Hostile Contact. Gordon Kent

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