Top Hook (35 page)

She had warned him. He was in her debt. She hoped he saw it that way.

The doors opened, and the black man was standing directly in front of her.

Harry couldn't pin the feeling down, but suddenly some change in movements told him that the meeting was happening
now
. None of his men had seen anything. Harry was convinced that the woman could pass as Arab; that was the only explanation for her invisibility at the airport. Shreed, on canes or crutches, should have been an easy target. It was possible that Valdez had got the meet wrong, or that
skating rink
had another meeting. But now they were in the window of the meeting time; the woman and Shreed had to be close, and Harry had decided that Ibrahim, stationed by the elevators, wasn't seeing everything on the concourse.

“I'm coming up.” He barely had to lean his head to murmur into the mike set in his lapel.

“There's an old white guy—”

“Where?”

“Leaning over…” static. The elevator closed and blocked his radio. Damn.
Damn!
Of course Shreed would stay high where he could watch the action. The elevator doors opened on a bevy of Arab women who were clutching their keycards and the plunder they had accumulated in the mall.

“…escalator?”

“What?” Harry was trying to push past the women, his focus down the concourse to the escalator.

On the periphery of his vision, he saw one of the women draw her keycard out of her purse as she entered the elevator. The doors began to close. The manicured
hand had been lightly tanned, the fingers tapered, the nail polish clear.

Anna. Screw her. He wanted Shreed. He ran down the concourse, looking for Ibrahim.

“Ib! Where are you?”

“He's in the tunnel. I'm following.” Dave Djalik, his other watcher, was running down the edge of the rink, clearly visible. Harry took the escalator two steps at a time, dodging locals and leaving a string of Arabic apologies in his wake. He leaped the partition at the bottom and entered the tunnel a few meters behind Djalik.

“Did you see him, Dave?”

“Negative!”

They ran along the curving corridor. They both smelled the blood before they saw the body. Ibrahim was lying at the foot of the steps to the convention center, his throat cut with a sharp blade, and he was dead. There was blood everywhere, all over the floor, even along the base of the tiles that covered the walls. Shreed had stood just there, behind the upper doors, picked his moment with precision, and risked that no one would see. He was a desperate man. Harry had never hated him before, but Ibrahim had been his first local man, loyal to a fault, ambitious and clever. Now he was a carcass drained of blood.

They ran into the convention center, but Shreed was gone.

“Dave, put out an APB through our friends. Tell them I'll pay ten thousand bucks for information on this guy. He has to try to flee the country.”

“Thought you wanted this quiet?”

“The Agency wants it quiet. I want Shreed. Okay, keep it personal, Dave—we won't give them his name
on the murder. I'll deal with the cops. You keep the pressure on Shreed.”

“And the woman?”

“I think she was there. She's due to meet with Craik tonight in Bahrain—maybe she's headed for the airport. You stay on Shreed.”

“Sure, Bwana.” Djalik flashed him a smile and trotted off. Harry pulled out his cellphone and called the police. He was already thinking of what he was going to say to Dukas.

Anna never went back to her room. Forty minutes later, still anonymous, she was in the air.

The plane was full of European vacationers headed for the beach. Dukas, who had stayed in his seat until most of them had crowded forward like some herd of ruminants heading for greener pastures, grabbed the seatback in front of him and pulled himself up. His legs were stiff, and, when he stood, weak with fatigue. He needed a shave. Even without a mirror, he knew that his eyes were baggy and the shade of red you got with either too much booze or not enough sleep.

He humped his lone bag down the littered aisle and through first class, which looked as if a battle had been fought there. An attendant gave him a more-or-less smile. He operated on automatic going through passport control and blew by the thundering herd that was waiting to recover its enormous loads of baggage, walked out of customs with a wave of the hand and into the arms of a tall man who was waiting with a sign that said, “NCIS.”

“Mister Dukas?”

Dukas stuck out his hand. “Thanks for meeting me.”

“I am Mister Wahad.” He had brilliant teeth and black hair streaked with silver, his manner that of a businessman who worked very hard at selling himself. “We will take a taxi,” he said and grabbed Dukas's bag and headed for a doorway. Over his shoulder, he said, “The event happened in the Turkish sector, so we have
to cross the UN line. You should have landed at Ercan, you know.”

“I would have had to fly to Istanbul—too much time.”

Wahad grinned. “Let's see how much time it takes to cross the line.”

Wahad was Lebanese, a kind of permitted alien on both sides of the green line; he spoke Turkish and Greek and English and German as well as Arabic, and he knew his way around both the Turkish and the Greek sectors. He was also recommended by the NCIS office in Athens.

“Do you know the history of Cyprus?” he said. He made a face. “Some of the police on the Turkish side are very nationalistic. You know what I mean if I say ‘settler mentality'? You see the same thing in Israel.”

They were driving through modern streets with heavy traffic. The sidewalks were crowded and noisy, many of the people clearly tourists—perhaps the same ones he had seen on the plane, or at least different ones wearing the same baseball caps and carrying the same bottles of water.

“I've put you up at the Saray in the Turkish Republic,” Wahad was saying. “You'll be comfortable there. Turks like Americans.”

“Even Greek Americans?”

Wahad laughed. “Sure, you will be fine. Maybe, with the three cops, not so fine—we'll see.”

“I was told there were two.”

“Three. A real dustup, Mister Dukas. Two of them apparently shot each other, and there was some sort of drug deal going on with this fourth man—the one you want.”

Dukas looked aside at him, not sure how much he knew or how much he was supposed to know; he filed
away the “drug deal” as not making any sense. Wahad made a gesture, closing the fingers of one hand into a fist. “I am discreet; it's how I make my living.” He grinned again. “All I know of the fourth man is that he exists and you want him.”

“Where is he?”

“Nobody knows. For now, I'm taking you to the hospital.” He adjusted his necktie. “One of the wounded is Palestinian. He, I think, is willing to talk to you. The other one, a Turk, is—” He raised his eyebrows.

“Not talking?”

“Afraid to talk, I think. We will see. For him, I will translate for you; with the Palestinian, there will be somebody else, also recommended by NCIS. We will see.”

The Gulf Hotel, where Alan was meeting Anna, has a mixed clientele that includes the wealthy, the powerful, and members of the US armed forces. Flight suits and uniforms cross paths in the marble lobby with thousand-dollar suits and traditional Arab dress. It hadn't changed since the end of the Gulf War, and Alan had a sense, not of coming home, but of returning to a well-loved vacation spot. He got their keys from the desk, Soleck and Stevens just behind.

“Sure does take me back,” Stevens said.

“Thought you missed Desert Storm.”

“We had a det here in '92,” Stevens said, looking up at the ceiling forty feet above his head. “I lived in this place for ninety glorious days, drawing per diem like a P-3 guy. I bought a truck when I got home.”

Soleck, whose experience of military hotels was limited to Super 8s and Great Westerns, couldn't seem
to look at enough things at once. He devoured the scantily clad starlet rotating her hips as she crossed the lobby; he stared at the dignified older men in traditional dress sharing coffee at a low brass table near the door, and he even spared a glance for the hostess, a beautiful Pakistani woman with perfect English and perfect control of her hotel.

“Don't wander off, okay?”

Soleck was still staring about him like a hick in the big city. Stevens raised an eyebrow.

“Stay in the hotel till I come back. If I need you guys, it's going to be fast. And Soleck, don't let that suitcase out of your sight.” The suitcase had a million dollars in Navy cash in it.

“Whatever.” Stevens was eyeing the concourse of shops that led down to the first of three bars. “I'll be by the pool.”

“Ready to fly.” Alan meant sober. As soon as he said the words he knew he was out of line. Stevens simply looked at him and then smiled. “Sure, massa. Whatever you say.”

Alan left them in the lobby and headed for his room. He dumped his flight gear on the nightstand, tossed his backpack on the bed and rifled through it. He had the gun he had carried in Africa, and he pushed that back to the bottom of the pack. Nothing the hotel needed to know about. Then he pulled out his PT gear and changed into it, did some quick stretches, and headed back to the lobby.

He ran a little too fast to the souk, just over a mile away down the al Fateh Highway, and paid a little too much for a bag of anonymous pagers. He stopped at a phone kiosk and called each to check them, and then he ran back up the sweltering streets, around the traffic
circle, past the most imposing mosque in the world, and back to the Gulf Hotel. He showered, decided against a second shave, and dressed in khaki slacks and a polo shirt. Then he tidied the room a little, placed a small photograph of Rose on the dressing table, and called the front desk. He had a message, and neither Stevens nor Soleck was in his room. He keyed the message.

“
Al, Harry. She was here and she tried to meet our other friend. I don't think they made contact. I don't know what game she's playing, but you're on your own tonight. I'm trying to find our other friend, and you can reach me on my cellphone at 971 S E C U R I T Y. Press one when the message starts and it will ring through, okay? Stay safe, bud.
”

Alan sat on his bed. Why would Anna try to meet Shreed in Dubai after Shreed had tried to kill her? And just before she was to meet with Alan in Bahrain? Was she playing one off against the other? Did she want Shreed as the new Efremov? Or was she simply a sick woman, playing very dangerous games?

He found his crew at the pool. Soleck was lying on a deck chair with a book, the nylon suitcase with the money wedged behind his back for a pillow. Stevens was sitting in the shade with a glass in his hand, watching a chorus line of airline hostesses fling their blond hair around.

Alan pulled up a chair by Stevens and passed him two pagers.

“Give one to Soleck.”

“Sure.” Stevens clipped one to his shorts. Alan took a hotel pad out of his pocket and began to scribble.

“These are numeric codes. Anything with seven digits is a phone number; call me back ASAP. Otherwise, this number means get your flight gear on and get the plane warm, and this one means we're scrubbed
and you can buy one of the Lufthansa girls a drink. Okay?”

Stevens watched him with a beneficent air. “You always work this hard?”

“Good planning gives you more options when everything goes to shit.”

“Should I write that down?”

“Paul, back off, will you? I'm going to this meeting and I want to know that you guys are set.”

“I could sit here all day. And there ain't nothing in this glass but iced tea, in case you planned to have a sniff.”

Stevens was on his high horse again, and Alan could have mounted his quickly enough. It struck him as odd that the better he knew Stevens, the more he found something likeable in the man, although he would have been hard-pressed to explain it. But Alan couldn't quite get his foot in the door with Stevens, and he seemed to have a talent for putting his foot in something else.

“Sorry, Paul, I was a dick.”

Stevens nodded, but his eyes were back on the women at the bar. “Whatever.”

Dick Triffler had spent a bad night because of Tony Moscowic. It was bad enough that Dukas felt guilty, worse that Dukas had abruptly left, leaving him holding what more and more looked like a bag with a hole in it. But what worried him most was his realization, actually reached a couple of days before, that everything about that day when they had driven past Shreed's house was tainted.

He had sat up part of the night thinking about it. The television, sound turned low, had blinked and cavorted in front of him, and he had unthinkingly worked the
remote and paid not a bit of attention. His mind was on an investigation that could yield only unusable evidence—evidence that any court would throw out because it was based entirely on Valdez's illegal surveillance of Shreed's home computers. It would make no difference that Valdez was Harry O'Neill's employee and not NCIS's. It would make no difference that Shreed was a potential security risk. The CIA could go after him internally, but they could never take him to court on a foundation of an illegal surveillance.

Triffler had made his eyes red and his shoulders stiff thinking about how to deal with it. Dukas, he suspected, would simply have gone around it and planned, perhaps, to fudge when he got to court. But Triffler was not a fudger. He was not even a fibber. He was a tightass, a hand-on-the-Bible, honest-to-God, truthful man. What he had worked out was that he could be no help with the death of Tony Moscowic because he knew of Tony Moscowic only because of an illegal act. And, although he was sure that it was important that some third party was also surveilling George Shreed's home computers, he couldn't tell Menzes or anybody else, because that information had been obtained illegally, too. All that he could do was try to cause other people to rediscover what he knew, and to do so in a way that was itself legal.

Bummer.

So, having put himself back to bed at four, he got up at eight feeling bleary and looking like hell. His wife even said, “Where were
you
while I was sleeping?” He only shook his head and made pancakes as she oversaw the bacon and eggs, and then they sat down with their kids—family-ritual Sunday breakfast: the family that eats together cheats disintegration together.

At nine-thirteen, he got a call from a detective who wanted to know if he had any interest in checking out Tony Moscowic's house.

“I'm going out,” he told his wife.

“It's Sunday, for God's sake!”

He made a face.

The detective's name was Moisher, and he looked about eighteen, an impression not helped by the baseball cap or the baggy jeans. He was actually thirty but new to detective status, and an air of gee-whiz clung to him. “This is some case!” he said when he met Triffler outside Moscowic's house, a ratty little frame structure behind Route 1 in Beltsville, yellow police tape across the door.

“Your first?” Triffler said.

Moisher blushed. “I've been a cop for nine years.” He shrugged. “First homicide I'm in charge of, yeah. We don't get a lot of homicides. Well, we do, but not good ones. Difficult ones, I mean. What can you tell me about it?”

Triffler winced internally, thinking of the tainted evidence chain, and decided to play it as the older, wiser one. “Later.” It was a relief from being Dukas's stooge.

The house was even rattier inside, and large enough for only a living-room with a gas fireplace, one bedroom about the size of a large car, and another room that you might have used to keep a cat in but that Moscowic had used for an office. Tony had been a Redskins fan (banners, beer glasses, team photo) and a porn fan (boxes of magazines), but he hadn't been a cook and he hadn't been much of a housekeeper. He must have watched a lot of television, though, to judge from the copies of
TV Guide
and a big chair and a bigger TV.

“You already been here?” Triffler said as they stood together in the office doorway.

“Unh-unh. Somebody else.”

“Lab?”

“Yeah, we use PG County. They did it last night.”

Triffler had already seen that there was print dust everywhere. “They done?”

Moisher grunted. He pointed at an ancient copy machine on the desktop. “Every week or so, he made a photocopy of this little book he had, and he sent them to his accountant.”

Triffler felt as if he was back with Dukas. “There's something you're not telling me.”

Moisher blushed, grinned, and produced a sheaf of paper from his attaché case. “Surprise! It's really why I got you out here.” He gave the papers a tap. “Copies of what the deceased sent his accountant. I woke the guy up at seven. Couldn't sleep.”

Triffler took the papers. They went back several years and ended a week before. On each one was a copy of two facing pages of a small, spiral-backed notebook. The writing in it was crabbed, sometimes in pencil and sometimes in pen, never very legible. “Where's the book?”

“Missing. Not on the deceased, not here. The accountant—his ex-brother-in-law, not a bad guy, just doesn't want to get involved—says he never left home without it. Quote, ‘That book
lived
with him. He took better care of it than he did my sister.' Meaning, maybe somebody killed him for the book?”