Top Hook (5 page)

“This is how it goes. The Chinks' military intel is the banker for the Party and for the bigwigs who are skimming the cream and sending the money offshore for themselves. Intel also has most of its own secret money offshore; it's what they use all over the world for spying, subversion—you know. It's a lot of money. A lot of money. So what I'm going to do is, on a given day, and it has to be soon, I'm going to activate my virus, and it's going to send little gobblers—like PacMans—and they're going to gobble up all the offshore accounts and all the data about the accounts, every scrap, and put it somewhere else. And the Chinks won't know where. And there they'll be, sitting with their thumb up their ass, with no money for ops, and no Party money, and no money for the bigwigs who will want to know how and why, and who will be trying to take revenge on anybody who stands in the way of their cash, and it's going to be a bloodbath!”

He grinned. “For about twelve hours, and that's all I need. Because the Chinks are going to be between a rock and a hard place during those twelve hours, and they won't know whether to shit or go blind. India is going to be hollering at them from one side, and we're
going to be hollering from another, and Pakistan is going to be begging them to send help, and they won't be able to do a thing! They'll be paralyzed.

“And then they'll try to recover the only way they know, which is by strutting around the world, pretending to be a superpower instead of the world's shoemaker. And they'll push some military provocation to make somebody else—India, let's say—back down,
and it'll all be bullshit!
Because China
is
a paper tiger—a hundred goddam nukes, and so far not a missile that they could lob a wad of toilet paper three thousand miles with! An army of goddam peasants, and technology they've had to steal! You know who says the Chinese are a superpower? The same assholes who said that Russia was a superpower!

“Well, I'm going to show what they really are. Their money is going to go down a rathole, and they're going to panic, and then they're going to the brink—and they're going to find that they're eyeball-to-eyeball with us, and they're going to back down,
because they don't have the muscle!

“So—I had a reason, do you see, Janey? I always had a reason. You're the moralist in the family; you're the one who used to argue the difference between ends and means, so you judge what I've done. Judge me. And then forgive me.”

He came to rest at the foot of the bed, his posture appealing to her, begging her. And for a moment, he thought what he saw in return was an illusion—a living woman, eyes open, the faintest of smiles—and then he knew it was not. It was quite real, even to the smears of pale color on her cheeks.

“Janey—!”

She might have said something; her lips parted. But
it was her eyes that spoke, sliding aside to look at the CD player. Then back at him. The eyes of a girl, hip and wise.

He got it.
Der Rosenkavalier.
He pushed the Repeat button. A few notes, and Schwarzkopf's voice climbed out of the box and filled the room. It was loud, too loud for him to talk. Seeing her eyes, he couldn't turn the volume down. He could only sit with her, listening.

He sat beside her, and her eyes closed. The music, lush as cream, swirled.

He touched her hand. It was wax. The music spiraled up, the duet, the two sopranos, glory. Then silence.

“Janey?” Now he felt his own desire again, his own urgency. “
Forgive me!
”

But the bird had flown.

Outside the hospice, Suter leaned his back against a tree. Music he didn't know played its tinny noise in his earphone, but he was oblivious to it.
A lot of money
. Suter tried to light a cigarette, but his hands were trembling and he had to give it up.

A lot of money
. What was a lot of money? A billion? Even two billion?

A lot of money, and Tony knows about it.
What would he do with Tony? The man could say that discretion was his stock-in-trade, but Suter knew that discretion, integrity, all that was bullshit when big money came around.

It frightened him and at the same time dazzled him. What could he do with a billion dollars? What could he
not
do?

He had come out here to get something on his boss. To get a little leverage. Now, Shreed hardly mattered. Now there was
money
. He tried again with the lighter, and it gave a flame and he was able to hold the cigarette
in it just long enough to get it alight. He drew in a gulp of smoke, coughed, and, bent over, began to hyperventilate.

He knew that the only way he could deal with Tony was if Tony was dead.

By the time that the JAG officer from the boat appeared, it was close to three in the morning and he had been moved from the cell where he had been questioned to a comfortable office belonging to one of the detectives, and he was being given strong coffee and biscotti. One of the cops even made small talk.

The JAG was a lieutenant-commander, middle-aged and short, and he weighed as much as he was allowed, but he was professional.

“Commander? You all right? I'm John Maggiulli.”

“Al Craik.”

“You okay? They don't have you as a suspect any more. Wish I could say that was my doing, but it was over before I walked in.” He lowered his voice. “Admiral Kessler is kind of freaked. Word we had was that there had been a terrorist attack. Why didn't you tell them to call the boat, Mister?”

“I did.”

“Not their story. They say that you wanted the boat kept out of it and cooperated willingly in their investigation. What were you doing there, anyway? Was it terrorists?”

Alan looked outside the office and saw the razor-thin man in the good suit watching him.

“Not here, John.”

“Al, I'd like an answer. This is serious.”

“I know it's fucking serious, John! I just shot a guy, excuse me, it's kind of wrecked my day! The Italians thought I might have been sent here to whack the terrorists, or some such crap. I started requesting legal counsel from the boat four hours ago, as soon as I discovered that we were moving beyond routine.”

John Maggiulli looked at him. Glared, in fact.

“Shore Patrol says you got a message from your wife. You withholding this message purporting to be from your wife from the Italian police?”

“Roger that. John, I'll make it clear when I'm not sitting in a foreign police station, okay?”

Shaking his head, Maggiulli took his arm; there was a suggestion of taking him into custody. “I got a car, and we're ducking reporters.” Alan limped beside him.

The thin man watched them leave.

Admiral Kessler was in pajamas and a flannel robe, a rather small man who was not at his best at four-thirty a.m. He sat a little slumped, one hand shielding his eyes as if the glare from Alan's story was too much for him. Still, he let him tell the whole thing, leaving out only the woman's saying “Bonner” and the fact that she had asked to meet him in Naples.

“I don't like my officers getting into trouble, Mister Craik. Especially big trouble.” He looked at Maggiulli, whom he had commanded to stay. “What I really want to know is why you lied to the Italian cops. Well?”

“Sir, it's, um, a matter of national security that touches on an existing counterintelligence investigation. I'm not in a position to say more until I can talk to NCIS.”

Kessler lowered his hand and turned a pair of very bright, very hard eyes on Alan. “Admirals don't like
to be kept in the dark by subordinates—you follow me?”

Alan, standing stiffly, bit back the angry sense of unfairness that came up like bile. “I'm eager to tell you, sir, as soon as I've cleared the matter with NCIS.”

Maggiulli cleared his throat and said, in the tone of a man trying to coax a bull into a chute, “Uh, Craik has a point, sir—if this is really a sensitive matter—”

“I know the goddam code, John!” He leaned still farther back. “What the hell do you have to do with ‘an existing CI investigation'? Your dad died years ago.”

Alan winced. Everybody in the Navy knew about his father's death; many people held it against him, credited his promotions to it—son of a hero, the man who had caught his father's killer. He would rather not have raised the subject at all. “It was that case, anyway.”

Kessler was unsympathetic. “All right. You get to NCIS pronto, and I want to talk to your contact when you're done. Get it to me by 0800.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Alan headed straight down to CVIC and tried to call Mike Dukas, an NCIS special agent who was still in charge of the old case and who was a close friend, at his office in Bosnia, dialing the eighteen digits with great care. First, the line was busy; then, he got a native German speaker who had difficulty understanding him. Could he call back after eight? Alan slammed the telephone down, thinking that eight a.m. in Sarajevo was the time he was supposed to report on his progress to the admiral.

Balked of contact with Dukas, Alan filled out a foreign-national contact report with the NCIS officer on the boat and put himself in his rack, where he fumed and stewed and waited for the dawn.

Rose had sat up with her father, drinking too much wine and letting him try to soothe her. Then she lay awake for an hour, then another hour, hearing dogs, the bells of clocks, the freights rolling along the old New York Central tracks. A car went by, its boombox thumping hip-hop bass. Somebody laughed and shouted. Her talk with the detailer went around and around in her head, and she tracked it, around and around, looking for the explanation, the solution, a rat running around and around, looking for a way out—

Rose woke to see by the pale orange digitals of the bedside clock that it was a little after two. Her head really ached now, and the wine rose as a sour nausea in her throat. She would feel really lousy tomorrow. Today.

She went to the old bathroom along the hall, the only one in the house, drank two glasses of water, looked at her bloated face in the mirrored door of the medicine chest.
Some looker you are!
she thought. Well, her face matched her thoughts, anyway. She drank another glass of water and knew she had to do something, anything—go for a walk, go for a drive. Scream. Instead, she went and checked her children and then went downstairs, the dog padding beside her, and by the time she reached the bottom tread, she knew what she was going to do.

She was going to scream for help.

She took the dog out into the cool night and, again leaning against the rear of her car, got on her cellphone. She called a duty number of a war crimes unit in Sarajevo, where Mike Dukas, who loved her and was her husband's friend and was an NCIS agent on loan to the International War Crimes Tribunal, was officer-in-charge. What she got was a gravel-voiced Frenchman named Pigoreau who wanted to flirt with her and who
finally told her that Mike was in a
grande luxe
hotel in Holland, The Hague, “being kicked up the stairs.” He gave her a phone number.

His flirtatiousness made her numb.
Some other time
—She punched the numbers into the phone and pulled her robe tighter around her. The cool air felt good on the hangover, but parts of her were a little too cool.

Pigoreau had been right. The hotel was very
grande luxe
. It was so grand she thought she was never going to get past reception, but finally a somewhat too elegant female put her through, and she heard one ring and then Mike Dukas's growl, and, before she could think, she cried, “Oh, Mike, thank God!”

“Hey! Rose? Rose?”

“Oh, Mike, goddamit, I'm so happy to talk to you! Mike—I need help.”

“What the hell. Help?”

So she told him. Two sentences, bam, bam.

“What, you got bounced from the program and sent to some nowheresville, and the orders came out of CNO?”

“You got it.”

“Where's Al?”

“Somewhere between Aviano and the boat.” She told him about the change to Alan's orders. “First him, now me.”

“Which I don't think is a funny coincidence, babe. You with me? You know the Navy—they get on one of you, you both go down. You need somebody to find out what the hell's going on. I don't think it's us—NCIS, I mean. Could be Navy intel, but they don't work like that; they'd come to you and do stuff—investigation, interviews, maybe polygraph.”

“But why?”

“Because either you or Al is a security problem, is why. That's all it can be.”

“My dad thinks I have an enemy.”

“Your dad may not be so far wrong. But maybe Al has an enemy and you're getting the backlash. But this has a kind of stink. Like, it sounds very quick and very from the top down, not by the book. And not the Nav, you know? But I'll check. Listen, give me an hour or two, shit, what time is it there—? I'll check to see if the Navy's involved, other than issuing the orders. But what you gotta have is information. What you do, call Abe Peretz and tell him to find out what's up.”

“It's two a.m.”

“What are friends for? He's FBI, he'll have an answer by the time you're eating breakfast. Then call me back and we'll talk about what happens next. Okay?”

“I hate to wake people up.”

“Oh, do you? Your life is shit, your career is ruined, and you hate to wake people up. Come on, babe, get with the program. This is war.”

“You're the best, Mike.”

“No, I'm a mediocre Navy cop, but I'm crazy about you, so you bring out the best in me. Now go call Abe and let me get some breakfast.”

“You sound grumpy.”

“Wait until you hear Abe.”

Abe Peretz was a former naval officer who had joined the FBI. Like Dukas, he was an old friend, a kind of mentor to her husband and a counselor to her. He was only a little pissed at being waked up; once he understood the problem, he gave her some hard advice: come to Washington, where the action is.

Half an hour later, she was on the road.

His first official act on the carrier was supposed to have been a brief to the admiral on the purpose of his detachment. The briefing was out the window, however, because of the Trieste mess, and when he showed up on the flag deck at 0800, he was met, not by Admiral Kessler, but by Maggiulli and the flag captain.

“Have you reached your NCIS guy yet?” Maggiulli said. He looked as wasted by lack of sleep as Alan, but he was certainly more nervous.

“I filed a contact report at the NCIS shack on the boat. I keep missing my guy when I call—I got the runaround in Bosnia, where he's detached to a war crimes unit, and I just found out ten minutes ago that he's in The Hague. I've got a call in to him there.” He turned to the flag captain. “Am I briefing on the MARI project this morning, sir?”

“The admiral would prefer that you straighten this other matter out first. Commander, it still appears that you're withholding evidence from the Italian police. You haven't offered us any reasonable explanation. People were
killed
, Commander.”

“This is a change from two hours ago.”

“It is
not
a change!” Maggiulli looked at the flag captain, thus proving that this was a change.

“John, I will continue to make contact with the special agent in charge of the investigation my first priority. He's at a hotel in The Hague, and I expect to talk to him as soon as I leave this meeting.”

“Admiral Kessler wants somebody with some authority at NCIS to explain this matter to him, as you don't seem prepared to do it yourself. It looks like you're jerking us around, Craik.”

His anger almost exploded, and his face went white.

Clenching his fists, Alan said in a dead, rigidly controlled voice, “It looks like
you're
jerking
me
around, John. Two hours ago, you seemed to accept my explanation and told me to call my guy; now you don't accept my explanation! Listen to me—and you, too, sir—because I'm in the right on this and I know the code, too! I am doing my goddam level best to satisfy you and the Italian police
and
my responsibility to a classified investigation! If you want to take me to the mat on it, you do it! Call me on it!”

With a gesture, the flag captain silenced Maggiulli. To Alan's surprise, he spoke quite gently, as if, all along, he had simply been hearing how it would play. “I'll forget the tone of voice you just used, Mister Craik, but you gotta remember the seriousness of this from our point of view. We got a capital ship here in a foreign port where we're not deeply loved to start with. So you just do nothing but work at getting on the blower to your man and make it right, okay?”

“Sir, I also have a detachment to run, and I haven't even met all my officers yet.”

The flag captain nodded. “I think that can wait for twenty-four hours.”

The man seemed to be saying that his whole detachment could sit on their thumbs until he got hold of Mike Dukas. And then he got it, through the fog of fatigue and anger: if he
didn't
get Mike Dukas and satisfy the admiral, there wouldn't be any detachment—at least not for him. That's why Maggiulli was the attack dog—to give legal cover if Kessler decided to kick his ass off the
Jefferson.
That really would end his naval career. And Kessler knew that, too.

“Sir, with all respect, I request permission to continue with my detachment while trying to locate Mister
Dukas.” He rushed on almost boyishly. “There's no point in me sitting on a phone if he's at breakfast and doesn't have a telephone handy.”

The flag captain thought about that and actually smiled. He picked up his hat, a signal that the meeting was about over. Again, his voice was almost soft. “I appreciate your position. You please try to appreciate ours.” He put his cover on and came close, as if he wanted to shut Maggiulli out. “You better satisfy the admiral today, or you're toast.”

Fifteen minutes later, Alan was in his stateroom, looking at the black heel-mark on a bulkhead where he had just thrown a dress shoe. Mike Dukas had
not
been at the hotel in The Hague—he had just checked out.

He had tried Dukas's office in Sarajevo again, and, although he had got an English speaker this time, she hadn't known anything, either.

Mike Dukas was in transit.

Now, shaking with anger, Alan tried to talk himself down. He was about halfway there when a knock sounded on his door and he whirled, ready to explode on anybody suggesting that the admiral wanted him to hurry. Flinging open the door, he saw first the captain's eagles on the collar, only belatedly the face above it.