Читать книгу Top Hook - Gordon Kent, Gordon Kent - Страница 24

Rose came to rest in a motel in College Park, recommended by Peretz because it was cheap and it was handy to the District. The hangover still rumbled; the feeling of helplessness kept her in a rage.

The telephone rang. She had to search for it, knocked it off its cradle, fumbled, stammered, “Siciliano!”

“Hey, babe, you sober?” It was Mike Dukas, whom she had last talked to from Utica.

“Mike! How’d you find me?”

“Peretz. I’m in Washington.”

“Your guy in Sarajevo said you were in Holland.”

“Yeah, well—” He sounded embarrassed. “The deal is I’m coming back to NCIS for six months to a year, then I’ll see.”

He had been excited about taking over the War Crimes Tribunal’s investigative side, she knew. And now he was coming back to NCIS? “Mike, are you doing this for me?”

“Nobody else would get me back to this place, babe.”

“Oh, Mike—” She started to cry.

“I love to hear women cry. It really cheers me up. How about saying ‘thank you’ and we’ll get on with it. Look, babe, here’s the deal—come on, turn off the hydrant, I need you to listen up—I been here a couple hours, nobody here has a case file on you, but there are these goddam rumors going around!” He was talking too fast to get her out of her crying jag. “Anyway, I am now the official investigator for the matter, which is now a case, with a computer-generated case name and number—I saw to that—but it’s not a case about security, it’s a case about abuse of CIA powers and outside interference, which gives me a very nice bit of leverage. You following me, or you still raining on the carpet there?”

“I follow.” She grabbed a Kleenex.

“I talked to Al,” he said. “He’s got his own problems, which I can’t go into on an open phone. You just hang on there, and he’ll call when he can get a phone on the Jeff. Your turn: what’s happening? Peretz says you’re seeing a lawyer.”

She told him about Emma Pasternak and the calls to the CIA. “I think she’ll be okay, Mike, but she’s real strange. Maybe—you know, maybe a lesbian, shit, I don’t know—”

“That gross you out?”

“Oh, God, no, what d’you think? No, she just isn’t—sympathetic.”

Dukas grunted. He took a moment, then said, “I gotta make this meeting she set up at the CIA.”

“You’re not invited.”

“What’s the CIA Internals guy like?”

“He sounded nice. Nicer than her. I felt sorry for him.”

“Yeah, well, don’t feel too sorry. This is the asshole gave you the shaft. Okay, so I gotta check around, get a line on him. Then I need to talk to your lawyer and tell her I’m tagging along.”

“She won’t like it.”

“Jeez, I’m terrified. Give me her number.”

She read off the number from her book. “Do I go to this meeting, Mike?”

“God, no. You wait for Al to call, get a lot of sleep, call home, talk to your kids, then go to a movie. We’ll call you when it’s over.”

“We?”

“Me and the Bride of Frankenstein. She’ll be eating out of my hand.”

Right.

Rose was going out to eat, but she couldn’t miss Alan’s call, and she lay down just for a minute, and then she was waking to hear the telephone and find her hand already on the instrument. Groping it to her, she mumbled something and heard her husband’s voice saying her name and then, “How are you? How are you?”

She felt a rush of joy.