The Venetian Judgment

by David Stone

  “That’s a small base. Can’t you work back from that? Take the roster, limit the search profile to only those who fit the parameters, add in a limiting factor for access—”

  “Yes, that’s the thing: access to what? We don’t know what triggered this audit, other than the fact that it had something to do with a Glass Cutter operation. I only know Cather’s on it because I sidelined this encryption.”

  “How did you do that? There’s no way you’re on her distribution loop.”

  “No. We’re too close to Cather. Pinky decrypted it for Tony—”

  “ ‘EYES/DIAL’ means the recipient deciphers it himself—”

  “Tony couldn’t decipher a finger jammed into his left eye. Pinky always does it for him. Pinky knows he has to do whatever Tony tells him because Tony knows he’s a latent perv and could burn him whenever he wanted to. And he would. Pinky also leaves his office unlocked whenever he’s in the loo scrubbing away at his flippers. I nipped in and rigged his lockbox codes—”

  “Why? Did you expect this memo?”

  “No. But I knew there was something in the wind when Tony Crane told me to stop copying ‘DD Clandestine’ on the Operational Summaries. Cather was always in that loop and now suddenly he’s not? Tony was vague about it, gave me some nonsense about not cluttering Cather’s desk with trivia. What struck me was that I never heard from anyone at Cather’s end, you know, asking about the summaries, where were they, that kind of thing. I made up some reason to call Cather’s office, and Sally Fordyce answered—”

  “Sally? She used to be with Jack. How’s she doing?”

  “Well, after what happened with you and Jack Stallworth, they really put her through the attar press, but Cather vouched for her and took her onto his staff. Anyway, Sally mentioned some routine thing she saw in that week’s London summary, and I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.”

  “So what they’ve done is construct a quarantine screen around Cather’s office, make it look like he’s still getting all the real stuff—”

  “Including composing fake OpSums from London Station—”

  “That’s what they did to Aldrich Ames,” said Dalton, stunned that things had gotten that serious. “That kind of quarantine operation would need top-level approval. Right from the Director of National Intelligence. He’d have to inform the President, and maybe his cabinet as well.”

  “That’s what I thought too. And I knew Tony wouldn’t isolate Deacon Cather unless he was sure he could get away with it. And he’d want it written down in a formal memo, so he could use it to cover himself if Cather somehow survived . . . whatever it was. So I’ve been hitting Pinky’s lockbox almost every day for the last month—”

  “Why take that risk? And why cover for Cather? He’s a grown-up.”

  “I know how you feel about him. I know Cather promised to bring you back in, and then he never called. I do think he meant what he said, and I think he’s left you out in the cold right now because he knows he’s under some sort of a shadow and doesn’t want you dragged into it. Anyway, there’s no way in the world that Deacon Cather is a mole. If there is a mole at all, which I doubt. Mariah Vale is using this as a way to step all over the operational side, that’s all. She hates it when anybody at Clandestine Services actually goes out and does things in the real world. If she had her way, everybody in Clandestine would sit around in the Bubble listening to Yanni and visualizing world peace. Anyway, this memo turned up two weeks ago. When I saw it, all I could think of was to warn you—”

  “Me? Why?”

  “You were, are one of his Cleaners. If Mariah Vale was trying to hobble Cather, then she’d start by pulling in all his Cleaners and running them through the ringer. Porter always said, in any audit one way to find out what the target is trying to protect is to find out what sectors he never seemed to be interested in at all. So what he did with the Cleaners Unit would be one way to help build up a total picture of what Cather was thinking and doing, and when. You know the drill: find the mole by finding out what the enemy knows and when he knew it and work backward through the possible sources of that information. Look for points of intersection, contact opportunities, travel itineraries that might coincide with major tactical shifts in the opposing intelligence operations. Watch for our sources going silent or doubling and run that backwards to see if that coincides with something the mole might have done, a trip he might have taken. Build up a complete map of the mole’s influence and you will eventually get him. That’s how MI6 finally got Philby and how we got Ames. That’s exactly what Vale is doing. She’s already called in Dewey Strickland and Javier Souza and Miles Terry—”

  “I thought Miles Terry was on the Orpheus?”

  Mandy winced at the mention of the ultrasecret floating CIA prison disguised as a hospital ship that Porter Naumann had set up for Cather a couple of years back, using the Burke and Single banking house as a cover for the operation.

  “He is. Or was. The Orpheus was in the eastern Med, off Rhodes. They sent a Sea King to take him off. He was pretty ticked because they had just taken on a new houseguest.”

  “Houseguest? You mean a defector?”

  “That’s the rumor. One of the old Moscow Center guys. Spent fifteen years as a Rezident in D.C. They didn’t name him but Pinky had made a note beside the decryption. ‘Y. Kirensky’—mean anything?”

  “You don’t mean Yitzak Kirensky! Christ, he’s famous. He’s one of the biggest old thugs in Moscow Center! Don’t tell me he came in?”

  “Yes. I think that was the name. He must be pretty old by now. He came in to the station officer in Athens. They got him onto the Orpheus the same day. The guy had some kind of pacemaker, and it was malfunctioning. Kirensky, he was pretty fragile and seemed anxious to talk. Miles felt they were right on the edge of a—”

  “Man,” said Dalton, thinking of the Yurchenko defection in 1985, “I really hate defectors. They’re either making stuff up to justify a huge payout and an estate in Maryland or they’re part of some Confusion Op.”

  “This guy seems legitimate. He had already given them some material on Russian negotiations with the Iranians about nuclear technology. Langley cross-checked it with other sources, and the data was solid. Could only have come from someone high up in the Kremlin.”

  “How do you know all this stuff?”

  “I’m a sneaky little minx. And it all goes through Pinky’s lockbox.”

  Pinky was Stennis Corso. He was called Pinky only behind his back. Tony Crane’s XO was a small, round seal-like man with slicked-back blond hair and tiny ears, very shy, definitely pink, who could not bear to be touched and who washed his soft, pudgy pink hands obsessively, perhaps with good reason.

  Corso contained in his formidable mind almost all of the secret histories of London Station going back to the Cold War. He was the station’s chief archivist and also its resident expert on the Balkans and any issues that touched on the Adriatic and the Aegean. This required the talents of a Princeton historian, which he had been, as well as an ability to calmly consider the tactics and strategies of the region’s worst people without anger or prejudice, seeing them in the clear—a priceless asset to a CIA station.

  He was therefore London Station’s most valuable analyst, so critical that his latent pedophilia, never acted upon once he had left Cambridge and apparent now only in the care he took to conceal it, was, if not overlooked, then at least tacitly tolerated. Still, the Minders kept an eye on him.

  “That’s a serious security weakness in London Station. What if you get taken up by the Reapers? They’d have the Agency by the—”

  “Now, that’s the odd part, come to think of it. We’ve been monitoring the Russians here, as always, and they’re not doing much of anything: no KGB thugs pretending to read the catalogues at the Tate Modern, no velvety Slavs cruising the fetish clubs looking to snap up another ambassador’s ADC, not even the usual god-awful Trade and Commerce bun-fights that they used to throw to try and cuddle up to
embassy sources. I mean, when you think of it, that’s all pretty strange, isn’t it? Even the Reapers, who are usually active in London, they’ve all been woolly bah-lambs for months now.”

  “They’ve just shaken up the Kremlin,” said Dalton. “Putin’s nailing down his base. Once he’s got that done, they’ll be back out in force. He wants to rebuild the USSR. I’m afraid these are the early days of Cold War Two.”

  “Yes, so am I. I hope the new guy is up to it. If he’s another Jimmy Carter, Putin will have his googlies for cuff links. Anyway, we’re wandering. I figured you were Mariah Vale’s next victim, and from what I was hearing—”

  “Hearing? About me? Hearing from whom?”

  “Issadore Galan. He was worried about you. He got in touch with me—”

  Dalton sat back, staring at her.

  “How? When?”

  “After Chicago, when Cather didn’t bring you to D.C. and you went back to Venice. He took one look and figured you were running off the rails. He contacted me—”

  “How?”

  “Sent me an invoice from Spink and Son, on Southampton Row. The gold coin people. I don’t owe Spink and Son anything. But the invoice amount looked like it could be a time marker. And he was there.”

  “Christ, Mandy, it could have been anyone. There could have been a Reaper crew in a white van ready to take you right off the curb.”

  “I know. But I told you, they haven’t been active lately—”

  “They’d have made an exception for you—”

  “Dear boy, you flatter me. Anyway, the invoice was for a set of Venetian florins, so I sort of made the connection. And I was right.”

  “How’d Galan get into London without Portcullis tagging him?”

  “I asked. The old dwarf just smiled. I think he has a crush on me, by the way, although from what I hear he’s no threat. Anyway, we set up a two-way system, which I’ll explain later, and he kept me informed about you and how you were swooning around Venice, pining for that Florentine ninny-hammer—”

  “I’m aware of your feelings about Cora, okay? The point, please.”

  “The point is, when I realized you were probably going to get picked up by Mariah Vale’s evil minions, I sent the cigarette case to Galan.”

  “You couldn’t just pick up the phone? Or get Galan to say something?”

  “I wasn’t going to mention the Glass Cutters to Galan, was I? And I wanted it to be something only you could figure out. Without employing any method that Vale could intercept. I don’t think she’s corrupted FedEx . . . yet.”

  “Galan put your cigarette case on Brancati’s desk.”

  “Did he? Why not just give it to you? I guess he just likes being Byzantine. Or he doesn’t like to do anything behind Brancati’s back. The point is, you’re here, and now we have to do something—”

  “We? What do we have to do? Why us?”

  “Micah, dear boy, do you really think Cather’s some sort of mole?”

  “Look, Mandy, whatever Cather is—and, no, I don’t think he’s a mole—this is not our problem. You’re an officer at London Station, a long way from Langley, and I’m as good as off the roster entirely. And, not to be too petty, I don’t owe Deacon Cather a damn thing.”

  “It’s not about Cather, you manky git. This audit has derailed Clandestine. Until the DD gets cleared, our whole operational arm is crippled. With men and women in the field. In wartime. Don’t you care about that?”

  “Yes, of course I do. But, like I said, I’m on the outside looking in.”

  “We’ll see about that. Do you have any money?”

  “Yes, pretty much the whole budget from the Chicago thing.”

  “Zowie! So, we are in funds, my sweet?”

  “We? What happened to all your money. Isn’t your family—”

  Mandy’s mood changed a bit, a look of sadness flitting across her face like the shadow of a swift flying overhead.

  “Not anymore, my lad, I’m cut off. Poppy’s gone off us Yanks since that bun-fight in Iraq. Gave me a bloody ultimatum, he did, the old teapot. Quit the Company or be thrust into the outer darkness to wither and die.”

  “What did you say?”

  Mandy made a show of looking about the booth, under the table.

  “I’m here, am I not? In the sinfully silky flesh?”

  “But penniless?”

  “For the nonce. I have the Agency pittance, sufficient to sustain a kind of grinding penury—rather like a monk but with silks and garters. Anyway, yes, I do mean we. So, Micah, my darling lad, hero of the hour, last hope of the West, will you do it? Will you help me? For the motherland—”

  “The motherland? You were born in Knightsbridge, Mandy. You’re only an American citizen because your mother was from Santa Fe.”

  “Yes, so in my heart I’m really a Girl of the Golden West. Come on, Micah, please don’t make me beg. Pleading’s bad for my complexion.”

  Here she rolled out one of her famous up-from-under looks. Dalton always felt that look of hers in his lower belly. Many lesser men, when exposed to it without a welder’s mask on, had simply burst into flames.

  Nevertheless, Dalton wanted very much to say no.

  It looked as if the Agency was once again ripping itself apart over internal security issues, as it had in roughly five-year cycles from the fifties to long after 9/11. Everybody at Clandestine knew the horror stories: the Jewels cipher machines being compromised by U.S. Marines at the Moscow embassy; Jimmy Carter and Stansfield Turner firing eight hundred and fifty experienced intelligence officers in the Far East and Asia in 1978, in the process deliberately wrecking Clandestine Services; Iran-Contra and the disastrous long-term effects of the Church Commission; the fallout at the NSA and the CIA from the FBI’s Power Curve investigation; Howard and Pelton in 1985, which set them up for the Poison Pill gambit the KGB pulled off with the defection of Vitaly Yurchenko later that year, a Confusion Op worthy of Viktor Fitin himself.

  The Yurchenko “defection”—he gave his CIA debriefing team the slip in November of 1985 and turned up back at his old desk in Moscow a Hero of the Revolution—resulted in the exposure, grotesque torture, and eventual execution of fifty-six high-value CIA sources in Russia and across the Soviet domain while sowing mass confusion and distrust throughout the entire espionage structure of the West. The Yurchenko affair created lasting rifts between the CIA and MI6, the French DGSE, the Syrians, the Mossad, the German BND, not to mention the FBI, the RCMP, and the NSA.

  Bill Clinton, a man with a ferocious ideological antipathy for the Agency, took advantage of the general condemnation of the CIA in this period, along with what he called the “Peace Dividend,” to gut its budget by thirty percent, to cull seasoned staffers from almost all the foreign stations, to forbid any Agency contact with what he called “unsavory sources” abroad, and to harry the CIA’s very best Middle Eastern and Indonesian agents into forced retirement. Then, in 1995, as a kind of coup de grace, Clinton instructed Deputy AG Jamie Gorelick to forbid the FBI from exchanging intelligence with the CIA, or, for that matter, over the cubicle partition between the law enforcement side of the FBI and the intelligence-gathering side of the same damned agency, creating the infamous “wall” that effectively blinded the U.S. intelligence community just as militant Islam was on the rise.

  Next came Aldrich Ames, Harold Nicholson, and of course all the famous, feckless, interagency cluster fucks that paved the way for September 11, the gross miscalculations about Iraqi WMDs . . . Taken all together, these events constituted a series of almost mortal blows to the Agency’s professional credibility and to American Humint and Sigint operations worldwide.

  Dalton, who saw the Agency clearly and understood it as well as any man alive, knew that this record appeared to be far more terrible than it actually was, since most of the Agency’s successes—and there were literally thousands of them—never reached the public’s eye in the first place. But these internal convulsions had almost wrecked the CIA, and now the wh
ole self-defeating process seemed to be starting up all over again.

  Not to mention the additional risk of getting involved in a mole hunt with a head-office carnivore like Mariah Vale at the other end. Attempting to conduct a parallel inquiry into the Glass Cutter case without her knowledge would be like trying to pluck a kitten out of a wood chipper.

  On the other hand, what were his options?

  Sooner or later, if his pattern held, two bottles of Bollinger and the Ruger for a chaser? Naumann was right: if he didn’t have work, his wheels started to come off. And, in the end, there was also that pesky concept called “duty, honor, country.” He’d sworn an oath with those words in it at one point, hadn’t he? They rang a bell, anyway.

  “Okay, what the hell, I’m in.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “You won’t regret it.”

  “Ha! Do you really believe that?”

  She reached out, patted his cheek, the one without the bullet scar.

  “Goodness no, dear boy, not a word of it.”

  NEW YORK STATE

  GARRISON, THE HUDSON RIVER VALLEY

  Briony Keating, in the living room, holding the fur wrap over her breasts and belly, leaving the rest of her to shimmer in the warming light of the fire, picked up the phone and said the name that this caller needed to hear. His name was Hank Brocius, the AD of RA for the NSA and at one time, a long time ago, her lover for one brief summer in Rockport. Brocius made the correct reply, and gave her his report.

  “Full name: Duhamel, Jules Thierry Dassault. Brown eyes, black hair going slightly gray, about five-eleven, runs one seventy-five. Born in Chantilly des Bains, France, November twenty-three, 1973, to Lucien and Celeste Duhamel. Catholics, duly registered him in the baptismal record two days later, although the originals—take note—were destroyed in a fire in ’seventy-nine, so this comes from the National Records instead. No siblings. No birth issues. Always been healthy, other than some childhood problems with asthma. Parents, both deceased—looks like a car crash in Bilbao when he was ten. He was okay but got some burns on his back, which were repaired by cosmetic surgery when he was sixteen. Can’t see his back from the shots you sent, so be sure to check, will you? By the way, as Fernando Lamas used to say, ‘You look mahvelous, dahling.’ I know, I know, I’ll delete them. Or post ’em on Facebook. Anyway, the father owned a big chain of photo shops called Kiosks Lumières in Paris and Cannes, and the boy inherited a lot of money. He was sent by an uncle to live with relatives in Montenegro—he’s some sort of minor Montenegrin royalty, is the word—I guess this is where he got the accent you were asking about. Educated in Paris, majored in visual arts and art history, spent time at the Sorbonne but did not graduate. Established a gallery in, get this, Saint Petersburg—I mean, the one in Russia—called Atelier Dassault.Very successful, according to the tax returns he files. Runs it under a numbered corporate shelter based in the Canaries. They sell to all the major houses. Concentrates on fine-art photography, and is well thought of as a shooter himself—had shows in Vienna, Prague, Paris—but is not well known in the U.S. other than that thing in Savannah. Nothing against him in any database. No known bad habits. Credit’s fine, liquidity excellent. Healthy, no STDs—guy in Russia described him as ‘serially monogamous.’ Keeps in shape, obviously, from the shots you sent along. The DNA came back with all the right numbers for his nationality. I called a lot of people in Montenegro, other locations where he does business. Spoke to the girl who runs the gallery in Saint Pete. She said he was gone for the holidays—wouldn’t say where—but he would likely call in soon. So, it all checked out—”