Read The Orpheus Deception Online
Authors: David Stone
The Orpheus Deception (46 page)
“Jesus. Anybody else?”
“Tia Sally, but she pretty old now.”
“So am I. She had a pub in Manado, didn’t she?”
“Yes. The Blue Bird. Next to KIPAM, near Sam Ratulangi Airport.”
“Kee Pam?” said Dalton. “Who’s Kee Pam?”
“Komando Intai Para Amfibi,” said Fyke. “Indonesian Special Forces. Snake eaters, just like you, only Marines instead of Army. You never heard of them?”
“Not under that name,” said Dalton. “This Tia Sally, she a good source?”
“She was,” said Fyke. Ki shook his head.
“Not now. She have diabetes. Lost legs. She sit in wheelchair all day by cash register, smoke-smoke, make sure her people not steal too much.”
“She always knew who was doing what in the Celebes, though.”
“Yeah,” said Ki. “She
lissen
pretty good still. You want I call?”
lissen
pretty good still. You want I call?”
“No,” said Dalton. “Don’t call. We’ll go up to Manado and see her.”
There was a commotion at the front counter. Dalton heard his name being called. He and Fyke came out of Ki’s office and saw Delia Lopez standing in the entrance to the shop. She saw them as soon as they came through the doorway, and ran to the counter.
“Micah, Ray—you have to come. It’s Mandy!”
“What is it?”
“She’s in the bar. I think she might be having a heart attack. I have to go back! Come quick. We’ve called the ambulance.”
They all hit the street at a dead run, weaving through the traffic. A crowd had gathered outside the bar area, tourists and backpackers and Kuta residents, all pressed together in the doorway. Dalton and Fyke went through them like pulling guards, sending people flying into tables. The interior of the bar was crowded with customers, most of whom were gathered around two young Balinese women who were crouched beside Mandy, who was kneeling on the floor, breathing hard, her hand on her chest, her eyes wide. There was a Thai silk scarf on the floor by her left knee, lying in a tangled heap of fiery oranges and brilliant scarlets.
Delia crouched down beside her. Mandy was looking at Dalton, a terrible fear in her eyes, her breath coming in gasps, each shorter than the last. She was trying to speak. They could hear sirens in the distance, coming closer, closing in fast. Dalton knelt down beside Mandy. She reached out and pulled him close, forced out some words he could not understand. He leaned in closer. Her body was hot, and she was coated in perspiration. Mandy tightened her grip on Dalton’s shirt.
“Bitten,” she managed to say. “I put the scarf on . . . I think something bit me!”
“Are you in pain?”
Mandy’s brief sideways glare was truly killing, one of her very best, and she gritted out her answer through clenched teeth.
“Do . . . I . . . look . . .
happy?”
happy?”
“She was bitten,” said Dalton, looking across at Delia Lopez. “She thinks something was in the scarf.”
Lopez immediately pulled up Mandy’s sleeves, tore her blouse open. A large brown spider scurried across the upper swell of Mandy’s china-white breast. Dalton saw a tiny red dot with a drop of blood on her skin. Mandy saw the spider and screamed, slapping at her torso. Delia caught her hands: “No! It will bite again!” The spider was incredibly fast, darting for the cover of Mandy’s shirt. Dalton snatched the spider off her skin; felt a sharp stinging sensation in his palm. Delia threw a bar glass toward him, saying, “Don’t crush it— we need to know what kind it is!” Dalton slapped the glass over his palm and turned his hand over, dropping the spider inside. It immediately began to climb up the side of the glass again, feelers twitching. Dalton turned the glass upside down and slammed it down on the floor.
Men in blue were all around him now, and Fyke was pulling him backward away from Mandy. In a moment, she was surrounded by paramedics. Fyke picked a menu up from a nearby table, slid it under the glass on the floor, and held the glass up to a light. His face changed as he watched the spider scuttle around the interior of the glass.
“Do you know what it is?” asked Dalton.
The spider was about an inch across including legs, dark brown, with a smooth hide and an odd marking on its back. To Dalton, it looked like a violin, and as soon as he realized that his left hand began to pulse. He looked down at it and saw the same kind of mark that he had seen on Mandy’s breast.
Spiders,
he thought, remembering Venice.
Spiders,
he thought, remembering Venice.
Why does it always have to be spiders?
“Yes,” said Fyke. “It’s a brown recluse. A female.”
“Jesus. I thought so.”
Necrotizing wounds the size of dinner plates. Renal failure. Coma.
Fyke looked down at Dalton’s hand, saw the lesion there, a tiny red mark with two bright drops of blood, glittering under the light like tiny rubies. Dalton stared down at it. There was pain, not bad yet but building.
“Boyo,” said Fyke. “You and Mandy need to get to a hospital. Now.”
36
Selaparang airstrip, Tengarra Barat, sixty miles east of Kuta City
For once, Kiki Lujac did exactly what Gospic told him to do. He had Bierko fly him to Selaparang airstrip, sixty miles across the channel from Kuta, and he waited there. And he waited alone. Bierko took off again in a few minutes, telling Lujac that he had orders from Gospic to get the Gulfstream back to Bari right away. There was nothing Lujac could do about that, other than shooting Bierko in the knee with the late Corporal Ahmed’s little semiauto—he’d kept it as a memento of their brief but memorable affair—which wouldn’t have helped, since Lujac couldn’t fly a jet. So, here he was, and if this place wasn’t Hell then it was the place where people who didn’t have the pull to get into Hell right away had to wait around for an opening.
The airstrip was a narrow, pitted stretch of blacktop, unmarked, carved out of the scrub bush all around, and used mainly by local transport services and a few private planes owned by some of the mining interests in the region. A squalid cantonment of tin huts and wooden shacks was clustered tightly around the strip, fighting a losingbattle with the encroaching jungle. There seemed to be no young people, only a few emaciated ancients, stumbling around in the gloom under the forest or sitting slumped over on their porches, staring blankly out into the mist and nursing bottles of lukewarm Singha. There was a large cinder-block building at one end of the strip, tucked into the edge of the tree line, roofed in corrugated iron, with a neon sign in one gun-slit window—TIGER BEER SOLD HERE—and it served as a kind of ticket counter, Laundromat, penny flop, whorehouse, latrine, and wet bar to whomever was unfortunate enough to have to spend any time here, which, in this case, happened to be the Lovely and Talented Kiki Lujac, who was leaning against the pitted wooden countertop and staring down at the surface of his beer, where a tiny winged creature was struggling to stay afloat and looked about to lose the fight at any moment.
There was no one else in the bar area except an elderly woman with Bugis tattoos across her cheeks and one gotch eye as round and yellow as a pickled egg. Her job, as far as Lujac had been able to define it, and he had plenty of time to work it out, consisted mainly of manning the cash register and keeping the beer cold and the mattress turned on the greasy cot at the far end of the hall, next to the filthiest, foulest, and fetidest unisex latrine in all of Southeast Asia.
An undernourished Bugis girl, who looked no older than she needed to, lounged on this stained mattress on the cot at the end of the hall, clacking a wad of gum loudly. And repeatedly. She had an iPod on her belly and was flipping idly through a well-thumbed Manga book, using it, from time to time, to smack another insurgent cockroach into crunchy yellow paste on the wall beside the cot. If the stains were any guide, the cockroaches were losing a lot of good men.
Over Lujac’s head, a broad, flat sail-like device made of woven reeds swept back and forth, stirring the steamy air and annoying the clustered bats trying to get some shut-eye under the bamboo rafters. It was raining hard now, and had been raining for quite a while, the rain drumming on the corrugated-iron roof and making an infernal, monotonous din.
There was a card table in one corner with an old fifties-era Sea-breeze record player on it, next to a pile of—God help us all—Wayne Newton albums. So far, Lujac hadn’t succumbed to the siren call of “Danke Schoen,” but if the scrawny Bugis pop tart at the far end of the hallway didn’t stop smacking her gum like that pretty damn soon he was going to take one of the Wayne Newton LPs down there and saw her head off with it.
Time passed, during which a lot more bugger-all happened in various deeply forgettable ways, but Kiki Lujac had stopped paying close attention and had sunk into a kind of a lizardlike torpor, during which he entertained a series of lurid fantasies involving Micah Dalton and a rubber dropcloth and a variety of everyday objects one might find around the house. He had conceived an intense resentment of Micah Dalton by this time, because, if Micah Dalton hadn’t been such a tricksy and unpredictable target, then he, Kiki Lujac, would be sitting on the fantail of the
Subito,
in the harbor at Santorini, sharing a deep-dish, ice-cold mojito and a hammock with some pliant hard-bodied Grecian youth seraphically free of those pesky gag reflexes. But, no, here he was, in Hell’s lobby. So Dalton was going to pay.
Subito,
in the harbor at Santorini, sharing a deep-dish, ice-cold mojito and a hammock with some pliant hard-bodied Grecian youth seraphically free of those pesky gag reflexes. But, no, here he was, in Hell’s lobby. So Dalton was going to pay.
Then he was going to find out what Vigo Majiic was doing with Emil Tarc and what it had to do with some drunken ex-spy and his missing tanker and how it could all be handled in a way that would end up with Kiki Lujac on top of the pile and everybody else either dead or wishing they were. The old Bugis woman behind the bar sat up on her bar stool and cocked an ear at the ceiling. A few seconds later, they both heard the sound of a rotary craft coming in low across the forest canopy. The beating of the rotors rattled the corrugated sheets above, drowning out the drumming of the monsoon rains. Outside the open door of the bar, the weeds began to lash around wildly in the downdraft. Lujac pushed himself off the bar and stepped out into the twilight as a very strange-looking aircraft, with a vertical propeller at each wingtip and a body like an oversized Huey chopper, flared out and settled heavily down onto the tarmac a hundred yards from the blockhouse.
It was a Boeing Osprey, a hybrid between a fixed-wing plane and a chopper. Lujac had seen them on the deck of a Grecian aircraft carrier in the eastern Med. They had a range of around two thousand miles, and were used all over the Indonesian Archipelago. Although this one was painted olive drab, it had no military markings, just a registration number painted on its side. Still, it looked pretty official, and that gave Lujac a bit of a jolt in his lower belly. The rotors slowed, rocking the airframe as they cycled. A door popped open on the crew chief’s side, and a squat, plump figure in a cheap black suit more or less flopped out and landed flat-footed on the rain-soaked tarmac. He looked up at the low charcoal gray clouds with an expression of reptilian disapproval on his sallow, thick-lipped face and deployed a very British-looking black umbrella, which was promptly shredded by the prop wash. He glared across the tarmac toward the open door where Lujac was standing. Lujac recognized the man around the same time that the man recognized him. Lujac’s belly went cold and did a slow roll. He had last seen the man in Dalton’s suite at the hotel back in Singapore.
He was Corporal Ahmed’s partner, Sergeant Ong Bo.
37
Ronchi dei Legionari Airport, Monfalcone, Italy
Antonia Baretto was waiting for Nikki Turrin when she walked out into the pale, watery light of Friuli in late November. She was nothing like her voice, which was rich and buttery and had the earthy tones of a mature woman. Antonia Baretto, leaning against her soft-green Alfa Romeo convertible with her arms crossed and a bright smile on her handsome young face, was a Nordic-looking water sprite no older than Nikki. Walking toward her, Nikki felt they could not be more than a couple of years apart, but where Nikki was a tall, elegant brunette with an hourglass shape, Antonia Baretto was slight, slender, pale-skinned, and so white blond she looked almost albino. She stepped forward as Nikki came up and offered her hand—a cool, dry, firm grip—smiling brightly as she did so. Her eyes were clear and blue, filled with good humor and cool intelligence.
“Signorina Turrin. How lovely to see you. The flight was good?”
Nikki rolled her eyes and smiled.
“Milan was a mess. But the flight here was very nice. Thank you for arranging it. I could have driven.”
Antonia waved the comment away, as she opened the passenger door and took Nikki’s carry-on bag, a large red leather item she had bought at the market behind the cathedral in Florence. In a few minutes, Antonia had the Alfa rolling smoothly through the flat farmland around Monfalcone, heading for the coastal highway that would take them down the bay, through Trieste and along the curve of the sound to Muggia, a distance of around thirty miles. Antonia drove well, with none of the stunt-driving lunacy of the typical Italian driver. The day was cool, and there were rain clouds hanging low in the mountains to the east. Antonia slipped a CD into the player—Paolo Conte, to Nikki’s surprise, a singer who usually appealed to much older people—and settled into the leather seat, glancing across at Nikki with a bright smile.
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