Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  Shreed stared down at him. “Morphine,” he said.

  The child vanished into a crack between two of the buildings. Shreed started forward, but he heard one of the cops behind him grunt and then mutter something that certainly sounded negative—Don’t? Not yet? Not him?

  A man stepped from a doorway several houses along the street. He gestured at Shreed, his palm open and then cupping closed, open and closed, open and closed: Follow me.

  Shreed swayed forward.

  Jamal Khouri was a detective sergeant in the Nicosia police and an agent for the PLO. The two jobs rarely conflicted, his duties to the PLO comprising mostly reporting on what he was doing and what was going on inside the Nicosia police. Yet he was a loyal Palestinian and hoped to return to what had been his father’s house in Palestine before the State of Israel had come into being. A displaced man, he took his divided life, his divided loyalty, as a given.

  When he saw the man with the wooden canes, he was walking a self-created beat to check on drug activity and his own informants along the route. He cared little about petty drug sales; unless they became violent, he ignored them, yet petty drug dealers made good snitches if they were rousted now and then, and so he walked this route once or twice a week, checking, reminding them of his presence, getting tips.

  And then he saw the man with the canes. A memory clicked—a very recent memory. Just before he had left home, in fact, an e-mail had flashed on his computer from a comrade in Turkey who had sent it to his entire list of Islamic contacts: An American who had murdered an Iranian agent was wanted. There had been a photo attached. And the telltale clue that the wanted man walked with canes.

  Khouri watched the man’s painful progress over the rough brown stones until he met with a petty dealer whom Khouri knew as Mustache. The man with the canes was obviously an American; Khouri would have taken note of him even if he hadn’t had the canes. He felt a rare excitement, and he moved closer, keeping to the wall of the buildings as the two men huddled in a doorway, just visible to him across the street and beyond the corner of a building that hid one shoulder and leg of the man with the canes.

  Khouri moved with his back against the house walls. Mustache spotted him and even gave him a look, as if to say, I’m just doing business here; don’t blame me.

  The American’s back was turned. Khouri wanted to see his face. Then, because of something Mustache did—hurrying the buy or fumbling the money—the American turned, and Khouri saw him.

  And he was sure.

  “Hey!” he shouted. He began to run, reaching across his navel to draw a Turkish copy of the .32 Mauser from a belly holster. “Hey, police—!” He said it in English, and, as he did so, he held out the gun, the barrel pointing up, the side turned toward the drug deal. “You—American—against the wall—!” He didn’t expect a man with two canes to resist.

  Then everything happened at once. The man with the canes gave some signal with one of them and shouted in rough Turkish, and Khouri shifted the gun into shooting position, stopping in the middle of the street only ten feet away. Mustache detached himself from the American and backed away, pushing money and God knew what else into a side pocket. Khouri heard shouting to his left and turned, and two men were running at him and one had a gun out, not yet ready to shoot, the gun just coming from a holster behind his fat right hip.

  “Polisi!” the man shouted.

  “Police!” Khouri shouted back. He didn’t know the men, and he knew all the cops who came into this part of the city and all the cops who busted drug dealers. These were fakes, he was sure, maybe two tough guys who had been following the American to roll him.

  But the other man’s gun kept coming out and up, and Khouri shot him, and the astonished man stumbled to a stop and stared at his chest, where blood was spreading over his yellow golf shirt. Then Khouri felt a smash of terrific pain in his right arm and realized too late that the American had come close enough to hit him with a cane; his gun jumped to the pavement and clattered and slid to the gutter, and Khouri turned to fend off the crippled man, only to see him already starting away, and he tried to push back the pain in his broken arm and pursue when his legs went out from under him and he lost consciousness, his last thought that he had been shot from behind and that probably the shot had hit his spine.

  Shreed forced himself almost to a run, his legs screaming with the pain of it but strong enough to carry him to the corner, where he staggered around and out of the line of the gunshots. “Gonif!” he shouted. A woman had come out of a house and stared at him. “Gonif!” He didn’t know the Turkish word for thief, and the Yiddish word was there, somehow, blotting out the other languages in which he knew the word—French, German, an Indonesian dialect. But the woman seemed to understand. She stepped into the cross street and looked down at the carnage and began to bellow in high-pitched Turkish.

  Somebody took Shreed’s arm. He was going to resist, until he saw it was a little man years older than he with a yarmulke. He beckoned and led and talked quickly in a throaty, guttural Yiddish. “Gonif,” Shreed said, and let himself be led away. He had ten new vials of morphine in his pocket.

  Washington.

  Ray Suter was in his apartment, pacing. Suter spent a lot of time now trying to blot out the killing of Tony Moscowic. He hated to admit he had done something badly, and he knew he’d done that one abominably.

  Suter thought something was wrong, but he couldn’t identify it.

  Shreed was in Belgrade, he believed. Suter had been a little worried when Nickie the Hacker had told him that Shreed hadn’t used his computers Thursday night—a change of pattern, always troubling—but he’d signed out sick Thursday afternoon, Suter knew. Then, presumably, he’d stayed in bed Friday and flown off to Belgrade.

  Suter didn’t like Shreed’s being off someplace. With my money! Maybe that was what was wrong—too much tension carried on too long—

  When the telephone rang, Suter twitched as if he’d had an electric shock.

  “Suter.”

  “Mister Suter, this is the duty officer at CIA Seven. Would you report as soon as possible to the third floor, please? Wait in the lobby there. You’ll be met.”

  Suter knew that if he spoke, he’d stammer. What the hell is on the third floor? Is it about Tony Moscowic? He licked his lips, breathed. “What’s this about?”

  “I’m just relaying the message.” He gave it all again. Suter started to say that it was Saturday, but the voice said goodbye and was gone.

  27

  NCIS HQ.

  Late in the afternoon, Dukas was cleaning up files and handing them to Triffler, who looked stunned. Dukas had decided to bow out of the Siciliano case and take himself back to the War Crimes Tribunal.

  “But you didn’t do anything!” Triffler protested.

  “I blew the investigation.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I let somebody get too close to me, and she got information from me and she flushed the suspect. That’s culpability, Dick.” He handed over another file.

  “But, Jeez—! I was just getting used to you.”

  “Think how neat the office’ll be without me.”

  “Yeah, you’re a slob, and your management style sucks, but—I like you, Dukas.”

  Dukas, shocked, looked up at the thin black man. He was so surprised that the ringing of his phone didn’t immediately register, although his right hand went to the instrument as if it had ears of its own. Then he picked it up and turned away to cover his confusion.

  “Dukas.”

  “Mike, Mother of God, where you been?” It was Pigoreau. The satellite delay made it seem as if he was calling from the moon. “I called and called!”

  “I been at the office all day. Hey, Pig—”

  “Mike, shut up! We got a contact. On your guy, the mutilé with the canes. You with me?”

  Dukas leaned into the desk and pressed the phone tighter to his ear. “Shreed?”

  “Some guy thinks he saw him in Cyprus, but it�
�s a big ball of shit, Mike. We’re trying to get clarity, but all we know is there was shooting, this guy’s in hospital, the cops are running around like dogs with hards on. A complete brouhaha, but I had to call you, because maybe your guy was there.”

  “Who’s in the hospital? Shreed?” His heart was pounding.

  “No, the guy who thinks he saw him. He’s a Palestinian, I think, but also a cop—I think we’re talking about the same guy. Maybe there were two cops, I can’t tell, they’re all fucked up. We got the story from the mujaheddin because he wants his thousand dollars.”

  “Holy shit. Gimme a minute here, Pig.” He was crouched over the desk; when he glanced up, Triffler was staring at him through the crates. Dukas covered the mouthpiece and lifted his head long enough to growl, “Some guy thinks he’s spotted Shreed.” Then he lowered his head again and said, “Pig, you there?”

  After the satellite delay, Pigoreau said, “Yes, yes.”

  “Where in Cyprus, Pig?”

  “Nicosia, Turkish sector.”

  “I’m on my way, Pig. Get me some contact data—names, phone numbers. The hospital where this guy is. Don’t call me; I’ll call you, ’cause I’m gonna be on the run.”

  Satellite pause. “This may be nothing, Mike.”

  “Pig, right now I’m settling for nothing. I’ll call you back.”

  He hung up and swung on Triffler, invigorated. “Dick, get NCIS Naples on a STU, tell them I’ve got a breaking case in Nicosia, Cyprus, and I need local support. Jesus, they’re Turks there. I’ll need a translator. Plus I want an in with the local Palestinians—NCIS Naples should be able to help on that, because the Nav port-calls in Haifa and God knows where else, and they’ll have Palestinians on the payroll. Got it?”

  Triffler nodded and reached for his telephone. Dukas reached for his own and began to thumb through a limp-paged old address book for a travel agent.

  “You reporting this to Menzes at the Agency?” Triffler called across.

  “Negative. If I get a positive confirmation, then—then we’ll see.”

  It was only after five that Dukas remembered that Sally Baranowski was supposed to be coming to his apartment for dinner. And to deliver the Chinese Checkers disk. And, perhaps, other things. Well, that was all down the tube now. He called the Peretzes and cursed their kids for tying up all three of their telephones. (How could two kids use three phones? With a computer, he supposed.) He called four times and never got through.

  “Dick!” Dukas was heading out the door. He wanted Sally’s computer disk, but he was going to be on an eight o’clock flight out of BWI, no matter what. “Call these numbers every five minutes until you get somebody.” He scuttled back in to scribble the Peretz numbers on a file folder. Triffler was horrified to see the clean surface of the file ruined. “Give them this message: Mike has been called away. Will Sally please get the disk to his apartment before seven. Got it?”

  Triffler repeated it in the bored voice of somebody who has a crack memory for detail. Then he smiled at Dukas—a rare moment—and said, “I thought you were giving up the investigation?”

  “I am—as soon as I catch George Shreed. Look, Dick, I don’t know where the hell I’m going from here, so it’s your baby now. Okay? You can run with it?”

  Triffler held out his hand. “Not as well as you, but I’ll do my best.”

  Dukas was in his apartment by five-forty, but hardly in the door when the telephone was jangling; he ran for it, thinking it would be Pigoreau again. Instead, it was Triffler.

  “It never rains but it pours, Mike. The cops found a body in the Anacostia River.”

  Dukas was fixed on Shreed, and the only body he could picture was the vanished CIA man’s. Triffler heard his confusion and said, “Cops, Mike. A body. They ID it as a private investigator named Tony Moscowic. Been in the water two-three days, they think.”

  “Dick, what the hell are you telling me?”

  “The guy you saw in front of Shreed’s house, Mike—remember? The day we went to check it out because Shreed’s computers were on, and the cleaning woman had her car in the driveway, and I was driving and—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I remember! So what?”

  “You got part of the license plate of a car that had a guy in it. You made me put out a flash on the partial, which the state DMV got seventy-three hits on. So a smart cop in Bladensburg, he did a routine check on their corpse and he got a hit on our list from the license plate. Get this: six .22 slugs in him and his face was bashed in with what they think was a concrete block.”

  Dukas didn’t see how it fit. He didn’t see why he should care. That part of the investigation was behind him, back in what seemed another age, before Shreed had split. Yet he felt the responsibility of having turned the investigation over to Triffler, a man who would want to dot every i and cross every t.

  As if he had heard the thought, Triffler said, “You’re the one who can ID him, Mike, and I need that to go forward. I was driving—I didn’t see him.”

  “Connect him with Shreed’s house, you mean. Yeah. What’d we do about that cleaning woman?”

  “Nothing; we been too busy. You think I should move on her?”

  Dukas’s mind was leaping ahead. “Yeah, because what we have, I think, Dick, is somebody else also on Shreed—the hacker that Valdez is watching, now this guy. Can you run with this, Dick?”

  “You bet. But you got to ID the guy—put him at Shreed’s that day.”

  Dukas groaned. “Have the cops fax a photo to airport security at BWI. I’ll look at it on my way out. It’s the best I can do. Hey, did you get the Peretzes?”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Rotten kids.”

  He was packed and wondering what he was going to do for money when his telephone rang again. This time it was Abe Peretz, whom Triffler had finally reached. Sally Baranowski was out.

  “Tell her I can’t make it tonight. She had something important to give me. But something’s come up with the investigation and I’m outa here, Abe. Goddamit.”

  “You flying? What airport?”

  “BWI. British Air to London, eight.”

  “If she comes in, I’ll tell her. Maybe we can do something.”

  Then he hit an ATM and headed for Maryland, dumped his car in the satellite lot at BWI and waited through what seemed an endless trip to the terminal.

  The wait at the counter was even longer, but he got through that with the help of a security man to whom he showed his NCIS badge, pleading the need for speed because he had to look at a police fax in the security office. He had twenty minutes before his flight left when he arrived, panting, at the security office and again presented his badge and his ID. A fax was slapped down in front of him, and he was looking at two photos, one of Tony Moscowic as he had been when he got his driver’s license and one as he had ended up on a gurney at the morgue. The desk man who had given it to him averted his eyes.

  “You seen this?” Dukas said.

  “Once was enough.”

  “Never know it was the same guy.” He called Triffler’s number on his cellphone and left the message that, yes, the man in the driver’s license photo was the man he had seen near Shreed’s house. Then he was pounding along the corridors of the terminal, cursing the line at the security check, running, dodging, thinking, Tony Moscowic, what did you ever do to George Shreed to deserve this?

  Dukas was at the gate, out of breath, his heart racing, and the airline people were waiting for him, the last passenger to board.

  And so was Sally Baranowski.

  “I thought you’d want this,” she said. She held out an envelope.

  “Boarding pass and passport, please,” the attendant said.

  “You’re great,” Dukas said. “This is great.”

  “I knew it was important to you.”

  “Would you board, please, sir?”

  “This isn’t exactly gnocchi with butternut squash.”

  “Well—another rain check—”

  “P
lease board the aircraft, sir.”

  “Now I’m the one asking for a rain check.”

  “Well—any time—”

  “Sir, if you don’t board, I’m going to close the aircraft door!”

  “Yeah. Well—” Dukas thought of kissing Sally Baranowski, but he thought he hadn’t known her long enough, and women didn’t like that stuff. He was wrong. She grabbed his arms and kissed him, a big one right on the mouth. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  Dukas grinned. “You bet.” Then he was racing down the carpeted tunnel to the plane.

  28

  Beijing 0500 GMT (1300L) Sunday.

  Colonel Chen rubbed the bald spot on the top of his head and then rubbed his face with a movement so habitual that he was unaware he had done it. Then he checked his uniform in the mirror for the second time, pulled sharply at the hem of his tunic, and stepped through the swinging door of the officers’ lavatory. The corridor was packed with senior officers, messengers, attendants, and civilian functionaries.

  He breathed in sharply one last time and exhaled with the control of a devotee of t’ai chi. Then he pushed open the door to the Red Room and entered, walking briskly past the ring of desks. The generals were in the center of the room, sitting or standing in an orderly crowd in positions that delineated rank and merit. The army dominated; the air force held important corners; the Navy was relegated to the fringes, although today a single admiral had made his way to the central group where the Old Man sat majestically in a carved chair.

  Chen was the only intelligence officer in the Red Room. The old guard distrusted intelligence officers.

  “South Fleet reports that a scout group of US aircraft approached our ships but turned away as soon as our fighter cover engaged,” the naval officer in the center read with enthusiasm. He was a southerner, and he gestured with his free hand as if giving a speech. Chen pursed his lips in distaste.