“What about the belts and buckles?”
“Ham and I wore ours. We put the other buckles into the bags with the jewels, but we rolled up the belts in our duffels. No one bothered with them.”
“What happened that night?” She leaned forward, her knuckles white on her water bottle. He ran his thumb over them, and her breath caught in a gasp. For an instant, he couldn’t move.
He cleared his throat. “We’d divided the cash into four rolls, two for each of us to carry. Ham took a roll from his pocket, thinking he’d give it to them and keep the other one and the real money in his wallet safe. They looked at the money, had a few Thai words between them, and threw it on the street.”
“They didn’t think it was real, either.”
“Ham picked it up, nodded and smiled, held it out. For his trouble, one of them whacked him on the back with the pipe.” He shook his head. “The guy shouldn’t have done that.”
Taylor covered her eyes with a hand. “Oh, no.”
“Ham had a short fuse. Mixed with too many beers, the combination turned lethal. He lost control, yanked the pipe out of the guy’s hand, and hammered him with it.” The sounds of a different, but equally severe, beating played in his head. One administered by thugs in an Iraqi prison. No one could ever forget the sounds of heavy blows to a man’s body.
She gasped. Her water bottle crinkled.
“The other man tried to crack his knees, but Ham’s reflexes took over. He went after the second guy with the pipe. Both of the Thais lay on the ground, bleeding.” His dad said the scene had been worse than seeing the bar girl die.
“My God.” Taylor’s eyes grew even wider.
Every Coastie learned Coast Guard history and heard sea stories, but what he’d told her presented a different, stranger, and most unofficial scenario.
“I tried to pull Ham off, but I wanted to stay out of the way of the pipe and the blood. He wouldn’t have realized it was me and not another thug. I picked up Ham’s money roll and checked for a pulse on the second guy.” He rolled the bottle between his palms.
“Was he alive?”
“No. Ham tossed the pipe and started kicking the first man in the side, yelling for him to get up. He was dead. It took a while for that to sink in. For both of us.”
Her hand covered his with warmth and concern.
“I picked up the pipe he’d used. All the time I kept telling him to come on. We had to leave. The police would show up. We were far from a main street, but it wouldn’t stay quiet long. Nothing in Bangkok ever did. I said whatever I could think of to get him moving. I’d have been guilty, too, if we’d been taken in.”
“So you fled?”
“Finally. I all but dragged him along with me. Two blocks away I found some old rags and wiped off the pipe and most of the blood from Ham. I carried the pipe in one hand and held on to Ham with the other.”
“You didn’t take it to the hotel?” Her fingers slid between his.
“No. Somewhere along the way, I dropped it and the rags into a sewage ditch. The next day, Ham and I boarded an Air Force plane back to Vietnam.”
But that was only the beginning of the story.
Taylor let out a breath she hadn’t been aware she held. Nor did she remember her fingers entwining with Jake’s. She didn’t pull away from the warmth of his touch. “What a frightening experience. How did it change the relationship between you and Ham? Did you even have one after that? You were seventeen?”
“I’d turned eighteen by this time. Neither one of us wanted to talk about what had happened. Ham didn’t say much. The flight back to Nam lasted a couple of hours. When we landed, four soldiers we didn’t know greeted us like long-lost friends. They took us to a row of offices on the air base, and stuck us in separate rooms. I waited hours—much longer than the flight lasted—before someone came in. When he did, he went straight to business. They’d started tailing us from the post office when we mailed the letter to the embassy. He knew everything.”
“I’m not surprised by any of this. This kind of . . . recruiting still happens today, though perhaps not to the same extent of extortion.” Although she wouldn’t bet on it. Sealed orders sometimes asked for strange things—once a request for anyone in her crew who was conversant in French and had ever run a marathon. No one had fit the profile. “Needs of the service.”
“Back then, our military moved in and out of Thailand with ease, especially Air Force and Navy. Single guys loved Bangkok for R&R, and it was popular as an information exchange. Because of all that, those with a need to stay on top of things did a good job.”
“CIA.” She let go of Jake’s hand and stood again to loosen muscles tensing in anger at men who were probably now dead.
Jake nodded. “And their counterparts. They said they spotted us at the post office, intercepted our letter, and followed us afterward.” His shoulders sagged.
She’d learned about the Cold War in history and more at grad school. “Were they following you the night you were attacked?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“They didn’t step in?”
“Why foil a perfect setup?”
The all-important case. Today Feddie investigators strove for barrels of evidence. Prosecutors wanted to have enough left for a conviction after a sharp defense attorney dismantled piece after piece as inadmissible or tainted evidence and dismissed witnesses with a sneer and a seed of doubt. Investigators and prosecutors alike also wanted to see if more information would lead them to conspirators at a higher level.
Jake leaned back in his chair, his concentration not leaving Taylor. “They wanted to see how much we knew.”
“About the dead girl?”
“The girl, her actions, her contacts. Whether or not we were a part of her world. Anything they could learn. Then, as now, things weren’t always what they seemed. They said they had my file. They also had our duffels. Ham had refused to carry any of our bounty in his. The belts, buckles, cash, jewels, and lapis rocks were in mine.”
“Surprise, surprise.”
He gave her a quick nod. “If I agreed to work for them, they wouldn’t charge me with accessory to murder or turn me over to the Thai authorities.”
She stopped short. “That’s absurd!”
“Remember . . . I was eighteen with a fair share of Brooklyn street smarts, but I was halfway around the world and didn’t know shit about the way the big leagues operated.”
She started pacing again. “They wanted you. They liked that you remained composed under pressure, thought on your feet, and they used the incident against you to force you to sign up. I know how that works—probe for the weakest point and use it. They might have been watching your progress since boot and A-school. Or followed you since your arrival and waited for you to screw up. Or maybe they set you up.”
“It was a war.”
“Doesn’t matter. In your case, they took advantage of your youth and innocence.” Look at him now. He might be almost twice her age, but he sat at the table cool and sexy as nobody’s business. His demeanor calmed her. She could fall hard, and those green eyes didn’t make her resolve any easier.
“I signed a paper, and they said they’d be in touch. They sent me to my unit alone.”
She sat back down. The bastards had put him through the wringer. “What about Ham?” She needed to concentrate on the subject. Not think about the earlier heat from his fingers.
“His boat was on the river when I got back. I didn’t see him again until a month or so later on Coast Guard Day. All the boats were in.”
“We still celebrate.”
He grinned. “Used to piss off the Navy pukes.”
Laughter swelled from inside her. “Nothing’s changed. I love August fourth.”
Jake walked to the door and back. “All the Compass Points met at the beer hall cookout. Ham pulled me aside and asked what happened. We exchanged stories, only I didn’t tell him about having to sign up. He didn’t mention anything either about signing up. He we
nt straight to his boat and out on patrol. When his boat came back in, he had a letter from home.”
“From his wife?”
“A baby boy. With photos. He showed them to me. Turns out this was his third kid. He was freaking, thought they’d keep him in country and he wouldn’t get to go home or ever see his family again. All he wanted was to go home and make more babies. He had a couple of beers and said he had one hell of a story to tell everybody about Bangkok.”
Taylor knew people like Ham. One drink and they aired all their dirty laundry. “I hope you could keep him quiet.”
“Not a chance. I did suggest we go over and sit in the shade on the other side of the beer hall. His tale was confined to the Compass Points. Randy told me he asked Ham later if he’d told anyone else about Bangkok, and Ham said no.”
“Small miracles.”
“Exactly. We tried to calm him down, but Ham kept talking about those two Thai thugs and saying he should’ve handled the situation better.”
“PTSD. He would have handled himself differently if he hadn’t been drunk, and those men might have killed the two of you.” She shivered inside.
He leaned back against the sink. “That’s what Randy tried to tell him. Even told him it might not have been about the cash, that they may have come to kill us instead of rob us. Ham wouldn’t shut up. I gave out the belts—I still had all of them.”
“What about the cash and the jewels?”
“Confiscated. They didn’t question the belts, so I guess they figured either those pieces of lapis were bought and paid for along with the belts or they’d throw them in as part of the deal.”
“So did they ever approach you and Ham?”
“If they contacted Ham, he never told me. He got out not long after, so maybe they left him alone. I told you I left for a large cutter after the Whitebanks. They yanked me off after two months and sent me stateside to sniper school.”
“Did you stay in touch with any of the Compass Points besides Randy?”
“We all stayed in loose touch. More so for a while after Ham hanged himself.”
Only an insensitive son of a bitch wouldn’t ache at the pain on Taylor’s face. She squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed her forehead, and the craving to take her in his arms and make her grief go away gnawed at him. His dad had said the job wouldn’t be easy. He was right.
Jake blew out a breath. “Ham’s suicide didn’t happen for a long while. I stayed in service for a total of eight years. When I got to sniper school, I had to sign another paper agreeing to an additional four on top of my original enlistment, but I’m a quick study. I bargained for guaranteed acceptance at a university of my choice—I chose Columbia—and a full ride for a master’s. If they wanted me to kill people for them, I had a hunch it’d be a piece of cake for them to pull off my education.”
“Did they? They had a good pick of Special Forces types back then.” She got up and paced again, questioning him.
“Without so much as a haggle.” He took a deep breath. “They weren’t looking for team players. I became a chess piece. Over the years, I bumped into others. Each of us had figured out a piece of the puzzle, and eventually we started putting the picture together.”
“So . . . you were independent operatives?”
He didn’t answer.
“Were you attached to CIA or State?”
“Off the books. I imagine our salaries and training were paid for out of a contingency fund, or perhaps privately underwritten. Or maybe buried deep in State or CIA. I never knew.”
“You had to fit in someplace.”
“I can’t tell you who we worked for.”
“Bullshit.” She stopped pacing.
His dad said people would have a hard time believing the way things were.
“This was in the Nixon administration. At least one of my cohorts had been around since Kennedy. Not long before I got out, I met a newbie who came in under Carter. Whatever agency or group paid and directed us had been around at least since the early sixties. And was still in operation in the late seventies. That’s all I know, and I haven’t tried to find out more. Too high-level for my blood.”
“You were smart not to try to find out, I think.”
“I can tell you no one ever burned any of us for our acts. We did things that had to be done. Sometimes they looked like accidents, sometimes not. Sometimes we got others to do the job. Not all our acts were bad. Rarely did our results make the news. We knew our actions changed the landscape for those in power. But most of the time we never saw the big picture. We followed orders, all of it blessed at the highest levels, no matter who held the office. Some things are better left alone.”
“Does the group exist now?”
“I can’t answer that either.” His dad hadn’t answered the question for him.
“Do you stay in contact with any of those men?”
He grinned. “A few work for me.”
Her eyes widened. “You’re kidding.”
“No. Flawless setup—nobody suspects an old guy. It’s a great cover.”
Taylor laughed. “Unbelievable. I need a minute to take this in. Do you realize how much ground you’ve covered? Vietnam, Bangkok, murder, suicide, and now international intrigue.” She held her head between her hands.
“It’s a lot.”
She nodded and closed her eyes. “I need processing time. Otherwise I can’t find my way back to the original discussion.”
“Follow the breadcrumbs.”
“What?”
“That’s what they taught us. If the trail got cold, we followed the breadcrumbs. Sometimes the breadcrumbs were drugs or murders. Or minor wars. Most of the time we followed the money.”
Her eyes popped open. “Follow the money. Should we follow the money to find out who killed Randy—if he was killed?”
“You inherited, but you didn’t kill him. We have to find different breadcrumbs.”
“Let’s go back. You chose Columbia. I understand why—it’s back in New York. Plus some prestige, good contacts. What were the Compass Points doing during the time you toured the world and went to school?”
“Basically, everybody went to school or went to work. Got married. Started or expanded families.”
She’d been regathering herself in ways she probably wasn’t aware of, fidgeting a bit, touching her hair, making sure her personal world still functioned. Her eyes had gone from wild to concerned. Now she quieted. “What about your family?”
The question he’d dreaded she would ask. He pushed the palms of his hands together. “Not me. I married several years later, but it didn’t last. Compass Points became my reason for living.”
He’d uttered the first lie. Not counting the big one he’d lived since meeting her. The Big Lie was mission truth. And his dad’s truth. It was his responsibility to stick to it. But the Little Lie turned his gut sour. If he were a kid, his dad would tan his hide. He couldn’t tell her the truth about his parents. Not now. He’d already told her he was single. That truth was his real fuck-up.
She started pacing again. The worn floor creaked under her slight weight. “So what do you do? What does Compass Points do?”
He shrugged. “Growing up, besides wanting to be a fireman and a cowboy, no one ever encouraged me in any direction other than to finish high school and get a job. During sophomore year at Columbia, I started by providing secure messengering services in the boroughs. Extremely secure. I relied on my experience. The more I learned about how to run a company, the more I expanded my services. I moved on to corporate security, executive security, anti-kidnapping training. Things I knew about.”
“You had street cred.”
“So-so. The phrase military security opens a lot of doors most people don’t know exist. I knew what a lot of people had done wrong. I also have an office in Jersey staffed with geeks doing the same sort of security on the electronic end. If they didn’t work for me, they’d be hackers. In fact, all but a few started out that way. They get the job do
ne.” Kelly took excellent care of that.
“I’m guessing your clients pay somewhat more than the government.” Light from the window lit her face and the hollow of her neck. Christ, he could barely concentrate.
He smiled. “Certain areas of the government contract us from time to time.”
“Good for you. So when did things start going south with Ham?”
Jake massaged his forehead over his eyes where a headache was forming. “He had problems from the beginning. His wife said he’d gone to the VA, a private shrink, a church-sponsored group. They gave him a lot of different drugs, a lot of talk—nothing helped. He’d been back from Nam for several years by this time. The night before he committed suicide, he told his wife about Bangkok. The incident still roosted in his head. She thought he experienced a breakthrough and was getting well. When she came home from work, she found him in the garage.” The phone call had shaken his dad to the core. He was different when he talked about it. “Ham used the Solomon’s Compass belt.”
She shuddered and wrapped her arms around him. “I know how much that hurt you.”
A good wind could blow her away. But she was a rock of solid support, and her touch set him on fire. He returned her hug and moved back a step. “There’s more. Since Ham died, all the Compass Points have been killed.”
She stiffened. “Before Randy?”
He nodded. “Randy was the most recent. Ten years after Ham committed suicide, Kyle Easley was murdered. Six years later, Ed Wharton. Three more, Randy Rankin.”
“This is why you’re certain Randy was murdered.”
“Yes. I’m next, unless I find the bastard first.”
“You’re not looking by yourself. I’m helping. He killed Randy and is trying to get rid of me. I tried to ignore the clues. Even this.” Taylor held out her hands. “I won’t now.”
“This is my fight, Taylor, not yours.”
“Like hell. Randy’s death grieves me, but I won’t open old wounds. He wouldn’t like that.” She squared her shoulders. “I’ll do everything I can to help find his killer. That’s what he would like. Tell me what you know.”
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