Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  activities.”

  “Ah, yes, sir.”

  “You going to tell me it’s too sensitive?”

  “No, sir. We may have discovered a senior mole in the CIA. Working for China. It all started with a connection to my dad’s death.”

  “Well, well. You’ve about tripled my knowledge of what the hell is going on. Are you still involved?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m supposed to meet the, uh, agent, the person who may have the data, in Bahrain in two days.” Alan was sweating again, and he still hadn’t had time to change his shirt. None of the three men facing him looked friendly, although Maggiulli looked a lot less accusatory than he had lately.

  “We’ll see. If it’s up to me, you’re out of it, but I have a feeling it’s not up to me. Now go do your job.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Alan walked out of the admiral’s briefing room with Tony Maggiulli on his heels.

  “Just understand, okay? You made a mess in Trieste and left us to hold the bag. You looked bad, withholding from the Italian cops and from us. Even a one-liner about the level of the operation would have saved you a lot of crap from our end.”

  “I didn’t know what it was about, then. Or that my wife had been accused of espionage. It was all over the boat when I got here. I didn’t have a clue what was going on.”

  “Well, next time, talk to a lawyer, okay?” Maggiulli stuck out his hand, and Alan shook it.

  London.

  The WAGN line crosses the River Lea a little north of Clapton, a part of metropolitan London that most tourists never see. A path runs along the river, part of the Lea Valley Park system, coming from Limehouse Cut and the Thames on the south and running north to Waltham Abbey and then to Ware. The Lea—the river that Izaak Walton once fished—is not much where Limehouse Cut runs into the Thames, and it remains an urban and industrial waterway for several miles, but then its banks grow greener and the spaces on each side widen, and by the time you reach the railway bridge where the trains cross, it is a pleasant, watery space.

  The five-seventeen to Cambridge crosses the river here. Marcus Huckabee rides the five-seventeen every weekday of his life. He always sits in the same seat, the third from the end on the downstream side, just as, on the trip into London in the morning, he sits in the fourth seat, downstream side. Every day, on both trips, he looks aside as the train crosses the Lea and takes a moment to study a row of posts along the western bank of the river by the path.

  Marcus Huckabee has seen something on one of the posts only three times in seven years. Each time, he did what he was paid twenty pounds a month to do: he telephoned a number in Fulham and said, “There’s a package for Hannah at the shop.” That was all. That was the entirety of Marcus Huckabee’s part in espionage.

  Two of those times, the thing on the post—once a Coke bottle, once a glove—had been left by a walker who had found it on the path. The third time, the thing (a lager can) had been put there by Marcus Huckabee’s handler, who was testing him.

  Today, lowering his newspaper, Huckabee looked aside and was pleased and, as with the other times, excited to see a red cap on one of the posts. Third from the end, exactly where it should be, although he reported anything on any of the posts. Red cap, third from the end, he told himself. It was important to remember the details, because his handler would contact him later and ask.

  As soon as he got home, right after kissing his wife, Huckabee called the number in Fulham.

  Within two hours, the Mossad office in Tel Aviv knew that a foreign friend, not yet an asset, wanted to make contact.

  At ten o’clock London time, George Shreed checked a mark on the wall of the cinema in Brunswick Center and walked to a bench at the far end of the shopping mall, where a middle-aged woman was waiting for him.

  He had been gone for twenty-one hours.

  NCIS HQ.

  “Suter hasn’t seen him since yesterday. I think he’s worried, but he says he isn’t.”

  Mike Dukas didn’t see much in Sally Baranowski’s call. Still, you had to encourage your agent, even when the agent was as informal an acquisition as Sally. “But you said he went home sick.”

  “His receptionist says he went home sick yesterday morning. The DO logged a call from him yesterday afternoon saying he was heading to the doctor’s but he was sure he wouldn’t be in today.”

  “Well, there’s some bug going around.”

  “But he didn’t call in this morning. We’re supposed to call in daily if we’re taking sick leave.”

  “Thanks for keeping on top of it. I really appreciate it. Check on him tomorrow, will you?”

  “Mister Dukas, I get really bad vibes about this. George isn’t the kind of guy who stays home sick. I used to work for him, remember—you could have terminal flu, he still expected you to be there.”

  “Well, thanks. You’re doing real good. How’s life at the Peretzes?”

  She laughed, the first time he had heard her laugh. The night that Rose had brought her to his place after the tire-slashings, she had seemed a basket case to him. “It’s pretty noisy,” she said.

  He laughed, too. Bea Peretz and her daughters were high-decibel arguers. “You take care.”

  He was going to dismiss what she had said, but he remembered the warning he had given Menzes: his rabbit was getting ready to run. Could George Shreed have run? But why? Nothing had changed.

  Still, what she had told him nagged.

  He called across to Triffler. “Hey, Dick—play telemarketer for me, will you?”

  “Oh, shit!”

  “Yeah, go on, you told me you moonlighted at it once—I bet you’re dynamite.” He had been asking Triffler more personal questions. “Just get on the phone and make one call for me, okay?”

  “Who to?”

  “George Shreed. I just want to know if he’s home, okay?”

  Triffler walked around the wall of crates to Dukas’s desk. He looked disgusted. “Why me?”

  “Because I can’t do that shit and you can! Will you call him?”

  Triffler looked at the wall. His lips moved. He nodded.

  “I’ll do the prescription-drug spiel. His phone listed?”

  “One is, one isn’t. Listing is G. Shreed.” Dukas pushed a paper with the number across the desk.

  “Okay, so I can say ‘Mister Shreed.’ Okay—” He did a quick rehearsal for Dukas’s benefit. “’May I speak to Mister Shreed, please? Mister Shreed, this is Thad Blaine calling from the Vital Health Foundation, how are you this afternoon, sir? Do you realize that the cost of prescription drugs—’ Okay!” He picked up Dukas’s phone. “My wife may call on my line; the dog was sick—Here we go—”

  Triffler dialed. He waited. He listened. He hung up. “Answering machine.”

  “Shit.”

  “Could mean nothing.”

  “I know, I know. Anyway, thanks, Dick.” He looked at Triffler. “Baranowski thinks he’s been out of sight too long—since yesterday some time.”

  “Melodramatic. She’s unstable.”

  “I know, I know. Still—” He put his hand on the phone. “If I tell Menzes, he’s going to cream me for withholding information. If I don’t tell him, Shreed could be in Tehran.”

  “Wait a day.”

  Dukas and Triffler stared at each other. Triffler was the cautious one, and Dukas reminded himself of that and that sometimes caution is misplaced. “Unh-unh,” he said and started to dial.

  “Thanks for your confidence in my judgment.”

  “I value your input.” He waited as the telephone rang. So did Triffler, who, despite his advice, wanted to know what was happening. After five rings, however, somebody else picked up and told Dukas that Menzes was in a meeting. Dukas left his name and number and asked to be called back before the end of the workday.

  “What day does that cleaning woman do Shreed’s house?”

  “Wednesdays.”

  “Well, that won’t work.” It was Friday. “Let’s see what Valdez has got.”
He dialed another number.

  “Nada,” Valdez said. “There was some computer use middle of the day yesterday, then nothing. No traffic last night, which he doesn’t usually fail to do, being a night person.”

  “What about the other hacker who’s on him?”

  “He’s still there, man, just waiting. Just like me.”

  He hung up.

  “I don’t like this,” he said to Triffler.

  USS Thomas Jefferson.

  The brief ended up in the VS-53 ready room, because it had the most seats, and because Rafe had decided to fly one of the VS-53 birds for Opera Glass. There were sixty aircrew packed into a space meant to seat forty, and the back was crowded with intelligence personnel, alternate crews, and flag staff. The admiral was sitting in the squadron skipper’s seat, front row on the aisle, and the embroidered cat symbol on the headrest shone in the reflected light of the projector.

  Rafe stood at the front of the ready room, a tall, lanky figure in a rumpled flight suit, and sixty pairs of eyes were glued to him as he slapped the screen with his pointer. The digital image showed the Indian Ocean from the Gulf of Aden to Sri Lanka. West of Socotra Island was a carrier shape. That’s where the pointer rested.

  “Evening, folks. Okay. Opera Glass is a long-range recon mission with a supporting war-at-sea package and fighter support. Our objectives are to locate and identify the Chinese surface-action group last located off the map in the southern Bay of Bengal. I want this to sink in, folks. We will be carrying war shots, but we’re not going to shoot unless we’re provoked. More on that in rules of engagement. What we want is to show the flag and convince the Chinese that we can find them and hurt them if we want to. More than that, we want them to know that we’re here and we’re serious. That’s what’s going to make it dangerous for us, because the mission is pretty provocative and they may not respond like our old friends the Russians would.” He nodded sharply to the sailor running the machine, and the computer-generated slide changed in a blink.

  “Okay. Here’s the package. Two MARI-equipped S-3s at the tip of the spear, with two VF-162 Tomcats to keep them company. Six VS-53 tankers with gas at these three points. All of the 53 birds carry a buddy store and a harpoon. That’s in case we have to go in shooting. Four F-18s with HARM back here covering the gas. The MARI birds go to Green Bay, here, tank, and start the search pattern here, at Dallas. When they locate the target, we either start bringing assets up the chain or we don’t, depending.”

  Rafe took a drink of water and looked out into the dark where the aircrews waited.

  “That’s the basic mission. Twenty-two planes in the chainsaw, then another six on alert five. At launch plus seven hours, we start rotating the chain. That’s the tricky part. For about thirty minutes, during this event,” Rafe went to a slide showing the cyclic ops cycle, “we’ll have about half the air wing going up the chain and half coming down. It has to be perfect, and we can’t practice. But it allows us to sustain the search at the pointy end for about five more hours and keep support packages ready to respond. With a little luck, and some ducting, we ought to be able to cover the whole area from Sri Lanka south to Point Denver, here, and west to Point Dallas. The devil’s in the details, though. Listen up and hold your questions till the end. Write ’em down if you have to.”

  Rafe was followed by the JAG with the rules of engagement. The JAG spoke for almost five minutes, but what he said boiled down to “Don’t shoot until shot at, and even then don’t shoot.” He closed by saying, “Weapons release will be held by the flag throughout,” for the third time. Then Brian Ho, with the intel portion: a lot about Chinese radar parameters, a cheat sheet for LantFleet sailors who had never seen a Chinese system, and another on the Pakistani and Indian navies. Kneeboard card after kneeboard card on missile ranges and reaction times.

  “They may have air support, in the form of Su-27 Flanker B’s out of Myanmar/Burma. Also watch for the Indian stuff listed on kneeboard three. No one out there will be particularly friendly, so ID everything you can. Everyone remember what a Tu-16 Badger looks like?” Grins. The Badger was an ancient Soviet plane still used by the Chinese. “They have some fitted out for sea-strike. They have long legs and they could be out for support. They may even do some ASW.”

  Aviators got up and talked about fuel loads. LTjg Sanchez briefed the comm plan. Her kneeboard cards were simple and accurate, color-coded by role in the mission package; they represented seven hours of work.

  “High Noon is the Strike Lead. Lone Ranger is MARI one and Tonto is MARI two. The tankers are Wagon Train one through six, and the Tomcats are Gunslingers. The F-18s are Riflemen. It’s all on the yellow card. Frequencies within your stations are color-coded. Thanks.” She ducked out.

  The brief rumbled on for more than an hour. When Rafe went back to the front and asked for questions, the briefing team endured another ten minutes of details that surfaced a fuel-consumption error and a lot of questions about the rules of engagement. Rafe announced that there would be a brief recce review of Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani hull types and aircraft in the VF-162 ready room in an hour. Then he looked at all the people in the ready room, running his eyes over them slowly as if measuring them.

  “Two days ago, China delivered a war ultimatum to India. It has three days to run. This is real, folks; we have to find ’em and wake them up to the New World Order. Or in three days we’ll be playing with fire.”

  The admiral nodded at Rafe and gave him a thumbs-up. Then he waved at a man in civilian clothes who was hovering in the doorway behind Rafe.

  Rafe looked at the man and held up his hands for silence.

  “This is Special Agent Stein from NCIS.”

  “Ahem, yeah. Admiral Kessler has asked me drop by to say something. Commander Craik is being, ah, instrumental in supporting an ongoing counterintelligence investigation. I have here a letter of commendation from the Director of NCIS that I’d like to present to Commander Craik. Admiral, shall I read it?”

  “No, Marty, I think we’ll save that for the awards ceremony. But thanks, and well done, Commander. Okay, boys and girls. If this thing gets approved, it launches in twenty-two hours. Get moving.”

  Alan thought his throat would burst, it had swelled so hard. The effect of the announcement was immediately visible: everybody was making surprised faces at everybody else.

  London.

  Shreed, wearing an English suit and tie, and with a wooden cane, was sitting in the Palm Court of the Langham Hotel. A businessman in an even more English suit and tie was sitting next to him at right angles, rather red in the face from sun and aggression, one of those Thatcherite go-getters who look as if they mean to eat you raw.

  “We have to know what you’re bringing,” he was saying in a surprisingly quiet voice.

  “Myself.”

  “My people would like something as a bona fide.”

  “Your people can go fuck themselves. They know me.”

  The man sipped his coffee. “They’d really like something.”

  “They’ll get something if they’re willing to deal.”

  “They don’t want to take a pig in a poke.”

  “Neither do I. Forget it.” Shreed made a movement to get up.

  The businessman laid a hand on his arm. “No, don’t. Please, don’t get angry.” He smiled a toothy smile. “They’ll just have to vet you that much more thoroughly at the other end, you know.” He put his hands up in mock surrender. “You’re too much for me. You can leave at seven. I’m terribly sorry, but two security people will go with you; they’ll have a passport for you. I’m told to say that we deeply regret any implication that you can’t be trusted to make the flight alone.”

  Shreed ignored the smile. “I’ll take the passport and a ticket to Nicosia. No minders, no ‘protectors.’ A room in a good hotel. If they try to snatch me and stick me in a safe house or fly me to Mossad headquarters, it’s over. Tell your people that.”

  “Please, Mister—Ackroyd—you must a
ccept some conditions.”

  “No, it’s Tel Aviv who must accept some conditions. If they don’t like it, I’ll go home.”

  “They’ll never agree to Nicosia. Nicosia is full of Palestinians.”

  “Exactly.”

  The man passed a hand over his face. “Let me consult with my people.”

  “You better consult fast. I’m not staying in London past midnight.”

  He had been gone for twenty-six hours.

  23

  USS Thomas Jefferson.

  The Jefferson and her escorts were out of the Ditch, and the moment they were clear of the navigational nightmare at the southern end of the canal, the carrier had again leaped forward to her full speed. Jordan dropped away to the east, and Egypt was a dirty yellow smudge to the west. A forty-knot wind generated by the huge ship’s passage blew African sand and heat through the p’ways; it was one hundred and twelve in the shade of the tower, and the sunset wind blowing over the deck was red hot.

  No one lingered on the flight deck, but men and women came up from below to see Africa and to feel the incredible heat. Flight operations remained at a standstill, and a group of sailors labored in the heat to replace the nonskid that had been worn down to bare metal by aircraft on the deck. Alan stretched his arms over his head and looked off the starboard side at Egypt and Somalia and thought about the past.

  It was hard to picture George Shreed, his father’s wingman, as a traitor. Yesterday, looking at the photo of the Top Hook ceremony in his mind, the connection had seemed obvious. Today, he considered the man’s ambition, his manipulations, and his relentless scheming at the Agency and couldn’t see George Shreed betraying his country. Certainly, Alan’s dad had said that he had come home from Vietnam a bitter man. The politics within any large bureaucracy had a corrosive effect that Alan had witnessed first-hand.

  Alan thought that Shreed was capable of using and discarding individuals. Was it a long step from personal betrayal to treason? He knew enough to know that falsehood was the foundation of espionage. Lies about identity, lies about purpose, lies about sides and roles and information.