by AD Davies
Money is a luxury that has, for many years, been in abundance for me, in quantities far greater than I have ever needed. I never used it flippantly, though, never took it for granted. But now I was cut off electronically from Park Avenue Investigations, my personal wealth was all I had, and if I needed to spend it all to rescue one girl from the clutches of men who think they wield the power of God, then I would gladly give it.
And yet, would giving these men so much do more harm than good? Would it encourage more kidnapping, more hurt and suffering?
Back at my hotel, everything went in the rucksack. All my electronics, my clothes, my binoculars, the defunct phones, even my flip-flops and guidebooks. I superstitiously ensured my genuine passport and bankcards were close to the top in case I did not return, so I would not forever be known as some French tourist who vanished one day. I changed into lightweight cargo trousers and a long-sleeved cotton shirt. I placed the money in my lower trouser pockets and inserted my fake passport into another Ziploc, along with the cloned credit card and the iPhone, charged to half-battery and switched off. I then taped this little package to the inside of my left thigh and secured the emergency two hundred bucks to my right.
With the UK in the middle of the night right now, I fired up the iPad and sent Jess an email telling her the plan. An item from Roger Gorman lay unopened in my inbox. I considered not reading it, but if he was going to do anything that affected me directly, I needed to know before it stung my case.
Dear Adam,
I hope this finds you well. You have been out of contact for several days, and we are starting to grow concerned. You have used PAI resources, namely IT and telecommunications equipment, in direct contravention of our strict rules, and you have been cut off from these resources. I am sure you appreciate we cannot allow board members to break such rules when it would not be tolerated by rank-and-file employees. You are also in breach of condition 311.5 (that no investigation will be carried outside the UK without line manager or board approval) and 312.1 (that no investigator will go more than 48 hours without filing a progress report). This also applies to freelance contracts, under which you are currently operating. While we appreciate that a missing persons case can be extremely stressful, we must insist that you file a report along with your immediate location.
In addition to the issues relating to your procedural breaches, you must also report to Paris’s Préfecture de Police on Friday 26th July at midday regarding your legal entanglement, for which Park Avenue Investigations holds no responsibility. A lawyer will be provided for your interview, which may lead to criminal charges being brought.
If you are suffering stress, depression or other mental illness, PAI will of course be more than happy to work with you to resolve these issues, and return you to your usual high standards of work. You must contact myself or another board member no later than midnight on Thursday 25th July.
Yours… etc.
Tomorrow. Same deadline as Benson, just twenty-four hours earlier.
It was his attempt to sound concerned, whilst allowing the subtext to wave a powerful fist under my chin. He’d obviously been advised to offer me help, to sound like the model chairman. Yet I was his boss. It was definitely a precursor to declaring me incompetent. It was like this when he blackballed my desire to blackball his client list. Although I could technically veto a company, I had to prove beyond doubt that our involvement with that company would damage our reputation due to ethics or morality, like the Church of England investing in payday loans companies. But because our company’s aim was to supply corporate investigative services, it was difficult to veto anyone. I succeeded a few times, with firms that had been dragged through the press for tax avoidance or bribing politicians, but Gorman mostly got his way.
I had run away before in the hope that I would come up with some tactic or legal challenge, or maybe hope Gorman upped sticks to explore newer pastures. I knew now that was the wrong move. But I couldn’t mount an attack yet. I had to form a defense, too, and time was the real problem here. I dared not focus on Gorman until Sarah was back safely with her sister. I was closer than I had ever been, and a corrupt police officer, the Giang connection, was going to take me there.
Chapter Thirty-Five
I dumped my pack in The Rex’s left-luggage, and caught a taxi to Notre Dame, a small but picturesque cathedral opposite a park lined with coaches disgorging backpackers young and old. Rickshaw vendors and taxi-bike owners descended upon them like starving masses around an aid truck. It was easy to pick out the seasoned travelers from the newbies by assessing the level of terror on their faces—the scale morphed from “meh” to “oh bloody hell, what have I done!”
Giang rolled up in an unmarked car, now changed into linen trousers and a V-neck t-shirt. He had dabbed cream on the sore, but his yellow smile was just as pleasant as when I first saw it. I got in, handed him the agreed-upon chunk of money, and let the air-con flow.
He said, “We will turn this off when we get close. To acclimatize you. Very hot out there.”
It took an hour to get out to the freeway, such as that was, then we did not talk as he sped along at a steady fifty-five, passing through little towns like the ones I’d seen on my way from the airport. Many were poorer, where naked children played football with junk tied together in a ball-shaped assemblage, and people sat on deck chairs beside what I would have assumed were derelict houses were it not for the bright decorations and curtains in the windows and doors. The open road yielded wide, expansive views of dusty land stretching for miles on either side. We passed a one-story complex that could have been an abandoned truck-stop, at which Giang waved a hand and said, “This is where I left your credit card man,” and we did not even slow down.
Two hours after leaving Saigon, we stopped for a comfort break beside a warehouse-like structure, one that served as a urinal for van drivers, policemen and British detectives alike. It was a fine way to empty a bladder. If you held your breath.
About ten yards from the stench of layer upon layer of old piss, a man with one tooth for every two centimeters of gum hocked snacks and drinks from the back of an estate car. I bought enough to keep my strength up—a stick of stale bread, some dried meat and a green banana, plus a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate and two one-liter bottles of water. When risking one’s life on pure hope, preparation is key, and water often equals life.
Giang showed me to the door of the main building. Invited me to peer inside.
People hunched over rows of workstations, sewing, cutting, hammering, like a cleaner-than-average sweatshop. The woman nearest me, in her thirties, had a gnarled stump below her knee and her right hand was a smooth knob. The woman next to her possessed no legs or teeth. Beyond her, a man in his forties worked with hands on the end of his biceps where his elbow should have been. No designer names that I could see on the colorful purses and wallets, the only brand being the yellow star on a red background from the Vietnamese flag.
“Cripple factory,” Giang told me as he led me back to the car. “Many places like this. Government assigns jobs to all, even our cripples. Some are from American bombs in the war, some with bad birth defects. The Americans dropped Agent Orange on the banks of our waterways to burn the plants and prevent ambushes by the North Vietnamese. They didn’t care that people lived there, drinking the water or washing food, spraying crops…”
“Why did you show me that?” I asked.
“To demonstrate why Vietnam is growing strong.”
“By penning disabled people into factories?”
“By creating money more efficiently than corrupt capitalist societies.” His arm swept aside. People got off a bus. Westerners, mainly. Tourists. He said, “We bring people here to show the evil brought to us by war, then they buy badly-made products sewn by hands mutilated by the Americans.”
I almost laughed. “Guilt-tourism.”
Giang smiled like we’d made some kind of bond. “But you see now? If men like those we see today can help a poor fa
mily by removing a daughter who is a burden, or a son who can program a computer, isn’t that worth it? Isn’t that how nations become great again?”
I said, “Can we get going?”
He seemed deflated as we trudged back to the car with our little bags of food and water. I ate the melting chocolate before we got in. It was not nice.
We spent the next hour and a half lumbering along in a car with the air-con off and my sweat glands turned up full. The roads smoothed and the verges grew greener. Eventually, we arrived in a bustling town with narrow streets, and through the car window I could smell that we were close to water. It reminded me of Cornwall except with more mopeds, more horns, and more dust. The young slouched as they walked. They sported big sunglasses and sluiced product in their hair, and wore basketball vests, smoking.
I don’t know what I’d been expecting from the Mekong Delta, but what I saw was definitely not it. Under canvass awnings, obscuring most of the view, twelve-foot motorized barges lined up side-by-side, the owners ferrying tourists out into the river made famous by a thousand movies. Some were workboats, bright dragon-faces on the front, with tractor-engine-sized rear propellers. Others were the narrow, four-man prop-powered gondolas that Giang referred to simply as “riverboats.” We wobbled down a floating platform to a quiet quay, headed for a lone riverboat with a long-stemmed propeller. No one manned it.
The boat wobbled as I lowered myself into the middle seat, my broken finger jabbing at the knuckle. Giang turned a key, depressed a teaspoon-sized lever and tugged on the starter chord. The engine fired first time and a cloud of blue-grey smoke belched into the air. He gave it some gas, tugging against the current as we sliced over the surface beyond the quay. And then, revealed before me, was the Mekong Delta itself.
The water stretched to the horizon in both directions, with few manmade outposts on the nearside shore. It looked less like a river, more like a brown lake with a constant riptide. Hundreds of boats navigated left and right, and we crossed their well-established lanes dangerously slowly. The bright faces of working boats carrying both tourists and fishermen grinned at us, the opposite shore growing slowly larger as we neared. Soon, as we skirted this side, tributaries fed off the main body, with houses lining aquatic residential streets.
We navigated upriver for half an hour or so, the grumble and intermittent stutter of the engine literally the only thing I heard. When the river traffic thinned, and the landscape grew green and tall on both banks, the nose of our boat rose and we accelerated, leaving a wake like a speedboat.
It isn’t often I think of my mother, her of the no-more-compromises. When I remember her readiness to shack us up with Stuart Fitzpatrick, I still feel the ache of a bitter child, but when I am on water like this, with the roar of a motor and the thump and bump of the hull skimming the surface, I wonder what her death was like. Did she see it coming? Did she have time for a final thought? Was it of me?
Soon, there were no other boats on the Delta. The engine quieted to a drone as Giang sought the correct route. I ran my hand over my head, feeling the sting of sunburn. Giang passed me a silly conical tourist hat. I reluctantly put it on.
He steered us into a wall of reeds, chugging slowly, his brow beaded with sweat. We eased into a tributary a mere three times as wide as the boat. Giang shouted something but I couldn’t hear it. I picked up something to do with snakes, so I just nodded.
Foliage bowed in from both sides, brushing my arms at times, and we both ducked occasionally to evade the odd low-hanging branch. The sun flitted through trees, and I got the idea that, if not for the engine’s volume, I’d be getting lectured on how the Americans destroyed all this with cripple-creating chemicals before it grew back again. Strong. Like Vietnam.
He had a point, I suppose. The people of this country were astounding. The disabled doing crappy jobs to keep their income, no matter how small; the young embracing a new era in their country’s evolution; communism trying to outdo capitalism through sheer willpower; a proud nation, rising from the ashes and blood of a long-ago conflict that still hung like a restless spirit over their daily lives.
We slowed to a crawl, and Giang let the engine idle. We drifted while he listened to the jungle chirp and screech around us. A whistle pierced the air and Giang replied with three bursts. Another, longer whistle responded and Giang gently steered us ashore. We angled for an overhanging tree, where a skinny brown arm pushed the branches aside and we glided easily to a ten-foot pier jutting out of solid land. The arm belonged to an elderly man in the black pajama-like garb we associate with the Viet Cong, or rather “North Vietnamese freedom fighters.” The old man was unarmed as far as I could tell, although his hollow eyes held on me all the way in. It took me a moment to realize his hands were missing.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Giang paused at a fork in the path and hung a left, taking us further from the river than the right-hand prong would have. The permanent shadows cast by the canopy lessened the heat somewhat, but the air remained muggy. I sipped water to keep my hands busy. The plant-life lining our route thinned and we came upon a shirtless, anorexic-thin teenager wielding an AK-47 that probably weighed more than him. He tracked us to where another sentry waited, as thin as his compatriot, his gaze equally hollow. The path opened into a square clearing about twenty feet on all sides, with three huts constructed from irregular wood. A cooking pot hung over a smoky fire in the center. Clothes dried on washing lines.
Four armed men emerged from the huts, two AK-47s, two old-looking pistols slung loosely in string-belts. Those with pistols had deformities to their arms. A man in his forties followed them out. He wore cargo shorts and a faded Manchester United shirt sponsored by Crown Paints with the name “Cantona” peeling on the back.
“Makes a change from Beckham,” I mumbled.
Cantona was the only one who didn’t look emaciated; he was portly, with a mop of thick black hair and a wispy beard like a fifteen-year-old’s. He spoke Vietnamese to Giang, his body language all open and friendly but the tone dragged with the throaty ring of annoyance. Giang mirrored the body language but his voice raised an octave.
He told me, “They will search you.”
The shirtless AK-47 boy slung his weapon on his back and patted me down. He was not exactly proficient at this. He found the larger wad of cash, and no one reacted when he removed it from my pocket. My document pack remained fastened sweatily to my leg. He handed the cash to Cantona. Clearly in charge, Cantona remained static except for a nod to one of the pistol-bearers, who took the cash aside to a tree stump that served as a dining table, and subjected it to a more thorough count.
We followed Cantona to the back of the camp, the two AK-47 boys and the remaining pistol-chap falling in line. Dead eyes at my back. Fingers poised over their triggers.
Cantona squatted at what looked like a tuft of mossy weeds the width of a dustbin lid, and lifted it to reveal stairs dropping into a jet-black cavern. He slithered into the hole, landed on the top step, then ducked out of sight. Giang went next, looked back up at me as he descended, then the dark swallowed him too.
I sat on the rim. Sipped my water. One of the AK-47s poked me in the back. I turned my head to give him a “yeah, what?” look, but was met with wide black pupils and an expressionless face. I held the boy’s gaze, then slid off the edge.
The staircase led down to a narrow passage, forcing me to crouch-walk all the way. It was, I guessed, one of the thousands of tunnels crisscrossing the country, left intact after the war. When it leveled out, a candle every ten yards or so did nothing except illuminate the basic shape of the tunnel and cast flickering shadows of the two men ahead. The air felt as if someone was boiling water and funneling the steam this way. At least one person tramped behind me, so I dared not pause for breath. A brighter light up ahead gave me some hope of a reprieve, though, preparing to emerge into sunlight any moment.
I did not emerge into sunlight. In many ways, it was the exact opposite of what we think of as “
light.”
A room, of sorts. Lit by candles and camping lanterns. Maybe fifteen wooden beds lined the walls and gave off the stench of moldy fabric. The people here, I counted ten in all, rose slowly from these beds as Cantona urged them with a prod or a barked command. No one over the age of twenty. The youngest was hard to tell. A boy, sixteen at the most, but could have been fourteen. Men and women, boys and girls. All in sack-like ponchos that mostly covered their bodies. They stood, slouched in the gaps beside their assigned bunk, heads bowed against the low curvature of the roof. All eyes concentrated on the floor.
Cantona stood at the far end, hands on hips, a salesman’s grin painted on a face lined with shadows from the dim wattage.
Giang said, “Do not think of them as human beings. It helps, trust me. If they were not here they would die on the streets. Now they have a chance to live.”
A gun barrel prodded me from behind. All three gunmen—gun-boys—were now so close to me I was surprised I could not feel their breath. I walked the line, determined to meet each gaze, to not shy away or bury it deep down. To not think of them as human would make this easier, yes, but it wasn’t something I could—or should—ever forget.
Of the ten, three were male and seven female. The males were all Vietnamese, but two of the females were Caucasian, with the high cheekbones of Eastern Europeans or Scandinavians. No one spoke, and they returned to staring at the ground once I passed.
I reached the end, Cantona and Giang in close proximity.
I said, “She isn’t here.”
“I told you it was unlikely.”
