The Three-Nine Line

by David Freed

  He shoved me at gunpoint into the backseat of one of the Toyotas without bothering to frisk or cuff me, then slid in beside me while one of the other cops got in behind the wheel. I looked back as we were driving away: the crowd of gawkers had grown exponentially despite warnings to disperse. They had pulled the sheet off Stoneburner and were snapping pictures of each other posing with the body.

  V

  For the second time in less than twelve hours, I found myself in custody. Angry Bird and his partner smoked cigarettes with the windows rolled up and said nothing as we navigated the streets of Hanoi, bustling even at 0500 hours.

  “So, this guy’s doctor tells him, ‘Sir, I’m afraid I’ve got bad news. You’ve got lung cancer from smoking. Plus, you also have Alzheimer’s disease.’ To which the guy says, ‘Well, it could be worse. At least I don’t have lung cancer.’ ”

  Angry Bird said something tersely to me in Vietnamese. I gathered it was, “Be quiet.”

  Near a Georgian mansion that flew the red, white, and blue flag of the Russian Federation—Moscow’s embassy, by the looks of it—we made a right turn down a side street, past a guard shack manned by soldiers armed with AKs, and into a gated, modern office complex. The sign out front was in both Vietnamese and English: Ministry of Public Safety.

  I was hustled inside, strip-searched, and thrown into a windowless, one-man, five-by-seven-foot cell with fluorescent overhead lighting, a stainless steel sink and toilet, and a concrete slab for a bed. My belt, watch, wallet, and iPhone were taken from me, and I was made to trade my clothes and shoes for coarse, zebra-striped pajamas and a pair of rubber flip-flops. I was concerned that the Vietnamese would find the counterintelligence apps Buzz’s people had installed on my phone, but there wasn’t much I could do about that. Breakfast was soon served through a hinged slot in the cell door: a cup of tepid green tea that left a bitter aftertaste and a Styrofoam bowl of meatless ramen.

  For aspiring Buddhists, incarceration offers an ideal opportunity for meditation, but I’m not much good at pondering my own navel. The detriments, I suppose, of an unquiet mind. So I jogged in place instead, did push-ups and crunches, and sang appropriately themed Merle Haggard tunes as time slowed to an interminable crawl.

  At around 0930, the cell door opened. I was shackled and placed in leg irons by three guards who smelled of beer, then escorted down a long hallway to an elevator. Two floors up, I was led along another lengthy hallway to a spacious corner office, the door of which was flanked on either side by a Vietnamese flag. Colonel Tan Sang was sitting behind a desk befitting a head of state.

  “A tragedy about Stoneburner, but you will be happy to know that justice goes on. Your Colonel Cohen is being transferred within the hour to our most secure prison facility. He will be safer there.”

  “Safer from what?”

  “The wrath of the people.”

  “You’re the only one who’s wrathful, Colonel.”

  He dismissed my comment with a wave of his hand and ordered the guards to free my wrists but not my ankles, then gestured to a folding chair opposite his desk. I shuffled over and sat as the guards took up station on either side of me.

  “You struck a police officer,” Tan Sang said. “This is a very, very serious crime in my country.”

  “But eating dog apparently isn’t.”

  His dark eyes grew hard and flat. “A man facing criminal charges in a foreign land would be best served by embracing a more, shall we say, contrite attitude.”

  I noticed my phone and wallet lying on his desk. “I’m not the one in trouble, Colonel,” I said, “you are. Forced labor. Sexual bondage. Peasant women kidnapped and shipped abroad. Ring any bells?”

  He folded his hands in front of him a little too calmly and cocked his head, a gesture meant to convey amused nonchalance. “Making slanderous, unfounded allegations against a ranking member of the Vietnamese Community Party is also a criminal offense.”

  “They’re hardly unfounded, Colonel.”

  “You have proof of these allegations?”

  “Abundant proof.”

  Tan Sang shifted his weight slightly—some would say squirmed—and leaned forward in his chair with his hands still folded in front of him.

  “As they say in your country, Doctor, I’m all ears.”

  I got to my feet and started to reach across the desk for my phone. Alarmed by my sudden movement, Tan Sang sat back in his chair and the guards quickly shoved me back down on mine.

  “The phone,” I said. “There’s something on it I think you’ll want to see.”

  Tan Sang hesitated. Then, trying not to look worried, he reached over and casually slid it across the desk to me.

  “By all means,” he said.

  I knew then that he hadn’t uncovered the classified applications imbedded in the phone’s software. I was tempted to smile, but I was all too aware that my well-being was still very much in jeopardy, and hinged on the plan I’d arranged with Buzz. It was either going to work, or I wouldn’t be going home for a very long time.

  “Twenty-two Cao Bac Son Street,” I said. “You were there last night, with Carl Underwood.”

  I powered up the phone, found the grainy picture I’d taken of the women held captive in the house, and handed it to Tan Sang. He peered closely at the screen and offered his own smile.

  “I do not know where this was taken. I do not know who the women are in this picture. This proves nothing.”

  I asked for the phone back.

  “You are not in command,” Tan Sang said. “I am in command.”

  “Duly noted. Look, we both know, Colonel, I wouldn’t be making these kinds of allegations if I didn’t have definitive proof. There may be a way out of this, for both of us. Now, please, give me the phone.”

  Again, with reluctance, Tan Sang handed it over.

  I checked my e-mail. There were no new messages. Nothing from the NRO with doctored satellite surveillance photographs attached. Thanks a ton, Buzz. Where are you when I need you? My only hope was that the photos were coming. I had to stall. I had to lie.

  “Carl Underwood’s already confessed, Colonel,” I said, still looking at the phone like I was trying to find the definitive proof I’d alleged. “He’s implicated you fully.”

  “Underwood? I have no idea who you are talking about.”

  “Well, he certainly knows you. He knows all about the women, and he knows all about your partner, Jimmy Luc, whose ear you cut off and whose body you dumped in the Red River to keep him quiet.”

  The blood rose in Tan Sang’s face. In Vietnamese, he ordered the guards to leave his office and to shut the door behind them. They came to attention, then did as ordered. The colonel unholstered his pistol and laid it on the desk.

  “If you think for one minute you will leave this building alive,” he said, “you are mistaken.”

  I tapped the button on the phone to update the list of e-mails. There were none.

  “Okay,” I said, “I’m gonna lay it out for you nice and plain. Billy Hallady’s back safe and sound in the states, along with his grandson. There’s no extradition treaty and there’s not a chance in hell of them ever returning to Vietnam. Stoneburner’s dead and all you’ve got is Steve Cohen, who spent years being tortured by Mr. Wonderful and his ilk. The war’s ancient history, Colonel. You’ve had your pound of flesh, so here’s my proposal: you cut Cohen loose and I’ll destroy any evidence tying you to Jimmy Luc’s murder and to all those women you’re holding captive.”

  Tan Sang was seething, his rage barely contained. “If you had any real evidence against me,” he said, “you would have revealed it by now.”

  He raised his pistol.

  I hit the refresh button on my phone.

  Still no new e-mails.

  Definitely not good.

  Even with irons around my ankles, I was confident I could leap over the desk and hopefully avoid a bullet before turning the gun on him, but there would’ve been little sense in that. The building was cra
wling with other armed personnel. I knew I wouldn’t make it very far. I needed more time. I had to keep him talking.

  “So now you’re just going to, what, shoot me? What excuse are you going to use, because I don’t think cold-blooded murder’s going to go over too big with my people, Colonel.”

  “You were attempting to escape.”

  “Escape. Right. With my ankles chained. That makes a lot of sense. Nobody’s gonna buy that, Colonel. Better come up with something better.”

  “Very well,” he said after thinking it through. “You attacked me. I was forced to defend myself.”

  “Attacked you with what?”

  Again, he had to think about it. “My pistol. You tried to take it from me. We fought.”

  “Like that’s gonna fly, after all the ballistics tests the FBI’ll do on my carcass, all the forensics. They’ll know exactly what went on here, and you can kiss your political future adios. Adios—that’s Spanish for don’t be an idiot. Accept the fact that I’m trying to help you before it’s too late.”

  He launched into an angry diatribe about America’s imperialistic ambitions and how if anyone had suffered, it wasn’t former POWs like Cohen. The Vietnamese people, Tan Sang declared, were the true victims of a misguided and illegal war, himself included. He went on and on, but I was no longer listening because, finally, there it was, on my phone. An e-mail from Acme-Ltd.com, with an attachment. I had no clue what the attachment would show, but it didn’t matter; I was about to get shot. I hit download and hoped like hell Buzz had gotten it right.

  “You wanted evidence, Colonel? Enjoy.”

  I tossed Tan Sang the phone. As he looked closely at the screen, I watched his expression turn from contempt to what one could only interpret as resignation. His shoulders slumped and his Adam’s apple bobbed. Slowly, he put the phone down on the desk, got up out of his burgundy leather executive chair with the pistol still in his hand and gazed out his office window like a man who’d just been confronted by his own mortality.

  I picked up the phone and looked for the first time to see what had prompted such a reaction. In all, there were four satellite surveillance-style photos, all infrared, each taken from a high angle. The first image, a computerized extrapolation of the picture I’d shot and sent Buzz, showed the women sitting on the floor in one of the bedrooms. The second photo revealed a man standing in the hallway outside the bedroom. He was looking up slightly and over his shoulder, exposing his face to the camera. The pixilation was left purposely grainy, but left little doubt that the image was Colonel Tan Sang. Photoshop wizards at the NRO had found a photograph of him in intelligence files or perhaps other open sources and manipulated it for my purposes. They’d typed in his name and date of birth next to his face, along with his height and weight. The third picture purportedly showed Tan Sang’s Lexus SUV parked in front of the house. The fourth shot was a close-up of the vehicle’s rear license plate. All in all, a masterful job of visual manipulation, but for one glaring mistake: the two shots of the Lexus showed it parked with the front end facing the house.

  The SUV had been backed in.

  Tan Sang was still staring out the window, mulling his options. Tree branches thick with broad leaves swayed gracefully on the morning breeze like a hula dancer’s arms. I worried that he would demand to take a second, closer look at the pictures. I wasn’t about to give him the opportunity.

  “You’ve got five seconds to make up your mind, Colonel. What’ll it be?”

  He turned away from the window and glared at me. “Who are you?”

  “I’m the guy who can make all this go away, who can give you back your political future. All you have to do is let Steve Cohen go free.”

  “And what do I tell my party? What do I tell the press?”

  Some might condemn me for what I said next, but under the circumstances, it seemed the only choice. One former prisoner of war was gone. I didn’t want to make it two. “Pin it on Stoneburner if you want to. Tell the press he did it for all I care. He’s dead. He won’t mind. Case closed.”

  Tan Sang sat back down at his desk, pinching his lips with his thumb and index finger, looking away, thinking. Long seconds ticked by before he finally relented with a nod.

  “You’ll make the necessary travel arrangements for Colonel Cohen and myself,” I said. “Your people will drive us from the hotel to the airport. I want two seats on the first flight out of Hanoi tonight, back to the United States. And I want it all in writing that your government will not press any charges against him.”

  “On one condition,” Tan Sang said. “That you destroy those photographs and that you tell no one.”

  “Whatever you say, Colonel.”

  It was a lie, of course. The man was morally corrupt, an unrepentant criminal. I had every intention of ratting him out just as soon as Cohen and I were clear of Vietnamese airspace.

  I stood. “Oh, I do have one more favor to ask. You’ll release my interpreter, Phu Dung, and won’t lay another hand on him.”

  Tan Sang refused, branding Phu Dung a spy. I insisted as a civilian psychologist licensed by the State of California and definitely not as a covert member of the American intelligence community that he was wrong, that Phu Dung had served as my interpreter, nothing more.

  “There’s no negotiating, Colonel,” I said, reminding him of the surveillance photos. “He gets a free pass or the deal’s off and you’re done.”

  The colonel smoldered, then unlocked my shackles. “You have my word,” he said. “Now go. Before I change my mind.”

  At his office door, I stopped and turned. “I’m curious. Somebody told me you’re a big knife collector, Colonel. Is that true?”

  He looked up from his desk, glaring vengefully at me.

  V

  After changing back into my street clothes, I walked out past the guard gate, unchallenged, and into oppressively humid sunshine. When I’d put two blocks between me and the Ministry of Public Safety, in a park where a giant bronze statue pays tribute to the Viet Cong soldiers who fought against the American military, I telephoned Buzz. He answered on the first ring.

  “Virgil Stoneburner didn’t make it. He fell off the balcony of his hotel room, apparently trying to escape.”

  “I heard. The embassy just got word.”

  Neither of us said anything for a few seconds.

  “I’m assuming it was an accident?” Buzz asked.

  “Definitively? I couldn’t tell you. That’s what it looked like to me.”

  “The poor bastard gets shot down, survives the Hanoi Hilton, goes back to the ’Nam and buys it falling off a balcony. Hard to get your head around that one.”

  “No kidding,” I said.

  “Anything you want me to tell the White House?” Buzz asked.

  “Yeah. Tell ’em the scam with the surveillance photos worked. Hanoi’s cutting Steve Cohen loose.”

  “Run that by me again?”

  “They’re letting Cohen go. We fly out tonight.”

  “Holy shit.” Buzz was ecstatic. “Logan, you son of a bitch, you did it. You’re a goddamned hero.”

  I felt nothing close to heroic. The mission had been to gather intelligence, but everyone hoped, including me, that my efforts would lead to freedom for Stoneburner and Cohen. Only one of them would be coming home alive. In that regard, I’d failed. I wondered how Stoneburner’s wife would take the news. I felt pity for her, a woman I’d never met.

  My stomach roiled at the notion of having scapegoated Virgil Stoneburner and encouraged Tan Sang to brand him a killer, but there was a certain obvious pragmatism in my having done so. The dead are dead. You can’t harm them any more than they’ve already been harmed—unless you assault their memory. The fact that I’d done exactly that, to save my former professor, was not lost on me. I vowed that if given the opportunity down the road, I would set the record straight, clear Stoneburner’s name—presuming it deserved clearing.

  The question of who murdered Mr. Wonderful remained very much
unanswered. Was it one of the former POWs or Carl Underwood Jr.? Was it Tan Sang or untold other possible culprits? The truth was, at that moment, I couldn’t have cared less about who stuck Mr. Wonderful and left his body floating in a lake in the middle of downtown Hanoi.

  My disinterest would prove short-lived.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Carl Underwood Jr. was hunched over an impossibly low table outside an outdoor restaurant across from the Temple of Literature, precisely where the woman who’d picked up his office phone said he’d be when I called and identified myself as an old friend from Oberlin who happened to be in town for the afternoon. He was working on a plate of what looked like stir-fried chicken and didn’t see me at first as I stepped out of the cab. The man he was lunching with, Leonard Rostenkowski, noticed me right off and pointed me out to him as I came walking up to them.

  “Looks tasty.”

  “How’d you find me?” Underwood asked.

  “You’re not exactly Jason Bourne.” I pulled out a plastic stool and sat. “How goes it, Leonard? Taking a breather from the wife, are we?”

  “You got that right.” He was eating plain white rice with a fork and a face that said he was no fan of Asian fare.

  Underwood looked at us both incredulously. “You two know each other?”

  “We met at the hotel,” Leonard said.

  I asked if Leonard and Underwood worked together.

  “Len’s my cousin,” Underwood said. “He drives a skip loader. He and his wife are visiting from Arizona.”

  “Cousin Len needs to take a walk,” I said.

  Underwood lowered his chopsticks and tried to stare me down. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “I’m about to ask you some questions, Carl, which may not be suitable for family viewing, if you get my drift.”

  “No worries,” Leonard said, pushing back from the table, “I gotta hit the can, anyway.”

  “Down the alley, on your right,” Underwood said. He waited until his cousin was gone and gave me a hard look. “What questions?”

  I held up my phone so he could see the shot I’d taken of the peasant women held in the house. “If you want a better look, I can enlarge the picture. Amazing, all the features on these phones, don’t you think? You have to go back to school, just to understand ’em all.”