Hostile Contact

by Gordon Kent

  Ten minutes later, they were standing outside the Orchid House.

  “You know Si Jagur?” Jerry said.

  Bobby Li grinned. “Everybody in Jakarta know Si Jagur.” Si Jagur was a seventeenth-century cannon that sat in a public place and was both a totem and a sort of pet, also a good place to meet for a date—See you at Si Jagur.

  “Fatahillah Square,” Jerry said. “You’re going to go check it out every day. Here’s the deal: When our man’s ready to make the meeting, he’ll leave a chalk mark on Si Jagur. A circle with a little tail, sort of a letter Q. Got that? On the left-hand wheel as you stand behind the gun. Okay? He leaves the mark, that means the clock is running and the first meeting time is next morning at nine-ten. Mmm?”

  “I got you, Andy.”

  “I want you to check Si Jagur every day, starting today. You’ll have to set up a route that takes you there, going someplace you usually go. Mmm?” Jerry wanted something sweet, which he hoped would absorb or minimize or anodize or do whatever the hell sugar did to alcohol. If the alcohol he’d taken in was still alcohol, and not some poisonous shit that it turned into after it hit the gut. “You know the drill—you make walking by the cannon look normal. Okay, you know all about that.” He also wanted a drink. “One of these days, you’ll see the mark. Then you let me know at once. I’ll give you a comm plan.”

  “Okay I ask a question?”

  “Ask.”

  “How soon this guy going to leave the mark, Andy?”

  Piat, hands on hips, inhaled and exhaled noisily. It was another flaw in Suter’s goddam plan. “Soon, I hope.” When Dukas gets around to it, he meant, but Suter had believed that Dukas was smart enough to find the comm plan quickly and to see that it was an anomaly. Well, maybe. We hope. “Soon.” He liked Jakarta, but he didn’t want to grow old there.

  Jerry wanted to go back into the Orchid House and sit down. He liked the bizarre mixture of smells—earth, flowers, rot, bark. But he had other things to do. “I’m leaving,” he said. “You hang around for fifteen, twenty minutes, check out the way you go into the Orchid House to make the meeting. Then check out Si Jagur, then start to get your shit together. Okay?” He smiled into the small man’s eyes. “Good to be working together again, Bobby.” He put out his hand.

  “Yeah.” Bobby’s face was sad. “I can’t believe George dead.”

  “For his memory, Bobby. Hmm? Loyalty—that’s what this is about. Loyalty to George.”

  Dulles Airport.

  The summer evening looked golden through the great windows. Incoming aircraft winked like stars in a sky still too light to show the real ones. Alan walked with his bad arm around Rose, in the other the carry-on that was his only luggage. “Seems weird, going halfway around the world with less stuff than I’d take to the beach.”

  She had her right arm around his waist; she squeezed. “I’ll miss you.”

  “Not the way I’ve been the past few weeks, you won’t.”

  “Even that way. Mikey cried when I told him you were going. It’s bad for him, you getting hurt, then you were so—so—”

  “Crazy.”

  “Whatever, and now you’re going away. . . .”

  There are few good conversations for a parting. Kids, the dog, her airplane, good-bye, good-bye. I love you, I love you.

  She stared at the security gate and the metal detector. “Jakarta,” she said, as if she could see it there. “I’ve just never heard anything good about Jakarta.”

  He kissed her. “You will.”

  Jakarta.

  The next day, Jerry Piat slept until noon. At four, he went to Hilda’s and a whorehouse and several bars.

  Bobby Li ran around Jakarta, stopping four times at his business, which was only an office and a storage space; a woman old enough to be his mother answered the telephone for him and kept the place clean. He visited Si Jagur; he bought a much-used SKS with a scope and wrapped it in a grass mat and took it out to a suburb where a petty gangster named Ho had a fiefdom of about three square blocks.

  “Got a job,” Bobby said.

  Ho grunted and looked at the rolled mat. “I don’t shoot guys,” he said.

  “Surveillance job. I need you and three others. You use a camera?”

  Ho grunted.

  “Use it good?”

  Ho grunted.

  “You use a telephoto?”

  Ho grunted, but without conviction.

  “Okay, I get you a point-and-shoot.”

  They talked money. Bobby made a deposit from the bundle Andy had given him. He handed over the roll with the SKS in it. “Pay some glue-head to put this up on the old platform in the Orchid House. You know, the Treetops? Some doper who’ll do it but then forget it, okay?” He peeled off another hundred, tore it in half, and put half in Ho’s hand. “I’ll check five o’clock this afternoon. You get the other half if it’s been done right.” They talked terms some more, then communications, and Bobby told him he and the team would have to be ready to move on short notice. That required another deposit.

  He went to the street market and bought an Olympus point-and-shoot cheap, probably ripped off from some tourist, loaded it with 400-speed film and took it back to Ho, who held it in his fat hand and looked puzzled. Bobby explained how it worked.

  He tried to buy a stun grenade.

  He told his wife nothing was wrong when she asked what was wrong.

  He went to a different street market and bought six Walkabout radios.

  He met with Andy and the team. He told Andy he needed more money.

  That evening, Alan Craik landed in Jakarta.

  About the same time, Dick Triffler took off from Washington.

  3

  Jakarta.

  “Hello, Mister!”

  Alan tried to ignore the swarm of aggressive children, each with his palm stretched up toward him in supplication. It was the morning after his arrival, stunningly hot, the streets steaming from a ten-minute downpour.

  “Hello, Mister! Hello!”

  The route on the map looked very clean and neat; here on the streets of Jakarta it was virtually impossible for a foreigner to decipher the name of any road, much less the maze of alleys (gangs) that had been marked for him to travel. He did his best, which was usually quite good, and found himself the only foreigner in what appeared to be the courtyard of a colorful and desperate tenement.

  “Hello! Hello! Mister!”

  Alan looked down at the sea of little faces that moved with him through the gang and took a folded bill from his shirt pocket and held it up.

  “Anyone speak English?”

  “Oh, Mister! Hello, Mister!” Like a children’s choir.

  “Mister!” Hand raised in the affirmative. A chorus of Yes.

  “I need a guide.” Alan didn’t think that James Bond required a nine-year-old to guide him through his surveillance detection route, but he wasn’t James Bond.

  “Why don’t we practice?” he had asked Triffler, back in Washington. Triffler had explained to him that if the Indonesians or the Chinese or any other service were watching them, they couldn’t practice in Jakarta, because anyone observing the practice might be set up to watch the real thing. The explanation had confused him, because the military believed that people should practice complex evolutions, but he followed his orders, and here he was, lost in Jakarta Barat. At least, he hoped he was still in Barat. And Triffler, who was supposed to be with him, was—Alan hoped—still over the Pacific somewhere.

  “We won’t even meet.” Triffler had been quiet, assured. “You’ll see me at the end of the route, because I’ll be the signal that you’re clean. But we won’t hang out; we won’t be in the same hotel or travel together; nothing to link us.” Nonetheless, Alan was tempted to look for Triffler on every corner.

  “I can speak Inglis, Mister!” one kid said. “Real Inglis, like you can understan’.”

  Alan handed him the folded bill without hesitation, then withdrew a second bill before the boy’s eyes wandered o
r he contemplated flight. This one he held up ostentatiously and then put back in his pocket.

  The boy launched into a torrent of abuse at his mates, most of whom vanished in an instant, although a few merely fell back as if waiting their turn.

  Alan read the next street on his route to the boy, who nodded and set off at a fast walk. Alan followed, sweating. He liked the sweat. He had been right: It felt good to be doing something, even if he required a nine-year-old to help him.

  A minute later, the boy stopped in a gang identical to the last, carpeted in the same bright trash that reeked of rotten fish.

  “Here, Mister. What we do here? You buy batik? This not a good place for batik.”

  Alan looked at the wretched row of shops, each offering its own batik and some of the “cap” cloth that every tourist seemed to want. Alan couldn’t see Rose in “cap.”

  In Washington, Triffler had told him that every stop would “make sense.” “These things have to have a logic of their own, Alan,” he had said. “We depend on that logic to look natural.” Alan saluted him, mentally. I look like a natural lost tourist. To keep his cover, he pointed at a piece of cloth slightly less repulsive than the others and nodded at the price.

  “He ripping you off,” his guide said, turning on the merchant. The exchange went on and on, getting louder and shriller; and then, suddenly, everyone smiled and Alan got a pile of cash back—too much, he thought, but the transaction seemed to have satisfied all parties.

  “Now I want this one.” Alan pointed at the next destination on the list, marked “Fish Market.”

  “Okay.” And they were off, Alan almost running to keep up, his batik (or cap, he couldn’t tell) clutched under one arm.

  It certainly smelled like a fish market. This one he had checked out on the Internet—supposedly the oldest part of the city, with some parts dating to the fourteenth century. What was he supposed to do, buy some squid? He walked about for a few minutes, followed by the boy. The fishmongers shouted at him and one another, and he was reminded of his first visit to Africa and how alien it had all seemed. Jakarta was alien, too—almost more alien, with a sturdy structure of the ultramodern, hung with a great deal of African-style poverty.

  Beyond the fish market were boats, old sailing boats with brightly colored hulls and sharply raked bows and masts, and he moved toward them without really thinking. The boy followed, incurious, and Alan walked along the pier, threading through the piles of nets and watching them being mended in much the same way that nets were mended in Mombasa and in Gloucester, Massachusetts. The ocean didn’t seem alien. He felt as if he had his feet under him, and he smiled at the boy.

  “You plan a hash run? That why you walk everywhere, Mister?”

  Hash runs—long cross-city races over a course marked by hash marks—were a feature of expat life from Bahrain to Mombasa. Alan had run a few and had helped mark one, and he smiled at the boy, thankful for a better cover story than any he had been able to concoct.

  “Fatahillah Square.”

  Now for the real thing. Or the thing that probably meant nothing but might lead to something real. What Triffler called the “operational act.” As if this were some espionage performance art.

  Alan crossed the square under the full weight of the sun and went to the gun, which had been here since the seventeenth century, had been loaded and used to keep surrendering Japanese from resisting in 1945, and now seemed to be the city’s leading fertility shrine. Si Jagur was the site he was to mark, the target set for him from the first meeting with Triffler and Dukas in Maryland.

  He needed to get rid of the boy.

  “Coke?” he said, miming unnecessarily to his guide. The boy stuck out a hand and Alan gave him some small colored bills. The boy vanished, and Alan walked up through a crowd of women, many of breathtaking beauty, to run his hands over the rims of the wheels on the old cannon. He touched it as if he were measuring it, as tourists often do, and many of the women giggled to see a man in such intimate contact with the old monster; things were said that might have made him blush or worse, and the older women didn’t hesitate to suggest that men often had their own failings.

  This part he did well. He seemed no more interested than any Bule tourist, but when he moved back to the boy and his two lukewarm Cokes, he had left a white mark shaped like a Q high on the rim of the wheel.

  Game on.

  But as he picked his way back toward his hotel, he thought, I’ll like it better when Triffler gets here.

  Bobby Li walked along the north side of Fatahillah Square, looking at nothing, moving purposefully toward his next business appointment—at least as far as a watcher would see. This was the third day he had walked through Fatahillah Square. When he came parallel to the ancient cannon, he stopped, covered his look at the cannon by glaring at a little girl who tried to beg, and moved off again, his head down, his stride again purposeful.

  In fact, his glance had caught the mark, high on the wheel of the gun, and his heart was pounding because it was too soon—he hadn’t been able to get a stun grenade; Andy was drinking a lot and Bobby wasn’t sure of him, and he was nervous about actually getting the ragtag team together so fast. Still, he walked on, planning the moves that would take him to another place to leave his own mark to tell Andy about the mark on the cannon. And then Andy would call him. And then tomorrow morning, they’d go to the Orchid House and—

  For George.

  No reason to bring his Chinese loyalty into it.

  Filomeno Hamanasatra was an aged Chinese agent who had no duties anymore except to monitor three out-of-date, probably dead, communications sites. He walked his dog past them, proudly, even defiantly, because most of his neighbors were Muslims and had little regard for dogs. Mister Hamanasatra was a Christian—well, nominally a Christian, certainly culturally a Christian, inwardly somewhat contemptuous of belief itself—but he loved the presence of the animal and never stopped wondering at the mystery of communication, even affection, between the two different species, his and the animal’s. The dog was a cairn terrier, the only one in Jakarta, and, although it suffered from the heat, he walked it every afternoon and then returned it to the air-conditioned coolness of his flat.

  Once a week, Mister Hamanasatra walked the cairn to Fatahillah Square. Faithful in his duty, he glanced each time at the wheels of Si Jagur, admiring when he could the women congregated there, and then, seeing nothing on the wheels, moving on.

  Today, however, as he glanced at a lovely woman who was probably barely in her teens, and, because he never stopped walking but kept moving so that nobody would think his visit unusual, he was almost past the great gun before he looked down again at it and saw that a mark had been made on a wheel with white chalk. And, yes, the mark looked like a letter Q with an extra bar through the pig’s tail that curled down to the right.

  Remarkable!

  Mister Hamanasatra’s aging heart beat a good deal faster. He had seen a mark on the wheel only three times in all the years he had been paid to watch it. He was a romantic: He made up scenarios, stories, of what messages, what events, that mark symbolized. Now, he was so excited that he walked faster, almost dragging the dog, and it balked, sat, scratched, looked at him accusingly.

  “Well, well,” Mister Hamanasatra said. He scratched the terrier’s ears. He walked more slowly to the far side of the square and then, because he wanted to “make assurance double sure” (Macbeth, a particular favorite), he walked the dog back past Si Jagur and the women and checked again to make sure, double sure, that the mark was there and that it was really the correct mark and not something a child had done at play.

  Then he walked home through the deafening traffic noise and, safe inside his flat, he called a number on his cell phone and said that Vidia had a message from Lakme. Had they got that? Yes, they had.

  That was all he did. A widower, retired, he had little else to do, but at least, that evening, he could stare out a window with the dog in his lap and dream of where his message wa
s going and what it meant.

  “Shit!” Jerry Piat said.

  He had just heard from Bobby Li that the mark was on the cannon in Fatahillah Square.

  That raging prick Ray Suter had been right—Dukas had glommed on to the comm plan first crack out of the box, and here the bastard was, making the mark and no doubt all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to hit the Orchid House tomorrow morning so he could enjoy a day at Uncle’s expense in Jakarta.

  Jerry knew that Dukas would believe that the comm plan was dead. In that situation, you left the mark, you made the meeting site faithfully for a couple of days, and, when nobody showed, you went home and checked the box marked “Deceased.”

  Well, surprise, surprise, Dukas!

  Jerry was still sober because it was only late afternoon. Now he wouldn’t take a drink until it was all over. He began to strip and change into running clothes—a good run, sweat, exertion to work the alcohol poisons out of the muscles, and he’d be ready to go.

  Nonetheless, he wished he’d done a dry run with Bobby’s team.

  The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

  NCIS HQ, Washington Navy Yard.

  Mike Dukas had talked to Triffler, who was in Manila waiting for an aircraft to get a hydraulic leak fixed to get him to Jakarta. It was plain that he wouldn’t get there in time for the first window for the meeting in Jakarta, and Dukas didn’t like it. He wanted Triffler with Alan to calm him down, even though nothing was going to happen, nothing could happen, and the comm plan was strictly what scientists called a chemical stomach.

  Dukas sat in his office, one hand on the telephone, wondering if he should call Alan at his hotel. Bad move—insecure phone. Around him, on every flat surface—chairs, desk, file cabinets, computer—were folders from the Sleeping Dog case file. Two days into them, Dukas was bewildered by technical radio jargon and bored by old reports about the futility of an investigation that had gone nowhere. He had read nothing that caused him to worry about Al Craik in Jakarta, and yet—