Top Hook
Authors: Gordon Kent
Gordon Kent
To those who drive the ships
Venice.
The streets were a river of color in the dark, sequins and silks swirling around bare flesh. Masks and cloaks fought the assault of the rain and the splashes of the sea underfoot. Costumes flowed toward San Marco, just as the tide of the Adriatic ebbed away, leaving salt puddles to reflect the glare of carnival.
The pounding music from the palazzi and the manic orchestration of voices, Italian and foreign, stunned Anna's senses as she ran. Her masculine costume had saved her in the seconds when the meeting had gone bad, and now it freed her to move, thrusting through the tangle of the crowd. The sword at her side caught at passersby until she took the sheath in her left hand and lifted the hilt off her hip.
She stopped with her back against a medieval shop at the base of a bridge. Music pulsed through the stone at her back, and her lungs burned as she peered around the corner at the arch of the footbridge. Two lovers embraced against the stone railing; a reveler in a black cloak and white Pantalone mask strode past her toward the bridge. At the top of the arch stood another of the Serbs who had tried to kill her, talking into a cellphone, his head moving like an owl's. None of the Serbs had bothered to wear masks or costumes; all had leather jackets and mustaches. High on adrenaline, she drew the sword and shrugged off her cloak in one unconsciously
dramatic motion. She gathered the cloak in her left hand and risked one glance back into the thick of the crowd. Then she drew herself up and flung herself around the corner at the bridge.
Because the Serb was talking, he was slow. She rushed past the Venetian in the white mask, his dignified walk and cloak screening her for an extra second. She threw her own cloak with both hands, and the Serb shot at it on instinct. His second shot buzzed in her ear as she took a last step and leaped, lunging forward, her whole weight driving the point of the smallsword through his neck. The blade grated against the vertebrae and she rolled her wrist and used the speed of her rush to tear the blade free. Momentum carried her past her victim, and she stumbled, caught herself on the railing, and leaped to the parapet of the bridge.
The reveler's white mask turned to the movement, black eye sockets locked on her. One of the lovers had been hit by a shot, and the Serb's open throat pumped red blood on the gray stones. A second's balance on the parapet as her mind recorded the copper scent and the sheen of blood, and she dove into the canal. The unwounded lover screamed.
The shock of the water cut off the screams, and she swam, eyes and mouth shut tight. She stayed down, lungs bursting from the run and the adrenaline, until her hands found the opening and she thrust herself through and up into the tiny space of a partly submerged chapel, lightless, silent. For an entire minute, she could do nothing but breathe, supporting herself on a stone that had been the base of the altar.
She snapped on a tiny flashlight whose glow reflected off gold leaf and mosaic.
Anna rolled into her waiting canoe, half filling it
with water, and sat up. Her right hand still clutched the sword, and she pushed it under the bag in the front of the boat and played the tiny beam of light around her. The chapel had been a military one, eight hundred years ago; she hadn't noticed it when she had entered at low tide. Now, she watched the ceiling as the tide ebbed and her escape route cleared. A Byzantine Saint Michael held aloft a sword of light and threatened Satan; a figure in armor at the far end looked to her like Saint Mauriceâor was it Saint George?
She shivered. She had never killed before. She didn't like it.
She pulled a travel book from her pack and opened it to the last page. She had written four names there in Arabic script, in an old Persian language that was better than a code. She studied them in the flashlight's inch-wide beam.
Her lips thinned and she shook her head at the first nameâ
George Shreed.
Sitting in his house alone, George Shreed stared at a dead computer screen and listened to the absence of his wife. She was dying in a hospice, and the house was dying with her, devoid now of her voice, of the smells of her cooking, of her off-tune singing. Thirty years of marriage create a lot of sound, and now it had all drained away, and he was alone.
He booted up one of his computers. Three monitors sat on tables in the small “study.” He could communicate directly with his duty officer at the Central Intelligence Agency, or with several distant mainframes on which he kept coded and secret files, or with the vast world
of electronic magic that a few years before had hardly existed.
“Janey,” he murmured. It was not as if he meant to call her back from the edge of death, but only that he had to say her name sometimes, as if, left unsaid, the name too would disappear and he would have nothing.
“Oh, God,” he muttered.
Shreed was frightened. Horrors never came alone: first, his wife's cancer; now, the woman in Venice. He had just learned that his people hadn't caught her, so she was still out there, still running around with evidence that could send him to prison for life.
Two weeks ago, she had made her first contact: an e-mail with a photograph that he had first sent two years before, encrypted, to an Internet address where it could be accessed by Beijing. Shreed had been stunned to get it backâa hand reaching out of the past to strangle him.
Ten days ago, the woman had e-mailed him a page of classified material about a project called Peacemakerâclassified material that Shreed himself had covertly sent to his Chinese control in 1997. The Agency would have him for treason if they knew he had transferred it. With it had been a curt message: “VeniceâOld Ghetto memorialâ16 Marchâone million dollars.”
Then he had sent people to find her, and she had escaped.
And she had sent him a second message: “Now the price is two million.”
The computer screen was bright. He punched keys, and icons and prompts flew by. He moved out into cyberspace, entered a mainframe on a university campus two thousand miles away and called up a file that appeared as random symbols and letters on his screen. He keyed in a password, then another, then empowered
an algorithm that ran in tandem with a checker within the file itself, and then he was in, and the symbols in the blink of an eye became words.
Project Peacemaker.
Janey didn't know about this part of his life. Nobody knew, in fact. Not trueâsome people in China knew. But Janey and his colleagues at the CIA didn't know. He didn't give a shit about the colleagues, but he was deeply guilty that he had hidden part of his life from Janey, who
was
his life, for so many years. He would have to tell her, he knew. Tell her the way people tell a priest, there in the humming silence of her hospice room, tell her as she lay full of painkillers, needles in her arms, tell her as if she were the wall with the little wicket of the confessional. And say,
Forgive me, Janeyâforgive me before you go.
Even though she wouldn't have heard him, most probably.
Shreed went through the Peacemaker file. He needed a fall guy, or at least a diversionâsomebody to take the heat of an investigation if this damned woman in Venice decided to go to the Agency.
He needed time.
Peacemaker had failed two years ago, a very promising project that hadn't worked right, in the end. He had backed it as a weapon with real potential, and he had leaked data about it to Beijing, and the Chinese had made too much stink about it, and Peacemaker had been aborted by the White House as “destabilizing.” The Agency had been nosing around ever since about how the information had leaked, and if the finger ever pointed at him, there would be a disaster.
He needed a scapegoat.
He had to find somebody likely. He was not, himself, likelyâthat was the good part. He had been too visible
in the project, one of its main sponsors. What he needed was somebody who had not been quite so visible, somebody about whom you could say after the fact, Oh, sure, now I see what that guy was doingâhe was spying for the Chinese the whole time. Somebody who would have had to exert a little extra to find things out. Not quite a munchkin, but not quite a master of the universe, either. He began to go down lists of names.
No, no, noâmaybeâno.
He smiled, a somewhat wolfish expression on his lean face. He had just come to the name of his own personal assistant, Ray Suter. Assistants were expendable, and Suter was a real bastard, but he was too closely associated with Shreed himself. Suspicion, like tar, sticks to everybody in the vicinity.
Who, then?
Name after name.
Not quite right. Completely wrong. Impossible. Maybe.
And thenâ
Shreed grinned.
Rose Siciliano.
She'd been the Seaborne Launch Officer on the project. Walled off from the Eyes-Only stuff but very much in on all the computer magic, the trajectory and targeting data. If she'd actually been the spy, she could have, with some snooping and some late hours and a certain amount of risk, busted the security and reported the deep stuff to Beijing. She'd even had a computer geek, an EM named Valdez (a name he'd already dismissed) whom she was always quoting about the data stream and stuff she wasn't being allowed to see. Perfect behavior for a spy.
Or at least the CIA investigators would see it that way.
And, she was Alan Craik's wife. And he owed Craik one, the little shit. They'd hated each other for years. His grin widened as he thought about it: if the wife
was accused of passing secrets about Peacemaker, the husband was sure to be suspected, too. Tar sticks.
Shreed glanced at his watch. He was due at the hospice to sit with Janey.
He hit a button and highlighted the name.
Rose Siciliano
.
The Cessna 180 held steady at 5600 feet. At the controls, Rose Siciliano flew with the unconscious ease of a seasoned pilotâhelicopters, now heading for astronaut training. Next to her, her husband glanced over the gauges and listened briefly to the Quonset tower. That was mostly the way it wentâshe flew and he kibitzed and ran the radio. Now, he put his hand on her knee, and her hand came down to cover his, and she flashed him a grin.
“It's been a great couple of years,” he said.
She nodded, looked aside. Below, the Rhode Island coast was spread out for them on a sparkling day, Quonset Naval Air Station in her near foreground as they came around for their approach. They had been here two years and now they were leavingâboth lieutenant-commanders, both at the Naval War College, both taking a quiet tour after some very hairy sea duty. And in two weeks it would be over.
“Gonna miss it,” he said.
“You bet.” Her normally husky voice was even a shade raspier. She had had their second child here. They had been happy. “Like real people,” she growled.
Like civilians
, she meant. Now, it was off to the CIA's “Ranch” for him, astronaut training for her. Great moves for both of them, exactly what they wanted, butâShe squeezed his hand. “We'll look back on it,” she said.
“Hey!” He squeezed her leg, laughed. “Come on! Life is good. What can go wrong? We're
us
.”
She grinned again, then leaned way over to kiss his cheek.
But what could go wrong? He was LCDR Alan Craik, off to the Ranch, the CIA's arduous school for spies; she was LCDR Rose Siciliano, off to conquer the stars. What could possibly go wrong?
He got on the radio, and she banked the plane and descended, and then both of them were absorbed into the routine of headings and altitudes, and they went down and down and around and she brought it in on the center line of the runway, the wheels touching with a bump and squeal, and the ground raced along under her, and she was happy.
Rose learned how fast things could go wrong when they got home. He was already indoors; she had put the car away and gathered up their stuff, and she was standing in the front door of their rented house, looking down the long central corridor at his study. He stood there, back to her, telephone at his ear. She knew that stiff posture and long neck and what they meant: rage.
Mikey, their seven-year-old, knew it, too. And he knew the Navy. “His detailer,” he said, with the wisdom of a child who had grown up in the Navy. The baby-sitter, also a Navy child, nodded.
Rose started down the hall. Calls to your detailer were life-changing: your detailer helped plan your career, generated your orders.
Alan hadn't said a word yet. She had almost reached him when she heard him say, “Understood,” and he slowly hung up and then gathered the cordless phone and its cradle in one hand and threw it across the study.
It smashed against the far wall; Rose flinched as bits of plastic flew.
“Those bastards!” he shouted. His face was contorted with anger. “Those bastards have changed my orders!”
Going to the Ranch had been a big deal. Their pal Harry O'Neill had urged it. It was a logical step for a hotshot whose squadron days were over, he saidâmove into the covert world and go where the action was.
“Why?” she said.
“How the fuck do I know why? They won't tell me why!”
“Butâhoneyâ”
He came down a little, his anger never hot for long. “They're sending me to some rinky-dink experimental project. Month at sea, thenâthe detailer doesn't know.”
“Tell them you won't accept the orders!”
He blew an angry sigh through puffed mouth. “The detailer doesn't advise it.” He bent to pick up the telephone and tried to fit two broken pieces of plastic together. “Not going to the Ranch, RoseâIt's as if they don't trust me all of a sudden.” He stood there, holding the pieces as if they were emblems of his helplessness. “All of a sudden, I'm a pariah.” He looked up at her in anguish. “Why?”
Tar sticks.
“Oh, shit.” He sat on the stair. “I've got to be in Trieste, Italy, in four days. I'm going to miss my own fucking graduation from the War College!”
