by Gordon Kent
“Who says it’s an action item?” Dukas said.
“Well, isn’t it? They should have moved on it when they got it, and they didn’t.”
Dukas raised his eyebrows. “We’ve barely looked at the stuff. There could be tons of action items.”
“Not according to the inventory.” Alan put his elbows on the table and turned to Rose. “The comm plan just leaps out at you; it’s the way a courier could meet with somebody else, and it was connected somehow with this Sleeping Dog—”
“We don’t know that,” Dukas growled. He finished the risotto on his plate. “Who taught you to make risotto?” he said.
“You did.”
“Good for me.” He held up his plate. “I’ll have some more.” He watched the plate being heaped with the yellow grains and the dust-colored beans. “Next time, just a tad more saffron, okay?”
Alan grinned at Rose and poured more red wine and said to Dukas, “I want to go to Jakarta.”
“To do what, for Christ’s sake?”
“To test the comm plan.”
“Alan, read my lips: You’re not a spy! You’re an intel officer!”
“Yeah, but I’m available. And you know you can trust me, which is a big deal for you right now because you think everybody’s on your back over George Shreed.” He leaned forward. “Mike, it’s three days—fly there, nice hotel, take a walk, leave a mark, have a nice dinner, go to the meeting place. Bang, that’s it.”
“And what happens at the meeting place?” Rose said, scenting trouble.
“Nothing. Ask Mike. He insists it’s a dead issue because nobody’s done anything with it for years and there’s nobody at the other end. Right?”
“Did I say that?”
“You did. Just before I left this afternoon.”
“Well—”
Rose was looking at her husband with her head tipped to the side. “If it’s dead and nothing’s going to happen, why go?”
He seemed to falter, then made an apologetic face. “Because it’s something to do,” he said softly.
She changed the subject then by asking Dukas about Sally Baranowski, a question that embarrassed him and made him almost stammer. Dukas told them about the call on his answering machine that he hadn’t returned and then admitted his doubts about getting involved, and at last he was telling them both that he was still shaken by the shooting and he didn’t know what he wanted. “So what is this,” he growled, “post-traumatic stress syndrome?”
Rose put a hand over one of his, then over Alan’s good one. “You guys,” she said. “You guys.”
After dessert, when Alan had brought coffee into the living room, he raised the subject of Jakarta again. It was clear to them then that Alan had brought Dukas there that night because he was asking Rose’s permission as well as Dukas’s: He was trying to get a go-ahead from both of them. “Give Rose and the kids a rest from my bad temper, drink some good beer, do Mike and Uncle a favor.” He looked at Rose. “And in case you’re worried, this is a no-risk operation—a walk in the park.” The appeal in his voice was touching. “It’s a walk in the park!”
Dukas snorted. “It’s a free trip to Jakarta, that’s what it is.” He stirred sugar and then cream into his coffee, even though all day long he drank it black. “Well—if you come back and tell me nothing happened, I can close out what you call ‘the action item,’ that’s true. Then I can bore myself stiff with the radio crap for six months and close out the whole file, and then I can go back to writing reports about why I should be reimbursed for ten grand I took on my personal responsibility when we were running after that shit George Shreed. That’s your view of it?”
Alan looked at him, then at his injured hand, and then he reached out with his good hand to his wife. “You’re flying all day. I just sit here.”
She squeezed his hand. To Dukas, she said, “Can he do it?”
Dukas shrugged. “You don’t just ‘do’ a thing like this. You got to have a country clearance. Once we apply, the Agency gets notified, then they want to know what’s going on and why they’re not the ones to do it. Then we wrangle, on and on.”
“They had their chance,” Alan said.
“Not the way they’d see it.”
“It’s your case now. You’ve got a number, what can they say?” He leaned forward. “Mike, let me go. I go, then you apply for the country clearance; it’s happening too fast for them to do anything.”
“No—I don’t think so—”
“Mike, Goddamit,” Alan snapped, “you lost your nerve? Jesus, you can’t apply for a country clearance; you can’t even call an old girlfriend on the fucking phone!”
Rose’s hand gripped Dukas’s. He looked into Alan’s suddenly angry face and looked away to keep things from escalating. He sighed. “And if something goes wrong?”
“What can go wrong? You said yourself, it’s dead! It’s just crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s! What can go wrong with that?”
Dukas sipped coffee. “Jakarta, that’s what.” He looked at Alan, and Alan winked. Another first since Pakistan. Dukas put down his cup. “Tell you what. Triffler’s back tomorrow. I’ll have him check Al out on the comm plan—walk him through it, lay it out on paper. Then it’ll be easy. Right?”
He was talking to Rose. She made a face. “It’s still Jakarta,” she said.
Jakarta.
Just an old-fashioned spy, he thought. The idea delighted him. He was drunk, happy-drunk. I want a spy/Just like the spy that buggered dear old dad. He lifted the telephone and rang through, picturing the little man who would be waiting at the public telephone.
“Yes?” The voice was tentative. Bobby Li, the agent at the other end, never seemed quite sure of himself. Well, people who were absolutely sure of themselves didn’t make good agents, right?
“Wondering if you’ve read Green Eggs and Ham.”
“Oh, yes, right. ‘Mister Brown is out of town/He came back with Mister Black.’ Hi!” Bobby sounded distant, but he had the recognition codes right. Good start.
“Hey, Sundance—how’re they hanging?”
Bobby Li giggled. George Shreed had given him that code name. “Hey, Butch Cassidy.”
“Long time, bud.” Three years, in fact. But they’d had some great times before that. “Want to play some ping-pong, bud?” Ping-pong was telephone code for an operation.
“Good. Great!” Real pleasure in the high voice. Bobby loved him still.
“I’m going to need a few items, bud.”
“Sure thing, boss.”
Jerry struggled for a moment with the simple telephone code, trying to remember the word for cameras. Ah. Camera. Hidden in plain sight. He was supposedly in Jakarta to find locations for a Hollywood feature film, as good a cover as he’d ever had, as it excused a great deal of roaming. He was using his old cover name, Andrew Bose, who had always been an antique dealer in the past, but what the hell. Cameras were now a legitimate extension of his cover, so no code word needed. Too much booze, he thought, but wryly, and not really meaning it. Can’t really have too much booze. “Need a camera, bud. And a guy to use it, okay? To photograph the ping-pong.”
“Sure.”
“And an ice bucket, okay?” Ice bucket was code for a weapon.
“Oh—okay—” Now Bobby seemed nervous, but, because Jerry was ordering him to find a weapon, that made sense.
“A big ice bucket, okay?”
“Sure, sure.”
“And some ice.” Then Jerry switched to a serious voice. Bobby would be happier if he thought things were serious. “This is a big game of ping-pong, pal.” Jerry leaned forward as if Bobby was right there. “You want to play in the big game. This is it, Bobby. The start of a big game.” He looked around the hotel lobby for the door to the bar, saw people going up three steps and out of sight and figured it was that way. “Meet me at Papa John’s and we’ll practice some ping-pong.” Papa John was code for a place and a time. Would Bobby remember after three years? Of course he’d remember! Bobby Li fucking l
oved him!
He hung up and headed for the bar. He was still sober enough to have kept from his old agent the fact that the ping-pong was going to end in the death of an American.
Bobby Li hung up and felt excited and happy. He had thought maybe his friend Andy had forgotten him.
Bobby had lived his whole life in Jakarta. He was Chinese only by ethnicity, but ethnicity made for sharp divides here. Sometimes it was the ultimate arbiter of loyalty.
And loyalty was crucial for Bobby Li, because he was a double agent—for his American friend who had just talked to him on the telephone, and for Loyalty Man, who was Chinese and a right shit and not his friend at all. Bobby was loyal to Loyalty Man because of ethnicity, the powerful force, but he was more loyal to the American because he was his friend and because he also loved George Shreed, who had been Bobby Li’s surrogate father. It had been George Shreed who had pulled him out of the gutter of Jakarta and made him a pet, a pal, and an agent. Love trumped ethnicity.
Bobby had worked for George Shreed for two years, and then for both George Shreed and Mister Chen, a double agent already at thirteen, but different then because both men had known he was a double—Chen had made him one and then Shreed had accepted it and become a double himself. And then one day George Shreed had taken him aside and had said that he had to go back to the United States, and somebody else would be there instead. That was the worst day of Bobby’s life, when George Shreed had told him he was leaving.
“And a new guy will be taking over,” George had said. “Taking you over, too, Bobby. But—” George’s eyes signaled the secret look that Bobby loved, the look that said that it was only the two of them against the world. “But we won’t tell the new guy about Mister Chen, okay? Mister Chen is our secret, Bobby.”
That had been twenty years ago, and he had never told. The new guy had been called Andy Bose, which was surely not his real name, but Bobby knew enough about espionage to understand that, and anyway, he had liked Andy from the start. And then Mister Chen had turned him over to another Chinese, and then he to another, and so on—six Chinese controls he had had, the last one this shit, Loyalty Man—and he had been the whole time with Andy. And now Andy had called him and they were going to do a big operation together, just like old times, and it would be great.
Being a double agent wouldn’t matter. He could be loyal to Andy for the operation, and nobody the wiser. It would be great.
Suburban Virginia.
Lying in the dark, Alan could feel Rose beside him, feel her wakefulness and her worry. There had been no sex since he had got out of the hospital. He had been afraid, he realized, confused by why the injury to his hand should make him so.
“Alan?”
He grunted.
“You really want to go on this Jakarta thing, don’t you?”
He grinned into the darkness. “Yeah—I confess: I really do.”
He heard her chuckle. “Hey, sailor,” she whispered, “want to have a good time?”
“I—” He swallowed. “I’m afraid I’ll touch you with my ha-hand. . . .” He felt her move on the mattress and heard the rustling of cloth.
He heard the smile in her husky voice. “Just you leave everything to me,” she murmured, settling on top of him.
Then he began to slide down that glassy slope that is sex, losing his fear, losing consciousness, losing self-consciousness, merging with her and coming to himself again in warmth and sweetness and safety; and, later, he knew that it was at that moment that his real healing began.
Northern Pakistan.
Colonel Lao stood in the remnants of a street, peering out from under the hood of an American rain parka at generations of rubble. The village had been fought over recently. The mosque had been destroyed years ago. In between, the village had been a focus of violence over and over.
His people had a generator running and spotlights on the ruins of the mosque. Forensics people from State Security were all over the site. He hoped they were working for him. Their team leader had an encrypted international cell phone of a type his department had never heard of, much less issued. Lao watched them with a detachment worthy of the ancients. He didn’t even have a cell phone.
“Sir?” His new man, Tsung. Young and competent. A little lazy, but well-trained. He was hovering at arm’s length, careful of Lao’s silence. Lao appreciated his courtesy.
“Are you waiting for me, Tsung?” He turned, shook rain off his parka.
“I have an eyewitness the Ministry seems to have missed. He says that after the plane left, another car left too, going north.”
Lao shook his head again, though not at the rain.
“Well done, Tsung. We needed another complication.”
North meant trouble. Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Russia. Lao didn’t want to consider what would happen if the Russians had Chen. He followed Tsung toward the ruined tower, stopped by a low wall where a technician in an olive-drab poncho was using forceps to clear something out of the muck.
“Cartridge?”
“That shotgun. The shooter moved all the time.”
Lao ducked under the awning and accepted a cup of tea from one of the State Security goons. He had a picture in his head of the fight in the village. Shreed had never moved, firing repeatedly from one position in the open. That made Lao think he had been the first man hit. It also suggested that Shreed had been either ambushed or set up, and that didn’t fit any of the theories he had been offered in the office in Beijing.
Chen’s opposition had come from only a few men, perhaps as few as three or four. They’d killed Chen’s paratroopers with relative ease. Because it was a trap? Or because the Chinese paratroopers weren’t all that good? Lao wasn’t that kind of soldier. He looked at the trails of tape that marked the movements of individual shooters, traced by the cartridge casings they had let fall, and thought that the opposition had done all the moving.
One of the Chinese, a sniper, had apparently killed two of his own men before he was killed himself. That made no sense to Lao. Lao thought that someone else must have killed the sniper and used his weapon. Perhaps the forensics men would find something to prove his theory—or perhaps they wouldn’t.
He used his teacup to warm his hands as Tsung brought him an older man, his thin trousers flapping in the wind. Lao bowed a little and the old man gave him a nervous smile.
“Tell him that I’m a policeman.”
Tsung spoke to the old man in careful Arabic. It wasn’t his best language, and it was one the old man probably only knew from the Qur’an, but they communicated.
Lao stood patiently, sipping tea and offering it to his witness, while the old man told the story of the evening in halting driblets. Lao taped it. He didn’t speak much Arabic and he wasn’t sure he’d trust anyone in Dar to translate, but he had to keep a record.
The old man pointed out the commanding view that the little hill village had of the highway below them in the valley. He described the plane’s landing on the road, and he described the other car’s driving away after the plane had left. Yes, he was sure. No, he had no idea who had been in the car.
Lao swallowed the rest of his tea and spat out the leaves.
Maybe Chen was alive, after all. Lao smiled without humor: If Chen was alive, then he could clean up his own messes. Like the unfinished operation to target the Jefferson. Lao disliked executing operations in whose planning he’d had no part—let Chen be alive and take it over! The operation, he thought, had been put together too hastily, too emotionally—it seemed part of that nervous hysteria he’d felt in Beijing. He never thought he’d be sorry that Chen was dead (if he was dead), but he’d be delighted to have him rise now from the rubble of this Pakistani village and take over.
“Tsung,” he said. The younger man came almost at a trot. Eager. Lao was wondering if Tsung could be trusted to take over some of the details of the Jefferson operation and free him, Lao, to concentrate on Chen. “You’ve run agents among the Pakistani military?” he said.
“I have a task for you.”
Tsung said something about being honored. Lao ignored it. He skipped details—the name of the Jefferson, the use of the submarines to pass data, the agent on the west coast of the United States—and explained about the plan to tap into Islamic hatred of America and to launch a small-boat attack on an American warship.
NCIS HQ.
Alan was in Dukas’s office at NCIS headquarters at nine-thirty, eager to hit the road for Jakarta.
Dukas was supposed to be making the travel arrangements; his assistant, the until-then absent Dick Triffler, was going to brief Alan and then go along to ride shotgun.
“Shotgun, hell,” Triffler said. “My son’s pitching tonight for his Little League team, and being Dad is more important than playing cops and robbers. Sorry, Commander.”
Alan grinned. “You wouldn’t say that if Mike was here.”
“I’d say it in spades if Mike was here! You think I’m afraid of Mike?”
Triffler was a tall, slender African-American with what Alan had to think of as “class.” His skin was the color of caramel; his face was handsome and lean; his voice was a tenor, his enunciation pure northeastern U.S. He was not afraid of Mike Dukas, that was true; in fact, he emphasized their differences whenever he got the chance. Their shared office, for example, was divided by a wall of white plastic crates, into which the obsessively neat Triffler had put potted plants, sculptures, books—anything, in fact, that would block his view of the squalid mess where Dukas ruled.
Alan laughed. “I think you’re about as afraid of Mike as I am, Dick. But, uh, this is an operation, and I really am going to Jakarta, and I really do need some—”
Triffler waved a long hand. “Okay! I know! Uncle Sam says I have to go. Tomorrow! Okay? So I get there twenty-four hours after you, so what? You take a nap, have some local beer, watch TV. I’ll catch up.” Triffler shot his cuffs, maybe to show off his cuff links. “I don’t want to spend any more time in a germ pit like Jakarta than I have to, anyway.”