Hostile Contact. Gordon Kent

was on the right side. On the left, on top, was a sheet that said simply, “No action recommended.” Below it were several sheets with long numbers at the top. On the top sheet, however, a different hand had written in pencil, “Follow this up—S?”

      “Suter’s writing?” Alan said.

      “Beats me; I don’t even have a sample of that. ‘Follow this up—S, question mark.’ S for Suter? S for Shreed? S for shit?” He made a farting noise with his lips and tongue.

      “Yeah, but Mike, at least Suter had it. So why did Suter have it? You say he was into Shreed’s business—what was he looking for? Maybe this is something you can run with, after all.” Alan began to turn the pages of the analyst’s report. “Doesn’t seem to be all there,” he said.

      “It wouldn’t be. The number’s a high one, meaning that this is part of something else. ‘Observation of courier contact site.’ See, this is what caught the analyst’s eye—actually, probably an abstract someplace. Yeah—here on the second page, see—‘The courier is believed to have visited the US, with special relevance for naval facilities in California and the Pacific northwest.’ Aha, says the analyst, that might have a connection—notice the ‘might’; the woman—it’s usually a woman—is reaching; she’s desperate. She gets a copy of the relevant stuff and smacks it into a folder and here it is.”

      “Who wrote the report?”

      “Who knows? Some agent doing his job; he’s busted a comm plan, written it up, turned it over to his case officer, and here it is.” He tapped the comm plan’s several pages of narrative.

      Alan reached over and turned the pages on the left side, reading quickly, then did the same on the right. The paper was slightly brittle, the comm plan itself old enough to have been done on an electric typewriter rather than a computer printer. He lifted the top page on the left again and said, “1993.”

      “A little long in the tooth,” Dukas said.

      “But they never checked it out.”

      Dukas stretched. “So?”

      Alan cocked his head. “Well, somebody, maybe Suter, thought it was worth following up.” His old grin, not seen for a month, partly returned. “Doing something is better than doing nothing—right?”

      Dukas shook his head. “You’re having an idea. I don’t like that.”

      “I just thought somebody could go to Jakarta, check it out—follow it up, like it says here—” He looked like a kid asking for the day off from school.

      

      Jakarta.

      Jerry Piat moved his practiced hand from the bargirl’s neck, over her breasts, down her flat and naked stomach, his hand always light and playful, never heavy or commanding. He hooked a leg under both of hers and rolled them both over so that she was above him, her breasts heavy against him, her long hair a black cloud that smothered him in incense. At least, it smelled like incense.

      He watched her with the detached part of his brain, the part that wouldn’t ever turn off, not when he was fucking, not when he was getting shot at, and that part registered that she was fourteen years old and had a “Hello Kitty” bag for her makeup. She liked him.

      The phone rang. His hand found it, lifted it from the receiver and dropped it back to the cradle. She laughed, happy that she was more important than a Bule (Westerner’s) business call, but Jerry was just following the signal procedure—his agent, Bobby Li, would give him one ring, and then he would go out to a pay phone to talk. It wasn’t exactly Moscow rules, but it was tradecraft, and Jerry was alive and sane where a lot of his peers were either dead or content to run Chinese double agents and lie about their access. Jerry rolled them both over again, still agile at fifty, and kissed her, hard, on the lips, which clearly surprised her.

      Her body was still very much on his mind when he cursed the lift and started down the seven flights of cockroach-infested stairs to the hotel’s lobby. The lobby was clean and neat, but the stairwell’s strong suggestion of urine stayed in his nostrils until the heavy petroleum scent of unleaded car exhaust drove it out as he stepped into the street, still pulling a light jacket over his old silk shirt. The jacket had only one purpose, to hide the bulk of the gun that sat in his shoulder rig. In Jakarta, the only men in jackets were wearing guns, or so Jerry had come to believe during Suharto’s regime. The place looked better now, cleaner, richer, even after the collapse in the nineties.

      He stopped on the street, lit a cigarette from a nifty gas lighter with a serious torchlight that he had picked up at the airport. You could solder with the damn thing, and that could have its uses. Or you could burn someone’s eyes out.

      Two cab rides and three bars later, he was getting ready to make his phone call, on his way to start the process by which he would kill the men who had killed George Shreed.

      One more stop, he told himself. For old time’s sake.

      And, of course, for caution’s sake, because there always just might be that watcher who needed to be convinced that he was bar-crawling and not running an op.

      

      Suburban Virginia.

      Alan greeted his wife at the door with a kiss and a suddenly urgent embrace. She leaned back in his arms and looked at his eyes and saw something that made her grab him and squeeze him hard. They stood there, holding each other, rocking, and she said, “Something good happened, right?”

      He laughed, a sound she hadn’t heard in a while, and he said, “I went to Mike’s office to do some work. He got a new case—it’s interesting, there’s something in it for me, maybe.”

      She was still in her flight suit. She had been out at Pax River, putting in her hours in the T-84 as she transited from choppers to fixed-wing. Holding her, seeing the sudden brightness in her eyes, he understood her misery of the past two weeks, never knowing what she would come home to. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

      “No, no—”

      “Yes, yes.” The dog pushed between them then and they both laughed and he pulled her into the house. “I had to leave Dukas early to get Mikey at school; no problem, but Dukas has this case, this crate of stuff! A case, something they dumped on him from the Agency because they can’t hack it but I think we can; there’s this comm plan in it; it doesn’t make sense, but—I’m babbling, right?”

      She laughed. “Right.” She kissed him. “Keep babbling; it’s nice.”

      “I’m getting dinner.”

      “I smell it. Risotto with white beans, garlic bread, frozen peas, and a salad, right?”

      “I invited Mike for dinner.”

      That took a beat for her to absorb, sobering her, and she smiled too brightly and said, “Great!”

      “To talk about the case,” he said.

      “Great!” She headed for the stairs. “I’ll just change into something glamorous.”

      Half an hour later, Dukas was there with an attaché and a cell phone, which he dumped on the battered coffee table. He kissed Rose. “Hey, Gorgeous, you’re breathtaking.”

      “Did you bring the comm plan?” Alan shouted from the kitchen.

      “Like you asked, yes, yes, yes! I always do what I’m told.” He glanced toward the kitchen and lowered his voice still further. “This okay with you, babe?”

      “If it makes him this cheerful, God, yes!”

      “He’s a little manic,” Dukas murmured.

      “I’ll take manic,” she said. “He’s so down when he’s not in things.”

      Dukas looked toward the kitchen again. “I used to think it was just, you know, type A behavior. But now I realize he always has to be proving something. To himself.”