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“Yaas, majikan.”
“Drink with me?”
“I can’t—I’m working.”
He looked at her and winked. “You were too good for that sort of thing when we were twenty years younger. The missus never made you oblige the customers.”
“But I’m the missus, now, and I have books to do. Come back—come back tomorrow and I’ll drink with you.”
“I might have to do that, Hilda.” He smiled, gulped the rest of his gin and tonic, disappointed at one level, happy to be on with the job at another.
Jerry gave her something like a salute. She had poise, like a runway model; maybe she had been a runway model before she crashed in Jakarta. He didn’t really know her, but he liked that she remembered him. Whores and spies; the oldest profession and the next oldest, or so the joke ran. He stopped in the alcove, still smiling because she had remembered him.
Aboard USS Thomas Jefferson.
Rafe Rafehausen pulled a stack of paper toward him, read again the paper on top, and then said, “Get me Admiral Pilchard at LantFleet. What the hell time is it there—? Yeah, you might catch him—try, try.” He took the next paper off the stack and started to read, rubbing his eyes and wondering if they’d last through the reams of reading on this cruise, thinking, Jesus, next I’ll need glasses, acutely aware again that his squadron years were over. He tried to concentrate on VF-105’s morale self-study and was relieved when a phone was shoved toward him and the lieutenant-commander said, “Admiral Pilchard.”
Rafehausen threw himself back in the chair. “Sir! Captain Rafehausen, CAG on the—Yes, sir.” He grinned. “Nice of you to remember. Unh, kind of a personal matter, sir. If I say the name ‘Al Craik,’ will you—? Yes, sir, that’s the one.” He nodded his head as he listened. Pilchard was Craik’s self-appointed “sea daddy,” a kind of naval mentor and enabler. He swung, Rafe knew, between thinking that Craik was God’s little crackerjack prize and that he was a dangerously loose cannon, but he’d concern himself with Craik’s welfare if it was threatened. Right now, he was in the loose-cannon phase, and Rafehausen winced at the admiral’s sour tone. When the admiral had finished reviewing Craik’s recent performance, Rafehausen said, “He’s going nuts onshore and he needs something. I can’t take him back here yet—med officers won’t allow it. If there’s something he could do—”
He looked up at the lieutenant-commander, winked as the admiral did some more talking about times in the past he’d gone out on a limb for Craik, and how sick he was of having Craik blue-sky things and act as if rules didn’t exist. When the admiral stopped talking, Rafehausen said, “Absolutely, sir!” He grinned again. “What I was thinking, I just received some correspondence about this experimental MARI det that was set up—that’s the det that Craik was commanding, sir, when—good, yes, sir, you remember all that. Well, it’s gone so well that there’s a request about setting up a second MARI det on the west coast; I was wondering if maybe that could be moved up some, then Craik could go out there now instead of at the end of this cruise—Yes, sir, to advise and—No, sir, not as det CO, and not to fly because—Yes, sir. No, sir. Purely advisory, yes, sir, of course they’d pull personnel from the west coast squadrons, and Craik would—Yeah, Miramar, I’m sure that Miramar—Uh—”
Rafehausen signaled to the lieutenant-commander to close the door. Swiveling around, he bent forward as if he had to talk to the floor. “It’s a matter of helping a good man, sir. I know Craik—I think we could lose him if he doesn’t get something to do. Between you and me, Admiral, I think he got hit harder than we thought on that recent mission. I don’t normally put much stock in ‘trauma’ and all that psychobabble, but he’s been sending me p-comms that, well, I think maybe he’s lost some faith in himself.” Again, he listened, slowly leaning back, and when there was silence on the other end, he said, “Yes, sir. That’d be great. That’d really be great. And absolutely, yes, I’ll put the fear of God in him to do it by the book. And if they can see their way to setting up a west coast det with him on board, it would—Of course, of course, these things take time—Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”
A minute later, he had hung up and turned back to the pile of paper, Al Craik now only one of many worries nibbling at the edges of his consciousness.
Jakarta.
He gave terse orders to the third cab of the night, cutting across the city, going twice down gangs rinsed clean by the heavy rain, until he was tired of the game. Clean as clean could be. Then he led them back south away from the sea by the toll road, off the Semaggi Interchange and into the gleaming modernity at the heart of Westernized Jakarta. It wasn’t his favorite part of the city; he liked the Japanese in Japan but hated them when they were abroad. It never occurred to him that they acted just like him.
“Wat ingang?” asked the driver in Dutch. Jerry was white and coming from Emmy-Lu’s, hence Dutch, as far as the driver could tell.
“Hotel Mulia Senayan, danke. Simpruk.” The Mulia was the newest, flashiest hotel in Jakarta, with over a thousand rooms and the largest ballroom in Asia. It was the multiple entrances and table phones that drew Jerry—a postman’s paradise. Simpruk was a broad and well-traveled avenue full of business traffic; he’d leave by the main entrance and go to the cabstand, and while he sat and talked he’d be another business traveler. A little seedy, but hardly the only Westerner in the lobby, and that’s what mattered to Jerry. And nice public lines—murder to monitor, and businessmen don’t like monitored lines.
Jerry paid the cab before they stopped, was out and up the steps before the cab had pulled away. No time to linger; this was the operational act itself, the very heart of the game. It didn’t matter if no one was watching; Jerry played for an invisible audience of fellow professionals he hoped weren’t ever there, breezing into the enormous lobby, walking past the desks to the central bar, where leather couches held the open space against a jungle of local potted plants. At each end of every couch sat a house phone, and Jerry knew how to use one to get an outside line in Jakarta. He ordered a gin and tonic from a waiter, sat, and looked at his watch.
Two hours and ten minutes since the phone had rung in his room and he had hung it up. The last time he had worked in Jakarta, he’d been following orders from George Shreed. Now he would set up an operation to avenge him. It had an Asian air to it, like an episode in the tale of the Forty-Seven Ronin.
He lifted the phone.
Suburban Virginia.
“Sleeping Dog was an NSA case, and then it was a Bureau case, and then it was a CIA case. And now it’s our case,” Dukas explained to Rose. They were eating in what was called the dining room, which barely had enough room for the table and three people. “Believe it or not, it’s nine years old.”
“And it’s got this comm plan,” Alan said. “The first action item.”
“Who says it’s an action item?” Dukas said.
“Well, isn’t it? They should have moved on it when they got it, and they didn’t.”
Dukas raised his eyebrows. “We’ve barely looked at the stuff. There could be tons of action items.”
“Not according to the inventory.” Alan put his elbows on the table and turned to Rose. “The comm plan just leaps out at you; it’s the way a courier could meet with somebody else, and it was connected somehow with this Sleeping Dog—”
“We don’t know that,” Dukas growled. He finished the risotto on his plate. “Who taught you to make risotto?” he said.
“You did.”
“Good for me.” He held up his plate. “I’ll have some more.” He watched the plate being heaped with the yellow grains and the dust-colored beans. “Next time, just a tad more saffron, okay?”
Alan grinned at Rose and poured more red wine and said to Dukas, “I want to go to Jakarta.”
“To do what, for Christ’s sake?”
“To test the comm plan.”
“Alan, read my lips: You’re not a spy! You’re an intel officer!”
“Yeah, but I’m available. And you know you can trust me, which is a big deal for you right now because you think everybody’s on your back over George Shreed.” He leaned forward. “Mike, it’s three days—fly there, nice hotel, take a walk, leave a mark, have a nice dinner, go to the meeting place. Bang, that’s it.”
“And what happens at the meeting place?” Rose said, scenting trouble.
“Nothing. Ask Mike. He insists it’s a dead issue, because nobody’s done anything with it for years and there’s nobody at the other end. Right?”
“Did I say that?”
“You did. Just before I left this afternoon.”
“Well—”
Rose was looking at her husband with her head tipped to the side. “If it’s dead and nothing’s going to happen, why go?”
He seemed to falter, then made an apologetic face. “Because it’s something to do,” he said softly.
She changed the subject then by asking Dukas about Sally Baranowski, a question that embarrassed him and made him almost stammer. Dukas told them about the call on his answering machine that he hadn’t returned and then admitted his doubts about getting involved, and at last he was telling them both that he was still shaken by the shooting and he didn’t know what he wanted. “So what is this,” he growled, “post-traumatic stress syndrome?”
Rose put a hand over one of his, then over Alan’s good one. “You guys,” she said. “You guys.”
After dessert, when Alan had brought coffee into the living room, he raised the subject of Jakarta again. It was clear to them then that Alan had brought Dukas there that night because he was asking Rose’s permission as well as Dukas’s: he was trying to get a go-ahead from both of them. “Give Rose and the kids a rest from my bad temper, drink some good beer, do Mike and Uncle a favor.” He looked at Rose. “And in case you’re worried, this is a no-risk operation—a walk in the park.” The appeal in his voice was touching. “It’s a walk in the park!”
Dukas snorted. “It’s a free trip to Jakarta, that’s what it is.” He stirred sugar and then cream into his coffee, even though all day long he drank it black. “Well—if you come back and tell me nothing happened, I can close out what you call ‘the action item,’ that’s true. Then I can bore myself stiff with the radio crap for six months and close out the whole file, and then I can go back to writing reports about why I should be reimbursed for ten grand I took on my personal responsibility when we were running after that shit George Shreed. That’s your view of it?”
Alan looked at him, then at his injured hand, and then he reached out with his good hand to his wife. “You’re flying all day. I just sit here.”
She squeezed his hand. To Dukas, she said, “Can he do it?”
Dukas shrugged. “You don’t just ‘do’ a thing like this. You got to have a country clearance. Once we apply, the Agency gets notified, then they want to know what’s going on and why they’re not the ones to do it. Then we wrangle, on and on.”
“They had their chance,” Alan said.
“Not the way they’d see it.”
“It’s your case now. You’ve got a number, what can they say?” He leaned forward. “Mike, let me go. I go, then you apply for the country clearance; it’s happening too fast for them to do anything.”
“No—I don’t think so—”
“Mike, goddamit,” Alan snapped, “you lost your nerve? Jesus, you can’t apply for a country clearance; you can’t even call an old girlfriend on the fucking phone!”
Rose’s hand gripped Dukas’s. He looked into Alan’s suddenly angry face and looked away to keep things from escalating. He sighed. “And if something goes wrong?”
“What can go wrong? You said yourself, it’s dead! It’s just crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s! What can go wrong with that?”
Dukas sipped coffee. “Jakarta, that’s what.” He looked at Alan, and Alan winked. Another first since Pakistan. Dukas put down his cup. “Tell you what. Triffler’s back tomorrow. I’ll have him check Al out on the comm plan—walk him through it, lay it out on paper. Then it’ll be easy. Right?”
He was talking to Rose. She made a face. “It’s still Jakarta,” she said.
Jakarta.
Just an old-fashioned spy, he thought. The idea delighted him. He was drunk, happy-drunk. I want a spy/Just like the spy that buggered dear old dad. He lifted the telephone and rang through, picturing the little man who would be waiting at the public telephone.
“Yes?” The voice was tentative. Bobby Li, the agent at the other end, never seemed quite sure of himself. Well, people who were absolutely sure of themselves didn’t make good agents, right?
“Wondering if you’ve read Green Eggs and Ham.”
“Oh, yes, right. ‘Mister Brown is out of town/He came back with Mister Black.’ Hi!” Bobby sounded distant, but he had the recognition codes right. Good start.
“Hey, Sundance—how’re they hanging?”
Bobby Li giggled. George Shreed had given him that code name. “Hey, Butch Cassidy.”
“Long time, bud.” Three years, in fact. But they’d had some great times before that. “Want to play some ping-pong, bud?” Ping-pong was telephone code for an operation.
“Good. Great!” Real pleasure in the high voice. Bobby loved him still.
“I’m going to need a few items, bud.”
“Sure thing, boss.”
Jerry struggled for a moment with the simple telephone code, trying to remember the word for cameras. Ah. Camera. Hidden in plain sight. He was supposedly in Jakarta to find locations for a Hollywood feature film, as good a cover as he’d ever had, as it excused a great deal of roaming. He was using his old cover name, Andrew Bose, who had always been an antique dealer in the past, but what the hell. Cameras were now a legitimate extension of his cover, so no code word needed. Too much booze, he thought, but wryly, and not really meaning it. Can’t really have too much booze. “Need a camera, bud. And a guy to use it, okay? To photograph the ping-pong.”
“Sure.”
“And an ice bucket, okay?” Ice bucket was code for a weapon.
“Oh—okay—” Now Bobby seemed nervous, but, because Jerry was ordering him to find a weapon, that made sense.
“A big ice bucket, okay?”
“Sure, sure.”
“And some ice.” Then Jerry switched to a serious voice. Bobby would be happier if he thought things were serious. “This is a big game of ping-pong, pal.” Jerry leaned forward as if Bobby was right there. “You want to play in the big game. This is it, Bobby. The start of a big game.” He looked around the hotel lobby for the door to the bar, saw people going up three steps and out of sight and figured it was that way. “Meet me at Papa John’s and we’ll practice some ping-pong.” Papa John was code for a place and a time. Would Bobby remember after three years? Of course he’d remember! Bobby Li fucking loved him!
He hung up and headed for the bar. He was still sober enough to have kept from his old agent the fact that the ping-pong was going to end in the death of an American.
Bobby Li hung up and felt excited and happy. He had thought maybe his friend Andy had forgotten him.
Bobby had lived his whole life in Jakarta. He was Chinese only by ethnicity, but ethnicity made for sharp divides here. Sometimes it was the ultimate arbiter of loyalty.
And loyalty was crucial for Bobby Li, because he was a double agent—for his American friend who had just talked to him on the telephone, and for Loyalty Man, who was Chinese and a right shit and not his friend at all. Bobby was loyal to Loyalty Man because of ethnicity, the powerful force, but he was more loyal to the American because he was his friend and because he also loved George Shreed, who had been Bobby Li’s surrogate father. It had been George Shreed who had pulled him out of the gutter of Jakarta and made him a pet, a pal, and an agent. Love trumped ethnicity.
Bobby had worked for George Shreed for two years, and then for both George Shreed and Mister Chen, a double agent already at thirteen, but different because both men had known he was a double—Chen had made him one and then Shreed had accepted it and become a double himself. And then one day George Shreed had taken him aside and had said that he had to go back to the United States, and somebody else would be there instead. That was the worst day of Bobby’s life, when George Shreed had told him he was leaving.
“And a new guy will be taking over,” George had said. “Taking you over, too, Bobby. But—” George’s eyes had signaled the secret look that Bobby loved, the look that said that it was only the two of them against the world. “But we won’t tell the new guy about Mister Chen, okay? Mister Chen is our secret, Bobby.”
That had been twenty years ago, and he had never told. The new guy had been called Andy Bose, which was surely not his real name, but Bobby knew enough about espionage to understand that, and anyway, he had liked Andy from the start. And then Mister Chen had turned him over to another Chinese, and then he to another, and so on—six Chinese controls he had had, the last one this shit, Loyalty Man—and he had been the whole time with Andy. And now Andy had called him and they were going to do a big operation together, just like old times, and it would be great.
Being a double agent wouldn’t matter. He could be loyal to Andy for the operation, and nobody the wiser. It would be great.
Suburban Virginia.
Lying in the dark, Alan could feel Rose beside him, feel her wakefulness and her worry. There had been no sex since he had got out of the hospital. He had been afraid, he realized, confused by why the injury to his hand should make him so.
“Alan?”
He grunted.
“You really want to go on this Jakarta thing, don’t you?”
He grinned into the darkness. “Yeah—I confess: I really do.”
He heard her chuckle. “Hey, sailor,” she whispered, “want to have a good time?”
“I—” He swallowed. “I’m afraid I’ll touch you with my—ha-hand.” He felt her move on the mattress and heard the rustling of cloth.
He heard the smile in her husky voice. “Just you leave everything to me,” she murmured, settling on top of him.
Then he began to slide down that glassy slope that is sex, losing his fear, losing consciousness, losing self-consciousness, merging with her and coming to himself again in warmth and sweetness and safety; and, later, he knew that it was at that moment that his real healing began.
Northern Pakistan.
Colonel Lao stood in the remnants of a street, peering out from under the hood of an American rain parka at generations of rubble. The village had been fought over recently. The mosque had been destroyed years ago. In between, the village had been a focus of violence over and over.
His people had a generator running and spotlights on the ruins of the mosque. Forensics people from State Security were all over the site. He hoped they were working for him. Their team leader had an encrypted international cell phone of a type his department had never heard of, much less issued. Lao watched them with a detachment worthy of the ancients. He didn’t even have a cell phone.
“Sir?” His new man, Tsung. Young and competent. A little lazy, but well trained. He was hovering at arm’s length, careful of Lao’s silence. Lao appreciated his courtesy.
“Are you waiting for me, Tsung?” He turned, shook rain off his parka.
“I have an eyewitness the Ministry seems to have missed. He says that after the plane left, another car left too, going north.”
