Top Hook (42 page)

Information about the hunt for George Shreed reached Washington by trickles and inferences all Sunday night, but it had immediate consequences on Monday morning. Ray Suter was told to stay at his desk and “keep himself available.” At NCIS, the halls were full of rumors that heads were rolling at the Office of Naval Intelligence. Triffler, to his astonishment, was in the midst of everything: he had a face-to-face meeting with the CNO, and he encountered a Rose Siciliano who had gone from accused outcast to CNO staffer and was suddenly a full commander.

Triffler was summoned early to the CNO's office to make an unprepared brief, a surprise that didn't terrify him but one that didn't impress him with his own worth, either: he knew that he was there as a stand-in for Dukas. The brief—a summary of his and Dukas's work on the inter-agency balls-up that had ruined Rose's career—was not done in the Pentagon briefing suite but in the Chief's office, with nobody else present but Rose and a captain who proved to be the CNO's intel staffer.

“So you don't know precisely how somebody at the Agency got somebody in this office to implicate Commander Siciliano?”

“No, sir.”

“And you don't know who was responsible?”

“Dukas thought he knew, sir.”

“Do
you
know?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

Triffler knew that there was a time to swallow hard and a time to say you've been screwed. He took a deep breath. “Agent Dukas got a direct order to concentrate on Commander Siciliano's case and forget the inter-agency thing.”

“A direct order from who?”

Triffler had read it in a file in the twenty minutes he had had in a cab coming over. “It was passed to him by our boss from ONI. The signature was a Captain Veering.”

The CNO looked at the intel captain, who nodded almost imperceptibly. Triffler could hear Veering's head start to roll. The CNO's face was dark with anger, but he kept his voice even as he said to Triffler, “Agent Dukas believed that the source of the lie that implicated Commander Siciliano was this guy Shreed?”

“Definitely.”

“Where is this Shreed now?”

Triffler was not afraid to say he didn't know.

The captain spoke up. “Agent Dukas appears to be pursuing him to Pakistan—did you know that?”

Triffler admitted that he didn't know that, either. The CNO looked at the captain, who said, “NCIS Bahrain reported him in Bahrain at six-thirty last night our time, and off about eight-thirty, destination Islamabad.”

Triffler sank deeper into confessions of ignorance. “I don't know about that, either, I'm afraid. Dukas doesn't have a secure link with me.”

“Or with anybody,” the captain growled.

The CNO turned to Rose. “Your husband's in on this, too, is he?”

“He's a designated agent of Dukas's in this business with the woman he calls Anna. They were supposed to have a meeting yesterday in Bahrain.”

The captain smiled. “Her husband put half a million
in cash
into the NCIS, Bahrain, office safe. She'd turned it down. Then Dukas reported he'd seen her at Manama and she was headed for Tashkent.”

The CNO's voice showed his irritation at this complexity. “
Tashkent!
How the hell does this relate to Shreed?”

“She and Shreed have been in touch, apparently with an eye to hooking up. We get this from an independent contractor who's, uh, surveilling Shreed's Internet use.”

“That legal?”

The captain cocked a skeptical eyebrow. “I'm having it looked at.”

“Make sure the answer is ‘yes.'”

It was Rose's turn to smile. “The contractor is a man named Harry O'Neill, sir. Ex-Navy. Maybe you heard of him when my husband flew him out of Uganda and landed a Cessna on the
Rangoon.
”

“Another friend?”

“Close friend, sir.”

“Where is
he
now?”

The captain cleared his throat. He, too, it seemed, was having trouble keeping up with the tangle of Rose's pals. “He seems to be aboard the S-3 that was pursuing Shreed in the IO, sir. With Lieutenant-Commander Craik—Commander Siciliano's husband.”

“How do we know that? The
Jefferson
?”

“The
Jeff
, plus this O'Neill seems to have an encrypted link with his office here in DC, so we also got a message that way. Via an ex-Navy man named Valdez who is,
uh—” He looked sheepish. “Another friend of Commander Siciliano's.”

The CNO looked hard at her. “Trustworthy?”

“I'd take him anywhere, any task. He was with me on the Peacemaker project as an EM.”

“Okay.” The CNO rubbed his hands together as he thought. “Nail down some sort of contract with O'Neill and his firm. Use his Internet link as comm when you have to.
If
this bastard Shreed hasn't compromised our codes, we're still safe to communicate with Craik via the
Jefferson
, but stay alert for a change there if we find that Shreed has bitched us. The real problem is Agent Dukas, who's out there on a shoeshine and a smile, as far as I can tell. He kind of a loner, Triffler?”

“Well—he does things his own way, sir.”

“So he hasn't got a STU and he hasn't got codes, and God knows what he's doing. How's he going to communicate with Craik and the S-3?”

“He picked up a satellite cellphone in Bahrain,” the captain said. “We think he's got e-mail capability that way; otherwise, he's got to find a place to connect his laptop. Ordinarily, that wouldn't be a problem in a big city like Islamabad, but that's a war zone now.”

“Do we know what he plans to do in Islamabad?”

The captain shook his head.

“And Craik and his crew?”

The captain's eyebrows semaphored again. “They gassed outside Pakistani territorial waters eight hours ago and went EMCON. If they headed for Islamabad, they should be there by now—but they didn't file a flight plan and we haven't heard zip from the Paks. We've got the naval attaché nosing around for word of them.”

The CNO eyed Rose. “Would your husband take an S-3 into a war zone without a country clearance?”

“He, uh—It's my understanding, sir, that his admiral gave him a lot of leeway in, um, pursuing Shreed.”

“I like yes or no answers. Would he take his aircraft into a war zone without a country clearance?”

“Yes, sir.”

The CNO exchanged a look with his intel captain and sat back. “Folks, I've got two battle groups cooling their heels because we don't know how bad Shreed's spying has been. I want this sonofabitch caught, and I want him caught
now.
” He looked up at them. “And I want him caught by
us
. The Agency and the Bureau will take twenty-four to thirty-six hours to gear up, and that'll be too late; besides, as you said, Gil, it's a war zone now. So—comm support for everybody, number one; number two, what's the combat situation up there? Gil, we got anybody over at Combined HUMINT now? If we have, I want them here pronto, and I want to know every agent they can scrape out of the files in Pakistan. And tell them that if they blab, it's their career. We got anything like marines within striking distance?”

The captain shook his head.

The CNO looked grim. He nodded at Triffler. “Thank you.”

Meaning,
Get to work.
Except that Triffler didn't see what he could do.

After Triffler was gone, the CNO's face turned grim and he said to the captain, “Get me Admiral Kessler. I want to know what the hell he thinks he's doing.” His look moved on to Rose, and the scowl he gave her said,
And I want to know what the hell your husband thinks he's doing, too.

A definite air of us-vs-them prevailed at both NCIS and ONI, with the Navy the
us
and the CIA
them
.
Nonetheless, Triffler tried to keep a back channel open to the Agency through their Inter-Agency Liaison Office, hoping that Menzes would know of it and would be receptive to any news coming from the police investigation into the murder of Tony Moscowic.

All morning, no such news came. Triffler almost had to hold back his own hands from picking up the telephone to call Moisher. He was afraid that the young detective would give up on the search for “AMH” too early, that the allure of Monday Night Football or an early visit to his favorite bar would make it easy to give up the boring round of checks against businesses culled from the Yellow Pages. When, at noon on Monday, no news had come, Triffler was tense and angry, telling himself that any rookie cop could have found the Angel of Mercy Hospice by now.
He ought to have it!
he screamed inwardly. Then he realized that he was starting to act like Dukas.

If it walks like a duck and it talks like a duck—
At lunchtime, he phoned out for pizza. He made coffee, spilled some on his immaculate desk, and didn't bother to wipe it up. He was practicing sympathetic magic: if he behaved like Dukas, maybe things would turn his way.

And the telephone rang.

“Guess what?” a voice said.

“Moisher?”

“Guess what!”

Triffler felt a surge of anger. “I told you, I don't like guessing games! What, already?”

“Jeez.” The terribly young voice sounded let down. “I thought you'd be surprised. I found AMH.”

“You're kidding!” Now it was Triffler's turn to sound young and excited. “Where? What is it? Did they know Moscowic?”

So Moisher told him the whole story from the beginning—not just how he found AMH, but
the whole story
. How he called the Montgomery and PG and Virginia police. How much help he got and how much he hadn't. How many names he pulled from four phone books. How many calls he had made on Sunday. How many calls—

“Moisher!”

“I'm getting to it, I'm getting to it! Just listen to this—at ten o'clock, I call—”

“Moisher, get to the point, will you? I appreciate all this detail, and it'll make a piss-elegant report, but just give me the facts, okay?”

“These are the facts.”

“The
salient
facts.”

“What's ‘salient'?”

“Important.”

“That's what I'm doing. Anyways, okay, I'm going into too much detail, I know; I'm excited, okay? So here's the bottom line: right this minute as I speak, I'm sitting in the office of the manager of the Angel of Mercy Hospice in Falls Church, Virginia, and
this is the place!
”

Triffler let out a huge, satisfied sigh. “No shit! A hospice!”

“Truly! It's a place where people come to die. You know that?”

“Uh, yeah—but, hey, what a great piece of work!”

“Man, my feet hurt. My buns hurt from driving. My fingers hurt from writing! Did I tell you about the Korean laundry in Kensington?”

“So—what'd you find at this hospice?”

“Where I am as we speak? Oh, at first, nothing. No hits. I was ready to leave. Then I think, no, wait—if this guy was planting a bug, he didn't talk to the receptionist
or the manager. He talked to the guys in the trenches, right? So I go to the nurses and I go, ‘Who does the scut work here? Who's around with bedpans and shit like that?' So they go, ‘The practicals and the orderlies and
staff
,' and I talk to some of them and hey, Triffler! I hit pay dirt!”

“They recognized him.”

“Absolutely! One woman, she's black but very bright, she'd seen him
twice!
Even reported him the second time to the manager, so I check, and the manager wants to cover her ass because now she knows this is not about Aunt Annie's false teeth disappearing from the nightstand, so she's cagey and says ‘Well, maybe, I'm a very busy person.' So I go, ‘Well, we're talking murder here, so I hope you're really recollecting everything important,' and she gets her ass in gear and in about fifteen minutes she can tell me which goddam
room
this Moscowic was in. No kidding.”

Triffler hadn't even blinked at Moisher's “black but very bright.” He was resigned to whites, and he didn't distract them when they were on a roll. “That's great. Great work.”

“Well—I got lucky.” Moisher was beaming over the phone. “Then guess what?”

“I can't guess.”

“I found the bug.”

Triffler felt it like an ice cube down his back. This was definitely new. “How?”

“Guy who's dying here actually talked to Moscowic. The deceased gave him some cock-and-bull story about being in the wrong room, but the guy—a gay, I think, but observant—didn't really buy it, and he remembers that Moscowic was heading straight from the door toward the bedside light when he barged in. So I go,
‘Toward the light?' and he goes, ‘No, he was bending over, like down toward the floor.' So I look, and what d'you think I see?”

“Shoes?”

“Nah, shoes! My ass, Triffler—the wall plate! I mean, check it out—nightstand, lamp, cord, wall socket. We're talking a bug, right? because that's what's in his notebook, the Xerox pages. Okay. So I look all over the lamp and the nightstand, I don't see anything.”

“You trained to look for bugs?”

“Hell no, what you think I am, the FBI? Nah, I just looked and used my head. Then I borrow a screwdriver and take off the wall plate and there it is.”

Triffler's stomach dropped into his shorts. He hated to ask the obvious question, afraid of what Moisher had done to the bug. “You took it out?” he said.

“Jeez, what d'you think I am? No! I called in an expert, a guy I know in PG police. Triffler, don't you know
anything
? You never touch a thing like that. Never!”

Triffler felt weak. “Good for you.”

“Yeah, he's having a look at it now, and what I think is, if I'm lucky, it's got prints on it, or the wall plate has, which I handled with Kleenex from the gay. Right? Moscowic's prints. Just icing on the cake, because I already got a positive ID, and the guy in the room, although he won't live long enough to testify at trial, I can depose him and I'm golden, right?”