Gordon Kent - Top Hook

“And no budget, and, more to the point, no faith that I can keep it just between some stranger and me and not have it wander off to ONI or, God help us, the Agency.” He hunched his shoulders. “Why do you think we’re meeting out here like a couple of spooks, for Christ’s sake?” He sketched out what had happened to Alan in Trieste, then said that the woman wanted a second meeting in Naples. “Naples NCIS is strung out to begin with, and with his carrier in port, they’ll be running around like jumping beans. You know how to do it. You’re available.”

“Mike, I’m a CEO.”

“Nobody’s perfect. Come on, he saved your life!”

O’Neill looked at the dollar bill, still in Dukas’s hand. “The pay isn’t very good.”

“It isn’t pay; it’s an honorarium.”

O’Neill laughed. He curled Dukas’s fingers back around the bill. “My contribution to the NCIS coffee fund. What do you want me to do?”

Dukas laid it out—finding a route in Naples, arranging the meeting, looking for counter-surveillance and bad guys.

O’Neill glanced at his watch. “But make it clear I’m a contract employee, right? Fax me a contract in Nairobi; I want cover if it goes bad.” He held out his hand. “Only for Alan and Rose, man.” He strode away.

George Shreed was sitting in the office of Clyde Partlow. His grief was now taking the form of a kind of psychological sadism, turned against anybody he happened to be with—at the moment, Partlow. On some organizational charts, Partlow was his boss and on others his equal. Right now, Shreed was having sadistic fun making Partlow sweat.

The subject was China. They had just come from a briefing on the deteriorating situation along the Kashmir border and Shreed had murmured to Partlow that they needed to talk “because of the China thing.” References like that always scared Partlow—”the China thing” sounded like dragons, or maybe Doctor Fu Manchu’s exploding mushrooms.

“The Chinks won’t say boo!” Partlow was saying now. He waved an empty pipe. A tall man going a little to fat, he favored suspenders and bright shirts and a boyish haircut—what Shreed called his Stover at Yale look. “The buildup is just saber-rattling.”

Shreed didn’t at all care what Partlow believed; what he was trying to do was set up his own Chinese operation. The India-Pakistan confrontation was looking more and more like an opportunity for him, but he had to make sure that the Chinese were really into it and that they would go over the edge into a confrontation with the United States if they were pushed hard enough. And the way to push was to goose the White House into sweating about China while goosing the Chinese to sweat about the US. “I think we should be prepared for a Chinese insertion into the India-Pakistan thing, and I think—only a suggestion—that we should float an operation past the National Security Council to see where they stand.”

Partlow winced. “Where they stand is they don’t want to get sucked into anything!”

“I think the Agency could gain back a lot of ground by being right about China this time, Clyde. If we float an idea now, at least they’ll remember afterward that we said the Chinks would go all the way on this one.”

“They won’t go all the way!” Partlow had a nasal voice that often sounded like a whine, less often like a whinny. “Will they?”

“Well, we probably ought to point out that the Taiwanese will think it’s a fine time to do something really stupid. If the Chinese are involved in the west, maybe ready to use nukes—”

“Oh, my God—!”

“The least we can do is suggest that an American battle group off Taiwan would remind Taipei to withdraw their head from their ass.”

“George, an American battle group off Taiwan would provoke the Chinese!”

“Not if they’re involved with India and Pakistan.”

They went round and round, but, as he knew he would, Shreed succeeded in planting in Partlow’s head the idea that he had better cover his ass by floating some possibilities at the White House. The whole business so upset Partlow that he excused himself and went off to the men’s room.

During his absence, Shreed, who had a better bladder, stood up and looked over Partlow’s desk, searching for useful items. He found what he was looking for next to the photo of Partlow’s wife: a trophy memo pad from the Director of National Security. It wasn’t to use, but only to show off—special paper, embossed seal, eyes-only classification. Shreed had always refused one as slightly tacky, but now he had a use for exactly that thing.

He reached across the desk and tore off two sheets, surprised again to find that he was trembling. Losing my nerve , he thought. It was a kind of inward joke to hide from himself the fact that he was frightened all the time now.

When Partlow came back, Shreed was sitting again in the visitor’s chair. Partlow looked scrubbed and pink. “I don’t like this, George,” he said.

“It’s a golden opportunity. Should we or should we not cook up an ops plan to penetrate the highest echelons of the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Army to find out if they’ll shoot when a US ship is in their sights?”

“Oh, George!” Partlow said. This time he was whining.

Dukas, back from the meeting with O’Neill and trying to pull together the ideas that had been aired in Rose’s motel room, came down the corridor of NCIS headquarters from an office where he’d borrowed a telephone. He’d made a lot of calls and set a lot of things in motion, but he didn’t feel that he knew a thing. Now, rounding the doorway into the small office where his typing table stood, he went to the prissy black guy’s desk.

“Phone is not available,” the guy said. He put his hand on the telephone to show it was his.

“You Triffler?” Dukas said.

“Yeah.”

“You’re my new assistant.” Dukas smiled. “You’re sitting at my new desk. Please take your hand off my new telephone.” He jerked his head toward the typing table. “Move.”

“My effing A!”

“Yeah, life is hard.” Dukas dropped a folder in front of the man. “Your first job—a lieutenant-commander named Rose Siciliano. Do the paperwork—make a budget, read my report, do a tentative walk-the-cat-back for a September fifteen Overview Assessment. Get on it, because it needs to be done today.”

“I don’t take orders from you!”

“You do now. Go see your former boss, third office on the left. He’ll explain to you what the Director of NCIS just explained to him. Now, please—I need the telephone.” He grinned. The guy bolted from the room, and Dukas sat at his new desk. He took a folder from under his arm and threw it down on the desk, where it fell open to reveal a navy officer’s personnel folder. The cover said “Crystal Insight.” The personnel folder said “Rose Siciliano.”

Trying to bring the MARI system up to speed, Alan had got Reilley to find them a dedicated frequency, and it made a difference. Stevens had flown the tech reps from the manufacturer twice, and they swore they could have a patch in a week, which was six days too long for Alan. Several of them were huddled around their own equipment in the back of the ready room at all hours, talking about code and parameters. They didn’t make much sense to Alan, but he noticed that both Campbell and Soleck understood them, and he got one or the other to give him plain-language reports on their progress.

Whenever Alan looked up, Soleck was there with a question. After one day, Soleck seemed to love everything about the boat, and his puppy-dog curiosity and enthusiasm would have been infectious if Alan had not had so much on his mind. Alan found himself snapping at Soleck because he made such a ready target, but another sleepless night in his stateroom chewing over the problems that surrounded him—his career, Rose, his detachment—suggested to him that Soleck was not the proper target. In fact, Soleck, despite his terrible youthfulness, was something like a genius. By his second flight, he had mastered the multi-function keys that older and wiser men avoided. He could get the constantly dropped link back in seconds. He even knew something about bandwidth and antennas, and the crews were jury-rigging bigger antennas on both planes to meet some new specs that Campbell, Soleck, and the reps had designed.