The Venetian Judgment

by David Stone

  Maybe the best thing to do would be to take the shuttle up to La Guardia, drive on up to Garrison, and just . . . pop in. Just like old friends do. See the guy for himself. Yes, he’d go tomorrow. Which reminded him of something else: he had promised Briony that he’d find out where in the eastern Med her son Morgan was stationed. So far, his guy at the Navy Yards hadn’t gotten back to him. So wrap that up too and take it all up to Briony in the morning.

  Nikki was waiting for a response. He made a dismissive gesture, looking down, playing with some papers.

  “Yeah, but it was nothing, a dead end.”

  She smiled, aware that Brocius had just set something aside, something he didn’t want to talk to her about at any rate. That was fine. She didn’t own the man. “Okay, who were you talking to just now?”

  “Nikki, do you like to travel?”

  “I know this one. You ask me if I like to travel and I say yes and then you say ‘Do you like sex?’ and I say yes and then you say ‘Well, why don’t you fuck off?’ ”

  “Is that a real line?”

  “I’ve used it to get rid of creeps in bars. Who were you talking to?”

  “You got me thinking about Lujac. I called a guy in Santorini, where this Lujac guy is supposed to have died. I reached a cop named Sofouli. He was a little worked up. Want to know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Somebody killed his sergeant and stole his helicopter.”

  “Why is he telling you this?”

  “Because he thought I had something to do with it.”

  “And why did he think that?”

  “Because I was calling from the National Security Administration, which to him is the same as calling from the CIA. Actually, the way he phrased it, that would be the facking CIA, pardon my Greek. And Captain Sofouli is convinced that it was somebody from the CIA. He described the man—in fact, it was a man and a woman. They were both Americans. They claimed to be a couple from Portland, Oregon, by the name of Bill and Dorothy Pearson. Had the passports to prove it, which tells us something. But when Captain Sofouli put a call in to the Portland police, they sent a cruiser around to Mr. Pearson’s home and—bingo!—there they were, and, according to them, there they had been for about three months. Would you like to know what brought these Portlandish Pearsonians to Santorini?”

  “I would love to.”

  “They were there, in Captain Sofouli’s view, to ascertain—now I’m talking like Audrey—to ascertain the identity of a corpse that Captain Sofouli’s people found floating in the waters off the island.”

  “Would that corpse be the corpse of Kiki Lujac?”

  “Correct. Your prize is a lollipop. Do you want it now or later?”

  “Later. Did he get any pictures of these people?”

  “He did. He’s e-mailing me their visa shots now. Oh look, here comes the lovely Alice right on cue.”

  Ms. Chandler came in with two-color printouts in her hand. She smiled at Nikki and put them down in front of the AD of RA. Then she smiled at Nikki again—unlike her opinion of Madonna, she was totally in favor of Nikki—and drifted out of the office on a lilac-scented zephyr.

  The AD of RA looked down at the Greek visa shots, taken at the customs desk at Athens International, and then turned them around so that Nikki could get a good look.

  The woman was fine featured and beautifully boned but rather imperious-looking, with milk-white skin and cool gray eyes and a damn-you twist to her sensual lips. Nikki knew her quite well.

  The other picture was a lean, cut young man with a sharply defined jawline and prominent cheekbones—one of which carried a deeply scored, raw-looking scar, almost a slash, looking quite recent—hooded eyes of an unnerving pale blue—killer’s eyes—a firm but not entirely cruel mouth, and pale blond hair, swept back from his face and long enough to reach his shoulders. This picture radiated a kind of predatory sensuality that she could feel in her . . . Well, it was none of anyone’s business where she could feel it.

  She tapped the shot of the woman.

  “That’s Mandy Pownall. Which probably means—”

  “The guy is Micah Dalton? That’s him. I’ve got his shot on file from the Agency. That’s Micah Dalton in the creeping flesh. Like his looks?”

  Nikki gave the question some serious thought, which bothered the AD of RA a little. He had just uncovered a long-dead emotion called “jealousy.” He didn’t like it and was working very hard at burying it again.

  “He looks like a guy you’d want around if you had a problem with an ex-boyfriend who needed scaring off. And he has a nice smile somewhere inside there. You can see the lines around his eyes and mouth. And he looks smart. He doesn’t have that deadeyed hating look that you see in some professional killers . . . ?”

  “ ‘The enemies of reason have a certain blind look,’ ” said the AD of RA, quoting Ridley Scott’s film The Duellists.

  “Yes, I call it the ‘Mohamed Atta face.’ That’s not what you see here. I’ll bet he has a good mind, but he’s a little damaged. I would love to know his whole story. What did his file say?”

  “Mainly classified. No next of kin listed, not even a sibling. Married once, wife suffered some sort of stroke and was in a vegetative state in a hospital in Carmel. Died a while back. Buried with their only child, a baby girl, killed in a domestic accident a few years earlier. Pretty young, considering his operational experience: Somalia, Central America, Afghanistan, Tora Bora, when they were trying to get Bin Laden. Word in the halls is, he’s resourceful, a great fieldman. Smart.”

  Nikki considered the man’s face for a time.

  “I would guess that women like him. A lot. Mandy Pownall certainly does. And that Vasari woman seemed to be important to him.”

  “Yeah, well, in the meantime why are these two in Santorini asking questions about Kiki Lujac? And whatever they’re doing, they’re playing hardball. This sergeant who got killed? They found his body in the bottom of a swimming pool. His neck was broken. According to his file, that’s a Dalton trademark. He likes to get in close, to kill with his hands. He was Fifth Special Forces before he came on with Clandestine Services, and they still talk about him around the noncom mess at Fort Campbell. They called him the ‘Crocodile.’ Last fall, he killed some psycho Indian medicine man in southeastern Colorado, hacked his head off, and mailed it to a cop in Butte, Montana. Yes, that’s right, Nikki, that got your attention. That’s what they’re like at the goddamned CIA. They’re either a pack of nancy-boy, left-wing college profs mincing around the hallways leaking state secrets to—”

  Nikki rolled her eyes theatrically, sighed heavily.

  “The goddamned New York Times . . . I know, sir. We all know.”

  “Well, it’s the simple truth, isn’t it? That’s on one side. Over on the paramilitary side, they’re a bunch of living-dead night stalkers, just like this guy, shape-shifters and dark-of-the-moon vampires who eat their dead and lick their blades clean after every kill.”

  “Now, there’s a lovely image.”

  Brocius ignored her.

  “Look, I don’t like this coincidence, Nikki, not one little bit. You tell me you have a feeling Kiki Lujac could have done this Durant thing. Now it looks like the CIA’s in Santorini on the same guy’s trail. I don’t believe in coincidences, but I do believe in your instincts. You’re fresh. You haven’t been inside long enough to start thinking like Audrey Fulton. You did great work in Trieste. So maybe it’s a good idea to send you—”

  “Maybe?”

  “Look, this is serious. Hear me. I do not want the CIA anywhere near this Millie Durant investigation. Or near the Glass Cutters in general. CIA types just complicate things. Look at this Agency harpy Mariah Vale, runs their Counter-Intelligence Analysis Group. Last fall, at an interagency briefing, which was just a courtesy, she took a vague, unsourced, and completely unverified reference we might have found in one of the Riga intercepts—it might even be a sorting artifact—”

  “What is that?”


  “Decryption’s a matter of number-frequency sorting. Depending on the language you think the message was encrypted in, you try to assign a frequency value to every possible letter. In English, for example, letters often appear in pairs or threes, so if you get a t followed by two other letters, you have a statistical basis for thinking the other two are h and e. Once you’re sure you have those three letters identified, you try to see where a similar number string occurs. Letter by letter, gradually over time, you get whole words, then phrases, and, theoretically, you have the entire message decrypted. Different languages have different letter groups, letter frequencies. You sort out the letter-frequency possibilities with the mainframes, but now and then things screw up and you get a sort of false positive. A string of words that look like a phrase—and it may be—but it’s not a real part of the actual message, it’s just a ‘program artifact.’ ”

  “Like the infinity of monkeys typing a Shakespeare play.”

  “That’s it, sort of. Only, in this case, it’s just a few words running together. The problem is, the words running together looked like an indirect reference to a long-term mole in a certain sector of U.S. intelligence.”

  “Did anybody try to tell Mariah Vale about this ‘artifact’ issue?”

  “I did, personally. I told her what I just told you. Several times. But she’s so freaked out about moles she’s come down with the Jesus disease.”

  Nikki had read a brief on the man last month and was pleased to let Brocius know it. “James Jesus Angleton. After Philby bolted, he got completely obsessed with the idea that there was still a mole in the Agency. But wasn’t he finally proved right?”

  “Christ, who knows? Depends on which KGB defector you believed, Golitsin or Nosenko. They told completely conflicting stories. Angleton’s own assistant, Clare Petty, was pretty convinced at the end that Angleton himself was a KGB agent. I mean, who did Jim Angleton ever expose? Nobody. Mostly, he wrapped the CIA up in a tangle of flat-out paranoia until Colby finally sacked him in ’seventy-six. He couldn’t have screwed up the Agency more if he had been a KGB mole. That’s the kind of swamp they swim in over there. And now this Mariah Vale broad—woman—now she’s got intelligence in a virtual war with the National Clandestine Service. She’s started a full-blown counterespionage audit looking for a mole that probably doesn’t even exist. The whole Agency’s paralyzed all over again. Including Deacon Cather. You ever meet the guy?”

  “I talked to him on the phone during the Chicago thing. I’ve seen a picture of him. Six feet two, long, horsey face, teeth like tombstones, bald, skin like a lizard’s, and the coldest black eyes I’ve ever seen. Reminded me of one of the meaner Medicis. Dalton works for Cather, doesn’t he?”

  “Hard to say. After Chicago, it looked like Cather was bringing him back in. But Dalton was still in Venice last week. And now he turns up in Santorini and people get killed. I think I really need to know what’s going on.”

  “So, do you want me to go to Santorini and talk to this cop?”

  “Last time, I sent you to Trieste and you almost died.”

  “But I didn’t. And it was Muggia, not Trieste.”

  “Look, if I let you go, I just want you to be a back-channel asset, and you report only to me, okay? Here’s your mission from which you will not deviate, hear me? You fly to Santorini as a declared representative of this Agency, you have a chat with this cop, he proves to you that Kiki Lujac is dead, you confirm for us that the two Americans who came to see him were actually Dalton and Pownall, you say thanks, you spend the night in a snazzy hotel, maybe soak in a Jacuzzi—alone—have a nice meal, you fly right back home in the morning. And Nikki, above all, you stay aeons away from this Dalton guy. Light-years. All I want you to do is put this Lujac theory to bed and then come back here and we go on with our quiet little lives. Could you do that, and only that?”

  Nikki was, for once, stunned into silence. Traveling declared. With ID. This constituted a major promotion. At least two pay grades.

  “I’m . . . dazzled. And complimented.”

  “Just don’t do anything nuts. Have a talk with Sofouli, then come home—straight home. Understand?”

  “Heard and understood. How am I traveling?”

  “You could have one of our Gulfstreams.”

  “I thought we weren’t trying to attract attention?”

  “I know. I just thought it would be—”

  “Safer? Thanks, but no. How about I just fly a public carrier?”

  “Okay, but not back there with the herbivores. First class. Full diplomatic protection. None of that covert crap. I want the NSA crest tattooed on your . . . your luggage. Your carry-on. Whatever.”

  “What do I say I’m doing?”

  “Consulting with other agencies. If they press you at any port, have them call Alice and she’ll page me and I’ll rip their lungs out.”

  “I accept. With heartfelt thanks. I mean, the whole assignment.”

  “Yeah, you’re welcome. Just don’t get hurt, okay?”

  Nikki gave him a hard look and then softened it.

  “I need to make my own name here. Not just as your—”

  “Anybody saying that?”

  “Not to my face.”

  “I get wind of any of that, time I’m through with them they’ll look worse than I do. Now, go. Go, and then come back.”

  ISTANBUL

  ÇENGELKÖY, THE ASIAN SIDE OF THE BOSPHORUS

  Dawn was a faint rose-colored tint on the black night in the hills behind them as the gypsy cab turned near the Bosphorus Bridge. They cleared a line of trees, and across the water the city of Istanbul opened up before them, a panoramic sweep of shimmering light from the northern suburbs all the way down the shoreline to the jutting headland of Sultanhamet, the skyline pierced in numerous places by the needle-tipped minarets of hundreds of mosques. There was no way Istanbul could ever be mistaken for a Christian city.

  Kipling aside, this was the city where East and West really did meet, a city that had been the crossroads of the world ever since the place was called Byzantium. As they made the long sweeping curve north through rolling parkland, the far shore, beyond the spotlit hulk of the Ortaköy Mosque at the water’s edge, was a wall of lights that filled up the low rolling hills of the city all the way to the crest, where a black starless night sliced them off abruptly. In the extreme south, they could just make out the illuminated domes of the Topkapi Palace and the four slender minarets of Hagia Sophia.

  It was the coldest part of a January night, and a veil of coal smoke and sea mist lay over Istanbul, giving it a pale aura and an ethereal beauty that, as ethereal beauty often does, vanishes in the cold light of morning. The air smelled of car fumes, coal fires, cooking oil, and under that the wet-stone-and-seaweed reek of the Bosphorus.

  Their cab, a rusted-out hulk that might once have been a Benz, was being driven by a fatally bored young man in a woolen watch cap and a Korn T-shirt who had listened to deafening techno-house on an iPod and chain-smoked little black cigars all the way from the tiny airfield at Sandirma. He was a terrible driver, jerking and jinking and horn-blasting his way through the mad swirl of jitneys and trucks and motorcycles that filled up the lunatic maze of Istanbul’s streets even at this unholy hour.

  Levka, up front with the driver, had his boots braced against the dashboard and had long since given up trying to engage the kid in small talk. Now he was staring out the passenger window at the storefronts and milling crowds hurtling past while nursing a paper cup of black tea. Mandy and Dalton were sitting close together in the rear, aware of the heat of their bodies, staring stoically out the side windows and breathing through their mouths.

  They had left the Blackhawk at Sandirma, rotors folded, wheeled into a hangar and covered with the tarp, for a rack rent of a thousand American dollars a night, paid in cash a week in advance to a shriveled little gnome in grease-stained mechanic’s overalls and an oil-soaked kaffiyeh, who had scowled at them out of a face so wizened and wrinkled it
looked like a dried apricot, until the dollars got counted out on top of his toolbox.

  Then his face had opened up like a lotus, as he displayed a set of snaggled teeth that were a standing indictment of Turkish dentistry, and solemnly swore by the Sema of Sufi that not even the imps of Shaitan would sniff a whiff of its presence. Then he dragged out a truly appalling nargileh, fired the bowl up with something that looked like compacted mouse dung, and insisted on passing the water pipe around three times to settle their business. But, thanks to Levka’s contagious criminality, it had been settled, and, to Mandy’s lasting amazement, Dalton’s wild ride had not ended in a Turkish prison but in the backseat of this Benz with Istanbul spreading its infectious charms out before her like a houri shedding veils. Dalton, hip to hip with her, felt her shiver slightly and folded her hand in his.

  “Are you okay?” he asked in a low, warm whisper, the heat of his body and the scent of him—dry grass and tobacco smoke and spices—filling her up and sending a flood tide of post-traumatic lust through her body.

  “I’m fine,” she said, leaning softly into him. “I’m tired. I need to be taken to bed. What is this place we’re going to again, the Sumatra . . . whatever?”

  “The Sumahan. You’ll like it. It’s a five-star hotel in Çengel village, right on the waterline, with a view across the strait. You can see all of Istanbul from your balcony. Trust me, it’s up to your standards. I wouldn’t put an English noble into a ratbag, would I?”

  She moved in closer, nuzzled into his neck, inhaled deeply, breathing him in, his heat, his scent. She moved his right arm closer to her left breast and held it there.

  “And what are your plans, dear boy, when we get there?”

  She got the answer she expected, but not before he kissed her in a not entirely brotherly way on the side of her mouth, his dry lips open slightly.