Gordon Kent - Top Hook

Rose sat down. “I don’t get it. Why would somebody—?”

“Agency,” Harry said. “She’d have to be Agency to know anything about Shreed. Or she’s an old girlfriend with a grudge. Which isn’t his style.”

“Yes, yes, but—” Peretz was so excited that he was waving one hand like a kid trying to be called on in class. “It’s exactly what I was going to say! Shreed was deep, deep in Peacemaker.”

“Wait!” Emma was on her feet. She had a real bellow when she needed it. “What the hell are you all talking about?”

So, while O’Neill and Peretz murmured together, Rose and Dukas sketched it in for Emma Pasternak: Peretz, who had started a routine, two-week Naval Reserve stint at Peacemaker two years before, had got suspicious of the sort of data he was seeing and had begun nosing around, tracking things back to Shreed and the Agency, a search that had been ended by the mugging that had cost him the hearing in one ear.

“Shreed got him beaten up?” Emma said.

“Oh, no,” Rose cried, “I never believed—” Then she looked at Dukas.

“They never followed up that idea,” he said. He made a note.

“Well, I would have!” Emma shouted.

“Yeah, you would have.” Dukas whacked O’Neill on the knee. “Harry, you think Telephone Girl’s Agency?”

“Likely.”

“You got any way to find her?”

“Put a tap on Rose’s phone.”

Emma was screaming, “No way!” Dukas turned back to O’Neill. “Poke around, will you?”

“I have to be in Nairobi on Saturday, Mike.” He turned to Rose and started mumbling something about tape-recording telephone calls.

Dukas was making notes. “Abe, I want everything you got on Peacemaker.”

“Hey, how about polygraphing Shreed?” Peretz said.

“Not yet.” He made a note. “The Agency wouldn’t let me polygraph its people without a hell of a fight, and I’m not ready for a fight. Yet.” He looked at his notes. “Rosie, does it make sense that George Shreed would go after you because he has an old rhubarb with Al?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, does it?”

Peretz shook his head. “He’s a high-powered guy, but he’s very personal—he fought the Cold War that way, his personal enemies. A big thinker in terms of geopolitics, but he personalizes everything. Can be very petty.”

“Could he be petty enough to go after Rose to settle with Alan?”

“Why should he go after Alan?” Emma said.

Dukas sighed. “A very old story. Al and I were in Mombasa in ninety—or was it ninety-one? Al had a contact with a, well, call him a foreign asset, and he didn’t know what to do, so he calls Shreed, who’s an old family friend. Bang! Al and I get pulled out of the country so fast we think we’re being deported, and two CIA types come in, and next thing we know, the foreign contact is dead.”

“Shreed had him killed?”

“No, no!” Dukas shook his head as if the question was the dumbest one he’d ever heard. “Suicide. Alan had a fight with Shreed about it when we got back to the US, and they’ve been on the outs ever since. But is that reason enough to lay a serious frame-up on Rose now? I don’t buy it.” He turned back to Harry. “But just to be on the safe side, as long as you’re going to be in Nairobi, how about checking into that death while you’re there?”

“Nairobi isn’t Mombasa.”

“Well, same country, what the hell. Come on, Harry—for Rose, okay?”

Peretz shook his head. “A man like Shreed doesn’t wait eight or nine years and then do something like this out of spite. Although, maybe if somebody else fingered Rose, Shreed might take advantage of it.”

They all started offering theories about Shreed then, and the skull session quickly degenerated into chaos. Dukas pounded on the bedside table with a beer bottle until they all shut up. “Hey! Hey!” He hiked his pants up and glared at them, then grinned. “Look, folks, we’ve allowed ourselves to narrow our focus too soon, you all understand that, right? I think the Shreed thing is…” He rocked his free hand back and forth. “At this point it’s nothing but a line for us to follow, and all we got is Telephone Girl’s voice telling us to.” He sighed. “What I think is, George Shreed is a sonofabitch who has nothing to do with Rose’s case, but I’m going to follow up, because that’s my job. Let’s have some other ideas, could we?”

They sat for another hour, repeating some of it, trying to cheer Rose, offering new theories. Did Rose have enemies? Peretz mentioned Ray Suter, who had been at Peacemaker and was now at the CIA and who had tried and failed to get Rose in the sack. Did that make him an enemy? Other names were mentioned—squadron squabbles, professional rivalries. Dukas made notes. Then they began to drift away, first Peretz, then Emma and Dukas, O’Neill last.

It was only when they were gone and she had put the television on to keep her from thinking that Rose remembered that Dukas and Emma had arrived and left together and that something was going on.

Later, Dukas lay on his back in the dark. Emma was lying half on him, her head on his chest, and he could feel her hair on his bare skin. He thought she was asleep and he was sliding off into sleep himself when she said, “I was married once.”

“No kidding.”

“It only lasted two years.” He felt her raise her head and shake her hair back; her head was dimly silhouetted against a window. “Doomed to failure. Two lawyers.”

He thought about that. He thought about it so long he thought she might have fallen asleep, but he said, “What’s doomed if you loved each other?” and he heard her laugh, a kind of wheezing, ratchety sound that didn’t seem as if she made it often, and she said, “Love? Christ almighty, Mike. Grow up.”

She was different in the dark. Her voice was lower, quieter, and she wasn’t on the attack. She had that laugh, and of course sex. Great sex. He suspected that this separation of light and dark might have had a lot to do with the failure of a marriage, as if perhaps both of them had been like that, and if both weren’t in the dark at the same time, there it went. “I never been married,” he said.

“Lucky you.” She raised her head against the window again, then pulled herself up until she was looking down at where his eyes must have been for her, perhaps even seeing some glint of reflection from the window in them. “You’re in love with Siciliano, aren’t you?” she said.

He thought about it. There was no good answer, given the situation. “I guess so,” he said. “But it’s meaningless.”

Again, she laughed. “Love? I thought you believed in love. Now it’s meaningless?”

“She loves her husband. And he’s my friend. What I feel—nothing can come of it, you see?”

She lowered her head on his shoulder. “So, her husband dies somewhere, you wouldn’t go to her like a shot?”

In fact, he’d thought about that question. It came down to sex, he thought, and he didn’t see Rose and him like this. Once, he had. Now, something different had happened between them. Not that they had passed beyond sex, but he thought of her now seriously, as his friend’s wife, as the mother of two kids. Would he go like a shot to father her children? To take Al’s place in her life, in her bed? No, he wouldn’t, because he’d seen her as a woman who loved one man, and he knew he would never be the man.

He started to tell Emma that, but this time she was asleep.

In the morning, she was grouchy and he was quiet; neither of them morning people, they avoided crashing into each other in the small apartment, drank coffee in silence, listened to NPR as they dressed. As she was rushing for the door, he said, “One thing, Emma.”