The Secret Agent (29 page)

Uncle Pete left one day and they moved again, this time to an apartment in the heart of Chicago. Later it was a house she rented in Evanston so that he could attend a good school, and for a while the letters stopped coming from Bangkok because she had forgotten to
forward their address. When his mother spent money lavishly, Rory understood that his father was writing again, and that he’d sent her money. The knowledge shamed and sickened him worse than if a stranger were keeping her.

He was fiercely protective of his mother. At fifteen he knew that he must choose allegiance in this private war, the agonizing battle between what he wanted and what he had been left. He chose the woman no one needed any longer, with her high brittle laugh and her greasepaint makeup; he became Joan’s protector, a supporting hand when the gin flowed too freely. He gathered the letters that had accumulated in her drawers and burned them in the basement furnace.

The photographs he kept.

His father at the prow of a great boat, teeth bared in his tanned face. His father in the skeleton of a peak-roofed house, with lizards at his feet and a white bird on his shoulder. His father with a length of silk in his hands, eyes direct and piercing for the camera.

“Your father is renowned throughout Southeast Asia,” Ruth insisted during one dark eternity of interrogation. “They call him Legend and King and Man of Many Faces. You should be proud to be Jack’s son.”

“That is why I will not dishonor him,” Rory said clearly, “by begging for your mercy.”

I
t’s time you came clean,” Rush told her as they threaded their way through Bangkok’s Friday afternoon traffic. “You’re not a tourist or an asset manager or even Max Roderick’s heiress. You’re working for Oliver Krane, who flips off crooks and cops alike, the world over. Krane got you in deep with the wrong sort of people, and now the wrong people want you dead. Fair summary?”

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” Stefani said curtly.

Rush stabbed at his horn and swerved viciously into the right-hand lane. “As long as you’re in my car, honey— and I’m all that stands between you and a bullet in the brain—you’ll answer my goddamn questions.”

“Then let me out here.”

Jeff Knetsch had known nothing—or nothing he was willing to share—about Harry Leeds. He claimed he’d never heard the name, and when Rush cut the interview short and sent Jeff back to his group cell, the lawyer lost
his last fingerhold on sanity. He brayed an unintelligible snatch of verse as the police hauled him back to the cell.

Stefani got no more information, no free passage from the labyrinth she’d entered that Friday morning.
Oliver’s sold the girl to Sompong.

Rush slid onto the highway’s shoulder and slammed on the brakes. As she reached for the door handle, however, he seized her wrist.

“Where the hell are you going? Where do you think is even remotely safe from Sompong and his thugs? He got to you at the Oriental. He got to a whore in Geneva and to Max in Courchevel. He’ll find you, wherever you are. Flight is not an option.”

She glared at him—at the golden-skinned, half-Thai face with the eyes that weren’t calculating, now, or veiled with facile charm—and saw that he was furious and prepared to be as ruthless as necessary. She let go of the door handle. He released her arm and turned off the engine.

“You’ve heard of Oliver?” she said. It was a rhetorical question.

“His name has come up in the course of my work. You can’t run an operation like Krane’s—selling information to corporate entities or countries or individuals with dubious or no loyalties—without brushing the margins of the law.”

“Was Knetsch telling the truth? About Sompong being one of Oliver’s clients?”

“I’ve known that for over a year,” Rush declared baldly. “How long since Krane hired you?”

“Eight months.”

“Do the math. You flew to Courchevel in March to represent Max Roderick? What did Krane tell you to do?”

“Explain to Max that the murdered prostitute was
just the opening round in a campaign to destroy him. Figure out if the lost Roderick fortune could be traced. Decide whether Max was serious about challenging the Thai government—and what exactly that effort might cost.”

“You were Krane’s spy. He needed a pair of eyes in Max’s camp, so he could monitor events for Sompong.”

“Knetsch was
already
in Max’s camp, reporting to Sompong! What would Oliver need me for?”

“To report on Knetsch. Oliver was taking fees from Max
and
Sompong, but working solely for himself. He played his clients against each other: he dictated every move. What a game! How could Oliver Krane resist?”

“You and I will be working both ends of the problem, ducks,”
she quoted bitterly. “Only one of us got royally screwed.”

“And Max died. You have to consider the possibility that your boss pushed that chair off the cliff.”

“He’s not my boss anymore.”

Rush smiled grimly. “You helped Krane engage in what might be called a flaming conflict of interest. What in Christ’s name were you thinking?”

“I trusted him,” she shot back. “I fell for the oldest male traps in the world: flattery and fine wine. He offered me the world on a silver platter and I condescended to take it. I never saw the setup.”

“Then Krane must be damn good—because you’re not a stupid woman.”

“He was so obviously torn apart by the death-murder, he called it—of his partner in Kowloon.”

Oliver in his worn leather chair in the Scottish Highlands, submitting to the sacrament of penance. She hadn’t imagined that pain on his face, or the hair shirt of culpability. Had she?

“Kowloon?” Beside her, Rush stiffened. “What do you know about Kowloon?”

“Harry Leeds,” she said. “Harry fucking Leeds. He was run down by a taxi on a Kowloon street and Oliver couldn’t accept it. I thought he wanted to nail Harry’s killers, and that I could help him do it.”

“Explain.” Behind their backs, the clogged street traffic inched by.

“Harry Leeds was Oliver’s Asian partner, operating out of Hong Kong—also his oldest friend, if we can believe anything Oliver says.”

“Does Krane have a Bangkok office?”

“No. Just Hong Kong and Shanghai, in this part of the world. Oliver’s primarily focused on the Chinese market.”

“Is he?” Rush’s eyes glinted. “Go on.”

“When the strangled girl showed up in Max’s bed last January, Piste Ski—the French firm for which Max designed equipment—called in Krane’s to investigate.”

“Covering its corporate back.”

She nodded. “Oliver used his networks to research the girl’s murder. The Swiss police knew nothing of Max’s Thai inheritance or his trip to Bangkok or Jack Roderick’s disappearance thirty-five years ago. They didn’t realize that the dead prostitute was a warning.
But Oliver knew.
The whole hit was Thai. And Oliver thought he knew who’d ordered it.”

“Sompong?”

“He didn’t tell me. But whatever report he sent to Harry, requesting help or information from Krane’s Asian division, got Harry killed. Four hours after receiving Oliver’s secure fax, Leeds was dead.”

“Let me get this straight: You trusted Oliver Krane
because
he’d gotten his oldest friend killed?”

“I thought he was emotionally invested.” She looked away from Rush, toward the lush jungle growth that
bordered the snarled highway. “Why are you so interested in Kowloon?”

“I lived there once.” Abruptly, Rush turned his key in the ignition. “Oliver Krane set the rules of this game, up until Wednesday night—when Jeff Knetsch told Sompong who you really are.”

“The cuckoo in the nest. Oliver’s fucked, isn’t he?” “Question is—will Sompong go after Krane? Or Krane’s pawn—you?”

Rush settled her
in his living room with a glass of Thai iced tea and a copy of
I Was Amelia Earhart
to entertain her. He solicited a promise that she wouldn’t move from the condo, wouldn’t open the front door to anyone but himself, and left her alone.

When he reached the pavement, he walked purposefully in the direction of the U.S. embassy until he knew, from experience, that he was beyond the sight of someone watching from his living-room window. Then he turned left along a side street and doubled back to Wireless Road. There he took up a sheltered position near a news kiosk that offered an excellent view of his building’s front entrance.

It was possible, of course, that she had told him everything she knew about Krane and Sompong Suwannathat. She might actually be a victim of circumstance—a puppet whose strings had been tangled against her will. But Rush believed that she was smarter than that—too smart to be played the way she insisted Oliver Krane had played her.

Is it a coin toss for control of Sompong’s empire?
Rush thought, as he surveyed a rack of magazines.
Is she pretending to be at odds with Krane, because Knetsch said too much
this morning?
It was possible that Krane intended to take over Sompong’s operation—and Stefani intended to take out Oliver first. Might she actually be shooting for all the marbles? Winning, Rush knew, was fundamental to Stefani Fogg. Almost more fundamental than survival.

He would pretend to be a credulous chump. He would leave her to her own devices for a while, and if she bolted—follow where she led.

“Marty,” he said quietly into his cell phone, “I’m waiting for our friend. I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

“Keep me posted.”

Rush shut off his phone. Marty Robbins, his station chief, knew all about Kowloon. Marty didn’t have to be told what Krane & Associates could do. He wanted Sompong Suwannathat by the balls and he was convinced Stefani Fogg would carry Rush to the end of all the questions the station had asked about the minister for years.

Why are you so damn interested in Kowloon?

He flipped through a sports magazine, his attention focused on his front door.

Once upon a
time Rush Halliwell had been a junior case officer in Hong Kong, with responsibility for the internal Chinese triads that controlled commerce and crime. Triads were an accepted part of the fabric of the colony’s life, and they made dull work for a CIA case officer—or had, until Rush took over the job. He landed in Hong Kong in 1995, when the fantasy of the island’s reversion to mainland China was about to come true. The greatest capitalist enclave in Asia would soon be handed to the greatest Communist power left in the world, and everyone who read tea leaves for a living was jumpy as hell about the consequences.

The U.S. embassy muttered darkly that the British were almost certainly fomenting Chinese rebellion, just to make the handover painful. The British countered hotly that the CIA must be funding triad violence to make the colonial administration look bad. In the midst of all the backbiting a cache of guns nobody could explain or account for was actually discovered in the ceiling joists of a condemned house in Kowloon. And the problem became Rush’s to solve.

Guns were banned from the Crown Colony of Hong Kong; possession of them was a capital offense. No one, however, would claim the Kowloon guns; thus, who could be prosecuted? Two men who loitered near the condemned house—triad scouts, in the hysterical language of the Hong Kong press—were arrested and questioned, but the trail was cold: interrogation led nowhere. Rush fruitlessly trolled the station’s best fishing grounds. He gauged the quality of the street silence and assessed the level of official no-comment and decided that the arms were intended not for triads or Commie haters among the Chinese population, but for a powerful man’s private militia. Somebody with massive amounts of money and no British passport—somebody who couldn’t get out of Hong Kong with his fortune intact—had decided to do a little gun-running as insurance against the Communist takeover.

The matter, as far as Rush and the Hong Kong police were concerned, would never be solved.

Except that Rush was intrigued by an item he found while scrolling through files on gun-running, worldwide. A series of arms shipments intended for mainland China that same year had never arrived at their appointed destination. The guns had originated in Slovakia—part of that country’s Soviet legacy being liquidated in the name of democracy. A Chinese broker in Bangkok had
arranged and insured the sales. The entire transaction was legal and above-board. Except that thirty million dollars’ worth of guns had never arrived.

Pirates hijacked one load from a commercial vessel in the Gulf of Thailand. Another disappeared when a transport plane crashed in western Burma. A third, traveling overland through Laos, was seized at gunpoint by masked guerillas. By the end of five unfortunate months in 1995, nearly ninety thousand weapons—street sweepers, AK-47s, nine-millimeter handguns—had vanished into thin air.

Rush called up an old friend in Bangkok who served as legal attaché, and requested background.

“The gun broker’s name was Chiang Wu Fat,” Avril Blair had said. “He rented a warehouse in the Nakorn Kasem—the Bangkok Thieves Market—but the warehouse is shut down now and Chiang can’t be found. He probably doesn’t exist.”

“He paid the insurance?”

“A hefty sum. Nothing compared to the street value of those guns, of course. Call it Chiang’s modest investment in his own future.”

“How did the FBI get involved?”

Avril had paused, no doubt debating Rush’s need to know. “We were approached by a man named Oliver Krane. You’ve heard of him?”

Rush had.

“Krane was hired by the insurance company that got stiffed for the full value of the guns, roughly thirty million dollars, all told. They’d like to recover a few of them. Krane figured the bureau was the only organization capable of handling this big a mess. And he suggested delicately that we wouldn’t want those guns to land in L.A. or Newark.”

“Any progress?” Rush asked.

“None,” she replied cheerfully.

He’d laughed out loud. “Krane picked the wrong agency, Avril. But the CIA is delighted to help.”

By 1997, when
the handover of Hong Kong seemed to be progressing smoothly, Rush traded the colony for Bangkok and, during his first week in the embassy, visited the warehouse in the Thieves Market. It was empty.

“Who owns that place?” he asked Avril later.

“The Minister of Culture—Suwannathat. You’ll find Sompong’s name behind a lot of local real estate, if you search hard enough.”

“He uses proxies to buy up land?”

“Extended networks of them.”

“Could we pin the minister for those Chinese arms heists?”

“Not a chance,” she’d retorted.

Had Sompong arranged the weapons thefts to supply his private army in Chiang Rai? Had he done the 30-mil-lion-dollar deal simply for kicks? Neither the LegAtt nor the station could say. The minister’s motives for his shadow life were obscure. Sompong possessed more than enough political power to protect himself; he had inherited millions from his father. “So what,” Marty had demanded in futile frustration, “is the asshole’s
point?

“He’s growing poppies up there in the hills,” the station chief complained, “and he’s got the Army to protect his drugs. The guns he stole from the Chinese
pay
for the drugs—and the drugs sustain Sompong’s offshore bank accounts. Which in turn support his Army. It’s one big circle-jerk. What the hell’s he doing it for? And where is all that poppy
dust going?”

The station had never, in the five years of Rush’s tour, fingered Sompong’s distribution network. The failure
was acutely embarrassing. They got no help, of course, from Thailand’s panoply of security forces. Sompong remained untouchable.