by Gordon Kent
“Of course, ma chérie. It is there, by the television. But it is probably the phone lines. They are antique, like everything else in Venice.”
Anna found the case, slipped down behind the chair next to the television, and connected to the net. The machine was very different from the succession of IBM laptops Efremov had always acquired for them. It had a fashion edge to it. The case was an after-market replacement, a deep, velvet blue.
“The case is wonderful!”
“It is, isn’t it? A boy gave it to me.” Greta’s voice suggested a deep satisfaction with the case, or the boy. Perhaps both.
Online connection. All the directions in German, but her German was up to the task. Greta spoke a movie-star English, but Anna’s stilted German had started the hasty friendship and established her bona fides as the child of Austrian Jews.
Search Engine. The second name from her list. Alan Craik. Several hits. A Navy locator address. Anna flicked her eyes over the street outside; the watcher had a cellphone out. She read two short bios of the man Craik—service, medals, marriage. Naval War College.
She searched again on some ship names: Alan Craik was going next to an aviation detachment, that much was clear. She tried “Ombudsman” and “USS Thomas Jefferson.” Seven hits. The Americans continued to pretend that their naval movements were classified, even as their wives posted lists of ports of call on the Internet. She used the unfamiliar finger pad to scroll through the seven hits.
Exactly. Liberty ports.
Movement on the street outside. A second man, a lit cigarette. Anna scooped Greta’s documents off the end of the bed and put them in her bag without hesitation. Then she took her own expensive forgeries and dropped them on the telephone table, never taking her eyes off the street. Greta prattled on, and Anna made noises—yes, no, interesting—to suit Greta’s noises. Greta knew nothing of the men outside the window or of the sudden loss of her identity.
One last bit of information from the laptop: Alan Craik would be in Trieste, Italy, in two days.
Anna closed the laptop and returned it to its case, running her fingers over the blue. Anna loved the best things, and so did Greta. On that ground, they truly met. Greta was applying her makeup, and their eyes met in the mirror.
“I have to run out, Greta.” Anna waved her handbag. “I’ll be back in a few moments.”
Greta nodded in the mirror. Anna bit her lips in regret. Greta did not deserve what was to come, but no one did. Anna headed for the elevator.
The antique elevator was the only way she knew of getting to a lower floor. Even in Iran, there would have been fire stairs, but not in Venice. She thumbed the button. She had no gun and she feared what would emerge from that elevator.
Abruptly, while she was still trying to devise a plan to meet a rush of armed men, the door opened. One elderly woman emerged. Anna had the elevator to herself. She took two deep breaths before she thumbed the button for the first floor.
The Serbs would be in the main lobby by now.
The elevator crept down three floors, her heart hammering in time to the gentle sway of the old car within its track, and stopped with arthritic slowness. The door attempted to compensate with a harsh crash that could be heard throughout the building. They would hear that, know that someone had used the elevator to the first floor above the lobby. Anna fought down panic. They could not know it was she. Not yet. Not until they found Greta. If they could tell the difference between Greta and Anna, she was dead. She hoped they only had a description. In her experience, all desirable women looked alike to most men.
She walked to the room that corresponded to her own on the fifth floor. She had no reason for this choice, only a certain blind superstition. She breathed and knocked.
A middle-aged man in a dressing-gown opened the door. Anna smiled, her body swaying with relief. “May I come in?” she asked. The man, a North American, appeared flabbergasted. His mouth moved, but no words emerged. Anna heard the elevator going up—and up, past this floor. Up to her room on the fifth?
She slipped past him into his room. Same layout as her room above, two beds, even someone in the bath. She walked to the window, moved the blinds. Empty. She pushed the window open. The man was saying something, and the sharp retort of a gunshot came from above them. She ignored both, letting the surge of adrenaline carry her out the window. She hung from the sill and dropped. One of her stupid heels broke, but her ankle held and she stumbled away. She pulled her shoes off, threw them in the canal, ran to the corner, began planning her movements off the island of Venice and up the coast to Trieste.
Planning it in her head as she ran barefoot—Trieste…Alan Craik…
Trieste.
Alan joined his new command, an airborne detachment testing a new imaging system called MARI, while it was moving from Pax River via NAS Norfolk and Aviano, Italy, to join the USS Thomas Jefferson at Trieste. At first, it was like flying with strangers in a commercial jet; he was CO in name only, the movement already organized by the acting CO, a lieutenant-commander named Stevens. He was still in a rage over the change of orders, so his mood was not charitable, and he found himself making harsh judgments about the unit. Movement planning seemed to him substandard, the preparations made to work only because the junior enlisted worked their butts off and the senior enlisted were pros. The officers remained an unknown quantity—faces and handshakes at Pax River, and little else—and most of them had flown off with the det’s two aircraft and would be waiting on the Jefferson.
By the time they had reached Aviano, he had at least gotten control of the anger, and he knew many of the faces, if not the names. He had made common cause with the senior chief, and they had agreed on how to improve the last leg to the ship. Then he saw to it that he was the last man to leave Aviano; that way, he knew that everything was in train, and the senior chief would get everything to the Jefferson on schedule.
He showered for the first time in two days, changed into civilian clothes at the NATO bachelor officers’ quarters, and rented a car, which he drove a little too fast into Trieste before walking down to fleet landing. The Jefferson was anchored out beyond the main harbor entrance, washed by hazy sun and a faint Mediterranean mist that gave the port a friendly look and gilded the harshness of the modern waterfront.
Now almost resigned to the change of orders and buoyed by seeing a ship he knew and felt great affection for, his mood was raised further by seeing a familiar face: Chris Donitz, an F-14 jock who had been the senior LSO on his last tour.
“Hey, Doughnuts!”
He smiled because it was obvious that Donitz was glad to see him. In an instant, shipboard camaraderie embraced him, and he listened with a smile as Donitz told him that he was heading shoreward for two days of liberty and a meeting with his wife. Donitz was just beginning to rhapsodize about meeting her in Venice when Alan heard a voice at his shoulder.
“Sorry to interrupt, sir—are you Lieutenant-Commander Craik? Message at the SP shack, sir.”
He thought, Oh, shit, trouble with the det. He shook Donitz’s hand. “Better catch your train. Give my regards to Regina.”
“You bet. But Al, listen, uh—”
Alan waited, literally balanced on one foot to walk away.
“Uh, watch your step, okay?”
That got Alan’s attention, and he swung back. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Donitz flicked a glance at his watch and shuffled his feet. “Just some scuttlebutt about why you’re here.”
“An intel guy commanding a bunch of aviators? I can deal with it.”
“Uh—sure. Hey, take care of yourself.”
If Alan had been in less of a hurry, he would have known that Donitz had more to say. As it was, Donitz gave a quick hand gesture, part salute, part wave, and hurried through the shore-patrol sentries and down the pier toward the railway station.
Alan strolled over to the shore-patrol office. A well-turned-out jg stood inside, his creased whites gleaming. He was from the ship�
��s company and didn’t recognize Alan in his civilian clothes, but as soon as Alan introduced himself, the man snapped to attention.
“Sir, the previous DO left a message that your wife came by about an hour ago and said she’d wait for you in, uh, Lettieri.” He had trouble with it, and the name came out as Letty-air-yury.
“My wife?” Rose was supposed to be in Newport, getting ready to graduate.
“That’s what the message says, sir. ‘Mrs Craik waiting for her husband at the Letty-air-iery.’”
“Lettieri?” Alan asked. Rose had never mentioned coming out. Of course, she wasn’t above surprising him—maybe even skipping her own graduation because he had to miss his, and they’d spend it together? Pick up a quickie flight from some friend in Transport—The thought of seeing her made him grin.
“Lieutenant, can you call the boat?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get CVIC on the line and tell them that LCDR Craik is going to miss the 1700 brief, okay? Ask my Det NCOIC to see that my stuff gets to my stateroom.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Now, where is the Lettieri?” He realized that he wanted to see his wife a lot more than he wanted to see his new command.
Alan’s eagerness to see Rose saved his life.
He followed the first part of the directions from fleet landing to the Riva Del Mandrachio, which ran along the waterfront, but the next turning eluded him. The landmark for this turn had been hotly debated by two sailors of the shore patrol, one arguing for a small church, the other for a bar, both making marks on the back of an advertising flier for a rock club. Alan saw several bars, but no church. He turned southeast, away from the waterfront, and headed into town, following the crude map and asking his way in his Neapolitan Italian, to the amusement of the Triestini.
The first local he asked pointed silently up the hill and waved Alan on. The second, as if to make up for the reticence of the first, offered to take him to a much better café, with a beautiful waitress, where the man himself was headed. Alan declined with courtesy, and the man shrugged. He gave directions rapidly, insisting that the Caffe Lettieri was on the Via San Giorgio. Alan followed the new directions as best he could.
Ten minutes later, he was deep in the old part of the city. He passed two of the city’s foremost Roman attractions and stopped, his temper flaring. The anger about his changed orders was just below the surface again, ready to flare at any provocation. He took a deep breath, looked at his map, and began to doubt that any members of the shore patrol had got this far from the fleet landing. Then, deliberately calming himself, he walked slowly until he found a cross street whose name appeared on his map and moved briskly south toward the Via San Giorgio. By then, the sunny day had turned gray, and thin Adriatic drizzle had begun to fall, and he was hurrying because he was afraid he would miss Rose.
He had to walk for more than five minutes to reach San Giorgio, and he realized by the time he reached it that he was directly above the fleet landing; indeed, the shore-patrol post was almost at his feet. The Caffe Lettieri was just ahead of him, a new, prosperous place with gold lettering on its façade. Rose’s choice of a rendezvous now made sense. He hurried to meet her, overtaking what he took to be a local man talking on a cellphone.
And then something struck him as out of place. A car had pulled up ahead of him, a big Audi 5000; the doors opened even before it had stopped, and as the doors popped feet and heads and hands appeared, fingers gripped around door frames, tension in eyes that darted back and forth at him and at the man with the cellphone. He knew those eyes, those tense hands: anticipating violence. That was his reaction, irrational, atavistic: memories of Africa and Bosnia, men going into action, high on it, super-alert.
And the man ahead of him was speaking Serbo-Croat, not Italian.
The man closed his cellphone with a snap and drew a pistol from his backpack, his eyes fixed now on the Caffe Lettieri. He looked just like the men coming out of the Audi. Almost dancing on the pavement in his anticipation.
They were going to hit the café.
The café in which his wife was waiting.
Alan lengthened his stride and stepped up behind cellphone man and took a last, careful look up the street at the car, his mind stretching the milliseconds as he tried to read what he was seeing. Weapons were appearing now from black leather jackets. One man was checking his fly, the second time he had done that: When did I see him do it? How did I notice? Another licked his lips. Looking here, there—predator’s eyes—
He took a deep, silent breath, gathered his anger and frustration and threw himself on the man with the pack, pinning his arms to his sides. His weight carried the man to the ground and the man’s head hit the pavement with a hollow thump, like a gourd meeting a cleaver. He heaved at the man, flipping him face up, gaining control of his limbs and taking the gun, a wrestling move that flowed from his past without conscious thought. He worked the slide on the pistol and rolled away, covering the head of the street, where one of the men from the Audi was opening fire into the front of the café.
Alan centered the sight picture on the man’s chest above the machine pistol he was using and fired twice, knocking the shooter back over the hood of the Audi. One of the other leather jackets fired back at him, walking the stream of bullets over the man he had tackled. Alan felt a blow to his leg and fired back without any attempt to aim. He raised his head and shot again on reflex, but the man who had fired at Alan had thrown himself into the car.
All Alan could think was that if it was a terrorist attack they still had time to throw a bomb, that Rose was still in danger. The car shrieked away from the curb, hitting the mirror of a parked van.
Two men were down.
Alan stumbled forward, his left leg striking oddly on the street. As he came to the corner, he saw that the whole front of the café had been shattered by bullets, and he threw himself forward into the café. He bellowed, “Rose!”
Two young men were bent over a body. Alan leaned past them, saw that the body was a man’s, and realized that he was still holding the gun. He shoved it in his waistband and went to the second body, clearly a corpse and with a pool of blue-black blood all around it. An older woman. Not Rose. Three other victims were on their feet, one staring at a bloody arm; a woman screamed and screamed; somebody slumped to the floor, his back tracing a red smear down the wall. He smelled gunpowder, blood, excrement.
Then his senses began to return from the overload of the shooting, and he heard the hooting of police sirens and more screaming.
“Alan Craik?” A woman’s voice behind him.
“Rose?” He turned and saw a woman who was definitely not Rose, a tall blond woman with a straight nose and Asiatic cheekbones.
“You are Alan Craik, I think.”
His leg was numb, and he looked down. The heel and sole of his left shoe had been shot away. He sat heavily on the floor, in a litter of broken glass. Reaction, fatigue. The sirens got closer. His foot had been cut by glass, otherwise was untouched, but his whole lower leg was numb. He focused on the woman in front of him. She looked like a wild animal caught between a need for food and a need to flee. His brain seemed to have been numbed, too: “Are you a friend of Rose’s?” he said, hearing the stupidity of it.
“I told them I was your wife so you would come.” Alan’s head snapped back to her, and his right hand moved toward the butt of the pistol in the small of his back. A trap? But the shooters are gone. What is she telling me?
“I must meet with you.”
Alan looked at her. She had neither blood nor glass on her and she looked like the cover of a glamour magazine, except for the fear in her eyes. She seemed to have no reaction to the screaming or the sirens or the blood, as affectless as a photograph, except for those eyes. He pulled himself up by grabbing a table that was puddled with coffee. His brain still seemed unable to make good sense. “Who are you?”
The sirens screamed outside. “Your next liberty port is Naples. Meet me there.”
“Why?”
She was already moving away into the crowd in front of the café. For the first time, she seemed at a loss. Once at the edge of the crowd, however, she stopped, now part of it, not part of the attack.
“Bonner,” she called. Then she was gone.
Bonner? He had to focus. Bonner was the name of the traitor who had got his father killed. Bonner was in a US prison. What did she mean, Bonner?
Police poured into the ruined café. He could make no sense of it, but his brain was clear enough now for him to know that what the woman had said had flung him back into a security investigation he had believed closed, and there was no way he could tell the Italian cops about it.
2
Newport and Utica.
For Rose, the new life started when she closed their rented house. She had loved living there, but now she was ready to go to the life she had dreamed of and worked toward for six years—Houston, the Space Center, astronaut training.
“Ready to go?” she said to Mikey, their seven-year-old.
“Let’s go!”
“You ready?” she said to the dog. The big tail banged against a wall.
“Well—let’s go!”
And without a backward glance she piled them into the 4Runner and started for her parents’ house in Utica, New York. The kids and the dog would be left there while she drove to Houston, then camped out in the house they had already bought there. Her children would adapt. They belonged to a happy family, except that every two or three years, one or both parents went to sea. Or into space.
“You feel abused?” she said to Mikey.
“I’m busy.” He was playing a computer game.
“That’s what I thought.”
The dog put his head over the seat from the back and licked her hair.
“You feel abused?” she said.
The dog wiggled all over.
