by David Stone
“I was here five years ago, part of a cruise we took on the Minoan Lines. Three days and nights in Venice. So, not very well.”
Dalton didn’t ask who had been with her. He didn’t want to know. Her past, and her future, did not belong to him, aside from his commitment to seeing that she lived to have one. She drank some more coffee, set the thermos down. Laying her head back, she closed her eyes again.
“The news said a police officer was killed back there in Vienna and two others burned. They’re saying it was a terrorist incident, Micah. How did we ever get across the Alps?”
“Great question. Right now, my money is on bureaucratic incompetence. We moved fast, and it’s been my experience that cross-jurisdictional screwups happen all the time.”
“Do you believe that? In this case?”
“Not entirely. But it’s possible. It’s harder to fix a border crossing than you think it is. No matter how well placed you are. Border guards are a cantankerous lot. I’m accepting it as a tactical reality.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“We’re about to find out. Before we do, check your laptop one more time. Maybe Jürgen got back to you.”
“Can we get a signal here?”
“Yes. The Sole Spa over there has an unsecured connection.”
Veronika took out her laptop, turned it on. The glow lit up the interior of the Benz with a bluish light. In a moment, the wireless icon blipped on, and she was at her incoming-mail site and a German carrier called Quecksilber.
She had about forty messages altogether, thirty-eight of which were from this same sender and contained the same message:
Zum Hauptquartier sofort unter Androhung der formalen Anklage
Dalton, looking over her shoulder, couldn’t make it out.
“That looks like trouble.”
“It is. It’s an order from my boss, I am to report in to headquarters immediately, under penalty of formal charges.”
She shrugged it off, hit DELETE, wiping out the entire list except for the other two messages.
[email protected] [email protected]
Both messages had been sent within the last hour, long after midnight. Both had attachments. Veronika looked at the second one and then over at Dalton.
“The first one is from Jürgen. But this other one? This cannot be from your friend. And how could he have my private e-mail address?”
“It’s not from him,” said Dalton, his face hardening. “Save it and open the other one.”
She did.
Veronika meine Liebe, die ich für Sie das Video hier ist es merkwürdig, wo bist du? Sind Sie sicher? Bitte rufen Sie mich an meine grüne Telefon. jemand hier, ich muss gehen
“It’s from him. He says he has the video, says it’s a bit odd. He asks if I am safe and asks me to call him on his green line. Then he says somebody is there and he has to go. What does that mean, somebody is here? It was one in the morning when he sent this. Is he in trouble? Have I gotten him into trouble, Micah?”
Her eyes glittered in the laptop light, filling with moisture. She began to cry and then crushed it down, drawing in a long, shuddering breath.
“It had to be done, Veronika. We needed that video.”
“I . . . I know.”
“If it’s the police, he won’t resist. He’ll be okay.”
“And if it wasn’t the police?”
“It was the police, Veronika. The bad guys don’t knock or ring the doorbell. What’s his ‘green line’?”
“Jürgen likes to play spy. He has a cell phone he bought on the street. It is in someone else’s name. Not traceable to him. He uses it to make horse-race bets. Also he orders—how do you say—Kokain?”
“Cocaine?”
“Yes. He uses it to stay awake on the job.”
“Do you?”
She gave him a look that did not quite sear his cheek and did not quite convince him she wasn’t lying.
“No. That is why we broke up. This cocaine drug.”
“I have some SIM cards. If you want to call his green line, see if he’s okay, we can switch out the SIM on your cell phone.”
She considered him for a time, something elusive flickering in her eyes, a veiled look, and then she cleared.
“Maybe. Let’s see the video.”
She opened the attachment, an MPEG with a time stamp. The code stated that it was four minutes long. She copied it onto a separate flash drive and then hit PLAY.
The video quality was poor, a cheap record from a cheap analog source. The POV was limited, a view of the Leopoldsberg parking lot from the top of a post in the middle of the yard. The camera turned slowly on a base, sweeping erratically around the lot. The clock was running, starting at 0630.23. The lot was empty and the light very dim. At 0631.12 the camera caught a glow coming up the drive, then swiveled away, returning to that spot at 0632.15 just in time to catch a fleeting glimpse of the brown Saab driving across the deserted yard toward the far corner, where Dalton had found it later. The camera, turning, then showed them a view of the sky growing slightly less dark and then the circles of lamplight in the parking-lot gravel. It came around again at 0633.05, and there was a large hulk standing by the side of the Saab, slope-shouldered, his long ropy arms hanging loose at his sides, his face staring up at the camera as it swept by.
The face was a blur, but Dalton could make out the slash of a mouth, see the shine of scar tissue on the ruined face.
“Is that him?” asked Veronika. “The man you fought?”
“Yes. It is,” said Dalton, watching the video. His face felt hot and his chest hurt. He thought that what he was feeling was fear. If this was true, it had to be driven down.
The question was how.
The camera moved away, showing them another maddening round of gravel, sky, gravel, stone wall, gravel, sky. And then, at 0641.06, it came back to the Saab and the apelike figure standing next to it.
The figure was naked, his pants in a heap around his ankles. He was holding his genitals out with one hand, his hips grinding, his other hand rhythmically busy, a simian leer on his slash of a mouth. Before the camera could move off, the man raised his left hand, pointed something dark at the camera. There was no sound, but they could see a narrow red laser beam coming from the thing in the man’s hand. The video image disappeared in a burst of white lines. The MPEG ran for another few seconds and then ended. Veronika closed the screen and sat back into the seat.
“My God, Micah. He’s a monster.”
“Yes. He is. Have you got this on the flash drive as well?”
“I copied it all. To the hard drive also.”
“Don’t lose it. We’ll need it before this is over. Open the other one. If you’re up to it?”
She hesitated, and then clicked on the one from Issadore Galan’s e-mail account. It opened with an attachment, a large file labeled JPEG. The message read:How this for slick slick got your bitches email off your own phone show the whore the picture maybe she see what kind of sick fuck she running with maybe she ask you about Podujevo see you soon slick
your old friend.
“How did he get my e-mail?” asked Veronika, deeply shocked at how close this creature was getting.
“He says how he did it. The same way he got my GSP coordinates. Somebody has cracked my BlackBerry encryption. I found your e-mail on the InteliLink database. He has my records. It was right there.”
“Somebody is . . . helping . . . him?”
“Somebody is running him, Veronika.”
Veronika moved the cursor over the attachment, got the DOWNLOAD box, and stopped.
“It’s a picture, Micah. Do we really want to see a picture from this man?”
“Open it,” said Dalton, his voice hoarse.
She clicked DOWNLOAD, and a moment later they were looking at a clear, crisp color photo of what looked like a burned-out building, stone, with heavy wooden beams that had fallen inward, bringing the walls down with them.
On the ground in front of the building lay a long row of dead bodies, all horribly charred, limbs twisted up into the fetal position as the fire had scorched their tendons. They lay on their backs, faces up to the cold clear sky, their mouths open, their blackened faces bloated and distorted.
But you could still tell that they were all women and children of varying ages: infants, toddlers, young girls, old women. They were displayed as if in a propaganda shot.
Two large men in black camos, their hair shaved into Mohawks and their faces streaked with camo paint, stood on either end of the row of dead people, one with an AK slung over his back and holding up a hand-painted sign, the other holding up what looked like a fragment of some sort of missile or rocket. On the fragment a row of letters could just be made out:GBU 10 2089 I USAR
On the hand-painted sign, a scrawled phrase:
Dalton knew, in a detached, reptilian way, that his skin was getting hot. He could feel the burn on his forehead and along his chest. Interesting. Understandable, given the stimulus. So why was his belly full of ice? Never mind. It didn’t matter, really. He knew what was going on. But thinking about his autonomic responses was a way to avoid thinking about that place in the picture for a few seconds.
And that was about all he got.
Veronika stared at the picture for a time. She was in an intelligence service, so pictures of atrocities did not shake her the way they would have shaken an ordinary civilian. Dalton could feel her thoughts, as she stared at the picture and the words. She knew this was something very serious, that it involved Dalton, and that if she asked him what it was he might tell her and then everything would change. Perhaps she wouldn’t ask him.
“What . . . what do those words mean, Micah?”
“The first word is a place-name. In Serbian.”
“Do you know what place?”
“Yes. It’s called Podujevo.”
“And where is Podujevo?”
“It’s a village in northern Kosovo.”
“It looks like a war is going on in that picture. Was it during the war there?”
“Yes. In 1999.”
“Were you there, in 1999?”
“Officially, no.”
There was a long pause.
“And what do the other words mean?”
“They mean ‘American murderers did this.’ ”
More silence—this time a tight, pounding silence. Dalton listened to his own pulse thumping in his ears and to Veronika’s shallow breathing.
She was no longer looking at the picture, not so much as looking away from it as looking at Dalton, the only other place to look. After a time she said in a soft voice, “You do not wish to talk about Podujevo, Micah?”
Dalton swallowed with difficulty, wishing for water.
“Yes, Veronika. I do not wish to talk about Podujevo.”
More silence.
“Fine. Then we will not talk about Podujevo. Right now.”
“Thank you.”
“But what are we going to do about this Smoke person?”
“Find him. Find who’s running him. Kill them both.”
She looked at him as if from a distance.
“I thought you were not an assassin? If we find them, we should turn them over to the proper authorities.”
He met her look with as blank an expression as he could manage, thinking, You just killed a man by sticking a curling iron in his brain and now you want to go through proper channels?
“Yes?” he said. “The proper authorities. Such as . . . ?”
She looked confused and then rallied.
“The UN has agencies. Interpol. The Criminal Court.”
Dalton let it go. She was young. She was Austrian. She’d been to a modern university. You had to make allowances.
“At any rate, he’s giving us a lot of help here.”
“This . . . Höhlentroll. This . . . cave thing. How?”
“He’s talking too much. He can’t help himself. Every time he prods us, he gives something away. The things he knows—your e-mail, how to get to Galan, breaking my BlackBerry encryption . . . this thing about Podujevo—only a few people know all of those things. We follow the information, find the sources, and sooner or later we find somebody who knows who Smoke really is. Maybe even where. Then we find Smoke. And we kill him. And his people. It all ends. You’re safe.”
They sat together in silence for a while longer, and then Veronika put the laptop away. Dalton leaned forward, popped the latch on the gun locker under the dashboard, pulled out her pistol, checked that it was loaded, and handed it to her along with her spare magazine.
“You still want to come along on this?”
“Yes. We’ve already talked about it too much.”
“Have you ever been in a real gunfight?”
“No. But every year we do two weeks of—what you Americans call CQB—close quarter?”
“Close quarter combat? You’re in a surveillance unit, for Pete’s sake!”
Mistake.
Dalton could almost hear her hackles rising.
“Sometimes, Micah, people object to being watched. Sometimes, like you, Micah, they are not so nice people. That’s why they gave us the weapons. Loaded. So we can actually fire them. If you are going to fire a weapon in Vienna, they would like for you not to kill too many tourists. So we train. Okay?”
Dalton figured he wouldn’t have to shave the Veronika side of his face for about a week. He nodded, took a breath.
“Okay. My apologies. You’ve got eight in the magazine,” he said in a careful, businesslike tone, “and one in the chamber. They’re Black Talon rounds, nine mil, just like I use in the SIG, so if you need some more I have them. The SIG has fifteen rounds in each mag. Black Talons will stay inside whatever they hit, and they hit hard. First rule of combat: Don’t shoot your partner.”
He managed a tight smile here as his equilibrium came slowly back. Podujevo had nothing to do with this woman, and they had a hard night ahead of them.
“You shoot me in the back, Veronika, I’m going to take it personally.”
She gave him a brave, if slightly off-center, smile.
“I won’t shoot you in the back. Unless you get in my way.”
“I’ll try not to do that. Keep cool. Remember. Keep cool. Don’t spray the area. I know, I know,” he said, seeing her expression, “but it happens, even to trained people. They get their blood up. They’ll empty a mag in seven seconds. You know how to do a fast magazine exchange in a firefight?”
She nodded.
“We’ve practiced it. Empty, slide locks back, drop magazine out, load the second magazine, slide forward, you’re ready to go.”
“Good. You have a second mag, also with eight rounds. That’s seventeen rounds in total. Count your rounds. Understand? Count your rounds. If things go bad and I’m not close, save one round. I mean that. If sixteen rounds out haven’t settled the matter, nothing will. So you save one round. You follow me, Veronika? Hear me. Save one round.”
She looked at him with a puzzled expression, and then her face set into harder lines.
“I understand. Save one round.”
“One last thing. I get killed, you don’t hang around. If we actually do get into a firefight, the polizia will come running. You reach them, ask for a Carabinieri major in town, his name is Allessio Brancati. He has an apartment in the Arsenale—that’s along the Riva degli Schiavoni—a few bridges east of the Piazza San Marco. Get the polizia to take you to Brancati, tell him everything you know. He’ll take care of you.”
“Allessio Brancati. In the Arsenale. Okay.”
“Okay. One last thing.”
She sighed.
“I thought the last thing was the one last thing?”
Dalton grinned at her, a wolfish expression, his eyes pale in the lamplight, his lips thinned over white teeth.
“If we’re dealing with Smoke and his people, I take one, a bad one, before you light out—”
“Don’t leave you w
ounded? Put one in your head?”
“Yeah. Two, if you can spare them.”
“Christ, Micah.”
“I’d do it for you.”
She smiled back at him, her breathing unsteady, leaned forward suddenly, and kissed him, open-mouthed, searching, hungry, pulling him into her, and then she broke away.
“Yes. You would. But you’re a much nicer person than I am. So my advice to you . . . ?”
“Don’t get shot?”
“Don’t get shot.”
THE sweeping northern arc of the Grand Canal, wide and smooth and empty as it curved around the southern edge of Cannaregio, was relatively easy to navigate, even in the fog that had settled in over the city, reducing visibility to less than twenty feet. At this hour the Grand Canal was deserted, the villas and shops along its banks closed down and lightless. Now and then, as they slipped quietly by a villa or a shop, a sliver of amber light showed through closed shutters or a few tinny notes of music would come drifting out of the mist. There were street-lamps and doorway torches all along the canal, but they were only luminous globes floating in the mist and shed no light on the canal, serving only to mark the outer limits of a cold gray water world.
The only warmth in that shapeless world was the blood-red glow of the Riva’s instrument panels as it lit up the underside of Dalton’s face, giving him a slightly satanic air.
Veronika, wrapped in a blanket, sat huddled in the stern, watching the shadowland of Venice pass by as if in a dream.
For the first time in many weeks, a single word was rising in the back of her troubled mind: Kokain. She pushed it down again with a shiver of apprehension, coming back reluctantly to the here and now. The launch was moving through the muddy water like a sea snake, its engines hardly a murmur, a bass-toned vibrato under the floorboards. Water lapped and rippled along her polished sides and curled whitely in her wake. Now and then a larger shape would loom up out of the fog—a tethered barge draped in canvas, a covered launch tugging at its moorings—but, in the main, there was only the slow unveiling of the middle distance beyond Dalton’s tall shape, outlined in a red aura, and the field of gray water all around her, parting with a reptilian hiss as the launch’s sharp-edged bow cut through it.