Night Trap. Gordon Kent

      GORDON KENT

      NIGHT TRAP

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Dedication

1

2

3

4

5

6

       7

       8

       9

       10

       11

       12

       13

       14

       15

       16

       17

       18

       19

       20

       21

       22

       23

       24

       25

       26

       27

       28

       29

       30

       About the Author

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       Dedication

      To our shipmates and squadron-mates, who will know the facts from the fictions.

       1

      14 March 1990. 2137 Zulu. Amsterdam.

      He was only a small man in a dark raincoat. He wore glasses, speckled now with raindrops. A minor bureaucrat, you would have said. Nobody. Completely forgettable.

      He turned into a wet little pocket park and followed the lighted path for twenty meters and then turned away into the darkness on a set of log steps that climbed steeply behind rhododendrons. At the top was room enough for two or three people who could, if they wanted, look at the Amsterdam skyline, or, if they looked down, watch the heads of people on the path below—if there had been any people.

      He watched the path. After three minutes, a woman appeared. She had entered from the other direction and was coming slowly along through the pools of light, moving with the rolling caution of pregnancy. He watched her, watched behind her, then slipped down through the wet bushes and was beside her.

      The woman, startled, swayed back, then seemed to recognize him and to pull herself in, as if protecting herself or her child. He spoke rapidly, very low; he might have been selling her something useful but not interesting—insurance, perhaps. She chewed her upper lip, messing the too-red lipstick.

      Traffic hummed beyond the park, but here in the rain there were only the two of them, and they might as well have been in the privacy of a locked room for all the attention they drew.

      The man asks her something. He seems urgent.

      She shakes her head.

       He says two or three words. His body is stiffer. What has he said: Are you sure? You won’t? We can’t?

      She shakes her head more quickly and tries to pull away.

      He took his right hand from his raincoat pocket and slashed her throat from side to side, and she fell back on the black asphalt, her red blood pumping out and spreading into a puddle of water that lay like ink.

      The man walked away.

      Seven minutes later, he was in a taxi. He took a white card from his gray pocket, found a black pen and with it made a mark beside the first of four names on a list. A small minus sign.

      2247 Zulu. Mid-Atlantic.

      “Spy?”

      “Huh? Yes, Rafe?”

      “Remember we’re in EMCON, and stay shut down for Christ’s sake until I give the word, got it?”

      “Yeah, yeah, I know.”

      Alan Craik glanced aside at the SENSO, a senior chief so good at his craft that Alan felt like a kid with him. Alan always wanted to ask him a kid’s questions—How do you know that? How do you do that? How, why, why, but—? He was a kid, he thought miserably, a beginner among men made mature by their skills.

      “Goin’ for a ride,” Rafe said. The elaborate casualness, the cowboy intonation, was what Alan didn’t have, at once both real coolness and overdone, flyboy bravado.

      Alan’s