The Scorpio Illusion: A Novel

  Silence.

  Captain Henry Stevens did not return to the telephone.

  26

  “We’re leaving now!” said Bajaratt loudly, opening the door of the bedroom, awakening Nicolo from a deep sleep. “Get up and pack us, quickly!”

  The young man raised himself from the pillows and rubbed his eyes in the bright afternoon sunlight streaming through the windows. “I faced my God last night and I am fortunate to be alive. Let me sleep.”

  “Get up, and please do as I say. I’ve ordered a limousine; it will be here in ten minutes.”

  “Why? I’m so tired and I ache so.”

  “To be frank, our chauffeur may have a bigger mouth than a thousand dollars will keep shut, although I’ve promised him more.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I’ve made arrangements; don’t concern yourself. Hurry! I’ve another phone call to make.” The Baj rushed back into the suite’s sitting room and dialed the number she had so well committed to memory.

  “Identify yourself,” said the strange voice on the line, “and state your business.”

  “You are not the man I spoke to before,” replied Bajaratt.

  “Changes have been made—”

  “There have been entirely too many changes,” said the Baj quietly, ominously.

  “They were made for the better,” interrupted the man on the Scorpio phone, “and if you’re who I think you are, you’re better off for them.”

  “How can I be sure—how can I be sure of anything? This chaos would not be permitted in Europe, and in the Baaka you’d all be executed.”

  “Scorpios Two and Three aren’t around any longer, are they? Weren’t they executed, Little Girl Blood?”

  “Don’t play your childish games with me, signore,” said Bajaratt, her voice now ice cold.

  “Nor you with me, lady.… You want proof, okay, I’ll buy that. I’m in the circle here and know every move that’s being made to find you. Among the men involved is a Captain H. R. Stevens, chief of naval intelligence. He’s been working with a retired N.I. lieutenant commander named Hawthorne—”

  “Hawthorne? You know this—”

  “That’s right, and they’ve traced you to a place called Chesapeake Beach. Each of us in the circle has been alerted over our secure faxes. However, Captain Stevens won’t be doing any more tracing. He’s dead, and sooner or later they’ll find his body in a thick row of hedges behind his garage. If they do, you’ll read about it in the afternoon papers. It may even be on the evening news, if they haven’t blacked it out.”

  “I’m satisfied, signore,” said Bajaratt softly, quickly.

  “So fast?” asked the elite Scorpion. “From what I’ve read and heard, that doesn’t sound like you.”

  “I have my proof.”

  “My word?”

  “No, a name.”

  “Stevens?”

  “No.”

  “Hawthorne?”

  “That will be enough, Scorpione Uno. I need equipment. The time will come any day now.”

  “If it’s smaller than a tank, you’ve got it.”

  “It’s not large but quite sophisticated. I can have one flown overnight from the Baaka via London or Paris, but I don’t trust our technicians. In two out of five occasions the equipment malfunctioned. I can’t afford the risk.”

  “Neither can the men who think like I do, and we’re all over this city. Remember Dallas thirty years ago—we do. How do you want to proceed?”

  “I have with me a detailed blueprint—”

  “Get it to me,” interrupted the Scorpio.

  “How?”

  “I suppose you won’t tell me where you are.”

  “Of course not,” the Baj broke in. “I will leave a copy for you at the concierge’s desk in the hotel of my choice. I will call you within minutes of depositing it.”

  “What name?”

  “Choose it.”

  “Racklin.”

  “You chose so quickly.”

  “He was a lieutenant, a prisoner of war who bought it in Vietnam. He thought the way I do; he hated our running out of Saigon, hated the goddamned pansies in Washington who wouldn’t give us the firepower.”

  “Very well, Racklin it shall be. Where do I call you, this number?”

  “I’ll be here for a couple of hours, that’s all. After that I have to return to the office for a meeting.… The conference is about you, Little Girl Blood.”

  “Such a charming sobriquet, so diminutive yet so lethal,” the Baj said. “I will call you … say within the next thirty minutes.” Bajaratt hung up the telephone. “Nicolo!” she shouted.

  “Henry!” Tyrell yelled into the phone. “Where the hell are you?”

  “Is anything wrong?” asked Poole.

  “I don’t know,” Hawthorne answered, squinting and shaking his head. “Henry was always easily distracted if something new came up, intruding on his personal tunnel vision. Maybe he got a security report from the inner circle; he’d read it first, forgetting he was on the phone. I’ll call him later; he didn’t have anything new anyway.” Hawthorne replaced the telephone and looked up at the air force lieutenant. “Come on, strap this meat up and haul your tail over to the State Department. I want to get started. I can’t wait to meet the mourning O’Ryans and the Ingersols.”

  “You’re not going anywhere until you’ve got your papers and your clothes. May I respectfully suggest that until then you lie down and rest, sir? I’ve taken medical courses in combat triage and wound-stress relationships, and I truly believe that the commander—”

  “Shut up, Jackson, and tape the damn thing!”

  Having called the Scorpion with the name of the hotel, Bajaratt left the envelope containing the deadly blueprints with the Carillon’s concierge; it was clearly marked: Racklin, Esq. To be picked up by courier, seals intact.

  “Sono desolato!” whispered Nicolo as their luggage was being put in the limousine. “My head is not yet on straight. I promised Angel I would call her from our new hotel and I am late!”

  “I have no patience for such nonsense,” said Bajaratt, walking toward the huge white vehicle.

  “But you must!” cried the dock boy, grabbing her by the shoulders and stopping her. “There must be respect for me in this matter, respect for her!”

  “How dare you talk to me this way?”

  “Listen to me, signora, I have lived through terrible things with you and killed a man who would kill me—but you brought me into this mad world of yours and to this young woman I have great affection for. You will not stand in my way. I know I am young, and I have had many women for all the reasons you say about me, but this girl is different.”

  “You sound better in Italian than you do in English.… Certainly, call your friend from the limousine, if you must.”

  Inside the car, the elderly black driver started the engine and turned in the front seat as Nicolo grabbed the telephone off its receptacle. “The dispatcher said you’d have an address for me, ma’am.”

  “A moment, please.” Bajaratt touched Nico’s cheek. “Keep your voice down,” said the Baj in Italian. “I must be clear with our chauffeur.”

  “Then I’ll wait until you’re finished, for I might yell with happiness.”

  “If you’d wait a bit longer, say a half hour or so, you may shout for joy as loud as you wish.”

  “Oh?”

  “Before we go to our next lodgings, we must make a stop—I must make a stop. There’s no reason for you to accompany me, so you’ll be alone in the car for at least twenty minutes.”

  “I shall wait, then. Do you think the driver would be offended if I asked him to raise the partition between us?”

  “Why should he?” Bajaratt stopped, her eyes squinting, cold. “I’m sure he does not speak Italian. You do speak only Italian with your actress, do you not?”

  “Please, signora, she saw through me before she left for California. She knows I understand English. She told me she saw it in my ey
es when we were with other people—how I laughed with my eyes when something funny was said.”

  “You admitted you spoke English?”

  “We speak it all the time on the telephone, where is the harm?”

  “Everyone thinks you do not speak English!”

  “You’re wrong, Cabi. That journalist in Palm Beach knew otherwise.”

  “He doesn’t matter, he’s—”

  “He’s what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “The address, ma’am?” interrupted the chauffeur, hearing the break in the Italian conversation.

  “Yes, here it is.” The Baj opened her purse and pulled out a scrap of wrinkled brown paper on which were written Arabic characters, in themselves coded words and digits. Decoding them from memory, she read aloud a number and a street in Silver Spring, Maryland. “Do you know where it is?” she asked.

  “I’ll find it, ma’am,” replied the driver. “It won’t be a problem.”

  “Raise the partition, please.”

  “A pleasure, ma’am.”

  “Does this ‘Angel’ of yours speak to others about you?” asked Bajaratt angrily, unpleasantly, her head snapping around to Nico.

  “I don’t know, Cabi.”

  “Actresses are cheap, they’re exhibitionists, and always seek publicity!”

  “Angelina is not like that.”

  “You saw all those pictures in the newspapers, all that gossip—”

  “It was terrible what they said.”

  “How do you think it got there?”

  “Because she is a famous person, the three of us understood that.”

  “She engineered it all! What she wants from you is publicity, that is all.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You are a stupid dock boy from the waterfront, what do you know about anything? If she knew who and what you really are, do you truly believe she’d look at you twice?”

  Nicolo fell silent. Finally, he spoke, his head arched back in the seat. “You’re right, Cabi, I’m nothing, a nobody. I have gone beyond myself, believing things I should not believe because of all the attention and the fancy clothes I wear for this grand game of yours.”

  “You have the rest of your life ahead of you, my darling boy. Consider all this as an experience that will help you grow into a man.… Now, be quiet, for I must think.”

  “What must you think about?”

  “About the woman I’m about to meet in this Silver Spring.”

  “I must think also,” said the dock boy from Portici.

  Hawthorne dressed in his new clothes with the help of Poole, who tied his tie, stood back, and rendered judgment. “You know, you’re not a bad-lookin’ civilian, as civilians go.”

  “I feel like a starched cornstalk,” said Tyrell, stretching his neck inside the shirt collar.

  “When was the last time you wore a tie?”

  “When I took off my uniform, and that’s the truth.” The telephone rang, and Hawthorne pivoted in pain toward it.

  “Stay where you are,” said Poole. “I’ll get it.” He crossed to the desk and picked up the telephone. “Yes?… This is the commander’s military aide. Please hold on.” He covered the phone and turned back to Tyrell. “Wooly muleshit, it’s the office of the director of Central Intelligence. The man wants to talk to you.”

  “Who am I to object?” said Hawthorne, lowering himself awkwardly on the bed and reaching for the phone. “This is Hawthorne,” said Tye.

  “The director wishes to speak with you, sir. Please hold on.”

  “Good afternoon, Commander.”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Director. I assume you know my rank is in retirement.”

  “I know a great deal more than that, young man, and it’s all to my regret.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been talking to Secretary Palisser. Like him, I was part of Van Nostrand’s extraordinary scam. My God, that man was brilliant.”

  “He was in a position to be brilliant, sir. He’s also dead.”

  “He knew which buttons to push; if things had turned out otherwise, we all would have falsely exonerated one another in light of his so-called contributions. He was the consummate actor, and I, like my colleagues, believed him completely.”

  “What did you do for him?”

  “Money, Commander, over eight hundred million dollars transferred to various European accounts.”

  “Who gets it now?”

  “With sums like that, I imagine it will go to international litigation. First, when the time is right, we’ll have to disclose the illegal transfers. I’ll resign, of course, and whatever grand illusions I had in taking this job are down the tube.”

  “Did you make a profit from the transfers?”

  “Good Lord, no.”

  “Then why take the fall?”

  “Because regardless of my good intentions, what I did was illegal. I used my office to benefit an individual by disregarding the law and concealing my action.”

  “So you were guilty of poor judgment; you weren’t the only one. The fact that you’re willing to admit what you did and why you did it would seem to me to let you off the hook.”

  “For a man with the baggage you carry, that’s a remarkable statement. Can you imagine the pressure on the President? An appointment of his to an extremely sensitive and influential position expediting illegal transfers of eight hundred million dollars? The opposition would scream corruption at the highest levels, as in Iran-scam, and I didn’t even get a security fence.”

  “Forget that crap, Mr. Director,” said Hawthorne, his eyes above the telephone wide, glazed, filled with an admixture of anger and fear. “What baggage do I carry?”

  “Well, I… I assumed you understood.”

  “Amsterdam?”

  “Yes. Why do you sound so surprised?”

  “What do you know about Amsterdam?” Tyrell interrupted, his voice hoarse.

  “That’s a difficult question, Commander.”

  “Answer it!”

  “I can only tell you that Captain Stevens was not responsible for your wife’s death. The system was at fault, not the individual.”

  “That’s the coldest goddamn statement I’ve heard since ‘I was just following orders.’ ”

  “It happens to be the truth, Hawthorne.”

  “Whose? Yours, his, the system’s? No one’s accountable for anything, right?”

  “To cure that disease was one of the illusions I had when I took this job. I was doing pretty well until you and Bajaratt came along.”

  “Get off my case, you son of a bitch!”

  “You’re upset, Commander, but I might say the same to you. Let me tell you something. I don’t like trained U.S. personnel—superbly trained as you were at the taxpayers’ expense—selling out to a foreign government for money! Do I make myself clear?”

  “What you say or think doesn’t interest me. You and your system killed my wife, and you know it. I don’t owe you bastards a thing!”

  “Then get out of our nest. I’ve got a dozen deep-cover agents better than you, and I can insert them without missing you for a minute. Do me a favor, get out.”

  “In your dreams! Friends of mine were killed—good friends—and one who survived may never walk again! You and your hotshots have been about as inadequate as you’ve ever been. I’m going down and deep, and I’d advise you to keep track of me because I’m going to lead you to Little Girl Blood.”

  “You know, Commander, I believe that’s possible, for as I mentioned, you were well trained. As to monitoring you, you can take that to the bank, insofar as your equipment is frequencied into our macrocomputers. Let’s get down to business, Commander. As your people requested, and relayed through Palisser, the communications and transponder units will be combined with no access to outside telephones. Frankly, I think it’s overkill, and our personnel will be individually and collectively upset—they’re among the finest we have.”

  “So was O’Ry
an. Have you told them about him?”

  “I see your point.” The director was silent for a moment or two, not finished, merely pausing. “Perhaps I will, although we have no concrete proof of his having turned.”

  “Since when are we in a court of law, Mr. Intelligence Man? He was there and she was there. One survived and one didn’t. Have our rules of engagement changed?”

  “No, no, they haven’t. Coincidence is rarely, if ever, a factor. Perhaps I’ll explain that there’s evidence that this operation has been penetrated; that could be enough. Sequestration is very bad for internal morale, and these people are all outstanding. I’ll have to think about it.”

  “Don’t think. Tell them about O’Ryan! What the hell else do you need? Why, when there’s a hundred thousand square miles of coastline, was he within a couple of hundred yards of Bajaratt when he was taken out?”

  “It’s not conclusive, Mr. Hawthorne—”

  “Neither was my wife, Mr. Director. But you know and I know what killed her! We don’t have to think, we know. Haven’t you made that leap? Because if you haven’t, you don’t belong in that chair.”

  “I made it years ago, young man, but where I am now demands that I make another leap—not so much of faith, but one of practicality. There are a lot of things I’d like to change around here, and I can’t do it being imperious. There’s been too much of that. Regardless, you and I are working on the same side now.”

  “No, Mr. Director, I’m working for my side and some degree of sanity, if it’s any comfort to you. But not yours. To repeat, I don’t owe you bastards anything—you owe me what you can never pay.” The blood rushing to his head in fury, Hawthorne slammed down the telephone, the strength of the impact cracking the tan plastic shell.

  Raymond Gillette, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, leaned over his desk, his fingers massaging the terrible ache in his forehead. Bewilderingly, the memory of Command Saigon had come back to him, filling him with anger and sorrow, and he did not know why. Then suddenly it was clear—it was Tyrell Hawthorne … what he was doing to the retired naval officer. The similarity to Saigon was acutely painful.

  Back in Vietnam, a young air force officer, an Air Force Academy graduate, had been shot down with his crew, parachuting out of a burning plane near the border of Cambodia, less than five miles from the camouflaged, crisscrossing Ho Chi Minh supply routes. How that man survived the jungles and the swamps while evading the Cong and the North Vietnamese, only God knew, but he had done so. He had made his way south through the rivers and the forests, living on berries and bark and rodents until he reached friendly territory. And the story he brought back to his intelligence debriefing was incredible.