The Secret Agent

by Francine Mathews

  In that sepia light, Jack had looked exactly like the hero of Rory’s childhood photographs—a man already a legend—and Rory had sat rooted in the tuk-tuk, his son in his father’s embrace, tears like rain on his cheek.

  You are guilty of black crimes against the Vietnamese people, his interrogators shouted. You are an air pirate of the United States, personally responsible for the murders of one thousand women and children. Admit that you bombed a school and a hospital filled with nursing mothers. Admit that we have been kinder to you than you deserve.

  For numberless days in the room reserved for interrogations, he refused to transcribe the official confessions into his own handwriting and sign them. For this he was beaten by men who shouted obscenities in broken English. They tossed him between them until a black miasma swam before his eyes and it was obvious he was of no further use to them. He would awake under the stifling light of his own cell and know from the pounding of his heart that the keys had rattled somewhere in his sleep, and the interrogators had returned.

  Hang tough, tapped Milt Beardsley, the boy from Indiana. If they want you to take early release, they’re not going to kill you.

  Sometimes in his dreams—the ones without rain—he heard the taped confessions of other men who had broken, broadcast throughout the cells.

  Fifty-three slashes on the wall, fifty-three days. Fifty-four slashes. Fifty-five. The marks were losing their definition, his hand trembled so badly. He had not seen the man named Ruth in ten days, and for an instant he thought that perhaps they had given up. He would die here, after all.

  How long would death take?

  There came an hour in the middle of a black and fevered night when the guards shattered his healing fracture a second time and the agony in his ruined leg nearly destroyed him. When they had dumped him once more on the floor of his cell he lay in his own blood and excrement, aware of the tapping that went on around him and too feeble to care what it meant. On the fifty-ninth day he summoned enough strength to rise on one leg, remove his shirt and invert the bucket intended for his waste.

  Looping the ragged cloth through the louvered grill of his window he made a rough slipknot and would have worked the noose around his neck, but he toppled and fell. When the guards came they were outraged and carried him immediately to the airy, sunlit room where he had first been offered freedom.

  There, his hands folded placidly in front of him, sat the old man in the Mao jacket, his black eyes quite steady as he gazed up at Rory’s face.

  “You would rather die than accept my gift?”

  “I would rather die than accept dishonor,” Rory replied.

  The old man grazed Rory’s cheek with the tip of his finger. “The soldiers who guard you feel the oppression of their country very deeply, you understand. They savage you, who cannot savage the United States.”

  The finger moved along his chin. Rory could not suppress a shudder.

  “It tears at my heart to see what they have done,” Ruth said softly. “One might almost call them animals.”

  “Fuck off,” Rory muttered.

  The old man did not reply. Then, leaning back in his chair, he said, “You are very proud. That is as it should be, for Jack Roderick’s son.”

  “I am not Jack Roderick’s son.”

  Ruth withdrew a paper packet from his sleeve. He thrust it across the table.

  Rory ignored it.

  “That is a letter from your little boy.”

  His eyes slid toward the envelope. It was crinkled and soiled, as though it had traveled many miles. The censors would have read it already. He could glimpse a faint pencil mark, the scrawl of childish writing. His breath rose like a balloon in his chest until the effort to suppress it choked him.

  “I bring it to you at considerable cost,” Ruth told him. “Many people have labored to send it so far.”

  Rory stared at the peace offering. The bribe. Max.

  The old man thrust his face within an inch of Rory’s. “He knows.” The words were brusque and brutal. “Your father knows that you die a little, every day. Although you do not even call yourself his son, this letter is proof of all he hears and all that he can do. While Jack Roderick lives, he will move heaven and earth to save you. Do you understand, Rory?”

  Would he? Would Dad give a damn if I died?

  Once he’d believed Jack Roderick was the most wonderful man in the world—a hero, a true American, a warrior with a just cause. He’d needed to believe that an extraordinary father existed somewhere, a father larger than life. But now he knew that Jack Roderick had whacked backroom goons and settled scores and delivered payoffs and refused to support this war his son was making. Billy Lightfoot had told Rory everything. Jack lived for himself alone. He had no allegiances, no higher laws. He had no right to a son.

  Still, Rory said nothing. He felt mesmerized by the letter, by what accepting it might mean. The first step down a long and desperate slide.

  “Read it, Rory. Your son wrote it himself.”

  His eyes closed. Then he reached out his hand. His fingers trembled.

  The man named Ruth placed the envelope tenderly in Rory’s palm.

  “Pride,” the old man said gently, “is merely another kind of prison, my son. Your father taught me that long ago, when he gave me back my life.”

  6

  Bangkok,

  1966

  Brigadier General Billy Lightfoot stayed in Thailand for eight months after his visit to Jack Roderick’s House in the rainy season of 1963. He traveled by Jeep for weeks at a time through Khorat and the border country of Laos and Cambodia, carrying a machete on his hip in case he was trapped by jungle vines or tigers or militant Communists. In August 1964, three North Vietnamese gunboats fired torpedoes at the U.S. Navy destroyer Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin and an aircraft carrier named Ticonderoga returned fire. It was tantamount to a declaration of war against Vietnam, and Lyndon Johnson—who faced a brutal reelection battle against the Republican Barry Goldwater in November—was in no mood to look soft on Communism. Lightfoot’s plans for Khorat were given priority. By the second week of August, the 36th Tactical Fighting Squadron of the U.S. Air Force was transferred to northeast Thailand and F105s were flying rescue missions over Laos soon after.

  “Fighter jets?” Jack Roderick said when Billy tore into Bangkok one September morning to give him the news. “This is Thailand, Billy. Not Vietnam.”

  “The boys are there to fly classified missions I don’t like to talk about, Jack. You understand.”

  Roderick understood. His clearances had been stripped; he no longer had need to know.

  By 1965, the air war over North Vietnam was raining fire on the villages and rice paddies; bombing runs against Hanoi were routine. Lightfoot spent much of that year in Washington, poring over blueprints and plans. He sent Roderick cheerful bulletins the Silk King read with distaste, and seemed to have forgotten the punch he’d thrown on his old friend’s Bangkok terrace.

  And so it was with resignation that Roderick found Lightfoot standing in his front courtyard one morning in September 1966, hands on his hips and a cigar in his mouth. Billy stared, narrow-eyed, at the dense vegetation of Roderick’s garden as though it might hide any number of Hostiles. He had a PFC to drive his Jeep now. There were flags fluttering on the front end.

  “What’s your rank these days?” Roderick called from the doorstep.

  “Major-General. Commander of U.S. Forces, Khorat.”

  Roderick thought of Boonreung’s dusty plateau and the Mekong River, broad and red, that wound into Cambodia. He knew the place had changed profoundly since the American pilots had arrived there. He did not wish to see it again.

  “Congratulations. That’s quite an assignment, Billy.”

  “How’s that kid of yours?”

  “Flying A-4s off the Coral Sea,” Roderick replied.

  “Good man.”

  Good man. Good for you, Rory, as you carry the ordnance high over Hanoi: the wide, tree-lined boulevards, t
he shady stucco mansions of l’Indochine, flaring like phoenixes as you pass. There had been bombs in the Good Fight of World War II, carpet bombs over Dresden and the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima—Roderick had no claim to moral superiority. Jack loved the boy who flew the plane more than he loved the ravaged city streets. Weren’t his hands as bloody as anyone’s in Washington?

  “Come for a little ride,” Lightfoot urged. “Up to my neck of the woods. Maybe into the Triangle, if the scouts say it’s safe enough. We can do some recon. Pitch camp in the rainforest. You can tell me what the place was like during the old days.”

  “Quieter,” Roderick said. He did not want to talk strategy with Billy over four hundred miles of broken road. He could recite the phrases in his sleep.

  The Pathet Lao, squatting on the border. The Khmer Rouge to the east. Probably somebody in Burma paying with matches and Uncle Ho’s got everybody bound in blood to the Chinese. Jackals, all of ’em. You think the Soviets aren’t looking for a way in? Give ’em half a chance, they’ll fund the Malays and drive a wedge into Thailand from the south.

  He thought of his Laotian friend, Tao Oum—the fine dissecting intelligence honed in a French lycée, the gentle manners wasted now on the Pathet Lao—and remembered the drive down the Western Seaboard they had taken together in 1945. Vukrit and Carlos, wary as dogs, with Boonreung laughing between them. The moist air tearing through the open windows of the Packard and the insults flying in Thai and English and French from backseat to front. The easy brotherhood that seemed more true than anything before or since.

  He had believed he could help Asia and his friends emerge from a brutal war. They were all scattered now, twenty-one years later, some of them dead, some still fighting battles they would never win. Only he and Vukrit Suwannathat remained, opposite sides of the same coin.

  “Billy,” he said, “thanks for the offer but I think I’ll stay home.”

  Lightfoot wheeled. “Those junior grunts at the CIA don’t know their heads from their asses, Jack. They can talk numbers and positions and pinpoint a Communist enclave on a goddamn map—but they don’t have the relationships with people you do. The human element is missing, old pal, know what I mean?”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “It’s the human element I need. We need. Hell, what’ve you spent all these years in Asia for—if not to put your contacts to good use?”

  It wasn’t the first time the Pentagon had run headlong into an Agency wall; it wouldn’t be the last. The problem, Roderick guessed, was a gulf Lightfoot would never span: the chasm that fell between intelligence and tactics, between the generals with their maps and those quieter folk who sniffed the wind. The Agency believed that Uncle Ho had far more men than the Pentagon wanted to admit. The Agency and the Pentagon wrangled endlessly over troop strength and enemy numbers. The Agency wrote estimates; the Pentagon scribbled red ink in the margins before sending the reports to LBJ and his cabinet. The Agency spoke its piece, and the Pentagon said what Johnson wanted to hear. The dialogue over this war had become an escalation of mutually deniable statistics.

  “Sometimes I’m amazed by the people you know,” Lightfoot persisted. “Not just the ones you invite to dinner—but the guys you never mention. Like that new Defense Minister. That fella with the unpronounceable name.”

  “Vukrit Suwannathat. Field Marshal now.”

  “Yeah. He’s the one. The Defense Ministry will be critical to us in the next few months.” Lightfoot slapped his thigh with his army hat, and a cloud of dust rose in the moist air.

  “Vukrit’s the only minister who has ever mattered. But you’ll learn that I have no influence with him.”

  “He says the Thais are going after your old buddy Carlos—the renegade who keeps an army in the hills. The Field Marshal thinks Carlos has gone Communist, and he means to stamp him out.”

  “He’ll have to find Carlos first,” Roderick said.

  That afternoon in September, 1966, Jack Roderick decided it was time to put his affairs in order.

  He watched Billy Lightfoot’s jeep spin in the courtyard and plunge into the narrow lane beyond his gate. He thought of Boonreung dying in agony and of Fleur as she had been at nineteen, a frightened bird caught in a snare; thought of Carlos’s wife Chao fading to nothing in the jungle. If he wanted to he could place all those sins in Vukrit’s column, but he knew that he bore equal responsibility for the blight and he knew, at last, that he must stop it before it destroyed Carlos.

  He thought briefly of Chacrit Gyapay and the way the gun had felt as he placed it against the torture chief’s temple and pulled the trigger. A March night, seventeen years ago. He was still fresh with an assassin’s training then, and whipped to violence by the outrage of Boonreung’s murder. He’d drawn blood in a way that was unthinkable to him now. His kind of war was over. Vukrit demanded subtlety and cunning, not a knife in the dark.

  Roderick went inside and made two phone calls: one to his lawyer and another to the Ministry of Defense.

  When the lawyer arrived, he gave the man his instructions: tear up the will he had signed in 1960, leaving his home and his collections of pottery and art to the people of Thailand; and draft a new one, leaving everything he possessed to his son, Rory.

  Then he sat down at his desk and wrote a brief letter to his old friend Alec McQueen. He signed it with the lawyer as witness and when the man had notarized it, placed it in his desk for safekeeping. Scrawled on the front were the words, in Roderick’s minuscule handwriting: To be opened in the event of my death.

  Roderick did these things with deliberation, as though he had received a diagnosis of a terminal condition that morning. Then he put on a hat in honor of the occasion, and went out into the street holding the lawyer by the arm. The man took him as far as Dusit in his car.

  Dusit was the administrative center of Bangkok, the royal quarter, an oasis of calm in the chaotic city. Chulalongkorn, Thailand’s most Europeanized king, had designed and built the district at the close of the nineteenth century, and the spacious boulevards and grand vistas might have been lifted from Haussmann’s Paris. At this hour of the afternoon, most of the bureaucrats were dozing in their chairs.

  He passed the racetrack at the Royal Turf Club and the cages of the Dusit Zoo, the National Assembly and the Prime Minister’s house and the residence of the king. At the Ministry of Defense he was admitted without question and ushered up three flights of stairs to the office, large as a ballroom, where Vukrit presided.

  The Defense Minister had been named to his post only six weeks before—the culmination, Roderick suspected, of a lifelong ambition. Vukrit must be in his mid-fifties now. Roderick was sixty-one.

  “Your Excellency,” he said with a slight nod.

  “The Legendary American,” the minister replied. “Isn’t that what they call you?”

  Vukrit remained seated as Roderick approached, like royalty, and made no move to form the ceremonial wei. The significance of his rudeness would not be lost on the five Thais who stood around his desk—some of them in uniform, some in civilian dress. All gazed at Roderick unsmilingly.

  “I can give you very little time.”

  “I’m grateful. I wish to speak to you in private.”

  “Then you should have invited me to your home. I do business at this ministry, Roderick—to meet alone suggests an unhealthy tendency toward plotting.”

  “I was pressed for time. The Commander of U.S. Forces in Khorat spoke with me this morning, Your Excellency, and having seen him I came directly to you. If we could speak in private—”

  Vukrit hesitated, as though it would give him pleasure to deny any of Roderick’s requests; then he waved his hand, and his coterie departed.

  Roderick waited until the door had closed firmly behind them. Then he drew something from his jacket pocket and held it aloft. Though uncut, the smooth surface of the dark red gem shimmered like a well of fire between his fingers. “Lightfoot tells me you have plans for Carlos, Vukrit. Don’t act on the
m.”

  “Do you think that old stone frightens me, Roderick? You cannot prove I ever touched it. You cannot prove it was left in the chambers of the king.”

  “True,” Roderick conceded. “But you of all people understand the power of rumor. You rose on rumor’s back. Rumor branded Pridi Banomyong the assassin behind the king’s murder, and rumor caused his government to fall.”

  “I’m more powerful than Pridi Banomyong ever was. More powerful than you, however many petty thugs you may once have murdered by moonlight. I hear that not even the CIA listens to Roderick anymore.”

  “May I inquire as to the health of Your Excellency’s son?”

  Vukrit’s eyelids flickered. “Sompong has earned his wings in the Royal Thai Air Force. My son trains in Khorat with your General Lightfoot, and wears a uniform like his father before him.”

  “Which father, I wonder? And which uniform? If you care nothing for the power of rumor, consider what it can do to that boy. If you so much as think of hunting down Carlos again, your career—and your son’s—will end in shame.”

  Vukrit threw back his head and laughed.

  “I wrote a letter today,” Roderick continued imperturbably, “instructing Alec McQueen, the publisher of the Bangkok Post, to print its contents should I die. Other papers will pick up the story, in the United States and around the world.”

  “You think your dying will be like a king’s? You flatter yourself, Roderick.”

  “My letter summarizes the case against you. You stole a gem—a talisman of good luck—from a priceless artifact you hacked out of a cave wall. The artifact sits in my house and the dealer who sold it is prepared to bear witness against you. The talisman—a cabochon ruby I will place with my letter—was dropped by the man who murdered King Ananda on June 9, 1946. Vukrit Suwannathat.”

  Roderick leaned across the minister’s desk. “If you hunt down Carlos, the rumors will begin. If I die, the rumors will twine around your neck until you strangle under their weight. It’s the only kind of justice left, Vukrit—that you fall the same way you rose.”