The Skorpion Directive (30 page)

Here, he turned his magnified myopic glare on Fyke, driving his observation home, his blue lips tight and his expression cold.

“I hear you, Gerhardt,” said Fyke, “I’m listening.”

“Good. In some obscure way, I feel that I am betraying the cause. But
Germany
was my cause, not Vladimir Putin’s febrile hegemonic obsessions. Well, I do have information concerning what sort of people have been recruited by Kirikoff. You’re familiar, I know, with the Serb Skorpions.”

“Too bloody familiar,” said Fyke.

“In Kerch—this is a port city in the Ukraine, something of a lawless frontier outpost full of mercenaries and soldiers of fortune, the flotsam and jetsam of various wars—Kirikoff got in touch with an ex-Skorpion paramilitary leader with direct ties to Ratko Mladic. As you know, Mladic is wanted by the ICC for war crimes committed in the Kosovo wars. He is thought to be hiding in Serb provinces, protected by a cadre of the KLA. Mladic had a unit commander named Milan Babic. Babic’s XO, his executive officer, was one Aleksandr Vukov. A very able man, he had been trained by the Spetsnaz as a sort of KLA commando. In 1999, in the town of Podujevo, while fighting alongside the KLA, he was assaulted by a group of captives in a mosque, Bosnian Muslims. As he struggled to get away, a U.S. Special Forces unit that had been observing Skorpion activity in and around the mosque for two days, unaware of the presence of captives inside, painted it for an aerial strike. A Nighthawk put two Paveways into the mosque, incinerating the captive Muslims, over a hundred and fifty women, children—”

“A setup. Christ. Jesus Christ.”

Kleinst turned and smiled at him, a death’s-head grin.

“Alas, Christ was a nonparticipant, as He usually is. Yes. The idea was to be able to portray the Americans as careless and barbaric. Vukov had managed to travel partway through an escape tunnel. When the Paveways hit, he was effectively roasted alive in this tunnel. He lived— these sorts of creatures often do. Perhaps the Devil sees to his own children. He was taken to Belgrade, hideously burned, a monster, and underwent several years of reconstructive surgery, which was not very effective. Although now physically quite repulsive, he was, from the reports before the flames reached him, a very handsome young man and much caressed by the ladies. However, his gruesome war wounds have given him a mythic stature with the Serbs and Croats, the Macedonians, who cannot forget their long centuries of torment under the Turks and the Albanians. They burn with the shame of their
dhimmitude
, their forced submission to the daily humiliations of life as infidels under the boot of Islam. Now they repay this brutality in kind. Babic and Vukov have lately emerged as the charismatic leaders of a resurgent KLA underground. Their area of operations is, of course, the Balkans—drugs and guns, kidnap, rape, extortion—working, I am told, out of a farm his family owns in the central Crimean highlands. Vukov especially has conceived a great hatred of NATO, and in particular the United States, a Christian nation that in Bosnia took the side of the hated Muslims and made war against its own Christian brothers. Kirikoff made contact, I believe at a bar called The Double Eagle on the Kerch waterfront, with Vukov and his cadre, perhaps with Milan Babic himself, and has placed them at the head of this operation against Dalton. Shall I tell you why Vukov took the job?”

“Dalton was the SFO man on the ground in Podujevo.”

Kleinst looked at Fyke. “He told you?”

“No. But it follows. Dalton was in the area at that time. I don’t believe in coincidences. What I’d like to know is—”

“Who told Kirikoff ? Exactly. Trace that information, and you will find the spider at the center of this entire web. Another line of inquiry would take you to Athens, my friend.”

“What’s in Athens?”

“Kirikoff draws his operating expenses through a corporate entity known as Arc Light Engineering. This firm does extensive business throughout the Mediterranean, from Spain all the way down to sub-Saharan Africa. It is a legitimate construction-and-design firm, specializing in large civil-works projects in developing nations, as well as privately funded construction in wealthy Arab nations such as the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Morocco. It is an umbrella corporation with many subsidiaries, some quite recently acquired. One of these recently acquired subsidiaries is indirectly controlled by a Moscow-based oligarch by the name of Yevgeny Korchoy. Korchoy, a friend and supporter of Vladimir Putin, is, in the Tolstoyan labyrinth of Russian familial kinships, distantly related to Piotr Kirikoff.”

“Do you know the name of this subsidiary?”

“I believe it is called Cobalt Hydraulic Systems.”

“What’s Kirikoff ’s official title?”

“Assistant Director. His mandate is unclear, his duties nonexistent, but his draws from the company funds are substantial. The company maintains a large motor yacht for his personal use called
Dansante
. He berths it at the Flisvos Marina. I suggest that it may be useful to take a closer look at Cobalt Hydraulic Systems.”

“Based in Athens.”

“Their HQ is not there, but that is where Kirikoff is alleged to maintain a sort of branch office. I have not been able to discover the precise location. However, he is also an investor in a seaside restaurant called Serenitas, on the Flisvos Marina. He was seen dining there last week but has not appeared . . . since . . .”

Kleinst sighed heavily, slumping a little into himself.

“Other than this . . .” Kleinst went on almost in a whisper, “I have only one thing to add. As I have said, this is not merely a vendetta. I was a satrap of the Soviet Empire for many years. I truly believed in the Socialist cause as the last best hope for humanity to have lasting peace. Thus, I justified its . . . excesses. History has demonstrated that I was grossly in error. For my sins, I am now an exile. I once thought the Russian Empire was in the dust, but it rises, Raymond, it rises. It senses weakness, indecision, in the West. Already it has made inroads. What inference should the people here in Prague, and the Poles, draw from America’s craven consent to the removal of a missile shield, a groveling appeasement which got them only mockery from the Kremlin and the contempt of America’s allies . . . ?” He lifted his hands, let them fall.

Fyke stood up, offered his hand. Kleinst, after a moment’s hesitation, took it.

“Can I offer you a lift somewhere, Gerhardt?”

“No, Raymond. I am happy to sit here for a while with the monuments. See to Geli, that will be enough. And to her unsuitable boy. Will you go to Athens?”

“Yes. We’ll go tonight.”

“You and the . . . Italian legend?”

“Yes.”

“Is she very beautiful?”

“Yes. Heartbreaking.”

“You are lovers?”

“No.”

“Why not? You are not old, life is short, the road is fraught . . .”

“I’m trying . . . to be faithful.”

“You are? To what?”

Fyke looked away into the gathering darkness, sighed, and came back. “To myself, Gerhardt.”

Kleinst dabbed at his blue lips, settled into his voluminous coat like a turtle, pulling it tight around him, his breath misting the chilly air, the shadows drawing in. Prague hummed and boomed and clattered in the distance: electric, vital, remote, oblivious.

“To yourself, is it? How brave. I tried that, Raymond, a long while ago, with Geli’s mother. Before I knew that I had lost myself in the places in between, like water slipping through a grate.”

“ ‘In between’? In between what?”

“There are
spaces
, Raymond. Gaps. You are walking on railroad ties, across a trestle, above a deep gorge. Watch your step amidst the spaces. Now, go. Do your work. We will meet again.”

Captain Bogdan Davit, prefect of the Kerch Constabulary, head of the port police, inspector of customs, commander of the Coast Guard, and the unofficial boss of pretty much anything else worth bossing in the little port town of Kerch, was waiting for them in the third-floor corner office of a slab-sided, bilious-looking concrete bunker across the road from Kerch’s industrial waterfront.

Dalton and Mandy Pownall, ushered into Captain Davit’s bare-bones office by his secretary—a round, cheerful peach-colored young girl, her hair pulled tight in a stern official bun—got a broad, welcoming smile from Davit. He was a tall, well-muscled blond with eyes the color of glacier ice, wearing his tailor-made sky-blue uniform very well and, although young for the job, carrying the competent air of an infantry captain in a beleaguered outpost. He had, as Dalton recalled, despite his boyish manner, a core of toughness coupled with a sly dark humor, a pragmatic willingness to take events on the fly and people as they came.

His office had a wall of windows that overlooked the waterfront and the port itself—admittedly, a dreary industrial morass, red-brick silos, tin-roofed warehouses, rust-streaked derricks rising up out of the mist, heaps of coal and iron ore, slag piles steaming in the damp, squalid gypsy freighters and oil tankers slouching by the crumbling quayside, a pall of smoke and rain and coal dust hanging low over it all, and, beyond this grim scene, across the muddy shark-tooth chop of the Kerch Strait, the dun-colored and moody forward slopes of fog-shrouded Russia.

Davit, still grinning broadly, came around his desk—a short trip, since it was basically a card table—took Mandy’s hand in both of his and kissed her on both cheeks, breathing her in as he did so, then stepping back and smiling down at her with warm appreciation, before turning to Dalton and offering a strong, dry hand.

“You are both well, I find. I am happy to have you back in my city. Marika”—he turned to the peach-colored girl still hovering at the door—“may we have . . . You will both take tea, I hope? Yes? Perfect! . . . Marika, would you be so good . . . Thank you. Now,” he said, pulling two hard wooden chairs out from against the wall and setting them in front of his desk, “now will you sit, please? And before we talk about what is in front of us—Dobri Levka and his boat, of which I have no news, sadly—and of our own homegrown spy . . . No, no, tea first . . . You must tell me . . . Miss Pownall, if I may, allow me to say you are
exquisite
today. My men still speak of you with great admiration, and of that terrible night, those poor people in the clinic . . .”

They talked amiably for a time about the chase the KGB had led them on last winter, from Istanbul across the Black Sea to Kerch, what they had found there, with Captain Davit’s help, in the basement of a clinic. Dalton told Davit what he could of the story, leaving out a few critical details, which Davit understood and did not in any way resent. He himself lived near the cave of the Russian Bear and felt its great bulk looming over everything he cherished.

“But it ended well, I hope,” he said, still beaming at Mandy, running a sharp cavalier’s eye over her body, from her black boots and tight jeans to her turtleneck and her fine leather jacket.

“Actually,” said Mandy, smiling back—she loved to be admired, especially by chiseled young Nordic officers in well-cut uniforms—“I think we ought not to say that it has
ended
at all.”

Dalton, setting his cup down on a small side table—he loathed tea, but this was the East, and tea was the inevitable drink—leaned forward, folded his hands. Davit, setting his tea down too, sat back quietly in his chair, tenting his fingers, watching Dalton’s face, his expression calm, interested, watchful.

“I assume, Captain Davit—”

“Please. I am Bogdan.”

“Bogdan. That you’ve checked into my situation.”

Davit smiled—a thin, careful smile.

“Oh yes,” he said, lifting his hands as if to ward off an evil spirit, smiling broadly. “Be warned! I am on my guard. I have been told to watch out for you, the American servant of Satan himself. That you are . . . a wanted man, an evil rogue, like—what is his name?—Austin Powers, the International Man of Mystery—”

“You’re not taking the warning very seriously,” said Mandy.

Davit lifted his tea, sipped it, set it down, his smile fading.

“I think for myself, Miss Pownall. I have good experience of Mr. Dalton, and of you, so I am not inclined to leap at squeakings of some little mice, am I? I hear from the Israelis that I am to do this or to do that or else rue the day. Kiev also has blustered at me. But Kiev is seven hundred kilometers away. I am here. For me, I dislike being blustered at.”

He made a gesture at the window, invoking the port, the harbor, the Strait, and what lay beyond.

“They—over there—the bully Russians, they bluster too and stamp their heavy boots. Last winter, we all froze here in Kerch because
they
wished to play ducks and drakes with our natural gas. So. Look around my office. Empty as a barn. We burn all our furniture. Keep warm. Russians starve. Ukrainians go on a diet. We survive. No, I will do what is good for Kerch and the Ukraine, not for the Mossad or even for Kiev. The Russians came into
my
waters and hijacked a boat belonging to one of our townsmen, Mr. Dobri Levka. Your friend, Mr. Dalton, and a fine, generous man, although perhaps not so sober as he could be. They force people from Kerch into rubber boats and tell them to row for their lives. Old people, women, kids. A father has a heart attack, an old woman dies of fear. Now they deny everything and blame it on Dobri. I mention maybe our homegrown spy?”

“Yes,” said Dalton. “What did you mean?”

“I mean exactly that. One of our own. A corporal. His name is Pavel Zelov. He is in Kiev now under arrest. I am afraid he is the cause of Mr. Galan’s death. After they took the
Blue Nile
, I received a call from Mr. Galan, from Venice. He mentioned you as an associate. He was asking for Irina Kuldic—”

“Is she all right?” asked Mandy, by now quite ready for terrible news. “Nothing happened to her?”