Читать книгу The Spoils of War - Gordon Kent, Gordon Kent - Страница 18

An hour after his release, Alan Craik was spent. He had been screaming at Mike Dukas. His voice was hoarse by the time he slammed down the phone, his rage a blast against the friend who had given him the supposedly trivial job that had led to humiliation. He had been snatched off the street like a beginner, held prisoner, shamed. Made helpless.

Then an aide to the Chief of Naval Operations had called, then an assistant secretary of state, then Abe Peretz, and a general from CentCom, and the ambassador to Israel. Their message was that they were behind him and that the wrong that had been done him would be paid for.

His fury at Dukas ran down and became contemptible.

“I lost it,” he said. His face was in his hands. He was sitting, disheveled and sweaty from the day, on the hotel-room bed. “One of my best friends, and I trashed him.”

She sat next to him and hugged his shoulders. “Mike understands. It’s okay.”

“Christ.” He looked at his hands. They were trembling. “What’s the matter with me?”

“You need a rest.”

He was thirty-eight. The face he lifted to her looked older. “What do I do?” he said.

“Call Mike back.”

“I can’t.”

“Apologize. Then work with him to get back at these bastards.” She got up and passed in front of him, and he followed her with agonized eyes as she picked up the telephone and dialed and waited. He heard her speak to somebody in the Naples office and then she held out the phone to him. “Mike,” she said.

He put the instrument to his ear but said nothing. He was listening to his own breathing and perhaps to Dukas’s, as well. Finally, he croaked, “I’m sorry, man.” He was suddenly choked with tears.

“Well, it was an experience.”

“It wasn’t meant for you. It was—”

“Jeez, it sure seemed to have my name on it! You kept calling me Mike and using the word bastard. Sounded like it was for me.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry—it’s them, but I can’t get at them—”

“I know, kid, yeah, shit. All is forgiven. Forget it.”

“If I could take it back—”

“You can’t, so forget it. I’m still the guy you’ve slogged through the shit with. The truth is, now you’ve calmed down, I put the phone down for a while and let you rant while I did something else. Anyway, look, you’re right: I sent you into something without checking it out, and you got slammed. It is my fault. So forget it. The real question is, what do we do now?”

“Declare war on Israel?”

“Ho-ho, naughty boy. I suspect the gubmint has about shot its wad, expressing its displeasure in a demarche. What happens from now is what we make happen. So what d’you want to make happen?”

“I want to nail several Israeli skins to the barn door.”

“Okay, but you gotta ID them. You got names?”

“The two ass-kissers who delivered me to the hotel were named Shlomo something and Ziv something. No last names. I don’t know the shmucks who had me in the hotel room, but my guess is they were grunts—dumb, clumsy, a couple of them didn’t even speak English.”

“I need first and last names.”

“They didn’t give last names. Don’t hassle me!”

“Okay, okay! You done good.”

“I want to hit somebody.”

“Don’t. I’ll take over from here.”

“You’re going to follow up?”

“After the chewing-out you gave me? Christ, I’ll have the tooth marks on my ass for life! Actually, I’ve already had the order to pursue ‘with utmost diligence,’ plus State sent a demarche to the Israelis that was the diplomatic equivalent of your blast at me, and it ended with a promise to follow up. That’s my warrant. I’m off to see the wizard as soon as I can clear my desk.”

“You’re coming to Tel Aviv?”

“No way are the Israelis going to fuck me out of a country clearance on this one; they’re too scared. So you leave, I arrive, life goes on.”

Alan gave the telephone a feeble grin. “You’re a good guy, Mike.”

“I’ve ordered up a forensics team. We’ll do a number on the dead guy, Qatib. Who, by the way, was a cryptologist—you know that?”

“You didn’t bother to tell me. Serious business?”

“Maybe. I mean, the Israelis, a former cryptologist, a body—like, they’d be dee-lighted to have our codes.”

“Oh, shit.”

“My favorite expression.”

They talked some more, but mostly they repeated what they’d said. Dukas’s parting words were, “Hang in there, kid.”

And Alan said, “Dov—one of them was named Dov.” That was all he could remember.

When Alan hung up, his hands were still shaking. Rose put her arms around him. He was enraged because he had to go to the embassy next morning to be de-briefed and to get a medical check. She told him it was all routine; everything would be okay. “It’s over. We’re okay. We’re okay.” She held him tighter. “You still going to do your meeting tomorrow?”

“You’re goddam right I am!” He stood. “It’s the reason I came! Not all this fucking Mickey Mouse—” He didn’t say that the clandestine meeting to exchange information with Shin Bet might erase some of the humiliation of the day.

Dukas put the phone down as if he were placing it on a box of eggs. He pushed his lips out, shook his head, then looked up at Dick Triffler.

“That bad?” Triffler said.

“Bad. Wouldn’t you be? I sure would.” He sat back in the desk chair, his weight making the springs groan. “The Tel Aviv cop woman says it was murder. She doesn’t say how, so we need the forensics before we jump to a conclusion; she and Al both say there was torture, too.” He shrugged. “Peretz says the FBI is already on it. I told him to spread the word there that this is our case and everything will come to us, and if it doesn’t, I’m going to scream all the way up to the White House. I talked to Kasser.” Kasser was the head of NCIS, Dukas’s immediate boss. “We’re to make the Qatib case a top priority. It’s what this office is here for until we close it. Okay?” He looked up through thick eyebrows at Triffler. “Craik’s out of it—he’s got some secret thing of his own tomorrow and then he’s outa there. Somebody has to go to Tel Aviv and ram an investigation down the Israelis’ throats.”

“Mike, I just got here. We’re still unpacking boxes!”

“It’s either you or me. That’s direct from Kasser. The one who doesn’t go runs the office. Which do you want?”

Triffler, rarely flustered, looked at his hands and pursed his lips. Dukas thought about it, then said, “Okay, I’ll go. Soonest, Kasser says. Can’t possibly go tomorrow. Saturday?”

“You’ve got the meeting with Italian security at Sixth Fleet Saturday—remember, Saturday’s the only day everybody can make it?” Before Dukas’s well-known contempt for meetings could erupt, he said, “Mike—you called the meeting! You said it was ‘essential to cooperation on matters of joint concern!’”

“Okay, I’ll go Sunday.”

“When are you going to brief me on running the office?”

“Okay, I’ll go Sunday night! Jesus.” Dukas swung forward. He grabbed a yellow pad and a pencil—the computer at his elbow might as well not have existed—and began to write. “I want everything we can get on Salem Qatib. Maybe he was murdered because he was porking somebody’s wife, but Kasser says we gotta know how important it is that he was a cryptologist. You know what it’ll cost if somebody got Navy codes out of him? About a hundred and fifty mil. So we want everything on that—what codes he knew, where he worked, where he studied, who remembers him. I want a detailed bio on him, not the summary. Check with FBI and CIA to see what they got on him. Don’t dick around—remind them of the demarche and who’s driving the bus. Okay?”

“We need to know what was going on in his life in Palestine.”

“Yeah, I’m working on that. Peretz and the policewoman. But listen—” He pointed the pencil at Triffler. “If the policewoman’s right, Mossad killed the guy. That’s a heavy, heavy idea. Rumor to the contrary, they don’t just kill people. Killing’s pretty rare; you need authorization, preparation. Unless it’s a mistake.”

“What does Craik say?”

“He’s too mad to make much sense. FBI’ll de-brief him tomorrow morning, maybe they’ll get more. He’s supposed to get a medical check; that’s got him pissed, too. He got a couple first names of the guys he thinks are Mossad, plus he thought the guys who snatched him were pretty much thugs. Maybe rent-a-goons. They kept talking to him in Hebrew and pushing him around until they looked at his wallet and realized what they had. When somebody showed up who spoke English, he was apparently all over himself explaining that they had mistaken Al for a Tel Aviv cop. Which makes you ask, why were they so ready to snatch a Tel Aviv cop?”

“I’m the one who opens the case file?”

“You bet. Go to it.”

Triffler looked at his watch. It was after seven in the evening. “This is just like working for Mike Dukas,” he said. “I suppose you don’t care that I have choir practice this evening.”

“Choir practice! You just got here!”

“My voice is very much in demand.”

Dukas hunched down over his work. “You can hum ‘Amazing Grace’ while you work. Quietly.”