The Venetian Judgment (16 page)
Read The Venetian Judgment Online
Authors: David Stone
Dub Kingman duly relayed this information to the rest of the village elders. From that point on, they began to regard the taciturn and uncommunicative resident of the former Morley Silverman villa on the East Dune Breaks with the kind of wary affection that old soldiers hold for crusty commanding officers such as George S. Pat-ton or Vinegar Joe Stillwell. They sensed his chilly silence and cold distance were qualities he had rightfully earned in hard service somewhere lethal and were to be gratefully honored by the better angels of the village.
So “Colonel Jack,” as he came to be known, was accepted into the tight little community of Seaside with a degree of quiet pride and a general determination to protect the old soldier’s privacy from sundry outsiders and local busybodies. Many may have wished to know more about the man who had taken up a great deal of the available ocean frontage and who had not spoken more than a dozen words to anyone in the village in the sixteen months that he had been in residence. Well, they all agreed, weirder folks than Colonel Jack were to be found all along the Emerald Coast, which was known by the residents as the “Redneck Riviera,” and all agreed that nothing good ever came of being a nosy parker.
All of this is recorded as a kind of preamble to the arrival of a Federal Express truck at the barred gates of Jack Forrest’s villa at three p.m. Seaside time, which was ten at night on the island of Santorini, where Micah Dalton and Mandy Pownall were considering tactics while awaiting the imminent arrival of Sergeant Keraklis.
The driver put the vehicle in park and pressed the buzzer beside the solid wooden gates. In a moment, a soft male voice came on the intercom, asked him to state his business, and reminded him to lean out of the window of his truck so that the overhead cameras could get a good look at him. This the driver did, since he had done it many times before all along Scenic Highway 30A, which was well populated if not downright infested with privacy-obsessed people behind heavy gates.
In a few minutes, a small side door clicked open and the man known to the locals as Jack Forrest appeared, tall, wiry, dressed in a starched khaki shirt and white linen pants and barefoot, his glance moving quickly about the terrain before settling on the face of the young black man behind the wheel, who, as always, was struck by the wintry chill in those pale blue eyes. No small talk was exchanged, as the man signed for and accepted a sealed envelope. The truck backed out onto the highway again, and the man known as Jack Forrest went back inside his gated compound carrying the envelope in both hands, his body erect and stiff, climbing the stone steps to the villa slowly, either like a football player with very bad knees or like a man who had once been shot several times in the back.
The open and airy interior had been sparsely furnished in dark wooden Shaker-style furniture, clean lines, all rectangles and screens, with a long teak desk that looked like it had been salvaged from a sailing ship taking up the entire width of the villa in front of ornate leaded-glass windows with a fine view out over the broad, churning sea.
This monastic simplicity contrasted oddly with the Romanesque arches and the Murano-glass lighting and the intricate marble floor the Morley Silvermans had installed at great expense the year before Mrs. Morley Silverman, born Agatha, had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. Forrest crossed the large room to his desk, pulled the chair back, and sat down in front of a gunmetal-gray Sony laptop, dropping the envelope onto the desk and reaching for a pack of Gauloise cigarettes sitting in a large crystal ashtray at his right hand.
He lit the Gauloise, drew in the smoke through thin pursed lips, a knot of corded muscle convulsing at the right side of his leathery neck as he did so, creating the unsettling impression that a very large tarantula lived right under the skin. His colorless eyes squinting against the burn of the smoke, he leaned back into the creaking wooden chair and considered the FedEx envelope as it lay unopened on the battered surface of the desk. A sticker on the cover said that the envelope had been sent by:
BEYOGLU TRADING CONSORTIUM
SUITE 5500, DIZAYN TOWER,
MASAYAK AYAZAĞA,
ISTANBUL, TURKEY
The packet showed signs of having been opened at one point, possibly at the U.S. port of entry, perhaps by the Turks themselves. The customs declaration stated that the contents were ELECTRONIC DOCUMENTS /NCV and not insured. Jack Forrest’s face, as he studied these exterior details of the packet, was closed. The fact that the package had been sent by a public courier indicated a number of things, first among them that the sender had been motivated primarily by haste and not by security. Otherwise, a personal courier would have been sent. This carried implications that would have to be dealt with, sooner or later.
Forrest exhaled a cloud of smoke, looked out at the light changing on the glittering shoreline as a chain of pelicans drifted past, in a single, sinuous line, uncannily snakelike, each bird gliding motionless, skimming the whitecaps. They looked prehistoric, like pterodactyls, and had the dead-black eyes of sharks. Crushing the Gauloise in the crystal ashtray, Forrest picked up a military dagger, a Fairbairn-Sykes, and used it to open the envelope. He tilted the envelope to empty its contents onto the table: a sheet of paper with some handwriting on it and an eight-gigabyte armored flash drive. There was nothing else in the envelope. He picked up the paper, a smooth, heavyweight vellum with the BEYOGLU watermark embedded in the fibers.
On it, a strong hard hand had written in Russian:
“Go tell the Spartans,” he said half aloud.
Forrest smiled to himself, although the effect on a watcher would not have been heartwarming. The lines of the epitaph played in his mind:
Go
,
tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.
Go
,
tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.
Although the flash drive looked ordinary, it contained a glass vial of sulfuric acid connected to a microscopic spring-loaded titanium spike. If anyone tried to read the contents of the drive without first entering the correct password, the plunger would break the vial, and the acid would destroy the drive’s memory chip. Sulphuric acid had an advantage over an explosive because it would not set off a detector. Freezing the flash drive to render the glass vial useless would also destroy the contents of the memory. If anyone tried to decode the password by attaching the drive to a decryption program using asymmetric algorithms, the drive would be destroyed. And, as a final barrier, the correct password had to be typed in
once only,
without a single error, within ninety seconds of being requested by the drive or, again, it would destroy itself. Forrest inserted the flash drive into the Sony’s USB port, waited as the computer brought up the drive’s password bar.
once only,
without a single error, within ninety seconds of being requested by the drive or, again, it would destroy itself. Forrest inserted the flash drive into the Sony’s USB port, waited as the computer brought up the drive’s password bar.
Counting off the seconds, he pulled a book of prime numbers off the shelf next to his desk. Since Herodotus, who wrote the most well-known history of the battle at Thermopylae, was a Greek, as, for that matter, was Leonidas, he flipped through to the list of the Euclidian primes, another Greek creation, and typed in the sixth one in the series—20056049013—because he and Piotr had agreed a long time ago that the password prime would always be the number in the series that had no more than nineteen and no less than eleven digits. Since each prime number in all of the seventy-seven categories of primes increased exponentially, anything higher than nineteen digits would have been too long to be accepted by most civilian password systems, and both agreed that anything lower than eleven might be successfully attacked by a powerful computer generating primes.
After all these years, Forrest had grown used to the way Piotr’s mind worked, and when the flash drive finally opened up and the MPEG it contained began to play, he understood the grim humor in his reference to the famous epitaph to Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans—
here, obedient to their laws, we lie
—as he watched a naked man sitting in a cheap metal chair bolted to the floor in the middle of a large sheet of clear plastic.
here, obedient to their laws, we lie
—as he watched a naked man sitting in a cheap metal chair bolted to the floor in the middle of a large sheet of clear plastic.
The chair sat in a pool of hot-blue light, but the rest of the scene was in darkness. The man in the chair, in his fifties, with a full head of lank brown hair, was pale and thin, with prominent blue veins all over his torso: he had been bound to the chair with plastic cable ties, bound so tightly that the ties had dug into his wrists and elbows and ankles deep enough to draw blood. The man in the chair was Antonijas Palenz, a Latvian police official who had lost his position in Riga after the fall of the old Sovietski and who was now Piotr’s chief “talent scout” for Athens and the Aegean.
Anton normally wore glasses, but they had been taken away, and now he blinked out into the darkness all around him, his face wet and his bony chest working very hard. The questioner, not visible, was a woman with an English accent and a soft, persuasive voice. The questions were in English.
“Tell us again, how you explain what your man did in London.”
Anton tried a smile, but fear twisted it into a grimace, and when he spoke his voice was hoarse and raw, as if he had answered the same question many times before, which, Forrest knew, would be the case exactly.
“I followed your instructions. Truly. I told him that it was to look like a robbery. That is what he did. What we wanted him to do. Truly. And he got the list, as we hoped he would. May I have some water now. Please. And where is Maya? Maya, are you there?”
“Maya is not here anymore.”
Anton’s breathing grew rapid and shallow.
“Where is she? Please, she is not a part of this . . . Please . . .”
“She is being questioned in another room. What happens to her will depend on what you say in here. Again, how do you explain London?”
The man worked at his wrist bindings, clearly on the edge of a breakdown, and tears began to flow down his sweaty cheeks.
“Maya . . . I need to see Maya.”
There was some muted talk off camera, and then a man stepped forward into the glare of the light, his back to the camera, a massive hulking shape with the kind of Mohawk cut favored by veterans of the Kosovo Army. He held a large sheet of paper up in front of Anton’s face. Anton peered at the paper, jerked his head away, and began to sob, his chest convulsing.
The big man stepped back from the chair, and for a time the only sound was the distant hum of an air conditioner or a generator and the deep wrenching agony of the man crying. Forrest lit another Gauloise and turned the volume up a bit so he could get an idea of where they were. The chair looked like something found at a market anywhere in the Middle East. The plastic was generic. The bolts that held the chair to the floor looked old and badly made; the plastic restraint cuffs looked like the ones the Turks used. Turkey, likely, or maybe Bulgaria.
The interrogation resumed.
“You’ve seen the pictures he put on the net. He sent these pictures to everyone on her list, and to the head of their NSA as well. Was this part of your instructions to him? Was this to help make the murder look ordinary?”
Anton made an effort, got his crying under some control.
“You knew what he was. He has done this before, many times. He
likes
to take pictures. He did this in Trieste, and in Athens, and in Kotor and Sveti Stefan, and possibly in Shanghai two years ago, and we think once in Singapore in the fall, and he was doing it in Santorini on the very day I reached him. We knew this. We
all
did! We agreed on the risk. I am not to blame. We chose him because he already had a legend and could move freely in the West. We chose him because there was no one else we could train in time. We chose him because he has courage and does not panic, and he is able to adapt and innovate. We took his legend and made it unbreakable. Even now we maintain it—”
likes
to take pictures. He did this in Trieste, and in Athens, and in Kotor and Sveti Stefan, and possibly in Shanghai two years ago, and we think once in Singapore in the fall, and he was doing it in Santorini on the very day I reached him. We knew this. We
all
did! We agreed on the risk. I am not to blame. We chose him because he already had a legend and could move freely in the West. We chose him because there was no one else we could train in time. We chose him because he has courage and does not panic, and he is able to adapt and innovate. We took his legend and made it unbreakable. Even now we maintain it—”
“It is still in place for only one reason. He is next to the target already. What do you suggest we do if he repeats this error?”
“What can we do? We have no one to send in his place. We have not enough time! We have to let him work.”
“Do you wish what is happening to Maya to stop?”
“Yes. Please.”
“Then you will go to America and control your man.”
Anton shook his head.
“You don’t
know
him. At Kerch, he could be controlled. But now that he is in America, we have no choice—”
know
him. At Kerch, he could be controlled. But now that he is in America, we have no choice—”
“You will go to America. You will either control him until he completes his mission or we will give Maya to the Chronic Ward.”
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