The Venetian Judgment (29 page)

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Authors: David Stone

BOOK: The Venetian Judgment
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“What’s in the flash drive?”
A massive shrug from Mike.
“Fuck if I know, kid. Comes right from where your mommy works, the NSA. My guess, it’s some kind of undetectable surveillance program, does a stealth scan of the entire system. Next time Chief Buck goes online, everything on his machine gets copied to Fort Meade. Don’t fucking ask me how, I’m no techno-geek, I’m just a cop. All I know, you can move around Chief Buck’s office, we can’t. So it’s gotta be you who finds some fucking way to get this flash drive into Chief Buck’s machine. You gonna try or not?”
Silence, the smoke rising, both men breathing audibly. A man’s voice, muffled through the walls, a harsh, braying laugh, coming closer.
“That’s Brad. Got his doughnut and now he’s coming back. You in or out?”
A slow zoom from the hidden video camera, coming in tight on Morgan’s face, so close Briony could see his eyelashes and the sheen of sweat on his pale cheek, see the child he had been and the son he had become, and the ruin he was about to make of his life. Her heart burned into a cinder and died, but none of that changed the outcome in the slightest.
“Yes . . . Yes, I’m in.”
A jump cut, as Briony expected.
Morgan, unshaven now, looking utterly spent and exhausted. He was in the same room, now missing its flag and its portrait of the President, and the table was bare except for the flash drive and a sheaf of computer paper neatly stacked beside it. There was a different man sitting in the chair opposite Morgan, back to the camera, a slope-shouldered lumpish shape with a squat neck and a roll of fat flowing over the collar of his dirty white shirt, his pale gray suit jacket wrinkled as if it had been slept in, sweat stains showing under the armpits. He was leaning forward under the cone of downlight, speaking to Morgan in a thick Eastern European accent—possibly Ukrainian or Georgian, or some kind of Russian-inflected dialect combining both of them and neither at the same time. His voice was low and calm, seeming to have been electronically distorted, and he spoke in short, unadorned sentences. He gave the general impression of being neither dead nor alive, present nor absent, real nor imaginary. He was neither black nor white but very gray, and decidedly lethal.
Briony, who knew the type, knew him for what he was.
A KGB officer, probably at or above the rank of colonel, and, given the classic nature of this honey trap, working for their Second Directorate, which handled Internal Security and CounterIntelligence. The fact that he had his back to the camera and that his voice was being electronically altered told Briony that he might be identifiable, a voice and a face known to the West. She studied his general body shape, burning it into her mind. No matter what else happened, she was going to find out who this man was.
The man reached out a fat sausage-fingered hand and tapped the pile of papers in front of Morgan.
“This will go to your Office of Naval Intelligence in a simple Federal Express package, along with the video of your confession—”
Morgan, flaring out, his neck muscles corded and his face red. “I’ve told you and told you, they were fucking MPs. They told me—”
The Gray Man—Briony had given the nameless man a name—interrupted, calm, in control, in a flat tone, his pudgy hand raised.
“The evidence presented will show you accepting this device and undertaking to introduce it into the personal laptop of your superior officer. The evidence will show that the program introduced in this way was able to penetrate this officer’s desktop when he transferred personal photo files of his children sent by his wife in Shreveport to his desktop as a screen saver. And, in a while, the program sent this—we have printed it out for you to consider—which is a sampling of the logistics and materials systems for much of the Fifth Fleet and peripheral operations in the eastern Mediterranean. Have you read this?”
“Fuck it.”
“I repeat, have you read it?”
“Yes. Fuck yes.”
“And you recognize that having obtained this material for us places you in a very difficult position?”
“No, I’ll just tell them what really happened.”
“And that it also places your mother in a very difficult position?”
“My mother?”
“Yes. How will the charges of treason and espionage against her son affect her standing within the American intelligence community?”
“She had nothing to do with this. You set me up.”
“You cooperated with a foreign agency and obtained classified—”
“None of that’s classified—”
“It’s not considered to be secret, but tactical information concerning your Navy’s logistical and materials-routing systems is always useful, perhaps in the resale market. And the fact that this stealth program remains resident in the Souda Base computer system is also an asset. It has other uses besides key counting and file copying. And it was placed there by you.”
Morgan, pushed to the limit, found his steel at last.
“Look, I’m tired. What the hell do you want me to do? I’m not doing anything more to help you. I think you’re KGB, and I’m not a traitor no matter how you try to make it look that way. I fucked up. I’ll pay the fare. Put a bullet in me or let me loose. Up to you. Kill me, let me walk. I don’t really give a fuck anymore.”
The Gray Man sat back, sighed, reached into a breast pocket, brought out a small stainless-steel pistol, laid it on the table in front of him, turned to someone off camera and said something in an Eastern bloc language that contained “Melina.”
At the name, Morgan jerked upright, opened his mouth, and closed it again. The room was filled with a taut silence, and nothing happened for a time. There was a commotion, the sound of a door being thrown back, and the man who had called himself “Brad” came into the room, dragging the young blond woman named Melina by the arm. She was crying, her hair matted, her clothes filthy, her face bruised and bloody. She knelt there, breathing heavily, looking at nothing. The Gray Man lifted the pistol, placed the muzzle against her temple, looked across the table at Morgan.
A moment passed, and then Morgan said, “Fuck her too. She’s probably one of yours.”
The girl called Melina lifted her head up, stared at Morgan.
“Morgan, please—”
The Gray Man squeezed the trigger. There was a sharp, cracking pop, a puff of smoke, a spattering of blood and brains on the wall beside her, and she dropped out of the camera frame. Morgan stared at her body on the floor, and then back across at the Gray Man again, his face slack, stunned. The Gray Man lifted the pistol, pointed it at Morgan’s head, squeezed the trigger—and the screen went black.
The black screen held for a moment, and then light came back, a tight shot of the pistol on the table and the voice of the Gray Man speaking.
“Miss Keating, your son is still alive. We have not yet decided our next course of action concerning him. He can be exposed to your Office of Naval Intelligence as a spy and sent to Leavenworth, which may not destroy your career but will certainly limit it. Or, to use an American term of art, he may undergo ‘rendition’ to a third party, such as Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Taliban, or the Iranian secret service, where he will be subjected to the most extreme forms of interrogation they can devise. He may eventually make an appearance in a terror video at some point, where he will be inexpertly beheaded on camera by some clumsy jihadist while he cries out for your help in his last terrible moments. All these things may happen or none of them. It is up to you. His fate is in your hands. Your organization is in possession of a collection of archived cable transmissions between certain Soviet station agents in Paris and their superiors in Moscow. This collection of paper documents was unearthed quite recently in Riga, Latvia, by a joint task force of American and NATO intelligence officers. These paper transcripts—let us call them the ‘Riga Transcripts’—which are in code, have been delivered to your superiors at Fort Meade and are now being addressed by your particular department, a group of decryption experts known internally as the Glass Cutters. I am about to give you a date range. Please secure a pen, since this video will automatically erase itself. Have you a pen?”
Briony looked up at Jules, her eyes hunted, looking suddenly haggard and old. He held a pen out to her, along with the pad she kept by the fridge to write out shopping lists. She was reasonably certain that the little Sony digital camera she had set up to record a backup of the image on her screen had enough capacity to hold the entire video, but she wasn’t going to leave anything to chance. She jerked it out of his hands and spread it out on the counter.
The Gray Man’s voice rolled on. “I will assume you now have a pen. The date range we are concerned with is from the twentieth day of April 1973 to the nineteenth day of June 1973. Do you have that?”
The Gray Man repeated the dates another three times.
Then he went on to his final statement.
“I will assume you have the dates clear. Please make certain that you also write down the following instructions as well. We are aware that as the Senior Coordinator of the Glass Cutters, you are in a position to review progress and assign certain sections of these cables to specific subgroups for more efficient decryption operations.
“Here are our instructions. They are quite simple.
“In your Venona transcripts, you make frequent reference to ‘x number groups unrecovered,’ as in ‘fifteen groups unrecovered’ or ‘forty groups unrecovered.’ You will see to it, Miss Keating, that in the Riga Transcript that you have in your possession now, on a specific transcript you have docketed as ‘Riga one five seven dash alpha hotel’”—Briony’s pen was racing—“on that particular transcript, you will find that
very
few number groups are recoverable. Very few, less than fifteen percent. Find whatever procedural excuses or justifications are persuasive. But you
will
ensure that outcome. I will repeat this section again.”
He did, and then closed with:
“Now, I know you are a patriot, Miss Keating, and this will run against all your instincts. I can tell you in complete honesty that we are dealing with ancient history here. There is
nothing
in this cable that can have any effect on our modern world in any way. It is our desire to protect the reputation and legacy of one of
your
most respected intelligence officers. His was not an act of betrayal but rather an inadvertent disclosure. But his exposure would have some peripheral consequences that would not be in the interests of
either
of our countries.
“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.”

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