Authors: David Stone

The Orpheus Deception (16 page)

BOOK: The Orpheus Deception

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Like an albatross, he soared, high above the concrete bunkers of Changi Prison—high above Cluster C, sailing over the forty-foot-high walls and the motion-sensing cameras and the heat sensors and, of course, the lovely chain-gun towers—soaring higher and higher, leaving Changi Prison far beneath, high enough now to see the airport by the water, then, higher still, the pancake-flat island of Singapore receding wonderfully, and he could see north all the way to Kuala Lumpur and south to the Malacca Strait, and higher, ever higher, until he could look to his left as he flew northward over Kuala Lumpur . . . he could just see Madagascar far across the Indian Ocean . . . and, in the north, at the farthest edge of the horizon, a strip of white sand edged by palms . . . the beaches of Phuket . . . and, beyond those crescent shores, the reptile green, softly mounded domes of the Central Highlands of Viet—

The door slammed open, and they were on him again: Big Dink— a flat-faced, pock-skinned, jaundiced-looking, bald-headed, foul-breathed sweathog in too-tight prison blues—along with his two reptilian sidekicks, a tall, effeminate coffee-colored Hindu—No Dink—and the compact, flexible little rat boy who looked a bit like a Gurkha—Little Dink. Fyke was jolted earthward, as they pinned his writhing body to the greasy padding of the floor. He felt a knee on the back of his neck and his arms being wrenched out of their sockets, as they held him fast . . . and then a sharp, piercing pain in his back. Then
. . . warmth . . .
a river of warm, rushing bliss that began in his skull and rushed down his neck and spread out like the Thames into the broad deltas of his chest and belly and thighs . . . apparently, the light and cold and sensory-deprivation part of the softening process had come to an end and now the SID had taken things to Level 2. His last thought, as the tide of warmth and calm rose up over his head and covered him in blessed sleep, was that a real cat would have been watching the door.

The Lido Beach, Venice

The Carabinieri pursuit boat was shell gray over matte black; long, lean, and fast, with a deep V hull that sliced through the choppy crosscurrents of the lagoon with a hissing snarl. Inside the low-ceilinged cabin, his grim face uplit by red-glowing dials and a small halogen lamp near the pilot chair, Brancati stared silently out at the black night as a beaded necklace of red-and-green lights in the distance grew closer—the gap of San Niccolò by the airport, and, beyond that, the broad Adriatic Sea, roaring and restless in a rising wind, white shark’s teeth curling on the tips of long, unsteady rollers. Weather was coming in, a growing bank of green clouds on the radar display. Dalton eyed it from time to time, the way a man might watch the slow progression of a snake across a marble floor, but he said nothing to break the silence in the ship.

Brancati was smoking one of his Toscanos with a closed and brooding expression, his thoughts turned inward, wondering what he was going to do about Dario DioGrazzi, the twenty-four-year-old Carabinieri clerk they were holding in the Lazaretto right now. As hard as it was for Brancati to accept, Galan’s proof was undeniable— a clear videotape of DioGrazzi sitting in a chair at the Café Electro last night, sending the digital shot of Dalton off to an IP address in Montenegro operated by a known associate of Stefan Groz. DioGrazzi was being questioned right now by one of their midlevel security people—so far, quite gently—in the early stages of an attempt to uncover how much had been betrayed and for how long.

Why
was a matter for later.

The difficulty for Brancati—aside from his murderous anger at the fact of the betrayal—was that young Dario was a distant cousin of his wife’s family and had been recruited and trained under Brancati’s wing. It was a cold comfort to Brancati that Issadore Galan had not suspected the boy either. Galan had been following another faint scent, looking in another direction entirely, so the exposure of this lad had come as a shock to both of them, if for very different reasons.

Still, what to do with him now was a troubling matter, since the penalty for selling state secrets to a foreign entity was twenty very hard years. So, Brancati was radiating suppressed rage, and the young carabiniere at the wheel was glancing at him from time to time with wary apprehension.

Dalton stood behind Brancati, bracing himself on the chairback, staring out through the windshield at the lights of the Lido streaming past on their starboard rails, his mind as far from here as Brancati’s, playing on the immense frying pan full of steaming heat and bustling crowds that was the island of Singapore, and on the northeast part of the city in particular, on the square mile of white concrete bunkers that was Changi Prison.

This uncomfortable silence, heavy with meanings not fully understood, oppressed all three men, carried each across the dark water in a tightly sealed carapace, each man alone in his thoughts. In a few minutes, they had reached and rounded the Lido gap by the airport. The Adriatic took them into its vast, booming dark, and the shop-worn Lido beaches unwound along their starboard side like a string of dirty pearls, half lit in hard, mercury lights, glowing a greasy blue in the dampness, each light surrounded by a distinct halo. Drops of rain began to spatter the windshield and the young captain, glancing nervously at Brancati, finally spoke, in Italian, his voice tight and his lips thinned by stress.

“Sir, Major Brancati, sir—you did not say which beach.” Brancati, looking back at Dalton with a startled air, as if he had forgotten he was there, faced out to sea again and answered the boy in English, a brooding, baritone growl, almost too low to hear over the muted burbling of the boat’s Maserati engines.

“Have you no eyes, Rafael? You see the lights! The
bagni communale,
by the Ospedale al Mare,” he said, gesturing toward a low cluster of buildings a hundred yards up an arc of gray sand lit by a string of cold-blue beach lights. In the middle of the narrow crescent of sand, close to the waterline, they could see a flare of brighter lights, hard and yellow, and two police boats, bobbing in the shallow surf, blue lights slowly churning. The pilot brought the boat in through the chop, slowing as the gravel shoals of the long bay rose up under the keel. The tone of the engines dropped, and the stern rose up as their wake caught up with them. The boat surfed the last few hundred feet until the keel scraped on the beach, where it settled and steadied, the waves curling around the hull.

Two men—black figures silhouetted against the lights of the beach—strode out into the shallows and took the prow in hand. Brancati looked at Dalton, gave him a weary smile, and both men climbed out and stepped off the bow and onto the coarse, sandy beach. The air was dank, smelling of dead fish and rotting seaweed. Twenty feet down, the men, gathered around a brightly lit tent on the beach, watched in silence as Brancati and Dalton slogged their way through the sand. Issadore Galan—short, bent, moving unsteadily—detached himself from the group, shuffling through the shale, dragging his left foot slightly.

They met him at the edge of the light cast by portable lamps positioned around the tent, which was actually more of a standing nylon wall pinned to the sand with aluminum rods. Three young men in Carabinieri uniforms and one old man in a yellow slicker stood in silence, watching them. Seven hundred yards out in the Adriatic, Kiki Lujac sat at the wheel of the darkened
Subito,
his attention fixed on the shoreline. The
Subito
was riding on two heavy Danforths, her lines straining against the wind; Lujac had a long Steadicam lens that was trained on the men on the beach. Music was playing softly on the ship’s sound system—Pink Martini—and a heavy crystal glass full of Oban sat in a gimballed tray at his left hand. The ship rose and fell on the waves like a dreamer breathing in deep sleep. Kiki watched the men from out of the great darkness of the Adriatic Sea and felt the light-headedness, the short, rapid beating, the rush of blood in his throat, the erotic charge that he always felt when he watched people from a long distance.

Kiki Lujac liked to watch, and this evening he was watching Micah Dalton, had the lens fixed on his hard cheek as he stood in a little group of men, his pale eyes fixed on the face of Issadore Galan. Lujac felt close enough to reach out and run his fingertips gently along the man’s jawline. He was truly a beautiful thing, with the kind of natural physical grace you would see in a racehorse or a cliff diver. Lujac hoped he would have a chance to photograph him before he died. And then after. Perhaps even during. That would be a show to start the critics talking. The idea warmed his lower belly, and he ran off a series of telephoto shots just to keep the charge running. Without taking his eye away from the viewfinder, Lujac reached out and turned up the gain on a radio receiver.

The hissing sound of beach curl came from the speakers and filled the cabin of the
Subito,
along with the mutter of idling police boats, and, under that, the muted murmur of men’s voices and the droning hum of the portable generator powering the police lights. Lujac turned a dial on the radio set beside him, and the white noise diminished enough for him to make out the voices of the three men standing apart, down at the water’s edge. Early in the day, Gospic’s man in the Carabinieri had placed a remote-controlled directional mike in the palm line not far from the place Lujac had chosen. Now Lujac watched and listened.

“SHE HAS NOT
been in the water long,” Galan was saying. “One of the gardeners found her here, a few feet from the water. The gulls have been at her, but not too much.”

“Which way is the current going?” asked Brancati. Galan made a gesture, indicating the rolling surf, the dark sea beyond, his black eyes sliding across but not seeing the low black mass far out on the water.

“Out now, more or less. It runs slantwise to the Lido at this time of year, and makes no more than three or four knots at best.”

“So she was brought here by the currents?”

Galan shook his head but not with conviction.

“We cannot say. If she went into the water up there”—he indicated the gap of San Niccolò airport—“then she might have been caught up in the flow and brought down the shoreline until she reached the shallows. Then the wave action might have brought her ashore. There is no way to be sure. The tides here are affected by the shallows, by the shoals, so there is no clear stream to judge by.”

“And what do you think?” asked Brancati, gently.

“I think we cannot know. It is only a feeling. The current is running out. But she should have been drawn out with the rush and she was not. The season is over, but there are always a few people walking the beach. If she had been here in the afternoon, they would have seen her. Yet here she lies. But there is always ambiguity in this kind of a finding.”

“Was she killed here?”

“No. She has no blood in her body at all. If she had been killed here, the sand would be thick with it.”

While Brancati considered this, Galan shifted his attention to Dalton.

“Good evening, Micah,” he said.

“Issadore.”

Galan looked back at the officials standing around the crime scene tent, judging the distance. Then he turned back to Dalton, speaking softly.

“Did you enjoy your talk with Signorina Pownall?”

“I did. Thank you for arranging it.”

“Have you reached a decision?”

Brancati was now looking at him as well, his face in shadow. Dalton had assumed that the private room at Florian’s had been bugged for the purpose, and the manner of these two confirmed it. They had heard the entire conversation. Dalton had no objection. These men were not his enemies.

“Yes. I’ll go. If Brancati here will let me.”

Brancati made a noise but said nothing. Galan kept his eyes on Dalton. “And she will go with you? Signorina Pownall?”

“Yes.”

Brancati sighed again and looked out to sea. He could not let it go and finally rounded on Dalton, his baritone purr now more of a growl.

“You put yourself in their hands, my friend.”

“You said I should try to
come in from the cold,
Alessio.”

“Hah! A silly novel. What do I know? And what about Miss Vasari?”

“You’ve made it plain she’s safer without me. I agree.”

“She did not go to Firenze, Micah. She stays here for you. To be with you for a time. So you have a responsibility. To her. She will not . . . sever this bond with you. Whatever it is. Whatever the risk. She made this clear to me while you were meeting with Miss Pownall. I argued. I threatened—”

“Cora? That must have been interesting.”

Brancati bared his teeth, a flash of white in the dark.

“Yes. She does not threaten well.”

“That has been my experience.”

Another long silence, with the rising wind stirring the palms in a dry rustle and the sand hissing at their feet. A bat flittered around their heads and was suddenly gone. When Dalton spoke again, his tone was heavy.

“So. I
have
to go to Singapore, then. If we’re ever going to have any kind of a life together, I have to go.”

Brancati put a hand on Dalton’s shoulder.

“Why, Micah? Stay here, in Venice. I would find good work for you, important work. You could be a help to Italy. We have enemies too.”

BOOK: The Orpheus Deception

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