Gordon Kent - Top Hook

Menzes gave away nothing. Not a flicker. Dukas tried again. “Give me the outline. Give it to me in one sentence.”

“What do we get in return?”

Dukas shook his head. “It’s you guys did the wrong here. Am I right?”

Not a flicker.

“Give it to me in one sentence and get Siciliano’s orders changed back, and I’ll pull the lawyer lady off you.”

“How?”

“Through the client. Never mind how. Come on, Menzes—one fucking sentence, you can’t compromise security in one sentence!”

Menzes chewed one side of his lower lip and leaned back against the wall, arms crossed. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and a pastel tie, and his arms looked wiry and muscular and hairy. “We got an intercept. Siciliano was implicated. That’s two sentences.”

“Implicated in what?”

“That wasn’t the deal.”

“I’d like something to work on. You understand how the Navy works, how easy it is to destroy a career? This is one very, very dedicated officer, a real piledriver; she’s had two kids by planning them for her shore tours, flying a chopper on her sea tours—Let me tell you something. Africa. 1994. War in southern Sudan—you got the picture? She flies a chopper into a hot zone, puts down and lifts me and another guy out. Menzes, whatever else is involved, I owe this woman!”

The two men looked each other in the eye. Dukas knew how hard this was for the other man, who had to evaluate a stranger, measure his own trust, decide how much he had been used himself by the system and how much he owed to his own idea of right behavior and of decency.

“Something called Peacemaker,” Menzes said at last. “That’s my final word, and if you quote me, I’ll deny it.” He looked at Dukas’s face again. “That means something to you,” he said.

“It sure does.” Rose had worked on Project Peacemaker two years before. “Okay, we got a deal. Haven’t we—haven’t we got a deal? You’re gonna withdraw whatever you did and get the orders rescinded, send her back to astronaut training?”

“She’s on our books as a security risk. This is a very grave situation, Dukas.”

“I know that. But you know what the proper procedure is—you tell us and you tell Navy intel, and we do an evaluation and an investigation. It’s our call if we bring in the Bureau. Right?”

“Right, but if she’s a spy, now she knows we’re on to her and she’ll—”

“What the fuck, she didn’t know the moment she got the change of orders? What are you talking? It’s a goddam given of my profession, you’re investigating somebody, you don’t make waves until you’re ready to!”

Menzes shrugged. “That wasn’t my call.”

“Have we got a deal?”

“Only the change of orders, and what I told you. That’s it. We don’t budge on access or on anything else.”

“Deal.” They shook hands. Menzes had a real grip.

A woman’s heels sounded on the marble floor like gunshots, and both heads turned to watch her march diagonally across. She was pale, scowling, swinging an attaché case like a weapon she was just waiting to use.

“That’s Pasternak,” Menzes said.

“What do we do about her?”

“The twelve-hour rule.”

“Meaning?”

“We let her scream for an hour, then we say we’ll consider it, and twelve hours later I agree to what you and I have already agreed to. Only we don’t tell her that.” He made a face. “The hard part will be listening to her.”

They crossed the lobby and went into the conference room, which looked like a party that wasn’t working out: all the Agency people were down at one end, and Emma Pasternak was sitting alone at a long table. Dukas went right to her, stuck out his hand, and said, “I’m Mike Dukas.”

She ignored the hand and started shouting. She went on shouting for most of an hour—Menzes’s timing was pretty good—and she used every trash-mouth word in the book to batter Menzes, CIA Security, lack of access, injustice, bureaucratic stupidity, and perhaps even (Dukas had stopped listening) rabies. Then Menzes begged her to give them twelve hours.

And, eventually, Emma Pasternak accepted.

Because she knew this is the way it would be! Dukas thought. Holy shit, she knows about the twelve-hour rule, too!

“That’s—six-thirty tomorrow morning,” she was snarling. “You can leave a message on my voice mail. Full access, and my client gets her orders changed back to Houston. Yes?”

Menzes lifted his shoulders. “I’ll meet with my people and get back to you in twelve hours.”

“You’re goddam right you will.”

She stood and began to fling stuff into her attaché case. The Agency people withdrew from her as if she had a disease, leaving Dukas alone with her. “Nice job,” he said. She shot him a look, went back to stuffing papers. Dukas leaned in, thinking paradoxically that there was something sexually interesting about her despite her noisiness. Maybe because of the noisiness. All that energy.

“Menzes has gone out on a limb for you. Trust me.”

“Trust you! I don’t even know you! You come barging in here, my meeting—”

“Ms Pasternak, look—” Dukas found himself looking down her tailored dress, thinking that there were quite nice breasts down there; Jesus H. Christ, what was going on? And then saying, “This really is an important security matter. Menzes is a standup guy who’s trying to do his job and defend his agency and be fair.”

She was breathing hard and her pale face was flushed. He suspected that she wanted to hit him. Lawyers’ egos were very big. “You’ve won,” he whispered.

“Get fucked!”

Well, there was an idea. But she annoyed him, too, because she really didn’t understand how hard it was for a man like Menzes to have come even this far. “And you get real,” he growled. “If he calls your bluff, you’ve got nothing but some bullshit in the Washington Post, and Rose will get creamed!”

Then he thought she was going to lose it, but she surprised him by looking at her watch and then at the CIA people at the far end of the room, who were looking at their watches because it was past the end of their workday, and she said, “I haven’t got time to dick around with a Navy cop.”

Then there was a lot of talking all at once, and several handshakes, and the Agency people scurried away, and only Dukas and Emma Pasternak were left. She was still trying to jam papers and a binder of vetted documents that Menzes had given her into her attaché. Dukas lingered by the door. Now that it was over, the optimism he had felt after meeting with Menzes left him; never an easy man with other people, he felt awkward. “Nice to have met you, Ms Pasternak,” he said.

“Nice to have met you,” she said. She didn’t mean that it had been nice to meet him, at all. She meant Get out of here. Then she swore because she couldn’t get the document binder into the attaché.

“Uh—yeah.” He took the binder from her, took the pages out of the cover, and handed the pages back. “You ever, uh, eat Italian food?”

“What the hell does that mean? Of course I’ve eaten Italian food.”

“I’m a, uh, pretty good Italian cook. I’m Greek, but I cook Italian a lot.”

She found that the unbound pages would now fit. They looked at each other. “What kind of Italian?”

“Gnocchi.” To his ears, it sounded like nooky, and he reddened. “Made with butternut squash. A very delicate flavor.” He cleared his throat. With Menzes, he had been on a roll, in charge, and now he was a stumbling jerk. The story of his life. “I, uh, thought you might, uh—like some.”

She stared at him. “You’re asking me to dinner?”