Hostile Contact. Gordon Kent

      Jerry knew that Dukas would believe that the comm plan was dead. In that situation, you left the mark, you made the meeting site faithfully for a couple of days, and, when nobody showed, you went home and checked the box marked “Deceased.”

      Well, surprise, surprise, Dukas!

      Jerry was still sober because it was only late afternoon. Now he wouldn’t take a drink until it was all over. He began to strip and change into running clothes—a good run, sweat, exertion to work the alcohol poisons out of the muscles, and he’d be ready to go.

      Nonetheless, he wished he’d done a dry run with Bobby’s team.

      The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

      

      NCIS HQ, Washington Navy Yard.

      Mike Dukas had talked to Triffler, who was in Manila waiting for an aircraft to get a hydraulic leak fixed to get him to Jakarta. It was plain that he wouldn’t get there in time for the first window for the meeting in Jakarta, and Dukas didn’t like it. He wanted Triffler with Alan to calm him down, even though nothing was going to happen, nothing could happen, and the comm plan was strictly what scientists called a chemical stomach.

      Dukas sat in his office, one hand on the telephone, wondering if he should call Alan at his hotel. Bad move—insecure phone. Around him, on every flat surface—chairs, desk, file cabinets, computer—were folders from the Sleeping Dog case file. Two days into them, Dukas was bewildered by technical radio jargon and bored by old reports about the futility of an investigation that had gone nowhere. He had read nothing that caused him to worry about Al Craik in Jakarta, and yet—

      He took his hand off the telephone and glanced at his watch. Ten-thirty-seven a.m. Meaning that it was ten-thirty-seven p.m. in Jakarta. If Alan had any sense, he had waited for Triffler to arrive before he left the mark on the cannon. Alan had good sense, Dukas knew, lots of good sense—but not always when it came to action. So maybe he had already left the mark, and the clock would start ticking, and tomorrow morning—tonight in Washington—he’d make his first trip to the Orchid House.

      And nothing would happen.

      Would it?

      Dukas told himself that he was suffering case-officer jitters. You sent somebody out, he fell off the face of the earth as far as you were concerned, of course you questioned what you were doing. Imagined worst-case scenarios. So what was the worst case here? Dukas frowned. What could possibly be the worst case with an old comm plan that had been unused for seven years? Your man walked into the Orchid House and—

      Dukas picked up a folder and got ready to read. He even took out the reading glasses they’d given him at his last physical and that he never used, except that now he was reading all day, day after day, and his eyes felt like hot bullets that had been superglued into their sockets. He started to read about alternative explanations for radio bursts that NSA thought they had detected in western Canada. The prose made him groan. Solar flares! Shifting magnetic fields!

      Dukas stared at the telephone. Something was bugging him, and he knew that the something was partly Alan’s mission in Jakarta, but only partly; some of it was this goddamned case itself.

      “It smells,” he said out loud. The smell wasn’t strong, and it wasn’t bad, but it was there. Dukas actually put his nose down and sniffed the pages in front of him. The odor was slightly musty, slightly dry and woody. Papery. Dukas thought of some storage site in Maryland or Virginia, somewhere secure but unknown to most people at Langley, a dead end for old Agency folders.

      He got up and walked along the corridor and swung into another office, one hand low on the doorway to support himself without stressing his injury. “Hey, Brackman,” he said.

      “Yoh.” An overweight black man was tapping a computer keyboard. He didn’t look away from the screen.

      “How long has the CIA been using computers?”

      “Long time, some of them; no time, a lot of them. Computer illiterates, lot of them.”

      “They still doing files on paper in, say, ninety-seven?”

      Brackman turned away from the screen and focused on a half-eaten Devil Dog. “Some of the holdouts, sure.” He ate the Devil Dog. “Very conservative place.”

      Dukas walked back to his office, poured himself coffee from Triffler’s machine, and sat on his desk, one hand on the telephone and a look on his face as if some source of deep dissatisfaction had been tapped. He fiddled his fingers on the telephone. He chewed his upper lip with his lower teeth. He made a sound with his tongue and the roof of his mouth, Tt-Tt-Tt. He picked up the phone and hit a button and said, “Find out how I get a Nav pilot who’s flying out of Pax River. Call me back.”

      Ten minutes later, the phone rang. He’d done nothing more with the folders in that time but had sat at his desk, staring at the wall. “Okay.” He scribbled a number. “Thanks.” He called and was put on to a duty officer who told him that Commander Rose Siciliano was in the air but expected back before lunch. Dukas left a message that she should call him, and then he went back to the folders and slogged; when she called at eleven-fifty, he was sighing and groaning, and the first thing he had to do was reassure Rose that he wasn’t calling about Alan—nothing had happened, everything was fine, there was no news. “What I want you to do is invite Sally Baranowski to dinner,” he said.

      “You still haven’t called her?” Rose snapped.

      “I’ve been busy, babe, plus—you know—”

      “You want me to be there so you won’t be on the spot, right?”

      Dukas sighed again. “This isn’t what you think.”

      “Oh, right.”

      “It’s sort of business.”

      “Funny business.”

      “No—damn it, babe—it has to do with the case.”

      “Alan’s case?”

      “Yeah.”

      That was different, she said. She’d invite Baranowski, although she wasn’t really running a restaurant. Tonight would be fine, although she’d planned to have a night alone with her kids and then wash her hair. Anything for you, Mike, you coward.

      “Six?” he said.

      “Six-thirty, and bring some wine and a dessert.”

      Dukas had a pizza sent in for his lunch, and at one, unable to control his jitters, he decided to call Alan in Jakarta, and then he decided he couldn’t.

      

      Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

      Colonel Lao was a day back from Pakistan when the message about the mark in Jakarta came. He was supposed to be an advisor on urban-rural relations, a subject in fact in which he had a good deal of knowledge (his training to be an intelligence chief at a foreign station had been excellent), but one that bored him. He had spent part of the day at a village forty miles from Dar, watching a performance of the Chinese-sponsored theatre-for-development troupe’s Hope is the Village, a play that seemed to him small return for six weeks of work and a good deal of Chinese money. By the time he got back to the office, the message had been on his desk for two hours. It had been rerouted from Beijing, re-encrypted, received and logged at the embassy in Dar, then marked “Most Urgent” and hand-carried to his desk, where it had sat.

      Lao looked down at the sealed envelope. What is the use of all the secrecy and all the hurry if I am out wasting my time in a muddy village? he wondered. He ripped open the envelope, found himself angered by an inner envelope and its stamps—“Most Urgent!” “Most Secret!” “Unauthorized Persons DO NOT OPEN!”—and ripped it so savagely that he tore part of the flimsy sheet inside. However, nothing was seriously damaged, and he saw that the message within had the class mark Wealthy Songbird, meaning that it had to do with the frightening but glorious task he had been given—finding