Shadows of War

Except Ms. Duncan. She is here because she sinned rather badly in her past life, and must now atone for it.”

“So Bangkok is the Buddhist hell?” Mara poured her coffee.

“Worse.”

“I go through this and in my next life I come back as a butterfly?”

“The Buddhist concept of hell is separate from reincarnation,” said DeBiase. “There is not necessarily any escape.”

“Describes Bangkok perfectly,” said Lai.

“Actually, there are many different strains of Buddhism,” said DeBiase, “and talking about specific beliefs can be highly contradictory.”

He was now in professor mode; there would be no interrupting his discourse until he had completely dissected the various strands of Buddhist belief, a process which could take hours. Mara took her coffee and slipped down the hall to the small office she shared with another officer exiled from the field, Roth Setco.

Roth was a dark and moody man; it was not unusual for him to sit at his desk staring at the blank wall in front of him for hours on end. Not yet thirty, he had thick scars on his right leg and both arms, and two small ones on his right cheek. His nose looked as if it had been broken several times, and the lobe of his right ear was either deformed or had been torn off and then poorly repaired. His long hair covered his ear, and possibly other scars on his neck. He wasn’t in this morning — neither a surprise nor unwelcome.

Mara flipped on her computer. As she was waiting for it to boot, her secure satellite phone vibrated, indicating that she was receiving an instant message from the bureau’s secure paging system. It was from Peter Lucas, the station chief, and consisted of one word: Come. He wanted to see her over at his office in the embassy.

She killed her computer and reversed course, gliding past the Million Dollar Man, still holding court.

* * *

Peter Lucas checked his watch as he passed into the secure communications suite. He was due to have lunch with the ambassador at the British embassy at noon; his counterpart from MI6 would be there, and while no agenda had been mentioned, the Brits would surely want to discuss the situation in southern Thailand, where the rebel movement was a growing concern to both countries.

The recent discovery of oil along Thailand’s southern coast would complicate things further. The world might be rapidly shifting away from oil as a fuel source, but the commodity’s value still seemed to double every other week.

They’d also be talking about Myanmar and Vietnam, as well as Malaysia. Lucas’s portfolio had been expanded beyond Thailand and Malaysia three days before; he was now in charge of operations in Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia as well. Officially, the move was temporary, due to a pending reorganization of the CIA’s Southeast Asia section; unofficially, Lucas was going to head whatever permanent arrangement resulted.

The shuffle was widely known inside the agency, and it was no secret to MI6, either. But the real reason for the reorganization was that the CIA’s Vietnam bureau had been compromised.

The counterintelligence people were trying to sort out exactly what was going on. The office’s main focus over the past two years had been drug smuggling, and it was clear that at least one officer there had been taking money from an Asian gang. But the NSA eavesdropping programs indicated that some elements of the top secret daily intelligence summaries prepared by the office were being read in Hanoi as well. The counterintelligence people were trying to trace the leak and see who exactly was involved. In the meantime, the office was essentially unusable.

Which was why he had called Mara over this morning.

She was waiting in the antechamber of the suite. Sitting in one of the leather club chairs — Lucas had personally ordered them installed upon his arrival the year before — she fidgeted nervously, clearly anxious and probably excited at the prospect of a new assignment. He remembered that feeling well — he’d felt it himself dozens and dozens of times, maybe hundreds, when he was a young stud.

Not that he didn’t feel enthusiasm now, at age fifty, but it was tempered, respectful of the pitfalls and problems that inevitably accompanied a job for the CIA. Too respectful, maybe.

“You’re looking good,” said Lucas, sliding down into the seat across from her. The secure suite was isolated from the rest of the building by a number of systems that made it impossible to bug. “How are you feeling?”

“You know your message could be considered suggestive,” said Mara.

“Suggestive?”

“Come?”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s what you wrote, Pete.”

“I was just being terse.”

She cocked her head slightly, still smiling, her body openly flirting. It was all subconscious. Tall and large- boned, Mara had an almost playful nature, a natural outgoingness that Lucas always associated with jocks. Her personality would have made her an excellent recruiter, though it wasn’t hard to guess why she had been moved into that area — she was far from ugly, but she wasn’t a knockout either, and her height would be considered a negative by old hands, especially in Asia. Spies wanted to be seduced, or so the theory went; few men were attracted to a woman who could just as easily whip them as seduce them.

As it was, she’d proven herself an excellent PM, or paramilitary officer, though at times a bit aggressive, as her last supervisor in Malaysia had written.

Lucas preferred the word “rambunctious” to aggressive. She was still young; she’d grow out of it. Not too much, he hoped.

“Refresh my memory,” he told her, backing into her assignment. “How good is your Vietnamese?”

“It’s fantastic.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Xin chao. Toi hieu. “

Hello. I understand.

The tones — there were six in Vietnamese — were off a bit, but the words were intelligible.

“I won’t embarrass you,” said Lucas. “You won’t need very good language skills on this.”

“What do we need?”

“It’s not really a very important job, or very complicated. You fly into Hanoi and meet a Belgian national in our employ.”

“Okay.” She nodded.

“Talk to him, then come back.”

“Great.”

“His name is Bernard Fleming. He speaks English.”

“When do I leave?”

Lucas couldn’t help but smile. Most of his people would have asked a few questions before taking the job, masking their enthusiasm even if it was already a foregone conclusion that they were going.

“There’s a flight this afternoon. You’re already booked,” Lucas told her. “I suppose you’d like to hear what this is all about.”

* * *

Fleming was a UN observer on a scientific survey team. They’d been sent to northern Vietnam to gather data on biological changes connected with the recent dramatic shifts in the weather. She would go to Vietnam as a journalist working for Voice of America; she was doing a story on climate change, and was talking to Fleming because he was the only one authorized by the UN to talk about the mission.

Not really, of course.

The area where the survey team was headed was near the suspected crash site of an Air Force F-105 during the Vietnam War; the pilot of the aircraft was still officially listed as MIA. Mara was to ask Fleming if he’d seen any sign of the plane.

That wasn’t really what she was doing, either. She would bring that up, but the matter was really a second- string cover story, to be used to placate the Vietnamese if they got very nosy. His real assignment was considerably