Top Hook (19 page)

“Bonner was in the papers. So were you.”

“Was Efremov?”

“Fair enough. Yeah, we never mentioned him in our case. Okay. When are you meeting her again?”

“I'm
not
meeting her again.”

“You can't
not
meet her! You just said there might be a link between the mole and the case of the woman who happens to be your wife!”

“I know, I know—but—Look, I promised the CAG I was out of this. I got a stack of fitreps to smooth, I've got to ride my maintenance guys, and I'm meeting the tech reps in an hour. Anybody could make this second meeting.”

“When?”

“Two days, just like you told me.”

“Who do you expect me to send to a meeting in Naples in forty-eight hours?”

“How about an NCIS agent?”

“Nobody with the training. They're in Bosnia.”

“I don't have any training, for Christ's sake.”

“Yeah, but I
know
you. Come on, it might help Rose. I don't have anybody else.”

“Harry.”

“No. He's doing too much as it is. Al—for
Rose.
”

Alan leaned his forehead on his free hand. He could argue to Rafe that they were in port, anyway, and he was entitled to some liberty—what if he had a meeting with a woman? So did half the guys on the ship. And it might help Rose: if Anna could really reveal the mole, and it was the mole who had framed Rose, then wouldn't she be exonerated? He made the decision, realigned priorities. He'd have to work harder tomorrow to buy the time. “Okay.”

“Good. Meet Harry first. I'll set that up from here. Just look for him.”

“How about he just waits for me on the pier?”

“That's not how we do this, Al.”

“Meeting's at two p.m. at Herculaneum.”

“Half-hour by train from Nap to Herc. Huh. I want you to come down the pier at 1230 local, okay? Look for Harry once you clear the pier. Once you see him, just follow him until he stops and let him initiate contact, got it?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. If I have anything else, I'll call Marty Stein, NCIS on the boat, and have him pass it, okay?”

“Roger. I gotta go, Mike.”

“You think I'm sitting here for my health? So get moving.”

“Love you too, Mike.”

Alan hung up the phone and went to his bank of safes in the intel area. This would have been the preserve of the intel officer, if his det had been large enough to rate one. Alan had to be his own intel officer. He spun through the combination to the big safe and extracted a set of files—system parameters on the MARI datalink, with yellow stickies and comments in his handwriting, plus a sheaf of briefing reports from his aircrew.

Dukas had got Triffler a real desk and his own telephone, partly by bootlegging a line and partly by moonlightrequisitioning a phone and a STU from a warehouse at the Navy Yard. Triffler had then walled himself off from Dukas's mess with a dozen new white plastic crates arranged into a kind of room divider—irregular, stair-step construction, spaces between crates filled with golf trophies, plants, a piece of ersatz sculpture from a museum shop, and an oversized plastic apple.

“Who's your decorator?” Dukas had growled when he saw it. He had yet to pick up the crate that had fallen from his own desk, or its files. Still, he tried to be friendly. “Want a jelly doughnut?”

Then Triffler was gone, researching the history of Rose's computer in the days it had been out of her sight. When he came back, Dukas was so eager for good news—any good news—that he greeted Triffler like an old friend, dragging his chair over to Triffler's side of the crates and pouring himself a cup of Triffler's coffee. Triffler was just telling him that Rose's hard drive had been switched in an Arkansas transit warehouse—two fake NCIS agents had appeared there and waved a forged letter from a non-existent Mister Tremont in NCIS Security—when Dukas's phone rang. Dukas groaned and tried to reach through a plastic crate to get it, knocked over a golf trophy, spilled his coffee, and groaned again. Triffler already had a roll of paper towels and was mopping the coffee as Dukas jumped past him and at last got to the phone. It was an encrypted call, so he had to hit the STU, and that really pissed him off. “Dukas!” he shouted. “I'm busy!”

“Jesus, Mike, take it easy.”

“Harry! Where the hell—? Listen, I'm in a meeting—”

“Mike, somebody just turned on George Shreed's home computers. What I want you to do is—”

Dukas exploded. “How the fuck do you know what's happening in Shreed's house?”

“Don't ask. The important thing is—”

“You're hacking! You stupid sonofabitch! You could get us both in deep shit!”

“Mike,
somebody has turned on George Shreed's home computers
. He's at his office—Valdez already checked. Think!”

Dukas thought. “Menzes?” he said. “Menzes is surveilling him and not telling me?”

“Possible. Think again.”

“Somebody else is in Shreed's house playing with his computers. So?”

“If it isn't us, and it isn't Menzes—Think wild card, Mike.”

Dukas hesitated only an instant. “I'm thinking. Bye!”

He grabbed Triffler by the arm and yanked him toward the door. “We're outa here!”

“Hey—! My suit—!”

“You got a car? Mine's got a bad muffler, makes a hell of a noise—” Dukas was trotting, pulling Triffler along. “People remember it, right?—notice it—your car is better. I bet your car is better. Right? What d'you drive, Dick?”

“Where the hell are we going—?”

Dukas made Triffler drive. As he expected, Triffler's Honda was less than a year old, unblemished. Dukas rode with a suburban Virginia map book spread on his lap.

“
Where are we going?”
Triffler demanded again.

“Shreed's, I thought I told you that.”

“You didn't!”

“Well, listen up when I talk to you!” He urged Triffler to more speed, and Triffler, who was a deft but cautious driver, pushed the car to within one mph of the posted speed limit. “We're gonna do a drive-by of Shreed's house and see is anybody there.”

“Why?”

“Somebody's using his computers.”

“How do you know that?”

“A friend told me.”

Shreed's street was tree-shaded and quiet. A few cars were parked along the curbs, but most of the residents were working. A young black man was walking two dogs; two white women pushed baby carriages; a lawn sprinkler threw dotted lines of water toward the pavement.

“It's the white house,” Dukas said. “Go slow.”

“The Colonial?”

“Whatever—the
white
one.”

“They're all white.”

“They're all brick, for Christ's sake; the
white
one! Yeah, that one—the one with the hatchback in the driveway. Oh, shit.” He said the last words because, as they came close, a thin white woman carrying a vacuum cleaner came out of Shreed's house and began to remove the machine's dust bag. She glanced up and then went back to her work. “Oh, shit, a cleaning lady!”

“A white cleaning lady, at that!” Triffler said.

“Read me the license number.”

“Of what?”

“The goddam car in the driveway. What d'you think, the fucking vacuum cleaner?”

Triffler read off the numbers as they cruised past. “Don't look at her,” Dukas hissed. “Don't look at her!”

Triffler chuckled. “What do you think, she's going to call the cops?”

“You know what the Agency would say if they knew we were surveilling Shreed's house? They'd crucify us!” Dukas was looking up the street, where four more cars were parked in a line along the curb. “Go slow,” he muttered, “like we're a real estate agent and a client, maybe.”

“I must be the agent,” Triffler said. “I'm the guy with the tie on.”

Dukas growled again. “It's bad enough we gotta worry about the local cops here—they know Shreed's Agency; they keep an eye on any Agency guy's house. Hey—”

He had seen a man's head in one of the cars in the line. Something, perhaps the angle of the head, suggested that the man was watching in his driver's-side mirror. Years of stakeouts and surveillance caused a little warning to sound in Dukas's head; his first thought was
local cop
, and then he realized how unlikely such a thing was. “Don't slow—don't look at this guy—” Dukas was trying to see the license plate, but the car was backed tight against the car behind it and it was only as they came almost parallel that he was able to see the first three characters of a Virginia plate.
G7B.
He said it over to himself, writing it on the pad without looking and hoping it would be legible later, because his eyes were swinging to look at the man in the car for one instant and then moving on, face registering nothing, trying to be as blank as a stranger looking over the neighborhood.

And that was how he came to see, for one instant, the face of Tony Moscowic.

Later, back at the NCIS building, he wondered what the hell he was doing. What he had said to Triffler
was true—if the Agency found he'd been near Shreed's house, they'd hang him. And hacking into Shreed's computers—! Even NCIS would hang him.
Rose, Rose,
he thought,
only for you!

“Bingo,” Triffler said in his ear.

Dukas jumped. “Don't do that, for Christ's sake. Clear your throat or something!”

“We got a hit on the license number of the car in Shreed's driveway. Heather Crouthammer. Local cops have a memo on her—she'll be parked in his driveway every Wednesday.”

“Cleaning lady,” Dukas said.
Shit.

“You got it.”

“
She
didn't turn the goddam computers on, Dick.”

“How do you know? Maybe she goes online. Plays games. Gambles, maybe.”

“On two computers at once? Come on!” Dukas hunched forward. “She goes there to clean; the computers go on. Funny coincidence. Find out what you can about her. What about the other car?”

“The partial? They're working on it. Not too hopeful.”

Dukas thought of the face he had seen in the car. Sallow, cynical, tricky.
The guy was watching the street,
he thought.
I know he was.
He could see the way it was done: somebody went into the house with the cleaning woman, went into the computers while she worked; this guy sat in his car and watched the street, ready to warn the other one if anything suspicious came along.

“Somebody else is after Shreed,” he said. “It could be CIA Internal, but I don't believe it. I think Menzes is too straight to lie to me.” Or at least he hoped so.

“So,” Triffler said, “who else could it be?”

Dukas wouldn't say it out loud, but he was thinking,
A woman I'm sleeping with named Emma Pasternak.

Suter had rented an apartment for Nickie the Hacker in a building in suburban Maryland where an international and polyglot clientele from the University of Maryland rubbed elbows with one of the more discreet drug markets in the area. It suited the hacker because nobody asked questions and the pizza deliveries were fast.

“It was a piece a cake,” Moscowic was saying. “He went in with the cleaning lady, she does her routine, he don't make a sound in case there's bugs someplace, and he does his thing.” He looked at Nickie, gave an encouraging jerk to his hips. “Isn't that true, Nickie?”

“I downloaded everything. He's got some software, man!”

Suter was still looking at Moscowic. “Nobody saw you?”

“Who'd see me? You think I'm some amateur?”

“The local police would have that house on a watch list. Local cops have
my
place on a watch list. Because of my employer.”

“Big deal, I'm really impressed. Nobody saw me.” Moscowic remembered very well the man who had seen him, but he wasn't going to tell Suter.
Let sleeping dogs lie,
he thought. Just some middle-aged guy in a Honda with a black dude—meaningless. But he could still see that face. Suspicious, intelligent, cynical. A cop's face but not a cop.

“Nickie got away clean?” Suter said.

“Wha'd I just say? He did the job, no problem. No problemo! He carries out some of the trash and shit, puts it in her car like he belongs there, and they drive away.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

Suter swung around to Nickie and spoke to him for the first time. “You looked at the files yet?”

Nickie, whose face was down over a pizza, shook his head.

“When are you going to do it?”

The thin shoulders went up and down in a shrug.

“Look, you little shit—!” Suter grabbed the raspberry hair at the back, and the face came up, and with it a knife that gleamed in Nickie's right hand. Cheese and tomato sauce were stuck along the cutting edge.

“Hey, hey—!” Moscowic shouted.

Suter let go of the purple-red hair. Nickie curled his upper lip. Moscowic made quieting gestures with his hands.

“Let's behave like gentlemen here, can we do that?” Moscowic said. The other two looked at him as if he was nuts.

When Alan knocked at the open door, Rafe said “enter” without looking up, took another sheet off the pile of paperwork under his left elbow, skimmed it, and scrawled a signature at the bottom.

“Rafe?”

“Sorry, Al. Wait one.” The next item was three pages long. Rafe hummed and muttered as he read it, slapped a yellow sticky on top, wrote a note, and threw it in another pile.

“Dickhead. Not you, Al. What's on your mind?”

“It's the NCIS thing, Rafe. I, um, need to meet the woman again, day after tomorrow.”

Rafe scowled, started to say something, then swung to: “What's all that under your arm? That better not be for me.”