Gordon Kent - Top Hook

To those who drive the ships

Cover Page

Title Page Top Hook Gordon Kent

Dedication To those who drive the ships

Part One Betrayal Part One Betrayal

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Part Two Flight

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Part Three Last Words

St Anselm’s Cemetery, Washington

About the Author

Praise

The Alan Craik Novels

Copyright

About the Publisher

The streets were a river of color in the dark, sequins and silks swirling around bare flesh. Masks and cloaks fought the assault of the rain and the splashes of the sea underfoot. Costumes flowed toward San Marco, just as the tide of the Adriatic ebbed away, leaving salt puddles to reflect the glare of carnival.

The pounding music from the palazzi and the manic orchestration of voices, Italian and foreign, stunned Anna’s senses as she ran. Her masculine costume had saved her in the seconds when the meeting had gone bad, and now it freed her to move, thrusting through the tangle of the crowd. The sword at her side caught at passersby until she took the sheath in her left hand and lifted the hilt off her hip.

She stopped with her back against a medieval shop at the base of a bridge. Music pulsed through the stone at her back, and her lungs burned as she peered around the corner at the arch of the footbridge. Two lovers embraced against the stone railing; a reveler in a black cloak and white Pantalone mask strode past her toward the bridge. At the top of the arch stood another of the Serbs who had tried to kill her, talking into a cellphone, his head moving like an owl’s. None of the Serbs had bothered to wear masks or costumes; all had leather jackets and mustaches. High on adrenaline, she drew the sword and shrugged off her cloak in one unconsciously dramatic motion. She gathered the cloak in her left hand and risked one glance back into the thick of the crowd. Then she drew herself up and flung herself around the corner at the bridge.

Because the Serb was talking, he was slow. She rushed past the Venetian in the white mask, his dignified walk and cloak screening her for an extra second. She threw her own cloak with both hands, and the Serb shot at it on instinct. His second shot buzzed in her ear as she took a last step and leaped, lunging forward, her whole weight driving the point of the smallsword through his neck. The blade grated against the vertebrae and she rolled her wrist and used the speed of her rush to tear the blade free. Momentum carried her past her victim, and she stumbled, caught herself on the railing, and leaped to the parapet of the bridge.

The reveler’s white mask turned to the movement, black eye sockets locked on her. One of the lovers had been hit by a shot, and the Serb’s open throat pumped red blood on the gray stones. A second’s balance on the parapet as her mind recorded the copper scent and the sheen of blood, and she dove into the canal. The unwounded lover screamed.

The shock of the water cut off the screams, and she swam, eyes and mouth shut tight. She stayed down, lungs bursting from the run and the adrenaline, until her hands found the opening and she thrust herself through and up into the tiny space of a partly submerged chapel, lightless, silent. For an entire minute, she could do nothing but breathe, supporting herself on a stone that had been the base of the altar.

She snapped on a tiny flashlight whose glow reflected off gold leaf and mosaic.

Anna rolled into her waiting canoe, half filling it with water, and sat up. Her right hand still clutched the sword, and she pushed it under the bag in the front of the boat and played the tiny beam of light around her. The chapel had been a military one, eight hundred years ago; she hadn’t noticed it when she had entered at low tide. Now, she watched the ceiling as the tide ebbed and her escape route cleared. A Byzantine Saint Michael held aloft a sword of light and threatened Satan; a figure in armor at the far end looked to her like Saint Maurice—or was it Saint George?

She shivered. She had never killed before. She didn’t like it.

She pulled a travel book from her pack and opened it to the last page. She had written four names there in Arabic script, in an old Persian language that was better than a code. She studied them in the flashlight’s inch-wide beam.

Her lips thinned and she shook her head at the first name— George Shreed.

Sitting in his house alone, George Shreed stared at a dead computer screen and listened to the absence of his wife. She was dying in a hospice, and the house was dying with her, devoid now of her voice, of the smells of her cooking, of her off-tune singing. Thirty years of marriage create a lot of sound, and now it had all drained away, and he was alone.

He booted up one of his computers. Three monitors sat on tables in the small “study.” He could communicate directly with his duty officer at the Central Intelligence Agency, or with several distant mainframes on which he kept coded and secret files, or with the vast world of electronic magic that a few years before had hardly existed.

“Janey,” he murmured. It was not as if he meant to call her back from the edge of death, but only that he had to say her name sometimes, as if, left unsaid, the name too would disappear and he would have nothing.

“Oh, God,” he muttered.

Shreed was frightened. Horrors never came alone: first, his wife’s cancer; now, the woman in Venice. He had just learned that his people hadn’t caught her, so she was still out there, still running around with evidence that could send him to prison for life.

Two weeks ago, she had made her first contact: an e-mail with a photograph that he had first sent two years before, encrypted, to an Internet address where it could be accessed by Beijing. Shreed had been stunned to get it back—a hand reaching out of the past to strangle him.

Ten days ago, the woman had e-mailed him a page of classified material about a project called Peacemaker—classified material that Shreed himself had covertly sent to his Chinese control in 1997. The Agency would have him for treason if they knew he had transferred it. With it had been a curt message: “Venice—Old Ghetto memorial—16 March—one million dollars.”

Then he had sent people to find her, and she had escaped.

And she had sent him a second message: “Now the price is two million.”

The computer screen was bright. He punched keys, and icons and prompts flew by. He moved out into cyberspace, entered a mainframe on a university campus two thousand miles away and called up a file that appeared as random symbols and letters on his screen. He keyed in a password, then another, then empowered an algorithm that ran in tandem with a checker within the file itself, and then he was in, and the symbols in the blink of an eye became words.

Project Peacemaker.

Janey didn’t know about this part of his life. Nobody knew, in fact. Not true—some people in China knew. But Janey and his colleagues at the CIA didn’t know. He didn’t give a shit about the colleagues, but he was deeply guilty that he had hidden part of his life from Janey, who was his life, for so many years. He would have to tell her, he knew. Tell her the way people tell a priest, there in the humming silence of her hospice room, tell her as she lay full of painkillers, needles in her arms, tell her as if she were the wall with the little wicket of the confessional. And say, Forgive me, Janey—forgive me before you go. Even though she wouldn’t have heard him, most probably.