Gordon Kent - Top Hook

Maggiulli cleared his throat and said, in the tone of a man trying to coax a bull into a chute, “Uh, Craik has a point, sir—if this is really a sensitive matter—”

“I know the goddam code, John!” He leaned still farther back. “What the hell do you have to do with ‘an existing CI investigation’? Your dad died years ago.”

Alan winced. Everybody in the Navy knew about his father’s death; many people held it against him, credited his promotions to it—son of a hero, the man who had caught his father’s killer. He would rather not have raised the subject at all. “It was that case, anyway.”

Kessler was unsympathetic. “All right. You get to NCIS pronto, and I want to talk to your contact when you’re done. Get it to me by 0800.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Alan headed straight down to CVIC and tried to call Mike Dukas, an NCIS special agent who was still in charge of the old case and who was a close friend, at his office in Bosnia, dialing the eighteen digits with great care. First, the line was busy; then, he got a native German speaker who had difficulty understanding him. Could he call back after eight? Alan slammed the telephone down, thinking that eight a.m. in Sarajevo was the time he was supposed to report on his progress to the admiral.

Balked of contact with Dukas, Alan filled out a foreign-national contact report with the NCIS officer on the boat and put himself in his rack, where he fumed and stewed and waited for the dawn.

Rose had sat up with her father, drinking too much wine and letting him try to soothe her. Then she lay awake for an hour, then another hour, hearing dogs, the bells of clocks, the freights rolling along the old New York Central tracks. A car went by, its boombox thumping hip-hop bass. Somebody laughed and shouted. Her talk with the detailer went around and around in her head, and she tracked it, around and around, looking for the explanation, the solution, a rat running around and around, looking for a way out—

Rose woke to see by the pale orange digitals of the bedside clock that it was a little after two. Her head really ached now, and the wine rose as a sour nausea in her throat. She would feel really lousy tomorrow. Today.

She went to the old bathroom along the hall, the only one in the house, drank two glasses of water, looked at her bloated face in the mirrored door of the medicine chest. Some looker you are! she thought. Well, her face matched her thoughts, anyway. She drank another glass of water and knew she had to do something, anything—go for a walk, go for a drive. Scream. Instead, she went and checked her children and then went downstairs, the dog padding beside her, and by the time she reached the bottom tread, she knew what she was going to do.

She was going to scream for help.

She took the dog out into the cool night and, again leaning against the rear of her car, got on her cellphone. She called a duty number of a war crimes unit in Sarajevo, where Mike Dukas, who loved her and was her husband’s friend and was an NCIS agent on loan to the International War Crimes Tribunal, was officer-in-charge. What she got was a gravel-voiced Frenchman named Pigoreau who wanted to flirt with her and who finally told her that Mike was in a grande luxe hotel in Holland, The Hague, “being kicked up the stairs.” He gave her a phone number.

His flirtatiousness made her numb. Some other time —She punched the numbers into the phone and pulled her robe tighter around her. The cool air felt good on the hangover, but parts of her were a little too cool.

Pigoreau had been right. The hotel was very grande luxe . It was so grand she thought she was never going to get past reception, but finally a somewhat too elegant female put her through, and she heard one ring and then Mike Dukas’s growl, and, before she could think, she cried, “Oh, Mike, thank God!”

“Hey! Rose? Rose?”

“Oh, Mike, goddamit, I’m so happy to talk to you! Mike—I need help.”

“What the hell. Help?”

So she told him. Two sentences, bam, bam.

“What, you got bounced from the program and sent to some nowheresville, and the orders came out of CNO?”

“You got it.”

“Where’s Al?”

“Somewhere between Aviano and the boat.” She told him about the change to Alan’s orders. “First him, now me.”

“Which I don’t think is a funny coincidence, babe. You with me? You know the Navy—they get on one of you, you both go down. You need somebody to find out what the hell’s going on. I don’t think it’s us—NCIS, I mean. Could be Navy intel, but they don’t work like that; they’d come to you and do stuff—investigation, interviews, maybe polygraph.”

“But why?”

“Because either you or Al is a security problem, is why. That’s all it can be.”

“My dad thinks I have an enemy.”

“Your dad may not be so far wrong. But maybe Al has an enemy and you’re getting the backlash. But this has a kind of stink. Like, it sounds very quick and very from the top down, not by the book. And not the Nav, you know? But I’ll check. Listen, give me an hour or two, shit, what time is it there—? I’ll check to see if the Navy’s involved, other than issuing the orders. But what you gotta have is information. What you do, call Abe Peretz and tell him to find out what’s up.”

“It’s two a.m.”

“What are friends for? He’s FBI, he’ll have an answer by the time you’re eating breakfast. Then call me back and we’ll talk about what happens next. Okay?”

“I hate to wake people up.”

“Oh, do you? Your life is shit, your career is ruined, and you hate to wake people up. Come on, babe, get with the program. This is war.”

“You’re the best, Mike.”

“No, I’m a mediocre Navy cop, but I’m crazy about you, so you bring out the best in me. Now go call Abe and let me get some breakfast.”

“You sound grumpy.”

“Wait until you hear Abe.”

Abe Peretz was a former naval officer who had joined the FBI. Like Dukas, he was an old friend, a kind of mentor to her husband and a counselor to her. He was only a little pissed at being waked up; once he understood the problem, he gave her some hard advice: come to Washington, where the action is.

Half an hour later, she was on the road.

His first official act on the carrier was supposed to have been a brief to the admiral on the purpose of his detachment. The briefing was out the window, however, because of the Trieste mess, and when he showed up on the flag deck at 0800, he was met, not by Admiral Kessler, but by Maggiulli and the flag captain.

“Have you reached your NCIS guy yet?” Maggiulli said. He looked as wasted by lack of sleep as Alan, but he was certainly more nervous.

“I filed a contact report at the NCIS shack on the boat. I keep missing my guy when I call—I got the runaround in Bosnia, where he’s detached to a war crimes unit, and I just found out ten minutes ago that he’s in The Hague. I’ve got a call in to him there.” He turned to the flag captain. “Am I briefing on the MARI project this morning, sir?”

“The admiral would prefer that you straighten this other matter out first. Commander, it still appears that you’re withholding evidence from the Italian police. You haven’t offered us any reasonable explanation. People were killed , Commander.”

“This is a change from two hours ago.”

“It is not a change!” Maggiulli looked at the flag captain, thus proving that this was a change.

“John, I will continue to make contact with the special agent in charge of the investigation my first priority. He’s at a hotel in The Hague, and I expect to talk to him as soon as I leave this meeting.”