Conspiracy

77

Phuc Dinh led Dean to a restaurant two blocks from the municipal building. He nodded at the maître d’ as they entered, and walked straight to the back, taking a large table set with eight places. Within moments, two waiters appeared and whisked the extra places away.

“You will have a drink?” Phuc Dinh asked Dean.

“Water, please.”

Phuc Dinh ordered two bottles, along with a pot of tea.

“It was a long time ago,” he told Dean. “My memory may be faulty.”

The comment disoriented Dean. He was confused, and for a moment he thought Phuc Dinh was talking about his mission, though that was impossible.

“I had not thought of the money for many years, or think that it was relevant,” added Phuc Dinh. He stopped speaking as the waiter approached.

“What money?” asked Rockman in Dean’s head.

Dean ignored the runner, trying not to show anything to Phuc Dinh, playing out the original bluff as if Forester had told him everything. He was a sniper again, a scout moving silently through the jungle, distractions and emotion in check.

“The war was a long time ago,” prompted Dean as the waiter left. “There were other things to think of.”

“The money was lost,” said Phuc Dinh. “It never arrived at the hamlet.”

“The hamlet was Phu Loc Two, wasn’t it?” asked Dean. It was a guess, but a good one — that was the village where he had stalked Phuc Dinh.

“Yes. Ordinarily a courier would arrive on the tenth of the month. He would bury the money beneath a rock on a trail about three miles out of town.”

“The trail to Laos,” said Dean.

Phuc Dinh nodded. “And then one month, it did not arrive.”

“Which month?”

“September 1971.”

Dean sipped some of the tea. The restaurant was not air-conditioned, and the temperature must have been well into the eighties, but despite the heat, it felt refreshing.

“There were complaints and threats from some of the leaders in the area,” Phuc Dinh said. “A rebellion. I sent a message and requested that the liaison come and explain what had happened, but he would not come. I heard later that he was killed by a rocket attack.”

“What was his name?”

“Greenfield.” Phuc Dinh looked up at the wall behind Dean, as if reading the answer off it. “He called himself Green. But that wasn’t his first name.”

“Was he a soldier?”

“No. Soldiers — Marines — were used as the couriers. But Green was a civilian — CIA, I assume.”

“Was his name Green feld?” asked Dean.

“Maybe.”

“Jack Greenfeld was a CIA officer who worked in this area. He ran a number of programs,” said Dean, who wanted the Art Room to know the background. “He worked in that area. Then he was killed by a rocket attack. He was replaced by a man named Rogers.”

“You’re familiar with the area?” said Phuc Dinh.

“Just some of the history.”

“Maybe it is the same person. Green. I don’t know what the arrangements were on the American side,” said Phuc Dinh.

“Only that payments were distributed to different elders.”

“We’re researching this, Charlie,” said Rockman. “Keep him talking. What does this have to do with Forester?”

Dean had already guessed the answer to Rockman’s question.

“What happened after the money stopped?” Dean asked Phuc Dinh.

Instead of answering, the Vietnamese official looked back at Dean. Their eyes met and held each other for a moment.

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

“I did.”

“Then you understand.” Phuc Dinh refilled his teacup.

“One had always to cut his own path.”

“So when the money stopped, you began working with the VC?”

“One works with whomever one can.”

Dean suspected that Phuc Dinh had been working with the Vietcong long before the payments stopped; double-dealing was common. But it could have been that he changed sides then. By now it was irrelevant anyway.

“Did you know a man named McSweeney?” Dean asked.

“He would have been a captain. He was with the strategic hamlet program.”

Phuc Dinh stared at the wall once more. “The name is not familiar,” he said finally.

“Did you have any contact with the strategic hamlet program? Before the payments stopped?”

“The couriers were Marines. Maybe they were that program?”

“Did any Marines live with you in your village?”

“You say you are familiar with the history of the area.

Would Marines have lasted long in that village?” Phuc Dinh gave him the names of the provincial leaders who benefited from the payoffs. The list was long, though the sums Phuc Dinh mentioned were relatively small — for the most part, a few hundred went to each. Still, that would have represented considerable money in Vietnam.

It probably bought a lot of AK-47s and rockets, Dean thought bitterly.

Obviously, someone decided that the money the village leaders were getting would be more useful in his pocket.

Was it the Vietcong, the South Vietnamese, or someone else?

Forester must have thought it was connected to McSweeney somehow.

Maybe he suspected McSweeney.

Or maybe McSweeney knew who did it, and was in danger because of that. Maybe the fact that he was targeted had nothing to do with his running for President.

“That’s all I know,” said Phuc Dinh.

“Do you have the e-mail Forester sent you?” Dean asked.

He shook his head.

“How did he find you?”

“I am not sure. I am not a famous man.” He broke into a grin for the first time since they’d met. “Maybe he met someone with a long memory. He claimed to have found my name in a government directory.”

“Is that possible?”

“Yes. I have contact with foreign banks. I have visited Beijing — I am in the directories. But how he knew to look, that I do not know. He asked if I knew anything about missing money. He named the date the payment should have arrived. That was all. I will not come to your country,” Phuc Dinh added. “I cannot help you more than this.” Dean took a sip of tea, savoring the liquid in his mouth as if it were expensive Scotch.

“What did you do during the war, Mr. Dean?” asked Phuc Dinh.

“I was a Marine,” Dean said. “I served in this province.”

“It was not a good place to be a soldier.”

“I’d imagine it was much more difficult to be a civilian.”

“Impossible, I would say.”

“There was an ambush near your village, Phu Loc Two,” said Dean. “You were targeted. Some reports said you were killed.”

A faint smile appeared on Phuc Dinh’s face, then faded into something close to sadness, and then blank stoicism. He scratched his ear but said nothing.

“How did you escape?” Dean asked. “Weren’t you shot?”

“Another man went in my place. We used many tricks of deception at the time, to confuse spies who might be watching.”

“The dead man wasn’t you?”

Phuc Dinh shook his head.

“But he had a scar like yours.”

“When the money did not arrive, that was a sign,” said Phuc Dinh, ignoring Dean’s comment. “From that point on, we were on our guard. The ambush was a few months later, but we were still watching.”

“There was a photo in a file,” said Dean. “The man had a scar like yours.”

Phuc Dinh pointed to it.

“Yes, like that,” said Dean.

“A time such as that brings us to the lowest point of our existence.”

“Charlie, ask him about money transfers,” Rockman interrupted. “Ask him if he had any access to bank records.” Dean ignored the runner, staring instead at Phuc Dinh.

He wasn’t a ghost, not in the literal sense. And yet he was in every other way. He had come to Dean from the past, con-juring up an entire world that Dean had passed through years ago, an unsettled world that continued to haunt him, much as he denied it.

Dean, too, was a ghost, haunting Phuc Dinh’s world, though the former VC official didn’t know it.

“I lost a friend on that mission,” said Dean softly. “A good friend.”

“I lost many friends during the war as well.” Phuc Dinh lowered his head. “The man who went in my place that day was my brother. The scars you noticed were burns from a French vicar for stealing his food when we were five and six.

He used the same poker to mark us both.”