Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  “I hear you, but that’s going to depend on other factors. Don’t keep me waiting, buddy. What did she whisper in your ear?”

  “She told me that the mole is run by the Chinese.”

  “That’s good. That’s really, really good.”

  “And that they call him Top Hook.”

  Harry stopped walking. He didn’t look at Alan for a moment. He put his hands behind him and looked out to sea, where the long, boxy shape of the carrier dominated the harbor entrance.

  “Well, well.” Harry seemed to be talking to himself.

  “Come on, Harry. Don’t tell me I don’t have the need to know.”

  “Not for me to say—I leave that to Dukas. But I’d say that your soiled flower has the goods. And that’s going to rock Mike’s world.”

  “‘Top Hook’ is a Navy expression, Harry. Best landing score on a carrier. Best pilot.”

  “I was in the Navy, too, old boy.”

  Alan shook his head. “It’s not Chinese.”

  “Give that man a kewpie doll.”

  Alan was about to say that he had been overwhelmed when he had heard it from Anna because of the implication that a naval aviator’s term had given a code name to a spy, but they were suddenly interrupted by a voice calling to them from above.

  “Hey, are you guys Navy?”

  “Who wants to know?” Alan looked up to the terrace above them. He sounded angry.

  “Shore Patrol. Got your ID?”

  Alan reached in his breast pocket and took out his battered ID, still covered with stickers from former ships.

  “Sorry, sir. You really ought to get a new ID, sir.”

  “I’ll see to it when I get back to the boat. Is that all?”

  “Is your friend Navy, sir?”

  “No. What’s this about, sailor?”

  “Recall, sir. We’re informing all liberty personnel that liberty is closed at 2000 local. Last boat leaves fleet landing in a little over an hour, sir.”

  “How come?”

  “All liberty canceled, sir.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m sure they’ll tell you on the boat, sir.”

  “Time for a cappuccino, Alan?” Harry waved to the tables on the black-and-white marble of the terrace.

  “Here? Sure.”

  “Sir, uh, shouldn’t you be—”

  “Petty Officer Lannes.” Alan was reading the man’s nameplate. “I’m pretty sure I can drink a cup of coffee with my friend and still catch the boat, okay?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The cup of cappuccino was purely an act of defiance. The café was crowded, and they didn’t return to the subject of Top Hook, except that Harry told Alan to call Mike Dukas as soon as he was on the boat. Otherwise, they talked about nothing. It was a good nothing, and it defied the creep of time. They were old friends who rarely got to see one another, and all their contact in Naples had been professional, or at least conspiratorial. In twenty hurried minutes they tried to make that up, swapping stories and tidbits. After, Harry walked Alan all the way down to the landing and hugged him, then handed him an envelope and a package from Rose.

  “See you in Bahrain.”

  “Fuck off, Harry. I’m not going to Bahrain.”

  “We’ll see, sweetheart. It’s my home ground, these days. Stay safe.”

  “You too. Kiss Rose for me, if you see her.”

  They shook hands once more, and Alan hurried through the crowd toward the boat.

  The ferries were packed with unhappy sailors. Many had barely got ashore. Some had missed liberty altogether. Alan looked for somebody to give him news, but those he knew were as ignorant as he, and the liberty-boat officers were mostly air-wing guys with little knowledge but a lot of speculation. Veterans could remember the same things happening in Naples in 1990, when the Eisenhower sprinted to the Red Sea to threaten Saddam Hussein.

  “Iraq’s attacked Kuwait again.”

  “It’s Israel.”

  “China’s shutting the Taiwan Straits.”

  “Russia’s declared for Serbia and we’re at war.”

  Alan thought it had to be Pakistan and India, but the Balkans loomed, too. Twice in a century?

  As he ran up the ladder from the ferry buoy to the carrier’s stern, he heard a sailor shout it down.

  “Pakistan’s fighting India!”

  His thoughts returned to the det.

  NCIS HQ.

  “Seventy-three positives on the partial,” Triffler said.

  The words meant nothing to Dukas.

  “The license plate. The car near Shreed’s house? You and me, driving by, guy in a car—?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Seventy-three! Holy shit.”

  “I tried what I remembered about make and color; that knocked it down to forty-some.” Triffler looked up. “Camry, I thought. Blue.”

  “It was gray.”

  “It was blue!”

  “Gray.”

  “Williamsburg blue, kind of a grayed-down blue—”

  “Dick, for Christ’s sake! Gray, blue, what the hell! You didn’t get the make or the year?”

  “I was driving. I pay attention to what I’m doing.”

  “Seventy-three hits, Christ!” Dukas rubbed his head. “Okay, put the whole list out, local PDs and state cops. Any hit on anybody on the list, we wanta know. Mark it priority, national security, direct to you or me.” He looked at Triffler. “You got a problem with that?”

  “I think it’s a misuse of tax money.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “I feel very strongly about taxes.”

  “So do I. They pay your salary, and if you don’t do your job, you won’t be earning one. Capisce?”

  Triffler’s face was set in a kind of mask of tragedy. Muscles worked in his cheeks. After several seconds, he said, “Your management style leaves something to be desired.”

  “Yeah, I missed that meeting on total quality management.”

  “A good manager values the input of his subordinates.”

  Dukas laughed. “Dick, you’re as good as a bumper sticker! Look—” He rubbed his head again. “Please put that out as a priority request—okay? I do value your input. I just don’t agree with it. Okay?”

  “I don’t like working for you,” Triffler said.

  “Neither do I.”

  USS Thomas Jefferson.

  Alan had been back aboard for an hour and he hadn’t called Mike Dukas—too much to do. He walked down through the enforced calm of the air-wing spaces and entered the controlled chaos of the intel spaces and waited for an hour to use one of the secure telephones. Then he called Mike at home and got no answer. He looked at his watch and tried Mike’s work number.

  “Dukas.”

  “Is my watch wrong, or should you be home?”

  “Al. What happened? I expected to hear from you hours ago. I’m waiting for you, okay?”

  “Mike, we’re a little busy here.” A young jg pushed her head and shoulders into Alan’s phone cube and asked him if he would be long. He waved her away. “Can we go secure?”

  “You push.” They waited while the seconds whirled by. The jg was still hovering. A rush of white noise told Alan that they had a link.

  “What happened, cowboy?”

  “Harry hasn’t called?”

  “Plan was, you were going to call. I’ve been sitting here picturing both of you gunned down by Serbs. What happened?”

  “She showed. The meeting was hard. She’s pretty tightly wound—”

  “Alan, did she provide any hard data? Did she say anything useful? Give!”

  “Fine. Whatever, Mike. I’ll leave out everything that happened and cut to the end. She made Harry. And she said that the mole is run by the Chinese—”

  “She said that? Right out? Not coached?”

  “—and that they call him Top Hook.”

  Secure phones cover most human sounds. The white noise now masked Dukas’s reaction. Alan, unable to wait, finally said, “I set a meeting for a we
ek from today in Bahrain. You’ll have to send somebody.”

  “Why?” Dukas sounded grim.

  “Mike, watch CNN. I’m on an aircraft carrier headed for the Indian Ocean, okay?”

  “Oh, yeah, the India thing.” Alan had experienced this disconnection from carrier reality to home reality all too often. On the Jefferson, India, Pakistan, and China had just become the focus of life. At home, people were still worried about other things like mortgages and report cards and spies.

  “So I’m out.” The jg was all but dancing behind him.

  “No, you’re not. Rose is fine, thanks for asking.”

  Alan snapped his chair around and glared at the jg. “Give me a second, okay? This isn’t a personal call, Lieutenant.” She vanished. “I can’t do another meeting.”

  “She just became my number one priority.”

  “Your number one priority is clearing my wife!” And me, he thought.

  “Al—” He could hear something odd in Dukas’s voice. “Look, I’ve got to ask you to trust me, okay? I’m not going to tell you why, but I think that meeting this woman is part of clearing your wife.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I know you don’t. That’s what ‘trust me’ means.”

  “But Mike, that means the cases are connected. How the hell—?”

  “Don’t—”

  “This is new! Is it something I just said?” He was thinking, Anna? Chinese? Top Hook?

  “Don’t ask! Okay? Jesus! Don’t you know what ‘trust me’ means? Just meet the woman again, will you? I swear to you, I think it may help Rose.”

  Alan thought he had a right to demand an explanation. But then, Dukas had a right—an obligation, in fact—to keep things compartmentalized. Trust me. “It’s a good thing we’re friends,” he said. “Okay. But I need help—I’ve promised this is the last one.”

  “I’ll go to the wall for you on this.”

  “Suspicion is making my job tough, and it also makes asking favors of the admiral a major pain in the ass, you understand?”

  “I hear you.”

  “Okay. See what you can do. Where do we go from here?”

  “You keep your head down and find a way to Bahrain. I start trying to find the lady a million dollars.”

  Suburban Virginia.

  George Shreed had a vial of his own blood in his freezer. It had been remarkably easy to get. He had complained to his urologist’s office about prostate pain, and they had ordered a PSA test, and after the aide had taken the blood and propped the vial in the rack, he had simply switched it with somebody else’s and walked out. He supposed that the results of the test might be peculiar—perhaps the switched blood was a woman’s—but that would hardly concern him.

  Of more interest was his Chinese control, Chen. The forged NSC memo had clearly excited him, and, as Shreed had expected, he had demanded to see the original. No dead drop would do for such a transfer, as Shreed had known; Chen thought both himself and the memo far too important to trust to an intermediary. So Chen had sent Shreed a contact plan complete with communications and fallback and escape, and the only fault in it so far as Shreed was concerned was that the plan called for the meeting to take place in Belgrade. Belgrade might once have been a fine place for such a meeting, but now NATO was bombing Serbia, and going there would be far more difficult than a dozen years before. Probably, he thought, that was why Chen had picked Belgrade, to keep his American spy in his place.

  And maybe Chen knew that Shreed would like to kill him, and Belgrade would be a tough place to pull off a killing.

  “You sonofabitch,” Shreed muttered to himself.

  “But—not bad,” he thought as he studied the passport that Chen had sent. It was Canadian (maybe a sop to his agent’s worry about being American?) and used an old photo of Shreed that he had left with the Chinese a decade before. He had worn a fake mustache for it. “Stupid,” Shreed muttered now. Disguises were idiotic, he thought, and he had told Chen so at the time, but the Chinese had liked putting Shreed into this partial falseface. “Jerking me around,” Shreed growled.

  He was still talking to himself. He had started doing it a week or so after Janey had gone into the hospice, as if he had had to fill the silence. “Losing my marbles,” he said now.

  Still, the forged passport was a good one. He’d have to cook up some sort of fake mustache if he used it. It gave him a total of three passports: this one, a real one, and an old Agency one from his last days in Operations. He was supposed to have turned that one in, but he hadn’t, and eventually the bean-counters had forgotten about it. He kept it in a safe-deposit box in a bank, with an unregistered pistol and ten thousand dollars. Just in case. For years, he’d paid the rental on the box and never gone near it. Just in case.

  “And now it’s almost the case,” he murmured. “Push is coming to shove.”

  He put the Chinese forgery into his freezer with the ampoules and the vial of blood, and he began to plan how he would kill Chen when he got to Belgrade. “Not easy,” he said to himself as he heated his dinner in the microwave. “But, things that are fun are never easy.” After three minutes, the microwave pinged and he took out the plastic dish and began to eat, leaning forward against the kitchen counter.

  “Yum, yum,” he said aloud. “Dogshit simmered in bat piss and served on a bed of pigeon droppings.”

  The terrible food made him think of Janey, who had been a splendid cook. His shoulders drooped. He tried to replace thoughts of her with his Chinese plan.

  16

  USS Thomas Jefferson.

  The Jefferson raced east, every inch of her thousand-foot length vibrating to her propeller shafts and her twin nuclear reactors. Despite noise dampening and earplugs, the ship roared at thirty-eight knots. Jefferson, packed with six thousand sailors and a hundred aircraft, ran faster than a greyhound, faster than most small boats and a great deal faster than any other vessel of her size; and behind her, the speculation of the world boiled like the water in her wake.

  Other carriers would have to keep the watch in the Mediterranean. Other carriers would handle Bosnia and the Serbs. As Alan scrambled to read the message traffic he had missed in Naples, the Jefferson rushed to avert, by her presence, a catastrophe born of malfeasance and inattention in equal parts. China, said the experts, was looking for an opportunity to flex her power and show her determination. China wanted the US to lose face. The reports did not say that China had been deluded into this stance by George Shreed, because the men who wrote them thought the Chinese inscrutable and alien (thus capable of anything) rather than human, fallible, and gullible.

  Alan reviewed the incidents in the first hour he was back aboard: a terrorist attack in Kashmir, a bomb in a market in Lahore, a border incident in the high country on the Northwest frontier. These incidents were commonplace; their like could be seen in every decade since the partition of the Raj in 1947. The step from cold war to saber-rattling was so common between India and Pakistan that it seldom raised any interest in the intelligence community or the press.

  Four days ago, however, when Indian Air Force pilots bombed a “terrorist training facility” in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan, Pakistani pilots in brand-new Chinese-built Mig-29s had struck back, downing three Indian aircraft and destroying a strategic forward airfield. Pakistan, always the underdog in the match-up, had rarely responded so promptly. Aerial skirmishes and artillery duels had followed all along the border. Pakistan had unleashed a barrage of hidden long-range SAMs and punished the Indian Air Force. India had delivered an ultimatum.

  To Alan’s reading, that much of the story was familiar. That Pakistan had a surprising inventory of equipment was a new wrinkle, but the rest of the tale read like a sequel to their other border incidents.

  The menacing difference came next. The Indian ultimatum was answered not by Pakistan, but by China—a counter-ultimatum that made extortionate demands of India in territory and political concession. To Alan’s eye, they were demands
calculated to force rejection. India could no more face China than, realistically, Pakistan could face India.

  China’s ultimatum was due at 0600 GMT on Tuesday. Alan looked at it; it was an odd time, as it gave days for tensions to drag on. It was of a piece with China’s dangerous stance, making demands far beyond China’s real power. He made these points to a series of visitors, leaving them dissatisfied and anxious. Then he looked at the date on his watch and did a calculation. China was threatening a world war in five days.

  Alan went to see Rafe.

  The Jefferson raced east against the rumor of war.

  Suter’s apartment.

  Suter owned a handgun. It was only a tiny Beretta .22 he’d bought for his ex-wife when she was still his wife and thought that drug-crazed black kids were going to mug her on a daily basis. When she had left him, she had thrown it at him, not having enough courage to shoot him.

  Suter had downloaded from the Internet a recipe for making a silencer from a toilet-paper tube. “Sounds crazy but it works!!!!” the website had boasted. It did sound crazy, but Suter was one of those smart people who don’t know how much they don’t know, and it made sense to him because he didn’t really know guns. He’d read in one of the late George Higgins’s novels about putting a .22 behind somebody’s ear and killing him with one shot.

  Suter had never killed anybody before.

  And, although he didn’t know it, he was out of his depth: like somebody vain about his swimming abilities who ignores warnings about a tide, he was being swept out into the deep blue—although the tide, in this case, was his own greed.

  He had cobbled up three of the makeshift silencers and tested two of them in a park near Fort Hunt. The little gun looked ridiculous with the toilet-paper tube duct-taped to its two-inch barrel, more as if the tube were wearing the gun than the other way around, but the usual sharp crack of the small cartridge was muted. Not silenced, but muted. Of course, he couldn’t aim the gun. The toilet-paper tube blocked the sight. But he was intending to put the barrel, or at least the toilet-paper tube, right against Tony Moscowic’s mastoid, so aiming was not really a consideration.