by Gordon Kent
“What does your boyfriend say?”
“What boyfriend?” she laughed. Oh. So it’s like that. Dukas growled that they had work to do, and she backed away from his desk, grinning, hugging her books, adoring. She wasn’t using Triffler’s desk anymore because Triffler was there, but she’d been put in a cubicle two doors down to help with the transfers of Sleeping Dog and Crystal Insight. She looked back at him, balancing the books, and giggled again. When she was gone, he could hear Triffler laughing.
“Not funny,” Dukas said.
“It is to me.”
“Keep that up, you’ll be back in Seattle.”
“No, I won’t. Kasser said I can have anything I want; I said I want only one thing, and that’s not to work for the now-famous and much-decorated Michael Dukas. So I’m being given the intelligence medal and three weeks in beautiful Egypt as a member of the Bright Star team, and you can kiss my pinkie.”
“Yours isn’t a pinkie; it’s a brownie.”
“Racist.” Triffler came to the end of the wall of crates and lounged against it. He was wearing a glen plaid suit, gray-blue with a minuscule red stripe, a blue shirt with a white collar, a thick silk tie of swirling clarets, and brown wingtips. “Free at last,” he said with a smile, “free at last.”
“You’ll miss me when you’re gone.”
“I’ll learn to live with the heartache.” He came a couple of steps closer. “Actually, what you pulled off with Lao and Bobby Li has me kind of dazzled. Kasser, too. I guess you can have anything you want now, right?”
Dukas shrugged. “What I want is to lose twenty pounds and still eat all the Dunkin’ Donuts I can hold.” He stretched his arms and didn’t wince at the small residual pain in his chest. “Actually, getting rid of my rabbit rig is enough.” He was afraid that Triffler was going to say something else nice, so he changed the subject. “Al Craik’ll be in this morning. He’s in town to testify for Sleeping Dog. You know they arrested Helmer?”
“I know it second-hand. Menzes. He thinks Helmer got Piat to waste Ray Suter, but the Bureau won’t let him interview Helmer. You think Piat did it?”
Dukas shrugged again. Piat was a painful memory to him, partly because of Sally, partly because he’d got away when Dukas was responsible for him. “I don’t know what they got. Agency’s very tight-assed about the whole thing.”
“But Piat was for sure in it with Helmer—trying to get something on you and Craik.”
“Yeah, but how do you tie them to Suter? The guy gets killed while he’s in Agency custody, at a fucking Agency safe house, and the only explanation is that he was involved in a scam from their safe house? No matter where they turn, they look like shit. So they’re saying nothing.”
“Menzes is pissed.”
“Not the first time.”
Triffler sat in the visitor’s chair and dusted one wingtip with a handkerchief. “Thanks for recommending me to head up the Seattle thing, anyway.”
“You could have made your career on it. Whoever runs Sleeping Dog to the end will be able to write his own ticket.”
Triffler licked the handkerchief and removed a spot visible only to him. “My boy’s going to make first team this year. Can’t pull him out and throw him into a new school three thousand miles away, Mike. These things are important.”
“I hope you won’t be sorry.”
“I won’t.”
“I would.”
“Yeah, but you’d have Leslie to comfort you.”
“Oh, Goddamit—” Dukas was halfway to his feet. He slowed, stood with his knuckles on the desk as Alan Craik walked in. Craik looked from one man to the other, grinned, and said, “You two guys squabbling again?”
Triffler stood. “I do not squabble.” He and Craik shook hands, and Triffler excused himself and left the office. Looking after him, Alan said, “He figures we want privacy. Nice guy.” He looked at Dukas. “You know Harry O’Neill offered him a job? Twice what he makes here?”
“His kid’s going to make the first team. They don’t play football at Bahrain High.” He waved at the chair.
“I hear you walk on water,” Alan said. “It’s all over the Navy. ‘The biggest intelligence coup in a decade.’ ”
“Yeah, completely forgetting about us bringing back George Shreed. Which everybody wants to do—forget, I mean. Win a few, lose a few. How’s Rose?”
“Just checking into our motel, I hope.”
“I won’t ask you to have dinner with me, then. Say hello for me.” Dukas left a gap for Alan to say something, and he didn’t, and then there it was: Dukas was going to be alone, and what the hell good was it to have pulled off the biggest intelligence coup of the decade if the only way you knew to celebrate was to give a party for yourself and a bottle of Wild Turkey? “I got things to do, anyway,” Dukas said lamely.
“I’m back to the boat tomorrow,” Alan said. “I dotted the i’s on Sleeping Dog, gave somebody a deposition on Helmer.” He, too, must have understood about Dukas’s being alone, because he said, “Anything on who killed Sally Baranowski?”
Dukas shook his head.
“Maybe you ought to—”
He didn’t finish, although Dukas was sure he was going to say either take some time off or get yourself a girl. Instead, Leslie came in, this time without the books but with a bundle of mail. She was wearing a tailored blouse in a color like the inside of an egg cream, bitter-chocolate slacks, and a scarf whose ends hung down between her substantial breasts. She stood quite close to Alan and smiled down at him and said in her little-girl voice, “Hi.” She looked at Dukas. “You want anything?” Her eyes were bright, her lips parted.
Dukas was leafing through the mail. Halfway down was a postcard. A postcard was an oddity, at best. This one was even odder—an old one from the 1950s in bright colors that made it look as if it had been computer-generated, and a texture like fine linen. A big green cactus stood in yellow sand in front of an aluminum-sided diner that looked more blue than silver. Above it was a sign in what was supposed to be red neon: JERRY’S EATS AND GAS.
Dukas turned it over. It had been mailed in Macao a week before. There was no signature, but there was a scrawled message that said, “I didn’t know she was your girl.”
Dukas tapped it on his lower teeth and then dropped it in the wastebasket.
“Junk mail,” he said.
Alan looked at Leslie, apparently saw something in her face, because he smiled. When she had left the office, he said, “Just when I start to worry about you, I see that everything’s going to be fine. Everything’ll be great.”
“She’s a kid.” He tried to stare down Alan’s smile. “I don’t do kids.”
Alan went right on smiling. “In this case, I don’t think you have anything to say about it.”
By Gordon Kent
Night Trap
Peacemaker
Top Hook
Hostile Contact
HOSTILE CONTACT
A Delacorte Book / July 2003
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2003 by Gordon Kent
Book design by Karin Batten
Please visit our website at www.bantamdell.com
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
&n
bsp; Kent, Gordon.
Hostile contact / Gordon Kent.
p. cm.
e-ISBN 0-440-33425-X
PS3561.E5185 H67 2003 2003043559
813/.54 21
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