The Skorpion Directive Read Online Free PDF Page B

sincerely enjoyed having it.”
    “You will have to leave it.”
    “Done. I thank you. Is there anything I can do . . . ?”
    Cesar stiffened, his cheeks darkening.
    “Are you offering me money ?”
     
     
     
    MIDNIGHT, and the tiny pink ears that were burning cherry bright did not belong to Veronika Miklas. Jägermeier had suffered through a very disagreeable confrontation with Veronika, who had set him down hard when, after making a couple of snide references to her previous relationship with “recreational chemistry”—a sore point—he started to criticize her professional skills, she finally reminding him, at the end of a short, sharp encounter conducted on her part with the kind of subzero ferocity that her class had once used to put the peasantry in its place, that her great-grandfather, Wilhelm Miklas, had been the President Doctor of Austria, and had, on March 11, 1938, single-handedly faced down Seyss-Inquart and all his Hitlerite flunkies, thank you very much, you nasty little Schneckengewinde .
    The interview ended in his complete rout—she had called him a nasty little worm, and he had actually apologized to her—and now, perhaps as an indirect result, Jägermeier found that he really—no, really —had to pee.
    He decided to do a press check on the target, while he was at it, dragging his numb butt and aching back out of the miasmic funk of his own methane-rich atmospherics. The Audi was also his personal service car, and he spent more time in it than he did at home in his lonely bed. Jägermeier hauled himself across the steps of the Votivkirche and into the lobby of the Regina, slouching, if not toward Bethlehem, then toward the men’s washroom hidden behind a row of fake linden trees.
    As he passed the entrance to the bar, he glanced sideways just long enough to see that the target was still there—the lazy son of a bitch—sitting with his back to the door now, hunched over what Jägermeier presumed was that damned BlackBerry, his girly-man blond hair splayed out across the collar of his coat and glowing in the downlight. What a tanzender Junge he is , thought Jägermeier, with a curl of his thick red lips. Krokodil! Hah! The only people who have to fear this Krokodil are in the Vienna Boys Choir.
     
     
     
    SADLY for Rolf Jagermeir’s career prospects, the tanzender Junge— the dancing boy—was actually slightly more than two miles north-northwest of the Regina Hotel, sitting on a bench in a small park at the intersection of Heiligenstadter Strasse and Barawitzkag, watching the main entrance to a dreary, slab-sided concrete block of Bolshevik Bauhaus called, appropriately, the Wohnungen Arbeitnehmer Hafen—Workers’ Haven Apartments.
    The blond-haired person currently sitting at the long bar back at the Regina, wearing Dalton’s Zegna topcoat, secretly enjoying Dalton’s scent—a mix of Balkan Sobranie cigarettes and some sort of spicy lemon-scented cologne—and idly fingering the pockets, which were stuffed with euros, was the old Hussar’s niece, Steffi, who had been dragooned into service in exchange for a pocketful of ready cash and the grim admiration of her terrifying grand-uncle Cesar.
    Dalton had already done a series of routine checks to see if there was still any kind of surveillance on him. He was reasonably certain there was not, and that there was no security guard in the building.
    He had only been there for little over an hour, and he was prepared to spend the night, but a few minutes later a familiar rat-brown Opel pulled up at the curb outside the entrance to the Workers’ Haven. There was some sort of brief exchange of hugs with the driver, who, his face caught in a shaft of dim light, looked to be the round fat man with the umbrella he had last seen in Sigmund Freud Park.
    In a moment the passenger door popped open, and the Girl With the Silver Lighter got out onto the sidewalk, looking weary and wrung out as she waved the Opel off, and then turned to trudge up