The Three-Nine Line

by David Freed

  As near as I could decipher, given our language differences, the American who’d told him to keep his mouth shut about what he’d seen that night was tall and balding, with oversized ears. He wore a coat and tie.

  The man he described sounded a lot like Carl Underwood Jr. from the US Embassy.

  “This American, he spoke Vietnamese?”

  A nod.

  I dangled another million dong.

  “Tell me what you saw that night.”

  The fisherman took the money eagerly. Then, as best he could, he told me.

  FIFTEEN

  It wasn’t so much what the fisherman saw that night. It was what he said he heard.

  He’d just caught a nice-sized perch and was reeling it in when, from where he was standing along the water’s edge, perhaps no more than fifty or sixty meters to the north of his position, came the discordant strains of two men shouting at each other—an argument that swiftly turned heated. Flowering bushes and the branches of an overhanging tree obscured his view of the fight, the fisherman said, but not the sound of it.

  An anguished scream. A loud splash. The footfalls of someone running away, fast.

  “Do you remember what the two men said to each other?”

  He didn’t understand the question. I rephrased it several times. He still didn’t get it. Then I remembered the translating program Buzz had installed on my phone. I typed in my question, hit translate, and showed him the screen. His eyes lit up and he smiled in recognition, then typed a response. We were off and running.

  He couldn’t make out the gist of the argument; the yelling lasted only a few seconds, but each combatant’s parting words, he said, were unmistakable. One of the men shouted, “Die!” This was followed almost immediately by the different male voice yelling, “Không! Không! Không!”—the Vietnamese word for no.

  Afraid that he might be next, the fisherman said he dropped his pole and ran south, toward his apartment on Hai Ba Trung Street. He didn’t stop running until he got home. An hour or so later, after he’d caught his breath, he chanced to retrieve his gear. That’s when he crossed paths with the American who told him in Vietnamese to keep his mouth shut about whatever he’d seen if he knew what was good for him. Police officers swarmed the area. The fisherman said he spoke to none of them.

  “Why didn’t you tell the police all of this?”

  I hit translate and handed him the phone. He typed his response and hit translate.

  “Because South Vietnam I am from. Police not trust.”

  “You are not a member of the Communist Party?”

  He chuckled when he read this.

  “Only some people Communist Party. Not many.”

  The fisherman was convinced that the man who’d repeatedly shouted “No” was the same man he would later read about in the newspaper—the former prison guard who’d watched over captured American pilots forty years earlier.

  “Could the man who yelled, ‘Die,’ be the same man you saw later that morning? The American who told you to keep your mouth shut?”

  He typed on my phone and hit the translate button: “I certain cannot be.”

  I thanked him for his time and his candor. He wanted to say one more thing, typed some more and again hit the button. “I take want one day go my children Disneyland,” it said on the screen.

  “Bring lots of money,” I said. “You’ll need it.”

  There was a boulangerie on the north side of Hoàn Kiếm Lake, about a five-minute walk. Fronting the street inside the shop was a display case filled with fancy french pastries to rival any I’d ever seen in Paris. I ordered a custard-filled éclair because you’ve gotta die of something so it might as well be custard, and a cappuccino instead of my usual black coffee. After I was comfortably settled at a table outside, I called Phu Dong. There was no answer. Almost immediately, my phone rang. Caller ID indicated it was Buzz.

  “I was just about to call you,” I said.

  “Great minds.”

  He said his people back in Cleveland had dredged up some new and potentially troublesome information about former POW Billy Hallady’s grandson, Sean Hallady, the ex-marine who’d left the corps for psychiatric reasons, and who had accompanied his grandfather to Hanoi.

  “Figured you might be interested,” Buzz said, “given your extensive training in clinical psychology.”

  “More than interested,” I said.

  What Buzz passed along was troubling. Sean Hallady had gotten loaded inside a Salt Lake City bar the night after he got back from Vietnam. Words were exchanged followed by blows between Hallady and several patrons. Police were summoned. One of them happened to be of Asian ancestry.

  “So Sean starts calling the guy names—gook this, slant-eyes that. Then he starts talking about how he would ‘set things straight’ for his grandfather, the big war hero, against all the ‘gooks’ of Vietnam who’d done gramps wrong. He ended up spending the night in the drunk tank.”

  “ ‘Set things straight.’ What does that mean?”

  “You’re a college graduate, Logan. What do you think it means?”

  “Sounds to me like he was bragging about taking out Mr. Wonderful.”

  Buzz concurred. He said his people were working with authorities in Utah to locate Sean Hallady, in hopes of questioning him in greater detail. The problem was, nobody had seen him since his release from jail. The guy had disappeared.

  “Anyway,” Buzz said, “you were about to call me?”

  I filled him in on the fisherman who’d likely heard Wonderful being stabbed to death, possibly by an American, and how the fisherman alleged that he’d later been told to maintain his silence by another American who resembled in description possible CIA operative Carl Underwood Jr.

  “Just because the guy heard somebody yell, ‘Die,’ does not mean the killer was an American,” Buzz said. “He could’ve been a Brit, or an Australian. They speak English, too, you know. More or less.”

  “What I want to know is why would an intelligence operative tell the potential witness in a murder to keep his mouth shut, unless it was to protect an American suspect?”

  “Or maybe his own ass.”

  “Yeah. That, too.”

  The General Services Administration’s Federal Citizen Information Center maintains a list of all US government employees whose e-mail and mailing addresses are available to the general public. Those employees working in classified assignments, needless to say, don’t appear on the list. What’s not commonly known is that all Tier One intelligence agencies have instant online access to all employee résumés, as well as the results of all background security investigations. Buzz had already spooled up Carl Underwood’s package without my even asking for it.

  The records showed that Underwood had grown up outside Dayton, Ohio, home of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where I’d once been assigned to the Air Intelligence Agency. He’d majored in international relations at Ohio’s Oberlin College, one of those small, quaint liberal arts colleges that serve as a fallback for kids whose SAT scores won’t get them into the Ivy League. Oberlin had a reputation as a feeder school to the intelligence community, its students not uncommonly recruited by the CIA and the National Security Agency, furthering my suspicions that Underwood was a spook operating out of the embassy in Hanoi under diplomatic cover. His seventeen-year career with the Foreign Service also gave me pause. Prior to his posting in the diplomatic backwater that was Hanoi, he’d been stationed in a half-dozen hotspots around the world, including Russia, China, Pakistan, and Yemen. But that wasn’t all.

  “Check this out,” Buzz said over the phone. “It says here in the questionnaire he filled out for his last security clearance renewal that he was twice questioned by detectives from the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs after he was posted to Moscow, back in 2006. They were looking into the disappearance of a drug dealer. The dealer and Underwood lived in the same apartment building. Underwood said he didn’t know the guy. Claimed to have never met him.”


  Underwood’s second contact with Russian authorities, Buzz said, involved a $1,000-a-night Moscow call girl who went by the name of Nastya. She claimed that Underwood refused to pay her fee after she serviced him, and then beat her up when she threatened to tell his wife. The case appeared to have been quietly dropped because of Underwood’s diplomatic standing.

  Despite the evidence, Buzz said he had his doubts that Underwood was CIA. “If this guy really does work for Christians In Action, how come I don’t ever remember running into him when I was in the field? I mean, I ran into everybody when I was out there.”

  “I don’t know, Buzz. Your guess is as good as mine.”

  He reminded me that my assignment was no guessing game. Conjecture didn’t factor into the equation. If Carl Underwood had anything to do with the death of Mr. Wonderful, whether he did or didn’t work for the CIA, the White House was still obliged to know ASAP. I assured Buzz I’d do my best to find out.

  Another call to my interpreter, Phu Dung, proved fruitless. He didn’t answer. Again. I left another message on his voice mail, alluding to the new leads I’d developed and that I required his assistance in pursuing them. Then I set out for the US Embassy.

  As I stepped to the curb to hail a cab, a woman piloting a Vespa motor scooter angled through one-way traffic on the boulevard to stop beside me. High-collared, long-sleeved white blouse, black slacks, spiked black heels. A hennaed ponytail hung down the back of her pink helmet. Her skin was luminous. She couldn’t have been older than twenty-two.

  “You need ride? Come on, I take you,” she said in more than passable English.

  A beautiful young thing just happens to see a foreign national standing on the street and offers to give him a ride out of the goodness of her heart? Doubtful.

  I looked past her. There were no taxis in sight. “I’m good,” I said. “Thanks anyway.”

  I walked on. She persisted, smiling, keeping up with me. “Where you go? I am excellent driver. I take you. Cheap. Hop on. You see.” She patted her backseat. “You will see.”

  “Cheap, huh?” I decided to play with her just for grins. “How much?”

  “This depends. Where you go?”

  “The American embassy.”

  “You are American?”

  “Yes.”

  “America number one.”

  “I’m glad somebody thinks so.”

  “A very long walk, American embassy. Half-hour. I take you there for . . . four dollars.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “I am student.”

  “A student. Right.”

  She reached into a little red purse slung like an ammo bandolier across her chest and proudly showed me a photo ID, supposedly from some university, the name of which was printed in Vietnamese.

  “I am study to be pharmacist.”

  “And I’m an astronaut.”

  “What?” She seemed genuinely starstruck. “You are really astronaut?”

  “No, not really.”

  I tried flagging down an approaching taxi. The cabbie speeded past.

  “Okay, okay,” the girl said, almost pleading, “three dollars.”

  I stopped and looked at her. Her eyes conveyed a persuasive innocence. Some men will do just about anything for a pretty face. I suppose I’m one of them.

  “Okay. Three dollars.”

  I climbed on behind her and we took off, the inside of my thighs straddling her hips, my hands locked around her exquisitely thin waist. If she was an intelligence operative, she was among the most convincing I’d ever met. If I was sitting too close, she never complained.

  Don’t ask me her name. She gave it to me as we drove, but I didn’t catch it; Hanoi’s incessant sound track of honking horns and tinny, two-stroke motorbike engines drowned out her words. She dropped me off around the corner from the embassy and asked if I needed someone to show me around the city, a tour guide. When I declined the offer, the corners of her mouth dropped.

  “You are married?”

  “Used to be.”

  “You have girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Vietnamese girl make very good girlfriend,” she said. “Very loyal. Cook very good. Ten dollars a day.”

  I handed her five dollars instead of the three we’d agreed upon. “Good luck with college.”

  She tucked the money in her back pocket, disappointed at not having landed the more lucrative gig, and zoomed away.

  The US Embassy in the Ba Dinh district south of downtown Hanoi was a six-story fortress of prestressed concrete surrounded by an imposing, eight-foot security fence topped with concertina wire. I handed my fake Dr. Bob Barker passport to a Vietnamese police officer standing guard behind the fence. He eyed it, then me, then the passport again, then unlocked the gate and pointed to the lobby.

  “May I help you?”

  The receptionist, a blousy, big-boned African American woman, was sitting at a desk on the other side of a bullet-resistant Plexiglas window with a two-way speaker built into it.

  “I’m here to see Carl Underwood.” I slipped my passport through a slot at the bottom.

  She picked up the passport and looked at it like it took effort on her part. Her acrylic nails were long and shiny purple, their squared-off tips painted white.

  “Purpose of your visit?”

  “It’s confidential.”

  “Sir, I’m sorry, but it doesn’t work that way around here. Y’all gotta state a legitimate reason for the purpose of the visit or it isn’t happening. Simple as that, okay? Those are the rules.”

  “Okay, if those are the rules.”

  “So, the purpose of your business is . . . ?”

  “To speak with Mr. Underwood about his many illegitimate children. It’s time they knew their father.”

  She gave me one of those snarky, oh-no-you-didn’t-just-say-that kind of looks. Then she snatched up her phone and swiveled her chair away from the window so I couldn’t overhear her conversation. When she was done talking, she hung up and wheeled back to face me.

  “I spoke with Mr. Underwood’s assistant. Mr. Underwood’s out of the office.”

  “Any idea when he’ll be back?”

  “No.”

  “Today?”

  “It’s hard to say.”

  “Sometime this century, you think?”

  She gave me that look again.

  “I’ll wait.”

  Across the lobby was a sitting area with two rows of metal folding chairs, six chairs to a row, flanked by anemic and wilting potted plants. Seven people occupied the chairs—four Caucasians, two Asians, and a guy in a brown Nehru-style jacket who looked to be Pakistani—all waiting, apparently, to be admitted inside the embassy itself. Two stout US marines, both Latinos, stood guard in Kevlar and camouflaged combat utilities, cradling their M-16s, scrutinizing people entering and exiting the building. The jarheads were chuckling about something and paying little attention to me as I took a seat behind a man I quickly recognized: Leonard Rostenkowski, whose overbearing wife, Lydia, had chatted me up days earlier in the lobby of the Yellow Flower Hotel. He was engrossed in a tattered copy of National Geographic and rubbing his right ear, which I noticed was not small.

  “What’re you doing here, Leonard?”

  He glanced back at me over his half-glasses and blanched, obviously nervous. “Me? Oh, I was uh, just here to, uh, meet somebody . . . ” He got to his feet, said something about having forgotten he was supposed to meet his wife somewhere, and quickly left the building.

  Definitely strange behavior.

  On the chair beside me was a week-old copy of the Viet Nam News, an English-language newspaper published in Hanoi. On the front page was a story about the collision between a train and a taxi in which two people were killed, and another about a Vietnamese amateur photographer winning some prestigious photo contest in Uruguay. There was also a piece on the People’s Court having handed down harsh prison sentences under the government’s new zero-tolerance policy on human
trafficking. Four defendants had all been found guilty of kidnapping girls from rural villages and forcing them to work as prostitutes in Malaysia. One defendant got sixteen years. I remember reading intelligence cables back in the day, describing how peasants from rural villages in Southeast Asia were often prime victims of ruthless traffickers who hustled them out of the country and into lives of sexual exploitation or hard labor in places like China, Malaysia, and even the United States.

  “Mr. Barker?”

  It took me a second to realize that the receptionist behind the Plexiglas was curling her finger, beckoning me. I got up and walked over to her window.

  “I was able to reach Mr. Underwood. Unfortunately, he will not be in for the rest of the afternoon. If you want to leave me your number, I will make sure he gets it.”

  Determining when people are lying is rarely easy. Much depends on knowing how they behave when they’re telling the truth—using their habits as a comparative benchmark when you suspect they’re being evasive or deceitful. My new friend, the receptionist, had used contractions when we first spoke, before she let me know that she’d spoken with Underwood and that he was gone for the day. During our second conversation, she avoided contractions altogether—“He’ll” became “he will”; “y’all” became “you all.” Some of the best interrogators around contend that liars are more inclined to avoid contractions, as if using the King’s English somehow makes them sound more convincing. My gut told me the receptionist was being less than honest about Carl Underwood’s availability.

  “Tell him I’ll meet him outside in five minutes.”

  “Maybe you didn’t hear me,” she said.

  “Maybe I did.”

  I headed for the exit. When I glanced back, the receptionist was on her phone.

  Across the street from the embassy was a stall open to the street. An old woman was stirring a large metal pot and serving up chicken soup. I handed her 20,000 dong and she ladled me out a bowlful. Carl Underwood emerged from the embassy about five minutes later and strode toward me with a grimace on his face.

  “We can’t talk here,” he said. “Let’s take a walk.”