Hostile Contact

by Gordon Kent

  “If Chen isn’t in America but is dead or wounded—” He pushed himself in like a timid housewife at a fish stall.

  “Yes, yes—?”

  “I would like to be ready to make a forensic examination, if I have to. If I find him. Fingerprints, DNA—”

  The civilian waved his cigarette and growled, “Yes, of course,” and muttered something about the files. The General nodded and separated the top three from the stack. Lao could see that he was reluctant, even now, to hand them over. “If you accept, then I suggest you take these with you—you will have an aircraft to fly you back to Dar es Salaam, plenty of time to read in an absolutely secure atmosphere.”

  “I won’t go direct to Dar, General. I’ll start in Pakistan.”

  “Good. Time is short.” He hesitated. “These are the communications files that Chen used with Shreed.” He put one file down on the desk. “Pass-throughs, cutouts, dead drops.” He put down the second file. “Electronic communications, mostly the Internet—Shreed was a master of the computer.” He put down the third file. “Communications plans for face-to-face meetings. Three places—Nairobi, Jakarta, and the village in Pakistan where the shootout took place. We consider that the Pakistan site is no longer usable; therefore, Nairobi or Jakarta—” He gave Lao a look.

  “These are the original files from American Go? Or substitutes?” Lao was suddenly sharp. He winced at his own tone, imagined that he could be marched from here to a basement and shot, but he knew he was being used and he might as well be used efficiently.

  The two exchanged a look. The Westerner wrapped a length of hair around his fist and twisted, gave an odd sort of grunt. “Substitutes,” he conceded.

  “I want the originals. I want the entire case, not three files.” Lao threw caution to the winds. “If you want me to find Chen, I think I need to have everything Chen was working on.”

  The General smiled, the last gesture Lao expected. “I told you he was sharp,” he said, talking to the Westerner as if Lao were not in the room. The General lit himself a Pear Blossom, lit one for the Westerner. Then he reached behind his desk and started to sort folders, old ones with red spines. Lao imagined hundreds of folders in the vast space he couldn’t see behind the General’s desk, all the secrets of the universe. He shook his head to clear it.

  Then they went over some of it again, and the General handed several files to Lao and told him that the entire case would be sent to him in the diplomatic bag at Dar es Salaam. Lao said that he would rather work out of Beijing, and the General’s eyes almost disappeared in a smile and he said that, of course, who wouldn’t rather be in Beijing, but they wanted him to stay where he was. “For cover.” They didn’t know if Chen had associates who might smell a rat if Lao worked from the capital. And there were other elements in the People’s Army and the Party who might try to interfere, for their own purposes—times were difficult—Lao’s mind had caught on the expression “for cover”; you didn’t need cover within your own service unless you were doing something fatally risky, he was thinking.

  “So,” the General said finally, “you will accept this responsibility?” He said it smiling, as if Lao had a choice.

  “Of course,” Lao said firmly, although he, too, knew they had passed the point of choice when he demanded the folders.

  “The people will be grateful.”

  The third man made another of his chopping gestures. “The people will never know! We will be grateful, which is what matters.” He began to cough.

  “There is another matter, Colonel Lao.” The General’s aged geniality had vanished. “It actually falls under your responsibilities at Dar es Salaam—a Middle Eastern matter. I speak of the loss of face we suffered when the Americans shot down two of our aircraft and got their agents and Shreed out of Pakistan. We were made to look like children in this matter. We were humiliated in front of the Pakistanis. We will pay for this failure for years. Admittedly, we may have been too ‘forward leaning.’ That is not for me to say. But we have been tasked to register our anger with the power that interfered with us.”

  Lao had an armful of critically secret folders and was burning to begin his investigation. The idea that there was further business irritated him. “Yes, sir?”

  “We are going to target a strike on one of their carriers. The one that was used in Pakistan.”

  The General opened yet another file and tossed it on the desk.

  Lao had to change his grip on his stack of folders and put them on the floor. The Westerner was watching him now, as if judging him. “Yes, sir?” he repeated.

  “USS Thomas Jefferson. We will hit her through surrogates. The Americans will get the message.”

  Lao’s heart pounded, and he thought, They’ll kill us. “Has this been approved by the War Council?”

  “This operation was planned by the War Council.” The Westerner seemed less watchful, as if he had passed some test. “It is called Jade Talon. You will execute it. Use Islamic surrogates. I have appended contacts that we recommend.”

  Lao opened the new file with trepidation. The first item was a photograph of a Nimitz-class carrier. There followed a detailed analysis of the possibility of crippling a Nimitz-class carrier with a speedboat full of explosives. Lao looked up. “I don’t believe this will sink a carrier.”

  “Sink? Probably not, although we want you to use several boats. But a nice big hole? Perhaps leaking radioactive material? Hundreds of dead sailors?”

  “And how are these small boats to target a carrier?”

  “I’m sorry, Colonel?”

  “How are a group of Islamic surrogates in tiny boats supposed to find this carrier and strike it?”

  “Jefferson will be off the coast of Africa for sixty days. We have a method to pass accurate targeting information.”

  “Is this my operation?”

  “Absolutely. Only, do not fail. And make finding Chen your priority. Am I clear?” The General was no longer smiling.

  “Perfectly clear, sir.”

  Lao picked up all the files and saluted and turned. The room wheeled as if he were dizzy, but his mind was utterly clear. He knew that he had been sent to walk a razor’s edge.

  “Does he know what this is really about?” the General said when the door had closed. The civilian snorted and shook his ugly hair. He lit another cigarette. The General sat back, hands folded. “He must have heard things.”

  “He doesn’t know about the money. Nobody knows about the money.”

  “Perhaps we should have told him.”

  “No!” The hoarse voice was rude; the General’s eyebrows arched a millimeter. “No. If he finds Chen, he finds the money. If he doesn’t find Chen—” He shrugged.

  “He is a good man,” the General said. “There is no real chance for a speedboat to cripple a carrier, is there?”

  “It sends a message. Either way. American public opinion is fickle. It might move the U.S. away from Africa. A lucky hit? It might damage the reactor and kill everyone on board. It might call into question the whole legality of placing a nuclear reactor on a vessel in international waters.”

  “But Lao? Whether he finds Chen or not, he loses.”

  The civilian shrugged again.

  Over the Pacific.

  “Craik and Dukas,” Jerry Piat said to himself, jammed into the middle of the five-across seats in the belly of a 747.

  He was traveling economy class to Jakarta. Jerry was just past having been a hotshot CIA case officer. He had always traveled well, first or business class on cover passports or diplomatic ones, and the reality of an economy seventeen-hour flight from Washington with a layover in Manila had settled into his bones. Being fired from the CIA means you have to travel like this, he thought. Even walking around the cramped aisles didn’t help the swelling in his feet.

  Booze cost cash and was harder to get in the back of the plane. It was claustrophobic, with kids screaming and their mothers trying to ignore them, couples chatting or fighting. Too much. Not Jerry’s
scene.

  The flight kept him awake and gave him too much time to think. He kept thinking of the messages and the plan he was on his way to implement. Too Byzantine, he felt. Too complex. The plan of an analyst, not an operator. He didn’t like Ray Suter, the desk-driver who had thought it up, didn’t trust him, thought him a boob when it came to the street. He didn’t like Marvin Helmer, Suter’s henchman, who was some big hotshot in Seattle now, but whom Jerry remembered as just one more Ops Directorate cowboy. Jerry wanted revenge against the traitors who had brought George Shreed down as much as anybody, but he didn’t like the Suter-Helmer plan—or the planner. Photographs, blackmail, and a smear campaign. Desk-driver shit. Like giving Castro an exploding cigar. Jesus. He shook his head, raised the plastic cup of wine to his lips, and hated the taste.

  Fuck that. In Jakarta, he would make up his own plan. Anything could happen in Jakarta. He began to shut out the plane as he worked it through. He had twelve hours left in his flight. By the time he landed, he’d be ready to act.

  “Dukas and Craik,” he murmured to himself, and tasted the wine again and concentrated on a simpler plan.

  Kill them.

  2

  NCIS HQ.

  Alan Craik showed up at Dukas’s office a few minutes after Dukas got there himself. Alan wasn’t a stranger to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, even had a somewhat tenuous designation as “agent” because of past work for Dukas. Still, he had had to go through some rigmarole with security that had cost him time.

  “Hey, Mike.”

  “Jesus, put out the cigarette! The tobacco police’ll be here with a warrant!”

  Alan crushed the cigarette against the sole of his shoe. “I quit, before—you know—then I—” He shrugged.

  “Surprised some turkey didn’t collar you out in the corridor.” Dukas took the cigarette butt and doused it in a half-full coffee cup and hid it under some trash, all the while studying Alan’s face. “I’ve seen you look worse.” In fact, he was surprised at how relatively normal Alan looked—drawn, sleepless, but okay except for a new tic that drew one corner of his mouth down in a kind of spasm and then was gone.

  Alan gave a lopsided grin. “Death warmed over?”

  “Practically lifelike. Anyway, enough about you; let’s talk about me for a while. My injury feels pretty lousy, thanks for asking. And you noticed I’m wearing my Bugs Bunny rig—how perceptive of you.”

  “Oh, shit, Mike, I’m sorry—Christ, all I think about is myself—”

  Dukas raised his hand, palm open, to shut Craik down, and said, “How’s Rose?” and Alan said she was fine, fine, doing her fixed-wing prep so she could fly out to Edwards and fly F-18s before she went into astronaut training. “While I sit on my ass and watch reruns,” he said, and Dukas knew that he had asked the wrong thing.

  He put Alan at his absent assistant’s desk and pulled up the drafts of his report on the Shreed affair and told him to read them and make comments. It was make-work, but it was work, and Alan seemed grateful. They worked that way for an hour, Dukas at his own computer, Alan at the other, a wall of white plastic crates between them, no sound but the building around them—footsteps, unclear voices—and the click of the computer keys.

  And then the telephone rang.

  “Dukas?”

  Not a woman’s voice. Not Sally Baranowski. A man’s voice he recognized. “Hey, Carl.”

  “Long time no talk.”

  Dukas cast his mind back. Only a month—just before he’d taken off for Pakistan. Carl Menzes had been in a rage at him then, had called him every bad name he knew, because he had believed that Dukas had blown the investigation of the very spy, George Shreed, that Dukas had then caught up with in Pakistan. “Still mad, Carl?” He wrote “Menzes” on a Post-it and slipped it through the crates to Alan.

  “Nah.” Menzes laughed, a laugh that sounded honest to Dukas. In fact, he liked Menzes, who was a straight-arrow guy, a real fighter in the CIA’s Internal Affairs Division. “How’s the injury?”

  “I can’t scratch my dandruff yet, but I’m healing.”

  “Lot of people think you can do no wrong, Mike.”

  “Yeah, fucking hero. In fact, what I hear is, the Crystal Palace thinks we made a huge mistake. What’s up?”

  “We’re sending you some of the paperwork you asked for.”

  Dukas was instantly on guard. “My experience is, you guys wouldn’t toss a used rubber this way. And I didn’t ‘ask’ for it; I got a court order for it. What happened, Legal Affairs decided that ten percent compliance would string it out for another six months?”

  “Hey, Mike—! We’re doing our best to satisfy you, okay?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Dukas said. “Oh, yeah.”

  “I was trying to be helpful.” Menzes’s voice was cold, and a few seconds later he hung up.

  Dukas looked across at Alan. “They’re throwing me a bone. Big deal.”

  “Shreed stuff?”

  “Worse—Suter.” Ray Suter had been Shreed’s assistant at the Agency, a one-hundred-percent bastard who got arrested when Shreed had fled the country. “Suter hacked into Shreed’s computers; he’s supposed to have killed some guy who helped him; he’s deep into Shreed’s business, and the Agency’s got him someplace and won’t let me near him. I’ve gone to court to get anything and everything that Suter had his hands on when Shreed went down.” He made a face as if he smelled something bad. “So now they’re sending something over. Oh, yeah.”

  At eleven, a Navy rating showed up at Dukas’s door with a dolly and a wooden crate the size of a refrigerator.

  “Messenger service,” the rating said. “He could only come as far as the loading dock. Where you want it, sir?”

  Dukas looked at the signature sheet and the labels and signed for it. Classified, secure, CIA origin. When the rating was gone, Dukas closed his door and growled, “Ten to one it’s a bag of shit.” Dukas was at his telephone then, trying to get somebody with a wrecking bar to come open the crate.

  “Must hold a lot of stuff.”

  Dukas made a face. “Probably a collection of Suter’s old jockstraps. You ask for everything, they generously extrude one item after a month’s delay. You can bet this is whatever the Agency people thought was least useful.”

  What the crate proved to contain was a case file. “Case file” implied a folder, something small, but this was folder after folder, pounds and pounds of paper. There was a cover letter to say that it was one case, sent in response to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service request of—et cetera, et cetera. Dukas and Alan peered in.

  “Jesus,” Alan said. “This is all one case?”

  “Wait until you see what the Shreed case looks like when it’s done.” Dukas shrugged himself out of the Bugs Bunny rig and reached into the crate. “If it’s ever done. Old cases never die, and they don’t just fade away.” He pulled out a folder. “Well, let’s see what we got.”

  Alan started to look in one of the folders, and Dukas said that they should go about it in an organized way, which was to find the inventory folder and the summary folder and get some idea of what the hell the thing was. The summary was at the bottom, of course, and it was only when they had covered the desk belonging to his absent assistant, Dick Triffler, as well as his coffee table and all the chairs, that they found it, and then Dukas sat at his desk and Alan leaned over him from behind, his hand with the missing fingers supporting him on the desktop—the first time since the shooting that he’d forgotten the hand enough to let somebody else see it up close.

  “Radio transmissions,” Dukas said, reading. “ ‘Burst transmissions of unknown origin—northwestern North America—’ What the hell has this got to do with that shit Suter?” He looked up at Alan. “Can I turn the page?”

  “I’ve been waiting.” Alan grinned.

  “Speed-reader, great. Okay—’detected by National Security Administration—’ I thought this was an Agency case, what the hell? Where’s the inventory? Where’s the document h
istory?” Dukas began to burrow as Alan read on. When Dukas came back, he had a red folder and a green one, both stamped “Top Secret,” and he fell into his chair and opened the red folder. “Okay, yeah—NSA started it and got zip and booted it to the FBI, who made it a case and apparently sat on it for five years. Then they booted it to the Agency—some great case, it’s been through three other agencies and nobody’s found out diddly-squat. Oh, swell—here’s why they broke down and sent it to me—signed out to Ray Suter two days before Shreed took off for Pakistan. Jee-sus H. Christ, he didn’t have it long enough to read the fucking summary. What’d you learn while I was slaving in the folder piles?”

  “That it’s a case that nobody’s solved in nine years. Your big chance, Mike.”

  Dukas sighed. “I was hoping I’d get something I could, you know, at least use to tie Suter to the Shreed investigation.” He threw down the red folder and opened the green one. “Oh, ow,” he said. “Ow, ouch, oh, shit—radio interference reports up the wazoo! Ouch. ‘Frequency Analysis Tables 1.1 through 1.17.’ Oh, shit.” He sighed. His right index finger ran down the page and he muttered, “Radio, radio . . . interview, interview, interview—” He looked through the wall of crates at the stacks of folders and growled, “They’ve dicked me.”

  And Alan said, “What’s that?”

  He had reached over Dukas’s shoulder and turned up the page so he could read ahead.

  “What’s what?”

  Alan turned the page all the way over. “ ‘Communications Plan, Jakarta, Indonesia.’ ”

  Dukas looked at the entry. “Jakarta, Jesus. That’s a long way from northwestern North America.”

  “Kind of jumps out at you, doesn’t it.”