Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  “She have anything to do with inter-agency abuse of power—your focus, am I right?”

  “She used to work for George Shreed.”

  Menzes stared at him. “Negative. Negative on Baranowski. She’s your Mystery Woman, right?”

  “No comment.”

  “Bull! I thought we were going to be straight with each other, Dukas. Yes?”

  Dukas leaned into him across the little table. “How about letting us interview Shreed?”

  “Negative that. Absolute negative.” They were still eye to eye. “You know why.”

  “You think we’ll spook him.” He saw Menzes’s eyes flick to Triffler, and he said, “Dick knows.”

  Menzes grimaced. “Nobody interviews him, nobody goes near him. Period.”

  “How about a guy named Ray Suter? Shreed’s assistant.” Dukas sat back. Peretz had fingered Suter as a good one to ask about Peacemaker, because he’d worked on the project but had CIA connections. “He worked on Peacemaker, so he’s part of the Siciliano case, which is at the center of my investigation of inter-agency abuse of power.” He leaned in again. “Let me put it this way—for him, I can go through channels. I’d rather not. Can we interview him?”

  “Tell me what your interest in Baranowski is.”

  Dukas looked at him, eyes slitted, looked aside at Triffler and said, “Okay, she’s our Deep Throat. But she doesn’t know we know.”

  Menzes digested that while he picked at the label of his beer. His hairy, muscular forearms worked, tight bands moving like rods. Despite the white shirt and tie, he seemed more like some sort of competitor—boxer, wrestler—than a desk jockey. “How do you know she isn’t feeding you lies?”

  “How about we interview Suter?”

  Menzes now shifted his look to Triffler. “By the book. No surprises. Somebody from my office present at all times. Put the request in writing, parameters of the investigation clearly stated.”

  “You’re a prince, Carl.” Dukas produced a folded sheet of paper from an inner pocket and laid it next to Menzes’s glass. “By the book. We’d like to do the interview as soon as possible.”

  Menzes started to laugh. He wiped moisture from one eye. “Hey, Dukas, no shit—you’re good!”

  Even Triffler smiled.

  Washington.

  O’Neill was off to Naples again to back up Alan Craik, but he had left Valdez in Washington to honcho a new computer-security wing for his company. The company offices were in the glitzy part of town near L and Connecticut, but Valdez found himself in a converted rathole in the old red-light district farther east.

  “Don’t matter,” he had said to O’Neill before he left for the airport, “you pay the electric bill, we’re in business.” He had installed four Dells and networked three of them himself, then two geeks had got them going on anti-hacking regimens.

  O’Neill was serious about developing a computer-security capability, but what he really wanted from Valdez was for him to hack into George Shreed’s home computer. He was doing that on his own without telling Dukas, convinced that Dukas would wave him off because he was so sensitive to the Agency’s desires; on the other hand, if Harry O’Neill’s Ethos Security got caught hacking into Shreed’s computer on its own, that was O’Neill’s problem and he’d deal with it.

  “Hack in how?” Valdez had said.

  O’Neill was computer-literate but not a geek. “However you do it,” he had said.

  “Oh, thanks. Just like that, huh? You ever hack into a desktop is sitting in somebody’s house, Harry?”

  “Uh—no.”

  “Well, it ain’t magic, you know—it’s science. We don’t got X-ray vision and we don’t walk through walls. We need a way in, man, some data, a tap on a phone line—dig?”

  “That’s your area of expertise.”

  “Oh, thanks. Can you do a break-in of his house?”

  “Jesus, no! My God—get that idea out of your head! Dukas would kill me.”

  Valdez had nodded gloomily. “Okay. What you mean is, you flew me here first class, you payin’ me all this money, now I should get to work—right?”

  Harry had grinned. “Right.” He gave Valdez his cellphone number. “If anything breaks, call me at once. Any time. Anywhere in the world. Don’t let me get behind the curve on this, okay?” He had said it lightly, but Valdez had known what Harry meant: if Valdez let him get behind the curve, Valdez was toast.

  So Valdez and his geeks had begun to exercise talents that were not strictly legal but that were part of their specialty, and in a long day of hacking they got two of George Shreed’s three IPs, with Shreed’s account numbers and the phone numbers from which he called.

  The third provider was a cable operator, and they were having some trouble with that. But they’d get it—they’d get it.

  By the next morning, they knew that Shreed worked at his computers in the evening and then at random times during the night. The program also followed Shreed to a couple of chat rooms, and Valdez wondered what he was doing there. He shared his curiosity with O’Neill.

  He also learned that Shreed had remarkable firewalls around his computers. Remembering Harry’s cautions, Valdez didn’t try to break in.

  Suburban Virginia.

  Ray Suter had had to drive on another of Moscowic’s wild-ass anti-surveillance routes, up and down and around and about, using cunning sharp corners and winding lanes, all of which annoyed Suter and made him wish even harder for the day Moscowic would be out of his life. Suter didn’t understand what he called “spy stuff,” never having been a case officer or even an agent, and he thought Moscowic was jerking him around for the fun of it. I keep seeing you lying face-down in the river someplace, Tony, Suter thought with angry satisfaction. The idea perked him up a little. “Does this ever end?” he said.

  “Now there’s a nice kind of what they call your chicane coming up—see there, where the road got a kinda hula-hoop in it? What I want you should do—”

  “Why the fuck don’t you do your own driving?” Suter snarled.

  “Hey, hey—temper, temper! This is all professional. You don’t like it, Mister S., we can break off our business relationship, wha’d’you say to that?”

  “I think you’re playing games. How the fuck much farther have we got to go?”

  “Wha’d I just say? This is professional. You get what you pay for, am I right? We’re almost there.”

  And so they were. In a ratty Korean restaurant, a kid who looked sixteen was eating some sort of beef dish and not looking up at them, even when Tony introduced Suter as The Man. The kid was the hacker who was going to get into Shreed’s computer. He was actually eighteen and had just got out of two years in a juvenile facility for stealing via electronic means, and he wasn’t supposed to touch a computer for five years or he’d go to adult prison for another three. Suter had been told all that.

  “Call him Nickie,” Moscowic said.

  Suter took the kid’s greasy plate between thumb and finger and pulled it away toward him, forcing the kid to look up. He had raspberry-dyed hair and enough pimples for an entire graduating class, and eyes like old dishwater. “Do I have your attention?” Suter said.

  “You gonna have my fist up your asshole if you ever touch anything of mine again. Give it back.”

  “I want your attention, shithead.”

  The dishwater eyes were not quite looking into Suter’s but were fixed somewhere over his right shoulder. Like a dog, the kid didn’t like eye contact. “Money and a computer,” he said. “Then you got my attention.”

  Suter held on to the plate. “Can you do this job?”

  The kid snorted. “Can you?” He snorted again, some substitute for laughter, and an unattractive quantity of mucus descended from his right nostril. “Shit, man. Come on! But I gotta get inside the house, download the files and connect.”

  Moscowic detached Suter’s fingers and pushed the plate back under the kid’s nose, and the head went down and he began to eat again. “He wants an apartme
nt and two computers and five thousand bucks. He can do it, Mister S.”

  Suter wiped his fingers on a napkin. “He better.” He walked out, thinking that now he would like to see two bodies face-down in the river someplace.

  USS Thomas Jefferson.

  Things got better. The MARI system stayed up, and, as the aircrews got more data on the parameters of the fast movers, they began to spot them more quickly and more often. The problem remained the Italian surface ships, which weren’t fast enough, but the effort counted and at least the det was in the game.

  Alan had his talk with Stevens and put him back on the flight schedule. Stevens’s part of the talk was bluster and resentment, Alan’s part reason and firmness. They struck a deal: they would be Mister Stevens and Mister Craik, and Stevens would keep his private grudges to himself, or he’d be going home early.

  Then the Jefferson made its turn away from the Yugoslav coast, and they were only a day out of Naples and the meeting with the woman named Anna. Calling from a STU in the intel spaces, Alan got a Special Agent Triffler at NCIS, and Triffler handed Mike over immediately.

  “Mike! My God, I got you first try!”

  “Al! Hey, jeez, at last.” Dukas sounded harried. “When you going ashore in bella Nap’?”

  “The very thing I’m calling about. What the hell do I do?”

  “The very thing I’m about to tell you, what do you think? Your buddy O’Neill is backing you up, but when you see him, you don’t know him, you never saw him before, he’s just another Italian, right? A dark Italian. Anyway, he’s scoped out a route and made the schedule, so you do as I tell you and everything will go down like a hot slider, get me?”

  “Ha-ha.”

  “Okay. One, don’t go ashore until noon local. You know Naples, right? Okay. You hit fleet landing, walk down the pier all the way and walk up to the old castle on the left.”

  Alan scribbled on his kneeboard. “What if she’s waiting for me at fleet landing?”

  “Walk the route I’m describing. Don’t get inspirations.”

  “Mike, after this I’m out of this thing. It’s in the way of my job.”

  “Now, from the castle, walk up the boulevard, past the roundabout, toward AVSOUTH, to the train station. You with me?”

  “Pier, castle, train. Did you hear what I said about being out after this one?”

  “If she hasn’t met you, sit in the station and drink coffee for a while, then head back to the boat on the same route.”

  “And if she does?”

  “Then get on the train with her and go to Pompeii. When you get there, go straight into the ruins and keep moving around while you talk.”

  “What if she doesn’t want to go to Pompeii?”

  Mike was silent. Static and STU-III noises on the line. Then: “Make it up, Al. But keep moving and keep away from fleet landing. Just in case.”

  “Have you talked to the NCIS guys on the boat?”

  “No need to know.”

  “Damn it, Mike, I need them to know! I whacked a guy in Trieste and the admiral still seems to think I’m

  a risk!”

  “Okay, okay! I’ll call them and say something.”

  “And after this I’m out.”

  “One step at a time. First, you set another meeting—tell her where and when. Like in two days, at the train station in Herculaneum. Tell her she might be meeting somebody else, but don’t give a description.”

  “Two days, at the train station in Herculaneum.”

  “Right. See what she has to say, but don’t give anything away. Do I need to repeat that?”

  “What is this, Spying 101? No, you don’t have to repeat it. Christ.”

  There was talk in the background, a different kind of static. Dukas said, “If Harry walks past you, real close, with a newspaper, then follow him. It means he wants to talk.”

  “Oh, God. If he’s real close, why doesn’t he say ‘Follow me’?”

  “Now repeat it all, from the top.”

  Alan looked at the kneeboard in front of him.

  “Go ashore at noon. Go up the pier to the castle, then past the roundabout to the station by AVSOUTH. If I’ve met her, take the train to Pompeii. If not, wait and drink coffee. Keep moving. Don’t look at Harry. If Harry walks past with a newspaper, follow him. If I talk to her, don’t give anything away, get a second meeting, make it for Herculaneum in two days.”

  “You write all that down?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dumb. Shred it right now. I wanta hear the shredder. Okay, a word of wisdom: don’t get heroic. Just do the routine.”

  “And you’ll call the NCIS office on the boat.”

  “Be careful, Al—she could be trouble.”

  “That’s occurred to me, Mike.”

  “Good. And, yeah, I’ll make up something for the NCIS guys.”

  Alan’s throat tightened. “How’s Rose?”

  Even over the STU, Dukas sounded troubled. “Oh, she’s—okay—I don’t see much of her—”

  Later, Dukas called the STU number for the NCIS office on the boat three times but didn’t connect. Triffler dug up a cellphone number for one of the agents, and he got the man on the second try and asked him to call Dukas on the STU.

  “This’s Mike Dukas.”

  “Yeah, Mike, this is Marty Stein on board the Jefferson.” The STU whistled and burped.

  “Marty, I got a case here that’s very sensitive. You know Al Craik? He’s on your boat with a detachment of S-3s.”

  Subdued rustling, as if leaves were blowing together at the other end of the STU.

  “Yeah. Security risk, that’s why it’s sensitive?”

  “Jesus, no! Where do you get this shit? I’m using Craik as a dangle in Naples, and I don’t want anybody dicking it up, okay?”

  “You don’t have to shout. Christ. This the same guy who popped a Serb in Trieste?”

  “And it’s the same business, okay?”

  “Mike, we’ve, uh, heard that this guy and his wife are, uh, bad.” “Bad” came across loaded with meaning.

  Dukas thought it was funny that in the most complex business in the world, there was this tendency to want to simplify. Good and bad. Black and white.

  “Well, they aren’t. Got that?”

  “We just keep getting these rumors. Plus the JAG says the admiral’s leery of the guy. You sure you want to use him as a dangle?”

  Dukas swallowed an angry retort. Instead, he said evenly, “Buddy, if Craik is a security risk, you and I are aliens from outer space. You do everything you can to spike those rumors, and for God’s sake don’t let my guy’s operation get dicked!”

  14

  Naples.

  Harry O’Neill saw Anna before Al Craik had cleared the fleet landing. She was well back from the pier, almost to the castle, sitting outside a trattoria. First, he had noticed men watching her, and then he had seen her. He had continued to look around, but she had to be the target.

  Now Harry watched Alan emerge from the shadow of the gate to the pier and start toward the castle, too, and he saw her leave a coin on her table, watch Alan for a moment, and then move toward the castle. They were on converging courses and Harry could watch them both from his Citroën. He had been there for two hours, going through the usual panics of surveillance: The target went past and I missed her; the target isn’t here; the whole thing is canceled. Now he felt relief.

  She was standing beside the metal railing that surrounded the bastion as Alan approached, her silhouette crisp against the sun-dazzled stone. There were a few men around, more interested in her than in the fortress, but their interest was so obvious that he knew they weren’t her enemies or her anti-surveillance. Alan walked right up to her, and his shock was visible when she put her arms around his neck. She said something. Harry cursed not having wired Alan.

  She took his hand and he led her up the hill toward the station.

  They walked for several minutes, and it was clear that Alan didn’t want to hold h
er hand. She kept looking at him and smiling—dazzling, sexy smiles meant to melt hearts. Harry could see that Alan was not melted; in fact, he seemed to be getting angry. Harry laughed a little and got out of his car to go up the steps to the station. Rose should see this, he thought. Picture of a loyal husband.

  Harry beat them into the station by a clear minute and had his tickets in hand when they came to the kiosk. It was the first time he could hear them. Her voice was deep and foreign, a kind of dream voice that went with the rest of her.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Pompeii. I thought it would give us time to talk.”

  She laughed. “I have never been to Pompeii. It is very sweet of you to turn this into an outing. A picnic, perhaps?”

  Harry boarded two cars ahead of them. He didn’t think that either of them had even looked at him yet. She seemed entirely focused on Alan. In fact, to Harry, she didn’t seem like an agent at all. He watched them, two cars distant but visible through the doors. She touched him several times and made him laugh, finally. Good.

  Loosen up, Al.

  The station at Pompeii was the danger point. It had an open platform, and when he had looked it over yesterday at this time there had been no traffic at all. They might be the only three people getting off the train, and it sucked to be black in Italy.

  She was laughing now, her head thrown back and her torso arched slightly, one perfect foot stretched across the aisle at Alan. Harry thought of Monty Python. Let me try and resist the temptation! Brave Sir Robin.

  As he had feared, the station was empty. Harry knew that the train would stop for almost a minute; he counted to forty and walked off, going directly to the phone kiosk at the far end of the platform. He called no one, chatted for a minute to no one, and hung up. They were moving far ahead on the dusty road to the ruins, and he was clear.

  Harry’s principal role was making sure she hadn’t brought any friends, and so far she seemed clean. She had moved through four groups of people so far, and no one had crossed from group to group. Harry picked his backpack off the urine-smelling floor of the kiosk and headed toward the amphitheater at the far end of the ruins.