Free The Skorpion Directive by David Stone Page B

Yusef said just before he died? You asked him who sent him. He used the term utazók . It means ‘wanderer,’ Micah. But I think in Hungarian it’s slang for ‘Hebrew.’ Hebrew actually means ‘wanderer’ or ‘homeless.’ ”
    Dalton looked over at her.
    “Okay. That’s enough. I think I know where he is.”
    “Then we should go and ask him a few rude questions. I can help you. I will call in to work and take some days off. They won’t find Yusef for a month. If ever. I have contacts in the OSE, contacts all over Europe. I can get access to the databases, this Smoke person. There would be paper on a man like that, with such terrible scars. I can drive—I can. What do you people say? ‘Scratch your back’?”
    In spite of his black mood, Dalton had to smile at that.
    “ Watch my back, and you already have. No. You have a life here, Veronika. A good one. Much better than mine. Go back to it.”
    He was thinking, but did not say, People around me die .
    Veronika leaned over and gave him a kiss, a very fine one. The two patrol cops grinned as they passed by, their muffled voices carrying through the window glass. Dalton felt the kiss with varying degrees of intensity everywhere in his body. So did Veronika.
    She pulled back, touched his cheek again.
    “Maybe I don’t like my life that much.”
     
     
     
    LEOPOLDSBERG, a Catholic cathedral-fortress about three miles northwest of Vienna, was a limestone monolith perched on top of what they like to call mountains in that part of Austria. The Danube, not actually blue, ran in a broad, lazy curve around its base before straightening out, splitting in two, and running like a divided highway right down the middle of Vienna. The view from the stone terrace on the south side, a memorial to the war dead, took in the entire city, from the industrial regions in the east to the dense masses of pink stone buildings in the Ring District. Low green hills and tilled farmlands rose up almost to the forward glacis of the cathedral. At this time in the spring, everything was green and growing, and the old city glowed with a rose light under a pale yellow sun.
    They were in Dalton’s ancient Mercedes-Benz, a squared-off and gleaming black tank with a black-leather-and-rosewood interior, that Dalton had inherited from Porter Naumann, along with his town house in Wilton Row and his hotel suite in Venice.
    It was a wildly impractical car, too damned big for most European towns. Getting it through a chicane was like riding a rhino down a wet clay bank. Every time he filled it up, he got a thank-you note from the Sultan of Brunei. It had the carbon footprint of a five-alarm fire in a rubber tire plant, but it was as hard to stop as a heart attack. Dalton could drive it through a brick wall. And the engine block had once taken three 7.62 rounds without missing a stroke. Try that with a Smart car sometime.
    Veronika, when she had first seen it, said all of the same things about it that everyone else did—the Austrians being an earnest and eco-minded people—but by the time they were coming up the long curving drive that led to the parking lot, she wanted to give up her flat and move in. The car had international plates—Dalton always kept a couple of valid sets in a hideaway under the trunk—and today he was using a set linked to an actual consulting firm in Marseille, where he had a freelance stringer who’d cover for him on any official check. And Europe was jam-packed with old black Mercedes-Benzes. So, all things considered, including the black-tinted windows, it was a good ride.
    It was about nine in the morning. The parking lot was full, and the café-restaurant was crowded with people. Hundreds of mangy back-packers and overstuffed tourists were milling about the grounds.
    Veronika wheeled the Benz slowly up and down the ranks of parked cars while Dalton scanned the plates and looked for anyone in the crowds around the cathedral steps who was paying a little too much