Hostile Contact. Gordon Kent

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ