The Venetian Judgment by David Stone

to Aldrich Ames,” said Dalton, stunned that things had gotten that serious. “That kind of quarantine operation would need top-level approval. Right from the Director of National Intelligence. He’d have to inform the President, and maybe his cabinet as well.”

    “That’s what I thought too. And I knew Tony wouldn’t isolate Deacon Cather unless he was sure he could get away with it. And he’d want it written down in a formal memo, so he could use it to cover himself if Cather somehow survived . . . whatever it was. So I’ve been hitting Pinky’s lockbox almost every day for the last month—”

    “Why take that risk? And why cover for Cather? He’s a grown-up.”

    “I know how you feel about him. I know Cather promised to bring you back in, and then he never called. I do think he meant what he said, and I think he’s left you out in the cold right now because he knows he’s under some sort of a shadow and doesn’t want you dragged into it. Anyway, there’s no way in the world that Deacon Cather is a mole. If there is a mole at all, which I doubt. Mariah Vale is using this as a way to step all over the operational side, that’s all. She hates it when anybody at Clandestine Services actually goes out and does things in the real world. If she had her way, everybody in Clandestine would sit around in the Bubble listening to Yanni and visualizing world peace. Anyway, this memo turned up two weeks ago. When I saw it, all I could think of was to warn you—”

    “Me? Why?”

    “You were, are one of his Cleaners. If Mariah Vale was trying to hobble Cather, then she’d start by pulling in all his Cleaners and running them through the ringer. Porter always said, in any audit one way to find out what the target is trying to protect is to find out what sectors he never seemed to be interested in at all. So what he did with the Cleaners Unit would be one way to help build up a total picture of what Cather was thinking and doing, and when. You know the drill: find the mole by finding out what the enemy knows and when he knew it and work backward through the possible sources of that information. Look for points of intersection, contact opportunities, travel itineraries that might coincide with major tactical shifts in the opposing intelligence operations. Watch for our sources going silent or doubling and run that backwards to see if that coincides with something the mole might have done, a trip he might have taken. Build up a complete map of the mole’s influence and you will eventually get him. That’s how MI6 finally got Philby and how we got Ames. That’s exactly what Vale is doing. She’s already called in Dewey Strickland and Javier Souza and Miles Terry—”

    “I thought Miles Terry was on the Orpheus ?”

    Mandy winced at the mention of the ultrasecret floating CIA prison disguised as a hospital ship that Porter Naumann had set up for Cather a couple of years back, using the Burke and Single banking house as a cover for the operation.

    “He is. Or was. The Orpheus was in the eastern Med, off Rhodes. They sent a Sea King to take him off. He was pretty ticked because they had just taken on a new houseguest.”

    “Houseguest? You mean a defector ?”

    “That’s the rumor. One of the old Moscow Center guys. Spent fifteen years as a Rezident in D.C. They didn’t name him but Pinky had made a note beside the decryption. ‘Y. Kirensky’—mean anything?”

    “You don’t mean Yitzak Kirensky! Christ, he’s famous. He’s one of the biggest old thugs in Moscow Center! Don’t tell me he came in?”

    “Yes. I think that was the name. He must be pretty old by now. He came in to the station officer in Athens. They got him onto the Orpheus the same day. The guy had some kind of pacemaker, and it was malfunctioning. Kirensky, he was pretty fragile and seemed anxious to talk. Miles felt they were right on the edge of a—”

    “Man,” said Dalton, thinking of the Yurchenko defection in 1985,