“Who the hell are you?”
“It is I who should ask that question. What is your name?”
“Richard Pierce Roderick.”
“Also known as Rory?”
Rory did not reply. When questioned, should I become a prisoner of war, I am required to give name, rank, service number and date of birth. Not sexual preference, favorite foods, specifics of warheads. And never my private name.
“You will answer!” barked one of the soldiers.
I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability. He doubted they’d stamp on his fracture in front of the camera. He shifted his head fretfully on the pillow. That seemed to satisfy them.
“Your father, I think, is Mr. Jack Roderick of New York and Bangkok?”
“Your English is damn good, pal,” Rory told the small man in the Mao jacket. “Where’d you learn it?”
“I taught it to myself. Please answer my question.”
“Go to hell.” He slumped back onto his pillow.
“You were born in New York, I believe?”
“So was half the world.”
“Tell me your father’s name.”
“Or what? You’ll have me killed?” Mirthlessly, Rory began to laugh. “My dad checked out when I was a kid. It doesn’t matter what his name was.”
“Do not speak that way.” The Mao jacket came closer. He reached for a chair, and sat down close to Rory’s head. “The name of Roderick is one to honor. These fools in the uniforms know little English but all the same I shall speak softly, and for your ears alone, Rory Roderick.”
Rory stared fixedly at the ceiling.
“Your father’s name is Jack. I know this, because Jack spoke often of you in the days when the world and I were young. He called me Ruth. Does that name mean anything to you?”
Rory collected what spittle he could and hawked derisively at the placid face.
“He showed me your picture,” the Mao jacket went on. “You were a little boy crouching beside a terrier dog and the dog’s name was Joss—an Asian name for luck. Your father loved Asia and abandoned his son and for that you cannot forgive him. But Jack Roderick gave me his faith and he saved my life. I am prepared now to repay my debt. Would you like to go free? Have your wounds treated by an American doctor? See your wife and your boy? I have the power to send you home, Rory Roderick.”
He understood it, then. In exchange for his release, the man named Ruth would force Rory to dishonor his name. I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy. And that includes any friend of Jack’s, buddy.
“American prisoners of war may only accept release in the order they were taken prisoner,” he said through his teeth. “Call me in a few years.”
“You would be wise to admit that you are Jack Roderick’s son.”
For an instant Rory saw the curved nose and the pale eyes, the intense stillness of his father. Deep in thought as he smoked a cigarette on the terrace by the khlong, the white bird always on his shoulder.
“I never had a dog. I have no father by any name.”
The man stood up. “In the Bangkok Post they say that you are missing. The Americans believe you are dead. I still read the Bangkok Post, you see, although it is unfortunately several weeks old by the time it arrives. I will send word to Jack Roderick that his son is alive.”
Rory had a deep and bitter horror of cowardice, of collaboration, of leaning away from torment into the nameless temptation offered him. Ruth had some bargain in mind, a quid pro quo; and Rory knew that if he accepted, he was lost. He would be unable to face the other men whose tortured screams filled the warren of cells, men whose fathers had never had the ear of ambassadors or been a sinister legend that struck fear in people’s hearts. When the man named Ruth returned a few days later, and asked him to write to Jack Roderick, he refused. He refused the surgery they offered for his damaged leg. He kept his eyes fixed on the flies that buzzed about the ceiling of his cell while Ruth whispered in his ear.
“I have sent word to Roderick through a mutual friend. Your father knows you are alive. He knows you are here, Rory. He knows that I struggle to win your release. Will you not honor your father, and do as I ask?”
“Leave me alone, old man.”
“Rory. You are not a dutiful son.”
His arms were slung back behind his head and his weight suspended at night. He marked the days of solitary confinement in a series of scratches on his prison wall. There were thirty-nine days of fever and dysentery, thirty-nine nights of dangling in the air.
When he dreamed, now, it was Annie he saw and sometimes Max, tanned and clear-eyed from a summer spent by the lake. Max was hunkered down as he examined something—a tortoise ponderously crossing the dirt road, Annie impatient to continue the walk and a dog barking farther in the distance. Annie’s hair was fluttering gold in the breeze off the water and he longed to touch it, but she kept her eyes averted from him, fixed on their son, still hunkered in the dust. Max would be nearly eight now but Rory could not remember his birthday. It was disturbing the way these things—dates, a few names, the faces of his flight mates on the Coral Sea—were slipping from his grasp. He had not seen Max since September. Did the boy believe he was dead?
Rory’s left toe jerked in a spasm and again the firestorm of pain ripped through his nerve endings.
He’s dead, he heard his own childish voice say accusingly. He’s dead and you never told me, Mama.
It was the only explanation for Jack Roderick’s absence when Rory was seven years old. Why else would a father abandon his boy to the desert of divorce? His mother packed up her paintbrushes and her clothes and they left Manhattan along with Joss, the terrier, in the entourage of one of her men, to a new life in Chicago. Rory was supposed to call this man Uncle Pete, except that he hated the farce of fictitious uncles and called him nothing at all. They lived in a great house on Lakeshore Drive and Joss ran barking after fat squirrels as though he had never been king of the city streets. Rory invented wild stories in the emptiness of the backyard, stories of assassins with pistols and cunning hands, and his father was the hero of all of them.
Boxes arrived from time to time, thick with foreign stamps, full of bejeweled monsters and silk jackets embroidered with dragons. There were photographs, too, and short sentences in his father’s hard-to-read hand. When his mother asked Rory if he wanted the letters, he turned away. She tucked the photographs in his bureau drawer, where he would look for them in the middle of the night and study them under the bedclothes.
Jack in his shirtsleeves, eyes crinkled against the sun, a cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth. His toes were bare, his hand stretched toward the gray water. A panama hat on his head.
Uncle Pete left one day and they moved again, this time to an apartment in the heart of Chicago. Later it was a house she rented in Evanston so that he could attend a good school, and for a while the letters stopped coming from Bangkok because she had forgotten to forward their address. When his mother spent money lavishly, Rory understood that his father was writing again, and that he’d sent her money. The knowledge shamed and sickened him worse than if a stranger were keeping her.
He was fiercely protective of his mother. At fifteen he knew that he must choose allegiance in this private war, the agonizing battle between what he wanted and what he had been left. He chose the woman no one needed any longer, with her high brittle laugh and her greasepaint makeup; he became Joan’s protector, a supporting hand when the gin flowed too freely. He gathered the letters that had accumulated in her drawers and burned them in the basement furnace.
The photographs he kept.
His father at the prow of a great boat, teeth bared in his tanned face. His father in the skeleton of a peak-roofed house, with lizards at his feet and a white bird on his shoulder. His father with a length of silk in his hands, eyes direct and piercing for the camera.
“Your father is renowned throughout Southeast Asia,” Ruth insisted during one dark
eternity of interrogation. “They call him Legend and King and Man of Many Faces. You should be proud to be Jack’s son.”
“That is why I will not dishonor him,” Rory said clearly, “by begging for your mercy.”
2
It’s time you came clean,” Rush told her as they threaded their way through Bangkok’s Friday afternoon traffic. “You’re not a tourist or an asset manager or even Max Roderick’s heiress. You’re working for Oliver Krane, who flips off crooks and cops alike, the world over. Krane got you in deep with the wrong sort of people, and now the wrong people want you dead. Fair summary?”
“I don’t have to tell you anything,” Stefani said curtly.
Rush stabbed at his horn and swerved viciously into the right-hand lane. “As long as you’re in my car, honey— and I’m all that stands between you and a bullet in the brain—you’ll answer my goddamn questions.”
“Then let me out here.”
Jeff Knetsch had known nothing—or nothing he was willing to share—about Harry Leeds. He claimed he’d never heard the name, and when Rush cut the interview short and sent Jeff back to his group cell, the lawyer lost his last fingerhold on sanity. He brayed an unintelligible snatch of verse as the police hauled him back to the cell.
Stefani got no more information, no free passage from the labyrinth she’d entered that Friday morning. Oliver’s sold the girl to Sompong.
Rush slid onto the highway’s shoulder and slammed on the brakes. As she reached for the door handle, however, he seized her wrist.
“Where the hell are you going? Where do you think is even remotely safe from Sompong and his thugs? He got to you at the Oriental. He got to a whore in Geneva and to Max in Courchevel. He’ll find you, wherever you are. Flight is not an option.”
She glared at him—at the golden-skinned, half-Thai face with the eyes that weren’t calculating, now, or veiled with facile charm—and saw that he was furious and prepared to be as ruthless as necessary. She let go of the door handle. He released her arm and turned off the engine.
“You’ve heard of Oliver?” she said. It was a rhetorical question.
“His name has come up in the course of my work. You can’t run an operation like Krane’s—selling information to corporate entities or countries or individuals with dubious or no loyalties—without brushing the margins of the law.”
“Was Knetsch telling the truth? About Sompong being one of Oliver’s clients?”
“I’ve known that for over a year,” Rush declared baldly. “How long since Krane hired you?”
“Eight months.”
“Do the math. You flew to Courchevel in March to represent Max Roderick? What did Krane tell you to do?”
“Explain to Max that the murdered prostitute was just the opening round in a campaign to destroy him. Figure out if the lost Roderick fortune could be traced. Decide whether Max was serious about challenging the Thai government—and what exactly that effort might cost.”
“You were Krane’s spy. He needed a pair of eyes in Max’s camp, so he could monitor events for Sompong.”
“Knetsch was already in Max’s camp, reporting to Sompong! What would Oliver need me for?”
“To report on Knetsch. Oliver was taking fees from Max and Sompong, but working solely for himself. He played his clients against each other: he dictated every move. What a game! How could Oliver Krane resist?”
“You and I will be working both ends of the problem, ducks,” she quoted bitterly. “Only one of us got royally screwed.”
“And Max died. You have to consider the possibility that your boss pushed that chair off the cliff.”
“He’s not my boss anymore.”
Rush smiled grimly. “You helped Krane engage in what might be called a flaming conflict of interest. What in Christ’s name were you thinking?”
“I trusted him,” she shot back. “I fell for the oldest male traps in the world: flattery and fine wine. He offered me the world on a silver platter and I condescended to take it. I never saw the setup.”
“Then Krane must be damn good—because you’re not a stupid woman.”
“He was so obviously torn apart by the death-murder, he called it—of his partner in Kowloon.”
Oliver in his worn leather chair in the Scottish Highlands, submitting to the sacrament of penance. She hadn’t imagined that pain on his face, or the hair shirt of culpability. Had she?
“Kowloon?” Beside her, Rush stiffened. “What do you know about Kowloon?”
“Harry Leeds,” she said. “Harry fucking Leeds. He was run down by a taxi on a Kowloon street and Oliver couldn’t accept it. I thought he wanted to nail Harry’s killers, and that I could help him do it.”
“Explain.” Behind their backs, the clogged street traffic inched by.
“Harry Leeds was Oliver’s Asian partner, operating out of Hong Kong—also his oldest friend, if we can believe anything Oliver says.”
“Does Krane have a Bangkok office?”
“No. Just Hong Kong and Shanghai, in this part of the world. Oliver’s primarily focused on the Chinese market.”
“Is he?” Rush’s eyes glinted. “Go on.”
“When the strangled girl showed up in Max’s bed last January, Piste Ski—the French firm for which Max designed equipment—called in Krane’s to investigate.”
“Covering its corporate back.”
She nodded. “Oliver used his networks to research the girl’s murder. The Swiss police knew nothing of Max’s Thai inheritance or his trip to Bangkok or Jack Roderick’s disappearance thirty-five years ago. They didn’t realize that the dead prostitute was a warning. But Oliver knew. The whole hit was Thai. And Oliver thought he knew who’d ordered it.”
“Sompong?”
“He didn’t tell me. But whatever report he sent to Harry, requesting help or information from Krane’s Asian division, got Harry killed. Four hours after receiving Oliver’s secure fax, Leeds was dead.”
“Let me get this straight: You trusted Oliver Krane because he’d gotten his oldest friend killed?”
“I thought he was emotionally invested.” She looked away from Rush, toward the lush jungle growth that bordered the snarled highway. “Why are you so interested in Kowloon?”
“I lived there once.” Abruptly, Rush turned his key in the ignition. “Oliver Krane set the rules of this game, up until Wednesday night—when Jeff Knetsch told Sompong who you really are.”
“The cuckoo in the nest. Oliver’s fucked, isn’t he?” “Question is—will Sompong go after Krane? Or Krane’s pawn—you?”
Rush settled her in his living room with a glass of Thai iced tea and a copy of I Was Amelia Earhart to entertain her. He solicited a promise that she wouldn’t move from the condo, wouldn’t open the front door to anyone but himself, and left her alone.
When he reached the pavement, he walked purposefully in the direction of the U.S. embassy until he knew, from experience, that he was beyond the sight of someone watching from his living-room window. Then he turned left along a side street and doubled back to Wireless Road. There he took up a sheltered position near a news kiosk that offered an excellent view of his building’s front entrance.
It was possible, of course, that she had told him everything she knew about Krane and Sompong Suwannathat. She might actually be a victim of circumstance—a puppet whose strings had been tangled against her will. But Rush believed that she was smarter than that—too smart to be played the way she insisted Oliver Krane had played her.
Is it a coin toss for control of Sompong’s empire? Rush thought, as he surveyed a rack of magazines. Is she pretending to be at odds with Krane, because Knetsch said too much this morning? It was possible that Krane intended to take over Sompong’s operation—and Stefani intended to take out Oliver first. Might she actually be shooting for all the marbles? Winning, Rush knew, was fundamental to Stefani Fogg. Almost more fundamental than survival.
He would pretend to be a credulous chump. He would leave her to her own
devices for a while, and if she bolted—follow where she led.
“Marty,” he said quietly into his cell phone, “I’m waiting for our friend. I don’t know how long I’ll be.”
“Keep me posted.”
Rush shut off his phone. Marty Robbins, his station chief, knew all about Kowloon. Marty didn’t have to be told what Krane & Associates could do. He wanted Sompong Suwannathat by the balls and he was convinced Stefani Fogg would carry Rush to the end of all the questions the station had asked about the minister for years.
Why are you so damn interested in Kowloon?
He flipped through a sports magazine, his attention focused on his front door.
Once upon a time Rush Halliwell had been a junior case officer in Hong Kong, with responsibility for the internal Chinese triads that controlled commerce and crime. Triads were an accepted part of the fabric of the colony’s life, and they made dull work for a CIA case officer—or had, until Rush took over the job. He landed in Hong Kong in 1995, when the fantasy of the island’s reversion to mainland China was about to come true. The greatest capitalist enclave in Asia would soon be handed to the greatest Communist power left in the world, and everyone who read tea leaves for a living was jumpy as hell about the consequences.
The U.S. embassy muttered darkly that the British were almost certainly fomenting Chinese rebellion, just to make the handover painful. The British countered hotly that the CIA must be funding triad violence to make the colonial administration look bad. In the midst of all the backbiting a cache of guns nobody could explain or account for was actually discovered in the ceiling joists of a condemned house in Kowloon. And the problem became Rush’s to solve.
Guns were banned from the Crown Colony of Hong Kong; possession of them was a capital offense. No one, however, would claim the Kowloon guns; thus, who could be prosecuted? Two men who loitered near the condemned house—triad scouts, in the hysterical language of the Hong Kong press—were arrested and questioned, but the trail was cold: interrogation led nowhere. Rush fruitlessly trolled the station’s best fishing grounds. He gauged the quality of the street silence and assessed the level of official no-comment and decided that the arms were intended not for triads or Commie haters among the Chinese population, but for a powerful man’s private militia. Somebody with massive amounts of money and no British passport—somebody who couldn’t get out of Hong Kong with his fortune intact—had decided to do a little gun-running as insurance against the Communist takeover.
The Secret Agent Page 33