Free The Skorpion Directive by David Stone

station. Tell them everything. Everything . Nothing has happened up until now that compromises you in any way. Tell them I turned up at your flat last night, that I forced you inside. Tell them why. The truth, all of it, about the Nomenklatur , about the word Verwandtschaft —whatever that means—the whole thing. Hold nothing back. Get them to take you into protective custody. Maybe you can get your boss to tell you what Verwandtschaft actually referred to. You can say I forced you to drive me to the train station—”
    “Sure. And perhaps I can tell them that I submitted to rape just so I could get a sample of your DNA. Maybe they’ll even give me a raise.”
    This was said with such a bitter edge to it that it stopped Dalton for a moment. Her face was closing down fast, but Dalton cut across her and drove the argument home.
    “Look, Veronika, if the idea was to frame me with your killing, it’s not going to work very well if you’re not actually dead, is it? This isn’t your fight. You walk away right now—”
    “Not my fight? I killed a man last night. In my own home. And if I leave now, what happens to you?”
    “It’s two hundred and eighty miles to Venice. I have friends—”
    “Really? Like the man who puts the mark on that poster? That said everything was safe? Friends like that? Who else knew that you’d be coming up out of the Schottentor station? And when ?”
    There wasn’t any other answer to that. Dalton had been visiting that prospect for several hours and wasn’t enjoying the view at all.
    “No one. He was the only one.”
    “The Cousins do not tell us who gave them the information about you. We both know Interpol doesn’t do anything but pass on data to real agencies. They’re just a clearinghouse.”
    “Yes.”
    “So he—whoever this friend is—it’s possible he’s the source that Interpol was covering for. He’s the one who put that tell on the poster and led you right into the trap. He wanted you watched so he could set you up somehow—”
    Dalton put up some fences just to see if she could clear them.
    “There’s no way he could have known about my contact with you, about the lighter. None of that was predictable—”
    “No. But you are. You said it yourself. If you’re under attack, the first thing you do is turn right around and go straight at them. The shark-in-shallow-water. If your friend knew you , he’d know that he could depend on you to—what do you say in English—percolate?”
    “Escalate.”
    “Right, and isn’t that what you would do. Every single time?”
    Veronika moved closer, leaned into her argument, her scent around him and her topaz eyes fixed on his.
    “If he has access somehow—we don’t know how—to your BlackBerry, then he knows you searched for the name of a unit member—me—and he knows where you are because of the GPS, so he sends in a team to kill me. Micah, listen, no one else could have. He’s the one behind all this. You had a fallback meet, didn’t you? I mean, everyone does. Where was it?”
    “Leopoldsberg. At ten this morning.”
    “Are you going to go?”
    Galan. Issadore Galan.
    Dalton could hear his laugh, a dry, creaking rasp. The voice of the Joshua tree. He could see his yellow skin, wrinkled and old beyond his years, and his eyes, the eyes of a crow, piercing black, full of sharp wit and cold intelligence. All these features were crowded into the center of a round, bald skull. Then there were the misshapen, clawlike hands, broken with hammers by the Jordanians, his body crippled after that. The stoic grace and resignation with which he bore these marks they had left on him, the things they had done in the months they had had him, things so terrible that when they finally dumped him, bound and naked, out in the Negev and then he later saw himself in the window glass of the Israeli Army medical unit, he quit the Mossad. And he never went back to his wife and family in Tel Aviv.
    Galan went to Venice, to put some sort