by Gordon Kent
He shook his head. He didn’t believe in the game of mirrors. He ground out his cigarette and called in Jiang, an aging captain with a good bureaucrat’s sense of how to get things done. Lao brought up on the computer screen a photograph of the Westerner leaving the Orchid House. “I want to know who that Westerner is. He was in Jakarta two hours ago: check the manifests of flights in and out for five days back and the outgoing from now on; I have a suspicion he will leave Jakarta soon. Check with embassy security in Jakarta; one of their people followed an American, maybe this man, to a hotel. Get a name if you can. Then check the hotels for Americans who were there yesterday and today. Ask if they have been asking for directions to Fatahillah Square and the Orchid House in the minipark.” He squinted at the screen. “This man was probably with somebody else—up to four others, maybe. A countersurveillance team. Maybe traveling together, but not necessarily.” He lit another cigarette. “Then get on to the Jakarta police and find out if they have any reports on an incident at the Orchid House this morning.”
The captain gave a forward jerk that suggested a bow. Both were in civilian clothes; military etiquette did not seem quite right.
“I am going home for lunch,” Lao said. It was, in fact, only nine in the morning. The captain’s face was impassive.
Lao drove to his rented house in a suburb where most of the diplomatic community lived (not so with most of his Chinese colleagues, who huddled around the embassy), kissed his wife, American-style, and responded to her questions about his day, then put his finger to his lips as he led her to the bedroom. The house was bugged; the phone was bugged; she had years ago given up trying to know how his days really were. Yet they had great affection for each other, despite their arranged marriage and his profession and its conditions. Sometimes, she knew, he came to her like this to make love when he wanted to make his mind a blank.
Lao wished he could talk about his problems to her. Or perhaps not. She might say, as she had once when they were test-driving a new car in Beijing and nobody could possibly have been listening, “Don’t you ever dream of living like other people?”
8
Washington.
Rose met her husband at Dulles airport. His embrace was hard, quick, eager. He looked worn out. “Jakarta was a bust,” he said as he settled in the car.
“I thought it was supposed to be a walk in the park.”
He folded his arms and sank lower in the passenger seat. “The case isn’t what we thought.”
“Mike should have his ass hauled for sending you.” Rose accelerated to get into the traffic heading toward Washington.
He looked out the window. A deer was standing by the side of the six-lane highway. He frowned. “I wasn’t very good out there.” He flexed his bad hand. “I’ll tell you the worst of it up front: there was shooting; a guy was killed; I got out by the skin of my teeth.”
She gasped, bit back some comment. “I’m just glad you’re home.” She put her hand on his.
“Everything went wrong,” he said. “Triffler never got there, one goddam thing after another.”
“What happened?”
“Everything.” He turned his hand over—the bad one—and squeezed her fingers. “ ‘This time, Amelican Fryboy, you make big mistake!’ ”
It had started to rain. He stared out the side window again, dimly seeing his own reflection, hers. He put his hand, the bad one, on her thigh, and she covered it with her own. “It was great to be doing something, though,” he said.
To his astonishment, she laughed. “You’re going to be doing a lot.” She reached across him and opened the door of the glove compartment and pulled an envelope into his lap. He saw the naval return address and his own name, and he opened the envelope and began to read, his heart swelling as he did so. “You are ordered to proceed to Naval Air Station, Miramar, California, for a period of—
“Sonofabitch,” he said. He was frowning.
“I thought you’d be beside yourself!”
“I am, I am—but— There’s the case, you know—Sleeping Dog— I’ve got some ideas I want to share with Mike—” He looked again at the orders. “My God, another MARI det—a week ago I’d have killed for this—”
He had called Mike Dukas from the west coast and invited him for dinner, something he broke to Rose only as they were nearing their rented house. “I’ve got to talk to him about the case,” Alan said.
“You’ve got orders to Miramar.”
“I let him down in Jakarta. I want to make it up to him.”
“Alan, the Navy’s given you a new job—you’re not an NCIS agent!”
“Mike’s my friend.”
“Mike should have his ass kicked.”
He kissed her cheek. She steered into their weedy driveway and turned the car off. “I wish you’d told me that you’d invited him,” she said.
“You’re right; I should have. I didn’t think. I was stupid.” They were in the house by then. He kissed her again, and she smiled and stood back from him. “Well—if working for Mike is this good for you—”
He embraced her. “I’ll get a shower.” He grinned. “And I know I’m still in the Navy.” As he headed up the stairs, he hugged the orders against his chest with his good hand.
Twenty minutes later, Dukas’s battered car pulled up behind theirs in the too-short driveway, and there he was, worried and guilty.
“Hey, babe.” He kissed her as he came through the door. Rose held herself stiffly, and he felt it and got the message. “Where’s the great man?” He dumped his attaché in one of the ugly chairs. “Rose, what’s wrong?”
“If you don’t know, there’s no point in telling you!”
Dukas blew out his breath and headed upstairs to see Mikey, his godson. Coming down again, he tested the atmosphere—Rose slamming things down in the kitchen, a smell of onions and garlic frying. Dukas positioned himself in front of Alan, who was sitting on the sofa and wincing with each slam of a pan lid in the kitchen. “Al, it was all my fault. I feel like shit about it.”
“No.” Alan looked up at him. Something thumped in the kitchen, maybe a piece of meat being thrown down on the cutting board. “Let’s get on with the case.”
Dukas flinched as a cupboard door slammed. “Rosie, can I help?” he shouted.
Rose appeared, no smile, a chef’s knife in her hands. “You’re unbelievable, Mike. You almost got my husband killed!”
“What can I say?” he muttered.
“Try ‘I’m sorry!’ ”
“Okay—Rosie, I’m sorry.”
Rose folded her arms. The chef’s knife stood straight up by her right shoulder like some kind of emblem in a statue of one of the more severe saints. “Saying you’re sorry isn’t enough!”
Dukas tried to grin, and Rose, uncharmed, walked out. “I should have never let you go,” Dukas sighed to Alan. “I’ve already had my ass chewed by two experts at ONI. CIA, Embassy Jakarta, and State all want a piece of me. Rose has to stand in line.”
“And I should have told her I’d asked you to dinner. We’ll get over it; Rose’ll get over it. What’s going on with Sleeping Dog?” Alan stood up, restless, wanting to move, but the room was too small. “The way I see it, that comm plan wasn’t dead; it was active as hell, so what about everything else in the file? Let’s go through it piece by piece and figure out—”
Dukas tried to raise a hand to Alan’s shoulder, winced, and settled for putting a hand on his arm. “I’ve been through the file—several times. I can tell you this: We thought the Jakarta comm plan was the only action item there. We were wrong. Maybe we were supposed to think the comm plan was the action item, but there’s also action in Seattle.” They sat down, their knees almost touching, their voices low because the small woman in the kitchen was still slamming things around. Dukas leaned forward, his face only inches from Alan’s. “After I talked to you in Jakarta, I began to check Sleeping Dog out. I got a retired FBI guy who’d been the case officer in ninety-two. He wouldn’t say much, but he�
�d at least admit that he remembered it—it was a real case, meaning that the whole thing isn’t a crock of shit. Some of it, at least, is real. Sally Baranowski insists that the Jakarta comm plan wasn’t in Sleeping Dog, but—news from town, kid, here comes a big one—” He bent even closer to Alan’s ear. “The Jakarta comm plan was part of Chinese Checkers—George Shreed’s personal map for meeting with his control.”
Alan stared at him. He was processing it—Jakarta, Shreed, Chinese Checkers. “The Chinese?” he said.
“I think, yeah. Who else has Chinese Checkers?”
“Well—the Agency—”
“Yeah, but the Agency isn’t going to lay a Shreed comm plan on us and then use it to try to kill you!”
“Well,” Alan said grudgingly, “I’m not sure anybody tried to kill me.” He was frowning, looking away from Dukas.
Dukas leaned in close again. “It’s the Chinese, stupid. Get it?”
Dar es Salaam.
By midnight, Colonel Lao knew enough about what had happened in Jakarta to make him start using obscenities in his conversation—always a sign of frustration in him. Inwardly, he cursed: he cursed the distance between Dar and Jakarta; he cursed the surveillance people there and the fact that he couldn’t debrief them himself. Had they been so incompetent that they had got themselves shot at? Had they frightened off Chen and Shreed? Had there been some other failure?
“Unlikely,” he said aloud. He believed in likelihoods, probabilities: when you must choose, choose the probable.
Start with the certain, he thought.
Nothing was certain.
Start with the probable, then.
What was probable was that the American in the Orchid House had been sent by the CIA. If Shreed was dead, then it was probable that the CIA had his files, including the comm plan; it was probable that they had tested the plan by planting the mark. Therefore, the man who had appeared at the meeting place with a magazine under his arm had been a CIA agent—unless Shreed was not, in fact, dead. If Shreed was not dead, then what was probable was that the American in the Orchid House had been sent by him.
What was utterly uncertain was why and how the meeting in the Orchid House had degenerated into a shootout. Such things were remarkably rare—so rare that most operations officers hardly ever even carried guns, much less used them.
James Bond, Lao thought with a sneer.
What went wrong?
A fuller report had landed on his computer. The American (if he was) had had no gun and had not fired. Others in the Orchid House, apparently locals, had been armed and had fired. And his people had returned the fire. All this suggested not two sides, but three, with the American seemingly at a different level of involvement—almost, in a sense, a bystander.
A third force. Maddening.
And the Americans as bystanders. Odd.
And then the odd behavior of Chen’s old agent, Li.
Analysis of airline manifests showed that an American named Alan Craik had flown into and out of Jakarta on the right days, and a report from the agent who had checked the hotels said that Craik had asked about the location of the cannon and the Orchid House and had then been gone for part of an afternoon. The officer in Jakarta had had to winnow down a list of possibles to get to this one, a list that included a Dutch businessman, an American tourist, two Japanese tarts, and an airline steward, but Craik seemed the likeliest because of the question about the park. Lao himself became convinced when a simple check of a military registry turned up Craik as a serving officer in naval intelligence—not quite real intelligence, to Lao, but close enough. Although why he was traveling under his own name to a hostile agent contact, Lao could not begin to guess. Madness! Amateur!
Currently on medical leave, he had read in the sketchy report on Craik. The Jakarta agent had reported that the hotel staff remembered quite clearly that Craik had had new, livid scars on his left hand and was missing two fingers. Was this relevant? Why would an officer on medical leave be sent on a dangerous mission?
He distracted himself by leafing through the new operational file on Jade Talon. Tsung had done the scut work, locating a local team to do the dirty work and finding an existing agent, a Pakistani intelligence officer with ties to the Islamic conservatives who could be used as the cutout. It wasn’t pretty, and the quality of the operational personnel (Somali) wasn’t high, but it had the virtue of being totally secure. The Pakistani thought Tsung was North Korean. The Somalis thought they were fighting for Allah. Lao put his chop in the upper right of the document, approving the next step, the passing of targeting data. The quality of the targeting would determine whether the Somalis had a prayer of hitting their very mobile target. It was also one thing that the Americans could use as an indicator of who was behind the attack.
But the real question was what could be done about Chen. Lao thought about that for hours, took it home with him and to bed with his wife, and then he decided that the answer must lie with this Craik.
Suburban Virginia.
Alan and Dukas had been over it all again—Jakarta, Chinese Checkers, the shooting—and had given it up for now, shaking their heads. Dukas was trying to change the subject.
“I understand you got duty orders.”
“Yeah, but I got an idea about that.” Alan raised his voice. “Rose, what’re you cooking out there?”
“Spaghetti, what do I ever cook for your friend in there?” The slamming had pretty much stopped, and she sounded pleasanter.
“Want some help from your thoughtless husband?”
“No.” She appeared with two glasses, which she set down on the coffee table. She held a wine bottle as if she’d fill the glasses only if they passed some test first. “What are you guys whispering about?”
“Uh . . . a little debrief—” Dukas mumbled.
“Oh, yeah, I bet.”
“Actually,” Dukas said, “we were talking about a case called Crystal Insight.”
Rose held the wine suspended over the glasses. “That’s my case!”
Dukas grinned. “Right. That’s the NCIS investigation of Shreed’s phony-baloney framing of you as a security risk—which hasn’t been closed, thank God, although I’ve been writing reports on it since I was able to sit up in a hospital bed! Because”—he tapped the coffee table—“because, guys, this Chinese Checkers connection drags in George Shreed, and George Shreed was the focus of Crystal Insight, so all of Sleeping Dog and all of Chinese Checkers is now part of Crystal Insight.” He looked triumphant.
“What’s so great about that?” Rose said.
“It lets him deal from strength,” Alan said, turning to look at her. “With an ongoing case, you’ve already got established tracks, leverage with the other agencies.” He looked at Dukas. “Cool. I like it.”
Rose poured the wine. “I thought my case was going to be closed.”
“Rosie, sweetheart, CNO as much as exonerated you by pulling you over to his staff for a month and restoring you to duty. But a case is different—a case has a life of its own. Now, it’ll go on for as long as there’s anything about Shreed out there.”
Alan grinned. “Mike’s kids will be working on Crystal Insight.”
Rose rolled her eyes. “If Mike is going to have kids, he’d better hurry up.” She skewered Dukas with a look. “How is Sally?”
Dukas pretended not to hear. “And now there’s this Seattle thing—”
“I have to go to Seattle,” Alan muttered to her.
“What?” Her voice was a shriek.
“I’m supposed to go to Seattle to investigate Sleeping Dog,” Dukas said. “But I don’t want to go to Seattle, because I’ve got to contact every officer who signed off in every agency on this pile of paper, and then I’ve got to go through the original index of every closeout file—when it left each agency—to make sure that every piece of paper matches. Then, when I’m satisfied that Chinese Checkers is the only clinker in the pile, I’ll do something.” He held up a hand to keep Rose from tearing into
him. “Listen, babe, it makes sense—you don’t know the case—
“NSA picked up these burst transmissions on satellite years ago. No idea where they came from, except the satellite was limited by line of sight to the Arctic and North America down to, like, Wisconsin. And not very helpful, because they got the tickle only now and then, sometimes months apart. In fact, for a couple of years, it was so sparse one expert put a note in the file that the transmissions could be a natural phenomenon, although he didn’t say what. Prairie dogs rubbing their back feet together, maybe. Anyway, this had no priority, and NSA shunted it over to the Bureau when the Bureau went international and got interested in communications. But nothing much happened. Then came wireless, namely the cell phone, and this case got hotted up along with a lot of other stuff. The Bureau leaned on NSA and got a new fix from them—new technology. Probably what we’d call triangulation, although in fact it was done by figuring the bounce off the ionosphere—you got that? it means zip to me, but I read practically a book about it in the case file—and they got to where they could say it was northwestern U.S. or southwestern Canada, so now they were down to about a million square miles. For a while, the Bureau actually worked on it—there’s reams of interviews in my office: RCMP, midwestern ham operators, ships’ radiomen, meteorologists, you name it—trying to get the location more precisely. I’ll give you the short form: They found nada, except for four reports of radio interference along the Canadian coast.”
Rose made a show of pretending to yawn. “Really fascinating stuff, Mike. Wow, how do you do it?”
“This is important! Anyway, they didn’t get enough for anybody to get the hots about it, so in 1994 the Bureau kicked it to the CIA, because the Agency put out a call for anything on burst transmissions in this frequency range. They were into terrorist groups operating in the Philippines, and there was some shit going around about Chinese intel supplying them with comm equipment that put out a signal more or less like this one.” Rose rolled her eyes.