Top Hook (20 page)

“Nope. It's my battle plan for the tech reps.”

“What are you doing to them?”

“Making them work. They haven't been talking to the aircrew very much. I made the debriefers run down these sheets with the TACCOs after every flight to get data on little stuff; link behavior, range, keyboard usage, function keys.”

“Bet they loved that.”

“Point is, I now have about two hundred queries and suggested fixes. We're in-port; tech reps don't get liberty. So now's the day and now's the hour. And since ‘Squash' Soleck got a free vacation in Aviano, he can ride shotgun on it.”

“Sounds good.” Rafe leaned back. “You're doing a good job now, you know that? No, really. I know what all that paper means, man. And the det shows it—your guys are looking better; hell, even your landing scores are up since you cleaned the clock on that cigarette boat.” He glanced at his watch, put his hands back behind his head. “Okay, the NCIS thing. You said one meeting. Now you say another meeting. Well, we're in port.” He nodded at Alan's papers. “But you're not going to get much liberty. If you want to spend it running errands for NCIS—Is this the
last
NCIS thing, Al?”

“Uh—jeez, I hope so—”

“I appreciate your honesty, so I'll just rephrase. This
is
the last NCIS thing. Period. Okay?” Their eyes met. Rafe nodded. “Have a ball.”

Rafe turned back to his paperwork. Alan had twenty minutes to prep for the tech reps, who weren't going to like the workload he was about to dump.

“
Inshallah
,” he breathed.

Suter was in Shreed's office.

“I got interviewed by somebody from NCIS this morning,” Suter said. “About Peacemaker. The Siciliano thing. I told you about it, remember? I just thought you'd like to know.” He was trying to sound casual and he sounded like hell.

Shreed made himself calm. “Why would I care?”

Suter flushed. “I just thought you'd want to know.” He stared at Shreed.

“‘The Siciliano thing.' The woman you spent an unsuccessful year trying to get in the pants of?”

“She's under investigation for security violations. Remember, you wanted me to try to spread, um, rumors about her and her husband?”

“Did I?”

“But I didn't say anything about that. You don't need to worry.”

You don't need to worry.
As if Suter knew something. Shreed had got so used to living two lives and being confident of the wall that separated them that he almost automatically dismissed the idea that Suter could know anything about his Chinese-agent self—and yet there was a
tone
in that nervous voice. It occurred to Shreed that maybe Suter was going ga-ga. The Agency could do that to people. He was certainly behaving oddly. Saying odd things. He gave Suter a long look now, trying both
to figure him out and to warn him. At last he said, “I don't worry.”

“That's good. They asked about my connection with both Peacemaker and the Agency, but they never asked about you. So I didn't bring your name up.”

Shreed did a lightning review of his own connection with Peacemaker and saw nothing to trouble him. He had had a semi-secret role, lobbying for the project before Congress, channeling money from some secret funds. And, of course, he had betrayed it to the Chinese. But he couldn't see anything that should worry him about it.

“What did you tell them?” he said.

“I told them that Siciliano asked a lot of questions about highly classified material that wasn't her business. And I told them that she had a very close relationship with an enlisted guy named Valdez.” Suter looked pleased with himself. “A computer geek.” His shoulders jerked. “I mean, the guy asked me if I knew anything about bad-mouthing Siciliano and her husband, the holy Alan Craik. I didn't tell him you'd told me to do the bad-mouthing. Instead, I talked about her Tex-Mex geek, Valdez. I said that they were
very
close.” As Shreed stared at him and the moment got longer and longer, Suter gave a kind of snort that became a giggle, and he began to make semaphoric signals with his eyebrows that were probably meant, Shreed thought, to suggest heavy sexual content. A thought flashed:
He's cracking up.

But then Shreed was thinking more about the implication of what Suter had said than about Suter's mental state. He signaled that their meeting was over. “Have my notes on all this crap transcribed and on my desk by four,” Shreed said. He wanted to think.

Suter got up and gathered the papers and put them into a neat stack with almost obsessive care. He hugged the papers to his chest. “I'm very good at things like the interview,” he said. “I didn't tell them
anything.
”He backed away from Shreed toward the door. “Anyway, they're not very bright. NCIS doesn't get very bright people.”

“They might surprise you.”

Suter made a movement with his whole body, something like a bow, or perhaps the jerk of a condemned man as he reaches the bottom of his fall and is stopped by the noose, and he backed out, staring at Shreed the whole time, his right eye being the last thing to disappear as he closed the door.

“Nutcase,” Shreed said aloud. However, he was thinking about the NCIS investigator's questions about what Suter had called bad-mouthing: Did NCIS have some reason to believe that the gossip had started inside the Agency? Had they interrogated Suter because they didn't yet dare to interrogate Shreed himself? He knew how such things were done: he knew that there was talk of a mole—knew it? By God, he had taken part in it! So that when the NCIS interrogator came to ask permission to examine people at the Agency, Internals would say Yes to this one, No to that. And the Nos would be reserved for anybody on their list of possibles, because they wouldn't want to scare the mole.

So let's see how it would go
, Shreed thought.
NCIS are investigating the Siciliano case. If Internals allowed them to see the “intercept” that Chen concocted to implicate Siciliano, then they realized pretty quickly that it was cock and bull. Internals knows it, too, of course. But Internals and NCIS are in a sense on opposite sides, because Internals wants to protect the Agency and NCIS wants to exonerate Siciliano. So then
there's the matter of her computer—No. No, next there's the Agency almost dropping the investigation because Siciliano's lawyer made so much noise, and then there's the Agency resuming the investigation because, well, because I made such a stink at that meeting the day of Janey's memorial service.

That was when I went public—public within a very small and select population of the Agency—with my need to implicate Siciliano, although they wouldn't have seen it that way; they would have seen cranky, grieving George Shreed playing the patriotic card. But if there was somebody at the meeting with the right set of eyes—

He thought about the meeting and who had been there.
Partlow. Jeffreys. Breedlove. Goering—
He went around the big table, seeing nobody who might have suggested to NCIS that he, George Shreed, had more interest in the Siciliano case than seemed reasonable.

Nobody.

He went around the table in his mind again. That committee met weekly, always the same. Everybody—

Not always the same.
Something had been different, some face at the corner of the table. That's where Handman of Technical Research always sat.
But he wasn't there. Somebody in his place, sitting not at the table but back a little against the wall—

Sally Baranowski.

My God, how could I have missed it?

Sally Baranowski, who had seen his performance that day and who had every reason to want to hurt him.
Bad move
, he thought. He hadn't taken her seriously.

He reached for his telephone, not for a moment trusting the e-mail system to be discreet.

“Breedlove,” a voice said at the other end.

“Mark, George Shreed. I'm wondering how your
contact in Internals is. I need a favor. Somebody named Baranowski—”

Triffler had just finished reporting on his interview with Ray Suter. The only thing that stuck out for Dukas was Suter's having implied some bullshit about sex between Rose and the computer guy, Valdez. It didn't make sense. Had Shreed coached Suter to lie about her and Valdez? If he could
prove
that Shreed was behind Suter's answers in the interview—

“Have we got anything new on Shreed?” he called to Triffler.

“If we did, it would be marked in green as an update on the chart.”

Triffler had made a chart that tried to track what they knew about Shreed. It was on the back of the door, so anybody coming in didn't see it, but Dukas could stare at it from his desk and try to figure out if it meant anything. But all that the chart gave him to date was Shreed's public biography, which was virtuous and admirable—naval air service, Agency postings in Jakarta and Washington, promotions. In recent months, it got more detailed—”Wife, Angel of Mercy Hospice. Death of wife. Memorial service of wife.” And then, “T. and D. surveil cleaning woman—” Triffler's way of saying they had been wasting their time.

So, nothing new. Dukas sighed. He made a note on a sticky and put it on Triffler's report of the interview: “Follow-up interview recommended.” But not just now, he knew, because he didn't have the people and he didn't have the budget.

Preparing for his second meeting in Naples with Anna, Alan had first to meet Harry. Not seeing him at fleet landing, he paused to watch the spectacle of fleet landing, a last bastion of America and one from which some sailors never quite dared to stray. Dozens of others stopped here to have a burger and a Coke before entering foreign territory (which, of course, offered its own burgers and Cokes a couple of blocks away). Dozens more, having already sampled Naples, waited for a ride back to the ship, gulping down fries and sodas in feeble attempts to cover the taste of mixed beer, pizza, wine, brandy, and “I dare you” exotics like Fernet Branca. Rap and Country boomed from radios, each asserting its own version of America to Italy, whose first inhabitants were just visible down the pier where panhandlers in sincere castoffs and hookers in bright clothes forced the sailors to run a gantlet of sympathy and sex.

Alan pushed through the Navy crowd to the shore-patrol post and walked the gantlet without a glance, smiling at the Neapolitan comments he was not supposed to understand. He continued to look for Harry, following a route he had been given by Dukas, past the hookers to the vendors, past the vendors to the first small trattorias, off the pier and left toward San Marco.

Harry was sitting in a big café on the other side of the boulevard, reading a paper with his back to Alan, who spotted him from a block away and crossed the street in the first lull of the traffic. When Alan saw him again, Harry did not appear to have seen him, but, as he walked closer, Harry stood up without hurry, tossed a coin on the table, and walked away from the docks with the newspaper pressed under his arm. Alan
followed him, now only a block behind. They walked uphill for two streets, took a right, and then entered a web of smaller streets that Alan vaguely remembered from his childhood as the medieval part of the city. Harry appeared unhurried, but every turn he made caused Alan to accelerate for fear that Harry would disappear in the crowded streets.

Most of Naples seemed to be buying coffee and fish and anything else that was out on tables. Several times Harry stopped and looked, and once he bought something, each stop causing Alan to stop behind him and do the same.

It was a moment's inattention while trying to make one of these forced stops inconspicuous that caused Alan to lose Harry altogether. He looked up from a display of seafood on ice to find that Harry had vanished from a similar stall a street ahead, and he moved toward his last sighting, unable to believe that a tall black man could be so hard to find in an Italian crowd.

Alan walked to where he had last seen him and looked around. He bit the inside of his cheek in annoyance and decided that Harry was headed either back toward the bay or up toward the Vomero and turned right, moving quickly. And there, seated at a tiny café just around the corner, was Harry, who smacked him with the newspaper as he was about to walk by.

“We've got to stop meeting like this, shweetheart.”

Alan's annoyance evaporated in the pleasure of meeting his friend.

“Almost lost you, there.”

“Nah, you were fine.” Harry smiled broadly. “Good to see you, old chap.” The fake Brit accent took Alan back to the boat. They had been junior officers together. They had survived in Africa together. The new Harry,
the one with only one good eye, was calmer, a little more reserved. Still Harry. They tried to crush each other's hand.

“How's Rose?” Alan said. “I mean, I've talked to her, but you've seen her.”

“Mad as hell. She misses you. I've got a note and some packages for you later.”

Alan smiled ruefully. “First we work?”

“Yeah. You ready to meet the dragon lady again?”

“I don't like her, Harry.”

“No shit. Can you pretend to like her?”

“She gives me the creeps.”

“It shows. First, stop acting like she has leprosy. I'm not saying get her in the sack—”

“Fuck, no!” Alan rocked back in his chair.

“Although all things considered, that would probably be best.”

“Harry,
old boy,
that is not on,
capisce
?” Alan's fake Brit accent was not up to Harry's standard.

Harry sighed, sipped his coffee, glanced around. Alan waved to the bored waiter and asked for an espresso.

“A little quieter, okay? Look, the dragon lady may have something really good; there were a few prize bits in her conversation. I want to give you a few pointers on dealing with her, and I'd like you to sit quietly and listen.”

“I don't plan to get her in the sack.”

“Little on-the-spot psyche profile. She's a people pleaser. She understands relationships best when they involve sex. That's common with people who got sexually abused as kids. Her self-image is largely based on her looks and the power that gives her. Okay, that's all way too simple, but you have to understand her. I watched you. You don't react to her looks,
you don't respond to her allure. In effect, you are dissing her. And she likes you, or at least she did at the start.”

“So I fucked the whole thing up.”

“Nope. You did all the basic stuff right—you arranged another meeting; you didn't promise her the moon; you kept her going. When she forced you, you started to sound human.
But you need to do better.
Today, you two are going to start real negotiations. Mike wants you to get some sort of peek at the goods, something we can use to check her out. That's going to take some level of interaction. You can't just order her to give you a look at her files, Al.”

“Harry, I have a detachment to command, a bunch of guys who think I'm a spy. I can't make a second career of dealing with this woman.”

“Man, you were on the way to the Ranch when your orders got changed. What did you think you'd be learning to do there—deal nicely with nice people?” Harry met Alan's eyes. He didn't relent. “Al, this is probably pretty important. Only Mike knows the full score, but it may help Rose, and I think this could be bigger than your detachment. Bear down. Play nice. If it helps, pretend to be somebody else.”