by Larry Bond
DeBiase was one of the deputy station chiefs, in title the annex supervisor, though he claimed his authority barely entitled him to order stationery. Mara had no idea what the Million Dollar Man did beyond telling stories to his officemates; he had never given her an assignment nor mentioned any of his. The latter might not have been particularly surprising, except that the Million Dollar Man talked so much about everything that it was hard to imagine that he would be able to resist at least hinting, indirectly, about things he had done in the distant if not recent past. But DeBiase never talked shop that way, and never seemed to have any appointments that had even the vaguest possible connection to espionage, real or potential. He was either very old-school about keeping secrets, or an officer who’d spent his career being promoted sideways and had never had anything real to do.
Probably the former, but you never could tell.
Today’s topic was his upcoming hernia operation, as yet unscheduled, but planned for the first week or maybe second after he returned to the States.
“Why not here?” asked Mara. Thailand had world-class medical care, and in fact many Americans flew there for so-called surgery vacations.
“No,” he said. “No. Some things—I was made in America. I’ll be fixed in America. So to speak.”
“So when are you going?” asked Mara.
“Soon,” said DeBiase. It was the same answer he’d given when they were introduced weeks before.
“What the hell’s keeping you here?” asked Tai Lai as he stirred creamer into his coffee. Alone among the annex denizens, Lai preferred powdered dairy substitute to the real milk and cream the Million Dollar Man managed to have delivered fresh twice a week. It couldn’t be for his health; Lai, who was on his second tour in Bangkok, stood about six feet and weighed all of 140. A good wind would push him over—though not break him, as he was a karate expert and in excellent shape.
Or so the certificates and trophies he kept in his office claimed.
“Duty, young Mr. Lai,” said the Million Dollar Man expansively. “The same thing that keeps us all here. Except Ms. Duncan. She is here because she sinned rather badly in her past life, and must now atone for it.”
“So Bangkok is the Buddhist hell?” Mara poured her coffee.
“Worse.”
“I go through this and in my next life I come back as a butterfly?”
“The Buddhist concept of hell is separate from reincarnation,” said DeBiase. “There is not necessarily any escape.”
“Describes Bangkok perfectly,” said Lai.
“Actually, there are many different strains of Buddhism,” said DeBiase, “and talking about specific beliefs can be highly contradictory.”
He was now in professor mode; there would be no interrupting his discourse until he had completely dissected the various strands of Buddhist belief, a process which could take hours. Mara took her coffee and slipped down the hall to the small office she shared with another officer exiled from the field, Roth Setco.
Roth was a dark and moody man; it was not unusual for him to sit at his desk staring at the blank wall in front of him for hours on end. Not yet thirty, he had thick scars on his right leg and both arms, and two small ones on his right cheek. His nose looked as if it had been broken several times, and the lobe of his right ear was either deformed or had been torn off and then poorly repaired. His long hair covered his ear, and possibly other scars on his neck. He wasn’t in this morning—neither a surprise nor unwelcome.
Mara flipped on her computer. As she was waiting for it to boot, her secure satellite phone vibrated, indicating that she was receiving an instant message from the bureau’s secure paging system. It was from Peter Lucas, the station chief, and consisted of one word: Come. He wanted to see her over at his office in the embassy.
She killed her computer and reversed course, gliding past the Million Dollar Man, still holding court.
Peter Lucas checked his watch as he passed into the secure communications suite. He was due to have lunch with the ambassador at the British embassy at noon; his counterpart from M16 would be there, and while no agenda had been mentioned, the Brits would surely want to discuss the situation in southern Thailand, where the rebel movement was a growing concern to both countries.
The recent discovery of oil along Thailand’s southern coast would complicate things further. The world might be rapidly shifting away from oil as a fuel source, but the commodity’s value still seemed to double every other week.
They’d also be talking about Myanmar and Vietnam, as well as Malaysia. Lucas’s portfolio had been expanded beyond Thailand and Malaysia three days before; he was now in charge of operations in Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia as well. Officially, the move was temporary, due to a pending reorganization of the CIA’s Southeast Asia section; unofficially, Lucas was going to head whatever permanent arrangement resulted.
The shuffle was widely known inside the agency, and it was no secret to M16, either. But the real reason for the reorganization was that the CIA’s Vietnam bureau had been compromised.
The counterintelligence people were trying to sort out exactly what was going on. The office’s main focus over the past two years had been drug smuggling, and it was clear that at least one officer there had been taking money from an Asian gang. But the NSA eavesdropping programs indicated that some elements of the top secret daily intelligence summaries prepared by the office were being read in Hanoi as well. The counterintelligence people were trying to trace the leak and see who exactly was involved. In the meantime, the office was essentially unusable.
Which was why he had called Mara over this morning.
She was waiting in the antechamber of the suite. Sitting in one of the leather club chairs—Lucas had personally ordered them installed upon his arrival the year before—she fidgeted nervously, clearly anxious and probably excited at the prospect of a new assignment. He remembered that feeling well—he’d felt it himself dozens and dozens of times, maybe hundreds, when he was a young stud.
Not that he didn’t feel enthusiasm now, at age fifty, but it was tempered, respectful of the pitfalls and problems that inevitably accompanied a job for the CIA. Too respectful, maybe.
“You’re looking good,” said Lucas, sliding down into the seat across from her. The secure suite was isolated from the rest of the building by a number of systems that made it impossible to bug. “How are you feeling?”
“You know your message could be considered suggestive,” said Mara.
“Suggestive?”
“Come?”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s what you wrote, Pete.”
“I was just being terse.”
She cocked her head slightly, still smiling, her body openly flirting. It was all subconscious. Tall and large-boned, Mara had an almost playful nature, a natural outgoingness that Lucas always associated with jocks. Her personality would have made her an excellent recruiter, though it wasn’t hard to guess why she had been moved into that area—she was far from ugly, but she wasn’t a knockout either, and her height would be considered a negative by old hands, especially in Asia. Spies wanted to be seduced, or so the theory went; few men were attracted to a woman who could just as easily whip them as seduce them.
As it was, she’d proven herself an excellent PM, or paramilitary officer, though at times a bit aggressive, as her last supervisor in Malaysia had written.
Lucas preferred the word “rambunctious” to aggressive. She was still young; she’d grow out of it. Not too much, he hoped.
“Refresh my memory,” he told her, backing into her assignment. “How good is your Vietnamese?”
“It’s fantastic.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Xin chào. Toi hiêu.”
Hello. I understand.
The tones—there were six in Vietnamese—were off a bit, but the words were intelligible.
“I won’t embarrass you,” said Lucas. “You won’t need very good language skills on this.”
“
What do we need?”
“It’s not really a very important job, or very complicated. You fly into Hanoi and meet a Belgian national in our employ.”
“Okay.” She nodded.
“Talk to him, then come back.”
“Great.”
“His name is Bernard Fleming. He speaks English.”
“When do I leave?”
Lucas couldn’t help but smile. Most of his people would have asked a few questions before taking the job, masking their enthusiasm even if it was already a foregone conclusion that they were going.
“There’s a flight this afternoon. You’re already booked,” Lucas told her. “I suppose you’d like to hear what this is all about.”
Fleming was a UN observer on a scientific survey team. They’d been sent to northern Vietnam to gather data on biological changes connected with the recent dramatic shifts in the weather. She would go to Vietnam as a journalist working for Voice of America; she was doing a story on climate change, and was talking to Fleming because he was the only one authorized by the UN to talk about the mission.
Not really, of course.
The area where the survey team was headed was near the suspected crash site of an Air Force F-105 during the Vietnam War; the pilot of the aircraft was still officially listed as MIA. Mara was to ask Fleming if he’d seen any sign of the plane.
That wasn’t really what she was doing, either. She would bring that up, but the matter was really a second-string cover story, to be used to placate the Vietnamese if they got very nosy. His real assignment was considerably more delicate.
The agency wanted to plant listening devices in the area to spy on the Chinese—without Vietnamese cooperation—and Fleming had been asked to survey possible sites. Mara was supposed to see how things were going.
Though planned months before, the mission had taken on extreme significance because of recent Chinese troop movements nearby. The intelligence about those movements was so sensitive that Lucas couldn’t even tell Mara about them. If he did, and she somehow was captured, by the Chinese or the Vietnamese, America’s intelligence-gathering capacities would be severely compromised.
That wasn’t going to happen, Lucas thought to himself. Basically, the assignment was a long, late dinner, with maybe some cocktails later on. Fleming would be in Hanoi for only a day, dropping off some snail mail and picking up supplies before heading back by truck to the survey area.
“The border area between the two countries is sensitive, as always,” added Lucas. “So ask him about it. The more information you can get, the better. Check in when you get there. Yada yada yada; you know the drill.”
“Don’t talk to locals?”
She was referring to the CIA bureau in Vietnam. Lucas hesitated. He trusted Mara, and knew she was connected to the problems there, but wanted to tell her only what was absolutely necessary.
“You should not talk to the locals, no,” he told her.
“Not at all?”
He shook his head.
“Okay. If I have problems I check in here?”
“Absolutely. You think you can handle all this?”
“In my sleep.”
“Let’s try it awake, just for practice.”
7
Northwestern Vietnam, near the border with China
The path Josh had taken swung back into the jungle for roughly a mile before starting to descend along the valley. It wove a zigzag path downward, the cutbacks easing, though not completely eliminating, the angle of the slope. The bottom of the valley was not a river as Josh had first supposed, but rather a road; though not paved, it was much wider than the path, with tire tracks that looked relatively fresh. Yellow dirt and silver-white rocks lined the bed; the shoulders were rutted grass and occasional ditches.
He couldn’t see the village from where he was, and had lost his sense of which way it would be.
A monkey screeched in the distance. Another joined in, then another. The sound rattled Josh, seemingly vibrating in his teeth. He decided to go left.
What was the word for hello?
Xin chào!
Can you speak English?
They would know right away that he was an American, smell it before they even saw him—Americans and Europeans smelled like the soap they washed their bodies with. His clothes, his haircut, his face, his manner—everything about him would make it obvious.
They would know he was an American and they would help him get back to Hanoi.
Good God, had it all been a dream? How could it be possible that robbers had come in and murdered the whole camp? What strange twist of fate was this, to have to endure two massacres in a lifetime?
What luck was it to have escaped both times?
Josh heard chickens clucking ahead. His heart pounded even harder.
“I need help,” he mumbled to himself, rehearsing. “My friends have been killed.”
He started to run.
“I need help,” he said louder. “I need help.”
He turned the corner. The chickens, a dozen of them, were scattered in and along the road. When they saw him they moved toward him excitedly.
The buildings sat above an elbow in the road at his right. Josh began running toward them, looking for people.
“Help!” he shouted. “I need help!”
Two cottages sat very close to the road. Both were one-story, windowless structures made of wood. Their steeply pitched roofs paired wood and sheets of rusted tin in a patchwork that seemed more artistic than functional. A slanted fence used for drying clothes stood to the right of the closest one; two large sheets and a man’s pants hung on it, flapping in the wind.
“Hey!” yelled Josh. “Help! I need help!”
He ran up the path, along the front of the house to the open door.
“Please,” he yelled. “Please.”
He slowed as he neared the door, then stopped.
“Help!” he shouted. “Hey! Hey!”
Inside, the house was dark. There was a table and chairs on his left, a primitive stove beyond them. Bedding was laid out on the right.
A loud moo startled him—the only inhabitant was the family’s cow, its long oval eyes blinking at him from the corner.
Josh had been raised on farms, but the cow being in the house unsettled him. The animal mooed again, and Josh took a step backward, unsure of himself.
Perhaps everything was a dream, a nightmare that extended all the way back to his childhood.
Moooo.
The sound was more grunt than moo. The animal followed him out. It wasn’t a cow but an ox.
It wouldn’t be unusual for a family to keep their animals in the house with them if they were very poor.
There was a noise behind him. Josh swung around, expecting to see a person. But it was a monkey.
The animal made a face at him, then ducked past into the house. It ran into the shadows at the side, scampering around among some furniture, then emerged with what looked like a potato, its white flesh revealed by the animal’s chiseled bite mark. The monkey shot by and scampered into the jungle, chattering as it ran.
“Hey!” yelled Josh. “Is anybody around? Hey? Hey!”
No one answered. The ox looked at him quizzically.
“Hello? Hey! Hello! Where is everyone!” shouted Josh, twisting around. “Can you help me? I need to get in touch with the authorities. I’ve been robbed.”
There was no one in the house next to the first, either. Walking up to a second cluster of buildings, he found a small shack set just off the clearing, at the side of what appeared to be a garden. It reeked of dung. He stuck his head inside, saw nothing except for a pile in the corner, then retreated, gasping for fresh air.
Josh wondered whether it might be market day. The people didn’t seem to have left in a hurry; there were no plates on the tables, no food in the pots, no possessions seemingly left for the moment. He walked in a circuit around the settlement, calling, expecting someone to answer at any second. As each minute p
assed, he became more optimistic, more set in the opinion that the villagers had gone off to either their chores or some nearby event. Finding them was only a matter of time.
The hamlet was wedged into the hillside, and his circuits took him up and down the incline flanking the road. Cleared but unplanted fields lay above and below the houses.
He was hungry. If the people didn’t mind a monkey stealing their food, they surely wouldn’t begrudge him. He’d pay them back, as soon as he was rescued.
Josh walked to a hut next to the lower field. It was built directly into the slope at the back, but otherwise was just like all the others, its large roof extending below the walls. He ducked his head to get through the door, then stood just inside the threshold for a few seconds as his eyes adjusted.
The area to the left was used by the family to sleep; the bedding was disheveled, piled haphazardly. Some of the blankets were rolled against the wall. There were clothes nearby. Josh walked over, staring at the dark shapes.
A set of sandals sat neatly at his left, next to a folded pair of pants and a cone-shaped hat. Josh bent to examine the hat. As he did, he glanced at the corner of the room. The shape of the blankets caught his eye, and for a moment he thought they were a body. He turned away quickly, but then curiosity forced him back.
It’s not a body. It’s just the weird way the blankets are.
There was definitely a blanket; the shape had a fold and curled furls. But it did look like a body.
He took a step toward it, his mind insisting his eyes were wrong.
It’s not a body.
And then his mind admitted what it saw: a dark black stain in the middle of the tan covering. It was definitely a body, wrapped in the blanket where it had been shot, thrown against the side of the house by the force of the bullets striking it.
Josh bolted from the house, his stomach turning.
8
Carlisle, Pennsylvania
Zeus Murphy gunned his Corvette away from the sentry post, spitting gravel as he exercised the classic Chevy’s engine.
“They don’t make ’em like this anymore,” said his passenger, Steve Rosen.