Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  The path led to the dilapidated dock. Three aluminum rowboats were dark shapes on the riprap. Suter picked his way over chunks of broken concrete and stepped onto the dock’s slimy planks.

  “Come on.”

  “That’s not safe.”

  “I walked all the way out when I was here before.” His voice was shaking. He had to clear his throat to speak. “We’re not going all the way. I just want to show you what I found.”

  Moscowic edged up beside him. He had picked up a stick to use as a cane, and he poked ahead of himself like a blind man. The water swirled ten inches below their feet.

  “You got the binoculars? Look across the river—the second high-rise from the left? It’s the fourth window from the top—” He had to make it sound as if there really was something there to look at.

  Tony raised the binoculars in a half-hearted way but didn’t quite put them to his eyes. Suter transferred the pistol to his right hand behind his back. He found that Moscowic was a little closer than he had intended, almost leaning on him. Suter moved to his own left; one foot slipped, and he started to fall, caught himself.

  “You okay?”

  Suter was starting to hyperventilate. “Look where I tell you, will you? I want to get out of here!”

  “You wanta get outa here! Listen to the guy!” Moscowic raised the binoculars to his eyes.

  Suter put the cardboard tube against the other man’s left mastoid and pulled the trigger.

  There was a slightly muffled report and a brilliant flash in the darkness, and shredded paper suddenly appeared on the hair at the back of Moscowic’s head, plastered to it by the wet. Suter smelled burning hair and paper.

  “Hey!” Moscowic said. He put his left hand to his head and turned. “Hey!”

  Suter stared at him. The stupid sonofabitch had moved just as Suter had pulled the trigger—that was all he could think. Moscowic had turned his head, maybe feeling the tube brush his hair, and Suter had fired a shot that hadn’t killed him.

  “What the hell—!” Moscowic was gasping. He took his hand away and looked at the blood, almost as dark as the river in the dimly reflected light.

  Suter felt as if somebody was choking him. He gagged.

  He fired again, the shot loud this time. Moscowic grunted and clapped his left hand to his chest. His eyes were wide.

  Suter fired again.

  Moscowic swung his stick and whipped Suter across the face. The pain was shocking. Moscowic seemed to be chanting: “You shit—you stupid dumbfuck shit—”

  Suter fired again and then again. Moscowic groaned and sagged to his left. Suter realized he might go over into the river alive, and, sobbing in his terror, he grabbed the front of Moscowic’s jacket, pulling him off the dock so that he fell to his knees on the broken concrete.

  “I knew, you slimy sonofabitch, I knew…” Moscowic’s voice was thin.

  Suter was blubbering, vocalizing gasps—“Unnh—uh—unnnn—uh—” He picked up a piece of broken concrete and brought it down on Moscowic’s head. Still he didn’t go all the way down. He groaned again, a horrible, animal sound, and Suter brought the concrete down again, and this time Moscowic fell at his feet, still alive, still able to roll on his side and try to grab Suter’s leg.

  Suter screamed at the touch. He smashed the concrete into Moscowic’s face. And again. And again. Until Moscowic was quiet.

  Suter backed away into the cover of the bushes, weeping; then he threw up. He felt a little better, but he was numbed by what had happened. He had had no idea how hard it is to kill another man. Five shots. Then, What the hell had he done with the gun? Panicked, he felt in his pockets, his hands on fire, torn by the concrete. He turned his burning hands up into the rain, like a man asking for mercy.

  Moscowic groaned.

  Suter sobbed, and he went down on his knees to look for the gun.

  Moscowic moved.

  Suter scrabbled around on all fours, going toward Moscowic, away from him, sideways toward the dock, back. He found the .22 in a pocket between two chunks of concrete. The cardboard silencer was gone.

  He crawled to Moscowic and put the barrel right against the man’s left eye and pulled the trigger. Then Tony Moscowic was dead.

  Suter wanted to run, but he made himself sit there. He made himself go through it and think what he was supposed to do next: It didn’t matter about the cardboard silencer, so let that go. It didn’t matter about the cartridge casings, because he’d handled them with gloves on, so let them go. The rain—maybe—would wash his blood away; nothing he could do about that, anyway.

  Book, he thought. Tony’s notebook, in which he kept all his cases, incredibly messy, incoherent, but a record that would damn him if anybody could figure out Tony’s code. He put a hand on Tony’s chest and felt the wet, went through Tony’s pockets and found the little spiral book in the upper pocket of the nylon jacket. One of the .22 slugs had gone right through it. He found Tony’s keys and threw them into the river; he wanted it to look like robbery, and he knew now he could never go into Tony’s house and search it, anyway. He couldn’t. He took Tony’s wallet.

  The rain fell more heavily.

  He tried to pull Tony Moscowic to the dock. Just as he had had no understanding of how hard it is to kill a man, so he had had no realization of how heavy and unyielding a corpse would be. Before he had Tony’s buttocks on the dock, he was weak from the exertion. Ready to give up. But he had the desperation of the cornered animal, and he pulled and pulled, then pushed the body and rolled it. At last he was far enough out on the rotting dock that he could see the lights of the marina a hundred yards downstream. He felt naked out there with those faint lights silhouetting him. He began to shake.

  He looked down at the lights, then across the river.

  He crawled back and picked up a piece of broken concrete and put it inside the bullet-riddled nylon jacket, then put another in the other side and zipped the jacket up. His hands were so cold he could hardly grasp the zipper pull.

  He toppled Tony Moscowic’s body into the brown water. It sank head and torso first, as if Tony were having a look around, snorkel fashion, and the dark water carried it downstream, spinning slowly and sinking away.

  Ray Suter watched it go, unable to move.

  20

  Istanbul, Turkey.

  Anna logged off the young medical student’s computer. Harun had been delighted to find a woman who spoke Persian in the youth hostel, devastated when she wouldn’t sleep with him. Women who wore blue jeans and lived in youth hostels were supposed to be loose. Western decadence was the lure that had brought him to study in Turkey, after all.

  By not sleeping with him, she had evaded all of his Iranian male contempt. He wanted her. She led him by the prick. They sat in a café and sipped thick coffee and she used his ancient laptop to log in through a Turkish university net.

  She thought of Alan Craik. A boy, like the boy beside her. Boys could be led. Shreed was not a boy, but an old, bitter spy. A professional manipulator. He would be dead to most of her wiles, and that made him impossible to manage. On the other hand, he had the knowledge to survive and prosper that she needed. Craik didn’t. She couldn’t see Craik leaving his life to follow her, but even if she managed it, what sort of partner would he be? Perhaps more biddable than Shreed, but hard?

  He pursued Bonner like a thing from beyond the grave. Efremov had said that with respect. Craik was at least handsome, even winning in a quiet way. She could lie down next to Craik without a qualm, perhaps even look forward to it. His eyes were powerful, as Efremov’s had been. There was something in Craik that drew her, and she fought it as she had since she had first seen him shouting for his wife in the café in Trieste. No one on earth would wear that look and shout for her, but he had responded to her when she had let him know a little of the truth of her life. He was a man who felt things. Shreed would use her like a towel. She was tired of old men.

  She was tired of boys, too.

  She stretched, absently di
splaying her perfect midriff below her sleeveless top to the boy seated opposite. He pawed her with his eyes. She smiled a little vacantly and typed a series of keys.

  “I have to use the washroom, Harun.”

  He smiled wolfishly at her. An hour later, he found that his laptop had been slicked down to core memory. In the hostel, two young Arab women discovered that their passports had been stolen. None of them ever saw her again.

  USS Thomas Jefferson.

  Alan’s solution to inaction was work. He sat in his stateroom, grinding away at a stack of first-class-petty-officer evaluations that were ready for signature, then reviewing his jg fitrep drafts, but his mind was on the map of the Indian Ocean pasted over his desk. Three feet above him, the distorted voice of Céline Dion pounded through the deck. A steel-beach picnic was in full swing on the flight deck, and Alan needed to get some air. He changed into running clothes and headed for the party.

  He ran into his own people as soon as he emerged on the blast furnace of the deck. It was a hundred and eight degrees in the shade, and it would get hotter as they entered the Red Sea. He got a burger and the allowed beer from one of the stalls set up at the deck edge and moved to where most of his officers were lounging in deck chairs. Reilley and Cohen were tossing a Nerf football. Stevens was describing a flight to Campbell, his hands flat in the universal aviator symbolism representing aircraft. Soleck was lying back and fondling a female helicopter pilot with his eyes while she played volleyball on a net stretched between two F-18s.

  “Hey, Soleck, keep your eyes in your head.”

  “Oh, yeah, hi, skipper. She’s real cute. Kinda flatchested, but—”

  “Soleck! She’s an officer in the US Navy, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Sure is a great Navy!”

  He thought he was funny. He was twenty-two years old.

  “Soleck, I’m serious as a heart attack. If you can’t learn to treat women like fellow professionals—”

  “Whoa! Attention on deck, it’s the CAG!”

  Rafe looked like a poster for the Navy in a clean haze-gray T-shirt and faded USNA shorts.

  “I’ll just go play volleyball.” Soleck grabbed his shirt and vanished.

  “He as sharp as he looks?” Rafe said.

  “Soleck? Sometimes I think he’s hopeless. Sometimes I think he’s a genius. I was just starting to give him the ‘don’t drool on the female cadre’ lecture. Same one as had so much effect on you, as I recall.”

  Rafe put his arm around Alan’s shoulder, a gesture that did not pass unremarked on the flight deck. Alan squeezed his arm and turned to face him. “I have an idea I need to turn into a plan.”

  “Talk to me, Al.”

  “I want to put recon way ahead into the IO as soon as we get to the bottom of the Red Sea. I’m thinking a big chainsaw right out over the IO.”

  “And you’re thinking that the MARI system might just win its spurs.”

  “Right.”

  Alan had the map of the vast reaches of the Indian Ocean in his mind. The Gulf of Aden opened like a mouth into the scene of action, the Arabian Sea. From Socotra Island at the eastern end of the Gulf of Aden, it was less than two thousand miles to Karachi, Pakistan, or to Goa, India, the two antagonists’ major naval bases. By the time the Jefferson reached Socotra, now fourteen hundred miles away, the Chinese surface-action group could be near Sri Lanka. All the players would be on the board.

  If the Jefferson and her escorts pressed hard, they could be at Socotra in three days. If they raced and left the escorts, sooner. Rafe looked at him, considering. “It’s one hell of a long way.”

  “Doable, Rafe. With even a modest tanker plan, we could get a good look at the Ceylon Channel. And we’d be south of the action, if they’re sparring.”

  “They’re already sparring. An Indian frigate sank a Pakistani missile boat about an hour ago.”

  “It’s a lot like a war, isn’t it?”

  “Looks like shit, and it tastes like it, too.”

  “Rafe, getting a scout would serve a lot of purposes. It ought to scare the piss out of the Chinese; they’ll have no idea where we came from. If we show our hand, I mean. And it might just help convince them we mean business. But I have to say it: they might shoot.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So we can’t just have the MARI birds. We’d need at least one or two shooters. That’s a lot more gas.”

  “We plan it both ways. F-18s would go a long way to convince them we were close. On the other hand, they can’t have any serious air cover.”

  “Maybe not. Also, remember that the Indians will be all over them. We can’t be the trigger that starts everybody shooting.”

  “Yeah. Okay, Al. You have ideas, I have ideas. Let’s get some pens and start planning. I’ll get everybody together when we have a draft. We plan it both ways; a strike package and just the two MARI birds and their gas. I expect it will have to be approved all the way up the chain to CNO.”

  “Higher than that, Rafe.”

  “And then, if we haven’t started WWIII with China, maybe you can slip off to Bahrain, okay?”

  The words marked a change in Rafe—conciliation, or new information?

  Part Two

  Flight

  21

  Washington.

  Alone in her office in the early morning, Emma Pasternak reviewed her e-mails and her voice mail and her paperwork, keeping her investigator’s file on George Shreed open in front of her. She knew what she was going to do, but it was too early yet. She worked on, glancing at her watch every half-hour. Finally, the watch told her that it was after nine-thirty and time to act.

  She reached for the telephone.

  Langley.

  George Shreed picked up the telephone without looking at it. He was pretending to listen to a former congressman orate on the subject of a missile defense system while, in his own head, he was concentrating on the problem of revenging himself on Chen. Giving an apologetic cock of the head as he touched his telephone, Shreed held up a hand.

  “Sir, I’m sorry—” It was his receptionist, who had the fear of being fired in his voice. “The caller said it was urgent. Priority Star—”

  “Put him on.” He gave the ex-congressman a fleeting smile.

  “Am I speaking to George Shreed?” It was a woman’s voice.

  “Speaking.”

  “Mister Shreed, this is Emma Pasternak of Barnard, Kootz, Bingham. I represent Lieutenant-Commander Rose Siciliano in an ongoing national security case.”

  Shreed felt the hair at the base of his skull rise. “Yes?”

  “Mister Shreed, is it true that you’re a Chinese agent who uses the code name Top Hook?”

  His mouth went dry and his gut dropped. He stared at the ex-congressman, who was cleaning the fingernails of one hand with a fingernail of the other. “Is this a joke?” he managed to say.

  “No joke, no kidding, no bullshit. I’m going to court today to request a subpoena to depose you under oath, hopefully tomorrow, about your role in the scapegoating of my client. Any comment?”

  “I think that if you have such an absurd action in mind, the place to go is the Agency Security Office. They pass on requests for interviews. Goodbye.”

  He tried to hang up, but her voice froze his hand.

  “Listen, Shreed, I’ll have that subpoena by three and I’m coming after you tomorrow! Under oath! I’ll bring a court steno and you by all means have somebody there from your Security office! I’ll want two hours, because I’ve got lots of questions about a Chinese agent named Top Hook who uses the Internet to pass US secrets! Get me?”

  He lowered the telephone into the cradle. He managed to smile at the former congressman. “Somebody who wants to subpoena me,” he said, as if it were a joke. His knees were trembling, but he kept his face pleasant and his hands steady. After a glance at his watch, he said, “I’m sorry to cut you short, Congressman, but the people upstairs have me down for a meeting in ten minutes.”

  The ex-con
gressman went right back to his spiel, which really had to do with his allegiance to the defense contractor who now paid his salary. Shreed pretended to listen while his heart pounded and his mind kept snarling at him, It’s over, it’s over, it’s over—

  He told his receptionist he was feeling sick and was taking the rest of the day off, and he hobbled down to his car in its privileged parking space and drove himself slowly out of the Agency lot and made the turn toward his home. Checking ahead and behind for surveillance, he detoured to a major artery and drove for ten minutes toward the district, then took the turnoff for Tyson’s Corner and its traffic and its upscale high-rises. He had actually visited a doctor out here sometimes, so the route might make some sort of sense.

  He found himself having to plan an escape too quickly. He thought he had been planning ever since Janey’s death—Jesus, only nine days ago—and, now that the moment had come, he wasn’t ready. In fact, he realized, he hadn’t believed that the moment would come at all. He hadn’t believed he would really have to flee.

  He turned down toward the doctor’s and watched behind himself for a tail. The call from that woman could have been a fake to flush me. Maybe they’ve known for months—a couple of years, that’s how long it takes them to get their act together— Seeing nobody, he pulled into the big parking lot that surrounded the doctor’s isolated high-rise on three sides, drove up and down two parking lanes as if looking for a space—there were plenty, but he after all was a man with a handicap—and then coasted through an almost hidden gap that took him into the parking lot of the next building. He turned right and exited immediately, went around the block three-quarters of the way, and headed for home.

  What he was supposed to do now was notify Chen and initiate an escape plan. The Chinese would pull him out within six hours, and tomorrow he’d be in Beijing, a hero.