Hostile Contact. Gordon Kent

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.

      Jerry led Bobby over