The Secret Agent (16 page)

And Boonreung watched them all with a chill in his young heart. Like all Thais of sense and cunning, he feared the retribution of the gods.

T
he small alley off Chakkrawat Road snaked down to Khlong Ong Ang, a fetid ditch almost too narrow for a boat’s passage. On either side were the iron doors of warehouses locked against the night, and chain-link barriers rolled to the sidewalk; green plastic awnings bucked crazily out of concrete doorways, and braziers burned there, with chicken roasting and noodles on the boil. A sweating cook hovered anxiously, while along the sidewalk hungry people waited in plastic chairs: a motorcycle mechanic, a mother shepherding twin boys. During the day the sidewalk was jammed with bodies, some buying and others selling; the old Thieves Market, the Nakorn Kasem, was only three blocks away. Even now, in relative darkness, the street was hardly menacing. But Jeff Knetsch was nervous as he made his way toward the open sewer of the khlong. He smelled the noodles and the burning flesh, and his stomach tightened.

He had flown out the previous night from Geneva, across Russia and India and then south toward the China Sea. Three days before, he had stood on the cliff edge where Max had died and endured a memorial service attended by nearly seven hundred of Courchevel’s year-round residents. No body had been recovered from the jagged crevasses below Max’s house; but Knetsch had chosen readings from Robert Frost and hired a tenor to sing “Danny Boy.” He’d fielded questions from reporters and cordoned off the old stone house to prevent its destruction by souvenir-seekers. He delivered a eulogy that rang with love and pride and grief. His voice broke only once during the seventeen minutes required for the speech.

And he had tried to comfort Sabine Renaudie and Yvette Margolan and Max’s old girlfriend Suzanne Muldoon—who had flown in unexpectedly from Oregon to pay her final respects. She wore Prada black and a hat with a veil and she was rumored to have sold the rights to her memoirs. Max dead was far more profitable than Max alive.

Even Sabine’s estranged mother, Claudine, had returned for the memorial. But there was not a single member of the Roderick family alive to bear witness; and Stefani Fogg never showed.

Through it all, Knetsch crossed his gambler’s fingers and prayed for his luck to hold. He walked the ridgeline with Max in spirit: a crevasse on one side, fathomless air on the other. He put one foot in front of the next and kept going, ignoring the impulse to glance over his shoulder. It was in moments like this that Jeff’s iron self-control proved its worth. He listened courteously and made adroit conversation to virtual strangers. He put his arm around Yvette Margolan and drank schnapps with Jacques Renaudie and even spoke with admirable restraint
to Oliver Krane. Krane appeared without warning at the ceremony that consigned Max to oblivion, standing in an absurd wool felt fedora and black cashmere coat beside a sobbing Sabine. Krane intended, Knetsch supposed, to make sure his invoices were paid. But Jeff had a bone to pick with Oliver Krane—the man had no business running a risk-management agency as he did, sending rapacious women as his emissaries, women who annihilated men’s lives. Krane would not receive a nickel for his trouble if Jeff Knetsch had anything to say about it.

“But you
don’t,
old thing,” Oliver had murmured gently, one hand on Jeff’s shoulder in deepest sympathy. “You’re not the executor of Roderick’s will, are you? I’ll submit my claim to his Geneva firm, of course. Now, if you’d be so good as to show me the way to the alpine-rescue chappies, I’d be no end grateful.”

Jeff had shaken off the man’s hand without a word of reply and gone in search of a strong drink. The terror he’d held at bay for days welled up and nearly throttled him.
Krane intended to talk to the rescue team.
The men who had gathered the pieces of Max’s shattered wheelchair off the rock ledge a thousand feet below his house.

His steps slowed as he reached the middle of the Bangkok alley. A block farther on was the door he must enter, but something moved in the distance—near the faint gleam of Khlong Ong Ang—and he raised his hand to his eyes. The figure of a boy in ski-racing gear: eleven or twelve years old, tall for his age, with a piercing green gaze. The swing of his stride was athletic and confident. The boy walked up to him and held out his hand. Anguish seared through Knetsch.

They’re timing us today. I thought I ought to say Good Luck. It’s icy out there.

Knetsch felt the sidewalk lurch and dip. He thrust out
his briefcase to ward off the demon—not young Max, immortal and blessed, but a figment of hell. His knees buckled and he almost sat down on the stinking stone curb. What he needed was rest. He had skipped too many time zones in quick succession. He had not been home in three weeks. He had not talked to his wife in days. She thought he was still in Geneva. She thought he was coming home.

One of the twin boys eating dinner with his mother hooted with laughter and skittered between the plastic chairs. He pointed an accusing finger at Knetsch, shrieked a word of Thai and fled back toward the charcoal brazier.

Jeff’s fists clenched. What had the kid called him? He met the eyes of the boy’s mother—black, implacable eyes with judgment in their depths. The cook was staring at him, too, and the mechanic with the greasy hands. The smell of noodles and garlic and frying oil-He wrenched abruptly toward the street and vomited in the gutter.

“That’s exceptionally fine,”
the man named Sompong murmured as he studied the terra cotta statue of Buddha he held in his hand. The halogen lamp was trained on the statue’s hooded gaze. So was his jeweler’s magnifying glass. “Seventh century, you say?”

“Possibly eighth. In such a case, it’s difficult to judge with certainty.”

“Yes,” Sompong agreed, pursing his lips in consideration; “quite difficult.” He reached for a chisel and with the utmost delicacy worked a flake of clay from the Buddha’s base. Fine red dust sifted to the plastic matting on the tabletop. Sompong began to whistle under his breath, and the man hovering beside him swallowed
anxiously. The chisel ground deeper. The red dust turned gradually pink, then white. Sompong sighed; he removed his jeweler’s lens.

“I’m disappointed, Khuang,” he said distantly. “Very disappointed. I told you expressly that the ceramic must have the delicacy of a rare antique, but the durability of a common pot.” Sharply, with the stem of his chisel, he struck the clay figure. A crack knifed through the statue’s face from nose to hairline. “This will never do. We’ll leave a trail from here to the Metropolitan Museum. Do you want me killed?”

“Excellency—”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Mr. Suwannathat—”

“Do you
want
us to fail? Because I assure you that it will be your neck on the block if the shipment is traced. Not mine.”

“I know that. Sir.” Khuang swallowed again—like a fish, Sompong thought, plucked straight from the tank and gulping for air. “But what you ask is impossible. If the artifact is not to be judged as a fake, the clay must be extremely thin—”

A buzzer sounded from the front of the warehouse. Khuang nearly jumped out of his skin.

“Get the door,” Sompong told him in disgust. “I haven’t much time.”

Jeff Knetsch had
been in this warehouse only once, two years ago when the talk of Jack Roderick first began and Max had sealed his own death warrant. It had been daylight then, and the dust that lay so heavily upon the collection of artifacts had swum in the few bars of sunlight allowed through the stifling shutters. Tonight a single
halogen lamp was trained on a bare worktable and a man sat behind it—a man with features as classically serene as an ancient figure from Angkor Wat. There was Khmer in his brow and a touch of Laos about the eyes and more than a little of the broad cheekbones of China; but this was Sompong’s face, and thus a thing to be feared.

Knetsch brought his palms high to his forehead, his shoulders sloping into submission and humility, and hoped that his hands did not shake.

“Leave us, Khuang,” Sompong said tonelessly.

The man scurried toward the recesses of the warehouse without a backward glance. Knetsch waited, the silence unbroken.

“The lawyer,” Sompong said finally. There was a world of contempt in his voice. “The lawyer from New York who is no better than any lawyer I have ever known, in Bangkok or Singapore or Hong Kong or Zurich. You have failed me, Mr. Knetsch, and I am enraged.”

“Haven’t you heard?” Jeff lowered his hands and stared at the man in disbelief. “Max Roderick is dead.”

Sompong traced a chisel idly through the dust on the worktable’s surface. “But his woman is alive, and in Bangkok asking questions.”

“That’s not my fault.”

“Fault!” Sompong stabbed the chisel deep into the table, and Jeff flinched. “I do not care about fault! I want to know what you intend to do to solve the problem.”

“What
I
intend to do?” Jeff’s stomach was churning again. “I—I hadn’t realized … I thought … you would just … handle it.”

“The way I handled the whore in Geneva?”

“Something like that.”

“You know far too much about my life, Mr. Knetsch,”
Sompong said. “Far too much. And you came here for money, didn’t you? That’s why you flew across two continents. For money.”

“I did what you asked me to do. Now I’m finished. A deal’s a deal.”

“But we differ in our assessment of your performance,” the other man objected, softly. “I asked you to put an end to the questions about Jack Roderick. And still the questions are asked.”

Anger flared through Knetsch’s gut—his gambler’s luck spun out like a roulette wheel, the ball dropping in red when he’d counted on black. “I’m
finished,
Sompong. I want my money and I want to go home.”

“That is very unwise.” Sompong stood and moved around the table. He was a head shorter than Knetsch but he appeared far more powerful. “I know where you live. And I know every sordid thing about your complicated life, Mr. Knetsch. Both facts could be dangerous to people you love.”

Jeff felt the tic above his right eye begin to twitch. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but no words came.

“I want the woman’s questions to stop,” Sompong repeated gently. “You will not leave Thailand until they do.”

Bangkok,
1946

R
oderick would remember for years afterward that the June morning was clear and bright, unusual for the first weeks of the rainy season in Bangkok. June 9, 1946. All over the country, boys of eighteen were entering the traditional period of monastic retreat for the first time since the Japanese surrendered to the Allies on September 2, 1945. Ordination ceremonies were held throughout the city, at once raucous and profoundly religious. Alec McQueen was drunk and singing off-key, something in Thai. McQueen spoke the language better than any foreigner Roderick knew, even when he was drunk.

He stumbled as they mounted the steps of the Chakri Throne Hall and clutched at Roderick’s arm.

“Shorry, Jack.”

Roderick placed a hand under his elbow and helped him to stand.

These days, it was not unusual to find McQueen in his cups. He was struggling: with the end of a love affair,
with his decision to turn his back on home, with his fledgling newspaper’s increasingly desperate need for funds. Roderick felt a surge of anger with Alec. He was lonely, too—and he was heartily sick of mopping up after other people’s problems. He was tired of conversations he didn’t understand in a language too difficult to learn. Tired, mostly, of rain and the flooded streets, of shoes welling with water and bedsheets that stank of mold.

“Pull yourself together, Alec,” he said irritably. “I’m depending on you.”

The Prime Minister—Pridi Banomyong—had summoned them to the Grand Palace for an audience with the young King Ananda, Rama the Eighth. There was to be an announcement of economic and political cooperation between the Kingdom of Thailand and the United States, Roderick thought—a necessary prelude to the Thai bid for membership in the United Nations that Pridi was ardently pursuing. The wording of the note delivered to Roderick’s hotel room at the Oriental that morning had been vague, and the messenger who conveyed it spoke no English. Roderick had pulled McQueen from his bed down the hall, stinking with the Bamboo Bar’s rye whiskey, and threw him headfirst into one of the great ceramic water jars that served as washbasins. Alec spluttered and howled and called Jack expletives in three languages; he still reeked of whiskey an hour later.

“Why’sh the kid staying in this old barn anyway?” he demanded as they reached the carved and gilded doorway. “Thought the royal family hated the center of town. Nobody’s been in reshidence here since old Rama the Fifth. We’re up to Eight now, right?”

“Right.”

There had been no king in Thailand since 1935, when Rama the Seventh had been thrust into exile. The present
monarch was a mere boy, summoned from his home in Switzerland in the burst of postwar royalist fervor after Thailand’s capitulation in September 1945. Ananda had ruled his Grand Palace barely ten months.

Roderick nodded to the palace guard who stood, frozen, at one side of the massive portal. A small door cut into the carved face opened as if by unseen hands, and Roderick guided Alec over the threshold. “The real question is why the Prime Minister asked for
you.
He ought to know by now that you’re not reliable.”

“You hurt me, Jack,” McQueen sulked. “You really do. And after all we’ve been through—”

The interior was dimly lit, soaring of ceiling, and empty. Not even the doorman had stayed to give them welcome. Roderick spun around, searching for a face in the vast emptiness of the hall, the skin on the back of his neck prickling. He seized McQueen’s arm.

“What?”

“Don’t you smell it?”

“Smell what?”

“Death. I smell
death,
damn you.”

He began to run, pelting down a corridor toward the sound of voices: a babble of words in Thai, a woman’s shriek. A terrified girl brushed past them in the corridor, like a silk-clad bird blundering against a windowpane. Her hand was pressed to her mouth. Roderick reached for her but she was already gone. The two men sped on, through empty salons and down hallways, until suddenly they rounded upon a burst of light, and everything became still.

He lay with his arms flung wide and his eyes fixed on the open window. The bullet hole was surprisingly neat— and McQueen, too, would notice that detail, Roderick thought; they had both seen enough head wounds to
last a lifetime. Some men shot their ears off, some blasted through pieces of skull, leaving a trench from ear to ear; but this wound was round and acutely precise, as though painted on the young king’s temple. He was dead, all the same.

Three people stood huddled at the foot of the king’s bed: an elderly woman, one hand clutching at her breast; a man in the livery of the royal household; and the third, a face they recognized. A man they knew.

“Carlos,”
McQueen said sharply. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

He turned, and they saw the gun he clutched in his hand. Before Carlos could speak or raise the weapon, Jack Roderick was at his side, his fingers like a vise on his friend’s wrist. The pistol clattered to the floor.

“He must have killed him,” Carlos told them blankly. “Did you catch him? Did he get away?”

Roderick kicked the revolver carefully out of reach before replying. It spun like a lethal top on the marble tiles. “Catch who?
Who,
Carlos?”

“He was masked. Threw the gun at my feet as I entered the room. I should have followed—but I went instead to the king—”

At this, his face twisted with a spasm of grief.

There was another screech from the old woman and without warning the harpy was upon them, her nails clawing a bloody trail across Carlos’s cheek. McQueen seized her arms. She spat out the words, a hail of Thai.

“She says they saw him.
Carlos.
When they heard the shot,” McQueen translated swiftly. “That Carlos did this. He was bending over the king, the gun in his hand, when she got here.”

Before Roderick could stop him, the manservant turned and ran from the room. “What are you doing in
the palace?” Roderick asked Carlos tensely. “You’ve got no business in the king’s bedroom.”

“A note. From the Prime Minister. I was told to wait for papers—”

A note delivered by an errand boy, one who knew nothing.

“Did you talk to Pridi yourself?”

Carlos shook his head.

The sound of running feet echoed in the corridor; Roderick turned, an intent expression on his face. “We’ve been set up, my friend. When I release your wrist, head for the window. Try to get to your old meeting place. Lie low. I’ll find you when it’s dark. Now—GO!”

Carlos shoved the old woman out of the way and leapt to the windowsill without a backward glance. He jumped—a blur of jet-black hair, khaki suiting the color of mud—and was gone. Only then did Roderick wonder how far the drop from the sill was.

The old woman, on her knees, began to sob wrenchingly. What was she? A princess? A nurse? Roderick placed his hand tentatively on her shoulder. She spat at him.

The first of the palace guards pounded into the room. Strange, Roderick thought, that it had taken them so long to respond to gunfire in the royal household. “Tell them,” he urged McQueen. “Tell them the killer went out the way they came. And get that woman to shut up.”

The real question,
Roderick thought later, was not why the young king had to be murdered. That, he almost understood. Ananda had grown up in exile, a child educated in boarding schools and surrounded by doting family; the boy knew nothing of government, nothing of
Thailand, but he had taken to the notion of rule like a duck to water. Ananda had descended on his capital ten months before with the sorry notion that he possessed absolute power; and he’d been itching to use it. He’d quarreled with his Prime Minister, Pridi Banomyong, who thought kings should remain figureheads while elected officials ran the government. Pridi could not control the king any more than he could destroy the machine that had governed Thailand in Ananda’s absence— the military faction that had cast its lot with Hirohito’s Japan, seized a large chunk of disputed territory beyond Thailand’s borders, and then retired in disgrace. The military hated Pridi and the king with equal force.

No, Roderick thought: the question had never been
why
the king was shot; the question would always be
who.
Who among the floating crap game of sedition politics in the soggy, rain-swept capital wanted to destroy Carlos—the Prime Minister’s most trusted aide—and through him, Pridi Banomyong? Who would want the regicide to be discovered by Jack Roderick, head of U.S. intelligence in Thailand, and Alec McQueen—who commanded the power of the English-language press corps?

Prime Minister Pridi’s chief enemies: Field Marshal Pibul and his cadre. The men Jack Roderick had helped to defeat and disgrace.

He sent Boonreung
that night to find Carlos, among the maze of canals and houseboats that made up the far reaches of Thon Buri. There was a place they always used for meetings—one of Carlos’s safe houses during the war. A sampan with a roof over its head, a widow who peddled vegetables on the water. Her husband another dead hero of the resistance, her children too gaunt and
terrified in the wavering lantern-light. Carlos crouched like a dog in the boat’s shelter, the woman going about her evening business as though frying oil were all she dreamed of. In the chaotic hours that followed Ananda’s murder, Roderick wondered if the hiding place was wise. It might have been betrayed long ago. It might be the first place the enemy would look. But there had been no time to regroup. First there was the necessary explanation to the palace guards. The shouted testimony of the two witnesses—the king’s Swiss valet and his ancient nurse—who insisted that Roderick and McQueen were in league with the assassin. Only after an endless period, were they allowed to place calls to U.S. Ambassador Edwin Stanton and the Prime Minister, who had never summoned them to the palace in the first place. At last, when they had been grudgingly released, there was the dressing-down in the ambassador’s office—the final blow that rankled in Roderick’s soul.

“Did you orchestrate this fiasco, Jack?” Stanton had demanded querulously. “Did you act on orders from Washington of which I was never informed?”

“You think I’m a kingmaker, Ed?” Roderick retorted acidly. “You figure I paid the assassin myself?”

“That’s what they’re saying in the street,” Stanton replied, “so it doesn’t much matter whether you did or didn’t. The air is thick with coups and plots wherever you walk, Roderick. This time you’ve gone too far.”

“This time I’m innocent,” he muttered sourly; but nothing he could have said would have mattered. From that day forward, Prime Minister Pridi’s hours were numbered, regardless of how many times Roderick attempted to explain how brilliantly they had all been set up—that the real villains were those who were ruthlessly determined to regain power. A single act of bloodshed and
calumny—the turning tide of public opinion—was worth more than an armored division in the streets any day.

King Ananda’s death was declared an accident. No one in Southeast Asia believed it.

“Carlos gave me
this,” Boonreung told Roderick before dawn the next morning. “He said you would know where it came from.”

Puzzled, Roderick turned over the smooth, dark red gemstone the boy handed him. It was polished but uncut, and looked quite old. A garnet? A ruby. “He told you nothing else?”

“Only that he found it on the floor of the palace, by the king’s bedside. Perhaps it was Ananda’s.”

Roderick pocketed the stone. “Did all go well?”

Boonreung had collected Carlos from Thon Buri in a borrowed long-tail boat and poled him downstream to the city’s edge. Roderick had arranged for transport—a truck packed with fish and bound for market in the interior. Carlos had clutched at Boonreung’s shirt and begged him to take care of his children. The boy promised what he could and refused to say goodbye.

“I saw Vukrit Suwannathat hunting through every sampan and houseboat on the Thon Buri side with three soldiers in army uniforms, just as I poled the boat out of the khlong,” he told Roderick.

“Did Vukrit see you?”

“I do not know. Maybe. He certainly did not see Carlos in the bottom of my boat.” The boy shrugged. “We got away.”

Unless,
Roderick thought,
Vukrit had you followed
—but he said nothing of his suspicion to Boonreung. Carlos would be safe soon in the hill country of Chiang Rai. He intended to pass into Laos at the first opportunity. If
Vukrit knew more than Boonreung guessed, Roderick could wait for the man’s attempt at blackmail.

It was only years later that Jack Roderick understood that blackmail was not the point. It was Boonreung he should have saved.