The Venetian Judgment
Read The Venetian Judgment Online
Authors: David Stone
Table of Contents
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
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Published simultaneously in Canada
printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy
of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stone, David, date.
The Venetian judgment / David Stone. p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-03208-4
1. Dalton, Micah (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Intelligence officers—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9199.3.S833V
813’.54—dc22
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
for
catherine stone
JANUARY 27, 1973:catherine stone
Linebacker I and II B-52 Air Operations over North Vietnam leave the NVA war-fighting machine in ruins. Cut off from the North, despised as murderous butchers by the people of South Vietnam, the Viet Cong insurgency collapses. Demoralized, with forty thousand NVA killed that year alone in their failed Easter Offensive, North Vietnamese leaders remove General Giap from command and sign the Paris Peace Accords. The Vietnam War ends in a de facto USA/RSVN victory.
APRIL 20, 1973:Nixon and President Thieu of South Vietnam meet at San Clemente. President Nixon reaffirms an earlier promise, backed by the U.S. Congress, that the U.S. would recommence Linebacker Air Operations over Hanoi if the NVA violated any elements of the Paris Peace Accords.
JUNE 19, 1973:Intimidated by antidraft student riots, and sensing Watergate blood in the water, a Democratic Congress passes the Case Church Amendment, forbidding
any
U.S. involvement with Southeast Asia as of August 15, breaking solemn American covenants made only nine weeks earlier. Freed from the Linebacker threat and given massive material support by the USSR, the NVA immediately and aggressively violates the Paris Accords. Abandoned by the U.S., fighting not only the NVA but a proxy war with the USSR, Saigon falls in April of 1975. That same month, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge army of psychopathic fifteen-year-olds arrives in Phnom Penh and the killing begins. Over the next ten years more than three million Laotians, Cambodians, and South Vietnamese die in “reeducation” camps, at the hands of roving murder squads, or in suicidal attempts to flee.
any
U.S. involvement with Southeast Asia as of August 15, breaking solemn American covenants made only nine weeks earlier. Freed from the Linebacker threat and given massive material support by the USSR, the NVA immediately and aggressively violates the Paris Accords. Abandoned by the U.S., fighting not only the NVA but a proxy war with the USSR, Saigon falls in April of 1975. That same month, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge army of psychopathic fifteen-year-olds arrives in Phnom Penh and the killing begins. Over the next ten years more than three million Laotians, Cambodians, and South Vietnamese die in “reeducation” camps, at the hands of roving murder squads, or in suicidal attempts to flee.
part one
KROKODIL
VENICE, LATE DECEMBER, 1:45 A.M. LOCAL TIMEDalton shot the bodyguard first, because that’s how these things are done, taking him as he came out of the west gate of the Piazza San Marco, right where it opens into the Calle de L’Ascensione. The guard was a bullnecked, buzz-cut Albanian kid, likely some hapless third-rater drummed out of the Kosovo Liberation Army, judging from the way he pixie-pranced right out into the calle, looking this way and that in the dark, with his war face on and his brows all beetled up, as if he actually knew what he was doing. He had a Tokarev in his left hand, a deeply useless piece of scrap iron, and he never even got it into play before Dalton stepped out of the alcove on his left and punched a soft-nosed, subsonic .22 caliber round into his temple. That was pretty much that, as the slug pinballed around inside the kid’s skull for a few seconds, making a lumpy gray soup out of his life so far. The boy went down—straight down, like a sack of meat falling off a flatbed.
Mirko Belajic, the kid’s boss, had been hanging back under the arch, waiting for the all clear, so when Dalton took out the bodyguard the wily old Serb flinched a half step back and reached into his Briony topcoat. But by then Dalton had the muzzle of his Ruger up against the man’s barrel chest.
“Dah, Krokodil!”
he grunted, as if his most depressing expectations for the evening had just been grimly confirmed. Dalton stepped out into the faint glow from the lights of the piazza, his face stony and a green spark in his pale blue eyes, his long blond hair pulled back from his hard-planed face. He was wearing a blue Zegna topcoat, black leather gloves, and a navy blue turtleneck, so in the dim light from the piazza he looked like a skull floating in the shadows. The snow was sifting down, a curtain of powdered glass, diamond-lit by a sickle moon. Their frozen breath hung in the still air between them, a pale glowing mist, slowly rising up.
he grunted, as if his most depressing expectations for the evening had just been grimly confirmed. Dalton stepped out into the faint glow from the lights of the piazza, his face stony and a green spark in his pale blue eyes, his long blond hair pulled back from his hard-planed face. He was wearing a blue Zegna topcoat, black leather gloves, and a navy blue turtleneck, so in the dim light from the piazza he looked like a skull floating in the shadows. The snow was sifting down, a curtain of powdered glass, diamond-lit by a sickle moon. Their frozen breath hung in the still air between them, a pale glowing mist, slowly rising up.
“
Krokodil,
you . . . you
wait
now, just a bit,” the old man said, in a flat, steady voice, no quaver, not begging, just making a suggestion, as if they were arranging to meet for drinks. “Not too late for you. We talk—”
Krokodil,
you . . . you
wait
now, just a bit,” the old man said, in a flat, steady voice, no quaver, not begging, just making a suggestion, as if they were arranging to meet for drinks. “Not too late for you. We talk—”
“No. We don’t,” said Dalton softly, squeezing the trigger once, popping a round into the old man’s chest about an inch below his left nipple. The old man staggered back, his roast-beef face losing color and his mouth gaping open. He plunged his hand into his coat and brought out a small stainless-steel revolver, which Dalton easily plucked from the man’s gnarled, arthritic hand. He threw it into the alley behind him. It struck and skittered across the frozen cobbles with a dull metallic clatter.
Belajic stared at Dalton for a time, blinking slowly, then pulled his suit jacket to the side and looked down at his shirt, where a black stain around a tiny frayed hole was starting to spread open like a black poppy. He put a meaty palm over it, winced, looked back at Dalton, his breathing now coming in short, sharp puffs as his lung slowly collapsed. The expression on his face wasn’t fear, or even anger.
He looked . . .
offended
.
offended
.
“I am . . . stabbed? Mirko Belajic is . . .
dying
?”
dying
?”
“Cora Vasari,” said Dalton, and had his suspicions confirmed by the flicker of recognition in Belajic’s face, a fleeting muscular contraction around the old man’s left eye, a blue vein flaring in his neck, gone in an instant.
“I was . . .
nothing
with . . . that. That was Gospic—”
nothing
with . . . that. That was Gospic—”
Dalton reached out and plucked a small Razr cell phone out of Belajic’s breast pocket, beeped it on, and handed it back to Belajic, who looked confused.
“Make a call.”
Belajic blinked at Dalton, his wrinkled face closing up.
“Call? Call who?”
“You’ve just been
shot,
Mirko. Call out your people.”
shot,
Mirko. Call out your people.”
Belajic blinked at Dalton for a while longer, trying to make sense of the words, then looked down and pressed in a number using both fat thumbs and lifted the phone to his ear. Glaring into Dalton’s eyes, he spoke rapidly into the handset, a low growl in gutter Serbian, ending with a harsh, coughing curse that included the name
Krokodil
more than a couple of times.
Krokodil
more than a couple of times.
He snapped the phone shut, still locked on Dalton, a killing stare. Twelve years ago, over a disagreement with an obscenely overweight son-in-law regarding the distribution of the proceeds from an opium-paste-for-SAMs deal with the Chechens, Belajic had made a point about greed, gluttony, gratitude by throwing the man, naked and bound hand and foot, into a small feed pen filled with hungry boars. As the story goes, in spite of their best efforts, the animals took several days to rip away everything considered tasty to a boar. In the process, the fat man’s shrieks grew so pitiful that Mirko himself got up from a large family dinner with his steak knife in hand and went out back to the barn to slice the man’s voice box so his screams wouldn’t upset the grandkids, one of whom was the victim’s only son, a ten-year-old lad named Zakary.
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