Hostile Contact
Gordon Kent

To those who tell the truth

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Part One Targeting

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Part Two Seattle

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

Part Three Nairobi

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

Coda

About the author

Praise for the Alan Craik novels

The Alan Craik Novels

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

“This adventure appears to have got us nothing, Mister Craik!” Admiral Pilchard’s face was grim. “You get shot up, Special Agent Dukas takes a bullet, we engage two Chinese aircraft and shoot them down for you—and you bring back nothing! Do you know what the Director of Naval Intelligence has to say about that?”

His voice faded in Alan Craik’s head as it all came back: Pakistan, night, blood…

When a shot from the darkness severed the sniper’s spine, they were sprayed with blood. Mike Dukas crouched next to Alan and then moved a step, and the Chinese officer spun and fired his pistol into Dukas’s chest from five meters away, knocking him back. Alan raised his good arm and brought the sight down one-handed, leaning forward as Dukas recoiled. He shot once and the officer stumbled back and caught himself against the ruined Islamic prayer screen; he raised his own gun again and then flew forward as a rifle shot from the darkness hit him.

Dukas staggered up and forward. He fell to his knees beside George Shreed, the traitor they had chased all this way…

The admiral’s voice stabbed through the memory: “Mister Craik, I’m sorry for your injury, but what in the name of God did you think you were doing?”

Alan grunted, more an acknowledgment that the admiral had been speaking than a reply. He sat there like a whipped dog, his uniform rumpled, his head down, his injured left hand a white mitten of bandage—two fingers gone. And, as the admiral said, for what?

“We caught a spy, sir. A damned important spy. A traitor.” Alan’s tone was flat.

“Yes, and I understand he’s been comatose since you brought him back and he’s going to die within twenty-four hours, and he hasn’t said a word! Craik, you can break the rules when you bring back the gold ring, but when you come back empty—!” When Alan didn’t respond, Pilchard looked at a stone-faced officer who had come over from ONI to sit in on this chewing-out, then back at Alan, and he said almost kindly, “Didn’t this guy Shreed say anything while you had him, Commander? Nothing?”

Had Shreed said anything? Alan had desperately wanted Shreed to say things. He had felt his head reeling as his hand had bled, but he had leaned over Shreed and tried to get him to explain…

“Why?” Alan had gasped. “I want to know why. Why did you do it?”

“Do what?” A smile in Shreed’s voice, as if he was saying, What, this little thing, these deaths, this meeting a thousand miles from nowhere? “This op? Because I could. None of those other dickheads had—intestinal—” Shreed rolled a little as if to rise on his elbow and gasped, falling back so hard his head hit the paving. He wasn’t smiling now. He had at least three bullets in him, and Alan was trying to get answers from him before he died.

“You weren’t running an op. You betrayed people.”

“China—won’t trouble—us—”

“China—!”

“Dickheads. Idiots…” The voice trailed off.

Alan was aware that Pilchard had been talking again, had stopped. Alan said, “No, he didn’t say anything, sir. Not anything that made any sense.”

Pilchard looked at him hard, and Alan realized that he’d lost track and that now he was responding to something already past. Pilchard had the furious look of a senior officer who wasn’t being listened to. “Maybe you need to take six months off,” Pilchard growled. “You’re not what I’d call rational.”

“Sir, once I’m back on the boat—”

“You’re not going back to the boat! Goddamit, Craik, look at yourself! Your uniform’s a mess, you look like an old man, you can’t concentrate—! Get a grip on yourself!”

Alan touched his bandages. They were really there so he couldn’t see the hand. As if not seeing it denied its reality. “I need work, sir, not six months off.” Pilchard looked aside at the man from ONI, and Alan got the message: ONI wanted to see a flogging. “We went to get Shreed, and we got him,” he said stubbornly.

The ONI man said, “And he hasn’t said zip. You got nothing.”

“What did you bring the Chinese?” Alan had said then to the dying Shreed. There were a dozen dead Chinese soldiers around the old mosque, and the Chinese officer who had shot Dukas was lying with his head a foot from Shreed’s. Alan thought that Shreed had brought Navy secret codes to give to the Chinese. “What did you bring them?”

Shreed gurgled, turned his head and spat blood against the wall. “Poison. Brought Chen—poison—” Shreed’s head turned, seemed to merge with the Chinese officer’s in the darkness, their faces as close as two lovers’.

“He’s your control? He’s running you?” Alan leaned within inches of Shreed’s ear, trying to force the answers from him.

“Chen?” Shreed snarled. He made the name sound like a dirty word. “Never—never—! The money—!” Shreed closed his eyes. His chest heaved, and Alan thought he was laughing. He wheezed and coughed, then quieted, and there was a silence. “You taking me home?” Shreed whispered.

“If we make it.”

“You think you’re heroes, but you don’t—understand—” Shreed’s voice faded. Alan heard the rasping breath in the darkness. Abruptly, the voice came back, loud now. “I’ll have a monument—like—Bill Casey. You’ll see—who the hero—is—”

The wheezing cough came again as if he was laughing, but he wasn’t laughing.

The admiral was looking at a photograph of the President on his wall and talking again. “Your ‘traitor’ was an important man with important friends at the CIA. They deny that he was a spy, and they’re saying that the Navy made a huge mistake. And you broke a lot of rules in doing it.”

“Shreed said he’d be a hero.”

“And to them he is! He’s got a big cheering section over there.” Pilchard glanced at the ONI man, who nodded gloomily. “Alan, you and this man Dukas broke a lot of rules. When you break the rules, you better come back with a diamond in your hand, or you’re in the deepest shit in the world.”

But Alan went on, like a drunk who doesn’t hear what’s said to him. “Shreed said he’d be a hero! What the hell, he was a traitor. Why would he be a hero?”

“You’re not listening, Commander—!”

“They’ll come back at us,” Alan said. He sat up a little straighter.

“What?”

“The Chinese. They have to come back at us.”

“Come back how?”

“Revenge. Like street gangs. They’ll take a shot at us.”

Pilchard wasn’t interested in street gangs. He nodded at the ONI officer; clearly, it was his time to talk, and it had all been arranged before the chewing-out had started. The ONI man said, “Our office would be happier if Shreed had lived to talk. Or if you’d got the Chinese officer—Shreed’s control. Chou?”

“Chen.”

Shreed saying, contempt in his voice, when Alan had asked if the Chinese officer was his control, “Chen?” as if Chen was a word for shit.

“Yeah. We think that if we could get this Chen, we could salvage something here. What happened to him?”

“I was pretty much out of it by then.” Meaning that his civilian friend Harry and Harry’s assassin girlfriend had had another agenda, and they had been the only good guys left standing at the end of the fight, so they had got whatever was left of Chen.

“If we had him, we’d bury Shreed’s buddies over at the Agency.” The ONI man, a full captain, shook his head. “Is Chou alive, do you think?”

“Chen. It’s Chen.”

“Okay, whatever! If there’s a chance that sonofabitch is still alive, we want to know. That would be something, if we could bring him in. Commander, you hearing me?”

Alan was hearing a sound and couldn’t place it, a distant drone. He was trying to say something to Dukas but he couldn’t hear, and then it was too late to ask anything, and the blood was draining out of him and he wondered if the sound was the aircraft that was supposed to lift them out.

“Money,” Alan said now to Admiral Pilchard. “Shreed said something about money. When he was talking about Chen and poison. I wanted to ask him about it, but then the aircraft came and—”

Alan stared at the wall of the Pentagon office, still hearing the S-3 that had come to take them out of Pakistan, still smelling the blood and feeling the wound in his hand. He’d thought that he had done some of the best work of his life, and now he was being read out for it. He wanted Pilchard, who was a damned good officer and a “sea daddy” to him sometimes, to say that he and Dukas had done a hell of a job and it wasn’t their fault that Shreed hadn’t talked. He wanted him to say that Alan should go back to sea and take over command of his detachment again. But what the admiral was dealing with was not Alan Craik, but a turf war between ONI and the CIA, with the Navy looking bad because one of its officers had broken a lot of rules to capture a man who could, in death, be made to wear a hero’s halo.

“If you know anything about what happened to this Chen, Commander, you better come out with it—quick.” The ONI captain leaned in on Alan, and Pilchard waved him off with a shake of the head.

“Maybe I can find out,” Alan said. Maybe. Maybe Harry and Anna had nursed Chen back to life and were having picnics with him in Bahrain. Maybe Alan’s lost fingers would grow back, too.

“Don’t maybe me. Find out.” The captain leaned away from him out of deference to the admiral, but he sounded threatening.

Admiral Pilchard stood to show the meeting was over. Alan looked him in the eye. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “I did what I thought was right.”

The admiral gave him a bleak little smile. “The Navy goes by results, Commander.”

Out in the corridor, the captain grabbed his arm. He was a big man who used his size to awe people. “Come up with a diamond, Mister Craik,” he snarled. “Come up with a diamond, or you’re going to be one early-out lieutenant-commander.”

Part One Targeting

1

400 NM east of Socotra, Indian Ocean.

Captain Rafe Rafehausen slammed his S-3B into the break and thought that he’d done it badly, out of practice, the move both too sudden and too harsh, and beside him he heard Lieutenant jg Soleck give a grunt. Rafehausen had an impulse to snarl and overcame it; he was the CAG and he didn’t fly enough and the kid was right—he should have done it better. Although, as he knew from the weekly reports, the kid’s landing scores were the worst on the boat.

“Gear one, two, three, down—and locked—flaps, slats out—hook is—down—read airspeed and fuel, Mister Soleck—”

The jg muttered the fuel poundage and airspeed, which Rafehausen could have read perfectly well for himself, of course. He supposed he was trying to communicate with the much younger man, who seemed mostly terrified of him.

“Not one of the great breaks of all time, Mister Soleck.”

“Uh—no, sir—but good, sir—considering—”

Rafehausen lined up dead-on, said, “Ball,” when he caught the green, and took the LSO’s instructions almost unconsciously, now into his groove and operating on long and hard-won experience. He caught the two wire, rolled, lifted the hook and let a yellow-shirt direct him forward.

“Nice landing, sir.”

Rafehausen smiled. “Little rough, Mister Soleck. Practice makes perfect.” He slapped the ensign on the shoulder. “Weeklies tell me you need some practice yourself.” He would have walked away then, but he saw the kid blush and look suddenly stricken, so he put the hand more gently on his shoulder and walked with him over the nonskid that way, shouting over the deck noise, “Don’t take it wrong, Soleck—we all get into slumps! Hey, how about you and me do some practice landings together sometime?”

He debriefed in the Det 424 ready room, which was his for the moment only because he’d borrowed one of their aircraft, and then made his way to the CAG’s office. He wished, often, that he was a squadron officer again—no stacks of paper, no wrangles with personalities and egos. Now that it was too late, he knew that when you were a squadron pilot, you were having the best that naval air offered; Soleck didn’t know how lucky he was. What came later—rank, status, command—were compensation for not being a young warrior with a multi-million-dollar horse and a whole sky to ride it in.

“Another urgent p-comm from Al Craik, Rafe,” a lieutenant-commander said as he sat down. “Same old shit—‘Request immediate orders,’ etcetera, etcetera.”

“What’s the medical officer say?”

“No way.”

“Even in non-flight-crew status?”

“Negative. MO says the man ‘needs to heal and overcome trauma, period, and don’t ask again.’ Another month, maybe.”

Alan Craik was a personal friend, and Rafehausen wished he could help him. Craik had been flown back to the carrier with part of one hand shot off and so much blood gone that the medics thought they’d lose him; now back in the States, he was recovered enough to be itching to return to duty. But not enough to serve.

“Send Craik a message over my name: the answer is no, and don’t ask again for at least two weeks.”

Unimak Canyon, Aleutian Archipelago.

“Depth is two hundred meters and steady.”

“Steady at two hundred.” The Chinese captain, standing by his command chair, turned and looked toward sonar station three, the towed array whose passive equipment had most reliably tracked the American. His crew had scored more contact hours on an American ballistic missile submarine in the last four days than any submarine in the history of the Chinese Navy. No moment of that time had been easy.

Even when he knew where the submarine would be, it was almost invisible.

Even trailing it by a mere four thousand meters, it was almost inaudible.

He dared not close any more. His own boat, the Admiral Po, was a killer, slow but sure—the best his service had to offer, but too loud and too old, and no amount of pious mouthing to the Party would change the fact that she leaked radiation from her reactor compartment. Her condition affected the crew, destroyed morale, made retention of the dedicated specialists vital to the service nearly impossible.

He was going to change that. He was going to follow an American ballistic missile sub, a “boomer,” from her base near Seattle to her patrol area, wherever that was. And he was going to take that information home and shove it down the throat of the Party until they paid the money to make his service the equal of her rivals in Russia, Great Britain, and, most of all, America. Because when he had the patrol area where the most precious eggs in the American nuclear basket rested, he would bury the army and the airforce.

“She’s turning to port.”

“All engines stop!” Drift. Every time the American maneuvered, Admiral Po had to drift. He couldn’t take the risk that the Americans were executing a clearing turn to get their passive sonar on their wake. Twice the boomer had done just that, and he had waited, knuckles white, drenched in sweat as the two submarines passed in silence. He couldn’t risk detection. Detection would imperil not only the operation but also its source, a faceless spy whose radio transmissions told him where to pick up the boomer near the American west coast and when.

Admiral Po’s secret friend. Jewel.

“Passing 340 relative and increasing engine noise.”

“Increasing speed?”

Two men in a darkened ballroom. Each can track the other only when he moves and makes a noise. Where is he? Where is he going? How fast is he moving?

Omnipresent—Is he behind me?

The sonarman, his best, watched his three screens, touching buttons and waiting for the computer to analyze tracking data. Passive sonar was an imperfect sensor that had to detect emanations from the target; only active sonar sent out its own signal and listened for the reflection. Sonarmen on passive looked for certain telltale “lines:” auxiliaries, reactors, propeller wash. They hoped for a specific signature that could be reliably assigned to the target, and not, say, a passing whale or a fishing boat on the surface. When they had a library of such noises, they became better trackers, but this endless game of follow-the-leader required constant analysis and perfect guesswork. The cream of the sonar team had been at their stations since they entered the difficult undersea terrain of the Aleutian chain—three watches. The captain hadn’t left the bridge for more than an hour in four days. Despite air-conditioning and high discipline, the bridge stank of sweat and shorted electrical power, a faint ozone smell that never left the Admiral Po. The captain thought it was the smell of leaking radiation.

“Nine knots and still increasing, turning hard to port. I think he’s diving, as well. I’m losing the track in his own wake.” The man sounded exhausted. That was not good; the excitement had kept them going through the first bad moments off Kodiak Island. Now that, too, was gone.

“Come to 270 and make revolutions for three knots.”

“270 and three knots. Aye.”

“Status?”

“He’s gone.”

The captain rolled his head slowly to the right and left, banished all thought of angry response from his mind, and settled slowly into his command chair.

“He’s drifting. He will complete the turn as a clearing turn before running the Unimak channel.” The captain didn’t feel anything like the certainty he projected, but it was a skill that came with command.

“270 and three knots, captain.”

“All engines stop.”

Two of the sonarmen played with the bow sonar, a much weaker engine than the powerful towed array behind them. The tail could be deployed only at low speeds, and certain maneuvers like rapid turns were not possible while it was deployed, but it was their only tool for following the American. The bow sonar had intermittent contact at best. He could hear the two murmuring to each other about the noise that the ocean was making, pounding on the island due north of them. Background noise, a white noise that would cross most of the spectrum, all of the “lines.” They were murmuring because sonarmen had a superstitious respect for their opposite numbers, afraid that loud conversation would be heard by the opposing specialists. No one knew how good the American sonars really were, but four days had taught the captain that they were not as good as his worst fears, and their tactics showed that they were cocky.

That still left a lot of room for them to be very, very good.

“350 relative! Range 3500 meters and closing!”

It was eerie, having his prediction fulfilled like that. He had tossed it off, based, yes, on some experience. But mostly to steady the bridge crew. The bastard was coming around toward them, and quite fast, now that his engines were driving him again.

“Take us down to 255 meters, bow up.”

“255 meters, bow up, aye.” The Admiral Po began a very slow dive, aiming to get her metal bulk through the deep isothermic layer that would reflect most sonar and greatly hamper passive detection. The captain looked down at his knuckles on the collision bar in front of his command seat and gradually willed his hands to relax.

In the darkened ballroom, there are long, velvet curtains that hide sound if you can get behind them.

“000 relative, 3000 meters and closing. Speed five knots. Vector 190.”

The boomer suddenly appeared as a digital symbol on the command screen with her course and speed displayed next to her. The distance between the Admiral Po and her quarry seemed very short, and the captain wondered if they were about to change roles.

“255 meters.”

“Try to put the bow sonar up in the layer.”

“Bow up, aye.”

This was a tricky maneuver and one that couldn’t really be accurately gauged for success. It required that the planesman adjust the pitch of the submarine so that her bow sonar was actually above the acoustic layer, allowing that sonar to listen to the enemy while the rest of the submarine’s metal hide was hidden below the temperature gradient of the layer. The problem was that you never knew for sure that you had it exactly right; the acoustic layer was simply a metaphor for the invisible line where two different layers of water with different temperatures met. It couldn’t be seen, only sensed, and only sensed as a relative gradient. The bow might be in the layer or meters above it, depending on luck and skill and local variations.

He’s bow on to us right now. The American, with his infinitely superior equipment, was in the best position he could ask to detect Admiral Po.

“Nothing on the tail.”

“Bow sonar has contact, 010 relative, 2500 meters and closing. Speed five knots. Vector 180.”

He has us. Or he will turn away.

The captain turned to the planesman.

“Well done. Very well done.” The bow sonar report indicated that the bow was, indeed, above the layer. But how far? And how reflective was the layer?

He watched the symbol on the bridge screen, the only visual input that mattered, willing it to continue its turn to port.

“020 relative, 2700 meters. Speed six knots. Vector 160.”

Deep breath, long exhalation.

“Make revolutions for three knots. Hold us at 255 meters and pitch for normal.”

“Aye, aye.” That pulled the bow back under the layer, making them blind, but he had to move or the American would get too far away. Simply avoiding detection was only half the game.

“Three knots.”

“Helmsman, three knots for the center of the channel.”

“Aye, aye.”

He cast an eye at the chart and decided he had a safe amount of water under his keel, even in these treacherous seas.

“Depthfinder off.”

“Depthfinder off, aye.”

Ahead, perhaps well ahead if he stuck to his six knots, the American would be entering the channel already. The captain calculated quickly; the American would be well over six thousand meters ahead when they were back in the deep water on the other side of the channel, but the captain thought that the risk was worthwhile, and he was a little distracted by the obvious adulation of the bridge crew and his own internal buzz of triumph. He had outguessed an American boomer captain. His crew had reacted well. He was worthy.

“Center of the channel.”

He waited patiently, following the channel on his chart while thinking over the last set of moves, trying to guess the next. His eyes actually closed twice. Minutes trickled by. He hated letting the American have so much time undetected, but he couldn’t risk anything in the narrow channel.

“Bow sonar has possible contact, range seven thousand meters, bearing 000 relative.”

He snapped fully awake.

“Speed?”

The man looked anguished. The data were too sketchy. He needed a longer hit, or a second and third hit in quick succession to get a vector and speed.

Seven thousand meters was too far ahead, and too far for the bow sonar to make contact. Unless he was going very fast. It had to be a false contact—a seamount, or a boat. Or another submarine. He struggled with the possibilities as his own boat continued to creep down the channel.

“All engines stop. Planesman, bow above the layer.”

The Admiral Po seemed to hold its breath.

“Possible contact, range seven thousand meters, bearing 000 relative.”

The image returned on the command screen.

“Vector 000. Speed twelve knots.”

The American was racing away. He would be clear of the channel in moments; indeed, given the vagaries of passive sonar, he might be free now, and increasing speed.

“Make revolutions for four knots. Retrieve the tail.” It was useless in the channel, anyway. The American was surely too far away to hear its telltale 44dB line as the bad bearing in the towed array winch screamed.

Were they detected? He didn’t think so, couldn’t think so. This had the smell of a standard operating procedure, a routine to lose hypothetical pursuit. If so, it was crushingly effective.

“Towed array housed, sir.”

“Very well. Make revolutions for six knots.”

At six knots, the Admiral Po was one of the loudest leviathans in the deep. Her second-generation reactor could not be made really quiet by the addition (and in some cases the slipshod addition) of the best Russian quieting materials from the third generation—isolation mounts, for instance. The captain hated to go above four knots in an operational patrol. He felt naked.

They roared along the channel, a painful compromise, too loud to avoid detection, too slow to catch the American if he was determined to go fast.

“How did we miss him going so fast? I make no accusation, understand. I need to know.”

“Captain, he is not much noisier at twelve knots than at six. Even the cavitation noise is, well, muffled. He is very quiet.”

No submarine should be so quiet at twelve knots.

In Severomorsk, they had told him about the “steel Sierra,” the Russian submarine that would do these things. That had been twelve years ago, before the Soviet Union rolled over and sank. Clearly the American boats could do the same. His antiquated attack boat had just fallen even farther behind, because the ability to run fast without cavitation, the designers’ dream since the 1960s, placed the new American boomer in the fourth generation.

He timed out the channel’s length on his own watch. The second he was sure he had depth under his keel, his voice rang out.

“Make our depth 300. Turn to port heading 270. Make our speed two knots.”

Turning gradually broadside to the expected vector of the target, exposing the length of the towed array to get the maximum signal, diving to avoid an unexpected ambush.

Time gurgled by down the hull.

“All stop.”

Nothing.

“Sonar?”

“No contact.”

The captain was a thorough professional and he didn’t quit. He searched in ever-increasing spirals for twelve hours, sprinting and drifting, risking detection and flirting with disaster if the American sub was lurking in the deep water just north of the channel. But he took such risks only because he already knew the answer: his opponent had raced down the channel and into the deep water and had vanished to the north.

Sleepless, grimy, sweat-stained, he rose from his command chair and addressed the bridge crew.

“This is not a total loss, comrades. We have unprecedented sonograms on the American; we know that he was headed north. We know more about their patrol routes and procedures than any boat in Chinese history. And they have no idea that we’re here.”

“Do we go north, then, Captain?” asked his first officer.

“No. No, we return to our patrol area, study our sonograms, and wait.”

Until Jewel gives us the next one, he thought. But Jewel was too precious, and he couldn’t say that to the crew.

The submarine set a course for the waters off Seattle.

Suburban Virginia.

The gleaming new S-3 sagged a little, turning on final for the carrier; his break had been weak, and he knew that no self-respecting LSO would give him an okay on any part of this trap so far. Now he was in the groove but chasing his lineup like a nugget, all of his motor coordination sluggish and unresponsive, like a bad hydraulics system in an old airplane. His brain knew where his hands should go, but his injured hand lagged and the signals seemed to move too slowly, too jerkily, and the plane, like a horse that knows that the hand at the reins is weak, seemed to fight him.

He eyeballed the lineup, called the ball in his head, and tried to recapture the flawless rhythm that he had once had at this game. One mile, six hundred feet, one hundred and forty knots. He knew the numbers, but the response seemed to lag and he wanted to blame the equipment, wanted to suddenly press a button and have all of those reaction times and skills come flooding back, and then he jerked physically to realize that he was there, the deck was THERE.

His angle of attack was too steep, tending to sag at the very end and fighting his near-stall speed for altitude; the plane had nothing to give him; his correction was too late, and the immovable laws of physics and mathematics grabbed his plane and flung it into the back of the ship, just a few feet above the neat, white lettering that said “USS Thomas Jefferson.” A brilliant orange-and-white explosion obliterated his control screen—

—and he picked up the joystick in his good, strong right hand and smashed it through the wallboard of the living room, screaming his frustration at the top of his lungs.

“Fuck! FUUUCK! Jesus FUCKING Christ!” He was roaring with anger, sweat and failure dripping from him, and the shards of a piece of expensive computer equipment broken by his own stupid rage prodded him to a sicker, meaner level, as he thought of what he had become with one wound—two fingers shot off his left hand in Pakistan and he was half what he had been. Less than half.

There was a small irregular hole in their rented livingroom wall. “Fucking stupid JERK!” he shouted. His face left no doubt whom he meant. He threw the shattered remnants of the joystick across the room, where they left a nick in the paint on the wall under the stairs. He clenched his hands, savoring the awful feeling of the missing fingers. A noise distracted him.

Crying.

His son was standing on the stairs, terrified by a side of his father he had never seen, never should have seen.

“Oh, my God, Mikey!” Alan said, his voice bruised from shouting.

Mikey stood, whimpering, looking afraid. Afraid of his father, the hero. Alan took a step toward the stairs and Mikey bolted for his room, and the front door opened, and there was Rose, beautiful and healthy in her flight suit, the poster child for women in naval aviation. She stopped as soon as the door opened; he could see in a heartbeat that she saw it all, knew it all.

He threw himself into an armchair he didn’t like, facing a television he hated. He hated the room and he hated the house. It might have been better if it had been his own house, but this was merely a place they had found in the hectic last days of the Shreed business, when Rose had been temporarily attached to the Chief of Naval Operations, and then he had got hurt. The house was too small and too mean, but it was what she could find in one day. And he hated it.

Now, she came into the room, trying, he knew, to mute her own joy at feeling good about herself and her life, going down to Pax River to fly every day, preparing to get her heart’s desire by going to Houston.

She kissed him lightly on the top of the head and went into the kitchen, and seconds later she was back.

“You know—” and she kept her voice light, “—you could have done something about dinner.”

“Because I don’t do anything but sit here on my ass all day? Right!” He shot up and headed for the kitchen. Upstairs, the baby started to cry. “And shut that kid up!” he shouted.

It was as if he hated her, too. As if hurting her, the thing he valued most in the world, was the only way to express his rage. She wouldn’t have it, however; she had a ferocious temper of her own, and she could be sweet Rose, forgiving Rose, good-wife Rose for only so long. Grabbing his arm from behind, she spun him halfway around and shouted, just as loudly as he had, “That’s your kid up there! If you don’t like him or me or us, get the hell out!”

“I might do just that!”

“Well, do it! We’re all sick of tiptoeing around so you can feel sorry for yourself and stare at your wounded hand and think how bad the Navy’s treated you. Get a grip or get out!”

And he raised his hand.

Washington.

Mike Dukas came out of his shower, his heavy, hairy body pink except for the livid red scars along his collarbone. Seeing it in the bathroom mirror, he made a face—the first bullet he had ever taken, and it had been a doozy. He still couldn’t lift his hands above his shoulders, and drying himself made him wince, and when he went out into the world he still had to wear a plastic harness that held his hands up in front of him so that he looked like the Easter bunny.

“Fucking George Shreed,” he muttered.

George Shreed dominated his life now: he had taken the bullet capturing Shreed, and now he was paying for it in the paperwork that waited at his office—reports and explanations and assessments. “The thanks of a grateful nation,” he said aloud and thought, Well, at least I don’t feel as bad as Al Craik. Craik, he knew, was in a deep depression.

He needed a change, Dukas thought. God knows, he needed something.

Time was, he would have thought he needed to fall in love. He fell in love easily, hard, usually badly. This time, however, he didn’t have the urge, as if scraping death’s fender had warned him off the risk. Even now, there was a call on his answering machine that he had started to listen to last night and had switched off because he had recognized the woman’s voice. “Hi, Mike,” she had said, the voice a little breathy and too bright. “Hi, this is—” and he had turned it off because he knew who it was.

Sally Baranowski. CIA analyst, incipient alcoholic just out of rehab, nice, nice woman. They had almost had something going, and then he had got himself shot and she had got herself rehabilitated, and now, what the hell, what good was any of it? Half-dry, his back still covered with water, he wrapped the wet towel around his gut and stalked out of the bathroom as if he meant to punch somebody out, went to the answering machine and stabbed it with a stiff finger and said to himself, Don’t be a shmuck.

“Hi, Mike. Hi, this is Sally!” A small laugh. “Baranowski. Remember me? Uh—I just thought I’d call—This is awkward as hell; I thought you’d be there. Goddam machines, you can’t—”

He switched it off. She must be just out of rehab. How long did rehab take, anyway? Thirty days? He didn’t want to get involved, was the truth. What he wanted was real work, a case, relief from the mindnumbing reports that filled his days. So far, his boss at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service wouldn’t give him a thing; he’d been going into the office for a week, pounding out paperwork, kept out of action. Because he was “awaiting a clean bill of health,” his boss said, which had nothing to do with his health and everything to do with the fact that he’d gone into a foreign country (Pakistan) without a country clearance and without adequate authorization, his boss said, and got himself shot up and had needed to be flown out by a Navy aircraft that was also there illegally. And, what the hell, the fact that they’d caught a major spy seemed to make no difference. And now Kasser, his boss’s boss, wanted to know where the Chinese case officer was. Dukas could see himself spending the rest of his life writing reports related to his trip to Pakistan.

So, Dukas had said, let me go back to the War Crimes Tribunal, from which he was supposedly on six months’ leave of absence as a favor to NCIS, but his boss had negatived that as “dodging the issue,” whatever the issue was.

“Shit,” Dukas said.

And his telephone rang.

“Dukas,” he growled into it in his early-morning voice.

“It’s Alan.”

“Hey, man!” Dukas sounded to himself like a jerk—happy-happy, oh boy, life is great! Trying to cheer Al Craik up because he sounded like shit. “How’s it going, Al?”

“Get me something to do, Mike. Anything!”

“That’s a job for your detailer, Al.”

“My detailer can’t do anything; I’m on medical leave and some genius at Walter Reade wants to disability-discharge me. I’m going nuts, Mike.”

“Yeah, well—you sleeping?”

“Sleeping—what’s that? No, I’m not sleeping. I fought with Rose, I shouted at my kid—” His voice got hoarse. “Mike—I’ll do anything to get my mind off myself. Scut work, I don’t care.”

This was Dukas’s best friend. They had almost died together. They had been wounded together. Dukas’s own helplessness made him somber. “I’m doing scut work myself, kid. Writing reports on what happened in Pakistan, closing the Shreed file.” He sighed. On the other end, Craik made a sound as if he was being wounded all over again, and Dukas, relenting, said, “Come down to the office, what the hell. We can talk, anyway. Okay? Hey, you talk to Harry lately?”

Alan Craik was slow to answer. He muttered, “I don’t like begging, Mike. But I’m going nuts. Last night, I—Rose and I had a fight, and I—almost—” He didn’t say what he had done. He didn’t have to; the tone of his voice said it all.

Then Alan snapped back from wherever he was. Mike heard the change.

“What about Harry?”

“Tell you later.”

In the Virginia Horse Country.

A dark Ford Explorer turned into a gap in a wooden fence where a paved drive led away from the two-lane road. There was a line of oaks and more wooden fence along the lane, and up ahead a Colonial Revival house that needed paint. The wooden fence wanted attention, too, and the pasture beyond it was scraggy with tufts of long grass, and a horseman would have known that no animals were being pastured there.

The Explorer pulled up next to the house and a tall man got out. He waved at somebody by the stable block and trotted up the front steps, nodded at the hefty young man at the front door and said, “Everything okay?”

“Bor-ing,” the young man said. “He’s upstairs.”

“I’ll talk to him in the music room.” Balkowitz always talked to Ray Suter in the music room, which had no music but did hold an out-of-tune baby grand that had been pushed against a wall to make room for recording equipment. Balkowitz was a lawyer for the Central Intelligence Agency; the bulky young man was named Hurley and worked for Agency security; the man out at the stable block was a local who took care of the place but wasn’t allowed in the house. And Ray Suter, the man upstairs, had been George Shreed’s assistant and was wanted by various people for murder, conspiracy to commit a felony, espionage, and perhaps corrupting the morals of a minor. The CIA, however, had him stashed away here, and what they wanted him for was information.

Balkowitz sat on a faded armchair that smelled of its age. He was dressed in jeans and a polo shirt and looked more like a Little League dad than a lawyer. When Suter came in—tall, pale, pinched—Balkowitz got up and waited for Suter to sit. Balkowitz’s manner reflected his Agency’s own ambivalence—polite and stern, unsure and patriarchal. Suter, to judge from his sour smile, knew all about it and rather enjoyed the situation. “You keep trying,” Suter said. “A for effort.”

“Mister Suter—”

“Ray.” Suter spread his hands. “We know each other well enough. Call me Ray.”

“I just want to apprise you of your situation here. Really, you know, if you’d get yourself a lawyer—”

Suter shook his head. “I don’t need a lawyer.”

“Your situation is serious.”

Suter raised his eyebrows. “The food’s good. Hurley plays pretty good tennis. Except for the lack of females, it isn’t bad.”

“Mister Suter, you’ve been charged in Virginia and Maryland, and we’re holding off federal charges until, until—”

“Until I talk?” Suter laughed. “Don’t hold your breath.”

“I just want to impress on you the legal seriousness of—”

“You say that every time you come. I’ve told you, I think three times now, I’ve got nothing to say. You guys are holding me here without a charge; well, okay, I’m suspended from work, anyway. I assume that you want me to get a lawyer because you think a lawyer would tell me to bargain. But for what? With what?”

“If we file charges, you face twenty years to life on the federal issues alone.”

“If you do. Right.” Suter grinned. “Maybe you should file.”

Balkowitz sniffed and reached into his pocket for a tissue. He was allergic to something in the room. “Mister Suter, we’re holding off the local jurisdictions with some difficulty.” He blew his nose. “Your relations with the young man, Nickie, um, Groski—if you’d be willing to tell us anything there—”

Nickie Groski was a computer hacker whom Suter had hired to hack into George Shreed’s computers, but Suter hadn’t admitted to a word of that. Instead, he said now, “What would you like to hear?”

“You were in the boy’s apartment when the police broke in.”

“I was, yes.” Suter seemed pensive, as if what Balkowitz was saying was a little surprising.

“You paid the rent on that apartment.”

“Maybe I felt sorry for him. Or maybe I’m gay. Is he gay?”

Balkowitz stopped with the tissue at his nose. “Mister Suter, we know you chased women all over the place.”

Suter nodded almost sadly. “Maybe I’m bisexual. What is it you think I did with this boy?”

“That’s what we want to know.” Balkowitz got out a document, which he kept tapping as he talked. “If you agree to tell us about Nickie Groski and certain other things, then we’re willing to—but you really should have a lawyer to help with this.”

Suter didn’t even look at the document. “You’d like me to have a lawyer because then I’d be admitting I was ready to deal. But I’m not. No deal, Balkowitz.”

They went around for another ten minutes, Suter seeming to enjoy it all the more as Balkowitz’s nose ran and the lawyer’s face got red. At the end, the man’s patience ran out and he pointed a finger and said, “This is my last visit! You come partway to us or the shit will hit the fan out there!”

Suter gave his thin, acid smile. “I love the majesty of the law.” He patted Balkowitz’s shoulder. “Have you tried Allegra-D?”

Suter went back upstairs and changed into shorts and took the time to scribble a note on a very small piece of paper, which he signed “Firebird” and stuffed into a chartreuse tennis ball in which he’d already made a slit. When he went downstairs, he told Hurley he was going to practice some serves, and he went out the back door and, passing the stable block, threw the slitted tennis ball for an old golden retriever to catch. The dog lumbered after it, caught up with it, held it down with a paw until he could get his old teeth around it, and then, tail wagging, carried it to his owner, the maintenance man.

Beijing.

Colonel Lao tse-Ku touched the place where the two sides of his collar joined at his throat. The gesture was unconscious, not quite nervous but certainly atypical—a last check of self before opening a door through which you can pass only once.

The door itself was quite mundane—gray, metal, the surface broken only by a small nameplate, “Information Directorate.” The man who held the door’s handle, ready to open it, was inconsequential, too, a captain, balding, smelling of cigarettes, but seeming to share the muted panic that Lao felt in Beijing, where heads were rolling and careers were crashing to an end. Now, when the captain opened the door and stood aside, the slice of room that Colonel Lao could see beyond was no more impressive than the outside—yet, again, he checked his collar, wondering if his own head was the next to roll.

And went in.

The General was sitting at a desk of a sleek, pale wood, certainly not government issue, the edges of its top slightly rounded, its proportions balanced and delicate. The door closed behind Lao; he braced, his eyes on the bent, bald head of the man behind the desk. Still, Lao’s first glance had registered an elegant bookcase, a scroll painting that was either old or well-faked, a silk carpet. All where they were not seen from outside the door.

And, to the right of the desk and slightly behind it, a pale second man in civilian clothes who was smoking.

The General looked up.

“Colonel Lao tse-Ku, sir,” Lao managed to say.

The old man smiled. “I know,” he said softly. He raised the fingers of one hand off the desk. “Sit.” The fingers seemed to indicate a chair to his left. Lao sat. The General looked at him for several seconds and then looked down at an open file on his desk, which he seemed to find more interesting than Lao. After several seconds more, the General glanced over his shoulder at the third man, but he made no move to introduce him.

“You have been called very suddenly from Africa,” the General said to Lao.

Lao was confused, uncertain whether he should say something banal about the soldier’s life or something enthusiastic about serving the nation, or—by that time, it was too late to say anything, and the General was going on. “You were ordered to Africa only a year ago.”

This time, saying “Yes, sir,” seemed best.

“You like it?”

What on earth could he mean? The old fox knew perfectly well that at his age and rank, a senior figure in intelligence, Lao wanted to be in a major capital or Beijing, not an African backwater. “The post has interesting aspects,” he managed to say.

The General glanced at his file and then at the third man and then said, “You were sent there because you lost a battle with your rival, Colonel Chen. Isn’t that so?”

This plain speaking caught him off guard. Although, when he thought about it, the General must know all about the savage struggles for supremacy within the service. He and Chen were on the same course toward the top, two of six or seven who might one day run all of Chinese military intelligence. And, yes, Chen had bested him this time and arranged to have him sent into darkness. Still, Lao said, “I did not question my orders, sir.”

He heard the third man flick a cigarette lighter and in his peripheral vision saw a new plume of smoke from that direction. He didn’t want to look directly at the man. Clear enough what he was.

The General had a round face made puffy with fat, so that his eyes seemed to have difficulty keeping from being squeezed shut by cheeks and brows. When he chuckled, as he did now, a thousand wrinkles came to life. Smiling, he said to Lao, “Chicks that picked their way out of the same egg will fight for the dunghill when they have combs and spurs. Rivalry between you and Chen is quite natural. Necessary, in fact. Working together is often required; going where you are ordered is required; rivalry, too, has its uses. You lost the last battle. Now it is your turn.” He leaned forward. “Colonel Chen has disappeared.”

Lao made his face, he hoped, impassive; in fact, it looked wooden.

“Chen has disappeared,” the General said again. “I want you to find him.” Lao sensed the third man’s movement, perhaps a gesture of a hand. The General frowned bitterly. “Finding him is of the highest priority.”

The air of tension, then, the stories of rolling heads and ended careers, might have the loss of a senior intelligence officer as its cause. Even before he had received the orders to come to Beijing, Lao had got ripples of it in Dar es Salaam—somebody’s inability to make a decision, the absence of a senior official from his office.

The civilian moved into the space by the General’s desk and began to speak in a low, guttural voice.

“Three weeks ago, Colonel Chen went to northern Pakistan to meet with an American agent. He has not been seen since.”

The man was tall, rather European in face—from one of the western provinces, Lao thought, feeling the dislike he couldn’t avoid for those people, not “real” Chinese. He had rather long and unkempt hair, sallow skin; there was something uncouth about his rapid gestures and his rumpled clothes. His voice was hoarse and heavily accented. An odd type to be a power in military intelligence. Lao thought he must be a party hack.

“The meeting place was a peasant village,” he went on. “At night. Chen took twelve special forces soldiers. Nine were killed outright; two have died since; one is not expected to live. We interviewed the people of the village. Typically narrow-minded and fearful, hard to get anything out of.” He blew out smoke, made a chopping motion with the hand that held the cigarette. “Still. A few talked. There was shooting, they said. Then an aircraft came in and landed on the road below the village, then took off again.” He took two strides toward the door, his big feet making thudding sounds right through the carpet, spun and started back, waving out of his path the smoke that hung there. “One fellow who runs some sort of hostel said he had a ‘Western’ customer, who rented a bed and then disappeared. Caucasian, he said, didn’t speak the language but had a computer that gave him some phrases. We found cartridge cases from Spanish and Pakistani ammunition, plus our own, of course.” He blew out smoke and stood by the window, staring out. “Seven local civilians killed—we think by a shaped charge that Chen had brought with him. He blew a hole in an old tower, no idea why. Enemy inside, maybe. Doesn’t matter.” He turned back to the room and said, seeing some look on Lao’s face, “No, hold your questions until I’m done.

“The aircraft. Karachi had had an emergency declared by an American naval aircraft the day before, but the aircraft never appeared. Went into the sea, maybe, they thought. Then, several hours later, an aircraft landed and took off from the village where Chen had been, and then an American naval aircraft exited Pakistani airspace while two American F-18s flew cover. Two of ours tried to engage and were shot down. The American carrier USS Thomas Jefferson was within recovery distance in the Indian Ocean.

“Probable scenario: the Americans flew a combat team in under Pakistani radar, using the fake emergency for cover if they were caught, landed the aircraft somewhere up near the village, and later picked up the combat team after they had killed Chen’s men—and either killed or captured Chen and the American agent he had gone to meet.

“That is one scenario. Knowing American military doctrine, we did not find evidence in the village of American special forces. Ammunition casings were relatively few for so many men, and limited to shotgun, 9 mm, .41 magnum, and—peculiar—.38 special. The .41 magnum came from a Desert Eagle that was left behind. Scenario: the American agent brought his own shooters, either as a backup team because the zone was hot or because he feared Chen.

“The agent—now I am telling you facts so tightly held that you will be only the fourteenth person in China to know them—the agent was an American CIA official named George Shreed. He had been giving Chen good material for years. Vetted, checked, proven. He was supposed to have met Chen in Belgrade a day earlier, but he cancelled that meeting and set up the one in Pakistan. Which fell apart into a lot of shooting. Only today are we beginning to learn that this Shreed had apparently fled the US two days before, not using the escape plan we had given him, not using our considerable resources, not informing Chen. And he may have offered his services to the Israelis before he finally did contact Chen.

“Scenario: Shreed faked flight from the US, with the connivance of his CIA superiors, lured Chen to a meeting, and captured him with the help of a CIA team; they were then picked up by a US Navy aircraft and flown to the Thomas Jefferson.

“Or: Shreed, who has shown signs of instability and whose wife recently died, had a mental seizure and set out to destroy his Chinese control.”

He took out a wrinkled package of Pear Blossoms and tapped one out. “Or: we have no idea.” He flicked the lighter, a cheap plastic one in bright peacock blue and lit the cigarette. He stared at Lao. “If the Americans have Chen, we will have been badly hurt. That is not your problem. If the Americans do not have Chen, then your problem is to find him and to bring him back. To fail to bring him back will be to fail the nation and its leaders. Unh?” He smoked, staring at Lao. “All right, ask your questions.”

“Can I investigate this village in Pakistan?”

“Yes. I warn you, it is still a hot zone; Pakistan and India are shooting over Kashmir. We will give you everything we found in the village.”

“Forensics?”

“Get it done. Our country team didn’t have the time or the skill for forensics.”

“What about the American, Shreed?”

The man took another turn to the window and stood there with his back to Lao. The General, still smiling, sat looking at Lao. Finally the civilian turned and said, “Shreed is a brilliant man. He has been a productive agent for twelve years. Still, like any agent, he could be a double. Scenario: the shooting in the village was a cover; Shreed and Chen were pulled out, and now both are in America.”

“Do you know that?”

“I don’t know anything!” A hank of the man’s coarse hair fell over his face, and he pushed it back with his free hand, hitting himself in the forehead as he did so as if punishing himself. “The Americans are saying that Shreed is dead. They are having a funeral, trumpeting the death rites. Is that natural?”

“Do you think Shreed is dead?”

“Don’t ask me! What do you think we want you for?”

Lao could see that the General was leaning his elbows on a file. The characters on the outside of the file were from an old code word. American Go. Lao had heard the name whispered before. High-level material from Washington, sometimes political, sometimes espionagerelated. So American Go was George Shreed. Lao wanted to laugh aloud. Chen had been running a penetration of the Operational Directorate in the CIA. No wonder he won every fight in Beijing.

The Westerner and the General talked about details for some minutes—Shreed, Chen, the reason why Chen himself had gone to Pakistan to meet with Shreed. Neither the General nor the civilian was being quite forthright, Lao thought. He wondered if he was simply being set up so that they would have a scapegoat. They talked almost as if he wasn’t there. He wanted to smoke, felt too junior to light up, although both older men were smoking hard.

“If Chen isn’t in America but is dead or wounded—” He pushed himself in like a timid housewife at a fish stall.

“Yes, yes—?”

“I would like to be ready to make a forensic examination, if I have to. If I find him. Fingerprints, DNA—”

The civilian waved his cigarette and growled, “Yes, of course,” and muttered something about the files. The General nodded and separated the top three from the stack. Lao could see that he was reluctant, even now, to hand them over. “If you accept, then I suggest you take these with you—you will have an aircraft to fly you back to Dar es Salaam, plenty of time to read in an absolutely secure atmosphere.”

“I won’t go direct to Dar, General. I’ll start in Pakistan.”

“Good. Time is short.” He hesitated. “These are the communications files that Chen used with Shreed.” He put one file down on the desk. “Pass-throughs, cutouts, dead drops.” He put down the second file. “Electronic communications, mostly the Internet—Shreed was a master of the computer.” He put down the third file. “Communications plans for face-to-face meetings. Three places—Nairobi, Jakarta, and the village in Pakistan where the shootout took place. We consider that the Pakistan site is no longer usable; therefore, Nairobi or Jakarta.” He gave Lao a look.

“These are the original files from American Go? Or substitutes?” Lao was suddenly sharp. He winced at his own tone, imagined that he could be marched from here to a basement and shot, but he knew he was being used and he might as well be used efficiently.

The two exchanged a look. The Westerner wrapped a length of hair around his fist and twisted, gave an odd sort of grunt. “Substitutes,” he conceded.

“I want the originals. I want the entire case, not three files.” Lao threw caution to the winds. “If you want me to find Chen, I think I need to have everything Chen was working on.”

The General smiled, the last gesture Lao expected. “I told you he was sharp,” he said, talking to the Westerner as if Lao was not in the room. The General lit himself a Pear Blossom, lit one for the Westerner. Then he reached behind his desk and started to sort folders, old ones with red spines. Lao imagined hundreds of folders in the vast space he couldn’t see behind the General’s desk, all the secrets of the universe. He shook his head to clear it.

Then they went over some of it again, and the General handed several files to Lao and told him that the entire case would be sent to him in the diplomatic bag at Dar es Salaam. Lao said that he would rather work out of Beijing, and the General’s eyes almost disappeared in a smile and he said that, of course, who wouldn’t rather be in Beijing, but they wanted him to stay where he was. “For cover.” They didn’t know if Chen had associates who might smell a rat if Lao worked from the capital. And there were other elements in the People’s Army and the Party who might try to interfere, for their own purposes—times were difficult—Lao’s mind had caught on the expression “for cover;” you didn’t need cover within your own service unless you were doing something fatally risky, he was thinking.

“So,” the General said finally, “you will accept this responsibility?” He said it smiling, as if Lao had a choice.

“Of course,” Lao said firmly, although he, too, knew they had passed the point of choice when he demanded the folders.

“The people will be grateful.”

The third man made another of his chopping gestures. “The people will never know! We will be grateful, which is what matters.” He began to cough.

“There is another matter, Colonel Lao.” The General’s aged geniality had vanished. “It actually falls under your responsibilities at Dar es Salaam—a Middle Eastern matter. I speak of the loss of face we suffered when the Americans shot down two of our aircraft and got their agents and Shreed out of Pakistan. We were made to look like children in this matter. We were humiliated in front of the Pakistanis. We will pay for this failure for years. Admittedly, we may have been too ‘forward leaning.’ That is not for me to say. But we have been tasked to register our anger with the power that interfered with us.”

Lao had an armful of critically secret folders and was burning to begin his investigation. The idea that there was further business irritated him. “Yes, sir?”

“We are going to target a strike on one of their carriers. The one that was used in Pakistan.”

The General opened yet another file and tossed it on the desk.

Lao had to change his grip on his stack of folders and put them on the floor. The Westerner was watching him now, as if judging him. “Yes, sir?” he repeated.

“USS Thomas Jefferson. We will hit her through surrogates. The Americans will get the message.”

Lao’s heart pounded, and he thought, They’ll kill us. “Has this been approved by the War Council?”

“This operation was planned by the War Council.” The Westerner seemed less watchful, as if he had passed some test. “It is called Jade Talon. You will execute it. Use Islamic surrogates. I have appended contacts that we recommend.”

Lao opened the new file with trepidation. The first item was a photograph of a Nimitz-class carrier. There followed a detailed analysis of the possibility of crippling a Nimitz-class carrier with a speedboat full of explosives. Lao looked up. “I don’t believe this will sink a carrier.”

“Sink? Probably not, although we want you to use several boats. But a nice big hole? Perhaps leaking radioactive material? Hundreds of dead sailors?”

“And how are these small boats to target a carrier?”

“I’m sorry, Colonel?”

“How are a group of Islamic surrogates in tiny boats supposed to find this carrier and strike it?”

“Jefferson will be off the coast of Africa for sixty days. We have a method to pass accurate targeting information.”

“Is this my operation?”

“Absolutely. Only, do not fail. And make finding Chen your priority. Am I clear?” The General was no longer smiling.

“Perfectly clear, sir.”

Lao picked up all the files and saluted and turned. The room wheeled as if he was dizzy, but his mind was utterly clear. He knew that he had been sent to walk a razor’s edge.

“Does he know what this is really about?” the General said when the door had closed. The civilian snorted and shook his ugly hair. He lit another cigarette. The General sat back, hands folded. “He must have heard things.”

“He doesn’t know about the money. Nobody knows about the money.”

“Perhaps we should have told him.”

“No!” The hoarse voice was rude; the General’s eyebrows arched a millimeter. “No. If he finds Chen, he finds the money. If he doesn’t find Chen—” He shrugged.

“He is a good man,” the General said. “There is no real chance for a speedboat to cripple a carrier, is there?”

“It sends a message. Either way. American public opinion is fickle. It might move the US away from Africa. A lucky hit? It might damage the reactor and kill everyone on board. It might call into question the whole legality of placing a nuclear reactor on a vessel in international waters.”

“But Lao? Whether he finds Chen or not, he loses.”

The civilian shrugged again.

Over the Pacific.

“Craik and Dukas,” Jerry Piat said to himself, jammed into the middle of the five-across seats in the belly of a 747.

He was traveling to Jakarta economy class. Jerry was just past having been a hotshot CIA case officer. He had always traveled well, first or business class on cover passports or diplomatic ones, and the reality of an economy seventeen-hour flight from Washington, with a layover in Manila, had settled into his bones. Being fired from the CIA means you have to travel like this, he thought. Even walking around the cramped aisles didn’t help the swelling in his feet.

Booze cost cash and was harder to get in the back of the plane. It was claustrophobic, with kids screaming and their mothers trying to ignore them, couples chatting or fighting. Too much. Not Jerry’s scene.

The flight kept him awake and gave him too much time to think. He kept thinking of the messages and the plan he was on his way to implement. Too Byzantine, he felt. Too complex. The plan of an analyst, not an operator. He didn’t like Ray Suter, the desk-driver who had thought it up, didn’t trust him, thought him a boob when it came to the street. He didn’t like Marvin Helmer, Suter’s henchman, who was some big hotshot in Seattle now but whom Jerry remembered as just one more Ops Directorate cowboy. Jerry wanted revenge against the traitors who had brought George Shreed down as much as anybody, but he didn’t like the Suter-Helmer plan—or the planner. Photographs, blackmail, and a smear campaign. Desk-driver shit. Like giving Castro an exploding cigar. Jesus. He shook his head, raised the plastic cup of wine to his lips and hated the taste.

Fuck that. In Jakarta, he would make up his own plan. Anything could happen in Jakarta. He began to shut out the plane as he worked it through. He had twelve hours left in his flight. By the time he landed, he’d be ready to act.

“Dukas and Craik,” he murmured to himself, and tasted the wine again and concentrated on a simpler plan.

Kill them.

2

NCIS HQ.

Alan Craik showed up at Dukas’s office a few minutes after Dukas got there himself. Alan wasn’t a stranger to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, even had a somewhat tenuous designation as “agent” because of past work for Dukas. Still, he had had to go through some rigmarole with security that had cost him time.

“Hey, Mike.”

“Jesus, put out the cigarette! The tobacco police’ll be here with a warrant!”

Alan crushed the cigarette against the sole of his shoe. “I quit, before—you know—then I—” He shrugged.

“Surprised some turkey didn’t collar you out in the corridor.” Dukas took the cigarette butt and doused it in a half-full coffee cup and hid it under some trash, all the while studying Alan’s face. “I’ve seen you look worse.” In fact, he was surprised at how relatively normal Alan looked—drawn, sleepless, but okay except for a new tic that drew one corner of his mouth down in a kind of spasm and then was gone.

Alan gave a lopsided grin. “Death warmed over?”

“Practically lifelike. Anyway, enough about you; let’s talk about me for a while. My injury feels pretty lousy, thanks for asking. And you noticed I’m wearing my Bugs Bunny rig—how perceptive of you.”

“Oh, shit, Mike, I’m sorry—Christ, all I think about is myself—”

Dukas raised his hand, palm open, to shut Craik down, and said, “How’s Rose?” and Alan said she was fine, fine, doing her fixed-wing prep so she could fly out to Edwards and fly F-18s before she went into astronaut training. “While I sit on my ass and watch reruns,” he said, and Dukas knew that he had asked the wrong thing.

He put Alan at his absent assistant’s desk and pulled up the drafts of his report on the Shreed affair and told him to read them and make comments. It was make-work, but it was work, and Alan seemed grateful. They worked that way for an hour, Dukas at his own computer, Alan at the other, a wall of white plastic crates between them, no sound but the building around them—footsteps, unclear voices—and the click of the computer keys.

And then the telephone rang.

“Dukas?”

Not a woman’s voice. Not Sally Baranowski. A man’s voice he recognized. “Hey, Carl.”

“Long time no talk.”

Dukas cast his mind back. Only a month—just before he’d taken off for Pakistan. Carl Menzes had been in a rage at him then, had called him every bad name he knew, because he had believed that Dukas had blown the investigation of the very spy, George Shreed, that Dukas had then caught up with in Pakistan. “Still mad, Carl?” He wrote “Menzes” on a Post-it and slipped it through the crates to Alan.

“Nah.” Menzes laughed, a laugh that sounded honest to Dukas. In fact, he liked Menzes, who was a straightarrow guy, a real fighter in the CIA’s Internal Affairs Division. “How’s the injury?”

“I can’t scratch my dandruff yet, but I’m healing.”

“Lot of people think you can do no wrong, Mike.”

“Yeah, fucking hero. In fact, what I hear is, the Crystal Palace thinks we made a huge mistake. What’s up?”

“We’re sending you some of the paperwork you asked for.”

Dukas was instantly on guard. “My experience is, you guys wouldn’t toss a used rubber this way. And I didn’t ‘ask’ for it; I got a court order for it. What happened, Legal Affairs decided that ten percent compliance would string it out for another six months?”

“Hey, Mike—! We’re doing our best to satisfy you, okay?”

“Oh, yeah,” Dukas said. “Oh, yeah.”

“I was trying to be helpful.” Menzes’s voice was cold, and a few seconds later he hung up.

Dukas looked across at Alan. “They’re throwing me a bone. Big deal.”

“Shreed stuff?”

“Worse—Suter.” Ray Suter had been Shreed’s assistant at the Agency, a one-hundred-percent bastard who had got arrested when Shreed had fled the country. “Suter hacked into Shreed’s computers; he’s supposed to have killed some guy who helped him; he’s deep into Shreed’s business, and the Agency’s got him someplace and won’t let me near him. I’ve gone to court to get anything and everything that Suter had his hands on when Shreed went down.” He made a face as if he smelled something bad. “So now they’re sending something over. Oh, yeah.”

At eleven, a Navy rating showed up at Dukas’s door with a dolly and a wooden crate the size of a refrigerator.

“Messenger service,” the rating said. “He could only come as far as the loading dock. Where you want it, sir?”

Dukas looked at the signature sheet and the labels and signed for it. Classified, secure, CIA origin. When the rating was gone, Dukas closed his door and growled, “Ten to one it’s a bag of shit.” Dukas was at his telephone then, trying to get somebody with a wrecking bar to come open the crate.

“Must hold a lot of stuff.”

Dukas made a face. “Probably a collection of Suter’s old jockstraps. You ask for everything, they generously extrude one item after a month’s delay. You can bet this is whatever the Agency people thought was least useful.”

What the crate proved to contain was a case file. “Case file” implied a folder, something small, but this was folder after folder, pounds and pounds of paper. There was a cover letter to say that it was one case, sent in response to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service request of—etcetera, etcetera. Dukas and Alan peered in.

“Jesus,” Alan said. “This is all one case?”

“Wait until you see what the Shreed case looks like when it’s done.” Dukas shrugged himself out of the Bugs Bunny rig and reached into the crate. “If it’s ever done. Old cases never die, and they don’t just fade away.” He pulled out a folder. “Well, let’s see what we got.”

Alan started to look in one of the folders, and Dukas said that they should go about it in an organized way, which was to find the inventory folder and the summary folder and get some idea of what the hell the thing was. The summary was at the bottom, of course, and it was only when they had covered the desk belonging to his absent assistant, Dick Triffler, as well as his coffee table and all the chairs, that they found it, and then Dukas sat at his desk and Alan leaned over him from behind, his hand with the missing fingers supporting him on the desktop—the first time since the shooting that he’d forgotten the hand enough to let somebody else see it up close.

“Radio transmissions,” Dukas said, reading. “‘Burst transmissions of unknown origin—northwestern North America—’ What the hell has this got to do with that shit Suter?” He looked up at Alan. “Can I turn the page?”

“I’ve been waiting.” Alan grinned.

“Speed-reader, great. Okay—‘detected by National Security Administration—’ I thought this was an Agency case, what the hell? Where’s the inventory? Where’s the document history?” Dukas began to burrow as Alan read on. When Dukas came back, he had a red folder and a green one, both stamped “Top Secret,” and he fell into his chair and opened the red folder. “Okay, yeah—NSA started it and got zip and booted it to the FBI, who made it a case and apparently sat on it for five years. Then they booted it to the Agency—some great case, it’s been through three other agencies and nobody’s found out diddly-squat. Oh, swell—here’s why they broke down and sent it to me—signed out to Ray Suter two days before Shreed took off for Pakistan. Jee-sus H. Christ, he didn’t have it long enough to read the fucking summary. What’d you learn while I was slaving in the folder piles?”

“That it’s a case that nobody’s solved in nine years. Your big chance, Mike.”

Dukas sighed. “I was hoping I’d get something I could, you know, at least use to tie Suter to the Shreed investigation.” He threw down the red folder and opened the green one. “Oh, ow,” he said. “Ow, ouch, oh, shit—radio interference reports up the wazoo! Ouch. ‘Frequency Analysis Tables 1.1 through 1.17.’ Oh, shit.” He sighed. His right index finger ran down the page and he muttered, “Radio, radio…interview, interview, interview—” He looked through the wall of crates at the stacks of folders and growled, “They’ve dicked me.”

And Alan said, “What’s that?”

He had reached over Dukas’s shoulder and turned up the next page so he could read ahead.

“What’s what?”

Alan turned the page all the way over. “‘Communications Plan, Jakarta, Indonesia.’”

Dukas looked at the entry. “Jakarta, Jesus. That’s a long way from northwestern North America.”

“Kind of jumps out at you, doesn’t it.”

Dukas wrote the ID number down on another Post-it and went around the wall of plastic crates and started going through the folders once again. He came back with a slender folder in a white cover with “Top Secret” and “Eyes Only” and “Eurydice” on the front. “You’re not supposed to see this,” he said.

“What’s Eurydice?”

“It’s a classification group, which you’re not supposed to know about, so don’t ask.” He sat down again and opened the folder.

“Holy shit,” Alan said. “It is a comm plan for Jakarta.” He looked over his shoulder. “What’s Jakarta got to do with the northwest?”

“More to the point, what’s it got to do with Ray Suter?” Dukas wrinkled his nose. “I smell an analyst at work.” He opened the folder on his desk, pressing the fold with the flat of his right hand and wincing because the effort hurt his chest. He pointed at the folder, which, opened, had papers attached to both inner sides by long, pointed prongs through holes in the paper. “Right side,” he said, “meat and potatoes. Left side, the analyst’s brilliant synthesis of materials.” The comm plan was on the right side. On the left, on top, was a sheet that said simply, “No action recommended.” Below it were several sheets with long numbers at the top. On the top sheet, however, a different hand had written in pencil, “Follow this up—S?”

“Suter’s writing?” Alan said.

“Beats me; I don’t even have a sample of that. ‘Follow this up—S, question mark.’ S for Suter? S for Shreed? S for shit?” He made a farting noise with his lips and tongue.

“Yeah, but Mike, at least Suter had it. So why did Suter have it? You say he was into Shreed’s business—what was he looking for? Maybe this is something you can run with, after all.” Alan began to turn the pages of the analyst’s report. “Doesn’t seem to be all there,” he said.

“It wouldn’t be. The number’s a high one, meaning that this is part of something else. ‘Observation of courier contact site.’ See, this is what caught the analyst’s eye—actually, probably an abstract someplace. Yeah—here on the second page, see—‘The courier is believed to have visited the US, with special relevance for naval facilities in California and the Pacific northwest.’ Aha, says the analyst, that might have a connection—notice the ‘might’; the woman—it’s usually a woman—is reaching; she’s desperate. She gets a copy of the relevant stuff and smacks it into a folder and here it is.”

“Who wrote the report?”

“Who knows? Some agent doing his job; he’s busted a comm plan, written it up, turned it over to his case officer, and here it is.” He tapped the comm plan’s several pages of narrative.

Alan reached over and turned the pages on the left side, reading quickly, then did the same on the right. The paper was slightly brittle, the comm plan itself old enough to have been done on an electric typewriter rather than a computer printer. He lifted the top page on the left again and said, “1993.”

“A little long in the tooth,” Dukas said.

“But they never checked it out.”

Dukas stretched. “So?”

Alan cocked his head. “Well, somebody, maybe Suter, thought it was worth following up.” His old grin, not seen for a month, partly returned. “Doing something is better than doing nothing—right?”

Dukas shook his head. “You’re having an idea. I don’t like that.”

“I just thought somebody could go to Jakarta, check it out—follow it up, like it says here—” He looked like a kid asking for the day off from school.

Jakarta.

Jerry Piat moved his practiced hand from the bargirl’s neck, over her breasts, down her flat and naked stomach, his hand always light and playful, never heavy or commanding. He hooked a leg under both of hers and rolled them both over so that she was above him, her breasts heavy against him, her long hair a black cloud that smothered him in incense. At least, it smelled like incense.

He watched her with the detached part of his brain, the part that wouldn’t ever turn off, not when he was fucking, not when he was getting shot at, and that part registered that she was fourteen years old and had a “Hello Kitty” bag for her makeup. She liked him.

The phone rang. His hand found it, lifted it from the receiver and dropped it back to the cradle. She laughed, happy that she was more important than a Bule (Westerner’s) business call, but Jerry was just following the signal procedure—his agent, Bobby Li, would give him one ring, and then he would go out to a pay phone to talk. It wasn’t exactly Moscow rules, but it was tradecraft, and Jerry was alive and sane where a lot of his peers were either dead or content to run Chinese double agents and lie about their access. Jerry rolled them both over again, still agile at fifty, and kissed her, hard, on the lips, which clearly surprised her.

Her body was still very much on his mind when he cursed the lift and started down the seven flights of cockroach-infested stairs to the hotel’s lobby. The lobby was clean and neat, but the stairwell’s strong suggestion of urine stayed in his nostrils until the heavy petroleum scent of unleaded car exhaust drove it out as he stepped into the street, still pulling a light jacket over his old silk shirt. The jacket had only one purpose, to hide the bulk of the gun that sat in his shoulder rig. In Jakarta, the only men in jackets were wearing guns, or so Jerry had come to believe during Suharto’s regime. The place looked better now, cleaner, richer, even after the collapse in the nineties.

He stopped on the street, lit a cigarette from a nifty gas lighter with a serious torchlight that he had picked up at the airport. You could solder with the damn thing, and that could have its uses. Or you could burn someone’s eyes out.

Two cab rides and three bars later, he was getting ready to make his phone call, on his way to start the process by which he would kill the men who had killed George Shreed.

One more stop, he told himself. For old time’s sake.

And, of course, for caution’s sake, because there always just might be that watcher who needed to be convinced that he was bar-crawling and not running an op.

Suburban Virginia.

Alan greeted his wife at the door with a kiss and a suddenly urgent embrace. She leaned back in his arms and looked at his eyes and saw something that made her grab him and squeeze him hard. They stood there, holding each other, rocking, and she said, “Something good happened, right?”

He laughed, a sound she hadn’t heard in a while, and he said, “I went to Mike’s office to do some work. He got a new case—it’s interesting, there’s something in it for me, maybe.”

She was still in her flight suit. She had been out at Pax River, putting in her hours in the T-84 as she transited from choppers to fixed-wing. Holding her, seeing the sudden brightness in her eyes, he understood her misery of the past two weeks, never knowing what she would come home to. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

“No, no—”

“Yes, yes.” The dog pushed between them then and they both laughed and he pulled her into the house. “I had to leave Dukas early to get Mikey at school; no problem, but Dukas has this case, this crate of stuff! A case, something they dumped on him from the Agency because they can’t hack it but I think we can; there’s this comm plan in it; it doesn’t make sense, but—I’m babbling, right?”

She laughed. “Right.” She kissed him. “Keep babbling; it’s nice.”

“I’m getting dinner.”

“I smell it. Risotto with white beans, garlic bread, frozen peas, and a salad, right?”

“I invited Mike for dinner.”

That took a beat for her to absorb, sobering her, and she smiled too brightly and said, “Great!”

“To talk about the case,” he said.

“Great!” She headed for the stairs. “I’ll just change into something glamorous.”

Half an hour later, Dukas was there with an attaché and a cell phone, which he dumped on the battered coffee table. He kissed Rose. “Hey, Gorgeous, you’re breathtaking.”

“Did you bring the comm plan?” Alan shouted from the kitchen.

“Like you asked, yes, yes, yes! I always do what I’m told.” He glanced toward the kitchen and lowered his voice still further. “This okay with you, babe?”

“If it makes him this cheerful, God, yes!”

“He’s a little manic,” Dukas murmured.

“I’ll take manic,” she said. “He’s so down when he’s not in things.”

Dukas looked toward the kitchen again. “I used to think it was just, you know, type A behavior. But now I realize he always has to be proving something. To himself.” He lowered himself into an upholstered chair. “You know the difference between you two? You’ve got a plan, an ambition—you’re going to be an astronaut. You’ve built a career around it. He doesn’t have a plan. He just has to—go.” Dukas looked up at her. “What’s the matter with him?”

Alan shouted from the kitchen, “You talking about me out there?” He appeared in the doorway, grinning. “Speak up, or I’ll think you’re analyzing me.” They stared at him a little guiltily, and the dog got up and sat there looking at him, too, and they all began to laugh.

Jakarta.

“Hey, Meester?” the voice said. Jerry whirled; that hand was awfully close to his pistol.

“Back off, bud.” Jerry glared at the boy, but the boy, half Jerry’s size and weight, held his ground.

“You memba?” He pointed up at a large sign in Dutch and English, Dutch still first, because this place went way back. ANHANGER ENKEL, MEMBERS ONLY.

“I was a member here when your mom still worked here, bud.” Jerry leaned forward. “Asrama pekerja?”

Malay was clearly not his mother tongue, but the boy smiled and nodded.

“Go get the missus, then, bud.” Jerry waved his hand, palm down, the fingers snapping open, like the locals—dismissed, the gesture meant. Then he turned and walked to the huge teak bar, forty-five feet long and carved from a single tree. He waved to the bartender, a slight youth in a clean white shirt. There weren’t many customers, at least in the bar; the rooms upstairs could be full to bursting and you’d never know. George Shreed had waited for him in the spy’s seat, there next to the alcove, a private booth invisible from the door.

“Meester?” It was the boy from the alcove.

“Hey, bud, we’re done, you and me.”

“You memba?” The boy was insistent, and it reminded Jerry of all the time and money he had spent here. He deserved better.

“Go get the missus. You hear me, sport? The missus? Before I bop you one, okay?” He wondered if they had gone to membership cards. Had it really been so long since he was here? Maybe they had fucking plastic IDs with your photo. He felt someone enter silently behind him, back by the alcove, and he turned to see Hilda, the handsomest of the western blondes of his own day, coming through the door in sensible business attire—not what she’d worn back then, but still attractive.

“Jerry, darling.”

“Hilda. Aren’t you still too young to be trusted with the keys?”

She laughed; she had natural lines at her eyes and mouth that meant she’d disdained surgery, but she looked good. Really good. “This man is a member. An old member who gets anything he wants, mengerti?”

“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.”

Lao shook his head again, though not at the rain.

“Well done, Tsung. We needed another complication.”

North meant trouble. Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Russia. Lao didn’t want to consider what would happen if the Russians had Chen. He followed Tsung toward the ruined tower, stopped by a low wall where a technician in an olive-drab poncho was using forceps to clear something out of the muck.

“Cartridge?”

“That shotgun. The shooter moved all the time.”

Lao ducked under the awning and accepted a cup of tea from one of the State Security goons. He had a picture in his head of the fight in the village. Shreed had never moved, firing repeatedly from one position in the open. That made Lao think he had been the first man hit. It also suggested that Shreed had been either ambushed or set up, and that didn’t fit any of the theories he had been offered in the office in Beijing.

Chen’s opposition had come from only a few men, perhaps as few as three or four. They’d killed Chen’s paratroopers with relative ease. Because it was a trap? Or because the Chinese paratroopers weren’t all that good? Lao wasn’t that kind of soldier. He looked at the trails of tape that marked the movements of individual shooters, traced by the cartridge casings they had let fall, and thought that the opposition had done all the moving.

One of the Chinese, a sniper, had apparently killed two of his own men before he was killed himself. That made no sense to Lao. Lao thought that someone else must have killed the sniper and used his weapon. Perhaps the forensics men would find something to prove his theory—or perhaps they wouldn’t.

He used his teacup to warm his hands as Tsung brought him an older man, his thin trousers flapping in the wind. Lao bowed a little and the old man gave him a nervous smile.

“Tell him that I’m a policeman.”

Tsung spoke to the old man in careful Arabic. It wasn’t his best language, and it was one the old man probably only knew from the Qur’an, but they communicated.

Lao stood patiently, sipping tea and offering it to his witness, while the old man told the story of the evening in halting driblets. Lao taped it. He didn’t speak much Arabic and he wasn’t sure he’d trust anyone in Dar to translate, but he had to keep a record.

The old man pointed out the commanding view that the little hill village had of the highway below them in the valley. He described the plane’s landing on the road, and he described the other car’s driving away after the plane had left. Yes, he was sure. No, he had no idea who had been in the car.

Lao swallowed the rest of his tea and spat out the leaves.

Maybe Chen was alive, after all. Lao smiled without humor: if Chen was alive, then he could clean up his own messes. Like the unfinished operation to target the Jefferson. Lao disliked executing operations in whose planning he’d had no part—let Chen be alive and take it over! The operation, he thought, had been put together too hastily, too emotionally—it seemed part of that nervous hysteria he’d felt in Beijing. He never thought he’d be sorry that Chen was dead (if he was dead), but he’d be delighted to have him rise now from the rubble of this Pakistani village and take over.

“Tsung,” he said. The younger man came almost at a trot. Eager. Lao was wondering if Tsung could be trusted to take over some of the details of the Jefferson operation and free him, Lao, to concentrate on Chen. “You’ve run agents among the Pakistani military?” he said.

Tsung grinned. “They don’t like to call themselves agents. ‘Friends of China,’ meaning they have an agenda that matches ours somewhere.” He made a joined-hands gesture, fingers of one hand inserted between the fingers of the other like meshing gears.

“I have a task for you.”

Tsung said something about being honored. Lao ignored it. He skipped details—the name of the Jefferson, the use of the submarines to pass data, the agent on the west coast of the United States—and explained about the plan to tap into Islamic hatred of America and to launch a small-boat attack on an American warship.

NCIS HQ.

Alan was in Dukas’s office at NCIS headquarters at nine-thirty, eager to hit the road for Jakarta.

Dukas was supposed to be making the travel arrangements; his assistant, the until-then absent Dick Triffler, was going to brief Alan and then go along to ride shotgun.

“Shotgun, hell,” Triffler said. “My son’s pitching tonight for his Little League team, and being Dad is more important than playing cops and robbers. Sorry, Commander.”

Alan grinned. “You wouldn’t say that if Mike was here.”

“I’d say it in spades if Mike was here! You think I’m afraid of Mike?”

Triffler was a tall, slender African American with what Alan had to think of as “class.” His skin was the color of caramel; his face was handsome and lean; his voice was a tenor, his enunciation pure northeastern US. He was not afraid of Mike Dukas, that was true; in fact, he emphasized their differences whenever he got the chance. Their shared office, for example, was divided by a wall of white plastic crates, into which the obsessively neat Triffler had put potted plants, sculpture, books—anything, in fact, that would block his view of the squalid mess where Dukas ruled.

Alan laughed. “I think you’re about as afraid of Mike as I am, Dick. But, uh, this is an operation, and I really am going to Jakarta, and I really do need some—”

Triffler waved a long hand. “Okay! I know! Uncle Sam says I have to go. Tomorrow! Okay? So I get there twenty-four hours after you, so what? You take a nap, have some local beer, watch TV. I’ll catch up.” Triffler shot his cuffs, maybe to show off his cuff links. “I don’t want to spend any more time in a germ pit like Jakarta than I have to, anyway.”

Alan didn’t comment on “germ pit.” He had heard enough about Triffler to know he was obsessive about cleanliness, too—the only man in NCIS who slid a coaster under your coffee cup when you picked it up. “Well—if it’ll work—”

“Sure, it’ll work. I got here at twenty of eight this morning, Dukas already had the file and a memo on top of the pile of other jobs he’s tasked me with while I was away, so I’ve read it and looked at the map and I’m up to speed.”

“If you wouldn’t take time off—” a voice came from the other side of the room divider—“you wouldn’t get tasked.”

“Hey, Mike—when did you sneak in?”

“I didn’t sneak, Al, I walked; you and Mister Clean were too busy dissing me to notice. And how are you this morning, Mister Triffler?”

“I was telling Lieutenant-Commander Craik that I’m not afraid of you, is how I am.”

“Good. Nobody should live in fear. You rested after your vacation?”

“It was not a vacation! It was quality time with my family.” Triffler smiled at Alan. “Some people don’t have families. Unsociable, outsider people.”

“Somebody has to do the scut work while you daddies are having quality time,” Dukas’s voice growled. “Will you guys get to it, please?”

They spent three hours. Triffler explained—redundantly, but there was no stopping him—what a comm plan was and what the Jakarta plan was. He went through the structure that Alan would have to build around the comm plan—walking a route before he left the mark that was supposed to set up the meeting, memorizing codes to communicate with his team (that is, Triffler), planning for a busted meeting and an escape.

“Which won’t happen,” Triffler said, “because there isn’t going to be any meeting to bust, right? This is a dead plan, right? Uncle’s paying to send us to Jakarta so Mister Dukas can cross an item off a list, right?” He raised his voice. “IS THAT RIGHT, MIKE?”

“Just do your job.”

Dick Triffler was down to shirtsleeves after an hour more of briefing Alan, revealing wide yellow suspenders to go with his yellow-on-beige striped shirt. His tie looked like heavy embroidery, also brown and yellow with flecks of green. He made Alan feel dowdy, even in uniform.

“Uh, what will you be wearing in Jakarta?” Alan said.

Triffler looked startled. He spread his arms as if to say, These. “Work clothes,” he said. He looked more than a little like a model in GQ.

“I thought I’d wear jeans.”

Triffler coasted over that by saying they weren’t going undercover, so there was no need to think of disguise. “We’re just two guys who happen to work for the Navy, having a look around Jakarta. In and out in two days. One suit, one wrinkle-free blazer, two neckties, four shirts.”

“And blue jeans.”

Triffler looked at Alan’s uniform, then his shirt, then his polyester tie, and apparently decided to say nothing. He got them both coffee—great coffee, because he was also obsessive about that—and sat again at his uncluttered desk. “You go in,” he said. “Normally, you’d have watchers. This time, only me. No problem; there’s nothing to watch. You do a route to a cannon, or whatever it is where you leave the mark. If we thought the plan was active, we’d have a team to watch the mark to see who picks up on it, but not ap, right? You get a good night’s sleep, we rendezvous—telephone codes to come, so you know where and when—and you go to make the meeting, which is in something called the—I had it a moment ago—”

“The Orchid House.”

“Right! You’re way ahead of me. In some sort of park—theme park? Something. So, you go there, and you walk the route in the comm plan—this is so the other side can look at you if need be; their guy is walking a route, too, in theory, and we’d have a team to watch, but we don’t and won’t—and you go into this Orchid House and walk to, quote, ‘bench by curved path, west side,’ where, at ten minutes after the hour at three stated times of day precisely there would be some guy waiting for you if this was an active plan. Which it ain’t.”

“What if it is?”

“It isn’t; we have Reichsführer Dukas’s word on it.”

“Yeah, but just suppose—what if?”

“You say your recognition words and he says his, some b.s. about a Christmas party, and then you look at each other and wonder what the hell comes next.”

“‘Hi, my name is Al, and I’ll be your waiter this evening?’”

“Try ‘What have you got for me?’ At least that sounds as if you know what you’re doing.” Triffler closed the folder and slapped his hand on it. “Won’t happen. In and out in two days, home again to the rapturous applause of Mike Dukas.”

“Ha, ha,” said the voice from the other side.

“Okay.” Alan grinned. “Now what do we do?”

“Now we go over it again, and then you memorize the codes and the greetings and the route, and then we go over it again, and then we go over it.”

“Not really.”

Triffler sighed. “Really. You thought signing EM orders was tedious? Try spying.”

Jakarta.

Jerry Piat had half a dozen places in Jakarta where he stayed when he made a trip there, places he’d come to like over the years and felt comfortable in. Only one had any class; only one was really a dump. The others were modest little hotels where low-end tourist agents put groups that were doing Asia on the cheap. He had kicked around the East long enough that he spoke the languages and didn’t require a blocksquare chunk of America to sleep in, and he liked the strange mix of comfort and oddness that the places gave him.

The Barong Palas had been built by a Dutch exporter as his city house in the nineteenth century; when the Dutch left after World War II, it had become a whorehouse, then a clutter of ground-floor shops with a squat in the upper floors, and finally a hotel, when an energetic Indonesian woman had bought it and kicked everybody out. It still looked Dutch—a stair-step roof, a certain overweight look to the cornices and lintels—but inside it was immaculate, slightly threadbare, secure. They locked the doors at twelve, required that guests pick up and drop off a key each time they went in or out, and paid their own knife-toting guards to patrol the gardens that surrounded it.

Now Jerry woke to one of its bedrooms. The room wasn’t much because the hotel—only twenty rooms in all—was full of a Korean gourmet club. He didn’t remember that, at first. His hangover was intense—familiar but awful: a headache like an axe in the skull, a swelling of the eyes, a nausea that became vertigo if he moved. Then he remembered where he was and what he had done last night—the bars, Hilda, the call to Bobby Li—and he sat up and let the full awfulness of the hangover grip him like a fist.

“Nobody ever died of a hangover,” he said aloud, a man who had suffered thousands. In fact, he thought that people probably had died of hangovers, but not this one, which he would classify as a Force Four, severe but not fatal. Nothing would help, he knew; showers and coffee and deep breathing were for amateurs. He dressed and headed out.

The code he had given Bobby Li, “Papa John’s,” meant a corner by a taxi rank opposite the Import-Export Bank, at ten minutes after seven in the morning, ten after nine, and ten after four in the afternoon. He had already missed the seven-ten. Bobby would have been there, he knew, waited for three minutes, pretending to read a newspaper, and walked away. Jerry felt guilty.

Not professional, missing a meeting time.

He walked slowly, balancing the hangover on his head. He stopped in a sushi bar and had two sea-urchin-egg sushis, supposed to be good for his condition. The green tea seemed to help. Four aspirin from a corner vendor helped still more, and each stop let him check his back trail and see that nobody was following. He then stepped abruptly to the street and pushed himself into a cab that two Indonesians were just leaving, then wove through central Jakarta and got out three blocks from the Import-Export Bank. At nine-ten, he was fifty feet from the taxi rank.

Bobby Li was there.

Jerry got into a cab and told the driver to go slowly. After a block, he looked back; another cab was following.

“Fantasy Island Park,” he told his driver. When they got there, the other cab was still behind. He’d noted nobody else. He had the driver go three blocks beyond the park, and he got out; the other taxi pulled up and Bobby Li got out and followed Jerry to the park entrance without acknowledgment.

“Hey, bud,” Jerry said when he was standing in the shade of the ornate gate. Bobby Li smiled. Bobby was a smiler, one reason he still seemed like a teenager to Piat, that and his small size.

“Hey, Andy,” Bobby said. He was pathetically happy to see him.

“Come on, bud, I’ll show you where the ping-pong’s going to be.” They went into the park, which was an old-fashioned fun park crossed with a somewhat corny cultural display, none of it terribly well maintained. The centerpiece, however, was a world-class collection of orchids.

“Been here before?” Jerry said.

“I bring the kids.”

“How’re the kids?”

“Good.” A big smile. “The boy is bigger than me. Fifteen now.”

“The wife?”

“She okay. Working hard.” The Lis didn’t make a lot of money, Jerry knew. Bobby had a small business, buying and selling exotic bird skins. Jerry, in fact, had set him up in it, persuading the CIA that it was worth the investment to have an agent with decent cover and an income. It amused him that Bobby was a feather merchant, the old term for a bullshitter. Amused him because that was the last thing Bobby could be.

“How’s the business?”

“Pretty good. Lot of problems, CITES, that stuff.” He waved a hand. “Big companies cutting all the forest everyplace, no birds.”

Jerry led them to a kiosk where ethnic dancers performed several times a day. The kiosk was white, glaring in the sunlight, empty plastic chairs around it for the audience. He nodded his head toward it. “Our man is going to walk in the gate and sit here—that’s in his comm plan.” Bobby took it in but didn’t ask any questions. Agents got told what they needed to know, nothing more. “I’ll give you a photo of him. You get a guy who’ll sit here and check him out. I want him checked for guns, wire, walkie-talkie—anything. Has to be visual—can’t touch him. Maybe bump him once when the crowd’s moving, but they got to be careful, because if it’s the guy I expect, he’s a pro and he’ll know what’s up.” The guy he expected was Dukas. Dukas was the one who would get the file; Dukas was the special agent. It wouldn’t be Craik, who was Navy and would be off saving the world someplace. If Jerry’s luck was bad, it would be merely some NCIS nobody that Dukas had got to come over from Manila, and then the whole plan would have to be shit-canned. That was one reason it was a bad plan, as Jerry had pointed out to both Suter and Helmer.

He dug out a photograph of Dukas that he’d lifted from an old Agency file. “That’s him.” The picture was ten years old, and Dukas looked tough and overweight. Jerry had looked for a photo of Craik but had dug up only a useless old group photo from a squadron book in which he looked about fifteen.

Jerry led Bobby over to a food concession and bought a Philippine pancake and two green teas, and he ate the pancake with his torso pitched forward so he wouldn’t spill anything on his shirt and pants. “You get the ice bucket?” he said. They both sipped the tea.

“Not yet, Andy.” He didn’t say, It was only last night you asked for it, for Christ’s sake. Bobby never said things like that.

“I’ll show you where I want it.” Piat licked his fingers and walked toward the Orchid House, a greenhouse perched atop a concrete model of a Javanese fortress, circa 1500. They went inside, where a broad path covered in bark mould wound through two full acres of flowers, which rose so high they screened the turns of the path, preventing long sight lines and making a perfumed maze with walls forty feet high. Four entrances, each arriving from a separate path through the minipark.

It was one of the most perfect sites for a clandestine meeting that Jerry had ever seen. It was a site where a man could meet his agent while the whole world watched him, never really knowing whether they had met. It had George Shreed written all over it.

Jesus, George knew his craft.

“This is where the meeting’s going down,” he said. He led the way along the path, his left hand gently stroking the narrow leaves of a mountain orchid. “I’m going to tell you a secret,” he said. Bobby was behind him; when Piat turned, he saw that the little man looked worried. Agents didn’t usually get secrets. “Who d’you think chose this site? Go on, guess. Take a guess.” Bobby frowned still more. “George,” Piat said.

“George!”

“George Shreed picked it.” Jerry grinned. The hangover had receded and was a dull ache with a peculiar peacefulness spread over it. “I shouldn’t be telling you this. No need to know. But I thought you’d care. Because of George.” Bobby looked flustered and excited. Jerry had paid him a great compliment, made a great gesture of trust. The little man was absurdly flattered. Finally, he was able to say, “How is George?”

Jerry realized that of course Bobby didn’t know. “ George is dead, Bobby. That’s what all this is about—the people who killed him are going to make this meeting. Then we’re going to get them.”

Tears stood in Bobby’s eyes. All the pleasure of being told a secret was wiped away. “George dead?” he murmured.

“We’re doing this for George, pal.” He touched Bobby’s shoulder. “Okay?”

Piat located the actual meeting place, where the path curved and a bench stood among the orchid plants. He pointed out the main entrance, through which their man would come, and then walked to the one at the opposite point of the compass. “And this is where our guy will come in. Then he’ll walk around that way, taking his time, back the way we just came, to the meeting place. Got it?”

Bobby nodded.

“Our guy will carry a copy of The Economist to identify himself, and he’ll also have an envelope stuffed with what will feel like money, which he’ll hand to the guy who killed George, and your team with the camera will get a good picture. Got that?”

“Got it, Andy.”

Jerry smiled. “You haven’t asked who’s going to be our guy.”

Bobby shook his head.

“Go on, ask. You can ask, it’s okay.”

Bobby knew then that he was supposed to ask. “Who?” he said, like a good stooge.

“You.” Piat laughed and slapped him on the shoulder and headed for the far wall of the greenhouse, walked boldly past a young man raking bark mould off the path and another misting leaves with water, both of whom looked at him but were cowed by his eyes. He pushed past them down a maintenance trail and on to a battered sign with “Treetops” painted on it; directly below it was a less old but hardly new sign that said “Closed.” Jerry remembered when “Treetops” (the name borrowed from the famous African lodge once visited by Queen Elizabeth) was new, a viewing platform out over the entire Orchid House, back when its trees had been young and its vines small. Built cleverly of steel pipe disguised to look like branches, it was meant to recall those game-viewing, tiger-shooting platforms once put up in real jungles. Now, the trees reached to the roof and the vines were as thick as your wrist, and Treetops was old and sagging and probably unsafe.

“Come on.”

He climbed the imitation-treetrunk stair, ignoring the thought that every worker in the Orchid House was watching them. The old viewing platform was filled with rolls of hose and cuttings, and the protective railing was broken, and the pigeons that flew in and out of the broken panes of the greenhouse had used it as their personal privy. The platform, however, looked as if nobody had been up there for years, except, he now saw, for the odd, courageous tourist who climbed up to stand in the one spot where you could see through some of the greenery.

Jerry lay full length, looking over the edge of the platform. “They need a few elephants,” he muttered. From up here, he could see most of the meeting site—the back of the bench, but not its legs because of the foliage, about three feet of path to the left of the bench, the side from which Bobby would come; and a little more on the side where he hoped Dukas would come.

“I want the big ice bucket placed up here, okay? Roll it in a floor mat; I can lie on that.”

“You going to—?” Bobby stopped himself. He had been about to ask a question. Piat ignored it, concentrated on the bark path beyond the bench. Have to wait until they’ve got the photo. Then shoot? Or wait until he starts out. He tracked an imaginary figure back toward the exit to his own right, seeing the path here and there as a red-brown stain among the green leaves and the flowers. There was one place that might do. Have to be ready, shoot as he moves into the open. Bang. Not such a long shot, but iffy because of the visibility.

Then noise and a lot of running around; I leave the gun, just like Oswald in Dallas; I head for the stairs—He raised his head to look at the steep, winding staircase, then craned to look down. There was better cover from the leaves where he was, one now-huge tree masking most of the front of Treetops. A sober man without a hangover could shinny down the old scaffolding unseen. Climb down, no sweat, there’s a lot of uproar, our team is making noise and providing a diversion—what? He looked up at the glass roof, saw the lines of water pipes up there. He studied the vast space. “Can you get a stun grenade, Bobby?”

“Not so easy. Maybe.”

“Try.” He didn’t like the idea of the stun grenade; it was distasteful to him—unprofessional. However, he would have to be out and away before the Jakarta cops arrived. Not good to get caught up in all that now that he wasn’t Agency any more.

Jerry got up and tried to brush the pigeon shit off his front, but the headache knifed back when he bent too far. “I think we’ll need four guys,” he said. He took ten American hundreds out of his wallet and handed them over.

Ten minutes later, they were standing outside the Orchid House.

“You know Si Jagur?” Jerry said.

Bobby Li grinned. “Everybody in Jakarta know Si Jagur.” Si Jagur was a seventeenth-century cannon that sat in a public place and was both a totem and a sort of pet, also a good place to meet for a date—See you at Si Jagur.

“Fatahillah Square,” Jerry said. “You’re going to go check it out every day. Here’s the deal: when our man’s ready to make the meeting, he’ll leave a chalk mark on Si Jagur. A circle with a little tail, sort of a letter Q. Got that? On the left-hand wheel as you stand behind the gun. Okay? He leaves the mark, that means the clock is running and the first meeting time is next morning at nine-ten. Mmm?”

“I got you, Andy.”

“I want you to check Si Jagur every day, starting today. You’ll have to set up a route that takes you there, going someplace you usually go. Mmm?” Jerry wanted something sweet, which he hoped would absorb or minimize or anodize or do whatever the hell sugar did to alcohol. If the alcohol he’d taken in was still alcohol, and not some poisonous shit that it turned into after it hit the gut. “You know the drill—you make walking by the cannon look normal. Okay, you know all about that.” He also wanted a drink. “One of these days, you’ll see the mark. Then you let me know at once. I’ll give you a comm plan.”

“Okay I ask a question?”

“Ask.”

“How soon this guy going to leave the mark, Andy?”

Piat, hands on hips, inhaled and exhaled noisily. It was another flaw in Suter’s goddam plan. “Soon, I hope.” When Dukas gets around to it, he meant, but Suter had believed that Dukas was smart enough to find the comm plan quickly and to see that it was an anomaly. Well, maybe. We hope. “Soon.” He liked Jakarta, but he didn’t want to grow old there.

Jerry wanted to go back into the Orchid House and sit down. He liked the bizarre mixture of smells—earth, flowers, rot, bark. But he had other things to do. “I’m leaving,” he said. “You hang around for fifteen, twenty minutes, check out the way you go into the Orchid House to make the meeting. Then check out Si Jagur, then start to get your shit together. Okay?” He smiled into the small man’s eyes. “Good to be working together again, Bobby.” He put out his hand.

“Yeah.” Bobby’s face was sad. “I can’t believe George dead.”

“For his memory, Bobby. Hmm? Loyalty—that’s what this is about. Loyalty to George.”

Dulles Airport.

The summer evening looked golden through the great windows. Incoming aircraft winked like stars in a sky still too light to show the real ones. Alan walked with his bad arm around Rose, in the other the carry-on that was his only luggage. “Seems weird, going halfway around the world with less stuff than I’d take to the beach.”

She had her right arm around his waist; she squeezed. “I’ll miss you.”

“Not the way I’ve been the past few weeks, you won’t.”

“Even that way. Mikey cried when I told him you were going. It’s bad for him, you getting hurt, then you were so—so—”

“Crazy.”

“Whatever, and now you’re going away…”

There are few good conversations for a parting. Kids, the dog, her airplane, goodbye, goodbye. I love you, I love you.

She stared at the security gate and the metal detector. “Jakarta,” she said, as if she could see it there. “I’ve just never heard anything good about Jakarta.”

He kissed her. “You will.”

Jakarta.

The next day, Jerry Piat slept until noon. At four, he went to Hilda’s and a whorehouse and several bars.

Bobby Li ran around Jakarta, stopping four times at his business, which was only an office and a storage space; a woman old enough to be his mother answered the telephone for him and kept the place clean. He visited Si Jagur; he bought a much-used SKS with a scope and wrapped it in a grass mat and took it out to a suburb where a petty gangster named Ho had a fiefdom of about three square blocks.

“Got a job,” Bobby said.

Ho grunted and looked at the rolled mat. “I don’t shoot guys,” he said.

“Surveillance job. I need you and three others. You use a camera?”

Ho grunted.

“Use it good?”

Ho grunted.

“You use a telephoto?”

Ho grunted, but without conviction.

“Okay, I get you a point-and-shoot.”

They talked money. Bobby made a deposit from the bundle Andy had given him. He handed over the roll with the SKS in it. “Pay some glue-head to put this up on the old platform in the Orchid House. You know, the Treetops? Some doper who’ll do it but then forget it, okay?” He peeled off another hundred, tore it in half, and put half in Ho’s hand. “I’ll check five o’clock this afternoon. You get the other half if it’s been done right.” They talked terms some more, then communications, and Bobby told him he and the team would have to be ready to move on short notice. That required another deposit.

He went to the street market and bought an Olympus point-and-shoot cheap, probably ripped off from some tourist, loaded it with 400-speed film and took it back to Ho, who held it in his fat hand and looked puzzled. Bobby explained how it worked.

He tried to buy a stun grenade.

He told his wife nothing was wrong when she asked what was wrong.

He went to a different street market and bought six Walkabout radios.

He met with Andy and the team. He told Andy he needed more money.

That evening, Alan Craik landed in Jakarta.

About the same time, Dick Triffler took off from Washington.

3

Jakarta.

“Hello, Mister!”

Alan tried to ignore the swarm of aggressive children, each with his palm stretched up toward him in supplication. It was the morning after his arrival, stunningly hot, the streets steaming from a ten-minute downpour.

“Hello, Mister! Hello!”

The route on the map looked very clean and neat; here on the streets of Jakarta it was virtually impossible for a foreigner to decipher the name of any road, much less the maze of alleys (gangs) that had been marked for him to travel. He did his best, which was usually quite good, and found himself the only foreigner in what appeared to be the courtyard of a colorful and desperate tenement.

“Hello! Hello! Mister!”

Alan looked down at the sea of little faces that moved with him through the gang and took a folded bill from his shirt pocket and held it up.

“Anyone speak English?”

“Oh, Mister! Hello, Mister!” Like a children’s choir.

“Mister!” Hand raised in the affirmative. A chorus of Yes.

“I need a guide.” Alan didn’t think that James Bond required a nine-year-old to guide him through his surveillance detection route, but he wasn’t James Bond.

“Why don’t we practice?” he had asked Triffler, back in Washington. Triffler had explained to him that if the Indonesians or the Chinese or any other service were watching them, they couldn’t practice in Jakarta, because anyone observing the practice might be set up to watch the real thing. The explanation had confused him, because the military believed that people should practice complex evolutions, but he followed his orders, and here he was, lost in Jakarta Barat. At least, he hoped he was still in Barat. And Triffler, who was supposed to be with him, was—Alan hoped—still over the Pacific somewhere.

“We won’t even meet.” Triffler had been quiet, assured. “You’ll see me at the end of the route, because I’ll be the signal that you’re clean. But we won’t hang out; we won’t be in the same hotel or travel together; nothing to link us.” Nonetheless, Alan was tempted to look for Triffler on every corner.

“I can speak Inglis, Mister!” one kid said. “Real Inglis, like you can understan’.”

Alan handed him the folded bill without hesitation, then withdrew a second bill before the boy’s eyes wandered or he contemplated flight. This one he held up ostentatiously and then put back in his pocket.

The boy launched into a torrent of abuse at his mates, most of whom vanished in an instant, although a few merely fell back as if waiting their turn.

Alan read the next street on his route to the boy, who nodded and set off at a fast walk. Alan followed, sweating. He liked the sweat. He had been right: it felt good to be doing something, even if he required a nine-year-old to help him.

A minute later, the boy stopped in a gang identical to the last, carpeted in the same bright trash that reeked of rotten fish.

“Here, Mister. What we do here? You buy batik? This not a good place for batik.”

Alan looked at the wretched row of shops, each offering its own batik and some of the “cap” cloth that every tourist seemed to want. Alan couldn’t see Rose in “cap.”

In Washington, Triffler had told him that every stop would “make sense.” “These things have to have a logic of their own, Alan,” he had said. “We depend on that logic to look natural.” Alan saluted him, mentally. I look like a natural lost tourist. To keep his cover, he pointed at a piece of cloth slightly less repulsive than the others and nodded at the price.

“He ripping you off,” his guide said, turning on the merchant. The exchange went on and on, getting louder and shriller; and then, suddenly, everyone smiled and Alan got a pile of cash back—too much, he thought, but the transaction seemed to have satisfied all parties.

“Now I want this one.” Alan pointed at the next destination on the list, marked “Fish Market.”

“Okay.” And they were off, Alan almost running to keep up, his batik (or cap, he couldn’t tell) clutched under one arm.

It certainly smelled like a fish market. This one he had checked out on the Internet—supposedly the oldest part of the city, with some parts dating to the fourteenth century. What was he supposed to do, buy some squid? He walked about for a few minutes, followed by the boy. The fishmongers shouted at him and each other, and he was reminded of his first visit to Africa and how alien it had all seemed. Jakarta was alien, too—almost more alien, with a sturdy structure of the ultra-modern, hung with a great deal of African-style poverty.

Beyond the fish market were boats, old sailing boats with brightly colored hulls and sharply raked bows and masts, and he moved toward them without really thinking. The boy followed, incurious, and Alan walked along the pier, threading through the piles of nets and watching them being mended in much the same way that nets were mended in Mombasa and in Gloucester, Massachusetts. The ocean didn’t seem alien. He felt as if he had his feet under him, and he smiled at the boy.

“You plan a hash run? That why you walk everywhere, Mister?”

Hash runs—long cross-city races over a course marked by hash marks—were a feature of expat life from Bahrain to Mombasa. Alan had run a few and had helped mark one, and he smiled at the boy, thankful for a better cover story than any he had been able to concoct.

“Fatahillah Square.”

Now for the real thing. Or the thing that probably meant nothing but might lead to something real. What Triffler called the “operational act.” As if this were some espionage performance art.

Alan crossed the square under the full weight of the sun and went to the gun, which had been here since the seventeenth century, had been loaded and used to keep surrendering Japanese from resisting in 1945, and now seemed to be the city’s leading fertility shrine. Si Jagur was the site he was to mark, the target set for him from the first meeting with Triffler and Dukas in Maryland.

He needed to get rid of the boy.

“Coke?” he said, miming unnecessarily to his guide. The boy stuck out a hand and Alan gave him some small colored bills. The boy vanished, and Alan walked up through a crowd of women, many of breathtaking beauty, to run his hands over the rims of the wheels on the old cannon. He touched it as if he were measuring it, as tourists often do, and many of the women giggled to see a man in such intimate contact with the old monster; things were said that might have made him blush or worse, and the older women didn’t hesitate to suggest that men often had their own failings.

This part he did well. He seemed no more interested than any Bule tourist, but when he moved back to the boy and his two lukewarm Cokes, he had left a white mark shaped like a Q high on the rim of the wheel.

Game on.

But as he picked his way back toward his hotel, he thought, I’ll like it better when Triffler gets here.

Bobby Li walked along the north side of Fatahillah Square, looking at nothing, moving purposefully toward his next business appointment—at least as far as a watcher would see. This was the third day he had walked through Fatahillah Square. When he came parallel to the ancient cannon, he stopped, covered his look at the cannon by glaring at a little girl who tried to beg, and moved off again, his head down, his stride again purposeful.

In fact, his glance had caught the mark, high on the wheel of the gun, and his heart was pounding because it was too soon—he hadn’t been able to get a stun grenade; Andy was drinking a lot and Bobby wasn’t sure of him; and he was nervous about actually getting the ragtag team together so fast. Still, he walked on, planning the moves that would take him to another place to leave his own mark to tell Andy about the mark on the cannon. And then Andy would call him. And then tomorrow morning, they’d go to the Orchid House and—

For George.

No reason to bring his Chinese loyalty into it.

Filomeno Hamanasatra was an aged Chinese agent who had no duties any more except to monitor three out-of-date, probably dead, communications sites. He walked his dog past them, proudly, even defiantly, because most of his neighbors were Muslims and had little regard for dogs. Mister Hamanasatra was a Christian—well, nominally a Christian, certainly culturally a Christian, inwardly somewhat contemptuous of belief itself—but he loved the presence of the animal and never stopped wondering at the mystery of communication, even affection, between the two different species, his and the animal’s. The dog was a cairn terrier, the only one in Jakarta, and, although it suffered from the heat, he walked it every afternoon and then returned it to the air-conditioned coolness of his flat.

Once a week, Mister Hamanasatra walked the cairn to Fatahillah Square. Faithful in his duty, he glanced each time at the wheels of Si Jagur, admiring when he could the women congregated there, and then, seeing nothing on the wheels, moving on.

Today, however, as he glanced at a lovely woman who was probably barely in her teens, and, because he never stopped walking but kept moving so that nobody would think his visit unusual, he was almost past the great gun before he looked down again at it and saw that a mark had been made on a wheel with white chalk. And, yes, the mark looked like a letter Q with an extra bar through the pig’s tail that curled down to the right.

Remarkable!

Mister Hamanasatra’s aging heart beat a good deal faster. He had seen a mark on the wheel only three times in all the years he had been paid to watch it. He was a romantic: he made up scenarios, stories, of what messages, what events, that mark symbolized. Now, he was so excited that he walked faster, almost dragging the dog, and it balked, sat, scratched, looked at him accusingly.

“Well, well,” Mister Hamanasatra said. He scratched the terrier’s ears. He walked more slowly to the far side of the square and then, because he wanted to “make assurance double sure” (Macbeth, a particular favorite), he walked the dog back past Si Jagur and the women and checked again to make sure, double sure, that the mark was there and that it was really the correct mark and not something a child had done at play.

Then he walked home through the deafening traffic noise and, safe inside his flat, he called a number on his cell phone and said that Vidia had a message from Lakme. Had they got that? Yes, they had.

That was all he did. A widower, retired, he had little else to do, but at least, that evening, he could stare out a window with the dog in his lap and dream of where his message was going and what it meant.

“Shit!” Jerry Piat said.

He had just heard from Bobby Li that the mark was on the cannon in Fatahillah Square.

That raging prick Ray Suter had been right—Dukas had glommed on to the comm plan first crack out of the box, and here the bastard was, making the mark and no doubt all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to hit the Orchid House tomorrow morning so he could enjoy a day at Uncle’s expense in Jakarta.

Jerry knew that Dukas would believe that the comm plan was dead. In that situation, you left the mark, you made the meeting site faithfully for a couple of days, and, when nobody showed, you went home and checked the box marked “Deceased.”

Well, surprise, surprise, Dukas!

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?”

Bobby felt nauseated. Surely it couldn’t be happening. Surely—were they testing him? Did they know all about Andy, after all?

“Well?”

Bobby forced himself to mumble, “Yes, sir,” and Qiu spoke to the driver and the car rolled to a stop. Again, the man in the jump seat opened the curbside door.

“Get out,” Qiu said. “You will be at the Fantasy Island Park in precisely—” pausing to study his watch—“one hour and forty-two minutes. Meet me at the main gate. Now get out.”

Bobby Li stepped into a puddle. The car pulled away, sending slow waves over the tops of his shoes. He watched it go, unable even to step up on the curb. At ten minutes after nine, he was supposed to meet an unknown American in the Orchid House for Andy, but at the same moment he was also supposed to watch Qiu meet the same unknown American in the same place. His life had turned into a contradiction. And a mystery: nobody had told him why Qiu was doing this to him!

He walked home. Passing the telephone, he thought of calling Andy and telling him—what? That he was too sick to go? No, you were never too sick for an operation, not when it was Andy, and not when it was for George. Tell him that his Chinese masters also had a job for him? But Andy didn’t know about the Chinese masters, and, because Bobby loved Andy, he couldn’t let him know. It would make Andy hate him, and he couldn’t bear that.

Loyalty, Andy said. It’s about loyalty.

He let himself into his house and sat in the little front room. His wife came in and stared into the dark where he sat, then went away.

Bobby thought it through. He had to do what Qiu said. He knew what the punishment would be if he did not—Loyalty Man’s attitude had told him that the thing was serious and out of his hands. To disobey was to end his life here, his family’s life. Maybe to see his children shipped to China, to disappear there. Therefore, he would have to do as Qiu ordered. How, then, would he keep Andy from knowing what he was doing? If he stayed far enough back, maybe Andy wouldn’t see him through the greenery—was that possible? But even then, there were the photos—Ho was supposed to get photos. Andy would see the photos.

And, of course, Andy would see Qiu meet with the American.

I never saw him before, Andy; he stole The Economist from me and his guys held me and he went into the meeting—

Andy wouldn’t believe it. Andy didn’t believe in unmotivated acts.

Well, the photos. Maybe he could just not hand over the film. No, Andy wouldn’t believe it if he said he lost it or Ho kept it. Or he could expose the film—pull it out of the canister. No, Andy didn’t believe in accidents, either.

But if the photos were simply bad photos—out of focus, for example—

Bobby went to the bedroom and turned on a light without warning his wife and without apologizing. He took his own camera from his drawer, hesitated, and then burrowed deep under his four shirts and took the gun that was concealed there. In the bathroom, he opened the camera—his pride, a good Nikon, 3X zoom, internal motor drive—and smeared Vaseline on the inside of the lens. He put in a roll of film.

Back in the living room, he sat with the gun and the camera in his lap. The gun had lost most of the bluing at the end of the barrel and a lot along the edges of the slide. It was a thirty-year-old Walther PP .32, an old police pistol from somewhere in Europe in the days when policemen could enforce the law with little guns that were now thought too weak for even ladies to carry. He put on a light. He took out the clip. Seven cartridges, their ends open—hollowpoints, segmented for expansion. Like looking into the heart of a flower. Well, you could kill with those.

It had been so good for the first day with Andy. Now it was all awful. He went back to the bedroom and began to change his clothes.

“Is it bad?” his wife said.

“Don’t take the kids to school today. Take them to the place in Tangerang.” He had a shack out there under a different name. Sometimes he went there to be alone. He had a garden out there, like his father. “Park the car in the trees, where it can’t be seen from the road.”

“How bad is it?” she said.

He finished dressing. Out of deference to her, he hadn’t brought the gun back into the bedroom. “It will be all right,” he said. He kissed her and went into the living room and put the gun inside his waistband just by his right kidney, and he picked up his camera and went out. It was daylight.

USSThomas Jefferson.

Cyclic air ops went on, creating thunder that went pretty much unnoticed in the corridors of the O3 level. In the ready rooms, crews preparing to fly were gathered around the TAMPS; others stood or sprawled to watch ongoing landings on the Plat camera. For the air group commander, a walk past the ready rooms was a mixture of envy, nostalgia, and irritation, the last because every squadron had its own problems, its own flaws, which he was supposed to solve and correct. To Rafehausen, who wasn’t flying that day and who could hardly find time to fly enough to stay qualified, the ready rooms were also a nagging reminder of what he had given up.

“Approval came through for Craik’s orders to Miramar,” a voice said at Rafehausen’s shoulder.

“Say again?” Both men flattened themselves against the bulkhead as a cluster of aviators hurried past. “Sorry, Deak, I was wool-gathering.”

“Not important. I just saw a message that Al Craik’s orders to Miramar to advise a second MARI det will be cut in a couple days.”

It took an instant for Rafehausen to switch focus. Then: “Oh, sure. Right, I wanted to find something for Craik. That’s great!” He detached himself from the bulkhead and started toward his office. “What’s being done about the parking problem behind cat three? They were supposed to have the mess there cleaned up by 0600 and now I learn that—”

Overhead, the engines screamed and the colored jerseys moved and spun, and aircraft blasted into the sky, and Alan Craik was forgotten.

5

Jakarta.

At five-thirty Alan was up, adrenaline and delayed jetlag combining to get him out of bed and into the shower. He had been awake for a long time, waiting for the alarm, and he was charged with energy, like a kid waiting for his parents to get up on Christmas morning. He shaved and had a long shower, humming something he had heard the day before, and then dressed carefully in slacks, a fancy T-shirt and the linen jacket Rose had packed for him. He felt that he looked like Don Johnson in Miami Vice, but so did everyone else in Jakarta. The air outside was already hot and heavy with moisture by the time he emerged to catch a taxi, almost an hour early. He told himself that he would spend the extra time making his route really complex. The truth was, he had to get out of the room.

Make some stops before you get to the park, Triffler had ordered without really explaining why. Alan knew it had something to do with helping his minders make sure that he was clear of surveillance, but Alan couldn’t for the life of him see how he could have acquired surveillance in Jakarta when traveling on his own passport. Nonetheless, he obeyed. Coffee and a decent roll were high on his morning agenda, so he asked the cabdriver where he could get the best cup of coffee in Java. The man smiled wickedly, as if he had just been asked where to find something far more sinister, and he left the curb with a jolt reminiscent of a cat shot.

Twenty minutes later, his insides comforted by a chocolate croissant and a cup of excellent coffee, Alan left the café and walked through the steamy morning. He window-shopped along a closed arcade and made left turns until he found an open news store, the magazines and newspapers international and mostly concerned with the upcoming presidential election in the United States. The subject didn’t interest him much, but he had a tiny cup of espresso and bought a local Englishlanguage paper, skimmed it to eat the rest of his surplus time, and departed with a much better understanding of the economy of oil in Indonesia.

His second cab of the morning was duller; the driver was quite young and didn’t seem to want to talk. He made good time, though, and Alan arrived at the gates of the park that contained the Orchid House with fifteen minutes in hand and a charge from all his energy and caffeine on top. He was beginning to feel nervous, the nerves of inexperience, concern about making mistakes through ignorance—feelings he hadn’t had in a long time. Then he told himself, for the twentieth time, that nothing was going to happen, and he sagged and felt the fatigue under his energy.

It was damp and hot. He started to walk.

Washington.

Dukas had got as far as suggesting to Sally, while Rose was out of the room, that they maybe check out his apartment, and then the shit had hit the fan. He had hardly tried his dessert when she had seen something in his open attaché and gone through the roof. “What the hell is this?” she cried.

“Hey, what—?”

“What the hell are you trying to pull?” she said. She didn’t seem vulnerable any longer.

Dukas misunderstood. He thought it was something about his clumsy approach to sex. “Hey, I was only—”

She tried to speak, moved her lips to form words that didn’t come, and then slapped the attaché and shouted, “This is Chinese Checkers!” She began to scrabble in the old papers, knocking them out of their neat alignment, dropping some on the floor and not caring.

“What the hell?” he said.

“You bullshitter, what have you done to—” She shook the folder. “This is the Jakarta part of Chinese Checkers!”

Dukas tried to focus. He had an idea what the code name Chinese Checkers meant. Chinese Checkers had been a CIA operational project—a comm plan that George Shreed had covertly used to meet with his Chinese control. When Dukas and Alan Craik had gone into Pakistan after Shreed, they had known he was following one of the Chinese Checkers comm plans to a village near the Kashmir border. That’s how they caught him—because Sally Baranowski had illicitly given Dukas a copy. But he had seen only the Pakistan section, and then only long enough to know where Shreed was going.

But Jakarta?

“Chinese Checkers is a defunct Ops comm plan,” Sally Baranowski snarled now. “And now here it is! I risked my fucking career to give you this stuff, and you’re walking around with it in your attaché!”

Dukas didn’t say that everybody walked around with classified material in his attaché. He was too stunned by what she was saying, stunned by the implications. A warning bell was sounding in his head. “This is Chinese Checkers?” he said.

“What did I just say?”

“Maybe it’s just like Chinese Checkers. Sally, it can’t possibly be—”

She simply looked at him.

“This comm plan can’t—I don’t see how it can be part of Chinese Checkers.” He grabbed her upper arm, then let it go and leaned back so she wouldn’t think he was bullying her. “I just sent Al Craik to Jakarta to roadtest it. He’s there right now.”

Sally stared.

“All I’d paid attention to in Chinese Checkers was the Pakistan part. I didn’t even read the rest. If this is really—”

Her look told him everything. She said, “I helped Shreed edit Chinese Checkers. I used to pull it up to see why it never got activated. There were three comm plans, Mike—Pakistan, Nairobi, Jakarta.” She picked the pages up again. “And why the hell is it typed this way? It’s beat-up, like you’ve had it forever. I didn’t give it to you like this—I gave you a goddam floppy! Where the hell did you get this?”

“It’s part of Sleeping Dog.” Even as he said it, Dukas saw the abyss that was opening.

“This was never part of Sleeping Dog!” she shouted. “Never, never, never!”

He realized that Rose was standing in the doorway and that she had heard. He ran for the telephone.

6

Fantasy Island Park, Jakarta.

Jerry Piat was up early and feeling good—rested, strong, wired just enough to stay alert. He got a paper cup of coffee and walked to the park. He took his time; it was only a little after seven, the streets already hideous with traffic, sidewalks still puddled from a rain that now steamed in early sunshine.

The Glorious Mornings. Title of some book. Nice phrase.

He looked around like a tourist, checked out a couple of ethnic displays, tossed his coffee cup at an overflowing trash bin, and went into the Orchid House.

Bobby Li hitched a ride on the back of a scooter to within five streets of the park gate. He’d shoved the gun down into his pants, with a loop of string holding it to his belt, a trick that George had taught him and that he said his side had used in World War II. The Economist and the envelope full of newspaper that was supposed to be money were inside his shirt. He kept the camera in view, like a tourist.

His heartbeat was way up. He thought a heart attack might be a good way to get out of this fix. His wife would get the business and a little insurance, and Andy and Qiu would forget him. But his heart wouldn’t cooperate.

A woman in a headscarf was sweeping the area in front of the park gate. He went around her and sidled in, looking for Ho, anxious not to miss him. Ho was lazy and would more likely be late than early. Bobby walked around, feeling his bowels get queasy. He couldn’t do it, he thought. He couldn’t walk in there behind Qiu and risk Andy’s seeing him. He was in a vise, being squeezed.

Ho grunted behind him, and Bobby whirled. His breath came too fast, and he had to breathe through his mouth or faint. “Give me the camera,” he managed to say. He had just seen, beyond Ho, a Chinese who looked professional and dangerous. But every Chinese he saw today would look as if he belonged to Qiu. “Don’t give it to me here; walk down to the toilets and meet me in the men’s.”

Ho walked away. He was eating an Indian sweet, slender coils of orange jelly. The smell of it made Bobby sick.

In the men’s room, he stood next to Ho and tried to piss. Ho was making water like a fire hose. Bobby strained; nothing came out. The vise was squeezing even his piss.

He put his own camera, the one with the grease on the lens, on the metal urinal. Below it was a wall of metal over which water ran, splashing their shoes. “Take this camera. Put yours there so I can take it.”

“Why?”

“It’s a better camera.”

They switched. Bobby said, “Take the pictures, and the moment the meeting is over, get out. Get your people out. You meet me by the east door and hand me the camera, and we’re done.”

“Not until you hand me the rest of the money.” Ho zipped up as if he was tightening a garrote.

“Right. You hand me the camera and I hand you the money.”

“Wrong. You hand me the money, and I hand you the camera.”

Bobby went out and walked up and down, keeping an eye out for Chinese men, glancing every half-minute at his watch, looking for Qiu. One of Ho’s team found him and gave him a Walkabout, which he had altogether forgotten. It seemed like one more terrible thing, one more burden—if the Chinese saw him with the handheld radio, they’d kill him. Or drag him off to the embassy, which would in the long run be much worse. He walked around the back of the toilets and smashed the radio under his foot and threw it into a tangle of weeds, then threw Ho’s camera after it. The less baggage, the better.

Washington.

Dukas and Sally Baranowski sat in Rose’s living room. It was going to be a long night.

A woman with a young voice and a thick Asian accent at Alan’s hotel had assured Dukas that she had tried the room three times, and, yes, she had the right room, and, no, Mist’ Cra-ik not answer. Dukas had looked at his watch for the tenth time since Sally had told him; it was by then eight-thirty-five in Jakarta, and Al Craik was already out of his hotel room. No, no, no, Dukas was saying. Don’t go this early—! He had left a message for Craik to call him at once; then he had tried Triffler, but Triffler still hadn’t checked in. The duty officer at NCIS told him that the last word they had was that Triffler was still in Manila.

Sally Baranowski now understood exactly what was going on. “How bad is it?” she said.

“Maybe pretty bad. I don’t know.”

She was an experienced operations officer. “If you don’t know,” she said, “then it’s pretty bad.”

“If you’re right about Chinese Checkers—”

She was contemptuous. “There is no ‘if.’ I’m right. So what is part of Chinese Checkers doing in a file about radio intercepts in Seattle?”

Dukas shook his head. Sally had his attaché open on her lap, and she took a sheet of memo paper from the Jakarta folder, smoothing the creases. It looked like the other papers, a little old, a little weary. It had a yellow fold-down FBI tab. “This is an FBI cover sheet,” she said.

“Yeah.” His voice was empty. “It’s supposed to date from the time when the Bureau had the case.”

“No way. The Bureau never had Chinese Checkers.”

She held it up to the light. There were columns for dates and times and signatures—a record of who had seen the pages and when. “Not much,” she said. “Only three names. Seven years ago, supposedly.” She brought her arm down. “Bullshit.”

“Check the document history.”

“‘Acquired 24/9/94 via Long Shot from E75P3211. Unverified. Authenticity 3, Reliability 3.’” She looked at Dukas. “What the hell is this shit?”

“What’s Long Shot?”

“Long Shot was a big buy from some very questionable sources after the Soviet Union went belly-up. Mostly in the ‘Stans,’ mostly KGB stuff, but there was some Chinese and Indian material in there, too. We never trusted it, never were able to use most of it. But no way is this comm plan from Long Shot.”

Dukas simply looked at the pale wall, waiting. She was sitting there now with her eyes slitted, staring at someplace he wasn’t allowed to go. “George Shreed would never have knowingly given Chinese Checkers to anybody,” she said. “The only way it could have shown up in the Long Shot buy was if the other side had got it somehow, and then after the end of communism, they sold it back to us.” She shook her head. “But it won’t wash. George would never have let it get out of his hands.”

“Yeah, but if he secretly used Chinese Checkers to meet his Chinese control, then the control had to have a copy, too. It could have got into the Long Shot buy that way.” Dukas was eager to authenticate the Jakarta comm plan, to tell himself that, after all, Al Craik was safe.

“You know that’s not the way intelligence works! It’s not the way George worked. If China had a top spy in the Agency—as they did, in him—then, by God, they wouldn’t have his comm plan someplace where it could be sold off to the highest bidder.”

Dukas stared at a rain-spotted window. “So how did it get into this file?”

She had no answer.

“If you’re right,” he said, “then the cover sheet and the document history and all that about Long Shot are forgeries.” He rubbed his eyes. “Somebody’s planted this stuff on me. And I’ve sent my best friend off to check it out.”

Fantasy Island Park, Jakarta.

To Alan, the park seemed empty. The night’s rain had left a faint gleam over the stones in the early morning light, but the only people in the park with him were the grounds crew and a few Chinese tourists and a school group of local girls in white shirts and ties and plaid skirts. Alan smiled, thin-lipped and tense, and moved on, heading for the first performance of the park’s Javanese dancers.

The dancers performed in a kiosk across from the looming concrete and glass of the Orchid House. Alan tried to see inside, but the fog of condensation on the walls of the greenhouse was impenetrable. It was hot already, with the heavy air of full humidity complicated by massive smog, but the lithe girls danced smoothly despite the early hour. The performance didn’t last long, and Alan was one of five members of the audience. All the rest were Asian, and Alan wondered if any of them was his target.

Bobby Li lingered where he could watch the front entrance to the Orchid House, knowing the American would go in there. Andy had said so. He was trying to cut down the variables in this horror, even though seeing the man, being able to recognize him, wouldn’t help matters much unless Bobby could get inside and get to him before Qiu did. It wouldn’t work. Nothing would work. He leaned back in the shadow of a pillar and gave a murmured whimper. A hand closed over his arm.

“Aaah—!” He spun, eyes wide, found himself inches from the face of Loyalty Man.

“Very nervous,” Loyalty Man said. “No reason to be.”

“Th-this Qiu makes me n-nervous.”

Loyalty Man spat and lit a fresh cigarette. “Your job here has nothing to do with Qiu. Qiu knows nothing. Qiu is like the wooden duck you put on the water to bring in the real ducks.” He pulled something from his lower lip, spat tobacco flakes. “You are to find if the person who makes the meeting with Qiu is either the American Shreed or Colonel Chen. You know both. That is all.” He inhaled smoke and looked at Bobby. “Orders from very high up.”

“But—” He started to say, But Shreed is dead, and remembered in time that he had learned that only from Andy and so wasn’t supposed to know it. “But,” he said instead, “it has been so long since I saw either.”

“I am told you knew both well. Do your job. Call me to report.” He walked away.

Bobby’s face screwed up as if he was going to weep.

Jerry had brought a piece of nylon parachute cord, which he tied across the rickety stairs to Treetops. He didn’t want any early tourists stumbling over him. Up on the viewing platform, he drew on a pair of gloves and located the gun and dragged it out, unrolling the mat to lie on. It was nice up there, a feeling of airiness and light, that tantalizing mixture of greenhouse odors in the nostrils. He looked through the scope of the SKS, unloaded it, checked the trigger pull, decided that it would do well enough. He reloaded it and laid the weapon next to him and looked down into the green and flowery target area.

“Report,” he said into his handheld. “One here. Report.” Bobby was Two. He should have said “Two,” but he didn’t. “Two?” Jerry said. After a silence, he said, “Three?” Three reported—that was the big ox, Ho—then Four, Five, and Six. “Two?” Jerry said again. Was Bobby out of range somehow?

It was eight forty-eight. Dukas should be in the park. “Anybody see our target?” He said it again in dialect, or as much dialect as he knew. An answer came, too fast, too local. “Say again?”

“Got a white man at the dancing thing. Not same as the photo.”

Shit. Maybe he wasn’t going to make the morning time. Maybe he was waiting until later in the day—overslept or got the trots or got laid. Or maybe he wasn’t coming. Or maybe he’d sent somebody else. “Two?” he said. “Two, answer up. Two?”

Bobby could see only one white in the dance kiosk, and he was young; his hair was dark and he had his left hand in bandages, none of which matched Andy’s description of the man he called Dukas. It suddenly struck him that perhaps the target wasn’t going to come, and his heart leaped. It was eight-fifty-three.

Qiu watched the American enter the Orchid House from twenty meters away, leaning over the railing of one of the reconstructed Sumatran houses, the long eaves shading the sun above him so that he could snap his first picture of him. He didn’t trust local people to do such things. And the American was carrying The Economist, so he was the man. Qiu checked his watch and saw that the man was four minutes ahead of schedule. Most unprofessional.

Bobby saw the American cross to the Orchid House, and he saw the copy of The Economist under his arm. And he was going in early!

Alan saw one of the Asian men on the platform to his right raise his camera, and his heartbeat rose to a quick march in his chest. This wasn’t a fake, Mike. That guy works for somebody else and he knows who I am. He just took my photo. Suddenly, Alan’s world changed, and the beautiful morning, the lithe dancers, the good coffee were all erased. He was in a foreign place, and he was alone.

Jerry settled himself on the platform. He had plenty of time to arrange the matting and lie flat so that only a foot of the barrel protruded over the edge, and two small dead shrubs served to camouflage his body. The mat smelled of rice and curry and sweat and dog shit.

Dukas would appear there, and he worried about how little time he would have to shoot. Plus, now he would have to identify the guy. Then the main door opened, and he saw a furtive movement. Then the west door opened, and he saw another movement. Jerry brought the rifle around slowly and settled it on a half-hidden figure. The head was turned as if the man was speaking to someone just outside the door, but Jerry knew him before the face turned, clear in the crosshairs, and Jerry’s lips moved.

Jesus.

Jerry Piat had worked Jakarta long enough to know most of the Chinese embassy watchers by sight, and he certainly knew the team leader when he saw him.

What the fuck were the Chinese embassy goons doing here?

Alan entered the Orchid House too fast, minutes early, and forced himself to slow down. He realized that he had not really expected this meeting to happen at all. Now it was real because of the man with the camera he had seen outside, and he felt exposed. He felt a wave of vertigo. He slowed his pace still further and forced a smile to his face. He began to smell the orchids, and he forced himself to stop and read the cards, admire the rich colors and marvelous shapes. He was so early that he would have to smell every flower on the path to get to his appointed spot at the right time. He dawdled, nervous and bored at the same time.

It was a nightmare.

Qiu had a hand around his left biceps. Qiu had a copy of The Economist in his other hand, also the side on which he wore his watch, which he now raised to read. He held Bobby in place, watching the seconds tick off. Bobby wanted to scream at him—he was wasting time that Bobby could use to find the American inside the Orchid House!

“I will go inside in precisely two minutes and twenty seconds,” Qiu said to the watcher by the door. He gave Bobby a shove and let go of his arm. “You stay out of my way!”

Bobby ran for the south entrance, all the way around the building.

Now he was in for it.

Jerry saw the man with the bandaged hand framed in the bright sunlight of the east door.

Jesus, this thing is fucked.

Jerry’s mind was racing through the ramifications of a Chinese surveillance team. Now he had to think who the man with the bandaged hand was. Not your typical NCIS special agent. Military. Fairly recent wound—from the dustup when they’d brought down Shreed? It must be Craik. He checked the face against his memory of the old squadron photo. Where was Dukas? Why were the fucking Chinese here?

They could have followed Bobby Li, but his tradecraft made that unlikely. They could be here for another reason entirely. Or one of his own could have brought them. Like Ho. Or—he hated the idea, but he had to consider the possibilities—Bobby Li.

What didn’t occur to him, nonetheless, was that it was his own signal, which he had used to draw Craik and Dukas to Jakarta, that might also have drawn the Chinese. It didn’t occur to him then, because, if it had, he would have had to consider that George Shreed had actually been a traitor.

Qiu entered on the second and hurried down the path, wondering where his team was, why none of them was supporting him. He stopped to photograph an orchid, allowing himself twenty seconds of the three minutes’ time he had scheduled for the approach to the site. The other man would be doing the same. He was suddenly scared. These tough CIA Americans were legendary—beautifully organized, skilled, always dangerous. Where was his team, now that he thought of it?

He looked around. Leaves and flowers were everywhere, like a nightmarish wallpaper; then, glimpsed through them, he saw faces, a hand, an ear. One of his own people? The other side’s? He moved more slowly.

Jerry saw somebody flash in and out of his chosen killing ground, and he hesitated. His crosshairs registered on the back of Craik’s neck and his finger took up the slack of the trigger, but he hadn’t decided.

Somebody seemed to step toward Craik—a dark shape, hanging back on the left side of the bench. Jerry saw black hair. Bobby.

Alan got to the edge of the clearing in the center of the maze. A man in a windbreaker was there just ahead of him, panting as if he had been running. He had The Economist. Alan shifted his own copy to make sure it would show.

The other man’s eyes were wide, almost crazed. His first meeting, Alan thought.

“You ever go AGIP party?” the man croaked at him. That was not quite the code. “AGIP Christmas party” was the code.

Oh, shit.

Bobby Li had reached the edge where panic becomes madness. Qiu was inside by now, and the American was standing across the space that Bobby knew was Andy’s window on the meeting. If Bobby took another step, he would be visible to Andy. Shoot, he thought. Shoot the American! His life, his family, his future hung on a gunshot. All because of—not because of Andy. Not because of George. Because of these two outsiders in this Orchid House in this foreign place—these interlopers, these meddlers, these oppressors—

“Did I see you at AGIP Christmas party?” he cried, realizing he had said the code words wrong.

The American across the open space looked relieved. He, too, was carrying The Economist. He gave the reply signal: “I was with a Dutch girl.”

Shoot! Bobby screamed inside his head. Did he say it aloud? No. And then he saw Qiu coming up behind the American. Bobby had the envelope full of newspaper in his hand and he stuck it out, shaking so hard the paper inside rustled and crackled. “Take it!” he cried. “Gift—for you—take it!”

The American put out a hand, but didn’t take it.

And Qiu, eyes horrified, backed against the wall of plants as if to sidle around the American, but what he was looking at was The Economist in Bobby Li’s left hand.

Bobby went over the edge.

It was Qiu. It was all Qiu’s fault.

Bobby flipped the safety on the Walther and began to shoot.

The Chinese man made a little “O” of surprise, and the American dove over a table of orchids.

Bobby just went on shooting. Three into Qiu, two down the path, one where the American had disappeared, one into Qiu again, and the slide locked open because the clip was empty.

Jerry heard the first shot and had a dizzy moment when he thought he had pulled his own trigger, and then he recognized the smaller, sharper report of a handgun. Shot after shot. Jesus! Then the Orchid House erupted in shooting, at least three guns on the north, west, and northeast. Glass began to break overhead and shower down.

It was a bust.

He rolled the gun in the mat and threw junk over it and swung himself off the platform.

Alan landed on his maimed hand and fire raced up his arm, but he rolled clear of a tangle of flowers and raced down the maze. The bastard had a gun, had fired at him. But how could he have missed?

Alan could hear at least three guns firing then, not all together, but two of them were close. He pressed past a tool shed and grabbed a pair of wicked-looking scissors from a table. Any port in a storm. Another shot was fired, so close that he saw the muzzle flash through the flowers and realized that he was separated by only a screen of plants from the main trail. He couldn’t tell whether the shot had been fired at him or not, but he flung himself around the next corner.

Bobby Li heard the shots as if through deep water, as if they were fired by somebody else. The young Chinese was down, lying on the trail, and Bobby headed for the west exit. He thought he was safe unless Andy had actually seen him fire the gun. If he hadn’t, Bobby could blame the shooting on the American. He could say that the American had shot Qiu.

But suddenly there was more shooting, all around him. Qiu’s team were now shooting at Andy’s team, and he was in the middle.

Alan moved through the maze of trails, unable to consider anything beyond his next cover. His hand pulsed with pain as he stumbled through a display, knocking plants in all directions. He threw himself behind a collection of tools and handcarts right at the edge of the greenhouse wall, determined to get his bearings before panic and paranoia eliminated his ability to think. He lay panting, trying to be silent. There was another shot. Were they shooting at him? He couldn’t seem to see the moment of the meeting, as if he had a spot of amnesia around the first shot.

Something had gone horribly wrong. But the man in the windbreaker had known the signal. And then the shots—now it was coming back—and a man behind him going down, and the guy in the windbreaker still shooting. At Alan, yes, he thought so, yes. But not really aiming. Looking—crazy. He lay still, his lungs going as hard as if he had run five miles, and tried to imagine where the shooters were, and what they were after. They had to be shooting at each other. There was no cover. The plants offered concealment, but in the whole building there wasn’t anything that would even deflect a small-caliber pistol bullet. Only the screen of the plants separated the trails. Alan thought there were at least four shooters, spread across the hall. Somewhere, one of them fired and a bullet hit the glass above him, and the whole pane crazed, lines of cracks spreading out to the frames.

Part of him wanted to stay and solve the puzzle, but that last bullet made up his mind. Time to go. And he realized that he was thinking again, not simply reacting.

He reached across, tore at a wheelbarrow with his good hand and tipped it, with its load of tools, squarely across the path. Then he pushed with his bandaged hand against the shattered pane of glass until pieces began to break out of the frames, and in a moment he had cleared it, although his hand was screaming and there was blood on his arm. There was another shot from twenty meters off, hidden several folds in the trail away. A potted plant burst, spraying him with loam and plant matter.

He rolled through the hole he had made and remembered to hold his maimed hand close with the other as he went. His shirt tore and a pain cut like fire across his back as he scraped through the frame. He fell much farther than he had expected and landed hard on his back, the wind knocked clean out of him. So many things hurt that his hand had to struggle to be heard. He rolled on to his knees and pushed himself to his feet, already plotting his path to the parking lot.

The shooting had stopped, and he had to consider that he had been the target, and he had to wonder if there were more of them outside, on the trails and in the parking lot. He balanced waiting in hiding, perhaps in the foundations of the Orchid House, against a run for the parking lot, if he could even run. Despite the pain, the desire for movement won. He’d be damned if he’d wait for them like a cornered rat. He might surprise them. He moved cautiously around the base of the Orchid House wall and then crossed the open ground to the first of the high-peaked roofs of the traditional buildings he had seen. He surprised the schoolgirls there, and his torn shirt and blood and the wildness of his expression shocked them. He took them as a sign he was safe for a moment and he ran along the gravel path, heedless of the looks that other visitors gave him until he made it to the parking lot without another shot being fired.

The cabdriver didn’t want him, but Alan shoved cash into his hands and made noises until the cab was moving. He had good instincts, but, because he lacked training and was preoccupied with his injuries, he didn’t see a car follow him out of the lot.

Bobby Li held out all the rest of his American bills as he and Ho collided. Ho grabbed the money and tossed the camera. He was fast for a big man, gone while Bobby was retrieving the camera. Men were pouring out of the Orchid House like ants; a woman was screaming somewhere near the food concession. Small, hollow-cheeked Indonesian men were turned, eyes wide, toward the Orchid House.

He had to get rid of the gun. He had to get out of Jakarta. He had to change his life.

But he hadn’t betrayed Andy or George Shreed with the truth.

Jerry held his ground until the building was clear. He should have left as soon as he saw the Chinese. He should have shown Bobby Li exactly where to stand. He should have had a better escape route. As it was, he was one step ahead of the Jakarta police. His mind reground the facts on and on, and he blamed himself, and he needed a drink. They all went together.

7

Washington.

Dukas got the call on his cell phone from the NCIS duty officer when he had been asleep at his desk and was dreaming of a house and a dog and was happy, perhaps because he didn’t own a house or a dog and these two seemed particularly congenial.

“You have a secure call.”

“Oh, shit.”

Oh, shit. He knew only one person who might want to call him at the office at eleven at night, and there wasn’t supposed to be any reason for him to call.

“What’s the number?” he said to the duty officer.

“US embassy. Naval attaché.”

Oh, double-shit.

“Dukas, NCIS, I have a message to call you.” There was the usual confusion, nobody at the other end ever having heard of him, and then they found the person who had asked him to call, a lieutenant-commander who asked him to wait, and then Alan came on the line.

“Hey, Mike. You secure?”

“Can’t you tell by the sound? You sound as if you got your head in a fifty-five-gallon drum. What’s up?”

“Somebody started shooting.”

Dukas felt his heart squeeze. “Oh, Christ, Al—”

“I left the mark, no sweat, and then I went to the meeting we said was going to be a piece of cake, and all hell broke loose.” He told it quickly to Dukas, what he knew of it from his point of view. “I’m sorry if I screwed it up, Mike.”

“But you’re okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, except for my self-esteem.”

“Where’s Triffler?”

“Good question.”

Dukas felt his blood pounding in his ears. He squeezed his eyeballs with his fingers and felt horrendous guilt. That Craik was okay made him no less guilty: he’d sent a good man into a bad place. “God, I’m sorry,” he said.

“I volunteered.”

“Yeah, but—you tell the local cops?” Dukas said.

“I came to the embassy; I didn’t know what the hell was going on. They’ve dealt with the locals.”

“Come home.”

“I hear the ambassador’s really ripped—”

“Come home!” Dukas was thinking fast, thinking about his mistake, about something that had seemed small and easy and was actually big and dangerous. “Come home now.” He saw that his hands were trembling. “Put the lieutenant-commander back on.”

Dukas asked the Jakarta attaché to put Alan on the first flight out to anywhere and to provide protection until they were in the air. “This a matter of national security?” the man said. He wasn’t unwilling, only a little jaded. Dukas gave him his full name and number and the case number he’d given the Sleeping Dog file, and he told him that, yes, it was a matter of national security.

After he’d hung up, he sat staring at the wall of the duty office for fifteen minutes, and then he went along dimly lit corridors to his own office and spent the rest of the night there. First, he tried to figure out how a meeting taken from a long-dead comm plan could go bad, really bad, because he had been sure that nobody would show, sure that the mark itself would go unnoticed. The answer was now easy: because the comm plan had been planted on him and he’d been suckered by it, and the intention had always been that it would go bad.

But who had planted it on him?

The easy answer was Shreed’s control, who must have had a copy—but how did a Chinese intel officer insert a comm plan into a dead CIA file, and then get it sent to Mike Dukas?

It didn’t make sense. Especially since Shreed’s control was probably dead himself, because the last Dukas had seen of him, he was lying face-down in a village in Pakistan with a hole in his back.

Then Dukas spent the rest of the night going through Sleeping Dog, which was supposed to be moribund but suddenly wasn’t.

Dar es Salaam.

Colonel Lao had been in his office before the African dawn had broken, because the first meeting time in Jakarta had been close and he wanted to be there for a report. The report would be negative, he had thought: surely whoever had left the mark in Jakarta would pass up the first meeting time, perhaps appear for the second or third. Yet his secure phone had sounded only fifteen minutes after the scheduled time, and his face had registered the horror he had felt as he had heard the report of the whole bloody, blown operation.

“Who shot first?” he said, hardly able to keep his rage out of his voice. On the other end was the Chief of Security at the Chinese embassy in Jakarta, a man who at that moment was facing the loss of his career and knew it. His answer was evasive; Lao excoriated him.

“How can you be sure there was an actual meeting?” Lao demanded. He was certain that there could be only two people who knew the American Go plan other than Lao himself—Chen and Shreed. When the officer insisted that a Westerner had appeared at the appointed time and place, Lao thought he saw it more clearly: Shreed had sent a substitute, meaning that he was alive and thought that Chen was, as well. Had Chen been there? Chen’s surrogate?

“Did you have the wits to identify anybody?” Lao growled. So much confusion, the officer whined, and there was shooting—unknown entities, Indonesians working perhaps for the Westerner or the Chinese, undoubtedly counter-surveillance. The embassy hadn’t had enough men, and the man sent out from Beijing, Qiu, was an idiot who had antagonized the in-country team and then got himself shot dead. Time had been too short, and—his voice stronger as he began to shift the blame—why hadn’t Lao informed them earlier? And why hadn’t he expected violence? And after the whining, the face-saving, and the excuses, a nugget of useful fact: one of the in-country team had followed one of the Americans to a hotel. He didn’t have a name yet.

Lao sat up and asserted himself. “Did you get photographs? Did you get at least that much?” They had, he learned. “Send them to me at once—have them scanned at the embassy and encrypted. I want them on my desk in twenty minutes. And the ID on the man your one competent agent followed.”

The officer protested that the films hadn’t been developed; these things took time—and hung up.

It was another hour before Loyalty Man reported that his agent had been unable to identify the man at the meeting. He had been only some American.

Jakarta.

The balls-up at the Orchid House made Jerry Piat angry—enraged drunk was only a couple of swallows away. Well, there you were, in the pleasant fog of booze one second, full-bore rage the next. He was jolting through a bad part of Jakarta in a taxi, a pint of Scotch in his hand and his head full of murderous doubts. Something apparently easy had gone bad—Jesus, shooting! It wasn’t supposed to be a hostile meet, and somebody had started shooting! Of course, he had planned to do some shooting of his own, but that was different. He was a renegade, what the hell. And Bobby Li had gone missing; he hadn’t shown at their rendezvous spot and he didn’t respond to phone signals.

And, Piat was thinking, he was himself in deep shit with the people who had sent him to Jakarta in the first place. What would he tell Suter and Helmer?

Well, he could tell them that Craik had done it. Some kind of personal thing. Maybe something snapped, he just—

Bullshit.

He couldn’t help thinking that what it reminded him of was the Watergate break-in. The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight. Jesus.

He went through it step-by-step. He had put somebody to check at the cannon, and a guy had come and had left the mark, only it hadn’t been Dukas, it had been Craik, which Piat hadn’t known until too late. (First mistake.) Then, this morning, they’d been at the meeting place, just as they had planned, and the same guy, Craik, had showed up there. Okay. Ho had been ready with the camera inside the Orchid House, too, or so Piat had thought, except that Bobby hadn’t got the film to him afterward (second mistake), meaning that to date there were no good photos of Craik inside, actually meeting with Bobby Li, which was the object of the whole operation. That had been the object, anyway, back before he had got enraged-drunk and had decided to shoot the sonofabitch—to get a photo of Dukas or Craik with what would look like a Chinese agent, which was what Bobby Li was meant to look like. But somebody had started shooting, and now he had no photos at all. Zip.

How was he to know that a bunch of people—Chinese—would fucking start shooting?

The thought of it made Piat scowl into the humid heat: he had screwed up—forget the others, he was talking to himself about good tradecraft—he had screwed up, and he was ashamed. He had let the booze do his thinking for him, the booze and his loyalty to George Shreed, and he hadn’t been on top of things and they’d gone to hell.

But why?

It was really a double screwup: first, he hadn’t made sure himself that somebody competent would be taking the photos inside the Orchid House. In fact, he should have been on the camera himself and not dicked around with the fucking gun. And, second, he’d somehow overlooked the possibility that a third party would read the mark on the cannon and know that it signaled a meeting in the Orchid House—somebody Chinese, as it turned out. An idea zinged around his brain: we set up somebody to fake a meeting with a fake Chinese, and real Chinese show up. How the fuck did the Chinese know?

Something ugly sucked at his brain. Suspicion.

George Shreed had been accused of selling out to the Chinese. If he’d given the Chinese the comm plan—

He couldn’t let himself be sucked toward that. Any direction but that. Think of something else.

He’d lifted this old, dead comm plan out of the Canceled file and had laid it on Dukas because it was dead, because nobody else could know about it, because it had been Shreed’s creation and therefore beautifully ironic—Shreed striking back from the grave—and therefore it was a safe hunk of bait to lure Dukas into a trap. But somehow the Chinese had known about it and had shown up and had started shooting.

Part of his brain kept picking at the problem of how they could have known, and it was saying, People know about comm plans because they’ve either stolen them or been given them, and, because this was a George Shreed comm plan—But another part of his brain, the part that loved the late George Shreed, was saying, Don’t go there.

Piat sipped and admitted to himself that he wasn’t going to tell Suter and Helmer the truth. Nothing had happened in the Orchid House, he’d say; he hadn’t tried to kill Craik and failed. There hadn’t been any Chinese.

Think about Bobby Li, he told himself. Where the hell is he?

He changed taxis and directed the driver out to an old temple that stood on the edge of a colossal industrial park that was once going to make somebody fantastically rich and that had gone belly-up like the rest of Indonesia in the nineties. Nature was vengeful in Indonesia: give it a chance to take something back, and Nature moved fast. The industrial park looked now like a Mayan ruin, with small trees growing out of windows, and wild pigs running around the decaying roads.

Across the road from the old temple was a cookshed. One old woman had a fire and a pot and a “cooler” full of water with cans of soda in it. You could get a really cheap lunch there, with a case of the shits thrown in for nothing. It was his and Bobby’s last-stand, desperation, no-fallback dead drop.

“Package for Mister Brown?” he said. He held up an American five.

“Ten dolla.” Prices had gone up.

He handed over a ten and, wonder of wonders, she fished out a brown envelope with a bulge in it. Inside was a plastic canister with a roll of film. That little sonofabitch! He took back his doubts about Bobby.

A piece of paper was in the canister with the film. One word had been scrawled on it: Scared.

It made Piat smile.

He wrapped three American hundreds into a tight roll and stuffed them into the canister and put the canister back into the envelope with the piece of paper, on which he had written, “I’ll be back.”

“Give to Mister Black when he comes, okay, Mama?”

“Ten dolla.”

Piat headed for the airport.

Dar es Salaam.

Two hours later than he had demanded, as Lao was smoking and staring at the wall, his stomach seething, the photos came through from Jakarta. They were not particularly clear, but one was clear enough for him to see that Bobby Li had been close to both Qiu, the dead man, and the Caucasian. Too close. Had he spoiled the meeting?

Lao tried to see the logic of such a thing. He had sent a case officer to Jakarta to run things, and he had got killed; and he had sent Chen’s old agent, Li, to identify Chen or Shreed if either showed at the meeting, and—and Li had then intruded on the meeting that was detailed in American Go. Doing so was far beyond the responsibility of an agent. It was a kind of hubris. Had Li thought that Lao wouldn’t know?

Or had he had some other, more important agenda? Had he wanted to eavesdrop? But why?

Li’s action suggested another set of orders, because Li, in Lao’s experience, was an insecure man who always needed orders: the only things he did on his own were acts of desperation. So, who else might be giving him orders? The question chilled Lao because it came from the ice of a case officer’s worst fear—that his agent was a double. This led to a second, colder question: double agent for whom? He couldn’t forget that Li had been Chen’s agent.

He shook his head. He didn’t believe in the game of mirrors. He ground out his cigarette and called in Jiang, an aging captain with a good bureaucrat’s sense of how to get things done. Lao brought up on the computer screen a photograph of the Westerner leaving the Orchid House. “I want to know who that Westerner is. He was in Jakarta two hours ago: check the manifests of flights in and out for five days back and the outgoing from now on; I have a suspicion he will leave Jakarta soon. Check with embassy security in Jakarta; one of their people followed an American, maybe this man, to a hotel. Get a name if you can. Then check the hotels for Americans who were there yesterday and today. Ask if they have been asking for directions to Fatahillah Square and the Orchid House in the minipark.” He squinted at the screen. “This man was probably with somebody else—up to four others, maybe. A counter-surveillance team. Maybe traveling together, but not necessarily.” He lit another cigarette. “Then get on to the Jakarta police and find out if they have any reports on an incident at the Orchid House this morning.”

The captain gave a forward jerk that suggested a bow. Both were in civilian clothes; military etiquette did not seem quite right.

“I am going home for lunch,” Lao said. It was, in fact, only nine in the morning. The captain’s face was impassive.

Lao drove to his rented house in a suburb where most of the diplomatic community lived (not so with most of his Chinese colleagues, who huddled around the embassy), kissed his wife, American-style, and responded to her questions about his day, then put his finger to his lips as he led her to the bedroom. The house was bugged; the phone was bugged; she had years ago given up trying to know how his days really were. Yet they had great affection for each other, despite their arranged marriage and his profession and its conditions. Sometimes, she knew, he came to her like this to make love when he wanted to make his mind a blank.

Lao wished he could talk about his problems to her. Or perhaps not. She might say, as she had once when they were test-driving a new car in Beijing and nobody could possibly have been listening, “Don’t you ever dream of living like other people?”

8

Washington.

Rose met her husband at Dulles airport. His embrace was hard, quick, eager. He looked worn out. “Jakarta was a bust,” he said as he settled in the car.

“I thought it was supposed to be a walk in the park.”

He folded his arms and sank lower in the passenger seat. “The case isn’t what we thought.”

“Mike should have his ass hauled for sending you.” Rose accelerated to get into the traffic heading toward Washington.

He looked out the window. A deer was standing by the side of the six-lane highway. He frowned. “I wasn’t very good out there.” He flexed his bad hand. “I’ll tell you the worst of it up front: there was shooting; a guy was killed; I got out by the skin of my teeth.”

She gasped, bit back some comment. “I’m just glad you’re home.” She put her hand on his.

“Everything went wrong,” he said. “Triffler never got there, one goddam thing after another.”

“What happened?”

“Everything.” He turned his hand over—the bad one—and squeezed her fingers. “‘This time, Amelican Fryboy, you make big mistake!’”

It had started to rain. He stared out the side window again, dimly seeing his own reflection, hers. He put his hand, the bad one, on her thigh, and she covered it with her own. “It was great to be doing something, though,” he said.

To his astonishment, she laughed. “You’re going to be doing a lot.” She reached across him and opened the door of the glove compartment and pulled an envelope into his lap. He saw the naval return address and his own name, and he opened the envelope and began to read, his heart swelling as he did so. “‘You are ordered to proceed to Naval Air Station, Miramar, California, for a period of…’

“Sonofabitch,” he said. He was frowning.

“I thought you’d be beside yourself!”

“I am, I am—but—There’s the case, you know—Sleeping Dog—I’ve got some ideas I want to share with Mike—” He looked again at the orders. “My God, another MARI det—a week ago I’d have killed for this—”

He had called Mike Dukas from the west coast and invited him for dinner, something he broke to Rose only as they were nearing their rented house. “I’ve got to talk to him about the case,” Alan said.

“You’ve got orders to Miramar.”

“I let him down in Jakarta. I want to make it up to him.”

“Alan, the Navy’s given you a new job—you’re not an NCIS agent!”

“Mike’s my friend.”

“Mike should have his ass kicked.”

He kissed her cheek. She steered into their weedy driveway and turned the car off. “I wish you’d told me that you’d invited him,” she said.

“You’re right; I should have. I didn’t think. I was stupid.” They were in the house by then. He kissed her again, and she smiled and stood back from him. “Well—if working for Mike is this good for you—”

He embraced her. “I’ll get a shower.” He grinned. “And I know I’m still in the Navy.” As he headed up the stairs, he hugged the orders against his chest with his good hand.

Twenty minutes later, Dukas’s battered car pulled up behind theirs in the too-short driveway, and there he was, worried and guilty.

“Hey, babe.” He kissed her as he came through the door. Rose held herself stiffly, and he felt it and got the message. “Where’s the great man?” He dumped his attaché in one of the ugly chairs. “Rose, what’s wrong?”

“If you don’t know, there’s no point in telling you!”

Dukas blew out his breath and headed upstairs to see Mikey, his godson. Coming down again, he tested the atmosphere—Rose slamming things down in the kitchen, a smell of onions and garlic frying. Dukas positioned himself in front of Alan, who was sitting on the sofa and wincing with each slam of a pan lid in the kitchen. “Al, it was all my fault. I feel like shit about it.”

“No.” Alan looked up at him. Something thumped in the kitchen, maybe a piece of meat being thrown down on the cutting board. “Let’s get on with the case.”

Dukas flinched as a cupboard door slammed. “Rosie, can I help?” he shouted.

Rose appeared, no smile, a chef’s knife in her hands. “You’re unbelievable, Mike. You almost got my husband killed!”

“What can I say?” he muttered.

“Try ‘I’m sorry!’”

“Okay—Rosie, I’m sorry.”

Rose folded her arms. The chef’s knife stood straight up by her right shoulder like some kind of emblem in a statue of one of the more severe saints. “Saying you’re sorry isn’t enough!”

Dukas tried to grin, and Rose, uncharmed, walked out. “I should have never let you go,” Dukas sighed to Alan. “I’ve already had my ass chewed by two experts at ONI. CIA, Embassy Jakarta, and State all want a piece of me. Rose has to stand in line.”

“And I should have told her I’d asked you to dinner. We’ll get over it; Rose’ll get over it. What’s going on with Sleeping Dog?” Alan stood up, restless, wanting to move, but the room was too small. “The way I see it, that comm plan wasn’t dead; it was active as hell, so what about everything else in the file? Let’s go through it piece by piece and figure out—”

Dukas tried to raise a hand to Alan’s shoulder, winced, and settled for putting a hand on his arm. “I’ve been through the file—several times. I can tell you this: we thought the Jakarta comm plan was the only action item there. We were wrong. Maybe we were supposed to think the comm plan was the action item, but there’s also action in Seattle.” They sat down, their knees almost touching, their voices low because the small woman in the kitchen was still slamming things around. Dukas leaned forward, his face only inches from Alan’s. “After I talked to you in Jakarta, I began to check Sleeping Dog out. I got a retired FBI guy who’d been the case officer in ninety-two. He wouldn’t say much, but he’d at least admit that he remembered it—it was a real case, meaning that the whole thing isn’t a crock of shit. Some of it, at least, is real. Sally Baranowski insists that the Jakarta comm plan wasn’t in Sleeping Dog, but—news from town, kid, here comes a big one—” He bent even closer to Alan’s ear. “The Jakarta comm plan was part of Chinese Checkers—George Shreed’s personal map for meeting with his control.”

Alan stared at him. He was processing it—Jakarta, Shreed, Chinese Checkers. “The Chinese?” he said.

“I think, yeah. Who else has Chinese Checkers?”

“Well—the Agency—”

“Yeah, but the Agency isn’t going to lay a Shreed comm plan on us and then use it to try to kill you!”

“Well,” Alan said grudgingly, “I’m not sure anybody tried to kill me.” He was frowning, looking away from Dukas.

Dukas leaned in close again. “It’s the Chinese, stupid. Get it?”

Dar es Salaam.

By midnight, Colonel Lao knew enough about what had happened in Jakarta to make him start using obscenities in his conversation—always a sign of frustration in him. Inwardly, he cursed: he cursed the distance between Dar and Jakarta; he cursed the surveillance people there and the fact that he couldn’t debrief them himself. Had they been so incompetent that they had got themselves shot at? Had they frightened off Chen and Shreed? Had there been some other failure?

“Unlikely,” he said aloud. He believed in likelihoods, probabilities: when you must choose, choose the probable.

Start with the certain, he thought.

Nothing was certain.

Start with the probable, then.

What was probable was that the American in the Orchid House had been sent by the CIA. If Shreed was dead, then it was probable that the CIA had his files, including the comm plan; it was probable that they had tested the plan by planting the mark. Therefore, the man who had appeared at the meeting place with a magazine under his arm had been a CIA agent—unless Shreed was not in fact dead. If Shreed was not dead, then what was probable was that the American in the Orchid House had been sent by him.

What was utterly uncertain was why and how the meeting in the Orchid House had degenerated into a shootout. Such things were remarkably rare—so rare that most operations officers hardly ever even carried guns, much less used them.

James Bond, Lao thought with a sneer.

What went wrong?

A fuller report had landed on his computer. The American (if he was) had had no gun and had not fired. Others in the Orchid House, apparently locals, had been armed and had fired. And his people had returned the fire. All this suggested not two sides, but three, with the American seemingly at a different level of involvement—almost, in a sense, a bystander.

A third force. Maddening.

And the Americans as bystanders. Odd.

And then the odd behavior of Chen’s old agent, Li.

Analysis of airline manifests showed that an American named Alan Craik had flown into and out of Jakarta on the right days, and a report from the agent who had checked the hotels said that Craik had asked about the location of the cannon and the Orchid House and had then been gone for part of an afternoon. The officer in Jakarta had had to winnow down a list of possibles to get to this one, a list that included a Dutch businessman, an American tourist, two Japanese tarts, and an airline steward, but Craik seemed the likeliest because of the question about the park. Lao himself became convinced when a simple check of a military registry turned up Craik as a serving officer in naval intelligence—not quite real intelligence, to Lao, but close enough. Although why he was traveling under his own name to a hostile agent contact, Lao could not begin to guess. Madness! Amateur!

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