laughed. “I think you’re about as afraid of Mike as I am, Dick. But, uh, this is an operation, and I really am going to Jakarta, and I really do need some—”
Triffler waved a long hand. “Okay! I know! Uncle Sam says I have to go. Tomorrow! Okay? So I get there twenty-four hours after you, so what? You take a nap, have some local beer, watch TV. I’ll catch up.” Triffler shot his cuffs, maybe to show off his cuff links. “I don’t want to spend any more time in a germ pit like Jakarta than I have to, anyway.”
Alan didn’t comment on “germ pit.” He had heard enough about Triffler to know he was obsessive about cleanliness, too—the only man in NCIS who slid a coaster under your coffee cup when you picked it up. “Well—if it’ll work—”
“Sure, it’ll work. I got here at twenty of eight this morning, Dukas already had the file and a memo on top of the pile of other jobs he’s tasked me with while I was away, so I’ve read it and looked at the map and I’m up to speed.”
“If you wouldn’t take time off—” a voice came from the other side of the room divider—“you wouldn’t get tasked.”
“Hey, Mike—when did you sneak in?”
“I didn’t sneak, Al, I walked; you and Mister Clean were too busy dissing me to notice. And how are you this morning, Mister Triffler?”
“I was telling Lieutenant-Commander Craik that I’m not afraid of you, is how I am.”
“Good. Nobody should live in fear. You rested after your vacation?”
“It was not a vacation! It was quality time with my family.” Triffler smiled at Alan. “Some people don’t have families. Unsociable, outsider people.”
“Somebody has to do the scut work while you daddies are having quality time,” Dukas’s voice growled. “Will you guys get to it, please?”
They spent three hours. Triffler explained—redundantly, but there was no stopping him—what a comm plan was and what the Jakarta plan was. He went through the structure that Alan would have to build around the comm plan—walking a route before he left the mark that was supposed to set up the meeting, memorizing codes to communicate with his team (that is, Triffler), planning for a busted meeting and an escape.
“Which won’t happen,” Triffler said, “because there isn’t going to be any meeting to bust, right? This is a dead plan, right? Uncle’s paying to send us to Jakarta so Mister Dukas can cross an item off a list, right?” He raised his voice. “IS THAT RIGHT, MIKE?”
“Just do your job.”
Dick Triffler was down to shirtsleeves after an hour more of briefing Alan, revealing wide yellow suspenders to go with his yellow-on-beige striped shirt. His tie looked like heavy embroidery, also brown and yellow with flecks of green. He made Alan feel dowdy, even in uniform.
“Uh, what will you be wearing in Jakarta?” Alan said.
Triffler looked startled. He spread his arms as if to say, These. “Work clothes,” he said. He looked more than a little like a model in GQ.
“I thought I’d wear jeans.”
Triffler coasted over that by saying they weren’t going undercover, so there was no need to think of disguise. “We’re just two guys who happen to work for the Navy, having a look around Jakarta. In and out in two days. One suit, one wrinkle-free blazer, two neckties, four shirts.”
“And blue jeans.”
Triffler looked at Alan’s uniform, then his shirt, then his polyester tie, and apparently decided to say nothing. He got them both coffee—great coffee, because he was also obsessive about that—and sat again at his uncluttered desk. “You go in,” he said. “Normally, you’d have watchers. This time, only me. No problem; there’s nothing to watch. You do a route to a cannon, or whatever it is where you leave the mark. If we thought the plan was active, we’d have a team to watch the mark to see who picks up on it, but not ap, right? You get a good night’s sleep, we rendezvous—telephone codes to come, so you know where and when—and you go to make the meeting, which is in something called the—I had it a moment ago—”
“The Orchid House.”
“Right! You’re way ahead of me. In some sort of park—theme park? Something. So, you go there, and you walk the route in the comm plan—this is so the other side can look at you if need be; their guy is walking a route, too, in theory, and we’d have a team to watch, but we don’t and won’t—and you go into this Orchid House and walk to, quote, ‘bench by curved path, west side,’ where, at ten minutes after the hour at three stated times of day precisely there would be some guy waiting for you if this was an active plan. Which it ain’t.”
“What if it is?”
“It isn’t; we have Reichsführer Dukas’s word on it.”
“Yeah, but just suppose—what if?”
“You say your recognition words and he says his, some b.s. about a Christmas party, and then you look at each other and wonder what the hell comes next.”
“‘Hi, my name is Al, and I’ll be your waiter this evening?’”
“Try ‘What have you got for me?’ At least that sounds as if you know what you’re doing.” Triffler closed the folder and slapped his hand on it. “Won’t happen. In and out in two days, home again to the rapturous applause of Mike Dukas.”
“Ha, ha,” said the voice from the other side.
“Okay.” Alan grinned. “Now what do we do?”
“Now we go over it again, and then you memorize the codes and the greetings and the route, and then we go over it again, and then we go over it.”
“Not really.”
Triffler sighed. “Really. You thought signing EM orders was tedious? Try spying.”
Jakarta.
Jerry Piat had half a dozen places in Jakarta where he stayed when he made a trip there, places he’d come to like over the years and felt comfortable in. Only one had any class; only one was really a dump. The others were modest little hotels where low-end tourist agents put groups that were doing Asia on the cheap. He had kicked around the East long enough that he spoke the languages and didn’t require a blocksquare chunk of America to sleep in, and he liked the strange mix of comfort and oddness that the places gave him.
The Barong Palas had been built by a Dutch exporter as his city house in the nineteenth century; when the Dutch left after World War II, it had become a whorehouse, then a clutter of ground-floor shops with a squat in the upper floors, and finally a hotel, when an energetic Indonesian woman had bought it and kicked everybody out. It still looked Dutch—a stair-step roof, a certain overweight look to the cornices and lintels—but inside it was immaculate, slightly threadbare, secure. They locked the doors at twelve, required that guests pick up and drop off a key each time they went in or out, and paid their own knife-toting guards to patrol the gardens that surrounded it.
Now
