Gordon Kent - Top Hook

“I want you to forgive me, Janey. Not for the porn—that was nothing—but for what I was really doing. I was sending classified information to a Chinese case officer. We used pornographic photos to embed the data in so we could send it over the Internet.” He sighed. “I’m a Chinese agent.” He waited. There was only the hum of the air-conditioning.

“I had a reason, Janey—I have a reason, I’m not just some goddam two-bit traitor! I have—my own goal.”

He put her hand down on the flowered sheet and sat back.

“Remember the first tour in Jakarta? I was running agents against the Chinese mostly. I had a guy I called Bali, he was Straits Chinese, he was one of those footboxers. Tough. I found he was a double; he was being run from the Chinese interest office, so I played him for a year until I got a line on his control and I busted him. It was one of those macho things to do—guy who walks on two canes muscles a Chinese case officer, pretty stupid now that I think of it, but at the time I was a high flier, remember?

“I picked up his control in the apartment of one of Sukarno’s buddies. He had the place wired like a concert hall. So I scoped it out and had a techie blank the mikes and play dead sound, and I went in and told him he was going to work for Uncle or he was going to be one dead Chink when Sukarno’s buddy came home.”

He looked at her. Was there something like a smile? “Remember Jakarta? The first time? Fantastic fucking. We were young.” Her eyelids trembled.

Shreed sighed. “So—The guy’s name was Chen. Bao Chen—Zhen, we’d say now. I was going to recruit Chen, and he recruited me. Not the way you think, though. He made me a deal. We’d trade. I’d give him stuff, he’d give me stuff. We were on the same level in our agencies; we’d help each other up the ladder. We’d both know the stuff wasn’t first-class, not the stuff that would really hurt, so we wouldn’t be traitors. More like scratching each other’s back.”

Shreed made a face—mouth opened in a snarl, tongue pressed first against the inside of an upper molar, then against the teeth in front, like a chimpanzee. His head went back and he breathed in and out. “I knew when he made the offer that it was really why I’d busted him—so he’d recruit me. You see, I didn’t care about going up the ladder that much. What I cared about was becoming a Chinese agent! Because I knew that the Chinese were my real enemies—the fucking Soviets were on the ropes, I knew it even back then—and I knew that if they made me an agent and trusted me, I could fuck them good!” He closed his eyes, then popped them open. “It disgusted me then. It disgusts me now. But I had to do it. Do you see? Do you see, Janey? ”

Rain was falling on the streets outside the hospice. The night was warm; few people were out, yet one man had walked by the building three times. He had a dog with him, perhaps the reason for his walking, but the dog, a long-haired mutt, was miserable and was being dragged on its leash now. Still, the man walked.

He was Ray Suter, George Shreed’s assistant. He was not there out of concern for his boss or his boss’s wife. He was there to listen to the monologue being radioed to him from a microphone hidden in Jane Shreed’s room. What he was hearing so excited him that he had forgotten the dog, and, hands plunged deep in raincoat pockets, he was striding along with the leash looped over a wrist and the dog trying to keep up on its short legs. The dog had given up sniffing bushes and posts and was simply trying to survive.

Suter was stunned by what he heard. All he had wanted was “something on his boss”—the words he had used in getting somebody to plant the bug. What he had expected was something ordinary, perhaps sordid but not monumental—a confession to his dying wife of a woman on the side, or maybe office gossip, inner resentments of people above him, or ways he had screwed other people in the Agency. Something you could turn to good account when you wanted more power for yourself, more money, a leg up.

And now this. Suter was in a kind of shock—oblivious to the dog, the rain. The man was talking about treason.

From time to time, Suter pressed his right ear. He had a hearing-aid-sized speaker there; the sound varied as he walked by the building and was sometimes so faint he lost it. At last, when there was no sound at all, he hurried away to the next street, where a closed van with a neighborhood parking permit stood among the bumper-to-bumper cars.

“I’ve lost him!” he snapped to the man who huddled in the back. A rich odor of pizza, doughnuts, coffee, and flatulence filled the van.

“It comes and goes.” The man was sitting in the dark with a cassette recorder and a couple of serious-looking electronic boxes. Suter could hardly see him in there, and he wanted to see him right then because he was thinking, He’s heard everything I’ve heard. The full impact of that made it hard for him to speak, and he had to draw a deep breath to say, “He just fades away sometimes.”

“What’d I just say?”

“Goddamit, this is important! Shreed’s spilling his guts! Move the van closer.”

“No way. I tole you, there’s no place over there the cops won’t notice me. Here, I’m golden.”

“I want you to move the van.” He didn’t really care about the van; what he cared about was that suddenly he feared and therefore hated this man, this on-the-cheap private detective.

“You want me to get the goods on your boss. Well, that’s what I’m doing. Djou feed that dog?”

Suter glanced at the cassette recorder. He had wanted a tape so that if there was something good, he could lay it on Shreed’s desk if he had to, even play it for him. Now, the tape was like a bomb. “You’re making only the one tape, right?”

“I promised my neighbor I’d feed the dog at eight. Gimme the can-opener.”

“I said, you’re making only one tape! Right? ”

“What’d I just say? I promised to feed the fucking dog, now gimme the can-opener. It’s right under your ass.”

Suter had left the driver’s-side door open, and the dog was sitting on the pavement in the rain. When it heard the can-opener start to operate on the can, it wagged its tail and then vaulted into the back seat, using Suter as a platform. He took a swipe at it with a hand and disentangled his wrist from the leash.

“Keep the fucking dog! Nobody’s out there, anyway. We never should have brought it.”

“So whose idea was it? ‘Get me a dog for cover,’ you said. Looka her eat! She’s fucking starved.”

“Tony, I don’t want a word of this getting out of that mouth of yours. You understand me?”

“What’d I tell you when we joined up? ‘I hear, I don’t listen. Absolute confidentiality is my stock in trade.’ Looka that doggie eat.”

Suter looked into the darkness at the sound of the dog’s slurping. “If any of this gets out, you’re dead.” The word boomed in Suter’s mind like a low-pitched bell: dead, dead, dead—

“What’d I just say?” In the dark, the other man patted the dog. “What’d you do, try to drown her? She’s fucking soaked! My fucking neighbor’ll have a cow, I bring her back like this. You’re a cruel guy, you know that, Suter?”

Suter lit a cigarette, inhaled, sighed. “Yeah, I know that. Make sure you know it, too.”

The car was silent. The smell of wet dog and cigarette smoke joined the other smells. After several minutes, Tony said, “Your boss’s talking again.”

“Christ!” Suter was out in the rain within seconds, pushing at his right ear and splashing away through the puddles. The bell kept tolling: dead, dead, dead—

“As soon as he drew a gun, I tackled the man in front of me and brought him down. Then I began to fire at the ones shooting into the front of the café. They returned fire and killed the man I had tackled.”