The Karta Conspiracy

Opening Chapter

AN EARLY MORNING rainstorm plinked percussively on the vent pipes of Mick Pierce's adobe hacienda. It created a plaintive song that amused him. The pipes weren't tuned to any particular scale, and the disharmony was quite original.

"It might let up," Natalie whispered hopefully.

He lay naked in bed with her under a thick patchwork quilt. Their hiking clothes sat piled in two neat stacks ready to wear for a day hike into New Mexico's high country.

"Won't let up," he said. "It'll last all day. You'll see."

He leaned over her and swept her shoulder-length, auburn hair away from her large, disappointed blue eyes.

"We can't lie here all day," she reminded him.

"What's the hurry? Wouldn't you say the hike's off?"

She grimaced as rain fell straight down the chimney and spat in the ashes of their corner adobe fireplace.

Mick leaned back and smiled. He had slept on that very bed as a youth, smelled the same muddy scent of wet adobe, and listened to the same battering on the vents. In the other rooms of his family hacienda, he had once heard gentle Pueblo words, lilting Swedish replies, and the babble of other languages from homesteading immigrants. It took him only a moment to recall whose voices they were.

With a flair for languages, his father had been a top code breaker for the OSS during the Second World War. After the war, he had remained in Washington as a sometime spook for several years before relocating to New Mexico and marrying a fetching young Pueblo Indian of the Tiwa tribe.

Early retirement had meant raising a family on a paltry government pension, but that didn't stop the old goat. They bore and raised Mick in that derelict hacienda in Questa, just outside of Taos.

An introverted lad, he was not destined to roam the scrubland alone. Shortly after Mick turned six, his father had a fling with a striking model in Stockholm. Two years later, an infant son joined the brood.

The little blond-haired boy they took in was named Alec. Over the ensuing years, his face acquired the slim, handsome features and ruddy Irish complexion of Mick's father.

Starved for income, the growing family was forced to open their extra rooms to immigrant families. Chugging pickup trucks and beat-up sedans loaded with extended families had brought the outside world into Mick and Alec's lives.

Each summer, the slim Swedish model would visit the family for a month. She would do some cooking, parade around the hacienda wearing only her undergarments, and torment the young immigrant men. To her, the pastoral American West was a personal playground that she could exploit without consequences.

After four years of undergraduate work at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Mick began a career in the Marine Corps. Forward deployed at various bases from Okinawa to the Mediterranean, he had seen the world and thirsted for more. He and Alec subsequently signed up with the same CIA recruitment officer and found themselves at Camp Perry together training in the muggy, mosquito-infested swamps of Virginia.

There, they had turned their bodies into surprisingly murderous weapons and learned the art of spycraft as it was practiced in those days against the Soviet menace.

While in Lisbon on his second posting, Mick had fallen in love with Natalie, then a fledgling vice-consul at the U.S. Embassy. What began as sightseeing trips to Sintra and the Algarve with the petite, feisty diplomat full of sexual energy soon became much more. It turned into lusty nights with the sea roaring just outside their pousada window, intimate picnics deep in the cork forest, and port wine flowing freely in various bars while earnest singers belted out soulful fados.

Despite being eight years younger, she proposed to marry him, and he consented. With the Ambassador's full blessing, and connections, the chaplain of the carrier USS Teddy Roosevelt married them on top deck during a port visit to Faro. The sailors and officers stood in full dress uniform and saluted the newlyweds as they dashed to a helicopter waiting for them amidships. Then the chopper whisked away the honeymooning couple to the south of Spain.

Several overseas assignments later, with Alec working underground in each country, they had run up against Yugoslavia. Like an embattled serpent, the dwindling country was lashing out at its neighbors.

It became the last place he saw Alec alive, and the end of Mick's short-lived espionage career.

Sticking with the State Department, Natalie had taken a temporary posting as a diplomat in residence at the University of New Mexico where, as she had put it to him, he could heal his wounds in his own time, and in his own place.

As the rain continued unabated, Natalie let out an impatient sigh.

"I heard the same raindrops when I was a kid," Mick said.

"Yeah, and you had to boil your own bath water and share an outhouse with fourteen others," she repeated tiredly from many previous conversations.

The rambling building was still quite primitive. Flagstone floors strewn with hand-woven rugs didn't meet from room to room where tiny steps and arched Pueblo-style doorways could trip or behead an unwary guest. The rooms were tiny with cold two-foot thick adobe walls.

"It feels like a refrigerator," he said. "I can light the propane stove."

"You could warm me up yourself," she suggested in a small voice.

Mick examined the light that played in her catlike sapphire eyes.

"And exactly what do you propose?" he asked, feeling a cold, unwanted tide flood his veins.

Her delicate hands reached upward and explored the tangle of black hair that carpeted the rigid and brawny contours of his chest.

He rolled onto his back and looked at the skeletal rib cage of log beams spaced across the ceiling.

He saw Alec's mother put a finger to her lips and lower herself on top of him. All he saw were the creamy outline of her ribs and two pointed nipples smothering him, shutting out the light.

God, he had waited for her, worshiped her, and wanted her, all the while fearing the consequences of such an act with his half-brother's mother. He had been caught transfixed in the twin crosshairs of desire and guilt.

"It's no use," he said, suddenly gasping for air.

"Why?" Natalie demanded. She crawled atop him and wrapped her well-toned thighs around his abdomen. Her compact body looked even more diminutive wearing his gray muscleman tank top as a nightgown.

She used her hips to try to evoke a reaction from him. Her firm breasts worked their way free through the gaping armholes and brushed against his chin.

He closed his eyes and twisted away.

"Why, Mick? Why can't you anymore?" she collapsed on the blankets.

"Because Alec's gone. I turned my back on him and left him for dead."

"Get over him, Mick," she said, her eyes shut tight and fighting tears. "You didn't kill him. Let's get on with our lives."

"I let him die," he said, his voice suddenly turning hollow with surprise.

He had always been frightened by his relationship with Alec's mother. Even long after she had disappeared from the family in his teen years, Mick had had trouble facing his brother.

He looked past Natalie's form and studied the doorframe.

He remembered hearing the metal latch slip open. He recalled his brother's thin shadow on the ceiling.

He remembered the lust drop out of his body like that fallen latch.

In his adolescent confusion, he wasn't just ashamed to face his brother: he had wanted Alec out of his life.

"I probably even wished him dead," Mick said.

"You didn't wish him dead," she said with a dismissive wave of her hand.

Would he ever tell his wife how often and carelessly he had been seduced as a child? How wonderful and terrifying the whole experience was?

Ultimately, it had crushed his self-respect and rendered him powerless. The presence of his brother was like a catalyst to his guilt. For any harm that befell Alec, Mick personally took the blame. As long as his brother was nearby, and safe, Mick was in control and life could be wonderful.

Rain tapped the earth just beyond the bedroom's recessed window. It streaked the mud-red hacienda's walls and beaded on decorative strands of dried red chili peppers hanging limp in the courtyard.

The day he had watched the Serbs' unchecked rape of Srebrenica, Bosnia, where Alec lay trapped, was the day the demons got loose and his impotence began.

 "Honey," Natalie said softly. "Yugoslavia was a long time ago. Do you still get those dreams?"

"Yes. Good ones and bad ones."

Shivering from the cold, damp air, she propped herself up on an elbow and stared at him. "Okay, then tell me a good one."

"Don't get me started," he said with a smile.

Her harsh gaze softened.

"He looked past her out the window. "Do you remember the fried squid, the fresh fish, and the red Kastelet wine at Rosarij by the Dominican Church?" he asked.

"Dubrovnik," she said. "Do you remember the sunny walk around the city ramparts?"

"All I remember is the wind blowing up your skirt and you had nothing on but that string bikini."

She slapped him lightly.

"Well, the Italian tourists applauded."

"Mick, dear. I remember you stripping down on Lokrum. Remember that island just off Dubrovnik? You weren't too embarrassed then."

"I just joined the crowd. Do you remember that drive across Bosnia? My shoulders still ache when I think about all those madcap Turk and Greek drivers heading for Austria and Germany. They'd tie a brick to their accelerator pedals in case they fell asleep. Always had to pass someone on a curve, just a two-lane highway, ditches on either side."

"Bosnia was so lovely," she said. "Rolling hills, small towns, houses painted white with red roofs set against those green alpine hills. Minarets and Catholic churches dotting the countryside."

"I remember May Day, and people had spring lamb turning on spits in front of their houses."

"And you turned on the radio and they were playing 'Black Magic' as the road wound upward through a pine forest."

"They were selling those braided red berries in Sarajevo, remember? All along the roadside people held them out. What were they, cherries?"

Natalie shrugged her shoulders, her breasts pointing through the fabric of the tank top. "Then we made it over the mountains to the Adriatic."

"Beautiful drive that clung to those cliffs over Dubrovnik. Then there was Mrs. Brankovic's."

Their conversation had gone full circle, and their minds were back in Dubrovnik at their favorite bed and breakfast, a large house up precipitous stairs that faced the city's Southern Gate. A plump old woman had kept a turtle in the garden and greeted them with coffee and cookies.

They would eat strawberries and yogurt under her trellis while the portly woman talked on her portable phone to her daughter up the Dalmatian coast.

"Jos malo kafa, molim." A little more coffee, please. She had happily obliged. The memories went on and on.

Mick found his lips gently pressed against Natalie's mouth. She relaxed against the mattress with a moan. He passed beyond her face and began to explore one of her elegantly shaped ears with his tongue.

For a moment, the sun pried an opening in the clouds. Shadows of a motionless pine tree grew more distinct against their pillows.

"Maybe there is hope," Natalie whispered, spacing out each word between deep breaths.

Then distant thunder, like a convoy of tanks, rolled across the sky. Moments later, brilliant light flashed through the dusty window and an explosive "boom" crashed just beyond the courtyard.

The ground trembled, and he fell back in his pillow. "Then there are the bad dreams," he said, distracted.

Natalie slowly sat up and splayed her legs before her. She cocked her head to one side as if studying a picture on the blank white wall. "We weren't talking about those."