The Venetian Judgment (41 page)

Read The Venetian Judgment Online

Authors: David Stone

Their shadows danced ahead of them as they went down the tunnel, shortened as they came up under the next lightbulb, and then stretched out behind them again as they made their way from pool of light to pool of light. Halfway along the tunnel, Anton noticed an old cast-iron pipe sticking out from the wall, with a brass mouthpiece attached to the end.
Anton looked at it as they passed, thinking that it looked a bit like the kind of communication tube they used to have on steamships, speaking tubes that ran from the bridge to the engine room. He thought he might have seen one in an old movie—
Wake of the Red Witch,
maybe.
He would have said something to Lujac, but Lujac had passed it by without comment, and he knew this old house pretty well, so Anton let it go.
They were almost at the far end when they heard the flutter of bare feet coming from somewhere behind them, carried down the shaft by an auditory trick of the stones, a whispery shuffle. Lujac turned then, his green eyes lit with a deep-yellow light. Cat’s eyes, Anton realized. Lujac brushed past him, stumbled, falling forward onto the wet stones, then got up again. Now he was flying back up the tunnel, with Anton, his heart beating through his chest, racing after him. They came stumbling around the curve just in time to see Briony Keating, her hair matted with cobwebs, her face as pale as death, and barefoot, tugging at the iron bar. Lujac screamed in animal rage, and she looked straight at him, her eyes wide, her expression turning into contempt before she gave the bar one ferocious tug and stepped back, heaving hard at the door. It slammed shut, the lock catching just as Lujac collided with the other side, the force of his blow making the iron boom like a heavy brass bell and echoing around in the long shadows of the basement.
Briony stepped back from the iron door, her chest heaving, her heart hammering, and stared at it for a long time, listening to the sound of Lujac’s fists thudding against the cold iron plating—
boom
. . .
bong
. . .
boom
. . .
bong
. . .
boom
. . .
bong
—as slow and steady as a heart of iron beating inside a man of cold, dead stone.
ISTANBUL
SUITE 5500, DIZAYN TOWERS
Melik Gul’s men were holding a little brown teapot-shaped man in the reception area of the office, hemmed in by three large officers with the thick black mustaches that seemed to be part of the uniform for Turkish cops, even the women.
Nikki, entering the glass-walled and blond-wood-paneled space on the heels of Sofouli and Gul, saw over Sofouli’s shoulder a tubby, sad-looking little man with bad skin and doughy cheeks. The pasty pallor of the “inside man” lay on him like the dusting on a sugar doughnut. And his dull-eyed, slack-jawed face carried the weight of long years of disappointed expectations on it, along with a kind of stoic acceptance of his current situation.
His soft-brown eyes flickered over the new arrivals, stopping for a moment to settle on Nikki, an expression of momentary confusion registering, and then he glazed over and went inward again, like a snapping turtle surrounded by sadistic schoolboys.
The office looked like any working space you’d find around the world, a few cubicles scattered about a large, open area, bland fluorescent lighting here and there in the acoustic-tiled ceiling, one large Dell PC with a huge flat-screen monitor, apparently turned off, on a long teak desk set off in a corner and littered with papers.
Several half-stuffed boxes sat around on the carpeted floor, and Nikki got the impression that the Teapot had been packing things up frantically when he got interrupted by Melik Gul’s men. The place had that indefinable
aftermath
look, the decrepit, tumbled look of a complicated project gone horribly wrong. The senior men already flown, and no one left but the stiffs, saps, and gunsels to mop up the mess and take the heat.
Gul went over and stood before the man, staring down at him, and asked a question in Turkish, which was answered by one of Gul’s Mustache Men. Nikki caught the name Ibrahim Sokak, and was about to make a note of it in her BlackBerry when it began to buzz in her hand.
Nikki stepped back out into the hall, closed the heavy glass doors with RUSSIAN INTER-ASIAN TRADE & COMMERCE BUREAU stenciled on it in gold, and looked at the text message from Alice Chandler:
Beyoglu Trading Consortium
Shell company wholly owned by BUG/Arkangel Industries,
Kiev, Moscow, Saint Petersburg. Sales rep for digital cameras,
electronics, trading internationally. Considered front for
Russian economic and Humint info gathering. No known KGB
affiliation. Re: prior queries other agencies, none on file.
More TK.
U OK?
Nikki sent a reply:
Query Russian Inter-Asian Trade & Commerce Bureau, also
Ibrahim Sokak, Anatoly Bakunin, Vassily Kishmayev, Melik
Gul. Also can you locate IP of computer here.
She got an answer back at once.
Is machine on? What kind of connection. I have phone number 90 212 288 8515. Is this main line?
Nikki looked over at the men, who seemed to be busy arguing about some procedural matter with the Teapot. She got the idea that he was aggressively asserting the sovereign rights of Holy Mother Russia and was being told where Holy Mother Russia could insert her sovereign rights.
She texted back:
Wait 1.
She walked quietly but with no particular air of furtiveness back into the office and across to the computer, reached out, switched it on, and got an ornate screenful of Cyrillic letters.
She texted a message:
Okay.
Plan B.
In Russian.
Can’t read Russian. Looks like hard-wired phone line. No
wireless indicator. Try 90 212 288 8515.
A moment passed, then a message came back:
Leave machine on.
See what geeks can do.
More on BUG/Arkangel. They also run Internet site.
www.odessaflowers.com
. Checked site. Internet dating site
for U.S. males seeking Russian, Ukrainian wives, girlfriends,
concubines. Disgusting! More TK. Keep machine on. Geeks
closing in on IP address. Anatoly Bakunin, Vassily Kishmayev:
KGB thugs from Moscow Center. Melik Gul: Turkish secret
police. Ibrahim Sokak: no file. no hit.
Word from AD RA 2 U at all?
Worried.
Nikki stared at the screen for a while, thinking about the feeling she had gotten that Hank had been keeping something from her. This had been during a discussion about Kiki Lujac. He had suddenly taken a hard right and sent her off to find a picture of the man, a search that had been unsuccessful at the time. Someone seemed to have scrubbed the name Lujac from cyberspace.
Worried too.
Can you search recent files on AD of RA machine? Look for
name searches, background searches.
A pause.
Nikki could see Alice pursing her lips.
 
No. Confidential
 
 
Nikki typed back:
 
Vital.
 
 
Another long pause.
 
Will try. Wait.
Nikki waited.
Through the glass door, she could hear raised voices, and then the short, sharp sound of a slap across the face. The men were standing around the Teapot in a tight knot, and it looked like the left-behind sap was about to get what was coming to somebody much higher up.
No one was paying her any attention at all.
Nikki assumed this was because beating up suspects in Turkey was considered to be a man’s job.
Fine by her.
After a few minutes, her BlackBerry buzzed her again.
Days ago he ran detailed background check on French national Jules Duhamel. No hits, no negatives. Did it himself, no file number. FedEx full paper report to B. Keating, Pershing Center, West Point Military Academy. This morning, he took shuttle to La Guardia, booked car, told me he was going to Garrison to look up B. Keating. Got 15000 Bear Mountain Beacon Hwy., phoned listed land line, no answer. Phoned his cell, rang rang rang, and then cut to message. Phoned west pt h.r. office, ID’d as NSA. Wpt hr says BK no show, no word.
Nikki read the long report, hit save message, and sent back:
Call NYS troopers urgent!
She got back:
OK.U come home. Geeks inside machine now copying hard drive files. Is anyone watching?
Nikki looked over, saw that the hard-drive indicator light was blip-ping on the face of the computer tower. No one but her was paying any attention.
No. But work fast.
Any image description etc. of Jules Duhamel?
 
 
She went back out into the hall, waited a moment, and got back:
 
 
Visa picture. Comparing with Lujac descrpt.
A long pause. Sofouli was heading back into the main room, his face closed and angry. He saw Nikki in the hall and headed for her. Her BlackBerry buzzed again.
Found MPEG in ad, private e-mail box.
Wait one . . .
Wait one . . .
Wait one . . .
Sofouli reached her, his expression softening as he got in closer, his professional cop getting a bit mixed up with his Greek lounge lizard.
“Look, Nikki, this is going to get complicated. Very quickly, Gul thinks you know more than you’re saying. So do I. Am I right?”
She opened her mouth to say something oblique but her BlackBerry was buzzing again. She looked down at the screen.
MPEG taken on boat image of fat gray man talking to
someone off camera. Sent by M. Pownall, CIA London
Station, from vicinity Istanbul. Found on boat connected to
Kiki Lujac and to Beyoglu Trading. Pownall claims plot against
Glass Cutters. B. Keating is a Glass Cutter. Could be him,
Nikki, could be him.
Come home now!
Sofouli, leaning in, read the message on her screen, bared his teeth in a grim smile, looked back over his massive shoulder at Melik Gul, who was staring back out at them through the green-tinted glass, his black eyes fixed and full of malice.
Sofouli turned back to her.
“I’m going now to pick up my chopper. I think you should come with me. I think you should come now.”
Nikki did not look at Melik Gul, but she could feel his glare.
“Do you think he’ll let me go?”
“I have told him I am to arrest you. As a suspect in the stealing of my helicopter. He’ll have no choice. We have jurisdictional agreements. If he tries to stop me, he’ll create an incident. Turks don’t want an incident with Greece right now. Turks are making too many enemies in NATO, after buggering U.S. over Iraq War. Greeks are in NATO, so Turks need Greeks.”
“
Are
you arresting me?”
His look was stern, even grave, but there was humor in it, along with a clear sexual appreciation for the woman he was looking at.
“Nikki,” he said in a pleading whisper, “I will not leave you with Melik Gul. He is with the Milli Istihbarat Teşkilati, their secret police. No one knows what they do, only that people who go with them do not come back. And he is no friend of America. Please, do what I ask.”
“Submit to being arrested?” she said with an edge.
“Yes. Please, submit. I ask you from the heart.”
She looked up at him.
He gave her his best totally innocent smile, which made him look like a grizzly bear with a rose between its teeth. The man was a black-marketing rogue, and possibly a corrupt cop, and certainly a serial womanizer whom she wouldn’t trust to keep his hands to himself anywhere other than in a chopper he would have to fly all by himself. He also smelled richly of tobacco and cognac and some kind of leathery citrus cologne, and, although old enough to be her father, he wasn’t.

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