The Scorpio Illusion Read online

  “Hey, wait a minute. Suddenly my perfectly okay engine doesn’t work; suddenly, out of a quiet night on the beach Cookie arrives with our old pal Richelieu from Martinique. What’s going on, gentlemen?”

  “I said we had to talk, Tyrell,” insisted Geoffrey Cooke, MI-6.

  “I’m not sure we do,” replied former Lieutenant Commander Hawthorne, U.S. Naval Intelligence. “Because if what you want to talk about has anything to do with the crap Washington is laying on me, forget it.”

  “You have every right to abhor Washington,” said Ardisonne in his heavily accented English, “but you have no reason not to listen to us. Can you think of a reason? You are correct when you say we should be retired, but ‘suddenly,’ to use your own word, we are not. Why is that? Is it not reason enough to listen to us?”

  “Hear me, and hear me well, fellas.… What you represent cost me the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. The goddamned games killed her in Amsterdam, so I trust you can understand when I say I don’t care to talk to you.… Give these ‘secret agents’ a drink, Roge, and put it on my tab. I’m heading out to the boat.”

  “I submit, Tyrell, that neither I nor Ardisonne had anything to do with Amsterdam,” said Cooke. “You know that.”

  “The fucking games did, and you know that.”

  “Far removed, mon ami,” said code name Richelieu. “Could we have sailed together otherwise?”

  “Listen to me, Tye.” Geoffrey Cooke clamped his hand with a great deal of force on Hawthorne’s shoulder. “We were good friends, and we really must talk.”

  “Holy shit!” Tyrell grabbed his arm. “He used a needle on me—it was a needle! It went through my shirt! Get your gun, Roge …!”

  Before the bartender could retrieve his weapon, Richelieu raised his arm and leveled it at his target. He snapped his index finger; a narcotizing dart flew out of his sleeve into the neck of the man behind the outdoor bar.

  Sunrise. The images came into focus but they were not what Hawthorne’s flashes of recollection projected. Neither face hovering above him belonged to Geoffrey Cooke or Jacques Ardisonne. Instead, they were the familiar features of Marty and his sidekick, Mickey, the cockney dock mechanics of Virgin Gorda.

  “How’re you doin’, bloke?” asked Marty.

  “You want a touch of gin, mate?” said Mickey. “Sometimes it clears the head.”

  “What the hell happened?” Tyrell blinked his eyes, trying to adjust to the bright sunlight that streamed through the windows. “Where’s Roger?”

  “In the next bed,” Martin replied. “We kinda commandeered this villa—we tol’ the front desk we found a nest of snakes crawlin’ into the place.”

  “There are no snakes on Gorda.”

  “They don’t know that,” said Mickey. “They’re mostly loser ninnies from London.”

  “Then where are Cooke and Ardisonne—the guys who freezed us?”

  “Right over there, Tye-Boy.” Martin pointed at two straight-backed chairs across the room. Strapped into them with towels wrapped and tied around their mouths were Geoffrey Cooke and Jacques Ardisonne. “I tol’ the Mick here that I had to do what I did ’cause they said the bloody crown demanded it, but nobody said nuthin’ ’bout what I do after that. You ain’t been out of our sight. And if those bahstards had done you any real damage, they’d be floatin’ bait without a hook on Shark Island.”

  “Then there was nothing wrong with the engine?”

  “Not a thing, chappie. The head boy at Government House called me personally and said it was for your own good. Some fuckin’ good, huh, mate?”

  “Some fucking good,” agreed Hawthorne, elbowing himself off the pillow and looking at his former friends.

  “Hey, mon!” came the throated cry from Roger, on the next bed, his head thrashing back and forth.

  “Check him out, Marty,” ordered Tyrell, pulling his legs over the mattress to the floor.

  “He’s okay, Tye,” said Mickey, kneeling beside the black man. “I made that old Frenchie tell us what he did to you two—it was that or his balls in a cylinder—and he said the whatever-it-was would wear off in five or six hours.”

  “The six hours are up, Mick. Another six, or however long it takes, are about to begin.”

  The woman helped the young man to secure the hull of the sloop in the sand by looping the bow line over a protruding rock in the breakwall beyond the short beach, a breakwall concealed behind a profusion of vines and creeping foliage. “It won’t move now, Nicolo,” she said, studying what was left of the boat. “Not that it matters. We might as well use the damn thing for firewood.”

  “You are mad!” The muscular adolescent started to yank a few supplies, including the rifle, from the deck of the beached sloop. “But for the grace of Christ we would be dead, our bodies at the bottom of the sea.”

  “Keep the rifle but leave the rest,” ordered Bajaratt. “We won’t need any of it.”

  “How do you know? Where are we?… Why did you do it?”

  “Because I had to.”

  “You don’t give me an answer!”

  “Very well, my lovely child, I suppose you’re entitled to one.”

  “Entitled? Three days of not knowing whether I’d live or die, frightened out of my mind? Yes, I think I’m entitled.”

  “Oh, come now, it was never that bad. What you didn’t realize was that we were never more than two or three hundred meters offshore and always to the leeward of the winds; it’s why we came about so frequently. Of course, I could not control the lightning.”

  “Insane, you’re insane!”

  “Not really. Not too long ago I sailed these waters for nearly two years. I know them very well.”

  “Why did you do it?” he repeated. “You nearly killed us! And why did you shoot the black woman?”

  Bajaratt gestured at the corpse. “Take her weapon; the water rises halfway up to the top of that hidden breakwall. She’ll be carried out to sea during the night.”

  “You tell me nothing!”

  “Let’s be clear about that, Nicolo. You have a right to know only what I care to tell you. I saved your life, young man, and at great expense hid you for days on end from waterfront scum who would have killed you on sight. Further, I have deposited many millions of lira for you in the Banco di Napoli, and for these acts I have the privilege of withholding whatever I care not to discuss.… Pick up the weapon.”

  “Oh, my God,” whispered the young man, bending over the uniformed body of the dead woman and wincing as he removed the gun from her hand; the small waves lapped over her face. “There’s no one else here?”

  “No one who counts.” The woman’s eyes strayed up to the island fortress as the memories swept through her mind. “Only a retarded gardener who controls a pack of mastiff attack dogs, and he himself is easily controlled. The owner of this island is an old friend, an old man who needs medical care. He’s in Miami, Florida, for radiation treatments. He goes there on the first of every month for five days. That’s all you have to know. Come, we’ll go up the steps.”

  “Who is this man?” asked the boy, staring at Bajaratt in the sand.

  “My only real father,” answered Amaya Aquirre-Bajaratt softly, dreamily, as they slogged across the beach, her abrupt silence signaling Nicolo not to interrupt her thoughts. And such thoughts they were! The happiest two years of a life consigned to hell. The padrone, the vizioso elegante, was the man she admired most. At twenty-four years of age he had controlled the casinos in Havana, the tall, blond golden boy of Cuba with the ice-blue eyes, chosen by the dons from Palermo, New York, and Miami. He had been afraid of no one, instilling fear in everyone who opposed his decisions. Few had dared, and those who did disappeared. The Baj had heard the stories—in the Baaka, Bahrain, and Cairo.

  The capo dei capi of the Mafia had chosen him, believing he was their most talented acolyte since Capone, who had ruled the American city of Chicago by the time he was a mere twenty-seven. But it all had collapsed for the you
ng padrone when the crazy Fidel came down from the hills and ruined everything, including the Cuba he vowed to save.

  Nothing, however, stopped the golden vizioso elegante, the man some called the “Mars of the Caribbean.” He went first to Buenos Aires, where he built an organization second to none, working with the generals, of course. Then he moved to Rio de Janeiro, building further, exceeding his superiors’ wildest dreams. Consolidating his efforts from an estate exceeding a hidden ten thousand acres, he brokered death throughout the world, recruiting an army of former soldiers, experts in the killing skills, outcasts from the militaries of many countries, and sold those skills for unheard of sums of money. Assassination was his product, and there was no end of buyers in a politically turbulent world. La nostra Legione Straniero the dons called it, roaring with laughter as they drank their vino in Palermo, New York, Miami, and Dallas, accepting their percentages of each expensive kill. Indeed, the padrone’s silent, unseen army was their own Foreign Legion.

  Until age and illness forced the padrone to retreat to his impregnable island. And then, suddenly, a woman came into his life. Across the globe, Bajaratt had been severely wounded in the Cyprus port of Vasilikos while hunting down an execution unit sent out by the Mossad to kill a Palestinian hero who had been spotted there, the firebrand who later became her husband. Leading the counterstrike, the Baj had trapped the executioners offshore, and like a pirate queen, flanking and outflanking them in a fast boat at night, had forced them into the shoals under floodlights, while continuously firing murderous rounds into the cornered Israelis. She had caught four bullets in her stomach, tearing apart her intestines, her life all but given up for lost.

  An underground doctor on Cyprus made it plain that he could only patch her up, partially stemming the internal bleeding. Heavily iced, she might last a day or two, but that was all without advanced surgery. And there was another consideration: No hospital or surgical team with the required technology—either in the civilized Mediterranean or Europe itself—would accept an obviously wounded terrorist without alerting the authorities … and the Soviet Union was no longer a refuge.

  However, repeated urgent calls to the Baaka Valley revealed a possible solution, certainly no guarantee that she would live, but at least an attempt—if she could last two days, or, better, three. There was a man in the Caribbean, a powerful broker of all things, from narcotics to industrial espionage to military secrets and extraordinary arms shipments. He had worked frequently with and for the Baaka, realizing well over two billion American dollars for his endeavors throughout the Middle East. He could not refuse the High Councils; even he dared not do so.

  For several hours he had tried, but the notorious freedom fighter whose life the woman had saved would not be denied. Should the man in the Caribbean refuse, he swore to bring down all the knives in the Baaka Valley, first and foremost his own, across the throats of the ungrateful broker and his allies everywhere.

  Half dead, the Baj had been flown to Ankara, and from there on a military cargo jet to Martinique, where she was transferred to a dual-engine seaplane. Eleven hours after leaving Cyprus, she arrived at the dock on the padrone’s uncharted island. A team of surgeons from Miami who had been in consultation with the doctor on Cyprus were waiting for her; her life had been saved, no expense spared by the reluctant padrone.

  As Bajaratt and Nicolo approached the stone staircase that led up to the fortress-estate, the Baj could not help but suddenly laugh out loud.

  “What is it?” asked Nicolo sharply. “I don’t find anything to be happy about.”

  “It’s nothing, my adorable Adonis. I was just remembering my first days here. You wouldn’t find it interesting.… Come now, the steps are a trial, but they are splendid to run up and down to regain one’s strength.”

  “I need no such exercise.”

  “I once did.” As they began the climb, the memories of those early weeks with the padrone came back to her, and recalling them, there was a great deal to laugh about. At first, when she became mobile, they were like two circling, suspicious cats, she outraged by the luxury he permitted himself, he frustrated by her interference with his opulent way of life. Then, quite accidentally, she invaded his kitchen when he was displeased with the cook’s cannelloni Sambuca Florentine—the same cook who now lay dead thirty feet behind them at the water’s edge. With great apologies to the servant, Bajaratt prepared her own; it pleased the unpleasant owner of the island. Next came chess. The padrone claimed he was a master; the young mistress beat him twice, then quite obviously let him win the third time. He roared with laughter, knowing what she had done and appreciating her charity.

  “You are a lovely woman,” he had said, “but never do that again.”

  “Then I shall beat you every time, and you’ll be angry.”

  “No, my child, I will learn from you. It’s the story of my life. I learn from everyone.… I once wanted to be a big movie star, believing my height and my body and my shining yellow hair would be loved by the camera. Do you know what happened? Never mind, I’ll tell you. Rossellini saw a test I made for Cinecittà in Rome; guess what he said?… Never mind, I’ll tell you. He said there was an ugliness in my blue eyes, an evil he could not explain. He was right, I went elsewhere.”

  From that night on they spent hours together, the two on equal footing, each recognizing the obsessions of the other, each accepting the other’s genius. Finally, one late afternoon, sitting on the veranda, looking at a magenta sun, the padrone said, “You are the daughter I could never have.”

  “You are my only real father,” Bajaratt had replied.

  Nicolo, a step ahead of the Baj, held out his arm as they reached the top step. A flagstone path in front of them led to a huge, wide engraved door at least three inches thick. “I think it’s open, Cabi.”

  “It is,” agreed Bajaratt. “Hectra must have been in a hurry and forgot to close it.”

  “Who?”

  “It’s not important. Give me the rifle in case a dog is loose.” They approached the half-closed door. “Kick it open, Nicolo,” she said.

  Suddenly, as they walked inside, from nowhere and everywhere explosions filled the great hall. The blasts of powerful, short-barreled shotguns echoed off the stone walls as Bajaratt and the boy sprang to the marble floor, Amaya firing indiscriminately—again nowhere and everywhere—until she was out of shells. Then, as the billows of smoke began to rise to the high ceiling, there was silence, a sudden quiet that found both intruders without harm. And both raised their heads as the smoke disappeared through the shafts of the setting sun, streaking through the small windows; each was alive and neither knew why. Then, revealed through the rising smoke was the figure of an old man in a wheelchair propelling himself forward from a recess at the far end of the hall. On the semicircular balcony above the curving staircase stood two men holding the Sicilian weapon of choice—the short-barreled lupo shotgun. They were smiling; their ammunition had been false, shells without lethal contents—blanks.

  “Oh, my, Annie!” cried the frail voice from the wheelchair, the language English but with the rasp of an accent. “I never thought you would do it.”

  “You’re in Miami—you’re always in Miami! For your treatments!”

  “Come now, Baj, how much more good can they do for me?… But to kill your old friend Hectra, who nursed you back to health five years ago, that killing was an act of commitment.… Incidentally, you owe me a woman of like loyalty. Shall it be you?”

  Bajaratt got slowly to her feet. “I needed this place for only a few days and no one, no one, could know where I was or what I was doing, or whom I was going to meet, not even Hectra. You have the radios, the satellites—you showed me them yourself!”

  “You say no one knows what you’re doing, or, more precisely, what you intend to do? Do you think this decrepit figure before you has lost his mind before his body?… I assure you, I have not. Any more than I have lost my familiars from the Baaka to the French Deuxième to the brilliant MI
-6 and their less than admirable American colleagues. I know exactly what your intentions are.… ‘Muerte a toda autoridad,’ is it not true?”

  “It is my life—the end of my life, no doubt, but I shall do it, padrone.”

  “Yes, I understand. No matter how much we inflict, each of us can take only so much pain. I’m sorry for your loss, Annie, your newest loss, the death in Ashkelon, of course. I’m told he was an outstanding man, truly a leader, decisive and fearless.”

  “I saw in him a great deal of you, padrone, of what you were at his age.”

  “He was somewhat more idealistic, I imagine.”

  “He could have been so many things, anything he wanted to be, but the world would not let him. Any more than it would me. The things we can’t control control us.”

  “Quite true, my daughter. I wanted to be a movie star, did I ever tell you that?”

  “You would have been brilliant, my only real father,” said Bajaratt. “But will you let me fulfill my final mission in life?”

  “Only with my help, my only real daughter. I, too, want all the controllers dead—for they have made both of us what we are.… Come and embrace me, as you used to do. You are home.”

  As Bajaratt knelt and extended her arms to the old invalid, he gestured toward the young man, who still crouched on the marble floor, taking in the scene with fascinated, frightened eyes.

  “Who the hell is he?” he asked.

  “His name is Nicolo Montavi, and he’s the essential core of my plan,” whispered the Baj. “He knows me as Signora Cabrini and he calls me Cabi.”

  “Cabrini? As in the beloved American saint?”

  “Naturalmente. For through my actions I will become the second American saint, won’t I?”

  “Delusions call for a great deal of rum and a very large meal. I’ll see to it.”

  “You’ll let me go on, won’t you, padrone?”

  “Of course I will, my daughter, but only with my help. The killing of such men—the world will be gripped by fear and panic. It will be our ultimate statement before we die!”