The Venetian Judgment (9 page)

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Authors: David Stone

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NEW YORK STATE
GARRISON, THE HUDSON RIVER VALLEY
Briony Keating’s “little place on the Hudson” reminded Jules Duhamel of Berchtesgaden, although Hitler, who had the Bavarian taste for vulgar excess, would never have built such a Lutheran home: it was a square, slightly stolid stone fortress done in the Federal style, with six bedrooms, maids’ quarters, a large book-lined study, an honest working kitchen. Its best feature was a long stone-walled, low-beamed living room that took up all of the home’s riverside view.
This open, light-filled, masculine space was filled with old saddle-leather couches and armchairs grouped around a large cut-stone fireplace, with a wall of antique sash windows on either side. A collection of Civil War weapons took up most of one wall, and six rather good oil paintings of the Adirondacks took up another.
The house overlooked the rolling Hudson River valley and the low blue mountains far to the west. It also had a small stone carriage house, built in the same Federal style, that had once been a stable. This was where Briony Keating kept her private office. He had not been shown this office. Yet.
The home rested on a shelflike outcropping of land that had been extensively planted a long time ago, so the entire three-acre estate now stood in a grove of ancient oaks and wind-twisted jack pines. The house was set squarely down in the middle of a rolling park that led to a steep drop into the broad brown Hudson River, which swirled massively in a long, lazy bend below the edge. All of this was tinted pale amber by the patina of old money that seemed to lie upon it like the soft winter light that bathed it every afternoon.
The house had been built by Briony’s great-great-grandfather, a West Point man, she explained, who served with John Buford’s cavalry, and had been severely wounded in the first day at Gettysburg. It seemed to be important to her, so he was careful to appear interested.
Duhamel had no idea who John Buford was, and he was a little vague on the details of the American Civil War, although he suspected that Gettysburg was somewhere in Pennsylvania. But he had always been good at looking as if he were listening, and getting Briony to speak freely about her life was important to him.
He listened attentively and with every appearance of intense interest as she explained that the house had originally been built on the site of an old riverside inn that had been a stop on the famous Underground Railway, the route escaping slaves from the South had taken to reach Canada.
Really,
said Jules Duhamel,
how fascinating
. W
as the railway really underground
?
But he hadn’t said that out loud, and he listened with counterfeit attention—his mind wandering a bit as he took in one priceless antique after another—the landscape in the study would need some verification, but it could be an original Lauren Harris—she even took him down to the basement to show him what looked like a massive cast-iron boiler set into a wall of fieldstone but which actually turned out to be the concealed gateway to an underground tunnel running from the main building across to the carriage house. She launched into some tiresome narrative connected to a tunnel collapse at some point and the shocking costs involved in opening it up again. Her voice faded into a kind of soothing background murmur . . . Slaves . . . Pinkerton men . . . An escape to the carriage house by moonlight . . . Even a secret speaking tube that ran from the tunnel up to the kitchen.
Duhamel abhorred tunnels of any kind—wouldn’t ride the London Tube or the Paris Metro at gunpoint—and this one was little better than a dank, dark hole-in-the-wall, lined in clotted moss and dripping stones, and it stank of the grave. Briony went on and on, rather too much of this for his taste, but at any rate the house—particularly the treasures it contained—were quite appealing. He felt that things were going wonderfully well so far, and he had to admit that the house was a perfect place to bring a lover. It was made even more private by the fact that Briony had sent her aging housekeeper back to Charleston for the holidays and they were perfectly alone.
If memory served, and there were times when he felt it was badly failing him along with everything else, they had made love all day and every day in practically every open, flat, and reasonably soft space the house provided, and in one or two of the knobbier corners as well.
While this was not strictly true, he recalled some interludes where champagne from Briony’s cellars may have been involved, this was how it seemed to him, caught in the eye of this sexual storm called Briony Keating. It was as if Briony had just discovered sex and was determined to get her master’s in it by the end of the first week. As for Duhamel, he simply held on for dear life and hoped she wouldn’t snap off anything he really needed.
This afternoon, as the pale winter light was fading into the west and the deep cold was rising out of the gorge, they were sitting, naked under fox furs, on an Adirondack-style couch padded with plaid cushions, breathing a little heavily after their exertions and sharing a bottle of claret, when the phone rang. They were about four days and three nights into the New York State part of their affair, and so far Briony had been ignoring phone calls, e-mails, letters, and any other kind of message from the outer world.
But this time she sighed, and gathered some of the furs around her, rising, showing him a flash of her lovely body. She padded across the flagstones and went in through the sliding-glass doors that led into the living room. As she went, Jules Duhamel noted that, unlike the other times this phone had rung, the ringtone was different, as if the caller’s number had a special identifying code.
He gathered the silky furs in close, drank some more of the claret, and savored the view across the river. America truly was a lovely country, and here he was, like a blade, deep in the beating heart of it.
LONDON
THE STAG AT BAY, SHOREDITCH
“Tortured to death?” said Dalton, not really believing Mandy, who could be cinematic if it amused her.
“Yes,” she said, without a trace of lightness, her expression suddenly grave. “Tortured. They’re saying it’s a robbery gone wrong, but there are complicating factors . . . I think something is very wrong with the Agency . . . Look, Micah, I want you to read something, but don’t
touch
anything.”
She took an envelope out of an inside pocket, turned it upside down, and let the papers inside it slip out onto the table. Dalton leaned forward to read them:
CASE NINETEEN WORKING GROUP
 
 
URGENT SURGE QUERY
all resources
concerning VENONA-SUBSET and GLASS CUTTER activities in-house or by neighbors and cousins emphasis on any link to
VENONA 95
decrypt “UNIDENTIFIED COVER DESIGNATION 19” in
VENONA 8/7/1953
ISSUED 10/9/74 (attached) Report assembly classified UMBRA and EYES/DIAL. Final summary to be conveyed by recipient direct to this sender.
No information concerning this audit is to be communicated in ANY FORMAT to D. Cather DD-OPS-NCS pending final audit review by POTUS/DNI/NSC. ENTITIES BREACHING THIS DIRECTIVE WILL BE SEQUESTERED FORMALLY SANCTIONED AND TERMINATED WITH PREJUDICE
.
 
 
EYES/DIAL MARIAH VALE IR/AUDITS/HQ
Dalton read all three pages quickly, and then again much more slowly. When he had finished, Mandy used one of the pub’s stir sticks to get the papers safely back into the envelope. “They’re reactive-dye-marked and touch-sensitive. I have to get all this back into Pinky’s lockbox by tomorrow.”
“They’re isolating
Cather
? Why in hell?”
“Not just him. Vale has a short list, but he’s on it.”
“Who else is on it?”
“I can’t get at that. Given the inference that if the other people on it are all in Cather’s age range in order to have any connection with the original Venona cable intercepts, there can’t be more than five or six at the outside.”
“That’s a small base. Can’t you work back from that? Take the roster, limit the search profile to only those who fit the parameters, add in a limiting factor for access—”
“Yes, that’s the thing: access to what? We don’t know what triggered this audit, other than the fact that it had something to do with a Glass Cutter operation. I only know Cather’s on it because I sidelined this encryption.”
“How did you do that? There’s no way you’re on her distribution loop.”
“No. We’re too close to Cather. Pinky decrypted it for Tony—”
“ ‘EYES/DIAL’ means the recipient deciphers it himself—”
“Tony couldn’t decipher a finger jammed into his left eye. Pinky always does it for him. Pinky knows he has to do whatever Tony tells him because Tony knows he’s a latent perv and could burn him whenever he wanted to. And he would. Pinky also leaves his office unlocked whenever he’s in the loo scrubbing away at his flippers. I nipped in and rigged his lockbox codes—”
“Why? Did you
expect
this memo?”
“No. But I knew there was something in the wind when Tony Crane told me to stop copying ‘DD Clandestine’ on the Operational Summaries. Cather was always in that loop and now suddenly he’s not? Tony was vague about it, gave me some nonsense about not cluttering Cather’s desk with trivia. What struck me was that I never heard from anyone at Cather’s end, you know, asking about the summaries, where were they, that kind of thing. I made up some reason to call Cather’s office, and Sally Fordyce answered—”
“Sally? She used to be with Jack. How’s she doing?”
“Well, after what happened with you and Jack Stallworth, they really put her through the attar press, but Cather vouched for her and took her onto his staff. Anyway, Sally mentioned some routine thing she saw in that week’s London summary, and I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.”
“So what they’ve done is construct a quarantine screen around Cather’s office, make it look like he’s still getting all the real stuff—”
“Including composing fake OpSums from London Station—”
“That’s what they did to Aldrich Ames,” said Dalton, stunned that things had gotten that serious. “That kind of quarantine operation would need top-level approval. Right from the Director of National Intelligence. He’d have to inform the President, and maybe his cabinet as well.”

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