Conspiracy (25 page)

“That him?” he asked the Art Room.

“That's him,” said Rockman.

“You see where he came out of?”

“He was already walking when the bug turned on. Why? You think he met someone there?”

“No, I'm starting to get hungry and I was hoping for a recommendation.”

 

IT WAS STARTING
to get dark by the time Dean and Qui reached Pleiku, a city in the Central Highlands roughly three-fourths of the way to Tam Ky. The streets were unlit, but Qui had no trouble navigating, driving down a small side street and stopping in front of a two-story stone building whose facade was covered with moss. Dean felt a surge of adrenaline as he got out of the car; they'd been driving so long that he was glad to have his feet on the pavement again. He took his bag and walked into the house behind Qui, muscles tensing, ready for action.

An older man in dark blue denim pants and shirt greeted them inside a small foyer. The man knew Qui, though he had not been expecting her. When Qui told him in Vietnamese that they needed two rooms for the night, he led them inside to a small room that was used as both a living room and office.

“You're going to have to pay, Charlie,” Rockman reminded him. “That's the custom. It's cash up front.”

Dean bristled at Rockman's interference but said nothing. The fee for both rooms came to ten dollars.

“His wife will make us something to eat,” Qui told Dean as they walked toward their rooms. “There's a terrace in the back. It will be pleasant there.”

“I'll see you there,” Dean told her.

 

DURING THE WAR
, an American base known as Camp Holloway had been located just outside Pleiku, on the site of an
old French air base. Helicopter transports and gunships, light observation and ground-support airplanes used the base. It had been attacked by Vietcong many times. The nearby city had suffered greatly; much of Pleiku had been burned during the North's final offensive after the Americans left.

“He's offering to take you to the old base tomorrow,” Qui told Dean, translating the old man's offer of a tour. The hotel proprietor clearly thought Dean was a visiting veteran who had fought here and wanted to see what had become of the place.

“No, thanks,” Dean said. “I'd like to get to Quang Nam as quickly as possible.”

Even before Qui translated, the old man's disappointment was clear. He told her that Dean was not a man with much curiosity or interest in the world. Qui softened his assessment when she translated it for him.

“You're not very nostalgic,” she told Dean.

“I guess I'm not.”

“Did you serve near here?”

Dean shook his head.

“Of course not,” said Qui, remembering what he had told her earlier. “You were a Marine. You would have been near Da Nang or Khe Sahn, or up in Quang Nam. Where we're going.”

Marines had served in other places throughout the country, but Dean didn't correct her. She was, after all, right on the crucial point.

“Is that why you're going back?” she asked.

“It's a coincidence.”

“Really?” she asked, but she let it drop.

The old man began talking about how much better things were when he was young. It wasn't clear from what he said exactly what was better or why—except that he was younger. Dean listened to him describing the countryside and the villages. There was no running water and no electricity. The villagers sold fresh fruit to people in the city, and got prices good enough to live on.

“We had a great festival for Vu Lan Bôn,” said the old
man. “From many, many miles, people would gather to honor their ancestors.”

“What kind of holiday is that?” Dean asked.

“It's Buddhist. Bôn. The fifteenth day of the seventh month. For ancestors who have gone to the Holy Land,” said Qui.

“The hungry ghosts,” added the old man's wife. “If you do not feed your dead, they wander the world, hungry.”

It was the living who wandered if the dead were not peacefully at rest, Dean thought to himself, but he said nothing.

 

THAO DUONG WENT
home after eating. Karr followed, keeping his distance as the Art Room had directed earlier. Shortly after he sat down at the café a block away, Marie Telach came on the line with new instructions.

“Tommy, we want to be in a position to pick up Thao Duong if necessary. You're going to have to find a way to get a tracking bug on him.”

“Aw, man.”

“I don't think it will be impossible. I was thinking you could plant one of the horseshoe bugs in his shoe. We've done that in heels before. We saw on one of the surveillance shots that he wears thick Western-style dress shoes.”

“Nah, that's not what I was complaining about. It'll be easy. But I was just about to order some food,” Karr said, getting up. “Now I have to get back to work.”

“Didn't you just eat?”

“Snacks from street vendors don't count,” said Karr.

He found a shoe repairman whose shop was still open a few blocks away. Considering the language barrier—even with the translator talking in Karr's ear, he struggled to get the tones right—he thought he did fairly well to buy an entire shoe repair set for fifty bucks. The cobbler even had his apprentice shine Karr's shoes as part of the deal.

He was wearing sneakers, so it wasn't much of a shine. Still, the thought was there.

Karr hoped that Thao Duong would veg out in front of the television and call it an early night; he'd break into the
apartment and doctor the Vietnamese bureaucrat's shoes once he was sleeping. But around eight o'clock, Thao Duong put on his things and went downstairs to his own motorbike.

Karr had already bugged the bike, so he let Thao Duong stay about two blocks ahead. It wasn't long before Karr realized where they were going—the same red-light district that Cam Tre Luc had visited the night before.

“Ten bucks he's headed to Saigon Rouge,” said Rockman. “I had a hunch these guys were connected.”

“Where's my ten bucks?” said Karr as Thao Duong passed by the street where Saigon Rouge was.

“He'll come back,” said Rockman. “Don't get too close.” Karr turned to parallel Thao Duong as he drove deeper in District 4. Finally Rockman reported that Thao Duong had stopped a few blocks away.

The buildings in the area Karr drove through were mostly one-story shacks, a patchwork of mismatched metal and discarded wood. Men clustered in the shade of the streetlights, eying the large motorcycle driver suspiciously.

Thao Duong had stopped on a block with large buildings, five- and six-story warehouses made of crumbling cement. Karr spotted the bike in front of a narrow five-story building whose bottom-floor windows were covered with pieces of cardboard boxes and whose upper windows were empty. He circled the block. A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire set off a tiny junkyard immediately behind the building. As soon as Karr stopped, a trio of large dogs ran at him, smashing into the fence as they yapped.

“Guess I'll wait somewhere else,” he told the dogs, revving the bike and driving away.

“Thao Dung's bike is moving,” Rockman said.

“You sure?”

“Bike's moving. I don't know if he's on it.”

“Yeah, around here, it could easily have been stolen,” said Karr. He zipped around the block, but rather than following Thao Duong, he cruised slowly in front of the building where he had been, pulled a U-turn at the end of the block, and came back.

“Tommy, what are you doing?” asked Rockman.

“We can always find the bike,” explained Karr.

He pulled his bike up on the curb, and cruised slowly down the sidewalk to the front of the building. Though uneven, the cement was in far better shape than the nearby structures. Karr stopped next to a telephone pole, casually steadying himself there with his left hand—and planting two video bugs at the same time.

A fireplug of a man came out of the building, yelling at Karr in Vietnamese. Karr waved at the man, then gunned the bike away.

“Are you interested in knowing what he said?” asked the translator in the Art Room.

“I'm thinking it had something to do with my ancestry,” laughed Karr.

“Good guess.”

“Thao Duong's bike is back at his apartment,” said Rockman. “It was him—he's inside. OK, we're listening to him.”

“You have any information on that building?” Karr asked.

“Negative.”

“See what you can dig up for me. I'll check it out later, once the genealogist goes to sleep.”

By the time Karr got to Thao Duong's apartment, Thao Duong had already gone upstairs and was watching a Vietnamese soap opera. Karr cruised the neighborhood, making sure he hadn't been followed, then found a restaurant several blocks away where he could get something to eat while waiting for Thao Duong to go to bed.

Three plates of Vietnamese barbecue ribs, two dishes of steamy noodles with shrimp, and a whole chicken later, Thao Duong was still awake and watching television.

“Didn't anyone ever tell him that stuff rots your mind?” Karr told Rockman when he gave him the update.

“Guess you'll just have to chill.”

“Yeah. Good thing I saved room for dessert.”

 

THE DOCTOR WHO
had examined Forester was one of three part-time coroners, all paid a modest retainer by the county to be on call. Full-time, he was a general practitioner, and his days were very full—or at least his office was when Lia went to see him. Even so, he squeezed her in between two appointments without her having to read more than one of the issues of
Glamour
magazine piled in the waiting room.

“Do you get a lot of gunshot wounds up here?” Lia asked, after the doctor had reviewed the basics of the autopsy report.

“I know what you're getting at.” He smiled, but there was an edge to his voice. “Small-town guy, looks at a homicide maybe once or twice a year, if that. Right? Part-time guy. How's he supposed to know what he's looking at, right?”

“It crossed my mind.”

“Admittedly, we don't have many homicides here. Which is why the coroners are part-time.”

He reached down and pulled a file from the bottom drawer of his desk, opened it, and slid a photo forward. It showed what the bullet had done to the back of Forester's head. Lia had seen a black-and-white copy; it looked more gruesome in color.

“I have seen that sort of thing before,” said the doctor. “A lot, actually. I worked in trauma medicine in New York City for about five years after my internship. I have to tell you, this is a textbook case.”

Lia leafed through the rest of the photos the doctor had.
Most hadn't been included in the formal report, though nothing in them jumped out at her.

“The Secret Service has copies of the report,” said the doctor. “They had their own doctors look at the body, of course.”

“Isn't it true, though, that you can't tell whether it was suicide from the wounds?” Lia asked. “Someone could have held the gun to his mouth.”

“Technically, you're right. But his mouth was closed around the barrel, the direction of the bullet was exactly as you'd expect if he were holding it himself, there were no signs that he was being held down or that he'd been in a fight.”

“He'd had some drinks.”

“Sure. His blood alcohol content was oh-point-one-one. Legally intoxicated if he were driving, but not stumbling-down drunk. He wouldn't have been unconscious. The pathology report on the organs was handled by the state police initially. They all came back negative. There weren't any signs of drug abuse, no pills at the scene. Really does look like a suicide. I've seen a couple like this. Very ugly.”

Lia put the report and photos back in the folder. Staging a death to make it look like suicide wasn't impossible, and despite what the doctor said, she still had her doubts that he was expert enough to pick it up. But the police had said the same thing.

So was she resisting? Because she knew a little about Forester?

“Depression is a funny thing,” said the doctor, finally finished sending the files. “We look for logic, but sometimes it's not there.” He rose. “I know people have a hard time with suicides. Accepting it. But I think it's pretty clear that's what happened in this case.”

 

THAO DUONG'S BEDROOM
floor was filled with dust. Tommy Karr's nose started twitching as soon as he got down on all fours and began creeping toward the side of the bed, where the Vietnamese bureaucrat had dropped his shoes. Karr stopped twice to suppress sneezes, pinching his nose closed and holding his breath.

The second time he stopped, he felt something run over the back of his thigh.

A mouse? Or a very large centipede?

Karr clamped his hand over his mouth, leaned forward as quietly as he could, and grabbed Thao Duong's left shoe. Then Karr sat back and rolled onto his side, doing a modified sidestroke to the door. Karr got to his feet in the next room but kept holding his breath until he was outside on the fire escape. As soon as he had closed the window behind him, he began coughing and gasping for air at the same time.

“Tommy, are you OK?” asked Marie Telach from the Art Room.

“Just need some chicken soup,” he told her.

“Jeez, aren't you full yet?” asked Rockman.

Karr checked his pants and shirt, making sure that he wasn't covered with insects. Then he went to work on Thao Duong's shoe. The heel was easily removed, but there was a problem—it was so worn that not even the slim transmitter would fit inside. Karr settled for placing two of the much smaller temporary trackers, which not only had a much more
limited range but also would send signals for at best twelve to sixteen hours.

Karr ransacked his brain and examined the feed from the surveillance bugs, trying to think of an alternative hiding spot, but Thao Duong's relatively bare existence made it impossible. He didn't use a briefcase or a mobile phone. Karr would have to return the following night to replace the bugs.