by AD Davies
Whoever bought Sarah was rich, and so if that’s how the slaves were relocated it wasn’t a great leap to think he’d be associated with this shipping firm. But the list of investors was huge. Through both dark web documents and conventional company records, I narrowed it down to eight men, and chopped a further five from there due to them being out of the country for at least the past two months. Whoever was holding her would want to receive her personally.
So three men stood out: a banker who appeared to work for the government rather than himself, yet when he was not domiciled in Vietnam he drove Ferraris around the Nurburgring in Germany and stayed in hotels that charged a thousand dollars a night; a property tycoon who made regular donations to art galleries and projects getting kids off the streets; and a mystery man, one who appeared to have no job to speak of, but whose father was a great northern military hero called Le Loi—he invested in over a hundred businesses, opening channels of trade to the rest of the world. I asked Gi-La to pop back in. She did so, with Tho at her side.
I said, “I think it’s him.”
“Him?” Gi-La said. “No, cannot be.”
“Why not?”
“He not real,” Tho said. “Is joke.
“Not real?”
“Le Loi is legend. He ride on turtles, take sword from woman in lake, fight off bad people from outside Vietnam. Many hundreds of years ago.”
Gi-La hurried out of the office and returned with a colorful storybook with Vietnamese script and a man standing proud on the backs of two turtles while ships burned behind him.
“Le Loi,” she said.
I looked at the investments again. All over the place. Seemingly random, but actually the timing was perfect. The injections of funds came mere months before those businesses started generating millions for the owners. I had to laugh. Through a capitalist system, the ruling party of Vietnam was taking a slice for the people, propelling private businesses into the global marketplace, before reaping the taxes that sustained this nation.
And then I saw it.
Not some clandestine deal. Not some shady government cover-up. A photo on Google Images. A donation, a philanthropist delivering a series of paintings to a charity auction in aid of street kids, commissions he arranged himself with a mysterious up-and-coming European artist. One featured a landscape along an industrial river, the freighters and cranes intricate in detail. A second presented a cityscape sketched in pencil and overlaid with charcoal, smudged just right to indicate a grim day. A grim day in Leeds.
But it was the third that nailed him: the silhouette of a lone woman on a cliff, water dappling behind her under a sunset so golden it could only have been real. Had Sarah’s previous work not been devoid of humans I might not have noticed, and to the uneducated eye the figure might have been waving. But I saw it as a break in her signature; a secret cry for help.
Sitting back in the chair, I said, “Vuong Dinh.”
“You go now?” Tho asked. “Find girl?”
I snatched up my pack and tightened the straps. “Damn right I’m going to find the girl.”
Chapter Forty-One
The capital city of Vietnam is situated on the western bank of the Red River, eighty-five miles from the South China Sea. Most people arrive in Hanoi by rail or—like me—by air. The express from Na Trang cost another sixty dollars, leaving me forty in my pocket, but I arrived by lunchtime and used the internet in the airport to access Google again.
Vuong Dinh was a fifty-four year-old property developer who lived in a mansion-like home overlooking the Red River. When US President Bill Clinton opened up the unified Vietnam for international commerce, Dinh bought up derelict shops and stalled housing developments for the cost of their outstanding debts. His expansion drew the attention of the ruling Communist Party, who frowned upon such wealth, so he made large contributions to the Party itself as well as funding community projects across the region, while he built a modest empire.
Photos of Vuong Dinh on the internet were mostly official shots of him shaking hands with politicians and holding skinny orphans in the air, as well as that story from less than a week ago of him donating Sarah’s paintings. After I clicked off here, I mined snaps that were clearly not posed, some paparazzi shots, some incidentals, and zoomed in on his entourage. One thick-set chap, who I would best describe as a “goon” cropped up time and again in the background; smart suit, wraparound sunglasses. It took me a few passes, but soon I was positive.
He was the man in Paris holding onto the black girl in the back room of that British-sounding bar.
I fired off an email to Jess to ask her to look deeper, and to press her on the subject of a loan. An out-of-office reply pinged back:
I’m sorry, I am out of the business due to a sudden bereavement. I will reply upon my return.
My first instinct was that Benson had killed Harry. I stopped myself being sick with the thought that the out-of-office was far terser than Jess’s usual prose. I dashed to a payphone and called her mobile.
“What happened?” I said.
She hesitated, groggy. It was still early morning in Britain. She said, “They suspended me. I have no access to DDS, the PAI mainframe, nothing.”
“Oh God, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, no more helping out the globe-trotting playboy. My loss.”
“That’s not what this is.”
“No? You’re off doing who-knows-what while Harry is who-knows-where having God-knows-what done to him. You have two days left. Are you any closer?”
“Yes, I just need—”
“Money, sure. The problem with that is, I can’t send it to your fake name because it’s been flagged by the Vietnamese, and I can’t send it to your real identity because there’s no visa attached to your passport. So, come on, master detective, any bright ideas? Shall I strap a wad of twenties to a carrier pigeon? Should be there in, oooh, ten days?”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Sorry? I’m suspended. Probably going to get fired and blackballed across the whole business. Harry is—”
“I know the situation. Give me a break a moment.”
“A break? You want a break? Bring Curtis Benson what he wants, then I’ll give you a break.”
“I’ll do that far quicker if you calm down and help me.” Drawing looks from others around me, I lowered my voice. “Can you research something? See if you can hack into someone’s personal accounts. His name is—”
“I’m being monitored,” she said.
“You told me you were suspended.”
“Not by Gorman, you prick. I’m under surveillance. Electronic and in person. I am a key suspect in aiding and abetting a wanted criminal. I can’t do anything online except shop and read the news.”
“Who’s watching you?”
A deep sigh. “I don’t know for sure. Guy in a Mondeo. And I have my own security system that makes my computers act in a particular way if there are eyes in there. I examined the sub-directories, and it looks very high-end. Possibly government.”
So Agent Frank hadn’t gone away completely. I told Jess everything I knew about him, and she accepted it without giving me any more lip.
I said, “Can’t you do it from another computer? I’m so close, Jess. So close.”
“Sorry, Adam. You used to do this without all the tech and gadgets. Do whatever you would have done before you met me.”
Google Earth revealed the topography of the hills and town that surrounded the Dinh mansion, but the mansion itself was blurred out. Not many people achieve that. A map printout would have to do. I hit the print button on instinct, not thinking of the cost, and paid five dollars for my trouble.
I took a bus to Hanoi central (two dollars) and bought a detailed map (three dollars) then headed to a second bus station, where I established which service I needed. I purchased an all-day pass (one dollar—bargain) and had an hour to kill.
Back in England, it was often the tedium that I found most difficult, but here I spent that
dead hour leaning on an ornate stone wall overlooking a lake with a depiction of the great Vietnamese folk hero Le Loi. It was cooler here in the north, perhaps thinner air thanks to the altitude, so when the bus turned up fifteen minutes late I was not as sticky as before. No air-conditioning again, but the open windows gave sufficient ventilation.
In the late-afternoon, the bus stopped in a small port town called Ong, a copper-colored dot on the Red River. Copper-colored due to the former chemical factory. These days, Ong was a lumber town with a natural harbor about half a mile wide. Behind the road, the green land rose steadily at first and then steeply, with craggy rocks coated with trees. From the tarmacked road, I counted maybe thirty workers on the dock, loading freshly milled timber onto a fleet of barges. I drew vaguely curious looks from a couple of bristly men but nothing more than that.
I dug out Giang’s knife, which I stashed in my pack for the flight, and carried it in my pocket as some sort of false reassurance. For the next hour, I hoiked my rucksack along the road, reading the map I printed out.
Trekking the longer stretches of road beside the river, I thought of Giang, sunk at the bottom of the Mekong Delta. I must have been spotted with him at some point, so that would make me suspect number-one. I wasn’t sure my story would hold, that we travelled together, he loaned me a boat, and that was the last I saw of him. I would have to surrender to the authorities eventually, but I’d be over a thousand miles from Giang’s last known location when I did so. If I ended up in jail, I just hoped my finding Sarah would lead to the recovery of Benson’s true target—the USB drive.
I was still bothered as to why he’d lied about the money, though. Something to do with his Caribbean Island retreat. Trying to avoid questions from the tax man? Perhaps he was doing something similar to Sammy—hiding revenue and keeping higher profits for himself.
Having concentrated on where I was going, I hadn’t noticed the clouds closing in, so I got little warning when the heavens opened and soaked me through in seconds. I protected the printouts as best I could, rounded the next bend, and found myself slightly elevated from a large house a mile away. I slogged into the forest until I hit upon a trail. When I came to a clearing with no tree cover, I dashed to the other side, and was rewarded with an unobstructed view of my target: Vuong Dinh’s mansion.
The rain stopped as abruptly as it started, and I dug out my binoculars.
A wall surrounded the mansion on three sides, with a solid gate on the main road overseen by cameras and an intercom. A warning sign depicted a man being electrocuted. The wall was topped with broken glass, and the fourth side dropped to a rocky grave that skirted the river. The rear grounds were smaller than I expected but still enough for twenty-two people to play a decent game of football, and allow a sprinkling of spectators. A driveway and garages accommodated a Land Rover, a Ferrari and a Humvee in plain view. Along with kennels.
I crouched in my soggy clothes. I hadn’t packed my cape or utility belt, so decided against breaking in and lobbing smoke grenades whilst silently taking out the baddies one at a time. Instead, I watched. I noted when people came in or out—feeding the dogs, a visual observation of the gate, checking the electricity supply. I jotted the time at which a van arrived and disgorged a man with brushes and poles, and mentally crossed out “pose as window cleaner” from my list of clever plans. That left a blank page of ideas.
I read again through the observations I made about the property and paid more attention to a phalanx of wires connecting the house to the outside world. I assumed the thickest cable, which ran from the north corner out to the cliff leading to the river, would be electrical, with a backup generator housed somewhere on the property. Several smaller wires from the south corner also spread to the river. I counted six. All shot into the rocky drop-off, beyond where I could see.
Around the mansion, all was lush and green, and the road was straight for a mile in either direction, as if they chose the site the way a king might select land for a fort. But there was one weakness. One access point.
I secured what I thought I’d need in a Ziploc, left my rucksack, and retraced my steps until I stepped out onto the road a few hundred yards from Vuong Dinh’s property. I crossed into the woods the other side, and once I was far enough from the house I switched on the flashlight. There was no path, so I caught branches and brambles several times. I heard scurrying every time I paused, and maybe a few slithers. The country was surely home to venomous breeds of snakes and spiders, but most animals would rather hide than confront something the size of a man.
The drop wasn’t quite as sheer as I thought, but still a long way down. I switched off the torch and used my binoculars and the light from Dinh’s house to locate the junction box. It was the size of a chest of drawers, embedded in the rock outside the perimeter. All the communications wires fed over the electrified fence, then bunched into it. Out of this box came a cable as thick as my forearm and stretched over the rocks, down into the river. Vuong Dinh could run his empire from home if he chose.
I closed my teeth around the Ziploc bag and used both hands to crawl along the ground skirting the cliff, up a slight incline to the mansion’s boundary. I came to the fence and swung my legs out into thin air. My feet pressed onto the ledge below. I lay on my belly and remained flat to the surface, crabbing in the dirt toward higher ground. The angle was so narrow, if I let go I would have slid and tumbled down the slope and slapped into the shoreline a hundred feet below. Hindered by my aching broken digit, my sideways-shuffling toward the junction box took ten minutes, by which time I was sweating enough to coat my face in dust, acting as unintentional camouflage.
On the flat ground, I knelt beside the box and took a screwdriver and a pair of pliers from my Ziploc and went to work, the torch in my teeth. I got it open, and had no idea what I was looking at.
Again, I needed old-school skills to solve a modern problem.
I emptied the dead phones from the bag, and found one of the more basic handsets still boasted a near-full battery despite there being no signal. I snipped the ear-buds off a set of headphones and plugged the jack into the phone, then sheared a tiny section of insulating coat from one of the mansion’s wires. I wrapped one of the headphone wires around this, grounding the other on the box. The pain in my finger grew worse than the scramble along the cliff, the precision required being far greater, so I removed the bandage and let it flutter away.
Then it was a case of opening the mobile with the tiny Torx screwdriver set and bypassing the CPU so it worked like a regular phone. I held it to my ear and got a blast of high-pitched static.
Broadband or some slower internet connection.
I attached it to the incoming wire at the far end, reasoning the other lines could also be internet-based. I was correct. The final one made no real sound, but there was enough of a hum to demonstrate the line wasn’t dead. I repeated this with another two phones, but they had less than a quarter of battery. In these, I pushed the speaker up full. Only the dead iPhone from Saigon went unused.
It was the clumsiest-looking wire-tap in my entire career. No way to tell if it would yield results. Over the next half-hour I considered how fortunate I was for the near-constant humidity. In Britain, even the warmest of nights would have seen me shivering after my soaking. But here, the warmth still surrounded me, dried me to an extent, and I lay there, listening to the river, and to creatures stirring in the night.
Eventually, one of the phones rang. Someone in the house picked up.
And spoke Vietnamese.
Of course they did. What was I thinking? Tap the phones, great, but then what? I didn’t even have Tho to give me the gist in his own way. I didn’t pick up on a single word. Nothing Anglicized, nothing remotely familiar. The line clicked dead.
On the bright side, they didn’t know I was listening.
Then the lights came on. I mean really came on. What I thought had been floodlights were just placeholders. I ducked behind the junction box, expected to draw a hail o
f gunfire or pack of dogs, but the new illumination revealed another layer of foliage between the fence and the main building. I was level with the football-pitch-sized garden, but my position was relatively dark.
And that’s when I saw something. Three somethings. Through the sparse bushes and thin trees, the three somethings carried trays: one with food, one with a decanter of amber liquid and a tumbler glass, and the third carried a domestic phone. I focused on the direction they were headed and pinpointed a balding man on a sun-lounger wearing a shiny dressing gown, facing the wide mass of water far below. He’d been there all along as I worked. Three hundred, maybe four hundred yards from me—was it far enough for the other sounds to have obscured my phones?
The three somethings arrived at the balding man: women. They were women. In porn-like French-maid outfits. One was a black girl, tall, with a sturdy hourglass figure; one oriental waif, possibly Vietnamese or Thai; and the final one was Caucasian, with dark bobbed hair, a petite frame and toned legs. I begged her to turn. Begged her. Would have screamed if my voice wouldn’t have brought security guards swarming.
And then she did. She moved her head slightly. Although I’d never seen her except in photos, on the net and on paper, even from this far away, it could not be anyone else in this huge and varied world.
It was Sarah.
I had found her. And she was only yards away.
Chapter Forty-Two
The man in the silk robe accepted a drink from Sarah—she was carrying the whiskey—and then the phone from the black woman, while the Vietnamese girl held the food until the phone call ended. Then he ate his evening meal—steak, by the looks of it—and the girls waited, eyes firmly on the ground before them.
In what we think of as the “developed” world—Britain, America, France—there have been several instances where high-profile rich men were tainted by what seemed like irrefutable evidence, but nothing was done until a massive public outcry. I wondered how much it would take for someone to investigate a kidnapping allegation against one of the architects of Vietnam’s revival, made by an illegal immigrant who was wanted on violence charges in Europe, and possibly involved in the disappearance of a Saigon policeman.