Hostile Contact

by Gordon Kent

  “Who by?”

  “Oh—me, most probably.”

  “Did you?”

  “Probably. I don’t remember. Yes, I suppose, because I remember about his code name, so I must have been close at some point. But he was a kid, so there wouldn’t have been much to check, would there?” She sipped the lemonade. “Why?”

  “How did he come to us? To you?”

  “Oh, gosh—” He thought she was faking how hard she had to think about that. “He may have been a walk-in.”

  “George never took walk-ins, Jill, you know that. None of us did.”

  “Well, maybe George felt sorry for him.”

  “George did.”

  She shook her head. “He was George’s little guy. He was, you know, outside the envelope. A kind of pet.”

  “But he had a code name and you vetted him.”

  She frowned. “Not a code name, actually. A nickname. I don’t think it ever went into a report or anything, because he never got involved in any real ops. Maybe he’d bring George street gossip, stuff like that. He wasn’t a real agent, and if he got an agent name, it was after I left.”

  Piat had been going over it in his head since he had seen the photos of Li shooting the Chinese intel guy. “It was just before George went back to the States, Jill. I remember that part. He handed the kid over to me and said he wanted me to take care of him. He gave me a file with ‘Sundance’ on it, and there was nothing in there but his basics and his contract and an account sheet that had just been opened. I was his first case officer, according to the file, and I said that to George and he said something about—this is a long time ago, Jill, and this wasn’t a big thing to me at all. I was taking over a lot more important stuff than this kid—George said something about the kid was growing up and he wanted to see he was taken care of. As if he hadn’t been an agent before that.”

  “Well, that’s what I said.”

  “But you said that George used him sometimes. George was punctilious about things like that. Well, that isn’t the point. The question is, was the kid a double?”

  “I can’t imagine that he was.”

  “But if you vetted him when he was twelve or fifteen or whatever, when, as you say, there was so little to check, you must have given him a clear bill. Right?”

  “I must have.”

  “But there was no new vetting done when George gave him to me. So we accepted him as ‘Sundance’ on the basis of whatever you did earlier.”

  She looked at him without expression. “Do you mean I gave a clear to a double agent? Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t mean anything, Jill. I’m just trying to find out.”

  “You think I did a sloppy job.”

  “No, no. It’s possible you thought, ‘It’s a kid, he’s harmless,’ and sort of, you know, did it once over lightly. Isn’t that possible?”

  “I never let a double get by me in my life!”

  “I didn’t say you had.”

  “If he turned out to be a double, then somebody turned him later. What you’re suggesting is that somebody planted him on us to start with? Never. I’d never have let that get by me. Nor George. George was the devil on that sort of thing. Every agent, I had to cross every t and dot every i; then George would go over the vetting and give me grief for the smallest little thing.”

  “A kid? One that George liked?”

  She started to flare up, and then he saw her pull back and look at something. She sipped her lemonade, her eyes turned toward the past. She put the glass down and wiped her fingers on a paper napkin and touched her lips, leaving a lipstick stain, and Piat had time to think that she must be seventy and she still used makeup, and maybe she did because it was something to do to fill the time. “It was George who vetted him,” she said. Had she remembered that earlier, and had she chosen not to tell him then? Maybe not, he thought. Maybe, in her hero-worshiping memory of George Shreed, she had edited this one out until now. “He gave me some notes and a file. Funny, how things slip away. The file was labeled ‘Kim.’ You know, like Kipling?”

  “And Kim Philby.”

  “Well, he called himself that after Kipling, too. My goodness, I’d forgotten all about that. Kim. I suppose—George was a romantic in his way, you know. I suppose he had some notion of teaching the boy tradecraft, that sort of thing.”

  Piat found himself shying away from this memory, too. He didn’t want to deal with the questions that spun off from a George Shreed who had vetted an agent himself, however young, and not gone by the book. Variations from routine were things Piat had been trained to look for, but he didn’t like this one and it wasn’t what he wanted to think about just now. “So what happened to the Kim file?” he said.

  “Oh, I don’t know. It turned into Go-Boy, I suppose. We must have started paying the boy something—I’ve some dim memory of authorizing a payment, I think—and you need an account sheet and a proper file for that. All pre-computer, of course.” She laughed. “I was using an IBM Selectric. George was the only one who understood computers.” She was relaxed now; he guessed that the one bad spot she’d feared had been got over. “Have I been any help?”

  He thought about that. “So you don’t have any recollection of anything that would have made you suspicious of Li—Go-Boy-slash-Kim-slash-Sundance.”

  “None whatsoever. He was so close to George, you know.”

  They talked a few minutes longer. She told him some of it all over again, emphasizing how unimportant the young Bobby Li had been to her. Bobby Li’s history as a spy really had begun when Piat had taken him over, and she’d been long gone by then.

  She seemed relieved when he left. He saw her looking toward the big television. Outside, the heat met him like a blow. He headed back for Las Vegas, planning how he’d set up a hostile interrogation of Bobby Li, which was the only way to go about it now. He drove along at eighty, looking for a bar, and pretty soon he saw a sign for a whorehouse called the Bar-XXX Ranch, and he went there thinking, What the hell, I’ve got an hour.

  Then he was off to Jakarta.

  Dar es Salaam.

  “Have you got anything new?”

  “An interesting detail on Lieutenant-Commander Craik.”

  Lao raised his eyebrows in question.

  “He was serving on the aircraft carrier USS Thomas Jefferson when it was sailing off India, about the time that Colonel Chen went into Pakistan. There was a report of an American aircraft that—”

  “I remember, I remember!” Lao waved the hand with the cigarette.

  “Well, the aircraft flew out of Pakistan and to the Jefferson. It was the antisubmarine type known as the S-3B. Craik has served in such aircraft.”

  “So it could be Craik who flew in and out, maybe picking up Shreed and Chen and taking them to the carrier. And that would explain his wound.” He inhaled, spat a bit of tobacco from his lower lip. “Meaning that Shreed could have lured Chen to Pakistan, where Craik captured him.” He threw his head back. “Anything new on our third force in Jakarta?”

  “The police say they are working on it.”

  “Keep on them.” Lao turned to his computer. He hunched over the keyboard, scowling at the screen. The captain, after several seconds of indecision, went quietly away, and, too late, Lao called after him, “Good work, Jiang—good work—”

  Lao scolded himself for not taking more notice of Jiang, who was, at the very least, a potential threat because he was undoubtedly reporting on Lao to another level of military intelligence. Lao had once held a position like Jiang’s; he knew how it went. Nothing personal. But there was no point in antagonizing Jiang and making things even worse. He made a mental note, Flatter Jiang. Trouble was, he would probably forget it.

  Too much to think about. Tsung was in Pakistan again, waiting to meet with his agent and move Jade Talon along to the next step. The agent in Jakarta he had let slip while he worried about these other things. Well, not let slip; he had wanted the man to stew for a few days. That time was over, howeve
r.

  Bobby Li had behaved oddly, wrongly, badly, in Jakarta. Time now, however, to find out what he had been up to and what he knew. Lao clicked on Li’s file. “Prepare a pickup and interrogation in Jakarta,” he wrote in a note for Jiang. “I want this man brought in and held. While we’re holding him, I want him squeezed dry.” He paused and then added, “Excellent work so far on this project, Jiang. I will put a note of commendation in your folder.”

  NCIS HQ.

  “Mister Dukas?” Leslie said from the other side of the plastic barrier. She sounded as if she feared she’d wake him.

  He had in fact forgotten that she was there, and he was half-asleep—lunch plus the boredom of the report he was trying to write. “Yeah, Leslie,” he said, coming to but not looking up.

  “I’ve compared the inventories.” Laugh, as if the idea of her doing anything was hilarious.

  Low self-esteem, Dukas thought, even though he didn’t believe in self-esteem. He still didn’t look up. “Okay, good, very good.” He wanted to give in to his sleepiness, but he remembered that she was new and young and looked as if her brain were made of tofu, and he owed it to her not to ignore her. “What’d you find, Leslie?”

  “I found an anomaly.” Leslie, despite her permanent hoarseness, had a little-girl intonation, and she made “anomaly” sound like the missing rabbit in a child’s picture-puzzle. “Want to see?”

  Dukas sighed. “You bet.” He went around the barrier and waited. When nothing happened, he said, “Well?”

  “I thought you’d want to check my work.”

  “Leslie, I haven’t got time to check your work. You check your own work.”

  “And you trust me?” Wild laughter.

  “Leslie, what have you got?”

  Leslie was left-handed. With a pencil, she was left-handedly checking pages of a yellow legal pad that she’d covered with entries about the Sleeping Dog inventories. “There’s actually tons of anomalies, right? Because you’d expect that two inventories made four years apart would be different, okay? So there’s all these items that aren’t in the FBI inventory because of course they didn’t exist yet, but they’re in the CIA inventory because they did. But! There’s one item that’s in the recent inventory and wasn’t in the old one, but it isn’t because it didn’t exist way back then. Even though the item has a date before the FBI one. You get me? What I’m trying to say is, it should of been in the FBI inventory but it wasn’t, but it is in the new inventory as if it was in the old one, which it should of been because it already existed. Okay?”

  “What’s the item?”

  She put her pencil on a notation. “EF392-94, ‘Newspaper Clipping.’ ” She looked up. “Want me to find it?”

  Dukas looked at the stacks of files that had been brought back from the office across the building where she had been working. “Can you?” he groaned.

  “Oh, definitely! I rearranged them while you was at a meeting.” She caught herself. “Were at a meeting.” Leslie began walking her fingers down the spines of a stack of files, holding them from toppling with her left hand and revealing more plump thigh than the office dress code would have recommended. Dukas looked quickly away and glanced around her side of the office, the words “sexual harassment” ringing in his brain, and saw files stacked in almost military order. “Here we a-a-a-re!” she giggled. She handed him a file, laughing her ass off, as the saying went.

  The left side of the folder held the analyst’s additions. The fifth paper down was the news clipping, in a Xerox copy with an NSA flag pasted on it:

  Police Arrest Ham Fan

  Mercer Island, WA. Mercer Island Police went into a local ham radio operator’s home today in answer to neighborhood complaints of interference. “That guy was on my radio every night,” complained Henry (Popeye) Ludlam of the Belle Isle subdivision. Other neighbors say that the interference came in short bursts, often of static, lasting only seconds.

  Arrested was John Tashimaya, who is a licensed ham operator. “He was just doing his thing, but he was coming through on his neighbors’ radios,” said Sergeant Jim Kusluski of the Mercer Island Police. “He isn’t supposed to even be anywhere near the broadcast bands, but we got these complaints.”

  Mister Tashimaya was charged with disturbing the peace before Magistrate Helen Malcoway. According to Sergeant Kusluski, the matter will be turned over to the Federal Communications Commission.

  Tashimaya had no comment, but his lawyer, Fred Dickers, said the matter is “a tempest in a teapot” and his client is a victim of “ionospheric reflectivity.” Arraignment is tomorrow in Seattle.

  “Poor guy,” Leslie sighed. She was reading over Dukas’s arm. “Is it important?”

  “I’m allergic to your perfume,” Dukas said. He made a great show of blowing his nose. “Oh, wow.”

  “It’s Dope!” she said.

  Dukas took several seconds to realize that Dope must be a brand name. “I don’t care if it’s Chanel Number 5.” He shook his head. “It’s too much for me.”

  “I bought it from a really knowledgeable guy on the street. He said it’s what Cameron Diaz wears, Mister Dukas!”

  “Maybe you could save it for best.”

  “My boyfriend loves it.”

  “Maybe it’s a question of context.” Dukas blew his nose again. He waved the paper. “You done good, Leslie. Yeah, this is important.”

  “Really? Wow, this is exciting!” She leaned in and lowered her crow’s voice. “Did he do it?”

  “Who?”

  “John Tashimaya. Is he the source of the burst transmissions?”

  Dukas was sure he wasn’t, but he mumbled something about security and high classification and went around to his own side of the office, wondering how a ditz-brain in cheap perfume who had been on the job for a week knew about burst transmissions. Leslie came to the plastic crates and looked through. Her voice was childish again. “I’m awful sorry about the perfume, Mister Dukas. I just won’t wear it again while you’re here, okay?” She shook her head. “My boyfriend just loves it.”

  “Well, there’s a time and place for everything,” Dukas said. His hand was on the telephone. “What’s good in the, um, in a relationship isn’t necessarily good in the office, right?”

  “No kidding!” This was news to Leslie. “Oh, wow.” She went back to her desk. “Oh.” She sat down. She blew a big pink bubble and drew the bubble back between her made-up lips. “Oh, I see.”

  Dukas picked up the STU and dialed Triffler’s number in Seattle.

  Whidbey Island.

  Alan half-expected to be told that yesterday’s flight was Surfer’s gift, a one-shot that wouldn’t be repeated, but when he put himself on the flight schedule, nobody so much as blinked. Surfer introduced him around and made more of Alan’s expertise with the experimental MARI gear than even Alan’s detailer would have thought justified.

  Alan found that some of his reputation had arrived ahead of him. A lieutenant named Cunnard said, “Did you really land a light plane on a gator freighter?”

  Alan felt his face go red. “I’m afraid I did, yeah—that was me.”

  To his surprise, Cunnard said, “That was great! Great!” Not a word about his ground-pounder wings or his intel designator. It wasn’t quite like coming home, but it certainly was better than landing among a bunch of aviators who resented his very existence. As it was, he found himself viewed as a kind of useful and nonthreatening eccentric—not there to stay, no command responsibility, an old buddy of the skipper’s, so okay until proven otherwise.

  Somebody out in the Indian Ocean had been right on the ball, because the first data packets from the Det 424 signal library began to arrive while Alan and Surfer were making a second flight. Alan’s old friend Master Chief Craw had sent a whole classified addendum on maintenance and tweaking of the MARI gear, too, based on their experience in the Mediterranean. Alan smiled to read it, remembering the hard early days that seemed to be years ago and had, in fact, only happened a few months back.


  He showed the new material to Surfer and they went down to the hangar, got Chief Soames going on Craw’s information, and got the DP from admin to load the new MARI image material on one of the training computers. In an hour, the backseaters were chattering away and making notes, while Surfer and Alan sat in his office and started to work out the approvals they’d need to use real-life sites onshore for training. It was basic organizational work. It didn’t fuel the adrenaline junkie in Alan Craik, but it was a hell of a lot better than flying a simulator and putting his fist through drywall.

  “I want you to brief the guys,” Surfer said. “Negative is not an acceptable answer.”

  “Great.”

  Surfer looked at him. “I thought you might say that hotshots with oak leaves don’t do briefings.”

  Alan laughed. “In the Pentagon, hotshots with oak leaves clean toilets.”

  NCIS HQ, Washington.

  Dukas caught Triffler on his third try at the Seattle office.

  “I’m running around like a chicken with his head cut off, Mike. Actually, I’ve never seen a chicken with his head cut off, but that’s what they say. What’s up?”

  “We got a breakthrough.” He didn’t mention Leslie, because she was just on the other side of the divider, but he outlined the finding of the newspaper clipping and its contents. “I suspect it’s a fake, and I think we’re supposed to notice that it has some connection with the burst transmissions.”

  “How old is it?”

  “It’s supposed to be from 1996, but the NSA analyst code was missing, and I’ve checked the wire services. I don’t think this story ever existed.”

  “So somebody wants us to go to Mercer Island.”

  “Somebody wants us to do something, and maybe Mercer Island is it. Send Craik—that’s what he’s there for. You’ll have to make up a route for him, provide surveillance and security—the whole nine yards. We don’t know what’s waiting out there.”

  “This isn’t going to result in more shooting, is it?”

  “Joke, yeah, ha-ha. He’s going to make an inquiry at a police department, for Christ’s sake.”