The Venetian Judgment

by David Stone

“Oh, that one’s really interesting. I got their brochure.”

  She handed him a third note, almost a letter.

  The Ataköy Marina Hotel. It’s in Istanbul, for God’s sake! I played the VOX recording, and it was all Greek to me (get it?), but I don’t think the man calling was Sofouli. I think the caller was Keraklis.

  That whiny voice! He said one word three times. He said subito. That’s Italian for “quick,” yes? But isn’t it also the name of Kiki Lujac’s boat?

  Dalton stared at the note for a time, his mind working. Mandy was sitting forward on the couch, watching him do so with gathering intensity.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “I think,” said Dalton, “we should get off this island.”

  At that moment, the phone rang. Mandy tensed, picked up the receiver, said a few words, and then listened for a time. She said yes and thank you and good-bye and set the phone down again.

  “That was Sergeant Keraklis. He says that Captain Sofouli has some new information for us, about our son’s disappearance, and would it be convenient for us both to come back to the station?”

  “And you said yes.”

  “I said yes, as you heard. They’re sending a car. Now what?”

  “He wants us both?”

  “Yes. He put some stress on that. I admit, I don’t like the timing.”

  “You sure it was Keraklis who called you?”

  “Yes. And it was the same voice on the VOX transmission. He made that call to Istanbul, to the Marina. I’m sure of it. His voice reminds me of a dental drill. That stays with one.”

  “And he said he was calling from the station?”

  “Yes.”

  Dalton picked up the receiver, showed Mandy the screen. She leaned forward and looked at the last number dialed from that location, 22860 22232. That call had been made almost thirty minutes ago. No other call had been made from the police station since that time.

  “That’s not this hotel number, is it?” she said. “I think it’s for the Atlantis Hotel, on the other side of the island. What do you think?”

  “He could have been calling from a cell phone.”

  “Yes, there’s that possibility. Do we take that chance?”

  Dalton did not hesitate.

  “No, we don’t. I think that either Sofouli found the transmitter—”

  “If he had, he would have left it in operation while he called, just to keep us in place while he sent a team over.”

  “Yes, good point. Which leaves us with the alternative . . .”

  Mandy studied Dalton’s face, her eyes widening slightly.

  “Sergeant Keraklis is lying?”

  “Yes,” said Dalton. “And he’s on his way over here.”

  “And if he’s any kind of field operator—”

  “His containment team is already here.”

  SEASIDE, FLORIDA

  SEVENTY MILES EAST OF PENSACOLA NAS

  On the inland side of Scenic Highway 30A, on the Gulf Coast of the Florida panhandle, there is a carefully planned little town called Seaside, a charming collection of highly stylized, compact wooden homes that are all built in the same classic Florida coastal style and painted in the officially approved colors of white or blue or red or teal and, if a special permit has been obtained, lime green or pink, and they sit in environmentally sensitive sand-and-gravel gardens trimmed in white picket fences, and every house has a veranda and every veranda has flower baskets, all overflowing with magnolia and bougainvillea and palmetto. The narrow cobblestoned streets are sheltered from the glare of the summer sun and the scouring winds of the hurricane season by towering live oaks and tough old Georgia pines. All the folks are good-ole-boy, shoofly-pie, down-home neighborly. Cars are not allowed, but just about everyone has an electric golf cart made up to look like the surrey with the fringe on top, which is just as cute as cute can be, and everything is done exactly the way it’s supposed to be done, or else.

  On the seaward side of Scenic Highway 30A, a large barrier dune runs for miles along the pristine shoreline of what is called around here the “Emerald Coast,” and the very best homes in Seaside sit atop this immense dune and look out from shaded balconies and palm-tree-lined terraces upon the shimmering blue-green eternity of the Gulf of Mexico. Most of the homes in Seaside have been given pet names by the enormously wealthy retired people from Georgia and Louisiana and Alabama who have their summer homes down here, names such as KATY-DID-IT and KIT ’N’ PRETTY and HEAVEN FOR BETSY, but the large stucco-walled and storm-shuttered Tuscan-style villa that sat high up on the barrier dune at the outer edge of the town line had no name at all, and the number plate had been taken off when the new owner moved in a year ago, around the same time that a tall wooden barrier fence had been constructed around the property.

  Nobody knew very much about the owner, which, in a tight-knit little place such as Seaside, was a difficult state to achieve and required some concentrated effort. The people on either side of the villa knew only that the owner seemed to live alone, had a gleaming white forty-five-foot Hatteras motor cruiser named Conjurado docked at the marina in Destin Harbor, spoke with a strong Tidewater Virginia accent, was tall, tanned, lean as whipcord, with vivid blue eyes and deeply etched lines around his eyes and a long silvery mane of perfectly convincing hair, and that he carried himself ramrod straight and had the air of a retired military man who had made a whole lot of money in the private sector.

  His name was, oddly, not available. The owner of the villa, as reported to the Rate-Payer Registry of the Incorporated Village of Seaside, was a corporate entity known as Conjurado Consulting, registered in Wilmington, Delaware. When directly addressed by an elder townsman, a retired lobsterman named Dub Kingman, who was a curious sort and not at all shy, the mystery man had introduced himself simply as Jack Forrest.

  Dub Kingman had gone online to generate the further information that the mysterious gentleman might be related to Nathan Bed-ford Forrest, the legendary Confederate cavalry commander. At one time, the U.S. Army had carried on its roster a man born on the same date, October 4, 1926, with the same name, James K. Forrest, who had served in various capacities with the U.S. Army’s intelligence branch, and who had been awarded, among lesser honors, the Vietnam Service Medal, the Bronze Star with a V for Valor, and the Purple Heart. James K. Forrest had retired as a major general in 1999. Information regarding the particulars of his service—which country, which units, which campaigns—was listed as “TNA” on the Army website: “Temporarily Not Available.”

  Dub Kingman duly relayed this information to the rest of the village elders. From that point on, they began to regard the taciturn and uncommunicative resident of the former Morley Silverman villa on the East Dune Breaks with the kind of wary affection that old soldiers hold for crusty commanding officers such as George S. Pat-ton or Vinegar Joe Stillwell. They sensed his chilly silence and cold distance were qualities he had rightfully earned in hard service somewhere lethal and were to be gratefully honored by the better angels of the village.

  So “Colonel Jack,” as he came to be known, was accepted into the tight little community of Seaside with a degree of quiet pride and a general determination to protect the old soldier’s privacy from sundry outsiders and local busybodies. Many may have wished to know more about the man who had taken up a great deal of the available ocean frontage and who had not spoken more than a dozen words to anyone in the village in the sixteen months that he had been in residence. Well, they all agreed, weirder folks than Colonel Jack were to be found all along the Emerald Coast, which was known by the residents as the “Redneck Riviera,” and all agreed that nothing good ever came of being a nosy parker.

  All of this is recorded as a kind of preamble to the arrival of a Federal Express truck at the barred gates of Jack Forrest’s villa at three p.m. Seaside time, which was ten at night on the island of Santorini, where Micah Dalton and Mandy Pownall were considering tactics while awaiting the imminent arrival of Sergeant Keraklis.
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  The driver put the vehicle in park and pressed the buzzer beside the solid wooden gates. In a moment, a soft male voice came on the intercom, asked him to state his business, and reminded him to lean out of the window of his truck so that the overhead cameras could get a good look at him. This the driver did, since he had done it many times before all along Scenic Highway 30A, which was well populated if not downright infested with privacy-obsessed people behind heavy gates.

  In a few minutes, a small side door clicked open and the man known to the locals as Jack Forrest appeared, tall, wiry, dressed in a starched khaki shirt and white linen pants and barefoot, his glance moving quickly about the terrain before settling on the face of the young black man behind the wheel, who, as always, was struck by the wintry chill in those pale blue eyes. No small talk was exchanged, as the man signed for and accepted a sealed envelope. The truck backed out onto the highway again, and the man known as Jack Forrest went back inside his gated compound carrying the envelope in both hands, his body erect and stiff, climbing the stone steps to the villa slowly, either like a football player with very bad knees or like a man who had once been shot several times in the back.

  The open and airy interior had been sparsely furnished in dark wooden Shaker-style furniture, clean lines, all rectangles and screens, with a long teak desk that looked like it had been salvaged from a sailing ship taking up the entire width of the villa in front of ornate leaded-glass windows with a fine view out over the broad, churning sea.

  This monastic simplicity contrasted oddly with the Romanesque arches and the Murano-glass lighting and the intricate marble floor the Morley Silvermans had installed at great expense the year before Mrs. Morley Silverman, born Agatha, had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. Forrest crossed the large room to his desk, pulled the chair back, and sat down in front of a gunmetal-gray Sony laptop, dropping the envelope onto the desk and reaching for a pack of Gauloise cigarettes sitting in a large crystal ashtray at his right hand.

  He lit the Gauloise, drew in the smoke through thin pursed lips, a knot of corded muscle convulsing at the right side of his leathery neck as he did so, creating the unsettling impression that a very large tarantula lived right under the skin. His colorless eyes squinting against the burn of the smoke, he leaned back into the creaking wooden chair and considered the FedEx envelope as it lay unopened on the battered surface of the desk. A sticker on the cover said that the envelope had been sent by:

  BEYOGLU TRADING CONSORTIUM

  SUITE 5500, DIZAYN TOWER,

  MASAYAK AYAZAĞA,

  ISTANBUL, TURKEY

  The packet showed signs of having been opened at one point, possibly at the U.S. port of entry, perhaps by the Turks themselves. The customs declaration stated that the contents were ELECTRONIC DOCUMENTS /NCV and not insured. Jack Forrest’s face, as he studied these exterior details of the packet, was closed. The fact that the package had been sent by a public courier indicated a number of things, first among them that the sender had been motivated primarily by haste and not by security. Otherwise, a personal courier would have been sent. This carried implications that would have to be dealt with, sooner or later.

  Forrest exhaled a cloud of smoke, looked out at the light changing on the glittering shoreline as a chain of pelicans drifted past, in a single, sinuous line, uncannily snakelike, each bird gliding motionless, skimming the whitecaps. They looked prehistoric, like pterodactyls, and had the dead-black eyes of sharks. Crushing the Gauloise in the crystal ashtray, Forrest picked up a military dagger, a Fairbairn-Sykes, and used it to open the envelope. He tilted the envelope to empty its contents onto the table: a sheet of paper with some handwriting on it and an eight-gigabyte armored flash drive. There was nothing else in the envelope. He picked up the paper, a smooth, heavyweight vellum with the BEYOGLU watermark embedded in the fibers.

  On it, a strong hard hand had written in Russian:

  “Go tell the Spartans,” he said half aloud.

  Forrest smiled to himself, although the effect on a watcher would not have been heartwarming. The lines of the epitaph played in his mind: Go, tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

  Although the flash drive looked ordinary, it contained a glass vial of sulfuric acid connected to a microscopic spring-loaded titanium spike. If anyone tried to read the contents of the drive without first entering the correct password, the plunger would break the vial, and the acid would destroy the drive’s memory chip. Sulphuric acid had an advantage over an explosive because it would not set off a detector. Freezing the flash drive to render the glass vial useless would also destroy the contents of the memory. If anyone tried to decode the password by attaching the drive to a decryption program using asymmetric algorithms, the drive would be destroyed. And, as a final barrier, the correct password had to be typed in once only, without a single error, within ninety seconds of being requested by the drive or, again, it would destroy itself. Forrest inserted the flash drive into the Sony’s USB port, waited as the computer brought up the drive’s password bar.

  Counting off the seconds, he pulled a book of prime numbers off the shelf next to his desk. Since Herodotus, who wrote the most well-known history of the battle at Thermopylae, was a Greek, as, for that matter, was Leonidas, he flipped through to the list of the Euclidian primes, another Greek creation, and typed in the sixth one in the series—20056049013—because he and Piotr had agreed a long time ago that the password prime would always be the number in the series that had no more than nineteen and no less than eleven digits. Since each prime number in all of the seventy-seven categories of primes increased exponentially, anything higher than nineteen digits would have been too long to be accepted by most civilian password systems, and both agreed that anything lower than eleven might be successfully attacked by a powerful computer generating primes.

  After all these years, Forrest had grown used to the way Piotr’s mind worked, and when the flash drive finally opened up and the MPEG it contained began to play, he understood the grim humor in his reference to the famous epitaph to Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans—here, obedient to their laws, we lie—as he watched a naked man sitting in a cheap metal chair bolted to the floor in the middle of a large sheet of clear plastic.

  The chair sat in a pool of hot-blue light, but the rest of the scene was in darkness. The man in the chair, in his fifties, with a full head of lank brown hair, was pale and thin, with prominent blue veins all over his torso: he had been bound to the chair with plastic cable ties, bound so tightly that the ties had dug into his wrists and elbows and ankles deep enough to draw blood. The man in the chair was Antonijas Palenz, a Latvian police official who had lost his position in Riga after the fall of the old Sovietski and who was now Piotr’s chief “talent scout” for Athens and the Aegean.

  Anton normally wore glasses, but they had been taken away, and now he blinked out into the darkness all around him, his face wet and his bony chest working very hard. The questioner, not visible, was a woman with an English accent and a soft, persuasive voice. The questions were in English.

  “Tell us again, how you explain what your man did in London.”

  Anton tried a smile, but fear twisted it into a grimace, and when he spoke his voice was hoarse and raw, as if he had answered the same question many times before, which, Forrest knew, would be the case exactly.

  “I followed your instructions. Truly. I told him that it was to look like a robbery. That is what he did. What we wanted him to do. Truly. And he got the list, as we hoped he would. May I have some water now. Please. And where is Maya? Maya, are you there?”

  “Maya is not here anymore.”

  Anton’s breathing grew rapid and shallow.

  “Where is she? Please, she is not a part of this . . . Please . . .”

  “She is being questioned in another room. What happens to her will depend on what you say in here. Again, how do you explain London?”

  The man worked at his wrist
bindings, clearly on the edge of a breakdown, and tears began to flow down his sweaty cheeks.

  “Maya . . . I need to see Maya.”

  There was some muted talk off camera, and then a man stepped forward into the glare of the light, his back to the camera, a massive hulking shape with the kind of Mohawk cut favored by veterans of the Kosovo Army. He held a large sheet of paper up in front of Anton’s face. Anton peered at the paper, jerked his head away, and began to sob, his chest convulsing.

  The big man stepped back from the chair, and for a time the only sound was the distant hum of an air conditioner or a generator and the deep wrenching agony of the man crying. Forrest lit another Gauloise and turned the volume up a bit so he could get an idea of where they were. The chair looked like something found at a market anywhere in the Middle East. The plastic was generic. The bolts that held the chair to the floor looked old and badly made; the plastic restraint cuffs looked like the ones the Turks used. Turkey, likely, or maybe Bulgaria.

  The interrogation resumed.

  “You’ve seen the pictures he put on the net. He sent these pictures to everyone on her list, and to the head of their NSA as well. Was this part of your instructions to him? Was this to help make the murder look ordinary?”

  Anton made an effort, got his crying under some control.

  “You knew what he was. He has done this before, many times. He likes to take pictures. He did this in Trieste, and in Athens, and in Kotor and Sveti Stefan, and possibly in Shanghai two years ago, and we think once in Singapore in the fall, and he was doing it in Santorini on the very day I reached him. We knew this. We all did! We agreed on the risk. I am not to blame. We chose him because he already had a legend and could move freely in the West. We chose him because there was no one else we could train in time. We chose him because he has courage and does not panic, and he is able to adapt and innovate. We took his legend and made it unbreakable. Even now we maintain it—”

  “It is still in place for only one reason. He is next to the target already. What do you suggest we do if he repeats this error?”