The Orpheus Deception Read Free Page A

calm and his skin was very pale. It seemed that a light was shining through him. Dalton looked back at Cora. She was standing there in the rain, her hat in her hands, her black coat blowing around her legs, her dark eyes fixed on him.

    Waiting.

    Dalton turned away from Cora to say good-bye to Porter but Porter Naumann was gone. Where he had been standing a few dry leaves fluttered up in a spiraling swirl, carried away on the back of the rising wind. Faint music was coming from the Piazza Garibaldi, and the sound of many voices. The wind out of the valley grew much stronger, carrying away the music and the voices, pulling at his coat— leaves flew into his eyes and he closed them.

    The sighing of the wind changed into the sound of cheering, thousands of people cheering. When he opened his eyes again, he was no longer in Cortona. He was still in Venice, lying on the steps of the Basilica in the Piazza San Marco, and the crowds were roaring like the sea as the marathon runners swept around the square. Cora was kneeling beside him, and, for some reason, a young Carabinieri trooper was holding a folded cloth against Dalton’s belly. Cora was saying his name, her voice low but urgent. He tried to get up but she pushed him down. He lifted his hand to touch her face and saw bright blood on his fingers.

    “You’ve been stabbed, Micah. We think the blade is still inside you, so you must not move. You must lie very still. Do you understand? The boat is coming. I can hear the siren. Don’t go away, Micah. Please stay.”

    The light grew stronger around her, and the low, charcoal-colored clouds beyond her shoulder changed to a fiery opal. He closed his eyes, and the sounds of the piazza faded away, and, for a timeless interlude, he was aware of nothing but the fluttering beat of his heart and Cora’s cool hand on his forehead. Then the feel of her hand faded, and there was only the hissing of his blood in his ears and the beating of his heart, like the half-heard murmur of a ship’s engine churning away in the darkness beyond the outer reef, and, soon afterward, there was nothing at all, and he was gone.

1

    The Mingo Dubai, Strait of Malacca, the South China Sea

    Chiddy Monkut was a good-natured seventeen-year-old Thai kid with a lot of charm and a ton of potential and fifty-three minutes to live. Chiddy’s only failing, as Father Kevin Casey back at the Jesuit school in Chiang Mai saw it, was a poor work ethic. On Father Kevin Casey’s advice the skinny, henna-haired boy with the outrigger ears had taken a break from his studies at Loyola. “Go off to sea for a year. Learn something about life,” said the leathery old priest, “and think hard about your potential,” meaning it kindly, because Father Kevin Casey had a real affection for the boy. So young Chiddy Monkut went off to sea for a year to learn something about life and to think hard about his potential and it killed him.

    On this windy November evening on the far side of the world Chiddy was pulling watch duty on the stern deck of a five-hundred-foot-long tanker named the Mingo Dubai. The tanker had just cleared the southern end of the Malacca Strait and was entering the Java Sea off Sumatra’s north coast when the long gray shadow boat glided smoothly into her wake.

    It was Chiddy Monkut’s job to notice precisely this kind of thing. Unfortunately, Chiddy was, at that moment, too busy getting himself outside a large jug of the Hindu cook’s potato-peel whiskey to notice the steel-gray cigarette boat that was now cruising along in the white V of the Mingo Dubai ’s wake at a range of about six hundred yards.

    In his defense, the light was failing. A pomegranate sun was setting behind the jagged green crest of Sumatra, and the shadow of the big island was spreading out across the Java Sea, cloaking Singapore and Kuala Lumpur in the fast-falling tropical night. Chiddy waved at the tiny people lining the rail as the Mingo Dubai swept ponderously by the