Gordon Kent - Hostile Contact

It had been so good for the first day with Andy. Now it was all awful. He went back to the bedroom and began to change his clothes.

“Is it bad?” his wife said.

“Don’t take the kids to school today. Take them to the place in Tangerang.” He had a shack out there under a different name. Sometimes he went there to be alone. He had a garden out there, like his father. “Park the car in the trees, where it can’t be seen from the road.”

“How bad is it?” she said.

He finished dressing. Out of deference to her, he hadn’t brought the gun back into the bedroom. “It will be all right,” he said. He kissed her and went into the living room and put the gun inside his waistband just by his right kidney, and he picked up his camera and went out. It was daylight.

USS Thomas Jefferson.

Cyclic air ops went on, creating thunder that went pretty much unnoticed in the corridors of the O3 level. In the ready rooms, crews preparing to fly were gathered around the TAMPS; others stood or sprawled to watch ongoing landings on the Plat camera. For the air group commander, a walk past the ready rooms was a mixture of envy, nostalgia, and irritation, the last because every squadron had its own problems, its own flaws, which he was supposed to solve and correct. To Rafehausen, who wasn’t flying that day and who could hardly find time to fly enough to stay qualified, the ready rooms were also a nagging reminder of what he had given up.

“Approval came through for Craik’s orders to Miramar,” a voice said at Rafehausen’s shoulder.

“Say again?” Both men flattened themselves against the bulkhead as a cluster of aviators hurried past. “Sorry, Deak, I was wool-gathering.”

“Not important. I just saw a message that Al Craik’s orders to Miramar to advise a second MARI det will be cut in a couple days.”

It took an instant for Rafehausen to switch focus. Then: “Oh, sure. Right, I wanted to find something for Craik. That’s great!” He detached himself from the bulkhead and started toward his office. “What’s being done about the parking problem behind cat three? They were supposed to have the mess there cleaned up by 0600 and now I learn that—”

Overhead, the engines screamed and the colored jerseys moved and spun, and aircraft blasted into the sky, and Alan Craik was forgotten.

Jakarta.

At five-thirty Alan was up, adrenaline and delayed jetlag combining to get him out of bed and into the shower. He had been awake for a long time, waiting for the alarm, and he was charged with energy, like a kid waiting for his parents to get up on Christmas morning. He shaved and had a long shower, humming something he had heard the day before, and then dressed carefully in slacks, a fancy T-shirt and the linen jacket Rose had packed for him. He felt that he looked like Don Johnson in Miami Vice , but so did everyone else in Jakarta. The air outside was already hot and heavy with moisture by the time he emerged to catch a taxi, almost an hour early. He told himself that he would spend the extra time making his route really complex. The truth was, he had to get out of the room.

Make some stops before you get to the park, Triffler had ordered without really explaining why. Alan knew it had something to do with helping his minders make sure that he was clear of surveillance, but Alan couldn’t for the life of him see how he could have acquired surveillance in Jakarta when traveling on his own passport. Nonetheless, he obeyed. Coffee and a decent roll were high on his morning agenda, so he asked the cabdriver where he could get the best cup of coffee in Java. The man smiled wickedly, as if he had just been asked where to find something far more sinister, and he left the curb with a jolt reminiscent of a cat shot.

Twenty minutes later, his insides comforted by a chocolate croissant and a cup of excellent coffee, Alan left the café and walked through the steamy morning. He window-shopped along a closed arcade and made left turns until he found an open news store, the magazines and newspapers international and mostly concerned with the upcoming presidential election in the United States. The subject didn’t interest him much, but he had a tiny cup of espresso and bought a local Englishlanguage paper, skimmed it to eat the rest of his surplus time, and departed with a much better understanding of the economy of oil in Indonesia.

His second cab of the morning was duller; the driver was quite young and didn’t seem to want to talk. He made good time, though, and Alan arrived at the gates of the park that contained the Orchid House with fifteen minutes in hand and a charge from all his energy and caffeine on top. He was beginning to feel nervous, the nerves of inexperience, concern about making mistakes through ignorance—feelings he hadn’t had in a long time. Then he told himself, for the twentieth time, that nothing was going to happen, and he sagged and felt the fatigue under his energy.

It was damp and hot. He started to walk.

Washington.

Dukas had got as far as suggesting to Sally, while Rose was out of the room, that they maybe check out his apartment, and then the shit had hit the fan. He had hardly tried his dessert when she had seen something in his open attaché and gone through the roof. “What the hell is this?” she cried.

“Hey, what—?”

“What the hell are you trying to pull?” she said. She didn’t seem vulnerable any longer.

Dukas misunderstood. He thought it was something about his clumsy approach to sex. “Hey, I was only—”

She tried to speak, moved her lips to form words that didn’t come, and then slapped the attaché and shouted, “This is Chinese Checkers!” She began to scrabble in the old papers, knocking them out of their neat alignment, dropping some on the floor and not caring.

“What the hell?” he said.

“You bullshitter, what have you done to—” She shook the folder. “This is the Jakarta part of Chinese Checkers !”

Dukas tried to focus. He had an idea what the code name Chinese Checkers meant. Chinese Checkers had been a CIA operational project—a comm plan that George Shreed had covertly used to meet with his Chinese control. When Dukas and Alan Craik had gone into Pakistan after Shreed, they had known he was following one of the Chinese Checkers comm plans to a village near the Kashmir border. That’s how they caught him—because Sally Baranowski had illicitly given Dukas a copy. But he had seen only the Pakistan section, and then only long enough to know where Shreed was going.

But Jakarta ?

“Chinese Checkers is a defunct Ops comm plan,” Sally Baranowski snarled now. “And now here it is! I risked my fucking career to give you this stuff, and you’re walking around with it in your attaché!”

Dukas didn’t say that everybody walked around with classified material in his attaché. He was too stunned by what she was saying, stunned by the implications. A warning bell was sounding in his head. “This is Chinese Checkers ?” he said.

“What did I just say?”

“Maybe it’s just like Chinese Checkers. Sally, it can’t possibly be—”

She simply looked at him.

“This comm plan can’t—I don’t see how it can be part of Chinese Checkers.” He grabbed her upper arm, then let it go and leaned back so she wouldn’t think he was bullying her. “I just sent Al Craik to Jakarta to roadtest it. He’s there right now.”

Sally stared.

“All I’d paid attention to in Chinese Checkers was the Pakistan part. I didn’t even read the rest. If this is really—”

Her look told him everything. She said, “I helped Shreed edit Chinese Checkers. I used to pull it up to see why it never got activated. There were three comm plans, Mike—Pakistan, Nairobi, Jakarta.” She picked the pages up again. “And why the hell is it typed this way? It’s beat-up, like you’ve had it forever. I didn’t give it to you like this—I gave you a goddam floppy! Where the hell did you get this?”