by Gordon Kent
“It spooked a pod of whales. I was whale-watching, and then, there was this sub.” She hesitated. “I guess it was one of ours.”
Alan didn’t want to talk about it on an open phone. He was waiting for confirmation from SubPac that the hit that Cunnard’s plane had made that day was a U.S. sub; he couldn’t talk about that. “Whereabouts?” he said.
“We were almost up to the Washington border. That C-12 can fly! I want one.”
“Couple million bucks, what the hell. Listen, send me the position of the sighting, will you?”
“Why? I’m sure it— Oh. Okay.” She would be thinking of what he had said after his first flight over Bremerton. “I miss you,” she said to change the subject.
They started to talk about their kids.
Later, in the officer’s mess, he sat alone and thought it through. Submarines don’t give people pause, because they can’t be seen. In fact, they were a lousy deterrent for just that reason. Then his mind ran down several strands of thought at the same time. He thought about how hard it would be to guard a coast from modern subs, especially if you had no real idea of where to start. He thought of the days of gunboat diplomacy. The Opium Wars in China. The use of gunboats and aircraft carriers as a show of force. And on another tack, he wondered why he had thought Bremerhaven every time Rose mentioned Bremerton. The brain was an odd animal, he thought. Two weeks. Bremerhaven had been the great German base, even as far back as World War I. The base that the hero is watching in The Riddle of the Sands. His breath caught in his throat for a moment. Bremerhaven and Opium Wars and submarines. And power projection.
How do you watch a coast to track a modern navy? he asked himself. He had asked Rose that question before, but they hadn’t had hits on a submarine that time.
Next morning in the hangar, he sought out a radioman. “Petty Officer Kralik, can you lend me your brain for a second?”
Petty Officer Kralik had a reputation as a radio fanatic, but his lack of a sense of humor hadn’t been mentioned. He stared at Alan as if he thought he was really going to hand his brain over. “Uuuh—sure—sir—”
Alan put a slip of paper with the Sleeping Dog burst-transmission specs on it. “What’s the range of a set in this frequency? Let’s say it’s something kind of small, maybe ten, fifteen years out of date.”
Kralik stared at the paper without touching it. “Why’d anybody want to use something like that?”
“Well, that isn’t the question. Range?”
“From where? I mean, if there’s interference—a mountain or something, bad weather—”
Alan wished he’d asked somebody else. “Petty Officer Kralik, with an outfit like this, could I reach a vessel at sea from the coast?”
Kralik stared at the paper. “Yes, sir, if the weather was okay and—how far is the vessel at sea?”
Alan folded the paper and put it back in his pocket. “Thanks very much.”
As he was going, Kralik said, “An uplink to a satellite would be lots better, sir. You could reach anywhere in the world with that.”
Alan smiled and got out of there.
Near Mogadishu.
The lighter-skinned one shrugged. “That’s why we have five boats. One will get through.”
“We’ll never get close enough to the Jefferson to do damage,” the dark one muttered. “They have smaller ships with guns, aircraft overhead all the time, satellites!”
“We pick the day. We pick the place. Their smaller ships are far out, defending against missiles and atom bombs—you think they fear five little boats like these? Their airplanes are useless in foul weather. Their satellites are your own superstitious obsession—you told me you believed they could track you wherever you went.”
“They can.”
The lighter one sighed. “You are a great fool, but beloved of God nonetheless, and I need you. There will be credit in Paradise for the act, and your superstitious idiocy will be forgotten there.” He patted the dark man as if he were a beloved dog. “We do this for a great cause. God will not let us fail.”
16
Jakarta.
Jerry Piat had been a day and a night in Jakarta, setting up the interrogation of Bobby Li. He had rented a soggy house in Menteng because Jalan Surabaya was close, and he was using his old cover of antiques dealing. The antiques in the market were mostly fakes, but they gave him a reason for being there and for going in and out. The house itself was almost unlivable, the owner absent in Malaysia, he was told; the absence had been a long one, Piat thought, because the furniture had visible mold and the ceiling of one room was sagging down as if the room above it had filled with water and was going to burst. The house had had pretensions, though, probably at about the time Raffles had been in Indonesia; it had a library, the books—mostly French, some Dutch—blue with mold and the pages stuck together; it had a conservatory, from which most of the glass had fallen, so that it was now part of the outdoors, birds flying in and out of the metal frame and monkeys in residence in the trees that had grown up through it. There was also a formal dining room, what may have been a billiard room, but no billiard table, and six bedrooms and sagging baths and dressing rooms. The kitchen, no longer usable, was below the first floor, the servants’ cells in a low building in the back. It was, all in all, a ruin, but Jerry rented it because it had a wall and because it was set a little apart and because this was on his nickel and nobody was providing him with a safe house at government expense.
He hired a petty hustler who was recommended to him by Hilda, the new “missus” at Emmy Lu’s. She knew well enough what he used to do and guessed what he was doing now. The hustler brought in two other men, and Jerry thought he should have done this the first time in the Orchid House and not used Bobby Li, but that was the brilliance of hindsight.
The hustler, a taut, insincerely smiling Indonesian with a neck that looked as if it were made out of rope and wire, told Piat to call him Fred.
“Fred isn’t your real name, right?” he had said.
“Sure, Fred—good name. You don’t like?”
“Fred is fine. Who’re your two pals?”
Fred had squinted at them. One was young, scrawny as a free-range chicken. “Bill,” Fred said. The other one was thicker, older, angrier, with a scowl like a rapper posing for his first CD cover. “Bud,” Fred said.
“Good—Fred, Bill, and Bud. Okay. Fred, you’re the boss—after me.” He handed out five-dollar bills, said in time-rusted Malay, “A gift to start things right.” Then he got them to work in the rented house, clearing the old dining room to the walls and wiping down enough furniture for them to sit on. With Fred, he went out along the Jalan Surabaya and bought cots and a mosquito net and used Tupperware and then set up camp in the living and dining rooms. By then, Bud had brought a hibachi from somewhere and set it up in the former garden and was grilling either dog or rabbit, Piat never asked which. Rabbit, he thought, from the hairs that stuck to the meat.
“Every day, bring in food for five people,” Jerry said to Fred. “Good food, okay? Don’t make anybody sick. Anybody gets sick, I’ll tell the missus, okay?”
“Okay, okay, good food.” Fred held out his hand for money. Piat counted out bills, resigned to watching his own money go. Not like the days when it was Uncle’s. Maybe he could get Marv Helmer to reimburse him somehow.
Next day, a woman was cooking over the hibachi and three naked kids were running around outside the collapsing servants’ quarters. “No problem,” Fred said, seeing Piat’s frown. Piat was weighing the advantage of a woman and kids as cover against the danger that comes with letting too many people get too close. “Okay,” he had said, and added in Malay, “if they ever come into the house, all of you are done, and I will tell the missus. Yes?” Fred had nodded, said “Yes,” and gone on hissing “yes yes yes yesssss—” as he walked away.
Hilda also put him on to somebody to partner with him in the interrogation. Piat had had some idea that he would pick up somebody who was also ex-Agency, even so
mebody he could trust, but a day of looking and asking questions left him defeated. Ex-Agency ODs didn’t wind up on the loose in Indonesia, except for Piat, it seemed; these days, they were making good money telling CEOs how to keep from getting their asses shot off. He had gone back to Hilda then, who had sat with him in the spy’s corner for old times’ sake and had a drink that he thought she didn’t really want and in fact didn’t drink.
“Lost your taste for it?” Piat had said.
“It’s excess calories.”
He groaned aloud. “Hilda, what’s happened to you?”
“I’m not a whore anymore. I can tell the truth, okay?” She patted his hand. “I can get one of the girls, if you want.”
“No, I need advice. The hell with nostalgia.” He gulped down his drink and ordered another. He told her what he needed: a Westerner, preferably American, who knew how things were done. Ex-cop would be okay. Maybe ex-mil. Male. (Bobby Li wouldn’t take a woman seriously.)
She thought about it and said what he already knew, that she didn’t think there were any Americans around like that. Maybe a Brit or an Australian. She didn’t like Australians, it turned out, something about the way they treated her girls. She didn’t explain. Hilda wasn’t much given to explaining things. She lit a cigarette and checked out three Asian men at the bar and nodded some message to the bouncer, and then she said, “There’s a fella named Derek, or that’s what he calls himself. Pretty good-looking guy, something not quite right about him, though, you know? Always moving house. Always got a couple of girls taking care of him. Different girls at different times; he has a lot of them. Told me a lot of crap about being in Interpol. Then another time he’d been a consultant to the Tokyo police. Actually, I think he’s a Russian doper.”
“Russian.” Jerry hadn’t expected a Russian. If the guy was Russian. “A pro?”
Hilda had shrugged. “Ask him yourself.” She smiled. “He’s looking for work. He’s always looking for work. He comes in, supposedly to see the girls, and what he really wants is to convince me that I need a security consultant.”
Piat ran Derek down in a squat in Sunda Kelapa. Piat didn’t see it himself but knew it had to be pretty bad, just from the location. Fred had simply shaken his head when Piat had told him about it. Still, Fred had sent Bill with a message, and a note had come back telling Mister Bose (Piat’s operational name) to meet him at the bar of the Aston. The Aston was a five-star hotel—pretty cheeky for a guy who was living in Jakarta’s worst slum.
Still, he looked good, sitting at a table away from the bar—a good-looking man, as Hilda had said, not quite a blond, six feet, a bit gaunt. Wearing a double-breasted blazer that looked wonderful at a distance and up close had noodle stains on one lapel and shiny edges to the cuffs, with shirt cuffs under it that were fraying. Something in his cheekbones and the eyes said he might, indeed, be Russian.
“Tell me about yourself,” Piat said.
“So much to tell.” Derek gave him a big smile. “Which story would you like?”
“The one about being in the SVRR.”
That registered but wasn’t necessarily a direct hit. “What makes you think I’m Russian?” Derek said.
“Hilda.”
“Ah, the missus.” Derek stubbed out a Chinese cigarette and touched his glass to suggest that he’d have another. Piat waved at the waiter and studied Derek. There was something wrong with him. He was a loser, that was what was wrong, Piat decided. One of those people with a knack for screwing up, probably because he couldn’t look beyond the end of his own nose to see what the consequences of his actions would be. Plus he was older than Piat had at first thought, maybe as old as Piat himself, although the mannerisms and the expressions tried to seem younger. Maybe were younger, because he’d never grown up.
“I’m looking for somebody to do some work for me,” Piat said, “but I need to know who he is. Let’s cut the crap. Who are you?”
“What makes you think I’ll tell you the truth?”
“Okay. That does it.” Piat got up. “Enjoy the free drinks.”
He’d gotten almost to the door before Derek caught up with him. Derek didn’t do charmingly contrite very well. He was panicking, Piat thought, losing his cool. They stood in the doorway, with Derek’s hand on Piat’s sleeve. Piat said, “You going to cut the crap?”
“Okay, okay.”
Some bullying and some more Scotch revealed that Derek was a small-time SVRR recruit who had spied on his buddies in the Russian army and then had been put undercover, where he had sold out both the SVRR and the Russian mafia, so now they were both after him. Derek had nothing to recommend him except that he was available, and Piat needed a stooge.
So, for three hundred dollars, he was hiring a two-time loser when what he wanted was a pro he could trust. Good-bye trust, good-bye security, good-bye help. Now Piat would have to do the interrogation alone, with this Russian clown stomping in on cue and shouting and getting the hell out again, and that was all he could be used for.
Piat raised his whiskey glass. “If you go one step over the line, I’ll get on the cell phone to my old pal Dmitri at the Russian embassy, and you’ll be toast. Understood?”
Derek’s panicky eyes said that he, too, knew that the local Russian SVRR honcho was named Dmitri.
Piat left Derek to mull that over and went to a pharmacy to buy an empty syringe, which he thought he’d need if Bobby Li didn’t want to talk.
Washington.
Dukas picked his way down wallpapered corridors, between tables, through doorways, getting lost once before he remembered the route to the old pantry behind what, in the eighteenth century, had been the kitchen fireplace. This was Menzes’s hangout at the Annex—the Hole.
Dukas collapsed into an armchair. “I’m late.”
Menzes nodded. He was a lean, fit man who always wore short-sleeved white shirts and a crisp necktie; in his mid-forties, he looked as if he could run marathons or climb mountains. “How you been?” he said. “Beer?”
“I been shot and put back together, but I was going to be fine until I got this Sleeping Dog mess from you guys. Yeah, Corona.”
“Mess?”
“It stinks. Did you know it stinks?”
Menzes tried to look startled. He was a terrible liar.
Dukas started to lunge across the table, felt pain in his wound, and straightened. “I need a favor.”
“Do I owe you one?”
“You still got the Shreed file open?”
“I’ll be retired when they close it. What’s the favor?”
Dukas’s beer appeared. He let the waitress pour it for him, because she was pretty and his chest hurt. When she was gone, he said, “I understand you’ve got Ray Suter, Shreed’s assistant.”
Menzes held up a hand. “No. N-O. Nothing to say, zero—end of conversation.”
“Hey, all I—”
“No!” Menzes could be a hardnose. “Not negotiable. Find another subject.”
“How about money? You willing to talk about money?”
“In general? In general, I like it.”
“In particular, what’s with Shreed and money? When Craik and I caught up with him, he was babbling about money.”
“No comment.”
“What the hell! Hey, Menzes, it’s me—I caught George Shreed! I’m a special agent of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service! I have a clearance!”
“No comment.”
Dukas opened his mouth, realized that he looked foolish, closed it. He drank some beer, watched the pretty waitress serve somebody else, and got a smile from her in return. “About the favor,” he said. “I need a dead file from Ops.”
“Our Ops?”
“Well, whose else, for Christ’s sake! Yes, your Ops, the jewels of the Crystal Palace.”
“Make a request.”
“I’m making a request! Jesus, Carl, what’s with you today? Give a little, will you?”
Menzes had on a serious face. He picked at the label on his ow
n bottle. “We did you a favor already.”
“I must have missed it.”
“The case we sent you.”
“Sleeping Dog—that was a favor? That was the result of a fucking court order!” Menzes was frowning, but his too-honest face showed something—unusual interest? A kind of intellectual greed? Dukas decided to take a chance. “You hear about my guy getting shot at in Jakarta?”
Menzes’s frown lessened. “That was you?”
“Craik. What’d you hear?’
“A report, then some bad jokes from some of the Ops guys. State was upset. That was you?”
“That was Sleeping Dog, buddy—the favor you guys did me.”
Now Menzes was really interested. He pushed the beer bottle aside and leaned toward Dukas. “Tell me. We sent you the case; we have an interest.”
“Unh-unh. The case got folded into Crystal Insight, which is open and ongoing and eyes-only.”
“That’s the Shreed case. That’s over.”
“The case is not over.”
“Why?”
“Figure it out.”
They sat there, two stubborn men, glaring at each other. Menzes, Dukas could see, was thinking. Menzes’s eyes closed slightly; his hands tightened. He said, “Did you find something in Sleeping Dog that kept Crystal Insight open?”
“Bingo.”
“What?”
Menzes was too eager. It was the eagerness that tipped Dukas off, and all at once, he got it. “You guys sent me Sleeping Dog as a ploy, you sonofabitch!” He was laughing, not entirely pleasantly. “What the hell! I wondered why my friend in Internal Investigations called me about an operational case—and now I get it. You’re investigating something about Sleeping Dog yourself!”
“Don’t go there, Mike.”
“I’m already there! You sent it to me because—what?” He was working it out as he talked. “Because of something in the case? No, because it’s old and it’s ready for the shit can? No, no—you’re suspicious because it was being sent to me. Right? I can see it in your face; I’m right. Anybody ever tell you you got a face like a light-up sign? Jesus, Carl, you set me up!”