The Skorpion Directive (11 page)

Nikki Turrin saw the navy blue Crown Victoria parked outside her town house as soon as she got off the Odenton transit bus. It was idling, like a whale in a lagoon, in the dappled shadows under the Civil War-era oaks that lined Caisson Street. Sunlight shimmered in a golden veil through the leaves and pooled on the walks and lawns where the kids were playing. A sprinkler was hissing away in the gardens in front of her place, sending a jet of diamond sparkles through the sunlight as it circled.

As she came down the walkway she checked out the plate: U.S GOVERNMENT. The windows of the car were heavily tinted, but she could vaguely discern the shapes of two men inside, one in the back and another up front behind the wheel.

The presence of an official vehicle outside her town house wasn’t particularly surprising to Nikki Turrin, since she was on the staff of the Assistant Director of Research and Analysis at the National Security Agency, an ex-Marine colonel named Hank Brocius. Nikki, an auburn-haired odalisque in the classic Italian style, kept her eyes on the rear door of the Crown Vic as she came up to her steps, shifting her briefcase to her left hand and, just as a precaution, freeing her right hand in case she needed the hammerless SIG she kept in a nylon holster at her waist.

The rear door cracked just as she put her right foot on the stairs, opened up wide, hinges creaking, revealing a very elderly white male, lanky and rail thin, with age spots on his hands and face. Deacon Cather, the Gray Eminence of Clandestine Services.

She knew him from his photograph on Hank Brocius’s office wall. The pair had served for a time together in the same AO in Central America, Cather with the CIA and Brocius with the Marines. She herself had had a glancing contact with him during a terrorist incident at the Port of Chicago the previous fall. Cather, never aglow with health, looked like a cadaver: bony, sunken features, hooded eyes, sallow, jaundiced-looking skin stretched too tight over prominent cheekbones, teeth like yellow tombstones in bright red gums, withered, age-spotted hands, twisted and arthritic.

But his eyes were clear, alert, and seemed to radiate an icy light, as if all the fading forces of his aging body were being concentrated in his look. A subtle, cold-blooded reptile with a very long memory, he held most of the secrets of the Cold War in the stony labyrinths of his mind. And although he had recently been shunted out of Clandestine Services by the new administration, he still wore power as easily as he wore his navy blue pinstripe, his pristine white shirt, and the gold-and-ochre tie with its hieroglyphic pattern that was his signature accessory.

“Miss Turrin,” he said in a raspy whisper, “may I impose for just a moment . . . ?”

Nikki felt a momentary chill and found herself at a loss for words. The intelligence community was full of stories about Cather and his sudden appearances, impromptu and unexpected encounters where people who got invited to share a moment with him in a car quite frequently never came back to their offices or to their homes and families.

“Of course, Mr. Cather,” she said, resisting the temptation to throw her briefcase at him and bolt for her town house door.

He developed out of the car slowly like a wolf spider coming out of a drain, straightening up with an obvious effort, smiling his terrible rictus of a smile at her with as friendly an air as a man with his reputation could manage.

“Thank you, Miss Turrin. It’s a lovely afternoon. Perhaps you would do an old man the honor of a stroll along the avenue?”

Towering over her like a rusted derrick, he extended his left arm in a ghastly parody of chivalry. Nikki took it, feeling the forearm bone like a dry twig under the material of his suit jacket. They walked along together, arms linked, as Cather’s driver slowly eased the Crown Vic to a crawl, keeping pace with them, its motor growling and muttering like an unhappy guard dog.

Nikki saw another blue Crown Vic parked a block up, facing their way, the shadows of two men visible in the tinted glass: Cather’s CIA security detail.

“You have a good eye,” said Cather, following her glance. “I hope you can tolerate the melodrama. I think they’re convinced I’m going to defect, God bless their paranoid little hearts. Let us choose to ignore them.”

Nikki looked up at him, at the side of his face. He was staring ahead, his eyes on the sidewalk in front of him, but there was an air of sadness around him, sadness and something else.

He looked . . . worried. Troubled.

“We never actually met, did we?” he said after a few moments. “I know we spoke on the phone during the . . . events . . . in Chicago last fall. Of course, Mandy Pownall was familiar with you, I recall, and her description of you—she compared you to Isabella Rossellini—seems to have been quite accurate. Compliments from a woman as formidable as Mandy Pownall are rather rare. I’m very glad that Hank has you around. He’s well, is he?”

“Yes, sir. He’s on leave right now.”

“Is he? I suppose even a Marine needs a break now and then. He’s had a difficult time recently, I know.”

“His wife left him, sir. Because of the scarring.”

Brocius had been badly burned in an IED explosion in Iraq, trying to get the fifty gunner out of a flaming Humvee.

“I’m aware. Not at all
Semper Fi
, was she?”

Did he know that Nikki and Hank Brocius had been lovers up until quite recently? Did he know that the AD of RA’s “leave” was being spent up in Garrison, New York, helping in ways Nikki did not care to contemplate a former lover named Briony Keating put her life back together after her son, a naval corpsman stationed in Crete, had been kidnapped and murdered by the KGB?

“No, sir. She sort of broke his heart, actually.”

A few more steps. Cather, in a heavy silence, stalking like a heron, clearly enjoying the leafy avenue, the green lawns, the row of red brick, federal-style town houses, the children playing in the shady street, the Rockwellian perfection of it.

An illusion, but how beautiful it was.

“I’m imposing my wearisome presence upon you, Miss Turrin, for a reason, I’m afraid. A matter of some subtlety.”

“Yes, sir. I’m here to do whatever I can for the service.”

“I know that, Miss Turrin. You’ve been an extraordinary help in a number of areas not usually addressed by an NSA officer. Your unofficial mission to Trieste, and, in the winter, that business in Santorini and Istanbul. That is why I am here, as you may have already inferred. I’ve given this matter some careful consideration. Before I present my case, allow me to lay before you a few preliminary observations in order to harmonize our viewpoints. As an initial predicate, you’re familiar, I’m sure, with the recent changes that have taken place at Clandestine Services?”

Nikki handled that one as if it were a Fabergé egg.

“Only what has been circulated, Mr. Cather. I know that a Commander Pearson has taken over as Deputy Director.”

Cather seemed to find her tact grimly amusing.

“And that I’ve been . . . marginalized? Rendered an operational nullity?”

“People who know your record, Mr. Cather, would never make the mistake of regarding you as ‘an operational nullity.’ ”

He looked down at her, his yellow face cracking into planes and deltas, his eyes hardening into chilly blue stones.

“But the
intent
is there, my child,” he said, squeezing her arm between his ribs and his forearm. “The doors are already closing as I come down the halls . . . Old friends and colleagues grow noncommittal. Communications go unanswered. The fog of irrelevance rises up around my barren desk. Well, let us not indulge in self-pity. None of this is unexpected, Miss Turrin . . . I have observed our great nation for many decades, from a position of power and influence. Change has come upon us again, as it must. America. I suppose all democracies are vulnerable in this way, although it seems to be a singularly American weakness. Our nation tends to
lurch
, to stagger drunkenly, from left to right, as if afflicted with an inner-ear problem. De Tocqueville predicted this, suggesting that it was a flaw woven into the very fabric of democracies. He appears to have been correct. We lunge at extreme positions of thought and ideology as if they were lampposts to lean on. We abandon the ancient Persian House of Pahlavi and blithely embrace the far greater evil of the Ayatollahs. We ignored the growing threat of Islamic terror in the early eighties, dreaming our isolationist dreams. In the late nineties, as the threat grew and grew, we indulged ourselves in the political persecution of a President for silly sexual follies that would have paled beside the saturnalian debaucheries of those Kennedy boys, creating as we did so a bitter divide in the House and Senate that continues to cripple us to this day. We slept on, until, in our folly—and, as a senior member of the intelligence services, I bear great responsibility for this disaster—we awoke to the horrors of September eleventh . . .”

He seemed to falter here, going inward, as if seeing that day in all its obscenity and horror playing once again in his memory. They went on in silence, Cather’s face creased in regret and remorse. After a while, he recovered, began again.

“And then, for reasons that seemed sufficient at the time, we plunged into the jagged canyons of Afghanistan. We quickly disposed of the Taliban. As a result, our hubris fully in play, we conjured up an elective war in which we crushed the armed forces of Iraq in three weeks and then spent the next six years snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. So here we are today. The cycle repeats. We pursue our enemies in their gathering multitudes with neither judgment nor sustained commitment, wavering—in a metronomic, biannual regularity that greatly comforts our enemies—with every shift in Congress and at the White House.”

“We’re still in Afghanistan, sir. The NSA is still doing its work. The armed services are fully engaged and profoundly dedicated to the safety of this country. Perhaps you’re just . . . weary, sir. Perhaps you’ve seen too much.”

“Perhaps . . . perhaps. I’m an old man, arriving at the end of my long hallway lined with delusions, failures, crimes. Here, at the end of my life, I have come to realize that the only reliable law is the Law of Unintended Consequences. This new administration, for the most part, is neither stupid nor blindly partisan, although some of the younger staffers at the White House seem to think it clever to act like junkyard dogs, as if political combat were the same as actual combat. But, then, when the young Turks in
any
new government aren’t prating to their elders, they’re preening in their shaving mirrors. They all share the same delusions of adequacy. The previous administration persuaded itself that it had the power to impose a kind of Junior League Republicanism on murderous tribal theocracies. The new one imagines that it can impose the asinine Marcusian sophistries of Noam Chomsky and the Harvard Faculty of Humanities on the people of America, as if Socialism had not already been tried many times before only to collapse in ruins, frequently very bloody ruins. And God only knows what sort of grotesque ideological calliope the next army of enthusiasts will ride in on, horns blatting and banners ablaze. My consolation is that I’ll probably not be around when the wheels fall off once again.”

The last was said in a fading whisper, and they went on for a time in silence. Nikki could feel a tremble in the old man’s arm, and a sheen of perspiration had come out on his sallow cheeks. But she felt compelled to wait him out and not to insult an old Cold Warrior with her concerns about his health. They reached a corner, and Cather hesitated at the crosswalk, looking off toward a small parkette sheltering under an ancient stand of live oaks.

“Look,” he said. “There’s shade there. Do you mind if we . . . What did Stonewall Jackson say . . . ?”

“ ‘Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees’?” said Nikki softly.

Cather turned and beamed down on her, his cold eyes softening. “You give me heart, young woman. Let us do that.”

By the time they reached a little wooden bench, his cheeks were quite damp, and the tremor in his forearm had spread to the rest of his skeletal frame. Nikki got him seated, looking over her shoulder at the Crown Vic, which had pulled up by the curb. Then a tinny radio voice came out of Cather’s pocket, a slow Southern drawl, but packed with affection and worry.

Cather didn’t bother pulling out the walkie-talkie, content to wave a bony hand at his driver in a dismissive gesture and then patting the bench beside him. Nikki sat down close to him, aware of the fever heat coming off Cather’s body.

He was not at all
okay
.

Cather took a folded linen handkerchief out of his suit jacket, dabbed his cheeks, refolded it carefully, and put it away.

“Stop looking at me like that, girl. I’m not going to keel over and die on you.”

Nikki smiled.

“Am I looking at you
like that
, sir?”

“Yes. I’m getting it a lot lately. As if I were being fitted for a shroud.”

“In my case, would that be the Shroud of
Turrin
?”

His response was alarming. He put his head back, closed his eyes, the tendons on his neck stood out, his mouth opened slightly, his body seemed to undergo a series of short, sharp contractions, and he began to emit a number of dry croaks. After a moment she realized that he was laughing. He looked like a pterodactyl swallowing a frog. He did this for a while longer, she endured it. He subsided, and patted the back of her hand.

“Very good, child. I like a girl with sass. My wife was very much a girl with sass. Dear Eleanor. How I miss her . . . Well, the afternoon is fleeting, and I have not yet begun to make my position plain. You’ll forgive me for enjoying the company of a beautiful young woman for a while.”