Читать книгу Hostile Contact - Gordon Kent, Gordon Kent - Страница 8

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 straightarrow 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 had 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—etcetera, etcetera. 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 history?” 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 next 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.”

Dukas wrote the ID number down on another Post-it and went around the wall of plastic crates and started going through the folders once again. He came back with a slender folder in a white cover with “Top Secret” and “Eyes Only” and “Eurydice” on the front. “You’re not supposed to see this,” he said.

“What’s Eurydice?”

“It’s a classification group, which you’re not supposed to know about, so don’t ask.” He sat down again and opened the folder.

“Holy shit,” Alan said. “It is a comm plan for Jakarta.” He looked over his shoulder. “What’s Jakarta got to do with the northwest?”

“More to the point, what’s it got to do with Ray Suter?” Dukas wrinkled his nose. “I smell an analyst at work.” He opened the folder on his desk, pressing the fold with the flat of his right hand and wincing because the effort hurt his chest. He pointed at the folder, which, opened, had papers attached to both inner sides by long, pointed prongs through holes in the paper. “Right side,” he said, “meat and potatoes. Left side, the analyst’s brilliant synthesis of materials.” The comm plan was on the right side. On the left, on top, was a sheet that said simply, “No action recommended.” Below it were several sheets with long numbers at the top. On the top sheet, however, a different hand had written in pencil, “Follow this up—S?”

“Suter’s writing?” Alan said.

“Beats me; I don’t even have a sample of that. ‘Follow this up—S, question mark.’ S for Suter? S for Shreed? S for shit?” He made a farting noise with his lips and tongue.

“Yeah, but Mike, at least Suter had it. So why did Suter have it? You say he was into Shreed’s business—what was he looking for? Maybe this is something you can run with, after all.” Alan began to turn the pages of the analyst’s report. “Doesn’t seem to be all there,” he said.

“It wouldn’t be. The number’s a high one, meaning that this is part of something else. ‘Observation of courier contact site.’ See, this is what caught the analyst’s eye—actually, probably an abstract someplace. Yeah—here on the second page, see—‘The courier is believed to have visited the US, with special relevance for naval facilities in California and the Pacific northwest.’ Aha, says the analyst, that might have a connection—notice the ‘might’; the woman—it’s usually a woman—is reaching; she’s desperate. She gets a copy of the relevant stuff and smacks it into a folder and here it is.”

“Who wrote the report?”

“Who knows? Some agent doing his job; he’s busted a comm plan, written it up, turned it over to his case officer, and here it is.” He tapped the comm plan’s several pages of narrative.

Alan reached over and turned the pages on the left side, reading quickly, then did the same on the right. The paper was slightly brittle, the comm plan itself old enough to have been done on an electric typewriter rather than a computer printer. He lifted the top page on the left again and said, “1993.”

“A little long in the tooth,” Dukas said.

“But they never checked it out.”

Dukas stretched. “So?”

Alan cocked his head. “Well, somebody, maybe Suter, thought it was worth following up.” His old grin, not seen for a month, partly returned. “Doing something is better than doing nothing—right?”

Dukas shook his head. “You’re having an idea. I don’t like that.”

“I just thought somebody could go to Jakarta, check it out—follow it up, like it says here—” He looked like a kid asking for the day off from school.

Jakarta.

Jerry Piat moved his practiced hand from the bargirl’s neck, over her breasts, down her flat and naked stomach, his hand always light and playful, never heavy or commanding. He hooked a leg under both of hers and rolled them both over so that she was above him, her breasts heavy against him, her long hair a black cloud that smothered him in incense. At least, it smelled like incense.

He watched her with the detached part of his brain, the part that wouldn’t ever turn off, not when he was fucking, not when he was getting shot at, and that part registered that she was fourteen years old and had a “Hello Kitty” bag for her makeup. She liked him.

The phone rang. His hand found it, lifted it from the receiver and dropped it back to the cradle. She laughed, happy that she was more important than a Bule (Westerner’s) business call, but Jerry was just following the signal procedure—his agent, Bobby Li, would give him one ring, and then he would go out to a pay phone to talk. It wasn’t exactly Moscow rules, but it was tradecraft, and Jerry was alive and sane where a lot of his peers were either dead or content to run Chinese double agents and lie about their access. Jerry rolled them both over again, still agile at fifty, and kissed her, hard, on the lips, which clearly surprised her.

Her body was still very much on his mind when he cursed the lift and started down the seven flights of cockroach-infested stairs to the hotel’s lobby. The lobby was clean and neat, but the stairwell’s strong suggestion of urine stayed in his nostrils until the heavy petroleum scent of unleaded car exhaust drove it out as he stepped into the street, still pulling a light jacket over his old silk shirt. The jacket had only one purpose, to hide the bulk of the gun that sat in his shoulder rig. In Jakarta, the only men in jackets were wearing guns, or so Jerry had come to believe during Suharto’s regime. The place looked better now, cleaner, richer, even after the collapse in the nineties.

He stopped on the street, lit a cigarette from a nifty gas lighter with a serious torchlight that he had picked up at the airport. You could solder with the damn thing, and that could have its uses. Or you could burn someone’s eyes out.

Two cab rides and three bars later, he was getting ready to make his phone call, on his way to start the process by which he would kill the men who had killed George Shreed.

One more stop, he told himself. For old time’s sake.

And, of course, for caution’s sake, because there always just might be that watcher who needed to be convinced that he was bar-crawling and not running an op.

Suburban Virginia.

Alan greeted his wife at the door with a kiss and a suddenly urgent embrace. She leaned back in his arms and looked at his eyes and saw something that made her grab him and squeeze him hard. They stood there, holding each other, rocking, and she said, “Something good happened, right?”

He laughed, a sound she hadn’t heard in a while, and he said, “I went to Mike’s office to do some work. He got a new case—it’s interesting, there’s something in it for me, maybe.”

She was still in her flight suit. She had been out at Pax River, putting in her hours in the T-84 as she transited from choppers to fixed-wing. Holding her, seeing the sudden brightness in her eyes, he understood her misery of the past two weeks, never knowing what she would come home to. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

“No, no—”

“Yes, yes.” The dog pushed between them then and they both laughed and he pulled her into the house. “I had to leave Dukas early to get Mikey at school; no problem, but Dukas has this case, this crate of stuff! A case, something they dumped on him from the Agency because they can’t hack it but I think we can; there’s this comm plan in it; it doesn’t make sense, but—I’m babbling, right?”

She laughed. “Right.” She kissed him. “Keep babbling; it’s nice.”

“I’m getting dinner.”

“I smell it. Risotto with white beans, garlic bread, frozen peas, and a salad, right?”

“I invited Mike for dinner.”

That took a beat for her to absorb, sobering her, and she smiled too brightly and said, “Great!”

“To talk about the case,” he said.

“Great!” She headed for the stairs. “I’ll just change into something glamorous.”

Half an hour later, Dukas was there with an attaché and a cell phone, which he dumped on the battered coffee table. He kissed Rose. “Hey, Gorgeous, you’re breathtaking.”

“Did you bring the comm plan?” Alan shouted from the kitchen.

“Like you asked, yes, yes, yes! I always do what I’m told.” He glanced toward the kitchen and lowered his voice still further. “This okay with you, babe?”

“If it makes him this cheerful, God, yes!”

“He’s a little manic,” Dukas murmured.

“I’ll take manic,” she said. “He’s so down when he’s not in things.”

Dukas looked toward the kitchen again. “I used to think it was just, you know, type A behavior. But now I realize he always has to be proving something. To himself.” He lowered himself into an upholstered chair. “You know the difference between you two? You’ve got a plan, an ambition—you’re going to be an astronaut. You’ve built a career around it. He doesn’t have a plan. He just has to—go.” Dukas looked up at her. “What’s the matter with him?”

Alan shouted from the kitchen, “You talking about me out there?” He appeared in the doorway, grinning. “Speak up, or I’ll think you’re analyzing me.” They stared at him a little guiltily, and the dog got up and sat there looking at him, too, and they all began to laugh.

Jakarta.

“Hey, Meester?” the voice said. Jerry whirled; that hand was awfully close to his pistol.

“Back off, bud.” Jerry glared at the boy, but the boy, half Jerry’s size and weight, held his ground.

“You memba?” He pointed up at a large sign in Dutch and English, Dutch still first, because this place went way back. ANHANGER ENKEL, MEMBERS ONLY.

“I was a member here when your mom still worked here, bud.” Jerry leaned forward. “Asrama pekerja?”

Malay was clearly not his mother tongue, but the boy smiled and nodded.

“Go get the missus, then, bud.” Jerry waved his hand, palm down, the fingers snapping open, like the locals—dismissed, the gesture meant. Then he turned and walked to the huge teak bar, forty-five feet long and carved from a single tree. He waved to the bartender, a slight youth in a clean white shirt. There weren’t many customers, at least in the bar; the rooms upstairs could be full to bursting and you’d never know. George Shreed had waited for him in the spy’s seat, there next to the alcove, a private booth invisible from the door.

“Meester?” It was the boy from the alcove.

“Hey, bud, we’re done, you and me.”

“You memba?” The boy was insistent, and it reminded Jerry of all the time and money he had spent here. He deserved better.

“Go get the missus. You hear me, sport? The missus? Before I bop you one, okay?” He wondered if they had gone to membership cards. Had it really been so long since he was here? Maybe they had fucking plastic IDs with your photo. He felt someone enter silently behind him, back by the alcove, and he turned to see Hilda, the handsomest of the western blondes of his own day, coming through the door in sensible business attire—not what she’d worn back then, but still attractive.

“Jerry, darling.”

“Hilda. Aren’t you still too young to be trusted with the keys?”

She laughed; she had natural lines at her eyes and mouth that meant she’d disdained surgery, but she looked good. Really good. “This man is a member. An old member who gets anything he wants, mengerti?”

“Yaas, majikan.”

“Drink with me?”

“I can’t—I’m working.”

He looked at her and winked. “You were too good for that sort of thing when we were twenty years younger. The missus never made you oblige the customers.”

“But I’m the missus, now, and I have books to do. Come back—come back tomorrow and I’ll drink with you.”

“I might have to do that, Hilda.” He smiled, gulped the rest of his gin and tonic, disappointed at one level, happy to be on with the job at another.

Jerry gave her something like a salute. She had poise, like a runway model; maybe she had been a runway model before she crashed in Jakarta. He didn’t really know her, but he liked that she remembered him. Whores and spies; the oldest profession and the next oldest, or so the joke ran. He stopped in the alcove, still smiling because she had remembered him.

Aboard USS Thomas Jefferson.

Rafe Rafehausen pulled a stack of paper toward him, read again the paper on top, and then said, “Get me Admiral Pilchard at LantFleet. What the hell time is it there—? Yeah, you might catch him—try, try.” He took the next paper off the stack and started to read, rubbing his eyes and wondering if they’d last through the reams of reading on this cruise, thinking, Jesus, next I’ll need glasses, acutely aware again that his squadron years were over. He tried to concentrate on VF-105’s morale self-study and was relieved when a phone was shoved toward him and the lieutenant-commander said, “Admiral Pilchard.”

Rafehausen threw himself back in the chair. “Sir! Captain Rafehausen, CAG on the—Yes, sir.” He grinned. “Nice of you to remember. Unh, kind of a personal matter, sir. If I say the name ‘Al Craik,’ will you—? Yes, sir, that’s the one.” He nodded his head as he listened. Pilchard was Craik’s self-appointed “sea daddy,” a kind of naval mentor and enabler. He swung, Rafe knew, between thinking that Craik was God’s little crackerjack prize and that he was a dangerously loose cannon, but he’d concern himself with Craik’s welfare if it was threatened. Right now, he was in the loose-cannon phase, and Rafehausen winced at the admiral’s sour tone. When the admiral had finished reviewing Craik’s recent performance, Rafehausen said, “He’s going nuts onshore and he needs something. I can’t take him back here yet—med officers won’t allow it. If there’s something he could do—”

He looked up at the lieutenant-commander, winked as the admiral did some more talking about times in the past he’d gone out on a limb for Craik, and how sick he was of having Craik blue-sky things and act as if rules didn’t exist. When the admiral stopped talking, Rafehausen said, “Absolutely, sir!” He grinned again. “What I was thinking, I just received some correspondence about this experimental MARI det that was set up—that’s the det that Craik was commanding, sir, when—good, yes, sir, you remember all that. Well, it’s gone so well that there’s a request about setting up a second MARI det on the west coast; I was wondering if maybe that could be moved up some, then Craik could go out there now instead of at the end of this cruise—Yes, sir, to advise and—No, sir, not as det CO, and not to fly because—Yes, sir. No, sir. Purely advisory, yes, sir, of course they’d pull personnel from the west coast squadrons, and Craik would—Yeah, Miramar, I’m sure that Miramar—Uh—”

Rafehausen signaled to the lieutenant-commander to close the door. Swiveling around, he bent forward as if he had to talk to the floor. “It’s a matter of helping a good man, sir. I know Craik—I think we could lose him if he doesn’t get something to do. Between you and me, Admiral, I think he got hit harder than we thought on that recent mission. I don’t normally put much stock in ‘trauma’ and all that psychobabble, but he’s been sending me p-comms that, well, I think maybe he’s lost some faith in himself.” Again, he listened, slowly leaning back, and when there was silence on the other end, he said, “Yes, sir. That’d be great. That’d really be great. And absolutely, yes, I’ll put the fear of God in him to do it by the book. And if they can see their way to setting up a west coast det with him on board, it would—Of course, of course, these things take time—Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”

A minute later, he had hung up and turned back to the pile of paper, Al Craik now only one of many worries nibbling at the edges of his consciousness.

Jakarta.

He gave terse orders to the third cab of the night, cutting across the city, going twice down gangs rinsed clean by the heavy rain, until he was tired of the game. Clean as clean could be. Then he led them back south away from the sea by the toll road, off the Semaggi Interchange and into the gleaming modernity at the heart of Westernized Jakarta. It wasn’t his favorite part of the city; he liked the Japanese in Japan but hated them when they were abroad. It never occurred to him that they acted just like him.

“Wat ingang?” asked the driver in Dutch. Jerry was white and coming from Emmy-Lu’s, hence Dutch, as far as the driver could tell.

“Hotel Mulia Senayan, danke. Simpruk.” The Mulia was the newest, flashiest hotel in Jakarta, with over a thousand rooms and the largest ballroom in Asia. It was the multiple entrances and table phones that drew Jerry—a postman’s paradise. Simpruk was a broad and well-traveled avenue full of business traffic; he’d leave by the main entrance and go to the cabstand, and while he sat and talked he’d be another business traveler. A little seedy, but hardly the only Westerner in the lobby, and that’s what mattered to Jerry. And nice public lines—murder to monitor, and businessmen don’t like monitored lines.

Jerry paid the cab before they stopped, was out and up the steps before the cab had pulled away. No time to linger; this was the operational act itself, the very heart of the game. It didn’t matter if no one was watching; Jerry played for an invisible audience of fellow professionals he hoped weren’t ever there, breezing into the enormous lobby, walking past the desks to the central bar, where leather couches held the open space against a jungle of local potted plants. At each end of every couch sat a house phone, and Jerry knew how to use one to get an outside line in Jakarta. He ordered a gin and tonic from a waiter, sat, and looked at his watch.

Two hours and ten minutes since the phone had rung in his room and he had hung it up. The last time he had worked in Jakarta, he’d been following orders from George Shreed. Now he would set up an operation to avenge him. It had an Asian air to it, like an episode in the tale of the Forty-Seven Ronin.

He lifted the phone.

Suburban Virginia.

“Sleeping Dog was an NSA case, and then it was a Bureau case, and then it was a CIA case. And now it’s our case,” Dukas explained to Rose. They were eating in what was called the dining room, which barely had enough room for the table and three people. “Believe it or not, it’s nine years old.”

“And it’s got this comm plan,” Alan said. “The first action item.”

“Who says it’s an action item?” Dukas said.

“Well, isn’t it? They should have moved on it when they got it, and they didn’t.”

Dukas raised his eyebrows. “We’ve barely looked at the stuff. There could be tons of action items.”

“Not according to the inventory.” Alan put his elbows on the table and turned to Rose. “The comm plan just leaps out at you; it’s the way a courier could meet with somebody else, and it was connected somehow with this Sleeping Dog—”

“We don’t know that,” Dukas growled. He finished the risotto on his plate. “Who taught you to make risotto?” he said.

“You did.”

“Good for me.” He held up his plate. “I’ll have some more.” He watched the plate being heaped with the yellow grains and the dust-colored beans. “Next time, just a tad more saffron, okay?”

Alan grinned at Rose and poured more red wine and said to Dukas, “I want to go to Jakarta.”

“To do what, for Christ’s sake?”

“To test the comm plan.”

“Alan, read my lips: You’re not a spy! You’re an intel officer!”

“Yeah, but I’m available. And you know you can trust me, which is a big deal for you right now because you think everybody’s on your back over George Shreed.” He leaned forward. “Mike, it’s three days—fly there, nice hotel, take a walk, leave a mark, have a nice dinner, go to the meeting place. Bang, that’s it.”

“And what happens at the meeting place?” Rose said, scenting trouble.

“Nothing. Ask Mike. He insists it’s a dead issue, because nobody’s done anything with it for years and there’s nobody at the other end. Right?”

“Did I say that?”

“You did. Just before I left this afternoon.”

“Well—”

Rose was looking at her husband with her head tipped to the side. “If it’s dead and nothing’s going to happen, why go?”

He seemed to falter, then made an apologetic face. “Because it’s something to do,” he said softly.

She changed the subject then by asking Dukas about Sally Baranowski, a question that embarrassed him and made him almost stammer. Dukas told them about the call on his answering machine that he hadn’t returned and then admitted his doubts about getting involved, and at last he was telling them both that he was still shaken by the shooting and he didn’t know what he wanted. “So what is this,” he growled, “post-traumatic stress syndrome?”

Rose put a hand over one of his, then over Alan’s good one. “You guys,” she said. “You guys.”

After dessert, when Alan had brought coffee into the living room, he raised the subject of Jakarta again. It was clear to them then that Alan had brought Dukas there that night because he was asking Rose’s permission as well as Dukas’s: he was trying to get a go-ahead from both of them. “Give Rose and the kids a rest from my bad temper, drink some good beer, do Mike and Uncle a favor.” He looked at Rose. “And in case you’re worried, this is a no-risk operation—a walk in the park.” The appeal in his voice was touching. “It’s a walk in the park!”

Dukas snorted. “It’s a free trip to Jakarta, that’s what it is.” He stirred sugar and then cream into his coffee, even though all day long he drank it black. “Well—if you come back and tell me nothing happened, I can close out what you call ‘the action item,’ that’s true. Then I can bore myself stiff with the radio crap for six months and close out the whole file, and then I can go back to writing reports about why I should be reimbursed for ten grand I took on my personal responsibility when we were running after that shit George Shreed. That’s your view of it?”

Alan looked at him, then at his injured hand, and then he reached out with his good hand to his wife. “You’re flying all day. I just sit here.”

She squeezed his hand. To Dukas, she said, “Can he do it?”

Dukas shrugged. “You don’t just ‘do’ a thing like this. You got to have a country clearance. Once we apply, the Agency gets notified, then they want to know what’s going on and why they’re not the ones to do it. Then we wrangle, on and on.”

“They had their chance,” Alan said.

“Not the way they’d see it.”

“It’s your case now. You’ve got a number, what can they say?” He leaned forward. “Mike, let me go. I go, then you apply for the country clearance; it’s happening too fast for them to do anything.”

“No—I don’t think so—”

“Mike, goddamit,” Alan snapped, “you lost your nerve? Jesus, you can’t apply for a country clearance; you can’t even call an old girlfriend on the fucking phone!”

Rose’s hand gripped Dukas’s. He looked into Alan’s suddenly angry face and looked away to keep things from escalating. He sighed. “And if something goes wrong?”

“What can go wrong? You said yourself, it’s dead! It’s just crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s! What can go wrong with that?”

Dukas sipped coffee. “Jakarta, that’s what.” He looked at Alan, and Alan winked. Another first since Pakistan. Dukas put down his cup. “Tell you what. Triffler’s back tomorrow. I’ll have him check Al out on the comm plan—walk him through it, lay it out on paper. Then it’ll be easy. Right?”

He was talking to Rose. She made a face. “It’s still Jakarta,” she said.

Jakarta.

Just an old-fashioned spy, he thought. The idea delighted him. He was drunk, happy-drunk. I want a spy/Just like the spy that buggered dear old dad. He lifted the telephone and rang through, picturing the little man who would be waiting at the public telephone.

“Yes?” The voice was tentative. Bobby Li, the agent at the other end, never seemed quite sure of himself. Well, people who were absolutely sure of themselves didn’t make good agents, right?

“Wondering if you’ve read Green Eggs and Ham.”

“Oh, yes, right. ‘Mister Brown is out of town/He came back with Mister Black.’ Hi!” Bobby sounded distant, but he had the recognition codes right. Good start.

“Hey, Sundance—how’re they hanging?”

Bobby Li giggled. George Shreed had given him that code name. “Hey, Butch Cassidy.”

“Long time, bud.” Three years, in fact. But they’d had some great times before that. “Want to play some ping-pong, bud?” Ping-pong was telephone code for an operation.

“Good. Great!” Real pleasure in the high voice. Bobby loved him still.

“I’m going to need a few items, bud.”

“Sure thing, boss.”

Jerry struggled for a moment with the simple telephone code, trying to remember the word for cameras. Ah. Camera. Hidden in plain sight. He was supposedly in Jakarta to find locations for a Hollywood feature film, as good a cover as he’d ever had, as it excused a great deal of roaming. He was using his old cover name, Andrew Bose, who had always been an antique dealer in the past, but what the hell. Cameras were now a legitimate extension of his cover, so no code word needed. Too much booze, he thought, but wryly, and not really meaning it. Can’t really have too much booze. “Need a camera, bud. And a guy to use it, okay? To photograph the ping-pong.”

“Sure.”

“And an ice bucket, okay?” Ice bucket was code for a weapon.

“Oh—okay—” Now Bobby seemed nervous, but, because Jerry was ordering him to find a weapon, that made sense.

“A big ice bucket, okay?”

“Sure, sure.”

“And some ice.” Then Jerry switched to a serious voice. Bobby would be happier if he thought things were serious. “This is a big game of ping-pong, pal.” Jerry leaned forward as if Bobby was right there. “You want to play in the big game. This is it, Bobby. The start of a big game.” He looked around the hotel lobby for the door to the bar, saw people going up three steps and out of sight and figured it was that way. “Meet me at Papa John’s and we’ll practice some ping-pong.” Papa John was code for a place and a time. Would Bobby remember after three years? Of course he’d remember! Bobby Li fucking loved him!

He hung up and headed for the bar. He was still sober enough to have kept from his old agent the fact that the ping-pong was going to end in the death of an American.

Bobby Li hung up and felt excited and happy. He had thought maybe his friend Andy had forgotten him.

Bobby had lived his whole life in Jakarta. He was Chinese only by ethnicity, but ethnicity made for sharp divides here. Sometimes it was the ultimate arbiter of loyalty.

And loyalty was crucial for Bobby Li, because he was a double agent—for his American friend who had just talked to him on the telephone, and for Loyalty Man, who was Chinese and a right shit and not his friend at all. Bobby was loyal to Loyalty Man because of ethnicity, the powerful force, but he was more loyal to the American because he was his friend and because he also loved George Shreed, who had been Bobby Li’s surrogate father. It had been George Shreed who had pulled him out of the gutter of Jakarta and made him a pet, a pal, and an agent. Love trumped ethnicity.

Bobby had worked for George Shreed for two years, and then for both George Shreed and Mister Chen, a double agent already at thirteen, but different because both men had known he was a double—Chen had made him one and then Shreed had accepted it and become a double himself. And then one day George Shreed had taken him aside and had said that he had to go back to the United States, and somebody else would be there instead. That was the worst day of Bobby’s life, when George Shreed had told him he was leaving.

“And a new guy will be taking over,” George had said. “Taking you over, too, Bobby. But—” George’s eyes had signaled the secret look that Bobby loved, the look that said that it was only the two of them against the world. “But we won’t tell the new guy about Mister Chen, okay? Mister Chen is our secret, Bobby.”

That had been twenty years ago, and he had never told. The new guy had been called Andy Bose, which was surely not his real name, but Bobby knew enough about espionage to understand that, and anyway, he had liked Andy from the start. And then Mister Chen had turned him over to another Chinese, and then he to another, and so on—six Chinese controls he had had, the last one this shit, Loyalty Man—and he had been the whole time with Andy. And now Andy had called him and they were going to do a big operation together, just like old times, and it would be great.

Being a double agent wouldn’t matter. He could be loyal to Andy for the operation, and nobody the wiser. It would be great.

Suburban Virginia.

Lying in the dark, Alan could feel Rose beside him, feel her wakefulness and her worry. There had been no sex since he had got out of the hospital. He had been afraid, he realized, confused by why the injury to his hand should make him so.

“Alan?”

He grunted.

“You really want to go on this Jakarta thing, don’t you?”

He grinned into the darkness. “Yeah—I confess: I really do.”

He heard her chuckle. “Hey, sailor,” she whispered, “want to have a good time?”

“I—” He swallowed. “I’m afraid I’ll touch you with my—ha-hand.” He felt her move on the mattress and heard the rustling of cloth.

He heard the smile in her husky voice. “Just you leave everything to me,” she murmured, settling on top of him.

Then he began to slide down that glassy slope that is sex, losing his fear, losing consciousness, losing self-consciousness, merging with her and coming to himself again in warmth and sweetness and safety; and, later, he knew that it was at that moment that his real healing began.

Northern Pakistan.

Colonel Lao stood in the remnants of a street, peering out from under the hood of an American rain parka at generations of rubble. The village had been fought over recently. The mosque had been destroyed years ago. In between, the village had been a focus of violence over and over.

His people had a generator running and spotlights on the ruins of the mosque. Forensics people from State Security were all over the site. He hoped they were working for him. Their team leader had an encrypted international cell phone of a type his department had never heard of, much less issued. Lao watched them with a detachment worthy of the ancients. He didn’t even have a cell phone.

“Sir?” His new man, Tsung. Young and competent. A little lazy, but well trained. He was hovering at arm’s length, careful of Lao’s silence. Lao appreciated his courtesy.

“Are you waiting for me, Tsung?” He turned, shook rain off his parka.

“I have an eyewitness the Ministry seems to have missed. He says that after the plane left, another car left too, going north.”

Lao shook his head again, though not at the rain.

“Well done, Tsung. We needed another complication.”

North meant trouble. Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Russia. Lao didn’t want to consider what would happen if the Russians had Chen. He followed Tsung toward the ruined tower, stopped by a low wall where a technician in an olive-drab poncho was using forceps to clear something out of the muck.

“Cartridge?”

“That shotgun. The shooter moved all the time.”

Lao ducked under the awning and accepted a cup of tea from one of the State Security goons. He had a picture in his head of the fight in the village. Shreed had never moved, firing repeatedly from one position in the open. That made Lao think he had been the first man hit. It also suggested that Shreed had been either ambushed or set up, and that didn’t fit any of the theories he had been offered in the office in Beijing.

Chen’s opposition had come from only a few men, perhaps as few as three or four. They’d killed Chen’s paratroopers with relative ease. Because it was a trap? Or because the Chinese paratroopers weren’t all that good? Lao wasn’t that kind of soldier. He looked at the trails of tape that marked the movements of individual shooters, traced by the cartridge casings they had let fall, and thought that the opposition had done all the moving.

One of the Chinese, a sniper, had apparently killed two of his own men before he was killed himself. That made no sense to Lao. Lao thought that someone else must have killed the sniper and used his weapon. Perhaps the forensics men would find something to prove his theory—or perhaps they wouldn’t.

He used his teacup to warm his hands as Tsung brought him an older man, his thin trousers flapping in the wind. Lao bowed a little and the old man gave him a nervous smile.

“Tell him that I’m a policeman.”

Tsung spoke to the old man in careful Arabic. It wasn’t his best language, and it was one the old man probably only knew from the Qur’an, but they communicated.

Lao stood patiently, sipping tea and offering it to his witness, while the old man told the story of the evening in halting driblets. Lao taped it. He didn’t speak much Arabic and he wasn’t sure he’d trust anyone in Dar to translate, but he had to keep a record.

The old man pointed out the commanding view that the little hill village had of the highway below them in the valley. He described the plane’s landing on the road, and he described the other car’s driving away after the plane had left. Yes, he was sure. No, he had no idea who had been in the car.

Lao swallowed the rest of his tea and spat out the leaves.

Maybe Chen was alive, after all. Lao smiled without humor: if Chen was alive, then he could clean up his own messes. Like the unfinished operation to target the Jefferson. Lao disliked executing operations in whose planning he’d had no part—let Chen be alive and take it over! The operation, he thought, had been put together too hastily, too emotionally—it seemed part of that nervous hysteria he’d felt in Beijing. He never thought he’d be sorry that Chen was dead (if he was dead), but he’d be delighted to have him rise now from the rubble of this Pakistani village and take over.

“Tsung,” he said. The younger man came almost at a trot. Eager. Lao was wondering if Tsung could be trusted to take over some of the details of the Jefferson operation and free him, Lao, to concentrate on Chen. “You’ve run agents among the Pakistani military?” he said.

Tsung grinned. “They don’t like to call themselves agents. ‘Friends of China,’ meaning they have an agenda that matches ours somewhere.” He made a joined-hands gesture, fingers of one hand inserted between the fingers of the other like meshing gears.

“I have a task for you.”

Tsung said something about being honored. Lao ignored it. He skipped details—the name of the Jefferson, the use of the submarines to pass data, the agent on the west coast of the United States—and explained about the plan to tap into Islamic hatred of America and to launch a small-boat attack on an American warship.

NCIS HQ.

Alan was in Dukas’s office at NCIS headquarters at nine-thirty, eager to hit the road for Jakarta.

Dukas was supposed to be making the travel arrangements; his assistant, the until-then absent Dick Triffler, was going to brief Alan and then go along to ride shotgun.

“Shotgun, hell,” Triffler said. “My son’s pitching tonight for his Little League team, and being Dad is more important than playing cops and robbers. Sorry, Commander.”

Alan grinned. “You wouldn’t say that if Mike was here.”

“I’d say it in spades if Mike was here! You think I’m afraid of Mike?”

Triffler was a tall, slender African American with what Alan had to think of as “class.” His skin was the color of caramel; his face was handsome and lean; his voice was a tenor, his enunciation pure northeastern US. He was not afraid of Mike Dukas, that was true; in fact, he emphasized their differences whenever he got the chance. Their shared office, for example, was divided by a wall of white plastic crates, into which the obsessively neat Triffler had put potted plants, sculpture, books—anything, in fact, that would block his view of the squalid mess where Dukas ruled.

Alan laughed. “I think you’re about as afraid of Mike as I am, Dick. But, uh, this is an operation, and I really am going to Jakarta, and I really do need some—”

Triffler waved a long hand. “Okay! I know! Uncle Sam says I have to go. Tomorrow! Okay? So I get there twenty-four hours after you, so what? You take a nap, have some local beer, watch TV. I’ll catch up.” Triffler shot his cuffs, maybe to show off his cuff links. “I don’t want to spend any more time in a germ pit like Jakarta than I have to, anyway.”

Alan didn’t comment on “germ pit.” He had heard enough about Triffler to know he was obsessive about cleanliness, too—the only man in NCIS who slid a coaster under your coffee cup when you picked it up. “Well—if it’ll work—”

“Sure, it’ll work. I got here at twenty of eight this morning, Dukas already had the file and a memo on top of the pile of other jobs he’s tasked me with while I was away, so I’ve read it and looked at the map and I’m up to speed.”

“If you wouldn’t take time off—” a voice came from the other side of the room divider—“you wouldn’t get tasked.”

“Hey, Mike—when did you sneak in?”

“I didn’t sneak, Al, I walked; you and Mister Clean were too busy dissing me to notice. And how are you this morning, Mister Triffler?”

“I was telling Lieutenant-Commander Craik that I’m not afraid of you, is how I am.”

“Good. Nobody should live in fear. You rested after your vacation?”

“It was not a vacation! It was quality time with my family.” Triffler smiled at Alan. “Some people don’t have families. Unsociable, outsider people.”

“Somebody has to do the scut work while you daddies are having quality time,” Dukas’s voice growled. “Will you guys get to it, please?”

They spent three hours. Triffler explained—redundantly, but there was no stopping him—what a comm plan was and what the Jakarta plan was. He went through the structure that Alan would have to build around the comm plan—walking a route before he left the mark that was supposed to set up the meeting, memorizing codes to communicate with his team (that is, Triffler), planning for a busted meeting and an escape.

“Which won’t happen,” Triffler said, “because there isn’t going to be any meeting to bust, right? This is a dead plan, right? Uncle’s paying to send us to Jakarta so Mister Dukas can cross an item off a list, right?” He raised his voice. “IS THAT RIGHT, MIKE?”

“Just do your job.”

Dick Triffler was down to shirtsleeves after an hour more of briefing Alan, revealing wide yellow suspenders to go with his yellow-on-beige striped shirt. His tie looked like heavy embroidery, also brown and yellow with flecks of green. He made Alan feel dowdy, even in uniform.

“Uh, what will you be wearing in Jakarta?” Alan said.

Triffler looked startled. He spread his arms as if to say, These. “Work clothes,” he said. He looked more than a little like a model in GQ.

“I thought I’d wear jeans.”

Triffler coasted over that by saying they weren’t going undercover, so there was no need to think of disguise. “We’re just two guys who happen to work for the Navy, having a look around Jakarta. In and out in two days. One suit, one wrinkle-free blazer, two neckties, four shirts.”

“And blue jeans.”

Triffler looked at Alan’s uniform, then his shirt, then his polyester tie, and apparently decided to say nothing. He got them both coffee—great coffee, because he was also obsessive about that—and sat again at his uncluttered desk. “You go in,” he said. “Normally, you’d have watchers. This time, only me. No problem; there’s nothing to watch. You do a route to a cannon, or whatever it is where you leave the mark. If we thought the plan was active, we’d have a team to watch the mark to see who picks up on it, but not ap, right? You get a good night’s sleep, we rendezvous—telephone codes to come, so you know where and when—and you go to make the meeting, which is in something called the—I had it a moment ago—”

“The Orchid House.”

“Right! You’re way ahead of me. In some sort of park—theme park? Something. So, you go there, and you walk the route in the comm plan—this is so the other side can look at you if need be; their guy is walking a route, too, in theory, and we’d have a team to watch, but we don’t and won’t—and you go into this Orchid House and walk to, quote, ‘bench by curved path, west side,’ where, at ten minutes after the hour at three stated times of day precisely there would be some guy waiting for you if this was an active plan. Which it ain’t.”

“What if it is?”

“It isn’t; we have Reichsführer Dukas’s word on it.”

“Yeah, but just suppose—what if?”

“You say your recognition words and he says his, some b.s. about a Christmas party, and then you look at each other and wonder what the hell comes next.”

“‘Hi, my name is Al, and I’ll be your waiter this evening?’”

“Try ‘What have you got for me?’ At least that sounds as if you know what you’re doing.” Triffler closed the folder and slapped his hand on it. “Won’t happen. In and out in two days, home again to the rapturous applause of Mike Dukas.”

“Ha, ha,” said the voice from the other side.

“Okay.” Alan grinned. “Now what do we do?”

“Now we go over it again, and then you memorize the codes and the greetings and the route, and then we go over it again, and then we go over it.”

“Not really.”

Triffler sighed. “Really. You thought signing EM orders was tedious? Try spying.”

Jakarta.

Jerry Piat had half a dozen places in Jakarta where he stayed when he made a trip there, places he’d come to like over the years and felt comfortable in. Only one had any class; only one was really a dump. The others were modest little hotels where low-end tourist agents put groups that were doing Asia on the cheap. He had kicked around the East long enough that he spoke the languages and didn’t require a blocksquare chunk of America to sleep in, and he liked the strange mix of comfort and oddness that the places gave him.

The Barong Palas had been built by a Dutch exporter as his city house in the nineteenth century; when the Dutch left after World War II, it had become a whorehouse, then a clutter of ground-floor shops with a squat in the upper floors, and finally a hotel, when an energetic Indonesian woman had bought it and kicked everybody out. It still looked Dutch—a stair-step roof, a certain overweight look to the cornices and lintels—but inside it was immaculate, slightly threadbare, secure. They locked the doors at twelve, required that guests pick up and drop off a key each time they went in or out, and paid their own knife-toting guards to patrol the gardens that surrounded it.

Now Jerry woke to one of its bedrooms. The room wasn’t much because the hotel—only twenty rooms in all—was full of a Korean gourmet club. He didn’t remember that, at first. His hangover was intense—familiar but awful: a headache like an axe in the skull, a swelling of the eyes, a nausea that became vertigo if he moved. Then he remembered where he was and what he had done last night—the bars, Hilda, the call to Bobby Li—and he sat up and let the full awfulness of the hangover grip him like a fist.

“Nobody ever died of a hangover,” he said aloud, a man who had suffered thousands. In fact, he thought that people probably had died of hangovers, but not this one, which he would classify as a Force Four, severe but not fatal. Nothing would help, he knew; showers and coffee and deep breathing were for amateurs. He dressed and headed out.

The code he had given Bobby Li, “Papa John’s,” meant a corner by a taxi rank opposite the Import-Export Bank, at ten minutes after seven in the morning, ten after nine, and ten after four in the afternoon. He had already missed the seven-ten. Bobby would have been there, he knew, waited for three minutes, pretending to read a newspaper, and walked away. Jerry felt guilty.

Not professional, missing a meeting time.

He walked slowly, balancing the hangover on his head. He stopped in a sushi bar and had two sea-urchin-egg sushis, supposed to be good for his condition. The green tea seemed to help. Four aspirin from a corner vendor helped still more, and each stop let him check his back trail and see that nobody was following. He then stepped abruptly to the street and pushed himself into a cab that two Indonesians were just leaving, then wove through central Jakarta and got out three blocks from the Import-Export Bank. At nine-ten, he was fifty feet from the taxi rank.

Bobby Li was there.

Jerry got into a cab and told the driver to go slowly. After a block, he looked back; another cab was following.

“Fantasy Island Park,” he told his driver. When they got there, the other cab was still behind. He’d noted nobody else. He had the driver go three blocks beyond the park, and he got out; the other taxi pulled up and Bobby Li got out and followed Jerry to the park entrance without acknowledgment.

“Hey, bud,” Jerry said when he was standing in the shade of the ornate gate. Bobby Li smiled. Bobby was a smiler, one reason he still seemed like a teenager to Piat, that and his small size.

“Hey, Andy,” Bobby said. He was pathetically happy to see him.

“Come on, bud, I’ll show you where the ping-pong’s going to be.” They went into the park, which was an old-fashioned fun park crossed with a somewhat corny cultural display, none of it terribly well maintained. The centerpiece, however, was a world-class collection of orchids.

“Been here before?” Jerry said.

“I bring the kids.”

“How’re the kids?”

“Good.” A big smile. “The boy is bigger than me. Fifteen now.”

“The wife?”

“She okay. Working hard.” The Lis didn’t make a lot of money, Jerry knew. Bobby had a small business, buying and selling exotic bird skins. Jerry, in fact, had set him up in it, persuading the CIA that it was worth the investment to have an agent with decent cover and an income. It amused him that Bobby was a feather merchant, the old term for a bullshitter. Amused him because that was the last thing Bobby could be.

“How’s the business?”

“Pretty good. Lot of problems, CITES, that stuff.” He waved a hand. “Big companies cutting all the forest everyplace, no birds.”

Jerry led them to a kiosk where ethnic dancers performed several times a day. The kiosk was white, glaring in the sunlight, empty plastic chairs around it for the audience. He nodded his head toward it. “Our man is going to walk in the gate and sit here—that’s in his comm plan.” Bobby took it in but didn’t ask any questions. Agents got told what they needed to know, nothing more. “I’ll give you a photo of him. You get a guy who’ll sit here and check him out. I want him checked for guns, wire, walkie-talkie—anything. Has to be visual—can’t touch him. Maybe bump him once when the crowd’s moving, but they got to be careful, because if it’s the guy I expect, he’s a pro and he’ll know what’s up.” The guy he expected was Dukas. Dukas was the one who would get the file; Dukas was the special agent. It wouldn’t be Craik, who was Navy and would be off saving the world someplace. If Jerry’s luck was bad, it would be merely some NCIS nobody that Dukas had got to come over from Manila, and then the whole plan would have to be shit-canned. That was one reason it was a bad plan, as Jerry had pointed out to both Suter and Helmer.

He dug out a photograph of Dukas that he’d lifted from an old Agency file. “That’s him.” The picture was ten years old, and Dukas looked tough and overweight. Jerry had looked for a photo of Craik but had dug up only a useless old group photo from a squadron book in which he looked about fifteen.

Jerry led Bobby over to a food concession and bought a Philippine pancake and two green teas, and he ate the pancake with his torso pitched forward so he wouldn’t spill anything on his shirt and pants. “You get the ice bucket?” he said. They both sipped the tea.

“Not yet, Andy.” He didn’t say, It was only last night you asked for it, for Christ’s sake. Bobby never said things like that.

“I’ll show you where I want it.” Piat licked his fingers and walked toward the Orchid House, a greenhouse perched atop a concrete model of a Javanese fortress, circa 1500. They went inside, where a broad path covered in bark mould wound through two full acres of flowers, which rose so high they screened the turns of the path, preventing long sight lines and making a perfumed maze with walls forty feet high. Four entrances, each arriving from a separate path through the minipark.

It was one of the most perfect sites for a clandestine meeting that Jerry had ever seen. It was a site where a man could meet his agent while the whole world watched him, never really knowing whether they had met. It had George Shreed written all over it.

Jesus, George knew his craft.

“This is where the meeting’s going down,” he said. He led the way along the path, his left hand gently stroking the narrow leaves of a mountain orchid. “I’m going to tell you a secret,” he said. Bobby was behind him; when Piat turned, he saw that the little man looked worried. Agents didn’t usually get secrets. “Who d’you think chose this site? Go on, guess. Take a guess.” Bobby frowned still more. “George,” Piat said.

“George!”

“George Shreed picked it.” Jerry grinned. The hangover had receded and was a dull ache with a peculiar peacefulness spread over it. “I shouldn’t be telling you this. No need to know. But I thought you’d care. Because of George.” Bobby looked flustered and excited. Jerry had paid him a great compliment, made a great gesture of trust. The little man was absurdly flattered. Finally, he was able to say, “How is George?”

Jerry realized that of course Bobby didn’t know. “ George is dead, Bobby. That’s what all this is about—the people who killed him are going to make this meeting. Then we’re going to get them.”

Tears stood in Bobby’s eyes. All the pleasure of being told a secret was wiped away. “George dead?” he murmured.

“We’re doing this for George, pal.” He touched Bobby’s shoulder. “Okay?”

Piat located the actual meeting place, where the path curved and a bench stood among the orchid plants. He pointed out the main entrance, through which their man would come, and then walked to the one at the opposite point of the compass. “And this is where our guy will come in. Then he’ll walk around that way, taking his time, back the way we just came, to the meeting place. Got it?”

Bobby nodded.

“Our guy will carry a copy of The Economist to identify himself, and he’ll also have an envelope stuffed with what will feel like money, which he’ll hand to the guy who killed George, and your team with the camera will get a good picture. Got that?”

“Got it, Andy.”

Jerry smiled. “You haven’t asked who’s going to be our guy.”

Bobby shook his head.

“Go on, ask. You can ask, it’s okay.”

Bobby knew then that he was supposed to ask. “Who?” he said, like a good stooge.

“You.” Piat laughed and slapped him on the shoulder and headed for the far wall of the greenhouse, walked boldly past a young man raking bark mould off the path and another misting leaves with water, both of whom looked at him but were cowed by his eyes. He pushed past them down a maintenance trail and on to a battered sign with “Treetops” painted on it; directly below it was a less old but hardly new sign that said “Closed.” Jerry remembered when “Treetops” (the name borrowed from the famous African lodge once visited by Queen Elizabeth) was new, a viewing platform out over the entire Orchid House, back when its trees had been young and its vines small. Built cleverly of steel pipe disguised to look like branches, it was meant to recall those game-viewing, tiger-shooting platforms once put up in real jungles. Now, the trees reached to the roof and the vines were as thick as your wrist, and Treetops was old and sagging and probably unsafe.

“Come on.”

He climbed the imitation-treetrunk stair, ignoring the thought that every worker in the Orchid House was watching them. The old viewing platform was filled with rolls of hose and cuttings, and the protective railing was broken, and the pigeons that flew in and out of the broken panes of the greenhouse had used it as their personal privy. The platform, however, looked as if nobody had been up there for years, except, he now saw, for the odd, courageous tourist who climbed up to stand in the one spot where you could see through some of the greenery.

Jerry lay full length, looking over the edge of the platform. “They need a few elephants,” he muttered. From up here, he could see most of the meeting site—the back of the bench, but not its legs because of the foliage, about three feet of path to the left of the bench, the side from which Bobby would come; and a little more on the side where he hoped Dukas would come.

“I want the big ice bucket placed up here, okay? Roll it in a floor mat; I can lie on that.”

“You going to—?” Bobby stopped himself. He had been about to ask a question. Piat ignored it, concentrated on the bark path beyond the bench. Have to wait until they’ve got the photo. Then shoot? Or wait until he starts out. He tracked an imaginary figure back toward the exit to his own right, seeing the path here and there as a red-brown stain among the green leaves and the flowers. There was one place that might do. Have to be ready, shoot as he moves into the open. Bang. Not such a long shot, but iffy because of the visibility.

Then noise and a lot of running around; I leave the gun, just like Oswald in Dallas; I head for the stairs—He raised his head to look at the steep, winding staircase, then craned to look down. There was better cover from the leaves where he was, one now-huge tree masking most of the front of Treetops. A sober man without a hangover could shinny down the old scaffolding unseen. Climb down, no sweat, there’s a lot of uproar, our team is making noise and providing a diversion—what? He looked up at the glass roof, saw the lines of water pipes up there. He studied the vast space. “Can you get a stun grenade, Bobby?”

“Not so easy. Maybe.”

“Try.” He didn’t like the idea of the stun grenade; it was distasteful to him—unprofessional. However, he would have to be out and away before the Jakarta cops arrived. Not good to get caught up in all that now that he wasn’t Agency any more.

Jerry got up and tried to brush the pigeon shit off his front, but the headache knifed back when he bent too far. “I think we’ll need four guys,” he said. He took ten American hundreds out of his wallet and handed them over.

Ten minutes later, they were standing outside the Orchid House.

“You know Si Jagur?” Jerry said.

Bobby Li grinned. “Everybody in Jakarta know Si Jagur.” Si Jagur was a seventeenth-century cannon that sat in a public place and was both a totem and a sort of pet, also a good place to meet for a date—See you at Si Jagur.

“Fatahillah Square,” Jerry said. “You’re going to go check it out every day. Here’s the deal: when our man’s ready to make the meeting, he’ll leave a chalk mark on Si Jagur. A circle with a little tail, sort of a letter Q. Got that? On the left-hand wheel as you stand behind the gun. Okay? He leaves the mark, that means the clock is running and the first meeting time is next morning at nine-ten. Mmm?”

“I got you, Andy.”

“I want you to check Si Jagur every day, starting today. You’ll have to set up a route that takes you there, going someplace you usually go. Mmm?” Jerry wanted something sweet, which he hoped would absorb or minimize or anodize or do whatever the hell sugar did to alcohol. If the alcohol he’d taken in was still alcohol, and not some poisonous shit that it turned into after it hit the gut. “You know the drill—you make walking by the cannon look normal. Okay, you know all about that.” He also wanted a drink. “One of these days, you’ll see the mark. Then you let me know at once. I’ll give you a comm plan.”

“Okay I ask a question?”

“Ask.”

“How soon this guy going to leave the mark, Andy?”

Piat, hands on hips, inhaled and exhaled noisily. It was another flaw in Suter’s goddam plan. “Soon, I hope.” When Dukas gets around to it, he meant, but Suter had believed that Dukas was smart enough to find the comm plan quickly and to see that it was an anomaly. Well, maybe. We hope. “Soon.” He liked Jakarta, but he didn’t want to grow old there.

Jerry wanted to go back into the Orchid House and sit down. He liked the bizarre mixture of smells—earth, flowers, rot, bark. But he had other things to do. “I’m leaving,” he said. “You hang around for fifteen, twenty minutes, check out the way you go into the Orchid House to make the meeting. Then check out Si Jagur, then start to get your shit together. Okay?” He smiled into the small man’s eyes. “Good to be working together again, Bobby.” He put out his hand.

“Yeah.” Bobby’s face was sad. “I can’t believe George dead.”

“For his memory, Bobby. Hmm? Loyalty—that’s what this is about. Loyalty to George.”

Dulles Airport.

The summer evening looked golden through the great windows. Incoming aircraft winked like stars in a sky still too light to show the real ones. Alan walked with his bad arm around Rose, in the other the carry-on that was his only luggage. “Seems weird, going halfway around the world with less stuff than I’d take to the beach.”

She had her right arm around his waist; she squeezed. “I’ll miss you.”

“Not the way I’ve been the past few weeks, you won’t.”

“Even that way. Mikey cried when I told him you were going. It’s bad for him, you getting hurt, then you were so—so—”

“Crazy.”

“Whatever, and now you’re going away…”

There are few good conversations for a parting. Kids, the dog, her airplane, goodbye, goodbye. I love you, I love you.

She stared at the security gate and the metal detector. “Jakarta,” she said, as if she could see it there. “I’ve just never heard anything good about Jakarta.”

He kissed her. “You will.”

Jakarta.

The next day, Jerry Piat slept until noon. At four, he went to Hilda’s and a whorehouse and several bars.

Bobby Li ran around Jakarta, stopping four times at his business, which was only an office and a storage space; a woman old enough to be his mother answered the telephone for him and kept the place clean. He visited Si Jagur; he bought a much-used SKS with a scope and wrapped it in a grass mat and took it out to a suburb where a petty gangster named Ho had a fiefdom of about three square blocks.

“Got a job,” Bobby said.

Ho grunted and looked at the rolled mat. “I don’t shoot guys,” he said.

“Surveillance job. I need you and three others. You use a camera?”

Ho grunted.

“Use it good?”

Ho grunted.

“You use a telephoto?”

Ho grunted, but without conviction.

“Okay, I get you a point-and-shoot.”

They talked money. Bobby made a deposit from the bundle Andy had given him. He handed over the roll with the SKS in it. “Pay some glue-head to put this up on the old platform in the Orchid House. You know, the Treetops? Some doper who’ll do it but then forget it, okay?” He peeled off another hundred, tore it in half, and put half in Ho’s hand. “I’ll check five o’clock this afternoon. You get the other half if it’s been done right.” They talked terms some more, then communications, and Bobby told him he and the team would have to be ready to move on short notice. That required another deposit.

He went to the street market and bought an Olympus point-and-shoot cheap, probably ripped off from some tourist, loaded it with 400-speed film and took it back to Ho, who held it in his fat hand and looked puzzled. Bobby explained how it worked.

He tried to buy a stun grenade.

He told his wife nothing was wrong when she asked what was wrong.

He went to a different street market and bought six Walkabout radios.

He met with Andy and the team. He told Andy he needed more money.

That evening, Alan Craik landed in Jakarta.

About the same time, Dick Triffler took off from Washington.