The Secret Agent

by Francine Mathews

  There was tapping on the walls around him, some of it urgent. He listened to the letters as they unreeled, but he was too exhausted to make sense of them or to respond. In his right hand he clutched a filthy scrap of paper. It was his letter from Max.

  —I’m learning to ski now that we’ve moved to California and my coach says I’m pretty good. Mom’s scared I’ll hit a tree but I tell her I’m not a baby. I’ll take you over all the jumps I’ve found in the woods when you come home. You know how to ski, right, Dad?

  Rory thought of that brief week in January, a lifetime before, when he had swerved off the trail at Stowe to hide in the woods, and prayed that his father wouldn’t find him. The fear and the weakness seemed laughable, now, but he was glad that Max loved the speed and the challenge of the tortuous pitch, as he never could. Max would make Jack Roderick proud. Rory felt a great and forgiving peace toward the father he loved and no longer needed to understand. He closed his eyes and slept.

  They came for him at dawn, shouting at him to get up, get up, although they knew he could no longer stand. In the end it took three of them to drag him into the courtyard where the old French guillotine from the glory days of the Maison Centrale had been resurrected for Jack Roderick’s son.

  “Where is Ruth?” he asked them, as he fell at the foot of the thing.

  “Ruth has failed.” The chief guard spoke with contempt and Rory understood now that the price of Ruth’s failure would be his death. “He is sent home to Beijing in disgrace.”

  Rory gazed across the courtyard. There the rest of the Americans were assembled, their faces white and startled, their bodies thin as martyred saints. He recognized Beardsley, the boy from Indiana, and saw the tears on his cheeks.

  He could not have walked away from them all, a free man, and held his head high. He closed his eyes instead and saluted, in his mind, the image of his father.

  The blade screeched as it was drawn upward. The guard beside him grunted with the effort; the winch, it seemed, had rusted. There were stars bursting behind his eyes and one of them had the face of Max.

  Rory tightened his hand on the letter, and thought of snow.

  12

  Stefani found the sunlight blinding after the shadows of the hut. Dazed, she blinked at the sea of faces and her entire body trembled with the effort not to show the terror that consumed her.

  Wu Fat gripped her arm tightly. Sompong yelled something brief and biting in Thai, and the General’s men came at a run to surround their prisoners. She had no time to estimate the number of guns pointed at her and Oliver Krane. Wu Fat forced her to kneel; she swayed and felt the world slipping sideways until the old soldier jerked her upright again.

  Sompong positioned the rifle Oliver held, thrusting the muzzle against the raw skin of her cheek. Oliver’s nerveless hands dropped the gun and Sompong swore, bending to retrieve it. Stefani’s breath was shallow and desperate. I will not think about it. She would not listen for the click of the trigger. She would keep her eyes trained on the jungle brush beyond the clearing. There were orchids in the trees. They would be the last bursts of color she saw.

  Except that one of the trees rose upward, and in the brilliant half-life of fear she thought it was a man, covered in leaves with branches on his head. Sompong had stopped talking, now. Raising the rifle again. Would he kill Oliver Krane after he made Oliver shoot her?

  The tree advanced. As she watched, hysteria bubbling in her brain, other trees joined it—all racing now across the open clearing of the encampment. Shots rang out and the General’s men wheeled and dived into the dirt, their guns trained on the shifting forest, hoarse curses torn from their throats. Oliver Krane lay facedown in the grass with his hands flung protectively over his head; Ankana tripped on her stiletto heels; and Stefani screamed with laughter. Her shrill madness blended with the cracking of rifle upon rifle.

  Wu Fat barked an order. Then the old soldier’s arm flew upward and his body jerked violently. He fell over on Stefani, crushing her beneath his weight, forcing her downward into the seared jungle brush. The shock of it finally slapped sense into her brain. She bucked upward with savage strength and crawled out from under his corpse, hand over hand, through the kicking feet and the strafing bullets, toward the open door of the hut.

  As she reached the threshold, a shot tore a splinter of wood from the door frame. It stung her cheek, drawing blood. Aged teak was no protection against firepower like this—the hut would surely prove a deathtrap in the end—but she could not bear the chaos behind. She thrust herself forward.

  Someone else had done the same.

  He lay, gasping for breath, propped against the pillar that had been her tether post that morning. Sweat poured from his face and pooled in the gap exposed by his shirt collar. His right hand was pressed over his stomach, and blood, purple and thick, welled between his fingers. In his left hand was Wu Fat’s rifle.

  Stefani waited for Sompong to level the gun, to finish the execution he’d started minutes before, but instead he raised the muzzle to his mouth. The long barrel wavering in his trembling grip.

  “No!” she screamed.

  The protest was explosive, startling him enough that he dropped the rifle. She stumbled across the hut and seized the gun.

  Sompong stared up at her. Even in the gloom she could see his eyes, riddled with pain. His chest heaved. He tried to stand—tried to do battle for the weapon—but the effort ended in a crouch, Sompong on his knees at her feet.

  “Kill me, then.” The words came like the rasp of a dying heart. “Take your revenge.”

  She held the barrel steady, inches from his ear. She was overcome, in that moment, with an anguish so fierce it felt like an iron fist to the ribs. Max—the man she might have loved beyond anyone, given time—Max, whose unflinching gaze swerved from nothing, no matter how difficult or brutal. She thought of the Legend with the silver hair and the fathomless eyes, a white bird on his shoulder. Of the father Max had lost too soon, his wings dipping in the sun. The Roderick men: brilliant, lost, believing in and demanding justice.

  She looked down at the man clenched in pain at her feet. And let her forefinger find the trigger.

  It was Rush Halliwell who found her there, twenty-three minutes after the last shot was fired.

  She stood defiantly in the center of the hut with a smear of dirt on her face and a gun in her hands. At her feet lay Sompong.

  She had torn off his shirt and made a clumsy bandage, but the wadded cloth was dark with blood.

  “Holy Christ,” Rush muttered. “You killed him.”

  “It’s what he wanted. But that’s too easy. I want him shamed. I want him tried. I want him called murderer before the whole world.” She handed Rush the automatic rifle. “I want Sompong to live.”

  Later, as they sat in the C130 transport plane waiting for takeoff, Rush stole a look at her as he adjusted the harness of his jump seat. She was already strapped in and staring mutely at the warnings printed in block capitals on the fuselage interior. The huge propellers thundered to life, and the uninsulated cabin was filled with the roar of gears and power. There would be no conversation, now—and it was just as well, Rush thought. Stefani looked as though she might tip over in a slight breeze. He was light-headed with exhaustion himself.

  Pulling off the raid on Sompong Suwannathat’s base had required whipcord nerve and ceaseless concentration. No joint U.S.-Thai exercise—even in the name of interdicting the drug trade—could be sprung without warning on the Thai Ministry of Defense. He and Marty Robbins had pressed the issue far into the wee hours of Friday night, with the Prime Minister, the Thai head of drug enforcement, the American ambassador and the director of the FBI—who appeared at the embassy via satellite on a secure videoteleconference screen. The case against Sompong was viewed and reviewed to the point of idiocy, the Thai government officials expressing regret and dismay with a world of disbelief in their stiff smiles. Rush paced the corridors in frustration, his patience scored raw.

  M
arty got the green light and a transport full of troops at 4:17 Saturday morning.

  The entire raid required forty-eight minutes, from the point when the jungle commandos moved into position, until the moment when Sompong and his men surrendered. The Thai drug-enforcement team claimed full credit for the speed and efficiency of its planning. Sompong’s downfall would be broadcast live in a matter of hours.

  Rush had held her back when she tried to fight her way onto the field helicopter that airlifted Sompong to a hospital in Chiang Rai. She seemed convinced that the minister might escape—and her passion to see him in handcuffs bordered, Rush thought, on obsession.

  Whereas she had barely glanced at Oliver Krane as he walked coolly up the C130’s rear gangway with Marty Robbins.

  “He goes free?” she asked.

  “Krane’s been cooperating with the FBI for months,” Rush told her. “He’s part of an active investigation of illegal arms racketeering. He’ll tell you the story, I’m sure.”

  “Oliver always has a story.” Contempt and weariness in the words. She had been one of Oliver’s stories herself, after all.

  “You’re free of him now.”

  “Am I?”

  Her voice was incredulous—mocking even; and he understood that she was changed from the woman he’d met at the Oriental’s cocktail party days ago. She would never walk in all the bravado of innocence again.

  When he asked, in the taxi from Bangkok airport, if there was anything she needed—anything he could do-she answered only, “I want to go home.”

  “We can arrange that.” He hesitated. “It might take a day or two. We’d like a complete account of your experience. Everything you know.”

  “All right then. Let’s work a trade.” She stared at him challengingly. “I still don’t know how Jack Roderick died. I’d like to hear the truth. Because of Max.”

  “I might be able to help you there.”

  “You’ll take me to see Sompong?”

  Rush shook his head. “Get some sleep tonight. We’ll visit my father tomorrow.”

  13

  Bangkok,

  Then and Now

  When he tore the piece off the press wire in the Bangkok Post newsroom that night—March 27, 1967—Joe Halliwell’s chest tightened and for a moment he could not believe the name he was reading. Jack Roderick. Lost in the Malaysian jungle. It was Easter Monday and the Silk King had been missing for thirty-one hours, the story would have to be written immediately and the presses stopped, and by sunrise tomorrow the entire city would be talking of nothing else. But first Halliwell must call Alec McQueen at his home and rouse him from sleep and tell him the news as one old friend to another.

  “Assign the damn piece,” McQueen barked through the tatters of his sleep, “and get the hell on a plane. I want you in the Highlands by dawn, you hear?”

  Joe had gone out of the newsroom as though his mother or his wife or his dearest child lay dying in a hospital somewhere and he had taken the last flight to Kuala Lumpur from the airport. As the plane hurtled south and then the hired car lurched north, he had believed that he would arrive to find Jack strolling out of the rainforest canopy with a careless grin and a wave for his supporters.

  By Tuesday morning, when he pulled up in Tanah Rata, the beaters had worked their way through twenty square miles of jungle. He stood for a time on the hillside above the golf course—the logical starting point for any search, because Jack must have started there himself—and took a few photographs. He talked to the cook who worked in a nearby cottage and who claimed to have seen a man walking downhill on the night of the disappearance, but the glimpse had been fleeting and the cook could not say whether the man stuck to the road or not. He talked to the local cop in charge of the search and to one of the beaters who was having a cup of tea after walking for nearly twenty hours, and to the cleric who had said Easter Sunday service for Jack Roderick and his friends. He found the caddy who had been cleaning clubs at the course but had failed to look up from his task long enough to note a solitary walker. He cajoled the woman who delivered flowers to the Marshalls at Rose Cottage and the grocer who supplied milk twice weekly when the couple was in residence; and only then did he turn toward the cottage itself.

  The Marshalls were nice people but bewildered and clearly out of their depth. They had known Jack Roderick as a social acquaintance, a Bangkok personality, a friend of a friend—and they knew Fleur Pithuvanuk, Jack’s companion, not at all. When they had awakened from their nap the day before and discovered Jack gone, they had seen no reason to worry. He’d been restless all weekend, they said.

  “You’re a personal friend?” Mrs. Marshall asked Joe. She was a plump woman with washed-out eyes. “Then I don’t mind telling you I’m worried about Fleur. She’s so quiet. And she won’t leave her room.”

  He had gone to her then, and found her sitting motionless in a chair with her eyes fixed on the window.

  He’s not lost, she told him, and he’s not coming back. I made sure of that.

  It took him fifteen minutes to get the story out of her. He listened without his pen or his paper and he listened with a building sense of doom. By choosing Jack’s mild-faced friend as her confessor, Fleur condemned them both to a lifetime of lies.

  Ten years earlier, when Fleur betrayed Jack Roderick for the first time, it was a simple matter of selling the Silk King’s secrets to the man who held Fleur’s neck in a noose. Vukrit Suwannathat had power of the crudest kind—power to support or arrest, to elevate or to destroy. He threatened the livelihood of Fleur’s father and brothers, he held the future of her clan over her head. She did what Vukrit told her to do and was thankful when he wearied of raping her body.

  “In August of that year I told Vukrit that the man he had sought most of his life—his brother-in-law, Carlos, a fugitive from justice—held camp in a village near Chiang Rai,” Fleur told Joe Halliwell. “But when Vukrit went to attack him, Carlos had fled. Vukrit looked like a fool. He returned in a rage. He called me a trickster and a whore and he had my father arrested and my brothers’ businesses seized. My family disowned me and I went alone to the south, where I filled my rice bowl as best I could. I never asked Roderick for help. It was impossible to see him again.”

  She understood how Jack had tested her—providing false information of the meeting, in perfect detail—and that he’d suspected she would pass everything on to Vukrit. She had betrayed both men in different ways.

  But there was still the secret Fleur guarded, year after year: when she fled in sorrow to the south, she carried Roderick’s child. The last day she spent with Jack—the picnic at Ayutthaya—she already felt the sickness of pregnancy.

  “My son brought me no honor,” she told Joe Halliwell. “The people of the village guessed that I had never married, although I called myself a widow. It was obvious from his birth that my child was a half-breed bastard of a farang. But I loved him all the same. He grew tall and strong, and his eyes were green.”

  When the war in Vietnam swept over them, and the boy needed schooling, she grew desperate at the poverty of her village. She told herself that no son of the Silk King should be raised in the dust, but still she was afraid to see Jack again. Until the day when the newspaper reported that Rory Roderick—a Navy flyer, Jack’s son who had grown up in the United States—had died in the wreck of his plane. She gathered her courage, then, and made the journey back to Bangkok.

  “I meant to tell him,” she said to Joe. “I meant to show him the child of my heart. I hoped that if he knew he had fathered a son—a boy to replace the one he had just lost—he would marry me and take us to America, where we could all be safe. But the very night I went to fall on my knees before Jack Roderick, the man named Carlos came back.”

  She had turned her face from the window, then, and stared at Halliwell. Her eyes were dark with malice.

  “To ransom that grown son of his—the pureblood farang he’d abandoned in America—Jack was prepared to give everything he owned. His house.
His business. His princely fortune. I watched how he burned to redeem his Rory—and I saw that he spared not a thought for me. He did not even know when I left his house that night. My bastard child would mean less to Jack than the old white bird he kept on his shoulder. I had waited too long—and my hope was dead.”

  “And so,” Joe Halliwell told Rush and Stefani as they sat in the sunlight of his back porch, “Fleur left Jack’s house and went in search of his worst enemy. She informed Vukrit that she had seen the man named Carlos, and that Carlos planned to meet with Roderick in the Highlands of Malaysia to collect a king’s ransom which would save his son from the Viet Cong. Vukrit could swoop down and kill the man he had hunted his entire life, and if Roderick died in the fighting—so be it.”

  “Ruthless,” Stefani mused. “She must have hated—or loved—Jack beyond reason.”

  “Men had used poor Fleur for so many years. I think she enjoyed having the upper hand, for once.”

  “But if she told you—a reporter—she must have known you had an obligation to write the truth.”

  “She knew that I had always loved her,” Halliwell replied baldly. “You can’t stare at a woman with longing, as I did for years, and have her fail to see. She knew that I would protect her. It was Suwannathat, after all, who’d killed Jack—though no one would ever prove it. Fleur was just Vukrit’s pawn.”

  “I wonder if Roderick knew—as he died—what she’d done.”

  “Jack was no innocent.” Joe’s eyes were filled with old grief. “Betrayal got Fleur nothing, in the end. The money Jack had brought into the Highlands vanished— presumably into Vukrit’s coffers. Fleur drowned herself not long thereafter, in the waters of the khlong.”