by Larry Bond
The nearby bushes were thick with green and pink berries. Josh reached for a bunch of the pink ones, then stopped. They might be poison, or simply unripe.
He could wait, he decided. He wasn’t that hungry.
Josh began walking along the bank of the flooded stream, following the ripples in the water as it moved downstream.
Was it the right direction? He reasoned that as long as he moved downhill, he would be heading toward people, but whether that was really a good thing or not he couldn’t say. The Vietnamese tended to be generous toward strangers, but what if the stream brought him to the people who had killed his friends?
Moving was better than sitting.
He was bruised terribly, and his knee hurt, but none of his bones seemed to be broken.
After an hour or so, the sun battered its way through the clouds and the air turned sweet. After another hour, his aches and bruises melted. Except for the insects and the shape of the trees and bushes, he could have been back at school, taking a summer’s hike in the woods.
Josh figured he’d been walking for nearly three hours when he spotted a small bridge made of bamboo and tree trunks spanning the creek. The bamboo on the bridge was bright yellow, relatively new—maybe in place for only a week or two. One of the posts was new as well, a rough-hewn tree trunk stuck into the ground at a slight angle, brown rather than gray like the others.
The bridge connected to a narrow path on both sides of the stream. The jungle was thick on the left, but light filtered through the trees on the right; there was a field beyond.
Josh climbed up the incline to the path, trying to muster his small store of Vietnamese words:
Xin chào!
Hello.
Vâng.
Yes.
Tôi không hiếu.
I don’t understand.
He knew other words. What were they?
Grandfather—Ông. It was an honorific, a tide that the Vietnamese used all the time. It was like saying “sir.”
Other words.
Josh tried to stoke his memory, dredging up full phrases and sentences. Vietnamese had tones that went with the sounds, dramatically altering their meaning—a word could mean a ghost, or a rice plant, or a horse, depending on how it was pronounced.
Ngon. Very tasty. The food is very tasty. Can you call for help.
Can you call for help?
Công an. Công an.
Police.
Depending on whom he met, Vietnamese might be of little use. Most of the residents of the valley were Hmong natives, who didn’t speak much Vietnamese themselves. They were poor mountain people, still very close to their roots as nomadic, slash-and-burn farmers.
The trail looped back around the side of a hill, then continued through a patch of jungle. Josh walked steadily, sticking to the side of the trail so he could jump into the grass and hide if he heard anyone. As he turned a corner, he saw a cluster of thatch-roofed huts on the opposite slope. They were about a mile away, across a steep, rock-strewn ravine.
Josh ran his hand over the slight stubble of his morning beard. Would the people help him?
Yes, he decided. They must. They would. He began trotting down the path, trusting that it would curve back toward the hamlet.
~ * ~
6
Bangkok, Thailand
Mara Duncan was engulfed in a human tidal wave as she stepped out the side door of her apartment building, swept along on the sidewalk with literally hundreds of other Bangkok residents making their way to their morning posts. The entire city seemed to be flooding to work or school, and a good portion of the population seemed to be using the small side street where she lived.
It was always like this, not only here, but all through Bangkok and the close-in suburbs, where the population had gone from an unofficial fifteen million to nearly thirty million in less than a decade. Bangkok— known to most Thai-speaking locals as Krung Thep—-was the unofficial poster city for the Third World’s population explosion. The streets were perpetually crowded and a thick shroud of pollution hung over the city. But it was a place of great wealth and commerce as well, a twenty-first-century boomtown that justifiably evoked comparisons to America’s Chicago or even New York in the early twentieth.
No fewer than five new skyscrapers were being built in the city; each was over one hundred stories tall. One of the buildings, Thai Wah V, was planned to top 45 5 meters—a height that would make it, not coincidentally, about a yardstick taller than Malaysia’s Petronas Towers I and II. The tower’s foundation was considered a modern engineering marvel, due to the wet ground that characterized so much of the city.
Mara glanced around as she joined the line to the escalators up to the skytrain. Bangkok was home to hundreds of spies from nearly every nation on earth, and it was not unusual for them to try to keep tabs on interesting Americans, whether they were known CIA officers or not. Two weeks before, Mara had been followed for several days, apparently by a Russian freelancer who bought her cover as a local sales rep for an American medical-equipment manufacturer and was trying to hunt up information for a Swiss firm. Either he’d lost interest or figured out who she really was; in any event, he’d disappeared without making an approach.
She missed him, in a way. He’d added a little spice to her mornings. Things had been dull since she’d come back from Malaysia.
The escalator moved swiftly. People stood only six or seven deep on the skytrain platform, a sign that there would be at least a five-minute wait for the next train. Mara wedged her way through the crowd, once again looking to make sure that she wasn’t being followed or observed.
The CIA’s Thailand bureau, traditionally one of the agency’s biggest in Asia, had grown exponentially over the past four years, and with space at the embassy at a premium, many of the officers worked in one of the “outbuildings”—secure suites rented by the CIA nearby. Mara’s office was in a building two blocks from the embassy; the agency leased five whole floors, but the offices were located in only two. While security was tight—the elevators had been rigged so that they couldn’t stop at the floor at all, and the stairwells were guarded by armed men—the “annex” had a much looser atmosphere than the embassy. The jokes were bawdier, and the coffee was better.
Or so the annex’s unofficial mayor claimed. He was in rare form when Mara arrived.
“You look just mah-valous,” Jesse DeBiase bellowed as she stepped out of the stairs. “Come taste some of the best joe this side of Seattle.”
“I don’t think I can drink another cup today,” said Mara.
“But dah-link, you must. Think of your fans.”
“All right, Million Dollar Man. If it’ll make you happy.”
DeBiase bowed. Just about everyone in the station called him Million Dollar Man, though most had no idea where he’d gotten the nickname. A few thought it was a reference to an op he’d run years before. In reality, he’d been awarded it decades before because his last name sounded the same as Ted DiBiase’s, a pro wrestler popular at the time. Why the CIA had ever hired a wrestling fan remained one of the agency’s most perplexing mysteries.
DeBiase was one of the deputy station chiefs, in title the annex supervisor, though he claimed his authority barely entitled him to order stationery. Mara had no idea what the Million Dollar Man did beyond telling stories to his officermates; he had never given her an assignment nor mentioned any of his. The latter might not have been particularly surprising, except that the Million Dollar Man talked so much about everything that it was hard to imagine that he would be able to resist at least hinting, indirectly, about things he had done in the distant if not recent past. But DeBiase never talked shop that way, and never seemed to have any appointments that had even the vaguest possible connection to espionage, real or potential. He was either very old-school about keeping secrets, or an officer who’d spent his career being promoted sideways and had never had anything real to do.
Probably the former, but you never could tell.
“Why not here?” asked Mara. Thailand had world-class medical care, and in fact many Americans flew there for so-called surgery vacations.
“No,” he said. “No. Some things—I was made in America. I’ll be fixed in America. So to speak.”
“So when are you going?” asked Mara.
“Soon,” said DeBiase. It was the same answer he’d given when they were introduced weeks before.
“What the hell’s keeping you here?” asked Tai Lai as he stirred creamer into his coffee. Alone among the annex denizens, Lai preferred powdered dairy substitute to the real milk and cream the Million Dollar Man managed to have delivered fresh twice a week. It couldn’t be for his health; Lai, who was on his second tour in Bangkok, stood about six feet and weighed all of 140. A good wind would push him over—though not break him, as he was a karate expert and in excellent shape.
Or so the certificates and trophies he kept in his office claimed.
“Duty, young Mr. Lai,” said the Million Dollar Man expansively. “The same thing that keeps us all here. Except Ms. Duncan. She is here because she sinned rather badly in her past life, and must now atone for it.”
“So Bangkok is the Buddhist hell?” Mara poured her coffee.
“Worse.”
“I go through this and in my next life I come back as a butterfly?”
“The Buddhist concept of hell is separate from reincarnation,” said DeBiase. “There is not necessarily any escape.”
“Describes Bangkok perfectly,” said Lai.
“Actually, there are many different strains of Buddhism,” said DeBiase, “and talking about specific beliefs can be highly contradictory.”
He was now in professor mode; there would be no interrupting his discourse until he had completely dissected the various strands of Buddhist belief, a process which could take hours. Mara took her coffee and slipped down the hall to the small office she shared with another officer exiled from the field, Roth Setco.
Roth was a dark and moody man; it was not unusual for him to sit at his desk staring at the blank wall in front of him for hours on end. Not yet thirty, he had thick scars on his right leg and both arms, and two small ones on his right cheek. His nose looked as if it had been broken several times, and the lobe of his right ear was either deformed or had been torn off and then poorly repaired. His long hair covered his ear, and possibly other scars on his neck. He wasn’t in this morning—neither a surprise nor unwelcome.
Mara flipped on her computer. As she was waiting for it to boot, her secure satellite phone vibrated, indicating that she was receiving an instant message from the bureau’s secure paging system. It was from Peter Lucas, the station chief, and consisted of one word: Come. He wanted to see her over at his office in the embassy.
She killed her computer and reversed course, gliding past the Million Dollar Man, still holding court.
~ * ~
Peter Lucas checked his watch as he passed into the secure communications suite. He was due to have lunch with the ambassador at the British embassy at noon; his counterpart from MI6 would be there, and while no agenda had been mentioned, the Brits would surely want to discuss the situation in southern Thailand, where the rebel movement was a growing concern to both countries.
The recent discovery of oil along Thailand’s southern coast would complicate things further. The world might be rapidly shifting away from oil as a fuel source, but the commodity’s value still seemed to double every other week.
They’d also be talking about Myanmar and Vietnam, as well as Malaysia. Lucas’s portfolio had been expanded beyond Thailand and Malaysia three days before; he was now in charge of operations in Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia as well. Officially, the move was temporary, due to a pending reorganization of the CIA’s Southeast Asia section; unofficially, Lucas was going to head whatever permanent arrangement resulted.
The shuffle was widely known inside the agency, and it was no secret to MI6, either. But the real reason for the reorganization was that the CIA’s Vietnam bureau had been compromised.
The counterintelligence people were trying to sort out exactly what was going on. The office’s main focus over the past two years had been drug smuggling, and it was clear that at least one officer there had been taking money from an Asian gang. But the NSA eavesdropping programs indicated that some elements of the top secret daily intelligence summaries prepared by the office were being read in Hanoi as well. The counterintelligence people were trying to trace the leak and see who exactly was involved. In the meantime, the office was essentially unusable.
Which was why he had called Mara over this morning.
She was waiting in the antechamber of the suite. Sitting in one of the leather club chairs—Lucas had personally ordered them installed upon his arrival the year before—she fidgeted nervously, clearly anxious and probably excited at the prospect of a new assignment. He remembered that feeling well—he’d felt it himself dozens and dozens of times, maybe hundreds, when he was a young stud.
Not that he didn’t feel enthusiasm now, at age fifty, but it was tempered, respectful of the pitfalls and problems that inevitably accompanied a job for the CIA. Too respectful, maybe.
“You’re looking good,” said Lucas, sliding down into the seat across from her. The secure suite was isolated from the rest of the building by a number of systems that made it impossible to bug. “How are you feeling?”
“You know your message could be considered suggestive,” said Mara.
“Suggestive?”
“Come?”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s what you wrote, Pete.”
“I was just being terse.”
She cocked her head slightly, still smiling, her body openly flirting. It was all subconscious. Tall and large-boned, Mara had an almost playful nature, a natural outgoingness that Lucas always associated with jocks. Her personality would have made her an excellent recruiter, though it wasn’t hard to guess why she had been moved into that area—she was far from ugly, but she wasn’t a knockout either, and her height would be considered a negative by old hands, especially in Asia. Spies wanted to be seduced, or so the theory went; few men were attracted to a woman who could just as easily whip them as seduce them.
As it was, she’d proven herself an excellent PM, or paramilitary officer, though at times a bit aggressive, as her last supervisor in Malaysia had written.
Lucas preferred the word “rambunctious” to aggressive. She was still young; she’d grow out of it. Not too much, he hoped.
“Refresh my memory,” he told her, backing into her assignment. “How good is your Vietnamese?”
“It’s fantastic.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Xin chào. Toi hiêu. “
Hello. I understand.
The tones—there were six in Vietnamese—were off a bit, but the words were intelligible.
“I won’t embarrass you,” said Lucas. “You won’t need very good language skills on this.”
“What do we need?”
“It’s not really a very important job, or very complicated. You fly into Hanoi and meet a Belgian national in our employ.”
“Okay.” She nodded.
“Talk to him, then come back.”
“Great.”
“His name is Bernard Fleming. He speaks English.”
“When do I leave?”
Lucas couldn’t help but smile. Most of his people would have asked a few questions before taking the job, masking their enthusiasm even if it was already a foregone conclusion that they were going.
“There’s a flight this afternoon. You’re already booked,” Lucas told her. “I suppose you’d like to hear what this is all about.”
~ * ~
Fleming was a UN observer on a scientific survey team. They’d been sent to northern Vietnam to gather
data on biological changes connected with the recent dramatic shifts in the weather. She would go to Vietnam as a journalist working for Voice of America; she was doing a story on climate change, and was talking to Fleming because he was the only one authorized by the UN to talk about the mission.
Not really, of course.
The area where the survey team was headed was near the suspected crash site of an Air Force F-105 during the Vietnam War; the pilot of the aircraft was still officially listed as MIA. Mara was to ask Fleming if he’d seen any sign of the plane.
