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2

NCIS HQ.

Alan Craik showed up at Dukas’s office a few minutes after Dukas got there himself. Alan wasn’t a stranger to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, even had a somewhat tenuous designation as “agent” because of past work for Dukas. Still, he had had to go through some rigmarole with security that had cost him time.

“Hey, Mike.”

“Jesus, put out the cigarette! The tobacco police’ll be here with a warrant!”

Alan crushed the cigarette against the sole of his shoe. “I quit, before—you know—then I—” He shrugged.

“Surprised some turkey didn’t collar you out in the corridor.” Dukas took the cigarette butt and doused it in a half-full coffee cup and hid it under some trash, all the while studying Alan’s face. “I’ve seen you look worse.” In fact, he was surprised at how relatively normal Alan looked—drawn, sleepless, but okay except for a new tic that drew one corner of his mouth down in a kind of spasm and then was gone.

Alan gave a lopsided grin. “Death warmed over?”

“Practically lifelike. Anyway, enough about you; let’s talk about me for a while. My injury feels pretty lousy, thanks for asking. And you noticed I’m wearing my Bugs Bunny rig—how perceptive of you.”

“Oh, shit, Mike, I’m sorry—Christ, all I think about is myself—”

Dukas raised his hand, palm open, to shut Craik down, and said, “How’s Rose?” and Alan said she was fine, fine, doing her fixed-wing prep so she could fly out to Edwards and fly F-18s before she went into astronaut training. “While I sit on my ass and watch reruns,” he said, and Dukas knew that he had asked the wrong thing.

He put Alan at his absent assistant’s desk and pulled up the drafts of his report on the Shreed affair and told him to read them and make comments. It was make-work, but it was work, and Alan seemed grateful. They worked that way for an hour, Dukas at his own computer, Alan at the other, a wall of white plastic crates between them, no sound but the building around them—footsteps, unclear voices—and the click of the computer keys.

And then the telephone rang.

“Dukas?”

Not a woman’s voice. Not Sally Baranowski. A man’s voice he recognized. “Hey, Carl.”

“Long time no talk.”

Dukas cast his mind back. Only a month—just before he’d taken off for Pakistan. Carl Menzes had been in a rage at him then, had called him every bad name he knew, because he had believed that Dukas had blown the investigation of the very spy, George Shreed, that Dukas had then caught up with in Pakistan. “Still mad, Carl?” He wrote “Menzes” on a Post-it and slipped it through the crates to Alan.

“Nah.” Menzes laughed, a laugh that sounded honest to Dukas. In fact, he liked Menzes, who was a straightarrow guy, a real fighter in the CIA’s Internal Affairs Division. “How’s the injury?”

“I can’t scratch my dandruff yet, but I’m healing.”

“Lot of people think you can do no wrong, Mike.”

“Yeah, fucking hero. In fact, what I hear is, the Crystal Palace thinks we made a huge mistake. What’s up?”

“We’re sending you some of the paperwork you asked for.”

Dukas was instantly on guard. “My experience is, you guys wouldn’t toss a used rubber this way. And I didn’t ‘ask’ for it; I got a court order for it. What happened, Legal Affairs decided that ten percent compliance would string it out for another six months?”

“Hey, Mike—! We’re doing our best to satisfy you, okay?”

“Oh, yeah,” Dukas said. “Oh, yeah.”

“I was trying to be helpful.” Menzes’s voice was cold, and a few seconds later he hung up.

Dukas looked across at Alan. “They’re throwing me a bone. Big deal.”

“Shreed stuff?”

“Worse—Suter.” Ray Suter had been Shreed’s assistant at the Agency, a one-hundred-percent bastard who had got arrested when Shreed had fled the country. “Suter hacked into Shreed’s computers; he’s supposed to have killed some guy who helped him; he’s deep into Shreed’s business, and the Agency’s got him someplace and won’t let me near him. I’ve gone to court to get anything and everything that Suter had his hands on when Shreed went down.” He made a face as if he smelled something bad. “So now they’re sending something over. Oh, yeah.”

At eleven, a Navy rating showed up at Dukas’s door with a dolly and a wooden crate the size of a refrigerator.

“Messenger service,” the rating said. “He could only come as far as the loading dock. Where you want it, sir?”

Dukas looked at the signature sheet and the labels and signed for it. Classified, secure, CIA origin. When the rating was gone, Dukas closed his door and growled, “Ten to one it’s a bag of shit.” Dukas was at his telephone then, trying to get somebody with a wrecking bar to come open the crate.

“Must hold a lot of stuff.”

Dukas made a face. “Probably a collection of Suter’s old jockstraps. You ask for everything, they generously extrude one item after a month’s delay. You can bet this is whatever the Agency people thought was least useful.”

What the crate proved to contain was a case file. “Case file” implied a folder, something small, but this was folder after folder, pounds and pounds of paper. There was a cover letter to say that it was one case, sent in response to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service request of—etcetera, etcetera. Dukas and Alan peered in.

“Jesus,” Alan said. “This is all one case?”

“Wait until you see what the Shreed case looks like when it’s done.” Dukas shrugged himself out of the Bugs Bunny rig and reached into the crate. “If it’s ever done. Old cases never die, and they don’t just fade away.” He pulled out a folder. “Well, let’s see what we got.”

Alan started to look in one of the folders, and Dukas said that they should go about it in an organized way, which was to find the inventory folder and the summary folder and get some idea of what the hell the thing was. The summary was at the bottom, of course, and it was only when they had covered the desk belonging to his absent assistant, Dick Triffler, as well as his coffee table and all the chairs, that they found it, and then Dukas sat at his desk and Alan leaned over him from behind, his hand with the missing fingers supporting him on the desktop—the first time since the shooting that he’d forgotten the hand enough to let somebody else see it up close.

“Radio transmissions,” Dukas said, reading. “‘Burst transmissions of unknown origin—northwestern North America—’ What the hell has this got to do with that shit Suter?” He looked up at Alan. “Can I turn the page?”

“I’ve been waiting.” Alan grinned.

“Speed-reader, great. Okay—‘detected by National Security Administration—’ I thought this was an Agency case, what the hell? Where’s the inventory? Where’s the document history?” Dukas began to burrow as Alan read on. When Dukas came back, he had a red folder and a green one, both stamped “Top Secret,” and he fell into his chair and opened the red folder. “Okay, yeah—NSA started it and got zip and booted it to the FBI, who made it a case and apparently sat on it for five years. Then they booted it to the Agency—some great case, it’s been through three other agencies and nobody’s found out diddly-squat. Oh, swell—here’s why they broke down and sent it to me—signed out to Ray Suter two days before Shreed took off for Pakistan. Jee-sus H. Christ, he didn’t have it long enough to read the fucking summary. What’d you learn while I was slaving in the folder piles?”

“That it’s a case that nobody’s solved in nine years. Your big chance, Mike.”

Dukas sighed. “I was hoping I’d get something I could, you know, at least use to tie Suter to the Shreed investigation.” He threw down the red folder and opened the green one. “Oh, ow,” he said. “Ow, ouch, oh, shit—radio interference reports up the wazoo! Ouch. ‘Frequency Analysis Tables 1.1 through 1.17.’ Oh, shit.” He sighed. His right index finger ran down the page and he muttered, “Radio, radio…interview, interview, interview—” He looked through the wall of crates at the stacks of folders and growled, “They’ve dicked me.”

And Alan said, “What’s that?”

He had reached over Dukas’s shoulder and turned up the next page so he could read ahead.

“What’s what?”

Alan turned the page all the way over. “‘Communications Plan, Jakarta, Indonesia.’”

Dukas looked at the entry. “Jakarta, Jesus. That’s a long way from northwestern North America.”

“Kind of jumps out at you, doesn’t it.”

Dukas wrote the ID number down on another Post-it and went around the wall of plastic crates and started going through the folders once again. He came back with a slender folder in a white cover with “Top Secret” and “Eyes Only” and “Eurydice” on the front. “You’re not supposed to see this,” he said.

“What’s Eurydice?”

“It’s a classification group, which you’re not supposed to know about, so don’t ask.” He sat down again and opened the folder.

“Holy shit,” Alan said. “It is a comm plan for Jakarta.” He looked over his shoulder. “What’s Jakarta got to do with the northwest?”

“More to the point, what’s it got to do with Ray Suter?” Dukas wrinkled his nose. “I smell an analyst at work.” He opened the folder on his desk, pressing the fold with the flat of his right hand and wincing because the effort hurt his chest. He pointed at the folder, which, opened, had papers attached to both inner sides by long, pointed prongs through holes in the paper. “Right side,” he said, “meat and potatoes. Left side, the analyst’s brilliant synthesis of materials.” The comm plan was on the right side. On the left, on top, was a sheet that said simply, “No action recommended.” Below it were several sheets with long numbers at the top. On the top sheet, however, a different hand had written in pencil, “Follow this up—S?”

“Suter’s writing?” Alan said.

“Beats me; I don’t even have a sample of that. ‘Follow this up—S, question mark.’ S for Suter? S for Shreed? S for shit?” He made a farting noise with his lips and tongue.

“Yeah, but Mike, at least Suter had it. So why did Suter have it? You say he was into Shreed’s business—what was he looking for? Maybe this is something you can run with, after all.” Alan began to turn the pages of the analyst’s report. “Doesn’t seem to be all there,” he said.

“It wouldn’t be. The number’s a high one, meaning that this is part of something else. ‘Observation of courier contact site.’ See, this is what caught the analyst’s eye—actually, probably an abstract someplace. Yeah—here on the second page, see—‘The courier is believed to have visited the US, with special relevance for naval facilities in California and the Pacific northwest.’ Aha, says the analyst, that might have a connection—notice the ‘might’; the woman—it’s usually a woman—is reaching; she’s desperate. She gets a copy of the relevant stuff and smacks it into a folder and here it is.”

“Who wrote the report?”

“Who knows? Some agent doing his job; he’s busted a comm plan, written it up, turned it over to his case officer, and here it is.” He tapped the comm plan’s several pages of narrative.

Alan reached over and turned the pages on the left side, reading quickly, then did the same on the right. The paper was slightly brittle, the comm plan itself old enough to have been done on an electric typewriter rather than a computer printer. He lifted the top page on the left again and said, “1993.”

“A little long in the tooth,” Dukas said.

“But they never checked it out.”

Dukas stretched. “So?”

Alan cocked his head. “Well, somebody, maybe Suter, thought it was worth following up.” His old grin, not seen for a month, partly returned. “Doing something is better than doing nothing—right?”

Dukas shook his head. “You’re having an idea. I don’t like that.”

“I just thought somebody could go to Jakarta, check it out—follow it up, like it says here—” He looked like a kid asking for the day off from school.

Jakarta.

Jerry Piat moved his practiced hand from the bargirl’s neck, over her breasts, down her flat and naked stomach, his hand always light and playful, never heavy or commanding. He hooked a leg under both of hers and rolled them both over so that she was above him, her breasts heavy against him, her long hair a black cloud that smothered him in incense. At least, it smelled like incense.

He watched her with the detached part of his brain, the part that wouldn’t ever turn off, not when he was fucking, not when he was getting shot at, and that part registered that she was fourteen years old and had a “Hello Kitty” bag for her makeup. She liked him.

The phone rang. His hand found it, lifted it from the receiver and dropped it back to the cradle. She laughed, happy that she was more important than a Bule (Westerner’s) business call, but Jerry was just following the signal procedure—his agent, Bobby Li, would give him one ring, and then he would go out to a pay phone to talk. It wasn’t exactly Moscow rules, but it was tradecraft, and Jerry was alive and sane where a lot of his peers were either dead or content to run Chinese double agents and lie about their access. Jerry rolled them both over again, still agile at fifty, and kissed her, hard, on the lips, which clearly surprised her.

Her body was still very much on his mind when he cursed the lift and started down the seven flights of cockroach-infested stairs to the hotel’s lobby. The lobby was clean and neat, but the stairwell’s strong suggestion of urine stayed in his nostrils until the heavy petroleum scent of unleaded car exhaust drove it out as he stepped into the street, still pulling a light jacket over his old silk shirt. The jacket had only one purpose, to hide the bulk of the gun that sat in his shoulder rig. In Jakarta, the only men in jackets were wearing guns, or so Jerry had come to believe during Suharto’s regime. The place looked better now, cleaner, richer, even after the collapse in the nineties.

He stopped on the street, lit a cigarette from a nifty gas lighter with a serious torchlight that he had picked up at the airport. You could solder with the damn thing, and that could have its uses. Or you could burn someone’s eyes out.

Two cab rides and three bars later, he was getting ready to make his phone call, on his way to start the process by which he would kill the men who had killed George Shreed.

One more stop, he told himself. For old time’s sake.

And, of course, for caution’s sake, because there always just might be that watcher who needed to be convinced that he was bar-crawling and not running an op.

Suburban Virginia.

Alan greeted his wife at the door with a kiss and a suddenly urgent embrace. She leaned back in his arms and looked at his eyes and saw something that made her grab him and squeeze him hard. They stood there, holding each other, rocking, and she said, “Something good happened, right?”

He laughed, a sound she hadn’t heard in a while, and he said, “I went to Mike’s office to do some work. He got a new case—it’s interesting, there’s something in it for me, maybe.”

She was still in her flight suit. She had been out at Pax River, putting in her hours in the T-84 as she transited from choppers to fixed-wing. Holding her, seeing the sudden brightness in her eyes, he understood her misery of the past two weeks, never knowing what she would come home to. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

“No, no—”

“Yes, yes.” The dog pushed between them then and they both laughed and he pulled her into the house. “I had to leave Dukas early to get Mikey at school; no problem, but Dukas has this case, this crate of stuff! A case, something they dumped on him from the Agency because they can’t hack it but I think we can; there’s this comm plan in it; it doesn’t make sense, but—I’m babbling, right?”

She laughed. “Right.” She kissed him. “Keep babbling; it’s nice.”

“I’m getting dinner.”

“I smell it. Risotto with white beans, garlic bread, frozen peas, and a salad, right?”

“I invited Mike for dinner.”

That took a beat for her to absorb, sobering her, and she smiled too brightly and said, “Great!”

“To talk about the case,” he said.

“Great!” She headed for the stairs. “I’ll just change into something glamorous.”

Half an hour later, Dukas was there with an attaché and a cell phone, which he dumped on the battered coffee table. He kissed Rose. “Hey, Gorgeous, you’re breathtaking.”

“Did you bring the comm plan?” Alan shouted from the kitchen.

“Like you asked, yes, yes, yes! I always do what I’m told.” He glanced toward the kitchen and lowered his voice still further. “This okay with you, babe?”

“If it makes him this cheerful, God, yes!”

“He’s a little manic,” Dukas murmured.

“I’ll take manic,” she said. “He’s so down when he’s not in things.”

Dukas looked toward the kitchen again. “I used to think it was just, you know, type A behavior. But now I realize he always has to be proving something. To himself.” He lowered himself into an upholstered chair. “You know the difference between you two? You’ve got a plan, an ambition—you’re going to be an astronaut. You’ve built a career around it. He doesn’t have a plan. He just has to—go.” Dukas looked up at her. “What’s the matter with him?”

Alan shouted from the kitchen, “You talking about me out there?” He appeared in the doorway, grinning. “Speak up, or I’ll think you’re analyzing me.” They stared at him a little guiltily, and the dog got up and sat there looking at him, too, and they all began to laugh.

Jakarta.

“Hey, Meester?” the voice said. Jerry whirled; that hand was awfully close to his pistol.

“Back off, bud.” Jerry glared at the boy, but the boy, half Jerry’s size and weight, held his ground.

“You memba?” He pointed up at a large sign in Dutch and English, Dutch still first, because this place went way back. ANHANGER ENKEL, MEMBERS ONLY.

“I was a member here when your mom still worked here, bud.” Jerry leaned forward. “Asrama pekerja?”

Malay was clearly not his mother tongue, but the boy smiled and nodded.

“Go get the missus, then, bud.” Jerry waved his hand, palm down, the fingers snapping open, like the locals—dismissed, the gesture meant. Then he turned and walked to the huge teak bar, forty-five feet long and carved from a single tree. He waved to the bartender, a slight youth in a clean white shirt. There weren’t many customers, at least in the bar; the rooms upstairs could be full to bursting and you’d never know. George Shreed had waited for him in the spy’s seat, there next to the alcove, a private booth invisible from the door.

“Meester?” It was the boy from the alcove.

“Hey, bud, we’re done, you and me.”

“You memba?” The boy was insistent, and it reminded Jerry of all the time and money he had spent here. He deserved better.

“Go get the missus. You hear me, sport? The missus? Before I bop you one, okay?” He wondered if they had gone to membership cards. Had it really been so long since he was here? Maybe they had fucking plastic IDs with your photo. He felt someone enter silently behind him, back by the alcove, and he turned to see Hilda, the handsomest of the western blondes of his own day, coming through the door in sensible business attire—not what she’d worn back then, but still attractive.

“Jerry, darling.”

“Hilda. Aren’t you still too young to be trusted with the keys?”

She laughed; she had natural lines at her eyes and mouth that meant she’d disdained surgery, but she looked good. Really good. “This man is a member. An old member who gets anything he wants, mengerti?”

“Yaas, majikan.”

“Drink with me?”

“I can’t—I’m working.”

He looked at her and winked. “You were too good for that sort of thing when we were twenty years younger. The missus never made you oblige the customers.”

“But I’m the missus, now, and I have books to do. Come back—come back tomorrow and I’ll drink with you.”

“I might have to do that, Hilda.” He smiled, gulped the rest of his gin and tonic, disappointed at one level, happy to be on with the job at another.

Jerry gave her something like a salute. She had poise, like a runway model; maybe she had been a runway model before she crashed in Jakarta. He didn’t really know her, but he liked that she remembered him. Whores and spies; the oldest profession and the next oldest, or so the joke ran. He stopped in the alcove, still smiling because she had remembered him.

Aboard USS Thomas Jefferson.

Rafe Rafehausen pulled a stack of paper toward him, read again the paper on top, and then said, “Get me Admiral Pilchard at LantFleet. What the hell time is it there—? Yeah, you might catch him—try, try.” He took the next paper off the stack and started to read, rubbing his eyes and wondering if they’d last through the reams of reading on this cruise, thinking, Jesus, next I’ll need glasses, acutely aware again that his squadron years were over. He tried to concentrate on VF-105’s morale self-study and was relieved when a phone was shoved toward him and the lieutenant-commander said, “Admiral Pilchard.”

Rafehausen threw himself back in the chair. “Sir! Captain Rafehausen, CAG on the—Yes, sir.” He grinned. “Nice of you to remember. Unh, kind of a personal matter, sir. If I say the name ‘Al Craik,’ will you—? Yes, sir, that’s the one.” He nodded his head as he listened. Pilchard was Craik’s self-appointed “sea daddy,” a kind of naval mentor and enabler. He swung, Rafe knew, between thinking that Craik was God’s little crackerjack prize and that he was a dangerously loose cannon, but he’d concern himself with Craik’s welfare if it was threatened. Right now, he was in the loose-cannon phase, and Rafehausen winced at the admiral’s sour tone. When the admiral had finished reviewing Craik’s recent performance, Rafehausen said, “He’s going nuts onshore and he needs something. I can’t take him back here yet—med officers won’t allow it. If there’s something he could do—”

He looked up at the lieutenant-commander, winked as the admiral did some more talking about times in the past he’d gone out on a limb for Craik, and how sick he was of having Craik blue-sky things and act as if rules didn’t exist. When the admiral stopped talking, Rafehausen said, “Absolutely, sir!” He grinned again. “What I was thinking, I just received some correspondence about this experimental MARI det that was set up—that’s the det that Craik was commanding, sir, when—good, yes, sir, you remember all that. Well, it’s gone so well that there’s a request about setting up a second MARI det on the west coast; I was wondering if maybe that could be moved up some, then Craik could go out there now instead of at the end of this cruise—Yes, sir, to advise and—No, sir, not as det CO, and not to fly because—Yes, sir. No, sir. Purely advisory, yes, sir, of course they’d pull personnel from the west coast squadrons, and Craik would—Yeah, Miramar, I’m sure that Miramar—Uh—”

Rafehausen signaled to the lieutenant-commander to close the door. Swiveling around, he bent forward as if he had to talk to the floor. “It’s a matter of helping a good man, sir. I know Craik—I think we could lose him if he doesn’t get something to do. Between you and me, Admiral, I think he got hit harder than we thought on that recent mission. I don’t normally put much stock in ‘trauma’ and all that psychobabble, but he’s been sending me p-comms that, well, I think maybe he’s lost some faith in himself.” Again, he listened, slowly leaning back, and when there was silence on the other end, he said, “Yes, sir. That’d be great. That’d really be great. And absolutely, yes, I’ll put the fear of God in him to do it by the book. And if they can see their way to setting up a west coast det with him on board, it would—Of course, of course, these things take time—Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”

A minute later, he had hung up and turned back to the pile of paper, Al Craik now only one of many worries nibbling at the edges of his consciousness.

Jakarta.

He gave terse orders to the third cab of the night, cutting across the city, going twice down gangs rinsed clean by the heavy rain, until he was tired of the game. Clean as clean could be. Then he led them back south away from the sea by the toll road, off the Semaggi Interchange and into the gleaming modernity at the heart of Westernized Jakarta. It wasn’t his favorite part of the city; he liked the Japanese in Japan but hated them when they were abroad. It never occurred to him that they acted just like him.

“Wat ingang?” asked the driver in Dutch. Jerry was white and coming from Emmy-Lu’s, hence Dutch, as far as the driver could tell.

“Hotel Mulia Senayan, danke. Simpruk.” The Mulia was the newest, flashiest hotel in Jakarta, with over a thousand rooms and the largest ballroom in Asia. It was the multiple entrances and table phones that drew Jerry—a postman’s paradise. Simpruk was a broad and well-traveled avenue full of business traffic; he’d leave by the main entrance and go to the cabstand, and while he sat and talked he’d be another business traveler. A little seedy, but hardly the only Westerner in the lobby, and that’s what mattered to Jerry. And nice public lines—murder to monitor, and businessmen don’t like monitored lines.

Jerry paid the cab before they stopped, was out and up the steps before the cab had pulled away. No time to linger; this was the operational act itself, the very heart of the game. It didn’t matter if no one was watching; Jerry played for an invisible audience of fellow professionals he hoped weren’t ever there, breezing into the enormous lobby, walking past the desks to the central bar, where leather couches held the open space against a jungle of local potted plants. At each end of every couch sat a house phone, and Jerry knew how to use one to get an outside line in Jakarta. He ordered a gin and tonic from a waiter, sat, and looked at his watch.