The Skorpion Directive (38 page)

“Mandy met me in Sevastopol with, among other useful things, a bag of gold wafers. I’m told they like gold in Tangier.”

Levka found this comforting, but he followed the line of inquiry awhile longer.

“You got any idea what is all about? Kidnap me, take my boat, set you up for killing Mr. Galan?”

“I’m beginning to. We’ve been following the
Blue Nile
all the way from Kerch to Gibraltar. And I’ve left a paper trail all the way along the line. Vienna. Venice. Kerch. Istanbul. Athens. Gibraltar. If they manage to use your boat for something spectacular, I’ll be the one most closely associated with it. And you? I think that was why they kept you alive. The idea was, after . . . whatever it is . . . they’d find your body in the boat. Mine too, and Mandy’s as well, if the trap on the road to Staryi Krim had worked a little better. I have no idea how they managed to get Burke and Single on the owners’ list of Northstar Logistics—”

“That your company in London?”

“Not mine. But it’s a CIA front. That’s another marker. If you could see it how the authorities would see it, Galan has a contact with you through Irina Kuldic, he turns up dead, and I’m the guy in the Leopoldsberg parking-lot video, so you and I are connected, we own the boat. The boat turns up at some disaster. They could make a case against us that would hold up in the court of world opinion, if not in a real court.”

“A—what you call—propaganda?”

“Yes. Something like that. Embarrass England and the U.S. Implicate the CIA in some atrocity. Ramp up the tensions between us and Israel. Not to mention further inflame the Muslim world against the Great Shaitan. Typical Russian ploy. The part I can’t figure out is . . . where.”

“But Bogdan, he know the truth.”

“Killing Bogdan Davit wouldn’t faze them. The only witness to what happened in Leopoldsberg is an Austrian OSE agent. Brancati’s got her in the Arsenale. I don’t think they can get to her. But all she has is what she saw. And that can be picked apart.”

“But, where they do this . . . propaganda?”

“It has to be at this end of the Med, or why waltz us all the way out here in the first place?”

“So. To know this, we
need
find boat.”

“Yes. Wherever your boat is, that’s where it will happen.”

“Where
what
will happen?” asked Mandy, coming up from the lounge with two cups of soup in her hands. She looked out at the stern and saw what looked like three dead men sprawled along the benches back there. No, not dead. One of them was up and over the stern again. “Dear God. You’d think they’d be empty by now.”

She turned and handed a cup to Levka and kept the other one for herself, delicately sipping at the rim, steam rising up.

“Where what will happen?” she asked again.

Dalton laid it out for her. She listened in silence, nodding from time to time. When he was finished, she said, “Let’s get Nikki up here. She’s the one with friends at the NSA.”

Nikki came up the stairs carrying a cup of coffee for Dalton, looking a little drawn. Going from a sunny spring afternoon in Seven Oaks to hunting gators in the Florida Panhandle to a midnight race across the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangier is the kind of thing that sounds better than it lives.

She looked out the windshield, saw Tangier filling up their future, the scattered lights of the Medina piling crazily up the sides of the hill, the radio masts on the top of Cape Spartel blinking in the dark, the sky turning from black to gray behind them, and wished she found the sight wonderfully romantic. As it was, she needed a shower, she was hungry, she was homesick, and she was scared. Mandy looked at her for a while, feeling a strange emotion for her . . . Sympathy? Compassion? Affection?

“Sit, Nikki,” she said, pushing her over to the copilot chair and putting a sweater over her shoulders. It was chilly out on the water, the dampness working its way into the bones. Mandy stepped back, looked at Nikki, reached out to brush a strand of hair out of her eyes. The girl
was
very beautiful, if you liked those dusky Mediterranean odalisques like Isabella Rossellini or Juliette Binoche. Mandy supposed some men did.

God knew why.

“We’ve reached a dead end, Nikki,” she said, folding her arms across her chest, cocking her head sideways. “These two berks haven’t a clue. It’s down to you and that trick with the cell phone. Were you able to get anywhere with that?”

Nikki sighed, looked up at Mandy.

What a simple question, and the answer was a killer.

“Yes. I managed. I ended up calling Hank Brocius.”

“The AD of RA,” said Dalton. “The Marine with the IED burns. I heard he was on leave.”

“Yes. He’s in Garrison, Upstate New York. With Briony Keating.”

Mandy and Dalton exchanged a charged look.

“With?” asked Mandy, who knew something of their history. “Or
with
?”

“I have no idea which,” she said, hardening up. “And I don’t really care. What’s important is, he said he’d put a tech on it and get back to me.”

She lifted up her BlackBerry, turned it in the red glow of the instrument panel. “That was . . . hours ago. So far, nothing.”

They heard a low moan and the sound of heavy feet dragging across the decking, turned and saw Daniel Roth making unsteady progress toward the gangway that led down to the head. He looked about as bad as a man can look and not be on an autopsy table. “I need,” he said, swallowing carefully, “to visit the facilities. You might wish to stand clear in case I do not make it.”

He got level with the pilot chair, stopped to stare out at Tangier, surprised to see how close it was.

“God be praised. Dry land. I may yet live. Is that Tangier?”

“It had better be,” said Dalton. “If it’s not, Levka goes overboard.”

“And I will go with him. Gladly. But if it
is
Tangier, before we dock, radio the port, ask for a man named Tariq Ibn Zuliman. He’s one of the harbor police. A secret Hebrew. If I am dead, tell him that Daniel Roth said
Shālōm
. Do we have money at all?”

“Better,” said Levka. “We have gold.”

“Good,” said Roth, weaving. His hawkish face suddenly took on an abstracted glaze, and his color altered for the worse.

“You will . . . excuse . . .”

“Dear God,” said Mandy. “Go!”

Roth went stumbling down the stairs. Mandy leaned down and called after him, “Mind, you make it all the way to the head. If you don’t, you’re the one who mops it up.”

She straightened up, registered the disapproving looks.

“I am not well suited,” she said with dignity, “to the caring professions. Sick people make me angry. I want to smack them.”

“She doesn’t approve of blood either,” said Dalton.

“Fine on the inside,” said Mandy, “where it belongs. But people who get some minor flesh wound and then go tottering about the terrain, moaning and wailing, spouting and gouting, ruining the rugs and draperies, well, they’re just . . .”

“Inconsiderate?” suggested Nikki.

“Exactly,” said Mandy with a thin but approving smile.

 

 

 

DAWN
light was slowly rising up the crowded slopes of the Medina, and already hundreds of people were out in the streets and swarming the crowded, dumpy little harbor. A small, neat brown man, in a starched tan uniform, a Sam Browne harness, and gleaming riding boots, was standing on the mole, watching with an amused smile, as their boat cruised slowly along the quayside.

He bowed as they came level, tipped his kepi when he saw Mandy and Nikki in the pilot cabin, adroitly caught a line from Ray Fyke, pulling briskly on the rope until their port-side bumpers rolled, squealing, up against the wooden dock.

“Mr. Roth is with you?”

Dalton stepped up to the taffrail.

“Mr. Roth is . . . unwell. Are you Ibn Zuliman?”

A cavalier bow, a sardonic half smile, eyes bright.

“I am he. We received your radio message. Are you intending to disembark? There will of course be . . .
formalities . . .”

“Yes,” said Dalton. “We have the ‘formalities’ in hand. May I introduce Miss Mandy Pownall and Miss Nicole Turrin, both of America. And the large unshaven gentleman with the lime-green skin is Raymond Fyke, a British national. We have some tea brewed. Will you step down and join us?”

“Tea? Tea would be wonderful!” he said, stepping lightly through the gate and down onto the teak decking, He looked around at the boat with an experienced eye and then came back to Dalton.

“A very fine craft, Mr. . . . ?”

“Dalton. Micah Dalton. Yes, she is.”

“But perhaps a little narrow in the beam to cross such waters. She would toss about a bit if the swells set in.”

“She tossed about more than a bloody bit,” said Roth, stumbling up from the lounge deck like an undead corpse rising from a crypt, shirtless, his face wet, a damp towel around his neck. He was holding on to the bulkhead and weaving, but less than usual. “She tried to kill us all, Tariq. I’m very glad to have lived to see you again.”

The officer’s dark face broke into a broad, teasing grin.

“I have always said you are no sailor, Daniel. Welcome to Tangier. Welcome, all of you,” he said as Joko and Levka climbed up to the pilot deck. “And your . . .
borrowed
. . . boat.”

“You know this boat?” asked Dalton.

“Oh my yes. A most famous boat, here in Tangier. We see her all the time. A Chris-Craft, built in 1967. A classic. She belongs to Margaret Llewellyn Woodside—”

“Woodside?” Roth asked. “As in—”

“As in Captain Dugald Woodside. I take it she is a friend?”

“Oh my yes,” said Mandy with a dazzling smile. “For-simply-ever. We were Head Girls together at Queen Ethelburga’s. Such happy times. I wonder, Major Zuliman, if you would consider keeping her lovely boat safe here in Tangier. I’m sure dear, darling Maggie will be along very shortly.”

Dalton sent Mandy a quick sideways look.

Mandy ignored him, turning her powers of enchantment loose on the dapper little major, who crumbled before them as men usually did.

“It will be an honor, Miss Pownall. An
honor
. But please, you are not staying in Tangier? I would love to invite you—invite
all
of you—for a luncheon. The café there, close by the sea. The lovely aspect. Tea, perhaps something pale and sparkling, a
priorato
? We have, fresh from the Levant . . .”

“Sadly, no,” said Mandy, looking over at Roth. “I do so wish we could. But . . . I’m afraid . . .”

“There’s a jet waiting for us at Boukhalef,” said Roth.

The major managed to tear his attention away from Mandy, visibly disappointed. Nikki Turrin, apparently invisible, sighed.

“Then we must not delay,” said the major. “I can lend you our Mercedes and driver. You must be away! So let us quickly conclude the . . . formalities . . .”

Dalton handed over the . . . formalities.

Two were required.

 

 

 

IN
a battered and overcrowded antique Mercedes, as they were speeding along the rue Ibn Zaidoun, the green peak of Cape Spartel dominating the northern horizon, about ten klicks from Boukhalef airfield and the waiting Israeli Legacy, Nikki Turrin’s BlackBerry finally rang. She picked it up, listened intently for a while, and then made that universal handwriting gesture meaning
I need a pen and paper
. Fyke, on whose lap she was sitting, after a pleasant interlude that involved some incidental contact with Nikki’s thighs while he ransacked his pockets for a pen, finally found one in his coat pocket, and Dalton handed back one of the limo driver’s business cards. Nikki, head down, her long auburn hair blowing in the hot wind coming in the open window, wrote furiously for about two minutes. She finished writing, saying something low and intense that no one could make out over the rush of wind and the rumble of the tires on the uneven blacktop, and ended the call.

She looked around at the faces, all of which were staring back at her with varying expressions.

“Yes,” she said. “He got it. But not—”

“Not here,” said Roth, agreeing completely.

Roth and Joko Levon were up front with the pilots, engaged in a low-level but heated discussion with their people back at Tel Aviv, trying to give them a plausible reason for asking the Moroccan authorities to allow a Mossad plane to land at Anfa and not be placed immediately in quarantine while the two governments worked out the ramifications over the following weeks and months.

Dalton, on the starboard side, was watching the coastline of Morocco unwind beneath the silver wing, an undulating ribbon of sand and rock, the long rollers of the Atlantic looking like lacy white ribbons as they crashed into the coast five thousand feet below him. There were boats in the water—tankers, stubby little trawlers, a large schooner far out beyond the sandbars in the deep blue, heeled over hard, trailing a widening V of wake a half mile long. Small craft, motorboats, what looked like a Zodiac. But nothing that looked like the
Blue Nile
.

He was aware of Mandy at his shoulder, craning to see the water through the small round porthole. Her face was set and tense.

“Anything?”

“Not a thing.”

“I’m not seeing any marinas,” she said, shading her eyes from the glare off the wing and the glare fracturing the water.

“No. Fort Meade had the location of the boat—”

“Or of Levka’s cell phone anyway—”

“Or Levka’s cell phone, at 33 degrees 36 minutes north and 7 degrees 36 minutes west. That’s basically in the middle of those dockyards coming up right underneath us. If the boat is there, it’s underneath one of those corrugated-tin shelters.”