Hostile Contact

by Gordon Kent

  “Give it to me.”

  “NCIS has had a contact from Jakarta, Indonesia. An ex-CIA officer has what he says is a Chinese double agent who apparently is connected with George Shreed, the guy the Agency recently—”

  “I remember.”

  “Special Agent Dukas believes that if this is genuine, it’s a big break. If the double agent is the real thing, he could walk us right back to the beginning of Shreed’s spying. At least that’s what the guy in Jakarta is saying, that he goes way back with Shreed.”

  “How come he didn’t go to the Agency?”

  “Dukas thinks it’s personal. The Agency retired him early. He’s looking for help.”

  “What’s he want?”

  “This is fuzzy, but apparently the Chinese are after the agent—Dukas thinks they’d want him for the same reason we would. He says the American ex-CIA guy is vouched for by somebody Dukas trusts.”

  “Dukas in touch with the guy himself?”

  “Apparently not. It’s coming to him secondhand.”

  The CNO rubbed his forehead, shielding his eyes from the bedside light. “I don’t like it.” He gave it more thought. “What can we do?”

  “USS Jackson Baldwin is twenty hours’ steam time away. We could order her to Jakarta, pull the guy out. Pull them both out.”

  “Indonesians in on this?”

  “No, sir. We’d have to declare a port visit, get their permission—the usual. Take them off clandestinely, I assume. Dukas isn’t clear on that.”

  “There’s nobody on a frigate can pull off an operation like that. Who’ve we got out there?”

  “I’m having that checked. Nobody in Jakarta itself—maybe the naval attaché—”

  The CNO muttered, “Unh-unh,” and wrote a note and said, “Man from here can’t be out there in time to do it. Got to be somebody already in the area. Get back to me on it.” He scribbled again on the pad. “What’s the Baldwin doing?”

  “Far picket for BG 16.”

  “All right, detach the Baldwin and order it flank speed to Jakarta. Get all this sorted out as fast as you can, and have the NCIS guy in my office at 0800. I don’t like it one little bit, and if it isn’t rock-solid within twelve hours, I’m ordering the Baldwin back.”

  His wife was awake and looking at him. She smiled at him sadly and he said, “Another quiet day in Washington.”

  Office of the Chief of Naval Operations.

  Dukas was supposed to have met with the JAG team about springing Nickie Groski at eight, but the command performance in the CNO’s office wiped the board clean. By nine, the CNO had ordered him to get a team to a U.S. frigate called the Jackson Baldwin with deliberate speed, but to be prepared for changes because he might yet call the whole operation off. Dukas had laid out the case, named Jerry Piat and Sally Baranowski, pointed out that anybody connected with Shreed was still in the Navy’s universe because he hadn’t closed Crystal Insight, and somebody who could really walk the cat back to Shreed’s early days in Jakarta was the catch of a lifetime.

  “Mister Dukas, this is the second time I’ve seen you in two days.” The CNO wasn’t amused.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I don’t want to see you again—clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If we do this, we have to do the whole thing and pull these guys out clandestinely. I’ll be frank with you: I don’t like it. It costs a lot of money to send a ship down to Jakarta, not to mention what the BG is having to do to patch the hole in its screen. I don’t like doing stuff by the seat of our pants, no planning, and I don’t like secondhand data. Has this guy in Jakarta called your contact back yet?”

  “Not yet.” Piat was, by then, forty-five minutes overdue.

  Dukas had tried to assure the CNO that Sally was rock-solid. He had tried to convince him that this guy Piat must mean what he said. He didn’t say that the name Piat had rung a bell because he had already heard it from Carl Menzes. By the end of his allowed time with the CNO, Dukas himself was a little dubious—skepticism is catching—but in the meantime, they had an NCIS agent named Ken Huang heading for the Baldwin from Manila by way of a COD to the carrier and a chopper the rest of the way.

  “If this goes down,” the CNO had growled, “Baldwin will make Jakarta early tomorrow our time. They’ll need twenty-four hours there for appearance’s sake, not to mention picking these guys up. That’s day after tomorrow, morning, earliest they can weigh anchor. Clear your calendar.”

  So Dukas had got his boss on a secure line and told him what was happening, and then he’d got his ass back to NCIS, where he had had ten minutes to leave a message for Triffler before he got a call from Sally.

  “The answer’s yes, he called.”

  Dukas felt his scalp tingle: The operation would go.

  “What’d he say?”

  “Not much.” She was being cautious because of the open line. “I just told him to hang on and wait because somebody was coming. I gave him the phone contact your friends gave me.”

  Dukas was nodding, looking at his watch. DNI had given her a telephone cutout where Piat and Huang, the NCIS agent from Manila, could communicate. “He understand?”

  “He’s been doing this all his life.”

  “He sober?”

  “Probably not.”

  She seemed tense and didn’t want to make small talk. Dukas hung up feeling dissatisfied with her and with himself but excited about the operation. He’d been planning to take her out to dinner again that night, somewhere decent this time, and then they were going back to his place for a change. Now, he’d have to think about it, to think about some guy named Jerry Piat whom Sally used to sleep with and how much they still meant to each other if she was the one person in the world he could call when he was really in deep shit. Dukas knew that he wasn’t in love with Sally, nor she with him, but he thought they were getting comfortable. He thought that he was good for her. Was some ex who called her up only because he was broke and in trouble going to make waves?

  “I look appropriate again, Mister Dukas,” Leslie said from the other side of the office.

  “That’s fine, Leslie.”

  “Actually, I look awful.”

  “You don’t. You look great.” Dukas hardly took in how she looked—something with a lot of gray. “Keep the phone available, Leslie—no personal calls, in or out. Something’s happening.” Her eyes got big and he turned away. “Tell you later,” he said.

  He was worrying about what was happening in Jakarta when his phone rang, and he flinched when he heard Carl Menzes on the other end. Menzes’s voice was like a glass raised in salute. “Hail, the conquering hero!” Dukas didn’t get it, and Menzes said, “Navy one, Agency zed. You haven’t heard?”

  “I’m the last to know.”

  “The Groski kid has to be produced to his mother and his lawyer. We caved—Legal advised against going against the Navy in court—bad precedent.”

  Dukas grinned. “You don’t sound too shocked.”

  “You should hear the OD people! They’re screaming to take it all the way to the Supreme Court, but I hear that Partlow has already negatived that.” He laughed, letting Dukas know that he enjoyed the Ops embarrassment. “Nice move. Applause, applause.”

  “You bitter?”

  “Sadder but wiser. But it’s a bad precedent, you know.”

  Dukas thought about the people whom the Baldwin was going to lift out of Jakarta. Dukas was already working to find secure housing for them and a place to run an interrogation. How long could he hold foreign nationals who’d be coming into the U.S. with only notification to Immigration and no paperwork? “Well, for now I’ll enjoy winning. It’s a nice change.”

  Menzes laughed. He was, despite everything, a good guy.

  “A Mister Welbert?” Leslie said from the other side of the office.

  “Welbert, Welbert— Oh, shit!” Welbert, he remembered almost too late, was Nickie Groski’s lawyer. “Mister Welbert!” he shouted into the telephone. “Congrat
ulations! When do I talk to the kid?”

  Welbert sounded petulant. “They made us wait at the D.C. jail for half an hour. His mother crying her eyes out.”

  “But they did hand him over.”

  “Well, he’s in the D.C. jail.”

  “Goddamit—” Dukas banged the telephone down and called JAG and began shouting about habeas corpus. He went through four Navy lawyers before he found the two who’d ramrodded the Groski thing, and then there was shouting at both ends of the telephone when the lawyers realized that the Agency had “released” the kid into the D.C. jail, a zoo where any peace of mind he had left after a month of being kicked around safe houses would be pounded out of him. “I’ll have him out of there in a quarter of an hour!” the JAG guy shouted.

  “Promise?”

  “Try me!”

  In the event, it was an hour, but, before noon, Nickie Groski was on the streets with his mother and his lawyer. Dukas didn’t see them, but he could picture it, and he had his doubts—a woman who hadn’t been able to control her kid up to that point (so why assume she could do so now?), and a hack lawyer with a styrofoam brain, and a seventeen-year-old who was trouble in spades. Still, the kid was out.

  “You have him where I can talk to him at five,” Dukas said to Welbert in another phone call.

  “He’s wearing an electronic bracelet.”

  “I don’t care if he’s wearing a training bra—where do I meet him at five?”

  Welbert cleared his throat with one of those “oh, by-the-way” sounds and said, “What are you offering?”

  “Offering? What is he, the recumbent Vishnu? What should I be offering?”

  “Nickie will talk in exchange for zero jail time.”

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  Dukas got on the phone to the JAG office again. “I’ve got to be able to offer the Groski kid zero jail time.”

  The JAG officer thought that that was pretty funny. “No way,” he said. “The FBI’s saying two years for violation of parole.”

  Dukas got on the phone to Myeroff, his FBI contact on the Seattle case.

  Four hours later, Dukas was on his third call with Myeroff. His forehead was on his left palm; a pencil and a legal pad were in front of him; and Leslie was looking worried on the other side of the divider because she had heard everything he’d shouted all morning.

  “Okay, how bad is it?” Dukas said.

  “We’ll take your deal.”

  Dukas sat up. “You will?”

  “We drop all charges on Groski. You bring us in on your investigation of the state police in Seattle. When there’s a bust, we take part. We do the PR and take the credit in the media. You don’t touch Helmer—he’s ours and we haven’t given him enough rope yet.”

  Dukas sighed, thinking that it would kill Triffler, and maybe Al Craik, as well. “And I can promise the Groski kid no jail time?”

  “You can.”

  “You got a deal.”

  Dar es Salaam.

  “We have a report from Embassy Washington.” Jiang charged into Lao’s office with a flimsy marked by a thread of red down the left edge.

  Lao was reading a set of agent reports that were all hearsay. None of his officers, spread over a wide theater of operations, seemed to have a single agent who had direct access to anyone who could help him with Chen. “Well?”

  Jiang shook his head.

  “Craik spends most of his time on the Whidbey Island base, and the one time they managed to lay eyes on him, he had a full countersurveillance team on him.”

  Lao threw his pen across the room, a very un-Chinese thing to do.

  Washington.

  At five in the afternoon, Dukas was in Welbert’s tatty law office. Convenient to the D.C. courts and five bail bondsmen, the place screamed of exploitation and clapped-out jurisprudence; its walls were drab and chipped, its furniture sagging, its wall calendar a year out of date. The Agency had insisted on sending somebody Dukas didn’t know, a young achiever who had decided to dress casual and try to look like his idea of Welbert’s clients, which he succeeded in doing as well as any other white Midwesterner with a college education could have done.

  Welbert shook hands with everybody and, apparently cast into deep depression by the effort, leaned against a yellow naugahyde chair.

  “Where’s his mother?” Dukas said.

  “She wanted to see her medical adviser.” Welbert looked frightened. “She’s bipolar.”

  They went into Welbert’s inner sanctum, which had a desk and some legal-book bindings that may or may not have had books inside them, and a wall map of the D.C. jail so that once Welbert had failed to get you free you’d know how to get around your new home. There was a smell of disinfectant.

  Nickie Groski had not so long ago had purple hair, most of which his Agency keepers had cut off; now he had only purple tips, so that he looked as if he were wearing a purple hair net. He also had plenty of acne, and a slouch that suggested that his bones above the waist were bending under the weight of his head and shoulders.

  “Yeah” was his response to Dukas’s greeting. He was the kind of kid Dukas wanted to slap up into a peak, as his grandmother used to say. Four years in the Navy would do him a lot of good, was Dukas’s view, although the Navy probably wouldn’t take him.

  “Mister Dukas is from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Nick,” Welbert said. “He’s going to ask you some questions. Mister Anderson here is from the CIA.”

  “I bet,” Nickie said. He sneered at young Mister Anderson.

  “Let’s get comfortable,” Welbert said.

  Nickie had collapsed into a chair as soon as he had got into the room. Now, the others sat down.

  “You understand the offer, Nickie?” Welbert said. “Reduction to one month, of which you’ve already done the time. And he can get you a job with good money.”

  “I don’t want a job,” the kid said, making a job sound like an unfashionable pair of sneakers.

  “You going to talk to me?” Dukas said.

  Nickie glanced at Welbert, who looked at Dukas and then nodded. This was as precise as the acceptance of the deal got, and Nickie said, “I’m talking, ain’t I?”

  “You’re speaking, but so far you aren’t talking.” Dukas placed his chair opposite the boy. “Tell me about Shreed’s computers.”

  “C-fucking-IA has them now, I bet. Ask him.” Nickie sneered at the Agency youth.

  “The hard drives were missing by the time the CIA got there. Nickie, don’t you want to stay out of jail?”

  The kid hugged himself and looked at the lawyer, who smiled. Dukas thought of all the doomed people who must have gotten that smile. Nickie looked away. “CIA fucks wouldn’t give me spit when I asked for a deal before.”

  “I’ve fixed that.”

  “How do I know when I’ve said enough?”

  “When I say so.” Dukas met the washed-out eyes. “It’s my call, Nickie. I’m the cop—you’re the one in the shit. I can’t change that.”

  Nickie leaned back in the chair and said, “Oh, man,” his spine so profoundly curved that his coccyx was resting on the edge of the seat. Dukas thought he had lost him. But, to his surprise, Nickie rallied himself, dug into one nostril with a finger, and, fortified by what he found, leaned way over toward Dukas and said, “Okay.”

  Dukas put a pocket tape recorder where Nickie and the lawyer could see it. He turned it on. Behind him, the CIA man was doing the same.

  It took an hour, and Dukas had to lead him back from tangents and pull him up when the boy thought he had said enough and Dukas knew he hadn’t. Nickie was trying to keep something to bargain with later, for which Dukas couldn’t blame him.

  Dukas already knew some of what he said, but a lot of it was new. Shreed, Nickie said, would have been tough to crack if he, Nickie, hadn’t physically been into his computers and copied their files. What Suter had wanted him for was information about money—not just any money, but big amounts that Suter said were in forei
gn accounts.

  “He never tole me how much or where, man, like that was his business—he was your a-number-one all-time prick, right?—but he expected me to do magic and pull this shit out of the hard drive with my weenie. Suter didn’t know zip about computers, so he couldn’t help me, but he couldn’t tell what I was doing, either, right? So I’m running my own penetration program on his files, right? Man, he had firewalls! Everything was passworded. So, about twenty hours into it—I got his password algorithms, right? So I know what I’m doing—I find this program that takes me to a mainframe someplace. I could tell because I looked around when I was in there; it was fucking huge. So Shreed’s got this program sitting on the mainframe, but it’s firewalled and they don’t know it’s there. From that, he’s sending out a worm whenever the mainframe’s on and getting back all this crap. I mean, code. A lot of it I can’t make shit out of because, I found this out later, it’s Chinese code, but my computer won’t display the right stuff, so it comes up as fucking chaos.”

  “What the hell’d you do?” Dukas said.

  Nickie’s voice had got louder and more confident, and Dukas realized that the kid was a whole creature only when he was playing with or talking about computers. He wasn’t talking to hear himself talk, and he wasn’t talking to show off: He was making verbal love.

  “I said screw it and went for what I could read, which took me where the worm went and then out again. I didn’t get it, but it took me to the money. I mean, that’s what it was all about: bank accounts. Which I didn’t get until the third day. I got a hit on one that came through with a name, and I saw it was a bank. Is there a Maldive Island?”

  “Islands, plural,” Dukas said. “The Maldives.”

  “Whatever. That’s where this was. So I wrote a little program to watchdog these messages, which were accounts, but I didn’t know that then, so the watchdog kept track of the messages going back and forth, including to this Maldive Island, so I figured then these were all banks. These were bank transactions.”

  “How many?” Dukas said.

  “A lot.”

  “How many is a lot?”