Top Hook (43 page)

“Right.” Triffler cleared his throat. He was looking at the chart of Shreed's life. “What's next?”

“Guess whose room this was before the dying gay moves in?”

Triffler wanted to shout
George Shreed's wife!
, but he bit the words off. “Whose?”

“The wife of a guy at the CIA. Get it? The
Central Intelligence Agency!
This is a fucking espionage murder!”

“Oh, now—” Triffler could see Moisher going off on brilliant tangents. “Don't jump at conclusions. Hey, listen, I just had a thought. I
know
somebody at the CIA.”

“I was going to go to the FBI. Except they'll take over my investigation, won't they?”

“They have that reputation. No, listen, I got this acquaintance, he's in Internal Investigations, a really standup guy. Moisher—call this guy, I bet he'd be grateful. You know, it helps to make contacts like this.”

“How?”

“Future reference. Suppose you want to leave the police department some day? Good to have a contact at a place like the Agency.”

“I don't feel comfortable with spying and all that stuff.”

“This guy is in Internal. No spying. He's like a cop.”

“They'll blow me away. I'll be this dumb local dick and they're the God-Almighty CIA.”

“His name's Carl Menzes. You can mention my name. Just tell him you were following this lead in a murder investigation, and it led to the wife of a CIA employee named—what was the name?”

“Shreed. Mrs George Shreed. Name of Jane.”

“Well, you could call Menzes and say something like, ‘Hi, I'm a friend of Dick Triffler's, I'm investigating a murder and the trail has led me to the wife of a CIA employee named George Shreed.' I think he'd be very grateful.”

“Well—”

“Moisher, you gotta do it sometime. See? You don't want to be perceived as suppressing evidence.”

“How could they perceive that?”

“Well—they're the CIA—”

“Oh, shit! You think this guy would still be in his office?”

“Try him. It'd be a really good idea to try him. And Moisher—you done good, no kidding. Brilliant!”

The pizza had arrived by then, and Triffler tore into it, being messy in honor of Mike Dukas. He was sitting at his old desk, not his new one, and he allowed tomato sauce and cheese to drip on the desktop and a couple of files. He saw that he had already dripped coffee on some of the papers. He finished the pizza and was thinking of doughnuts when Carl Menzes telephoned.

Triffler listened to him, sucking bits of cheese and anchovy through his teeth, wiping grease from his fingers on the drawer pulls. He said, “No kidding,” and “Unh-
unh
!” several times. When Menzes was done, Triffler said, “That's amazing.”

“Somehow I think you're not amazed. This detective mentioned your name—how close are you to this investigation of his?”

“Not close.”

“Funny you should be working on Shreed because of Siciliano, and here he pops up in a completely different context, and your name gets mentioned.”

Triffler thought of Dukas and how Dukas would handle it, and he became his own real self and said, “Keep me at arm's length. Understand? I've kept Moisher at arm's length. Anything I know about this is tainted and you can't use it in court. Get me?”

“So you already knew.”

“No comment.”

“Okay, I get you. Moisher's going to send me everything he's got. He says that this bugging of Shreed's
wife's room was done for ‘Hotshot,' who is somebody he hasn't identified. That your view of it?”

“Sounds right.”

“He says that there's a log for ‘entry into S's.' You got any ideas there?”

“None.”

“S is for Shreed?”

“No comment.”

“Well, Moisher says that the entry into S's was apparently worth five thousand dollars. Any comment?”

“None.”

“I thought it was a big fee for a locksmith.”

Triffler was silent, thinking,
Go, go—go for it!

“So, I ask myself, why does it cost five thousand bucks to get into a house? And all I can think of is a bribe. Correct me if you don't agree.”

Triffler said nothing.

“So, I'm wondering who's worth five thousand and can get into Shreed's house, and except for Mrs Shreed, who was already in the hospice and dying, I can't think of anybody. However, if I call Shreed's local police, I can find if there are other people who have authorized entry, and guess what: The Shreeds had a cleaning woman with a key. What d'you make of that?”

“You're telling the story.”

Menzes actually laughed. “Triffler, if you ever think of leaving NCIS, keep me in mind. I can always use a guy who understands an evidence trail.” Menzes was still laughing when he hung up.

Triffler drove to a Dunkin' Donuts and bought a mixed dozen. Back at the office, he passed the box around and bit into one of the forbidden fruits.

“Jeez, Triffler,” a female agent said, “what's going on?
You?
”

Triffler let red jelly run down his chin. “I'm awarding myself the Mike Dukas Prize for Biting Your Tongue in Aid of Jurisprudence.”

Long ago, in basic counterintelligence training, an instructor had told Mike Dukas that the ideal clandestine meeting site had multiple entrances and exits, terrain to screen the meeting from prying eyes, and a logical proximity to the agent's daily routine. At first glance, Jolcut lacked all the requirements.

It was no different from dozens of other little hamlets at the edge of the war zone. Its strategic position at the top of a long hill suggested that its inhabitants must be familiar with violence, must have endured it for hundreds of years—but there is a difference between endurance and acceptance. Caught between the northern plains of India to the east and the Khyber Pass to the west, the region had been a highway for invaders since well before Alexander's phalanx had rolled to the Indus River, and the villagers here had suffered them all.

The sun cast long shadows on the trash-strewn road as Dukas trudged up the hill toward the town. He had left his taxi miles away in another hilltop village and had taken a weirdly painted local bus to a turn in the highway. When he raised his head now, he could just see the smooth column of a minaret silhouetted against the sunset sky. He shifted the duffel bag in his hand and kept walking.

The same strategic position that made life in Jolcut
historically precarious gave it utility as a meeting-place for spies. The Gilgit entrance to the Karakoram highway to China was two hundred miles to the north. Afghanistan and India were closer still. The main eastwest highway ran flat and straight along the base of the hill below him. A watcher in the village could see movement on all the roads in the area, yet, even three-quarters of the way up the hill, Dukas still couldn't see into the village. He wondered if there was a watcher now, but it was too late to go back. He kept walking. His leg muscles burned as if his heart was pumping acid instead of blood.

He crested the hill and got his first look into the town. The whole thing wasn't more than a hundred yards square; the main street was only a row of false-fronted rectangular buildings painted in contrasting pastels, the false fronts giving the place the look of Hollywood's notion of the Old West tarted up for Easter. Behind the main drag the roofs sloped away at random angles, a crazy quilt of alleys and narrow streets.

At the far end of the main street sat the mosque, which the Chinese Checkers comm plan used as its meeting site. It was smaller than he had expected, with the minaret set in a corner and the square block of a low tower behind it.

The mosque was in ruins. And that was
not
in the comm plan.

Oh, shit,
he thought. Even at a distance, he could see that the place had been bombed, and recently enough so that the rubble hadn't been cleared away.

He walked down the deserted street, his nostrils assaulted by a combination of rot and spice. Scraps of trash muffled his footsteps. Twice he saw furtive movement in doorways, flashes of color that suggested
observation, and then the smell of wood fires began to overwhelm the perfume and the rot.

It was dinnertime in Jolcut.

When in Rome
, he thought, and he sat on a detached block of stone and began to eat the pakora he had bought at a bus stop.

He had called Buse every hour, as he had promised in Bahrain, and the smart NCIS man had come through for him. Half an hour out of Islamabad, he had said, “You'll be met. Look for a sign. He'll give you your mother's maiden name and the make and year of your car. Good luck, man.” He was good, Dukas had thought—no crypto, no time, so he had waited until it was too late for anybody to look up that shit before the plane landed and had given it in clear. And there was a short, very dark man waiting at the airport with a sign that said “MIKE!” When Dukas had looked at him, the man had shouted, like a child reciting a poem fast before he forgets it, “Maranlis! Subaru! Eighty-seven!”

He never gave a name. He said he was a VIP greeter, but what he did for Dukas was not very VIP: local clothes, a big thirty-eight special and a duffel bag with a knocked-down AK in it. And a taxi driver who knew how to get around roadblocks and didn't ask questions. And why would he, with a thousand American dollars of Mike's money in his pocket?

And now here he was in a minuscule village, an American in a country that no longer liked Americans, a Christian in an Islamic nation, a cop in a place that had no local cops. He wiped his greasy fingers on his pants and hoped that the pakora didn't give him the crud. That would be the last straw.

He looked around. A tourist? Sure, he was a tourist.

He took out his cellphone and, hoping that it looked at a distance like a camera, pretended to take pictures of the ruined mosque and then of the tower behind it. Pretending to get just the right light, just the right positioning, he studied out a route up the rubble to the tower. It could be done.

But could it be done in the dark?

In the west, the last gleams of the sun disappeared behind the magnificent peaks of Afghanistan, where, not so long ago, American weapons had helped to fuel a war against an enemy who now no longer mattered.

Before the streets were dark, he found a hostel, which was really only a shed for truck-drivers who got stuck on the highway below. English speakers, if they existed in Jolcut, weren't on order that night; Dukas conned a few words of Baluch from his computer—
bed, sleep, traveler
—and was pointed to what might have been intended as a mattress.
Toilet?
More like a privy, but big enough to assemble the AK in, which he then propped against the outside wall before he showed himself once more inside before disappearing as if to bed.

Then it was dark, and he got the rifle and found his way back to the ruined mosque and the pile of stones he had picked as his route up the tower. With the rifle slung on his back—
romantic, very romantic, Lawrence of Arabia goes rock-climbing—
he scrambled up. Rocks fell with noises like an avalanche. Small animals scuttled. A dog barked. Dukas, cowering on the stones, waited for the village elders to come with torches and guns. When they didn't, he scrambled higher, put his left foot on a stone ledge, and hoisted his out-of-shape body to the top.

As housing, it wasn't much. There was a low wall and
a rotting wood floor, and, in the light of his pocket torch, a trap door. That was bad news, because he could smell cooking, and he had an idea that the tower, or at least its lower floor, was occupied. The best he could do was move fallen rock from the wall to the trap and hope that if anybody came visiting, at least the rocks would make a racket.

Then he sat down to wait. For what, he was not sure. The woman and Shreed were to meet below him where the front of the mosque had been, perhaps, and he would climb down with his badge in his hand and arrest the traitor and take him home. Clean and fast. A dream.

He wondered how Triffler was doing without him. Better, probably. And Menzes? Dukas shook his head. It was as if that had been a hundred years ago. He crawled to the wall and looked into the warm night and saw the highest peaks of the Hindu Kush glowing white in a full moon to the west, one of the most beautiful views he had ever seen. Little fires burned in a walled market beyond the square, human and almost domestic; they enhanced the breadth of the view beyond the village. The road to the south was a sharp line across the foot of the hill.

And then vehicles were moving down there. He could see a small convoy moving fast along the road, their headlamps blacked down to slits. The roar of their distant passage rose slowly behind them like the passage of a jet plane in a clouded sky. The first vehicle slowed at the foot of the hill, and, after it turned, the sound of clashing gears lingered a little.

Oh, shit
, he thought.
They're coming here.

He had expected that Shreed would have a local agent to watch his back. But not truckloads.

Pakistani army setting up an outpost? The Indians, invading?

Three vehicles pulled into the rubble-strewn square with a roar and a shriek of brakes. Men jumped down from the first two; one man, taller than the rest and older, shouted orders. They had stubby machine pistols; two had sniper rifles, another man a heavy radio. They were dressed in a complex camouflage pattern he had never seen, and one of them started arguing with the older man as soon as they got off the trucks.

Dukas looked at their faces in the moonlight and listened to their language with a sinking feeling in his gut. He thought of Sally sitting at her computer. “
Chinese Checkers—it was such a funny name for him to pick
.”

The soldiers in the square weren't Pakistani or Indian. They were Chinese.

He dug out his cellphone.

Harry had pulled the Toyota in between two international relief agency trucks. The traffic jam that blocked their four-by-four looked endless in both directions. Vehicles from the north were fleeing the fighting, and the refugees already had the blank, slack look of refugees everywhere. Vehicles from the south were taking aid and military supplies to the war zone.

“Let me do the talking,” Harry said.

“Shouldn't we have kept Kamil? Do you speak the language?”

“I speak Arabic. Kamil is a hill man—he'd just make trouble, now. These guys will speak Urdu or Baluch. Anyway, somebody will speak English, and I'll stick out a lot less if I do, too. The guys in the truck ahead are Canadian.”

“When did you learn Arabic?”

“Last couple of years.”

“Probably important in your business, now.”

“I learned it to read the Koran.” He looked at Alan with a wry grin. “I converted to Islam.”

They pulled forward a few feet and stopped again. One of the Canadians hopped out of the truck ahead, pissed by the side of the road, and strolled up to Harry's window. He was a tall, heavy man, his face burned red by the sun. A hardass.

“Who you guys with?”

Harry pulled a business card out of his pocket.

“I'm Harry O'Neill. I run a private security firm.”

“Oh, sure. Doesn't everybody?” He came well up the side of the Toyota. “Who do you really work for? And why'd you cut into our convoy?”

“I really do run a private security firm. Mostly, I work for the UN.”

“Look, I don't really care who you work for, okay? I just want to know that you aren't running drugs. That could get us stopped for hours, okay?”

“No drugs. Who you with?”

“IRC. We got about twenty trucks.”

“You know this checkpoint?”

“It's new. I've only made this run twice, but there's never been a check before the desert.”

“I do work for the IRC in Mombasa.”

“Yeah?” The man looked disbelieving, but interested. “You can prove it, eh?”

“Yeah, but why should I?”

“Because if you don't want me to point you out to the

checkpoint, I want to know, okay? I'm not losing four hours here because some drug dealer decided to use me as cover.”

Harry smiled and pulled out his phone. The truck ahead rolled forward and Harry nudged the Toyota along a few more feet. The checkpoint became visible to the north. To the east, a passenger train moved slowly into the desert. The big Canadian kept pace on foot.

“Call your headquarters and ask if they know Ethos Security. Call the United Nations High Council for Refugees, if you know the number. I'd give it to you, but you wouldn't trust me.”

Somebody was shouting at the Canadian from the truck ahead. He looked them both over and shrugged.

“No time. I won't tell them you're part of our convoy, but if they don't ask, I won't say different.”

“Fair enough.”

Alan looked over at Harry. “Are we screwed?”

“Just let me do the talking.”

The truck ahead rolled into the checkpoint. Soldiers raised the canvas in the back with their rifles, but the inspection was perfunctory and the truck was halted less than a minute.

Harry rolled the Toyota forward and halted next to the officer.

“Where are you going?”

“Islamabad.”

“This highway is closed except for required traffic.”

“I understand that, sir.”

“Are you with the Red Cross?” Asked with deceptive mildness, the question made Alan cringe inwardly. This was not an ignorant man.

“I provide security for UNHCR sites.”

“You are American?”

“I live in Dubai.”

“Really? You don't have a newspaper, do you?”

“I don't. You want to know about the cricket?”

The officer nodded, his whole demeanor changed. Dubai had been a right answer. So had the word “cricket.”

“It was a very close game, but Inzamam-ul-Haq attacked the Australian bowling and in the end Pakistan won by ten runs.”

“
Allah ahkbar!
The game was starting when we were sent here.”

Harry handed over a UN passport.
Where had Harry come up with a UN passport?

“Do you need something to read?” Harry burrowed in his bag and pulled out a thick yellow book. The cover said “Wisden.” The officer took it with reverence—the bible of international cricket.

“This year's!”

“I have another. Take it.”

The man held it on his palm, weighing his duty to look at Alan's passport against the book.

“Drive carefully. The desert road is full of refugees.”

“Good luck to Pakistan. I hope they make the final.”

“
Inshallah
. Go on, please.”

Alan breathed again, and the Toyota rolled forward. He didn't even notice the last cars of the passenger train passing beyond Harry's window. Aboard the train, a man raised his head from the computer on his dinner table to glance at the endless traffic jam. It was George Shreed.

Shreed glanced up from his screen because a flash of light distracted him, but his thoughts were far away. The screen showed the encrypted commands that would begin the drain of Chinese intelligence money from their secure accounts in Hong Kong and Malaysia. He thought that when he showed Chen the empty bank accounts,
Chen would defect to save his skin—what old East German hands called an “induced defection.” And if he didn't, Shreed would shoot him. He thought Chen would more likely defect.