The Echelon Vendetta Read online

  She was full-figured (the word “luscious” came to him) and she smelled of single-malt scotch, a fine peaty scent. Also of cigarettes, and under these spicy aromas a familiar perfume that he dimly recalled

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  but could not place. She was looking at him, directly and without

  emotion, a closed and guarded look.

  “Do you have some identification?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  Dalton reached into his coat and extracted a slim blue leather folio with the seal of the United States on the cover. He flipped it open so that she could read it in the light. Next to an embossed holographic seal of the U.S. State Department there was a picture of him taken a few years ago, when he still had an Army haircut, and beside that his name and station: Micah Dalton/Consular Security Division.

  She read it carefully and took her time comparing the photo with the man standing in front of her. Dalton let her take all the time she needed. If she didn’t like this ID, he had four others just as impressive in his briefcase.

  Finally she snapped the folio shut, handed it back to him.

  “There is no one in that room. He left a day ago.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know your name.”

  She looked sharply at him, and then smiled. “I am Alessandra Vasari. I own the building.”

  Her voice was low, with a rich vibrato, and it had the husky undertones of a smoker. Dalton made her age at forty, perhaps younger. She had no rings on her fingers. No jewelry of any kind, for that matter. But to Dalton’s experienced eye she had that indefinable aura of very old money.

  In spite of his dislike (face it, his envy) of old money, not to mention his throbbing headache and a general feeling that he had spent the last forty-eight hours poisoning himself with licorice-flavored cough syrup, he felt a mild resurgence of his long-extinct libido.

  If Signora Vasari reciprocated any of this animal emotion, she was concealing it beautifully.

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  “May I ask who was living here?”

  Wrong question.

  He saw the suspicion flaring up in her hazel-brown eyes.

  “Don’t you know?”

  Time to get official.

  He altered his tone, hardened it.

  “Ma’am, this inquiry has to do with matters of state. I’m following up on a request from an agency in Washington, D.C. We have an interest in the man who was living in this room. Under what name was he registered?”

  That backed her off a bit.

  “We do not ‘register’ guests. I rent out the rooms to people who seem reliable and honest. On a monthly basis. I have been told this man’s name was Mr. Sweetwater. I believe he was an American Indian. What name were you looking for?”

  “Pellerossa?”

  She smiled thinly at that. “Pellerossa just means ‘red skin’ in Italian. Or, I suppose, Red Indian. I wish to know why are you interested in Mr. Sweetwater?”

  She placed a slight ironic emphasis on the word “interested.” Signora Vasari didn’t approve of him. Either she didn’t like authority figures or she didn’t like Americans. Probably both, he decided. And seeing her dislike of him so manifestly apparent made Dalton think a little more carefully about this... escapade would be how Stallworth would put it, and not with a loving heart. This “innocent little side trip” to the Dorsoduro.

  He had already used a solid State Department jacket with this stunningly delicious but intimidating woman, and if she got curious and followed up with the Consulate, the word would get back to Stallworth faster than a French soldier could throw away his rifle. The resulting cell-phone séance with Stallworth would go roughly as follows:

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  Jack: You used what? Dalton: My consular ID, but— Jack: So you could find some fucking Indian? Dalton: Yes, but— Jack: And this was company business how? Dalton: The guy had this spider in his cigarette case and— Jack: A spider? Dalton: Right, a huge honking emerald green spider— Jack: I asked you how this connects with Naumann! Dalton: Well this Indian, he was eating at the same restaurant— Jack: What restaurant? Dalton: The restaurant where Porter used to eat. Carovita— Jack: Hold the line for a moment, will ya? Don’t go away now.

  Three minutes later there’d be a knock on the door of his hotel room, and when he opened it there’d be these two no-neck ex-Marines from the company’s Meat Hook Squad reaching for him, and then everything would go black. This was what he was risking right now and the burning question was...Why?

  All of this flashed through Dalton’s rather banged-up brain in a heartbeat. She was still waiting for an answer, an answer he didn’t have. “What do you do for a living, Miss Vasari?”

  “Scusi?”

  “Your work? May I ask what it is?” Got her back on her heels now. Good. “I...I am—dottoressa.” Great. Rattled her enough to bounce her back into Italian. “Really? How nice for you. A doctor? In what field?”

  “Psicologia. A Firenze.” “Psicologia? Psychology, you mean?” “Yes.”

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  A shrink. She was a shrink. Run for your life, my friend. “Sounds fascinating. Want to know what I do?” “What you do... ?” “Yes. What I do is I find people. Sometimes I do this with the

  help of the Carabinieri. Is it necessary that I go and get the Carabinieri so that you will do me the great honor and courtesy of allowing me to have an interest in Mr. Sweetwater even though you do not approve of me?”

  “Do not approve ...?” Dalton held up a hand, palm out, and gave her a wry smile. “I know. I am an instrument of the global Yankee Imperium and

  you despise me and all my works. When the revolution comes the proletariat will rise up and I—and all of my parasite kind—will be nailed to the doors of the basilica.”

  She stepped back and folded her arms across her breasts. “You are—tu sei pazzo !” “You called me ‘tu.’ Does this mean we’re friends?” She started to smile, struggled against it, and then let out a short,

  sharp full-throated laugh that he could feel in his lower belly.

  “You are very wrong, Signor Dalton, if you think I am one with the proletariat. My mother’s family can be traced back for a thousand years. For much of that time they collected taxes for the Doge. Often this required the application of heated irons. When the revolution comes, I will be right up there beside you, also nailed to the doors of the basilica.”

  “It’s a date, then?”

  She gave him the cool professional appraisal of a full-grown Italian woman, an experience not to be missed. When it was over he felt like sharing some espresso and a biscotti with her in a tangle of scented sheets.

  “D’accordo. And you do not have to tell me why you are interested in Mr. Sweetwater. Allora, you want to see his room?”

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  Yes. Then yours.

  “I would love to.”

  Alessandra Vasari was wearing what Dalton had assumed was a gold link belt around her waist. It turned out to be what Laura would have called a “chatelaine,” a chain with keys attached, the keys to the manor. In this case, the keys, among others, to the massive wooden door to Apartment Three. She led Dalton down the darkened hallway—Dalton would have followed her down any darkened hallway in the world at that point—her keys a-jangle and trailing her scotch-and-cigarettes scent behind her like a shimmering train of sparkling fairy dust. With deep appreciation Dalton watched the muscles across her shoulders working as she wrestled with the lock.

  There was a snap and a rumbling as of tumbrels and the door rolled slowly backward, filling the darkened hallway with autumnal sunlight. In the glow from the opened room, she gave Dalton a theatrical bow and waved him through in front of her.

  Dalton, who knew very well that old Italian families never advertised their wealth and that some of the best villas in Venice had entranceways that looked like the door to a toolshed, should have expected that Numero Quindici was a lot more than it h
ad appeared to be from street level. It was as if they had stepped back into the Renaissance.

  Five large wood-framed windows, each one eight feet high and two feet wide, ran along one whitewashed stone wall, the glass in them so old it had thickened along the lower part of the frames. Through the glass and over a sea of terra-cotta roof tiles the spire of the Church of All Saints rose up into the afternoon sky, a cloud of swifts swirling around it. On the end wall of the one-room flat was a massive stone fireplace with a great curved stone mantel. Above the mantel was the lion of the Medicis and over that two medieval lances forming a cross.

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  A rudimentary kitchen—added later, perhaps in the seventeenth century—consisted of a brick oven and a grill and a chimney above it. The floor was made of inlaid wooden marquetry, deeply worn but shining and smooth. A single bed, stripped, with the sheets and a brocaded coverlet neatly folded on the mattress, had been placed under the window wall. Two heavy green leather club chairs were positioned in front of the fireplace, in which was set a small pyre of cedar over a mound of torn paper. The room smelled of Toscano cigarillos, boot polish, and stale coffee.

  Dalton took this all in with one glance while Alessandra Vasari stood behind him in the open door. None of it held him long. His attention was drawn to a tall terra-cotta cylinder, hanging by a leather thong in the center of the room. The cylinder was spinning slowly on what looked like a length of thick twisted sinew, the tube weighted enough to wrap and rewrap the sinew as it spun down and rewound, keeping the pressure on the cord, making the cylinder hum in the strong wind from the open windows. A strange murmuring buzz was coming from this cylinder, rising and falling, stopping and starting again, almost like a rhythmic chant.

  He reached up to the spinning cylinder.

  “Be careful, Signor Dalton. I think it has bees in it.”

  Incisions—slices—had been carved into the wall of the cylinder. They ran in wavelike forms all around the circumference. Standing close to it, watching it turning in the wind, Dalton could feel the sound waves swirling around it, rising out of its mouth. He reached up for it with both hands, hesitated.

  And then he closed his hands around it.

  The music ceased at once, and silence settled into the room. He raised the cylinder enough to slip the thong off the ceiling hook, and turned around to say something to Miss Vasari.

  As he turned the motion disturbed a small round leather pouch

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  balanced on a ledge inside the cylinder. It plopped to the floor at his feet, a swollen little leather balloon. Cocaine, he thought, kneeling down to touch it with a fingertip.

  As soon as he touched it the neck of the bag burst open with a puffy little pop and a cloud of palepinkish smoke; the scent was almost exactly but not quite like eucalyptus, and it rose upward and covered his face. He fell back, dropping the cylinder onto the marquetry floor, where it shattered into pieces.

  His head was pounding.

  He could not draw a breath.

  He was dimly aware of Alessandra Vasari’s voice, but it was coming from a great distance. Incapable of either speech or motion, he watched as each shard of the terra-cotta cylinder changed into a scuttling spiderlike creature. They began to close in around him. The whole room turned a soft pale blue and then flashed into a blinding bright white—

  —AND HE IS in the basement of their decrepit old federal town house in Quincy standing at his paint-stained workbench with a broken alabaster lamp base in his left hand and a tube of porcelain glue in his right but not really thinking just watching the snow fly sideways across the frost-glazed window and beyond the falling snow the slope of their lawn now mounded six feet deep with snow and past that to the churning sweep of Quincy Bay and Long Peddocks harbor; this would be his last happy memory of Boston Bay. He hears the front door open and then Laura’s voice calling. No, not calling.

  Crying his name, and the urgency of her tone is so electric that he drops the alabaster vase onto the workbench and runs up the staircase toward the half-open kitchen door, through the door, sliding on the braided rug; yes Laura is everything okay?

  She is still screaming his name as he rounds the final turn down

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  the front hall. Laura is standing in the open door with the blizzard swirling around her and her blond hair flying. At her feet is a paper sack of groceries spilling out its contents like a cornucopia of baby food and Handi Wipes. What chills him is the look on her face, as if she has been bled white and flash-frozen: the only color is in her wide open deep blue eyes and they are filled with horror. Past her, just out on the front porch, is the antique emerald green baby carriage with the gold trim and the golden springs, and now Laura is whispering his name and her face is as white as the snow that is whirling around her; she turns to point at the emerald green carriage, he rushes past her, she reaches out for him but he breaks through her grasp and blunders out into that wind-driven swirling white cloud of powdery snow. He looks down into the mounded green blankets and he sees—

  —AN UNKNOWN WOMAN LEANING over him, an aura of light surrounding her, and under his back he’s aware of a hard wooden floor and now he recognizes her scent, whiskey and cigarettes and the name of that perfume. It was Eau de Sud by Annick Goutal, Laura’s favorite, drifting around him. The woman is leaning close, and as he focuses on her he sees that her strong, handsome face is full of worry and her voice is low, urgent, and frightened. He also notes, dimly at first but with increasing interest, that she is holding a large hypodermic needle in her left hand. And she’s wearing surgical gloves.

  “Signor Dalton? Are you all right? Are you okay?”

  Dalton tried to raise his head. The room started to go white again and he let his head fall back against the tiles. He looked up at—

  What was her name?

  “I...I think I passed out.”

  “Yes. You did. Sta prendendo medicine? Do you take any medicines? Are you allergic to anything? Are you sick with anything?”

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  Dalton blinked at the ceiling for a minute, trying to get the room to stay still and not fill up with the disturbing white light again. For a moment he seemed to be caught between two worlds: Boston; Quincy, Mass.; the snow swirling around the window, his broken alabaster lamp, the baby carriage with its terrible little pink-wrapped package.

  He shut those pictures down and by sheer force of will brought his unsteady focus back to Miss Vasari’s strong Italian face and to the frightened expression in those amazing eyes.

  “No. No medicine. Not sick. Just lost my balance.” She pursed her lips and shook her head. “You did not lose your balance. You have been drugged by this

  powder. You were hallucinating. I have given you some Narcan and some Adrenalin to counter it. I have wiped the powder off your face. Can you stand up?”

  Narcan? Adrenalin? “I don’t know.” “Perhaps I should call the Consulate?” Please, don’t, he thought to himself. “No. No, I’ll be fine.” He raised a hand to rub his eyes and saw that he wasn’t wearing

  his black leather gloves. She must have pulled them off. He looked around him. His topcoat was lying in a heap beside him, next to his tie and his suit jacket, and his right shirtsleeve was pushed up to expose the vein in his arm. He closed his eyes and managed to sit up.

  The room stayed mostly in Italy, and with her help he managed to get to his feet. She moved in close and put her arm around his waist, supporting him. Her body heat came through his shirt and her perfume—Laura’s perfume—filled his head.

  “You should sit. Here, on the chair.” She half-carried him—God she was strong—across to one of the

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  two green leather club chairs in front of the big fireplace. Shards of

  pottery cracked under their feet as they crossed the floor. Pottery. Not spiders. She got him into the chair and knelt down in front of him, the

  tanned skin on
her fine knees dimpling white, her black leather skirt

  creaking. “Would you like some water?” “Water? Dear God. No water.” She smiled up at him. Some of the tension went out of her face. “A scotch, then?” “Yes. That would be wonderful.” She got up, peeled off her latex gloves with practiced skill, picked

  up what looked like a leather-bound medical kit, and considered him

  warily. “You will be here when I get back?” “I’ll do my best. No ...wait.” She stopped, an impatient look on her face. “What did you stick me with?” She glanced at the leather-bound kit, and shrugged. “Narcan. And Adrenalin. It’s an antidote for most narcotics.” “How did you know what to give me?” “I’m a doctor.” “You’re not a medical doctor.” Another shrug, which reminded him of Major Brancati.

  `

  “E vero. You wish to sue me?” “No. God no. I’m sorry. Thank you.” Her broad smile reached all the way into her deep brown eyes. “Un momento. Aspetta. I’ll be right back.” Dalton watched her leave the room and thought in a pale lemon

  yellow kind of haze how nice it would be to watch her leave a room the way she left rooms for the rest of the long Venetian winter.

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  This of course he could not do, because in the deepest places of his heart, and, he realized, in a sudden crystalline clarity of thought that was probably the direct result of the Narcan, he knew that he had been well and truly played. Set up and baited and waltzed straight to this room by a calculating mind three steps ahead of him.

  He knew that if he went back to Carovita to ask that old dragon some hard questions, he would find out that she had been paid to tell Dalton exactly what this strange old man had wanted him to know. And of course he came running, and got himself a faceful of hallucinogen for his trouble. Whatever the powder in that pouch was, and he assumed from its sudden and overwhelming effects that it was a psychoactive drug of some unknown kind, it had a kick like a Valparaiso jackass.