by AD Davies
“Is yours,” he said.
“Now it’s yours.”
He accepted with a bow of his head and necked the lot in one go. Then he asked if I might share some food, so I passed him Giang’s bag. All that was left was a bar of chocolate, now virtually a liquid, but Tho unwrapped it and poured the gloop into his mouth, then let the wrapper flutter away onto the river.
My mouth widened in a nervous funeral-type smile. Among all the death and inhumanity of the past hour or so, I was annoyed at the kid for littering.
The boat arrowed out of the bush and into the Mekong Delta, and Tho gunned it to several knots faster than Giang. I looked back to the shore to memorize the lay of the land for when I returned to destroy all I’d seen.
Was this really what people called “sanctimonious” when I got on my high horse about morals and “doing the right thing?” Seeing humans treated like livestock, and vowing to do something about it? If it was within my power, that wasn’t a bad thing; it was my duty to act. It wasn’t hand-wringing liberal guilt, either. I was going to burn everything here, and every evil person within if I had to.
I mentally marked a tree with five tall branches, all hooked like hockey sticks; three shrubs close together, which I nicknamed the Three Stooges; a rock the shape of a cake. But as we ploughed deeper into the river, the reeds got smaller. The trees too. And when I searched for more landmarks, I found none. Nothing to give a name or simile, no arrow pointing the way. The vastness of the jungle swallowed everything, and with the view’s growing uniformity, it dawned on me so slowly, with such a creeping sense of sickness, that I would never find this place again, no matter how long I searched.
And I would have to live with that forever.
When we could see the other side, Tho dropped the power and let the engine idle, and prodded the corpse with his toe.
I wanted to take Giang to his family. But I could not. I’d be arrested for the murder of a man willing to kill a child in order to stay alive himself, who used women as property as surely as the traders did. I should not go to jail for that.
I did not deserve it.
With the boat wobbling so much we were close to capsizing, I took one end of the body, and Tho managed the other, and we rolled Giang into the brown water of the Mekong Delta. He barely made a splash. Rocks weighed him down efficiently, and the air that bubbled to the surface was minimal. It was only when the current turned us downriver that I realized we could possibly have said a word or two before disposing of him.
“Na Trang,” Tho said. “Now we go to Na Trang?”
Eventually, we passed that same pier from which Giang launched, but carried on a few hundred meters past the town’s main drag. There was no landing dock, but the bank tapered to a sliver of beach, allowing Tho to ground the boat safely next to a smaller one, upside-down with its hull in need of repair. We were at the bottom of someone’s garden. That someone was an elderly man in a floppy hat. He shouted, waved his hand at us to leave. I placed the boat’s key in his hand and he seemed appeased.
We skirted the side of his house and emerged into a street full of traders and stalls. A marketplace. I bought us a meal of rice and prawns from a street vendor, which Tho ate so fast it was pretty much an inhalation. The next Saigon-bound bus cost five dollars apiece, and as we waited under a simple bus shelter beside a dusty road, I counted my money, both physically and mentally.
The cloned French credit card was taken from me, and I had no access to my genuine accounts, no backup money in any form. Nothing except the cash in my pocket. One hundred and eighty dollars.
I said, “Shit.”
“What shit?” Tho asked.
“Nothing. How do we get to Na Trang?”
“We fly. You have jet, mister?”
“No. And my name is Adam.”
“Mister Adam, we can fly. No problem. I never been on a plane.”
“We can’t fly.”
He slumped back. “But you rich, yeah? We fly.”
“I’m not rich,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “But better than hole. Many people come to see me, no one want me. Skinny boy, not much good for working.”
I expected a lot of people would have been interested in him, those of particular tastes, but the customers so far had not been that way inclined. I didn’t explain that, though. He could keep that tiny shred of his innocence intact.
There was no air-conditioning on the bus, and the air actually felt grey. The boy managed to sleep on the three-hour journey, but I could only think about death.
We were dropped a couple of blocks from The Rex, and Tho’s eyes lit up when we entered the hotel’s reception, but I told him not to get too excited. I retrieved my bag, and in the bar I checked the contents. Nothing out of place. My iPad was still there, as well as my genuine Adam Park passport and Adam Park credit and debit cards, the latter items now nothing but inert plastic. I possessed no more working SIM cards, and could not risk spending money on a new one.
I purchased a payphone card from reception, and ordered a drip-coffee for me and a Coke for Tho, forgetting about the prices here, but I needed a caffeine boost. While Tho kept our seats in the pristine ground-floor bar, I used a payphone to call Jess.
Voicemail.
I briefly outlined my situation, omitting the slave-trading and my committing murder, and told her I was heading to Na Trang and that I was skint. I asked her to loan me some money via Western Union and said I’d call back in an hour.
However, as I sampled the sweet coffee, I picked up on someone outside, drinking beer at a stall on the wide pavement. It could have been the sort of paranoia that follows any encounter in which a person could have—should have—died.
I couldn’t see the man directly, but he was hunched over a laptop. His body shape and vaguely-glimpsed skin suggested Caucasian: thick brown hair and beard, black-framed glasses, a worn-looking suit. He looked up briefly, then smoothly back to his screen. No jerky movement, no panic.
Was he really watching me? Maybe his interest was because I looked like I’d been rolled through a jungle and steam-blasted; bald head, goatee beard, stubble shading through, a filthy bandage on my finger, imbibing alongside a boy in this chrome-gleaming bar.
The man downed his beer, closed his computer, and wandered away without so much as a glance.
Once we’d finished our drinks, I took Tho outside and flagged down a couple of taxi-bikes to take us to the grand-looking train station. I paid sixty dollars for two bunks on the overnight to Hanoi, which stop off in Na Trang at five a.m.
“You’re sure she’s there?” I said.
“Yes. The man who took her is there. He own many businesses. Is famous. I know him. I show you offices.”
The train was seventies technology—clunky and chunky—but clean. It was on time, and we found our bunks in a four-bed cabin. We’d eaten at the station, and brought water and crisps for the journey, so I was ready for bed. A man in his twenties shared our cabin, a chubby guy in fake Nike high-tops and a fake Real Madrid football shirt with the name Beckham on the back. He nodded to me and said, “English?”
I said, “Yes,” and held the same football chat with the new guy as I had three or four times so far.
Conversation faded from all parties within an hour, with Tho and the football fan both asleep. I closed my eyes and waited to be taken down into some nightmare. I expected to be assaulted by gunfire, by a head splitting, then disintegrating.
Instead, I dreamed of Roger Gorman.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
We were in a park, where the mahogany-tanned executive calmly scattered bread for a flock of ducks gliding about the water. I yelled at him that it was wrong, that he shouldn’t be doing that. He carried on, standing upright in his five-grand suit just the right side of a shin-high fence. I handed him a bag of seed and told him to use this instead, but he ignored me, flashing a smile from which his teeth shone in a parody of a toothpaste ad. I screamed at him to please use the damned seed. Ju
st because bread fills their bellies, it doesn’t mean there isn’t a better way. He pointedly held up a slice of white and ripped it into six pieces, then tossed them in the water. The ducks gobbled it up. Sweat coated my head, and the pressure in my chest built and swelled, then exploded through my limbs. I hit him. I punched and kicked, but all he did was sway.
“This is not very professional,” he said.
I woke in the bunk with sunlight filling the cabin. Outside, hills rolled by in unremarkable monotony, mist shrouding the view in grey. Tho and the other lad were up already and sharing a pan of water which they splashed on their faces and rubbed in their hair. They offered it to me and I accepted. The bandage on my hand got wet and when I brought it to my face, it stank of sewage—or perhaps something worse. I removed it and washed my slimy, broken finger, the pain less than before, but still swollen and tender to touch. Tho helped me find one of the bandages I bought in France and when I struggled to wrap it tightly enough, he unwound the fabric and bound it for me.
He said, “Okay-dokey.”
“Thanks,” I said.
He beamed and then the train took a corner, and all three of us could do nothing but stare. We were high up, cresting a hill, and the mist was actually clouds. We now dropped out of the sky, winding down tracks with a sheer drop to the right. Paddy fields on the flats ran on for miles into the distance. Men and women tended these fields even this early. A couple of children waved at the train. The fields disappeared into a light ground-fog, and out of the fog rose tree-covered mounds that poked up into the clouds. A rail bridge curved sharply across all this, as if designed to give travelers the perfect view of this postcard-scene.
Na Trang itself was a bit different.
When we left the concrete train station, the heat had not yet fired up, and the mild air made me want to walk a bit. Tho led the way like he knew exactly where he was going, marching to a tune in his own head. I grew more and more suspicious the further we went.
He seemed too happy, like he’d shrugged off a month of imprisonment in some of the least humane conditions imaginable. I shouldn’t have worried, though.
I found it troubling how easily I’d forgotten about killing Giang. I was thinking about coffee and how hard carrying a rucksack was. Surely I should have been curled in a ball, sobbing at the fragility of human life. A normal person would, wouldn’t they?
When Tho led me round a corner that led to the beach, my suspicions piqued once again. The sea was calm and children played in the shallows. Primary-school age. No parents. It was seven a.m. I didn’t voice my concerns, just followed him.
He watched the sea as we wandered a promenade that felt like a ghost town: hotels, a pavement, a road, another pavement, then beach. There was no fairground, no dodgems or candy-floss van, no donkey rides; not one, single slot-machine. Roped-off areas of beach belonged to the hotels lining the front, allowing their guests to sunbathe without the constant attention of hawkers, many of which were already gearing up at the side of the road, selling cigarettes and bags of pineapple.
Tho stopped by a hotel called Cineram. Not a chain I’d heard of.
“He owns this place?” I said. “The man who bought Sarah?”
Tho didn’t answer. Watching the boy, listening to his voice, the vagaries of his promises, I knew some time ago what we were doing here, and it was nothing to do with finding a missing English girl. I followed him inside anyway, into a deserted marble lobby adorned with gold fittings and a traditional Vietnamese tapestry depicting a man on a boat being towed by turtles. The woman on reception glanced up at us. She fixed a smile in greeting toward me, then lost the smile as she saw my guide.
She said, “Tho?”
“Mam,” Tho said.
The receptionist rushed toward Tho and the pair hugged so tightly, she might have snapped the boy had I not fed him. It was Tho who broke the embrace. He pointed to me and said a few words, and the woman came at me so fast I flinched. She bowed, then shook my hand with both of hers. She spoke words of thanks in accented English, and I nodded and smiled in return, told her it was no problem, I was happy to help. It should have been a beautiful reunion, but I was so empty, so devoid of emotion that I could have walked away without saying anything.
Still, I said, “You’re welcome.”
I wasn’t even angry. The boy wanted to be with his mother, and I could not hate him for that.
I turned to leave. “Good luck.”
I’d taken two steps when Tho grabbed my hand, spun me round to face him, and hugged me about the waist. He said, “I am sorry I lie to you.”
I patted his head. I held back tears, the effort stinging. “I understand,” I said.
“I do what I have to do. I worry you leave me in Saigon.”
I was already planning to return to Saigon and pick up Gareth’s trail at the motel where Giang said he dropped him. But I wasn’t equipped to seek out a killer in a city like Saigon. Not without funds. Not without resources. With the time difference, I had something like a day remaining on the deadline Benson set for Harry’s release, and I now held little hope of making it.
“I would have done the same,” I told him, although I wasn’t sure I meant it. But what else could I do? Beat the crap out of him? “I’m glad you’re home.”
Chapter Forty
There was no train to Saigon until noon and, without any money, I didn’t really know what else to do, so I returned to the beach. It was deserted, and a morning haze gathered on the horizon. I removed my footwear and strapped it to my pack, rolled up my trousers, and strolled in the shallow sea. For the first time I faced the prospect of failure, and the very real notion that I could lose the man who saved me.
Saved me. That wasn’t an exaggeration. After our first case saw a teenage girl reunited with her father, he told me a few things about my own dad. That he’d been a bruiser in his youth, that Harry joined the army while dad learned a trade, and when Harry came home on leave he’d always be the one yanking my dad out of fights, holding him up on the way home, lecturing him through the fog of another hangover. My dad didn’t listen. Harry was out there fighting all over the place, so where did he get off telling his friends how to live? He thought he’d lost my dad to that life. A life of anger, first sated by booze then exacerbated by it.
The next time he returned for a little R&R, my dad introduced him to a radiant young woman who worked in Marks and Spencer and sought to be a store manager—ambitious for those days, especially for a girl—and during that particular holiday not once did Harry have to intervene between two men whose fists were flying.
Within two years of meeting my mother, dad was running his own plumbing business, owned a terraced house with four bedrooms, and lived with a wife who adored him. Harry always had my dad’s back, but it took the love of a driven woman to properly save him.
I listened, though. I heeded his advice. I grew. I became the man I was today, now lingering stock still in the sea on the other side of the world, waiting for the sun to break through the fog and brighten my day.
Waiting.
Always waiting. Watching the horizon. Hoping for a solution to present itself.
For my dad, the solution was my mum. Until her ambition stretched beyond the house they worked so hard to acquire. She tried to keep on working after I was born, but the hours, coupled with the sexism of the seventies and eighties, it was too much for her to carry on. She retreated into herself, and while my dad worked extra jobs to keep us in that house in the street with the upside-down Union Flag, my mother discovered something better. Always looking for something better. And once dad was gone, she snatched the first shiny object that came her way. A nice house, comfortable living, a good school for her son, then expanding her reach to a canal barge, where she could do all the things she wanted.
The mist cleared and I shielded my eyes from the low sun.
Expanded her reach…
Where she could do the thing she wanted.
I turned from the ocean,
and ran with my heavy bag all the way to the hotel where I dropped off Tho. I knew how they could thank me.
The Cineram was serving breakfast, and Tho’s mother, whose name I now learned was Gi-La, welcomed me back, and Tho himself beamed broadly. I asked for access to a computer and a phone, and Gi-La, a supervisor for this shift, was more than happy to provide it. I used Tho to translate my way onto an English language server based in Belize, then logged in to the personal network Jess and I set up years earlier. It didn’t utilize the bespoke software I’d gotten so used to at PAI, but it accessed the bowels of the dark web without detection.
I could not navigate this world anywhere near as well as Jess, but I could poke around without fear of some digital bogeyman snatching my soul. I could also access pilfered files that went up for sale occasionally, and that included legitimate public documents as well as the sort of information our Deep Detect System could easily penetrate. When I wasn’t locked out.
Land registry.
That was the key. Ownership of land away from home. Like my mother’s barge, a Vietnamese criminal who could afford to spend a hundred grand a time on human cargo would own many properties both here and abroad. I was thinking of France.
It took me half an hour of conventional Googling to identify the quarry in which I fought Umbrella Man. It was owned by an ostensibly American firm called “Cargo Links Around the World,” which fit with the communist mentality of naming everything in the most utilitarian way imaginable. That company was part of a chain of shipping container manufacturers that—last year—branched out into the business of transporting those containers across the globe. A decent cover for smuggling whatever cargo you choose, especially when whatever you choose will not cross a country’s borders willingly.