Top Hook. Gordon Kent

lips parted. But it was her eyes that spoke, sliding aside to look at the CD player. Then back at him. The eyes of a girl, hip and wise.

      He got it. Der Rosenkavalier. He pushed the Repeat button. A few notes, and Schwarzkopf’s voice climbed out of the box and filled the room. It was loud, too loud for him to talk. Seeing her eyes, he couldn’t turn the volume down. He could only sit with her, listening.

      He sat beside her, and her eyes closed. The music, lush as cream, swirled.

      He touched her hand. It was wax. The music spiraled up, the duet, the two sopranos, glory. Then silence.

      “Janey?” Now he felt his own desire again, his own urgency. “Forgive me!”

      But the bird had flown.

      

      Outside the hospice, Suter leaned his back against a tree. Music he didn’t know played its tinny noise in his earphone, but he was oblivious to it. A lot of money. Suter tried to light a cigarette, but his hands were trembling and he had to give it up.

      A lot of money. What was a lot of money? A billion? Even two billion?

      A lot of money, and Tony knows about it. What would he do with Tony? The man could say that discretion was his stock-in-trade, but Suter knew that discretion, integrity, all that was bullshit when big money came around.

      It frightened him and at the same time dazzled him. What could he do with a billion dollars? What could he not do?

      He had come out here to get something on his boss. To get a little leverage. Now, Shreed hardly mattered. Now there was money. He tried again with the lighter, and it gave a flame and he was able to hold the cigarette in it just long enough to get it alight. He drew in a gulp of smoke, coughed, and, bent over, began to hyperventilate.

      He knew that the only way he could deal with Tony was if Tony was dead.

       3

      Trieste.

      By the time that the JAG officer from the boat appeared, it was close to three in the morning and he had been moved from the cell where he had been questioned to a comfortable office belonging to one of the detectives, and he was being given strong coffee and biscotti. One of the cops even made small talk.

      The JAG was a lieutenant-commander, middle-aged and short, and he weighed as much as he was allowed, but he was professional.

      “Commander? You all right? I’m John Maggiulli.”

      “Al Craik.”

      “You okay? They don’t have you as a suspect any more. Wish I could say that was my doing, but it was over before I walked in.” He lowered his voice. “Admiral Kessler is kind of freaked. Word we had was that there had been a terrorist attack. Why didn’t you tell them to call the boat, Mister?”

      “I did.”

      “Not their story. They say that you wanted the boat kept out of it and cooperated willingly in their investigation. What were you doing there, anyway? Was it terrorists?”

      Alan looked outside the office and saw the razor-thin man in the good suit watching him.

      “Not here, John.”

      “Al, I’d like an answer. This is serious.”

      “I know it’s fucking serious, John! I just shot a guy, excuse me, it’s kind of wrecked my day! The Italians thought I might have been sent here to whack the terrorists, or some such crap. I started requesting legal counsel from the boat four hours ago, as soon as I discovered that we were moving beyond routine.”

      John Maggiulli looked at him. Glared, in fact.

      “Shore Patrol says you got a message from your wife. You withholding this message purporting to be from your wife from the Italian police?”

      “Roger that. John, I’ll make it clear when I’m not sitting in a foreign police station, okay?”

      Shaking his head, Maggiulli took his arm; there was a suggestion of taking him into custody. “I got a car, and we’re ducking reporters.” Alan limped beside him.

      The thin man watched them leave.

      

      Admiral Kessler was in pajamas and a flannel robe, a rather small man who was not at his best at four-thirty a.m. He sat a little slumped, one hand shielding his eyes as if the glare from Alan’s story was too much for him. Still, he let him tell the whole thing, leaving out only the woman’s saying “Bonner” and the fact that she had asked to meet him in Naples.

      “I don’t like my officers getting into trouble, Mister Craik. Especially big trouble.” He looked at Maggiulli, whom he had commanded to stay. “What I really want to know is why you lied to the Italian cops. Well?”

      “Sir, it’s, um, a matter of national security that touches on an existing counterintelligence investigation. I’m not in a position to say more until I can talk to NCIS.”

      Kessler lowered his hand and turned a pair of very bright, very hard eyes on Alan. “Admirals don’t like to be kept in the dark by subordinates—you follow me?”

      Alan, standing stiffly, bit back the angry sense of unfairness that came up like bile. “I’m eager to tell you, sir, as soon as I’ve cleared the matter with NCIS.”

      Maggiulli cleared his throat and said, in the tone of a man trying to coax a bull into a chute, “Uh, Craik has a point, sir—if this is really a sensitive matter—”

      “I know the goddam code, John!” He leaned still farther back. “What the hell do you have to do with ‘an existing CI investigation’? Your dad died years ago.”

      Alan winced. Everybody in the Navy knew about his father’s death; many people held it against him, credited his promotions to it—son of a hero, the man who had caught his father’s killer. He would rather not have raised the subject at all. “It was that case, anyway.”

      Kessler was unsympathetic. “All right. You get to NCIS pronto, and I want to talk to your contact when you’re done. Get it to me by 0800.”

      “Aye, aye, sir.”

      Alan headed straight down to CVIC and tried to call Mike Dukas, an NCIS special agent who was still in charge of the old case and who was a close friend, at his office in Bosnia, dialing the eighteen digits with great care. First, the line was busy; then, he got a native German speaker who had difficulty understanding him. Could he call back after eight? Alan slammed the telephone down, thinking that eight a.m. in Sarajevo was the time he was supposed to report on his progress to the admiral.

      Balked of contact with Dukas, Alan filled out a foreign-national contact report with the NCIS officer on the boat and put himself in his rack, where he fumed and stewed and waited for the dawn.

      Utica.

      Rose had sat up with her father, drinking too much wine and letting him try to soothe her. Then she lay awake for an hour, then another hour, hearing dogs, the bells of clocks, the freights rolling along the old New York Central tracks. A car went by, its boombox thumping hip-hop bass. Somebody laughed and shouted. Her talk with the detailer went around and around in her head, and she tracked it, around and around, looking for the explanation, the solution, a rat running around and around, looking for a way out—

      Rose woke to see by the pale orange digitals of the bedside clock that it was a little after two. Her head really ached now, and the wine rose as a sour nausea in her throat. She would feel really lousy tomorrow. Today.

      She went to the old bathroom along the hall, the only one in the house, drank two glasses of water, looked at her bloated face in the