108
XUE XIN CLIPPED a vine away from the stone and looked up to see a novice monk approaching.
“What is it?” he asked, unhappy to be interrupted.
“I have a message for you.”
“Well, what is it?”
“I am instructed to tell you,” the boy said, looking puzzled, “that ‘the Go stones are pearls.’ ”
“Thank you.”
The boy stood there.
“You may go,” Xue Xin said.
He returned to his work and smiled.
Nicholai Hel was in Saigon.
109
DIAMOND RECEIVED THE CABLE and went straight to Singleton’s office. He cooled his heels in the waiting room for a good forty minutes until the receptionist told him he could go in.
The old man didn’t look up from the briefing book that he was reading. “Yes?”
“Hel is in Saigon.”
Now Singleton looked up. “Really?”
The boss was in one of his moods, in which every response came in the form of a single-word interrogative. Diamond continued, “Sir, he seems to have arrived on a French military flight with a shipment of weapons, rumored to be rocket launchers.”
That information made Singleton somewhat more expansive. “Where did the flight originate?”
“X.K.”
“Would that be an initialization of ‘Xieng Khouang’?”
“Yes, sir.”
Singleton thought for a moment. “Well, that’s not good.”
“No, it isn’t.”
It was especially not good, Diamond thought, as he hadn’t received this information from Haverford but from Signavi, who had phoned him shortly after Hel left Cap St.-Jacques. The Frenchman had asked him to find out everything he could about this Michel Guibert. Signavi was worried about Guibert’s alleged prior relationship with the Viet Minh, especially with the agent Ai Quoc. Signavi’s Vietnamese special forces troops had been hunting Ai Quoc for months, to no avail.
“Who is in possession of the weapons now?” Singleton asked.
“The BX,” Diamond answered. Seeing Singleton’s annoyed look he added, “The Binh Xuyen.”
“Hel is creative.”
“That’s one word for it.”
“Do you have a better word in mind?”
“No, sir.”
Singleton sat back and thought. This Hel person is really quite remarkable, he decided.
Remarkable, unpredictable, and dangerous.
“Take care of it,” Singleton said.
“What should I tell Haverford?”
Singleton pondered Hel’s remarkable escape from Beijing. “Why tell him anything?”
He went back to reading the briefing book.
Diamond stood there for a couple of seconds before figuring out that he’d been dismissed. Feeling the receptionist’s contemptuous look on his back, he hurried out of the office and into the elevator, discovered that he was in a sweat, and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.
Then he realized that it was all working out. Hel would finally be terminated and…
But what if Hel talked to Haverford about what he had seen in Laos.
And what if Singleton ever found out that…
He left the office and booked himself on a military flight to Saigon.
The supposedly brilliant Hel had walked right into his trap.
110
CITIES, NICHOLAI PONDERED as he walked along Boulevard Bonard, are like women of a certain age.
The evening masks the signs of aging, smoothes over lines, shades decay, replicates the golden glow of young years. So it was in Saigon, which at night became a lady in a basic black dress, with diamonds around her neck.
Haverford was doubtless a fine intelligence agent, but he made a damn poor street operative, and his clumsy efforts to follow Nicholai were almost comical. Nicholai quickly grew bored of the game, however, and literally turned on him near the clock tower outside the central marketplace.
He looked to be alone, but Nicholai scanned the crowd for signs of other agents. It would be almost impossible to tell, he had to admit. They could be mixed among any of the shoppers or merchants in the busy pavilion. But he looked for the overly watchful, the purposefully disinterested, or anyone who made even glancing eye contact with Haverford.
Nicholai eased into the crowd, circled, and came up behind him.
“Don’t turn around,” Nicholai said. “And walk.”
“Easy,” Haverford said. But he kept walking. Nevertheless, he took the offensive. “Where have you been? I’ve been worried about you.”
“After setting me up to be killed? I’m touched.”
“I don’t know what happened in Beijing,” Haverford said. “We had an extraction team in place and then you just went off the radar.”
“You had an
“What are you talking about?” Haverford asked as they walked past stands selling everything from cold soup to silk parasols. “If something went wrong in Beijing, it had nothing to do with us.”
But Haverford had to wonder. Was it possible that stupid bastard Diamond had co-opted the extraction team in an attempt to terminate Hel? What are you thinking? he asked himself. Of course it’s possible. And now Hel blames you.
Nicholai herded him out onto the street. Boulevard de la Somme was busy with evening traffic. If Haverford was going to try anything, it would have been in the market. “You can turn around.”
Haverford, a look of hurt innocence in his eyes, turned to face him. “You have this all wrong. I don’t know what happened back there. Maybe Chinese intelligence made you, somebody flipped, I don’t know. How did you get -”
“You owe me money,” Nicholai said, “a new passport, and certain addresses in the United States. I’ll forgive the monetary debt, but -”
There it is, Haverford thought. Hel had done just what I figured he’d do. Amazing – and characteristic. “Nicholai, did you bring those weapons into -”
“I will require the passport and the addresses.”
“Of course,” Haverford said, “There’s no problem with that. The sooner the better, in fact. You have to go underground, Nick. The whole world is looking for you.”
Nicholai suspected that by “underground” Haverford meant “under the ground,” but in either case had little
