The Secret Agent (35 page)

“Sorry, Stefani,” Oliver muttered.

“Why, old thing?” Stefani told him as she stumbled past. “It’s just the high-wire act, isn’t it? Without a safety net.”

The Cameron Highlands,
Easter Sunday, 1967

T
he air was chill as Jack Roderick loped down the winding road toward the Tanah Rata golf course in his dark blue suit, the briefcase with his entire life’s fortune swinging jauntily by his side. It had been a cool weekend—the weather of late March oddly reminiscent of Scotland, with its showers and sudden fogs rising over the scattered cottages and elaborate English gardens. The British had built this hill station cheek-by-jowl with the jungle and tea plantations because of that weather: it was a haven from the oppressive tropics of Kuala Lumpur. Rapacious vines encroached on the scrupulous plots of roses.

For a time during the war the Highlands had been overrun with Communist guerillas, and the darker rumors of the expatriate community still infested the jungles with pygmy tribes and mercenary bands. Carlos commanded one of these, as he had done somewhere in
Southeast Asia ever since his flight from the Grand Palace twenty-one years before. Vukrit Suwannathat might have overrun one encampment in Chiang Rai, but the General had moved south, into Malaysia. Carlos never forgot the hill country of the Golden Triangle, or the hidden shrine to his dead wife, a woman named for a river.

A breeze whipped through the low-lying scrub, and Roderick shivered. After two decades in the moist heat of Bangkok, he could not adjust to Tanah Rata.
Nerves,
he thought.
Christ, you’ve done this sort of thing all y our life. Snap out of it—

But never, in all his life, had it mattered so much.

When, three weeks before, Carlos had left him standing alone on the terrace in Bangkok to decide his son’s fate, Roderick went sleepless until dawn. He’d thought of night drops over North Africa. Of training in Ceylon. Of his youthful arrogance at being a warrior, his unswerving belief in Right. He felt again the irrational love for the OSS—that happy band of brothers—and how ready he had been to die for men like McQueen and Billy Lightfoot. He thought of the hero named Ruth and the curious way in which his life had diverged from the one that Pridi Banomyong had planned.

He considered Rory, both the boy he had abandoned and the man who was dying with courage and pain. He thought of his grandson, Max, as he had been four years ago—and the way the boy’s dark eyes had widened as he’d stared at the blood on his grandfather’s face.

Is life more valuable than honor?
He recalled, suddenly, the schoolboy taunts Rory had endured—Joan’s description of a necktie swinging from the bedroom light fixture. Rory felt passionately that the shadow of cowardice was not to be endured. If he gave way to extortion, Rory
would never forgive him. But he could not bear to know that he might save his son—and allow Rory to die. He carried too much guilt already.

“Tell Ruth he can have his blood money,” Roderick had said, when at dawn Carlos reappeared like a ghost. He pressed a crumpled envelope into the General’s hand, scrawled in childish pencil. Max had written to his father from Lake Tahoe, and when Rory was declared MIA, the letter had been sent on to Jack. “And see that Rory gets this.”

He sent young Dickie Spencer to the bank for all the money in the world. He signed the draft of his second will, leaving everything to his heirs instead of the people of Thailand, whom he had decided to betray. He tried not to think of Rory, dying by degrees. He did not see Fleur for almost a week, but when she appeared on his doorstep as inexplicably as she had gone the night of Carlos’s visit, he asked her to stay with him. He craved distraction. He was inattentive and remote, and he knew that he hurt her. She did not again raise the subject of flight to the United States.

Rose Cottage, where
he had spent this Easter with Fleur, belonged to friends of Alec McQueen. Roderick had visited the Marshalls before, in Singapore; they had dined in turn at his house on the khlong. It had not been difficult to press them for an invitation to their summer home in the Cameron Highlands. Roderick drove south with Fleur on Holy Thursday, and reached Rose Cottage on Good Friday afternoon. He impatiently waited for Carlos’s signal—a red smear of paint on a rock near the golf course. Two days passed in growing tension, in fitful walks and abrupt conversations, Fleur staring at him uneasily and the Marshalls pretending disinterest.

He had seen the splotch of crimson paint that morning as he walked to Easter service in the little town of Tanah Rata. The meeting time with Carlos would be between four and five o’clock that day. After an impromptu picnic, during which Roderick glanced perpetually at his watch, the Marshalls and Fleur declared themselves tired and lay down to rest. Roderick poured himself a drink in the silent living room. He lit a cigarette, and left it burning in an ashtray.

Now, at the
foot of the road, he hastened his step. The exercise felt good. The end of waiting felt better.

In the slanting light of late afternoon, the jungle loomed at his right hand like an emerald wall. Roderick had a map of the local hiking trails in his pocket, with Carlos’s meeting place marked. The first cutting swerved perpendicular to the road and ran skittishly into the underbrush. He glanced over his shoulder: the hillside and surrounding landscape were empty of life. He struck into the path in his supple leather shoes, a gesture toward Easter Sunday. Carlos would laugh.
I had forgot that men dressed like that, in places like these.

The path dwindled as he walked, the air sharpened, the light dimmed. The canopy overhead was broken by the startled wings of birds. Roderick had chosen this hour and place because it was certain to be deserted, and offered Carlos protective cover. The intense loneliness, however, he had forgotten. He had not considered tigers. He walked on, feeling the cold sweat on his back, suppressing the urge to whistle.

Perhaps twenty minutes passed in solitary trudging. The briefcase felt awkward in his hands. How must he look to anyone watching: an urbane and distinguished figure in his Thai silk suit. This was a landscape for
combat fatigues, for thick boots and army packs. Shadows swallowed the path behind him. Even the birds were silent, now, and Roderick wondered why Carlos’s men were not heralding his course from the surrounding trees, as they had done in Chiang Rai ten years earlier.

He stopped dead, the back of his neck prickling. Not only darkness filled the gap behind him, now. Someone was following.

“Hello, Jack.”

He turned, fingers clenched on his briefcase.

A towering figure in U.S. Army green, broad and hard as a side of beef.

“Billy,” he said, bewildered. “What are you doing here?”

“Gotta ask the same of you.” Lightfoot shambled toward him, two others behind—privates, by their uniforms. All three carried automatic rifles.

Roderick glanced farther down his path into the welling dusk, and caught a movement in the underbrush. Of course. Lightfoot would have thought of that—of the mad impulsive plunge a man might make into the jungle. He said, “You’re a long way from Khorat.”

“And you’re a long way from Bangkok, old pal. Care to tell me why?”

The figures he’d glimpsed ahead were approaching, now. He would shortly be surrounded. He considered a sidelong dash. Useless. One of the soldiers would be sure to fire.

“We’ve had some intelligence, Jack, that a pack of Commie bastards are hiding out in this jungle,” Lightfoot said cannily, “run by an old warlord, code-named Carlos. They’re planning to bring the revolution right to the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. You know anything ’bout that?”

“Not a thing.”
Abort the meeting, Carlos. Turn around. Go home.

“That’s a load of crap, Jack. You always take a walk in your civvies at this hour of the afternoon?”

“You think I’m a Communist, Billy?”

“What I think is that you’d better talk fast. What’s in the briefcase?”

The second group of soldiers stood twenty yards away, now, and recognizable: regular Thai Army troops. “Do you fellas have permission to maneuver on Malaysian soil?”

Lightfoot held out his hand. “Give that case to me.”

One of the privates stepped forward with his gun leveled. The Thai soldiers closed the gap ahead. It was Field Marshal Vukrit Suwannathat, however, who wrestled the briefcase from Roderick’s fingers.

When the combination lock on the thing would not open, one of the privates shot it off with his gun. A dull, pinging sound, like nails thudding into a coffin.

“You see?” Vukrit cried exultantly to Billy Lightfoot. “I
told
you. One million U.S. dollars. The warlord Carlos was to carry this into Hanoi.”

“Jesus Christ Almighty, Jack,” Lightfoot muttered hoarsely. He stared down at the money, which gleamed sickly in the jungle light. “The Legendary American, aiding and abetting the Viet Cong.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“I didn’t want to believe it.” Lightfoot’s anger and disappointment were scorching. “No American with your record of service—no man with a son shot down in this war—would sell us out to Uncle Ho. That’s what I told the minister, when he came to me with his tale. I had to see for myself.”

Fleur,
Roderick thought despairingly,
you’ve betrayed me again. Why tell Vukrit? Why now?
“Rory’s a POW in the
Hanoi Hilton, Billy. The money is his ransom. You’d do the same for your son, given the chance.”

“I’d have died first, and so would any boy of mine,” Lightfoot replied thickly. “And if you believe for one second that poor kid’s still alive—Hell, you been played big time, Jack. The Viet Cong spun you a tale. All they wanted was your cash. And like a fool, you brought it to them. You realize what this means? You’ll be tried in the States for treason.”

“Rory’s alive. If you don’t believe me, ask Carlos.”

“Carlos is done talking.” Vukrit’s voice was smug. “We raided his camp last night; he was never a competent fighter. But he told us, eventually, how to signal you. It was almost the last thing he said before he died.”

“You son of a whore,” Roderick said tautly. “I don’t believe you.”

Vukrit shrugged. “You can see his body if you like.”

It was not
many minutes farther down the path to the place on Roderick’s map where he had been supposed to turn, and strike off alone into the thick vines that tangled about the ankles, groping like a blind man toward a clearing where no paths led. Here the huts had been erected, their roofs covered with leaves; but the place was deserted, now, except for the few men Vukrit had left to guard it.

When they reached Carlos’s camp it was quite dark, and Roderick stumbled between the two Thai soldiers who frog-marched him through the brush. A great desolation welled in his heart:
Rory my boy, Rory you’re lost, and Carlos is dead.
Carlos had been tortured and he had died with the shame of betrayal on his lips—he had told Vukrit of the rock and the red paint and Jack’s intended course through the jungle. To think of this—and to
think of Rory, who would never know how his father had tried to save him—was agony.

As he was hauled into the clearing, one of the soldiers lit a torch: the flames soared under the jungle canopy. Seven bodies lay sprawled in death on the ground; but not, Roderick thought with satisfaction, a fifth part of the General’s men. The bulk of Carlos’s troops must have escaped.

There would be no money sent to Ruth. No release or salvation for Rory. Bitterness and loss filled his mouth with ashes.

“We left Carlos inside that hut,” Vukrit told him with a smile. “Look at his body well. This is how the Thais deal with traitorous dogs.”

Roderick lunged for the man and knocked him heavily to the ground. He beat at Vukrit’s face with his fists, his breath tearing in his chest. He was sixty-one and he smoked too much and his doctor nagged him about his heart—but he was filled with the violence of blasted hope, the lifelong hatred of Vukrit and men like him and the knowledge of the lives they had destroyed.

Rory, my son, my son-He
felt Vukrit’s nose collapse under his fists and the wet smear of blood and he heard screaming; then a soldier hauled him to his feet and a gun was pressed to his temple.

“Kill him,” Vukrit screamed from the ground where he lay, writhing in pain. “Kill him, I say!”

The last thing Jack Roderick saw was Billy Lightfoot, standing rigidly at attention, an expression of sorrow on his face.

Two days later,
when the search for the Silk King was at its peak and more than two hundred men swarmed
through the clinging underbrush, Major General Billy Lightfoot—Commander of U.S. Forces, Khorat—flew a phalanx of Army helicopters into Malaysia to join in the search for his old friend.

More than one reporter thought it singular that at a time of warfare in the region, a foreign military service was allowed to violate Malaysia’s airspace; and it seemed unlikely that a helicopter would be able to discern much through the dense canopy of the Highlands jungle. But Lightfoot ignored his critics and flew into Malaysia anyway and was much admired for his dedication to Jack Roderick. Billy had always been a man for whom duty was the highest calling.

He flew directly to the clearing in the brush that had once held a military encampment of no particular political orientation. It was deserted now but there was evidence of fighting in recent days. Lightfoot set down his helicopter and ordered two of his men to lift the body that rested, as though sleeping, in the doorway of one of the abandoned huts.

The Army chopper swung away to the east. It was a matter of half an hour by air to the China Sea. Roderick’s body turned twice in an arc of sunlight as it tumbled through the sky, like a man who had jumped without a parachute. It slipped soundlessly into the waves.

Hanoi,
April 1967

T
here came a night—the seventy-first slash on his prison cell wall—when Rory Roderick was left alone. No guards came to bind his arms together and hang him from the torture-room ceiling. No one shouted abuse through his door. He was only conscious of the passage of time because he was very weak, now, from raging fever and dysentery, but he understood that the night continued without interruption, unmarked even by sleep, and he was thankful.

There was tapping on the walls around him, some of it urgent. He listened to the letters as they unreeled, but he was too exhausted to make sense of them or to respond. In his right hand he clutched a filthy scrap of paper. It was his letter from Max.

Rory thought of that brief week in January, a lifetime before, when he had swerved off the trail at Stowe to hide in the woods, and prayed that his father wouldn’t find him. The fear and the weakness seemed laughable, now, but he was glad that Max loved the speed and the challenge of the tortuous pitch, as he never could. Max would make Jack Roderick proud. Rory felt a great and forgiving peace toward the father he loved and no longer needed to understand. He closed his eyes and slept.

They came for
him at dawn, shouting at him
to get up, get up,
although they knew he could no longer stand. In the end it took three of them to drag him into the courtyard where the old French guillotine from the glory days of the Maison Centrale had been resurrected for Jack Roderick’s son.

“Where is Ruth?” he asked them, as he fell at the foot of the thing.

“Ruth has failed.” The chief guard spoke with contempt and Rory understood now that the price of Ruth’s failure would be his death. “He is sent home to Beijing in disgrace.”

Rory gazed across the courtyard. There the rest of the Americans were assembled, their faces white and startled, their bodies thin as martyred saints. He recognized Beardsley, the boy from Indiana, and saw the tears on his cheeks.

He could not have walked away from them all, a free man, and held his head high. He closed his eyes instead and saluted, in his mind, the image of his father.

The blade screeched as it was drawn upward. The
guard beside him grunted with the effort; the winch, it seemed, had rusted. There were stars bursting behind his eyes and one of them had the face of Max.

Rory tightened his hand on the letter, and thought of snow.