The reporters and the tourists fell silent.
Rush Halliwell, from his post at a second-floor window inside the museum, stared down at the scene with a faint smile of amusement. Stefani Fogg, he thought, was a ringmaster. She’d turned the whole of Bangkok into a circus.
“… given the clear indication of Mr. Roderick’s governing testament,” Matthew French intoned, “we would like to challenge the Thai Heritage Board and the Ministry of Culture to review the 1967 will, as well as the Board’s policy regarding administration of Jack Roderick’s House, in order to fairly address Ms. Fogg’s claims.”
He raised his eyes serenely from his notes. “Thank you very much. Ms. Fogg would be willing to take a few questions.”
A clamor of shouting broke out. Across the courtyard, the rear window of the cream-colored Mercedes slid down silently, and Stefani glimpsed a man’s head within, his attention concentrated entirely on her. There was malevolence, cold as a viper’s, in the man’s look.
“Ms. Fogg! Ms. Fogg!”
The reporters were baying for attention. A Thai woman was wedged painfully between two burly men, her arm extended in supplication. Stefani pointed at her.
“Why did the family suppress Jack Roderick’s second will for so many years?” the woman cried, and thrust out a microphone.
“It appears that Jack Roderick misplaced the will by accident,” Stefani replied, “and that when it was discovered eighteen months ago, the document was contested by the Thai Heritage Board and the Minister of Culture. The Roderick family lawyers have authenticated Jack Roderick’s signature, however, and there can be no doubt that the testament reflects Mr. Roderick’s final wishes. I’m standing before you today in an effort to see justice done.”
“Do you think Roderick was killed so that the Thai government could seize his art collection?” a man shouted.
“No one can say what happened to Jack Roderick. We can all see, however, that the Thai government benefited far more from Roderick’s estate than did his heirs.”
Stefani’s eyes roved over the surging mass of reporters and came to rest on one who held no microphone, no tape recorder or pen. A powerful Asian with expressionless eyes and gleaming black hair, his arms crossed protectively over his chest. The thug from the Oriental. Her shadow. Rush Halliwell must have told him where and when to find her. She had invited Rush to the museum that afternoon as a sort of test: now she had her answer.
“What do you plan to do with the house?”
The question came from a mild-faced man with a shock of white hair and bright blue eyes, a Westerner who held a pad of paper in his hand.
“I have no plans as yet,” she replied. “My object is to honor Jack Roderick’s memory and win restitution for his family, whose rights have been disregarded for decades.”
“But the family’s gone,” the reporter countered. “Admit it, Ms. Fogg. You’re fortune-hunting at the expense of the Thai people. You’re hijacking our national treasures.”
Our treasures? she thought. “I have no wish to deprive the public of access to the collection. If the Thai Minister of Culture, Mr. Suwannathat, is willing to meet me halfway, perhaps we could arrive at a compromise regarding the museum’s future.”
Across the courtyard, the window of the cream-colored Mercedes slid closed. The engine throbbed to life.
At the far end of Soi Kasemsan, a siren wailed. Dickie Spencer had called the police.
“Nice show,” Rush Halliwell breathed in her ear. He had slipped down the museum’s main stairs and out the front door, so that he was standing just behind Stefani when the police arrived. “You look like a woman in need of consular support. Want me to run interference?”
“Call off your dog,” she said tersely.
“My dog?”
She nodded in the direction of a broad-shouldered man with dark hair who was forcing a path toward them. Journalists bobbed like bowling pins in his wake. The lump at the base of Rush’s skull throbbed sharply.
“The man’s name is Jo-Jo and he belongs to the guy in the beige Mercedes,” Rush muttered. “Sompong Suwannathat, if I’m not mistaken. I know his license plate.”
She stiffened. “Introduce me?”
“To the minister? No thank you.” He grasped her wrist tightly and half-pulled, half-propelled her toward the waiting black limo.
But Jo-Jo had reached it first; he’d propped himself firmly against the passenger door, an immovable wall. There was no way out by the front gate: the police were using bullhorns, herding the journalists like cattle toward the sole exit. Camera crews were avidly filming the scene as they went.
“Shit,” Rush muttered to himself.
Stefani wrested her hand from his grasp and darted back toward the house. She was making for the garden— for the khlong gate, and the water beyond.
The khlong. It might work.
He turned abruptly and came up hard against Matthew French’s chest. The lawyer was staring after his fleeing client.
“Hold the guy who’s blocking the car,” Rush said urgently. “Do anything you can. She’s not safe.”
She had dragged a bench against the garden wall’s ornamental stone-work, and was attempting to swing her leg over the vicious barbed wire that spooled along the ledge.
“Did you have to wear that skirt today?” Rush asked. “Jesus—how tight is that thing?”
He jumped up beside her and began cutting the wire with a Swiss army knife.
“I don’t need you—”
“Yes, you do. Hold this.”
He handed her his suit jacket and dove without hesitation into the khlong.
The water was colder than he expected, colder than in the days when he’d jumped off the lock gantries for the sheer joy of doing it with the other tanned and bare-chested Thai boys. How old had he been? Eight? Ten? Rush came up sputtering, and swam toward the Ban Khrua side of the khlong and the dock thrust out into the water. The weaving families were long gone, now, and what faced him was a series of industrial sheds. He did not like to think about what swirled around him in the brown current.
He heaved himself onto the dock, which bounced and swayed on its pylons. Two boats lay overturned on the muddy bank. He righted the smallest of them and found oars tucked beneath.
There was a splash, and he glanced hastily around to see Stefani’s dark head rising out of the turgid water. Jo-Jo stood on the garden side of the khlong gate, his hands grasping the wall.
She pulled herself up beside him; Rush thrust the small craft into the water and she quickly stepped into it. People were shouting at them from both sides of the khlong, now.
She gave Jo-Jo the finger as they rowed away.
“That guy reported to you at the Oriental’s cocktail party last night,” Stefani said, as she squeezed the khlong out of her hair. “Explain.”
“Jo-Jo is a piece of paid protection whose weapon of choice is an Uzi.” Rush leaned into the oars and feathered the brown water. The smell of garbage and decaying water plants was fetid: Stefani wrinkled her nose as she surveyed her ruined suit.
“I’ve watched Jo-Jo for years,” Rush went on, “but I’ve never run into him at the Oriental before. I blocked his path at the party, and he told me in exquisite Malay to go fuck myself.”
“He was sitting in the hotel lobby when I arrived Tuesday morning. He took something from my tote bag that afternoon. And if I’m not mistaken, he intended just now to haul me off by force. In the course of twenty-four hours he’s gone from surveillance to kidnapping.”
“He’s working on Sompong’s orders.”
“The minister wanted to chat?”
“Don’t joke about it,” Rush said brusquely. “Jo-Jo’s methods aren’t pretty. I’m more worried about your safety now than I was last night—and last night I was worried sick.” He winced at the memory of the blow to his head. “What did he steal from your bag, anyway?”
“A piece of paper. I’d made … notes … on it.”
“Then assume Som
pong’s read them.”
She pursed her lips, but volunteered no more information.
“Stefani, you’ve got to tell me why the minister’s trained his paid gun on you.”
“I want Sompong’s house.”
“It isn’t that simple. He saw you coming.”
“You expect me to believe that Sompong Suwannathat knew my name—knew what I intended in Bangkok— before this afternoon? That’s bullshit.”
“You’re willing to believe the same of me,” he observed quietly.
“You’re U.S. government,” she shot back. “You know far more than is healthy for anybody. Yesterday I’d have said you put Jo-Jo on my tail. But since you failed to hand me over this afternoon—”
“Let me make one thing clear, Ms. Fogg,” Rush said brusquely. “I don’t make contact with my own surveillance in the target’s direct line of sight. I don’t have an intimate dinner with somebody I’m following. And I could be fired—or worse—for surveilling a U.S. citizen. I didn’t unleash the dog.”
Her dark eyes regarded him steadily. “I was warned about you. Or rather, the people you work for.”
“By whom?”
“Max Roderick. He told me the CIA knew the truth about his grandfather’s death. And that they’d make sure it stayed … buried.”
“Who says I’m CIA?”
She snorted and held his gaze.
Halliwell sighed in exasperation. “You think Max was murdered, don’t you? So do I. But I didn’t push his wheelchair off that cliff. And neither did anybody I work for.”
He saw from the slight movement of her head that he had surprised her. He shipped his oars.
“Max told me the same fairy tale about his grandfather eighteen months ago. He’d found the second will just weeks before, and made a quick trip to Thailand. It was the beginning of all his troubles.”
“You met him?” She broke in quickly, as though the very idea were painful. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”
“I spent about three days in his company. He hit town the same week as our Secretary of Defense, and most of the embassy staff paid homage to Washington. I stayed behind to do some real work. I got to talk to Max.”
Her eyes had filled with a hunger that disturbed him. The boat rocked gently in the sluggish current.
“What did he want?”
“Anything we might have concerning his family. He thought there’d be file drawers with Jack’s name on them, I guess. I couldn’t help him.”
She laughed with bitterness. “He expected you to shut him down. And you did.”
“Jack Roderick was rumored to have been a spy for most of his life. Who knows how close his ties were to the United States after he started his silk company? For a man who was supposed to be plotting coups in the fifties and sixties, he spent an awful lot of time supervising weavers and buying art. Max seemed convinced that his grandfather opposed the Vietnam War—and was eliminated by his own intelligence service because of it.”
“Is that so shocking?”
“Grow up, Stefani,” Rush snapped. “It’s the classic cynicism of the conspiracy theorist. It’s ignorance masquerading as privileged information. I told him as much. But then I realized: Max is a Roderick. Two generations of Roderick men died in brutal and unexplained ways. What else is the third generation going to believe?”
“It wasn’t just a theory,” Stefani persisted. “He saw things, as a kid—”
“The man in uniform, running downstairs,” Rush mocked. “Roderick shouting, with blood on his face. What the hell does that prove? Nothing but that a kid of four, awakened from a sound sleep, will always see nightmares.”
“Did you ever check the details?”
“I didn’t have to.” He dipped the oars once more into the khlong. “If you’d studied the history of the Vietnam War, you’d know that the CIA fought pitched battles with the Pentagon for years over what constituted truth in intelligence. North Vietnamese troop strength assessments, for instance: the Agency projected far greater enemy numbers than Army Headquarters would report to LBJ. The Army rewrote the Agency’s numbers and got their asses kicked when too many Viet Cong crept out of the rice paddies. Heads rolled and good men fell on their swords over that one. But nobody was blown away. Not even Jack Roderick.”
“The fact remains that Roderick disappeared. And no one—in Thailand or the United States—has been willing to say why.”
“Maybe he killed himself,” Rush retorted. “Twenty years of buying people’s souls can be hard to live with.”
15
Bangkok,
1951
In the months after Boonreung’s murder, Jack Roderick gave himself up entirely to the business of selling silk. He devoted hours to what he loved instead of to Edwin Stanton or Stanton’s successors in the ambassadorial post. As the years of Truman gave way to those of Eisenhower, and Mao Tse-tung straddled China with iron knees, Roderick avoided the embassy and lived on his own terms, a figurehead in the expatriate community, a fulcrum of every rumor among the Thais.
There was good cause for the whispers behind Roderick’s back. Although he had brokered a deal with the CIA that allowed him to work as he chose—an export merchant unattached to the embassy, with no diplomatic status—he continued to serve as eyes and ears for the spymasters in Washington, and too many Thais knew it. His numerous and influential friends came from every strata of Bangkok life: policemen on the beat, noodle vendors, courtesans and barbers, the assistant chiefs of police. Assistant chiefs were ambitious, and thus more open to persuasion. They sat down to dinner and shared their heartaches, muttered their opinions, confessed their lovers’ secrets. If, after one of these evenings, a modest sum of money exchanged hands … the payment was only a sign of esteem and affection. It hardly constituted a binding contract. The essence of Roderick’s power lay not in what he bought, but the charm with which he bought it. It was clear to his friends that Roderick loved them all—understood them all—and cherished their dreams of an expansive future.
And yet there were moments, when his clear, light eyes saw through a man to his very soul, and the memory of Gyapay the Torturer’s fate surfaced in the unquiet mind, and the sum of cash was spent quickly and heedlessly and not without a shudder.
Roderick was Washington’s clearinghouse for every covert operation undertaken in Thailand. Covert operations, in that Cold War decade, were the CIA’s reason for being. The Agency did what no president or Congress was prepared to admit: influenced voters, propped up democratic candidates, threw elections, leaned on newspaper editors, made or broke careers. Covert operators managed all this with the ample funds provided under the yearly defense appropriations authorized by Congress, and they did it in the name of defeating the Soviets, who—along with Mao’s China—were hellbent on ruling the world. It was a dirty game, but it succeeded in part because of American prestige. The United States had saved the world from tyranny in the last war. The United States stood for freedom. It was the sole shining beacon capable of countering the immense Russian darkness; and Roderick never questioned its ultimate purpose. He was an American by privilege, by birth and by conviction; he knew that he was the envy of the world.
Washington was content to maintain Field Marshal Pibul in power. Pibul was no democrat, but he was the farthest thing from Communist that Thailand could offer. Now that Pridi Banomyong had traveled to Beijing, and thrown himself under the protection of Mao, the CIA was leery of wartime resistance fighters and their dubious ambitions. For the moment, the Field Marshal was comfortingly sound. Pibul had learned the lesson of his torturer’s gruesome end, and kept his secret police on a tighter leash.
The people of Bangkok had long ago decided that Jack Roderick was responsible for Gyapay’s murder and those of his staff, and they were by and large grateful— the exception being Thanom, the young bartender at the Oriental. Thanom had circulated his suspicion readily among the staff; and though he could not prove Roderick had slit his uncle’s throat, any more tha
n he would discuss Old Man Maha’s duties as a torturer, his words carried conviction. It was well known that Roderick was in the arms of Miss Lucy when the chief of the secret police, Chacrit Gyapay, was shot dead in his own car. But Thanom could imply great knowledge of sinister deeds—he could speak darkly of the farang who pretended to be one of them. Thanom could make the sign against evil behind Roderick’s back. And eventually fearful powers were accorded the American. He was treated with care and respect.
Roderick moved out of the Oriental and hired rooms not far from Ban Khrua, where his silk weavers lived.
He found, to his surprise, that the management of his business connected him to the life of Siam in a way he had not expected. He began to know the weavers’ habits, the dictates of their Muslim faith, the names and ages of their children. He sat cross-legged on their wooden porches in the early morning, Boonreung’s orphaned cockatoo nibbling at his ear, and uttered halting words of the Thai none of his Western friends thought he spoke. He studied antiquities and Siam’s history and the chemistry of Swiss aniline dyes, and he experimented with the khlong’s waters, lifting silk skeins high on wooden racks, cerise and aquamarine and viridian. He hiked with his friends from the Siam Society—a local group of antiquities enthusiasts—into the dense jungles of the interior, and brought back treasures of lost empires. Never again would he leave something as priceless as the Buddha cave to the chance knives of scavengers. He had returned to the Western Seaboard only once since that first trip in 1945, and found the cave plundered, the head of the Buddha hacked from the living rock.
And he went back, again and again, to the ancient capital of Ayutthaya.
The city had been built in the fourteenth century as a refuge from smallpox, on a group of islands trapped in the confluence of three rivers. Ayutthaya grew in wealth and power until by the end of the seventeenth century it had subjugated all Siam. And then, in 1767, the Burmese sacked the city and enslaved all those they did not put to the sword.
The Secret Agent Page 24
