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 apron served Laško Pivo on tap to underpaid dockworkers. The woman seemed annoyed by Angela’s request for a cappuccino, and when it arrived it turned out to be a too-sweet instant mix. Charles convinced her to just drink it, then asked why she hadn’t told him that Frank’s wife had walked out on him.
She took another sip and made a face. “Lots of people get divorced.”
“It’s one of the most stressful things there is,” he said. “Divorces change people. Often, they get an urge to start again at zero and redo their lives, but better.” He rubbed his nose. “Maybe Frank decided he should’ve been working for the other side all along.”
“There is no other side anymore.”
“Sure there is. Himself.”
She didn’t seem convinced of anything yet. Her phone rang, and as she listened she shook her head in anger—at Frank, at Charles, at herself. Rome station told her that on Sunday morning a boat with Dubrovnik registration tags had been found floating just beyond the Lido’s docks. “They say there’s blood inside,” the station chief explained.
After she’d hung up, Charles offered to drive—he didn’t want her Austrian habits slowing them down. In reply, Angela showed him her stiff middle finger.
He won out in the end, though, because once they were among the tangled hills of the upper peninsula, she started to cry. He got her to pull over, and they switched seats. Near the Italian border, she tried to explain away her hysterical behavior.
“It’s hard. You work years teaching yourself to trust a few people. Not many, but just enough to get by. And once you do trust them, there’s no going back. There can’t be. Because how else can you do your job?”
Charles let that sit without replying, but wondered if this
