Top Hook (17 page)

“We have to turn him south again. Jaeger Two, push him again.”

“Roger, Jaeger One.” Alan switched back to guard, decided not to worry that the Italians were going to hear all this.

“
Sophia
, heave to or be sunk. This is your last warning.”

Campbell lined up and pressed in closer. 902 pounced again, appearing out of a dirty cloudbank right in front of the contact, who turned hard to starboard. For a
moment, both of Alan's planes were on a collision course, with the target fleeing off south, visible to both, and in that moment, the white Italian patrol ship emerged like a specter from the fog bank to the east. Her deck gun stirred, just visible to the aircrew, and a tiny white puff appeared.

“Put the rockets away, Brian. I think the good guys won.” Alan saw Campbell's finger come off the pickle switch, but any comments were drowned with whoops from both aircraft.

The Italians confirmed the illegal nature of the cargo before the two planes were in the stack over the
Jefferson
. They didn't mention that any rockets had been fired. Alan was writing his report in his mind when 902 called.

“Jaeger One, this is Jaeger Two, over.”

“Go ahead, Jaeger Two.”

“Hey, have you figured out how you lost that rocket?” Sounds of laughter. A change for the better.

On the flight deck, Alan waited for the other crew and welcomed them with handshakes. Walking to the lock, he fell in with Cohen. “I'm putting myself down for your plane next launch,” he said.

Cohen took a moment to digest that, then said, “Whatever,” and opened the hatch. At least he held it for his commanding officer to go through.

Of course, Alan came clean to Rafe. He told the whole story in a rush, his helmet under his arm, suddenly a young man again. Rafe shook his head at the story and the change in his friend, shut the door, and went back to the stack of fitreps on his desk.

“Wish I'd been there,” he murmured and turned a page.

George Shreed was looking at a sheaf of dailies that mostly contained trivia but now and then yielded a nugget. Mostly, the dailies were case-officer-level stuff, the material you grooved on if you were down there in the trenches but found less and less interesting as you moved up the echelons of deskwork. For Shreed, however, things like agent reports were a contact with real intelligence. “They remind me of why I'm here,” he liked to tell people like Partlow.

Now, his eyes scanned the pages, flicking past this and that detail of contacts and failures and recruitments and information of questionable reliability. He yawned; it was that time after lunch when the body wanted to lie under a tree and digest. “Our animal past,” he said aloud and flicked a page.

A phrase halfway down caught his eye. He hadn't really even looked at it, but it jumped at him:
firefight, Trieste.

It was a simple contact report. From NCIS.

“Naval officer on shore liberty reported contact with foreigner, possibly asset. Lieutenant-commander off USS
Jefferson
was caught in firefight, Trieste, Italy, later questioned by Italian police and released. (See NCIS Case File DL7/27/94-0734.) Under investigation/NCIS control.”

Shreed felt his heart stop, then a flush of warmth spread to his face and down his legs. Trieste—where his
Serbs had bungled the second attempt on the woman who said she had a file on him. There could be no question it was the same woman; there can't have been two firefights there on the same day.

And the naval officer? Why would a naval officer have got involved? Coincidence?

There are no accidents
.

His mind made a leap,
naval officer—Alan Craik
, and he felt it in his heart like adrenaline, but then he thought how unlikely it was that Alan Craik could have been the officer in Trieste, and he dismissed the idea.
It's only because I've sucker-punched the little shit's wife.
Still, he started to make a note for Ray Suter to check on the ID of the officer, but he stopped himself. He didn't dare show too much interest, or he might tip Internals to his connection with the woman. Nor could he trust Suter any more.

Leave it.

Or had the woman who was blackmailing him made contact with somebody in the Navy? Or NCIS? But she wouldn't do such a thing—the Navy wouldn't have any special interest in what she had for sale. What was she up to?

He chewed on that all the way home, and he ate that question instead of dinner. It made him sick. Was there a connection there he had missed? Had Navy intelligence got involved somehow? Was the woman in Trieste somehow their agent?

Or—?

It was certainly a new factor in his relationship with the woman who called herself Anna. Maybe it was time to change tactics with her.

He sent her a message via the chat room where she had reached him before: “
I like your style. Time we
met, don't you think? Maybe we can make beautiful music together.
” And he signed it with the abbreviation she had asked he use: TH, for Top Hook
.

Next day, he had an answer.

“
TH, I'm not an idiot. Money talks.
”

He replied, “
Thinking of the future and what we might do as a team—money that would really talk. Will meet your place, your conditions. Hoping to see you soon. TH.
”

Enrique Valdez had put on weight since he had been Rose Siciliano's EM computer whiz. Short, broad-shouldered, he now had the genesis of a midriff bulge from the good life in Seattle. He had picked up the casual clothes of that culture, too, and O'Neill had already had a word with him over breakfast about what he expected of his employees in the way of dress.

The NCIS interrogation room that Dukas had borrowed for the examination of Rose's computer had the bleak look of an institutional dead end—abandon hope, all ye who have the bad luck to get busted here—with a single table with a dead-gray, rubberized top, on which the computer sat like something washed up on a beach.

“Mister Valdez and I are lending our expertise to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service in this instance,” Harry O'Neill said. He seemed to be speaking to two geeks from Fort Holabird but was in fact speaking for the tape he knew was turning. “Ethos Security are helping because of Mister Valdez's special knowledge of the particular computer in question.”

“Okay, lemme look,” Valdez said. He started forward, but one geek put out a hand and the other stepped in front of the computer as if he was trying to hide something indelicate.

“Hey—” Valdez said.

“Nobody touches the computer but them.” Dukas made a face. “Evidence trail. Anyway, I got to ID you.” Dukas asked some canned questions about Valdez's name and job and how well he knew LCDR Rose Siciliano and what work he had done for her.

“Would you say you would know her computer from the time when you served under her?”

“What, the outside—the case? No.”

“The inside?”

“Unless somebody's dicked with it, sure.”

“You programmed her home computer?”

“Sure I did.”

“Tell me briefly what you did.”

Valdez knew he was being taped, too. Still, he rolled his eyes, shrugged, sighed. “She bought it off the shelf with all that Windows shit on it, and I cut the redundancies and added some Linux-based stuff to make it coherent.” Valdez looked at the two geeks. “These guys will understand when I say that everything I did on her computer, I used a zip drive and put on disk. I mean, you keep your architecture. It's ego, right, guys?”

The geeks nodded.

Valdez grinned. “So, I got disks of what her computer looked like every time I worked on it. If this machine looks different, it isn't hers. Okay?” He was impatient. “Can we boot it up now?”

Valdez seemed inattentive until gray letters began to scroll down the black screen; then he leaned forward. When the Windows logo came up in color, he waved a hand and said, “Shut it down and boot it again, Alphonse.” The geek looked at Dukas, who growled, “Do it,” and he shut it down and then back on, and Valdez watched the whole thing again, told the geek
again to shut it down, and then twisted in his chair to look up at Dukas.

“This isn't hers,” he said.

Dukas felt hope bang on his chest, but he fought it with cop skepticism. “How the hell can you tell?”

“How can I
tell?
Jesus—Hey, you—” He punched the geek on the shoulder. “You can tell, right?”

“My name is Patrick,” the geek said.

“Yeah, well, Patrick, you could tell after what I said I did on her computer, this isn't Commander Siciliano's, am I right?”

“Uh, well—” Patrick got very pink when spoken to, and he looked uncertain. “Well, this one's all standard Windows and no Linux, I could see that.” The other geek said that his name was Josh, and he could
easily
see that.

Dukas, trying not to hope and thinking of the tape, thinking of a Navy court, said slowly, “Explain to me how you know that.”

So Patrick booted the computer again, and then both he and Valdez pointed out, as the programs scrolled by, how they could tell this computer had not been streamlined by somebody with a dislike for redundancy and a passion for open-source code. Several times, Dukas would say aloud, “Now, Valdez is pointing at—” and he would read the string of letters that was fast vanishing into the tabletop. By the time they were done, Patrick and Valdez were almost buddies, and Josh was leaning in to do his part, too.

“What d'you think?” Dukas said to Triffler and O'Neill, not giving any sign of his own giddiness. “I need stuff that'll hold up in court.”

“You got three guys there will testify.”

Triffler, it turned out then, was no fool. “I'd accept what's put in front of you, Dukas, and ask the obvious
question: how did the computer get to be different from the way this guy left it?”

Patrick muttered, “Cherchez le hard drive.”

“Do what?”

Valdez was nodding. “Absolutely. You check and see did somebody switch hard drives. Huh, guys?” He looked at the two geeks, who nodded and began to speak at the same time.

“How long to switch drives?” Triffler said. He was sounding more like a cop with every minute.

“Two hours? Hour, if you were really good and maybe had some help—?”

Dukas waved at Triffler. “Then, Dick, what we gotta have is the record of where the computer was from the moment it left her house. Call Siciliano, get the date and time she last saw the computer—when she saw it boxed, if she did. Then I want to know every place that computer was, every second of every day in that time period. Use my phone.”

“How come
you
don't call her,
Mike
?” They hadn't used first names before. “You know her.”

“Not such a good idea just now. Get on it, will you, um, Dick?”

Later Dukas, alone now, leaned against the wall, his shoulders quivering with relief and guilt, convinced now that Rose was innocent, hating himself for having suspected she was not.

Late that afternoon, O'Neill blew into Dukas's office. “Rose has had another call from the Mystery Woman.”

Dukas winced. Normally, he would have been the first one to hear this from her.

“This time, she got part of the call on tape. She was so excited, she drove up to meet me halfway to DC. Good
thing she did, too.” He leaned forward, his good eye sparkling. “I know the Mystery Woman, Mike. I know the voice.”

“You're kidding!” Dukas's heart jumped: good news.

“From the Agency. She was Shreed's assistant when Alan first got crosswise of him.
Nice
woman. Alan knows her, too.”

Dukas waited, because he knew there was more.

“She's had a bad patch lately—marriage gone bad; career in the Agency gone nowhere—thanks to Shreed, would be my guess. So maybe she's cracked up; maybe she's bitter; maybe she's—you know.”

Maybe she's bullshitting us,
he meant. “So what'd she say?”

“Nothing new. Kind of rambled—Shreed is a badass; he's after Rose; he's acting odd all of a sudden. The lady had had a few, I think—a little loose, you know?”

“Gimme a name.”

“Sally Baranowski.”

Dukas thought about it. “Good catch,” he said. “Leave it to me, okay?”

O'Neill grinned. “Just trying to earn my dollar, Mister Dukas.”

That evening, after Dukas had introduced Carl Menzes to Dick Triffler at the Old Commonwealth Tavern, and they had all sat down and ordered beers, Dukas said to Menzes without any warning, “Sally Baranowski on your short list, Carl?”

Again, he thought that Menzes was a terrible liar, but this time it was because Menzes couldn't keep his face from looking blank. He might as well have handed out cards saying that nobody named Sally Baranowski was suspected of anything.

“You're a standup guy, Carl,” Dukas said. “Don't ever take up poker for a living.”

Menzes waved the comment away. “Who is Sally Baranowski?”

“Agency employee. I want Triffler to interview her.”

“She have anything to do with inter-agency abuse of power—
your
focus, am I right?”

“She used to work for George Shreed.”

Menzes stared at him. “Negative. Negative on Baranowski. She's your Mystery Woman, right?”

“No comment.”

“Bull! I thought we were going to be straight with each other, Dukas. Yes?”

Dukas leaned into him across the little table. “How about letting us interview Shreed?”

“Negative that. Absolute negative.” They were still eye to eye. “You know why.”

“You think we'll spook him.” He saw Menzes's eyes flick to Triffler, and he said, “Dick knows.”

Menzes grimaced. “Nobody interviews him, nobody goes near him. Period.”

“How about a guy named Ray Suter? Shreed's assistant.” Dukas sat back. Peretz had fingered Suter as a good one to ask about Peacemaker, because he'd worked on the project but had CIA connections. “He worked on Peacemaker, so he's part of the Siciliano case, which
is
at the center of my investigation of inter-agency abuse of power.” He leaned in again. “Let me put it this way—for him, I can go through channels. I'd rather not. Can we interview him?”

“Tell me what your interest in Baranowski is.”

Dukas looked at him, eyes slitted, looked aside at Triffler and said, “Okay, she's our Deep Throat. But she doesn't know we know.”

Menzes digested that while he picked at the label of his beer. His hairy, muscular forearms worked, tight bands moving like rods. Despite the white shirt and tie, he seemed more like some sort of competitor—boxer, wrestler—than a desk jockey. “How do you know she isn't feeding you lies?”

“How about we interview Suter?”

Menzes now shifted his look to Triffler. “By the book. No surprises. Somebody from my office present at all times. Put the request in writing, parameters of the investigation clearly stated.”

“You're a prince, Carl.” Dukas produced a folded sheet of paper from an inner pocket and laid it next to Menzes's glass. “By the book. We'd like to do the interview as soon as possible.”

Menzes started to laugh. He wiped moisture from one eye. “Hey, Dukas, no shit—you're good!”

Even Triffler smiled.

O'Neill was off to Naples again to back up Alan Craik, but he had left Valdez in Washington to honcho a new computer-security wing for his company. The company offices were in the glitzy part of town near L and Connecticut, but Valdez found himself in a converted rathole in the old red-light district farther east.

“Don't matter,” he had said to O'Neill before he left for the airport, “you pay the electric bill, we're in business.” He had installed four Dells and networked three of them himself, then two geeks had got them going on anti-hacking regimens.