The Venetian Judgment Page 16

  “Means ‘bribe.’ ”

  “Would a straight bribe be enough to get them to take a risk like that? If they got caught with a chopper involved in the deaths of Turkish military personnel, they’d be lucky to just get shot.”

  “Asia side hate Europe-side Turk soldiers. Arab side lie to Turk soldiers for free. With big smile on. Vermek is for them honey on top of pretty girl’s belly.”

  “I’m not sure I get that, but vermek works for me,” said Dalton.

  “Vermek work for everybody,” said Levka. “Is proof God love us.”

  NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY

  FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

  THE BLUE BOX, CRYPTO CITY

  The AD of RA’s office, in the large blue-glass cube in the center of Crypto City, was a stripped-down corner suite with a view out over the barren ochre forests of Maryland in winter. The office interior echoed this wintry austerity: wooden floors, a long wooden desk of no particular style, a sideboard from Crate and Barrel. The only impressive fixture was a Sony plasma screen hanging on the wall facing the desk, on which were running several simultaneous feeds from news operations and intelligence services inside the American security matrix.

  There was a U.S. flag with military-style gold fringe in one corner next to a framed photo of a platoon of U.S. Marines moving carefully through a jungle clearing. Judging from the style of their BDUs, it was sometime in the mid-eighties. The jungle could have been anywhere from Central America to Malaysia. The young Marine LT on point, in itself unusual for an LT, was a large-bodied artillery shell of a man with clear-cut features, deep-set eyes, and a wild piratical look about him.

  A few years later, an older version of this young Marine would have an Iranian-made shape charge detonate against the side of his armored Humvee during the taking of Fallujah, rocking it onto its side, mortally wounding the driver and setting the interior on fire. The hatch gunner on the .50 got his sleeve tangled up in the gun-mount swivel as the ammo started to cook off, and he would have either been burned alive or riddled with .50 caliber rounds if the third Marine in the Humvee, a lieutenant colonel by then, hadn’t gone back into the flaming vehicle to drag the boy free, getting a faceful of fire for his efforts.

  The .50 gunner lived to fight again, the driver DOA at the TOC, and the lieutenant colonel—a brigade-level G2—got a Silver Star and a mandatory early out due to facial disfigurement and the loss of one eye.

  The man now sitting at the unremarkable desk in this Zen room was that same man, Hank Brocius, ex-USMC, and now the AD of RA for the National Security Agency, dressed in a fine gray pinstripe, the jacket neatly stowed on a hanger on the back of the door.

  Brocius, one side of his face covered with a masklike burn scar from temple to chin, and the other side, an older and more battered version of the same Marine in the framed jungle photo, was leaning back in an armless wooden swivel chair with his back to the window, his hands folded behind his neck, as he directed his one-eyed but highly approving consideration upon the lovely young woman sitting in the rail-back chair on the far side of his desk, a classic, full-bodied Italian heart attack in the style of Isabella Rossellini, whose name was Nikki Turrin.

  Ms. Turrin was reading from a decrypted communication sent by the London field team investigating the torture killing of Mildred Durant, once a mainstay of the Venona Project and, up until her death, a kind of unofficial adviser to an NAS decryption team, known generally as the Glass Cutters.

  The work of the London investigation team was complete, and Nikki Turrin, chief assistant to the AD of RA, was relaying the summary of their findings in a flat, toneless voice, much unlike her normal speech, which was bright, quick, lively, and delivered in a soft soprano lilt. Nikki’s tone now was unvarying, Brocius was well aware, because she thought the field team’s report was, from title to appendices, a load of utter horseshit.

  “. . . and the toxicology report came back with nothing other than some alcohol traces in her blood—”

  “Millie loved her gin and tonic,” said the AD of RA.

  “And of course the meds she was on were all represented. But nothing in that was, they say here, ‘indicative,’ whatever that means. Why can’t Audrey simply say they didn’t find anything useful? Never mind. She goes on here about the state of Mrs. Durant’s health, several paras of that—”

  “Does she ever cut to the chase?”

  Nikki looked up, tossing her long brown hair as she did so, her dark eyes full of the winter light streaming in through the blinds behind Brocius.

  “As far as I can see, sir, Audrey and her people have no actual ‘chase’ in them. Her conclusions are laid out in the summary page. Do you want me to read the rest or just go there?”

  “Just give me the summary.”

  Nikki put the documents into a lockbox on the AD of RA’s desk with a Post-it on it reading REDDIT? SHREDDIT!, sat back in the uncompromising chair, crossed her legs demurely at her ankles like a good Italian girl, and gave Brocius a smile that was completely devoid of humor.

  “Sir, to be brief, she concurs . . . God, I’m starting to talk like her . . . She agrees with the findings of the First Response forensic unit when they got on scene, namely, that the intruder was male, possibly in his mid- to late forties, based on the results of the witness canvass, quite strong, that he must have presented an appearance to Mrs. Durant that was acceptable to her or she would never have unlocked her door to him—no sign of forced entry—that he took control of Mrs. Durant immediately upon gaining entry—she had a medic-alert alarm on a chain around her neck and it was never used—”

  “Never found either, right?”

  “Yes, sir. The initial assault took place in the front room, based on the pattern of scrape marks on the hardwood . . . She was picked up and carried into the bedroom, where the assailant proceeded to—”

  “Oh my no. Stop there, will you? I’m not up to all that again. None of us are. What does Audrey say about the thing with the pictures?”

  “Part of his fetish—that’s the word she uses—she’s let Oprah and Dr. Phil completely screw up her mind—part of a humiliation ritual with Oedipal subtext—” She stopped, sighing heavily.

  “Christ, sir, this is all boneheaded crap—”

  “We can editorialize later, Nikki.”

  “Fine, you’re the boss. Basically, Audrey and her team have reached the conclusion, based on all the evidence they could avoid—”

  “Nikki!”

  “Sorry. That Mrs. Durant was the victim of a sadistic predator who had two motives in the assault, the first was the complete domination and destruction of his victim—penetrative sex did not occur, apparently—and the second was something she’s calling ‘fetish robbery. ’ Items taken from the victim’s body that would serve later as masturbatory aids as the fantasy replayed in his . . . I mean, what the hell is a fetish robbery? Is that like armed robbery only instead of a gun you brandish a dead chicken? Anyway, the assailant obtained the entry codes to Mrs. Durant’s safe—a Victorian-era Whitney embedded in the bricks of her house that would require a pound of plastique to dislodge—and took from that various items which, from the insurance policies she had, included rings, bracelets, necklaces, assorted loose jewels—rubies, sapphires, emeralds—possibly three thousand pounds’ worth of old Bank of England notes, a man’s antique Breguet wristwatch—her husband’s, I guess—some bearer bonds, perhaps a diary . . . It goes on, but all of it’s basically what you’d expect to find in a wealthy woman’s flat—”

  “And the hard drive?”

  “The killer used it to upload the digital shots. It’s where he got all her e-mail connections, the nasty little prick. We got the entire machine here two days ago, and the Gearboxes went through it bolt by bolt. And there was no subsequent attempt at an intrusion into the Glass Cutter network that the Net Watchers could find. So Audrey’s conclusion is NEA—”

  “No Enemy Action—”

  “Right. Just an unlucky collision between a lovely old lady
and a walking demon from the deepest pits of Hell. Too bad, but there it is, life is hard, lah-dee-dah, sometimes bad things happen to good people—”

  “And you don’t agree? With any of this?”

  She shifted in her very uncomfortable chair—one day she was going to sneak into this office and install a whole new suite of furniture, it so looked like a military monk lived in this barrack—folded her arms across her chest, and cocked her head to one side, giving him a look of affectionate exasperation.

  “Sir—”

  “Nikki, we’ve been sleeping together for weeks.”

  She gave him a lovely smile but shook her head.

  “Not in this office, we haven’t.”

  “Yet.”

  She looked around at the sharp-edged furnishings.

  “And we never will. Sir, if you ask me, Audrey sees what she wanted to see.”

  Brocius wasn’t persuaded.

  “Audrey’s been right most of the time, Nikki. And I agree with her that no foreign intelligence agency would indulge itself in the kind of elaborate vivisection that happened here. Nor would they invite a phalanx of federales down on them by sending pictures of the attack out to all her friends and colleagues. I have to think—”

  “Sir, do you remember a CIA Cleaner by the name of Micah Dalton?”

  Brocius, under stress, often stroked his cheekbone just under the patch over his missing eye. He did that now.

  “Christ yes. How could I forget him? He fast-talked me into doing a unilateral TEMPEST shutdown of half the communication grid in the Balkans. I ended up in the Oval Office in front of the DNI and the President.”

  “That TEMPEST intervention also saved the nation from a Serbian stock swindle that could have sunk the American commodities market for ten years.”

  “Yeah, yeah. And the market tanked, anyway, didn’t it? This is me waving a tiny, invisible flag. I don’t have stocks. I have a rapacious ex-wife and a penny jar. Anyway, what about him? Cather never called him back in, did he? Last I heard of him, he had gone back to Venice to sit around and sulk in some stinking pink palazzo.”

  “I doubt that man sulks very much. Did you read his AAR?”

  “I didn’t have to. I had it read to me, by the DNI, at the top of his lungs.”

  “Do you remember what it said there about this Montenegrin national named Kiki Lujac?”

  “Yes, I do. Some kind of fashion shooter who was using his day job as a cover for freelance intelligence work. Supposed to be connected with Branco Gospic, the guy Dalton eighty-sixed in Kotor. Lujac turned up dead, a floater somewhere in the southern Aegean, I think it said.”

  “Yes, sir. Off the island of Santorini, actually.”

  “Okay, good riddance. Probably the Croats, cleaning house. Or Dalton, who, if you don’t mind my saying, is a serious whack job. One of our stringers in Trieste said the Carabinieri were jumpy as hell just having the guy hanging around Florian’s.”

  “I didn’t think he was all that bad when I talked to him on the phone. He seemed competent. Calm. Had a sense of humor. And some grace. I had some news for him about a woman he was involved with, Cora Vasari, she had been shot in Florence. When I told him she was going to be okay, you could hear the relief in his voice, thanked me from the heart. Doesn’t sound like a whack job to me. And I met the woman he was working with in Singapore—”

  “That English babe? Pownall? I saw a picture of her, made . . . I mean, she made quite an impression on me. What about her?”

  “She thought the world of him. And from the little time I got to spend with her, she was in no way a fool.”

  “Fine, I stand corrected. The chicks all adore him. Even you, sounds like. Isn’t that special. You have an actual point here?”

  “She talked about this Lujac guy, the photographer. She said that he had done something pretty kinky to a cop in Singapore—”

  “Good for him.”

  “And that afterward, he had taken pictures of it—”

  “Okay, now I see where this is going.”

  “Digital pictures—”

  “Geez.”

  “And sent them to his superiors, to the local press in Changi—”

  “But not to his Facebook page?”

  “You know very well what I’m saying—”

  “Yes. You’re saying that somehow this guy Kiki Lujac rose from the dead in the Aegean, strapped on some Hermès sandals—note the classical reference—flew himself to London, where he managed to weasel his way into Millie Durant’s flat in Chelsea. Nikki, I knew Millie, and I’m pretty sure she would not have opened her door to a dripping-wet partly decomposed corpse no matter how nice his shoes were.”

  “It pleases you to be droll.”

  “It pleases me to . . .”

  He stopped, his expression altering, thinking suddenly of the little frog prince.

  “Nikki, what did this guy look like?”

  “Lujac? We can get shots from his website—”

  “Can you? Get me one, will you?”

  “Right now?”

  “Yeah, please, if you don’t mind.”

  Nikki got up without a word and went back into the outer office. Alice Chandler, secretary to the AD of RA, was a rather severe-looking but greathearted older woman with shining silver hair swept up behind and sterling silver reading glasses that she wore low on her aristocratic nose. She worked whatever hours her boss worked, having no life outside the NSA and no desire for one. Tonight, Nikki and the AD of RA were working until well after midnight, therefore so was she.

  “Alice, can you click onto a website for me?”

  Ms. Chandler, who knew very well that Nikki Turrin and the AD of RA—that’s what she called him, and, after a while, so did everyone else except Nikki—were having an affair. Alice Chandler had known the AD of RA’s wife before she was an ex—the woman had left a fifteen-year marriage because she couldn’t deal with the man’s burn scars!—and she highly approved of the poor man’s new relationship.

  “Certainly, dear, what is it?”

  “I think it’s kikilujac.com.”

  Ms. Chandler keyed it in, waited a heartbeat. A site not found popped up on the screen.

  “Are you sure that’s the right one, Nikki?”

  “Positive. Can you just Google the name Kiki Lujac?”

  “Of course.”

  Seconds later, she shook her head at the screen.

  “Not a thing. Some writer used the name in a novel, but, other than that, there’s no return for Kiki Lujac at all.”

  “Can you try his full name, Kirik Lujac?”

  Ms. Chandler tried that too.

  “Not a thing, sweetheart. Nothing at all.”

  Nikki frowned at the screen.

  “But that makes no sense at all. He was a well-known fashion photographer. There would have been hundreds—thousands—of references to his work all over Europe. He shot Madonna, for heaven’s sake.”

  “With a gun?” said Ms. Chandler, who deeply disapproved of Madonna and all her works and days.

  “With a camera, I imagine. I don’t get it. How could this be?”

  “Well, if you wanted to have someone hunt down every reference in Google and try to get it pulled, I guess you could do it that way.”

  “That would take . . . No, it’s just impossible. There’d be thousands of references—websites—many of them buried in other sites that you couldn’t hack into if you . . .”

  Her voice trailed off.

  “Do you think someone hacked into Google in some way?” asked Ms. Chandler. Nikki was silent for a while and then shook her head.

  “No . . . I don’t know . . . no. The whole thing’s impossible. Thank you, Ms. Chandler . . . really.”

  “That’s fine, dear. Always happy to help. Do you two want some coffee?”

  “Please, that would be terrific,” said Nikki, going back into the AD of RA’s office. She found him on the phone, listening intently to someone on the other end of the line. He smiled at her, p
ointed to the same damned chair. He was still on the line when Ms. Chandler came back with the coffee, but he ended the call as she was leaving.

  “Thank you, Alice, just what I needed.”

  Ms. Chandler let her beatific smile shine upon them both, like the blessing of a saint upon the marriage bed.

  Nikki caught the smile on Brocius’s face.

  “Does she know about us?”

  “Alice?” said Brocius, his face a mask of innocence. “Goodness no.”

  “You never say ‘goodness.’ ”

  “I do when I’m lying. What did you get?”

  “Odd,” she said. “Really odd. There’s not a trace of him anywhere on the Web. It’s as if someone scoured the Internet, wiping out every reference to him. I mean, that isn’t possible, is it?”

  Brocius didn’t smile.

  “I don’t know. If I don’t mind spending the rest of my life in Leavenworth, I can shut down the entire communications net of a foreign country with a couple of keystrokes.”

  “But why . . . why would someone do something like that? And think of the resources you’d have to have. I mean, the guy’s dead. What would it matter?”

  “If he was such a fashion celebrity, there’d be pictures of him—hard-copy shots—in all the high-style magazines like GQ . . . Vogue . . . um . . . ?”

  “NASCAR Week? Guns ’n’ Ammo?”

  “Well, excuse me. I’m sorry I’m not quite up to speed on the fashion scene. I think I’ll put one of the kids in Research on that.”

  “You looked like you were thinking of something specific. I mean, something to do with Lujac?”

  Brocius said nothing for a while, running his background check of Briony Keating’s little toy frog through his mind. He had done it himself so he would know that it had been done properly. And it had been. There were a couple of things that had bothered him: the parents dead early, the fire at the records hall. And Briony had never confirmed that the burn scars that were supposed to be on this guy’s back were there.

  But on everything else, the guy was rock solid.

  And something else: he and Briony had gotten a little tangled up—more than a little—in Rockport, Massachusetts, for a few memorable weeks one long-ago summer—by then, both their marriages had been cratering—but the story of Briony Keating was one he didn’t feel like cracking open with Nikki Turrin just yet.