Hostile Contact

Jerry was still sober because it was only late afternoon. Now he wouldn’t take a drink until it was all over. He began to strip and change into running clothes—a good run, sweat, exertion to work the alcohol poisons out of the muscles, and he’d be ready to go.

Nonetheless, he wished he’d done a dry run with Bobby’s team.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

NCIS HQ, Washington Navy Yard.

Mike Dukas had talked to Triffler, who was in Manila waiting for an aircraft to get a hydraulic leak fixed to get him to Jakarta. It was plain that he wouldn’t get there in time for the first window for the meeting in Jakarta, and Dukas didn’t like it. He wanted Triffler with Alan to calm him down, even though nothing was going to happen, nothing could happen, and the comm plan was strictly what scientists called a chemical stomach.

Dukas sat in his office, one hand on the telephone, wondering if he should call Alan at his hotel. Bad move—insecure phone. Around him, on every flat surface—chairs, desk, file cabinets, computer—were folders from the Sleeping Dog case file. Two days into them, Dukas was bewildered by technical radio jargon and bored by old reports about the futility of an investigation that had gone nowhere. He had read nothing that caused him to worry about Al Craik in Jakarta, and yet—

He took his hand off the telephone and glanced at his watch. Ten-thirty-seven a.m. Meaning that it was ten-thirty-seven p.m. in Jakarta. If Alan had any sense, he had waited for Triffler to arrive before he left the mark on the cannon. Alan had good sense, Dukas knew, lots of good sense—but not always when it came to action. So maybe he had already left the mark, and the clock would start ticking, and tomorrow morning—tonight in Washington—he’d make his first trip to the Orchid House.

And nothing would happen.

Would it?

Dukas told himself that he was suffering case-officer jitters. You sent somebody out, he fell off the face of the earth as far as you were concerned, of course you questioned what you were doing. Imagined worst-case scenarios. So what was the worst case here? Dukas frowned. What could possibly be the worst case with an old comm plan that had been unused for seven years? Your man walked into the Orchid House and—

Dukas picked up a folder and got ready to read. He even took out the reading glasses they’d given him at his last physical and that he never used, except that now he was reading all day, day after day, and his eyes felt like hot bullets that had been superglued into their sockets. He started to read about alternative explanations for radio bursts that NSA thought they had detected in western Canada. The prose made him groan. Solar flares! Shifting magnetic fields!

Dukas stared at the telephone. Something was bugging him, and he knew that the something was partly Alan’s mission in Jakarta, but only partly; some of it was this goddamned case itself.

“It smells,” he said out loud. The smell wasn’t strong, and it wasn’t bad, but it was there. Dukas actually put his nose down and sniffed the pages in front of him. The odor was slightly musty, slightly dry and woody. Papery. Dukas thought of some storage site in Maryland or Virginia, somewhere secure but unknown to most people at Langley, a dead end for old Agency folders.

He got up and walked along the corridor and swung into another office, one hand low on the doorway to support himself without stressing his injury. “Hey, Brackman,” he said.

“Yoh.” An overweight black man was tapping a computer keyboard. He didn’t look away from the screen.

“How long has the CIA been using computers?”

“Long time, some of them; no time, a lot of them. Computer illiterates, lot of them.”

“They still doing files on paper in, say, ninety-seven?”

Brackman turned away from the screen and focused on a half-eaten Devil Dog. “Some of the holdouts, sure.” He ate the Devil Dog. “Very conservative place.”

Dukas walked back to his office, poured himself coffee from Triffler’s machine, and sat on his desk, one hand on the telephone and a look on his face as if some source of deep dissatisfaction had been tapped. He fiddled his fingers on the telephone. He chewed his upper lip with his lower teeth. He made a sound with his tongue and the roof of his mouth, Tt-Tt-Tt. He picked up the phone and hit a button and said, “Find out how I get a Nav pilot who’s flying out of Pax River. Call me back.”

Ten minutes later, the phone rang. He’d done nothing more with the folders in that time but had sat at his desk, staring at the wall. “Okay.” He scribbled a number. “Thanks.” He called and was put on to a duty officer who told him that Commander Rose Siciliano was in the air but expected back before lunch. Dukas left a message that she should call him, and then he went back to the folders and slogged; when she called at eleven-fifty, he was sighing and groaning, and the first thing he had to do was reassure Rose that he wasn’t calling about Alan—nothing had happened, everything was fine, there was no news. “What I want you to do is invite Sally Baranowski to dinner,” he said.

“You still haven’t called her?” Rose snapped.

“I’ve been busy, babe, plus—you know—”

“You want me to be there so you won’t be on the spot, right?”

Dukas sighed again. “This isn’t what you think.”

“Oh, right.”

“It’s sort of business.”

“Funny business.”

“No—damn it, babe—it has to do with the case.”

“Alan’s case?”

“Yeah.”

That was different, she said. She’d invite Baranowski, although she wasn’t really running a restaurant. Tonight would be fine, although she’d planned to have a night alone with her kids and then wash her hair. Anything for you, Mike, you coward.

“Six?” he said.

“Six-thirty, and bring some wine and a dessert.”

Dukas had a pizza sent in for his lunch, and at one, unable to control his jitters, he decided to call Alan in Jakarta, and then he decided he couldn’t.

Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Colonel Lao was a day back from Pakistan when the message about the mark in Jakarta came. He was supposed to be an advisor on urban-rural relations, a subject in fact in which he had a good deal of knowledge (his training to be an intelligence chief at a foreign station had been excellent), but one that bored him. He had spent part of the day at a village forty miles from Dar, watching a performance of the Chinese-sponsored theatre-for-development troupe’s Hope is the Village, a play that seemed to him small return for six weeks of work and a good deal of Chinese money. By the time he got back to the office, the message had been on his desk for two hours. It had been rerouted from Beijing, re-encrypted, received and logged at the embassy in Dar, then marked “Most Urgent” and hand-carried to his desk, where it had sat.

Lao looked down at the sealed envelope. What is the use of all the secrecy and all the hurry if I am out wasting my time in a muddy village? he wondered. He ripped open the envelope, found himself angered by an inner envelope and its stamps—“Most Urgent!” “Most Secret!” “Unauthorized Persons DO NOT OPEN!”—and ripped it so savagely that he tore part of the flimsy sheet inside. However, nothing was seriously damaged, and he saw that the message within had the class mark Wealthy Songbird, meaning that it had to do with the frightening but glorious task he had been given—finding his rival, the missing Colonel Chen, and the intelligence funds that had disappeared with him.

He had to do his own decoding, Wealthy Songbird being too secret even for the embassy cryptographers, but the message was short, and his interest in it carried him through the drudgery of it. All that it told him was that a mark had been left on an antique cannon in Jakarta, and that the Jakarta watcher had reported it exactly as if to Chen himself, because of course the watcher knew nothing of Chen or his disappearance or, in fact, anything at all. Lao had a moment’s envy for the watcher in Jakarta, somebody lucky enough not to be caught up in a tangle of ambition, deceit, strategy. Lao sighed.

He opened the Chen files and searched for Jakarta, found it in eleven of them, found the mark that the watcher had seen in the communications plan called American Go. The plan was not Chinese, Lao recognized at once; Chen’s agent in the CIA, George Shreed, must have drafted it, as Lao now knew the agent was named. Who, like Chen, had also disappeared. And who was supposed to have been buried nine days ago in Washington, although that was being checked.

Lao sighed again, wondered if he had caught something in the cold rain in Pakistan. He thought that this was not a real illness but a reaction to the beginning of an operation that would be difficult and long and, quite possibly, disastrous for him.

The immediate question to be answered was, Who had left the mark in Jakarta, and why? Was it Shreed—supposedly dead, but not necessarily so—trying to contact the missing Chen? Chen himself, trying to throw off pursuers like Lao? Some third party, working for both of them? The CIA, using a dead Shreed’s files?

What the mark was meant to signal was a desire for a meeting, the meeting place a playland called Fantasy Island Park, something left over from the boom of the nineties and now gasping, he supposed, since the bubble had burst. Such matters had no reality for Lao; economics was somebody else’s concern. What mattered to him here was that a meeting had been signaled, and he, as the new master of the plan called American Go, must find out what the meeting was for and who had asked for it.

He sent a message to the intelligence chief at the Chinese embassy in Jakarta, requiring that a surveillance team monitor the meeting site for the next three days; the times, according to the comm plan, were to be ten minutes after nine, two, and six. Parties meeting according to the plan would identify themselves by carrying a magazine under the left arm. The surveillance team were to watch the site without being seen, note all persons who appeared at any of the appointed times, photograph them if possible, and follow them if they were sure no counter-surveillance was present (an unlikely possibility). No, he would have to give them more instructions than that, and they’d have to have a senior officer in charge—if Chen actually appeared, there were major decisions to be made very quickly.

Then he sat late, trying to see how it would go and what he could do if the meeting really happened as early as tomorrow. Jakarta was an hour ahead of Beijing, where an officer would have to be found to fly to Jakarta to oversee the surveillance. Early evening here in Dar es Salaam was the middle of the night in Beijing. They’d be lucky to find anybody at all, much less the veteran officer Lao wanted; then the officer would have to find air transport to Jakarta—he’d be on the run every moment and still be fortunate to get there for the first meeting time. Lao couldn’t send anyone from his own office; Dar was an impossible distance by air, and Tsung, in Pakistan, already had an operational meeting for tomorrow. Bad, bad—the last thing he wanted, a tired man arriving late with no time to prepare the surveillance team. Lao smoked and made notes and sent messages. At nine his own time, he got confirmation that an officer was on the way to Jakarta. Lao started to prepare further instructions for him, to be handed to him when he got off the plane. An hour later, he shook his head and threw down the ballpoint pen with which he had been trying to write. The papers were a mess of crossed-out sentences and scribblings over scribblings.

The gist of it all was that he needed somebody on the spot who could tell him if either Shreed or Chen made the meeting. Somebody who would know at once and somebody who was loyal—not one who would hurry the information to Beijing, and not one who would babble to the officer running the operation.

He dug into Chen’s personal file. He knew it fairly well by then, knew that there was something in there—And found it.

“Jiang!”

A captain hurried in.

Lao held out a piece of paper. “This agent is still active. I want him. Most urgent!”

“Sir!” Jiang vanished, in his fingers the piece of paper on which Lao had written, “Code name Running Boy, name Li, Bobby, agent for Chen 1983.”

Jiang was back in ten minutes. “Still in Jakarta, still active, but not used in three years. Control code-named Loyalty Man.”

“Get him.”

4

Jakarta.

Alan lay in his dark hotel room and watched Jakarta through the window. It was cool in the room, almost cold. Outside, Jakarta was hot and busy, and Alan watched it for a while, the constant bustle of taxicabs, rickshaws, and vast limousines pulling up to the front of his great hotel, twenty stories below. NCIS seemed to have paid for a really good room in a really good hotel, and it was all wasted; Alan felt as if the huge windows were force fields walling him off from the reality of Jakarta. He wanted to go out and explore, but his instructions were explicit. So he repeated today’s operation until he had it to his satisfaction and then reviewed tomorrow’s until it bored him.

Buy a copy of The Economist. Go to the theme park and go to Anjungan Bali. Sit in the dance kiosk and watch the dancers. When they finish, walk across the Anjungan Sumatra to the Orchid House, carrying The Economist. When you are inside, walk along the path. If a man approaches you with a copy of The Economist and asks if he met you at the AGIP Christmas party, respond that you were there with a Dutch girl. It won’t happen, cowboy. It’s a fake. There won’t be anybody there. Just go and fill the bill, okay?

He got up and headed toward the door. He needed to walk.

Just stay in your room, Al. Just sit tight and don’t get robbed, don’t leave your briefcase, don’t have any adventures, okay?

Alan walked back and forth in front of the window for the thirtieth time, bored, angry, all keyed up and wanting to discuss the problems of the morning, talk about the tactics for tomorrow, anything. He had been a spy for about thirty hours; so far, it was really dull.

It beat the crap out of flying a Microsoft product in his living room and having rages at his wife, though.

He paced back again. He wanted to go down to the giant lobby; there had to be a kiosk there to buy a paper. Triffler wouldn’t mind if he just went and bought a copy of The Economist.

He got as far as the door with his electronic key in his hand before his conscience stopped him.

Just stay in your room, Al. Just sit tight and don’t get robbed, don’t leave your briefcase, don’t have any adventures, okay?

Triffler wasn’t Mike Dukas; he was a thorough, professional man who seemed unimpressed with Alan’s reputation and impatience. He hadn’t grinned when he spoke about any adventures, either. He meant what he said. Alan walked back to his enormous bed and threw himself on it, the expensive pillow-top mattress swallowing him whole.

Too damn soft.

Lying sideways on the bed, Alan stretched out an arm to rifle his belongings in the carry-on on the floor. Underwear; a linen jacket that Rose had given him a year ago and thought would be perfect in Jakarta; probably would, at that. She’d ordered him to hang it up as soon as he got to a room, and he smiled at the pang of guilt and unfolded it from the bottom of the case.

Something heavy slipped out from its folds and fell on the bed. Alan leaped back for a moment, and laughed aloud. A book. The cover said Blue at the Mizzen. Inside, a feminine hand had written: All I want you to take to bed while you’re away. Love, R.

His grin threatened to crack his face, and he kissed her writing. Deep inside him, more ice cracked.

And he started reading.

In the air, Beijing–Jakarta.

Qiu was very young, as his code name—“young dragon with new horns”—announced. The name irritated him, as it indicated a lack of respect from his superiors. He had, after all, graduated from all the schools; he knew exactly how to perform his tasks. Why such a disrespectful code name?

He knew what he was about to do to perfection: he would meet with the Jakarta embassy black team in a warehouse near the Jakarta waterfront only two hours before the meeting was to take place, and he would outline to them his surveillance plan as based on a map of the Fantasy Island Park that he had downloaded from the Internet. If, as he anticipated, the local chief watcher was rude, Qiu would step on him hard to make sure that the fellow knew his place. In fact, he planned to step on everybody hard.

This was his first independent assignment.

The local station had reported a certain signal placed on a certain old cannon. They had no idea what the signal meant. Qiu, however, knew, because he had been told in Beijing: it was an old signal from an old comm plan between his service and an American double agent. Qiu was to follow the comm plan and meet whoever had left the mark. No reason had been given for doing so: there was no context, no background, no time for analysis or research. His head swam with questions, but no answers came. He knew enough to do only one thing: follow orders. And, by implication, a second thing: be ruthless, meaning that he wanted an armed team, as if for a hostile meeting, and he wanted absolute discipline.

He went over and over it, and any idea he had had of sleeping on the flight proved foolish. He was awake all the way—awake when the sun rose and still awake when the plane banked and began its final approach into Jakarta.

The local man seemed relieved to be able to push the responsibility for the hasty operation off on him. He was even apologetic, in fact. “But there’s been a change,” he said.

Qiu bristled. “I will decide that!” he said. They weren’t even in the embassy car yet.

“It was decided at a higher level.” He handed Qiu a message.

Qiu read it, his fatigue suddenly heavy and depressing. He gave an exasperated groan. “Where is this Loyalty Man now?” he said.

The embassy man jerked his head at the car. They walked toward it; the driver, standing by the passenger door, braced and swung it open. A middle-aged man was sitting inside, a burning cigarette in his fingers. He looked at Qiu without expression, making it clear that he was a veteran who would go along with this stripling because he had been ordered to. Qiu settled himself next to him. “Well?” he said. He made it sound like a challenge.

“You are to add one of my agents to your team. He is to be with you at the meeting.”

“That is ridiculous!”

“That is the order.” Loyalty Man didn’t even bother to look at him.

The embassy man got in and sat on a jump seat. The driver got in behind the wheel. Everybody sat there until at last Qiu realized that they were waiting for him to give an order.

“Well, get him!” he shouted.

Suburban Virginia.

Sally Baranowski was healthier-looking than Dukas remembered, but vulnerable, obviously glad that Rose was there with them. She was a fairly big woman, better eyes and color now she had dried out, good black dress that maybe showed too much of pretty hefty legs. But who was he to notice?

“Did you ever run into a case code-named Sleeping Dog?” he said to her.

“If I did, I wouldn’t talk about it, would I?”

“Well, you were Shreed’s assistant for a while there, I thought you knew what was going on.”

“I knew some things.” She was picking at her food, not looking at him. She’d been kicked sideways from her job at the Agency, because when the dying Shreed was brought back as a traitor, there had been a lot of vengeance within the Agency. Some people had been punished for being too loyal to Shreed. She had been punished for being too disloyal. Now, fresh out of rehab, she was working in a nothing job in Inter-Agency Liaison after having been a rising star in Operations Planning.

Dukas wanted to pick her brains—and to take her to bed—so he tried to explain the case as he understood it. The burst transmissions, the case’s being kicked around among NSA, the Bureau, and the CIA.

“Now does it sound familiar?”

“Not even remotely. Sorry.” She smiled at him. “Why?”

“Because I’ve got the case, and it seems to me to have a kind of tang. What the Brits call a pong. A hint of fish.”

“Like what?”

He was thinking of how to propose that they start over, go to his place, get in the sack—“Like I need your help,” he said.

Jakarta.

Bobby Li was awake. He was a nervous man, easily kept awake by the tensions of the family or his business. Now he was awake because of the operation. Nothing would go wrong, but—

The telephone rang twice and stopped. He felt his wife tense beside him; he realized that he had tensed, too. The telephone rang again—twice. And stopped.

Bobby sighed.

“You have to go?” she said.

“Only a few streets.”

He dressed quickly, not even bothering with socks, and went out into the warm, wet night. Three streets away was a public telephone. He leaned into its plastic shelter to escape a sudden patter of rain and dialed. He knew the voice at the other end at once: Loyalty Man, his Chinese control. He flinched.

“The southeast corner of Suharto and Nyam Pareng. Now.”

He knew better than to object or ask a question. He hung up, found he was trembling, lit a cigarette in the shelter of the phone and then splashed off into the night. His sockless shoes rasped on his feet and he shivered as if the warm rain had given him a chill. He was at the proper corner in six minutes, but there was already a dark car there waiting. He saw from thirty feet away that there were three men as well as the driver, and he knew what sort of car it was and what sort of people were inside.

“Get in.” A man he didn’t know, sitting with his knees drawn up on a jump seat, had opened the door from inside and was holding it open. Loyalty Man was against the far window, a young, foolish-looking stranger closer to Bobby.

“Get in!” the young one screamed.

The air inside was bitter with cigarette smoke. The car pulled away but went slowly, so that he knew they were not really going anywhere yet. Whatever it was, they were going to talk first. Did they know about Andy? Did they know he was helping on an operation he hadn’t told them about? He began to think up excuses—

“I am Qiu,” the foolish one said. “I am your superior, and you will do precisely what I tell you.”

Bobby tried to look at Loyalty Man, through whom this insane youth should have been speaking, but Loyalty Man was looking out the window, as much as to say to Bobby, I have nothing to do with this.

“Yes, sir.”

“I have orders directly from Beijing. I am from Beijing. Flown in expressly for this.” Bobby knew he was from Beijing from his accent.

“Yes, sir.”

“You have been added to my team. I have a strict plan. You will conform to it. Well?”

“Yes, sir.” This didn’t seem so bad as he had feared. Nothing about Andy, at any rate. Merely some stupid, extra work. Bobby kept himself from sighing.

“In—” Qiu looked at his watch, which he had to hold up in the light of a street lamp to read—“precisely one hour and forty-three minutes, my team will report to a site for an operation. You will be there.” The young man paused, perhaps debating how much to tell Bobby, then, if he was at all wise, seeing that time was so short that he had no choice. “I am making a hostile contact in a place called the Orchid House, in a park called Fantasy Island. My arrangements are none of your affair; however, I have been ordered to allow you to observe the meeting. Therefore, you will make yourself available at the Fantasy Island Park at—” He looked at his watch again. “From precisely ten minutes before nine, local time, until completion of the operation. You will do precisely as I say. At six minutes after nine, I will enter a certain entrance of the Orchid House and will proceed to a certain place. You will go in another entrance and find a place from which to observe. If you get in the way or cause any trouble, you will be dealt with. That is all you need to know. Understood?”