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Authors: David Stone

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BOOK: The Venetian Judgment
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“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.”
“Kiki Lujac,” said Dalton, “is he alive or is he dead?”
“And if he’s alive, why is he in England killing Glass Cutters?”
Dalton made one last attempt to slip his cables, not because he didn’t want to know the truth but because he didn’t want to put another woman for whom he had real affection out on the firing line. His record in that area was rotten: two dead, one still missing, one badly wounded and currently recovering in Capri and not taking his calls.
“We
could
save ourselves a lot of trouble by simply telling Hank Brocius about Lujac. The photographs. Singapore. We just stay the hell out.”
Mandy looked doubtful.
“We could. But we’re Agency. Without any real proof, he’s just as liable to tell us to go to hell. He’d think we were just trying to elbow our way in. We need to have something solid to show him. Anyway, Kiki Lujac was working for Gospic, and Chong Kew Sak, and that horrible fat little policeman—”
“Sergeant Ong Bo.”
“And did Kiki Lujac not do his best to get us all killed in Singapore?”
“Yes, he did,” Dalton said, resigned now, giving in to fate.
“So, if he’s still alive, don’t we
owe
that psychopathic little shit?”
There was no other answer to Mandy’s question.
“Yes, we do.”
He stood and offered Mandy his hand.
“Shall we?”
Mandy smiled, reached for her purse and gloves, and took Dalton’s hand as he helped her out of the booth and then held open her cape.
“Yes,” she said, slipping into it, “we shall.”
part two
SANTORINI, THE AEGEAN SEA
FIRA
They were inbound to Santorini on an Olympic Airlines airbus, flying in wave-top low because a major storm was lashing the Aegean from Athens to Rhodes, and the heavy plane was taking one hell of a beating. From where Mandy was sitting, wedged in tight between the pale and the queasy, the island of Santorini looked like the jagged base of a shattered amphora sticking up out of an angry coal-black sea, ringed in by lashing surf, apparently uninhabited, although there were signs of clustered dwellings running along the saw-toothed cliffs that ringed the lagoon in a rough semicircle.
All in all, the place looked nothing like the travel brochures she had cheerfully picked up in Heathrow and which were now stuffed, crumpled and forgotten, into a slot next to the airsickness bag, an item that now held much more significance for her immediate future. She watched the ocean tilt as the plane lurched heavily into a banking turn, riding a crest of wind like a sailboat quartering a crosscut sea.
Mandy closed her eyes and swallowed carefully.
“What do we know about this bloody island?” she asked, mainly to distract herself. “It looks like a hellhole. Have you ever been here?”
“No, but I pulled an Agency brief off the website.”
“Anything useful?”
“Not as useful as this,” he said, holding up a
Lonely Planet
guide. “What would you like to know?”
Mandy swallowed again, her cheeks damp, managing somehow to evoke images of both Ophelia and Camille.
“Just enough to keep my mind off how bloody ghastly I feel.”
“Fine. As you are indisposed, I will read aloud . . . ‘The island that is now called Santorini first came to the attention of the rest of the ancient world by blowing the living daylights out of itself about sixteen hundred and fifty years before Jesus got his first tricycle—’ ”
Mandy opened one eye.
“ ‘Tricycle’ seems a bit glib, don’t you think?”
“It’s pithy. At
Lonely Planet,
they strive for pith. Pith is their policy. Shall I go on, or would you prefer to editorialize?”
“God, no. Continue.
Pleathe.
”
“Thank you . . . ‘The island was known at the time as Strongoli, which means “the round island.” Strongoli became the center of a vast trading empire based on the vast trading of . . . stuff. Unfortunately, it was also the center of a huge volcano, a feature of the landscape that the Minoans probably should not have overlooked since, when this volcano finally blew itself thirty miles into the upper atmosphere, it also blew the Minoan civilization, which had up until then been pretty hot potatoes, to smithereens.’”
“ ‘Smithereens’? They actually say smithereens?”
“Right down here in Helvetica Bold. Apparently, it’s an old The-ban word meaning ‘pieces too small to pick up with tweezers.’ Since the island was no longer quite so round, they renamed it Thera, which means ‘no longer quite so round.’ Now
this
is interesting. The famous Homeric expression ‘Iερά ‘’Hη! Tí εστí ἐκεîνoσ δυνατόσ θόρυβoσ?, which, as I’m sure you will recall from reading Greats at Oxford, means ‘Holy Hera! What was that really loud noise?,’ may actually date from this period.”
BOOK: The Venetian Judgment
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