Hostile Contact

by Gordon Kent

  “You walk with an NCIS agent on each side of you until they bring you right back here.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You’ll be here, and Carl Menzes won’t be able to get at you.” Dukas looked at the now-unhappy face. “You’re in trouble, Piat. I can’t make the trouble go away. I can offer you protection—for a price.”

  “Yeah? And for how long?”

  “Long enough for me to put a file together that says you cooperated and you’re a good American and NCIS believes that whatever you did with Sleeping Dog is water over the dam. You were a bad boy and now you’re a good boy, and the Agency is just trying to cover its own shit if they prosecute you. The alternative is I turn you over to Menzes today and say you refused to cooperate and I hope he hangs your balls on the Langley doorpost for a bellpull.”

  “I could tell you a lot about Shreed, Dukas. You don’t want to give that to Menzes.”

  “Your man Bobby Li can tell me more. Anyway, Piat, I know more about Shreed already than you ever dreamed.” Dukas leaned forward and raised his right index finger. “The only thing I need you for is Chinese Checkers. Produce it or sweat.”

  Piat pulled away from the tree and straightened his sunglasses and then brushed his shoulders with his hands. “You see any ticks?” he said. “In Texas, the Spanish moss is full of them.” He pulled at the top of his blue jeans. “Chinese Checkers is on a disk in my safe-deposit box. Let’s go.”

  In the Virginia Horse Country.

  Ray Suter stared down at his palmtop with disgust and something like horror.

  Project blown. Competitor swept the board. Am out of my office. Don’t contact. Where is Mustang? Le Mans

  Suter’s sallow face flushed. “Project blown!” For Christ’s sake, how? There was only one way that they could have known enough to screw him—if Piat had gone over to the other side. That must be what happened, he told himself: Piat had chickened out. He had gone to Dukas and told him everything. Now Helmer was “out of his office,” meaning he was holed up with a lawyer someplace, and they’d come after Suter himself now.

  Suter stared past the horses at the faraway trees, willing the people he had hired to find Piat. He worked the palmtop back into the pouch and took out the cell phone and dialed.

  “Yah?”

  “Five flies.”

  “So?”

  “You’re doing a job for me.”

  “So?”

  “Find him and do him!”

  There was a second’s silence. “All the way?”

  “All the fucking way.” Suter’s anger was in his voice; he was thinking of the message from Helmer. Project blown. No, Suter couldn’t allow it; nobody could do that to him now.

  More silence, and the sense that the man on the other end was consulting somebody else.

  “Five down, five after.”

  After he had put the phone away, Suter realized that he was trembling. He loved control, and he was helpless. It enraged him that a stupid Ops jock like Jerry Piat could screw him, could undermine his control. Suter forced himself to breathe more slowly. Leave it to the pros. He had tried killing somebody himself once, and he had really blown it. Leave it to the pros. Control at long distance.

  But he was still trembling.

  Washington, D.C.

  Dukas drove Piat into D.C. in his beat-up car, Piat looking around as if he were on a vacation tour, and two NCIS agents grumbling in the back about the heat. They were loaners whom Dukas had gotten because he had caught a Chinese double and his boats were rising, but they weren’t happy about it. Baby-sitting a former CIA Ops puke, as one of them put it, was right up there with working security at the mall.

  They went first to Piat’s apartment, which was in the inner corner of North East not far from the Supreme Court, in a 1950s building with glass-block inserts in the walls. Dukas left the agents in the car and went in with Piat and waited while he took much time getting out his keys and caught Piat’s eye on the upper part of the doorjamb, where, he guessed, Piat had put something—a hair, a sliver of sticky tape, a fake spiderweb—that wasn’t there anymore. So somebody had been into the apartment—Menzes?

  Three minutes later, they were out on the street again.

  “He’s in his fucking flop,” a heavyset black man said to his partner. “He set off the sensor, man.”

  “Oh, shit, man, four days he doesn’t show, now he turns up the only day I got a hangover that’d fucking kill a moose.”

  They were down the street in a Jimmy with dyed windows. The first man looked in the side mirror to see if he could spot Piat. The other man fiddled with a control on an electronic box that took up too much of the space where he wanted his feet to be. “He’s in there, but he ain’t doing much.” He turned the volume up still further, and the electronic sound of silence filled the car, broken by a kind of pop and a grinding sound. “The fuck’s he doing?”

  “He don’t come right out, we go in and do him now.”

  More silence, then the jingle of keys. “He’s comin’ out. The fuck’s he doing?”

  The first man was watching in the side mirror. After several seconds, he said, “Shit, he’s got somebody with him—gettin’ into a car, that cream-colored heap— Don’t look, for Chrissake—let ’em go past.”

  They watched the car go past them. They saw Piat clearly, then the silhouettes of the two men in the backseat.

  “This gonna be hard, man.” He handed over a cell phone. “Get on to Robert, tell him we need another car. Those guys are cops.”

  Piat laughed when they all went into the bank with him, but of course he’d understand that Dukas wasn’t enough of a fool to let him out of his sight. Dukas sent one of the other agents into the vault with Piat, and, when the man pissed and moaned, Dukas hissed, “Go with him, Goddamit!” and then leaned against a counter and watched the stainless-steel grid of the gate until Piat came out again.

  “So?” Dukas said.

  Piat grinned. He had the disk in a side pocket. “Thought I’d make you sweat a little,” he said. He handed over a disk that could have had anything on it from kiddy porn to a list of synonyms for the word “sucker.”

  “Afraid you stick with me until this checks out,” Dukas said. “You didn’t have any plans, anyway, right?” Dukas somewhat understood Piat now, recognizing the tense look of a man who was being guarded. He drove Piat to the Ethos Security computer office, a littered place in a ratty building not far from the National Gallery. Within a minute, a former Navy EM named Valdez had the disk up on a screen, and two minutes later Dukas knew that it checked out as the complete Chinese Checkers comm plan. He put the disk in his own pocket and nodded to Piat. “Don’t get cute, okay?”

  They walked out to the street, and Piat squinted at the two agents standing in the too-bright sunlight. “Never liked this city,” he said.

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “Run for it.” Piat waited for a response, apparently got it, and said “Joke.” With a grin, but not much of a grin. Piat put his hands in his pockets and looked up and down the broad, sunny avenue. “I’m going to go someplace and have a drink, is what I’m going to do. Come along?”

  Dukas shook his head. “Stick with him,” he said to the two agents. “He goes right back to Pax River.”

  Dukas had hardly walked through the door of his office when Leslie was shouting at him.

  “Mister Dukas, Mister Dukas—!”

  Dukas was still drying his hands on his pants after a visit to the head.

  “Mister Dukas, you got a call, he’s very upset and got to talk to you! Special Agent Gandry?”

  Gandry was one of the lard-asses he had left to bring Piat back to Pax River. Dukas’s hand grabbed for the phone as he fell into his chair.

  “I’m, uh, afraid we lost him,” Gandry muttered.

  Dukas stood up as if he’d been goosed. “How?” he said, his voice cold.

  “He ran.” The man was defensive, trying to cover himself. “The fucker was wearing fuck
ing running shoes, we were in suits and street shoes, for Chrissake. He just took off. The sonofabitch runs like a rabbit.”

  Dukas was thinking that he should go through the ceiling and then thought it wasn’t worth it. Still, he was enraged. He thought of the two of them—both big men, late forties, big in the ass and gut. And Piat as lean as a greyhound. “Get your asses back to Pax River,” he growled. “Write it up for me. And don’t expect to have any time off for the next couple of years.”

  And part of his mind was saying, Still, it might be for the best. How was I going to keep him?

  Jerry Piat had put down four shots and was feeling better. He had found a bar that was dark and a little sleazy and no more like Washington, D.C., than it was like Syracuse or Duluth. Piat had drunk his whiskeys and sipped some water and then he asked the barman for some change, and he went to the wall phone and called Sally Baranowski.

  He went out into the hot sunshine and found a cab to take him to a cheap car rental near the Convention Center.

  “So where’s he going?” the black man said. They were following Piat’s rental car, staying way back, waiting for the second car to check in and take over. “Where the fuck’s he going?”

  “Not to his flop, for sure. So who cares? Maybe he’s going shopping. Who cares? We found him, we’re on him, now what?”

  The black man stared through the tinted windshield, watching as the Beltway exits slid past. They were heading for Virginia. “Where the hell’s he going?”

  Suburban Virginia.

  Sally Baranowski awoke after midnight and tasted the alcohol residue in her mouth and felt guilt settle over her like a collapsing balloon. The memory made her almost groan aloud. She had fallen off the wagon with a real thump. She ran her tongue over her teeth, around her gums. Bourbon. Why had she been—?

  Then she remembered Jerry. She put her hand behind her and felt the warm, hairy leg. Not Dukas. Jerry.

  He had called her and she had come home early, thrilled and appalled, and then he had shown up. With a pint of bourbon. Only a pint, as if he were willing to go easy if she was, not knowing she’d been dry but somehow sensing it. He was already a little in the bag, but it didn’t matter. It had taken them all of two minutes to get from the front door to the bedroom.

  Oh, shit, she thought. It had been clear that Jerry didn’t know about her and Dukas. She’d told him later, sometime around ten-thirty, when they’d finished the bourbon and she was making scrambled eggs. Ironic: The only reason she’d had eggs was that Dukas had scolded her for her empty refrigerator.

  I want a drink, she confessed to herself. It was the old story. If you drank, you kept on drinking; if you were dry, you tried to stay dry. Then you got wet and you wanted to drink forever.

  “What’s up?” Jerry whispered. Had he been awake the whole time? Had she moved? She felt his hand on her shoulder, then her breast. “What’s wrong?”

  “I need a drink,” she said. She rolled away, laughed to cover her own feeling of guilt, and began to pull on warm-ups. “You got me started, Jerry—sorry, I’m a girl who can’t say no. I need a drink.”

  “I’ll go.”

  “No!” She was pushing her feet into Birkenstocks. She wanted to get away from him for a little, as if he were the source of the guilt that had collapsed around her. “Get a little air,” she said.

  “Get some cigarettes, will you. Marlboros.”

  “I remember, I remember—”

  Her purse was on the kitchen table. She burrowed in it for her wallet and keys, not wanting to turn on a light, not wanting to see herself even in the reflection of a window. Street light illuminated the living room enough for her to see—and what was there to see, anyway? The room was tawdry to her just then; what she had done that evening was sordid; what she was about to do was pathetic. At the front door, she looked out through the single pane and saw his car, pulled into her weedy driveway behind her own, its tinted windows black, and as reflective as mirrors where the light hit. She pulled on a hooded sweatshirt.

  “I need your keys,” she said. He was asleep again. She remembered that trait, an ability to sleep like a cat, probably because he was always tired. She said it again, and he opened his eyes and said he’d go, but she said that all she wanted was his keys, because his car was in the way.

  “Right pants pocket,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Is it worth it?”

  “You ever been detoxed and stayed on the wagon for a month?” She found the keys. “No, it isn’t worth it, because I’m going to be really sorry tomorrow or the next day or whenever, but, right now, I need it.”

  He looked at her in the gloomy little room. “Hurry back.”

  “Twenty minutes,” she said.

  “He’s out,” the black man said. He moved so suddenly that the panel truck rocked. “Get it started, for Chrissake—!” He looked out again and saw the dark figure get into the rental car they had been following.

  “Don’t have a fucking cow, Jesus Christ—”

  The engine caught. The black man was taking a shotgun from a toolbox fixed to the inside of the truck. “Hold it until he’s at the end of the block, see which way he turns.”

  “Want to wipe my ass for me after you’re through telling me how to do my business?”

  The shotgun was an old Stevens double twelve-gauge, the barrels cut to eighteen inches. The black man popped it open and shoved in two buckshot shells and snapped it shut as the truck pulled out, did a U-turn, and started up the street. He cranked the side window all the way down. “This has to happen fast,” he said. He was nervous now—not scared, only keyed up. He talked too quickly. “Don’t pull up on him and sit there; you got to pull up and out and right next to him, all at once, or he’ll catch on. Even then—”

  “Shut up,” the other man said. “You give me the jumps.”

  They picked up the taillights a block away. The panel truck moved up until it was fifty yards behind, and then the black man said “Go!”

  The panel truck accelerated. It was out in the other lane in less than a second, then pulling even with the left rear panel, then right up alongside. The black man had waited to point the barrels out the window until they were that close, and then they were beside the car, still accelerating, going right past, and he pulled both triggers.

  Dar es Salaam.

  Captain Jiang scuttled into Lao’s office, his sallow face flushed.

  “I have a report from our people in Afghanistan. They have a border-watcher report—it’s flagged here—indicating that a car crossed the Afghan border on the date Chen disappeared. A white Toyota Land Cruiser, old model, two passengers, one a woman.”

  “A woman?” Lao was interested. “I can’t see Chen traveling with a woman. He was never the type.” He chuckled. “Never mind, Captain. Please go on.”

  “The vehicle went north across the mountains. I have the same or similar vehicle crossing into Tajikistan the next morning at about five o’clock, at the border post near Quaraval.”

  “And then?”

  “And then nothing.”

  Lao read through the report, noting the agent’s number and checking it against the reliability chart. Pretty good score. Then he composed a quick cable for Beijing, asking for Chen’s prior operational involvement in Tajikistan.

  23

  Over the Pacific.

  Alan’s ESM screen was as empty as the dawn-lit sea beneath his plane.

  They had been in the air since two-thirty in the morning. They had launched in the cool, moist air of night, and somewhere in the flight the burdens of fatigue and full bladders had been relieved by the glory of dawn. And there was no sign of any action.

  It made Alan Craik, ordinarily immune to introspection, ponder the different qualities of waiting. He thought of his last missions off Bosnia, just a few months back, and the heavy tension of waiting for cigarette boats smuggling arms to appear on radar. There, the pressure had been self-induced; he had needed a mission for his detachment, and the possible existence of
cigarette boats had opened new vistas for their systems. But the quality of the waiting had been different. It was full of action. The det’s planes had been in the air constantly, plying up and down the Dalmatian coast like cats searching for a lost mouse. They had known that smuggling was real. They had been in constant communication with other planes, ships, even the Italian Guarda Costa.

  This was different. Alan had had no contact with SubPac since his telephone call from Captain Manley yesterday, and the events in the park had served to separate it so much that it seemed like another world. They were looking for a potentially hostile submarine that might exist; they were using an American submarine as bait but had no contact with her, so that her existence, too, seemed merely probable. There was no one to talk to, no potential allies beyond the borrowed P-3 from the local squadron, waiting over to the west with her bigger payload of sonobuoys.

  Alan had added to the silent quality of the waiting by suggesting that they practice Emcon (emissions control) during the whole of the search. It seemed possible to him that if the potential submarine were near the surface to receive a transmission from the supposed Seattle spy, it would be listening for radio signals. Especially for any sign that aircraft or surface ships were searching for a submarine. It occurred to him (not that he could do anything to check his hypothesis) that the dates where sailings and transmissions did not correlate might relate to exercise activity off Seattle that had scared the submarine away, except that as the dawn came up around them without a sign of transmission, the likelihood of the whole theory seemed to diminish. Now, in the warm light of dawn, Alan saw holes in his theory broad enough for the supposed submarine to drive straight through.

  Surfer popped his shoulder harness and rotated his butt on the ejection seat, then scratched vigorously at some areas best left undescribed.