Rainfall

me, letting you make me a potential point of vulnerability? I know how careful you are, and I know what you’re capable of.”

“I’m not sure I understand what you mean,” I said.

He looked at me for a long time before he responded. “I’ve kept your secrets for a long time. I’ll continue to keep them. Fair enough?”

Never underestimate Harry, I thought, nodding.

“Fair enough?” he asked again.

“Yes,” I said, not having anywhere else to go. “Now, enough of the I’m-okay-you’re-okay routine. Let’s work the problem. Start with Holtzer.”

“Tell me more about how you know him.”

“Not right after I’ve eaten.”

“That bad, huh?”

I shrugged. “I knew him in Vietnam. He was with the Agency then, attached to SOG, a joint CIA-military Special Operations Group. He’s got balls, I’ll give him credit for that. He wasn’t afraid to go into the field, unlike some of the other bean counters I worked with out there. I liked that about him when I first met him. But even then he was nothing but a careerist. The first time we locked horns was after an ARVN — Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the South’s army — operation in Military Region Three. The ARVN had mortared the shit out of a suspected Vietcong base in Tay Ninh, based on intelligence from a source that Holtzer had developed. So we were involved in the body count, as a way of verifying the intelligence.

“The ARVN had really pounded the place, and it was hard to identify the bodies — there were pieces everywhere. But there were no weapons. I told Holtzer this didn’t look like Vietcong activity to me. He says, What are you talking about? This is Tay Ninh, everyone here is Vietcong. I say, Come on, there aren’t any weapons, your source was jerking you off. There was a mistake. He says no mistake, there must be two dozen enemy dead. But he’s counting every blown-off limb as a separate body.

“Back at base, he writes up his report and asks me to verify it. I told him to fuck off. There were a couple officers nearby, out of earshot but close enough to see us. It got heated, and I wound up laying him out. The officers saw it, which is exactly what Holtzer had wanted, although I don’t think he bargained for the rhinoplasty he needed afterward. Ordinarily that kind of thing wouldn’t have aroused much attention, but at the time there was some sensitivity to the way Special Forces and the CIA were cooperating in the field, and Holtzer knew how to work the bureaucracy. He made it sound like I wouldn’t verify his report because I had a personal problem with him. I wonder how many subsequent S&D operations were based on intelligence from his so-called fucking source.”

I took a swallow of coffee. “He caused a lot of problems for me after that. He’s the kind of guy who knows just which ears to whisper in, and I’ve never been good at that game. When I got back from the war I had some kind of black cloud over me, and I always knew he was the one behind it, even if I couldn’t catch him pulling the strings.”

“You never told me about what happened in the States after the war,” Harry said after a moment. “Is that why you left?”

“Part of it.” The terseness of my reply was meant to indicate that I didn’t want to go there, and Harry understood.

“What about Benny?” he asked.

“All I know about him is that he was connected to the LDP — an errand boy, but trusted with some important errands. And that apparently he was also a mole for the CIA.”

The word mole felt unpleasant in my mouth. It is still one of the foulest epithets I know.

For six years, SOG’s operations in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam were compromised by a mole. Time and again, a team would be inserted successfully, only to be picked up within minutes by North Vietnamese patrols. Some of these missions had been death traps, with entire SOG platoons wiped out. But others were successful, which meant that the mole had limited access. If an investigator could have compared dates and access, we could have quickly narrowed down the list of suspects.

But MACV — the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam — refused to investigate due to sensitivities about “counterpart relationships” — that is, they were afraid of insulting the South Vietnamese government by suggesting that a South Vietnamese national attached to MACV might have been less than reliable. Worse, SOG was ordered to continue to share its data with the ARVN. We tried to get around the command by issuing false insert coordinates to our Vietnamese counterparts, but MACV found out and there was hell to pay.

In 1972, a traitorous ARVN corporal was uncovered, but this single, low-level agent couldn’t possibly have been the only source of damage for all those years. The real mole was never discovered.

I took Benny’s and the kendoka’s cell phones from my jacket pocket and handed them to Harry. “I need two things from you. Check out the numbers that have been called. They should be stored in the phones.” I showed him which unit had belonged to the kendoka, and which to Benny. “See if there are any numbers speed-dial programmed, too, and try chasing them all down with a reverse directory. I want to know who these guys were talking to, how they were connected to each other and to the Agency.”

“No problem,” he said. “I’ll get you something by the end of the day.”

“Good. Now the second thing.” I took out the disk and put it on the table. “What everybody is after is on this disk. Bulfinch says it’s an expose on corruption in the LDP and the Construction Ministry that could bring down the government.”

He picked it up and held it up to the light.

“Why a disk?” he said.

“I was going to ask you the same question.”

“Don’t know. It would have been easier to move whatever’s on here over the Net. Maybe a copy management program prevented that. I’ll check it out.” He slipped it inside his jacket.