The Secret Agent

by Francine Mathews

  “We? Fleur, is that why you’re here? Are you—”

  But she gave a startled little cry and clutched at his arm. A man was climbing over the khlong gate, which was locked against the night. The wolf, Roderick thought, the wolf is at the door. He’d been waiting for this moment ever since he’d threatened Vukrit Suwannathat in the minister’s office, four months before. Vukrit would want the letter that could destroy him.

  Roderick pulled Fleur behind him, shielding her with his body, and backed toward the terrace door. As he did so, a more deadly thought entered his mind: Had Fleur come tonight by purest coincidence? Or was she here as decoy, while Vukrit’s assassin crept through the darkness?

  The black-clad figure dropped heavily from the khlong gate to the ground and crouched low, his head turned toward them.

  “Jack!”

  A guttural whisper, scored with violence.

  Roderick stopped dead, eyes straining through the dusk of the torches. Then he released Fleur, very gently, knowing that he had misjudged her. He went to the terrace railing and reached down into the darkness. A shadowy hand gripped his own, and Roderick hauled the man upward—filthy uniform, mud on his face, no longer young.

  “Carlos,” he breathed. “Good God—you should be safe in the Cameron Highlands. Vukrit is hunting you.”

  “A man must do certain things, Jack, regardless of the risk.”

  Roderick glanced over his shoulder at Fleur. “I’m sorry,” he told her, and meant it. “I have business. We’ll finish our conversation later. I know it’s important.”

  She bowed her head silently and turned away from them, toward the house. Roderick closed the French doors behind her and steered Carlos to the far end of the terrace. He did not wait to hear if she crossed the gleaming floor on her soundless feet, or if she remained by the door, listening. But he kept his voice low.

  “I cannot stay long,” the old soldier muttered, “though I’m tired to death. Bangkok has grown in twenty years! I did not know how to find you, Jack—but I learned quickly. The lowest khlong rat has heard of the Silk King.”

  “Why are you here, Carlos?”

  “Your son. I have news of him.”

  “Alive? Or dead?”

  “Alive,” Carlos replied. “Barely. He’s kept in the Maison Centrale—the old French prison. You know it?”

  “The Hanoi Hilton.”

  “Not a hotel, Jack—” Carlos began, but Roderick interrupted him.

  “I know the Maison Centrale. I saw it during the fifties, when it was still run by the French.” He passed a hand over his eyes, as if to blot out the image of those thick-walled, lightless cells. The manacles soldered to the stone, like a medieval dungeon. The tongs for twisting testicles, the pincers for tearing out fingernails. The guillotine, in permanent operation in the central courtyard. The French had not been kind to the Vietnamese who hated their rule.

  “How do you know Rory’s there? I’ve had no word—”

  “Ruth is with him.”

  “Ruth? Pridi Banomyong?”

  “Quietly, Jack,” Carlos cautioned. “I would not want that woman of yours to hear.”

  “What is Ruth doing in Hanoi?”

  “What Ruth has always done. He writes poems. He declaims manifestoes. He makes great speeches to his friend Ho Chi Minh. He does this at the behest of his keepers in Beijing, who have preserved his life these twenty years.”

  “What you mean,” Roderick said bitterly, “is that he’s sold everything he once loved, and has convinced himself otherwise.” Why should Ruth be any different from the rest of us?

  “He found your son. Rory is wounded—his leg is badly broken. He has fevers and dysentery and is very weak. The Vietnamese guards beat him, despite what Ruth says. Ruth is urging Rory to accept his offer, Jack, because he hopes to save his life—but the boy is stubborn. He will not listen.”

  “Rory is no boy,” Roderick replied tersely. “What is he refusing?”

  “Early release. Your son could walk out of his prison tomorrow. But he will not do it.”

  “It can’t be as simple as that. Why the favor, Carlos?”

  “Because he’s Roderick’s son.” Carlos said it simply.

  Comprehension flooded his mind in a sickening tide. Ruth had asked Rory to buy freedom with shame—and had done so in Jack’s name. Would Rory ever forgive him? “Rory says what every American soldier would say, confronted with this same devil’s bargain. He’s thinking of the men imprisoned with him. He’s refusing special treatment. I can’t go against that.”

  “The choice is not so easy,” Carlos replied. “If it were only your son and his sense of honor, I would never have come these hundreds of miles. It is not only Rory. This is a matter between you and Ruth, Jack.

  “You once saved a life. You gave Ruth his freedom in a way that ravaged his pride. He tried to win back his glory and his reputation—through the coup that failed in ’49, and then, by turning his heart toward Mao. A new allegiance he believed would negate the old. But his debt— his debt to you, and the shame that goes with it—rankles in his mind. Ruth is old. He must discharge his debt and be freed. He can do that by saving your son.”

  “I understand,” Roderick said. “But—”

  “Ruth has new masters,” Carlos said. “He can’t control them or even admit how subtly they use him. The Viet Cong know Rory’s name. They know the name of his father.”

  Roderick’s eyes narrowed. “A silk merchant in Bangkok?”

  “One of the greatest spies that Asia has ever known,” Carlos corrected softly. “Master of networks and of secrets told in darkness. Avenger of the innocent and killer in the night. It is you and the country you serve that Ruth’s masters think to strike, by using your son.”

  “What do they want?” He thought of Rory at the mercy of such people and his throat felt parched. “Some sort of photo op? A press release, thanking them for their kindness?”

  “They want to embarrass you,” Carlos said impatiently. “There’s nothing new in that! But they intend also to profit from the exchange. They want you to ransom your son, Jack. They ask for one million dollars— a paltry sum for the widows and orphans of North Vietnam, who lament the cost of your American bombs.”

  It always came down to money, in the end. Roderick smiled faintly. “How … capitalist of them. Rory can’t know that part of it.”

  “He knows nothing. But I think he guesses. He refuses even to admit that you are his father.”

  “I can well believe that.” Roderick stared bleakly out toward the khlong that moved unseen beyond the banana trees, and thought of another night, four years ago, when Rory and Billy Lightfoot had stood opposite him. Rory had believed then that his father was a traitor—a man who refused to support his country. The better part of Rory’s stubbornness in the Hanoi Hilton was a determination to show just how different the two of them were.

  “Ruth chides him with disrespect,” Carlos added, “but I detect in his pride the way your son honors you. Rory has courage. He has suffered a good deal.”

  “And if I refuse to ransom him?”

  “He will die.”

  Roderick reached out his hand. The old soldier gripped it.

  “You have my thanks, my friend, for all you’ve done. You will sleep here, tonight?”

  “I cannot risk it. I will come again at dawn, and have your answer.”

  “You may have it now,” Roderick said with difficulty. But Carlos raised his hand.

  “The choice brings with it all manner of kharma, my friend. Think not only of your son, but of yourself and your son’s son as well. What will cause you the least misery, until the end of your days? The loss of face—or the loss of life? Use the hours of night I’ve given you. And consider well.”

  Carlos let himself down over the terrace wall, slipping like a darker shadow among the fronds of the back garden. Dawn was merely six hours off; there would be no sleep tonight. Roderick stood in the torches’ glow until the houseboy came and extin
guished them with sand.

  When he called for Fleur through the rooms of his slumbering house, he found that she had gone.

  9

  There’s a bug the size of a condom in my bunk,” Ankana said acidly, “and no toilet paper anywhere. You might have told me what it was like before I came. I ought to have been prepared.”

  She could have spoken Thai to the man who stood in the doorway, but the Sloane Ranger drawl was infinitely better suited to expressing contempt, Stefani decided.

  “If I did, you would never come,” Sompong Suwannathat replied. “Some journeys are better made in ignorance.”

  A thinking person might have found the sentiment disturbing; but Ankana had never wasted much time on thought. In her lipstick-colored leather jacket and stiletto heels, she looked like Tina Turner descended upon a USO show. The men of the camp were torn between leering at her legs and avoiding her eye. She stalked out of the hut without another word.

  It was true there were bugs of uncommonly large size, Stefani thought hazily, but if you chose to pretend they were a figment of drug-induced sleep, they swiftly lost their power. She had been drugged ever since the wild drive to Don Muang airport, and the hurried transfer of the contents of Ankana’s car to the private jet that waited on an auxiliary runway. Jo-Jo’s parting gift had been the plunge of a hypodermic in the muscle of her thigh: she had awakened, gagged and bound, to the deep velvet of jungle darkness. Someone was dumping her into the flatbed of a truck.

  Much later, the whistles and calls of birds and a feral cat’s howl. In the predawn gloom, a cock crowing.

  She sat propped now against a wooden post that supported the roof of a dirt-floored cabin. Trussed behind her, her arms were so numb she could not feel the ropes at her wrists. A squat and muscular man, clad in faded khaki, sat in a chair by the door. When she stirred and moaned, he crossed the space between them and yanked up her head by the hair. He stared an instant into her eyes—judging the size of her pupils, she guessed—then tore the gag from between her teeth. He tilted a little water into her parched mouth.

  So much for breakfast.

  Sompong stood in the doorway with his arms folded. The first light of morning must be flooding his face, but as his back was turned Stefani could not see his features. He was short, like many Thais, with a broad back and sloping shoulders. He looked fit and alert and without fear of any kind.

  “How long you want to wait, boss?”

  “We have some time, Wu Fat.” He glanced at the sky and then turned. “Good morning, Ms. Fogg.”

  She allowed herself to study his face—the broad nose, the eyes as black as olives, the gleaming thatch of close-cropped hair and the high, flat cheekbones—but she did not return his greeting. Neither did she rant or scream or break down in tears. In a world where Ankana Lee-Harris was the model for women, she was determined to look as alien as possible.

  He made a pretense of adjusting the rope that secured her to the wooden post. “You are in Chiang Rai province, Ms. Fogg. You have seen many strange and beautiful places in the world—but never the heart of the monsoon forest, where the General’s men stand guard.”

  She kept her eyes fixed on the dirt floor.

  “No questions?” he demanded; and she felt delight at having provoked him enough to ask. There were so many questions: Why am I here? Why haven’t you killed me? What were you waiting for, in that sunlit doorway?

  But instead she said only: “Where do I pee?”

  He snorted with laughter. “Ankana will take you. It will give her something to do.”

  There was a crackle of static from one corner of the hut, and Sompong’s head swung around. Wu Fat leapt to the radio. They all listened to a spate of words-incomprehensible to Stefani—and then the voice went dead.

  Wu Fat glanced at Sompong. He nodded once. The two men ducked through the open doorway and left her alone.

  For a while she strained her ears to catch what she could of the sounds beyond the hut. There was the thwack of wood splitting under an axe, the murmur of conversation rising and falling. A screech of complaint in high-pitched Thai. How many people were out there, anyway? And what exactly had Sompong meant by the General’s men?

  Ankana never came to conduct her to the latrine.

  She tried, for a time, to force herself upright by bringing her knees to her chest and thrusting downward with her heels; but the rope was tied too efficiently to the post. She felt weak and sick and utterly helpless—a condition so unlike her usual one that she burned with rage: rage at Sompong and the way he had outpaced her; rage at Oliver Krane, who had sold her life without remorse; rage at herself, for believing she controlled her fate. She had entered into Oliver’s service as though it were a lark, a fantasy turn on the set of some action movie. She had deceived herself far more than Oliver could. He had counted on that.

  She worked futilely at her bonds, their stiffness another insult, and loathed the tears of frustration that gathered under her lids. Her heels scored raw wounds in the packed earth and she cursed aloud.

  At least an hour passed before she heard whistles and calls in the distance: Sompong must be returning. Her breath came quickly in her dry mouth. She closed her eyes and tried to think of Max—of the old stone house in Courchevel and the coldness of the stars at night—but there was the sudden thunder of many feet, the call and response of military orders. Her eyes flew open and she stared, intently, at the hut’s door.

  Had Sompong brought her executioner? Or a local dignitary—some lord of the poppy fields—invited to view her killing?

  “Don’t put yourself out, Sompong old son,” said a languorous voice just within earshot. “A glass of orange juice, perhaps, but nothing more. That little jaunt through the plantain has me positively chuffed. Couldn’t ask for a finer morning, what?”

  Oliver was laying it on thick, she thought with a surge of outrage and despair. Graham Greene on his morning stroll. Never mind that mass of trained mercenaries standing at attention, their automatic rifles in hand.

  How many were there? A hundred? A thousand?

  His shadow edged over the doorstep, and then the ginger head with the foppish fall of hair. He was dressed like an Abercrombie & Kent safari guide, although his shoes were probably more expensive. Even now, when she knew he had deceived her in every possible way— when she knew that his hands had shoved Max’s wheelchair from the cliff—she was struck by the innocence of his face. He blinked once, allowing those elusive eyes to adjust behind his spectacles, and when his gaze fell on Stefani she was surprised to catch the faintest lifting of his brows.

  Whatever Oliver had expected to find at the end of his chuffing trail, it had not been her.

  Sompong entered with Ankana at his heels. Wu Fat closed the door and thrust his back against it, one finger looped casually around the trigger housing of his rifle. Oliver stood alone in the center of the room, looking bored. Stefani heard the rush of feet through the dried jungle grass as the General’s men hurried to form a ring around the hut. Sompong’s snare had closed on her neck.

  Rush would assume she had simply cut her losses and gone back to New York. He would decide that she had never been someone to trust. The knowledge filled her with anguish.

  “I believe you know Ms. Fogg,” Sompong said formally.

  Oliver glanced in her direction. “We’ve met once or twice. On the last occasion she threw a glass of Scotch in my face.”

  The minister smiled. “Was that in the Central High-lands, where you trained her to kill? She’s impressive, Oliver, I’ll give you that. A friend of mine was choked to death in her hotel room two nights ago.”

  “Sompong, heart, I’ve been flying for the past twenty-two hours,” Oliver responded wearily. “I ate wretched food, surrounded by wilted orchids. I’m utterly done in. Where’s that orange juice?”

  Sompong reached for Wu Fat’s chair by the closed hut door, and presented it to Oliver. “Sit down.”

  “Happy to.” Oliver settled himself on the har
d wooden seat as though it looked nothing like a place of interrogation.

  “Do you expect me to hunker in the dirt?” Ankana asked the Chinese soldier indignantly. “You’re enjoying this, you sod—I smell like a zoo and I’ve got chicken shit on my shoes. This whole bloody trip’s been one huge laugh. Well, I’ve had enough. I’m going home. Get out of the way, you oily-mouthed son of a whore, or I’ll cut off your secret sack and stuff it down your throat.”

  “Ankana, darling,” Oliver drawled, “Wu Fat would rather die than move without Sompong’s orders. The poor man yearns for martyrdom. Don’t make him happy.”

  She bared her teeth in a snarl and leaned against the hut’s bare wall, arms crossed beneath her breasts.

  “The past few days have been terrible,” Sompong said slowly. “People dying like flies. First poor Chanin—the one Ms. Fogg crushed in her bare hands—and then Mr. Knetsch, knifed by a pack of jackals in a Bangkok jail—”

  “Jeff?” Stefani choked on the word. And she hadn’t even liked the man.

  “My condolences, old son,” murmured Oliver Krane. “Dulce et decorum est, and all that. But what’s one less lawyer in the world, after all?”

  “Knetsch was a complete liability, as everyone in this room knows,” Sompong observed. “But he did me one service before he died. He told me exactly how you used Ms. Fogg, Oliver. You never mentioned she worked for you.”

  “Knetsch lied,” Oliver said stonily. “He spun a crock. You’ve been had—coming and going, Minister.”

  “Certainly. But not by Knetsch. You sent Fogg to Max Roderick without telling me. You sent her to Bangkok to make that public and quite infantile claim on Jack Roderick’s House. You believed she’d distract me, while you moved in and took over my entire network. It must have looked easy—Knetsch was so vulnerable, he was scared and he needed money. Ankana never cares where the cash comes from, so long as she gets it. But you forgot the General’s men, Oliver, who are impervious to bribes. Did you really believe you could take me down?”

  “It was a question of survival: yours, or mine.” Oliver studied Sompong coolly. “I’m not in the business of risk management for nothing, ducks. I see the handwriting when it’s scrawled in blood on my door. You wanted Max Roderick dead—and I did my best to give client satisfaction. Would it be possible to get on with the business that brought us here?”