The Secret Agent (22 page)

“Is that so shocking?”

“Grow up, Stefani,” Rush snapped. “It’s the classic cynicism of the conspiracy theorist. It’s ignorance masquerading as privileged information. I told him as much. But then I realized:
Max is a Roderick.
Two generations of Roderick men died in brutal and unexplained ways. What else is the third generation going to believe?”

“It wasn’t just a theory,” Stefani persisted. “He saw things, as a kid—”

“The man in uniform, running downstairs,” Rush mocked. “Roderick shouting, with blood on his face. What the hell does that prove? Nothing but that a kid of four, awakened from a sound sleep, will always see nightmares.”

“Did you ever check the details?”

“I didn’t have to.” He dipped the oars once more into the khlong. “If you’d studied the history of the Vietnam War, you’d know that the CIA fought pitched battles with the Pentagon for years over what constituted truth in intelligence. North Vietnamese troop strength assessments, for instance: the Agency projected far greater enemy numbers than Army Headquarters would report to LBJ. The Army rewrote the Agency’s numbers and got their asses kicked when too many Viet Cong crept out of the rice paddies. Heads rolled and good men fell on their swords over that one. But nobody was blown away. Not even Jack Roderick.”

“The fact remains that Roderick disappeared. And no one—in Thailand or the United States—has been willing to say why.”

“Maybe he killed himself,” Rush retorted. “Twenty years of buying people’s souls can be hard to live with.”

Bangkok,
1951

I
n the months after Boonreung’s murder, Jack Roderick gave himself up entirely to the business of selling silk. He devoted hours to what he loved instead of to Edwin Stanton or Stanton’s successors in the ambassadorial post. As the years of Truman gave way to those of Eisenhower, and Mao Tse-tung straddled China with iron knees, Roderick avoided the embassy and lived on his own terms, a figurehead in the expatriate community, a fulcrum of every rumor among the Thais.

There was good cause for the whispers behind Roderick’s back. Although he had brokered a deal with the CIA that allowed him to work as he chose—an export merchant unattached to the embassy, with no diplomatic status—he continued to serve as eyes and ears for the spymasters in Washington, and too many Thais knew it. His numerous and influential friends came from every strata of Bangkok life: policemen on the beat, noodle vendors, courtesans and barbers, the assistant
chiefs of police. Assistant chiefs were ambitious, and thus more open to persuasion. They sat down to dinner and shared their heartaches, muttered their opinions, confessed their lovers’ secrets. If, after one of these evenings, a modest sum of money exchanged hands … the payment was only a sign of esteem and affection. It hardly constituted a binding contract. The essence of Roderick’s power lay not in what he bought, but the charm with which he bought it. It was clear to his friends that Roderick loved them all—understood them all—and cherished their dreams of an expansive future.

And yet there were moments, when his clear, light eyes saw through a man to his very soul, and the memory of Gyapay the Torturer’s fate surfaced in the unquiet mind, and the sum of cash was spent quickly and heedlessly and not without a shudder.

Roderick was Washington’s clearinghouse for every covert operation undertaken in Thailand. Covert operations, in that Cold War decade, were the CIA’s reason for being. The Agency did what no president or Congress was prepared to admit: influenced voters, propped up democratic candidates, threw elections, leaned on newspaper editors, made or broke careers. Covert operators managed all this with the ample funds provided under the yearly defense appropriations authorized by Congress, and they did it in the name of defeating the Soviets, who—along with Mao’s China—were hellbent on ruling the world. It was a dirty game, but it succeeded in part because of American prestige. The United States had saved the world from tyranny in the last war. The United States stood for freedom. It was the sole shining beacon capable of countering the immense Russian darkness; and Roderick never questioned its ultimate purpose. He was an American by privilege, by birth and by conviction; he knew that he was the envy of the world.

Washington was content to maintain Field Marshal Pibul in power. Pibul was no democrat, but he was the farthest thing from Communist that Thailand could offer. Now that Pridi Banomyong had traveled to Beijing, and thrown himself under the protection of Mao, the CIA was leery of wartime resistance fighters and their dubious ambitions. For the moment, the Field Marshal was comfortingly sound. Pibul had learned the lesson of his torturer’s gruesome end, and kept his secret police on a tighter leash.

The people of Bangkok had long ago decided that Jack Roderick was responsible for Gyapay’s murder and those of his staff, and they were by and large grateful— the exception being Thanom, the young bartender at the Oriental. Thanom had circulated his suspicion readily among the staff; and though he could not prove Roderick had slit his uncle’s throat, any more than he would discuss Old Man Maha’s duties as a torturer, his words carried conviction. It was well known that Roderick was in the arms of Miss Lucy when the chief of the secret police, Chacrit Gyapay, was shot dead in his own car. But Thanom could imply great knowledge of sinister deeds—he could speak darkly of the
farang
who pretended to be one of them. Thanom could make the sign against evil behind Roderick’s back. And eventually fearful powers were accorded the American. He was treated with care and respect.

Roderick moved out of the Oriental and hired rooms not far from Ban Khrua, where his silk weavers lived.

He found, to his surprise, that the management of his business connected him to the life of Siam in a way he had not expected. He began to know the weavers’ habits, the dictates of their Muslim faith, the names and ages of their children. He sat cross-legged on their wooden porches in the early morning, Boonreung’s orphaned
cockatoo nibbling at his ear, and uttered halting words of the Thai none of his Western friends thought he spoke. He studied antiquities and Siam’s history and the chemistry of Swiss aniline dyes, and he experimented with the khlong’s waters, lifting silk skeins high on wooden racks, cerise and aquamarine and viridian. He hiked with his friends from the Siam Society—a local group of antiquities enthusiasts—into the dense jungles of the interior, and brought back treasures of lost empires. Never again would he leave something as priceless as the Buddha cave to the chance knives of scavengers. He had returned to the Western Seaboard only once since that first trip in 1945, and found the cave plundered, the head of the Buddha hacked from the living rock.

And he went back, again and again, to the ancient capital of Ayutthaya.

The city had
been built in the fourteenth century as a refuge from smallpox, on a group of islands trapped in the confluence of three rivers. Ayutthaya grew in wealth and power until by the end of the seventeenth century it had subjugated all Siam. And then, in 1767, the Burmese sacked the city and enslaved all those they did not put to the sword.

Now the ruins poked disconsolately through the modern town’s sprawl—snarling
singhas,
mythic lions as massive as horses, still standing guard around the crumbling
wats;
astronomical observatories set in the heights of towers; crumbling palaces, their fountains dry. The tombs of withered princes were smothered beneath clinging vines. Even the hallowed temple that held the footprint of the Lord Buddha was submerged in green.

Roderick wandered and gazed not at
wats
or palaces
but at the commoners’ houses, which were built of wood ornately carved: houses three centuries old, whose teak sides were pegged together and capped with steep roofs. From their corners flew the
cho fa,
the cobralike gable ornament Siam had borrowed from the Khmer. Roderick loved the teak houses and their carving. He tracked them in the ancient capital itself, and in the villages north of Ayutthaya; he found them even in the tangled web of Bangkok’s humblest quarters. He had been trained as an architect in those far-off days before the war and before Joan: something of the draftsman still lurked in his fingers. In March of 1951, he bought six of the old teak houses from owners eager to sell, and disassembled them where they stood.

The land was a half acre snatched from the bank of Khlong Mahanak. He knew the waterway well, because the silk-weavers’ quarter of Ban Khrua bordered it, and he walked among the weavers each morning of his life, now, inspecting the lengths of silk as they unfurled from the looms. He imagined a house, commodious and winged, formed from the six jumbled frames on the swatch of tended garden; he saw a terrace of soft Ayutthaya brick, three hundred years old, that faced the khlong. He saw torches and people and he heard laughter in the night. He would hire barges and float his six houses down the Chao Phraya and bring them directly to the site on Khlong Mahanak, he would turn the houses’ walls inward so that he might run his fingers over the carved teak. He would hire craftsmen from the ancient capital who still remembered the old ways of building. He would pave his floors with royal marble scavenged from abandoned palaces.

The Buddhist priests came three times during the long months of building the house on the khlong. The first ceremony was held at a precise hour early in the
morning on the day when astrologers foretold auspicious spirits, so that the workmen could raise the first teak column of the house. Roderick threw a sort of party for his friends and the Brahmin priest and the nine ordinary monks from Ayutthaya, who chanted prayers while the column was raised. Bowls of food were left at appointed spots about the compound to encourage the earth spirits to keep Roderick and his builders safe. The food was consumed by rats from the khlong but as this was expected, it was deemed a favorable sign; construction commenced with a vengeance and went on for months, until the second ceremony was due.

This was the placing of the spirit house in Roderick’s garden. It is necessary in Thailand to provide a lodging for the spirit one disrupts from its place in the earth— and the spirits that governed Ban Khrua and Khlong Mahanak had always been deemed powerful. The spirit house must never be touched by the shadow of a building, and in the crowded quarters of the city this became a singular problem. All manner of ills—burglaries, poor sewage, squabbles with servants and bad luck in business—could be traced to the mismanagement of a spirit house. The priest spent the better part of a morning concluding that the house might be placed exactly where Roderick preferred; and then the old man consulted his astrologic charts and mapped the genealogy of the resident spirits.

The day for moving house required that the charts be consulted again, and further calculations performed. In Roderick’s case, the ideal time for luck and appeasing Fate proved to be several weeks before his house was finished—but he brought back the nine monks to sit in the lotus position on his rough drawing-room floor, their faces turned toward the khlong, and they chanted and blessed the house. Gold leaf and sandalwood powder
were placed above the lintels of each door and daubed on Roderick’s brow. He slept alone that night on the floor of his bedroom, and rose to the sound of his weavers singing across the khlong.

And finally, on
a day of sun and rain, he set off for the Nakorn Kasem, the old Thieves Market, with a lark rising in his breast and his palms tingling. Something was waiting for him in the warren of alleys and shop fronts where all the treasures of Asia ended; something was singing through the weavers’ voices and the ripple of the khlong. He could do no wrong on such a day—he was on the hunt, and the hunt was all he lived for.

He handled vessels of worked silver and Bencharong cups; dirtied his fingers with the dust of manuscripts; cleaned them again for a lunch of shrimp and beer. He traced the beads and embroidery on a pair of silk shoes, and held a ruby brooch to the light, before he recalled with a sinking heart that he had no wife anymore to send such things. And still the call of that singing lark went unanswered.

It was as he made his way home through the markets of the Chakkrawat Road that he stumbled upon it.

A carved poetry of stone; the limestone eyes half lidded in sublime repose; the brow resting lightly against one hand. And where he remembered the head curving into the neck and then the massive weight of the trunk-nothing but a chiseled hole.

The Buddha of the Hidden Cave.
His
Buddha.

Where there had once been a ruby set into the forehead, there was now only a ragged wound. He crouched and traced the edge of the hole with his fingertip. Thinking of the dull red stone he had kept safe for five
years in his bedroom. The ruby his old friend Carlos had found beside the corpse of a murdered king.

“Where did you get this piece?”

The dealer smiled. “It is quite fine. Very precious. Very old—”

“I know what it is.” Roderick stood and faced him. “I found it myself, six years ago, in a cave on the Western Coast. It had a body, then. I ask you again: Where did you get it?”

The dealer’s smile soured and he backed into his shop. “The gentleman is mistaken. The gentleman has never seen this piece. I have had it in my warehouse thirteen years. I have had it from a very old customer, very old, from Vientiane—”

Roderick gripped the wooden door that would have closed in his face. “Let us roll dice for the truth.” He drew a money clip from his trouser pocket and thrust it beneath the dealer’s nose. “Two thousand baht. If the luck favors you, you tell me nothing and the two thousand is yours. If the luck favors me, I pay two thousand for the head and the name of the man who sold it to you. Agreed?”

The thief of Nakorn Kasem considered the deal, and then he considered the implacable eyes of the man who offered it. His fingers closed over the money.

S
tefani Fogg frowned as she peeled a clementine by her breakfast-room window Thursday morning. It was not that the view of the river was any less enchanting than it had been the night before. She had slept well and had ventured across the Chao Phraya before breakfast for a workout and a massage at the spa. What troubled her now was the coverage of the previous day’s spectacular press conference in the
Bangkok Post.

The local television news had devoted six minutes to the story, complete with footage of Stefani, her lawyer and the police decked out in riot gear. One Bangkok television station had presented the story neutrally, another with obvious sympathy for her claim. CNN used the piece as a springboard to review the sinister history of Jack Roderick’s disappearance and espionage connections; the footage closed with a tour of the house and its treasures. Stefani watched this final segment with interest from the comfort of her sofa, swathed in one of the
Oriental’s cotton robes and a glow of self-righteous satisfaction.

But the
Bangkok Post
had ignored the press conference as a news item, and had buried the story in a column written by one of their oldest hands.

Fortune-Seeker Lays Claim to Bangkok’s Pride,
the headline shrieked. There was no photograph of Stefani in her mourning garb, no attractive backdrop of Roderick’s famed house. Just a mug shot of the column’s author: white-haired and mild-faced, his eyes ingenuous and true. The middle-aged reporter who’d fired the tough questions, yesterday. She glanced at the byline. Joe Halliwell.

Joe
Halliwell?
Surely he couldn’t be related to Rush. It must be coincidence.

Stefani read on.

The reporter’s tone was indignant. Stefani Fogg was exploiting the legendary memory of Bangkok’s Silk King, Jack Pierpont Roderick, for personal promotion and private gain. A foreigner, a woman from New York without a blood connection to the Roderick family, she had shamelessly capitalized on the death of Roderick’s grandson to attack a respected museum and its board of directors with a preposterous claim she could barely prove. Halliwell closed his piece with the injunction that the people of Bangkok should rally behind Dickie Spencer, who had managed Roderick’s legacy superbly, and demand that the Legendary American’s gift to the Thai people—his home and priceless collections—be left undisturbed. This was the only fitting tribute to Jack Roderick, and all that he had done for Thailand.

“Another sacred fucking cow,” Stefani muttered, and tossed the newspaper across the room.

Halliwell.
Halliwell.
It wasn’t a common name like Jones or Smith. So Rush must have called in the family
chips at the dominant English-language newspaper in all of Southeast Asia, and the
Bangkok Post
had obediently shut Stefani down.

Rush had been so
nice,
too, last evening—waiting patiently in the Bamboo Bar while she showered and changed her clothes, although his own were a mess and he frankly stank of the khlong. She should have expected betrayal; she should have seen the shaft behind the smile. But she had been tired out and off her guard. They had clicked glasses of Scotch—for medicinal purposes, Stefani said, though the smoky palate reminded her wistfully of Oliver Krane. Rush had promised to arrange a meeting with Sompong Suwannathat as soon as possible, and to escort her to the ministry himself. He’d left her feeling grateful after one drink, with a warning ringing in her ears.

Jo-Jo isn’t a subtle kind of guy, Stefani If Sompong’s put him on your trail, Sompong wants you scared. Next time, Jo-Jo will do more than pick your pocket. Watch your back.

Last night she had even thought it possible that Max had been wrong—that Rush Halliwell, the U.S. embassy, the CIA, even—were not arrayed against her. But the headlines this morning changed everything.

It was time, she decided, to ask Oliver to investigate Rush. What Oliver couldn’t find was not worth knowing.

Tenacious and not
unintelligent,
the Krane & Associates’ report noted,
but prone to a surfeit of confidence. Her chief weakness is a tendency to believe too much in herself and too little in the existence of evil.

“In other words,” Sompong Suwannathat said to himself, “she’s just a woman.”

He thrust the sheaf of paper into a leather case and
glanced out the jet’s window. The sun was rising over Chiang Rai, striking the airport runway and the sprawl of trekkers’ hotels; but shadow still lay thick and jagged on the terraced hills of cabbage and tea and coffee plants on the outskirts of the city.

Sompong knew the streets of Chiang Rai and the
wats
and the immense statue of a fat Buddha, sitting with its hand raised in a gesture of peace, as intimately as he knew his own roof garden in Bangkok. He had dedicated the Hill Tribe Museum himself, years before, when he was just a ministry functionary. He had even spent a sweltering afternoon on a boat trip down the Kok River, smiling and bowing distantly to the Akha and Hmong and Karen and Lisu tribal chiefs, brought in as dogs and ponies in the traveling show the Ministry of Culture mounted each year for the Foreign Aid people from the United States. The Foreign Aid people wanted to protect the subtle and varied cultures of the Golden Triangle before they completely died out. They encouraged the growth of cabbage and tea and coffee plants in the hills, preferring them to the opium poppies for which the Hmong and Lisu had fought and died during most of the past century.

Travel agents the world over talked glibly of the beauties of Chiang Rai province—about the soaring vistas of Burma and Laos, about the tribal crafts and the pristine rivers meandering among the monsoon forests. But Sompong knew the villages of Fang and Mae Salong and Tha Ton better than the tour operators. He knew the hill paths and the riverbanks with the sure-footed certainty of the boy he had once been, a child of seven loosed like a wolf in the woods; and he knew, too, that the Golden Triangle was—and would always be—a crucible of illegal trade and war.

It was a saddle of terrain ringed by hills and the
borders of three nations: Burma, Thailand and Laos. China loomed like a goiter to the north, and from China the usual evils came: war and addiction and the violence both spawned. In 1949 it had been Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist troops, the Kuomintang defeated for the last time by Mao Tse-tung. The Kuomintang settled in Mae Salong and squabbled over the Lisu women and worked the poppy fields under mounted guard; they gave the streets new names in a different tongue and called their children after broken warlords. By 1959 the king of Thailand had outlawed opium production, but the ban only made trade more lucrative. In the early sixties—the years of Sompong’s childhood—the Shan United Army, led by the Burmese warlord Khun Sa, had fought its way into the rich border country and preyed on the Chinese. They partitioned the hills and bought missiles from the Soviets and shed blood for the right to sow poppy fields.

The American war with Vietnam had merely sanctioned the Triangle’s lawlessness. It convinced the people who worked the fields that the only salvation possible was from the muzzle of a gun. The Communists and the Nationalists who had slaughtered each other in Beijing brought their quarrel south, and now civil war infected all the ancient kingdoms of Southeast Asia.

Khun Sa had retreated to Burma in the 1980s, but the men with guns remained. No less a personage than Vukrit Suwannathat, Field Marshal and Minister of Defense at the time of his death, had been found dead by the road leading to Mae Salong, his body riddled with bullets and his ministry car burned to a blackened steel frame. Vukrit had been murdered in 1986, and in the wake of the outrage, government troops had been deployed to stamp out the last of the drug farmers. Sompong himself had supervised the scorched-earth
campaign, and watched the chemical defoliants wither the fields in which he’d played as a boy. Opium production in the Golden Triangle had fallen by nearly eighty percent in the past decade, to Sompong’s satisfaction.

He had managed, by government fiat, to destroy the supplies of his chief competitors.

The tea and the cabbages and the cash crops encouraged by the king flourished now in the terraced hills, but illegal trade still coursed down the rivers and along the more secret paths: endangered ivory or forbidden teak, the rubies sliced from the heart of Myanmar.

The tribesmen, as always, were pawns who gained nothing, their numbers fewer each year.

What the tribesman wants is simple, my son,
Sompong’s father had told him thirty years before.
Not glory or justice or world dominion. Just rice for his table. Just safety from war.

“That’s right, Father,” Sompong told himself softly. “The world and glory belong to men like me.”

Two and a
half hours later, the sun full in the sky, he abandoned his rental car and set out for the hill station by foot.

He had brought no driver and no bodyguard. It was the first of Sompong’s rules:
In deadly business, trust no one but yourself.
He had picked out the pattern to existence long ago, crouching in the serrated shadows of the jungle undergrowth, watching his father and the men the General commanded. Loyalty was cheap. It was lifeblood that came dearly.

There was a whistling akin to birdsong above him in the trees; he recognized the signal and ignored it. The whistles would turn to radio transmissions muttered into microphones, and by the time he emerged from the
last branching of the path, the committee would be waiting. He walked straighter under the gaze of the unknown scouts, trying not to gasp with exertion as the path climbed, though he was past forty now and could never again run with a boy’s fleetness. Something of the old nobility, nonetheless, descended upon his shoulders. He stood alone and powerful against a rabble army. He was the General’s son.

For an instant, the American woman in Bangkok tramped heavily through his brain.

She has courage at the bone and does not scare easily. Does this reflect a belief in her own immortality? Or worse yet, a disdain for her own life? Whatever the reason, she relishes a good fight.

“Then she has never been beaten as she ought,” he said grimly, and chose the final turning in the path.

He had disliked
the American from the moment he saw her in the courtyard of Jack Roderick’s House the previous afternoon. He had watched her pose and preen for the photographers, her
farang
body too thin and hard, her voice too shrill. This woman was naïve, and stupid because of it; she would fatally misjudge her enemies. For all their guns, Americans had not the slightest comprehension of the way violence established order in society. They thought of violence as an urban blight, a horrific toll engendered by untrammeled capitalism. Whereas Sompong Suwannathat had learned at his father’s knee that the chief gift of violence was power. Violence alone established hierarchies. Violence made kings.

He had driven directly to the Peninsula Hotel after the farce of the press conference, in a high rage because Jo-Jo had failed to muscle the woman into his car as he
had ordered. He had persuaded the Peninsula management—who were beholden to Sompong as so much of Bangkok was—to admit him to Knetsch’s room. Sompong waited in the semidarkness nearly two hours before the lawyer stumbled through the door. Knetsch still suffered from jet lag and from something worse— the ravaging erosion of mortal fear.

It had not taken Sompong long to say what he wanted.

He reached the crest of the path and emerged onto a ridgeline that offered a view of three countries, flung out like a carpet on every side: Burma, Laos and Thailand. His personal kingdom. His paradise on earth.

His duty and honor to the father taken so brutally from life, so long ago.

They escorted Sompong
under armed guard to the small hut where the business was usually concluded.

It was windowless and damp, five meters square. He knew the distance to within a fraction; he had measured it repeatedly during one bout of imprisonment as a boy. The floor was unpaved dirt but someone had thrown dried grass underfoot to make the place sweet smelling. In Sompong’s mind, however, this would always be a place of execution.

Tell me again about the night Jack Roderick died.

Himself, much younger, his right hand wrapped decisively around the pistol butt. The muzzle against the old man’s ear. A ring of soldiers outside the hut, standing at attention as they had for hours, in honor of their fallen comrades. The smell of sweat from his own armpits and urine from the old man’s bladder. The other two, already shot but not yet dead, staring dully at what remained of their knees. The old man beginning to tremble.

Tell me again.

Today there were burlap sacks piled on the spot where the corpses had lain fifteen years before, and Wu Fat now sat in the old man’s seat. Sompong thought of the rocket-propelled grenade launchers and the surface-to-air missiles crated in the belly of his ministry plane at Chiang Rai, and felt a piercing relief for the art of the deal. Today there would be no shouting or pistol shots, no brains spattering the dried grass of the floor. Just a handshake and the exchange of priceless commodities.

Today it hardly mattered how Jack Roderick died.

Wu Fat pushed back his chair and saluted the General’s son.