Read The Orpheus Deception Online
Authors: David Stone
The Orpheus Deception (19 page)
“Brancati had her driven back to Florence in an armored limo. She’s at the university now, with a couple of Galan’s Jew boys riding shotgun.”
“So you lost her as well?”
Lujac’s voice got tighter. He lost some of his easy charm.
“Look, Branco, my dear friend, I’m trying to do you some good here. This is
my
thing, what I do best. I don’t do this for money; I have more than I can use. I’m in this for the charge I get. So what I’m saying is, all you want is to cancel a couple of bad debts; I can do that. Sure. But I took this ball on the hop because sometimes you’re your own worst enemy, all this macho vendetta stuff. I’m giving you good info, and your Poppa always said that good info is better than bad blood. But you’re pissed off. Okay. Fine. You want me to break off the Dalton thing, daisy on up to Florence and create some lovely splatter, I’ll do it. Frankly, it’s nuts, but I’ll do it.”
my
thing, what I do best. I don’t do this for money; I have more than I can use. I’m in this for the charge I get. So what I’m saying is, all you want is to cancel a couple of bad debts; I can do that. Sure. But I took this ball on the hop because sometimes you’re your own worst enemy, all this macho vendetta stuff. I’m giving you good info, and your Poppa always said that good info is better than bad blood. But you’re pissed off. Okay. Fine. You want me to break off the Dalton thing, daisy on up to Florence and create some lovely splatter, I’ll do it. Frankly, it’s nuts, but I’ll do it.”
Gospic held his temper, barely; he never snarled at his people, but he always remembered insolence, and Lujac was insolent. He was also very smart and very good, and he made good tactical decisions. And he had never failed Gospic in any important work. Lujac was valuable and Lujac knew it. Gospic thought about it and decided it might be useful to have a secondary asset in the region, just in case his associates there became . . . what?
Problematic.
“Okay. Go to Singapore. One of our Gulfstreams is in Bari. I’ll have Larissa find out where they’re staying, and she’ll get the details to you in flight. Pick them up in Singapore and stay on them. I want to know where he goes in Singapore and who he meets with.”
“I get the idea we got something going in Singapore?”
“No. Nothing.”
Lujac sensed the evasion but said nothing. Before Saskia died, he had worked her over for everything she knew about Gospic’s operations. In the end, all she had to tell him was that Gospic had sent Emil Tarc to Singapore over a month ago. She had no idea why. Lujac filed the information away, against the day he and Gospic would no longer be friendly. And now Gospic had confirmed her story. Okay, duly noted, and time to back off. Lujac could push Gospic a little because Lujac was good, but Gospic would not tolerate an inquisitive subordinate no matter how useful.
“Okay. One last thing. What about the
arista?”
arista?”
“I’ll send Radko Borins to deal with her.”
“Radko Borins screwed that stunt his last time out. Is he up to it?”
“Yes. He’s in Trieste. He can be in Florence in two hours.”
“Is he motivated?”
“I gave him a special incentive.”
“Yow. Hope he was wearing a diaper. Boss, I gotta ask you . . . why go after the broad? I mean, right now? Brancati knows it was you behind the marathon thing. You really want to start a war with him, just to take out some upper-class
puta?
Galan may be saying the Carabinieri are not assassins, but Brancati made his bones many times over, and he’s already pissed at us. You make him mad enough, he’ll unload the entire Carabinieri on us, and some of those guys are as hard as anyone we got.”
puta?
Galan may be saying the Carabinieri are not assassins, but Brancati made his bones many times over, and he’s already pissed at us. You make him mad enough, he’ll unload the entire Carabinieri on us, and some of those guys are as hard as anyone we got.”
“The woman has a debt. She will pay it.”
“Boss . . .”
“No more talk. That is the end of this. You failed to take her, so Radko will do it for you. But, at the end of the day, when I tell you to do it, our American friend will get my message. Am I clear?”
“As megapixels, boss. I’ll be in touch.
Ciao.”
Ciao.”
ON THE SEVENTH
floor of the giant glass cube at Fort Meade, Maryland, that houses elements of the National Security Agency’s global computer systems, a brown-eyed, olive-skinned, heart-attack brunette named Nikki Turrin, one of the Monitors, was sitting at a thirty-inch LCD watching a running scroll of numbers and letters fly over the screen, thinking about her new Great Dane pup’s case of separation anxiety, when she got a hit on a flagged target phone that brought her upright. The screen showed a digital packet ID and an adjacent routing number, an indication the mainframe had detected a transmission, targeted at a specific phone matrix, that contained a trigger word or phrase, a voice-recognition hit, or a reference to some person or operation of interest to an element of the nation’s Intelligence community. Unlike the paranoid nightmares of the ACLU and
MoveOn.org
, the NSA was technically unable to monitor every single communications transmission in all media all over the globe.
floor of the giant glass cube at Fort Meade, Maryland, that houses elements of the National Security Agency’s global computer systems, a brown-eyed, olive-skinned, heart-attack brunette named Nikki Turrin, one of the Monitors, was sitting at a thirty-inch LCD watching a running scroll of numbers and letters fly over the screen, thinking about her new Great Dane pup’s case of separation anxiety, when she got a hit on a flagged target phone that brought her upright. The screen showed a digital packet ID and an adjacent routing number, an indication the mainframe had detected a transmission, targeted at a specific phone matrix, that contained a trigger word or phrase, a voice-recognition hit, or a reference to some person or operation of interest to an element of the nation’s Intelligence community. Unlike the paranoid nightmares of the ACLU and
MoveOn.org
, the NSA was technically unable to monitor every single communications transmission in all media all over the globe.
Even God would have to outsource that. But they could monitor thousands of
identified
targets. And this was one of them. The digital packet showed only a tag and a reference code—the targeted transmission had been detected seconds ago—and, from the source numbers, it looked like a wireless cell-phone transmission originating somewhere in the upper Adriatic.
identified
targets. And this was one of them. The digital packet showed only a tag and a reference code—the targeted transmission had been detected seconds ago—and, from the source numbers, it looked like a wireless cell-phone transmission originating somewhere in the upper Adriatic.
The codes did not indicate the content of the packet—Monitors are neither cleared for, nor remotely interested in, content—but the routing code was quite familiar to the tech. This packet—from the size of the file, an audio packet—was to be relayed immediately to Langley, Virginia. Something in the intercept was important to some operation or other inside the CIA. Nikki, a pragmatic but dedicated young woman seraphically free from the chief sin of the career NSA staffer—inappropriate curiosity—hit the requisite codes and the slice of data was duly fired off to a computer in Langley. There, it was received, tagged, and bounced upstairs to another equally pragmatic tech, who transcribed and reencrypted it and fired it through a series of secure channels that terminated in the flat-screen LCD on the desk of a horse-faced, cold-eyed, yellow-toothed, thin-lipped old man in a charcoal pinstripe who was talking on the phone, in his soft, Tide-water Virginia cadences, to a nervous contact in Prague, who had another man in an Internet café across the street pinned in the long lens of a night-vision scope.
The old man, whose name was Deacon Cather, chief of the Clandestine Services section of the CIA, did not stop listening to his nervous man in Prague while he read the transcription of the audio packet, which contained references to
Singapore, Dalton, Vasari,
and
CIA.
Cather scanned the text: someone calling himself
Gianni from Padova
had contacted a Serbo-Croatian mafia don called Branco Gospic and warned him that Micah Dalton was on his way to Singapore.
Singapore, Dalton, Vasari,
and
CIA.
Cather scanned the text: someone calling himself
Gianni from Padova
had contacted a Serbo-Croatian mafia don called Branco Gospic and warned him that Micah Dalton was on his way to Singapore.
Cather knew a great deal about Gospic and his network, but he would dearly love to know much more, which was why he had arranged for the NSA to monitor his communications systems. He was also keenly aware of Gospic’s vendetta against Micah Dalton. With half his mind on his agent in Prague and the other half on Micah Dalton and the operation known as Orpheus, Cather weighed the uses that could be made of Gospic’s sudden interest in Singapore. Perhaps it would be useful to hear the actual conversation. Much could be learned from a living voice. Cather listened to his feckless agent go on for a time, silenced him with six words of simple instruction that sent the man out into the twilight streets of Prague with twenty thousand euros in a vacuum pack labeled Lavazza Espresso, and then reached out to his keyboard to hit ARCHIVE. The audio packet was then reencrypted in an asymmetric code unique to Cather’s Zip drive. The transcript disappeared from the screen, from the system, from ever having existed, and now resided only in a small black steel slab that Cather detached every evening when he left the office, slipping it into his breast pocket, next to a sterling silver case containing Montecito cigars. This being done, Cather leaned back in his chair, crossed his long legs, and placed his liver-spotted hands gently on his belly. Through the tinted window he could see a great deal of rolling Virginia countryside, the tree canopy bathed in a light so pure and clean this could have been the first morning of the ancient world.
He leaned his head back, exhaled theatrically, a thin stream of acidic contentment flowing through his once-powerful frame. The question of Micah Dalton’s war with Branco Gospic, seen in the light of Gospic’s apparent interest in Singapore, required some careful thought. It was pregnant with tactical possibilities. He slowly pulled his pale blue lips back from his long yellow teeth in a leathery retraction, producing a kind of frozen predatory grimace that stretched the corded muscles of his neck and cracked his blue-veined cheeks into deltas of scaly, sagging flesh. This reptilian display, which his associates had learned to regard with carefully blanked faces, was Deacon Cather’s legendary smile.
12
The Celebes Sea
Vigo Majiic, sweat-drenched, reeking of oil and bilgewater, weary beyond belief but unable to sleep with the clamor of the rebuild clanging through the hull, staggered up the gangway and found Emil Tarc out on the open deck beside the gutted bridge of the
Mingo Dubai.
Dawn was hours away, and the heat under the spreading camouflage tarp was brutal, steamy and close and dense with the stink of paint and welding smoke. Tarc was adding to the choking reek with a foul Russian cigarette and watching the small, wiry brown-skinned workers swarming over the floodlit main deck, painting and polishing and scrubbing. Up at the bow, a crew of welders was replacing one of the hatch covers, and the little knot of men was silhouetted in the blue-white flare of a welder’s torch. To Tarc’s left, a crew of naked, navy-paint-streaked workers was standing on a suspended platform, slathering primer on the side of the hull. Inside the bridge, a team of marine technicians, flown into Sulawesi in a private Lear with the portholes covered and destination unknown, was repairing and replacingthe ship’s antique electronics and updating the steering hardware.
Mingo Dubai.
Dawn was hours away, and the heat under the spreading camouflage tarp was brutal, steamy and close and dense with the stink of paint and welding smoke. Tarc was adding to the choking reek with a foul Russian cigarette and watching the small, wiry brown-skinned workers swarming over the floodlit main deck, painting and polishing and scrubbing. Up at the bow, a crew of welders was replacing one of the hatch covers, and the little knot of men was silhouetted in the blue-white flare of a welder’s torch. To Tarc’s left, a crew of naked, navy-paint-streaked workers was standing on a suspended platform, slathering primer on the side of the hull. Inside the bridge, a team of marine technicians, flown into Sulawesi in a private Lear with the portholes covered and destination unknown, was repairing and replacingthe ship’s antique electronics and updating the steering hardware.
By Tarc’s own calculations, rebuilding the
Mingo Dubai
was costing Branco Gospic around six million euros—and that wasn’t covering the cost of bribes to Bittagar Chulalong, the gotch-eyed old villain who was the head of the local chapter of the Babi Rusa Brigade. Tarc turned as Majiic came to the railing, wiping his gaunt face with an oily rag.
Mingo Dubai
was costing Branco Gospic around six million euros—and that wasn’t covering the cost of bribes to Bittagar Chulalong, the gotch-eyed old villain who was the head of the local chapter of the Babi Rusa Brigade. Tarc turned as Majiic came to the railing, wiping his gaunt face with an oily rag.
“Vigo, you look like goat shit.”
“Thank you, Emil. I feel like goat shit. The heat . . . I cannot believe the fucking heat.”
“It’s not your watch. Go below.”
“But who can sleep with all . . . this . . . going on.”
“Do what I do. Sleep onshore. There are girls in the village, pretty ones. I have three.”
Majiic had gone across to the squalid cantonment of tin huts and prehistoric latrines and wandering livestock that the locals called a village—the young men there had all been forcibly conscripted into the ranks of the Babi Rusa Brigade, and the remaining villagers— leathery old men and women with pinched, hate-filled faces; feral, naked brats, rolling in the muck and the reek; sullen young girls with flat-black eyes—they had not seemed to burn with sexual fire for a scraggy little Serbo-Croatian in dire need of a serious scrubbing. Majiic had once entertained the fantasy of a tropical isle of swaying palms and curling surf and naked Polynesian beauties with laughing eyes and inviting arms. The reality was this stinking atoll and the dwarfish gremlins of this godforsaken island. Majiic had not stayed long enough to exhale twice and was spending all his spare time in the locked steel-walled cabin that had once belonged to Captain Wang. Wang was now lying in three thousand feet of ocean at the outlet of the Strait of Malacca, his skull peeled open like a green banana by three rounds from the Tokarev pistol currently strapped to Emil Tarc’s leg, his body sewed into a canvas duffel bag, along with an ancient Remington typewriter to keep him down. Majiic had no interest at all in risking his manly bits—or his health—in a dubious encounter with one of the
village girls.
village girls.
“And what do the old men of the village say?”
Tarc showed his teeth, his leathery skin cracking. Beads of sweat glittered on his unshaven cheeks and his black goatee glistened. The side of his face, lit up by the glare of the welder’s torch, looked like pitted sheet metal. He smacked the pistol strapped to his combat pants.
“Bugger the old men of the village.”
“Really? How
do
you find the time?”
do
you find the time?”
Tarc’s ratlike face contorted in wary puzzlement and then brightened, as he realized that this sullen young pessimist had actually made a joke.
“Vigo. You surprise me.”
“I’m not the only surprise you have coming. Have you been watching that man in the blue head scarf, the one sitting on the anchor by the bow?”
Tarc shaded his eyes from the glare of the work lights, squinting into the distance. He saw a small figure squatting by the bow, his bony knees as high as his ears, a home-rolled cigarette dangling from his mouth, his tiny black eyes sharp, his gaze flickering around the deck, watching the work closely. He was wearing cut-off blue jean shorts and a GREENPEACE T-shirt. In his callused hands was a shining steel parang.
Tarc grunted, identifying the man.
“That’s Gango. He’s Bittagar’s enforcer.”
“Yes. I know. Do you know what he’s doing?”
“Enlighten me.”
“He’s counting. Counting our men. Counting the days.”
“I know. Bittagar thinks he may take the ship.”
“That’s what I think too.”
“It will be ready in a week. So we have some time.”
“Time? Time to do what, Emil? Write our wills? Bugger the village elders? There are exactly six of us here, and maybe two of us can use a weapon. Bittagar has sixty men, sitting around in the town and on the hillside up there, smoking bhang and drinking piss-warm Singha and watching the ship. When the ship is ready, Bittagar’s men will come down on us like . . .”
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