Hostile Contact. Gordon Kent

at the other, a wall of white plastic crates between them, no sound but the building around them—footsteps, unclear voices—and the click of the computer keys.

      And then the telephone rang.

      “Dukas?”

      Not a woman’s voice. Not Sally Baranowski. A man’s voice he recognized. “Hey, Carl.”

      “Long time no talk.”

      Dukas cast his mind back. Only a month—just before he’d taken off for Pakistan. Carl Menzes had been in a rage at him then, had called him every bad name he knew, because he had believed that Dukas had blown the investigation of the very spy, George Shreed, that Dukas had then caught up with in Pakistan. “Still mad, Carl?” He wrote “Menzes” on a Post-it and slipped it through the crates to Alan.

      “Nah.” Menzes laughed, a laugh that sounded honest to Dukas. In fact, he liked Menzes, who was a straightarrow guy, a real fighter in the CIA’s Internal Affairs Division. “How’s the injury?”

      “I can’t scratch my dandruff yet, but I’m healing.”

      “Lot of people think you can do no wrong, Mike.”

      “Yeah, fucking hero. In fact, what I hear is, the Crystal Palace thinks we made a huge mistake. What’s up?”

      “We’re sending you some of the paperwork you asked for.”

      Dukas was instantly on guard. “My experience is, you guys wouldn’t toss a used rubber this way. And I didn’t ‘ask’ for it; I got a court order for it. What happened, Legal Affairs decided that ten percent compliance would string it out for another six months?”

      “Hey, Mike—! We’re doing our best to satisfy you, okay?”

      “Oh, yeah,” Dukas said. “Oh, yeah.”

      “I was trying to be helpful.” Menzes’s voice was cold, and a few seconds later he hung up.

      Dukas looked across at Alan. “They’re throwing me a bone. Big deal.”

      “Shreed stuff?”

      “Worse—Suter.” Ray Suter had been Shreed’s assistant at the Agency, a one-hundred-percent bastard who had got arrested when Shreed had fled the country. “Suter hacked into Shreed’s computers; he’s supposed to have killed some guy who helped him; he’s deep into Shreed’s business, and the Agency’s got him someplace and won’t let me near him. I’ve gone to court to get anything and everything that Suter had his hands on when Shreed went down.” He made a face as if he smelled something bad. “So now they’re sending something over. Oh, yeah.”

      At eleven, a Navy rating showed up at Dukas’s door with a dolly and a wooden crate the size of a refrigerator.

      “Messenger service,” the rating said. “He could only come as far as the loading dock. Where you want it, sir?”

      Dukas looked at the signature sheet and the labels and signed for it. Classified, secure, CIA origin. When the rating was gone, Dukas closed his door and growled, “Ten to one it’s a bag of shit.” Dukas was at his telephone then, trying to get somebody with a wrecking bar to come open the crate.

      “Must hold a lot of stuff.”

      Dukas made a face. “Probably a collection of Suter’s old jockstraps. You ask for everything, they generously extrude one item after a month’s delay. You can bet this is whatever the Agency people thought was least useful.”

      What the crate proved to contain was a case file. “Case file” implied a folder, something small, but this was folder after folder, pounds and pounds of paper. There was a cover letter to say that it was one case, sent in response to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service request of—etcetera, etcetera. Dukas and Alan peered in.

      “Jesus,” Alan said. “This is all one case?”

      “Wait until you see what the Shreed case looks like when it’s done.” Dukas shrugged himself out of the Bugs Bunny rig and reached into the crate. “If it’s ever done. Old cases never die, and they don’t just fade away.” He pulled out a folder. “Well, let’s see what we got.”

      Alan started to look in one of the folders, and Dukas said that they should go about it in an organized way, which was to find the inventory folder and the summary folder and get some idea of what the hell the thing was. The summary was at the bottom, of course, and it was only when they had covered the desk belonging to his absent assistant, Dick Triffler, as well as his coffee table and all the chairs, that they found it, and then Dukas sat at his desk and Alan leaned over him from behind, his hand with the missing fingers supporting him on the desktop—the first time since the shooting that he’d forgotten the hand enough to let somebody else see it up close.

      “Radio transmissions,” Dukas said, reading. “‘Burst transmissions of unknown origin—northwestern North America—’ What the hell has this got to do with that shit Suter?” He looked up at Alan. “Can I turn the page?”

      “I’ve been waiting.” Alan grinned.

      “Speed-reader, great. Okay—‘detected by National Security Administration—’ I thought this was an Agency case, what the hell? Where’s the inventory? Where’s the document history?” Dukas began to burrow as Alan read on. When Dukas came back, he had a red folder and a green one, both stamped “Top Secret,” and he fell into his chair and opened the red folder. “Okay, yeah—NSA started it and got zip and booted it to the FBI, who made it a case and apparently sat on it for five years. Then they booted it to the Agency—some great case, it’s been through three other agencies and nobody’s found out diddly-squat. Oh, swell—here’s why they broke down and sent it to me—signed out to Ray Suter two days before Shreed took off for Pakistan. Jee-sus H. Christ, he didn’t have it long enough to read the fucking summary. What’d you learn while I was slaving in the folder piles?”

      “That it’s a case that nobody’s solved in nine years. Your big chance, Mike.”

      Dukas sighed. “I was hoping I’d get something I could, you know, at least use to tie Suter to the Shreed investigation.” He threw down the red folder and opened the green one. “Oh, ow,” he said. “Ow, ouch, oh, shit—radio interference reports up the wazoo! Ouch. ‘Frequency Analysis Tables 1.1 through 1.17.’ Oh, shit.” He sighed. His right index finger ran down the page and he muttered, “Radio, radio…interview, interview, interview—” He looked through the wall of crates at the stacks of folders and growled, “They’ve dicked me.”

      And Alan said, “What’s that?”

      He had reached over Dukas’s shoulder and turned up the next page so he could read ahead.

      “What’s what?”

      Alan turned the page all the way over. “‘Communications Plan, Jakarta, Indonesia.’”

      Dukas looked at the entry. “Jakarta, Jesus. That’s a long way from northwestern North America.”

      “Kind of jumps out at you, doesn’t it.”

      Dukas wrote the ID number down on another Post-it and went around the wall of plastic crates and started going through the folders once again. He came back with a slender folder in a white cover with “Top Secret” and “Eyes Only” and “Eurydice” on the front. “You’re not supposed to see this,” he said.

      “What’s Eurydice?”

      “It’s a classification group, which you’re not supposed to know about, so don’t ask.” He sat down again and opened the folder.

      “Holy shit,” Alan said. “It is a comm plan for Jakarta.” He looked over his shoulder. “What’s Jakarta got to do with the northwest?”

      “More to the point, what’s it got to do with Ray Suter?” Dukas wrinkled his nose. “I smell an analyst at work.” He opened the folder on his desk, pressing the fold with the flat of his right