Читать книгу Top Hook - Gordon Kent, Gordon Kent - Страница 7

Sitting in his house alone, George Shreed stared at a dead computer screen and listened to the absence of his wife. She was dying in a hospice, and the house was dying with her, devoid now of her voice, of the smells of her cooking, of her off-tune singing. Thirty years of marriage create a lot of sound, and now it had all drained away, and he was alone.

He booted up one of his computers. Three monitors sat on tables in the small “study.” He could communicate directly with his duty officer at the Central Intelligence Agency, or with several distant mainframes on which he kept coded and secret files, or with the vast world of electronic magic that a few years before had hardly existed.

“Janey,” he murmured. It was not as if he meant to call her back from the edge of death, but only that he had to say her name sometimes, as if, left unsaid, the name too would disappear and he would have nothing.

“Oh, God,” he muttered.

Shreed was frightened. Horrors never came alone: first, his wife’s cancer; now, the woman in Venice. He had just learned that his people hadn’t caught her, so she was still out there, still running around with evidence that could send him to prison for life.

Two weeks ago, she had made her first contact: an e-mail with a photograph that he had first sent two years before, encrypted, to an Internet address where it could be accessed by Beijing. Shreed had been stunned to get it back—a hand reaching out of the past to strangle him.

Ten days ago, the woman had e-mailed him a page of classified material about a project called Peacemaker—classified material that Shreed himself had covertly sent to his Chinese control in 1997. The Agency would have him for treason if they knew he had transferred it. With it had been a curt message: “Venice—Old Ghetto memorial—16 March—one million dollars.”

Then he had sent people to find her, and she had escaped.

And she had sent him a second message: “Now the price is two million.”

The computer screen was bright. He punched keys, and icons and prompts flew by. He moved out into cyberspace, entered a mainframe on a university campus two thousand miles away and called up a file that appeared as random symbols and letters on his screen. He keyed in a password, then another, then empowered an algorithm that ran in tandem with a checker within the file itself, and then he was in, and the symbols in the blink of an eye became words.

Project Peacemaker.

Janey didn’t know about this part of his life. Nobody knew, in fact. Not true—some people in China knew. But Janey and his colleagues at the CIA didn’t know. He didn’t give a shit about the colleagues, but he was deeply guilty that he had hidden part of his life from Janey, who was his life, for so many years. He would have to tell her, he knew. Tell her the way people tell a priest, there in the humming silence of her hospice room, tell her as she lay full of painkillers, needles in her arms, tell her as if she were the wall with the little wicket of the confessional. And say, Forgive me, Janey—forgive me before you go. Even though she wouldn’t have heard him, most probably.

Shreed went through the Peacemaker file. He needed a fall guy, or at least a diversion—somebody to take the heat of an investigation if this damned woman in Venice decided to go to the Agency.

He needed time.

Peacemaker had failed two years ago, a very promising project that hadn’t worked right, in the end. He had backed it as a weapon with real potential, and he had leaked data about it to Beijing, and the Chinese had made too much stink about it, and Peacemaker had been aborted by the White House as “destabilizing.” The Agency had been nosing around ever since about how the information had leaked, and if the finger ever pointed at him, there would be a disaster.

He needed a scapegoat.

He had to find somebody likely. He was not, himself, likely—that was the good part. He had been too visible in the project, one of its main sponsors. What he needed was somebody who had not been quite so visible, somebody about whom you could say after the fact, Oh, sure, now I see what that guy was doing—he was spying for the Chinese the whole time. Somebody who would have had to exert a little extra to find things out. Not quite a munchkin, but not quite a master of the universe, either. He began to go down lists of names. No, no, no—maybe—no. He smiled, a somewhat wolfish expression on his lean face. He had just come to the name of his own personal assistant, Ray Suter. Assistants were expendable, and Suter was a real bastard, but he was too closely associated with Shreed himself. Suspicion, like tar, sticks to everybody in the vicinity.

Who, then?

Name after name. Not quite right. Completely wrong. Impossible. Maybe. And then—

Shreed grinned.

Rose Siciliano.

She’d been the Seaborne Launch Officer on the project. Walled off from the Eyes-Only stuff but very much in on all the computer magic, the trajectory and targeting data. If she’d actually been the spy, she could have, with some snooping and some late hours and a certain amount of risk, busted the security and reported the deep stuff to Beijing. She’d even had a computer geek, an EM named Valdez (a name he’d already dismissed) whom she was always quoting about the data stream and stuff she wasn’t being allowed to see. Perfect behavior for a spy.

Or at least the CIA investigators would see it that way.

And, she was Alan Craik’s wife. And he owed Craik one, the little shit. They’d hated each other for years. His grin widened as he thought about it: if the wife was accused of passing secrets about Peacemaker, the husband was sure to be suspected, too. Tar sticks.

Shreed glanced at his watch. He was due at the hospice to sit with Janey.

He hit a button and highlighted the name.

Rose Siciliano.