Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  Rose knew that Sally had a child but saw no sign of one. Maybe upstairs? A tough atmosphere for a kid. As if sensing her interest, Sally said, “My daughter’s at my mother’s. I sent her home because I thought my husband might—” She shrugged. “We’re having a real ugly separation.” She tried to smile. “He already took my dog.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Unhappiness is like an environment: it alters the body and the face, even the clothes. Sally Baranowski was taller than Rose, and she had been slim but had put on pounds that made her warmups bulge at the waist. Depression, not alcohol, made her face older than her years, which Rose guessed at late thirties. Her ginger hair hung slack. “Not your concern. Can I fix you a drink? I’m drinking too much, as I’m sure you’ve heard. You have heard, right—you’ve discussed me with all these people who are helping you?”

  “Only four people.”

  “But you did discuss me.” She lit a cigarette. “How’d you identify me?”

  “One of my friends recognized your voice.”

  Sally’s eyebrows went up; her lips pursed, the expression one of mocking acknowledgement. “Some Deep Throat I am.” She leaned back against the loaded countertop. “I don’t want you to stay. They might see your car.”

  “’They’? Isn’t that a little paranoid?”

  “I don’t know what’s paranoid. I don’t know anything any more. What do you want to talk to me about?”

  Rose sat down. The chair seat was a little sticky; so was the table when she put her fingers on it. “Why do you think George Shreed was behind the accusation that I betrayed classified material?”

  She tapped ash into the dirty sink. “I was in a meeting where George pushed your investigation really hard. I think something had happened, like it was going to be called off, and he went ballistic. It wasn’t even the right meeting for it.” She shrugged. “So, I called you up.”

  “Do you hate Shreed?”

  Sally thought about that. “Yeah, I suppose so. He destroyed my career.” She chuckled again. “My marriage, I destroyed by myself.” She drank from a glass that had been standing on a windowsill over the sink. “Your husband’s a nice guy. I liked him.”

  “Let me help you.”

  “No, no, it’s me who’s helping you. What are you, drunk?” She smiled. “You want to help me, do the dishes?”

  Rose stood. “You got a sponge?”

  “I’m joking.”

  “I’m not. I like to do things. Come on—let’s clean up a little.”

  “My place is filthy, right?”

  “Right.” Rose smiled. “You want to wash or dry?”

  “I want to get drunk and pass out. But I’m not that far gone yet, and I have terrible hangovers. Plus I have to go to work every day, and would you believe that I take that very seriously? Even now.”

  And then she began to talk. She dried and Rose washed, and Sally talked and Rose listened. Later, they sat in the now cleaner kitchen and Rose drank a weak vodka-and-tonic and Sally made coffee. “I don’t want to be a drunk,” she said. “I really don’t. But God! You get tired of yourself. Weepy, whiney, self-pitying you—I mean me.” She chuckled again. “I haven’t told you anything you came to hear.”

  “As a matter of fact, you have.”

  “What, you came to hear my life story?” She knelt suddenly and put her hands on Rose’s arm, looking slightly up at her. “Look, I wanted to help you because I saw Shreed blow up over you, and I know what a bastard he is. But now—they know, which means that he knows, and that man can do anything. I can’t help you any more.”

  “Maybe I can help you.”

  Sally shook her head. “Stay away from me. I’m poison now. Anyway, there’s nothing else I know.”

  “You don’t know what you know, do you? You worked for Shreed; you’ve watched him; maybe somehow you know why he came after me.”

  Sally shook her head. “You may just have been standing there. A target of opportunity. George sees the world in only one way—his. He’s incapable of seeing somebody else’s point of view. He sees the world this way, and he sets out to do something to the world, and if you’re standing in the way, too bad for you!”

  “What’s he trying to do to the world, that I’m standing in the way?”

  “No idea. No idea at all.”

  “He put the blame on me for something about a project called Peacemaker.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with that. I was running Section 6 then—that’s George’s old stand, which I got when he was moved up—so I didn’t sit in on meetings or anything that involved Peacemaker. Only afterward, we heard that it had been aborted by the White House, and maybe there was a security leak. Are you supposed to be the leak?”

  “What’s Section 6?”

  “I can’t really tell you that. All I’m supposed to say is that we vetted certain aspects of operations.”

  “Peacemaker didn’t qualify as an operation?”

  Sally hesitated, then grinned. “You’re quick—quicker than me and this vodka, anyway. No, I guess it’s okay to say—Peacemaker was someplace else.”

  “But Shreed was in it, I know, because he had this slimy character named Suter planted on the Peacemaker project team. I know, because I was there.”

  “Holy God, Ray Suter? Mister Makeout?”

  Rose’s eyebrows went up. “You, too?”

  “Sweetie, he tried to come on to me the first time we were alone—and I was married then. I still get the eye from him.”

  Rose stared at her and smiled. “He’s George Shreed’s assistant.”

  “Oh, I know that—” Sally straightened. “Oh, no—I’m not going to bed with Ray Suter so you can know what George Shreed is up to!”

  “You wouldn’t have to go to bed with him.”

  Sally put down the almost empty glass. “You’re dangerous, lady. Good at your job, right?” She took out another cigarette. “And I thought George Shreed was ruthless!”

  “Sally, I only meant you could talk to him. You might hear something.”

  “Actually, he can be kind of charming.” She blew smoke out of the side of her mouth. “Don’t count on anything.”

  Rose stood. “Don’t risk it. I know you’re worried about—them.”

  “Yeah. But I’m soberer now—drunks are paranoid, did you know that? My father was an alcoholic. They lie, they cheat, they steal, they think everybody’s against them. Comes with the territory.”

  They talked a minute or two more. Rose asked no more questions. Sally steered her through the dark house with one hand on an arm. At a front window, she paused and looked out through a narrow gap in the curtain, just as she must have when Rose rang the bell. “Just checking,” she said. “So I’m a little paranoid.”

  The sky was dead black—no stars, no moon. “I gotta run; it’s going to rain!” Rose said goodnight and walked to her car and turned to wave.

  Before she got into the car she found that all four tires had been slashed.

  Washington.

  It began to rain at ten o’clock. By ten-twenty, the rain was heavy, and the cars slowed and the sidewalks were empty. Crime went down.

  The gutters were swept clean, and the rubbish flowed down storm grates into the sewers, where gathering rainwater rushed through black tunnels and splashed into the rivers. By midnight, three underpasses in the city were flooded and cars could not go through. By two in the morning, the North Branch of the Anacostia was running fast and brown. The fish ladder in Riverdale was entirely under water. A supermarket cart that had lain on its side, exposed like the skeleton of some beached sea creature, disappeared in the flood and washed three hundred yards downstream before it caught in a dead tree. The banks, mud and concrete riprap, were cleansed of the trash and glass and condoms that had been piling up for weeks.

  Ray Suter woke and heard the rain and decided that today was the day.

  NCISHQ.

  Dukas was in his office at seven next morning and on the phone to Abe Peretz at
seven-ten.

  “Mike, what the hell are you doing awake at this hour?”

  “I’ve been awake since five. I’ve had two women in my apartment all night.”

  “That would keep you awake, all right.”

  “Abe, I was sleeping on the floor, because Rose was in my bedroom and somebody you don’t know was on the sofa. Listen up—I need some advice and maybe some help.” He told Abe about the slashing of Rose’s tires. She had called him from Sally Baranowski’s and asked for his advice, and he had told her to call the police, and then he had got AAA and had picked the two women up and taken them back to his place.

  “Okay,” Abe said. “I got the picture. What d’you want from me?”

  “I need a place for this woman to stay a couple days while she gets over being scared to death. You got a big house. How about it?”

  Abe hesitated, then sighed. “Bea’ll have a cow.”

  “So, cows give milk. Tell her it’s for national security.”

  “Yeah, fat chance. Anyway, sure, I’ll make it okay.”

  “This woman I’m sending to you, Sally Baranowski, she was giving us information about Shreed. Rose went to see her, and bingo! her car tires are slashed. Funny coincidence.”

  “So you think—Mmm.”

  “I’m thinking of you getting mugged and beaten up. See, if the way he works is first he sends a warning—like you first getting your orders changed, then getting beaten up—and then he really gets nasty, then Sally really maybe has something to worry about. That’s why I want her safe for a while.”

  “But how did he find out about her?”

  “It looks like there’s a leak in CIA Internals.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “Yeah. And I can’t go to my man there, because if he knows I’m talking to Sally, he’s going to say I’m violating inter-agency policy and he’ll tie me up in official bullshit and I’ll be spending all my time trotting around Washington covering my ass. So talk gently to this woman and see if there’s anything else you can get out of her—anything like similarities to what happened to you. I’ll be honest with you, all of a sudden I think we’re dealing with a dangerous man.”

  “What about Rose?”

  “Rose is a rock, you know that. She’s okay. Anyway, I don’t think he’ll hurt her, because he needs her—if I’m right that he implicated her in the first place to cover himself, then he needs her out there for the same reason.” He hesitated. “Just to be on the safe side, I told her to carry.”

  “A gun?”

  “No, a sandwich. Jesus, Abe. He could be a dangerous guy! You’re the one who said that everything is personal for him.”

  “We keep saying ‘he’—you’re sure it’s Shreed? That’s a pretty sensational conclusion, Mike.”

  “I’m not sure. Nothing’s sure. I’m just trying to find a place to stand on, Abe—that’s why I’m coming to you.”

  After he had hung up, he stared at the chart on the door for several minutes. Then he walked over and wrote in the dates and approximate times of the tire-slashing and his having spoken Sally Baranowski’s name to Carl Menzes. After a moment, he added Peretz’s mugging and, way off by itself, the death of the Iranian agent in Kenya. Then he sat at the desk again and thought about how he would use three agents he had asked for to help in the investigation. While he drafted an outline of assignments for them he was thinking about Sally Baranowski and the CIA Internal Investigations Directorate.

  When he had the outline, he went up the hall to talk to his boss, who, instead of giving him the three agents even part-time, told him to spend less money, not more.

  “I got a budget meeting Monday, Mike; I gotta show some cuts. No, you can’t have three agents; you can’t have one agent, and I’m tempted to jerk Triffler back so I can put his salary someplace else. Forget Siciliano for now; it’s a long-term thing. Word from ONI is to concentrate on the inter-agency abuse of power—it’s cheaper.”

  Going down the hall, Dukas thought, Like hell I will, and he grabbed his telephone, thinking about Sally Baranowski and the slashed tires, and dialed Carl Menzes’s number.

  “Carl, Mike Dukas,” he said as soon as the call was answered. “You got a leak in your office, and if you don’t plug it today, I’m going to interview George Shreed under oath.”

  That was the day that Ray Suter got ready to kill Tony Moscowic. For Dukas and Triffler, it was a day of frustration—paperwork, dead ends, more questions. The Jefferson made its way through Suez. Sally Baranowski, frightened, stayed in the Peretzes’ house all day and shadowed Bea Peretz like a child shadowing its mother. George Shreed waited.

  19

  Suburban Maryland.

  Ray Suter had to concentrate on every detail of driving, every stop, every turn, because he was so excited he felt as if he was on a drug. If he took his hands from the wheel, they shook. His knees felt weak, his thighs liquid. He kept belching.

  The little .22 and its cardboard silencer were taped under the dashboard. He was in it now, so high on the idea of killing that he didn’t care whether the silencer worked or not. He was just going to do it.

  I can do anything.

  Moscowic was waiting for him outside a Wendy’s on Route 1. Another of his goddam stupid tricks, Suter thought. Countersurveillance routes, secret phone calls, out-of-the-way pickup points—what a shithead! Moscowic always dictated the wheres and hows, and Suter had let him; it had suckered Moscowic into thinking of Suter as a loudmouthed jerk who paid big money.

  And now the loudmouthed jerk was going to kill him.

  “Wet,” Moscowic said when he got in. A drizzle was sifting down, and he had beads of moisture all over his cheap rain jacket. “What’s up, you gotta get me out on a night like this?”

  “You said you were going out anyway.”

  “A manner of speaking.”

  Whatever the hell that meant.

  “You said you wanted to show me something,” Moscowic said.

  “That’s right.”

  “What, for Christ’s sake? I was watching television.”

  “Then you aren’t sacrificing anything, are you?”

  Moscowic began to tell him all the things that were good about television. Suter let him talk, glad to have him distracted while he drove to Bladensburg and the remains of an old pier that was crumbling into the North Branch.

  “Hey, where we going?” Moscowic said, at last aware of the industrial landscape around them. Or maybe he had always been aware; he was sharper, Suter had to remind himself, than he seemed.

  “Where I can show you this thing.”

  “What is it?”

  “I have to show you.” Suter heard suspicion in Moscowic’s voice, so he added, “It’s about the kid. The hacker.”

  “Nickie?”

  “That hacker, yes.”

  “What’s he done? I bet he done nothing. He’s good—you know the judge that sent him up called him a menace to the new economy? What’s he done?”

  “I have to show you.”

  Suter glanced over, saw, in the lights from another car, Moscowic’s frown. Moscowic seemed to like Nickie. Or was it simply that Nickie was his discovery?

  They passed the darkened Indian Queen Tavern, and Suter made a quick right and left, and Moscowic said, “Hey.”

  “What now?”

  “Where the hell?” Moscowic was turned almost all the way around to look behind them. “We’re heading for the fucking river. There’s nothing over here.”

  “There’s a place to stand. The only place you can see what I want to show you.”

  “It’s across the river?”

  “Exactly.”

  “How come we aren’t across the river?”

  Suter gave the sort of sigh he hoped sounded like righteous exasperation. His right leg was vibrating on the gas pedal, and he felt as if he was going to jump right out of his skin, leaving his clothes and his skin sitting there, driving the stupid car with this stupid boob in it. He took deep breaths.

&
nbsp; “This is not a good neighborhood,” Moscowic said. “Jesus, why didn’t you tell me, I’d’ve brought a weapon. Jesus, Suter.”

  Suter let the car glide to a stop. A hundred yards farther along, the lights from a marina glowed between the leaves of sodden trees. On their left, a wall of greenery hid the highway, and on their right a twisted hurricane fence guarded what had probably been a junkyard. Beyond it, across the river, the lights of an old working-class town and the high-rises of a project were haloed by drizzle.

  “No way you can see Nickie’s apartment from here!” Moscowic said.

  “I didn’t say you could. Come on.”

  When he got out, Suter thought his legs would give way. He leaned one hand on the car and took another deep breath. “Come on.”

  “I think you’re a wacko,” Moscowic said, but he got out.

  Suter opened the glove compartment and took out a pair of lightweight binoculars, which Moscowic studied, even leaning back in a little to see what Suter had. He knows, Suter thought. Or he’s just always suspicious.

  “Here.” He handed the binoculars to Moscowic. “You’ll need these.”

  He had thought the binoculars were a brilliant touch. They gave him cover as he closed Moscowic’s door and then grabbed the .22, feeling his hands almost too strengthless to pull it loose from its tape. He held it by his side with his left hand as he locked the car.

  “Let’s go,” he said. He started down the path beside the hurricane fence. He didn’t look back, didn’t wait; he had planned all of this, every step, but he hadn’t factored in his own tension. It was the worst thing he had ever gone through. Not from any horror of killing, not from repugnance at the act, but from the tension.

  I can do anything.

  “This better be good,” Moscowic said behind him.

  The path was greasy with mud, and there were puddles right across it in several places. Suter couldn’t balance well enough to take the sides; he simply waded through. Moscowic took the sides, chuckling at Suter. “Ruining your shoes,” Moscowic said. “This really worth a pair of shoes, Mister S.?” He laughed again.