The Secret Agent

by Francine Mathews

  Though you looked, in all those photos clipped from a hundred magazines, like a match made in Hollywood …

  “A frivolous suit,” she mused. “Impossible to prove. But instead of fighting it, you settled out of court. Pity?”

  Max handed her the wineglass. “Failure is so goddamn tedious. I gave Suzanne half a million to go away. Do you want to see my shop?”

  It was connected to the house’s lower floor by a short passage, beyond an exercise room and a hot tub with doors that opened into the night. The workspace was spartan. A drafting table with color ads of ski gear clipped to its upper edge; a promotional poster or two tacked to the walls; a computer and a few chairs. But every square surface of the open area beyond was lined with prototypes of skis, red and black and strident yellow. Boots were scattered around the floor in various stages of assembly and the tools of the ski tuner’s trade reared up like the medieval rack: vises, benches, warming pans for wax. Brushes. Spray cans. Flat-bladed knives. Buffers and drills.

  “I hadn’t realized this was so hands-on,” she remarked.

  “I test everything I make.”

  “But you don’t make it, surely? You draw it. On that drafting table. The skis themselves are made in …”

  “Lyons.” He was watching her, checking off the facts she’d found in his dossier. “They send everything back for quality control and technical refining.”

  He crossed the room and chose some skis from the horde against the wall. “Here’s the pair I thought might suit you. The Volant T3 Vertex. They’re designed specifically for women and their marketing slogan is: Weaker sex, my ass. That suits, right?”

  The skis were the color and sheen of stainless steel. A Bauhaus concept of a blade. The DeLorean of the slopes. “You didn’t design these,” she said.

  “I don’t design for women,” he replied. “I can’t test the skis properly. Women have a totally different strength-to-weight ratio. Your center of gravity is lower. You turn differently, carry your weight differently, bend differently than men. I can simulate that on the computer, of course, but not on the slope.”

  “I like my skis,” she protested.

  “Because you paid for them. You’re skiing Vökls right now—and don’t get me wrong, they’re great if you’re a two-hundred-and-twenty-pound guy. You handle them well, considering. But I’d like to see you on these.”

  She ran her eye down the surface. “Teflon?”

  “Over a foam core.”

  “They’re too short.”

  “They’re perfect. I’m taking you into the steeps tomorrow. Off-piste terrain. Anything longer, you’ll be sliding down the Alps on your backside.”

  “You’d make sure of that, wouldn’t you?” She spoke with a trace of amusement. “If only to have the satisfaction of being right. You need to ski faster, live harder, think quicker—”

  “Dominate,” he agreed evenly, taking a step toward her. “It’s my driving force. I dominate the people around me just like I dominate the mountain. Or so Suzanne always said. I pushed and pushed until she broke. And I feel not the slightest regret, Stefani. I always knew Suzanne lacked staying power. It was only a question of what and when.”

  He held her gaze as though daring her to challenge him, and Stefani resisted because resisting was her reflex in all such contests. So it’s true, she thought. You are relentless, and you don’t give a fuck about anybody. I’ve been warned. But I’m not the kind of woman who breaks.

  “Poor Suzanne,” she said dryly. “She must miss you awfully.”

  “She got the cash. That’s all she really wanted.”

  “What did the Thai prostitute want, Max?”

  He flinched. For an instant she caught the pain—or was it violence?—swimming through the green gaze.

  “Did you invite her to your room? Did it get a little … rough?”

  “No.” His voice was quiet. “I haven’t asked anybody into my bed for a long, long time.”

  He was close enough to graze with her fingertips and the air was suddenly charged. She was too conscious of the unblinking stare, sharp as a talon; the face that had lurked in her Scottish dreams. Something fluid and animal had entered the room.

  This is why, she thought bitterly in the direction of Oliver Krane, you choose men by their shirt size instead of their IQs. Because it never, never forces you to see the ugly side of yourself—the selfish, ravaging desire to rule.

  And then a drawling voice from the hallway said, “You should lock your doors, buddy. Valuable stuff must be hidden somewhere in this house, although I admit you hide it pretty well.” A sharply molded head peered around the door frame; the dark eyes lighted instantly on Stefani. “How many more women have you stashed away beneath the floorboards?”

  “This is Stefani Fogg,” Max said. She heard the warning in his voice.

  “I’m Jeff Knetsch” The newcomer extended a hand. “Max’s oldest friend. Also his lawyer. Is there any more wine?”

  6

  Max had given her no warning of Jeff Knetsch’s arrival in Courchevel—though Knetsch had flown in from New York to assess this woman who held her fork so indolently as she listened to his talk of the Westchester suburbs and his passion for golf. She had taken the lawyer’s appearance in stride; but Max suspected that she was on her guard. She was too shrewd to mistake a business meeting for a casual dinner among friends. The current between them had altered subtly: the dangerous intimacy of the afternoon had vanished. Now she projected a cultivated intelligence that was as distancing as the cynical banter of the chairlift. He understood how close he had come to the real woman only once she was in retreat.

  Max had known Knetsch for more than thirty years— they had celebrated their eleventh birthdays together on the giant slalom course at Tahoe—and he knew the lawyer was on edge this evening. His deep-set, hungry eyes roved constantly over the room, over Stefani Fogg’s figure, over the books on Max’s shelves. He twirled his wine in nervous, long-fingered hands. As Max watched, a thread of Bordeaux trickled down the stem of the glass and beaded the table as with blood.

  They ate figs wrapped in prosciutto and balsamic vinegar, goat cheese drizzled with honey, and Moroccan lamb stew ladled over crisp French bread. Dessert was a tarte tatin he’d bought from Yvette Margolan in Le Praz that morning; otherwise, he’d cooked the meal.

  “I can hardly boil water,” Stefani said as he poured her more wine.

  “Freedom,” he observed, “must buy a lot of takeout.”

  She looked at him then—hearing the afternoon’s echo in his words—and for an instant, it was as though Knetsch had never appeared and they were alone.

  “How long have you worked for Oliver Krane?” the lawyer asked her abruptly.

  “Maybe ten days. But I thought only Max was supposed to know why I’m here.”

  “Max would never hire an outside consultant without my approval.”

  “Really?” She smiled. “I thought he already had. Do you get to France often, Jeff?”

  “About four times a year. Whenever Max needs a friend.”

  “He’s needed one quite a lot lately.”

  Knetsch raised a skeptical brow.

  “The body in the bed,” she prompted. “The Swiss police. A lawyer comes in handy, don’t you think?”

  What did the Thai prostitute want, Max?

  He understood then that she’d been thinking about the murder in Geneva from the moment she’d arrived. She hadn’t accepted his story.

  “The Swiss police, thank God, know a setup when they see one,” Knetsch said heavily. “Max was never in real danger of being charged.”

  “I find murder hard to dismiss, regardless of whether anyone’s been charged. Why would someone frame you, Max?”

  “For the negative publicity. That’s been true all my adult life.”

  “There are sick people out there ready to ruin anyone’s morning.” Knetsch kept his eyes on the garnet depths of his wineglass. “Particularly our Golden Boy here. But that’s not
the matter you were hired to pursue, Stefani. You’re here to help Max with his inheritance claim.”

  “Don’t you think it’s probable the two matters are linked?”

  “Oliver Krane charges a goddamn fortune,” Knetsch persisted. “He ought to have sent somebody with a bit more experience. It’s obvious you can ski—but what else do you bring to the table?”

  “Back off, Jeff,” Max said quietly.

  “As your lawyer—”

  “—You’re presuming on attorney-client privilege. I’m going to light the fire in the living room. Anyone want coffee?”

  He was behaving, Max thought, like a maître d’ in his own house—sliding among the difficult guests with his hope for a perfect evening. And yet he’d asked Jeff to come—he’d wanted his opinion. Why, then, was he so quick to defend Stefani Fogg?

  The sky beyond the great room’s windows was very black and punctured by stars only visible when the house lights were dimmed. They were dimmed now. She had draped herself across one of his leather sofas—that whipcord body a visual sketch of her mental strength: disciplined, precise, economical. When he looked at her he saw not the form in repose, but the tensed spring of scores of ski runs. He dropped an armload of firewood on the hearth and busied himself with kindling. Knetsch picked up where he’d left off.

  “What do you know about Molly Sanderson, Stefani?”

  “She was Max’s first crush.” Amusement in the velvet voice; but she was right. He’d adored Molly in the diffident, grudging fashion of five- year-olds, subjecting her to the tyranny of his rage as often as he hugged her.

  “Molly was Max’s nanny in Evanston from 1964 until 1966, when he entered first grade,” Stefani said matter-of-factly. “She was nineteen when she started with the Rodericks and married two months after she left them. Now divorced and living in St. Paul. She remembers Max fondly.”

  “Joe DiGuardia?”

  “Downhill ski coach at Squaw Valley. That was after Max and his mother moved to San Francisco.”

  “In what year?”

  “Late ’66. Max would’ve been seven. His mother rented an apartment in Haight-Ashbury, joined the antiwar movement, and discovered recreational drugs. She died of a heroin overdose in 1969, when Max was ten.”

  He was conscious of his hands, arrested in the act of laying the fire, his whole body tense with listening. Her voice was too casual; she must suspect how it affected him to hear such things on the lips of a stranger.

  “Max was given the choice of moving to Chicago—his grandmother was still alive then—or to his great-aunt’s house in Delaware. Joe DiGuardia, the ski coach, opted instead to act as guardian. Max stayed in Tahoe. He lived with DiGuardia, off and on, for the next decade.”

  “Doing what?” Knetsch asked, as though it weren’t obvious. Max felt a spurt of anger toward his friend-to ward the rigid stance he’d adopted in the center of the room, inquisitor to Stefani’s languid heretic.

  “Max trained with the U.S. Ski Team, competed worldwide, took his first Olympic medal at nineteen. He met you years before that, however, in 1970, when you were both kids in the Squaw program. You took silver twice—once at the World Cup and once at Sarajevo—but you were never quite in Max’s class. Is that the basis of your friendship?”

  Every relationship requires someone to dominate, and the other to submit.

  Knetsch’s face had paled. He set down his glass.

  “Your racing career ended when you broke your femur at Jackson Hole,” she continued implacably.

  “—Saving his sorry ass, I might add.”

  “Max lost a ski in Corbett’s Couloir. You went in after him. When you caught an edge and fell fifty feet, he crawled the length of Corbett’s to get help.”

  That strange exhilaration as he inched his way down the sheer granite face of the most famous chute in North America. Clinging with his gloved fingers to an outcropping of granite, he’d kicked off his boots and felt with his toes for purchase in the ice. Knetsch was wedged between two jagged shafts of rock above, his teeth clenched and sweat already beading his forehead. The bone of his left thigh shafted through his ski suit’s Kevlar. When the rescue team roped up an hour later and rappelled down the face to reach him, he had fainted. Max’s feet were frostbitten from stumbling through the snow. What he remembered now was the fierce sensation of triumph: himself, alone against the mountain.

  “He always was a noble son of a bitch,” Jeff remarked carelessly. “What drugs were prescribed for my post-op pain?”

  “I’d guess you popped Percocet, but my sources aren’t telling.” Her dark eyes shifted to Max’s face; their intensity jarred him. “What I don’t know is what you hope to gain by digging up the past. This isn’t just a battle for misappropriated assets. Is it?”

  He reached for a box of matches, averting his face. “I want the truth about what happened on Easter Sunday, 1967.”

  “Do you think the truth exists, after all these years? Everybody connected to your grandfather must be dead.”

  “Not everybody.” He closed the fire screen. “There’s me, for instance—and whoever’s killing fifteen-year-olds and leaving them in my hotel room.”

  “So you agree. The two matters are connected.”

  “Of course. I didn’t strangle that girl. Whoever did, meant it as a warning. Let sleeping dogs lie.”

  “What dogs, exactly? I’ve heard a bit about your family—Jack’s disappearance, your father’s death as a POW But no more than the bare outline. What can you tell me, Max? What do you think happened to your grandfather?”

  He glanced at Knetsch. His friend rocked slightly on his heels in the center of the room, lips compressed. He didn’t like this woman or her easy assurance. Knetsch wanted her bowing and scraping to them both.

  “How much do you know about my grandfather?” Max asked.

  “It’s a pretty broad legend. Socialite, Brahmin, Silk King, spy—”

  “Forget the first three and concentrate on the last. Jack Roderick, trained by the OSS to liberate Thailand in 1945, trained in intelligence and jungle warfare. After Truman drops the bomb on Hiroshima and the Thais capitulate to the Allies, Jack’s made Bangkok intelligence chief for the outfit that eventually becomes the CIA. And then the spy story drifts into nowhere. Or more importantly, into Khorat.”

  “Khorat?”

  “Northeast Thailand. A region that borders Laos and Cambodia, with soil so arid it’s good for nothing but clay pots and mulberry trees and the production of silk. Jack went to Khorat in 1946 and fell in love with raw silk. By 1950, he’d founded an export company and set down roots in Bangkok. He led quite the glamorous expatriate life.”

  “The Brahmin, the Silk King, the art collector—”

  “All cover,” Max said flatly, “from start to finish. Gramps was a NOC—an agent of American intelligence operating under Non-Official Cover. Or so I believe. The CIA refuses to confirm or deny it.”

  Knetsch groaned and threw himself into a chair.

  “A NOC,” she repeated. “You mean—a businessman by day, spy by night?”

  “It’s the most dangerous kind of spying there is. You’re not attached to the U.S. embassy, so you’ve got no diplomatic immunity. If you’re accused and tried for espionage by your host country, nobody can save you. That’s what my grandfather was doing. And that’s why he disappeared.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  How to explain the sense of mission that had been growing in him for months? The certainty, akin to instinct, that guided him the way a sixth sense drove a sleepwalker through a darkened landscape?

  “I’ve … examined the facts.”

  “Facts?” Knetsch snorted.

  “It’s obvious Jack was still working for the CIA when he set up the silk business. Otherwise, why bother with Khorat at all, right after World War II? The place was—it is—a goddamn desert. Other than a few Khmer ruins, it’s got nothing to tempt a tourist. Even the Thai King has ignored it for fifty years.”
/>   “So?” she prompted.

  “Jack went there about once a month. A fifteen-hour car trip, each way. He supposedly had a bunch of Laotian friends—but I think they were agents he ran for U.S. intelligence. He needed a plausible reason for all those meetings on the Laotian border, so he came up with the silk business.”

  “Okay.” Stefani nodded. “I can accept that as a theory. But are you suggesting that these Laotians killed your grandfather? Or was it the Thais, pissed off because he was spying on their turf?”

  He stabbed a poker at the burning logs, sending a shower of sparks up the chimney. “Stefani, what was happening in Southeast Asia in 1967?”

  “The Vietnam War.”

  “The Vietnam War.” He glanced over at her. “By the late 1960s, Jack’s secret life began to catch up with him. Suddenly the revolutionaries in every former colonial power—the guys who were on my grandfather’s side during World War II—are leading guerilla armies through the jungle and committing atrocities in the backyard. Suddenly all of Southeast Asia’s exploding and my dad— the Silk King’s son and heir—is trapped in the worst shit-hole in enemy territory. U.S. fighter jets are flying missions out of air bases in Khorat—Gramps’s favorite playground—and Billy Lightfoot is the commanding officer of U.S. Forces in Northeast Thailand. Too much coincidence, Stefani. Too much for me to swallow.”

  “Who’s Billy Lightfoot?”

  “A soldier’s soldier. He trained my grandfather during the OSS days, and when Gramps disappeared, Lightfoot flew Army helicopters into Malaysia to hunt for him.”

  “Unsuccessfully.”

  Max nodded. “I tried to find Billy two years ago, to talk to him about Gramps. I thought he might even know something about my dad’s execution. But Lightfoot had died of heart disease. His widow was senile.”

  “Your father was killed in North Vietnam, a few weeks after Jack disappeared. But he was a POW, wasn’t he? A casualty of war?”