Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  Triffler chuckled. “What do you think, she’s going to call the cops?”

  “You know what the Agency would say if they knew we were surveilling Shreed’s house? They’d crucify us!” Dukas was looking up the street, where four more cars were parked in a line along the curb. “Go slow,” he muttered, “like we’re a real estate agent and a client, maybe.”

  “I must be the agent,” Triffler said. “I’m the guy with the tie on.”

  Dukas growled again. “It’s bad enough we gotta worry about the local cops here—they know Shreed’s Agency; they keep an eye on any Agency guy’s house. Hey—”

  He had seen a man’s head in one of the cars in the line. Something, perhaps the angle of the head, suggested that the man was watching in his driver’s-side mirror. Years of stakeouts and surveillance caused a little warning to sound in Dukas’s head; his first thought was local cop, and then he realized how unlikely such a thing was. “Don’t slow—don’t look at this guy—” Dukas was trying to see the license plate, but the car was backed tight against the car behind it and it was only as they came almost parallel that he was able to see the first three characters of a Virginia plate. G7B. He said it over to himself, writing it on the pad without looking and hoping it would be legible later, because his eyes were swinging to look at the man in the car for one instant and then moving on, face registering nothing, trying to be as blank as a stranger looking over the neighborhood.

  And that was how he came to see, for one instant, the face of Tony Moscowic.

  Later, back at the NCIS building, he wondered what the hell he was doing. What he had said to Triffler was true—if the Agency found he’d been near Shreed’s house, they’d hang him. And hacking into Shreed’s computers—! Even NCIS would hang him. Rose, Rose, he thought, only for you!

  “Bingo,” Triffler said in his ear.

  Dukas jumped. “Don’t do that, for Christ’s sake. Clear your throat or something!”

  “We got a hit on the license number of the car in Shreed’s driveway. Heather Crouthammer. Local cops have a memo on her—she’ll be parked in his driveway every Wednesday.”

  “Cleaning lady,” Dukas said. Shit.

  “You got it.”

  “She didn’t turn the goddam computers on, Dick.”

  “How do you know? Maybe she goes online. Plays games. Gambles, maybe.”

  “On two computers at once? Come on!” Dukas hunched forward. “She goes there to clean; the computers go on. Funny coincidence. Find out what you can about her. What about the other car?”

  “The partial? They’re working on it. Not too hopeful.”

  Dukas thought of the face he had seen in the car. Sallow, cynical, tricky. The guy was watching the street, he thought. I know he was. He could see the way it was done: somebody went into the house with the cleaning woman, went into the computers while she worked; this guy sat in his car and watched the street, ready to warn the other one if anything suspicious came along.

  “Somebody else is after Shreed,” he said. “It could be CIA Internal, but I don’t believe it. I think Menzes is too straight to lie to me.” Or at least he hoped so.

  “So,” Triffler said, “who else could it be?”

  Dukas wouldn’t say it out loud, but he was thinking, A woman I’m sleeping with named Emma Pasternak.

  Suburban Maryland.

  Suter had rented an apartment for Nickie the Hacker in a building in suburban Maryland where an international and polyglot clientele from the University of Maryland rubbed elbows with one of the more discreet drug markets in the area. It suited the hacker because nobody asked questions and the pizza deliveries were fast.

  “It was a piece a cake,” Moscowic was saying. “He went in with the cleaning lady, she does her routine, he don’t make a sound in case there’s bugs someplace, and he does his thing.” He looked at Nickie, gave an encouraging jerk to his hips. “Isn’t that true, Nickie?”

  “I downloaded everything. He’s got some software, man!”

  Suter was still looking at Moscowic. “Nobody saw you?”

  “Who’d see me? You think I’m some amateur?”

  “The local police would have that house on a watch list. Local cops have my place on a watch list. Because of my employer.”

  “Big deal, I’m really impressed. Nobody saw me.” Moscowic remembered very well the man who had seen him, but he wasn’t going to tell Suter. Let sleeping dogs lie, he thought. Just some middle-aged guy in a Honda with a black dude—meaningless. But he could still see that face. Suspicious, intelligent, cynical. A cop’s face but not a cop.

  “Nickie got away clean?” Suter said.

  “Wha’d I just say? He did the job, no problem. No problemo! He carries out some of the trash and shit, puts it in her car like he belongs there, and they drive away.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

  Suter swung around to Nickie and spoke to him for the first time. “You looked at the files yet?”

  Nickie, whose face was down over a pizza, shook his head.

  “When are you going to do it?”

  The thin shoulders went up and down in a shrug.

  “Look, you little shit—!” Suter grabbed the raspberry hair at the back, and the face came up, and with it a knife that gleamed in Nickie’s right hand. Cheese and tomato sauce were stuck along the cutting edge.

  “Hey, hey—!” Moscowic shouted.

  Suter let go of the purple-red hair. Nickie curled his upper lip. Moscowic made quieting gestures with his hands.

  “Let’s behave like gentlemen here, can we do that?” Moscowic said. The other two looked at him as if he was nuts.

  USS Thomas Jefferson.

  When Alan knocked at the open door, Rafe said “enter” without looking up, took another sheet off the pile of paperwork under his left elbow, skimmed it, and scrawled a signature at the bottom.

  “Rafe?”

  “Sorry, Al. Wait one.” The next item was three pages long. Rafe hummed and muttered as he read it, slapped a yellow sticky on top, wrote a note, and threw it in another pile.

  “Dickhead. Not you, Al. What’s on your mind?”

  “It’s the NCIS thing, Rafe. I, um, need to meet the woman again, day after tomorrow.”

  Rafe scowled, started to say something, then swung to: “What’s all that under your arm? That better not be for me.”

  “Nope. It’s my battle plan for the tech reps.”

  “What are you doing to them?”

  “Making them work. They haven’t been talking to the aircrew very much. I made the debriefers run down these sheets with the TACCOs after every flight to get data on little stuff; link behavior, range, keyboard usage, function keys.”

  “Bet they loved that.”

  “Point is, I now have about two hundred queries and suggested fixes. We’re in-port; tech reps don’t get liberty. So now’s the day and now’s the hour. And since ‘Squash’ Soleck got a free vacation in Aviano, he can ride shotgun on it.”

  “Sounds good.” Rafe leaned back. “You’re doing a good job now, you know that? No, really. I know what all that paper means, man. And the det shows it—your guys are looking better; hell, even your landing scores are up since you cleaned the clock on that cigarette boat.” He glanced at his watch, put his hands back behind his head. “Okay, the NCIS thing. You said one meeting. Now you say another meeting. Well, we’re in port.” He nodded at Alan’s papers. “But you’re not going to get much liberty. If you want to spend it running errands for NCIS—Is this the last NCIS thing, Al?”

  “Uh—jeez, I hope so—”

  “I appreciate your honesty, so I’ll just rephrase. This is the last NCIS thing. Period. Okay?” Their eyes met. Rafe nodded. “Have a ball.”

  Rafe turned back to his paperwork. Alan had twenty minutes to prep for the tech reps, who weren’t going to like the workload he was about to dump.

  “Inshallah,” he breathed.

  15

  Langley.

  Suter was in
Shreed’s office.

  “I got interviewed by somebody from NCIS this morning,” Suter said. “About Peacemaker. The Siciliano thing. I told you about it, remember? I just thought you’d like to know.” He was trying to sound casual and he sounded like hell.

  Shreed made himself calm. “Why would I care?”

  Suter flushed. “I just thought you’d want to know.” He stared at Shreed.

  “‘The Siciliano thing.’ The woman you spent an unsuccessful year trying to get in the pants of?”

  “She’s under investigation for security violations. Remember, you wanted me to try to spread, um, rumors about her and her husband?”

  “Did I?”

  “But I didn’t say anything about that. You don’t need to worry.”

  You don’t need to worry. As if Suter knew something. Shreed had got so used to living two lives and being confident of the wall that separated them that he almost automatically dismissed the idea that Suter could know anything about his Chinese-agent self—and yet there was a tone in that nervous voice. It occurred to Shreed that maybe Suter was going ga-ga. The Agency could do that to people. He was certainly behaving oddly. Saying odd things. He gave Suter a long look now, trying both to figure him out and to warn him. At last he said, “I don’t worry.”

  “That’s good. They asked about my connection with both Peacemaker and the Agency, but they never asked about you. So I didn’t bring your name up.”

  Shreed did a lightning review of his own connection with Peacemaker and saw nothing to trouble him. He had had a semi-secret role, lobbying for the project before Congress, channeling money from some secret funds. And, of course, he had betrayed it to the Chinese. But he couldn’t see anything that should worry him about it.

  “What did you tell them?” he said.

  “I told them that Siciliano asked a lot of questions about highly classified material that wasn’t her business. And I told them that she had a very close relationship with an enlisted guy named Valdez.” Suter looked pleased with himself. “A computer geek.” His shoulders jerked. “I mean, the guy asked me if I knew anything about bad-mouthing Siciliano and her husband, the holy Alan Craik. I didn’t tell him you’d told me to do the bad-mouthing. Instead, I talked about her Tex-Mex geek, Valdez. I said that they were very close.” As Shreed stared at him and the moment got longer and longer, Suter gave a kind of snort that became a giggle, and he began to make semaphoric signals with his eyebrows that were probably meant, Shreed thought, to suggest heavy sexual content. A thought flashed: He’s cracking up.

  But then Shreed was thinking more about the implication of what Suter had said than about Suter’s mental state. He signaled that their meeting was over. “Have my notes on all this crap transcribed and on my desk by four,” Shreed said. He wanted to think.

  Suter got up and gathered the papers and put them into a neat stack with almost obsessive care. He hugged the papers to his chest. “I’m very good at things like the interview,” he said. “I didn’t tell them anything.”He backed away from Shreed toward the door. “Anyway, they’re not very bright. NCIS doesn’t get very bright people.”

  “They might surprise you.”

  Suter made a movement with his whole body, something like a bow, or perhaps the jerk of a condemned man as he reaches the bottom of his fall and is stopped by the noose, and he backed out, staring at Shreed the whole time, his right eye being the last thing to disappear as he closed the door.

  “Nutcase,” Shreed said aloud. However, he was thinking about the NCIS investigator’s questions about what Suter had called bad-mouthing: Did NCIS have some reason to believe that the gossip had started inside the Agency? Had they interrogated Suter because they didn’t yet dare to interrogate Shreed himself? He knew how such things were done: he knew that there was talk of a mole—knew it? By God, he had taken part in it! So that when the NCIS interrogator came to ask permission to examine people at the Agency, Internals would say Yes to this one, No to that. And the Nos would be reserved for anybody on their list of possibles, because they wouldn’t want to scare the mole.

  So let’s see how it would go, Shreed thought. NCIS are investigating the Siciliano case. If Internals allowed them to see the “intercept” that Chen concocted to implicate Siciliano, then they realized pretty quickly that it was cock and bull. Internals knows it, too, of course. But Internals and NCIS are in a sense on opposite sides, because Internals wants to protect the Agency and NCIS wants to exonerate Siciliano. So then there’s the matter of her computer—No. No, next there’s the Agency almost dropping the investigation because Siciliano’s lawyer made so much noise, and then there’s the Agency resuming the investigation because, well, because I made such a stink at that meeting the day of Janey’s memorial service.

  That was when I went public—public within a very small and select population of the Agency—with my need to implicate Siciliano, although they wouldn’t have seen it that way; they would have seen cranky, grieving George Shreed playing the patriotic card. But if there was somebody at the meeting with the right set of eyes—

  He thought about the meeting and who had been there. Partlow. Jeffreys. Breedlove. Goering— He went around the big table, seeing nobody who might have suggested to NCIS that he, George Shreed, had more interest in the Siciliano case than seemed reasonable.

  Nobody.

  He went around the table in his mind again. That committee met weekly, always the same. Everybody—

  Not always the same. Something had been different, some face at the corner of the table. That’s where Handman of Technical Research always sat. But he wasn’t there. Somebody in his place, sitting not at the table but back a little against the wall—

  Sally Baranowski.

  My God, how could I have missed it?

  Sally Baranowski, who had seen his performance that day and who had every reason to want to hurt him. Bad move, he thought. He hadn’t taken her seriously.

  He reached for his telephone, not for a moment trusting the e-mail system to be discreet.

  “Breedlove,” a voice said at the other end.

  “Mark, George Shreed. I’m wondering how your contact in Internals is. I need a favor. Somebody named Baranowski—”

  NCIS HQ.

  Triffler had just finished reporting on his interview with Ray Suter. The only thing that stuck out for Dukas was Suter’s having implied some bullshit about sex between Rose and the computer guy, Valdez. It didn’t make sense. Had Shreed coached Suter to lie about her and Valdez? If he could prove that Shreed was behind Suter’s answers in the interview—

  “Have we got anything new on Shreed?” he called to Triffler.

  “If we did, it would be marked in green as an update on the chart.”

  Triffler had made a chart that tried to track what they knew about Shreed. It was on the back of the door, so anybody coming in didn’t see it, but Dukas could stare at it from his desk and try to figure out if it meant anything. But all that the chart gave him to date was Shreed’s public biography, which was virtuous and admirable—naval air service, Agency postings in Jakarta and Washington, promotions. In recent months, it got more detailed—”Wife, Angel of Mercy Hospice. Death of wife. Memorial service of wife.” And then, “T. and D. surveil cleaning woman—” Triffler’s way of saying they had been wasting their time.

  So, nothing new. Dukas sighed. He made a note on a sticky and put it on Triffler’s report of the interview: “Follow-up interview recommended.” But not just now, he knew, because he didn’t have the people and he didn’t have the budget.

  Naples.

  Preparing for his second meeting in Naples with Anna, Alan had first to meet Harry. Not seeing him at fleet landing, he paused to watch the spectacle of fleet landing, a last bastion of America and one from which some sailors never quite dared to stray. Dozens of others stopped here to have a burger and a Coke before entering foreign territory (which, of course, offered its own burgers and Cokes a couple of blocks away). Dozens more, having a
lready sampled Naples, waited for a ride back to the ship, gulping down fries and sodas in feeble attempts to cover the taste of mixed beer, pizza, wine, brandy, and “I dare you” exotics like Fernet Branca. Rap and Country boomed from radios, each asserting its own version of America to Italy, whose first inhabitants were just visible down the pier where panhandlers in sincere castoffs and hookers in bright clothes forced the sailors to run a gantlet of sympathy and sex.

  Alan pushed through the Navy crowd to the shore-patrol post and walked the gantlet without a glance, smiling at the Neapolitan comments he was not supposed to understand. He continued to look for Harry, following a route he had been given by Dukas, past the hookers to the vendors, past the vendors to the first small trattorias, off the pier and left toward San Marco.

  Harry was sitting in a big café on the other side of the boulevard, reading a paper with his back to Alan, who spotted him from a block away and crossed the street in the first lull of the traffic. When Alan saw him again, Harry did not appear to have seen him, but, as he walked closer, Harry stood up without hurry, tossed a coin on the table, and walked away from the docks with the newspaper pressed under his arm. Alan followed him, now only a block behind. They walked uphill for two streets, took a right, and then entered a web of smaller streets that Alan vaguely remembered from his childhood as the medieval part of the city. Harry appeared unhurried, but every turn he made caused Alan to accelerate for fear that Harry would disappear in the crowded streets.

  Most of Naples seemed to be buying coffee and fish and anything else that was out on tables. Several times Harry stopped and looked, and once he bought something, each stop causing Alan to stop behind him and do the same.

  It was a moment’s inattention while trying to make one of these forced stops inconspicuous that caused Alan to lose Harry altogether. He looked up from a display of seafood on ice to find that Harry had vanished from a similar stall a street ahead, and he moved toward his last sighting, unable to believe that a tall black man could be so hard to find in an Italian crowd.