Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  Suter lit a cigarette, inhaled, sighed. “Yeah, I know that. Make sure you know it, too.”

  The car was silent. The smell of wet dog and cigarette smoke joined the other smells. After several minutes, Tony said, “Your boss’s talking again.”

  “Christ!” Suter was out in the rain within seconds, pushing at his right ear and splashing away through the puddles. The bell kept tolling: dead, dead, dead—

  Trieste.

  “As soon as he drew a gun, I tackled the man in front of me and brought him down. Then I began to fire at the ones shooting into the front of the café. They returned fire and killed the man I had tackled.”

  “You had a gun, Commander?” The Italian cop smelled strongly of cologne and leaned forward across the desk every time he spoke. Alan couldn’t decide whether it was a very polite interrogation or a very thorough witness examination.

  “No, signore, I did not have a gun. I took it from the man who was standing in front of me.”

  “You are a commando? A specialist?”

  Alan was now going over this ground for the third time. “I took him by surprise.”

  “You overpowered one terrorist, took his gun, and shot a second.”

  “Yes.”

  The cop watched Alan with a kindly look of disbelief. Another investigator entered the room, a razor-thin man in a very nice suit.

  “Why were you there at all, Commander?”

  “I wanted a cup of coffee.” The name, Bonner, and all its implications hung before him. He wasn’t ready to give them the woman yet. “Signori, may I remind you that I’m an officer in the US Navy, and that under international agreements I have the right to representation by my service, and to have them informed? Am I a suspect in this?” He wanted to say as well that his foot hurt like hell, but he didn’t think they’d be sympathetic.

  “It would be easier for all of us if you would simply aid our investigation, Commander. Are you uncomfortable?”

  “I have a detachment to command.”

  “You shot two men in our city, Commander. That causes us huge concern. You understand that since the recent unfortunate incident with the US plane and the cable car, Italians are very touchy about Americans killing people in Italy.”

  Alan spread his hands in an engaging, almost Italian way, as if to say, What can I do?

  “I do understand that, but I also understand that you’re keeping me without a charge, and I would like my command to be notified. I have cooperated. And I didn’t kill both of them. I shot one. The other was shot by his own people. And they weren’t Italians, they were Serbs.”

  “Italy is not at war with the Serbs, Commander.” He put an index finger, pointed upward, beside his temple, as if he was signaling an idea. “I wonder if you did not come to Italy to execute these men.” He raised his eyebrows: Good idea? Getting no response, he looked for the fifth or tenth time at Alan’s passport. “You landed in Aviano just seven hours ago.”

  Alan was unsure whether to react with anger or to continue to respond politely. He’d tried both for two hours, and he didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. He started again.

  “I tackled the man I had noticed in front of me as soon as he drew a gun…”

  Suburban Washington.

  Shreed had been to the toilet and had splashed cold water on his face. He hated that face, most of all now—a whipped look, hangdog, drained from the effort of telling her. “Janey.” She gave no response. Maybe it was his own forgiveness he wanted, as much as hers. “So, Janey, there was this guy Chen. In Jakarta.”

  No response.

  “Jakarta. So we worked out a comm plan, all that old Cold War junk. Then I came back here for a tour and I got into computers. Bad days here, you remember—the Agency was in the doghouse, everybody pulled in like a flock of turtles. You called me ‘Captain COBOL.’ Remember?” He smiled, used both hands to pull one leg over the knee of the other.

  “In those days, you actually did your own programming. And I was good. Real good. They were making the first stabs at a net; they didn’t even call it the Internet then, just ‘a net,’ and I hacked my way into a big mainframe at Cal Tech and staked out some space for myself in the source code. Once I did that, I knew what was possible, and I waited for the Chinese to get good enough for me to use what I knew. I waited and then piggy-backed on a couple of Chinese ‘students’ who were sending computer stuff back on audio tapes, rode their data, and there I was—I had a way in, into China. The trouble was, computers were too new. So what I was, I was like a mold-spore that can exist for twenty years in the desert. I had to wait.

  “Chen and I were exchanging stuff the old way, dead-drops and that crap, both moving up. It took ten years—then, finally, everybody had a PC. At last, it was my world. So I laid it out for the Ops guys—what we could do to the Chinks with computers, what now we’d call information warfare.

  “Would you believe nobody in Ops cared, even then? The fact is they were scared shitless—a lot of fake Brit preppies who would do anything to protect the heritage of God and capitalism, and so let’s send in some poor lower-class, preferably foreign asset to do our dying for us, but please, no high technology! HUMINT forever!” He wiped his hand over his bristly hair. “Stupid shitheads,” he muttered. After a minute or two, he got up and dragged himself to the window. It was raining hard, and there was only a single figure out there, somebody walking slowly in the downpour. There was something terrible about the loneliness of that figure, he thought. He shook himself as if it had been he standing in the rain.

  “So I’m a traitor for a purpose, Janey,” he said. There, he’d said it—traitor. “I’m a traitor with a cause.” He continued to stare into the rain. The walking figure was gone.

  “I’d have given them what I had, if they’d listened. I’d have risked even prison, if they’d listened. But they made me go it alone. They made me be a traitor.”

  He looked to her for affirmation then, but she was still.

  “So I went it alone. I programmed a poison pill, a worm, to fetch something from Chinese military intel. A kind of virus, but one like—what the hell is it? shingles? the one that sits in your spine for twenty years and then pops out—one that would sit tight until I told it to act. Then every time the Chinks upgraded, they took me with the upgrade. I’d go in and tinker a little, snoop around, see how much better they were getting at firewalls and passwords and encryption, and it got to the point where I knew I was going to have to do something or they’d either catch me or they’d wall me out.

  “And then Chen lowered the boom on me. Nineteen ninety-four. Turned out I’d been suckered. Now he was going to get serious, and if I didn’t play along, he’d turn me in to the Agency.” Shreed sighed, made a sound that was something like a laugh—short, barking gags of sound. “I thought I was playing him and he’d been playing me. We’d been doing a circle jerk for twenty years, and it was all a fake to land me. Now, the Chinks wanted good stuff—hard stuff.

  “They had a website that flacked pornography. That was the comm link; we encrypted data and reduced it to one pixel and buried it in the middle of a porn image. That was what I was doing that night you caught me. I was sending them the data on a classified project called Peacemaker, and when you came in, I got rattled and I sent the last batch in clear. You scared me, baby. I felt like a kid caught jacking off.” Shreed massaged the bridge of his nose, sighed again. “Not your fault. Mine. But—” He gave the laughing sound again.

  “Chen’s really been bleeding me. Chen’s an insatiable prick; I’m going to have to—I’ve got to end it. I’ve got to wind up my Chinese connection. You see? Janey?”

  He put his hand on hers again, felt the skin cooler but not cold.

  “Oh, baby, the things I’ve had to do! And the things I have to do yet!”

  He got up, grabbed his canes, swung himself around the room; the movements were restless, angry, the prowlings of something in a cage. Still, his voice was tender when he said, “Maybe it’s better you w
on’t be here.”

  He pulled himself to the window again, then away to her side, across to a corner, back.

  “This is how it goes. The Chinks’ military intel is the banker for the Party and for the bigwigs who are skimming the cream and sending the money offshore for themselves. Intel also has most of its own secret money offshore; it’s what they use all over the world for spying, subversion—you know. It’s a lot of money. A lot of money. So what I’m going to do is, on a given day, and it has to be soon, I’m going to activate my virus, and it’s going to send little gobblers—like PacMans—and they’re going to gobble up all the offshore accounts and all the data about the accounts, every scrap, and put it somewhere else. And the Chinks won’t know where. And there they’ll be, sitting with their thumb up their ass, with no money for ops, and no Party money, and no money for the bigwigs who will want to know how and why, and who will be trying to take revenge on anybody who stands in the way of their cash, and it’s going to be a bloodbath!”

  He grinned. “For about twelve hours, and that’s all I need. Because the Chinks are going to be between a rock and a hard place during those twelve hours, and they won’t know whether to shit or go blind. India is going to be hollering at them from one side, and we’re going to be hollering from another, and Pakistan is going to be begging them to send help, and they won’t be able to do a thing! They’ll be paralyzed.

  “And then they’ll try to recover the only way they know, which is by strutting around the world, pretending to be a superpower instead of the world’s shoemaker. And they’ll push some military provocation to make somebody else—India, let’s say—back down, and it’ll all be bullshit! Because China is a paper tiger—a hundred goddam nukes, and so far not a missile that they could lob a wad of toilet paper three thousand miles with! An army of goddam peasants, and technology they’ve had to steal! You know who says the Chinese are a superpower? The same assholes who said that Russia was a superpower!

  “Well, I’m going to show what they really are. Their money is going to go down a rathole, and they’re going to panic, and then they’re going to the brink—and they’re going to find that they’re eyeball-to-eyeball with us, and they’re going to back down, because they don’t have the muscle!

  “So—I had a reason, do you see, Janey? I always had a reason. You’re the moralist in the family; you’re the one who used to argue the difference between ends and means, so you judge what I’ve done. Judge me. And then forgive me.”

  He came to rest at the foot of the bed, his posture appealing to her, begging her. And for a moment, he thought what he saw in return was an illusion—a living woman, eyes open, the faintest of smiles—and then he knew it was not. It was quite real, even to the smears of pale color on her cheeks.

  “Janey—!”

  She might have said something; her lips parted. But it was her eyes that spoke, sliding aside to look at the CD player. Then back at him. The eyes of a girl, hip and wise.

  He got it. Der Rosenkavalier. He pushed the Repeat button. A few notes, and Schwarzkopf’s voice climbed out of the box and filled the room. It was loud, too loud for him to talk. Seeing her eyes, he couldn’t turn the volume down. He could only sit with her, listening.

  He sat beside her, and her eyes closed. The music, lush as cream, swirled.

  He touched her hand. It was wax. The music spiraled up, the duet, the two sopranos, glory. Then silence.

  “Janey?” Now he felt his own desire again, his own urgency. “Forgive me!”

  But the bird had flown.

  Outside the hospice, Suter leaned his back against a tree. Music he didn’t know played its tinny noise in his earphone, but he was oblivious to it. A lot of money. Suter tried to light a cigarette, but his hands were trembling and he had to give it up.

  A lot of money. What was a lot of money? A billion? Even two billion?

  A lot of money, and Tony knows about it. What would he do with Tony? The man could say that discretion was his stock-in-trade, but Suter knew that discretion, integrity, all that was bullshit when big money came around.

  It frightened him and at the same time dazzled him. What could he do with a billion dollars? What could he not do?

  He had come out here to get something on his boss. To get a little leverage. Now, Shreed hardly mattered. Now there was money. He tried again with the lighter, and it gave a flame and he was able to hold the cigarette in it just long enough to get it alight. He drew in a gulp of smoke, coughed, and, bent over, began to hyperventilate.

  He knew that the only way he could deal with Tony was if Tony was dead.

  3

  Trieste.

  By the time that the JAG officer from the boat appeared, it was close to three in the morning and he had been moved from the cell where he had been questioned to a comfortable office belonging to one of the detectives, and he was being given strong coffee and biscotti. One of the cops even made small talk.

  The JAG was a lieutenant-commander, middle-aged and short, and he weighed as much as he was allowed, but he was professional.

  “Commander? You all right? I’m John Maggiulli.”

  “Al Craik.”

  “You okay? They don’t have you as a suspect any more. Wish I could say that was my doing, but it was over before I walked in.” He lowered his voice. “Admiral Kessler is kind of freaked. Word we had was that there had been a terrorist attack. Why didn’t you tell them to call the boat, Mister?”

  “I did.”

  “Not their story. They say that you wanted the boat kept out of it and cooperated willingly in their investigation. What were you doing there, anyway? Was it terrorists?”

  Alan looked outside the office and saw the razor-thin man in the good suit watching him.

  “Not here, John.”

  “Al, I’d like an answer. This is serious.”

  “I know it’s fucking serious, John! I just shot a guy, excuse me, it’s kind of wrecked my day! The Italians thought I might have been sent here to whack the terrorists, or some such crap. I started requesting legal counsel from the boat four hours ago, as soon as I discovered that we were moving beyond routine.”

  John Maggiulli looked at him. Glared, in fact.

  “Shore Patrol says you got a message from your wife. You withholding this message purporting to be from your wife from the Italian police?”

  “Roger that. John, I’ll make it clear when I’m not sitting in a foreign police station, okay?”

  Shaking his head, Maggiulli took his arm; there was a suggestion of taking him into custody. “I got a car, and we’re ducking reporters.” Alan limped beside him.

  The thin man watched them leave.

  Admiral Kessler was in pajamas and a flannel robe, a rather small man who was not at his best at four-thirty a.m. He sat a little slumped, one hand shielding his eyes as if the glare from Alan’s story was too much for him. Still, he let him tell the whole thing, leaving out only the woman’s saying “Bonner” and the fact that she had asked to meet him in Naples.

  “I don’t like my officers getting into trouble, Mister Craik. Especially big trouble.” He looked at Maggiulli, whom he had commanded to stay. “What I really want to know is why you lied to the Italian cops. Well?”

  “Sir, it’s, um, a matter of national security that touches on an existing counterintelligence investigation. I’m not in a position to say more until I can talk to NCIS.”

  Kessler lowered his hand and turned a pair of very bright, very hard eyes on Alan. “Admirals don’t like to be kept in the dark by subordinates—you follow me?”

  Alan, standing stiffly, bit back the angry sense of unfairness that came up like bile. “I’m eager to tell you, sir, as soon as I’ve cleared the matter with NCIS.”

  Maggiulli cleared his throat and said, in the tone of a man trying to coax a bull into a chute, “Uh, Craik has a point, sir—if this is really a sensitive matter—”

  “I know the goddam code, John!” He leaned still farther back. “What the hell do
you have to do with ‘an existing CI investigation’? Your dad died years ago.”

  Alan winced. Everybody in the Navy knew about his father’s death; many people held it against him, credited his promotions to it—son of a hero, the man who had caught his father’s killer. He would rather not have raised the subject at all. “It was that case, anyway.”

  Kessler was unsympathetic. “All right. You get to NCIS pronto, and I want to talk to your contact when you’re done. Get it to me by 0800.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Alan headed straight down to CVIC and tried to call Mike Dukas, an NCIS special agent who was still in charge of the old case and who was a close friend, at his office in Bosnia, dialing the eighteen digits with great care. First, the line was busy; then, he got a native German speaker who had difficulty understanding him. Could he call back after eight? Alan slammed the telephone down, thinking that eight a.m. in Sarajevo was the time he was supposed to report on his progress to the admiral.

  Balked of contact with Dukas, Alan filled out a foreign-national contact report with the NCIS officer on the boat and put himself in his rack, where he fumed and stewed and waited for the dawn.

  Utica.

  Rose had sat up with her father, drinking too much wine and letting him try to soothe her. Then she lay awake for an hour, then another hour, hearing dogs, the bells of clocks, the freights rolling along the old New York Central tracks. A car went by, its boombox thumping hip-hop bass. Somebody laughed and shouted. Her talk with the detailer went around and around in her head, and she tracked it, around and around, looking for the explanation, the solution, a rat running around and around, looking for a way out—

  Rose woke to see by the pale orange digitals of the bedside clock that it was a little after two. Her head really ached now, and the wine rose as a sour nausea in her throat. She would feel really lousy tomorrow. Today.