The Secret Agent

by Francine Mathews

  “You cannot prove I killed the king.”

  This time it was Roderick who smiled. “Your enemies would snatch at any excuse to hang you: no one in Thailand is interested in proof.”

  7

  Does this place always empty out before six o’clock?” Rush Halliwell demanded as he strode back from the loading dock. He glanced through an open doorway, but the lights were doused. “Dickie Spencer keeps his office here. Where’s he?”

  “It’s Friday afternoon,” the salesgirl said indignantly. “Mr. Spencer quits early and goes to his country place on the weekends. Just who are you, and what do you want?”

  “Did you see the American woman leave by the back door?”

  The girl shook her head. “I’m supposed to stay up front. Mr. Spencer’s assistant might know where your friend went, but she’s gone home for the day. If you’d like, I can have her call you on Monday.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Rush swung back into the shop, his gaze scanning the brightly colored aisles. “No other exits, right?”

  “None. Is this … really important?”

  “Not to you,” he answered with one of his most charming smiles, and hurried out into the street.

  He arrived home to discover that Stefani’s luggage was still in his guest room. This brought him up short. She had carried nothing but a backpack when she’d left his building, but a woman of Stefani’s resources could easily jettison an entire season’s worth of unwanted ballast.

  She was less likely, however, to leave behind her U.S. passport. As she had certainly done.

  Rush stood over the contents of her luggage, tossed willy-nilly on his spare bed, and thought. Did she keep a second identity handy—passport and all? Such a thing was common practice in CIA circles; did Oliver Krane’s operatives do it, too? Or was he reaching for an explanation? Had she meant to return from Jack Roderick Silk that afternoon?

  “That’s crazy,” he said aloud. “Asinine, in fact. You just can’t accept that she flipped you off and escaped.”

  He headed for the embassy at a run.

  Before she was fully conscious, she knew that something dreadful had happened. The catlike shrieking near at hand was unbearable. She struggled awake, resisting the impulse to sleep, sleep, and forget the world. It was important that she open her eyes and somehow strangle the damn cat.

  “The amount of trouble you’ve caused—you vicious shit.” Ankana Lee-Harris’s Knightsbridge croon had vanished. “I might have had the whole evening with Dickie—but here I am, carting you to the airport. God, it makes me wild!”

  Clarity returned slowly to Stefani’s mind, and with it, a ton of self-abuse.

  Dickie Spencer had been supremely accommodating when she called that afternoon to request an interview. He seemed genuinely pleased to hear her voice and enthusiastic at the prospect of a meeting. Her arrival at the shop had brought his assistant hurrying to the door, a warm smile on her lips, to personally conduct Stefani past the glowing squares of silk patterned with elephants and parrot tulips, the pillowcases and bed coverings and drapes, past the bolts of fabric in every imaginable hue. The woman had offered Stefani water or coffee and when Stefani refused both, had ushered her into Dickie’s office and closed the door behind her.

  Stefani had advanced, her hand extended, toward the man who stood somewhat stiffly by the drafting table; but the pleasantry she meant to utter died on her lips. Spencer’s face was strained, his eyes focused on someone behind her—and as she instinctively began to turn, the small, hard cylinder of a gun was pressed sharply into her spine. It was quite emphatic; impossible to confuse with anything else.

  She went rigid, her eyes fixed on Spencer’s face.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Fogg,” he said gently, “but not all of us are capable of tilting at windmills.” Then he dropped his gaze to the silk pattern that rested on his drafting table.

  It had been Jo-Jo who held the gun, and even now she could not say whether Dickie had called Sompong the moment she set up the appointment, or whether Ankana Lee-Harris had done it—Ankana who had been in Dickie’s pocket all day, ostensibly coordinating museum loans for the big show, darling, but actually insinuating herself as only Ankana could. Spencer’s motives—his personal integrity versus the pressure Sompong had brought to bear—would remain open questions. For now, Stefani had stickier problems to solve.

  Her arms, bound behind her, ached. The base of her skull throbbed. She tried to part her lips, and decided they were fused with electrical tape. She was slumped in one corner of a large car, Ankana in the other. Jo-Jo, predictably, driving. It was he who had knocked her out with the butt of his gun, and tossed her into the backseat.

  “Left to myself, I’d have shot you dead and slipped your body into the Chao Phraya,” Ankana complained. “But Sompong says no. He wants you for his own.”

  The U.S. embassy on Wireless Road was a massive concrete block, derisively known as an “Inman Box,” after Bobby Ray Inman, the Navy admiral chiefly responsible for its design and construction during the 1980s. It was a structure intended to foil the worst sort of terrorist attack, and it was so secure that it resembled a penitentiary rather than a seat of diplomacy. Two decades ago, Inman Boxes had sprung up on U.S. installations worldwide, and as one wag observed, they could withstand assault by an entire platoon of tanks—but as they had virtually no windows, no one inside would be able to tell.

  Rush was staring intently at his computer terminal within the embassy’s CIA station. He and Marty Robbins were the only two working this Friday evening. It was seven-thirteen; most of the lights within the vault were extinguished.

  “You think she knew she was being followed?” Marty asked Rush for the third time.

  “What else can I think? She went into the silk shop by the front door. She left by the loading dock.” Rush printed the screen he had been studying so acutely and shoved it at Marty. “I knew I’d heard that name before. She wasn’t lying about this.”

  Marty adjusted his reading glasses and peered at the cable Rush had given him. It was a back-channel report-one sent between two regional stations without the knowledge or transmission of headquarters in Washington. He glanced at the date and time group that headed the cable coding, and noticed Rush had received it from the CIA’s Hong Kong base only minutes before.

  Regarding your query re: Harry Leeds, British national formerly resident in Hong Kong, we can confirm Leeds died in a pedestrian accident November 23, 2001, in Kowloon. Summary of Leeds’s station file follows. Note: this file was compiled for the most part by LegAtt then residing in Hong Kong, since posted on to London, and represents Bureau interest in subject rather than active Agency development. Nothing contained herein should be construed as official Agency information regarding Leeds. End Note.

  Subject first came to Bureau attention in 1997, in the course of an investigation into gun-smuggling networks then operative around the island. Subject was suspected of using highly sophisticated electronic interception equipment to surveil the Royal Coast Guard and Hong Kong Harbormaster’s offices in an effort to provide early warning and escape-and-evasion assistance to ships involved in the smuggling network. Subject admitted to possessing such equipment but asserted that it had been stolen from his offices and subsequently operated by persons unknown to him. When asked why he never reported the theft, Subject stated that had he done so, his true profession in Hong Kong would be known. Subject is director of HK office of Krane & Associates, the international risk management firm, an occupation he wishes to remain secret. It would not help Krane’s reputation as a security firm, moreover, if it were generally known that Leeds had been successfully burgled. Note: Subject is generally regarded as a socially prominent man of independent means, a member of the Jockey Club, and not as a security professional. End Note.

  LegAtt conducted interviews of Subject’s professional assistant (See file No. HK-2467-1997), who denied all knowledge of smugglers and corroborated the story of the theft. LegAtt also investigated Subj
ect’s personal financial statements and found no apparent gain in assets, such as might represent criminal profits, during the period in question. Subject participated fully with both Hong Kong police and LegAtt throughout, but was extremely anxious regarding conclusion of investigation. Subject ultimately was not charged with wrongdoing.

  Final note: From 1997 to date of death in November 2001, Leeds drew no further interest from Hong Kong law enforcement.

  There the cable transmission ended. Marty looked up from the sheet of paper, and growled, “What the hell?”

  “Stefani told me this morning that she decided to work for Krane because he said his best friend and Asian partner, Harry Leeds, had been murdered in Kowloon and he wanted to bring Leeds’s killer to justice. Krane suggested that the same people responsible for Leeds’s death had it in for Max Roderick.”

  “We’ve always suspected Sompong Suwannathat was running guns in Hong Kong in ’97,” Marty mused, “the same year, according to this cable, that Leeds was under FBI investigation. I see the connection—but I don’t see why we should care. If one crook kills another—”

  “Leeds’s name rang a bell this morning, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. I left Hong Kong almost five years ago. I never looked at the smuggling operation itself— that was Bureau and police territory. I was charged with pinpointing which triad or terrorist group had received the guns, and what they intended to do with them. Harry Leeds didn’t come into it.”

  “Rush, are you clutching at straws?” Marty glared at him from under his brows. “Trying to dig up something— anything—that suggests Fogg didn’t snow you? If Oliver Krane actually trained this broad, then she knows when to use the truth. A scrap of honesty at the right time could make Satan look plausible.”

  “She left her passport behind. That feels wrong to me.”

  “She probably has ten of them, complete with visas. She’s probably on a flight to Europe as we speak. Not every girl who’s set up to be whacked is a victim, Rush. Speaking of which—Police Chief Thak informed me that Jeffrey Knetsch was knifed to death in his cell two hours after you left him. We’ll have to arrange shipment for the body.”

  “Christ.” Rush groaned. “Of course he was killed. That pathetic bastard—”

  “You did what you could. You couldn’t get him out— they don’t post bail in drug cases.”

  “I should have learned more from him while I had the chance. He never told us who’s on the receiving end of the drugs Sompong is shipping to New York.”

  “I’ve handed that problem to Avril Blair. She’ll get the Bureau’s Manhattan office working on it ASAP.”

  “And what about us? Do we use that potter’s confession to go after Sompong?”

  “You know goddamn well the CIA’s got absolutely no jurisdiction here. We don’t do law enforcement, Rush. We pinpoint the crooks. We don’t snap on the cuffs.”

  “But we know people who do.”

  “Police Chief Thak passed the buck to the federal security forces—and most of their relevant bodies have already gone home for the weekend.”

  “We can’t miss this chance,” Rush muttered through his teeth. “It’s the best we’ve had in five years—five years, Marty, we’ve been watching this asshole pull shit that’d get him castrated in public in any self-respecting country.”

  “What do you want me to do? Hire a gunship and buzz Sompong’s compound in Chiang Rai myself?”

  “Call in your chips! Get on the horn to Washington right now, and use any clout you can beg, borrow or steal. If the Thai federal police have gone home for the weekend, then fuck ’em. Let’s go over their heads.”

  “And catch hell on Monday?”

  “Look—our DEA guys have spent over a decade training Thai drug enforcement squads to sniff out opium networks and kill government corruption. But what’s the Thai enforcement record?”

  “A lot of small stuff, nipped in the bud.”

  “Because the big stuff—the kind Sompong Suwannathat breeds—is out of reach. We’re in a position, you and I, to hand these poor jokers the biggest bust of their lives: one of the most powerful and hated figures in Thai government, caught with his goddamn pants down. We should be auctioning seats in the Chinook, Marty.”

  “Chinook?” Marty chortled. “You’re dreaming, Rush. By the time we get a chopper full of commandos in the air, Sompong’ll be long gone.”

  “Sompong won’t know we’re coming. Thak’s too afraid of you this time to report what he knows—that Khuang the potter blew Sompong’s network. Sompong thinks he’s silenced Knetsch, and that the Bangkok police are in his pocket. He’s free as a bird.”

  “Unless Miss Fogg told him otherwise.”

  Brought up short, Rush stared at his station chief. It was a vulnerable point; indeed, it was the crux of the whole dilemma. Doubt about Stefani’s motives—her loyalties, if she had any—had sent him careening here to the embassy to write a priority cable. He had been searching for any sort of evidence to tip the scales in his mind. And still he could not say with certainty what she had done. Or what she was capable of doing.

  “I can call in my chips,” Marty said slowly. “I can get on the horn to Washington and disturb some VIP weekends. I can move heaven and earth if I have to, Rush. But I don’t care to look like shit afterward.”

  “You won’t. Provided we move fast.”

  “And Miss Fogg?”

  Rush snapped off his computer and grabbed his suit jacket. “Is a chance we’ll just have to take.”

  8

  Bangkok,

  February 1967

  Fleur was standing on the terrace as the sun went down. The houseboy, Chanat Surian, moved like a faint breeze among the braziers, and as the torches flared, Roderick studied the woman he had once loved. She was still slight and elegant as a question mark, with all the life of Siam in her fingertips; but she was no longer young. He noticed the difference first in her mouth, which was hard and unyielding. Her eyes gazed flatly on a disappointing world. She wore her sleek hair in a tight knot at the crown of her head, but the attempt at discipline collapsed with her neck. The slim bones of her spine where it met the nape of dark hair were as fragile as a kitten’s.

  It was the only part of her that he ached to touch.

  He had found her waiting in his entrance courtyard just after four o’clock that afternoon, simple sandals on her bare feet and a cotton scarf tied around her head. She looked like a peasant—one of the country women who begged rides on the back of market trucks bound for the city—and from the condition of her clothes, which were clean but shabby, Roderick understood that she lived in poverty. She stood humbly, with her hands clasped, and would not have been surprised, he thought, if he had refused to recognize her.

  “Fleur,” he said in bewilderment, “what are you doing here?”

  “I read about your son.”

  The English words came haltingly after a decade of disuse. Ten years. My God, has it been so long?

  “In the newspaper,” she went on. “The Viet Cong shot down his plane. I never knew you had a son.”

  “I’m sorry, Fleur. I should have told you.”

  “But at least he died for his country. There is much honor in such a death.”

  “They’re calling it ‘Missing in Action.’ Not killed,” Roderick said awkwardly. “A formality. They don’t know for certain Rory’s dead. Won’t you come in? And have a drink?”

  She had demurred for a while but in the end he’d ushered her upstairs, with the careful politeness he reserved for strangers referred by mutual friends.

  It was one of the few nights he had no guests to dinner, and so she sat on his couch and talked glancingly about the decade that had passed. The houseboy brought plates of satay and papaya salad for them. Roderick exerted himself to be charming—the uncomplicated polish and amusing words that had carried him through a lifetime of difficult encounters—but this was not the way he had been accustomed to talk to Fleur. Watching her unresponsive face, her thou
ghts so obviously elsewhere, he knew she felt the difference in him, despite all his care.

  More than the knowledge of Rory’s plane had brought her to the house on the khlong. Some trouble preyed on her mind. He waited for her to explain, through the food and the talk and the silences that fell between them.

  “So much has changed,” she said now as they stood on the terrace. “The garden has grown so wild, I cannot see the waters of the khlong. Even your cockatoo has forgotten me.”

  “She’s just angry you neglected her for so long. Did you keep up your dancing?”

  “It’s a habit, like any other. But no one would choose to watch me perform now.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “I speak of art, and the loss of art, and you know nothing of either, Jack.” She said it bitterly.

  “I know you’ve been gone too long.”

  She traced the wood grain of the railing with her fingertip. “Did you ever look for me?”

  “Relentlessly.”

  “I didn’t want to be found.”

  “Why not? Because you’d betrayed me? Sooner or later, we all betray what we love.”

  “Cynic,” she said violently.

  “No. You confuse me with that other man in your life.”

  She opened her mouth to say something harsh, but with an effort controlled herself. “I’m sorry, Jack. It’s this war. The men in uniforms and the guns everywhere. The planes flying overhead. I hate the war and it frightens me. Do you ever think of going home?”

  “Home?”

  “To the United States.” She clutched at his shirt, her face suddenly beseeching. “Why stay in Bangkok when the world is in flames? Why stay and wait for death, Jack, when we could run away from it?”