The Skorpion Directive by David Stone

lamp.
    “I can’t seem to think straight. Maybe some more coffee.”
    “Then you will be wide awake and stupid. Then what?”
    He sat up straighter, looked around the room as if were surprised to find himself here.
    “Look, I really have to go. Your boss finds out I was here—”
    He stood up, looked down at her, weaving slightly.
    “And where will you go?”
    “Remember? I left a car at the Westbahnhof train station.”
    “The trolleys are shut down. You will walk five kilometers?”
    “Okay. I’ll find a local pensione.”
    She stood up, faced him.
    “No. You will sleep here,” she said, her tone final.
    He looked over, a little longingly, at the big brocaded couch under the row of black-and-white nudes.
    “Just a couple of hours? If you have a blanket.”
    She reached up and touched the bullet scar on his right cheekbone with her fingertip, traced a line down to the corner of his mouth, ran her hand around his neck and pulled him close enough to breathe him in, to smell her own shampoo in his damp hair.
    “Are you scarred everywhere , Micah?” she asked softly.
    “Yes,” he said, with a slight smile. “I’ve been told I look like a battle map of Antietam.”
    “You are horrible to look at, then, if you are naked?”
    “Yes. Hideous.”
    She kissed him very lightly on the corner of his mouth.
    “Then we will turn off the lights.”
     
     
     
    DALTON, waking abruptly, stared up into the blackness above him, his heart pounding in his chest. Beside him Veronika was deep in sleep, one arm on his chest, her hand resting on his pectoral muscle, her cheek on his shoulder, her body pressed up against him, her left leg lying across his belly. In the east, on the far side of the Danube, the sky was showing a faint milky light, but in the city it was fully dark. Vienna was—here in the northern suburbs anyway—as black and silent as a crypt.
    Dalton lay there in the night, his eyes open, feeling her slow, steady breathing and the frantic hammering of his heart in his chest. He looked at the window, where heavy silk drapes kept the room in darkness. A warm yellow light, almost too faint to register on his retinas, was showing around the edges of the drapes, the glow from the streetlamp just outside her window, which was why she had such heavy drapes in the first place. The interior of the flat was black and utterly still. In a moment, he realized what had awakened him.
    The refrigerator in her kitchen was old and tired. The compressor wheezed and rattled and rumbled and groaned when it wasn’t clicking off and on. But all that had stopped. He looked to his left, and saw that the moon-faced clock on the night table was dark. The power was out.
    If the power had gone out, why was the streetlamp still on?
    Of course. A separate system.
    If the power had gone out, would her security box have switched over to battery power?
    And, if it had, wouldn’t it be beeping?
    He had a similar system in his hotel room in Venice, and it always beeped when the power was off. Another kind of system? A different setting on the same system?
    Maybe.
    Maybe not.
    Get up and see.
    He gently eased Veronika’s arm off his chest. She stirred, said something in German he could not understand, rolled over and burrowed into her pillow, went right back to sleep. He slipped out of the bed and stood in the room, his heart rate slowing as he forced himself to be still, to listen .
    The skin on his neck and along his shoulders was cold and crawling. The blackness seemed to press against his eyes. In his throat, an artery was throbbing. His personal sidearm, a SIG-Sauer P226, was in a locked compartment in the trunk of his Mercedes, and the Mercedes was in the Auto-Park at the Westbahnhof.
    Veronika’s H&K pistol.
    Where the hell had she put it?
    He had no idea. An unforgivable lapse of tradecraft, and being dead-bone tired was no excuse. Maybe it was in her night table.
    He pulled on his slacks, came around the end of the bed, keeping his