The Echelon Vendetta (21 page)

the echelon vendetta
|
161

“You think some other agency may be working this man?” “I have no idea. Do you have access to the EU passport logs?” “Yes. Of course. For all the good that does. Now that we have all

this open-border European Union nonsense, an intruder can slip

into some lawless piratical country like—” “Like Croatia?” “Yes. Like Croatia, and then simply walk across into Italy at

Trieste. Or come ashore on a boat. A fast boat.”

He stopped, considering, turning over the Croatian element in his mind. Dalton was ahead of him, but not at all of the same view. Naumann’s death, the murder of his family, terrible though they were, had no obvious connection to Croatian drug cartels.

No
obvious
connection. “What about the Croatian end of this. I don’t want these guys...

what were their names?” “One was called Radko. The other one she did not hear.” “I don’t want these guys going after Cora again. Is there any

thing you can do?” “Have you ever tried to put a cat in a hatbox, Micah?” “No. I haven’t.” “I know the Vasari family. They are not the people who go into

the hatboxes. Her grandfather was an airman. Very brave. He was murdered by a Fascist assassin during Il Duce’s little adventure in Abyssinia. Cora will insist on being left alone. However, I will place some watchers on her.”

“Thank you. “What will you do? Now?” “About the Croatians?” “No. That is
my
business. I must insist on that. The Croatians

you will leave to me. In Split there is a man named Branco Gospic— you remember him?”

162
|
david stone

“Yes. You told me about him. He runs a crime syndicate. Gavro’s family, the Princips, they’re connected to this Gospic character?”

“Yes. By blood. And by guilt. By debts. So Branco Gospic is the doorway to this. I will go after him. I give you my word that everything will be done to protect her. I ask about this Sweetwater fellow. You think he is connected to these Gospic people?”

“I have no reason to think it. But I can’t rule it out.”

“You have been back to London. Was it to look for him?”

“No. I think he had already been there.”

Brancati sensed the meaning, raising an eyebrow. “No. More killing?”

Dalton told him everything, the complete report, not the edited version he had told Cora. Brancati asked one or two technical questions, but in the main he just sat there quietly and absorbed the data, entirely a cop at this moment. When Dalton had finished, Brancati was silent for a while.

“Such viciousness . . . it makes me wonder. Do you believe this butchery was done before the death—perhaps the murder—of your friend Mr. Naumann?”

“Yes. Forensics indicated that the time of death was around the fourth of October. Porter was in Venice at the time.”

“So your friend died three days later?”

“Yes.”

“And, as we saw, in a great state of emotion. Of horror.”

“Yes.”

“Such a state of horror that might be caused by images of the brutal torture and murder of your entire family.”

“Porter wasn’t a man to collapse under that kind of challenge.”

“Not in his right mind, of course not. But suppose he was under the influence of some terrible drug—a drug that magnified all of his fears, his horror—would that not drive him to such an end?”

the echelon vendetta
|
163

“Yes,” said Dalton, thinking about icicles. “Yes. Quite easily.”

“So we may be justified in thinking that whoever killed Mr. Nau-mann’s family did so partly to have such terrible images to present to the husband, the father, at a time and place of this man’s choosing.”

“Such as a hostel in Cortona?”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“This kind of planning, this sustained malevolence, this can only be for one of two things, Micah. For the joy of inflicting pain. Or for vengeance.”

“I think it’s both. So do you. It’s a vendetta.”

“Yes. Like the Croatians have against you. But you do not think this man has any connection to Gavro and Milan, to the Croatians?”

“I didn’t. Now I’m not sure. I’m also worried about this connection with Carovita. I went there on Saturday night and I saw this Indian having a meal there, alone, at a table in the back. And I spoke to an old woman the next day, who told me where to find him. The fact that the people who ran the—”

“My information may not have been correct. I will check it further. I am not aware that Branco Gospic has any connection to this restaurant. Many Croatians run restaurants. They are not
all
criminals. Most. But not all. You have told me that Mr. Naumann had no connection to illegal drugs. I believe you are telling me what you yourself believe, although we see that at least one very powerful drug has been used against you. Nor have we been able to discover any in our own investigations. A man like that—with such connections; Burke and Single is known to us—if he had been involved in drugs, he would have appeared on our . . . on our radar screens, as it were. “Now, this does not mean that a clever man could not fool us, make us the dupes. You and I, we begin to think that Mr. Naumann and his family, they were killed for vendetta. The way they died, the cruelty—this speaks of vendetta. Here is what I offer you: I will follow the Croatians. The Serbians. This Branco Gospic and

164
|
david stone

his friends. I do this for myself as well. They have assaulted two citizens of Italy. This is my duty. But I will also do it to see if there is any connection between Branco Gospic and Mr. Naumann and this Sweetwater man.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet. There is a
contraccambio
—two ways. You reciprocate for me. In the end, I wish to know all about the drug that this Sweetwater man has used in Venice. Nothing held back by your ‘people’ in Washington. The whole story. From you, sitting in the front of me. I expect this.”

He tapped his chest with his fingertips, and his face was hard.

“You’ll get it.”

“
La propria parola?
Your oath, as a soldier?
Di soldato?
”

“
Parola di soldato.
I wonder if you can look at something for me, while we’re on this subject. Perhaps it would mean something to you?”

“
D’accordo.
Show me.”

Dalton flicked through the images on the digital camera until he found the one he was looking for. He held up the screen.

Brancati stared at this through his reading glasses, pursed his lips, making his mustache bristle up. He shook his head.

“Sorry. It means nothing to me.”

“You have never seen it before? A gang sign. A graffito?”

the echelon vendetta
|
165

“Never. Where is it from?”

“It was scrawled across the mirror in the bathroom where Por-ter’s family was killed.”

Brancati looked more closely. “Print it out for me somewhere?”

“I will. The hotel has a printer. I’ll—”

A shrill beeping cut through the smoky atmosphere. As if summoned by the sound, Naumann’s ghost materialized behind Bran-cati’s shoulder as Brancati fumbled for his cell phone.

Dalton stared at Naumann’s ghost, wondering when, if ever, he was going to fade away. Wondering, as well, why Naumann’s ghost never once asked him about London, now never even
mentioned
London, never seemed to be bothered by the brutal murders of his wife and daughters, or for that matter, by his own violent, horrific death, but seemed rather to be quite happily immersed in the same kind of jaunty insouciance that had been so much a part of Porter Naumann when he was in the living world.

No immediate insight occurred, and since any question posed to a hallucination must of necessity be purely rhetorical in nature, he simply watched with a kind of detached puzzlement as Naumann slowly made the sign of the cross, his face solemn, grave, composed, an effect of dignity and close military order only slightly undermined by the fact that he was now coming on to six days dead and wearing a pair of emerald green pajamas.

Brancati, quite oblivious to the presence of Naumann’s ghost in their little cubicle, punched Risponda, said his name, and listened for a time to the tinny little crackle in his ear. His face altered, sagging. He aged in front of Dalton’s eyes. Setting the phone down, his face grave, remote, he rapped on the table.

The fat waiter billowed grandly through the curtains; Brancati asked for
il conto, per favore,
and turned to Dalton.

“Domenico Zitti. He died on the table. An hour ago.”

166
|
david stone

friday, october 12 cia hq, langley, virginia 5:30 p.m. local time

egonias! Brothel-creeping Jesus,” said Stallworth to himself.

“The pustulating sodomites are planting begonias.”

Jack Stallworth was standing at the window of his inside corner office, muttering curses into the green-tinted glass. His was the only office in the entire CIA complex to more closely resemble a greenhouse than a branch of the Intelligence arms: a greenhouse stuffed to its moldy ceiling tiles with every kind of growing thing and generally maintained at a drenchingly humid eighty degrees, an office that smelled of black earth and frangipani and lilies. Immediately to Stallworth’s left as he stood at his long window was a towering sago palm, and on his right a monumental glass-and-bronze terrarium in which floated pale clouds of mist drifting through a miniature jungle of orchids. Stallworth himself was a squat, blunt man shaped like an artillery round. His sinewy arms were folded across his broad muscular chest, his battered red face closed as a fist, daylight gleaming on his polished pink dome, his thick white brows pulled down in a ferocious frown as he glared out through the blinds at the workers digging up the flower beds by the atrium:
the fucking catamounts were planting begonias,
a plant he considered little better than a tuber, and a foul-smelling one at that. He was still contemplating this atrocity when Dalton, carrying a large ungainly package wrapped in flower-print paper, flanked by two guards and trailed by Stallworth’s 2IC, a stunning and libidinous ex-sergeant of Marines named Sally Holyrood Fordyce, got himself frog-marched into the room.

Stallworth turned his head. The glare was unchanged, if anything intensified, the sunlight streaming in through the blinds and the window full of potted plants giving his forbidding face a distinctly tigerish look. He pursed his thin lips and emitted a half grunt, half snarl that could only be interpreted as a friendly greeting by a Barbary ape.

Dalton gave it a shot anyway.

“Jack,” said Dalton, full of counterfeit cheer. “How the hell—”

“Save that honey-tongued crap for the disciplinary hearing, you gangrenous pustule. Right now explain just exactly
why
you kicked the living lights out of two unsuspecting Croatians in the Palazzo Ducale. Wait. Let me think. Did I? Or did I not? Oh yes. By golly. Now I remember. I
did
order you to stay in your goddam room, didn’t I?”