The Venetian Judgment Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  part one

  KROKODIL

  SAVANNAH

  LONDON

  NEW YORK STATE

  LONDON

  NEW YORK STATE

  LONDON

  part two

  SANTORINI, THE AEGEAN SEA

  SEASIDE, FLORIDA - SEVENTY MILES EAST OF PENSACOLA NAS

  SANTORINI, THE AEGEAN SEA

  GARRISON

  UH-60 BLACKHAWK CHOPPER - 155 MPH, ALTITUDE 6,000 FEET,304 MILES NNE SANTORINI

  NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY - FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

  ISTANBUL

  GARRISON

  ISTANBUL

  SANTORINI, THE AEGEAN SEA

  ISTANBUL

  GARRISON

  THE BLACK SEA

  part three

  ISTANBUL

  GARRISON

  ISTANBUL

  KERCH

  CIA HQ - LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  SEASIDE

  GARRISON

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Copyright © 2009 by DavidStoneBooks

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  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stone, David, date.

  The Venetian judgment / David Stone. p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-03208-4

  1. Dalton, Micah (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Intelligence officers—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9199.3.S833V

  813’.54—dc22

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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  for catherine stone

  JANUARY 27, 1973:

  Linebacker I and II B-52 Air Operations over North Vietnam leave the NVA war-fighting machine in ruins. Cut off from the North, despised as murderous butchers by the people of South Vietnam, the Viet Cong insurgency collapses. Demoralized, with forty thousand NVA killed that year alone in their failed Easter Offensive, North Vietnamese leaders remove General Giap from command and sign the Paris Peace Accords. The Vietnam War ends in a de facto USA/RSVN victory.

  APRIL 20, 1973:

  Nixon and President Thieu of South Vietnam meet at San Clemente. President Nixon reaffirms an earlier promise, backed by the U.S. Congress, that the U.S. would recommence Linebacker Air Operations over Hanoi if the NVA violated any elements of the Paris Peace Accords.

  JUNE 19, 1973:

  Intimidated by antidraft student riots, and sensing Watergate blood in the water, a Democratic Congress passes the Case Church Amendment, forbidding any U.S. involvement with Southeast Asia as of August 15, breaking solemn American covenants made only nine weeks earlier. Freed from the Linebacker threat and given massive material support by the USSR, the NVA immediately and aggressively violates the Paris Accords. Abandoned by the U.S., fighting not only the NVA but a proxy war with the USSR, Saigon falls in April of 1975. That same month, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge army of psychopathic fifteen-year-olds arrives in Phnom Penh and the killing begins. Over the next ten years more than three million Laotians, Cambodians, and South Vietnamese die in “reeducation” camps, at the hands of roving murder squads, or in suicidal attempts to flee.

  part one

  KROKODIL

  VENICE, LATE DECEMBER, 1:45 A.M. LOCAL TIME

  Dalton shot the bodyguard first, because that’s how these things are done, taking him as he came out of the west gate of the Piazza San Marco, right where it opens into the Calle de L’Ascensione. The guard was a bullnecked, buzz-cut Albanian kid, likely some hapless third-rater drummed out of the Kosovo Liberation Army, judging from the way he pixie-pranced right out into the calle, looking this way and that in the dark, with his war face on and his brows all beetled up, as if he actually knew what he was doing. He had a Tokarev in his left hand, a deeply useless piece of scrap iron, and he never even got it into play before Dalton stepped out of the alcove on his left and punched a soft-nosed, subsonic .22 caliber round into his temple. That was pretty much that, as the slug pinballed around inside the kid’s skull for a few seconds, making a lumpy gray soup out of his life so far. The boy went down—straight down, like a sack of meat falling off a flatbed.

  Mirko Belajic, the kid’s boss, had been hanging back under the arch, waiting for the all clear, so when Dalton took out the bodyguard the wily old Serb flinched a half step back and reached into his Briony topcoat. But by then Dalton had the muzzle of his Ruger up against the man’s barrel chest.

  “Dah, Krokodil!” he grunted, as if his most depressing expectations for the evening had just been grimly confirmed. Dalton stepped out into the faint glow from the lights of the piazza, his face stony and a green spark in his pale blue eyes, his long blond hair pulled back from his hard-planed face. He was wearing a blue Zegna topcoat, black leather gloves, and a navy blue turtleneck, so in the dim light from the piazza he looked like a skull floating in the shadows. The snow was sifting down, a curtain of powdered glass, diamond-lit by a sickle moon. Their frozen breath hung in the still air between them, a pale glowing mist, slowly rising up.

  “Krokodil, you . . . you wait now, just a bit,” the old man said, in a flat, steady voice, no quaver, not begging, just making a suggestion, as if they were arranging to meet for drinks. “Not too late for you. We talk—”

  “No. We don’t,” said Dalton softly, squeezing the trigger once, popping a round into the old man’s chest about an inch below his left nipple. The old man staggered back, his roast-beef face losing color and his mouth gaping open. He plunged his hand into his coat and brought out a small stainless-steel revolver, which Dalton easily plucked from the man’s gnarled, arthritic hand. He threw it into the alley behind him. It struck and skittered across the frozen cobbles with a dull metallic clatter. />
  Belajic stared at Dalton for a time, blinking slowly, then pulled his suit jacket to the side and looked down at his shirt, where a black stain around a tiny frayed hole was starting to spread open like a black poppy. He put a meaty palm over it, winced, looked back at Dalton, his breathing now coming in short, sharp puffs as his lung slowly collapsed. The expression on his face wasn’t fear, or even anger.

  He looked . . . offended.

  “I am . . . stabbed? Mirko Belajic is . . . dying?”

  “Cora Vasari,” said Dalton, and had his suspicions confirmed by the flicker of recognition in Belajic’s face, a fleeting muscular contraction around the old man’s left eye, a blue vein flaring in his neck, gone in an instant.

  “I was . . . nothing with . . . that. That was Gospic—”

  Dalton reached out and plucked a small Razr cell phone out of Belajic’s breast pocket, beeped it on, and handed it back to Belajic, who looked confused.

  “Make a call.”

  Belajic blinked at Dalton, his wrinkled face closing up.

  “Call? Call who?”

  “You’ve just been shot, Mirko. Call out your people.”

  Belajic blinked at Dalton for a while longer, trying to make sense of the words, then looked down and pressed in a number using both fat thumbs and lifted the phone to his ear. Glaring into Dalton’s eyes, he spoke rapidly into the handset, a low growl in gutter Serbian, ending with a harsh, coughing curse that included the name Krokodil more than a couple of times.

  He snapped the phone shut, still locked on Dalton, a killing stare. Twelve years ago, over a disagreement with an obscenely overweight son-in-law regarding the distribution of the proceeds from an opium-paste-for-SAMs deal with the Chechens, Belajic had made a point about greed, gluttony, gratitude by throwing the man, naked and bound hand and foot, into a small feed pen filled with hungry boars. As the story goes, in spite of their best efforts, the animals took several days to rip away everything considered tasty to a boar. In the process, the fat man’s shrieks grew so pitiful that Mirko himself got up from a large family dinner with his steak knife in hand and went out back to the barn to slice the man’s voice box so his screams wouldn’t upset the grandkids, one of whom was the victim’s only son, a ten-year-old lad named Zakary.

  Belajic doted on the boy, and, as an act of mercy, suspended the ancient law of Serbian vendetta that required that all sons must die with their fathers. Zakary lived a privileged life in the bosom of Mirko’s family in their sprawling mansion in Budva. At an engagement party for the popular young man, laid out on a broad terrace overlooking the sparkling sapphire plains of the Adriatic Sea, with Zakary’s gazellelike Danish fiancée at his side and all the family present, Belajic’s wife, Anna, rose to propose a toast to Zakary on the occasion of his twenty-first birthday, pointing out that, according to Serbian custom, he was now an adult, with all the related privileges.

  Mirko raised his glass along with all the company, and then they sang happy birthday to Zakary. At the end of the evening Mirko took the boy aside and walked him out to the garage, where, with some ceremony, he opened the double doors to show his favorite grandson a special birthday present, an emerald green Maserati. Zakary, deeply touched and genuinely surprised, bear-hugged his beloved poppi, pronounced this “the happiest day of his life,” and stepped forward to touch the splendid machine, running a hand gently over it, his face glowing. Belajic shot him in the back of the head.

  It is said that Mirko had tears in his eyes as he wiped a spray of bright red blood off the hood of the Maserati. Simple prudence dictated that once Zakary reached full manhood he had to die, but Mirko was greatly comforted by the knowledge that Zakary had died on “the happiest day of his life.”

  So Mirko Belajic’s killing stare was a pretty good one.

  Dalton, ignoring the stare, took the cell from his hand, thumbed up LAST CALL, read the number, and gave Belajic a look with some sympathy in it.

  He didn’t have anything personal against Belajic, whose role in the attempted assassination of a woman who, in a better world, he might have loved was peripheral, but if you’re going to start revenge-killing Serbian mafiosi, it’s best to be thorough.

  “Mirko, you’d have been better off with the Carabinieri.”

  Belajic showed his ragged teeth, his bloodred gums.

  “Ha! For why? Brancati runs them, and he is your cinci băiat.”

  Dalton shut the phone off and tossed it out into the dark. It hit a wall with a crack, clattered onto the cobblestones, and bounced with a wet plonk into an open drain. Then the silence came back.

  “So,” said Belajic, his chest heaving and his face wet, his expression defiant, “now the Krokodil will shoot me again?”

  “No. I just wanted to stick a banderilla in you.”

  Belajic had no idea what Dalton was talking about, but he sensed a reprieve. “So, now . . . ?”

  Dalton, smiled, stepped aside, clearing the way into the Calle de L’Ascensione, waving Belajic through the ancient gate with a slight bow.

  “Now? Now you . . . go.”

  Belajic stared at Dalton.

  “Go? I . . . go?”

  Dalton nodded.

  Belajic held Dalton’s eyes a second longer and then lunged forward, shoulder-butting Dalton aside and plunging out into the street, his thin Ferragamo slippers slithering on the icy cobbles, his topcoat flaring out like bat wings as he lumbered heavily across the shadows of the narrow lane and into the Calle Moisè, heading for the brighter lights at the far end, the Calle Larga 22 Marzo, a wide, open mall of exclusive shops behind the Gritti.

  Dalton held back for a full minute, waiting until the old man reached the set of steps where Calle 22 began, watching as the man broke out of the shadow and into the hard halogen downlight of the mall’s security lamps. Belajic ran pretty well, thought Dalton, for a syphilitic old rhino with a soft-nosed bullet in his left lung. Dalton slipped the Ruger in the pocket of his coat, sighed, and stepped out into the street. Fifty yards away, Mirko Belajic was pounding on the steel security plates of Cartier, calling hoarsely for help. Dalton, coming on now, playing by the rules of the corrida, his hands in his pockets, his collar turned up against the bitter burn of the snow drifting down, smiled to himself.

  Help?

  This was Venice in December, and in December, after midnight, the San Marco district was basically a stone-walled cattle chute lined with barricaded villas and shuttered stores. Even if someone had heard the man calling, no sensible Venetian would leave his warm bed to help some frightened old Serb. The Venetians hated the Serbs almost as much as they hated the Bosnians and the Montenegrins and the Croats and the Albanians and all the rest of those murderous Slav pigs from across the Adriatic.

  Belajic, his breath chuffing out in a white plume, turned under the glow of the light. His face was in shadow, his bald head slick with sweat, staring back into the Calle de L’Ascensione at Dalton’s silhouette. Belajic slammed the steel shutter of the Cartier store once more, making it ring like a temple gong, leaving a bloody smear on the ice-cold metal.

  “I am not . . . to die . . . like old . . . bull in . . . abattoir?”

  “They shot her in the head, Belajic.”

  “Fah,” said Mirko, backing away up the calle, still facing Dalton. “They? Who . . . the fuck . . . is they? It is only business.”

  “They?” replied Dalton in a tone of sweet reason, as if he were taking Belajic’s question seriously. “They were Branco Gospic’s people. Radko Borins. Emil Tarc and Vigo Majiic. Stefan Groz. Gavrilo Princip. Milan somebody, never got his last name—”

  Belajic flared up at that.

  “Milan Somebody-never-got-his-fucking-name? His name was Milan Kuchko! He was my . . . cousin!” said Belajic in a wet, wheezing growl, fighting for every breath. “And you, Krokodil! For . . . nothing, to amuse, you . . . kick him . . . half to death . . . in the cloisters by the Palazzo Ducale . . . while you sing a song. Now he is all day . . . in a shabby room . . . over a she
ep-stinking wool shop in Budva . . . where he moans like a calf and . . . stares and . . . fouls himself . . . and . . . his tongue sticks out—”

  “Better keep it moving,” said Dalton, lifting the weapon and punching a round into the cobblestones at Belajic’s feet. Chips of cobble spattered Belajic’s coat, and the round sizzled off into the gloom beyond the storefront lights.

  Belajic cursed him again and turned to stumble away, his head down and his arms slack at his sides, chest heaving, blood on his thick blue lips, his chubby legs working as the final minutes of his life flowed past him, his breath pluming out over his shoulder as he made his slow way down the Calle Largo, past the darkened hulk of the Santa Maria del Giglio, down the steps over a small canal and on into the narrow Calle Zaguri. There he came out into the cold blue moonlight again as he crossed the open campo near the Bellavite, his light Italian slippers leaving black sickle-shaped ribbons in the powdery snow. Dalton let him gain some distance, let him think he was going to—

  Dalton froze in midstep, lifted his haggard face to the knife-edged moon, his head cocked to one side, thin lips tight, looking much like a raptor as he did so. There was a muted rumble in the air, a soft, churning mutter: a boat, some kind of launch, in one of the canals, and it was close. He looked back across the open square of the Campo Bellavite and saw Belajic stumble into the darkened archway that hid the doors of the chapel of San Maurizio.

  And stay there.

  Going to ground, thought Dalton.

  He was expecting this boat.

  Dalton listened intently to the sound of the cruiser’s engines, deciding that it was too deep and steady for one of the Venice police boats, and not pockety-pockety enough for one of those late-night water gypsies. It had to be private. He was trying to guess which canal it was running in—there were three small canals running off the Grand Canal at this point, just across from the domes of Santa Maria della Salute. He lifted his mind up, tried to see Venice as if from the air, picturing the way the narrow waterways threaded through the tightly packed maze of hotels and villas and overhanging archways of the San Marco district.