The Venetian Judgment (15 page)
Read The Venetian Judgment Online
Authors: David Stone
“You
do
know he doesn’t exist, don’t you?”
do
know he doesn’t exist, don’t you?”
“He’s pretty convincing, you ask me.”
“Does he ever ask about me?”
“All the time,” Dalton lied.
“You’re a lying hound, aren’t you?”
“Moi?”
“This isn’t really all that funny, Micah. Are you coming apart at the seams? Are you up to what we’re doing? Really?”
“Hey, you dragged me into this. I was doing just fine in Venice—”
“Oh yes. Other than suicidal, single-handed vendettas—”
“I don’t do well without . . . work. I just don’t like being cut off.”
“From the Agency, you mean?”
“That, yes, and . . . from the States. To be honest. I miss it.”
“You wouldn’t miss it right now. The market is in ruins.”
“Not the current events. I miss the country itself. Everything in Europe is so damned close to everything else. I was brought up in Tucumcari. Country was so flat, you could watch your dog run away for three days—”
“My mother used to say that all the time.”
“Yes, she was from Santa Fe, wasn’t she? How’d she end up in London?”
“Changing the subject, are we?”
“If it works, yes. If not, then no.”
“Galan thought you were like a man who had jumped out of a very high window and somehow missed the ground.”
“He say that in Italian or Yiddish? It sounds Yiddish.”
“He said it in English. Is it true, Micah?”
Dalton looked at her face, at the worry lines around her eyes and the tension in her neck and shoulders. She was an extraordinary women, truehearted, smart, occasionally dangerous, crazy brave, with a powerful sensuality and a fine loving heart, and her life was racing past her while she sat in this still, silent place looking at a man who had nothing left to give to anyone. He felt a fish hook tug under his ribs, and a kind of slow-burning shame. She could be loved, he realized, and she should be loved.
“Mandy,” he said, “you need to get yourself a
real
man.”
real
man.”
She smiled back at him, raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t want a
real man,
Micah, I’d rather have
you
.”
real man,
Micah, I’d rather have
you
.”
“You had Porter, didn’t you?”
“Frequently, in one sense. Not at all in some others.”
“Then I’m the last thing you need. Can we let this go?”
Mandy held his look for a time, long enough for the tension to build between them, long enough for him to want very much to take her to bed right now and bury himself inside her for the rest of the night. Then she broke it.
“For now . . . Now, eat. Then I have something to show you.”
Dalton caught her tone, poured out some more Vinsanto for both of them, and sat back on the couch.
“I can eat later. What did we get?”
Mandy reached into her purse and set a shell-pink BlackBerry on the table beside his plate, tapping the screen with a polished nail. Dalton gave her a look, picked the BlackBerry up, clicked it on, and hit a series of letters and numbers that bypassed the ordinary functions of the machine and activated the high-powered radio receiver embedded in the casing.
The receiver was tuned to the CCS Ghost Series nanotransmitter hidden inside the tube of the cheap ballpoint pen that Dalton had used to fill out the form Sofouli had handed to him. Dalton had taken three versions of it to the interview, one in a ballpoint, one embedded in a wad of rubber made to look like gum, which could be stuck to the underside of a chair, and a third hidden inside a pencil.
The nanotransmitter could pick up voices in the next room, but it could also detect the electronic tones produced when someone dialed a phone number or the radio signals emitted by a wireless keyboard when someone typed. The ballpoint was configured for voice and phone. In a moment, he was looking at a long list of phone numbers, along with time markers. There were twenty-six numbers on the readout but only five had markers.
Mandy, speaking as if the room was miked in the unlikely event that Dalton’s sweep had missed something, said, “I went down through the list and thought these places might appeal to you.”
Dalton recognized the first number. It was the main desk of the Porto Fira Suites, where they were staying. Sofouli had called right after Dalton left his office. There was a VOX icon next to the number, which meant that whatever Sofouli had said on his end during the call had been recorded. Since neither Mandy nor Dalton had a useful command of Greek, and the Agency’s language-translation module was, to be honest, an utter waste of time, they were concentrating just on the numbers themselves.
Dalton tapped the second number.
“This place looks interesting, dear.”
“Yes,” said Mandy, “it’s a place called Franco’s Bar, on Martiou.”
He moved his finger to the third number, gave her a look.
Mandy handed him a piece of hotel notepaper.
The Tourist Police Office in Athens
Dalton gave that some thought, tapped the fourth number, and then looked at the next note Mandy handed him.
The Portland Oregon Police Department
“Well, I’m not sure that appeals to me,” he said.
“I didn’t think it would,” said Mandy, lifting an eyebrow.
“How about this last one?”
“Oh, that one’s really interesting. I got their brochure.”
She handed him a third note, almost a letter.
The Ataköy Marina Hotel. It’s in
Istanbul
, for God’s sake! I played the VOX recording, and it was all Greek to me (get it?), but I don’t think the man calling was Sofouli. I think the caller was Keraklis.That whiny voice! He said one word three times. He said
subito
. That’s Italian for “quick,” yes? But isn’t it also the name of Kiki Lujac’s boat?
Dalton stared at the note for a time, his mind working. Mandy was sitting forward on the couch, watching him do so with gathering intensity.
“Well, what do you think?”
“I think,” said Dalton, “we should get off this island.”
At that moment, the phone rang. Mandy tensed, picked up the receiver, said a few words, and then listened for a time. She said yes and thank you and good-bye and set the phone down again.
“That was Sergeant Keraklis. He says that Captain Sofouli has some new information for us, about our son’s disappearance, and would it be convenient for us both to come back to the station?”
“And you said yes.”
“I said yes, as you heard. They’re sending a car. Now what?”
“He wants us both?”
“Yes. He put some stress on that. I admit, I don’t like the timing.”
“You sure it was Keraklis who called you?”
“Yes. And it was the same voice on the VOX transmission. He made that call to Istanbul, to the Marina. I’m sure of it. His voice reminds me of a dental drill. That stays with one.”
“And he said he was calling from the station?”
“Yes.”
Dalton picked up the receiver, showed Mandy the screen. She leaned forward and looked at the last number dialed from that location, 22860 22232. That call had been made almost thirty minutes ago. No other call had been made from the police station since that time.
“That’s not this hotel number, is it?” she said. “I think it’s for the Atlantis Hotel, on the other side of the island. What do you think?”
“He could have been calling from a cell phone.”
“Yes, there’s that possibility. Do we take that chance?”
Dalton did not hesitate.
“No, we don’t. I think that either Sofouli found the transmitter—”
“If he had, he would have left it in operation while he called, just to keep us in place while he sent a team over.”
“Yes, good point. Which leaves us with the alternative . . .”
Mandy studied Dalton’s face, her eyes widening slightly.
“Sergeant Keraklis is lying?”
“Yes,” said Dalton. “And he’s on his way over here.”
“And if he’s any kind of field operator—”
“His containment team is already here.”
SEASIDE, FLORIDA
SEVENTY MILES EAST OF PENSACOLA NAS
On the inland side of Scenic Highway 30A, on the Gulf Coast of the Florida panhandle, there is a carefully planned little town called Seaside, a charming collection of highly stylized, compact wooden homes that are all built in the same classic Florida coastal style and painted in the officially approved colors of white or blue or red or teal and, if a special permit has been obtained, lime green or pink, and they sit in environmentally sensitive sand-and-gravel gardens trimmed in white picket fences, and every house has a veranda and every veranda has flower baskets, all overflowing with magnolia and bougainvillea and palmetto. The narrow cobblestoned streets are sheltered from the glare of the summer sun and the scouring winds of the hurricane season by towering live oaks and tough old Georgia pines. All the folks are good-ole-boy, shoofly-pie, down-home neighborly. Cars are not allowed, but just about everyone has an electric golf cart made up to look like the surrey with the fringe on top, which is just as cute as cute can be, and everything is done exactly the way it’s supposed to be done, or else.
On the seaward side of Scenic Highway 30A, a large barrier dune runs for miles along the pristine shoreline of what is called around here the “Emerald Coast,” and the very best homes in Seaside sit atop this immense dune and look out from shaded balconies and palm-tree-lined terraces upon the shimmering blue-green eternity of the Gulf of Mexico. Most of the homes in Seaside have been given pet names by the enormously wealthy retired people from Georgia and Louisiana and Alabama who have their summer homes down here, names such as KATY-DID-IT and KIT ’N’ PRETTY and HEAVEN FOR BETSY, but the large stucco-walled and storm-shuttered Tuscan-style villa that sat high up on the barrier dune at the outer edge of the town line had no name at all, and the number plate had been taken off when the new owner moved in a year ago, around the same time that a tall wooden barrier fence had been constructed around the property.
Nobody knew very much about the owner, which, in a tight-knit little place such as Seaside, was a difficult state to achieve and required some concentrated effort. The people on either side of the villa knew only that the owner seemed to live alone, had a gleaming white forty-five-foot Hatteras motor cruiser named
Conjurado
docked at the marina in Destin Harbor, spoke with a strong Tidewater Virginia accent, was tall, tanned, lean as whipcord, with vivid blue eyes and deeply etched lines around his eyes and a long silvery mane of perfectly convincing hair, and that he carried himself ramrod straight and had the air of a retired military man who had made a whole lot of money in the private sector.
Conjurado
docked at the marina in Destin Harbor, spoke with a strong Tidewater Virginia accent, was tall, tanned, lean as whipcord, with vivid blue eyes and deeply etched lines around his eyes and a long silvery mane of perfectly convincing hair, and that he carried himself ramrod straight and had the air of a retired military man who had made a whole lot of money in the private sector.
His name was, oddly, not available. The owner of the villa, as reported to the Rate-Payer Registry of the Incorporated Village of Seaside, was a corporate entity known as Conjurado Consulting, registered in Wilmington, Delaware. When directly addressed by an elder townsman, a retired lobsterman named Dub Kingman, who was a curious sort and not at all shy, the mystery man had introduced himself simply as Jack Forrest.
Dub Kingman had gone online to generate the further information that the mysterious gentleman might be related to Nathan Bed-ford Forrest, the legendary Confederate cavalry commander. At one time, the U.S. Army had carried on its roster a man born on the same date, October 4, 1926, with the same name, James K. Forrest, who had served in various capacities with the U.S. Army’s intelligence branch, and who had been awarded, among lesser honors, the Vietnam Service Medal, the Bronze Star with a V for Valor, and the Purple Heart. James K. Forrest had retired as a major general in 1999. Information regarding the particulars of his service—which country, which units, which campaigns—was listed as “TNA” on the Army website: “Temporarily Not Available.”
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