Top Hook (15 page)

He waved the woman out of his office and hunched over his reports, a pencil tracing characters on a pad, his left hand rubbing the top of his head. He would have to have the original of this memorandum, and the only way to make sure it went directly from Top Hook to the Cabal was to get it himself.

He and Top Hook would have to meet—the first time in years. Chen almost groaned aloud at the idea.

But it was essential, not only to authenticate the document, but also to reappraise Top Hook. Was he really what he seemed?

Rose had decided to pull up her socks and face reality. The day after the meeting in her motel room, she reported (early) to the Inter-Service Word Processing Training Center as its new executive officer. She had expected Appalachia and gloom; instead, what she found in West Virginia went into the subject line of her e-mail to Alan:

Subject: DISNEYLAND, WEST VIRGINIA

Arrived this pm, everybody so goddam nice i cant stand it. No shit, nice nice nice I may be sick. The town is nice the scenery is nice the job is nice my boss is nice the eighteen hole championship golf course is nice the town looks like they make movies on it and you expect Opie and Aunt Bea to come around every corner. The kids are going to be ecstatic! I'm in hell but the punishment is being niced to death not the opposite Im not sure which is worse. Mike says for me to get to work and forget the case and let him handle it/thats what I'm doing. Oh shit I miss you. Off to get the kids. Your nice wife.

Alan took the catwalk without looking to the right or left and strode down into the ship, looking for Rafe. He found him in CIC. “I need to talk to you,” he said.

His face told Rafe everything. He didn't quibble. “My office, ten minutes.”

Rafe was waiting for him there on time, and Alan closed the door, still in flight clothes, and stood facing Rafe across his desk. “I want real-world tasking for the MARI system. The thing works and I need to prove it!”

“You heard the admiral.”

“The thing didn't work when he talked to me. Now it works—our baby-faced newbie had an inspiration and the goddam thing
works
.” He leaned forward, knuckles on the desk. “Rafe—
please
. Give us something to do!”

Rafe shook his head. “He won't buy you guys in a combat situation, Al! He's not gonna let you go snooping for radars and SAM sites.”

“Rafe—look. My detachment is a mess; you said it yourself. Morale is shit. I inherited it that way; you told me to make it better. What these guys need to get better is some sense of
doing
something, some sense of belonging on this fucking boat! You know what I heard somebody say yesterday? I was asking for suggestions for a det nickname, and a voice from the p'way says, ‘How about the Freeloaders?' How the hell do you think these guys can get better if they hear shit like that?
Give them something to do!”

Rafe stroked his chin. He looked tired. He gave Alan a quick look of disgust, but he began to burrow in a stack of pubs. “You sure the system really works?”

“It's brilliant! We could see the swimming-pool on a cruise ship at thirty miles! I've got a report on my laptop; let me print it out and—”

Rafe waved a hand. “Send it to the admiral; I'll take your word for it.” He pulled out a thin document in a NATO binder. “There's one low-priority tasking order.” He looked up at Alan. “Cigarette boats smuggling contraband from Italy to the Yugo coast.”

“Speedboats?” It was a far cry from SAM sites and EW
radars. And he had a plunge into doubt:
Could the MARI system identify something as small as a speedboat?

Rafe held the publication out. “Haven't read it; haven't had time. You want something real-world, this is real-world. You can access NATO for more data via—you know all that.” As Alan took the pub, Rafe withdrew his hand and leaned back. “Best I can do, bud.”

“Take it or leave it?”

Rafe nodded.

“I'll take it.”

Rafe stood up. “What I like about you, Al, you really take time to think things over. Okay, I'll square it with the flag.” He shrugged. “If it doesn't work, you can always go back to cruise ships, right?”

He went straight to his stateroom and read the tasking order. It was more interesting than he thought: smugglers were moving significant quantities of arms, ammo, and military gear across the Adriatic in ten-meter boats that could hit eighty knots at the top. Nothing else on the water could touch them, and, in the heavy surface traffic of that sea, they were virtually invisible.

Could the MARI system find them and, equally important, pass the information to somebody down there who could intercept them?

He stopped to grab Chief Navarro and told him to get everything he could beg, borrow, or look up on ten-meter speedsters, and then he went straight to the ready room, took down the ops board, and read through the flight schedule. Stevens was bringing 902 back to the boat in fifteen hours. Good. One check flight and 902 could be off. Alan grabbed Cohen and laid on a two-plane “test flight” for early the next morning. Then he told the duty officer to grab the crews he
had assigned and have them in the ready room that evening.

Although Alan had no way of seeing it, for the first time he appeared utterly in charge of his unit.

Ray Suter got a message on his beeper to call a number he recognized as Tony Moscowic's. He left the office and drove to a strip mall where there was a public telephone, wondering how many other CIA people over the years had used the same phone for more or less the same purpose. Everybody said the office telephones weren't bugged; everybody went outside to make sensitive calls.

“Yeah, this is Tony,” the voice said when he called.

“You called my beeper.”

“Yeah, what it is, I think I got a way into the guy's house, costs you five thousand.”

“Dream on.”

“You want in or don't you? I don't give a shit; the money isn't for me.”

“Five thousand for a break-in?”

“Did I say that? Mister Suter, I'm not a moron just because I look like one, okay? You're taking me for granted, you know that?”

“Okay, I'm sorry. I'm tense.”

“Here's the deal. The cleaning woman comes on Wednesdays to do Shreed's house. I saw her. She got a key. I followed her; I id'd her. I got a cop will pick up her kid for possessing a rock of crack,
which
he will plant on said kid;
that's
what the five is for. Mother gets a choice: she lets us in the house, keeps her mouth shut, or her kid does hard time.”

Suter pictured it. He saw a black woman, a black
teenager, mean streets. None of that bothered him. “It's bringing other people in. I don't like it.”

“What'd I just say? You think this woman is going to let her kid do time? She'd kill first. She'll do it; she'll keep her mouth shut. Once I get a hacker, we go in, we do whatever the hacker has to do, it's over. Yes or no.”

Suter didn't like it. He didn't like having other people know; he didn't like having things spiral out this way. But he had no choice, and he liked having no choice least of all. No, least of all did he like having Tony Moscowic know so much about Shreed and what Suter was trying to do with him. A mental image of Moscowic dead floated across his brain. “Okay, I guess,” he said.

“What you do, put five thou in bills in an envelope, meet me six p.m. on the dot tomorrow, the Safeway on Glebe Road. Push a cart; I'm pushing a cart; you shop a little, pass me, drop the envelope in my cart. I'll call you in a couple days.”

A week before, Suter wouldn't have laid out five thousand for anything. Now, he thought of the billion or more waiting for Shreed to release it—could it be two, three?—and five thousand in bills seemed petty.

He hung up and walked to his car. He didn't like any of it, not at all—all this cloak-and-dagger stuff. Letting Moscowic tell him what to do. Having Moscowic know so much. The idea of Moscowic dead, therefore, became more and more attractive, but he had never killed anybody and he didn't know how you did that sort of thing.

The brief he gave after chow at 2000 was succinct. He didn't promise the sky. But he held out the possibility of real-world support to the war in Bosnia, something that the aviators took seriously. Alan appointed Campbell mission commander and ticked off a list of preflight responsibilities for him.

The back of the ready room was crowded. Alan had made it plain that any member of the det was welcome to the brief. Maintenance guys are not usually invited to share operational details, but Alan had found his platform to effect change. He wanted the message to get out. And it wasn't only chiefs standing in the murk behind the projector; there were sailors of all ranks. Perhaps some came out of curiosity; certainly more than a few were there because Senior Chief Craw had dragged them.

“Folks, we came out here to test our planes, but NATO is pasting the Serbs every day. We aren't bombers, and the Air Force has plenty of gas, so we've been testing our systems and cutting holes in the sky while the other squadrons support the air war.

“Time to change that. This first slide shows the coast of the former Yugoslavia.” As Alan read the slide, he noted that his intel chief had used the local spellings of all of the towns. Still, it was a good slide, informative and simple.

Alan hit a switch and the slide acquired an overlay. “This shows the principal smuggling corridors between the Serbs and various Italians who provide them with stuff.” Alan had entered the location of the
Jefferson
. “We're sitting between the two principal corridors and we'll continue to do so for two more days before we head for Naples.

“These guys are taking war materials—weapons, ammunition, information, spare parts, you name it, it's moving out of Italy and into Yugoslavia. The Italians are trying to stop it. Up till now, there hasn't been a lot of interest in using NATO assets on the problem, because the chance of a plane detecting one of these little bastards at night is like trying to find a guy on the mess decks after lights out.” He looked straight at a maintenance tech's face at the back. “This detachment has the tool to change that.”

He had them. Even the guys in back, the guys who knew nothing about the MARI system, were interested. He was offering them something tangible—a chance to play in a bigger game than training and testing.

“I've talked to Air Ops and got a spot on the air tasking order, so this will count as operational flight time. Our two planes are callsign Jaeger One and Two. Captain Rafehausen has given it the thumbs up. The first flight will go at 0300. All missions will be two planes. Flexing the MARI will be the first priority every flight, but once you have it up, in the link and going, your next priority is to look for east-bound fast movers. Soleck?”

“Sir!”

“You were anxious to modify the simulator parameters. Here are some predictions from Rota on what twin-engined cigarette boats might look like on P-3 ISAR. Get with Navarro and give us a guess what
they might look like on MARI. Then put them in the

system.”

“Yes, sir!”

“In time for aircrew to get a look before we walk to the planes. Any questions?”

There was a happy buzz at the back when he was done, and as he shut down the projector and unhooked his laptop, he saw Rafe wink at him.

Dukas was by nature messy. He was also active, a fleshy man whose short arms jabbed and swung in constant gestures. A desk was not enough for him, and in the day he had been in the Washington office he had installed a bookcase, buried a chair in files, and piled four plastic crates in a tottering stack within arm's reach.

Triffler, the prissy agent who was now his assistant, was at the decryption center at Fort Holabird, waiting for the geeks to finish with Rose Siciliano's home computer, which had been seized as it was unloaded from the moving van at her newly rented house in West Virginia. The computer analysis would come up blank, he knew—he was waiting for Triffler to call him with that non-news—and then there wasn't much to wait for. O'Neill had given Rose a recorder and told her how to get the Telephone Woman on tape—if she ever called again—but Dukas wasn't optimistic.

He was doing the plod-work of investigation: paperwork and more paperwork. Making notes. Making lists. Making a budget. Checking e-mail. A tiny moment of relief: an e-mail from O'Neill, who was already in Nairobi, about his attempts to find out something about the incident that had got Alan crosswise of George Shreed. Dukas had forgotten all about asking Harry
to check it when he was in Kenya; now, reviewing his notes from the skull session at Rose's motel, he remembered. Harry hadn't found much, as it turned out—only that, contrary to the CIA reports, the foreign national whom Alan had contacted in Mombasa had been shot to death, not a suicide. Nine years ago. Did it mean anything? A naive young naval officer; a murdered Iranian asset; George Shreed taking the thing away from Alan; Alan blowing up at Shreed—what the hell? What could Shreed have had to do with a murder in Mombasa, Kenya?

He opened a computer file on Shreed, George, saved the e-mail to it, went back to work.
Better call the Inter-Agency woman at CIA, start to show some muscle—

His phone rang. Dukas located the ring under a pile of papers, pushed the papers aside and hit the stack of crates and grabbed the third one up as it started to go. The top one did go, falling over backward like somebody hammered in the front of the head, while Dukas was scrambling amid the papers with his left hand to grab the phone. The crate hit with a crash; files spilled; Dukas yanked the phone cord, and the bottom half of the instrument, restrained by paper but pulled by the cord, flew from the desk and hit him in the chest.

“Dukas, NCIS,” he said. The crate he had been holding stopped teetering and he let go of it and it, too, went over backward.

“This is Triffler.”

“Hey, how you doing?”

“What's all that noise?”

“Moving some stuff around.”

“My phone sounds funny.”

“
My
phone. Sounds fine.” In fact, the phone hadn't
sounded quite right all day—ever since, as he remembered, he'd eaten a jelly doughnut and some of the jelly had squirted on it. “What's up?”

Triffler went into his iron-assed official voice. “I got the report on the Siciliano home computer.”

“Nothing, right?”

“It's
loaded
with classified material.”

It was as if Triffler had come through the phone and whacked him. “Can't be!” Dukas cried.

“Loaded.” Was Triffler pleased? Maybe he was simply pleased to have something positive to report. “Geeks say there's ‘residue in the Temp files,' whatever that means, plus ‘sectors on the hard drives adulterated with highly classified materials not effectively deleted from Recycle Bin.' Later on they say something about—let's see—it's about how she tried to delete stuff—yeah, here: ‘Attempts to delete show usual lack of understanding of computer technology by naive user.'”

It was the one moment when Dukas, for all his love of her, doubted Rose. He had been jerked around by a lot of women, lied to a lot, conned a lot; it would hardly have been a new experience. But Rose? He felt that gut-sunk nausea that he got when somebody lied to him, then the familiar wave of loathing.

For
Rose?
Jesus, what could he be thinking!

But he had been a Navy cop too long to say such a thing couldn't happen.

“You're sure it's her computer.”

“Cast-iron evidence trail. She even identified it for the agent—hassled him, in fact. I got that somewhere—”

“Leave it, leave it. Okay. Listen, Triffler, keep this to yourself, you hear me? I want the whole report on my desk soonest, so get your ass back here today. Tell the geeks to put that computer on ice—nobody else touches
it. If they fuck the evidence trail, tell them I'll have their balls in court.”

Dukas hung up and sat in the creaking desk chair. The floor was littered with files and fallen crates. He stared at them without seeing them, his heart breaking but his mind racing as he saw the possibilities, the likelihoods, the ways the investigation could go now.

When Triffler came in that afternoon, he shook his head in disgust at the mess. Dukas had cleared enough space with one arm to write longhand notes and swing around to his computer; otherwise, except for some new Chinese-food cartons, the chaos was as it had been.

“This is a disgrace,” Triffler said. He sounded like somebody's mother.

“Where's the report?”

“In my hand. I don't dare put the fucking thing down; it'll disappear.”

“Gimme.” Dukas held out a hand and took the folder. “If it's any consolation to you, Triffler, I'm not where I'd like to be, either; if I had my druthers, I'd be sitting in a brand-new office in The Hague, with a big-assed receptionist and two gung-ho French cops to assist me, and I'd be running a whiz-bang new program at twice my current salary. But I'm here, and you're here, and I'm busy, so get on with the Siciliano case.”

“The fucking day's almost over.”

“That's what happens when you waste time arguing. Go, go—I'm too busy to dick around!”

Dukas read the report twice. He was still reading it long after most other people had gone home. The long summer twilight deepened outside and he switched on the overhead lights, then walked from desk to desk, reading, leaning against the windowsills, reading, cutting
through the computerese and the e-jargon and adding it all up.

At eight, he called Rose in West Virginia. He didn't mince words. “Rose, you're in deep shit. Your computer's full of illegal classified data.”

She went through the same stages he had: it couldn't be; there was some mistake; she just hadn't done that stuff.

“You done? Okay, Rosie, moment of truth. Tell me now, babe, for all time, yes or no: did you
ever
put classified material on this computer? Rosie, before you answer, I'm going to Miranda you—yeah, go ahead, gasp; this is Mike, your old friend, your old admirer, yes, I love you, Rosie, but I can't stand this and I've got to do it right: I'm taping this call. You may remain silent. Anything you say may be used against you. You have a right to a lawyer. Now: Rose: yes or no, did you
ever
put classified material on that computer?”

“No, goddam you. No! No, you sonofabitch!”

“Did you ever put any Peacemaker material on that computer or use that computer for any purpose connected with Peacemaker?”

“No! How many times do I have to say it?”

“You never came home, tired, remembered some notes you meant to make at the office, made them on your home computer and—”

“NO!”

“You had your laptop with classified material on it; you were behind, you had to get done; you downloaded Peacemaker stuff and did the work and deleted it from your home computer—right?”

“NO, NO, NO!”

Dukas sighed. He'd have to polygraph her, for all the good it would do. He turned off the tape. “Okay, babe,
this is not on the record. Look, this is hell time—I've got a report, there's no question the computer's loaded with stuff. They infer a conscious effort to delete the stuff and hide the fact it was ever there, by somebody who didn't know computers very well. Come on, give me some help, babe; I need to know it wasn't you. I need some help here.”

“I thought you trusted me. Jesus, you of all people.”

“I guess—Push comes to shove, I don't trust anybody.” He sighed again. It was a discovery he made about himself every few investigations or every love affair, and not a discovery he liked. “Help me, Rose.”

She was crying. She cried for some seconds. Then she said, “Valdez.”

He didn't get it right away, then remembered the Latino kid who had been her pet computer geek on the Peacemaker project. “What about Valdez? He put stuff on your computer?”

“Valdez would know if I put whatever is there on my computer.”

“You saying he did it?” It was the oldest escape there was, blaming somebody else.

“No, for Christ's sake! Valdez is a straight-arrow. No, I mean he would know if it was me. He said everybody had a signature. He said he could always tell my stuff because I was a computer illiterate and it was like a signature, and he fixed my programs to make things easier for me.”

“Did he fix your home computer?”

“Sure.”

Dukas felt drained. Probably she did, too. Would they recover, he was wondering—would the friendship recover? He tried to focus. “Where's Valdez stationed now?”

She sobbed again. He was supposed to apologize, he knew, but he couldn't do it yet. Everything was awful. “He got out of the Navy,” she said. “Mike, how could you do this to me?”

“Any idea where he is?”

Silence. He could picture her, squeezing her eyes to stop the tears, swallowing hard, putting her head back with a hard jerk as if she meant to strike it against something. “He took a job in computers.” She had an address and a first name for him: Enrique.

Then neither of them spoke. At last, she said, “This is going to take a while to get over, Mike,” and she hung up on him.

Dukas went back to the borrowed apartment and grabbed a bottle. He hadn't noticed before how
brown
the apartment was—like chocolate. Walls, rugs, furniture. Deeply depressing. He sat there in all that brown, drinking bourbon from the first glass that came to hand, hating the taste of what he'd done to Rose.

But she could be lying.

He sighed. He put out a hand for the telephone. He could put in a call to The Hague—what the hell time was it in Holland? well, he could put in a call in a few hours—and tomorrow he could fly away and have precisely the office he'd described to Triffler, and the big-assed woman and the two French cops, and he could leave the investigation to somebody who didn't know Rose and didn't give a shit and would probably do a better job.