Hostile Contact

by Gordon Kent

  “That’s what you said about Jakarta.”

  “Okay, okay, I made a mistake about Jakarta!”

  “Your first ever, right? Okay, Mike, I’ll run with this, but I tell you, we’re busy little beavers out here. You know how many potential targets there are in the Seattle area?”

  “Think military.”

  “I’ve thought military. I sent a guy out this morning to Bremerton, they go, ‘Please submit this through channels and we’ll clear it with Washington.’ Is this the same Navy out here, or are they working for Lithuania?”

  He was simply blowing off steam, Dukas knew. He could tell when Triffler was having a good time. They talked some more about who was out there—Triffler was already impressed with a local NCIS man named Nagel—and what sort of surveillance had to be laid on Craik when he was off the base, and how strict the need was that Triffler and Craik never be seen together. “Use your skills, Dick. You’re the control; Al’s the agent. Make him follow the rules.”

  “Will do.”

  “And don’t let him fly. I know him; once he’s around those airplanes, he’ll want to go up; next thing you know, he’ll be gone for good. No flying, got it?”

  Triffler started laughing, and Dukas hung up too quickly to ask why.

  “Mister Dukas?” Leslie said.

  Dukas was still sitting with his hand on the phone. “I’ve been thinking,” Leslie said.

  Dukas smiled at her, remembered that he didn’t want to seem to be valuing her too lightly. “Thinking about what, Leslie?”

  She came around the plastic barrier and leaned against the white crates, endangering one of the plants—which she had started to water without being asked—one plump hip cocked and her red-dyed hair like a sunburst around her face. She was holding one hand as far away as possible so she could study the nails. “What d’you think of green?” she said. Before Dukas could answer, she snapped the hand back to her hip and said, “What I’ve been thinking is that this burst-transmission stuff is spying. You know? I think it’s some guy hunkered down with some radio, reporting on stuff, you know? I ask myself, What is there in Seattle to spy on, and so I go on the Web and, really, Mister Dukas, there’s so much out there you wonder the government allows it all in one place. But what I figure is—”

  Dukas’s face was clouded. “Leslie, how do you know about the burst transmissions?”

  “I read the files, don’t I? You’ve had me reading the files for days! I’m cleared.” She looked only slightly scared, like a kid who’s been caught out but is going to plow ahead, anyway.

  “Well, yeah, but—”

  “So I figure— Can I go on and tell you my idea? Okay. I think we ought to interview the mave-rick who got canned by the CIA for finding the truth about the transmissions.” That was the way she pronounced it—mave-rick, to rhyme with pave and brick. “It seems a little fishy to me, by the way, that he got canned. Doesn’t it to you? Like he was getting too close?”

  Dukas started to laugh a paternal laugh, and he actually said something about the Agency’s canning people all the time, and then a voice in his head was saying, Yeah, but what if she’s right? What if—? “It’s mav-er-ick, Leslie, three syllables. Okay? Maverick?”

  She said it silently to herself. “How do you know these things?” she said. “I’m so dumb.”

  “No, no—no you’re not.” Dukas was on his feet, wincing at the stab in his chest, trying to get to her because he was sure she was going to burst into tears or something worse. Her already low self-esteem would bottom out; she’d quit; and he’d be left with no help. “That was very smart, Leslie, a very smart idea—”

  “My ass it is,” she said. She laughed. Merrily. “You think I’m a ditz-brain. My boyfriend says I’m a ditz-brain about nine times a day. My social studies teacher said I should sell my brain to science, because I wouldn’t miss it.” She laughed.

  Dukas shook his finger at her. “Don’t let people say things like that to you!” he shouted. “You’re a very bright girl; you’re just—!” He wondered why he was shouting. Why did he care? “It’s a good idea, but it took me by surprise because I didn’t think you knew the case. Um, most file clerks don’t, you know, read for content.”

  She looked at him and stopped laughing. Their eyes locked, and he realized they never had before; one or the other had always looked away, some sort of avoidance syndrome. And he knew it was because he was a very old man to her. Leslie clearly had her own ideas about it, because she went pink and turned away and went to Triffler’s desk. “Well, that was my idea,” she said and went back to work.

  Dukas sat behind his own desk. What the hell was all that?

  12

  Dar es Salaam.

  Colonel Lao had come to the humiliating conclusion that he didn’t know quite what he was doing. This realization had come in the midst of a flurry of what he had been thinking was productive work—messages, orders to pursue lines of investigation, study of Chen’s files—and he had stopped for a cup of tea and suddenly seen, as if the message had been written on his wall by a moving hand, that he was simply filling time.

  The realization was not helped by two messages from Beijing, one from the General and one from the Party man, both stiffer than their last message and both demanding the same thing: progress.

  “We’re not making progress,” Lao said to Jiang. Jiang had become a sometime confidant, a full-time wall against which he could bounce the ball of his ideas. “Progress is not satisfactory.”

  “Early days yet, Colonel.”

  “Early days are all we have. Beijing is pressing.”

  He kept looking for lines along which to make real progress, and he kept coming back to the same questions: Was Chen dead? Was Shreed really dead? Who was in the car that left the Pakistani village after the plane? Was it really George Shreed who was buried in St. Anselm’s Cemetery? Until he knew the answers to those questions, it was difficult to proceed with any confidence. If Chen had been lifted out of Pakistan alive, flown to an American aircraft carrier and then to the United States— He actually shuddered. If such things had happened, Lao’s career was over.

  Maybe his life, as well.

  “Who can tell us if Chen is dead?” he said.

  The captain smiled—one of those smiles that can mean anything because he didn’t know whether the question was real or ironic.

  “Craik,” Lao said. “We now believe that Craik was in Pakistan when Chen disappeared and flew out with the S-3B aircraft. So, he is the likeliest one to know what happened. He can tell us if Chen is dead.”

  The captain tried the same smile, because he still didn’t understand what the line of attack was here. “Why would he tell us?”

  “Because we would give him something that he wants.”

  The captain was now truly puzzled. “What?”

  Lao fiddled with his computer mouse. It skated over the rubberized desktop, sending the cursor into wild dances on the screen. “Good question.” Lao shot a glance at the captain and made a rare joke. “How about you?” He laughed, but Jiang didn’t. Lao made the cursor dance some more. He sucked air between his teeth in little rhythmic pulses. “I think,” he said, “it is time to send Lieutenant-Commander Craik a message.”

  Seattle.

  It was a Saturday and it should have been a day off—a no-fly day for Rose and the det, both—but Triffler, energized by the discovery of the fake newspaper report, was hot to trot to Mercer Island. He had laid out a surveillance route for Alan to drive, and he had promised—promised, honest to God, cross my heart—that Alan would be done by four P.M. and he and Rose could have a romantic evening in Seattle. “Just remember, you got to drive the route exactly the way I wrote it down so we can keep an eye on you and scope out anybody who seems to be a tail. Okay? Okay?” When Alan had said that it was okay, Triffler had said, “And no deviations, right? No deviations!”

  Alan and Rose were just on the mark of noon when they drove into the parking lot of the Blue Rodeo, which T
riffler had thoughtfully put on Alan’s surveillance route to check out the fake newspaper story, and the lunch wasn’t bad, just yuppier than anything Alan or Rose would have eaten if left to choose for themselves. Alan sensed the finicky Triffler behind every bite of watercress salad, and he wondered if Triffler always led his agents on a trail of gourmet food and expensive coffee. He grinned at the thought.

  “What you thinking, baby?” Rose said.

  “That we might get a really good dinner tonight, too, if Triffler picked the restaurant.” Alan had explained the game to Rose. She seemed to be reserving judgment. But the country was beautiful and occupied both of them as soon as they were clear of the place. The Olympic Mountains dominated the horizon, and the road had enough elevation to offer them tantalizing glimpses of the sea and the mountains and great splashes of trees stretching away as if they would run in a single forest to the edge of the world. It made Alan want to get out in the woods and really gulp the air.

  “Smells better without the JP-5,” he said, and she clasped his gearshift hand. His other hand, the one he thought of as the other hand, rested on top of the steering wheel. Even in an Ace bandage, he could steer the car with it.

  Somewhere behind them, Dick Triffler was happy to be working, too. He had three cars out, one with him and two waiting ahead on Alan’s route, where parallel roads would make their actions less obvious. Professionally, it was all going pretty well.

  Alan followed Triffler’s route exactly, driving carefully and using Rose as a navigator. Unlike Washington, Seattle does not believe that street signs need to be hidden from foreign invaders. Better yet, prosperity had hit Seattle recently enough that a ring of well-marked highways with well-warned exits penetrated most of the city. Saturday had no real rush hours, and he crossed the long bridge to Mercer Island well ahead of his time and stopped at the park at the end of the bridge to sightsee, an unplanned stop that had Triffler cursing Alan’s name as he redirected one of his two supporting agents into the park behind Alan.

  There was no sign of surveillance. Triffler thought about his wife, and decided that unless he saw something worth investigating in the next two hours, he was calling Dukas and going home.

  Alan pulled into the campus of the Town of Mercer Island and followed the signs to the Police Administrative Services.

  “I’ll go for a walk,” Rose said, waving her hand at the distant skyline. He nodded and went inside, feeling incongruous in shorts and west coast shirt. He checked his pocket for his credentials and went in.

  Fifteen minutes of moving from counter to counter finally led him to the office of the administrator, a competent-looking, middle-aged woman who had a sign on her desk that announced The buck stops here.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, as he leaned into her office. Her nameplate read MS. TENCETI.

  “I’m Lieutenant-Commander Alan Craik, and I’m looking for a file that may or may not exist on an arrest made here on Mercer Island sometime back in the nineteen nineties.”

  “Can you tell me the name of the man arrested? And may I ask your interest in our case?”

  Alan showed her his credentials. He had a plain set, no badge, given to him by Dukas with the admonition that he was to use them only for identification to other law enforcement agencies—not to get out of speeding tickets. She looked at them with something like boredom. “If this is a Maritime Patrol case, you’re in the wrong office. We do handle some of their paperwork, but—”

  “No, ma’am. This is a matter of national security. I’m interested in a case that involved the arrest of a local man with an Asian name for some illegal ham radio operation that seems to have jammed the local radio station.”

  “Really?” She perked up. “Can I see your credentials again? Thank you.” She put glasses on and read them. “I am sorry to say that I’ve never heard of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.”

  “We have jurisdiction over crimes committed by or against members of the U.S. Navy.” Alan suspected that he was simplifying.

  She nodded. “So you’re with the shore patrol.”

  “No, ma’am. Shore patrol would be the equivalent of your local police. We’re sort of the FBI of the Navy.”

  She frowned. “We’re not really big on the FBI, here.”

  Alan laughed. Neither are we, he thought. She handed him his credentials back. He handed her his newspaper clipping, and she pushed her glasses up and read it attentively.

  “This doesn’t look like any local paper,” she said.

  “I imagine it was taken from a wire service.”

  “But what gets me is the content. I’ve been here fifteen years, as a clerk and as an administrator. I don’t remember any such case.”

  Alan sagged a little, but her fingers were already flying.

  “Oh, my goodness. There it is, too. Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.” She turned her screen on a swivel mount so that he could see it.

  “Could I have a transcript of the file?”

  “According to this, we don’t actually have the file. That’s marked as being in Olympia, with the state police. That’s odd too, unless they made the arrest. Is that why I don’t remember it?” She was clearly muttering to herself, and Alan took out a notebook and started writing the file number and any other information he could get off the screen. “Except that it lists an arresting officer by name. Sergeant Kusluski is retired now.”

  “I may need to interview him. Do you know Mister Tashimaya?”

  “Never heard of him. It’s all odd, if you ask me.”

  “Can you get the file from Olympia for me?”

  She smiled. “We’re paperless,” she said proudly. “They aren’t. That’s a paper file and they won’t let go of it unless you go down there. Even then, I suspect that you’ll have a hard time getting access to it. Mister Tashimaya was arraigned, according to your article, but he was never tried. That means that Privacy Act laws will protect his paperwork.”

  Alan shook his head. “Even in a case of national security?”

  “We prize our rights here,” she said primly.

  They made it to Olympia with Triffler and gang in tow, and Alan followed the directions provided by Ms. Tenceti to the state police administration and records section in an office park that would have benefited a minor university.

  “There’s a lot of money out here,” said Rose.

  Alan surfaced from his thoughts to contemplate the limited time and the ruin of their plans for the day—shopping in Seattle, a romantic dinner—and Rose’s apparent acceptance.

  “I, uh, don’t think you should come in,” he said, lamely.

  She eyed him steadily. “You owe me, mister. This is my no-fly day. You just remember that.”

  He kissed her.

  Bored, hopeful, and professional, Triffler directed his people to form a loose bubble around the office park, and set himself to watch and call them when Alan came out.

  The clerk at the front desk was helpful once she saw Alan’s credentials, and she passed him to a file clerk who led him into the basement of the building. No one had bitched that it was Saturday, and Alan wasn’t going to be the one to bring the subject up. His guide seemed excited that the case involved national security. “Are you trying to catch a spy?” he said. “Like, a real spy? That is so cool.”

  “I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation.” Alan had heard this line a thousand times, on TV and from Mike, and it pleased him to get to use it himself. The truth was, he had only the vaguest idea how this file was going to fit into Sleeping Dog, but the answer seemed to please his guide.

  “Right. Of course you can’t. Sorry I asked, really. It’s just exciting.”

  He led Alan past enough doors to hide all the secrets of several jurisdictions and finally into a neat cave lined with metal shelves. The dates of the files could almost be taken from the age of the shelves. At one end were metal barrister-style bookcases from the 1950s, and they led to heavy metal units with wood shelves from the 60s, to light
er-framed modular shelves of the 80s and finally to black freestanding shelves that looked as if they had come from IKEA. His guide probed along the last for several minutes until he found a plastic carton and dug inside. He surfaced with a pale green file.

  “That’s funny,” he said.

  “What’s funny?” Alan said as he reached for it.

  “It’s color-coded. We didn’t start color-coding files until last year.”

  Alan started to riffle the file, still afraid that it was going to be snatched away, trying to remember everything. “Maybe it was active recently.” But the file was virtually empty. It had a report filed by a state police sergeant supporting the arresting officer’s report, but there was no investigating officer’s report.

  “Is that what you needed, Commander?”

  “Can I make a copy?”

  “I’ll copy it for you. Want to wait in the hall?”

  Alan walked out, smiling at the ways of bureaucracy and thanking his stars that Ms. Tenceti wasn’t the administrator here and they didn’t seem to have heard of the Privacy Act. He was also thinking that the file should have had more data, like an arrest report or some surveillance data. Anything. He didn’t really know much about cops, but he knew about bureaucracy. The file was a fake. He could feel it by the weight.

  By the time Alan and Rose came up the entrance ramp and got back on the interstate headed for Seattle, Dick Triffler no longer cared that Alan was a hundred miles off his countersurveillance route, because the other watchers had identified two cars following him.

  Alan was under surveillance.

  And it had started at the state police office park.

  “Chinese, my ass,” Triffler said to his rearview mirror, but he was smiling. In fact, he was grinning. He thought it was absolutely great that Al Craik had surveillance all over him, because it meant that, by God, things were moving!