Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  “I follow.” She grabbed a Kleenex.

  “I talked to Al,” he said. “He’s got his own problems, which I can’t go into on an open phone. You just hang on there, and he’ll call when he can get a phone on the Jeff. Your turn: what’s happening? Peretz says you’re seeing a lawyer.”

  She told him about Emma Pasternak and the calls to the CIA. “I think she’ll be okay, Mike, but she’s real strange. Maybe—you know, maybe a lesbian, shit, I don’t know—”

  “That gross you out?”

  “Oh, God, no, what d’you think? No, she just isn’t—sympathetic.”

  Dukas grunted. He took a moment, then said, “I gotta make this meeting she set up at the CIA.”

  “You’re not invited.”

  “What’s the CIA Internals guy like?”

  “He sounded nice. Nicer than her. I felt sorry for him.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t feel too sorry. This is the asshole gave you the shaft. Okay, so I gotta check around, get a line on him. Then I need to talk to your lawyer and tell her I’m tagging along.”

  “She won’t like it.”

  “Jeez, I’m terrified. Give me her number.”

  She read off the number from her book. “Do I go to this meeting, Mike?”

  “God, no. You wait for Al to call, get a lot of sleep, call home, talk to your kids, then go to a movie. We’ll call you when it’s over.”

  “We?”

  “Me and the Bride of Frankenstein. She’ll be eating out of my hand.”

  Right.

  Rose was going out to eat, but she couldn’t miss Alan’s call, and she lay down just for a minute, and then she was waking to hear the telephone and find her hand already on the instrument. Groping it to her, she mumbled something and heard her husband’s voice saying her name and then, “How are you? How are you?”

  She felt a rush of joy.

  Suburban Washington.

  Tony Moscowic was wearing a sport coat and a white shirt and an actual goddam tie, because he wanted to look legitimate, and he didn’t want anybody at the hospice to remember him from the last time, when he wore an orange jumpsuit. The last time, he had planted the bug that had allowed Suter to listen in on George Shreed’s confession to his wife; this time, he was going to remove it. He had his legit clothes and a visitor’s badge, and he went right to the room that had been Mrs Shreed’s and jingled his picks in his pocket, ready to pop the lock in four seconds, max, and was surprised and maybe disappointed that the door was unlocked.

  Bad omen, he thought. Too easy is a bad omen. He closed the door behind him, turned on the light, and he was heading for the wall switch by the bed when a male voice said, “Who the hell are you?”

  The fucking bug was behind the wall plate. He could have had the plate off and the bug in his pocket in one minute. Less. Now here was some guy, asking him who the hell he was. Good question, Homer!

  “Who are you, if I might ask, sir? You’re in my aunt’s room!” That was his story—sort of. The story, if he got caught with the wall plate actually off and in plain sight, was he was checking out the structural integrity of the building before he moved his aunt there. Weak, but it would work for a practical nurse. Above that level, he got more inventive.

  “You have the wrong room,” the guy said. He was sitting in an armchair where he’d fallen asleep, Tony guessed. No energy. He was thin, blond, wearing a cashmere sweater that was almost purple, and Tony thought he was a fag, meaning he was here to die of AIDS. Swell.

  “Jeez, I guess I do. Seventeen?”

  “Nineteen,” the guy said. He sounded okay, no longer surprised, maybe kind of amused. He was smiling at Tony. “I just moved in.” He smiled some more. “I won’t be moving out.”

  Tony could see now that there were changes in the room. It even smelled different. He was losing his touch; jeez, he could have really put his foot in it here. “You have my greatest sympathy,” he said, moving toward the door.

  “Yeah. Mine, too.” The guy smiled. “See you.”

  That blew getting the bug. Now he’d have to wait until the guy actually checked out or at least went comatose, and holy shit, the room would probably be filled with grieving fairies holding candlelight vigils and he’d never get that fucking wall plate off. It was really, really unfair. What were they running here, a revolving door, the lady dies one night, the next they’ve got a new guy dying in her room? Fucking Heartbreak Hotel, for Christ’s sake.

  He shucked off the sport coat as soon as he was outside the hospice and walked up the street, loosening the tie and tossing the coat over his shoulder. Suter’s car was waiting at the end of the block, and Tony took a moment to get his story straight and then walked right to it and got in.

  “Did you get it?”

  “Piece a cake. Drive.”

  “Let me see it.”

  “You nuts or something? It’s gone. Wipe it down, smash it good with your foot, throw it in the nearest dumpster. That’s my routine. Bugs are like guns—use them once, get rid of them. Drive.” So, he’d hung a story on Suter, so what? The important thing was he’d wiped the bug down when he put it in; nobody would ever find it; and if they did, couple years, ten years from now, so what? “You know that doggie is still sick?” he said. “I think it was the pizza. I didn’t feel too good next day, either. My neighbor’s pissed.” Suter said nothing, and Moscowic said, “Some story your boss told! Huh? Huh?” He tapped one palm on his knee. “Treason, you know—Jeez, that’s worse than child-molesting.”

  “We have to get into Shreed’s house.” Moscowic missed the emotions that flashed across Suter’s face—fear, then hatred.

  “You nuts? What for?”

  “Computers. There’s a memorial service for the wife on Thursday. You can do it then.”

  “Djou hear what I just said? You’re nuts! You think I’m breaking into some CIA guy’s house, you’re nuts. And another thing, he’ll have a security system, which is no big deal if you don’t care who finds out after, but bypass it and try to make it look like it never happens, trust me, you’re nuts.”

  “I want you to go into that house.”

  “Not Thursday, I’m not. Why?”

  “I need a hacker. You know any hackers?”

  “Do I look like Bill Gates or something? No, I don’t know any hackers.” Tony stared out the window at a strip mall. “Vietnamese, they’re all Vietnamese,” he said, meaning the strip mall and not the hackers. “But I can find you one.” Meaning a hacker, not a Vietnamese.

  “He’s got to be good.”

  “Oh, that should make it easy. What I think, some kid’s been busted and isn’t allowed near a computer for two years or something, somebody like that. Itchy, you know? And not a stranger to fucking with the law, because that’s what he’s already done. Am I right?”

  “Then we have to get him into Shreed’s house. Only once.”

  “So what’s this Thursday shit? You think I’m going to find the magical mystical hacker by Thursday?”

  “Time is of the essence.”

  “Oh, yeah? well, caution is of the essence, my friend, so I’m not going in anyplace till I’ve scoped it out but good, plus finding your perfect hacker is going to take more than five minutes. Let me out at the Iwo Jima Memorial; I’m meeting somebody.”

  Suter drove without saying anything for several minutes. Then, as they approached Arlington, he said, “You keep your mouth shut about this.”

  “What’d I say to you the first time we met? You don’t fucking listen to me. Leave me off on the other side of the circle.”

  “If you talk about this, you’re dead.”

  Tony laughed. And laughed. He got out of the car, looked around, leaned back in and said, “Don’t try it,” still laughing. He watched Suter’s car roll away and, because he wasn’t really meeting anybody, he walked.

  Suter, in the car, was trying to digest what Moscowic had said about treason. It wasn’t treason that was proving indigestible; it was the man’s talking about it. M
oscowic, Suter saw, would have to be dealt with.

  6

  USS Thomas Jefferson.

  By 1000 next morning, the detachment was showing signs of life. The relief Alan felt at having the admiral off his back had spread to his men: Senior Chief Frazer had located an entire pallett of missing stuff stored forward in the hangar bay; Reilley, Campbell, and Lang were in the back of the ready room, getting a lesson in the MARI simulator from Chief Navarro; and Stevens and Cohen were briefing for a check flight on 902’s hydraulics.

  Alan had twenty minutes before his flight with Stevens. He headed toward the dirty-shirt wardroom, cut into line, grabbed a burger, and wolfed it down while hustling back, getting there just in time to see the television change from a movie to the closed-circuit brief. He watched the young female jg intel officer with professional interest; her brief was neither brilliant nor boring. Alan scribbled frequencies as fast as he could.

  “No backseaters?” he asked, eyeing the empty chairs behind him.

  “We’ve been changed to a tanker.” Stevens still sounded belligerent, but perhaps he always sounded that way. “In S-3s, mostly we pass gas.” Ordinary S-3s do, you mean, Alan thought. He wondered why Rafe had put his det aircraft in the tanker pool. The det wasn’t supposed to handle air-wing crap.

  “Is 902 going up for a check flight this event?” Alan tried to make professional small talk.

  “Yeah. If the hydraulics check, we can take her out tomorrow.”

  “Need parts from the beach?”

  “On the way?” This was the closest to civilized discourse Alan had got with Stevens.

  “Roger. I sent a message to Aviano to put the parts and the missing Mister Soleck on the same COD.”

  “So we’ll get a new aircrew and our spare parts? I’d rather have the parts.” Stevens didn’t look at him. “Sure you aren’t too important to ride along on a tanker, Commander?” And there was that damned tone again, a stubborn refusal to come around.

  “How about you lighten up, Stevens? It’s going to be a long cruise, and you’re stuck with me. And, yeah, I’ve done one or two tanker flights before. Let’s walk.” He planned to spend the flight talking to Stevens about the det.

  He had planned a reorganization, starting with putting Campbell in Maintenance in place of Cohen, because he had an engineering degree and seemed to have his minor responsibilities organized. Cohen got the liaison slot, a dangerous move—Alan had already seen how prickly Cohen could be. In the long run, the success of the project depended on their ability to exchange information with the F-18 squadrons. Cohen was an LSO with a full qualification in F-18s; he had been to school with some of the nugget F-18 pilots. He hoped Stevens bought it. There was more to come, when he had a chance to breathe.

  Alan picked up his father’s helmet and his thermos and headed for the flight deck, a different man from the one he had been yesterday.

  CIAHQ.

  Emma Pasternak railed at Mike Dukas over the telephone and said No goddamit he wasn’t horning in on her meeting, but he was already on Menzes’s agenda because he was investigating the Agency’s interference in Navy procedures, and Menzes must have known it was better to have him. So Dukas got to go to the meeting at the CIA, which actually happened late in the afternoon and not at ten a.m. By the time he shook Menzes’s hand and looked him in the eye, he was prepared for exactly what he got: an ethical hardnose. Well, it took one to recognize one. Menzes was thin, dark, fortyish, one of those people who worked out a lot; he must have been thought a hunk when he was younger, Dukas thought. Now, he looked tired.

  Emma Pasternak was late. She was doing the Agency one better than it did other people: typically, it was the Agency who kept the rest waiting. Dukas jumped at the opportunity her lateness offered. “Let’s deal,” he said. Menzes looked surprised but led Dukas out of the conference room and down the corridor to the big third-floor lobby, where the gold-and-black memorial to the late William Casey dominated one wall. Some people called it The Shrine; cynics called it the SOB—Shrine of Bill. Menzes led him across the echoing marble floor to a spot below Casey’s left shoulder. Dukas looked at him, then at Casey (real gold), and then he rested his back against the wall and folded his arms. “Let’s deal,” he said again.

  Menzes looked skeptical. “With what?”

  “What have you guys got on Rose Siciliano?”

  “I can’t tell you. What’s your interest, anyway?”

  “Straight for straight, okay? She’s a friend. But she’s also Navy, and you guys have fucked the Navy. What’s up?”

  “That wasn’t my doing.”

  “Upstairs? Okay, I wouldn’t tell some outsider, either. The way I see it, the lawyer lady has you guys by the balls in the PR department, am I right? It’s the way her law firm works—lots of fireworks, lots of media. Unless you’ve got a great case, it’s better to give it up, am I right?”

  “I’d buy that.”

  “Have you got a great case?”

  He waited until Menzes said, “We over-reacted. That’s off the record.”

  “Understood. Okay, what I’m going to do is get together with your Inter-Agency people and work out what happened. That’s not your bailiwick, correct me if I’m wrong. Right? Sooner or later, though, you gotta share what you got with us. You see what I’m saying? Our position at NCIS is, will be, you should have come to us with it first.”

  Menzes gave away nothing. Not a flicker. Dukas tried again. “Give me the outline. Give it to me in one sentence.”

  “What do we get in return?”

  Dukas shook his head. “It’s you guys did the wrong here. Am I right?”

  Not a flicker.

  “Give it to me in one sentence and get Siciliano’s orders changed back, and I’ll pull the lawyer lady off you.”

  “How?”

  “Through the client. Never mind how. Come on, Menzes—one fucking sentence, you can’t compromise security in one sentence!”

  Menzes chewed one side of his lower lip and leaned back against the wall, arms crossed. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and a pastel tie, and his arms looked wiry and muscular and hairy. “We got an intercept. Siciliano was implicated. That’s two sentences.”

  “Implicated in what?”

  “That wasn’t the deal.”

  “I’d like something to work on. You understand how the Navy works, how easy it is to destroy a career? This is one very, very dedicated officer, a real piledriver; she’s had two kids by planning them for her shore tours, flying a chopper on her sea tours—Let me tell you something. Africa. 1994. War in southern Sudan—you got the picture? She flies a chopper into a hot zone, puts down and lifts me and another guy out. Menzes, whatever else is involved, I owe this woman!”

  The two men looked each other in the eye. Dukas knew how hard this was for the other man, who had to evaluate a stranger, measure his own trust, decide how much he had been used himself by the system and how much he owed to his own idea of right behavior and of decency.

  “Something called Peacemaker,” Menzes said at last. “That’s my final word, and if you quote me, I’ll deny it.” He looked at Dukas’s face again. “That means something to you,” he said.

  “It sure does.” Rose had worked on Project Peacemaker two years before. “Okay, we got a deal. Haven’t we—haven’t we got a deal? You’re gonna withdraw whatever you did and get the orders rescinded, send her back to astronaut training?”

  “She’s on our books as a security risk. This is a very grave situation, Dukas.”

  “I know that. But you know what the proper procedure is—you tell us and you tell Navy intel, and we do an evaluation and an investigation. It’s our call if we bring in the Bureau. Right?”

  “Right, but if she’s a spy, now she knows we’re on to her and she’ll—”

  “What the fuck, she didn’t know the moment she got the change of orders? What are you talking? It’s a goddam given of my profession, you’re investigating somebody, you don’t make waves until y
ou’re ready to!”

  Menzes shrugged. “That wasn’t my call.”

  “Have we got a deal?”

  “Only the change of orders, and what I told you. That’s it. We don’t budge on access or on anything else.”

  “Deal.” They shook hands. Menzes had a real grip.

  A woman’s heels sounded on the marble floor like gunshots, and both heads turned to watch her march diagonally across. She was pale, scowling, swinging an attaché case like a weapon she was just waiting to use.

  “That’s Pasternak,” Menzes said.

  “What do we do about her?”

  “The twelve-hour rule.”

  “Meaning?”

  “We let her scream for an hour, then we say we’ll consider it, and twelve hours later I agree to what you and I have already agreed to. Only we don’t tell her that.” He made a face. “The hard part will be listening to her.”

  They crossed the lobby and went into the conference room, which looked like a party that wasn’t working out: all the Agency people were down at one end, and Emma Pasternak was sitting alone at a long table. Dukas went right to her, stuck out his hand, and said, “I’m Mike Dukas.”

  She ignored the hand and started shouting. She went on shouting for most of an hour—Menzes’s timing was pretty good—and she used every trash-mouth word in the book to batter Menzes, CIA Security, lack of access, injustice, bureaucratic stupidity, and perhaps even (Dukas had stopped listening) rabies. Then Menzes begged her to give them twelve hours.

  And, eventually, Emma Pasternak accepted.

  Because she knew this is the way it would be! Dukas thought. Holy shit, she knows about the twelve-hour rule, too!

  “That’s—six-thirty tomorrow morning,” she was snarling. “You can leave a message on my voice mail. Full access, and my client gets her orders changed back to Houston. Yes?”

  Menzes lifted his shoulders. “I’ll meet with my people and get back to you in twelve hours.”