“He’s still watching you, Charlie,” warned Rockman as Dean went up the steps.
As long as he focused on his immediate tasks — moving the booster, bugging the phones, appearing nonthreatening to the suspicious worker — Dean was fine. The moment he reached Phuc Dinh’s office, however, Dean hesitated, remembering Longbow, remembering the shot he’d taken some thirty-five years before.
How cruel was fate to bring him together with this man?
“Charlie, is something wrong?” asked Rockman.
Dean answered by knocking on the doorjamb, then going in to speak to the woman at the desk.
It was a different, older woman.
“I came earlier and left a message for Mr. Dinh,” he told her in English. The woman didn’t seem to understand and so he repeated the words the translator gave him in Vietnamese.
“What is this about?” asked the secretary.
“I’m not sure I should discuss Mr. Dinh’s business with you,” said Dean, carefully repeating the translator’s words.
He got the tone wrong at the end, and had to repeat it before the secretary understood.
She frowned, then got up from her desk and went to find Dinh.
There were photos on the wall — a ceremony with Phuc Dinh in a Vietnamese-style suit receiving a certificate, a parade, Phuc Dinh in a row of other men…
And one, much older, showing Phuc Dinh standing next to the charred wreckage of a Huey, smiling.
Anger surged over Dean, like the wave of a tsunami. It was the most useless emotion, a deadly emotion for anyone, most especially a sniper. To succeed, a sniper had to operate without anger. He could live with fear, he could live with sadness, but he could not operate with anger. When he stalked his enemy, he had to be emotionless, his movement and perception incorruptible by hate or lust. When he pushed against the trigger he had to be stone-cold steady, empty of anything that would blur his aim.
“He will see you,” said the secretary, returning. “For a moment.”
Dean tried not to think of Longbow as he walked to Phuc Dinh’s office.
The man Charles Dean had killed sat behind a small metal desk, surrounded by paper. His hair was thinner, his face a little plumper, but his scar was the same, his eyes were the same, his nose and mouth precisely as Dean remembered. Dinh was a ghost rising from the past, a dead man who had not died.
“I am Phuc Dinh,” he said in perfect English. “Who are you?”
“Charles Dean.” Dean forced the words from his mouth.
“Can we go somewhere and talk?”
“What about?”
“A mutual friend.”
Dinh started to scowl.
“Gerald Forester,” said Dean. “I believe you may have exchanged some e-mail with him.”
“I don’t think so.”
I could kill him easily, Dean thought. I could drop to my knee, grab the gun at my ankle, shoot him. It would be done in three seconds.
“Forester was murdered,” Dean said. “This won’t go away.” Dean stared at Phuc Dinh, expecting that he would deny knowing Forester and tell him to leave. But to Dean’s great surprise, he rose.
“Come with me,” Phuc Dinh told him.
“He’s telling his secretary he’ll be back in a few hours,” said the translator.
“Home run, Charlie,” said Rockman. “Home run.”
76
None of the houses in the subdivision looked any smaller than four thousand square feet, and if there was a single blade of grass out of place on any of the lawns, Lia couldn’t see it through the high-powered night vision glasses.
“This doesn’t look too good,” she told Mandarin.
“Yeah. But you never know.” Mandarin cruised past Meadowview Court, slowing to get a view of the front yard.
It was a little before 5:00 a.m.; even the early birds hadn’t gotten up yet.
“They have a wireless network without any security,” said Lia. She held up her handheld computer; the screen showed that she had just successfully signed on. “Anybody could have used the network.”
“Probably.
Doesn’t explain the gun questions and the chat rooms, though.”
“I bet there’s a teenage boy inside,” said Lia. “One who plays basketball and is thinking he’d like to hunt.” She’d seen a basketball net and was guessing the rest.
“Maybe,” admitted Mandarin. He jabbed his thumb toward the roof of the car. The he li cop ters delivering the tactical team were nearly overhead. “We’ll know in a few minutes.” twenty federal agents, backed up by six state troopers and their cars, had been assigned to raid the Hennemman residence, the origin of the latest e-mail threat — a vow to “finish what’s been started”—against Senator McSweeney. The government had been granted a search warrant to seize the Hennemmans’ computers and other papers and material possibly related to the threat. The evidence was not just the e-mailed threat but also inquiries from a computer on the same home network in several public forums about weapons, rifles in particular.
Two members of a special DEA team took down the door; Mandarin and Lia came in right behind them. Within ninety seconds, the house had been searched and the three occupants of the house found themselves pinned in their beds by agents.
Lia helped secure the basement — nothing more threatening there than a dehumidifier — then came upstairs to find Mandarin holding his credentials out to Mrs. Hennemman, explaining what they were doing there. Her husband lay next to her, blinking up as if he wasn’t sure whether this was part of a dream or not.
“Where are the computers?” Mandarin asked.
There were four in the house, including one that was packed away in a box.
“We want our lawyer,” said Mrs. Hennemman belatedly.
“Give him a call,” said Mandarin, handing her his cell phone. “We’ll be downstairs.”
“Do you know whether your wireless network is secure?” Lia asked.
“What’s that?” said Mrs. Hennemman.
77
Phuc Dinh led Dean to a restaurant two blocks from the municipal building. He nodded at the maître d’ as they entered, and walked straight to the back, taking a large table set with eight places. Within moments, two waiters appeared and whisked the extra places away.
“You will have a drink?” Phuc Dinh asked Dean.
“Water, please.”
Phuc Dinh ordered two bottles, along with a pot of tea.
“It was a long time ago,” he told Dean. “My memory may be faulty.”
The comment disoriented Dean. He was confused, and for a moment he thought Phuc Dinh was talking about his mission, though that was impossible.
“I had not thought of the money for many years, or think that it was relevant,” added Phuc Dinh. He stopped speaking as the waiter approached.
“What money?” asked Rockman in Dean’s head.
Dean ignored the runner, trying not to show anything to Phuc Dinh, playing out the original bluff as if Forester had told him everything. He was a sniper again, a scout moving silently through the jungle, distractions and emotion in check.
“The war was a long time ago,” prompted Dean as the waiter left. “There were other things to think of.”
“The money was lost,” said Phuc Dinh. “It never arrived at the hamlet.”
“The hamlet was Phu Loc Two, wasn’t it?” asked Dean. It was a guess, but a good one — that was the village where he had stalked Phuc Dinh.
“Yes. Ordinarily a courier would arrive on the tenth of the month. He would bury the money beneath a rock on a trail about three miles out of town.”
“The trail to Laos,” said Dean.
Phuc Dinh nodded. “And then one month, it did not arrive.”
“Which month?”
“September 1971.”
Dean sipped some of the tea. The restaurant was not air-conditioned, and the temperature must have been well into the eighties, but despite the heat, it felt refreshing.
“There
were complaints and threats from some of the leaders in the area,” Phuc Dinh said. “A rebellion. I sent a message and requested that the liaison come and explain what had happened, but he would not come. I heard later that he was killed by a rocket attack.”
“What was his name?”
“Greenfield.” Phuc Dinh looked up at the wall behind Dean, as if reading the answer off it. “He called himself Green. But that wasn’t his first name.”
“Was he a soldier?”
“No. Soldiers — Marines — were used as the couriers. But Green was a civilian — CIA, I assume.”
“Was his name Green feld?” asked Dean.
“Maybe.”
“Jack Greenfeld was a CIA officer who worked in this area. He ran a number of programs,” said Dean, who wanted the Art Room to know the background. “He worked in that area. Then he was killed by a rocket attack. He was replaced by a man named Rogers.”
“You’re familiar with the area?” said Phuc Dinh.
“Just some of the history.”
“Maybe it is the same person. Green. I don’t know what the arrangements were on the American side,” said Phuc Dinh.
“Only that payments were distributed to different elders.”
“We’re researching this, Charlie,” said Rockman. “Keep him talking. What does this have to do with Forester?”
Dean had already guessed the answer to Rockman’s question.
“What happened after the money stopped?” Dean asked Phuc Dinh.
Instead of answering, the Vietnamese official looked back at Dean. Their eyes met and held each other for a moment.
“Did you serve during the war, Mr. Dean?” Phuc Dinh asked.
“I did.”
“Then you understand.” Phuc Dinh refilled his teacup.
“One had always to cut his own path.”
“So when the money stopped, you began working with the VC?”
“One works with whomever one can.”
Dean suspected that Phuc Dinh had been working with the Vietcong long before the payments stopped; double-dealing was common. But it could have been that he changed sides then. By now it was irrelevant anyway.
“Did you know a man named McSweeney?” Dean asked.
“He would have been a captain. He was with the strategic hamlet program.”
Phuc Dinh stared at the wall once more. “The name is not familiar,” he said finally.
“Did you have any contact with the strategic hamlet program? Before the payments stopped?”
“The couriers were Marines. Maybe they were that program?”
“Did any Marines live with you in your village?”
“You say you are familiar with the history of the area.
Would Marines have lasted long in that village?” Phuc Dinh gave him the names of the provincial leaders who benefited from the payoffs. The list was long, though the sums Phuc Dinh mentioned were relatively small — for the most part, a few hundred went to each. Still, that would have represented considerable money in Vietnam.
It probably bought a lot of AK-47s and rockets, Dean thought bitterly.
Obviously, someone decided that the money the village leaders were getting would be more useful in his pocket.
Was it the Vietcong, the South Vietnamese, or someone else?
Forester must have thought it was connected to McSweeney somehow.
Maybe he suspected McSweeney.
Or maybe McSweeney knew who did it, and was in danger because of that. Maybe the fact that he was targeted had nothing to do with his running for President.
“That’s all I know,” said Phuc Dinh.
“Do you have the e-mail Forester sent you?” Dean asked.
He shook his head.
“How did he find you?”
“I am not sure. I am not a famous man.” He broke into a grin for the first time since they’d met. “Maybe he met someone with a long memory. He claimed to have found my name in a government directory.”
“Is that possible?”
“Yes. I have contact with foreign banks. I have visited Beijing — I am in the directories. But how he knew to look, that I do not know. He asked if I knew anything about missing money. He named the date the payment should have arrived. That was all. I will not come to your country,” Phuc Dinh added. “I cannot help you more than this.” Dean took a sip of tea, savoring the liquid in his mouth as if it were expensive Scotch.
“What did you do during the war, Mr. Dean?” asked Phuc Dinh.
“I was a Marine,” Dean said. “I served in this province.”
“It was not a good place to be a soldier.”
“I’d imagine it was much more difficult to be a civilian.”
“Impossible, I would say.”
“There was an ambush near your village, Phu Loc Two,” said Dean. “You were targeted. Some reports said you were killed.”
A faint smile appeared on Phuc Dinh’s face, then faded into something close to sadness, and then blank stoicism. He scratched his ear but said nothing.
“How did you escape?” Dean asked. “Weren’t you shot?”
“Another man went in my place. We used many tricks of deception at the time, to confuse spies who might be watching.”
“The dead man wasn’t you?”
Phuc Dinh shook his head.
“But he had a scar like yours.”
“When the money did not arrive, that was a sign,” said Phuc Dinh, ignoring Dean’s comment. “From that point on, we were on our guard. The ambush was a few months later, but we were still watching.”
“There was a photo in a file,” said Dean. “The man had a scar like yours.”
Phuc Dinh pointed to it.
“Yes, like that,” said Dean.
“A time such as that brings us to the lowest point of our existence.”
“Charlie, ask him about money transfers,” Rockman interrupted. “Ask him if he had any access to bank records.” Dean ignored the runner, staring instead at Phuc Dinh.
He wasn’t a ghost, not in the literal sense. And yet he was in every other way. He had come to Dean from the past, con-juring up an entire world that Dean had passed through years ago, an unsettled world that continued to haunt him, much as he denied it.
Dean, too, was a ghost, haunting Phuc Dinh’s world, though the former VC official didn’t know it.
“I lost a friend on that mission,” said Dean softly. “A good friend.”
“I lost many friends during the war as well.” Phuc Dinh lowered his head. “The man who went in my place that day was my brother. The scars you noticed were burns from a French vicar for stealing his food when we were five and six.
He used the same poker to mark us both.”
78
“Didn’t know you were a gun nut!”
Startled, Jimmy Fingers turned to his right and saw Sam Iollo, one of the capitol police supervisors, standing nearby.
“I hope I’m not a nut,” said Jimmy Fingers.
“What is that little peashooter you got there?” asked Iollo, pointing at Jimmy Fingers’ pistol.
Jimmy held out a Colt Detective Special, a .38-caliber two-inch snubby. Though old, the weapon was in showroom shape, its blued finish gleaming and the wood bright and polished.
“Pretty,” said Iollo. “What, you don’t trust us protecting you?”
“Of course I trust you,” said Jimmy Fingers.
“Hey, just busting on you there, Counselor.” Iollo seemed to think that everyone who worked for a senator was a lawyer. He gave Jimmy Fingers a serious look. “Can you shoot a rifle?”
For a brief moment, Jimmy Fingers was filled with fear.
Surely this wasn’t an idle question, nor an idle meeting.
“Of course I can use a rifle,” he told Iollo.
“Maybe you’ll want to come out to the annual turkey shoot then. Good food, and the competition’s fun. If you’re as good with a rifle as you are with that pistol, you might take yourself home a bird.”
<
br /> “Maybe I will. Let me know when it’s coming up.” Jimmy Fingers started to leave, but Iollo held out his hand to stop him.
“Tell me the truth now — you think he’s going to be President?” Iollo asked.
“Without a doubt.”
“He is looking real good. Be careful no one shoots at him again, though. Next time, they may not miss.”
“Yes,” said Jimmy Fingers grimly, before walking away.
79
Dean pushed back in the chair as Phuc Dinh rose.
“I have enjoyed our meeting,” Phuc Dinh said perfuncto-rily, his tone suggesting the opposite.
“Thank you,” Dean told him. “I appreciate your time.
And your honesty.”
Once more, a faint hint of a smile appeared on Phuc Dinh’s face, only to dissolve. As Dean watched him walk toward the door, it occurred to him that it would be an easy thing to shoot him, completing the mission he had been assigned thirty-five years before.
But Phuc Dinh had not caused Longbow’s death any more than Dean had.
Meeting his Vietnamese enemy reminded Dean not of the war but of how much had changed in the intervening years.
As a sniper, he’d seen Vietnam, the world, as black-and-white. Now he saw only colors, infinite colors. He knew his job and his duty, and would perform both. But he no longer had the luxury the teenager had of looking at targets through a crosshaired scope. What he saw was weighted with the time he’d come through, the miles he’d walked.
The ghosts he’d shared space with, haunted by and, in turn, haunting.
80
“it was a CIA program. The Marines were involved because they were in the area,” Hernes Jackson told Rubens. “I have to say that there wasn’t much online from the CIA. I found nearly everything I needed from the Department of Defense.
I’ve made appointments to look at the paper records as well.
Possibly that will reveal more.”
Jackson explained that the CIA had sent “support” payments to loyal village elders during the war. The payments were essentially bribes, and there were few checks and balances in the program. The CIA worked with local military units to arrange and protect couriers; depending on the sec-tor, Army Special Forces, Marines, and even SEALs had been involved. In the area of Phu Loc 2, the CIA worked with Marines attached to the strategic hamlet program.
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