More Deaths Than One (15 page)

He felt the skin tightening over his face as
he spoke the words. “They’ve been watching me on and off for
sixteen years.”

A sharp intake of breath. “Sixteen
years!”

“That’s what they said.”

She studied him through narrowed eyes. “Does
this have anything to do with you being a spy?”

He drew back. “A spy?”

“Don’t you remember? At Buckingham Square
when we watched your other self, I asked if you’d ever done that
sort of thing before, and you said yes.”

“Oh, right. The syndicate of sergeants.” His
mouth dropped open, and he stared at her, unable to believe what
he’d said. He pushed the Styrofoam containers aside and scrambled
off the bed. He had put on his pants and shirt when she went for
food; now he grabbed his socks and shoes and headed for the
door.

“Where are you going?” Kerry pressed her
fingertips to her mouth. “Did I say something wrong?”

Bob turned around. Seeing the hurt in her
eyes, he took two long steps toward her before he could stop
himself.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t afford the luxury of
being with you. This person I am when I’m around you . . . I don’t
know who he is. He’s not the real me. He’s too relaxed and he talks
too much. The real me is the man you first saw in the Rimrock
Coffee Shop. You once referred to him as a mousy little fellow, and
you were right. He is. And that’s the person I need to be right
now.”

To his surprise, her eyes danced. “Another
self. That makes three of you.”

He frowned at her. “I’m being serious.”

“So am I. Did it ever occur to you that the
person you are around me could be the real you? In your whole life,
no one tried to draw you out. You and Hsiang-li shared some sort of
compact of silence. He didn’t even tell you the most important
episode in his life until the very end. Whatever friends you had, I
bet they did all the talking while you sat there, never
interrupting. And your parents. They were probably so enamored with
their perfect Jackson they never paid any attention to you.”

Bob sank onto the chair by the door and put
on his shoes and socks. That she knew him so well did not alter the
situation. He still had to leave to keep ISI from finding out about
his relationship with this young woman who’d managed to penetrate
his very soul.

He glanced up from tying his shoes. Her eyes
appeared unfocused, staring at something only she could see.

She shifted her gaze to him. “I still don’t
understand what set you off. The last thing you mentioned was the
syndicate of sergeants. That’s the Khaki Mafia, isn’t it?”

He shot bolt upright. “You know about the
Khaki Mafia?”

She gave him a curious look. “Sure. Everyone
knows.”

“How?”

“William Henry Harrison wrote a book about
it. I reread it not too long ago.”

“William Henry Harrison wrote a book about
the Khaki Mafia,” he repeated flatly.

“Yes. He’s that best-selling author—”

Bob nodded. “I know him. Tell me about the
book.”

“It’s a novel called Dark Side of Heroes and
starts out with this guy Bob Noone—spelled with an e like no
one—sitting on the veranda of a hotel in a Vietnamese resort town
called Nha Trang. Until I read the book, I didn’t even know Vietnam
had resort areas.” She sighed. “One more place I never got to see,
but it must have been beautiful with miles of white sandy beaches
next to the turquoise waters of the South China Sea.”

“Did Harrison happen to mention why Noone
went there?”

“Sure. He was recuperating from an injury and
waiting for his orders. A guy approached him and introduced himself
as Michael Tate. Tate told Noone he was from the State Department
and that the army had lent Noone to him for a temporary duty
assignment. See, this organization of sergeant majors ran the NCO
clubs, and they’d been misappropriating—that’s the word Harrison
used, I call it stealing—liquor, food, cigarettes, and anything
else they could get their hands on and selling them on the black
market, possibly to the VC. That organization extended all the way
to the Pentagon. Tate wanted Noone to hang out at the NCO clubs,
get a feel for the place, see who ran things, who drove the trucks.
All the minor observations that could add up after a while.

“Noone protested that he was a private and
didn’t know anything about undercover work, but Tate gave him
uniforms with stripes, the proper ID, and even a jeep so he could
move from base to base. Tate wanted him because he seemed so plain
and ordinary and non-threatening that nobody would pay attention to
him long enough to notice he spent all his time at the NCO
clubs.”

Her eyes sparkled. “But Tate was wrong. Some
people did notice.”

She paused to gulp the last of the orange
juice and sip her coffee. Bob moved from the chair to the unused
bed and sat on the side, facing her.

She searched the take-out containers.
“There’s a couple pieces of bacon left, you interested?”

He shook his head. Even if he wanted to
speak, he didn’t think he could. There was something surreal about
hearing this particular story from her lips, and it stripped him of
all capacities and desires except to hear more.

Kerry ate the bacon, then settled back
against her pillow. “One of the people who noticed Noone was a war
correspondent named John Tyler. Tyler was a big, hearty man who
usually wore a gauzy white suit. Since Tyler also moved from NCO
club to NCO club, doing research for articles, he often hitched a
ride with Noone, and the two became friends.

“Noone learned to recognize many of the
people involved in the Khaki Mafia and reported his findings when
he and Tate met.”

“Did Harrison say what happened to the
sergeant majors?”

A frown flashed across her face. “Nothing
happened to them.”

“What to you mean nothing? They were thieves
on a grand scale. They were traitors. They sold out their country,
pocketing tens and tens of millions of dollars, and left the
American taxpayers to foot the bill.”

“According to the book, very few criminal
charges were ever filed and those charges were against the guys on
the low end of the organization. Most of the others retained their
jobs, some retired with full pensions. They even got to keep their
ill-gotten gains.”

Bob slumped forward, burying his face in his
hands.

“There was more to the book than the Khaki
Mafia,” Kerry said. “After Tate terminated the surveillance of the
NCO clubs, he sent Noone to Bangkok to spy on the CIA and NSA.”

Bob’s head jerked up. “Harrison knew? Did he
say why Tate sent Noone to Thailand?”

“Something about the government needing to
find out what the Chinese did to help the North Vietnamese. The NSA
erected communication towers in Thailand to intercept military
transmissions from China, and got college students and recent
graduates who scored high on language aptitude tests to work there.
A lot of those kids went to whorehouses and some talked about their
work. The CIA owned the whorehouses, and a couple of their contract
workers sold the information they heard to the communists. Tate
wanted Noone to hang out at the whorehouses and try to find out who
did the talking and who did the selling.”

Bob shook his head.

Kerry put her hands on her hips. “That’s what
Harrison wrote.”

“I believe you. I just don’t understand how
he knew about that. I never told him, and I doubt the man from the
State Department did either.”

Chapter 13

Kerry blinked. “What do you mean—you never
told him?” Her eyes grew round. “Are you saying you’re Bob
Noone?”

“Apparently.”

“William Henry Harrison, the author who’s
been on the bestsellers list every week for fifteen years, wrote a
novel about you?” She threw a pillow at Bob. “How could you not
tell me something like that?”

“I didn’t know. I haven’t read all of his
books, and he seldom talked about them.”

Kerry gaped at him. “I don’t believe this.
It’s like I stepped into a different universe.”

Bob nodded stiffly, trying to smile. “Welcome
to my world. Tate, as Harrison called him, swore me to secrecy.
I’ve spent the past sixteen years guarding my tongue, and now I
find I’ve been protecting a secret the whole world knows.”

“So, before when you said you knew Harrison,
you meant you knew him personally?”

“Yes. We’ve been friends since Vietnam, like
it says in the book. He’s John Tyler.”

“Weirder and weirder.”

“Not really. He worked as a war correspondent
when we met. He didn’t become internationally famous until later.
Back then, only us grunts knew him. Many American soldiers in
Vietnam weren’t too sure who General William C. Westmoreland
was—”

“Who?” Kerry said.

“Exactly. But we all knew of William Henry
Harrison, the one journalist who wrote stories that made us feel
like heroes, as if perhaps we really were fighting for truth and
justice, as if perhaps our presence meant something after all. The
funny thing—” He stopped and shook his head. “See? Around you I
always seem to be letting things slip.”

“But you didn’t,” Kerry pointed out.
“Besides, you can’t stop there. What were you going to say?”

He regarded her for a moment, then shrugged.
“He revealed me to the world. I guess I can reveal him to you. Some
of the stories he wrote in Vietnam weren’t true.”

Laughter sparkled in her eyes. “You’re
kid-ding.”

“No. He told me once the press hung out
together and came to a consensus on what happened so all their
stories had the same bias. Like the Tet offensive. The rest of the
press corps wrote articles calling it a great psychological victory
for the NVA, but Harrison saw it as a rallying point for the South
Vietnamese. Before Tet, the war hadn’t greatly affected the lives
of the city dwellers, and they didn’t care who won, but once their
cities became war zones, on the most sacred day of the year, no
less, they grew outraged. Harrison wrote that if the allied forces
pushed their advantage, they would soon win. Instead of printing
this story, his editor sent him a message telling him if he didn’t
stop writing his anticommunist bullshit and stick to the facts, he
would be fired.”

“But Harrison was right, wasn’t he?”

Bob nodded. “His editor refused to print the
article. He also rejected Harrison’s story about the VC forcing
whores to stuff glass up their privates before copulating with
American GIs. And he rejected the one about toddlers being sent
into bars with live grenades strapped to their bodies and getting
blown up along with everyone else. The editor called these articles
anticommunist propaganda.”

“So those things did happen?” Kerry said in a
small voice. “I’d read about them, but didn’t know what to
think.”

Bob shifted position. “It was not a pretty
war.”

She crossed her arms at her waist. “I’m glad
you got to play secret agent instead of having to fight.”

“I didn’t play secret agent.” He smiled at
her. “I know this because secret agents have ingenious gadgets,
fast cars, and gorgeous girls. I had a jeep and Harrison.”

She chuckled. “Well, now you have the girl.
What happened with Harrison?”

“He decided to prove his editor could not
discern the difference between fact and fiction, so he sat at his
typewriter and banged out an imaginary story. To make it as obvious
as possible that he fabricated his story, he wrote that the hero’s
name was John Kane but his buddies called him Big Jake. He
described Big Jake as a hellfighter with true grit.”

“I remember that story,” Kerry said. “We had
to read it in school. The VC captured one of Big Jake’s friends
after an ambush. The sergeant refused to authorize a rescue
mission, so Big Jake went off on his own and tracked the VC to a
small compound where several Americans were being held. Big Jake
picked the VC off one by one and rescued all the prisoners. When he
led them back to base camp, his sergeant con-gratulated him and
told him he was a real horse soldier who rode tall in the
saddle.”

“The story catapulted Harrison to fame. He
decided if that’s what people wanted, he’d give it to them. He told
me, ‘We’re living in a strange new world where what people think is
true means more than what really is, where fallacy is more powerful
than fact. The illusion of John Wayne as the quintessential
American war hero is much more real than the fact that he never
went to war, never even enlisted in the military.’ Years later,
when Harrison got a contract for the definitive novel of the
Vietnam era, he found he couldn’t write fiction, even though he’d
been doing it all along, so he wrote the truth.”

Kerry laughed. “You’re telling me his
non-fiction was fiction, and his fiction was non-fiction?”

“Yes. He researched and wrote his novels as
if they were nonfiction, then he added dialogue.”

She gave him a sheepish look. “I guess I made
a mistake before when I said your friends did all the talking. If
he knew enough about you to put you in a book, he must have
listened while you talked.”

“You weren’t wrong. I never told him anything
about myself—that’s what’s so strange. Of course, he saw me in
Vietnam, but the rest had to have been guesswork. He once mentioned
that after I left Vietnam he heard talk of a secret government
agency infiltrating the CIA-owned brothels in Thailand, but he
never indicated he knew my part in the investigation.”

Bob slowly shook his head. “I still can’t
believe he wrote a book about me, or that anyone bothered to read
it. It was all so boring. Endless hours of listening to inane
conversations and watching people drink, gamble, or play pool. I
don’t know how I’d have survived without Harrison’s stories. He
believed the ability to tell stories is the one thing separating
humans from animals, and he always had a story.”