Conspiracy

by Stephen Coonts

“Why? Don’t trust my driving?”

  “Your leg’s bleeding,” Dean answered.

  “Ah, just a scratch.”

  “Well, let’s give it a chance to heal.”

  “You don’t trust my driving,” said Karr.

  “No, I don’t.”

  Karr chuckled, and pressed harder on the gas.

  THAO DUONG LIVED a few blocks away. Even from the outside, it seemed obvious he hadn’t taken the cab there; the place was dark. Dean left Karr in the truck and went up the fire escape. The window to the kitchen was open; Dean lifted it and slipped inside. Ten minutes later he was back in the truck, having planted two audio bugs in the flat and a tracking bug on the bicycle Thao kept in the hallway.

  “Gotta be our guy,” said Karr as they returned the truck. “Whatever you said to him at the reception spooked him.”

  “Maybe,” said Dean. “But if he is, how do we get him to talk?”

  “You turn on the charm,” said Karr. “But before that, we ought to find out what he’s got locked away.”

  “Yeah,” said Dean.

  A light-colored sedan passed on a nearby street. The car looked like an unmarked police car, though he caught only a glimpse. They waited a few minutes, then slipped from the truck and began walking in the direction to the hotel.

  “You don’t think Thao Duong’s our guy?” asked Karr.

  “Seems too easy.”

  “Easy?”

  “First guy we check?”

  “Odds are only one out of three,” said Karr. “Just as likely to be number one as number three.”

  “The one thing I know about Vietnam,” said Dean, “is that nothing’s easy. And nothing’s what it seems.”

  “That’s two things,” said Karr. “You can’t fool me, Charlie. I was once a mathematician.”

  42

  THE MARSHALS’ SERVICE credentials didn’t impress the state troopers in Danbury, Connecticut, nor were they shy about letting Lia know that they’d been over the same ground with both the Secret Service and the FBI, ad infinitum. But one of the investigators was recently divorced, a little lonely, and obviously bored—a combination that made getting him to give her a complete tour of the crime scene and an in-depth review of the case child’s play.

  The only downside was that he wanted to take her to lunch as well. Not particularly hungry—and in no need of a shadow as she checked out the computers in the hotel for messages Forester might have sent—Lia let him down as gently as possible, feigning a headache. But he didn’t really get the message until she told him she had to call her boyfriend.

  “Oh,” said the investigator. “Maybe another time.”

  “Wait,” said Lia as he headed for his car.

  When he turned around, she could see the hope in his eyes. She felt like a heel.

  “Was there a notebook in the car?” she asked. “One of Forester’s notebooks seems to be missing.”

  “Notebook? No.”

  “Oh.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s OK.”

  “Another time.”

  “Sure.”

  Lia drove back to the hotel where Forester had killed himself, thinking about Charlie Dean the whole time. She wished she’d gone to Vietnam with him—or that he was here with her. She thought of calling him, or asking the Art Room to connect them, but Vietnam was eleven hours ahead time-wise; he’d be sleeping.

  The hotel advertised that it “catered to businesspeople” by offering a “dedicated business center.” The business center turned out to consist of a fax machine and copier, along with two computers connected to the Internet. The person supervising the center was also assigned to clean up the nearby eating area and help at the front desk, and left Lia alone soon after showing her the room. Lia slipped a specially designed “dongle” into one of the computer’s USB ports, then had the Art Room read off the contents of the hard drive via the Internet. She repeated the process a few minutes later with the second computer.

  “Did you get it all?” she asked Marie Telach, taking out her sat phone and pretending to use it.

  “Another minute. When you’re done, check out the hotel where Amanda Rauci stayed. Maybe he was there.”

  “She says he never made it.”

  “Check it out anyway,” said Telach, her tone implying that Lia was somehow slacking off.

  “Wild-goose chases are us,” replied Lia.

  THE OTHER HOTEL was set back farther from the road, up a twisting driveway that made it feel more secluded—it looked exactly like the sort of place someone would pick for an affair, Lia thought. The lobby was located at the side of an atrium, and the place had a less rushed, more luxurious feel than the other hotel. The business center here had a full-time employee and six computers, three of which were occupied when Lia came in. There was also a wireless network, allowing individuals to connect to the Internet via their laptops.

  “Room number?” asked the room’s supervisor.

  “I haven’t checked in yet,” said Lia.

  “I’m sorry, the computers are only for guests.”

  “Well I’m going to register,” said Lia.

  “Come back when you do.”

  Lia left the room and walked back to the atrium, where she took out her sat phone, pretending to use it while she spoke to Telach.

  “You want me to flash the credentials and ask if I can look at the computers?” Lia asked. “Or should I just rent a room?”

  “Rent a room,” said Telach.

  “Sorry,” said the desk clerk when Lia got there. “We’re booked solid. It’s a busy week. Two weddings, and the biker festival. You here for the Harleys?”

  “Just looking after a friend,” said Lia.

  “Maybe at one of our sister hotels.”

  “But my mom really wants me to register here,” said Lia. “Right, Mom?”

  The clerk gave Lia an odd look.

  “Sometimes I talk to my mom in my head,” Lia explained.

  “Tell her to check the central reservations system now,” said Telach. “Looks like one of the bikers just got a flat tire.”

  43

  DEAN WOKE UP in the middle of the night, not knowing where he was. He stared at the ceiling, waiting for his memory to come back. It took only a few seconds, and yet those few seconds seemed enormously long. He sank into them, unsettled, his disorientation extending.

  Finally he realized he was in Vietnam. Dean remained on his back, still staring into the gray light above him.

  How strange was it to come around in a circle?

  It wasn’t as if Vietnam or the things he did here haunted him. From time to time he’d remember things, missions as a sniper, old buddies, songs that he’d first heard here, but Vietnam never obsessed him, never burned viciously in his brain the way it did for many others. Vietnam to Charlie Dean was a place and time in the past, not the present. Its demons had been real enough, but they had no afterlife to haunt him.

  Except for Phuc Dinh.

  Dean sat upright in the bed, then slipped his feet over the side to the floor, one by one.

  He had made that kill. He’d taken a photograph to prove it.

  So why wasn’t it in the file?

  There were a million possible reasons, starting with the fact that what he’d seen at Crypto City wasn’t the file, just a copy of some things that were in it.

  Or might have been. He had no real idea. He didn’t know what happened behind the scenes or above him. He knew only what the CIA people and the Marines who dealt with them wanted him to know.

  AFTER HE’D KILLED the last VC guerilla on the trail, Dean had gone back to his friend’s body. There was no way Dean was leaving Longbow behind. Dean hoisted Longbow onto his back and began trekking up the trail into the jungle. He couldn’t have expressed the emotions he was feeling. Grief and anger, guilt—everything was tangled together.

  The original plan called for Dean and Longbow to either hook up with the unit they had swung into the area with, or, missing t
hem, trek about twenty miles southeast to a small observation post held by another Marine unit.

  Twenty miles in the Vietnamese heat was a good, long hike, even if you weren’t carrying a body. Dean didn’t think about the distance at first, trudging slowly but steadily, using the path for long stretches before tucking into the jungle and making sure he wasn’t followed. Twice, he lost his way and found himself almost back where he started. By nightfall, he reckoned his destination was still fifteen miles away.

  Dean knew he was going no farther with Longbow’s body. What had once been his friend was now a decrepit bag of gases and ill-smelling remains. And Dean himself was so exhausted he could barely carry himself. His only option was to leave Longbow where he could find him and come back with help.

  Dean had no shovel. The best he could do for his friend was hide him in the brush. Dean marked several trees, and in the morning took two measurements to the trail so he could be certain of the location. Tears streamed down his face as he headed in the direction of the Marine camp. It was the first and last time he ever cried in Vietnam, and one of the very few times he was moved to tears in his life. They were tears of shame, for in his heart he felt that he had failed his friend by abandoning his remains.

  Four or five hours later, too exhausted to go on, Dean stopped for the rest of the night. He crawled under a large tree about a hundred yards from the trail and slept fitfully. An hour before dawn, he woke and began walking again. When he reached a road about a mile and a half later, he collapsed by its side.

  Within a few minutes, he heard American voices nearby. Dean shook his head and feet, rocked back and forth, made sure he was awake. The voices continued.

  “Hey,” he said finally. “Hey, are you guys Marines?”

  The silence that followed convinced him he’d imagined the voices.

  “Damn,” he muttered.

  “Where are you?” came a voice back.

  Dean got to his knees. “Are you Marines?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Dean. I’m a sniper. What unit are you in?”

  It turned out to be the company they’d come up with. The men were waiting for a helicopter, due any minute.

  Dean told the commander where he’d left Longbow’s body. Four Marines were sent up the trail immediately—Dean was too wasted, though they had to hold him back—but couldn’t find him.

  “We’ll be back to get him,” said the captain. “I’ll bring a platoon—I’ll bring the damn division if I have to.”

  That captain was as good as his word, rallying a sizeable search force, but Longbow’s body was never found.

  DEAN ROSE AND began pacing back and forth in the large hotel room.

  If he didn’t shoot Phuc Dinh, who had he killed?

  And if Phuc Dinh was alive, was Longbow?

  They were both dead. Dean was sure of it. Sure of Longbow, and sure of Phuc Dinh. But in the gray stillness of the hotel room, Dean wondered if he was the shadow and they were the ones living and breathing.

  44

  THE ART ROOM didn’t turn up anything interesting on the other computers. Though it was already after three, Lia decided she would go over to Pine Plains and see if she could talk to the police chief there. His dispatcher said he would be in the office until five and after that would be available at home.

  “It’s jess around the corner,” the dispatcher added. “You can walk.”

  Forty-five minutes later, Lia drove down the main street of the small town, gazing at the one-and two-story clapboard buildings as she searched for the police station. The town reminded her a great deal of the Connecticut village where she’d grown up. A sleepy farming community for most of its existence, it had recently been overrun with weekenders from New York City, who found the two-and-a-half-hour drive a worthwhile trade-off for relatively cheap real estate and the illusion of a simpler life, so long as that simpler life included Starbucks and a pricey dress shop tucked into a side block behind the bookstore.

  Old-timers had made one of two choices: cash in on the newcomers by catering to their whims or slink back and mutter about them behind the closed ranks of old friends. Lia’s hometown had negotiated a similar clash twenty years earlier; the result was an ambiguous and somewhat uneasy truce, where the old-timers held on to the low-level political and business positions and the transplanted city people ruled everything else.

  Lia’s mother and father had feet in both camps, and regarded the transition with mixed feelings. It was not always easy to predict their views, however. As she parked behind the village hall, Lia thought of her father, ostensibly a member of the old-timers’ camp, with eight generations in the local graveyard. He viewed the local police chief, whose family had been in town since the mid-1800s, with twice as much skepticism as he would have shown a newcomer.

  Pine Plains’ police chief was about the age of Lia’s father, but there the resemblance ended. Tall and still fairly trim, Christopher Ball had a narrow face set off by a graying brush cut and a tight-lipped smile. He greeted her with a crusher of a handshake.

  “I’m with the marshals’ service,” said Lia breezily, showing him the credentials. “I’m following up on the Forester case.”

  “So my dispatcher said. I don’t recall the case.”

  “Agent Forester. The Secret Service agent who killed himself in Danbury?”

  “Oh, OK. Sure.”

  “Did he speak to you the day he died?”

  “No. He was supposed to show up the next day. We had an appointment. I stayed in the office waiting. Had to have a part-timer come in to do my road patrol because of it.”

  “Did he tell you what he was looking into?”

  “Not at all.” Ball pushed his chair back and got up. “Service agents out of Danbury told me about it the day after. Or maybe it was Poughkeepsie.”

  Ball stared at her. His rising was evidently intended to signal that they were done talking, though Lia didn’t budge.

  “So you knew nothing about the threat against Senator McSweeney?”

  “I have no idea why your man thought that someone from Pine Plains was involved. I’d’ve been happy to investigate anyone—happy to do it still.”

  “When Agent Forester came to talk to you, did he have a notebook with him?”

  Something flicked in Ball’s eyes. “He never came to talk to me.” Ball took another step, reaching the edge of the desk.

  “Something wrong, Chief?” Lia asked.

  Ball frowned. “It’s getting toward dinner.”

  “Thanks, but I’m not hungry.”

  His frown turned into a full-blown scowl.

  “Senator McSweeney has a house near here, doesn’t he?” asked Lia.

  “That’s up in Columbia County. Forty-five minutes—an hour, if you drive the speed limit. Most don’t.”

  “You deal with him a lot?”

  “Are you trying to investigate me, miss?”

  “Do you need to be investigated?”

  “Get the hell out of my office.”

  “Gladly,” said Lia.

  “WHY’D YOU ANTAGONIZE him?” Telach demanded when Lia reached the car.

  “Something about him doesn’t jibe,” said Lia.

  She pulled out the booster unit for the audio fly she had left in the office and activated it. Lia looked around, trying to decide where to leave the unit. The fly couldn’t transmit very far on its own.

  “He’s just a macho ass,” said Telach. “Unfortunately, that’s not against the law.”

  “I planted a bug. Are you picking it up?”

  “A bug? I didn’t authorize you to plant a listening device, Lia.”

  “Since when do I have to ask?”

  “Stand by,” said Telach abruptly.

  45

  CHIEF BALL KEPT his wrath and tongue in check as he contemplated the arrogant federal agent whom he’d just dismissed. Teeth clenched, he stomped out of the village hall, down the white wooden steps, and around the back to the path that led to Maple
Avenue, where he lived with his wife.

  The federal people had egos the size of the Lincoln Memorial. The younger they were, the more full of themselves they were. And the women were the worst.

  Ball waved at his neighbor, who was ushering his two sons to Little League practice. Ball had to be nice to Marco, because the shortcut was on Marco’s property.

  Actually, Ball decided, he didn’t have to be nice to anyone. He made up for it by scowling at Scott Salotti, who was mowing his lawn next door.

  So they were still interested in Forester, were they? They couldn’t just take “no” for an answer and move on?

  “Hi, honey,” said his wife from the kitchen when he came in the front door. “Dinner’s ready.”

  Ball didn’t bother answering. He went up to the bedroom and changed out of his uniform.

  “Your beer’s on the table,” his wife said when he came into the kitchen. She rose on her tiptoes and kissed him on his cheek. “Something wrong?”

  “Just the usual.”

  “Village board talking about cutting back the part-timers’ hours again?”

  “Nothing specific.” Ball took a swig of the beer, Miller Lite. “I’m going out after dinner.”

  “But we were going to watch Survivor together.”

  “Another time.”

  A pout appeared on his wife’s face. But it dissipated quickly, as they always did.

  46

  RUBENS WAS SO angry he pounded his desk. He barely kept himself from shouting. “Lia left a bug in the police chief’s office because he was rude to her?”

  “You know Lia,” said Telach, frowning uncomfortably.

  “It’s one thing for her to trash-talk someone and quite another to leave a bug in his office.”

  “Well, she did both.”

  “We’re not overseas, Marie. We can’t be leaving audio devices in people’s offices—especially the police.”

  “I didn’t tell her to. But—”

  “There’s a but?”

  “The operatives are trained to work a certain way. That’s what she’s doing. If she were in Vietnam—”

  “She’s not in Vietnam. Why did she even bother?”

  “It’s just standard procedure. She’s not used to working in the U.S.”

  As angry as he was, Rubens realized that Telach was right. The Deep Black operatives had been trained to operate overseas, under very dangerous conditions, where the rules of engagement—what could or couldn’t be done under different circumstances—were much looser. Listening in to other people’s conversations was something they did all the time. America was a very different environment, and the ops and support team had not been trained to operate in it.