The Venetian Judgment Read Online Free Page B

crumpled body and battered face during several months of captivity with the Jordanians in the late eighties. The fingers of his hand had been broken many times . . . broken with hammers. Other obscene atrocities had been performed, not so much for the extraction of useful information—which, from a man such as Galan, was unlikely—but rather for the sheer joy some modern young Islamic men take in delivering pain to a helpless infidel body.

    In the course of this torture, they had taken away any hope he may have ever had of giving or receiving physical love again. Perhaps as a result, he tended to flare out at life through small dark eyes wreathed in pain lines and a cold, unsettling smile. After he was released in a prisoner exchange, he studied his naked body in a hospital mirror and resolved never to allow his wife and family back in Tel Aviv to see what he had become. Now he worked for Major Alessio Brancati in Venice and was, in his arid, ruined, and clinically detached way, reasonably content.

    The smile he returned to Dalton was genuine; he and Dalton and Alessio Brancati’s Carabinieri had just come through a short, sharp war with the Serbian Mafia and, in the main, had won. Dalton, once a CIA Cleaner whose job had been to police up the blood and ruin left by other CIA agents, now exiled by an internal conflict in the Agency, was still waiting for the official call back to Langley that had been promised to him by Deacon Cather, the Deputy Director of Clandestine Services. That call had never come, and waiting for it, Galan believed, was killing the young man.

    Dalton touched his cheek, came away with blood on the tips of his glove. A wave of fatigue swept through him, and his vision blurred for a moment.

    “Issadore,” he said, shaking his head to clear it. “How are you? You look well.”

    Galan gave him an oddly Italianate shrug, raised his hands.

    “You have had a busy night, Micah.”

    “Almost through,” said Dalton, feeling Mirko Belajic’s eyes on him.

    Galan turned and looked down at Belajic, came back to Dalton.

    “I have called the water ambulance. They will see to you as well.”

    Dalton shook his head.

    “Not necessary, but thanks. Now, Issadore, I need you to step away.”

    Galan lifted his hands. He had no weapon, at least no visible one.

    “Micah, you cannot continue in this—”

    “Ask him where are my men,” Belajic said in a breath-starved whisper. Dalton looked down at him, his pale eyes glittering in the candlelight.

    “How many did you have?” asked Dalton. Belajic hesitated, looking crafty, but the black hole in the Ruger’s muzzle made it hard to dissemble.

    “Four. All I had left.”

    “I killed every one who came at me.”

    Belajic stared up at him, his wet cheeks glistening.

    “All? Even Zorin ?”

    “If he was out there, Mirko, he’s dead.”

    “Zorin . . .” said Belajic, more to himself than anyone and in a tone of shocked wonder, “he was a . . . golem . Even you . . . could not kill . . . him . How did he die?”

    “I broke his neck.”

    Belajic shook his head.

    “A . . . black lie . . . No one man could—”

    Dalton lifted the Ruger, pointed it at Belajic’s forehead.

    “You can talk it over with him in Hell.”

    Galan stepped into the line of fire.

    Dalton sighed, slumped, gave him a look.

    “You know what this thing is,” he said in a soft voice, meaning the old man on the floor and the snail-slime trail of violence that stretched out behind him for all the long years of his predatory life. Galan nodded.

    “Sure. He is . . . a waste. I am here, Micah. I am here for you.” He hesitated, and then went on. “For Cora Vasari too, maybe.”

    Dalton winced at the name.

    “Cora’s in Anacapri. Her family has her in the villa there. I’ve tried to reach her. Everything I send drops into a well. But I can still finish . . . this.”

    “It is already finished. And how do you know she doesn’t answer? Her family has her