Hostile Contact

by Gordon Kent

  “Don’t let them know. Got it? Until we know better, the state cops are not on our side.”

  “Jesus, Triffler, I know a lot of state cops!” Nagel drank coffee and looked unhappy. “What’re they tailing a naval officer for, anyway?”

  Triffler rested his buttocks on the desk. “Good question,” he muttered. He chewed his upper lip. “Ve-ry good question.”

  In the Virginia Horse Country.

  Ray Suter was lying in the grass that lay at the end of a long slope down from the house toward a meadow where two horses, the only ones on the farm, were standing nose-to-tail. They were way out in the big meadow, as if they were part of a herd of dozens. Always together, the only ones of their kind that either knew, they were called “the boys” by the maintenance man and now by Hurley. Suter, who disliked animals, never referred to them.

  He was lying with his hand on his cheek and his back to the house. A book was open on the ground. To anybody behind him, he seemed to be reading. Nobody was in front of him except the horses.

  A palmtop lay on the pages of the open book. Suter was reading a message in the small display window:

  Subject checked in here today. All OK. Where’s Mustang? LeMans.

  “Fuckhead,” Suter whispered. He meant Jerry Piat, the missing “Mustang.” He stabbed the device with his left index finger, keeping the movement out of sight of anybody in the house. He pretended to stretch and yawn and glanced back to make sure nobody was there. Then he pulled a cell phone from a nylon pouch that was hidden in the grass under the book and pecked a number and put the phone against his right ear as if he were still leaning his head on that hand.

  “Say what?” a voice on the other end said. It was male, maybe black.

  “Five flies.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Friend of Spanish Fly.” Spanish Fly had been Shreed’s code name when he was dealing with the same people and wanted black jobs done. Suter had learned it from the mass of data that Nickie Groski had hacked out of Shreed’s computer. “You hear me?”

  “Yeah, ah heard you. Talk.”

  “I want you to find somebody for me. Name, Piat. First name, Jerry—I think it’s Gerald. Address on Millington Avenue, Silver Spring; get it from the phone book. I want to know where he is and what he’s doing, and I may want you to deal with him. Okay?”

  “Thousand bucks, man; ‘dealing’ with people costs more.”

  Suter hesitated, then said, “Same arrangement as before.”

  “Half up front.”

  Again Suter hesitated. Anybody seeing his face would know he was angry, but he kept control of his voice as he said, “Okay. Money coming the same route.”

  He switched the cell phone off. Piat had been one of his interrogators in the first days after Shreed had fled, even though it had been Agency dogma that Piat had idolized Shreed. We love the enemies of our enemies.

  Suter had believed—and still believed—that he could stonewall forever, because he knew too much about Shreed and because too many people still loved Shreed. Once he’d learned that Shreed had died, it had been a short step to the beginnings of the plan to protect himself further, by framing the people who had brought Shreed down. Marv Helmer had been a natural ally because he had thought that Shreed walked on water. So had Piat, especially when he disappeared from the interrogation team and, Suter had learned from Helmer, quit the Agency under duress. Now, however, Piat was proving unstable—not where he should have been, not doing what he was told. We love the enemies of our enemies only so long as they prove useful.

  Suter pretended to read for another twenty minutes, then made his way on a long curve to the horse barns, the way a man who had nothing to do might wander on a big place like this. He stayed outside the barns so they could see him from the house, and whistled, walking up and down. He bent and took a stone from his shoe; when he stood, the pouch with the palmtop and the cell phone was on the ground.

  The maintenance man came out of the tack room. Unlike Suter, he was nervous and he squinted up toward the house.

  “Don’t look there!” Suter growled. “How many times do I have to tell you?” He pointed at the two horses far out in the field. “I’m asking you about the horses. You’re telling me about them. You’re telling me why they’re always together.” The two men stood side by side, not, in fact, unlike the horses they were looking at. Suter shaded his eyes to look at them and said, “I’ll need the checkbook at noon. Bring it to me at the tennis court. Then you’ll have to go to the bank and get cash and take it to the same place.”

  “Jesus God,” the maintenance man said, “you think I got nothing else to do?”

  “Nothing else you’re so well-paid for,” Suter said. “Come back and pick up the pouch in twenty minutes. I may need it tomorrow.” He shook the maintenance man’s hand and gave him a big smile and ambled up toward the house.

  Dar es Salaam.

  Colonel Lao had got the E-mail from Greekgod and had printed it out and taped it to the wall next to his computer. Above it was a printout of the photo of the American naval officer, Craik, in Jakarta. Lao stared at the two as if expecting them to speak to him, and when they did not, he said, “Jiang!”

  The captain put his head in from the outer office.

  “What do you have on the E-mail trace?”

  “Nothing yet. Too soon. The domain’s American, but otherwise, it’s too soon.”

  Lao expected nothing more. He had sent his own E-mail to Craik through a cutout server in Denmark; he was not surprised that Craik had done the same in reply. But he didn’t understand the use of the code name. “I don’t get ‘Greekgod,’ ” he said.

  “The Greeks had many gods, in their classical era,” the captain said. “Jupiter, Hercules—”

  “Herakles.”

  “Sorry, sir?”

  “The Greek name is Herakles. The Romans called him Hercules.” Lao rubbed his hand through his hair and looked up at the clock. “Is Craik a bodybuilder? Does he think he’s a Greek god? Maybe it’s a joke. The Americans make jokes.” He lit a cigarette and tossed the pack where the captain could reach it. “I have to send an answer. We can’t waste time here.”

  The captain, who now knew a great deal about the Chen case because Lao could not do everything himself, said, still standing because Lao hadn’t asked him to sit, “Make a meeting.”

  “Too soon. I don’t know what I’m dealing with. Craik must have turned the message over to the CIA; they could have agents all over it. Anyway, a meeting will be hard to arrange.” And, he thought, where will it leave me, meeting with a foreign intelligence officer?

  “Use American Go. There are three meeting places—Jakarta, Nairobi, Pakistan.”

  “Pakistan is where Chen disappeared; I could hardly go there. Nairobi? Huh.” Nairobi was close by; he could oversee the entire thing himself. The office had agents in Nairobi. It was a good thought, but premature. “I think we will send him a cautious answer,” he said. “Then we must write a report on this contact.” He said “we” because he couldn’t entirely trust Jiang, and it was best to make him share the burden of contact with a foreign national.

  Cyberspace.

  From: Rathunter

  To: greekgod

  Cc:

  Subject: your egg roll

  it is a fine time of year for travel/ maybe you want to broaden your acquaintance? you always learn something, often things of great value/ we cannot see forward if we look only over our shoulder/ maybe meet location 2 of the plan you have

  Washington.

  Dukas slammed ahead despite its being Sunday, sleeping at his office and getting bad-tempered and frowsy and piling up work for Leslie to start Monday morning. He pushed the back-checking of the items in Sleeping Dog, looking for more forgeries; when he had this in train for Leslie to finish, he dug into Crystal Insight to see what he had missed in there.

  And that was how he found out about Nickie the Hacker. First, however, he had had to read Triffler’s report on wha
t had happened here in D.C. while Dukas was off in Pakistan, which was so circumspect that Dukas realized that Triffler was tiptoeing around something, especially in his work with somebody named Detective Moisher. Dukas wanted to know what.

  He called Seattle. “What the hell did you leave out of this report? It’s all pussyfooting.”

  Silence. Then, “I thought it was masterful.”

  “Oh, smell me.”

  Triffler sighed. “Because of something my boss, Michael Dukas, had done, an entire evidence trail was tainted. Therefore, Detective Moisher had to be helped along without my hand ever showing. And I did it very, very well.”

  Dukas could see that. Yes, he believed that the thoroughly honest Triffler would have done that. “So what was the upshot about Suter?”

  “Detective Moisher is dumb as a stump, but he’s tenacious,” Triffler said. “He finally made a connection between a crime in Bladensburg and Ray Suter, which led him to Menzes, with a little help, and Menzes invited him along on the bust. He—”

  “This cop was with Menzes at the bust?”

  “Yes, I think he actually served the local warrant on Suter. Anyway, they got to Suter and the kid and arrested them both.”

  “What kid?”

  “A computer hacker named Nickie—mm, what was it?—Groski, Nickie Groski, who was working for Suter. Remember? You had illegally put a tap on Shreed’s phone lines so you’d know when his computers were on? And they showed that somebody else was hacking in? Well, there was this kid who had hacked into Shreed’s computers, I think to get things on Shreed for Suter. Anyway, Menzes got Suter and the kid and he wouldn’t tell me a thing about any of it. It’s locked up tight. You there?”

  “I’m thinking,” Dukas said, and he hung up. What stayed in his head was “Shreed’s computers” and a kid who had hacked into them. Shreed had been a computer nut; he had communicated with his Chinese control by embedding data in photographs and sending them over the Internet. A hacker who was into Shreed’s computers might know a lot. A hell of a lot.

  After a couple of minutes, he called Abe Peretz, a pal at the FBI, at home and asked if he could get anything on a bust on the date in Triffler’s report. Peretz, who was unfazed by the call, came back to him in two hours with the information that two FBI agents had been on the team that had gone in with Menzes, and they had, among other things, charged a juvenile named Nicholas Groski with violation of parole.

  “The FBI bothered with a kid who’d violated parole?”

  “Computer crime. Federal offense.”

  “What happened to the kid?”

  “I’ll find out.”

  Dukas knew that the Agency could hold on to Suter for as long as they wanted because he was an Agency employee, but they couldn’t do that for a juvenile who wasn’t an Agency employee and whose only crime was violation of parole. In fact, the Agency wasn’t supposed to mess with people inside U.S. borders at all. Oh, yeah.

  Dukas went on the trail of Detective Moisher. On a Sunday, that trail was cold and dead. The local police didn’t give out home telephone numbers; Moisher was unlisted; and why didn’t he call back on a weekday?

  Peretz called a little after four. “Nicholas Groski was picked up when Suter was busted. We—the Bureau, I mean—made the arrest and charged him with parole violation; local jurisdictions in Virginia and Maryland also charged him with local stuff—breaking and entering to get into Shreed’s computers, stuff like that. Federal judge slapped a ten-thousand-dollar bail on him; bail was posted by the CIA, and they met him at the door and nobody’s seen him since. I think it’s what we call ‘unlimited detention.’ ”

  “Sonofabitch. How come?”

  “I smell a fix with the judge. Also, there’s a federal gag order on him—that’s a place to start.”

  “What court?”

  “Fourth Circuit, Virginia.”

  “Oh, shit.” That was a tough, conservative court that liked what it heard from prosecutors and the government. “Who asked for it?”

  “You need to find the kid’s lawyer, if he’s got one. Start with the local charges—where did he get arrested?”

  Dukas looked at Triffler’s report. “Prince George’s County, Maryland.”

  “Okay, check the charge sheets in the county court, that’s Upper Marlboro. Don’t try to do it yourself; get somebody from your legal affairs that knows how it’s done.”

  “How the hell do they get to keep a kid for a month?”

  “They would have said the magic words, Mike—’national security.’ ”

  “Well, I know those words, too.”

  He called NCIS Legal Affairs and was told to call back in the morning.

  So he started calling people at home.

  Sunday was a day of rest.

  There is no rest on a carrier at sea, and on the Jefferson, aircraft were being worked on the hangar deck and stashed on the deck and launched off the cats. There could be church; there could be rotation-scheduled leisure; but the Air Ops that were the carrier’s reason for being went on. LTjg Soleck didn’t fly that day and was glad enough for the rest from the tension of trying to get a landing right. Captain Rafehausen allowed himself time to go to church, but he was in his office and among the ready rooms as if it were any other day.

  On Whidbey Island, the det took another no-fly day, but, at Alan’s insistence, the flight crews put in a couple of hours on the MARI files from the Jefferson. CDR Rose Siciliano flew her F-18 down to Edwards and got herself a room in the BOQ so she could get up bright and early and get checked out on a different airplane.

  Sunday was a day of rest.

  14

  NCIS HQ.

  On Monday morning, Dukas found an E-mail on his computer from another special agent that said:

  Hey, Dukas, how do I get me a teenage sex bomb like yours for my office?

  It took him a moment to realize that the message referred to Leslie. Teenage sex bomb? Dukas sighed and told himself that he had better things to do than trade insults with assholes.

  He got himself an appointment in Legal to talk about Nickie Groski. When he hung up from that, there was a call waiting: Detective Moisher. As Triffler had said, Moisher was a few kilowatts short of a sound-and-light show, but at least he got to work early, and besides, he was thrilled to be called by a special agent. He remembered Triffler with enthusiasm because “for a black guy, he was really, really great.” Dukas was tempted to say that he was a black guy, but he guessed that Moisher was one of those people who live without irony.

  “I want to talk to you,” Dukas said.

  “You bet. Anything!”

  “Nicholas Groski.”

  “Oh. I can’t talk about him.”

  “Sure you can.”

  “I’m under a court order. National security.”

  “Ray Suter.”

  “I don’t dare. They’d crucify me.”

  “Oh, they would? Well, let me put it this way—I’m going to put a court order under your nose telling you to talk to me in the cause of national security, so get your pipes in order, or I’ll crucify you.”

  “Jeez, can you do that?”

  “Watch me.”

  Dukas stabbed the lever on the telephone cradle that disconnected them, and, phone to ear to make a call to Carl Menzes at the CIA, he looked up to see Leslie. She was standing by the end of the wall of crates and she had a silly look on her too-wide face. When she saw him looking, she giggled. “Notice anything?” she said.

  It was the question with which old-fashioned women drove old-fashioned men to drink. Dukas was old-fashioned enough to feel panic. “Uhhhh—” he said. Teenage sex bomb danced in his brain. He didn’t want to look at her.

  “It’s my hair, stupid!”

  It certainly was. It wasn’t red anymore. It was an unreal, impossible, sword-and-sorcery, computer-game witch’s black. It looked like a pile of wet black asphalt, spiraled up on top of her head.

  “He-e-e-y!” Dukas said. He had learned a few things f
rom the many women he’d failed with.

  “I wanted cornrows, but there wasn’t time,” she croaked.

  He smiled with false enthusiasm and thought that it was about time he had a talk with Leslie about her public image, and then he got very busy with the telephone, because anything he said was going to sound like sexual harassment. A lose-lose situation, his specialty.

  He had decided that Sally was right—he had to ask Carl Menzes to get him a copy of the Chinese Checkers file so he could try to set up a meet with Rathunter. When he got Menzes, Menzes was unenthusiastic about meeting; he temporized, hesitated, finally agreed only if they could meet at “the Annex,” actually the Old Commonwealth Tavern, a restaurant and booze salon down the road from the Agency—miles and miles of Beltway driving for Dukas. It wasn’t clear whether he didn’t want to talk to Dukas or he simply didn’t want to be seen talking to Dukas.

  “Late?” Menzes said. “I can’t make it until about six-thirty.” It was clear that he hoped that Dukas couldn’t make it at all.

  “This is kind of urgent.”

  “Six-fifteen.”

  When Dukas hung up, Leslie was on his side of the wall of crates, straightening and sorting the piles of paper that he had on every surface. Dukas dared to glance at her, taking in the whole of her, which was much more than the lacquered, unreal hair. She was wearing shack-up shoes, white panty hose, a black vinyl skirt that stopped about where a purist would think that decency began, and a shiny red T-shirt. Teenage sex bomb, oh, yeah!

  “Uhhh—Leslie—uh—anything going on I need to know?”

  “I’ve got an interview set up with the maverick. You know, the guy who—”

  “You can’t have an interview set up. I just submitted the request.”

  “Yeah, we have. I talked to the agent in Florida, where the maverick is—he’s a Marine captain? I called the Marine Corps and found where he was; I, uh, had to sort of fudge a little, like I was his sister? But I found him, so I called the NCIS office down there and— Mister Dukas, you’re mad at me, aren’t you!”