Restless Soul

by Alex Archer

  He looked noticeably paler, and his face was even sweatier.

  “You’re coming with me,” she said.

  He started shaking, and she let out a disappointed sigh. She’d thought a smuggler should have a little more backbone. “To…Hue? Going…to…Hue?”

  It was her turn to nod. She nudged him out the back door and toward the muddy Jeep, just as a silver Hilux Vigo pulled into the far side of the alley. A four-door pickup, it was pristine enough to have just been driven off the showroom floor. Its windows were tinted, but Annja could make out three shapes inside.

  “Lovely. I’ll bet those are the men who work for your uncle.” She shoved him into the Jeep’s passenger side, jumped behind the wheel, sitting on the maps she’d grabbed, and prayed one of the keys fit in the ignition. Annja didn’t want another fight right now.

  She fumbled with the keys as two of the men leaped out of the Hilux, the driver staying behind the wheel. One man headed to the shop’s back door, the other came barreling at the Jeep, pulling a gun out of his waistband.

  The second key worked, and the Jeep’s engine roared, tires spinning and throwing clumps of dirt at the man.

  “The seat belt,” Annja shouted. “Put it on! Now!”

  Nang groped for the belt as Annja slammed her foot on the gas pedal and shot down the alley, right front fender catching a garbage can and sending it and its smelly contents flying.

  “Duck!”

  Nang hunched down as much as the belt allowed. The windshield shattered as bullets struck it. The shooter was using a silencer.

  At the end of the alley she jerked the wheel hard right and swerved to avoid a parked car. Traffic wasn’t heavy in this part of the city, and she took advantage of a near-empty street as she raced south. A few more turns, a cut through an alley, the silver truck gaining on her, and she found herself going west on Si Donchai Road, where a steady stream of cars headed in both directions and exhaust filled the air and settled heavily on her tongue.

  She slammed her hand against the steering wheel in frustration as she weaved around a late-model Honda Civic and found herself smack behind a tour bus. She heard tires squeal behind her, and a glance in the rearview mirror showed the pickup bullying the Civic onto the sidewalk.

  “They will kill us!” Nang’s knuckles were white on the dashboard.

  “I will do my best to not let that happen.” Annja spun the wheel to the right, cutting across the opposite lane of traffic and nearly being sideswiped by a minivan. More tires squealed, including the Jeep’s. Cars started honking, and in the distance she heard a siren.

  “The police!” Nang looked relieved and frightened at the same time.

  Annja was confident she could talk herself out of trouble; she’d done it many times before. But having an unwilling passenger could be considered kidnapping. Then there was the issue of car theft, breaking and entering at the shop, beating up the old man—it would take a while to talk herself out of this.

  The truck swerved right behind her. Only two shapes were visible inside, one leaning out the passenger window—the man who’d shot at them in the alley. Everything was happening too fast for Annja to get a good look at him, but his yellow shirt and his shaved head stood out. He fired at them again, the bullet striking the rear of the Jeep.

  Her heart pounded; she realized he was aiming at the jerricans in the back. He could blow them up with a well-placed shot.

  “Hold on!” she shouted.

  Annja hadn’t needed to tell Nang that. He’d dug his fingernails into the dashboard and was gritting his teeth. His eyes were needle slits and he took in great gulps of the exhaust-filled air. One hand on the steering wheel, she flailed about with the other, finding her seat belt and pulling it across her lap, shimmying by a Land Rover and past a Camry, praying all the while that the gunmen didn’t shoot an innocent driver. She clicked the belt and felt only a little safer.

  Sirens wailed louder and she reached a stretch where traffic was thinner. She floored the gas pedal and the Jeep surged faster, and then was bumped from behind. A glance in the mirror showed the grille of the pickup. It conveniently had no license plate.

  “They will kill us! They will—”

  “Shut up,” Annja warned. She didn’t need Nang’s distraction.

  The truck veered to the left, coming alongside the Jeep. Annja kept one hand on the wheel and extended the other, calling for her sword and finding it difficult to grip the pommel with the blade meeting resistance from the wind and the speed.

  Nang screamed and Annja swiped down with the blade, aiming for the gun in the man’s hand and instead connecting with his arm. It had the same effect—the gun clattered away on the pavement, disappearing beneath a black BMW. The truck smashed into the Jeep’s side, and Annja had to compensate to keep from being pushed off the road.

  “Bridge!” Nang warned.

  Annja divided her attention between the road, the threatening pickup, oncoming traffic and now the bridge, which narrowed the road to a single lane. Below, the water sparkled like sapphire glass spun between the dirt-brown banks.

  “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” she coaxed the Jeep as she pressed the gas pedal as far down as it would go and inched past the truck. At least the passenger was inside the truck now, holding his injured arm. The driver was another matter; she spotted a gun in his hand. But he had to jump in behind her in the face of now-one-lane traffic.

  “We will die!” Nang cried.

  “Everyone dies,” Annja said. “But I won’t let us die today.”

  The Jeep rode up on the sidewalk as she jockeyed for a better position to see the truck behind her. The passenger was on a cell phone; she couldn’t make out more than that because of the tinting to the windows. The driver had his arm out the window, gun against the door.

  More sirens wailed, and she picked out three distinct sounds. At least three police cars were coming. Before they reached the end of the bridge a fourth was added to it. Car horns blared as she took an off-ramp at full speed, tilting the Jeep up on its right wheels and nearly tossing Nang from his seat, despite the seat belt. She raced past a motorcycle that spun out in her wake and watched in horror as the silver truck headed straight for the motorcycle.

  “God, please don’t,” she prayed, her stomach rising into her throat. The biker’s death would be on her hands.

  A maintenance worker on the side of the road pumped his fist and shouted at her as she continued to look in her rearview mirror.

  The truck driver veered to the right to avoid the motorcyclist. His tires screamed in protest and the truck briefly rose up on its right tires like a stunt car before rolling on its side, sparks from the metal scraping against the pavement shooting up like fireworks.

  Annja jabbed the gas pedal again and switched lanes, driving straight west again and leaving Chiang Mai and the increasing number of sirens behind.

  28

  “Nang, I want you to tell me all about Lanh Vuong. You were going to do that, remember, before we were rudely interrupted by your uncle’s thugs.”

  Nang was still shaking from the wild ride in the city. She’d pulled onto a narrow road that cut through farmland. She wanted to avoid any major routes for a while, as plenty of witnesses would have described her and the Jeep to police.

  “Lanh Vuong,” she repeated. “Tell me about him.”

  “I called him Uncle Lanh when I was a boy, but he was not a true uncle.”

  “Go on.” She stopped and let the engine idle, and she unhooked her seat belt and stood, pulling the maps out from under her. If she hadn’t sat on them, they would have blown out. Other papers had, and she’d nearly lost the jerricans and her backpack with the skull pieces, too. Stretching forward, she knocked the glass out of the window frame, making it easier to see. “I’d guess it was a 9 mm,” she mused as she began to drive again.

  “Lanh Vuong is an important—” Nang picked through his brain for the appropriate word “—exporter of goods from Vietnam.”

  “S
muggler,” Annja corrected under her breath. “How did he get in the business, Nang?” An odd question for her to ask, she thought, but something niggled at a corner of her mind.

  “Because of the Vietnam War, I think. Before I was born, before my father and Uncle Kim were born, Uncle Lanh was a soldier in the North Vietnamese army. An important one, a colonel. He was in his forties then, and he led many men to battle.”

  So he was in his eighties, or perhaps ninety now, definitely an old man, Annja thought. She waited, listening to the wind blow across the hood and welcoming it cooling her. It dried the sweat on her face; she’d sweated rather profusely during the erratic race from the antiques shop and out of Chiang Mai.

  “Uncle Lanh was captured by American fighting men in the war. Some of his men were captured also, and all of them were put in a prison in South Vietnam. A bad prison, Uncle Kim told me. For forty years.”

  Annja’s eyebrows rose. “Forty years?” How was that possible? She’d thought prisoners on both sides were released after the war, though to this day reports lingered of MIA American soldiers still rumored to be held in the heart of the country.

  “Papers were lost, and the prison changed hands,” Nang said. “Uncle Kim said Lanh was supposed to be free after the war, but the lost papers kept him in prison. Until the prison closed and everyone left inside was freed.”

  “A forgotten man,” Annja said.

  “A bitter man with no love left for his country. Vietnam was bad to my uncle Lanh.”

  “So he took from it,” she surmised. “In the past few years of his freedom, he has taken relics.”

  “What is the wrong in that? Uncle Lanh was owed for all the years in prison. A lifetime he spent in a cell.”

  “Uncle Lanh is a thief and a smuggler,” Annja said. And probably worse. Those in the operation under him showed no compunction against killing, so likely Lanh hadn’t, either.

  “There were places, Uncle Kim said, where ancient golden treasures were hidden during the war. Monks did not want the temple riches to fall into American hands and so they hid them in the jungle. Uncle Lanh knew of the places, and much of it was still there when he got out of prison. So Uncle Lanh and a few of the soldiers who served under him regained the treasures and sold them to wealthy men in other countries. Getting them out of Vietnam was the dangerous part, he once told me. But he had ways, and people looked the other way when he gave them gold. He sent the gold to Laos and Thailand, to hidden places in the mountains. Then buyers were found and the treasures moved on. And when those treasures were gone he found more.”

  Nang kept talking without more prodding, as if he wanted someone to know about Lanh and the operation. He spoke about it with a sense of pride and clearly believed that it was all justified because of the prison time Lanh had served.

  “He took things from temples. Not a lot at any one time, but all together a lot since his freedom. Also from a museum once, he told me. And from burial places. Uncle Kim said the dead did not need their gold. Lahn needed the gold, though, gold and diamonds and emeralds. Uncle Lahn said he would be dead soon enough because he was so old, and that he would enjoy the gold while he still lived. It became, I think, the only thing he loved. Gold and money. Everything else he hated.”

  “You don’t need to be involved with all of this, Nang. The world is full of opportunities and—”

  “This is what my family does. This is all I know,” he said angrily.

  And this is all I know, she thought. Seeing something through to its end, putting the last piece of the puzzle into place and righting any wrongs along the way. It wasn’t all she knew before she picked up the sword, but it was her life now. Along her previous path she would have made a few phone calls and let some international authorities find Lanh Vuong. She would never have been involved in a chase scene on Chiang Mai’s streets, or a sword fight in the antiques store. She certainly wouldn’t have been driving across Thailand, and now Laos, and within several hours into Vietnam.

  “But I do not hate like my uncle Lanh does. I do not hate everything. You, though, I hate you.”

  Had Lanh Vuong hated enough during the war to use the skull bowl? Annja wondered.

  “Read this map to me.” Annja sat the one of Northern Vietnam on Nang’s lap. “Read about Hue. Tell me all about Hue.”

  She genuinely did want to know about the city she was driving to, and she wanted to keep his mind occupied at the same time.

  Nang was clearly terrified of her, and she did nothing to ease that feeling. She’d left the gun in the back room of the antiques shop and appeared unarmed to him. He’d seen the sword during the race through Chiang Mai’s streets, but she didn’t have it now, so it would seem that she’d dropped it when the Jeep nearly flipped over. Still, he made no move to escape or call for help as they took a narrow road over the border in Laos and passed a farmer leading an ox.

  The map shook in his hands.

  Annja felt bad for him…but not bad enough to let him out of the Jeep. Annja might need his help to translate and to find the antiques shop in Hue, which he’d admitted to visiting on more than one occasion to see his “uncle” Lanh.

  Her stomach rumbled, apparently taking issue with the food she’d bought a half hour earlier and wolfed down. Annja had wanted to keep her strength up and so had ordered, in effect, three meals. Next to a gas station was a noodle shop, and her reluctant passenger had ordered neua gai, steamed chicken on rice. She’d been hungrier, ordering the same, plus loog chin plaa, fish meatballs, which had a softer texture than beef meatballs, and giaw plaa, dumplings stuffed with chopped fish. Normally, Annja had a cast-iron stomach, but with every rut and bump in the road she hit, her meal threatened to make a reappearance.

  “It is seven hundred kilometers,” Nang said, oblivious to her discomfort. “From Chiang Mai to Hue.”

  “Good to know.” Annja had filled up the tank, and the two jerricans in the back; she didn’t know when the next service station would present itself. “Tell me more.”

  “Hue has a population of…” He paused and leaned forward, trying to read the tiny print as they bounced along. “Three hundred and fifty thousand, a little more. It covers five thousand square kilometers.”

  A big city. Good thing she’d brought Nang with her, after all, as navigating a large foreign city she’d never been to might be daunting.

  “It has many districts. Phong Dien, Quang Dien, A Luoi, Nam Dong, Huong Thuy, Vang…”

  She let his voice trail to the back of her mind. She’d pay more attention when the subject became more interesting or relevant.

  She knew the dirt road they drove down was not on her map, but that she’d eventually come to something larger that would be. The grass that lined the edges was tall and broad and a brilliant green that gave way to paler green trees in the distance with wide, sweeping fronds. It was more of the primitive beauty that she’d noted around the Thins village, but the village she approached looked much poorer. The homes were made of severely weathered planks that looked as if a strong wind would take them down. Several of them were two levels high with rickety-looking outer stairs leading to the second floor. The villagers who made their way between the buildings were dressed simply, many of them in white, and none of the men wearing shirts.

  The next village looked little different, though there were children playing. They wore colorful shorts and shirts that had seen better days.

  “This part of the country is poor,” Nang told her.

  The road narrowed and rice fields appeared on both sides. Men and women worked them, and a boy led an ox across the road, forcing Annja to slow. There were puddles and deep ruts, and the Jeep bounced with the passing miles. Far to the south were forested mountains wreathed in gray clouds. One formation looked like the humps on a camel’s back.

  “Nang, tell me some more about Hue.”

  “Uncle Kim would take me to the palaces on the bank of the Perfume River when I was a child. Emperors and mandarins had built them. More than a
hundred very old buildings along that river. Tombs of the Nguyen kings there also. Lanh took from some of those tombs. My favorite was the Khai Dinh tomb, but the Gia Long and Minh Mang I also remember.” He was relaxing, talking about the city, but only a little. The map still shook in his hands. “Good food in Hue—mostly vegetables, though. Beautiful pagodas. Tourists like the pagodas. He took me to Da Nang also, my uncle Kim. It is north of Hue and not as rainy. Hue is a very rained-on city.”

  Lovely, Annja thought. An opportunity to find myself in another torrential downpour. She’d been rained on quite enough the past few days, and the clouds over the Laos mountains looked as if they could open up at any moment.

  “Anything else?”

  He gave her a blank look.

  “Is there anything else you can tell me about the city?”

  “I attended school there. It was the capital of the Nguyen lords.”

  She had no idea what that was, nor was she particularly interested. But she wanted to keep him talking. “Go on, Nang.”

  “Hue was the national capital until near the end of the Second World War. That was when Bao Dai abdicated as emperor and a new government was established.”

  “That would be the communist one.”

  “Saigon in the south became the new capital. And Hanoi in the north. Saigon is called Ho Chi Minh City now.”

  “Hue looks like it sits on the border between North and South Vietnam.” Annja had noticed that from craning her neck and looking at the map when he had it opened.

  “The Battle of Hue was in 1968, the year my older brother was born. The city was hurt very bad by American bombs. Only in recent times are some of the buildings being restored. But some will never be fixed.”

  She came to a wider road and took it, snaking around a rice field and passing an impressive-looking temple. Her stomach had finally settled down, and she wished she had bought some candy bars or nuts at the gas station. At least she’d picked up a few cans of Cheerwine cherry cola and a six-pack of Red Bull. They’d cost her four or five times what she would have paid for them in New York. She reached behind Nang’s seat.