The Venetian Judgment (40 page)

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Authors: David Stone

BOOK: The Venetian Judgment
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Brocius felt the rear end dropping. He straightened the wheel, dropped the selector to ALL-WHEEL LOW, and hit the accelerator as he felt the truck beginning to tip. The wall of brush marked a steep slope covered in thin trees, and although he was on the accelerator and plumes of snow were flying out behind the front wheels, the truck tipped up, and he felt the front wheels start to spin in midair. The truck was sliding backward now, out of control. He fumbled for the door handle as the Escalade suddenly dropped ten feet down a sheer slope. Brocius slammed into the roof-window brace, blood filling his eyes.
The truck stood on its tailgate for a moment before it began to tilt sideways, rolling onto the driver’s side and then sliding down the slope, crashing though the slender pines and alders like a bear crashing through the undergrowth, leaving a hundred-yard-long swath of broken trees and plowed snow, finally coming to a smashing stop on its side up against a stand of hawthorn, all four wheels spinning slowly, the back buried in a deep drift of snow with only a thin red glow to mark the Escalade’s taillights.
Its headlights had bored through the snowfall for a few feet and now played on a few bare pines, lighting them up like stick figures on a stage.
Although the Escalade was now tilted onto the driver’s side, the engine—solid, bolted into a steel frame, and fueled by a very efficient closed-compression system—kept on running.
Inside the truck, Hank Brocius lay slumped up against the driver’s-side window, semiconscious, stunned, his head bloody but otherwise unhurt. The tailpipe was jammed into a snowbank, not deep enough to choke the engine to a halt but deep enough to let some carbon monoxide seep back into the interior. Slightly heavier than air, it started to pool around the rear section, which was lower than the front, but after a time it began to seep forward, an invisible, scentless cloud working toward the driver’s seat.
The air bags had automatically deployed, sending an alert to the truck’s OnStar system. The internal radio attempted to send a digital DRIVER IN DISTRESS signal to the OnStar monitoring offices in Michigan. The system would continue sending this alert until it received a reply.
To do this, it relied on local cell phone tower systems, all of which were temporarily blanketed out by the huge snowstorm now covering most of New York State and the northern half of Pennsylvania. The screen on the cell phone Brocius had in his coat pocket showed a line of power bars. As the storm clouds moved slowly into the south, the bars ON started to change, and the screen went from NO SIGNAL to LOOKING FOR SERVICE.
The OnStar system was doing exactly the same thing, searching for a signal. In the rear of the truck, the carbon monoxide level slowly rose. Brocius began to breathe more deeply, and his color began to change from pale to pink. There was a break in the clouds, and OnStar found a signal and sent out a digital 911 alert. It was immediately answered by a young woman named Luwaana Brody, sitting at her console in Michigan like an air traffic controller at her screen, dealing with hundreds of calls that had been coming in from all over the Northeast since this huge storm had rolled down from Saskatchewan. Her voice, soft but authoritative, boomed through the truck’s audio system:
“Sir, we are receiving an air-bag-deployment signal from your vehicle. Are you all right?”
Brocius reacted to the voice, but it was as if he were hearing it from the bottom of a cold lake. He opened his mouth, fighting through a terrible lethargy that was pulling him back toward the bottom.
“I’m . . . not . . . The air . . .”
“Sir, I cannot hear your reply. I’m sending help right now.”
She looked at her screen, got the GPS coordinates—41 degrees 23 minutes 12.35 seconds north, 73 degrees 55 minutes 36.24 seconds west—New York State, at the intersection of Indian Brook and Avery. She hit the CALL button for the nearest New York State EMS station, got an answer, and read out the coordinates, describing the vehicle. The dispatcher was hopeful but not encouraging. ETA was thirty minutes to an hour. Luwaana Brody then got back on the radio to Hank Brocius.
“Sir, sir, can you hear me?”
Nothing.
No, she could hear
something
: a low, vibrating rumble, like wheels turning slowly. And, under that, a steady burbling sound.
She looked at the VEHICLE STATUS report.
The Escalade’s engine was still running. The drive was engaged. But the truck was stopped—its GPS numbers hadn’t shifted a yard—the air bags had deployed, but the wheels were still turning.
They were
freewheeling,
she realized. The truck had overturned, or at least had tilted onto one side.
“Sir, can you hear me? We’ve got an ambulance on the way. You hold on now. Can you hear me?”
The air
. . .
She looked at the Escalade’s exterior temperature. It was six below zero. She tried to rouse Brocius, heard a low moaning reply. Was he hurt? Was he having trouble breathing?
He’s in a remote area, it’s getting serious snowfall, the truck’s on its side, the engine is running. Does he suffocate or freeze to death?
Luwaana Brody gave it another half second, reached out, shut the truck’s engine off.
 
 
 
NIGHT HAD COME DOWN
on the stone house in Garrison, but the snow kept falling, a steady, downward drift that reminded Anton Palenz of the way his mother would sift flour into a bowl when he was a child back in Riga. He followed Kiki’s fluid shape as they went back up the stairs of the old house, one behind the other, coming up as silent as the shadows that filled the house, now that the last of the daylight, as thin and blue as skim milk, had finally died into darkness. Kiki did not move so much as he glided, moving up the stairs in a liquid flow that did not seem quite human, as if Kiki were more of a ghost or a nightwalker than a real person.
In Latvia, they lived close to the first forests of the world and the last to be walked by men. There were folktales about people like Kiki, and Anton wished with all his heart that he had found something else to do with himself after the old empire had collapsed.
But he had been a secret policeman in Latvia, what the people of Riga used to call “one of the heels of the Russian boot,” and when Latvia had broken away and the Latvians had risen up, men like Anton Palenz had to run, and so did their families. His brother and father had been run down and beaten to death in the streets of Riga, and his younger sister Maya had been beaten and raped, and had her head shaved in the courtyard of Riga Cathedral by her own neighbors. Now Maya was in Kerch with Piotr, and Piotr would do exactly as he promised with Maya if Anton didn’t keep Kiki under control.
He smiled a sick, sideways smile as he climbed the stairs behind Kiki. Keeping Kiki Lujac under control was like trying to herd a shark: you pointed it at something, kept your hands clear, and hoped it didn’t see you out of the corner of its eye. They reached the landing, and Lujac put out his left hand, palm down, then raised it and pointed toward the open door of the master bedroom. Anton nodded, swallowing, looking down at the M14 rifle that Kiki had taken down from the weapon display in the great room.
It was loaded now: its box magazine held twenty rounds, powerful 7.62 NATOs, heavy in Anton’s small pale hands as he followed Kiki down the long carpeted hallway to the door of the bedroom. Lujac pushed the door open slowly and stepped carefully into the evening glow of the bedside-table light. The room looked unchanged, the covers still rumpled and careless, the quilt in a heap at the foot of the bed.
The room smelled of Briony’s scent, a rich, complicated aroma, and stale, less appealing cigarette smoke. Lujac looked at Anton, nodded for him to come forward. He had made a sketch, indicating what he thought to be the dimensions of the panic room set into the interior wall of the bedroom, a space that Lujac had estimated to be about fifteen feet by ten.
“It will have strong walls,” he said, “but I doubt they will be bulletproof. Not against a few rounds from your Winchester. I think if we start to poke some holes in the box the voice of the rabbit will be heard in the land.”
“What if we kill her?” Anton had asked, thinking more of Maya than of the American code breaker. If she died, the mission failed, and Maya went down that hallway to the other wing, which, after what the people of Riga had done to her, would very likely break her mind in pieces.
“One round, up high, should do it. She’ll be flat on the floor. If she’s not screaming for us to stop by three rounds, she’s either suicidal or she’s not in there. Stop carping. Let’s go flush out our little grouse.”
Now they were up in the bedroom, and the moment had come. Lujac nodded to Anton, held up a hand to stop him for a second.
“Briony, this is Jules. There’s a man here with one of your grandfather’s rifles. He is going to start shooting into your little room. The rifle has twenty rounds. Your room is about fifteen feet long. These are not good odds. Will you not come out now, and we can talk?”
Silence, and the bones of the old house ticking as the chill outside began to seep into its stones and timbers. Lujac made a sign to Anton, who raised the rifle, pulled the cocking handle back, and released it, scooping a round out of the magazine and locking it home in the firing chamber.
He raised it to his shoulder, grimacing in anticipation of the recoil. Lujac covered his ears as Anton began to squeeze the trigger, and faintly from the bowels of the old house came the muffled clang of iron on stone.
“The tunnel!” said Lujac, pulling Anton’s hand away from the trigger guard. “There’s a
tunnel
in the basement. It goes to the coach house!”
Anton stared at Lujac for a moment, uncomprehending. Lujac turned and raced off down the hall, heading for the stairs, his bath-robe flying out behind him like wings of red silk, his bare feet whispering on the thick rug of the landing, turning to see that Anton was coming after him. His handsome, skull-like face was tight with a look Anton could not read, something like lust and joy and hunger combined, a look that was not at all human.
Lujac went pounding down the stairs, Anton right behind him, into the kitchen. Ripping open the basement door—the light was on—he ran down the rickety wooden stairs into the musty old space.
The walls were made of river rock and caulked with clay that was falling out in sections. Old, rough-cut beams, sagging a little in the middle, ran the length of the low, open space. The concrete floor looked new, and Lujac could see wispy traces in the dust on it—a woman’s bare feet had crossed here. At the far end of the basement, half hidden in the shadow, stood the iron wall of the tunnel gate, made to look like an old steam boiler. It even had a brass label on it: PITTSBURGH IRON, 1854. Anton followed Lujac as he padded barefoot across the floor, silent as sleep. Lujac stopped before the door, indicated to Anton that he should cover it with the M14. Lujac fumbled a bit at the jamb of the door, where, he vaguely recalled, Briony had told him there was a spring-loaded latch.
He found it, braced himself on the floor, looked at Anton, and hauled the door back with a single muscular surge. The tunnel was lit. The floor, covered in ancient cobblestones, curved to the left about ten feet in. They stood for a moment listening, and in the silence they heard the distinctive sound of someone’s breathing—rapid, short, sharp huffs, with an undertone of panic.
“Briony,” said Lujac, “this is silly. We’re just trying to help Morgan.”
Silence then as even the breathing stopped.
Lujac hesitated at the entrance to the tunnel, unwilling to enter.
But the
idea
of that . . . fucking
cow
. . . reaching the coach house and somehow locking herself inside it until help came . . . it could not be
tolerated
. . . She owed him . . .
satisfaction
. Anton stood beside him, with the M14 at port arms, looking worried as hell but still ready to go forward.
Lujac took a breath, stepped into the tunnel, and padded down the cobblestoned pathway, the old stone walls closing in, around, and over him. He reached the curve, looked back at Anton, who had not followed him yet.
“Come on.”
“Where does this go?”
“It comes out at the coach house, about sixty yards.”
“What if she has a gun?”
“She
does
have a gun. But it won’t fire. I jammed the muzzle.”
Anton looked at the gate, half open, a massive black-painted iron wall looming in the half-light. “What if this closes?”
Lujac looked around, saw an iron bar leaning against the wall. He picked it up and tossed it to Anton, who caught it with one hand, fumbling a bit with the heavy rifle.
“Jam that into the hinge. Hard as you can.”
Anton did, shoving the bar in deep, wrenching it sideways to fix it in place, huffing with the effort, skinning a knuckle as his hand slipped free.
“Okay,” said Lujac. “Now, let’s go.”
Both men padded carefully down the tunnel, picking a path over the mossy rocks, avoiding the thin trickle of springwater that ran down the middle. The bulbs overhead were strung on ancient copper wire, one every ten feet, and they cast the stones in a dim glow.

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