Gordon Kent - Hostile Contact

The cabdriver didn’t want him, but Alan shoved cash into his hands and made noises until the cab was moving. He had good instincts, but, because he lacked training and was preoccupied with his injuries, he didn’t see a car follow him out of the lot.

Bobby Li held out all the rest of his American bills as he and Ho collided. Ho grabbed the money and tossed the camera. He was fast for a big man, gone while Bobby was retrieving the camera. Men were pouring out of the Orchid House like ants; a woman was screaming somewhere near the food concession. Small, hollow-cheeked Indonesian men were turned, eyes wide, toward the Orchid House.

He had to get rid of the gun. He had to get out of Jakarta. He had to change his life.

But he hadn’t betrayed Andy or George Shreed with the truth.

Jerry held his ground until the building was clear. He should have left as soon as he saw the Chinese. He should have shown Bobby Li exactly where to stand. He should have had a better escape route. As it was, he was one step ahead of the Jakarta police. His mind reground the facts on and on, and he blamed himself, and he needed a drink. They all went together.

Washington.

Dukas got the call on his cell phone from the NCIS duty officer when he had been asleep at his desk and was dreaming of a house and a dog and was happy, perhaps because he didn’t own a house or a dog and these two seemed particularly congenial.

“You have a secure call.”

“Oh, shit.”

Oh, shit. He knew only one person who might want to call him at the office at eleven at night, and there wasn’t supposed to be any reason for him to call.

“What’s the number?” he said to the duty officer.

“US embassy. Naval attaché.”

Oh, double-shit.

“Dukas, NCIS, I have a message to call you.” There was the usual confusion, nobody at the other end ever having heard of him, and then they found the person who had asked him to call, a lieutenant-commander who asked him to wait, and then Alan came on the line.

“Hey, Mike. You secure?”

“Can’t you tell by the sound? You sound as if you got your head in a fifty-five-gallon drum. What’s up?”

“Somebody started shooting.”

Dukas felt his heart squeeze. “Oh, Christ, Al—”

“I left the mark, no sweat, and then I went to the meeting we said was going to be a piece of cake, and all hell broke loose.” He told it quickly to Dukas, what he knew of it from his point of view. “I’m sorry if I screwed it up, Mike.”

“But you’re okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, except for my self-esteem.”

“Where’s Triffler?”

“Good question.”

Dukas felt his blood pounding in his ears. He squeezed his eyeballs with his fingers and felt horrendous guilt. That Craik was okay made him no less guilty: he’d sent a good man into a bad place. “God, I’m sorry,” he said.

“I volunteered.”

“Yeah, but—you tell the local cops?” Dukas said.

“I came to the embassy; I didn’t know what the hell was going on. They’ve dealt with the locals.”

“Come home.”

“I hear the ambassador’s really ripped—”

“Come home!” Dukas was thinking fast, thinking about his mistake, about something that had seemed small and easy and was actually big and dangerous. “Come home now. ” He saw that his hands were trembling. “Put the lieutenant-commander back on.”

Dukas asked the Jakarta attaché to put Alan on the first flight out to anywhere and to provide protection until they were in the air. “This a matter of national security?” the man said. He wasn’t unwilling, only a little jaded. Dukas gave him his full name and number and the case number he’d given the Sleeping Dog file, and he told him that, yes, it was a matter of national security.

After he’d hung up, he sat staring at the wall of the duty office for fifteen minutes, and then he went along dimly lit corridors to his own office and spent the rest of the night there. First, he tried to figure out how a meeting taken from a long-dead comm plan could go bad, really bad , because he had been sure that nobody would show, sure that the mark itself would go unnoticed. The answer was now easy: because the comm plan had been planted on him and he’d been suckered by it, and the intention had always been that it would go bad.

But who had planted it on him?

The easy answer was Shreed’s control, who must have had a copy—but how did a Chinese intel officer insert a comm plan into a dead CIA file, and then get it sent to Mike Dukas?

It didn’t make sense. Especially since Shreed’s control was probably dead himself, because the last Dukas had seen of him, he was lying face-down in a village in Pakistan with a hole in his back.

Then Dukas spent the rest of the night going through Sleeping Dog, which was supposed to be moribund but suddenly wasn’t.

Dar es Salaam.

Colonel Lao had been in his office before the African dawn had broken, because the first meeting time in Jakarta had been close and he wanted to be there for a report. The report would be negative, he had thought: surely whoever had left the mark in Jakarta would pass up the first meeting time, perhaps appear for the second or third. Yet his secure phone had sounded only fifteen minutes after the scheduled time, and his face had registered the horror he had felt as he had heard the report of the whole bloody, blown operation.

“Who shot first?” he said, hardly able to keep his rage out of his voice. On the other end was the Chief of Security at the Chinese embassy in Jakarta, a man who at that moment was facing the loss of his career and knew it. His answer was evasive; Lao excoriated him.

“How can you be sure there was an actual meeting?” Lao demanded. He was certain that there could be only two people who knew the American Go plan other than Lao himself—Chen and Shreed. When the officer insisted that a Westerner had appeared at the appointed time and place, Lao thought he saw it more clearly: Shreed had sent a substitute, meaning that he was alive and thought that Chen was, as well. Had Chen been there? Chen’s surrogate?

“Did you have the wits to identify anybody?” Lao growled. So much confusion, the officer whined, and there was shooting—unknown entities, Indonesians working perhaps for the Westerner or the Chinese, undoubtedly counter-surveillance. The embassy hadn’t had enough men, and the man sent out from Beijing, Qiu, was an idiot who had antagonized the in-country team and then got himself shot dead. Time had been too short, and—his voice stronger as he began to shift the blame—why hadn’t Lao informed them earlier? And why hadn’t he expected violence? And after the whining, the face-saving, and the excuses, a nugget of useful fact: one of the in-country team had followed one of the Americans to a hotel. He didn’t have a name yet.

Lao sat up and asserted himself. “Did you get photographs? Did you get at least that much?” They had, he learned. “Send them to me at once—have them scanned at the embassy and encrypted. I want them on my desk in twenty minutes. And the ID on the man your one competent agent followed.”

The officer protested that the films hadn’t been developed; these things took time—and hung up.

It was another hour before Loyalty Man reported that his agent had been unable to identify the man at the meeting. He had been only some American.

Jakarta.

The balls-up at the Orchid House made Jerry Piat angry—enraged drunk was only a couple of swallows away. Well, there you were, in the pleasant fog of booze one second, full-bore rage the next. He was jolting through a bad part of Jakarta in a taxi, a pint of Scotch in his hand and his head full of murderous doubts. Something apparently easy had gone bad— Jesus, shooting ! It wasn’t supposed to be a hostile meet, and somebody had started shooting ! Of course, he had planned to do some shooting of his own, but that was different. He was a renegade, what the hell. And Bobby Li had gone missing; he hadn’t shown at their rendezvous spot and he didn’t respond to phone signals.