Gordon Kent - Top Hook

“You had a gun, Commander?” The Italian cop smelled strongly of cologne and leaned forward across the desk every time he spoke. Alan couldn’t decide whether it was a very polite interrogation or a very thorough witness examination.

“No, signore , I did not have a gun. I took it from the man who was standing in front of me.”

“You are a commando? A specialist?”

Alan was now going over this ground for the third time. “I took him by surprise.”

“You overpowered one terrorist, took his gun, and shot a second.”

“Yes.”

The cop watched Alan with a kindly look of disbelief. Another investigator entered the room, a razor-thin man in a very nice suit.

“Why were you there at all, Commander?”

“I wanted a cup of coffee.” The name, Bonner, and all its implications hung before him. He wasn’t ready to give them the woman yet. “ Signori , may I remind you that I’m an officer in the US Navy, and that under international agreements I have the right to representation by my service, and to have them informed? Am I a suspect in this?” He wanted to say as well that his foot hurt like hell, but he didn’t think they’d be sympathetic.

“It would be easier for all of us if you would simply aid our investigation, Commander. Are you uncomfortable?”

“I have a detachment to command.”

“You shot two men in our city, Commander. That causes us huge concern. You understand that since the recent unfortunate incident with the US plane and the cable car, Italians are very touchy about Americans killing people in Italy.”

Alan spread his hands in an engaging, almost Italian way, as if to say, What can I do?

“I do understand that, but I also understand that you’re keeping me without a charge, and I would like my command to be notified. I have cooperated. And I didn’t kill both of them. I shot one . The other was shot by his own people. And they weren’t Italians, they were Serbs.”

“Italy is not at war with the Serbs, Commander.” He put an index finger, pointed upward, beside his temple, as if he was signaling an idea. “I wonder if you did not come to Italy to execute these men.” He raised his eyebrows: Good idea? Getting no response, he looked for the fifth or tenth time at Alan’s passport. “You landed in Aviano just seven hours ago.”

Alan was unsure whether to react with anger or to continue to respond politely. He’d tried both for two hours, and he didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. He started again.

“I tackled the man I had noticed in front of me as soon as he drew a gun…”

Shreed had been to the toilet and had splashed cold water on his face. He hated that face, most of all now—a whipped look, hangdog, drained from the effort of telling her. “Janey.” She gave no response. Maybe it was his own forgiveness he wanted, as much as hers. “So, Janey, there was this guy Chen. In Jakarta.”

No response.

“Jakarta. So we worked out a comm plan, all that old Cold War junk. Then I came back here for a tour and I got into computers. Bad days here, you remember—the Agency was in the doghouse, everybody pulled in like a flock of turtles. You called me ‘Captain COBOL.’ Remember?” He smiled, used both hands to pull one leg over the knee of the other.

“In those days, you actually did your own programming. And I was good. Real good. They were making the first stabs at a net; they didn’t even call it the Internet then, just ‘a net,’ and I hacked my way into a big mainframe at Cal Tech and staked out some space for myself in the source code. Once I did that, I knew what was possible, and I waited for the Chinese to get good enough for me to use what I knew. I waited and then piggy-backed on a couple of Chinese ‘students’ who were sending computer stuff back on audio tapes, rode their data, and there I was—I had a way in, into China. The trouble was, computers were too new. So what I was, I was like a mold-spore that can exist for twenty years in the desert. I had to wait.

“Chen and I were exchanging stuff the old way, dead-drops and that crap, both moving up. It took ten years—then, finally, everybody had a PC. At last, it was my world. So I laid it out for the Ops guys—what we could do to the Chinks with computers, what now we’d call information warfare.

“Would you believe nobody in Ops cared, even then? The fact is they were scared shitless—a lot of fake Brit preppies who would do anything to protect the heritage of God and capitalism, and so let’s send in some poor lower-class, preferably foreign asset to do our dying for us, but please, no high technology! HUMINT forever!” He wiped his hand over his bristly hair. “Stupid shitheads,” he muttered. After a minute or two, he got up and dragged himself to the window. It was raining hard, and there was only a single figure out there, somebody walking slowly in the downpour. There was something terrible about the loneliness of that figure, he thought. He shook himself as if it had been he standing in the rain.

“So I’m a traitor for a purpose, Janey,” he said. There, he’d said it— traitor . “I’m a traitor with a cause.” He continued to stare into the rain. The walking figure was gone.

“I’d have given them what I had, if they’d listened. I’d have risked even prison, if they’d listened. But they made me go it alone. They made me be a traitor.”

He looked to her for affirmation then, but she was still.

“So I went it alone. I programmed a poison pill, a worm, to fetch something from Chinese military intel. A kind of virus, but one like—what the hell is it? shingles? the one that sits in your spine for twenty years and then pops out—one that would sit tight until I told it to act. Then every time the Chinks upgraded, they took me with the upgrade. I’d go in and tinker a little, snoop around, see how much better they were getting at firewalls and passwords and encryption, and it got to the point where I knew I was going to have to do something or they’d either catch me or they’d wall me out.

“And then Chen lowered the boom on me. Nineteen ninety-four. Turned out I’d been suckered. Now he was going to get serious, and if I didn’t play along, he’d turn me in to the Agency.” Shreed sighed, made a sound that was something like a laugh—short, barking gags of sound. “I thought I was playing him and he’d been playing me. We’d been doing a circle jerk for twenty years, and it was all a fake to land me. Now, the Chinks wanted good stuff—hard stuff.

“They had a website that flacked pornography. That was the comm link; we encrypted data and reduced it to one pixel and buried it in the middle of a porn image. That was what I was doing that night you caught me. I was sending them the data on a classified project called Peacemaker, and when you came in, I got rattled and I sent the last batch in clear. You scared me, baby. I felt like a kid caught jacking off.” Shreed massaged the bridge of his nose, sighed again. “Not your fault. Mine. But—” He gave the laughing sound again.

“Chen’s really been bleeding me. Chen’s an insatiable prick; I’m going to have to—I’ve got to end it. I’ve got to wind up my Chinese connection. You see? Janey?”

He put his hand on hers again, felt the skin cooler but not cold.

“Oh, baby, the things I’ve had to do! And the things I have to do yet!”

He got up, grabbed his canes, swung himself around the room; the movements were restless, angry, the prowlings of something in a cage. Still, his voice was tender when he said, “Maybe it’s better you won’t be here.”

He pulled himself to the window again, then away to her side, across to a corner, back.