The Secret Agent

by Francine Mathews

  The matter, as far as Rush and the Hong Kong police were concerned, would never be solved.

  Except that Rush was intrigued by an item he found while scrolling through files on gun-running, worldwide. A series of arms shipments intended for mainland China that same year had never arrived at their appointed destination. The guns had originated in Slovakia—part of that country’s Soviet legacy being liquidated in the name of democracy. A Chinese broker in Bangkok had arranged and insured the sales. The entire transaction was legal and above-board. Except that thirty million dollars’ worth of guns had never arrived.

  Pirates hijacked one load from a commercial vessel in the Gulf of Thailand. Another disappeared when a transport plane crashed in western Burma. A third, traveling overland through Laos, was seized at gunpoint by masked guerillas. By the end of five unfortunate months in 1995, nearly ninety thousand weapons—street sweepers, AK-47s, nine-millimeter handguns—had vanished into thin air.

  Rush called up an old friend in Bangkok who served as legal attaché, and requested background.

  “The gun broker’s name was Chiang Wu Fat,” Avril Blair had said. “He rented a warehouse in the Nakorn Kasem—the Bangkok Thieves Market—but the warehouse is shut down now and Chiang can’t be found. He probably doesn’t exist.”

  “He paid the insurance?”

  “A hefty sum. Nothing compared to the street value of those guns, of course. Call it Chiang’s modest investment in his own future.”

  “How did the FBI get involved?”

  Avril had paused, no doubt debating Rush’s need to know. “We were approached by a man named Oliver Krane. You’ve heard of him?”

  Rush had.

  “Krane was hired by the insurance company that got stiffed for the full value of the guns, roughly thirty million dollars, all told. They’d like to recover a few of them. Krane figured the bureau was the only organization capable of handling this big a mess. And he suggested delicately that we wouldn’t want those guns to land in L.A. or Newark.”

  “Any progress?” Rush asked.

  “None,” she replied cheerfully.

  He’d laughed out loud. “Krane picked the wrong agency, Avril. But the CIA is delighted to help.”

  By 1997, when the handover of Hong Kong seemed to be progressing smoothly, Rush traded the colony for Bangkok and, during his first week in the embassy, visited the warehouse in the Thieves Market. It was empty.

  “Who owns that place?” he asked Avril later.

  “The Minister of Culture—Suwannathat. You’ll find Sompong’s name behind a lot of local real estate, if you search hard enough.”

  “He uses proxies to buy up land?”

  “Extended networks of them.”

  “Could we pin the minister for those Chinese arms heists?”

  “Not a chance,” she’d retorted.

  Had Sompong arranged the weapons thefts to supply his private army in Chiang Rai? Had he done the 30-mil-lion-dollar deal simply for kicks? Neither the LegAtt nor the station could say. The minister’s motives for his shadow life were obscure. Sompong possessed more than enough political power to protect himself; he had inherited millions from his father. “So what,” Marty had demanded in futile frustration, “is the asshole’s point?

  “He’s growing poppies up there in the hills,” the station chief complained, “and he’s got the Army to protect his drugs. The guns he stole from the Chinese pay for the drugs—and the drugs sustain Sompong’s offshore bank accounts. Which in turn support his Army. It’s one big circle-jerk. What the hell’s he doing it for? And where is all that poppy dust going?”

  The station had never, in the five years of Rush’s tour, fingered Sompong’s distribution network. The failure was acutely embarrassing. They got no help, of course, from Thailand’s panoply of security forces. Sompong remained untouchable.

  As Rush stood before the kiosk on the pavement opposite his condo building, he thought of all that Stefani Fogg had told him that day. One fragment of information—so casually dropped she probably thought he’d overlooked it—was the key to everything.

  There’s a show going up in a few weeks that both Ankana and Jeff are involved in. Rush knew all about the art exhibition intended for the Met. For months, the embassy had worked closely with the Ministry of Culture on the project, approving the duty-free shipment of artifacts and oiling the delicate wheels of international exchange.

  What Rush hadn’t understood was the significance of Jeff Knetsch—whom Halliwell had glimpsed studying ceramics with Sompong Suwannathat in the Nakorn Kasem Tuesday night. Knetsch, the distinguished member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Board, who’d been arrested Thursday for heroin possession.

  Rush returned the magazine he’d been scanning and pulled out his cell phone a second time.

  “Marty, we need a favor from Liaison. Find a Bangkok police detective named Itchayanan. Tell him you’ve got a lead in a murder case he’s tracking. He should visit a warehouse in the Nakorn Kasem—”

  Rush would have told Marty about the ceramics Sompong was using to ship drugs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but he broke off in midsentence, his eyes fixed on the entry of his building.

  Stefani Fogg had just walked out the door.

  3

  Bangkok,

  1963

  The three of them sat in a corner of the Bamboo Bar until nearly two A.M., not drinking much but enjoying the protective cover of other farang conversation. Amid the English and French and occasional spurt of Italian it was possible to converse without drawing attention. Joe Halliwell was in his shirtsleeves and his tie was loosened. Roderick wore a pair of light cotton pants and an open-collared shirt; three hours earlier he’d worn an elegant suit fashioned of his own Thai silk, but had handed it to the host of their dinner party merely because the man admired it.

  Self-promotion, Roderick explained airily as he ducked into a taxi in a borrowed dressing gown. Grand gestures. Market sense. Halliwell refrained from snapping a photo or quoting him for the morning edition. It required all his strength.

  Alec McQueen was his usual disheveled self. In the course of nearly two decades in Thailand he had acquired a bit of weight to his frame, a rounding of his garish edges. He blew smoke rings to torment Jack, who had been advised for his health to forgo tobacco. Roderick followed the rings’ flight through the huddle of heads in the shadowy room, his eyes narrowed and his thoughts quite far away.

  “They’re saying a few more months,” McQueen murmured around the stem of his pipe. “Months!—When Kennedy’s facing a stiff reelection campaign, and needs to look like a winner? Call it a few more weeks.”

  “You think JFK escalates,” Halliwell countered, “and wipes up the mess in an afternoon? Or does he keep the boys at home and save lives? Which strategy wins the most votes?”

  “They’ll never kick Jackie out of the White House,” Roderick said absently, “so Kennedy should stop worrying about the election and get the hell out of Southeast Asia. Every local boy between the ages of nine and eighty-three, from Vientiane to Rangoon to Phnom Penh, has an AK-47 under his pillow courtesy of Chairman Mao. We’re outgunned and in this terrain we’re bound to be outmaneuvered. I told the President so, myself.”

  “Kennedy? You talked to the President?”

  “I sent some fabric to the First Lady. Kennedy phoned in his thanks.”

  The newspapermen stared at Roderick, who shrugged. “She’d seen The King and I on Broadway. All the costumes were made of Jack Roderick Silk. She liked them.”

  Halliwell fidgeted with his lighter, snapping the flame on and off. Then McQueen said, with a barking laugh, “You never urged retreat in the jungles of Ceylon, Jack.”

  “We were fighting the Japanese then. They had ships and planes and an organized attack. There was predictability, Alec—something we could target, an enemy we could find. This bunch in Vietnam is nothing but a lot of armed zealots firing knockoffs of Soviet missiles.”

  “Exactly. We’ll roll
over ’em. Give us a real army! The hell with military advisors!”

  “Roll over them—just like the French did?”

  “The French are a bunch of pussies. We bailed them out in ’44, and we’re about to do it again. Besides,” McQueen added, changing tack, “it’s not a real war in Vietnam. It’s all about Uncle Ho. A cult of personality.”

  “Look what that did for the Chinese.”

  Roderick had silenced them again. Across the room, a girl with platinum hair and a beauty mark like Monroe’s laughed in a timbre husky with smoke. The three men allowed their eyes to graze her form but none of them was moved to comment.

  “Your old friend Ruth still alive, Jack?” McQueen asked idly.

  “As far as I know.”

  “Spouting propaganda in China? Or has he moved on to Laos?”

  “We aren’t exactly in touch, Alec.”

  “Who’s Ruth?” Joe Halliwell asked.

  “I’ve been thinking about a profile for the paper,” McQueen persisted. “Pridi Banomyong, fifteen years after the failed ’48 countercoup. Thailand’s wartime hero, disgraced and living in exile. Where is Ruth now? Was all the blood and loss worth it? That sort of crap.”

  “Who’s Ruth?” Halliwell repeated.

  Roderick glanced at the reporter’s innocent face, a good twenty years younger than his own, and reflected that experience of war made a profound difference in a man. He and Halliwell had both sprung from privileged families, on opposite sides of the United States, and they’d both had an Ivy League education; but there the commonalities ceased. Too much history filled the chasm between them.

  “Ruth is an old war hero, Joe. Heroes, you’ll find, never age well.”

  “Speaking of which,” McQueen broke in, “I saw that little shit Vukrit yesterday. He didn’t see me, however, so I crossed to the opposite sidewalk and ducked into a doorway. Word has it he’s bought his way back into power.”

  “Impossible,” Roderick said easily.

  “This is Thailand, Jack. Nothing’s impossible.”

  Roderick drained his glass. “Vukrit’s been wandering in the wasteland of Pattaya for at least six years.” Ever since Field Marshal Sarit had ousted the dictator Pibul. September 1957—the same month Roderick had delivered Carlos’s son to Vukrit’s wife at her villa on the coast. Six years ago. The last time Roderick had seen Fleur.

  My God, she’d be thirty-one. What does she look like now? And where has she gone?

  “Word has it Vukrit’s got the Ministry of Culture back in his pocket,” Joe Halliwell put in unexpectedly. “Paper’s running a piece on the appointment tomorrow.”

  “We expect him to come out swinging on behalf of tradition and heritage,” McQueen added. “Siam for the Siamese, that sort of thing.”

  “When a man is afraid of the people he leads,” Roderick said, “he makes them hate the outsider instead of himself.”

  The two journalists were both watching Roderick now, McQueen’s eyes glinting through his tobacco smoke. Roderick knew that he was pontificating in a way that was embarrassing—ideals had gone out of fashion lately—but he could not stop himself. The lateness of the hour, the effect of gin, the mention of Vukrit’s name. The memory of Fleur—

  “Vukrit will circle the wagons around his sacred ruins while the rest of Southeast Asia goes up in flames,” he said, more loudly. “And you know what, gentlemen? He’ll get funding from the United States to do it. Vukrit’s our boy, now. We’ve put the palace thief in charge of the armory. That’s where two decades of fostering democracy have got us.”

  “He’ll start by attacking the farang community,” Halliwell observed.

  “By seizing my house, in fact. Isn’t that what you’re trying to tell me? Vukrit will come calling, and carry out everything I own in a wheelbarrow? At least it’ll save me having to invite him to dinner.”

  Roderick rose from the table. He was fifty-eight years old and the weight of age was suddenly stifling. “Gentlemen, I believe I should call it a day.”

  “Come on, Jack,” McQueen said brusquely. “Let me buy you another drink! The evening’s young.”

  “I wasn’t talking about the evening, Alec.” Roderick nodded courteously to Halliwell, then turned away.

  He decided to walk for a bit, although Ban Khrua was miles off and the streets at this hour were empty. Another man might have felt vulnerable, the sole farang in the night of an Asian city, but Roderick waved off the Oriental’s taxi and set out at a brisk pace along New Road. He walked with one hand in his trouser pocket and the other swinging at his side, his shoulders hunched slightly forward. Six years. Fleur might even have died in so much time.

  He wondered, as he walked, when it would happen to him—that instant of oblivion called death. His doctor was worried about his heart. His heart. He laughed mirthlessly. Perhaps he should leave Bangkok, and put behind him forever the factions and the folly and the endless cycle of warlords supplanting warlords in the name of democratic process. He had no love for Communism but he could not distinguish it from the military dictatorships in Siam that called themselves constitutional monarchies, and he could not support this new American “engagement”—a word for a wedding party!—with Vietnam. He had dreamed a dream of Asia that sprang from silk and the bones of a boy named Boonreung, but art and the desire for justice both grew cold with the passage of years. Perhaps he should go home to die.

  Mother’s not well, his son Rory had said the previous afternoon as they stared at each other across the gleaming expanse of his teakwood floor. “She’s got high blood pressure. There’s the possibility of stroke.”

  He had tried to imagine Joan as she must look now, twenty years further into her gaudy gypsy life. He failed to conjure a face. Joan, with high blood pressure. A box she could not paint herself out of.

  And there was Rory standing in his living room—a tall stranger in a naval uniform, his hair clipped short and his cap tucked neatly under his arm. All the lost years like high water between them. In the absence of photographs, Roderick had conjured Rory’s face a thousand times. And never imagined this.

  The boy had sent letters, of course—at least three of them scrawled childishly on lined yellow paper, several others that were typewritten and signed. For his part, Roderick had corresponded persistently after the final break in 1946—mailing cheerful, abrupt, unrealistic letters. He shipped lengths of silk to Joan and sketches of the dresses she might make of them. Hand-carved wooden toys the boy had long outgrown. Pictures of himself with Boonreung’s old bird on his shoulder. And money. Bank drafts were the surest antidote to guilt Roderick knew.

  He had made four trips back to the United States during his years in Asia. He’d visited his son in Evanston and California and at the Naval Academy when Rory was a cadet, Roderick established in an elegant hotel room, the boy delivered like a package by an efficient bellman. Joan flitted in and out on these occasions, waving gloved hands, and spoke heartily of Rory’s need for “man time.” They visited museums together. They conferred on the finer points of baseball. They shook hands efficiently at parting.

  But Rory was no longer a boy. It was September 1963, and he was twenty-seven years old, married now to the daughter of a Chicago banker he’d known since he was eleven. He’d brought to Bangkok a four-year-old named Max—Roderick’s only grandchild, whom he had never before seen. They had three days until Rory joined his carrier group in Subic Bay.

  “How long has it been?”

  He stood, correctly gripping his son’s hand, Rory’s gaze on a level with his own at last.

  “Since that trip to Stowe? I’d just turned sixteen.”

  Roderick remembered then the patchy snow of Vermont in January, shining blue with ice in places, and the way Rory’s fear had hunched his body over the skis, so that the boy was rigid with the certainty of falling. Had the kid ever skied again?

  “But I came to Annapolis,” he protested. “For your commission.”

  “So you did. Five years ago, then.�
��

  The house was lashed with rain; the khlong curled above its banks in a heavy brown spume. It was the height of the monsoon season. Roderick introduced Rory to Chanat Surian, the houseboy, who took young Max under his wing and fed him rice pudding made with coconut milk. Roderick filled the silences with anecdote. He found he was bracing for some vital communication-news of a death, of emotional upheaval—that might explain his son’s unexpected visitation.

  “Your life’s nothing like I imagined it.” Rory’s gaze roamed the soaring rafters of the room. “I always saw you in the jungle, surrounded by crocodiles. Like the ends of all the old maps: Here there be dragons.”

  Roderick liked the sailor’s image, though the truth of it pained him. “Your wife,” he said diffidently. “She doesn’t mind you being gone for months at a time?”

  “Annie hates it. And I swore if I married I’d never leave like …”

  … I left you, Roderick supplied mentally.

  “But what can I do? I can’t catch tailhooks in the middle of Illinois. That’s why I brought Max on this trip. I’ve got carrier duty next week. He’ll be almost five by the time I get back.”

  Max, with a shock of blond hair and the self-absorbed expression of a child who lives in his head, was sliding across the floorboards in his stocking feet. Murmuring to himself. The sounds were akin to birdsong.

  “You never found … anyone else, I suppose? After Mother?” Rory asked unexpectedly.

  “No,” Roderick lied. “I never found her.”