The Venetian Judgment Page 29
Nikki, entering the glass-walled and blond-wood-paneled space on the heels of Sofouli and Gul, saw over Sofouli’s shoulder a tubby, sad-looking little man with bad skin and doughy cheeks. The pasty pallor of the “inside man” lay on him like the dusting on a sugar doughnut. And his dull-eyed, slack-jawed face carried the weight of long years of disappointed expectations on it, along with a kind of stoic acceptance of his current situation.
His soft-brown eyes flickered over the new arrivals, stopping for a moment to settle on Nikki, an expression of momentary confusion registering, and then he glazed over and went inward again, like a snapping turtle surrounded by sadistic schoolboys.
The office looked like any working space you’d find around the world, a few cubicles scattered about a large, open area, bland fluorescent lighting here and there in the acoustic-tiled ceiling, one large Dell PC with a huge flat-screen monitor, apparently turned off, on a long teak desk set off in a corner and littered with papers.
Several half-stuffed boxes sat around on the carpeted floor, and Nikki got the impression that the Teapot had been packing things up frantically when he got interrupted by Melik Gul’s men. The place had that indefinable aftermath look, the decrepit, tumbled look of a complicated project gone horribly wrong. The senior men already flown, and no one left but the stiffs, saps, and gunsels to mop up the mess and take the heat.
Gul went over and stood before the man, staring down at him, and asked a question in Turkish, which was answered by one of Gul’s Mustache Men. Nikki caught the name Ibrahim Sokak, and was about to make a note of it in her BlackBerry when it began to buzz in her hand.
Nikki stepped back out into the hall, closed the heavy glass doors with RUSSIAN INTER-ASIAN TRADE & COMMERCE BUREAU stenciled on it in gold, and looked at the text message from Alice Chandler:
Beyoglu Trading Consortium
Shell company wholly owned by BUG/Arkangel Industries,
Kiev, Moscow, Saint Petersburg. Sales rep for digital cameras,
electronics, trading internationally. Considered front for
Russian economic and Humint info gathering. No known KGB
affiliation. Re: prior queries other agencies, none on file.
More TK.
U OK?
Nikki sent a reply:
Query Russian Inter-Asian Trade & Commerce Bureau, also
Ibrahim Sokak, Anatoly Bakunin, Vassily Kishmayev, Melik
Gul. Also can you locate IP of computer here.
She got an answer back at once.
Is machine on? What kind of connection. I have phone number 90 212 288 8515. Is this main line?
Nikki looked over at the men, who seemed to be busy arguing about some procedural matter with the Teapot. She got the idea that he was aggressively asserting the sovereign rights of Holy Mother Russia and was being told where Holy Mother Russia could insert her sovereign rights.
She texted back:
Wait 1.
She walked quietly but with no particular air of furtiveness back into the office and across to the computer, reached out, switched it on, and got an ornate screenful of Cyrillic letters.
She texted a message:
Okay.
Plan B.
In Russian.
Can’t read Russian. Looks like hard-wired phone line. No
wireless indicator. Try 90 212 288 8515.
A moment passed, then a message came back:
Leave machine on.
See what geeks can do.
More on BUG/Arkangel. They also run Internet site.
www.odessaflowers.com. Checked site. Internet dating site
for U.S. males seeking Russian, Ukrainian wives, girlfriends,
concubines. Disgusting! More TK. Keep machine on. Geeks
closing in on IP address. Anatoly Bakunin, Vassily Kishmayev:
KGB thugs from Moscow Center. Melik Gul: Turkish secret
police. Ibrahim Sokak: no file. no hit.
Word from AD RA 2 U at all?
Worried.
Nikki stared at the screen for a while, thinking about the feeling she had gotten that Hank had been keeping something from her. This had been during a discussion about Kiki Lujac. He had suddenly taken a hard right and sent her off to find a picture of the man, a search that had been unsuccessful at the time. Someone seemed to have scrubbed the name Lujac from cyberspace.
Worried too.
Can you search recent files on AD of RA machine? Look for
name searches, background searches.
A pause.
Nikki could see Alice pursing her lips.
No. Confidential
Nikki typed back:
Vital.
Another long pause.
Will try. Wait.
Nikki waited.
Through the glass door, she could hear raised voices, and then the short, sharp sound of a slap across the face. The men were standing around the Teapot in a tight knot, and it looked like the left-behind sap was about to get what was coming to somebody much higher up.
No one was paying her any attention at all.
Nikki assumed this was because beating up suspects in Turkey was considered to be a man’s job.
Fine by her.
After a few minutes, her BlackBerry buzzed her again.
Days ago he ran detailed background check on French national Jules Duhamel. No hits, no negatives. Did it himself, no file number. FedEx full paper report to B. Keating, Pershing Center, West Point Military Academy. This morning, he took shuttle to La Guardia, booked car, told me he was going to Garrison to look up B. Keating. Got 15000 Bear Mountain Beacon Hwy., phoned listed land line, no answer. Phoned his cell, rang rang rang, and then cut to message. Phoned west pt h.r. office, ID’d as NSA. Wpt hr says BK no show, no word.
Nikki read the long report, hit save message, and sent back:
Call NYS troopers urgent!
She got back:
OK.U come home. Geeks inside machine now copying hard drive files. Is anyone watching?
Nikki looked over, saw that the hard-drive indicator light was blip-ping on the face of the computer tower. No one but her was paying any attention.
No. But work fast.
Any image description etc. of Jules Duhamel?
She went back out into the hall, waited a moment, and got back:
Visa picture. Comparing with Lujac descrpt.
A long pause. Sofouli was heading back into the main room, his face closed and angry. He saw Nikki in the hall and headed for her. Her BlackBerry buzzed again.
Found MPEG in ad, private e-mail box.
Wait one . . .
Wait one . . .
Wait one . . .
Sofouli reached her, his expression softening as he got in closer, his professional cop getting a bit mixed up with his Greek lounge lizard.
“Look, Nikki, this is going to get complicated. Very quickly, Gul thinks you know more than you’re saying. So do I. Am I right?”
She opened her mouth to say something oblique but her BlackBerry was buzzing again. She looked down at the screen.
MPEG taken on boat image of fat gray man talking to
someone off camera. Sent by M. Pownall, CIA London
Station, from vicinity Istanbul. Found on boat connected to
Kiki Lujac and to Beyoglu Trading. Pownall claims plot against
Glass Cutters. B. Keating is a Glass Cutter. Could be him,
Nikki, could be him.
Come home now!
Sofouli, leaning in, read the message on her screen, bared his teeth in a grim smile, looked back over his massive shoulder at Melik Gul, who was staring back out at them through the green-tinted glass, his black eyes fixed and full of malice.
Sofouli turned back to her.
“I’m going now to pick up my chopper. I think you should come with me. I think you should come now.”
Nikki did not look at Melik Gul, but she could feel his glare.
“Do you think he’ll let me go?”
“Are you arresting me?”
His look was stern, even grave, but there was humor in it, along with a clear sexual appreciation for the woman he was looking at.
“Nikki,” he said in a pleading whisper, “I will not leave you with Melik Gul. He is with the Milli Istihbarat Teşkilati, their secret police. No one knows what they do, only that people who go with them do not come back. And he is no friend of America. Please, do what I ask.”
“Submit to being arrested?” she said with an edge.
“Yes. Please, submit. I ask you from the heart.”
She looked up at him.
He gave her his best totally innocent smile, which made him look like a grizzly bear with a rose between its teeth. The man was a black-marketing rogue, and possibly a corrupt cop, and certainly a serial womanizer whom she wouldn’t trust to keep his hands to himself anywhere other than in a chopper he would have to fly all by himself. He also smelled richly of tobacco and cognac and some kind of leathery citrus cologne, and, although old enough to be her father, he wasn’t.
“Yes, all right, I submit.”
His eyes widened and he grinned ferociously at her.
“Then you are under my protective arrest. Now we go, yes?”
Nikki looked back at Gul then, saw latent malice, and much worse.
“Now we go, yes.”
“And while we go, Nikki, we talk, yes? About films, and the stealing of boats and helicopters?”
“I can’t tell you everything.”
“No,” he said, turning her with a gentle hand on her shoulder, heading toward the elevator at a quick trot, “but you will tell me enough for me to keep my job, yes?”
The doors of the elevator were sliding shut, slicing off the black glare of Melik Gul. It was full of a soft light, and music was coming from a speaker overhead, something snaky and sinuous, with drums and cymbals under a melody carried by a silvery clarinet.
The floor quickly dropped away under her feet, as she stood looking across at Captain Sofouli, who was smiling at her with a certain possessive air. Nikki realized she was suddenly feeling quite unsteady.
KERCH
THE SUBITO
When it became light, Dalton backed the Subito off the Shark’s wake, slowing down, until the Shark was just a notch on the horizon. Although the day began clear, the sea remained blue-black, stretching out all around them, the surface almost mirrorlike, brushed here and there by the feather touch of light winds that ruffled the surface as they passed over it.
Dalton locked the ship’s throttles when the red blip of the Shark steadied at six miles out, the limit of their radar unless they extended the retractable radar mast, which would likely draw the attention of the man driving the trawler.
There they stayed, as the miles slipped by the cutwater, and the day grew older and the light changed from clear to a sullen yellow haze, the stink of steel mills and coal plants drifting from the Russian coast, now coming in closer with every mile, a barren landscape of rock and bony bare hills matted with dirty scrub grass.
Sometime after midday, Levka had noticed a rainbow swirling in the black water as the light increased, pointing it out to Dalton as they cruised north. It seemed to be trailing out directly in the wake of the Shark.
“Look like gasoline, boss. Maybe you hit her fuel line?”
Dalton remembered punching a few large holes in the trawler’s stern in that firefight back in Sariyer. Maybe Levka was right, although they were running just a little outside one of the busiest ship channels in Eastern Europe, and perhaps the filthiest. The debris on the surface did not bear close inspection and the hull of the Subito was streaked with oily slime.
As the light changed and the evening drew on, they saw that they were now part of a gathering flotilla of ships, all bearing down on the narrow funnel-like passage of Kerch—from an old Slav word for throat—a narrow, meandering strait that snaked up between low hills and rolling grasslands. To the west was the Ukraine, now independent, and, to the east, Russia, a growing threat.
Beyond the Kerch Strait lay the shallow, heavily polluted Sea of Azov, bordered on the west by the Ukrainian shoreline—low barrier islands and sand dunes, the largest being the Arrow of Arabat, and on the east by the long, jagged Russian shoreline with a shallow bay cutting inward to the city of Azov.
Unlike Istanbul and the Bosphorus, there was no trace of fable and romance in the Kerch Strait. The land was low and sullen and treeless, and over it hung the grimy miasma of coal smoke and industrial pollution. The water under the hull was filthy and black and streaked with yellow foam, studded with garbage from the tankers and freighters closing in all around them, and the dank sea air reeked of dumped bilgewater and raw sewage leaking from or deliberately pumped out of rusted-out keels.
The groan and rumble and mutter of heavy shipping was all around them now, as if they were traveling north with a herd of elephants—massive tankers rumbling into view, freighters with angular cranes sticking up like gibbets, stumpy containerships riding dangerously low in the dirty water—all coming in, closing up into a packed mass, heading for the mouth of the strait.
Dalton picked a careful way through the shipping lanes, keeping the black notch of the trawler fixed in the bowsprit of the Subito as if he were aiming a pistol at a target. To his right, on the starboard side, an oil tanker flying a Liberian flag, her sides streaked with rust and grime, boomed massively close, as a row of bored Muslim sailors stared down at the Subito, her clean lines and gleaming brass as out of place here as a stiletto in a toolbox.
In a while, they could see on the far western horizon a single black pillar, set out on a sloping headland. Levka, shading his eyes from the sideways slant of the pale match-head sun, pointed it out.
“That is Obelisk of Glory, on Mithridate Hill. Kerch is there.”
Mandy was standing at the navigator’s station, studying a chart of Kerch Harbor.
“There’s a customs house, by this central mole here”—she touched the tip of a pencil to an image of a long rectangular dock reaching out into the sickle-shaped harbor. “We can dock there. Levka can show our papers—”
“We have papers?” said Levka.
“Yes. While I was at the Sumahan, I had the concierge fax our passports and the boat registry to Kerch—”
“The boat registry?” asked Dalton. She gave him a look.
“You can do a lot with Microsoft Office and a color printer,” said Mandy. “What? Did you think I spent my whole morning rolling about in the bubbles with that—”
“No, I didn’t,” said Dalton, interrupting her. “Great work.”
Levka looked dubious.
“You think will pass for customs at Kerch? Ukrainians very tricksy about Russians coming across the channel. Pricky—”
“Prickly, do you mean?” put in Mandy.
“Prickly, yes.”
“What’s the fee,” asked Dalton, “for docking at Kerch?”
Levka considered this.
“One American dollar, about six hryvnia . . . Maybe two hundred hryvnia.”
“What happens if we offer a thousand?”
“In American dollars or hryvnia?”
“U.S. dollars.”
Levka’s worried look went away.
“I think then all will be okeydokey, boss.”
Mandy was looking at Dalton, who was staring out to sea, watching the shoreline of Kerch slowly filling up the western horizon.
“I’ve been thinking, Micah, about that film . . .”
Dalton glanced over at Levka, who blinked back, open and innocent, slightly confused. Mandy followed his look, shrugged.
&nbs
p; “In for a penny. Levka, I want to show you something.”
“Okeydokey, Miss Boss,” he said, coming over to the multifunction screen to stand next to Mandy.
She noticed that since he had come into their service he was taking much better care of himself. She had bought him some clothes at the Sumahan: slacks, jeans, boat shoes, some sweaters, socks and underwear, a big yellow squall jacket, even a pair of Prada sunglasses.
He was also showered and shaved, and he smelled of soap and cigarettes. He looked years younger, and seemed to have filled out a bit as well, looking less vulpine and now more like a well-fed black Lab.
Mandy slipped the MPEG in, hit PLAY.
Levka watched for a moment, and then his face went a little pale.
“That’s him. Peter. Siva Čovjek. The Gray Man.”
“We thought it might be,” said Mandy. “Listen to what he says in a moment . . . something about a clinic . . . Here it comes.”
They reached the part where the fat man was speaking about the target, whoever she was. Levka was watching the screen, his face rapt.
“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.”
Mandy reached out, shut the MPEG off.
“Did any of that mean anything to you, Dobri?” she asked.
Levka said nothing for a time. She could see the agile mind working under the mop of black hair, behind the soft-brown eyes, the pale cheeks. He was a soldier of fortune, she knew, but it was a risk worth taking.
So far, he had been true and straight, tracking the Shark even while she had slept the night away . . . sadly, quite alone.
“Only this name,” he said after a while, “Marksa Plaz.”
“Marksa Plaz,” she said, leaning in a little, “what does it mean?”
“There is street in Kerch, called Karla Marksa Plaz—Karl Marx Place—there is. . . Big clinic, big hospital for teaching students to be doctors. Also is . . . crazy place? Like big hotel only with bars.”