“There was an ambush near your village, Phu Loc Two,” said Dean. “You were targeted. Some reports said you were killed.”
A faint smile appeared on Phuc Dinh’s face, then faded into something close to sadness, and then blank stoicism. He scratched his ear but said nothing.
“How did you escape?” Dean asked. “Weren’t you shot?”
“Another man went in my place. We used many tricks of deception at the time, to confuse spies who might be watching.”
“The dead man wasn’t you?”
Phuc Dinh shook his head.
“But he had a scar like yours.”
“When the money did not arrive, that was a sign,” said Phuc Dinh, ignoring Dean’s comment. “From that point on, we were on our guard. The ambush was a few months later, but we were still watching.”
“There was a photo in a file,” said Dean. “The man had a scar like yours.”
Phuc Dinh pointed to it.
“Yes, like that,” said Dean.
“A time such as that brings us to the lowest point of our existence.”
“Charlie, ask him about money transfers,” Rockman interrupted. “Ask him if he had any access to bank records.”
Dean ignored the runner, staring instead at Phuc Dinh. He wasn’t a ghost, not in the literal sense. And yet he was in every other way. He had come to Dean from the past, conjuring up an entire world that Dean had passed through years ago, an unsettled world that continued to haunt him, much as he denied it.
Dean, too, was a ghost, haunting Phuc Dinh’s world, though the former VC official didn’t know it.
“I lost a friend on that mission,” said Dean softly. “A good friend.”
“I lost many friends during the war as well.” Phuc Dinh lowered his head. “The man who went in my place that day was my brother. The scars you noticed were burns from a French vicar for stealing his food when we were five and six. He used the same poker to mark us both.”
78
“DIDN’T KNOW YOU were a gun nut!”
Startled, Jimmy Fingers turned to his right and saw Sam Iollo, one of the capitol police supervisors, standing nearby.
“I hope I’m not a nut,” said Jimmy Fingers.
“What is that little peashooter you got there?” asked Iollo, pointing at Jimmy Fingers’ pistol.
Jimmy held out a Colt Detective Special, a .38-caliber two-inch snubby. Though old, the weapon was in showroom shape, its blued finish gleaming and the wood bright and polished.
“Pretty,” said Iollo. “What, you don’t trust us protecting you?”
“Of course I trust you,” said Jimmy Fingers.
“Hey, just busting on you there, Counselor.” Iollo seemed to think that everyone who worked for a senator was a lawyer. He gave Jimmy Fingers a serious look. “Can you shoot a rifle?”
For a brief moment, Jimmy Fingers was filled with fear. Surely this wasn’t an idle question, nor an idle meeting.
“Of course I can use a rifle,” he told Iollo.
“Maybe you’ll want to come out to the annual turkey shoot then. Good food, and the competition’s fun. If you’re as good with a rifle as you are with that pistol, you might take yourself home a bird.”
“Maybe I will. Let me know when it’s coming up.”
Jimmy Fingers started to leave, but Iollo held out his hand to stop him.
“Tell me the truth now—you think he’s going to be President?” Iollo asked.
“Without a doubt.”
“He is looking real good. Be careful no one shoots at him again, though. Next time, they may not miss.”
“Yes,” said Jimmy Fingers grimly, before walking away.
79
DEAN PUSHED BACK in the chair as Phuc Dinh rose.
“I have enjoyed our meeting,” Phuc Dinh said perfunctorily, his tone suggesting the opposite.
“Thank you,” Dean told him. “I appreciate your time. And your honesty.”
Once more, a faint hint of a smile appeared on Phuc Dinh’s face, only to dissolve. As Dean watched him walk toward the door, it occurred to him that it would be an easy thing to shoot him, completing the mission he had been assigned thirty-five years before.
But Phuc Dinh had not caused Longbow’s death any more than Dean had.
Meeting his Vietnamese enemy reminded Dean not of the war but of how much had changed in the intervening years. As a sniper, he’d seen Vietnam, the world, as black-and-white. Now he saw only colors, infinite colors. He knew his job and his duty, and would perform both. But he no longer had the luxury the teenager had of looking at targets through a crosshaired scope. What he saw was weighted with the time he’d come through, the miles he’d walked.
The ghosts he’d shared space with, haunted by and, in turn, haunting.
80
“IT WAS A CIA program. The Marines were involved because they were in the area,” Hernes Jackson told Rubens. “I have to say that there wasn’t much online from the CIA. I found nearly everything I needed from the Department of Defense. I’ve made appointments to look at the paper records as well. Possibly that will reveal more.”
Jackson explained that the CIA had sent “support” payments to loyal village elders during the war. The payments were essentially bribes, and there were few checks and balances in the program. The CIA worked with local military units to arrange and protect couriers; depending on the sector, Army Special Forces, Marines, and even SEALs had been involved. In the area of Phu Loc 2, the CIA worked with Marines attached to the strategic hamlet program.
In the case cited by Phuc Dinh, one set of payments totaling $250,000 had gone missing during the last year of the war. This had happened after the man who had been coordinating the payments—Greenfeld, as Dean had said—was killed in a rocket attack on a Marine camp he’d been visiting. Three payments were missed in the interim, making the amount carried by the new courier extra large and probably extra tempting.
A South Vietnamese officer acted as the courier, with two Marines assigned as his escort to Phu Loc 2. There was an ambush. The Marines and the South Vietnamese officer were separated. Neither the money nor the South Vietnamese officer was ever seen again.
“The Marines just let him run off?” said Rubens.
“No,” said Jackson. “There was an ambush. They came under heavy attack. According to the Marines, he was obliterated by a mortar. They ended up calling for an air evac.”
The guards were Marine Sergeant Bob Malinowski and Marine Sergeant Robert Tolong.
“Malinowski was wounded in the ambush and died back in the field hospital, or en route,” said Jackson. “One of the reports says that Tolong was wounded as well, but if so the wounds were minor, because he rejoined his unit immediately afterward. The CIA wanted to talk to Sergeant Tolong, apparently because he was the last American to see the cash. I am reading a bit between the lines.”
“Perfectly logical assumption,” said Rubens. “Go on.”
Before the CIA could debrief him, Tolong volunteered to go on a patrol, checking on a hamlet team that had missed its call-in the day before. The unit was attacked in the afternoon of their first day out, a few miles west of Tam Ky. Tolong and another man named Reginald Gordon were separated from the main group. The firefight continued well into the night. In the morning, the fighting resumed when some helicopters approached, and it wasn’t until late afternoon that they were extricated. Gordon and Tolong were among the missing.
“About ten days later, Sergeant Gordon showed up at the base camp of a unit about thirty miles to the west,” continued Jackson. “Tolong, he said, had been seriously wounded and died a few days after the ambush. He’d buried him, but wasn’t sure where. The Marines sent two different patrols into the area, but never found him.”
“Did the CIA find the money?” asked Rubens.
“Doesn’t appear so. As I said, I’ll have to look through their paper records to be sure,” said Jackson. “The men were assigned to the courier job by a Captain McSweeney. His name was
on some of the reports, including two about the ambush.”
“Senator McSweeney.”
“Apparently. One other thing I found interesting,” added Jackson. “Reading between the lines, it seems that the CIA later concluded that the courier had been set up by one of the village leaders, who was working with the Vietcong. The leader was Phuc Dinh.”
“Why would he have the courier ambushed before he got the money?” asked Rubens.
“It would make sense if the South Vietnamese officer didn’t really die, but escaped during the attack,” said Jackson. “In any event, the CIA apparently tried to get a little revenge by assassinating him. According to one of the Marine Corps reports, they succeeded.”
“So I surmised from the transcript of Mr. Dean’s interview with Mr. Dinh.”
“Did the interview note that the assassin was a Marine scout sniper named Charles Dean?”
81
RUBENS WAS STILL considering exactly how to summarize the situation for Bing when she returned his call.
“This is Dr. Bing. You have an update on the Vietnam project?”
“Thao Duong is part of a people-smuggling network,” said Rubens. “There is no Vietnamese assassination plot.”
“There’s no assassination plot or he’s not part of it?”
The bite in Bing’s voice annoyed Rubens. He reached for his cup of cinnamon herbal tea—part of his never-ending campaign to cut back on caffeine—and took a long sip before replying.
“The only evidence that we had of a possible plot involves dated CIA data, and circumstantial evidence we developed related to Thao Duong. Upon further analysis, that evidence now fits better with the hypothesis that he was part of a people-smuggling operation originating in China. We were wrong, initially,” added Rubens—even though he had cautioned about jumping to conclusions all along. “We have now given the material a very thorough review, and there is nothing substantial there.”
“There was an attempt on a senator’s life, Billy. If that isn’t evidence enough for you, what is?”
Rubens winced. He hated being called Billy.
“I realize that you want to take a harder stand toward Vietnam,” said Rubens as evenly as he could. “But I have to tell you that we have no intelligence linking them to the attempt on the senator’s life.”
“Then you’re not working hard enough,” said Bing, abruptly hanging up.
82
FINISHED BRIEFING RUBENS, Ambassador Jackson returned to his desk in the research and analysis section, planning on taking care of some odds and ends before checking back in with the FBI and Secret Service. While he’d been up with Rubens, the Pentagon had answered Jackson’s request for contact information regarding the members of Tolong’s unit. Among the information was an address and phone number for Reginald Gordon, the last man who had seen Tolong alive.
Jackson called the phone number, only to find it had been disconnected. That wasn’t particularly surprising—the Defense Department data was many years old. Next, Jackson entered the name and last known address into a commercial database used by private investigators and others trying to track down people. Within a few minutes, he had an address and phone number in Atlanta.
This phone, too, had been disconnected.
Jackson then did what a layman might do when looking for information about someone—he Googled Gordon.
The screen came back quickly. All of the top hits were from newspapers.
Reginald Gordon had jumped from a hotel window in Washington a week before.
83
MOST TIMES, DEALING with small-town police departments was very easy. The Secret Service had a long-standing aura because of its role protecting the President; unlike the FBI or DEA, its image had not been tarnished by scandal. The locals also tended to be less suspicious that the Service might be crowding in on their territory, and as a general rule the police chiefs and lieutenants Amanda Rauci met with on various cases went out of their way to be cooperative and helpful.
The Pine Plains chief was a notable exception. She’d tried making an appointment to see him first thing in the morning, but he’d been “unavailable” until three in the afternoon. Then he’d kept her waiting nearly forty-five minutes while he was “tied up on patrol”—she suspected this meant shooting the breeze at the local coffee shop. When he finally came into the backroom suite of the village hall, which served as the local police station, he put on a sour puss as soon as he saw her. He answered her questions in a barely audible monotone.
“Never showed.”
“Did you speak to Agent Forester on the phone?” Amanda asked.
“Nope.”
“Did anyone in your department talk to him?”
“Maybe Dispatch.” Chief Ball bellowed for his dispatcher, “Steph! Get in here!”
The white-haired woman who’d been manning the phone and radio in the front room appeared at the door. She glanced at Amanda and gave her a reassuring look, as if to say, His bark is worse than his bite.
Amanda didn’t believe it.
“That federal guy—Secret Service,” said Chief Ball. “He ever show up that day?”
“You mean the one checking on the man who passed away?”
“No. The one that killed himself.”
“He died before he came, didn’t he?”
“Did you talk to him?”
“Just to make the appointment.”
Ball looked back at Amanda, a satisfied expression on his face.
“Did he say what it was about?” Amanda asked.
“Wanted to talk to the chief.”
“Agent Forester sometimes had a habit of looking over a place before he interviewed someone,” said Amanda. “He might have done that the night before he died.”
“Couldn’t prove it by me,” snapped the chief. He looked over at his dispatcher.
“I never met him.”
“Other questions?” Chief Ball’s voice strongly implied the answer was, No.
“I have a lot of questions,” answered Amanda. She turned to the dispatcher. “But not for you, ma’am.”
The dispatcher gave Amanda the same bark-is-worse smile, then left.
“You have no idea what he might have been working on?” asked Amanda.
“Well, sure, I know now. It had to do with threats against Gideon McSweeney. I didn’t know then. And I doubt anybody in my town made those threats.”
Amanda opened her purse and took out Forester’s notebook. “He had spoken to a man named Gordon who lives in Georgia,” she told the chief. “There was another man, I believe named Dinn, whom he was interested in.”
“Dim?”
“Dinn. I don’t know how it’s spelled.”
“Never heard of it.”
“There don’t seem to be any in the phone book.”
“See?”
Amanda glanced down at the page in Forester’s notebook, where he had circled the name and question marks in the middle of the page:
Gordon?
Chief?
“Is it possible he wanted to talk to you about Gordon?”
“Last name or first name?”
“Last name.”
“Don’t know any Gordons. None in the phone book, right?”
“I thought maybe it might be unlisted.”
“Nah. Now we got two Gordons as first name, that I can think of. There’s Gordon Hirt, the high school principal?”
“I don’t know. Was he a Marine?”
“Might have been. I’m not sure. Don’t know much about him. Respected. Beard. Lives down in Stanford. Here three and a half years.” The chief leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk. “And then there’s a Gordon Clegg. I doubt it was him. He’s like ninety-three and lives in Annabel Shepherd’s old-age home. She takes old people in. Has a license from the state. Gordon used to be sharp as a tack, but he had a stroke a few months ago. Not so good now.”
“What if Gordon was a last name?” Amanda asked. “Or if it were someth
ing near that?”
“Well. That’s a little different. Like Gordon. Hmmm. This isn’t that big a town. I think I know just about everybody, but sometimes you can be surprised.” Chief Ball stared at the ceiling, clicking through a mental Rolodex. “Goddard—we have a Pete Goddard. Retired newspaper guy, tried to make a killing off his uncle’s horse farm. Bit of a jerk. Caught him speeding once and he managed to talk himself into a ticket. Usually, if you’re a local, I’ll let ya go. Unless you’re a jerk.”
“Do you have an address?”
“Stephanie?”
POLICE CHIEF CHRIS Ball fixed his hat on his head as he strode toward his car.
Thank God for dumb blondes—or brunettes as the case might be. She had the whole damn thing in her hands and she still couldn’t figure it out.
One of the other 10 million federales working on the case would, though. Eventually. They had enough stinking people poking their noses in the woodpile.
“Hello, Chief. Nice day, isn’t it?”
The chief glanced over and saw the town librarian, Joyce Dalton, walking her dog. Good-looking woman, that.
Too young for him, and married, and reading constantly, being a librarian, he would bet, but good-looking anyway.
“Mrs. Dalton. Beautiful day. Taking time off?”
“My day off. I thought I would work in my garden.”
“Nice day for it. You take care now.”
“I will, Chief.”
Ball got into his car, trying to decide whether the dumb brunette would go to the high school first or out toward Pete Goddard’s rundown horse farm.
84
THE LEAD OFFICER on Gordon’s suicide case had a photographic memory, and described the scene to Hernes Jackson in vivid detail.
Too vivid, thought Jackson; he started getting queasy about halfway through.
Gordon had jumped from the twenty-third floor.
“As far as the room goes, it was locked, with no signs of forced entry, no disturbance. Gordon’s suitcase was still packed and in the corner,” said the detective, a middle-aged African-American named Drew Popkin.
Jackson listened as the detective described the rest of his investigation. They were standing on the pavement of a driveway a few feet from where the body had been found. According to Popkin, there were no eyewitnesses to the jump. In fact, Gordon had probably been on the ground at least fifteen minutes before somebody found him.
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