The Secret Agent (33 page)

Bangkok,
1966

B
rigadier General Billy Lightfoot stayed in Thailand for eight months after his visit to Jack Roderick’s House in the rainy season of 1963. He traveled by Jeep for weeks at a time through Khorat and the border country of Laos and Cambodia, carrying a machete on his hip in case he was trapped by jungle vines or tigers or militant Communists. In August 1964, three North Vietnamese gunboats fired torpedoes at the U.S. Navy destroyer
Maddox
in the Gulf of Tonkin and an aircraft carrier named
Ticonderoga
returned fire. It was tantamount to a declaration of war against Vietnam, and Lyndon Johnson—who faced a brutal reelection battle against the Republican Barry Goldwater in November—was in no mood to look soft on Communism. Lightfoot’s plans for Khorat were given priority. By the second week of August, the 36th Tactical Fighting Squadron of the U.S. Air Force was transferred to northeast Thailand and F105s were flying rescue missions over Laos soon after.

“Fighter jets?” Jack Roderick said when Billy tore into Bangkok one September morning to give him the news. “This is Thailand, Billy. Not Vietnam.”

“The boys are there to fly classified missions I don’t like to talk about, Jack. You understand.”

Roderick understood. His clearances had been stripped; he no longer had need to know.

By 1965, the air war over North Vietnam was raining fire on the villages and rice paddies; bombing runs against Hanoi were routine. Lightfoot spent much of that year in Washington, poring over blueprints and plans. He sent Roderick cheerful bulletins the Silk King read with distaste, and seemed to have forgotten the punch he’d thrown on his old friend’s Bangkok terrace.

And so it was with resignation that Roderick found Lightfoot standing in his front courtyard one morning in September 1966, hands on his hips and a cigar in his mouth. Billy stared, narrow-eyed, at the dense vegetation of Roderick’s garden as though it might hide any number of Hostiles. He had a PFC to drive his Jeep now. There were flags fluttering on the front end.

“What’s your rank these days?” Roderick called from the doorstep.

“Major-General. Commander of U.S. Forces, Khorat.”

Roderick thought of Boonreung’s dusty plateau and the Mekong River, broad and red, that wound into Cambodia. He knew the place had changed profoundly since the American pilots had arrived there. He did not wish to see it again.

“Congratulations. That’s quite an assignment, Billy.”

“How’s that kid of yours?”

“Flying A-4s off the
Coral Sea,”
Roderick replied.

“Good man.”

Good man. Good for you, Rory, as you carry the ordnance high over Hanoi: the wide, tree-lined boulevards, the shady
stucco mansions of l’Indochine, flaring like phoenixes as you pass.
There had been bombs in the Good Fight of World War II, carpet bombs over Dresden and the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima—Roderick had no claim to moral superiority. Jack loved the boy who flew the plane more than he loved the ravaged city streets. Weren’t his hands as bloody as anyone’s in Washington?

“Come for a little ride,” Lightfoot urged. “Up to my neck of the woods. Maybe into the Triangle, if the scouts say it’s safe enough. We can do some recon. Pitch camp in the rainforest. You can tell me what the place was like during the old days.”

“Quieter,” Roderick said. He did not want to talk strategy with Billy over four hundred miles of broken road. He could recite the phrases in his sleep.

The Pathet Lao, squatting on the border. The Khmer Rouge to the east. Probably somebody in Burma paying with matches and Uncle Ho’s got everybody bound in blood to the Chinese. Jackals, all of ’em. You think the Soviets aren’t looking for a way in? Give ’em half a chance, they’ll fund the Malays and drive a wedge into Thailand from the south.

He thought of his Laotian friend, Tao Oum—the fine dissecting intelligence honed in a French
lycée,
the gentle manners wasted now on the Pathet Lao—and remembered the drive down the Western Seaboard they had taken together in 1945. Vukrit and Carlos, wary as dogs, with Boonreung laughing between them. The moist air tearing through the open windows of the Packard and the insults flying in Thai and English and French from backseat to front. The easy brotherhood that seemed more true than anything before or since.

He had believed he could help Asia and his friends emerge from a brutal war. They were all scattered now, twenty-one years later, some of them dead, some still fighting battles they would never win. Only he and
Vukrit Suwannathat remained, opposite sides of the same coin.

“Billy,” he said, “thanks for the offer but I think I’ll stay home.”

Lightfoot wheeled. “Those junior grunts at the CIA don’t know their heads from their asses, Jack. They can talk numbers and positions and pinpoint a Communist enclave on a goddamn map—but they don’t have the relationships with
people
you do. The human element is missing, old pal, know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean.”

“It’s the human element I need.
We
need. Hell, what’ve you spent all these years in Asia for—if not to put your contacts to good use?”

It wasn’t the first time the Pentagon had run headlong into an Agency wall; it wouldn’t be the last. The problem, Roderick guessed, was a gulf Lightfoot would never span: the chasm that fell between intelligence and tactics, between the generals with their maps and those quieter folk who sniffed the wind. The Agency believed that Uncle Ho had far more men than the Pentagon wanted to admit. The Agency and the Pentagon wrangled endlessly over troop strength and enemy numbers. The Agency wrote estimates; the Pentagon scribbled red ink in the margins before sending the reports to LBJ and his cabinet. The Agency spoke its piece, and the Pentagon said what Johnson wanted to hear. The dialogue over this war had become an escalation of mutually deniable statistics.

“Sometimes I’m amazed by the people you know,” Lightfoot persisted. “Not just the ones you invite to dinner—but the guys you never mention. Like that new Defense Minister. That fella with the unpronounceable name.”

“Vukrit Suwannathat. Field Marshal now.”

“Yeah. He’s the one. The Defense Ministry will be critical to us in the next few months.” Lightfoot slapped his thigh with his army hat, and a cloud of dust rose in the moist air.

“Vukrit’s the only minister who has ever mattered. But you’ll learn that I have no influence with him.”

“He says the Thais are going after your old buddy Carlos—the renegade who keeps an army in the hills. The Field Marshal thinks Carlos has gone Communist, and he means to stamp him out.”

“He’ll have to find Carlos first,” Roderick said.

That afternoon in
September, 1966, Jack Roderick decided it was time to put his affairs in order.

He watched Billy Lightfoot’s jeep spin in the courtyard and plunge into the narrow lane beyond his gate. He thought of Boonreung dying in agony and of Fleur as she had been at nineteen, a frightened bird caught in a snare; thought of Carlos’s wife Chao fading to nothing in the jungle. If he wanted to he could place all those sins in Vukrit’s column, but he knew that he bore equal responsibility for the blight and he knew, at last, that he must stop it before it destroyed Carlos.

He thought briefly of Chacrit Gyapay and the way the gun had felt as he placed it against the torture chief’s temple and pulled the trigger. A March night, seventeen years ago. He was still fresh with an assassin’s training then, and whipped to violence by the outrage of Boonreung’s murder. He’d drawn blood in a way that was unthinkable to him now. His kind of war was over. Vukrit demanded subtlety and cunning, not a knife in the dark.

Roderick went inside and made two phone calls: one to his lawyer and another to the Ministry of Defense.

When the lawyer arrived, he gave the man his instructions: tear up the will he had signed in 1960, leaving his home and his collections of pottery and art to the people of Thailand; and draft a new one, leaving everything he possessed to his son, Rory.

Then he sat down at his desk and wrote a brief letter to his old friend Alec McQueen. He signed it with the lawyer as witness and when the man had notarized it, placed it in his desk for safekeeping. Scrawled on the front were the words, in Roderick’s minuscule handwriting:
To be opened in the event of my death.

Roderick did these things with deliberation, as though he had received a diagnosis of a terminal condition that morning. Then he put on a hat in honor of the occasion, and went out into the street holding the lawyer by the arm. The man took him as far as Dusit in his car.

Dusit was the administrative center of Bangkok, the royal quarter, an oasis of calm in the chaotic city. Chulalongkorn, Thailand’s most Europeanized king, had designed and built the district at the close of the nineteenth century, and the spacious boulevards and grand vistas might have been lifted from Haussmann’s Paris. At this hour of the afternoon, most of the bureaucrats were dozing in their chairs.

He passed the racetrack at the Royal Turf Club and the cages of the Dusit Zoo, the National Assembly and the Prime Minister’s house and the residence of the king. At the Ministry of Defense he was admitted without question and ushered up three flights of stairs to the office, large as a ballroom, where Vukrit presided.

The Defense Minister had been named to his post only six weeks before—the culmination, Roderick suspected, of a lifelong ambition. Vukrit must be in his mid-fifties now. Roderick was sixty-one.

“Your Excellency,” he said with a slight nod.

“The Legendary American,” the minister replied. “Isn’t that what they call you?”

Vukrit remained seated as Roderick approached, like royalty, and made no move to form the ceremonial
wei.
The significance of his rudeness would not be lost on the five Thais who stood around his desk—some of them in uniform, some in civilian dress. All gazed at Roderick unsmilingly.

“I can give you very little time.”

“I’m grateful. I wish to speak to you in private.”

“Then you should have invited me to your home. I do business at this ministry, Roderick—to meet alone suggests an unhealthy tendency toward plotting.”

“I was pressed for time. The Commander of U.S. Forces in Khorat spoke with me this morning, Your Excellency, and having seen him I came directly to you. If we could speak in private—”

Vukrit hesitated, as though it would give him pleasure to deny any of Roderick’s requests; then he waved his hand, and his coterie departed.

Roderick waited until the door had closed firmly behind them. Then he drew something from his jacket pocket and held it aloft. Though uncut, the smooth surface of the dark red gem shimmered like a well of fire between his fingers. “Lightfoot tells me you have plans for Carlos, Vukrit. Don’t act on them.”

“Do you think that old stone frightens me, Roderick? You cannot prove I ever touched it. You cannot prove it was left in the chambers of the king.”

“True,” Roderick conceded. “But you of all people understand the power of rumor. You rose on rumor’s back. Rumor branded Pridi Banomyong the assassin behind the king’s murder, and rumor caused his government to fall.”

“I’m more powerful than Pridi Banomyong ever was. More powerful than you, however many petty thugs you may once have murdered by moonlight. I hear that not even the CIA listens to Roderick anymore.”

“May I inquire as to the health of Your Excellency’s son?”

Vukrit’s eyelids flickered. “Sompong has earned his wings in the Royal Thai Air Force. My son trains in Khorat with your General Lightfoot, and wears a uniform like his father before him.”

“Which father, I wonder? And which uniform? If you care nothing for the power of rumor, consider what it can do to that boy. If you so much as
think
of hunting down Carlos again, your career—and your son’s—will end in shame.”

Vukrit threw back his head and laughed.

“I wrote a letter today,” Roderick continued imperturbably, “instructing Alec McQueen, the publisher of the
Bangkok Post,
to print its contents should I die. Other papers will pick up the story, in the United States and around the world.”

“You think your dying will be like a king’s? You flatter yourself, Roderick.”

“My letter summarizes the case against you. You stole a gem—a talisman of good luck—from a priceless artifact you hacked out of a cave wall. The artifact sits in my house and the dealer who sold it is prepared to bear witness against you. The talisman—a cabochon ruby I will place with my letter—was dropped by the man who murdered King Ananda on June 9, 1946. Vukrit Suwannathat.”

Roderick leaned across the minister’s desk. “If you hunt down Carlos, the rumors will begin. If I die, the rumors will twine around your neck until you strangle
under their weight. It’s the only kind of justice left, Vukrit—that you fall the same way you rose.”

“You cannot prove I killed the king.”

This time it was Roderick who smiled. “Your enemies would snatch at any excuse to hang you: no one in Thailand is interested in proof.”

D
oes this place always empty out before six o’clock?” Rush Halliwell demanded as he strode back from the loading dock. He glanced through an open doorway, but the lights were doused. “Dickie Spencer keeps his office here. Where’s he?”

“It’s Friday afternoon,” the salesgirl said indignantly. “Mr. Spencer quits early and goes to his country place on the weekends. Just who are you, and what do you want?”

“Did you see the American woman leave by the back door?”

The girl shook her head. “I’m supposed to stay up front. Mr. Spencer’s assistant might know where your friend went, but she’s gone home for the day. If you’d like, I can have her call you on Monday.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Rush swung back into the shop, his gaze scanning the brightly colored aisles. “No other exits, right?”

“None. Is this … really important?”

“Not to you,” he answered with one of his most charming smiles, and hurried out into the street.

He arrived home
to discover that Stefani’s luggage was still in his guest room. This brought him up short. She had carried nothing but a backpack when she’d left his building, but a woman of Stefani’s resources could easily jettison an entire season’s worth of unwanted ballast.

She was less likely, however, to leave behind her U.S. passport. As she had certainly done.

Rush stood over the contents of her luggage, tossed willy-nilly on his spare bed, and thought. Did she keep a second identity handy—passport and all? Such a thing was common practice in CIA circles; did Oliver Krane’s operatives do it, too? Or was he reaching for an explanation? Had she meant to return from Jack Roderick Silk that afternoon?

“That’s crazy,” he said aloud. “Asinine, in fact. You just can’t accept that she flipped you off and escaped.”

He headed for the embassy at a run.

Before she was
fully conscious, she knew that something dreadful had happened. The catlike shrieking near at hand was unbearable. She struggled awake, resisting the impulse to sleep,
sleep,
and forget the world. It was important that she open her eyes and somehow strangle the damn cat.

“The amount of trouble you’ve caused—you
vicious
shit.” Ankana Lee-Harris’s Knightsbridge croon had vanished. “I might have had the whole evening with Dickie—but here I am, carting
you
to the airport. God, it makes me wild!”

Clarity returned slowly to Stefani’s mind, and with it, a ton of self-abuse.

Dickie Spencer had been supremely accommodating when she called that afternoon to request an interview. He seemed genuinely pleased to hear her voice and enthusiastic at the prospect of a meeting. Her arrival at the shop had brought his assistant hurrying to the door, a warm smile on her lips, to personally conduct Stefani past the glowing squares of silk patterned with elephants and parrot tulips, the pillowcases and bed coverings and drapes, past the bolts of fabric in every imaginable hue. The woman had offered Stefani water or coffee and when Stefani refused both, had ushered her into Dickie’s office and closed the door behind her.

Stefani had advanced, her hand extended, toward the man who stood somewhat stiffly by the drafting table; but the pleasantry she meant to utter died on her lips. Spencer’s face was strained, his eyes focused on someone behind her—and as she instinctively began to turn, the small, hard cylinder of a gun was pressed sharply into her spine. It was quite emphatic; impossible to confuse with anything else.

She went rigid, her eyes fixed on Spencer’s face.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Fogg,” he said gently, “but not all of us are capable of tilting at windmills.” Then he dropped his gaze to the silk pattern that rested on his drafting table.

It had been
Jo-Jo who held the gun, and even now she could not say whether Dickie had called Sompong the moment she set up the appointment, or whether Ankana Lee-Harris had done it—Ankana who had been in Dickie’s pocket all day, ostensibly coordinating museum loans for the big show,
darling,
but actually insinuating herself
as only Ankana could. Spencer’s motives—his personal integrity versus the pressure Sompong had brought to bear—would remain open questions. For now, Stefani had stickier problems to solve.

Her arms, bound behind her, ached. The base of her skull throbbed. She tried to part her lips, and decided they were fused with electrical tape. She was slumped in one corner of a large car, Ankana in the other. Jo-Jo, predictably, driving. It was he who had knocked her out with the butt of his gun, and tossed her into the backseat.

“Left to myself, I’d have shot you dead and slipped your body into the Chao Phraya,” Ankana complained. “But Sompong says no. He wants you for his own.”

The U.S. embassy
on Wireless Road was a massive concrete block, derisively known as an “Inman Box,” after Bobby Ray Inman, the Navy admiral chiefly responsible for its design and construction during the 1980s. It was a structure intended to foil the worst sort of terrorist attack, and it was so secure that it resembled a penitentiary rather than a seat of diplomacy. Two decades ago, Inman Boxes had sprung up on U.S. installations worldwide, and as one wag observed, they could withstand assault by an entire platoon of tanks—but as they had virtually no windows, no one inside would be able to tell.

Rush was staring intently at his computer terminal within the embassy’s CIA station. He and Marty Robbins were the only two working this Friday evening. It was seven-thirteen; most of the lights within the vault were extinguished.

“You think she knew she was being followed?” Marty asked Rush for the third time.

“What else can I think? She went into the silk shop
by the front door. She left by the loading dock.” Rush printed the screen he had been studying so acutely and shoved it at Marty. “I knew I’d heard that name before. She wasn’t lying about
this.”

Marty adjusted his reading glasses and peered at the cable Rush had given him. It was a back-channel report-one sent between two regional stations without the knowledge or transmission of headquarters in Washington. He glanced at the date and time group that headed the cable coding, and noticed Rush had received it from the CIA’s Hong Kong base only minutes before.

There the cable transmission ended. Marty looked up from the sheet of paper, and growled, “What the hell?”

“Stefani told me this morning that she decided to work for Krane because he said his best friend and Asian partner, Harry Leeds, had been murdered in Kowloon and he wanted to bring Leeds’s killer to justice. Krane suggested that the same people responsible for Leeds’s death had it in for Max Roderick.”

“We’ve always suspected Sompong Suwannathat was running guns in Hong Kong in ’97,” Marty mused, “the same year, according to this cable, that Leeds was under FBI investigation. I see the connection—but I don’t see why we should care. If one crook kills another—”

“Leeds’s name rang a bell this morning, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. I left Hong Kong almost five years ago. I never looked at the smuggling operation itself— that was Bureau and police territory. I was charged with pinpointing which triad or terrorist group had
received
the guns, and what they intended to do with them. Harry Leeds didn’t come into it.”

“Rush, are you clutching at straws?” Marty glared at him from under his brows. “Trying to dig up something—
anything—that
suggests Fogg didn’t snow you? If Oliver Krane actually trained this broad, then she knows
when
to use the truth. A scrap of honesty at the right time could make Satan look plausible.”

“She left her passport behind. That feels wrong to me.”

“She probably has ten of them, complete with visas. She’s probably on a flight to Europe as we speak. Not every girl who’s set up to be whacked is a victim, Rush. Speaking of which—Police Chief Thak informed me that Jeffrey Knetsch was knifed to death in his cell two hours after you left him. We’ll have to arrange shipment for the body.”

“Christ.” Rush groaned. “Of course he was killed. That pathetic bastard—”

“You did what you could. You couldn’t get him out— they don’t post bail in drug cases.”

“I should have learned more from him while I had the chance. He never told us who’s on the receiving end of the drugs Sompong is shipping to New York.”

“I’ve handed that problem to Avril Blair. She’ll get the Bureau’s Manhattan office working on it ASAP.”

“And what about us? Do we use that potter’s confession to go after Sompong?”

“You know goddamn well the CIA’s got absolutely no jurisdiction here. We don’t do law enforcement, Rush. We pinpoint the crooks. We don’t snap on the cuffs.”

“But we know people who do.”

“Police Chief Thak passed the buck to the federal security forces—and most of their relevant bodies have already gone home for the weekend.”

“We can’t miss this chance,” Rush muttered through his teeth. “It’s the best we’ve had in five years—
five years,
Marty, we’ve been watching this asshole pull shit that’d get him castrated in public in any self-respecting country.”

“What do you want me to do? Hire a gunship and buzz Sompong’s compound in Chiang Rai myself?”

“Call in your chips! Get on the horn to Washington right now, and use any clout you can beg, borrow or steal. If the Thai federal police have gone home for the weekend, then fuck ’em. Let’s go over their heads.”

“And catch hell on Monday?”

“Look—our DEA guys have spent over a decade training Thai drug enforcement squads to sniff out opium networks and kill government corruption. But what’s the Thai enforcement record?”

“A lot of small stuff, nipped in the bud.”

“Because the big stuff—the kind Sompong Suwannathat breeds—is out of reach. We’re in a position, you and I, to hand these poor jokers the biggest bust of their lives: one of the most powerful and hated figures in Thai government, caught with his goddamn pants down. We should be auctioning seats in the Chinook, Marty.”

“Chinook?” Marty chortled. “You’re dreaming, Rush. By the time we get a chopper full of commandos in the air, Sompong’ll be long gone.”

“Sompong won’t know we’re coming. Thak’s too afraid of
you
this time to report what he knows—that Khuang the potter blew Sompong’s network. Sompong thinks he’s silenced Knetsch, and that the Bangkok police are in his pocket. He’s free as a bird.”

“Unless Miss Fogg told him otherwise.”

Brought up short, Rush stared at his station chief. It was a vulnerable point; indeed, it was the crux of the whole dilemma. Doubt about Stefani’s motives—her loyalties, if she had any—had sent him careening here to the embassy to write a priority cable. He had been searching for any sort of evidence to tip the scales in his mind. And still he could not say with certainty what she had done. Or what she was capable of doing.

“I can call in my chips,” Marty said slowly. “I can get on the horn to Washington and disturb some VIP weekends. I can move heaven and earth if I have to, Rush. But I don’t care to look like shit afterward.”

“You won’t. Provided we move fast.”

“And Miss Fogg?”

Rush snapped off his computer and grabbed his suit jacket. “Is a chance we’ll just have to take.”