The Venetian Judgment (34 page)

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Authors: David Stone

BOOK: The Venetian Judgment
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He flipped open the orange wallet, riffled through the cards, dug out an ID with her picture on it that said she was Gretel Pinskoya, lived in Saint Petersburg, and was an attaché of something called the “Russian Inter-Asian Trade and Commerce Bureau.”
Dalton flipped her things back into the bag, keeping the nasty little PSM pistol, the keys, and the phone, dropped the bag back at her feet, and took a moment to see where they were going.
As far as he could tell, they were headed north, out of the city, in a stream of heavy traffic—cars, scooters, jitneys, diesel trucks—moving through open country with rolling farmland stretching away into the coming night on their left and acres of brand-new housing tracts on their right. He saw a street sign as they whipped across an intersection: BÜYÜKDERE CADDESI. He leaned forward, keeping the pistol rammed in tight against the woman’s ribs, tapped the driver’s screen.
“Yes, sir?”
“How long till we get there?”
“
Sariyer,
sir?”
Dalton had no idea where that was.
“Yes, how long?”
The driver, a kid really, looked a little shifty, and Dalton realized he was thinking about his tip and whether or not he’d make more if he just drove around in the hills for a while until he got the tab up where he liked it.
“Oh, maybe ten miles. Hard to say in all this traffic.”
Dalton pulled some euros out of his pocket, held them through the partition window. The driver eyed them and literally licked his lips.
“Get us there in half the time and this is yours.”
“Okay, sir!” he said, punching the gas and accelerating around an oil tanker, darting back into the lane again, as a transport went by in the other direction, horn blasting.
Dalton leaned back and looked at the woman beside him, who so far had spoken not one word, which impressed him.
“So, Gretel, how the heck are you?”
The woman’s lips were blue and tight, and for a moment Dalton thought she was going to pass out. She was not used to this kind of thing, but she knew enough about it to know her chances of still being alive by sundown were slim.
“Who are you?” she finally got out after a couple of attempts.
Dalton gave her a large and unsettling grin.
“My name is Micah Dalton and I work for the Central Intelligence Agency, and I am here to totally fuck up your world. Lovely to meet you.”
“What . . . What do you want?”
“I want to know who’s waiting for us, Gretel.”
“Waiting for us where?”
“Wherever we’re going.”
Her skin was almost powder blue now, and her lips were white.
“Goodness, Gretel,” he said, pulling the Beretta out of her ribs and resting it on her elbow, “you’ll faint. Breathe, sweetheart, breathe.”
“I am an attaché of a Russian trade office, and what you are doing is kidnapping me. There will be very serious reper—”
“Gretel, sweetie, save it for
Pravda
. By the way, Vladimir’s dead.”
Gretel couldn’t control her reflexive gasp, but she clamped down on it a second later, the muscles along her jawline clenching and her lips set.
“I do not know a—”
“Didn’t mean to, actually. Cracked him across the back of the head back at the Ataköy Marina. Had a skull like a paper cup, I guess. Never came to. Dumped him into the Bosphorus. Was he a dear friend?”
She blocked herself off and tried to retreat inward.
“Where’s the rest of your crowd, by the way? Can’t just be you and the little brown man back at the mall.”
In spite of her efforts, something flickered in her eyes. A secret?
“Maybe they’re all off tracking us with Anatoly’s cell phone? Closing in like avenging harpies? Sorry. Anatoly doesn’t have it anymore—”
She flinched at Anatoly’s name.
“You know Mr. Bakunin, do you? Little dwarf of a guy? Hung like a hamster?”
She flared at that, her cheeks red, turning to hiss in his face.
“Viktor is—”
She stopped abruptly, shutting down again. But it cost her.
Dalton decided to let her cook for a while, leaning forward to tap the driver’s shoulder. The driver had an iPod in his ear—didn’t anyone under thirty ever worry about still being able to hear when they were forty?—and he popped it out with a large, gap-toothed grin. Dalton’s promise of multiple euros had made them boon companions . . . for now, at least.
“What’s that address again? Where’re we going?”
The driver looked down at a notepad on the seat beside him.
“Three-six-seven Meserburnu Caddesi, sir.”
“Okay, thanks.”
“We’ll be there in five minutes, okay?”
Dalton sat back again, smiled at Gretel.
“So, Gretel, what’s at 367 Meserburnu Street? What’s waiting for us there?”
She turned her face away, staring out the side window, probably, Dalton thought, to hide her reaction to the question. Which meant that whatever was waiting there wasn’t going to be good for Dalton. He smiled at the side of her head for a time and then tugged out his own cell phone. The line beeped for a while and then Mandy’s voice came on, a low, purring vibrato.
“Micah, where are you?”
“Ask our guy if he knows a place in the north called Sariyer?”
There was muffled exchange, and then Mandy was back on.
“Yes. It’s a port town, kind of a fishing village, about six miles from the northern end of the strait. On the European side.”
“Okay. Where are you?”
“We’re . . . just coming up to a bridge . . . Levka says it’s the Sultan Mehmet Bridge. Hold on. Are you in Sariyer?”
“Just about.”
“Levka says it’s about five miles up the strait. We can be there in thirty minutes, if we open the boat up.”
“What’s the risk?”
“He says there’s a ten-knot speed limit in the strait because the wake erodes the shoreline.”
“Risk it. Did you find anything?”
“Yes. You want to talk about it in the clear?”
“No. Does it help?”
“Oh my yes. Lujac is alive, and we can prove it. Are you all right?”
Dalton looked over at Gretel Pinskoya, who was simmering away like a little teapot and harrumphing audibly every few seconds.
“I am.”
“What’s in Sariyer, Micah?”
“A surprise, I expect.”
“You should wait until we get there.”
“I can’t. Speed counts here. Look for me at the main dock.”
He flipped the phone shut, sat forward to look through the windshield. They had come down out of a range of low, tree-covered hills and were now racing along a waterside causeway—PIYASA CADDESI, according to the signs—past some very elegant waterside villas with red-tiled roofs and colonnaded balconies, windows glowing with wealth and ease, parks and walkways running along the waterside, mothers jogging with their kids in those big-wheeled strollers, a load of ancient tourists stumbling out of a large blue bus with MINOAN TOURS painted on the side. The kid was slowing down now, counting the numbers, as Piyasa turned into Meserburnu. The trees thinned out, and now they were moving through what looked like a more industrial section of the little town. Fishing boats filled a small marina on his right. The road curved east, and the driver, at a slow crawl, brought the cab to a stop beside what looked like a cannery or a warehouse, about a hundred feet long and perhaps twenty-five deep, sitting out on a concrete wharf.
The driver pulled through a narrow gate in a tall concrete wall and into a small enclosed parking area, which was empty. He turned around to offer his gap-toothed grin to his passengers. If he thought anything of the obvious tension between the blond young man and the teapot woman, he wasn’t showing it.
“Here we are, sir. Make good time, yes?”
Dalton thanked him, paid the fare, and gave him a fifty-euro tip on top of it, which caused his young face to break into an ear-to-ear grin. He forced a business card onto Dalton as Dalton got out, bringing Gretel Pinskoya out on his arm in what looked like but was not a chivalric gesture.
She came unhappily but offered no resistance, and they stood together in the fenced-off parking lot for a moment while Dalton considered the solid-steel doors and the blank windows, dirty with dust, closed off with slatted beige blinds like the cataract-whitened eyes of a very old man. The place had a general air of decay and felt empty. Behind the low building, above its corrugated-iron roof, gulls wheeled and dipped, and a single pelican, roosting on the peak, squawked at them indignantly. Maybe, thought Dalton, he was the pelican who got fed a cell phone earlier and had now come back to bitch about it. Probably not.
Nothing for it but to push on, Dalton decided, although he intensely disliked walking into seemingly deserted buildings without backup and maybe air cover. He tugged Gretel into motion—she had lapsed into a kind of slack, sullen resistance—and they got up to the door. Dalton looked around the doorframe for alarms or triggers or any kind of telltale sign, saw nothing.
“So what do we do, Gretel? Do we open the door and get blown out of our panty hose? What should we do?”
Gretel shrugged, stared back at him for a moment, then looked quickly away, but not quickly enough to conceal the tiny glitter of hate-filled anticipation in her flat-brown eyes.
Dalton took out his Beretta, stepped to one side, and then rapped on the door three times—short, sharp blows. There was a silence then, during which even the sound of the traffic flowing behind them faded into stillness and there was only the ripple of the waves lapping against the pylons of the wharf. Dalton waited another sixty seconds and then took out the key ring, riffled through the choices, and settled on a large triangular one that looked like it suited the lock. He was about to insert the key when he realized that Gretel was now backing away from the door. Dalton heard a distinct metallic click, then reached out and caught Gretel, jerking her to the ground just as there was a series of deep, thudding booms, five huge holes blasting out through the walls at waist level, first on the far left, then near left, then through the center of the door, the near right, then far right. The shooter paused, perhaps to assess damage or to reload his Godzilla shotgun. Dalton stepped in, fast and low, and fired nine quick rounds through the hole in the door. He heard a strangled yelp, and then the clatter of a weapon falling on concrete. Gretel had gotten to her feet and tried to waddle away as fast as she could, but Dalton caught her by the wrist and held her as he fired the Beretta again, taking out the door’s upper and lower hinges. He booted what was left of the door and it slammed backward into a dark space that was filled with smoke still hanging in the air from the shotgun discharge. The afternoon sun was lighting up the wide, dust-filled interior, which was bare except for a few sticks of office furniture. There was a huge KS-23 shotgun lying in the rectangle of sunlight, a spray of fresh blood making a fan behind it, and a pair of military boots, splayed out and still, half hidden in the shadows. Dalton pulled Gretel in front of him and shoved her through the door. She staggered a few feet and went down on her hands and knees, her head down, her body shaking.
Dalton changed out his mag, slapped a new one home. He stepped quickly through the open door, checked six, checked right, checked left, checked above, got his back to the wall, covering the large open space. The smell of cordite hung in the air, the coppery bite of fresh blood, along with something else . . . something he did not quite recognize.
He looked back out into the parking lot, expecting to see it filling up with cop cars. But there was no sign that the gunfire had been heard over the booming of the waves. He shut the door, found a light switch, and a series of tired fluorescent bars gradually flickered on, filling the long open space with unsteady shimmering blue light and a buzzing electric whine.
Dalton stepped over the young man, weapon at the ready, and looked down at his shocked features. Fresh-faced, the man had a military crew cut; he was wearing jeans, combat boots, and a white turtleneck sweater.
He also had four bloody black holes stitched across his chest and was obviously dead. The four-gauge KS slide-action shotgun—a Russian military piece designed for their Special Forces, with a pistol grip and a massive barrel—lay a few inches from his right hand, with five ejected casings scattered around the floor behind him. Dalton bent down, picked the shotgun up, checked the chamber, slipping the Beretta into his belt. He looked over at Gretel.
“There was a
tell,
wasn’t there?”
She said nothing.
“It was nothing you did, so it was something you didn’t do. I guess the cell, right? If you showed up without calling first, the kid knew he should light up whoever was in the door. That was almost you, my dear. I saved your skin. Remember me in your will . . . Okay, Gretel, on your feet.”

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