The Venetian Judgment Page 24

  As far as he could tell, they were headed north, out of the city, in a stream of heavy traffic—cars, scooters, jitneys, diesel trucks—moving through open country with rolling farmland stretching away into the coming night on their left and acres of brand-new housing tracts on their right. He saw a street sign as they whipped across an intersection: BÜYÜKDERE CADDESI. He leaned forward, keeping the pistol rammed in tight against the woman’s ribs, tapped the driver’s screen.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “How long till we get there?”

  “Sariyer, sir?”

  Dalton had no idea where that was.

  “Yes, how long?”

  The driver, a kid really, looked a little shifty, and Dalton realized he was thinking about his tip and whether or not he’d make more if he just drove around in the hills for a while until he got the tab up where he liked it.

  “Oh, maybe ten miles. Hard to say in all this traffic.”

  Dalton pulled some euros out of his pocket, held them through the partition window. The driver eyed them and literally licked his lips.

  “Get us there in half the time and this is yours.”

  “Okay, sir!” he said, punching the gas and accelerating around an oil tanker, darting back into the lane again, as a transport went by in the other direction, horn blasting.

  Dalton leaned back and looked at the woman beside him, who so far had spoken not one word, which impressed him.

  “So, Gretel, how the heck are you?”

  The woman’s lips were blue and tight, and for a moment Dalton thought she was going to pass out. She was not used to this kind of thing, but she knew enough about it to know her chances of still being alive by sundown were slim.

  “Who are you?” she finally got out after a couple of attempts.

  Dalton gave her a large and unsettling grin.

  “My name is Micah Dalton and I work for the Central Intelligence Agency, and I am here to totally fuck up your world. Lovely to meet you.”

  “What . . . What do you want?”

  “I want to know who’s waiting for us, Gretel.”

  “Waiting for us where?”

  “Wherever we’re going.”

  Her skin was almost powder blue now, and her lips were white.

  “Goodness, Gretel,” he said, pulling the Beretta out of her ribs and resting it on her elbow, “you’ll faint. Breathe, sweetheart, breathe.”

  “I am an attaché of a Russian trade office, and what you are doing is kidnapping me. There will be very serious reper—”

  “Gretel, sweetie, save it for Pravda. By the way, Vladimir’s dead.”

  Gretel couldn’t control her reflexive gasp, but she clamped down on it a second later, the muscles along her jawline clenching and her lips set.

  “I do not know a—”

  “Didn’t mean to, actually. Cracked him across the back of the head back at the Ataköy Marina. Had a skull like a paper cup, I guess. Never came to. Dumped him into the Bosphorus. Was he a dear friend?”

  She blocked herself off and tried to retreat inward.

  “Where’s the rest of your crowd, by the way? Can’t just be you and the little brown man back at the mall.”

  In spite of her efforts, something flickered in her eyes. A secret?

  “Maybe they’re all off tracking us with Anatoly’s cell phone? Closing in like avenging harpies? Sorry. Anatoly doesn’t have it anymore—”

  She flinched at Anatoly’s name.

  “You know Mr. Bakunin, do you? Little dwarf of a guy? Hung like a hamster?”

  She flared at that, her cheeks red, turning to hiss in his face.

  “Viktor is—”

  She stopped abruptly, shutting down again. But it cost her.

  Dalton decided to let her cook for a while, leaning forward to tap the driver’s shoulder. The driver had an iPod in his ear—didn’t anyone under thirty ever worry about still being able to hear when they were forty?—and he popped it out with a large, gap-toothed grin. Dalton’s promise of multiple euros had made them boon companions . . . for now, at least.

  “What’s that address again? Where’re we going?”

  The driver looked down at a notepad on the seat beside him.

  “Three-six-seven Meserburnu Caddesi, sir.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “We’ll be there in five minutes, okay?”

  Dalton sat back again, smiled at Gretel.

  “So, Gretel, what’s at 367 Meserburnu Street? What’s waiting for us there?”

  She turned her face away, staring out the side window, probably, Dalton thought, to hide her reaction to the question. Which meant that whatever was waiting there wasn’t going to be good for Dalton. He smiled at the side of her head for a time and then tugged out his own cell phone. The line beeped for a while and then Mandy’s voice came on, a low, purring vibrato.

  “Micah, where are you?”

  “Ask our guy if he knows a place in the north called Sariyer?”

  There was muffled exchange, and then Mandy was back on.

  “Yes. It’s a port town, kind of a fishing village, about six miles from the northern end of the strait. On the European side.”

  “Okay. Where are you?”

  “We’re . . . just coming up to a bridge . . . Levka says it’s the Sultan Mehmet Bridge. Hold on. Are you in Sariyer?”

  “Just about.”

  “Levka says it’s about five miles up the strait. We can be there in thirty minutes, if we open the boat up.”

  “What’s the risk?”

  “He says there’s a ten-knot speed limit in the strait because the wake erodes the shoreline.”

  “Risk it. Did you find anything?”

  “Yes. You want to talk about it in the clear?”

  “No. Does it help?”

  “Oh my yes. Lujac is alive, and we can prove it. Are you all right?”

  Dalton looked over at Gretel Pinskoya, who was simmering away like a little teapot and harrumphing audibly every few seconds.

  “I am.”

  “What’s in Sariyer, Micah?”

  “A surprise, I expect.”

  “You should wait until we get there.”

  “I can’t. Speed counts here. Look for me at the main dock.”

  He flipped the phone shut, sat forward to look through the windshield. They had come down out of a range of low, tree-covered hills and were now racing along a waterside causeway—PIYASA CADDESI, according to the signs—past some very elegant waterside villas with red-tiled roofs and colonnaded balconies, windows glowing with wealth and ease, parks and walkways running along the waterside, mothers jogging with their kids in those big-wheeled strollers, a load of ancient tourists stumbling out of a large blue bus with MINOAN TOURS painted on the side. The kid was slowing down now, counting the numbers, as Piyasa turned into Meserburnu. The trees thinned out, and now they were moving through what looked like a more industrial section of the little town. Fishing boats filled a small marina on his right. The road curved east, and the driver, at a slow crawl, brought the cab to a stop beside what looked like a cannery or a warehouse, about a hundred feet long and perhaps twenty-five deep, sitting out on a concrete wharf.

  The driver pulled through a narrow gate in a tall concrete wall and into a small enclosed parking area, which was empty. He turned around to offer his gap-toothed grin to his passengers. If he thought anything of the obvious tension between the blond young man and the teapot woman, he wasn’t showing it.

  “Here we are, sir. Make good time, yes?”

  Dalton thanked him, paid the fare, and gave him a fifty-euro tip on top of it, which caused his young face to break into an ear-to-ear grin. He forced a business card onto Dalton as Dalton got out, bringing Gretel Pinskoya out on his arm in what looked like but was not a chivalric gesture.

  She came unhappily but offered no resistance, and they stood together in the fenced-off parking lot for a moment while Dalton considered the solid-steel doors and the blank windows, dirty with dust,
closed off with slatted beige blinds like the cataract-whitened eyes of a very old man. The place had a general air of decay and felt empty. Behind the low building, above its corrugated-iron roof, gulls wheeled and dipped, and a single pelican, roosting on the peak, squawked at them indignantly. Maybe, thought Dalton, he was the pelican who got fed a cell phone earlier and had now come back to bitch about it. Probably not.

  Nothing for it but to push on, Dalton decided, although he intensely disliked walking into seemingly deserted buildings without backup and maybe air cover. He tugged Gretel into motion—she had lapsed into a kind of slack, sullen resistance—and they got up to the door. Dalton looked around the doorframe for alarms or triggers or any kind of telltale sign, saw nothing.

  “So what do we do, Gretel? Do we open the door and get blown out of our panty hose? What should we do?”

  Gretel shrugged, stared back at him for a moment, then looked quickly away, but not quickly enough to conceal the tiny glitter of hate-filled anticipation in her flat-brown eyes.

  Dalton took out his Beretta, stepped to one side, and then rapped on the door three times—short, sharp blows. There was a silence then, during which even the sound of the traffic flowing behind them faded into stillness and there was only the ripple of the waves lapping against the pylons of the wharf. Dalton waited another sixty seconds and then took out the key ring, riffled through the choices, and settled on a large triangular one that looked like it suited the lock. He was about to insert the key when he realized that Gretel was now backing away from the door. Dalton heard a distinct metallic click, then reached out and caught Gretel, jerking her to the ground just as there was a series of deep, thudding booms, five huge holes blasting out through the walls at waist level, first on the far left, then near left, then through the center of the door, the near right, then far right. The shooter paused, perhaps to assess damage or to reload his Godzilla shotgun. Dalton stepped in, fast and low, and fired nine quick rounds through the hole in the door. He heard a strangled yelp, and then the clatter of a weapon falling on concrete. Gretel had gotten to her feet and tried to waddle away as fast as she could, but Dalton caught her by the wrist and held her as he fired the Beretta again, taking out the door’s upper and lower hinges. He booted what was left of the door and it slammed backward into a dark space that was filled with smoke still hanging in the air from the shotgun discharge. The afternoon sun was lighting up the wide, dust-filled interior, which was bare except for a few sticks of office furniture. There was a huge KS-23 shotgun lying in the rectangle of sunlight, a spray of fresh blood making a fan behind it, and a pair of military boots, splayed out and still, half hidden in the shadows. Dalton pulled Gretel in front of him and shoved her through the door. She staggered a few feet and went down on her hands and knees, her head down, her body shaking.

  Dalton changed out his mag, slapped a new one home. He stepped quickly through the open door, checked six, checked right, checked left, checked above, got his back to the wall, covering the large open space. The smell of cordite hung in the air, the coppery bite of fresh blood, along with something else . . . something he did not quite recognize.

  He looked back out into the parking lot, expecting to see it filling up with cop cars. But there was no sign that the gunfire had been heard over the booming of the waves. He shut the door, found a light switch, and a series of tired fluorescent bars gradually flickered on, filling the long open space with unsteady shimmering blue light and a buzzing electric whine.

  Dalton stepped over the young man, weapon at the ready, and looked down at his shocked features. Fresh-faced, the man had a military crew cut; he was wearing jeans, combat boots, and a white turtleneck sweater.

  He also had four bloody black holes stitched across his chest and was obviously dead. The four-gauge KS slide-action shotgun—a Russian military piece designed for their Special Forces, with a pistol grip and a massive barrel—lay a few inches from his right hand, with five ejected casings scattered around the floor behind him. Dalton bent down, picked the shotgun up, checked the chamber, slipping the Beretta into his belt. He looked over at Gretel.

  “There was a tell, wasn’t there?”

  She said nothing.

  “It was nothing you did, so it was something you didn’t do. I guess the cell, right? If you showed up without calling first, the kid knew he should light up whoever was in the door. That was almost you, my dear. I saved your skin. Remember me in your will . . . Okay, Gretel, on your feet.”

  Still on her hands and knees, her shoulders shaking, she looked at him, her eyes smeared with running mascara.

  “No. Shoot me here.”

  He walked over, grabbed her by the shoulder, jerked her to her feet.

  “Anybody else here?”

  Gretel shrugged, but now there was a blankness in her face that had not been there before. He pushed her ahead of him, and they went through the warehouse together. There was no one else there, and most of the space was empty except for a card table and a cot, where Dalton figured the young soldier he had just killed had slept, and a large rusty fish freezer, still muttering away, where the kid probably kept his food and beer. Next to the cot was an ammunition box, open, full of shells for the shotgun. Dalton, reloading the weapon and filling his pockets with spare shells, saw something sticking out from under the cot, a black triangle of wood. He used his shoe to drag it out from under the bed and found himself looking into the eyes of the President of the United States, the glass shattered, as if the picture had been stepped on. The President grinned up at Dalton, apparently delighted to see him. Dalton kicked the frame back under the cot and walked away.

  He found a small, windowless room in a far corner that looked as if it had just been built. The exterior walls were made of new spruce two-by-fours, carelessly hammered together, obviously hasty construction. There was a solid-steel door set into one wall, with a heavy glass window reinforced with chicken wire in it. Dalton looked through the glass, saw a steel table, a wooden chair behind it, a lightbulb hanging down over the table. The table was covered with circular brown stains where coffee cups once sat, and there was a large glass ashtray in the middle overflowing with cigarette butts.

  Dalton stepped away, walked back to Gretel, who stood in the middle of the warehouse, her shoulders slumped, staring dully at him. He pulled her over to the cot, pushed her down onto it.

  Her eyes grew very wide.

  “Hey, I’m not going to rape you, lady. That’s a Russian thing.”

  He found some wire left over from the construction of the little room and trussed her up as gently as he could and left her there. He went back to the door, tripped the light switch on the outside.

  A lightbulb, large and painfully bright inside its wire cage, came on, casting a harsh glare all over the room. Dalton opened the door slowly, looking right and left and above, before he entered.

  The interior of the room had been walled with thick panels of Sheetrock and then painted institutional colors—pale green over dark green—and had been treated with something to make the walls look old and dirty. The windowless room smelled of cigarette smoke, stale urine . . . and blood.

  On the left-side wall, about halfway up from the floor, there was a large black-spattered stain with bits of lumpy material stuck here and there, mainly in the center. Dalton touched the stain, looked at his finger. It was blood, all right . . . old blood.

  The table was made of steel and had been bolted to the floor, and the chair behind it was also screwed down tight. There were U-bolts set into the concrete, as if whoever sat here had been chained to the chair. He sat down in the chair, looked around the room from that perspective, and saw a small grate in one corner of the room at ceiling level.

  He leaned forward and picked one of the cigarette butts out of the pile of ash. An American cigarette, he realized, a Camel filtertip. He rolled the cigarette between his fingertips. It was still soft, the filter stained almost black.

  Whatever had happened here, it had happened a
while back, maybe a month ago, maybe less. He got up, went outside, got a chair, and used it to take a closer look at the grating in the wall. He could see that something had been screwed in place there, probably a camera.

  Dalton stepped back down, walked around the walls.

  “They made this room look like a police interview room, Gretel. Why did they do that? Who was in this room?”

  Gretel said nothing, lying on the cot, her eyes closed.

  Dalton looked at her for a while, knowing that he wasn’t going to get anything out of her without force and not quite ready to use it. He stood in the empty space, trying to get a sense of what had been going on here. The warehouse was probably leased, but by whom? The Russian trade mission? But now that Dalton was burning up their network, they were dismantling everything and pulling back. But to where?

  Kerch?

  A sudden wave of exhaustion rolled over him. He hadn’t slept since they had flown into Santorini. How long ago was that? A week? A day? He drew in a long breath, and that scent was there, faint, hard to detect under the stale cigarette smoke and the reek coming from the bathroom on the seawall side. Where was it coming from?

  He followed the smell across the room, ending up by the fish freezer near the sliding steel doors that opened out onto the wharf. He stood over it for a while, staring down at the rust-streaked lid, at the thin stream of brown water running out from underneath it and pooling by the sliding doors. He looked back at Gretel Pinskoya and found her staring back at him, her expression fixed and white.

  “What’s in here, Gretel?”

  He didn’t expect an answer. He opened the lid. A white fog rose up from the inside of the freezer. Huddled there, wrapped in what looked like a tattered American flag, was the frozen corpse of a young girl, her black eyes wide and glazed with hoarfrost as she stared upward at him, her mouth a little open as if she had died struggling for air. The left side of her skull had been blown open by some sort of heavy round. There was a star-shaped entrance wound on the right side of her skull, which meant that the weapon that killed her had been pressed right up against it when the trigger was squeezed. She was wearing jeans and a thin T-shirt, and her blond hair, stiff with blood and matted in a frozen tangle, looked fake, tawdry. She had been crying when she died: her fogged eyes were streaked with black. She may have been thrown into the freezer moments after she died. What looked like tear tracks were still visible on her cheeks, thin silvery trails running sideways down her face. He turned around and went back over to stand beside Gretel Pinskoya, no longer feeling quite so chivalric.