Hostile Contact. Gordon Kent

analyst, incipient alcoholic just out of rehab, nice, nice woman. They had almost had something going, and then he had got himself shot and she had got herself rehabilitated, and now, what the hell, what good was any of it? Half-dry, his back still covered with water, he wrapped the wet towel around his gut and stalked out of the bathroom as if he meant to punch somebody out, went to the answering machine and stabbed it with a stiff finger and said to himself, Don’t be a shmuck.

      “Hi, Mike. Hi, this is Sally!” A small laugh. “Baranowski. Remember me? Uh—I just thought I’d call—This is awkward as hell; I thought you’d be there. Goddam machines, you can’t—”

      He switched it off. She must be just out of rehab. How long did rehab take, anyway? Thirty days? He didn’t want to get involved, was the truth. What he wanted was real work, a case, relief from the mindnumbing reports that filled his days. So far, his boss at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service wouldn’t give him a thing; he’d been going into the office for a week, pounding out paperwork, kept out of action. Because he was “awaiting a clean bill of health,” his boss said, which had nothing to do with his health and everything to do with the fact that he’d gone into a foreign country (Pakistan) without a country clearance and without adequate authorization, his boss said, and got himself shot up and had needed to be flown out by a Navy aircraft that was also there illegally. And, what the hell, the fact that they’d caught a major spy seemed to make no difference. And now Kasser, his boss’s boss, wanted to know where the Chinese case officer was. Dukas could see himself spending the rest of his life writing reports related to his trip to Pakistan.

      So, Dukas had said, let me go back to the War Crimes Tribunal, from which he was supposedly on six months’ leave of absence as a favor to NCIS, but his boss had negatived that as “dodging the issue,” whatever the issue was.

      “Shit,” Dukas said.

      And his telephone rang.

      “Dukas,” he growled into it in his early-morning voice.

      “It’s Alan.”

      “Hey, man!” Dukas sounded to himself like a jerk—happy-happy, oh boy, life is great! Trying to cheer Al Craik up because he sounded like shit. “How’s it going, Al?”

      “Get me something to do, Mike. Anything!”

      “That’s a job for your detailer, Al.”

      “My detailer can’t do anything; I’m on medical leave and some genius at Walter Reade wants to disability-discharge me. I’m going nuts, Mike.”

      “Yeah, well—you sleeping?”

      “Sleeping—what’s that? No, I’m not sleeping. I fought with Rose, I shouted at my kid—” His voice got hoarse. “Mike—I’ll do anything to get my mind off myself. Scut work, I don’t care.”

      This was Dukas’s best friend. They had almost died together. They had been wounded together. Dukas’s own helplessness made him somber. “I’m doing scut work myself, kid. Writing reports on what happened in Pakistan, closing the Shreed file.” He sighed. On the other end, Craik made a sound as if he was being wounded all over again, and Dukas, relenting, said, “Come down to the office, what the hell. We can talk, anyway. Okay? Hey, you talk to Harry lately?”

      Alan Craik was slow to answer. He muttered, “I don’t like begging, Mike. But I’m going nuts. Last night, I—Rose and I had a fight, and I—almost—” He didn’t say what he had done. He didn’t have to; the tone of his voice said it all.

      Then Alan snapped back from wherever he was. Mike heard the change.

      “What about Harry?”

      “Tell you later.”

      

      In the Virginia Horse Country.

      A dark Ford Explorer turned into a gap in a wooden fence where a paved drive led away from the two-lane road. There was a line of oaks and more wooden fence along the lane, and up ahead a Colonial Revival house that needed paint. The wooden fence wanted attention, too, and the pasture beyond it was scraggy with tufts of long grass, and a horseman would have known that no animals were being pastured there.

      The Explorer pulled up next to the house and a tall man got out. He waved at somebody by the stable block and trotted up the front steps, nodded at the hefty young man at the front door and said, “Everything okay?”

      “Bor-ing,” the young man said. “He’s upstairs.”

      “I’ll talk to him in the music room.” Balkowitz always talked to Ray Suter in the music room, which had no music but did hold an out-of-tune baby grand that had been pushed against a wall to make room for recording equipment. Balkowitz was a lawyer for the Central Intelligence Agency; the bulky young man was named Hurley and worked for Agency security; the man out at the stable block was a local who took care of the place but wasn’t allowed in the house. And Ray Suter, the man upstairs, had been George Shreed’s assistant and was wanted by various people for murder, conspiracy to commit a felony, espionage, and perhaps corrupting the morals of a minor. The CIA, however, had him stashed away here, and what they wanted him for was information.

      Balkowitz sat on a faded armchair that smelled of its age. He was dressed in jeans and a polo shirt and looked more like a Little League dad than a lawyer. When Suter came in—tall, pale, pinched—Balkowitz got up and waited for Suter to sit. Balkowitz’s manner reflected his Agency’s own ambivalence—polite and stern, unsure and patriarchal. Suter, to judge from his sour smile, knew all about it and rather enjoyed the situation. “You keep trying,” Suter said. “A for effort.”

      “Mister Suter—”

      “Ray.” Suter spread his hands. “We know each other well enough. Call me Ray.”

      “I just want to apprise you of your situation here. Really, you know, if you’d get yourself a lawyer—”

      Suter shook his head. “I don’t need a lawyer.”

      “Your situation is serious.”

      Suter raised his eyebrows. “The food’s good. Hurley plays pretty good tennis. Except for the lack of females, it isn’t bad.”

      “Mister Suter, you’ve been charged in Virginia and Maryland, and we’re holding off federal charges until, until—”

      “Until I talk?” Suter laughed. “Don’t hold your breath.”

      “I just want to impress on you the legal seriousness of—”

      “You say that every time you come. I’ve told you, I think three times now, I’ve got nothing to say. You guys are holding me here without a charge; well, okay, I’m suspended from work, anyway. I assume that you want me to get a lawyer because you think a lawyer would tell me to bargain. But for what? With what?”

      “If we file charges, you face twenty years to life on the federal issues alone.”

      “If you do. Right.” Suter grinned. “Maybe you should file.”

      Balkowitz sniffed and reached into his pocket for a tissue. He was allergic to something in the room. “Mister Suter, we’re holding off the local jurisdictions with some difficulty.” He blew his nose. “Your relations with the young man, Nickie, um, Groski—if you’d be willing to tell us anything there—”

      Nickie Groski was a computer hacker whom Suter had hired to hack into George Shreed’s computers, but Suter hadn’t admitted to a word of that. Instead, he said now, “What would you like to hear?”

      “You were in the boy’s apartment when the police broke in.”

      “I was, yes.” Suter seemed pensive, as if what Balkowitz was saying was a little surprising.

      “You paid the rent on that apartment.”

      “Maybe I felt sorry for him. Or maybe I’m gay. Is he gay?”

      Balkowitz