The Echelon Vendetta (17 page)

“I owe it to
her
. Besides, I’m the one who found them.”

“Please, Mandy. Stay here.”

She wavered, her porcelain skin growing paler. She had a fan of delicate wrinkles at the outer edges of each eye, and her upper lip was incised with vertical creases that deepened as she tightened her mouth.

“Micah. I will
not
be sheltered.”

Dalton let it go, stepping reluctantly aside as she opened the door to a large well-lit room with an elegant coffered ceiling done in tones of taupe and gray with wide crown moldings. A half-open

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door on the far side of the room led to a large master bath. The lights were on in that bathroom, and what looked like a large red towel was lying crumpled up in the half-open door. In the center of the great room, in front of a row of tall sash windows, was a large sleigh bed heaped with satin pillows. Dalton, who had braced himself for the room, stopped abruptly.

“Not here,” said Mandy, close behind him. “They’re in the bathroom.”

They crossed the hand-knotted Persian rug on little cat feet, their shoes whispering, and stopped before the half-open door. The crumpled bath towel that lay just inside the door was holding back a red tide of blood. Pin lights from the halogen fixtures on the ceiling glittered like diamonds on the congealed surface of a lake of blood. He leaned over this clotted mess of fabric and fluid, pushed the door open, and stepped into the room...

. . . AND GRADUALLY BECAME AWARE
of the fact that Mandy Pownall was holding on to his upper arm, her fingers digging in, her breathing ragged. He wanted her out of here, for her sake, and because she was a distraction.

“What can I do?”

“First of all, do not throw up. Go call Removals.”

“Okay,” she said, relief in her voice. “Don’t forget the mirror.”

She was gone, leaving Dalton alone with the bodies.

He stepped carefully around the matted bloody towels and moved in close to the knotted cords that had cut so deeply into Joanne’s ankles that her feet had swelled into eggplant-colored balloons. He looked carefully at the knots themselves.

All three bodies had been strung up in the same way, an open-eye loop with the free end run in and pulled out to make a lariat, then around the ankles, then a running loop over the shower railing, and

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then . . . and then he did not care to complete the rest of this mental image. But it was range work.

Dalton had seen enough of this kind of casually efficient hand slaughter when he was a kid back in Tucumcari. It was cowboy work, done the way a man who was used to cleaning game would do it. Even the throat and abdominal cuts were practiced and efficient, a single vertical slice along the left carotid, and in the belly a low punching start with a deep circular rising sweep and a quick step back to avoid the avalanche.

Cowboy-style.

Dalton recalled Jack Stallworth’s words:

“Sally says she’s been pretty silent. Not a call for four days, and she’s not answering her voice mail.”

Four days.

Naumann had gone dark in Venice on the third of October, stopped filing reports, never picked up his e-mail, shut off his Treo. Typically, Langley hadn’t sent Dalton out to try to track him down until the seventh. And sometime between Saturday night and Sunday, the seventh of October, Naumann died in Cortona. In the courtyard of San Nicolò. From unknown causes. Could Naumann have done this?

Yes.

It
could
have been Naumann.

An agency pro like Porter Naumann could get from Venice to London and back without leaving an obvious trail, and the European Union had made doing that sort of thing even easier in the last two years. But why would Naumann
do
something like ...this?

This
atrocity.

This wasn’t even remotely like him. Naumann had done some very cruel things in the field, but that was combat, even if it was covert combat, and he’d done it to legitimate if undeclared enemies of the country. But what had been done here—this was...
savored.

You could see the time that had been taken, the way in which the

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killing had been drawn out. Prolonged. There wasn’t a chance in hell that Porter Naumann would do something like this; it just wasn’t in him. This inner certainty wasn’t anything he could have supported in a court of law, or even justified to his boss if he had been a homicide cop. But this wasn’t a court, and he wasn’t a homicide cop, and on-the-fly operational judgments were being made—had to be made—all the time.

There was no point tying up limited Agency resources doing due diligence and chasing down everyone in London and the continent with Opportunity and Means when your professional gut was taking you straight to the heart of the matter. Unlike the homicide cop and the DA in a civilian case, Dalton
knew
Porter Naumann, and Porter Naumann would not have been capable of this kind of killing, especially not with his wife and children.

Hell. Not
any
woman, anywhere.

He just wasn’t
made
that way.

If not Naumann, then who?

Who do you really like for this, Micah?

He knew damn well. On Monday night, the eighth of October, Sweetwater was having dinner in Carovita, because Dalton saw him there. Carovita was Naumann’s favorite restaurant—he ate there almost every night he was in Venice. It was reasonable to infer that Naumann and Sweetwater could have been in Carovita at the same time. It certainly put them in the same territory. Then Dalton sees Sweetwater at the same restaurant, and immediately afterward he slams into The Night of the Emerald Green Spider.

Next, on Tuesday afternoon, Dalton locates—no, he’s led to— Cora Vasari’s house on Calle dei Morti, and Cora says Sweetwater left her rental flat the day before, on the Monday, a timely and convenient departure, by the way.

Working it backward, it all could have started here, in London.

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Dalton had spoken with Stallworth on the Monday, and Stall-worth said it had been four days since anyone had heard from Joanne. Four days from Monday meant last Thursday, the fourth of October. Yes. Sweetwater could have been in London on the fourth.

If Naumann could have done it, then it could have been done by anyone, including Sweetwater. There was no reason to attribute this slaughter to Naumann just because he had gone dark around the time it was done. But other than Dalton’s gut instincts, there was even
less
reason to hang this on Sweetwater, other than tenuous circumstantial connections, such as the presence of morning glories in Naumann’s suite and later in Cora’s flat, and the fact that Naumann and Sweetwater had both been in Venice around the same time. And in Cortona: the grocery bag they found in the trash can, that put Sweetwater in Cortona as well.

So what?

Lots of people were in Venice and Cortona all the time. It didn’t prove a damn thing. All Dalton really had was what amounted to a strange gut-level obsession with a weird old man in lizard-skin cowboy boots. But it would not go away.

He sat down on the toilet seat lid and concentrated on the bodies, taking in the scene, trying to put himself in the mind of a man who was capable of doing something like this. What could a reasonable man—a sane man—infer from this kind of butchery?

First of all, the guy was a sadist all the way to his bone marrow, a true aficionado of human suffering. It was one thing to kill three people. Hit them and split. That was what a killer would do.

A
professional
killer.

So this guy, whatever else he was, was no professional.

He had spent far too long in the house, possibly all night. The cleanup. The wipe-down. Getting his prints and stray DNA, his skin

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cells and hairs and leavings off the surfaces, would have required at least a couple of hours.

No real professional would put himself into that kind of situation: you got in, wore protection, made the hit, got your ass out. You didn’t hang around to...
enjoy
yourself; that kind of indulgence would get a pro caught and killed in a very short time.

So
definitely
not a professional hit.

But a hit that
could
have been carried out by a professional who, in this one instance, was not behaving like a pro.

And it was a good, highly skilled hit, in the sense that the entry and execution, although elaborate and prolonged, had been successful. The killer had gotten into the town house, disabled the security.

Spent his party time with the victims.

And gotten clean away without leaving a trace. A pro at entry, at stealth, at not being caught. Perhaps, in addition, someone with access to an electronic cloaking device, a magnetic field radiator capable of burning out the sensors of digital cameras.

Dalton had heard some vague rumors about gear like that; it was all high-level gear. Government gear.

Not necessarily
our
government.

The Brits could have gear like that. So might the Mossad, and some of the Pakistani counterintelligence outfits.

Also the Germans.

Another good question: Was this guy military. Or a spook?

If so,
whose
spook was he?

And we come back around to the chaos of the killing itself.

No reliable, well-trained spook would kill like that, at least not for any reason you could attribute to a recognizable intelligence goal. Neither Joanne Naumann nor the girls were very plausible targets.

If the idea was to destabilize London Station, to disrupt Burke and Single, then it made more sense to take out Naumann himself.

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Or Mandy.

Or you, Micah.

If it wasn’t a tactical hit, then it was ...what?

Done for the sheer pleasure?

Certainly that element was here.

But why
these
targets? What made the killer pick these three women, out of a city of seven million people?

No, it wasn’t random; they were
chosen.

But chosen for what?

Only one reason was workable, in the sense that only one reason gave Dalton an operational handle on the killings.

Their connection to Porter Naumann.

So we have a possible spook killer who’s in this for the joy of it, but he’s not picking his targets at random.

There’s an overarching strategy here: somebody’s being
pun
ished.
Was that somebody Porter Naumann?

Why him? And how did the killer know who Porter Naumann was in the first place?

No idea.

And what did this killer have against Naumann?

Again, no idea.

The longer Dalton looked at the three brutalized corpses, the more convinced he became that all of this had something to do with Sweetwater. For reasons known only to him, Sweetwater came to London, found the house in Belgravia, made an entry, killed the women.

Then he went to Venice.

He
must
have gone to Venice next, if he was acting alone—which Dalton had no reason to believe—because that was where Naumann was, and where he died.

But why go to Venice?

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To
show
Naumann what he had done? That would fit the pattern of a sadistic killer. Fit the idea of the killings as punishment. Which means the killer

knew
that Naumann was in Venice. How did he know
that
?

He looked at Joanne’s body.
She
would have known. And she would have told her tormentor. By the end, she would have told him everything she knew about Porter Naumann.

Mandy was at the door again, her eyes fixed on Dalton’s face. “The Removals van will be here in ten minutes.” “Mandy, did Forensics get any of Porter’s DNA off the bodies?” She shook her head, keeping her attention fixed on him. “No. There was no mitochondrial DNA of any kind on them.

Forensics figured they’d been hosed down with the showerhead.” “What about the drains?” “Forensics pulled them; they’d been cleaned recently. There were

traces of chlorine, a few hairs that were identified as Joanne’s.” “Nothing else? No sign of Porter at all?” “Not in the scene. His DNA and prints are all over the house,

along with Joanne’s and the girls’. But none at the scene.” “Mandy, do you know if Porter had a spike?” “One of those GPS thingies, the little silver ones they stick under

your skin?” “Yes.” “No. He thought the idea of having a spike implanted was a se

curity risk. Even if the locator output was encrypted, the very fact that you had one in your body was a tip-off to any foreign agency that you were definitely not just some kind of banker. Why?”

“I’m trying to eliminate Porter as a suspect—” “I thought he wasn’t!” “He’s not. But if I could
prove
he wasn’t in London—” “Prove it! To whom?”

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“Mandy, he went dark on the third. We didn’t find his body until the seventh.”

“And you found it in
fucking
Cortona, Micah. If you’re looking for suspects, how about me?”

“You?”

“Why not. I loved Porter. If his wife is dead...”

“Fine. And
did
you do this?”

“Would I admit it? If I had?”

“Yes. I think so. Have you ever killed anyone, Mandy?”

“Not yet, Micah. But if you keep on trying to lay this on Por-ter’s grave, I could find some murder in my heart. It
wasn’t
Porter, Micah!”

“I know, I know.”

“You want to prove he wasn’t here. What about his cell? His Treo? His laptop—if he used a Bluetooth it would show a location.”