came up for air, ignored Angela’s taunts, then submerged again. He used the pilings for leverage. Once he’d dragged the body into the partial light around the Italian boat, through the cloud of kicked sand, he saw why it had been such a struggle. The bloated body—a dark-bearded man—was rope-bound at the waist to a length of heavy metal tubing: a piece of an engine, he guessed.
He broke the surface gasping. This water, which had seemed so clean a minute before, was now filthy. He spat out leakage, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. Above him, hands on her knees, Angela said, “I can hold my breath longer than that. Watch.”
“Help me up.”
She set his clothes in a pile, kneeled on the pier, and reached down to him. Soon he was over the edge, sitting with his knees up, dripping. A breeze set him shivering.
“Well?” said Angela.
“What does Frank look like?”
She reached into her blazer and tugged out a small photograph she’d brought to show to strangers. A frontal portrait, morose but efficiently lit, so that all Frank Dawdle’s features were visible. A clean-shaven man, bald on top, white hair over the ears, sixty or so.
“He didn’t grow a beard since this, did he?”
Angela shook her head, then looked worried. “But the last known photo of Masković …”
He got to his feet. “Unless the Portorož murder rate has gone wild, that’s your Serb down there.”
“I don’t—”
Charles cut her off before she could argue: “We’ll talk with the SOVA, but you need to call Vienna. Now. Check Frank’s office. See what’s missing. Find out what was on his computer before he left.”
He slipped into his shirt, his wet body bleeding the white cotton gray. Angela started fooling with her phone, but her fingers had trouble with the buttons. Charles took her hands in his and looked into her eyes.
“This is serious. Okay? But don’t freak out until we know everything. And let’s not tell the Slovenes about the body. We don’t want them holding us for questioning.”
Again, she nodded.
Charles let go of her and grabbed his jacket, pants, and shoes, then began walking back up the pier, toward the shore. From her boat, her chubby knees to her chin, the Italian woman let out a low whistle. “Bello,” she said.
An hour and a half later, they were preparing to leave again. Charles wanted to drive, but Angela put up a fight. It was the shock—without him having to say a word, she’d put it together herself. Frank Dawdle, her beloved boss, had killed Leo Bernard, killed Dušan Masković, and walked off with three million dollars of the U.S. government’s money.
The most damning piece of evidence came from her call to Vienna. The hard drive of Dawdle’s computer was missing. Based on power usage, the in-house computer expert believed it had been removed sometime Friday morning, just before Frank and Leo departed for Slovenia.
Despite this, she clung to a new, hopeful theory: The Slovenes were responsible. Frank might have taken his hard drive, but he would only have done so under coercion. His old SOVA buddies were threatening him. When they met with Bogdan Krizan, the local SOVA head, she glared across the Hotel Slovenia table while the old man gobbled a plate of fried calamari and explained that he’d spent Friday night with Frank Dawdle, drinking in his room.
“What do you mean—you visited him?” she said. “Didn’t you have work to do?”
Krizan paused over his food, holding his fork loosely. He had an angular face that seemed to expand when he shrugged in his exaggerated Balkan manner. “We’re old friends, Miss Yates. Old spies. Drinking together until the early morning is what we do. Besides, I’d heard about Charlotte. I offered sympathy in a bottle.”
“Charlotte?” asked Charles.
“His wife,” Krizan said, then corrected: “Ex-wife.”
Angela nodded. “She left him about six months ago. He took it pretty hard.”
“Tragic,” said Krizan.
To Charles, the picture was nearly complete. “What did he tell you about his visit here?”
“Nothing. I asked, of course, many times. But he’d only wink at me. Now, I’m beginning to wish he’d trusted me.”
“Me, too.”
“Is he in trouble?” Krizan said this without any visible worry.
Charles shook his head. Angela’s cell phone rang, and she left the table.
“There’s a bitter woman,” said Krizan, nodding at her backside. “You know what Frank calls her?”
Charles didn’t.
“My blue-eyed wonder.” He grinned. “Lovely man, but he wouldn’t know a lesbian if she punched him in the nose.”
Charles leaned closer as Krizan dug into his calamari. “You can’t think of anything else?”
“It’s hard when you won’t tell me what this is about,” he said, then chewed. “But no. He seemed very normal to me.”
Near the door, Angela pressed a palm against one ear so she could better hear the caller. Charles got up and shook Krizan’s hand. “Thanks for your help.”
“If Frank is in trouble,” said Krizan, holding on to him a moment longer than was polite, “then I hope you’ll be fair with him. He’s put in a lot of good years for your country. If he’s slipped up in the autumn of his life, then who’s to blame him?” That exaggerated shrug returned, and he let Charles go. “We can’t keep to perfection one hundred percent of the time. None of us are God.”
Charles left Krizan to his philosophizing and reached Angela as she hung up, her face red.
“What is it?”
“That was Max.”
“Who?”
“He’s the embassy night clerk. In Vienna. On Thursday night, one of Frank’s informers sent in information about a Russian we’re watching. Big oligarch. Roman Ugrimov.”
Charles knew about Ugrimov—a businessman who’d left Russia to save his skin, but kept influential contacts there as he spread his diversified portfolio around the world. “What kind of information?”
“The blackmail kind.” She paused. “He’s a pedophile.”
“Might be a coincidence,” Charles said as they left the restaurant, entering the long socialist-mauve lobby, where three SOVA agents stood around, watching out for their boss.
“Maybe. But yesterday Ugrimov moved into his new house. In Venice.”
Again, Charles stopped, and Angela had to walk back to him. Staring at the bright lobby windows, the final pieces fitted together. He said, “That’s just across the water. With a boat, it’s ideal.”
“I suppose, but—”
“What does someone with three million dollars in stolen money need most?” Charles cut in. “He needs a new name. A man with Roman Ugrimov’s connections could easily supply papers. If persuaded.”
She didn’t answer, only stared at him.
“One more call,” he said. “Get someone to check with the harbormasters in Venice. Find out if any boats were abandoned in the last two days.”
They waited for the callback in a central café that had yet to adjust to the postcommunist foreigners who now shared their thirty-mile coastline. Behind the zinc counter a heavy matron in a coffee-and-beer-splattered