Authors: David Stone

The Orpheus Deception (26 page)

BOOK: The Orpheus Deception

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“Black Sea Freight Forward.”

“Hello, Cabbage.”

“Kiki. What do you need?”

“I got into the room. There—”

“How?”

“Pardon?”

“How did you get into the room?”

“How is this your business, Cabbage?”

“If you were clumsy, it will be Daddy’s business.”

Lujac glanced at the driver. He was—or appeared to be—talking on a cell phone and paying no attention to his passenger. Lujac spoke softly.

“I knocked on the door. I was holding an empty FedEx envelope so that if somebody was in the room, I could ask for the wrong guy and apologize. Just trying to find the right guy to give this to. Somebody opened it. A Chinese man with a face like a frog. Bad suit and heavy shoes. An obvious cop. He looked nervous. I said I was there to assist Mr. Dalton. I asked him to identify himself. He said he was from HSBC. The bank. Like hell he was. I said Mr. Dalton may have left some papers in the room and that I had been asked to retrieve them. He looked at the FedEx envelope and thought about it and then let me in. There was another guy there, a short, ratty-looking Malay with a bruised eye and a bandaged hand. Another cop. They looked like they had been tossing the room. They watched me as I wandered about the suite. Looking for the papers. No papers. There was a cell phone on a charger by the house phone. I pretended to use the phone to call Mr. Dalton. While I did, I palmed the cell phone—”

“What would you have done if no one had been in the room?”

“I have a random-number generator; looks like a Palm Pilot. You stick the slide card in the slot and it unlocks almost every hotel door in Christendom in thirty seconds. Why? Are you taking a night course in illegal entries, Cabbage?”

“Why didn’t you wait until there was no one there? Now you’ve been seen.”

“Life is risk. You take it on the hop. I liked the rush, too, with those two cops right there.”

“They know what you look like.”

“Of course they do. So what? They’re gonna call Dalton up, say, Hey, while we were tossing your room, this handsome young blade came to the door asking for you?”

“Aren’t they going to be afraid you’ll tell Dalton
they
were in the room?”

“This is Singapore. Cops do whatever they want in Singapore. They wanted to toss his room, they tossed it. Maybe they care if he knows, maybe they don’t. Frankly, Cabbage, I don’t give a shit either way. I’m not here for the waters, am I? I’m here to find out why Dalton came to Singapore and then kill him. Kill him
a whole lot.
This will all be over in twenty-four. The real question is, these are supposed to be two Brits in town for some kind of banking party. Why were the cops in the room in the first place?”

A silence from Larissa’s end of the line. Lujac could hear her thinking it through. She was quick. He’d give her that. A monstrosity but quick.

“Something drew their attention. The cops. If I had to guess, I’d say that when we hacked into the Intourist system to find out where they were staying, we left signs.”

“That’s what I thought too. Did you run a string that would have flagged those two particular names?”

“They were the only ones checking into the Intercontinental. So maybe that would have . . .”

“Not so smart, Cabbage. Now we have cops all over the job.”

“We don’t know that. There could be other reasons.”

“Doesn’t matter now. Got to play it out.”

“Do you still have the cell phone?”

“No. Of course not. All I wanted was a minute with it.”

“Why?”

“Trade secrets, Cabbage. Trade secrets.”

The cab was slowing, moving into the gate area of a massive Victorian pile straight out of
Wuthering Heights.
Uniformed guards in bug-eyed sunglasses were tensing up and scowling at the car. Lujac snapped the phone shut without saying good-bye, handed the driver a fistful of Sing dollars and got out of the vehicle, putting a puzzled tourist expression on his face as one of the guards moved forward to intercept him at the gates.

“No get in,” said the guard a bit redundantly, given the machine gun and the thuggish scowl, in the pidgin Malay Chinese dialect called
Singlish.
Lujac went for upper-class Brit Twit, one of his favorites.

“Dreadfully sorry. This isn’t the Parliament?”

“No
Parla-men.
This Home Ministry. You have note?”

“Note? You mean, appointment?”

“Yes.
Appoin-men.”

“No. Just breezing through Singapore. Thought I’d see the sights. What is this building again? The Home Ministry? Lovely old pile. What does the Home Ministry do?”

Direct questions are considered rude in Singapore, but the guard tried to bear up. He was used to Brit Twits. They were thick on the ground in this part of the world.

“Run all Singapore. Run prisons.”

“Prisons? Really. Are there
prisons
in Singapore?”

The guard was a slab-faced, blocky youngster with a unibrow like a big, fuzzy black caterpillar and a deep furrow between his flat-black eyes. Lujac’s question made the guard’s brow furrow much deeper. He looked a little like Bush thinking. George Bush actually thought pretty well, but it was the bane of his political life that he didn’t look good doing it.

“Yes. All prisons run from here. Changi Prison run from here.”

“Really. Can one visit Changi Prison? Are there tours?”

“Tours?
Lah.
Go stun now,
ang mor.
You a bit the blur. No tours.”

“May I tour this building?”

“No. Private. Must have note. Good day, now. You look-see maybe Arab-town town. Look-see Cheena-town town, can. Good day,
lah.”

The guard turned away, muttering something in Hokkien that may have been a slur on Lujac’s ancestors. Lujac waved him off, and wandered a bit, looking for a hawker stand or maybe an open café. He found one not too far away, settled in under an awning, ordered a pint of Singha, a plate of stingray and a bucket of unshucked raw oysters, leaned back into the chair, twitching around a little to get comfortable. He sipped at the Singha—it was chilled delightfully, right down to the core—yawned, blinked, focused his attention on the gates of the Home Ministry.

And waited.

AS SOON AS
he entered the suite, Dalton knew it had been tossed. Mandy waited in the front hall, trying not to look for cameras and mikes, feeling that talking herself into this field trip may have been unwise. Dalton went through everything, the entire suite, inch by inch, his motions economical, even graceful.
He moves a little like a crocodile,
she thought, watching him.
Slithery and boneless.
She sat on a chair in the entrance hall, leaden and depressed, and desperately in need of a shower.

But she wasn’t ready to go farther into the suite yet.

Just wasn’t . . . ready.

Dalton went through the place quickly, his choices based on bitter experience. He came to a halt, like a short-haired pointer, at two distinct locations: a large Zen garden sandbox, complete with ebony rocks, that sat in the middle of the black lacquer coffee table; and, again, in the master bedroom, the long rosewood campaign chest that sat at the foot of the four-poster bed. He came out of the bedroom, his face a little harder than normal, and walked back out to the entrance hallway. He was holding Mandy’s cell phone. He held it so that Mandy could see the screen and typed in some text.

2 mks 1 coffee table 1 chest my bedrm
Pretty sure no cam

Mandy took the phone.

Fk pretty sure
B dam sure

Dalton smiled, took the phone back.

Am dam sure
Have a shower
Lots of steam
Fog any lens

Mandy considered it, looking hard at Dalton. She had wanted a shower ever since Chong Kew Sak had given her his dung beetle roll around back at the Ministry.

“I think,” she said, trying not to sound theatrical, “that I will have a shower. I’m absolutely beat. Why don’t you mix us some drinks? If you want to call the Head Office, use my phone. The phone charges here are ridiculous.”

She moved past him down the hall, her shoulders straight, walking like an actress emerging on a stage. She straightened a floral arrangement on the table behind the sofa in the living room, stopped to take in the early-evening panorama of downtown Singapore—the lights were coming on now and the effect was magnificent—she passed on through the living room and slipped soundlessly down the hall toward her own master suite. Dalton watched her go with a certain amount of affectionate amusement.

His face changed as he went into the living room and stood at the window wall, staring out, seeing nothing but the cobblestone atrium and the pillared colonnade of the Uffizi in Florence. He didn’t want to make a cell-phone call, even on Mandy’s heavily encrypted fast-burst phone.

But he had no choice. The hotel lines were tapped. The suite had been politely ransacked. The signs were everywhere, if you knew where to look. It had been done with just enough roughness to send a message: we’ve been stamping around in your life and we can do it again anytime we want. Dalton didn’t care. They could have ripped the lining out of his suits and shredded his shoes. There was nothing to find but whatever items fit a banker’s life. They had learned nothing, and given away everything in the attempt. It was lousy tradecraft, and it made him feel a little better.

He used the remote to turn on the television, got the BBC, spiked the volume up to
stun,
picked up the phone and dialed Brancati’s cell-phone number. Venice was nineteen hours ahead of Singapore, on the other side of the date line. It would be the middle of yesterday for Brancati. Dalton didn’t give a damn if it was the middle of the night. The line rang three times and got picked up on the fourth.

“Brancati.”

“How is she?”

“Where are you? I have been trying to reach you.”

“I was in a dead zone. How is she?”

“It’s bad, my friend.”

“How bad?”

“She is out of surgery. In a private intensive care room. She was shot twice. The first bullet went through her left lung. Collapsed it, but not too much damage. A miracle. The second bullet struck her in the temple. Left side. Traveled around the left side of her head, lodged in the muscle near the base of her neck.”

“Spinal?”

“No. Missed the vertebrae. But some bleeding into the brain.”

“What kind of slug?”

“Small. Hollow-point. A .32 ACP. From a CZ Model 10.”

“That’s a Serbian piece, and a close-up gun. How did he get so close?”

“You cannot be on the streets in Florence and not be close to somebody. Florence is made for assassins. I told you this some time ago, when we first met. We told her this also. Many times. You do not control Cora, as you are aware. My men behaved well. Two are dead now. A third will be blind in his left eye. Cora . . . They have put her into a coma, to relieve pressure on the brain. She sleeps now. Her pulse is steady. She is not on a respirator. But her brain function is . . . it is not good, my friend.”

“Where is she— No. I don’t want to know.”

“I wasn’t going to tell you. Not on this. Her family is with her. They have come from all over Italy. None of them blame you. Will you come?”

Dalton was quiet for a time.

“She’s in a coma?”

Brancati’s tone was harder now, the tone you use when you are steeling yourself to share grief. The ghost of Porter Naumann flickered briefly to life in the reflection from the window glass.

Grief is coming, Micah. More than you know.

“Yes. Induced medically. But I must say to you, there is no telling how much time. She may sleep for a month. She may get up and go dancing. She may never awake. She may die within the hour.”

Grief is coming.

“Will she know me?”

“Only you can say. What will you do?”

In a coma.

Just like Laura.

His first wife, Laura, had suffered irreparable brain damage after a suicide attempt, an attempt brought on by Dalton’s unwillingness to forgive her for the accidental death of their baby girl. She had died more than a month ago, after years in a vegetative state. Now a second woman in his life was lying in a deadly sleep. This was punishment. Karma. Fate.

Will you go to Florence to sit by her bed?

Dalton knew the answer and hated it.

“The only way I can help her is to finish this.”

Now the silence was on Brancati’s end. Finally, he said:

BOOK: The Orpheus Deception

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