Hostile Contact

by Gordon Kent

  Triffler sang. “Happy days are here again. . . .”

  He got on his cell phone to the rest of the surveillance team. “Just a reminder, ladies and gents—I want license numbers of every car that’s after the subject, plus numbers of people in the cars, all relevant data. If you can follow them home when Craik peels off, so much the better.”

  “Craik may stay out until midnight.”

  “That’s the breaks, folks. Play the game.”

  Alan and Rose were back at the BOQ by nine-thirty, unaware of Triffler’s followers or Triffler himself. He stood above the computer, expecting there to be nothing, ready to shut it down, but the E-mail inbox came up with “1 New Message” in the window, and suddenly he was staring at a message line that said “From: Rathunter. Subject: Missed You in Jakarta.”

  Lieutenant-Commander Craik: Didn’t I see you at the AGIP Christmas party? You were there with a Dutch girl. Sorry I missed you in the Orchid House. Maybe you left town early because some people did some foolish things there.

  We need to talk. Maybe you have something I am looking for. Send a reply with “Egg Roll” in the subject line and I will tell you more. Your faraway pal, Rathunter

  When Rose came from her room, wearing only a towel, he was still staring at it. She wrapped her hands around his arm and said, “What’s the matter?” He pointed at the screen.

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means I have to call Mike.”

  It took Jewel an hour to decipher the message he had from his case officer. He spent that hour sitting in his car, drinking coffee and scribbling. He had privacy in the car. At home, his wife would want to know what he was doing.

  The message was full of praise for his coup at the JOTS terminal, and he beamed. The message also promised him the payment of ten thousand dollars immediately, to show the “satisfaction of the people of China,” a phrase he read several times. It made him very happy.

  In the last paragraph, his case officer ordered him to go back to watching submarines. That suited him; the nuclear missile boats were the most important part of the American arsenal. He didn’t understand why the carrier had been inserted into his targeting. They had watched carriers for years without much result. The submarines, while harder, were a better target, and ever since he had switched to subs last year, these messages of praise had been more frequent.

  He finished his coffee, read the phrase about “satisfaction” and the money one more time, and got out of the car with all the scraps of paper he’d used, headed for the campsite’s firepit. Jewel was thorough. When he’d burned the scraps, he broke the ashes up with a stone and then urinated on the results.

  Washington and Seattle.

  Dukas was at home. Because Alan insisted on a STU, however, he had to get into his car and drive back to NCIS headquarters. Already late for a date with Sally, he called her first, then got on the STU.

  “This better be good,” he said.

  To his surprise, Triffler’s voice said, “It is.”

  “I thought I was talking to Al!”

  Craik’s voice came on. “Conference call, Mike. This is important.”

  “What the hell?”

  “I got an E-mail that uses the Jakarta codes. Right after Dick discovered surveillance on us.”

  “Uses them how?”

  “The recognition codes—the AGIP Christmas party, ‘I was with a Dutch girl.’ Right out of Chinese Checkers.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Signed ‘Rathunter.’ He wants a meeting,” Triffler said. “As if he missed the Jakarta meeting and now he wants another.”

  “Chinese,” Dukas said.

  Triffler gave a disgusted groan. “When Al comes out of that state police parking lot, he’s got a tail. I asked you how they would know when Al hit town, well, now I know. And two hours later, he gets an E-mail using the Jakarta codes. It’s got to be the same guys, Mike—and they’ve made Al, for sure.”

  “Holy God,” Dukas said. “Al, read me the E-mail again. Dick, fax me a report ASAP.”

  Alan read the E-mail in a flat voice, as if it were important to keep any interpretation out of it.

  “Rathunter,” Dukas muttered. “Chinese.”

  He heard Alan suck air between his front teeth. “ ‘Missed you in Jakarta.’ As in, ‘I aimed at you but I missed you in Jakarta’?”

  “Rathunter.” Dukas continued to stare at the STU as if Alan’s face were there. “The Chinese have a Year of the Rat. That mean anything? What year is it now? Anyway, the ‘hunter’ part is interesting. Hunting for a rat? You? Nah. Then ‘egg roll.’ ” He grinned. “This is a Chinese with a sense of humor.”

  Triffler groaned. “You’re hipped on the Chinese. Mike, what we have to focus on is the tail that was put on him. He follows up the newspaper article about the ham-radio guy, he picks up the tail, then he gets the E-mail.”

  “Mike, Dick’s right. We agreed there were three parties in the Orchid House.”

  Dukas sighed. “I hate ambiguity.”

  “He says, ‘Maybe you have something I am looking for,’ ” Triffler said. “That could be important.”

  Dukas folded his arms over his chest with a wince that said that that hurt his wound, too. “Okay, okay. Al, don’t answer this E-mail; I’ll take care of it. You just forget this part and concentrate on Seattle. Dick, you, too—Al’s to have countersurveillance every step he takes off the base and maybe on it, too. I’ll put a request in to the FBI to try to trace the E-mail, but you know how long that’ll take.” He sighed. “Meanwhile, we try to ID Rathunter.” He paused. “What was it, ‘your faraway pal’? What does that mean—what’s far away—Brooklyn? Beijing? San Diego? ‘Faraway pal,’ sounds like his English is pretty good.”

  “How about, he’s in Seattle and uses ‘faraway’ to disguise it?” Triffler said.

  Alan spoke up. “How about if Rathunter is Shreed’s control, or somebody in his office? I mean, walk the cat back: I leave the mark for the meeting, which we think won’t produce squat, but in fact it’s a live plan, and a watcher picks up the mark and flashes Beijing or someplace—sorry, Dick, I agree it may not be the Chinese, but I’m just thinking it through—and holy hell breaks loose—wouldn’t it? It’s like Dick said last week: If we had a dead agent’s comm plan light up, wouldn’t we come to life? So they cover the meeting, and then, if you’re sitting in Beijing, you still want to know what the hell’s going on, so you try to set up another meet—right?”

  “How’d they know it was you?”

  “Oh, come on!” Triffler snorted. “They probably ID’d him before he was back in the U.S.”

  “Maybe it was Chen himself,” Alan said, his voice wry. “George Shreed’s control,” he added for Triffler’s benefit.

  “What happened to him?”

  Dukas squinted. “He’s dead. I saw the body. Harry’s girlfriend shot him. My boss asked me just the other day why I didn’t bring him home.” He sighed.

  “But the Chinese or whoever could think they’re talking to Shreed,” Triffler said. “If Chen was Shreed’s control, and the Jakarta comm plan was the way they met, then maybe they think Shreed is still alive and they’re trying to make contact.”

  “They’re missing both their A-number-one agent and his control. They get the signal for a meet in Jakarta. Bingo! It’s Shreed making contact! They make the meet, bang-bang-bang, it goes bad, their guy gets killed, but they didn’t do it! But they know it wasn’t Shreed; it was some American Navy guy. So they go, ‘Shit, we’ll settle for him—maybe he knows what’s going on.’ So they E-mail him.”

  “Mike,” Triffler said, “would you do that? E-mail another intel agency after what, at best, you have to think of as a hostile meet, just to find out what he wants? No, they have to have a damned good reason to make contact this way.”

  “Like they’re taking a big risk,” Dukas said. “I agree. So, something makes the risk worthwhile.”

  The three voices were silent for some seconds until Alan sai
d, “Shreed was talking about poisoning the Chinese. When he was dying. He acted like he’d done something wonderful. He said that he’d have a monument at the Agency like Casey.”

  Dukas frowned. “I don’t remember.”

  “Shreed was giving Chen hell about something. And he said to me that he was a hero—as if he really believed it! Jesus, do you suppose he really had done something to screw his control, and now the Chinese are shitting bricks over it?”

  “How could he have screwed them?” Triffler said. “He was their best spy!”

  “He was saying something to Chen about money,” Alan said. “Mike doesn’t remember any of this. Do you, Mike?”

  “I don’t remember anything about money. Maybe I read it in your debrief, but I don’t remember.”

  “Well, you know what they say,” Alan said. “Follow the money.”

  “Yeah, but what money?” Dukas rubbed his eyes with his right hand. When he stopped to think about it, he was really worn out. “What money?” he said again.

  Alan muttered that he had no idea. Triffler was silent. Dukas sniffed, got a lingering hint of Leslie’s perfume, and unaccountably smiled. He had Alan read him the E-mail again, and then again while he copied it down.

  Dukas was circling things on his version of the E-mail. Rathunter. Missed you. Something I want. “Are we done?” he said.

  When Dukas hung up, he was thinking that the E-mail from Rathunter was either a big break or a scam, and the surveillance on Alan was a satisfying development and certainly significant; and somewhere in the back of his mind he was registering the fact that Triffler hadn’t complained and even sounded happy now that he was doing something.

  “Win a few, lose a few,” he groaned as he got to his feet. Then he sat down again and called Sally. “We still got a date?” he said. Her voice was suspicious, a little shocked, but forgiving. She said she was awake, anyway.

  “Half an hour,” he said. “Don’t decide to take a nap.”

  He booted up his computer and wrote a brief E-mail and went out the door.

  To: Rathunter

  From: greekgod

  Subject: egg roll

  let’s meet

  Seattle.

  When Alan at last got off the telephone, Rose was asleep. She had moved into her own room, he supposed as a way of telling him that it had not been her idea of a romantic day for just the two of them.

  Alan got into her bed. “Hey,” he said softly.

  “You bastard.”

  “I like you even better without the towel,” he said.

  Washington.

  In the dark, his cheek against Sally’s bare ribs, Dukas said, “Can you get Chinese Checkers for me again?”

  “You’re such a romantic, Mike.” He felt her chest go up and down with a wry laugh. “I gave you my only disk.”

  “I lost it in Pakistan.” Sensing the beginnings of her annoyance, he said, “Craik had a contact. I want to see how they react if I suggest a meeting at another Chinese Checkers site.”

  “Don’t you wish you smoked?”

  “What the hell’s that mean?”

  “It was always so cool in old movies when people smoked after they’d, you know.”

  “They didn’t ‘you know’ in old movies; the production code didn’t allow it. They kissed and faded to black.”

  “Well, after they faded to black, they smoked. I feel as if I’ve faded to black.”

  “I feel good.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “And you want to smoke?”

  “No, I— You’re a literalist, you know that? You have no imagination.” The room was not quite dark, light from a neighbor’s backyard spilling in the window. “Is this going to work?” she said.

  “It’s worked so far.”

  “I’m trying to get my daughter back. They don’t take it too seriously anymore if Mommy has got herself a new guy, but still—I don’t want to risk her for something that doesn’t work.”

  Dukas patted her bare thigh. “It’s working.” He sat up. The bedroom was small and mean; he wondered how three people had ever lived in the house. “Give me the name of somebody who can get the rest of Chinese Checkers for me.”

  She was silent so long that he said, “I asked if you—”

  “I heard you.” She swung herself off the bed and grabbed something from the back of the closet door and went into the kitchen. When he followed her, he found her heating frozen eggnog. “That stuff’ll kill you,” he said.

  “It’s all I could find that’s sweet. I want something sweet.” She put out two cups and leaned against the sink, a tall, slightly overweight woman with hair untidy from sex, pale, freckled arms sticking out below the sleeves of a faded shorty robe. “If you could get somebody to process a retrieval request, you could get Chinese Checkers out of storage. Anybody could do it. Anybody with the clearance. But for somebody to have the clout and the knowledge to do it himself, I just don’t know anybody. Anybody who’d help, I mean. I’m a bad girl over there.” She stirred the mixture, which now smelled like cotton candy.

  “If I send a normal request, they’ll be a month.”

  “It’s part of Crystal Insight, isn’t it? That’s ongoing; you can plead urgency.”

  “Okay, three weeks.”

  She poured the thick, yellow liquid into two cups. “Ask Carl Menzes.”

  “He isn’t Ops.”

  “He doesn’t have to be Ops—he’s Internal Investigations, and he’s still running the Shreed case, so he has a reason to ask for it.” She sipped and reacted away from the cup because it was too hot. “Anyway, Menzes is the straightest guy at the Agency.”

  “Yeah, but—” Dukas stuck out his lower lip.

  Her face got gleeful. “There’s Ray Suter.”

  “That bastard! He’s one of the guys I’m after, not somebody I’m going to ask to get a classified file for me! The word is that Suter knew that Shreed was a Chinese mole, and the Agency has him on ice and is squeezing him dry someplace. I hope he rots!”

  “I was joking, okay? My God, talk about overreacting!” She spooned up some of the sticky, sweet mess. “Try Carl Menzes.”

  Dukas didn’t have to tell her about the risk of having your investigation taken over by somebody else, or about the conflict of personalities and agencies, or about stubbornness. “I’ll think about it,” he said. He put down his cup. “This stuff is terrible.” He took her hand and led her back toward the bedroom.

  13

  Seattle.

  Sunday is a day of rest.

  Nonetheless, Dick Triffler called Alan at the BOQ at seven.

  “Alan? Going secure.” As Alan listened to the snap-crackle-pop of encryption static on the STU, he wondered if Triffler ever slept.

  “I have you secure,” Triffler announced.

  “I have you the same.” Alan yawned.

  “This is about your getting followed yesterday.”

  “Sure.”

  “I know why you departed from the route. Totally understandable, but this would be easier if you could signal me, if you—”

  “Knew what I was doing?”

  “You were very good yesterday.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I think I was, but it could be better. How are we going to fix that? And how long is this going to continue?”

  “I’d like to get together with you every day, run some exercises. Opportunity to give you some training before we get much further. You sound like you’re laughing!”

  “I am. Yesterday, I thought I had nothing to do.”

  “How about tomorrow first thing?”

  “Deal.”

  “I have a map of Whidbey. Can you find the corner of Perry and Lawrence, in officer housing?”

  “I’ll find it.”

  “I’d like you to be there from 0702 until 0705. If I’m not there to meet you, try again from 0802 to 0805. I’ll have a Seattle Mariners ball cap in the passenger-side visor of my car. Got it?”

  “0702 until 0705. If you
don’t show, try again from 0802 to 0805. Seattle Mariners ball cap. That’s early, Dick.”

  “Want to make it later?” The tone carried a great deal of what Surfer would call “negative energy.”

  Alan smiled to himself. “I’ll be there.”

  Seattle.

  Dick Triffler had called from the empty NCIS office; he was there before any but the duty officer, and he was waiting at a desk when the man he wanted came in to take over, a tall, almost emaciated-looking man of fifty named Nagel, one of the two local agents Triffler had been able to borrow.

  “You’re kind of a gunner,” Nagel muttered. “Not even eight o’clock on fucking Sunday.”

  “Eager beaver,” Triffler said. “I couldn’t wait to get back to your coffee.” He waved at the office coffee machine, which he had washed and filled and turned on. “What do you guys buy for coffee, old horseballs?”

  “Go to Starbucks,” Nagel rasped. He had a chronic cough. “Weather here strangles me,” he said. He poured himself coffee, paused when it met his lips. “What’d you do?” he accused Triffler.

  “I scrubbed the filter.”

  Nagel sipped. “Tastes weird.” He sat at his desk and put his feet up. “I can’t surveil your guy today; I got the duty.”

  “Reason I’m here, man, is I want to know who the cars we picked up trailing Craik belong to. Any movement on the search?”

  Nagel made a face. “This is a joke, right?”

  Triffler looked baffled.

  “Some search! I picked them up before I knocked off yesterday. Those license numbers are state cop cars, for Christ’s sake!”

  “You should have called me.”

  “All day, you got us trailing three cars that belong to the state police! What the hell, Triffler!”

  “You sure?”

  Nagel gave him a disgusted look.

  “What kind of state cops? Off-duty? Plainclothes?”

  “They’re in a block of licenses issued to the state police. The cars are probably unmarked leftovers from drug seizures or some shit like that. Probably came out of a car pool in Tacoma. We need to trail them back and ID the guys in them—get a few pics, maybe a fingerprint if we can get into the cars.”