulein. Haben Sie ein Feuerzeug?”

The woman flinched very little, smoothly recovered. She looked a bit royal, and was quite handsome in that damn-your-eyes-
my
-family’sin-Debrett’s style that made him think of Mandy Pownall. Slender, an aurora of wild auburn hair, strong bones, and dark, intelligent eyes. Her pale cheeks bloomed a bit as she fumbled in her purse, an Hermès, but by the time she offered him her heavy silver Art Deco lighter with an insignia inlaid in ebony she had a fine cool smile in place, although in her eyes there was a faint flicker of fear. Dalton lit his Sobranie, studying the insignia as he did so—VRM—waved the cloud away, smiled, and handed the lighter back to her, saying,
“ Vorzüglich, Fräulein. Wie Sie sind.”

She held his look for a moment, quite steadily. The light changed. She smiled carefully, and turned to walk on in front of him. Dalton stayed where he was. As spectacular as she was—far too showy for any halfway competent box team—he had no doubt that she was the Eye. And now she would have to cross over Rooseveltplatz ahead of him, forfeiting her position to her backup. In order to indicate that she had to surrender the Eye, she would either give the couple across the street some visual indication—they were still locked in a pretty convincing embrace—or she would call it in to her Control.

There was a spherical and hairless little man, carrying a Burberry raincoat, standing at a phone kiosk about a hundred feet back, apparently absorbed in a vigorous debate with someone on the other end of the line. He would be the second watcher. And in a moment, if she handed off, he would become the Eye.

Halfway across the broad avenue, her back rigid and her shoulders a little too straight, she reached up to brush a strand of fine hair away from her left ear, holding her hand there for just a moment. Dalton saw a tiny black rectangle against the white skin of her wrist, a microphone. She had just called it in.

She reached the far side of Rooseveltplatz and disappeared into a crowd of students without a backward glance. On the far corner, the couple was breaking apart—one last air kiss—the boy trudging off toward the Pension Franz, dragging his bootlaces, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, and the girl on her cell phone.

As he watched her, something off to his left in the middle distance caught his eye. The head-scarf girl who had gone by in the trolley—the blonde he had first seen leaving the Volksbank—walked out from under the arched entrance of the Regina Hotel and got into the gray four-door Audi, which immediately pulled away.

On the far side of the street, the girl with the cell had ended her call and was now walking in the same direction as he was. Behind him, the round fat man had put on his Burberry raincoat, opened an unnecessary umbrella, and was now following Dalton at the regulation fifty feet.

There you go
, thought Dalton.
We have now officially confirmed the surveillance
.
Isn’t that just peachy
.

Now?
thought Dalton.

Now it was time for a drink, as Porter Naumann would say.

Dalton crossed Rooseveltplatz, heading for the lobby of the Regina Hotel, for a couple of reasons. First, it would rattle his watchers, who were probably using the hotel’s lobby washrooms for pee breaks. At least, the head-scarf girl certainly was. Second, there was a pretty good cigar bar in the hotel, with a range of excellent scotch, and he intended to sit down there for a while and think this thing through. His meeting with Issadore Galan was only another block north on Währinger Strasse, at the Pension Franz, but Dalton had no intention of dragging this chain of watchers into Galan’s territory.

The Audi four-door was nowhere to be seen by the time he reached the cab stand outside the Regina. He pushed open the double glass doors and walked into the ornate lobby, nodding to the gray counterman, in his gray suit, who returned his greeting with a gray smile and a perfunctory
Guten Abend, mein Herr.

The cigar bar was on the left, on the far side of a wall of wonderfully indecent satyrs and nymphs frolicking in a gravity-free pink marble Arcadia. There was no one around in the lobby other than a couple of comatose bellmen, apparently tricked out as extras in
The Merry Widow
. There was no one working in the newsstand and no one loitering about the lobby trying to look invisible.

He figured Control would settle for having all the hotel exits covered rather than risk putting a watcher inside, where Dalton could get a closer look. This also told him that there was probably no electronic gear zeroed in on him, that the surveillance team’s mission was to track, monitor, and contain him, not to gather signals intelligence. He sat down at the far corner of the long bar—also quite deserted, the global recession having its effect even here in Vienna—got his back up against a wall, established a clear sight line to the lobby entrance, and ordered up a Laphroiag—doubled, no ice—from a stiff-necked old crowbar behind the counter who looked exactly like C. Aubrey Smith, right down to the craggy bloodhound face and the huge white handlebar mustache.

The man had a miniature medal pinned to the left-hand lapel of his red mess jacket, a navy-blue-and-red swallowtail pennant with a gold iron cross, and over the cross the inscription 1WDK 1944-1947. Dalton recognized it as the breast badge of the First Warsaw Cavalry Division. He saw Dalton looking at it, said nothing, but gave him a short, comprehending smile, which Dalton returned with genuine respect. While the old Hussar—a brass tag over his breast pocket had his name, CESAR—was hunting down some Laphroiag, Dalton considered his situation, which boiled down to a simple question:

Why me?

Dalton’s current MOS, his operational designation, was Cleaner, an Agency “fixer,” working out of Clandestine Services, based in London Station, and at least nominally run by Tony Crane. Dalton’s tactical AO was Europe, Greece, the Balkans, and until recently he had been operating out of Venice. His drink arrived in a large crystal glass as heavy as a hand grenade. Dalton thanked Cesar. Cesar nodded, giving Dalton a moment of morose regard and apparently finding him marginally acceptable before turning away to shuffle massively down to the other end of the bar, where he began to polish some heavy hotel silver.

Dalton went back to his situational analysis. He was usually assigned to fix, repair, or otherwise pressure-wash away the sticky residue of an endless variety of cluster fucks and self-inflicted disasters generated by field officers or their agents in place, all of whom were prone to nervous collapse, envy, greed, paranoia, delusions of adequacy, conniptions, hissy fits, the vapors, the marthambles, as well as most of the standard vices and—Dalton had to give them credit—a few stunningly original ones as well, the most memorable of which had involved live goldfish.

Dalton did not run networks, did not attempt to construct or tend a trapline, made no brush contacts, serviced no drop boxes, recruited no sources, ran no covert agents, solicited no HumInt in other people’s backyards: in short, he did none of the back-channel double-dealing dirty work that so often irritated the living hell out of in-country agencies. That kind of covert HumInt stunt was usually the responsibility of whatever station chief happened to be on the scene. His professional life had been pretty well summed up many years back by Warren Zevon, in his song lyric “Send lawyers, guns and money / The shit has hit the fan,” except that Dalton was no lawyer.

So why all the attention?

He checked his watch—a little after nine in the evening. It would be midafternoon in D.C. He punched in a few numbers, waited, hit the company access code, waited some more for the encryption to kick in . . . And then he heard, with some surprise, the voice of Sally Fordyce, once Jack Stallworth’s senior assistant and now, after Stall-worth’s death, apparently back on Fourth Floor West at Langley.

“DeeDee’s office. Is that really you, Micah?”

“Sally? You’re back at Clandestine?”

“I am. The new man’s new guy likes me.”

The “new man” was the new President. The “new guy” was Clay Pearson, an ex-Navy JAG officer who had served in the White House under Carter and emerged from the second-most-calamitous presidency in modern history with his career actually enhanced, which meant he was part cobra and part mongoose.

Clay Pearson was the man chosen by the new President to replace Deacon Cather, Dalton’s aging mentor and the former DD of Clandestine, now forced to the sidelines with an honorary title as Adviser Pro Tem to DD Clandestine.

Pearson, an African-American, was tall, lean, cool, calm, as steely smooth as the kiss of a guillotine, with a throaty baritone purr, a ready smile, and a great memory for the faces and family connections of anyone with even the faintest chance of becoming useful, one fine June day, to the lovely and talented Clay Pearson.

He was, however, no friend at all to covert operations, which were messy and vulgar and occasionally violent escapades, heavily freighted with political risk, and Clay Pearson, as a Carter man, strongly disapproved of political risk.

It was generally believed by the permanently paranoid CIA staffers that Pearson was in the DD Clandestine post with orders to assign blame, to view with righteous alarm, and generally to hound and afflict any hapless bastard who had actually been of some tactical use in the War on Terror. Which, by the way, according to the new administration, was henceforth to be known as the “Expression of Strong Disapproval of Man-Caused Disasters.”

“The new guy
likes
you? Doesn’t he know you were a Marine?”

“He’s regular Navy. A squid. They never take the corps seriously. Squiddies think we’re knuckle-dragging mouth breathers who eat our dead.”

“And you’re not?”

“I see you’re in Vienna. At number 15 Rooseveltplatz, wherever that is.”

“It’s the Regina Hotel. I’m at the long bar.”

“And, pray tell,
why
are you in Vienna? The duty roster has you in Bonn, I think, babysitting an Albanian stringer with a bad case of the yips? No?”

“I was, up until yesterday. His wife left him for another woman. After thirty-four years of marriage. I sat up with him for three days and nights. We told each other outrageous lies and drank several bottles of Cherry Heering. Have you ever had Cherry Heering?”

“Sounds like a stripper. What’s it like?”

“It’s exactly like Bonn.”

“Gad. That awful?”

“Yes. Only with cherries.”

“The stringer all right? Got over his case of the yips?”

“Yeah. Eventually. Made a pass at me on day three.”

“How did you handle that?”

“With my usual style and grace.”

“Oh my. He’s dead, then, is he?”

“Sally, can you do me a favor?”