Top Hook. Gordon Kent

or tenth time at Alan’s passport. “You landed in Aviano just seven hours ago.”

      Alan was unsure whether to react with anger or to continue to respond politely. He’d tried both for two hours, and he didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. He started again.

      “I tackled the man I had noticed in front of me as soon as he drew a gun…”

      Suburban Washington.

      Shreed had been to the toilet and had splashed cold water on his face. He hated that face, most of all now—a whipped look, hangdog, drained from the effort of telling her. “Janey.” She gave no response. Maybe it was his own forgiveness he wanted, as much as hers. “So, Janey, there was this guy Chen. In Jakarta.”

      No response.

      “Jakarta. So we worked out a comm plan, all that old Cold War junk. Then I came back here for a tour and I got into computers. Bad days here, you remember—the Agency was in the doghouse, everybody pulled in like a flock of turtles. You called me ‘Captain COBOL.’ Remember?” He smiled, used both hands to pull one leg over the knee of the other.

      “In those days, you actually did your own programming. And I was good. Real good. They were making the first stabs at a net; they didn’t even call it the Internet then, just ‘a net,’ and I hacked my way into a big mainframe at Cal Tech and staked out some space for myself in the source code. Once I did that, I knew what was possible, and I waited for the Chinese to get good enough for me to use what I knew. I waited and then piggy-backed on a couple of Chinese ‘students’ who were sending computer stuff back on audio tapes, rode their data, and there I was—I had a way in, into China. The trouble was, computers were too new. So what I was, I was like a mold-spore that can exist for twenty years in the desert. I had to wait.

      “Chen and I were exchanging stuff the old way, dead-drops and that crap, both moving up. It took ten years—then, finally, everybody had a PC. At last, it was my world. So I laid it out for the Ops guys—what we could do to the Chinks with computers, what now we’d call information warfare.

      “Would you believe nobody in Ops cared, even then? The fact is they were scared shitless—a lot of fake Brit preppies who would do anything to protect the heritage of God and capitalism, and so let’s send in some poor lower-class, preferably foreign asset to do our dying for us, but please, no high technology! HUMINT forever!” He wiped his hand over his bristly hair. “Stupid shitheads,” he muttered. After a minute or two, he got up and dragged himself to the window. It was raining hard, and there was only a single figure out there, somebody walking slowly in the downpour. There was something terrible about the loneliness of that figure, he thought. He shook himself as if it had been he standing in the rain.

      “So I’m a traitor for a purpose, Janey,” he said. There, he’d said it—traitor. “I’m a traitor with a cause.” He continued to stare into the rain. The walking figure was gone.

      “I’d have given them what I had, if they’d listened. I’d have risked even prison, if they’d listened. But they made me go it alone. They made me be a traitor.”

      He looked to her for affirmation then, but she was still.

      “So I went it alone. I programmed a poison pill, a worm, to fetch something from Chinese military intel. A kind of virus, but one like—what the hell is it? shingles? the one that sits in your spine for twenty years and then pops out—one that would sit tight until I told it to act. Then every time the Chinks upgraded, they took me with the upgrade. I’d go in and tinker a little, snoop around, see how much better they were getting at firewalls and passwords and encryption, and it got to the point where I knew I was going to have to do something or they’d either catch me or they’d wall me out.

      “And then Chen lowered the boom on me. Nineteen ninety-four. Turned out I’d been suckered. Now he was going to get serious, and if I didn’t play along, he’d turn me in to the Agency.” Shreed sighed, made a sound that was something like a laugh—short, barking gags of sound. “I thought I was playing him and he’d been playing me. We’d been doing a circle jerk for twenty years, and it was all a fake to land me. Now, the Chinks wanted good stuff—hard stuff.

      “They had a website that flacked pornography. That was the comm link; we encrypted data and reduced it to one pixel and buried it in the middle of a porn image. That was what I was doing that night you caught me. I was sending them the data on a classified project called Peacemaker, and when you came in, I got rattled and I sent the last batch in clear. You scared me, baby. I felt like a kid caught jacking off.” Shreed massaged the bridge of his nose, sighed again. “Not your fault. Mine. But—” He gave the laughing sound again.

      “Chen’s really been bleeding me. Chen’s an insatiable prick; I’m going to have to—I’ve got to end it. I’ve got to wind up my Chinese connection. You see? Janey?”

      He put his hand on hers again, felt the skin cooler but not cold.

      “Oh, baby, the things I’ve had to do! And the things I have to do yet!”

      He got up, grabbed his canes, swung himself around the room; the movements were restless, angry, the prowlings of something in a cage. Still, his voice was tender when he said, “Maybe it’s better you won’t be here.”

      He pulled himself to the window again, then away to her side, across to a corner, back.

      “This is how it goes. The Chinks’ military intel is the banker for the Party and for the bigwigs who are skimming the cream and sending the money offshore for themselves. Intel also has most of its own secret money offshore; it’s what they use all over the world for spying, subversion—you know. It’s a lot of money. A lot of money. So what I’m going to do is, on a given day, and it has to be soon, I’m going to activate my virus, and it’s going to send little gobblers—like PacMans—and they’re going to gobble up all the offshore accounts and all the data about the accounts, every scrap, and put it somewhere else. And the Chinks won’t know where. And there they’ll be, sitting with their thumb up their ass, with no money for ops, and no Party money, and no money for the bigwigs who will want to know how and why, and who will be trying to take revenge on anybody who stands in the way of their cash, and it’s going to be a bloodbath!”

      He grinned. “For about twelve hours, and that’s all I need. Because the Chinks are going to be between a rock and a hard place during those twelve hours, and they won’t know whether to shit or go blind. India is going to be hollering at them from one side, and we’re going to be hollering from another, and Pakistan is going to be begging them to send help, and they won’t be able to do a thing! They’ll be paralyzed.

      “And then they’ll try to recover the only way they know, which is by strutting around the world, pretending to be a superpower instead of the world’s shoemaker. And they’ll push some military provocation to make somebody else—India, let’s say—back down, and it’ll all be bullshit! Because China is a paper tiger—a hundred goddam nukes, and so far not a missile that they could lob a wad of toilet paper three thousand miles with! An army of goddam peasants, and technology they’ve had to steal! You know who says the Chinese are a superpower? The same assholes who said that Russia was a superpower!

      “Well, I’m going to show what they really are. Their money is going to go down a rathole, and they’re going to panic, and then they’re going to the brink—and they’re going to find that they’re eyeball-to-eyeball with us, and they’re going to back down, because they don’t have the muscle!

      “So—I had a reason, do you see, Janey? I always had a reason. You’re the moralist in the family; you’re the one who used to argue the difference between ends and means, so you judge what I’ve done. Judge me. And then forgive me.”

      He came to rest at the foot of the bed, his posture appealing to her, begging her. And for a moment, he thought what he saw in return was an illusion—a living woman, eyes open, the faintest of smiles—and then he knew it was not. It was quite real, even to the smears of pale