The Venetian Judgment Read online

  “A lunatic asylum?”

  Levka nodded vigorously.

  “Yes, lunatic asylum. One time, Uncle Gavel and me, we go to throw stones at bars, makes people all go crazy inside. Good fun.”

  Levka seemed to catch the shift in her mood, looked a little ashamed of himself for a fleeting second, then brightened.

  “Oh, but we both big rolling drunk at time. Meaning no harm, eh?”

  Dalton, at the helm, stiffened, checked the radar screen

  “They’ve stopped,” he said. “The Shark. It’s dead in the water.”

  THEY WERE WITHIN a hundred yards of the Shark in thirty minutes.

  It was wallowing in the swell, tossing in the wake of a huge tanker that had skimmed past her, a canyon wall of steel racing by at thirty knots, her props as big as windmills, the tormented sea at her towering stern a boiling cauldron.

  Twilight was coming down fast, a cloak of indigo settling down on the brown slopes and the black water, lights winking on all along the Ukrainian shore, and the gathering glitter of thirty or forty ships closing in on the narrow strait. A single gull soared high overhead, calling and crying. The huge old trawler was bobbing in the wake and drifting rudderless, awash, pitching crazily over the swells. Two men in greasy knit sweaters and rubber overalls were visible, one standing on the bow with a checkered distress flag, the other—older, grizzled, with a white beard and small blue eyes narrowed in the sidelong light—in the stern, staring out at the Subito, as Mandy brought her within hailing distance.

  Dalton stood just inside the pilothouse door, the oversized shotgun in his hands, his eyes fixed on the old man in the stern.

  When they were within a hundred feet, Mandy backed the engines and brought the Subito to a standstill, her wake rolling outward, waves lapping at the mud-stained hull of the fishing trawler.

  The name on the stern——was almost completely obscured by a coating of fish scales and mold and fuel oil, but the holes Dalton had blown into the stern boards, four of them in a ragged line a few inches above the water, were clearly visible. Patched, badly, but visible.

  Levka, standing next to Dalton with Dalton’s Beretta behind his back, leaned out of the cabin, using a bullhorn to call across to the man in the stern.

  “? Are you in trouble?”

  “Dah,” said the man in the stern, then in English: “We are out of gas. Have you any to spare?”

  Dalton whispered to Levka,“Ask him if he wants a tow.”

  “Do you want a tow?” asked Levka. “Kerch is only a few miles.”

  The man in the stern frowned and shook his head.

  “No. No tow. Only gas.”

  Levka leaned back inside, spoke softly to Dalton.

  “He thinks of the salvage law. We tow him, we own his boat.”

  In the meantime, the man standing on the bow had been staring hard at the Subito. Although a lot grubbier than she had been back at Ataköy Marina, she was still a slim, trim boat, and much too pretty for these waters. He called out to the man in the stern, a rapid flow of Russian. The man in the stern turned and said something back to him.

  The other man—younger, with a dark face and a black beard—dropped down through a forward hatch in the trawler’s bow and was gone. Dalton braced himself, setting a hip against the door: this shotgun kicked like a cart horse. Levka had the Beretta out and down by his right side now, his expression open and cheerful.

  At the wheel, Mandy was listening to the marine channel.

  “Dalton, I think somebody on that boat is calling Kerch.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Somebody just got on Channel 22. He’s speaking in Russian, I think, but I just heard the name Subito.”

  Dalton moved up next to Levka.

  “Ask him if he wants us to throw him a line.”

  Levka put the bullhorn up, and at the same time the older man in the stern ducked back into the wheelhouse.

  “Boss, I don’t—”

  The old man popped out of the cabin again, something blunt and metallic in his hand, and leveled it at the pilothouse of the Subito. Dalton stepped quickly out of the door and fired three rapid rounds with the shotgun, three tremendous cracking booms, the muzzle flash lighting up the water between them. The bearded man disappeared behind the transom. There was a short, crackling fizz, and a fountain of red fire shot up from the stern boards.

  “Flare,” said Levka. “He fired a flare!”

  Mandy hit reverse, pushed the throttles to high, and the Subito began to back up, waves crashing over her low stern. The trawler was on fire now. They could see the dark man running out onto the bow, carrying that big Russian .50. Levka leaned out of the window, put a couple of rounds into the man at a hundred feet, and he fell backward into the water. Mandy turned the ship, the Subito wallowing in the turbulent wake, as the trawler blew up in a flower of red oily smoke, chips of wood, chunks of meat and metal, rising up on a column of roiling fire into the twilit sky. The explosion lit up the black water all around and put a red glow on Mandy’s face as she stared back at the wreckage, some of it still on fire as it hissed and spattered down a few yards short of the bow.

  Levka pointed off to port, at a low black hull speeding toward them, a blue light flashing at the peak. Even at a half mile, they could hear the whoop-whoop-whoop of its siren.

  “Are we in Russian water,” put in Mandy, “or in Ukrainian?”

  “Ukrainian, I hope,” said Levka, a very worried look on his face.

  “Micah,” asked Mandy, “whose side are the Ukrainians on?”

  “Ours, last time I looked. Levka, can you see a flag on that boat?”

  Levka got the binoculars, trained them on the sleek gray arrowhead flying toward them across the water. They could hear its engines now, a deep, drumming vibration. Levka put the glasses down, sighing.

  “Blue over yellow. Is Ukrainian.”

  “Well,” said Dalton into the silence that followed, “I think this concludes the covert part of our journey. Levka, break us out a U.S. flag.”

  THE CLINIC at Karla Marksa Plaz, known as—Kerch Psychiatric Hospital—was a ghastly holdover from the Soviet occupation, a crumbling concrete box painted in garish sky blue and sulfurous yellow. The narrow street it sat in was lit by harsh blue globes that cast a pale light over the façade of the building.

  Dalton and Mandy Pownall had come to finish this job. Levka was back at the customs house, seeing to the berthing of the Subito, keeping one eye on the seaside bar a few hundred yards south of the entrance to the Mithridate Staircase, the Double Eagle. Levka had expressed his intention to finish the day there, with a final double-vodka toast to poor Uncle Gavel, no offendings, and the capricious fortunes of war.

  The young Ukrainian captain—his name was Bogdan Davit, and he seemed to consider the unexpected arrival of a shipload of CIA agents on the shores of this grubby little town to be a career-making opportunity to show his quality—stood next to Dalton, shaking his handsome young head as he pointed his swagger stick at the ragged iron awning drooping down over the entrance, lit by a sickly fluorescent glow that seemed to come from nowhere in particular like an emanation from a crypt.

  “This is private, not open to public. Russians come over for the cure from vodka. Money comes from all private donation. Russian money, so I am told. I have not been inside, but I hear they have many sick-in-the-head types. But they have closed the place, it looks like, and when we called nobody answered. Come, we will go in and see what is to see.”

  Captain Davit nodded to a couple of officers waiting nearby, saying something in Ukrainian that neither Dalton nor Mandy could quite understand. They followed the little group as they crossed the deserted street, Davit reaching out when they stood before the fingerprint-covered greasy glass of the main doors to press the after-hours bell in its slot beside the entrance. They could hear the buzzing whine of the alarm echoing around the lobby. A bald head popped out from around a corner, wild-eyed, toothless. The body attached to it then t
ottered out from the corner and stood there in the hall, an elderly male, naked, grossly fouled, sucking his thumbs, both of them shoved together into his grinning mouth.

  “Oh Jesus,” said Captain Davit in Ukrainian, but Dalton and Mandy knew what he was saying because, under the circumstances, what else was there to say?

  THE STAFF HAD FLOWN. Someone from the docks said a boat had come in from the Russian side of the strait and taken fifteen people, including a large fat man with purple lips, off the customs dock, heading out to sea at around three in the afternoon. Pursuit at this point was pointless. It was a matter for diplomatic negotiations with the Russians.

  Whatever might happen later, the facts in front of them were that the entire staff of the clinic was gone, baby, gone, and the inmates had to be rounded up, chased down and collared or dragged blubbering from closets and toilet stalls on all five floors of the clinic; in the end almost fifty people, including about nine men from a locked-down section with a sign on it that read, in large red letters:.

  “Chronic Ward,” explained Captain Davit, watching with distaste and a trace of nausea as the ambulance people and a few unlucky junior cops went through the filthy ward, looking under tables and through unspeakable washrooms—looking, in the end, not so much for inmates as for survivors.

  Mandy and Dalton trailed through, Mandy with a cloth held against her face, Dalton smoking a Balkan Sobranie, his expression cold and stony. A young medic came running up to Captain Davit, her broad, sweet face contorted in horror. Davit listened for a time, and then turned to look at Dalton and Mandy, his young face as hard as Dalton’s now.

  “In the basement. We must look. Please come.”

  In the basement—a medieval horror of crumbling concrete pillars, rubbish, rags, rusted-out medical gear, old moldering beds, huge laundry machines, a row of dryers large enough to tumble-dry a moose, dripping walls, and an appalling stench that seemed to stir up under the dragging foot like a pale green cloud—at the far end, under a low tangle of copper tubes, rags hanging from them like Spanish moss from a live oak, lay two bodies:

  One male—a young man, with a military crew cut, a U.S. Navy tattoo on his left biceps, his hands tied behind him, his face a ruin. It had been beaten in with a lead pipe, which lay beside him, as if thrown down by the killer as he turned away. Droplets of blood, still red and still damp, sprayed out in every direction from the shattered remnants of the boy’s skull.

  And a woman, older, also naked, also bound, treated the same way. Both of them savagely beaten to death with the same three-foot section of lead pipe, both dead not five hours all told. It didn’t take a forensic team to read it, it was all there in front of them, the pipe, the blood spatter not yet dry, even the white plastic suit the killer had worn, peeled off, and thrown in a corner like a condom after sex.

  The three of them stood there, in a row, three good people—the English aristocrat, the Ukrainian policeman, and the gaunt, gray-faced Cleaner—all of them staring into the pit together.

  “We failed,” said Mandy after a long while, “didn’t we?”

  “Yes,” said Dalton. “But what did we fail at? What was going on here? What did this all mean?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mandy, “but I think I need to leave now.”

  “Yes,” said the young captain, swallowing, “so do I.”

  CIA HQ

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  THE ANNEX

  They held the hearing in Room 19 of the Annex, a large wood-paneled conference room buried deep in the windowless interior of the building, shielded and armored, and lit from above by rippled glass that shed a diffuse violet light down on a huge oblong table of hammered oak surrounded by sixteen evenly spaced tan leather chairs. The room was filled with the kind of humming pressurized silence that comes from filtered compressors deep in the basement and the inaudible hypersonic whine of antisurveillance electronics. If you pulled out a pistol and shot yourself while sitting in one of these chairs, the sound of the shot would be like a puff of wind under a locked door. Not even God would hear your brains hit the wall behind you.

  At the head of the table, flanked by two unsmiling aides—one female, one undecided—sat a whippet-thin, sharp-featured woman of indeterminate age with cool gray eyes and a bell of shining blue-black hair, wearing a charcoal gray pantsuit and a white blouse, open enough to remind the others that she was a woman, closed enough to remind the others that she was one of the “Virgins of Vigilance,” part of a team sent over from the Counter-Intelligence Analysis Group to do some long-overdue housecleaning here at the National Clandestine Service.

  Her name, it will come as no surprise, was Mariah Vale, and before her lay a sheaf of papers that contained the essential details of one old man’s history of deceit, betrayal, perfidy, and treason.

  The old man in question—Deacon Cather, Deputy Director of the National Clandestine Service, who was currently suspended pending the results of this hearing—was apparently at ease. He was beautifully turned out in a satiny charcoal pin-striped suit tailor-made for his Lincolnesque body. Tall, angular, lean, almost cadaverous, with yellow skin and tobacco-stained teeth, dry, cold eyes, a leathery reptilian neck, and large hands with flat nails, he sat with them folded comfortably on the bare table in front of him: his calm, still gaze rested upon the pink-tinged forehead of Mariah Vale the way a hawk might look at a hen.

  Next to him in the nearly empty room sat Micah Dalton, acting in a way as his aide in this matter. Dalton’s left cheek still showed a livid scar where a bullet had scored a path across his face only a few weeks before.

  In front of Dalton was a leather case, battered, tan, with gold fittings, unlatched but unopened. Dalton was wearing a navy blue pinstripe, a snow-white shirt, a gold-and-blue-striped tie held in place with a gold collar bar, and an expression of cold dislike in his pale blue eyes.

  Somewhere off in the dark, a camera rolled and a recorder spun slowly. This was the third hour of the proceedings, and the matter had come down to the proof, as these things usually do, and Mariah Vale had “the proof ” in her bony-fingered hands as she leaned forward to address the hidden watchers.

  “We have here the decryption of Riga 157-alpha hotel, dated the twentieth of May, 1973, done by Miss Keating’s staff and overseen by Miss Keating herself, which, considering the death of her son only a short time ago, calls for the highest commendation.

  “We have all read the transcript, the decryption of which has been verified by an independent unit of the Glass Cutters, under the supervision of the DNI herself, but I will present it here in hard copy so you may refresh your memory if you need to. Is that satisfactory, Mr. Cather?”

  “It is,” said Cather in his Tidewater drawl, his Easter Island gravity undiminished, his humorless smile a thin curve on his bloodless lips.

  Dalton reached out and took a copy from the pile, laid it out in front of Deacon Cather:

  New York 20 MAY 1973 1425—WALDORF

  PREACHER confirms to KEVIN that WG entry

  Connects to RN. PREACHER confirms recordings exist of RN

  discussing entry cover-up. PREACHER confirms

  consequences.

  Will be terminal to RN. Congress intends to force

  RN resignation (six groups unrecovered), ADC in

  Paris (nine groups unrecovered), confirmed by

  Preacher.

  In direct communication with (unrecovered sequence).

  Recommend immediate communication with Giap to:

  Secure treaty (nine groups unrecovered) document (eighteen

  groups unrecovered).

  By hand to Gordon by Preacher (four groups unrecovered).

  Also Preacher insists on extended payment grade

  citing:

  Extreme risk of (six groups unrecovered) in reference.

  To Hudson, Garza, others (eleven groups unrecovered).

  Cable wire/Kevin to Gordon, copy Karla,

  NY, 20 May 1973. End.

  “You are aware,
” said Mariah Vale, “that Kevin has been confirmed by the man himself to be Oleg Kalugin, who from 1965 to 1970 was the so-called Press Officer of the Tass News Agency in New York, and who admitted, after his defection to the United States, that he recruited many agents from the diplomatic and military personnel, who were at that time active in the States, including attachés to the United Nations? You have heard of him?”

  “Heard of him, Miss Vale? Goodness yes. I have gotten drunk with him. A lovely man.”

  “And you’re also aware that Gordon is Vladimir Kryuchkov, who was Kalugin’s immediate superior, based at Moscow Center, and that Kryuchkov was the head of the KGB’s counterintelligence division, and that Kryuchkov reported directly to Yuri Andropov?”

  “It is my job to be aware of these things. I was aware of such things when you were still an attractive young woman, Miss Vale.”

  “It is our contention that you, Mr. Cather, are the agent known as Preacher—”

  “Come now,” said Cather. “Deacon? Preacher? Would they be that transparent?”

  “They called Alger Hiss Ales. Winston Churchill was Boar. Their cables are full of such clumsy pseudonyms. So, you have admitted, for the record, that on this date—the date in question—you were in fact the Aide de Camp—the ADC—in service to our representatives at the Paris Peace Accords?”

  “Yes, along with Colonel Garza, Colonel Hudson, Major Prescott, and Colonel Dale, all of whom were attached as military advisers to our envoys at the Paris Accords and all of whom made many trips between New York and Washington and Paris during those very hectic weeks—”

  “We are not concerned with all of these trips, Mr. Cather, but only with this one particular trip—a trip which you admit that only you made, a trip during which you conveyed critical information concerning the Watergate break-ins that convinced the Soviets that President Nixon was about to be investigated in connection with these break-ins, an investigation that would very likely render moot his prior guarantees to the government of South Vietnam to return to extensive Linebacker operations over Hanoi and Haiphong if the North were to violate the terms of the Accord. In a word, Mr. Cather, we are suggesting that your treason in this matter caused us to forfeit the Vietnam War.”