The Venetian Judgment Read online

  Lujac had almost forgotten. As soon as Briony had gone missing, he had decided to bring Anton and whomever in close where they could help, if needed. Or be handled, if necessary. So he had sent out a text message on the cell: cq911cq.

  Which, according to their code, meant “Get here now.”

  And, in accordance with their laws, here was Anton the Latvian.

  Lujac now had only two minor problems left to deal with.

  Where was Briony?

  And where was . . . whomever?

  “Come in, Anton,” he said. “You’re freezing.”

  Anton pushed the door closed behind him, shuffled a little farther into the room, his gaze flicking about the entranceway, peering off into the dim interior of the large main room, seeing the pale light shining in through the wall of windows that looked out over the Hudson. The room smelled of wood fire and cigarette smoke. To his right, the kitchen counter was an island of light in the shadows, with light shining down on Lujac’s laptop, the red letters still glowing vividly on the blue background:

  MESSAGE ERASED.

  Anton squinted at the laptop screen and then moved in closer to look down at the message. Lujac glanced back toward the door and realized that Anton had contrived to leave the latch open an inch, which cleared up one of his problems. He stepped back a little into the hallway, slipping an umbrella out of the stand by the door.

  Anton, thinking that his theatrical interest in the laptop would have pulled Lujac along with him, heard the umbrella being pulled out of the rack, sensed Lujac’s move, and turned around, opening his mouth to say something. The heavy door slammed back. Lujac caught it with a shoulder, as a large, bulky figure in a black leather jacket and jeans butted through and lurched into the hall, a pistol in his gloved hand. Bukovac, his battered white face wet with melting snow, his darting black eyes blinking through the wet, saw Anton standing there, stunned, his mouth hanging open.

  “Behind—”

  Bukovac moved fast and well, dropping to one knee and pivoting, his pistol up and tracking to his right. Lujac stepped inside the arc, kicking Bukovac’s pistol hand to one side with his left foot.

  Bukovac, still on one knee, brought his left hand up. There was a flash of silver, and a grating slither as Lujac deflected the blade with the umbrella. Lujac stepped in low, bringing his right hand up in a silvery arc and jamming all ten inches of slender filleting knife upward through the underside of Bukovac’s chin.

  The blade pinned Bukovac’s tongue to the roof of his mouth, punching all the way through it and into his brain, deep enough that Lujac could feel the bristles on the curve of Bukovac’s unshaven chin, feel the man’s blood rushing down his wrist.

  Lujac held that position for a long, exquisite moment, moving Bukovac’s head just a touch to the left so the light from the halogens could shine directly into his eyes as he died.

  Lujac held Bukovac pinned in place, watching him go through the changes in a matter of heartbeats—Lujac . . . parry . . . hurt . . . dying? . . . dying!—it took almost a full minute for Bukovac to complete this process, and, when it was over, Lujac had to resist the urge to kiss the man on the lips.

  That, he thought, withdrawing the blade and stepping back as Bukovac slumped onto the stone floor in a welter of fresh blood, was perfect. What do the Americans say? Better than sex?

  When he shook off the hypnotic spell of it all, he was not surprised to find that Anton had disappeared. He wiped the blade off on Bukovac’s coat, turning it to see it glitter in the light, and then moved off into the darkness of the great room. He stopped in the middle of it, listening carefully, and heard Anton’s rapid, shallow breathing on the other side of the room.

  He came over and found him huddled under one of the casement windows. Anton made a sound rather like a lamb bleating and turned his face into the stones, covering his head with his arms, his bony knee trembling.

  Lujac put a gentle hand on his shoulder, moved his arm away. “Anton, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Anton’s face came away from the wall, his eyes wet.

  “Why not?”

  “I need to know why you came.”

  “Piotr sent us. I had no choice. They said they’d put Maya in with the men in the Chronic Ward.”

  “Okay,” said Lujac, his tone low and soothing, “I can see that. You had no choice. But why did Piotr want you to come over in the first place?”

  “The woman, in London. You sent pictures, Kiki.”

  Lujac sat back on his heels, folding his arms over his knees.

  “Yes, I did, didn’t I? Naughty me. So what?”

  “So what? Kiki, we are supposed to be doing this carefully.”

  “Tell me, did anything come of it? Anything at all?”

  Anton looked uneasy and then shook his head.

  “No, not yet. They think it was a robbery that went . . . strange.”

  Lujac sighed, patted him on the shoulder.

  “See? Nothing. And now look what you made me do to Bukovac.”

  Lujac stood up.

  “Well, now that you’re here, you can at least help.”

  “Help?”

  “Yes. Go do . . . something clever . . . with that mess in the hall.”

  “What will you do?”

  Lujac showed his teeth.

  “Do you know what a ‘panic room’ is?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “There’s one in this house.”

  “Do you know where it is?”

  “Yes, I believe I do.”

  THE BLACK SEA

  THE SUBITO, OFF POYRAZ

  The sun had gone down long ago, sinking into the low green hills to their left, taking with it the temperature. Dalton steered the Subito north, passing the long concrete jetty of Poyraz on the starboard shore. The last Army outpost on the Nung, thought Dalton, watching the little village drift by: beyond it there was only Kerch . . . On either side, the sloping hills fell away into the lingering twilight while ahead of them the endless sweep of the Black Sea opened up, calm tonight, moonless and cold, a few early stars showing, five hundred miles of black water between them and the Ukrainian peninsula.

  Up ahead, they could see the glimmering lights of an oil tanker, already far out to sea, steaming north by northwest for Kerch and the Sea of Azov, the sound of her engines a faint murmur coming over the water, barely audible above the steady rumble of the Subito ’s twin diesels. The radar screen under Dalton’s left hand glowed green, a yellow line sweeping around the circumference, passing over tiny red blips far out at sea: the freighter up ahead, a smaller red blip that was probably a fishing boat, and, two miles dead ahead of that, moving at fifteen knots, the trawler that had attacked Dalton at the warehouse in Sariyer, the. Levka, sound asleep in the guest stateroom now, snoring audibly, had explained that the name was Ukrainian for “shark.”

  Dalton was maintaining a safe distance from the Shark, unwilling to come under the muzzle of that heavy machine gun again. Taking fire like that was sort of like being sealed inside an oil drum full of barbed wire and getting pushed down a fire escape.

  He could still feel the sting of the concrete slivers that had peppered his right leg, and the back of his neck was stinging from the sheet of phosphorus fire that had billowed out from the warehouse as he made the leap for the Subito. He was reasonably sure the men on the Shark up ahead were not aware that they were being trailed by the Subito.

  If they were, Dalton would find out as soon as they were a few miles offshore, when the trawler would wheel around and close in to rake them with machine-gun fire and send them to the bottom of the Black Sea.

  If that looked as if it were about to happen, Dalton intended to turn tail and bolt, counting on the Subito’s superior speed to get them out of range. The radar array had a “tagging” option that allowed Dalton to enter the GPS coordinates of another ship and monitor their relative positions. The computer would sound an alarm if the GPS parameters changed in any way. He had marked the Shark and s
et the proximity alarm, and now all they could do was run silent and wait.

  Mandy Pownall was standing at his left, her strong face uplit by the amber glow of an electronic navigation chart, tracing with her long white fingers a path across the sea to Kerch. She tapped the screen, sighing.

  “God, Micah, it’s almost five hundred miles to Kerch. What’s our speed right now?”

  “Fifteen knots.”

  “At that rate, it’ll take us thirty hours to get to Kerch. Can’t we go any faster?’

  “We could. Subito will do thirty-five knots on a flat sea. But we’d overtake that trawler in thirty minutes. I don’t want to tangle with her, but I’d like to see where she’s going.”

  Mandy went back to the communications set, slipped on a pair of headphones. They were tuned to Channel 16, the universal frequency for marine radio distress calls, but she was also scanning other frequencies from time to time to see if she could pick up any chatter from the Shark up ahead.

  She stood there in the dim glow of the pilothouse, moving gracefully with the lift of the sea, Subito’s long bow stretching out into the darkness in front, lit only by the faint glow from their cabin.

  Dalton had the boat running with all of her bow lights off, although she was still showing stern and flank lights. Running completely dark would be suicidal in these busy waters.

  Dalton hoped that this tactic, along with her low radar profile—she had no flying bridge and, from the side, looked a lot like a patrol boat—would keep her from being detected by the men on the Shark.

  So far, it seemed to be working.

  The downside to this tactic was the possibility of being rammed by a southbound freighter in the dark, but Dalton figured they’d see any freighter coming on the radar screen long before she posed a threat. Subito had a proximity alarm connected to the radar array that would recognize any incoming ship, compute her course, and sound a warning if a collision was likely. So running without bow lights was a risk worth taking.

  That was his theory, anyway. He supposed there were other sailors, now sleeping their long sleep at the bottom of the seven seas, who had entertained similar delusions. But it was his call.

  Mandy put the phones down, came back to stand beside him, holding a cup of hot black coffee in her hands.

  “God, there are a lot of indecipherable languages loose on this planet. Why can’t they all speak English?”

  “Whose English? I seem to remember a bartender in London saying you had ‘lorly garms and was very queenly-like.’ ”

  “He also called me a ‘bint.’ There’s nothing out there but chatter. I think there’s a Ukrainian patrol boat out there over the horizon. I could hear some cross talk between somebody who sounded official and the captain of an Italian freighter. Other than that, a lot of buzz and crackle and foreigners babbling. Anything on the news?”

  Dalton turned the dial on a shortwave radio tuned in to Istanbul, listened to some complicated tribal drumming, lowered it to a murmur.

  “News isn’t on again for an hour. All I got was, they found the chopper, and the Greeks are flying in to cooperate in an investigation of the crash.”

  “Have they put that together with a fire in a warehouse?”

  Dalton shook his head.

  “If they did, they’re not telling the media about it. I’m surprised we don’t have a Turkish Coast Guard vessel running us down right now. Or a chopper overhead. Hundreds of people watched that firefight. You’d think someone would have remembered the name of this boat.”

  Mandy sipped at her coffee, set it down on a gimbaled tray.

  “Drugs, would be my answer. People run drugs all up and down the Bosphorus, Levka says. Maybe people have learned not to get involved when gunfire breaks out. I don’t think the Turkish cops are all that popular either. A nasty reputation for random brutality, so I hear. Perhaps it’s safer to keep a low profile. These aren’t the Hamptons.”

  “No, they’re not,” said Dalton with a wry smile.

  Mandy glanced down at the stairs that led to the main salon, thinking about Dobri Levka sound asleep behind the closed door of the guest stateroom, and looked back at Dalton, her expression somber.

  “Now that we have a moment alone, you remember I said we’d found something on the boat?”

  “Yes, something about Lujac?”

  She reached into the pocket of her squall jacket and brought out a Sony memory chip.

  “We found this taped to the back of a drawer in the master stateroom.”

  She slipped it into the reader slot of the boat’s onboard computer, hit a function button. The MFD screen flicked from the radar input to a blank blue screen and then to an MPEG. Dalton braced himself for one of Lujac’s horror shows, but instead he got a color image of a large, shapeless man wearing a striped shirt, unbuttoned, baggy gray slacks, the fly undone and some of his round hairy belly showing.

  The fat man was sitting back into a couch—it looked like one of the leather ones down in the salon—at his ease, smiling at someone off camera. Music was playing in the background, and the setting had an end-of-the-evening feeling about it, two people sitting around relaxing after some larger group had said their good-byes and wandered off to their homes.

  He was bald and bland, and had thick wet lips, disturbingly dark against his blue-white skin. His black eyes were small and sharp, like a gull’s, and his hands, folded around a glass of beer, looked like fat pink flippers, his fingers thick tubes of pink sausage.

  The man seemed to be unaware of the camera, and, from the angle, it was likely the camera was hidden. He leaned forward to refill his beer glass, spreading the fly of his overstressed pants, his belly pushing out through it like a fleshy balloon. Then he sat back in the creaking, overburdened couch again, his thick legs spreading wide. When he spoke, his accent was heavy and Slavic, but the language was English.

  “So, we are done, and you are ready . . . ?”

  A reply, offscreen, barely heard, a younger voice, clear, French. The man listened, his small eyes glittering, and then showed his cheap yellow dentures in a broad, wet smile, stretching his thick purple lips wide.

  “Good . . . What?”

  He seemed to be reacting to a question the mike did not pick up, leaning forward and putting his head to one side, looking puzzled. The question was repeated, and the fat man’s smile went away, revealing the cold, calculating reptile that lived inside.

  “None of us know the answer to that. And you should not ask. All you know—all we know—is that she must amend the transcript, and must do so without being in any way detected.”

  Another muffled interjection, and the fat man frowned.

  “She will know . . . And she will also know what happens if she does it wrong or puts in any kind of trick.” Here he sighed, and drained half his glass. “As for the old woman, she is to be an example. We have been over this. She is no longer an active member, but she is a mentor to them, a figure of reverence and affection. She is cherished, like a mother. What happens to her should be ambiguous, should be taken by the authorities as a natural death. That is very important, my friend, because—should you need it with your subject, to complete her motivation, you can then provide her with the visual proof that you in fact were the cause of her beloved mentor’s death. The shock? The fear? These will be your bona fides, so to speak. What? Of course you will be with her. You read the personality analysis—the psychologists in Marksa Plaz confirmed this, you saw the films—her husband’s betrayal hurt her deeply. She is a physical creature. Her husband said she was insatiable.”

  The fat man stopped to run a wet white tongue, like the head of a blind cave snake, over his lips, his face creasing into an obscene leer.

  “And look at you! How can she resist you? At any rate, one way or another, by charm or by force, you will be with her at the vital moment.

  “Up until then, you must be disciplined. Your very generous remuneration will depend upon that, my friend, and you would not want to disappoint ou
r employer. I mean that sincerely. Hear me. You do not want to draw their disapproving attention. But afterward, of course, indulge! A bonfire of indulgences, so long as she is dead at the end of them. Yes, at the end, a bonfire, a great cleansing fire, and then you can—”

  The MPEG ended abruptly, the screen pulsing blue. Mandy pulled the chip out of the reader, her face solemn. The multifunction display flicked back to radar, and the screen came up again, the sweeping yellow bar, the tiny red blip of the Shark holding steady at two miles out, a few random returns at the outer limit of the arc, some high clouds far away in the west. Dalton stared at the screen, his face as solemn as Mandy’s.

  “Well,” he said, “that’s the proof you were looking for. My compliments, Mandy. You were right all along.”

  “We never actually see Lujac.”

  “We’re not trying to prove this in a court of law. The film was taken on his boat. And we got a big reaction in Santorini when we threw his name around. And nobody knows where this Marcus Todorovich guy is. I’d say it was his body Sofouli pulled out of the Aegean. Levka seen this film yet?”

  “Not yet. I’m not sure I want him—”

  “I agree. Need to know. But we can take a slice, a still, of just the fat man, and show that to Levka. He has to be the Gray Man. Fits Levka’s description down to the lips, the sausage fingers—”

  “Yes, he does. But—”

  “Look, with this film we could just break off, take this to Hank Brocius. Back it up with everything we know. He can’t pass this off as more interagency bullshit. We could turn around now and go back to . . .”

  He caught the look in Mandy’s eye, the sardonic smile.

  “Well, I guess I’ve kind of burned that particular bridge—”

  “Along with half of that particular Istanbul—”

  “There’s an airfield at Yalta—”

  “Micah, we don’t need to take this to the NSA.”

  “Why the heck not?”

  “God, and you a CIA agent. Because, you berk, I’ve already sent it.”