Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  In forty hours, she would be someone else, somewhere else, with a lot of money. Or she would be dead. Either way, by then, the watchers would be welcome to the file.

  First, she had to meet Alan Craik in Bahrain.

  30

  Nicosia.

  The hospital on the Turkish side of the green line was like many Dukas had seen around the world—better than most, hardly luxurious, a place where he hoped he’d be okay himself if somebody shot him.

  “Doctor Irmanli.” Wahad introduced the doctor as if he’d invented him, although Dukas suspected they’d never met before. The doctor gave a small bow and ignored Dukas’s hand. So much for Greek-Turkish relations.

  “How are the two policemen who were injured?” Dukas said. Irmanli looked at Wahad, who translated. Wahad had told him that the doctor spoke English, but he wasn’t going to do so to Dukas. Irmanli rapped out words.

  Wahad translated. “One had a bullet in the right pectoral, did some bleeding, is doing well. The other—the Palestinian, a detective—was shot in the lower back and suffered shock to his spine, which temporarily paralyzed him. He is now able to move his limbs, but pieces of the bullet are in his right kidney and elsewhere. He is stabilized.”

  “Can I talk to them?”

  “The doctor disapproves.”

  “Tell the doctor I’ll risk his disapproval. I need to talk to both of them.”

  The doctor understood that well enough without the translation, because he spun around and gestured to a bulky man twenty feet away. Dukas had already seen him, registered cop and risked a small smile in his direction. The man lumbered over and, to Dukas’s surprise, stuck out his right hand.

  “Gorzum, Turkish Republic police,” he said. “I am six months in Minneapolis.”

  “Dukas, Naval Criminal Investigative Service. These hurt boys yours?”

  Gorzum shrugged. “I am sent to deal with you.” He had a thick accent, a voice that sounded phlegmy and muffled, but the tone was not unfriendly. “I am information and liaise. Just now keeping the medias from the door.” He grinned and showed a gold tooth.

  “The hardest job on the force,” Dukas said. “When can I see your boys?”

  “Oh, now. Now, if you like. But—no tricks. I am six months with Minneapolis police as intern, I see a lot of tricks. Don’t do none.”

  “Okay, no water torture and no good-cop, bad-cop. That’s it?”

  Gorzum unfolded a sheet of paper and coughed in its direction. “We get this from your Navy criminal service. They ask cooperation and etcetera like that. What I want to know, what the hell you doing here?” His gold tooth flashed.

  “I’m following an American.”

  “Some important guy, you follow him to here!” Despite the emphasis, it was a question.

  “We think he stole Navy secrets.” This wasn’t strictly true, but it was simple, and anyway Dukas had spent his waking hours on the plane thinking that if this really was George Shreed who had turned up in Cyprus, he could be as dangerous here as he might have been in China, because the million-dollar question was, What might George Shreed have brought with him? So saying “Navy secrets” was merely a convenient way of expressing the fear that George Shreed, with access to a vast amount of American classified data, could be a very dangerous man.

  “He was buying morphine,” Gorzum said. The word morphine hit Dukas, even through his fatigue. Momentarily, it made no sense—Shreed had no record of drug use—and then he saw it. That’s how he got out of the US without attracting notice. The sonofabitch is walking!

  “Morphine for his pain,” Dukas said. “He’s crippled—handicapped—Bad legs.”

  “Buying drugs very bad thing here. Especially tourist. Bad example.”

  “You want to prosecute him?”

  Gorzum nodded.

  “First you gotta catch him.”

  Gorzum nodded some more.

  “Can you catch him?”

  Gorzum shrugged, then smiled. “Can you?”

  Washington.

  Alone in his grubby computer center, Valdez analyzed the Shreed-Anna chat-room exchange and noted that their next meeting time was to be in thirty hours. She must be some bitch, man—she’s meeting with Al Craik today, getting it on with old Shreed in thirty hours. Valdez noted the facts in a window and sent the note, encrypted, to O’Neill.

  He didn’t know her birthday, however, and he didn’t have the tools to simultaneously select thousands of numbered Annas at the hub, so he couldn’t figure out the account number she had given Shreed in the chat room. He wasn’t even sure her first name was Anna, in fact, so he tried watching Shreed’s laptop until Shreed sent an encrypted document in fits and starts, as if he had a poor connection. Valdez shook his head. Too many bytes in the encryption key. Beyond his reach. Finito.

  Bahrain 1600 GMT (1900L) Sunday.

  The restaurant where Alan was meeting Anna sat in a lane behind the Gulf Hotel. The street was residential, and the atmosphere warm, friendly, and European, despite the Thai menu. The patrons varied from expat Brits looking for a night out to hungry students with limited budgets. It didn’t feature live floorshows or breathtaking waitresses and so was not a favorite with the US military personnel living nearby. Alan stood out a little as he went to his table; too American, not tanned enough to be an expat. An Aussie at the bar gave him a hard stare.

  The menu appeared unchanged since Alan had last eaten here in 1993. He ordered an iced tea and watched the door. Scenarios chased each other around his head. Shreed had offered her more money. Alan had been a sucker from the first and she was somehow allied with Shreed. She had been playing with him since Trieste.

  The time for the meeting came and went. Alan drank his second iced tea, and then a third. He ordered satay, and found that he had devoured the plate without noticing the taste. She wasn’t coming. His feelings about that were too complicated to pin down. Relief was there, and some little element of hurt that angered him all the more.

  “Planning to eat without me, Alan?”

  He was sitting over the wreckage of the appetizer with two sticky hands and a spot on the front of his shirt.

  She was wearing a crisp linen shirt and blue jeans, her face as perfect without its usual glitter of cosmetics as it had been in Naples. Her lips touched his cheek firmly, and he cursed inwardly when his pulse responded. He hadn’t expected to be so glad to see her.

  “Slow flight from Dubai?” He was wiping his fingers with a napkin. She sat across from him; the waiter held her chair and she held every eye in the room.

  “I had trouble getting a cab into Manama.”

  “Have a nice chat with Mister Shreed?”

  Her eyes had a faintly liquid quality that made her a difficult target for his angry stare, as if she were never too far from tears, but her head snapped round like a cat’s spotting a bird.

  “Your black friend must have told you that there was no meeting. I’m hungry. May we eat?”

  “I certainly recommend the satay.”

  “I really do apologize for being late. It is—unsuitable?”

  “Unprofessional?”

  “Really, Alan. You sound jealous.”

  Alan pondered that while the waiter was captivated by her smile and given his marching orders. Alan found that she had ordered for both of them without reference to him at any point. Rose often did the same. The picture of Rose deciding his edible future in an Afghani restaurant in Newport restored his humor. He did not want this woman. He wanted her information. And she no longer had much to offer.

  “I’m naive, Anna. I hadn’t realized that I was in a bidding contest.”

  “It isn’t a contest.”

  “There’s certainly no hurry. I know who your man is, of course; what else do you have to offer?” Too strident. Win the battle of the small talk.

  “Please, can we speak of something else while we eat?”

  “What would you like to discuss? Music?” His intended sarcasm fell flat. She tilted her head slightl
y, like a curious puppy.

  “Music would suit very well, I think. What do you like? What do you listen to, at home?”

  Alan tried to remember the last time he had listened to music, at home or anywhere else.

  “I used to like folk songs. Rose loves Italian opera.” It was as if, by saying her name, he had a talisman against the formidable magic deployed across the table. “My dad loved Wagner.”

  “Really? No rock? No Madonna?”

  He laughed, because of the image Madonna brought to mind.

  “On the boat, just before the pilots get briefed for a flight, we used to play cuts from MTV.” He looked at her for signs of interest.

  “Yes, I know MTV.”

  “Back during the Gulf War, one of Madonna’s songs was top on the list. I don’t know if anyone cared about the tune, but every pilot liked to watch her move around, you know? That, and the Kim Basinger dance scene from Nine and a Half Weeks. Every time I hear those songs, I feel like I’m about to launch.”

  Anna laughed, the real laugh that didn’t cut out when the owner was through with it.

  “English is so full of innuendo, isn’t it?”

  Alan held his ground. “Do you know Italian?”

  She shook her head, but laughed.

  “What do you listen to?”

  “I love music,” she said simply. “I can listen to almost anything. I used to listen to Mozart, over and over. I just bought some of what you call ‘alternative’ in Dubai.” She stopped, as if by saying the name she had raised a ghost.

  “I think you ought to tell me a little more about the alternative in Dubai, Anna.” Not bad, he thought.

  Her mouth set in a hard line. The arrival of the entranced waiter arrested her reply, and a whole tray of dishes was laid before them. The waiter began to load their plates with samples of each dish, missing no opportunity to lean over her or speak to her. Alan picked up a fork and took a mouthful of perfect basil beef.

  She leaned over her food. She smelled like cardamom, but she was hissing mad.

  “Did we have sex some time when I wasn’t paying attention? Do I have some special relationship with you, that you should question me about whom I may meet?”

  Alan reached for his anger at her, just touched it to be sure it was there.

  “I have some natural concerns about you meeting the man you described as a ‘mole in the CIA.’ That’s fair, I think.”

  Again, the angry, quick head movement. And then a sigh.

  “So you know.”

  “Yes.”

  She switched her attention to her food. She carved through the dishes on the table like a cat with a tin of tuna, but then she paused and dabbed her mouth with her napkin.

  “Tell me about your wife.”

  Something about the way the question was asked put him on his guard. Or more on his guard.

  “Why?”

  “She is important to you, yes?”

  “She’s everything to me. She’s, oh, beautiful and smart, but that’s not…” He tapered off. She was considering him again.

  “Did you bring me money?”

  “Yes. Okay, Anna, we tried music. What do you like?”

  “In music? Were you listening?”

  “No, in life. Find a new subject.”

  “I like fine rifles.”

  “Rifles.” Alan flashed on a conversation he had overheard on the boat—worst dates. I was meeting a spy in Bahrain…

  “Yes! Efremov had a few, and we bought more. A Holland and Holland nitro express. One of those wonderful US Marine rifles with the half-inch bore. We were going to go lion hunting in the mountains, except that we both felt there weren’t enough left to justify the hunt.”

  “Iran has lions?”

  She looked at him as if he was an idiot. He hastened to correct the impression.

  “I have a 1918 Springfield armory sniper rifle.”

  “With a star on the muzzle?” She looked impressed.

  “Absolutely.”

  She leaned forward, her food forgotten.

  “Have you shot it?”

  “Sure. My friend and I tried some long shots.”

  “You shoot together?”

  “We shoot skeet, when we can.”

  She frowned.

  “Efremov and I used to lie in the rocks near an old quarry and shoot for hours. Your friend is Harry O’Neill?”

  Alan looked at the liquid eyes and saw that she knew the answer, so he nodded.

  “Your friend Harry. He runs a security company. He is a very impressive man.”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “Shall we have dessert?” She smiled. “What other rifles do you own?”

  NCIS HQ.

  Triffler had meant to go home but he found himself in his office. He supposed that there had been some consciousness in getting there, but it was a little eerie, to set out for home on a Sunday morning and wind up here. The office was eerie, too, the corridors empty.

  He looked at the room he had shared with Dukas and that was now his again. The wall of plastic crates looked suddenly tacky, the plants and the tschotchkes foolish. He made a pot of coffee, whistling, thinking about Moisher and his case. He took a cup of coffee and sat at Dukas’s desk because it was actually his own old desk and he felt in charge there.

  George Shreed, he thought. How do we get from George Shreed to Tony Moscowic? Or how do I get Moisher to go from Tony Moscowic to Shreed without passing Go? How do I tell Menzes that there’s some third party, and the third party may be connected with Tony Moscowic because he got five big ones for “entry into S’s”? That has to be important to the CIA. Has to be. Maybe it’s even important to Dukas somehow.

  He could just get on the blower and tell Menzes all about it, but he had liked Menzes when he had met him at the Old Commonwealth with Dukas, and he didn’t want to screw him. How could he give this part of the investigation to Menzes and not taint it?

  He closed the door so that he could see the chart he had made of Shreed’s life. It wasn’t quite up to date—he hadn’t entered Shreed’s running away. If in fact Shreed had run away and hadn’t fallen down his cellar stairs or had a stroke while he was in a movie. Triffler looked it all over and then looked it all over again.

  And then he saw the letters A M, and H. Full caps.

  Angel of Mercy Hospice.

  Tony Moscowic had taken three thousand dollars to bug a hospice?

  An old phrase from a criminal-justice class rattled through his head: death-bed confession. But it was Shreed’s wife who had been in there, not Shreed. But she would have known things, wouldn’t she? So that somebody who wanted to know Shreed’s secrets might have—He thought it through and was half-ready to believe that Menzes himself had paid Moscowic to bug the AMH, except that that wasn’t the way the Agency usually operated. Some other country? What rinky-dink intelligence service would hire a Tony Moscowic? Yes—North Korea, Sudan—you name it.

  He got out Moisher’s card and called him at home. On the phone, Moisher sounded even younger than he did in the flesh. Triffler wanted to ask for his parents.

  “Hey, Detective Moisher, Dick Triffler. I had a thought.”

  “Yeah?” As in Yeah, yeah, yeah, pant, pant!

  Triffler was leafing through the Northern Virginia phone book, and he didn’t speak until he was sure that the Angel of Mercy Hospice was listed in just that way. Then he said, “About that AMH.”

  “Hey, yeah!”

  “You think of looking in the phone book?”

  “Yellow pages?”

  “No, the white pages where they list businesses and stuff like that. You said it was a place, not a person, right? It just occurred to me that you could look under the As, and under there find things that also had an M and an H.”

  “That’d be a lot of looking.”

  “Well, yeah, because you’d have to do DC and Northern Virginia as well as PG County and maybe Montgomery, right?”

  “Boy, that’s a lot.”

 
; Triffler wanted to reach down the phone and grab his throat. “But it might pay off!”

  “How would I know?”

  Triffler suppressed a groan. “You’d have to make a list, and then visit every place on the list with a photo of the dead guy and ask if they’d ever seen him or if they knew his name. You might get lucky.”

  “Gee, that’s a lot of places to visit.”

  “Yeah. I’d get right on it.” He heard Moisher sighing, like a man whose Sunday has just been taken away from him. “I’ll bet if you worked it right, you could get the Virginia and DC cops to do their areas for you.” He was counting the number of AMH businesses. “After all, how many can there be?”

  Not so many, actually.

  After he hung up, he smiled. If Moisher would get on the stick, it would work—if, that is, somebody at the hospice remembered Tony Moscowic.

  If not, maybe he’d have to tell Menzes and let him figure how to keep his case from being tainted.

  31

  Dubai, UAE 1615 GMT (1915L).

  Harry O’Neill was sipping a second cup of coffee in the restaurant of the Hilton, staring out the enormous windows at the dhows drawn up along the pier in the last rays of sunset. Most of them were from Iran, laden with carpets and saffron, opium and marijuana. They were at the forefront of Harry’s thoughts because he was trying to judge if Shreed might attempt to use one of the boats to cross to Iran and disappear. He hadn’t heard from Djalik, who was supposed to be following Shreed, and he didn’t know what to do next. His watch told him that Alan ought to be meeting with Anna at that moment, but his concern was fixed on Shreed. He knew he ought to call Dukas, but he was leaving his cellphone free so Djalik could get him.

  When his cellphone rang, he had it in his hand and active before it had a chance to ring a second time.

  “Harry?”

  “Dave, where the hell are you?”

  “I’m driving through the Al Hajar. Shreed crossed into Oman about an hour ago.”