The Venetian Judgment Page 31

  “My dear Miss Vale, the Watergate affair began on the night of June seventeenth, in Washington, in 1972, and by the date in question here, the twentieth of May, 1973, a blind bat in a barn in Fargo could have told you that Nixon was in serious trouble.”

  Vale came back with heightened choler.

  “Nixon was not under serious threat until the revelations concerning the taped evidence—the so-called Nixon Tapes—surfaced in the fall of 1973. There was, however, a lot of talk in D.C. and New York in the weeks before that he had, like many other Presidents before him, kept accurate records of everything that transpired in the Oval Office. We have shown that in March of ’seventy-three you yourself were made aware of this situation in a conversation, a taped conversation between yourself and Colonel Garza—”

  “Who is dead, by the way. A suicide, you may recall?”

  “The tapes are still with us, Mr. Cather. Do you deny that such a conversation took place?”

  “I do not.”

  “So you admit that you were in possession of prior information concerning the Nixon Tapes—”

  “I was in possession of professional speculation between two military intelligence officers concerning a matter that was of great interest to every American, Miss Vale. The fact that the FBI was taping Colonel Garza in connection with possible accounting fraud at Fort Campbell—”

  “That does not negate the—”

  Dalton leaned forward here, opening his case.

  “Miss Vale, I think I can help clear this up for all of us.”

  “Captain Dalton, late of the Fifth Special Forces, for the record, and now one of Mr. Cather’s more controversial assistants over at Clandestine Services. Yes, how could you clear this up, I wonder?”

  Her tone was sarcasm laced with venom.

  God help Clandestine, thought Dalton, if she ever got her fangs in it.

  Dalton smiled back at her, reached into the case, and pulled out a pile of papers, passed one across to Miss Vale, who pulled it in close and peered down at it over her reading glasses.

  “The first is a statement from a Mr. Dylan Keating—Briony Keating’s ex-husband, now facing several charges under the Patriot Act—who states in this affidavit that eleven months ago he used a dating service known as ‘Odessa Flowers dot.com’—I have enclosed a web shot—and that Odessa Flowers provides a forum for American men to contact Ukrainian and Russian women with a view to contracting marriage . . . of a sort . . . And Dylan Keating further states that he traveled in the fall of that year to visit a Marina Kelo, a nurse who was living in Odessa, in the Ukraine. We have shown you already, in a film clip, that a man known only to us as Piotr referred in this film clip to a man he called ‘her husband,’ stating that this man had provided, for reasons we don’t have to get into, background information on Miss Briony Keating, his ex-wife. We have also shown that Odessa Flowers was run by an outfit called BUG/Arkangel and that it was a KGB front specifically designed to identify possible intelligence sources inside the United States. Dylan Keating admits telling this Marina Kelo that his wife was a top encryption analyst in the National Security Agency. Marina Kelo was a paid stringer for the KGB, and as soon as she heard this she took the information to the KGB, who encouraged her to go back to Odessa and to learn everything she could about Dylan Keating’s wife—”

  “None of this in any way mitigates—”

  “So this scam began there, in Odessa—”

  “‘Scam’? This is not a scam—”

  “Miss Vale, how many men were in a position to convey this information about the Nixon Tapes to the Soviet Union and how many of those men were also attached to the Paris Accords as military intelligence advisers?”

  “You mean the short list?”

  Dalton tapped the third sheet of paper.

  “There are the names of five men, all of whom could have been the source for the information conveyed to the Soviets—”

  “So you don’t contend that the information was never conveyed—”

  “No. The historical record is undeniable. Nixon’s commitment to the Linebacker campaign forced the North Vietnamese to the table in Paris in January of 1973. On April twentieth, he and Thieu met at San Clemente, where Nixon confirmed his absolute determination to resume the Linebacker bombing campaign if the North Vietnamese broke any of the agreements under the Paris Accords. If the purpose of our intervention in Southeast Asia was to prevent a Soviet proxy from taking over South Vietnam, then the war was won—”

  “There are conflicting views on that,” said Mariah Vale.

  “This isn’t about views, Miss Vale, it’s about an historical fact. It’s also a fact that overflight surveillance missions show the Russians shipping arms and matériel to the North Vietnamese, beginning in May of 1973. This is a few days after the Nixon Tapes rumor reached Andropov, delivered by Preacher through Kryuchkov. By August ninth, the Democrats, using Watergate as a lever, lowered the hammer on Nixon and the Republicans, forcing the passage of the Case-Church Amendment. The Case-Church Amendment effectively ended any possibility of further United States support for South Vietnam.”

  “A quagmire, as we all know now—”

  “To people who dislike all military operations, there’s always a quagmire around to jump into. By the summer, the Russians were going full speed ahead in their support of the North Vietnamese, something they would never have done if they hadn’t known that Nixon was going to be in serious trouble. Nixon resigned on August ninth, 1974. Saigon fell in April of ’seventy-five. None of that would have happened if Congress had backed Nixon about the Linebacker campaigns. The Soviets would have let South Vietnam stand. Millions would still be alive.”

  “Thank you. Our case is made,” said Vale, sitting back, smiling.

  “Your case is made, but you’ve made it against the wrong man. You know what a ‘Confusion Op’ is, I’m sure.”

  Vale’s face hardened.

  “Thank you. I know what a Confusion Op is.”

  “You’ve been told about our observations in Santorini, in Istanbul, what we found in Kerch.”

  “Yes. You went through their network like a drill. Too bad you couldn’t save Briony Keating’s son, or Maya Palenz.”

  “What happened in Santorini and Istanbul was a dance, a waltz, a polka—the KGB set up a straw dog and we burned it down in ten days. Why was it so easy?”

  “Easy? It didn’t look easy from our perspective. They made a serious effort to kill you at the warehouse in Sariyer, and later in the approaches to Kerch Strait.”

  “Yes. But by then, their objectives had been achieved. You believe the whole idea of this Kerch network was to suppress that cable, right?”

  “Yes. And it failed. Thanks to you, and to the singular courage displayed by Briony Keating.”

  “They failed to suppress a single cable, and in failing to suppress it they made damned sure the only thing we were going to pay real close attention to was that same damned cable—”

  Mariah Vale’s expression was slightly less confident.

  “You’re saying it was, what, a diversion?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You’re saying there is no mole, that this was all an attempt by the KGB to destabilize Clandestine Services?”

  “No. There was a mole all right. But Deacon Cather isn’t it. Look at your short list again—”

  He passed over the third sheet:

  Colonel Bevan Hudson

  Major Luther Prescott

  Colonel Emilio Garza

  Colonel Colin Dale

  Colonel Deacon Cather

  “All of these men knew each other, all of them were in military intelligence, all of them saw service in the Vietnam War—”

  “And only one of them fits the details of this cable—”

  “Exactly my point. You were supposed to think the KGB was moving mountains to stop you from reading this cable. What you were supposed to do was look at nothing else but this cable.”

  “You’re sugg
esting that the agent code-named Preacher was not Mr. Cather?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly right.”

  Vale sat back again, her face showing some uncertainty.

  “And if Mr. Cather was not Preacher, whom do you suggest we look at next?”

  “I have a candidate. It took us a while. We got some help from Nikki Turrin, at the NSA—”

  “We’re aware of her—”

  “You should be. All these men had opportunity. None of them had any discernible motive. Or so we thought. We went through all of these men, through their backgrounds, looked at their service records, all of them were spotless. Each man was a hero of his nation. But only one man had this connection.”

  He slipped an envelope across the table.

  Vale picked it up, held it in her hand.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a photograph. We found it in a yearbook. Take a look.”

  She slipped the photo out, an eight-by-ten glossy, a reproduction of a photograph taken back in the thirties, twenty-five young men, all wearing baggy football uniforms, all of them lean and strong, in the full flush of their youth. A boy in the middle was holding a trophy, and they were all smiling. There was handwriting in the lower-left-hand corner, in white ink, a scrawl but legible: “Loyola Bobcats, State Champions 1938.”

  “Okay, a football team. Buckle down, Winsocki, and all that.”

  “I’ve circled two boys. See them there?”

  “Yes,” she said, looking at two young men, one of them in the first row, tall and pale-eyed, with a stern expression, the other one, in the back row, smaller, softer-looking, a shy smile, large brown eyes.

  “The boy in the back row, his name is Stephen Hopkins. He was born in a New York City hospital in 1925. His father was Harry Hopkins, one of Roosevelt’s top advisers during the Second World War. Stephen joined the Marines, and was killed in action in the Marshall Islands in 1944.”

  Cather sighed, templed his long fingers.

  “Harry Hopkins, as you will recall, was proposed as Unidentified Cover 19 in Venona 95, dated 8/7/1953. Micah, tell Miss Vale who the other lad is.”

  “The other boy is Colin Dale.”

  Mariah Vale shook her head in distaste.

  “This is pure McCarthyism. You’re suggesting that a glancing connection with the son of a man falsely accused of being a Soviet agent during the war is sufficient grounds for accusing Colin Dale of treason?”

  “First of all, the guilt or innocence of Harry Hopkins has not been decided. Here is the original Venona memo that named him.”

  Dalton passed over two Xeroxed pages.

  “You can see the handwritten reference to Harry Hopkins.”

  “That was put in by some historian, long after—”

  “A military historian,” said Dalton. “Eduard Mark, and only after doing better than a year of research into every Venona document.”

  “Still, gross speculation, sheer McCarthyism—”

  Dalton did not rise to the taunt.

  “Gordievsky reported that he attended a lecture given by Ichak Akhmerov, mentioned in this Venona transcript. He was the Soviet intelligence Rezident in D.C. all through the war, and Akhmerov identified Hopkins as his most important Soviet agent during those years—”

  “The word of a . . . Look, this is quite beside the point. Nothing will persuade me that a glancing connection with the son of a man who might have been a Soviet agent is sufficient grounds for accusing Colin Dale of treason. Nothing.”

  “I agree. Although it turns out that Colin Dale and Stephen Hopkins were close friends, and that Dale spent a lot of time at the Hopkins’s house, had a father-son relationship with Hopkins. But, you’re right, it’s not nearly enough.”

  “Good. Perhaps we can move on—”

  “Will you read these documents for me?”

  Dalton handed over a sheaf of legal-sized papers. Mariah Vale shuffled through them, looked up at Dalton.

  “These are papers of incorporation, of a company called Conjurado Consulting. What am I supposed to make of them?”

  “We’ve managed to pry the owner’s name out of Delaware. It’s on the last page.”

  She flipped through to the last sheet.

  “Okay, Conjurado Consulting is owned by Colin Dale, so what?”

  Dalton handed over another sheet.

  “This is a printout taken from the hard drive of a computer belonging to a company called Beyoglu Trading Consortium.”

  “I know who they are. I know how you got that information too.”

  “One of the programs resident on the hard drive was related to the shipping of documents through Federal Express. Will you read this?”

  One last sheet.

  She took it with a wary expression, sighing heavily.

  “It’s a bill of lading for a package sent from Beyoglu Trading in Istanbul via Federal Express . . .” Her voice died away.

  “Yes?” said Dalton, sitting back.

  “. . . to Conjurado Consulting, in Seaside, Florida.”

  SEASIDE

  THE EMERALD COAST

  Sundown at Seaside, in the turning of the year, and the heat was beginning to come back, along with the tourists. Down here, on the long white-sand beach, with the turquoise perfection of the Gulf laid out before him, the sharp clear line of the southern horizon setting off a twilight full of reds and golds and opal fire, Captain Jack was serenely content, at peace with his fellow man.

  The first few stars pierced the perfect indigo sky like silver needles. He had a broad wooden Adirondack chair to sit on, his bare feet cooling in the sugary sand, a heavy tumbler of single malt in his hand, a cigar in the other. God was in His Heaven, and all was right with the world.

  And then he heard the whispery squeak of footsteps coming down from the high barrier bluff behind him, turned around in the big chair, and saw a tall angular man in a navy blue suit carrying his black brogues in one long-fingered hand, a glass in the other, smiling broadly at Captain Jack, his thin blue lips stretching wide to show large yellow teeth like tombstones. The man came over to Captain Jack, looked down at the empty chair beside him.

  “Colin, may I join you?”

  Dale started to get up, his face wreathed in a smile, but Cather held out a hand, sat down heavily beside him, sighing as he twisted around to get his bony frame into some sort of truce with the chair.

  “Deke,” said Colin Dale—known locally as “Captain Jack Forrest”—“you look like hell. What have you got there?”

  Cather looked down at his tumbler, swirled it around.

  “Some of your Laphroaig. Hope you don’t mind?”

  “Not at all. You’re welcome any time. Here’s to merry meetings!”

  The two old men clinked glasses, sipped at the scotch, and for a while nothing was said. They just sat there side by side, staring out to sea as the light slowly changed, breathing the sparkling air, puffing on their cigars. A strolling couple passed by, a young girl and her beau, holding hands, and they smiled and waved, dwindling into the long empty reaches of the gathering night.

  “Well, Deke,” said Colin Dale, after a puff, “I take it the jig is up?”

  Cather showed his teeth, his leathery cheeks pulling back in a distorted rictus.

  “Oh my yes. A heavy hand is being laid upon us all, Colin. This Vale creature . . . A new day is dawning.”

  “A red day, a sword day, and the world ending?”

  “If she gets her way.”

  Another long silence, and now a slight chill was coming in off the water and the sand was a bit too cool.

  But neither man stirred.

  Finally, Dale stretched, reached down, picked up a bottle of Laphroiag, filled both glasses, and offered a last cigar to Cather.

  After they had them fired up, the flare of the match lighting up their weathered faces as they leaned in toward the flame, Cather’s eyes glinting in the dark as he watched Dale’s hands, Dale began to talk.

  “I guess it began wh
en Stevie Hopkins died . . .”

  “In forty-four, the Marshall Islands.”

  “Yes. You didn’t know his father, but I did. A fine man, Deke.”

  “Smoked too much, I hear?”

  “Oh yes,” said Dale, turning the cigar in his long brown fingers. “Killed him in ’forty-six, but by then he was ready to go. Losing Stevie broke his heart, but it was Uncle Joe who broke his mind. You have to remember the times, Deke—the times—the Depression, then Roosevelt’s New Deal. If you weren’t a Communist then, you had no heart. Breadlines, and the bankers stealing everything . . . To Harry, to Lauchlin Currie and Alger Hiss and Dexter White, the Silvermaster set, it looked like Russia had all the answers. The West? Corrupt, greedy . . . doomed to fail. They were visionaries, Deke, and they looked to the East in those days, and my what a glorious vision they had . . . All lies, of course, all foolish Utopian illusions, with Uncle Joe in the middle of it all like a tarantula, spinning and plotting . . . But, in spite of his flaws, Harry Hopkins was a patriot, Deke, a true patriot. And more than a father to me than my own dad—”

  “No offense, Colin, but your dad was a bully and a drunk.”

  “Yes, I guess he was. Anyway, one thing you never knew, I never told you, was how Harry Hopkins could talk . . . the sound of his voice . . . raspy but soft, never hectoring, always patient, a sweeping sense of history, a vision of what America could be . . . What a waste, Deke.”

  A silence.

  “Colin,” said Cather after a while, “we were together in the war—we saw what the North was doing, the Vietcong—how could you help bring those . . . creatures . . . down on the people of the South?”

  Dale’s face tightened as he looked back through the years.

  “I guess by then they had me, didn’t they? Owned me, the Soviets. I’d already sent them whatever I could, and once you do that, well, there’s no going back, is there? And I really did think that the North Vietnamese would make Vietnam a better place. I mean, there we were, working with Diem, those criminals, and look at some of our own people, in MAC-SOG and Phoenix, the things we did . . . the guns, the heroin, the women—”