Hostile Contact. Gordon Kent

the comm plan—

      He couldn’t let himself be sucked toward that. Any direction but that. Think of something else.

      He’d lifted this old, dead comm plan out of the Canceled file and had laid it on Dukas because it was dead, because nobody else could know about it, because it had been Shreed’s creation and therefore beautifully ironic—Shreed striking back from the grave—and therefore it was a safe hunk of bait to lure Dukas into a trap. But somehow the Chinese had known about it and had shown up and had started shooting.

      Part of his brain kept picking at the problem of how they could have known, and it was saying, People know about comm plans because they’ve either stolen them or been given them, and, because this was a George Shreed comm plan—But another part of his brain, the part that loved the late George Shreed, was saying, Don’t go there.

      Piat sipped and admitted to himself that he wasn’t going to tell Suter and Helmer the truth. Nothing had happened in the Orchid House, he’d say; he hadn’t tried to kill Craik and failed. There hadn’t been any Chinese.

      Think about Bobby Li, he told himself. Where the hell is he?

      He changed taxis and directed the driver out to an old temple that stood on the edge of a colossal industrial park that was once going to make somebody fantastically rich and that had gone belly-up like the rest of Indonesia in the nineties. Nature was vengeful in Indonesia: give it a chance to take something back, and Nature moved fast. The industrial park looked now like a Mayan ruin, with small trees growing out of windows, and wild pigs running around the decaying roads.

      Across the road from the old temple was a cookshed. One old woman had a fire and a pot and a “cooler” full of water with cans of soda in it. You could get a really cheap lunch there, with a case of the shits thrown in for nothing. It was his and Bobby’s last-stand, desperation, no-fallback dead drop.

      “Package for Mister Brown?” he said. He held up an American five.

      “Ten dolla.” Prices had gone up.

      He handed over a ten and, wonder of wonders, she fished out a brown envelope with a bulge in it. Inside was a plastic canister with a roll of film. That little sonofabitch! He took back his doubts about Bobby.

      A piece of paper was in the canister with the film. One word had been scrawled on it: Scared.

      It made Piat smile.

      He wrapped three American hundreds into a tight roll and stuffed them into the canister and put the canister back into the envelope with the piece of paper, on which he had written, “I’ll be back.”

      “Give to Mister Black when he comes, okay, Mama?”

      “Ten dolla.”

      Piat headed for the airport.

      

      Dar es Salaam.

      Two hours later than he had demanded, as Lao was smoking and staring at the wall, his stomach seething, the photos came through from Jakarta. They were not particularly clear, but one was clear enough for him to see that Bobby Li had been close to both Qiu, the dead man, and the Caucasian. Too close. Had he spoiled the meeting?

      Lao tried to see the logic of such a thing. He had sent a case officer to Jakarta to run things, and he had got killed; and he had sent Chen’s old agent, Li, to identify Chen or Shreed if either showed at the meeting, and—and Li had then intruded on the meeting that was detailed in American Go. Doing so was far beyond the responsibility of an agent. It was a kind of hubris. Had Li thought that Lao wouldn’t know?

      Or had he had some other, more important agenda? Had he wanted to eavesdrop? But why?

      Li’s action suggested another set of orders, because Li, in Lao’s experience, was an insecure man who always needed orders: the only things he did on his own were acts of desperation. So, who else might be giving him orders? The question chilled Lao because it came from the ice of a case officer’s worst fear—that his agent was a double. This led to a second, colder question: double agent for whom? He couldn’t forget that Li had been Chen’s agent.

      He shook his head. He didn’t believe in the game of mirrors. He ground out his cigarette and called in Jiang, an aging captain with a good bureaucrat’s sense of how to get things done. Lao brought up on the computer screen a photograph of the Westerner leaving the Orchid House. “I want to know who that Westerner is. He was in Jakarta two hours ago: check the manifests of flights in and out for five days back and the outgoing from now on; I have a suspicion he will leave Jakarta soon. Check with embassy security in Jakarta; one of their people followed an American, maybe this man, to a hotel. Get a name if you can. Then check the hotels for Americans who were there yesterday and today. Ask if they have been asking for directions to Fatahillah Square and the Orchid House in the minipark.” He squinted at the screen. “This man was probably with somebody else—up to four others, maybe. A counter-surveillance team. Maybe traveling together, but not necessarily.” He lit another cigarette. “Then get on to the Jakarta police and find out if they have any reports on an incident at the Orchid House this morning.”

      The captain gave a forward jerk that suggested a bow. Both were in civilian clothes; military etiquette did not seem quite right.

      “I am going home for lunch,” Lao said. It was, in fact, only nine in the morning. The captain’s face was impassive.

      Lao drove to his rented house in a suburb where most of the diplomatic community lived (not so with most of his Chinese colleagues, who huddled around the embassy), kissed his wife, American-style, and responded to her questions about his day, then put his finger to his lips as he led her to the bedroom. The house was bugged; the phone was bugged; she had years ago given up trying to know how his days really were. Yet they had great affection for each other, despite their arranged marriage and his profession and its conditions. Sometimes, she knew, he came to her like this to make love when he wanted to make his mind a blank.

      Lao wished he could talk about his problems to her. Or perhaps not. She might say, as she had once when they were test-driving a new car in Beijing and nobody could possibly have been listening, “Don’t you ever dream of living like other people?”

       8

      Washington.

      Rose met her husband at Dulles airport. His embrace was hard, quick, eager. He looked worn out. “Jakarta was a bust,” he said as he settled in the car.

      “I thought it was supposed to be a walk in the park.”

      He folded his arms and sank lower in the passenger seat. “The case isn’t what we thought.”

      “Mike should have his ass hauled for sending you.” Rose accelerated to get into the traffic heading toward Washington.

      He looked out the window. A deer was standing by the side of the six-lane highway. He frowned. “I wasn’t very good out there.” He flexed his bad hand. “I’ll tell you the worst of it up front: there was shooting; a guy was killed; I got out by the skin of my teeth.”

      She gasped, bit back some comment. “I’m just glad you’re home.” She put her hand on his.

      “Everything went wrong,” he said. “Triffler never got there, one goddam thing after another.”

      “What happened?”

      “Everything.” He turned his hand over—the bad one—and squeezed her fingers. “‘This time, Amelican Fryboy, you make big mistake!’”

      It had started to rain. He stared out the side window again, dimly seeing his own reflection, hers. He put his hand, the bad one, on her thigh, and she covered it with her own. “It was great to be doing something, though,” he said.

      To his astonishment, she laughed. “You’re going to be doing a lot.”