The Scorpio Illusion Read online

  “Tye-Boy,” said the mechanic cautiously, “yer not into somethin’ over yer head, are you, lad?”

  “I hope not,” replied Hawthorne, cutting off the line and immediately dialing the number for Paris.

  “llo, la maison de Couvier,” a female voice said.

  “S’il vous plaît, la madame,” replied Tyrell, his fluency in French adequate for the moment. “Madame Dominique, please.”

  “I’m sorry, monsieur, Madame Dominique barely arrived when her husband called from Monte Carlo, insisting that she join him immediately.… As I am a confidante of the madame, may I ask if you are the man from the islands?”

  “I am.”

  “She instructed me to tell you that all is well, and that she will return to you as soon as she can. I praise God, monsieur. You are what she needs, what she deserves. I am Pauline, and you must never talk to anyone in this house but me. Shall we have a code between us in the event the madame cannot be reached?”

  “I know just the one. I’ll say, ‘Saba calling.’ And tell her I don’t understand. She wasn’t there!”

  “I’m sure there is a reason, monsieur, and I’m certain madame will explain.”

  “I consider you a friend, Pauline.”

  “Forever, monsieur.”

  * * *

  On his private island, the padrone hissed and giggled as he wheeled himself to the telephone and dialed the hotel in St. Barts, his new assistants racing behind him. “You were right, my only daughter!” he shouted into the phone after reaching the room. “He bought it! Hook, line, and sinker, as the banal Americans say. He now has a confidante in Paris by the name of Pauline!”

  “Of course, my only father,” said Bajaratt over the telephone. “But I can conceive of another problem, and it disturbs me greatly.”

  “What’s that, Annie? Your intuitions have proved too accurate to dismiss.”

  “Their headquarters are temporarily at the yacht club in British Virgin Gorda—what have they received from MI-6? Or even American intelligence?”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Send an animale from Miami or Puerto Rico. Find out who they have there—and what they have there.”

  “It is done, my child.”

  It was four o’clock in the morning when the telephone pierced the silence of the deserted control tower. Hawthorne rolled off the short bed in panic, blinking his eyes, trying to orient himself, and rushed through the open door to the telephone on the desk.

  “Yes?” he cried. “Who is it?” he said rapidly, shaking his head to throw off the sleep.

  “Stevens, you bastard,” said the intelligence officer from Washington. “I’ve been at this for damn near six hours, and someday you’d better explain to my wife—who for reasons I’ll never understand happens to like you—that I’ve been working for you and not out tripping the light fantastic with a nonexistent girlfriend.”

  “Anyone who uses the phrase tripping the light fantastic hasn’t a thing to worry about. What have you got?”

  “To begin with, everything’s so buried, it would take an archaeologist to sort it out. That number in Miami is unlisted, naturally—”

  “I hope that wasn’t a problem for you,” broke in Tyrell sarcastically.

  Stevens ignored him. “It’s billed to a popular restaurant on Collins Avenue called Wellington’s, only the owner doesn’t know a thing about it because he’s never gotten a bill. He offered up the accounting firm that does his bookkeeping and pays his bills for verification.”

  “The line can be traced; it’s called installation.”

  “Oh, it was traced all right. To a voice-activated machine on a yacht in Miami harbor. The owner’s a Brazilian, currently unreachable in Brazil.”

  “That lupo wasn’t talking to a machine!” insisted Hawthorne. “There was someone at the other end.”

  “I don’t doubt it. How often have you and I monitored a drop or a pay phone during an operational time span? That someone on the yacht was told to be there when your lupo called.”

  “So you didn’t get anything.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Stevens corrected him. “We called in the electronic whiz kids with their voodoo equipment. I’m told they tore that machine apart like Swiss watchmakers, factoring it with several hundred programs, and came up with what they call a satellite laser search.”

  “What does all that mean?”

  “It means they came up with map coordinates based on probable satellite transmissions. They’ve narrowed down the reception areas to roughly a hundred-plus square miles between the Anegada Passage and Nevis.”

  “That’s meaningless!”

  “Not exactly. Number one, that yacht is now under constant surveillance. Whoever goes near it will be taken in and broken—chemically or otherwise.”

  “What’s number two?”

  “Less effective, I’m afraid,” answered Stevens. “We’ve got a smaller version of an AWAC at Patrick Air Force Base in Cocoa, Florida. It can pick up satellite transmissions, but the transmissions have to be active in order to pinpoint the reception dishes. We’re sending it out.”

  “So they’ll shut down on both sides, all transmissions!”

  “That’s what we’re counting on. Somebody’s going to check on that yacht, that machine. They have to. We’ve short-circuited it, so someone’s got to come down and find out what’s wrong and retrieve any messages received. It’s foolproof, Tye. They don’t know we found it, and the second anybody approaches that boat, we’ve got him.”

  “Something’s wrong,” said Hawthorne. “Something’s wrong, but I don’t know what it is.”

  The last light of the descending moon passed over the Miami skyline as dawn broke over the eastern horizon. A telescopic video camera was trained on the yacht in the marina, every image projected on a screen in a warehouse two hundred yards away on the waterfront. Three agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation successively kept their eyes open, taking turns at a table where a red telephone with a single black button would instantly connect them to both the CIA and naval intelligence in Washington.

  “This is bullshit,” said the agent on watch as he got up from his chair to answer the door. “The pizza’s here and I’m not picking up the whole tab.” His two companions opened their eyes in their chairs, yawning as the door was opened.

  The gunfire from the single automatic weapon was absolute and lethal. In less than four seconds the three agents were slaughtered, sprawled across the floor, their blood-soaked bodies riddled. And on the television screen the yacht in the harbor exploded, the sharp, jagged flames drawn to the Miami skies.

  6

  “Jesus Christ!” roared Stevens over the phone to Hawthorne on Saba. “Miami was a massacre! They know everything! Everything we do!”

  “Which means you’ve got a leak.”

  “I can’t believe it!”

  “Believe it, it’s real. I’ll be back in Gorda in an hour or so—”

  “To hell with Gorda, we’re picking you up in Saba. Our mappers say it’s near the target area.”

  “Your plane can’t land on this strip, Henry.”

  “The hell it can’t. I’ve checked with our aircraft controls, you’ve got almost three thousand feet; with reverse thrust at max, they can make it. I want you to check out those coordinates—it’s all we’ve got left! If anything turns up, take whatever action you deem necessary. The plane’s under your command.”

  “A hundred square miles between the Anegada and Nevis? Are you out of your goddamned mind?”

  “Have you got a better suggestion? We’re dealing with a psychopathic female who could blow governments apart. Frankly, with what I’ve learned about her, I’m scared, Tye, really scared!”

  “I don’t have a better suggestion,” Hawthorne conceded quietly. “I’ll cancel Gorda and wait here. I hope Patrick’s got an outstanding pilot.”

  The AWAC II appeared in the western sky, a fat, snub-nosed, unattractive aircraft with its huge disk
protruding above the fuselage. The super-secret plane descended, but instead of landing, swept up toward the end of the runway, circled, and repeated the procedure a second time. Watching, Tyrell had come to the conclusion that the pilot was radioing Patrick Air Force Base and telling them they were out of their minds, when, on the third approach, the bulky aircraft seemed to float down precariously close to the edge of the strip like a feathered pillow, its jet engines instantly roaring in reverse thrust.

  “Hey, mon!” cried the tower controller, his eyes wide, his breathing momentarily suspended as the plane came to a stop several hundred feet from the end of the runway, then turned and taxied back. “That pilot, he good! I never seen nothin’ like that here on Saba. He flyin’ a pregnant cow!”

  “I’m off, Calvin,” said Hawthorne, heading for the door. “You’ll hear from me or my associates. Take the money.”

  “Like I said last night, mon, that would be attractive.”

  Tyrell raced out onto the field as the side door of the AWAC II opened and an officer, followed by a master sergeant, descended the extended metal steps and stretched their bodies. “Damn fine flying, Lieutenant,” said Hawthorne, approaching and spotting the silver bar on the officer’s collar.

  “We try to deliver the electronic mail, friend.” He was hatless, with light brown hair, and a pronounced southern accent. “You the mech-man here?” he asked, eyeing Tyrell’s grease-laden coveralls.

  “No, I’m the package you’re picking up.”

  “No kiddin’?”

  “Ask for an ID,” said the older master sergeant, his right hand ominously inside his flight jacket.

  “I’m Hawthorne!”

  “Prove it, buddy,” continued the sergeant quietly. “You don’t look like any commander to me.”

  “I’m not a commander—well, I was once, but not now. Christ, didn’t Washington explain? Whatever identification I had is at the bottom of the harbor here.”

  “Now, isn’t that convenient?” said the enlisted man, slowly withdrawing a general issue Colt .45 from his jacket. “My colleague, the lieutenant here, operates all that fancy equipment, but I’m on board to look after other interests. Like, shall we say, security?”

  “Put it away, Charlie,” a female voice said as a slender figure in uniform emerged from the hatch door and descended the steps to the ground. The woman approached Hawthorne and extended her hand. “Major Catherine Neilsen, Commander. Sorry for the two passes over the field, but the doubts you expressed to Captain Stevens were on the mark. That was a chancy touchdown.… It’s okay, Charlie, Washington faxed down his photograph. This is the man.”

  “You’re the pilot?”

  “Does that shock the commander?”

  “I’m not a commander—”

  “The navy says you are. Sergeant, perhaps you should keep your sidearm out in the open.”

  “With pleasure, Major.”

  “Will you people cut the … the … nonsense!”

  “You mean cut the shit?” asked the pilot.

  “That’s just what I mean.”

  “And maybe that’s just what we object to. We accept the premise that the services cooperate with one another, but we find it difficult to be told that a former naval officer with absolutely no knowledge of our operations is in command of our aircraft.”

  “Look, lady … miss … Major, I didn’t ask for anything! I got roped into this mess like you did.”

  “We don’t know what the ‘mess’ is, Mr. Hawthorne. We only know that we’re to traverse the given parameters of an area, scanning for satellite transmissions, intercept whatever we find, and deliver the data to you. Then you, and only you, tell us what to do.”

  “That’s … that’s crap.”

  “That’s pure shit, Commander.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’m glad we understand each other.” The major took off her visored officer’s cap, removed several barrettes, and shook her blond hair loose. “Now, I don’t care to breach security, but I’d like an overall view of what you expect of us, Commander.”

  “Look, Major, I’m just a charter man in the islands. I gave up the military Sturm und Drang four, nearly five years ago, and I suddenly got recruited by three governments, three different countries, who mistakenly think I can help in what they call a crisis. Now, if you think otherwise, take this pregnant cow of a plane out of here and leave me alone!”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Orders.”

  “You’re one tough lady, Major.”

  “You’re one outspoken former naval officer, mister.”

  “So what do we do now? Stand here and insult each other?”

  “I suggest we get on with the operation. Climb on board.”

  “Is that an order?”

  “You know I can’t do that,” said the pilot, brushing her hair back with her left hand. “We’re on the ground, where you’re my superior officer; upstairs we’re more equal.… Still, you’re in command of the aircraft.”

  “Good. Get your asses back inside and let’s get airborne.”

  The muffled roar of the jet engines became a constant irritant as the AWAC II crisscrossed the skies, forever banking to reenter the surveillance pattern from yet another point of the compass. The first lieutenant in charge of the complex electronic equipment kept pressing esoteric buttons and twirling mysterious dials while erratic beeps were heard in greater and lesser degrees of volume. With each burst of activity he touched a brief sequence of letters on a computer that produced a printout of his efforts into a wire basket attached to his processor.

  “For God’s sake, what’s happening?” said Hawthorne, who was sitting across from the young officer in a strapped swivel seat.

  “Don’t let the hogs rattle ya, Commander,” replied the lieutenant. “They git a mite loud at lunchtime.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means please shut up, sir, ’cause I gotta concentrate—if the navy will let me—sir.”

  Tyrell unbuckled his strap, got to his feet, and walked forward into the open flight deck, where Major Catherine Neilsen was at the controls. “May I sit down?” he asked, gesturing at the vacant seat beside hers.

  “You don’t have to ask, Commander. You’re in charge of this bird except where airborne safety and regulations are involved.”

  “Can we get by the military horseshit, Major?” said Hawthorne, sitting down and strapping himself in, relieved that the numbing rush of the jets was reduced. “I told you, I’m not navy anymore, and I need your help, not your hostility.”

  “Okay, how can I help—hold it!” The pilot adjusted her earphone. “What, Jackson?… Reenter the last trajectory from the SP?… Will do, genius.” Neilsen again banked the plane in a semicircle. “I’m sorry, Commander, where were we?… Oh, yes, how can I help?”

  “You can start by explaining: What is the last trajectory and why are you reentering it, and what the hell is the ‘genius’ doing back there?”

  The major laughed; it was a nice laugh, devoid of ridicule or pretentious authority; it was a grown-up girl laughing because the situation was funny. “To begin with, Jackson is a genius, sir—”

  “Cut the ‘sir,’ please. I’m not a lieutenant commander anymore, and even if I were, that’s not superior to a major.”

  “Okay, Mr. Hawthorne—”

  “Try Tye. Short for Tyrell. That’s my name.”

  “Tyrell? What a dreadful name! He killed the two young princes in the Tower of London; it’s right there in Shakespeare’s Richard III.”

  “My father had a warped sense of humor. If my brother had been a girl, he swore he’d have called her Medea. As it happened, he was a boy, so Dad settled for Marcus Antonius Hawthorne; our mother switched it to Marc Anthony.”

  “I think I’d like your father. Mine, who barely made the farm work in Minnesota, was an education-starved son of Swedish immigrants. It was either studying like hell to get into West Point
and a free college education or slopping cowshit for the rest of my life. He was very clear about that.”

  “I think I’d like your father too.”

  “Back to your questions, please,” said Neilsen, suddenly distancing herself. “Jackson Poole—of the Louisiana Pooles, mind you,” she allowed, permitting a slight smile to crease her lips, “is a genius with that equipment, as well as a damn fine pilot; he’s my relief, but if I touch his machinery, I get yelled at.”

  “That’s two tough talents. Sounds like he’s an interesting guy.”

  “He really is. He went into the army because that’s where all the real money was going for computer science, but without too many qualified takers. He’s pretty much been able to write his own ticket. Merit counts in the services; they can’t afford to overlook ability.… Incidentally, he just told me to reenter this trajectory from SP. In simple language, that means we sweep back and retrace our current path across the target area from the parameter starting point.”

  “And that means?”

  “He’s trying to find you a pattern—not of the traffic he can identify, which has to be at least fifty to seventy-five, discounting scrambled military and diplomatic—but by factoring in the aberrations, the unusual, the relatively untraceable.”

  “He can do that with those buttons and dials and squeaks?”

  “Oh, yes, he can do that.”

  “I hate Renaissance men.”

  “Did I mention he’s also one of Patrick’s top karate instructors?”

  “If he picks a fight with you, Major,” said Tyrell, smiling, “I’m on his side. A crippled midget could knock me out of the ring.”

  “Not according to your dossier.”

  “My dossier? Is nothing sacred?”

  “Not when you’re assuming even limited control over an equally ranking commanding officer from another branch. Military courtesy as well as regulations require that the replacing officer be convinced of the validity of the command replacement. I was convinced.”