The Secret Agent (32 page)

He stood at
the head of the stairs, watching Lightfoot descend in blunt, angry steps. It was nearly dawn. He held a white silk handkerchief to his bleeding nose and Rory— who should have thought of his career, and left with Lightfoot in a hired taxi, never to return—was crouching in the doorway of Max’s bedroom.

“It’s okay, Max,” he told the four-year-old, over and over, stroking his hair just as Roderick had imagined he would. “It’s okay. Go back to sleep. It will all be fine in the morning.”

A
wareness that one is a hunted animal will focus the mind wonderfully; but not, it seemed, upon
I Was Amelia Earhart.
Abandoned in Rush Halliwell’s apartment, Stefani found the character of the doomed aviatrix uncongenial. She dropped her book a mere twelve minutes after Rush’s exit, and roamed restlessly about his apartment in search of distraction.

She did not, as he suspected, watch at his window to be certain he was truly bound for the embassy. She ran one finger over a Bencharong vase he had placed squarely in the middle of his bookshelf and scanned the few photographs, mostly European landscapes—there seemed a marked absence of people in Rush’s private world—that he had propped on surfaces about the room. She had no interest, as some partygoers might, in examining the bathroom medicine cabinet for clues to his weaknesses. She was leashed like a dog in the confines of
her own mind, prowling the walls without discovering an escape hatch.
Flight,
Rush had said,
is not an option.

It occurred to her that if the sum of a person’s talents might be regarded as, for example, a mutual fund—then she had performed very poorly since her departure from FundMarket. She had operated on untested assumptions: that Oliver possessed integrity, and valued her as a person; that her instincts were sound; that her native intelligence would save her from mortal error. When viewed in retrospect, however, her actions of the past eight months were appalling. She had misjudged almost everyone. She had badly miscalculated the level of risk in the games she played, and fatally underestimated the depth of her own entanglement. Sompong Suwannathat had possessed greater knowledge of her movements than she had known of his; he had outmaneuvered her from the start. It was reasonable, in sum, to feel like an ignorant fool.

It was not constructive to feel terrified.

She had always believed that the rest of the world was less intelligent than she was. That arrogance had blinded her. As the lawyer Matthew French had pointed out, her style was anything but subtle. A truly devious woman would have looked obvious while operating deftly behind the scenes; but she had somehow skipped that part of the agenda.

How could she recover? How could she beat Oliver and his brutal client—outwit the odds—and
win?

She needed an ally. Not Rush Halliwell. He obviously mistrusted her and clearly had the interests of the CIA to protect. But someone who might benefit materially if she came out on top. Someone like … like
Dickie Spencer.
Dickie was on air-kiss terms with Ankana Lee-Harris, it was true, but not even Jeff Knetsch had implicated him in Max’s murder. Dickie seemed like a subtle thinker. He
had his silk business to protect, and control of the Thai Heritage Board to wrestle from Sompong’s hands; he would instantly comprehend the advantage in joining forces with a dark horse like Stefani. Dickie knew Thai politics and Thai culture backward and forward—and that knowledge would counterbalance her abysmal lack. She was stuck in the tightest possible corner—on the lam in Sompong Suwannathat’s city—and Spencer looked like the sole avenue out. Besides, she liked his dry British wit. Her gut insisted that Dickie could be trusted. Used, even?

The fact that her gut had led her astray more than once was irrelevant at the moment.

She flagged down
a
tuk-tuk
in Wireless Road. Crossing the street casually in her wake, his head buried in a sports magazine, Rush Halliwell did the same. He wondered, with a dismay that surprised him, why she had bolted so quickly and where she was going without her luggage.

They jostled south through the evening rush hour, past Lumphini Park with its tandem lakes for boating and its vendors peddling fresh snake bile, then turned into Surawong Road.

“Marty,” Rush muttered into his cell phone as the
tuk-tuk
pulled up before Jack Roderick Silk, “our lovely friend is souvenir shopping. Did you find Detective Itchayanan?”

“He’s heading to the Nakorn Kasem.”

“Keep in touch,” Rush said, and told his driver to wait.

Surawong Road cut through the commercial soul of Bangkok, a place of skyscrapers and choking smog that was renowned, before the Second World War, for its fruit orchards. Now, the noise of cars and motorcycles and
tuk-tuk
horns drowned out the conversations of pedestrians standing yards away from Rush, and completely masked all activity on the street. He wandered past shop windows, his eyes apparently focused on the leather purses and rattan chairs offered within, while his gaze actually studied the reflection of the silk shop’s doorway opposite. It remained persistently empty. Rush killed seventeen minutes this way, before abandoning the shops for a street cart positioned at the corner. He ordered a bowl of noodles and kept his eye roving over the opposite pavement while he ate them. Rain spattered the sidewalk and he huddled under the street cart’s umbrella. The idling
tuk-tuk
driver blasted his horn.

Rush tossed the empty noodle cup in a trash can and glanced at his watch. Twenty-six minutes had passed since she had entered Jack Roderick Silk. How long did a woman need to choose a scarf? Was she Christmas shopping for her family back home? Assessing upholstery fabric for her New York apartment?

Apprehension gathered in his gut. He handed the
tuk-tuk
driver a hundred-baht note and told himself that he was absurd; women lost all track of time in places like Jack Roderick Silk. He’d worked surveillance for too many years to be so easily spooked.
Thirty-three minutes.
His eyes flicked back to the empty doorway, and suddenly he snarled, “Fuck it.”

He stepped into the street and tore recklessly around cars idling in the sluggish traffic. He slowed as he reached the shop itself, only long enough to glance through the glass door. The interior was empty but for a girl arranging neckties in a display case. She glanced up when he entered, and smiled.

“The woman who came in,” he said hurriedly in Thai. “Black hair. American. Where’d she go?”

The girl frowned and looked helpless.

The oldest dodge in the book,
he raged to himself.
In by the front door, out by the back. The bitch gave me the slip.

“Sir,” the salesgirl called in distress as he sprinted for the offices at the rear of the store. “You cannot go back there without an appointment. The offices are closed! Sir!—”

Rush pushed through the door and found himself in a corridor. The lights were on, but the space was empty. So was the conference room to the right. And the large office with the planters’ chairs on the left.

At the far end of the corridor a lighted
Exit
sign glowed. The door to the loading dock.

He slammed it open, furious now at his own stupidity, and stood staring down at the empty back lot. The rain was lashing down, drumming on the concrete of the delivery bay, running in steaming rivulets toward the drains. Rush turned his face into the wet and cursed Stefani Fogg. He almost hoped Sompong found her.

Marty Robbins stared
intently through the one-way mirrored panel that lined the interrogation room’s door. He had a clear view of the man seated at the table; his head was in his hands and he was sobbing uncontrollably. The police officer leaning over him—a Thai detective named Itchayanan, responsible for collecting evidence in Stefani Fogg’s hotel room the previous night—barked something harsh and guttural. Everyone in the room behind the mirrored panel—Itchayanan’s superior, a woman seated at a tape-recording device and Marty-straightened a bit, as though correct posture might help them comprehend the hysterical words filtering from the room.

His name was Khuang, and he worked as a potter. An exquisite craftsman, by all accounts. He had been found
in a warehouse in the Nakorn Kasem, filling museum-quality ceramic vessels with heroin. Detective Itchayanan was exceedingly grateful to Marty Robbins for the tip. The discovery of Khuang, in fact, placed Itchayanan in Marty’s debt.

Marty had been in Thailand long enough to know how to use that obligation. Cooperation between host-country and foreign security services was not unknown; but in a routine police matter like this, the CIA had no place. Itchayanan, however, had allowed Marty to watch the interrogation.

The American paid a hefty bribe to the woman running the tape-recording device, and was promised a copy of the suspect’s confession. Khuang had said little, thus far, beyond a broken plea for his wife.

The atmosphere in the Bangkok police station was quite different, had Marty known it, from five hours earlier when Jeff Knetsch sat at the same interrogation table. It was one thing for
a farang
scooped up on Khao San Road to implicate a respectable Thai minister with every kind of wild calumny, and bring shame upon the police before the eyes of their American liaison. It was quite another for a distinguished Bangkok detective to discover monumental wrongdoing through hard work and good fortune.

“Itchayanan is one of the best,” boasted the police chief, whose name was Thak. He stood a few feet away from Marty, a broad man whose face gleamed perpetually with sweat. “If the khlong rat does not tell him what he wishes to hear, he will hang him by his thumbs in the men’s cell until Khuang screams for mercy. And then we will see what Khuang tells us.”

Itchayanan’s face was thrust close to his suspect’s; the detective muttered in a low and vicious tone. Marty’s knowledge of Thai was only adequate, but Itchayanan
was speaking slowly and the threat came through the microphone loud and clear.

Tell me who gives you the opium and where you send it, or by the king himself I’ll find your wife. I’ll throw her in the men’s cell and leave her there all night. Is that what you want? You want to hear her screaming?

Khuang sobbed wretchedly and covered his face with his hands. Itchayanan slapped the side of his head.

We left a woman there once. She was raped fifty-three times. By morning, she couldn’t stand. Don’t make me do it, Khuang Don’t make me find her.

The potter screeched like a wounded animal. “All right! All right! I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

Itchayanan sank down into a chair at the opposite side of the table.

“His Excellency,” Khuang gasped. “The Minister of Culture. He brings the drugs down from Chiang Rai on the ministry plane. He flies it himself.”

“Liar!” Itchayanan roared, and shoved the table hard against Khuang’s chest.

“I swear it! I swear it! The minister is in charge of the whole operation—”

Itchayanan reached out and seized the man’s shirt. He lifted Khuang off his chair and hurled him across the room.

“So sorry,” muttered Thak. The chief’s face had gone white. “The khlong rat is devious. Not worth hearing. You will wish to leave.”

“We’ve been tracking Sompong,” Marty replied softly. “He’s been running guns for years. His number’s up this time.”

From the interrogation room behind them came the sound of a fist crashing against bone.

“The Bangkok police have always found His Excellency
most benevolent.” Thak looked as though he might be sick.

“When His Excellency rots in prison, his benevolence will end. The man who brings him to justice, however, can expect a promotion. And the respect and gratitude of the United States—which sends millions of dollars each year to Thailand, to fight the drug trade.”

Thak’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Sompong is untouchable. Untouchable! If we try, and fail—”

“Listen.” Marty leaned closer. “I have a source in the minister’s office. Sompong flies to Chiang Rai tonight. His plane is already on the tarmac. I know the coordinates of his camp. If we hurry—if together we bring our case to the right people—we could have troops there by morning.”

The potter, Khuang, lay whimpering in a ball on the interrogation room floor. Itchayanan drove his boot viciously into the man’s ribs.

Thak stared at them through the one-way glass, his mind working. Marty waited.

Hanoi,
February 1967

S
ometimes the men talked through their drinking cups, wrapping the filthy cloth of their prison garments around the tin and pressing it like a mouthpiece to the wall of their cells; and sometimes, when a message had to be sent up the chain of command—for the discipline of military rank was one of the few things their captors could not steal from them—the words were tapped in a simple code. On a night when Rory had been left inexplicably free of interrogation and the ropes slung from the torture room’s ceiling, a twenty-two-year-old named Milt Beardsley, a Navy ensign from Indiana, taught him the system in a murmur through the wall.

“Divide the letters of the alphabet in five columns,” Milt whispered. “Five letters each.”

“That’s only twenty-five,” Rory said, puzzled.

“Drop the
K,”
Milt instructed patiently. “Line the rest up in your head. It’s good to think about something clean, once in a while.”

Clean,
Rory thought.
Letters arranged in clean, vertical lines, nothing emotional or distracting about them. A, B, C, D, E
would be in the first column.
F, G, H, I, J,
were in the next. To form a word, Milt told him, he must first signal which column of letters he was using—one through five—and then the order of the letter in the column itself. The letter
A
would be one tap followed by another; the letter
J,
two taps followed by five.

Thus Rory joined in the conversations flying around the prison walls.

The men traded war stories and news of interrogations and offered support to the ones too weak or depressed to communicate. They boasted of old conquests and reminisced about carrier duties they’d shared; they passed on insults or jokes. They rarely talked about home or those they loved. Such topics were painful and intensely private—the only parts of their souls the Hanoi Hilton could not invade.

What I don’t get,
Rory tapped one night to his commanding officer—an Air Force colonel by the name of C. J. Howard—
is why they don’t just force me to leave. It’s not like I could resist if they hauled me out of here.

Assholes are afraid,
Colonel Howard tapped back.
If you agree to early release, you sign a statement thanking them for their kindness. You promise not to say how bad things are for POWs. But if they kick you out on your butt against your will, God knows what you’ll tell the press. They can’t risk bad press.

It seemed simple enough. To keep his honor—to cling to his code—to destroy a man named Ruth—all Rory had to do was resist. Until he died.

As a boy
he’d been certain he was a coward. He refused to play chicken with the freight trains in the Chicago stockyards, and was ridiculed in school for weeks as a result.
His heart pounded painfully when his mother drove her car too fast or swung recklessly into oncoming traffic. He dreaded visits to the doctor and bare needles gleaming under bright lights. He once cracked his toe while dashing through a door frame, drew blood and fainted.

He kept his cowardice locked in a crevice of his mind, where it crept out in the form of nightmares his mother mistook for an overactive imagination. Joan forbade him to watch horror movies and made sure he had cookies and milk before he went to bed, but still the demons came.

His father’s visits were the worst because Rory yearned to be worthy of the man in the photographs who lived in the jungle with a white bird on his shoulder. Each visit was a kind of test, the most disastrous being the ski trip to Vermont when Rory was sixteen. His mother had talked brightly about all the “man time” he’d get alone with Jack, so that he had been sick with apprehension before the trip even started. He had hated skiing—hated the lack of control over his own legs, the fierce pitch of the trails, hated the way his father’s body curved effortlessly into the fall line and obeyed his slightest movement. Rory desperately wanted Jack Roderick to crow with delight—to slap his son’s shoulders in unabashed admiration and shout,
That’s my boy!
like Fred MacMurray might have done if he were a real parent instead of an actor. But in Vermont, Jack had stared at him appraisingly with those cool blue eyes and said, “Are you scared, Rory?”

Later, in the final year of school at Evanston, there’d been a boy named Aubrey Smith who divined Rory’s weakness. He’d lie in wait by the lockers when classes changed, and as Rory passed, Aubrey would crow the word at him like an epithet.
Yellow, yellow.
Other boys picked up the chant and it would follow Rory the length
of the hall, so that he came to dread the unprotected expanse of the school corridors, a gauntlet he traversed seven times daily. He hated the lunchroom, and the wads of clenched bread hurled at his ear. Dreaded the moment he was forced to fight Aubrey Smith, and prove his schoolmate wrong.

It was inevitable, a rite of passage in most boys’ lives: the deserted lot three blocks from school; the circle of bloodthirsty classmates, one of them a bookie taking bets on the fight’s outcome; Aubrey stripping to his shorts and swinging his arms while Rory struggled with the knot in his tie. He had lasted three minutes and twenty-seven seconds, swinging blindly at Aubrey’s head until the other boy landed a kick squarely in the groin. It was his tears, not the pain, Rory despised the most.

He had tried to hang himself that night from his bedroom light fixture. It was a source of shame to him even now, that memory of himself balancing on a chair, his necktie too short for the elaborate loops he’d thrown over the brass. He’d called frantically for his mother to save him before he toppled to the floor.

Try the Army,
Jack had told Joan when she consulted him by long-distance telephone call a few hours later.
Something that’ll make a man of him. He’s been with women too long.

In hatred and rage Rory had sought an appointment to the Naval Academy instead. And found, on the bucking surface of an aircraft carrier, the one thing that made boyhood fears irrelevant. To gun a plane’s engines and fire himself straight off a deck demanded a different kind of courage, and Rory’s fund of it was limitless.

He awoke each
morning now to the broadcasts of Hanoi Hannah, the shrill-voiced Vietnamese who recounted
the latest American losses with relish. Next he was visited by his turnkey guard, who demanded that he bow low in obeisance. When Rory refused—partly from defiance and partly because his leg was healing badly and could not support his weight—the guard punched him in the face, after which he was ordered to hobble into the courtyard and fetch his breakfast: a hunk of bread and a bowl of thin soup. His bowels were wracked with dysentery and he lost as much nourishment as he managed to consume. When he returned to his cell he scratched a mark on the wall to note another day, and waited for the rattle of a key in the lock that signaled the next bout of interrogation. Sometimes his captors let entire days lapse between his torture sessions. Sometimes it was a matter of hours. Unpredictability spawned most of the fear.

It was the dry season when his plane fell out of the sky and his cell was airless and baking. Under the single bulb that stayed perpetually lit, even while he slept, he dreamed of rain: rain and the black asphalt of Michigan Avenue dreaming in the car headlights, the swish of tires and the gutters roiling with wet. The waters of the Severn and the Chesapeake in heavy chop, rain like a spatter of bullets against his cheek. He dreamed the spring rain on leaves and the dim green light of an April morning filtering through a tent’s canvas in the backyard. Max’s rib cage rising and falling gently beneath his encircling fingers.

And he remembered, almost against his will, the way the Bangkok streets had been flooded that day in September ’63, when he had journeyed with Max to visit the boy’s grandfather—how the muddy brown water had swirled and fanned about the wheels of the
tuk-tuk
and Max had crowed with delight. Rory had wanted to hate Bangkok as he hated the whole idea of Asia—Bangkok
his father’s mistress, Bangkok the destroyer of happiness— but Rory had stared about him in wonder. When they arrived at last at the house on the khlong, his father had waded out into the flooded courtyard with his silk trousers rolled to the knee and clutched the child in his strong, light grasp. Max had gone to Jack Roderick without a backward glance.

In that sepia light, Jack had looked exactly like the hero of Rory’s childhood photographs—a man already a legend—and Rory had sat rooted in the
tuk-tuk,
his son in his father’s embrace, tears like rain on his cheek.

You are guilty
of black crimes against the Vietnamese people,
his interrogators shouted.
You are an air pirate of the United States, personally responsible for the murders of one thousand women and children. Admit that you bombed a school and a hospital filled with nursing mothers. Admit that we have been kinder to you than you deserve.

For numberless days in the room reserved for interrogations, he refused to transcribe the official confessions into his own handwriting and sign them. For this he was beaten by men who shouted obscenities in broken English. They tossed him between them until a black miasma swam before his eyes and it was obvious he was of no further use to them. He would awake under the stifling light of his own cell and know from the pounding of his heart that the keys had rattled somewhere in his sleep, and the interrogators had returned.

Hang tough,
tapped Milt Beardsley, the boy from Indiana.
If they want you to take early release, they’re not going to kill you.

Sometimes in his dreams—the ones without rain—he heard the taped confessions of other men who had broken, broadcast throughout the cells.

Fifty-three slashes on the wall, fifty-three days. Fifty-four slashes. Fifty-five. The marks were losing their definition, his hand trembled so badly. He had not seen the man named Ruth in ten days, and for an instant he thought that perhaps they had given up. He would die here, after all.

How long would death take?

There came an
hour in the middle of a black and fevered night when the guards shattered his healing fracture a second time and the agony in his ruined leg nearly destroyed him. When they had dumped him once more on the floor of his cell he lay in his own blood and excrement, aware of the tapping that went on around him and too feeble to care what it meant. On the fifty-ninth day he summoned enough strength to rise on one leg, remove his shirt and invert the bucket intended for his waste.

Looping the ragged cloth through the louvered grill of his window he made a rough slipknot and would have worked the noose around his neck, but he toppled and fell. When the guards came they were outraged and carried him immediately to the airy, sunlit room where he had first been offered freedom.

There, his hands folded placidly in front of him, sat the old man in the Mao jacket, his black eyes quite steady as he gazed up at Rory’s face.

“You would rather die than accept my gift?”

“I would rather die than accept dishonor,” Rory replied.

The old man grazed Rory’s cheek with the tip of his finger. “The soldiers who guard you feel the oppression of their country very deeply, you understand. They savage you, who cannot savage the United States.”

The finger moved along his chin. Rory could not suppress a shudder.

“It tears at my heart to see what they have done,” Ruth said softly. “One might almost call them animals.”

“Fuck off,” Rory muttered.

The old man did not reply. Then, leaning back in his chair, he said, “You are very proud. That is as it should be, for Jack Roderick’s son.”

“I am not Jack Roderick’s son.”

Ruth withdrew a paper packet from his sleeve. He thrust it across the table.

Rory ignored it.

“That is a letter from your little boy.”

His eyes slid toward the envelope. It was crinkled and soiled, as though it had traveled many miles. The censors would have read it already. He could glimpse a faint pencil mark, the scrawl of childish writing. His breath rose like a balloon in his chest until the effort to suppress it choked him.

“I bring it to you at considerable cost,” Ruth told him. “Many people have labored to send it so far.”

Rory stared at the peace offering. The bribe.
Max.

The old man thrust his face within an inch of Rory’s. “He
knows.”
The words were brusque and brutal. “Your father knows that you die a little, every day. Although you do not even call yourself his son, this letter is proof of all he hears and all that he can do. While Jack Roderick lives, he will move heaven and earth to save you. Do you understand, Rory?”

Would he? Would Dad give a damn if I died?

Once he’d believed Jack Roderick was the most wonderful man in the world—a hero, a true American, a warrior with a just cause. He’d needed to believe that an extraordinary father existed somewhere, a father larger than life. But now he knew that Jack Roderick had
whacked backroom goons and settled scores and delivered payoffs and refused to support this war his son was making. Billy Lightfoot had told Rory everything. Jack lived for himself alone. He had no allegiances, no higher laws. He had no right to a son.

Still, Rory said nothing. He felt mesmerized by the letter, by what accepting it might mean. The first step down a long and desperate slide.

“Read it, Rory. Your son wrote it himself.”

His eyes closed. Then he reached out his hand. His fingers trembled.

The man named Ruth placed the envelope tenderly in Rory’s palm.

“Pride,” the old man said gently, “is merely another kind of prison, my son. Your father taught me that long ago, when he gave me back my life.”