The Venetian Judgment

by David Stone

  “And you think . . . what?”

  “I think . . . I think he probably is what he says he is. Although I don’t like the church-records fire, or the fact that his parents are dead. Also no siblings, no wife—not even engaged. And there are some shots of him—the Paris Station sent me his visa photo, for example—where he looks, I don’t know, wrong. But who looks good in those shots? If you actually look like your passport shot, you’re too sick to travel, right? I really worked that stuff, and there was nothing all that hinky, just the usual chaotic mess of a normal life. Point is, what do you think? I mean, he’s right there in the house, isn’t he? That’s not like you, taking a risk, right? You want, we could flake him somehow, take him in on some phony visa gig, questions about his declaration. He’s a foreign national—he’s French, for chrissakes—we can heat him up, see if he shows any cracks? No muscle, no bruising, just a few hours of hard-ass interrogation by some steroidal federal thugs. I got just the guys. More I think about it, more I like the idea. If he comes through clean, we can set it up that you used your pull with ICE to get him sprung. Then it’s all polka dots and moonbeams for you and the little frog prince, right?”

  Briony stared at the fire for a while.

  “I think you’ve done very well.”

  The man’s voice was heavy with disappointment.

  “So, no flaking a beef? You sure? Come on, just a teensy one?”

  “No, I think I’m . . . satisfied . . . with the results. Very relieved.”

  “Too bad. Would have been fun. Do I send you the hard copy?”

  “Yes. Send it to my office at Pershing Hall.”

  “Okay. Anything else?”

  “Not now. Will you be accessible?”

  “I’m off the grid for a while . . . that thing in London?”

  “Yes. Terrible. I knew her. We all did.”

  “Well, the spanner’s hit the spinners. Agency’s trying to muscle in, but I’m not going to let them near this. Pack of seditious old kiddy diddlers slipping state secrets to the Times.”

  “Yes, I have heard your views. Have they decided anything?”

  “Looks like a simple home invasion that went postal. I have follow-up people inbound right now. First Response said there was no sign that it had anything to do with her profession, no incursion attempts on the grid, no attempts to hack in anywhere so far. She had a lockboxful of jewels, gold, bearer bonds, and they got the numbers to open it, which supports the torture-for-robbery idea. Still, you sure you don’t want some of our security crew up there with you?”

  “No. I was rather worried about this one issue, which now seems to have been resolved, but other than that I’m fine.”

  “Yeah, well, I hope so. This guy checks out, I guess, but I don’t like the idea of you making a brand-new friend at the same time that we lose Millie Durant. I don’t like . . . coincidences.”

  “Neither do I. That’s why I had you check it out. And you did.”

  “Yeah, okay, I’ll stand down. By the way, you hear from Morgan lately?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Last I heard, he was at NAS Souda. How long since you had a call?”

  Briony tried to keep her fear out of her voice. Her son, Morgan Keating, was a twenty-six-year-old U.S. Navy medic. He had been sent out to the Naval Air Station at Souda Bay on the island of Crete a year ago. The base was isolated on the northwestern end of the island, so isolated that service there was pay-rated the same as duty at sea. Morgan had managed to get quarters off the base, which he shared with a couple of E4s. According to his last e-mail, thirty days ago, he was even dating a local girl. Briony didn’t like to hover, so she hadn’t been pushy about e-mail replies. But thirty-plus days was not at all like him. She had told herself—often—that there was a war on and that his silence could have any number of legitimate explanations.

  “Oh, it’s been a while now.”

  “Yeah? That’s not like Morgan. That young man loves his mother. Want me to look into it? I got a guy with the Sixth Fleet. If he’s on a medical deployment anywhere in the Med, I could probably find out.”

  “Oh, that’s not necessary.”

  “You’re being pretty oblique. The little frog prince around?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Look, I’m gonna find out where your kid is, okay? There aren’t that many places they can hide a Navy corpsman. I’ll call back when I know something. You still got that little Sig P-230 around?”

  “Yes, I keep it close.”

  “Good. Keep it real close. Nothing settles a lover’s quarrel faster than a coupla Black Talons in the chitlins. You take care, you hear me?”

  “I will. Thanks again.”

  When she set the phone down, Duhamel was standing in the open doorway, naked, with the last of the winter light a corona around him. Although he looked splendid, his face was in darkness, and there were only two small yellow sparks of firelight reflected in his deep-brown eyes. For a moment, she felt a shimmer of unease ripple through her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said from the shadows, his baritone purr carrying a note of concern, “but I could not help but overhearing something about results? That you are relieved? I do not mean to pry, but are you not well, Briony?”

  She heard the note of genuine concern in his voice, and it warmed her. She was too old to fall in love, but you’re never too old to be loved.

  “No, nothing, just the usual woman stuff. Came back negative.”

  “Good,” he said, relief flooding his voice, his posture changing. “I am not ready to lose . . . to lose your company. You are . . . important . . . to me.”

  Lovely words. She’d heard them before and believed them. Could she believe them now? All men were gifted liars in the early days. Getting laid seemed to inspire them. She was about to say something droll and cool when he stepped into the fire glow and she saw him in that golden light. She let the blanket fall and for a while stopped thinking about anything at all.

  LONDON

  THE STAG AT BAY, SHOREDITCH

  “So . . . let’s review,” said Mandy, relaxing into the booth now that she had made her kill. “It all starts with the Glass Cutters, doesn’t it?”

  “Looks like it,” said Dalton, reaching for his cigarettes, realizing as he did so that England, like all the nanny nations of the West, had banned smoking in public bars. Feeling a tad aggrieved, he called for a Guinness.

  “What are they doing right now?”

  “They’re still working on all the Venona subsets,” said Mandy. “All the intercepted cables from the Cold War and later. You knew that, didn’t you?”

  “I know what the Glass Cutters do, more or less. Decryption’s not my thing. I suck at math and I hate crosswords. But I thought they wrapped up the Venona project in the eighties. Moynihan had all the Venona decrypts made public in ’ninety-five. Nobody even noticed, although the cables confirmed that Joe McCarthy was dead right about Alger Hiss and his Harvard—”

  Mandy rolled her eyes, reached over, and patted his hand.

  “Whatever. Let it go, Micah. Ancient history. You’re in danger of turning into this saggy old sorehead, pounding the long bar at the Hicksville VFW until your false teeth pop out: ‘Lissen up, sonny. Joe McCarthy was a gol-dern hero, I tell ’ee, ba tunderin’ Jaysus!”

  “He was a hero, a Marine combat vet, and I am not a saggy old—”

  “Perhaps not yet, Micah, but you’re well on your way. Can we get back to my subject, please? The Glass Cutters picked up where Venona left off, and now they’re working their way through all the intercepted cables that Venona couldn’t crack, as well as new stuff from the seventies and eighties. They’re triangulating the cipher codes by using archival communiqués from places the Russians pulled out of when the Evil Empire collapsed. The Ukraine, Georgia, Latvia, Estonia, what used to be East Germany.”

  “What’s this ‘Venona 95 Unidentified Cover Designation 19’ thing?”

  “Yes. I saw that reference, and I admit I ha
ve no idea. From the context, I’d guess that Stalin had a source close to Roosevelt who was never exposed. They only know him as ‘Unidentified Cover 19.’ People who looked into it a few years back figured this 19 guy could have been Harry Hopkins, but he died of cancer in ’forty-six, so there wasn’t a lot of attention paid. Other people said he was Eduard Beneš, and others were dead certain he was Owen Lattimore, or that it was code for Alger Hiss, although he worked for the GRU, not the KGB, and his code name was ‘Ales.’ So, it’s still up for grabs. Find out who he was and then maybe you open up the box a bit—”

  “You can bet they’re trying,” said Dalton.

  Mandy nodded.

  “Yes. As far as the decrypt itself, it looks like a report to a Soviet control officer named Viktor on talks Roosevelt and Churchill were having with Stalin about opening up a Second Front. Dated May 29, 1943.”

  “Cather was only ten in ’forty-three. He got to West Point in ’fifty-two, I think. Missed Korea. MOS was G2, Military Intelligence. Worked against Castro, and may have been in Bolivia when the military shot up Che Guevara in ’sixty-seven. Did Vietnam, from ’sixty-eight to ’seventy-one. Served in Eye Corps, out of Anh Khe, up near the DMZ. Stallworth used to say he was probably MAC-SOG, and, if he was, he went the distance too, three tours in the open and a lot of black work. Did Phoenix in Laos and Cambodia. ADC at the Paris Accords in ’seventy-three. Got the Beirut watch after Hezbollah butchered Bill Buckley. May have done something with the Taliban after the Russians invaded Afghanistan. His whole era was the Cold War, Vietnam, up to the Soviet collapse in ’ninety-one. He was right in the middle of all of it. The link to some Agent 19 in a Venona cable from 1943 sure doesn’t jump out.”

  “Not yet,” said Mandy, “but the name Fitin rings a bell. Wasn’t he the GRU colonel who specialized in making deep legends for his people?”

  “Viktor Fitin was an espionage genius. They still teach him at Peary. Say the name Viktor to anybody in the trade, they’ll know who you’re talking about. Look, about the Glass Cutters, they’re NSA, aren’t they?”

  “Technically,” said Mandy, “but they’re not working at Crypto City. The AD of RA at Fort Meade runs them. You remember him?”

  “The ex-Marine with the burn scars on his face?”

  “Yes, Hank Brocius. He hates the CIA, thinks we’re all a gaggle of treasonous pencil necks. He didn’t like the Glass Cutters being too near Langley, so he broke them up and scattered them all over. They stay in touch through shielded servers at Fort Meade. But whatever is going on, the Glass Cutters must be making somebody nervous.”

  “How do we know this?”

  Mandy gave him her lifted-eyebrow-and-curled-lip look.

  “Because, as I may have mentioned, somebody just killed one?”

  “Yes. I meant, how do we know that all this is connected? You said they were calling it a random robbery that went bad. Where did this go bad?”

  “Here. Right here in London. At her flat on Bywater Street in Chelsea.”

  “Jesus, who’s got it, the Bobbies? The FBI? The Yard? MI5?”

  “No. She was NSA, so Brocius wants his own people on it. Some NSA field agent named Audrey Fulton. The FBI raised hell, but the DNI made it happen. They’re telling the Yard and MI5 that Fulton’s crew is FBI, but actually they’re part of Crypto City’s security detail. London Station is to provide logistical resources only and otherwise to stay the hell away. As I said, Brocius hates the CIA.”

  “Then how are we involved? I know, duty, honor, country, and all that. But there’s something else going on, isn’t there? Something personal.”

  Mandy looked at Dalton for a while as if she were about to do something difficult that she knew she was going to have to do eventually and now the time had come. Her mood shifted abruptly, all the light leaving her face: “Yes, there is something . . . personal.”

  Dalton sat back, took in some Guinness.

  “Okay. I thought there was more going on than you were saying.”

  Mandy considered Dalton for a time as if taking a reading on his mental state. Then she reached into her purse, took out a small digital camera. She did not hand it to him immediately but held it in her bone-china hands, looking down at it.

  Her expression, normally mobile, reactive, with a quiver around her lips that very easily became a teasing smile, turned still, even grave. Watching a somber mood come over a person as innately sunny as Mandy Pownall was like watching a vandal spray-paint a stained-glass window.

  Dalton braced himself for what was coming.

  “I’m going to show you a file of digital shots, Micah. I wish I didn’t have to. I wish I hadn’t seen them myself. But I think you need to see them. They’re from the crime scene . . . Micah, I really do hate to do this to you.”

  Mandy was deadly serious.

  He felt his breathing alter, tried to get his adrenaline back down.

  She was silent for a time, gathering herself.

  “Well, let’s get this behind us, then. The woman in the pictures had a name. Her name was Mildred Durant. They called her Millie. She was one of the original women who worked on the Venona Project under Colonel Carter. She had a long, full life, served her country well. She had children and grandchildren, and lots of people who loved her. You understand me?”

  Dalton understood that only too well. Working as a Cleaner was like being a homicide cop, a priest, and an executioner. He had seen many photos of what was left of one of their agents or what an agent had done to someone else. Pictures of the victims caught in the obscene sprawl of violent death, of deliberate murder, impose a special burden on anyone who must look at them. The victim needs to be honored, to be recognized as a human being, and, for a moment, held in your own heart, as much as you can, as she was held in the hearts of those who knew and loved her in life.

  You owed them that much.

  Mandy passed the camera over to Dalton. He pressed the ON button and looked at the wide LCD screen. There were thirty pictures on the chip, taken from several angles. It was brutally clear from the shots that they were taken by the killer, or killers, before, during, and after the murder. Looking at what was being done to the frail nude body of an elderly woman was like looking into the sun. It couldn’t be done for long, and Dalton was no different.

  There was a long silence between them after he set the camera down. Mandy picked it up and put it in her purse again, handling it like poison, which it was. Dalton knew he would never forget those shots, that they’d come back to him every now and then for the rest of his life, that he was not the same man now that he had been a few seconds ago.

  Mandy, knowing this, feeling it herself, reached out and put a hand on his wrist, not to comfort him so much as to touch another human in the midst of such a cold place.

  “Micah, I have to tell you this part too. Whoever did this sent copies of the shots to everyone on the victim’s e-mail list. Her kids. Her grandchildren. Her brother. College alumni. Hank Brocius too. Sound familiar to you?”

  Dalton was staring at her, his expression setting like concrete. Mandy held his look.

  “Yes, I thought it might.”

  Dalton looked out at the rain streaming down the pub windows. Night was coming on, and the little pin lights across the street were bravely blinking on in the storm. You could almost hear Vera Lynn singing, he thought: When the lights go on again all over the world. Then a procession of mole people passed by the windows of the pub, blurred brown figures hunched against the driving rain, braced against the coming of the night.

  “But what about this home-invasion angle? I mean, taking the photographs? Sending them out to the family? Are there any records of that kind of thing happening in London—hell, anywhere in the U.K.?”

  Mandy shook her head.

  “Nothing remotely like this. Lots of things as weird: this is England, isn’t it? We gave the world Jack the Ripper. But the . . . methods here? The extreme violence, the way it was . . . prolonged? I’ve seen crime scene shots
like these only in one other place and that was when we were in Singapore.”

  Dalton was still struggling with it.

  “I mean, didn’t they find his body in the water off Santorini? Strangled with a scarf. Cut up. Sexually mutilated. Do you really think it’s him?”

  She considered it for a while, staring at her cold tea, listening to the rain. Finally, she said, “I really don’t know for sure. What I do know is that the Glass Cutters stumbled onto something that brought Mariah Vale down on Deacon Cather’s head, and now one of them is dead. And either the killing was random or it wasn’t. And, if it wasn’t, the NSA isn’t going to let us poke around at their end, so we need a line of our own. And, as far as I can see, this is the only one we have.”