Gordon Kent - Hostile Contact

Booze cost cash and was harder to get in the back of the plane. It was claustrophobic, with kids screaming and their mothers trying to ignore them, couples chatting or fighting. Too much. Not Jerry’s scene.

The flight kept him awake and gave him too much time to think. He kept thinking of the messages and the plan he was on his way to implement. Too Byzantine, he felt. Too complex. The plan of an analyst, not an operator. He didn’t like Ray Suter, the desk-driver who had thought it up, didn’t trust him, thought him a boob when it came to the street. He didn’t like Marvin Helmer, Suter’s henchman, who was some big hotshot in Seattle now but whom Jerry remembered as just one more Ops Directorate cowboy. Jerry wanted revenge against the traitors who had brought George Shreed down as much as anybody, but he didn’t like the Suter-Helmer plan—or the planner. Photographs, blackmail, and a smear campaign. Desk-driver shit. Like giving Castro an exploding cigar. Jesus. He shook his head, raised the plastic cup of wine to his lips and hated the taste.

Fuck that. In Jakarta, he would make up his own plan. Anything could happen in Jakarta. He began to shut out the plane as he worked it through. He had twelve hours left in his flight. By the time he landed, he’d be ready to act.

“Dukas and Craik,” he murmured to himself, and tasted the wine again and concentrated on a simpler plan.

Kill them.

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.