Читать книгу Hostile Contact - Gordon Kent, Gordon Kent - Страница 9

Jakarta.

“Hello, Mister!”

Alan tried to ignore the swarm of aggressive children, each with his palm stretched up toward him in supplication. It was the morning after his arrival, stunningly hot, the streets steaming from a ten-minute downpour.

“Hello, Mister! Hello!”

The route on the map looked very clean and neat; here on the streets of Jakarta it was virtually impossible for a foreigner to decipher the name of any road, much less the maze of alleys (gangs) that had been marked for him to travel. He did his best, which was usually quite good, and found himself the only foreigner in what appeared to be the courtyard of a colorful and desperate tenement.

“Hello! Hello! Mister!”

Alan looked down at the sea of little faces that moved with him through the gang and took a folded bill from his shirt pocket and held it up.

“Anyone speak English?”

“Oh, Mister! Hello, Mister!” Like a children’s choir.

“Mister!” Hand raised in the affirmative. A chorus of Yes.

“I need a guide.” Alan didn’t think that James Bond required a nine-year-old to guide him through his surveillance detection route, but he wasn’t James Bond.

“Why don’t we practice?” he had asked Triffler, back in Washington. Triffler had explained to him that if the Indonesians or the Chinese or any other service were watching them, they couldn’t practice in Jakarta, because anyone observing the practice might be set up to watch the real thing. The explanation had confused him, because the military believed that people should practice complex evolutions, but he followed his orders, and here he was, lost in Jakarta Barat. At least, he hoped he was still in Barat. And Triffler, who was supposed to be with him, was—Alan hoped—still over the Pacific somewhere.

“We won’t even meet.” Triffler had been quiet, assured. “You’ll see me at the end of the route, because I’ll be the signal that you’re clean. But we won’t hang out; we won’t be in the same hotel or travel together; nothing to link us.” Nonetheless, Alan was tempted to look for Triffler on every corner.

“I can speak Inglis, Mister!” one kid said. “Real Inglis, like you can understan’.”

Alan handed him the folded bill without hesitation, then withdrew a second bill before the boy’s eyes wandered or he contemplated flight. This one he held up ostentatiously and then put back in his pocket.

The boy launched into a torrent of abuse at his mates, most of whom vanished in an instant, although a few merely fell back as if waiting their turn.

Alan read the next street on his route to the boy, who nodded and set off at a fast walk. Alan followed, sweating. He liked the sweat. He had been right: it felt good to be doing something, even if he required a nine-year-old to help him.

A minute later, the boy stopped in a gang identical to the last, carpeted in the same bright trash that reeked of rotten fish.

“Here, Mister. What we do here? You buy batik? This not a good place for batik.”

Alan looked at the wretched row of shops, each offering its own batik and some of the “cap” cloth that every tourist seemed to want. Alan couldn’t see Rose in “cap.”

In Washington, Triffler had told him that every stop would “make sense.” “These things have to have a logic of their own, Alan,” he had said. “We depend on that logic to look natural.” Alan saluted him, mentally. I look like a natural lost tourist. To keep his cover, he pointed at a piece of cloth slightly less repulsive than the others and nodded at the price.

“He ripping you off,” his guide said, turning on the merchant. The exchange went on and on, getting louder and shriller; and then, suddenly, everyone smiled and Alan got a pile of cash back—too much, he thought, but the transaction seemed to have satisfied all parties.

“Now I want this one.” Alan pointed at the next destination on the list, marked “Fish Market.”

“Okay.” And they were off, Alan almost running to keep up, his batik (or cap, he couldn’t tell) clutched under one arm.

It certainly smelled like a fish market. This one he had checked out on the Internet—supposedly the oldest part of the city, with some parts dating to the fourteenth century. What was he supposed to do, buy some squid? He walked about for a few minutes, followed by the boy. The fishmongers shouted at him and each other, and he was reminded of his first visit to Africa and how alien it had all seemed. Jakarta was alien, too—almost more alien, with a sturdy structure of the ultra-modern, hung with a great deal of African-style poverty.

Beyond the fish market were boats, old sailing boats with brightly colored hulls and sharply raked bows and masts, and he moved toward them without really thinking. The boy followed, incurious, and Alan walked along the pier, threading through the piles of nets and watching them being mended in much the same way that nets were mended in Mombasa and in Gloucester, Massachusetts. The ocean didn’t seem alien. He felt as if he had his feet under him, and he smiled at the boy.

“You plan a hash run? That why you walk everywhere, Mister?”

Hash runs—long cross-city races over a course marked by hash marks—were a feature of expat life from Bahrain to Mombasa. Alan had run a few and had helped mark one, and he smiled at the boy, thankful for a better cover story than any he had been able to concoct.

“Fatahillah Square.”

Now for the real thing. Or the thing that probably meant nothing but might lead to something real. What Triffler called the “operational act.” As if this were some espionage performance art.

Alan crossed the square under the full weight of the sun and went to the gun, which had been here since the seventeenth century, had been loaded and used to keep surrendering Japanese from resisting in 1945, and now seemed to be the city’s leading fertility shrine. Si Jagur was the site he was to mark, the target set for him from the first meeting with Triffler and Dukas in Maryland.

He needed to get rid of the boy.

“Coke?” he said, miming unnecessarily to his guide. The boy stuck out a hand and Alan gave him some small colored bills. The boy vanished, and Alan walked up through a crowd of women, many of breathtaking beauty, to run his hands over the rims of the wheels on the old cannon. He touched it as if he were measuring it, as tourists often do, and many of the women giggled to see a man in such intimate contact with the old monster; things were said that might have made him blush or worse, and the older women didn’t hesitate to suggest that men often had their own failings.

This part he did well. He seemed no more interested than any Bule tourist, but when he moved back to the boy and his two lukewarm Cokes, he had left a white mark shaped like a Q high on the rim of the wheel.

Game on.

But as he picked his way back toward his hotel, he thought, I’ll like it better when Triffler gets here.

Bobby Li walked along the north side of Fatahillah Square, looking at nothing, moving purposefully toward his next business appointment—at least as far as a watcher would see. This was the third day he had walked through Fatahillah Square. When he came parallel to the ancient cannon, he stopped, covered his look at the cannon by glaring at a little girl who tried to beg, and moved off again, his head down, his stride again purposeful.

In fact, his glance had caught the mark, high on the wheel of the gun, and his heart was pounding because it was too soon—he hadn’t been able to get a stun grenade; Andy was drinking a lot and Bobby wasn’t sure of him; and he was nervous about actually getting the ragtag team together so fast. Still, he walked on, planning the moves that would take him to another place to leave his own mark to tell Andy about the mark on the cannon. And then Andy would call him. And then tomorrow morning, they’d go to the Orchid House and—

For George.

No reason to bring his Chinese loyalty into it.

Filomeno Hamanasatra was an aged Chinese agent who had no duties any more except to monitor three out-of-date, probably dead, communications sites. He walked his dog past them, proudly, even defiantly, because most of his neighbors were Muslims and had little regard for dogs. Mister Hamanasatra was a Christian—well, nominally a Christian, certainly culturally a Christian, inwardly somewhat contemptuous of belief itself—but he loved the presence of the animal and never stopped wondering at the mystery of communication, even affection, between the two different species, his and the animal’s. The dog was a cairn terrier, the only one in Jakarta, and, although it suffered from the heat, he walked it every afternoon and then returned it to the air-conditioned coolness of his flat.

Once a week, Mister Hamanasatra walked the cairn to Fatahillah Square. Faithful in his duty, he glanced each time at the wheels of Si Jagur, admiring when he could the women congregated there, and then, seeing nothing on the wheels, moving on.

Today, however, as he glanced at a lovely woman who was probably barely in her teens, and, because he never stopped walking but kept moving so that nobody would think his visit unusual, he was almost past the great gun before he looked down again at it and saw that a mark had been made on a wheel with white chalk. And, yes, the mark looked like a letter Q with an extra bar through the pig’s tail that curled down to the right.

Remarkable!

Mister Hamanasatra’s aging heart beat a good deal faster. He had seen a mark on the wheel only three times in all the years he had been paid to watch it. He was a romantic: he made up scenarios, stories, of what messages, what events, that mark symbolized. Now, he was so excited that he walked faster, almost dragging the dog, and it balked, sat, scratched, looked at him accusingly.

“Well, well,” Mister Hamanasatra said. He scratched the terrier’s ears. He walked more slowly to the far side of the square and then, because he wanted to “make assurance double sure” (Macbeth, a particular favorite), he walked the dog back past Si Jagur and the women and checked again to make sure, double sure, that the mark was there and that it was really the correct mark and not something a child had done at play.

Then he walked home through the deafening traffic noise and, safe inside his flat, he called a number on his cell phone and said that Vidia had a message from Lakme. Had they got that? Yes, they had.

That was all he did. A widower, retired, he had little else to do, but at least, that evening, he could stare out a window with the dog in his lap and dream of where his message was going and what it meant.

“Shit!” Jerry Piat said.

He had just heard from Bobby Li that the mark was on the cannon in Fatahillah Square.

That raging prick Ray Suter had been right—Dukas had glommed on to the comm plan first crack out of the box, and here the bastard was, making the mark and no doubt all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to hit the Orchid House tomorrow morning so he could enjoy a day at Uncle’s expense in Jakarta.

Jerry knew that Dukas would believe that the comm plan was dead. In that situation, you left the mark, you made the meeting site faithfully for a couple of days, and, when nobody showed, you went home and checked the box marked “Deceased.”

Well, surprise, surprise, Dukas!

Jerry was still sober because it was only late afternoon. Now he wouldn’t take a drink until it was all over. He began to strip and change into running clothes—a good run, sweat, exertion to work the alcohol poisons out of the muscles, and he’d be ready to go.

Nonetheless, he wished he’d done a dry run with Bobby’s team.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

NCIS HQ, Washington Navy Yard.

Mike Dukas had talked to Triffler, who was in Manila waiting for an aircraft to get a hydraulic leak fixed to get him to Jakarta. It was plain that he wouldn’t get there in time for the first window for the meeting in Jakarta, and Dukas didn’t like it. He wanted Triffler with Alan to calm him down, even though nothing was going to happen, nothing could happen, and the comm plan was strictly what scientists called a chemical stomach.

Dukas sat in his office, one hand on the telephone, wondering if he should call Alan at his hotel. Bad move—insecure phone. Around him, on every flat surface—chairs, desk, file cabinets, computer—were folders from the Sleeping Dog case file. Two days into them, Dukas was bewildered by technical radio jargon and bored by old reports about the futility of an investigation that had gone nowhere. He had read nothing that caused him to worry about Al Craik in Jakarta, and yet—

He took his hand off the telephone and glanced at his watch. Ten-thirty-seven a.m. Meaning that it was ten-thirty-seven p.m. in Jakarta. If Alan had any sense, he had waited for Triffler to arrive before he left the mark on the cannon. Alan had good sense, Dukas knew, lots of good sense—but not always when it came to action. So maybe he had already left the mark, and the clock would start ticking, and tomorrow morning—tonight in Washington—he’d make his first trip to the Orchid House.

And nothing would happen.

Would it?

Dukas told himself that he was suffering case-officer jitters. You sent somebody out, he fell off the face of the earth as far as you were concerned, of course you questioned what you were doing. Imagined worst-case scenarios. So what was the worst case here? Dukas frowned. What could possibly be the worst case with an old comm plan that had been unused for seven years? Your man walked into the Orchid House and—

Dukas picked up a folder and got ready to read. He even took out the reading glasses they’d given him at his last physical and that he never used, except that now he was reading all day, day after day, and his eyes felt like hot bullets that had been superglued into their sockets. He started to read about alternative explanations for radio bursts that NSA thought they had detected in western Canada. The prose made him groan. Solar flares! Shifting magnetic fields!

Dukas stared at the telephone. Something was bugging him, and he knew that the something was partly Alan’s mission in Jakarta, but only partly; some of it was this goddamned case itself.

“It smells,” he said out loud. The smell wasn’t strong, and it wasn’t bad, but it was there. Dukas actually put his nose down and sniffed the pages in front of him. The odor was slightly musty, slightly dry and woody. Papery. Dukas thought of some storage site in Maryland or Virginia, somewhere secure but unknown to most people at Langley, a dead end for old Agency folders.

He got up and walked along the corridor and swung into another office, one hand low on the doorway to support himself without stressing his injury. “Hey, Brackman,” he said.

“Yoh.” An overweight black man was tapping a computer keyboard. He didn’t look away from the screen.

“How long has the CIA been using computers?”

“Long time, some of them; no time, a lot of them. Computer illiterates, lot of them.”

“They still doing files on paper in, say, ninety-seven?”

Brackman turned away from the screen and focused on a half-eaten Devil Dog. “Some of the holdouts, sure.” He ate the Devil Dog. “Very conservative place.”

Dukas walked back to his office, poured himself coffee from Triffler’s machine, and sat on his desk, one hand on the telephone and a look on his face as if some source of deep dissatisfaction had been tapped. He fiddled his fingers on the telephone. He chewed his upper lip with his lower teeth. He made a sound with his tongue and the roof of his mouth, Tt-Tt-Tt. He picked up the phone and hit a button and said, “Find out how I get a Nav pilot who’s flying out of Pax River. Call me back.”

Ten minutes later, the phone rang. He’d done nothing more with the folders in that time but had sat at his desk, staring at the wall. “Okay.” He scribbled a number. “Thanks.” He called and was put on to a duty officer who told him that Commander Rose Siciliano was in the air but expected back before lunch. Dukas left a message that she should call him, and then he went back to the folders and slogged; when she called at eleven-fifty, he was sighing and groaning, and the first thing he had to do was reassure Rose that he wasn’t calling about Alan—nothing had happened, everything was fine, there was no news. “What I want you to do is invite Sally Baranowski to dinner,” he said.

“You still haven’t called her?” Rose snapped.

“I’ve been busy, babe, plus—you know—”

“You want me to be there so you won’t be on the spot, right?”

Dukas sighed again. “This isn’t what you think.”

“Oh, right.”

“It’s sort of business.”

“Funny business.”

“No—damn it, babe—it has to do with the case.”

“Alan’s case?”

“Yeah.”

That was different, she said. She’d invite Baranowski, although she wasn’t really running a restaurant. Tonight would be fine, although she’d planned to have a night alone with her kids and then wash her hair. Anything for you, Mike, you coward.

“Six?” he said.

“Six-thirty, and bring some wine and a dessert.”

Dukas had a pizza sent in for his lunch, and at one, unable to control his jitters, he decided to call Alan in Jakarta, and then he decided he couldn’t.

Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Colonel Lao was a day back from Pakistan when the message about the mark in Jakarta came. He was supposed to be an advisor on urban-rural relations, a subject in fact in which he had a good deal of knowledge (his training to be an intelligence chief at a foreign station had been excellent), but one that bored him. He had spent part of the day at a village forty miles from Dar, watching a performance of the Chinese-sponsored theatre-for-development troupe’s Hope is the Village, a play that seemed to him small return for six weeks of work and a good deal of Chinese money. By the time he got back to the office, the message had been on his desk for two hours. It had been rerouted from Beijing, re-encrypted, received and logged at the embassy in Dar, then marked “Most Urgent” and hand-carried to his desk, where it had sat.

Lao looked down at the sealed envelope. What is the use of all the secrecy and all the hurry if I am out wasting my time in a muddy village? he wondered. He ripped open the envelope, found himself angered by an inner envelope and its stamps—“Most Urgent!” “Most Secret!” “Unauthorized Persons DO NOT OPEN!”—and ripped it so savagely that he tore part of the flimsy sheet inside. However, nothing was seriously damaged, and he saw that the message within had the class mark Wealthy Songbird, meaning that it had to do with the frightening but glorious task he had been given—finding his rival, the missing Colonel Chen, and the intelligence funds that had disappeared with him.

He had to do his own decoding, Wealthy Songbird being too secret even for the embassy cryptographers, but the message was short, and his interest in it carried him through the drudgery of it. All that it told him was that a mark had been left on an antique cannon in Jakarta, and that the Jakarta watcher had reported it exactly as if to Chen himself, because of course the watcher knew nothing of Chen or his disappearance or, in fact, anything at all. Lao had a moment’s envy for the watcher in Jakarta, somebody lucky enough not to be caught up in a tangle of ambition, deceit, strategy. Lao sighed.

He opened the Chen files and searched for Jakarta, found it in eleven of them, found the mark that the watcher had seen in the communications plan called American Go. The plan was not Chinese, Lao recognized at once; Chen’s agent in the CIA, George Shreed, must have drafted it, as Lao now knew the agent was named. Who, like Chen, had also disappeared. And who was supposed to have been buried nine days ago in Washington, although that was being checked.

Lao sighed again, wondered if he had caught something in the cold rain in Pakistan. He thought that this was not a real illness but a reaction to the beginning of an operation that would be difficult and long and, quite possibly, disastrous for him.

The immediate question to be answered was, Who had left the mark in Jakarta, and why? Was it Shreed—supposedly dead, but not necessarily so—trying to contact the missing Chen? Chen himself, trying to throw off pursuers like Lao? Some third party, working for both of them? The CIA, using a dead Shreed’s files?

What the mark was meant to signal was a desire for a meeting, the meeting place a playland called Fantasy Island Park, something left over from the boom of the nineties and now gasping, he supposed, since the bubble had burst. Such matters had no reality for Lao; economics was somebody else’s concern. What mattered to him here was that a meeting had been signaled, and he, as the new master of the plan called American Go, must find out what the meeting was for and who had asked for it.

He sent a message to the intelligence chief at the Chinese embassy in Jakarta, requiring that a surveillance team monitor the meeting site for the next three days; the times, according to the comm plan, were to be ten minutes after nine, two, and six. Parties meeting according to the plan would identify themselves by carrying a magazine under the left arm. The surveillance team were to watch the site without being seen, note all persons who appeared at any of the appointed times, photograph them if possible, and follow them if they were sure no counter-surveillance was present (an unlikely possibility). No, he would have to give them more instructions than that, and they’d have to have a senior officer in charge—if Chen actually appeared, there were major decisions to be made very quickly.

Then he sat late, trying to see how it would go and what he could do if the meeting really happened as early as tomorrow. Jakarta was an hour ahead of Beijing, where an officer would have to be found to fly to Jakarta to oversee the surveillance. Early evening here in Dar es Salaam was the middle of the night in Beijing. They’d be lucky to find anybody at all, much less the veteran officer Lao wanted; then the officer would have to find air transport to Jakarta—he’d be on the run every moment and still be fortunate to get there for the first meeting time. Lao couldn’t send anyone from his own office; Dar was an impossible distance by air, and Tsung, in Pakistan, already had an operational meeting for tomorrow. Bad, bad—the last thing he wanted, a tired man arriving late with no time to prepare the surveillance team. Lao smoked and made notes and sent messages. At nine his own time, he got confirmation that an officer was on the way to Jakarta. Lao started to prepare further instructions for him, to be handed to him when he got off the plane. An hour later, he shook his head and threw down the ballpoint pen with which he had been trying to write. The papers were a mess of crossed-out sentences and scribblings over scribblings.

The gist of it all was that he needed somebody on the spot who could tell him if either Shreed or Chen made the meeting. Somebody who would know at once and somebody who was loyal—not one who would hurry the information to Beijing, and not one who would babble to the officer running the operation.

He dug into Chen’s personal file. He knew it fairly well by then, knew that there was something in there—And found it.

“Jiang!”

A captain hurried in.

Lao held out a piece of paper. “This agent is still active. I want him. Most urgent!”

“Sir!” Jiang vanished, in his fingers the piece of paper on which Lao had written, “Code name Running Boy, name Li, Bobby, agent for Chen 1983.”

Jiang was back in ten minutes. “Still in Jakarta, still active, but not used in three years. Control code-named Loyalty Man.”

“Get him.”