Read Online The Skorpion Directive by David Stone - Free Book Online Page A

skin as shiny as plastic, and totally earless. And the voice, harsh, guttural, as if the vocal cords had been scorched. Burned.
    Smoke had been in a fire, a very bad one, his features melted, burned away. Skin grafts, surgery, whatever had been done for him had not been done very well. Smoke was a walking horror.
    A fifty-foot drop onto a lawn would not kill something like that. Dalton wasn’t sure what would.
    Maybe an RPG.
    “I don’t think he’s dead, Veronika. I think we’ll see him again. Let’s get you into the shower. I think they bypassed the alarm, but your neighbors will have called the police.”
    She shook her head.
    “They’re turning this building into a co-op. That’s why there’s a big scrap bin out at the back. Renovations. They forced out most of the renters. There is only one other family on this floor, the Zuckermans, and they’re in Tel Aviv. The building is made of concrete. I don’t think anybody heard anything. And, if they did, they’d mind their own business. They’re old. They remember the Russians. Old Viennese do not call the police when they hear things in the night.”
    “We’ll have to go.”
    “We?”
    “Yes, Veronika. You can’t stay here.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I think Yusef was here to kill you.”
    “Why do you think that?”
    Dalton laid it out for her, how Smoke had held back, keeping Dalton busy, while Yusef had slipped past him and gone after her. When he was done, her eyes were full of a liquid light, and her skin was as pale as new snow. He took her in his arms and held on to her for a time. Gradually her breathing steadied.
    “Now what? What do we do now?”
    “You take a shower. I’ll clean up the place and dump Yusef in the bin. Then we get the hell out of Dodge.”
    She looked up at him, puzzled, and managed a smile.
    “Dodge? What is ‘get . . . out of Dodge’?”
    Dalton smiled grimly, and bent down to pick up what was left of Yusef, rolling him into the bloody mat, hoisting his skinny corpse easily, draping it over a shoulder.
    “I mean, we’re leaving. Leaving Vienna. Leaving now.”

    THEY cleaned up the flat as well as they could. Dalton carried Yusef’s body down the fire escape, dumping it into the construction bin at the bottom of the yard and burying it in a mounded heap of discarded shingles. When he got back up to Veronika’s flat to clean himself up, she was dressed and holding a small black leather bag.
    She looked shaken, confused, frightened, resolute, and very sad. Dalton, who was feeling a few of the same emotions, and a couple of different ones—guilt and anger being the strongest—thought she was feeling exactly the way she should be feeling.
    She had a small Volkswagen Jetta parked in the lot, a little black bullet with racing tires and a tuned exhaust. She eased it out of the lane, and they headed south through the deserted streets. In a few minutes they were on the Gürtel, and only a short distance from Mariahilfer Strasse. Dalton, in the passenger seat, scanned the streets and the skyline, and the road behind them, looking for a sign of surveillance. Unless they were a lot better than Jagermeir’s team, he was reasonably certain that they were not being followed.
    As they turned south on Mariahilfer Strasse, entering the maze of office clutter and antique housing that ringed the Westbahnhof, the sky in the east was full of a fiery orange light, and a huge flock of ravens was wheeling and spinning in the sunrise, their glossy black wings glinting with gold and copper flashes. Veronika, who had been, in the main, silent as she worked her way through the center of Vienna, finally found a way into the heart of her concerns.
    “Why me , Micah? Why are those men after me?”
    Dalton looked at the side of her face, lit by a shaft of rising sun as they cleared an intersection before plunging back into the shadowed canyons of the Ring District. Her skin was white, and her hands on the leather wheel of the Jetta were white with