Hostile Contact. Gordon Kent

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ