Top Hook (9 page)

“Time is of the essence.”

“Oh, yeah? well, caution is of the essence, my friend, so I'm not going in anyplace till I've scoped it out but good, plus finding your perfect hacker is going to take
more than five minutes. Let me out at the Iwo Jima Memorial; I'm meeting somebody.”

Suter drove without saying anything for several minutes. Then, as they approached Arlington, he said, “You keep your mouth shut about this.”

“What'd I say to you the first time we met? You don't fucking listen to me. Leave me off on the other side of the circle.”

“If you talk about this, you're dead.”

Tony laughed. And laughed. He got out of the car, looked around, leaned back in and said, “Don't try it,” still laughing. He watched Suter's car roll away and, because he wasn't really meeting anybody, he walked.

Suter, in the car, was trying to digest what Moscowic had said about treason. It wasn't treason that was proving indigestible; it was the man's talking about it. Moscowic, Suter saw, would have to be dealt with.

By 1000 next morning, the detachment was showing signs of life. The relief Alan felt at having the admiral off his back had spread to his men: Senior Chief Frazer had located an entire pallett of missing stuff stored forward in the hangar bay; Reilley, Campbell, and Lang were in the back of the ready room, getting a lesson in the MARI simulator from Chief Navarro; and Stevens and Cohen were briefing for a check flight on 902's hydraulics.

Alan had twenty minutes before his flight with Stevens. He headed toward the dirty-shirt wardroom, cut into line, grabbed a burger, and wolfed it down while hustling back, getting there just in time to see the television change from a movie to the closed-circuit brief. He watched the young female jg intel officer with professional interest; her brief was neither brilliant nor boring. Alan scribbled frequencies as fast as he could.

“No backseaters?” he asked, eyeing the empty chairs behind him.

“We've been changed to a tanker.” Stevens still sounded belligerent, but perhaps he always sounded that way. “In S-3s, mostly we pass gas.”
Ordinary S-3s do, you mean,
Alan thought. He wondered why Rafe had put his det aircraft in the tanker pool. The det wasn't supposed to handle air-wing crap.

“Is 902 going up for a check flight this event?” Alan tried to make professional small talk.

“Yeah. If the hydraulics check, we can take her out tomorrow.”

“Need parts from the beach?”

“On the way?” This was the closest to civilized discourse Alan had got with Stevens.

“Roger. I sent a message to Aviano to put the parts and the missing Mister Soleck on the same COD.”

“So we'll get a new aircrew and our spare parts? I'd rather have the parts.” Stevens didn't look at him. “Sure you aren't too important to ride along on a tanker, Commander?” And there was that damned tone again, a stubborn refusal to come around.

“How about you lighten up, Stevens? It's going to be a long cruise, and you're stuck with me. And, yeah, I've done one or two tanker flights before. Let's walk.” He planned to spend the flight talking to Stevens about the det.

He had planned a reorganization, starting with putting Campbell in Maintenance in place of Cohen, because he had an engineering degree and seemed to have his minor responsibilities organized. Cohen got the liaison slot, a dangerous move—Alan had already seen how prickly Cohen could be. In the long run, the success of the project depended on their ability to exchange information with the F-18 squadrons. Cohen was an LSO with a full qualification in F-18s; he had been to school with some of the nugget F-18 pilots. He hoped Stevens bought it. There was more to come, when he had a chance to breathe.

Alan picked up his father's helmet and his thermos and headed for the flight deck, a different man from the one he had been yesterday.

Emma Pasternak railed at Mike Dukas over the telephone and said No goddamit he wasn't horning in on her meeting, but he was already on Menzes's agenda because he was investigating the Agency's interference in Navy procedures, and Menzes must have known it was better to have him. So Dukas got to go to the meeting at the CIA, which actually happened late in the afternoon and not at ten a.m. By the time he shook Menzes's hand and looked him in the eye, he was prepared for exactly what he got: an ethical hardnose. Well, it took one to recognize one. Menzes was thin, dark, fortyish, one of those people who worked out a lot; he must have been thought a hunk when he was younger, Dukas thought. Now, he looked tired.

Emma Pasternak was late. She was doing the Agency one better than it did other people: typically, it was the Agency who kept the rest waiting. Dukas jumped at the opportunity her lateness offered. “Let's deal,” he said. Menzes looked surprised but led Dukas out of the conference room and down the corridor to the big third-floor lobby, where the gold-and-black memorial to the late William Casey dominated one wall. Some people called it The Shrine; cynics called it the SOB—Shrine of Bill. Menzes led him across the echoing marble floor to a spot below Casey's left shoulder. Dukas looked at him, then at Casey (real gold), and then he rested his back against the wall and folded his arms. “Let's deal,” he said again.

Menzes looked skeptical. “With what?”

“What have you guys got on Rose Siciliano?”

“I can't tell you. What's your interest, anyway?”

“Straight for straight, okay? She's a friend. But she's also Navy, and you guys have fucked the Navy. What's up?”

“That wasn't my doing.”

“Upstairs? Okay, I wouldn't tell some outsider, either. The way I see it, the lawyer lady has you guys by the balls in the PR department, am I right? It's the way her law firm works—lots of fireworks, lots of media. Unless you've got a great case, it's better to give it up, am I right?”

“I'd buy that.”

“Have you got a great case?”

He waited until Menzes said, “We over-reacted. That's off the record.”

“Understood. Okay, what I'm going to do is get together with your Inter-Agency people and work out what happened. That's not your bailiwick, correct me if I'm wrong. Right? Sooner or later, though, you gotta share what you got with us. You see what I'm saying? Our position at NCIS is, will be, you should have come to us with it first.”

Menzes gave away nothing. Not a flicker. Dukas tried again. “Give me the outline. Give it to me in one sentence.”

“What do we get in return?”

Dukas shook his head. “It's you guys did the wrong here. Am I right?”

Not a flicker.

“Give it to me in one sentence
and
get Siciliano's orders changed back, and I'll pull the lawyer lady off you.”

“How?”

“Through the client. Never mind how. Come on, Menzes—one fucking sentence, you can't compromise security in one sentence!”

Menzes chewed one side of his lower lip and leaned back against the wall, arms crossed. He was wearing a
short-sleeved shirt and a pastel tie, and his arms looked wiry and muscular and hairy. “We got an intercept. Siciliano was implicated. That's two sentences.”

“Implicated in what?”

“That wasn't the deal.”

“I'd like something to work on. You understand how the Navy works, how easy it is to destroy a career? This is one very, very dedicated officer, a real piledriver; she's had two kids by planning them for her shore tours, flying a chopper on her sea tours—Let me tell you something. Africa. 1994. War in southern Sudan—you got the picture? She flies a chopper into a hot zone, puts down and lifts me and another guy out. Menzes, whatever else is involved, I
owe
this woman!”

The two men looked each other in the eye. Dukas knew how hard this was for the other man, who had to evaluate a stranger, measure his own trust, decide how much he had been used himself by the system and how much he owed to his own idea of right behavior and of decency.

“Something called Peacemaker,” Menzes said at last. “That's my final word, and if you quote me, I'll deny it.” He looked at Dukas's face again. “That means something to you,” he said.

“It sure does.” Rose had worked on Project Peacemaker two years before. “Okay, we got a deal. Haven't we—haven't we got a deal? You're gonna withdraw whatever you did and get the orders rescinded, send her back to astronaut training?”

“She's on our books as a security risk. This is a very grave situation, Dukas.”

“I know that. But you know what the proper procedure is—you tell us and you tell Navy intel, and we
do an evaluation and an investigation. It's our call if we bring in the Bureau. Right?”

“Right, but if she's a spy, now she knows we're on to her and she'll—”

“What the fuck, she didn't know the moment she got the change of orders? What are you talking? It's a goddam given of my profession, you're investigating somebody, you don't make waves until you're ready to!”

Menzes shrugged. “That wasn't my call.”

“Have we got a deal?”

“Only the change of orders, and what I told you. That's it. We don't budge on access or on anything else.”

“Deal.” They shook hands. Menzes had a real grip.

A woman's heels sounded on the marble floor like gunshots, and both heads turned to watch her march diagonally across. She was pale, scowling, swinging an attaché case like a weapon she was just waiting to use.

“That's Pasternak,” Menzes said.

“What do we do about her?”

“The twelve-hour rule.”

“Meaning?”

“We let her scream for an hour, then we say we'll consider it, and twelve hours later I agree to what you and I have already agreed to. Only we don't tell her that.” He made a face. “The hard part will be listening to her.”

They crossed the lobby and went into the conference room, which looked like a party that wasn't working out: all the Agency people were down at one end, and Emma Pasternak was sitting alone at a long table. Dukas went right to her, stuck out his hand, and said, “I'm Mike Dukas.”

She ignored the hand and started shouting. She went on shouting for most of an hour—Menzes's timing was pretty good—and she used every trash-mouth word in the book to batter Menzes, CIA Security, lack of access, injustice, bureaucratic stupidity, and perhaps even (Dukas had stopped listening) rabies. Then Menzes begged her to give them twelve hours.

And, eventually, Emma Pasternak accepted.

Because she knew this is the way it would be!
Dukas thought.
Holy shit, she knows about the twelve-hour rule, too!

“That's—six-thirty tomorrow morning,” she was snarling. “You can leave a message on my voice mail. Full access, and my client gets her orders changed back to Houston. Yes?”

Menzes lifted his shoulders. “I'll meet with my people and get back to you in twelve hours.”

“You're goddam right you will.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Get fucked!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“At
your
place?”

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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