Hostile Contact

by Gordon Kent

  Bobby looked around the darkness for help. “Very bad guy,” he said. “Killer.”

  “Tell me the truth, Bobby. Who was he?”

  “I’m telling you the truth!”

  “Who was he?”

  Bobby had folded himself into a smaller tangle of arms and legs—one foot up under him now, arms still wrapped around his torso, the left side of his face against the carved chair back. He slowly pulled the other leg up until he was curled entirely within the embrace of the chair, and he lay there a long time, his face turned away from the gasoline lantern so that it was deeply shadowed. At last he said, “Chinese guy.”

  “Okay.”

  “Some kind of job at Chinese embassy. You know—like, security, or—”

  “Okay.”

  Piat waited. It was easy to wait, his body heavy from fatigue, the night sounds from the old garden peaceful, Bobby Li shrunken to something like a child. After a long time, Piat said, “Why’d you have to shoot him?”

  Bobby Li didn’t move.

  “Are you a double agent, Bobby?”

  Bobby began to weep.

  18

  NCIS HQ, Washington.

  Dukas was in his office at six-thirty on tuesday, puffy-eyed, aching. He had bought a pound of coffee at a 7-Eleven and some pastries that he knew he’d regret, and he made coffee in Triffler’s machine, knowing he would never clean the filter, although he’d promised. Actually, it tickled him that coffee from a can was trickling through Triffler’s pristine machine, which had never known anything but custom blend.

  At midnight he had called Rose at Edwards, doubting that she’d be out of her room with flying to be done the next day. In fact, her line had been busy for an hour—checking on her kids in Utica, then yakking with Alan in Seattle, she said. He had finally reached her a little after one, D.C. time.

  “Rosie,” he’d said, “where do you stand with the CNO?”

  “I worked for him until two weeks ago. He was nice to me.”

  “I want to see him, subito. He know who I am?”

  She laughed. “Your name came up several times during the Shreed thing. Yeah, of course he knows your name. You’re the guy that arrested Shreed, and that’s a very big deal to him. You and my heroic husband.”

  “I need him to back me on a play, babe. Get me in to see him. It’s big-time legal stuff, so he might as well have the JAG there, too. Can you give him a call?”

  Now he glanced at a set of dailies and ambled down the hall and checked CNN. When Menzes came in at seven-twenty, he was almost alive.

  He had dragged Triffler’s elegant office chair over and put it so that the two of them could talk face-to-face, no bullshit about the power seat or being separated by the desk. After a few meaningless noises about traffic and weather and how early it was, Dukas said, “Are we on the same sheet of music?”

  Menzes was drinking from Triffler’s cup. He shrugged.

  “Who’s up first?” Dukas growled.

  “I’m hardly awake.”

  “Okay, I’ll start. What was that last night, a charade?”

  “A charade, right.”

  “Tell me about Partlow.”

  “It’s supposed to be Shreed who called Partlow ‘The Velvet Fart,’ which still sticks to him. Partlow makes a pained face when you mention Shreed—’poor old George,’ that kind of crap. He’s a politician and a bureaucrat, knows when to dodge and rope-a-dope, wouldn’t cut your throat himself but would probably look out the window while he had it done.”

  “What’s he after?”

  “Ops—thanks to Partlow—has swept up everything having to do with Shreed. They’ve taken over this kid, the kid’s computer and his files, and a CD-ROM that Al Craik brought back from Pakistan that was supposed to prove Shreed’s guilt. I’ve been told to mind my own business, which I thought the Shreed thing was, and what’s coming across the gossip network is that Ops has found evidence that Shreed wasn’t a spy and he was a hero, and they’re going to sit on the evidence.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “You know that and I know that, but they’ve got all the stuff. It’s only rumor, but—you know. I don’t know what they’re doing.”

  “Where’s Nickie Groski?”

  “No idea. A safe house someplace. Once, I heard a rumor he was at Quantico.”

  “They’re tromping all over the kid’s rights.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  They sat there and sipped and chewed and Dukas decided to change the subject. “Tell me why you sent me Sleeping Dog. I was right yesterday, right?—you sent it to me because you were suspicious of it? What’d you think, I was going to solve it for you?”

  Menzes sighed and reached for another pastry. “Mike—do you believe in will? As in, ‘America has to show its will, its resolve,’ et cetera, et cetera, blah, blah, blah? I don’t. Normally. But I have to say, what’s going on at the Agency right now is a loss of will. Lousy morale, indecision, dicking around. The place is shattered by the Shreed thing. People don’t want it to have happened. I think that’s why Ops has gone nuts over Nickie Groski and the computer and that stuff—it’s a way out. I think they want to sit on the evidence and make it not have happened.”

  “What’s that got to do with them giving me Sleeping Dog?”

  “I’ve got a boss who’s at the head of the line in the loss-of-will department. He keeps saying to go slow on everything and not make waves ‘just now.’ As if there’ll be a better time next year or the year after. If word leaks that I’m suspicious about Sleeping Dog, it’s just more grief for me.”

  “So who’s your suspect?”

  Menzes frowned and held out an empty cup. “I’m not ready to say—and I’m not freezing you out! I’m not sure, is what I mean. How’s ‘friends of George Shreed’?”

  “Oh, ‘Aha!’ as they say in the dick novels. ‘Friends of George Shreed’—well, well.” Dukas poured more coffee. “Friends of George Shreed with a personal mad against Craik and me?”

  “Something like that.”

  Dukas sat down again and the two men stared at each other, both frowning because they were both thinking the same things.

  “You might have warned me.”

  “I might have, but I didn’t. Hindsight says I made a mistake. How did it take you guys to Jakarta, anyway?”

  Dukas told him again about the comm plan, this time naming Chinese Checkers and explaining what it had been. “It doesn’t make sense as somebody’s way of getting at Craik and me—unless they wanted to kill us.”

  Menzes was shaking his head. “Look, Mike, I could name some names, but I’m not going to—not yet, okay? I think it may be some of our good guys—except that they’ve gone a little bad because you and Craik brought down their hero. But I don’t see them as killers. Not the type to lure you or Craik to Jakarta to get murdered. To embarrass you, maybe. Maybe even to implicate you in something. But not shooting.” Menzes tapped Dukas’s knee.

  “You don’t want to tell me who they are?”

  Menzes shook his head.

  “Trade?”

  “For what?”

  “I told you yesterday I wanted a favor.”

  Menzes looked skeptical. Dukas started to tell him the truth, and Leslie walked in and went to her side of the office. She was wearing dark blue slacks and a short-sleeved blouse and—yes, actually—a scarf draped around her shoulders. Her hair was down and caught with a rather childish plastic barrette into a ponytail.

  Dukas called over to her. “Leslie! Could we, uh—give us fifteen minutes, okay? Have a cup of coffee in the canteen. Okay?” She looked at him, looked at Menzes. She nodded. “You look appropriate,” Dukas said. Leslie sighed and groaned, “I know,” and went out. Dukas turned back to Menzes. “There are two more comm plans in Chinese Checkers. I want them.”

  Menzes looked weary.

  “How hard can it be, Carl, digging two old comm plans out of dead storage?”

  Menzes laughed. “Dukas, we’re not as smar
t as you guys over here at NCIS, but we did figure out that a bunch of comm plans that Shreed had squirreled away for his personal use were just a little suspect. They’re not in dead storage anymore. They’re in Ops, with ‘Operational Directorate Eyes Only’ stamped all over them. Everything that Shreed ever touched is now eyes-only.” He tried to smile. “File a request, maybe something’ll come back in six months.”

  Dukas hadn’t told Menzes about Rathunter and the E-mails. He would have if Menzes had had something to trade, but it looked as if he didn’t. Still, Dukas went on probing. “There’s a name we need to discuss,” he said. “Ray Suter.”

  “Forget it.”

  “He was Shreed’s assistant and he was the guy who hired Nickie the Hacker. He was there when you guys made the bust; he could—”

  “Forget it! Ops has him someplace and is grilling him, but he’s one smart shit and he’s stonewalling.”

  “Yeah, but I got Sleeping Dog because I’d asked for everything that Suter was working on when Shreed skipped, meaning that Sleeping Dog came to me just after Suter had it. Okay, you tell me—did it come direct?”

  Menzes hesitated. “I had Suter for twenty hours after I grabbed him. I really put the screws to him; I got nothing. Meanwhile, guys from Ops sealed his office, stripped it bare, and the stuff hasn’t been seen since, except for Sleeping Dog, which I think they squeezed out because you were making so much noise.”

  “Ops? Sleeping Dog came to me from Ops? Carl, that isn’t on the record. Neither is Suter and neither is Shreed, but my guess is that the only reason that Suter had Sleeping Dog was that it had had something to do with Shreed. Am I wrong?” Dukas was thinking of Leslie’s idea—that the maverick’s discovery in the Sleeping Dog case had been rejected because he had come too close to something. “Carl,” he said, “was Shreed the one who terminated Sleeping Dog and sent it to the trash bin?”

  Menzes’s haggard face said it all. Bingo.

  “Sleeping Dog was a Shreed case?”

  Menzes sighed. “It wasn’t Shreed’s case, but it was terminated after review by a committee that Shreed chaired. I got the committee’s raw notes; Shreed really pressured them to shit-can it. The reasons he gave were good ones—budget, allocation of resources, trivialization of the Agency’s mission. But—”

  “But when you know Shreed was a Chinese mole, the cancellation takes on new meaning, right? Jesus Christ, Carl, why didn’t you tell me?”

  Menzes looked at him, sighed again. “It would have given you a reason to fold all that shit into Crystal Insight—and go on with your own investigation of Shreed.”

  This changed what Triffler and Alan were doing in Seattle. But it didn’t change the fact that the Sleeping Dog file, whatever it had been to the dead George Shreed, was a case that had been tampered with after his death. Dukas got them both more coffee and brought it back and sat down and said, “You know that Sleeping Dog was doctored before I got it.”

  “I do now.”

  “But you didn’t know it when you sent it to me.”

  “Negative.”

  “It was in Suter’s office. Suter’s office gets sealed. The office gets stripped and everything disappears into Ops. Who signed for the stuff?”

  “Dukas, you’re getting too close to the bone. Lay off.”

  “Who signed the order to seal Suter’s office?”

  Menzes compressed his thin lips. “Clyde Partlow.”

  “Did he sign for the files? Come on, Carl! This is important! I’ve got two guys in Seattle right now because of what was done to Sleeping Dog. One of them was in a shoot-out in Jakarta because of Sleeping Dog! You say I’m too close to the fucking bone, I say you’re endangering my guys! Give me a name!”

  Menzes rubbed his forehead. “An Ops officer named Piat. Jerry Piat. He’s a hardnose—the kind who still carries a gun everyplace, you know?—but absolutely solid securitywise. A protégé of Shreed’s, but straight as an arrow. I’d go to the wall on it.” Menzes sipped. “He’s a professional case officer, but he was stationed in D.C. on a rotation; he’s not one of Partlow’s boys, but I suppose that Partlow grabbed him because he was there and because he was loyal to Shreed. Anyway, he signed for the stuff in Suter’s office and they carted it away to Ops. Two weeks later, Piat took early retirement—scuttlebutt is, he was forced to because he wouldn’t sign on to the idea that Shreed had been disloyal.”

  “Is Piat one of your suspects?”

  Menzes nodded.

  “Partlow?”

  Menzes shook his head. “Partlow’s a shit, but he’s too smooth to get involved in anything like doctoring an Agency file or trying to get you guys. I think it’s three or four of the old guys who’ve got a bug up their ass about you and Craik. After the funeral—you remember?—some of the old ones put their intelligence medals on Shreed’s grave. Those guys. Retired, angry, remembering the good old days in Ops. Action, right?”

  “I assume you been surveilling this Piat. Yes?” Menzes, for once, kept his face blank. “He in Jakarta when Craik got into the mess?”

  Menzes sighed. “I didn’t have anybody to tail him once he left D.C. They’re all Ops, and I didn’t want to go to Ops, for obvious reasons.” Menzes sipped his coffee. “He was back in his D.C. apartment two days after your Jakarta thing. Then he took off. For Seattle.” He glanced up, met Dukas’s eyes. “I did have somebody there; he tailed Piat to Olympia, to a state police building. Picked him up later and tagged him to the airport, and he flew to Las Vegas. No idea why, although Piat’s a throwback, wouldn’t be unlike him to go to Vegas to gamble or hit the whorehouses.”

  Dukas shook his head. “You should have told me all this, Carl. Jeez.” Dukas shook his head again. “Who’d he see in Seattle?” It was Menzes’s turn to shake his head. “You got some more of your ‘old guys’ in Seattle, Carl?”

  Menzes was silent. Then he said, “There’s a former CIA employee working in an important position in the state police up there, and the FBI’s already on him for suspicion of abuse of office. They’ve warned me off and now they’re going to warn you off, because when I leave here, I’m going to tell them that you’re up there investigating. Okay?”

  “You pimping for the FBI now?”

  “If you didn’t have that injury, I’d fucking deck you for saying a thing like that to me.” Menzes’s face was cold. “I work with the Bureau and I need them. I don’t fight them when they’re on a case before me and we have the same goals.”

  Menzes had left, still angry. Dukas was already check-ing with the liaison office to see what the FBI had going in Seattle. Before the day was out, he had an E-mail asking him to call an Agent Myeroff at the Bureau. When Myeroff heard who it was, they both started shouting. It turned out that Myeroff wanted the NCIS to call off its Seattle investigation entirely, and Dukas wanted the FBI to go blow it out a drainpipe. In the event, they both went to their bosses and did some more shouting and went home with another step down toward ulcers.

  In Seattle, Triffler, up at six, looked at the evidence they had on state-police surveillance of Alan and the state-police holding of the local police files in the fake newspaper report. He went on the Internet and checked the bios in the state-police PR pages. He found an ex-CIA man there who was now head of the international intelligence unit.

  Triffler grinned. “Bingo.”

  Jakarta.

  Late in the day, Piat woke from brief, unpleasant sleep, to face what he thought would be the last round with Bobby Li. Derek had been exiled to one of the upstairs bedrooms with a cot and a cup of whiskey laced with opium, and Bud was sitting on a chair outside to make sure he stayed there. Piat had turned Derek loose on Bobby once more during the day, and he had done his angry-boss act well, but now, Piat thought, no more was needed.

  Once Bobby had admitted he was a double, the flood had started. Not a lot of truth, but a lot of apologies and breast-beating, and a lot of tears. That had gone on until Bobby had realized, about the time the sun came up and the day birds began t
o sing, that Piat wasn’t going to reject him.

  “It’s okay,” Piat had said a dozen times. “It’s okay to be a double, Bobby, so long as you tell me the truth. So long as I can trust you. See, you’re really even more valuable to me as a double, because when you’re a double and you tell me the truth, then you and I can play things back to the other side and really turn their heads around. See?” He hadn’t said to Bobby that a case officer never could really trust an agent, anyway, and there was only half as much reason to trust a double, and turning him back on the other side probably meant that they were going to turn him back again. And so on.

  Nor did he tell Bobby that, in fact, he, Piat, was no longer a case officer.

  Bobby had finally told him about having a Chinese control and about the conflicting directions he had had for the meeting in the Orchid House. He’d shot Qiu to get himself out of it. A stupid way of doing it, maybe, certainly a desperate way of doing it. Bobby and Derek had certain things in common, Piat thought, most of all that need to please, to feel love coming back like change from every transaction. They should have been actors, he thought as he ate the breakfast of rice and fish that Bud brought in from the hibachi out in back. And Piat thought that actors were the most pathetic people in the world.

  Bobby had given him the code name of his control, Loyalty Man, and some of the working details of how they communicated, and, now that they were getting down to it, Piat thought he wanted a record of it. He shopped in one of the flashier malls for electronics and bought himself a small, voice-activated cassette recorder. But Piat also thought that they were brushing up against something much scarier, and for that, he didn’t want to have to deal with Bobby’s difficulties with the truth. He wanted now to cut through the fears and the lies and reach way back into Bobby Li.