The Skorpion Directive Read Online Free PDF Page A

channels, and she hasn’t.”
    “You’d know?”
    “Micah. Sweetheart. This is the CIA, not the IRS. Nobody here can keep a secret. Just ask The New York Times .”
    “So I can assume these people don’t work for us?”
    “Yes. For now. But let me see what else I can find out. Can you tell me why you’re in Vienna? Maybe it’s relevant?”
    “I’m seeing an old friend.”
    “Dear God. Not that Cora Vasari creature? I thought her family stashed her away in a castle in Crete and barred you from the gates?”
    “It’s a villa in Anacapri, as far as I know. And yes, they have. But Cora’s no ‘creature.’ ”
    “I know. I know. Mandy Pownall told me all about her. Mandy loathes her, root and branch, mainly because Mandy has plans for you herself. Anyway, I’m just heating you up. You haven’t said why you’re in Vienna. Or who you’re there to meet.”
    “I don’t like to say it in the clear.”
    “You’re not in the clear. This line is shielded.”
    “Well, keep it to yourself, but I’m meeting Issadore Galan. Galan’s got a problem, a nasty one. I need to meet him, take care of it.”
    “Okay. No need to get more specific. Good luck with him. In the meantime, I don’t think whoever is on you is any friend of ours. So you be careful. Lots of people don’t like you very much. Especially those Cagey Bees. They’re all over Vienna too, horrible nasty little bugs. And you can’t trust the Austrians either. Hitler was an Austrian. So was Henry Kissinger.”
    “Hitler was a Bavarian, but I hear you. Bye, Sally.”
    He rung off, set the machine down, thought it over for a moment, and then picked it up again, hit BROWSER, and pulled up a restricted CIA search engine. Cesar, polishing his silver and looking in the mirror behind the bar, studied the young American’s rocky face for a time and then put his head down and went back to his work.
     
     
     
    ALTHOUGH Rolf Jägermeier was indeed a Pfennigfuchseres Arschloch , he was also a seasoned street operator, and it had been his bitter experience to lose more than one target inside a hotel. A sallow, boneless man with a wide dish-shaped face made morose by years spent disapproving of everything placed in front of it, he had sat slumped down behind the wheel of the gray Audi, fretting and biting his nails for two hours, while the target—who was really beginning to grind on Jagermeir’s nerves—sat at the long bar inside the Regina Hotel, quietly drinking serial scotches and, as far as his watchers could tell from their occasional furtive sashays through the lobby, playing games on his dämliches BlackBerry.
    In the meantime, Jägermeier had multiple agents out and about in the streets, cooling their heels, wandering aimlessly around the Ring District or sitting in cafés buying themselves Löwenbräus and Weiner Schnitzels on his ticket, and all of this dead-end farrago at double time and a half for excessive overtime.
    And then there was Veronika Miklas, the aristocratic little bitch, who had gotten herself so completely burned at the intersection of Währinger Strasse and Rooseveltplatz—she lit his verfluchte Z igarette , can you believe it? — so there was no point paying her overtime to hang about the perimeter with nothing useful to do. At least he could do something about her , which was to cut her loose and send her home. And he was really looking forward to doing it.
    He’d get that stiff-necked little Kokain-Kopf under his heel and grind her into a stain. When he got through with her, she’d be in a mobile unit on her way back to her artsy little flat in Heiligenstadt, sniveling into a hankie, with her tiny ears pinned back and burning cherry bright. So something to savor, at least. But how was he supposed to justify all of this killer overtime to necrotizing fasciitis, his Spitzname for Nenia Faschi, their section chief?
    Reluctantly, after some more nail biting and fretting, Jägermeier decided to confirm Dalton’s status again, this