Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  If it walks like a duck and it talks like a duck— At lunchtime, he phoned out for pizza. He made coffee, spilled some on his immaculate desk, and didn’t bother to wipe it up. He was practicing sympathetic magic: if he behaved like Dukas, maybe things would turn his way.

  And the telephone rang.

  “Guess what?” a voice said.

  “Moisher?”

  “Guess what!”

  Triffler felt a surge of anger. “I told you, I don’t like guessing games! What, already?”

  “Jeez.” The terribly young voice sounded let down. “I thought you’d be surprised. I found AMH.”

  “You’re kidding!” Now it was Triffler’s turn to sound young and excited. “Where? What is it? Did they know Moscowic?”

  So Moisher told him the whole story from the beginning—not just how he found AMH, but the whole story. How he called the Montgomery and PG and Virginia police. How much help he got and how much he hadn’t. How many names he pulled from four phone books. How many calls he had made on Sunday. How many calls—

  “Moisher!”

  “I’m getting to it, I’m getting to it! Just listen to this—at ten o’clock, I call—”

  “Moisher, get to the point, will you? I appreciate all this detail, and it’ll make a piss-elegant report, but just give me the facts, okay?”

  “These are the facts.”

  “The salient facts.”

  “What’s ‘salient’?”

  “Important.”

  “That’s what I’m doing. Anyways, okay, I’m going into too much detail, I know; I’m excited, okay? So here’s the bottom line: right this minute as I speak, I’m sitting in the office of the manager of the Angel of Mercy Hospice in Falls Church, Virginia, and this is the place!”

  Triffler let out a huge, satisfied sigh. “No shit! A hospice!”

  “Truly! It’s a place where people come to die. You know that?”

  “Uh, yeah—but, hey, what a great piece of work!”

  “Man, my feet hurt. My buns hurt from driving. My fingers hurt from writing! Did I tell you about the Korean laundry in Kensington?”

  “So—what’d you find at this hospice?”

  “Where I am as we speak? Oh, at first, nothing. No hits. I was ready to leave. Then I think, no, wait—if this guy was planting a bug, he didn’t talk to the receptionist or the manager. He talked to the guys in the trenches, right? So I go to the nurses and I go, ‘Who does the scut work here? Who’s around with bedpans and shit like that?’ So they go, ‘The practicals and the orderlies and staff,’ and I talk to some of them and hey, Triffler! I hit pay dirt!”

  “They recognized him.”

  “Absolutely! One woman, she’s black but very bright, she’d seen him twice! Even reported him the second time to the manager, so I check, and the manager wants to cover her ass because now she knows this is not about Aunt Annie’s false teeth disappearing from the nightstand, so she’s cagey and says ‘Well, maybe, I’m a very busy person.’ So I go, ‘Well, we’re talking murder here, so I hope you’re really recollecting everything important,’ and she gets her ass in gear and in about fifteen minutes she can tell me which goddam room this Moscowic was in. No kidding.”

  Triffler hadn’t even blinked at Moisher’s “black but very bright.” He was resigned to whites, and he didn’t distract them when they were on a roll. “That’s great. Great work.”

  “Well—I got lucky.” Moisher was beaming over the phone. “Then guess what?”

  “I can’t guess.”

  “I found the bug.”

  Triffler felt it like an ice cube down his back. This was definitely new. “How?”

  “Guy who’s dying here actually talked to Moscowic. The deceased gave him some cock-and-bull story about being in the wrong room, but the guy—a gay, I think, but observant—didn’t really buy it, and he remembers that Moscowic was heading straight from the door toward the bedside light when he barged in. So I go, ‘Toward the light?’ and he goes, ‘No, he was bending over, like down toward the floor.’ So I look, and what d’you think I see?”

  “Shoes?”

  “Nah, shoes! My ass, Triffler—the wall plate! I mean, check it out—nightstand, lamp, cord, wall socket. We’re talking a bug, right? because that’s what’s in his notebook, the Xerox pages. Okay. So I look all over the lamp and the nightstand, I don’t see anything.”

  “You trained to look for bugs?”

  “Hell no, what you think I am, the FBI? Nah, I just looked and used my head. Then I borrow a screwdriver and take off the wall plate and there it is.”

  Triffler’s stomach dropped into his shorts. He hated to ask the obvious question, afraid of what Moisher had done to the bug. “You took it out?” he said.

  “Jeez, what d’you think I am? No! I called in an expert, a guy I know in PG police. Triffler, don’t you know anything? You never touch a thing like that. Never!”

  Triffler felt weak. “Good for you.”

  “Yeah, he’s having a look at it now, and what I think is, if I’m lucky, it’s got prints on it, or the wall plate has, which I handled with Kleenex from the gay. Right? Moscowic’s prints. Just icing on the cake, because I already got a positive ID, and the guy in the room, although he won’t live long enough to testify at trial, I can depose him and I’m golden, right?”

  “Right.” Triffler cleared his throat. He was looking at the chart of Shreed’s life. “What’s next?”

  “Guess whose room this was before the dying gay moves in?”

  Triffler wanted to shout George Shreed’s wife!, but he bit the words off. “Whose?”

  “The wife of a guy at the CIA. Get it? The Central Intelligence Agency! This is a fucking espionage murder!”

  “Oh, now—” Triffler could see Moisher going off on brilliant tangents. “Don’t jump at conclusions. Hey, listen, I just had a thought. I know somebody at the CIA.”

  “I was going to go to the FBI. Except they’ll take over my investigation, won’t they?”

  “They have that reputation. No, listen, I got this acquaintance, he’s in Internal Investigations, a really standup guy. Moisher—call this guy, I bet he’d be grateful. You know, it helps to make contacts like this.”

  “How?”

  “Future reference. Suppose you want to leave the police department some day? Good to have a contact at a place like the Agency.”

  “I don’t feel comfortable with spying and all that stuff.”

  “This guy is in Internal. No spying. He’s like a cop.”

  “They’ll blow me away. I’ll be this dumb local dick and they’re the God-Almighty CIA.”

  “His name’s Carl Menzes. You can mention my name. Just tell him you were following this lead in a murder investigation, and it led to the wife of a CIA employee named—what was the name?”

  “Shreed. Mrs George Shreed. Name of Jane.”

  “Well, you could call Menzes and say something like, ‘Hi, I’m a friend of Dick Triffler’s, I’m investigating a murder and the trail has led me to the wife of a CIA employee named George Shreed.’ I think he’d be very grateful.”

  “Well—”

  “Moisher, you gotta do it sometime. See? You don’t want to be perceived as suppressing evidence.”

  “How could they perceive that?”

  “Well—they’re the CIA—”

  “Oh, shit! You think this guy would still be in his office?”

  “Try him. It’d be a really good idea to try him. And Moisher—you done good, no kidding. Brilliant!”

  The pizza had arrived by then, and Triffler tore into it, being messy in honor of Mike Dukas. He was sitting at his old desk, not his new one, and he allowed tomato sauce and cheese to drip on the desktop and a couple of files. He saw that he had already dripped coffee on some of the papers. He finished the pizza and was thinking of doughnuts when Carl Menzes telephoned.

  Triffler listened to him, sucking bits of cheese and anchovy through his teeth, wiping grease from his fingers on the
drawer pulls. He said, “No kidding,” and “Unh-unh!” several times. When Menzes was done, Triffler said, “That’s amazing.”

  “Somehow I think you’re not amazed. This detective mentioned your name—how close are you to this investigation of his?”

  “Not close.”

  “Funny you should be working on Shreed because of Siciliano, and here he pops up in a completely different context, and your name gets mentioned.”

  Triffler thought of Dukas and how Dukas would handle it, and he became his own real self and said, “Keep me at arm’s length. Understand? I’ve kept Moisher at arm’s length. Anything I know about this is tainted and you can’t use it in court. Get me?”

  “So you already knew.”

  “No comment.”

  “Okay, I get you. Moisher’s going to send me everything he’s got. He says that this bugging of Shreed’s wife’s room was done for ‘Hotshot,’ who is somebody he hasn’t identified. That your view of it?”

  “Sounds right.”

  “He says that there’s a log for ‘entry into S’s.’ You got any ideas there?”

  “None.”

  “S is for Shreed?”

  “No comment.”

  “Well, Moisher says that the entry into S’s was apparently worth five thousand dollars. Any comment?”

  “None.”

  “I thought it was a big fee for a locksmith.”

  Triffler was silent, thinking, Go, go—go for it!

  “So, I ask myself, why does it cost five thousand bucks to get into a house? And all I can think of is a bribe. Correct me if you don’t agree.”

  Triffler said nothing.

  “So, I’m wondering who’s worth five thousand and can get into Shreed’s house, and except for Mrs Shreed, who was already in the hospice and dying, I can’t think of anybody. However, if I call Shreed’s local police, I can find if there are other people who have authorized entry, and guess what: The Shreeds had a cleaning woman with a key. What d’you make of that?”

  “You’re telling the story.”

  Menzes actually laughed. “Triffler, if you ever think of leaving NCIS, keep me in mind. I can always use a guy who understands an evidence trail.” Menzes was still laughing when he hung up.

  Triffler drove to a Dunkin’ Donuts and bought a mixed dozen. Back at the office, he passed the box around and bit into one of the forbidden fruits.

  “Jeez, Triffler,” a female agent said, “what’s going on? You?”

  Triffler let red jelly run down his chin. “I’m awarding myself the Mike Dukas Prize for Biting Your Tongue in Aid of Jurisprudence.”

  36

  Jolcut, Pakistan 1430 GMT (1830L) Monday.

  Long ago, in basic counterintelligence training, an instructor had told Mike Dukas that the ideal clandestine meeting site had multiple entrances and exits, terrain to screen the meeting from prying eyes, and a logical proximity to the agent’s daily routine. At first glance, Jolcut lacked all the requirements.

  It was no different from dozens of other little hamlets at the edge of the war zone. Its strategic position at the top of a long hill suggested that its inhabitants must be familiar with violence, must have endured it for hundreds of years—but there is a difference between endurance and acceptance. Caught between the northern plains of India to the east and the Khyber Pass to the west, the region had been a highway for invaders since well before Alexander’s phalanx had rolled to the Indus River, and the villagers here had suffered them all.

  The sun cast long shadows on the trash-strewn road as Dukas trudged up the hill toward the town. He had left his taxi miles away in another hilltop village and had taken a weirdly painted local bus to a turn in the highway. When he raised his head now, he could just see the smooth column of a minaret silhouetted against the sunset sky. He shifted the duffel bag in his hand and kept walking.

  The same strategic position that made life in Jolcut historically precarious gave it utility as a meeting-place for spies. The Gilgit entrance to the Karakoram highway to China was two hundred miles to the north. Afghanistan and India were closer still. The main eastwest highway ran flat and straight along the base of the hill below him. A watcher in the village could see movement on all the roads in the area, yet, even three-quarters of the way up the hill, Dukas still couldn’t see into the village. He wondered if there was a watcher now, but it was too late to go back. He kept walking. His leg muscles burned as if his heart was pumping acid instead of blood.

  He crested the hill and got his first look into the town. The whole thing wasn’t more than a hundred yards square; the main street was only a row of false-fronted rectangular buildings painted in contrasting pastels, the false fronts giving the place the look of Hollywood’s notion of the Old West tarted up for Easter. Behind the main drag the roofs sloped away at random angles, a crazy quilt of alleys and narrow streets.

  At the far end of the main street sat the mosque, which the Chinese Checkers comm plan used as its meeting site. It was smaller than he had expected, with the minaret set in a corner and the square block of a low tower behind it.

  The mosque was in ruins. And that was not in the comm plan.

  Oh, shit, he thought. Even at a distance, he could see that the place had been bombed, and recently enough so that the rubble hadn’t been cleared away.

  He walked down the deserted street, his nostrils assaulted by a combination of rot and spice. Scraps of trash muffled his footsteps. Twice he saw furtive movement in doorways, flashes of color that suggested observation, and then the smell of wood fires began to overwhelm the perfume and the rot.

  It was dinnertime in Jolcut.

  When in Rome, he thought, and he sat on a detached block of stone and began to eat the pakora he had bought at a bus stop.

  He had called Buse every hour, as he had promised in Bahrain, and the smart NCIS man had come through for him. Half an hour out of Islamabad, he had said, “You’ll be met. Look for a sign. He’ll give you your mother’s maiden name and the make and year of your car. Good luck, man.” He was good, Dukas had thought—no crypto, no time, so he had waited until it was too late for anybody to look up that shit before the plane landed and had given it in clear. And there was a short, very dark man waiting at the airport with a sign that said “MIKE!” When Dukas had looked at him, the man had shouted, like a child reciting a poem fast before he forgets it, “Maranlis! Subaru! Eighty-seven!”

  He never gave a name. He said he was a VIP greeter, but what he did for Dukas was not very VIP: local clothes, a big thirty-eight special and a duffel bag with a knocked-down AK in it. And a taxi driver who knew how to get around roadblocks and didn’t ask questions. And why would he, with a thousand American dollars of Mike’s money in his pocket?

  And now here he was in a minuscule village, an American in a country that no longer liked Americans, a Christian in an Islamic nation, a cop in a place that had no local cops. He wiped his greasy fingers on his pants and hoped that the pakora didn’t give him the crud. That would be the last straw.

  He looked around. A tourist? Sure, he was a tourist.

  He took out his cellphone and, hoping that it looked at a distance like a camera, pretended to take pictures of the ruined mosque and then of the tower behind it. Pretending to get just the right light, just the right positioning, he studied out a route up the rubble to the tower. It could be done.

  But could it be done in the dark?

  In the west, the last gleams of the sun disappeared behind the magnificent peaks of Afghanistan, where, not so long ago, American weapons had helped to fuel a war against an enemy who now no longer mattered.

  Before the streets were dark, he found a hostel, which was really only a shed for truck-drivers who got stuck on the highway below. English speakers, if they existed in Jolcut, weren’t on order that night; Dukas conned a few words of Baluch from his computer—bed, sleep, traveler—and was pointed to what might have been intended as a mattress. Toilet? More like a privy, but big enough to assemble th
e AK in, which he then propped against the outside wall before he showed himself once more inside before disappearing as if to bed.

  Then it was dark, and he got the rifle and found his way back to the ruined mosque and the pile of stones he had picked as his route up the tower. With the rifle slung on his back—romantic, very romantic, Lawrence of Arabia goes rock-climbing—he scrambled up. Rocks fell with noises like an avalanche. Small animals scuttled. A dog barked. Dukas, cowering on the stones, waited for the village elders to come with torches and guns. When they didn’t, he scrambled higher, put his left foot on a stone ledge, and hoisted his out-of-shape body to the top.

  As housing, it wasn’t much. There was a low wall and a rotting wood floor, and, in the light of his pocket torch, a trap door. That was bad news, because he could smell cooking, and he had an idea that the tower, or at least its lower floor, was occupied. The best he could do was move fallen rock from the wall to the trap and hope that if anybody came visiting, at least the rocks would make a racket.

  Then he sat down to wait. For what, he was not sure. The woman and Shreed were to meet below him where the front of the mosque had been, perhaps, and he would climb down with his badge in his hand and arrest the traitor and take him home. Clean and fast. A dream.

  He wondered how Triffler was doing without him. Better, probably. And Menzes? Dukas shook his head. It was as if that had been a hundred years ago. He crawled to the wall and looked into the warm night and saw the highest peaks of the Hindu Kush glowing white in a full moon to the west, one of the most beautiful views he had ever seen. Little fires burned in a walled market beyond the square, human and almost domestic; they enhanced the breadth of the view beyond the village. The road to the south was a sharp line across the foot of the hill.

  And then vehicles were moving down there. He could see a small convoy moving fast along the road, their headlamps blacked down to slits. The roar of their distant passage rose slowly behind them like the passage of a jet plane in a clouded sky. The first vehicle slowed at the foot of the hill, and, after it turned, the sound of clashing gears lingered a little.