Gordon Kent - The Spoils of War

“You’re venting again. That’s what I’m here for, isn’t it—to listen to you vent. As you know, naval attachés have better things to do, like looking for a good place to have lunch, and dealing with dead sailors in foreign places is our charge.”

Dukas sighed. “Well—yeah, it’s our business—so who’s near Tel Aviv? The Jefferson’s already in the Canal. Athens office is too busy. We got anybody who can take a day and go?”

Triffler’s laugh was deliberately false. “How about Al Craik? He’s in Tel Aviv even as we speak.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“Your wife told my wife.”

Dukas stared at him, stuck his lips out, raised an eyebrow. “That’s some network you got—two wives. You ever think of going into intelligence?”

Triffler stood—an impressive unfolding of long-boned limbs. “Am I done being vented at? You get in touch with Al.”

“You giving the orders now?”

“Somebody has to do it.”

Dukas scowled at his retreating back and then put out his hand for the phone and called Fifth Fleet, Bahrain, to ask where Commander Craik was staying in Tel Aviv.

Washington

In the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) mint-new Office of Information Analysis, the workday went on longer even than in the White House. The atmosphere of the place was that of a great business enterprise at the top of its game—buoyant, aggressive, determined, and overworked.

For a thirty-five-year-old named Ray Spinner, the place was salvation. He’d got bounced from the Navy for passing privileged information to his power-lawyer father; Dad had placed him in OIA to make it up. Now, Spinner reeled through his workdays in a frenzy half joy and half terror (Could he measure up? Could he be hardline enough? Did he dare to ape the bosses and wear power suspenders?). It was better than the Navy had ever been, but scary.

Sitting in a cubicle among twenty other cubicles, he was watching a message come up on his computer. New data came first to people like him; he knocked out the obvious bullshit and passed the rest up the line. The criteria had little to do with either authenticity or reliability and everything to do with usefulness to the office’s main goal—just then, getting something going in Iraq. He had already made the mistake of knocking out a report from a defector who said he had overheard a third party say that sarin gas was being manufactured nights and weekends in a Baghdad elementary school; it had been made very clear to him that this was precisely the kind of intelligence that was wanted, and if he made the same kind of dumb-nuts mistake again, he’d find himself handing out towels in the men’s room.

Spinner therefore really bore down now. The bit he was looking at struck him as a no-brainer—forwarding of a Tel Aviv police department memo about some dead A-rab.

Yarkov District police tonight reported death of Salem Qatib, Palestinian, resident West Bank. Held US student visa 1994-95, ex-US Navy reserve.

Meaning that the informant thought the dead guy might be of interest because he had US connections. Wrong. The real question was, Was he a terrorist? Well, let’s see. Spinner brought up OIA’s own list, which was different from the CIA’s and the FBI’s and much longer, and he didn’t find Salem Qatib as a terrorist but did find him on the Purgatory list (“not in Hell, but nearby”) of people “tracked for conflate background”—that is, for combining at least two suspicious factors. Like being Palestinian and having served three years in the US Naval Reserve.

As a cryptologist.

Hey, whoa!

Cryptologists had high security clearances and were tracked for years after they left the service because they had had access to sensitive stuff—codes, for example, that might not be changed for a long time. So Qatib must have been tracked, and he appeared to be clean, but OIA still had him on the conflate list because Palestinian plus cryptology equaled possible spy, right?

So. It wouldn’t do to make another mistake. Which he could do either by bumping this one up the line (but the word was that the White House was tired of the Palestinian problem), or by killing it (but maybe there was a secret interest in Palestinians that he didn’t know about).

Naval Reserve. That meant that the Navy would have to do a red-tape write-off—certify that the guy was dead, close his files, tie up all the loose ends of debts and pensions and all the other petty crap that the bean-counter mind could think of. So who did that?

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service, that’s who.

Nearest office to Tel Aviv? Athens. He looked at the Athens roster, didn’t recognize any names—Spinner liked to deal with friends—and noted that Athens was actually under NCIS Naples, so looked there. And my God, Mary, look at that—the Special Agent in Charge, Naples, was an asshole named Mike Dukas!

Spinner grinned.

Mike Dukas had been the prick who’d got him read out of the Navy.

So Spinner forwarded the Qatib report to Michael Dukas, SAC NCIS Naples, blind-copied to his own boss at OIA, with the terse order, “Check implications anti-terrorism and terrorist connections and report back ASAP.” He put the name of OIA’s head at the bottom—a stretch, but permissible. He sent it Urgent.

Up yours, Dukas. He could just see the overweight, glowering, blue-collar Dukas hunched over the message, trying to figure out why he’d been told to jump, and to jump urgently.

Spinner grinned. He stood, stretched, looked over his cubicle wall at a guy going by wearing red suspenders. Yeah, he’d look drop-dead good in those.

Tel Aviv

Alan Craik was sitting on a hotel-room bed, a telephone in his hand. His wife, mostly naked, came out of the bathroom and turned, her back to him, to rummage in a suitcase. He grinned at her back. “Sexy buns.”

On the telephone, a voice barked, “Dukas.”

“My God, you mean I was holding for you? If I’d known it was you, I wouldn’t have waited.”

Rose ran back toward the bathroom, an irrelevant nightgown fluttering from her shoulders.

“I got a favor I want you to do me.”

“The answer is no.”

“No, the answer is yes. There’s nothing to it; it’ll give you something to do in Tel Aviv while Rose shops.”

“How the hell’d you know where I am?”

“Rose talked to Les a couple days ago. Les talked to Triffler’s wife. You can’t have secrets, man.” Les—Leslie—was Dukas’s new and pregnant wife; she and Rose were pals. “Anyways—”

“Yeah?”

“This is strictly routine—I gotta have somebody from the Navy get a death certificate. A guy died, ex-Nav. Find out what the story is, blah-blah-blah. Anybody could do it.”

“Get anybody.”

“There isn’t anybody! Look, the guy died; we gotta make it possible to close out his file, notify next of kin, all that. Just do it, will you?”

“Meaning what?”

“Piece o’ cake.” Dukas told him where to go in Tel Aviv—the main police building on Dizengoff Street—and the victim’s name—Salem Qatib.

“That’s an Arab name.”

“Palestinian.”

“Mike, a Palestinian who’s ex-US Navy?—in Tel Aviv—?”

“Just do it, will you? Fax me the death certificate and anything else you get. And don’t overdo it—forget you’re an intel officer and just be my errand boy. I’ll fax the dead guy’s paperwork to the embassy.”

He would have objected, but Dukas had hung up and his wife came out of the bathroom, and when she saw his face, she said, “Now what?”

Bayt Da Border Crossing, Gaza

Rashid spent the bus drive across Israel handling his papers and his Israeli passport, and imagining how he might handle the border crossing. He was dirty—even his eyes felt dirty—but the other passengers going to Gaza weren’t much cleaner.