Hostile Contact. Gordon Kent

to help him.

      A minute later, the boy stopped in a gang identical to the last, carpeted in the same bright trash that reeked of rotten fish.

      “Here, Mister. What we do here? You buy batik? This not a good place for batik.”

      Alan looked at the wretched row of shops, each offering its own batik and some of the “cap” cloth that every tourist seemed to want. Alan couldn’t see Rose in “cap.”

      In Washington, Triffler had told him that every stop would “make sense.” “These things have to have a logic of their own, Alan,” he had said. “We depend on that logic to look natural.” Alan saluted him, mentally. I look like a natural lost tourist. To keep his cover, he pointed at a piece of cloth slightly less repulsive than the others and nodded at the price.

      “He ripping you off,” his guide said, turning on the merchant. The exchange went on and on, getting louder and shriller; and then, suddenly, everyone smiled and Alan got a pile of cash back—too much, he thought, but the transaction seemed to have satisfied all parties.

      “Now I want this one.” Alan pointed at the next destination on the list, marked “Fish Market.”

      “Okay.” And they were off, Alan almost running to keep up, his batik (or cap, he couldn’t tell) clutched under one arm.

      It certainly smelled like a fish market. This one he had checked out on the Internet—supposedly the oldest part of the city, with some parts dating to the fourteenth century. What was he supposed to do, buy some squid? He walked about for a few minutes, followed by the boy. The fishmongers shouted at him and each other, and he was reminded of his first visit to Africa and how alien it had all seemed. Jakarta was alien, too—almost more alien, with a sturdy structure of the ultra-modern, hung with a great deal of African-style poverty.

      Beyond the fish market were boats, old sailing boats with brightly colored hulls and sharply raked bows and masts, and he moved toward them without really thinking. The boy followed, incurious, and Alan walked along the pier, threading through the piles of nets and watching them being mended in much the same way that nets were mended in Mombasa and in Gloucester, Massachusetts. The ocean didn’t seem alien. He felt as if he had his feet under him, and he smiled at the boy.

      “You plan a hash run? That why you walk everywhere, Mister?”

      Hash runs—long cross-city races over a course marked by hash marks—were a feature of expat life from Bahrain to Mombasa. Alan had run a few and had helped mark one, and he smiled at the boy, thankful for a better cover story than any he had been able to concoct.

      “Fatahillah Square.”

      Now for the real thing. Or the thing that probably meant nothing but might lead to something real. What Triffler called the “operational act.” As if this were some espionage performance art.

      Alan crossed the square under the full weight of the sun and went to the gun, which had been here since the seventeenth century, had been loaded and used to keep surrendering Japanese from resisting in 1945, and now seemed to be the city’s leading fertility shrine. Si Jagur was the site he was to mark, the target set for him from the first meeting with Triffler and Dukas in Maryland.

      He needed to get rid of the boy.

      “Coke?” he said, miming unnecessarily to his guide. The boy stuck out a hand and Alan gave him some small colored bills. The boy vanished, and Alan walked up through a crowd of women, many of breathtaking beauty, to run his hands over the rims of the wheels on the old cannon. He touched it as if he were measuring it, as tourists often do, and many of the women giggled to see a man in such intimate contact with the old monster; things were said that might have made him blush or worse, and the older women didn’t hesitate to suggest that men often had their own failings.

      This part he did well. He seemed no more interested than any Bule tourist, but when he moved back to the boy and his two lukewarm Cokes, he had left a white mark shaped like a Q high on the rim of the wheel.

      Game on.

      But as he picked his way back toward his hotel, he thought, I’ll like it better when Triffler gets here.

      Bobby Li walked along the north side of Fatahillah Square, looking at nothing, moving purposefully toward his next business appointment—at least as far as a watcher would see. This was the third day he had walked through Fatahillah Square. When he came parallel to the ancient cannon, he stopped, covered his look at the cannon by glaring at a little girl who tried to beg, and moved off again, his head down, his stride again purposeful.

      In fact, his glance had caught the mark, high on the wheel of the gun, and his heart was pounding because it was too soon—he hadn’t been able to get a stun grenade; Andy was drinking a lot and Bobby wasn’t sure of him; and he was nervous about actually getting the ragtag team together so fast. Still, he walked on, planning the moves that would take him to another place to leave his own mark to tell Andy about the mark on the cannon. And then Andy would call him. And then tomorrow morning, they’d go to the Orchid House and—

      For George.

      No reason to bring his Chinese loyalty into it.

      

      Filomeno Hamanasatra was an aged Chinese agent who had no duties any more except to monitor three out-of-date, probably dead, communications sites. He walked his dog past them, proudly, even defiantly, because most of his neighbors were Muslims and had little regard for dogs. Mister Hamanasatra was a Christian—well, nominally a Christian, certainly culturally a Christian, inwardly somewhat contemptuous of belief itself—but he loved the presence of the animal and never stopped wondering at the mystery of communication, even affection, between the two different species, his and the animal’s. The dog was a cairn terrier, the only one in Jakarta, and, although it suffered from the heat, he walked it every afternoon and then returned it to the air-conditioned coolness of his flat.

      Once a week, Mister Hamanasatra walked the cairn to Fatahillah Square. Faithful in his duty, he glanced each time at the wheels of Si Jagur, admiring when he could the women congregated there, and then, seeing nothing on the wheels, moving on.

      Today, however, as he glanced at a lovely woman who was probably barely in her teens, and, because he never stopped walking but kept moving so that nobody would think his visit unusual, he was almost past the great gun before he looked down again at it and saw that a mark had been made on a wheel with white chalk. And, yes, the mark looked like a letter Q with an extra bar through the pig’s tail that curled down to the right.

      Remarkable!

      Mister Hamanasatra’s aging heart beat a good deal faster. He had seen a mark on the wheel only three times in all the years he had been paid to watch it. He was a romantic: he made up scenarios, stories, of what messages, what events, that mark symbolized. Now, he was so excited that he walked faster, almost dragging the dog, and it balked, sat, scratched, looked at him accusingly.

      “Well, well,” Mister Hamanasatra said. He scratched the terrier’s ears. He walked more slowly to the far side of the square and then, because he wanted to “make assurance double sure” (Macbeth, a particular favorite), he walked the dog back past Si Jagur and the women and checked again to make sure, double sure, that the mark was there and that it was really the correct mark and not something a child had done at play.

      Then he walked home through the deafening traffic noise and, safe inside his flat, he called a number on his cell phone and said that Vidia had a message from Lakme. Had they got that? Yes, they had.

      That was all he did. A widower, retired, he had little else to do, but at least, that evening, he could stare out a window with the dog in his lap and dream of where his message was going and what it meant.

      

      “Shit!” Jerry Piat said.

      He had just heard from Bobby Li that the mark was on the cannon in Fatahillah Square.

      That raging prick Ray Suter had been right—Dukas had glommed on to the comm plan first crack