Rafe Rafehausen pulled a stack of papers toward him, read again the paper on top, and then said, “Get me Admiral Pilchard at LantFleet. What the hell time is it there—? Yeah, you might catch him — try, try.” He took the next paper off the stack and started to read, rubbing his eyes and wondering if they’d last through the reams of reading on this cruise, thinking, Jesus, next I’ll need glasses, acutely aware again that his squadron years were over. He tried to concentrate on VF-105’s morale self-study and was relieved when a phone was shoved toward him and the lieutenant-commander said, “Admiral Pilchard.”
Rafehausen threw himself back in the chair. “Sir! Captain Rafehausen, CAG on the— Yes, sir.” He grinned. “Nice of you to remember. Uh, kind of a personal matter, sir. If I say the name ‘Al Craik,’ will you—? Yes, sir, that’s the one.” He nodded his head as he listened. Pilchard was Craik’s self-appointed “sea daddy,” a kind of naval mentor and enabler. He swung, Rafe knew, between thinking that Craik was God’s little crackerjack prize and that he was a dangerously loose cannon, but he’d concern himself with Craik’s welfare if it was threatened. Right now, he was in the loose-cannon phase, and Rafehausen winced at the admiral’s sour tone. When the admiral had finished reviewing Craik’s recent performance, Rafehausen said, “He’s going nuts onshore and he needs something. I can’t take him back here yet — med officers won’t allow it. If there’s something he could do—”
He looked up at the lieutenant-commander, winked as the admiral did some more talking about times in the past he’d gone out on a limb for Craik, and how sick he was of having Craik blue-sky things and act as if rules didn’t exist. When the admiral stopped talking, Rafehausen said, “Absolutely, sir!” He grinned again. “What I was thinking, I just received some correspondence about this experimental MARI det that was set up — that’s the det that Craik was commanding, sir, when — good, yes, sir, you remember all that. Well, it’s gone so well that there’s a request about setting up a second MARI det on the west coast; I was wondering if maybe that could be moved up some, then Craik could go out there now instead of at the end of this cruise— Yes, sir, to advise and — No, sir, not as det CO, and not to fly because— Yes, sir. No, sir. Purely advisory, yes, sir, of course they’d pull personnel from the west coast squadrons, and Craik would— Yeah, Miramar, I’m sure that Miramar— Uh—”
Rafehausen signaled to the lieutenant-commander to close the door. Swiveling around, he bent forward as if he had to talk to the floor. “It’s a matter of helping a good man, sir. I know Craik — I think we could lose him if he doesn’t get something to do. Between you and me, Admiral, I think he got hit harder than we thought on that recent mission. I don’t normally put much stock in ‘trauma’ and all that psychobabble, but he’s been sending me p-comms that, well, I think maybe he’s lost some faith in himself.” Again, he listened, slowly leaning back, and when there was silence on the other end, he said, “Yes, sir. That’d be great. That’d really be great. And absolutely, yes, I’ll put the fear of God in him to do it by the book. And if they can see their way to setting up a west coast det with him on board, it would— Of course, of course, these things take time— Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”
A minute later, he had hung up and turned back to the pile of paper, Al Craik now only one of many worries nibbling at the edges of his consciousness.
He gave terse orders to the third cab of the night, cutting across the city, going twice down gangs rinsed clean by the heavy rain, until he was tired of the game. Clean as clean could be. Then he led them back south away from the sea by the toll road, off the Semaggi Interchange and into the gleaming modernity at the heart of Westernized Jakarta. It wasn’t his favorite part of the city; he liked the Japanese in Japan but hated them when they were abroad. It never occurred to him that they acted just like him.
“Wat ingang?” asked the driver in Dutch. Jerry was white and coming from Emmy-Lu’s, hence Dutch, as far as the driver could tell.
“Hotel Mulia Senayan, danke. Simpruk.” The Mulia was the newest, flashiest hotel in Jakarta, with over a thousand rooms and the largest ballroom in Asia. It was the multiple entrances and table phones that drew Jerry — a postman’s paradise. Simpruk was a broad and well-traveled avenue full of business traffic; he’d leave by the main entrance and go to the cabstand, and while he sat and talked he’d be another business traveler. A little seedy, but hardly the only Westerner in the lobby, and that’s what mattered to Jerry. And nice public lines — murder to monitor, and businessmen don’t like monitored lines.
Jerry paid the cab before they stopped, was out and up the steps before the cab had pulled away. No time to linger; this was the operational act itself, the very heart of the game. It didn’t matter if no one was watching; Jerry played for an invisible audience of fellow professionals he hoped weren’t ever there, breezing into the enormous lobby, walking past the desks to the central bar where leather couches held the open space against a jungle of local potted plants. At each end of every couch sat a house phone, and Jerry knew how to use one to get an outside line in Jakarta. He ordered a gin and tonic from a waiter, sat, and looked at his watch.
Two hours and ten minutes since the phone had rung in his room and he had hung it up. The last time he had worked in Jakarta, he’d been following orders from George Shreed. Now he would set up an operation to avenge him. It had an Asian air to it, like an episode in the tale of the Forty-Seven Ronin.
He lifted the phone.
“Sleeping Dog was an NSA case, and then it was a Bureau case, and then it was a CIA case. And now it’s our case,” Dukas explained to Rose. They were eating in what was called the dining room, which barely had enough room for the table and three people. “Believe it or not, it’s nine years old.”
“And it’s got this comm plan,” Alan said. “The first action item.”
“Who says it’s an action item?” Dukas said.
“Well, isn’t it? They should have moved on it when they got it, and they didn’t.”
Dukas raised his eyebrows. “We’ve barely looked at the stuff. There could be tons of action items.”
“Not according to the inventory.” Alan put his elbows on the table and turned to Rose. “The comm plan just leaps out at you; it’s the way a courier could meet with somebody else, and it was connected somehow with this Sleeping Dog—”
“We don’t know that,” Dukas growled. He finished the risotto on his plate. “Who taught you to make risotto?” he said.
“You did.”
“Good for me.” He held up his plate. “I’ll have some more.” He watched the plate being heaped with the yellow grains and the dust-colored beans. “Next time, just a tad more saffron, okay?”
Alan grinned at Rose and poured more red wine and said to Dukas, “I want to go to Jakarta.”
“To do what, for Christ’s sake?”
“To test the comm plan.”
“Alan, read my lips: You’re not a spy! You’re an intel officer!”
“Yeah, but I’m available. And you know you can trust me, which is a big deal for you right now because you think everybody’s on your back over George Shreed.” He leaned forward. “Mike, it’s three days — fly there, nice hotel, take a walk, leave a mark, have a nice dinner, go to the meeting place. Bang, that’s it.”
“And what happens at the meeting place?” Rose said, scenting trouble.
“Nothing. Ask Mike. He insists it’s a dead issue because nobody’s done anything with it for years and there’s nobody at the other end. Right?”