Double Impact

by Tess Gerritsen

  Guy turned to the driver. “Excuse me while I talk some sense into the lady…”

  But Willy had already risen to her feet. “Don’t bother. You can’t talk sense into me.” She went into the bathroom and shut the door. “I’m Wild Bill Maitland’s kid, remember?” she yelled.

  The driver looked sympathetically at Guy. “I will get the car.”

  THE ROAD OUT OF SAIGON was jammed with trucks, most of them ancient and spewing clouds of black exhaust. Through the open windows of their car came the smells of smoke and sun-baked pavement and rotting fruit. Laborers trudged along the roadside, a bobbing column of conical hats against the bright green of the rice paddies.

  Five hours and two ferry crossings later, Guy and Willy stood on a Cantho pier and watched a multitude of boats glide across the muddy Mekong. River women dipped and swayed as they rowed, a strange and graceful dance at the oars. And on the riverbank swirled the noise and confusion of a thriving market town. Schoolgirls, braided hair gleaming in the sunshine, whisked past on bicycles. Stevedores heaved sacks of rice and crates of melons and pineapples onto sampans.

  Overwhelmed by the chaos, Willy asked bleakly, “How are we ever going to find him?”

  Guy’s answer didn’t inspire much confidence. He simply shrugged and said, “How hard can it be?”

  Very hard, it turned out. All their inquiries brought the same response. “A tall man?” people would say. “And blond?” Invariably their answer would be a shake of the head.

  It was Guy’s inspired hunch that finally sent them into a series of tailor shops. “Maybe Lassiter’s no longer blond,” he said. “He could have dyed his hair or gone bald. But there’s one feature a man can’t disguise-his height. And in this country, a six-foot-four man is going to need specially tailored clothes.”

  The first three tailors they visited turned up nothing. It was with a growing sense of futility that they entered the fourth shop, wedged in an alley of tin-roofed hootches. In the cavelike gloom within, an elderly seamstress sat hunched over a mound of imitation silk. She didn’t seem to understand Guy’s questions. In frustration, Guy took out a pen and jotted a few words in Vietnamese on a scrap of newspaper. Then, to illustrate his point, he sketched in the figure of a tall man.

  The woman squinted down at the drawing. For a long time, she sat there, her fingers knotted tightly around the shimmering fabric. Then she looked up at Guy. No words were exchanged, just that silent, mournful gaze.

  Guy gave a nod that he understood. He reached into his pocket and lay a twenty-dollar bill on the table in front of her. She stared at it in wonder. American dollars. For her, it was a fortune.

  At last she took up Guy’s pen and, with painful precision, began to write. The instant she’d finished, Guy swept up the scrap of paper and jammed it into his pocket. “Let’s go,” he whispered to Willy.

  “What does it say?” Willy whispered as they headed back along the row of hootches.

  Guy didn’t answer; he only quickened his pace. In the silence of the alley, Willy suddenly became aware of eyes, everywhere, watching them from the windows and doorways.

  Willy tugged on Guy’s arm. “Guy…”

  “It’s an address. Near the marketplace.”

  “Lassiter’s?”

  “Don’t talk. Just keep moving. We’re being followed.”

  “What?”

  He grabbed her arm before she could turn to look. “Come on, keep your head. Pretend he’s not there.”

  She fought to keep her eyes focused straight ahead, but the sense of being stalked made every muscle in her body strain to run. How does he stay so calm? she wondered, glancing at Guy. He was actually whistling now, a tuneless song that scraped her nerves raw. They reached the end of the alley, and a maze of streets lay before them. To her surprise, Guy stopped and struck up a cheerful conversation with a boy selling cigarettes at the corner. Their chatter seemed to go on forever.

  “What are you doing?” Willy ground out. “Can’t we get out of here?”

  “Trust me.” Guy bought a pack of Winstons, for which he paid two American dollars. The boy beamed and sketched a childish salute.

  Guy took Willy’s hand. “Get ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  The words were barely out of her mouth when Guy wrenched her around the corner and up another alley. They made a sharp left, then a right, past a row of tin-roofed shacks, and ducked into an open doorway.

  Inside, it was too murky to make sense of their surroundings. For an eternity they huddled together, listening for footsteps. They could hear, in the distance, children laughing and a car horn honking incessantly. But just outside, in the alley, there was silence.

  “Looks like the kid did his job,” whispered Guy.

  “You mean that cigarette boy?”

  Guy sidled over to the doorway and peered out. “Looks clear. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  They slipped into the alley and doubled back. Even before they saw the marketplace, they could hear it: the shouts of merchants, the frantic squeals of pigs. Hurrying along the outskirts, they scanned the street names and finally turned into what was scarcely more than an alley jammed between crumbling apartment buildings. The address numbers were barely decipherable.

  At last, at a faded green building, they stopped. Guy squinted at the number over the doorway and nodded. “This is it.” He knocked.

  The door opened. A single eye, iris so black, the pupil was invisible, peered at them through the crack. That was all they saw, that one glimpse of a woman’s face, but it was enough to tell them she was afraid. Guy spoke to her in Vietnamese. The woman shook her head and tried to close the door. He put his hand out to stop it and spoke again, this time saying the man’s name, “Sam Lassiter.”

  Panicking, the woman turned and screamed something in Vietnamese.

  Somewhere in the house, footsteps thudded away, followed by the shattering of glass.

  “Lassiter!” Guy yelled. Shoving past the woman, he raced through the apartment, Willy at his heels. In a back room, they found a broken window. Outside in the alley, a man was sprinting away. Guy scrambled out, dropped down among the glass shards and took off after the fugitive.

  Willy was about to follow him out the window when the Vietnamese woman, frantic, grasped her arm.

  “Please! No hurt him!” she cried. “Please!”

  Willy, trying to pull free, found her fingers linked for an instant with the other woman’s. Their eyes met. “We won’t hurt him,” Willy said, gently disengaging her arm.

  Then she pulled herself up onto the windowsill and dropped into the alley.

  GUY WAS PULLING CLOSER. He could see his quarry loping toward the marketplace. It had to be Lassiter. Though his hair was a lank, dirty brown, there was no disguising his height; he towered above the crowd. He ducked beneath the marketplace canopy and vanished into shadow.

  Damn, thought Guy, struggling to move through the crowd. I’m going to lose him.

  He shoved into the central market tent. The sun’s glare abruptly gave way to a close, hot gloom. He stumbled blindly, his eyes adjusting slowly to the change in light. He made out the cramped aisles, the counters overflowing with fruit and vegetables, the gay sparkle of pinwheels spinning on a toy vendor’s cart. A tall silhouette suddenly bobbed off to the side. Guy spun around and saw Lassiter duck behind a gleaming stack of cookware.

  Guy scrambled after him. The man leapt up and sprinted away. Pots and pans went flying, a dozen cymbals crashing together.

  Guy’s quarry darted into the produce section. Guy made a sharp left, leapt over a crate of mangoes and dashed up a parallel aisle. “Lassiter!” he yelled. “I want to talk! That’s all, just talk!”

  The man spun right, shoved over a fruit stand and stumbled away. Watermelons slammed to the ground, exploding in a brilliant rain of flesh. Guy almost slipped in the muck. “Lassiter!” he shouted.

  They headed into the meat section. Lassiter, desperate, shoved a crate of ducks
into Guy’s path, sending up a cloud of feathers as the birds, freed from their prison, flapped loose. Guy dodged the crate, leapt over a fugitive duck and kept running. Ahead lay the butcher counters, stacked high with slabs of meat. A vendor was hosing down the concrete floor, sending a stream of bloody water into the gutter. Lassiter, moving full tilt, suddenly slid and fell to his knees in the offal. At once he tried to scramble back to his feet, but by then Guy had snagged his shirt collar.

  “Just-just talk,” Guy managed to gasp between breaths. “That’s all-talk-”

  Lassiter thrashed, struggling to pull free.

  “Gimme a chance!” Guy yelled, dragging him back down.

  Lassiter rammed his shoulders at Guy’s knees, sending Guy sprawling. In an instant, Lassiter had leapt to his feet. But as he turned to flee, Guy grabbed his ankle, and Lassiter toppled forward and splashed, headfirst, into a vat of squirming eels.

  The water seemed to boil with slippery bodies, writhing in panic. Guy dragged the man’s head out of the vat. They both collapsed, gasping on the slick concrete.

  “Don’t!” Lassiter sobbed. “Please…”

  “I told you, I just-just want to talk-”

  “I won’t say anything! I swear it. You tell ’em that for me. Tell ’em I forgot everything…”

  “Who?” Guy took the other man by the shoulders. “Who are they? Who are you afraid of?”

  Lassiter took a shaky breath and looked at him, seemed to make a decision. “The Company.”

  “WHY DOES THE CIA WANT you dead?” Willy asked.

  They were sitting at a wooden table on the deck of an old river barge. Neutral territory, Lassiter had said of this floating café. During the war, by some unspoken agreement, V.C. and South Vietnamese soldiers would sit together on this very deck, enjoying a small patch of peace. A few hundred yards away, the war might rage on, but here no guns were drawn, no bullets fired.

  Lassiter, gaunt and nervous, took a deep swallow of beer. Behind him, beyond the railing, flowed the Mekong, alive with the sounds of river men, the putter of boats. In the last light of sunset, the water rippled with gold. Lassiter said, “They want me out of the way for the same reason they wanted Luis Valdez out of the way. I know too much.”

  “About what?”

  “Laos. The bombings, the gun drops. The war your average soldier didn’t know about.” He looked at Guy. “Did you?”

  Guy shook his head. “We were so busy staying alive, we didn’t care what was going on across the border.”

  “Valdez knew. Anyone who went down in Laos was in for an education. If they survived. And that was a big if. Say you did manage to eject. Say you lived through the G force of shooting out of your cockpit. If the enemy didn’t find you, the animals would.” He stared down at his beer. “Valdez was lucky to be alive.”

  “You met him at Tuyen Quan?” asked Guy.

  “Yeah. Summer camp.” He laughed. “For three years we were stuck in the same cell.” His gaze turned to the river. “I was with the 101st when I was captured. Got separated during a firefight. You know how it is in those valleys, the jungle’s so thick you can’t be sure which way’s up. I was going in circles, and all the time I could hear those damn Hueys flying overhead, right overhead, picking guys up. Everyone but me. I figured I’d been left to die. Or maybe I was already dead, just some corpse walking around in the trees…” He swallowed; the hand clutching the beer bottle was unsteady. “When they finally boxed me in, I just threw my rifle down and put up my hands. I got force marched north, into NVA territory. That’s how I ended up at Tuyen Quan.”

  “Where you met Valdez,” said Willy.

  “He was brought in a year later, transferred in from some camp in Laos. By then I was an old-timer. Knew the ropes, worked my own vegetable patch. I was hanging in okay. Valdez, though, was holding on by the skin of his teeth. Yellow from hepatitis, a broken arm that wouldn’t heal right. It took him months to get strong enough even to work in the garden. Yeah, it was just him and me in that cell. Three years. We did a lot of talking. I heard all his stories. He said a lot of things I didn’t want to believe, things about Laos, about what we were doing there…”

  Willy leaned forward and asked softly, “Did he ever talk about my father?”

  Lassiter turned to her, his eyes dark against the glow of sunset. “When Valdez last saw him, your father was still alive. Trying to fly the plane.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “Luis bailed out right after she blew up. So he couldn’t be sure-”

  “Wait,” cut in Guy. “What do you mean, ‘blew up’?”

  “That’s what he said. Something went off in the hold.”

  “But the plane was shot down.”

  “It wasn’t enemy fire that brought her down. Valdez was positive about that. They might have been going through flak at the time, but this was something else, something that blew the fuselage door clean off. He kept going over and over what they had in the cargo, but all he remembered listed on the manifest were aircraft parts.”

  “And a passenger,” said Willy.

  Lassiter nodded. “Valdez mentioned him. Said he was a weird little guy, quiet, almost, well, holy. They could tell he was a VIP, just by what he was wearing around his neck.”

  “You mean gold? Chains?” asked Guy.

  “Some sort of medallion. Maybe a religious symbol.”

  “Where was this passenger supposed to be dropped off?”

  “Behind lines. VC territory. It was billed as an in-and-out job, strictly under wraps.”

  “Valdez told you about it,” said Willy.

  “And I wish to hell he never had.” Lassiter took another gulp of beer. His hand was shaking again. Sunset flecked the river with bloodred ripples. “It’s funny. At the time we felt almost, well, protected in that camp. Maybe it was just a lot of brainwashing, but the guards kept telling Valdez he was lucky to be a prisoner. That he knew things that’d get him into trouble. That the CIA would kill him.”

  “Sounds like propaganda.”

  “That’s what I figured it was-Commie lies designed to break him down. But they got Valdez scared. He kept waking up at night, screaming about the plane going down…”

  Lassiter stared out at the water. “Anyway, after the war, they released us. Valdez and the other guys headed home. He wrote me from Bangkok, sent the letter by way of a Red Cross nurse we’d met in Hanoi right after our release. An English gal, a little anti-American but real nice. When I read that letter, I thought, now the poor bastard’s really gone over the edge. He was saying crazy things, said he wasn’t allowed to go out, that all his phone calls were monitored. I figured he’d be all right once he got home. Then I got a call from Nora Walker, that Red Cross nurse. She said he was dead. That he’d shot himself in the head.”

  Willy asked, “Do you think it was suicide?”

  “I think he was a liability. And the Company doesn’t like liabilities.” He turned his troubled gaze to the water. “When we were at Tuyen, all he could talk about was going home, you know? Seeing his old hangouts, his old buddies. Me, I had nothing to go home to, just a sister I never much cared for. Here, at least, I had my girl, someone I loved. That’s why I stayed. I’m not the only one. There are other guys like me around, hiding in villages, jungles. Guys who’ve gone bamboo, gone native.” He shook his head. “Too bad Valdez didn’t. He’d still be alive.”

  “But isn’t it hard living here?” asked Willy. “Always the outsider, the old enemy? Don’t you ever feel threatened by the authorities?”

  Lassiter responded with a laugh and cocked his head at a far table where four men were sitting. “Have you said hello to our local police? They’ve probably been tailing you since you hit town.”

  “So we noticed,” said Guy.

  “My guess is they’re assigned to protect me, their resident lunatic American. Just the fact that I’m alive and well is proof this isn’t the evil empire.” He raised his bottle of beer in a toast to the four policemen
. They stared back sheepishly.

  “So here you are,” said Guy, “cut off from the rest of the world. Why would the CIA bother to come after you?”

  “It’s something Nora told me.”

  “The nurse?”

  Lassiter nodded. “After the war, she stayed on in Hanoi. Still works at the local hospital. About a year ago, some guy-an American-dropped in to see her. Asked if she knew how to get hold of me. He said he had an urgent message from my uncle. But Nora’s a sharp gal, thinks fast on her feet. She told him I’d left the country, that I was living in Thailand. A good thing she did.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t have an uncle.”

  There was a silence. Softly Guy said, “You think that was a Company man.”

  “I keep wondering if he was. Wondering if he’ll find me. I don’t want to end up like Luis Valdez. With a bullet in my head.”

  On the river, boats glided like ghosts through the shadows. A café worker silently circled the deck, lighting a string of paper lanterns.

  “I’ve kept a low profile,” said Lassiter. “Never make noise. Never draw attention. See, I changed my hair.” He grinned faintly and tugged on his lank brown ponytail. “Got this shade from the local herbalist. Extract of cuttle-fish and God knows what else. Smells like hell, but I’m not blond anymore.” He let the ponytail flop loose, and his smile faded. “I kept hoping the Company would lose interest in me. Then you showed up at my door, and I-I guess I freaked out.”

  The bartender put a record on the turntable, and the needle scratched out a Vietnamese love song, a haunting melody that drifted like mist over the river. Wind swayed the paper lanterns, and shadows danced across the deck. Lassiter stared at the five beer bottles lined up in front of him on the table. He ordered a sixth.

  “It takes time, but you get used to it here,” he said. “The rhythm of life. The people, the way they think. There’s not a lot of whining and flailing at misfortune. They accept life as it is. I like that. And after a while, I got to feeling this was the only place I’ve ever belonged, the only place I ever felt safe.” He looked at Willy. “It could be the only place you’re safe.”