Top Hook. Gordon Kent

up, sat staring at an unfamiliar wall, concerned now that he had two cases, not one. Just when he had meant for his life to get simpler, it had got all twisted.

      College Park, Maryland.

      Rose came to rest in a motel in College Park, recommended by Peretz because it was cheap and it was handy to the District. The hangover still rumbled; the feeling of helplessness kept her in a rage.

      The telephone rang. She had to search for it, knocked it off its cradle, fumbled, stammered, “Siciliano!”

      “Hey, babe, you sober?” It was Mike Dukas, whom she had last talked to from Utica.

      “Mike! How’d you find me?”

      “Peretz. I’m in Washington.”

      “Your guy in Sarajevo said you were in Holland.”

      “Yeah, well—” He sounded embarrassed. “The deal is I’m coming back to NCIS for six months to a year, then I’ll see.”

      He had been excited about taking over the War Crimes Tribunal’s investigative side, she knew. And now he was coming back to NCIS? “Mike, are you doing this for me?”

      “Nobody else would get me back to this place, babe.”

      “Oh, Mike—” She started to cry.

      “I love to hear women cry. It really cheers me up. How about saying ‘thank you’ and we’ll get on with it. Look, babe, here’s the deal—come on, turn off the hydrant, I need you to listen up—I been here a couple hours, nobody here has a case file on you, but there are these goddam rumors going around!” He was talking too fast to get her out of her crying jag. “Anyway, I am now the official investigator for the matter, which is now a case, with a computer-generated case name and number—I saw to that—but it’s not a case about security, it’s a case about abuse of CIA powers and outside interference, which gives me a very nice bit of leverage. You following me, or you still raining on the carpet there?”

      “I follow.” She grabbed a Kleenex.

      “I talked to Al,” he said. “He’s got his own problems, which I can’t go into on an open phone. You just hang on there, and he’ll call when he can get a phone on the Jeff. Your turn: what’s happening? Peretz says you’re seeing a lawyer.”

      She told him about Emma Pasternak and the calls to the CIA. “I think she’ll be okay, Mike, but she’s real strange. Maybe—you know, maybe a lesbian, shit, I don’t know—”

      “That gross you out?”

      “Oh, God, no, what d’you think? No, she just isn’t—sympathetic.”

      Dukas grunted. He took a moment, then said, “I gotta make this meeting she set up at the CIA.”

      “You’re not invited.”

      “What’s the CIA Internals guy like?”

      “He sounded nice. Nicer than her. I felt sorry for him.”

      “Yeah, well, don’t feel too sorry. This is the asshole gave you the shaft. Okay, so I gotta check around, get a line on him. Then I need to talk to your lawyer and tell her I’m tagging along.”

      “She won’t like it.”

      “Jeez, I’m terrified. Give me her number.”

      She read off the number from her book. “Do I go to this meeting, Mike?”

      “God, no. You wait for Al to call, get a lot of sleep, call home, talk to your kids, then go to a movie. We’ll call you when it’s over.”

      “We?”

      “Me and the Bride of Frankenstein. She’ll be eating out of my hand.”

      Right.

      

      Rose was going out to eat, but she couldn’t miss Alan’s call, and she lay down just for a minute, and then she was waking to hear the telephone and find her hand already on the instrument. Groping it to her, she mumbled something and heard her husband’s voice saying her name and then, “How are you? How are you?”

      She felt a rush of joy.

      Suburban Washington.

      Tony Moscowic was wearing a sport coat and a white shirt and an actual goddam tie, because he wanted to look legitimate, and he didn’t want anybody at the hospice to remember him from the last time, when he wore an orange jumpsuit. The last time, he had planted the bug that had allowed Suter to listen in on George Shreed’s confession to his wife; this time, he was going to remove it. He had his legit clothes and a visitor’s badge, and he went right to the room that had been Mrs Shreed’s and jingled his picks in his pocket, ready to pop the lock in four seconds, max, and was surprised and maybe disappointed that the door was unlocked.

      Bad omen, he thought. Too easy is a bad omen. He closed the door behind him, turned on the light, and he was heading for the wall switch by the bed when a male voice said, “Who the hell are you?”

      The fucking bug was behind the wall plate. He could have had the plate off and the bug in his pocket in one minute. Less. Now here was some guy, asking him who the hell he was. Good question, Homer!

      “Who are you, if I might ask, sir? You’re in my aunt’s room!” That was his story—sort of. The story, if he got caught with the wall plate actually off and in plain sight, was he was checking out the structural integrity of the building before he moved his aunt there. Weak, but it would work for a practical nurse. Above that level, he got more inventive.

      “You have the wrong room,” the guy said. He was sitting in an armchair where he’d fallen asleep, Tony guessed. No energy. He was thin, blond, wearing a cashmere sweater that was almost purple, and Tony thought he was a fag, meaning he was here to die of AIDS. Swell.

      “Jeez, I guess I do. Seventeen?”

      “Nineteen,” the guy said. He sounded okay, no longer surprised, maybe kind of amused. He was smiling at Tony. “I just moved in.” He smiled some more. “I won’t be moving out.”

      Tony could see now that there were changes in the room. It even smelled different. He was losing his touch; jeez, he could have really put his foot in it here. “You have my greatest sympathy,” he said, moving toward the door.

      “Yeah. Mine, too.” The guy smiled. “See you.”

      That blew getting the bug. Now he’d have to wait until the guy actually checked out or at least went comatose, and holy shit, the room would probably be filled with grieving fairies holding candlelight vigils and he’d never get that fucking wall plate off. It was really, really unfair. What were they running here, a revolving door, the lady dies one night, the next they’ve got a new guy dying in her room? Fucking Heartbreak Hotel, for Christ’s sake.

      He shucked off the sport coat as soon as he was outside the hospice and walked up the street, loosening the tie and tossing the coat over his shoulder. Suter’s car was waiting at the end of the block, and Tony took a moment to get his story straight and then walked right to it and got in.

      “Did you get it?”

      “Piece a cake. Drive.”

      “Let me see it.”

      “You nuts or something? It’s gone. Wipe it down, smash it good with your foot, throw it in the nearest dumpster. That’s my routine. Bugs are like guns—use them once, get rid of them. Drive.” So, he’d hung a story on Suter, so what? The important thing was he’d wiped the bug down when he put it in; nobody would ever find it; and if they did, couple years, ten years from now, so what? “You know that doggie is still sick?” he said. “I think it was the pizza. I didn’t feel too good next day, either. My neighbor’s pissed.” Suter said nothing,