The Venetian Judgment

by David Stone

  “Come, Miss Keating, do not be excessively fastidious. These accommodations are made between agencies all the time. They are called ‘realpolitik.’

  “This man is far from a threat to your country or ours. But the orders have come from my own superiors, and I must, as you must, obey orders.

  “Our methods are forceful—perhaps too forceful. If I had been left to my own methods, I would have been far more subtle. Such is not the case. We are, to use an American phrase, ‘under new management .’

  “I beg you, as a Christian man, to carry out this simple request, and I give you my word as an officer that you will do no damage to your nation in any way, and that by carrying out this mission you will also save the life and honor of your brave young son. Such a sordid game we find ourselves in, and for what? I cannot say. Perhaps one day, we will find ourselves in a better world, yes?

  “Finally, I am directed to warn you that if you fail in this mission, events in the real world will play out in such a way that we will know that you have failed. At that point, your son’s fate is out of my hands.

  “Good-bye, Miss Keating. And may God bless our nations.”

  A snap to black, a flicker, and then a single bar line that read MESSAGE ERASED.

  Briony closed the machine lid softly, sat in silence for a time with her head down, and then looked up at Duhamel, her expression unreadable.

  “My God, Briony,” he said, “what will you do?”

  “Do?” she said, her voice faint but clear. “I will save my son.”

  “But your job . . . your obligations? And if you do this, they will own you. These . . . people . . . they will never let you go if you do this.”

  “I know.”

  “And if you are exposed, you will go to prison. You know that?”

  “Yes, I know that.”

  “So you have only two roads in front of you: your son will suffer or you will become a traitor.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then what will you do? What can you do?”

  “Take the third road.”

  “The ‘third road’? What is that?”

  Briony looked up from the screen, unsmiling, her expression wary, slightly veiled.

  “I think, Jules, you should leave in the morning.”

  Duhamel kept his expression mild, although inside him a dark thing was starting to uncoil.

  “I would not want to leave you like this. In this trouble.”

  “You can’t help me with this. And I can’t do what I’m going to do with you around. You said it yourself. You’re a foreign national. This is a National Security issue. You can’t be anywhere near it. I wish it were different, but I can’t make it so. You’ll have to go.”

  “But you’ve already brought me into this, haven’t you?”

  She looked uncertain for a moment, but then she settled into certainty.

  “What you know so far, it is not dangerous to know. Most people in my trade know the same things. Much of it is already in the public domain.”

  “I know your son is being held hostage by . . . Russians, I think.”

  “Yes. And if you love me, if you really want to help me save him, then you need to go. You can’t be near this. You have a gallery in Saint Petersburg. You could go back there and wait. When this is over, I’ll fly out and you can show me your world.”

  Don’t tempt me, he thought but did not say.

  It was clear that Briony had made up her mind on this. Duhamel, trying to remain professional, was about to make some final attempt at loving persuasion. But if it failed, then by the terms of his commission, in the Gray Man’s own words, he was free to use “his own methods.” This arrogant woman on the far side of the counter was about to meet the real world that Jules Duhamel lived in, the world Mildred Durant and others before her had seen. He felt the heat rising in his belly, his heart pounding in his chest, the coming release all the more sublime for being so long delayed. He set his glass aside, leaned forward with a look of counterfeit concern, and the telephone rang three times, a silence, and then three more times—rich, deep bell tones—reverberating through the house.

  They exchanged puzzled glances, and then Briony got up and walked over to the wall phone next to the stove.

  “Hello?”

  “Briony, it’s Hank.”

  Unaware of her movement, she had turned her body away from Duhamel slightly. She put her hand on the receiver, looked back at him.

  “It’s the office,” she explained in a hoarse whisper.

  She turned away to the phone again, pitching her voice low.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “Okay, I take it the little frog prince is right there?”

  “That’s true. So what’s the problem?”

  “I heard from my guy in the Sixth Fleet. Briony, you really want this now with the guy sitting right there?”

  “You called, I’m listening.”

  “Okay. It’s not good. Get ready. The reason you haven’t heard from him is he’s AWOL. Navy didn’t want to let it out until they were sure. He’s been off base for five weeks now. They knew he had a girl in the town. Figured he’d just taken an unofficial vacation. The MPs started looking for him in earnest three weeks ago. By now, they’ve torn Crete apart. He’s not on the island. They have no idea where he is. Have you heard from him?”

  She tried to keep the lie out of her voice.

  “No, not at all.”

  “Damn. I was hoping . . . Look, this isn’t good. They find him now, he’ll be in the brig for weeks. If you have any idea where he is, anything at all—”

  “I don’t. None at all. That’s why you have the file.”

  Brocius said nothing for a time.

  “I don’t like this whole thing, Briony. Something’s not right. I can feel it. Something’s going on here.”

  “I see. What will you do?”

  Another long silence.

  Brocius had . . . antennae. She could feel his mind racing.

  “Your guy there, I have to say, he’s . . . bugging me. I don’t know why. Something’s . . . hinky.”

  She saw that he was on his cell.

  Where was he calling from? Was he close? she wondered.

  “How close are you, Dianne? To getting this done?”

  “Close? I’m on the Taconic. Don’t talk about this to anyone. You follow?”

  “I follow.”

  “You’ll hear from me . . . soon.”

  “That would be good.”

  “Yeah, real soon, Briony. You still got your fallback option?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Good. Maybe you should use it right now.”

  “If you feel that strongly about it, then it’s okay with me.”

  “I do.”

  The line went dead. She set the receiver back in the hook.

  “What did they want?” asked Duhamel.

  “They had a problem with the sorting thingy. A technical thing.”

  She was lying to him, she realized.

  About Hank Brocius.

  Why?

  The lie hung in the air between them, and she felt Duhamel’s dark eyes on her, a look in them that she had not seen before, a cold, remote appraisal.

  I don’t really know you, do I? she thought.

  “You look strange, Briony. What’s wrong?”

  The question was asked in a loving tone, but there was no light in the young man’s eyes. They looked like black holes in a mask. She thought about a few things she should have thought about much sooner:

  “You’ve just arrived from some exotic shore, have you?”

  “From London only, I’m afraid. Are you staying with friends?”

  Just arrived from London.

  With an antique Breguet watch, just like the one Mildred Durant’s husband used to wear. And what had Brocius said, about some scars?

  “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?”

  She knew this man’s back very well. It was as strong and smooth as a horse’s neck. And it had never been scarred.

  “You know,” she said, “I think I need to pee. And I think we’re going to be up for a while. Would you put on some coffee?”

  “Do you still want me to leave tomorrow morning?”

  The question was asked in a soft tone, a gentle pleading note in it, but there was nothing in his face that looked anything like softness. He looked like a gundog her father used to have, taut, primed, trembling, waiting for a grouse to explode out of a hedge. She shook her head.

  “No, I don’t.”

  Duhamel softened visibly, seemed to come off point.

  “You’re sure?”

  She gave him her bravest smile.

  “I’m sure. Maybe I’m just being . . . dramatic. I . . . just want to have some coffee. Talk a bit. Get my mind clear. Maybe there’s some way out of this I haven’t thought of. That we haven’t thought of. Maybe there’s a movie on cable, or we can watch a DVD. We can figure out what to do about all this in the evening, okay?”

  “Yes, that would be fine.”

  “I need to freshen up. Will you go see what’s on?”

  He smiled at her then, and it was one of his best smiles, like the one that had pulled her in and held her in Savannah. Hank’s words played in the back of her mind as she smiled sweetly at him.

  “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.”

  “Yes,” he said, “maybe one of those old black-and-white films?”

  Gaslight.

  She thought of it immediately but could not say why.

  She turned and left the kitchen then, more in a glide than a walk. She felt his eyes on her until she reached the corner and melted into the winter shadows of the old stone house.

  Duhamel stared at the black rectangle of the door for a time, his expression unreadable. Then he walked across to the wall phone. It had a caller-list screen. He keyed up the last call: 443-479-9560.

  The area code for Garrison, and for West Point, across the river, where Briony said the call had come from, it was 845. In another part of his mind, he was thinking about the compact seven-round Sig Sauer pistol that he had come across in Briony’s night-table drawer a few days back. Since moving it would have been hard to explain, he had left it in place. With a thick wad of tinfoil rammed up the muzzle, the plug shoved well out of sight with a pencil. If she fired it now, the weapon would take her hand off.

  He himself had brought no guns to America.

  Why would he?

  He was in a kitchen right now, with the all tools of his trade laid out in front of him. He slid open one of the drawers and considered the array of knives. They were very fine knives, all of them, and well maintained. They shone in their blue velvet coffins like quicksilver. He felt a soft, burring sensation in the pocket of his robe, reached in and extracted his cell phone. He had a text message: cq.

  He stared down at the letters, his vision blurring briefly, trying to take in the implications. The code was childish for a reason: complex codes announced themselves to the NSA computers.

  He hit reply and typed in: ?ru.

  The answer came back at once: ?ur+3n-c cqcq.

  Three miles north of where you are. In a car. Emergency.

  Anton was here, in Garrison.

  Their protocol for a flash meet such as this was to text back a specific time and then make a reconnaissance run forty minutes before the time set. In this case, Anton was likely in a car three miles north on the parkway. If there was no tell in the area—a chalk mark at the location, a cat’s-eye marker stuck into the ditch nearby—then the actual meet would take place ninety minutes after the announced time. If there was a tell, the meet would take place in the nearest church at eleven the next day. But why? Why was Anton here?

  Duhamel looked out through the doorway into the shadows of the old house. He had not heard the upstairs toilet flush. You could always hear it, or at least hear the water rushing in the ancient pipes.

  The silence felt wrong.

  The whole house felt wrong.

  And where was Briony?

  ISTANBUL

  NORTHBOUND THROUGH THE BOSPHORUS

  They had rounded the high, tree-covered northern cape of Sultanhamet, with Hagia Sofia and the Topkapi Palace glowing in the slanting light of a setting winter sun, and now they were cruising northwest into the windswept channel of the straits, heading back to Çengelköy.

  Waiting for them there, at this very moment, was Mandy Pownall, fresh from a nap, a long, luxurious bubble bath, a thorough full-body massage from a green-eyed Turkish girl—who had, in the final six minutes of the massage, earned every Turkish lira of her tip—and then a mad round of spending Micah Dalton’s money in the hotel’s wonderful shops. Mandy was now gracefully arrayed by a table on the marble wharf in front of the Sumahan Hotel, at one with her world, an icy G and T in one hand and a gold-tipped black Balkan Sobranie cigarette in the other, her fine-boned face turned just so to catch the fleeting warmth of the winter sun on her cheek. Service to country had its consolations, she felt, however fleeting they were.

  The Subito was just now coming level with the Maiden’s Tower, a small island in the channel on their starboard side a few hundred yards off the Asian shore, with nothing on it but an ancient stone temple with a tall, turretlike tower. On their port side, a quarter mile up, was the long, neogothic façade of Dolmabahçe Palace, sitting right on the waterline and looking very much like the Houses of Parliament in London without Big Ben.

  The cruiser was burbling smoothly along at five knots, cresting the swell and gliding like a white heron through the shipping along the way, the hazy air filled with the muttering and snarling and popping of boat engines, small planes buzzing overhead, tugs and rusted freighters growling along, big props chopping up blue-black water into dirty yellow foam. Crowded and dilapidated ferries, their hulls streaked with rust and river grime, butted their way from the Asian side to the European side and back again, like loom shuttles weaving both halves of Istanbul together.

  Flotillas of pug-ugly grain and oil tankers steamed north, heading for the ports of Georgia and the Ukraine, the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, passing their heavy-laden sister ships coming back down the waterway. And from the far shore, the tape-recorded chant of the Muslim call to prayer, blaring out from every minaret along the channel. And, under that call, like the half-heard roar of a great ocean, was the sound of the city of Istanbul itself, filling the sky and echoing back from the hills all around.

  Packing the slopes on either side were the crowded warrens of red-roofed apartment blocks, narrow switchback alleys, side streets and dead ends, unexpected leafy little squares, squalid factory blocks with plumes of black smoke rising up, and here and there, in the northern distance, tall blue-glass office towers set out on the hilltops—the tallest, the Diamond of Istanbul, a towering arrowhead glittering in the last of the sunlight.

  Covering the slopes in between, like tumbled clay bricks, were miles and miles of tightly compressed houses and flats and shops, pressed into every nook, and all crammed tight together under the palms and fig trees, then pinned in place by the black hairnet tangle of overhead power lines.

  If not for the spearheads of the sultan’s towers and the needle-sharp minarets that pierced the skyline everywhere you looked, and the romantic veil of coal smoke and sea fog that lay over it all as the day ended, Istanbul might have been any one of a hundred overcrowded Third World hellholes like Kowloon or Port Said or Valparaiso.

  Levka, at the helm of the Subito, was enjoying the kaleidoscopic panoramas of Istanbul immensely, sitting at ease inside the lemon-oil-scented cabin. With all this shimme
ring mahogany and highly polished brass, the cabin reminded him of the mandolin his mother used to play for him back in Legrad.

  If he were a man given to reflection, which he was not, he might have stopped to ponder the capricious currents of life that could take you in just twenty-four hours from the brink of a grubby little death, in pee-soaked pants on a hotel balcony in Santorini, to sitting here with a glass of tea in one hand and the wheel of a million-euro yacht in the other.

  Although for Dobri Levka life was sweet, for Kissmyass and his one surviving colleague, whom Levka had christened Numbnuts, life was considerably less so.

  The third man, Vladimir Krikotas, according to the ID they found on his body, had succumbed to his severe cranial fracture and its consequent massive subdural hematoma, slipping into a stertorous coma and later being consigned, not quite dead, to the loving embrace of the Sea of Marmara, slipping quietly over the starboard side with a short quote from Dalton about “the sea giving up her dead” and the ship’s spare Danforth to see him quickly to the bottom of the bay.

  Levka had, a while ago, tuned the radio in to a local station that specialized in a kind of “techno-arabesk” music, a sinuous North African threnody, accompanied by driving djembe drumming and the tinkling clash of finger cymbals. This music served two purposes: it nicely caught the exotic flavor of this contradictory town, part Asian hellhole and part hashish-induced illusion, and it helped drown out the sounds Levka was expecting shortly from the galley, where Dalton was about to begin what Levka, based on his brief but compelling experience with the man, was reasonably certain would be an aggressive and bloody interrogation.

  Down in the galley, Dalton, fresh from his shower, shaved, and, wearing a navy blue V-neck sweater he had found in the closet off the forward stateroom that went very well with his navy pin-striped pants, had both men, trussed and naked, sitting side by side on a section of the plastic sheeting they had used to cover the Subito back at the Ataköy Marina.