David Stone - The Skorpion Directive (Micah Dalton)

Table of Contents

for Catherine Stone

And in memory of

A scorpion and a crocodile reached the edge of a broad, swift-running river, and both paused a moment on the bank. The scorpion, who could not swim, asked the crocodile to carry him across it. The crocodile was reluctant, fearing that once they had set out upon the river the scorpion would sting him. The scorpion replied that if he were to sting the crocodile in the middle of the river, he would die as well.

The crocodile considered this, and then consented to carry the scorpion across the river. But when they reached the middle of the rushing river, the scorpion coiled and stung the crocodile many times.

Dying, the crocodile cursed the scorpion for his malice, but the scorpion answered that the crocodile knew what kind of creature he was when he agreed to carry him across the river and the crocodile should not be amazed when a scorpion behaves like a scorpion. The river, wiser than either, killed them both.

Traditional, possibly from Egypt

Micah Dalton, riding a crowded escalator up into the cold blue light of the Schottentor trolley station, was instantly spotted by a member of the berwachungs-Dienst, in this case a twenty-eight-year-old cut-crystal blonde named Lasha Seigel. Seigel had been assigned the trigger position, the trigger being the most likely member of the Overwatch Service to have First Contact with the target.

HumInt obtained by the Cousinsthey would not reveal the sourceindicated that Dalton was likely to surface at the Schottentor subway stop at some point in the early evening of this day. Seigel had therefore taken up her trigger post at daybreak, in a vacant office on the fifth floor of the Volksbank, on the far side of Whringer Strasse, and had remained there ever since, fixed, alone, without relief, mainly because her boss, Rolf Jgermeier, was a Pfennigfuchseres Arschloch, a blunt Teutonic curse that, when sounded out, needs no translation. The rest of the box team would commence der Aufzugthe lift, the active mobile surveillance operationas soon as Seigel established First Contact. Which, to her credit, she managed to do three seconds after Dalton cleared the escalator exit. In another two seconds she had a digital camera with a thousand-millimeter lens zeroed in on Daltons face. And as soon as she had it focused, down in his lizard brain, Micah Dalton sensed... something. Nothing as specific as a surveillance lens, or the adrenalized young woman behind it. Just a sudden and skin-crawling sense of unease. In his current state, this was not surprising.

He had not slept for two days, and his weary mind was far away in London, recalling the murder of an Uzbek courier on an escalator very much like this one. He became aware that his pulse rate was also climbing, but thinking about the Uzbeks murder could be the cause of that as well, since Dalton had been the murderer.

The Agency had gone to no end of trouble to recruit this Uzbek, whose family was supposed to have a direct connection with the largest al-Qaeda unit in Tashkent, and they were not at all pleased to learn that he had already been doubled by the Albanians, or at least thats what Dalton had been told, by Tony Crane, the head of the CIAs London Station. Dalton, whose time in the Fifth Special Forces had given him some intimate and bloody contact with the Albanians, didnt think they had enough tradecraft to double a decaf mocha latte.

No matter. According to Tony Crane, the inconvenient Uzbek needed his ticket punched. Crane was a languid blond-haired Back Bay princeling with a perma-tan, a history degree from Oxford, and a Harvard Yard drawl. His only firsthand experience of incoming fire was facing a forehand smash on a clay court. Nevertheless, Crane labored, with some success, at least among the young and gullible on the staff, to create the impression that he and sudden death had been roommates at Choate. Crane wanted the hit done in a memorable way, so those fucking Albanians would get the fucking point.

Cranes XO, Stennis Corso, known as Pinky behind his back, a round, seal-like little man with tiny pink ears and bright pink cheeks and soft pink hands that were always raw from too much scrubbingno one at London Station cared to know whyhad a hopelessly mad crush on Dalton at the time, so Dalton got the assignment as a kind of burnt offering from Pinky, whose private passion for Dalton had tented Pinkys hand-sewn Quaker bedspread for over two years.

Dalton resented the assignment bitterly: he didnt mind a necessary combat killing, but he deeply despised murder. Nevertheless, he had stayed on the Uzbek for a couple of weeks, realizing pretty early on that, for a double agent supposedly steeped in guile, the fragile old man had the situational awareness of a mollusk.

On the day marked for what Crane liked to call the hitthe Friday of the Victoria Day weekend, a three-day holiday in LondonDalton had stalked him for hours, checking for countersurveillance, waiting for his moment, which, as these moments often do, presented itself on an escalator, in this case the one inside the Marylebone tube station. He could still see the old mans tweed coat, draped over his narrow bony shoulders like a shawl, his yellow-gray hair, damp with sweat, his left hand shoved deep into his coat pocket, a few inches of his spine showing above a grimy white shirt collar, as he rode the escalator up into the rush-hour clamor of a London afternoon, his right hand, clawlike, gripping the worn rubber rail. The Uzbek was deep inside himself, curled up inside his thoughts like a cat in a closet.

In the final seconds of his life the old man, perhaps sensing Dalton closing in, turned sharply, his blue lips tight, his cheekbones jutting out, his milky eyes widening. Dalton showed his teeth in what he quite mistakenly imagined to be a disarming smile and put four subsonic .22s into the old mans lungs, the mans shocked breath a short, sharp puff of peppermint and whisky straight into Daltons face.

The chuffing crackle of the Ruger, the silenced muzzle pressed hard up against the mans woolen vest, was no louder than a dry cough, barely heard above the shuffling din of the crowds, the roar of the subway, and the rattle-clank-rattle of the ancient cast-iron escalator. Four in the lungs looks a lot like a fainting spell to anyone passing by, and everyone did just that.

The Uzbeks clothes reeked of Turkish tobacco. His teeth were too large and unnaturally white, like little slabs of plastic, the gums a lurid pink. Baltic work, very likely. Dalton had seen enough of that sort of Stalinist dentistry in the blackened mouths of bloated corpses all over Kosovo.

He caught the mans body as it fell, holding the Uzbek up, pasting a worried look on his sharp-planed, cold-eyed face for the benefit of the other people on the escalator, all of whom glanced quickly away, avoiding involvement of any kind, flowing easily around the two of them like water over stones.