Top Hook Page 9

  “You’re goddam right you will.”

  She stood and began to fling stuff into her attaché case. The Agency people withdrew from her as if she had a disease, leaving Dukas alone with her. “Nice job,” he said. She shot him a look, went back to stuffing papers. Dukas leaned in, thinking paradoxically that there was something sexually interesting about her despite her noisiness. Maybe because of the noisiness. All that energy.

  “Menzes has gone out on a limb for you. Trust me.”

  “Trust you! I don’t even know you! You come barging in here, my meeting—”

  “Ms Pasternak, look—” Dukas found himself looking down her tailored dress, thinking that there were quite nice breasts down there; Jesus H. Christ, what was going on? And then saying, “This really is an important security matter. Menzes is a standup guy who’s trying to do his job and defend his agency and be fair.”

  She was breathing hard and her pale face was flushed. He suspected that she wanted to hit him. Lawyers’ egos were very big. “You’ve won,” he whispered.

  “Get fucked!”

  Well, there was an idea. But she annoyed him, too, because she really didn’t understand how hard it was for a man like Menzes to have come even this far. “And you get real,” he growled. “If he calls your bluff, you’ve got nothing but some bullshit in the Washington Post, and Rose will get creamed!”

  Then he thought she was going to lose it, but she surprised him by looking at her watch and then at the CIA people at the far end of the room, who were looking at their watches because it was past the end of their workday, and she said, “I haven’t got time to dick around with a Navy cop.”

  Then there was a lot of talking all at once, and several handshakes, and the Agency people scurried away, and only Dukas and Emma Pasternak were left. She was still trying to jam papers and a binder of vetted documents that Menzes had given her into her attaché. Dukas lingered by the door. Now that it was over, the optimism he had felt after meeting with Menzes left him; never an easy man with other people, he felt awkward. “Nice to have met you, Ms Pasternak,” he said.

  “Nice to have met you,” she said. She didn’t mean that it had been nice to meet him, at all. She meant Get out of here. Then she swore because she couldn’t get the document binder into the attaché.

  “Uh—yeah.” He took the binder from her, took the pages out of the cover, and handed the pages back. “You ever, uh, eat Italian food?”

  “What the hell does that mean? Of course I’ve eaten Italian food.”

  “I’m a, uh, pretty good Italian cook. I’m Greek, but I cook Italian a lot.”

  She found that the unbound pages would now fit. They looked at each other. “What kind of Italian?”

  “Gnocchi.” To his ears, it sounded like nooky, and he reddened. “Made with butternut squash. A very delicate flavor.” He cleared his throat. With Menzes, he had been on a roll, in charge, and now he was a stumbling jerk. The story of his life. “I, uh, thought you might, uh—like some.”

  She stared at him. “You’re asking me to dinner?”

  “Uh, yeah, I guess—if you put it like that—and we could call Lieutenant-Commander Siciliano and give her the news—”

  “At your place?”

  “Uh, no, belongs to a friend of mine—out of town—”

  “It’s the same thing! Let me get this straight—are you asking me to dinner, when we’ve just met and haven’t exactly blended, and at your place?”

  “Okay, okay, bad idea—I just thought—” He shrugged.

  “What?”

  “You sort of—interest me.” He tried to smile, and the effort made him feel like a dog who’s trying to make up for eating somebody’s sandwich. He grabbed the door and held it for her. “Sorry. I didn’t mean anything.”

  “Everything means something, Mister Dukas.” She swept past him into the corridor. “Well, okay.”

  “What’s okay?”

  “Okay, I’ll come to dinner. I’d like to see somebody make gnocchi, because when I tried all I got was dough all over the fork.”

  “You pushed too hard. On the fork.” He didn’t say, Probably you always push too hard. “You’re really gonna come to my place for dinner?”

  “Why not? We can call Siciliano. But please don’t try to make any moves, okay? The best I ever hope for from other people is that we don’t sue each other.”

  She turned away. He saw her buttocks move in the tailored skirt. Life is full of surprises.

  E-mail, Rose to Alan.

  Subject: ITS OVER!

  I cant believe it but it’s over/mike called me just now, just hung up and it’s over!!!! they cut a deal with the agency and i’m to go back to astro soonest, waiting to cut orders, i want to go right back and see the kids and head for houston but mike says no, stay until orders/hes so cautious! i still have to fight whatever allegation was made but this will be a couple of years he thinks sorting it out but i’ll be in orbit by then and fuck em/ i love you, thinking of you kept me sane, a hell of an ordeal but i felt better thinking of you and the kids but helpless, helpless, my god how do people stand it being caught up in suspicion and all that? Kisses, love, moans/ Rose

  Alan sat back and smiled, his whole face transformed. Safe. Rose was safe. Yeah, they’d have to listen to snide remarks for a while. Some semi-friends might drop off. Alan knew that a deal at the Agency wouldn’t help him here on the ship, but if it put Rose back on the space shuttle, they were a long way toward home. He laughed aloud, startling a chaplain’s clerk near him, leaped up, and headed toward his ready room with a new feeling of purpose.

  Everything looked better to him. Even the tanker flight with Stevens, which had been a torment of bad performance by the MARI system—dropped links, bad plane-to-plane communication—and stubborn hostility from Stevens, faded.

  In the ready room, he munched a second doughnut and drank his coffee while he fanned through the detachment’s bulging message board. There was a NATO Air Tasking Order for Bosnia that didn’t include them; that had to be addressed. There were messages for the technical representatives; he skimmed them. Intelligence messages about the frequencies of Serbian radars; Alan made a note that all flight personnel were required to read and initial. A message on decline in manpower retention that he was required to read and initial. He did so, finishing the doughnut in two bites and dusting the powdered sugar off the front of his flight suit.

  Some change in the noise level at the back of the ready room alerted him, and he turned in his seat to see Senior Chief Craw coming up the center aisle with a figure in pressed shipboard khakis, a sea bag over his shoulder and his hands full of luggage. Craw had an anticipatory smile on his face.

  “Look what I found on the flight deck, skipper.” He pushed the slim figure in khakis forward. A Tomcat went to full power overhead.

  “How do you guys hear yourselves think?” asked the figure with what appeared to be genuine concern. A face came into focus—incredibly young, rather pink, eyes as blue and innocent as a newborn’s. Alan got to his feet.

  “Is this by any chance the missing Mister Soleck?”

  Alan looked past the new man to Craw. Craw merely shook his head a little, as if to disclaim any responsibility.

  A hand appeared out of the pile of luggage.

  “Sorry, sir. I’m LTjg Evan Soleck, reporting aboard.” He was a little bowed by his load, giving him a slightly gnome-like appearance below the wonderfully fresh face.

  “Glad to see you brought a tennis racket, Mister Soleck.”

  “Oh, that’s not a tennis racket, sir. That’s a squash racket.” Now Craw was laughing openly. Behind him in the back, a small crowd had gathered. Alan smiled inwardly and reminded himself that this young man had been first in his class at Pensacola.

  “Did you get in any squash in the last few days?”

  “Yes, sir! They had a court at the hotel. It was great! And they had really fast Internet connections, too. Europe isn’t as primitive as people say.” Soleck lo
oked perfectly capable of babbling on (had he really just said that Europe wasn’t primitive?) but Alan cut him off with a gesture.

  “Mister Soleck, you’re two days late meeting the boat.” They had traced him from Norfolk to Aviano, and found that he was waiting there in a first-class hotel for further orders because he hadn’t had the common sense to grab a COD to the boat.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Care to enlighten me?”

  “I missed my assigned flight, sir.” Soleck stood a little straighter and looked Alan in the eye. “No excuse.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I made a couple of mistakes flailing around. Then I got another message and got on the COD.”

  He kept the eye contact. The wide-eyed wetness seemed to drop from him for a moment. He was just Alan’s height, thinner but with obvious neck muscle and he continued to hold his luggage without apparent effort. His demeanor seemed to say, I screwed up but I’m here. Let’s get on with the job. And Alan was thinking, Was I ever this young? Am I really this old?

  “What were you doing on the Internet, Mister Soleck?”

  “Working on a wargame.”

  “You played a wargame all day?”

  “No, sir. Writing one. And only after I had tried to reach the boat and failed.”

  Alan sighed, careful not to meet Craw’s eye. “Okay, Mister Soleck. Get rid of all that stuff, stow your squash racket, and report in flight gear. You’re on the schedule in two hours.”

  “Cool!”

  Alan shut his eyes. “Soleck, was ‘cool’ on the list of acceptable responses at Pensacola?”

  “Wow, yeah. Sorry. Aye, aye, sir.”

  Alan eyed the pile of luggage. “You seem to anticipate a long cruise, Mister Soleck.”

  “Oh, well, sir, a lot of it’s books. Books. Use the time, you know—spare time—” He looked to Alan for help.

  Alan pointed at the row of det pubs. Five of them covered the MARI system that was their primary reason for being. “Our library, Mister Soleck. Please have mastered the five MARI pubs by tomorrow.”

  Soleck looked at the shelf of standalones. “Cool!” he cried. “Sir.”

  Alan handed him the message board. “That’s after you read and initial these. Carry on, Mister Soleck.”

  7

  Suburban Virginia.

  Thursday morning, George Shreed made breakfast at the butcher-block island in their big kitchen, her great love, and he ate his breakfast standing there. He didn’t have to move a lot that way, the coffee-maker to hand in front of him, fruit in the basket where she had always kept it to his left, breads in a drawer where his pelvis pressed against the wood. The bread was stale; how long since he’d replaced it? Could she have bought it? No; she’d been gone for a month before she died, now dead two days. He felt as if hands pushed down on his shoulders, the weight of her absence.

  The cleaning woman would come in today. He wrote her a note. “Buy bread. Get good stuff, no white paste—you know.” He looked around the kitchen. What else did he need? He wrote, rice. He could live on rice. Chicken breasts. She had been a superb cook. He was not. Frozen dinners, a dozen or so. He put some money on the note, wrote the check for her, as Janey must have done, once a week, years and years. Had he ever seen the cleaning woman? Must have. An image of a too-thin white woman swam into his consciousness, swam away. Something about ADD or OCD or one of those goddam disorders everybody had now.

  The telephone rang. He hobbled to the extension on the kitchen wall, expecting it to be the cleaning woman saying she couldn’t come that day—also part of her image, a certain unreliability that had plagued Janey,

  something about her kids and her disorders.

  “Shreed.”

  “George, Stan.” Rat-a-tat machine-gun of a voice, instantly recognizable—a friend (of sorts) in Internal Investigations. “George, they’re calling off the Siciliano investigation. Just thought you’d like to know.”

  Fear surged, and he could feel himself flush. He controlled his voice, however, and said, “How come?”

  “She made a lot of noise, got a lawyer. More trouble than it’s worth, was the call.”

  “Bad call. Okay, thanks.”

  He thought about it as he flossed his teeth. He saw an angry man in his mirror, composed his face better, shrugged into his suit-jacket while watching himself and decided that he looked okay. Grieving, enraged, worried, but okay. The suit was for the memorial service, which he would endure because that was what you did, because memorial services were for the survivors, who needed to believe that when they died somebody would also remember and sing hymns and give eulogies. For his own part, no memorial was needed, and memory itself was enough, but grief was now turning one of its corners toward anger and the change was dangerous. He knew his own anger and knew to fear it.

  Bad times a-comin’, he thought.

  His people had missed the woman in Venice and Trieste. He thought he’d neutralized her by tossing Siciliano to Internals. Now the Siciliano thing was falling apart. Bad, bad.

  Shreed was no fool about his situation. Talk of a mole had rumbled around the Agency for years; anybody who put scraps of evidence and suppositions together would have had a look at him, if only because he had a finger in a lot of pies and he had been there a long time. But they wouldn’t do anything, not actually do anything (polygraphs, bugs, taps, interviews), not until somebody like this woman who wanted money gave them cause. Having the Siciliano woman to entertain themselves with would have kept them occupied for a couple of years—all the time he needed—and now they were washing that out and he couldn’t afford it.

  The Siciliano woman would have to stay a suspect.

  It was still too early to go to the office, and he vented his anger by stumping through the house on his canes, trying to erase the signs of Janey. He didn’t need mementos—how could he ever forget her?—and the house itself, its smell, its decor, was all hers, anyway. But things of hers that were now useless, from her toothbrush in the bathroom to a pair of old slippers near the back door, had to go.

  He stormed through the house. He jammed things into plastic trash bags. He threw things.

  When he got to the bedroom where she had hoped to die but where death had come too slowly, he almost refused to open the door. This one can stay a few days, he thought, and then, hating his own cowardice, he flung the door open so that it banged back against the wall, and he leaned in the doorway, glowering on his canes, taking in the futility of all fights against death. Magazines she had tried to read, a television he had bought for her, an IV rack, a godawful bedpan thing. He began to throw things into the corridor.

  It was when he got to the drawer in the bedside table that he found the things that caused him to decide that it was time for him to wind it all up.

  A lot of junk lay in there, lipsticks and pencils and sickroom crap, but there were thirteen ampoules of morphine and two syringes, and they were what did it. He put out his hand to gather them up and throw them away, and he was aware of his hand there, hovering over the drawer, not gathering them up, as if the hand knew better than he did. And he looked at the morphine. It was as if a voice whispered to him: Morphine. You could walk like anybody else with morphine. It wasn’t the vanity of wanting to seem normal that affected him, however; no, it was the idea of looking normal.

  As if the voice had whispered, If you could walk like other people, your most identifiable characteristic would be gone, and you’d be invisible. Which was a way of saying, You could vanish.

  Then his hand moved and gathered the ampoules and the syringes and, more carefully than he had handled anything else, put them into a plastic sack that he carried downstairs and put into the freezer. By the time he was down there, he saw the implications, was already planning it, gauging the risks, the gains: without his canes, with an injection of morphine and a false passport, he could be out of the country before the wolves got the scent. He’d have to do something else to throw them off—fake a suicide, an acc
ident, or—? He’d work that out.

  But he’d have to set up the Chinese disaster first. Set it up and get it running and then vanish. Leaving nothing behind except this house. No lost love, no regrets. She was dead; why wait?

  But an escape plan took time, and to gain him time, the Siciliano woman would have to remain a suspect.

  Shreed leaned back against the refrigerator and began to think it all out. He looked down at his hands and saw that they were trembling, and for the first time he realized, to his astonishment, that he was scared.

  At Langley, Sally Baranowski was waiting, like everybody else, for Shreed. They didn’t think of it just like that, for they all had other concerns, but the memorial service sat in the middle of the day like a pillar in a highway, it and Shreed unavoidable. Plus they were all waiting to see how he would take it.

  For Sally Baranowski, waiting to see how Shreed would take something was an old routine. She had once been his assistant (that year’s Ray Suter, as she now said to friends, although Suter had lasted several years longer than she), then had briefly followed Shreed in his old job when he had been promoted. That she had failed in that job was partly his doing, she believed—retribution for having once (once) been disloyal to him. He had taken retribution in the best of all possible managerial ways: he had given her so much rope that she had hanged herself. Now she was in a liaison job that wasn’t going to go anywhere except toward an honorable retirement thirteen years down the pike.

  Still, when she saw Shreed she was shocked. She saw him seldom now, usually thought he was his old, bitter, amusing self, but this morning he looked merely grim. Is it grief? she wondered. Hard to imagine Shreed feeling grief, although they said he had adored his wife. No, it was more than grief, something hard and ugly, she thought. Look out, people. She was representing her new boss on a committee where everybody else knew each other, and, as the new kid on the block, she found it best simply to listen and watch. And the one she watched was Shreed.