The Scorpio Illusion: A Novel Page 6

  “It wasn’t my error! You just said it: She wasn’t logged in the system!”

  “Neither are eighty to a hundred others, what do you think of that?”

  “I think it smells!”

  “Including several dozen assets of your own.”

  “That was before I came on board,” said the naval officer curtly. “A system doesn’t work if it’s disregarded. There are fail-safe procedures in those computers.”

  “Don’t tell that to the hackers who broke into the Pentagon machines. They might not believe you.”

  “One in a million chances!”

  “Roughly the same as a specific sperm fertilizing an egg, yet nine months later a life is there. And you took one of those lives, Captain.”

  “Goddamn you—”

  “Spare me,” said the CIA director, holding up his hands, his elbows on the arms of the chair. “That information remains in the confines of this room. For your edification, I made a similar mistake on the Ho Chi Minh trail—and that, too, will remain in this room.”

  “Are we finished?”

  “Not yet. I can’t order you, but I’d suggest you reach Hawthorne and give him whatever oceangoing help he needs. You’re all over the Caribbean, and we’re stretched thin down there.”

  “He won’t talk to me,” said the captain slowly, quietly. “I tried several times. As soon as he realized who it was, he hung up without a word.”

  “He’s talked to someone on your staff, MI-6 confirmed it. He told their man, Cooke, in Virgin Gorda, that Hawthorne knew about the Bajaratt woman, that the Oval Office was under max-security, the President in a jacket. If you didn’t tell him, who did?”

  “I put it up for grabs,” replied Stevens reluctantly. “After I couldn’t get anywhere with that bastard, I told a few men who knew him that if anyone felt he could make any progress with him, to go ahead and give Tye the scenario.”

  “Tye?”

  “We knew each other, not well, but we’d have drinks now and then. My wife worked at the embassy in Amsterdam; they were friends.”

  “He suspected you in his wife’s murder?”

  “Hell, I showed him the photographs but swore we had nothing to do with her death—which actually we didn’t.”

  “But you did.”

  “There’s no way he could have known that; besides, the Soviets left their mark as a warning to others.”

  “But we all develop instincts, don’t we?”

  “What do you want from me, Mr. Director? I’m out of conversation.”

  “Since the British recruited him, hold an immediate staff meeting and figure out what you can do to help.” The DCI leaned over his desk and wrote on a memo pad. “Coordinate with MI-6 and the Deuxième; here are the two men you should contact, and only them and only on scrambler.” The director held out the paper.

  “Right to the top,” remarked the officer from naval intelligence, reading the names. “What’s the code?”

  “Little Girl Blood. That’s when you go on scrambler.”

  “You know,” said Stevens, getting up from the chair and putting the note in his pocket, “I have an idea that we all may really be overreacting. We’ve lived through dozens of alerts like this—hit teams being sent out from the Middle East, psychos waiting to take a shot at the big man in airports, nuts rounded up who’ve written crazy letters—and ninety-nine percent of the time they turned out to be vapors. Suddenly, a lone woman traveling with a kid shows up on our subcellar screens, and the alarms rattle cages from Jerusalem to D.C. with loud bells in Paris and London. Doesn’t that strike you as a little heavy?”

  “How thoroughly did you read the information I got from London and forwarded to you?” asked the DCI.

  “Very. She’s a psychotic for all the reasons the Freudians expound on, and, without doubt, obsession-oriented. That doesn’t make her super Amazon.”

  “Because she isn’t. A larger-than-life subject is an easier target; he or she stands out. Bajaratt could be the girl next door in Centerville, U.S.A., or the vacuous fashion model on Paris’s Saint-Honoré, or a shy sabra private in the Israeli Army. She doesn’t lead charges, Captain, she orchestrates them, that’s her genius. She creates events, then moves the principals within them toward the predetermined objectives. If she were an American and of a different mentality, she’d probably be sitting where I am.”

  “May I ask …?” The naval officer shifted his feet, breathing deeply, his face growing red as the blood rose to his head. “What I did—oh, God, what I did—you said it would remain in this room.”

  “It will.”

  “Christ, why did I do it?” The officer’s eyes were clouded as his body shook. “I killed Tye’s wife …!”

  “It’s over, Captain Stevens. Unfortunately, you’ll live with it for the rest of your life—as I have for over thirty years since the Ho Chi Minh. That’s our punishment.”

  Tyrell’s brother, Marc Anthony Hawthorne—“Marc-Boy” in the Caribbean’s lingua franca—had flown to Virgin Gorda to take over his sibling’s charter. Marc Hawthorne was in several respects the eternal younger brother, slightly taller than the tall Tyrell, quite a bit more slender—very thin to be precise—and with a face similar in appearance but without the crow’s-feet or the neutral eyes of his older, more experienced brother. He was seven years younger, and although it was apparent that he held the first Hawthorne son in great affection, it was also obvious that he frequently questioned his brother’s intellect.

  “Come on, Tye!” he said emphatically as they stood on the deserted dock at sundown. “You quit all that crap! You can’t go back, I won’t let you!”

  “I wish you could stop me, bro, but you can’t.”

  “What the hell is this?” Marc lowered his voice to a guttural incantation. “Once a navy man, always navy! Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Not at all. It’s just that I can do what they can’t do. Cooke and Ardisonne flew around these islands; I’ve sailed them. I know every inlet, every land mass, mapped and unmapped, and there aren’t too many ‘autoritees’ I haven’t bribed with a dollar or fifty.”

  “But why, for Christ’s sake?”

  “I’m not sure, Marc, but maybe it’s something Cooke said. He said they were the ‘whipped of the world,’ not the enemies we knew before, but a new breed, raging fanatics who just want to destroy everything they believe has kept them in the garbage dumps.”

  “That’s probably socioeconomically true. But, I repeat, why are you getting involved?”

  “I just told you, I can do what they can’t do.”

  “That’s not a why, that’s an egotistical quasi-justification.”

  “All right, brother-academic, I’ll try to explain. Ingrid was killed—for one reason or another, perhaps I’ll never find out which—but you can’t live with a woman like her without knowing that she wanted the violence to stop—one way or another. At this point I honestly don’t know which side she was on, but I do know she wanted peace. I’d hold her in my arms and out of nowhere she’d cry, ‘Why can’t it stop? Why can’t the brutality stop?’… Later, when they told me she was a Soviet mole … well, I still can’t believe it, but if she was, it was for the right reasons. She did want peace; she was my wife, and I loved her, and she couldn’t lie to me when she was in my arms.”

  Silence. Finally Marc spoke softly. “I won’t even pretend to understand that world you lived in. God knows, I couldn’t handle it. Still, I have to ask you again, why are you really going back?”

  “Because there’s someone out there who represents something more powerful than we can understand that has to be stopped, and if I can help stop that psychopath because I know a few dirty games, maybe someday I’ll feel better about Ingrid. It was the filthy games that killed her.”

  “You’re persuasive, Tye,” Marc said.

  “I’m glad you agree.” Hawthorne looked at his younger brother and flicked his hand against Marc’s shoulder. “Because for the next week or so you’re running t
he business, which includes looking around for two new sloops, class A, large sail, fore and aft. If you find one suddenly on the market at a good price and I’m not available, put a binder on it.”

  “With what? Paper we can’t back up?”

  “The money will be at our bank in Saint T. tomorrow morning, courtesy of my temporary employers.”

  “I’m glad you mix idealism with reality.”

  “They owe me, more than they could ever pay.”

  “In the meantime, what do I do about another charter captain? We’ve got two bookings next Monday.”

  “I called Barbie in Red Hook; she’ll come on board. Her boat still isn’t repaired from the hurricane.”

  “Tye, you know charters don’t feel comfortable with women skippers!”

  “Just tell her to do what she does with her own charters when they find out that B. Pace isn’t Bruce or Ben but Barbara. She punches out her steward as soon as everyone’s on board.”

  “She also pays him for taking the shot.”

  “So pay, we’re rich.”

  Suddenly, the roar of an automobile engine, followed by screeching tires, filled the twilight from the nearby parking area beyond the dock. Within seconds the muffled voices of Cooke and Ardisonne were heard shouting at Marty and Mickey in the yacht club’s repair shop. Moments later the Englishman and the Frenchman came rushing across the walkway.

  “Something’s happened,” said Tyrell quietly.

  “Something’s happened!” exclaimed Geoffrey Cooke as both men turned and ran up the pier, breathless. “We’ve just come from Government House.… Hello, Marc, I’m afraid we have to talk to your brother privately.” The MI-Sixer pulled Hawthorne to the far left of the pier, code name Richelieu following.

  “Take it easy,” said Hawthorne. “Catch your breath and slow down.”

  “There’s no time!” Ardisonne said. “We’ve received four reports, each claiming to have seen the woman and the young man.”

  “Same island?”

  “No, three, damn it!” said Cooke. “But each has an international bank.”

  “That means two reports came from one—”

  “St. Croix, Christiansted. A plane’s waiting for us at the airfield. I’ll take St. Croix.”

  “Why?” countered Hawthorne angrily. “I don’t want to hurt you, Geoff, but I’m younger and pretty obviously in better shape than you. Give me St. Croix.”

  “You haven’t seen the photographs!”

  “From what you told me, they’re three different people, so what good are they?”

  “You forget so easily, Tyrell. It’s a far chance, but one of them may be the right one. We certainly can’t dismiss them.”

  “Get them to me.”

  “They have to come by courier; Virgin Gorda’s out of our secure routing. The Deuxième is flying them in from Martinique by diplomatic pouch first thing tomorrow.”

  “We cannot waste the time,” insisted Ardisonne.

  “I’ll give you the names of our sources, Tyrell,” said Cooke. “You’ll take St. Barthélémy. Jacques will cover Anguilla.”

  Hawthorne woke up on the narrow bed in the hotel on the island of St. Barts, still angry at Geoffrey Cooke for having sent him into a no-win situation. The native source he had reached through the chief of island security was a known drug informant, a hustler overreaching himself for the prize of three million American dollars. He had seen an elderly German lady, escorted by her adolescent grandson, disembark from the St. Martin hydrofoil. With that flimsy evidence, he had gone for the prize. The grandmother in question, however, proved to be an overly made-up, very Germanic mother who disapproved of her daughter’s plebeian life-style, and had offered to take her grandson on a grand tour of the islands.

  “Goddamn it!” exploded Hawthorne, reaching for the telephone to order whatever breakfast the hotel had available.

  Tyrell walked the streets of St. Barts, passing the time until he flagged a taxi to the airport, where a plane would take him back to British Gorda. There was nothing else to do but walk around; he hated being in hotel rooms alone. They were like solitary prison cells, where a person rapidly became angry with his own company.

  And then it happened. Fifty feet away, walking across the street toward the entrance of the Bank of Scotland, was the woman who had saved his sanity, if not his life. She was, if possible, even more beautiful. Her long, dark hair framing the lovely features of her suntanned face, the way she walked, the sure glide of the cosmopolitan Parisienne who was never above being courteous to strangers. It all came back to him, the glorious sight of her almost more than he could bear.

  “Dominique!” he shouted, parting the bodies in front of him and racing into the street toward the woman he had not seen for so long, too long. She turned on the curb, her face lighting up, her smile filled with joy. He pulled her across the pavement to a storefront, and they embraced, holding one another in quickly remembered warmth and affection. “They told me you went back to Paris!”

  “I did, my darling. I had to get my life together.”

  “Not a word, not a letter, even a call. I went out of my mind!”

  “I could never replace Ingrid, I knew that.”

  “Didn’t you know how much I wanted you to try?”

  “We come from different worlds, my dearest. Your life is here; mine is in Europe. I have responsibilities you don’t have, Tye, I tried to tell you that.”

  “I remember only too well. Save the Children, Relief for Somalia—two or three other initials I could never figure out.”

  “I’d been away too long, far longer than I would have been without you. Organizationally, things were a mess, and several interfering government regimes weren’t helping. But now that the Quai d’Orsay is firmly behind us, things are easier.” “How so?”

  “For example, one time last year in Ethiopia …” As she spoke of the triumphs of her several charities—over bureaucratic barriers or far worse—her natural ebullience lent a kind of lovely electricity to everything about her. Her wide, soft eyes were so alive, her face so expressive, revealing that well of infinite hope she drew from and which sustained her. Her capacity for compassion was almost unreal, made infinitely credible by a sincerity that bordered on naivete, in itself denied by a soft-spoken intelligence and worldliness.

  “… so you see, we got through with twenty-eight trucks! You can’t imagine what it was like to see the villagers, especially the children whose hunger was in their faces, and the older ones who had nearly given up hope! I don’t think I ever cried with so much happiness.… And now the supplies get through regularly, and we’re branching out everywhere, as long as we keep up the pressure!”

  “Keep up …?”

  “You know, my darling, harass the harassers with our own threats, presented gently, of course, with our very official documents. The Republic of France is not to be toyed with!” Dominique smiled triumphantly, her eyes bright.

  He loved her so. She could not leave him again!

  “Let’s go get a drink,” said Hawthorne.

  “Oh, yes, please! I do so want to talk to you, Tye. I missed you so. I have an appointment with my uncle’s lawyer at the bank, but he can wait.”

  “It’s called island charm. Nobody gets anywhere on time.”

  “I’ll call him from wherever we are.”

  4

  They sat at a sidewalk café, their hands clasped across the table as a waiter brought Dominique an iced tea and Hawthorne a carafe of chilled white wine. Tyrell spoke.

  “Why did you disappear?”

  “I told you. I had other commitments.”

  “We might have become one, a commitment, I mean.”

  “That’s what frightened me. Quite simply, you were becoming too important.”

  “For what? I thought you felt the way I did.”

  “Your confusion and your guilt about Ingrid were overwhelming, Tye. You didn’t drink because you were an alcoholic, your charters proved that. You simply had to go a
little wild when you weren’t responsible for anyone but yourself. You couldn’t forgive yourself for what happened.”

  “That was it, wasn’t it?”

  “What was?”

  “You wanted to be more than a nursemaid, and I was so wrapped up in myself, I couldn’t see it. I’m so sorry.”

  “Tye, you were deeply hurt and bewildered, I understood that. If I’d felt the way you say, we wouldn’t have had the time we did together. Almost two years, my darling.”

  “It wasn’t long enough.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Remember how we first met?” asked Hawthorne warmly, his eyes locked with hers.

  “How could I forget?” she replied, laughing softly and squeezing his hand. “I’d leased a boat and was sailing it into the marina on St. Thomas when I had some difficulty pulling into the slip I was told to use.”

  “Difficulty? You came in under full sail as though you were tacking toward a racing marker. You scared the hell out of me.”

  “I don’t know how afraid you were, but you were certainly angry.”

  “Dominique, my sloop was moored in your direct line of attack.”

  “Oh, yes, you stood on your deck, waving your arms and swearing at me—but then I did manage to miss you, didn’t I?”

  “I still don’t know how you did it.”

  “You couldn’t see, my darling. You were so angry, you’d fallen into the water.” They both laughed, leaning toward each other over the table. “I felt so ashamed,” continued Dominique softly. “But I did apologize to you when you came on shore.”

  “Yes, you did, at Fishbait’s Whisky Shack. Your coming over to me made me the envy of all the charters … and it was the beginning of some of the happiest months of my life. What I remember best were the sails we took alone to so many tiny islands, sleeping on the beaches—making love there.”

  “And loving, my darling.”

  “Can we start again? The past recedes, and I’m a lot less screwed up now. I’m even known to laugh a lot and tell dumb jokes, and you’d like my brother.… Can we start again, Dominique?”