Hostile Contact. Gordon Kent

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СКАЧАТЬ talk, anyway. Okay? Hey, you talk to Harry lately?”

      Alan Craik was slow to answer. He muttered, “I don’t like begging, Mike. But I’m going nuts. Last night, I—Rose and I had a fight, and I—almost—” He didn’t say what he had done. He didn’t have to; the tone of his voice said it all.

      Then Alan snapped back from wherever he was. Mike heard the change.

      “What about Harry?”

      “Tell you later.”

      

      In the Virginia Horse Country.

      A dark Ford Explorer turned into a gap in a wooden fence where a paved drive led away from the two-lane road. There was a line of oaks and more wooden fence along the lane, and up ahead a Colonial Revival house that needed paint. The wooden fence wanted attention, too, and the pasture beyond it was scraggy with tufts of long grass, and a horseman would have known that no animals were being pastured there.

      The Explorer pulled up next to the house and a tall man got out. He waved at somebody by the stable block and trotted up the front steps, nodded at the hefty young man at the front door and said, “Everything okay?”

      “Bor-ing,” the young man said. “He’s upstairs.”

      “I’ll talk to him in the music room.” Balkowitz always talked to Ray Suter in the music room, which had no music but did hold an out-of-tune baby grand that had been pushed against a wall to make room for recording equipment. Balkowitz was a lawyer for the Central Intelligence Agency; the bulky young man was named Hurley and worked for Agency security; the man out at the stable block was a local who took care of the place but wasn’t allowed in the house. And Ray Suter, the man upstairs, had been George Shreed’s assistant and was wanted by various people for murder, conspiracy to commit a felony, espionage, and perhaps corrupting the morals of a minor. The CIA, however, had him stashed away here, and what they wanted him for was information.

      Balkowitz sat on a faded armchair that smelled of its age. He was dressed in jeans and a polo shirt and looked more like a Little League dad than a lawyer. When Suter came in—tall, pale, pinched—Balkowitz got up and waited for Suter to sit. Balkowitz’s manner reflected his Agency’s own ambivalence—polite and stern, unsure and patriarchal. Suter, to judge from his sour smile, knew all about it and rather enjoyed the situation. “You keep trying,” Suter said. “A for effort.”

      “Mister Suter—”

      “Ray.” Suter spread his hands. “We know each other well enough. Call me Ray.”

      “I just want to apprise you of your situation here. Really, you know, if you’d get yourself a lawyer—”

      Suter shook his head. “I don’t need a lawyer.”

      “Your situation is serious.”

      Suter raised his eyebrows. “The food’s good. Hurley plays pretty good tennis. Except for the lack of females, it isn’t bad.”

      “Mister Suter, you’ve been charged in Virginia and Maryland, and we’re holding off federal charges until, until—”

      “Until I talk?” Suter laughed. “Don’t hold your breath.”

      “I just want to impress on you the legal seriousness of—”

      “You say that every time you come. I’ve told you, I think three times now, I’ve got nothing to say. You guys are holding me here without a charge; well, okay, I’m suspended from work, anyway. I assume that you want me to get a lawyer because you think a lawyer would tell me to bargain. But for what? With what?”

      “If we file charges, you face twenty years to life on the federal issues alone.”

      “If you do. Right.” Suter grinned. “Maybe you should file.”

      Balkowitz sniffed and reached into his pocket for a tissue. He was allergic to something in the room. “Mister Suter, we’re holding off the local jurisdictions with some difficulty.” He blew his nose. “Your relations with the young man, Nickie, um, Groski—if you’d be willing to tell us anything there—”

      Nickie Groski was a computer hacker whom Suter had hired to hack into George Shreed’s computers, but Suter hadn’t admitted to a word of that. Instead, he said now, “What would you like to hear?”

      “You were in the boy’s apartment when the police broke in.”

      “I was, yes.” Suter seemed pensive, as if what Balkowitz was saying was a little surprising.

      “You paid the rent on that apartment.”

      “Maybe I felt sorry for him. Or maybe I’m gay. Is he gay?”

      Balkowitz stopped with the tissue at his nose. “Mister Suter, we know you chased women all over the place.”

      Suter nodded almost sadly. “Maybe I’m bisexual. What is it you think I did with this boy?”

      “That’s what we want to know.” Balkowitz got out a document, which he kept tapping as he talked. “If you agree to tell us about Nickie Groski and certain other things, then we’re willing to—but you really should have a lawyer to help with this.”

      Suter didn’t even look at the document. “You’d like me to have a lawyer because then I’d be admitting I was ready to deal. But I’m not. No deal, Balkowitz.”

      They went around for another ten minutes, Suter seeming to enjoy it all the more as Balkowitz’s nose ran and the lawyer’s face got red. At the end, the man’s patience ran out and he pointed a finger and said, “This is my last visit! You come partway to us or the shit will hit the fan out there!”

      Suter gave his thin, acid smile. “I love the majesty of the law.” He patted Balkowitz’s shoulder. “Have you tried Allegra-D?”

      

      Suter went back upstairs and changed into shorts and took the time to scribble a note on a very small piece of paper, which he signed “Firebird” and stuffed into a chartreuse tennis ball in which he’d already made a slit. When he went downstairs, he told Hurley he was going to practice some serves, and he went out the back door and, passing the stable block, threw the slitted tennis ball for an old golden retriever to catch. The dog lumbered after it, caught up with it, held it down with a paw until he could get his old teeth around it, and then, tail wagging, carried it to his owner, the maintenance man.

      

      Beijing.

      Colonel Lao tse-Ku touched the place where the two sides of his collar joined at his throat. The gesture was unconscious, not quite nervous but certainly atypical—a last check of self before opening a door through which you can pass only once.

      The door itself was quite mundane—gray, metal, the surface broken only by a small nameplate, “Information Directorate.” The man who held the door’s handle, ready to open it, was inconsequential, too, a captain, balding, smelling of cigarettes, but seeming to share the muted panic that Lao felt in Beijing, where heads were rolling and careers were crashing to an end. Now, when the captain opened the door and stood aside, the slice of room that Colonel Lao could see beyond was no more СКАЧАТЬ