Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  Triffler went into his iron-assed official voice. “I got the report on the Siciliano home computer.”

  “Nothing, right?”

  “It’s loaded with classified material.”

  It was as if Triffler had come through the phone and whacked him. “Can’t be!” Dukas cried.

  “Loaded.” Was Triffler pleased? Maybe he was simply pleased to have something positive to report. “Geeks say there’s ‘residue in the Temp files,’ whatever that means, plus ‘sectors on the hard drives adulterated with highly classified materials not effectively deleted from Recycle Bin.’ Later on they say something about—let’s see—it’s about how she tried to delete stuff—yeah, here: ‘Attempts to delete show usual lack of understanding of computer technology by naive user.’”

  It was the one moment when Dukas, for all his love of her, doubted Rose. He had been jerked around by a lot of women, lied to a lot, conned a lot; it would hardly have been a new experience. But Rose? He felt that gut-sunk nausea that he got when somebody lied to him, then the familiar wave of loathing.

  For Rose? Jesus, what could he be thinking!

  But he had been a Navy cop too long to say such a thing couldn’t happen.

  “You’re sure it’s her computer.”

  “Cast-iron evidence trail. She even identified it for the agent—hassled him, in fact. I got that somewhere—”

  “Leave it, leave it. Okay. Listen, Triffler, keep this to yourself, you hear me? I want the whole report on my desk soonest, so get your ass back here today. Tell the geeks to put that computer on ice—nobody else touches it. If they fuck the evidence trail, tell them I’ll have their balls in court.”

  Dukas hung up and sat in the creaking desk chair. The floor was littered with files and fallen crates. He stared at them without seeing them, his heart breaking but his mind racing as he saw the possibilities, the likelihoods, the ways the investigation could go now.

  When Triffler came in that afternoon, he shook his head in disgust at the mess. Dukas had cleared enough space with one arm to write longhand notes and swing around to his computer; otherwise, except for some new Chinese-food cartons, the chaos was as it had been.

  “This is a disgrace,” Triffler said. He sounded like somebody’s mother.

  “Where’s the report?”

  “In my hand. I don’t dare put the fucking thing down; it’ll disappear.”

  “Gimme.” Dukas held out a hand and took the folder. “If it’s any consolation to you, Triffler, I’m not where I’d like to be, either; if I had my druthers, I’d be sitting in a brand-new office in The Hague, with a big-assed receptionist and two gung-ho French cops to assist me, and I’d be running a whiz-bang new program at twice my current salary. But I’m here, and you’re here, and I’m busy, so get on with the Siciliano case.”

  “The fucking day’s almost over.”

  “That’s what happens when you waste time arguing. Go, go—I’m too busy to dick around!”

  Dukas read the report twice. He was still reading it long after most other people had gone home. The long summer twilight deepened outside and he switched on the overhead lights, then walked from desk to desk, reading, leaning against the windowsills, reading, cutting through the computerese and the e-jargon and adding it all up.

  At eight, he called Rose in West Virginia. He didn’t mince words. “Rose, you’re in deep shit. Your computer’s full of illegal classified data.”

  She went through the same stages he had: it couldn’t be; there was some mistake; she just hadn’t done that stuff.

  “You done? Okay, Rosie, moment of truth. Tell me now, babe, for all time, yes or no: did you ever put classified material on this computer? Rosie, before you answer, I’m going to Miranda you—yeah, go ahead, gasp; this is Mike, your old friend, your old admirer, yes, I love you, Rosie, but I can’t stand this and I’ve got to do it right: I’m taping this call. You may remain silent. Anything you say may be used against you. You have a right to a lawyer. Now: Rose: yes or no, did you ever put classified material on that computer?”

  “No, goddam you. No! No, you sonofabitch!”

  “Did you ever put any Peacemaker material on that computer or use that computer for any purpose connected with Peacemaker?”

  “No! How many times do I have to say it?”

  “You never came home, tired, remembered some notes you meant to make at the office, made them on your home computer and—”

  “NO!”

  “You had your laptop with classified material on it; you were behind, you had to get done; you downloaded Peacemaker stuff and did the work and deleted it from your home computer—right?”

  “NO, NO, NO!”

  Dukas sighed. He’d have to polygraph her, for all the good it would do. He turned off the tape. “Okay, babe, this is not on the record. Look, this is hell time—I’ve got a report, there’s no question the computer’s loaded with stuff. They infer a conscious effort to delete the stuff and hide the fact it was ever there, by somebody who didn’t know computers very well. Come on, give me some help, babe; I need to know it wasn’t you. I need some help here.”

  “I thought you trusted me. Jesus, you of all people.”

  “I guess—Push comes to shove, I don’t trust anybody.” He sighed again. It was a discovery he made about himself every few investigations or every love affair, and not a discovery he liked. “Help me, Rose.”

  She was crying. She cried for some seconds. Then she said, “Valdez.”

  He didn’t get it right away, then remembered the Latino kid who had been her pet computer geek on the Peacemaker project. “What about Valdez? He put stuff on your computer?”

  “Valdez would know if I put whatever is there on my computer.”

  “You saying he did it?” It was the oldest escape there was, blaming somebody else.

  “No, for Christ’s sake! Valdez is a straight-arrow. No, I mean he would know if it was me. He said everybody had a signature. He said he could always tell my stuff because I was a computer illiterate and it was like a signature, and he fixed my programs to make things easier for me.”

  “Did he fix your home computer?”

  “Sure.”

  Dukas felt drained. Probably she did, too. Would they recover, he was wondering—would the friendship recover? He tried to focus. “Where’s Valdez stationed now?”

  She sobbed again. He was supposed to apologize, he knew, but he couldn’t do it yet. Everything was awful. “He got out of the Navy,” she said. “Mike, how could you do this to me?”

  “Any idea where he is?”

  Silence. He could picture her, squeezing her eyes to stop the tears, swallowing hard, putting her head back with a hard jerk as if she meant to strike it against something. “He took a job in computers.” She had an address and a first name for him: Enrique.

  Then neither of them spoke. At last, she said, “This is going to take a while to get over, Mike,” and she hung up on him.

  Dukas went back to the borrowed apartment and grabbed a bottle. He hadn’t noticed before how brown the apartment was—like chocolate. Walls, rugs, furniture. Deeply depressing. He sat there in all that brown, drinking bourbon from the first glass that came to hand, hating the taste of what he’d done to Rose.

  But she could be lying.

  He sighed. He put out a hand for the telephone. He could put in a call to The Hague—what the hell time was it in Holland? well, he could put in a call in a few hours—and tomorrow he could fly away and have precisely the office he’d described to Triffler, and the big-assed woman and the two French cops, and he could leave the investigation to somebody who didn’t know Rose and didn’t give a shit and would probably do a better job.

  Instead, he dialed O’Neill’s hotel in Nairobi. It was a little after seven a.m. there, what the hell?

  “Jambo!” The voice was O’Neill’s, alert and full of juice.

  “I wake you up?”

  “Hell, no, I been out for my run before the muggers get up. W
hat’s doing?”

  “I just Miranda’d Rose.”

  “Oh, shit, Mike—!”

  “Her computer’s full of bad stuff.”

  “Yeah, but Mike—Rose! Hey, man, you can’t believe she—? Hey, you sober?”

  “Not particularly.”

  O’Neill led him through it with several questions, got to Valdez and what Rose had said about him, went over that part again, and then O’Neill said, “Leave this Valdez to me.”

  “To do what?”

  “To have him look over that goddam computer. You get it down there where he can take it apart if he has to, Mike—I’ll provide this Valdez.”

  “Shit, why?”

  “Because Rose thinks he can save her and I think he can save you. Okay? Now put the bottle away and go to bed, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  Dukas thought that over. The telephone was still in his hand, the dial tone buzzing because O’Neill had hung up. After thirty seconds, he decided that O’Neill’s judgment was probably better than his own just then, so he put the bottle away and went to bed.

  In Nairobi, O’Neill e-mailed his Dubai office and told them to contact a former US Navy computer specialist named Enrique Valdez, now in the computer world in America. “Hire him and have him meet me for breakfast Monday morning, Willard Hotel, Washington, and don’t take no for an answer! Harry”

  12

  USS Thomas Jefferson.

  Stevens had brought 902 back from Sigonella and made no public comment about the “operational” mission he was missing, but Alan sensed that he had said something elsewhere, because some of the sense of purpose seemed to slip away from the aircrew. Late in the day, Cohen came to him in the ready room and said, “How come Stevens isn’t on the sked for this?”

  Alan was very bland. “Mister Cohen, please tell Mister Stevens that when he has a question, he should ask it himself.” He smiled. “Meanwhile, you have enough to do with your own responsibilities.”

  Stevens showed up thirty minutes later. His sullenness had become outright anger. “All right, how come I’m not on the sked?” he shouted. People at the back of the room were working the sim; they looked around, then began to move out.

  “You don’t need to shout; I’m right here.” Alan looked at him. “You know why.”

  “I’m the best pilot in this goddam det—maybe on this boat!”

  “Maybe you are. You did a hell of a job in Sigonella, and I told you so. But I didn’t get your attention with that, and now I’m trying to get your attention with the flight sked—it’s the two-by-four with which I’m hitting the jackass.” He looked at his watch. “I have a brief, but you and I need to talk. When we’ve talked, you’ll fly.”

  “I got nothing to say to you!”

  “Think of something.”

  Alan had put himself in a crew with Campbell, Soleck, and Craw for the first anti-fast-mover flight. He wanted to make the operation work, and he wanted his best people. Deep down, he realized that he had also chosen a crew of men who liked and respected him, and that 902 had Cohen and Reilley, who didn’t, in the front seats. He told himself that he couldn’t hide from them forever without starting to play favorites—knowing from experience where that command path could lead. But this time, the first time, he wanted no distractions from the mission, no comments, no edge. No Stevens, he admitted to himself.

  The preflight brief went well. The aircrews were a little sleepy, but, even though Cohen and Reilley kept their distance, they seemed up and even eager. They got their televised brief and then Soleck got up and gave them a quick peek at some expected “smugglers,” based on photos from Rota and some imagination. Alan had stood over his shoulder while he drafted them. Soleck could be a pain in the ass, but he was smart, and he understood computers and computer graphics better than any pilot Alan had ever met.

  They were launching with the first event, so there were no planes launching or landing before them. The flight deck was quiet. Dawn was three hours away, and quiet ghosts in flight deck jerseys moved around the deck, pulling hoses, spotting planes, moving ordnance. Alan checked his seat and watched Soleck check the outside of the plane and discuss the chaff and flare load and react with surprise to the port wing’s rocket pod, which Alan had ordered in case they had to show teeth to a fast mover. Rules of engagement forbade him to fire at a suspected smuggler, but he wanted the pods in case—in case he had to fire at a suspected smuggler. He also wanted them for the effect on the aircrew. No one in ordnance questioned the load.

  Soleck got the mandatory lecture from Craw on chaff and flare loading and got into the plane, while Campbell stuck his whole arm into the engine intakes and checked the fan blades with a flashlight, like a man buying a horse and checking its teeth. Alan approved. He also saw Cohen run a finger over the struts on 902’s landing gear, checking for a recurrence of the hydraulics leak. They were thorough, and his spirits rose. Maybe this was going to work.

  If they could locate one fast mover and pass it to the Italian coast guard, the effect on morale would be incredible. All they needed was some cooperation from the smugglers.

  Nine thousand feet over the Adriatic, Alan felt a sag in his energy as he saw the volume of traffic down on the water. Even with both MARI systems up and running, even with datalink support from all of NATO to deconflict white contacts (merchant ships), he was looking at hundreds of unknowns in a huge expanse of water.

  Soleck had put in the smugglers’ corridor parameters as an overlay on the screen, but the corridors were hypothetical at best. The system lacked the ability to ignore selected contact parameters, so the aircrew couldn’t direct it to ignore, for example, all westbound contacts. They could only watch the patterns, sip coffee, limit their search areas, sip more coffee, and wait.

  Sunrise crept closer. The coffee got bitter, then vanished.

  Each plane found likely contacts every few minutes, but by the time the possible smugglers gunned their engines and turned into the west coast of Dalmatia, it was too late to give a vector to any of the Italian coast guard ships. The experience was maddening, and Alan began to fear that they would not only fail, but that the frustration would exacerbate the squadron’s troubles.

  MARI worked like a trooper, however. Cohen kept his plane well off Campbell’s axis on every sweep, and, with fiddling, the two crews had almost constant link. They were able to add several distinct images of speedboats to their onboard libraries for future comparison. Soleck seemed obsessed with finding a way to identify individual boats with the MARI system, convinced that he could see slight differences in hull pattern even with one-meter resolution. Alan wasn’t so sure. The system had been designed to locate and accurately identify warships, not bass boats.

  By 0600, interest was flagging in both planes, except for Soleck, who was focused on small-boat antenna arrays. The eastern sky was pale, and they were almost against the Yugoslavian coast. Away to the west, the link showed Canadian F-18s returning from a sortie over Kosovo.

  “Jaeger Two, this is Jaeger One, over.” One more sweep and time to head for home, Alan thought.

  “Roger, this is Jaeger Two.”

  “Jaeger Two, let’s turn to 270 and sweep west one more time.”

  “Roger, Jaeger One. Turning to 270.” Reilley’s voice sounded bored even through the encrypted comms. In front, Campbell turned slowly to the west.

  Alan raised the Italians in clear and told them where he was turning. He had spoken with them several times, and knew that they had little faith in his ability to find their needles in the Adriatic haystack. Communication with them was limited, too. They didn’t have the encryption to keep comms secure, and Alan had to be vague as a result. As well, their English wasn’t much, and he was the only Italian speaker in the aircraft.

  They bored holes in the water for ten minutes. Suddenly, Craw said, “Got one,” his first words in an hour.

  Thirty miles away, the pale light of the eastern sky had worried someone else. Well off the coast, a twelve-meter ar
rowhead with two distinct returns from powerful engines suddenly jumped from ten knots to nearly forty and headed due east. Alan marked it and imaged it. An identity code appeared next to the image—PG1221.

  Craw called it to AW1 Denton in Jaeger Two. Alan located the nearest coast guard ship, almost fifteen miles away to the south and probably too far behind to intercept. They still seemed unimpressed, but they turned toward the contact. According to Jane’s, the Italian vessel could make thirty-two knots. If their contact was a cigarette boat, it could put on bursts of nearly eighty.

  “Jaeger Two, descend to angels 15 and turn to 180. I want you to set up for a bow-on intercept, but stand off until I give the word.”

  Alan leaned forward into the cockpit. “That bastard is going to outrun the Italians without even knowing they’re there.” He held on to the frame as Campbell turned toward the contact. Once, he had been nervous about unstrapping in flight. Long time ago.

  “I hear you, skipper.” Campbell was dead calm, the archetypal pilot.

  “I’m going to put 902 ahead of them and have you come in from abeam, from the north.”

  “No problem.”

  “Then we order them to stop and be boarded.”

  “No problem, unless they don’t stop.”

  Soleck whooped. “Then we shoot ’em!”

  Alan whacked Soleck’s helmet. “We don’t shoot anybody. We call in 902 to buzz them real, real low, right down the throat. Okay? Brian, you’re the mission commander.”

  “Sure, skipper. Strap in, here we go.”

  Alan scrambled for the familiar straps while the plane nosed down and powered for the deck, her turbofans suddenly changed from distant vacuum cleaners to avenging furies. Craw had his head pressed almost to the glass of his screen despite the acceleration, intent on his target. Alan got the second clip into his harness and called an update of the contact’s position to the Italians. They took a second to respond. Their comms officer reported that they were too far away to intercept. Alan wanted to scream at him but paused, counted to three, and explained that the Jaeger patrol would stop the contact.