The Venetian Betrayal (15 page)

He'd already been told of the visit by his chief scientist, Grant Lyndsey.

"You should have seen her with that assassination attempt," O'Conner said. "Rode straight toward the gunman, daring him to shoot. We watched on a long-range camera. Of course, she had a sharpshooter on the palace ready to take the guy down. But still, to ride straight for him. You sure there's not a set of nuts between her legs?"

He chuckled. "I'm not going to look."

"That woman's crazy."

Which was why Vincenti had changed his mind with the Florentine. The Council of Ten had collectively ordered some preliminary investigative work on the possibility that Zovastina might have to be eliminated, and the Florentine had been contracted to perform that reconnaissance. Vincenti had initially decided to make use of the Florentine in a full-scale rush to judgment, since to accomplish what he privately planned Zovastina had to go. So he'd promised the Florentine a huge profit if he could have her killed.

Then a better idea blossomed.

If he revealed the planned assassination, that might quell any fears Zovastina harbored about the League's trustworthiness. Which would buy him time to prepare something better--something he'd actually been conceiving over the past few weeks. More subtle. Less residuals.

"She also visited the house again," O'Conner told him. "A little while ago. Slipped out of the palace, alone, in a car. Tree-mounted cameras caught the visit. She stayed a half hour."

"Do we know her former lover's current condition?"

"Holding her own. We listened to their conversation with a parabolic monitor from a nearby house. A strange pair. Love/hate thing going on."

He'd found it interesting that a woman who'd managed to govern with unfettered ruthlessness harbored such an obsession. She'd been married for a few years, the man a midlevel diplomat in the former Kazakhstan's foreign service. Surely a marriage for appearance's sake. A way to mask her questionable sexuality. Yet the reports he'd amassed noted an amicable husband/wife relationship. He died suddenly in a car crash seventeen years ago, just after she became Kazakhstan's president, and a couple of years before she managed to forge the Federation. Karyn Walde came along a few years later and remained Zovastina's only long-lasting interpersonal relationship, which ended badly. Yet a year ago, when the woman reappeared, Zovastina had immediately taken her in and arranged, through Vincenti, for needed HIV medications.

"Should we act?" he asked.

O'Conner nodded. "Wait any longer and it might be too late."

"Arrange it. I'll be in the Federation by week's end."

"Could get messy."

"Whatever. Just no fingerprints. Nothing that links anything to me."

Chapter
TWENTY-SEVEN

AMSTERDAM

9:20 P
. M
.

STEPHANIE HAD EXPERIENCED THE INSIDE OF A DANISH JAIL LAST summer when she and Malone were arrested. Now she'd visited a Dutch cell. Not much different. Wisely, she'd kept her mouth shut as the police rushed onto the bridge and spotted the dead man. Both Secret Service agents had managed to escape, and she hoped the one in the water had retrieved the medallion. Her suspicions, though, were now confirmed. Cassiopeia and Thorvaldsen were into something, and it wasn't ancient coin collecting.

The door to the holding cell opened and a thin man in his early sixties, with a long, sharp face and bushy silver hair, entered. Edwin Davis. Deputy national security adviser to the president. The man who replaced the late Larry Daley. And what a change. Davis had been brought over from State, a career man, possessed of two doctorates--one in American history, the other international relations--along with superb organizational skills and an innate diplomatic ability. He employed a courteous, folksy way, similar to that of President Daniels himself, that people tended to underestimate. Three secretaries of state had used him to whip their ailing departments into line. Now he worked at the White House, helping the administration finish out the last three years of its second term.

"I was having dinner with the president. In The Hague. What a place, by the way. Enjoying the evening. Food was superb, and I usually don't care for gourmet. They brought me a note that told me where you were and I said to myself, there has to be a logical explanation why Stephanie Nelle would be in Dutch custody, found with a gun beside a dead man in the rain."

She opened her mouth to speak and he held up a halting hand.

"It gets better."

She sat quietly in her wet clothes.

"As I was deciding how I could actually leave you here, since I was reasonably sure I did not want to know why you came to Amsterdam, the president himself took me aside and told me to get over here. Seems two Secret Service agents were also involved, but they weren't in custody. One of them was soaking wet from swimming in a canal to retrieve this."

She caught what he tossed her and saw again the medallion with elephants, snug in its plastic sleeve.

"The president intervened with the Dutch. You're free to go."

She stood. "Before we leave I need to know about those dead men."

"Since I already knew you'd say that, I found out that they both carried Central Asian Federation passports. We checked. Part of Supreme Minister Irina Zovastina's personal security force."

She caught something in his eye. Davis was much easier to read than Daley had been. "That doesn't shock you."

"Few things do anymore." His voice had lowered to a whisper. "We have a problem, Stephanie, and now, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, you're part of it."

She followed Davis into the hotel suite. President Danny Daniels sat sprawled on a sofa, wrapped in a bathrobe, his bare feet propped on a gilded glass-topped table. He was a tall stretch of a man with piles of blond hair, a booming voice, and a disarming manner. Though she'd worked for him for five years, she'd only come to really know him last fall with the treachery surrounding the lost library of Alexandria. He'd then both fired and rehired her. Daniels held a drink of something in one hand and a remote control in the other.

"There's not a damn thing on this TV to watch that isn't subtitled or in a language I don't understand. And I can't bear that BBC News or CNN International any longer. They show the same stories over and over." Daniels blackened the screen and tossed the remote aside. He sipped from his drink, then said to her, "I hear you've had another career-ending night."

She caught the twinkle in his eye. "Seems to be my path to success."

He motioned and she sat. Davis stood off to the side.

"I've got some more bad news," Daniels said. "Your agent in Venice is missing. She's not been heard from in twelve hours. Neighbors in the building where she was stationed reported a disturbance early this morning. Four men. A door kicked in. Of course, no one now officially saw anything. Typical Italians." He raised one arm in a flurry. "For God's sake don't involve me." The president paused, his face darkened. "Nothing about this sounds good."

Stephanie had loaned Naomi Johns to the White House, which needed some field reconnaissance on a person-of-interest--Enrico Vincenti, an international financier with ties to an organization called the Venetian League. She knew the group. Another of the countless cartels from around the world. Naomi worked for Stephanie for many years, and had been the agent who'd investigated Larry Daley. She'd left the Billet last year, only to return, and Stephanie had been glad. Naomi was good. The recon job should have been low risk. Just record meets and greets. Stephanie had even told her to take a couple of days off in Italy when she finished.

Now she might be dead.

"When I loaned her out, your people said this was simply information gathering."

No one answered and her gaze shifted between the two men.

Daniels pointed. "Where's the medallion?"

She handed it to him.

"You want to tell me about this?"

She felt grimy. What she wanted was a shower and sleep, but she realized that wasn't going to happen. She resented being interrogated, but he was the president of the United States and had saved her hide, so she explained about Cassiopeia, Thorvaldsen, and the favor. The president listened with an unusual attentiveness, then said, "Tell her, Edwin."

"How much do you know about Supreme Minister Zovastina?"

"Enough to know that she's no friend of ours."

Her tired mind retrieved Zovastina's pertinent history. Born to a working-class family in northern Kazakhstan, her father died fighting the Nazis for Stalin, then an earthquake, just after the war, killed her mother and the rest of her immediate relatives. She grew up in an orphanage, until one of her mother's distant cousins took her in. She eventually became an economist, trained at the Leningrad Institute, then joined the Communist Party in her twenties and worked her way to head of the local Committee of the Representatives of the Workers. She then snagged a spot on the Central Committee of Kazakhstan and quickly rose to the Supreme Soviet. She first promoted land and other economic reforms, then became a critic of Moscow. After independence from Russia, she was one of six Party members who ran for president of Kazakhstan. When the two front-runners failed to receive a majority, under the national constitution both were disqualified from the second round of voting, which she won.

"I learned a long time ago," Daniels said, "that if you have to tell someone you're their friend, the relationship's got big problems. This woman thinks we're a bunch of idiots. Friends like her we don't need."

"But you still have to kiss her ass."

Daniels enjoyed more of his drink. "Unfortunately."

"The Central Asian Federation is not something to take lightly," Davis made clear. "Land of hardy people and long memories. Twenty-eight million men and women available for military conscription. Twenty-two million of those fit and ready for service. About one and a half million new conscripts available each year. That's quite a fighting force. Currently, the Federation spends one point two billion dollars a year on defense, but that doesn't count what we pour in there, which is twice that.

"And the real crap," Daniels continued, "is that the people love her. The standard of living has improved a thousandfold. Before her, sixty-four percent lived in poverty. Now it's less than fifteen percent. That's as good as we do. She's investing everywhere. Hydroelectric power, cotton, gold--she's loaded with surpluses. That Federation is perched in a superb geoeconomic position. Russia, China, India. Smack between them all. Smart lady, too. She's sitting on some of the world's largest oil and natural gas reserves, which the Russians once totally controlled. They're still pissed about independence, so she made a deal and sells them oil and gas at below-market prices, which keeps Moscow off her tail."

She was impressed with Daniels' command of the region.

"Then," the president said, "a few years ago she entered into a long-term lease with Russia on the Baykonur Cosmodrome. The Russian spaceport sits in the middle of the old Kazakhstan. Six thousand square miles, which Russia now has exclusive use of until 2050. In return, of course, she got some debt cancellation. After that, she stroked the Chinese by settling a centuries-old border dispute. Not bad for an economist who grew up in an orphanage."

"Do we have problems with Zovastina?" she asked. Again neither man answered her question, so she switched gears. "What does Enrico Vincenti have to do with this?"

"Zovastina and Vincenti are connected," Daniels said, "through the Venetian League. Both are members. Four hundred and some people. Lots of money, time, and ambition, but the League isn't interested in changing the world--only being left alone. They hate government, restrictive laws, tariffs, taxes, me, anything that keeps them in line. They have their hands in lots of countries--"

She saw that Daniels had read her thoughts.

The president shook his head. "Not here. Not like last time. We've checked. Nothing. The Central Asian Federation is their main concern."

Davis said, "All of the stans were heavy with foreign debt from their Soviet domination and tries at independence. Zovastina has managed to renegotiate those obligations with the various government creditors and a large chunk of that debt has been forgiven. But an influx of new capital would help. Nothing quells progress more than long-term debt." He paused. "There's three point six billion dollars on deposit in a variety of banks across the globe, traced to Venetian League members."

"An ante in a huge poker game," Daniels said.

She realized the significance, since presidents were not prone to sound an alert based on flimsy suspicion. "Which is about to play out?"

Daniels nodded. "So far, corporations organized under Central Asian Federation law have acquired, or taken over, nearly eighty companies around the world. Pharmaceuticals, information technology, automobile and truck manufacturing, and telecommunications are just a few of the areas. Get this, they even acquired the world's largest producer of tea bags. Goldman Sachs predicts that, if this continues, the Federation could well become the third or fourth largest economy in the world, behind us, China, and India."

"It's alarming," Davis noted. "Particularly since it's happening with little or no fanfare. Usually, corporations like to play up their acquisitions. Not here. Everything is being kept close."