Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  “So the air force made good its forecasts and kept the covering force refueled?” asked an army officer.

  “There has not yet come a point where our ships lack the cover of our brave airmen.” The air force general’s comment sounded more sarcastic than pious.

  “And the Americans turned away? We are sure that they were not merely short on fuel?”

  “They ran like rabbits. And they dove away, all the way down to the ocean. I believe that this indicates that they had plenty of fuel.” He looked at Chen. “The unverified memo that Top Hook allegedly stole from the US Security Advisor seems to be authentic.”

  A little buzz of mutual congratulation filled the Red Room. The Old Man gestured with his cane at a tea girl and looked around him with the imperious gaze of a falcon. He saw Chen near the edge of the army group and beckoned to him.

  As Chen bowed, the Old Man nodded and spoke. “One victory does not win a war. I agree that your man’s memo is looking authentic in the light of today’s events, but I am an old man, Chen, and I hesitate to commit us to an action we might regret.”

  Chen’s heart pounded. They were on the brink, and they held the winning pieces in their hands.

  “General, if we hesitate too long—”

  The general cut him off with a sharp chop of his right hand.

  “Our ultimatum with India expires in forty-eight hours. You have plans to meet with your Top Hook?”

  “Yes, General.”

  “I want you to take him. Bring him and the original of the memo here. When he is in your hands and has no option to retreat, then I will be prepared to commit my forces.”

  “That requires a delay of almost two days!” Chen regretted the nervous breaking of his voice and the anger of his posture instantly, and he could see from the closed faces of the men around him that he was alone in his desire to move quickly.

  “The delay will allow us to move aircraft and reposition forces. And I prefer to hold all of my pieces when that ultimatum expires. I do not trust spies.” The old eyes studied Chen, who had to admit to himself that he was, after all, a spy. “There is too much at stake. Do not quote to me from the ancients, Colonel Chen.”

  None of the men in the room knew how tenuous Chen’s hold on his agent was. Chen had feared double agents since he had graduated from the academy, and he worried about nuances in every signal from Top Hook, but today’s success should have been the vindication of his career. His work could catapult China into the front rank of world powers. The old generals were hesitating on the brink of victory. Who knew what delay might bring in the dangerous realms of diplomacy? Why had they given India so long to decide?

  But Chen’s real fear was that Top Hook, always a fickle agent, might revolt, and that he would bear the whole responsibility for failure.

  “Sir, I still believe that we should strike now.” Chen glanced around and found himself isolated, alone against the leadership, his only support some younger men too junior to argue. Nervous enthusiasm had compelled him to make a last effort to change the general’s mind. They’re in disarray! he wanted to scream at them. Who knows where they will be in two days!

  “I do not agree. You will meet with him and bring him home to his new father. We can learn more from him in an interrogation chamber than in these cryptic notes. Bring him home.”

  Chen swallowed hard. “Yes, sir.”

  “Where will you meet him?”

  “We have an established contact point in Pakistan.”

  “Have you a team prepared?”

  “It was to have been a clandestine meeting.” Chen passed his hand over his head. “Only an intelligence team.”

  “Insufficient. You will use paratroopers from the Eleventh and a transport from the air force. See to that.”

  Chen hid his anger behind a mask very like the masks that surrounded him. Four years of planning now depended on the vagaries of an agent and the will of an old man. If Top Hook missed the meeting, these men would withdraw their support from the bold gamble and cover their cowardice by blaming him. He could feel their eagerness to withdraw, now that they were at the brink. Chen blinked once and straightened his back. I didn’t want this, he thought. You did. And if it fails, you’ll blame me. “I will bring him to you, General.”

  “Do so.”

  Dubai, United Arab Emirates 1200 GMT (1500L) Sunday.

  When Anna had said to Shreed in the chat room, “the skating rink,” she could have meant only one place: the skating rink in Dubai’s great shopping mall. Now, she waited there for Shreed.

  Below her on the ice, a girl in a skating costume built up speed, legs pushing her forward in pulses, until just short of the barrier she leapt in the air, turned once with juvenile grace, and sank back to the ice in a crouch. Some of the shoppers in the mall who had stopped to watch gave little nods of satisfaction, and one or two hissed or applauded quietly. She wasn’t world class, but she had grace and heart.

  Anna looked at the girl’s expensive skating costume and the servant waiting for her. In Tajikistan, such talent might lead to a sports academy and real training. This spoiled Arab girl would flirt with excellence for a while and then marry, to spend the balance of her existence behind the walls of a house. Perhaps a rich husband would build her a place to skate.

  Down on the level of the skating rink, on the far side where there was a tunnel to the convention center on the other side of the boulevard, was a man Anna had seen before. She couldn’t place him, but his muscled bulk and large American face had featured in her life sometime recently. He looked like a watcher, and that doubled her caution.

  She went into the record shop on her level. It had neck-high racks of CDs, illegal copies made in Singapore or mainland China. Crowds of giggling Arab girls, their black coverings hiked up to reveal flashing, sequined shoes, rifled the racks in search of their favorite Western pop singers. Anna could browse among them and still watch for Shreed through the plate-glass wall and over the second-level concourse.

  She checked the clock on the wall behind the Pakistani cashier.

  The meeting’s window of time would open in two minutes. She moved to the cash register and paid for the three albums she had chosen. Paying, complete with a bit of haggle, ate more than a minute. When she emerged on the concourse, the meeting time had begun; however, she expected Shreed to arrive near the end of it, to show that he was not to be ordered about.

  She walked slowly along the top of the concourse. Few Westerners passed, and none met her idea of Shreed, whom she knew only as old and Caucasian. Haste and distrust had placed barriers between them. Perhaps he wouldn’t come. Perhaps this was another trap.

  She saw the muscled American she recognized from a few minutes before near the bottom of the escalator. Was he a watcher? One of Shreed’s? She would have to pass him to get to the vantage point she had selected down by the skating rink. She would have to risk it. She glanced at a mirror in one of the fashion shops, assured herself that no part of her above her ankles showed, and stepped lightly on the escalator.

  She was committed.

  Halfway down, she realized that the muscled man had been at the airport when she arrived, too. She smiled beneath her veil, pleased to have made the connection. Almost certainly an American. If that was the case, there would be other watchers, and she glanced quickly over the lower floor from her height on the escalator, looking for some hint of movement or stillness that might reveal more. The escalator descended inexorably toward him. Ugly man, with fingers missing from his hand and a face capable of brutality. He had moved to the bottom of the escalator and was alternating watching it and the tunnel.

  Anna clung to the assurance that her veil was impenetrable. She stepped past the watcher without a glance, almost brushing his arm where it rested on the partition. She was invisible, and her heart leaped as the pure joy of outwitting her foes hit her with a rush like a drug.

  She turned right as she passed him, rounding a partition and nearing him a second time. Her route r
equired it, but now she was confident, and she had to restrain an impulse to commit some silly act. She wanted to pinch him or to laugh aloud. Instead, she continued past to the lower-level shops, watching the elevators from the hotel lobby. She had taken one straight from her room to the concourse, allowing no opportunities for interception, and she believed that Shreed would do the same.

  A small Pakistani stood near the elevator. He was out of place here; no Pakistani could afford to shop in this gleaming concourse. He seemed to feel the weight of this social inferiority, avoiding the eyes of passers-by. She marked him as another watcher.

  She reached the coffee shop at the far end, entered exactly at her planned time, walked carefully to her planned table, and took a seat, fussing with her handbag and the plastic bag of CDs like any other Arab woman on a jaunt. She spoke careful English to the waiter, having decided that English would seem less remarkable than her stilted Arabic. The coffee stall was a good watch post, so she had to assume that another of its patrons would be a watcher, too.

  And who are the watchers? she wondered. Shreed had said he was changing employers. Perhaps his old employer was watching for him? The idea troubled her; the CIA were formidable, as Efremov had taught her. Or were the watchers another set of killers trying to make up for Trieste and Venice?

  She began to doubt the wisdom of remaining for the meeting. Either Shreed had sold her again, or a third party had access to the chat room, something she had feared from the first.

  She didn’t really want to make an alliance with Shreed, that was her real problem.

  What do I want? She had come this far, and she still didn’t know.

  Five minutes into his window, and he still hadn’t showed. She got her coffee, managing her veil and her coffee cup with the ease of long practice. She began to speculate about the patterns and behavior of other patrons, but none of them gave any clear signs of being a watcher. Six minutes.

  The Arab skater had finished a short break and began doing long, backward sweeps around the rink. Anna assumed that the young woman had paid for the time alone. Anna thought that her legs were too short for real competition. Seven minutes.

  A black man who emerged from the elevator was instantly familiar. She had seen him twice in Naples with Craik. Just for a moment, she wondered if Shreed and Craik were partners, if she was utterly their dupe, trying to play them off while they laughed together offstage. But her Efremov had told her that Shreed hated Craik. The idea was absurd, born of fear.

  The black man changed the balance too much. Her arguments for and against the meeting shifted one last notch and she knew that she had to move immediately and leave Shreed to fend for himself. She waved at the waiter and reached in her purse for money.

  When her head came up, she saw him.

  He was neither so old nor so crippled as she had expected. He was leaning over the Plexiglas partition above her and to the right, almost directly in front of the record shop on the second level. She cursed their mutual distrust, their lack of shared signals, and she paused in indecision. Warn him? Leave him? Still high on risk and the invisibility, she decided to warn him, if it could be done without too much risk.

  The black man and the muscled American passed each other. She watched their hands talk as they focused on each other, and she rose and walked boldly to the elevator. She worried that, having just descended the escalator, her five-minute stop for coffee would be too transparent, but her worries depended on the watchers’ being able to sort her black covering from those of other shoppers, and she told herself that she was safe. She reached the elevator, and the doors closed behind her. She pressed the button for the concourse, went up in the humming car, and came out just a few yards behind Shreed.

  Another group of Arab girls, or perhaps the same group, still giggling, came out of the record shop and stood a few feet from Shreed, watching the skater, gossiping about her movements, her costume, her status.

  Anna walked over to them as if she had known them all her life.

  “Look at her show herself! Anyone can see her,” said one with adolescent scorn that failed to hide her envy.

  Anna leaned her head into the circle.

  “I could never do that,” she said in English. “There are so many people watching.”

  They tittered, surprised by her intervention, but she was already moving away, back toward the elevator. The older man turned stiffly from the railing, inclined his head the smallest fraction, and began to move toward the escalator. She reached the elevator, one of a small group, most clutching their hotel-floor keycards like badges. She opened her purse and rifled it for her own, her blood roaring in her ears.

  She had warned him. He was in her debt. She hoped he saw it that way.

  The doors opened, and the black man was standing directly in front of her.

  Harry couldn’t pin the feeling down, but suddenly some change in movements told him that the meeting was happening now. None of his men had seen anything. Harry was convinced that the woman could pass as Arab; that was the only explanation for her invisibility at the airport. Shreed, on canes or crutches, should have been an easy target. It was possible that Valdez had got the meet wrong, or that skating rink had another meeting. But now they were in the window of the meeting time; the woman and Shreed had to be close, and Harry had decided that Ibrahim, stationed by the elevators, wasn’t seeing everything on the concourse.

  “I’m coming up.” He barely had to lean his head to murmur into the mike set in his lapel.

  “There’s an old white guy—”

  “Where?”

  “Leaning over…” static. The elevator closed and blocked his radio. Damn. Damn! Of course Shreed would stay high where he could watch the action. The elevator doors opened on a bevy of Arab women who were clutching their keycards and the plunder they had accumulated in the mall.

  “…escalator?”

  “What?” Harry was trying to push past the women, his focus down the concourse to the escalator.

  On the periphery of his vision, he saw one of the women draw her keycard out of her purse as she entered the elevator. The doors began to close. The manicured hand had been lightly tanned, the fingers tapered, the nail polish clear.

  Anna. Screw her. He wanted Shreed. He ran down the concourse, looking for Ibrahim.

  “Ib! Where are you?”

  “He’s in the tunnel. I’m following.” Dave Djalik, his other watcher, was running down the edge of the rink, clearly visible. Harry took the escalator two steps at a time, dodging locals and leaving a string of Arabic apologies in his wake. He leaped the partition at the bottom and entered the tunnel a few meters behind Djalik.

  “Did you see him, Dave?”

  “Negative!”

  They ran along the curving corridor. They both smelled the blood before they saw the body. Ibrahim was lying at the foot of the steps to the convention center, his throat cut with a sharp blade, and he was dead. There was blood everywhere, all over the floor, even along the base of the tiles that covered the walls. Shreed had stood just there, behind the upper doors, picked his moment with precision, and risked that no one would see. He was a desperate man. Harry had never hated him before, but Ibrahim had been his first local man, loyal to a fault, ambitious and clever. Now he was a carcass drained of blood.

  They ran into the convention center, but Shreed was gone.

  “Dave, put out an APB through our friends. Tell them I’ll pay ten thousand bucks for information on this guy. He has to try to flee the country.”

  “Thought you wanted this quiet?”

  “The Agency wants it quiet. I want Shreed. Okay, keep it personal, Dave—we won’t give them his name on the murder. I’ll deal with the cops. You keep the pressure on Shreed.”

  “And the woman?”

  “I think she was there. She’s due to meet with Craik tonight in Bahrain—maybe she’s headed for the airport. You stay on Shreed.”

  “Sure, Bwana.” Djalik flashed him a smile and trotted off. Ha
rry pulled out his cellphone and called the police. He was already thinking of what he was going to say to Dukas.

  Anna never went back to her room. Forty minutes later, still anonymous, she was in the air.

  29

  Nicosia.

  The plane was full of European vacationers headed for the beach. Dukas, who had stayed in his seat until most of them had crowded forward like some herd of ruminants heading for greener pastures, grabbed the seatback in front of him and pulled himself up. His legs were stiff, and, when he stood, weak with fatigue. He needed a shave. Even without a mirror, he knew that his eyes were baggy and the shade of red you got with either too much booze or not enough sleep.

  He humped his lone bag down the littered aisle and through first class, which looked as if a battle had been fought there. An attendant gave him a more-or-less smile. He operated on automatic going through passport control and blew by the thundering herd that was waiting to recover its enormous loads of baggage, walked out of customs with a wave of the hand and into the arms of a tall man who was waiting with a sign that said, “NCIS.”

  “Mister Dukas?”

  Dukas stuck out his hand. “Thanks for meeting me.”

  “I am Mister Wahad.” He had brilliant teeth and black hair streaked with silver, his manner that of a businessman who worked very hard at selling himself. “We will take a taxi,” he said and grabbed Dukas’s bag and headed for a doorway. Over his shoulder, he said, “The event happened in the Turkish sector, so we have to cross the UN line. You should have landed at Ercan, you know.”

  “I would have had to fly to Istanbul—too much time.”

  Wahad grinned. “Let’s see how much time it takes to cross the line.”

  Wahad was Lebanese, a kind of permitted alien on both sides of the green line; he spoke Turkish and Greek and English and German as well as Arabic, and he knew his way around both the Turkish and the Greek sectors. He was also recommended by the NCIS office in Athens.