Conspiracy (20 page)

“Nothing. Try the next room,” said Chafetz after two minutes.

Karr aimed the “camera” at the next window.

“Two women talking. Next window,” said Chafetz.

It took three more windows before Karr found the proper room. By that time, it appeared that Thao Duong's conversation was nearly over; he was telling someone how disappointed he was.

“It's a dispute about money. The other guy seems to be holding him up for more than they bargained for,” explained Thu De Nghiem, the Art Room translator. “And he wants payment by the end of the day.”

“Don't they always?”

“Thao Duong is coming out of the building,” said Rockman. “In a hurry.”

A white-haired Vietnamese dockworker was staring at Karr's camera when he turned around.

“Take my picture?” Karr asked the man. Before he could object, Karr had clicked the “camera” off and thrust it into the man's hands. “You look through the viewer, see? Then press the button on the top.”

The man gave Karr a confused look, then did as he was told, aiming it in the general direction of the blond American giant who had just accosted him. As soon as he pressed the phony shutter button, Karr came toward him.

“Didn't work,” said the man in Vietnamese. “No click.”

“Thanks, Pop,” said Karr, grabbing the camera.

“No click. No click.”

“He's telling you that the camera didn't work,” said Thu De Nghiem in the Art Room.

“No, well, then I'll have to get it checked out.” “You want the words in Vietnamese?” Thu De Nghiem asked.

“No,” said Karr. “But tell me how to ask him where there's a good restaurant. My stomach's growling.”

 

“
THE OFFICE THAO
Duong visited in Saigon belongs to a company called Asia Free Trade Shipping,” Marie Telach told Rubens. “As the name implies, they arrange shipping from the port. Furniture, mostly. Some leather goods.”

“Have you found a link to Infinite Burn?” asked Rubens, staring at the screen at the front of the Art Room. It showed a feed from the front of Thao Duong's building. Thao Duong was back inside in his office, having returned there after visiting the Asia Free Trade Shipping office.

“Nothing obvious. But the company does have connections in the U.S.,” said Telach. “And the man Duong met wanted more money. Maybe for a second attempt?”

Rubens put the fingers of his hands together, each tip pushing against its opposite. Good intelligence was often a matter of making good guesses; the trick was knowing when a guess was good.

“Nothing else?”

“We're looking.”

“Stay on Duong. Arrange to intercept any international calls Asia Free Trade makes. Put together a call list, a transaction scan—find out everything there is to know about anything remotely connected to either Duong or that company.”

 

DEAN CAUGHT UP
with Karr just after Thao Duong had begun to move again, this time walking in the opposite direction from the waterfront. At first they thought he was going back to his apartment, but about a block away he veered right and began zigzagging through a series of small alleys.

“Thinks he's being followed,” said Dean. “We better hang back for a while.”

“He's going to take one of those taxi bikes,” predicted Karr. “Come on. I have a motorbike around the corner.”

“You think I'm getting on the bike with you?”

“It's either that or walk,” said Karr.

“I'd rather walk,” insisted Dean.

Karr obviously thought he was joking, because he started to grin. Dean relented when Sandy Chafetz told them that Thao Duong had apparently found a Honda
ôm,
since he was heading north at a good clip.

They followed Thao Duong to the north side of the city. Dean kept his eyes closed the whole way.

“He's in a bus station,” Chafetz told them when they were about a block away. “Odds are the key he had last night fits a locker there.”

“Not much of a bet,” said Karr. He pulled off the street into a small loading area at the side of the station. “You feel like driving for a while, Charlie?”

“You follow him. I feel like stretching my legs.”

“What are you going to do?”

“See what else is in his locker.”

 

THE TRACKING DATA
from the Art Room was good enough to locate a person to within a meter and a half. That still left Karr nine feet of lockers to check. Each door was just over a foot square, and they were stacked six high.

“Can you give me a little help here?” he asked Chafetz.

“Your guess is as good as ours.”

Karr reached into his pack and pulled out his night glasses, hoping that the infrared lenses would pick up a temperature difference in the locker that had been recently opened.

It didn't.

He glanced around the waiting room, hoping there might be a video camera trained on the locker area. But there were none.

There were forty-eight lockers. He'd start in the middle, and work his way outward. He'd check two or three at a time, then go away, make sure he wasn't being watched, and take two or three more.

Not ideal, but the best solution under the circumstances. He'd plant video bugs so the Art Room could watch his back.

Should've let Charlie take this one, he thought to himself as he scouted out the best places to put the bugs.

 

DEAN FOLLOWED THAO
Duong back to his office, circled the block, then found a café nearby to hang out. The place dated from the days when the French ruled Vietnam; its facade, woodwork, and furniture were all modeled on a Parisian café. Dean wondered if the familiarity had provided any comfort to the French diplomats and soldiers watching the last vestiges of their empire slip away in the late forties and early fifties.

A half hour later, Chafetz told him a young man had just walked into Thao Duong's office and received an envelope.

“Follow the messenger and see where he goes,” the runner told Dean. “The locator bug is still working on Thao
Duong, so we'll know if he leaves the building. This looks more interesting.”

Dean left a few dollars—American—to pay for his coffee, then went to get his motorbike. As the young man who'd made the pickup came out of the building, a blue motorbike pulled in front and stopped. The kid hopped on and sped away.

Dean managed to get close enough to read part of the license plate for Rockman. But the bike's driver knew the city far better than Dean, and was considerably more aggressive in traffic; within four or five blocks Dean had to concede he'd lost him. Dean headed to the riverfront area and with Chafetz's help found the Asia Free Trade Shipping building, but there was no trace of the messenger there, either.

 

“
SHE'S ASKING WHAT
you're doing,” the translator told Karr as he opened another locker.

“Does she work here?” Karr asked.

“I don't think so. See, most—”

“Tell me how to ask that in Vietnamese.”

Thu De Nghiem gave him the words. Karr repeated them to the woman as best he could. He also continued to work the lock with his pick. The others—he was now on number thirteen—had been easy; this one seemed to be gummed up with something.

The woman's tone became more high-pitched. Karr prodded his tool in the lock, then finally heard a click.

He turned to the woman. “My key always sticks,” he told her in English, though by now he was reasonably certain she didn't speak it.

“She says she's going to report you to the authorities,” said Thu De Nghiem. “She thinks you're a thief.”

“I
am
a thief,” said Karr brightly. “How old you figure she is? Sixty?”

“Younger,” said Nghiem, who was looking at a feed from Karr's bug.

Karr opened the locker and saw a large manila envelope, similar to the one he had found beneath Thao Duong's desk. He gave it a big smile and took it with him to a nearby seat.

The woman followed; her harangue continued uninterrupted.

“You remind me of my mother,” Karr told her.

She kept right on talking.

“Yo, Thu,” Karr said to the translator. “This lady reminds me of my mother. What are the words?”

“For what?”

“You . . . remind me . . . of . . . Mom.”

Clearly perplexed, Thu De Nghiem translated the sentence. Karr repeated the words loudly and correctly enough to stop the woman's rant. He then proceeded to spin a story in English and mispronounced Vietnamese about how he had returned to Saigon to find his mother, who had come to the States, given birth to him, then abandoned him and returned home to Saigon.

“You look very much like the picture Dad has on the bureau back home,” Karr declared, in first English and then Vietnamese. “Are you my mom?”

The woman mumbled something, then fled.

“Did I get the accent wrong?” Karr asked the translator.

“She thinks you're a nut,” said Nghiem. “I promise you, she'll be bringing back the police.”

Karr laughed and peeked into the envelope.

“Wow,” he said.

“Mr. Karr, do you have a problem?” asked Rubens, coming on the line.

“No problem at all,” said Karr. He pulled out his PDA and popped the camera attachment on. Then he held it inside the envelope far enough to get a picture of the bundles of hundred-dollar bills sitting there. “No, I have no problem at all. At least none that a hundred thousand bucks can't solve.”

 

THAO DUONG'S HARD
drive, downloaded by Tommy Karr to the Art Room the previous evening, contained an unremarkable assortment of agricultural reports and bureaucratic memos, each laboriously worked over: Robert Gallo, who was in charge of examining the drive, found at least nine drafts of most of the reports.

There was one file, however, different from all the rest. Not only were there no other versions; it was encrypted, albeit in a simple encryption performed by the word processor that had created the file. Gallo used a software tool to “break” the encryption. The result was a solid block of numbers, which Gallo at first assumed was another encryption. He applied a range of software tools to try to parse the block without getting anything that the translator could recognize. Giving up, he forwarded the file to the cryptology section; the people working there had better tools and worked with encryptions all the time, unlike him. He also posted it on an internal intranet “blog” or continually updating log used by the Deep Black team to communicate their progress and problems. A few minutes later, Johnny Bib turned up in Gallo's office, hovering over his shoulder.

“Call home,” said Johnny.

“Huh?”

“Ding-a-ling,” said Johnny Bib.

Gallo couldn't figure out what he meant.

And then he did.

“They're phone numbers?”

“Ha!!!!”

 

RUBENS RUBBED HIS
eyes, trying to clear away some of the fatigue making them blur.

“There are contacts in New York, Washington, LA, all cities where the senator has been,” Gallo told him. “None of these numbers are red sheeted. FBI has nothing on them, and neither does the CIA. If there's a network there, we have zero data on it.”

Money and a network of connections in most major American cities—this looked a hell of a lot like what they were looking for, Rubens realized.

“Have you built call lists for these numbers?” Rubens asked.

“Didn't want to do that without your OK. 'Cause it's, like, in the States.”

“Go ahead and do so,” Rubens told him. “I'll forward this information to Ambassador Jackson and see if we can get additional information from the FBI. Keep me informed.”

 

THE TRACKING BUG
Karr had placed on Thao Duong ran out of juice a little past six, while Thao Duong was on his way back to his apartment. Dean and Karr decided there was no use planting another; Thao Duong was likely to get changed when he got home anyway. They trailed him to his house and waited outside until half past eight. The Art Room reported that he was watching television; Dean and Karr decided to knock off for dinner before checking out Saigon Rouge. They stopped in a noodle place; pots of boiling water and noodles were brought to the table, along with an assortment of vegetables and meat that they were supposed to toss in the water to cook.

“Do-it-yourself soup,” said Karr, enthusiastically tossing in everything from his side dish. “I'll take anything you don't want.”

Dean found himself brooding while he waited for the noodles to cool. He missed Lia. It had nothing to do with the mission; he just wanted to talk to her, to feel her bumping up against him.

“You hit the red-light district when you were in the war, Charlie?” asked Karr.

“I was only in Saigon once, for a really short time.”

“Not just
this
red-light district,” said Karr, spooning up some broth to taste. “Any red-light district.”

Dean knew what he meant, but instead of answering, he stared at Karr.

“Good stuff,” said Karr.

“Isn't it hot?”

“Steaming.”

“I did go to a cathouse once,” said Dean.

“Cathouse?”

“That's what we called them,” explained Dean apologetically. “It was my eighteenth birthday—my
real
eighteenth birthday. Some of the guys arranged it for me.”

“Pop your cherry, huh? Great present.”

“They thought so.”

Dean hadn't been a virgin; the other men made that assumption because he didn't have a girlfriend back home, never talked about getting laid, and was consistently shy around women, a trait that afflicted him to this day.

Between his shyness and the girl's limited English, the encounter had been awkward. The only part that he remembered now came after it was over—he was shy, but not
that
shy—she'd given him a soft kiss and then left the bamboo-and-rice-paper-sided room.