Conspiracy

112

Even though Cam Tre Luc had reversed the order directing that Dean be apprehended, the Art Room arranged another pickup for them. A speedboat picked them up at the harbor just before dawn; a half hour later they were climbing into the belly of a he li cop ter whose own er made good money transporting roustabouts to the oil derricks off the South Vietnamese shore. The chopper took them to an airstrip, where they’d caught a plane to Thailand and then boarded a commercial airliner for home.

On the flight from Bangkok to LA — first class, arranged by Rubens despite his earlier comment — Dean thought of Qui.

He remembered her face and voice, the easy way she had, how even when addressing him very formally and keeping him at a distance, she seemed intimate, more than a friend.

He tried but could not explain to himself what the attraction was. It wasn’t physical, he didn’t think; Qui was past the age where she might be called pretty, and in any event he hadn’t felt sexually aroused by her. If he had represented an alternate future to her — what she must have meant when they said good-bye in the bar — she must have represented something different to him. But what exactly that was wouldn’t fit into a neat equation.

“I see what my future might have been. Now, I no longer have to mourn for it.”

Dean thought back to the mountain lion, to his shot then, and to the mission with Longbow. Every moment held a fork or a bridge in the road — a different direction based on a decision you made, often without knowing it. Some of the possibilities lived on, like ghosts haunting a future they couldn’t have, or a past they’d come to regret.

Then Dean thought of Lia, longed to hold her, and drifted off to sleep.