Читать книгу Hostile Contact - Gordon Kent, Gordon Kent - Страница 13

Washington.

Dukas got the call on his cell phone from the NCIS duty officer when he had been asleep at his desk and was dreaming of a house and a dog and was happy, perhaps because he didn’t own a house or a dog and these two seemed particularly congenial.

“You have a secure call.”

“Oh, shit.”

Oh, shit. He knew only one person who might want to call him at the office at eleven at night, and there wasn’t supposed to be any reason for him to call.

“What’s the number?” he said to the duty officer.

“US embassy. Naval attaché.”

Oh, double-shit.

“Dukas, NCIS, I have a message to call you.” There was the usual confusion, nobody at the other end ever having heard of him, and then they found the person who had asked him to call, a lieutenant-commander who asked him to wait, and then Alan came on the line.

“Hey, Mike. You secure?”

“Can’t you tell by the sound? You sound as if you got your head in a fifty-five-gallon drum. What’s up?”

“Somebody started shooting.”

Dukas felt his heart squeeze. “Oh, Christ, Al—”

“I left the mark, no sweat, and then I went to the meeting we said was going to be a piece of cake, and all hell broke loose.” He told it quickly to Dukas, what he knew of it from his point of view. “I’m sorry if I screwed it up, Mike.”

“But you’re okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, except for my self-esteem.”

“Where’s Triffler?”

“Good question.”

Dukas felt his blood pounding in his ears. He squeezed his eyeballs with his fingers and felt horrendous guilt. That Craik was okay made him no less guilty: he’d sent a good man into a bad place. “God, I’m sorry,” he said.

“I volunteered.”

“Yeah, but—you tell the local cops?” Dukas said.

“I came to the embassy; I didn’t know what the hell was going on. They’ve dealt with the locals.”

“Come home.”

“I hear the ambassador’s really ripped—”

“Come home!” Dukas was thinking fast, thinking about his mistake, about something that had seemed small and easy and was actually big and dangerous. “Come home now.” He saw that his hands were trembling. “Put the lieutenant-commander back on.”

Dukas asked the Jakarta attaché to put Alan on the first flight out to anywhere and to provide protection until they were in the air. “This a matter of national security?” the man said. He wasn’t unwilling, only a little jaded. Dukas gave him his full name and number and the case number he’d given the Sleeping Dog file, and he told him that, yes, it was a matter of national security.

After he’d hung up, he sat staring at the wall of the duty office for fifteen minutes, and then he went along dimly lit corridors to his own office and spent the rest of the night there. First, he tried to figure out how a meeting taken from a long-dead comm plan could go bad, really bad, because he had been sure that nobody would show, sure that the mark itself would go unnoticed. The answer was now easy: because the comm plan had been planted on him and he’d been suckered by it, and the intention had always been that it would go bad.

But who had planted it on him?

The easy answer was Shreed’s control, who must have had a copy—but how did a Chinese intel officer insert a comm plan into a dead CIA file, and then get it sent to Mike Dukas?

It didn’t make sense. Especially since Shreed’s control was probably dead himself, because the last Dukas had seen of him, he was lying face-down in a village in Pakistan with a hole in his back.

Then Dukas spent the rest of the night going through Sleeping Dog, which was supposed to be moribund but suddenly wasn’t.

Dar es Salaam.

Colonel Lao had been in his office before the African dawn had broken, because the first meeting time in Jakarta had been close and he wanted to be there for a report. The report would be negative, he had thought: surely whoever had left the mark in Jakarta would pass up the first meeting time, perhaps appear for the second or third. Yet his secure phone had sounded only fifteen minutes after the scheduled time, and his face had registered the horror he had felt as he had heard the report of the whole bloody, blown operation.

“Who shot first?” he said, hardly able to keep his rage out of his voice. On the other end was the Chief of Security at the Chinese embassy in Jakarta, a man who at that moment was facing the loss of his career and knew it. His answer was evasive; Lao excoriated him.

“How can you be sure there was an actual meeting?” Lao demanded. He was certain that there could be only two people who knew the American Go plan other than Lao himself—Chen and Shreed. When the officer insisted that a Westerner had appeared at the appointed time and place, Lao thought he saw it more clearly: Shreed had sent a substitute, meaning that he was alive and thought that Chen was, as well. Had Chen been there? Chen’s surrogate?

“Did you have the wits to identify anybody?” Lao growled. So much confusion, the officer whined, and there was shooting—unknown entities, Indonesians working perhaps for the Westerner or the Chinese, undoubtedly counter-surveillance. The embassy hadn’t had enough men, and the man sent out from Beijing, Qiu, was an idiot who had antagonized the in-country team and then got himself shot dead. Time had been too short, and—his voice stronger as he began to shift the blame—why hadn’t Lao informed them earlier? And why hadn’t he expected violence? And after the whining, the face-saving, and the excuses, a nugget of useful fact: one of the in-country team had followed one of the Americans to a hotel. He didn’t have a name yet.

Lao sat up and asserted himself. “Did you get photographs? Did you get at least that much?” They had, he learned. “Send them to me at once—have them scanned at the embassy and encrypted. I want them on my desk in twenty minutes. And the ID on the man your one competent agent followed.”

The officer protested that the films hadn’t been developed; these things took time—and hung up.

It was another hour before Loyalty Man reported that his agent had been unable to identify the man at the meeting. He had been only some American.

Jakarta.

The balls-up at the Orchid House made Jerry Piat angry—enraged drunk was only a couple of swallows away. Well, there you were, in the pleasant fog of booze one second, full-bore rage the next. He was jolting through a bad part of Jakarta in a taxi, a pint of Scotch in his hand and his head full of murderous doubts. Something apparently easy had gone bad—Jesus, shooting! It wasn’t supposed to be a hostile meet, and somebody had started shooting! Of course, he had planned to do some shooting of his own, but that was different. He was a renegade, what the hell. And Bobby Li had gone missing; he hadn’t shown at their rendezvous spot and he didn’t respond to phone signals.

And, Piat was thinking, he was himself in deep shit with the people who had sent him to Jakarta in the first place. What would he tell Suter and Helmer?

Well, he could tell them that Craik had done it. Some kind of personal thing. Maybe something snapped, he just—

Bullshit.

He couldn’t help thinking that what it reminded him of was the Watergate break-in. The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight. Jesus.

He went through it step-by-step. He had put somebody to check at the cannon, and a guy had come and had left the mark, only it hadn’t been Dukas, it had been Craik, which Piat hadn’t known until too late. (First mistake.) Then, this morning, they’d been at the meeting place, just as they had planned, and the same guy, Craik, had showed up there. Okay. Ho had been ready with the camera inside the Orchid House, too, or so Piat had thought, except that Bobby hadn’t got the film to him afterward (second mistake), meaning that to date there were no good photos of Craik inside, actually meeting with Bobby Li, which was the object of the whole operation. That had been the object, anyway, back before he had got enraged-drunk and had decided to shoot the sonofabitch—to get a photo of Dukas or Craik with what would look like a Chinese agent, which was what Bobby Li was meant to look like. But somebody had started shooting, and now he had no photos at all. Zip.

How was he to know that a bunch of people—Chinese—would fucking start shooting?

The thought of it made Piat scowl into the humid heat: he had screwed up—forget the others, he was talking to himself about good tradecraft—he had screwed up, and he was ashamed. He had let the booze do his thinking for him, the booze and his loyalty to George Shreed, and he hadn’t been on top of things and they’d gone to hell.

But why?

It was really a double screwup: first, he hadn’t made sure himself that somebody competent would be taking the photos inside the Orchid House. In fact, he should have been on the camera himself and not dicked around with the fucking gun. And, second, he’d somehow overlooked the possibility that a third party would read the mark on the cannon and know that it signaled a meeting in the Orchid House—somebody Chinese, as it turned out. An idea zinged around his brain: we set up somebody to fake a meeting with a fake Chinese, and real Chinese show up. How the fuck did the Chinese know?

Something ugly sucked at his brain. Suspicion.

George Shreed had been accused of selling out to the Chinese. If he’d given the Chinese the comm plan—

He couldn’t let himself be sucked toward that. Any direction but that. Think of something else.

He’d lifted this old, dead comm plan out of the Canceled file and had laid it on Dukas because it was dead, because nobody else could know about it, because it had been Shreed’s creation and therefore beautifully ironic—Shreed striking back from the grave—and therefore it was a safe hunk of bait to lure Dukas into a trap. But somehow the Chinese had known about it and had shown up and had started shooting.

Part of his brain kept picking at the problem of how they could have known, and it was saying, People know about comm plans because they’ve either stolen them or been given them, and, because this was a George Shreed comm plan—But another part of his brain, the part that loved the late George Shreed, was saying, Don’t go there.

Piat sipped and admitted to himself that he wasn’t going to tell Suter and Helmer the truth. Nothing had happened in the Orchid House, he’d say; he hadn’t tried to kill Craik and failed. There hadn’t been any Chinese.

Think about Bobby Li, he told himself. Where the hell is he?

He changed taxis and directed the driver out to an old temple that stood on the edge of a colossal industrial park that was once going to make somebody fantastically rich and that had gone belly-up like the rest of Indonesia in the nineties. Nature was vengeful in Indonesia: give it a chance to take something back, and Nature moved fast. The industrial park looked now like a Mayan ruin, with small trees growing out of windows, and wild pigs running around the decaying roads.

Across the road from the old temple was a cookshed. One old woman had a fire and a pot and a “cooler” full of water with cans of soda in it. You could get a really cheap lunch there, with a case of the shits thrown in for nothing. It was his and Bobby’s last-stand, desperation, no-fallback dead drop.

“Package for Mister Brown?” he said. He held up an American five.

“Ten dolla.” Prices had gone up.

He handed over a ten and, wonder of wonders, she fished out a brown envelope with a bulge in it. Inside was a plastic canister with a roll of film. That little sonofabitch! He took back his doubts about Bobby.

A piece of paper was in the canister with the film. One word had been scrawled on it: Scared.

It made Piat smile.

He wrapped three American hundreds into a tight roll and stuffed them into the canister and put the canister back into the envelope with the piece of paper, on which he had written, “I’ll be back.”

“Give to Mister Black when he comes, okay, Mama?”

“Ten dolla.”

Piat headed for the airport.

Dar es Salaam.

Two hours later than he had demanded, as Lao was smoking and staring at the wall, his stomach seething, the photos came through from Jakarta. They were not particularly clear, but one was clear enough for him to see that Bobby Li had been close to both Qiu, the dead man, and the Caucasian. Too close. Had he spoiled the meeting?

Lao tried to see the logic of such a thing. He had sent a case officer to Jakarta to run things, and he had got killed; and he had sent Chen’s old agent, Li, to identify Chen or Shreed if either showed at the meeting, and—and Li had then intruded on the meeting that was detailed in American Go. Doing so was far beyond the responsibility of an agent. It was a kind of hubris. Had Li thought that Lao wouldn’t know?

Or had he had some other, more important agenda? Had he wanted to eavesdrop? But why?

Li’s action suggested another set of orders, because Li, in Lao’s experience, was an insecure man who always needed orders: the only things he did on his own were acts of desperation. So, who else might be giving him orders? The question chilled Lao because it came from the ice of a case officer’s worst fear—that his agent was a double. This led to a second, colder question: double agent for whom? He couldn’t forget that Li had been Chen’s agent.

He shook his head. He didn’t believe in the game of mirrors. He ground out his cigarette and called in Jiang, an aging captain with a good bureaucrat’s sense of how to get things done. Lao brought up on the computer screen a photograph of the Westerner leaving the Orchid House. “I want to know who that Westerner is. He was in Jakarta two hours ago: check the manifests of flights in and out for five days back and the outgoing from now on; I have a suspicion he will leave Jakarta soon. Check with embassy security in Jakarta; one of their people followed an American, maybe this man, to a hotel. Get a name if you can. Then check the hotels for Americans who were there yesterday and today. Ask if they have been asking for directions to Fatahillah Square and the Orchid House in the minipark.” He squinted at the screen. “This man was probably with somebody else—up to four others, maybe. A counter-surveillance team. Maybe traveling together, but not necessarily.” He lit another cigarette. “Then get on to the Jakarta police and find out if they have any reports on an incident at the Orchid House this morning.”

The captain gave a forward jerk that suggested a bow. Both were in civilian clothes; military etiquette did not seem quite right.

“I am going home for lunch,” Lao said. It was, in fact, only nine in the morning. The captain’s face was impassive.

Lao drove to his rented house in a suburb where most of the diplomatic community lived (not so with most of his Chinese colleagues, who huddled around the embassy), kissed his wife, American-style, and responded to her questions about his day, then put his finger to his lips as he led her to the bedroom. The house was bugged; the phone was bugged; she had years ago given up trying to know how his days really were. Yet they had great affection for each other, despite their arranged marriage and his profession and its conditions. Sometimes, she knew, he came to her like this to make love when he wanted to make his mind a blank.

Lao wished he could talk about his problems to her. Or perhaps not. She might say, as she had once when they were test-driving a new car in Beijing and nobody could possibly have been listening, “Don’t you ever dream of living like other people?”