Top Hook (8 page)

“How'd you end up here with two down birds?”

“I don't know yet.”

“Better find out. Kick some ass.”

“Right.”

“Hey—I know you ain't the bad guy. But you
are responsible.

” “I know!”

“Make it work for you. Sometimes it helps to get mad; you get the assholes' attention that way. Oh, hey—I forgot. We found your NCIS guy.”

“You forgot!”

“Yeah, I forgot. I'm the CAG; I have other duties than carrying messages. In fact, I was just gonna give it to you in Air Ops when we got sidetracked with your other
problem.” He pulled a piece of paper from a shirt pocket. “I've already run this past the flag captain. Here's the deal: your guy is arriving at a hotel in DC about five their time—that's, um, 2300 here—and we've left messages there that he's to call the NCIS office on the ship ASAP. That's direct from Admiral Kessler, so he knows we're serious. We also left messages at NCIS HQ in case he goes there. When he calls, you get your ass to the NCIS office and get on their STU and you tell him whatever the big secret is; when you're done, Maggiulli, the JAG guy, gets on the STU
at once
and hears from your guy that you're a patriotic American who did it all to save the world for democracy. You with me?”

“What the hell is Dukas doing in Washington?”

Rafe rolled his eyes. “Jesus H. Christ, who gives a shit? Did you get all that or didn't you?”

Alan grinned. “I got it. Can I kiss you now?”

Mike Dukas got the message to call the
Jefferson
in the office of his boss's boss at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service at the Navy yard. But, because his boss's boss was flattering him and almost begging him to stay at NCIS and not transfer permanently to the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague, and because Dukas was trying to parlay that request into a temporary position where he could help Rose, he didn't make the telephone call right away. In fact, it was another hour before he called the
Jefferson
, and only then, when he was talking to the NCIS agent on board the carrier, did he understand that he was really calling Alan Craik. It was damned confusing: three days before, he had been in Sarajevo, this morning in Holland, and why was he calling the husband of the woman he had come to Washington to help?

“Hey—” he started to say.

“Mike, Al Craik. Jesus, you're hard to find! I've got to talk to you—”

“And I gotta talk to you! Have you heard—?”

“Mike, I had to file a—”

“—about Rose?”

“—contact report—What about Rose?”

“What contact report?”

They shouted at each other for several seconds and then both shut up at the same time, and it was Dukas,
wide awake now, who took charge and said, “Rose first,” and told Alan Craik about his wife's loss of her astronaut's place. Then he told him about the suspicions that were flooding through the Navy about both of them, and about Peretz's discovery that CIA Internal Investigations was behind Rose's fall.

“That doesn't make any sense!” Alan shouted.

“Tell me about it. Don't bother sputtering, Al; we've all said the same thing, and it's a waste of breath. Get hold of yourself—Rose is in deep shit and so are you, by association.”

“Jesus, poor Rose! And I've been feeling sorry for myself—”

“This is serious shit, Al. Now what's this contact report?”

Alan had to say “Poor Rose” again, and only then did he get to the contact report and the woman in Trieste who had said “Bonner.” He ran through it all quickly—the Serbo-Croat, the shootings, the police, the JAG officer—almost mumbling, as if it had suddenly become almost unimportant.

But it was not unimportant to Dukas. “And you're sure she said ‘Bonner'?”

“Absolutely. Otherwise, I'd have—”

“Jesus, old investigations never die! Holy shit, Bonner. Bonner works for Efremov out of Iran; we bust him and send him to prison; now some babe has people shooting at her and she says, ‘Bonner,' and you're supposed to snap to, right?”

“She wants me to meet her in Naples—next liberty port.”

Dukas could think fast when he had to. He had heard a rumor two days before that Efremov, the Russian/Iranian mercenary, was dead. After only a moment's silence, he said, “Do it.”

“Mike, I'm in trouble with my admiral and the JAG guy as it is!”

“I'll give you NCIS cover and clear it with both of them; for now, you tell them it's classified and all will be revealed in the Lord's good time. Then you go to Naples as my agent; I'm your control. You
capisce
?”

“I'm not trained for that stuff.”

“Yeah, well, you weren't trained for half the shit I know you've got yourself into, and you came out smelling like a rose. Look, Al, I want you to do it: if she's got real dope on Bonner, I want it!”

“She didn't
say
she had stuff on Bonner; she just said his name.”

“Oh, as a way of passing the time? Come on—she sets up a meeting with you by posing as your wife, then she says a notorious spy's name, and we're supposed to think she's just, what? making a pass? selling Mary Kay cosmetics the European way? Get real—she's got something to sell.”

Dukas heard Alan sigh. He sympathized. But, as he had told Rose, life wasn't fair. “You gotta do it, Al.”

“Okay. But put it in writing, for God's sake!”

Dukas explained to him that there would be a case number and a file and a classified memo naming Alan Craik as an agent of the NCIS.

“Can you talk to the JAG guy here as soon as I'm done? They think I'm a spy or something, Mike—the shooting stuff has really freaked them—”

“Yeah, yeah, I'll talk to the guy. Jesus, how do you get into these things? She really pretended to be Rose so she could say ‘Bonner' to you? Weird, man. Yeah, we gotta go for it.”

“Mike, I'm up to my ass with this detachment thing. I don't want to be your agent!”

“One meeting, Al. I promise you. Meet with her once, find out what she's got, that's it.”

Dukas heard the hissing silence of the STU as Al Craik thought it over. Finally, he said, “Where's Rose now?”

“Somewhere here in DC. I'm supposed to hear from Abe Peretz in an hour or so.”

“Okay—you give me Rose's phone number in an hour, I'll be your agent
once.
”

Dukas smiled into the telephone. “That's my boy. Put on your JAG guy. And stop worrying!”

Dukas stroked the JAG officer and, after he hung up, sat staring at an unfamiliar wall, concerned now that he had two cases, not one. Just when he had meant for his life to get simpler, it had got all twisted.

Rose came to rest in a motel in College Park, recommended by Peretz because it was cheap and it was handy to the District. The hangover still rumbled; the feeling of helplessness kept her in a rage.

The telephone rang. She had to search for it, knocked it off its cradle, fumbled, stammered, “Siciliano!”

“Hey, babe, you sober?” It was Mike Dukas, whom she had last talked to from Utica.

“Mike! How'd you find me?”

“Peretz. I'm in Washington.”

“Your guy in Sarajevo said you were in Holland.”

“Yeah, well—” He sounded embarrassed. “The deal is I'm coming back to NCIS for six months to a year, then I'll see.”

He had been excited about taking over the War Crimes Tribunal's investigative side, she knew. And now he was coming back to NCIS? “Mike, are you doing this for me?”

“Nobody else would get me back to this place, babe.”

“Oh, Mike—” She started to cry.

“I love to hear women cry. It really cheers me up. How about saying ‘thank you' and we'll get on with it. Look, babe, here's the deal—come on, turn off the hydrant, I need you to listen up—I been here a couple hours,
nobody
here has a case file on you, but there are these goddam rumors going around!” He was talking too fast to get her out of her crying jag. “Anyway, I am now the official investigator for the matter, which is now a case, with a computer-generated case name and number—I saw to that—but it's not a case about security, it's a case about abuse of CIA powers and outside interference, which gives me a very nice bit of leverage. You following me, or you still raining on the carpet there?”

“I follow.” She grabbed a Kleenex.

“I talked to Al,” he said. “He's got his own problems, which I can't go into on an open phone. You just hang on there, and he'll call when he can get a phone on the
Jeff.
Your turn: what's happening? Peretz says you're seeing a lawyer.”

She told him about Emma Pasternak and the calls to the CIA. “I think she'll be okay, Mike, but she's real strange. Maybe—you know, maybe a lesbian, shit, I don't know—”

“That gross you out?”

“Oh, God, no, what d'you think? No, she just isn't—sympathetic.”

Dukas grunted. He took a moment, then said, “I gotta make this meeting she set up at the CIA.”

“You're not invited.”

“What's the CIA Internals guy like?”

“He sounded nice. Nicer than her. I felt sorry for him.”

“Yeah, well, don't feel too sorry. This is the asshole gave you the shaft. Okay, so I gotta check around, get a line on him. Then I need to talk to your lawyer and tell her I'm tagging along.”

“She won't like it.”

“Jeez, I'm terrified. Give me her number.”

She read off the number from her book. “Do I go to this meeting, Mike?”

“God, no. You wait for Al to call, get a lot of sleep, call home, talk to your kids, then go to a movie. We'll call you when it's over.”

“We?”

“Me and the Bride of Frankenstein. She'll be eating out of my hand.”

Right.

Rose was going out to eat, but she couldn't miss Alan's call, and she lay down just for a minute, and then she was waking to hear the telephone and find her hand already on the instrument. Groping it to her, she mumbled something and heard her husband's voice saying her name and then, “How are you? How are you?”

She felt a rush of joy.

Tony Moscowic was wearing a sport coat and a white shirt and an actual goddam tie, because he wanted to look legitimate, and he didn't want anybody at the hospice to remember him from the last time, when he wore an orange jumpsuit. The last time, he had planted the bug that had allowed Suter to listen in on George Shreed's confession to his wife; this time, he was going to remove it. He had his legit clothes and a
visitor's badge, and he went right to the room that had been Mrs Shreed's and jingled his picks in his pocket, ready to pop the lock in four seconds, max, and was surprised and maybe disappointed that the door was unlocked.

Bad omen
, he thought.
Too easy is a bad omen.
He closed the door behind him, turned on the light, and he was heading for the wall switch by the bed when a male voice said, “Who the hell are you?”

The fucking bug was behind the wall plate. He could have had the plate off and the bug in his pocket in one minute. Less. Now here was some guy, asking him who the hell he was. Good question, Homer!

“Who are
you
, if I might ask, sir? You're in my aunt's room!” That was his story—sort of. The story, if he got caught with the wall plate actually off and in plain sight, was he was checking out the structural integrity of the building before he moved his aunt there. Weak, but it would work for a practical nurse. Above that level, he got more inventive.

“You have the wrong room,” the guy said. He was sitting in an armchair where he'd fallen asleep, Tony guessed. No energy. He was thin, blond, wearing a cashmere sweater that was almost purple, and Tony thought he was a fag, meaning he was here to die of AIDS. Swell.

“Jeez, I guess I do. Seventeen?”

“Nineteen,” the guy said. He sounded okay, no longer surprised, maybe kind of amused. He was smiling at Tony. “I just moved in.” He smiled some more. “I won't be moving out.”

Tony could see now that there were changes in the room. It even smelled different. He was losing his touch; jeez, he could have really put his foot in it here. “You
have my greatest sympathy,” he said, moving toward the door.

“Yeah. Mine, too.” The guy smiled. “See you.”

That blew getting the bug. Now he'd have to wait until the guy actually checked out or at least went comatose, and holy shit, the room would probably be filled with grieving fairies holding candlelight vigils and he'd never get that fucking wall plate off. It was really, really unfair. What were they running here, a revolving door, the lady dies one night, the next they've got a new guy dying in her room? Fucking Heartbreak Hotel, for Christ's sake.

He shucked off the sport coat as soon as he was outside the hospice and walked up the street, loosening the tie and tossing the coat over his shoulder. Suter's car was waiting at the end of the block, and Tony took a moment to get his story straight and then walked right to it and got in.

“Did you get it?”

“Piece a cake. Drive.”

“Let me see it.”

“You nuts or something? It's gone. Wipe it down, smash it good with your foot, throw it in the nearest dumpster. That's my routine. Bugs are like guns—use them once, get rid of them. Drive.” So, he'd hung a story on Suter, so what? The important thing was he'd wiped the bug down when he put it in; nobody would ever find it; and if they did, couple years, ten years from now, so what? “You know that doggie is still sick?” he said. “I think it was the pizza. I didn't feel too good next day, either. My neighbor's pissed.” Suter said nothing, and Moscowic said, “Some story your boss told! Huh? Huh?” He tapped one palm on his knee. “Treason, you know—Jeez, that's worse than child-molesting.”

“We have to get into Shreed's house.” Moscowic missed the emotions that flashed across Suter's face—fear, then hatred.

“You nuts? What for?”

“Computers. There's a memorial service for the wife on Thursday. You can do it then.”

“Djou hear what I just said? You're nuts! You think I'm breaking into some CIA guy's house, you're nuts. And another thing, he'll have a security system, which is no big deal if you don't care who finds out after, but bypass it and try to make it look like it never happens, trust me, you're nuts.”

“I want you to go into that house.”

“Not Thursday, I'm not. Why?”

“I need a hacker. You know any hackers?”

“Do I look like Bill Gates or something? No, I don't know any hackers.” Tony stared out the window at a strip mall. “Vietnamese, they're all Vietnamese,” he said, meaning the strip mall and not the hackers. “But I can find you one.” Meaning a hacker, not a Vietnamese.

“He's got to be good.”

“Oh, that should make it easy. What I think, some kid's been busted and isn't allowed near a computer for two years or something, somebody like that. Itchy, you know? And not a stranger to fucking with the law, because that's what he's already done. Am I right?”

“Then we have to get him into Shreed's house. Only once.”

“So what's this Thursday shit? You think I'm going to find the magical mystical hacker by Thursday?”