Top Hook

8

Rose’s motel.

Harry O’Neill was putting beer bottles into plastic tubs of ice. He was a big, handsome black man who came from money and behaved with the confidence of a Harvard education and a family of big-time lawyers. He had been a CIA case officer, now had his own security company, and he had flown in from Dubai to help her.

“We’re going to get you out of this,” he said, as if he had all the confidence in the world. He held out a bottle. “Have a beer.” They were in Rose’s motel room, waiting to have the skull session with Dukas and Peretz and Emma Pasternak.

She shook her head.

“Come on, Rose! It isn’t the end of the world!”

She started to snap at him but caught herself. Harry really knew about the end of the world: he had lost an eye to torture two years before in Africa. She gave him an apologetic grin, accepted a sweaty bottle.

He winked at her, as if to say: See? You can fall in the shit and come up holding a diamond. He was wearing a linen blazer and an electric-blue T-shirt that Rose suspected was real silk, and he was handsome and breezy and rich-looking.

“Sorry,” she said. Her smile was half-hearted.

Then Abe Peretz arrived, and Dukas and Emma Pasternak came in right behind him. After a lot of shouted introductions and greetings, people shoved chairs around and grabbed beer and sat down, all but Dukas, who took up the space between the beds and announced loudly, “I’m taking charge of this meeting.” Emma started to protest but he waved her down. “I’m the NCIS investigator and it’s a Navy case, so I’m in charge.” He pointed a finger, the thumb cocked like a hammer, at Emma. “You’re here by my permission.”

“She’s my client, and she remains my client wherever we are! She says nothing unless I okay it. She—”

Dukas put his hands on the arms of her chair and leaned his face down very close to hers and said in a tone like a dog’s growl, “Shut up or get out.”

Before either of them could do something terrible, Rose grabbed Emma’s arm and said, “Emma, please! Mike’s my friend!”

Emma glanced at her, then locked eyes with Dukas again. Something passed between them. At last, she mumbled, “But no taping. Nothing she says can be used in court. Okay?”

Dukas grinned, patted her arm. He straightened. “So here’s what I want to do tonight. I want to chew on it and come up with a way to attack. I mean, we’re all clear that Rose is being smeared and her husband’s getting screwed by association, are we all agreed on that? Okay, so what we want to find is how and why. Rose, I want everything you have on Peacemaker, because this whole thing seems to start there. The word is you gave Peacemaker secrets to—well, we don’t know who to. You got reports, printouts—disks—?”

Emma started to say, “What’s Peacemaker?” but Rose jumped in ahead of her. “Mike, Peacemaker was more than two years ago! I haven’t got anything!”

“Sure, you have. People always keep stuff. It’s in a box in a closet or the cellar—bullshit awards they gave you, photos from the Christmas party—”

“Oh, that sort of shit.”

“Yeah, and I want it. All.”

Angered again by her own lack of control, Rose growled, “It’s all on its way to Houston, remember? I don’t have a cellar or a closet!”

Harry O’Neill uncrossed his long legs and said, “Computer.” He looked at Dukas. “What d’you think?”

“I never used my home computer for Peacemaker,” Rose cried. “Everything was classified.”

Dukas bored in. “You never brought anything home and worked it on your computer? Tell me another, Alphonse!”

Emma half-rose from her chair. “I object—!”

“You stay out of it!”

“This is typical cop bullshit; you’re tricking her into making statements to incriminate her.”

Dukas stared at her. He stuck his lower jaw out, his tongue running over his upper teeth. “Do you want me to take her into an interrogation room with a tape recorder and a witness? Would that be better? Goddamit, we’re here to help her!”

Again, Rose put her hand on Emma’s arm. “I’ll answer, Emma.”

“I don’t want you to!”

“Well, deal with it.” Rose looked up at Mike. “What was the question? Did I put Peacemaker stuff on my home computer? No, I didn’t. I’m a good little naval officer, Mike; I follow the rules.”

“Rosie, we got a former Director of National Intelligence who put stuff on his home computer. Everybody does it! I want your computer.”

“It’s on the way to Houston! And it’s clean. Clean.”

“Okay.” He talked it as he wrote. “Find—truck—en route—Houston—”

The telephone rang.

“Oh, shit—” She sprang up, reaching for it, knocking over her beer. “Goddamit—!” O’Neill and Peretz were both there, mopping at the carpet, and she stepped over them. “Hello!” She sounded enraged, and she hoped, therefore, that it wasn’t Alan.

And it wasn’t. It was a woman.

“You don’t know me,” the female voice said. Rose’s first thought was that it was some sort of telemarketer, an idea that was gone as fast as it came; telemarketers didn’t do motel rooms. Did they?

“Who is this?”

“I want to help you.”

The voice was soft, as if she didn’t want somebody on her end to overhear. A little tense. Guarded. Around Rose, the room had fallen silent, and the men were watching her.

“Who is this, please?”

“George Shreed is behind what’s being done to you.”

Rose heard the click as the woman hung up. Even so, she spoke into the phone again. And got nothing.

When she turned back to the room, they were all looking at her.

“A woman I don’t know said that George Shreed is behind what’s happening.”

Abe Peretz exploded. “Sonofabitch—!”

Emma was saying, “Who’s George Shreed?” to Dukas, and O’Neill was frowning at Rose in a way that meant he knew exactly who Shreed was, and what was the connection? Suddenly the room was electric where before it had been sullen.

Rose sat down. “I don’t get it. Why would somebody—?”

“Agency,” Harry said. “She’d have to be Agency to know anything about Shreed. Or she’s an old girlfriend with a grudge. Which isn’t his style.”

“Yes, yes, but—” Peretz was so excited that he was waving one hand like a kid trying to be called on in class. “It’s exactly what I was going to say! Shreed was deep, deep in Peacemaker.”

“Wait!” Emma was on her feet. She had a real bellow when she needed it. “What the hell are you all talking about?”

So, while O’Neill and Peretz murmured together, Rose and Dukas sketched it in for Emma Pasternak: Peretz, who had started a routine, two-week Naval Reserve stint at Peacemaker two years before, had got suspicious of the sort of data he was seeing and had begun nosing around, tracking things back to Shreed and the Agency, a search that had been ended by the mugging that had cost him the hearing in one ear.

“Shreed got him beaten up?” Emma said.

“Oh, no,” Rose cried, “I never believed—” Then she looked at Dukas.

“They never followed up that idea,” he said. He made a note.

“Well, I would have!” Emma shouted.

“Yeah, you would have.” Dukas whacked O’Neill on the knee. “Harry, you think Telephone Girl’s Agency?”

“Likely.”

“You got any way to find her?”

“Put a tap on Rose’s phone.”

Emma was screaming, “No way!” Dukas turned back to O’Neill. “Poke around, will you?”

“I have to be in Nairobi on Saturday, Mike.” He turned to Rose and started mumbling something about tape-recording telephone calls.

Dukas was making notes. “Abe, I want everything you got on Peacemaker.”

“Hey, how about polygraphing Shreed?” Peretz said.

“Not yet.” He made a note. “The Agency wouldn’t let me polygraph its people without a hell of a fight, and I’m not ready for a fight. Yet.” He looked at his notes. “Rosie, does it make sense that George Shreed would go after you because he has an old rhubarb with Al?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, does it?”

Peretz shook his head. “He’s a high-powered guy, but he’s very personal—he fought the Cold War that way, his personal enemies. A big thinker in terms of geopolitics, but he personalizes everything. Can be very petty.”

“Could he be petty enough to go after Rose to settle with Alan?”

“Why should he go after Alan?” Emma said.

Dukas sighed. “A very old story. Al and I were in Mombasa in ninety—or was it ninety-one? Al had a contact with a, well, call him a foreign asset, and he didn’t know what to do, so he calls Shreed, who’s an old family friend. Bang! Al and I get pulled out of the country so fast we think we’re being deported, and two CIA types come in, and next thing we know, the foreign contact is dead.”

“Shreed had him killed?”

“No, no!” Dukas shook his head as if the question was the dumbest one he’d ever heard. “Suicide. Alan had a fight with Shreed about it when we got back to the US, and they’ve been on the outs ever since. But is that reason enough to lay a serious frame-up on Rose now? I don’t buy it.” He turned back to Harry. “But just to be on the safe side, as long as you’re going to be in Nairobi, how about checking into that death while you’re there?”

“Nairobi isn’t Mombasa.”

“Well, same country, what the hell. Come on, Harry—for Rose, okay?”

Peretz shook his head. “A man like Shreed doesn’t wait eight or nine years and then do something like this out of spite. Although, maybe if somebody else fingered Rose, Shreed might take advantage of it.”

They all started offering theories about Shreed then, and the skull session quickly degenerated into chaos. Dukas pounded on the bedside table with a beer bottle until they all shut up. “Hey! Hey!” He hiked his pants up and glared at them, then grinned. “Look, folks, we’ve allowed ourselves to narrow our focus too soon, you all understand that, right? I think the Shreed thing is…” He rocked his free hand back and forth. “At this point it’s nothing but a line for us to follow, and all we got is Telephone Girl’s voice telling us to.” He sighed. “What I think is, George Shreed is a sonofabitch who has nothing to do with Rose’s case, but I’m going to follow up, because that’s my job. Let’s have some other ideas, could we?”

They sat for another hour, repeating some of it, trying to cheer Rose, offering new theories. Did Rose have enemies? Peretz mentioned Ray Suter, who had been at Peacemaker and was now at the CIA and who had tried and failed to get Rose in the sack. Did that make him an enemy? Other names were mentioned—squadron squabbles, professional rivalries. Dukas made notes. Then they began to drift away, first Peretz, then Emma and Dukas, O’Neill last.

It was only when they were gone and she had put the television on to keep her from thinking that Rose remembered that Dukas and Emma had arrived and left together and that something was going on.

Later, Dukas lay on his back in the dark. Emma was lying half on him, her head on his chest, and he could feel her hair on his bare skin. He thought she was asleep and he was sliding off into sleep himself when she said, “I was married once.”

“No kidding.”

“It only lasted two years.” He felt her raise her head and shake her hair back; her head was dimly silhouetted against a window. “Doomed to failure. Two lawyers.”

He thought about that. He thought about it so long he thought she might have fallen asleep, but he said, “What’s doomed if you loved each other?” and he heard her laugh, a kind of wheezing, ratchety sound that didn’t seem as if she made it often, and she said, “Love? Christ almighty, Mike. Grow up.”

She was different in the dark. Her voice was lower, quieter, and she wasn’t on the attack. She had that laugh, and of course sex. Great sex. He suspected that this separation of light and dark might have had a lot to do with the failure of a marriage, as if perhaps both of them had been like that, and if both weren’t in the dark at the same time, there it went. “I never been married,” he said.

“Lucky you.” She raised her head against the window again, then pulled herself up until she was looking down at where his eyes must have been for her, perhaps even seeing some glint of reflection from the window in them. “You’re in love with Siciliano, aren’t you?” she said.

He thought about it. There was no good answer, given the situation. “I guess so,” he said. “But it’s meaningless.”

Again, she laughed. “Love? I thought you believed in love. Now it’s meaningless?”

“She loves her husband. And he’s my friend. What I feel—nothing can come of it, you see?”

She lowered her head on his shoulder. “So, her husband dies somewhere, you wouldn’t go to her like a shot?”

In fact, he’d thought about that question. It came down to sex, he thought, and he didn’t see Rose and him like this. Once, he had. Now, something different had happened between them. Not that they had passed beyond sex, but he thought of her now seriously, as his friend’s wife, as the mother of two kids. Would he go like a shot to father her children? To take Al’s place in her life, in her bed? No, he wouldn’t, because he’d seen her as a woman who loved one man, and he knew he would never be the man.

He started to tell Emma that, but this time she was asleep.

In the morning, she was grouchy and he was quiet; neither of them morning people, they avoided crashing into each other in the small apartment, drank coffee in silence, listened to NPR as they dressed. As she was rushing for the door, he said, “One thing, Emma.”

“I’m in a hurry.”

“Forget what was said about George Shreed. You never heard of George Shreed. Okay?”

She sighed too loud and too long, the sigh a child makes when given housework.

Dukas put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s too early to go sniffing around Shreed. If you do, you could screw everything—okay? Leave it for a while.”

She gave him a crooked grin. “’Trust me’?”

“Yeah, trust me.”

She shrugged. “Okay.”

“Promise?”

She swung toward the door. “Oh, puh-leeze!”

By eight, Emma Pasternak already looked frazzled, even seedy, but her day was only starting. She threw her suit jacket on a couch, ran her hand through her already messy hair, and collapsed into her desk chair. Bashing a laptop into submission, she began to make phone calls from the list in her scheduler. The first one was to the investigator she had hired for Rose’s case.

“Hey,” she said. She didn’t wait for a response. “This is Pasternak. I got something for you; I want it followed up priority. Yeah, yeah, I know you got other work; push it back in the queue. What I got is a name, I want everything on it, I mean everything—go back to birth records, schools, the whole nine yards. Okay? Name: George Shreed. He’s now at CIA, pretty high up. What we’re gonna do is get all the shit that’s fit to print and hit him with it—scare him to a near-death experience. If he caves, I think we’re golden. Okay? Go for it.”

USS Thomas Jefferson.

When Rafe sent the word that the brief for the admiral was finally a go, Alan threw his notes into a presentable briefing in a rush. He dragged the new officer, Soleck, into his preparations, because it was obvious that Soleck could find his way around a computer, and he was still so new that he didn’t have the sense to stay out of Alan’s way.

Most of the squadron commanders and a sizeable portion of the flag staff were at the brief. The admiral glanced at him several times while other officers delivered readiness reports, his face unreadable. When his time came, Alan went to the front, squared his shoulders, and went for it.

“Good evening, Admiral. I’m going to cover the capabilities of the MARI system and how it can act as a force multiplier for the BG.”

“Go ahead, Commander Craik.”

“Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar was fitted on all of the S-3bs in the late nineteen-eighties. That allowed us to do long-distance recognition of targets and greatly aided over-the-horizon targeting. MARI, or Multiple Axis Radar Imaging, uses the latest developments in computer-image modeling to allow several ISAR systems to link and provide a sharper, 3-D image. With multiple-axis imaging and a lot of new software, we can get a synthetic-aperture picture of a stable object, like a surface-to-air missile site, a hangar, or a tank.”

“How fine is the resolution?” the flag captain said. He didn’t sound hostile, at least.

“The contractors say one meter, but I don’t think it’s there yet, sir. Just before we left Pax River, we got an across-the-board software upgrade that ought to improve both processing time and resolution. I’ll be able to tell you more when we’ve implemented it.”

“Have you flown it?”

“Once, sir.”

“What’s your reaction?”

“It still drops link too often to be considered reliable. I’m not a computer expert, but I think the volume of data exceeds the bandwidth available.” Alan glanced at Soleck, who nodded. Soleck had the confidence of a puppy—a newbie who hadn’t even flown with the system yet.