Temple of Gold

by A. J. Stewart

  He didn’t move. He stood against the basin as she looked him over, maybe not caring, or maybe enjoying the attention, but not offering any kind of expression to indicate his thoughts. She lay on the bed, naked and dripping, and she couldn’t help but notice that Lenny’s gaze never wandered. He was watching her eyes, nothing more, nothing less.

  Eventually, she beckoned with her finger, and he came, silently. He slipped under the covers and lay on his back, and she flipped a leg between his, put her hand on his collarbone, and cradled against him. She lay in the humid night breathing hot air onto his chest, and feeling a very long way from anywhere.

  Chapter Ten

  The drive back to Bangkok was uneventful. Lenny deposited his cargo at the embassy and then parked the van and took a tuk-tuk to his billet. This was a small room with a cot and a wardrobe and a shared bathroom, better than barracks but not quite the Four Seasons. There was a note to call his CO, so he went to the coffee shop next door and used their phone. Yardley was not available but did want to meet.

  Lenny showered again and got into his regular Marine Corps uniform, and then took another tuk-tuk to Colonel Yardley’s office, which was within a Royal Thai Armed Forces compound on Sathon Tai Road.

  Yardley sat behind an army-issue metal desk that looked like the same desk he sat behind everywhere he went. He told Lenny to be at ease and to take a seat.

  “Fun trip?” asked the colonel.

  “It was a memorial service for the fallen, so, no, sir, that wouldn’t have been my first categorization.”

  “You didn’t stay in a fancy hotel and order room service?”

  “The hotel was fine. Room service didn’t seem to be a thing.”

  “Ventura wants to see you,” said Yardley, cutting to the chase.

  “A mission?”

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t like to share. You or intel.”

  “Roger that. When?”

  “First thing tomorrow.”

  “Okay.”

  “Be careful.”

  “Sir?”

  “You know what I mean, Sergeant. You have the capacity to go off half-cocked.”

  “Sir?”

  “Don’t play dumb with me, Lenny. These guys are serious.”

  “No more serious than the Marines, sir.”

  “No, but different. Don’t cross them. Ventura might be a hotshot with a war complex, but he’s got people in high places in the CIA. And the CIA has POTUS’s ear.”

  “You think the president is concerned with what I do in Bangkok?”

  “No, I think POTUS is concerned with whatever the director of the CIA tells him to be concerned with. Remember, the Vice President ran the damned CIA. They have the president’s attention, I assure you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But don’t do anything illegal, either. The CIA will hang us all out to dry if they have to.”

  “I suspect everything Ventura is doing is technically illegal, in an international law kind of way.”

  “I don’t care about international law, Lenny. I’m talking about US law. I’m talking about directives coming from the White House. They say it’s okay, then it’s okay. But if Ventura goes off on his own adventure, well that’s different. Don’t go with him. Talk to me. The press is just hankering for a story about rogue Marines in Southeast Asia. You get it? Don’t be the only guy at the dance left without a partner.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “And, Lenny, get a haircut.”

  “Ventura doesn’t want me to. He says I need to blend in.”

  “With who? How many red-headed men do you see around Bangkok?”

  “Just doing what the CIA wants, sir.”

  “You seem to be enjoying it a little too much.”

  “I like the regulation cut just fine, as it happens.”

  “That is all, Marine.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Lenny wandered back out onto the street. Times like these were the hardest. He was as good as anyone at waiting. He was a master at it. But usually the waiting had an end point—even if he didn’t know the when, there was always a what. A mission, a battle, a march. Something. But this was just killing time. He didn’t know what Ventura wanted, but he was growing tired of being on call like a chauffeur.

  Lenny walked along the river for any hint of a breeze, before heading back to his billet. He thought about calling in on Alice, but they had just spent days and nights together and he wasn’t sure what she’d think about him just turning up. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it, either. He liked her, that was for damned sure. She was smart and worldly, and not so hard on the eye. But she was the diplomatic equivalent of a soldier, ready at a moment’s notice to ship off to wherever her higher-ups dictated. Just like him. Being in Bangkok was as settled as he had been since joining the Marines, and that her stint had coincided was serendipity, but it wasn’t destined to last. Lenny wasn’t sure whether that meant he should avoid getting too close to Alice, or that he should get as close as he could while he could.

  When he reached his billet, he hung up his uniform and put on a pair of pants. He wasn’t much for doing laundry, other than his uniforms. He preferred to wander the lanes of Bangkok and simply pick up a new shirt whenever the old one got too dirty, or more likely, too sweaty. The prices were rock bottom and the quality was good enough. He wandered out into the street bare-chested, and walked until he found a street vendor selling shirts from a table. Most of them were plain white button-ups, but the vendor took one look at Lenny and pulled something out of a cardboard box under his table. He held it up for Lenny to see. It was what Lenny would call a Hawaiian shirt. Yellow and pink sunsets over a small tropical island, with a single coconut palm and, for no apparent reason, a bucket and spade. The pattern repeated across the shirt.

  “It’s pretty loud,” Lenny said, looking back at the plain white offerings.

  “These not for you,” the vendor frowned, glancing at his table. “This one for you.” He held up the Hawaiian-style shirt and beamed from ear to ear.

  Lenny shrugged and handed over some baht and took the shirt and put it on. It fit perfectly, as if tailor-made. The vendor had a good eye. Lenny rolled his shoulders to test the fit, but it felt great.

  “Kob jai,” said Lenny.

  The vendor nodded and smiled. “I have many shirt. You come back.”

  Lenny walked on into a night market and ate rice and fish and a chicken satay from a roadside grill. He drank the coldest Coke he had ever tasted and walked through the market taking in the smells and the cacophony and the banter. It was hot and humid and crammed with bodies, all talking or eating or drinking or all of the above, and Lenny found it to be humanity at its most pure.

  He walked through the market and then back, and without conscious thought kept walking, out onto the street and back toward his billet. As the sound died away and the frenetic motion of the market ebbed to regular Bangkok hubbub, he felt an emptiness creep inside. His room felt like a cell, empty and soulless. He got undressed and put a mix tape in his Walkman, slipped the headphones on and lay on top of the sheets, blocking out the world and falling asleep to the sounds of Billy Joel offering him the eternal choice between red wine and white.

  Chapter Eleven

  Lenny woke with a hankering. He was a believer in really being in a place, so he was always eager to eat and drink and do what the locals did, but now what he desired most was a cold glass of California orange juice. And he knew just where he could get it.

  He put on his pants and his new Hawaiian shirt and took to the streets. It was early, the sun barely hinting at its existence, and the city was as cool as it ever got. He walked down toward the river, to the offices of the import–export company where Ventura plied his trade. The sun was up by the time he arrived, but the office building was locked up tight. Shutters had been pulled down over the windows and the door was barred.

  Lenny didn’t care. He wandered back past the building next door and crept sideways down a p
ointless gap between it and its next neighbor. At the end he hit the river—here an oily, putrid mess—so he stepped up onto the balustrade of the building next door and scooted over onto the balcony. He walked back toward Ventura’s building, and then jumped up to grab the railing of the second-floor balcony. Like an orangutan, he swung himself up and then flipped his leg over the railing to land outside the safe house’s window.

  There were no shutters up here. That seemed a miscalculation on Ventura’s part, given the classified nature of his work. Lenny used a wire from a planter box to open the sliding door and he stepped inside.

  Ventura clearly didn’t live in the safe house apartment. It was still and dark as Lenny made his way to the fridge. Inside was Ventura’s own little stash of home. There were cans of Budweiser and packets of Oreos. And a bottle of orange juice. As it turned out, it was Florida orange juice, but that sounded just fine to Lenny, so he poured himself a glass. He sipped it as he wandered around the darkened space. The room looked like a movie set made to look like a home office. There was cheap lounge furniture and a potted plant and a computer monitor on a desk. There was some kind of modern art on the wall along with a photo of someone Lenny didn’t recognize holding up a big fish. The only sign that Ventura had ever been here was a framed shot on the desk of Ventura shaking hands with Vice President Bush.

  The orange juice was sweet and tart at the same time, and it reminded Lenny of home, of breakfast before school on a warm San Diego fall morning. He sat in Ventura’s chair and kicked his feet up onto his desk, knocking aside a manila folder as he did. He edged the folder back with his heel and then leaned forward and pulled it off the desk. It was a plain folder that looked like every other folder. No classified markings, no eyes only designations.

  Lenny flicked the folder open. Inside were photographs. Black-and-white aerial shots. It looked like mountain jungle, the shadows hinting at undulating terrain. He turned over the first picture and looked at the second. It was familiar. He had seen it before, at least something very similar. He recognized the river and the hill and the village beyond, a few ramshackle buildings. It was a shot of the village where Ventura had met General Tan. Lenny had seen such a photo in the mission briefing. There were no people and no trucks in view.

  He flipped to the next shot. It had been taken from a higher altitude, so the elements weren’t as clear, but it covered a greater area. The riverbed where he and Barbera had been dropped and collected, and the hill where he had watched the village through his scope. Above the village was dense jungle, perhaps a hint of the path where the truck had come and gone. Then, at the top left of the shot, an open area like a hole, and some distance from there, at the top right, a long stripe of shadowed earth. Some kind of trench. Lenny glanced at the bottom corner of the photograph. A filing code he didn’t recognize and a date. The shot had been taken while he was in Kanchanaburi.

  Lenny heard the rattle and thwack of a rolling shutter opening downstairs. He folded the photo and slipped it into his pocket and then dropped the folder back onto Ventura’s desk. He heard the office opening up below, people arriving and turning on the AC, checking fax machines and setting up coffee. He ambled over to the fridge and helped himself to more OJ, and then took a plastic chair near the window and watched the river while he waited.

  It was a good half hour before Ventura unlocked the door, stepped inside, and flicked on the light.

  “Holy hell,” he said, spilling coffee on himself. He swore repeatedly at Lenny as he dropped his mug onto his desk and grabbed for a towel, mopping the coffee from his shirt.

  “What the hell are you doing in here?” he spat.

  “You wanted to see me, first thing,” Lenny said.

  “I mean how did you get in here?”

  “I’m a Marine.”

  “Don’t give me that semper fi crap. How did you get in?”

  “I climbed up the balcony. You really should make this place more secure, given your line of work.”

  Ventura strode over to the window and looked down at the river. “From the river?”

  “No, not from the river.”

  Ventura shot Lenny a look and then noticed the glass in his hand. “Help yourself to my OJ, won’t you.”

  “Thanks, I did.”

  “What the hell are you wearing?”

  Lenny glanced at his new shirt and smiled. “Like it? Hawaiian.”

  “We’re in Thailand, and you’re supposed to be blending in.”

  “I look like a tourist.”

  Ventura shook his head, strode back to his desk, and dropped down into the seat behind it. He snatched up the folder on the desk and slammed it into a drawer. It was early, but he looked like a man whose day wasn’t going all that well.

  “What’s up?” asked Lenny.

  “Nothing,” said Ventura.

  “It doesn’t look like nothing. You’re sweating like a sumo.”

  “I mean nothing, as in nothing is happening when something should be.”

  “General Tan?”

  “Yes, General Tan. We should be hearing about things. Reports of raids, attacks on government positions.”

  “But we’re not?”

  “No. We are not. It’s like he’s not even there, like he’s shut up shop or is sleeping on the job.”

  “And he knew what you expected?”

  “Of course he knew, Cox. We don’t give people a shipment of weapons for the good of our health.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought they’re good for anyone’s health.”

  “You’ve got a remark for every occasion, don’t you?”

  “I’ll be here all week. So what do you want from me? You planning on going back in again?”

  “No. I can’t get clearance for that without offering up that Tan’s done nothing for us. And that will make us look bad at Langley.”

  Make you look bad, Lenny thought. “So what do you think he’s doing?”

  “I have no idea. What have you heard? What do the Brits know?”

  “The Brits? I have no idea what they know.”

  “You were with some of them up at the River Kwai. Come on, Cox, you gotta stop being Gomer Pyle and get with the program. We need intel.”

  “The Brits are our allies. Why are you so interested in them?”

  “That’s above your pay grade.”

  “Best I know is that the Brits are staying out, for now.”

  “Typical.”

  “The Kanchanaburi thing was mostly Australians, anyway. What do they know?”

  “Don’t worry about the Aussies, Cox.”

  “There are a lot of them around, for some reason.”

  “I said, don’t worry about the Aussies, Cox.” Ventura sat back and looked up at the ceiling. “All right,” he said eventually. “This is what I want you to do. You’ve got a friend in the British Embassy.”

  “I do?”

  “The girl with chipmunk cheeks. Abernathy.”

  “Okay, Kendra. But she’s only British Council. That’s the arts and language lessons and so on.”

  “Yeah, and I’m a pastrami on rye. She seems to pop up in places where language learning ain’t at the top of the activity list. I want you to get to know her better, you know what I mean?”

  “No, I do not.” Lenny knew exactly what Ventura meant, but he wanted to hear him say it.

  “Do what it takes. Bed her if you have to.”

  “What am I, James Bond? Women don’t exactly fall at my feet, you know.”

  “I saw her with you at the embassy. She likes you.”

  “There’s a lot of distance between a chat at the bar and what you’re talking about. Besides, I think she’s seeing someone.”

  “So jump to the head of the line. You’re a Marine, aren’t you?”

  Lenny stood and walked over to Ventura’s desk and placed his glass down. “I am a Marine,” he said. “Leave it with me.”

  Ventura nodded like he was happy that Lenny was with the program, finally. Lenny stepped
toward the door. He was a Marine. He took that seriously. And he wasn’t about to sleep with Kendra Abernathy to get intel. Even if that could happen, which he was pretty sure it wouldn’t. Her interests clearly lay elsewhere. As did his. He reached the door and opened it.

  “She lunches most days at the mall near the embassy,” Ventura said.

  Lenny stopped for a moment but didn’t look back.

  “Roger that,” he said, and he walked away to find a woman who could help.

  Chapter Twelve

  Lenny met Alice at her apartment. She was dressed for business—dark skirt and white blouse—and was drinking a glass of water at the kitchen counter having walked from the embassy to meet Lenny.

  “Nice shirt,” she said, offering him a glass.

  “Everyone seems to think so.”

  “You look like Magnum, P.I.”

  “The TV guy? You think I should grow a mustache?”

  “No, I do not. So what is it you didn’t want to discuss at the embassy?”

  Lenny pulled from his pocket the photograph he had taken from Ventura’s desk, and unfolded it and set it on the counter. Alice studied it for a time in silence and then frowned at Lenny.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “What do you see?”

  She turned her attention back to the photograph. “It’s an aerial surveillance shot. A flyover, not satellite. The definition is too good for sats. Looks like Southeast Asia, at a guess.”

  “But what do you see?”

  “I see a small village. Looks abandoned. These are rice paddies, but I see no evidence of rice growing. Then at the top here, in between these trees, looks like some kind of depression, but it doesn’t strike the eye as natural. It’s like they’ve dug a hole.”

  “And what about the other side, on the right?”

  For a moment she said nothing.

  “I’ve seen something like that before,” she said.

  “It’s like a long trench,” said Lenny. “I can’t figure what for. You say you’ve seen it before?”