alabaster cherubs, copper putti, bronze Valkyries, winged stallions with nostrils flaring—all of this Dream of Ossian imagery overlooking a maze of streets packed with earnest little Austrian eco cars bustling up and down the avenues under a glittering web of trolley wires, like fat white rabbits, late, too late, for a very important date.
It had rained hard most of the day, clearing around seven, turning the Viennese sky into a luminous California sunset. The Ring smelled of wet stone, early-spring mosses, diesel fumes, and, floating on the misty air from a student café across the Strasse, the biting tang of fresh dark coffee.
In this threshold moment, Lasha Seigel took one last chance to pull in tight on the target, filling her lens with the glowing image of a taut, muscular man, narrow-hipped but broad at the shoulders, a little less than six feet, with longish blond hair, a slightly cruel face made of angles and edges, deep-set eyes hooded by the downlight. He was too well dressed to be a student or a tourist, in a long blue overcoat over navy slacks, a blue V-neck sweater, a scarf of pale gold silk, expensive black wingtips.
Her heart rate rose perceptibly as she studied Dalton’s uncompromising face in the lens. Back at the Office, during their final Tactical Briefing, trying to drive home just how dangerous this target was, the unit chief, Nenia Faschi, had told them that the Serbian Mafia, who had tangled with the target several times last year, were calling him the Krokodil. Seigel had to admit he had that . . . look. The voice of Rolf Jägermeier, in his Mobile 2 unit in front of the Regina Hotel, came up in her earpiece. Jägermeier had seen the transmitted image from her digital camera, checked it with a file photo in his laptop.
Ja. Das ist Dalton. Gehen Sie in die Strasse, mit dem Aufzug.
Yes. That’s Dalton. Get down on the street with the Lift Team.
Double-clicking her throat mike to let Jägermeier know she had heard and would comply, Seigel noticed that the Viennese, a wary people, were giving this Krokodil a certain space. She packed up her gear, stopping at the door to see that she had left no traces, and slipped out into the deserted hallway, heading for the stairs, thinking, as she came hurriedly down the darkened hall, He can’t lose us in the Ring. Too many buildings, too much street light.
Across the Strasse, Dalton was thinking exactly the same thing: this was bad ground for a covert meeting. Too brightly lit, too many rooflines, too many long walled-in blocks, and no room at all to maneuver. A cattle chute to the slaughterhouse, Dalton’s CQB instructor at Fort Campbell would have said. Exposed, lines of fire from every angle, fully in enfilade, no chance to get to cover. It must have been hellish to fight in the streets of Vienna during the war, although the Panzers and the Stukas would have been a great help.
There was a broad open space to his right—Sigmund Freud Park, looking threadbare and tired after a hard Austrian winter—and, on the far side of the park, he could see the floodlit yellow hulk of the Regina Hotel. To the left of the Regina, the twin spires of the Votivkirche glittered like silver spikes against the fading glow of the evening sky. A red-and-cream trolley rumbled past on steel tracks, heavy as a Tiger tank, shaking the ground under his feet. A young blond woman in faded jeans and a mud-brown ski vest popped out of a door in the Volksbank Building across the street, clearly in a hurry. She glanced in his direction, seemed to flinch away, and then she jerked her head around sharply, turning north on Währinger Strasse, lugging her camo-colored backpack, melting quickly into the street crowds. That jumpy glance, and her body language as she headed away from him, that was all it took.
His vague ripples of unease hardened into a near certainty. He made the professional decision to assume he was under surveillance. It was the only safe thing to do. But surveillance by whom?
Possibly the KGB.
He had, just a few weeks ago, exposed a KGB mole buried deep inside the U.S. Army, in the process decimating a KGB network in Istanbul and Kerch, so the KGB had no reason to love Dalton. And these days the KGB—who had changed their official name to the FSB in 1991 but who were still thought of as the