The Skorpion Directive (23 page)

Mandy lifted an eyebrow.

“On your sacred honor, as an officer and a gentleman?”

“On my sacred honor, as an officer and a gentleman.”

She reached for her flute, put it to her full red lips, and studied him over the glittering crystal rim as though he were the remaining half of some crawling thing she had found in her salad. She set the flute down carefully, leaned over, and used his tie to pull him close enough for a hungry, searching kiss.

“You,” she whispered in his ear, “are a lying shit.”

 

 

 

“SETTING
that aside,” Mandy said, leaning back again, “what is our agenda here in this squalid Soviet sinkhole, Mr. Castle?”

Their rack of lamb—paired with asparagus, mint sauce, and tiny roasted potatoes—floated in on a large silver platter unsteadily piloted by a small mud-brown man with an absurd mustache and wearing a gravy-stained monkey suit that looked as if it zipped up the back and a bow tie that looked like it was made out of spray-painted cardboard. The lamb was, however, brilliant, and Dalton, suddenly ravenous, settled in for the long haul, as did Mandy, for whom all of the sensual appetites had irresistible charm. After a decent interval, the wreckage hauled away and the table duly whisked, Dalton poured out the last of the Bollinger, handed Mandy her flute along with a demitasse of thick espresso.

“Our agenda,” he said softly, taking her in and thinking that his libido, which had once been MIA, seemed to have reasserted itself in force, “is to address the killing of Galan and, while we’re at it, dig me out of a cesspit. How much do you know?”

Her face lost some of its cheer.

“I have most of it from Allessio. Poor Issadore. The Hessian gumshoe, that . . . hideous burned creature . . . you fought with in her flat. The car bomb at Leopoldsberg. The note from Dobri Levka. Is it true about the Mossad?”

Dalton, his face growing stonier, said yes.

“Oh my,” said Mandy, a worried expression flickering across her face like the shadow of a swift. “Have you seen any sign? Not that one normally does until it’s too late.”

“None so far. And I’ve been looking.”

“What will you do if they do take a run at you?”

“Try to reason with them,” he said with a wry smile.

“In other words, strew their guts about the landscape in the usual Dalton style. That’ll do
so
much for U.S.-Israeli relations.”

“I think that’s the idea,” he said seriously.

“Kirikoff ? You flatter the man. That’s rather
too
clever for that fat gray slug, don’t you think?”

“He led us quite a dance up and down the Bosphorus and across the Black Sea, Mandy. And then got clean away.”

“With his pants flapping around his ankles and his great, wobbly plum pudding of an arse in the wind, I remind you. About this Mariah Vale creature, did I not warn you repeatedly about what was landing on our heads if Harvard Yard really took the town? Why do you think I went on leave?”

“Mandy, my darling, you went on leave because your daddy threatened to cut off your allowance and you couldn’t finance the Sloane Square Fandango on a paycheck from Langley.”

She made a moue and then smiled.

“Poppy’s such a teapot. Iraq was giving him a migraine. And he
was
being an awful bugger about my stipend. But I’m glad to be out of it for a while. Really, I don’t know how it will all end.”

“No? I’m getting a rough idea.”

“Yes,” she said, frowning. “That’s why I’m here.”

“And I thank you for it. How did you manage it?”

“Getting here without Langley knowing? Poppy commandeered the Lear and billed it to Threadneedle Street. I wasn’t even on the manifest. At this end, I was met by a lovely man who runs Poppy’s mining interests in the central Ukraine. His name is Earl Ford. He’s a cross between a Mafia hit man and the piano player in an upscale brothel. Quite well-off on his own. He keeps a pretty sloop in Balaklava. Has a huge condo there too.”

“Sounds like a good man to know.”

“Poppy thinks so,” she said quite seriously. “If all this goes south, I’d advise us to bear him in mind.”

“We will.”

Mandy stretched, sighed, gave him a coy and sleepy smile.

“So, Mr. Castle, dear boy, here I am, in the sinfully silky flesh. Tell me, are we leaving for Kerch right this
very
minute?”

Dalton shook his head.

“No. Too late in the day. It’s two hundred and fifty klicks overland, sixty from here to Simferopol—”

“God. That rathole—”

“Yes, and worse ratholes to follow. And a long, hard one hundred klicks over the spine and down to Feodosiya on the coast, and another one hundred klicks across some pretty bleak terrain to get into Kerch by the back door. Two-lane blacktop most of the way, but some of it could have worn down to dirt and gravel to within a hundred miles of Kerch. The hotel here has a fleet of Mitsubishi Lancers for rent. I’ve got one with an off-road upgrade, and I’m asking for extra tanks, a GPS, and some water bottles.”

“What’s our story? For the Russkies, I mean.”

“You’re my mistress. Locals love infidelity. It adds spice to their lives. You have pretensions to being a photographer and are simply on fire to document the entire Crimean Peninsula.”

“God,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Can’t we just take Poppy’s Lear? We could be there in a half hour.”

“The idea is to come in low, look around, find Irina Kuldic and Bogdan Davit, see if we can get a handle on what Kirikoff is up to. I don’t want to swan into town like Di and Dodi.”

“Dead, you mean?” she said, blinking sweetly. “Poor Lady Di. Always wanted a halo around her head and all she got was a steering wheel. By the way, how are you fixed for funds?”

“Until you arrived, I figured that I had enough for a month. With you here, I’ll be flat broke by Tuesday.”

“Well, I have good news for both of us. Allessio had a package waiting for me at Stansted airfield. I have it in my bag.”

“What is it?”

“Your
trousseau
, darling,” she said, quite pleased with herself. “The one you had stashed away in the Savoia.”

Dalton had kept a steel briefcase hidden at the back of a cleaner’s closet in the Savoia Hotel. In it, he had twenty grand in mixed euros, another ten thousand in U.S. dollars, and a small Crown Royal bag filled with 99.9 percent pure Canadian gold wafers. Along with a Colt Anaconda and four boxes of .44 Magnums.

“Including the Colt?” said Dalton, since flying public airways as he just had meant leaving his SIG behind in Venice.

“God yes,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Weighs a ton! Bloody great stainless-steel hand cannon with an eight-inch barrel. If I hadn’t already seen you naked, I’d think you were compensating for a personal shortcoming.”

“Anything for you?”

Mandy, taking another Cocktail and lighting it up with Dalton’s gold Cartier, nodded through the smoke. “Yes. I have my cute little SIG. And some of those spare bullet-holder thingys.”

“Magazines?”

“Whatever,” she said, waving away the comment with the smoke cloud. Dalton was very impressed about the trousseau’s unexpected arrival and said so.

“So was I,” said Mandy. “I just adore a man with bags full of solid-gold wafers. May I have just a teeny one? As a keepsake?”

Dalton, who knew his Pownalls, said, “How many have you already lifted?”

“Only two,” she replied with a sideways smile. “For mad money. So . . . we’re staying the night . . . are we?”

“Yes. I’ve already booked you an adjacent suite.”

“How very tactful. It follows that you already
have
a suite?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Mr. Castle, as your designated harlot I’ll be bunking with
you
.
In flagrante.
If only for the sake of the mission.”

“Mandy . . . we need to keep this—”

She set her flute down, glaring at him through the smoke.

“Oh no you
don’t
, you manky little git! I have
had
it with all this Hamlet hearts Ophelia stuff. Cora Vasari, a grown woman, on the flimsy excuse of a teensy-caliber bullet to the head, which she acquired only because she couldn’t follow Pascal’s simple instruction to sit quietly in her room, has allowed herself to be shut up in a tower like some dago Rapunzel, while
you
, my dear, have flirted with
me
as few men have and lived to tell the tale
.
Oh yes. I know. I let it slide after you stood me up in the middle of the Black Sea last winter. And if I were a cruel woman, I would call that the act of a sniveling eunuch. However, now that you’ve already boinked the Hessian Hussy, you will either stand and deliver tonight or die valiantly in the attempt. Are we clear on
that
?”

The Mediterranean side of Tel Aviv Boulevard looked a lot like Panama City Beach, as Nikki Turrin and Ray Fyke walked across the still-warm sand toward the squared-off, bunker-style building that housed Joko’s Beach Bar. From the outside, at least, it was exactly the kind of migraine-inducing, rock-and-rolling stucco-walled beer joint that would have been packed with drunken kids from Ole Miss back on the Redneck Riviera. A few hard-nosed sago palms jutted up out of the grainy sand around Joko’s like jagged green bomb bursts, and the waterside deck was trimmed in red-and-blue neon, pulsing in time to the music. But when you looked the other way, back across Tel Aviv Boulevard, it was another story entirely.

Then you were looking at South Beach in Miami or Santa Monica, row upon row of expensive and stylish houses and condos, Art Deco hotels, first-class dining, upscale shops. Tel Aviv had floodlights and neon and glittering marquees stretching for miles in either direction along a wide four-lane street lined with royal palms, softly waving in the gentle wind off the Med.

This warm spring evening, the beachside walks were crowded with families out for a stroll, dating couples, kids running wild on the sand, and even a few surfers, like seals in their black wet suits, trying out tonight’s truly hopeless waves.

When she thought of Israel, Nikki had to admit, she pictured stony battlegrounds and ancient settlements: the Sinai and the Negev and the Golan Heights, battered but eternal Jerusalem, and the bleeding sores of Gaza and the West Bank. She did not think of the beaches and luxury hotels of Tel Aviv, of the river of SUVs and luxury sedans hissing past, the intricately laid stones of the walkway, the sparkling fountains, and the light off the wide Mediterranean floating above them like an aurora.

Ray Fyke, walking along beside her, almost but not quite taking her hand, seemed oblivious to the glamour. He was a looming presence in black slacks and a black polo, his muscular forearms and bulky chest stretching the material, his shaggy head moving from side to side as he studied the crowds swirling all around them, his easy loping stride covering the ground as she struggled to keep up with him in the deep sand.

They reached the entrance to Joko’s, and Fyke put out a hand to get the door for her. He was quite gallant for a drunken Irish roustabout, thought Nikki, who was gradually getting used to traveling with him. It was rather like traveling with your own personal panther. Fyke paused and grinned at her, his green eyes alight in the glow of the entrance floods.

“Now, I don’t have to remind you—”

“I know, I know. I’m just your biographer.”

“Joko’s a strange lad, Nikki. Looks like a fat old Kodiak bear, but he spent thirty years on the other side of the blanket . . . A real hard boy. I’m not sure which way this talk will go. If it goes badly, I want you to walk quickly away. And don’t get—”

“I won’t, Ray. Just relax. You look a little tense yourself.”

“Do I?” he said, checking his reflection in the door glass.

“Yes. You look like you’re going to your own wake. Try to smile more. When you smile, you’re not as horrible to contemplate.”

Fyke gave her a sardonic bow, took her arm, and shoulder-butted his way into the bar, the blare of easy-listening music assaulting their ears as soon as he got the glass doors open. Unlike Dirty Dick’s in Panama City, Joko’s place was crowded with reasonably well-dressed young people, very few backpacker types, and some sleek-looking older folks in Tommy Bahama and Banana Republic who had to be in on a cruise tour. The décor was a mix of
African Queen
, cargo cult, and
Pirates of the Caribbean
—twinkling pin lights in the fake thatch, bamboo walls, fiberglass spearfish and Styrofoam sharks caught in the ceiling nets—but the cooking smells coming from the kitchen were wonderful, and the entire glass front of the bar opened up onto the Mediterranean Sea, which was a shimmering field of deep blue under an opal sky.

A dazzling young waitress in a gauzy sarong that was struggling unsuccessfully to hold the line in the face of overwhelming pressures gave them a saucy smile and led them to a large booth overlooking the Med.

She took the stuffed parrot with the RESERVED sign in its beak off the table and seemed utterly thrilled to bring them a bottle of Perrier Jouët champagne and two iced glasses.

“And would you let Jacko know,” said Fyke, touching the waitress’s arm before she turned away, “that Ibis says hello?”

“ ‘Ibis’?” she said, her expression faltering, and then she recovered. “Of course, Mr. . . . Ibis?”

“Yes,” said Fyke with a piratical leer. “Ibis. Like the bird.”

When she was gone, Nikki leaned into him, trying to make herself heard above Astrud Gilberto, who, Nikki felt, ought to be over the girl from Ipanema by now.

“Wasn’t IBIS your operational ID in Kosovo?”

“That it was,” said Fyke, watching a cluster of giggling young blondes bobble past their booth. “And Mikey was Shrike. That’s how Joko knew us back in Pristina. It’ll bring him running, if only to see who’s pulling his . . . Who’s playing a game with him.”