Top Hook

by Gordon Kent

  Now she was alive in the night with a gun, and the thought of terrified mothers and her own mother with her throat cut on the dirt floor of the cellar enraged her, pulled at her, and with one surge of adrenaline she crossed the alley and leaped higher than the man had done, her left hand catching the edge of the wall and her body swinging, right knee over, and the man was turning, his mouth a little open, his right hand scrabbling at his belt, and still she was patient the extra half a second, and she settled her right foot on the roof and dragged the left in next to it, crouched on her haunches, both hands coming together, and his eyes were huge in his round face and her hands came together with the gun. She shot him twice in the face. His body spasmed, his kicking feet making more noise than her whole sweeping attack, and she smelled his body’s surrender of control. She sank to the roof and shook, the sweet high of adrenaline screaming in her veins in contrast to the silent village. Then she started to examine the body and the rifle.

  NCIS HQ.

  Triffler’s workday was nearing its end, and he was tired and let down after his high of the morning. He hadn’t heard a word more about Dukas, and the rest of the case seemed frozen. And then the phone rang.

  “Hey, Triffler, Carl Menzes.” Menzes was almost giggling. “Want to go on a bust?”

  “What the hell?”

  “I thought you might like to be in at the finish of something. We ID’d a kid who was in Shreed’s house and we’re getting the guy who put him up to it. We’re going to scoop them both in half an hour.”

  “Four hours ago you didn’t have zip!”

  “Yeah, well, something of this importance, we move. Plus, with the Bureau, local cops, and my own folks, I got sixty people on this since noon.”

  Sixty! Dukas would have killed for six!

  Menzes was going on. “We got the cleaning woman; she started crying as soon as my man showed his badge. Moscowic, the dead guy, bribed a cop to get her kid on a dope charge—she lets him into Shreed’s house, the kid goes free, so of course she did it. That’s what cost five Gs. So she tells us that it wasn’t Moscowic who went into the house; it was a kid, punk hairdo, the whole nine yards. And he goes in, and what do you think he does? He sits at Shreed’s computers for two hours!”

  “No shit.”

  “He’s a hacker, what else could he be? So I get to the Bureau, they have a file of these guys, and they fan some photos in front of the cleaning woman, she goes, ‘That one.’ Nick Groski—did juvenile time for computer crime, isn’t supposed to go near one for three years, ha-ha. So the local cops call his parole officer, and he’s got an address for him in College Park. You know Carnivore?”

  “What the hell is that, a game?”

  “It’s an FBI program to bug e-mail, come on! This is where it helps to have sixty people working on a case, I kid you not! By three this afternoon, they had the hacker’s Internet providers and a warrant and they’re into his e-mail, so half an hour ago, they caught their first message. It says, ‘It’s going down.’ Nice?”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I don’t get it, either, but guess who it was sent to.”

  Triffler started to say, I don’t like guessing games, but he remembered that this wasn’t Moisher and said, “Who?” instead.

  “You ready? Ray Suter. Familiar name?”

  Pause, then a light bulb. “I just interviewed him. Shreed’s assistant!”

  “The very man. Sent the e-mail to his office here at the Agency. Suter left the office twenty minutes ago and we’re trying to locate him, but we know he turned toward the Beltway and we think he’s heading for the hacker’s place in College Park. You want to go?”

  “You’re going to bust them now?”

  “I got a search warrant that’s still warm from the judge’s hand; I don’t want to let it get cold. Local cops have a warrant for the kid because of the cleaning woman’s testimony—illegal entry, plus violation of parole. If Suter’s with him when we go in, it’s conspiring with a felon, at least as a charge until we get something better. And if there’s one partial of Moscowic’s in that apartment or in Suter’s car, we’ve got suspicion of murder. Want to come along?”

  Triffler wanted to, but he knew what was the right thing to do. “If my name’s on an arrest sheet or even a report, you could be tainted. Thanks for thinking of me.”

  Menzes started to protest, then caught himself. “You’re a hell of a guy, Dick. Hang in there.”

  Washington 1430L (1830GMT).

  Suter drove through rain-wet streets with hatred in his heart for every other driver on the road. The Beltway had been nightmarish; the streets inside it were worse. Delays, near-accidents, real accidents. Asshole! he thought as he almost rear-ended a Honda that had braked suddenly. Ahead, a young woman was climbing out of a car, laughing, flirting with somebody inside—it was for her that the Honda had had to stop. Suter leaned on the horn. The woman looked down the street at the line of stopped cars, her face uncomprehending. Other horns began to sound.

  “Jesus!” Suter shrieked at his windshield. He pounded on the steering wheel.

  Five slow minutes later he pulled into the parking lot of Nickie’s apartment building. Suter’s hands were trembling. The message—It’s going down—meant only one thing: Shreed had initiated the program to pull the plug on the Chinese intelligence money. If Suter got into that money now, he’d be out of the country before morning, and then let Internal Investigations try to polygraph him!

  Lots of money. Which Nickie was going to track to its destination and then re-direct to an offshore bank account.

  Suter dodged through the rain. By the time he got to the apartment house doorway, his feet were sopped to the ankles, and he could feel water soaking through his suit jacket. His mood was foul, worsened by the weather and tension and the fear that something, somehow, would go wrong.

  One thing at a time, he thought. He had had to tell himself that all day. He had come close to panic several times, and he had had to tell himself to hold on, to go slowly, to look only at the next step. He never should have killed Moscowic. The horror of the killing, the sheer messiness of it, had spooked him. To have done it so badly! Next time, he would pay to have it done.

  He climbed the stairs to Nickie’s apartment because he couldn’t bear to wait for the elevator. At the top, breathing a little hard, he turned right and walked along the ugly corridor, hating the smells of cigarettes, cooking dinners, babies, disinfectant. Somebody was laughing. A television played. Assholes! he thought. He wanted the world, his world, emptied of all the people who got in his way, who impinged on his consciousness. Shreed’s money—his money—would do that for him.

  “Hey, Nickie,” he said when he had let himself in.

  Nickie looked up from the computer and said, “Yeah.” He had never asked about Moscowic after Moscowic had disappeared. He never asked about much of anything, in fact. Nickie lived in the computer.

  “So—it’s going down?”

  Nickie had already turned back to the screen. Suter stood behind him. Incomprehensible numbers and words were parading across the screen.

  “What’s happening?” Suter said. He couldn’t keep the tension out of his voice.

  Nickie drank from a tall plastic cup and gestured toward the screen as if to say, See for yourself. Suter wanted to grab his thin neck from behind, right now, and squeeze. To get some response from Nickie.

  “Nickie—what the fuck is happening?”

  Nickie shrugged. “It’s going down.” He was eating a Big Mac. He chewed noisily. The apartment stank of food and dirt. Suter wanted to scream.

  Outside in the parking lot, Carl Menzes sat in his car and watched the rain splashing in the puddles. He had a headset on, and he was listening to a report from an FBI agent in the apartment lobby. When the man was done, he switched his mike and talked to all his people at once. “Suter’s in the apartment. We’re going in now, and please, will the local jurisdiction double-check that you have officers in place on the stairs
and near the windows, because one or both of these guys may try to leave. Confirm, please.”

  A minute later, he was out of the car and in the rain, his coat collar up. Moisher, the gee-whiz detective who had the murder case, was hanging near the apartment entrance. Inside, two FBI agents waited.

  “You Menzes?”

  He turned. A black policeman was coming through the rain as if it was a dry day. He stuck out a hand. “Renfrew, PG police. Yeah, they call me Renfrew of the Mounties, so I heard the jokes.”

  “You got the search warrant?”

  Renfrew held up a document in a plastic cover.

  “Okay, you serve it. This is Detective Moisher; he’s going to do ‘suspicion of murder’ if we turn up any prints. You got a crew here?”

  “They’ve already started on his car.”

  Menzes led the way into the lobby. “We’ll take the stairs; Renfrew and Moisher take the elevator, if you will. And one thing, gentlemen—this guy Suter is a CIA employee. That means he signed a paper that allows his employer to interrogate him in matters of security. Don’t Miranda him.” He looked at each one. “Let’s go.”

  Suter was watching the numbers fall down the screen like confetti. The numbers changed, but he didn’t know what the change meant, except that Nickie started to laugh.

  “Shut up.”

  But Nickie kept laughing. And then he saw something that made him laugh even harder.

  “I said shut up!” Suter’s right arm twitched, as if he was going to hit the kid. “What the fuck are you laughing at?”

  “Your money, man. Your money—it’s going!”

  “I know it’s going, asshole, that’s the idea! Your job is to find where it’s going!”

  Nickie laughed some more. He was almost on the floor, it was so funny. “Man, I know—I know—” He was laughing so hard he couldn’t say it. “I know where it’s going!”

  “Then shut the fuck up and tell me where. Where?”

  Nickie made a gesture, fingers fluttering, down, down. “It’s going, man—going, going, gone.” He hiccuped, laughed, gasped. “Your guy there didn’t send—didn’t send the money to a fucking bank! He sent it to—to—” He roared again. “Cyberspace!”

  Suter grabbed him. “What d’you mean? It’s money! Where’d he send it?”

  He was shaking Nickie, and the kid went limp and hung from his hands, staring up and gulping his laughter. “It isn’t money, you dick—it’s digitals. It’s just signals. It isn’t money until somebody sends the signals to a bank and then asks the bank to turn them into money. And this guy didn’t send it to a bank! He sent it to—nowhere. Cyberspace. He destroyed it, man!” Then he kicked Suter in the crotch and tore himself free and grabbed a glass ashtray from a table.

  And the doorbell rang.

  The two looked at each other and then at the door.

  A loud knocking sounded. “Police. Open up!”

  Nickie dropped the ashtray, which fell on the carpet with a thud. Suter was fiddling with his tie, his eyes too open, hyperventilating.

  “Open the door, please! Police!”

  Suter crossed the gray-brown carpet, looking back once at Nickie as if to see if he was still there. There was no back door, and the windows were three stories above the street. Where would Nickie go?

  Suter opened the door. He saw what struck him first as a crowd, too many people, faces, men.

  “I’m Officer Renfrew of the PG police, and we got a warrant to search these premises. This is Detective Moisher of the Bladensburg police, Special Agent Dillick of the FBI—” He had pushed his way in as he spoke, moving Suter backward. Somebody moved past Suter, and he heard Nickie cry out, and a voice began to read Nickie his Miranda rights.

  Suter would have gone on moving backward, but a hand closed around his left arm and a voice said, close to his left ear, “You’re mine.”

  Suter recognized Menzes then.

  37

  Jolcut, Pakistan 2130 GMT Monday (0130LTuesday).

  Dukas couldn’t raise Alan and Harry on their phone, and, after an hour of trying, he called the number in Dubai and left a message. He’d have to hope that Harry checked in.

  “Harry, this is Mike. I’m at the location. Listen up, man—we got trouble.

  “The village sits at the top of a steep ridge next to the highway. There’s one good gravel road up from the highway and it’s marked, but if you come that way we’re fucked, because there’s a dozen Chinese military all over this place like fleas on a dog. You can’t come in by car, you get me? I think the best way is up behind, the steep side.

  “The town itself is roughly square. At the center, from, um, east to west, are a small open square, the mosque where the meet is, and a tower. The mosque is a ruin, I think a bomb, and I haven’t seen the caretaker, who’s our friend’s contact and advance man, so maybe he’s under the thing someplace. But that means another screwup, because he’s supposed to leave signals and I haven’t seen him and there wasn’t any signal when I came by the place in daylight. What we got here is Screwup City.

  “You’ll be able to see the minaret of the mosque from the road, and the top of the tower. Use those to orient yourselves.

  “I’m on the tower.

  “There’s eleven troops and an officer and I’m sure they’re Chinese. That makes no sense, unless China has invaded Kashmir while I wasn’t looking. What I think is, this is a special unit that infiltrated or parachuted and they’re here because of Shreed. Maybe to back him up, maybe to take him—Shreed hasn’t been behaving like a guy who was running happily to Beijing, after all. But it may not matter—these guys aren’t going to like us, no matter what they’re here for.

  “They’re covering the road in and the square to the east of the mosque. I don’t think they’re covering the rest of the ridge, but I can’t tell. There isn’t enough of them to do it very well, I do know that. They’ve been sneaking up and down, scoping out the town—looking for Shreed’s backup, I think. Except there isn’t any, that I can see. The locals have battened down the hatches, and if they know what’s going down, they’re just letting it happen.”

  Dukas sighed.

  “A guy could get real lonely in a place like this.

  “’Bye.”

  North of Jand, Pakistan 2155 GMT Monday (0155L Tuesday).

  Alan handed the cellphone back to Harry and shifted down for another sharp curve.

  “We have to send for the plane.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if I send for it any later than right now, we can’t get out of Pakistan in the dark. You sense what we’ve been seeing at those last roadblocks?”

  “Yeah. A lot of military buildup.”

  “Right. I think Pakistan is getting ready to punch over the border on a wide front with a lot of guys and some Chinese air. Once that happens, it’s war. Not just another border clash. And we won’t get to drive out through it, Harry. If we get Shreed, we have to fly out.”

  “Al, this may come as a shock, but have you considered that we may have to shoot Shreed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can Stevens get an S-3 up here?”

  “Short of Rafe, he’s about the best I’ve seen. And the Pakistanis are all looking east, Harry. That might not be true tomorrow.”

  “Okay, cowboy. But this is going to be messy. Chinese, villagers, Shreed, maybe the woman.”

  “One way or another, it’ll be over by dawn. Shreed either shows by then or he doesn’t. I’ll ask Stevens to buzz the road then.”

  “Give him a signal?”

  “Headlights on the car?”

  “Good enough.”

  North of Rawalpindi, Pakistan 2240 GMT Monday (0240L Tuesday).

  George Shreed pulled the car to the wide gravel shoulder, driving carefully to avoid the deep strips torn by trucks. Despite a fresh dose of morphine, he was too keyed up to sleep. The Chinese money must be running out of their accounts like water, he thought—no, like an invisible gas, escaping into the atmosphere.
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br />   He had two tickets for a flight out of Islamabad at 0830. For him and Chen. It would take them to Athens, if the plan went that way. He had another, a single, for Thailand.

  He rummaged in his flight bag and took out a big automatic pistol and a shoulder rig. If he had to shoot, the game would be over anyway. Then it would just be a matter of professional pride to take as many with him as he could. The big Desert Eagle automatic had a ten-round clip, and every round had an armor-piercing bullet, what Americans called “cop killers.”

  He knew the route to the mosque, but he looked at the map one more time, anyway, relieved himself beyond the gravel, where a stink of urine told him that other drivers had had the same idea, and looked at the moonlit mountains in the far distance. It was damned cold, and he didn’t linger. His legs obeyed him well enough. Close enough for government work, as they say. He rested with his weight against the car and looked at the mountains again. Then he got back in his car.

  “On to glory,” he said aloud, and turned the key.

  Jolcut, Pakistan 2320 GMT Monday (0320L Tuesday).

  The moon was going down. Dukas was cold. Around him, the Chinese had settled into positions and were silent. Below him in the tower, a slamming door had startled him, and, when he had looked over the wall, he had seen the family file out one after the other to a privy—a teenage girl, a younger boy, two women, a man. Then silence.

  After another hour, his cellphone buzzed.

  “Mike! Harry.”

  “Jesus, at last! Did you get my message?”

  “Roger.”

  “Situation’s unchanged.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “On my ass on top of this tower. It’s cold here, man.” He could hear Harry repeating it to Alan, who must have been driving. Then Harry’s voice came back. “We’re about twenty klicks away. Maybe forty minutes if we don’t hit another roadblock.”