Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  “China couldn’t win a war with France, and a war might just expose the real roots of dissatisfaction in the country. They lack any real trained troops, their air forces are mostly untrained and totally GCI-harnessed, and their navy has no blue-water potential at all. To be honest, Rafe, I’m not sure we’re confident that their nuclear deterrent will work. They are not a superpower in a military sense.”

  “How did we get here, then?”

  “Rhetoric exerts a strange fascination, Rafe. And China is holding some card here that I’m not seeing.”

  “So when we show them some muscle, they back down?”

  “That’s how it’s supposed to work.”

  Alan wished he had convinced himself.

  The carrier would not deviate from her course to launch or recover aircraft, and the air wing was idle. Maintenance continued, but aircrew sat and played cards or ran on the flight deck or sat and complained. Every unit had dropped weeks of work and preparation. Alan’s det had lost their new role of catching smugglers, and every unit had forfeited some role in the NATO air effort. The troops had lost their liberty in Naples. They were sailing toward an unknown ocean and a potentially disastrous war. The younger ones were excited, the veterans pensive. Bickering and griping increased. In the det, factions dampened by action and success acquired renewed life and tempers flared.

  Alan sensed it all. He forced his aircrews to the simulator, made Soleck and Navarro spend hours getting Chinese, Pakistani, and Indian data into the system, drilled his crews, and ignored the stares and whispered comments from Stevens’s group. He had them at the brink of becoming a cohesive unit and he wasn’t backing away now.

  And in the back of his mind, he thought that what they all needed was to do something. To help send the message. He thought about the unrefueled range of the S-3 and started measuring distances in the Indian Ocean. Because China intended to push them to war. In four days.

  NCISHQ.

  Dukas had spent most of the night trying to figure out how Al Craik’s flimsy identification of Top Hook with George Shreed could be used. The trouble was, it was purely inferential. What he wanted was hard evidence. He put his face in his hands and blew an exasperated sigh through pursed lips.

  “It can’t be that bad,” a husky voice said right next to him.

  Dukas jumped.

  It was Rose.

  He scrambled up; the crate of files fell over on the floor again. “Ro-Rosie—” he said.

  She came to him, put her arms around him and leaned her face on his chest. Triffler stared through a gap between the philodendron and a suction-cupped Garfield.

  “I can’t stay mad at you, damn it,” she said.

  “Rose, Rose—I’m so sorry—”

  “You were doing your job.”

  “I wanted to kill myself—”

  She looked up. “Harry said you got drunk. I hope the hangover was awful.”

  “Killer.”

  “You’ve done your penance; you’re forgiven.” She kissed him.

  “Rose, what are you doing here?”

  “Seeing my old pal Mike Dukas.”

  “What are you doing in DC?”

  “Making the rounds. Alan’s idea—see every Navy guy we’ve ever known, scotch the rumors, press the flesh, try to make something happen. Mike, they’re saying terrible things about us!”

  “Yeah, I know; I hear things.” He had his arms around her and didn’t want to let go. “Jesus, you feel good.”

  “You, too. But knock it off, or people’ll start talking about us.” She pulled away from him. Dukas became at once too buoyant, too active, couldn’t help himself. “Hey, Dick,” he called, “come on over here, meet the star of our show!”

  Rose turned, stricken. “Star!”

  “Joke.”

  “Some joke. It’s okay—it’s okay—but I get pretty sick of being what you call ‘the star,’ Mike—”

  She shook hands with Triffler, and, in turning, saw the chart on the back of the door. “Wow, you are serious about George Shreed.”

  “Only kind of testing the waters.”

  “Looks like more than that to me. You got something new?”

  “Oh—well, Rose—”

  “Alan said something, too. We send a lot of e-mails; he said that something had happened in Naples and now he saw why you guys were suspicious of Shreed.”

  Dukas and Triffler exchanged a look, and Dukas moved Rose back to his side of the office. “I don’t think you should know too much about this, Rose—”

  “I’m just the defendant here!”

  “No, no, it isn’t that. I’m walking this tightrope with the Internals guy at the Agency. If he got even a whiff that we were talking outside the office about Shreed—”

  “This isn’t outside the office. Emma says you’re not very forthcoming with her, either—and by the way, what’s going on between you and Emma?”

  “Emma? Pasternak, you mean?”

  “Mike! Hey—it’s me. Are you and Emma—?”

  Dukas sighed. He pushed a chair for her next to his desk and called to Triffler for coffee; sitting down, he put his hands on the desk and stared at them and said, “It’s just physical.”

  She gave a peal of husky laughter. “What does that mean?”

  “Emma and I have a mutually satisfying physical relationship, how’s that?”

  Rose stared at the coffee cup that appeared next to her. She shook her head. “And I thought she was maybe gay.” She smiled up at Triffler. “Great coffee. Starbucks?”

  Triffler looked hurt. “I grind my own. A shop on M Street mixes it for me; in fact, they sell it as Triffler’s Blend. You get the touch of vanilla?”

  “Oh, yeah.” She talked coffee for thirty seconds, then decorating and the wall of crates, then clothes and where could she buy her husband a jacket like that one? and in that short time she succeeded in doing what Dukas had not: Triffler became her friend. When they were finished, Triffler looked at Dukas as if to say, See how it’s done? and walked back to his desk, whistling.

  “Nice guy,” she murmured. Dukas rolled his eyes, but she missed it. “So,” she said, “is it Shreed?”

  “I really don’t know, babe. I just don’t know.”

  She was wearing civilian clothes, a dark dress with a rather full skirt that she pulled up a little to cross her legs. She looked pretty and vulnerable and a little tired. “You going to get me out of this, Mike?”

  “You know I am. But—”

  “I know. ‘But it takes time.’” She put her hands over both of his. “Harry told me who the Telephone Woman is. I want to talk to her.”

  “No, no—”

  “Listen to me, Mike. She wants to help but I think she’s scared; maybe if I go to her, give her some support—”

  “Menzes would crucify me.”

  “Maybe if I’m a real person to her, with a face, not just a voice on the phone. Maybe she’ll give us more—facts. Something.”

  “Have you told Emma?”

  “No, have you?”

  He shook his head. “I have to compartmentalize. I like Emma; I like what we do together. But she’s—”

  “On the other side?”

  “One of the other sides; there are about six. Yeah, I can’t be completely honest with her.”

  “Or with me?”

  He winced. “Anyway, I don’t want you to scare off our Telephone Lady.”

  “I won’t. Really.”

  Dukas pursed his lips, thought hard. “Don’t tell me about it, then. And don’t tell Emma.”

  “You got a lot of compartments, Mike.”

  He nodded. “It’s a mare’s nest of a case.”

  “What was Alan up to in Naples?”

  He shook his head.

  “He said he was doing something for you.” When Dukas shook his head again, she squeezed his hands. “Hey, I’m the good guy, remember? Or—are you still suspicious of me—?”

  “No! I swear it, Rose. But what Al’s doing is anothe
r thing altogether. Honest.”

  “He thinks it’s Shreed.”

  Dukas kept his left hand out so that she’d keep hold of it; with his right, he rubbed his eyes. “Al talks too goddam much. He got a hit on ‘Top Hook.’ This is not to get out of this office, okay? I’ve got to tell Menzes at Internal, but he’s the only one who’s in on this, so keep your mouth shut. See, ‘Top Hook’ was supposed to be your code name when you leaked the Peacemaker stuff.”

  “Which I didn’t do.”

  “Which you didn’t do; therefore, somebody else did. Therefore, when somebody elsewhere in the world mentions Top Hook, I think there’s a connection.”

  “What’s it got to do with Shreed?”

  He shook his head. “End of conversation.” He patted her hand. “Hey! New thought. Your Navy pal there, Valdez—”

  “Yeah, Harry hired him! And he proved my computer had been tampered with. He’s the best, just the best!”

  Dukas called Triffler over. “Dick, tell Lieutenant-Commander Siciliano what your interviewee told you about her and Valdez.”

  “Oh—Well—This is hearsay, okay? But, um—he said that you and Mister Valdez were, um—‘very close.’”

  “We were. He saved my life.”

  Dukas interrupted. “The implication was very close.”

  She stared, then exploded. “That’s bullshit! I was his division officer; I couldn’t operate without his special skills—I took him with me when I traveled because I fucking needed him, but—! Who the fuck said that?”

  “I can’t tell you,” Triffler muttered.

  “Tell her,” Dukas said.

  “Regulations say—”

  “Tell her!”

  Triffler straightened. “Guy named Ray Suter.”

  To Dukas’s surprise, she threw herself back and laughed. She blew a lock of hair off her forehead. “That slimy sonofabitch! He would have been my first guess. Oh, shit, Suter the Seducer! The only thing nastier than a woman scorned is a man scorned.”

  “You think that’s the only reason he’d say something about you and Valdez—revenge?”

  “What other reason is there?”

  “Well—he works for Shreed.”

  “What, you think they’re a conspiracy?” She made it a joke.

  To Dukas’s surprise, it was Triffler who defended the idea. “They don’t have to be spies or something to work together to discredit you and your husband. They both got reason to dislike you. Or—” He cocked an eye at the chart on the door. “If Shreed really is behind it, then Suter’s a perfect patsy for him if he’s trying to lay blame on you. Especially if he knows that Valdez is the one who cleared you on the computer stuff—if he can smear you and Valdez as lovers, then what Valdez did for us is suspect. See?”

  Dukas shook his head. “No way either Shreed or Suter could know about that.”

  “Oh, no? You filed a report with Menzes, right? You don’t believe there’s a leak out of that office?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Triffler shrugged. “Dream on.”

  “We’ve got to believe in something, Dick! We gotta have a place to stand! You can’t investigate a case if there’s no truth anywhere.”

  Rose stood. “Hey, hey, guys. Lighten up. You’re on the same side, remember?”

  Triffler and Dukas looked at each other. Triffler shot his eyebrows up and down, a rather Groucho Marx gesture, and then he said to Rose, “You’re not leaving us, I hope.”

  “I am. I’m having lunch with Admiral Pilchard, at the Army-Navy Club, and then this afternoon I’m doing some congressional offices.” She stuck out her hand. “A real pleasure, Dick. We’ll be seeing more of each other, I know.”

  Triffler made pleased sounds. Still seated, Dukas watched them, surprised again by this new side of Triffler. Then Rose kissed Dukas’s cheek and said she’d call him really soon. “Don’t compartmentalize too much,” she said as she bent over him. “It’s bad for your emotional health.” And then she was gone,

  leaving a faint ghost of perfume.

  “That’s some pretty woman,” Triffler said.

  “She’s married.”

  “So am I. So?”

  “I didn’t know that!”

  Triffler looked down at Dukas. “There’s lots you don’t know. In fact—Dukas, they tell me that those guys worked for you in Bosnia thought you walked on water, but the way I figure it, you were all from different countries, so nobody spoke the same language and they never got to know you. I do speak your language and I never yet heard you say one positive, personal thing. For your information, my wife is named Germaine and is big-time cute; I have two kids; the boy is a freshman wide receiver at DeMatha and the girl is a super-smart student at St Anselm’s. I have loving sex on a regular basis and I’m a Redskins fan. And what that pretty woman who was just in here sees in you, I don’t get!”

  Dukas had meant to get around to a little personal stroking just as soon as he got on top of the case. Anyway, he had thought that maybe Triffler was gay and he hadn’t wanted to pry.

  Maybe, when all this was over, he’d work on his management skills.

  Washington.

  Because of what she had overheard about George Shreed on Mike Dukas’s phone, Emma Pasternak called her investigator. She was in a hurry—she was always in a hurry—but she knew she had to do this one exactly right.

  “George Shreed,” she said. “You with me? I asked you to—Right, that guy. Okay, I want everything you’ve learned about him, and I want it messengered to me by four today so I can take it home with me—okay?”

  The woman on the other end said that that was fine, no problem, but was there a problem, because it sounded like Emma was taking this away from her?

  “No, God—! No, I picked up a piece of information from another source, and I need to see exactly where I am. What I’m looking for today is Shreed’s Navy record—he was a pilot in Vietnam, a carrier called the Midway— You got that in the file? Great!”

  Emma dropped her voice. She sounded almost uncertain. “Unh—one thing, hon—don’t get me wrong on this, but do you by any chance have any kind of, um, computer surveillance or anything on Shreed’s house?” She listened to the angry denials from the other end. The woman there was almost spluttering. “Okay—okay—just asking, hon, just asking! Because somebody asked me, as if I’d do such a thing, and I thought—you know, I just thought—maybe—Okay, okay—don’t get on your high horse—”

  18

  Alexandria, Virginia.

  The plantings around Sally Baranowski’s were out of control. They looked as if they hadn’t been trimmed since last fall. The grass needed cutting.

  Not a happy house, Rose thought. She pulled into the driveway, which was only two ribbons of cracked concrete that led nowhere—no garage, no car port, only a grassless area where a VW Golf seemed to be leaning against the house.

  She rang the doorbell and stood back so that Sally Baranowski wouldn’t feel threatened. A lot of experience with young pilots and even younger enlisted people made Rose believe that Baranowski’s phone calls might have been far more about Baranowski herself than about George Shreed. Maybe simply wanting to make contact. Maybe simply wanting to feel good about having done one positive thing. Or maybe simply wanting to be rescued?

  Rose was aware of a darker dark behind a window. No lights, except at the back of the house, but something there behind closed drapes now. Then, a sound at the door. And a wait that seemed to threaten to last until the stars came out.

  “What is it?”

  The door had opened almost soundlessly, so little that Rose could see nothing through the crack. But the voice had been a woman’s, and there was an odor, probably food and—vodka?

  “Hi. Mrs Baranowski?”

  “What is it?”

  Rose moved in a little and put her right toe against the door. “I’m Rose Siciliano.”

  The other woman’s hesitation gave her time to brace her leg and put a hand on the door near the kn
ob; then Sally Baranowski tried to push the door shut and Rose, reacting against it, put her right hip forward and pushed with her hand.

  “I don’t want to talk to you!”

  “Please—Sally—we’ve talked—”

  “No, we haven’t—go away—”

  Close to the door now, with the other woman just on the other side, Rose got the smell of vodka more strongly. It disgusted her and threw her off for a moment, but she knew she recognized the woman’s voice; she swung her hip hard against the door and it yielded, and Rose slipped inside.

  “Please let’s talk,” she said into the near-darkness.

  “Go away!”

  “Sally, you tried to help me—you did help me; you helped a lot—Let’s talk.”

  “That was a mistake. That never happened. I don’t know you.”

  “You know my husband.”

  The woman backed away. Rose moved forward until she could see a spill of light from the kitchen and the woman partly silhouetted against it. As if defending some indiscretion, the woman said, “I didn’t know your husband at all well. Not at all.” If she was drinking, the alcohol wasn’t affecting her much.

  “Alan talked about you. He said you backed him when George Shreed was against him.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “Look, I don’t want to bust into your house if you don’t want me. But I’d like to just talk. Can’t we do that?”

  “I’ve been told not to talk to anybody.”

  “When?”

  “Today. My boss told me that I was talking out of turn and I’d better stop.”

  “But you—He couldn’t know.”

  “He did. You told somebody, didn’t you?”

  “Only the people who are helping me. None of them would tell!”

  Sally Baranowski chuckled. It was a surprisingly rich sound, as if she really enjoyed the joke. “You don’t know the Agency. Everything is a secret, and there aren’t any secrets.” She moved; Rose heard the movement rather than saw it. “Come on into the kitchen.”

  The tiny kitchen was like the yard, but worse. Dirty dishes had been stacked on the drain board. The window of the microwave was filthy. Fast-food containers jutted from the yellow trash bin, which was too full to close. A vodka bottle stood on the table.