The Venetian Judgment Page 20

  “Thing is, kid, you’re on the tape—that’s the whole problem here—”

  The standing man broke in, angry, aggressive.

  “Mike, I don’t know why we’re playing hide the floppy with this fucking mutt. He’s a traitor. We’re in a goddamned war. He sold out his mother for a cheap piece of Turkish skank. He’s going to Leavenworth for the rest of his fucking life—”

  The man in the chair held up his left hand, made a calming gesture.

  “Brad, leave the kid alone, will you? Go take a piss or something. You’re scaring the crap outta him, okay? Get a fucking cruller or something.”

  Brad stood with his huge furry arms crossed for a few seconds longer, glaring down at Morgan, looming over him like an avalanche.

  “Hey, fuck it. You wanna play nice with this asshole, be my guest.”

  He left the room, there was a brief silence, and then Mike sat forward, placing his forearms on the table and leaning in close to Morgan.

  “Look, Morgan, forget Brad. Okay, you talked loose around a Turk broad. Yeah, she’s got a background. Yeah, she was a whore for a while—”

  Morgan rallied a bit at that.

  “She’s not a whore.”

  “That’s never all they are, kid. But the part that’s a whore is how you got into this fix. She’s been seeing the wrong guys, why we had her room wired, guys with connections to drug dealers, guys who’ve been selling dope to our people—stand-up patriotic kids just like you—and I’m a military cop, and it’s my number one job to take care of dumb young gullible pukes like you. So when I’m sitting there watching you start to shoot your mouth off about your mother and the NSA and all that shit, I figured enough’s enough, and in we go. You were digging yourself a hole, and I wanted to give you a chance to shut the fuck up. Do you a favor.”

  “Favor?” said Morgan, his skin wet, and his eyes hunted-looking in the shaft of light from the ceiling fixture. “I’m going to Leavenworth.”

  “Maybe . . . maybe not,” said Mike.

  A silence, during which Morgan’s expression altered, showed a glimmer of hope coming like a thaw to the red-rimmed eyes.

  “Maybe not?”

  “Don’t have to go that way, kid. Could go another way.”

  “It could?”

  Mike lit a cigarette, took a pull, blew out a dense cloud that roiled in the still air, and leaned forward into Morgan’s space, his tone cold and grating, like someone scraping ice off a windshield in a Minnesota winter.

  “Look, I’m gonna let you in on something, you ever shoot your mouth off about it to anyone—I mean anyone—I will flake your case so huge that the admiral himself will personally shoot your ass into the heaviest block in Leavenworth. You’ll get punked out before your heels hit the ground, spend the next fifteen years getting passed around behind the blanket wall like a rubber chicken, and if you ever get out you’ll be wearing Depends the rest of your sorry fucking days. And Melina will get sent back to Istanbul so loaded down with contraband that the Turks will bury her deep in Arkasoy Pits, and not even the roaches will be able to find her then. She’ll be fucking gone forever. My word on that, Morgan, as a United States Marine. Am I making myself totally fucking clear?”

  Morgan could only nod, his bony chest working. Briony, watching in mute horror as this fatal farce unfolded, was torn between wishing him safe home and wishing him dead.

  Mike, having said his piece and gotten the response he wanted, leaned back out of Morgan’s space, tossed a pack of Camels across the table, waited while Morgan, his hands shaking, took one out and put it in his mouth. Mike threw him the lighter, a pink plastic Bic, waited with massive stillness while Morgan lit it up and exhaled a shaky plume.

  “Okay,” said Mike, “here’s what I can tell you. You know NAS Souda is a fucking backwater, right? Not even run by major brass. Just fucking noncoms and swabbies like you. Only claim to glory is it’s overrun with stray cats. It’s the asshole of Crete, nothing to do but smoke and drink and chase pussy and go fucking bats with boredom. War going on anywhere but here, guts and glory for everybody but you.”

  Morgan drew on the cigarette, his attention focused on Mike’s face.

  “But what else has NAS Souda got? I’ll tell you. Souda is two hundred and sixty miles south-southeast of Izmir, in Turkey, and Izmir is the fucking Emerald City of fucking drugs. That shit you were puffing with little Melina? Laced with hash oil straight from Izmir. How does it come from Izmir to Melina’s cockroach cottage in Souda? Go on, ask me.”

  “How does it come—”

  Mike slammed the tabletop so hard the cups flew into the air, and Morgan jumped a yard.

  “Your fucking Chief Strahan, that’s how.”

  That rocked Morgan. The cigarette, halfway to his lips, froze in midair. He started to shake his head slowly back and forth.

  “Chief Strahan? Chief Strahan is running drugs?”

  Mike nodded heavily, his face turning into a scowl.

  “Damn well told us he is. He’s running your medical supply unit, ordering up gear, meds, has them brought in by Sea King from the Persian Task Force Support Group, right? Also by supply hulls out of the mainland.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Kid, we got this asshole locked down. Case file is longer than my dick. Not a lot of shit, just enough to make him rich. Moroccan hash oil by way of Izmir, meth from an ethanol distillery in Kerch, shit from all over the eastern Med, and a lot of it’s running right through Strahan’s AO—”

  “No. Chief Buck’s stand-up. He wouldn’t do—”

  “Chief Buck Strahan is a puke, is what he is, Corpsman, and we only need one thing to take him down for good.”

  Another silence while Mike let the message percolate through Morgan’s panicky haze.

  “What . . . What do you need?”

  Mike leaned forward, setting the hook in tight.

  “We need to know where the fucking money is.”

  “But can’t you—”

  “Shut up and listen. Brad gets back here, he has the push to jerk you onto a C-130 going stateside this evening, he gets pissed enough. I don’t have time for a back and forth on this. We’ve got his whole system, but if we can’t lay the money on the table in front of the JAG-offs, he’ll get a tap and go, and I want serious time for this puke. Here’s where you come in. You got one shot and one shot only. You either take it or you’re gone this afternoon, and your mommy will never see you again, except maybe through a piece of chicken-wired bulletproof glass. And she won’t like what she sees. You with me?”

  “I am. Christ, I am. What do you want me to do?”

  Hooked . . . Hooked and gaffed, thought Briony.

  Mike took a USB flash drive out of his pocket, laid it on the table between them, used the tip of his index finger to nudge it closer to Morgan.

  “You have access to Chief Strahan’s personal laptop, right?”

  “His personal one? No, I don’t. He keeps it in his briefcase, locked up. Has it with him all the time. I mean, it’s his own machine. He uses it mainly to MSN with his family back in Shreveport. Nobody gets near it.”

  “Yeah. Ever wonder why?”

  “No . . . No, I guess not.”

  Mike sat back, leaving the flash drive on the table, his face closing up. “You guess not? You guess not? Well, start fucking guessing. You either find a way to get this flash drive into Chief Strahan’s personal laptop for fifteen seconds or you go to Leavenworth. We been all over the guy’s hooch, his office, his office desktop, his pay books, and can’t find the money trail. Laptop’s gotta be it. Nowhere else. Fifteen seconds is all we need.”

  “What’s in the flash drive?”

  A massive shrug from Mike.

  “Fuck if I know, kid. Comes right from where your mommy works, the NSA. My guess, it’s some kind of undetectable surveillance program, does a stealth scan of the entire system. Next time Chief Buck goes online, everything on his machine gets copied to Fort Meade. Don’t fucking ask me how, I’
m no techno-geek, I’m just a cop. All I know, you can move around Chief Buck’s office, we can’t. So it’s gotta be you who finds some fucking way to get this flash drive into Chief Buck’s machine. You gonna try or not?”

  Silence, the smoke rising, both men breathing audibly. A man’s voice, muffled through the walls, a harsh, braying laugh, coming closer.

  “That’s Brad. Got his doughnut and now he’s coming back. You in or out?”

  A slow zoom from the hidden video camera, coming in tight on Morgan’s face, so close Briony could see his eyelashes and the sheen of sweat on his pale cheek, see the child he had been and the son he had become, and the ruin he was about to make of his life. Her heart burned into a cinder and died, but none of that changed the outcome in the slightest.

  “Yes . . . Yes, I’m in.”

  A jump cut, as Briony expected.

  Morgan, unshaven now, looking utterly spent and exhausted. He was in the same room, now missing its flag and its portrait of the President, and the table was bare except for the flash drive and a sheaf of computer paper neatly stacked beside it. There was a different man sitting in the chair opposite Morgan, back to the camera, a slope-shouldered lumpish shape with a squat neck and a roll of fat flowing over the collar of his dirty white shirt, his pale gray suit jacket wrinkled as if it had been slept in, sweat stains showing under the armpits. He was leaning forward under the cone of downlight, speaking to Morgan in a thick Eastern European accent—possibly Ukrainian or Georgian, or some kind of Russian-inflected dialect combining both of them and neither at the same time. His voice was low and calm, seeming to have been electronically distorted, and he spoke in short, unadorned sentences. He gave the general impression of being neither dead nor alive, present nor absent, real nor imaginary. He was neither black nor white but very gray, and decidedly lethal.

  Briony, who knew the type, knew him for what he was.

  A KGB officer, probably at or above the rank of colonel, and, given the classic nature of this honey trap, working for their Second Directorate, which handled Internal Security and CounterIntelligence. The fact that he had his back to the camera and that his voice was being electronically altered told Briony that he might be identifiable, a voice and a face known to the West. She studied his general body shape, burning it into her mind. No matter what else happened, she was going to find out who this man was.

  The man reached out a fat sausage-fingered hand and tapped the pile of papers in front of Morgan.

  “This will go to your Office of Naval Intelligence in a simple Federal Express package, along with the video of your confession—”

  Morgan, flaring out, his neck muscles corded and his face red. “I’ve told you and told you, they were fucking MPs. They told me—”

  The Gray Man—Briony had given the nameless man a name—interrupted, calm, in control, in a flat tone, his pudgy hand raised.

  “The evidence presented will show you accepting this device and undertaking to introduce it into the personal laptop of your superior officer. The evidence will show that the program introduced in this way was able to penetrate this officer’s desktop when he transferred personal photo files of his children sent by his wife in Shreveport to his desktop as a screen saver. And, in a while, the program sent this—we have printed it out for you to consider—which is a sampling of the logistics and materials systems for much of the Fifth Fleet and peripheral operations in the eastern Mediterranean. Have you read this?”

  “Fuck it.”

  “I repeat, have you read it?”

  “Yes. Fuck yes.”

  “And you recognize that having obtained this material for us places you in a very difficult position?”

  “No, I’ll just tell them what really happened.”

  “And that it also places your mother in a very difficult position?”

  “My mother?”

  “Yes. How will the charges of treason and espionage against her son affect her standing within the American intelligence community?”

  “She had nothing to do with this. You set me up.”

  “You cooperated with a foreign agency and obtained classified—”

  “None of that’s classified—”

  “It’s not considered to be secret, but tactical information concerning your Navy’s logistical and materials-routing systems is always useful, perhaps in the resale market. And the fact that this stealth program remains resident in the Souda Base computer system is also an asset. It has other uses besides key counting and file copying. And it was placed there by you.”

  Morgan, pushed to the limit, found his steel at last.

  “Look, I’m tired. What the hell do you want me to do? I’m not doing anything more to help you. I think you’re KGB, and I’m not a traitor no matter how you try to make it look that way. I fucked up. I’ll pay the fare. Put a bullet in me or let me loose. Up to you. Kill me, let me walk. I don’t really give a fuck anymore.”

  The Gray Man sat back, sighed, reached into a breast pocket, brought out a small stainless-steel pistol, laid it on the table in front of him, turned to someone off camera and said something in an Eastern bloc language that contained “Melina.”

  At the name, Morgan jerked upright, opened his mouth, and closed it again. The room was filled with a taut silence, and nothing happened for a time. There was a commotion, the sound of a door being thrown back, and the man who had called himself “Brad” came into the room, dragging the young blond woman named Melina by the arm. She was crying, her hair matted, her clothes filthy, her face bruised and bloody. She knelt there, breathing heavily, looking at nothing. The Gray Man lifted the pistol, placed the muzzle against her temple, looked across the table at Morgan.

  A moment passed, and then Morgan said, “Fuck her too. She’s probably one of yours.”

  The girl called Melina lifted her head up, stared at Morgan.

  “Morgan, please—”

  The Gray Man squeezed the trigger. There was a sharp, cracking pop, a puff of smoke, a spattering of blood and brains on the wall beside her, and she dropped out of the camera frame. Morgan stared at her body on the floor, and then back across at the Gray Man again, his face slack, stunned. The Gray Man lifted the pistol, pointed it at Morgan’s head, squeezed the trigger—and the screen went black.

  The black screen held for a moment, and then light came back, a tight shot of the pistol on the table and the voice of the Gray Man speaking.

  “Miss Keating, your son is still alive. We have not yet decided our next course of action concerning him. He can be exposed to your Office of Naval Intelligence as a spy and sent to Leavenworth, which may not destroy your career but will certainly limit it. Or, to use an American term of art, he may undergo ‘rendition’ to a third party, such as Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Taliban, or the Iranian secret service, where he will be subjected to the most extreme forms of interrogation they can devise. He may eventually make an appearance in a terror video at some point, where he will be inexpertly beheaded on camera by some clumsy jihadist while he cries out for your help in his last terrible moments. All these things may happen or none of them. It is up to you. His fate is in your hands. Your organization is in possession of a collection of archived cable transmissions between certain Soviet station agents in Paris and their superiors in Moscow. This collection of paper documents was unearthed quite recently in Riga, Latvia, by a joint task force of American and NATO intelligence officers. These paper transcripts—let us call them the ‘Riga Transcripts’—which are in code, have been delivered to your superiors at Fort Meade and are now being addressed by your particular department, a group of decryption experts known internally as the Glass Cutters. I am about to give you a date range. Please secure a pen, since this video will automatically erase itself. Have you a pen?”

  Briony looked up at Jules, her eyes hunted, looking suddenly haggard and old. He held a pen out to her, along with the pad she kept by the fridge to write out shopping lists. She was reasonably certain that the little Sony digital camer
a she had set up to record a backup of the image on her screen had enough capacity to hold the entire video, but she wasn’t going to leave anything to chance. She jerked it out of his hands and spread it out on the counter.

  The Gray Man’s voice rolled on. “I will assume you now have a pen. The date range we are concerned with is from the twentieth day of April 1973 to the nineteenth day of June 1973. Do you have that?”

  The Gray Man repeated the dates another three times.

  Then he went on to his final statement.

  “I will assume you have the dates clear. Please make certain that you also write down the following instructions as well. We are aware that as the Senior Coordinator of the Glass Cutters, you are in a position to review progress and assign certain sections of these cables to specific subgroups for more efficient decryption operations.

  “Here are our instructions. They are quite simple.

  “In your Venona transcripts, you make frequent reference to ‘x number groups unrecovered,’ as in ‘fifteen groups unrecovered’ or ‘forty groups unrecovered.’ You will see to it, Miss Keating, that in the Riga Transcript that you have in your possession now, on a specific transcript you have docketed as ‘Riga one five seven dash alpha hotel’”—Briony’s pen was racing—“on that particular transcript, you will find that very few number groups are recoverable. Very few, less than fifteen percent. Find whatever procedural excuses or justifications are persuasive. But you will ensure that outcome. I will repeat this section again.”

  He did, and then closed with:

  “Now, I know you are a patriot, Miss Keating, and this will run against all your instincts. I can tell you in complete honesty that we are dealing with ancient history here. There is nothing in this cable that can have any effect on our modern world in any way. It is our desire to protect the reputation and legacy of one of your most respected intelligence officers. His was not an act of betrayal but rather an inadvertent disclosure. But his exposure would have some peripheral consequences that would not be in the interests of either of our countries.