The Secret Agent

by Francine Mathews

  It was possible, he thought, that he might yet be saved. He had looked honest enough, hadn’t he? He had posed his arguments in the best legal manner. He was an American. He had an embassy.

  He had been framed.

  Sompong.

  The minister owned everybody in Bangkok. Ankana and Jeff and the man named Chanin, who must have squealed about the contract murder. The minister even owned the police.

  He thought of his wife, Shelley. By now she would have called the managing partner of his firm in a desperate bid to find him. The firm might have reported him missing to the police or the FBI—but then again, when Jeff considered the discretion habitual among lawyers, he figured they probably hadn’t. Calm down, Shelley. Wait for Jeff to call. Maybe he’s spending a bit of time, hiking in the Alps. Grief can affect people in strange ways. He had, after all, suffered a loss in Courchevel ten days ago. He had eulogized his best friend.

  What should I have done differently? Max taunted him from beyond the cell. He was older today, more like the man Jeff had last seen in a wheelchair. Asked better questions? Taken more time? Paid you higher fees?

  “I just wanted to win,” Jeff answered fretfully. “I was sick to death of running second to you all my life.”

  As he watched, Max rose and shoved the wheelchair away. And without another look, he walked easily through the prison wall.

  Jeff felt a flare of panic and loss. He surged to his feet, thrusting stray bodies aside. Gripping the bars of his cell, sticky with other men’s sweat, he screamed a name aloud.

  The murmurs behind him fell abruptly silent.

  And then, like the growing beat of coming rain, the laughter began.

  He swung around to face them. Twelve, maybe fifteen men of every class and description, all reeking of alcohol and filth and days-old urine. Their eyes were mocking and ruthless. And they were advancing upon him.

  “You say this Ankana woman told you yesterday that Knetsch was in Bangkok,” Rush repeated for clarity’s sake as he and Stefani waited in the conference room that the police, after a brief but heated squabble in Thai, had grudgingly turned over to him. A pad of paper and two pens, caps mangled by other people’s teeth, rested on the table before them. “He was already in custody when you talked to her. Raving about murder.”

  It was almost noon on Friday by Stefani’s watch. She was drinking Thai iced coffee and lusting for a cigarette. She doubted Rush carried one. During the drive from his father’s house, she had told him everything she knew about Jeffrey Knetsch: that he had been Max’s attorney and best friend. That he was friendly with Ankana Lee-Harris, a British woman of Thai birth whom Max loathed. That Knetsch was heavily in debt and had probably sold information to Sompong Suwannathat. The last, she admitted, she could not prove.

  She said nothing whatsoever about Oliver Krane.

  “Ankana told me that Jeff was meeting with the minister to discuss the loan of artifacts to the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” she added. “There’s a show going up in a few weeks that both Ankana and Knetsch are involved in. He serves on the Met Board, she’s a curator at a British museum.”

  Rush’s expression of interest sharpened. “You mean— they’re borrowing paintings?”

  “Dickie Spencer said sculpture and ceramics. He’s loaning pieces from Jack Roderick’s collection.”

  “Ceramics,” Rush mused. “I caught a glimpse of a few clay pots Tuesday night, at a warehouse near the Thieves Market. What does Ankana look like?”

  “She’s Thai. Her hair’s bleached orange.”

  Rush drummed his fingers restlessly on the table. “I’ve seen her—with the minister and a guy who might even be Knetsch. But we can talk about it later.” He glanced significantly at the opposite wall.

  A large framed mirror hung there. One-way glass, with the Bangkok police arranged on the other side. Microphones were suspended from the ceiling. The police hadn’t bothered to disguise them.

  The door swung open and three men shuffled inside. A burly cop in the close-fitting dark khaki uniform of the Bangkok police, a man in the blue jumpsuit of the prison guards, and Jeff Knetsch. The latter’s hands were cuffed.

  For a moment, Stefani did not recognize him.

  Rush Halliwell stood. “Mr. Knetsch? Rush Halliwell, from the U.S. embassy. Please sit down. We haven’t much time.”

  “You’ve got to get me out of here.” Knetsch shrugged off the hand of the prison warden and was thrust, stumbling, toward the table where Stefani sat. His eyes were bleary, his skin ashen beneath a growth of beard. What looked like a human bite was purpling on his neck.

  “What happened to you, Jeff?” Stefani asked.

  At the sound of her voice, his gaze drifted vaguely toward her face. “You’re dead,” he said firmly. “So shut up.”

  Rush shot her a warning glance. She sat very still.

  “Mr. Knetsch. Please—have a seat.”

  “Just get me the fuck out of here!”

  “It’s not that simple, I’m afraid.” Rush came around the table and helped Jeff to sit.

  He sagged into the hard wooden chair and laid his cheek on the table like a child. “They searched me, you know. Without a warrant! My clothes. My … my … body cavities.” His shoulders began to heave. Dry, racking sobs. “He framed me. He set me up.”

  “Who?”

  Jeff reared like a jack-in-the-box. “I’m not talking to you,” he countered craftily. “I want a lawyer. An American lawyer.”

  “There is no legal organization in Thailand that specifically represents foreigners. I can try to find you local counsel, but it will have to be a Thai who understands the criminal justice system. Until then, it might help if you simply told me what happened.”

  “Make the monkeys leave,” Jeff insisted.

  Rush said a few words in Thai to the impassive policeman and his warder. The two men left the room.

  “Lot of good that’ll do,” Stefani murmured, with an eye to the mirror.

  “I told you to shut up,” Jeff snapped querulously. “You’re dead.”

  Stefani felt Rush’s hand squeeze hers under the table, in warning. “Did you kill her, Jeff?” he asked.

  “I don’t get my hands dirty.” Contempt soured the words. “I paid the kid to do it. He came cheap enough. And look where it got me! The fucking rat squealed to Sompong. He set me up.” Knetsch lunged suddenly across the table, seizing Rush’s jacket. “I was framed, do you hear me? They put that friggin’ bag in my pocket.”

  “I hear you,” Rush said calmly. “Let’s sit down, shall we? And start at the beginning.”

  “It was a guy in dark glasses and a tropical shirt. At a fish & chip place in Khao San Road. He bumped into me. Next thing I know, the cops are pulling heroin out of their hats. A full ounce.”

  “Was this after you paid the kid—that would be Chanin, I suppose—to kill Stefani?”

  “Two thousand baht,” Jeff muttered. “All the cash I had on me. I can’t even make cab fare home. Oh, God, I want to go home …” He crumpled again, weeping into his hands.

  Two thousand baht, Stefani thought. I almost got my throat slit for a lousy fifty bucks.

  “Why did you want to kill her?” Rush’s voice sounded almost bemused.

  “Because she asks too many questions. Sompong says so. She’s going to ruin everything—the shipments, the show. Sompong is fucking out of his mind, he’s so pissed.”

  “At you?”

  “I’ve failed him. First Max, and now this … She should never have been allowed near him.”

  “Near Sompong?” Rush pressed sharply.

  “Near Max.” The weeping man’s voice rose hysterically. “If Oliver hadn’t sent her to France, none of this would have happened!”

  Oliver. The name jolted through her like an electrical current. Knetsch was on a first-name basis with Oliver Krane.

  Rush glanced at her, then wrote on the pad: Is Oliver somebody from FundMarket?

  Later, she slashed back.

 
“Max has been driving me nuts,” Knetsch muttered. “Following me around. Talking, talking. Now she will, too.”

  “You pushed him off the edge, didn’t you?” Stefani demanded, her pulse racing with rage. “In his wheelchair. He left the brakes jammed on.”

  “No!” Jeff reared upward, his cuffed wrists straining. “I triggered the avalanche and Ankana trashed his binding—but he had those coming. You know he did. He left me alone in that chute with a broken leg, years ago, when I tried to save him. Dragged himself out and they called him a goddamn hero. I was supposed to be the hero. I never skied again. Not so it counts.”

  Rush gripped the man’s shoulders and eased him back into the chair.

  “Make her stop,” the lawyer implored. He refused to look at Stefani. “She always hated me. Jealous.”

  In that instant, she barely restrained herself from smashing his head down onto the table. “Who killed Max,

  Jeff?”

  “Someone else. Sompong’s man. Oliver, perhaps.”

  “Oliver Krane?”

  “He was in Courchevel,” Knetsch confided. “He’s always where you least expect. He’s a snake in the grass, Oliver. Been in Sompong’s pocket for years. Working both ends of the stick.”

  The unknown client. The vague referrals. The high-wire act with no safety net and enough rope to hang herself several times over. What had he said? The beauty of it is that I can deny you, ducks.

  “When Max decided to hire Krane’s, of course I agreed. Couldn’t be safer than old Ollie. The right hand would tell the left exactly what it was doing, right? But then Oliver sent her. I knew something was wrong. Playing us all false. Tried to tell Sompong.”

  Stefani went cold. “Sompong knows? That Krane is playing both sides?”

  “Thought we’d all be safe. Oliver’s cuckoo in Sompong’s nest! Now he’s sold the bitch down the river, too. Doesn’t know she’s dead.”

  “What are you saying?” Rush demanded.

  “Oliver gave her to Sompong. Lock, stock and nine-millimeter barrel. He faxed his report to Bangkok Wednesday. Sompong won’t need it, though, now that I’ve killed her.”

  Knetsch rubbed fretfully at his ears as though he heard something that pained him.

  Her mind darted frantically down a darkened corridor, snatching blindly for a door. There must be a way out. Not Oliver, with his hand on Max’s chair. Jesus, what had she been thinking, last March in New York? She had practically begged to be screwed.

  “Why kill Stefani, Jeff? What threat does she pose?” Rush’s eyes were narrowed as a snake’s before it strikes.

  “Sompong wanted her dead. Happy to oblige, of course.”

  Stefani reached for the pad and pen. Ask him, she wrote, to tell us everything he knows. About a man named Harry Leeds.

  1

  Hanoi,

  January 1967

  When the dreams came, as they always did a few hours before dawn, he thought that he was back on the flight deck of the USS Coral Sea, sitting in the cockpit of the A-4, pulling his helmet and then his canopy down while his parachute rigger gave the thumbs-up sign. The plane in front was Jimmy Serrano’s, except that Jimmy was dead and not taking off in a surge of sound and flame at the cliff edge where the tilting carrier became the South China Sea.

  In that moment of dozing hallucination it was all possible again: the ordnance clutched like a lethal goose egg under the wing and wild hope still beating in his veins. He might slip through the boiling black cloud of antiaircraft flak that streamed upward from the wide boulevards of Hanoi and buzz the opera house or perhaps the tree-lined park of the old French governor’s mansion. The Walleye smart bomb might actually hit the thermal plant he was supposed to target and not the apartment house next door. The goose egg would slide harmlessly toward a forest of industrial stacks, he and Jimmy would both pull up and out into the sunlight, with no thump of Jimmy’s fuselage crumpling suddenly like a Christmas cracker.

  If the dream were true he would not have turned back, to circle eight times over the antiaircraft guns with his eyes straining for the white surrender of Jimmy’s chute, until the surface-to-air missile sliced his own wing in half and he was spiraling toward the lake at the heart of Hanoi, scrabbling for the ejection-seat handle. His leg would not have shattered against the cockpit mouth as he hurtled from the plane, his left wrist would still be whole.

  In the seconds before he shook off the dream, it was one version of events—more real than the nightmare of waking.

  His dangling legs twitched now as he dozed, and the movement sent a spear of pain from his broken femur up along his spinal column, screamed across his numb shoulder blades where they had been drawn back tightly like a chicken’s, to end in a whimper at his biceps. The ropes were tied just below each muscle to cut off his circulation, then drawn back behind the head and slung from the ceiling. He had been suspended at dusk the previous evening; it was now, he thought, nearly dawn. Each night they trussed him like a bird and every morning they cut him down. He was supposed to confess to something.

  I am an American, fighting in the forces which guard my country and our way of life. I am prepared to give my life in their defense.

  The Code of Conduct for American Prisoners of War. It chattered like a radio jingle around and around his brain, a fragment of doggerel he had memorized at the Academy years ago.

  When questioned, should I become a prisoner of war, I am required to give name, rank, service number and date of birth. I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability.

  After the first four days of interrogation at the Maison Centrale, the former French prison, he had told them he was Richard Pierce Roderick, a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy. When they beat him and stamped on his fractured leg, swollen and black from the blood pooling beneath the surface of the skin, he shouted the numbers on his dog tags and the fact that he was thirty years old. Seven days later, lying in his own vomit and shit on a dank cement floor, he offered the starting lineup of the ’43 Yankees as members of his squadron. By the time the prison doctor arrived sometime that night, he was delirious and could say nothing at all.

  If I am captured, I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and aid others to escape. I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy.

  There was nothing special about beatings and solitary confinement: all the pilots interned in the Hanoi Hilton got them.

  “Too late,” the Vietnamese doctor muttered in disgust as he probed the splintered femur. Medical care was not wasted on the badly wounded.

  Jimmy Serrano, dead in three pulses of flaring light, waggled his wings at Rory and soared off into the blue. Rory raised his right hand and managed a salute.

  At dawn three prison guards had arrived to carry him from the room. He had known, in the part of his brain that remained clear despite the fever and the pain, that he was being taken away to die. They would want to work him over once more in the hope of extracting something—a list of bombing targets, a filmed confession denouncing the United States. He had heard confessions in the ten days he’d been lying on the prison floor—voices broadcast loudly over the prison’s speaker system, so that every downed pilot would comprehend that resistance was futile.

  He would not, Rory decided, confess to anything. Before he died, he would raise the middle finger of his right hand and thrust it full at the camera’s lens. Maybe little Max would see a broadcast of it someday, and understand.

  They had carried him to an unventilated cell, six feet by three feet, and left him to die of dehydration and shock. Except that he had not died. He lay listening to the rasp of his own breathing while a Beach Boys song circled maddeningly in his head. Forty-nine hours later, the guards opened the door and peered inside.

  Something had changed. He was too weak to bother wondering what it was; he knew only that the guards were agitated, they were barking orders and abuse at one another, and he was hauled painfully out of
the hole in which he had been supposed to die and carried at a run toward a different block of the prison. He caught sight of American faces peering through narrow bars and slatted windows and he’d tried to shout his name and rank and carrier group. But his lips were swollen shut. They left the prison yard behind and entered the cool depths of the central block, where the guards ate and the commandant had his offices. He was shunted down a hall and into a bare room with a great stone tub. There his filthy clothes were cut away from his body.

  As water sluiced over his head he tried desperately to drink, the bile choking in his throat. One of the guards forced warm tea between his lips. They threw a set of prison pajamas over his chest and legs and carried him hurriedly toward a gurney with a bare lightbulb swinging overhead.

  Rory had thought that he was beyond the reach of fear, but the sight of medical equipment in the hands of the Vietnamese brought a flood of adrenaline coursing through his system. He battled upright. Two guards forced him down while a medic attempted to set his fractured leg without benefit of anesthesia. He opened his mouth wide at the agony of it and bit hard on the forearm of the nearest guard, who leapt backward, howling and cursing, while the other guard punched him in the face. Rory passed out.

  A great while or perhaps only a few minutes later he found that he was lying in an actual bed made up with clean linen. His leg had never been set—he knew enough of injuries to understand it required surgery—but there was a cast about his left wrist. A cool breeze was blowing through an open window. In one corner of the room was a camera mounted on a tripod. Three men stood at the foot of his cot. Two wore the uniform of the North Vietnamese. A fourth man stood behind the camera, rolling film.

  “Lieutenant Commander.” It was the civilian who spoke—a short, aged man in a Mao jacket. He inclined his head in what might be a salute, although that seemed impossible.