Hostile Contact

“Yes?” The voice was tentative. Bobby Li, the agent at the other end, never seemed quite sure of himself. Well, people who were absolutely sure of themselves didn’t make good agents, right?

“Wondering if you’ve read Green Eggs and Ham.”

“Oh, yes, right. ‘Mister Brown is out of town/He came back with Mister Black.’ Hi!” Bobby sounded distant, but he had the recognition codes right. Good start.

“Hey, Sundance—how’re they hanging?”

Bobby Li giggled. George Shreed had given him that code name. “Hey, Butch Cassidy.”

“Long time, bud.” Three years, in fact. But they’d had some great times before that. “Want to play some ping-pong, bud?” Ping-pong was telephone code for an operation.

“Good. Great!” Real pleasure in the high voice. Bobby loved him still.

“I’m going to need a few items, bud.”

“Sure thing, boss.”

Jerry struggled for a moment with the simple telephone code, trying to remember the word for cameras. Ah. Camera. Hidden in plain sight. He was supposedly in Jakarta to find locations for a Hollywood feature film, as good a cover as he’d ever had, as it excused a great deal of roaming. He was using his old cover name, Andrew Bose, who had always been an antique dealer in the past, but what the hell. Cameras were now a legitimate extension of his cover, so no code word needed. Too much booze, he thought, but wryly, and not really meaning it. Can’t really have too much booze. “Need a camera, bud. And a guy to use it, okay? To photograph the ping-pong.”

“Sure.”

“And an ice bucket, okay?” Ice bucket was code for a weapon.

“Oh—okay—” Now Bobby seemed nervous, but, because Jerry was ordering him to find a weapon, that made sense.

“A big ice bucket, okay?”

“Sure, sure.”

“And some ice.” Then Jerry switched to a serious voice. Bobby would be happier if he thought things were serious. “This is a big game of ping-pong, pal.” Jerry leaned forward as if Bobby was right there. “You want to play in the big game. This is it, Bobby. The start of a big game.” He looked around the hotel lobby for the door to the bar, saw people going up three steps and out of sight and figured it was that way. “Meet me at Papa John’s and we’ll practice some ping-pong.” Papa John was code for a place and a time. Would Bobby remember after three years? Of course he’d remember! Bobby Li fucking loved him!

He hung up and headed for the bar. He was still sober enough to have kept from his old agent the fact that the ping-pong was going to end in the death of an American.

Bobby Li hung up and felt excited and happy. He had thought maybe his friend Andy had forgotten him.

Bobby had lived his whole life in Jakarta. He was Chinese only by ethnicity, but ethnicity made for sharp divides here. Sometimes it was the ultimate arbiter of loyalty.

And loyalty was crucial for Bobby Li, because he was a double agent—for his American friend who had just talked to him on the telephone, and for Loyalty Man, who was Chinese and a right shit and not his friend at all. Bobby was loyal to Loyalty Man because of ethnicity, the powerful force, but he was more loyal to the American because he was his friend and because he also loved George Shreed, who had been Bobby Li’s surrogate father. It had been George Shreed who had pulled him out of the gutter of Jakarta and made him a pet, a pal, and an agent. Love trumped ethnicity.

Bobby had worked for George Shreed for two years, and then for both George Shreed and Mister Chen, a double agent already at thirteen, but different because both men had known he was a double—Chen had made him one and then Shreed had accepted it and become a double himself. And then one day George Shreed had taken him aside and had said that he had to go back to the United States, and somebody else would be there instead. That was the worst day of Bobby’s life, when George Shreed had told him he was leaving.

“And a new guy will be taking over,” George had said. “Taking you over, too, Bobby. But—” George’s eyes had signaled the secret look that Bobby loved, the look that said that it was only the two of them against the world. “But we won’t tell the new guy about Mister Chen, okay? Mister Chen is our secret, Bobby.”

That had been twenty years ago, and he had never told. The new guy had been called Andy Bose, which was surely not his real name, but Bobby knew enough about espionage to understand that, and anyway, he had liked Andy from the start. And then Mister Chen had turned him over to another Chinese, and then he to another, and so on—six Chinese controls he had had, the last one this shit, Loyalty Man—and he had been the whole time with Andy. And now Andy had called him and they were going to do a big operation together, just like old times, and it would be great.

Being a double agent wouldn’t matter. He could be loyal to Andy for the operation, and nobody the wiser. It would be great.

Suburban Virginia.

Lying in the dark, Alan could feel Rose beside him, feel her wakefulness and her worry. There had been no sex since he had got out of the hospital. He had been afraid, he realized, confused by why the injury to his hand should make him so.

“Alan?”

He grunted.

“You really want to go on this Jakarta thing, don’t you?”

He grinned into the darkness. “Yeah—I confess: I really do.”

He heard her chuckle. “Hey, sailor,” she whispered, “want to have a good time?”

“I—” He swallowed. “I’m afraid I’ll touch you with my—ha-hand.” He felt her move on the mattress and heard the rustling of cloth.

He heard the smile in her husky voice. “Just you leave everything to me,” she murmured, settling on top of him.

Then he began to slide down that glassy slope that is sex, losing his fear, losing consciousness, losing self-consciousness, merging with her and coming to himself again in warmth and sweetness and safety; and, later, he knew that it was at that moment that his real healing began.

Northern Pakistan.

Colonel Lao stood in the remnants of a street, peering out from under the hood of an American rain parka at generations of rubble. The village had been fought over recently. The mosque had been destroyed years ago. In between, the village had been a focus of violence over and over.

His people had a generator running and spotlights on the ruins of the mosque. Forensics people from State Security were all over the site. He hoped they were working for him. Their team leader had an encrypted international cell phone of a type his department had never heard of, much less issued. Lao watched them with a detachment worthy of the ancients. He didn’t even have a cell phone.

“Sir?” His new man, Tsung. Young and competent. A little lazy, but well trained. He was hovering at arm’s length, careful of Lao’s silence. Lao appreciated his courtesy.

“Are you waiting for me, Tsung?” He turned, shook rain off his parka.

“I have an eyewitness the Ministry seems to have missed. He says that after the plane left, another car left too, going north.”

Lao shook his head again, though not at the rain.

“Well done, Tsung. We needed another complication.”

North meant trouble. Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Russia. Lao didn’t want to consider what would happen if the Russians had Chen. He followed Tsung toward the ruined tower, stopped by a low wall where a technician in an olive-drab poncho was using forceps to clear something out of the muck.

“Cartridge?”

“That shotgun. The shooter moved all the time.”

Lao ducked under the awning and accepted a cup of tea from one of the State Security goons. He had a picture in his head of the fight in the village. Shreed had never moved, firing repeatedly from one position in the open. That made Lao think he had been the first man hit. It also suggested that Shreed had been either ambushed or set up, and that didn’t fit any of the theories he had been offered in the office in Beijing.

Chen’s opposition had come from only a few men, perhaps as few as three or four. They’d killed Chen’s paratroopers with relative ease. Because it was a trap? Or because the Chinese paratroopers weren’t all that good? Lao wasn’t that kind of soldier. He looked at the trails of tape that marked the movements of individual shooters, traced by the cartridge casings they had let fall, and thought that the opposition had done all the moving.

One of the Chinese, a sniper, had apparently killed two of his own men before he was killed himself. That made no sense to Lao. Lao thought that someone else must have killed the sniper and used his weapon. Perhaps the forensics men would find something to prove his theory—or perhaps they wouldn’t.

He used his teacup to warm his hands as Tsung brought him an older man, his thin trousers flapping in the wind. Lao bowed a little and the old man gave him a nervous smile.

“Tell him that I’m a policeman.”

Tsung spoke to the old man in careful Arabic. It wasn’t his best language, and it was one the old man probably only knew from the Qur’an, but they communicated.

Lao stood patiently, sipping tea and offering it to his witness, while the old man told the story of the evening in halting driblets. Lao taped it. He didn’t speak much Arabic and he wasn’t sure he’d trust anyone in Dar to translate, but he had to keep a record.

The old man pointed out the commanding view that the little hill village had of the highway below them in the valley. He described the plane’s landing on the road, and he described the other car’s driving away after the plane had left. Yes, he was sure. No, he had no idea who had been in the car.

Lao swallowed the rest of his tea and spat out the leaves.

Maybe Chen was alive, after all. Lao smiled without humor: if Chen was alive, then he could clean up his own messes. Like the unfinished operation to target the Jefferson. Lao disliked executing operations in whose planning he’d had no part—let Chen be alive and take it over! The operation, he thought, had been put together too hastily, too emotionally—it seemed part of that nervous hysteria he’d felt in Beijing. He never thought he’d be sorry that Chen was dead (if he was dead), but he’d be delighted to have him rise now from the rubble of this Pakistani village and take over.

“Tsung,” he said. The younger man came almost at a trot. Eager. Lao was wondering if Tsung could be trusted to take over some of the details of the Jefferson operation and free him, Lao, to concentrate on Chen. “You’ve run agents among the Pakistani military?” he said.

Tsung grinned. “They don’t like to call themselves agents. ‘Friends of China,’ meaning they have an agenda that matches ours somewhere.” He made a joined-hands gesture, fingers of one hand inserted between the fingers of the other like meshing gears.

“I have a task for you.”

Tsung said something about being honored. Lao ignored it. He skipped details—the name of the Jefferson, the use of the submarines to pass data, the agent on the west coast of the United States—and explained about the plan to tap into Islamic hatred of America and to launch a small-boat attack on an American warship.

NCIS HQ.

Alan was in Dukas’s office at NCIS headquarters at nine-thirty, eager to hit the road for Jakarta.

Dukas was supposed to be making the travel arrangements; his assistant, the until-then absent Dick Triffler, was going to brief Alan and then go along to ride shotgun.

“Shotgun, hell,” Triffler said. “My son’s pitching tonight for his Little League team, and being Dad is more important than playing cops and robbers. Sorry, Commander.”

Alan grinned. “You wouldn’t say that if Mike was here.”

“I’d say it in spades if Mike was here! You think I’m afraid of Mike?”

Triffler was a tall, slender African American with what Alan had to think of as “class.” His skin was the color of caramel; his face was handsome and lean; his voice was a tenor, his enunciation pure northeastern US. He was not afraid of Mike Dukas, that was true; in fact, he emphasized their differences whenever he got the chance. Their shared office, for example, was divided by a wall of white plastic crates, into which the obsessively neat Triffler had put potted plants, sculpture, books—anything, in fact, that would block his view of the squalid mess where Dukas ruled.

Alan laughed. “I think you’re about as afraid of Mike as I am, Dick. But, uh, this is an operation, and I really am going to Jakarta, and I really do need some—”

Triffler waved a long hand. “Okay! I know! Uncle Sam says I have to go. Tomorrow! Okay? So I get there twenty-four hours after you, so what? You take a nap, have some local beer, watch TV. I’ll catch up.” Triffler shot his cuffs, maybe to show off his cuff links. “I don’t want to spend any more time in a germ pit like Jakarta than I have to, anyway.”

Alan didn’t comment on “germ pit.” He had heard enough about Triffler to know he was obsessive about cleanliness, too—the only man in NCIS who slid a coaster under your coffee cup when you picked it up. “Well—if it’ll work—”

“Sure, it’ll work. I got here at twenty of eight this morning, Dukas already had the file and a memo on top of the pile of other jobs he’s tasked me with while I was away, so I’ve read it and looked at the map and I’m up to speed.”

“If you wouldn’t take time off—” a voice came from the other side of the room divider—“you wouldn’t get tasked.”

“Hey, Mike—when did you sneak in?”

“I didn’t sneak, Al, I walked; you and Mister Clean were too busy dissing me to notice. And how are you this morning, Mister Triffler?”

“I was telling Lieutenant-Commander Craik that I’m not afraid of you, is how I am.”

“Good. Nobody should live in fear. You rested after your vacation?”

“It was not a vacation! It was quality time with my family.” Triffler smiled at Alan. “Some people don’t have families. Unsociable, outsider people.”

“Somebody has to do the scut work while you daddies are having quality time,” Dukas’s voice growled. “Will you guys get to it, please?”

They spent three hours. Triffler explained—redundantly, but there was no stopping him—what a comm plan was and what the Jakarta plan was. He went through the structure that Alan would have to build around the comm plan—walking a route before he left the mark that was supposed to set up the meeting, memorizing codes to communicate with his team (that is, Triffler), planning for a busted meeting and an escape.

“Which won’t happen,” Triffler said, “because there isn’t going to be any meeting to bust, right? This is a dead plan, right? Uncle’s paying to send us to Jakarta so Mister Dukas can cross an item off a list, right?” He raised his voice. “IS THAT RIGHT, MIKE?”

“Just do your job.”

Dick Triffler was down to shirtsleeves after an hour more of briefing Alan, revealing wide yellow suspenders to go with his yellow-on-beige striped shirt. His tie looked like heavy embroidery, also brown and yellow with flecks of green. He made Alan feel dowdy, even in uniform.

“Uh, what will you be wearing in Jakarta?” Alan said.

Triffler looked startled. He spread his arms as if to say, These. “Work clothes,” he said. He looked more than a little like a model in GQ.

“I thought I’d wear jeans.”

Triffler coasted over that by saying they weren’t going undercover, so there was no need to think of disguise. “We’re just two guys who happen to work for the Navy, having a look around Jakarta. In and out in two days. One suit, one wrinkle-free blazer, two neckties, four shirts.”

“And blue jeans.”

Triffler looked at Alan’s uniform, then his shirt, then his polyester tie, and apparently decided to say nothing. He got them both coffee—great coffee, because he was also obsessive about that—and sat again at his uncluttered desk. “You go in,” he said. “Normally, you’d have watchers. This time, only me. No problem; there’s nothing to watch. You do a route to a cannon, or whatever it is where you leave the mark. If we thought the plan was active, we’d have a team to watch the mark to see who picks up on it, but not ap, right? You get a good night’s sleep, we rendezvous—telephone codes to come, so you know where and when—and you go to make the meeting, which is in something called the—I had it a moment ago—”

“The Orchid House.”

“Right! You’re way ahead of me. In some sort of park—theme park? Something. So, you go there, and you walk the route in the comm plan—this is so the other side can look at you if need be; their guy is walking a route, too, in theory, and we’d have a team to watch, but we don’t and won’t—and you go into this Orchid House and walk to, quote, ‘bench by curved path, west side,’ where, at ten minutes after the hour at three stated times of day precisely there would be some guy waiting for you if this was an active plan. Which it ain’t.”

“What if it is?”

“It isn’t; we have Reichsführer Dukas’s word on it.”

“Yeah, but just suppose—what if?”

“You say your recognition words and he says his, some b.s. about a Christmas party, and then you look at each other and wonder what the hell comes next.”

“‘Hi, my name is Al, and I’ll be your waiter this evening?’”

“Try ‘What have you got for me?’ At least that sounds as if you know what you’re doing.” Triffler closed the folder and slapped his hand on it. “Won’t happen. In and out in two days, home again to the rapturous applause of Mike Dukas.”

“Ha, ha,” said the voice from the other side.

“Okay.” Alan grinned. “Now what do we do?”

“Now we go over it again, and then you memorize the codes and the greetings and the route, and then we go over it again, and then we go over it.”

“Not really.”

Triffler sighed. “Really. You thought signing EM orders was tedious? Try spying.”

Jakarta.

Jerry Piat had half a dozen places in Jakarta where he stayed when he made a trip there, places he’d come to like over the years and felt comfortable in. Only one had any class; only one was really a dump. The others were modest little hotels where low-end tourist agents put groups that were doing Asia on the cheap. He had kicked around the East long enough that he spoke the languages and didn’t require a blocksquare chunk of America to sleep in, and he liked the strange mix of comfort and oddness that the places gave him.

The Barong Palas had been built by a Dutch exporter as his city house in the nineteenth century; when the Dutch left after World War II, it had become a whorehouse, then a clutter of ground-floor shops with a squat in the upper floors, and finally a hotel, when an energetic Indonesian woman had bought it and kicked everybody out. It still looked Dutch—a stair-step roof, a certain overweight look to the cornices and lintels—but inside it was immaculate, slightly threadbare, secure. They locked the doors at twelve, required that guests pick up and drop off a key each time they went in or out, and paid their own knife-toting guards to patrol the gardens that surrounded it.

Now Jerry woke to one of its bedrooms. The room wasn’t much because the hotel—only twenty rooms in all—was full of a Korean gourmet club. He didn’t remember that, at first. His hangover was intense—familiar but awful: a headache like an axe in the skull, a swelling of the eyes, a nausea that became vertigo if he moved. Then he remembered where he was and what he had done last night—the bars, Hilda, the call to Bobby Li—and he sat up and let the full awfulness of the hangover grip him like a fist.

“Nobody ever died of a hangover,” he said aloud, a man who had suffered thousands. In fact, he thought that people probably had died of hangovers, but not this one, which he would classify as a Force Four, severe but not fatal. Nothing would help, he knew; showers and coffee and deep breathing were for amateurs. He dressed and headed out.

The code he had given Bobby Li, “Papa John’s,” meant a corner by a taxi rank opposite the Import-Export Bank, at ten minutes after seven in the morning, ten after nine, and ten after four in the afternoon. He had already missed the seven-ten. Bobby would have been there, he knew, waited for three minutes, pretending to read a newspaper, and walked away. Jerry felt guilty.

Not professional, missing a meeting time.

He walked slowly, balancing the hangover on his head. He stopped in a sushi bar and had two sea-urchin-egg sushis, supposed to be good for his condition. The green tea seemed to help. Four aspirin from a corner vendor helped still more, and each stop let him check his back trail and see that nobody was following. He then stepped abruptly to the street and pushed himself into a cab that two Indonesians were just leaving, then wove through central Jakarta and got out three blocks from the Import-Export Bank. At nine-ten, he was fifty feet from the taxi rank.

Bobby Li was there.

Jerry got into a cab and told the driver to go slowly. After a block, he looked back; another cab was following.

“Fantasy Island Park,” he told his driver. When they got there, the other cab was still behind. He’d noted nobody else. He had the driver go three blocks beyond the park, and he got out; the other taxi pulled up and Bobby Li got out and followed Jerry to the park entrance without acknowledgment.

“Hey, bud,” Jerry said when he was standing in the shade of the ornate gate. Bobby Li smiled. Bobby was a smiler, one reason he still seemed like a teenager to Piat, that and his small size.

“Hey, Andy,” Bobby said. He was pathetically happy to see him.

“Come on, bud, I’ll show you where the ping-pong’s going to be.” They went into the park, which was an old-fashioned fun park crossed with a somewhat corny cultural display, none of it terribly well maintained. The centerpiece, however, was a world-class collection of orchids.

“Been here before?” Jerry said.

“I bring the kids.”

“How’re the kids?”

“Good.” A big smile. “The boy is bigger than me. Fifteen now.”

“The wife?”

“She okay. Working hard.” The Lis didn’t make a lot of money, Jerry knew. Bobby had a small business, buying and selling exotic bird skins. Jerry, in fact, had set him up in it, persuading the CIA that it was worth the investment to have an agent with decent cover and an income. It amused him that Bobby was a feather merchant, the old term for a bullshitter. Amused him because that was the last thing Bobby could be.

“How’s the business?”

“Pretty good. Lot of problems, CITES, that stuff.” He waved a hand. “Big companies cutting all the forest everyplace, no birds.”

Jerry led them to a kiosk where ethnic dancers performed several times a day. The kiosk was white, glaring in the sunlight, empty plastic chairs around it for the audience. He nodded his head toward it. “Our man is going to walk in the gate and sit here—that’s in his comm plan.” Bobby took it in but didn’t ask any questions. Agents got told what they needed to know, nothing more. “I’ll give you a photo of him. You get a guy who’ll sit here and check him out. I want him checked for guns, wire, walkie-talkie—anything. Has to be visual—can’t touch him. Maybe bump him once when the crowd’s moving, but they got to be careful, because if it’s the guy I expect, he’s a pro and he’ll know what’s up.” The guy he expected was Dukas. Dukas was the one who would get the file; Dukas was the special agent. It wouldn’t be Craik, who was Navy and would be off saving the world someplace. If Jerry’s luck was bad, it would be merely some NCIS nobody that Dukas had got to come over from Manila, and then the whole plan would have to be shit-canned. That was one reason it was a bad plan, as Jerry had pointed out to both Suter and Helmer.

He dug out a photograph of Dukas that he’d lifted from an old Agency file. “That’s him.” The picture was ten years old, and Dukas looked tough and overweight. Jerry had looked for a photo of Craik but had dug up only a useless old group photo from a squadron book in which he looked about fifteen.