Hostile Contact

by Gordon Kent

  Alan didn’t comment on “germ pit.” He had heard enough about Triffler to know he was obsessive about cleanliness, too—the only man in NCIS who slid a coaster under your coffee cup when you picked it up. “Well—if it’ll work—”

  “Sure, it’ll work. I got here at twenty of eight this morning; Dukas already had the file and a memo on top of the pile of other jobs he’s tasked me with while I was away, so I’ve read it and looked at the map and I’m up to speed.”

  “If you wouldn’t take time off”—a voice came from the other side of the room divider—“you wouldn’t get tasked.”

  “Hey, Mike—when did you sneak in?”

  “I didn’t sneak, Al, I walked; you and Mister Clean were too busy dissing me to notice. And how are you this morning, Mister Triffler?”

  “I was telling Lieutenant-Commander Craik that I’m not afraid of you, is how I am.”

  “Good. Nobody should live in fear. You rested after your vacation?”

  “It was not a vacation! It was quality time with my family.” Triffler smiled at Alan. “Some people don’t have families. Unsociable, outsider people.”

  “Somebody has to do the scut work while you daddies are having quality time,” Dukas’s voice growled. “Will you guys get to it, please?’

  They spent three hours. Triffler explained—redundantly, but there was no stopping him—what a comm plan was and what the Jakarta plan was. He went through the structure that Alan would have to build around the comm plan—walking a route before he left the mark that was supposed to set up the meeting, memorizing codes to communicate with his team (that is, Triffler), planning for a busted meeting and an escape.

  “Which won’t happen,” Triffler said, “because there isn’t going to be any meeting to bust, right? This is a dead plan, right? Uncle’s paying to send us to Jakarta so Mister Dukas can cross an item off a list, right?” He raised his voice. “IS THAT RIGHT, MIKE?”

  “Just do your job.”

  Dick Triffler was down to shirtsleeves after an hour more of briefing Alan, revealing wide yellow suspenders to go with his yellow-on-beige striped shirt. His tie looked like heavy embroidery, also brown and yellow with flecks of green. He made Alan feel dowdy, even in uniform.

  “Uh, what will you be wearing in Jakarta?” Alan said.

  Triffler looked startled. He spread his arms as if to say, These. “Work clothes,” he said. He looked more than a little like a model in GQ.

  “I thought I’d wear jeans.”

  Triffler coasted over that by saying they weren’t going undercover, so there was no need to think of disguise. “We’re just two guys who happen to work for the Navy, having a look around Jakarta. In and out in two days. One suit, one wrinkle-free blazer, two neckties, four shirts.”

  “And blue jeans.”

  Triffler looked at Alan’s uniform, then his shirt, then his polyester tie, and apparently decided to say nothing. He got them both coffee—great coffee, because he was also obsessive about that—and sat again at his uncluttered desk. “You go in,” he said. “Normally, you’d have watchers. This time, only me. No problem; there’s nothing to watch. You do a route to a cannon, or whatever it is where you leave the mark. If we thought the plan was active, we’d have a team to watch the mark to see who picks up on it, but not ap, right? You get a good night’s sleep, we rendezvous—telephone codes to come, so you know where and when—and you go to make the meeting, which is in something called the—I had it a moment ago—”

  “The Orchid House.”

  “Right! You’re way ahead of me. In some sort of park—theme park? Something. So, you go there, and you walk the route in the comm plan—this is so the other side can look at you if need be; their guy is walking a route, too, in theory, and we’d have a team to watch, but we don’t and won’t—and you go into this Orchid House and walk to, quote, ‘bench by curved path, west side,’ where, at ten minutes after the hour, at three stated times of day precisely, there would be some guy waiting for you if this was an active plan. Which it ain’t.”

  “What if it is?”

  “It isn’t; we have Reichsführer Dukas’s word on it.”

  “Yeah, but just suppose—what if?”

  “You say your recognition words and he says his, some b.s. about a Christmas party, and then you look at each other and wonder what the hell comes next.”

  “ ‘Hi, my name is Al, and I’ll be your waiter this evening’?”

  “Try ‘What have you got for me?’ At least that sounds as if you know what you’re doing.” Triffler closed the folder and slapped his hand on it. “Won’t happen. In and out in two days, home again to the rapturous applause of Mike Dukas.”

  “Ha, ha,” said the voice from the other side.

  “Okay.” Alan grinned. “Now what do we do?”

  “Now we go over it again, and then you memorize the codes and the greetings and the route, and then we go over it again, and then we go over it.”

  “Not really.”

  Triffler sighed. “Really. You thought signing EM orders was tedious? Try spying.”

  Jakarta.

  Jerry Piat had half a dozen places in Jakarta where he stayed when he made a trip there, places he’d come to like over the years and felt comfortable in. Only one had any class; only one was really a dump. The others were modest little hotels where low-end tourist agents put groups that were doing Asia on the cheap. He had kicked around the East long enough that he spoke the languages and didn’t require a block-square chunk of America to sleep in, and he liked the strange mix of comfort and oddness that the places gave him.

  The Barong Palas had been built by a Dutch exporter as his city house in the nineteenth century; when the Dutch left after World War II, it had become a whorehouse, then a clutter of ground-floor shops with a squat in the upper floors, and finally a hotel when an energetic Indonesian woman had bought it and kicked everybody out. It still looked Dutch—a stair-step roof, a certain overweight look to the cornices and lintels—but inside it was immaculate, slightly threadbare, secure. They locked the doors at twelve, required that guests pick up and drop off a key each time they went in or out, and paid their own knife-toting guards to patrol the gardens that surrounded it.

  Now Jerry woke in one of its bedrooms. The room wasn’t much because the hotel—only twenty rooms in all—was full of a Korean gourmet club. He didn’t remember that, at first. His hangover was intense—familiar but awful: a headache like an ax in the skull, a swelling of the eyes, a nausea that became vertigo if he moved. Then he remembered where he was and what he had done last night—the bars, Hilda, the call to Bobby Li—and he sat up and let the full awfulness of the hangover grip him like a fist.

  “Nobody ever died of a hangover,” he said aloud, a man who had suffered thousands. In fact, he thought that people probably had died of hangovers, but not this one, which he would classify as a Force Four, severe but not fatal. Nothing would help, he knew; showers and coffee and deep breathing were for amateurs. He dressed and headed out.

  The code he had given Bobby Li, Papa John’s, meant a corner by a taxi rank opposite the Import-Export Bank, at ten minutes after seven in the morning, ten after nine, and ten after four in the afternoon. He had already missed the seven-ten. Bobby would have been there, he knew, waited for three minutes, pretending to read a newspaper, and walked away. Jerry felt guilty.

  Not professional, missing a meeting time.

  He walked slowly, balancing the hangover on his head. He stopped in a sushi bar and had two sea-urchin-egg sushis, supposed to be good for his condition. The green tea seemed to help. Four aspirin from a corner vendor helped still more, and each stop let him check his back trail and see that nobody was following. He then stepped abruptly to the street and pushed himself into a cab that two Indonesians were just leaving, then wove through central Jakarta and got out three blocks from the Import-Export Bank. At nine-ten, he was fifty feet from the taxi rank.

  Bobby Li was there.

  Jerry g
ot into a cab and told the driver to go slowly. After a block, he looked back; another cab was following.

  “Fantasy Island Park,” he told his driver. When they got there, the other cab was still behind. He’d noted nobody else. He had the driver go three blocks beyond the park, and he got out; the other taxi pulled up and Bobby Li got out and followed Jerry to the park entrance without acknowledgment.

  “Hey, bud,” Jerry said when he was standing in the shade of the ornate gate. Bobby Li smiled. Bobby was a smiler, one reason he still seemed like a teenager to Piat, that and his small size. “Hey, Andy,” Bobby said. He was pathetically happy to see him.

  “Come on, bud, I’ll show you where the ping-pong’s going to be.” They went into the park, which was an old-fashioned fun park crossed with a somewhat corny cultural display, none of it terribly well-maintained. The centerpiece, however, was a world-class collection of orchids.

  “Been here before?” Jerry said.

  “I bring the kids.”

  “How’re the kids?”

  “Good.” A big smile. “The boy is bigger than me. Fifteen now.”

  “The wife?”

  “She okay. Working hard.” The Lis didn’t make a lot of money, Jerry knew. Bobby had a small business, buying and selling exotic bird skins. Jerry, in fact, had set him up in it, persuading the CIA that it was worth the investment to have an agent with decent cover and an income. It amused him that Bobby was a feather merchant, the old term for a bullshitter. Amused him because that was the last thing Bobby could be.

  “How’s the business?”

  “Pretty good. Lot of problems, CITES, that stuff.” He waved a hand. “Big companies cutting all the forest everyplace, no birds.”

  Jerry led them to a kiosk where ethnic dancers performed several times a day. The kiosk was white, glaring in the sunlight, empty plastic chairs around it for the audience. He nodded his head toward it. “Our man is going to walk in the gate and sit here—that’s in his comm plan.” Bobby took it in but didn’t ask any questions. Agents got told what they needed to know, nothing more. “I’ll give you a photo of him. You get a guy who’ll sit here and check him out. I want him checked for guns, wire, walkie-talkie—anything. Has to be visual—can’t touch him. Maybe bump him once when the crowd’s moving, but they got to be careful, because if it’s the guy I expect, he’s a pro and he’ll know what’s up.” The guy he expected was Dukas. Dukas was the one who would get the file; Dukas was the special agent. It wouldn’t be Craik, who was Navy and would be off saving the world someplace. If Jerry’s luck was bad, it would be merely some NCIS nobody that Dukas had got to come over from Manila, and then the whole plan would have to be shit-canned. That was one reason it was a bad plan, as Jerry had pointed out to both Suter and Helmer.

  He dug out a photograph of Dukas that he’d lifted from an old Agency file. “That’s him.” The picture was ten years old, and Dukas looked tough and overweight. Jerry had looked for a photo of Craik but had dug up only a useless old group photo from a squadron book in which he looked about fifteen.

  Jerry led Bobby over to a food concession and bought a Philippine pancake and two green teas, and he ate the pancake with his torso pitched forward so he wouldn’t spill anything on his shirt and pants. “You get the ice bucket?” he said. They both sipped the tea.

  “Not yet, Andy.” He didn’t say, It was only last night you asked for it, for Christ’s sake. Bobby never said things like that.

  “I’ll show you where I want it.” Piat licked his fingers and walked toward the Orchid House, a greenhouse perched atop a concrete model of a Javanese fortress, circa 1500. They went inside, where a broad path covered in bark mold wound through two full acres of flowers, which rose so high they screened the turns of the path, preventing long sight lines and making a perfumed maze with walls forty feet high. Four entrances, each arriving from a separate path through the minipark.

  It was one of the most perfect sites for a clandestine meeting that Jerry had ever seen. It was a site where a man could meet his agent while the whole world watched him, never really knowing whether they had met. It had George Shreed written all over it.

  Jesus, George knew his craft.

  “This is where the meeting’s going down,” he said. He led the way along the path, his left hand gently stroking the narrow leaves of a mountain orchid. “I’m going to tell you a secret,” he said. Bobby was behind him; when Piat turned, he saw that the little man looked worried. Agents didn’t usually get secrets. “Who d’you think chose this site? Go on, guess. Take a guess.” Bobby frowned still more. “George,” Piat said.

  “George!”

  “George Shreed picked it.” Jerry grinned. The hangover had receded and was a dull ache with a peculiar peacefulness spread over it. “I shouldn’t be telling you this. No need to know. But I thought you’d care. Because of George.” Bobby looked flustered and excited. Jerry had paid him a great compliment, made a great gesture of trust. The little man was absurdly flattered. Finally, he was able to say, “How is George?”

  Jerry realized that, of course, Bobby didn’t know. “George is dead, Bobby. That’s what all this is about—the people who killed him are going to make this meeting. Then we’re going to get them.”

  Tears stood in Bobby’s eyes. All the pleasure of being told a secret was wiped away. “George dead?” he murmured.

  “We’re doing this for George, pal.” He touched Bobby’s shoulder. “Okay?”

  Piat located the actual meeting place, where the path curved and a bench stood among the orchid plants. He pointed out the main entrance through which their man would come, and then walked to the one at the opposite point of the compass. “And this is where our guy will come in. Then he’ll walk around that way, taking his time, back the way we just came, to the meeting place. Got it?”

  Bobby nodded.

  “Our guy will carry a copy of The Economist to identify himself, and he’ll also have an envelope stuffed with what will feel like money, which he’ll hand to the guy who killed George, and your team with the camera will get a good picture. Got that?”

  “Got it, Andy.”

  Jerry smiled. “You haven’t asked who’s going to be our guy.”

  Bobby shook his head.

  “Go on, ask. You can ask, it’s okay.”

  Bobby knew then that he was supposed to ask. “Who?” he said, like a good stooge.

  “You.” Piat laughed and slapped him on the shoulder and headed for the far wall of the greenhouse, walked boldly past a young man raking bark mold off the path and another misting leaves with water, both of whom looked at him but were cowed by his eyes. He pushed past them down a maintenance trail and on to a battered sign with TREETOPS painted on it; directly below it was a less old but hardly new sign that said CLOSED. Jerry remembered when Treetops (the name borrowed from the famous African lodge once visited by Queen Elizabeth) was new, a viewing platform out over the entire Orchid House, back when its trees had been young and its vines small. Built cleverly of steel pipe disguised to look like branches, it was meant to recall those game-viewing, tiger-shooting platforms once put up in real jungles. Now, the trees reached to the roof and the vines were as thick as your wrist, and Treetops was old and sagging and probably unsafe.

  “Come on.”

  He climbed the imitation-treetrunk stair, ignoring the thought that every worker in the Orchid House was watching them. The old viewing platform was filled with rolls of hose and cuttings, and the protective railing was broken, and the pigeons that flew in and out of the broken panes of the greenhouse had used it as their personal privy. The platform, however, looked as if nobody had been up there for years, except, he now saw, for the odd, courageous tourist who climbed up to stand in the one spot where you could see through some of the greenery.

  Jerry lay full length, looking over the edge of the platform. “They need a few elephants,” he muttered. From up here, he could see most of the meeting site—the back of the bench, but not its legs, becau
se of the foliage; about three feet of path to the left of the bench, the side from which Bobby would come; and a little more on the side where he hoped Dukas would come.

  “I want the big ice bucket placed up here, okay? Roll it in a floor mat; I can lie on that.”

  “You going to—?” Bobby stopped himself. He had been about to ask a question. Piat ignored it, concentrated on the bark path beyond the bench. Have to wait until they’ve got the photo. Then shoot? Or wait until he starts out— He tracked an imaginary figure back toward the exit to his own right, seeing the path here and there as a red-brown stain among the green leaves and the flowers. There was one place that might do. Have to be ready, shoot as he moves into the open. Bang. Not such a long shot, but iffy because of the visibility.

  Then noise and a lot of running around; I leave the gun, just like Oswald in Dallas; I head for the stairs— He raised his head to look at the steep, winding staircase, then craned to look down. There was better cover from the leaves where he was, one now-huge tree masking most of the front of Treetops. A sober man without a hangover could shinny down the old scaffolding unseen. Climb down, no sweat, there’s a lot of uproar, our team is making noise and providing a diversion—what? He looked up at the glass roof, saw the lines of water pipes up there. He studied the vast space. “Can you get a stun grenade, Bobby?”

  “Not so easy. Maybe.”

  “Try.” He didn’t like the idea of the stun grenade; it was distasteful to him—unprofessional. However, he would have to be out and away before the Jakarta cops arrived. Not good to get caught up in all that now that he wasn’t Agency anymore.

  Jerry got up and tried to brush the pigeon shit off his front, but the headache knifed back when he bent too far. “I think we’ll need four guys,” he said. He took ten American hundreds out of his wallet and handed them over.