Conspiracy

75

At eight stories high, Tam Ky’s municipal building not only towered over the town but also dominated the jungle beyond, its white body standing like a ghost before a dark castle.

From the distance, the building made the city seem larger than it truly was, the eye and brain adding bulk to the blocks around it out of a sense of proportion.

“I don’t want you to get insulted,” Dean told Qui as they parked. “But when we go in, I’m going to talk to him alone.”

“I’m not insulted.” Qui took the key from the ignition and opened her door.

There were more bicycles and motorbikes here than there were in Saigon, and many fewer cars. A large open square paved with pinkish brown stones sat before the municipal building at the center of town. Dean couldn’t remember being in Tam Ky during the war, but he was sure it wouldn’t have looked like this — bright and shining in the sun, the facades of the nearby buildings showing off new paint, the tree leaves so green they almost looked fake.

There were no guards, and no receptionist in the lobby as they entered. The floors and walls were polished stone.

“Second floor,” Rockman told Dean. “Near the back.” Dean passed the information on to his interpreter, who simply assumed that Dean knew where the person was he’d come to meet. They walked up a wide flight of stairs at the side of the lobby, passing a large mural of Uncle Ho Chi Minh.

The office corridors were much less elaborate than the public area below. The carpet was well-worn and the hallways narrow. The doors to many of the offices were open, revealing mazelike interior passages and tiny cubicles separated by carpet-faced partitions. Dean didn’t see more than two or three people as he passed.

Dean and Qui entered the second door from the end, turning until they found a woman sitting at a small desk.

“I’m here to see Phuc Dinh,” Dean said in English. Qui translated.

“You have an appointment?” The young woman, who looked barely out of her teens, used English.

“No. But we have a mutual friend.”

Dean meant Forester, but he thought of Longbow instead.

“Mr. Dinh is out this morning. We expect him back after lunch.”

“Our friend’s name is Forester,” said Dean. “I’ll be back after lunch.”

He leaned against her desk, slipping an audio bug into place.

Dean bought Qui lunch at a café a few blocks away. While the translator went to the restroom, Dean took out his satellite phone and pretended to be talking on it as he talked to the Art Room. He’d left a booster unit in the car, but it was a little out of range; the two bugs he’d planted at the office building were sending garbled signals.

“You’re going to have to leave a booster much closer,” said Rockman.

“All right, I’ll do it as soon as I get rid of Qui.”

“Do you think you’ll be able to tap the building phone network?” Rockman asked.

“I’m not sure,” said Dean. “There were no guards in the lobby. There looked like there was a door at the other side of the staircase. But anyone could come right down and see me.”

“You could say you were lost.”

Dean looked up and saw Qui returning.

“Yeah, well, I’ll make sure to update you to night,” Dean said into the phone. “Take it easy.” Qui gave him a soft smile as she sat. “Reporting in?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you know Phuc Dinh during the war, Mr. Dean?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I know you’re not here for your job, Mr. Dean. Not for the International Fund, at any rate.”

“What would I be here for, if not that?”

“Your conscience would be my bet.”

A waiter approached. Dean let Qui order two large bottles of water, and then meals.

“Do you remember the people you killed?” she asked when the waiter retreated.

“Some I remember,” Dean told Qui honestly. “Every one of them wanted to kill me.”

“I’m sure.”

“What side were you on during the war?” The waiter appeared with their water before Qui could answer. She waited until he was gone.

“The proper answer today in Vietnam, Mr. Dean, is that we were all on the same side. The proper answer is that we all fought for liberation in our own way.”

“And what was your answer during the war?” Qui sipped her water. She was a beautiful woman, Dean realized, too old to be pretty, but age had given her a presence that a younger woman could never emulate. She looked up at him and caught him staring; something flashed in her eyes — anger, maybe, or resentment — and then she looked down.

Dean, too, changed the direction of his gaze, turning his head and looking across the street. Two girls were jumping rope in front of a small shop across from the café. One wore a matched top and pants in pink; the other had Western-style jeans, complete with sequins down the side. They were laughing and singing a counting song as they skipped over the rope.

“Many times I have driven men who came to the country as a kind of penance as well as curiosity,” said Qui. “I think it odd, apologizing for necessity.”

“Maybe that’s not what they’re apologizing for.”

“Maybe not.”

“I won’t need you to come back with me,” Dean told Qui.

“You can take the rest of the afternoon off. I’ll see you for dinner.”

She nodded slightly.

Neither of them spoke as they ate. Dean wanted to ask her about the country — ask what it was like now, and what it had been like when she was growing up. He felt an urge to ask a lot of questions, not just of her, but of everyone in the country: if the North had been defeated, would things have been better? But he couldn’t.

After lunch, dean took a seemingly aimless walk around town. He spotted a Dumpster behind the municipal building that would serve as a perfect hiding spot for the signal booster; pretending to toss out a bag he’d found in the road, he slid the device under the Dumpster.

“Much better, Charlie,” said Rockman. “Thanks.” Dean took another walk. When he returned to the municipal building, he walked inside, strode to the steps at the back, and quickly opened the door to the basement. He couldn’t find a light switch; he took out his key chain and used the small LED light he kept on it to guide him down the steps.

“Network interface is going to be somewhere in the west-ern side of the basement,” said Rockman, who’d been studying an aerial photo of the building. “At least it ought to be.” The only things in the basement were metal stanchions helping to support the floor, and miscellaneous utilities.

Dean found the telephone network access boxes and the small computer they fed in the far corner of the basement.

He took what looked like two large pens from his pocket, unscrewed the tops from them, and then put them together.

Then he took a thick wire from his pocket and connected one end to the tops of the pens. Standing on his tiptoes, he slid the pen onto the block ledge where the telephone trunk wire came into the building. To finish off, he wrapped what looked like a Velcro strap around the trunk line and connected it to the wire he’d inserted into the pens.

Dean’s device was a listening system that used the phone line to send its data back to the Art Room. The device allowed the NSA to hear internal intercom calls, and made it easier to pick up regular calls as well.

Dean had one worrisome moment as he came up the steps. He had planted a pair of video bugs so the Art Room could warn him that someone was approaching, but the coverage left a blind spot on the second-story stairs right near the hallway entrance. As he came up out of the basement, turning to go up the main staircase, a young man confronted him, asking in angry Vietnamese what he had been doing.

The translator told Dean how to say that he was lost in Vietnamese, but Dean knew it would be considerably more effective to simply use English.

“Mr. Phuc Dinh? I can’t find his office,” said Dean.

“Where is it?”

“Do you think we have offices in the basement?” demanded the man in Vietnamese.

Dean held up his hands. He took a piece of paper with Phuc Dinh’s name on it from his pocket.

“Dinh,” he told the man. “Phuc Dinh.”

“You are an ignorant American,” said the man in Vietnam ese. Then he added in English, “Upstairs.”

“He’s still watching you, Charlie,” warned Rockman as Dean went up the steps.

As long as he focused on his immediate tasks — moving the booster, bugging the phones, appearing nonthreatening to the suspicious worker — Dean was fine. The moment he reached Phuc Dinh’s office, however, Dean hesitated, remembering Longbow, remembering the shot he’d taken some thirty-five years before.

How cruel was fate to bring him together with this man?

“Charlie, is something wrong?” asked Rockman.

Dean answered by knocking on the doorjamb, then going in to speak to the woman at the desk.

It was a different, older woman.

“I came earlier and left a message for Mr. Dinh,” he told her in English. The woman didn’t seem to understand and so he repeated the words the translator gave him in Vietnamese.

“What is this about?” asked the secretary.

“I’m not sure I should discuss Mr. Dinh’s business with you,” said Dean, carefully repeating the translator’s words.

He got the tone wrong at the end, and had to repeat it before the secretary understood.

She frowned, then got up from her desk and went to find Dinh.

There were photos on the wall — a ceremony with Phuc Dinh in a Vietnamese-style suit receiving a certificate, a parade, Phuc Dinh in a row of other men…

And one, much older, showing Phuc Dinh standing next to the charred wreckage of a Huey, smiling.

Anger surged over Dean, like the wave of a tsunami. It was the most useless emotion, a deadly emotion for anyone, most especially a sniper. To succeed, a sniper had to operate without anger. He could live with fear, he could live with sadness, but he could not operate with anger. When he stalked his enemy, he had to be emotionless, his movement and perception incorruptible by hate or lust. When he pushed against the trigger he had to be stone-cold steady, empty of anything that would blur his aim.

“He will see you,” said the secretary, returning. “For a moment.”

Dean tried not to think of Longbow as he walked to Phuc Dinh’s office.

The man Charles Dean had killed sat behind a small metal desk, surrounded by paper. His hair was thinner, his face a little plumper, but his scar was the same, his eyes were the same, his nose and mouth precisely as Dean remembered. Dinh was a ghost rising from the past, a dead man who had not died.

“I am Phuc Dinh,” he said in perfect English. “Who are you?”

“Charles Dean.” Dean forced the words from his mouth.

“Can we go somewhere and talk?”

“What about?”

“A mutual friend.”

Dinh started to scowl.

“Gerald Forester,” said Dean. “I believe you may have exchanged some e-mail with him.”

“I don’t think so.”

I could kill him easily, Dean thought. I could drop to my knee, grab the gun at my ankle, shoot him. It would be done in three seconds.

“Forester was murdered,” Dean said. “This won’t go away.” Dean stared at Phuc Dinh, expecting that he would deny knowing Forester and tell him to leave. But to Dean’s great surprise, he rose.

“Come with me,” Phuc Dinh told him.

“He’s telling his secretary he’ll be back in a few hours,” said the translator.

“Home run, Charlie,” said Rockman. “Home run.”