Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

“Do you know the history of Cyprus?” he said. He made a face. “Some of the police on the Turkish side are very nationalistic. You know what I mean if I say ‘settler mentality’? You see the same thing in Israel.”

  They were driving through modern streets with heavy traffic. The sidewalks were crowded and noisy, many of the people clearly tourists—perhaps the same ones he had seen on the plane, or at least different ones wearing the same baseball caps and carrying the same bottles of water.

  “I’ve put you up at the Saray in the Turkish Republic,” Wahad was saying. “You’ll be comfortable there. Turks like Americans.”

  “Even Greek Americans?”

  Wahad laughed. “Sure, you will be fine. Maybe, with the three cops, not so fine—we’ll see.”

  “I was told there were two.”

  “Three. A real dustup, Mister Dukas. Two of them apparently shot each other, and there was some sort of drug deal going on with this fourth man—the one you want.”

  Dukas looked aside at him, not sure how much he knew or how much he was supposed to know; he filed away the “drug deal” as not making any sense. Wahad made a gesture, closing the fingers of one hand into a fist. “I am discreet; it’s how I make my living.” He grinned again. “All I know of the fourth man is that he exists and you want him.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Nobody knows. For now, I’m taking you to the hospital.” He adjusted his necktie. “One of the wounded is Palestinian. He, I think, is willing to talk to you. The other one, a Turk, is—” He raised his eyebrows.

  “Not talking?”

  “Afraid to talk, I think. We will see. For him, I will translate for you; with the Palestinian, there will be somebody else, also recommended by NCIS. We will see.”

  Bahrain 1300 GMT (1600L) Sunday.

  The Gulf Hotel, where Alan was meeting Anna, has a mixed clientele that includes the wealthy, the powerful, and members of the US armed forces. Flight suits and uniforms cross paths in the marble lobby with thousand-dollar suits and traditional Arab dress. It hadn’t changed since the end of the Gulf War, and Alan had a sense, not of coming home, but of returning to a well-loved vacation spot. He got their keys from the desk, Soleck and Stevens just behind.

  “Sure does take me back,” Stevens said.

  “Thought you missed Desert Storm.”

  “We had a det here in ’92,” Stevens said, looking up at the ceiling forty feet above his head. “I lived in this place for ninety glorious days, drawing per diem like a P-3 guy. I bought a truck when I got home.”

  Soleck, whose experience of military hotels was limited to Super 8s and Great Westerns, couldn’t seem to look at enough things at once. He devoured the scantily clad starlet rotating her hips as she crossed the lobby; he stared at the dignified older men in traditional dress sharing coffee at a low brass table near the door, and he even spared a glance for the hostess, a beautiful Pakistani woman with perfect English and perfect control of her hotel.

  “Don’t wander off, okay?”

  Soleck was still staring about him like a hick in the big city. Stevens raised an eyebrow.

  “Stay in the hotel till I come back. If I need you guys, it’s going to be fast. And Soleck, don’t let that suitcase out of your sight.” The suitcase had a million dollars in Navy cash in it.

  “Whatever.” Stevens was eyeing the concourse of shops that led down to the first of three bars. “I’ll be by the pool.”

  “Ready to fly.” Alan meant sober. As soon as he said the words he knew he was out of line. Stevens simply looked at him and then smiled. “Sure, massa. Whatever you say.”

  Alan left them in the lobby and headed for his room. He dumped his flight gear on the nightstand, tossed his backpack on the bed and rifled through it. He had the gun he had carried in Africa, and he pushed that back to the bottom of the pack. Nothing the hotel needed to know about. Then he pulled out his PT gear and changed into it, did some quick stretches, and headed back to the lobby.

  He ran a little too fast to the souk, just over a mile away down the al Fateh Highway, and paid a little too much for a bag of anonymous pagers. He stopped at a phone kiosk and called each to check them, and then he ran back up the sweltering streets, around the traffic circle, past the most imposing mosque in the world, and back to the Gulf Hotel. He showered, decided against a second shave, and dressed in khaki slacks and a polo shirt. Then he tidied the room a little, placed a small photograph of Rose on the dressing table, and called the front desk. He had a message, and neither Stevens nor Soleck was in his room. He keyed the message.

  “Al, Harry. She was here and she tried to meet our other friend. I don’t think they made contact. I don’t know what game she’s playing, but you’re on your own tonight. I’m trying to find our other friend, and you can reach me on my cellphone at 971 S E C U R I T Y. Press one when the message starts and it will ring through, okay? Stay safe, bud.”

  Alan sat on his bed. Why would Anna try to meet Shreed in Dubai after Shreed had tried to kill her? And just before she was to meet with Alan in Bahrain? Was she playing one off against the other? Did she want Shreed as the new Efremov? Or was she simply a sick woman, playing very dangerous games?

  He found his crew at the pool. Soleck was lying on a deck chair with a book, the nylon suitcase with the money wedged behind his back for a pillow. Stevens was sitting in the shade with a glass in his hand, watching a chorus line of airline hostesses fling their blond hair around.

  Alan pulled up a chair by Stevens and passed him two pagers.

  “Give one to Soleck.”

  “Sure.” Stevens clipped one to his shorts. Alan took a hotel pad out of his pocket and began to scribble.

  “These are numeric codes. Anything with seven digits is a phone number; call me back ASAP. Otherwise, this number means get your flight gear on and get the plane warm, and this one means we’re scrubbed and you can buy one of the Lufthansa girls a drink. Okay?”

  Stevens watched him with a beneficent air. “You always work this hard?”

  “Good planning gives you more options when everything goes to shit.”

  “Should I write that down?”

  “Paul, back off, will you? I’m going to this meeting and I want to know that you guys are set.”

  “I could sit here all day. And there ain’t nothing in this glass but iced tea, in case you planned to have a sniff.”

  Stevens was on his high horse again, and Alan could have mounted his quickly enough. It struck him as odd that the better he knew Stevens, the more he found something likeable in the man, although he would have been hard-pressed to explain it. But Alan couldn’t quite get his foot in the door with Stevens, and he seemed to have a talent for putting his foot in something else.

  “Sorry, Paul, I was a dick.”

  Stevens nodded, but his eyes were back on the women at the bar. “Whatever.”

  Washington.

  Dick Triffler had spent a bad night because of Tony Moscowic. It was bad enough that Dukas felt guilty, worse that Dukas had abruptly left, leaving him holding what more and more looked like a bag with a hole in it. But what worried him most was his realization, actually reached a couple of days before, that everything about that day when they had driven past Shreed’s house was tainted.

  He had sat up part of the night thinking about it. The television, sound turned low, had blinked and cavorted in front of him, and he had unthinkingly worked the remote and paid not a bit of attention. His mind was on an investigation that could yield only unusable evidence—evidence that any court would throw out because it was based entirely on Valdez’s illegal surveillance of Shreed’s home computers. It would make no difference that Valdez was Harry O’Neill’s employee and not NCIS’s. It would make no difference that Shreed was a potential security risk. The CIA could go after him internally, but they could never take him to court on a foundation of an illegal surveillance.

  Triffler had made his eyes red and his shoulders stiff thinking about how to deal with it
. Dukas, he suspected, would simply have gone around it and planned, perhaps, to fudge when he got to court. But Triffler was not a fudger. He was not even a fibber. He was a tightass, a hand-on-the-Bible, honest-to-God, truthful man. What he had worked out was that he could be no help with the death of Tony Moscowic because he knew of Tony Moscowic only because of an illegal act. And, although he was sure that it was important that some third party was also surveilling George Shreed’s home computers, he couldn’t tell Menzes or anybody else, because that information had been obtained illegally, too. All that he could do was try to cause other people to rediscover what he knew, and to do so in a way that was itself legal.

  Bummer.

  So, having put himself back to bed at four, he got up at eight feeling bleary and looking like hell. His wife even said, “Where were you while I was sleeping?” He only shook his head and made pancakes as she oversaw the bacon and eggs, and then they sat down with their kids—family-ritual Sunday breakfast: the family that eats together cheats disintegration together.

  At nine-thirteen, he got a call from a detective who wanted to know if he had any interest in checking out Tony Moscowic’s house.

  “I’m going out,” he told his wife.

  “It’s Sunday, for God’s sake!”

  He made a face.

  The detective’s name was Moisher, and he looked about eighteen, an impression not helped by the baseball cap or the baggy jeans. He was actually thirty but new to detective status, and an air of gee-whiz clung to him. “This is some case!” he said when he met Triffler outside Moscowic’s house, a ratty little frame structure behind Route 1 in Beltsville, yellow police tape across the door.

  “Your first?” Triffler said.

  Moisher blushed. “I’ve been a cop for nine years.” He shrugged. “First homicide I’m in charge of, yeah. We don’t get a lot of homicides. Well, we do, but not good ones. Difficult ones, I mean. What can you tell me about it?”

  Triffler winced internally, thinking of the tainted evidence chain, and decided to play it as the older, wiser one. “Later.” It was a relief from being Dukas’s stooge.

  The house was even rattier inside, and large enough for only a living-room with a gas fireplace, one bedroom about the size of a large car, and another room that you might have used to keep a cat in but that Moscowic had used for an office. Tony had been a Redskins fan (banners, beer glasses, team photo) and a porn fan (boxes of magazines), but he hadn’t been a cook and he hadn’t been much of a housekeeper. He must have watched a lot of television, though, to judge from the copies of TV Guide and a big chair and a bigger TV.

  “You already been here?” Triffler said as they stood together in the office doorway.

  “Unh-unh. Somebody else.”

  “Lab?”

  “Yeah, we use PG County. They did it last night.”

  Triffler had already seen that there was print dust everywhere. “They done?”

  Moisher grunted. He pointed at an ancient copy machine on the desktop. “Every week or so, he made a photocopy of this little book he had, and he sent them to his accountant.”

  Triffler felt as if he was back with Dukas. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  Moisher blushed, grinned, and produced a sheaf of paper from his attaché case. “Surprise! It’s really why I got you out here.” He gave the papers a tap. “Copies of what the deceased sent his accountant. I woke the guy up at seven. Couldn’t sleep.”

  Triffler took the papers. They went back several years and ended a week before. On each one was a copy of two facing pages of a small, spiral-backed notebook. The writing in it was crabbed, sometimes in pencil and sometimes in pen, never very legible. “Where’s the book?”

  “Missing. Not on the deceased, not here. The accountant—his ex-brother-in-law, not a bad guy, just doesn’t want to get involved—says he never left home without it. Quote, ‘That book lived with him. He took better care of it than he did my sister.’ Meaning, maybe somebody killed him for the book?”

  Triffler was looking at the recent weeks. “Somebody who didn’t know he made copies, in that case.” He put the last page on the desk and switched on the lamp. The photocopy was pretty dim, a copy of a copy, but he could make it out.

  “Interesting, huh?” Moisher said.

  “You already been over it, I take it.”

  “Right!” In fact, what Moisher had wanted this morning was an audience, and that was why Triffler was there. Moisher was pointing at the entries. “Most of them, the brother-in-law got a name and address from the deceased, very straightforward. He bills them, they pay. End of the year, he does the deceased’s taxes. But sometimes, like once in a blue moon, he gets a client doesn’t want to leave tracks and pays cash. Then, see? he puts a dollar sign next to the entry, like this one.” He tapped a line of the faint notebook page that said, “$1G Hotshot retainder.”

  “What the hell’s ‘retainder’?”

  “I think he meant ‘retainer.’” Moisher was embarrassed for Moscowic’s spelling. “Hotshot’s a code name.”

  “I bet we don’t know who it’s a code name for.”

  “Afraid not. I guess he was pretty standup about that—very secretive, the accountant said, really protected the client’s privacy. Drove the wife nuts, among other things.”

  Triffler had been looking ahead and not entirely listening. He had found four Hotshot entries with dollar signs, and the amounts were significant. The second, however, had something new, a scribble that looked like a rising sun—an uneven oval with rays coming out of it.

  “What the hell’s that?”

  “Guess.” Moisher was bursting to tell him.

  Triffler turned on him. “Look, Detective Moisher, I didn’t come out here to guess, okay? I don’t play guessing games, even with my kids. If you know what it is, tell me.”

  Moisher blushed. “It’s a bug. Get it? An insect, so, a bug.”

  Triffler looked at it again. “I’d get a turtle, but not a bug. But okay, I suppose the brother-in-law told you it’s a bug. So, ‘3G bug at AMH.’ Three thousand bucks to—what, bug? plant a bug?—on AMH. Who’s AMH?”

  “It says ‘at AMH.’ I think it’s a place.”

  “Okay, what’s AMH?”

  “I was hoping you’d know.” Moisher looked very young, rather moist.

  “Well, I don’t.” Triffler looked back through other pages, saw nothing that set off any bells and nothing recent enough to be likely. He returned to the last page and read the four entries again. The last one, dated shortly before he and Dukas had driven by Shreed’s house, was a corker: “5G entry S’s.”. S’s house? Five thousand dollars to get into a house—Shreed’s? Pretty expensive lock-picking.

  “See anything?” Moisher said, as hopeful as a dog who hears his dish rattled.

  Triffler took his elbow and led him out of the office. “I have to tell you something. A sad story. Okay?”

  Moisher looked puzzled.

  Triffler took a breath. “Everything I know about Tony Moscowic is tainted. Even if I knew some things, I wouldn’t tell you, because I’d destroy your case if I did. You couldn’t take them to court, and you couldn’t take anything you learned because of them to court. So I’m not even telling you why I wanted Tony Moscowic’s name in the first place.”

  “Because of his car.” Moisher all but wagged his tail.

  “Forget that! Wipe it out of your mind! It’s tainted!”

  “But you do know what ‘AMH’ means!”

  Triffler sighed. “No, I don’t. But if I did, I couldn’t tell you. Get it?”

  Moisher looked sad, then brighter. “Nobody’d know but us two. I could say I found it out on my own!”

  “In court?”

  Moisher looked sideways into a corner for help. “Sure.”

  “Then you’re a fucking idiot.” Triffler headed out the door.

  “Don’t you talk to me like that!” Moisher shouted at him.

  “You’re talking perjury, Moisher—
you think that isn’t idiocy?”

  Moisher came close and almost whispered, “We have to do it all the time.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t. Anyway, this is peripheral to my case. It’s all peripheral to my case. What NCIS wants is for me to investigate a female officer who’s got the shaft, period.” From George Shreed—we think—whose house may have been worth five thousand dollars for Tony Moscowic to effect an entry, but we can’t know that and we can’t tell you about it.

  “I thought you’d be real excited,” Moisher said, downcast.

  Triffler stood there, looking for an exit line. Finally, he said, “You got a card? Give me your card. Maybe I’ll think of something.” And he meant it, except that he meant something legal.

  Cyberspace (9000 feet above the Persian Gulf) 1530 GMT (1830L) Sunday.

  someone is lurking here so lets not get too

  open okay?

  They weren’t mine.

  of course they weren’t i know who they were

  Do tell.

  too complicated

  I WANT TO KNOW.

  friends of the us navy

  I see. Do you still want to meet?

  yes

  Buy a copy of PGP and install it. Give me an e-mail address.

  my first name and my birthday in numbers at hotmale.com i have pgp

  Good. I’ll see you in thirty hours.

  perhaps

  The use of e-mail for espionage communication was in its infancy. The great powers and their cautious spies still distrusted the computer, and she felt the thrill of the pioneer. Anna had fifteen anonymous e-mail accounts and each one had a simple code that she could use to pass it. Some were dates from history, several were telephone numbers, one related to an advertising jingle. All of them were disposable, each maintained through its own web of credit. She was quite proud of the result.

  She stretched and watched the island of Bahrain through the aircraft window. Then she accessed the account she had sent to Shreed, downloaded the file there, and closed the account. Anyone who wanted that file could get it, but it would take time. Several websites listed the times that big computers would take to break various commercial encryptions. PGP got a rating of forty hours.