The Secret Agent (27 page)

“Carlos, my friend, it is time to break camp,” he said as he entered the hut, “lest Vukrit and all his soldiers find you here.”

“Let Vukrit come,” the General replied without hesitation. “I will break him like a twig.”

“You did not live in the hills for eleven years, guarding your men like children, to throw them to the dogs. Vukrit is fighting for political survival. He will have a new master soon, and needs an easy victory—like the capture of a king’s assassin. You must be gone before nightfall.”

Carlos stood with his hands on his hips and stared out over the fields toward Burma. “Vukrit would kill me, you say. And I believe you. Why, then, should I send him my son?”

“Because Chao wished it. Because Vukrit has no child and will treat your boy as his own. Because Vukrit has the power to give Sompong a life beyond poppy fields and bullets.”

When the other man did not answer him, Roderick added, “Your son will come back to you, Carlos.”

The General spat. “I curse the day I gave my word to Chao!”

He had changed since her death, Roderick realized. Every softening element in his nature had been sheared from his soul by a diamond knife.

“Has your Flower betrayed us?” the General asked Roderick.

“I don’t know. But it’s better not to wait.”

Carlos rubbed at his hair with a hand stained by gun grease. “I have no money to send with the boy.”

“I will take care of that.”

“The rearing of a son is a fearful obligation. It places me in my enemy’s debt.”

“Then at last the balance is struck,” Roderick replied. He held up the cabochon ruby that Boonreung had given him on the night of Carlos’s flight from Bangkok—June 9, 1946. “How long have you held Vukrit’s life in your hands? Since the day of the king’s death—or earlier?”

The General’s eyes were on the ruby. “I found that on
the floor of the Grand Palace. The murderer of King Ananda dropped it.”

“This ruby was pried from the head of the Buddha we discovered together in the hidden cave. Vukrit cut the head from the rock and sold it. The ruby he kept, until the morning he murdered the king.”

“Then Vukrit wore a mask in the palace,” Carlos said stubbornly. “I did not see his face.”

“But you have always known,” Roderick persisted.

“There are obligations, Jack—debts that one owes. My wife loved her sister. I could not betray my brother-in-law.”

“Although he leapt at the chance to betray you?”

“So I possess more honor than Vukrit. I have always known that.”

Roderick gazed out from the ridge where they stood at the dense canopy of green. A brilliant bird rose up from the treetops. “Let me take you back to Bangkok with your son. Or if not Bangkok, then north to Vientiane.”

“I believed in Pridi Banomyong, when he fought the Japanese and snakes like Vukrit and Field Marshal Pibul. If a man cannot believe in something, Jack—what does he live for?”

“I don’t know,” Roderick returned quietly. “But at some point, my friend, belief costs too much.”

The General shook his head. “I have only the troops who follow me, now. I cannot destroy their pride. They are all I have left.”

“Pibul the Dictator is about to fall from power. Vukrit might fall with him. You could still come home.”

“I have no home but this.”

“I tell you it is betrayed,” Roderick said brutally. “Break camp, and call your son.”

* * *

Seven nights after
he had told Fleur his plans in the grass of Ayutthaya, Roderick lay sleepless in his cot at Sop Ruak. Carlos had torched the huts of his encampment and led his men on a long and twisting journey south, through the borderlands of Burma. The General intended, after several days, to reach the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia. Ever since the battles of the Malay Peninsula in the Second World War, the Highlands had sheltered bands of armed men. And the hills were beyond even Vukrit Suwannathat’s reach.

A beetle crawled purposefully along the boards of the roof, where the jungle vines had forced an entry; Roderick counted off the seconds of the minutes and hours while the moonlight shifted across the dirt floor of the room. He imagined the river path where it met the jungle, and the poppy fields blossoming with flames. He thought of Vukrit, and the soldiers he must have brought, creeping through the mud. He liked to think of the minister’s rage, when he discovered that Carlos had eluded him.

The boy slept soundly in the opposite bunk. He was seven years old, Roderick thought, with Chao’s cheekbones and Carlos’s nose; Sompong was thin and tough from running wild along the mountain paths. When the crackle of gunfire sprang up like rain from the hills to the northwest, he sighed in his sleep and curled into a tight ball. It was a sound he had known from birth.

Roderick left him sleeping. Before dawn, he walked with the rising sun to Chao’s funeral shrine and knelt among the teakwood trees. He told her what he had done; he asked for her blessing. Then he collected her boy and turned the Buick south.

Fleur was gone
from the house on the khlong when Roderick returned. He did not go in search of her.

He sent the carved
singha
and the Lisu headdress to Urana, the mistress of
lakhon.

The boy he delivered to Chao’s sister, Li-ang, at the villa on the coast near Pattaya.

And on September 16, 1957, Sarit Thanarat seized supreme power in Thailand.

J
oe Halliwell’s house in Nonthaburi was a peaceful place, and Stefani dreamed neither of murderers nor hands throttling her neck. She slept until almost ten o’clock and awoke to the sound of a bird screeching.

Someone tried to kill me.
Oliver would like to know, she thought, that the C-clamp he’d taught her had saved her life.

She found Rush’s father seated before his computer, typing madly. There was nothing remotely of his son in his manner or face. A white bird perched on his shoulder, and for an instant she was certain she had imagined it. The cockatoo lifted one viridian claw as she approached.

“Welcome.” He kept his eyes fixed on his screen. “There’s coffee and fruit in the kitchen. Make yourself at home. I don’t have guests that often.”

“Thank you,” she replied. “I won’t trouble you for long.”

“I understand there was a problem at the Oriental.”

“You could call it that.”

“Crazy damn town. That press conference of yours might not have been the best idea.”

By way of answer she asked, “Where did you get that bird?”

Halliwell smoothed the cockatoo’s feathers with a stubby finger. “They’re all over Thailand. She’s not a bad old girl. Just loud.”

“Jack Roderick had one.”

“So he did. Ever eaten a durian?” Halliwell rose, set the bird on its perch and led her toward his kitchen. “They grow ’em around here. Look like dinosaur eggs and they stink to high heaven. Have a slice.”

The fruit was tough skinned, with sharply flavored, mustard-yellow flesh.

“It’s an acquired taste,” Joe told her. “Took me years. Now I can’t get enough of it. Some need in the blood.”

“Like Thailand?” she asked.

“For some people, maybe. The ones who want to escape. If you stay here long enough, you choose Thailand—or it chooses you.”

“When did you make your choice?”

“Forty years ago. I took Rush back to school in California for a while. I wanted him to know what the States were like. You planning to stay?”

“It depends upon the house. What was Jack Roderick escaping? When he first chose Bangkok, in 1945?”

“Himself, probably. Caught up with him in the end.”

“Did it?” She eyed him curiously. “Do you know how he died?”

“Everyone’s got a theory.”

“But no one wants to tell.”

“I’d like to live in Thailand for the rest of my life,” Joe said flatly, “and I intend to live a long time. I don’t talk much about Jack Roderick.”

“Because he was your friend?”

“Jack was news,” Halliwell corrected icily. “I just followed him around for the paper.”

He grabbed the slices of durian and led her to a terrace, glass-walled and shaded with bamboo blinds. There was no breeze; an insect whirred from the jungle garden. Photographs of his son stood on every surface. But none of Rush’s Thai mother. Another story with an unhappy ending?

“So,” he said briskly. “You were nearly killed and your attacker died instead. Trouble follows Jack Roderick’s name like a shark follows blood. I should tell you to forget Bangkok and catch the first plane back to wherever you’re from.”

“I wouldn’t go. You don’t approve of me, do you?”

His eyes slid away. “The old stories are better left buried. When people start digging, innocent folks always get hurt.”

“I got hurt last night,” Stefani said bluntly. “And I didn’t demand the truth about Jack’s death. I just asked for my inheritance.”

“It comes down to the same thing. Let sleeping dogs lie, Ms. Fogg. You won’t solve the mystery by stirring up trouble. And maybe there’s no mystery at all. Jack could have been killed by a tiger. Or a truck that ran off the road. Ever seen how those Malay truckers drive? High on amphetamines, all of them.”

“I just want the house.”

“But it was never Jack’s to give,” Halliwell replied unexpectedly. “The Ministry of Culture took it by fiat, the day he left for the Highlands. Nobody told you?”

“Told me what?”

“That Jack was a criminal. Branded one by the Thai government. ‘Dealing in stolen artifacts’ was the exact
phrase, I think; his house was confiscated along with everything in it. Quite a sensation at the time.”

She frowned. “By the Ministry of Culture, you must mean Vukrit Suwannathat—Sompong’s father.”

“Vukrit was at Defense by ’67. He’d been sidelined for a few years when his buddy Field Marshal Pibul was sent off at gunpoint, and everybody figured he was washed up—but Vukrit clawed his way back. He was never down for long.”

“I’m told that he and Jack were enemies.”

“They were.” Halliwell shifted in his seat. “Vukrit had been threatening for years to clean Roderick out. It enraged him to see Asian artifacts—religious, at that—in a
farang’s
home. In the end Jack vanished, and Vukrit’s successor at Culture got to grab the goods.”

“How convenient.”

“The government set up the Thai Heritage Board, which ran the place as a museum for seven years, until Jack was declared legally dead. At that point, a Thai court ruled that the property belonged to the state. But you know that.”

“Do you think someone had Roderick killed just to get his house?”

“No.” Halliwell shifted again. “Everybody knew Vukrit was behind the seizure, regardless of which ministry he was supposed to be running at the time. Getting Roderick’s goods was a symbol of Vukrit’s power-though much good it did Vukrit. He was shot to death in ’86, you know—on a road in the middle of Chiang Rai. Car burned to cinders. Body riddled with bullets. The government claimed drug runners did it—but Vukrit had a lot of enemies. Who’s to say what really happened?”

“Who were Jack’s enemies, Mr. Halliwell?”

His glance grew shrewd. “If you’d asked me the day before Jack went to the Highlands whether he was a marked man, Ms. Fogg—I’d have laughed in your face.”

“You thought he was invulnerable?”

Halliwell’s expression altered slightly, as though he were listening to a voice she couldn’t hear. “Politics is a vicious game and plans sometimes go wrong, but Jack believed in making the world a better place.”

“Sounds naïve.”

“We were all naïve after World War II. We’d fought the Good Fight; we’d made the world safe for democracy. Vietnam woke us up. Napalming the kiddies turns you real cynical, real fast. But Jack lived and died an idealist. That’s why his failures tore him up inside.”

“I didn’t know he’d had any failures.”

Halliwell sighed. “Jack saw
people
when he looked at Thailand, not politics or the U.S. interest. That got him into trouble—here and at home. He never quite belonged in one place or the other. By the time he disappeared, he was remote as Everest. My boss—Alec McQueen—was Jack’s closest friend, but even McQueen didn’t understand him. Just caught the pieces when they fell at his feet.”

“What was it? The napalm? The spying?
Being farang
in the land of the Smiling Thai?”

“Jack Roderick loved spying. Loved the Smiling Thai. Some men love drink, but it still rots their guts.”

“What exactly was Roderick doing for the United States in this town?”

“Watching the men with guns. There were a lot of ’em in the old days. You people who were born after 1950 forget what it was like back then. The Red Menace was everywhere. We’d lost China to Mao in ’49. The next year, we fought a war on the Korean Peninsula. In the late
fifties, the French were whipped out of Indochina and Communist insurgencies were springing up like weeds, all of them armed to the teeth. Jack’s job was to stem the tide.”

“What about Vukrit? Was he a Communist?”

Halliwell snorted. “He was a strongman’s bag carrier, nothing more. If Jack saw only people, Vukrit saw only Vukrit. He was the ultimate opportunist.”

“You didn’t like him.”

“He was a nasty little thug.”

“And his son?”

“Is worse.”

They were both silent for a moment. Then Stefani asked, “Joe, what made it worthwhile? What did Jack Roderick live and die for?”

“To be king,” Halliwell answered softly. “That’s what they called him, remember. And he had moments of happiness, Ms. Fogg. When Jack walked past the weavers’ looms or watched them dye the silk. When he found a rare piece of Bencharong pottery in the Nakorn Kasem.”

“Did Fleur make him happy? Or was she just another piece in his collection?”

Joe’s eyes flickered. “Fleur was one of the most beautiful of the classical
lakhon
dancers, in her prime.”

“But she belonged to Vukrit before Jack Roderick.”

“Fleur did what she had to do in order to survive. Jack didn’t understand that; he liked to be sure of his possessions. Fleur was always on loan.”

“What happened to her?”

“She drowned herself in the khlong.” Halliwell said it brusquely. “Not long after Jack disappeared. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Bad luck dogs that family. You know that Jack left a son?”

The old reporter’s hand clenched involuntarily, and she watched the knuckles whiten. “Did you ever meet Rory Roderick?” she persisted.

“Only once. Rory came to Bangkok sometime in the sixties. Nice kid. Nothing like Jack.”

“Rory was executed in the Hanoi Hilton a few weeks after Jack disappeared that Easter Sunday. On the face of it, there’s no connection between the two deaths.”

“None whatsoever. Boys were dying all over Vietnam.”

“Did you folks at the
Bangkok Post
hear about Rory Roderick’s execution?”

“If he was killed a few weeks after Easter, I would have been in the Cameron Highlands. I flew there the night Jack’s disappearance broke.”

She went quite still. “You went to look for Jack?”

“Who didn’t? That patch of Malaysian jungle was like Grand Central Station for a while.” He barked out a mirthless laugh. “Two hundred-odd people combing the damn rain forest. No footprints, no witnesses and no corpse.”

“Jack supposedly carried a million dollars U.S. into the Highlands in a black briefcase.”

“Dickie Spencer has told a lot of people that fairy tale.”

“That doesn’t make it untrue. What was Jack buying in the Highlands?”

The phone rang.

“Rush,” Halliwell said with relief into the receiver. “She’s just fine. We’ve been chatting about the old days. I warned her they’re better left buried.”

He held out the phone to Stefani.

“Detective Itchayanan just called the embassy,” Rush told her without preamble. “An American named Jeff Knetsch was arrested on drug charges last night. He’s claiming to have killed you.”