The Venetian Judgment Read online

  “What if I am killed?” he asked, smiling at her.

  “I’ll have my favorite bits pickled and bury the rest of you in the garden. You did love the view across the river. Go on.”

  She raised the digital camera, pressed MPEG, and waited.

  “You are not a good person,” said Duhamel, still smiling.

  “You should hear what my ex-husband thinks.”

  Duhamel took a fork out of the silverware drawer, pinned the envelope to the counter with it, and carefully inserted the sharp tip of the K-Bar into the narrow opening at the end of the flap, thinking Anton, have you decided to punish me for what I did in London?, which was not out of the question. He had, as he liked to think of it, exceeded his mandate somewhat.

  He slipped the blade in and slowly drew it along the edge of the envelope. Nothing happened—no flash of white light, no rising cloud of white powder—nothing at all.

  Sighing a little, he used the knife and the fork to tip the envelope up. A blank rectangle of white paper the size and shape of a business card slipped out onto the granite. Taped to the middle of the card was a small black plastic square, very thin. Along one edge of the square ran a row of tiny gold bars. It was a memory chip, with no maker’s mark of any kind.

  Briony kept the digital camera focused on him as he slipped the tip of the K-Bar under the chip, carefully pried it up, and held it out to the camera on the end of the knife. She clicked the button, then stopped filming and stepped in closer.

  “It’s a memory chip,” he said, keeping his voice level.

  “So it is,” said Briony. “What do we do with it?”

  “I have my laptop. It has a reader.”

  “What if the chip is full of viruses?”

  “You didn’t worry about that when I put my chip in your reader.”

  She looked at him, laughed, and let her breath out in a rush.

  “Well, yours was a much bigger chip. Okay, let’s go stick this in your machine and see what happens.”

  Duhamel’s machine was in the great room, next to a large leather wingback chair that had become his by default. It was next to the fire, beneath a lovely old Art Nouveau lamp that Duhamel, with his thief ’s eye, had pegged as an original Gallé.

  They flipped his laptop open, inserted the chip in the card-reader slot, and waited for the program to open it up. A few seconds later, the screen went black and then dark blue, and they were looking at a single string of numbers in red and a cursor icon blinking beside it.

  408 508 091

  Briony stared at the numbers in silence, her expression closed and wary. Duhamel watched her for a while.

  “Well,” he said, “I have no idea. Is it a password?”

  “No,” said Briony with a chill, “it isn’t.”

  “What is it, then?”

  She was quiet for a while longer.

  “Maybe I should take this into my office.”

  She was talking more to herself than to him.

  “Why? How does that help?”

  She looked at him steadily, working it through.

  “Jules . . . I don’t know what . . . to do with you.”

  “With me?”

  “Yes. I don’t really know you, do I?”

  “I think we have known each other pretty well, no?”

  His accent seemed to come back under stress. She felt a surge of affection for him—she could either shut him out or bring him in a little further. Hank Brocius had vetted him thoroughly, and Hank was one of the most untrusting men she knew. Yes, he was closed. But perhaps that just meant he was uncomplicated. He could be exactly what he seemed. And she wasn’t ready to shut him out of her life yet. Besides, she had already let him see too much, he was already involved.

  “These numbers, Jules, do they mean anything to you?”

  Duhamel studied the screen.

  “Are they a series perhaps?”

  “They could be. But I don’t think they are. I think this is just one number. That’s the way these things are done.”

  A seam. A crack, an opening, after all this time.

  “What . . . ‘things,’ Briony?”

  She went inside herself then and stayed there for almost a full minute, clearly struggling with a difficult decision. Duhamel found that he was holding his breath—this single moment was the fulcrum upon which all their calculations turned. Which way would she lean? Inside her silence, she could not know that her life was also in play. If she chose wrongly, Duhamel had clear instructions on how to continue, and overwhelming brutality would only be the beginning. He himself did not know which outcome he was favoring. It didn’t matter. In the end, she would be his.

  She looked up at him, as if trying to read his mind, and then sighed.

  “Look . . . Jules . . . if I wanted to send you something in a strongbox and I didn’t want anyone to know that we knew each other and I didn’t want anyone to be able to open it, how would I do that?”

  “You would lock the box.”

  “When you got the box, you would have to unlock it. How?”

  “We would have the same key maybe?”

  “Then at some point, I would either have to send you the key or have someone else give you a copy. Either way, our connection is open to exposure, right?”

  “Yes. If you insist we have no contact, then there can be no key exchange. I don’t see how this can be done without a key to open the box, do you?”

  “Yes. There is a way to lock the box without exchanging keys. I send you the box with my lock on it and then you put your lock on it and send it back to me. On both trips, no one can open the box because it has two locks on it. Not even me when it gets to me, because you have put your own lock on it next to mine and I don’t have that key.”

  “Yes,” said Duhamel, seeing it at once. “And then all you have to do is to take off your lock—”

  “Leaving yours in place—”

  “And when I get the box back, I take off my lock and the box is open. Brilliant, except for all the going back and forth with the box.”

  “Not a problem, if the box is really just a string of electrons.”

  “A ‘string of electrons’? You mean a coded message?”

  “Yes.”

  Duhamel considered her for a while.

  “Briony, in Savannah, Tally said you did something—”

  Very clever for the government. “Yes.”

  “Are you a spy after all?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “But you are not a librarian either, are you?”

  “No. I can’t say any more, and don’t ask me. But I know about things like this, and the fact that someone has sent this chip to me . . . is a problem. I should take this in to my employers and let them deal with it.”

  Anton had seen this moment coming. They had discussed the psychology of the subject, what they knew of her character. In the end, they had formulated this reply: “I agree! Completely. Whoever they are—and I do not want to know—give this to them, and you and I can go back to being . . . quiet. I like this time with you, and I don’t like to see this worry in your face.”

  She reached out and touched his hand, but her mind was elsewhere.

  Crete, she was thinking, Morgan is on Crete. And he has not contacted me in more than thirty days. What if there’s something in here that has to do with Morgan. If I give this to Hank Brocius, who will he take care of first? Morgan or the NSA? She knew the answer as well as she knew Hank Brocius.

  “What are you thinking, Briony?”

  “I think . . . I need some practical advice.”

  “Off the record?” he said with a disarming smile, softening her resistance to him. She poured out another glass of wine for herself and one for him, sipped it, thinking hard.

  “Yes,” she said with a note of decision in her voice. “Look, my son Morgan, I told you he was in the military?”

  “Yes. But you did not know where.”

  “I was being careful. America is at war and . . .”


  “ ‘Loose lips sink ships’?”

  “Morgan is in the Navy. And I am a little worried about him.”

  “Of course, that is only natural for a mother in war—”

  “No, it’s more than that. He’s always been great about staying in touch—phone calls, e-mails, sometimes a postcard . . .”

  “But he is at sea, is he not?”

  His accent was all the way back, she noted, and forgot it at once.

  “No, he’s actually on a land base. He’s stationed at a Naval Air Station. It’s called Souda, and Souda is—”

  “On Crete,” said Duhamel, his expression altering.

  “Yes, on Crete. My worry is—”

  “That he is in trouble of some sort. And if that trouble has to do with this chip, and you take it to your boss, then what happens to your son will be out of your hands, yes?”

  “Yes. I just want to . . . know. I have to take this to . . . my boss, anyway. But I want to know first.”

  “Briony, is your . . . boss . . . in your government?”

  “Yes,” she said after a struggle.

  “Okay, I must now speak as stranger. Briony, I am here on a visa, I am a French national, and if there should be problems with your government connected to this . . . whatever it is . . . I run a greater risk than you think. I do not wish to appear craven, but if you are concerned about this package and what it contains, I would not wish to complicate your life by forcing you to explain a foreign national.”

  “My boss is not a fool . . . but . . . I don’t know what to do.”

  “I do. You must take this to him now. Without touching this thing anymore. Your son is a grown man. If he is in trouble, he should face it. If you try to protect him, you might destroy yourself. Then what can you do for your son? For that matter, you do not really know that this involves your son in any way. You are making a nervous conjecture based on facts that could be . . . totally unrelated, yes?”

  She looked miserable.

  Duhamel tried to imagine what she must be feeling. He knew it as a concept, but misery as a feeling? He had been cold, sick, angry, sometimes worried. But misery? He did not know it. He kept his face in order and hoped that his tactic worked.

  “But they’re not totally unrelated.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Jules, how good are you at math?”

  “I am, in a word—two words—a cretin.”

  “Then I’m not going to try to explain asymmetric encryption to you. Let’s just say that this number here is like that box I was talking about.”

  “The one with all the locks?”

  “Yes. But this number is also the key to the box.”

  “It is its own key?”

  “In a way. All encrypted messages now are actually numbers. The original message—we call it a ‘plaintext’—is encrypted using—”

  “Please, recall I am a cretin—”

  “Using what we call a ‘one-way function.’ A one-way function does something tricky to a series of numbers that can’t be reversed. To put the lock on the box, we turn the plaintext message into a series of numbers, and then we do something tricky to these numbers that can only be undone if the receiver has the keys to it—”

  “And now my head begins to throb.”

  “Have some more wine . . . Good . . . Yes, me too . . . Okay, how that is done is that everyone has access to the receiver’s ‘public key’—a number like this—made by multiplying two prime numbers. So anyone can send her a message using this public key number and an encryption program, but only the receiver can decipher the message because only the receiver knows the two primes she used to create her public key number—”

  “Like the box?”

  “Yes. For reasons too irritating to go into, we use prime numbers for this kind of encryption. On this chip, the number here is a public key made by multiplying two secret primes. To open it, we need to know—”

  “What the two secret primes were. Okay, so we use a computer—”

  “Yes, it’s called ‘factoring.’ Want to know how long that would take factoring this number?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “About eight hours. This isn’t really an encryption attempt here. The number’s too small. For a real encryption, the number might be in the trillions. It would take all the computers in the world five years to factor out the primes for a really large number. This isn’t an attempt at encryption, it’s a message to me personally, and the message is that the person who sent this has an understanding of asymmetric encryption—”

  “And that he knows you do too?”

  “Yes.”

  Duhamel looked at the screen.

  408 508 091

  “Do you know what the two secret primes are that make this number?”

  “Yes: 18313 and 22307. Both are prime numbers. Multiply them together and you get 408508091.”

  “That’s amazing! How did you do that?”

  “Morgan is like you: he hates math. I once tried to teach him what I’m trying to teach you.”

  Duhamel was quick, Briony thought, but the speed of his reply was surprising: “And this is the number you used, yes?”

  She looked at him without expression, and his chest began to tighten, seeing for the second time the steel under the velvet skin.

  “Yes. That’s . . . amazing. You missed your calling.”

  “I should have been a spy, you mean?”

  “Maybe . . . Anyway, now what do we do? I know this has to do with Morgan. There’s no other explanation. The number makes that clear. So, what do we do?”

  “As I said, take it to your boss.”

  Silence, and her large gray eyes on his, unblinking.

  “I can’t. I can’t take that chance. I need to know.”

  “To know, and then to decide?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want me to go away?”

  She softened, her shoulders slumping, her eyes glistening.

  “No, I don’t. I should, but I can’t.”

  “I will leave, if you wish. But to know, you must open it.”

  She stared at the thing, her face full of dread. Duhamel reached out and touched her hand. She looked up, her eyes glistening.

  “Then, for now, do nothing. Perhaps in the morning things will seem more clear. Why hunt grief?”

  She sighed, and a shudder ran through her. Duhamel got up, took her hand, and led her upstairs. Duhamel knew what was in the memory chip, knew that after she opened it things would change between them.

  But not just yet.

  UH-60 BLACKHAWK CHOPPER

  155 MPH, ALTITUDE 6,000 FEET,

  304 MILES NNE SANTORINI

  INBOUND OVER TURKEY

  Mandy, in the copilot’s seat—cold, tired, her entire body throbbing to the complex beat of the aging Blackhawk’s rotors and the deafening howl of its turbines—was watching, without enjoyment, the strobing lights of the two Hughes OH-6 Cayuse choppers that had picked them up as they crossed the coastline of Turkey about an hour and a half ago. Also known as “Little Birds,” they were small egg-shaped machines, each bearing the marking TURKISH AIR DEFENSE SERVICE, each with a machine gun visible in its open bay door.

  They had one chopper on their port side and another on their starboard, which created in Mandy’s mind the image of a pair of crows harassing a condor. These Little Birds had made radio contact with the Blackhawk when they were ten miles off the Aegean coast of Turkey, a young male voice asking, in accented English and with cool efficiency, who they were, why they were flying a chopper with the markings of the United Nations, what their intentions were, and, finally, why they had filed no flight plan. All excellent questions, thought Mandy at the time.

  Dalton had told them they were UN medical officers inbound for Istanbul on an emergency mission to the Hastanesi Children’s Hospital in Beyoglu, that they were carrying a donor heart for an urgent transplant case, and that they had filed a formal flight plan as soon as the
heart had become available.

  Reactions to this statement varied.

  From the coolly efficient pilot of the Little Bird on their port side—Mandy’s side—there had been a prolonged silence followed by an order to maintain level flight, to make no evasive maneuvers, and to await further instructions.

  From Dobri Levka, sitting on one of the two gunners seats—in his case, the starboard—fondling the rusty pintle-mounted 7.62mm machine gun in the bay, there was shocked silence, and a kind of sinking dismay that his new employer had turned out to be a suicidal lunatic, followed shortly by a typically Balkan acceptance of the fact that fate seemed determined to see him either dead or in a Turkish prison before dawn. He patted the pockets of his medical corpsman’s BDUs, found in one of the lockers and into which he had happily changed, being painfully aware that peeing in your pants had a chafing effect on the inner thighs, and extracted a bottle of ouzo from a case that had also been hidden in the locker. He downed a third of it in one go, which helped tremendously.

  Mandy, for her part, simply stared at Dalton for a while, shook her head, and settled into the copilot’s seat a little deeper, trying without much hope to find a way to be comfortable in it, which was not the maker’s intent. Her silence was eloquent, as was the taut tense way in which she was resisting the meager military comforts of the pipe-and-canvas chair.

  The interior of the Blackhawk’s cockpit had been painted matte-black—“Helps with the night vision,” Dalton had offered, to a cool reception—and the control panel was a migraine-inducing array of red, green, yellow, and amber lights coming from the altimeter dial, the compass and horizon indicators, the RPM indicator slides for both engines, and the large multifunction display panel in the middle. A pale green glow shone down on Mandy from the lights in the breaker systems arrayed overhead. Through the overhead window, she could see the blurring fan of the rotors and, beyond that, a starless, moonless sky.

  A few minutes later, there was a burst of static, and Little Bird 1 came back on the air to inform them, in vaguely accusatory tones, that the night-desk nurses at Hastanesi Children’s Hospital in Beyoglu had no record of any heart-donor flight scheduled to arrive from anywhere in Greece.